According to the Supreme Court (Grokster case), “software companies can be held liable for copyright infringement when individuals use their technology to download songs and movies illegally.” But the logic is inverted when applied to the gun industry. According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, “The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others.”

So the corporation is liable for criminal uses of a product by its customers when that product involves copyright. But the corporation is not liable for criminal uses of a product by a customer when that product is a firearm (and the stakes could be human lives).

Daily Kos: What’s the common logic holding these disparate concepts together? Massive corporate special interest money. Welcome to your government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, where a pirated copy of “Hollywood Homicide” is bigger threat than an actual Hollywood homicide.

Not making a point here about copyright or gun laws per se’, but about hypocrisy, messed up priorities, inconsistent logic and double standards.

via Weblogsksy

Geodog on how the Prius has become the new Volvo, and the danger to bicyclists and pedestrians of having a lot of silent cars on the road (owners say the car is “stealth mode” when runnning on battery power):

With the Prius, you don’t get any warning — the car literally sneaks up on you. After nearly being run over several times in the last month, and again this night on the way back from the Berkeley Cybersalon, I did a little research and turned up quite a few mentions of this problem, the scariest from a blind person’s perspective … the Toyota engineers need to find a way to make the car nosier, even if it involves something as silly as recordings of internal combustion engine noises that the car plays through an external speaker when the car is in battery mode.

While I’ve certainly noticed the local upwelling of Pria (is that a legitimate pluralization? probably not), I personally haven’t had close calls with them. But then I haven’t been biking as much lately due to knee problems. I think the problem is offset by the fact that the kind of person who buys a Prius is likely to be a more considerate driver to begin with. I have a lot more close calls with drivers of SUVs, and with people talking on cell phones (regardless the model of car). Remember too that all cars have become much more quiet in the past decade — it’s gotten to the point that a vehicle from the 1970s seems loud in contrast.

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome michaelpollan.com, the website of environmental journalist and J-School professor Michael Pollan. “A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism.” Site neatly designed by Birdhouse affiliate designer Leena Pendharkar.

What better way to show your lifelong commitment to another than by wearing a piece of their endoskeleton as jewelry? London scientists allow couples to extract chips of bone and infuse the samples’ osteoblasts into a baked glass ceramic composite. The bone/glass composite is then grown into a lattice structure closely resembling actual bone, which can then be carved into handsome rings. The symbolism is lovely (at least it strikes me that way) and so are the rings. A nice way to avoid supporting the slavery of the diamond industry, too.

Talking with Miles this evening about colors. I ask him what colors of clothes go well together.

“A gray shirt.”

Hmmmm, I think. Conservative tendencies. Maybe the makings of a GAP kid. Sigh. I press on: “And what color pants go with a gray shirt?”

“Pink and orange and green and blue.”

“All of those colors together in one pair of pants?”

“Mmmm hmmm.”

“Polka dots or stripes?”

“Polka dots AND stripes!”

“With a gray shirt?”

“Mmmm hmmm daddy, with a gray shirt.”

Keep in mind this is coming from a kid who has never expressed one iota of interest in his clothes, other than to favor boots shaped like alligators.

Went to watch a documentary about The Minutemen, We Jam Econo, with Roger tonight. Archived gig footage interleaved with interviews — Watt driving his old white van around San Pedro plus dozens of conversations with musicians from in and around the early 80s SoCal punk scene.

The movie reminds you how awkward it is to use the word “punk” to describe The Minutemen — they get lumped in due to their energy and their label and their place in time, but really shared very little with typical punk bands — no mohawks, no punk uniform (check D. Boon’s ridiculous shoes for proof), little in the way of punk attitude. The Minutemen were never crass. They were more complex than that - political without being blunt, musically complex without making “music for musicians” (not that I think art music is bad, just saying The Minutemen weren’t about that). Artful without being arty. Humble, totally honest, real people making music that sounded like nothing that’s come before or since.

The interviews are great - a virtual who’s who of the SST scene, “including John Doe, Thurston Moore, Colin Newman, Ian MacKaye, Jello Biafra, Richards Hell and Meltzer, and a big chunk of Black Flag’s large revolving cast: Greg Ginn, Henry Rollins, Keith Morris, Kira Roessler, and Dez Cadena” (from Pathetic Caverns).

