Van dingen die voorbijkomen

Net uitgekomen: Wantrouwen in de wandelgangen. Hoe pers en politiek van elkaar vervreemd raakten. Het is in feite een tweeluik, geschreven door good old Jan Tromp (1949) en coming man Coen van de Ven (1992): zij namen achtereenvolgens deel I … Lees verder →

If asked to name the best-known tower in London, one could, perhaps, make a fair case for the likes of the Shard or the Gherkin. But whatever their current prominence on the skyline, those works of twenty-first-century starchitecture have yet to develop much value as symbols of the city. If sheer age were the deciding factor, then the Tower of London, the oldest intact building in the capital, would take the top spot, but for how many people outside England does its name call a clear image to mind? No, to find London’s most beloved vertical icon, we must look to the Victorian era, the only historical period that could have given rise to Big Ben.

We must first clarify that Big Ben is not a tower. The building you’re thinking of has been called the Elizabeth Tower since Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, but before that its name was the Clock Tower. That was apt enough, since tower’s defining feature has always been the clock at the top — or rather, the four clocks at the top, one for each face.

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You can see how they work in the animated video from Youtuber Jared Owen above, which provides a detailed visual and verbal explanation of both the structure’s context and its content, including a tour of the mechanisms that have kept it running nearly without interruption for more than a century and a half.

Only by looking into the tower’s belfry can you see Big Ben, which, as Owens says, is actually the name of the largest of its bells. Its announcement of each hour on the hour — as well as the ringing of the other, smaller bells — is activated by a system of gear trains ultimately driven by gravity, harnessed by the swinging of a large pendulum (to which occasional speed adjustments have always been made with the reliable method of placing pennies on top of it). Owens doesn’t clarify whether or not this is the same pendulum Roger Miller sang about back in the sixties, but at least now we know that, technically speaking, we should interpret the following lyrics as not “the tower, Big Ben” but “the tower; Big Ben.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Before her literary fame, her stormy relationship with Ted Hughes and her crippling battles with depression, Sylvia Plath was an enthusiastic student at Smith College. “The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon,” she wrote to her mother. “If only I can work, work, work to justify all of my opportunities.”

During her junior year, she broke her leg on a skiing trip in upstate New York. The accident landed her briefly in the hospital and she wound up with a cast on her leg. Her mood darkened.

Psyching herself out for her return to college, she wrote in her diary a pair of lists.

The first list is a short series of rules about how to behave around her new beau, Myron Lotz. All three points are good advice for anyone who is utterly smitten, particularly number two – “I will not throw myself at him physically.” In the end, Plath’s relationship with Lotz didn’t amount to much. She reportedly commemorated him within her poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” with the refrain “I think I made you up inside my head.”

The second list is a collection of “Back to School Commandments.” These commandments included asking her English prof Robert Gorham Davis for an extension; consulting with her German teacher Marie Schnieders (“Be calm,” she writes mysteriously, “even it is a matter of life & death.”); and completing her application to be a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine. (She nailed that last task.)

The list’s final commandment comes off bleaker than the mildly panicky motivational tone of the rest of the list. “Attitude is everything: so KEEP CHEERFUL, even if you fail your science, your unit, get a hateful silence from Myron, no dates, no praise, no love, nothing. There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

via The Excellent Lists of Note book

Related Content:

Why Should We Read Sylvia Plath? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Christopher Hitchens Creates a Revised List of The 10 Commandments for the 21st Century

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here.

Een pakketbezorger van PostNL blijkt vorige week een doos hondenvoer van 15 kilo bovenop konijn Okkie in de Almeerse Filmwijk te hebben gegooid. Dat meldde Omroep Flevoland woensdag. De zaak is direct opgelost door PostNL, maar velen tipten mij hierover met de vraag hoe dit zou zijn gelopen als iedereen zich zuiver juridisch had gedragen.

Juridisch bekeken ligt de casus als volgt. Een consument plaatst een bestelling bij een webwinkel. Die moet zorgen dat deze bij de consument wordt bezorgd. Dat de winkel daar een hulppersoon (bezorgbedrijf PostNL) voor inschakelt, is voor haar rekening en risico. Niet alleen bij kwijtraken, maar ook bij andere vormen van schade. Zoals letsel- en zaakschade; toegegeven dat is zeldzaam bij bezorging maar het kan. (En voor de fijnproevers: een konijn is geen zaak, art. 3:2a BW, maar de regels van zaken gelden in principe ook voor hen.)

De consument kan dus de winkel aanspreken voor de gevolgen van de fout bij het bezorgen. Oók PostNL mag zij aanspreken, al gaat het dan om onrechtmatige daad en niet om wanprestatie bij een bezorgovereenkomst – de consument heeft geen contract met PostNL, alleen de winkel heeft dat.

Mogelijk heeft de winkel een bepaalde uitsluiting van aansprakelijkheid in haar voorwaarden. Dat is sowieso naar consumenten toe twijfelachtig. De grijze lijst van algemene voorwaarden vermeldt immers dat het vermoedelijk onredelijk bezwarend is om je aansprakelijkheid in te perken. Als winkelier moet je dus een goede reden hebben om dat wél te mogen. En dat is zelden voorstelbaar. Maar er is hier nog iets bijzonders aan de hand.

“[H]et was wel een roekeloze actie. Het had ook een kind kunnen zijn.” Zo citeerde men de eigenaar van het konijn. En dat triggert de meelezende juristen wellicht: een categorie bijzondere gevallen in het aansprakelijkheidsrecht is de schade veroorzaakt door opzet of bewuste roekeloosheid. Als daarvan sprake is, dan kun je je sowieso niet beroepen op een beperking van aansprakelijkheid.

Opzet is makkelijk – en zeldzaam. Je had dan de bedoeling de schade te veroorzaken. Dus niet enkel “weet je wat, ik gooi die doos over de schutting”, dan heb je wel opzet op het gooien maar niet op het vernielen van het konijn. Bij opzet was je motivatie “ha, ik zie een konijn, daar gooi ik eens lekker een doos van 15 kilo op”. En nee, dat krijg je zelden bewezen.

