Tag Archives: creativecommons

Wire & Plastic & Flashing Lights

How’d that video get made?

Professor Kliq was a music student at the University of Chicago. He released a couple of albums under a Creative Commons license so that people could feel free to copy them and use the music without having to ask his permission. It’s worked out well for him – he’s gotten gigs doing soundtracks, gotten invited to do concerts, received donations, all without a major label backing him. When Chris Acton and I were doing the Hope for Hotties movie, Professor Kliq was an easy choice for the soundtrack.

Victor Hagelin is a french speaking animator. No idea how he found the track, but he just made a video for it. He didn’t ask permission or negotiate for the rights – he just made it, because Creative Commons works.

And then Professor Kliq got worked up and remastered the track to bring it up to date, and that’s how we get Wire and Flashing Lights:

Broken Road is an SEO optimized music video by Numbers and Letters

I’m gonna brag a little and say I knew Katie Hasty when. She’s rolled with the Old Dirty Barristers and she’s good peeps. I had to share her latest video because it has stepped hard on all my buttons. My buttons might be a little cracked, so hard has she stepped.

This upbeat banger from Numbers and Letters is all about Kittens, Sex, Fail – the most popular search terms on the internet.

From their description:

This lyric video was designed to make use of the three of the most popular SEO-friendly terms: “kitten,” “sex” and “fail.” They are among the internet collective’s favorite things to search for. At times, they are interchangeable, full of meaning and without meaning. Congratulations, us.

This video was made possible through Creative Commons-licensed content and the contributions of Numbers And Letters fans. Cats cats cats

BTW – she does the right thing and cites her sources in the youtube page. GO KATIE! Buy the album when it comes out in APRIL.. WTF?

A Poem about Proper Paperwork

Today is my birthday, and I’ve been overwhelmed with happy birthday wishes. I’m very fortunate and grateful.
I’d like to give you a gift back.
Here is a poem about the importance of filling out forms.
Please enjoy “We Know” in a browser like Chrome or Firefox.

Tonight we will be having dinner at Superfine in DUMBO and then off to see “Black Watch” at the St Ann’s theater. Perhaps we will see you Saturday at Cinco de Matto?

How to Safely Win an Impossible Book

When I heard that Charles Yu was giving away the mysterious “Book from Nowhere” from his novel I was terribly excited. The book is a McGuffin/plot point in Yu’s novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” – the protagonist is the author who gives himself the book before shooting himself in the stomach.

It’s one of those books.

The publisher actually created a physical mockup of the all-metal book from the story and let Wired give it away in a contest – best comment wins the tome. I dashed off an entry and a few days ago I learned that I won that contest.

My winning comment was what I could get done in a little bit, but I’m so excited to have won that I cooked up a special presentation of the story I wrote.  Charle’s book deals with fathers and sons and families and regret and time and loss and paralysis and so does this.

Click here to read “How to Safely Live on in a Science Fiction Universe”

I wrote this.  I can’t illustrate worth a damn, so I wrote some code to do it for me.  Every time you load that page, it will reach out to Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images on the subjects of mistakes, loss, time, etc.  Much thanks to Tove Hermanson and Sam for their help as my editors.  There are also links in there. Click them.

Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

I loved this book.
Forget my review and go get it now, it’s wonderful. If you don’t have the scratch right now, that’s ok:  Cory Doctorow walks the talk and has published his book under a creative commons license.  You can get “Makers” for free at his site as a pdf, as html, ePub, or as an audiobook.  Just go get it and read it. Why?
The characters felt right and true and good and wonderful, like people you’ve always wanted to be friends with.  It’s the story of people playing around and doing the creative work that felt right to them, pushing to stay free and work on beautiful things.  Their hard work takes a damn beating from the world around them and they rise up after that beating.

I was sad closing it, because I wanted more from them, more for them, and another thing…

I always wanted to be Perry, but I looked in that book and I’m Sammy.

My Best Books of 2009

I like to read.
Here are the best books I read this year.

Nonfiction

Born On A Blue Day & Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet

Yes, it’s two books, but it’s really about the same subject. Daniel Tammet is an autistic gay savant synesthete. He won the unusualness lottery. The first book is his life story and the second is a tour through what he’s learned about the human mind. An amazing amount of good neuro and cognitive science in here, presented in a clear, non-technical way. You can read more about it in my earlier review.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

It’s brilliant. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines all of human history through a single lens, in this case win-win games.
The thesis is that human life and all progress comes about as a series of non-zero sum interactions, games where both parties win.

It gets a bit repetitive some times – when a story begins you can start predicting how it will end because there is only one theme in the book, but it effectively demonstrates the idea and shows you the impact throughout history and applications for the future

Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

When I was a kid, my answer to “whaddya wanna be when you grow up” was always “Happy.” 1 I had noticed how often adults didn’t seem to be happy and how often they weren’t doing anything about it. Seligman is no snake-oil guru, he’s a past president of the APA and an experimental psychologist who worked on some of the great experiments of the 20th century. His explanations of happiness are based on actual study and experimentation and the recipes for success seem to match up with my personal experience. While I haven’t read his book on Learned Optimism, I’ve heard similar praise for it.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater

Pure poetry. Laura uses the structure of foundational experiments in social psychology to raise deep questions about medicine, free will, obedience, and the ethics of experiments that involve conscious beings.
I’ve reconsidered long held ideas because of this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who are unfamiliar with how brains work but don’t want to wade through the dry details. Where Daniel Tammet is explaining the big picture, Laura is giving you the impact of these experiments.
If Mary Roach wrote about psychology, but actually had something to say, she might write this book.
Worth reading just to learn what happened to the subjects after the Milgrim experiments in obedience to authority.

