desirable things

CCTV music video

An unsigned Manchester band The Get Out Clause wanted to create a music video but did not have a camera crew so they got creative. They set up and played in front of surveillance cameras at different locations and then requested the surveillance tapes from the under the Data Protection Act and cut together a music video of the results.

cctvmusic.jpg

The result is a very cool grainy effect – My favourite part is when they are playing on a buss! More information about the video here – Check out the actual video on YouTube!

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

Singer in Stockholm

The philosopher Peter Singer will be giving a lecture in Stockholm on the 29 May on the “Ethical Aspects of the Difference between Secular and Religious Approaches”, read more about his lecture here. Unfortunately it is Stockholm but I will see if I can go up to Stockholm to listen to him.

The lecture will be followed by an existential discussion between Ann Heberlein (blogged about her recent book)
Georg Klein & Peter Singer.

Place: Lärarhögskolan, Stockholms Universitet (Aulan, Konradsberg) at 7 pm (more details here)

Posted on by mklang

North Pole Marathon

Talk about pushing life to the extremes. There are those who feel that a marathon in itself is not enough of a challenge and choose to run the in extreme. Naturally they are not alone. The North Pole Marathon is an annual event…

Photo: North Pole Marathon 2008 by Mike King

Once you have got over the shock, an intense desire to participate is natural 🙂 And why stop there? The organizers of the North Pole Marathon also hold the Antarctic Ice Marathon.

 

 

Posted on by mklang

Better Podcasts

Finding good podcasts is really difficult. Not because they are rare but because, like everything online, there is too much to search through. Martin (from the blog with the impossible name Aardvarchaeology) has asked his readers to recommend some better podcasts for him to subscribe to.

So, Dear Reader, you clearly aren’t a moron: in aggregate, Aard’s readers should be a much better authority than the unwashed masses when it comes to podcasts. Please tell me your favourite podcasts with a sentence or two explaining what they’re about…

The list makes a good starting point for those who are looking for better podcasts. My own suggestion to Martin’s list was the University of Bath Public Lecture Podcast. The series features leading names from the worlds of science, humanities and engineering talking about the latest research in their field.

Some of my favorites are:
General Sir Rupert Smith: The utility of force
Professor Allan Kellehear: The history of death and dying
Steve Jones: Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right
Lord Desai: Why is poverty persistent?
Professor Jacque Lynn Foltyn: Dead sexy: The corpse is the new “porn star” of pop culture

Posted on by mklang

Boyle Book Cover Competition

Via an email list I found out that James Boyle, the new Chairman of the Board at Creative Commons and a founder of Science Commons, is holding a contest to design a cover for his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. In the book, Boyle argues that more and more of material that used to be free to use without having to pay a fee or ask permission is becoming private property — at the expense of innovation, science, culture and politics.

Details, including specs and a link to some great source material for imagery, are available at the Worth1000 website. Both the book and the cover will be distributed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Boyle is a great writer and enjoys exploring legal questions surrounding property in a way which makes it accessible and interesting to the reader. His book Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society was a real eye opener for me. I am definitely going to get his new book.

When my PhD was almost finished I announced a similar competition for the design of the book cover and was lucky to get it widely publicized. The whole idea of the competition was actually quite resented and discussed on my blog. Professional designers felt I was cutting them out of the market by asking for free work. Interesting discussions ensued. The results of the competition were posted on my blog and the winner was chosen by popular vote and used on the cover of my PhD.

Posted on by mklang

Copyright in real life

In the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons they often make strange sculptures out of snowmen. Yesterday I came across this sculpture outside the humanist faculty at the University of Göteborg.

The scene depicts two figures pushing and pulling a huge wheel over a third figure lying down in the snow in front of the wheel. Check out a larger size at my Flickr account.

On a interesting side note – according to Swedish copyright law only public art which is placed in the public sphere on a permanent/constant basis may be reproduced without permission. An interesting question which needs to be addressed first is: Is this installation/sculpture copyrightable art? The second point is the issue of permanent/constant. It can hardly be considered to be placed there on a permanent basis but could we interpret the word constant to mean for the duration of the snow?

