Unused and Probably Unusable

Welcome to the 9th Heinlein Friday! Well, sort of. I posted the first HF-related post on May 26th, announcing a "new recurring feature" - how prescient of me. There have been 8 substantive posts since then, on topics I listed in my last post previewing this HF, but I omitted two: the Judge Jones speech report, and the Science in Superman post.

Those topics, in no particular order, were: Aliens; Justice; Courts and Judges; Lawyers ("...beyond stereotypes"); Crime; and a special post on Jerry Was A Man, a short story involving a chimpanzee who would be human - or at least a person.

This week, as I discussed in my preview post, I'll be discussing "patents, trade secrets, and invention in Heinlein's fiction."

Inventions

Why?

Why bother talking about the ray guns and rocket ships in the (sometimes awful, sometimes talky/ preachy, occasionally disturbingly dated) science fiction of a Dead White Male?

Good question, insultingly posed. Let's break it apart.

Heinlein didn't do much with Ray Guns - although he had some fantastic weapons - see the opening chapter of Starship Troopers, which would make a fantastic movie - if only they would film the book, instead of a horrible soft-porn version from which all of the best technology has been deliberately clipped ("too expensive to create!") from the film. To quote a noted philosopher, "Aaaargh!" The Suits, which operate something like muscular exoskeletons plus heads-up-display plus skydiving-slash-submersible-slash-spacesuit-slash-weapons platforms, are the coolest military tech there is - and at that, Heinlein doesn't spend long on them. The opening pages, and then a subsequent mention or two later in the book about maintenance and training, and that's all. They're assumed, once described.

Heinlein also seldom did rocket ship - he preferred ships that either floated or went, ZAP, and the whole mass-reaction flaming-rear of rockets, while having the benefit of being possible "now," were always slightly dissatisfactory to him. Although see Rocket Ship Galileo. But his best spaceships were interesting. Consider:

Rides in Heinlein

1. Gay Deceiver, a heavily (post-sale) modified "duo" ("built on a Ford shell") - a duo being a car that could fly! - with extensive, expensive upgrades by a military-trained suspicious and survival-minded computer and software geek (and then a physicist specializing in N-space, and then his daughter with REAL ability in mathematics... and then they took it to Oz, where things wake up...)



2. the colony ship in Methuselah's Children, which depends on an invention by "Slipstick" Libby Long to escape the solar system and reach stars in less than lifetimes



3. the "UFOs" in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, in which Heinlein used some impressive popular mathematics (in the plot of the story!) to prove that nearby space travel is feasible in terms of length of time - and to suggest that post-Einsteinian physics would make nearby interstellar travel equally feasible. Although the Real travel in the book is done instantaneously, or even FTL, by going not through space but "past" it - in the inadequate descriptions of English, rather than math.

Enough with the Ships and Weapons. Heinlein did a great job with ideas, when necessary backing them up with concrete and practical science and engineering - but the real excuse is to talk law. So, let's talk about the interesting stuff: IP!

As I said last time, Intellectual Property (IP) is like this:

instead of "owning" a house or a shirt or a wallet or a pile of sprockets, you "own" rights in the plans of the house, or the shape of the shirt, or the design of the wallet, or the name of your sprocket business.

Heinlein's got IP in the books, a-plenty.

Blockbuster discovery: "Let There Be Light"

Two scientist-inventors in this provocative early short story have a dynamite secret - they can turn light into heat (vibrations) - or vice versa - with an enormous, nearly 100 %, efficiency. That is, there would no longer be any need to manufacture light bulbs. Or inefficient solar cells. Or transformers. Or gas tanks. Or oil wells. Or generators. Or oil furnaces. This is, to put it mildly, the biggest potential discovery since the printing press. In fact, it probably outstrips the wheel, the atomic bomb, and the transistor quite handily. Their discovery, Heinlein coyly says, involves the enzymes used by the common firefly or "lightning bug," luciferin and luciferase, which create intense, nearly monochromatic (looks greenish to me) with almost no heat. How does a measly bug do better than humans with neon lights and LEDs? Well, maybe it no longer outstrips us quite so much. Any bioengineers know the relevant facts?

What do they do? Well, they're in trouble. Moneyed interests have no particular desire to see the utter destruction of a host of industries. Free power, as Nicola Tesla once learned, is not in the interest of each everyone, just every anyone. This can apply more broadly to all advances or potential advances - someone's ox gets gored. For Fantasy fans, I'd highly recommend Lawrence Watt-Evans' best-seller "The Misenchanted Sword," in which Valder the Innkeeper tries to place a convenient ferry across a river near his Inn, and finds that a torch "accidentally" drops off the toll bridge nearby, destroying his effort. He learns his lesson; the next torch, he notes, could have landed on his inn, and could have hurt someone.

The scientists are not so cowed - but they can't fight the powers arrayed against them. So they use the weakness of the powerful against them: they (spoiler)

Other works show different approaches to IP - and different Science Fictional twists on same.

Time Travel and Invention: The Door Into Summer

I wish I had time to spend a few weeks on this book - there's just so much! The protagonist, Daniel Boone Davis - "Dan" - is tired of life. At least, he's tired of life in the 1970s, set in the future in this book, after The Big One - which was a nuclear One. Life goes on, but certain areas are uninhabited, and the capital is no longer in Washington, D.C.

Dan is an engineer, and in the futuristic 1970s, he has invented a robot - a household robot, which can help do away with some of the drudgery of modern life, particularly in areas like housecleaning - where most of the poorly compensated, utterly necessary work still takes place for most families. This is a highly typical view of robots and technology - but it's not too far wrong. Some of my favorite Toys, today, are labor-saving devices. That, or they help me do things I can't do without them, like walking down the street talking to a friend, or sending a picture I took on my cellphone.

Dan, as I said, is tired of There-Then. He wants to go to Tomorrow. He's signed up for Cold Sleep (SF fans should consult Orson Scott Card's series about Hot Sleep, the Worthing Saga), and will wake up in 30 years - with all the things that make him sad over and gone.

