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Michael Lewis on Bill Parcells and the surreal world of the professional football coach.
October 2006 Archives
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Or how an obscure album cut by a bunch of Hollywood session men became the most sampled album of all time.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Tom Jones.
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The drawback to the serialized drama format.
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The real question is does it work with Westlaw and Lexis?
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A.k.a. Voting Fraud for Dummies
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Gary Shteyngart says that modern writers need to drink more. Hear that, Carney?
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I’ve always wanted to do this.
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Apparently having lots of sex makes you live long. Conversely, I should be dead by now.
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The guy who plays the incredibly charming Hiro Nakamura on Heroes turns out not only be a wonderful actor, but he’s a certified ILM computer genius, too….
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Rabert pretty much sums up the level of discourse on the Internets.
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The greatest, most improbable, and outright lucky Scrabble game ever.
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Amateur athlete tries performance-enhancing drugs, discovers they work.
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How 2 tweak Firefox 2.0.
…after all, it’s been out of beta for so long that it’s time to rebuild it again. And it’s been so freaking long since I’ve done this….
So, let’s suggest something seasonal for the title line (in the comments, please!). It doesn’t necessarily have to work the word “November” in there, though if you can, why the heck not. Bonus points if you can work it into haiku (5-7-5) form.
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A Trek-themed parody of the Drudge Report.
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Wired asked a number of SF writers to come up with six word stories. They’re pretty good, but I’m partial to Marget Atwood’s and Neil Stephenson’s.
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Which version of Vista for you?
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The Space Shuttle Launch as seen from
orbitfrom a chase plane -
Painter finds out that he has Alzheimer’s; paints self-portraits as a way of charting his journey.
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How to build web forms for idiots (like me). (via martin)
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A free, open-source, 3d planetarium program for Mac OS X, Winders, and Linux. Hawt.
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Franco Bonisolli, playing a nightclub gig, isn’t taking himself too seriously in the encore. It’s amusing.
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Interesting discussion about reporting from Iraq coming up. Unfortunately I can’t make it, as I have class…
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It’s not your imagination; restaurants are just getting ridiculously expensive these days.
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Features that didn’t make the cut for Windows, like Mimesweeper.
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Mimi Sheraton on West 12th St., a street that I happen to know pretty well, all things considered.
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Harold Pinter is in London right now, performing Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
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It’s not your imagination; restaurants are just getting ridiculously expensive these days.
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Wendy Seltzer deconstructs the Windows Vista license (abstract: it sucks).
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“Shock the Monkey” meets Carmen. Goes together surprisingly well.
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I’m not a frakkin’ Cylon!
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Leave it to the Times to overintellectualize the Sexy ______ Halloween costume.
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A critique of the latest trend in blog design.
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Shaun Inman has redesigned, and with the redesign comes a really neat way to track the passage of time.
As it turns out, IE 7 breaks the layout of this site. It’s not entirely borked, as the main content is still there, but the left-hand column has just completely vanished. Gone. Disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa.
Well, it’s about time that I rebuilt this site anyway.
Oh, and IE 7 is not exactly pleasing to the eye either, with some curious design choices. Remember: use Firefox!
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Condi rocks the hawk (via the gawk)
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Anil Dash on the problem of the Web 2.0 monoculture.
Deadspin features this great clip of Denny Green’s post-game press conference after the Cardinals blew a 20-3 halftime lead (note that the Bears didn’t manage an offensive touchdown; rather, Chicago scored on two fumbles returned for touchdowns and a punt return for a touchdown).
Let’s just say that the game was pretty ugly and leave it at that, ok?
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Klosterman on the extinction of the barefoot kicker.
Two interesting cyberlaw/IP things on the interweb from my classmates:
- Alice Goldmann has written an interesting paper about community-based Internet governance. Alice’s paper, which was inspired by Craigslist’s governance model, was even mentioned on Craig Newmark’s blog. It’s worth noting that trying to run the Internet from the bottom up is a very kind of Interwebby idea.
- Renaissance man Patrick Runkle (writer, journalist, musician, soon-to-be-lawyer and general all-around suave dude) muses about the copyright implications of services that automatically check term papers for plagiarism. I’d argue that first, these services are a non-infringing fair use[1], and second, even if they are infringing, what are the damages?
Patrick’s point raises something that I’ve been thinking about. Prior to 1976, to secure a copyrightin the United States, you needed to register it with the Copyright Office. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 changed that completely; now, whenever an expressive work is fixed in a tangible medium, a copyright automatically attaches to the fixed work. For example, a dance performance can’t be copyrighted; however, choreographer’s notes that describe how the dance is performed are copyrighted, as would be any video recordings of the dance. Note, however, that the copyright of the video recording extends only to the tape itself and not the actual dance.
Anyway, this automatic copyright provision greatly expanded the reach of what’s copyrighted and what is copyrightable. A letter from your aunt is now copyrighted, for example. There are, however, some unforseen side effects from this very broad expansion of IP rights; for one thing, it makes doing things in the public commons much more difficult. Going back to Patrick’s example of the plagerism services; prior to the 1976 Act, there would be no copyright problem, in part becase copyright wasn’t originally intended to cover things like school papers. Indeed, one could ask if the drafters of the 1976 Act really thought about the applicability of a lifetime+50 year copyright term for term papers.
