Angel investor and iTulip.com founder Eric Janszen contributed to this month’s Forum, "How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system," and wrote "The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash."

1. Is the Dow still inflated?
2. What can we expect from federal intervention?
3. How do we create a stable regulatory structure?
4. There have been warnings about how precarious it is for the $63 trillion credit-derivatives market to be bigger than the “world economy.” What are people talking about when they bring up this figure?
5. How much worse will it get, and has anyone been able to beat this market?
6. Who should go to jail?

Six Questions for Eric Janszen on the Economic Collapse

Amid the news of McCain's DMCA woes, Lawrence Lessig's new book is now on sale.

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war—a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.

For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of today’s most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldn’t do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to “biting” riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them.

Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

From the archive:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. ...

-- John Donne

Jonathan Lethem wrote this 'remix' in the February 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine.

He elicited a response from Larry Lessig in the April 2007 issue:

In his beautifully crafted February criticism, "The Ecstasy of Influence", Jonathan Lethem teaches more about the importance of what I call "remix" than any other work I have read. Certainly more than my own work.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

George Dyson, at Edge, republished from MAKE Volume 15:

The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks?

If you've finished Anathem, you might want to take another dip into the Baroque Cycle [1, 2, 3, 4]:

One of the things I wanted to talk about in "Cryptonomicon" was the history of computing and its relationship to society. I was talking to Stephen Horst, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, and he mentioned that Newton for the last 30 years of his life did very little in the way of science as we normally think of it. His job was to run the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. I'd been thinking a lot about gold and money, which were themes in "Cryptonomicon."

At the same time, I read a book by George Dyson called "Darwin Among the Machines," in which he talks about the deep history of computing and about Leibniz and the work he did on computers. It wasn't just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn't been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn't been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century. There's this story of money and gold in the same era, and to top it all off Newton and Leibniz had this bitter rivalry. I decided right away that I was going to have to write a book about that.

Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?

All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or "mine" personal data -- such as phone records or Web sites visited -- should be required to evaluate the programs' effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy. A framework is offered that agencies can use to evaluate such information-based programs, both classified and unclassified. The book urges Congress to re-examine existing privacy law to assess how privacy can be protected in current and future programs and recommends that any individuals harmed by violations of privacy be given a meaningful form of redress. Two specific technologies are examined: data mining and behavioral surveillance. Regarding data mining, the book concludes that although these methods have been useful in the private sector for spotting consumer fraud, they are less helpful for counterterrorism because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity. Regarding behavioral surveillance in a counterterrorist context, the book concludes that although research and development on certain aspects of this topic are warranted, there is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for operational use at all in counterterrorism.

Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment

Kevin Kelly:

Here is why you don't have to worry about the Singularity in your lifetime: thinkism doesn't work.

The Singularity is an illusion that will be constantly retreating -- always "near" but never arriving. We'll wonder why it never came after we got AI. Then one day in the future, we'll realize it already happened. The super AI came, and all the things we thought it would bring instantly -- personal nanotechnology, brain upgrades, immortality -- did not come. Instead other benefits accrued, which we did not anticipate, and took long to appreciate. Since we did not see them coming, we look back and say, yes, that was the Singularity.

Thinkism

So, without further ado, here are the five regular expressions that I have found the most useful for day-to-day web programming tasks.

5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know

1. Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
2. The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth
3. The Elements of Programming Style by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger
4. Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, by Alfred V. Aho, and Jeffrey D. Ullman
5. The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann
6. A Programming Language, by Kenneth E. Iverson
7. Writing Efficient Programs, by Jon Louis Bentley
8. Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, by Marvin L. Minsky
9. Operating System Principles, by Per Brinch Hansen
10. Artificial Intelligence, by Elaine Rich

10 Books that will Substitute A Computer Science Degree

The question that comes to my mind whenever I catch a glimpse of aggregate consumption is always the same: How can it last?

Fear of fallowing: The specter of a no-growth world

Even when he’s drawing space vehicles, the myriad of minutiae executed with sharp precision hints at Keith Thompson’s classical influences. I’ve spent hours browsing Keith’s incredible portfolio and getting lost in the stories written for most of the art on display. The worlds behind each piece feel thoroughly conceived - it’s clear the author mulled over each detail of the fable along with the art. Gorgeous detailing decorates mutants, deities and demons, some of it recognizable, like this machine-beluga or the violin necks in the legs of the lovely musician below.

Allegories In Digital: Keith Thompson

After forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, Roy Blount Jr. still can’t get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is “over the counter” and concentrates more on questions such as these: Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince?

Three and a half centuries ago, Sir Thomas Blount produced Blount’s Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount’s Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is “arbitrary.” Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its roots, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of “alligator arm”), and especially from the author’s own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

The Washington Post has a review.

Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory