Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad wakes up, gets out of bed, drags a comb…

Return of the caption contest. Now with pandas! [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

Me, on the Google Books settlement and your legislators: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

“The Six Billion Dollar Colon” — ‘s rarest published story.

Airplane ‘bird strikes’ have climbed dramatically, FAA records show — Foxes?

Brewing with Synthetic Biology — Science! Plus I love the fact that “synthetic biologist” is a job title.

Microbe-Powered ‘Fart’ Machine Stores Energy — Um…

Reclaiming America’s soul — Paul Krugman on torture. Having spent years as a liberal being told I was immoral, unethical and Godless, I’d sure like to see some moral and ethical accountability for the conservatives who made this mess. God will know His own, I guess.

with more on Tea Parties — Not that conservatives make much sense to start with (intellectual consistency being pretty much a disqualification for aconservative), but the more you look at the nuts and bolts, the nuttier they seem.

Thought police muscle up in Britain — Liberal-progressives get as creepy as conservatives. (Thanks to .)

?otD: Which way to the egress?

4/25/2009
Body movement: hiking this morning!
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (forgot to weigh in)
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville; The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

Tags: Books, Contests, Links, Personal, Politics, Publishing, Science, stories, Travel, weird

Posted: 3:52 am Sat April 25 2009 | Comments(0) |

[publishing] The Google Books settlement and your legislators

Anent my post earlier today about the miserable thievery that is the Google Books settlement [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ], asked me via Twitter:

@jay_lake Is this the sort of thing that can be changed by new laws? Is getting our legislators involved a good idea?

My answer is, well, it’s worth a shot, but probably not going to accomplish much. Here’s why.

Two things move legislators. Money, and popular reaction.

The money is all on the Google side here. Overwhelmingly so. I am not implying Google has bought anybody off, merely saying that of the parties involved, only Google has the ability to swing meaningful weight through lobbying and campaign contributions.

Unfortunately, popular reaction is probably also on the Google side. What we’re arguing about here isn’t the indexing of the books per se. At least, I’m not. As someone said on an author’s mailing list, if Google had come to us as authors and asked to do this on an opt-in basis, we’d have been falling all over ourselves to be included. What we’re arguing about here is how copyright licenses are created, compensated and enforced. The Google Books settlement inverts the entire modern history of copyright, moving licensing from something controlled by the author (or other copyright holder) into something which can in effect be homesteaded by any entity large enough to not be concerned with individual lawsuits for copyright violation. Think movie studios, for example.

Most people don’t know or care about that sort of thing. It’s legal neepery of interest only to copyright holders and their publishers. What most people care about (if they care about this at all) is the ready access to a huge index of books, including many orphaned or out of print works. This is world-threatening to authors, agents and publishers, but it’s a net benefit to most voters.

We can’t swing money, and we can’t swing public outrage. What are we left with? The biggest kid on the block playing bully, and all our agents and editors telling us we might as well take what we can get, because this can’t be fought. And even though I support in principle what Google is trying to do here, the methods they’ve used, thanks to the Author’s Guild and the settlement, are bullying, pure and simple, compounded by theft of copyright today and the potential for incalculable future economic damage to copyright holders.

Much as the Thor Power Tool decision had the unintended consequence of destroying publishing backlists for a generation, the Google Books Settlement has the distinct possibility of an unintended consequence of undermining or destroying author control of copyrights, and decimating the value of those copyrights.

And I don’t see how our community can leverage legislators on this one, because we don’t have money or popular appeal on our side. Advantage, the bully that is Google.

Do you agree with my analysis? Or am I mistaken?

Tags: Books, Culture, Publishing

Posted: 6:33 pm Fri April 24 2009 | Comments(3) |

[publishing] A bit more on the banal evil of the Google books settlement

Literary agent Ashley Grayson on the Google Books settlement. Go read it.

Some of you read my prior post on this [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ], which generated a pretty interesting comment thread.

Nothing I’ve read since then makes me feel any better. For one thing, everybody seems to have a different conclusion about it, which tells me it isn’t the least bit clear cut. That lack of consensus in and of itself is a bad thing, because it tells me this is a crappy settlement if no one involved can explain it the same way.

So far as I can determine, my rights as a copyright holder are being permanently hijacked, and the advice I’m getting boils down to “relax and enjoy it, you can’t afford to sue Google anyway.”

Those of you who work at Google, what the hell happened to “Don’t be evil?” You’ve jumped the shark, guys. Wretchedly so. In fact, let me say a hearty “fuck you very much” to your entire organization.

I hate that I’m going to have to stop using Gmail, Google Maps, Google Desktop, Google search, and all the other really cool stuff Google has put into my life. But what else am I going to do? Because this thing is vile, it stinks to high heaven, and I’m being ripped off both now and in perpetuity by Google.

Thanks a million, Larry and Sergey. You guys have really made my publishing career.

