XKCD is brillian! Here is his comment on the Pirate Bay trial
Culture
Liberty for free – later
The title almost becomes a meta-comments for so many things…
Giving away books online for free has worked for many authors. The customers who download tend often even to buty the books. Most of the evidence is anecdotal but Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig & Yochai Benkler have done well by following this principle.
The publisher Faber is now trying this with a twist. It will let readers will let readers decide what to pay for to download a digital copy of Ben Wilson’s What Price Liberty?.The Guardian writes:
In the book, Wilson argues that the contemporary assault on civil liberties in the UK follows a decline in the importance and status of ideas of liberty in Britain’s national culture, and that it is only through an understanding of history that we can fashion a liberty fit for the 21st century.
The recommended price is £14.99 but you can download the pdf for free. Now I doubt that many will pay for the pdf but I don’t think that the free pdf will limit or decrease sales. The smart thing that Faber is doing is releasing the free ebook six weeks before the launch of the physical copy with the main aim “to stimulate debate for the issues at the centre of this book, as well as generating interest for the book itself”.
The annoying thing is that you cannot download the book until April 27 – so this news is not really news its more about something which will be news. Anyway the book sounds interesting so I will be keeping tabs on this. Even if I would have preferred to download directly – this is the generation of instant gratification and I just didn’t get any!
Women not designed to take life
Here is a nice piece of nostalgia from the newspaper Daily Mail of October, 1 1942 a quote from Major-General Jean Knox:
Women have won a merited place in the active army, but they cannot be trained to kill. I don’t believe woman can take life as men can. I know nothing of Russia, but I know women. Women give life. They are not designed to take life, even in total war.
So is this a complement or a criticism? It makes you wonder if it is better or worse to be “designed” to take life? On the other hand those struggling for equality find it positive that men and women are equally allowed to take lives in war. Personally I would like to disqualify all genders from taking lives.
Random Knowledge
Just found a great way of learning something new in a random way.
Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” (or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random) This is what I got:
G?o Qípeì (???) (1660-1734) was born in Jiangxi to a family with Manchurian connections. He had success as an official in southern China, but is best known today as a painter. He initially gained reputation as an artist who did landscapes and figures in traditional style. By age twenty he became known as an eccentric who preferred using his fingers instead of a brush. This style had precedents as Zhang Zhao also preferred finger painting, but G?o Qípeì went further. He grew his fingernails long to make them more effect instruments and used his entire hand to create a highly individualized style. (wikipedia)
Cool! Interesting guy and a fun way to discover something new.
Royal expenses go up – royal marriage anounced
Paying for your own wedding is expensive, paying for your childrens weddings is probably even more expensive but paying for someone else’s wedding is just plain stupid. So why on earth should people claim to be happy when the crown princess is going to marry her boyfriend?
Personally I have always considered myself as a disinterested royalist. Who cares if there is a king but since we have one why bother to change the system? I doubt that any other system would be more cost efficient or cheaper. There is the democratic deficit of course but then again the Swedish king has no power – so how much of a loss for democracy can it be?
But now that we have a royal wedding in the future it makes me think… The family is wealthy enough to pay for their own damn party. If not then they may want to think about some cash saving tips and ideas just like other poor slobs. But what really pisses me off is that the state will have to provide extra funds for the police, the foreign office, the royal family, department of transport, department of sanitation etc etc
So basically, to the couple: I would congratulate you on your upcoming wedding if I didn’t have to pay for a party that I am not invited to… And no! being a spectator to the event does not count. Get married on your own time and money.
Vive la republic!
The Vulnerable IT Society
The formalities are cleared and I will be responsible for a new course at Göteborg University begining after summer. The course “The Vulnerable IT Society” (Det sårbara IT-samhället) will be in Swedish and there is some more information here.
Naturally the new course already has a blog http://techrisk.wordpress.com which will focus on the vulnerabilities of the information technology society. So basically I am looking for students, bloggers and general interest in the subject – but all in Swedish this time.
Internet Safety Day
A couple of days ago was the Internet safety day (or Safer Internet Day) I missed this (Cearta reminded me) and then did not have time to return to it until this morning. The purpose of the day is to promote safer and more responsible use of internet and mobile phone technologies. Cearta writes:
An excellent contribution to this issue is the ongoing EU Kids Online project at the LSE, funded by the EU’s Safer Internet plus Programme.
