mandarine

It has been more than a year that I have been devotedly reading Paul Krugman’s columns on the New York Times website. His very intelligent views on the world’s economy make him one of the top figures of my personal pantheon, right next to George Monbiot.

And guess what: he’s just been awarded the Nobel prize for economics. I feel like a one-man Nobel prize jury.

And vade retro Milton Friedman and consorts. High time for a change of spirit.

You all know I am a fan of Librivox, the website and community that publishes free audiobooks recorded by volunteers from public domain books.

Podiobooks.com is another model. On this website, you can download free audiobooks, but these are not in the public domain : they are mostly brand-new (often unpublished) stories read by their authors to get exposure while struggling to get the book published.

For my first step into podiobooks, I was lucky and selected the novel ‘Clear Heart‘, by carpenter/writer Joe Cottonwood. The story is a wide human saga woven around the construction of a bilionnaire’s ‘perfect house’ in the Silicon Valley, and the life of Wally, the widowed contractor on the brink of retirement. The reading is perfect, the story is gripping, the construction backdrop is something new and worth discovering, and the characters are very very … endearing. I could not say about language skills, but as far as narration and humour are concerned, the book reminded me of a blend of P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain.

In the three weeks it took me to listen to the whole novel, I think I have smiled more while riding to work than in the three years before that.

Apparently, the book will soon be available in print. I will definitely order it. Hope it comes with a CD with the audiobook version: the voices were so great…

We left in a hurry in the middle of the night, leaving boy #1 to his auntie. Boy #2 was born this morning at 5 UTC, three weeks ahead of estimated schedule. That was fortunate, because he was already a fat little pink Yoda (3.5 kg / 7.7 lbs). We are very happy of having chosen this (one-hour-drive away) smalltown hospital, as it was renowned for its high ‘natural’ birth rate (and breastfeeding-friendly practices). My beautiful wife made it without any sort of chemicals, a thing she had dreamed of, but had never imagined she was actually capable of.

All congratulations to be forwarded to Mrs Mandarine and the little pink one, room #3. Sorry I was late with the pictures…

To the day.

As with whiskey, balsamic vinegar or Bordeaux, 12 years is probably how long it takes to reveal the full palette of flavours and the heart of the aroma (especially considering we were only 22 on October 5th, 1996).

Although on the economic front, ’slowdown’ sounds inappropriately shy to describe what is soon becoming a great depression, it is the right word on the blogging front. I have long hesitated to write about it here, probably because I still have not made up my mind about how personal I want this blog to be. But I figure I owe that much to all my blogging friends who seldom fail to mention a word or two about what is happening in their lives, especially when it keeps them away from the keyboard.

It’s not blog burnout, it’s not boredom or weariness. I simply have been busy.

• Busy at work because I have been working on two tenders, three patents, and a spacecraft dynamics course for internal training which is turning into a testament



• Busy in the garden and the kitchen because you may have a no-work garden for pretty much of the growing season, the tomatoes still won’t pick themselves (you can read about the garden there)



• Busy at home because I am stepping in to replace my terminally pregnant wife with her computer home help business (logo by yours truly below) in my spare time and days off



• Busy in the house because we still have to build a bedroom for kid #1 so that he can leave his bedroom staircase landing to kid #2 when kid #2 leaves our bedroom (that would be before next summer)
• And busy mentally because there maybe new opportunities job-wise (but shhush..)

This slowdown will probably last another fortnight, but after the birth I will be on leave for at least a month, leaving enough time to resume the weekly posting rhythm.

The problem: racing thoughts

I have always had a little difficulty to fall asleep at night, especially during exciting or otherwise eventful periods of my life. My head remains on problem-solving overdrive and keeps juggling frantically with ideas, hopes, fears and I can find no ’standby’ button to calm things down for the night. Then I have to wait for sleep to stifle this dance, like a slow rising tide of foam in a giant foam party, and this can take between half an hour to two hours.

Up until a few years ago, it would be fine as it only happened once each night, when I went to bed. But as I get older, any time I wake up in the middle of the night, the hubbub of thoughts awakens too, with less and less slumber power to fight it with.

