I just noticed that my Timex Ironman watch says "www.timex.com" on the steel backplate. I remember being with a girlfriend in 1997 or so, and marveling that there was a URL...on a toothbrush. It occurs to me often that kids, even people six or eight years younger than I, have no clear concept of a time when the Internet did not occupy so much cultural mindspace, any more than I can clearly imagine the times before television, radio, telephones, flush toilets (well, okay, I do have some experience with that one), guns, and other modern conveniences. I tend to think that the Information Age has only really started to bloom maybe a decade ago or less, when computers got simultaneously cheaper and unthinkably more powerful. Mine is probably the last generation who ever really had to use a typewriter (I think my grandmother's old Smith-Corona sits happily in my parents' basement, waiting to (a) become a museum piece, or (b) become useful for the next generation's college applications), and even I latched onto computers pretty early on, and continued on not just to learn how to use them but also to learn how they work and the mathematics they incarnate in their design and other mathematics they can further express through programming. It would be wonderful if all those ideas, from people like Gödel and Turing, could find wider acceptance and understanding. I don't know if the modern familiarity with computers enables that; probably not. I'll likely live to find out, though there are more important things.

I've been reading through the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision, and it's pretty cool. It's not very dense, as legal writings go, and I highly recommend reading it through.

I'm expecting someone to try and amend the Massachuetts Constitution to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, though, and it turns out several others states, and Congress and the Bush administration, are planning to do the same with their respective Constitutions. So I took a look at some of the opposition, and the rhetoric is amazing-- "it would destroy civilization as we know it"? That article shows one of the fundamental biases behind the opponents of gay marriage, namely that gay relationships are somehow inherently unstable. They must live in that other United States, without the high divorce rate and infidelity among heterosexuals.

Isn't it wonderful that the same men who restrict what women can do with their bodies also support the sanctity of marriage while cheating on their wives? I'm not sure if I'm disappointed in America, or humanity at large, for not seeing what's in front of them and being able to act in their own interests. Go on, ask me about black or gay Republicans. I dare you.

Now is a good time to review William Safire's article on gay marriage. (For reference, he's not usually a liberal.)

I'm not quite suffused with the ecstasy of universal love at the moment, but I'm not unhappy either, so I think I'll call it even and go to bed. :-)