Wat is dan “bewust roekeloos”? De Hoge Raad formuleerde het in 2012 zo: Bij bewuste roekeloosheid is de schadeveroorzaker zich bewust van de aanmerkelijke kans op letsel of schade; er is sprake van een gebrek aan zorg met betrekking tot de gevolgen van het handelen of nalaten. Een voorbeeld van dat laatste is het achterwege laten van eenvoudige maatregelen ter voorkoming van dreigende aanzienlijke schade. In dit geval: je had even over de schutting kunnen kijken of daar iets (of iemand) lag die de doos op zich zou krijgen. Dat nalaten maakt het dus bewust roekeloos, waarmee de (onbeperkte) aansprakelijkheid gegeven is.

Gelukkig ging het in de praktijk beter: Nadat hij een melding deed bij PostNL kwam er een manager van de bezorger langs. “We hebben een fijn gesprek gehad, hij heeft zijn excuses aangeboden. Ook alle kosten voor de dierenarts worden vergoed. Maar het brengt Okkie niet terug.” Vreeswijk is blij dat PostNL goed heeft doorgepakt, maar baalt er wel van dat hij er zo achter moest komen. “Er ligt natuurlijk veel druk op die gasten. Maar doe dan ten minste een briefje in de bus dat er iets mis is gegaan.” Arnoud

 

Het bericht Is een verpletterd konijn nu ook al internetrecht? verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

This week I am at the annual iPres digital preservation conference. It is an amazing week of meeting colleagues and old friends who share the same passion of digital preservation. Outside of this community and my co-workers, talking about file formats and digital preservation usually bores people to death and I can hear some of them mumble under their breath, “nerd”! I term I am happy to accept.

At the conference, which is in lovely Urbana-Champaign Illinois this year, I am trying to soak in all the amazing talks and conversations about the challenges facing our work. There were a couple great workshops on Persistent Identifiers and Digital Object Storage Criteria. The presentations I made were of course on File Formats, documentation, and obsolescence. One talk before my panel conversation was about the ubiquitous Adobe Flash format.

The paper, “Around for Decades, Gone in a Flash: How we dealt with Flash objects and the National Archives of the Netherlands” was presented by Lotte Wijsman and Marin Rappard. They knew they had flash objects in their web archives and wanted to go through the process of how they might be preserved and accessed. They started out looking for any files with “FLA”, “SWF”, and “FLV” as extensions. This proved problematic as there were references to those extensions within other documents and objects. They then used DROID to identify the flash formats. “SWF” has quite a number of format PUID’s.

PUIDFormat NameFormat VersionExtensionfmt/104Macromedia Flash1swf,fmt/105Macromedia Flash2swf,fmt/106Macromedia Flash3swf,fmt/107Macromedia Flash4swf,fmt/108Macromedia Flash5swf,fmt/109Macromedia Flash6swf,fmt/110Macromedia Flash7swf,fmt/505Adobe Flash8swf,fmt/506Adobe Flash9swf,fmt/507Adobe Flash10swf,fmt/757Adobe Flash11swf,fmt/758Adobe Flash12swf,fmt/759Adobe Flash13swf,fmt/760Adobe Flash14swf,fmt/761Adobe Flash15swf,fmt/762Adobe Flash16swf,fmt/763Adobe Flash17swf,fmt/764Adobe Flash18swf,fmt/765Adobe Flash19swf,fmt/766Adobe Flash20swf,fmt/767Adobe Flash21swf,fmt/768Adobe Flash22swf,fmt/769Adobe Flash23swf,fmt/770Adobe Flash24swf,fmt/771Adobe Flash25swf,fmt/772Adobe Flash26swf,fmt/773Adobe Flash27swf,fmt/774Adobe Flash28swf,fmt/775Adobe Flash29swf,fmt/776Adobe Flash30swf,

Even the Macromedia/Adobe Flash Video format has a PRONOM PUID, x-fmt/382.

The format missing from PRONOM is the FLA format. FLA is the native format for Macromedia/Adobe Flash for saving the source project of your Flash document. SWF files are compiled from the FLA source. This means the the SWF will be the most common format found on the web and in public places, but the FLA format might be more often found on local drives and working folders.

The Flash format and software was actually created by Future Wave software in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator, but was shortly bought by Macromedia later that year and Flash 1.0 was born. FutureSplash used the extension .SPA, but Macromedia changed it to FLA.

The format was initially based on the Microsoft Compound File Format or the OLE container format.

oledir Flash4-S01.fla oledir 0.54 - http://decalage.info/python/oletools OLE directory entries in file Flash4-S01.fla: ----+------+-------+----------------------+-----+-----+-----+--------+------ id |Status|Type |Name |Left |Right|Child|1st Sect|Size ----+------+-------+----------------------+-----+-----+-----+--------+------ 0 |<Used>|Root |Root Entry |- |- |1 |5 |4416 1 |<Used>|Stream |Contents |2 |- |- |6 |4013 2 |<Used>|Stream |Page 1 |- |- |- |0 |329 3 |unused|Empty | |- |- |- |0 |0 ----+----------------------------+------+-------------------------------------- id |Name |Size |CLSID ----+----------------------------+------+-------------------------------------- 0 |Root Entry |- |597CAA70-72AA-11CF-831E-524153480000 1 |Contents |4013 | 2 |Page 1 |329 |

The FLA format stayed with OLE until Adobe Flash CS5, which the format changed to use a ZIP container to store all the content.

Flash5.5-S01.fla Type = zip Physical Size = 216632 Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 25 25 mimetype 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 9 9 Flash5.5-S01.xfl 2022-07-09 11:57:46 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY 2022-07-09 11:57:46 D.... 0 0 META-INF 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 49267 3936 DOMDocument.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 9735 1103 META-INF/metadata.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 8093 2222 PublishSettings.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 0 0 MobileSettings.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols 2022-07-09 11:57:48 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY/Voice 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 151006 151006 bin/M 1 1252032698.dat 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 99707 15311 LIBRARY/mouth.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 16510 4534 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/A I.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14334 4086 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/C D G K N R S Th Y Z.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14531 4040 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/E.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 15846 4007 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/F V D Th.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 13093 3542 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/L D Th.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 2106 751 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/M B P Closed.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14130 3949 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/O.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 11082 2951 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/Open_Rest.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14847 4066 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/U.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 8139 2202 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/W Q.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 15768 3914 LIBRARY/panda.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 10477 1064 LIBRARY/sample graph.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 538 538 bin/SymDepend.cache ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2022-07-09 11:57:48 469243 213256 21 files, 4 folders

The move to a ZIP container included a new format, XFL. This XFL file is a simple text file with the text “PROXY-CS5″. In the DOMDocument.xml file we find an XML namespace, xmlns=”http://ns.adobe.com/xfl/2008/” and a version of the XFL structure, xflVersion=”2.1″.

This ZIP compressed FLA file is still being used in the current Adobe Animate software, which no longer uses the flash technology and uses more modern web formats like HTML5 to display the animations.

I took each version and made a PRONOM signature, which you can find here with samples. These container signatures should cover all the major changes for the format, but there is a problem……..

Listing archive: Flash5.5-S01v5.fla -- Path = Flash5.5-S01v5.fla Type = zip ERRORS: Headers Error Physical Size = 216581 Embedded Stub Size = 63 Characteristics = Local Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 25 25 mimetype 2022-07-09 11:57:46 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY 2022-07-09 11:57:46 D.... 0 0 META-INF 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 48556 3742 DOMDocument.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 10133 1112 META-INF/metadata.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 8115 2219 PublishSettings.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 0 0 MobileSettings.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols 2022-07-09 11:57:48 D.... 0 0 LIBRARY/Voice 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 151006 151006 bin/M 1 1252032698.dat 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 99551 15319 LIBRARY/mouth.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 16580 4536 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/A I.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14404 4089 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/C D G K N R S Th Y Z.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14531 4044 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/E.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 15848 4008 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/F V D Th.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 13024 3546 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/L D Th.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 2106 752 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/M B P Closed.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14200 3955 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/O.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 11152 2963 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/Open_Rest.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 14777 4069 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/U.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 8287 2228 LIBRARY/Mouth shape graphic symbols/W Q.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 15768 3914 LIBRARY/panda.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 10477 1064 LIBRARY/sample graph.xml 2022-07-09 11:57:48 ..... 538 538 bin/SymDepend.cache 2022-07-09 11:57:46 ..... 25 25 mimetype 2022-07-09 11:58:18 ..... 9 9 Flash5.5-S01v5.xfl ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2022-07-09 11:58:18 469112 213163 22 files, 4 folders

Turns out majority of the samples I have from many versions of Adobe Flash after CS5 have a ZIP Header error. When using the new signatures in DROID, the samples with the header errors will fail in the DROID’s zip library processing. The DROID logs shows this issue:

Could not process the potential container format (ZIP): file:///Flash5.5-S01v5.fla Expected 25 more entries in the Central Directory!

The Central Directory header in a ZIP file is quite important to the proper function of the ZIP container. Wikipedia has a great explanation of the header. You may notice in the listing above the file “mimetype” is shown twice which is probably the extra entries the parser wasn’t expecting.

So currently the identification of majority of these FLA formats is on hold until a way is discovered to ignore the error and continue the container identification in DROID.

In the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota stands a piece of urban utopia. It takes the surprising form of a gas station, albeit one designed by no less a visionary of American architecture than Frank Lloyd Wright. He originally conceived it as an element of Broadacre City, a form of mechanized rural settlement intended as a Jeffersonian democracy-inspired rebuke against what Wright saw as the evils of the overgrown twentieth century city, first publicly presented in his 1932 book The Disappearing City. “That’s an aspirational title,” says architectural historian Richard Kronick in the Twin Cities PBS video above. “He thought that cities should go away.”

Cities didn’t go away, and Broadacre City remained speculative, though Wright did pursue every opportunity he could identify to bring it closer to reality. “In 1952, Ray and Emma Lindholm commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build them a home on the south side of Cloquet,” writes photographer Susan Tregoning.

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When Wright “discovered that Mr. Lindholm was in the petroleum business, he mentioned that he was quite interested in gas station design.” When Lindholm decided to rebuild a Phillips 66 station a few years later, he accepted Wright’s design proposal, calling it “an experiment to see if a little beauty couldn’t be incorporated in something as commonplace as a service station” — though Wright himself, characteristically, wasn’t thinking in quite such humble terms.

Wright’s R. W. Lindholm Service Station incorporates a cantilevered upper-level “customer lounge,” and the idea, as Kronick puts it, “was that customers would sit up here and while their time away waiting for their cars to be repaired,” and no doubt “discuss the issues of the day.” In Wright’s mind, “this little room is where the details of democracy would be worked out.” As with Southdale Center, Victor Gruen’s pioneering shopping mall that had opened two years earlier in Minneapolis, two hours south of Cloquet, the community aspect of the design never came to fruition: though its windows offer a distinctively American (or to use Wright’s language, Usonian) vista, the customer lounge has a bare, disused look in the pictures visitors take today.

Image by Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many such visitors, who arrive from not just all around the country but all around the world. But when it was last sold in 2018, the buyer it found was relatively local: Minnesota-born Andrew Volna, owner of such Minneapolis operations as vinyl-record manufacturer Noiseland Industries and the once-abandoned, now-renovated Hollywood Theater. “Wright saw the station as a cultural center, somewhere to meet a friend, get your car fixed, and have a cup of coffee while you waited,” writes Tregoning, though he never did make it back out to the finished building before he died in 1959. These sixty-odd years later, perhaps Volna will be the one to turn this unlikely architectural hot spot into an even less likely social one as well.

Related content:

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How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)

The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Doghouse, His Smallest Architectural Creation (1956)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempting, but church Latin barely resembles the classical written language, a highly formal grammar full of symmetries and puzzles. You don’t speak classical Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in particular, when you’ve rendered it somewhat intelligible. Given that the study of an ancient language is rarely a conversational art, it can sometimes feel a little alienating.

And so you might imagine how pleased I was to discover what looked like classical Latin in the real world: the text known to designers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erroneously) “Greek copy.”

