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Sunday 11 August 2002

Sunday - I had planned to lay in bed, maybe get up by noon, and then generally laze about. But NOOOOO . I was dragged down to Little Tokyo for a Taiko drumming concert . It turned out to be a LOT of fun. After the first couple of groups you start to get a feel for the drumming, and start enjoying the contrasts in style and attitude. I'd go again!

Monday 12 August 2002

Monday - I lay in bed until about noon, and then generally lazed about. I like to follow through on things...

Tuesday 13 August 2002

Tuesday - work, bah. Hot, bah. Paid bills, bah.

Wednesday 14 August 2002

Wednesday - work, bah. Had a MRI exam, moderately interesting when the doctor said "Hey, it never made that noise before..." but otherwise rather boring. I assumed that they would have a little machine, big enough for a limb, but instead they had a full size machine and made me stick my hand in it. Apparently I fell asleep (it was after lunch) and moved once and they complained. After that I managed to stay awake.

I tried to send some trip pictures to my father - they only made it about half the time. I have about four email accounts that I tried, so I suspect his ISP, but it's really hard to tell sometimes. Sunspots anyone?

Thursday 15 August 2002

Thursday - I was the only one of my group in, so I kept busy. Rotated some surfaces on a new CFD model, sent a plotting code to a fellow worker off site, stuff like that.

I couldn't get to Yahoo! at all from work, the browser would hang. Other sites worked reasonably well. I suspect a local server problem of some sort. People off site said it was working OK for them.

There were also a couple of interesting talks today. One was by James Murray and Joe Pahle here at Dryden on inflatable aerostructures (wings). These are collapsible airfoils made of vectra, foam, and other space age materials, not the old canvas coated with rubber stuff of the 1940's. Inflated to a few hundred pounds of pressure they are quite capable of changing the flying characteristics of a vehicle in a flash. Vehicles highly optimized for a certain capability, say cannon launch projectiles or hypersonic lifting bodies often have less than stellar characteristics 'off design' as we engineers might say. Without pyrotechnics, gears, slides, pivots or any of the rest of the configurable aircraft gear the inflatable technology might turn out to be a treat to use.

The second talk was by Al Bowers and was on the topic of birds and 'adverse yaw'. Birds, unlike most human aircraft, lack a vertical tail. Highly optimized by millions of years of evolution, what do they know that we don't? Bowers prepared this talk for a Wright Brothers Lecture, and it was fun to hear him span about 150 years of technological development, tracing patters of concept, theory, and practice. Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, the Wright brothers, Ludwig Prandtl, the Horten brothers, R.T. Jones, various condors and albatrosses, and Paul MacCready all make their appearance in turn. I'm not convinced that induced wingtip thrust is practicable, but it was a fun lecture!

Friday 16 August 2002

Friday - another hot day, about 110 or so. I brought my digital camera in to work, per requests, to photograph some of the company safety meeting and 'spotlight award' stuff this morning. You know, it's kinda cool to be an official photographer - it's almost a license to be obnoxious, walking around when people are talking, using the flash, and so on.

There was an interesting comment on Slashdot today: "They are trying to make it a crime to interfere with a business model". In the context of the folk trying to control any sort of digital recording the issue with TIVO and such is that they allow the user to fast forward past commercials. The media conglomerates want to make this illegal.

It's an interesting subject, digital; right, intellectual properly, and so on. Firstly, whoever coined the phrase 'intellectual property' should get a prize - it's a great name, and it implies by it's very existence that the ephemeral stuff of thought can be treated like a piece of land, or a cow, or a car.

Can it? And even if it could, should it?

Some thoughts.
At one time there was only live music. Before about a century ago music was concert halls, dance halls (dens of iniquity), and the upright piano and banjo in the front parlor. So the only thing you could steal was the sheet music. Then the phonograph came along. You could record music, but it took a big expensive recording studio to do so. So stealing was still out of the questing for individuals. And it turns out that owning the distribution channel was the way to go to make money. Once an organization controls what music people will have access too, then they can manipulate the price, and decide who's music and what artists will succeed - and demand a big piece of the pie. In fact, most of it. In a mystery story the detective will often say 'follow the money" to solve the murder. Follow the money to discover the true history of the movie and music business.

Saturday 17 August 2002

Saturday - I had my carpets cleaned. With two cats, keeping clean can be difficult, and it's a lot easier to have a couple of big guys come on and push around their industrial strength cleaners than it is to rent stuff and do it your self. It costs about twice as much though. But I did try to get the place cleaned up a bit beforehand and that's a bonus - until you spend two hours cleaning junk up it sometimes isn't obvious how clutter things have been.

More thoughts on 'fair use' and 'property':
Other organizations could steal the music by re-recording from a phonograph disk made by a studio, and this was made illegal. The individual media consumer was still not part of the equation. Then came the era of workable tape recorders for the masses, both audio and visual. Fears arose that people would stop buying disks, and just copy their friends. And this indeed happened, but not anywhere to the point that it hurt business. In fact, there were signs that it helped business. Media and music sales have climbed consistently for decades. And the analog recordings on tape of analog recordings on disk weren't particularly good.

The concept of 'fair use' arose - you did indeed buy the music once, for your own home recorded player, but you made a copy on cassette to use in your car. You could only listen to one recording at a time, and there wasn't any real downside. If you had a VCR you could use it to 'time shift' a show you wouldn't be home for. The music and tv industry never accepted the concept of 'fair use' - but they made only minor protestations about what was basically a minor issue, but they didn't agree to it in principle. They did eventually manage to get anti-copy circuitry built into VCRs, and no-one complained, because no-one really cared.

And when the technology changed again, to digital, it suddenly became a bigger and hotter issue. Suddenly software was easy to copy (always was, really), along with music cdroms. When digital tape became a viable technology the music industry convinced the legislatures to basically ban the use. And with the advent of DVD-R as an inexpensive media suddenly it has become a huge issue. And the use of computers with big hard drives to save/store/swap content is like pouring gas on a fire.

Personally, if I had to choose between freedom and the existence of, say, Capital Records, I'd choose freedom. I'm not sure that is true any more for a lot of people in this country. It's late, I'm tired, and the black thoughts come.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Here are some Taiko drummers, picture taken last year. This year the audience was in the shade and the drummers were in the sun, but everyone still had a lot of fun!

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