Monthly Archives: December 2002

New Time Radio

Every once in a while I have a chain of thoughts that connects seemingly unrelated
things together into a new set of ideas. One of those happened to me over the last week or so. I’ve previously complained that the creation of our “culture” is increasingly a manufactured entity: that our music and stories are increasingly the result of commercial interests carefully screened for marketing purposes rather
than the stories and music that we create as individuals. We have become a world of watchers rather than doers.

But there are some interesting counterexamples. One that I’ve begun to find interesting is fan fiction and art. Recently Slashdot ran an interesting story on
Star Wars Second Strike,
a fan fiction story rendered as an audio play in the style of old time radio. It is
a fascinating attempt at collaboration: over 40 actors in five countries participated in producing the first hour long episode. I’ve listened to just a bit
of it (the rest will wait for my anticipated long trip to Monterey next week), but
the production quality is quite high. Audio dramas present interesting challenges for story telling, but this would seem to be an area where amateurs could make
significant and interesting new contributions using the Internet as a collaborating
medium. I dug around a bit, and discovered an interesting set of links for
Radio Drama Resources. The idea of creating new dramatic works in the audio format
seems very compelling, and more within the budget and resources of amateur
productions.

I’ll ponder it some more…

A gift from the public domain…

While surfing around for Christmas ideas, I landed upon a link to L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) and his classic story The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Amazon.com has a printed version of this book for over a hundred dollars, but the story itself is now in the public domain and available from Project Gutenberg. As my Christmas present to all, I dusted off some text macros and converted it into a slightly better PDF file that you can download and read to your young ones for Christmas (or enjoy yourself!).

Merry Christmas to all, and happy holidays!

The Evil Film/Music/Media Conglomerate

While reading slashdot, you can’t escape the

rants like this
about the evils of the MPAA and RIAA. People respond in great numbers to postings like this, and everytime they do, I am baffled by the lack of clear thinking on the subject. This rant will try to isolate a few of the ways that they are stupid and wrong thinking and I am correct and right thinking.

The first set of wrong thinkers are just thieves. They oppose the RIAA and MPAA by stealing their copyrighted works
from them. They typically say things like “if they made stuff that wasn’t shit, I would pay for it”, as if that actually is an excuse for
larceny. I actually have more respect for those who merely admit that
what they are doing is illegal, they know it, and just don’t care.
At least they avoid the hypocrisy of having collected 57 gigabytes of mp3 files, all of which are crap. I have
better uses for 57gb of disk space.

The second group of wrong thinkers are what I call recyclers. Recyclers refuse to by CDs and the like from
retail outlets, and instead buy them from used stores and friends. They think that because they are buying their CDs from
used dealers, they are hurting the profits of the record companies but still getting the music they want.

This is wrong on two levels. First of all, record companies only promote artists which make them money. It isn’t because they are evil, it is simply that they are in business, and businesses exist to make money. When you choose not to buy a record of an artist you enjoy, you decrease the incentive of that artist to produce new works and the incentive of the record company to promote them. Net result: you don’t hear as much of the music that you enjoy.

The second thing wrong with this idea is that even if you do buy from second hand outlets, you are still creating demand for the record. Some people will buy records and
enjoy them for a time, and then pass them onto the used market and recoup some of their initial investment. If you didn’t
buy these records in the secondary markets, retailers wouldn’t
buy them, and demand for them would fall off in the primary
markets as well.

The third set of people are fatalists. Fatalists believe that people just can’t live without their influx of music and artists, and therefore nothing will ever change. Therefore, they go out and spend their money and then come back to their keyboards and complain about the state of affairs on slashdot.

In the end, the fatalist merely complains, but has no new ideas to offer. His thinking is too limited to actually imagine other solutions, but that doesn’t keep him from complaining about
the problems.

My own views on this matter is one of pragmatism. If I want to go see the new Two Towers movie, I go see it, and I don’t complain about the vast media machine that builds such movies. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how such epic movies are constructed without the backing of immense media empires, so I accept that as the cost of entertainment. Do I think that Tom Clancy or Stephen King deserve the huge amounts of money they earn? Well, I’m willing to buy paperback editions of their books, so I’m willing to trade my six fifty for their book. If a few
million people think the same way, then I guess they really do deserve the millions that they get paid.

Lastly, we should realize that much of the human experience has become watching rather than doing. In older cultures, activities such
as singing, music, cooking, painting, sculpture and the like are
things that are done by people, not watched by
people. I volunteer time to teach telescope making each week
because I want to encourage people to build and use telescopes, and pursue their own understanding of the universe
around us. My friend Tom schedules and performs music concerts for small audiences so that he can participate in music rather than merely consume it.

If you are opposed to the music industry and complain about
the quality of acts that they promote: make some different music and promote and distribute it yourself. The internet makes such
distribution very inexpensive. Yes, you aren’t going to be the next Britney Spears, but we already have one of those. If your
interest is in making music and sharing it with others, then make music and share it with others. Join the producer side of the equation rather than the remaining on the consumer side. The RIAA exists only because they think they can monopolize music production, and for the moment, they seem to be correct. If you
change this supply vs. demand equation, the viable business models that the record companies rely on will change as well.

More on copyright

Lawrence Lessig has another nice short opinion piece entitled
Racing Against Time. If you’ve followed Lessig’s crusade against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, you probably won’t learn anything new, but it is a nicely written and short article that extols the value of the Constitution’s rule for limited copyright terms. Worth reading!

Fun with environment maps

escher.jpg

I’ve been goofing around a bit with trying to acquire environment maps from real environments for
use in computer graphics. The usual method (quite old, but recently made more popular by
Paul Debevec) is to photograph a reflecting sphere in
the environment of interest. You can see this happening all the time in the extra footage for
Attack of the Clones Toward this end, I wrote a program that unwraps these
spherical images. It took a couple of hours, but it appears to work.

My most fun example so far is to try to do this with M. C. Escher’s drawing of himself
reflected in a sphere.
The first image on the right is a cropped version of his original composition. The image itself isn’t
quite spherical, which could be the result of the a poorly scaled scan. Nevertheless, it isn’t far off,
so I fed it to my program and….

escher.env.jpg
The texture map on the right was the result. It’s a pretty close approximation to correct perspective
in each view, which illustrates Escher’s genius in designing this particular work of art.

Anyway, i thought it was cool.