My latest project: attach laser pointers to my dumbek drum so I get a mini-lightshow shinging on the drum head every beat. Total cost (with the exception of the dumbek) was about $5.
Drums with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads Read More »
Speaking of On The Media, Bob Garfield has an interesting take on Stephen Colbert’s somewhat chilly (or at least uneven) audience reaction at the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner:
The question shouldn’t be “Why was Stephen Colbert so rude?” The question should be, “Why is the press gathering to toast a sitting politician in the first place, socializing with the government officials they’re supposed to be covering?” How cna you sit there in your formal wear over boeuf and cabernet and maintain an arms-length distance from the person less than an arms-length away from you? The problem with the White House Correspondent’s Dinner on Saturday was not the Master of Ceremonies it was the ceremony itself. Democracy requires a vigilant press. It doesn’t much need the Friar’s Club.
Bob Garfield on Stephen Colbert Read More »
Guest-blogging for Larry Lessig, Tim Wu asks why movie studios pay for the rights to newspaper stories:
In 1997, the New York Times reported on the story of Tim “Ripper” Owens, who rose from being a lifelong Judas Priest fan to becoming the actual lead singer of Judas Priest…
Great writing and a great story. Good enough to inspire the 2001 film Rock Star, starring Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston, for which, I am told, Warner Bros. paid the New York Times for the movie rights.
But wait — what movie rights? According to basic copyright law, and as interpreted by the Supreme Court, the facts of Ripper Owen’s life are free to be used by anyone. There is, according to the law, almost nothing to purchase. Reading the story out loud during the film would be a copyright violation, but under U.S. law, little else would borrow the expression as opposed to the facts.
It’s a question I’ve asked myself a couple times in the past few months. The first time was when I saw a booth selling old historical photos at a local arts festival. The company, Photos of Old Amercia, had claimed to have a copyright on each of the photos, even though the woman in charge said she mostly found old pictures from libraries and collections and usually never had any clue who the original photographer was. Some of the photos have been retouched, and Photos of Old America would own the copyright on those changes. However, near as I can tell the company is itself violating the copyright on most of these photos, figuring (correctly) that they’ll probably get away with it.
The second time was when I learned about Zorro Productions, Inc., which decades ago bought all the rights to Zorro™, the legendary masked hero first introduced by Johnston McCulley in The Curse of Capistrano in 1919. Apparently if you want to make a play, movie, book or even appearance at a local mall about Zorro™ you have to license the rights from Zorro Productions first. But what rights? The copyright on The Curse of Capistrano expired ages ago and is in the public domain, as is the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks classic movie The Mark of Zorro. That leaves trademark law, which (in theory anyway) only applies so far as consumers might be confused as to the source or producer of a product or service. Raise your hands out there if you knew Zorro Productions, Inc. owned the licensing rights to Zorro™ before now, or would assume when you went to a Zorro™ movie that it would be protected by that company’s good name.
Unfortunately, in practice it doesn’t seem to matter what the law actually says. By licensing these non-existent rights, powerful companies like Sony Pictures gain a powerful threat over potential competitors, namely the ability to scare away financiers and potential partners with a simple cease-and-desist letter. When it comes to intellectual property, might makes rights is all too often the true law of the land.
Where’s Zorro when you need him?
This week’s On The Media has a piece on the new website www.healthnewsreview.org, a non-profit site launched last month that rates health news on criteria such as whether the story discusses cost, efficiency and potential harms of treatments, compares to alternative treatments, reveal sources of their information, etc. Ratings are performed by a review board of doctors and other health experts.
Health News Review Read More »
If I were to write a kind of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying kind of guide to giving demos of your research, it would probably include the following list of things to avoid:
Never one to take the easy route, my current research project contains every one of these features. No matter how many successful trials I run, I never really know whether this time it’ll go boom.
On demos and Heisenbugs Read More »
From a short article in Left Lane News about how car thieves are using laptops to circumvent keyless-entry locks:
The expert gang suspected of stealing two of David Beckham’s BMW X5 SUVs in the last six months did so by using software programs on a laptop to wirelessly break into the car’s computer, open the doors, and start the engine…
While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know where and how security information is stored in a car, the information eventually falls into the wrong hands.
This should come as a surprise to no one. What concerns me more is that such software is no doubt available not just to “expert gangs” but also the equivalent of script-kiddies who normally wouldn’t even be able to figure out how to hot-wire a ’69 Buick.
(Thanks to Regis for the link…)
Gone in 20 minutes… Read More »
Here’s a nice example and how-to on drag & drop sortable lists in Javascript (by way of Steve)
Drag & Drop sortable lists in Javascript Read More »
Apparently there’s another Bradley J. Rhodes out there that publishes in a vaguely related field (Cognitive and Neural Systems) and who got his Ph.D. from Boston University at the same time I got mine from MIT. This should cause no end of fun-filled confusion for years to come!
