Turns out that this hospital is really quite wonderful. The staff have been splendid and caring, she has a very nice room to herself, and they have treated me as a real part of the process and not just a mildly annoying guy in the way.

So, really wonderful. Except that the guest wireless doesn’t seem to reach her room. It’s great in the lobby. It’s great here in this family room. But her hospital room appears to eat radio signals, as neither wifi or cell seem to penetrate that space reliably.

As a result I suggested that we buy a film or similar for the iPad to help make up for the Netflix shortfall, and came here to the family room to download Thor as a bit of distracting popcorn.

And it was $20.

Which gave me pause.

Which in turn really made me annoyed with myself.

So far today I’ve spent that much on meals. We’ll certainly spend that much on gas back and forth for this procedure. It’s a fraction of our minuscule share of the huge bill this will rack up. (We are very grateful for the University’s excellent health care plan.) Or we could compare this to the cost of Thomas’s tuition at Hampshire. Or my soda pop habit at the office. Or money I lose under the bed.

JOCP!!! What was I thinking? Why did I even remotely care? If this film gives her even an hour of distracted relief from the mending and tearing going on in her leg it’s totally worth it! And, I’m quite sure it will do more than that.

I realize that there’s a lot of privilege assumed in this, and that there are people for whom that $20 would be a genuine concern. (& way too many for whom an operation like this would be out of reach.)

But that’s not us.

And I just spend the best $20 I’m likely to spend in a very long time.

One of the happy side-effects of living in the Cities this summer is that I’ve been able to partake of locally made ice cream being sold by a number of local vendors. Morris doesn’t have a lot of options in that department (DQ isn’t really ice cream), so my ice cream habit is supported primarily by Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs from Willie’s). Here in the Cities, however, there’s ice cream all over the place, and I’ve definitely been taking full advantage :)

In the process, however, I’ve been forced to confront the unfortunate reality of the packaging mess that is by-the-scoop ice cream. I always try to order it in cones instead of cups, so the container is consumed instead of entering the garbage stream, but even that’s often not a huge help. The Wilde Roast is just down the road a piece and has a nice selection of gelato, for example, and I have been known to amble down to enjoy a little. Unfortunately, even if I order a cone, they scoop it into one of their plastic serving cups (essentially as a measuring device), then splooch it into the cone, and then throw the cup away! They also stick a little plastic spoon in my cone, thereby ensuring that I’ve ended up putting just as much plastic crap in the waste stream as I would have if I’d ordered it in a cup in the first place. And then there’s the paper wrapper on the cone, and the napkins ’cause is runs and drips, and blah, and blah, and blah…

There was once this crazy time when people sat down and ate ice cream in a glass bowl with a metal spoon, both of which could be washed. This is simply not an option at the majority of the places I’ve been getting ice cream at – even if you sit down you get a paper or a plastic cup and a plastic spoon. And I seem to remember that when I was a kid ice cream cones were a more straight forward, less wasteful deal – there was probably a lot of paper (’cause they were still a mess), but there was a heck of a lot less plastic (like, I’m thinking, none).

This, frankly, is dumb, and we can totally do better. I suspect the big problem is that plastic is too cheap due to the complex subsidy chain, so neither the cost of its production or its disposal are being properly assessed in our accounting and decision making.

In the meantime, it would be nice if I could order my ice cream in a nice (or, hell, a cheap) glass bowl with a metal spoon. Maybe I should start bringing my own, although I suspect they’d refuse to scoop into it (some sort of health regs) and I’d still end up with a plastic spoon stuck on top before I’d managed to cut them off at the pass.

There’s an Izzy’s Ice Cream opening tomorrow about a block from the Guthrie, which is just across the river from where I’m staying. It’s a very good thing (for my waistline, my pocketbook, and for the environment) that it and I won’t be together very long before I head back to Morris.

A very good thing.

In short, we’re being played, peeps. A small number of very wealthy folks have rigged the system in their favor and trashed the economy in the process. The amazing thing is how thoroughly they’ve convinced the middle class to support them as they’ve smashed up the family china. They have only a few votes, and their power rests ultimately in their ability to buy and bully ours.