[1] The four fair use factors are
1. The purpose and character of the use [e.g. how transformative is the use and to what purpose is the use put; educational and research purposes get a very broad pass here]
2. The nature of the copyrighted work [e.g. fact-based works get less protection than wholly fictional works]
3. The amount and substantiality taken [or, in English, how much of the work did you take? While as a general rule, the more you take, the less likely your use will pass muster with the courts, it’s quite possible to take the entirety of a work and still have it pass as a fair use]
4. And finally, what is the effect of the use on the potential market for the work?
It is left as an excercise to the reader to apply the four fair use factors to the case of the plagerism services.
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If this is how they teach English in Japan…
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Great Dove TV ad that shows how a model goes from completely un-madeup to being a face on a billboard. Hint: there’s a lot of photoshop involved.
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National Blog Writing Month! One post a day every month! (via the LOD)
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As Halloween costumes go, this is just wrong on so many levels. On the other hand, my brother will appreciate it.
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The condensed NYT guide to Koreatown.
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“if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water. (There are flaws, however. As Vardi noted, “In some regions,
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A demo movie and concept art for what looks to be a very cool, artistic, groovy game.
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On how many law students view what Weird Al calls “international copyright law”.
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The LOD on having kids: “I am a father. I’ve only been one for 4+ years, but Moxie always says I was a father when she met me, only the kids hadn’t arrived yet.”
So, here are the answers to last week’s quiz:
- Grizzly Bear, “Owner of A Lonely Heart”, by Yes
- Pet Shop Boys, “Where The Streets Have No Name”, by U2
- Travis, “Baby Hit Me One More Time”, Britney Spears (more than one person thought that this was the Fountains of Wayne version)
- t.A.T.u., “How Soon Is Now”, The Smiths (everyone’s favorite Russian fake-lesbian pop tarts)
- Bob Harris/Bill Murray, “More Than This”, Roxy Music
- Paul Anka, “Jump”, Van Halen
- Seal, “Fly Like An Eagle”, The Steve Miller Band
- Cat Power/Chan Marshall, “Wonderwall”, Oasis
- Mosquitos, “A Man Needs A Maid”, Neil Young (no-one even bothered guessing at this one; the closest was “It’s in Portuguese, right?”
- Rachid Taha, “Rock el[the] Casbah”, The Clash
Your two co-winners both scored 25 points out of 30 possible, which, given the difficulty of the quiz, is really quite respectable.
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More funny lawyer shirts and other garments.
Just a note—if you want to try your luck at the cover song trivia contest, the deadline to enter is midnight ET tonight. So give it a go!
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Random quotes from Nietzsche + random Family Circle cartoons = Art.
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Bunche on “Blackness”.
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I’ve actually seen a similar device, but manufactured by a Japanese company, in a Hong Kong shopping mall a few years ago.
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Google is now accepting blog pings. One wonders how long it’ll be before the robots take it over completely.
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Macej visits Hong Kong for the first time after four months of living in Beijing and gets slapped in the face by culture shock. Bonus: Macej on mooncakes.
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Derek Jeter asks announcers to just lay off the adulation.
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Johannes Brahms, professional smart-alec.
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ET on the state of the London public transit system (in short, slow, inefficient, and bloody expensive).
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As a future lawyer, I see this as a real growth area for our industry. (via martin)
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Yummy, Yummy Chicken.
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Ed Levine drops by the Upper West Side.
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Steglitz on what’s wrong with the world economy.
R.W. Apple, one of the last great newspapermen, died yesterday. He wrote about everything from war to politics to food. His last article detailed 10 of his favorite restaurants around the world. He is missed by many.
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NASA on the curious properties of moonlight.
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Khoi Vihn: “Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?”
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Macej on flying the polar route from New York to Beijing.
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Almost 60 MPH on a bicycle, sustained for an hour.
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Why the detainee bill is really a programming problem.
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These lists, they write themselves.
It’s the first (and, depending on participation, perhaps the last) Official pf.org Cover Song Contest!
Here’s how it works: below, you’ll find links to 10 clips of cover songs. Each clip is about 30 seconds, and is in MP3 format. Some of these are really easy, some are somewhat harder (the first version had 15 songs and was, by all accounts, much harder).
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the artist playing, the song that they’re playing, and the original artist. Each answer is worth one point; each song is worth up to 3 points; the maximum possible score is 30. I suspect the actual winning score will be somewhat less than 30.
Email your answers to contests@paulfrankenstein.org (or just click on the link). This contest will run for a week, so enter early and enter often!
And what does the winner get? A fabulous pf.org prize package (that is to say, at least a t-shirt and maybe some other stuff)! That’s right—you’ll actually win real stuff on the Internet! Who ever said that technology never got you anything?
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Note that this freak is the sponsor of legislation to “protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet.” I guess he was doing “research.”