Thursday, 29 July 2010
it's time to play the pyramid
I've think that a word cloud has been a good and accessible way to present a concept scatter-shot. Maybe one's CV or résumé in the future could be in word cloud form, plastered here and there like the translucent advertizing film that they preserve mass-transit busses in. I stumbled across a snazzy, aesthetic word cloud generator called Wordle quite by accident. I pasted the text from the last two months of blog entries in it and it spun out this picture. It's funny to see one's words parsed this way and what tags are tops.
flavor-fla
At the beginning of the month, voters in Bavaria moved to reject (I believe) the state's remaining vestiges of smokers' protections. The act, Raucherschutz, was criticized in part because the measure had a misleading name--were voters endorsing protection for smokers' and smokers' rights or protection from smokers and the rights of nonsmokers. The confusion in wording smacked of the criticism levied against the 2008 US state of California's ballot Proposition 8. Proposition 8 sought to formally define the institution of marriage to exclude same-sex partnerships, so an affirmative vote for Proposition 8 was delivering a resounding no to marriage equality. In both cases, lobbyists took advantage of this fact. The Raucherschutz also passed, some believe because enough people misunderstood the message. Mostly the new law dealt with schemes that bypassed fairly comprehensive EU smoking bans, like hookah bars or beer tents or beer tents inside of nominally non-smoking establishments. The debate is still on, and a second vote may be pending, whether "members' only" clubs and renting a restaurant for completely private function are exempt.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
alpengeist or keys to the kingdom

In unrelated news, like the plot of some role-playing adventure quest, inventor of the Interwebs Al Gore, has vetted seven people across the Earth with electronic keys to restart the World Wide Web, I guess at a safe-point in case of catastrophic failure. It sounds as if these proponents were chosen for their propensity and life-force when it comes to the Legend of Zelda--pieces of the Triforce were scattered across the Land of Hyrule.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
jailbreak
A US federal judge and the Librarian of Congress, in two separate rulings, have in the former decided that it is permissible to disable, fold, spindle, or mutilate DRM (digital rights [restrictions] management) protocols to enhance functionality, so long as it's not with the intent of infringing copyrights, and in the latter that one can tinker with one's own smart phone in order to liberate the hardware and open it up to the service provider of one's choice. This is fraptuous news, and I am sure after the browser choice injunction, the EU will welcome these precedents. German-American legal relations on these sort of matters can be strange. I have learned about an early, founding case, along with becoming more educated on Richard Wagner's opus of works. There's a flood of publicity concerning the Festspiel in Bayreuth, who annually host productions of Wagner's works. It's nearly impossible to secure tickets, and there's a ten year waiting list--if I tried for good seats, it would probably mean that I would have to choose between Wagner or Oberammungau, whose next Passion Play is the next decade.
I did not realize that Wagner's operas debuted there under Wagner's direction and have a founding connection with that particular, storied opera house. The early legal wranglings between America and Germany, with a collolary to copyrights, telephone and utility and bookface monopolies, regarded performances of Parsifal. Staging rights belonged exclusively to Bayreuth and the opera was never shown outside of Germany, until US courts ruled that Germany had no jurisdiction over a group of Wagner enthusiasts in New York City and could not stop the show from being put on. Wagner had hoped to secure a perpetual allowance for his wife and surviving family by granting Bayreuth exclusive rights, but this was in jeopardy by relinquishing control. Quite a few singers from Germany repaired to the States for the first performance outside of Bavaria. Wagner's widow, however, got her reckoning by making sure that none of these players ever worked in the German theater again.
I did not realize that Wagner's operas debuted there under Wagner's direction and have a founding connection with that particular, storied opera house. The early legal wranglings between America and Germany, with a collolary to copyrights, telephone and utility and bookface monopolies, regarded performances of Parsifal. Staging rights belonged exclusively to Bayreuth and the opera was never shown outside of Germany, until US courts ruled that Germany had no jurisdiction over a group of Wagner enthusiasts in New York City and could not stop the show from being put on. Wagner had hoped to secure a perpetual allowance for his wife and surviving family by granting Bayreuth exclusive rights, but this was in jeopardy by relinquishing control. Quite a few singers from Germany repaired to the States for the first performance outside of Bavaria. Wagner's widow, however, got her reckoning by making sure that none of these players ever worked in the German theater again.