from a comment I left on Comics Worth Reading:

I easily deny that scanlations are theft from the creators.  Calling it theft is an attempt to set the terms of the debate by means of a false analogy. Or are libraries, which also purchase a small number of copies of a work and then share them indiscriminately, also hotbeds of crime? I could equally well call attempts to hoard and demand payment for information, the only thing in this world that can be shared without diminishing it, piracy of people’s natural rights, no more moral than pirates who stop ships and demand money to let them pass.  It’s not likely to convince anyone who doesn’t already share my point of view.

If you actually want to make progress in discussing “intellectual property” you have to start out by acknowledging that it’s a completely artificial category and has special properties that can’t be analogized to anything else.  The natural state, absent any coercion, is that people can freely share information without diminishing it, and if you don’t want to let them do that you need to keep it secret.  From there you can then reason that the natural state provides too little incentive to create and share new information…people would ultimately be better off if you created a legal framework where creators would have a limited monopoly on the duplication of the information they share.  But how much better off they would be depends on the exact parameters of that monopoly…and it could make them worse off if the rules are poorly written. It’s pretty easy to say, well, nobody really needs to read Naruto so there’s a very small price to pay if you don’t let them read it until the publisher puts it out… it’s a lot harder when you’re arguing that poor folks who could never afford a certain drug they need to live should die even if there was somebody willing to produce the drug cheaply if only they had the right to duplicate the information because otherwise there’s not enough incentive for creators to come up with such drugs in the first place.  The latter argument may even be harsh but right, but saying it’s simply or obviously theft from the creators strikes me as an attempt to short-circuit any rational discussion of the trade-offs.

I continue to be really bad at predicting what I’m going to have enough enthusiasm to work on in my free time.  I’ve made no progress at all on getting back into doing any comics, but I’ve made a great deal of progress on writing and releasing a superhero RPG.  We’ve been playtesting it in the Sunday game group, and that’s been going well. I’ve almost completed the manuscript (currently in its 9th draft), including typesetting in in LaTeX (for which I had to learn just enough LaTeX), and started to produce some artwork for the illustrations.  The plan is to release it as both a free PDF and a POD book via some service like Lulu, under a Creative Commons license.  So I’ve been quite busy, happy and productive, just not on the project that I thought I was going to tackle next….

I’m planning on getting back into doing comics, to give myself a creative outlet.  One minor problem: my wife glommed onto the Macbook Pro that I used to use for these things.  She’d be willing to loan it back on an as-needed basis, but I know myself well enough to know that if whenever I wanted to sit down and do some art I’d first have to go get the laptop and bring it up, plug in the monitor and so on, I’d never get around to it after the first couple of times.  So instead I’m planning on reproducing my environment on my Vista box.  My Wacom tablet works, no problem, and I’ve just downloaded trial versions of Comic Life and Corel Draw Painter (which is up to 11, from version 10 last time I touched any of this stuff).  I’ve got 30 days to decide whether I like the Windows versions enough to pay for them, or want to try to find something else.  As an added bonus, I’ve just stuck a Seagate 1TB external drive on this machine, so I have plenty of backup space.  I lost way too many of the original files for my last comic when my prior Macbook Pro was stolen.

Now I just have to decide little details, like what’s the comic going to be about, the format, and so on.  One thing I have decided is I want to actually draw it instead of using mostly photos of Legos, but I haven’t yet decided whether to do a gag-a-day, a continuity strip, or what.  My wife says I should do something funny, so even if I do a continuity strip it’ll be humorous as best as I can make it.  I’ll probably set it up as its own WordPress blog on this site, using the ComicPress theme.  I do still have a Webcomics Nation account, but I kind of like the idea of being in control of the whole thing…and it’s not like the bandwidth is going to kill me, even if it turns out to be more popular than my wildest dreams.  Ok, maybe in my wildest dreams, it would require me moving it to Webcomics Nation for free hosting, but those are some pretty wild dreams for somebody who doesn’t have much more than an idea that he wants to do a comic and there are certain genres he enjoys.

Yay!  Installing Ubuntu 8.04 instead of Easy-Peasy fixed my wireless access (basically by downgrading the drivers to ones that worked–theoretically I could have done that by fetching them and compiling them, but without net access I was missing too many pieces).  Now all I have to do is never upgrade again and I’m set!

update: actually, it survived the first update.  It claims to be current for the moment for the build, and wireless still works.  Time to call it a success and a night.

Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut – Pravda.Ru

As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin’s famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday.

update: My friend Mac, who follows stuff about the Russian space program closely, doubts the authenticity of this story.  She says that these claims have been floating around for years, but there’s no new evidence presented here.

What I Did Over Christmas Vacation « Miss(ed) Manners

‘This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.’

The above was actually from last year. This year, they’ve done The Battle of Pelennor Fields (the siege of Minas Tirith). It’s truly made of awesome. And candy. Awesome candy.

protagonize: interactive fiction & collaborative story writing community

Welcome to Protagonize: your destiny awaits.

Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the\naddventure, a type of collaborative\ninteractive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches to it in different directions. The result is\nan organic, evolving story where everyone can participate

via EFL Geek

We had something like this on the computer system where I went to college–I think either written by, or just mostly populated by, folks in the Science Fiction Club.  The fiction that resulted was god-awful.  Some of that may have been the form, some of that may have been the folks (hard to expect much coherence from a club with the motto “Randomness Rules!”), but it was a way to while away time, and sometimes was pretty funny.

1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”, by Laia Hanau
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.

2. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.

3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method – George Polya
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career

4. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).

5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar – Huddleston & Pullum
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.

6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated – Judith Martin
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.

7. Historian As Detective – Robin Winks
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.

8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space – Gerard K O’Neill
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.

9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain – Antonio Damasio
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)

10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement – Milton and Rose Friedman
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.

11. The Substance of Style – Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.

There are days when I just don’t get xkcd (at least until I Google).

Today was one of them.

Urban Dictionary: rickroll
To post a misleading link with a subject that promises to be exciting or interesting, e.g. “World of Starcraft in-game footage!” or “Paris Hilton blows Busta Rhymes’ dick” but actually turns out to be the video for Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. A variant on the duckroll. Allegedly hilarious.

Of course, it might help to have the slightest idea who Rick Astley is in the first place….

Transterrestrial Musings

Thoughts On Objectivity

In both science, and journalism.

The notion that journalists are, or should be, or can be “objective” is perhaps the profession’s most fatal conceit. As Virginia Postrel says, what’s important is to be fair, something that they often don’t even attempt, as demonstrated by CNN and its performance in the debates.

I’m dubious. Even granting that “objective” is something of a term of art among journalists that doesn’t quite correspond to what a philosopher or scientist might mean in terms of attempting to avoid prejudice, bias, or wishful thinking, I don’t see how you can aim at fairness without first being able to assess what parts of your reporting might be unfair. And to do that, it seems to me you have to try to be objective…unless you’re just going to reduce everything to a procedure, as in “he said; she said” journalism.

From my point of view, the problem isn’t that journalists try to be objective where they should be trying to be fair–it’s that they’re so damn bad at objectivity. And it doesn’t reassure me that fairness over objectivity would be an improvement when the biggest critics of objectivity as a journalistic goal (e.g. Chomsky) want to downplay it precisely so they can hide their biases and better achieve their agendas. “Fake but accurate” is exactly what that approach is trying to legitimize. It is unfair that the journalist can’t present what he knows to be true based on his expert judgment, just because there’s no actual “objective” evidence. But because journalistic standards still require objectivity, he supplies fake evidence (and maybe even believes it to be true because of his biases), and with luck gets caught out. I say that if you believe that the journalist is obligated to provide the actual documents for other people to examine, and not just assert that they exist, you believe in objectivity not fairness; you believe that there is a truth of the matter that can be gotten at through examination of the evidence*, and not just a requirement to announce your biases.

Rand Simberg’s post above is in reference to a Virginia Postrel post on Objectivity. I haven’t read the book, but to infer anything about the appropriateness of objectivity as an epistemic virtue from a discussion of its history is to commit the genetic fallacy. I’m not at all sure whether the Daston and Gallison, the authors of Objectivity, would agree with Postrel’s take-away that “Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making,” but I am sure that it is a core epistemic virtue for journalists to start by simply recording the data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. As the folks at Language Log have demonstrated over and over and over again, if you want the truth you have first accurately record what really was said. That doesn’t mean that you end there, and the journalist’s job is just to faithfully transcribe and then print it–but it has to start there.

* if it can be gotten at at all…