While I was waiting for the train with Rahul, the conversation petered out, and he started calling people on his cellphone. After he hung up, he started talking about how it was nice to have friends whom he could call when he got bored. Now, the word “bored” always triggers alarms in my head. I take boredom to be a personal choice, at least for people with Swarthmore-quality brains. I feel you should have everything you need to keep yourself entertained, if not in your own head, then certainly between yourself and another person. If you’re bored, you must just not be looking hard enough.

“Uh-uh,” I said to Rahul, “Real men don’t get bored.” At that point I produced a pencil and paper and introduced him to 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, which can become strategically challenging when you use a 4x4x4 board. Rahul beat me handily a couple times once he understood the game, although he spent much of his time trying to visualize the cube in his head and failing because it was too late at night.

I like games like that, which you can carry around in your head. I like the feeling of just unpacking from my brain whatever I need. This is one reason I like Adam Lizzi’s new board game he just invented, called “Influence”… although he intends to develop a real board for it sooner or later, it’s easy enough to draw the board as a series of dots representing hexagons. Also, since each piece is placed once and never moved, it’s easy to play with pencil and paper, as opposed to Chess… you just fill in each space. If you’re curious to play test a brand new strategy game, just come talk to me or Adam.

That’s part of why I like open source software, the idea of having everything I need with me, even if I don’t pack any bags… you can just give me a blank computer, and as long as I have an internet connection, I can suck down whatever I need to be productive. What’s funny is that this independence (“I have everything I need”) is based on interdependence… the free software community gives me this freedom. If software patents or Microsoft’s machinations somehow were to kill off the community that supports me, then I’d be screwed. (Yes, I use a Mac, but almost all of the software besides the OS that I use is open source.) I suppose that’s the way it always is, but it seems to say something deep to me….

I’ll be visiting New York City on Friday, to see my friend Lars do a show at the Whitney Museum, starting at 7pm, called “Early Morning Opera”. A bunch of FreeCulture.org people and other random acquaintances should be meeting me there, so if you want to talk free culture and/or hang out afterwards, meet me there!

Then on Tuesday evening, I’ll be traveling to Allentown, PA to appear on Law Journal Television to discuss free culture and copyfighting. More details to follow… rest assured, I’m keeping myself busy!

I had to replace my Powerbook today…

If you have any friends who go to Duke University, or if you go to Duke yourself, you should come see me speak on Wednesday, September 14th. I’ll be speaking at noon in Room 4000 4049 of Duke Law School, where Professor Jennifer Jenkins has invited me to address her seminar. I’m actually jealous of the students in that class; her seminar is called “IP, The Public Domain, and Free Speech”, which which focuses on how the public interest is defined and defended in formulating IP policy. Sounds right up my alley! I guess I’d better get moving on my law school applications…

I will also be available for partying on Duke’s campus the night before, so I don’t know if there’s anything exciting happening on a Tuesday night, but if there is I am in the mood for some excitation 😉

UPDATE: They switched me to a room with a projector so that I can show you cute free culture clips, so come find me in room 4049 🙂

When I say that something is a museum piece, it often carries the connotation that it is something that no longer has relevance to a living culture, and that it can only be found behind glass panels in a museum. This got me to thinking… what if museums thought of themselves as preserving things that are akin to endangered species, that would disappear without a specific effort to preserve them, and they made it part of their mission to “release them back into the wild,” to make them part of a living culture again, to try to preserve the environments that created them? Why keep art and cultural artifacts dead behind glass walls? Why not infuse our culture with old memes every now and then, after they’ve been forgotten? Clearly, this would not be appropriate for some museums, such as the Holocaust museum, but surely this would produce good results for many art, historical, and cultural museums. Is this already being done by anyone? If so, to what degree?

UPDATE: In a slightly related train of thought, while googling “museum piece”, I came upon this poem… it’s probably not that profound, but I found it interesting:

==Richard Wilbur – Museum Piece==

The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.

See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.

Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.

For people who just can’t get enough of Nelson, there’s a picture of me in Newsweek this week. I also get to say a line or two, although they unfortunately don’t mention FreeCulture.org. Ah well, maybe people will google my name and turn up my blog, and find out about free culture that way 🙂

UPDATE: In case the original article becomes unavailable, here’s my quote:

And yet, for those who fully embrace the new world, the possibilities are great. Napster, after all, was created by Shawn Fanning in his dorm room at Northeastern, and college dropouts famously founded Microsoft and Apple. Students push technology forward. That’s why Nelson Pavlosky, a Swarthmore student active in the copyright wars over file sharing, thinks all campuses are worth watching. “It’s what the rest of the country might look like in two to five years.” And then he pauses for a profundity moment. “Hey,” he says. “We are the future.” It’s the sort of thing college students have always said. But guys like Pavlosky might actually be right.

By John Schwartz
Newsweek © 2005