Jam Side Down

The Man Who Loves Scholars

I am a huge fan of Simon Winchester -- a peripatetic Brit who writes brilliantly about geology, lexicography, and sinology. At his best, Winchester turns science into biography by demonstrating how an obscure scholar shaped our view of the world.

Winchester majored in geology at Oxford and worked in the field for many years before turning to writing. His 2001 book The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology is a fine treatise on a man whose world map revolutionized shipping, energy, religion, and science and inspired a young Charles Darwin as he sailed across the globe. Winchester followed with Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded in 2003 -- the colorful story of the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded. In 2005 he published A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. All three books are cogent history, good science, frequently funny, and in the case of the volume on Smith, compelling biography.

Economics and Politics as Choice Architecture

Some years back, I passed through Schiphol in Amsterdam and realized why some designers consider it the world’s finest airport. Its layout is logical and efficient, public internet terminals are numerous and free, and the stores, including a full 24/7 supermarket, are so attractive that locals come to the airport to shop.

But it was the urinals that made the biggest impression. At my first pit stop, I looked down and noticed that an insect had unfortunately chosen to land directly in the target zone. I took aim and was secretly pleased when I scored a direct hit. When the bug did not flinch, I realized that the joke was on me.

The purpose of the ceramic fly was instantly clear – to minimize needless mopping by reminding men to focus their efforts. Baking an insect onto a urinal reportedly reduces the amount of janitorial work required at the airport. Years later, JFK airport awarded the company that designed Schipol the contract to build the new international terminal in New York – so you no longer have to fly to Holland to witness this miracle of sensible design.

I recalled my visit when Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cited the strategic placement of ceramic insects as an example of a “nudge” – a low cost incentive to make the right choice. The two men have just published an important, educational, and fun book titled Nudge. If you read Jam Side Down, you are very likely to read this book, not just because I will recommend it so highly but because everyone who reads it will recommend it so highly.

Media Wants to Be Digital, Downloadable, and Free

Moore’s Law famously describes an important trend in computer processing power: the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit increases exponentially. Specifically, Intel founder Gordon Moore observed that chip density doubles about every two years. Thanks to Moore’s Law, computer processing is now free for most intents and purposes.

Metcalfe’s Law is a lesser known but equally powerful law concerning not hardware but the economics of networks (specifically a telecommunications network, but the Law appears to apply more broadly). It says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.  A telephone is an easy example: the first one is useless, the second one can call only one other machine, but the millionth one increases however slightly the utility of each of the other machines (assuming they can connect. You have to count Chinese phones as a separate network if you don’t speak Chinese). Plenty of people debate whether Metcalfe (who invented Ethernet and founded 3Com) got the math right, but the principle seems sound and goes a long way to explaining what economists like to call network effects: businesses in which each participant is better off when a new participant joins. This is a topic for another day, but Microsoft, Google, eBay, iTunes, and a lot of other "can't live without them" businesses have taken powerful advantage of network effects and Metcalfe's Law underpins a lot of the economics at work.

Even less well known than Metcalfe’s law is what arrogance and alliteration led me some time back to term Manley’s law, which states that all media wants to be digital, downloadable, and free. Like Moore’s or Metcalfe’s theorems, this is a hypothesis that can be falsified: Moore will be proven wrong the day chip density stops increasing, Metcalfe the day that bigger networks are not more valuable, and me the day that media stops becoming digital or freely exchanged. By now you have noticed that Manley’s law is in  some respects a corollary of the other two – I doubt that it would exist except as a by-product of Moore and Metcalfe.

Manley’s Law is having a good run lately. For simplicity, let’s define media as books, movies, and music -- although you could apply it to photographs and several other media types. Music digitized first simply because the files are smaller and people want to listen to the same song more often than they want to read the same book or see the same movie. 

MUSIC

Manley's law hit the music business so fast and that the New York Times referred this week to “the anarchy sweeping the music industry”.

Music became a digital media on August 17, 1982, when ABBA's The Visitors became the first CD to roll off an assembly line at a Philips factory in Langenhagen Germany. In 25 years, analog vinyl LP albums have been reduced to an audiophile niche and cassettes and 8-tracks have mercifully disappeared altogether.

Five years ago, iTunes made music commercially downloadable and since then, Tower Records, Musicland, Sam Goody and many smaller retailers have disappeared or been absorbed by chain discounters like Wal-Mart and BestBuy.

This week Apple Computer announced that in January iTunes passed Wal-Mart to become the largest music retailer in the United States. CD sales have declined every year since Apple launched iTunes and in recent years CD sales have fallen in double digits each year. In 2006, 38% of US teens did not by a single CD. In 2007, the number was 48%. 

Outside of the Box

Nobel Prize winning physicist and genius quantum mechanic Niels Bohr once pointed out that "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- a fact that he demonstrated empirically with respect to subatomic particles. Former Economist writer and business historian Marc Levinson has demonstrated that the maxim applies to technology businesses as well in a business history entitled The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.

