mandarine

The wealth of the world does not come from our material labour. This is becoming more and more obvious each day. Look around and count how much of your stuff is more than thirty years old: you will agree that what really matters is not the accumulation of material wealth from the commercial labour of past generations, but the legacy of intellectual riches from the volunteer contribution of our elders.

Let us pick a few examples from the public domain:

• washing one’s hands (the biggest life-saving practice of all times)
• quantum physics (which made the internet revolution possible)
• democracy (Athenian, American, French, …)
• crumpets, muffins, pancakes
• soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf,…
• the English language

In fact, as soon as we are considering ideas, concepts, inventions, or intellectual production at large (except books, songs and movies), it is actually harder to find something that is not in the public domain than something that is.

However, I am worried. The public domain has seldom had powerful advocates. For the past couple of centuries, works have generally ‘fallen’ into the public domain inadvertently, instead of being given as offerings to the world. And the insane divergence of recent capitalistic greed in staking claims over things which should (and used to) belong to the common good (molecules, genes, seeds, theorems) is ominous. In my nightmares, I see large auctions in which Universal buys exclusive rights for Elizabethan theater, Monsanto buys corn (any variety), Apple buys Beethoven, Intel buys quantum physics and HSBC mathematics, and so forth, so that everything is now owned, making things so much simpler…

Meanwhile (from a very-well researched economics paper on the value of the public domain):

Older [copyrighted] works gathering dust in vaults or even rotting away (as has occurred with a large amount of early film in the United States (Lutzker et al 2002)) generate no revenue or value for society, and represent a tragedy for any nation’s cultural heritage.

On the other hand, there are also encouraging signs that mentalities may be changing. The internet is an ideal medium in which the public domain can thrive, as it considerably reduces the cost of exchanging and duplicating intellectual production. The uptake of Linux and open-source software, the growing number of GPL or other Creative-Commons-licenced content on the web, the rise of wikibooks and other books directly published in the public domain are unprecedented phenomena. My belief is that if we lean to the right side, we can sway the balance in favor of the public domain, and private owership of ideas will nicely return to its original minority niche.

If, like many, your are making a list of resolutions for the new year, let me suggest you added a line for one thing you could contribute to the public domain. The good thing about contributions to the public domain is that you never have to keep up. The cumulative nature of intellectual production is such that what is done will never have to be done again. Whereas reducing chocolate intake in the new year is an everyday’s endeavour, if you give something to the public domain just once, it will be forever: what you give will be available for people all around the world and in all future generations.

Below is a list of activities that everyone should contemplate at least once in a lifetime:

• Proofreading public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg
• Creating, editing, completing, commenting Wikipedia articles or any wikibook
• Recording, proof-listening, editing public-domain audio-books for LibriVox
• Contributing to open-source software projects (code, documentation, support forums)
• Uploading your pictures to flickr and specifying ‘no rights reserved’
• Collecting copyrighted material for the time it goes out of copyright (be a library/vault)
• Recording public-domain music and uploading it to musopen.org
• Dropping the copyright notice on your blog
• Exchanging seeds
• Publishing and exchanging cooking recipes
• Inventing something and just publishing it instead of filing a patent
• Writing a novel and publishing it over the internet instead of running the obstacle course of finding a publisher and then having your book out of print after one year and until 70 years after your death
• Bookmooching and bookcrossing (from Dew)
• Writing quality content and making it available (if not necessarily public-domain) on a website or blog (from Dew)

If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment: I’d like this list to grow to outrageous proportions to show just how much anyone can do.

After my recent diatribe against scientism, maybe this is the right moment to write a little something about Jules Verne, the archfather of scientism in literature. I used to love Jules Verne novels when I was a child, although the red cover of the hardback editions had always intimidated me. Then I had almost forgotten all I’d read until some years ago when I delved into ‘De la Terre à la Lune’ for a physics class I was giving: I ripped all space mechanics references from the book and made a very funny physics test out of them (providing that units were properly converted). The one question I remember best was an illustration of Michel Ardan’s head, where I had drawn a downward arrow with a legend ‘m.gamma’ representing the apparent weight of the head on the neck during the acceleration phase of the shell in the cannon. Students were expected to show that even with the hydraulic cushion below the cabin floor, there was no way Ardan & co. could come out alive from an acceleration of 21,000g (you can check for yourselves: the cannon is 900 feet long, the liberation velocity was and still is 11000 m/s), as the head would have appeared to weigh more than 30 tons, i.e. the weight of twenty midsize cars. [more]

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.

In response to Emily’s very true remark when linking to Mandarine from Cam’s roundtable that I do not write so much about books, I hereby solemnly promise more bookish posts.

