Midnight sourdough

There is a sourdough bread recipe that came to me highly recommended. Last week I made the starter, and today the time had come to make the bread, which I started when I came home. It took longer to rise than I (or the recipe) expected, both times, and so here I am, baking bread in the middle of the night. Absolutely not hungry for it, though it does smell nice. I hope that all the sleepers who smell the wafting fragrance of my baking bread are having nice associative dreams.

Baking in the middle of the night is not too bad. It's quiet, and there's a lot of waiting involved, so I'm working my inbox down to zero, completing tasks on my increasingly-urgent "to do" list, and blogging. No one is awake to interrupt me. If it weren't for the fact that this is discombobulating my sleep schedule in ways I don't want to contemplate, I'd like it.

Bonus: waking up to nearly-freshly-baked bread.

[Update: bread done. I set off the smoke detector by burning crumbs on the pan, and now everyone in the building probably hates me.]


This post's theme word: bap, "a soft, round bread roll."

Why can't we all just get along? (copyright edition)

I just watched this lecture by Lawrence Lessig.* It inspires me to do good out in the world. Maybe I should have gone to law school? I like to write and I'm killer at logic puzzles; being a lawyer might really agree with me. And I care about all the enormously, outrageously bad things that are happening in the way that we -- a society, a species -- treat ideas.

Why can't we all just get along? Why do court cases take so long? (And how dramatically different would the entire world be if the US had a time-limit on court cases?) Why is it so hard to get people to do the right thing?**

I have trouble believing that there is some Recording Industry Executive sitting up in his mountain retreat, stroking a cat in his lap, and ordering his minions to go forth, and shower the fuel of money upon their army of lawyers. Why is this the way things work? Perhaps it's a gradual accumulation of small negative decisions which leads to this massively evil, broken system. The RIE needs to make a payment on his yacht, so he has an underling sign a new artist, so... and the lawyer can charge $100 more per hour if he works for the RIE's company, and... so on and so forth.

How can I help? Perhaps I can help devise a more realistic model of this profit-corporation-courts-makers model, and then a game-theoretic strategy where it is in the interests of all parties to be nice. Then the next step is to change the entire political/social system to conform to the rules of my game.***

So I can't really help, or at least I feel that I can't really help, and this feeling will cause me to fail to help. sigh

*Via *Emergent Chaos*, who has some interesting thoughts on the term "non-commercial." More on Creative Commons' research project into "non-commercial" via Boingboing.
** I know that it is more complicated than just "do the right thing," because people have different opinions of what "the right thing" is. That just makes me more frustrated.
***Oh, algorithmic mechanism design, how I love you.


This post's theme word: quodlibet, "a subtle argument, especially on a theological or philosophical issue" or "a musical medley: a whimsical combination of popular tunes." As in, "we had a quodlibet about whether the quodlibet was legal."