girtby.net

As you know, I’m a fan of the DRM free music. In fact it seems that I’ve blogged about it each time I’ve discovered a new website that sells the stuff. And the latest discovery is emusic. They have hits and some misses.

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Herewith, some comments apropos of the Macworld 08 Keynote, specifically Randy Newman’s performance at the end.

Firstly, the Keynote as a whole seems to have moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment. Apple are simply leading the pack, and I expect Microsoft and others to follow (e.g. Bill Gates’s CES keynote). At the end of the Keynote, Randy Newman sang a couple of songs and rambled (fairly incoherently I thought). Part of the monologue was related to Apple as he said that “this company” wasn’t like the others; although it was sufficiently vague that he could have been talking about Pixar instead. And aside from this one mention, Newman could have been playing a set on a late night chat show or something.

The convergence of entertainment with marketing is taken to an extreme in Jon Armstrong’s excellent and hilarious novel Grey (available for free on audio podcast from his site). Without giving away too much, in the world of Grey, corporate marketing includes “publicity dates” between members of the respective CEOs families, the resulting courtship is eagerly devoured by a gossip-hungry public, and actual information about the products or the company is completely ignored. In a similar vein, future MacWorld Keynotes could easily include dance routines from Steve Jobs’ offspring. OK maybe not, but you have to wonder where it will end.

My second point is that the flavour of entertainment on display at the Macworld 08 show was particularly inappropriate I thought. The message came through pretty loud and clear: Randy Newman doesn’t like the Bush administration. The song A few words in defense of our country makes the case that the current US government is bad, but not as bad as it could have been, in comparison to the Roman Caesars for example (setting the bar rather low I would have thought).

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch?

To those apparently many people at the launch who were pleased with Newman’s performance; please ask yourself how you would have felt if the entertainment had taken a position contrary to your own. Mark Nottingham described this exact situation a few years back. I have been in a similar situation, albeit on a smaller scale; prior to the Iraq invasion I was at a business meeting where one of the attendees made his clear pro-Bush views known, much to my discomfort.

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

Broadcast radio is changing. It’s going digital, and with this change broadcasters are likely to start embedding watermarks in the audio stream (if they haven’t already). Podcasters, and other internet music publishers are likely to do the same. Watermarks are inaudible markers that uniquely identify the broadcaster, and are also the key enabling technology of a great new business venture that I’ve just thought of, and will now share with you, in the hope that someone, if not me, implements it.

The elevator pitch: music insurance. Insurance against hearing music that you hate.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you wake up one day with a revelation. “I would,” you think to yourself, “pay good money to never have to hear Meat Loaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light ever again. I would pay until the end of time, should it hurry up and arrive.” Or words to that effect.

Pick whatever example you want here: maybe the Crazy Frog song might be your choice instead? Or Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You? I-I-I-I-I-I-eee-I-I-eee-I-I don’t wont to go on, I’m sure everyone has at least one song that is disliked to the point of justifying financial outlay. (For me it would be the majority of the AOR canon, which could get expensive, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

So you take out insurance against accidentally hearing this song, whatever it might be. Like most insurance policies you pay a premium, and when you hear one of the covered songs, you make a claim and receive some financial compensation to ease the pain. All you have to do is prove that the music was broadcasted publicly and you couldn’t escape it. This guards against fraudulent claims, and is where technology comes in.

We need to make two simplifying assumptions. Firstly we require the music to be broadcast by a radio station or similar public broadcaster, who are motivated to watermark their broadcasts in the interest of asserting their license to do so. This precludes the private playing of insured music; in other words, you’re not allowed to play Celine Dion CDs to yourself and claim on them.

Secondly we require the insured to be in a public place, or specifically nominated private places, for the claim to be valid. This might be at work, at a pub, restaurant, or wherever you have no control over what radio station is played. This precludes you claiming against family members who play music too loud, but I’m sorry no insurer is going to go anywhere near that sort of dispute.

When you sign up for the policy you will download a small application to install on your mobile phone. When you hear an offensive song, you whip out your phone and start the application. This records a sample of the music, the date and time, and the place (either manually entered or from the GPS receiver). This information is transmitted (via internet, SMS, or whatever) to the insurer’s servers. These servers will automatically extract the music sample, match it against the sender’s insured songs, verify its authenticity using the watermark and location data. The watermark is verified against a known list of broadcasters, and the location data against a set of covered locations. If after this, the claim is determined to be valid, the insured amount would be paid.

Of course there is still a potential for fraudulent claims, but — without meaning to oversimplify the actuarial art — this can be countered by conventional risk management techniques. Claiming against Achy Breaky Heart when you’re *at* a Billy Ray Cyrus concert is obviously fraudulent, for example. And as with all insurance policies, the premiums and claim amounts can be adjusted in relation to specific risk factors, including the potential for fraud in a given situation. I am not an actuary, but feel free to chime in if you are (or can impersonate one on the internet).

Now I know it’s a great idea, but if you make millions from selling musical insurance policies, I don’t even want a cut. I just want you to cover me. Come on in and cover me.

Amazon recently opened their MP3 store (in “beta” of course). It is awesome.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t see it coming. Previous Amazon efforts with downloaded content were pretty lame, and I had no idea that they were going to come back with an offering that was as good as this.

Although I am a very happy bleep.com customer, their selection of music is limited to the Warp label plus a couple of degrees of separation. So I’ve been looking around at other DRM-free music stores, but few have excited me enough to become customers.

Amazon’s catalogue of music is quite large and hopefully getting larger. Most importantly, they have an extensive back-catalogue into which I have been delving in my quest to go legit, and to reclaim old legitimately-purchased albums that have got lost along the way. The purchase and download process is very easy and efficient.

I can also get individual songs from those long-lost albums. Somehow though I managed to turn on the infamous one-click purchase, so rather than bundling up a bunch of individual tracks and purchasing them en masse, Amazon conducts a separate transaction for each one. But no matter.

So if you have a US credit card, do yourself a favour and check it out. This, plus the new Radiohead release, make me think we’ve finally reached the point where purchasing legitimate DRM-free music is easier than stealing it.

Technology people have an understandable tendancy to be a bit disdainful of printed material. We argue that bits are where the real value lies, and not in the atoms. Although books are seen as valuable and portable offline representations, they are mere projections into the physical world of the real asset, which is digital and intangible.

At least, that’s how I sometimes think.

Now I don’t know whether it is because my possibly skewed perception has been brought back to reality, or that there is a growing trend towards high-quality niche book publishing, but I have really been struck lately by some examples of the printed medium. I want to share some of these with you. And exercise my new scanner.

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Some brief thoughts on The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins’ latest book.

I was initially reluctant to read The God Delusion, on the assumption that it was going to tell me a lot of things I already know, and reinforce views I already have. And I assumed that it was just going to make me cross. Upon reading it, and re-reading it, I do commend this book to other atheists, wavering atheists, and especially to agnostics. And of course open-minded religious people. For me the surprises were:

• A systematic cataloguing of the dubious moral lessons contained in the bible;
• A detailed demolition of the idea that science and religion occupy separate “magesteria”, where each is entirely independent of the other;
• Some interesting observations on the extent to which supposedly secular societies can bend over backwards to accommodate religious belief;
• A fascinating chapter on the possible Darwinian explanations for the origins of religious belief as a near-universal human trait;
• Popularising the term “American Taliban” to refer to fundamentalist Christians in the US;
• Meditations on the extent to which our perceptions are drastically limited by our evolutionary legacy.

The latter point culminates in a particularly inspiring passage at the end of the book. Dawkins channels Sagan in looking towards science to inspire us through new perceptions of the world.

