Monday, January 27, 2003

Online exclusive! Read predictions from our 1979 issue on what LA would be like in 2002. 4:16:19 PM

EXTREMITIES Long Beach video artist Bill Viola is at the top of the world. His new show, "The Passions," is the largest group of contemporary artworks by a single artist the Getty has yet exhibited. So why all the histrionics? "It's been a long journey for Bill Viola, from the small fringe world of video art in the early 1970s to his current position as one of the most highly regarded artists working in any medium, but his odyssey has always been closely tied to the cutting edge of technology." 3:57:47 PM

From ArtJournal Ideas: In Density We Trust For some time, many experts have been saying that high-density cities are no longer essential for business success. The internet has made it unnecessary for workers and companies to always be in close proximity. But "creative activities — whether economic, cultural or political — thrive on density. In a global economy, with uncertain markets and changing conditions, the most advanced and speculative sectors need concentrations of resources — talent, management, technological infrastructure and buildings. They need dense environments where information does not simply circulate but gets produced. The geography of the global economy consists of both world-spanning networks and these concentrations of resources, as provided by about 40 global cities." The New York Times 01/25/03 A Radical Proposal - Let's Cut Copyright Terms Back Long copyrights are choking creativity, and make no sense as incentives to further creativity. "The flood of free content on the internet has shown that most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations. To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights would be enough. The 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a good place to start." The Economist 01/23/03 Ideas That Exceed Our Abilities "Sometime in the next 20 or 30 years, we're going to have, because of Moore's law, machines that will have the computational power and memory of humans." Even now, many of today's new engineering achievements are so complex, they can't really be designed by people - they're invented by sophisticated computers that exceed our own abilities. "But we don't know how to program them yet to interact naturally with people. So it's all a software problem." Discover 02/03 The Solo Cartoonist Created in the traditional way, a cartoon takes teams of artists and years of work. Produced at a digital animation studio like Pixar, it takes banks of advanced computers and $100 million give-or-take for a full-length feature. Andy Murdock is creating his cartoon feature on home computer equipment, doing all the animation himself. "Even five years ago, it would have been hard to imagine an animator, working alone in his studio, making a 3-D feature. But fast computers and software like 3D Studio Max, Maya and SoftImage are making high-quality animation more of a do-it-yourself process." And Murdock is showing his work-in-progress at this year's Sundance Online Film Festival. Take a look. Sundance Online Film Festival [Windows Media Player required] 01/03 When Van Gogh Met Gauguin An interactive website put up by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam traces the interactions between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Attaching colors to sounds, allowing the viewer to change the color palette of the website, and linking pictures to paintings, the site explores the artists' lives and work. Van Gogh Museum [Flash Required] 01/03 3:42:42 PM

From The New York Times: Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art's Expense By LAWRENCE LESSIG The Supreme Court decided this week that the Constitution grants Congress an essentially unreviewable discretion to set the lengths of copyright protections however long it wants, and even to extend them. While the court was skeptical about the wisdom of the extension, seven justices believed it was not their role to second-guess "the First Branch," as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it. As I argued the opposite before the court for my clients, a group of creators and publishers who depend on public domain works, I won't say I agree. But there is something admirable in the court acknowledging and respecting limits on its own power. Still, missing from the opinion was any justification for perhaps the most damaging part of Congress's decision to extend existing copyrights for 20 years: the extension unnecessarily stifles freedom of expression by preventing the artistic and educational use even of content that no longer has any commercial value. As one dissenter, Justice Steven G. Breyer, estimated, only 2 percent of the work copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 continues to be commercially exploited (for example, the early Mickey Mouse movies, whose imminent entry into the public domain prompted Congress to act in the first place). But to protect that tiny proportion, the remaining copyrighted works will stay locked up for another generation. Thus a museum that wants to produce an Internet exhibition about the New Deal will still need to find the copyright holders of any pictures or sound it wants to include. Or archives that want to release out-of-print books will still need to track down copyright holders of works that are almost a century old. This is a problem that the First Branch could fix without compromising any of the legitimate rights protected by the copyright extension act. The trick is a technique to move content that is no longer commercially exploited into the public domain, while protecting work that has continuing commercial value. The answer is suggested from the law governing patents. Patent holders have to pay a fee every few years to maintain their patents. The same principle could be applied to copyright. Imagine requiring copyright holders to pay a tax 50 years after a work was published. The tax should be very small, maybe $50 a work. And when the tax was paid, the government would record that fact, including the name of the copyright holder paying the tax. That way artists and others who want to use a work would continue to have an easy way to identify the current copyright owner. But if a copyright owner fails to pay the tax for three years in a row, then the work will enter the public domain. Anyone would then be free to build upon and cultivate that part of our culture as he sees fit. 3:39:57 PM

From ArtsJournal: The Best-Selling Band You've Never Heard Mannheim Steamroller is a man, a band, and a marketing juggernaut, and no one really seems to understand why. The music is new age pop with just enough intelligence to be slightly more palatable than, say, Yanni or John Tesh. "Mannheim is really just one person, a 53-year-old, bearded, wool-sweatered and slightly rotund former jingle writer named Chip Davis. He lives near Omaha, composing what he calls 'Elizabethan-style rock' by himself, recording with hired hands as he needs them, for his own label, American Gramophone. He pockets about $4 for every album he sells. He owns three mansions and a Saberliner jet. He smiles a lot." Washington Post 01/22/03 3:18:12 PM

