Science Addiction

A long time ago, Chris Seibold, one of my co-writers at Apple Matters, asked if I had any ideas for a book he was writing for O’Reilly publishers called “The Big Book of Apple Hacks”. That email turned in to a little brainstorming which led to five chapters that I have in the book.

• MacFuse
• SSH Tunnels
• ImageMagick
• Tivo + Mac
• Fink & MacPorts

Of course, those chapters have much better names in the book. Unfortunately, a publishing error left my name off the acknowledgments at the end of the book (seriously!), but my name is at the end of each chapter I wrote. Hopefully the book will have many reprints in the future which will include my name!

No kidding. The paper (by Gary Pulsinelli) is about the ownership rights of artistic works among goblins in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Last year, I had noted that they sounded a lot like the RIAA/MPAA/ MAFIAA. This paper has a different take, but tips its hat to this blog post and the reader comments. If you read the paper, it is in footnote #29 on page 5.

Salman Rushdie was at the Memorial Church at Harvard last night, for a reading organized by the Harvard Book Store. He read from his newest novel “The Enchantress of Florence” (which I had him sign) but I had another agenda. I got my father’s 20-year-old copy of Midnight’s Children signed, the copy (and father) that introduced me to Rushdie.

Rushdie was everything his novels indicated he might be- frighteningly smart, witty and with an uncanny ability to keep an audience surprised and entertained.

The new novel sounds fascinating, with a classical mix of history, fantasy and Rushdie. It is one of those what-ifs that every student of history has when they look at ancient contemporaries and wonder if they had ever met. (What if Picasso met Einstein in Paris in 1904?). What if the Mughal Emperor Akbar in India had contact with rennaissance Europe, asks Rushdie. In his words, the unbelievable stuff in his book is true; the believable is what he made up.

(An exercise for the reader: one of the people in the picture is Rushdie and one is me. And the purple book is my wrinkled old Midnight’s Children.)

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!

SciFi writer, activist, BoingBoing editor, EFF evangelist and now US-Canada Fulbright Chair at the University of Southern California recently gave a talk to people at USC that covers many topics ranging from digital freedoms to science fiction that is truly worth listening to [MP3]. Of course, the greatest Cory Doctorow speech of them all is his talk at Microsoft about why DRM is bad for business, bad for people, bad for artists and bad technology (streaming video). The text of that talk is also available online.

While I may be biased to certain sciences and am no longer unfamiliar with the sciences I love, I still do pick up the all-encompassing science books for ‘the rest of us’- i.e. people who do not have Ph.D.s in the subject of the book. I do plan on getting a Ph.D. in something sooner or later- unfortunately I will not have the time or the inclination to get one in all the subjects I love. Read more »