Levinson's account of how shipping containers transformed the world economy reads like a good novel, a story revealed in layers. The plot is a compelling tale of egotistic business innovators struggling to overturn a regulated, moribund, unionized transportation sector. Characters include Malcom McLean, a self-made trucking magnate who understood the power of "inter-modal" containers that could move quickly between trucks, trains, and ships and Harry Bridges, the colorful and incorruptible communist longshoreman and  powerful advocate for civil righs who built the ILWU into a west coast waterfront powerhouse. The setting is a half-forgotten world of tough dockside neighborhoods, federally-backed transportation cartels, and incompetent urban port authorities thriving in a

Hitchens vs. God and Islamic Jihad

Our crack shot, karate-chopping, head-bashing action-hero Christopher Hitchens calls a spade a damned shovel in today's Slate. His piece, entitled "Don't Mince Words: The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women" begins

Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

OK, time out for a confession. I love this guy (as noted here, here, here, and here). The breadth of his intellect and the audacity of his arguments astonishes and convinces. One of my goals in life is to never debate Christopher Hitchens -- and frankly, the list of people I would avoid debating is pretty short.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day began in Greece -- and it may end there, too.

To the ancient Greeks, fertility was life. They worshiped mothers with a festival to Cybele, the mother of all gods. Modern Greeks worship motherhood, but they also avoid it. The average woman in Greece gives birth to 1.3 children. Over a generation or two, this is a problem for Greeks who prefer that Greece be populated with Greeks. Societies with birth rates this low enter a demographic death spiral from which they are unlikely to recover.

The Romans had a different holiday, Matronalia. Today, the Italian fertility rate is 1.29 births per woman -- meaning that by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles.

Mothers Day began in the US when Julia Ward Howe, having rallied union troops for the Civil War with her song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", decided to import Mother's Day to the US from the UK. She hoped to use the holiday to unite women against future wars but today restaurants, greeting card companies, and florists promote Mother's Day, not pacifists.

Alone among developed countries, America maintains a fertility rate right at replacement level -- 2.09 births per woman. The UK and Canada, in contrast have fertility rates of about 1.6 births per woman. Even China will shrink with a fertility rate of 1.75, achieved the wrong way and for the wrong reasons and featuring a dangerous gender imbalance.

Gravity Lessons

Leaders of businesses assaulted by technology can sympathize with Wile E. Coyote. We know how he feels when he discovers that the road beneath his feet has turned to air. We laugh in sympathy as his expression turns sheepish and he pedals frantically. We know that fall is gonna hurt.

These days you can find that sheepish expression on the face of media executives who are paying attention. They have run off the cliff and the descent has begun. All the frantic footwork in the world is not going to keep some of these guys from making a large and messy hole in the ground. Whether they publish books, movies, or music, media companies confront an astonishing fact: their content is increasingly available for free.

Many denounce the sharing of copyrighted files as theft - but they are pedaling air. The music industry illustrates the challenge. Only about 10% of digital music is paid for - the rest is exchanged for free. The New York Times reports that "Peer-to-peer networks yielded five billion downloads in 2006, whereas 509 million songs were downloaded from iTunes-style services". Although almost as many households pay for digital music as exchange it online, those who get music for free generally get a lot more of it.

Many people expect that as more songs are made available for purchase without copyright protection that both commerce and P2P file sharing will increase. The response of the music industry in general has been a case study in Roadrunner chasing -- they have spent dramatically more money on lawsuits than any of the P2P services have ever taken in revenue. But as the industry has squashed file sharing sites, others have grown to take their place. Napster is now a paid service (and a dying one), Streamcast, Kazaa, and Grokster are a shadow of what they used to be. But BitTorrent, Limewire and Freenet have sprung up to take their place - from offshore locations if necessary. The industry says they want to monitor individual downloading; P2P programmers are now making this more difficult.

Are You Ansgarr?

When you spend just a bit too much time around books, book customers, and technology, this starts to look pretty funny... [Update: they removed the embedding. Click here instead.]




And when you spend just a bit too much time around librarians, this is pretty funny too.
 

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Cities concentrate people, wealth, culture -- and memories. In New York this week, I walked by an Indian restaurant and recalled a lunch almost twenty years ago with friends who tried to persuade me to come work on Wall Street. Across from the restaurant stood a former men's club where I pitched an IPO fifteen years later and 50 feet further along sat a hotel that I had once lived in for a month as a consultant. These were a trivial fraction of the memories millions of people have of this fairly ordinary midtown block.

At the end of the week, I passed very briefly through Paris. I had a single free evening and realized that it had been exactly thirty years since I spent seven months in Paris studying and wandering. I had been inspired by Hemingway's famous claim that "to be a young man in Paris is a movable feast". When I arrived in 1977, my feast was cold and rainy. I headed to point zero -- the official center of the city in front of the Cathedral Notre Dame. On Friday, I retraced my steps.

Cathedrals, especially old, complete European ones, store memories as well as values. I remembered staying late at Notre Dame, listening to choral music with my backpack at my feet, happy for shelter and warmth after a long flight. Eventually however, I had to face a disconcerting reality: I had no place to spend the night. My savings of $2,000 had to last many months. I wandered perhaps 100 yards from the cathedral and came to 37 Rue de la Bucherie, sort of an extension to Notre Dame -- a bookstore I had never heard of that has greeted wanderers for more than half a century. It is a cathedral of books -- a bookstore unlike any other in the world (its closest companion, City Lights in San Francisco, is a hip pretender by comparison -- as its name all but acknowledges).

A Freak of Nurture

Michael Lewis on Race, Class, and Football

Michael Lewis (author of the must-read Liar's Poker and Moneyball as well as the somewhat less terrific New New Thing) recently published The Blind-Side: Evolution of a Game. Despite the title, this book is only partly about football.

Lewis likes to describe an industry undergoing a fundamental transformation (Wall Street during the late 80's, Major League Baseball or internet companies during the 90's) and to profile someone helping lead the change (John Goodfriend at Salomon Brothers, Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, Jim Clark of Netscape). He has a great sense of humor and an unfailing eye for comic detail.

