I am … unhindered by talent

Big congrats to PeeZed for his continued annoyance of the Discovery Institute, and equally big props to the admin/PR folks here at UMM for making sure that people list Paul as being from the University of Minnesota, Morris, and not our little sister campuses in the Twin Cities. It would be easy for UMM to turn a blind eye to this whole thing, quietly distancing themselves from Paul’s work, and I’m damned impressed that they’ve made such a clearheaded effort to support him (or at least remain clearly connected to him) in this way.

What’s equally impressive is the excellent way that Paul responded, taking the opportunity to point out UMM’s continuing support for the wide diversity of beliefs and backgrounds (religious and otherwise) at UMM.

We have an excellent university out here in our lonely stretch of the prairie, and I think it is wonderful that the Discovery Institute has chosen to mock us for our institutional support for diversity. That’s public relations gold. “Come to UMM—the university the Intelligent Design creationists detest!” It’s good timing, too, as this is when we’re trying to get students to apply and enroll for the next academic year. It’s not too late: if you know any high school seniors, send them to our page for prospective students, have them apply, and we promise to give them a first-rate liberal arts education if they are accepted and choose to come here. As another bonus, the Discovery Institute’s PR is going to discourage students who are poor at science, the only ones who approve of their message, from coming here. It’s free advertising, and it’s going to select for a better applicant pool. Woo-hoo!

“Woo-hoo!” indeed! I know that our lives are absolutely enriched by friendships with people with a broad range beliefs and experiences, from Christian to Athiest and from Buddhist to Wicca. I’ve also been lucky enough to have done research (mostly in evolutionary computation) with well over a dozen of our fine students here at UMM since arriving in 1991, and they’ve ranged from athiests of a flavor not unlike Paul to a great collaborator who went on to spend two years in seminary in Scotland.

Oh, and WeatherGirl (who brought PeeZed’s post to my attention) says “Woo-hoo!” as well :-). She’s painting closets at the moment, though, so the response was left to me. We’re hoping she comes out of the closet soon, though, and you might hear more from her then.

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The powers that be at ReR must have decided that their club members needed a little holidy goody a few days in advance of the 25th, and I got two albums today that I’d been heavily anticipating since I saw that they were in the pipeline:

• A 2 disc set combining Skeleton Crew’s two albums (Learn to talk and The country of blinds) and a bunch of unreleased stuff.
• A re-release of Massacre’s Killing time album with six extra tracks.

Skeleton Crew and Massacre were both key bands for Fred Frith during his time in NYC in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I really love Fred’s stuff. To make it even cooler, Tom Cora was the other half (or third, depending on the configuration) of Skeleton Crew, and Tom was also truly amazing, so how can you lose? There’s an excellent Skeleton Crew track (”Zach’s flag”) on the brilliant Tom Cora tribute set (Hallelujah, Anyway: Remembering Tom Cora), and an excellent Skeleton Crew track (”Sparrow song”) and an equally fine Massacre track (”Legs”) on Step across the border, which is still my favorite overview of his work that I’ve heard. Based on those tracks I’ve been very keen to hear more from both bands, and now I can (and am!).

I’ve only been through them once, but there’s definitely lots of winning stuff there. Massacre is loud and crazy (they were often described as punk jazz, which I think says a lot), and Skeleton Crew just has so many ideas crammed into their (fairly short) songs that I’m going to be digging in that stuff for quite a while!

Here’s hoping I have lots of time to listen to music over the holidays, as the size and shape of more than a few packages under the tree suggests several more round, reflective, shiney music things in my near future!

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Props to Alex (whose blog looks pretty but has no posts) for pointing me at this Ars Techica article on more damn silliness going on in D.C. Once again the Media Mogul Puppet Masters (seen here napping) are trying to get our Congress Creatures (or is it them napping?) to dance to their tune, and once again we have to try to stop them. I quite agree with this new piece and this earlier Ars piece that the real issue is about Fair Use and Consumer Rights and not this damn fool piracy argument. There’s no question that (some) large scale piracy exists, is illegal, and should be stopped.

But that’s not what these proposals address. They make it so that I can’t pause the Tivo in mid-program to take a phone call or go make some nachos (why aren’t the snack food companies on our side on this one?!?). They make it so I have to watch all the damn commercials, and at the time when they’re initially aired. They make it so I can’t re-watch a program (and its commercials) over and over until my brain melts, unless, of course, I’m willing to pay for every re-viewing.

Take all that and replace “viewing TV” with “reading a book or magazine” and it becomes painfully obvious what a dramatic change this would make to the (very old) status quo. And it’s a change that hurts consumers and small media producers and lines the pockets and increases the control of Big Media. This is not a Good Thing.