Tags: Books, Personal, Publishing, Writing

Posted: 2:10 pm Fri April 24 2009 | Comments(5) |

[links] Link salad kicks back at home

Return of the caption contest. Now with pandas! [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

Vintage sexist ads — Um, wow. (Thanks to .)

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as bad pizza

Asteroid deflection by tether — Centauri Dreams is interesting again.

Nanotubes come into fashion — Technology Review with more fascinating materials science.

Moon and morning star — APOD photography coolness.

The Chinese Character – no simple matter — Nuances and politics behind the debate over simplified Chinese character. Language neepery with a dose of politics.

The Edge of the American West on the evils of vegetarianism — From their series on the Boxer Rebellion. Something seems to have been lost in translation from the original Klingon.

The revenge of geography — A lengthy piece on geopolitics from Foreign Policy. Well worth the read if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

The Republican Party Has Lost Its Way — A brief squib contrasting the teabaggers’ objections to Obama with their silence on Bush.

?otD: Why me? There must be a thousand other guys.

4/24/2009
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
This morning’s weigh-in: 218.0
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville; The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

Tags: Contests, Culture, Food, Funny, Language, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science

Posted: 4:39 am Fri April 24 2009 | Comments(0) |

[books] What I’ve been reading lately

Books read recently (alpha by author)

So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past) by Louisa A. Burnham
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
The Solitudes by John Crowley
The Good Humor Man by Andrew Fox
Making Money by Terry Pratchett (reread)
Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death; by Jessica Snyder Sachs
Slights by Kaaron Warren

Books currently being read:
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville (really)

Books on deck to be read shortly:

Engine Summer by John Crowley
Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century by Robert Charles Wilson

Tags: Books, klog

Posted: 7:51 pm Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(0) |

[personal] A dinner in New York City

A rather nice dinner in New York City last night, at Tarffalli y Vino just off Union Square. That’s an elegant little wine bar with a nice Italian menu. and organized it for me, though was only to make it by for dessert. We had a nice turn out, including , , KA, , (without , unfortunately), , , NF from the Day Jobbe, , , , and the sadly tardy .

I’d ordered some appetizers in advance, including a nice duck confit, a terrific fried chevre, and cheese plates consisting of Sottocenere al Tartuffo, Epoisses, Garroxta, a chevre whose name escapes me now, and Blacksticks, a Lancashire blue with a strong resemblance to Shropshire.

Dinner was very nouveau, with elegantly modest portions, but quite tasty. Some wine flowed — I had a pinot grigio, while had something Basque she’d never tried before. Conversation flowed around the table quite nicely. I felt very welcomed in New York by old friends and new.

Thank you everyone who made it out for this.

Tags: Cheese, Food, New York, Personal, Photos, Travel

Posted: 6:33 pm Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(0) |

[contests] Caption contest returns!

A new caption contest! Usual rules apply. I’ll collect captions in comments here (at both jlake.com and jaylake.livejournal.com) until I get bored with it, then build a voting poll. Please try to limit the length of your entries or they may become truncated in the poll code.

Prize will be a hardback of Green (when it’s available) or another of my books of the winner’s choice. Have fun!

Tags: Books, Contests, Green, Photos

Posted: 5:34 pm Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(8) |

[photos|funny] Who says disco is dead?

Tags: Funny, Photos

Posted: 5:30 pm Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(1) |

[books] So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke

On this trip I read So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke [ Powell's | Amazon ] by Louisa A. Burnham. This is a fairly brief history of the Beguin heretics of Languedoc, an early fourteenth century movement which was stifled effectively by the Inquisition. (And tangentially figures into Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.) This is a fairly scholarly book which I read simply for the sake of something interesting well outside my usual splash zone. It was interesting in an intellectual sense, though more scholarly than popular, so didn’t have the same reading buzz as the narrative nonfiction which has been so prevalent in recent years. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.)

I certainly learned more than I ever thought to know about Franciscans, the politics and practices of the Inquisition, life in Medieval France and sundry other details. Fascinating stuff at the detail level which will certainly inform my thinking and writing in the future. I also learned some new words, such as “macaronic” and “archiepiscopal”, and new terms, such as “Angel of Philadelphia” — that last definitely a story title waiting to happen.

Interesting stuff, worth my time, and much as with my recent reading of Corpse, about the history of forensic pathology and time-of-death estimates, definitely gave my brain a jolt of different-from-the-usual. Which was, of course, the point.

Tags: Books, Cool, history, klog

Posted: 4:06 pm Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(2) |

[travel|tech] Up in the air, Junior Birdman

Blogging from 37,000 feet here. I’m on a JFK-SFO flight, and it turns out to be one of those airplanes they’ve got WiFi configured aboard. I caviled about signing up for it (I like to think of airplanes as Quiet Places), then realized I never take this flight, so I may as well try this for the hell of it. So, erm, hello from the skies of Colorado.

Tags: California, New York, Tech, Travel

Posted: 10:28 am Thu April 23 2009 | Comments(0) |