Solid Block of Ise

I’ve just come home from spending a rather interesting saturday pre-noon. Today there was a shindig of some kind downtown, promoting free culture and other such good things. The first half of the day consisted of lectures from Lars Aronsson, founder of Project Runeberg (a swedish project with similar aims as the more wellknown Project Gutenberg, but focusing on swedish literature instead) and Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party.

Consisting of the day after lunch was a lecture by Maud Olofsson, and then an open debate where Rick, Lars and representatives of various organizations would be present. I didn’t feel like attending this since I find Maud Olofsson at best to be very annoying, and at worst to be a two-faced untrustworthy person sprouting whatever opinion is currently in vogue. The debate would’ve been interesting, but I didn’t like the prospect of sitting 20 minutes on a bus home to eat something, then 20 minutes back to listen to the debate for an hour and then 20 minutes on the bus home again.

But the first half was very interesting. I’ve never heard of Lars Aronsson before, but I’m a big fan of open media such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, and he was obviously very enthusiastic about what he did. He chatted a bit about the process of digitization, the problems that intellectual property-laws posed on his work, and generally held an interesting lecture about thing. Rick held another interesting lecture, although I found it a bit sad that he was essentially just preaching to the already converted. Never the less, he gave me an interesting new angle on the whole thing, and talked at lengts about why patents need to be abolished, as well as the origins of intellectual property and why laws regarding them need to be severely reformed. I heartily agree with Rick on the subject of patents on medicine. Not only are the patents stupid and restrictive - they’re actively harmful and causes people to die! Completely absurd.

On a different note I found it rather neat to find that both Rick and Lars apparently run Ubuntu on their laptops. Good!

Other than that the weather is spectacular here. Thermometer says only 10 degrees celsius, but it feels a lot warmer than that. Compare the photo below with the one I took in January. Same angle, almost standing in the same spot.

UPDATE: Apparently there was some kind of mix-up. It wasn’t Maud Olofsson who was scheduled, rather someone with the confusingly similar name of Maud Johansson. Weird. The sendout that I got said Maud Olofsson. Anyhoo, there’s some photos from the event at Stefan Flods blog.

And this ginormous tractor outside the tractor-place. It’s a humdinger. It has nothing to do with the rest of this post, I just thought it was cool.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.