I gave a talk at a the Boston Ruby group last Wednesday. The meeting was generously hosted by the Boston start-up Back Channel Media. On the way out, BCM offered attendees schwag in the form of branded inflatable globes and Slinkies. On Thursday, I suggested to SJ Klein and Seth Schoen that we might be able to use the globe as a research aid during the MIT Mystery Hunt. That seemed like a good idea until they pointed out that there were a few inaccuracies on the map. Sure enough, a quick glance revealed that:

• Burkino Faso is marked as Upper Volta (it's only been 22 years) with a capital as Duagadougou.
• Rwanda seems to be a small horizontal bar across a country marked both as Ucanda and Buhuno.
• Zimbabn is labeled clearly while Morocco, clearly divided into two countries, is not marked in either of the resulting (and differently colored) states.
• A missing border and a color identical to the ocean (!) renders Egypt completely underwater. Yemen, Iraq, Thailand, Romania, Austria, Croatia, Finland, (whose name is missing), and the eastern quarter of India are better off in that they blend into the ocean but have river colored borders demarcating them from the rest of the sea.
• The Arabian peninsula is host to Qatah, the United Arab Emiraies, and the Saudi capital of Rivaiih.
• A bit to the north, Jurdan borders Irae and Lebanaw.
• The countries Czek and Slovak seem to be located just above Czechoslovakia which, in turn, is just above Huudatn.
• A similar situation happens in Yugoslavia which seems to be next to Monienegro and other more familiar Slavic states.
• Amstercam is right next to the the German city of Roro.
• Swirzerlano sits in the middle of Europe.
• England's Lworpool and Rirmingham are clearly, and clearly incorrectly, marked.
• Both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States are clearly marked while China, despite having dozens of its cities labeled, is not.
• St. Petersburg seems a full 1000+ kilometers from any body of water and closer to Bellarussian than to a port.
• Lapan shows many cities including Tokya, Kyole, and others -- while most seem to be located somewhere off the coast of Lapan in the Pacific ocean.
• The Korean peninsula contains N. Korea and S. Aurla.
• Myanmar is marked as Burma (although I might forgive that one if I had reason to believe it was intentional).
• Malaysia is labeled Malaskia.
• The continent at the South Pole is proudly marked Tarctica.

Of course, this list is extremely incomplete. I've barely looked at cities, rivers, and even some country names and I've barely looked at the degree to which the cities and labels are correct but incorrectly placed. The full list of errata would, in a manner reminscent of English As She Is Spoke, be very, very, long. While the globe does not bear any markings of a producer (I wouldn't want to take credit for it either), a group of us suspected that we might be able to find the country of origin by locating the one country that was represented completely accurately. We couldn't find a single one.

I competed in the MIT Mystery Hunt again this year for Codex (this year, we were Codex Ixtlilxochitl). Codex has improved in the rankings every year. This time, we came in second place solving 106 of 108 puzzles in 40 hours -- only 90 minutes behind Palindrome (this year, they were Dr. Awkward). I'm very much looking forward to helping Codex improve again next year. Our team has an interesting mix of free software advocates (e.g., myself, Seth Schoen, Don Armstrong, Dave Turner) and a very large contingent from Microsoft. The effect is pretty impressive. I'm looking forward to the days when we work together on much more than just puzzles.

I noticed recently that often had trouble remembering mnemonics. To help remember them, I've started a list of mnemonics that I have trouble remembering on my Wikipedia user page. If there are mnemonics you have trouble remembering, you should leave a comment on my blog or a message on my Wikipedia talk page because it's possible I have trouble with them as well. If I do, I'll add them to my list. If they are not even in Wikipedia's List of mnemonics I can add them so others who forget them also might be able to recall them as well. One thing I noticed when making the list was that in some situations (e.g., the lists of planets or the hierarchy of the taxonomy in biology), I have no problem remembering the thing that the mnemonics in question are referring to but can't remember the mnemonic itself. Of course, I can sometimes use the referent as a mnemonic for the mnemonic. Also, since my list is hosted in my user page on Wikipedia, I should also urge you to considering donating to the Wikimedia Foundation to help support the great work they and to insure that they can purchase the bandwidth and servers necessary to keep Wikipedia going.

