links for 2007-10-31
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“Strength. Sacrifice. Strongness.”
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“We are dealing with a 25-year degradation of everything public.”
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Thanks to Cosma for leading me to Coilhouse.
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Good lord, I’m deliciousing cat movies. What has become of me?
Archive for October, 2007
links for 2007-10-30
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Sam Rose on loosely coupled work
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via Sam Rose
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e.g., “We take their rights FOR THEIR PROTECTION.”
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Copyright fear has chilling effect on educators
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API for arXiv
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Summary of OK vs. CC similarities and differences
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What we really need is a distributed solution to scanning orphaned works. Really. All of us. We need to take the centralized policy-makers out of the equation early on, and support OCA with sweat equity.
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Very interesting
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And I couldn’t care less, either.
links for 2007-10-29
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Javascript implementation of [most of] Push, suitable for inclusion in unwitting distributed computational systems.
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“Even journals in a technical field don’t have RSS feeds.”
ArbCamp: Buying you a beer
With equal parts optimism and trepidation, I’d like to pass along the following:
(1) Today is ArbCamp
(2) After ArbCamp, the Jaffe lecture
(3) And from 6–10pm, at Arbor Brewing Company Taproom, I will buy all the attendees of ArbCamp a beer. Personally.
Because Barbara and I would like to thank them for giving their peers, colleagues and a bunch of total strangers a chance. Just to meet and talk is a big effort for a lot of people around here; good job doing it.
links for 2007-10-27
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“Most SEOs are making headphones out of coconuts, hoping it brings traffic, and then wondering why the gods are so angry at them. They never get that the headphones probably aren’t hooked up to anything but their make-believe radio.”
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Yes, related. My brother.
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Met Gregory Johnson at Marshall Poe’s lecture at Eastern Michigan.
links for 2007-10-26
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“Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year.”
links for 2007-10-25
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And I did not see this before I wrote my call to war. Something in the air.
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“Today, possibly because of Photoshop and other photography-doctoring software, people have become suspicious of photographs. This is a good thing.”
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“The rise of the millennial generation brings workers who are more introspective, more connected to the world and their community, and less willing to align themselves to the needs of employers.”
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“If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family.”
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Wondering where Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman are provided attribution, since the image used in the poster and trailer for the film was lifted straight from their Creative Commons by-attribution paper.
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The movie’s logo is lifted directly from a paper published under a CC remix+by-attribution license. So that will be an interesting thing to see play out.
links for 2007-10-24
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Gorilla inflation?
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original gorilla weight experiment results (May 2007)
On miscegenation
Too many things going on.
Not here, not just me. Yes, I’m busy, but that’s not what this is about. Not directly, not immediately.
Too many things. Going on.
You should know what I mean.
Libraries don’t want Google and Microsoft to make them digitized books for free, if they can’t release them without restraint to the public. Good for them. German publishers opine that “world copyright” should only expire when the last government in the world releases its grip on a work. Bad for you. Authority of Wikipedia is crap. Good for everybody. Authority of printed books is an illusion. This is news? It’s getting so you can’t make a living as a content creator anymore. My ass. It’s getting so you can’t make a living as a content creator anymore without giving it away for free. How odd.
A swirl. A roil. And a real—but unremarked—opportunity for the world to break something all of us think is important: our own authority.
See, you clearly haven’t seen the future I have. You’re not making it seem that way, at least. It terrifies me on a deep level, and yet I will sit by the window watching for lights on the horizon, trying to discern thunder from mortar fire. Despite the fact that I expect to be caught up and consumed, destroyed, and remade in it.
What?
No, not physically. Nononono. Not “us” in the sense of the meat bags we walk around in. “Us” in the sense of this character writing this scary unintelligible rant right here. The author.
The auctorial “us”. The authoritative “us”. The definitive edition of “us”. We’re dead in the water.
You should know this already, at least: I spend hours every week preserving old books. I buy them, I scan them, I OCR them, I proofread them, and thousands of other people around the world help do that as well, and in the end we produce authoritative electronic versions that get distributed around the world.
It’s fun. You learn a lot. But a number—the majority, I’d guess—of our volunteer colleagues believe that what we’re doing is making correct and accurate editions of books. We’re preserving them. Saving them, in some way.
Some others of us just like to read random crap. Count me in that minority.
It makes you smart, this arbitrary magpie journey through bits and snips of disconnected learning. By my accounting, at least, it makes you smart. As in, it is not merely sufficient but necessary to do it.
If you don’t do it, then you are not smart. If you do it—read widely and indiscriminately, and find pleasure in variety and esoterica—you will become smart.
The coming war, the destruction and remaking of the world, is about that.
It’s not about music copying. It’s not about Flickr and consumer-generated content. It’s not about p2p networking and piracy and earning a living as a parasite on the creative class.
It’s about what’s true. Because if it’s in a book, it’s true.
See. Anybody can scan a book. Google, the Open Content Alliance, you. Go buy a Plustek OpticBook 3600 and some old books—or new books, if you’re feeling lucky—and scan the hell out of ‘em and post them to the Internet. As an individual, it should take you a day to produce a reasonable machine-readable version of any volume you want. Tops.
Go do it now.
First you will do it. And Google will do it. Microsoft will do it. Five Universities will also do it. If the book is at all of interest, there will have been multiple printings. Translations, editions, revisions, competing versions in print. Those will multiply, and propagate, and mutate, and they will all of them more or less be accessible. Soon.
What then is real? Which is right?
Further: Take each book, and make from it a sheaf of pages. Each page an image from a paper book, and metadata version of the words and images thereon. You’re looking online at page 23 of an old classic novel, or perhaps an original Mark Twain short story from The Galaxy Magazine, and you click the “next” button in your book-reader, and something happens on the Internet and you are shown page 24.
Which? The next one made by the same person on the same day, from the same edition of the same printed original? What if the microfilm from the 1970s was missing its page 24, but a friendly colleague in Minnesota has managed to scan one and post it on their booklog, and the magic of the world to come has linked the first broken record to the second, mending it?
That sounds safe, right? You just fixed the book. Collaboratively. That’s awesome and all web2.0y.
But here is the sound the drums of war will make in the distance: which page 25 is the right one? Whose page 25, reached from your 24? If there are six different 25s? If there are some that have been proofread and others made by machine OCR with no punctuation? If there are versions improved, with modernized spellings or improved standards of propriety or amusing in-jokes or footnotes or scholarly marginalia, or taken from manuscripts and drafts, or taken from mashups and foreign translations?
How can you know what is right, if any path to the truth is allowed?
Who will get credit? What will you cite? And who will you trust?
And so the book will die. Thousands more will take each dead book’s place… but they will not count.
And the author, as it is understood today—in the law, in the culture, in the academy—will die. And something else will take its place as well… but they will not count.
The science I was given as a child entailed pond water and hunting fossils and looking closely at the diversity of the world. The humanities I was taught as a child entailed reading footnotes and going to the biggest library and an immoderate lack of focus, of wanting to know more about the thing unremarked than the subject at hand. The art I was admiring as a child entailed illustrators, typographers, advertising, all their beauty made mundane by its prevalence and ubiquity, not the classics and the canon: the music of experiment, the museum in a magazine, the craftsman and the hobbyist’s greatest work. And my people were engineers above all else, and the engineer’s eye I inherited was the sense of potential everywhere, in every scrap of metal or snippet of code, to be remade someday into something wonderful, or necessary, or interesting. The same eye I use for science, and art, and scholarship.
I was raised to see straw spun into gold.
Not everybody was. And so there will be war, because what we are doing now in this age of digization is shredding the austere and canonical nuggets of traditional gold back into flakes and thence to straw. And raising up the dross and chaff and lost and lesser works that the world had thought it threw aside, and making them as easily reached as any classic tome.
The virtues of great works aren’t easily differentiated from those of unknown works, when you get a close look at them all. Nor are the virtues of scholars, and laymen; craftsmen and hacks. Nor even plagiarists, and compilers.
The contingent history of what is worthwhile and correct is being undone. Every day. And all that potential is being redistributed, willy-nilly, faster all the time.
This war will be sad, and terrible, and many whose lives revolve around the establishment and propagation of auctoritas will be hurt in this conflict. And it may in time spill over into the physical world as well: there will be imprisonment, and firings, and industries made and broken.
But the victims don’t deserve this inevitable pain, nor will they be prepared. For the most part, they have not been trained for it.
quotable
From the Knickerbocker New-York Monthly Magazine vol 22, no 2 (1843)
One of the hobbies cherished in the most especial manner by the good citizen of Paris, is Philosophy; not that he takes delight in the cultivation of wisdom, or makes the study of nature his pursuit: but when things go well with him in the world; when his fortune has reached the limit of his desires; when age has abated the ardor of his passions, and in the bosom of his family he finds himself surrounded with every comfort and luxury that heart could wish; he fancies himself beyond the common accidents of life; he becomes a philosopher. His philosophy is his pet, his play-thing, his hobby-horse upon which he gets astride, and gambols like a frolicsome child. Should his wife scold, should his roast-beef be burnt, should a sudden shower break up a party of pleasure, he alone preserves his equanimity; is smiling, soothing, and consolatory; he is a philosopher. Philosophy is his sovereign panacea; with the understanding that no precautions have been neglected to secure him as far as possible against the weightier mishaps of life.
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