It probably does not qualify medically as acute insomnia, but believe me that when I am awaken several times each night by a newborn baby (this is going to happen again soon), by a son with whooping cough, by a cat demanding that the door be opened, by a snoring wife, or by a bad dream, and I toss and turn for one hour each time, this begins to eat away the hours of sleep. The next day, I find myself craving for an afternoon nap just like true insomniacs.

The clue: books

However, there is one thing that can slow down the mental race and make me fall asleep in an instant: books. Not every kind of book. Thrillers and detective stories generally keep me awake. But a good old Victorian novel, a slow paced chapter of Proust, or any nonfiction work has a huge doze-off power. By forcing my mind to focus, these books keep my ideas tame, leaving the dance floor open for a fast sleep invasion.

This is great, but if I fall asleep with a book on my lap and the light on, I am bound to wake up soon. And if I close my book, rearrange the pillows and switch the light off before I am fully asleep, there is a 50% chance that my head has the time to revert to overdrive mode before I am properly set for sleep.

The solution: an ipod and audio-books

I found the solution when I started listening to audio books. It was a chance discovery: I was trying to listen to ‘Treasure Island‘ by R. L. Stevenson, and thought it a good idea to listen to it in bed before going to sleep just like I would with a real book. After one week, I had still not been able to go beyond the first chapter, as I would always fall asleep within the first five minutes.

This was it: this was the solution to my insomnia issues, and it has been how I have kept insomnia at bay for the past two years.

I have identified the following pattern: the first time, the text is new, and the interest of novelty delays sleep for a couple of minutes. Yet I fall asleep within ten minutes generally. Next time I listen to the same chapter, the novelty wears off, but I can still focus. This makes for the fastest sleep effect - less than five minutes. Then after twenty or fifty times, I know the first five minutes by heart, and I have to wait for five minutes of new text before I fall asleep.

One 15′ short story by Maupassant lasted almost one year before its sleep-inducing power became insufficient.

The technical requirements

• I choose an audio-book which is interesting enough to keep me focused. Dull stories may allow my mind to wander away, so that the soundtrack only adds to the cacophony of ideas. The same goes with music, by the way. I have seldom found music that would be captivating enough to prevent my mind from escaping to the circus of ideas.
• I choose a narrator with a soft voice, and a narrow dynamic range: I do not want to have to turn the volume up to listen to whispered lines and then be woken up by sudden roaring as the narrator experiments with pirate voices in a dialog. Note that this requirement is also valid for any sort of outdoor listening (car, airplane, bicycle,…)
• I set the volume as low as possible. The objective is to be able to hear everything to stay focused on the story, but not be disturbed after I fall asleep.
• I use an MP3 player with the best autonomy (and a rechargeable battery). Although I do not recommend it for those who are (like me) suspicious of proprietary formats and windows-only sluggish and buggy proprietary syncing software, my Sony NW-E405 MP3 player has a breathtaking autonomy of 50 hours.
• I use comfortable earphones. As I like to sleep on my side, I often have only one earbud on, and the other one under the pillow. The earphones have to have sturdy cords and connections too, as there can be a lot of wear and tear. The ones which last longest are not necessarily expensive: I have had my little 6€ Philips earphones for three months now, and both ears are still functional (whereas I have had 20€ earphones go kaputt in both ears after less than a month).
• Unless you have an MP3 player which is capable of playing only the specified track and then stop, you want to upload only one or two tracks to the player at a time. Otherwise, you’ll be draining the battery each night as the novel keeps playing to the end, and you’ll probably be woken up at some point. With only one or two tracks in the novel, I can ask the MP3 player to play only the album corresponding to the novel, and the reading will stop (hopefully when I am already asleep).
• An important detail: you probably want to choose an MP3 player which can fast-forward fast (this can only be tested by trying, as it is not often mentioned in the specs). This allows you to skip the first five or ten minutes of a given chapter once you know those minutes really by heart. In this respect, my Sony is appalling: the maximum fast-forward ratio is limited to 2x or 3x, so that I get cramps in the fingers before I can get to the point I want. This feature is very important if you intend you use the same player for listening to podcasts or audio-books in your waking hours: audio-book or podcast tracks can be one-hour long. No way I am going to keep the fast-forward button pressed for fifteen whole minutes just to get to the part I want.

