Tidbits from unusual sources

Dilbert on format shifting:
"I'd like to see books that are printed on regular paper, the kind that comes out of the copy machine. You could be sitting four feet away from your boss, reading a bodice-ripping romance novel, and still look like the hardest-working employee in the room, especially if you're red and perspiring. [...] Another source of leisure reading on company time is public-domain books that are in the Internet, courtesy of Project Gutenberg [...]. Load it on your laptop. You'll be able to escape the oppression of your office by enjoying the feel-good writing of Dickens." p58, The Joy of Work

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"'What is unpleasant and threatens my modesty is that in fact I am every name in history.'
Nietzsche wrote that in a letter to Jacob Burckhardt in January, 1889, after his descent into insanity, but if you look past the self-absorption, in a disturbing and poetic fashion the sentence manages to captures the essence of the hypothesis that Tomasello defends in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition: our uniquely human cognitive abilities exist because our minds "stand on the shoulders of giants," or contain within them the advances of the human minds that came before us." from the CogBlog book club"
The rest of the article is probably only interesting to neuro-geeks like me, but the statement of the critical role of derivation in innovation certainly argues for more limited terms on IP protection.

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The MCAT administration takes the property metaphor a little too literally: "Removal of MCAT property by any means, including tearing out individual sheets, keeping test booklets, memorizing, etc., is strictly prohibited." [not exact wording, but the key parts are right]

--Ari