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The idea, Priceonomics informs us, is to force people to look at the layout and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mistake it for their native language,” therefore Lorem Ipsum is “less likely than other filler text to be mistaken for final copy and published by accident.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve probably seen it, looking something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

When I first encountered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about trying to translate it. But it wasn’t long before I realized that Lorem Ipsum is mostly gibberish, a garbling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” meaning pain, suffering, or sorrow. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syntax come from, and how did it get so scrambled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Hampden-Sydney Director of Publications Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, statesmen, and philosopher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

Why Cicero? Put most simply, writes Priceonomics, “for a long time, Cicero was everywhere.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetoricians meant that his writing became the benchmark for prose in Latin, the standard European language of the Middle Ages. The passage that generated Lorem Ipsum translates in part to a sentiment Latinists will well understand:

Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.

Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tortuous feeling of trying to render some of Cicero’s complex, verbose sentences into English. Doing so with tolerable proficiency is, for some of us, “great pleasure” indeed.

But how did Cicero, that master stylist, come to be so badly manhandled as to be nearly unrecognizable? Lorem Ipsum has a history that long predates online content management. It has been used as filler text since the sixteenth century when—as McClintock theorized—“some typesetter had to make a type specimen book, to demo different fonts” and decided that “the text should be insensible, so as not to distract from the page’s graphical features.” It appears that this enterprising craftsman snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into nonsense. The text, says McClintock, “has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.”

The story of Lorem Ipsum is a fascinating one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevity raises a further question: should we still be using it at all, this mangling of a dead language, in a medium as vital and dynamic as web publishing, where “content” refers to hundreds of design elements besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nostalgia that’s outlived its usefulness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spirited defense of the practice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the garbled Latin go the way of manual typesetting machines, consider perhaps as an alternative “Nietzsche Ipsum,” which generates random paragraphs of mostly verb-less, incoherent Nietzsche-like text, in English. Hey, at least it looks like a real language.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Related Content:

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Compelling Case That the “Dead Language” Is an “Eternal Language”

What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It

Can Modern-Day Italians Understand Latin? A Youtuber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

De Nederlandse politie zegt bij de chatapp Telegram telefoonnummers op te kunnen vragen die gebruikers juist geheim willen houden, zo ontdekte BNR via een Woo verzoek. Op de eigen website meldt Telegram dat het deze gegevens alleen deelt als het een gerechtelijk bevel ontvangt dat de betreffende gebruiker een terreurverdachte is. Eindelijk een kans me op te winden over die mega-irritante term “gerechtelijk bevel”.

Bij Security.nl leggen ze uit: Op de formulieren die door de politie zijn gedeeld blijkt dat het om zogenoemde ‘emergency disclosure requests’ gaat. Meerdere chatdiensten bieden opsporingsdiensten deze optie om gegevens van gebruikers op te vragen als er sprake is van onmiddellijk dreigend levensgevaar. Dat opsporingsdiensten deze mogelijkheid ook bij Telegram hebben staat niet op de website van de chatdienst vermeld. Maar dat iets niet op je website staat, betekent natuurlijk niet dat je het niet hoeft te doen. De wet is de wet, en zeker bij telecom-vorderingen kan de politie heel erg veel. En nee, daar is lang niet altijd tussenkomst van een rechter bij nodig.

Wat me bij mijn irritatie brengt: die term “gerechtelijk bevel” is natuurlijk de letterlijke vertaling van “court order”, de Amerikaanse constructie waarbij een rechtbank oordeelt over een kwestie en dan een -meestal voorlopige- uitspraak doet. Dat kan bijvoorbeeld een gag order zijn, hou je mond hierover, maar ook een bevel tot afgeven van gegevens of verwijderen van een publicatie.

De court order verscheen als term in websitevoorwaarden en dergelijke omdat dit het mechanisme is waarmee je in de VS dingen afdwingt. Niet eens met de publicatie? Wil je weten wie hier achter zit? Zoek je een persoon voor je schadeclaim? Haal maar een court order en dan doen we wat daarin staat. En zónder court order kun je roepen wat je wilt, maar blijven we lekker zitten waar we zitten.

De misvatting is hiermee ontstaan dat áltijd een court order nodig is, oftewel dat er altijd een rechter naar moet kijken. Wat niet waar is: in Nederland is bijvoorbeeld afgifte van NAW-gegevens van klanten zonder rechter verplicht, en je kunt schadeclaims krijgen als je daar niet aan meewerkt.

In het strafrecht is het allemaal iets strenger en vooral formeler. Maar we hebben een gelaagd systeem, waarbij de benodigde checks and balances afhangen van de ernst van de gevorderde maatregelen én van het achterliggende misdrijf. Neem bijvoorbeeld artikel 126na Strafvordering: In geval van verdenking van een misdrijf kan de opsporingsambtenaar in het belang van het onderzoek een vordering doen gegevens te verstrekken terzake van naam, adres, postcode, woonplaats, nummer en soort dienst van een gebruiker van een communicatiedienst. Artikel 126n, tweede lid, is van toepassing. Volgens dit artikel mag dus iedere politieagent vorderen tot afgifte van NAW gegevens en nummer (ip-adres, telefoonnummer, etc) van een gebruiker wanneer er vermoedelijk een misdrijf is gepleegd. Het maakt niet uit welk misdrijf. Hierbij is dus géén tussenkomst van de rechter nodig, dit mag de agent gewoon vragen en je moet dat dan geven als dienstverlener.

De reden dat dit zo mag, is omdat dit vrij basale gegevens zijn en een misdrijf toch wel iets ernstigs is. Met deze gegevens kan de politie dan bijvoorbeeld nagaan of het ip-adres matcht met het ip-adres dat men op een oplichtingssite vond.

Een agent mag hiermee echter géén inhoud van bijvoorbeeld mailboxes vorderen, want die gegevens staan hier niet genoemd. Daarvoor zou je bijvoorbeeld artikel 126nd inzetten: In geval van verdenking van een misdrijf als omschreven in artikel 67, eerste lid, kan de officier van justitie in het belang van het onderzoek van degene van wie redelijkerwijs kan worden vermoed dat hij toegang heeft tot bepaalde opgeslagen of vastgelegde gegevens, vorderen deze gegevens te verstrekken. Dit mag dus alleen als het gaat om een ernstig misdrijf – artikel 67 Strafrecht bevat een lijst met wat we “ernstig” vinden. En de vordering moet gedaan worden door een officier van justitie, dus niet door iedere willekeurige opsporingsambtenaar. Dat is dus een iets hogere lat.

De rechter-commissaris komt in beeld als het nóg wat strenger moet, bijvoorbeeld bij het vorderen van gegevens die aan te merken zijn als bijzondere persoonsgegevens. Die zijn in artikel 126nd uitgesloten (lid 2) van de vordering. Wil de officier dat toch, dan moet zhij naar artikel 126nf:

1. In geval van verdenking van een misdrijf als omschreven in artikel 67, eerste lid, dat gezien zijn aard of de samenhang met andere door de verdachte begane misdrijven een ernstige inbreuk op de rechtsorde oplevert, kan de officier van justitie, indien het belang van het onderzoek dit dringend vordert, van degene van wie redelijkerwijs kan worden vermoed dat hij toegang heeft tot gegevens als bedoeld in artikel 126nd, tweede lid, derde volzin, deze gegevens vorderen.
2. (…)
3. Een vordering als bedoeld in het eerste lid kan slechts worden gedaan na voorafgaande schriftelijke machtiging, op vordering van de officier van justitie te verlenen door de rechter-commissaris. Artikel 126l, zevende lid, is van overeenkomstige toepassing.

Hier bepaalt lid 3 dus dat een rechter-commissaris nodig is, deze machtigt de officier om de vordering te doen. Maar er is hier nóg een eis bijgekomen: het ernstige misdrijf moet nu ook nog eens “een ernstige inbreuk op de rechtsorde” opleveren, wat een nog weer hogere inhoudelijke toets betekent.

En om dan weer het bericht van BNR erbij te pakken: het gaat hier dus om telefoonnummers, wat een ‘licht’ gegeven is en waarvoor dus iedere opsporingsambtenaar een vordering mag doen bij verdenking van enig misdrijf. Daarvoor is dus zeer zeker geen rechter-commissaris nodig. Waarom Telegram dit niet op de site vermeldt, weet ik niet.

Arnoud

 

 

 

Het bericht ‘Politie kan ip-adressen en telefoonnummers Telegramgebruikers vorderen’ verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

Mark Rutte was een jonge minister-president die op 5 november 2010 enthousiasme en daadkracht uitstraalde op zijn eerste persconferentie met de parlementaire journalisten. Er zou worden aangepakt. Hij spreekt van 17 hervormingen en een kleinere overheid is daar eentje van. … Lees verder →

Last week Germany’s highest court, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), for the 2nd time in less than a decade referred questions related to the Metall auf Metall case to the European Court of Justice. This time the BGH is asking the CJEU to explain the concept of pastiche so that it can determine if the use of a 2 second sample of Kraftwerks 1977 song Metall auf Metall in Sabrina Setlur’s 1997 song Nur Mir qualifies as such.

Last week’s referral is the newest development in the legal saga that started in 1999, when Kraftwerk sued Setlur‘s producer Moses Pelham for the unauthorized use of the sample, and that has seen Germany’s highest court deal with the matter for the fifth time already. In response to the previous referral, the CJEU had established that the use of the sample was legal under Germany’s pre-2002 copyright rules but that it was infringing under the post-2002 copyright rules (that implemented the 2001 Copyright in the Information Society Directive). This conclusion was largely based on the finding that following the adoption of the 2001 Copyright in the Information Society (InfoSoc) directive, the concept of free use (“Freie Benutzung”) in German copyright law was against EU law.

The new referral arises from the fact that, as part of its 2021 Copyright revision and in order to bring German copyright law into compliance with the EU directives, Germany had removed the free use provision and at the same time introduced a new exception for the purpose of Caricature, Parody and Pastiche (§ 51a UrhG). The Hamburg Court of Appeals, to which the BGH had returned the case for a final determination, has subsequently ruled that after the introduction of the new exception in 2021 the use of the sample was in fact legal again as it constituted a use for the purpose of pastiche.

This decision has since been appealed by Kraftwerk, which is how the case came back to the BGH for another round and in the context of this appeal the BGH has now again asked the CJEU for guidance, this time on the meaning of the the term Pastiche in Article 5(3)(k) of the 2001 InfoSoc Directive from which the German exception is derived. This means that this time around the CJEU’s ruling in the case will have much wider implications than for German copyright law alone. It is very likely to determine the EU legal regime for sampling.

The referral to the BGH contains two separate questions which are described in the court’s press release (the text of the actual decision which contains the questions has still to be released by the BGH). According to the press release (translation ours)…

… the question first arises as to whether the restriction on use for the purpose of pastiche within the meaning of Article 5(3)(k) of Directive 2001/29/EC is a catch-all provision at least for an artistic treatment of a pre-existing work or other subject matter, including sampling, and whether restrictive criteria such as the requirement of humour, imitation of style or homage apply to the concept of pastiche.

The idea that uses for the purpose of pastiche serve as a sort of exception of last resort to safeguard artistic freedom is a welcome one, as it would protect freedom to create at the EU level, as we recommend in our Policy Recommendation #7. Considering that the pastiche exception is already mandatory in the EU, a positive answer to the first part of that question by the CJEU would ensure an harmonized protection of freedom of artistic expression at the EU level.

The CJEU has been suggesting for a while now that the principles enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights are already fully internalized by EU copyright law, namely through the existing list of EU exceptions. As we have noted in our Policy Paper #14 on fundamental rights as a limit to copyright during emergencies, that is not necessarily the case, as the existing exceptions do not appear to have exhausted all the fundamental rights considerations that are imposed by the Charter, and on the other hand not all of those balancing mechanisms have yet found full expression in the national laws of the EU Member States.

With this referral, however, the court will have the opportunity to analyze whether the EU copyright law is sufficiently taking into account artistic freedom considerations. In our view, an interpretation of the pastiche exception in light of that fundamental freedom should lead the Court to provide a broad scope that covers all forms of artistic treatment protected by the Charter.

In the press release the BGH expresses a very similar concern noting the inherent conflict between the rigid EU copyright system and the freedom of (artistic) expression:

The pastiche exception could be understood as a general exception for artistic freedom, which is necessary because the necessary scope of artistic freedom cannot be safeguarded in all cases by the immanent limitation of the scope of protection of exploitation rights to uses of works and performances in a recognisable form and the other exceptions such as, in particular, parody, caricature and quotation.

This understanding of the Pastiche exception would also align with the intent of the German legislator when introducing it in 2021. In his 2022 study on the Pastice Exception conducted for the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, Till Kreutzer notes that

The German legislator has deliberately phrased the pastiche term in an open manner. It is clearly stated in the legislative materials that sec. 51a UrhG is intended to have a broad and dynamic scope of application. The pastiche exception serves to legitimize common cultural and communication practices on the internet, especially user-generated content and communication in social networks. It is supposed to be applied to remixes, memes, GIFs, mashups, fan art, fan fiction and sampling, among others.

In the context of this study Kreutzer proposes the following “copyright-specific definition” of pastiche and concludes that the concept covers the practice of sampling:

A pastiche is a distinct cultural and/or communicative artifact that borrows from and recognizably adopts the individual creative elements of published third-party works.

It will be interesting to see how the CJEU will approach the same task. In this context the second question formulated by the BGH is slightly more troubling. Here the BGH wants to know …

… whether the use “for the purpose” of a pastiche within the meaning of Article 5(3)(k) of Directive 2001/29/EC requires a finding of an intention on the part of the user to use an object of copyright protection for the purpose of a pastiche or whether the recognisability of its character as a pastiche is sufficient for someone who is aware of the copyright object referred to and who has the intellectual understanding required to perceive the pastiche.

Taking into account the facts of the Metall auf Metall case this question does not make much sense. In 1997, when Nur Mir was recorded, the concept of pastiche did not exist in German copyright law (and neither did the InfoSoc directive which introduced the concept at the EU level). This makes it pretty much impossible for the record producers to have had the intention to use the snippet from Metall of Metall for the purpose of pastiche — a purpose that according the the BGH itself still need to be defined by the CJEU.

For the reasons of legal certainty alone the CJEU should reject the intention requirement and base any definition on the characteristics of the use alone, as suggested in the above quoted definition developed by Kreutzer.

In any case the new BGH referral is a very welcome development in the Metall auf Metall saga. It provides the CJEU with the much needed opportunity to clarify this important concept that played a major role in the recent discussions about Article 17 CDSM Directive. In order to secure a majority for the directive, the EU legislator made the pastiche exception mandatory in an effort to safeguard transformative uses of copyrighted works on user generated content platforms.

It would only be fitting that the final legacy of Kraftwerk‘s narrow-minded attempt to weaponize copyright to limit the creative expression of a subsequent generation of artists would almost three decades later result in a broad conceptualisation of pastiche as safeguarding artistic expression across the EU.

The post Do 90s rappers dream of electric pastiche? appeared first on COMMUNIA Association.

The distinctiveness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s isolation. It’s probably no coincidence that, as almost every place in the world has become less isolated, accents have become less distinctive. In these days of vanishing forms of regional speech, if you wanted to hear a new one coming into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth — or one specific end of the Earth, anyway, as demonstrated not long ago by researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Taking and analyzing recordings made over the course of one winter, they discovered that a new accent has begun to take shape in English as spoken in Antarctica.

“Antarctica has no native population or permanent residents, but it does have a transitory community of scientists and support staff who live there for part of the year on a rotational basis,” writes Tom Hale at IFL Science. “In the summer months, there are typically around 5,000 people living in Antarctica, but that drops to just 1,000 in the winter.” It was from this group of the Antarctic “over-winterers” — and in particular, from those working on the British Antarctic Survey — that the linguistic researchers recruited their subjects, eight of whom were from England, one from the United States, one from Germany, and one from Iceland.

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“The findings revealed subtle but measurable changes in the speech of the overwintering staff during their time in Antarctica,” writes Mental Floss’ Brett Reynolds. “One change was convergence, where individuals in a close-knit group unconsciously begin to adopt similar speech characteristics. In this case, that meant convergence of /u/ (the ‘oo’ in goose), /ju/ (the ‘you’ in few), /ou/ (the ‘oh’ in goat), and /ɪ:/ (the ‘ee’ in the last syllable in happy).” Apart from that phenomenon, the researchers also noticed another change in the /ou/ of goat: “the over-winterers began to pronounce it more toward the front of their mouths than toward the back. (British pronunciations are already typically fronter than American /ou/.)”

Even if you got into a conversation with a scientist just back from a long winter in Antarctica, you probably wouldn’t notice any of this. But the fact that the differences between the series of recordings taken at six-week intervals during the winter show measurable changes in pronunciation when compared to control recordings taken back in the United Kingdom suggests that the isolation of Antarctica really does encourage the formation of a new accent. Given a sufficiently long time span, an accent naturally becomes a dialect, and eventually a separate language. Perhaps, even in our age of much-lamented loss of linguistic diversity, some of us can look forward to having Antarctic-speaking descendants.

via Mental Floss

Related content:

The Speech Accent Archive: The English Accents of People Who Speak 341 Different Languages

Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a Foreign Language

What English Would Sound Like If It Was Pronounced Phonetically

Meet the Americans Who Speak with Elizabethan English Accents: An Introduction to the “Hoi Toiders” from Ocracoke, North Carolina

Metallica Plays Antarctica, Setting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Continents: Watch the Full Concert Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

As a general rule, you can gain a decent understanding of any part of the world by eating its regional specialties. This holds especially true in a country like China, with its great size and deep history. Travel to the southeastern province of Fujian, for instance, and you’ve got to try guang bing or “shiny biscuit,” the Chinese equivalent of the bagel. “With flour, dietary alkali and salt, the cake, no bigger than a palm, can be simply cooked, and sells for about 1 yuan ($0.14) on the streets,” says China Daily. “Locals love it, not only because of the crispy and salty taste, but also because of a legendary story.”

The distinctive dishes of border or coastal areas always seem to have particularly intriguing histories, and so it is with the one behind Fujian’s guang bing. “During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), General Qi Jiguang brought an army to fight Japanese invaders in Fujian. Because of continuous rain, they could not cook for the soldiers, so Qi created a kind of cake with a small hole in the middle. Soldiers could string the cakes together and carry them while fighting the enemy.”