Sadly, a culture that values sound bites more than data and rational discussion is ripe for this kind of abuse. It’s probably no accident that these people are so intent of gutting our schools, as it just serves their short term goals. Ultimately, though, they need a solid middle class to buy their toys, so this can’t be a good long-term strategy for anyone.

While it’s really hard to describe and summarize such a complex performance, a section I particularly loved had them doing a somewhat traditional dance to a large chunk of the audio from the video below. The video is of an art installation by Nate Harrison where the viewer listens to the audio on an LP, where Harrison discusses how a drum break from the The Winston’s 1969 B-side “Amen, brother” (often referred to now as the “Amen break”) has been sampled, re-used, and deconstructed in hip-hop and commercial advertising. Harrison’s discussion is a really nice piece of cultural history and analysis, although I confess it was perhaps more compelling with casebolt and smith dancing at the same time.

It would have been interesting in its own right if casebolt and smith had simply danced with Harrison’s commentary. They took it up a notch, however, by following it up with a really interesting dance/discussion of how dancers use and re-appropriate moves and steps they learn in classes and see in performance, effectively “sampling” movements much like a hip-hop artist samples beats. She demonstrated various moves and styles, and he then grilled her about where she learned the moves, and on the appropriateness of re-using these moves without credit or payment. This quickly borders on the absurd, which is of course the point. The courts have allowed labels to charge for re-use of tiny fragments of recordings, where there are no such expectations in dance. Presumably a key piece of this is the ability to record (either on paper or as an audio recording) and distribute music, where dance can’t be recorded and copied in the same way.

In short, it was a cool, funny, intelligent performance. We had a great time, and highly recommend the show.

I found it really interesting to find that the YouTube version of the video above was in fact lifted from Harrison’s web site without his permission, although he says in the comments that he doesn’t care (search for “nkhstudio” in the full comments). So you have Harrison making a commentary on copyright and intellectual property, which is then appropriated by someone else and turned into a YouTube video. Then casebolt and smith use it in their performance, without ever telling us where that audio comes from, as a starting point for a great conversation about intellectual property. And while it’s possible they knew about the Harrison piece before it showed up on YouTube (Harrison was a friend from college for all I know), the odds favor them discovering the piece via YouTube, where it has over 2 million views.

So…

• Now I’ve listened to “Amen, brother” (a song I’d never heard of)
• because of a dance performance
• borrowing parts of an audio track
• which I was able to find via Google
• as a YouTube video
• generated (without permission) from a video by a performance artist commenting on intellectual property and copyright
• using as a springboard the extended and repeated use of a 6 second drum break from The Winston’s “Amen, brother” in hip-hop and advertising

What a wonderful example of how re-appropriation can enrich the world, especially if we worry less about profit and more about gain.

Via TechDirt I found this very cool video on how our “standard” notions of incentives don’t always work very well, especially when it comes to cognitive work. There’s a ton of cool ideas in the video (and more in the TechDirt piece, including some cool links).

The incentives in the talk are typically money, but I suspect that there are interesting things to be said about grades as an incentive in the academy. Does anyone know of work along those lines?

One really interesting story is about Atlassian, an Australian software company. (Their stuff is cool, and we’ve used some of it here at UMM in the past, but it’s gotten pricey and we’ve moved to other tools.) Apparently Atlassian gives their employees a 24 period every quarter to work on whatever they want, and then they have a party where people share what they’ve done. This apparently leads to a ton of cool ideas, bug fixes, and development. So, so cool.

How could we apply that here in the academy? What if we gave everyone in our Computer Science discipline a 24 hour period to work on whatever they wanted to and then had a big party where people shared what they did? Could we do it? Would it make sense if we did? What would it mean? We’d probably have to cancel at least our CSci classes that day, and probably make sure that no one was giving an exam the next day, etc., etc.

Because we would only control our discipline’s behavior, though, we wouldn’t give many of the students the freedom they’d need to really take advantage of the opportunity. It would presumably work a lot better if we did this across the entire campus – no classes, no exams, no papers due, and then some sort of event (or set of events distributed across campus) at the end for people to share their results.

