parker higgins

I wanted a t-shirt in the style of the famous Experimental Jetset Beatles shirt, but with the traditional Alice & Bob placeholder names from crypto discussions. There were a few options for similar things—Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands has one that has Alice and Bob but also intelligence officials, and there are other designs online—but none was quite what I wanted.

For the first time today I noticed that the They Might Be Giants song “Lucky Ball and Chain” off Flood quotes melody and reversed lyrics from a Phil Spector produced Darlene Love song “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry“. Hear the two segments back to back:

I filed a FOIA request a few months back to the US Patent and Trademark Office, seeking information about their mascot character, T. Markey, that appears at official events. The character is an anthropomorphized registered trademark circled-R symbol, and is weird and creepy and I wanted to know more. (Incidentally, I can’t find a USPTO confirmation, but I presume T. Markey is named for Howard T. Markey, who was the first chief judge of the Federal Circuit.)

There’s an emotionally compelling comic going around now that shows some of the hardships artist Russ Heath faced in the decades after Roy Lichtenstein appropriated one of his panels in a now famous painting. Per the comic, Lichtenstein sold the painting for four million dollars. (I’m not sure where that figure comes from, as another source says he sold it in 1966 for under £4,000.)

The USPTO has released a log of the FOIA requests it has processed in the fiscal year 2014 in response to a request I submitted early last month.¹ Looking through these logs is interesting because you can start to pick out a little narrative for many of the requests, and you can get a sense of the public’s connection with an agency. The USPTO’s log is manageable, too: they only handle about 250-300 FOIA requests per year, and in my experience have been very timely with replies.

I’ve trimmed a few clips out of videos recently, and wish to submit them to the internet as reaction GIFs wherever the situation may merit it.

When Chuck Klosterman weighed in on the ethics of downloading ebooks last month, he became the third writer for the New York Times ethicist column to do so in the last four years—starting with Randy Cohen in 2010, and continuing with Philip Corbett in 2012. I’ve enjoyed some of Klosterman’s writing a lot, but I’m not thrilled with his work as Ethicist. This answer follows that trend, forgoing ethical insight for a rigid application of contractual terms.

NASA just submitted a proposed update to its acquisition regulations, specifying that contracting software developers may request to retain their copyright in order to release their software as part of a free software project. This is a good update, and parallels earlier language that allowed contractors to request to retain their copyright to use in commercial software projects—obviously more choice for free software is nice.

I realized today that despite spending a lot of time looking at each of them, I didn’t know which was taller: Berlin’s Fernsehturm or Sutro Tower. Quick answer is the TV Tower is quite a bit taller if you don’t take into account the elevation of Mount Sutro, but in order to visualize it better I stuck them next to each other, at scale.