Breathtaking

Cynthia McKinney has announced that she is running for president on the Green Party ticket.

It doesn't get much better than this.

They fight the artists

The RIAA constantly gives the line that they're fighting for the artists, the little guys, the creators. But really, they are fighting for themselves: the Big Four recording companies. Though they sometimes find a favoured artist to shill for them, they are transparently anti-artist: they want to lower the royalty paid to songwriters from 13% of wholesale (about nine cents) to 8% (about 5.5 cents).

Why? Because that way the "recording companies" can keep more of the money. This, at the same time that they slash their promotional budgets and the Internet eliminates their former costs of actual disc production. Basically, they now operate as a protection racket: they don't actually do anything anymore but stand between artists and distributors like iTunes and Napster, take their cut & screw over artists financially, and prevent "illegitimate" music from getting on the radio. Pimps give better economy in their service to prostitutes.

The recording industry is at arms because file sharing threatens their business model, not artists or the quality of the art. Just ask 50 Cent: "What is important for the music industry to understand is that file-sharing doesn't hurt artists." It sure does hurt the recording industry that feeds on artists, though.

Why should we care? Because the recording companies (and movie companies) are willing to destroy freedom of expression for all of us (and hurt our democracies, too) just to prop up their dying monopolies. They can only do it if we allow them. If you're Canadian, it is not too late: help stop the Canadian DMCA.

Cheerleader of the Apocalypse

Peter Watts is one of the most delightfully pessimistic authors I've ever read. His breakout novel, Starfish, gave me temporary serotonin depletion before it energized me with vicarious grim satisfaction. The cozily hopeless ambiance of inescapable doom continued in the next three books of the Rifters trilogy (yes, it is a four-book trilogy, okay?), but evolved from a self-pitying wide-eyed hopelessness into a grimly enthusiastic, squinting near-nihilism which... somehow... strangely... never failed to lose hope. It is precisely my cup of tea, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the environment, natural disasters, biology, software, and the evolution of geopolitics. Mr. Watts is Canadian, and used to work at the Vancouver Aquarium, and many of the settings are familiar: Vancouver, Toronto, Sudbury.

His stories are grounded in real bioscience – and he provides wonderful notes and references in the appendices. Some of his pessimistic predictions about the timeline for weird bioscience, climate change and various enviro-disasters has been, if anything, optimistic.

"I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me." _{(Footnotes to ßehemoth)}

His fourth (fifth) novel, Blindsight, is a deep-space adventure with a fun take on the nature of consciousness. And vampires. Good stuff.

All four (five) of his books (and many short stories) are available for free download on his site (which is awesome, shiny, rich & deep). I have donated twice to his tip jar (which he dedicates to the care and feeding of his cats); although I bought the books the first time I read them, I subsequently gave them away, but when wanted to read them again I could, so I really appreciate that he puts them online.

Clean out Canada's mailboxes

Canada Post has an easy service to eliminate junk mail: fill in a form, put it in your mailbox, and Canada Post will put a pretty red dot on your mailbox and refrain from stuffing your box with unread crap. Obviously Canada Post doesn't want to promote this service, as they make a lot of money on it, and they're a "for-profit" government corporation (Margaret Thatcher would be proud). To fill the gap some nice creative types started the Red Dot Campaign to encourage Canadians to reduce waste by eliminating this avalanche of painted pulp. What a beautiful example of citizen activism. I've been printing a few copies of the enrollment form and putting them in the mail room, where people have been snapping them up. Hopefully soon we won't have fifty Best Buy flyers drifting across the floor of the mail room every week.

Print this book

I recently read the novel Roo'd by Joshua Klein: a near-future thriller that explores themes like body modification, poverty, and runaway corporatism. Although I had printed it in nearly invisible double-sided 4-up I was engrossed as I squinted at the pages on the poorly-lit bus. Although it was not without flaws, it ranked in my personal top 5 for the past year, and comes highly recommended, especially for code-heads of a literary bent. I would compare it favourably with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, with some of the humour of the former and dark characterisations and settings of the latter. The author, a software developer, released the book for free download under a Creative Commons license. I gave the author five bucks, which is a damned sight more than he would have gotten through a publisher. A publisher probably would have made him change the title, though – I guess they're still good for something after all.

Procrastination pays off

I've been wanting to replace my aged Auditron for a whlie – it was great while it lasted but eight years is a long time for technology. I've been somewhat torn between the Squeezebox and the Sonos, and the price of the Sonos (got a grand laying about?) pretty much left me decided – the Squeezebox was it.