Although there is plenty in the book that is contrary to established religion, Dawkins spends considerable time on the power of science to inspire and to “raise consciousness” (as he puts it). So it’s not all bashing the bible-bashers. But when doing so he is quite forthright and provocative. The title itself says it all, although I get the feeling he would have preferred “The God Hypothesis” as a title because that phrase occurs far more commonly in the book. Still he devotes some time to explaining his tactics, namely to avoid a confrontative debate with his opponents.

As evidenced by a recent appearance at a Lynchburg, VA university, he is clearly not an aggressive man. He listens thoughtfully and responds succinctly and clearly. This article in the New Humanist discusses Dawkins’ tactics further with reference to that incident, and includes a highly telling response to one question: “I hadn’t thought of that”.

I’m rambling on about tactics because some of the reaction to the book has tried to paint the picture of a rising new force of “militant atheism”, lead by Dawkins and others. For example, Richard Bernstein in the IHT, and Tobias Jones in the Guardian. These two use the term “militant atheism” and it is entirely unjustified. Dawkins strikes pre-emptively in the book:

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement.

So the bar is set quite high for militancy.

Bernstein’s article exposes a bit of a blind spot with regards to religious militancy, claiming that unlike Islam, “Christian fundamentalism [engages] in no violence or threats.” Which of course makes me wonder if he’s even read the book he’s talking about. Dawkins writes at length about the threats he has personally received, and about the terrorists who kill doctors in the name of Christianity, and other modern-day examples. And what about George W. Bush’s claim that God told him to invade Iraq? Does that not count as Christian fundamentalism also?

Dawkins does not demand any action of his readers, except to help raise consciousness. He explicitly draws his tactics from the feminist movements who encouraged us to think about language and how it reinforces an undesirable mindset. He also makes parallels to the gay pride movement, trying to bring atheists out of the closet. Neither of these can be claimed to be militant by any stretch of the imagination.

So please raise your consciousness, come out of the closet, and read The God Delusion. Or I’ll kill you.

The features I want out of an online music store are:

• No DRM. At all. Seriously.
• MP3 encoded at a high bitrate (diskspace is cheap).
• Optional lossless encoding.
• Reasonable prices.
• Must be legit (rules out allofmp3 for example).
• Decent website with online previews.
• Appropriate embedded meta-data.

I am happy to say that although it is not perfect, Bleep is pretty close to satisfying every item on my list. (hat tip: Uninnovate)

Bleep is a spin-off of the hugely influential electronic music label Warp Records. Hence the catalogue is heavy with Warp and similar electronic artists. Not the sort of thing you’re likely to hear on commercial radio.

The website is probably the least appealing thing about Bleep. It looks pretty — thanks to TDR design — but it’s a usability nightmare. No scroll bars, fixed layout, weird coverart-based navigation. However it is quite searchable and there are online previews of all songs in their entirety (but served up in 30 second chunks). Also, you can embed colour-coordinated previews in your own site, like this:

That’s a track from Autechre’s Confield, specifically chosen because 30 seconds is probably all you’re going be able to listen to. (That album is particularly impenetrable to mere mortals, although I am a big fan of some of their other stuff.)

I’d also like to see Bleep provide some user reviews, artist background info, and notable previous works. Preferably outsourced to another site that specialises in this stuff.

On the plus side, all tracks are available as MP3 encoded in LAME using the canonical --alt-preset standard option. Some are also available with FLAC encoding, which is a nice touch. (Unfortunately FLAC doesn’t seem to be playable in iTunes yet.)

MP3 encoded albums are all US$9.95 from what I can see. FLAC encoding costs a little more. Individual tracks are also available, but I don’t know why you’d bother.

In the name of research I bought an album and EP. The purchase experience was quite pleasant although after concluding the paypal-based payment the download did not start automatically as promised. No worries though, there’s a downloads page where you can download all the songs you have paid for but not received yet.

I would like the ability to re-download purchases but Bleep does not seem to allow this. No matter, just burn a CD and keep it with all the other receipts.

The download is delivered as a big honkin’ zip file. You unzip, import to iTunes, sync to your iPod, and play happily ever after.

