I used to think that couples who share a single email address were just too cute. Then I saw this article which imported this whole "keeping each other honest" logic into the practice.
Mika and I have never even had accounts on each other’s servers.
Redefining “Realistic”
When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest that they would love to support free models, but that they don’t see how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is the world I want to live in and, even though I don’t know exactly how to get to there from here, I’m going to refuse to settle for anything short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as "impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being unimaginative.
Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among many, that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and South Asia as jockeys for camel racing. Human rights groups campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course, they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives they were considering.
As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in several Gulf states gave in to calls from UNICEF and others and created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded by racers desperate for an alternative, had created the first robotic camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter, cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys, racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis, to the system they had fought to keep.
Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early free software advocates suggested that most programmers would likely need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful economic models to support free software have supported a large and growing free software industry. But we have free software business models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line to try them out. As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined "practical" and "realistic."
One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It’s easy to get stuck on the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a local maximum) and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little hill, chances are pretty good we’ll find a "higher" peak.
Of course, it is also possible that we will find the global maximum or the best possible solution to a given problem. In those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can be thought of as having many interacting dimensions — and only some of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they are like trying to transcend the laws of physics.
Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and knowledge are extremely complicated human creations. Do we really think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find out.
AcaMako
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been writing summaries of academic articles I read over on AcaWiki. You should join me and write summaries of academic articles you read or help improve the summaries other folks have shared!
Of course, you can also just read AcaWiki summaries. But while reading summaries takes less time that reading the full articles and books, a 500-1000 word summary is still too much for some very busy people. That’s why I created a new microblog on Identica where I post summaries of the summaries I post to AcaWiki. You can subscribe to AcaMako to follow along.
Italian Travel Update
Due to a variety of people and places we want to see, Mika and I have regrouped around a more ambitious travel schedule in Italy for the next week or so. Our new plan is:
- August 23-27: Florence
- August 27-29: Verona
- August 29-31: Bologna
- August 31-September 1: Siena
- September 1-3: Rome
I know we’ll have an organized LUG meeting in Siena. The rest of the period is a little more open. As always, if other free software, wikimedian, or like-minded folks are around and would like to meet up in any of those places, don’t hesitate to get in contact.
In related news, inspired by Florence and by Mika’s domo-kun purse, I made a duomo-kun today.
Grades
Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes.
I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students’ assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however — at my school at least — there’s always a grade.
For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there’s a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.
Memory
Today I started to tell a friend about something from dinner the night before. Except that she was at the dinner. And sitting at the same table! Even when prompted, I couldn’t really remember!
This does not warrant a blog post. Anybody who knows me well knows that my memory for these kinds of more mundane details is pretty porous. This kind of thing happens all the time.
I’m writing this so that when I’m much older, and still forgetting things all the time, folks can use this as a reference point before concluding that senility is setting in.
I’m afraid that everyone else will forget my forgetfulness!
“Lance!”
On probably a dozen occasions, I’ve had people in cars taunt me by yelling some version of "Lance!", "Hey Lance!" or "Go Lance!" at me while I am riding my bike. It seems to be particularly likely if I’m wearing spandex.
Indeed, the "verb" to Lance has an Urban Dictionary entry and there is a Facebook group for Yelling "Hey Lance!" when you see someone riding their bike.
My friend Seth pointed out — after we were (collectively?) called "Lance" in California — that it’s pretty strange to insult somebody by comparing them to a man who is nearly guaranteed to be on any list of greatest living athletes, in any sport.
Center For Future Irony
My sister just got a lower back tattoo that says "No Regrets." She does not seem to appreciate the potential for irony. That’s too bad. In my book, that potential is the best reason to get such a tattoo.
Center for Future Names of Media Lab Centers
A few years ago, the MIT Media Lab, working with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, created the Center for Future Civic Media. It’s a great project and one I’ve been involved in since the beginning.
Not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Banking through a partnership with Bank of America. One couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the names. The meme became further entrenched when, not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Storytelling in collaboration with Plymouth Rock Studios.
But perhaps the very first in the pattern is the the Okawa Center for Future Children announced in 1998 as a way of bringing together and supporting the labs work with kids. And no, it has nothing to do with zygotes.
