works of wanderlust

Tag: history lessons

  • Copy Wrongs & Rights

    Perhaps the only reason to bring up here the great copyright debates that permeated the internet in the early 2000s is one of idle speculation linked to a tangential theory.

    As digital media formats matured and before technologies were blessed by the often-corporate owners of the media encoded therein, piracy abounded. Discussions flared and festered online about the modern relevance of copyright in a world where art, music, film, and literature could be moved through networks in minutes and bypass the barriers of physicality once deemed a near insurmountable obstacle to such voluminous theft.

    My sideshow of choice was a tech site called Slashdot, which still thrives today to a great extent even as I write this, tho my own visits are rare. Within those comment feeds I more often observed, but occasionally participated in, a regular debate on this topic of copyright. “Copyright was nuanced. Copyright needed adjustment. Copyright didn’t understand the internet, and neither did the politicians policing the scramble to protect the people too slow to keep up.” There was seemingly no end to the nuance and clout of arguments that shaped the conversation there. Nor was there a shortage of participation across a broad spectrum of the digital entrepreneurial class seeking to ride the next wave of a hope for restriction-free content into a reshaping of every floor of the entertainment industry.

    My idle speculation and theory on the subject of the copyright debate arises when one considers that the very capital-G Generation calling for a digital uprising and an overthrow of century-old copyright rules in the first decade of the 2000s was, in fact, my Generation, specifically the geeks among us. We are twenty years older now and frequently found in senior-level jobs, managing corporations, or leading valuable technological projects on behalf of governments and business. It is only speculation, but I would not be surprised if nigh every leader in modern AI computing or any related discipline once had—and may still possess—a very strong opinion about modern copyright, its failings and perhaps its very relevance thanks to the so-called Napster years.

    And of course copyright is almost certainly to be considered a central sore point to many who are questioning the largely-unchecked progress of artificial intelligence algorithms today.

    What is copyright, you ask?

    Copyright as we know it today has roots dating back well over three hundred years and might have in those antique times seemed like little more than a bit of government red tape to control the printing of information not registered and approved by the English government.

    There were barriers to publication in the cost of participation, but even those barriers could be leapt over with the right patronage to buy the equipment and a bit of gritty determination. Legal standards to prevent just anyone from putting their opinion onto ink and paper were enacted. Red tape indeed, but it had the side benefit of working in harmonious lockstep to legally protect both creators and owners of valuable works to earn their due from the investment of time and resources they may have put into making them. After all, everything comes from something, even the words you are reading here were an investment of my time, resources, and at least two cups of coffee that I drank while writing all this. Copyright, it was argued, should give the individual who spent the time, learned the skill, made the effort, and honed the output both the privilege and the right to at least have a chance to recoup a benefit from their investment. The emergent capitalistic world order agreed, of course, and the idea of copyright blossomed around the modern world, enshrining content ownership and countless tangential legal frameworks to ensure the profitability of and long term protection of many things such as images, sounds, poetry and prose for a couple hundreds of years.

    Then? Digital technology crushed the barrier to entry. Who needs an expensive printing press when a bit of free software turns your desktop computer into an online pirate radio station, or a networked distribution service for a library worth of novels, or a toolkit to launch the latest box office blockbuster into a public forum for instant access to anyone who wants to avoid the trip to the theatre? One of the flanks had fallen, a barrier that had been protecting people who made stuff from the people who might pay to use it. Content for all, steal everything, the world rejoiced—and the lawyers pounced.

    Perhaps you already see the catch, I suggest.

    If no one pays for anything, then no one gets paid for anything. Copyright, for all its flaws and corporate meddling, does one thing very well—and it often seemed the sticking point of all those great debates I trolled on Slashdot two decades ago: your goodwill does not pay my rent. If I am a creator existing in society, I need to earn a living to continue existing in said society—I may not have a right to earn that living by creating content for others to enjoy, but I have the right to try without that trying being trounced by the threat of theft and piracy. And if the world tells me that I don’t have that right, then why on earth would I even try? Why would anyone try? Poets will be poets, and will try forever, I might argue on a good day, but the realist in me sees that crushing the incentive to make anything may result in nearly nothing being made.

    I know nothing for certain about the opinions of the people who are building and shaping these AI algorithms, but given their behaviour and indifference to the rights of both creators and their works which are fed with abandon into the gaping insatiable maws of neural nets and large language model training and generally consumed with indifference to copyright and basic human morality by the emergent AI industry—I suspect, only suspect, that they were among the many preaching the end of copyright just two decades ago.

    And what of the creators who make new things, those who earn their livings from entertaining the world with their words, images, films and ideas? We, my suspicions nudge me to suggest, are considered by those same people an unfortunate casualty in the creation and proliferation of the machines designed to replace artists, writers, and makers alike. After all, a perfect AI will will generatively create anything, everything, forever and faster and never once demand rights in return, will they?

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

  • Douglas Fir

    Look up but watch where you’re going.

    On a recent trip to the mountains I was reminded of the diversity of the forest and the interesting world of trees. I may not work in the field, but I have a four year university degree in biology which included more ecology, botany, and entomology coursework than any normal lifespan should have to contain.

    Even though it didn’t turn into a job, those four years earned me an immovable respect for the natural world and a firmly entrenched fascination with the diversity of living things.

