Embracing Chaos

Participatory Culture and the Democratization of Information

An example of the trend towards information democracy is the democratization of culture.  "Participatory Culture" is the modern trend of many individuals contributing to the mass of popular culture rather than culture being broadcast from a small elite of performers.  By analogy, Hollywood's hegemony over movies and television represented a communist politburo where a small group had the power and responsibility to control the cultural experiences of the masses.  Today's information technology is tearing down this monopoly that broadcasters held, and thus democratizing culture through three mechanisms: easier content creation, distribution, and a better editorial process.  We'll look at each of these three aspects after a brief review of other aspects of the democratization of information.

Broadly, the concept of information democracy is that an increasingly large number of people are able to influence how information is aggregated.  Wikipedia is a clear and simple example of allowing anybody to contribute to what used to be authored by a select few -- "The Encyclopedia."  Google's Pagerank algorithm democratized web search.  Today's most successful software is democratizing the feature set by allowing users to vote on how they want to use it.  The general principal is that large numbers of individuals can together make better decisions than any small group.  Applying this principal to culture, we can predict that a cultural democracy will produce "better culture" than what was available before.

Information technology makes it cheaper and easier to both create and to distribute culture.  With the right software, any laptop today has all the power of a professional music or video studio.  Sure the quality won't be as good without professional inputs (microphones, cameras, etc) but the cheap stuff is good enough for a lot of things.  Obviously the internet makes distribution of this content trivially easy, which is disrupting traditional media businesses.  Easy creation and distribution of cultural content is an important part of creating a cultural democracy, but it is not the critical enabling step.

The key to democratizing culture is in the editorial process.  If everybody is contributing cultural content that is easily distributed, but there's still a small group deciding which pieces everybody watches, we're still in a cultural dictatorship.  Enabling the mass public to "vote" on content is the democratizing step.  That enables the collective intelligence of all media consumers to help choose what should become part of mass culture.  So instead of some programming executive trying to guess what will be popular, the question almost becomes moot -- whatever is popular becomes popular culture.  Actually making this work is not at all straightforward.  I'll save a full description of the necessary ingredients for another post, but we can look at a couple examples.

Youtube does this quite well.  It blurs the line between sharing a video clip with your friends and publishing it as a piece of mass culture.  Any video that isn't marked private is submitted into a kind of massive popularity contest.  Videos that get millions of views are undeniably bits of popular culture.  For music, last.fm does a good job of being inclusive, but hasn't quite taken off.  When I started building social features into Rhapsody I hoped they could democratize the music editorial process but that hasn't happened yet.  Like many things in social media there's a chicken and egg problem with scale which Youtube has clearly gotten past, but music is still struggling with.

Cultural Democracy is "retro"?!

This post is inspired by a recent story by Heather Chaplin that NPR aired describing participatory culture in video games.  The surprising part of the story for me was the assertion that this trend is not modern but in fact “retro.”  The story points out that before analog broadcast media, most culture was participatory -- singing, dancing, crafts, etc.  Analog technology created the possibility of cultural hegemonies, and digital technology is breaking them down.  A fine point, implying that the 20th century will likely be unique as the only period in human history when popular culture was dictated by an elite group of editors.  Thanks for the interesting tidbit.

2009: A Year of Commitments

As the year wraps up, I'd like to share some of the major events that have happened in my life recently.  Many of my readers will be well aware of these events, but I recognize that personal news travels through a variety of channels, and all of those channels are unreliable.  (I'll save the diatribe on why Facebook is a horrible way to keep up with friends for another day.)  For readers who are looking for insightful analysis of technology, my apologies.  Note the "ego" tag.  This is a personal update but does contain a little insight into real-estate finance.

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

Alarm Clocks, Geeks, Hippies and the Robot Revolution

I'm at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today.  It's wonderful seeing my company doing great things for the world.  Enabling people to build universally accessible applications that help people solve difficult problems together.  It gets us closer to the ultimate solution.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

UAW vs. Chrysler: friends at last!

I'd like to share a couple thoughts on Detroit -- a couple ideas that I'm not hearing in the popular or business press, but are important to understand.

Chrysler goes bankrupt

First some background.  Chrysler is being restructured under bankruptcy.  This doesn't mean they're going out of business.  It means that they owe more money than they have or will be able to pay.  So with the help of a judge, they're sitting down with everybody they owe money to and telling them frankly "you're not getting everything we owe you.  Sorry, but there just isn't enough to go around."  So everybody has to compromise.  The idea is that by striking some bargains to reduce debt the company can get back in the game and become profitable again.