Blind Side adheres to the formula then manages to transcend it -- which is why this is Lewis' best book yet. Lewis chronicles a series of profound shifts in professional football that originate with the West Coast Offense. In the 1980s, Bill Walsh notices that the running game in football is like a mature industry: performance does not improve with the application of resources, innovation, or world class talent. For decades, NFL rushers had averaged 4-5 yards per carry and fumbled about 3% of the time. Runners became bigger and faster, plays became more complex -- but defensive players adapted. Four decades after Ohio State's Woody Hayes pioneered the "three yards and a cloud of dust" offense, the running game was still about the same. So Walsh focused on pioneering a new approach to the passing game. By the time he became head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, he had built a novel and highly productive offense around short, wide passes. It represented a fundamental change and the results transformed professional football. Suddenly Joe Montana and Jerry Rice -- along with other quarterbacks and tight ends -- become household names.

The Immortal Game

During the summer of 1972, I worked as a cook in a small resort in New York's Hudson Valley. It was a small, family-run place patronized entirely by elderly Jews from New York city that hired me, a goyem from southern California, sight unseen. I passed as Jewish well enough -- my hair was curly, I talked fast, and my guests' powers of observation were generally past their prime .

 

At the end of that summer, right after Labor Day, a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September attacked the summer Olympic games in Munich. They took Israeli athletes hostage and murdered eleven of them in the worst assault ever on the modern Olympics. The event was celebrated (and I wish I could say commemorated) by the recent Steven Spielberg film Munich.

The massacre terrified guests at the resort -- many of whom wore faded numbers tattooed on their arms as souvenirs of Nazi death camps. Televisions stayed on all night; prayers were spontaneous and frequent and the news that Israeli athletes had been massacred brought sobs and rage. No experience before or since has brought home to me with such force the absolute necessity for Israel and the horror of anti-Semitism.

Prior to the attack, the summer had passed wonderfully. We had largely ignored the Olympics because America -- and especially New York -- was consumed by a new passion for chess. Everyone was learning to play, everyone talked about it, chess books were sold on street corners and chess matches were televised and endlessly analyzed (a young comic named David Letterman noted sardonically at the time: "You really can't have too much televised chess"). For a brief period, chess was huge; in New York you could mention the King's Gambit declined in casual conversation and everybody acted like they understood you.

Triumph of the Philoperisterons

Every now and again someone comes along and makes me change my mind. They assault my prejudices with facts, challenge my beliefs with evidence, and even cause me to reinterpret certain life experiences. I could defend the old ways of course, but why bother? The other guy is right and I have been wrong. Time to change.

I refer, of course, to pigeons. "Rats with wings", as I have gleefully taught my children to call them. I kick them when I can, dodge them when I can't, and curse them at all times. Never actually shot or poisoned one, mainly because I did not want a rotting carcass to dispose of. Glad to mount fake plastic owls, install sharp wires or spread smelly goop to try to keep them away (didn't work) or to shoot their eggs with a pellet pistol pumped to low velocity (worked fine). Anything to curtail their incessant hooting and restrict the worrisome accumulation of guano outside my bedroom window when I lived in San Francisco.

Now along comes Andrew Blechman to gently explain that I am a victim of false consciousness imposed by pest control companies. He has published Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird. He gets carried away with the whole thing, as authors of books like this tend to, but he does make a persuasive case for rethinking pigeon hatred ("anti-philoperisteronism" as Simon Winchester would put it. Winchester is a splendid writer, liked the book, and apparently feels that since he wrote two tomes on the OED he is now entitled to make up any damned word he likes. Works for me.)

If an entire book on pigeons is just a touch more than you care to muster, you can hear Blechman's KQED Forum podcast here, read his New York Times column here, check his editorial rant here, or visit his website here. Or read on.

Echo Echo

Recent coast-to-coast flights gave me time to enjoy two cop novels that reveal a lot about the genre and maybe about ourselves. Echo Burning is the 2001 Lee Child potboiler featuring Jack Reacher; Echo Park is the newest Michael Connelly police procedural starring Harry Bosch. Both are airport books that demand little of a reader other than the ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy. Both feature attractive, tough guy heroes and both are the work of stylists at the top of their craft.

These writers locate their stories with such a sure sense of place that you may end up at the wrong baggage carousel when the flight lands. Connelly lives in Florida but sets his Harry Bosch stories in Los Angeles. Bosch is a fully caffeinated homicide detective with the LAPD Open-Unsolved crimes unit (ed: what crimes are all the other units investigating?). Connelly once worked as a police journalist in LA; his accounts of police and DA politics have the ring of someone who has been there. Connelly writes ready-to-shoot noir screenplays. Hopefully somebody will want to film 'em dark and sinister again.

Child works harder to build a sense of place. This is partly because he is a Brit and partly because his chosen hero, ex MP Jack Reacher, is an itinerant freelancer who has previously set things straight in Indiana, Maine, Florida, Georgia, Washington, DC, and South Carolina (including a memorable visit to Paris). Echo Burning takes place in the high heat of August in Echo County Texas, some distance from Pecos.

