Felix has posted an interesting review of the recent Economies of the Commons Conference over on the nettime mailing list. He picks up a remark that i made during the ‘Sustainable Images of the Future panel’ on friday night:

The most poignant moment came when Edwin van Huis (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) recounted a discussion with a broadcaster about whether the institute could put online some TV segment that was already on Youtube. The answer was: No! When he asked the broadcaster how he felt about his content being on Youtube the answer was: ‘You can’t do anything against Google’. Thus, as Paul Keller remarked, there is a perverse situation that the official repositories of culture are going to be stuck with stuff that either they cannot make accessible, or nobody cares about. All the rest will be better accessible via Youtube or piratebay.

In short, it became abundantly clear that, no matter how much money you have, the attempt to solve all the legal issues first and only then start to release the material is doomed to failure. Digitization plus strict adherence to the law will not create digital archives but copyright dungeons.

Most of the successful, innovative projects, it turns out, are operating in zones of varying degrees of grey. In the American example, Youtube, the grey zone is protected by corporate might (Google). In the European example, piratebay, the grey zone is sustained by mass civil disobedience.

You can read his full post in the nettime archive or on the knowledgeland blog, where i have reposted it with some additional thoughts of mine.

There is an intriguing article about the insane noise levels in the city of Cairo on the NYT website (‘A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream‘). makes me at the same time want to go to Cairo and worry about Nat who recently moved there for a year:

“The noise bothers me and I know it bothers people,” said Abdel Khaleq, driver of a battered black and white taxi, as he paused from honking his horn to stop for passengers. “So why do you do it?” he was asked. “Well, to tell you I’m here,” he said. “There is no such thing as logic in this country.” And then he drove off, honking. […]

“We like to live our life with people around us “there is no privacy,” said Ahmed El-Kholei, a professor of urban planning at Monufiya University in the Nile Delta north of the city. “This is not a bad thing in itself, but the way it is expressed is wrong. Before, when someone held a funeral, the neighbors would postpone a wedding out of consideration. Today, you see the funeral and the wedding all howling in the microphones at the same time.” […]

“Life is like this,” said Ahmed Muhammad, 23, who makes his living delivering metal tanks of propane to homes. He hangs four tanks off the back of a rusted bicycle, then rides with one hand on the handlebars, the other slamming a wrench into one of the tanks to announce his arrival to the neighborhood. “Making money is like this,” he said. “What am I going to do? This is how it is.”

NYT via BLDGblog

Came across this tiny dog in a faux-gold and transparent plastic bag in the cafe of de Balie in amsterdam yesterday. Makes me wonder if they sell them in animal or in hand bag shops.

So one of the worst things about living in the Netherlands has been that there has been no proper supply with Gold Bears (Gummibärchen) which did reduce my quality of life quite substantially. The only way they have been selling Harbio Gummibärchen has been in those ridiculous 300g bags that contain 30 or so 10g bags that contain macrobiotic quantities of tiny gold bears [the other option was to buy properly sized gold bears from one of the kosher shops in Buitenveldert, that import them from the US but they charge you €4 per bag the last time i checked…].

Now this morning i cycled past this advertisement which reads ‘now also BIG Gold Bears’. Never been this happy about an advertisement…

Found this picture a while back on some russian design website but lost the url so i can’t link to it. these seem to be japanese tetra pack containers for banana juice. extremely beautiful/sweet if you ask me (not sure if they are for real or just a concept).

Update [11-05-08]:Apparently they are by product designer Naoto Fukasawa

So the big non-news of last week has been the release of the long anticipated ‘anti-islam’ movie ‘fitna‘ by the dutch clown/politican Geert Wilders. not only was he too stupid to release the movie via bittorrent (which would have scaled with demand much better & allowed for better quality) he also actually confirmed what i had always assumed, namely that he is too stupid to make a proper film: ‘fitna’ is not much more than an amateurish powerpoint show that shows that wilders has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

So while the media (in holland) were wasting their time and energy on the the release of ‘fitna’ and were desperately trying to find someone on the streets who would talk about some kind of violent uprising there were actually two much more interesting developments at the intersection of film and islam last week:

First the Lebanese general security department reversed a decision to ban screenings of the prize-winning animated film Persepolis in Lebanon. This move came after an initial decision to ban the film for being offensive to islam and offensive towards Iran (Iran is the backer of the influential lebanese Hezbollah party). Needless to say this move will have multiplied interest by the moviegoing public in Persepolis (which, regardless of repeated attempts i still have not seen).

