Controller of California
Sometimes, when things feel crazy and chaotic, it's good to remember that Kathleen Connell is in charge. She's the Controller of California!
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Sometimes, when things feel crazy and chaotic, it's good to remember that Kathleen Connell is in charge. She's the Controller of California!
I went out to Moss Beach and saw Shari's place, on the beautiful California coast by the ocean. I hadn't been along Highway 1 since I was about six years old.
We played a good game of Frisbee, and I got a nice bruise on my hand. And it turns out that Shari (in order to bolster her reputation as a vicious copyright pirate?) owns a player piano. I played through "Hotel California" twice on the player piano, with enthusiasm, and I've got a picture of that which I ought to scan in. Playing a player piano is real exercise.
I also saw an example of this and felt suitably impressed.
Sumana found that Berkeley's journalism department is going to have a for-credit class on weblogs (and their research subject is intellectual property).
I thought of submitting "The DRM Dark Age" to DRM2002, but I worry that the rule about "papers that have been published" might get me in trouble. I should ask some people who've had papers in academic conferences before about how this all works.
According to Google, I am the seventh Seth. (I'm the first Schoen.)
What a lot of shrinkwrap license debates!
When I go into a store and buy a CD and take the CD home with me then that transaction is either a sale or a bailment, and it most certainly is not a bailment. (And I've taught lots of people how to know a bailment when they see one.)
(That actually isn't the funniest thing Professor Junger said in those debates, but it was memorable.)
I went to a CPTWG meeting in person (getting up at 5:00a, back at EFF in San Francisco by 4:00p). The BPDG report was presented there, amidst much press coverage (though not from any reporters in the room).
That evening, I went to an SVLUG meeting with Biella. (It's an interesting contrast to CPTWG, though not quite so dramatic as the CPTWG/EFF Pioneer Awards contrast back in April.)
The speaker at SVLUG talked about his work at NASA on atmospheric physics data acquisition systems, and now on data acquisition using EEGs and EMGs (electroencephalograms and electromyograms). Although he seemed to lack confidence in himself, he was very clear, and kept my interest the whole time. In fact, I was so curious about electromyography that I spent a long time the following evening sticking voltmeter probes into my hand in the hope of measuring a repeatable millivolt change.
The EEGs are taken with electrodes placed on the scalp, and have now been used successfully to place a simulated robot entirely under a human subject's mental control. (It's like the old biofeedback machines, but with renewed NASA study on practice interface techniques.) It's totally non-invasive. EMGs are also non-invasive and are taken with electrodes placed on the skin at either end of a muscle. Apparently electromyography is very well-understood and can accurately measure even a tiny muscle movement. (Zack suggested to me that electromyography can measure a muscle movement so small that you can't feel you're making it. I didn't ask the NASA researcher to confirm that, though I should have.)
All this work uses Linux and free software, by the way.
At SVLUG, I mentioned that EFF was about to file an exciting court case. The case I was referring to is Newmark v. Turner, also known as Craig v. Hollywood.
Contact: Seth David Schoen