If Connelly channels Raymond Chandler, Child lives in the thrall of Zane Grey. Child manages a credible rendering of the desolation, scale, and hellish heat of West Texas but his caricature of the the locals are from someone who has inhaled too deeply at the BBC. White locals are redneck racist imbeciles whether they are waitresses, sheriffs, or ranch hands. Mexicans are uniformly handsome and noble whether they are Texas Rangers or campesinos (one Mexicana quotes Balzac to Reacher -- I kid you not). In Child's Texas, all immigrants are exploited, all judges are corrupt, and justice for the underdog comes only from Reacher's indignant fists.

Alien Nation: Another Urban Legend?

OK, you want more friends, more involvement with your community, and more contact with you neighbors. Where are you better off living -- in the buzz of the city or out in the socially alienating suburbs?

I'm a city guy from the burbs -- which are the butt of contemporary sociology. Bob Putnam's Bowling Alone is just the most recent documentation on how Americans are increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and civic life. Critical social theorists argue with Marx that that capitalism makes alienation inevitable, that we are doomed to shallow, "commodified" relationships. The burbs? Didn't Marx have something to say about "the idiocy of rural life?".

Now comes research from an economics professor at UC Irvine (that's suburbs, in case you don't live here) finding that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 per cent.

"We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower," says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. "What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city."

Brueckner says the UC Irvine study accounted for differences in social class, family structure and other factors, and found that people are still friendlier in the suburbs. The results suggest society needs to re-think some received wisdom about the evils of suburbia, he says, but other criticisms about the loss of green space and the costs of commuting still stand.

The Canadians report here and here is the paper on-line.

Sexonomics

During the 1970s, I worked in an enormous machine shop in Sunnyvale, California. It was noisy, messy, boring, and occasionally dangerous. Silicon Valley was popping up all around us, creating technology that would change the world -- but we carried lunch buckets and cut metal for a living. Perhaps a thousand machinists, operators, tool and die guys -- almost all men. A huge place, with several acres under roof. Your basic slice out of the nineteenth century sitting smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was reported to be the largest machine shop west of the Mississippi and amazingly, the place appears to still be operating.

Naturally, every company that sold machine tools sent salesmen to call on our shop. They left color brochures of the latest in computerized mills, lathes, drill presses, etc. As often as not the pictures advertising machine tools featured a woman in a bikini. I recall seeing ads for tractors and earth-moving equipment that did the same thing.

Now I understand that sex sells booze, sports cars, clothing, exotic travel, nice restaurants, and a lot of other things associated with romance. But do attractive women in bathing suits really help sell big, smelly, oily, slice-your-hand-off-in-a-nanosecond machine tools?

The right guy to answer this question is Steven Levitt, economist and author of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Levitt (winner of the 2003 Clark Medal, explained here) has produced a delightful unfocused romp of a bestseller that finds economic causes of things that you might not, at first glance anyway, think had anything to do with economics.

Well, it turns out that Levitt's book was translated into Turkish but wasn't selling well in Turkey. So the publisher reissued it with a new cover, shown at left. Maybe economics in Turkey is more fun than I thought. Or perhaps Levitt knows something I don't about selling economics books. Or did those guys who used to write the machine tool ads finally find work overseas? (Thanks: Marginal Revolution)

      Technorati : Freakonomics 

5. The Ashtray of History

Beijing, China

Outside of Tienamen and the national currency, Mao Zedong has now been reduced to a cultural relic. Mao ashtrays are the height of Beijing kitsch, available in the local flea markets. Mao statuary, posters, and Little Red Books are available as well, but these sell mainly to tourists.

Vendor: "Get Little Red Book! You need Little Red Book. Very good price!!"

Me: "Have you read it?"

Vendor, blushing: "Just a little bit. This book not for reading"

Mao is not yet officially a political relic, but this seems certain to come. Occasionally my hosts would make mention of the "Gang of Four", the ultra-leftists who rose to power during the Cultural Revolution and were purged for it following Mao's death. The gang included Mao's wife, the much-despised Jiang Qing. I would refer to them as the Gang of Five, which always got a smile -- but never a laugh.

Widespread publication of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story will help that cause along. The book, the result of a decade of careful research including exclusive access to Chinese and Soviet archives, is a devastating account of the level of deception and thievery carried out by Mao and his cronies. It is the political counterpart to Jung's earlier personal story as told in Wild Swans, the international bestselling account of three generations of Chinese women. Jung tells of her grandmother who lived under warlords, her mother who lived through the revolution, and her own life as a daughter of the Cultural Revolution in Sichuan Province. Wild Swans was available in English in China and Mao: The Unknown Story was available in Hong Kong. Although I would not give Jung or her husband high points for dispassionate scholarship, the research is credible and the findings important even if the book reads like Jung's best shot at sweet revenge for her undoubted suffering. Both books are compelling and highly recommended.

Fiasco by Thomas Ricks

On vacation, couldn't wait to get to Thomas Ricks Fiasco, acclaimed by many as the best writing to date on the Iraq war. Ricks is the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of an account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps. He is not an anti-war writer and is not even against the war in Iraq -- although the history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006 is simply devastating -- and he names names.

Like all good stories, this one has layers. It begins with the invasion planning in the terrified environment that followed the attacks of September 11. It confirms FDR's maxim that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- especially in leaders. Some of the material concerning the early invasion planning, was covered by Woodward in Plan of Attack, although in keeping with his different role at the Post from his senior colleague, Ricks tends to use military, not political sources, The effect is sickening -- like listening to the victims not the perpetrators.

Ricks does not focus heavily on Bush, although we all know where the buck stops. The role of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are described with detailed research and on-the-record sources. Ricks paints a picture of deception, including self-deception, that is simply devastating. As the fiasco unfolds, it is clear that the military is fighting a very different war than it planned to fight and that it is not equipped to prevail strategically or doctrinally.

