People who know me are often amazed at my lack of interest on sports, specially during the Olympics. The question of “why” does arise occasionally, although not as often as you'd think. So I figured, hmm, that's a reasonable topic for a blog post.

First, I don't like competitive sports.

The idea of physical activity for fun or pleasure, I can relate to. You feel exhilarated when you bike, hike, or row up a hill? Good for you.

And the concept of wanting to “improve” your body, stretch your limits, is to be commended. I think.

But competing for the feeling that you're “better” than your (often arbitrary) “adversary”, on account of some extremely abstract, and usually completely pointless accomplishment, like running a ball through a loop? That's just ridiculous. It's understandable, since it appeals to many of our baser instincts, but it's not the kind of behaviour I'd encourage.

In fact, maybe that's the point: encouraging. Many sports activities — in fact, generally the most popular ones — are really updated excuses to engage in many kinds of behaviour we really, really should be working harder on leaving behind. I'd even go so far as saying, in my opinion, the love for sports in our modern culture is one of the (admittedly many) roots of the predatory, every-man-for-himself mentality which is perhaps the greatest obstacle to our evolution into a fairer and, well, more reasonable society.

And there you go, we segue nicely into the Olympics. The whole thing is, as I see it, hugely hypocritical. Its proponents, like many supporters of sports all over the world, try to pass it as a symbol of union and brotherhood; but at the bottom line, it's all about “my” country getting more medals than yours. It's not only a barbaric competitive tribal war, it's also a reinforcement of nationalism, which is another thing we're overdue getting rid of.

Feel free, if you want, to invite me for a hike, or biking, golfing, or even, if I'm in the right mood, a baseball game. But please, please, don't invite me to watch sports; while I understand and share the pleasure of doing it, I really see no point in watching it. And above all, don't ask me about the Olympics, unless you really want to hear how strongly I don't care.

Billy has a broken car. It's broken mostly because he doesn't know how to run it, of course; and more importantly, because it's making Billy rivers of money even though it's broken, so there's no incentive to learn to run it right.

Then Jerry drives by with an incredibly shaggy, shitty car, with a few nice accessories.

Billy immediately thinks: I'll buy Jerry's car, and use the parts to make mine less broken!

Of course, Billy still not knowing what to do with a car, it will remain broken, or best case, be fixed for a short time before he breaks it again. And it will still be hugely profitable. So to be honest, I see nothing wrong with Billy's logic.

Yeah, there's a reasonable chance it will make zero difference to Billy's car in the long run. But it will make people talk about Billy even more, which of course, puts more money on his pocket. Maybe even more than he's offering.

Here's an excellent post on the Python newsgroup, which I think anyone still not convinced that copyrights as they currently exist are evil should reflect on. Of course, this blog posting is a copyright violation, as I didn't ask the author (Steven D'Aprano) for permission to blog it. ;-)

He says (everything from here on):

> I'm glad it doesn't work that way here in the US.  Over here, something
> is copyrighted as soon as it's written (actually I think the phrase is
> "fixed in a medium" or something like that).

I'm not glad at all. The Change from an "everything is uncopyrighted unless explicitly copyrighted" model to a "everything is copyrighted unless explicitly exempted" model was only one of many deleterious changes to copyright law over the last half century or so.

It means the merest throw-away scribble on a napkin has equal protection to the opus an author slaved over for thirty years (although in fairness you are unlikely to win a copyright case over the words "Meet me at the bar" scribbled on a napkin then tossed in a rubbish bin... wink). It means that there is a serious problem of "orphan works", where rare and valuable films from the 1920s and earlier are rapidly decaying into an unusable powder because nobody dares copy them lest the unknown copyright owners descend like vultures and sue you for copyright infringement after you've done the hard work of restoring our cultural heritage.

(Although the orphan works problem is at least equally as much a problem of excessively long copyrights as it is to do with automatic copyright.)

I dare say that European countries which have had automatic copyright longer than the US have seen far more of their national heritage (early film, photographs and the like) rot away.

Discussions of copyright so often focus on protecting the author's privileges and ignore the opportunity costs of locking up works. When works needed to be explicitly copyrighted, something of the order of just ONE PERCENT of authors bothered to copyright their published works -- and just one percent of them bothered to renew it for a second 14 year term. That gives you an idea of how valuable copyright really is. For every Mickey Mouse, there are 100,000 or more works that don't have enough economic value to the creator to bother protecting -- but they're part of our cultural heritage, and maybe somebody else could build on top of it, like Disney built their empire on other folks' uncopyrighted stories and ideas. Even Mickey Mouse himself got his start in a derivative work of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.

This newsgroup is a perfect example of the fraud that is the idea of copyright. Every single post sent to the newsgroup is copyrighted, and yet they invariable have no economic value to the author. If they have any economic value, it is to the readers -- but they don't pay for it, and we authors don't ask for payment. In principle, anyone who forwards on something they read here, or uses a code snippet in their own work, is infringing copyright. We don't need copyright to encourage us to create works of this nature, and in fact this newsgroup can only exist by pretending copyright doesn't exist -- there are informal conventions that unless somebody explicitly states otherwise, any reader can forward on posts, copy and reuse code, and so forth.

(Disclaimer: for the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not suggesting that ALL creative works should be uncopyrighted, or that no creative works benefit from the encouragement of copyright.)

May just sent me a really nice article about “nerds”. After reading, I concluded I'm a “meta nerd”; I'm such a sad case that nerds would probably react to me the way “norms” react to nerds.

Let's take a look at it:

Spam is so useful! I keep being surprised every time I clean my spam box!

See; this MegaDik thing supposedly will add 4 inches to my length down there. Did you buy yours yet? All my 7 girlfriends have been complaining I need another 2 inches. Well, I'll get 4 and they'll be happy!

Of course, I can only have the energy to have sex with so many girls because I always buy ciallis from this other nice guys that keep sending me spam. In fact, I GOT one of these girlfriends thanks to those great "win a free ipod" spams -- since I already had 3, I gave the new ipod to a girl I was interested on, and she immediately took off her clothes!

And it's only fair that I spend so much money on spam. After all, my email seems to win some lottery or another twice a week, I don't even have to work anymore... not to speak of all the money I got helping that nice gentleman that had some trouble in Nigeria!

I'm so happy that we have spam. When we started using the internet, we had no idea it would eventually become such a huge factor in our lives.

Better stop now; my eyes are welling up.