KK Lifestream

Very Long-Term Backup

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:32:22 +0000

Originally posted in Long Now>

Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information. While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are "eye-scanable." No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.

We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone. Imagine the incompatibility of today's DVD in 1,000 years.

As durable as paper is, its inherent limitations in storing digital data are clear. Pity the person who would need to find something if the only backup of the web was a paper printout that filled several airline hangers. What we need are media that have the durability of paper and the accessibility of a floppy disk (or better!).

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationaly. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 1998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by the Norsam company, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.

Might it be possible to etch an entire library onto a set of disks? It might be worth trying. All we needed was a finite data set that a society might want to have backed up.

During a Long Now field trip to a southwest archeological site, the idea of a modern Rosetta Stone came up -- a backup of human languages that future generations might cherish. At a winter retreat in 1999, Long Now board member Doug Carlston suggested that for the parallel common text of this modern Rosetta Stone we should use the book of Genesis, since it was most likely already translated into all languages already. We hatched a plan to produce a 3-inch non-corroding disk which contained at least 1,000 translations of Genesis and other linguistic information about each language.

Following the archiving principle of LOCKS (Lots of Copies Keep 'em Safe) we would replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world with built in magnifiers. This project in long term thinking would do two things: it would showcase this new long-term storage technology, and it would give the world a minimal backup of human languages. We thought it might take a year to do.

Long story short, it took eight years. Last night at a ceremony at the Long Now museum in Fort Mason, one of five prototype disks Rosetta disk was presented to the Oliver Wilke Foundation, a Frankfurt-based linguistic center, who help support the project. The disk is 3 inches in diameter, and mounted beneath a glass hemisphere.

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog "human-readable" scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on. Some of the key indexing meta-data for each language section (such as the standard linguistic code number for that language) are displayed in a machine-readable font (OCRb) so that a smart microscope could guide you through this analog trove.

Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years. But even without reading, a person might guess there are small things to see in this disk.

All this took eight years because back in 2000 the Norsam technology could not handle the size of our library, and there was in fact, contrary to our assumptions, no library of already completed Genesis translations. There was no central depository of language information, either. So in order to gather 1,000 translations of Genesis and related linguistic information for those 1,000 language, Long Now created the Rosetta Project.

Heading the project was artist/linguist Jim Mason, who ran Rosetta at first like it was an art project. Which it kinda was. Working under the radar of the academic linguistic community, Mason began collating and scanning all known versions of Genesis, and later regional and ethnic creation stories in native languages. He collected maverick linguists and bridged the feudal factions in the academic linguistic community. Under Mason the project quickly morphed from art project into a major linguist initiative. Mason steadily won the support of the world-wide professionals as the Rosetta website grew into the "All Language Archive." Eight years down the road, after major NSF grants and other funding the Rosetta Project now has a unified (such as it exists) set of information in 2,300 languages. At several points in its evolution, the Rosetta's tiny non-profit offices were crammed with dozens of grad students scanning pages of wonderfully obscure languages as fast as paper could move. Over 100 people contributed work in the office and thousands more on the website. The intention all along has been to cram this all language archive onto a few disks. Or a tiny cube. Or maybe, art project at the core, etched onto a long wall.

This is a Long Now project, which means it is okay if it takes a while. It took 8 years to gather the scanned Genesis texts. During that time Norsam perfected their production. Now we have a disk.

But it was not the very first disk. That one is in space. In 2004 the Rosetta Space Probe was launched by the European Space Agency. This small craft was created to land on a comet in 2014. Before it blasted off, the ESA contacted us because we share names. They asked if we'd like to mount a version of the disk on their probe. Of course we would! We had manufactured a pure nickel disc with a subset of 6,000 pages of language translations, which was mounted on the payload section of the probe.

Rosetta Space Probe

So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.

Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000. Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all languages. Long Now hopes to produce additional copies in the future, so that these small globes will be scattered across the world in nondescript locations; that way at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan.

There's a small hidden cavity inside the globe where owners can inscribe their name, with room and encouragement to have the next owners inscribe theirs. This is a multi-generational device. As Oliver Wilke said when he picked up his glass sphere last night, "This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth. If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations."

Standing in front of sample pages from the Rosetta disk, Oliver Wilke holds his new sphere and Laura Welcher, Rosetta Director, holds the nickel disk.