Yesterday we took a little road trip south to the Great Satan and I thought I'd pick one up while I was down there. Surprisingly, neither Best Buy nor Circuit City carried them (stupid of me not to check, but impulse buys, like impulse trips, are better left unplanned). So today I went to the website to find out where I could buy one, and discovered there's something better on the way: the Squeezebox is incorporating the best elements of the Sonos in its recently announced Squeezebox Duet.

There's no telling when it'll be in stores, but after waiting four years to listen to OGG and FLAC files without turning on the computer, I'm sure I can wait another few months.

The Whore of Babylon

I've been a fan of Fernando Vallejo since I saw Our Lady of the Assassins. After that I dug into several of his books, and when I ran into La Puta de Babilonia (ISBN 970-37-0326-7) I snapped it up. The opening paragraph gave me a frisson of delight:

La puta, la gran puta, la grandísima puta, la santurrona, la simoníaca, la inquisidora, la torturadora, la falsificadora, la asesina, la fea, la loca, la mala; la del Santo Oficio y el Índice de Libros Prohibidos; la de las Cruzadas y la noche de San Bartolomé; [...] la que reprime a las demás religiones donde manda y exige libertad de culto donde no manda; [...] la corrupta, la hipócrita, la parásita, la zángana; la antisemita, la esclavista, la homofóbica, la misógina; [...] la puta de Babilonia, la impune bimilenaria tiene cuentas pendientes conmigo desde mi infancia y aqui se las voy a cobrar.

My loose, unprofessional translation:

The bitch, the great bitch, the greatest whore, the hypocritically pious, the loan shark, the inquisitor, the torturer, the fabricator, the murderous, the ugly, the crazy, the bad; she of the Holy Office and the Index of Forbidden Books; of the Crusaders and the eve of St. Bartholomew; [...] she who represses other religions where she has power and demands freedom of worship where she does not; [...] the corrupt, the hypocritical, the parasitic, the shiftless; the anti-Semitic, the slave, the homophobic, the misogynist; [...] the whore of Babylon, the unpunished two-thousand-year-old bitch has been screwing with me since my childhood and now it is payback time.

It was highly satisfactory as a polemic, and for a fellow traveler it was enjoyable to sit back and enjoy the outrage of a highly informed, deeply knowledgeable and extremely articulate critic of a vain, useless, and obsolete institution. However, the opposite of love is not outrage: it is indifference, and Vallejo remains in the orbit of the Vatican's dark star, obsessed with the enemy he would destroy. I would prefer to let the RC church hang itself on its own rope, as it seems to be doing a pretty good (if sometimes frustratingly slow) job of it.

Journalism in exile

Jon Talton is a decidedly unhappy journalist. He heaps scorn in the way I only could if I had been practicing it for 27 years (and if I had more talent for it). He writes lovely articles about growth boosterism, poor land-use decisions, and do-nothing politicians. I find it unsurprising that he has a hard time writing for today's neurotic Happy McNews media outlets – it's not the sort of stuff around which real estate agents and car dealers want to hawk their wares. So here's a professional journalist who has to write outside of the mainstream media in order to say what he really thinks... the era of the powerful, relevant newspaper with real opinions is completely, resolutely past.

Jesus Takedown

The NFL is going after churches for copyright infringement for showing the "Super Bowl" on a large-screen TV. As much as I favour the elimination of organized religion, I really wonder what the hell the NFL thinks it is achieving by pissing off their fans this way. Have they learned nothing in the past ten years about pointless copyright enforcement actions which garner bad publicity? This is much like when the ASCAP went after the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire. My hope is that those devout Christians have realized that this "sport" is a vile gladiatorial spectacle with no appropriate role in their lives, and leave them starving.

You see, choosing one's battles unwisely could make one look like a greedy bastard. The Immanuel Bible Church's 200 members are unlikely to fork over cash for a special use permit. The NFL's argument that large groups "shrink TV ratings and can affect advertising revenue" doesn't hold water: what exists there is a counting problem, not a viewership problem. I fully support treating churches like any other business (including taxing the holy fuck out of them), but most people don't feel that way – so the NFL has bought itself some really bad publicity. Hopefully it will prompt some pious souls to sit out this year's mammon-fest.

Quants: powered by VBA

So here's a scary thought: quants, the wiz4rd5 behind our brave new automated markets, write their masterpieces in VBA. That's right, the "unthinkably complex financial instruments" that journalists have been gushing over for the last few years are written in Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic's lead-poisoned little brother. [As if Visual Basic isn't dumb enough already.]

William Gibson made the job sound so sexy back in 1997 with Idoru. It's hilarious that in real life they're a bunch of physics nerds with Excel spreadsheets. Knowing this makes me want to ensure my retirement by implanting a thimble-sized piece of gold in my abdomen. I'm constantly astonished that anything, anywhere, ever works at all.