There you go: my very efficientest way of falling asleep or going back to sleep within ten minutes. 90% efficient (for me at least, which is what matters most to, well, me). And not addictive. When I do not have my MP3 player or the battery is empty, I just revert to ordinary sleep patterns (and I use earplugs as a compensation).

Where to find audio-books

For an unlimited supply of free ammo, go to LibriVox.

Because I am jealous of HealingMagicHands’s giant tomatoes, I wish to show off my version.

Those were eaten 20m from where they grew. The taste was fabulous (all the more so as I knew I had sown and planted them myself).

Gift economy and intellectual production

I have already said that the commercial model is not the right tool for the promotion and the exchange of ideas. When the cost of replicating something is close to zero, applying a model that was invented to deal with scarcity is just nonsensical. Yet, it is what the French representatives are trying to do right now, by legislating clumsily against illegal downloading, motivated by music labels lobbying, and handicapped by an obvious ignorance of how the internet works.

I claim that piracy is not the same thing as theft: when one downloads songs or software, one does not deprive the author of his work. Yet the legislators are trying to make it sound as theft, although we are already paying a tax on all data recording materials (CDs, DVDs, hard drives) as a compensation to the music industry.

In my ideal music world, all music would be self-produced and self-distributed on the web, and artists would be paid either by subscriptions and donations like Radiohead, and/or by selling concert tickets. The web would contribute to their fame, so that I would know and love them when they come on tour near where I live. Probably fewer musicians would become millionaires. Bummer. But I think there are not many musicians who choose music as a way to make money. Behind every artist is a giver. Artists want to give and share pleasure with people. All we need to do to make sure they keep on giving, is to keep them alive (and happy). And I had much rather donate to my favorite artists than buy from their music labels.

Linux and Google

There are two flourishing gift economy examples on the web right now that I want to write about. One is Linux, the other is Google. The motivations are different, but the benefits to the world are huge.

Linux is pure gift: not only can everybody have a free better-than-commercial-grade operating system, but no contributors to Linux can ever get it back and claim it’s theirs. In order to promote the idea of freedom, the licenses behind Linux are made so that nobody can confiscate the code. You can sell a bit of open-source code, but you have to leave it open. Essentially, this tends to force the selling price of any generic code to zero, while still allowing premium charging for specific code (e.g. I want Linux integrated with my business’s accounting system) and consulting support. Because it’s free, it does not show in terms of GDP. But the value Linux brings to the world economy is considerable. The simplest estimate would be Linux market share (10%) x Microsoft revenue (60 bn $), and you have a 6 billion dollar industry powered by pure gift.

Google have understood this, but they want a more tangible share of the benefits, therefore they have a more cunning business model than pure gift. They distribute things for free, but they still like to hold the keys. Then they can leverage the power they have over those keys, in addition to selling ads (which unfortunately I see as official spam).

Google Sketchup

Now a personal example. I stumbled upon a Google tool named Sketchup. It makes 3D drawing as easy as 1-2-3. With its quality, it is on par with 500$ tools for the general public, or 5000$ tools if we consider professional tools (e.g. architecture & construction). And it is distributed for free. It is not open-source, Google can decide one day that version n+1 will be charged 100$, but right now, it is a gift to the world, and more specifically a gift to me.

Some years ago, I had practiced with illegal copies of professional 3D software (3D studio MAX), but had failed to keep up with new versions. Over the past few months, I had been hovering around blender and K3D, two great free and open-source tools, but I found them too complex for what I needed. I do not need to produce a CG animation movie. All I want is sketch my projects in 3D for the next stretch of renovation in my house, and it should not take me longer than sketching them on paper.

And then comes Sketchup. The underlying paradigm is revolutionary, and the upfront personal investment is extremely light. There is also a really fine feature, generally available only with top-notch commercial tools: non-photorealistic rendering. It make 3D look like handmade sketches. Way nicer than pure 3D, which feels bland unless adorned with hi-res textures.

