unreasonable.org

I really enjoyed the Doctor Who episode Blink. Turns out it's based (loosely) on a nifty short story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/2007/blink_annual.shtml

It's an interesting theme in the new series, how encounters with The Doctor change people's lives, opening them up to new possibilities.

Over at Edge, Kevin Kelly confronts the economics of the digital age:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

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From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

Put down whatever you're doing and go read Tim Kreider's artist's statement for this week's The Pain -- When Will It End?.

Highlights:

But there’s a half-millennium of institutional racism on this continent, and social progress happens slowly and unevenly, person by person. There are still vast, savage swaths of unapologetic bigotry in this country. I spent fifteen years living in a county where there's still an active Klan chapter, where guys in diners or bars will casually drop the old N-bomb early on in a conversation just to test you out, to see if you’re one of them or some “edjumacated idjot.” This wasn’t in darkest Alabama or anything—it was technically within the East Coast megalopolis, between Baltimore and Philadelphia, just off I-95. There are millions of people out there who chuckle over the wit of the nickname “Obama-Osama.” And thanks to the second amendment, they can all have top-of-the-line, high-powered rifles with excellent telescopic sights.

Friday, a jury awarded $6.1 million to Louise Ogborn, who said she was subject to a strip-search in a McDonald's back office after someone posing as a cop called the restaurant and accused her of theft.

Ogborn claimed McDonald's was negligent when they failed to warn her and other employees about this caller, who had already struck other fast-food joints. Yes, this wasn't an isolated case: there were over 70 such incidents.

From the fine web comic XKCD. What will they think of us in a few hundred years? Maybe I should go put on a cape.

Just stumbled across this great Robert Anton Wilson / Discordianism video:

How is it that I have reckoned myself a poet all these years, and yet not read this?

For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.

...

Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

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For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothing but that all was changed,--man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome,--what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side.

I've been thinking a lot about stories lately, on the nature of the brain as a storytelling machine. More on that later, but one point that I've been considering is that, just as an infinite number of curves can be drawn through any finite set of points, so an infinite number of stories can be told through any finite set of events.

And then a few weeks ago, along came this lovely example, in which the Star Wars movies are re-interpreted with R2D2 and Chewbacca as prime agents of the Rebel Alliance. I love it!

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

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Yahoo's "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" blog interviews First Lieutenan Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq.

Watada announced last June that he would not follow orders to participate in an illegal war. He has avoided charges of desertion by staying on base (Fort Lewis, Washington), but faces counts of "missing troop movement" and "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." He faces up to six years in prison.