Cory at Boing Boing posts a "Crafter manifesto" from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. It is indeed splendid, and points out wonderful reasons why work, including the output of the Gravity Monkey labs, exists and thrives beyond capitalistic logic. An excerpt:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.


2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.

....


12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

Anyone who's read Larry Lessig's books, including the most recent and my favorite, Free Culture, has probably already read the New York article by John Heilemann, called The Choirboy, about Lessig's personal history of abuse, and his quiet (until now, I guess) fight for justice for others at the Boychoir School. And again, in typical Lessig fashion, not just for a single individual, but to fight against an idiotic law that could protect institutions from crimes as heinous as years of institutional sexual abuse.

I decided to visit his blog, to follow up on the aftermath of the article. Another posting there, however, caught my eye "support hyperion":

Hyperion was sued by Dr. Lionel Sawkins, who had created a performance edition of four works by Lalande. The British court has now concluded that a performance edition, even one that does not claim to be an "arrangement," is copyrighted. Apparently, the "sweat of the brow" in producing the performance edition was enough to create an "original" work.

It's amazing to me that here I sit, in 2005, writing an entry praising "my favorite lawyer" (or technically, law professor), while I also write about how much, as a "still-embedded-in-my-marrow" composer, I can find real tangible proof that musicologist-swine are indeed lower on the totem pole of mankind, below idiots, criminals, loud tenor sax players who play solos twice as long as they should, and people who text message on their cell phone while driving.

My heros don't have capes, but giant brains. Or, like Lessig, many of my musical heroes have giant foreheads, or a rumor of having twelve toes.

An interesting project, as reported by Mari-Len De Guzman in ComputerWorld, by Microsoft Research, the University of Washington in Seattle and Royal Perth Hospital in Australia using Microsoft tools for SPAM detection to find patterns in HIV, in order to develop more effective vaccines.

The great similarity between how spam works and how HIV cells mutate in the human body has allowed researchers to use Microsoft's machine-learning and data mining algorithms to analyze the genetic sequences of the virus. The purpose was to identify patterns within the genetic mutations of the virus and the patient's immune system, according to Schofield. These patterns are then used to create vaccine designs that have more HIV-fighting genetic markers.

I believe the tools and techniques to kill Spam will ultimately prove to be incredibly fertile ground for developing new methodologies and new techniques for data mining and pattern recognition, and into areas still unknown.

Speaking of Spam, as a product of the Islands of Spam, (full disclosure) I must admit I've always preferred Portuguese sausage, myself.