A Philosopher's Blog

Philosophical Essays on Many Subjects

Archives for September 2011

Is Graffiti Art?

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I made it, its yours. Dumpster with spray pain...
Not art.

While I thought the matter had been settled by better people than I, a friend just asked me about graffiti, thus obligating me to write up a bit about it.

In regards to the question of whether or not graffiti is art, my stock response is to ask “is painting art?” This response is not intended to be flippant, rather it indicates my actual view on the matter which is a serious philosophical position.

Contemporary graffiti is, by its nature, a form of painting. After all, the person creating the graffiti (typically) uses the methods and material of painting (although the paint is typically spray paint). As such, specific examples of graffiti would be assessed as art or not art by the same standards by which a painting would be assessed. For example, a crude tagging involving a person spray painting his/her name on the hood of your car would no more be art than it would be for a person to sign his/her name on a canvas using a brush. As another example, if the ghost of da Vinci manifested and grabbed spray paint to create a work on par with Mona Lisa masterfully on the side of a business, then that would have the same status as the Mona Lisa, at least in terms of being art or not. Thus, given that graffiti is essentially painting it follows that it is as much art as painting is or is not. In fact, given that graffiti involves the very same techniques and mediums as “conventional” painting, the burden of proof would seem to be on those who would deny that graffiti is (or more accurately, can be) art while maintaining that painting is art.

One common objection is that graffiti is not art because it is vandalism and hence a criminal act. While it is true that it can be vandalism and a criminal act, these facts would not seem to have a bearing on its status of being art. The mere fact that something is illegal or classified as vandalism hardly seems sufficient to make something fall outside of the realm of art. After all, imagine a state in which music was a criminal act and labeled as a vandalism of the public sound space. It would hardly follow that music would thus cease to be art. As such, this objection fails.

Another common objection is that graffiti is crude or simplistic and hence cannot be considered art. The obvious reply, to steal from Aristotle, is that not all graffiti is to be condemned, just that which is crude or simplistic. After all, music would not be considered non-art simply because some musicians create crude or simplistic music. The same should hold for graffiti as well.

Thus, graffiti is as much art as painting is or is not.

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Are Used Games Theft?

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Heavy Rain
Image via Wikipedia

According to the French game developer Quantic Dream, the company has lost  between €5m and €10m due to the selling of used copies of its game Heavy Rain. This estimate was calculated by matching the sales figures of new games with the number of players registering Trophies on PSN. The company’s co-founder Guillame de Fondaumiere summed the matter up by saying, “on my small level it’s a million people playing my game without giving me one cent.”

While de Fondaumiere is not actually accusing buyers of used games of being involved in an act of thievery, the parallel to piracy seems to be an apt one to draw. After all, one stock argument against the digital  piracy of video games is that the piracy is costing the companies money via lost sales. However, the people who buy (and sell) used copies are clearly not engaging in piracy: the buying and selling of used property is well established and the burden of proof rests on those who would argue that the owner of a piece of physical property (in this sort of case, a game disk) cannot re-sell his used property. To use the obvious analogy, if I buy a house, then I have the right to resell it again. Imagine, if you will, a developer complaining that he is not getting a cut every time the house he sold is re-sold. Obviously, they would like such a cut. But, when it is sold, it is sold and the right to re-sell it goes along with the purchase (unless specified in the contract).  To use another analogy, when I do my job, I do not expect to be endlessly paid for the work I did (even when my students use what I taught in their careers)-I get paid for it and that is the end of it.

The matter become a bit less clear in cases of digital purchases, but Fondaumiere is discussing the re-selling of the actual games disks. As such, there seems to little foundation for his complaint, other than the fact that he is worried he is not getting every cent he thinks he is owed.

One obvious factor worth considering is that the reselling of a used game does not entail that a sale is lost. As a gamer, I can attest that there are games that I have bought used that I would not have bought new. As such, calculating the “loss” from used game sales would be somewhat tricky.

