[insert witty title]

Today I fell off my bike, and it got me thinking about all the different times I had managed this feat since arriving in Holland. I remember three different occasions, it seems that I am very accident prone (read: shit at biking), and here they all are:

Crash #1: I’m like the sail on a boat

About two months ago a good friend of mine was leaving Holland for England. She didn’t have enough packing boxes, and I just happened to have a whole pile of the things sat mouldering away in my shed, naturally I volunteered to donate a couple of them to her. To give you some sense of how big these things are, they are full size tea chests, made of very thick cardboard. When they’re flattened down they’re easily over a meter square.

I decided that I would ride my bike with one box under each arm, as walking to her house would take rather a long time. The first section of the journey went just fine, I was riding slowly but surely, whilst cursing the strong wind blowing directly into my face. At one point I clearly recall thinking: “I’m glad this wind isn’t blowing sideways, it would probably knock me off the bike”. Somehow that thought had already left my head when I turned a 90 degree corner, was caught by a strong gust of wind, and was pushed hard into a hedge.

Damage done: Luckily thick cardboard boxes provide a comfy landing mat and I was unhurt.
Lesson learnt: If you have the profile of a ship’s sail do not ride perpendicular to the wind

Crash #2: I can ride through sand!

Riding along the shorefront at Katwijk shortly after a big windstorm I noticed a big pile of sand covering the bike lane, it was around a foot deep, it covered the bike lane left to right and went about 10-12 feet back.

“It’s only sand! Surely my bike will glide over that, for am going very fast” I thought without really thinking. It turns out that in reality roadbikes do not glide over sand drifts. Bikes actually plow into sand drifts, the wheels sink quickly and get choked with sand, the bike begins to skid, if the rider tries to brake his weight is shifted forwards giving the back wheel free reign to go whichever way it chooses, it probably does not go in a straight line, in fact from experience it jackknifes out sideways, and the rider is unceremoniously deposited on the ground.

Damage done: Bruised ego, found out that I did not actually have magic levitating bike powers.
Lesson learnt: You can, in fact, not ride through sand on a road bike.

Crash #3: Shopping Trip (today)

Returning from the Hoogvliet (supermarket) with a heavy load of shopping in a plastic bag gripped by the handle in my left arm. I glance down at my shiny new speedometer, you know, because it’s nice to see how fast I’m going. As I glance down I notice that the handle is slowly tearing from the shopping bag and my shopping will shortly be dashed over the floor. Rather than stop the bike and take care of it I decide that if I lift up the bag, rest it on the cross bar of the bike I’ll be able to readjust my grip lower down on the bag.

Turns out that trying this apparently simple maneuver was not such a good idea. As I lifted the bag up a car pulled out in front of me and I had to brake. The shopping bag swung forwards knocking my left handlebar forwards and causing me to swerve right. At the same time my left knee was raised by my pedalling motion, jamming the bag hard into the underside of the handlebar. I noticed that I was swerving towards a brick wall and leaned hard to the left, simultaneously trying to pull the only brake I could reach (my other hand still stuck in the shopping bag) at the same time I was backpedalling, trying to get the shopping bag free from underside of the handlebar. It almost worked, but by then it was too late and I was out of control, one handed, braking with only the back brake, and drifting closer to a brick wall.

At this point I have a very vivid recollection of what I thought, it was: “Oh, this is not good”

Then I hit the wall. Then I hit the floor.

Damage done: Left elbow is bleeding a lot, my left ankle is looking pretty manky, and my kneecap momentarily popped out of its socket, now I can’t support my own weight on my left leg and it hurts like buggery
Lesson learnt: If things begin to break you probably do need to stop, rather than fix them whilst travelling at 25.3 km/h

I noticed a Guardian blog post today about Jim Davidson getting kicked off some reality TV show for abusing a gay guy, here is part of the exchange:

“Why do shirtlifters pull that same face?” asked Davidson. “Please don’t say shirtlifters, it’s really rude,” replied Dowling.

