Links for 2012-02-29

I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you’d expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not.

Yes, we’re in America. Yes, we have the Freedom of Speech, and it’s the single most important right we have. But it doesn’t mean that you have to be an asshole. In America, you’ve got the freedom to believe whatever you want. There are viewpoints I consider to be stupid and hateful and that I despise with a passion and I’d like nothing better than to see them completely excised from the collective human mindset, but they exist there, and we don’t have morals and ethics and Constitutional rights for when things are easy. We have them for when things are difficult, so we all just have to grit our teeth and allow people to go on believing these stupid, hateful things and expressing them the way they see fit. Just like I have to grit my teeth and agree that yes: It is not technically illegal for you to be openly hostile to women and to claim that in doing so, you are in fact being an asset to this community you seem so proud of.

When I heard that Amazon had decided to pull buy access away from Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Kindle titles in an attempt to get better terms, I assume that those better terms, if achieved, would ultimately be reflected in lower prices. Indeed, IPG has publicly lamented that they find it difficult to sell digital titles for less than $10.00 given their current cost structures. Yet as Jane Litte has observed, IPG is not offering anything in exchange to Kindle customers to convince us that the IPG strategy is better for me, as a consumer. In this case, my response is, “Go, Amazon!,” because as a consumer, I want a market that doesn’t treat digital books as the most holy manifestation of creative art ever conceived.

From my orbital perspective, I am sitting still and Earth is moving. I sit above the grandest of all globes spinning below my feet, and watch the world speed by at an amazing eight kilometers per second (288 miles per minute, or 17,300 miles per hour). This makes Earth photography complicated.