Lightning, by Adam Franco.

This has been a crazy summer with only about 5 days between June and mid-August that didn’t have rain. The thunderstorms usually start in the afternoon and sometimes last over night. A few drop several inches of rain at a time causing the flash-floods that have taken out Route 125 several times as well as other bridges and roads.

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike ()

Aside: The reason I use different licenses is that for software I have a reasonable expectation that commercial use of my software would result in feedback, bug-reports, translations, or patches that would further improve said software, whereas I do not feel that commercial use of photographs without compensation would improve my photography.

While I encourage others to make use of my work, I do expect them to respect the (liberal) license that I have applied to them and properly give credit where it is due. What particularly bugs me is Flickr’s so-so support of Creative Commons licenses. They encourage usage of CC licenses (decent) and display license information on the photo page (good):

But in the HTML snippets that they provide users for showing an image in one’s blog, they do not include any attribution or CC license information as required by the CC licenses (bad).

One of the knocks against the Creative Commons effort as a whole is the lack of clarity as to how attribution should be done in different media. For web publishing however, how to attribute is quite clear - though buried as the 11th item in their FAQ. Major services like Flickr failing to provide good example of attribution and how to properly credit work just makes the whole Creative Commons thing that much less clear for the general public who now find Creative Commons work readily available and with copy-paste code that violates the license by default.

In an effort to push Flickr to provide a good example for users of Creative Commons-licensed works I’ve started the following thread (reposted below) on the Flickr Ideas forum. I encourage others to weigh in if proper attribution is important to you. Such a fix should only take a Flickr developer about 15 minutes to do, but first such a feature needs to hit their radar.

Flickr Ideas: Update embed code to properly attribute for Creative Commons Licenses

As discussed in this Help thread from a year ago, the “Share This” and “All Sizes” embed code does not meet the Creative Commons license requirements for proper attribution. To quote the CreativeCommons.org FAQ:

How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?

If you are using a work licensed under one of our core licenses, then the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you’re making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the URL for the work if applicable.

You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.

If you are making a derivative use of a work licensed under one of our core licenses, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work, ie. “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author]” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

Further recommendations and guidelines for marking works can be found at the CC Marking project.

The creator’s name (2) and license logo/link (1) are required for proper attibution, but missing from the Flickr-provided embed code. This means that when a user copy/pastes the embed code provided by Flickr, they violate the license by default if they do not take other steps (not mentioned anywhere on Flickr) to give proper attribution.

After no response on the previous thread for a year, TeX HeX has utilized the Flickr API to create an embed code generator at www.ImageCodr.org that can take the URL of any CC licensed Flickr photo and generate the proper HTML code on the fly. This ImageCoder example page provides embed code with the results below:

  by  Adam Franco 

Note the proper link to the license and attribution of the photographer. Also, note the very understandable description of how the Creative Commons license terms affect usage of the image:

I applaud TeX HeX for his wonderful work, but this embed code really should be generated by Flickr itself as only a small percentage of users are going to find their way to ImageCoder.

Please Flickr staff, update the embed code with proper attribution lines so that users of our images can properly attribute by default.

Comment on this thread in the Flickr Ideas forum »

I had originally hoped to construct the case over 2 months of weekends, but this time-line turned out to be a little optimistic and though I didn’t count the hours, it didn’t get completed until 4 months after I started. Work on the project went much faster after I got my own table saw at the end of February and could pop downstairs whenever I had a free moment. Until that point I did most of the work in my friend John Filan’s shop in Weybridge (VT). John is a wood-artisan, master cabinet-maker, and was an amazing resource throughout this project: from showing me the ropes at Lathrop’s lumber mill, to machine setup, to notes on grain direction. Without his expert help (and workshop, and tools) this project would not have been nearly as successful. While I have so much more to learn, at least I now know where to begin and how to safely and successfully use all of the major machine-tools.

I read (after the fact of course) that it is usually best to start with simple projects before cabinetry to avoid dealing with the close tolerances of all of the joinery and inset pieces. I’d have to agree. Though I consider this project to be a success I did spend many periods just staring at all of my pieces, dry-fitting them, and trying to convince myself that if I trim off 1/64 of an inch off one side that they would all fit together properly.