Why People Pirate Stuff

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:36:33 -0800

Originally posted in The Technium

In the universe of the free ("free" as in beer), getting ripped off is the norm. Yes, many products and services are deliberately priced at zero these days, but a significant portion of consumers will gravitate to illegitimate free versions of not-free stuff. Free versions of pricey digital products are not hard to find on underground file trading sites, or in bits and pieces on above ground aggregators like YouTube. Most high-priced wares like expensive commercial software can be had for literally nothing. But very cheap things are widely pirated for free as well.

Why do people pirate inexpensive digital goods? Why steal candy? This was the question game developer Cliff Harris asked the online world. His games were priced at what he thought was a very reasonable $20. Yet, his games were being pirated constantly. Why? He really wanted to know if he needed to alter his business practices so he simply asked the Great Hive, "Why do people pirate my games?" No judgement -- just asking. His query was replicated deep into the blogosphere making it to Slashdot, Digg, Arstechnica, and so on. He got hundreds and hundreds of replies, none of them shorter than 100 words. "It was," he said, "as if a lot of people have waited a long time to tell a game developer the answer to this question."

He found patterns in the replies that surprised him. Chief among them was the common feeling that his games (and games in general) were overpriced for what buyers got -- even at $20. Secondly, anything that made purchasing and starting to play difficult -- like copy protection, DRM, two-step online purchasing routines -- anything at all standing between the impulse to play and playing in the game itself was seen as a legitimate signal to take the free route. Harris also noted that ideological reasons (rants against capitalism, intellectual property, the man, or wanting to be outlaw) were a decided minority.

Much to his credit, the sincere responses to his question changed Harris's mind. He decided to alter his business model. He reduced the price of his games in half (to $10), he removed the little DRM copy protection he had, he promised to make his web store easier to use, maybe even with one-click checkout, he decided to increase the length of his free demos, and most importantly, he had the revelation that he needed to increase the quality of his games -- even though they were only going for 20 bucks. He wrote:

My games aren't as good as they could be. Ironically, one of the things that reduces your enthusiasm to really go the extra mile in making games is the thought that thousands of ungrateful gits will swipe the whole thing on day one for nothing. It's very demoralizing. But actually talking to the pirates has revealed a huge group of people who really appreciate genuinely good games. Some of the criticisms of my games hit home. I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it. I've gone from being demoralized by pirates to actually inspired by them, and I'm working harder than ever before on making my games fun and polished.

A final note is trying to make it easier for people to buy my games. I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than Steam. I'm always doing what I can to make buying them as quick and easy as possible.

Harris's article "Talking to Pirates" is only one page long, and worth reading. It will be most interesting to see if his modifications actually help his sales. I hope he follows through on this most excellent exercise by posting next year what happened.

(Thanks, Rebecca Blood.)

New Geometric Keyboard

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:06:57 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

Rather than confine itself to one long string of keys, this novel keyboard interface uses hexagonal keys in a honeycomb pattern to arrange notes ordered according to a harmonic table. Called the Axis, this innovative MIDI controller is in commercial production.

This is not a alternative tuning system, but an alternative keyboard. All twelve notes of the traditional Western scale fit into onto a 2-dimensional surface with a visible logical pattern.

Their web site says:

Starting from any note, the next note up-to-the-left is a minor third above the starting note. The next note directly above is a fifth above the starting note, and the next note up-to-the-right is a major third above the starting note.

Semitones are in horizontal lines, like the semitone between Minor and Major 3rd.

In this arrangement, a minor triad (three note chord) has the shape of a left-facing triangle, and a major triad has the shape of a right-facing triangle.

The Harmonic Table pattern can be extended in all directions, and all intervals, chords and scales have the same shape in any key. See some chord shapes.

The best explanation is simply to see it at work. Here is rock musician Jordan Rudess playing it after a few months practice:

Will anyone use it? If you play more than one instrument you already use more than one fingering system. Some folks will think of this as a new instrument. New instruments have a tough uphill challenge in becoming accepted, but often win a small following of dedicated fans. The long-tail of instruments. For some types of music, this keyboard may be perfect. (Thanks John La Grou)

Out of Control, The Illustrated Edition

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:09:44 -0800

Originally posted in Kevin Kelly

My first book, Out of Control, still in print from Amazon and available online in full text since 1995, was always imperfect in my eyes. I had wanted to fill it with illustrations. But it was so large (230,000 words) and so overdue (by years), that illustrating it in detail was never feasible. Among the illustrations I had hope to include were photographs of the folks I interviewed, of which I had captured many.

