Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a challenge of the Constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This act extended the term of all current copyrights by an additional 20 years. The net result of this is that no currently copyrighted works will enter the public domain for another 20 years. There is many things wrong with this state of affairs, not the least of which is the inability for individuals to make copies or derivative works even when the copyright holders have no plans or incentive to do so. Many books and films of historic or cultural importance are decaying on shelves and in film cans because they have no substantial economic value. Organizations such as Project Gutenberg can make these economically unfeasible sources available for the benefit of the public.

You could do much worse than to read Lawrence Lessig’s webpage which will contain links to many sources of information on the case.

Thanks to Wayne Wooten, who sent me to this Ig Nobel prize winner. Surprisingly decorative and informative!

Recently I experienced something new: the excitement of rushing my wife to the emergency room for stitches. She slipped while hiking and gashed her arm pretty good on some jagged concrete. Score: 10 stitches and one tetanus shot. Today she sent me a link to the
The National SafetyCouncil, who are offering an
online First Aid and CPR course for free from Sep. 11 to Sep. 17. While this will not give you certification, it might help you be better prepared for the eventual emergencies, so I urge you all to
give it a look.

While surfing around on sweetcode today I found a link to a project called Alphabet Soup, a wacky project by Matt Chisolm that attempts to generate slightly perverse versions of regular characters using a context free grammar that describes possible characters. For instance, the following renditions of BRAINWAGON were made by his nifty script:

Pretty nifty, although I don’t think they will become my logo anytime real soon.

National Geographic reports that a group of model airplane builders are about to attempt the first transatlantic crossing with a true model airplane. A model airplane must weigh less than 11 lbs, and displace no more than 10cc.
Pretty damned amazing feat if they can pull it off. They have built four copies of their plane, and were supposed to launch beginning on August 7, but have delayed due to fog. You can watch the progress reports as they come in. The plane should transmit position and speed information every minute using an onboard GPS and transmitter.
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