It’s the sad truth – XKCD understands the tecchie lifestyle.
Author: mklang
Big brothers birthday
Almost missed the news that last week was the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. And even though it seems that Huxley is winning the ideological pole position (check out the Neil Postman cartoon), aall birthdays are doubleplusgood.
You can read the full text of 1984 here.
The abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren
Buying a good beer has never been this complicated! Check out the instructions and the promises you have to make if you would like to buy beer from The abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren. Amongst the instructions and warnings:
Our beer is sold in limited quantities and the reservations which we accept are always for a particular type of beer. Since we want to serve as many customers as possible, orders are limited to one order per car per per telephone number within any given month.
Anonymous numbers cannot be used.
You yourself must be the consumer. The receipt stipulates that the beer is not to be sold commercially to a third party. We reserve the right to prosecute offences.
Not only are you making promises to the monks – they even reserve the right to prosecute you if you break your promise. What is the religious punishment for lying to a monk?
Is blogging counterproductive to writing?
Like many bloggers I have occasionally indulged in online self-examination and questioned why I blog (here, here & here). Obviously there are many reasons why to blog (personally I do it because it’s fun). But I have never really considered the effects of my blogging. Not the effects on other people, but the effects on me.
So far in my blogging I have been happy to write posts. They are a quick and comfortable way to organise and spread thoughts and ideas. Didn’t think much more about it. But then I came across a quote – which I cannot find right now, how typical. Anyway the quote was from a writer who said he did not like to talk about what he was writing about becuase… it ruined his creative tension.
I find the idea of maintaining a creative tension very interesting. Blogging is fun and can be used successfully to organize and communicate but could it have a negative effect on other writing? Writing blog posts not only take time and effort but is also very rewarding.
The rewarding part is actually not all good as it does produce a feeling of well being. And this well being does acutally remove part of the motivation to continue writing. Obviously I have no intention of giving up my blogging but I may need to come up with a better strategy to prevent blogging from killing the motivation to write other stuff.
Copyright in fossils
Some early morning copyright humor from Norway via Olav Torvund‘s blog. Apparently the researcher who found the fossil Ida, Jørn Hurum wants to hold copyright in the fossil (in Norwegian). A quick reminder of what we are talking about here, from the Guardian:
Ida is believed to be the most complete primate fossil ever discovered. She is 95% intact and so well preserved that her tissues, hair and even her stomach contents are visible. By comparison, the much more recent fossil “Lucy” from Ethiopia is only 40% complete.
And for what noble cause does this academic want copyright? Well he tells the newspaper that he wants the exclusive right to put the image on caps, t-shirts and childrens soft toys.
Statements like this should make us copyright speakers think! With all the noise about copyright in society today many people, even highly educated people, just don’t get copyright. They don’t understand how it works today even less why some groups argue that it does not work today.
Hopefully Jørn Hurum and the Museum of Natural history will read Olav blog or be informed by someone else that copyright expires 70 years after the creators death… and may be a tad difficult to apply to a 47 million year old corpse.
Endnote-Zotero lawsuit dismissed
This is good news. The Quintessence of Ham writes that the lawsuit against Zotero has been dismissed.
I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The lawsuit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media “reverse-engineered” Thomson Reuters’s EndNote software to provide data interoperability between Zotero and EndNote.
Blade Runner & Copyleft
OMG! From the Creative Commons blog:
Ridley Scott, the famed SciFi director of the classic Blade Runner will be producing a new web series based on the film released under our free copyleft license. The series will is initially slated for web release with the possibility of television syndication and will be a project by Ag8.
Read more about the project at the New York Times, on Ag8’s Purefold page, or join up on the FriendFeed discussion.
In case we forget
The terrible acts and the incredible bravery. China 20 years ago today troops were ordered in to clear the democracy movement protests in Beijing.
The incredible image of Jeff Widener captures the bravery of the individual 5 June 1989.
Work and art
Finally finished the mind-numbingly boring work of reading proofs for a manual on the GPL license. It’s so boring that I have broken records in procrastination but today surrounded by loud music I stayed at home and finished. In front of me is my latest acquisitio, a color lithograph graphic by Claude Weisbuch which I brought home today.
While on the subject of art I cannot help but spreading this anecdote about Dali which I just read on _Paddy K_
Apparently Dali liked to eat out, with large groups of friends in tow, but was not so fond of paying the bill. So he made a point of paying using a check from his checkbook and, just before handing the check over, scribbled a little drawing on the back and signed it.
And now the owner, suddenly in possession of a signed Dali, would usually just frame it and hang it on the wall and show it to his friends instead of cashing it at the bank.
Sitting with licenses is sooo boring.
Running the distance
Since I survived my first real running event and managed to get around despite my lack of character in relation to serious training I have decided to make it an annual event. So next year on the 22 May I will be running the GöteborgsVarvet again. I registered today.
This year I ran with a camera and took pictures of the race. Many of the pictures were really bad but those which I liked ended up here. Not sure if I will take the camera with me next year, maybe I should try liveblogging! But then again my hope is to take the race more seriously and dramatically reduce my time from 2:17 to under two hours… so maybe just twitter?