UAW owns Chrysler

One of the biggest debts Chrysler has is to the UAW, the United Auto Workers.  This is the labor union which represents all the "blue-collar" workers who actually make the cars.  Chrysler owes them benefits like pensions and health benefits.  Part of the settlement is that the UAW will own 55% of Chrysler stock.  That's a majority.  So the workers will own the company.  Personally I think this is great and makes a ton of sense, and I'll tell you why.  But not everybody does.

If you're lucky enough to be blissfully unaware of labor relations in Michigan, this is downright bizarre.  Chrylser corporation is "management."  UAW is "labor."  These two groups traditionally have not gotten along.  I don't think the word "hate" is out of place.  People say the UAW will try to unwind this position as fast as they can.  I heard one "expert" say that the UAW is placed in a position of conflict of interest representing both Chrysler stockholders and UAW workers.  Why?  Because their responsibility to stockholders is to increase the value of the company, but their responsibility to the union is to save jobs, and these two goals are diametrically opposed.

Cooperation is the only way

Hold on.  The goals of the workers and the goals of the company are diametrically opposed?  This kind of adversarial thinking underlies how Detroit got into trouble in the first place.  In truth the UAW's goals and Chrysler "management" goals are very strongly aligned.  This painful truth of this fact is excrutiating today.  Chrysler and GM are on the verge of ceasing to exist.  If and when this happens, the UAW workers will lose their jobs.  What's bad for management is bad for labor.  But figuring out how to keep Chrysler building cars that can compete with Japan and everybody else is a really hard problem.  Solve it and both labor and management win.  If ever there was a time for labor and management to come together and cooperate it's now.  To be extremely blunt for those still harboring grudges: if you two don't figure out how to play nicely together, you're both doomed.

Historical tensions caused these problems and SUV's too

Conventional wisdom cites two reasons for why Detroit is in this mess:

• They only built big gas-guzzling cars as consumer preferences shifted towards smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles
• Union labor costs for things like pensions and health care are so high compared to foreign competition that the company just can't compete

I believe both these are true.  But more interestingly (and something I've never heard reported in the press) I believe there's a causal link here.  It is precisely because of these high labor costs that Detroit has focused on building gas-guzzlers.  Smaller cars are cheaper and are subject to more intense price competition, meaning the margins are lower.  In business school we learn about two basic types of product strategies: low cost and high-end.  In the low-cost strategy you try to be more efficient than your competitors.  You do things cheaper and still maintain a good enough product.  This is what Japan did with cars.  But because UAW kept labor costs high, Detroit couldn't go this direction.  Their small lower-end cars would just cost more because of the higher input costs.  So they had to go after a high-end strategy where they made bigger, more expensive vehicles that came with higher profit margins.

Sophie's Policy Choice

So UAW workers collectively bargained their way out of jobs.  That is, they bargained up their salaries beyond what their labor is actually worth in the modern economy.  So what should we do?  Let the market correct itself so many of them lose their livelihoods?  Or sustain them publicly somehow?

There is no easy answer to this question from a policy perspective.  China is facing this same question with hundreds of millions of uneducated peasant farmers.  A relatively modest investment (on the national scale) in farm machinery could replace a good fraction of their output.  But the economically efficient choice comes with a high human cost.  In this country we believe governments exist to serve the people.  We'll see how it does.

Some feedback to Financial Reporters

I'm sure you know the US economy is in recession, which means the total amount of economic activity is declining.  Last week you might have heard the official numbers on how fast it's declining.  The big story was that the economy is down 6.2%, and everybody agrees that's a lot.  Most everybody agrees on what it was that shrank -- the GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is a strictly defined measure that attempts to sum up all economic activity within the country's borders.  But subtle differences in wording make it really unclear on actually how fast the economy was shrinking.  For example, consider these statements:

• Gross Domestic Product shrank 6.2% in the fourth quarter of 2008.  [Marketplace]  [similar in Reuters]
• Gross domestic product shrank at a 6.2 percent annual pace from October through December [Bloomberg] 

These statements mean very different things.  If the economy was actually 6.2% smaller at the end of December compared to the beginning of december, that is equivalent to an annual pace 22.6%.  (You might think it'd be 24.8% = 6.2% * 4, but actually it's 100*(1-(1-6.2/100)^4) -- just like compound interest.  If it shrank in half twice, it would be a quarter, not zero.)