This is how music should be sold online. Recommended.

There’s a science fiction story I read as a kid, and I want to say that it’s Phillip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, but that may not be right. In this story, or one like it, I can remember being amused and confused at the decadent characters in the story who, as adults, would take a drug that would instantly transport them back to relive some of the more pleasant experiences from their early childhood. The obvious name “Wayback” comes to mind.

At the time I read about Wayback, I couldn’t understand the appeal. Why would you want to revisit your childhood? It seemed pretty odd.

As an adult I now know the lure of the past all too well. (And no, I’m not talking about re-reading one’s previous blog posts, though the principle is the same). The past can be quite addictive. We carry with us through life little souvenirs, which are very handy triggers to recall the past. Smells, music, clothes, movies, books; all are basically a more dilute form of Wayback. And using these to take the occasional stroll through the landscape of one’s childhood memories can be quite pleasant.

Of these popular culture artifacts, some can be digitised and preserved forever. Or at least until those who care about them die off. And as we all know, bits are a lot easier to store long-term than atoms. It seems that music and movies are already well catered for; it’s surprisingly easy to find some surprisingly obscure movies and music online (copyright notwithstanding, and I’ll get to that).

Books are, somewhat ironically, far more transient than movies. It’s a lot harder to find an out-of-print book from the 1970s than a movie from the same period. I’m sure this has something to do with the sheer volume of printed material, as well as the relative difficulty of creating a digital archive of it. The problem is particularly acute for material that is not out of copyright, but predates the rise of the Internet.

Now I can apparently still buy a copy of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. But what are my chances of finding a copy of 2000 A.D. where Judge Dredd battles the League of Fatties? OK, so it’s not exactly Voltaire, and maybe in 50 years time noone will care. But hey, I’d like to read it again. And I’m probably not the only one.

Copyright laws quite rightly stop us just scanning any old thing and putting it online. But what if the book is out of print? Surely the collective publishing industry could just look the other way? OK maybe not.

For clearly important works like, I dunno, The O’Reilly Factor For Kids we can look to the major libraries to keep a copy and in however-many years after the death of the copyright holder’s lawyer we can expect someone to dust it off and scan it for the benefit of all.

But at the lowbrow end of the literary scale I would argue that there is a very real chance that a significant proportion of printed material is just never going to survive to be made available online. Fifty years after the death of the Judge Dredd artists, are there going to be any 2000 A.D. progs even left any more? If so, what condition will they be in? If we even wanted to digitise this material after so much time sitting in someone’s closet, what would be the result?

With the long tail effect, you can pretty much count on every published work being valuable to someone. Readers outnumber authors by a significant margin, so it’s a reasonable first assumption that every published work is worth saving. And we shouldn’t be relying on the libraries to save us (no disrespect intended). I say to hell with the copyright laws, if it’s out of print and is not likely to earn the author any more sales, then get it online pronto! Or at least scan it in and keep it in escrow.

When traditional journalism reaches its limits, the citizen journalists step in. By extension, when traditional libraries reach their limits, the citizen librarians step in.

A published work which is out of print and which may perish unless someone save it. Like a literary Steve Irwin. I’d like to see other people do the same. There must be lots of boxes hidden in closets all over the world, filled with rare gems. Or lots of obscure trash which assorted random people all over the world may appreciate. In other words: stuff that needs to be on the Internet.

Obviously there are other challenges besides the copyright laws, there are the technical challenges of getting the best quality scan, performing OCR, storage, etc. But it seems like a worthwhile challenge.

So to kick off, I’ll dig deep into the darkest corners of my library and find something that deserves to be preserved for posterity. I’ll have a go at preserving it myself and report back.

Now I know you have no reason to trust my taste in music. I haven't written much about it — except in passing — so you have no way of knowing whether my music recommendations will have any meaning for you.

