FINALLY

…that will change on Jan. 1, when “The Prophet” enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.

This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status — a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose both money and creative control.

But it will also be a boon for readers, who will have more editions to choose from, and for writers and other artists who can create new works based on classic stories without getting hit with an intellectual property lawsuit.

…

The sudden deluge of available works traces back to legislation Congress passed in 1998, which extended copyright protections by 20 years. The law reset the copyright term for works published from 1923 to 1977 — lengthening it from 75 years to 95 years after publication — essentially freezing their protected status. (The law is often referred to by skeptics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” since it has kept “Steamboat Willie,” the first Disney film featuring Mickey, under copyright until 2024.)

Now that the term extension has run out, the spigot has been turned back on. Each January will bring a fresh crop of novels, plays, music and movies into the public domain. Over the next few years, the impact will be particularly dramatic, in part because the 1920s were such a fertile and experimental period for Western literature, with the rise of masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/books/copyright-extension-literature-public-domain.html

These are really remarkably soothing to watch. The narrative tone is somewhere between Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers. My only wish is that he would do ones that are more lightly edited, down to 40 minutes or so. Although then I wouldn’t have time to watch them ;P

Julian Baumgartner, of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration in Chicago, condenses over 40 hours of delicate swiping, scraping, and paint retouching into a 11.5 minute narrated video of a recent conservation project. Baumgartner walks the audience through his restoration of The Assassination of Archimedes, which involved cleaning a darkened varnish from the surface of the piece, removing the work from its original wooden panel using both modern and traditional techniques, mounting the thin paper-based painting to acid-free board, and finally touching up small areas that had become worn over the years. You can watch the entire process in the video above, and learn about Baumgartner’s other conservation projects on Instagram and Youtube.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/12/conservation-by-baumgartner/

Sans Forgetica is a free-to-download font that supposedly helps you “remember your study notes”, designed by typographer Stephen Banham and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Behavioural Business Lab. It’s a remakably hostile mindhack: the letterforms are designed to be difficult to read without losing their legibility, thereby “prompting your brain to engage in deeper processing” and “question the gestalt understanding of type”.

 

Millitext is a “font” whose glyphs are just one pixel wide. But it’s really a clever exploitation of how subpixels — the individual red, green and blue lights of an LCD display — are triggered by pixels of certain colors. For example, a magenta pixel triggers the red and blue subpixels, leaving the green one dark between them.

Both via Boing Boing:

Sans Forgetica, a font to make you remember

Millitext

Posting mostly for the tangential collection of links in this paragraph:

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

Globally, the rate has fallen by 38% from its peak in 1994. As a result, over 4m lives have been saved—more than four times as many people as were killed in combat over the period. The decline has happened at different rates and different times in different parts of the world. In the West, it started long ago: in Britain, for instance, the male rate peaked at around 30 per 100,000 a year in 1905, and again at the same level in 1934, during the Great Depression; among women it peaked at 12 in 1964. In most of the West, it has been flat or falling for the past two decades.

In other parts of the world, rates have dropped more recently. China’s started to come down in the 1990s and declined steadily, flattening out in recent years. Russia’s, Japan’s, South Korea’s and India’s rates, still high, have all fallen.

America is the big exception. Until the turn of the century the rate there dropped along with those in other rich countries. But since then, it has risen by 18% to 12.8—well above China’s current rate of seven. The declines in those other big countries, however, far outweigh the rise in America.

https://www.economist.com/international/2018/11/24/suicide-is-declining-almost-everywhere

http://wondermark.com/c1444/

…and there’s some suggestion of the dangers of centralization. That’s quite telling too. The Cold War really shaped the way we see the relationship between AI and economic planning. A computer-controlled economy tends to make us think of megalomaniac evil supercomputer taking over the world, till you burst it with a logic bomb like, “Omnitocom, what is love?” Occasionally you get more benign economic planning by AI — like in The Dispossessed where the computer isn’t personified at all, or in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, or most of the Minds in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. But generally we think AI in economics is kind of sinister, and we think it’s sinister because it’s centralized and it’s totalitarian. I don’t think that this imagery — this way of looking at things — has served us well over the past half century. Finance and computation have in fact grown more and more integrated, and we’ve missed too many of the dangers because we’ve focused so much on centralization vs. decentralization. Are gig economy platforms centralized or decentralized? Well, they’re both those things in different ways. It’s the wrong question to ask. A better question is, “Omnitocom, are the platform’s stakeholders empowered? Are the transformative processes unleashed by platformization subject to democratic scrutiny?”