If Google had distributed their tool for 100$ it would still have been extremely cheap for what it can do (and probably considered as dumping by the competition). But I would not have bought it. Not even at 10$. Probably because I would never have known it; and even if I’d known it, and they offered free demo versions, I would not have tried, because 3D sketching was really so unimportant in my hierarchy of things that I would not have bothered. So would everyone else.

But because it was free, I was just one click on a download button away from trying it and loving it. After two hours of toying with the Sketchup toolbar, I could draw a satellite. The next day, I drew my project of composting toilet. Google do not know it, but their contribution to my composting toilet was crucial. I avoided probably four mistakes in the overall design. I found three good ideas. I now have all the dimensions of all the parts I have to make and/or order. And I have a great 3D blueprint that I can share with everybody else on Earth, because I know they can have Sketchup for free.

This example shows how this gift has cascaded into a series of benefits, first for me, and then maybe for the whole world if my initiative contributes to the publicity of composting toilets (I believe composting toilets are the future of sanitation and therefore human health, especially for dry, poor countries). The immediate benefit to Google is that I will obviously contribute my models back to their Sketchup 3D warehouse, so that all architects who want to put a composting toilet (or a spacecraft) in a project will save a couple hour’s work, then they will love Sketchup, then they will buy Sketchup pro, because they know how cool the free version is, and they’ll trust that the pro features are worth the few extra bucks.

So despite the ads, hurray for Sketchup and Google! I doubt that those guys are giving things just for the pleasure of giving. But I do wish more people did as they do.

Last minute: Google chrome

Google have just released a brand new web browser. Apparently, it is full of high quality innovations in terms of software innards (pretend to be a geek and read the comic-book release notes). As always, it is free, but it is now even open-source. We can understand what they gain in the bargain: by releasing top-quality tools as open-source code, they are encouraging everyone to adopt their choices as future web standards. Cunning.

Still, this is a fabulous gift. Again.

When I was a kid, my brother, after perusing too many history books, used to speculate about which period and place he would have preferred to live in if he had had a choice. Depending on his mood, he would choose the Roman empire, New Zealand before the arrival of European settlers, Victorian England, etc. Sometimes, he would inquire what my choice would be. My answer was always ‘here and now’. Maybe I lack imagination. Or somehow I felt that life had never been so fine, at least around here. Food, health, democracy, justice, knowledge, comfort, leisure: it was impossible to find a time in history when even the most powerful emperor could have had such an easy life as that we were having.

Now that I am gradually changing my lifestyle and my project of life, I sometimes play the same sort of game and wonder if such a change could have been easier before, for instance in the late sixties. And the answer is no.

It has never been so easy to change one’s life, because the surrounding mentalities have probably never been so open. Nobody is going to come and lynch me because I dress differently, or because I worship another God, or because I am eating less meat, or because I ride a bicycle, or because I have unclassifiable economic activities, or because I take a nap on weekdays. I cannot imagine how a black, lesbian, hippie, unemployed, communist single mother could have managed back in the seventies. I am almost sure she could come to my village now, and at least half the people would stand up for her if she came into trouble with the closeder-minded minority. This trend is the delayed effect of the big mentality change of the sixties and seventies - human rights, civil rights, women rights, sexual freedom, freedom of speech - now getting new momentum from environmental concerns.

However, there is a strong opposing trend: the buildup of conservative ideas, probably associated to a wealthy and aging dominant culture. People who see terrorism as a greater threat than global warming; people who believe one molested old lady or one abused child is a motive for putting surveillance cameras everywhere and everybody’s life into electronic databanks, while cutting on education spending because we need to reduce taxes; people who say we have to work more and earn less because this is globalization, idiot.

So my take is that now is the best of times to choose to do something different, to choose an uncommon lifestyle, or even to go against mainstream cultural habits (before it’s too late). Maybe not for artists or intellectuals - the golden age of total freedom was probably twenty years ago for them. But for ordinary people, now is probably the right time.

In fact, even if we feel there are still too many shackles in our lives, I guess the word ‘freedom’ in the declaration of human rights and our (French) constitution has probably never been so meaningful than here and now. I can travel, I can work or not work, I can live with whomever I want, I can say whatever I think and read whatever I like, I can vote or even run for President, I can get a divorce, I can make friends with whomever I choose, I can go out after hours, etc. So many things I can do that were impossible a hundred years or even fifty years ago.