I would like to be able to point to my last.fm profile and say that you could get a good idea of the type of stuff I listen to, but it's not really accurate. Mainly because last.fm is blocked by the censorware used at my work, so none of the stuff I listen to there is recorded. Also the top artists list hasn't been updated since May, for some reason.

But forget all that bollocks and take my word for it that music from the Monotonik net label is really good.

Net label? Yes, net label. As in, music label on the net. As in, MP3 format with no DRM, for all to download free of charge. Creative commons licensed, even.

Monotonik specialise in what they call "headphone music". This is a term which may be confusing to you but makes sense to me. Its electronic music which you listen to late at night with the headphones on. Just like I'm doing now. There are a huge variety of artists and styles mostly revolving around the IDM genre.

Go and get the torrent of all their 2006 releases for a start. Do yaself a favour.

Here is someone's list of must-see movies (via Kottke). If you see them all you can apparently call yourself "movie literate". I've seen some of them.

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Last weekend, Peter convinced me to go to the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club Field Day.

This was a great event, providing me with a glimpse of what cyberspace looked like before the Internet. Before the personal computer even. Events like this are great, you really get a sense of the community, and of the obsession that drives the members to spend all their free time on what is, to outsiders, an incomprehensible hobby. Lots of fun.

Some photos over the fold.

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Mixing topics is apparently one of the top ten design mistakes of weblogs, but I just can't help myself. So if you'll (continue to) indulge me...

A couple of days ago I found myself updating a wikipedia entry for a topic that I know very little about: Numbers Stations.

These are shortwave radio transmissions that are, according to best guesses, used for communicating messages to espionage agents in the field. They consist of tones and music, but often simply voices reciting sequences of numbers. The idea is that the numbers correspond to a one-time pad, which the agent in the field uses to look up the pre-agreed (and secret obviously) message text.

Being only recently new to the world of numbers stations I haven't heard any directly myself. However a few years ago there was a 4 CD set of numbers station recordings released called the Conet Project (pictured). The hopefully legal MP3s are available.

Have a listen to some of the transmissions, I find them quite compelling. They are at once spooky (groan), slightly disturbing, and highly evocative of the world of the deep cover agent.

It's no wonder that musicians have been inspired by numbers stations, and that's how I found out about them. I have been a fan of the equally mysterious artists Boards of Canada for a while now, and according to the unofficial BoC resource pages the Scottish duo were inspired by numbers stations from an early age. If you're not a BoC fan and you like analogue-heavy electronic music inspired in equal parts by nature and maths, give them a listen. If you are a fan, get over to Fredd-E's resource page which has lots of background material to help understand the tracks (and now also has RSS feeds at the suggestion of some nerd).

Numbers stations are also referenced in the TV series Lost. If you've seen the show you'll probably appreciate why. This show also gets the girtby seal of approval, despite it suffering from the X-Files syndrome of irritating the viewers with a perpetually imminent revelation of the Big Secret. Although the Lost plot does move forward, it is at times frustratingly slow, particularly in the middle of the series. But despite this, and the unintentionally hilarious Australian accents, it was still one of the best shows on television last year.

So there you have it, mysterious broadcasts and two popular culture recommendations. Makes a change from user interface disasters, anyway.

Yesterday we were like a racecourse, today a cruise ship. Yesterday Bob Hawke, today our great playwright David Williamson, whose recent spray in The Bulletin is worth a read.

[There's a back-story here which [Crikey](http://www.crikey.com.au) have been following. A few days after appearing in The Bulletin, the full text of the speech on which the article was based was requested by someone at the PM's department. And a few days after that, the usual suspects (Bolt, Ackerman, Henderson) appeared in their respective columns pouring scorn. The timing of these events is seen as suspicious.]

For mine, the article itself starts pretty shakily. Williamson sets the scene of a cruise ship, and the types of people encountered there. The concept of sampling bias obviously doesn't worry Williamson as he proceeds to extrapolate from the passengers of that cruise ship to the entire nation. Such a concentrated dose of, and such extended exposure to, their fellow countrymen would doubtless drive anyone to a skewed perspective of them. I've always found it fairly easy to cringe at the behaviour of other Australians whilst out of the country, and so I'm sure it's far worse in the confines of a cruise ship.

So while he is pretty scathing — in many cases overly so — the basic point is well taken.

He wades in to attack the blind materialist "aspirational" nature of Australian society. The anti-intellectual, hyper-critical, and superficial are all aboard Williamson's cruise ship and he is not happy. They drink at the bar, overindulge themselves on leisure and entertainment (mostly American), and generally drift along making the occasional unflattering comments about the neighbours. I have some sympathy for this appraisal. We have no real intellectual tradition to speak of, at least not one that extends to the general populace. This leads to a blissful unawareness of the direction taken, where we just drift and blindly consume the fruits of our natural resources (like the passengers on a cruise ship, see).

Williamson argues that by far the most important factor in the success of our nation has been the exploitation of natural resources. We are stripping the country bare — at first through farming, but now mining — and are completely unaware and uninterested in the long term consequences. Of course being an actual writa he put it more betterer than I dun:

Like a hedonistic cruise ship we’re sailing through time – not to a palm-fringed tropical island, but to a sobering destiny. We might not suffer, and perhaps our children won’t, but our grandchildren will certainly live in a very different and less plenteous Australia.

The environment only has so much to give, and we haven't exactly restrained ourselves. I'm glad I'm not the only one to think that maybe we should just give up on farming altogether:

Some economists already believe that we’d be better to shut down our farming efforts completely as they’re a net cost to the country rather than a net gain. At best they contribute 3% to the gross national product, and the subsidies to rural areas to keep them viable already top this. John Howard tells us we must preserve a rural lifestyle, and maybe he’s right, but it goes right against his long-avowed ideology of economic rationalism.

The stated facts here are certainly worth following up on, but it does make you wonder. Towards the end he makes a particularly resonant point:

The problem is that the alternatives to oil just aren’t there, or even on the horizon. Wind, wave and solar energy can’t provide nearly enough, and even atomic energy can at best supply about 25% of the world’s current power needs. [...] Coal is proving such a disastrous polluter (try finding a patch of blue over any Chinese city) and greenhouse gas generator, that its use may well be banned not too far into the future.

So while sustainable energy production is a global problem, our particular dependence on coal is going to be more of a problem for us than other western countries. And we are not doing much of anything about it.

The general (i.e. not just scientific) intellectual tradition, which Williamson argues is missing from the Australian character, might seem like a fairly indirect approach to these specific environmental problems. But I think he's right. It is analogous to the relationship between basic scientific research and specific technological advances: you can't have the latter without the former. The basic scientific research provides the foundation on which to build the edifice of technology.

In the same way, I believe that a strong general intellectual tradition is a foundation for a culture that is willing to face up to its problems.

As the government feels it necessary to introduce its new Anti-Democracy Laws on Melbourne Cup Day — laws which re-introduce the offence of sedition — it may be my last chance to inform the world of my inflammatory opinion on horse racing.

[I should first point out that the timing of the introduction of this legislation into Parliament is by no means the worst thing about it. There are many excellent reasons to hate it, such as those outlined on [Media Watch](http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1489465.htm) last night, and in [Chas Savage's savage rant in the Age](http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/hows-this-for-sedition/2005/10/23/1130005997719.html). And let's not even talk about the process by which it was created. I can't add any more here that hasn't already been said elsewhere, so now onto our feature presentation...]

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Please don't let John Doyle's fantastic speech for the 2005 Andrew Olle Media Lecture pass you by. Grab the MP3 for the full effect.

This little aside by no means does justice to the range and depth of the speech, but nonetheless had me in hysterics on the way to work this morning:

Tim Flannery recalls seeing a burial service in the [New Guinea] highlands whereby the deceased was picked up and swung over the grave with the family and onlookers solemnly chanting the incantation ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and into the hole he goes’.

5 out of 5 on the read-the-rest scale.