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The Kindle-not-so-much link cycle

• So Book-like, You’d Think It Was a Book (but it’s not)
  

  When I first read about this, I admit, I was a little apprehensive.

  “Who is actually going to buy this stupid piece of shit for jerks?” I yelled at my computer screen.

  “Jerks?” I added, slyly.

  “Think about it,” you may be saying as you read this blog post on your flawless e-paper during a long train ride.“Kindle combines your love of reading with your even bigger love of putting your book down so it can recharge for three hours.” Well, you’ve got me there, I hadn’t really thought about that.

  (via The Written Nerd)

• The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
  

  When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

  Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

  You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

  Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Monday words (and music): the end of time

This weekend Rice’s Shepherd School held its annual Chamber Music Festival, which is a great, free, all-day series of six concerts put on by students. This year the festival focused on Eastern European music from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is really the sweet spot of the classical music I like. But what really excited me was the program for the fourth concert, which included Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

As I’ve written before, the Quartet is one of my favorite pieces of music, but this is the first time I’ve heard it live. I am no good at writing about music, but I can say it’s a long quartet – eight movements – and the music alternates between furious clashing noise and long, beautiful, pure tones. This performance received a long standing ovation, which is especially impressive considering it ends on a very slow, haunting note, and not the loud, designed-for-applause climax that so many classical pieces end with.

This festival came at a particularly good time for me as I work my way through Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Not only did his blog introduce me to the Quartet a couple of years ago, but the part of his book I’m reading right now corresponds almost exactly to what was played at the festival. I felt much more informed and smug than my usual self.

Here’s Ross on how the Quartet was written:

A composer of advanced ideas and strong religious feeling, Messiaen had been serving as a medical orderly when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He was captured near Nancy with two other musician-soldiers, the cellist Etienne Pasquier and the clarinetist Henri Akoka. While the three were being held with other French captives in an open field, Akoka played through a newly composed Messiaen piece titled “Abyss of the Birds” – a clarinet solo that took the form of precise yet disconnected gestures, slow, trancelike changing lines intertwining with rapid runs and squawks and trills. When Messiaen was sent with his musician friends to Stalag VIII A, near Gorlitz, Germany, he set about composing seven other movements for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, those being the instruments that he and his fellow inmates played…

Stalag VIII A was staffed by several officers who lacked true devotion to the Hitler regime. As Rebecca Rischin reveals in a book about the Quartet, one of the guards, Karl-Albert Brull, advised French-Jewish prisoners not to try to escape, on the grounds that they were safer in camp than they would be in Vichy France. Brull also took up the cause of Messiaen’s music, giving the composer pencils, erasers, and music paper with which to work. The prisoner was relieved of his duties and placed in an empty barracks so that he could compose in peace, with a guard posted at the door to turn away intruders.

The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp’s makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed.

Democracy at work

Via Josh:

When I first saw this I had two simultaneous reactions:

1. That is awesome.
2. That is what our democracy has come to.

Serfs of the Turf – New York Times

What he said: 

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

Fake Steve Jobs interviewed on Ars

I don’t know why I’m such a fan of Fake Steve Jobs, but I am.  Ars Technica interviews him:

Charles Jade: I noticed your book was printed on paper. It’s an interesting choice in medium for the inventor of the iPod, and by extension the audiobook, and even more so with Apple under constant attack by groups like Greenpeace. Can you tell us about your thought process in creating the physicality that is the book?

Fake Steve Jobs: I love paper. Paper is beautiful. There’s something about the way paper feels between your fingers that’s just, well, right. In the case of Options I insisted on using a very special paper stock that had in the end to be invented specially for this book. I spent about six months just working on the paper itself. Looked at thousands of samples. You have no idea how many shades of white there are. Then once you get the exact right paper you have to experiment with how the ink will look on that paper and which ink is best and then what typeface — it’s super complex. And only then, after all that, can you start writing.

Machine Logic

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to test run your arguments:

When you first hear about Amazon.com’s “Mechanical Turk” service, which allows “requesters” to pay “Turk workers” a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans, what’s the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been discussed previously on Slashdot, but I’ll bet a week’s wages for a Mechanical Turk worker ($1.45, according to one of them) that I was the first person who used it to pay people to write rebuttals to one of my arguments.

I’m a big fan of hacking the Mechanical Turk. For another fun example, see The Sheep Market.

Roll your own high-definition map

Digital Urban has a great tutorial on how to use Google Maps, a screen-shot capture application, and a image stitching application to create great looking large-scale maps. Looks very cool.

Noise

Last weekend I bought Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise from Book People in Austin (the largest independent book seller in Texas). I paid the full, non-Amazon price, which is unusual for me, but I’ve been waiting for this book to arrive for almost two years, which is when I started reading Ross’s blog of the same name. Ross is the music critic at the New Yorker, and he writes clearly and without pretension about both classical music and acts like Bjork and Radiohead. The little I know about classical music comes from him.

I’m only about one third through the book, but I mention it because it’s received much more buzz recently than I expected, and the New York Times book review just bestowed a well-deserved blessing.

And speaking of the New York Times and classical music, the Magazine has an interesting article about Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor who was just named the music director of the L.A. Philharmonic. A good read, even though I am skeptical of big-haired conductor theatrics.

Back from Maker Faire

It was a great weekend. The weather was perfect, the crowd size was perfect, and it was good to catch up with old friends. Being around so many smart, creative, and dorky people was awesome, even though I now feel incredibly uncreative.

Everybody that came in had to sign a waiver to get a green wristband which allowed you to do any number of probably safe but hacked-together activities, like ride in a giant wheel. The whole event really had the feeling of a bunch of people informally getting together to show off cool stuff they did for the hell of it. Unlike a lot of other festivals or fairs I’ve been to, it didn’t feel commercial and I didn’t feel the least ripped off.

Highlights include:

• A life-size replica of the board game Mousetrap. Incredibly bizzare, but strangely captivating to watch. And I’ve never even played the game. When we watched it didn’t work exactly right the first time, but the performers did a great job making even that seem like part of the show. There’s an associated blog with more pictures, but there’s only one post.

  

• There were several minor internet celebrities on the schedule. The original Mentos and Diet Coke guys put on a live show that brought everything else to a halt. The original iPhone hacker also presented, although we didn’t see that.

  

• Lots of home-made and hacked bicycles. There was a little amusement park made out of bicycle parts, the major function of which seemed to be spinning people into dizziness.

• Little kids. This place was a kid heaven. There was an area where they could make model rockets and shoot them off. And apparently, they love running around in Diet Coke spray.

• An area where you could buy DIY kits for stuff like MP3 players or digital clocks and get help building it right there.

• A guy who knitted with drumsticks and played a drum set at the same time. I actually have no idea what to make of that.

• Giant catapult. Enough said.

The rest of my photos can be found here, and the Maker Faire blog has tons more. This is a great event, and I definitely recommend going next year.