• http://twitpic.com/11vvn2 – See my Friend Wheel! Get yours at http://bit.ly/FrWhl #
• RT Facebook Continues to Dominate Among Youth: Last week, we discovered that 4 http://bit.ly/bqD5Rf #psychology #news /via @PsychologyNow #
• @hyblis AAAARG.ORG has been taken down?? in reply to hyblis #
• #Amazon #039;s #Stanza downgrade WTF does that mean i cant sync via usb? time to jailbreak? Wld that help? Nexus? #apple http://yfrog.com/32a80j #
• Boycott #iBooks RT Stanza USB transfer killed by Apple. Making room for the iBook app I wager. Not happy. Not surprised. /via @SizzlinBeard #
• #Amazon #039;s #Staza downgrade WTF does that mean i cant sync via usb? time to jailbreak? Wld that help? Nexus? #apple http://yfrog.com/32a80j #

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I’m getting the hang of the difference!  Each has its place, one is not better than the other, both are pretty amazing social networking innovations.   (both are owned by corporate leaches who suck our life for profit).

Why are they different.  Permissions.  I can follow others without their permission, they could block me, but by default I can follow the Dali Lama, Bill Gates, Obama.  Very different to Facebook.  Their it is not follow, but friending, and the link must be mutual.  This is of course of great interest from a sociometric point of view.  Never have there been such huge social networks.

Look at this sociogram!

Click for larger image.

Me on Facebook, me on Twitter  (not that I am very active on either really).

Facebook Continues to Dominate Among Youth | World of Psychology:

7 out of 10 (73% to be exact) teens use social networking websites like Facebook, only 1 in 12 teens use Twitter.

The recent introduction of the new Apple iPad has stirred the discussion over the future of web content and application runtime formats, and shone light onto the political and business battles emerging between Apple, Adobe and Google. These discussion are often highly polarized and irrational. My hope in this post is to help provide some balance and clarity onto this discussion.

My somewhat vitriolic comments follow

The article and the comments together make for a good read.  I am now thinking of the Net, not in terms of open / closed, but as a sort of battle field for various economic and political interests.  At least the enemy are in-fighting.  Whoever wins is the enemy.  The corporates determine the very shape of the net, there is no disintermediation, only re-intermediation by bigger sharks.  If we favour “more open” that favours Google probably, to sell more ads.  Ads!  Who needs ads!

Freedom is a strange notion.  The iPhone has freed me up from being at the desk, I read far more than before.  I read this article on the phone, sent myself a liink and am now blogging on the PC.  It has no Flash, I hate it when I get the blue lego tile on the iPhone!  I hate it that to build in flash costs $$$ worth of tools.  I hate it that Apple stops Amazon from allowing book sharing on the iPhone Ugh! 

I learned in the comments in the article that Apple does not allow developers on the Mac to access the GPU!  That’s it, I lost all my Apple, thing of beauty lust.  Gone. 

Where is the EFF? http://www.eff.org/  WC3, what could they possibly do to create a people’s Web?

Do they make a phone in Venezuela?  Or Cuba?  I’d like to not feel contaminated by the dirty technology I always use. Windows XP, iPhone  Ugh!

Men at Work’s Colin Hay’s statement on court battle over Down Under and Kookaburra in full | Herald Sun:

Full statement follows:

Men at Work’s Colin Hay’s statement on court battle over Down Under and Kookaburra in full

Colin Hay, of Men at Work, issued a statement responding to Thursday’s finding in battle over the band’s biggest hit Down Under. Here is the statement in full:

For Those Interested,      

The song Down Under is my friend. It has always been my friend, ever since it was born. I have been playing it for over 30 years, to audiences the world over, and will no doubt play it for as long as I am able. We look after each other very well. I co-wrote this song known as Down Under, with Ron Strykert, sometime in the winter of 1978. I remember because we had played the song at the Cricketers Arms Hotel in Richmond one Thursday night, and on the way home to Arthur’s Creek, just north of Melbourne, with Ron and my girlfriend Linda in the car, I fell asleep at the wheel, and ran off the road into a ditch. We ended up with the car pointing toward the sky, and we found ourselves staring through the condensation streaked windscreen at the stars above. It was cold, very cold, you know that two o’ clock in the morning Melbourne cold, the kind that chills your bones.  

The Federal Court ruling of Justice Jacobson regarding Down Under, and Marion Sinclair’s song Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, came down today. I am as we speak, wading through the 60 page document of his ruling. Clearly, I’ve had better days.  

The copyright of Kookaburra is owned and controlled by Larrikin Music Publishing, more specifically by a man named Norm Lurie. Larrikin Music Publishing is owned by a multi-national corporation called Music Sales.

