How, then, should you go about disposing of a compact fluorescent light bulb in the UK? I’d suggest putting the bulb back into its original box (or else a toilet roll tube or similar) to reduce the risk of breakage, and then doing one of the following, in descending order of preference:

• If convenient, take the bulb to a designated recycling point for gas discharge lamps (use the options on this form to find one near you).
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb back to a branch of the store where you bought it, and ask them to recycle it for you. Explain that under WEEE guidelines, the store should help you recycle the bulb.
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb back to a branch of another store that sells CFLs, and ask them to recycle it for you.
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb to the reception desk of your local council’s main office, explain to the receptionist that you’d like the council to provide kerbside recycling collection of CFLs but that in the meantime you’ll leave your old CFLs at the council office for the council to recycle.
• If none of the above is even remotely convenient, then wrap the boxed bulb in a couple of small plastic bags, and put it in a rubbish bin. The plastic bags should reduce the rate at which the mercury from the bulb will leach into the environment if the bulb breaks.

Is it really worth going to all this trouble? Well, yes.

The SSCS mostly toes, but perhaps sometimes crosses, some delicate lines in the overlap between international conservation law and maritime law. Since I'm interested in conservation, in law, and in peaceful protest as a means of social change, the SSCS makes an interesting case study.

When I read that the SSCS's boat Ady Gil had been sunk by the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru 2, I was initially a little sceptical, essentially for the same reasons outlined in this Christian Science Monitor piece. But having watched footage of the collision (see below), it seems fairly clear that the Shonan Maru 2 did indeed deliberately strike the Ady Gil. Watch closely, and you can see that with the latter almost stationary and positioned off the Shonan Maru 2's starboard bow, the Shonan Maru 2 turns sharply to starboard just in time to force a collision, and then turns just as sharply to port once the damage has been done.

It seems obvious from the video that the rate of turn of the Shonan Maru 2 was more than sufficient to allow its captain a free choice either to force a collision with the drifting Ady Gil or to avoid one. If so, then the SSCS's claim that the Ady Gil was deliberately rammed must be true.

Interesting. I guess I don’t see such a sharp divide; more of a rather blurry spectrum.

We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.

Ah, so in Visser’s ontology, obligatory giving is an oxymoron, but obligatory gifting is not, because the former is in the private realm, which is nonjudgemental, and the latter is in the public realm, which isn’t. (Approximately.)

I guess she and I come from different cultures. I grew up with the impression that when someone gives you a gift in the private realm, you are obliged to that person for that gift. As such, gift-giving is usually done with an obvious opportunity for reciprocation in mind, so that the recipient will be able to discharge the obligation without trouble, as otherwise, the gift is burdensome on the recipient.

I’m finding it fascinating and useful to see how powerfully the giftonomies we grow up with shape our perceptions of what constitutes generosity and how to handle it, and also to learn how difficult it can be to translate between giftonomies.

It’s not a lot to ask.

I propose that online music stores should, except perhaps when they are selling solitary songs, sell their records in a format that includes all of this. It would probably be something like a JAR file but for musical records instead of Java programs. Each file would have a copy of the inlay card and cover art as a PDF or suchlike, and a playlist in XSPF or similar. The tracks would also be included in the JAR (or whatever; let’s call it a UZQ file in honour of Michael Paradinas’s best-known alias) file as FLAC files.

How hard would this be to implement? For a major online music retailer like 7digital or iTunes, not very difficult. What about player software? Most player software could very rapidly be extended to accommodate such a file structure.

So, why hasn’t this been done? Is the industry waiting for someone to write a UZQ file format specification? Has someone already written an archive file specification for music based on JAR, TAR, XAR or similar, but it didn’t catch on? Please leave your thoughts and insights as comments below. Thanks!

Sam,

You may have heard about Jamie Leigh Jones — an American woman who was gang raped by her co-workers while working for a defense contractor in Iraq.

Her employer (KBR, an affiliate of Halliburton) “lost” the rape kit, locked her in a box for 24 hours, and then prevented her from filing charges in court — by invoking a private-arbitration clause in her contract. KBR picked the arbitrator.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) proposed a bill last month to allow victims of rape to bring their case to court. Sounds like an easy vote, doesn’t it? Most senators thought so. All female Republican senators thought so.

But Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) voted no to protecting rape victims — after receiving over $700,000 in campaign contributions from the defense industry and Chamber of Commerce, both of which lobbied against Franken’s proposal because arbitration saves them money.

Today, we are asking people across the country to sign an expression of outrage at Burr’s decision to put campaign contributors above rape victims. We’ll keep the media informed about our growing number of signatures, and shame Burr publicly.

Can you help us shame Burr? Click here to sign — and then please pass this email to others.

(At the link, you can see a great video of Jon Stewart calling out Burr and others.)

We are also releasing a poll we commissioned in North Carolina, which shows Burr voted against the overwhelming majority of his own constituents. 73% of North Carolinians disapprove of Burr’s vote against Franken’s proposal. And after hearing that Burr took over $700,000 from the defense industry and Chamber of Commerce, a majority believe Burr’s vote was affected by those interests.

Thus again, the point we have made over and over: Whether or not you believe Burr sold out, his behavior leads most to believe money buys results in Congress — and that taints our democracy. We need to shame these politicians one by one until Congress realizes that it’s time to replace special-interest-funded elections with citizen-funded elections.

Can you help us shame Burr? Click here to sign — and then please pass this email to others.

We will keep you up to date on our progress. Thanks for helping to Change Congress.
– Lawrence Lessig

P.S. Local and national media have already reported on our poll this morning. Here are some more results:
73% of North Carolina voters disapprove of Burr’s vote against rape victims, only 14% approve.
56% of voters are less likely to vote for Burr in 2010 as a result of his vote, only 11% are more likely.
67% think money buys results in Washington DC, only 14% think it doesn’t.
47% think Burr cast his vote because of the money, only 34% think he thought it was the right thing to do.
52% think Burr’s $700,000 in special-interest contributions “hurt his judgment,” only 34% thought it didn’t.

I’ve signed. While I understand that the question of how to legally prosecute accused rapists in a manner that is fair both to the plaintiff and the defendant remains a matter for disagreement, I’m disgusted anyone with the resources to learn about the issue would vote in favour of allowing corporations to eliminate opportunities for rape trials altogether. Arbitration should, perhaps, be an option, but it should certainly not be the only option: the possibility of pursuing a criminal prosecution against rapists must be allowed to remain open for all citizens. I’m relieved that despite the efforts of Burr and other Republicans (they were all Republicans) who voted against it, Franken’s proposal passed.

In case you want to post it on your own blog or otherwise re-use it, the email above was licensed under CC-BY.

History can be viewed as matter of fact; or as interpretative; or as literary. Surely it can be viewed in other ways too - for instance, some people regard it as being essentially unimportant - but here I want to consider these three views. I should add that although I focus here on Darwin, much of what follows is applicable to all other (historical) figures, not least among them Emma Darwin and the other characters we meet in Creation.

There are, as Randal Keynes has put it to me, at least three Darwins: the Darwin of his published work, the Darwin of his correspondence, and the Darwin of his notebooks. These are in roughly increasing order of intimacy. They are also in roughly increasing order of knowledge assumed and therefore, one might say, in roughly decreasing order of penetrability for the non-Darwin scholar. (Fortunately, much valuable work continues to be done by professional Darwin scholars to provide the necessary contextual information to render the letters, notebooks and even the publications accessible to non-specialists.)

I view this trinity of Darwins as being compounded by a trio of fearsome multipliers: the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, the multiplier of individual interpretations of Darwin, and the multiplier of the interpreter's days. I will discuss these briefly.

By talking of the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, I mean that at each moment Darwin - as with all people - was maturing, physically and mentally. If we take the Darwin of his correspondence, we find that he was in a great many ways not the same in, say, 1836 as he was in 1866. Taking a smaller span yields smaller differences, but the point remains: a living human being is dynamic, not static - and is therefore somewhat new and different at each turn.