The previous year saw far too much fighting over who gets to define and control the term free culture. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that these fights conflate a very important discussion about the goals of a set of nascent social movements -- or the lack thereof -- with much less important issues of semantics, definitions, and control over terms. The term is being used in a way that describes a whole lot of projects I support and participate in fully -- and a few I don't. And I think that's OK. When Erik M ller and I launched the Free Cultural Works Definition (at the time, the Free Content and Expression Definition), we struggled to find a good term for the works that we wanted to liberate. We thought about using the terms content, expression, knowledge, information, art, data and communication but each word seemed to exclude an important body of works or producers. Few musicians we knew thought of their productions as "content" while few encyclopedia writers did not. The term we liked most was culture: it defines a very broad set of practice and has very positive connotations. Of course, others had already been using the term free culture so we spent some reading up on the term and talking to the people most closely associated with it. Originally, the term seems to have its roots in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I reread the book to get an idea for exactly what Lessig meant when he used the term but, upon reaching the end, I found myself without a good answer. The book's index included a promising entry for "Free culture, defined" which pointed to a short section in the preface:

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. (emphasis mine)

Framed by a negative definition of what free culture is not, Lessig's definition describes the broad space between two unattainable extremes. This resulting ambiguity is fully intended: Lessig has not only spoken out against my particular suggestion but against any definition and the process of offering ex cathedra definitions or goals altogether [1]. In personal conversations about our definition, Lessig was initially very supportive. In fact, it was Lessig who introduced Erik and I to each other and suggested that we work together. What Lessig did disagree with us on however, was calling the definition the Free Culture Definition. I think that Lessig felt some sense of ownership of the term and felt that he and others had defined it and been using it in a way that was broader and incompatible with the definition we were proposing and with any definition of the type of we were suggesting. Early on, Lessig blessed a group of students to create a Free Culture student movement. Most active now in Harvard Free Culture and Free Culture NYU and but in a handful of other places as well, these groups have been involved in everything from the promotion of transgressive approaches to IP, to speech bubbles, to anti-DRM work, to protecting the right of cereal restaurants to operate. When Erik and I suggested to this group that they might benefit from adopting the Free Cultural Works Definition as a set of explicit ideals or goals for their movement, the larger part of the coalition soundly rejected the idea. Like Lessig, they wanted free culture to refer to wide variety of projects and did not feel good about describing any work by sympathetic parties as "non-ideal." Erik and I were faced with two choices: we could call our definition the Free Culture Definition and in effect engage in a power struggle with Lessig and with some portion of the free culture student movement or we could pick another term. While we don't like the alternatives as much as free culture, we didn't have a lot of trouble deciding that going with a term like free cultural work or free content and expression was the better choice. This is why I am a little worried about the recently announced UK-based Free Culture Foundation. I have nothing but respect for the founders (Matt Lee, Tom Chance, and Rob Myers) and trust them to create the type of free culture organization that I would like to see. I am very much looking forward to working closely with them on this project in the future. They seem likely to choose a set of goals and adopt a set of strategies in line with the ones I've argued for. But in that my goals and strategies have run into opposition among many of the most visible people using the term free culture in the past, that's also why I'm a little worried. SJ Klein and I were recently saying that its time to start naming organizations and projects in this area using only words in dead languages. That way, we can side-step the (unimportant) semantic arguments over who gets to control existing terms and focus on the real goal of building stronger social movements, setting goals that sound as unthreatening to each other as they actually are, and building better tools. Without semantic arguments in our way, we'll be able stronger to build coalitions and work together in all the ways we should be.

[1]

This is an important distinction because it is also possible to disagree with the first fully articulated definition but also feel that offering another set of goals -- for example, a set that allowed for commercial use or anything under current CC licenses -- was productive. After all, I have been arguing for much longer in favor of any set of goals much longer and more strenuously than I have argued for any particular set of goals and I still feel that a set goals is much more important than any paritcular one.

