I will be on Air America Radio at 2pm EST on the O’Franken Factor, talking about the Diebold case of course.  A few minutes ago I was on Arnie Arnesen‘s show, which was very enjoyable!  Sorry I didn’t blog about it in time for all y’all to tune in, but hopefully there will be a recording of the show available online.  Thanks again to Mother Jones for spreading the word about us!

Does this article on the free rider problem tell us anything about why our “communist fruit bowl” failed on our hall on Mertz 1st South freshman year?  I definitely remember there being spoiled fruit there often, and it might have been due to our “take a fruit, leave a fruit” policy.

Look at these groovy cross-sections!  I wish I had done something this pretty.  My dad bought a gigantic pro-quality microscope when I was litttle, presumably in hopes of turning me into a scientist/bio major like him.  We found some pretty cool critters under that microscope, especially one time when we looked in some pond water and actually found a rare creature.  It kind of looked like a 2D Brontosaurus without legs, and it moved around by reaching its “head” forward, and then pulling the rest of itself along (if I remember correctly).  Sadly, I ended up being a philosophy major/computer geek and stopped playing with the microscope as I got older, and now I don’t know where it went…. probably in the attic somewhere.

According to this post on Aaron Russo‘s blog (my favorite Libertarian nominee for president), there will be a presidential debate at Swarthmore college on September 28th?

http://russoforpresident.com/batm/index.php/2004/05/24/p311

This will be unbelievably awesome, especially if the two major parties’ candidates come as well as the Libertarians, Nader etc.

I hope Russo wins the Libertarian nomination, his campaign keeps the best blog 🙂  Nolan’s blog is weak.  Russo just did his first audioblog yesterday!  I haven’t even done an audioblog yet….

And yes, I will probably be voting Libertarian in this next election, especially if Russo is nominated.  Russo is very strongly in favor of alternative medicine, which is one of my pet issues (I have never had a drug in my life except for anaesthesia during operations), and he is very strongly against the draft, which is important to me as a Quaker.  My only concern is that since he made his money in Hollywood, he may be opposed to the Free Culture movement.  If he is at Swarthmore on September 28th, I will certainly ask him.

Unfortunately it looks like my parents won’t let me out until I finish writing my 4 overdue papers, which probably means that I won’t be free until Friday night.  Therefore, this Friday, May 21st, I will be holding a GINORMOUS GOING-AWAY PARTY, the day before I fly out to San Francisco to intern with the Electronic Frontier Foundation!  OK, maybe not ginormous… It will be 8pm-1am at my house in Morris Plains, New Jersey.  If you do not know where my house is, e-mail or IM me. 

Everyone who wants to see me before I leave for California is invited, and I’m always open to meeting new people as well, so feel free to bring your friends! (or yourself, if I don’t know you yet)  However, don’t bring them if they have no interest in seeing or meeting me, but just want to help trash my house 😉

If you could help defray the costs of this party by bringing food/drinks/cups/plates, that would make me your friend forever.

This will have to be a stone soup sort of party, since I don’t have time to plan it properly due to my papers.  I’ve asked a couple of friends already to help me think of and implement cool things to do, but the ideal would be for everyone to bring awesome ideas and equipment for having a good time with them.  Then we can just pick whatever seems the coolest!

We have a small yard which is good for more restrained outdoor games, but it is next to a hill, so balls tend to escape down the hill and force people to go fetch them.  If you have musical instruments, bring ’em!  If you have a laptop, bring it, there will be Wi-fi internet, and we can have LAN games!  We should have a TV, so if you want to watch a DVD or play video games, bring your system!  Bring super soakers, nerf guns, whatever floats your boat 🙂

Please rsvp by replying to this post or e-mailing me at nelson at freeculture dot orrg.

Thanks a gazillion!

If you haven’t left Swarthmore yet, talk to Luke about getting one of the Tux armbands we made at the last SCDC meeting!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing. This is seriously awesome, although it relies on a flash program for most of its cool features. Proprietary bad. But, cross-platform, location-independent is good. I must ponder this.

If you’re desperate to get by on fewer hours of sleep, polyphasic sleep (a.k.a. the Uberman’s sleep schedule) may be the answer!  Basically, you do weird things to your sleep schedule and practices to maximize REM sleep.

Unfortunately, all the bloggers who were going to test polyphasic sleep on themselves seem to have quit the blogosphere in 2002.  I hope they didn’t die… someone suggested that they were recruited by the NSA to train agents, but I think they were snuffed because they were getting too close to the secrets of the Illuminati 😉  At any rate, this seems to imply that the sleep schedule was not practical, if 4 bloggers couldn’t maintain it with each other’s support and the eyes of the community watching them.

These airlines secretly supplied passenger information to government contractors, which is of questionable legality:

*JetBlue
*Northwest
*American Airlines

For more info, see the EFF’s blog:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001470.php

Don’t fly on these airlines, and start getting angry about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) controversial CAPPS II air passenger-profiling system.

The issue came up because I’m speaking at this conference at UPenn on Friday, June 18th, and they’re going to fly me back East from my internship at the EFF this summer. The conference is called Knowledge Held Hostage, and you should seriously come! Among others, Siva Vaidyanathan of New York University will be speaking there.

The organizer of the conference said, “Just a reminder that any of the Swarthmore people who worked with you on Diebold or who have a particular interest in the scholarly fair use issue are welcome to register and come to the conference. That includes friends and professors.” He also said that if you’d be coming from far away and you need some travel/hotel assistance, they might be able to help you out a little. Budgets are tight though, as always.

Hm… this site is linking to FreeCulture.org:

http://www.russ.ru/culture/network/20040426.html

Putting it into Babelfish causes an error, so I can’t tell what the article is about.  At least with languages that use Roman characters I can make some guesses as to what they’re saying.  This Cyrillic alphabet is a pain in the butt.  Can somebody who reads Russian check the page out and at least tell me what the gist of the article is and what kind of a site it’s on?  Thanks a gazillion!

P.S. This Livejournal community also mentions us:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/za_lib_ru/58701.html

That works in Babelfish and I kind of get what’s going on.  The poster makes an interesting point at the end, according to Babelfish: “American students are concerned, first of all, by access to the music and the films. In Russia The situation Is another: as it is assumed to the most reading people, on the agenda – the protection of right to reading. However it seems to us there is to what to learn in the Americans – both in the plan of line of reasoning and in the plan of organization.”  The right to read!  Richard Stallman talks about that!  I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that though, it’s probably not what RMS means… do they mean they fear government censorship, and that’s why filesharing is important for them?  Are they worried because they can’t buy books, so they’re anxious to find free learning/reading material online?

I’d like to contribute to the discussion, but of course I can’t.  Can somebody who understands the scdc and FreeCulture.org go in there and make sure they understand who we are?  One thing I would like to emphasize is that it really is an international student movement, and once we have some good, high-quality articles on the site in English, we will start up a wiki for each language, so that non-English-speakers can join in and help contribute.

Update:  I posted about the results of my sleuthing in the brand spanking new freeculture community!