“I don’t care. Gay men have the same look - some gay men have the same look… it’s a sort of preen.”

When Dowling challenged him again, Davidson accused him of playing “the homophobic card. You are a fucking disgrace.”

From the little I remember Brian Dowling was a whiny twat, but this level of abuse about his sexuality is utterly inappropriate and boils down to nothing more than bullying.

I always assumed that this opinion would be shared by the majority of people, and so was very surprised by the following link to the Sun newspaper (Think: lowest common denominator, right wing trashmag. Also Britain’s best selling newspaper). The Sun now has a discussion forum and one of the threads is about Davidson’s removal, check out some of the quotes:

“Jim, well done mate, [...] Well, he only said what the rest of us where thinking.”

If by ‘rest of us’ you mean ‘the rest of us homophobic fucknauts’

“I can’t see how you can criticise Jim Davison, he was invited on to the programme purely and simply because people knew all about the type of humour he delivered. He should not have been asked to leave at all….. Just ask the British troopps who they would rather be entertained by: Jim Davison or Brian Dowling.”

hahahaha, the troops?

I oculd understand if Jim was abusing one of the females but it was a man argument for gawds sake, and Brian ends up crying ?????

Yes it’s wrong to bully a woman, but perfectly fine to pick on a man!

Political Correctness has gone barmy.

Not allowing people to viciously lay into others on the basis of their sexual orientation sure is barmy!

On every ‘reality’ show there has to be the obligatory homosexual or lesbian. I refuse to use the word ‘gay’. They act like spoiled little children, bursting into tears or over react to every situation.

No shit? They pick emotionally unstable people to go on reality shows? I hadn’t noticed.

i felt sorry for jim, he`s just being victimised for being normal.

WHAT?

Why is tv full of sh..t stabers and god do they go one about it they are in your face and they think they are funny jim/d he just told him a home truth and what did we get boooo hoooo booo hooo how sad is that its the gays that can not take the stick lovey darling kiss kiss they make you sick

OK. I give up. I’ll just let the rest of the quotes speak for themselves:

U GOTTA LUV JIM!!!!!!!!! WHAT A TOP BLOKE!!!!!!!!!

If you’re not man enough to take some insults then you’re too emotionally unstable to be allowed to live.

All I said was Nice one Jim! and that I thought Gay means Got Aids Yet

I’m not even half of the way through the discussion and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

The most popular newspaper in Britain, indeed.

Last night myself, Greg and Mark N ran a pub quiz for the new batch of PhD students (all 100 of them from around the country). I ended up with the job of writing the questions, whilst Greg and Mark acted as very able and charismatic quizmasters/kitten herders for the night. Just to store them for posterity, here are the questions that were asked

Feel free to play along, but remember, if you cheat then the only person who loses is you.

A. General Knowledge

1. Which country has the world’s largest Muslim population? (1 point)

2. The main news in London on July 7th 2005 was the bombing. What was the main
news item the previous day? (1 point)

3. Which organisation has the motto: Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity? (1 point)

4. In the phonetic alphabet what word represents the letter Q? (1 point)

5. Which american state has a name that ends in three vowels? (1 point)

6. Excluding resigning, How many different moves does a player have the
choice of at the start of a game of chess? (1 point)

7. What are the only three words in the English language that end with
the letters `ceed`? One point for each. (3 points)

(total 9 points)

B. History

1. Who was the last English King to die in battle? (1 point)

2. In which city was Archduke Ferdinand assassinated leading to the
World War I? (1 point)

3. Which century saw the abolition of the slave trade in the British
Empire? (1 point)

4. What was the name of the first artificial satellite sent into space? (1 point)

5. Which World War II action had the code name Operation Chastise? (1
point)

6. What was the name of Napoleon`s first wife? (1 point)

7. When the first World War broke out which three countries made up the
Triple Entente? One point for each (3 points)

(total 9 points)