A second factor is that gamers sometimes wait for the price to drop on a game. For example, I bought Borderlands when the Game of the Year edition came out (with all the expansions included). It was much cheaper than the original version, yet it would be odd to say that my delay robbed the company (they did, of course, get some money from me).

A third factor is that when gamers buy games, they often factor in the fact that they can resell the game or pass it on to someone. Laying out $60 for a game is more palatable when you know that you’ll get some of that back or that you can give it to someone. While it is difficult to calculate the positive sales impact of the ability to re-sell or give away games, it would seem to be a factor worth considering. As such, the re-selling of games might not be a losing proposition for game companies. At the very least, this factor would mitigate any harms done by the reselling.

A fourth factor is that gaming stores generate significant income from re-selling used games (often over and over). While this has also been a point of contention, it does help retailers stay in business and thus be available to sell new copies of games.

However, de Fondaumiere  contends that the retailers will ultimately hurt themselves by selling used games. He asserts that game companies will think that they cannot make money via retail and will instead go to direct online distribution (which is already an option for many games), thus eliminating the retail game sellers by removing their access to products. From the perspective of retailers, this would be rather bad-after all, many retailers make their main profits from selling (and re-selling) used games. It is, of course, worth noting that the used record and CD retail industry took a severe hit with the advent of the digital revolution. The same could very well happen to the gaming world. While I have bought games via Amazon, it has been years since I bought a game at an actual physical store and I often buy download versions of PC games.  This trend might solve the problem of used games, at least how he sees it. Of course, this might also lead consumers to be more reluctant to purchase games on release-after all, being unable to sell them back or give them away does reduce their value for some customers.

My considered view is that the selling of used games is acceptable and companies have little grounds on which to complain of such losses.

 

 

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Re-Licensed to Drive

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California Department of Motor Vehicles
Image via Wikipedia

No, I did not get my license revoked and then restored. As my friends will attest, on the rare occasions I do drive, I am rather cautious. Instead, I recently renewed my license.

Back in the day, you renewed your license by going to the DMV (or tax collector). After getting a number, you’d wait and then hand over your old license. You’d get a new photo taken, pay the fee and they would hand you your new license. Done and done. But, as everyone knows, people had a tendency to forge driver’s licenses. This was often done by teens eager to get their drink on, but it was also used for more nefarious purposes. Then came the rising tide of concern about illegal immigrants and, of course, the horror of 9/11. Fear and politics then motivated the creation of a new system that was recently put into effect.

Under the new system, getting your driver’s license renewed is much more involved or far less so.  In Florida you can renew by mail or online every other renewal. Since I renewed my license online last time, I had to go in person to get my new license.  I did, however, wisely make an appointment online-so while the less wise sat waiting for their number to come up, I was able to walk right up to the “appointments only” window.

Under the new requirements, I needed to provide proof of citizenship (I had my passport-which I got mainly because of all the new obsession with identification, papers and cards), proof of my social security number (I used my W-2), and two pieces of evidence showing my address (I used a 1099 form and my voter card).  After my documents were copied (and presumably checked), I got my photo taken, was questioned at length,  paid and got my new license. Given all the documents I had to provide, I was hoping for a smart card on par with my university ID, but it was just the same old lame license that looked like it could duplicated by a competent criminal.  On the plus side, the new renewal period is eight years, so I won’t have to go back in person for another 16 years (assuming the Tea Party does not eliminate the government).

Naturally, I did have some concerns about this new process. The first is that I am unsure how effective it will be. After all, forging the needed documents or otherwise using criminal means to get through the process seems like it would be well within the capabilities of the sort of folks who this process is supposed to thwart. That is, of course, the problem with using documents as proof to get other documents: if my current license cannot be trusted, then why should my other documents be trustworthy? After all, if someone can pull off a fake license, why could they not fake the other stuff? Of course, no security is perfect and perhaps this method does stop enough criminal misuse to make the effort worthwhile.