Conversely, there are few things I have to do. In fact, contrary to what some people will say, today’s western lifestyle is not only negotiable, but mostly optional: I do not have to watch TV; I do not have to buy stuff in a supermarket; I do not have to own a car; I do not have to have a full-time job; I do not have to have a large house with central air, three bedrooms, a living-room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a garage; I do not need a lawn or a swimming pool; I do not even have to have a phone or a computer or the internet.

Once I decide I can let go of some of these (maybe I’ll keep my internet connection, though…), then comes a breath of fresh freedom that makes everything possible.

Introduction

Intellectual property rights in general and patents in particular are monopoly rights under a disguise. For the sake of encouraging innovation and the communication of ideas, society grants exclusive exploitation rights to the company or individual holding the patent, therefore making patents a very effective way for big business to circumvent anti-monopoly legislation.

The justification for inventing the concept of patents in the first place was this one: we wanted to support innovation, so we wanted to reward inventors, and for this we accepted a temporary monopoly in return for sharing the idea (when a patent is filed, the idea is published) and for giving it away (after a 20-year period, the idea goes into the public domain). Obviously, this scheme is more beneficial for society than an absence of protection, which would result in either discouraging inventors, or at least in making inventors keep most inventions secret. When the inventor dies, the idea is lost.

Essentially, it is the general public, or more specifically the customer, who pays for the idea: because of the exclusive exploitation rights granted to the holder of the patent, the product is sold with a higher commercial margin. The good side for the customer is that he/she only has to pay for successful ideas. The ideas which do not make it into a successful product will not generate revenue for the inventors: it is as if these unsuccessful ideas had been ‘given away’ with simply a 20-year delay.

Monopoly is not the only solution

But granting monopoly rights over an idea is not the only way we could encourage ideas. There are at least two other ways.

The first alternative is public research. We do not call them inventors, but I am certain that publicly-funded research scientists are contributing far more efficiently to the world of ideas and innovation than corporations. As soon as they are published, new scientific discoveries enrich the public domain, and they often lead to successful commercial applications from companies who file patents based on industrial applications of free, public-domain ideas.

The second alternative is preemption: society (represented by a government, a patent office, an association, etc.) could buy an idea upfront when the applicant files for a patent. The deal could be the following: how much do you want society to give you (the inventor) in exchange for giving the idea away? This is exactly what big corporations do when they buy patents from private inventors or small businesses. The main difference is that society, now holder of the patent, would choose to give away the idea. The net result is that the inventor has received the same reward, but the general public gets the benefit of the idea for a fraction of the price.

Free ideas have more value than commercial ones

You could argue that 20 years is not long when we consider really really good ideas like the wheel, the bicycle or semiconductors. So why I am so keen on seeing innovation make its way into the public domain as fast as possible?

The first reason is that there is a very stiff threshold effect between something free and something we have to pay for. If I tell you I have an idea which might make your day or even make you rich, but that you have to pay me 10$ first, you would certainly decline the offer. And even if I told you the idea first, and then told you you had to pay 10$ to use it, you would probably decide to try to find another way of doing the same thing rather than pay me the 10$, even though the extra effort you put into it would probably greatly exceed the 10$ mark. Maybe if I had asked you only 1$ or 1c, you would not have been so strong-headed. But if I had given the idea for free, then I am quite sure you would have taken it at once. Or even better: you would have improved on it and probably shared your new idea for free.

This leads to the second reason why I think ideas should all be free: many ideas are just marginally good ideas until they meet a host of other ideas and they can make a fantastic whole. To make a good bicycle, you need the wheel, you need cable spokes, tires, sprockets, ball bearings, a fork with trail, a diamond frame, hollow tubes, welding, light alloys, pedals, cranks, gears, a drive-chain, a derailleur. Each of these is a patentable idea in itself. Imagine you wanted to invent the bicycle and had to pay for all of these but did not know whether you’d sell three or ten, or maybe a hundred bicycles (how could you predict it was going to be the single greatest revolution in human transportation after the wheel?), you would have been stuck.

