Making a mixtape is so 1980s. Now you can make a muxtape:
[On the site,] you can upload . . . what the kids call playlists. [The program then streams the mp3s you chose on a url you pick.] I am not sure of the legal issues, but the system is smart […]

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The Computer History Museum “is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history.” A current exhibit is a working version of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which is seen as a 19th Century computer design that was never built for a host of reasons from personality to claims that it could not be built with […]

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With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye.  But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes.
Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U.S. Postal Service […]

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As many people know, there is an election brewing in Pennsylvania.  As fewer people know, that election involves the annual awards known as “The Webbies,” sometimes known — semi-seriously at least, and undoubtedly without the blessing of AMPAS — as the Oscars of the Internet.
My colleague Bernard Hibbitts is the Editor in Chief and publisher […]

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Even the person who gets the news from CNN.com (which is today, much of American humanity) knows that the much-anticipated copyright trial of the young century started today in New York:  J.K. Rowling and all things Harry Potter vs. Steve Vander Ark, publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon, online here and, the federal courts willing, […]

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Today there was a hearing convened by the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet (a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) on the potentials and policy concerns raised by virtual worlds. Archives of the hearing are here. An MP3 of the proceedings can be found here. Many news reports about the substance here.
Mike […]

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Just over a year ago I pointed to a lawsuit brought by Bob Yari, producer of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar winner Crash, against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Producers Guild of America.  AMPAS writes the rules for the Academy Awards, and in 2005, before the competition that resulted […]

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The annual USNews ranking of law schools (indeed, of graduate programs generally) became broad blogospheric knowledge yesterday, thanks to “leaked” announcements (see here and here).  The magazine is supposed to be released tomorrow — Friday.
I put “leaked” in quotation marks because the first link above points to images of the law school report snapped from […]

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Three things seem related today:
First:  I saw Be Kind, Rewind this weekend.  The movie has an amiable charm.  It’s a goofball of a film, wildly implausible at every level and built out of devices that scrape the pavement of the plot like broken mufflers.  But there’s a winning performance from Jack Black (is there any other […]

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Fred is the resident sports person, but here is an interesting one for sports and law or law like discussions. MLB has a rule that all base coaches must wear a helmet. The rule was a response to a minor league coach being killed by a line drive last year. Larry Bowa, the third base […]

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It’s a good thing that I have a couple of trips to New York City planned for later this Spring, because what looks like a can’t-miss exhibition has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art:  Design and the Elastic Mind.
Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, […]

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Passionate followers of professional football know that the National Football League is just now concluding its annual “combine,” the camp where would-be draftees get timed, tested, and measured by pro scouts in anticipation of draft day.  There are speed tests, jumping tests, “position specific events,” measurements, and the famous or infamous Wonderlic intelligence test.  The […]

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A friend in Pittsburgh sent me a link yesterday to this eBay auction of what’s being billed as the world’s greatest collection of recorded music.  I thought that it was too odd to be true, but the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and NPR have both run interviews with the collector, a man in Pine, a Pittsburgh suburb, who […]

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I saw a great concert by Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette at Newark’s NJPAC last night (which Jarrett called “one of the best halls–if not the best–in the US”). It was a really extraordinary performance, especially during one transcendent passage near the end where he was seamlessly interweaving some classical themes with […]

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From the Department of Aren’t There More Pressing Issues in the World:
Yale alumni are rallying to save the Yankee Doodle.  From the Yale Daily News:
Yankee Doodle may come back to town, riding on support from University students and alumni.
Since the restaurant closed Monday, citing “economic considerations” — and provoking sadness and shock among Yalies past […]

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Somewhere between conceptions of the firm as proprietary, hierarchical production mechanism and the firm as distributed, commons- and peer-based institution lies an emerging class of virtual firms that mix and match sensibilities: some peer-based, some hierarchical; some commons-based, some proprietary.  My hunch is that these sorts of organisms are going to be the most interesting […]

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Last month, Clive Thompson wrote in the New York Times about the Gömböc, which
leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a “standing” position as if by magic. It doesn’t have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an […]

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Amazon.com has had, for about a year, a beta feature/forum called Askville.com. According to the web site:
What is Askville?
Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge
with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a
fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a […]

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Worth more time than I have to give it:  Nick Carr’s excerpting a “metaphors of the mind” discussion from Edge’s recent “Annual Question.”  The excerpts are from the response of MIT professor Rodney Brooks, who notes how the dominant metaphor for the workings of the mind tracks society’s sense of the world’s most sophisticated information […]

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The Times today reports on the latest version of an old theme: 
Silicon Valley, the wellspring of the digital technologies fueling globalization, is itself a collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams.
“Here, we have microclimates for wines and microclimates for companies,” said […]

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