Alan Jacobs

If the Beatles represent one end of the spectrum of business models for music (all efforts support the sale of the recording), on the other end is the Grateful Dead, whose business strategy invited free copying in order to sell tickets to concerts and branded paraphernalia. Former Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow has posited that the Dead business model will ultimately prevail for all artists. This may or may not be true, but Barlow does not explain how this would have worked for the Beatles, who were simply too popular to venture before a live audience. The Beatles were recording artists, the Dead brand marketers.

It would be wrong to assert that creative individuals such as the Beatles would never have developed into artists in the absence of a copyright regime. But it would also be wrong to say that the absence of a copyright regime would not have made a difference. What that difference might have been, we will not know, until another group as talented as the Beatles appears, operating in an “information wants to be free” environment.

theatlantic:

Last Night, San Diego Accidentally Set Off All Its Fourth Of July Fireworks at Once

[Image: Ben Baller/Instagram]

Either that or the chasm between worlds has opened and Cthulhu is coming for dinner.

In Defense of Cursive

“Great Changes After the Liberation”, 1950

People are going to think this is maudlin or just plain silly, but I think I need to say it: I learned a lot about being a father from Andy Griffith. Or rather from Andy Taylor, the character he played on The Andy Griffith Show. (I owe as much to the show’s writers as to the actor.)

My own father was in prison for much of my childhood, and when he got out was — to be frank — either absent or drunkenly angry. Once, when I was about thirteen, I thought I had broken my arm after a fall in a pickup basketball game, and he just backhanded me across the injured arm and told me to stop being a pansy. When my wrist continued to swell and throb, my mother finally took me to the emergency room, and x-rays revealed the break. About this my father was silent. I relate this as an exemplary, not a unique, story.

When I was a teenager, and The Andy Griffith Show reruns turned up on TV a lot, the episodes that struck me the most forcibly were the ones in which Andy made mistakes in raising his son Opie, and responded to those mistakes by apologizing. It’s not too strong to say that I was awestruck by this behavior. None of his mistakes seemed massive to me; they arose from the misunderstandings, the cross-purposes, that are endemic to human attempts to communicate with one another. If anything, Opie was overreacting, or so I thought. (Didn’t he know how lucky he was to have such a cool dad?)

But once Andy came to see that he had inadvertently hurt his son, the next step was, to him, obvious: he went to Opie, looked him in the eye, asked his forgiveness, and told him that he loved him. The power of repression is such that I had to watch each of those episodes several times before I could account for the fascination they held for me. But when I finally grasped the point, I said to myself, “If I’m ever a father, that’s the kind of father I’m going to be.”

And it’s not just Henry who receives the Reverend’s fossil-fuelled justice. Sodor experiences its own miniature version of the cold war with the arrival of Bulgy, a red (yes, red, just like a Soviet) double-decker bus who cries “Free the roads!” and anticipates the revolutionary overthrow of rail transport.

Bulgy gets trapped under a bridge, painted green and converted into a henhouse. That’s what you get for being a blow-hard socialist. But in terms of class warfare, Bulgy’s doom has nothing on what’s done to the truculent Troublesome Truck who refuses to learn his place during one of the later stories. Having caused intolerable levels of confusion and delay, the offending blue-collar worker is coupled (see how much I’ve learnt about railway management from these terrible bedtimes?) between two engines pulling in opposite directions and yanked until he flies apart.

The climactic frame of that story, with a wincing truck-face lying splintered on the ground, is one of the most disturbing in children’s literature. Is he dead? Does he suffer? Could he be recombined – and if he was, would he feel the thirst for vengeance against those who tried to murder him?

It’s a long stretch, but it seems to me that “ease of access” and the quite miraculous enquiry-request-delivery systems now available to the scholar have had an effect on research. The turn to theory - attention to textuality rather than physical things such as books, manuscripts, letters and paraphernalia of various kinds - has, I think, coincided with big changes in method. Discovery has been replaced by critical discourse and by dialectic.

I was on a train with my earphones shoved in my ears completely ignoring my fellow commuters (as is my want early in the morning) while reading inane things on twitter. Before getting off at her stop, a woman patted me on the arm and said “I see you on the train every morning and I just wanted to say it’s great. You’re an inspiration to me.” Should I have said “you too”? Because we were doing exactly the same thing; catching public transport to our respective places of employment. I was just doing it sitting down. Should I have pointed out that, in many ways, that requires less effort, not more?

That’s the thing about those kids in the inspiration porn pictures too - they’re not doing anything their peers don’t do. We all learn how to use the bodies we’re born with, or learn to use them in an adjusted state, whether those bodies are considered disabled or not. So that image of the kid drawing a picture with the pencil held in her mouth instead of her hand? That’s just the best way for her, in her body, to do it. For her, it’s normal.

I can’t help but wonder whether the source of this strange assumption that living our lives takes some particular kind of courage is the news media, an incredibly powerful tool in shaping the way we think about disability. Most journalists seem utterly incapable of writing or talking about a person with a disability without using phrases like “overcoming disability”, “brave”, “suffers from”, “defying the odds”, “wheelchair bound” or, my personal favourite, “inspirational”. If we even begin to question the way we’re labelled, we slide immediately to the other end of the scale and become “bitter” and “ungrateful”. We fail to be what people expect.

Which brings us back to Scott Hamilton and his mantra. The statement “the only disability in life is a bad attitude” puts the responsibility for our oppression squarely at the feet, prosthetic or otherwise, of people with disabilities. It’s victim blaming. It says that we have complete control of the way disability impacts our lives. To that, I have one thing to say. Get stuffed.

With a search engine, you type in a keyword and try to find the best matches. It’s like walking into a library and being handed the ten best books about a topic. What we are trying to do with WolframAlpha is to create custom-created reports to answer specific questions. We are computing answers – even if nobody has ever asked that question before, maybe we can work out a report that answers it. It takes human experts to do that, and that is something that the search engine crowd is often skeptical about. They say that something is only good when it is based on a good algorithm and infinitely scalable. But we are interested in encapsulating the world’s knowledge, not in scalability. Wikipedia is basically a container for random texts written by random people at random times. We can surely do better than that, especially if we want to build something that has different layers and relies on good information. The actual data that we have inside of Wolfram Alpha is now roughly comparable to the textual content of the internet, and much of it comes from primary data sources that are not available online.

There is no greater dishonor when reflecting on the death of a young journalist than by referring to them as “aspiring.” It happened on Monday when news broke that Armando ‘Mando’ Montaño, a 22-year-old recent graduate of Grinnell College and intern with the Associated Press in Mexico City, was found dead in an elevator shaft. Word of his death rocked social networks and prompted friends to write tributes to him that went viral in minutes.