Gary Stock is funny and telling on Senator Bill Frist’s past as a torturer of cats. It’s Reality Based Comedy, unfortunately.

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Greg Elin records a human interchange that he terms a “cluetrain moment.”

Yeah, it does happen occasionally. A small thing but it keeps you going for a while.

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Dave Curley writes to let us know that

You will soon be able to check out e-books from the Cleveland Public Library, which is cool, broadly speaking. Of course, the devil is in the details: a limited number of each title will be available at any time. E-books – just like the real thing!

If there were e-drugs the way there are e-books, would we be ok with limiting access to them in order to maximize revenues for the drug companies?

Ok, so that analogy has some holes in it. I’m a writer. I’m in favor of getting paid for what I write. But this particular way of balancing the interests of the author and the public is such an unimaginative note-for-note copying of real world limitations that you have to believe there’s a better way to weight the scales.

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David Isenberg’s SMART letter alerts us to some seemingly irrational behavior by the FCC:

The FCC is planning to eliminate wholesale rate rules, called UNE-P, that make it possible for companies that do not yet own their own last mile to enter the local telephone service marketplace. The UNE-P rules were established to make local competition possible. (For a good overview [too technical for me – dw] of the current UNE-P debate see here .)

This is such a reversal and such a bad idea that it’s hard to fathom Chairman Powell’s reasoning. It gives the incumbent telcos more money, but it ends competition and shuts down the market.

Now Howard Greenstein suggests an explanation: Suppose limiting the number of telco providers is a requirement for John “The Felon” Pointdexter’s Total Information Awareness plan?

I’m reluctant to get all paranoid about this, but does anyone have a better explanation?

Kevin Werbach, ex-FCC wonk and all-around good guy, says: Nah. (I’ve boiled down his email while I await permission from him to run it.)

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In support of Marek’s campaign to brand Jack Valenti as the Gollum of Content:

Jack Gollenti

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U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA), John Doolittle (R-CA), Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) introduced on Tuesday the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act. Boucher said:

“The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before. Historically, the nation’s copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the Fair Use rights of the users of copyrighted material,” Boucher said. “The re-introduced legislation will assure that consumers who purchase digital media can enjoy a broad range of uses of the media for their own convenience in a way which does not infringe the copyright in the work,” Boucher explained.

Let us not only praise these reps, let us reward them. Cash? Cuban cigars? Hookers? Just let us know, boys!

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The last time I taught a college course was in 1986. I’d forgotten how hard it is to teach.

About 12 people showed up for the Jan-Plan mini-course I’m leading at MIT. Last night’s topic was the Web’s effect on how we understand the self. I talked for about 30 mins along the lines I’d laid out here. Discussion was halting in part because I didn’t do a good enough job stimulating the class with questions and in part because we’re a bunch of strangers, although we did seem to be an exceptionally thoughtful bunch o’ strangers. Since this class is non-credit and doesn’t require people to have come to previous sessions, we’ll start from scratch next week also when the topic is the Web’s effect on morality. (The next class is on Tuesday, 7-9pm in room 1-390.)

Nevertheless, the conversation certainly had its merits. I got challenged at the beginning on whether the Internet is anything except more of what already existed: people already could create public selves oddly disconnected from their real world selves by publishing books and articles. Yes, but that’s like saying that all democracy did was make everyone a king. When you do that, you alter something fundamental.

Then someone said that studies show that people spend most of their time on the Internet reading about (and possibly discussing — this was vague) health information. Therefore, my contention that the Internet/Web is mainly about connection is cockeyed. And this is something that bothers me. My claim is not quantifiable. In fact, if you were to produce studies showing that the vast majority of hours spent on the Internet are consumed doing research, I’d still say that the Net has touched us so deeply not because it’s an information library but because it enables us to connect with one another. And when I say “touched us,” I really mean “touched me and the people I hang out with.” I know that I am trying to explain a phenomenon that may be quite parochial. But I make no claims to being objective. This is a general problem with phenomenology: you’ll accept an insight as true if it reveals to you the phenomenon as you experience it. Otherwise, you won’t and the phenomenologist can’t argue you into it. So, if Small Pieces helps clarify for some Western, middle-class people why the Internet has touched them but utterly fails to clarify it to a kid in a small Cambodian village, I’d be satisfied.

There was good discussion about whether the way our selves can be fragmented and varied on the Web is any different than the way they’re fragmented and varied in the RW. It seemed clearer to me than ever that there is a difference about what gives continuity. If you could magically search for everything I’ve written that’s been on the Internet, the only thing that makes these all pieces from a single identity is that the same fat-assed corporeal being sitting in a RW chair typed them all. There is no unified self on the Web that corresponds to our bodies. (If this weren’t so damn obvious it might be worth the electrons I just consumed writing it.)

So, the evening was, from my point of view, worthwhile although I wish I’d been able to inspire more of a dust-up. Please feel free to come to the next one — on morality — and wreak some intellectual mayhem.

[NOTE to the attendees: Thanks! And, yes, my comments here obviously don’t cover all that we talked about. Rather, I’m commenting on what fits with my peculiar interests, what spurred me to think, and what my poor memory recalls.]

[NOTE to those who commented on the sketch of my comments I blogged last week: Thanks! They were very helpful. In fact, I handed out copies of your comments.]

Asphodel has found a possible source of the data about how much information-seeking is done on the Internet: http://www.onemerchant.com/marketing/online.pdf

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Some enjoyable bluster goin’ on between Mitch, Eric and back to Mitch over digital ID, with actual light emerging: The Genio Protocol, an open identity protocol. As Mitch says, the Protocol page does indeed say the right sorts of things (“digital identity systems need to first uphold the rights of the identity holder”). And while I totally agree with Mitch (and have been saying for a while) that digID has to emerge from the bottom up, I still don’t see why I want to have any broadly-instituted digID system. I see the way in which such systems will enable things I don’t want (DRM and intrusions on my privacy) but not what it brings that I do want. So, I’m not eager to support a better digID instead of a god-awful one when in fact I don’t want any.

Eric is probably already typing his reply: “Dude, the Bog Boys are already imposing digID systems so you’d better fight for the one that serves the interests of individuals.” To which I am already mentally composing my reply: “Ok, but we ought not act as if digID is something we actually want.” To which Eric is probably muttering his response: “Mumble mumble … big cry-baby … mumble … Cluetrain-hag … mumble mumble … RealPolitik…” To which I respond with a subcutaneous karmic rubescence…

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The Norwegian kid being tried for playing DVDs on his computer, bypassing the DeCSS encryption, has been found innocent by the court.

Woohoo!

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The intentionally funny Annals of Improbable Research‘s free newsletter has unearthed the following research:

“Mandibular Angle Augmentation with the Use of Distraction and Homologous Lyophilized Cartilage in a Case of Morphing to Michael Jackson Surgery,” M.Y. Mommaerts, J.S. Abeloos, H. Gropp, Annales de Chirurgie Plastique et Esthetique, vol. 46, no. 4, August 2001, pp. 336-40. The authors, who are at Hôpital General Saint-Jean, Bruges, Belgium, explain that:

This article presents a combination of distraction osteogenesis and lyophilized cartilage used to three- dimensionally over-augment the mandibular angle of a long-face prognathic patient who had the wish to be morphed to Michael Jackson or at least as far as current technique and his endogenic features allowed.

A bird’s-eye view of the article (with some of its photographs!) is here.

So, we may have found the only thing weirder than Michael Jackson: a guy who wants to undergo extensive surgery in order to look like Michael Jackson. On purpose.

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