Ideas have to circulate, they have to meet, exchange, improve each other, talk together, fight. The more barriers between them, the harder it is for them to grow into really great improvements.

Legal costs of enforcing a stupid system

Now imagine I had told you a really good idea for making butter, and then asked 10$ in case you wanted to use the process. You could very well say no thanks and use the idea nonetheless, as no-one would know how you make your butter. Once disclosed, ideas can never be taken back. Therefore it takes a lot of effort to consider ideas like solid objects that can be traded, sold, and taken back.

It is a bit like giving you a chair for free, allowing you to take it home, but asking you 10$ for each time you actually sat on it. I would have to plant cameras in your home (or a pressure detector in the chair) to know whether you were using the chair or not. But that would be a violation of privacy, so I would need to go to the courts and get a legal action started if I wanted to go that way.

Ideas are not solid objects that we can apply the standard commercial business model to. Just like digital music, when one wants to go against the laws of physics (I cannot prevent you from copying a file when I want you to be able to download it for listening, and I cannot physically take back an idea I have disclosed), one has to spend considerable effort on legal aspects. And each time, there is no benefit for society, only lawyers get richer.

A few examples of the costs related to forcing ideas into an inadequate model:

• because patents are a property right, the text must be absolutely unambiguous and must follow a very strict pattern, by law. When I could simply publish my idea in a few lines so that my colleagues and competitors worldwide would understand what it is, I have to spend ten times the effort and force the idea into a very awkward mold of matryoshka-doll-like claims, with very awkward language so I leave as few cracks as possible for the competition to break it or find a workaround.
• because patents are a monopoly right, they are a key element in failing to find commercial agreements. The question of what party will become proprietor of whatever innovations result from a given joint project is so important that we are seeing more and more projects delayed or even dropped because both parties could not find an agreement over the corresponding contract clauses. Instead of encouraging innovation, patent laws are in fact holding collaboration back. When you know how much collaboration can boost innovation, you understand that intellectual property becomes clearly counter-productive in those cases.
• because ideas should never be disclosed outside of the patenting process (otherwise the patent is not valid) and because the patenting process is so long (up to several years), we are stuck in the development of a great new idea: we need external funding to proceed, but we can hardly communicate what it is we want funding for. And even if we can communicate, we are asking funding while telling at the same time that we will have exclusivity. I do not know many customers who would love such a bargain.
• legal battles over a patent result in so much legal costs that any commercial profits from the exploitation of the patent would be nulled. Big corporations know it. This is why they favor quantity over quality: nobody will dare to question the validity of 1000 patents. Between them, big corporations merely count patents and mutual patent violations, and they generally do not go to full-fledged legal action. But against smaller businesses, they do not hesitate to unleash the steam-roller.

Costs of monopoly

As mentioned above, legal costs are so high that nobody really dares to question patents. Therefore, big corporations with a lot of cash, a large patent portfolio, and an intimidating team of IPR lawyers can essentially claim monopoly over almost anything and kill off weaker competitors by simply raising the fist of their intellectual property rights.

As they get more powerful and richer, they start intense lobbying in favour of extending intellectual property rights:

• in scope (patenting living things, patenting exotic medicinal plants that aboriginal healers have always used but never published about, patenting genome,…)
• in time (there is intense lobbying from big pharmaceutical firms to extend patent monopoly from twenty years to fifty or seventy years, with the justification of long time-to-market for new molecules)

As they can keep their monopoly only by renewing their patent portfolio, they start a runaway race for innovation. Innovation for the sake of monopoly, not for the sake of any true advantage to the general public. And to make sure the general public runs along, they start spending the monopoly money on advertising. By endlessly fueling our frustration and making stuff with the new patented gizmo appear so much more desirable than the stuff we just bought, advertising contributes to the general dissatisfaction while it feeds landfills. Therefore, not only do we have to pay more for some innovation because it is patented, but as it is an innovation we do not really need, we pay even more for the advertising which frustrates us into buying it; and a little extra for resource depletion and pollution.

Just give

We should just give our ideas away. After all, an idea is the least costly and the most valuable gift.

I will write soon why I even think there is a business model for open-source industrial innovation just like there is one for open-source software. Stay tuned.