DanKohn.com

Ever notice a bunch of Latin-looking text starting with `lorem ipsum dolor’ serving as a placeholder to show off a page design or font and wonder what the text means?

I like to comment on things I quote, but what could one possibly add to this paragraph from the NYT? “Toilet jet sprays, which sometimes confuse foreign visitors with disastrous results, are now in nearly half of Japanese homes, a rate higher than that of personal computers.”

The NYT reports on Korean teens spending all their time on broadband gaming (instead of wholesome sex, at least according to the subtext of the opening paragraphs):

More than half of all Korean households have high-speed Internet connections — compared with fewer than 10 percent in the United States — and the exploding Web culture has driven economic growth and spawned civic movements that have powerfully affected everything from politics to consumer culture.

Promising news for Pedestal Networks. The story also includes a great, uncredited Timothy Leary homage: “Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.”

Two Kuwaiti gunmen were killed after attacking a marine training exercise near Kuwait City. Call me unoriginal, but if I were a terrorist, I would think attacking marines in their barracks (e.g., Beirut and Saudi Arabia) or onboard a ship that thought it had reached a safe harbor (the Cole) would make a lot more sense then attacking armed soldiers on a training exercise.

The Supreme Court will be hearing Lawrence Lessig argue against Solicitor General Ted Olsen this Wednesday, in the most important constitutional challenge to copyright in history. The LA Times Magazine has a nice background piece on The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State. It describes Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, calling unauthorized copying a “terrorist war” and asserting that “the movie industry is under siege from a small community of professors.”

An industry with about $70 billion in worldwide revenues being thwarted by a handful of scholars, none of whom could get within a mile of Morton’s on Oscar night? “When I read that,” said Duke law professor James Boyle, “I had a Monty Pythonesque image of a siege of this massive castle by a tiny number of individuals armed only with insults. ‘Now open your gates,’ they were yelling, ‘or we shall taunt you once again.’ “

All of the filings and background for the case are at eldred.cc.

I got back last week from one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken, 15 days and 14 nights rafting through Grand Canyon. Here is an action shot of taking a very shaky inflatable kayak through a rapid (I’m in the back), and the obligatory before and after pictures. Special thanks to Ed Gausman for the photography and website, as well for being a great travel companion.

I was on the Namibia trip with Seth Berkely on which he broke his leg, which was covered by this MSNBC article. His wedding was covered as the lead vows column in last week’s NYT. Dealing with a broken angle in one of the most remote areas of the world was quite an experience, and I give Seth a lot of credit for how he dealt with it and his long recovery. My best wishes on a happy marriage.

“After a year of painstaking scientific research, the world’s funniest joke was revealed on Thursday.” Don’t get your hopes up. Since the methodology is what joke is funniest across all cultures and types of people, the outcome was predestined to be pretty mild. Here is the study’s website, with some descriptions on why the jokes are funny.

Great NYT special issue on New York, showing it at the canonical great city. Here’s Kurt Anderson (of Turn of the Century fame), on the dot com bust: “The dreamers and tinkerers of Silicon Valley were not innocents, but they were, at worst, Drs. Faustus willingly seduced by the slick Mephistophelean agents of New York’s blue-chip money culture.”

Arguments for the wacky p2p “self-help” bill. Of course, everywhere you see “self-help”, read “vigilante”. It really is amazing that the music and movie industries would try to go against several hundred years of jurisprudence arguing for justice provided through neutral third-parties, and bring us back to the vigilante days of cattle lynchings and retribution murders.