Dan, the inventor, doesn't go quite as intended. He doesn't walk that plank; he's pushed. Meanwhile, it appears, his inventions have been stolen, and patents issued in his name, which he does not own.

In the futuristic world of the 2000s, things have changed. Heinlein lists advances in clothing technology (and Don't! count those as minor; ask any military clothing historian about the difference between a zipper on a battlefield vs. "those damnable buttons!" when you're under fire or in heavy snow), advances in dentistry, in movie entertainment technology (if "talkies" replaces "movies" - at least in theory - when sound became available, then can you picture what watching a "grabbie" will be like? I don't want to - I get carsick even in Universal Studio's Back To the Future ride). And, of course, in robotics and miniaturization.

Then Dan (spoiler, not hidden) finds something out: he can go back and fix the problem. He has a chance to try unauthorized time travel, and like many a protagonist, he does it, instead of worrying about paradoxes and the end of the universe. Maybe he's right to do that; maybe if you can do it, there's nothing unnatural about doing it.

So Dan goes back in time, and invents the inventions that he had just seen a few weeks previously, in the future ("later in time"). Here's where my head hurts: where did his ideas come from?

Pre-1970: Dan has ideas, and builds robots.
1970: Dan goes to the future, and sees robots, including ones based on his own ideas.
The future: Dan travels to the past, intending to build those robots.
1970: Dan builds the robots using then-existing materials, and drafts claims and descriptions in order to patent them. Then Dan goes "Back to the future" via cold sleep, and wakes up with All's Well That Ends Well.

So the question is: are his patents valid or invalid? The ideas came from him, essentially. The USPTO has no interest in where ideas come from, unless it's one of

1. from someone else,


2. from abroad, or


3. from nature, with no addition by you.

So maybe it doesn't matter; there was no prior thinker who had the idea (earlier in Time): Dan is both first to invent and the originator of the idea.

Incidentally, there's also some discussion of trademarks, since Dan has very particular ideas on what the name of the company should be and what the logo should look like. He wants it to look like what it will look like - and what would have happened if he'd decided he didn't like a Genie or the name Aladdin, and gone with a swoosh and the name Enron? Well, he didn't, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Incidentally, time travel is full of fun thought experiments for the Law. Consider: Can you rob yourself? What if you refuse to consent? What about seduction, marriage under false pretenses, rape? Crimes of violence? Property crimes? Can you sue yourself? If so, should you win?

Back to IP!

Friday: Shipstones and the Decision Not to Patent

In Heinlein's masterpiece Friday (not that everyone can stand it, let alone love it as I do), there are Things called Shipstones. Although this sounds like the word is based on a Thing, it is based on an Inventor - Mr. Shipstone. This pioneering sort educated himself in mathematics and physics, and then (paraphrased quotation) went into his basement and spent long years discovery applied facts about the natural world, which allowed him to invent the Shipstone.

Shipstones are as revolutionary a New Thing as the folks in Let There Be Light, above, stumbled on. With a miniature shipstone in your cigarette lighter, you don't need fuel. With a big one, you don't need gas for your car. With a number of enormous ones, spaceships Go - although I think these are also/alternatively atomic, at least in part - and they travel at supralight speeds, which can't be explained purely in terms of atomic power.

There's some fascinating historiography, and indeed muckraking history, as Friday reads about the invention. The result, she learns, is that everything in the entire world is owned, in whole, in part, or even overlappingly, by different arms of the Shipstone companies. They own Coke. They own Mastercard. They own the power companies, they own the banks - and they own each other, in an interlocking and stupendously sinister way. Not because it's not predictable - a good product displaces bad, and generates power and influence and above all money - but because it's kept relatively quiet. The Nations are no longer powers; non-state entities, including multinational corporations, can decide that a country should come to heel, and hire its own army - or its own terrorists. If you think I'm drawing a parallel, stop it. "Black Friday," which involves sudden, violent change, is not like 9/11.

It's much, much worse than 9/11. See this boingboing post from September, 2001, which mysteriously misses many of the most frightening similarities. Cities are blotted out. Methods of travel are sabotaged. Assassinations, on a global and coordinated scale never seen in history, occur. I don't ever want to live through one of those.

In any case, Friday reads two competing histories of the Shipstone invention.

In one, the Inventor is selfless, noble, motivated only by the quest for knowledge.

In the other, his wife Muriel is scheming, sophisticated, and informs him that he shouldn't be a fool.

Whichever may be the "real" facts (if either), the result is the same. The Shipstones are not patented. Neither, however, are they disclosed. They are simply - sold. This is the Trade Secret method of protecting an invention.

It takes brains to make a Shipstone, and power. If you don't know what you are doing, you simply break it - or blow yourself up. It's almost self-protecting, and there's no need for the Shipstone Companies to disclose in order to get the competitive advantage of monopoly. They just sell, at their chosen price, and the world buys, and buys, and buys.

Such a "perfect" trade secret is unlikely in the real world; most things are either capable of being copied, or can be reverse-engineered, since the biggest obstacle is always knowing for sure that something can be done. See, for example, the atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb. The lag between seeing one demonstrated, and having one of your own, was on the order a decade, and need not have been so slow.

In any case, they chose not to take advantage of the Deal we offer inventors: disclose, and you have exclusive control over your invention until the term expires. During that period, you can do nothing; you can go into business yourself; or you can license. The Shipstones did not need to make that choice.

Finally, there's a few miscellaneous inventions I'd like to discuss.

Misc. Inventions

Dr. Pinero, in Heinlein's first published story "Lifeline," invents a blockbuster. It's impossible, alas, but it's an absolutely fascinating idea. What if a scientist could measure how old you were? (So far, so not exciting. Where you going with this, Eh?) What if, moreover, the scientist could do this by "bouncing" "sonar-like" "waves" back along the time dimension, following the skin-colored four-dimensional "worm" (picture a circle moving through space: a tube. Now picture a human moving forward through time: a human-shaped worm) back to where it began, at its inception.

