Somehow I missed Nat Hentoff's second piece about the Patriot Act, the one that discussed libraries. Big John Wants Your Reading List outlines the slippery slope librarians have been warning against.

"As I often do when Americans' freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I've covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.

As she has often said, "How can anyone involved with libraries stand up and say, 'We are going to solve problems by withholding information'?"

I called to talk with her about the FBI's new power to force libraries to disclose the titles of books that certain people are reading—and she, of course, knew all about this part of the USA Patriot Act. And the rest of it, for that matter.

Accordingly, the press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI's harvesting lists of what "suspect" Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers."

Judith continues to fight the good fight - more power to her. Thanks to Library Juice for pointing this one out.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:27:31 AM -

Urban navigation technique

"John writes: 'I have discovered a new urban navigation technique. If you're ever unsure as to which direction you're heading. Take a look at the satellite dishes. They're always pointing SW. It's like the moss growing on the north side of the tree!" Does this only work in northeastern North America? (via John!) [bOing bOing]

I hadn't thought of it, but I noted today that this works well in rural areas, too.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:54:30 AM -

Also, I've collated my blogged TED trip reports for your reading pleasure. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:52:32 PM -

Physics for Future Presidents.... Physics for Future Presidents

I'm back! Did you miss me? Wait, don't answer that. ; )UC Berkeley physics professor Richard A. Muller is teaching an amazing course called Physics for Future Presidents. Have you ever heard of those Physics for Poets classes? This is similar, only far cooler. And the book Muller is writing to accompany the course - with chapter titles like Explosions, Nuclear Weapons, and Secrets of UFOs - is available online!

posted by David Pescovitz at 17:14 [bOing bOing]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:20:47 PM -

But just at the cusp of this future, at the same time that we are being pushed to the world where anyone can "rip, mix [and] burn," a countermovement is raging all around. To ordinary people, this slogan from Apple seems benign enough; to the lawyers who prosecute the laws of copyright, the very idea that the music on "your" CD is "your music" is absurd. "Read the license," they're likely to demand. "Read the law," they'll say, piling on. This culture that you sing to yourself, or that swims all around you, this music that you pay for many times over--when you hear it on commercial radio, when you buy the CD, when you pay a surplus at a large restaurant so that they can play the same music on their speakers, when you purchase a movie ticket where the song is the theme--this music is not yours. You have no "rights" to rip it, or to mix it, or especially to burn it. You may have, the lawyers will insist, permission to do these things. But don't confuse Hollywood's grace with your rights. These parts of our culture, these lawyers will tell you, are the property of the few. The law of copyright makes it so, even though the law of copyright was never meant to create any such power.

[ ... ]

So deep is the rhetoric of control within our culture that whenever one says a resource is "free," most believe that a price is being quoted--free, that is, as in zero cost. But "free" has a much more fundamental meaning--in French, libre rather than gratis, or for us non-French speakers, and as the philosopher of our age and founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, puts it, "free, not in the sense of free beer, but free in the sense of free speech." A resource is "free" if 1) one can use it without the permission of anyone else; or 2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally. So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free.

[ ... ]

In proliferating forms of signatures, searches, sorts and surveillance, digital technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To reestablish a balance between control and creativity, our aim should be to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford Law School and author of The Future of Ideas, from which this is excerpted.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:58:34 PM -

This was an extraordinarily good day. The only weaknesses of the day are weaknesses of TED's format itself: the presentations are non-interactive with the audience and with one another so it is very difficult to develop ideas. For example, if a Nobel prize winner raises a provocative issue in his allotted 15-20 minutes, there's no Q&A, no panel, and no further discussion by later speakers who, by and large, have labored for months polishing a presentation from which they dare not swerve.

This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts' lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the "ideas are viruses" meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn't it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we're just picking the ideas we don't like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of "virus" under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all ... if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer.

Here are some more highlights:

Steve Jurveston had 7 minutes to talk about the nanotech revolution. Fascinating but way too abbreviated. He expects revolutions in computing, medicine, materials and manufacturing in 5-10 years. He also pointed out in passing that the human genome is smaller than MS Office.

Nobelist Kary Mullis gave a country-boy reminiscence of his discovery that the scientific method is a human invention. After giving a vivid sense of what "doing science" means to him, he attacked politicized science, taking global warming as his example. He cited two recent studies that found no warming in the past 50 years, throwing into doubt the "More CO2 = More Warming" hypothesis first formulated 100 years ago.

