derivative work

okay, i’ve been very sporadically having a couple of spare hours to catch up, and i do a lot of reading, and noting articles i’d like to comment on, but you know what? it’s just not going to happen. so here is some of the stuff that’s caught my eye this month, relatively uncommented-upon and [...]

We’re finally finished with the summary report for our DMCA 512 study, which is officially released today. The final report will follow shortly. [pdf & html] Marjorie Heins @ The Free Expression Project is doing a complementary study; she released her preliminary report in early October and the full report will hopefully be out soon. [...]

questionable authority reviews a pro-’intelligent design theory’ entry that describes a future history of the fabulous medical and scientific breakthroughs generated by ‘intelligent design theory’ and the abandonment of ‘Darwinism’. While the whole post is highly recommended, it was one of the commentors who really tickled my fancy. Responding to the future history’s assertion that [...]

I want free public lectures about science (and okay, social sciences, humanities, politics, art, whatever — but especially science!) to be as freely, conspicuously, and ubiquitously available as church/synagogue/temple services. In a city the size of Boston, people have the opportunity to choose from hundreds of free lectures about religious ideas every week, probably several [...]

BoingBoing recently posted about the songs sung by male mice during courtship, linking to the PLOS Biology article, and the audio files of the actual songs. We independently verified the actual mouse-nature of the songs by performing a Spontaneous Audio Performance Test (SAPT) with a feline experimental audience.* Sure enough, four sleeping cats roused, lifted [...]

part of a longer post i’m developing on military bloggers, but this to start: another military blogger silenced: discussing all the king’s horses blog and CBFTW [blog]

Rosa ‘Lee’ Louise McCauley Parks, Feb. 4, 1913 – Oct. 24, 2005 photo grabbed from marian’s blog

For some time (years, literally) I’ve been pondering the perfect phrase to capture ‘information rights’ — the natural right people have to create, invent, tinker, think, imagine, ponder, access information, etc. The First Amendment conceptual toolkit doesn’t really measure up: we have First Amendment concepts for speaking and the corollary, listening. But these concepts don’t [...]

A new book by Fred Jerome & Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism, fleshes out the historical record on Dr. Einstein’s anti-racist work. The most amazing thing is that, apart from a few quotes, the work that Einstein did on race has been largely forgotten by the public, and obliterated from popular historical accounts [...]

I don’t know how to sum up Dan Brown’s contributions to American literature any better than to say that the first “word” of praise on his website is “Unputdownable.” Plus Harry Reid, David Brooks, and William Safire. Read the whole thing.