Reading a book on a website is not ideal, so I am happy to announce that I am releasing a PDF version of Out of Control. This is a free PDF which also has the option of displaying contextual ads if you want to see them. See my earlier experiment with this Adobe/Yahoo program for full details on how it works, but briefly it goes like this: if you have Acrobat Reader 9 you can opt in to allow context appropriate ads delivered by Yahoo to appear adjacent to the pages of the book. If readers click on the ads, I share some small fractional revenue, just as I do on my website ads. You won't see these small text ads off to the side unless you opt in via the dialog boxes on opening the file.

The PDF version of Out of Control is the full book, with the full annotated bibliography, redesigned with new subheads not present in the book, new Table of Contents, and lots of color photos of the scientists I spoke to. Some like Rod Brooks, Marvin Minsky, Danny Hillis, and Ted Nelson are more well known now than back then. They all look so young! I wish I could have added all the other graphic material I had on hand then but that is a job too big to redo now.

In many ways, this version is better than the book. It is searchable, it has color illustrations, it has better navigation, it is free, and it has surprising contextual ads, which I find interesting.

It is still not perfect. To be an ideal book, it should have tons of charts and diagrams, and the text should be massively hyperlinked, and the bibliography linked to Amazon. The former will probably never happen (at least by me), but the latter might happen in the next edition of the PDF, depending on the response to this version. Also, currently PDFs are not readable on the Kindle. So I am working on a Kindle version as well.

Free downloads of the Out of Control: The Illustrated Edition PDF are available from these two free file-hosting sites, here and here. (Beats me how these sites, Driveway and MediaFire earn enough income; let me know if you have any trouble downloading.)

And remember, I can mail you a crisp print out of the entire book, if you want one, for $16. Click here.

Out of Control is selling better now than it was when first published 14 years ago. People "get it" now. The importance of decentralized systems, peer production, emergent behaviors, hive minds, and evolutionary systems are now obvious in a Web 2.0 world. Back then it seemed too wildeye, woo-woo, esoteric, and geeky. To my delight, it still contains relevance and news for most readers. And it is getting better reviews now than it did back then. Here's a recent rave from Chris "Long Tail" Anderson who calls it "among the most important books of its decade... and may be the smartest book of the past decade."

If you have not read it, click above for a free copy!

Me-to-We Opening Ceremonies

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:48:15 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

Since we are a TV-less household, I may be the last person on earth to see the Opening Ceremonies of the Chinese 2008 Olympics. I just watched them on the Internet Tubes. They struck me, as many others have noted, as remarkable. But I also believe there are seminal. Something not only memorable, but significant.

* The 2008 Opening Ceremonies were a spectacle. Spectacles are becoming more important in our culture. As mediated experiences overtake most of our waking hours, the power of a huge mass experience in real life rises in meaning. The grand scale of the Opening experience was a large part of its appeal. Where we would have ordinarily been content with 12 tai-chi experts, we got instead 2008 of them. Or a sphere big enough to have its own gravity so that scores of dancers could orbit it upside down. It was very important -- even to those of use watching it on TV or the internet -- that this performance was live. With people who could trip or make mistakes. That is why the minor breaches of this assumption -- the lip syncing girl and digitally painted footprints -- were decried. They diminished this remarkable feat of physical achievement.

* This was a new media. It had very strong cinematic and filmic elements -- the movie projections on the rim, but also the narrative thread throughout. The spectacle was co-designed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou. He's a world-class artist who directed many Chinese films, notably Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Both of these films are epic, visually extravagant feats of spectacle themselves, so it is no surprise to see similar elements in this new kind of film: the opening. The other element was the choreography by the People's Army officer in charge of communist parades and grand musical showcases for moral uplift. There was also the key digital effects like he LED scroll and blinking drums. There was a lot of broadway and a lot of rock concert. Put all these together and it feels like an entirely new thing. Part rock, part opera, part film, part parade, part circus, part video game. A new medium. Apparently the Bird's Nest stadium was designed specifically to showcase this spectacle, as no other venue could have possibly staged it. I wonder if it might stage another spectacle like it?

