an image of an eye glowing green...

0wn yourself

2007-04-28

the green glowing eye

green glowing eye
have i ever told you how much i _love_ the gimp? maybe one of these days i'd like to save up for photoshop, but gimp (gnu image manipulation program) is free (both as in beer and as in speech), is nearly as powerful (not quite the range of filters and no true color space) and is growing steadily (including splitting into several subprojects).

it just amazes me, every time i fire up a good open source/free program, to see what people can make just by cooperating and volunteering their time and energy to an idea.

if you've never used gimp (even if you're hooked on photoshop) you might give it a try some time. you might like it, might find something useful it has to offer, or might find something useful you could offer the gimp community.

--cid

2007-04-26

you down with opb?-- other people's breastmilk

this article talks about the changing patterns (past and present) of breast feeding infants, and specifically about someone other than the biological mother doing the breast feeding.

the article mentions wet nurses, the re-rise of breastfeeding in the us, and cases where it's not possible--e.g. adoption. the article goes on to mention something i've thought about before, but never heard a name applied to--cross-feeding (babies breastfeeding from multiple women).

now, while most of the women mentioned in the post seemed to be doing it more for reasons such as scheduling, but the reason i thought of it was slightly different. when i heard that mothers pass antibodies which help to build the immune systems of infants through breast milk, i immediately thought 'cool, does that mean that if i would have been breastfed by say thirty or forty different women (each with their own various immunities) that i'd have an immune system like wolverine?

just goes to show you how differently people perceive situations.

--cid

0wn yourself

the many or the few?

slashdot (/.) had a story today that really illustrates the gray area which harbors the current incarnation of intellectual property laws (even the concept itself and the definition of the word is in dispute). shelley batts, a grad student at university of michigan, received legal threats from wiley interscience (one of whose projects she posted about on her blog (retrospectacle (which, incidentally is a very clever name)).

her call to the global internets was met with a rally of online support and the situation quickly resolved itself (apparently, it had all been a misunderstanding...

now, whether this was really all just a simple misunderstanding, or whether this wiley group changed their tune after the topic started to gain some ip (independent press), i could not tell you for certain. but what i can tell you is that this sort of thing is important, because these technological/social/economic pressures are really building and it's gonna come to a head pretty soon.

there've been a lot of crazy scary laws passed the past few years and if we're not careful, some bad decisions will slip by, and a few people will get screwed--no one really pays too much attention. but then that stuff starts getting held up as precedent and case law, and then a whole mess of people start getting screwed. but by then, it very well might be too late.

money seems to be able to make laws that benefit the few instead of the many.

now, like i said--this is just me talking. i wasn't there, and i don't really know what happened for sure or why, but from an external perspective, my first instinct is that the right thing happened for the wrong reason.

and, truth be told, i guess i'm alright with that as long as there's always enough good people in the world (who are paying attention) to make sure that 'the right thing' _does_ happen. anyway, i'd say that this situation definitely turned out to have a good resolution, and that's a good thing.

something to think about.

--cid

0wn yourself