In his latest talk Lawrence Lessig spends time defending the use of non-commericial use clauses and goes into detail about how the free culture movement does not need and should not have definitions of freedom. In doing so, he was referring to a public discussion the two of us had most recently in September. While my name was not mentioned until the questions, he implicitly criticized both my freedom definition and my call for any definition at all. As usual, his criticism has made me think a lot about what it is that I'm trying to do. I've been thinking about a conversation I had with Aaron Swartz recently where he was also criticizing me for focusing too much on definitions. He was skeptical about my assertion that social movements and freedom movements needed "definitions." I thought about it and told him then that I thought I'd been making a mistake by saying I want free culture movements to have definitions. More accurately, what I want are goals, standards, or ideals. I want to be able to say, "music when will be free when every producer can do A, B, and C and every listener can do X, Y, and Z." I want the possibility of a shared utopianism. I want these kinds of goals because I believe that these images of what what things might be like if we win is what motivates us to win in the first place. I believe that the idea that, "things might be better" is simply never as powerful as a strong, perhaps even unattainable, ideal that challenges people and gives them something to strive for. The leaders of other successful social movements I know can tell you exactly what they are trying to achieve -- although few of them ever will realize it completely. No free culture movement leader can do this with any authority. For reasons I've talked about in the past, I think that fact may ultimately make us less successful. In the free software movement, our most important goal (free software itself) is documented in the Free Software Definition. Even the most ethically motivated among us aren't perfect -- most of us use some proprietary software -- but we have an ideal to hold our behavior up to and a method by which we can always improve. Inspired by free software, I unimaginatively said that I thought free culture needed a "definition." I probably could have found a better way to describe what I wanted and I'll do so in the future. I suppose I should have thought a little more about the definition of definition.

The Digital Disobedience event that I helped organize on December 1st went (IMHO) very well. If you missed it, you can check out this video (MP4) that the Berkman Center has recently posted. I was particularly impressed with Stanford's Fred Turner whose work I was not familiar with before. I haven't had a chance to check out From Counterculture to Cyberculture but I am looking forward to doing so soon.

Is Mika's new shirt meaningless engrish drivel or a statement against the violence of DRM? Or both?

I managed to find the futon we sleep on for $20 (USD) in Harlem. When that mattress got a little compressed and hard, I managed to get my friend Shekhar to loan us his futon and frame for the year. I also found and dragged in a decent fold out bed in New York that we keep in our living room for guests. Last night, I managed to procure a very nice mattress pad for free. Some might call me the bed winner of the Acetarium household.

I went to buy some pseudoephedrine yesterday because we ran out at home. A sign on the shelf prompted me to ask for it at the pharmacy. They would only sell it to me in small blister-packs and in order to buy any, they wanted to transcribe all of the information on my driver's license. A little bit of research reveals that this is roughly connected to the national Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, signed into law earlier this year as part of the PATRIOT act extension. Apparently, pseudoephedrine is used to created (illegal) methamphetamine and meth chemists qualify as terrorists under PATRIOT. States, however, have gone even further. Oregon has gone so far as to make pseudoephedrine a Schedule III controlled substance that requires a prescription. Many other states, like Massachusetts have made pseudoephedrine a over-the-counter drug that's kept, well, on the other side of the counter. It was, I think, the first I ever had to buy an over-the-counter drug over a counter. Usually, I just pick it off the shelf myself. I find that fact slightly humorous. But it hardly seems worth collecting and recording a pile of personal information on every person who wants to buy a weeks worth of cold medicine -- particularly when the largest producers of U.S. meth remain outside of the country.

I'm going to be in Seattle between December 16-19 and 26-31 and in Tokyo between December 19-26. I know it's around the holidays but if there are folks in either place that want to meet up for a keysigning or a caffeinated/alcoholic beverage, or even have me give a quick talk at a LUG or something, it might be a lot of fun. Please don't hesitate to get in contact.

I am excited to see that a number of local hackers have organized the first Dev House Boston for this coming Saturday. There are many projects I'm interested in but I might try to take the opportunity to work on my iRony Rockbox Installer because it's likely that there will be many people there with different types of iPods. If you're going, I look forward to seeing you there, although I might not show up until a little later in the afternoon.