Nothing Left to Lose

For most people, age 27 is prime time. You are usually done with school, although hopefully not with learning. You are making your own way in the world. You are young and strong but ideally less foolish than you had been a decade earlier. You may even be in a stable, more-or-less adult, relationship. If the past was good, the future looks even better. 27 is a good age.

Unless, of course, you were a rock star in the early 1970s, in which case at age 27 you died, often thanks to a drug overdose. Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones died on drugs at age 27. Jimi Hendrix was 27 when he died on pills. Jim Morrison was 27 when he lit his final fire in Paris. Pigpen McKernan, dead from alcohol but not grateful at age 27. These were among he most talented and successful musicians of the 1960s. WTF?

How Long the Tail -- and How High the Head?

This is the question of the season for two reasons: Dead Man's Chest, the recent installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, which launched last night, and The Long Tail the much-blogged, long-awaited book by Wired's Chris Anderson.

The movie features (what else?) a Kraken, a veritable long-tailed, high-headed Leviathan that unceremoniously sucks ships out of the ocean.

As the sequel to The Black Pearl, the number three movie of 2003, Dead Man's Chest is not just a movie -- it is a fully packaged, well merchandised blockbuster. So sure was Disney of the success of DMC, that it filmed part three at the same time on the same locations as part two.

Not bad for a movie based on a theme park ride. You may remember those moments in The Black Pearl where you could not believe that they had contrived a scene just to match a moment on the now two decade old theme park ride -- but they did. To judge from the current movie, Disney is about to redo the half century old Jungle Cruise into a Dead Man's Chest ride. Traditionally don't you do the movie first, then the merchandising?

The New York Times declared the film

"not just a movie, (but).. a glistening, sushi-grade chunk of franchise entertainment, which means that maximal enjoyment of it comes with certain obligations. It is the second episode in what will be at least a trilogy - the third installment is scheduled for release next summer - and full appreciation of its whirligig plot will depend on thorough acquaintance with the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" picture, conveniently available for purchase on DVD. And since "Dead Man's Chest" brazenly dispenses with the convention of an ending - it's pretty much all middle - you will, by virtue of buying that ticket, have committed yourself to buying another one a year from now if you're the least bit curious about how the whole thing turns out. By then, chances are good that you will have forgotten most of what happened in "Dead Man's Chest," so you'll have another disc to add to the shopping cart.

As for the "all-star three-way battle of the cheekbones (Orlando Bloom vs. Keira Knightley vs. Johnny Depp)", well

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Brings Down the Dutch Government

First voting in Kuwait and now Ayaan Hirsi Ali brings down the Dutch government! An excellent day for Islamic women! This is horn-honking, TERRIFIC news.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Muslim Somalia-born refugee who arrived in Holland, learned Dutch, was elected to Parliament, spoke out against fascist Islam, and collaborated with Theo Van Gogh to make his last film, Submission. Van Gogh was brutally murdered for his efforts by a Muslim thug who stabbed a note onto Van Gogh's chest promising that Islamicists would kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali next.

Ali has spent the past two plus years under guard from death threats while writing her book, The Caged Virgin: an Emancipation Proclamation for Islamic Women, which I previewed here.

Tomorrow Never Knows

"turn off your mind, relax, float downstream"

-- Timothy Leary, as appropriated by John Lennon

Did you catch the Sunday New York Times review by Luc Sante of the Robert Greenfield biography of Timothy Leary? For a cultural icon, Leary always seemed odd and ill at ease -- he gave the impression of having done just a touch more acid than is medically wise. I have not read the Greenfield book but the Times review is entirely complementary and serves to remind us that the sixties produced people in public and cultural life who were amazing, astonishing whackos. Sante:

...although he was among the major protuberances in the cultural bouillabaisse we call The Sixties, he was not much of a 60's type himself, as Robert Greenfield demonstrates in his thorough and judicious biography. While he may have been the leading spokesmodel for LSD, Leary remained to the end an old-fashioned booze hound, as well as a snake-oil peddler of the most traditional American sort. Had he been born a decade or two earlier, he would probably have been offering to cure arthritis through the application of the electric belt.

Leary was admitted to West Point (!) and kicked out for "blatant transport of hooch" as the Times puts it. Drove his first wife to suicide while climbing the Berkeley/Harvard faculty ladder.

He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment (!), but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching. Along with his colleague Richard Alpert, son of the president of the New Haven Railroad (and today a guru known as Ram Dass), Leary tried to turn on all of Harvard.

Tripping with students got both Leary and Ram Dass booted from Harvard (and getting fired from the Harvard faculty takes effort and perisistence). Leary moved west and brought LSD to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other members of the literary and artistic avant-garde. He picked up some very wealthy devotees, acquired the use of a fabulous mansion in upstate New York where he held a party that went on for five years. What happened next was a perfect Age of Aquarius moment:

....by 1969 (Leary) had accumulated enough outstanding indictments, mostly on penny ante marijuana charges, that he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod."

In a twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo - he pulled himself along a telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car - and transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

But when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played that role myself."

Oh -- and the book doubtless mentions, although Times review doesn't, Leary's exile in Kabul, Afghanistan, his being called "the most dangerous man in America" by Richard Nixon, his campaign for Governor of California, and his decision to videotape his death and send his ashes into space along with Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry.

