Pensatorium

Women in red. I like particularly this one.

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

If we know little about the utility of longer copyright terms, there is abundant evidence regarding the vital importance to the progress of our culture of a robust stock of public domain works.

Most artists, if pressed, will admit that the true mother of invention in the arts is not necessity, but theft. And this is true even for our greatest artists. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1591) was taken from Arthur Brooke's poem Romeus and Juliet (1562), and most of Shakespeare's historical plays would have infringed Holingshead's Chronicles of England (1573). For the third movement of the overture to Theodora, Handel drew on a harpsichord piece by Gottlieb Muffat (1690-1770). Passages of both works are compared at this very interesting web site.

Cultural giants borrow, and so do corporate giants. Ironically, many of Disney's animated films are based on Nineteenth Century public domain works, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book (released exactly one year after Kipling's copyrights expired).

Borrowing is ubiquitous, inevitable, and, most importantly, good. Contrary to the romantic notion that true genius inheres in creating something completely new, genius is often better described as opening up new meanings on well-trodden themes. Leonard Bernstein's reworking in West Side Story of Romeo and Juliet is a good example.

"Nocturne, of Chopin, [is] so beautiful music. But few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is.

But often that's how we present statistics; we just show the notes – we don't play the music."

Hans Roslings
(summary speech at the OECD World Forum
in Istanbul in June 2007)

Hans Roslings is the creator of the Gapminder Foundation, where he helped develop the Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) which turns complex statistical data into lively animations, making the statistic's song play in a way never seen before.

Whatch his amazing talks at the TED conferences of 2006 (Debunking myths about the "third world") and 2007 (The seemingly impossible is possible -- Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally!) jaw-dropping finale). Then, you can try it out yourself on gapminder.org/world.