As the Irish contribution to Safer Internet Day, the Office for Internet Safety, the National Centre for Technology in Education, the National Parents Council (Primary), Childline, and the Hotline will host a joint Safer Internet Day event in Dublin to launch a TV and online awareness raising campaign focusing on the issue of cyberbullying.
Sweden has naturally also worked in this area too. Mediarådet has come out with reports such as Violence & Pornography in Video Games (in Swedish), IIS has a report on Young Peoples Integrity online (in Swedish), & Bris has Internet advice to parents (in Swedish).
All that can be said is that the fear and paranoia (or reality) of the Internet will provide a rich field of work for many people for a long long time – or is this too cynical?
Some interesting media reports on Internet Safety include: BBC | Guardian | Irish Times | Telegraph | Times Online | Silicon Republic | Sydney Morning Herald.
Macabre Tourists
So what makes some strange tourist attractions “normal” and other attractions are seen as macabre? When in Rome admiring piles of bones in the Christian catacombs on the Via Appia qualify is normal behavior, but this is really too easy. Many religious festivities and sights include relics often comprising of bones or other bodily remains of the great and not so great. They have become so mainstream so as not to be considered macabre. In fact body parts are all to often part of our veneration of the famous – even if the thought makes us a bit queasy.
Several examples of our need to collect memento’s of the famous exist:
Beethoven’s ears were hacked out and soon went missing. Rene Descartes’s middle finger was stolen… Napoleon’s reputed penis went on a picaresque odyssey of its own… Josef Haydn’s head was stolen by phrenologists at his burial. (Hayden Digging Up the Dead For Medical Diagnoses OHMY News)
So it’s not surprising that when we are tourists we drop in and stare at them. Not to mention mummified remains in various museums. Imagine a dead relative presented in a glass case for all to stare at…
But this is so commonplace that it is not strange.
On the other hand there are some activities which may be seen as more odd, or decidedly macabre. A relatively common tourist activity in Paris is visiting the graves of the famous. The Père Lachaise Cemetery is listed in all the better guidebooks (in London the activity confined to gawking at the tombs and comematorive plaques in Westminster Abbey) this is begining to be odd.
But leaving lipstick kisses on the tomb of Oscar Wilde, alcohol at Jim Morrison, notes with Marilyn Monroe, or pennies on the stone memorial of Traveller (General Robert E. Lee’s horse), quarters at Jayne Mansfield, must be seen as belonging to the more bizarre behavior.
While all this is strange, the strangest so far is the practice of tourists in Dallas to get the photograph taken standing on an X in the middle of the road. It’s the X that marks the spot were Kennedy was killed. Now that’s macabre. It makes visiting graveyards seem perefectly natural.
Rushdie on book copyright
In January, Salman Rushdie was 92nd Y in New York attending something called The Moral Courage Conversations together with Irshad Manji. A brief interlude among the questions was whether or not he saw copyright as an impediment to freedom of speech. So while I was waiting for a deep understanding from one of my favorite authors on a topic that interests me deeply.
Question: Have you considered copyright law as an barrier to free speech?
Rushdie: er,…no… but that’s because I write for a living…
Then Rushdie launches into an interesting perspective on book piracy. In particular to the problem of illegal copies of his work being made. Actually he does not throw any light on the role of Internet in this question but it does raise an interesting perspective which we digital copyright activists tend to forget in our focus on file sharing. Rushdie is is as eloquent as ever. humorous in the face of piracy.
The question comes a long way in the video at 1 hour 10 ten minutes 55 seconds (ends about 1 hour, 14 minutes 40 seconds)
A great step for UK art & world culture
This is really cool news and it just makes you wish that all other countries will follow suite. So what’s the news? Well the director general Mark Thompson of the BBC has just announced that the BBC is going to digitalize and put online all paintings in public ownership in the UK and the contents of the Arts Council’s vast film archive online as part of a range of initiatives that it has pledged will give it a “deeper commitment to arts and music”. Just the art amounts to around 200,000 oil paintings! (via The Guardian)
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw
John Singer Sargent, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Lady Agnew is one of the 200 000 pictures we can look forward to seeing online. The good news may still be spoiled if the technology used (or indeed the licenses) somehow prevents users from being able to enjoy them properly.