I must say that I don’t know a whole lot about Creative Commons. I know that it is an alternative licensing model for copyrighting material that is promoted by people who want more freedom of content but I never really knew the details of it. I saw a link to this video last night and it intrigued me. The man presenting is Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School and more important in this context the founder of Creative Commons. Needless to say this is not an unbiased look at creative commons, but it does do a good job of explaining what creative commons is and isn’t, and relates it back to the free software movement.
The video is long (an hour and fifteen minutes) but the actual presentation only takes up about 45 minutes of that, the remainder being Q&A. Regardless of how you feel about the content, the presentation is good and surprisingly entertaining (by Geek Standards) (Worth watching the first few minutes for the Back to the Future 3 remix). The audio is a little out of sync (at least on my computer) which is annoying until you get used to it.
I am involved with a project at work where we go out to area schools with projects that are meant to show that engineering can be fun. This year I am on the team charged with developing a project to bring to Middle Schools. One idea we had was to attempt to do a Rube Goldberg Machine. For those of you not familiar with Rube Goldberg, he was a cartoonist who did most of his work in the early 1900’s. His most remembered cartoons involve very complicated machines that were built to do very simple tasks. A collection of his works can be seen at www.rube-goldberg.com.
I built this demo machine last night. The objective was to “park” a toy car, which I was able to do in five steps. The machine worked very well, however the toy cars Amber and I purchased at the dollar store last night, did not perform admirably.
On a side note, this is the first video I have posted to YouTube, when waiting for my video to pop-up on the “Recently Added” list (you know you would have done the same), I was amazed at the volume of video that gets posted (about 20-30 videos per minute by my count).
Speaking of Rube Goldberg, I also found one of my favorite Rube Goldberg Machines posted on YouTube (while I was using the “search” to find my video, again you know you would have done the same!). This machine was professionally made for a Honda commercial. It is all real, they only used parts from the car itself, and if I remember correctly they did it in one continuous shot.
P.S. A big thanks to Ernie for letting us borrow his video camera.