The second is I am not entirely keen on having so much personal information and documentation stored at the DMV. While I do not have special doubts about the folks who work there (I know plenty of state and city workers), the DMV seems to have the legal right to distribute quite a bit of information to various folks. With the new requirements, the DMV will now have quite a bit more on file. This also makes the DMV a more appealing target for criminal intrusion. I am not, however, exceptionally worried about this. I would, however, not be shocked or amazed if a story came out about someone getting into the system and stealing all sorts of personal information (including copies of people’s documentation). While requiring people to provide much more information is supposed to make the process more secure, it also puts people more at risk by concentrating that information. But, if you want to drive legally, you have to obey the state (or get the rules changed).

Amazingly, my photo wasn’t bad.

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10 Years Later

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Sanjay Gupta
Image via Wikipedia

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. It is, obviously enough, fitting to look back on that terrible day and reflect upon it and its ramifications.

One matter that is of special importance is the fact that the 9/11 responders seem to be suffering from an unusual high level of health complications. Given that they were exposed to burning materials and various other hazards, this is hardly shocking. What is, however, rather shocking is the fact that it took congress nearly a decade to work out a health care bill for the first responders. What is rather disturbing is that Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican, said he would block the bill. He gave two reasons. First, he wanted it to be funded through spending cuts. Second, he claimed that the bill had not gone through the proper committee process. His second reason was also backed by fellow Republican Mike Enzi.

In regards to the first reason, it struck me as rather sad that after Republicans had “wrapped” themselves in 9/11 and spent billions on “homeland security” and two wars, a major Republican would do such a thing. While I do understand the need to be fiscally responsible, suddenly finding this fiscal faith when it comes to the 9/11 responders seems rather morally questionable. Surely those people earned the right by their sacrifices. To support this, one needs merely to turn to the speeches in which the Republicans spoke of 9/11 and the heroism of the first responders.

In regards to the second reason, Coburn actually missed the committee meeting in question (and he was a member of the committee). Hence, his complaint was spurious.  While following due process is important (although it was often bypassed in the name of national security), it seems rather petty and mean of him to have used such a point to try to delay or block the bill.

While the bill eventually passed, there were some significant changes. First, the money allocated to the bill was reduced. Apparently the new found sense of fiscal responsibility arrived to late to prevent the massive spending under Bush but just in time to cut back spending on health care for the first responders (who had been praised as great heroes by the very folks who insisted on cutting the budget). Second, the Victims Compensation Fund was set to close significantly earlier and  various other limitations were set.

Coburn justified his actions  (after acknowledging the heroism of the first responders) by claiming that they prevented the bill from “robbing future generations of opportunity.” On the one hand, Coburn does have a point: spending should be carefully reviewed to ensure that the need is legitimate and that the cost will not be too burdensome. Oddly enough, this rather laudable principle seems to be generally overlooked in other cases. In regards to spending on the war on terror, there seems to have been little concern paid to determining whether the spending would be effective (generally not) and whether or not it would burden future generations (definitely so). The main justification given for funding the war on terror is that doing so saves lives. However, terrorism is rather unlikely cause of death for Americans. Except, of course, for the 9/11 responders who became sick because of their exposure to a devil’s cocktail of toxins. There is a certain irony in a congress that funds x-ray machines for full body scans to “protect” us against the minute chance that someone will try to smuggle a bomb on a flight in his underwear (again) yet balks at medical care for people who are, in fact, in danger from the actions of terrorists. Of course, helping the first responders does not, in general, funnel money to the folks who help fund the re-election of politicians.

A final point of concern is that the bill leaves out coverage of cancer. While we went to war in Iraq without checking the facts, folks in congress claimed that a causal link had not been established between the exposure on 9/11 and the cancers that are appearing in the responders. After all, if these people did not get their cancer from 9/11, then there would be no reason for the taxpayers to foot the bill for their care.

One obvious response is that even if the cancer was not caused by their exposure during the 9/11 events, these people should simply be given the benefit of the doubt. After all, treating sick or dying people who put their lives on the line for others hardly seems to be a waste of money. If arguments are needed for how important this event was and how great these people are, one can merely look at what the Republicans said about them, at least prior to the debate over the bill.

