Graffiti is being wiped out across the city of Brookline by a wave of hyperrealist art. If you’ve ever wanted ‘tattoo removal’ for that Banksy your overpass got when it was young and carefree, or want to know which bricks match Textured Rusted Umber, this Tumblr’s for you..
It’s like The Man Who Planted Trees for a smooth, unblemished urban landscape.
AFP breaks down her successful kickstarter project to support an album:
it means i’ll probably buy an abandoned church somewhere and turn it into a free 24-hour circus brunch bar for everybody.
we’re all investing, dollar by dollar, pledge by pledge… not just in the future of my little record and band, but in an idea whose time has come.
A nutshell guide to the language by the floating-point divide.
Stefano Mazzochi and other former MetaWebbers now at Google have turned out another beautiful structure in the garden of human knowledge: the Knowledge Graph.
This helps visualize one key aspect of information meshes, though it has many limitations still. (It is only a graph, as the name suggests; as defined within Google it is only the part of the universal knowledge graph that they choose to bless as ‘clean’; it doesn’t include any data that they choose not to make publicly visible; and there is no higher level of structure to support a metric, or a multi-dimensional space).
David Gerard recently pointed out that despite recent expansion of the global commons of “freely-licensed knowledge”, all license terms still last for much too long. “Free licenses” still rely on copyright laws which impose restrictions on reuse for unreasonably long term lengths: currently “Life of the author + 70 years” in most countries — roughly 10-50x as long as the average commercial lifespan of a new work.
Economists and researchers studying copyright have often noted that copyright terms have been extended with little justification, always on the request of the publishing industry, since the first copyright term (14 years) was set centuries ago. And that there is no data to suggest that longer copyright terms are good for society or useful in encouraging creative work.
The social memes of “free culture” and “free knowledge” have been shaped in large part by a community that bought into the idea of copyleft in the past decades: a derivative of copyright law which defines the copyrights the author wishes to exercise in a way that lets people reuse their work, as long as they release the result under the same license.
We should figure out a reasonable maximum term for the sort of rights that are currently covered by copyright – say, something no more than 14 years – and embed that term into the most-recommended free culture licenses. That includes all Creative Commons and free-culture and other FOSS licenses. All of these licenses should explicitly transition to the Public Domain before the ultralong default term enshrined in international law.
(In practice this could mean automatically switching to a CC0 license at the end of the shorter term.)
David’s comments started a recent discussion on the Wikimedia-l mailing list, about whether Wikimedians should help push for a saner copyright term. Mike Linksvayer noted similar discussions on the Creative Commons licenses list from last December – part of brainstorming how to improve those licenses.
Two people made comments along these lines: “Shortening the copyright term is totally infeasible in the near term; instead we should encourage people to switch to free licenses.“
This misses two key points. Firstly, free culture groups are now some of the largest around; they include major content providers and platforms; and Creative Commons itself is a powerful global brand. Secondly, while convincing slow, conservative national governments to change their laws is hard, almost everyone who is not working/lobying for content publishers — including the vast majority of content creators — feels copyright terms are too long. So this is an obvious place for citizen innovation to come first, and legislation second.
A few publishers are already adopting limited terms. O’Reilly Books uses a license that switches to CC-BY after 14 years.
Some free culture groups have taken a position here as well: Sweden’s Pirate Party advocates for a maximum term of 5 years. Richard Stallman of the FSF recommends a maximum of 5 or 10 years (though only for society as a whole; and only if it comes with open source requirements for proprietary software).
Adding an explicit term after which works become PD should not complicate the “opt-in commons”, to use Mike’s term. This could be implemented with a few simple changes (I am imagining how CC could implement this; as they have great authority to recommend licensing norms):
Within that framework, people can use terms that make sense to them; some may want a license with a fixed PD date, so that a large group can collaborate on a shared work which is set to become PD in 2020. Ongoing collaborations like Wikipedia could use a license set to become PD after 8 years – so the latest version of a project would always be under a CC-SA license, but one from today would become PD in 2020.
Creative Commons and others could then promote the use of PD-friendly licenses. Collaboratives like Wikimedia communities, and publishers like O’Reilly, could switch to those licenses for their projects and works. Together we would return to building a true intellectual and artistic Commons — something which in the US has been starved of almost all works produced in the past 35 years.
Via Béria Lima:
The Wikimedia chapters have, by voting, selected the following two people to serve on the Wikimedia Foundation board, replacing Arne Klempert and Phoebe Ayers:
* Patricio Lorente is the current President of Wikimedia Argentina. He had worked as Project Manager of the Association for Social Development in Argentina. At present, he serves as General ProSecretary of the National University of La Plata.
* Alice Wiegand is an IT specialist for system administration in the public sector, and a former board member of Wikimedia Deutschland, the largest Wikimedia chapter. She runs the IT department of a German municipality, and is starting a Master’s program in Public Policy and Governance.
Congratulations to Patricio and Alice, who will join the Board in mid-June; I look forward to working with both of you.
And much gratitude to Phoebe and Arne, who have helped us all to stay focused on what matters, for their amazing work over the past years.
Congratulations to my friend Ken Liu, phosphorescent fiction shaper whose story “The Paper Menagerie” won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story last night! Next stop: the Hugos (chosen by the Chicon 7 attendees 
).
Can you tell what these world leaders are watching in this recent photo? (Hint: You should be able to guess down to the second).
Spurred by a discussion of language learning and pronunciation, I revisited my favorite English-language poem this weekend: Gerard Nolst Trenité’s “Dearest Creature In Creation” (a.k.a. “English Pronunciation”, or “The Chaos”). I cleaned up my composite version, fitting in most of the remaining couplets that have appeared in one of the author’s revisions, marking where the various versions start to diverge, and adding pronunciation notes for a few more words.
