Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

Thanksgiving is this Thursday in the U.S. and I’m looking forward to eating platefuls of turkey, squash, stuffing and whatever else catches my eyes-too-big-for-my-stomach. But I want to give you something else to sink your teeth into, fellow Americans (and you others around the world who will not be gorging yourselves). Here is some delicious food for thought.

V.S. Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego (director of the Center for Brain and Cognition; professor with the Psychology Dept. and Neurosciences Program; and adjunct professor of Biology at the Salk Institute). Although all these titles may lead you to the swift conclusion that any talk he gives would be boring and jargon-filled – incomprehensible without the benefit of a PhD/MD — Ramachandran is actually quite funny. And he has the ability, like Oliver Sacks, to describe the inner workings of the brain through clever example.

But why is he a geek on the cheap? Because in trying understand phantom limb syndrome, he came up with a $3 therapy that works — a mirror box. A simple cardboard box with a mirror in the middle. This was instead of trying to create a virtual reality for an amputee, which would cost millions of dollars. Ramachandran’s therapy is now used routinely at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on soldier amputees.

Brilliant, funny and cheap. That’s my kind of geek.

For more fascinating lectures, be sure to check out TED.com, “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” It’s an incredible resource and, as they say in their tag, it’s free.

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel has just come out in print but you can read Makers for free. And the author is the one giving it away.

Doctorow is a well-known blogger, near-future sci-fi writer and electronic rights activist who has been serving up his writing for free since publishing his first novel in 2003. That book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first work of fiction to be covered by a Creative Commons (CC) license. The license basically allows people to share or adapt a work as long as they: include attribution, don’t use the work for commercial purposes and distribute the new work under a similar license.

Why is any of this fodder for a Geek on the Cheap? Because the issues of “free” and “copyright” are as integral to what I talk about in this blog as they are to our technological and social lives in general.

Why offer something for free? Is this a sustainable idea? (Yes, if free leads to payment elsewhere or elsehow.) How should copyright work in our digital age? Should we be restricted from using digital works we own in any way we like? (Is it right that I can’t resell a digital book in the same way I can resell a paperback?) These are serious questions being debated by artists, technologists and politicians all over the world.

This is Doctorow’s take on offering his books for free:

CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace [the physical world]: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it. (Read more)

As you may know, I’m a novelist (seeking representation) and I believe this offer-a-free-version business model makes sense. As Doctorow says elsewhere, one of the biggest hurdles writers face is getting eyeballs on their work. It’s like when you go to the local bakery and snag a free cookie sample. You might just buy yourself a cookie if you like the way it tastes, right? Maybe, or maybe you’ll go to the bakery every day and eat for free. But you’re not going to buy any of those cookies if you don’t even know they exist.  (Now I’m getting hungry.)

This topic is gigantic and complex – far too multifaceted to be summed up here – but you already know more about it than you think. You’re already living it.