It majorly ticks me off when these So-Called Capitalists put all this effort into protecting themselves from the horrors of trade that’s actually free. Yes, we fast forward over many commercials. But not all commercials. There are even ads that we go out of our way to watch. We watched the recent iPod/iTunes commercial featuring Eminem about a zillion times and then went and bought the song from iTunes. Shock! Horror! Advertising that worked! WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy watch darn near every movie ad that airs. We probably pay more attention to the ads at the Super Bowl than we do to the game. Some advertising can be interesting and effective. Some advertising is boring or annoying. Giving the consumer the ability to choose where to invest their neurons and their dollars is part of the game, and that should hold for TV (as a proxy for digital) just as much as it holds for print (as a proxy for analog).

But in the silver lining department, what wonderful timing for the honors course Arne and I are teaching next semester on exactly this topic :-). (Actually it’s about open source and network economics, but it all comes down to the same intellectual property issues.) Nothing like having a hot, active topic to motivate the discussion! Maybe we’ll have them read up on this over the holidays …

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About a week ago we had the happy surprise of an e-mail saying that someone had bought some “Make Tea Not War” shirts from our CafePress shop. Very cool, eh?

I was mildly surprised to discover that we get told the name (but no other info) of people that purchase from our shop. On the one hand this isn’t too weird - if they purchased from us directly we’d know a whole lot more than that. On the other hand it’s totally unnecessary for us to know anything about them, so I was a bit surprised that they told us the name.

This initial purchase was by some friends of ours here in Morris that had already expressed some interest, so no huge surprise there. Last night, however, I got an e-mail saying there had a been another purchase, and this is by a stranger! Lord knows how they found us, but we’re thrilled to know that they or someone they know will be wearing our sentiment. Hope you enjoy the shirt!

We’ve ordered a bunch of our own “Make tea not war” stuff as Xmas prezzies, and I really like the large mug that we bought for ourselves while we were ordering. It’s quite large, and nice and heavy - it feels like it’ll really last. The fridge magnets are also pretty cool and make nifty stocking stuffers, and the tote bag turned out all spiffy as well.

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A huge HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Sub-Evil Boy, who today turns a mighty 12. We had a nice party at the RFC yesterday with a group of his friends swimming, playing games, and consuming loads of pizza grease and corn syrup.

Today’s the actual birthday and is mostly family time, including our year end radio show on KUMM (their site is currently a mess due to repeated hacking, but you can still listen on-line). We couldn’t do our normal 2-4pm slot because of the way they’ve organized the slots for finals week, so we’re doing a noon-3pm show today. The first hour was entirely music chosen by Sub-Evil boy and is a pretty excellent sample of what he’s been listening to this year. The entire list is below, and it’s full of fine stuff worthy of a spin. I really love the diversity of his taste in music; I know I’m biased, but he’s just such an interesting guy.

Before getting to his playlist, though, I should apologize for the near silence here. It’s the whole end of the semester, look at all that grading, oh there are research submission deadlines looming, we need to make a Christmas card, what faucets are we going to use when we remodel the bathrooms, and I need to personally prop up the Multinational Economy through my holiday purchases thing. I do plan on replacing the annoying CAPTCHA implementation with the much nicer on that’s currently being used on WeatherGirl’s Station, and follow-up on Jane’s request for more photos from the local embroidery show. Not to mention finish up and post a few of the zillion half-formed things queued up here.

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PeeZed was spot on when he said that winter here can be

…a bony old hag with knives in her hands who comes howling out of the northwest. Our snow is tiny little flecks of ice that screams in sideways, and what’s on the ground are hard pans of icy white grit scoured and scored by the wind. We have a fierce kind of winter here, not the friendly scenic kind.

But there are also times, like last night, when she sits quietly through the long night with her brush, covering every twig and branch with the thick hoare frost, and one wakes up to the muted light of the fog and the muted sound of the snow. It makes me feel like singing, if but softly.

So, frankly, she’s a schizoid. You can guess which of these faces is better company when Sub-Evil and I are doing our half hour morning walk to school together!

And while I’m going on about winter, I’ll point everyone to Lance Fortnow’s recent interaction with winter in the South. Having grown up in Texas (and done my graduate work in Austin), I know all too well what he means about whole towns shutting down because of a little ice. It took me several years to really adapt to the winters here in Minnesota. In my early days I used to just stop in mid-lecture and stare out the window, amazed at how much snow was coming down (or blowing by). The students mostly thought I was nuts, but they were patient with the Strange Foreigner, and I’ve learned to cope much better now. Thank you for asking.

In my 14.5 years here, I think that UMM has closed once for a day because of weather, and most everyone regarded that as a mistake. If you’re in town things are much more sheltered from the howling winds than out in the country (which can easily make a difference of 10 degrees F or more to the wind chill), and the distances are just too short to not get out and walk. So we get a nice e-mail from the admins around the time of the first big storm reminding us that, while school is still on, people (students, faculty, and staff) who live out in the country may not make it in, or may make it late, and that needs to be OK. I had three students who had trouble getting back to UMM after Thanksgiving because of the weather (therein lie some great stories, but no time now), but they eventually got here safely and we coped.

Toto knows you’re not in Texas anymore when you get a matter-of-fact e-mail saying they’re closing one of the campus parking lots so they can use it for snow storage…

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