So is it 6.2% change in a quarter or a 6.2% annual rate?  Knowing which one is correct requires enough background in the topic at hand to know what's reasonable.  An annual decline of 22.6% in GDP is unheard of for a first world economy, so they must mean a 6.2% pace.  Fortunately our intuitions work for macroeconomic terms we're familiar with like US GDP.  But when the same reporters talk about other numbers like housing prices or oil prices or an individual stock, these statements really are ambiguous for most of us.

I'm calling out to all the reporters in the world, especially financial reporters.  When you read a number with the word "rate" or "pace" next to it, and you re-report this number, leave the word "rate" or "pace" on it!  Unless you really know what you're talk about of course, but if you're not busting out a calculator, you can't just drop that word and have the right answer.  That word is a unit like miles or kilometers.  A 6.2% annual pace means 6.2% change over 12 months, and if you imply that same change happened over a quarter or a month, you've made a mistake as bad as changing pounds to ounces.  </rant>

The quotes I chose are from presumably reputable financial news sources.  You don't have to venture far at all into mainstream media to find these numbers getting butchered.  (See LA Times, Herald.)  The Reuters quote is possibly excusable in that it's refering to something you presumably already know, rather than reporting the fact directly, which you might claim to be jargon since everybody reading Reuters knows the economy couldn't shrink 6% in three months.  Marketplace just screwewd up -- they were clearly reporting the number as news, and should know better as they try to address a broader audience and educate them about financial issues.  I call them out because I like them, even though they make this mistake a lot.  Maybe they'll read my feedback on the air.

Dinocams - The legacy of SLR cameras in the 21st century

DSLR cameras make very little sense today.  Modern imaging technology is rapidly turning them into dinosaurs.  The forces keeping them alive are a combination of a physical legacy in hunks of glass, and aspirational marketing.  I'll explain, but first, what's a DSLR and why don't they make sense?

Background on SLRs and DSLRs

(If you what "f-stop" means, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex.  Practically speaking it refers to a camera where you can change the lens.  You look through the same lens that actually takes the picture, letting you put any lens from an ultra-wide angle fisheye to a telescope-length zoom lens.  You can also put filters on the front like star filters or color shifters or polarizers.  Imagine a classic 35mm camera -- like what a P.I. would carry to snap pictures of your wife having an affair -- that's an SLR.

SLR's require a mirror that physically moves to divert the light into one of two places -- your eye, or the film / CCD. The mirror was important when the only technology for capturing images was chemical film.  But nowadays we have various electronic devices like CCDs that digitize an image.  DSLR cameras use a CCD to get many of the benefits of digital imaging, but still have the same physical form factor as an old chemical-film SLR.  They can use the old lenses, which is one of their big appeals.  But so many things about these cameras just don't make sense.

The problems with DSLR cameras

First there's the noise.  The sound of the mirror slapping against its stops as it switches positions is very recognizable. We used to accept sounds like that as a necessary part of taking pictures.  Today it just annoys me.  Especially when I'm at a small event and some photographer is there making loud clicking noises all the time while I'm trying to enjoy whatever it is they're digitizing with their dinocam.  In 99% of all use cases, it's totally unnecessary.  CCDs can continuously capture images and display them on a screen, creating a digital light path that doesn't require loud expensive mechanical assemblies.  These displays aren't as good as what a human eye can pick out, so this doesn't work all the time.  But if you don't need interchangeable lenses, then the camera can have a second optical path just for the eye, which doesn't need to be as good.

One argument against a separate optical viewfinder is that youc can't put filters in front of the lens.  This is very true, but filters are also obsolete.  With few exceptions, everything that a physical filter does can be done later in photoshop with more control and accuracy.  Color tinting, sparkle, gradients, soft, mist, etc -- these all used to be rendered in physical glass out of necessity.  Polarizing filters are probably the most important exception to this -- since CCD's don't record a light's polarization state, it can't be adjusted later.  But for the most part, filters aren't necessary anymore, meaning you don't need the whole single-lens thing. 

But what about interchangeable lenses?  Isn't it useful to have the same camera body and be able to change lenses?  (I hear you cry.)  Yes, sorta.  There are definitely situations where one lens won't be able to do everything you want.  But those situations are getting rarer and rarer.  And in the few exception cases, I'll argue that interchangeable lenses aren't the right solution.  The reason these cases are getting less and less common is that zoom lenses are getting better.  When SLR cameras first came on the scene zoom lenses basically didn't exist because they sucked when they did.  You needed a different lens for each amount of magnification you wanted, so people had lots of lenses.  But with computers to help us design the lenses, and vastly improved manufacturing processes, zoom lenses are getting better all the time.  Nowadays a lens with a huge 10x zoom can even win accolades from camera snobs.  And lenses as versatile as 26x cover every situation most of us would ever want, and at a quality we'll be thrilled with.  So for almost all situations, a single zoom lens is good enough today.

What about the situations where that's not quite good enough?  Where you need that 14mm fisheye that captures people standing immediately to the left or right side of the lens?  Or that 8000mm super- long telephoto telescope?  It turns out in either of these challenging cases, getting the lens to fit the standard SLR form factor becomes the hardest part.

Why SLR's cripple even the extreme lens cases

 

With ultra-wide fisheye lenses, the problem is the space reserved for that stupid mirror.  In this case, the focal length is very short, so as a lens designer, you'd naturally want the focal plane to be very close to the glass.  (Like about 14mm.)  But the place where the lens attaches to the camera body necessarily needs to be a certain distance away from the imaging plane.  That distance was determined by the size of the mirror, which was determined by the size of your chemical film -- 35mm, which is more than you'd really want for a 14mm lens.  Even on today's 2009 DSLR cameras, that distance is exactly the same as it was a generation ago in order to ensure backwards compatibility with old lenses.  The literal tons of carefully polished glass represent a very real barrier to improvement since people have invested lots of money in them. 

So if you really want a camera that's good at taking super-wide angle pictures, you don't want your lens to have to be that far away from the imaging plane.  You're better off with a specially built camera.  The lens will be simpler, cheaper and higher quality.  But super-wide starts to look funny, no matter what.  Funny meaning distorted, because if your eye is more than a couple of inches away from the reproduced super-wide image, then it won't look right.  And it's not super useful to capture 360 degrees in one shot -- you can shoot a dozen pictures and stitch them together later in software, and it'll look more natural.  This is all why people don't pay a lot of attention to how super-wide lenses get anymore.

On the super-telephoto side of things, the SLR legacy is even worse.  To get a super-long telephoto lens you need lots of big glass.  This gets expensive quickly simply because it's a large mass of carefully manufactured stuff.  The amount of glass you need for a lens is proportional to the cube of the length of your imaging plane, which for legacy chemical-film is 35mm.  But CCD's just don't need to be that big.  On almost every DSLR they're only about 20mm across, and on high-quality non-SLR cameras are as typically about 6mm across.  So that size legacy means you would need literally 200x  the almost 40x the amount of physical glass to make a good telephoto lens for an SLR vs a non-SLR camera.  This ridiculous discrepency is just going to get worse.

CCD's are silicon devices, so they share manufacturing improves along with CPU's and follows a Moore's law-like improvement curve for performance.  A key way they improve is in pixel density, but also by simply getting smaller.  As they get smaller, high-quality zoom lenses get smaller and cheaper too.  But only if the lenses are specifically designed for the new smaller CCD's.  With an SLR system they can't be -- the size must be fixed in order to maintain backwards compatibility.  So while sensor technology improves at Moore's law speed, lenses for non-SLR cameras improve as well, but SLR lenses do not.  Expensive zoom lenses for modern cameras just don't need to be that big or expensive -- It's like having to build a cell-phone big enough to hold floppy disks.