…

But I also think economics can work as a well of weird ideas. So not just something to get “right,” but something to deliberately do “wrong.” Economics is filled with plausible assumptions. So make some implausible assumptions, and imagine what changes. Invent some aliens with some exotic cognitive biases, and extrapolate how their economy works. Think of the weirdest smart contract you can imagine your protagonist getting tangled up in. Imagine a biopunk world in which feelings can be literally bought and sold. Create a society in which the division of labor is done in some radically different way. Develop a world of great abundance — perhaps kind of post-scarcity — in which anything that is paid for is paid for a brief stint of on-the-spot labor. Or a society where tweets are used as currency. Or imagine there are no economies of scale. Or come up with a society where prices are probabilities rather than fixed points ($1d6). Or imagine a world where temporal discounting is reversed, so faced with two similar rewards, people tend to choose the one furthest in the future. Why are things like this, and what are the implications? And what are the implications of the implication? You know. Science fiction.

https://medium.com/adjacent-possible/the-economics-of-science-fiction-c8a3b7fd21a5

This is a much funner read than you would imagine 🙂

Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.

Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In homes and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and every kind of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It is glitter.

What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.

Ah, but if you, like an impertinent child seeking a logistical timetable of Santa Claus’ nocturnal intercontinental journey, demand a more detailed definition — a word of warning: The path to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, C.I.A. levels of obfuscation, the invisible regions of the visible spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as “10-6 m” and also New Jersey.

What Is Glitter? – The New York Times

A useful summary of the latest Facebook privacy scandal:

We don’t yet know what precise methods Facebook uses to undercut its promises, but one thing is true – the company has made to this reporter, and many other reporters, users, lawmakers, federal agencies, and academics untrue statements with an intent to deceive. And it has created false or misleading impressions. It has lied. And it has done so deliberately. Over and over again.

And it is still lying today. Faced with evidence of its data-sharing agreements where – let’s not forget this – Facebook provided third parties access to people’s personal messages, and more importantly to their contacts lists and friends’ feeds, the company claims it broke no promises because it defined the outfits it signed agreements with as “service providers.” And so, according to Facebook, it didn’t break a pactit has with the US government’s trade watchdog, the FTC, not to share private data without permission, and likewise not to break agreements it has with its users.

Facebook also argues it had clearly communicated that it was granting apps access to people’s private messages, and that users had to link their Spotify, Netflix, Royal Bank of Canada, et al, accounts with their Facebook accounts to activate it. And while Facebook’s tie-ups with, say, Spotify and Netflix were well publicized, given this week’s outcry, arguably not every user was aware or made aware of what they were getting into. In any case, the “experimental” access to folks’ private conversations was discontinued nearly three years ago.

The social network claims it only ever shared with companies what people had agreed to share or chosen to make public, sidestepping a key issue: that people unwittingly had their profiles viewed, slurped, harvested, and exploited by their friends’ connected apps and websites.

As for the question of potential abuse of personal data handed to third parties, Facebook amazingly used the same line that it rolled out when it attempted to deflect the Cambridge Analytica scandal: that third parties were beholden to Facebook’s rules about using data. But, of course, Facebook doesn’t check or audit whether that is the case.

And what is its self-reflective apology this time for granting such broad access to personal data to so many companies? It says that it is guilty of not keeping on top of old agreements, and the channels of private data to third parties stayed open much longer than they should have done after it had made privacy-enhancing changes.

We can’t prove it yet, and may never be able to unless more internal emails find their way out, but let’s be honest, we all know that this is another lie. Facebook didn’t touch those agreements because it didn’t want anyone to look at them. It chose to be willfully ignorant of the details of its most significant agreements with some of the world’s largest companies.

And it did so because it still believes it can ride this out, and that those agreements are going to be what keeps Facebook going as a corporation.

What Zuckerberg didn’t factor into his strategic masterstroke, however, was one critical detail: no one likes a liar. And when you lie repeatedly, to people’s faces, you go from liar to lying asshole. And lying asshole is enough to make people delete your app.

And when that app is deleted, the whole sorry house of cards will come tumbling down. And Facebook will become Friendster.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/20/facebook_disaster/