Science Addiction

Daniel Plainview’s “I drink your milkshake” line from “There Will be Blood” has gained a lot of pop-culture traction lately (most famously on SNL). While he wasn’t directly talking about the remix culture, it’s great to hear artists that understand that the more they get “slagged” the better it is for culture (and them). Here’s Daniel Day-Lewis:

“If people absorb something you’ve done… and people can make something else out of it, that’s delightful to me. I come from two cultures – England and Ireland – where there’s a long tradition of… we call it slagging in Ireland, taking the piss in England, and if you can offer up something that people can slag you for, they’re always grateful for that.”
[From IMDb]

This is very addictive: Slate’s Delegate Calculator. I could hypothesize for hours…

Three weeks ago, the Freakonomics blog called for a “6 word motto for the U.S.” There were many suggestions, ranging from the mocking the right (“Hubris: it’s not just for Greeks!” and “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”) to mocking the left (“What would liberals hate without it?”), but finally blogger/writer Stephen Dubner narrowed them down to these five, which the readers were asked to vote on:

1. The Most Gentle Empire So Far
2. You Should See the Other Guy
3. Caution! Experiment in Progress Since 1776
4. Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon
5. Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

And now, I’m happy to report, the winner is: “Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay”.

Is your child growing up with false hope? Never fear, Playmobil has just the toy for you:

From the Manufacturer: The traveler hands her spare change and watch to the security guard and proceeds through the metal detector. With no time to spare, she picks up her luggage and hurries to board her flight!

Presenting, the Playmobil Security Check Point- so your child can fantasize about a police-state before living in one. If your lucky, maybe she can run it! Of course, the best part are the reviews:

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).

Of course, remind your kid to leave the set at home the next time you travel. Never know what will happen if the authorities find a detailed model of their awesome security system in your luggage.

(via Schneier and Threat Level)

Fantastic profile of Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, in the New York Times.

In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. [..] Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

I’ve had a similar theory for a while now, which I’ve tried to spin in to a fantasy novel (someday…) about a creator as a high-on-sugar kid with a LEGO set, albeit a LEGO set that builds intricate worlds. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

In any case, none of these ideas are ‘Matrix’-like pluggable-hybrid humans; they’re actually completely simulate that live in the circuits. The tubes, as they say in Alaska. I’d buy this theory, except there’s no way of knowing if it’s true. This isn’t the Truman Show, where you can walk out the end of the world or where everyone else is in on the joke. So, ultimately, it’s a cool hypothesis but I’m already set against unprovable creators.

The boss of the toy company responsible for the huge recall in the US has committed suicide by hanging himself in his warehouse. The toys were recalled due to toxic paint in the toys, which was sold to this ‘boss’ by a close friend of his. The most interesting paragraph in the AP story is:

Zhang hung himself on Saturday, according to the report. It is common for disgraced officials to commit suicide in China.

No Impact Man has put together a questionnaire for U.S. presidential hopefuls and John Edwards is the first to have answered. It’s a pretty straight and informed dialogue- I hope other candidates respond.

If you’re not familiar with No Impact Man, then his is a blog worth keeping track of. In his words:

No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

This guy isn’t a nut- he’s doing this for the right reasons. To demonstrate that it can be done. To remove the cynicism and the inertia from the process of reducing our impact on the planet. This guy is the real deal and is an inspiration.

I created this video on a whim. I call it: “First, They Came for the Box Cutters”

Here’s a passage from page 517 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
(Ron’s brother Bill is warning Harry against trusting a goblin Griphook.)

“You don’t understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs.”

“But if it was bought – ”

”- then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [...] They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.”

These goblins sound like our friendly neighborhood MPAA/RIAA lawyers!

In 1978, 20th Century Fox studio sued Universal for “stealing 34 distinct ideas” from the then recently, immensely successful film Star Wars to create “Battlestar Galactica”. This was one year after the release of Star Wars and an old, hackneyed genre had just been revived. At the time, Universal said that this is like the first Western movie ever suing the second one.

George Lucas visited the production of BSG and decided not to link his name with the law suit. 20th Century Fox, however, pressed on. Universal countersued with a claim that Star Wars (particularly R2D2) was lifted from Universal’s own film Silent Running. Maybe it’s time for some descendant of the Brothers Grimm (the great-grandchildren Grimm?) to come knocking on Disney’s front doors with legal papers- suing them for every cent they’ve made since Snow White.

A few major Star Wars co-conspirators were major players on the original BSG production as well- John Dykstra, Dennis Muren- which also played a major part in the common “feel” to them both.

There is a fantastic article from 1978 called ABC’s Multi-Million Dollar SF Gamble: Battlestar Galactica which closes with these two interesting paragraphs which hint at more issues than just copyright and derivative works:

Once all the charges of copyright infringement and the other legal elbowing have subsided, and once other modern space fantasies like Buck Rogers, Star Trek—The Motion Picture, Starcrash, and Flash Gordon have come out to keep Galactica company, it will be more evident that Galactica was innovative in many ways all its own—not the least of which is its courageous, almost carefree use of funds in the hope of bringing to the public a TV fantasy of unparalleled quality. And some of the daring can be seen in things that neither zoom, blast, flash, or explode.

When, since the days of the Untouchables, have we seen such exciting wholesale slaughter on our livingroom screens? And it happened during the very season when the networks have been bragging that at last they have censored physical conflict from the screen. The full extent of the ramifications of a successful Galactica on TV programming is yet to be seen, but it will certainly be interesting to watch.