* It was both deeply alien and comforting at the same time. Both old and new. The message was successful -- of presenting China's pride of its history and its rising modern power. Not only will this be a landmark in contemporary China's cultural psyche, but I think it will also resonate in the memory of the rest of the world. Something happened that night.

*The most alien, shocking and awesome portion of the Opening were the mass routines. Part of this is cultural. The Koreans are good at these mass effects, and the Japanese too. It's somewhat an East Asian thing. Historically these mass dances are designed to resemble machines. The wave rippler in the Opening Ceremonies appeared to be a cool mechanical effect until the disguised boys inside them were revealed. The mass fou drummers beat so rapidly and in synchrony that when their lights started blinking it seemed as if we were watching a computer chip, or the innards of a drum machine. See the pic above. We are a machine! Machine are us! That is our first reaction but I think it goes further than that. The 2008 fou drummers represent the We -- the power of the collective. The West and particularly Americans have traditionally emphasized the Me -- the individual. China is a culture more comfortable with the We than the Me, and here they were showing both the power of the We and its modern face -- blinking LED drums. We once thought computers were about individuation, but these days we see they are about socialization as well. More importantly, the social aspects of web 2.0 have shifted the center of gravity from Me to We. Witness books like Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Here come 2008 Chinese drummers. The great uncertainty in the coming years is how far China will shift to the Me and how far the west will shift to the We. What the Opening Ceremonies opened up was the arrival of the We. What I heard in the pounding pulse of the drummers was not "Here come the Chinese," but "Here comes everybody."

Long after the winners of the gold metals are forgotten, these Olympic Opening Ceremonies will be bookmarked as the Opening Ceremonies for China itself.

(I watched the longer version of the Opening Ceremonies on the NBC Olympic site. It sucks. You need to download the current version a non-standard Flash wannabe called Silverlight. That version only works on new Intel chipped versions of Macs, leaving our Mac G5 useless. Hello?)

Temporary Becomes Permanent

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:42:39 +0000

Originally posted in Long Now>

Most permanent things begin as a temporary fix. A footpath becomes a road becomes a highway. A quick hut becomes a house becomes a hotel. A doodle becomes a logo becomes a brand. A patch becomes an operating keystone. A camp becomes a city.

Very few infrastructure details begin with the idea that they will last 1,000 years. Strange as it sounds it is very likely that some basic software running inside computers today will be running in computers 500 years from now. We see that conservation in cells, where very primitive metabolic cycles present in archaic cells are still operating in cells today. All the fancy "recent" improvements run upon them. One could imagine that in 5 centuries, parts of unix will be found operating in servers. But it is clear that no one would be more surprised than the creators of unix. Most creations, including software, are written in less than optimal conditions. Creators always have the idea that they will go back later to fix the many known imperfections. Of course they are never fixed because the shipped rev is "good enough" -- and so the temporary good enough becomes a permanent good enough.

This inevitable progression from temporary to permanent was brought to mind on my vacation visit to Washington DC this summer. While touring the large gaudy WWII memorial on the Mall, I noticed a cute bit of popular culture hidden in the back of the stone monument. There in an obscure corner of a staircase on both sides of the oval memorial, a popular graffiti from World War II has been carved into stone. (Not a prank; this is Official Art.)

The unmistakable cartoon Kilroy Was Here began in the US as a temporary chalk marker on ships. It later morphed into a more weatherproof cartoon painted on walls in many countries all over the world. And now it has moved to a lined relief deeply etched into stone, to endure for the ages.

A really lovely art piece would be a long stone wall carved with other popular world graffiti designs. For future enjoyment.

Improvised Polish Hot Water Setup

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:09:07 -0800

Originally posted in Street Use

This picture of a jury-rigged hot water delivery system from Poland is pretty cool. I bet it works. (Ignore the label, it is meaningless, added by the website Fail Blog, where I found the picture. Thanks, Ross Beane. )

Another One for the Machine

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:23:36 -0800

Originally posted in The Technium

Computers have mastered chess and checkers, beating the best human players. Nowadays cheap computerized or even online players can beat most ordinary humans. The ancient game of Go, however, has long resisted the efforts by engineers to construct a Go-computer than can beat a human Go master. Some Go fans believed computers would never be able to beat a Go master. The vast combinatorial sums of possible moves are much greater in Go than chess, and there is there more of an emphasis on pattern recognition in Go rather than the brute force exhaustive search used in chess. Winning Go seemed a uniquely human achievement.