D. Art and Literature

1. What novel has the subtitle `The Modern Prometheus`? (1 point)

2. Who wrote `Gullivers Travels`? (1 point)

3. In which country was Hamlet a prince? (1 point)

4. Who wrote the book `About A Boy` which was later turned into a successful
film starring Hugh Grant? (1 point)

5. In which month is poet Robert Burns birthday celebrated? (1 point)

6. Who wrote `The Catcher In The Rye`? (1 point)

7. The film `The Shawshank Redemption` was based on a story by which author? (1 point)

(Total 7 points)

E. Geography

1. The city of Rome stands on which river? (1 point)

2. Which country, other than England, has a city called London on a
river called the Thames? (1 point)

3. What is the world’s largest land-locked country? (1 point)

4. Liechtenstein lies in between which two European countries? One
point for each. (2 points)

5. What is the only American state which starts with the letter `A` but
doesn`t end with the letter `A`? (1 point)

6. What is the longest river in the UK? (1 point)

7. Which five official districts make up New York city? One point for each.

(total 12 points)

(TOTAL 47 POINTS)

I’ll put the answers in the comments sometime soon.

Walking through waterstones the other day I saw a copy of The Long Tail, an economics book I have long wanted to read. The long tail is all about the power of power laws and the shifting patterns of supply and demand in society. The book was inspired by an article in Wired magazine, which has been mentioned multiple times on this blog and can be read in full here

So what about power laws? Well, they’re ubiquitous. The sales figures for books? Power law. Number of rentals of DVDs? Power law? Names given to children? Power law. Box office takings? Power law. TV ratings? Power law. Citations per scientist? Power law. Length of encyclopedia entries? Yep. Colours people choose for their kettle? You guessed it. The popularity of blogs? Power law. Youtube video watches? Power. Law.

The central theme of the book is summed up really well by this graph:

Here we see how the popularity of titles is distributed. There are relatively few hit products that sell in an incredibly large volume, whereas there are millions of less popular products. This is a pretty typical power law shape.

“Bricks and Mortar” shops can only stock a few items, given the limitations of shelf space. Retailers naturally choose to sell the most popular items and as such can only carry items from the “head” of the curve, i.e. blockbuster movies and hit singles. However, there are many hundreds of thousands of less popular products that shops cannot afford to stock and together their sales add up to rival those of the traditional hits. Online retailers aren’t so constrained by having to maintain a network of shops and so can afford to offer a much larger range, their catalogues stretch further down the long tail, offering an amount of choice that would have been unimaginable only a couple of decades ago. The extreme case of this phenomenon is something such as iTunes, where the goods are purely digital. The cost of adding a product to the iTunes library is negligible (upload it to a server) and as the popular ‘hits’ and more common ‘misses’ are on an equal economic footing. iTunes can quite happily sell them all. It is interesting to note that every single song on iTunes has now sold at least once showing there is demand, however small, for pretty much anything you can imagine. To further underline this point: 57% of Amazon’s revenue now comes from products far enough down the curve that they are not even sold in brick and mortar shops. This is an absolutely incredible shift in the way we consume things. Chris Anderson describes it as follows:

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

So what does this mean for us? A massive amount of choice is useless on its own, how do we know what we want to see? There is a lot of crap down amongst the unpopular items of music and literature. This is where the second half of the theory of the long tail comes in: filters. Think Amazon’s “Other people who bought this item…”, think specialized blogs, think Google’s pagerank algorithm think specialised search and recommendation engines, think user reviews. The collective wisdom of the people (along with some clever coding) allows us to navigate the sea of niches, tracking down obscure things that we like in a way that is completely impossible in a brick and mortar shop.

