Books

Removing the bibles

In 2007 Scandic Hotels decided that it will no longer be carrying bibles in their guestrooms (via Hotelchatter & Sydsvenskan) but after “massive” protests the bibles were replaced. Now the hotel chain Ibis has decided to remove the bibles since they are offensive to others (Dagen).

I would rather have free wifi than a bible but I guess there will be “massive” protests. The problem with massive in this scenario is that the majority couldn’t give a damn while the minority is the loudest…

Seriously even if you are a believer, even if you are a believer in any form of the new testament – what does it matter if there is no bible in the hotelroom? Why are believers in a loving god so intolerant of the rest of us? If they are right then we go to hell – so what? we don’t believe in it…

If it is your favorite book then carry your own! Everyone else has to.

Posted on by mklang

Too many books – a givaway

I am now faced with an aesthetic dilemma – I have too many books and not enough will-power to stop buying more. The solution to the problem was to decrease the number of books I had so that I could keep up my addiction to dead trees. So first I used BookCrossing to release a bunch of books into the wild. Ten books, almost all in Swedish, but this was not enough

So now I am announcing a book givaway. I will send you any of the following books just tell me which you want in the comments below:

Collins & Makowsky (1998) The Discovery of Society (6th ed)

Robert Graves (1981) The Greek Myths vol 1 & 2

David Ariel (1988) The Mystic Quest

Wittgenstein (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

John Allen Paulos (2000) I Think Therefore I Laugh

Sean Lang (1999) Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928

Stephen Gray (2001) The Artist is a Thief

Will Kymlicka (1995) Multicultural Citizenship

Hegel’s Political Writings (1998)

Mary Midgley (1991) Wisdom, Information & Wonder: What is knowledge for?

Giordano Bruno (1995) The Ash Wednesday Supper

Posted on by mklang

Never Whistle While You're Pissing

A badly kept secret about myself is that I suffer from a sci-fi/fantasy/murder/mystery deficiency. It’s a bit like dyslexia (which oddly enough is a very difficult word to spell… is this sarcasm on the part of the non-dyslectics?). Anyway it’s a bit like dyslexia in that I like, enjoy and get sci-fi/fantasy films but it’s really grueling work for me to read even the shorter books. Reading Lord of the Rings was almost as difficult as reading Joyce’s Ulysses – and I enjoyed the latter more! In the interest of honesty I admit to reading Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code but it made me cringe with embarrassment at its banality and silliness – I would have preferred to read a porn magazine on the bus but I realized that the rest of the bus probably didn’t care what I read.

Due to this deficiency I am often being educated by more knowledgeable people (mainly sci-fi/fantasy nerds and most under 16) about points I need to know. Most recently one of my students emailed me a link to the Wikipedia page on the fascinating Celine’s Laws.

Celine’s Laws are a series of three laws regarding government and social interaction attributed to the fictional character Hagbard Celine from Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. Celine, a gentleman anarchist, serves as a mouthpiece for Wilson’s libertarian, anarchist and sometimes completely uncategorizable ideas about the nature of mankind. Celine’s Laws are outlined in the trilogy by a manifesto titled Never Whistle While You’re Pissing.

The three laws are

  1. National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.
  2. Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.
  3. An honest politician is a national calamity.

Pessimistic and reasonably accurate. I like it, very dystopian so I guess I have found another sci-fi/fantasy book to punish myself with.

Oh, I don’t mean that I don’t read fiction. Right now I am on the final chapters of the brilliant and strange Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase.

Posted on by mklang

The Art of Community

One of the best things about the internet is the amount of cool material is available online. Now The Art of Community by Jono Bacon is available under a Creative Commons license. Here is some information from his website http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world.

Even if you don’t buy it, I would be hugely grateful that if you like it, please go and review it on Amazon. This is a hugely contribution. Thanks!

You can download the The Art of Community here.

Posted on by mklang

Effective Copyright

In March this year William Patry presented at the Society for Computers and Law

William Patry went on to surprise many by his emphatic rejection of an approach to copyright which classified it as property. He sees it as a creature of a government programme, and believes that that should bring with it an approach akin to that applied to government housing or educational initiatives. In fact, the copyright debate is dominated by references to moral cases and what is right and just, with scant account taken of the public interest or economic realities.

This is a very refreshing view of where copyright should be from one of the most important copyright figures in law today. Recently I ordered his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars which I hope (and believe) is as good as its hype so worth reading. You may want to check out William Patry’s blog.

Posted on by mklang

XKCD book finally out

The long awaited event has finally occurred, xkcd: volume 0 is now available from the XKCD website. Price 18? dollars, rubles, sheep? it doesn’t say. I want!

xkcd: volume 0 is the first xkcd book! It features selections from the first 600 comics, including various author and fan favorites. It was lovingly assembled from high-resolution original scans of the comics (the mouseover text is discreetly included), and features a lot of doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins.

The book is published by BreadPig, a company founded by my friend Alexis, and their portion of the profits will go to build a school in Laos through the charity Room to Read.

Posted on by mklang

Science books: The best of the best

Tim Radford reviews the short listed books for this years prestigious Royal Society Science Book Prize. Read the reviews and then go read the books. We are living in a time when science books are fun reading – are we at the height of science reporting? So sure the criticism that science becomes devalued into entertainment but that’s a hell of lot better than being ignored.

What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert (Crown $23.95)

What the Nose Knows - Royal Society Science Book Prize

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Harper Perennial £8.99)

Bad Science - Royal Society Science Book Prize

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Harper Press £25)

The Age of Wonder - Royal Society Science Book Prize

Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer by Jo Marchant (Windmill Books £8.99)

Decoding the Heavens - Royal Society Science Book Prize

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin £9.99)

The Drunkard's Walk - Royal Society Science Book Prize

Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-million-year-old Ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin £9.99)

You Inner Fish - Royal Society Science Book Prize

Posted on by mklang

Hanging with TJ

On my way home I was wandering aimlessly browsing stores and walked into a second hand bookstore and found The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson for 1.99 euros! The book includes many of his longer and shorter works and a large selection of letters. My favorite is Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) which includes the wonderful quote:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Thomas Jefferson was also in Paris during the French revolution and I am looking forward to reading his letters during this period. Some red wine and an interesting discussion with Thomas is my idea of a good Friday.

Posted on by mklang

Google Books goes Creative Commons

Some interesting news from the Creative Commons blog

Google launched a program to enable rightsholders to make their Creative Commons-licensed books available for the public to download, use, remix, and share via Google Books.

The new initiative makes it easy for participants in Google Books’ Partner Program to mark their books with one of the six Creative Commons licenses (or the CC0 waiver). This gives authors and publishers a simple way to articulate the permissions they have granted to the public through a CC license, while giving people a clear indication of the legal rights they have to CC-licensed works found through Google Books.

The Inside Google Books post announcing the initiative talks a bit about what this all means:

We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

Posted on by mklang

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.

claude

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.

Posted on by mklang