Wrong! Last week on Thursday August 7, 2008, MoGo, a software program running on borrowed supercomputers (stuffed with 800 4.7 ghrz processors with 15 Teraflops of storage), beat a US Go professional. According to the American Go Association MoGo beat Myungwan Kim who is an 8-dan master. While the game was played on a professional 19 x 19 board (most previous wins by computers were done on smaller amateur level 9 x 9 boards), Kim is not the highest ranking pro (a 9-dan) and he gave the computer a nine-stone handicap. He beat the machine in two other games. Afterwards he estimated MoGo as a 2 to 3-dan player.

Still Go has been Turing'd. Driving a car has been Turing'd. The list of human cognitive activities that normal humans believe computers can't do is very short;

Make art. Create a novel, symphony, movie.
Have a conversation.
Laugh at a joke.

Are there other things people popularly believe computers can't do?

Generational Theater

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:26:32 +0000

Originally posted in Long Now>

Brian Eno emailed this note to the Long Now list:

Yesterday I had the good fortune to find myself in Oberammergau, in Upper Bavaria.

In the early seventeenth century, as plague raced across Europe, the people of this small town made a deal with God: spare us and we'll perform a Passion play every ten years. All of us. The whole town.

True to their word, they've done this every decade since. The first performance was in 1634, and ever since it's been at the turn of the decade. It's a startling event, because everyone in the town really is involved. All the actors, the musicians, the technical staff, the director, the costumiers, the carpenters, the singers, the stagehands, the press agents, the bartenders, the ushers - are local people. In normal life they're the hairdresser, the postman, the dentist, the notary, the teacher, the plumber, the bus driver.

What I went to last night was not the full-blown Passion play - that won't happen until 2010 (they're working on it now). I attended instead a play called JEREMIAS, written by the Jewish pacifist Stefan Zweig in 1933, which featured a relatively modest cast of 500, ranging in age from 3 to 80. The criterion for being in a play is that you should be born in Oberammergau or have lived there for 20 years. The current director is Christian Stückl, a local man who directed his first Passion at the tender age of 28 (making him the youngest director in the long history of the play). Stückl told us that, in the 2000 Passion, a group of Muslim inhabitants of the town asked if they could be included: they'd by that time fulfilled the 20 year residency criterion. After enormous discussion during which the Muslim folk elucidated the parallels between the Koran and the Bible, they were included.

I won't attempt a description of the content: my German is so rudimentary that I understood very little of what was going on. It was 3 hours long, but it didn't matter: I was intrigued.There were at times several hundred people on the huge open-air stage (the audience sit inside, under cover, but the stage area is open to the sky, the elements and the changing light of evening): there was fire, rain, camels, sheep and horses, a 50 piece orchestra of local players and a 100 person choir of local singers.... all to a totally professional standard. There was nothing 'local' about the quality of any of the performances.

Luckily I'd brought along a little monocular, and that proved invaluable. I was intrigued by the faces - normal faces, normal children (picking their noses, being distracted), not 'actory' types. I kept returning to this thought: what would it do to a community to have a tradition as long and as defining as that, to know from an early age that you were, probably throughout your life, going to be woven into this incredibly rich tapestry of time, spirituality, art and craft? What would it be like to be a child growing up there, to watch your parents and grandparents learning their lines and practising their parts and building the sets and making the clothes? It must be so rich, such a powerful social binder and foundation.

Oh - I suddenly realised. It would be like tribal life. For isn't this exactly what growing up in Bali or Mali, with their long traditions of folk art, must be like?

I tried to discover whether there had been any sociological studies of Oberammergau, to see whether this unique (in Europe anyway) situation produced any measurable results on the society that made it. I haven't done this yet - all I gathered last night from Stückl was that deaths seem to decrease in the two years before a Passion play - as though people want to stay alive for the next one. In fact, in the 2010 there will be a 100-year old actor - the oldest in the history of the play. He was 90 last time, and inisisted on being in the next one.

Backstage there were lots of props for The Passion - some of them 200 or 300 years old. There was the wooden table for The Last Supper, made for the 1750 production and used in every performance since; 'Roman' shields and pikes from the early 19th century, crucifixes (enormous things!) a century old....

These people think long...