If it is to be seen as impermanent copyrightable art then it may not be reproduced. If the photo is to be seen as permanent copyrightable art the photo may be reproduced, but the creators must be named. Actually this is all a moot point since in neither case can this photo be reproduced on the Internet.

So who says copyright is complicated?

Posted on by mklang

Wikipedia takes Manhattan

Free Culture at NYU and Columbia are organizing a photo contest in  New York. The idea is to document the  city and provide  images which can be later used for wikipedia articles. This is a great way to increase awareness and to provide a bank of images for others to use. Does anyone want to organize something similar in Göteborg?

On Friday, March 28th (April 4th rain date), join Free Culture @ NYU and Free Culture @ Columbia on a quest to get the best shots of NYC. Bring your camera and a way to get around town for the biggest scavenger hunt in Free Culture’s history.

All photos will be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons for inclusion into Wikipedia articles about NYC that need photos. We’ve got hundreds of locations, sites, and things to document for Wikipedia and it should be a really fun day.

Each member of the winning team will receive an iPod shuffle loaded with Creative Commons music! Second and third place teams will win copies of “Wikipedia, The Missing Manual” donated by O’Reilly.

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Logo Competition

Creative Commons Sweden goes live and on that occasion we want to ask you how we can best represent you. We are looking for a logo that best represents you, in your surroundings and your culture – a more personalised CC Sweden logo if you will.

So we ask you, as artists, to be creative and make the Creative Commons Sweden your Creative Commons.

Here is the deal:

Take one of the Creative Commons logos (two examples here or/and here) and create something that represents CC Sweden. It can be a variation with the flag, the shape of the Sweden or a cultural sight or something completely unrelated but yet unique. The only condition is, that the logo you use as a basis remains unchanged.

The best 3 designs will be rewarded with a) a price from one of our supporters and b) will represent the CC Sweden from then on, on our website, on T-shirts, hoodies, keychains etc. and wherever the CC Sweden appears.

So, take to you sketch-boards and make the CC Sweden your Creative Commons.

Send your designs including a short mail explaining your thoughts and you idea behind the logo to contest@creativecommons.se (text can be either in English or in Swedish).

More information online here. If you have any questions feel free to contact Mirko.

Posted on by mklang

Cognitive overload

The whole act of packing one life into boxes and moving to another location is on the surface a trivial event. This triviality is however an illusion, the event is a mass of decisions that need to be taken: boxes, packing, changing address, notifying the electric, telephone and broadband company and on and on.

All this is manageable until the added decisions of decorating come along. Life seems easy and major decisions seem manageable until you all of a sudden spend half an hour trying to decide which curtain rail will fit in the bedroom. Seriously! Half an hour trying to arrive at a decision over curtain rails!!

Since seemingly simple decisions quickly become a quagmire of choices the act of moving stuff from one place to another creates a cognitive overload even before arriving at stupid decisions like where to put stuff in the new place.

Moving the boxes is the easy part. It reminds me of a Sufi proverb: Freedom is the absence of choice.

Posted on by mklang

Honor the heretic

The Vatican is planning to erect a statue for Galileo 400 years after they put him on trial for heresy but this is not the first attempt by the church to look into the Galileo affair, as early as 1979 attempts were made to rethink the trial of Galileo. Still better late than never?

The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

This does feel a bit like an apology of too little, too late.

A statue to the heretic might be a good idea but I would prefer a statue that would remind the church of the power and responsibility is has for preventing the truth from spreading. And a statue to the need to remind everyone that the truth needs to be discussed and challenged if we are going to progress. While the Galileo affair was four centuries ago the church attitude towards birth control and abortion are ongoing in a world struggling to deal with overpopulation, poverty and aids. Do you think that they will erect a statue of this in about four hundred years?

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang