StephanKinsella.com

According to this site, an attempt to create a “new Hong Kong”, called the Limón REAL Project, is in the works. The idea is apparently to transform the Costa Rican province of Limón into a free market autonomous zone (REAL is the Spanish acronym for “Free and Autonomous Region”). See also this link (link purported to expire in 3 days). Another “new libertarian nation” scam? Who knows.

Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders, by Declan McCullagh, Wired, Mar. 22, 2002, discusses how a new bill introduced in Congress would regulate the entire electronics-computer-software industry. And advocates of copyright say it’s just another “property right.” Bah. More on IP

Fascinating reading (for those with an interest in, but who have always been just slightly bothered by, modern quantum physics): Interview with Carver Mead. (Other links on revisionist physics.) Mead comes tantalizingly close to an almost Austrian view of scientism and the hyper-mathematicism of modern science. Mead critiques the substitution of “mathematical description” for “intuitive understanding”. Of some of the mathematics, he says: “It’s conceptual nonsense. You can calculate stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don’t make any sense. That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented students out of physics. We have ended up with more and more mathematicians in the physics departments. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with mathematics—it’s the language we use to express the precise relations of physical law. But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for the physics itself. Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing becomes a shell game.” This will sound familiar to those familiar with the Austrian-Misesian critique of scientism-positivism-empiricism-monism. Mead could benefit from reading Ludwig von Mises’ The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science and Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s Economic Science and the Austrian Method.

To supplement my previous blog: Another fascinating article on this topic: The Law of Accelerating Returns, by Raymond Kurzweil (author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence).

The “Wayback Machine” at the Internet Archive is extremely cool, and a bit scary. It lets you find old or dead web sites. They take a complete snapshot of the entire web every so often, and archive it. You can type in a given website or URL and see the content on various dates (thanks to Pat Galea).

Interesting discussion of notion of “copyleft”: The Great Giveaway: Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard headed operators giving them away for free?, by Graham Lawton, NewScientist.com. It’s interesting to note that though the (often leftist) advocates of the copyleft idea seem to brand themselves as radical opponents of copyright (and private property, capitalism, commercialism, profit motive, etc.), the very notion of copyleft requires there to be copyright. This is because copyleft is really just a special type of copyright license, one that gives users of a copyrighted work virtually unfettered permission to use/copy/distribute/modify the work–but only “on the condition that” similar “copyleft” is given in the subsequent work. Without copyright, there could be no copyleft. While copyleft is an admittedly clever use of copyright, advocates of copyleft are also necessarily advocates of copyright.

Examiner Obscenity: in a purportedly genuine Official Action sent by an Examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to a patent applicant (see Paragraph 8) (JPG file, 116Kb; courtesy PATNEWS)

Voicemail message, with increasingly frustrated obscenities, purportedly left by trademark applicant/appellant with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) (WAV file, 1.3Mb)

I’ve updated my list of Annoying and Pretentious Terms & Figures of Speech. Suggestions/comments welcome.

Pat Buchanan’s latest book, The Death of the West, looks to be an important wake-up call about the dangers that immigration, multiculturalism, and the like pose to western culture and civilization. However, Buchanan has written a recent column linking libertarians with a pro-immigration stance–despite explicitly libertarian anti-immigration arguments by arch-libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe (longer PDF article) and other reservations about open borders by other libertarians. In response to Buchanan’s lumping of all libertarians together under the pro-immigration banner, WorldNetDaily published today a response to Buchanan from paleolibertarian Karen De Coster, plus other responses and articles on immigration. De Coster makes it clear that not all libertarians are pro-open borders, despite Pat’s incorrect assumption to the contrary.

Another Pat Response

In addition to the commentary linked in the last blog, see also Buchanan’s column accusing libertarians of being pro-immigration.

I’ve come across DynamicDrive.com, a neat website with cool tricks, tips, and tools for web sites, e.g., mouse trail effects.

I’ve been using Netflix–a great service that I recommend–and the other day rented The Man in the Moon. It’s a fantastic movie; I agree with Roger Ebert’s review.