Archive for February 2012
I forget…
source: Flickr/Lord Rex
As we worry about the skills being lost in our growing dependence on new technologies, we might contemplate Plato’s recounting of Socrates’ dialogue with Phaedrus:
Socrates: Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Thoth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and above all else, writing.
Now, the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes; Thamus they call Amun. Thoth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Thoth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.
The story goes that Thamus said much to Thoth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Thoth said, “O king, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied, “O most expert Thoth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
Via Lapham’s Quarterly. (C.f. also Josh Mostel’s hysterical dramatization on Media Probes, if you can find it…)
As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that the final episode of The Lawrence Welk Show was taped (for syndicated release on April 17). The series aired locally in Los Angeles for four years (1951–55), then nationally for another 28 years via the ABC network (1955–71) and– supported by anti-aging tonic Geritol, sleep aid Sominex, and laxative Serutan–in first-run syndication (1971–82). Then in 1986, lest a generation of Americans forget the polka, Oklahoma Public Television acquired the rights and began redistributing the programs to PBS stations… on which they run to this day.
And a one, and a two…
That’s life…
Virus (source: Flickr/Razza Mathadsa)
Writing in The Scientist, Professor Edward N. Trifonov tackles the most fundamental of questions:
The definition of life is as enormous a problem as the phenomenon of life itself. One could easily collect from the literature more than 100 different definitions, none satisfactory enough to be broadly accepted. What should the definition contain, to be suitable for all varieties of observable life? Humans, animals, plants, microorganisms. Do viruses also belong to life?
There are two tendencies in the attempts to define life. One is to formulate an all-inclusive definition, accommodating life’s attributes and manifestations from all levels of complexity. Another tendency is to reduce the attributes to only those which are common to all forms of life. But we do not know what would be the “simplissimus” from which everything, probably, started…
Spoiler alert! In “What is Life?” he presses down and further down the hierarchy of scale and process to suggest that “The border between life and nonlife may, actually, be placed anywhere within the realm of the abiotic processes.” (For those distant from their biology classes: “abiotic.”) Trifonov’s conclusion is fascinating– at once, inspiring and humbling:
… life never stopped emerging, starting some 4 billion years ago with replicating RNA, and continuing to this day within the genomes of every living organism.
As we revisit Walt Whitman, we might send germinating birthday greetings to botanist Charles Joseph Chamberlain; he was born on this date in 1863. Chamberlain was a specialist in the cycad genera (palmlike, cone-bearing plants). His work laid the foundation for understanding the life histories, distribution, ecology, and diversity of cycads (and other primitive seed plants), postulated a course of evolutionary development for the spermatophyte (seed plant) ovule and embryo, and led to speculation about a cycad origin for angiosperms (flowering plants).
A modest proposal…
Our copyright laws are stealing from the mouths of Charles Dickens' great-great-great-great grandchildren
Neuroscientist and game designer Adrian Hon has a radical answer to the continuing problem of intellectual property; as he writes in The Telegraph,
…Imagine you’re a new parent at 30 years old and you’ve just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the “public good”, simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they’d just make it worse.
No, it’s clear that our current copyright law is inadequate and unfair. We must move to Eternal Copyright – a system where copyright never expires, and a world in which we no longer snatch food out of the mouths of our creators’ descendants…
A bold idea such as Eternal Copyright will inevitably have opponents who wish to stand in the way of progress. Some will claim that because intellectual works are non-rivalrous, unlike tangible goods, meaning that they can be copied without removing the original, we shouldn’t treat copyright as theft at all. They might even quote George Bernard Shaw, who said, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”…
Certainly we wouldn’t want to listen to their other suggestions, which would see us broaden the definition of “fair use” and, horrifically, reduce copyright terms back to merely a lifetime or even less. Not only would such an act deprive our great-great-grandchildren of their birthright, but it would surely choke off creativity to the dark ages of the 18th and 19th centuries, a desperately lean time for art in which we had to make do with mere scribblers such as Wordsworth, Swift, Richardson, Defoe, Austen, Bronte, Hardy, Dickens, and Keats.
Do we really want to return to that world? I don’t think so.
The full piece is here. [TotH to Pop Loser]
As we return to our senses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1632 that Galileo Galilei “published” Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo)– that’s to say, he presented the first copy to his patron, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Dialogue, which compared the heliocentric Copernican and the traditional geo-centric Ptolemaic systems, was an immediate best-seller.
While there was no copyright available to Galileo, his book was published under a license from the Inquisition. Still, the following year it was deemed heretical and listed in the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum); the publication of anything else Galileo had written or ever might write was also banned… a ban that remained in effect until 1835.
Walking the line…
3.28 Renminbi (about 49 cents)-- the per capita poverty line in China-- in peanuts
Beijing-based photographer Stefen Chow has produced an arresting series of photos illustrating the tangible reality of poverty:
This body of work explores a simple question. What is the poverty line in a country?
We decided to generally calculate a per-person, per-day rate of a national poverty line, and to create a visual portrayal of items found in that country that could be bought by a person living at the poverty line.
This is not an emotional analysis of what it means to be poor. It is an examination of the choices one would face being poor. This is an ongoing project, with the first series understanding China, Japan, Nepal and Thailand. We have since expanded this project and have gone to five continents. We are not trying to compare different countries’ poverty, but rather to have a starting point to understand poverty within a country’s context.Everything else is left up to interpretation.
… though the viewer notes that the local newspapers that provide the background for each shot (and their enticing advertisements) offer an ironic counterpoint to the sparse reality of life on the poverty line.
See samples of the collection here. And then check out Jonathan Blaustein’s similar project, Value of a Dollar.
[TotH to GOOD]
As we count our pennies blessings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Richard M. Nixon arrived in China to begin the historic 8-day visit that ended 25 years of separation between the two countries; it was the first time a U.S. president had visited the PRC.
Mao Zedong and Nixon (source)
The essence of entrepreneuring…
From the Kauffman Foundation’s “Sketchbook” series, “Make it Happen,” a wonderful animation of a recent interview with Tim O’Reilly on the “Maker Movement” (see here and here)– and on what it can teach us about innovation and entrepreneurial energy:
click image above, or here, for video
For more, see CNN’s interview with Make‘s founder (and Tim’s long-time publishing partner), Dale Dougherty.
As we return with enthusiasm to our workbenches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1872 that U.S. Patent No.123,790 was awarded to Silas Noble and James P. Cooley for a device that allowed “a block of wood, with little waste and in one operation, [to] be cut up in to toothpicks ready for use.” The inventors had been working together since 1854, as drum makers; at the time of the toothpick breakthrough, their company , Noble and Cooley, which remains in the percussion business to this day, was manufacturing 100,000 drums per year.
So, in much the same way that an unplanned byproduct of NASA’s space program was the powdered drink that gave American households a convenient source of vitamin C (Tang), Noble and Cooley’s quest for better drum shells and sticks helped bring down the cost of cleaner teeth and healthier gums…
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