Author: Mathew Ingram

Trung Phan has a great newsletter, and one of the topics he wrote about recently was how Disney loves — but also hates — the idea of copyrighted work losing its protection and winding up in public domain. Here’s an excerpt:

“January 1st is Public Domain Day, when works lose their copyright protection. The 2024 batch was highly highly anticipated. Why? Because Disney lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse (specifically, the version that was in the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” short film). And people care about Disney because the entertainment conglomerate has a very contradictory relationship to copyright.

On the one hand, the number of Disney films that are sniped from Public Domain is astounding. There are at least 50 of them. Just 8 of these sources — including Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Sea Maid), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland) and some little-known writer named Shakespeare — have accounted for more than $16B at the box office:

But when it comes to Disney’s own content, it’s a very different story. Why? In 1927, Walt and his chief animator created a popular cartoon character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The character blew up and then the chief animator took his team to Universal and basically jacked Oswald. In response, Walt was determined to never let someone else control the fate of his animations. This has manifested in US copyright laws conveniently being extended every single time Disney’s works are about to enter the public domain:

From the Everything Is Amazing newsletter comes this gem, about what is involved in trying to join the legendary tribe of Brits who drive traditional London black cabs:

“Everton Thomas, a 33-year-old bus driver from Woolwich in southeast London, is sitting in a cramped, ugly office decorated with maps of the city. There are maps on the walls, maps on shelves, and a big paper map spread out on the angled desk opposite him. But if Everton sneaks a look at any of these maps, he goes back to being a bus driver – a job he’s desperate to leave. He’s hoping a better life awaits him and his family if he can keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, and not let his nervousness cloud his brain. He really, really needs to think clearly right now. In a sense, this is a job interview – but it’s also one of the hardest memory tests in the world.

The examiner says: “Everton, where’s the London Edition Hotel?”

This question, and the following ones like it, requires him to remember specific locations from London’s roughly 100,000 landmarks. He has to know where these places are – and he has to know how to get there from anywhere else. The exam is called The Knowledge – and these days, Everton teaches it, in the school he set up after he successfully passed it in 2017. Most students take four or five years of study to get to the required level – or they drop out, or get disqualified (there’s a 70% fail rate). But the ones that succeed will earn anything from £15,000 to £30,000 more per year than any of London’s bus drivers.”

via Depths of Wikipedia

In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

(via Slashdot)

It’s four years to the day since a doctor in China privately warned colleagues about pneumonia cases related to coronavirus (which turned out to be COVID). His message was leaked, and went viral on social media, leading to his arrest by authorities for spreading fake news. A few months later he contracted COVID and died, aged 33 (via Kevin Beaumont on Mastodon)

Random fun film fact: The crow in It’s a Wonderful Life seen in the Building & Loan that Uncle Billy kept as a pet is the same crow that flew on Scarecrow’s arm in The Wizard of Oz whom he was unable to scare. His name was Jimmy and he was a raven who first appeared in You Can’t Take It With You directed by Frank Capra who went on to cast the bird in every subsequent movie he made.

Via John Pinter on Mastodon

As an acoustic guitar player, I’ve played Norman guitars and Godin guitars and Boucher guitars and Seagull and La Patrie guitars, and I knew they were all connected somehow, but I was never sure how. This is a chronological description of the relationships between some of Canada’s best luthiers (guitar-makers) rrom a regular poster on the Acoustic Guitar group on Facebook:

“Robert Godin met Normand Boucher on a hunting trip to La Patrie around 1969-70, maybe 71. Robert was then a salesman at La Tosca music store in Montreal. Normand Boucher was then a carpenter, door and windows and cabinet maker in La Patrie. Building / designing guitars took more and more of his spare time.
He wanted to design an adjustable angle neck so that musicians could adjust their guitars as needed in a few minutes. Normand Boucher and Robert Godin both started working together in 1972, Normand running his shop, Robert being the exclusive distributor through his company Sibécor.

Even before that, Robert started to sell Norman guitars through La Tosca. Norman guitars were a smash hit in the province of Quebec, every player wanted one, tons of artists using them. Robert Godin started to build his own guitars in 1979 with Claude Boucher, son of Normand: Kamouraska and Lys, which later became La Patrie and Seagull. Claude designed and ran the shop, Robert on the road selling. Now we had in La Patrie the Unisonic shop up the hill (Robert Godin/Claude Boucher) and the Norman shop down the hill (Normand Boucher), All distributed by Sibécor (Robert Godin).