Upcoming Travel
As is becoming my custom, I’m planning to spend much of December and January on the road. This time I’ll be in Seattle, Japan and Wellington, New Zealand. Here’s the rough schedule:
- December 18-28: Seattle
- December 28-January 2: Tokyo
- January 2-14: Traveling in Japan
- January 15-17: Boston to compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt
- January 19-24: Wellington, New Zealand to give a talk at LCA
Mika will also be around for everything but the NZ leg and SJ seems likely to make an appearance in Japan during the first week of January.
Feel free to get in contact if you’d like to meet up in any of the places above for a coffee or beer. I’m also open to hanging out with giving talks at LUGs, GLUGs, Wikipedia groups, free culture groups, colleges or Universities along the way. Most of my time in Japan is still basically unstructured so I’m quite open to suggestions during the first couple weeks of January.
Zimmermanhosen Confessions
Between second and seventh grade, I went to a school that required that I wear grey corduroys. Every day. I loathed them. When I left that school, at twelve years old, I swore to myself that I would never wear a pair of corduroys again.
And I kept that vow until earlier this year when, in Germany, I came across a couple carpenters in Germany on their one-year traveling post-apprenticeship waltz. As it turns out, journeyman German carpenters wear some pretty wild bellbottom corduroys — zimmermanhosen. Although I tried, I couldn’t resist acquiring a pair at a local work clothing store.
A year and a couple more trips to Germany later, I now own several pair of zimmermanhosen and wear them nearly every day. They are tough, distinctive, and have pretty awesome double-zipper flies. And although I love them, I still feel a little conflicted every time I put them on.
A. Dehqan, man of inquiry
Due entirely to the efforts of one inquisitive and indefatigable A. Dehqan, a web search for the phrase "In The Name Of God The compassionate merciful" now almost exclusively turns up hits to a wide variety of free software mailing lists, forums, and IRC channels with questions on everything from what is a kernel (in a minimum of half a line, no less), to how to send a FAX, to the intersection between Islam and copyright and much more! I’ve now run across him in five distinct projects. Maybe you have too!
Wikireaders
My friend Sean from OpenMoko recently gave me one of OM’s new WikiReaders. It’s essentially a touchscreen-based device dedicated to displaying Wikipedia articles offline.
And while I’ll never forgive the thing for not having an Edit button, I’ve got to admit the device is pretty cool. Not only does it make it possible to bring WP to a bunch of places that are otherwise impossible or impractical, the thing is built entirely with free software. One of my colleagues at the Center for Future Civic Media suggested we should put one in every bar to help settle drunken arguments. Think of the lives we might save!
I hope the device becomes successful but I’m worried about what success will mean for the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia. After all, the ability to change and contribute is the thing that makes Wikipedia interesting, empowering, and successful; cutting this functionality out kind of misses much of the point.
I think it is important to start implementing a simple method to allow users of these types of devices to contribute back. Over the last few years, Sj and I have talked repeatedly about a simple method for contributing back from offline devices that would even be possible from devices like the Om Wikireader where editing the articles is probably impractical. Perhaps the device could be extended so that people could write short comments about articles from their reader — there’s an on screen keyboard after all — which could be saved to a log on the SD card. When the data on the card is updated, messages from this log could be uploaded somewhere — perhaps the talk pages of the articles in question or some dedicated page or ticketing queue. Editors could help merge these changes back into the articles.
All-In-One
I know it’s old news but I couldn’t resist pointing out this item from the "all the things my software freedom advocacy and activism has been based around recently" department:
Apparently, Apple filed for an software patent on an antifeature that uses a DRM-like system and a proprietary network services to lock down people’s mobile phones.
If someone can figure out how to work in a revealing error, I think I can make it a sweep.
Mr. Postman
The mailbox in my building is broken. Nobody can remember it being any other way. The lock is busted so anyone in the building can get access to every apartment’s individual boxes in the same way that the mailman does. It’s not a huge problem since there are only four apartments in the building and the box is behind a locked door to the street.
I saw the mailman come one day to deliver mail. He used a key to unlock a box on the outside of the building from which he retrieved a key to first unlock the outside door and then another to "unlock" the mailbox.
Every day, my mailman unlocks a mailbox that is always unlocked and, in fact, unlockable. As far as I can tell, he’s been doing it for years. I don’t have the heart to tell him the truth.