Some rights reserved

I'm currently reading a pretty good book by Lawrence Lessig called Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. It's a very interesting analysis of the state of copyright law in the United States that takes a look at the past, the present and the future. I'm only half-way through, but I still heartily recommend it.

If, like me, you don't live in the US, you're probably wondering why you should care about US copyright law and US lobbies, etc. Well, simply put, because bad ideas have a tendency to escape the United States and spread throughout the world, like a tumor spreads its deadly tentacles throughout a healthy body (and there you go, I'm now probably banned for life from entry to the United States for exercising one of the rights Americans appreciate the most.)

Anyway, if you do not have the time to read the actual book (freely available from the book's web site, by the way) or you do not like reading in English, you might want to take a look at this presentation that, even though it does not really summarize the book, does cover some of its main points:

Does this thing have a manual?

Well, I didn't think an escalator needed one, but the numbers seem to say different:

For those who can't read the poor quality text, it says "Last year: 1,024 injuries".

The number drew my attention for two reasons:

1. What are the probabilities of the number of injuries on escalators being a power of 2?
2. How can there be almost 3 injuries per day on something as trivial as an escalator‽ (that's an interrobang, in case you're wondering)

Sure, the escalators on the London tube can be impressive:

(CC) Flickr swh

But still...

Bionic monkey-talk at TED

OK, maybe the title doesn't mean much, but I couldn't think of anything better. So how about you just watch the videos?

I was barely finished with last week's TED post when I stumbled upon the first of this week's recommendations. I know I said that TED videos were only 18 minutes long, but I guess when you're Jane Goodall you're inherently expected to need a little more:

As inspiring as Mrs. Goodall might be, I would have preferred a longer talk from Alan Russell, the speaker on this video called Why can't we grow new body parts?:

My weekends with TED

Those of you who know me personally, know that, as active as I might be during the week, on weekends I'm basically a vegetable. Well, I'm exaggerating a little, but I do like to take it slowly on weekends. For instance, I like to stay in bed late. I prepare for this on Friday night by leaving my laptop and all my remotes, as well as books or anything I might need in the morning, next to the bed. This way, I can stay under the covers as long as possible, which is usually until my body requires some energy input, or would like to output waste. Anyway, I'm starting to digress here...

Another thing I like to do on weekends is spending a while with TED. I should actually say on TED, but your mischievous little minds will probably wander where they shouldn't. At least until I explain what, and not who, TED is. From their website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Every year TED brings together "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers" who give 18-minute talks about what they do. Speakers include Chris Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Philippe Starck, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Frans Lanting; and I've only mentioned the "famous" ones here (by which I mean, the ones I know), but there's also "regular" people: mathematicians, anthropologists, musicians, physicists, computer scientists. People you've (or at least I've) never heard about before, such as Majora Carter (actually her talk is the one that made me discover TED), Kenichi Ebina (not everything is talk at TED, there also onstage performance), Ron Eglash, Robert Full and plenty of others.

Most of these talks are described as inspiring, fascinating, beautiful and even funny. I definitively don't mind spending my whole weekend watching these people talk 18 minutes at a time. That's why I've decided that every week I'll be sharing my favorite TED videos on the blog. Every Sunday, when technically possible, I will post here the videos I like the most in an attempt to get you inspired by these wonderful people.

So let's start with the one that got me started. Majora Carter's Greening the ghetto:

And so that you can see how diverse TED videos actually are, here is an extremely funny video from Ze Frank:

See you again with more TED next week ;)

A quand 100% de métros automatiques ?

Your help is needed to find Jim Gray!

I know I have a tendency to abuse exclamation marks, but this time it is really important.

On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment.

Follow the story here.

Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

The satellite images have been put on the Amazon Mechanical Turk and you can help with the search efforts by dedicating some of your time to looking for Jim’s boat.

So put whatever you intended to do on the Web today aside for a couple of minutes. I am sure Jim’s family will appreciate it very much.

Click here to go to the Mechanical Turk.

The International Language of Gestures

We take most of the gestures we make every day for granted: nodding means "yes", shaking your head means "no", a thumb up means "OK", etc. But are they universal? Will people from other regions, countries, cultures understand what you mean when making these gestures?

The answer is no.

A while back, I wrote a post about counting with your fingers, commenting another post by Alex Barnett. Based on the comments received by Alex's post you can already conclude that people around the world use their fingers in different ways to represent numbers. What about other gestures?

Well, I just read this article: Why do we nod our heads for "yes" and shake them for "no"?

They talk about how things as simple as saying "yes" or "no" can be represented by different gestures around the world, even though nodding and shaking your head is almost universal.

Other gestures, however, such as the "thumbs up" can have several different meanings. Depending on cultures and, of course, context it can mean:

1. OK,
2. number 1,
3. give me a ride, :)
4. or "screw you"

You can see that, if you're not careful, not knowing what the gesture you're making means can get you in quite a lot of trouble. I'm thinking of the hitchhiker (meaning 3) walking on a Greek (meaning 4) road giving drivers the "thumbs up" :P