Not enough time spent on Double Nickels, easily the greatest album ever made in the history of humanity (don’t challenge me on that, even though I mean it). But compensated for it with some jaw-dropping acoustic footage (who knew?) — including Hurley on bongos.

Run, don’t walk.

- Interview with filmmaker at the Seattlest
- New Yorker review

Wondered why I was suddenly getting comments on the old Miles Stuck in the Cat Door and e-i-e-i hop hop videos. Then discovered that Miles has been linked to from Milk and Cookies, with the caption “Crawling baby gets stuck in the cat door and sadistic mommie makes him clean up his puke while videotaping it.”

Funny, we were mildly concerned when we originally posted that video that someone would not get the joke (the deck-cleaning clip was shot days before the throw-up clip; I temporally transposed them in Final Cut to make a funny). No one ever did comment on it, so I assumed everyone got it. Now, two years later, we’re waiting for a knock on the door from Child Protective Services.

Hard to believe it’s been a decade since Christian Crumlish invited me to become part of a small-ish group of web-based artists and developers called antiweb (ironically, no web site to speak of). Mostly centered around a mailing list that has survived the ups and downs of the internet through the years, antiweb has become one of the few stable aspects of life online for me over the years, as well as a posse of online friends I always know I can turn to with tech questions and observations, confessions, ramblings, etc.

Because antiweb is scattered over the earth’s surface, only small sub-clusters of us have ever met face-to-face. Even though it’s a closed list, antiweb isn’t a clique; it’s loose, ragtag, sometimes seems barely to hang together at all. But I feel strangely close to almost everyone on the list, if only for the amount of time we’ve spent together.

To celebrate our 10th birthday, antiweb founder Malcolm Humes is throwing a Bay Area happening this Thursday night (July 28), public invited.

Hard to say exactly what the evening will become, but there’s some cool stuff planned (click Continue for details). I’m working on a 30-page digital comic mash-up including photography by Amy and me, recklessly integrated with text culled from the antiweb list. Will post the comic at birdhouse sometime after the event.

Hope to see some of you there!
(more…)

Posted about Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad Is Good For You.” Bought the book, start reading it, excellent, more on that later. A few days ago, Fresh Air airs an interview with Johnson.

mneptok sends me a link to a kuro5hin story on kite buggies (something I’d love to try). Later that day, hear Living on Earth piece on wind farms and other wind-harnessing technologies… including a segment on kite buggies. Part 1 of the piece connects up to previous posts here about the Altamont wind farm.

This morning, talked with a friend while kids played at the park about the French Laundry and the slow food movement in general. Listening to the radio while sanding today, caught an NPR piece on the slow food movement (not online), which I mentioned here just a few days ago. The piece included reference to the French Laundry.

At what point should I get freaked out?

Must-see mugshot of man arrested for abusing harmful intoxicants.

The 41-year-old Tribett, it seems, had been huffing spray paint and needed a refill. According to a Bellaire Police Department report, Tribett’s pupils were constricted and he replied slowly to their questions. Oh, and “officers observed the paint on face and hands.”

As much as I like pretty much anything spray-painted gold, this guy’s face doesn’t count.

Drywall job is complete (had a contractor do that - there were some tricky bits expected and we wanted to get on with it). He also found a crack running across the floor where two backer boards met and worried that it could cause tile popping or cracking in the future. Hasn’t been a problem in the past, but decided to go ahead and have him install double-thick 2×4 supports between the joists and drive long screws through the backer board, sub-floor, and into the supports.

Put about 12 hours this weekend into sanding, spackling, digging out bubbles of tired old paint (four layers!), removing messy old caulk job where it will meet the new paint, etc… Funnest part: Sanding new mud from ceiling. Must wear goggles and filter, but breath from filter fogs goggles from inside while falling dust obscures from the outside. So had to remove goggles every few strokes just to be able to see.

The closer one stares at an old wall, the worse it looks. Like word processing, a process of infinite revision. Gotta know when to quit and get on with it.

Finally decided on paint color. Found two separate vendors to supply the chicken-wire floor tile and the coving that will serve as a baseboard; coving color and texture identical to existing shower tile, which we’ll be keeping. Finally found the perfect light (i.e. one we can agree upon) to replace the 1970s Hollywood-style vanity light. I so look forward to ripping that monstrosity out of the wall.