I recently found out that Simon and Schuster (and some other publishers) have been publishing books under an MTV imprint. In a way that is slightly reminiscent of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, MTV has given their project the obvious name: MTV Books. That is to say, Music ... Television ... Books. Of course, MTV Books is hardly constrained to traditional book media and been proactive in releasing MTV Books eBooks (including the intriguingly titled Oh My Goth! and Life as a Poser). Additionally, they have published an MTV Photobooth -- a Music Television photography book. While they've published Sing Like the Stars! (quite a few of their titles are exclamations), a paperback accompanied by an audio CD, they do not seem to have published an audio book. I am looking forward to the day when they do so and finish the process of coming full circle.

I am helping to organize and host an event called Digital Disobedience on cyberactivism and culture jamming this Friday with Harvard Free Culture. The event will explore the interplay between technology, activism, and cultural critique. Here are the details if you are local to Cambridge/Boston and would like to drop by:

Digital Disobedience

Cyberactivism and Culture Jamming

Friday, December 1, 18:00

Science Center 110, Harvard University

(One block north of Harvard Square T)

The event will feature talks by:

• Ji Lee, Artist and Creator of the Bubble Project
• J. Salvatore Testa, Defender of Truth and Liberty, Hacktivismo
• Prof. Fred Turner, Stanford University and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture
• Prof. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard VES Department, teaching Art and Activism since 1989: Culture Jam

The format will be interactive with short presentations from the speakers and then break-out groups to discuss thoughts and questions with the presenters. A few people have voiced a desire to do some culture jamming of our own afterward. My birthday is the next day so maybe we can have that turn into a little bit of a celebration.

Here's an association or riddle game that Mika and I created last night that I found interesting.

• Give a player a list of three random, dissimilar objects (e.g., pancakes, manhole covers, and condominiums). Tell them that you are thinking of some quality or feature shared by all three and ask them to tell you what it might be.
• After letting them think for some time, or even after supplying answers, tell the player that you lied and that you didn't have an answer in mind. In fact, the goal of the game is to come up with any and all associations.

Most people I've talked feel that the problem becomes easier after one realizes that there isn't a correct answer. Of course, the strategy that the second stage invites (thinking of anything without the idea that the answer might be right or wrong) is exactly what the player should have been doing from the beginning. Why don't we? In what situations might we be more creative problem solvers if we pretended that there isn't a correct answer?

I'm been perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling. The issue has been discussed by many people, most recently and eloquently in a blog post by Scott James Remnant. I have never been 100% comfortable with our (Ubuntu's) decision to ship proprietary drivers. The Ubuntu philosophy document -- which Mark Shuttleworth and I drafted originally -- says quite unambiguously:

Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.

I believe this deeply. Consequently, I feel that binary drivers in Ubuntu are, and always have been, a failure to live up to our principles. If our philosophy document is still representative, most people in our community should be a little uncomfortable with them -- even if they think, as most of us do, that shipping them is the correct thing to do. Early on Ubuntu decided that binary firmware and hardware drivers would be distributed and quasi-supported in restricted. While not completely comfortable with the move, I could understand and defend it for three reasons:

1. The drivers were easily removable and not enabled by default unless necessary to achieve functioning hardware.
2. As part of this process, we promised to work with vendors to accelerate the freeing/open-sourcing of their drivers.
3. Perhaps most importantly, I couldn't imagine not using them if it were the choice between non-free drivers or inoperable hardware.

The proposal to include proprietary nVidia driver in place of the existing free nVidia driver is important because it changes, or eliminates, the first and third justifications. Since the first issue has been discussed in depth, it seem appropriate to focus on the third and final point. The point is perhaps best introduced with an observation:

While I have met many people who research and buy hardware to avoid the need for non-free drivers, something I do myself, I have never met anyone who voluntarily chooses inoperable hardware on a computer they use over working hardware through a non-free driver.