If you haven’t read it recently, it’s worth a few minutes of your time. And if someone with a melodious voice feels like recording a reading of it, that would be a boon.
Update: Jacob Rus points me to this recording he made of a different version of the poem. Awesome! A British version would be grand too.
Finally, which rhymes with enough:
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough‽
Hiccough has the sound of ‘sup‘ …
My advice is: give it up!
A fine heatmap of birthday frequency, in which you can see what country the data comes from, which holidays they celebrate, and even some of their superstitions:
HT to Amitabh Chandraand Matt Stiles.
I passed a burning Bolt Bus this morning. I wanted to learn more about it, so I trolled some local news sites.
Then some hyperlocal news sites.
Then The Internetz, via various search engines.
Nothing.
Twitter? Came through after a fashion: people passing it, like me, on the NJ Turnpike.
Some had cameras to match their rubber necks.
Someone also tweeted from another Bolt Bus that whose driver commented on the fire to them.
But no word from people on the bus, or involved with the event; and no actual coverage.
It’s locally newsworthy;
Are there any alternatives to find out more?
Alternatives that focus on certain subgenres?
R.I.P. Maurice Sendak, brilliant children’s author and dry wit (1928–2012). He died yesterday of a stroke.
In a crossing of the stars, that May 8 was also the publication date of the satirical children’s book Stephen Colbert dreamed up for his interview with Sendak back in January.
In last night’s show, Colbert included more of the interview, to honor Sendak’s memory.
Act 3 (15 min. in)
Colbert: Today is the release date of my beloved children's classic, I am a Pole (And So Can You!) It's the heartwarming coming-of-age story of a pole searching for its place in the world. It's the perfect gift for mother's day, father's day, graduation day... and all other days. And you know it's a good book because of this blurb: "THE SAD THING IS, I LIKE IT" - Maurice Sendak. Well, the real sad thing is Mr. Sendak died this morning, at age 83. I had the pleasure of interviewing him earlier this year, and tonight we'd like to show you just a few more things that Maurice had to say. =============================== Colbert: Mr Sendak, thanks for sitting down with me today. This is a, this is a real honor. Sendak: No shit! Colbert: No, I'm not shitting you. I mean it. Now what's your favorite of your own books? I really wished you'd ask that question. Well I'm glad I did then. I think the best is two books I've done. I can have two favorites. All right. One is called 'outside over there' Terrifying. It is my attempt to do a Mozartian book, to take elements -- It's terrifying! these goblins that make ice babies... and replace a child with it! Yes... what can I say. those were all -- I was really deeply in love with romantic art of the beginning of the 18th century, middle of the 18th century. Mozart was dead, and this beautiful /thing/ came out of his generation and Mozart of course being the best quality, the best artist, the best everything that ever -- Mozart is the highest quality. He's like the Donald Trump of classical music. Only the finest... I'm gonna have to... I'm gonna have to kill you. I'm gonna have to kill you! Donald is quality. You've seen, Everything he does is gold plated. That's quality. Yes, yes, he's just like Donald Trump. Everything is primo. Primo. You got it, you nailed him. The other... is called 'Higgelty Piggelty Pop!' It's probably the best thing I've done. Tell me the story. It's about a sealyham terrier. My sealyham terrier. The dog i had. Ok. Her name was Jennie, and she appeared in all my books, up until the time she died. And higgelty piggelty pop! was the big book I wrote about her because I knew she was going to die, soon. She was getting old. What happens in it? What happens is the little dog goes out into the world and leaves her master to find out, "is there more to life?" and the series of adventures that she has where she proves her total inadequacy to almost everything that happens to her. And - but she accepts that. and that is the truth of her life that she must accept her inadequacy and her failure to live up to expectations that others may have of her, that she surely has of her. And she just ends up a sweet, jerky dog which she is, noone ever really wanted anything more from her, so... Does she return to him? No. She dies. She dies. And she leaves him a letter, saying "If you ever come this way, look me up. But I can't tell you how to get here." The book has had a very difficult life. All of it. Considered like, "why is this a children's book?" Why not! What is a children's book? I don't have a clue! I'm famous for them, I write them, I illustrate them, but I don't know what they are I don't know why they're for children. I like that your work does not sugargcoat childhood. Right You bring the pain. You keep it real. But some people think that is not appropriate for children - To suffer pain, read about it, think about it, feel about it. Yet that's all they do. Every moment of childhood is a sense of uncertainty Yes. I think childhood is a period of great torment. We learn all these things about what is, what isn't what you can do, what you cannot do. It's hard. It is very hard. What's the best thig a parent can do for a child? Love him, her. But what's that mean? Take them for what they are. ===============================
Saying thank you with pancakes:
The pain of purrhisstance. via Ross Mayfield
Big Lou at CMU is working on a language-learning and web-translation project, known in the lingo as Duolingo.
Class this with Meedan and livemocha under “facets of global collaborative translation that need to happen”: it’s one of a long line of shared translation efforts that I admire and follow; though I’ve yet to see one that was able to take a deep breath and just let the process unfold naturally.
I hope this one is different. I want it to be a pillar of our multilingual Web, not just one piece among thousands. They need some design help for an amazing poster campaign to Free Language Learning — see their latest blog post for an example. If you have a brainstorm on the topic, post up!
Meteor: The future of web-apps?
Congrats to deberg and others for pulling off an inspiring soft-launch.
Bad Behavior has blocked 2318 access attempts in the last 7 days.