I only mention this as Mr Lurie is always banging on about how he’s the underdog, the little guy. Yet, he is part of a multi-national corporation just like EMI Music Publishing. It’s all about money, make no mistake. He litigated against EMI Music Publishing, who controls the copyright of Down Under, and Ron Strykert and myself, the writers of Down Under. He alleged that we appropriated a “substantial” part of Kookaburra, and in so doing, infringed upon that copyright, and incorporated it into the flute line of Men At Work’s recording of Down Under. It is indeed true, that Greg Ham, (not a writer of the song) unconsciously referenced two bars of Kookaburra on the flute, during live shows after he joined the band in 1979, and it did end up in the Men At Work recording. What’s interesting to me, is that Mr Lurie is making a claim to share in the copyright of a song, namely Down Under, which was created and existed for at least a year before Men At Work recorded it. I stand by my claim that the two appropriated bars of Kookaburra were always part of the Men At Work “arrangement”, of the already existing work and not the “composition”.

When Men At Work released the song Down Under through CBS Records, (now Sony Music), in 1982, it became extremely successful. It was and continues to be, played literally millions of times all over the world, and it is no surprise that in over twenty years, no one noticed the reference to Kookaburra. There are reasons for this. It was inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men At Work recorded the song, it had become unrecognizable. It is also unrecognizable for many reasons. Kookaburra is written as a round in a major key, and the Men At Work version of Down Under is played with a reggae influenced “feel” in a minor key. This difference alone creates a completely different listening experience. The two bars in question had become part of a four bar flute part, thereby unconsciously creating a new musical “sentence” harmonically, and in so doing, completely changed the musical context of the line in question, and became part of the instrumentation of Men At Work’s arrangement of Down Under.  

Justice Jacobson has ruled, and for the most part, not in EMI’s or my favour. What was born out of creative musical expression, became both a technical and mathematical argument. This ruling will have lasting repercussions, and I suspect not for the better.   

Mr Lurie is a music publisher, and today Judge Jacobson ruled mostly in his favor. Mr Lurie claims to care only about protecting the copyright of Marion Sinclair, who sadly has passed away. I don’t believe him. It may well be noted, that Marion Sinclair herself never made any claim that we had appropriated any part of her song Kookaburra, and she wrote it, and was most definitely alive, when Men At Work’s version of Down Under was a big hit. Apparently she didn’t notice either.  

I believe what has won today is opportunistic greed, and what has suffered, is creative musical endeavor. This outcome will have no real impact upon the relationship that I have with our song Down Under, for we are connected forever. When I co-wrote Down Under back in 1978, I appropriated nothing from anyone else’s song. There was no Men At Work, there was no flute, yet the song existed. That’s the truth of it, because I was there, Norm Lurie was not, and neither was Justice Jacobson. Down Under lives in my heart, and may perhaps live in yours. I claim it, and will continue to play it, for as long as you want to hear it.  

Sincerely,  Colin Hay

I read this book in 1967, at the Cragieburn ski-field where I was a custodian. I was upstairs in the sleeping loft of the ski hut, and often there would be a loud party downstairs. I’d read it by candle light or with a torch. I made notes! I may still have them. It was part of a few years of delightful self education, prior to going to the University of Canterbury, which by comparison was like a padded cell of the mind, though I have no regrets. I am looking forward to hearing the book read to me.

Click for larger image.

I have converted the mp3 for the first book into iPod Audiobook format (keeps track of where you are up to). Book 1 m4b Audiobook format

Links follow to the download page, Librivox, notes on a stage production where I found the image, and Wikipedia – where there is an excellent summary of the characters & their various names!

LibriVox » The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Translated by Constance Garnett (1861-1946) The Brothers Karamazov (Russian: Братья Карамазовы) is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is generally considered the culmination of his life’s work. The book portrays a parricide in which each of a murdered man’s sons share a varying degree of complicity. The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that explores deep into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, reason, and modern Russia. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Pope Benedict XVI as one of the supreme achievements in literature. (Summary by Wikipedia)

LibriVox » Blog Archive » And Karamazov Makes Two (Years):

And Karamazov Makes Two (Years) By cataloging The Brothers Karamazov, LibriVox has now made two full years of free public domain audiobooks available to the world. That is, if you started listening to our catalog today, and listened 24 hours a day, it would take you two years to get through our catalog. By which time, I hope, we’ll have another two years for you to listen to.

