turns out d.c. is a rather lovely city to live in, especially when you've more or less got the day off of work and the weather outside is spring-in-february. tommy and i took the opportunity to ride the metro up to the national zoo, mostly because i was just about dying to see the four new baby cheetahs. the tiny little furballs were out, but since they were just in their faraway cage, i couldn't really get any good photos of them. doesn't matter. just check out this set of thumbnails and prepare to die at their cuteness.

we went on to check out the elephant house (which strangely also houses giraffes, hippos, and the nasty, nasty capybara, which is apparently the largest rodent in the world; some weirdo has archived a whole set of photos of the capybaras' original arrival at the d.c. zoo).

tommy had to leave soon thereafter, but i spent a while more, just roaming around the zoo and taking bad photos (you can see my flickr set here), and marvelling at the pure weirdness of animals. i mean, i haven't been to the zoo in over a decade so i'm not used to checking out wildlife close up, but really, does anyone sometimes look at a giraffe or hippo or seal, and think, "holy fuck, that is one crazy-looking thing?" it's like when you say a word several times over and it loses all meaning; staring into the eyes of a hippo has the same effect. and it can TURN YOUR WORLD UPSIDE DOWN.

anyway, after my mind-trip at the zoo, i walked back home (yes, i walked from up on connecticut down to shaw; i couldn't help it. it was gorgeous outside, and it's only about 2.5 miles, and i really needed to do something to get rid of my gut from eating two pizzas and 376 wings the night before while watching the superbowl). i cleaned up around the house a little bit, tommy headed off to meet charles and matt to watch a wizards game, so i have the house to myself, am listening to "the tyranny of distance" and "i'm wide awake, it's morning," and drinking several glasses of chianti. a very nice monday, overall. and after spending almost the entire day at the zoo, where i hadn't been since middle school, i'm inspired to go check out other classic d.c. establishments where i never take the chance to go. so tomorrow, perhaps the air and space museum? the botanical gardens? um, shopping in georgetown? that's totally classic.

also noted: this advertisement in the metro.

UPDATE: if you go RIGHT NOW to the cheetah cam, you can see them sleeping, wrapped up into four little fuzzballs in a row, and IT IS SO AWESOME. i've been watching it for ten minutes now. i suppose i should also let you know that i'm the kind of person who watched 45 minutes of the puppy bowl last night.

Tyler Cowen's got a post up offering an economist's perspective on filesharing (link via BTD). Its three parts are short, and so will be my responses.

1. In ten year's time, what will happen to the DVD and pay-for-view trades? ... a song download can be a loss leader for an entire CD or a concert tour. Downloading an entire movie does not prompt a person to spend money in comparable fashion.

No argument here. I believe that filesharing will flatten musicians' incomes, and that -- counterintuitively -- this will actually raise the quality of the product available by improving the signal/noise ratio of the marketplace. But for movies, this is going to be a real problem. Technology may democratize the process in the same way that it has music, letting anyone with a couple thousand dollars produce a professional-quality product. But it seems likely that the barriers to entry will still remain relatively higher, and certain types of movies -- effects-heavy scifi epics spring to mind -- will doubtless be selected against as their high budgets create a substantial base cost and their tech-savvy fanbase steals the final product freely.

2. Perhaps we can make file-sharing services identify (and block) illegally traded files.

This badly misunderstands the technical situation. Certainly you can legislate such a thing, but until US IP law extends across the globe (and enforcement improves by orders of magnitude) this is pragmatically untenable. The industry can respond in an ad-hoc manner by both finding and prosecuting violators and injecting junk into P2P networks. But the collective distributed intelligence of thousands of users will filter out that junk and find new ways to trade their files, and there *are* decent ways to make finding violators sufficiently difficult to be effectively impossible. The next increase in processing power and bandwidth may not revolutionize the way we trade media in terms of speed -- it could be that the revolution will lie in bringing truly anonymous FreeNet-style systems up to current technology's speeds.

3. I question the almost universal disdain for the "Micky Mouse" copyright extension act... Economic research indicates that current cash flow is a very good predictor of investment. So the revenue in fact stimulates additional investment in creative outputs... We are fooling ourselves if we deny that the extension will benefit artistic output, at least in the United States.

From an economic standpoint, perhaps -- if we're going to measure artistic output by some kind of universal metric, then yes, Disney keeping the rights to Mickey will result in them getting more money, which will result in more Mickey utilization. But surely that can't be considered useful artistic output -- once we're 75 years out, who cares how good the cartoon mouse on your Taco Bell commemorative cup is? I suppose commercial Mickey-driven success may result in more money being invested in Disney, which could then presumably be spent on the creation of new characters. But I think you'd have to show that this would increase the content industry's total share of the investment pie -- and I'm not convinced of that.

Even if it does, is it worthwhile? We don't give NEA grants to NBC, after all. Improving society's creative output is a worthwhile goal that we can talk about implementing, but are we really so sure that it's a good idea to rob from the commons in order to provide an intellectual subsidy to entrenched copyright holders? It seems like an awfully regressive way to subsidize the arts. I can't say I'm convinced.

Catherine's office is moving this week, so she's ""working"" from home. Normally I'd just use one set of quotes, but I've already laid claim to "working" from home.

Anyway, all she has to do is check her email periodically. I had added "blog furiously" to that job description, but so far she's been slacking off. In fact, right now Catherine's at the zoo -- I went over with her during lunch hour, but then my company's little corner of the internet exploded and I had to scurry home. If she hasn't gotten herself eaten by something I imagine there'll be an awful lot of photos of cute critters available here in a few hours, but for now you're stuck with me, and all I can offer is this preview: both the baby cheetahs and the video of the elephant giving birth are about what you'd expect.

Two quick security links

• Kazaa is even worse than you thought: not only is it chock-full of malware, it also keeps track of your downloads.
• Boston's South Station's got wifi security problems. This whitepaper is kind of silly -- the author's self-serious adoption of the "white hat hacker" monicker is a bit much, considering that the exploit he used was guessing some abysmally bad passwords. But it does provide a decent entry-level overview of how not to run a professional wifi access service.