The Phantom City

A spam message I received this afternoon, with responses:

You Do not like your machine size.

Well, you know us programmers, always looking for a bigger machine.

Women laugh at you.

Oh, great. I thought they were laughing with me.

You have unique chance to solve this problem.

Yay!

Try our male aggregate enla’rgement and Chicks will adore you surely enough.

Well, I am male, and I have been enlarging ever since college…good food, good times. But as far as adoration, well, I already thought that ladies love me, girls adore me, I mean even the ones who never saw me…. So I’m not sure how that would be better.

I used. My wife is really happy.

I’m glad for her and you, Mr…Oh, sorry…Dr. Cheryl Reaves. Cheryl? Wow, that stuff must really work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about the difficulties faced when negotiating rights fees for essays an editor wants to include in a volume about New Criticism. It makes an interesting point: Doesn’t the rights holder, often a publisher, have an obligation to promote the work and make it available for scholarship?

Here’s an idea that I’m sure has been said before: Copyright law should require the rights owner make the information available to the public in some fashion. If not available for more than, say, ten years, the copyright term would be severely shortened. In the case of printed material, it would mean that the rights holder would need to make the information available for some fee to the public either in a digital or printed form. That wouldn’t take care of the problem faced in putting together the New Criticism book, since the rights holder could still charge an exorbitant fee for the material, but it would give the publisher an incentive to not charge as much, because any use of the material in a book would count as being publicly available.

What that would affect is my greatest worry about long copyright terms. The lack of financial incentive to publish some material, combined with the fact that it can’t fall into the public domain for an extremely long time, causes works to fall into a limbo where they exist, but they aren’t truly available. We shouldn’t have to rely on the used-book market to find a majority of books published in the Twentieth Century. There are vast video archives locked away by rights holders who have little incentive to make them available even through lower-cost digital publishing systems.

However, put that information in the hands of thousands of individuals who have personal interest in the material and low-cost publishing systems…well, you can see it happening all over the place today, often illegally. But why should the public good of rescuing information be illegal?

Of course, DRM also has a hand in this question. Does it do us any good for a work to fall into the public domain if the only copies of it are encrypted? Particularly when it’s illegal to attempt to break that encryption? I have a lot of faith in the ability of the masses to break or otherwise circumvent encryption, but it should be explicitly legal to break encryption on public-domain works.

Anyway, enough pontificating for today.

…turns out to be just as boring as regular baseball. The list from the Mitchell Report, as reported by Deadspin, provoked an immediate reaction from me: I thought steroids were supposed to make you better at sports? It’s like someone took a vertical cross-section of baseball players from the Steroids Era based on talent.

That being said, the Balco list looks more interesting. Apparently you had a much better chance of success with Balco products.

An important read.

Actually, it’s surprisingly hard to get anything under torture, true or false. For example, between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.

Link courtesy of EdCone.com.

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What a huge surprise, given his extraordinary empathy and deep…oh, wait…he’s the one who wrote this article:
American Beauty? I get it now. I’m thinking insulting both British and American women when he lives in both countries probably won’t work for him. Unless he watched The Pick-up Artist and decided to be really ambitious.

I really hope this was supposed to be A Modest Proposal, particularly given the selection of pictures of Charlotte Church and Paris Hilton to illustrate.

Oh, and ladies…according to Tad’s informal poll, his friends spend $1700 a month just on makeup and keeping in shape. That might have something to do with him being a screenwriter and living in LA, but I’m thinking we need to go a bit further on closing the wage gap between men and women. Women definitely need much more money than men…although in Tad’s world there would be much less spent on food.

Jamaal Tinsley — point guard for the Indiana Pacers and apparently a bad person to party with — and his entourage were shot at after leaving a club around 3:30 AM, possibly with a .223 assault rifle. ESPN paraphrases Pacers’ coach Jim O’Brien with “Tinsley made an error in judgment by being out so late.”

Wow, so the real problem is that after around 3 AM, the streets of downtown Indianapolis are crawling with gunmen looking for cars to shoot? He would have been fine if he went home earlier? Dang, now I’m really glad we didn’t move there.

In other sports news, ex-Falcons QB Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months in jail for dogfighting. According to the AP, Falcons owner Arthur Blank called the sentencing “another step in his legal journey.” I guess the next step is finding a prison girlfriend? Or maybe it’ll be like My Name is Earl, and he’ll solve prison problems while getting certificates for time off?

Coincidentally — maybe — today’s featured article on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org, at least) is the Brown Dog affair.

Too much pedestal, not enough dog.

I went out to my car a bit ago and there was a squirrel sitting on one of the tires. It was eating a seed. I shooed it away before I thought to take a picture of it. I felt a connection with it. Squirrelly (by definition) and loves seeds. I can understand that.

I got a dollar bill in change this morning. On the back of the bill someone wrote the words “I LOVE YOU.” “How sweet,” I thought. Then I turned the dollar over. On the front was the word “ASSHOLE.” I don’t think I’m going to use that bill for legal commerce with another person. I shall probably use it in a machine and pass it on to someone else anonymously. If you run across this dollar, it’s probably best to read it front to back.

There are a group of guys who gather to smoke and talk outside my workplace. They can be found out there several times a day. While I don’t smoke, I understand people who do would want to engage in it fairly often. What I don’t understand is what is there to talk about every day? I like my coworkers, but I’d be willing to bet I could run through almost all interesting information within a day or two if I talked to them frequently.

I got a coupon for a dollar off McDonald’s McSkillet Burrito. I saw some commercials for it over the weekend. The tagline was something like “Everything you love about breakfast.” They then listed the ingredients. My thoughts after each one:

• Scrambled eggs (Yep.)
• Skillet potatoes (Yum.)
• Breakfast sausage (Okay, not a big fan of sausage, but I understand that.)
• Cheddar jack cheese (Mmm, cheese…)
• Peppers and onions (Hmm, maybe, but not usually a part of my morning repast.)
• Spicy salsa (Uh, no. Thanks for ruining the rest.)

Oh, by the way, the McSkillet Burrito? It had a blog. And a car.

Addendum: Oh, I almost forgot. This personal ad, inspired by the webcomic xkcd? He’s looking for a stick figure with squiggly hair. It’s that kind of unrealistic portrayal that can cause poor self-esteem in women whose heads aren’t wider than their bodies.

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Previously on The Phantom City, Interest Ratings Falling.