The Complete Manual of Woodworking by Albert Jackson

I’m just a beginning woodworker, but this is a great resource.
It’s full of huge, gorgeous shots of wood, cuts, examples and tools. It covers the wide range of methods and materials with great detail but remains accessible.
Reading this book is also worth it for someone uninterested in actually doing any woodworking. It shows you how the furniture and tools around you are made, how the character of wood shapes the architecture of the things around you. I certainly look at my kitchen cabinets with new eyes. You’ll find out why in this book.

Fiction

Litttle Brother by Cory Doctorow

Loved this.
Sent it to my dad. Recommending it to everyone. It’s about how smart courageous kids deal with adults giving up on freedom after a terror attack.

Well written, fast paced, and filled with real characters – something the SF genre doesn’t always get. This isn’t far future fiction, this is about right now.
The technology is all homemade and usable. Heck, they even have DIY instructions for elements of Little Brother up on instructables. Doctorow is a smart thinker about the problems of security, terrorism and politics. He’s an editor on the wonderful BoingBoing blog and is kind enough to provide you free electronic copies of Little Brother under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. That means you can give it away and make new things with it, but you’ve gotta make those shareable, give Cory credit, and share your results under a CC license.
Get it, give it to a kid, and hope.

Crystal Nights and Other Stories by Greg Egan

Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

Greg Egan can’t stop writing things I enjoy. I’ve read so many rehashes of the same ideas and Egan never does that. Every story contains at least two ideas completely foreign to me. He piles them on into a delicious meal in each story. What’s in there: completely alien life 2, the ethics of evolutionary algorithms 3 , and a hundred other things you’ve never thought about, all packaged in exciting, well plotted stories.
Egan is consistently the best hard SF writer working.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel

This is a little bit of weirdness that I read on my new Droid phone. It’s a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 story, so you have no excuse whatsoever for not reading it. The stories are good and whip-smart.
If you’ve ever read a certain Flannery O’Connor story, you’ve got to read this for the perfect “Every Angel is Terrifying”. Set right after the O’Connor story ends and tells you just what happens next in the smartest way.  “The Red Phone” was a delightful story of phone sex, romance, and telecommunications for the deaf
I also enjoyed a series of stories about a matriarchy on the moon. Each story opens up more and more thought into the society – a lovely little bit of world building.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a bit of a complement to Crystal Nights. Egan’s book is full of bright sharp ideas and this one has warm comfy stories with great characters.
Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I’ve read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.

I’m looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Wonderful. A beautiful classic noir mystery set in a place where bodies are a commodity and life is cheap and possibly permanent.
Sex, death, betrayal and crime for the cyber set.
This is SF for those who thought they didn’t like it because all of the flashy SF ideas are just layered onto a really strong closed room mystery, but one that couldn’t have been done in any other setting. To check out if you think science fiction is stupid but you love Lawrence Block or Robert Parker mysteries.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I finished this book 24 hours after picking it up, and didn’t read anything else till I had finished. It’s fantastic.
Fastest book I’ve read since Palahniuk. Similar style and rhythm – full of secret knowledge about medicine and mobsters, great amounts of violence, pain, and gross-out.
It’s a book paced like a punk song about a hitman who becomes a doctor. Yes it’s a cliche to have a hitman who gets found by the mobsters he flipped on, but I couldn’t care less while reading this. It’s fun and furious and a damn fine read.

  1. OK, sometimes it was burglar or policeman, but generally it was happy.   (back)
  2. alien alien, not like the sexy blue elves of avatar   (back)
  3. it’s also a covert of indictment omniscient, omnipotent, but uninvolved deities.   (back)

Bringing Something to the Party

I just noticed that Paul Carr has released his new book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore” as a Creative Commons BY-NC  licensed download for the US. And the, um, rest of the internet.

I’m going to read it on my hot new Droid phone, but there’s only a PDF version and an HTML version. I want ePub format, so I converted it.  You can download the ePub version of “Bringing Nothing to the Party” here.

It looks like Paul has put a CC-BY-NC license in his blog post, but has put also ND in his text.  He’s also been thankful for a derivative work before, so I think he really means BY-NC.  Regardless, if he asks me to take down the ePub, I will.  You gotta make sure CC licenses actually match up with what you want.

Better Berkeley Webcasts even better

Nate Whitten wrote in with a suggestion for Better Berkeley Webcasts.  He wants to save all of the files to check them out later.  He’s using a download manager like Down Them All 1, but Berkeley’s files are named poorly, so he doesn’t know which one to watch first.

Even better, he sent in the fix for it – he’s numbered the download links.

You should download it from me, or over on the UserScripts.Org page.  As always, you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey.

  1. my favorite, you should check it out  (back)

Professor Robb Willer and the Golden Apple

Robb WillerThe group of misfits I grew up with has turned out pretty well.
One of them, Robb Willer was my debate partner for a while. He’s gone on to be a professor at Berkeley. Robb won the Golden Apple award for being an awesome teacher. How awesome? Robb’s got intellectual groupies!

Berkeley put up Robb’s lectures under a Creative Commons license, so you can download them if you want and distribute them. Of course, Berkeley hasn’t given people any links to download the lectures. A bit lame if you ask me. Also, the way they’ve presented the lectures is terrible. Clicking anywhere on the page during playback makes the video close! That won’t do. I whipped up a quick fix.

  1. Install the excellent greasemonkey firefox addon.
  2. Install my Better Berkely script to fix  the webcast page.

Done.  Now the video is fixed.  When I get a free moment I’ll update the script to provide download links to all of the lectures, because what use is a creative commons license when you can’t get the media‽ Now the videos are available for download as well.

Congrats Robb!