From ArtsJournal: Doubts About The Music Industry's Survival "This year could determine whether the music business as we know it survives. In the first six months of 2002, CD sales fell 11 percent - on top of a 3 percent decline the year before. Sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent last year, while the users of Kazaa, the biggest online file-trading service, tripled in number. As recently as 10 years ago, the media conglomerates that own record labels regarded them as cash cows - smaller than Hollywood but more reliably profitable. Now all five major labels are either losing money or barely in the black, and the industry's decline is turning into a plunge." Wired 01/03 3:10:27 PM

This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England (read more about him). A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day, with the first appearing on 1st January 2003. 3:07:49 PM

From ArtsJournal: A sweet mystery  Norah Jones' artistry stands out in a world of prefab pop. Where'd it come from? In an era full of great voices, from Mariah Carey to Whitney Houston, that have been plugged into formats that make them more manufactured than memorable, her success is leading record executives, always on the lookout for the next big thing, to search for singers again, not just voices with hit formulas. 3:06:30 PM

TV Commercials - 30-Second Art "TV Commercials may be crass, loud, an insult to our intelligence. They may even be a colossal waste of money. But they're also the one brand of big-budget filmmaking that regularly makes room for artistic risks, especially when compared with most of the programs that surround them. I'd rather watch a beer ad than any episode of 'Friends,' and not just because the commercial is shorter." OpinionJournal.com 01/22/03 2:57:39 PM

Blogs as Disruptive Tech How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants Blogging is the first and truest killer app of Personal Publishing: these other Crimson sites will extend that power into more flexible and powerful personal and business websites.  And because we'll be offering them through a browser interface, they'll tap the viral nature of weblogs - letting users set up sites in seconds rather than minutes (or hours!). By tapping the violently disruptive force of weblogs, we hope to help bring the power of blogware to the masses and push blogware to the next level.  To the Content Management Giants, a word of warning: watch out for weblogs! 2:43:35 PM

WhatIsMyIP.com is the easiest way to determine your IP address. 2:32:14 PM

From Boing-Boing: Sony's schizophrenia Frank Rose's long feature on the schizophrenia inside Sony (which is simultaneously an entertainment giant and a consumer electronics giant) is excellent. DRM is destroying Sony's product lines, from "NetMD" minidisc recorders than can't share over the net to digital televisions equipped with restrictive outputs and recording tools that hobble your ability to tape and manipulate programming. The company that gave us the Walkman has all-but-abandoned the personal stereo market, focuing on dead-end tech like CDs and MiniDiscs, instead of hard-disc players that offer more flexibility and utility. The personal stereo market has been taken over by niche players like Apple and Creative Labs (Creative was just a tiny little startup in Singapore when its products rocketed it to success, the kind of outfit Sony was accustomed to grinding into paste without even thinking -- today, it's sucking away tons of business from Sony's personal stereo market). Sony's not pouring its R&D efforts into better products that offer more value. Instead, it's chasing a DRM scheme that makes every product it touches less useful. Sony's betrayal of its customers is a big part of the crisis in the public's rights in copyright today. From 1976 to 1984, Sony fought tooth and nail for the right of Americans to record video off their televisions; today, Sony is part of the RIAA's efforts to stifle innovation and contract fair use to a sorry, mingy speck. Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious "check-in/check-out" procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony's copy-protection mechanisms don't allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another - not an issue with the iPod. "We do not have any plans for such a product," says Kimura, the smile fading. "But we are studying it." Really? No plans? When the world leader in consumer electronics takes a pass on the hottest portable music player out there, you have to wonder what gives. Sony became a global giant on the basis of innovative devices manufactured by the millions on nothing more than a hunch that people would buy them. Now Apple is delivering the innovation while Sony studies the matter. 1:55:21 PM

From The Atlantic Monthly | December 2001: One Nation, Slightly Divisible  Interesting take on the division of America - Republican/Democratic and Coasts/Heartland The electoral map of the 2000 presidential race became famous: big blocks of red (denoting states that went for Bush) stretched across the heartland, with brackets of blue (denoting states for Gore) along the coasts. Our Blue America correspondent has ventured repeatedly into Red territory. He asks the question—after September 11, a pressing one—Do our differences effectively split us into two nations, or are they just cracks in a still-united whole? 1:44:43 PM

Media Ownership Chart - click to view. 1:08:16 PM

Connect, They Say, Only Connect  Facinating piece on network theory. "Network theory has become a bit of a fad," Mr. Watts conceded after hanging up the phone. "I spend half my time telling people I think it's relevant to a lot of problems people care about and half my time trying to tone down the hype." Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. [A]s an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components — particles and subparticles — and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: "In biology, we've had great success stories — the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don't have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks." Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes. 12:51:50 PM

Toothbrush trounces car as top invention:  So say the findings of a new survey released Wednesday by the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which asked which of five inventions Americans could not live without. The toothbrush emerged the undisputed champ, beating out the car, the personal computer, the cell phone and the microwave -- in that order -- as the most prized innovation. 12:22:59 PM

From Forbes: A Fatter Deduction For Fatter Cars Under the new proposed rules small businesses could immediately deduct the entire price of a large SUV like the Hummer H2, BMW X5, Ford's (nyse: F - news - people ) Lincoln Navigator and the Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) Land Cruiser. The reason is that the new law would allow businesses to deduct $75,000, up from $25,000, from an equipment purchase, including the cost of a truck--and the IRS considers SUVs to be trucks, not cars, which have their own rules. 12:19:48 PM

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