Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 — permalink
Wikimedia Commons is one of those web resources everybody should be aware of. It’s an archive of sounds, animations, and images that are available for your reuse under some sort of Creative Commons licencing (or are public domain). Among other things, you find the images embedded in Wikipedia here.
A link from Boing Boing led me to the 2008 Wikimedia Commons picture of the year. There are quite a number of pictures selected out on that page. To be sure the highest voted pictures are great, but my two favorites were not the top two images.
One was the one I’ve included here— but, of course, it’s an image I’m already familiar with, and one that could be described by the title of this blog! It’s the famous Whirlpool Galaxy, known to amateur astronomers as M51 and to professional astronomers by any number of catalog names (although usually as M51). The galaxy has very strong, very well-defined spiral arms, making it a classic “grand design” spiral. The fact that the spiral arms are so well-defiend is probably as a result of the interaction with the smaller galaxy that’s off to the right in the image. A self-gravitating, rotating disk naturally rings in a spiral density wave pattern when you disturb it, just like the smooth surface of water “rings” in concentric circular waves to a point disturbance (e.g. throwing a rock into the water), or in parallel ripple waves to a plane disturbance (e.g. a steady wind blowing across the water). (You’re probably more familiar with the term “ringing” when applied to the vibrations that occur in a bell when it is disturbed.) The gravitational interaction with the companion galaxy is almost certainly the disturbance causing such a well-defined spiral pattern in the primary galaxy. This particular image of M51 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.
I think my favorite image of the set, though, is Reflection in a soap bubble. It’s a beautiful photograph, and it has a sort of Escheresque quality to it. (Exploring the geometry of these sorts of reflections was the sort of thing Escher loved to do.) This is a photograph by Mila Zinkova, and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. (I don’t believe that I need to make this post available under the GNU FDL simply by including the image, but I could be wrong.)
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A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came
Posted on December 30th, 2007 — permalink
I refer, of course, to the executives, lawyers, and so-called thinkers behind and among the RIAA. They’ve been making noises about this for a while, but finally they’ve gotten around to trying to hold somebody legally liable for making a copy of a CD for their own personal use (that is, not even to distribute, but just for convenience of listening). I mean, heck, I’ve done this myself, and despite my ideological concerns, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid violating even some too-extreme interpretations of copyright law. How many of us haven’t? And if you think about it, it is impossible to make any use whatsoever of the music on a CD without making at least a transient copy of it, be it just in the soundwaves in the air between the speaker and your ear, or in the nerve impulses in your brain. Where does this extreme overreaching self-righteous behavior come from? Well, from fear, obviously. Amidst all their talks about educating kids about the morality of “stealing” and “protecting artists,” somewhere they recognize that large music publishing companies are fundamentally obsolete given modern technology, and like any frightened and unintelligent animal whose cornered, they’re lashing out viciously in any direction they think they can hit.
The mistake many of the rest of us make is by taking them seriously enough to allow them to hurt us rather than just dying off along with the dinosaurs and buggy whip manufacturers and piano roll sellers.
The world has moved on. Technology is no longer such that for musicians to communicate their music to the world at large, they require the resources of a large music publishing company. Alas, the publishing companies do not want to give up the power that yesterday’s technology granted them. Rather than trying to figure out how to best fit into the modern world, they are trying to criminalize modern technology.
I know a lot of musicians (and writers, and such) get huffy when people make arguments like the one I make, saying that I’m just “rationalizing stealing.” My response is this: we are asking the wrong question. The question we should be asking is not how do we protect intellectual property? Rather, we should be asking how can we insure that musicians and authors and artists are able to be paid and make a living producing the creations we value? The rhetoric, lawsuits, and luddism that we are seeing today in those who support the music industry’s utterly crazy crusade are results of limitations on thinking provided by asking the first question. The first question presupposes an answer to the second question that made sense in an earlier era, but that does not made sense in the modern digital era.
Rather than adapt, the RIAA seems to be going ever further into rectal defilade, ever further down the path of trying to outlaw the flexibility and individual empowerment provided by digital technology in favor of granting their member companies stifling control over anything anybody does with music.
I am sad that our government puts up with this. I am sad that so many creative people think that somehow the crusade of the RIAA is really doing them any good in the long run. I am sad that there are people out there who seem to think that it’s at all a reasonable opinion that there is justification in what the RIAA is doing.
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