Decided to make a fairly major change to the cabinet, which is too deep to be fully usable - we’ll install three drawers on sliding rollers, which will require knocking out its frame and molding and building a replacement door. Unanticipated work and might cause delay, but will be worth it.

Next up: Final spackle pass, final floor prep, lay tile.

Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome a pair of high-consciousness newcomers:

punnaji.com, a web site dedicated to distributing the teachings of Sri Lankan meditation master Bhante Punnaji.

weiquan-aid.org, “a web site representing the Small Grant Project For Rights Defense Assistance, a project of the Princeton China Initiative-Monica Fund” (site is written primarily in Chinese).

Washington Post:

Unborn babies in the United States are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides … The report, by the Environmental Working Group, is based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical-cord blood taken by the American Red Cross. They found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and the Teflon chemical PFOA.

Of course if all that goo is in the cord blood, it has to be in the mother as well…

Returned home from vacation to discover the cat food supply compromised by raccoons. Used to be, they’d come through the cat door, move a large garbage can aside, open the cabinet door, pull out a 25-lb. bag of cat food and claw it open. We “solved” that one last year by regularly transferring cat food bags into a large sealable plastic container. Now, it seems, they’ve realized that if they pull the whole container out onto the kitchen floor and start gnawing, they can eventually break the plastic and hit paydirt. No one went hungry, but cats are furious about the smell. We hear that placing a transistor radio set to a talk station near the cat door works - will try that next time.

I’ve complained for years that I can never seem to get out in front of the email inbox. One of the most continuously frustrating aspects of my job is that a million small distractions conspire to prevent me from tackling larger projects, and I know I’m not alone in this.

The problem for many workers is not just the amount of communication, but the fact that it takes time to mentally “shift gears” and sink fully into a larger task after handling a piece of communication (it takes the average person eight minutes to return to a creative state after an interruption).

Many workers today feel too connected, and are beginning to rebel against connectedness itself. Personally, I’ve found that I become more productive when I shut down my email client completely and just deal with mail in larger batches two or three times a day. I rarely enable iChat for the same reason, as useful as it can be at times. CNET:

“It used to be: ‘I’ve got to be online, it’s so frustrating that I can’t get on,’” said Chris Capossela, a vice president in Microsoft’s Information Worker unit. “Now that’s happened. People are ultraconnected. And you know what? Now they are starting to realize, ‘Wow, I want to actually stop getting interrupted.’”

Interesting that Veritas’ marketing department has actually implemented “email-free Fridays” for the same reason.

The “Slow E-Mail Movement” is probably inspired by the slow food movement.

As if Google Earth wasn’t kicking enough booty, now we have Google Moon to complement the effort for lunar-bound travelers. While exploring, be sure to zoom all the way in for stunning close-ups of the surface composition.

Visited the Walker Art Center in Minnneapolis today, amazement around every corner. Stunning to find the actual tub in which Yves Klein had his naked models dip before applying themselves to large white canvases in the early 60s, saturated in the cosmically deep hue IKB. International Klein Blue was a color invented and patented by Klein, bluer than blue, virtually the only color he ever used. And yet, despite his total commitment to IKB, Klein refused to touch paint. Wish I had jotted down the quote since I can’t find it referenced on the web, but laughed out loud when I read something to the effect of “I would never stoop to dirty my hands with actual paint” … more stuff about distance and control… picturing these poor models bathing in the deepest blue, throwing themselves against white muslin, and Klein standing back, directing traffic, the total puppeteer. An absurd power trip with absurdly beautiful results.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, lobotomies actually helped about 10% of the people upon whom they were performed. Many of the remaining 90% of lobotomy recipients were left in a vegetative state and spent the rest of their lives in institutions. Now, 30 years after doctors stopped performing lobotomies (electroshock and drugs took over where physical brain scrambling left off), groups are mobilizing to strip lobotomy inventor Egas Moniz of the Nobel prize he was awarded half a century ago. Associated Press:

“How can anyone trust the Nobel Committee when they won’t admit to such a terrible mistake?” asks Christine Johnson, a Levittown, N.Y., medical librarian who started a campaign to have the prize revoked.

Ironic to think that if he had born 30 years earlier, Joey Ramone probably would have been a prime candidate for the barbaric procedure. Instead, his song Teenage Lobotomy became a proto-punk smash hit.