Review: The Brothers Karamazov/Lookingglass Theatre | Newcity Stage:

“Animals could never be so artistically cruel as man,” Ivan, one of the brothers K, offers to his religious brother as what will eventually serve as evidence for God’s non-existence—and is something of a hypothesis for Dostoyevsky’s novel. What’s so admirable about this Lookingglass production is that, moment to moment, it rises to the level of artistry needed to sustain an epic-length and predominantly verbal exploration of such cruelty—and its antidote. The story, of course, is a heavy, dark and unflinching look at the terrible things people do to each other, with a patricide-murder-mystery plot providing a trial that damns everyone for being guilty for everyone else. Cleverly, director Heidi Stillman doesn’t try to counteract the verbosity and constant philosophizing, but instead works somewhat subordinate to the text, and in so doing creates a punk-stylized, sexy production with a fluid set that acts like a set of illustrations for the narrative, and keeps up with the play’s fever pitch. The acting sometimes borders on the frenzied or melodramatic for longer than is comfortable—but hey, that’s what Russian literature seems to do best. (Monica Westin)

The Brothers Karamazov – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Major characters
[edit] Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

The father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is a 55-year-old “sponger” and buffoon who had sired three sons during the course of his two marriages. He is also rumored to have fathered an illegitimate son, Pavel Smerdyakov whom he employed as his servant. Fyodor took no interest in any of his sons. As a result, they were all raised apart from each other and their father. The murder of Fyodor and the ensuing implication of his oldest son provides much of the plot in the novel.
[edit] Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

Dmitri (Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka, Mitri) is 28 years old, Fyodor’s eldest son and the only offspring of his first marriage. Dmitri is a sensualist much like his father, and the two men’s personalities often clash. Dmitri spends large amounts of money on debauchery-filled nights with plenty of champagne, women, and whatever entertainment and stimulation money can buy, soon exhausting any source of cash he comes across. This leads to further conflict with his father, who he believes is withholding his rightful inheritance, and his lack of money will cast suspicion upon him in the murder investigation. He finally comes to the brink of murdering his father when they begin fighting over the same woman, Grushenka. He is close to Alyosha, referring to him as his “cherub”.

Dr. Keely Kolmes (@drkkolmes)
5/02/10 6:10 PM
Sex Education in Online Media: http://vb.ly/20uy Excited to see video of @violetblue’s talk. She also links to her slides.

Click for larger image.

Item from an art show follows, the first two paragraphs translate the dutch ones in the earlier post.

Daily News – Van Gogh Museum: Jan Kruis Illustrates Woutertje Pieterse – TAXI: The Global Creative Network:

13 Jun 2007

ART EXHIBITION

On view through 26 Aug, 2007

Woutertje Pieterse is about the open, highly imaginative boy named Woutertje who grows up in 19th-century middle-class Amsterdam. He is not understood by the people around him who are convinced that he will not amount to anything. When he reads about the bandit chief Glorioso and schoolmaster Pennewip assigns him to write a poem, he draws inspiration to write his own Bandit’s Ballad. Its content shocks his family and friends.

With vividly portrayed events and personalities Multatuli offers a subtle satirical portrait of a narrow-minded 19th-century bourgeoisie reminiscent of the work of his English contemporary Charles Dickens.

Multatuli and Woutertje Pieterse
Multatuli (pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1820-1887) was famous in his day as the author of Max Havelaar (1860). In this novel he described the abuses he had encountered as a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies. Its success persuaded him to become a professional writer in the hope of promoting social change.

Originally, the story of Woutertje Pieterse was not a novel. It began as part of Multatuli’s magnum opus, Ideën (Ideas, 1862-1877). This diverse collection of over 1.300 texts, including essays, fairytales and letters appeared in seven volumes, with Woutertje Pieterse featuring as a serial amid the various items. It was only in 1890, after Multatuli’s death, that his widow decided to publish Woutertje Pieterse as a separate book.

I was named after Woutertje Pieterse in a book by Multatuli. Researching that!  Here is an image of the character I was named after!

Van Gogh Museum – Jan Kruis tekent Woutertje Pieterse:

Het Van Gogh Museum toont de originele schilderijen en tekeningen die striptekenaar Jan Kruis vervaardigde voor de geïllustreerde versie van Multatuli’s Woutertje Pieterse. Aanleiding voor deze tentoonstelling is de presentatie van dit boek, uitgegeven door De Bezige Bij.

Woutertje Pieterse gaat over de onbevangen, maar onbegrepen Woutertje die opgroeit in een kleinburgerlijk 19de-eeuws milieu in Amsterdam. Als hij leest over de roverhoofdman Glorioso en van zijn leraar, Meester Pennewip, de opdracht krijgt een gedicht te maken, wordt hij geïnspireerd tot het Rooverslied. De inhoud daarvan schokt zijn familie en kennissen hevig. Met vele andere levendige gebeurtenissen en treffende personages geeft Multatuli zo een mild-satirische beeld van het bekrompen 19de-eeuwse burgerdom. Tegelijkertijd schetst hij een boeiend psychologisch portret van een kind, iets dat in zijn tijd uniek was.

DECC | Dharawal State Conservation Area:

A beautiful and distinctive network of creeks, including the ecologically important O’Hares Creek catchment, make Dharawal a special place to visit. Swim in the peaceful creeks and rock pools, enjoy the superb waterfalls, or ride your mountain bike on signposted trails in the park. Birdwatchers will love the prolific bird life.