What if, now, Dr. Pinero had invented a way to tell not only your duration-to-date, but your time of death?

What if the worm is connected both ways, in a concrete and irreversible way?

What if you are destined to die at a particular instant, and someone could know, and could tell you, right now, for money?

Would you pay? Or would you pay to *not* be told?

Consider, just to start, the consequences explored in the story: suddenly, every life insurance company is on the losing side of a bad bet, against people who can determine with 100 % accuracy when they will die. The healthy will not pay premiums. The about-to-die certainly will.

In reality, the insurers would leap up on this technology, find a way to charge for it, and would stop having to rely on guesswork.

In the story, Pinero refuses to deal with the slavering mob, and calls them fools. A more Galileo-like character I think Heinlein never wrote. The result is nearly the same - but more like Socrates' end, now that I think of it.

Heinlein, besides all the concepts described above, invented or particularly described a number of inventions.

For example,

He described the waterbed in such precise detail that it became unpatentable. An entrepreneur tried. His patent was invalid, having been fully detailed in a published work, Heinlein's. A later entrepreneur, working without the benefit of a patent, sent a waterbed to Heinlein in recognition and gratitude.

Heinlein's descriptions of spacesuits were so good, that when it came time for NASA to build one, they went back and read the SF - carefully. Water bottle? Check. Radio? Check. Tools on the outside? Check. How do you view readouts, how do you breathe, eliminate heat and wastes, how do you move with pounds of pressure resisting any bending of your arms and legs?

Heinlein also "particularly described":

• how to do childbirth if you have a convenient gravity manipulator (Time Enough for Love, Ace 1988, pp.203-04)



• how to use the word "grok" (see Stranger in a Strange Land. There's no copyright or trademark protection, alas, and patenting a word is worse than useless, it's unpossible)



• the waldo, an item utterly necessary for modern surgery and nuclear engineering, used by his character Waldo in the story, well, "Waldo." Waldoes are used to manipulate something you can't touch (too small, too "hot," too large) - you put your hands in gloves, which provide feedback to a different set of gloves, which are small/large/powerful/delicate/hardened enough to do the job



• what TANSTAAFL means. See generally The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, as well as his later work The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which some think is a Late Stinker, but which I like. The phrase is also significant there, late in the book. By the way, don't accept the alternate spellings. It's "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." Anyone who uses an alternate formulation would probably also say, "in their own words"

About 87 years ago our ancestors created a new country,
founded on freedoms
and dedicated to the, y'know, idea that all persons are more or less equal, give or take, know what I'm sayin'?

(Original; Wikipedia. Also see the brilliant Powerpoint Presentation thereof, which is startlingly bad.)

There is no need to shoot such people. It is wasteful, and makes a startling noise. (/RAH) Although if they're being funny, again see the Powerpoint slides, then it's really quite funny.

And that's all I have for this week's Heinlein Friday!

As always, I welcome input, feedback, and requests for future topics or stories to cover.

As I've got my act (more) together this week than last week, when I needed to make the HF post mostly not about Heinlein, and come out on a not-Friday (HF: Judge Jones speech report) - does that make it a non-H non-F post? - let's kick things off with a Wednesday preview of this week's HF.

So far, to recap, we've discussed

• Courts and judges



• Crime



• Lawyers



• Justice



• Aliens



• And there was a special post one week on Jerry Was a Man, which implicated humanity - implicated Being Human.

This week, I turn to another interest of mine: Intellectual Property. HF: Inventions will discuss patents, trade secrets, and invention in Heinlein's fiction.

Not all the inventions Heinlein discusses (or "discloses," or "particularly describes") are covered by IP. Intellectual Property, for anyone without a background is "an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form." (Wikipedia, which covers the topic nicely).

In other words,

with IP, instead of "owning" a house or a shirt or a wallet or a pile of sprockets, you "own" rights in the plans of the house, or the shape of the shirt, or the design of the wallet, or the name of your sprocket business.

These rights are different in some respects from Property Rights, which most people instinctively understand. If you own your home outright, only one person can be The Owner - sell it, and you no longer own. You can exclude others from entering (in general, with exceptions for emergencies, the police with a warrant or exigent need, etc.), you can let others in, you can allow others to trespass on your rights. And you can divest, as I said, by selling (or giving) your property away.

In intellectual property, you can do many of those things - but the law has to change, as always, when the underlying nature of the property alters. A song, for example, is not a fixed Thing until you record in some form (on a music sheet, or on tape, or in the head of a parrot) - at which point, there's a song AND a thing. The song can't be reproduced - it's a song. It can be imitated. It can be captured, replayed, edited, mocked. But the Thing can be copied, and copied, and copied - that's the nature of Things.

IP sometimes lets you prevent people from copying Things, and also sometimes from copying the Idea expressed in the Thing.

Heinlein didn't usually spend a lot of time discussing all this, the policy and nature of IP. But he certainly used it.

In "The Door Into Summer," the entire plot hinges on patents. And not in a normal way - TDIS is a time-travel story, with at least one paradox or bootstrapping problem. In other science fiction, authors (who often understand far too little biology) may ask, what if you go back and become your own grandpa? (Cf. the song - also note that things are different if a woman goes back and becomes her own grandmother.)

In Heinlein's book, Dan patents a design - but he does it after he's already seen it invented. This convoluted result is one of the things I'll discuss for Friday. The story also contains IP fraud, trademark issues, brand naming, and various new inventions, including Stik-Tite (think velcro on steroids), and "grabbies" (think movies, then extrapolate - they "null the theater on some shots" so "buckle your seatbelt").

Other stories I'll discuss include "Let There Be Light," "Lifeline," and "Friday." But you'll have to come back on Friday for the rest.

And since I've got your attention, and did this before, let me take one more opportunity to flog my del.icio.us page. It's HIGHLY linky, it's got my commentary, and it's much more categorizable (and categorized) than any blog. It's only bloggy in two ways: Newest added entries are at the top, and I post new (and old) links frequently with a note or a description if needed.

