How to be creative: keep an untidy desk

Let’s face it, my study is a mess. Lots of computers surrounded by piles of paper — magazines, books, letters, drafts etc. My wife (a supremely tidy, organised administrator) despairs of me. When people come to stay (or even come to dinner) I have to ‘tidy’ my study, which basically means sweeping all the piles into containers and placing them out of sight. This of course is a disaster for me because the act of sweeping the piles into boxes scrambles what is in fact a sophisticated filing system.

But now comes a marvellous New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he of The Tipping Point) arguing that there are very good reasons why creative people are great pilers of paper. Excerpt:

‘Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.’

So there! Why I feel six inches taller already.

Lovely essay by Richard Posner on plagiarism. Makes the point that most creative endeavour involves borrowing ideas from others — which is why nobody ever wrote a popular song who did not ‘borrow’ from what went before. This is why the copyright mania now sweeping the world is nuts. Here’s an excerpt:

“Plagiarism,” in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work[~]for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I’m using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony: “on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her” becomes “on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.” (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot “stole” the famous opening of Shakespeare’s barge passage, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burn’d on the water” becoming “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.” Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s “quote” extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Hear, hear! And while we’re at it, here’s a nice satirical piece on the subject by Steve Mirsky.

DAN GILLMOR: Don’t Deny Privacy for Security’s Sake

(March 18, 2002) One of the more pernicious bits of propaganda to emerge in post-Sept. 11 America is the notion that security must trump liberty. The nation’s founders are surely spinning in their graves to see their descendants sell out their heritage.

Now we’re being told of the supposed incompatibility between security and privacy in the practice of everyday business. You won’t be surprised to know that the major beneficiaries of this misinformation are the corporate busybodies themselves.

There’s no doubt that security has been lacking. Our technology infrastructure is riddled with flaws, most of them the result of an architecture that wasn’t designed with security in mind. Some are simply the result of poor programming practices.

But corporate America has never been a friend of privacy. Building dossiers on customers and regulating their behavior has always been something of a Holy Grail for businesses.

Abandoning their supposed libertarian principles, Silicon Valley companies and their competitors around the world are racing to help the snoops. Hardly a day passes that I don’t get a press release from a company promoting some new tool that would let government and private interests collect and manipulate information about our daily lives.

For some powerful business interests, privacy is an unacceptable threat. The entertainment industry, for example, wants to prevent any possibility of unauthorized use of copyrighted material. There’s only one way to achieve this – a fundamental lockdown of digital hardware and software – and the result would be a privacy debacle, because the only way to police users would be to monitor everything they view, read and hear.

Meanwhile, companies are dropping privacy products. In one of the more depressing examples, Network Associates is abandoning products with the Pretty Good Privacy encryption protocol for desktop computers.

Encryption is one technology that promotes security and privacy. Yes, it enables bad people to communicate. But if we want a safe economy in the Digital Age, strong cryptography – with its positive and negative uses – isn’t an option. It’s a requirement. [ more…]

Here’s clicking at you, kid.
Yeah I know it’s terrible but even the NYT couldn’t resist it.

As the first step in an ambitious program to establish the Internet as a future forum for film study, the American Film Institute plans to collaborate with the Georgia Institute of Technology to create a scholarly Web site for the movie “Casablanca.”

Good, critical review of John Cassidy’s book about the Internet bubble — Dot Con.

Kevin Kelly on the future of music in a digital age.

The importance of technical standards

Lovely Wired article on how standardisation was brought to the screw-making industry.

Tim O’Reilly joins the technology versus Hollywood debate
O’Reilly Network article

“I wanted to weigh in from two perspectives. First, as the CEO of one of the country’s largest and most successful computer book publishers, I am in a unique position to see both sides of this issue. My business is content and copyright, just like Disney’s, but my subject matter is technology. And I want to go on record as saying unequivocally that the Silicon Valley perspective on this issue has far more substance to it than the Hollywood/Nashville/New York version. The legislation currently being explored in the Senate Judiciary Committee, to require computer makers to build copy-protection into its products, is extremely ill-conceived. ”

Internetnews.com reports on a potential FCC ruling limiting 2.4 GHz radiated signal: this is the most frightening development to hit Wi-Fi in its history. If the attempt by satellite radio firm Sirius succeeds, public space, wISP, and community Wi-Fi could suffer crushing blows.

[80211b News]

Richard Clarke’s Six Lessons on network security
(with commentary by Bruce Schneier). From Bruce’s latest newsletter…

1. “We have enemies.” Everyone does. Companies have competitors. People have others who don’t like them. Some enemies target us by name, others simply want to rob someone and don’t care whom. Too many organizations justify their inattention to security by saying: “Who would want to attack us?” That just doesn’t make sense.

2. “Don’t underestimate them.” Don’t. Whether it is a DVD pirate living in a country with no copyright laws, or a hacker kid who spends days trying to break into a network, cyberspace attackers have proven to be better funded, smarter, and more tenacious than anyone has estimated. If you assume that your enemies won’t be able to figure out your defenses and bypass them, you’re not paying attention.

3. “They will use our technology against us.” This is especially true in cyberspace. Almost all attacks involve using the very network being attacked. Maybe it’s a vulnerability in the software; maybe it’s a feature that should never have been created. Hacking is judo: using network software to do things it was never intended to do.

4. “They will attack the seams of our technology.” As bad as most cryptography is out there, it’s almost always easier to break a system by some other method. Attacks on the seams — the places where different technologies come together — are more fruitful. Think of the FBI reading PGP-encrypted mail by installing a keyboard sniffer, or people who bypass copy-protection controls by mimicking them rather than breaking them. This lesson is obvious to anyone who has broken security software.

5. “Our technology is surprisingly interdependent.” That’s certainly clear. We’ve seen vulnerabilities in IIS affect all sorts of systems. We’ve seen malicious code use features of Microsoft Word and Outlook to spread. A single SNMP vulnerability affects hundreds of products. Interdependence is how the Internet works. It’s also how it fails.

6. “The only way to solve this problem is for government and industry to work together.” This is more subjective, but I agree with it. I don’t think that industry can do it alone, mostly because they have no incentive to do it. I don’t think that government can do it alone, because they don’t have the capability. Clarke seems to think that it’s government’s job to provide some funding, high-level coordination, and general cheerleading. I think it’s government’s job to provide a financial incentive to business. If you want to fix network security, hack the business model. Remove the liability exemptions from software. Demand regular reporting similar to what was required for Y2K. Make the CEO care.