the art of writing is discovering what you believe
outside my house. Not sure how I didn’t get the edge of the roof in the frame . . .
from a roll of Holga-riffic images taken during the snowstorm of mid-December.
I’m starting to tire of the chanciness of the Holga, the missed images. Some of this roll looks fine, some is way underexposed. Same day, same light. [grumble]
This project is launching a (relatively) high altitude balloon carrying a number of digital cameras and some other instrumentation. The project was conceived and is being implemented in a short time with a crowd of eager volunteers and little prior experience and a lot of optimism.
Lots of great things have been done with “eager volunteers and little prior experience and a lot of optimism.” This should be fun to watch.
Important Dates
Build Date: February 24
Flight date: Early morning March 4
Will Steve Jobs drop iTunes DRM in a heartbeat?:
If Steve Jobs comes through with his promise to offer DRM-free music from artists who will allow it, we’re at the beginning of the end of the DRM wars.
Of course, he never said that: he said this:
Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.
The word “artists” never appears. An oversight? I doubt it. I’m sure Apple wants to hire a building full of entertainment lawyers to work with individual artists on their iTunes licensing — perhaps not.
The message is directed at the music companies and their customers, not to artists.
Steve Page from Barenaked Ladies is ready to take Steve Jobs up on his “in a heartbeat” offer to sell BNL’s music without DRM.
Well, yeah, who isn’t? My question there is, who owns the rights to do that? The Ladies are signed to a label and the label makes the deals with iTunes et al. That’s how everyone gets paid (setting aside how the Man always rips off the Artist).
Don’t misunderstand, I think this is a great development, but the simplistic attitude some people take to this kind of thing amazes me. Nothing I have read about this points to any advantage for a hardware manufacturer to make life difficult for customers: it’s always the content owner (the label in this case) who makes those decisions.
I’ve wondered for years how we got to this situation where the copyright in a recording is owned by the manufacturer of plastic/aluminum ware, not the performer, and the performer — the reason for the whole process — gets very little say in how their work is marketed. Perhaps that will start to change now as well, as artists seek out labels that offer DRM-free music downloads, ie, who don’t hate the people who buy music.
Big news: we’ll see what comes of it.
AAPL up US$.21 on the day with the gain coming in the last couple of hours of trading.
I’m not sure why Black and White film makes sense any more. When I want black and white, I can just choose “desaturate” in PhotoShop and it is done. Still, if you want to work with traditional processes (i.e., you don’t want to scan) and you want a negative that will last for hundreds of years, black & white is the way to go.
Actually, it’s more likely to be true of color film than B&W. But coming from someone who thinks desaturate in PS is the same as true B&W, who cares?
While fascinating and depressing myself, by turns, here, I was reminded of an anomaly that those with kids might have noticed. Weight and height for kids generally tracks at one pound/inch. A 60 inch tall kid weighs about 60 pounds. Yet for adults, it looks more like one pound per centimeter — 2.54 times as much. At 183 cm my ridiculously ideal weight is close to 183 pounds. But my kids both follow a pound/inch ratio.
Do our <ahem> bones become that much more dense?
Shorter Verbatim Oliver Willis:
The idea that the majority of kids are going to choose to do schoolwork versus screwing around is batty. When I was young I was what you would call studious, nerdy, etc. and I actually liked school. But if I had been given a choice, I would have messed around. That’s what kids do.
You ever get the feeling that some righteous thunderers are not all that self-aware? This on the heels of a gripe about how African kids want books and clothes to go to school while American kids want iPods and sneakers. The contradiction from the beginning to the end of the above short paragraph could give you whiplash. He liked school but given the choice(?), he would have “messed around.”
He needs constant supervision, he thinks he was a representative kid, so all kids need supervision/no kids can be trusted to make good choices. Sounds like a younger Bill Bennett.
from fortune(6)
I think that I shall never see
A thing as lovely as a tree.
But as you see the trees have gone
They went this morning with the dawn.
A logging firm from out of town
Came and chopped the trees all down.
But I will trick those dirty skunks lousy chumps
And write a brand new poem called ‘Trunks’ ‘Stumps.’