As I mentioned, the case started as about 20 board-feet of rough lumber stacked on the upper rack of Lathrop’s mill. Once in John’s shop it was flattened on the jointer, planed to thickness and made square, straight and ready for use. I had sketched out most of the design prior to starting, but many things changed over the course of construction. For instance, I hadn’t planned for wood movement so the back panel had to become floating and interior header and footer pieces added to replace the strength I was planning on getting from the panel. Similarly, my initial plans to hang trays on the insides of the doors fell away as I contemplated the additional complexity of cramming them into an already-tight location.

The ring-pillow I made from a piece of foam cut into a wedge-shape with rows then sliced into its surface. I wrapped it in dark red velvet and put stitches in the base of the slices, the ends, and elsewhere to keep it all tightly together.

Happy belated birthday, Sarah!

For those who are interested in the extent of the development, I’ve biked the new roads and recorded their positions via GPS:

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Middle Road KML

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The map above was generated with a GPS track of our path (the blue line) and the photo output from my new photosetToKML.php script

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See photos of Zoe on Flickr.

Watch her YouTube debut below:

While this address is fascinating on its own, one thing I find interesting is that Noam Chomsky has for years be describing the US-led overthrow of third-world democracies that clash with American corporate interests. Critics have often derided Chomsky saying “he’s a linguist, not an economist” or otherwise attaching Chomsky for not having the ability “to really know what is going on”. Now we have John Perkins, a man who was at the bargaining tables and behind the scenes telling basically the same story.

Anyway, here is Perkins’ address (broken into three clips for some reason):

Part one:

Part two:

Part three - Questions:

Having seen the movie, the most important next step is to make your voice heard so that we can rid ourselves of the parasite that is our current for-profit health care system. Luckily legislation that would do this has already been introduced, it just needs to be passed.

In 2003 John Conyers and 25 other representatives introduced a bill “to provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, and for other purposes.” This bill, H.R. 676 - “United States National Health Insurance Act”, would provide universal health care for all residents of the United States with no premiums, deductibles, or enrollment exclusions. Everyone is covered for all of their health care needs. All providers of health care must be publicly owned or not-for profit. I highly recommend reading the text of this bill, it is only 25 pages and very straight-forward. It even has a provision to retrain the clerical and administrative staff of all of the HMOs that would be put out of business.

The letter I’ve sent to my senators, representative, and local newspaper:

Senators Leahy, Sanders, and Congressman Welch,

As a citizen of the State of Vermont and the United States of America, I urge you to do everything in your power to pass H.R. 676, “The United States National Health Insurance Act”. It is imperative to the continued prosperity of our state and nation that free universal health care be provided to all residents of our country.

Our current for-profit health care system not only fails to provide needed care to thousands of people and saddles us all with huge costs, but it has other failings as well: With health care provided as a benefit of employment, workers are forced to do the will of their employer as termination not only removes a paycheck, but also access to health care. Small and large businesses often cannot give full-time, stable jobs to willing workers due to the cost of providing them with health care in addition to a salary.

Sirs, please do your part to make universal, single-payer health care a reality in the United States of America.

Adam Franco

From the Sicko website you can find out more information and send letters to your congress-critters.

* Sorry world, I can only keep this promise to personal friends and family.

The man-approach to the toilet seat does in fact drastically reduce the total number repositions of the seat, though at the cost to the woman of a small number of repositions. Siddiqi finds that the woman-approach remains the norm however because the cost to the man of the woman’s anger each time she repositions is greater than the effort needed to reposition the seat many times.

From the paper’s conclusions:

For “mankind”, the analysis in this paper has the following appeal: Once again, it has been found that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient; hence, “mankind” may feel vindicated.

For “womankind”, the analysis in this paper is appealing for the following reason: It has been shown that the social norm of leaving the seat down is a trembling-hand perfect equilibrium. Hence, this norm is not likely to go away, at least in the near future.