Patents are bogus: another reason
2010-04-20
What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong?
[The paper] looks at the putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary monopoly protection to keep out competitors in order to recoup the cost of research and development.
The problem is that while this is certainly true sometimes, in many, many, many other cases — it’s not the way it works at all.
TV
2010-04-04
Clay Shirky: The Collapse of Complex Business Models
There are two essential bits of background here. The first is that most TV is made by for-profit companies, and there are two ways to generate a profit: raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues. The other is that, for many media business, that second option is unreachable.
Kafka’s Castle is collapsing | openDemocracy
The saying «We have been put on earth to make Kafka come true» has been well known since Soviet times. We have been so steeped in absurdity since childhood that we haven’t even learnt to distinguish any of the rules that regulate it. We are on the other side of the looking glass but somehow manage to function, work out what moves to make and make careers for ourselves.
[…]
[IKEA] had repeated the mistake of the surveyor K in Kafka’s «The Castle», who tried to use the powers of reason to overcome the absurd. A fruitless attempt. Reason has limited possibilities, whereas the absurd knows no limits.
Still on the case
2010-03-25
Sinead O’Connor: ‘There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope’
Sinead O’Connor is still singing. And she’s still speaking out against abuse — only now her 1992 stunt on “Saturday Night Live” almost seems prescient as the Roman Catholic Church faces a growing catalog of complaints about child sexual and physical assault by priests in her Irish homeland and across Europe.
Good for her.
Punk Rock Mathematics
2010-03-03
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics – Technoccult interviews Tom Henderson
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.
2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.
[…]
What’s wrong with math education in the US? What’s wrong is, Whatever it is that makes my students uninterested in learning any more math than is required to minimize feeling stupid.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
2010-03-03
We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong
The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random.
[…]
In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial.
Classical music in a can
2010-02-25
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
“I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is,” he says. “But Bach peed, and he shat, and he had a lot of kids. We’re all just people.”
Whither
2010-02-11
Seems like i post a lot of stuff on Facebook that i should be putting here. Most of it is that Facebook is easier; besides the smaller number of mouse clicks necessary, using a full-on blog obligates me to put in some kind of editorial comment with the content i’m linking to, at minimum putting a title to the post. Also, more people are reading what i put on Facebook. Maybe. i’ve never told a lot of people this blog was here, though. And in fact, what ends up on the blog now for the most part is stuff that is edgier and slightly more controversial than i would show most of my acquaintances.
Maybe a simpler system like Tumblr would help. Twitter is too far the other way though, i think, and i would need to adjust my habits towards it.
There is some tech available to do automatic WordPress to Facebook posting but i would sooner do Facebook to WordPress.
i would also still like to transfer some of my old blog posts – why can’t i remember the system? oh yes, Movable Type, wonder what’s up with it now? – but i would have to relearn Perl or learn something else to redo the involved scripting necessary to switch the format, or cut-and-paste manually; both options are daunting.
i could always scrap the whole thing, but i still rather like having my own webspace. The photos are still here. i might need to put up a message board again sometime too.
(Reminds me of when my buddy and i started a phpBB about Magic the Gathering. He was running Apache off an old shitbox at his house, it overheated regularly from the traffic and he was having to call his dad to reboot the thing every so often. Eventually he bailed out and brought in some tool who happened to have better hardware to host it, which eventually motivated me to quit the enterprise. i couldn’t afford a thing to help at the time; not a problem now.)