Brown Paper Tickets

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:00:00 -0800

Originally posted in Cool Tools

Ticketmaster sucks. Consumers hate having to purchase tickets through them because of their outrageous pile of excessive and phony fees. Hosts hate them because Ticketmaster's effective monopoly demands everyone play by their heavy-handed rules. Venues and fans feel totally stuck with them.

However if you are putting on an event and want to sell tickets, you have an alternative that will be cheaper, better, faster than Ticketmaster.

Brown Paper Tickets is one of several alternative online ticket vendors for anyone hosting a ticketed event. Might be a ball, a fundraiser, a race, a concert, or an exhibit. At Long Now we've used them and can recommend them highly.

Brown Paper Tickets bills themselves as "fair-trade" ticketing. What that means is that they offer a fair deal to both the consumer and the venue. BPT provides the lowest consumer fees on tickets (99 cents and 2.5%), with no add-on overcharges, and free first class postage. For hosts setting up an event, they offer fantastic 24/7 live-person phone support, a clean usable website, and cheap (10 cent) printed secure tickets. They offer venue hosts other goodies too. You have control over when to stop sales, how to customize the ticket, ways to manage multiple events, means to offer media tickets, assigned seating, and so on.

Plus, they give you real-time sales, and pay up promptly! Try that with Ticketmaster.

If you are running an event, it's crazy to use the old monster; if you are a fan, petition your venue to switch to Brown Paper Tickets.

-- KK

Brown Paper Tickets

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

The Complete Guide to House Concerts

Shopping with a Conscience

Sony Portable Reader

Where Quotes Come From

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:36:41 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

The collective memory we call the wikipedia never ceases to amaze me.

I just noticed that Stewart Brand's famous quote that "information wants to be free" has its own wikipedia page. It earns a page in part because the quote is only half of what he said, as the wikipedia properly explains. The tribute is a nice trophy.

Strangely, Wikiquote, a site collecting quotes which is published by Wikimedia Foundation, does not serve up very deep background on its quotes. As an example it has a rather enimic page for the same Brand quote It does however point to an even better page with a more thorough history of "information wants to be free."

I now realize that every adage should have an encyclopedia page explaining its actual genesis, history of antecedents, counter claims and context. Like any portriat, the story behind the quote is usually more interesting than the quote.

Here's a few random adages that have a wikipedia page:

Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap”

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

Currently wiithout a page (just attribution);

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.

Friendability

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:24:28 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

Are you my friend? Should I friend you? Or you me? I have a very large backlog of inquiries on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all the rest.

Deciding friendability has become a new and necessary social skill. Here is a hierarchy that works for me:

Friend -- Most of the people that Facebook calls "friends" I call Acquaintances.
Actual Friend -- Someone whom I've had a meal with, or has visited my home.
Real Friend -- Someone who would drive me to the airport at 6 am.
True Friend -- Someone who would get me out of jail.

We all have lots of friends, a few real friends and -- if we are lucky -- one or two true friends.

I am delighted to know so many acquaintances. But I only call friends Actual Friends, Real Friends, and True Friends.

Some folks think this approach is too serious and not in the spirit of the social game of Web 2.0. But I think in the long run, making distinctions in friendability will make our social webs stronger.

Wooden Pedal Bicycle

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:26:58 -0800

Originally posted in Street Use

Unlike the wooden bikes I posted about previously in Street Use, this wooden bike is unusual because it employs a pedal. It is made by the Cameroon wood sculptor Jules Bassong who normally makes effagies out of wood. He is riding his wooden bike on a tour of Cameroon. As reported by Walter Nana in Africa News:

“There is the break mechanism, if not I wouldn’t have been able to go down the steep slopes found along the Dschang road in the West Province of Cameroon,” Bassong noted.

Outstanding in the Field

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:23:42 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

Santa Cruz artist and foodie Jim Denevan sets up a long table in an outdoor environment and hosts a dinner party. Usually the long table is set in the fields of the farm where much of the food being served has been grown.

The intent of the gathering is to reinforce the connection between food and place. There is also an element of conceptual art; the stretched table often mirroring Denevan's beach art. His organization Outstanding in the Field hosts about two dozen of these dinners per year. More photos on his Flickr stream.

Monster Segway

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:28:17 -0800

Originally posted in Street Use

When I saw a photo of this I thought it must have been photoshopped. But here's a video: