Two-word pairs, as they occurred in a recent piece of spam I got, with a subject line of ‘fabric paradoxic colette harpsichord oilcloth’.

Some of these would make better movie titles than band names:

extraterrestrial cyclorama cheek meteor nether keg circumpolar exhaustion drab gibberish [this would be Cheek Meteor's first album] lithe necrosis shoestring bootlegging cereus gimmick [part of Wile E. Coyote's schtick] chlorate chisel inclination hippo hippo bookseller epsom contralto [you can hear her all over Surrey] cedric montreal [e.g. Cedric Montreal and the Rue Sherbrooke Players] literate pythagoras ineducable eclipse ominous command [starring Gene Hackman as the evil general] hellenic chairwomen [Sophie Nickapopolous moves that we adjourn] huff cordage caustic club [perhaps Ms. Nickapopolous could chair this, if she's acerbic enough] invidious methodist checkmate appellant ovenbird acumen [what you need on Thanksgiving]

I spent some time today going through some boxes in the junk room and picking out things to haul to the dump. Among the things to go: Oracle 7 documentation, freebie CDs from trade shows seven years ago, lots of floppy disks, papers, bags, trash. We have a reasonably-sized room in the basement that’s almost completely filled, floor to ceiling, with banker’s boxes, and in those boxes you are liable to find anything.

One of the boxes — long since sorted and discarded — famously contained:

1. A complete set of Simpsons dolls, missing only Maggie;
2. A glass Garfield coffee mug, offered as a premium at some fast-food restaurant in the 1980s;
3. A plastic-coated-wire dish drainer;
4. Two 9×11 darkroom trays;
5. A Swedish gasoline-fuelled blowtorch, of the kind you see cartoon characters using.

The box was labelled “Miscellaneous”.

The problem is that few of the boxes have labels that are much more helpful than that. A good quarter of them are labeled, literally, “Random”, and a lot of the others have labels like “Gadgets (broken)” or “Wires, probably useless”. Somewhere in that room, there are at least three toasters, and one toaster oven. Some of those boxes are full of old newspapers — and I don’t mean ones with stories about us, or things like the Washington Post from September 12, 2001; those tend to get thrown away. I mean, they’re full of just random newspapers that were thrown in a box because we were too lazy to do anything else with them. We have paid movers to move such boxes from house to house. I once opened a banker’s box only to find that it was full of miniature bags of snack chips. Judging by the dates on the things, we’d moved that box three times.

Anyway, once in a while you do come across a gem:

This is an excerpt from the first page of a diary I found in a box that otherwise contained old shopping bags.

Particularly interesting is that this diary was begun exactly nine years ago today. I don’t generally keep a diary, so this is particularly serendipitous.

It’s amazing the difference nine years make. In 1995, I had a gray BMW and a PowerBook. Now, I have a different gray BMW and a different PowerBook. The superficial details of my life don’t change all that much, I suppose. But nine years ago, I never would have guessed that today, I’d be living in the middle of nowhere in fucking Virginia and sorting through boxes of old junk.

Some of today’s other activities drove home the theme of how time changes circumstances. One of the things I was trying to root out from the junk room was my collection of seriously obsolete software and documentation. I estimate that I threw away CDs, floppy disks, etc., etc. with an original retail value of about $20,000 (there were some copies of Oracle in there, which tends to push the price up pretty rapidly). Today, they’re worthless. The 80 mb hard drives I didn’t throw away; I just can’t bring myself to do it. They’re the blowtorches salted through this year’s generation of boxes, I suppose.

It all makes me wonder — I realize that this is hardly going to come as a surprise to most readers — what I might be doing nine years from today, in 2013. I might be dead by then, of course, but the odds are against it.

Presumably I’ll be chucking today’s 160 gb disks into boxes and sneezing from the dust. I only hope that some kind of hover-belt is invented by then, so I can do away with the step-stool.

The New Yorker is legendary for the rigor of their fact-checking department. They leave nothing to chance:

A “Talk of the Town” piece once said that the musician Art Garfunkel had gesticulated nervously with his hands during an interview. Garfunkel later recalled getting a call from a New Yorker fact-checker asking if he still had both arms.

That’s obsessive.

So a recent Malcolm Gladwell article — entitled “Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety” — in the magazine is all the more puzzling. Gladwell has in the past shown himself to be a remarkably level-headed person; I’m sure that, like all of us, he has his biases, but in his writing he’s been very good about supporting his assertions with evidence. It appears, though, that his dislike of SUVs is greater than his dedication to honesty.