This is already beginning to have an effect on society. As more and more avenues for consumption open up, more and more people get interested in (well… they already were interested, but it’s now possible to pursue) niche pursuits. Be it ambient dub music, the history of lace making or ceramic crocodiles, it is now possible to track down communities, blogs, product recommendations, and out of print books incredibly easily. Monoculture is fragmenting as people begin to follow their own interests. Just look at the numbers for television: In the 1970’s over 70% of American households watched the most populat TV show, ‘I Love Lucy’, on a Sunday night. Today the TV shows with the highest ratings (CSI) attract only 15% of the population. The total amount of TV consumption certainly hasn’t decreased since the 70’s, so the explanation we’re left with is that when offered choice people actually do have different tastes and those steep power laws are suddenly beginning to flatten off…

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
–David Foster Wallace

It’s a fantastic book and I would heartily recommend that everybody reads it. The author additionally keeps a long tail blog here, which itself makes for a fantastic read.

Earlier this evening I was feeling a bit guilty and catching up with a bit of reading at arXiv. For those of you who aren’t familiar with arXiv, wikipedia comes to the rescue:

arXiv is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology which can be accessed via the Internet. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are placed on the arXiv. As of June 2007, arXiv.org contains over 423,000 e-prints, with roughly four thousand new e-prints added every month.

arXiv is broken down by subject area, and I usually confine my reading to astro-ph, where pretty much every single scientific paper in astronomy is released, for free, to the community. Today, for some reason I took a look through the category list and found physics.pop-ph, the repository of articles about popular physics. One title in particular stood out, and I couldn’t resist having a read:

Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy

I’m really not sure what to make of the article, it is all very po faced and hyper-serious, but I just can’t help laughing at the indepth analysis given to some films. For example, there is a scene in The Core where the heroes go deep underground and get out of their vehicle.

We could discuss many questionable issues with this scene: (a) Could a cave exist at such depths? (b) Could the crew afford to open and close the door of the vehicle in such a depth? This would mean the loss of breathable air from the vehicle and changes in the air pressure and temperature of the vehicle. (c) Could the flexible suits that the crew is wearing really protect them at that depth? Many more questions could be added in this list. The reader can reflect on these issues on his own. We will only discuss the sinking of a human body in lava

I can’t even tell if the authors are being serious, or wrote this whole thing for a laugh in the pub. Don’t even get them started on why time would probably not go backwards when superman flew around the earth, or why in X-Men: The Last Stand the bit where Magneto moves the golden gate bridge is not feasable (unless Magneto is powered, like the sun, by fusion).

The relocation of the bridge gave to the director an opportunity for great special effects. However, even with the acceptance of Magneto’s special powers, it is an unrealistic scene given the physical laws in our universe

The whole paper is absolutely brilliant and I urge everybody to read it.

I really like the idea of doing some movie reviews focused entirely on movie physics, think Angry Nintendo Nerd but with graphs and equations and foul language.

Finally, as a single word of advice. If you’re ever in a situation where either of the authors of this paper ask you to watch a movie with them you should respectfully decline.

There is something I very much like about this exchange on an internet message board (clicky for big):

(found via the Encyclopedia Dramatica ‘Irony’ Page, which is amusing in its own right and could probably teach a thing or two about irony to even the most dedicated connoisseur of comedy)

Finally we have a contender for the best news article of 2007:

Drunken German Heinrich Mueller, 28, has been arrested after climbing into one of the emergency post boxes for unwanted babies.

As Mueller slid down the chute he ended up in an emergency incubator, triggering alarms among medical staff that another unwanted baby had been deposited.

But instead of a newborn they found Mueller, who had started smoking a cigarette - then fell asleep as staff worked out how to get him out of the incubator at the hospital in Dortmund, Germany.

Hundreds of babies have been deposited in the boxes, set up across Germany and Austria, since the scheme started five years ago.

It came into effect after more and more young mothers, unable to cope with their newborns and afraid of dealing with officials, had been abandoning them on the street. The baby boxes offered a no-questions-asked alternative.

Yes. That’s right. There are baby-postboxes for your unwanted newborns and for some mysterious reason they are large enough for a grown man to fit inside.