Small wonder that kids don't believe that the sixties happened. You really can't make this stuff up.

End State Textbook Monopolies

Good for Debra Saunders for calling bull on a bill before the California assembly mandating "age appropriate" information about the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in California and American history. Saunders is nearly always the voice of sanity in Bay Area political journalism. She archives here.

Without minimizing the doubtless extraordinary contributions of my GLBT bretheren, I have a rather better idea: end the practice of allowing states to approve textbooks. Three reasons.

First, these books don't work. Government-approved books are lame -- that's why they got approved. Can you honestly remember a single thing you ever learned from a history or social studies textbook -- other than that you hated the subject? And why should government have a monopoly on what kids read at school?

Second, they are a rip-off. Textbooks are artificially expensive because the buyers have no choice but to buy. They are wildly profitable for authors and publishers and, yes, resellers.

Finally, textbooks make teachers and students lazy. Sorry, that probably sounds insulting, but it's true. You can literally tell how good a college is by checking to see how often they allow teachers to resort to textbooks in social sciences and humanities. In four years of college and two years of graduate school, I did not use a single one -- mainly because I refused to take any class that used one. There are always, with no exceptions, better ways to learn a subject than using textbooks -- especially state-authorized textbooks.

Let teachers select the books. Bring on writers with a point of view: the bigots, the blow-hards, and the biased. Bring on the saints, the scholars, and the wack-job pundits. Face it, even racists or anti-Semites are more interesting than the bland output of state censors.Get writing that is lively and has a point of view -- even a distasteful one. One rule: teachers must expose students to three or four competing perspectives on each topic. The idea is not to teach students what to think -- it is to teach them how to think. Exposing students to competing perspectives is lively and fun. Trying to develop a single politically correct and universally palatable perspective is boring, frustrating, and a waste of time.

"The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army" George Washington, July 2, 1776

I was fortunate to speak recently with David McCullough, author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, a wonderful volume of essays called Brave Companions, and other well rendered bits of US history. McCullough began writing for USIA in Washington, DC when it was run by Edward R. Murrow. He is now the father or grandfather of seventeen and the kind of person we all wish to be when we get older: a teller of magnificent stories with a rich sense of history and values.

McCullough is not only a Pulitzer Prize winning author, he is an accomplished painter as well. He describes painting as a great way to learn composition; he believes that his writing benefits from the practice of focus, balance, and deciding what to leave out that comes from painting. Brave Companions opens with an essay that details these and other connections between painting and writing.

This volume also contains a captivating essay about Alexander Von Humboldt whose travels in South America, McCullough noted, "made the Louis and Clark expedition look like a Sunday stroll in the park." When I asked why Von Humboldt would not make a wonderful subject for a full length book since he was a pathbreaking explorer, a reknowned and influencial scientist, a widely admired writer and is frequently judged to be the 19th century's most famous person after Napoleon. McCullough is aware that his gifts have limits: "I would love to", he said, "but I would need to read old French a lot better than I do."

I have not quite finished 1776, but am amazed at the challenge that George Washington faced in forming and retaining an army of free men.

Americans were not especially loyal to the cause of independence: McCullough estimates that no more than a third of the population favored independence and at least a third actively opposed it. Enlistment in what came to be called the Continental Army was voluntary and accomplished via state militias which were poorly equipped, poorly paid, miserably led, and frequently little more than drinking parties. Finally, illness was a huge risk of military life, with "camp fever" (typhus or dysentary) and smallpox extracting a frightening toll. Not surprisingly, volunteers would frequently reconsider and simply return home.Washington's military errors, which were nearly catastrophic on more than one occassion, did little to hold his army together.

We Know What You Want - So We Know You

Confirming my suspicion that JK Rowling had Google in mind when she created the Mirror of Erised, the current Cal Alumni magazine has an outstanding cover article on The Future of Search by Forbes Silicon Valley editor and Berkeley faculty member Quentin Hardy. Hardy works with the Jamwife, who tipped me to an earlier piece of his on Google here and a lecture here.

Hardy looks over the horizon to a world where an enormous amount of information is discoverable with Internet search. Those of us with a blogging Jones get little assurance when he asserts that:

"Soon enough, thanks to an ever-denser Internet and increasingly effective search technologies, we should possess enormously augmented brains, relentlessly searching new landscapes for knowledge and connection...Our two primal urges-to know the world and have the world know us-will flower as never before, encoding us in a continual, global bazaar of talk, products, and sensation. We will have virtual selves on the Internet at all hours. They may earn us real money, or involve us with real friends and political movements, or help us find parts of ourselves we now see only dimly, if at all.

Hardy understands both the economics and the sociology of networks: "The more people contribute, the more people there are to contact, to see what they have to offer".

Many of us already seem to be in constant contact-bees in a massive intelligence hive-with social-networking software for pheromones, and weblogs for bee dances in which we come and go with a single click. Soon, however, today's 1 billion Internet users will be able to meet the planet's 5 billion other people, connected by cheap cell phones and $100 laptops. Watch the bees dance then. Amplify that mix with 10 times more sensors than people on the Internet. The sensors will aggregate data and, aided by pattern-searching software, will see now-unobserved movements in nature and society. That search may create cures for the common cold by watching the flow of air through a city, or change agriculture by watching the jungle grow at night. It may create new commerce or communities by watching the time it takes me to trust someone with whom I've just connected online.