Hmmm…

Segregating information by its mode of production, convenient and profitable for software houses, too often becomes a corrupting metaphor for evidence presentations. Why should the intellectual architecture of our reports and evidence reflect the the chaos of software bureaucracies producing those reports?

— Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, p. 61

Really.

Nothing.

Take Northwest Airlines (or Delta or whatever the hell they are at the moment) as a shining non-example.

Last Tuesday I flew to Montréal for GECCO (one of the really big conferences in my research area). I was supposed to fly to DC yesterday for an NSF review panel today and tomorrow. I would then fly back to MSP on Wednesday.

Unfortunately I became quite ill yesterday morning, starting with diarrhea, and then adding vomiting just in case I hadn’t gotten everything out of my system. As a result I took what I thought was the fairly wise decision of not flying to DC for the panel. The one relevant study I found indicated that after surveying 1,000s of people, they only found one would actually wanted to sit for several hours in a small tin can thousands of feet in the air next to someone who was busily ejecting all their gastro-intestinal contents. And that one lucky customer thought they were Napoleon.

So, you might think that I was doing the airline industry a favor by not bravely struggling to the airport, puking at the ticket counter, and racing to the toilet the moment I boarded their flight.

They apparently see it differently.

The folks at the NSF have kindly told me to skip the whole panel thing and go home and recuperate. Most of the panel’s work is being done today, so there’s not much point showing up tomorrow, etc., etc. My insides are behaving today, but I’m still quite weak and run down, so I’m planning to stay here the rest of the day and head home tomorrow.

I called Northwest Airlines to see what we could work out. Twice. Same stupid answer both times.

They insist on flying me back to MSP via DC “because that’s how my original ticket was set up”. I’m sick. I just want to get the hell home. They have a direct flight to MSP from Montréal. Put me on it. Please?

No.

“Can I put you on hold to see what we can work out with ticketing?”

“Sure.”

<Polite language that translates to “You’re screwed.”>

And they wanted $200 in penalties for the privilege of six hours of travel instead of two. Oh, and the chance to see the inside of DC National again for a bit. Thanks. Really. Thanks.

200 frickin dollars to put a sick person on the slow boat to Minnesota. This is the finest customer service money can buy, apparently.

I did this twice, with identical results.

I was so pissed the first time that I announced that I was going to buy a one way ticket from some other airline (any other airline) and hung up. I’m generally extremely polite with these people, because they’re powerless drones passing along bad news they have no control over. I suspect on their scale of asshole-ness, I was still really polite, but I did feel a little bit bad about it after I hung up.

A phone call was placed to the center of all wisdom and common sense (aka WeatherGirl), and we discussed the situation. It would in fact cost me over $500 to fly back on another airline, and that had a stop in Philidelphia; the best non-stop was over $800.

Ugh.

Crow was therefore eaten, and I called Northwest back and said I’d take the $200 “deal” (hence the second call).

Ugh again. And to DC I go.

Because of the DC leg, there’s no plausible routing that gets me to MSP for the last (3 hour) shuttle ride back to Morris. The current plan is for my remarkably generous family to drive out to pick me up (7 or 8 hours of their life I don’t get to bill to anyone). Otherwise I’ll start shopping around contacts in the Cities and see if someone will let a sick puppy sleep on a couch tomorrow night and take the shuttle Wednesday.

I’m sure there are a thousand reasons by their bureaucracy “needs” me to go through DC, but none of them make a damn bit of sense. I’ve heard this sort of “logic” before, and it’s the same stuff lazy software developers use to justify why something “can’t be done”, which what they really mean is “We can’t be bothered”.

I suspect the big issue may be that the middle leg (Montréal to DC) is on United, and United is gonna want a pound of flesh from Northwest regardless. So instead of working with me, or trying to work with United, Northwest insists on making United fly me to DC so the corporate accounting plays out in the end.

Damn.

At least I have a good health care plan. Watching this amazing Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter makes one despair for the capitalism that is running rampant across the globe, and all the misfortunates being trodden under foot in the process. In that perspective I’m damn privileged.

I think I’m going to eat some more of the fruit from this morning’s breakfast and take a nap. I’ve got a long day tomorrow and need my rest.