To illustrate this point, consider the popular Canon SX10IS camera which does not feature interchangeable lenses.  It features a zoom lens that goes from pretty wide (28mm equivalent) to really very far zoom (560mm equivalent).  Because its CCD is only 6mm across, it can do all this for under $400 and weigh in under a pound for the whole camera.  For comparison, a comparable SLR lens weighs in at over 11lbs and costs upwards of $7,000, just for the lens.  No doubt this lens can take better pictures than the tiny Canon, but a smaller lens built for a modern CCD could take pictures that are every bit as good for a fraction the price.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the noise floor on these sensors.  When the scene is dark, you need more light to get a good image.  A bigger hunk of glass captures more light.  This all makes intuitive sense and is mostly accurate.  CCD sensors can take more accurate pictures in low light when they are bigger.  But the limits here are electronic noise, which is also improving.  At some point we'll hit some other barrier like the thermal noise in the sensor, although a piezo cooler could work around that.  Ultimately there's the the quantization of photons, but if you're taking pictures in a scene that dark, you probably can't see what you're pointing at anyway.  My point is that while there are advantages in low light for larger glass and sensors, technology is erroding away at those too.  We're seeing ISO equivalents of 6400 as fairly common in cameras these days, with an economic competitive pressure to improve that.

 In summary, the problems with the SLR format are that it ties its owner to a physical legacy that denies them the advantages of advancing technology.  There are cases where specialized lenses are still important.  But those cases are dwindling.  Personally, I'm going to be happier carrying around a full featured small camera that can transform itself into whatever I want without needing interchangable parts than a bag full of bits that were standardized before email.

The Paradoxes of Color Temperature

Last week I went to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Fremont and got a couple new CF bulbs for the house.  I love their selection -- they have everything from tiny 7W candelabra bulbs to these massive 150W bulbs that look like death-rays.  A giant 105W bulb (pictured) is now trying to make my monstera deliciosa's home in the living room a little more like tropical mexico and less like winter-in-seattle.

In addition to a huge range of powers, they also clearly show you the color temperature of each bulb.  Some of my friends have avoided CF bulbs because of their harsh color.  But not all CF bulbs cast a vampirish hue on everything.  In fact if you know what to look for, you can tell how cool or warm the color will be by reading the box.  But not always.  Depends on the brand.

The key is to look for a color temperature number like 5000 K or 2700 K.  The higher the number, the more cool or blue the light will be.  The lower numbers will be warmer or more yellow.  Bulbs that are described as "full spectrum" typically do so because their color temperature matches that of regular sunlight -- 5000 K or 6000K, but indoors these lights look pretty blue.  A typical incandescent bulb will be more like 3000 K.  Here is a good page showing what color temperature numbers typically mean.

Indoor Sun has CF bulbs at 2700 and 4000.  They're not quite as efficient, but they're still a lot cleaner than incandescent, and if it pushes you away from "I won't use them because they're ugly" then that little efficiency drop is well worth it.

A little science

The irony of color temperatures is in our vocabulary for describing them.  What we call a "cooler" light with more blue in it actually corresponds to a hotter temperature.  When we describe a light as 5000 K we mean this is the spectrum of light that would be emitted by something heated to 5000 degrees Kelvin, or about 8500 Farenheit.  (Technically, it's a black box radiation spectrum, but most hot objects radiate pretty darned close to a theoretical black body.)  Just as bluer flames represent hotter combustion, so with color temperature.  But we still call lights "warm" when they've got plenty of yellow and red in them and not so much blue.

Putting these numbers in context gives us a little physical grounding for lighting.  With a basic incandescent bulb, we really are heating a tiny filament up to about 3000 Kelvin, just to see it glow.  Incandescent bulbs are ancient, incredibly simple, and really inefficient.  The color temperature of sunlight is about 6000 K, because that's just how hot the surface of the sun is.  Thinking about how the sun is this amazingly hot nuclear fire that powers practically everything on the planet, it might be surprising that we can achieve about the same temperature in a piece of wire protected by nothing more than a couple inches of glass globe.  The discrepency there is because the atom smashing fun doesn't happen at 6000 K on the surface -- the real power is in the middle of the sun where things are well over 10,000,000 Kelvin.  And even heating your bit of wire that hot would start a nuclear fire without the incredible pressure caused by gravity pushing things together.  So in case you were worried, there really is no danger of making a hydrogen bomb out of a lightbulb, just because you can get it as hot as the surface of the sun.

[Oh and props to Six Apart for updating the typepad editor and supporting Chrome.  Thanks!]

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons is a type of license, which is somewhere between a traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and public domain.  There are many variations of CC licenses, and they're onto the 3.0 version of the licenses, so expect more soon.  Generally CC licenses require Attribution, which is to say, you can do stuff with this content, so long as you say where you got it from.  Often this is in the form of a hyperlink back to the original author's website.  Flickr popularized this by making CC licenses an option on all their photos.  You'll see that almost all of my photos are CC licensed.

