The moon is down

Posted on by

Around 8 PM last night, there was a total lunar eclipse, so Brian and Andrew and I went and hung out under the stars for a while, freezing our butts off. If I understand it right, a lunar eclipse means that the Earth came between the Sun and the Moon, so that the Earth’s shadow completely covered the moon. On a clear day, this would have meant some interesting optical effects. Unfortunately, that night was moderately cloudy, and although we could see the Earth’s shadow covering the moon, we couldn’t really see it in detail.

As usual, however, we managed to entertain ourselves despite adverse conditions. While waiting for the moon to eclipse, we sang “Jailhouse Rock” with the lyrics from “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, as the Evolution Control Committee did when they had too much time on their hands. Fortunately they recorded the results for posterity, so that we didn’t have to 🙂 The best part is how they actually made All Your Base rhyme! The first verse and chorus goes, “In AD twenty-one-oh-one/war was beginning, what happen?/somebody set us up the bomb/we get signal, main screen turn on! Chorus: It’s you! How are you gentlemen? All Your Base… Are Belong to Us.” All you Elvis fans, go and download the mp3 right now! This also resulted in an in-depth discussion of Zigs, and taking off every last one of them. Brian: “I’d like to let you know that I’m not wearing any Zigs today…”
We also discussed at length how the moon is getting like 3 inches closer to the Earth every year. How freaking cool will it be when the moon is orbiting at GROUND LEVEL? “Oh sh*t! Here comes the moon! Duck!” WHOOMPH! Andrew said that he remembers a kid’s story where the moon was close enough to the Earth that people could get there just by jumping high enough, and they could all go hang out there until they got tired of lunar life, and then jump back down again. Does anybody know what this story was? E-mail me if you do! Someday I really have to install blogging software that allows for comments… I installed PHPosxom because it’s just a single PHP script that’s simple enough for me to understand and hack around with. Heck, maybe I could implement comments myself! That would be mad phatty, yo.

Ha ha ha, WIPOUT!

Posted on by

I just run across this really cute site, www.wipout.net, which has a bunch of essays on why the current intellectual property regime is dumb. It was a response to an international student essay contest that the WIPO sponsored in 2001 about, like, “What does intellectual property mean to me?” Which sounds like something that would make any decent student barf. So this collection of essays says stuff like, “I can’t purchase anti-HIV drugs because of patent law” instead. The site is cobwebby and not terribly standards compliant, but people were less conscious of standards back then (yes, a matter of a couple of years has made a difference). The essays don’t have airtight arguments, but it’s nice to see the perspectives of ordinary people on the subject.

In other news, I went into Philly today with my main man Steve Bhardwaj and Ivan Boothe of Why-War, to be interviewed by Lynn Landes for DUTV. While we were there we met Rebecca Mercuri in person for the first time, and we chilled and talked about all that good ol’ voting stuff. That was pretty cool, but the best part was driving there in Steve’s car listening to Simon and Garfunkel! Steve and I were singing “Keep the Customer Satisfied” all day, in harmony 🙂 That is, he harmonized, and I just blundered along, but trust me, it was cool.

Were old video games actually any good?

Posted on by

This is the funniest article I’ve read in a LONG time, it had me in stitches for 10 minutes when I should have been doing my Chinese homework. I found it on a random Swat alumn’s blog, continuing in the tradition that Swarthmore students pioneered.

The thing is, just think about how hard it would be to play old games if we didn’t have emulators. Most of us can’t play these old games and laugh at them anymore, because unlike the staff of a gaming magazine, we don’t have every piece of the history of gaming at our disposal. Unless you’re uber-careful with your equipment, your old gaming consoles are probably dead or dying, and what use will all of your game cartridges be without the machine that plays them? Sure, Space Invaders and other really popular games have survived to some degree in commercial form, but the more obscure games become completely unavailable as it becomes more difficult to find the old, proprietary hardware needed to play them. Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir if you got here from the SCDC‘s website, but we need the freedom to format-shift our old games to our new computers, so that all of this wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) creativity and entertainment isn’t lost forever.

Oppose the FTAA

Posted on by

Stop! Instead of reading this, go do something about the FTAA!
If you don’t know what the FTAA is, or why you should oppose it, read on.
To borrow from globalexchange.org, the FTAA is essentially an expansion of NAFTA, both into new geographic areas such as Central America, South America and the Caribbean, and into new areas of the economy and the law that NAFTA didn’t cover.

Even if you’re not opposed to NAFTA (and if don’t know enough about it to make a judgement, you really ought to research it more), you should be strongly opposed to the FTAA. As reported by IP Justice, the FTAA has a truly horrifying chapter on intellectual property rights. Basically it exports our poorly conceived copyright regime to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and adds on even more autocratic provisions. Among other things, it mandates imprisonment (!) for P2P filesharing for signatory nations, and destroys many of our remaining “fair use” rights. To see for yourself, try searching the chapter for “prison”… then read the whole thing, if you have a legal bent. Otherwise just visit IP Justice’s page.

I just love how the government talks in Newspeak: Free Trade here means “we throw you in jail for trading files”. Are they going to arrest people for making mix CDs for one another? I thought it was bad enough with the RIAA‘s frivolous lawsuits; now we really may get the police spiriting you away in the night for using Kazaa, no joke.