Next came Richard Dawkins who pissed me off mightily. He's obviously one of our great minds but ... he's got an impressively blinkered view of religion. I wholeheartedly agree with his main point: American culture needs to accept atheism as a mainstream belief, and I liked his proposal that atheists come out of the closet in order to legitimize the atheist position. But he wrapped this in a virulent and, frankly, ignorant attack on religion. I wanted to go up to him afterwards and say: "I hate science. Scientists experiment on animals." He would reply (I imagine): "First of all, you twit, astronomy, physics, etc. don't experiment on animals." Then I would pounce, it being my fantasy and all: "Exactly. And a critique of religion-in-general is just as twitty." It genuinely irks me that he recklessly conflates all religions as if they all reject science, all insist on blind faith, and all appeal only to the weak-minded. (The fact that my wife, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is one of the clearest-headed people I know, is an orthodox Jew certainly doesn't affect my attitude :)

Josef Penninger gave a fascinating presentation on his genetic research that may result in treatments for osteoporosis, arthritis, and pain management. More interesting, however, was his explanation of discoveries about how particular genes work. For example, the gene that controls the death of cells is also used by the body to "sculpt" fingers out of fetus's webbed mass. I spoke with him afterwards and found him to be shy and friendly. (Yes, you can be both.) When he talked about his new institute, he talked mainly in terms of human values. Emotionally, he felt like Dawkin's mirror image.

By the way, I also had a chance to talk briefly with Dean Kamen. "Since Segway challenges so many of our habits and many of our institutions," I asked, "how do you see it getting accepted? Who's going to adopt it first? Where will the breakthrough be?" "I wish I knew," Kamen said while standing, as always, on his Segway. But, he said, things are looking up since the Segway's introduction: Automobile companies don't hate it the way he thought they would and two states have passed laws allowing Segways on sidewalks.

Steven Pinker, whose work on language and the brain is brilliant and too hard for me, gave a highly understandable preview of his new book that argues that there is indeed such a thing as human nature. He pointed to four reasons we fear that idea: We don't like the inequality of capability it implies, we think it means that we are not perfectable, it seems to imply determinism and it seems to suck all the meaning out of life. He gave brief, effective counters for each fear.

Next up was Deepak Chopra, a popular spiritualist. He opened up by saying that Dawkins "seems to be a bit of a fundamentalist [laughs from the audience] and even perhaps a bit of a bigot [gasps from the audience]. He then spent his twenty minutes trying to erase science's distinction between observed and observer, using indeterminacy and quantum leaps as his proof points. He spoke the language of physics fluently, but even I, whose lack of understanding of quantum mechanics is truly deep, spotted some misunderstandings. I think. Besides, his approach can't possibly convince scientists because he's not telling them anything they don't already know.

Quincy Jones talked about his life. Frank Gehry chatted about his life as an architect. Chris Bangle, BMW's chief designer, told an amusing story to show that love and trust are at the heart of the collaborative process.

Overall, it was an amazing line up of intellect, squeezed, alas, into slots as small as veal pens — with just as much room to move around.

This is Richard Saul Wurman's last year as the head of TED. Next year, Chris Anderson, founder of Business 2.0, will host it. Chris is promising to maintain TED as it is, but it remains to be seen if it can weather the departure of its leader and icon.

By the way, I managed to leave out one extraordinary presentation yesterday. David Macauley cycled through about 100 drawings in 20 minutes to show the process by which he created his upcoming book about Rome. (What's the graphical equivalent of thinking out loud?) He is such a magnificent artist. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:15:23 AM -

"The Matrix" Website Updated. Click on the keyboard twice, and enter the password "reload" to get to the new material. There's QuickTime VRs, on the set shots and most likely a slew of new hidden stuff. Happy searching. [Gretchen just gave me a red pill. I wonder what that means?]

[C:PIRILLO.EXE]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:27:54 PM -

The co-founder of the 12-year-old Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) tries not to be bleak. But he sincerely worries that Microsoft will usurp e-commerce and AOL Time Warner will seize media, and the two forces will extinguish dissenting voices in a "diabolical" plot to own the economy and the human mind.

But Barlow, perhaps best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, isn't entirely forlorn. He's optimistic that courts will soon strike down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 agreement that banned online distribution of companies' intellectual property. And he's hopeful that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates--the smartest man Barlow says he's ever met--will hatch a plan to control the Internet that is so ridiculous that it will spark a public boycott that ultimately will topple the software giant.

The 54-year-old owner of an Apple PowerBook--festooned with Grateful Dead bumper stickers--sat down to chai tea in his rent-controlled apartment overlooking San Francisco. Donning black leather pants, cowboy boots, a turquoise necklace and a cell phone earplug, the self-declared "techno hippie" talked to CNET News.com about dot-communism, cattle ranching and the hallucinations of the masses.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:16:24 PM -

Jonathon Delacour in his blog points to a great web site for all us beer lovers:

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:11:11 PM -

Whiskey River | has a fucking beautiful, delicious, tender quote from the master of humanity, Jorge Louis Borges. Read and taste heaven and dance to the beat of your heart and embrace all of life in this quote.

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?"

[soapbox]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:43:32 PM -

The new mnftiu is available. We're watching genius unfold.

Thanks, Gary for the early warning. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:03:44 AM -

In a polarized environment where opinions on privacy are simplistically reduced to "for" or "ignore," David Brin's concept of "The Transparent Society" (the title of his 1998 book) is a nimble approach that appears more relevant by the day.

