I've finished reading Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' in the e-mail installment system. It's not a bad way to read a book like that.

The penultimate section included some suggestions about how to better the system. In particular:

Fire Lots of Lawyers

... [M]y criticism of the role that lawyers have played in this debate is not just about a professional bias. It is more importantly about our failure to actually reckon the costs of the law.

Economists are supposed to be good at reckoning costs and benefits. But more often than not, economists, with no clue about how the legal system actually functions, simply assume that the transaction costs of the legal system are slight. [11] They see a system that has been around for hundreds of years, and they assume it works the way their elementary school civics class taught them it works.

But the legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.

These costs distort free culture in many ways. A lawyer's time is billed at the largest firms at more than $400 per hour. How much time should such a lawyer spend reading cases carefully, or researching obscure strands of authority? The answer is the increasing reality: very little. The law depended upon the careful articulation and development of doctrine, but the careful articulation and development of legal doctrine depends upon careful work. Yet that careful work costs too much, except in the most high-profile and costly cases.

The costliness and clumsiness and randomness of this system mock our tradition. And lawyers, as well as academics, should consider it their duty to change the way the law works--or better, to change the law so that it works. It is wrong that the system works well only for the top 1 percent of the clients. It could be made radically more efficient, and inexpensive, and hence radically more just.

But until that reform is complete, we as a society should keep the law away from areas that we know it will only harm. And that is precisely what the law will too often do if too much of our culture is left to its review.
. . .
The law should regulate in certain areas of culture--but it should regulate culture only where that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?"

We should ask, "Why?" Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.

Lifted from William Gibson.

WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE
posted 9:46 AM
'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?'

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm wrapping up from bottling the 4th hefeweizen I have made, Pondering Weasel 4.0. It's one of my favorite beers, in terms of how well it has turned out, although PW 3 was a disappointment. I was looking at the yeast vials I have collected, and I think I (inadvertently) used a different strain for PW3 than I did for other Ponderings.

PW 4 had the right aroma. As soon as I opened the fermenter, I could tell it was better than the last one. And I sampled a bit at the end of bottling tonight; it had the right flavor, as much as one can judge these things at this stage, anyhow. I'm hopeful that it's a good batch. It should, at least, be drinkable with a slice of lemon.

Final yield was 16 bottles (std 12 oz), 22 grolsch size (16 oz), and 10 summer-size (22 oz or so). That translates into roughly 2-1/2 cases.

This batch blew up a day after fermentation started. It blasted the airlock across the kitchen and popped the lid off the fermenter. I ended up with lots of foam on top of the lid, which dried into nasty "beer flakes" (although the dog liked them when I offered them to him as snacks), sort of like dried seaweed, except with hops instead of seaweed.

I also planted two hops rhizomes next to the garage. A Newport (which is supposed to be a good yield, high Alpha acid variety, nearer the door) and a Fuggles. The Fuggles is already sending shoots out of the ground. They won't yield anything this year, and neither variety is ideal for weizen, but next year, I should be able to make some other homebrews with my own hops.

There are only nine images in this series on the photographer's website, but it's all really good. I'm including a few of the images here.




link: Carl Wooley

Gakked tout entier from BoingBoing:


Bad news for freedom. Snip from WIRED Threat Level piece by David Kravets:

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed lawsuits targeting the nation's telecommunication companies for their participation in President George W. Bush's once-secret electronic eavesdropping program. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker upheld summer legislation protecting the companies from the lawsuits. The legislation, which then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for, also granted the government the authority to monitor American's telecommunications without warrants if the subject was communicating with somebody overseas suspected of terrorism.

Image courtesy Billboard Liberation Front.

What will our children think of us when they look back at this time? Worse, what if they don't find this particularly disturbing?

"You know, Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke, who was the head of the counterterrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it."
-- Dick Cheney, on Richard Clarke

"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (5/3/01)

"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (5/26/01)

"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (6/23/01)

"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (6/25/01)

"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (6/30/01)

"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (7/02/01)

-- subject lines of Richard Clarke emails to Bush Administration prior to 9/11/01

(via Doonesbury

Cooked up the 4th iteration of Pondering Weasel Weizenbier today. I couldn't find any of my recipe cards from the earlier ones (particularly from #3, which didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, and I wanted to see if it was something in the ingredients for that one in particular). So I'm putting my recipe here so I can find it again in the future.

1.5 gal water for boil
1 can 3.3# Munton's wheat malt extract
4# Munton's light dried malt
1oz Cascade hops (6.7%)
White Labs' American Hefeweizen Yeast WLP320

Boil 60 min (only about 30-40 min w/ boiling hops). Pour into fermenter w/ ~4 gal water & pitch yeast.

I managed to have the wort boil over (as I was off dealing with a tantruming 5-year-old), which is the first time in several batches that that has happened. According to tradition, this means that my wife is mad at me for messing up the stove, but also, it means that the beer will be good. Hope that tradition holds true.