A second reply is that it seems reasonable to believe that being exposed to that devil’s cocktail of toxins that arose from the wreckage could very well cause cancer. There is also the fact that the 9/11 responders seem to suffer from cancer at a higher than expected rate. Of course, given that our understanding of cancer is limited, there are grounds for “cancer skepticism” (which has been fueled by the tobacco and other industries). I suspect that one reason that congress has been reluctant to provide coverage for cancer in this case is that doing so would seem to admit that the various chemicals and toxins the responders were exposed to do cause cancer. This would, obviously enough, present various liability problems and could also be used in backing up stronger regulations regarding pollutants. This sort of result would not, of course, please the corporations who donate so lavishly to re-election funds. Then again, perhaps it is just about saving money by not paying for cancer treatments.

A third reply is that there does seem to be a causal link. Sanjay Gupta has been investigating this and reports what he has learned in “Terror in the Dust.” If such a link has been established, then the 9/11 responders should receive coverage for cancer. After all, this would show that at least some of their cancers were caused by the events of 9/11 and that would seem to warrant the state picking up the  tab. At the very least, the Republicans owe them for years of using them for political purposes (the Democrats too, only to a lesser extent).

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Dread Mill

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Johnson T7000 Treadmill @ TaiSPO 2006.
Image via Wikipedia

I am a lazy runner. I do not like speed work or hill work. I prefer to simply run distance at a comfortable pace. I have been like this for as long as I have been a runner, which seems to be at odds with the fact that I have run some pretty good times and was even all-conference twice in college cross country. However, my laziness is a relative sort of thing. Back in the day (that is, back when I ran 33 minute 10Ks and 16 minute 5Ks) my comfortable pace  for my lazy distance running was 7:00 minutes per mile for 13-16 miles. Back then, I was a running machine: I could lock into that pace and keep it mile after mile.

While I am lazy by nature when it comes to running, I also love to compete. As such, I was willing to set aside my laziness during track and cross country seasons and endure speed work and hill work. After college, I settled back into my lazy distance ways, although I would engage in some social running, even if it involved visiting a track. I did, of course, keep racing and that seemed to work out well.

Sadly, it is no longer back in the day and my lazy ways have ceased to serve me well, mainly because my comfortable pace for 13+ miles is no longer 7 minutes. While I have tried using my GPS watch to force me to run harder, my natural laziness proved to be stronger: I’ll speed up for a mile, then I’ll start slacking until I catch myself.

Thanks to my summer unemployment (budget cuts at the university) I had plenty of extra time and started going to planned and supervised track work outs. Normally I loath doing that, but there are few races in the summer here in Florida, so I just told my lazy self that this was racing (I am, oddly enough, not lazy when I race). However, I am back to teaching again and have to return to my usual schedule, which means no evening workouts. However, these had helped me so much I wanted to keep working hard. As such, I needed a way to defeat my own laziness.

As I mentioned above, I had tried my GPS watch. But its beeps and data fields lacked the power needed to be a cruel master of my running. I needed something with the power to prevent my laziness. In my desperation, I turned to the much hated tread mill (or, as runners often call then, “dread mills.”

My girlfriend recently moved to Orlando, leaving behind her very nice Nordic Track treadmill at my house (along with 7.6 tons of other stuff from her apartment). While I normally scorn treadmills, I realized that the damn thing could force me to run at a certain pace. This would, I reasoned, force me to run fast and also help retrain me to running at a fixed pace. While the readouts for distance and pace are probably not dead on, they are probably pretty close. In any case, my Garmin watch provides accurate time and heart rate data so I would know how long I had been running and my effort.

So, I warmed up by running a few miles outside, then fired up the dread mill. The first time I tried it, I must have triggered some sort of per-programmed workout or death trap: the thing suddenly sped up  to a much faster pace and activated the incline feature at the same time. That got my heart rate up pretty good before I could stop it. After re-setting the infernal thing, I was able to run a test 5K on it at a moderate 6:45 mile pace. That worked out pretty well, although the boredom almost killed me. I got some water and then did a five mile run outside. That helped me sweat out the shame of being on a treadmill.