At his best, Hardy has a firm handle on the drivers of network economics, which he summarizes nicely as

• "Moore's Law. It is based on an observation Intel founder Gordon Moore made 40 years ago, that the density of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles about every 24 months. Now, following the curve of Moore's Law, they forecast computers in 2020 will have the processing power of a human brain. Thirty years later, by the same thinking, they expect to welcome a net computational power of all the brains on earth...
• "Metcalfe's Law, (from Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe which) states that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of its users. Because value is good, in effect the network wants to be big, maximizing its use and utility...
• "Bell's Law (from VAX inventor Gordon Bell), which talks about regularly timed decade-long reigns of dominant computing platforms: The mainframe begat the microcomputer, which begat the PC, which begat the Internet, which begat the multipurpose cell phone computer. Bell's Law implies a march of electronic intelligence expanding the self. In the future, Bell sees the world dominated by sensors, extending our intelligence into remote locations like space, or the ultraviolet spectrum.

When intelligence gets on a roll-with all three laws operating-it wants to grow, and it wants to connect. The engineers, with their belief in the power of the collective mind, turn out to be accidental mystics. What they know for certain is that the need for computing and communication is virtually insatiable.

As evidence that search engines are becoming nothing less than an access point to the collective mind of the Internet, Hardy cites:

• "MySpace.com, (where) millions of kids memorialize themselves and create communities around bands and art they would never otherwise know, in constant contact with one another through instant messaging...
• "..fanfiction.net, people write new chapters to hundreds of beloved books, bringing Willy Wonka scores of additional authors.
• "...Second Life, (where) people build their own characters for a digital world, and make up their own adventures. Linden Labs, the owners of Second Life, originally tried to control the game, but the players rebelled and took control. Now they access Linden's software and build each other's bodies, clothes, weapons, and buildings. Then they sell them for real-world money. A Chinese woman based in Germany develops Second Life property to the tune of $150,000 a year. Linden contents itself with controlling the currency, releasing additional land, and watching the adventures roll along.
• "Couples (who) IM each other on one end of the computer screen, then cut and paste the dialog on another message channel, where their friends, say, critique a boyfriend's sincerity or a girlfriend's promises. Love gets coached, in real time-a kind of Wikipedia for emotional life. My friend in Virginia eats dinner with his wife, son, and son's laptop, its Internet camera bringing the boy's girlfriend to the kitchen table every night.
• In China, IM provider Tencent claims 450 million registered users, 18 million of them chatting online at any given moment. Their new social-networking site, a kind of MySpace for China, though still in its testing phase, quickly filled an experimental limit of 20 million users.

Implication: for Google to succeed in its mission of "organizing world's information", it will also organize our consciousness or engage in a technical pas de deux to allow us to do so. A company this ambitious requires an unprecedented level of trust. "Don't Be Evil" will not be enough.

BEATNIK TRAINING: Caen Would Laugh, Ginsberg Would Howl

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

"Howl" is the classic Allen Ginsberg paen to liberty and licensiousness. You gotta love this picture, taken at the Virginia Military Institute in 1991 by Gordon Ball, although it makes me wonder what the world’s first blogger, our 3 dot role model,  Herb Caen (who invented the term beatnik) would have made of it. Damn, I miss him.

From tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review:

"..a row of uniformed cadets, their heads shaved, each with an identical blank notebook, each holding a copy of the City Lights Books Pocket Poets Series edition of Allen Ginsberg’s "Howl and Other Poems," published in San Francisco in 1956, subject to an obscenity trial soon after, cleared by Judge Clayton Horn in a ringing affirmation of individual liberty and creative expression - and a flag of revolt, a blow against conformity, a hallowed relic, ever since.The picture is all irony. What are these presumed soldiers of Moloch - the demon of money and power summoned in the second part of "Howl" to devour the soul rebels of the epic first section, unless, somehow, they can escape to fight another day - supposed to make of Ginsberg’s celebration of a tiny band of comrades determined to free America from itself? Of his paeans to men who "screamed with joy" as they were penetrated by other men, to heroin and marijuana, to suicide and madness? Who knows what the cadets made of "Howl" - in the picture, they look bored. Another assignment to get through.

Full article is here.

Ready for the Worst

The centennial of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, recent FEMA hearings, and a spate of catastrophic tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes all remind us that personal preparation for disaster can be the difference between life and death. So why do we rarely prepare?

Avian flu is believed by many scientists to be one inevitable mutation away from becoming a really unpleasant pandemic. According to ABC

"Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recently recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States.

Despite these serious federal warnings, a quick glance beneath America's beds will surely reveal more dust bunnies than canned fish.

Even local disasters have lost their power to motivate. Heavy rains caused California levees to breach in San Mateo, Merced, and Sonoma this week. Did Senators and Governors remind Californians of the need to prepare for the unexpected? Not exactly. Both promptly demanded more money from the federal government and turned their attention to other matters.

Why don't most of us prepare for disaster? Unfortunately, humans naturally ignore low probability events -- even potentially deadly ones. . Our emotional wiring makes it hard to grasp independent low probabilities: when no disaster has occurred in awhile, we think that one is less likely to occur, even though the odds of independent disasters are constant.Government officials with priorities set around short time horizons are especially likely to ignore disasters or other low probability events unless, of course, one has occurred recently.

How much should you prepare? Depends on what it takes to get you through the night. Everyone approaches risk differently. I live on an earthquake fault and as a mildly paranoid former Boy Scout, sleep better by preparing for the worst even when the expected value of my preparation approaches zero (meaning that I am quite likely wasting my time). I seem to have an easier time paying attention to other risks if my downside is covered.