I have rather a lot to say about this, with charts and graphs and all, to the tune of about 30 KB.

(more…)

On a flight into Tampa:

John McLeod didn’t immediately return his seat to its full upright position as a US Airways jet approached Tampa last month, and he was shocked by the consequences.

The 60-year-old small business owner from Asheville, N.C., said a flight attendant rebuked him and gave him sharp pokes in the shoulder.

After McLeod complained, the crew member reported him as a disruptive passenger and had Tampa International Airport police escort him off the plane.

Police questioned McLeod, who teaches Bible study at his church, and several passengers who backed up his story, then decided the flight attendant’s call was unfounded.

So: the passenger is assaulted by a flight attendant — admittedly, it was a minor assault, but certainly it would have been enough to get a passenger arrested, had the roles been reversed — and the flight attendant makes a charge against the passenger that the police find to be unfounded. What happens?

Several passengers “are advising the same circumstances as the accused,” reads an airport police report. “No further action will be taken.”

Ahh, yes. Assault, making false reports: never mind. As long as it’s been established that a passenger hadn’t, you know, raised his voice or anything. Whew. The airline appears to have the same view of the incident:

“We do not discuss personnel actions or issues involving our customers,” said [US Airways] spokesman David Castelveter. “Though we will not discuss the circumstances of this matter … in no case should a customer interfere with flight attendants in the discharge of their duties.”

So the airline will not discuss the particulars of this case where a member of their staff assaulted and made a false charge against one of the their passengers — one of their customers — but they will use the opportunity to warn passengers against annoying their staff — which the police determined didn’t happen in this case. Gosh. Maybe this attitude is part of the reason why US Airways isn’t profitable.

In my experience, many flight attendants are rude and have this withering disdain for passengers; I’ve never seen a flight attendant assault anyone. But stories like this one are not rare, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to figure out why.

Flight attendants are, in 99% of their duties, flying waiters and waitresses. They give the speech about the oxygen masks, they bring you drinks and peanuts, and then they clear out the larger pieces of trash. In any other job, we would say: this is the job. In the case of the flight attendant, though, they’re told that their job is to ensure the safety of the passengers in an emergency. In truth, this justification is the result of lobbying by the flight attendants’ unions, aimed at making their members more indispensable. It’s worked: commercial aircraft are required by law to carry X flight attendants for every Y seats on the plane. If the pilot shows up but the flight attendants are stuck in traffic, the plane can’t legally take off.

This is all fine; the whole point of the union is to make sure that its members have jobs. But when you take what is essentially a low-skill, low-pay job, require all kinds of training for it — training that has little to do with customer service — and dress it up in all this safety mumbo jumbo, you’re going to have frustrated people working that job. If you then give these frustrated, low-skill, low-pay people the opportunity to abuse their customers and broad powers to have these customers arrested if they don’t sit down and shut up, you’re going to wind up with a certain percentage of petty tyrants in the sky.

Aside from being bad business all around, this kind of thing is dangerous as well. The airlines are losing money as fast as ever, but this kind of thing seems to be more tolerated today than it has been in the past, because of The Need To Fight Terrorism.

But tell me: wouldn’t Fighting Terrorism be easier if you could be reasonably sure if a passenger who the flight attendants had determined to be a risk was, you know, actually a risk and not just someone who had bruised the flight attendant’s fragile ego? Does not the flight attendants’ lofty position as the Thin Beige Line protecting us from those who would hijack planes demand at least a little more professionalism from the flight attendants and their employers?

A little over a month ago, I wrote something here that I illustrated with a picture of a pair of $5 bills.

This image would be impossible using the latest versions of the $20 bill and Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Systems Inc. acknowledged Friday it quietly added technology to the world’s best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world’s major currencies.

Trouble is, the software doesn’t just prevent you printing accurately-representative copies of currency, it prevents you doing anything at all to images of currency. If you attempt to scan currency, or open a file containing an image of currency, or paste in something from the clipboard that contains an image of currency, it’ll refuse — even if you are using the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s own ’specimen’-marked samples.

In the U.S., at least, there are specific laws governing the use of currency images: you’re allowed to use them, as long as they are less than 75% of the ordinary size, or greater than 150%, and as long as they’re one-sided. But, given that Photoshop is the tool of choice for things like this, you are effectively no longer permitted to do so — and without any debate in Congress about it, either.