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The result looks — and presumably tastes — like a necklace of bagels, the preparation of which could be accomplished in underground ovens that didn’t give away the soldiers’ position as clearly as open campfires would.

You can learn more about this bagel-powered victory of five centuries ago from the Great Big Story video at the top of the post, and more about the continued preparation and sale of guang bing by a few dedicated bakers in the Atlas Obscura video just above. Though plenty of Fujianese take them straight, “some like to add pork, or dried shrimp and Chinese chives in it; some fry it with chitterlings, duck’s gizzard or green been; and some break it into pieces and boil it with soup.” Written records of the bagel as Westerners know it date back to early seventeenth-century Poland, with apparent predecessors seen in that country as early as the late fourteenth century. It may naturally occur to an American traveler in China to unite these two long but distant culinary traditions, in which case he’d do well to pack his own with lox and cream cheese.

Related content:

A Brief History of Dumplings: An Animated Introduction

When Italian Futurists Declared War on Pasta (1930)

Bob Dylan Potato Chips, Anyone?: What They’re Snacking on in China

Philosophy Explained with Donuts

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Eiser was klant van het beleggingsplatform Coin Meester toen zijn crypto account op de website gehackt werd en vervolgens werd leeggeroofd, las ik bij ITenRecht. Oftewel: wat is de zorgplicht van een cryptoplatform, met name op het gebied van security? Had het platform specifiek moeten afdwingen dat tweefactorauthenticatie werd gebruikt?

De eerste vraag bij ICT-diensten is altijd: wat gebeurt hier juridisch nu precies. De klant stelde dat sprake was van een overeenkomst van opdracht, wat in principe bij 95% van de gevallen het juiste antwoord is. Coin Meester wees erop dat klanten akkoord gaan met een “gebruikersovereenkomst”. Wat dat precies zou moeten impliceren weet ik ook niet, en de rechter komt dan ook direct tot de conclusie dat het inderdaad een opdracht is.

Dat is van belang, want bij opdracht hoort een zorgplicht. Hier komt dat neer op een securityniveaudiscussie: had Coin Meester ervoor moeten zorgen dat je alleen met tweefactorauthenticatie kon inloggen, of was toelaten van enkel emailadres en wachtwoord op zich wel adequaat geweest?

Coin Meester bood allebei als keuzemogelijkheid, zij het met waarschuwingsmailtjes als je 2FA niet had aangezet. Dat is echter geen factor bij de vraag of je adequaat je best had gedaan; het enkele feit dat een crimineel toegang kreeg tot het account, maakt dat sprake is van een tekortkoming. De vervolgvraag is of Coin Meester dat verweten kan worden (toerekenbaarheid) en of wellicht sprake is van eigen schuld waardoor de schadevergoeding omlaag mag.

De kantonrechter legt bij Coin Meester een zware verantwoordelijkheid, omdat zij een professioneel gespecialiseerd bedrijf is en bovendien Wft-geregistreerd, hoewel niet als een ‘echte’ betaaldienst. Als professional moet je weten dat er criminelen binnen kunnen komen als je die zwakke beveiliging zonder 2FA hanteert. Het is dan een risico om die situatie te laten bestaan, en dat maakt dat de tekortkoming toerekenbaar is aan Coin Meester.

De keuzes van de consument spelen een beperkte rol, mede vanwege de wettelijke eisen voor betaaldiensten die laten zien dat de wetgever eigenlijk de consument toch best wel wil beschermen. Daarom hoeft de consument slechts 10% van de schade als eigen schuld (het niet instellen van 2FA terwijl dat wel kon) te dragen.

De rechter verwijst de uitsluiting van aansprakelijkheid snel naar de prullenbak, met een redenering die ik niet vaak gezien heb: op grond van Europese regels zijn bedingen verboden die de rechten van consumenten op oneerlijke wijze uitsluiten of beperken. Dit is de blauwe lijst, die meestal wordt gebruikt om boetebedingen te matigen.

De rechter gaat hier een stapje verder: de beperking van aansprakelijkheid sluit het recht op schadevergoeding volledig uit en daar is geen goede reden voor, dus is de hele exoneratie nietig. In dit concrete geval een te begrijpen uitkomst, het bewaren van de bitcoins is zeg maar de kern van de dienstverlening en het niet op orde hebben van security dus een kern-tekortkoming. Maar de rechter gaat niet in op waarom er dan geen goede reden is; het is toch vrij gebruikelijk om bij consumentendiensten je aansprakelijkheid in enige mate te mogen beperken.

Arnoud

Het bericht Cryptoplatform Coin Meester verplicht tot schadevergoeding na diefstal digiwallet van gebruiker verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has stood, in its distinctive fashion, for six and a half centuries now. But it hasn’t always leaned at the same angle: to get the most dramatic view, the best time to go see it was the early nineteen-nineties, when its tilt had reached a full 5.5 degrees. Granted, at that point — when by some reckonings, the tower should no longer have been standing at all — it was closed to the public, presumably due to fears that the sheer weight of tourism would push it over the tipping point. The 1989 collapse of Pavia’s eleventh-century Civic Tower also had something to do with it: couldn’t something be done to spare Pisa’s world-famous landmark from a similar fate?

Attempts to shore up the Leaning Tower up to that point had a checkered history, to put it mildly. Built on soft soil, it started to lean in back in the twelfth century, before its construction was even complete. The process of that construction, in the event, took nearly 200 years to complete; during one decades-long pause during a particularly embattled period for the Republic of Pisa, the tower actually settled enough to prevent its later collapse, though it remained aslant. In the late thirteenth century, the best solution available for this condition was simply to build the rest of its floors in a curved shape in compensation.

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For centuries after, the sight of the Leaning Tower tempted generations of structural engineers to straighten it out. It even tempted non-engineers like Benito Mussolini, who in 1934 ordered large amounts of concrete pumped into its foundation. Like most such operations, it only made the tower lean more; only in the second half of the twentieth century did the technology come along to analyze its foundations and the soil in which they were embedded clearly enough to devise an effective solution. This ended up involving the removal of soil with a slanted drill from under the tower’s higher end, which eventually brought it back to lean about four degrees, as it did nearly two centuries ago. After subsequent stabilization work, it was guaranteed to remain upright for at least another two centuries.