Secondly i came across (via boingboing) this marvelous video snippet from some Iraqi TV channel wherein a distinguished gentlemen (identified as Fadhel Al-Said, a ‘researcher on astronomy’) eloquently explains why the earth is flat and the sun is circling around the earth. enjoy… (made possible by the ever productive propaganda translators at memritv.org)

Update [05 Apr 08]: Jim has an article in the daily star that attempts to unravel ‘Fitna’ from the Lebanese perspective: The barbarian horde of Geert Wilders’ ambition.

Although i have a well documented faible for CFLs and i maintain a growing collection of CFL pictures in one of my flickr sets, all the photos i have taken so far originate from the middle east (the CFLs usually found in the west are pretty uninspiring). Fortunately a young entrepreneur (who is otherwise in the fairly stupid business of selling old style telephone handsets for mobile phones) has come to the rescue and created the PLUMEN, a low-energy light bulb prototype with a twist:

Some people find them unpleasant, but low-energy lightbulbs are a necessary innovation. Their presence in our lives explain the PLUMEN’s designers, “should be seen as an advantage to be celebrated by drawing, sculpturing, or scrawling in the air with light. The bulbs should not be viewed as an afterthought but instead as a centerpiece. then people might begin to buy these bulbs through genuine desire rather than mere moral obligation.”

Not sure if i buy this tear-jerk bullshit about genuine desire to buy a lightbulb, but at least this prototype has managed to get into the New York MOMA where the PLUMEN is currently on display at the ‘Design And The Elastic Mind‘ exhibition (extremely annoying flash site, that takes forever to load!).

Personally i think that cheap chinese flower shaped CFLs look much better…

Just back from a week in New York (taking benefit of the favorable dollar to euro exchange rate) which was amazing in a number of ways. One of the more interesting culinary discoveries was the Sichuan hot-pot. If you like honest spicy food than you should try one if you have the chance. It consists of a simmering metal pot of stock made from Sichuan Pepper (also known as ‘flower pepper’) that is placed at the center of the table. The broth is so spicy that the Chinese seem to refer to it as ‘Ma La‘ (‘numb and spicy’).

The hot-pot is used to cook vegetables, thinly sliced meats and seafood at the table (pretty much like fondue) which are then dipped in a dipping sauce (try the extra spicy dipping sauce for extra effect!) and eaten. Takes a while to get used to but then it is delicious!

Apparently the best hot-pot in NYC is served at Grand Sichuan, a tiny little storefront restaurant on 125 Canal Street opposite of the Manhattan bridge on-ramp (at the intersection of Bowery and Canal street)…

CCTV Birdbox – designed by Céine Shenton ‘Big bird is watching you’ is a birdbox that looks like a CCTV camera. It works just like a dummy camera, but on closer inspection, it offers a great refuge for birds in need of a new home. Inside the box is a little camera that films the activities in the nest, so that avid nature watchers can watch the flighty comings and goings.

The CCTV Birdbox it is a competition entry, vote for it here

update [25 May 08]: not as nice as the brid house ones but also quite lovable: CCTV cameras as mirrors.

Was in brussels for a 3 days earlier this week (some pictures here). As i have pointed out before Brussels is one of the my favorite cities in europe. Not only because i really like the roughness of the place, but also because seemingly endless imagination of the eurocrats that are based there!

On the train back to amsterdam Joeri pointed me to the foreword to the Communication from the European Commission to the spring European Council which was written by José Manuel Barroso. In this essay (titled ‘Keeping up the pace of change‘) Baroso suggest introducing a 5th fundamental freedom¹:

We have to build on this momentum and agree on a focusssed list of ambitious actions. Here are a few examples of what we need to do together:

[…] give europe a new “fifth freedom”, the free movement of knowledge to allow europe to Capitalize on its creative potential […]

Brilliant idea! (although it feels a bit as if Barrso is getting his ideas from what we have been saying for a while: see for example here or here) Now we just have to hope that they do not fuck up the free movement of knowledge in the same way they fucked up the free movement of people (by making it a freedom that can only be enjoyed on the inside of Europe).