Images from a sunset walk with Miles and Amy at the Albany Bulb, June 1, 2005. The Bulb is a local landmark - artists (many of them homeless) use this strut of land jutting out into the harbor to create installations improvised from existing junk and ingredients brought onto the land in wagons drawn by pedaled trikes. Repeat visits bring new discoveries. The light is nearly edible at sunset. Rust and graffiti and plant life in chaotic collaboration. Deterioration part of the artistic process, always a joy. Miles mostly concerned with finding rocks to huck into the sea, but occasionally adds his own contributions to the public spectacle.

I’m one of those people who don’t see numbers in most of the color-blindness crop circles. Have never minded, nor known what I’m missing (though I have at times felt bored by the available spectrum and daydreamed that some genius will come up with a new primary color one of these days). Vischeck helps normally-sighted people visualize how the world looks to color-blind people — a process that proved fascinating to Amy just now.

But the really cool thing at Vischeck is their web page processor, constructed to help web designers see how their sites will look to color blind users. Running the test in deuteranopia mode, pages look identical to me before and after.

I had been on the job two years before I learned that most people see the J-School’s homepage as greenish — I had always thought of it as beige or tan. The designer who preceded me should have used Vischeck :)

Note: Planned downtime at the jschool today as we undertake a Tiger Server upgrade.

People are getting smarter. Remove the periodic recalibration of IQ tests that keep the mean IQ at 100, and you find that average intelligence is rising as the decades pass.

For the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell covers Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. Johnson pins causes for rising IQ on the increasing complexity of pop culture. As much energy as we spend pointing fingers at the idiot box for dumbing us down, TV puts “greater cognitive demands” on us today than it did 30 years ago. Compare the simple, linear, single-plotline pace of “Dukes of Hazzard” with an episode of “The Sopranos” or “Desperate Housewives” and you see a marked uptick in complexity and the demands put on the viewer to keep track of multiple threads and do lots of “filling in” (less is spelled out for the viewer). Johnson sees the same trend in video games — steadily increasing complexity putting ever-greater intellectual demands on the player.

Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs� for “Grand Theft Auto III�—that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities—is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Have to say I’m a hard sell on these points, but it’s not an unconvincing argument. Might make a good summer read.

With so many mail scanners rejecting mail with .zip attachments (which so often carry malware payloads), some sites are moving to a “.piz policy.” Need to send a .zip attachment? Rename it to filename.piz and instruct recipient to rename it back. A pain in the neck, but effective if you can manage the user education component. Hopefully .tgz will remain unsullied for a while, but I predict that all compression formats are ultimately doomed as simple attachment formats.

Being a university (i.e. state) employee means I’m not entitled to the generous $15/day stipend for my time serving jury duty last month. No idea what this whopping extraneous sum for my excruciating civic effort is all about, but I plan to spend it all in one place, profligate wastrel that I am.

Six Apart’s TypeKey is a damn fine authentication system, and its open API means it can be implemented in any application, not just in Movable Type. A common complaint about TK is that it runs as a centralized system on Six Apart servers. If Six Apart tanks or goes down for a while, your authentication system goes with it. LiveJournal’s Brad Fitzpatrick has launched OpenID, an open and distributed authentication system with similar goals, but without the problems of centralization.

But there’s no denying that despite its efficacy at stopping spam and limiting the strain on server resources, required authentication on comments inhibits free-wheeling conversation and casual commenting. To overcome this obstacle, an authentication system needs critical mass, needs not to be regarded as alien or invasive to the user’s privacy. If OpenID can solve the social barrier problem and gain mass acceptance, it could have legs.

But wait… Six Apart now owns LiveJournal, and OpenID will compete with TypeKey. The page says that Fitzpatrick is working to make TypeKey into an OpenID server. Making that so could amount to an implied admission by Six Apart that centralization of an authentication service by a commercial entity puts a lot of people off. This could be interesting to watch. Discussion on Slashdot.

Recently discovered that the title of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” (the swirling keyboard intro of which I used as the soundtrack to a speech given by a talking moose to Amy at our wedding five years ago) is derived from the names of composer Terry Riley, who gave Pete Townsend the idea for the synthesizer part, and spiritual teacher Meher Baba, who was Townshend’s spiritual guru at the time. The things you learn.