Is it worth the cost and time to personally prepare for disasters that are very serious but not very likely? You may want to think of it as insurance. You have only a 1-2% chance of ever filing a claim on your homeowners insurance policy, for example, but that is sufficient to motivate most lenders to require insurance.

The other problem with preparing for a disaster is that there just aren't many moderate approaches available. Most want more than a first aid kit tossed in the closet but a lot less than the underground shelters stocked with food, guns, and cash favored by nutters in Idaho. Belief in impending apocalypse or the second coming helps motivate some people to prepare. What about those less inclined to cults?

Audacious. Daring. Artistic. Insanely Great. 30 years old.

CNET wishes Happy 30th Birthday to the company that won our minds by knowing our hearts. They recall that the founders used to go "door-to-door at the UC Berkeley dorms selling "blue boxes"--electronic devices that tricked the telephone network into allowing free long-distance phone calls".

One of the scofflaws was Steve Jobs, easily America’s most remarkable CEO. (Doubters see Apple’s timeline or read his brief and much circulated Stanford commencement address that ends by advising graduates to "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish".)

Kremvax and other marvels of April

What is your favorite April Fools hoax? Alex Boese over at the very slow loading Museum of Hoaxes has documented the 100 best April Fools Jokes of all time.

My favorite hoaxes involve the Internet. Perhaps the first Internet prank ever is the almost forgotten Internet legend of Kremvax. Kremvax was a message distributed on Usenet in the days before the Internet had a "World Wide Web". According to Boese, the announcement was simply that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet in order to "have a means of having an open discussion forum with the American and European people." It is a tribute to the Cold War, to the defense-orientation of the Internet (whose DARPA originators were still among the heavy users) that the message created a flood of responses. When the government of the Soviet Union did join the Internet in 1990, it requested the domain name "kremvax" in honor of the hoax.

The second Internet hoax occurred on 1st April, 1991 at the height of the Internet bubble when investors were backing almost anything -- Internet related or not. Mitsubishi Bank sent around a proposal to venture capitalists describing an exciting new investment opportunity. They sought to raise a $45 million Series A financing (a very large initial round) to fund Fibropower, a 14-megawatt generating plant fueled entirely by chicken droppings. The investment prospectus boasted that this was a way to put unwanted chicken manure to good use. Given the April 1 publication date, VCs recognized a chickenshit proposal when they saw it and tossed it on the (relatively small) stack of ideas that were not getting funded.

The joke, of course, is that the proposal was genuine.

Boese, author of Hippo Eats Dwarf and other books on hoaxes, also has a theory of where April Fools comes from. After noting the role of ancient rituals of Saturnalia, Holi, Festus Fatuorum in celebrations of Foolishness, he discloses a bit of history that was new to me:

In 1582 France became the first country to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar established by the Council of Trent (1563). This switch meant, among other things, that the beginning of the year was moved from the end of March to January 1. Those who failed to keep up with the change, who stubbornly clung to the old calendar system and continued to celebrate the New Year during the week that fell between March 25th (known in England as Lady Day) and April 1st, had various jokes played on them. For instance, pranksters would surreptitiously stick paper fish to their backs. The victims of this prank were given the epithet Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish. Thus, April Fool’s Day was born.

A rundown of Boese’s top 10 April Fools hoaxes of all time:

#1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.

#2: Sidd Finch. In its April 1985 edition, Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch and he could reportedly throw a baseball with startling, pinpoint accuracy at 168 mph (65 mph faster than anyone else has ever been able to throw a ball). Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa."...in reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the writer of the article, (the late) George Plimpton.

#3: Instant Color TV. In 1962 there was only one TV channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station’s technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that thanks to a newly developed technology, all viewers could now quickly and easily convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their TV screen, and they would begin to see their favorite shows in color. Stensson then proceeded to demonstrate the process. Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of people, out of the population of seven million, were taken in. Actual color TV transmission commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.

#4: The Taco Liberty Bell. In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger. The best line inspired by the affair came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

#5: San Serriffe. In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer’s terminology.

#6: Nixon for President. In 1992 National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again." Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.

#7: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi. The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ’Biblical value’ of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.

#8: The Left-Handed Whopper In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left- Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own ’right handed’ version."

#9: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers In its April 1995 issue Discover Magazine announced that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

#10: Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

Then, of course, there is the Blogosphere -- where every day is Fool’s Day.

Intellectual Property Gone Beserk

Mother Jones has a hysterical list of examples of IP gone mad. Highlights:

MICROSOFT UK held a contest for the best film on “intellectual property theft”; finalists had to sign away “all intellectual property rights” on “terms acceptable to Microsoft.”

BY PASSING the memorial Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, Congress added 20 years to copyrights. “I Got You Babe” now won’t enter the public domain until 2061.

NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents.

HUEY NEWTON’S widow is trademarking the phrase “Burn, Baby, Burn” for use as a BBQ sauce slogan. Small wonder: GEORGE FOREMAN has earned $113 million by lending his name to a grill.

THE PUBLISHER of Super Hero Happy Hour removed “Super” from the comic book title after Marvel and DC Comics stated they own the phrase “super heroes and variations thereof.”

RENTAMARK.COM makes money by claiming ownership of 10,000 phrases, including “chutzpah,” “casual Fridays,” “.com,” “fraud investigation,” and “big breasts.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s estate charges academic authors $50 for each sentence of the “I Have a Dream” speech that they reprint.