Creative Commons licenses can either allow somebody to make commercial use of your material, or not, at your discretion, assuming you're the one who created the license.  Independently, you can allow anybody to modify, adapt, or remix the content.  Or not.  Or you can allow modification so long as the modified content shares the same license, a so-called "Share Alike" license.  Here's a nice page that shows you the options and allows you to pick a license appropriate for your material.

A CC attribution license is in many senses more realistic in the modern world than an all-rights-reserved license.  It is practically impossible to stop people from using or distributing your work.  The all-rights-reserved license is a threat to take legal action to prevent somebody from using your work.  But suing somebody is such a hassle that it almost never happens for personal content.  Asking somebody to put a link to your website is a pretty reasonable thing and easy to accomplish.   An all rights reserved copyright is for most individuals a bluff.

CC content is also easier to use.  Negotiating terms of licensing under a traditional copyright is daunting.  It necessarily requires a back and forth with the author and probably a whole lot.  The underlying mindset is that content costs money, so if you're going to use my content, then you're going to sell it and I deserve some of that money.  As the music industry is slowly, painfully learning, in modern times this model doesn't work so well.  Access to information is generally free, and those who are making money here are doing so by providing value-added services on top of merely distributing the information.  (Think ads by Google, or concerts for music.)  With a CC license the terms of use of the license are right there.  No need to negotiate.  Just follow the attribution instructions and do what you will.  Instead of requiring negotiation and payment in the traditional economy, this is payment in the nascent reputation economy.

The Strangest Man in my family

A new biography of my grandfather has just been published called "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius."  I'm quite excited about it for a number of reasons I'll describe below.  The summary of the book on the publisher's site is great:

The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Newton - and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century, who may have suffered from autism.

Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried only once, when his friend Einstein died.

I'm very much looking forward to reading it, mostly because somebody wrote a whole book about somebody in my family. I recently met Francis Crick's granddaughter and she said how fun it was to read her grandpa's biography and wished somebody would write them about all of her relatives!  I'm waiting for Amazon to ship me my copy, but they say it'll still be a couple of weeks, although apparently I can get it faster from Amazon.co.uk so I might just do that.  I've had a few chats with Graham Farmelo, the author, over the last few years as he's been working on it, but I hadn't been in touch with him recently and was tipped off to its publication by the Economist's book review.

I'm also very happy to see that Graham is being upfront about the possibility that Autism or Asperger's was at the root of his strangeness.  Many of us in the family suspected this, but it hasn't been talked about publicly much if at all.  I'm happy to see this out in the open especially with the dramatic rise of Autism in the world today.  When people hide or just don't talk about medical conditions, it creates a stigma that makes them that much harder for the afflicted to deal with.  Moreso, my grandfather can be a role model of what is possible to accomplish even with a potentially debilitating condition like that.

I'm also happy that it will provide authority to improve his wikipedia page.  I've tried making corrections and additions myself in the past, but I quickly learned that wikipedia's editorial policy does not allow me to include anything I know about my grandfather in the article, until it has been "published" by somebody else, otherwise it's "original research."  I include the quotations because the definition of publication is rapidly becoming less clear these days -- is this blog published?  How about an IM conversation in a chat room that is persisted at a public URL?  But I digress -- this policy is big part of why wikipedia is the important modern reference that it is, so I can't really begrudge it.  And now that Faber & Faber has blessed Graham's work into dead trees, wikipedia's policy will allow his extensive research to be included on their summary.

How to stop getting phone books

A while ago I posted about how to stop getting Dex phone books delivered in Seattle.  Unfortunately doing that wasn't enough to stop all the dead trees from showing up on my doorstep.  Now there's a new grass-roots service called Yellow Pages Goes Green which handles this nation-wide across all providers of phone books.  They liken themselves to a national do-not-call registry for dead trees.  If you use the internet or your phone to look up people and businesses, I encourage you to visit

http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/

and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books.  Even if recycled, these books waste resources through paper processing, transportation and the recycling process which produces a lower quality paper, supported by inefficient advertising.

While I'm on the subject, if you haven't tried Google SMS, it's a great way to look things up.  Just send a text to 466453 ("GOOGLE") with the name of the business you want, and a location specified in writing or zip-code and it'll respond with what you're looking for.  It does all sorts of other good things too.  Works on all phones.  I'm a big fan.