It appears that this has to do, in part, with these little ’20’s on the back of the new bill:

If you look at other currencies, you’ll find similar things, little circles in decorative or random patterns. But they’re not random at all, and their decorative value is secondary; on a lot of modern currency, you’ll find these little circles in constant relation to one another, like these:

You find the same thing on bills from a number of countries:

Now, what concerns me is not that this is going to put a crimp in my bogus-$20 operation. What concerns me is that there’s now a class of images that you effectively cannot make use of, even though such use is perfectly legal. There’s no defense for people who want to be able to make their own twenties, of course, but there are a lot of other uses for images of money.

This move echoes what’s been going on in the copyright industry of late. The problem with counterfeit currency isn’t (usually) that there’s so much counterfeit currency floating around that the issuing bank goes broke redeeming bogus notes; the problem is that, the more counterfeit currency there is, the less people trust the stuff, and the less the currency is trusted, the less it’s worth.

A copyrighted work — let’s say a DVD of Gigli — has its value diminished by counterfeiting, too. (More accurately, a movie has its value diminished by piracy in general, of which counterfeiting is just one category. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s all the same.) When Gigli came out in the theater for the first time, it cost you around $10 a head to see it. Currently, you can buy a DVD of it for $25 at Amazon, a DVD that you can watch time and time again, in the company of friends. Soon, you’ll be able to buy the DVD in the giant bin of B-movies at Wal-Mart for $3, and not long after that you’ll find it showing in the wee hours on the Hallmark Channel, interspersed with commercials for Tom-Vu-esque real estate scams, porn chat lines, and Billy Mays products.

Every time the movie is shown, it loses a bit of value. The value of something like a movie never actually drops to zero — though in the case of Gigli, I’m not so sure that’ll be true — but certainly in the early years of a movie’s life, every person that sees the movie costs the studio something in that the value of the movie as a product is diminished. (Good movies are ones where this value diminishes the least every time it’s watched.) Columbia Pictures wants to make sure that they capture as much of this drop in value as possible in the form of dollars flowing into their bank accounts. The more unauthorized copies of Gigli there are out there, the more people can see the movie without any money going to Columbia, and the more money — in terms of the value of the unseen film — they lose: so Columbia opposes and fights piracy.

However, much of the copyright industry, in fighting piracy, is these days taking the opportunity to expand its control of how its information is used, far beyond the control necessary to ensure the value of its product — in much the same way that the ham-fisted anti-counterfeiting software now built into Photoshop goes beyond what’s necessary to make the product useless for counterfeiters.

Next: What this has to do with copyright

Last night’s not-very-good episode of The Simpsons features, at one point, Milhouse grimacing in a peculiar way.

This looked familiar, so I turned to the web. Eventually, I found the original image, and in fact The Simpsons had been more directly aping the original than I’d even thought:

This is a Frenchman watching the Germans march into Paris on 14 June 1940.

Now, as it turns out, this photo is in the U.S. National Archives, apparently having been taken by an Army Signal Corps photographer who was in Paris when the Germans arrived. The Archives’ information on the provenance of this photo is sketchy.

I began my search, though, assuming that this photo had been taken by a photographer for Life magazine, since many of the best photos of World War II originally appeared in Life. I did some poking around and eventually came across the Life magazine photo archive.

There are actually two different Life photo archives online, depending on what you want. There’s this, a hosey Flash-based site touting prints of their photos. That is, for a price, you can purchase a copy of, say, Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, printed from the original negative. Pretty neat.

Of course, you can’t just buy a print from them. They’ll sell only “to approved art and design trade accounts, including art and photography galleries, museum shops, corporations, lifestyle retailers, designers, and architects.” If you are not in this rarefied group, and if you don’t want to buy at least three photographs to begin with, they don’t want to hear from you. You must go through one of their authorized dealers, which are located in at least twelve states. Well, then.

Oh, and the prices? I have to assume that it’s a matter of ‘if you have to ask, you can’t afford it’. Nowhere on their website do they give any indication of what you might pay for one of these prints once you track down a dealer. One wonders why they even have a website for this product, given that the main purpose of the site seems to be to tell you to go away.

I’m wasn’t interested in buying a print, though; I just wanted to see the photograph in question, so I could compare it to The Simpsons. Time-Life’s picture digital picture archive is here, and it’s run by Getty Images.

Trouble is, random members of the public can’t search the archive, and you can’t even browse more than a very few images. Eisenstaedt’s Times Square picture, probably the most-famous photo Life ever published, is nowhere to be found among the tiny thumbnails featured on the site.

The site promises that you can search (and presumably see versions of the images large enough to distinguish details) if you register for an account; so I registered, supplying them with all kinds of personal information.