Until today I was unaware of the existence of baby hatches, but since this article have read a bit about them. I think that one of the reasons that I have never heard of baby hatches is that:

In the United Kingdom there are no baby hatches as they are illegal: the law states that any mother who abandons a child less than two years of age is a criminal and can face up to five years’ imprisonment (wikipedia)

The baby-letterbox is, obviously, a huge ethical dilemma, but overall I think their existance is probably a good thing, especially considering the numbers in this article from a German broadsheet

Many women abandon their babies in rubbish bins. In the past week alone three dead babies have been found in waste bins.Officially only 15 to 20 children are killed each year, but Signora Passeri said that the true figure was at least ten times that number.

The latest cases of abandoned infants — one Chinese, one Ukrainian and one Nigerian — came to light after the mothers arrived at hospital with birth injuries but no baby. Signora Passeri said that, until six years ago, “nearly all” the women abandoning newborn babies were Italian. “Nowadays the majority are immigrants, often illegal immigrants afraid to turn to the authorities .”

I have a favourite essay.

I’m always a bit uncomfortable sharing this sort of thing because I am pretty self conscious and don’t want to come over as the sort of conceited, pseudo-intellectual idiot that roams the earth just bringing up the oh-so clever things they know, and overwhelmingly clever things they think about.

That said. This is my blog and I’m allowed to be all self-indulgent sometimes* so today I’m going to talk about George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (1946, full text in link). The essay is essentially about the way in which the english language is used and abused both incompetently (laziness) and competently (sophistry).

Firstly it is important to emphasise the difference between the ever-evolving state of language (which L>T has written about very nicely), and what this essay discusses. Here, I am concerned only with how the english language is used in unclear, ambiguous, misleading and emotionally charged writing. Like when you hear a politician speak. I’m often taken in by their long words, acronyms, catchphrases and ambiguities to the point that I almost can’t remember what the original question they were answering was.

Overall though, I take away two main points from this writing:

a) Language is twisted by those with an agenda (everybody, I guess!) in order to make their points. Describing something with an overused buzzword like ‘free’ or ‘democratic’ doesn’t necessarily make it ‘good’.

b) In your own writing it is important that you remain clear and concise. If you want to be understood then say it using understandable words and say it using as few words as possible.

At the end of the essay Orwell offered six rules for writing that, if followed, do a lot to help with the clarity of writing. They are:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable”

I always strive to bear this in mind when writing, to varying degrees of success. I’m just as guilty as every other blogger of sometimes using a long word when a short one would suffice; I use tired metaphors, which have lost all emotional impact and sometimes I’m verbose for the sake of it.

Still, one can only try!

^{*also the essays I enjoy aren’t impressive or difficult, so I don’t really feel bad bringing them up. I’m much happier reading some really trashy fiction most of the time.}

So there I was, in the office minding my own business when suddenly the head of the department bursts through the door.

“Hey! Do you wanna be on TV?” he asked us all. Nobody had any massive objections so a documentary team rolled on in and set up shop. One guy ran around with a camera, another with a big furry microphone, and a third just kind of stood in the background. I think he was probably there to look menacing. It was very weird just trying to get on with my work and having some ‘media types’ around jamming cameras into my face and taking pictures of the paper I was writing on. The documentary they were filming is about astrophysics (unsurprisingly), and should air on the BBC at some point in the future. I think the purpose of visiting our office was to film some kind of continuity shots, where they use short clips of scientists hard at work (!) and dub over an interesting monologue from some other (actually important) scientist.

I really hope they use the tape of me poking at a graph with a pen and gesturing wildly at my supervisor, or hell, using any of it would do. When the documentary crew left a nice young girl came in and asked us to sign contracts to allow the footage to be used on TV. Here is mine:

^{clicky for readable version}

This thing is just mental! It is much more comprehensive than any other form I have ever signed. Just look at the language, it is really good! I have irrevocably signed away the rights to this footage throughout the entire universe for all time in all media, even if it hasn’t been invented yet. I can be used in any sort of advertising and additionally no longer have any ‘moral rights’. Luckily I don’t know what this really means and so am happy enough to sign my soul away for a chance to be on telly.

late edit: I have just ordered some signed prints of two of the Perry Bible Fellowship comics. I plan on framing them really nicely and keeping them out for the world to see

“Setting fire to a post box only to later learn that a child had just tried to post her puppy to Santa Claus”

^{p.s. see comments}

“Driving down the motorway at well over 70mph and then noticing my friend’s brand new pet kitten has wriggled from her grasp and somehow got itself stuck under my brake pedal.”