The multiplier of of individual interpretations of Darwin recognises the subjectivity inherent in learning. The Darwin of Janet Browne's biography is not the same as that of Desmond and Moore's accounts. Nor is either of them the Darwin of Annie's Box; and the latter is in turn not the Darwin of Creation. It is plausible that each person who learns about Darwin imagines him slightly differently; partly because of learning about him from different sources, perhaps, but also because of associating the information in those sources with understanding gained by personal experience, which necessarily differs from person to person.

By referring to the multiplier of the interpreter's days, I really mean the multiplier of moments in the interpreter's life. Darwin is not alone in being a dynamic human being. Each of us modifies his or her view of the world continually, prompted by experience. I feel confident in hypothesising that the mental models Janet Browne has of Darwin now are not the same set that she had when she finished writing her biography of him, and that those are again not the same as the ones she had before she embarked upon the biography. You needn't be a professional historian of natural history to change your mental model of Darwin in the light of new information about him, whether this new information comes from external sources or is produced analytically in your own mind. For instance, each person who sees Creation may well, as I did, find that it adds new sensory elements to his or her mental model of Darwin. (They may also find that some parts of it clash with existing elements, not least because Creation is a literary, imaginative - and thus somewhat novel - account of Darwin.)

These multipliers are fearsome because of the quantity of multiplication they produce. From three Darwins (which is more than enough to keep a small army of historians and modern scientists very busy indeed), we have in addition at least one Darwin in the mind of every person who has thought about Darwin, and in many cases multiple Darwins in each of those minds: new Darwins produced by shifts in the insights the thinker, and new Darwins for each moment of Darwin's development. Mathematically, assuming the number of ideas ever held by people is finite, this is an infinite but countable number of Darwins. Practically speaking, it is an uncountable number of Darwins.

The three views of history I mentioned earlier are all valid to some extent. History may indeed be factual: it may be objectively true that some things happened and others didn't. Yet even if we were there when those things happened, our accounts of them would be informed by our own subjective interpretations of them; and equally, if we were not there to experience them directly, our understanding of those events will still be informed by our personal experiences, try as we might to avoid this and to achieve an uncoloured perception. Finally, the human aching for narrative prompts us to view and to communicate history in the form of stories. These may be ostensibly objectively true stories, as modern historians strive for; or they may be more imaginative ones, as Creation is and as we see in the work of historical writers across the centuries, from Curtius to Eric Temple Bell and beyond.

What is not so valid is presenting a consciously imaginative account of historical events as a factual one, and consequently I was glad that at the screening last night, both Jon Amiel and Randal Keynes were present to discuss Creation with the audience and to explain some of the uses of dramatic license that were made in writing the film. They were enjoyably frank about its imaginative nature, Amiel saying at one point, There is plenty for the anoraks to cavil at [but] it's just a movie, get a life!. This is not unjustified, for what they have created is an affecting and at times deeply inspiring cinematic spectacle with many superb performances and striking, memorable vignettes. It is a worthy addition to the cinematic canon.

Still as I hope I have shown, if you want to learn about Darwin interpretatively, you will need to do more than to just see this film. Dive into his letters, his notebooks, his published works, and the secondary scholarly literature. Produce, for yourself, a set of Darwins of your own.

In my dream, the EastEnders universe was real – it wasn't a television show – and Simon and I both lived in that universe and were nodding acquaintances via a mutual friend. Inside this odd dream world I passed Simon outside a bakery that used to exist on Church Street in Stoke Newington (evidently, he had wandered to Stoke Newington from Walford – no great distance in this fictional universe and indeed not a terribly long way in reality). Lingering to overhear a conversation he was having with someone I did not know, I discovered that he was planning – as all EastEnders characters seem to plan at some stage – an act of larceny. Specifically, he was planning to provide unlimited lemonade at a large children's party by means of a bar pump connected to an illegally tapped water supply and barrels of lemonade syrup stolen from a neighbourhood business.