Brin's cleverly-argued thesis is a spin on the arms race code of "Trust, but verify." For Brin, the supposed trade-offs between liberty and security are false dichotomies that could be resolved with, "Access, but accountability."

A scientist and sci-fi author as well as a non-fiction writer, Brin prophetically envisioned in "The Transparent Society" that an act such as the destruction of the Twin Towers by terrorists would usher in a new era of government surveillance. "The important point is that once the bureaucracy gets a new prerogative of surveillance, it is unlikely ever to give it up again," he wrote. "The effect is like a ratchet that will creep relentlessly toward one kind of transparency, the kind that is unidirectional."

Trying to prevent such government "sight" is pointless, according to Brin, who maintains that it is much better to seek "oversight" to watch the watchers, a pragmatic position at odds with many techno-libertarians and privacy advocates.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:34:37 PM -

Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased. Bookstore owners and privacy advocates say that's scarier than a Stephen King novel.

[ ... ]

Although many people aren't aware of it, in the eyes of the law buying a book is different from buying a bicycle or a pack of cigarettes. Through the years, the protections accorded materials covered by the First Amendment, such as books and newspapers, have evolved to protect the institutions that provide those materials as well. So when law enforcement officials say they just want information about the books a suspect purchased, booksellers and civil rights advocates see the demand as something that could erode book buyers' privacy and First Amendment rights.

[ ... ]

In fact, according to Finan, less-publicized demands by law enforcement for customer information have become "alarmingly" more frequent over the past two years. And not only independent booksellers, but giants like Borders and Amazon, have been subpoenaed. In perhaps the most egregious case, authorities ordered Amazon to give them a list of all customers in a large part of Ohio who had ordered two sexually oriented CDs. Independent booksellers have been especially hard-hit by these cases. And fighting them without the benefit of a corporate budget or in-house counsel means hefty legal bills and months, if not years, of hassle.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:17:36 PM -

Just remember, the coffee bean is nature's most complex natural foodstuff. Over 3,000 chemical components between the green and roasted bean, and some
800 of them directly responsible for taste and flavour (source, Andrea and Dr. Ernesto Illy: Espresso, the Chemistry of Quality). By comparison, a fine red wine has about 300 identifiable components that contribute to taste. And it's nature's (and man's) second most complex food item. If you ever wondered why 'coffee flavoured' isn't exactly coffee flavoured, the above numbers are why.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:48:30 PM -

Dana Parker sends us to Julian Baggini's Staying Alive: The Personal Identity Game that presents three scenarios having to do with what constitutes self-identity. For example, in the first one, you have to decide whether you'd rather get to Mars by taking a risky space ship or via a teleporter that maps your atoms and rebuilds you on Mars. The entire game takes about five minutes to play, and it's fascinating. Then you can read a brief and clear analysis of your results. (The site is presented by The Philosopher's Magazine, which looks like an interesting compendium of ideas.)

It reminds of a thought experiment I used to present to students. (I don't remember where I read it.) Suppose a genie tells you that you can become the emperor of China, with all the luxury and riches you could ever want, just by drinking a potion. You think this would be great and you're all set to do it when the genie says, "Oh, there's just one small catch. When you drink this potion, you'll fall asleep and a few hours later you'll wake up as the emperor ... but you'll have no memory of ever having been you." Most students say they would drink the potion anyway. But then, demonstrating how much smarter you are than your poor little students, you ask: "Ok, then tell me the difference between (1) waking up as the emperor of China with no recollection of who you are today and (2) you dying and someone else very much like you becoming emperor."

This, by the way, is also a pretty good argument against reincarnation. Reincarnation without memory is indistinguishable from death. Having a soul that gets recycled without memory is as satisfying as having a body that gets recycled. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:51:40 AM -

Bastard Operator from Hell II (Son of the Bastard) [Slashdot]

Bastard Operator from Hell through 1999

BOFH  2000

BOFH  2001

BOFH  FAQ

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:39:20 PM -

A site with an incredible collection of "amusing euphemisms for the sexual organs, sexual activities or bodily functions".

Roger's Profanisaurus
   

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:24:38 PM -

Showing good taste in beer can translate into music:

14414 » February 3 12:05 AM. The Peterson beer powered organ. Its like being the conductor of a well trained ensemble of jug playing hillbillies. (with sound samples) [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:27:15 AM -

Interesting overview of Cynicism:

14416 » February 3 2:33 AM. I've been accused in the past of only posting clever and astonishingly cynical quips - so just to prove that I'm no fly-by-night-non-serious-funster here is an informative link. It requires no flash plugins of any sort..... ladies and gentlemen I give you.... What Is Cynicism? thank you.. As usual, details within. [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:17:52 AM -

Michael Moore, America's Last Populist, rants about Bush and Enron. He paints a damning portrait of the intimacy between W and "Kenny Boy."

[JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:15:09 AM -

It's the metaphor, stupid 

Great piece at ABC News on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Where Mathematics Comes From. Thanks to Andre for the Link.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:36:59 PM -