The Reverend John Pickett and the damage done
Saturday 9 December 2000, 13:37The son of Abraham and Mary Pickett was born on an overcast Sunday morning in May of the year of Our Lord 2015. When the Reverend Frederic McAuley performed the baptism, he held the screaming baby up to the light and asked the parents what his name should be, and in a choked-up voice Abraham Pickett said "John, call him John," and John Pickett was his name.
Mistakenly thought to be djinn
Sunday 4 April 2010, 17:41First appeared in talk.bizarre, July 1997
You must know that Man was not the first of the Earth's masters.
A great many unusual people may be seen in the marketplace of Damascus on any hot summer day, but the Adept was definitely out of the ordinary. She strode, alone and proud, though the crowd which parted unconsciously. Foreigners have written that one veiled woman looks like any other, but even the quality of the material of Fatima's veil distinguished her from the rest. The locals, accustomed to making the most of whatever they could get, stared outright, all as if they'd never seen a woman before. They undressed her in their minds as she passed by. The year, in your infidel's reckoning, was 738.
Race
Friday 2 April 2010, 17:37This is a re-posting of an item that first appeared in Livejournal, in October 2004.
One day the Fox met the Bunny, eating grass at the edge of a big field. "Hey," he said, for no particular reason, "let's race to the other side of this field." "Okay," said the Bunny. So she hopped and he ran, and the Fox made it across the field just a little bit ahead of the Bunny. "I win!" he said, and went on his way. "Bye!" called the Bunny happily, and went back to eating grass. The Turtle had been watching them, and he said, "I want to do that, too."
Colour, social beings, and undecidability
Monday 9 August 2004, 12:01Okay, it's been about two months since I posted my piece about colourful bits, and I really should have posted a follow-up before now, but better late than never. First of all, here are ten other places that carried the story, in no particular order:
What Colour are your bits?
Thursday 10 June 2004, 11:54As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between identical copies of things is still important; but the most salient issues today are not directly related to the verbatim copying that was a big deal in 2004 and was the main topic of "What Colour." I've written other articles about today's issues, and I wish my more recent articles would get the attention that the 20-year-old one still commands; they are more relevant now.
In particular, people in 2024 care a lot about how intellectual property issues and "creator's rights" relate to material that is not actually created by humans - like the output of so-called "generative AI." I talk about that in some detail in my article on training and copyright on the Eleven Freedoms site. I don't think the copyright issues associated with generative models are actually so new after all, and they are best understood using the existing concept of fair use. Copyright holders worry about how to exercise control over the use of "their" creative material for training models; but that begs the question of whether copyright holders ever had, or should have, a right to any such control. If a human can read a book and learn from it, and then write their own books, why shouldn't a computer?
Another of my recent articles, possibly my most important one ever, discusses two conflicting points of view somewhat like the views of "computer scientists" and "lawyers" below, but in the realm of institutional hiring and promotion. That is my 2021 piece on Scarcity, abundance, and lost careers. The difference between "lawyers" and "computer scientists" might be said to reflect a difference between abundance and scarcity: recognizing that a work can be copied at effectively zero cost makes works plentiful, whereas extending ownership of the original to ownership of all copies greatly reduces the supply of works, and then either view has important consequences. Similarly, institutions that see promotion candidates as being abundant or scarce will operate differently from each other and will have difficulty comprehending each others' points of views. The tension between scarcity and abundance leads to dysfunctional situations like the "elite overproduction" currently eating up some North American cultures; I think there's a way to understand that and several other current issues in a consistent framework.
Now, the historical article on Colour.
There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is
set in an extremely repressive Utopian futuristic world
run by The Computer, who
is Your Friend. Looking at a recent LawMeme
posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of
colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for
a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate
why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the
ideologies in these areas.
An article based on this one and its follow-ups, by me, Brett Bonfield, and Mary Fran Torpey, appeared in the 15 February 2008 issue of LJ, Library Journal.
Yon and Tinu
Sunday 23 April 2000, 21:25There are settlements in the great Western forest where people are born, live their whole lives, and die without ever seeing a road or a cleared area bigger than one household's vegetable garden. Why not? It would be more than a week's hard riding from the middle of the forest to the nearest civilized land, and the forest folk just aren't interested in the world beyond. They live comfortably on what they grow, gather, and hunt among the trees. People seldom ride out from their own settlement.
Light and speed
Sunday 2 February 1997, 12:13It's not so easy to find a primitive, backward culture anymore. Satellite constellations can lay down a gigahertz on every square kilometer of the Earth's surface and where there's a signal there will be receivers. We need not even mention the orbitals. The painters may be naked - they may be using mud pigments and hair brushes. You might mistake them for a tiny group of prehistoric people somehow cut off from the march of progress for thousands of years. That would be a mistake. Machines dug this cave, the hair for the brushes was grown by bacteria in a bottle, and the design taking shape on the wall does not represent an animal to be hunted. Not exactly.
Counting coup
Sunday 4 April 2010, 09:23First posted 21 June 2004.
Forgive me, I did not return your call
But through no fault of yours, your offer stings
I know it is not about me at all
You'd count me coup and gain a feather more
What are you saving up to, will you say?
How long until you earn your angel wings?
Or are you weaving head-dress for the day
You'll lead your painted soldiers off to war?
You say you're guilty, and you've cause to be
You say I've been deprived of many things
You'd pay your debts to someone, maybe me
But charity like that I would abhor
Please understand, no matter what was said
Your pen was dipped in blood I never shed
Rootbeerman don't care
Saturday 3 April 2010, 09:30First posted 21 April 2000.
Rootbeerman at the back of the McDonald's hunched over he chicken nuggets. He always super size it, and he always eat a cherry pie cause he don't care. Donuts for breakfast, Pizza Pops for dinner, Rootbeerman drink root beer at every meal and that how he got his name.
The sing-song of unknown Kadath
Sunday 11 August 2002, 19:25Not always was Antarctica a cold and barren wasteland, but a lush green continent of ghoulish degraded tribes. They were grey and they were rubbery and dined upon corpses. They made a nameless sacrifice and danced upon a mountaintop and called up the Lesser God Yig.
