Sunday, September 19, 2004

From a blog posting by Stephen Meyer earlier today: "Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the American Association of Publishers' objections to the recent NIH proposal to require work funded by the NIH to be deposited in PubMed Central is AAP's refusal to address a critical issue. Publishers are trying to assume monopolistic copyright privileges over works they are not willing to fully fund themselves. This would be analogous to a landscaping company trying to charge for access to a public park after the city outsourced some of its maintenance work. The AAP does not own the content and they will not address the issue." (PS: Let's anticipate an AAP objection: But facilitating peer review is much more important for research literature than landscaping is for a park. Granted. But what follows? That publishers who didn't fund the research, didn't conduct the research, and didn't write up the research should control access to the results?) [Open Access News] The hypothetical counter-argument about peer review would be disingenuous: the cost of managing peer review should be trivial compared with the cost to institutions and funding agencies of the time spent by actual reviewers, at least with the Web-based journal workflow systems now available. 10:29:56 PM

Recent CD purchases: Gillian Welch: Time (The Revelator). A total keeper. I learned about Welch in a New Yorker story. Wow. Manu Chao: Proxima Estacion... Esperanza. Not as tight as Clandestino, at least at first hearing. Some promising tracks. Taraf de Haïdouks. A keeper. Crazy, varied, edgy. These guys have fun. Charlie Haden and Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Land of the Sun. Soft, subdued, rewards repeated hearing. Louis Sclavis Sextet: Les Violences de Rameau. Intriguing. Needs full attention. No easy tracks here (well, maybe one). Layers upon layers. Jacob Young: Evening Falls. Melodic, meandering, a bit aimless. Need to listen again to identify the best tracks. 5:41:46 PM

This another favorite picture, from the minibus driving down to Santiago from Valle Nevado at the end of the second day of our trip. The huge volcanic crest to our Southeast was infused with evening sunlight, hinting at an almost Martian landscape. 5:07:28 PM

Among the pictures I was able to take in Chile before my Nikon Coolpix 775 failed with a "System error" that I can't fix, this is one of my favorites. I woke up early our first morning in Farellones, as the city lights of Santiago started to turn off and disappear under the blanket of winter smog. The full moon was setting over the Western sky. I experimented with making it lighter with Photoshop, but the original dark cast reflects better the low dawn light, before the huge shadows of the Andes crest behind me started lifting. 4:52:31 PM