I did find that although the treadmill has some big buttons for controlling the various settings (mainly speed and incline), working them while running was rather awkward and they did not always react when pushed. While I did see that it could be programmed, the actual process seemed to be pretty annoying and limited in its functionality. That is when I noticed the iFit slot (really just an SD card slot). I went online and found that cards could be used to load workouts. I did not want to make Jillian Michaels any richer and wanted to design my own workouts, so I did not buy any of the preloaded cards. I figured that the iFit files were pretty simply (just commands to adjust speed and incline) and found some free software to create my own files. The software is not fancy, but it gets the job done. Because of the way iFit works, it seems that workouts have to be programmed in one minute intervals (this can be exceeded, but is supposed to cause some minor problems). Fortunately, my workout cap on the dread mill is 3 miles of hard running and some rest jogging, which means I only need to program in a bit over 20 minutes. I did read that some SD cards do not work with the iFit readers (usually the ones that are larger than 1 GB). I tried a 32MB card that came with my digital camera and it worked fine. The actual files are very small, so unless you load the card with audio (you can link audio files to the workout, but I do not) a small card should suffice.

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Polonium Smokes

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This is an x-ray image of a chest. Both sides ...
Image via Wikipedia

“With each puff, the victim inhaled polonium, unaware that her cigarette was killing her.” While this might sound like a line from a bad spy novel (no doubt featuring rogue former KGB agents), it is actually what smokers experience with each puff from a normal cigarette.  Tobacco plants pick up polonium via contamination from fertilizer which is made from phosphate rock that happens to be rich in uranium. Some of this contamination comes through absorption via the roots and some comes from contamination via the leaves.

Obviously, people will point out that the radioactive material in tobacco is not the major threat. After all, tobacco is chock full of dangerous stuff and it is generally a bad idea to inhale any smoke. That is quite correct, but it is worth noting that the polonium makes tobacco even more dangerous. It is, in fact, estimated that it causes about 2% of the smoke caused lung cancers. This means that it kills thousands of people each year.

It is tempting to simply say that people know the risks and if they prefer to harm themselves, then that is their right. Laying aside the matter of second hand smoke and the fact that smokers often become health care burdens for the rest of us, there is also the fact that tobacco could be made less dangerous by reducing or eliminating the polonium. This can actually be done without undue hardship on the part of the tobacco industry.

In fact, the industry studied the matter for quite some time and found that changing fertilizer would have a significant impact as would using a different sort of filter. Also, something as simple as washing the tobacco leaves would have a significant effect (it might also remove other contaminants). Not surprisingly, the industry decided to stay quiet about its findings and elected to not actually address the polonium problem because “removal of these materials would have no commercial advantage.”

While my natural hatred of tobacco inclines me to advocate simply outlawing it, my moral principles require me to allow people to engage in self-harm under certain conditions (such as knowing what they are doing). As such, I have to oppose an actual ban on tobacco. I can, however, consistently support bans on public smoking (you can smoke, but I do not want to share your smoke). I can also support making tobacco less dangerous to those who smoke it on the grounds that this would enable them to get their enjoyment while harming themselves less. I am assuming that people who smoke do so for the allegedly enjoyable aspects of the drug use rather than the aspects that involved cancer and death. As such, I would infer that smokers would not object to having a product that would be somewhat less likely to hurt them. If they do smoke for the harm, then they can easily find substitutes, such as burning and inhaling plastic.

Tobacco companies might object to the cost of making their product less dangerous, but it would seem odd for them to claim they have a right to poison people with radiation when they could easily remove it. To use an analogy, imagine if cell phones actually gave off cancer causing radiation that caused thousands of deaths and that this flaw could be cheaply and easily rectified. It would seem to be unacceptable for companies to refuse to do so on the grounds that they would gain “no commercial advantage” and that it would cost them a little money to kill fewer people. The same would seem to hold for tobacco.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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