    I was looking up at the trees, but not really watching where I was going.

    Of the many of varieties of trees I was looking at, and among the dozens of species that make up the mountain forests, there is one that has held my interest for a very long time: the mighty and curiously-named Douglas Fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It has held my interest not because it is necessarily an interesting tree, which it probably is in its own right, but because when I learned about this tree as a kid my best friend’s name was “Doug” and I always felt a bit jealous that he had his own tree.

    Yet, the Douglas fir was most definitely not named after my school chum, Doug. It was in fact named after a nineteenth century Scottish botanist and explorer named David Douglas. He is credited (in the narrow bandwidth of European science) with first cultivating the fir which would later bear his name. He did this in his twenties. In his twenties!

    I certainly did not discover or cultivate much of interest in my twenties. Though in my thirties I helped cultivate a daughter who is now a teenager and who is anxiously contemplating her future education. We spent nearly an hour last night having a heart-to-heart conversation, me trying to bear witness to her struggles to find a meaningful life path, and also empathize through recounting my plight of squandering a university education in an interesting field for which I still have passion but most definitely no career.

    She is young and still looking up at those millions of trees in the forest and their possibilities.

    I’m getting older and often watching my feet, trying to remember to look up occasional and admire that world around me.

    Look up.

    David Douglas died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty five, but the officially documented cause was still interesting. Like a cartoon villain in a Gilligan’s Island rerun, he fell into a trap hole on a Hawaiian island and was mauled to death by an angry bull while his dog watched from the edge the pit. I suppose it could be said he, being a young and ambitious guy, spent a lot of time looking up at the trees and what was under his feet ultimately got him in the end.

    The moral of the story is that if you’re always looking up at the trees someone might name one of those trees after you forever securing your legacy… but also don’t be surprised if you fall into a hole to your immediate doom.

    The parenting lesson is that I need to give my teenage daughter the ability to look up and admire those trees, take her to the forest (both literal and metaphorical) but that I also need to be a good dad and keep my eyes on the ground for her. Maybe those four years of university weren’t a waste of time after all.

  • Savoury Avacado Chicken in a Cast Iron Wok

    I’ve read all manner of reviews about one of the epic cast iron pieces in my collection, the fourteen inch wok, and it turns out the idea of a big and heavy iron wok is divisive and controversial.

    A traditional wok (which I do not own) is an agile tool. It is light. It’s meant to be brought up to screeching hot temperatures in which food is moved, flipped, agitated, swirled and stirred with motion of both a scoop in the hand and by tossing and lifting the wok itself. Wok cooking is truly an art form.

    It does turn out however that a residential gas stovetop with modest ventilation is not an ideal place to cook in a traditional wok. On the other hand, a wok-shaped bowl of cast iron is pretty darn good enough to replicate some of the properties of a wok. In fact, having spent the last two years learning how to cook well in my cast iron wok has been a remarkably rewarding experience.

    And a tasty one.

    Our challenge in the wok has been learning to cook dishes that have a curious cultural legacy here in North America. Not everything cooks well in a wok. Woks have a very narrow purpose even in experimenting across cultural recipes. Again, this may be a sensitive topic for some, but as a result of colonial history and inequalities among those who settled here over the generations, in the twenty-first century we have what I understand is a unique form of cuisine: North American Style Asian food. Or as one of my running pals who hails from Hong Kong reminds me frequently “not real Chinese food.”

    What I’ve read is that cooking styles and spices mingled with availability of ingredients and limited by tastes linked back to various European ancestries meant that traditional cooking was almost impossible. Immigrants who crossed the Pacific rather than the Altantic set up restaurants as a means to make a living and a life here. They found that they needed to invent dishes that brought the knowledge and experience from their homelands but would be palatable to western tastes (so people would buy and eat it) so dishes like General Tao’s Chicken, Chop Suey, or Ginger Beef became locally known as “Chinese food” but were never dishes that one would actually find in China.

    Fast forward to my kitchen, and decades of savouring those shopping mall food court noodle and rice clamshells of spicy goodness. A cast iron wok in my kitchen and a very Canadian-style of recipe that brings together a mish-mash of cultural and regional styles, ingredients, and flavours that results in many various stir-fry-style dishes something like Savoury Avacado Chicken:

    The Recipe

    First, mix up the following as a deglazing sauce and then set aside.

    125 ml water
    15 ml of cornstarch
    small packet of chicken bouillon powder
    15 ml of lemon juice

    As you heat up the wok to get it screaming hot, mise en place your main ingredients, frying in succession the chicken, then the peppers and mushrooms, then adding the spices and diced avacados until it all comes together into a lovely stir fried jumble.

    vegetable oil and/or sesame oil for pan
    450 grams chicken breast meat (cubed)
    handful red bell pepper (diced)
    handful white mushrooms (sliced)

    10 ml curry powder
    salt and pepper to taste
    1 large avacado (diced)
    toasted sesame seeds to garnish

    Deglaze the whole thing with the boullion/lemon juice mix from earlier, and serve over rice garnished with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds.

    Thus, the controversy of the cast iron wok: not an authentic wok, sure, but I’m not cooking authentic recipes. It all evens out, right?