Lone Gunman

With two of my main inter­ests being per­sonal finance and copy­rights (and wrongs), I always get giddy when the two collide.

Recently, Plon­kee made me think: is con­don­ing (buy­ing) knock off fur­ni­ture com­pa­ra­ble to con­don­ing copy­right theft?

There are quite a few peo­ple who get quite pas­sion­ate about the unde­sir­abil­ity of knock offs. Check out this post on Apart­ment Ther­apy, for exam­ple, where var­i­ous peo­ple chime in about the (rea­son­ably assumed) lack of qual­ity on the knock off and that you should sup­port the designer.

Part of me thinks that that I should think that buy­ing a repro­duc­tion is a bit like con­don­ing copy­right theft. But I don’t. It’s not like peo­ple don’t buy repro­duc­tion Chip­pen­dale, and no one thinks that’s a prob­lem. And, I’m never going to spend £1300 on an arm­chair, no mat­ter how nice it is, even £350 is quite a lot of money, really.

Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smil­ing and not smil­ing at the same time? The smile part of the Mona Lisa’s face was painted by Leonardo in low spa­tial fre­quen­cies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, there’s no smile. But if you look at her eyes or else­where in the por­trait, your periph­eral vision picks up the smile.

I’ve heard this before, but I’m post­ing this today because I recently read this great quote from Stan­ley Kubrick:

How could we pos­si­bly appre­ci­ate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had writ­ten at the bot­tom of the can­vas: ‘The lady is smil­ing because she is hid­ing a secret from her lover.’

via kot­tke

Imag­ine going into a bar, drink­ing as much (or as lit­tle) as you want, and then only pay­ing what you think is fair. Sounds good, right? Well, Jür­gen Stumpf owns three wine bars in Berlin that do exactly that:

For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent your­self a glass and get to sam­ple as many of the wines as you want. At the end of the night you throw some bills or coins into a big jar, the amount based on what you think is fair.

via kot­tke

…Lon­don­ers on Income Sup­port can get a card to allow travel on Lon­don buses and trams for half price. At the bot­tom of the [adver­tise­ment] are the proud logos of Mayor of Lon­don, Trans­port for Lon­don, and, incon­gru­ously, the Boli­var­ian Gov­ern­ment of Venezuela.
I pre­sume that this is the fruit of Hugo Chavez’ visit to Lon­don, when he cosied up to Mayor Ken, and offered cheap oil to the peo­ple of London.

From The Magistrate’s Blog

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the ben­e­fit of those who are unfa­mil­iar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my inten­tion to work into each of my lec­tures … one lie. Your job, as stu­dents, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.

A novel — and seem­ingly pow­er­ful — way to teach your stu­dents crit­i­cal think­ing and analy­sis, from Over­com­ing Bias.

via kot­tke