You can learn more about the construction and re-engineering of the Leaning Tower in the videos above from TED-Ed and Discovery UK. But you may still ask, why was it never brought down by an earthquake? “It turns out that the squishy soil at the structure’s base that caused its fetching infirmity – the tower was tilting by the time its second story was built in 1178 – contains the secret to its structural resilience,” writes Joe Quirke at Global Construction Review. This means that “the softness of the foundation soil cushions the tower from vibrations in such a way that the tower does not resonate with earthquake ground motion.” The very element that caused the tower to lean kept it from falling over, an irony to match the fact that such a seemingly misbegotten building project has become one of Italy’s proudest tourist attractions.

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How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Story of Filippo Brunelleschi and the Duomo in Florence

Why Hiroshima, Despite Being Hit with the Atomic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Wasteland Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

What do Tiffany lamps have in common with Kleenex?

A brand name so mighty, it’s become an umbrella term.

Of course, Kleenex is still manufacturing tissues, whereas authentic lamps from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s New York studio were produced between 1890 and 1930.

Handcrafted of coiled bronze wire and many pieces of blown favrile glass arranged in intricate natural motifs, bonafide Tiffany lamps can fetch prices of over a million dollars.

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The “Tiffany lamps” for sale on Wayfair?

Not the genuine article.

Still, if the one on your end table brings you pleasure, who are we to get snippy about it?

There’s plenty of that attitude to be found in the YouTube comments for the above process video …

To be clear, what you’re seeing is the process by which an affordable colored glass lampshade in the style of Tiffany comes together at an overseas factory.

The quality may be lacking, but it’s still a pretty labor-intensive proposition.

First, the pieces are cut by hand or using blades mounted on metal arms. Their shapes and number are predetermined by a pattern…again in the style of Tiffany.

You won’t find the speckled confetti glass or golden hued glass with a translucent amber sheen that are defining features of the real McCoy here…

Once the pieces have been cut and sorted, their edges are wrapped in copper foil tape. (In Tiffany’s day this would have involved hand cutting strips of copper, then smearing them with beeswax to help them to adhere to the glass.)

The wrapped pieces are then laid out in a mold according to the pattern and soldered together.

The bottom edge is reinforced, and the shade is fitted onto a lamp base.

If you’re a museum curator, a connoisseur of the genuine article or a glazier, we don’t fault you for getting a bit salty.

(Our favorite comment: Oh the humanity. I used to be a glazier. I couldn’t finish watching the video. The way they cut the glass dry and slide it around without felt on the table makes me cringe. You can hear the crinkling sound of glass particles under it when it’s being slid around. The smallest contoured cuts and breaks are so rough they’re practically gnawed. If clear glass was handled this way every window would have deep scratches and would probably self destruct from thermal cycling or a strong breeze.)

If you’re susceptible to ASMR, enjoy your tingles – all those crinkling sounds of glass particles!

If you’re someone who’s insatiably curious as to how ordinary things are made, we hope you’ll consider the twelve minutes of this Process Discovery video time well spent, and no less interesting than their non-narrative peeks into the manufacture of bubble mailers, snow globes and swim goggles …

We leave you with a brief tour of the “real thing”, courtesy of the New York Historical Society:

via Colossal

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay

Veel bedrijven die met kunstmatige intelligentie bezig zijn, noemen zichzelf ‘open’: ze zijn transparant over wat ze doen en hun software is voor iedereen gratis toegankelijk. Zo opende De Correspondent onlangs. Veel datamodellen – zoals LLaMa van Meta – zijn zo open beschikbaar, in tegenstelling tot het OpenAI GPT model dat stevig op slot zit. Maar hoe open is dat nou echt?

Open source heeft het internet gewonnen, daar is iedereen het wel over eens ondertussen. Het model waarbij je broncode deelt en samen bugs oplost onder het motto “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” blijkt de meestgebruikte software te hebben opgeleverd waar zo ongeveer alle internetdiensten op gebaseerd zijn.

Velen willen meeliften op dit succes, dus alles en z’n broer heet “open dit” of “open dat”, maar je moet altijd wel even verder kijken of het écht open is. Want dat betekent niet alleen “je kunt het zonder registratie of aanvraag te pakken krijgen” maar ook “je mag er écht alles mee doen dat je wilt, inclusief aanpassen en ons ermee beconcurreren”. De Business Source License bijvoorbeeld is dus géén open source.

Men citeert in het artikel onderzoek van drie taalwetenschappers van de Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, die zo’n dertig verschillende modellen scoorden op dertien variabelen. Specifiek voor LLaMa2 concludeert men: Zo blijven de data waarop het model is getraind geheim en is Meta minimaal scheutig met de onderliggende computercode. Er is geen erkende wetenschappelijke onderbouwing van het model en de technische uitleg haalt een ruime onvoldoende. In de techwereld zijn dit allemaal gebruikelijke standaarden waaraan je moet voldoen, wil je met goed fatsoen het label ‘open source’ kunnen dragen. Llama2 voldoet aan geen enkele. De meeste andere modellen komen niet veel beter uit het onderzoek. Dat wordt nog ingewikkeld: de AI Act komt eraan en die gaat óók aan dit soort modellen regels stellen. Die regels gaan onder meer over transparantie en verantwoording, waar komt je data vandaan, hoe representatief en volledig ben je bijvoorbeeld. Hierover hadden we laatst dat onderzoek naar LLMs dat concludeerde dat niet eentje echt voldeed. (Bloom, dat daar het beste scoorde, komt ook nu het hoogste eruit.)

De term ‘open source’ is dan natuurlijk een mooie schaamlap om te doen alsof je model maatschappelijk heel nuttig is. Hopelijk zal de nieuwe wet ervoor zorgen dat we ook daadwerkelijk openheid gaan krijgen.

Arnoud

 

 

Het bericht De wassen neus van ‘open’ kunstmatige intelligentie verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.