Walking away from the bakery, it struck me that this was not so very different from Simon's normal modus operandi: to deliver a synthetic product to the masses in a way that undermines the very communities from which those masses are drawn, and what is more, to do so in a way that has a fraudulent veneer of generosity.

At a dinner party hosted by the mutual friend later that same day, I confronted Simon about this at a moment when we were in the kitchen away from the rest of the guests, surprising myself by then  launching into a monologue conveying the dislike I have for his career. It went something like this:

“The sad thing is, Simon, this nasty business with the lemonade is really no worse than what you do in your day job; in fact, in your day job you take fewer risks and do more damage. You give society a saccharine experience at a greater cost than its members imagine. The products you push are designed to be addictive and to make a small number of people a large amount of money. They actively promote imitation over innovation, fakery over reality and cult of personality over human understanding.

“What good did Westlife or 5ive do for the music scenes of the countries in which they grew up? Are Girls Aloud really consequential enough to warrant the column inches written about them, or do they merely have the luxury of some of the best publicists money can buy? The difficulty Susan Boyle has had adjusting to the binary nature of the fame you purvey isn't her fault: it's due to the unhealthy nature of that fame. She is, to paraphrase the well-known quote, too healthy to easily conform to the  expectations caused by the sick social paradigm you promote.

“Now, had the money your labels invest in manufactured stardom instead been used in fostering grass-roots art and music scenes perhaps Boyle and those around her would have had a less competitive, commercial vision of musical theatre, thereby allowing her to achieve something of the success of her hero Elaine Paige but organically and without feeling she required the opportunistic and hyper-judgemental attention of TV talent show hosts like yourself or Michael Barrymore.

“And how much other innovation might have come from that sort of investment? Whole new musical genres might have been created! And yet your television shows and the records you release seem always to be shackled to unimaginative cover versions of Unchained Melody. They are derivative to the second or third order. Britain is squandering talent by wasting so much time and money on your shows when the television cameras could be crawling the night clubs, community centres, concert halls, schools and dingy rehearsal rooms where musicians congregate to explore new ideas. Why not foster that collaboration by reporting on the many such artists whose talents are all worthy of exposure to a wider audience instead of creating artificial scenarios in which a handful of people receive adulation and the rest are dismissed because they don't fit the narrow confines of your preconceptions or those of your fellow judges and big-label A&R men? Innovators need exposure to like-minded audiences and colleagues, and yet you have shown little interest in facilitating this, preferring instead to reap the fruits of earlier innovators' sweat.

“Simon, for all that the singers among your selected few represent the kind of sweetness and light that can be found by making the most MOR choices, you are the king of the millenial philistines. Your philosophy is not that of Matthew Arnold, it is that of Andrew Keen, and its damage is felt by every struggling but competent musical artist whose adventurousness you have taught your audiences not to share.”

At that point, he picked up a frying pan from the draining board and made quite seriously as if to hit me in the face with it. I ducked, hefted a heavy glass blender to throw at him if he continued, and said, raising my eyebrows, “Surely you don't think fighting over this is the best way out.”

A sudden click of sharp heels on the tiled floor alerted us to the arrival of our host, who had surely come to see what was detaining us. She, in turn, raised her eyebrows. Under her gaze, we put down our weapons and returned to the dining room.

It’s some time since I’ve posted here with much regularity. A spate of deaths among family friends, the end of a romance I tried to save before concluding it was impossible, a substantial investment of time helping out a friend who was having a harder time of things than me, and a few other significant complications, have been my lot of late. That hasn’t left much room for blogging.

Now, I’m finally turning my attention back to my academic future. Much as I love my current job, my (almost) three year contract finishes in December, and besides, I’ve a research project I’ve been itching to get off the ground and I need to find somewhere that’ll let me do that. Most likely, this will be a university department in the informatics field, but I suppose it could potentially be a forward thinking company. If you know of any funded PhD positions or jobs being advertised that would provide scope for researching, experimenting with and publishing on semantic annotation and the authority of information, please drop me a line.

As for the blog, I’ve drafted several new posts over the last few months, none of which are ready for publication yet. I’ll polish them up and post them if allows.