Some of my favorite sites — like Instructables, xkcd and Boing Boing — and others I use all the time — like YouTube and Wikipedia — are a product of and are only possible in an open internet that promotes the free exchange of knowledge.

Even a tiny site like mine is only possible in a world where I’m not in legal jeopardy if I link to a site anywhere online that has any links to copyright infringement (how could I possibly police that?).

Legislation currently pending in the US congress — H.R.3261 “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and S.968 “PROTECT IP” (PIPA) — threaten, at a minimum, to significantly undermine our (that’s all of us on the web, people) ability to communicate with each other and encourage collaborative learning through linking to and direct sharing of resources and ideas. At worst, some of our favorite websites could disappear from the web without warning, and without due process of law.

So PLEASE take just a minute to contact your representatives in congress. For more information about what these bills could mean for the internet, there are more resources over at the EFF.

Thanks!

But today I read about The End over at Wonderland (the blog by Alice Taylor, hard-core gamer and wife of writer Cory Doctorow). Even though it’s for kids, it sounds like something I’d like to play. As Alice explains:

I’ve posted about this before because it was a treasured thing to commission – a game about death and philosophy – and has taken a little longer to gestate than I originally anticipated. So, with pleasure, a trailer for The End, from Preloaded, for Channel 4 Education.

This is one reason I haven’t had time to post in the past few months — tap and ballet. Today is our recital and the colored tights my teacher lent me are a little too short! Need to buy some new ones before tonight. Otherwise my three “costumes” are all set to go. I have a quick change between ballet performances (pants off, tutu on) and then a full change for tap. Apparently, you’re never to old to pretend to be a ballerina.

Do you remember the game Mouse Trap? A boot kicks over a bucket sending a marble down a stair and through a chute to a pole with a hand on top holding another ball that drops down through a hole into a bathtub — on and on it goes until the mouse cage comes rattling down, trapping the poor mice below. That game was my first exposure to a Rube Goldberg machine and I thought it was incredibly fascinating and clever.

Well, I was recently reading in Fast Company about Syyn Labs, a team best known for the Rube Goldberg machine it built for the band OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” video. This fun-loving and hard-working team learned when constructing their RB machine to put the most unreliable parts first, so if they didn’t work, it didn’t take as long to reset before testing again. And it took them 6 months to make their contraption and 85 takes to film it in a single shot.

So what does this have to do with writing?

Over the past three months, I’ve been trying to write faster. To get that first draft down and only then go back and edit the hell out of it. I have a tendency to nit-pick myself to death over nuance, or what I perceive to be nuance in word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, etc.

So I flew through the first five chapters of my new book, was driven to get it down. Then slam, I hit a roadblock — I needed to do some heavy-duty research before continuing. And I’ve been beating myself up for it over the past three weeks. Was I falling back into my old habits, I wondered, deluding myself that I was being productive when I was merely not writing?

But what if the writing process is the same as making a Rube Goldberg machine? What if the beginning comprises the pieces that can most easily go awry, and so it’s not such a bad idea to stop and make sure all your ducks (or dominoes) are in a row before continuing? Maybe getting that basis right is important and then you’re ready to fly through the rest before you go back and edit, edit, edit.

Is a Rube Goldberg machine just a diversion or is it something more? Is art just a diversion or must it be something more? Sometimes I think it’s pointless to wonder about such ideas while other times I feel the need to reach a conclusion, or at least to form an opinion.

Maybe all art is a form of Rube Goldberg machine, and all Rube Golderg machines are art — overly complex ways of saying/showing the simplicity of a thing so that we can marvel at it.

That works for me today.

Last year’s winner for me was the Lenovo UI hybrid laptop where the screen popped out and became a tablet. The laptop + tablet is back this year but running Android now, and it’s again my favorite of the show. But keep in mind that there just wasn’t much competition.

In fact, I thought the best coverage of the show this year was the Wootable Awards, which includes such honors as “Creepiest Innovation” and “Best USB Hub to Keep Your Weed In.” (If you aren’t familiar with Woot, you’ll want to be — see Geek on the Cheap #108.)

The Wootables are more fun than CES looked, that’s for sure.

The 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) — an annual four-day conference in Berlin organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) — took place in late December. I’m only hearing about it now through io9, but what a blast it would have been to attend.

There were talks like “Contemporary Profiling of Web Users: On Using Anonymizers and Still Getting Fucked,” which included a description of ways of distinguishing bots from humans to provide crawlers with false data or to lure them into tar pits. And “From Robot to Robot: Restoring Creativity in School Pupils Using Robotics,” where university students mentor high school students. Topics also ranged from “Adventures in Mapping Afghanistan Elections” — using an open source mapping system called Ushahidi to track the election — to “A Short Political History of Acoustics: For Whom, and to Do What, the Science of Sound Was Developed in the 17th Century” about how the science of acoustics is connected to the desires to surveill and communicate.

io9 has a great post on it by Annalee Newitz, “10 devious new ways that computer hackers can control your machines (or fix them)” about how hackers might “subvert your computer, phone, bank card, and life” in 2011. It’ll either make you paranoid or spur you to learn more.

LINKS:

• Carleen Hutchins , 98, Innovator in Construction of the New Violin Family (NYTimes)
• The Carleen Hutchins Collection and Archive

Check out these bags by Rachel Lozada at Etsy. The totes fold up into a tiny square, while the shoulder bags are reversible — two bags in one! They’re so cute. And they’re made by my cousin, Rachel Lozada, a busy mom who sews like crazy during nap time. (Theirs, not hers. I think.)