Licensing
'Blog Posts' Category
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Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
June 8, 2008I was watching MSNBC’s election coverage of the South Dakota and Montana primaries on June 3rd, and heard Brian Williams make a very interesting statement. He was talking about how surprised he was to see the resurgence of political rallies in this age, and said that people his age thought the whole idea of the rally died in 1968. He then, almost wistfully, stated that this election is showing how we still need a physical community even though we are all digitally connected 24/7. I’ll quote from the transcript:
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Memetic Inkblots
June 3, 2008I’ve been tossing around this concept of the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information (memes) that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Now, if semiotics has taught me anything, it is that the sign is nothing but a social construction, and I do not intend to make the mistake of attributing intrinsic value to any meme. Obviously, how someone feels about anything is a way you can learn about them, but these concepts are so vague that they rarely have a stable, concise definition.
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Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
May 23, 2008I’ve been doing a lot of work with copyright and software licenses for my new job at the Federation of American Scientists, and I’ve come upon a strange situation that someone else has bound to have thought about before. The GNU Free Documentation License, the copyleft license that Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation, and many others use to ensure open access as well as the right to modify and re-release their text-based works, is itself not licensed under the GNU FDL or any similar scheme. Instead, the freedom to modify the license is explicitly denied.
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Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
May 18, 2006This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list.