It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.

Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.

Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.

So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).

It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.

So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?

Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.

So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.

You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.

I mean, like, duh.

Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.

My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:

It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.

Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.

Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.

Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.

He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.

There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”

Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.

This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.

Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.

So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”

The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.

There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.

But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”

That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.

A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.

Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:

Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.

We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.

I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.

As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.

In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.

One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). [...] In a depressing twist, these remixes are reportedly disappearing from YouTube, thanks to Constantin Film (the movie’s producer and distributor) and YouTube’s censorship-friendly automated filtering system, Content I.D. Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content — whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use — a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch. It seems that’s exactly what Constantin Film has chosen to do.

Oliver Hirschbiegel, the film’s director, does not condone this. He says, “”Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one. I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director. I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.”

You know who else isn’t happy about it? Hitler.

Someone had to do it, so I did:

For pictures or movies taken on film, it’s called film grain, and it’s determined by the physical structure of the photographic film. On a digital photo, it’s image noise, which is an often random pattern created by the circuitry of the camera’s sensor.

Grain usually has to be very, very extreme for our brains to immediately perceive it; at normal levels, we often don’t even notice it unless we’re looking closely. But our brains are generally quite skilled at perceiving small visual patterns — the pages of a closed book, the bumps of paint on a wall, etc. — so does the average case of grain or noise fail to register? Perhaps it’s because we’ve learned to ignore the noisy, grainy pattern that we’re constantly seeing all the time.

Yes, our eyes have a film grain of their own.

So is this grain caused by a physical texture in our eyes, like film grain, or by something in our circuitry, like image noise? A little of both, in fact.

Like a camera, the human eye has a lens in the front, which collects light and sends it into the photographic medium behind it. In a camera, it’s film or a digital image sensor; in an eye, it’s the retina. However, in between the lens and the retina is squishy gel called “vitreous humour“, and anything inside the vitreous humour gets in the way of the light passing through the eye. The blood vessels in the humour never change position, so our retina learns to disregard them soon after we’re born. However, there are always little bits of material that don’t stay still: floaters. These little deposits of protein and debris don’t stay in one place, so our retinas never figure out how to tune them out.

You’ve probably seen floaters in your eyes before; in most people they look like small, faint dots traveling down your field of vision from top to bottom. You can usually get a good look at them by rolling your eyes all over the place for a second and then staring at one spot for a while.

Floaters are only part of the patterns we see every day, though. The brain’s visual cortex, which interprets the information sent to it by the retina, isn’t 100% accurate. In fact, it’s constantly hallucinating.

Close your eyes, and then gently press on them both with your fists. After a few seconds, you should start to see a strange, kaleidoscopic pattern. This is a geometric visual hallucination, or form constant.

This pattern is generated by your visual cortex as a by-product of all the neural activity going on in and around it. It’s amplified by closing or pressing on your eyes, and even more by taking hallucinogenics (not that I’d know that from experience or anything), but it’s actually present all the time. Again, try staring at one spot for a while. It usually helps to stare at something very low saturation; mostly gray, white, or black. You’ll probably start to see a fainter version of that same geometric pattern you got from pressing on your eyes. If you close your eyes after staring for a while, you’ll still see it.

It’s interesting to know how much our vision has in common with the photos and videos we look at every day. Not only do we capture images the same way as cameras do, but the results are similarly imperfect and grainy.

Creative Commons-licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, modified by me.

WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Here’s why:

Let’s look at what occurs up until that point. Jake has gained the trust of the Na’vi, he and Ney’tiri have fallen in love, and he’s beginning to feel “like out there [in the avatar] is the true world, and in here [in his human body] is the dream.” But there’s nothing he can do to stop the military from coming to blow up the Na’vi’s Hometree. The attack is devastating, and the Na’vi know that Jake was fully aware it was coming. Ney’tiri rejects him, says he will never be one of them. It’s heartbreaking. Tragic. The evil corporation with the big guns killed the innocent natives, destroyed the beautiful forest, and tore Jake away from the woman he loved, all so they could mine a stupid rock.

If the movie ended there, everyone in the audience would leave with one thing on their mind: blood for oil is a horrible thing. Look what it did to the Na’vi. Look what it did to our boy Jake.

But no, the story keeps going. Jake escapes and gets back in his avatar body to find that the Na’vi are still alive and well (albeit badly beaten and grieving for their lost people), and all he needs to do to become “one of them” again is to ride on the back of a really big dragon. He leads them into battle against the humans, and apparently their advanced technology is no match for flying lizards, rhinoceroses, and kitty people with bows and arrows (the same kitty people with the same bows and arrows that didn’t do squat just a few scenes before, but now they’re angry kitty people, so it totally works). In the end, the evil humans are defeated, and the kitty people live happily ever after with Jake among them.

So, what is the audience thinking now? Holy shit, we just saw dragons killing helicopters. That was cool. It was like Reign of Fire, but fucking awesome instead of fucking awful.

Yes, the battle scene was awesome, but what happened to the anti-war, anti-corporate, environmentalist message? Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I guess the whole Iraq thing really does suck. Anyway, remember when that angry cat guy just like jumped onto the ship and shot like seventeen soldiers with his bow? That was fucking sweet!!!!!!

If James Cameron had ended Avatar on a horribly tragic but realistic note, it would have been a bold, ballsy, daring move, and an extremely effective one at that. Most if not all arguments about the story being derivative and cliché would be rendered moot, and its message would pack more of a punch than any recent film of its type in recent memory. It would impress not only with its visual technology, but with its audacious injection of seriousness and maturity into a blockbuster. Here would be a big-budget, spectacular film telling us that a hero cannot save the day; only we, the people, can do so by preventing the horrors just witnessed in glorious 3D from ever occurring in reality. In terms of making pacifists out of us, “war is a drug” has nothing on that.

Alas, dragons killing helicopters is a much more impressive demonstration of glorious 3D technology. It’s not Best Picture material, though.

That is all.

Sources:
» Ticket Price
» Gross

Yeah, I feel your pain, guys. People don’t pay for movies anymore either, and if they did I’d have a clear-cut business plan that anyone could understand, and I’d be rolling in investment money by now and going full speed ahead on a bajillion-dollar live-action-CGI-blend-extravaganza about space pirates or something. But that’s just not the way the world works anymore.

Now, I understand the need for a coping mechanism. Blame the cheap bastards who just want to download all of your hard work that you worked so hard on for weeks and months and years. Maybe they’ve got a point when they say the big record companies shouldn’t keep making money, but you, nooooo, you’re indie! You make less money than a part-time fry cook at McDonald’s, and if people steal from you, then they’re bad, bad people! You deserve to be paid for your hard work!

No you don’t. You’re indulging in your own creative vision; nobody asked you to, and you’re not providing a service to anybody. You are creating all the pretty music in your head because you feel like it, and you are not inherently entitled to anybody’s appreciation and certainly not monetary compensation.

If you’re good, though, and people like your music, then you don’t have to tell them that you deserve to be paid for it, because they know. They’re your fans now, and they’d love to throw money at you.

So, I’m sorry to break it to you, impoverished indie musician, but if you’re not making money from your music, then you’re either not good enough or you haven’t put a god damn PayPal button on your website.

Slash rant.

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.