The early 80’s were tough times for the acoustic guitar industry. In 1982 the Unisonic / Sibécor companies were shut down, Claude Boucher left and Robert with fresh investors restarted under a new company structure: Guitabec (the shop) / Lasido (distribution), that is when the Kamouraska / Lys lines changed names to La Patrie / Seagull. Meanwhile down the hill in September 1980 the Norman shop burned down to the ground completely. Normand Boucher rebuilt the shop and tooling, and tried to restructure a decent distribution network. Claude Boucher came back to the Norman shop in 1983.

Times were hard as there was also a general economic recession. Eventually Normand Boucher lost control of his shop around 1986 and the new management who had no experience in the making of musical instruments. Struggled trying to survive, eventually, Robert Godin ended up buying Norman in 1989. Claude left Norman in 1986 and bought the village’s restaurant. Richard Boucher (Normand’s other son) stayed at the Norman shop till the end. Richard and Claude would years later start up the « Boucher » line of guitars, run today by Robin Boucher, Normand’s nephew.”

A poem by Anne Boyer, found via Matt Bogle’s excellent newsletter Pome, which sends used to send you a new poem every day (alas, Matt recently announced the Pome newsletter is on hiatus):

“Did I explain that those days were the days when the people wrote on machines that connected to machines that connected to machines that connected to people who wrote on machines?

Those were the days when we believed in information.

And I was a person in those days, but I did not believe in information. I liked to imagine the interfaces that would make the public private and make the private okay.

Privacy was not an effect, exactly, of confession, which in those days was buying stock in the public company. Those were the days of crude luxury and genteel sorrow. Those were the days I loved to delete.”

Anne Boyer (2015)

Yes, it’s your favourite time of the year — the Ingram Christmas Letter is finally here! In what has become a somewhat depressing annual event, I am typing this in mid-December and it’s plus 10 Celsius, not a trace of snow on the ground. The part of me that hates shovelling snow is happy, but the part of me that is concerned about global warming is not happy at all. In any case, on to the letter! I will do my best not to make this all about our 18-month-old granddaughter Quinn, but it is going to be difficult, since I am convinced she is the cutest and smartest child who probably ever existed (it’s possible there were some cuter and smarter children in ancient Greece, but I doubt it). As usual, the photos here are also available as a Google Photos album or at the Ingram Family Photo Archive  — which runs on an old computer in our daughter’s bedroom, so please don’t get mad if it’s down. You can also find a more old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, at https://mathewingram.com/christmas. However you consume it, it’s the same great Ingram family content that you know and love!

Since most of these letters are written before Christmas, they don’t often include photos *from* Christmas, but I will make an exception in this case because of the aforementioned angel known as Quinnderella, who was a vision in plaid for her first Christmas. She appeared to have a great time, despite not really knowing what was happening, and at one point she appeared to be channeling her Scottish ancestors and telling a tall tale, clad in her tiny sweater and plaid skirt. And someone upstairs must have heard us wish for a white Christmas, because we got a massive dump of snow just a few days before, and Meaghan — who was driving Becky’s mother from Ottawa — had to be rescued from the blizzard by Wade and me. But once everyone was safe, the snow made it very pretty on hikes around the property, making everything look like Narnia.

Continue reading “The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2023”

Scott Alexander, a psychologist who blogs at Astral Codex Ten, writes about a book that dives into the question of whether bees can think or not:

“Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers. Not only did the bees have a bad time, their behavioural patterns totally changed. They began to approach the flowers differently. They began inspecting flowers via quick scanning flights before landing on them, and would occasionally reject flowers even if there was no crab spider present. They seemed more nervous. If you want to see if humans are optimistic or pessimistic, you point at a glass of water that is halfway filled and ask them to describe it. Similarly, you can do the glass half-full versus half-empty test on bees, where you give them an ambiguous stimulus – it might be sucrose, which bees love, or it might be quinine, which they hate – and see if they want it. 

If they want it, they’re likely a happy-go-lucky bee with nothing on their mind. If you simulate the bee being attacked by a predator right before this test, they are much less likely to fly to the solution and much more likely to fly into the container labelled ‘Therabee’. Does that mean bees feel emotions? If they feel emotions, would that mean bees have conscious states? Or are these all just instinctive responses? Bees exist in that great hinterland of consciousness – the valley where we throw all manner of creatures and living beings whose experiences we remain fundamentally uncertain about. Some readers will likely enter the book believing that bees do not have conscious experiences, and Lars Chittka does a good job disabusing these people of their certainty in this belief, if not the belief altogether.”

There’s a lot more to it than this small sample, and it’s all fascinating — why bees build hexagonal honeycombs (even in space with zero gravity), why they do the waggle dance to deliver information about the angle of the sun even though it doesn’t improve their ability to gather nectar, and much more.