How to stress-test academic-reference trackers Read More »
At the Ambidexterous Magazine launch party last night, Chris Tacklind (of D2M, I think) was showing off his laser-diode glove. These things are lots of fun — I remember my group-mate Michael P. Johnson built one when I was at the Media Lab, and got good enough he could make little figure-8s with two fingers while the other dots circled around them.
Something I hadn’t seen before and liked even better was a sound-display toy Chris was playing with, but I forgot to take a picture that one (eit!). It was just a small cardboard tube with a balloon stretched across one end, and a laser diode shining onto a small mirror stuck to the end of the balloon. You’d speak or sing into the tube and the sound vibrations would show up as little laser shows on the wall in front of you. Use it as a drum and you’d get even cooler effects. (Chris goes around teaching kids to make these things — the one he had was made by a 10-year old.)
Now I want to install something like that into the bottom of the little dumbek drum I have. Stretch a membrane across the bottom of the drum and attach a laser pointer to the inside of the drum shining onto a mirror on the membrane such that it reflects up onto the underside of the white translucent drumhead. Aligned correctly, I bet I could get some fun lasershow-style patterns on the drum head on every beat. (Might need to modify the design if the membrane changes the sound too much — we’ll see.)
Living in California as I do, I have a lot of friends who have ideas about the physical world that on their face seem ludicrous to a scientifically-minded materialist like myself. For example, people I love and respect think that some people have the ability to heal by adjusting a patient’s “energies” without touching him, others think that spells and witchcraft have power beyond the psychological, and even more think there’s some “guy” up in heaven that controls what happens here on Earth and that 2000 years ago His son rose from the dead. Since I respect these friends a great deal I’ve been looking for common ground, and have started playing a game with myself where I try to translate these beliefs into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.
I mean translate literally — I look for meanings of the words my believer friends use that make the belief plausible in my own world-view while compromising their actual beliefs as little as possible. There are some limits to the game — no amount of translation is going to make the claim that one can change the weather just with one’s mind any more palatable to me. But there is a surprising amount of room to maneuver. For example, I’ve heard some describe the energy manipulated by reiki practitioners as “electricity,” but when pressed it’s clear that’s just a metaphor for something else — they don’t actually mean that this energy can be measured with a voltmeter any more than a physicist talking about an electrical “current” thinks you could steer a boat down a river of the stuff. The goal of my private game then is to answer the question, “a metaphor for what?”
The fun part of this game is that when I’m being honest with myself I rapidly wind up at logical impasses in my own philosophy as well. My latest conundrum has to do with belief in some sort of soul, a “thing” that is a fundamental part of and unique to every living being (or at least every person), and that persists after that person has died. So the game is to come up with something that is (a) something fundamental to the identity of an individual person and yet (b) still exists after the body has turned to dust. As I cast about for things in my own world-view that might fit the bill (including things like “the patterns of memories left in surviving friends and family” and “the combination of genes and upbringing one leaves in one’s own children”) I started to recognize that the idea of a soul is an answer to a basic philosophical question left unanswered by materialism, namely “when we see an object at two points in time, what features are necessary such that we recognize the two viewings as the being of the same object?” I’ve always heard this called the Granddad’s Axe problem:
I’ve got my Granddad’s old axe. I’ve replaced the handle twice, and the head three times, but it’s still my Granddad’s old axe…
We can certainly accept that Granddad’s axe is still the same axe even if we paint it or sharpen it, and might even accept it’s the “same” axe after we’ve replaced both the head and the handle if we use it in the same way, it evokes the same memories of Granddad that it did before, etc. What about people? It’s been said that every molecule in a person’s body is replaced after a decade or two, and certainly I’m very different in both appearance and thinking than I was when I was 12. Am I still the same person I was then, even with all those changes? If so, why do we connect the atoms that made up that child then with the person sitting here typing this now? And if not, is there some 12-year-old boy living today who, based on similarity to that boy of 24 years ago, is more deserving of the title?
Materialism (or my understanding of it at least) doesn’t offer any answers to these questions, nor does it feel the need to do so. The philosophy simply suggests that there are patterns that exist in the world at different points in time, that they follow certain rules, and that any vocabulary that accurately describes those patterns is equally valid (though potentially more or less practical and comprehensible). Unfortunately, just calling such a pattern “soul” doesn’t get us any further — that just amounts to saying “yes, you are the same person as you were when you were 12, and we’ll call the thing that binds those two defined entities together your soul.”
Games we materialists play when you aren’t looking Read More »