I preempt (preemptively!) this week's Heinlein Friday, the recurring examination of the fiction of Robert Heinlein through a legal lens, to bring you...

Speech Report Thursday! Okay, that's a weak title. Let's just call it Heinlein Friday on Thursday (HF on Thu).

The reason for this unusual (and heretofore unprecedented) interruption in the Normal Series of Things is that I bring you a firsthand report on a speech by famed ("conservative, Republican, Bush-appointee") U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III, of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, known far and wide as the "Intelligent Design Judge," because of his role in overseeing the bench trial (no jury) of the Katzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.

If you need background, the Wikipedia page on Katzmiller should have all you'd ever need. I mean, it is extensive. Readable, too.

Why is Judge Jones now a touring celebrity? In part, it's because of the enemies he has made - and what he has chosen to do about it. And that will, in due course, bring us full circle, to my reason for making this Speech Report a HF on Thurs.

Judge Jones' speech

Site: Conference Center, the Wanamaker Building (Emporis link, images, the Man Himself, John Wanamaker)
Invitation from: Judge Denis P. Cohen (although he says the idea originated with his co-chair) of the Professional Responsibility Committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association.
Date and time: Wednesday, July 19th, at lunchtime.

Subject (as freely interpreted by me): The Role of Judges (and why Civic Education in this country needs help)

His honor thanked us for our welcome, and hoped he would give us some food for thought. He opened with a brief description of his recent (and evanescent) fame. He has received at least one death threat, as Judge Cohen noted in his introduction, but has also been receiving wide recognition and a great opportunity to speak about the topics of his speech. He disclaimed any intention of engaging in post-hoc analysis of
- the trial
- Intelligent Design, or
- his opinion

all of which he believes speak essentially for themselves.

He did noted in good humor that although judges mainly seek to be affirmed on appeal, should it come to that, he's one of the few judges whose trial opinions have been affirmed... by the Vatican. [See, e.g., MayerBlog, here: "Significantly, even the Vatican – whose hostility to science when it appears to conflict with religious dogma is well-known in Western history (consider, for example, the prosecution of Galileo by the Inquisition, for his 'heresies') – has recently recognized that intelligent design is not a science."]

Judge Jones issued a call to arms. He asked that judges, and lawyers, step up. The public level of understanding of basic civics, of the structure and nature of government in this country, of the purpose and practice of law and judging, is abysmal - and I'm not going to argue. A recent poll (avoid recent polls!) said that nearly 3/4ths of a recent sampling of 100,000 high school students had either no opinion regarding, or took for granted, their First Amendment rights.

That's bad, no matter how invalid the actual result might be. The fact remains that there's anyone out there who isn't exercised about the idea that the First Amendment is constantly under siege; that the powerful seek to stifle the voice of the powerless; that newspapers exist not at the suffrance but despite the active antagonism of monied and politically powerful interests (although they are themselves monied and powerful...).

Judge Jones's point is that we don't know what our liberties are, nor why they should be that way.

Judge Jones also cited the reaction of the punditry to his case. They're entitled to free speech, he argued, but in the absence of adequate education in civics and theory of government, the public is liable to be "whipsawed" - and whipped into a frenzy by people of ill will.

And what about those ill-willers?

Judge Jones noted what an honor it was to be called "fascist" by Bill O'Reilly; to be deemed "arrogant" by the Reverend, Pat Robertson; and to be described as "sticking a knife in the back" of those that brung him to the dance, by one Phyllis Schlafly.
His Honor also commented at some length about the abominable Ann Coulter's abominable new book, in which she takes time out, not to excoriate the law of the Katzmiller decision, but to engage in a prolonged ad hominem attack on those who support the result and on the Judge who penned it. He noted that she (accusations paraphrased, since it's my recollection of his quotation or perhaps paraphrase)

• called him a 'hack judge'


• called him a bastard Joe Wilson who merely "hasn't posed in a Jaguar outside the White House" - yet


• accused him of being as good an expert on the requirements of the First Amendment as Harriet Myers
  

(Bravo, Ann, bravo. You failed to mention the Lemon test (I'm sure you hate it, your idol Scalia hates it too), or the endorsement test (that awful Woman, Sandra Day O'Connor invented it - too bad she's more famous, wise, and beloved than you - I hope her next book does better than yours, as well), which are the governing tests that a judge must use, or be reversed, when analyzing a claim under the establishment clause of the First Amendment. You also lowered the discourse, Ann. Way to go. Twit. Well, I've already mentioned Ann in HF before. Twice. That's quite enough about her.)

Judge Jones argued on three interrelated themes

- Judges perform their duties in a "workmanlike" way (with a hattip to Judge M. Rendell (3d Cir.) who used the word as well)
- Judges are bound by precedent, must obey the rule of law, and do not do their jobs in an ad-hoc fashion, constrained only by their own wishes, and by putting a finger to the wind of public opinion to see which way it blows
- Better education, of the public and the media, would help preserve judicial independence and respect for the rule of law. Here, the comment was that we (as the legal profession) should put a face on the Judiciary, and answer critics.

On the education front, as noted above, he emphasized civics. He called for better government classes. And he noted that history is important; although the public is "yearning" to have a reasoned public debate, they are too likely to believe the last hysterical pundit they heard. "Civic Stupidity" is a term he used.

And that, finally, brings us to Heinlein.

Judge Jones noted that if you don't know your history, "You're gonna get rolled."

This echoed Heinlein's statement about knowledge.

The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

That is, if you can't count (or do some serious math), you have to take things on faith. If you don't speak the language, you're a provincial ignoramus who doesn't even know their own language, let alone what almost everyone else speaks (that is, "something else"). And if you don't know history, it's not just that you are bound to repeat it; you are doomed to fail to learn from the grand mistakes of the past.

You are doomed to be historyless - to lack identity, self-knowledge, a basic understanding of what even is. If you don't know when World War II was, give or take, how can you understand what Germany is like, and why Japanese-U.S. relations are the way they are, and why we are scared of WMDs? You can't pick this stuff up by watching all-news networks. You have to actually study, read, or learn things.

Same with math, and with languages. Translations aren't enough. If you can't even figure out how your taxes are calculated, you're going to get rolled. If you take their word for it that the scary foreign leader is saying "We will bury you!" rather than what he actually was implying ("We will outlast you!"). Math and foreign languages are the way you interact with the real world. History is the context into which all facts must fit - because if it's not accurate history, it's not about the real world, about the facts. It may be important - may be culture, society, shared beliefs, faith, morality, or an entertaining story (Superman!), but it's not history.

So Judge Jones, like the Dean of SF / Grandmaster himself, is urging us to Do Something - fight back ignorance. Encourage civic understanding. If you're a lawyer, go into a classroom. If you're a judge and your ruling (or integrity, or impartiality) are questioned and there's a teachable moment, don't remain silent.

The Old Way, Judge Jones said, was that judges would issue their opinions and then "batten down the hatches," and wait for it to be over. Jones, while denying he makes his decisions with that finger in the air, is a consumer of the media. And as such, he wants to fight the impulse. When you have an impulse to speak up, he suggests, speak up. Speak out. Within the confines of ethical rules for judges, take a stand against the pervasive, and perverse, rantings of the punditry. "We did not check *all* our First Amendment rights at the chamber door" when we became judges, he notes, paraphrasing the language from - is it Tinker, or Hazelwood? Too tired to remember. Hopefully one of those pages says.

And since he has a bully pulpit, he is taking a stand against the "deliberate inaccuracies," "cartoonish" and "outlandish" portrayals of law by Ann Coulter and others, foisted on an uninformed, ill-educated public.

Two last notes on his speech:

Judge Jones says his greatest regret about the trial is not allowing cameras in the courtroom - because the lawyering was so superb, so unparalleled, and you can't just tell someone to read about the case - "you had to be there." It would have been an outstanding civics lesson, he believes.

And, he favors civility between lawyers. The "knife fights over discovery," and "flaming arrows back and forth," he treats as he would a childish tantrum. A time out, and zero tolerance.

And that's it for Heinlein (Thursday)! Stop back next week, when we return to our regularly scheduled examination of science fiction.

Go read the latest Skeptics' Circle, up now at MWSR - it's Scooby Doo-themed this time. Also quite funny.

As always, the Best of the Web (according to moi) appears irregularly but quite frequently at the Del.Icio.Us page I post to. I mentioned how cool delicious is here, and had been previously ranting about Jots, as in this post. The adulation previously unduly showered on Jots.com (now defunct) is equally if not more deserved by the more-popular, more-stable, still-extant delicious.

Why are you still here? Go read the 39th Skeptics' Circle, or check out my delicious page.

Sensationalistic? Purposely filled with violence, gore, and sex?

Well, hopefully. Otherwise, this is going to be a fairly tedious post. Actually, upon review, there's no sex. That's not a comment on Heinlein. Heinlein was a very sexy writer, at times. At other times (like when the Boy Scouts were publishing the material), not so much. And there's plenty to tut-tut about, if you're into that kind of thing. I'm not particularly into tutting. We'll leave Sex and Law in Heinlein for another time.

Following my ambitious boast in yesterday's preview, HF Pending (And no more Jots), I'm going to discuss

Science Fiction Crimes

in Heinlein's stuff. Stuff being broadly construed, and referring here to his books, short stories, and writings generally.

Follow me then, deep into the tangential plot details, past the thicket of uncertain meaning, your only guide the mind of a lawyer (no, don't turn back!) - to our goal: Real Crime! Ripped from the Headlines of - not the real world, that's for certain.

First, let's do some definitional work.

I'm not going to discuss civil litigation in Heinlein. I've mentioned some of the more dramatic instances, including last week's post on the short story Jerry Was a Man, in which a genetically modified chimpanzee brought suit in his own name ("Jerry," if you're wondering) and asked the court to declare that he deserved a basic amount of dignity - which implied, for example, denying the corporation that created him the right to euthanize him, and by extension those like him. If you're curious how the suit is resolved... and you haven't noticed the title of my post or the title of the story yet... I reveal it, behind spoilers, in the post.

There's also the various proxy fights, quasi-civil cases (see the case of Lummox, discussed in these two previous HF posts), and similar good stuff. In that second post, for example ("Lawyers Beyond Stereotypes," I mention I Will Fear No Evil's Jake Solomon and the case he brings on behalf of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, whose brain has been transplanted into the body of his (deceased) young female secretary, Eugine Branca. A rollicking case. But not the subject of today's post.

We're also not discussing torts, like civil trespassing, nuisance, civil battery (including punching someone in the nose), or invasion of privacy; we're also not discussing cases involving property, real or otherwise. Property cases can involve inheritance (plenty of Will battles, as I noted in earlier HF posts; see Citizen of the Galaxy, not to mention I Will Fear No Evil, supra). I'm definitely going to devote an upcoming HF to patent law and trade secrets; there's a wealth of good material there for IP (intellectual property) geeks.

What is a crime?

We're going to have to get a bit stuffy and formal here, I'm afraid.

Crimes are forbidden acts, committed by actors. Extended legal discussion follows:


How might a sci fi crime play out? Well, ideally it's not just another boring murder mystery where the deceased is an alien, and the locked room is a locked room, and the detective has two heads. If there's no reason to make it a science fiction story, tell it straight. See e.g. Watt-Evans' Sixth Rule of Fantasy.

A crime could be

- an act not forbidden under law as we know it ("No time-traveling back to shoot your grandfather; it's a form of suicide")
- an act "committed" by science-fictional means ("And then he lifts up the gun with his telekinesis, and teeks the bullet right into the other guy!")
- committed by a "person" who is science-fictional (alien, computer, disembodied...)
- committed in a science-fictional setting, where the rules (indeed, the laws of nature or the amount of gravity) could be totally different.

Isaac Asimov played a lot with murder mysteries; Larry Niven the same. But Heinlein usually wasn't as focused on the murder, as on the rest of the plot he was telling. "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls," for example, one of my most favorite Heinlein books (despite its detractors), begins with a murder, and ends with (spoiler!) the death of a cat, not to mention the protagonist and his spouse. Apparently. Everyone (except that first corpse) is resurrected in the next book, and on the fun rolls. The murder is not punished at all, or indeed discussed for hundreds of pages. Yet, it is a key plot element; it sets all other events in motion.

Let me restate (some of) the possibilities.

• Crimes with impossible acts


• Crimes in impossible places


• Crimes committed by impossible people.

I particularly like the first one. It's not generally speaking possible to commit a crime by taking your own possessions. The elements of the crime of theft (or larceny) are that the actor must have deliberately taken without permission the property of another, intending to permanently deprive the person thereof. But could it be a crime to take your own possessions, without permission? See "By His Bootstraps," and "The Door Into Summer."

Impossible places: This includes outer space, which exists but which is not currently inhabited beyond high Earth orbit, and Venus, which is not nearly as Heinlein depicted it back in the 1960s and earlier. The Wiki article on Venus notes that the 1962 space probe Venera I was the first to reveal that the surface of Venus was a balmy 425 degrees Celsius, or hot enough to ruin a pizza - or your day. Pizza-baking occurs at 425 degrees F - or about 235 Celsius.

Impossible people: Is it a crime to steal, if you're a computer? Don't ask Mike, aka Mycroft, the H.O.L.M.E.S. IV computer that runs much of the infrastructure in the Moon, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He plays a few gentle jokes, like the following exchange between Manny (Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis, the narrator) and Mike:

"Mike, why did you tell Authority's paymaster to pay a class-seventeen employee ten million billion Authority Scrip dollars?"

"But I didn't."

"Damn it, I've seen voucher. Don't tell me cheque printer stuttered; you did it on purpose."

"It was ten to the sixteenth power plus one hundred eighty-five point one five Lunar Authority dollars," he answered virtuously. "Not what you said."

"Uh . . . okay, it was ten million billion plus what he should have been paid. Why?"

"Not funny?"

"What? Oh, every funny!"... etc. Text gakked from this sample chapter, probably a copyright violation but it's not my problem, my use is academic and not commercial, and would fall under fair use.

Has a crime been committed? If a human did it to enrich himself, there certainly would have been. Uttering a false check, maybe embezzlement, fraud, grand larceny on a scale never attempted before by a human being. Something.

Same kind of question, different crime: What if the "actor" is an alien for whom humans are subhuman or even lunch? For both sorts of alien, consider my post on Aliens, Combatants, and the Other. If there's something that's godlike, then what is man to It, that It should be mindful of us? And if it's a predator and we are Soup to it, then how are we going to punish it under our laws for doing so? The most we can do, is kill them - if we can. The Moderator, of course, might have the power to adjudge a species to be a threat, and take appropriate action. But again, if it's just us, vs. superaliens? "Mice voting to bell the cat," is what Wormtongue - oops, wrong Ficton. I mean "Wormface" - said. More accurate when it's humans trying to outlaw eating us, as opposed to the Three Galaxies who decide to pass the ultimate sentence on Wormface - and his entire race. They rotate his planet. See Have Spacesuit, Will Travel for the story behind that simple, chilling sentence.

Heinlein didn't spend as much time on bank robberies as Harry Harrison, of Stainless Steel Rat fame, has. He has fewer superdetectives than Asimov. There's nothing like Gil "The Arm" Hamilton's amazing third arm, or his or Beowolf Schaeffer's impossible crimes, solved by rigorous logic and luck and bravery in Niven's Tales of Known Space. But for all of that, there's some great crimes in Heinlein.

Murder - with a laser, or an exploding dart gun, or an H-bomb, or by "erasure."
Theft - is it a crime to steal a person, if the person is a computer, and the computer will be destroyed if you don't "steal" it?
Tax evasion - well, it's fun, anyway. See the trial in The Rolling Stones, mentioned in HF: Courts and discussed more substantively in Lawyers.
Assault - we discussed the "punch in the face" example, linked at the beginning of this post.

Got any more favorites? Note them in the comments, please, and I'll update the post.

And that's it for this week!

Check back next week for another installment of Heinlein Friday. I believe I'll be taking up patent law, in connection with The Door Into Summer among other stories.

(Heinlein) Friday is just three hours away, so keep your eyes (or RSS feeds) peeled. In other news, I've had it with Jots. It was a noble experiment. I'm fed up.

My new non-blawg links collection is available here: My del.icio.us. I have 80 links posted so far, none duplicative, and they're neatly categorized (and cross-categorized). They are not, alas, saved cached versions, so the expiring pages (like my most recent addition, Jeremy's brilliant WSJ op-ed piece) will someday no longer be found at the addresses posted.

As most of you know already, delicious (I'm tired of putting in the dots, please assume them) is a wildly popular site that takes advantage of collaborative tagging. See the Main page (clever use of the .us suffix, no?) for more.

I have other useful pages elsewhere, besides this blog, and the previous iteration of this blog: There's also my Wikipedia profile (minimal, to say the least; Wikipedia isn't about the User, it's about the Project), and as I've noted previously I also am a big fan of Bloglines, so I have a Bloglines subscription (free) which aggregates my favorite feeds. Check it out by clicking here.

The upcoming Heinlein post will finally get to one of my favorite topics: Science Fiction Crimes! After all, if a story doesn't have a science-fictional element crucial to the story, it shouldn't be set far in the future, or under the blazing twin suns of Fomulhaut VII, or anywhere other than in a standard contemporary setting. So if a story is appropriately set in a what-if ficton, and there's a crime, it's much more interesting if it's not a normal crime happening to normal people who happen to live in a futuristic or high-tech setting.

The best part of the intersection between Law and Heinlein: coming up next, in the sixth Heinlein Friday.

See this morning's post for the intro to this week's Heinlein Friday, or the previous posts in the series, linked at the end of this post.

"Jerry Was a Man"

"Jerry Was a Man" was copyrighted in 1947, according to the Wikipedia stub entry on the story. The somewhat longer stub about Assignment In Eternity, the collection in which it appeared in 1953, notes that three of the four stories in the book "contain speculation on what makes one a human" but that only "two of those depict potential for evolution into a superior form of human" - a subject which is decidedly not the topic of JWaM.

The Wiki stub on the story accurately sketches the most basic plot summary, but in noting that the early work had features that would echo in later stories bizarrely draws a parallel to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress rather than to a number of more apposite stories. Let's deal with those first.

JWaM: Foreshadowing of later RAH works

As the stub says, the shyster (thus called; it's his job description, and on his card) who is recommended (or located) by Mrs. van Vogel's regular attorney, is "splendidly drawn." By this, I assume was meant that he is colorful, irascible, competent, and unethical in the conventional sense. In these features, he exactly mirrors his counterpart in Citizen of the Galaxy, described at some length in the prior Heinlein Friday post, Lawyers Beyond Stereotypes. The shyster, "The Real McCoy," care of the "notorious Three Planets Club," is not a stereotype - but he may be an archetype. That is, he is an "idealized model of a person, object, or concept from which similar instances are derived, copied, patterned, or emulated." McCoy is, in a sense, The Shyster.

As an aside, van Vogel's main attorney, Sidney Weinberg, is an interesting character himself. He is a respectable fellow; he is not a shyster, which as I said is apparently a distinct profession (or branch of the legal profession), with its own recognized specialties and rules. He "retains a staff shyster," I assume in order to best carry out the work he does on behalf of his client, but thinks it best not to reveal to her that he does so. When she needs one, however, he locates a "special shyster" who is willing to do the necessary, for an exorbitant fee. His interior dialogue on this subject is revealing, and implies a legal profession divided by type of work, just as the work appears to reflect the (pre-Federal Rules, i.e. pre-1938) traditional division between law and equity ("We are met today in the mellow light of equity, rather than in the cold and narrow confines of the law." Assignment in Eternity, Baen 1991, p.270). (Legal discussion follows...)


[the rest of this post technically was posted on Saturday; let's call it a delayed Heinlein Friday, ignore the back-dating, and leave it at that.]

More Foreshadowing and Echoes of Heinlein's Other Work

I'll briefly note three frequent features of Heinlein's work, and then move on to the meat of the post.

As in Citizen of the Galaxy and The Man Who Sold the Moon (wikipedia), a proxy battle is itself a proxy for a battle of wills, a central conflict in the story. In this case however, as in I Will Fear No Evil (see HF: Lawyers for discussion of proxy fights in RAH's books, and links for IWFNE), it is not a proxy fight over control over a company which decides the outcome, but rather a court case to settle rights and obligations under law.

Geriatrics, like genetic engineering, are far advanced in the story. The protagonist's regular lawyer is "respectable," as I noted above; he is also 125 years old and more, see pp.259-260. Compare Methuselah's Children, and all the other Lazarus Long stories, including Time Enough for Live, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

As in so many other stories, there is a depiction of an intelligent, affectionate pet - in this case, Napoleon the miniature elephant. Compare all the pets mentioned in HF: Aliens.

Like many other Heinlein plots, there's a court scene. See, well, HF: Courts. Heinlein puts an alien on the stand, a Martian who is expert at genetic modification and engineering. The Martian, no particular fan of humanity, moves the action forward by providing the relevant law - which in a real court case would usually be briefed by the parties, rather than dramatically revealed by a testifying witness. One exception might be when a witness is testifying as an expert, and his or her understanding of the relevant law, as applicable to the facts, is relevant to his or her testimony. In this case, however, although the Martian is an expert, his main function is to embarass his employer, which is the opposing party.

The Martian, like the more-than-human aliens in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel (see HF: Aliens, and the bit about the Moderator), indicates disdain for the backward humans. (See p.273, "The court discussed the idea of contempt briefly.") In the process, he draws an equivalence between Jerry, a genetically modified chimpanzee, and the apelike humans.

The Moral of the Story
Why'd Heinlein bother writing this story? What was his point?

He was exploring a very particular what-if, involving some of the deepest philosophical questions Science Fiction can wrestle with. What does it mean to be human? What counts? Where does personhood begin, and where must being a chattel [ed: apparently it's not "chattle" - who knew?] therefore end? Heinlein answers the question, in part, with Art. He also suggests that the ability and inclination to cheat (see p.264) is part and parcel of being human. But his true answer, I think, is Emotion - the ability to experience, and communicate, the sort of feeling which humans interpret as unique to them. Whether this perception is accurate is beyond the scope of this post.... But I suspect that if we could prove that dolphins don't just hurt, but can sorrow, or that chimpanzees don't merely mourn, but can yearn, then we would have to consider altering laws governing (certain) animals.

I note that even in the story, the above-mentioned respectable lawyer cites to a landmark court case, see p.260, which provides supposedly apposite precedent. Its binding effect, of course, requires that a modified chimpanzee be equivalent to an expensive cat: a possession or chattel which cannot be wantonly destroyed if there is still value in the animal, as to some human. If a chimp is like a man, not like a cat, then the rule is distinguishable, and Jerry can at least have the right to be not destroyed - not because he is valuable (he is valued by Mrs. van Vogel, but cannot work because of his failed eyesight - I guess they didn't have Lasik(tm) in this future....) but because he has certain minimal rights.

As his trial attorney argues (note that Jerry no-last-name brought the case "in his own name," italics in original, p.268) that he would be entitled to certain perquisites of "humanity," as the Martian is, p.274-75. "Not for him to vote, nor to hold property, nor to be relieved of special police regulations appropriate to his group" - although how precisely one can have a "human" born and living in a country without having all the usual rights pertaining to personhood and citizenship I'm not sure - it could be legal, but it smells to me.

In fact, the entire sheaf of themes of personhood, "counting" as a man, and race in Jerry bother me a little. At one point, the (unsympathetic)
manager comments that "One Nisei farmer working three neo-chimpanzees can grow as many vegetables as a dozen old-style farm hands." P.254. There are too many things in that one sentence for me to unpack. What is Blakesly referring to? Should we picture Hispanic migrant farm workers? Jim Crow-era blacks? Slaves? No matter what the case, the racial luggage or should I say "freight" - of the statement, in the mouth of a minor villain, continues to puzzle me.

Heinlein's resolution is (spoiler)



If you believe that an animal does not merely feel, but that you understand and feel their feelings as a result, it is nearly impossible not to want to treat them as rough equals - even if animals have always been capable of substantially more than human chauvinists prefer to remember.

Despite the impressive and intricate abilities of animals, I have taken on some of Heinlein's extreme skepticism of the claim that humans are not in some important sense unique. Not, I think, because of his religious beliefs (as in divinity), but because of his unshakeable belief that there is something special about what humans do, in terms of thinking, creating, and feeling. If this belief proves false, then the mantle of humanity (and the protections that go with it) will in my view have to be enlarged.

Just like last week ("Pending Post: Heinlein Friday & Superman"), I'm choosing not to publish this week's HF before I head off to work in the morning. But, here's a preview.

I've been talking about "Jerry Was a Man" for the last three weeks, in the Superman, Aliens / Combatants, and Courts posts. That story's time has come, its day in the sun is here.

(Hey, why not? After all, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia....) (FX official site; Wikipedia entry). [That new tv show, by the way,


Right, end of digression. Oops, just one more: anybody heard anything good about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest? I did so like Jack Sparrow (channeled portrayed - or is it perpetrated? - ably by Johnny Depp, one of my handful of favorite male actors) but the current movie's getting mediocre reviews at best, unlike its predecessor. So many p's.

Back to the subject: HF

Last week's HF had me looking outside of Heinlein's work to shed light on what he was doing, and whether it was successful. This week, I'm back to focusing on his writing as my main source material. "Jerry Was a Man" is a 1947 short story, collected in Assignment In Eternity, and although there are some (to me, today) inexplicable words or phrases, most of the story has aged quite well in 53 years. It's timely, even, in part. But if the racial and sexual politics (and sensibilities) have changed, have the scientific ones? Maybe. Possibly not. We have 50 more years of genetic modification, of experience with the nuclear age [if it's proper to describe the End of Innocence as if it were an Age, of Steam or of Information (aside - which last we are assuredly in, even as most new American jobs continue to be in the service industries, and the professions, rather than in dealing with "pure" information)... nested parenthesis problem... perhaps a ']' would help. ]. The world is older and not necessarily wiser. People are much the same. And Jerry? Is he a Man? We'll open it up, later today. You have about 10 hours to submit comments or questions, and then the post is up. Of course, since it's a blog, unlike a newspaper, I can then make corrections/ additions/ emendations to the piece - that's why I consider every post to be New, for purposes of discussion. Heinlein doesn't go stale - or any staler than he already is.

So if you see anything in any of the HF series (full list at the bottom of any HF post), leave a comment (until the comment period expires - and I may extend them) or drop an e-mail. This is my forum, and I'm inviting your reactions.

Next topic: the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany

The greatest single-sport athletic event the world has to offer is nearly at an end, to return in another four years. Several countries have distinguished themselves. A greater number did not. A few embarassed themselves - or were humiliated by others. Brazil, which had so effortlessly cruised over lesser teams, bowed out ignominiously, not even making it to the semifinals. Finishing below the top four, when you are defending champs (2002, hosted in Korean/Japan) and have won outright many times, is a major fall.

The last non-Brazil winner, France, won in 1998, and will be playing in the finals this Sunday, at 1:30 p.m. eastern time, against Italy, which has a long history with the finals. I remember watching Baggio in 1994, when Italy last made it to the finals, losing on penalty kicks. A sad end, and not the best way to decide a soccer game, if I had it to design over again. I stopped watching games in this tournament when they went to PKs. That's why I was so glad Italy beat Germany in the final seconds - scoring twice at the end of the second period of (non-sudden death, aka "No Golden Goal") overtime, in the 119th minute overall, and at 120 + 1 minute of injury time, only a minute or so before the final whistle.

I'd have loved to see a German home final. I'd also have loved to see Portugal (an underdog favorite for me since their defeat of Mexico in the opening round) in the final, but it was not to be; they had opportunities but could not convert. For that matter, a Germany/ Argentina final would have given me a chance to make lots of Fascist jokes, which would apparently get me arrested in Germany. Freedom and democracy, at the cost of limited freedom of speech. A suspicious proposition, in my view. Portugal/ Brazil, had it happened, would have been a "former colony/ former colonialist" match, and would also have been an opportunity for interesting social commentary beyond the match itself.

The Third Place match, between the losers of the semifinal matches, will be played by Germany and Portugal at 3 pm EDT on July 8th, tomorrow, Saturday.

Next World Cup, in South Africa, we'll see who has stepped up and who can't handle the stiff competition.

As a side note, Jots seems to be performing quite poorly. I may have to migrate from Jots to del.icio.us, which has an inferior interface (but if it works, that's necessarily a better interface), or switch to something else entirely. BlogSpot has a Blog post feature; I may check that out. (Free *is* a good price). Or I may try Tags.

And that's all, until later today.

Try the new & improved, fresh and exciting taste sensation that's sweeping the nation, ever so refreshing, Skeptic's Circle! It's hosted at SkepticRant by LBBP (motto: "a man without GOD is like a fish without a bicycle" - that's harsh stuff, LBBP, but amusing).

Visit the 38th Skeptics' Circle, aka "Thirsty for truth? Try Skeptic Cola!" The post is helpfully tagged, cross-referenced, and easy-to-use: it's in bins, with witty names like "Creationist Tonic," "Alt History fusion," and "Scam Sipper." Recommended - but then, most of the Skeptics' Circles are recommended. Let's say, "especially recommended."

Read the whole thing.

And previously, the 37th Skeptics' Circle: From somewhere within the Bermuda Triangle.