A little while later, I got the following e-mail:

Thank you for registering with Time Life Pictures. An account executive will be contacting you shortly to complete your registration. Once registered, you will be able to search, view and download high-resolution images from our website. We look forward to providing you with exceptional service and the world’s best imagery.

I have not yet been contacted, presumably because this is some process that requires the intervention of a human.

So, their position is this: I can buy their images as photographic prints, but not directly from them; I have to jump through some specific hoops. I can, presumably, view their images online, and I can, for a price, use them in my creative works, but to even see whether one of their images will suit my purposes, I must establish an account with them — and establishing an account is not just a matter of signing up.

Oh, and they look forward to providing me with ‘exceptional’ service.

I would say that they’re already providing me with ‘exceptional’ service, as most people who are selling things are eager to do so. Tiffany’s will send you diamond rings in the mail, provided you can pay for them. A process that involves so many obstacles certainly is an exception.

Presumably, Time-Life is hysterically paranoid about their images being ’stolen’ and used without permission or payment, but I have to wonder whether this makes any sense at all.

It’s not as if it’s in Time-Life’s interest to hold these images close to their vest; the main reason these images are so valuable in the first place is that hundreds of thousands of copies of the things were printed in magazines. Eisenstaedt’s Times Square photograph isn’t actually all that good a photo, particularly compared to the rest of his work: its importance and value comes almost entirely from the fact that nearly everyone has seen it, and that it symbolizes the end of World War II more clearly for most Americans than anything that happened on board the U.S.S. Missouri.

And it’s not as if they have any hope of really capturing every last bit of potential revenue here. The Times Square photo is readily available at low resolutions online now, and I seriously doubt that all of these people have paid the license fee. Were Time-Life to attempt to collect licenses from people using the photo, most of those people would just take it down. If Time-Life were assiduous enough in their enforcement, they might manage to suppress the thing altogether, and create a generation of people who see that photo as nothing more than a couple of people kissing in the middle of the street.

Part of the difficulty of valuing intellectual property is that exposure of the product — sale, piracy, whatever — carries an opportunity cost that’s almost impossible to accurately calculate. If I can see the Times Square photo for free, I’m a tiny bit less likely to buy an Eisenstaedt book, a small portion of the revenue from which goes to Time Warner. If I can buy it for $1.00, I’m less likely to buy it for $10.00 later. And so on.

While it’s impossible to accurately calculate the opportunity cost of exposing intellectual property, nobody appears to even try to estimate the opportunity cost of keeping all this stuff locked up. It’s a Wonderful Life provides one of the very few examples of a quality media product that hasn’t been rigidly controlled for its entire existence. It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t the best movie ever made, but it’s certainly the best-known movie of 1946: The Best Years of Our Lives, a much better movie, won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Music in 1946, but most people today are not familiar with it. It almost certainly makes less money for MGM today than It’s a Wonderful Life does for Republic. In fact, It’s a Wonderful Life has probably made more money altogether, despite effectively having been in the public domain from 1974 to 1994, than The Best Years of Our Lives.

Why is this? It’s because It’s a Wonderful Life was, for a time, a cultural artifact rather than a product. People now purchase it — either outright or by watching a broadcast with advertising — not because the information contained in the movie is otherwise unavailable to them, but precisely because it isn’t. It’s familiar; George Bailey’s wild run through the town, the halting Auld Lang Syne, Zuzu’s petals, and all the rest are part of the American Christmas tradition. The kid who works at the video store who had never heard of Citizen Kane and who told me that they probably didn’t have it because ‘it’s an old movie’ has undoubtedly seen It’s a Wonderful Life fifty times. There’s a value in that, and a value that can be measured in dollars.

Unfortunately, most companies in the intellectual-property business show by their actions that they are more interested in having more iron-fisted control than they are in having more money.

The interesting thing is not that one of the headlines on the front page of today’s Washington Post is “A Triumphant Landing on Mars”. The particularly interesting thing here is that this is not the largest headline on the page.

Of further interest is the story directly beneath the boxed Mars story, about how many people in China must rely on candles for light because of electricity shortages. Electricity production in China is controlled by the state, and the central planners have, surprisingly enough, misjudged the demand. The Post, of course, intimates that this may be the result of what little competition and liberalization have been introduced to the Chinese electricity business:

But much as the energy shortages in California sparked a rethinking on deregulation, China’s troubles have sown doubts about the virtues of its reforms.

Ah, yes. If only people weren’t doing so many things and using so much electricity, there would be no electricity shortage. If only people would see the virtues of central planning, all these problems would go away.