Below is a shortlist of books I have read recently and on which I have something to share:

• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours (J. Verne)
• The Water-Babies (C. Kingsley)
• Something New (P.G Wodehouse)
• Northanger Abbey (J. Austen)
• Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë)
• A Tale of Two Cities (C. Dickens)
• Various short stories by Maupassant
• American Tabloid (J. Ellroy)
• The Great Influenza (non fiction, by J. M. Barry)
• Fausse Route (non fiction, by E. Badinter, which I’ll cross-post at What We Said)
• And just because Litlove listed Vian’s works amonst her worst reading experience, I’ll be re-reading l’Ecume des Jours and tell you whether she’s right.

About the picture: I just love poppies (coquelicots ‘coke-alee-koe’). I have collected a lot of seeds this summer from various places and intend to sow them in my lawn/prairie. Looking forward to July.

(cross-posted at absidea)

Prelude

Politically, I am on the liberal side (possibly as liberal as they make them in France, but not brave/foolish enough to hope a revolution could help things out). Note for French readers: ‘liberal’ means rather the contrary of ‘libéral’.

But linguistically, I am a conservative prick. I do not often rant in public, but allow me to do so here:

• I hate it when people invent new words for old words they did not even bother to learn, and then think they are smart;
• I loathe jargon and acronyms that make it into general language;
• I shudder at spelling mistakes or inadequate punctuation in widely distributed papers and magazines or even books;
• I am ill-at-ease when people I know can’t spell two words right are speaking to me, because I am convinced they are making those spelling mistakes even as they speak;
• I detest it when grammar mistakes travel by way of radio waves from the mouth of an illiterate journalist to the minds of could-have-been-literate-but-too-late-for-that-now listeners;
• I dislike it when people say that language has to evolve, that it’s natural that it should do so, that it must adapt to the new times;
• I would be sorry to learn that people in a hundred years from now have to have Molière or Voltaire translated into new French. It is already enough that we have to have Montaigne and Rabelais adapted now;
• I would kill the guy who invented leet speak (but I keep a cool head and hope this is just a fad).

Let me justify myself: I am convinced that spoken language has a right to change, and that there is no freezing it. But I am also convinced that written language and official speech (as in TV or radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, books, blogs) must not follow the fashion. Otherwise, it is our literary legacy, the very memory of our culture which goes down the drain as we forget how to speak the language of our forebears and otherwise illustrious predecessors.

Written Icelandic language has changed so little that people can still read viking sagas from the 11th century. Does this make Icelanders more archaic? I do not think so.

What can we express today with modern English that Shakespeare could not? What nuances and accuracy of description do we have access to now with modern French that Villon (or even Ovid) did not?

What is at stake is the ability to communicate with the past (a one-way communication, but better than nothing), so that we are not a bunch of oblivious gnus going about our little businesses but we are part of a history. This is what George Orwell so accurately described in 1984: to force oblivion (and to channel thought), Big Brother had invented Newspeak.

Unfortunately, Newspeak is being made right now because we fail to learn and transmit language with all its depth and breadth; while we mine what little is left with bad spelling and bad grammar.

Blame it on the media

Then I point an accusing finger: I say that the collective carelessness of journalists is what causes all the ills of contemporary language and is turning everybody into illiterate savages. I would not have said that a hundred years ago when teachers and priests were the guardians of the country’s language. But now teachers are no match against the big media in terms of authority and broadcasting time; priests are gone; and classics cannot compete with magazines and other hastily-published prose. With their large audience, under-read mainstream journalists distribute bad spelling and grammar, improper words and unhappy neologisms as if it was the Holy Gospel.

There is hardly anyone left in France who knows that ‘après que’ is not followed by subjunctive mood. There is hardly anybody left across the Atlantic who knows what subjunctive mood is.

A digression

What are we to do? We cannot sentence nine in ten journalists to forced (linguistic) labour in Cayenne. We could try to re-educate them, but some might argue that it is too late for that and we cannot change behaviours overnight on such a large scale. Yet, we have seen miracles in the not-so-distant past on other subjects, and I gather we might reproduce such a miracle here.

The miracle I am referring to is what speed cameras did to French driving habits over the past five years. If there is one thing former President Chirac should be hailed for (apart from not going to Irak), it is the drastic reduction of the death toll on French roads. Before 2001, there were 8,000 deaths each year (that’s two and a half 9/11 attacks each year). In 2006, the yearly death toll was below 5,000. Between 2001 and 2007, more than 11,000 people did not die (maybe I am one of them), because the driving habits have adapted to speed cameras. Ruthless repression has succeeded where decades of weak calls to civic behaviour and drivers’ responsibility had miserably failed. End of digression.

The idea: a distributed language stasi

Whenever an official communication channel (TV, radio, newspaper, theater, political speaker, book, magazine, administration, anything that has some authority to the eyes of the public) makes a linguistic mistake, they would be fined for it. In order to avoid the complexity of a big state-run censorship department having to check everything, it would be up to the general public to detect and report mistakes. There would need to be a few experts for litigious mistakes, but I am sure that a wikipedia-like distributed organization of ordinary citizens could do the job quite well. Once a mistake is validated, the orgnization from which the mistake originated is fined (the broadcasting company, or the editor, or the ministry, whomever we can lay our hands on).

The key element in this process is that half the financial benefits from the fines go to the people who reported the mistakes. Citizens therefore act as automatic language cameras.

But it does not stop here. Soon enough, the big media companies will see that they are losing a lot of money. And the amateur censors will gradually make a real living from reporting language sins (by the way, this would give new credits to literary-type skills). I am quite convinced that they can find some sort of understanding, and that the successful censors will be offered official positions as correctors or personal language coaches inside the big companies. In the end, there will be fewer stray mistakes, and language will straighten itself up.

Who wants to sign the petition?

If you want more language ranting, I warmly recommend Tim’s Mother Tongue Annoyances blog

That’s it: Charlotte and healingmagichands have convinced me that I should enlist for NaBloPoMo. However, I am certain it would take too much time if I had to write a deep philosophical post every day. So I will not be doing the daily posting here on Mandarine, but on my other blog, the one with the weird inventions, with which I have had difficulties keeping up recently. In fact, absidea is not really a blog. It is more of an irregular serialized book.

Hence I am not sure which one I should really choose between NaBloPoMo or NaNoWriMo. Anyway, NaBloPoMo it will be; I will be posting the thirty ideas for absidea Season 2 over the thirty days of November.

Then the blog will hibernate until I write Season 3. Well, not entirely. As illustrations take me an awful lot of time, I will skip them for the daily November postings. Then I’ll take the next twelve months to update the articles with the illustrations, bringing each newly illustrated post to the top of the stack in turn.

There it goes. As a teaser, here are a few of the absurd ideas that you’ll be reading about over at absidea in November:

• 03 Nov Space mirrors that look into the past
• 05 Nov The cheese-jet pizza printer
• 11 Nov N-dimensional tic-tac-toe
• 12 Nov Autobuilt underwater coral cities
• 16 Nov Placebotherapy
• 19 Nov A tall fence against global warming
• 24 Nov The co-sleeping hammock

If you are not acquainted with absidea, feel free to try before November.

Introduction

Pencasting: publication of manuscript content to the world-wide-web as scanned images of pen-and-paper text. The practice is not new, but the term was first coined in April 2007 by mandarine in Emily’s blog.

The underlying idea behind pencasting is that it can serve as a very nice complement to blogging, halfway between plain digital text publication and podcasting; halfway in terms of how much of the blogger’s personality is revealed, and halfway in terms of how much bandwidth is needed.

People reasonably comfortable with multimedia publication should have no difficulties inventing their own pencasting process. This tutorial is pencasting for dummies (well, not completely, for if you have a scanner, chances are you have already scanned stuff — if not, play with your scanner first).

Minimum hardware configuration

• a pen and a sheet of paper
• a computer with an internet connection
• a flatbed scanner (or a digital camera)

The tutorial

[more]

I am slowly but steadily becoming addicted to audiobooks. In the meantime, the supply of free, public domain or otherwise copyleft audiobooks is skyrocketing, and this certainly fuels my addiction beyond the reasonable.

In the recent weeks, I have been ‘reading’ (all from www.Librivox.org):

• Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter
• A Tales of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (that one at LoudLit.org)
• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours, by Jules Verne
• A truckload of short stories

As I was lying awake in the dark earlier tonight around midnight, [more]

The name

All right, I know the domain name is pretentious, but let me just give a little background. For this, let me take you back a couple of years ago, when I hardly knew the word ‘blog’. My personal e-mail address has the classical structure first.last@provider.ext. After I sent a birth announcement message to all relatives and friends, I started to get spam mail in my inbox. It was too late when I realized that I should not have used my personal e-mail address for such a broad communication. Now my e-mail was out in the spam world, with my real name in it for everyone to see. I have a very rare name, so if someone looks up my name in Google, all the results are about me: they’ll know what I do and in what city I live, and then if they look up my name in the phone directory, it’ll tell them my personal address.

I do not know about you, [more]