While not airtight, this observation is precisely why the old policy of using non-free drivers only when no free drivers exist works so well. By effectively synonymizing use of the non-free driver with use of the hardware, the crisis created by non-free drivers is rendered paradoxical: anybody using a piece of hardware that only works with non-free drivers is, by definition, either using non-free drivers or not using the hardware. The only way to not use non-free drivers in situations where no free drivers exist is to not use hardware that requires them. If you use different hardware, you will not need to use non-free drivers. This important justification is completely inapplicable to the proposal to include non-free drivers in place of free (but not perfect) alternatives. Second, while shipping non-free drivers is wrong because we lose our freedom and violate our philosophy, the desire for basic hardware support is universal and important enough that it's defensible. One reason that the "binary by default for bling" situation alarms me is that I don't believe that the desire for desktop bling is as universal, or as strong, as the desire for working hardware. An analogy might be stealing food to feed your family and stealing a CD from the record store. Both are wrong because stealing is wrong, but I have a lot more sympathy for the hungry thief in the first example because CDs are not as necessary as food and because many people would rather go without a new CD than steal. We can ask: "Which is worse: selling your soul for a decent job or selling your soul for a PS3?" In an absolute sense, neither is worse; but it's easier to support the former than the latter. I'm very impressed with Beryl -- but I have trouble empathizing strongly with the need for a spinning desktop cube. New users may be impressed and attracted to an Ubuntu desktop powered by proprietary drivers. They might also be impressed by proprietary applications. However, it is self-defeating to attract new users to our free platform and principles by compromising our core values. Many users already make the decision to use non-free video drivers and Ubuntu makes it very easy to do so once they have made that choice. Installing binary drivers by default is choosing for the large number of users who will stick with any default. It may be a conservative stance but as long as we believe that a non-insignificant number of users would choose to live without bling before compromising Ubuntu's philosophy and goals, we should make the difficult decision to side with freedom by default. When discussing this issue, many people say, it's not my decision or it isn't my call. Regardless of whether anyone agrees with me and regardless of who the final decision is up to -- and it's not clear to me now -- I believe that the Ubuntu community has the power to inform and shape the development of their distribution. As the Ubuntu community, we can make our position heard. The best place to do that right now seems to be the Accelerated X specification comments page. One can also email the the Technical Board (for technical comments) and the Community Council (for principle or philosophy related issues).

My friend James Grimmelmann, currently a Resident Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, contacted me recently because he was concerned that it doesn't seem likely that parallel distribution language is going to make it in latest draft of the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses. The issues and arguments around parallel distribution are complex but James and I both think that the status quo represents a mistake and a lost opportunity by CC. As a result, we have written a position statement that tries to explain the issues simply, make a case for parallel distribution, and answer some of the criticism that has been leveled against the idea. Prompted by conversations with hackers from Debian (myself included), CC lawyers recommend new "parallel distribution" language at the beginning of the CC 3.0 license revision process as a way to fix unanticipated effects of the current CC anti-DRM clause. Immediate negative reactions by a number of people demoted the language to an issue for debate. While the resulting debate has been both lengthy and heated, it has not involved more than a small handful of voices or led to any firm decisions. Time is running out for the drafts of CC's 3.0 licenses and unless something changes, the status quo -- no parallel distribution -- will remain. As a result, it's extremely important that users of CC licenses try to familiarize themselves with the issue and to make their voice heard. James and I feel the lack of a parallel distribution language in the CC licenses represents a failure by CC to live up to its own ideals and to do what is in the best interest of the users of CC licenses. Please read our position statement, pass the link and article around to others, and make yourself heard either on the cc-licenses list by emailing cc-licenses@lists.ibiblio.org or by posting a response on the comments page in my wiki. Finally, as a Debian developer, it's important for me to say that I do not think that the lack of parallel distribution makes the CC licenses non-free under the DFSG -- especially in light of the recent general resolution on the GFDL which deemed the GFDL, which contains language that is extremely similar to the current CC text, DFSG free. CC should use parallel distribution language because it is the right thing to do for the free culture movement and for the users of CC works and not because it will have any effect on the inclusion of CC BY and BY-SA works in Debian. You can find the position statement at: http://wiki.mako.cc/ParallelDistribution

I think it wold be a good idea if companies did not typeset their bicycles in ways that remind people of falling. With that said, the red and white theme is a particularly nice touch in this case.