Ebay is quite the thing. Checking my alerts for the preset “Greenock” search and, voom, there is my Grannie.
This is news? Why not a title like “Islands MPs: 50% Deadwood That Just Won’t Float Away?”
Go About
Attentive readers might not expect I might find illumination in the words of the Monarch but look today at what Elizabeth R wrote this morning:
The dreadful events in London this morning have deeply shocked us all. I know I speak for the whole nation in expressing my sympathy to all those affected and the relatives of the killed and injured. I have nothing but admiration for the emergency services as they go about their work.
Go about. She uses that phrase in Christmas messages – being pleased to see people going about their business and, if I took note of it at all, I would have thought it aloof.
But I just came in from the bank and the bakery at noon in crowds going about. I like going about. Much of what I write here is about my going about, either travels of my mind or on my feet. When, however, the Nazis flattened great-grannie’s home by shovelling parachute bombs from Henkels for 72 hours straight over her Scottish city, they were really saying “don’t go about”. When those teens I taught in Poland after the fall of the Wall were under martial law in the 80s when they were in elementary school, they were being taught “don’t think you can just go about.” These few jerks today in London said the same thing.
I am far madder now than I thought I would be. I still plan to have a holiday in the States, be in public every day, not hide or even pray to be saved from such events. I am going to go about. So today, you go about, too.
Round 46782: Humans 1 – Robots 0
In a victory for humankind, workplace keystroke surveillance was deemed illegal in Alberta today. Hoo-ray. Once again class – just because you can do something with a computer does not mean you should.
Post Post II
Post “post-9/11” that is. I am trying to note if I see any markers for the ending of an era. Whether you think that that terrible day was caused by the alignment of a great number of extraordinary unlikelihoods giving the terrorists a clean run they would never have gotten on any other day or whether you think the years since 9/11 without a repetition of the horror are as a result of the winning of the war on terror, there will be a time some day that will be after the post-9/11 era.
I noticed the events in Edinburgh this week, the protests against the G8 and the echoes of the violence to the Battle in Seattle and wonder if that is one of the markers.
Update: weeks later I realize I have another post called Post Post so I dub this Post Post II.
When Is Theft OK?
If I never read the Boingsters, I probably would never encounter the “right to take” as a great new idea. But two recent posts point out something of the hypocrisy and the case-by-case arbitrary judgement that really is at the core of the arguments against respect for authorship – let’s call them the “anti-authorship” group – who call themselves “copyfighters” and part of the “remix” culture:
- On June 29, 2005 Boing confirms that big Nike stole little rock band’s imagery without payment. The taking of the stuff of others wrong.
- On July 6, 2005 Boing praises an essay in Wired which states that the new era of takery is here:
The remix is the very nature of the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.
So because it now can be done, it must be ok…except when we like the band and the company that takes is big. The sad thing is that people by what Boingsters like Cory Doctorow and Wired and they say about the appropriation of copyrighted material because he has successfully leveraged status rather than successfully argued the point. It is a tyranny of the self-described cool, which is a very weird tyranny. Sadder still is that there may be good arguments for specific accommodations of digital media which are lost through this broad and craptastic “remix culture” pap that sounds so neato…until it is your website layout, your icon, your text, your music and your art that is taken.
Sciencenter, Ithaca, New York
This is the real reason we visited Ithaca last weekend – not the ice cream, not the fine beer store and certainly not the hotel which shall go nameless with the blinking light on the smoke detector. The Sciencenter is hard to beat for an afternoon with the kids. Basically, it is only about 150 experiments to jump on, pull the rope, splash in the water or crawl through. Kid heaven.
Unlike the Children’s Museum in the Canadian Museum of Civilization there are no dioramas explaining things, no helpful staff with FedCo logoed t-shirts, no museum of the postal service – every child’s joy. Unlike the Portland’s Children’s Museum of Maine, there are no sponsored grocery store interactive displays teaching your kid to shop. But, to be quite fair, unlike either of those, the Sciencenter did not have that stage area with a real curtain and a trunk full of dress up clothes for putting on a play which is the killer app for a six year old.
No, the Sciencenter was all about science and teaching through doing in the inside exhibits as well as the outside playground. Water is explained through a spashy duck run, sinks and toilets. Lots of giggles and paying attention. There is a simple insulated room where kids can scream on the inside and watch a sound meter record decibels on the outside. Hard to get the kids away from that one. Outside swings with different rope length side by side as well as swings with intervening beams explain waves and motion. A 150 metre length of PVC tubes looped back to its beginning explains the speed of sounds and what you say into one end is heard half a second later. Kids argue with themselves. You can lift Dad seated in a chair pulling different ropes attached along the other end of the see-saw they hang from. Again, do it again!
Coming up on Ithaca week: the Farmer’s Market and Buttermilk Falls.