War News Radio, Nelson’s absent-mindedness

As I may have mentioned before, I am now enrolled in a class at Swarthmore College called “Intro to Radio Broadcasting”: its main feature is that we get to work on War News Radio, a student-produced podcast about the war in Iraq.

We are lucky enough to have a distinguished journalist with a long career in public radio running the show. His name, however, is NOT Bill Moyers, despite what I may have thought… his name is in fact Marty Goldensohn. This explains why he didn’t seem to respond to me the last few times I tried to talk to him: I was calling him “Bill.” Marty seemed flattered when I informed him of my error. My apologies to anyone else whom I may have confused!

Incidentally, I am attempting to do a story on private security firms operating in Iraq, such as perhaps Blackwater USA, which people got upset about when they arrived in New Orleans, or the Custer Battles security firm covered last year on WNR. Marty warned me that I may have difficulty finding anyone from a private security firm who wants to talk to me, but hopefully I’ll be able to get their side of the story. If you have any leads for me on this subject, please let me know! Alternately, if you have ideas for less difficult stories, suggest those too 😛

UPDATE: Incidentally, if you want to manually subscribe to the War News Radio podcast in iTunes, go to Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast, and then paste in this URL:

http://warnewsradio.org/show/index.xml

Our podcast doesn’t seem to be in the iTunes podcast directory at the moment, despite our attempts to submit it, so this will have to do for now… hope you enjoy it! I’ve suggested that we break up the podcast into smaller chunks, and update more often, but if you have any other suggestions to make the podcast rock more, let me know.

Mathematicians get free culture

I’m not sure why I downloaded this PDF, but I am looking at Antongiulio Fornasiero’s thesis about “Integration on Surreal Numbers” (the first Google hit for “surreal numbers thesis intellectual property”). I have little to no interest in the topic, but when I skimmed through it in an attempt to find out what it was doing on my desktop, the “Notice” caught my eye:

==Notice==
The notions of intellectual property and originality are self-contradictory. Ideas
cannot be the private property of anybody; nihil sub sole novi was already in the
Bible.(1) Nobody cares about who first uttered a theorem, only whether it is true or
false.(2)
You can freely distribute, copy, quote, edit or modify the present work, either
as a whole, or in part, without any further obligation on you.

(1)The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes I, 9–11.

(2) Unfortunately, this work, being a (almost) verbatim copy of a Ph.D. thesis, does not follow the principles stated here. . .

You tell ’em, Antongiulio!

UPDATE: Mystery solved, I found the link in my del.icio.us inbox… I have friends who are math geeks 😉