Links for 2010-11-25

"Thanksgiving is the perfect time of year to evaluate how well you have done as a parent..."

"We also thank you for once again not allowing our technology to gain sentience, to launch our own missiles at us, to send a robot back in time to kill the mother of the human resistance, to enslave us all, and finally to use our bodies as batteries. That doesn't even make sense from an energy-management point of view, Lord, and you'd think the robots would know that. But in your wisdom, you haven't made it an issue yet, so thank you."

"In my world, copyright's purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage - that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical.

That is, I don't want a copyright system that precludes making money on art, since there are some people who make good art who, credibly, would make less of it if there wasn't any money to be had. But at the same time, I don't think that you can judge a copyright system by how much money it delivers to creators - imagine a copyright system for films that allowed only one single 15-minute short film to be made every year, which, by dint of its rarity, turned over £1bn. If only one person gets to make one movie, I don't care how much money the system brings in, it's not as good as one in which lots of people get to make lots of movies."

"While we're on this subject I want to mention a pet peeve of mine -- a phrase frequently employed by Al Mohler and other proponents of creation-ism. It's a phrase that bothers me as a lover of the Bible and of stories and of words.

That phrase is "the creation account" or "the creation account in Genesis."

The book of Genesis offers no such account. It provides a creation story -- more than one, in fact, the first 11 chapters are nothing but origin stories. But it most decidedly does not provide an account of creation.

An account is testimony, witnesses telling what they have seen. The speaker or writer -- the one giving the account -- does not need to be a direct witness herself. She may be a journalist or a historian compiling the testimony of others. But without some basis in such testimony from actual witnesses we haven't got what we can call an account."