The judge expedites our case

Posted on by

So, in case you haven’t heard, my friend Luke Smith and I are suing Diebold for trying to use copyright law to suppress their internal company memos that expose questionable business practices. We are being represented pro bono by lawyers from Stanford’s Cyberlaw clinic.
Today the judge set an accelerated schedule for our case, which seems like a good thing, since we would like to have free speech again as soon as possible 🙂

I asked the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to link to the website for our club, the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, and they said they would… which would rock! It’ll be like a permanent Slashdotting! Ooh, Branen and all the other SCCS sysadmins are going to kick my butt for this one…

When flats are good

Posted on by

Last night I got a flat tire on my bike while riding past the construction around the new science center. I was very annoyed, because since I live in Woolman, slightly uphill from campus, biking to class and stuff is very convenient, and I save a good deal of time. I also enjoy leaving skid marks on the pavement and playing around with my 21 gears. I was quite dismayed at the prospect of having to actually walk around. However, a while back I was telling Blake how wonderful it was to save time with my bike, and he said, “So what do you do with all of the time you save?” I didn’t have a good answer. Where does the time go that I save in transit?

I guess it probably goes towards checking my e-mail or reading Slashdot; it doesn’t really help get me to class on time.

Today as I was walking back to my dorm, I noticed for the first time that the leaves were changing, and many of them had fallen to the ground already. In retrospect I remember that there had been leaves on the ground before; I like to step on the leaves and hear them crinkle and crackle, and I recall crinkling leaves several times in the last few weeks. However, it hadn’t really computed that, “Oh, fall is here, the leaves are pretty!” I’m glad that I took the time to look at all the colors, and check out the big picture, of the greenery of Swarthmore preparing for winter.

Eat? Sleep? Work? Party? Save the world?

Posted on by

My parents are probably going to kick my butt next time they see me, because I keep forgetting to eat, and I’ve definitely gotten thinner. There are several reasons this happens:(1)I get wrapped up in homework or SCDC business, and never make it to the dining hall or my room to eat (2)I make it to the dining hall, but something terribly exciting comes up and I drop my food and run off, or an interesting topic of conversation comes up and I neglect my dinner (3)I make it back to my room, but instead of cooking something, I just nibble on a snack.

The positive side of all this is that I’ve become so insubstantial that I can sneak around like Frodo Baggins with the One Ring, and nobody can catch me! Whee!

Back from long hiatus

Posted on by

Hey folks, thanks to friendly nagging from Maggie, I’m going to try to keep my blog updated again, although it’s going to be terribly difficult because of all of the developments occurring with the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons. Swarthmore College has been in the news a lot lately because of the Diebold voting machine memos, and if you haven’t heard about it, I recommend that you check out our website.
In other news, my roommate Jerome recently mistook my electric toothbrush for a vibrator. He walked into the room the other day, and exclaimed, “You know somebody has been keeping a vibrator in our bathroom?” This would indeed have been odd, since we two are the only people who use our bathroom regularly. However, my Periobrush is probably not suitable for this purpose, despite its vaguely phallic shape. I can’t say that I’m disappointed about that…

Willpower

Posted on by

A failure of your will is a failure of rationality. If you can will that you accomplish something (such as cleaning your room), that means that you have done the necessary calculations and decided that this course of action will be best for you in the long run. If, despite this knowledge, you persist in a different course of action (i.e. you lack the willpower to do what you have decided upon), this means that you have failed to keep your eye on your rational, long term self-interest. Instead you have conceded the field to short-sightedness, you have given into the pleasures of the moment. A person who cannot act in their own self-interest is by definition incompetent and weak. Also, failing to stand by your rational self reeks of hypocrisy, of lying to oneself. The more frequently you are able to adhere to your own decisions, the more effective and admirable you will be.

The SCDC is getting big

Posted on by

I’m so excited about how the SCDC is doing! We’ve been getting press from all over the place: the two Swarthmore College newspapers, the Phoenix and the Daily Gazette, Lawrence Lessig’s site, Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”), boycott-riaa.com, a random personal blog… All of these people from across the country are e-mailing and IMing us, wanting to work with us or start their own similar campus groups!
The most interesting conversation I’ve had today was with a grad student from UTexas at Austin, about the licensing practices of Role-Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the Open Gaming License, which is essentially like the GPL, and the more restrictive license D20, which lets you use the D&D brand name but doesn’t let you change the game in certain basic ways. Unfortunately it seems that the D20 license is taking over the industry, which reduces the diversity of games. I honestly don’t know much about the topic, but I expect to learn more about a lot of interesting topics like this through my work with the SCDC. These are certainly amazing times!
It’s really strange to realize that the SCDC is the first organization of its kind; that over all these years, there hasn’t been a student anywhere in the nation who cared enough about these issues to build a club to promote them. Swarthmore does have a somewhat radical, avant garde history though, which is easy to forget when we’re looking at it from the inside. Did you know that a Swattie may have been the first blogger? Here’s the article that says so, and here’s what the first blog looked like. I guess it just looks like a really basic webpage, kind of boring, but the bloggy content and the extremely early date (January 27, 1994!) is what sets it apart. Go Swat!