The current temperature is -31�C (-24 F). Our car is frozen solid and I've drained the battery dead while trying to start it. I'll try to boost later on today. Hopefully the block heater will have done it's job by then.

I've got some links to hand out. Let's do this paragraph style instead of a bulleted list, this time around. The people at creative commons have launch two sampling copyright licenses free for public use. Much like their other public licenses, the sample licenses will allow content creators to fuel the global creative process.

"The Sampling licenses will help authors foster a broad range of culture, from photo collage to musical "mash-ups," that the law currently deems illegitimate. [...] The Sampling license will let authors invite others to transform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting distribution of verbatim copies, or any use in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo. A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network."

I stumbled across some great philosophical musingss over the holidays. This thread over at Information Pollution has been attracting some interesting discussion. The seed of these discussions was the trailer for the movie 21 Grams, which states that a human body loses 21 grams of mass at the moment of death. (Proof of the existence of a soul?) This thread eventually lead me to C. C. Keiser's musings on Poly-Solopsism and existence, (complete with philoso-poetry.) From there I discovered panentheism.com, a website "dedicated to the creation of a Universal Philosophy for life universally and for humankind in particular using the metaphysical concept of Symbiotic Panentheism." Inspired, I teased the following out of google: Telespace.org - A game-player's guide to reality. Where the author presents his working hypothesis, that "reality may be an interactive fiction -- a game -- designed to promote the evolution of consciousness at all levels."

The Triplets of Belleville looks like a wonderful new animated feature. Watch the trailer here.

In music news, the Onion A.V. Club has posted their best albums of 2003 lists.

Kottke and Fimoculous are two fine blogs.

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