—–

It is well known that one of the other occasional contributors to this blog, JEG, enjoys a bit of trashy television. I really sympathise with him as I have a real soft spot for cheesy fiction. This is probably the highlight of my cheese-collection and probably also the most contrived fan-fiction ever: “Star Trek the Next Generation / X-Men: Planet X”

Yes, you read that correctly, it’s a book with both Star Trek and the X-Men in it. I found it on a market stall almost a decade ago (for the bargain price of 99p) and couldn’t resist grabbing a copy for me and Gem to read, it is everything you would expect from a Star Trek/X-Men mashup. Here is my synopsis of the plot:

Via some sort of techno-voodoo the X-Men appear mysteriously on the Enterprise. Coincidentally this occurs just in time for the X-Men to help the Enterprise combat an alien threat. The good guys win, the evil aliens are vanquished, and there is much rejoicing. Then the X-Men go home and everybody acts like this adventure never happened.

The whole book reads like comic-book guy’s wet dream, there are a series of encounters designed solely to make nerds go “Hell yeah! That’s like the best thing I’ve seen since Trinity in the matrix jumped off her motorbike in that rubber catsuit”. A few highlights include:

• Worf and Wolverine having a fight, then coming to respect each other as warriors
• Prof. Xavier and Picard meeting up and noting that they look very similar
• Picard and Storm having a ‘relationship’

Can anybody find any books trashier than mine? I very much doubt it!

^{Warning! serious post ahead, if you’re here for pictures of puppies or stupid stories then stop back tomorrow, when normal service will be resumed}

I was reading a couple of opinion pieces today in The Guardian on the subject of copyright. The music industry in the UK is pushing for the extension of the copyright term in sound recordings to be increased from 50 to 95 (or more) years. This is as astoundingly bad idea.

Copyright as a concept has its roots in Britain. With the advent of movable type press machines it became possible for authors to earn money from selling copies of their works. Very quickly, however, other publishers would re-typeset the book and flood the market with their own editions making it almost impossible for authors to make any money. In response to this the government passed the Statute of Anne (1710), a law ensuring that authors have the exclusive right to publish their book for 14 years from first publication. This protected authors by allowing them to make money from their work for a fair length of time, before it was passed into the public domain.

The copyright laws that hold today are, in their basic structure, similar to the Statute of Anne (as per usual wikipedia has a good discussion). In the case of music, the copyright term is 50 years; after which the works lapse into the public domain where they may be used by anybody. This means that much of the classic rock and roll from the 1950’s is now coming into the public domain. Record companies wish to avoid this and are lobbying hard for an extension of the copyright term from 50 to 95 years.

Extending the copyright term in this way is a bad idea for two reasons. Firstly the copyright laws are designed so that the people who create great works of art are fairly compensated for them; a period of 95 years is utterly unnecessary for this purpose, the only people who stand to gain from this are the record labels, who get the exclusive rights to works long after the original artists (and probably anybody who remembers the music being made) are dead.

The second point is that most songs over 50 years in age have little to no commercial value, as demonstrated by this quote from one of the Guardian articles:

As the British Library reminds us (in a very even-handed review of the situation), a number of US-based studies show that less than 2% of works have any commercial value at all 55 to 75 years after they have been created

Increasing the copyright period to 95 years would leave us with masses and masses of songs that it just isn’t economically feasable for the labels to reissue, but shut off from those who are enthusiastic about them by a law that exists only to keep more control with the record companies (as an aside I am somewhat reminded of the long tail: The observation that the popularity of objects is well described by a power law (very few popular objects, and very many less popular ones that nevertheless combined make up most of the total sales).