I think that it is possible that PW #3 was made with all barley malt, rather than a 50/50 of wheat and barley malts. This might explain its darker color and non-weizen qualities. It's still a drinkable beer (and in fact, I opened one to drink while I was brewing), but it doesn't have that bright, summery quality that a proper weizen (and the previous Ponderings, in particular) have had.

So for now, I'm hopeful that this one will turn out like the earlier Ponderings.

I was tipped off to the title of this book from DailyLit. I don't think I need to read the whole book (and I certainly don't need to pay $10 to get it e-mailed to me in segments), but I get a sense of the gist of it from an interview with the author (Patrick Lencioni) on Amazon:

Q: What are the three signs?

The first is anonymity, which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.

The second sign is irrelevance, which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life--a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor--in one way or another.

The third sign is something I call "immeasurement," which is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees who have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers’, to gauge their progress or contribution.

On a somewhat related note, I've also been looking for a quote I liked about the three things to look for in a job (it was along the lines of: make a little money, have a little fun, learn something new; if the job doesn't offer at least two of the three, I won't take it.) I thought I had copied it here on LJ, but I can't find it now.

Lastly, I found an article (which has now expired, so I can't link to it [My Google-fu is better than that, at least for the time being...]) with a title "Lack of 'team spirit' at work tied to depression." That would seem to tie in with Lencioni's premise, as well.

Peter Dinklage to play Tyrion Lannister in an adaptation of GRR Martin's 'Game of Thrones' for HBO.

Wow.

I haven't thought about casting for it, but Dinklage is near perfect (though I always thought of Tyrion as somewhat fairer). But I think he's ideal in having both charm and ruthlessness. I'd say casting is off to a fine start.

I may have to borrow the in-laws' cable when it airs (does it make sense to say "airs" anymore?)

But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad--in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law.

Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate "breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that newspapers impose upon journalists--these are the real laws governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law" with which judges comfort themselves.

For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak--in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name "copyright" silence speech and creativity. And in that world, it takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe they live in a culture that is free.

from installment 68 of Free Culture

I'm reading Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' via DailyLit, and this was a particularly compelling analogy:

In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm production.

No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions.

But in 1962, Rachel Carson published /Silent Spring/, which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed.

No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve.

It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for culture. [7] His point, and the point I want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not that the aims of copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for their work. Or that music should be given away "for free." The point is that some of the ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended consequences for the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural environment. And just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or an attack on farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of regulations protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on authors. It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be aware of our actions' effects on the environment.

My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this effect. No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should also be little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law over time, plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing just now, the net effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted work is effectively protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive increase in protection will be devastating to the environment for creativity.

In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost.

7. See, for example, James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?" /Duke Law Journal/ 47 (1997): 87.

Image from moleitau

And don't forget the original inspiration, either.

There's a story behind this, but I'm interested in hearing your version first.

Last week was N's birthday. madgallica had an appointment, so I took the boys out for dinner myself. N wanted to go to Grizzly Peak, either because he really likes their chicken strips, or because that has become almost a ritual for my birthday, and he wanted to get a GP glass, too.

After dinner, we came home and watched the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." I'm how old now, and I'd never seen it until now?!!

Here's a very apropos image I came across just today. (And all the names are great: John Lemon, Apple McCartney, George Pearrison, and Mango Starr.)

Maybe it's better to discover some things very late. Some of the retro aspects of the movie, its very two-dimensionality and graphic quality, were quite compelling, and I really liked it a lot. I don't know that I would have thought it was as great if I had seen it 20 years ago.

We also watched "Hard Day's Night" a few weeks back, and a year or so back we watched "Help!" for the first time. I hadn't seen any of the Beatles movies until I was old enough to watch them with my kids. It's been fun catching up.

I like this image I came across recently. Somewhat reminiscent of a Hipgnosis album cover (thanks CBC).

The photographers are Lucie & Simon. They have some other compelling stuff that is worth taking a look through, too. Here's another one I like quite a bit:

from EcoGeek.org



We seem to feature new ideas for methods of generating power every week on EcoGeek. Varieties of methods for harnessing energy from wind, waves, and the sun are being investigated and developed by scientists and inventors all over the globe. But many of these power sources are intermittent, compared to the steady output that is available from combustion of (most often) non-renewable fossil fuels.

One of the regular complaints from opponents of wind or solar power is that it is sporadic or unreliable. "The sun doesn't shine at night;" "The wind doesn't always blow when you need it;" and other complaints are leveled against renewable power systems. That doesn't mean they aren't useful, though. Instead, the grid needs to be better equipped to store that power when it is generated and then draw from it again when demand rises. It's part of the 21st century grid our power system will need.

Ars Technica has a story on power storage that is well worth reading. It looks at some of the theoretical options for power storage, as well as current technologies that are already in use.

( full article text )

I made bigos last weekend.