Ah, good old 1978. It was the best of time, it was the worst of times. Television bosses were actively censoring TV. Major studios were trying to control the fate of genre media. Journalists were hoping for a future that resembled a rose-tinted past. And beneath the surface, a vast array of creators were waiting to unleash their derivative works that had the potential to change the face of a genre, at the very least, and media in general if we were lucky. In short, it was a time much like today.

I was in Vegas in April of this year and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Love- a truly magnificent tribute to The Beatles through their music and Cirque’s visual extravagance.

The show opens with one of the last songs The Beatles recorded- “Because” for Let it Be. John Lennon is quoted as having said that the song is based on Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. Listen to both, and you know he’s right.
(Video of Moonlight Sonata on YouTube)

This got me to thinking about fair use. Would Lennon (or his lawyers) have risked it if the Sonata was still under copyright? There were “only” about 170 years between Moonlight Sonata and Let it Be, so in modern copyright terms, they were cutting it a little close.

Think that’s a stretch? Remember, Rep. Mary Bono channeling Jack Valenti once asked Congress for “forever less one day” copyright terms.

Note: I know that Lennon’s use would probably be ruled as fair use in a reasonable court of law. That is not the issue. The issue is that fear of litigation may have prevented Lennon (or his producers) from ever releasing “Because” in to the wild and ours would have been a poorer culture for that.

When I had my idea for a questionnaire for US Presidential candidates about issues important to geek activists like myself, I started reading up on the positions of the most popular candidates.

Guess what? None of them talk about the issues that matter to us directly. Even the big ones like reforming the USA PATRIOT Act aren’t being touched with a 10-foot pole- no one wants to look weak on security, I suppose.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about Lawrence Lessig. For those not familiar, after 10 years of leading the fight to protect a free culture among other things, Lessig is stepping away to embrace a much broader issue- corruption. At first, this seems simplistic, naive. But in the end, isn’t that what it all comes down to?

Net neutrality, copyright laws and fair use, the MPAA/RIAA, the DMCA and all the other issues that lock consumers, fans, hackers and hobbyists in a cage where the key is sold to the highest bidder. As a geek, these look like issues for hacktivists. In a broader sense, however, this is the oldest game in politics- the government serving the deepest pockets.

Corruption. Lessig is specific about what he means by corruption, in this quote as applied to himself:

I never promote as policy a position that I have been paid to advise about, consult upon, or write about. If payment is made to an institution that might reasonably be said to benefit me indirectly, then I will either follow the same rule, or disclose the payment.

The key word is never. Not sometimes. Not with disclosure. Just, plain, never.

So coming back to the issue of getting the current US Presidential contenders to answer questions about PATRIOT Act reform or Network Neutrality- shouldn’t the ultimate question be: What would you do to remove the influence of lobbies and corporations from US politics?

If we have an answer for that- a workable, sincere one- then we have an answer not only for problems in hackland, but also in healthcare, in energy policy, in every major social issue of this land of plenty.

Along those lines, here are links to what the major contenders have to say on Washington’s culture of corruption:

• Barack Obama on Reforming Washington
• Hillary Clinton on Government Reform and how she is shaping up as the Privacy Candidate
• John Edwards’ letter to the FCC Chairman regarding the upcoming 700MHz auction.
• The closest Rudy Giuliani comes is in talking about fiscal responsibility but that’s a stretch. Also, here is video of Edwards’ talk at Google
• Mitt Romney on investment in technology and tort liability
• John McCain on Lobbying & Ethics Reform and McCain at Google talking policy.

(Send me more links for the rest of the candidates if you find them. Also, I’m still putting together a questionnaire for the candidates, so suggestions would be great!)

First of all- yes, there was a Starbucks in Beijing’s Forbidden City.

Fortunately, there was a Starbucks in Beijing’s Forbidden City. It’s gone now after huge protests.

Says the BBC:

Starbucks, which has nearly 200 outlets in China, opened the Forbidden City shop seven years ago and removed its brand sign two years ago to address cultural sensitivities.

Here’s what it looks like on Google Maps. Yeah, no Starbucks inside 600 year old monuments. Sorry.

Via Schneier, here’s a funny little photo that sums up many thoughts I have about Airport security. I wish there was a button to click to fix the problem…

The so-called iPhone Hearings yesterday were entertaining and it seems they may only be the first shot fired on the issue of separating devices from the network.

The folks at FreePress.net have set up Free the iPhone as a ‘save the internet’ (net neutrality) and ‘save net radio’ type movement. The idea is to strike while the iPhone publicity peaks and the current 700MHz auction planned by the FCC rolls around. Also, since the FCC, Google and some members of Congress seem to be showing interest in the idea of separating the Network from the Devices (Delaminate the bastards says Weinberger) this seems to be the appropriate time to be pushing for separating the layers.

Also, the folks at Public Knowledge have a set of videos from the iPhone Hearings including Rep. Ed Markey comparing the iPhone lock-in with Hotel California (_check out, but they can never leave_), Professor Tim Wu pointing out the tech gap between US and Europe in the wireless space, the Verizon General Counsel claiming that there is no consumer demand for delamination, and finally Jason Devitt on the issues for small innovators in the business.

A few more reads:

• Om Malik on the meaning of competition in the US
• Susan Crawford on balancing public interest, security and business pressure
• Google’s Public Policy blog on open access to the wireless network
• Jason Devitt on the implications of the new spectrum auction