It is orders of magnitude more beneficial for our society to release these songs so that they may be archived and enjoyed by anybody that is interested. The extended copyright term does nothing but put more money and control in the hands of a few powerful record labels.

It is for these reasons that the article by Mick Hucknall on copyright law got me pretty riled up. Just read through it for yourself. The first five paragraphs say “copyright is a good thing, it allows artists to make money”, which I agree with completely. It is important that creators have a mechanism by which they can be guaranteed to benefit from their own creations.

In a completely baffling logical jump it is then stated that “arguments against the extension of the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years are retrogressive and misconceived” without ever giving a reason why we should increase the length of the copyright period! He states that extending copyright is about “nurturing the development of a truly revolutionary explosion in small-scale grassroots creative businesses” without ever explaining how an extension of copyright would achieve this, and also says:

Allowing valuable sound recordings to pass into the public domain does not create a public asset: it represents a massive destruction of UK wealth, and a significant loss to the UK taxpayer as exploitation moves offshore or into the grey market.

Completely neglecting the facts that materials in the public domain do create completely awesome public assets (here is another) and that the vast majority of our musical heritage is not considered profitable enough to bother record labels and so, if the copyright term is extended to 95 years these works will just be locked away by laws, where nobody can see them and they are helping nobody at all. Have you ever noticed how cheap it is to purchase copies of classical music and literary classics? This is because they are out of copyright, forcing companies to be competitive with their pricing (if you sell them at a high price, somebody else can just release a cheaper version). This opens up huge swathes of our cultural heritage to the people at large and is a far cry from the “grey market” that Hucknall warns us about. Indeed there is more incentive for an underground market to arise around copyrighted works (DVD copying in SE Asia, anyone?), as the monetary gains are much, much higher.

I am well aware that a business with a monopoly over something will resist change very strongly. In a world full of YouTubes, Google Videos, Myspaces, blogs, vlogs, social networking and Facebooks there comes a time when we have to realise that laws designed to protect against the first printing presses just aren’t adequate to deal with today’s world.

Rant over.

late edit: just looked at the comments below Hucknall’s opinion piece, looks like the Guardian readers are also ripping him a new one. This is probably my favourite comment so far:

Rubbish, capitalist nonsense. Having said that, I wish the Valentine Brothers and Aretha Franklin had stepped in and asserted some protection over their songs before you butchered Money’s Too Tight and Angel

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
_{–William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984)}

There is a real art to the opening lines of books. The first few sentences have a big job: setting the scene, introducing the characters and hooking the reader. The example above is one that I come back to time and time again and still love. It is very poetic, the way that just this one sentence can begin to paint a picture of a dismal, rainy place is very impressive. Some opening lines become so famous that they are remembered long after the rest of the book has been forgotten. Here are a few of my favourites, most of them are very well known so I have left off the author and book, feel free to take a guess at them or to share your own favourite opening lines:

1. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

2. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

3. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

4. I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.

5. A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys. Over the main entrance the words “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” and, in a shield, the World State’s Motto: “Community, Identity, Stability”.

6. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (I have never actually read this book, but the opening line is famous enough that it springs straight to mind)

7. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

Each of these openings serves its purpose beautifully, and each time I see one of them I’m hooked enough to continue reading.

01001001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01100011 01110100 01110101 01100001 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101111 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01100001 01100010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01110010 01100101 01100011 01101001 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101110 01101011 00111010

01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 00111010 00101111 00101111 01110111 01110111 01110111 00101110 01101101 01100011 01110011 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101110 01100101 01111001 01110011 00101110 01101110 01100101 01110100 00101111 01101100 01101001 01101110 01101011 01110011 00101111 01101100 01101001 01110011 01110100 01110011 00101111 00111000 01001010 00101110 01000001 01101100 01100101 01111000 01000010 01101111 01111001 01100100 00101110 01101000 01110100 01101101 01101100