Famous Curves Index. I’m not going to pretend I have a clue about even one or two of these, but they’re fascinating to read and think about.

Several months ago I had the good fortune of meeting Adolfo Rozelfeld, a digital/video artist and photographer living in Argentina. He now has some of his work online (parts of the site aren’t finished).

Adolfo’s work is beautiful. So far, four fragments from his Paradigma video series are online as well as a small collection of photographs. The first video from Paradigma about stairs is amazing but they’re all worth watching. And all the people in the photo portraits have much cooler furniture and apartments than I do.

I generally don’t believe people are evil. There are exceptions of course, but in most cases most people try to do the right thing. Sometimes the foundations used for judging the right thing are unfortunately at odds with the rest of society. Most often though, good people simply fail to understand the consequences of well intended actions. It’s no fun to watch.

I’ve known Gilbert Flores for over a decade and throughout that time his creative vision and dedication have remained solid. As good as his work is, he’s equally as inspiring as a person. Gilbert has earned every drop of success that comes his way, and I’m convinced he’s still in the early stages of a very long and prosperous career.

Glimmer*
Paintings & Drawings
by New York Artist Gilbert Flores

October 19th - November 16th
Fluxion Gallery, Omaha NE

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about morality, ethics and what the foundations of those ideas are. The past few days I’ve been dwelling specifically on how or if morality relates to history and past events.

History can not be fixed. No amount of reparations, acknowledgments or apologies can right past wrongs. Apologies can go back forever, no matter what people, country or group is cited. We need to learn from history and not repeat it’s mistakes. That rule applies as much to the aggressor as the victim. Moral judgment only looks backwards for guidance on how to deal with what is yet to come. So what is the role of prosecution and punishment? Is there statute of limitations?

Divine morality is fundamentally worthless in a multi-cultural world. How can someone argue against an opinion which is claimed to come down from the highest conceivable place? However there is a point where the secular foundation of morality parallels the basis of religious morality. Self-preservation trumps all other moral foundations. Religions divide people, when two religious groups clash, no matter what each claims, their moral foundations are not based in divinity, except as their belief in divinity functions to enjoinder their defense against another group who would see them destroyed. Divine morality uses literal interpretations of holy books to justify their own position, when in most cases, those positions actually justify themselves. There is no chosen people, each of us is a chosen person.

Today I found this quote from the 18th century Ukrainian Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav:

“If you won’t be better tomorrow then you were today, then what need do you have for tomorrow?”

To which I ask, “What need do you have for yesterday?”

The answer seems obvious. Yesterday is the benchmark of our progress. History should be learned from, not dwelt over.

Crawling Back To You
Words And Music By Tom Petty

I’m so tired of being tired
Sure as night will follow day
Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway

Meezan writes with a perfect example of why DVD Region codes have no place in the future:

I live in Taiwan (region 3), study in the UK (region 2), but am from Canada (Region 1). Today my 5 region switching limit was reached and I couldn’t play any but the US DVDs ordered through Amazon.


Anyway, the point is I found the answer on your page… I downloaded Region X and thought I would let you know that it does in fact work.

I think it was this DVD post from June, they didn’t mention what kind of Mac it worked on… [update: Taiwanese Powerbook G4 400, OS X10.1.5]

This reminded me of something I started writing last week but never finished:

The most perversely hopeful thing I’ve heard recently about the copyright and digital usage fight was from Jonathan Taplin, President and CEO of Intertainer (from a presentation at Digital Hollywood as reported by Doc Searls in LinuxJournal)

AOL Time Warner is $30 billion in debt. That means the first $3 billion of profits goes to pay the banks. Vivendi Universal has $20 billion in debt. Disney has $25 billion in debt. These are companies that have been leveraged to the neck. If you think about the deflationary economy, which is where we are going, the pricing power–whether for VoD, or DVD rental, or for advertising–is not going to happen. Viacom was smart enough not to do anything stupid in the Internet space, and will probably weather this. But I am here to say that it is going to be a very rough two or three years for the media sector.

• Disney has $27B in debt with a market capitalization of $32.247B.
• AOL has $32B in debt with a market cap of $50.123B.
• Vivendi Universal appears to be completely underwater with $24.7B in debt and a market cap of only $13.136B.

Anybody want to buy a big media company? (talk about a money pit). I hadn’t realized exactly how badly these companies were doing, but I won’t be surprised if all three file for bankruptcy protection sometime within the next 2-3 years.

Crappy products and too much money spent trying to stop progress, this industry is going to look completely different in 5 years. At first I’m sure they’ll blame the internet and piracy, but then everyone will forget about them as better and more open content becomes available.