A life in words

  • Real, or Ideal? OR What To Name A Post When No Cohesive Theme Binds It Together

    1. Academia Last night I went to the “Evening for New Graduate Students” at BYU (which was actually secretly or not-so-secretly open to all graduate students—note for next year 🙂 ). President Samuelson spoke first. During that short talk and during his devotional address on Tuesday, I had the feeling that I have really undervalued…

  • So Far, So Good

    Of course, having a good first day as a graduate student is bound to be a poor predictor of the whole graduate experience: everybody knows that nothing but syllabus-reading ever happens on the first day of class. Nevertheless I am glad to have had a good first day in the computer science MS program today.…

  • Медесифра!

    This post is in honor of finally getting my blog to support Unicode characters, including Cyrillic and nearly every other writing system in existence. It used to just replace non-Western-European characters with question marks, but no longer! This is a big deal for someone as fond of writing systems as me. This has caused problems…

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech … Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. … A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their freedom of speech. … Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. … Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 (orthography and spelling modernized)