Typically it's made in a big batch, and I took that to heart with this. Roughly 7# cabbage, 2# sauerkraut, 1# mushrooms, 6# various meat and sausage, and all the other stuff. We ate it for dinner, and had, oh, about 20 pounds of leftovers. I think I put about seven containers in the freezer, we gave one to a friend, and I took one to work for lunch (for three lunches, actually, as it turned out).

This is the third time I've made bigos, and I've enjoyed it every time (which is good, because there's plenty of it afterwards).

I didn't write down my recipe before, so I had to go back and find the versions I had worked from and try to make it more or less the way I did before. For future reference (and yours too, if you're interested), the recipe is here.

The recipe I worked from says to serve it with boiled potatoes, a bowl of sour cream, and thick crusty bread. When we've had this at Amadeus, it comes with very nice yeast rolls which I always slather with butter, and sometimes I get it in a platter with kielbasa and pierogies. With this, madgallica and the boys made huge dinner rolls and we had those, plus a couple pierogies and some small, whole dill pickles as accompaniments, and it was delicious.

( recipe )

originally posted at EcoGeek

NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Project suffered a severe setback when the most recent satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to achieve orbit and crashed into the ocean near Antarctica not long after liftoff. The fairing surrounding the orbiter on the Taurus rocket apparently failed to separate, which prevented the vehicle from reaching its intended orbit. The OCO was intended to specifically measure atmospheric CO2 levels in order to provide scientists with a better picture of what is happening in Earth's atmosphere and collect specific information about carbon dioxide sources (where it comes from) and sinks (where it is pulled out of the atmosphere and stored). The OCO was to have collected 8 million measurements every 16 days.
To even out the measurements since CO2 levels fluctuate at different times of day, the OCO was intended to orbit the Earth in a "sun synchronous polar orbit" which would have the vehicle traveling from pole to pole in order to sweep the entire globe, and would take measurements at approximately 1PM local time across the entire planet.
Launching satellites is still a difficult process, and while space science vehicles have become commonplace, this event reminds us of the difficulty in getting vehicles into space. Unfortunately, the information about the atmosphere this spacecraft would have supplied will now be delayed by several years, at least. It is, of course, too early for NASA to have any plans about replacing the vehicle. But the information it would provide is important, and a replacement should be considered at the earliest opportunity.

I've decided to sell my slipcased, limited edition copy of Neuromancer published by Phantasia Press if I can get a decent price for it. I'm mentioning it here and a couple places first before jumping into the predations of eBay in case someone I know is interested in it.

from Lore Sjoberg's Bad Gods

Philip Glass walks into a bar Philip Glass walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar Philip Glass Philip Philip Phil Philip Glass walks Glass walks Glass walks into Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Glass Glass Glass Glass Philip bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.

from Architectural Dance Society

An article by Bruce Sterling on 2009 as a year of panic.

Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn't be reproduced.

Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we've somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet's most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation's abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

On the reading front, David Marusek has a new book out (Mind Over Ship), which is great. I just finished reading it. I thought that his first book, Counting Heads, was an amazing, mindbending novel, and I've recommended it highly. Mind Over Ship is likewise an excellent read.

Mind Over Ship is a sequel to Counting Heads. You could probably read Mind Over Ship on its own, and enjoy it, but since things that are going on in this are continuations of earlier events from the first book, I think it's better to read them in order. If you haven't read Counting Heads, you really should; you're in for a treat. And if you have, then Mind Over Ship is another dose of Marusek. Either way, you win!

This is not necessarily a representative passage, but it completely cracked me up. (And, in case you didn't know, Marusek lives in Alaska.)

"For all the pent-up desire, the forced separation, the long tube ride from the prison, the nudist intimacy of the sauna, and especially the utter privacy of the null suite, their first intercourse was brief and to the point. Merely a down payment on later, more tender lovemaking. And so it was, with full belly and empty bladder, Fred plowed into Mary like a moose through a windshield." Mind Over Ship p63

---

and Life's Imitation

Since there was no school on Monday, N had a sleep-over with a friend. T and I dropped him of, and then went out for a little father-son time together. It was about 6pm, and we were driving along a road in the rural stretch near the Washtenaw/Wayne County line. T wanted to go to IKEA ("the place with the elevator stairs") to have dinner so we were making our way up to Ford Rd. when I suddenly saw a deer standing in the middle of the road in front of us.

I braked hard, but did not try to swerve, and the deer figured that this bright thing coming at it fast should be avoided, so it tried to start running, but I heard a thump as we reached it, and I think I clipped it's hind leg.

I stopped the car. We were okay, and I checked the front of the car, and there was no damage there, so I am hoping that I had slowed enough that we didn't injure the deer and it was able to safely run away. I though about going back to look and see if it was okay, but there wasn't a good place to turn around and the snow was highalong the shoulder so I couldn't get entirely out of the traffic lane. I also had T in the car, and there were other cars comng along the road, so I didn't want to walk back to try to find it.