Sarah Davies

Before the free culture movement even existed:

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to bend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

– Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990

Having read that, can you honestly feel that the law ought to ban outright artists like Girl Talk and sound advice? We are strangling the innovative, willful, daring mockingbirds of our time.

“The US is 9 trillion dollars in debt. That’s 9 teradollars!”

- someone at the belated Giraffe Labs opening party last night

I don’t remember who said that, but once they did, the magnitude of US debt suddenly fit somewhere in my mind. It went from “it’s some really big number that I can’t even conceive of ” to “I can compare that to several different things I actually use”.

My generation (and especially my career) deals with file sizes on a daily basis. I am practically familiar with exactly how different a kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte are. I have no practical experience of the difference between $1,000,000, $1,000,000,000, and $1,000,000,000,000 dollars. I have made one financial transaction in my life over $10,000 (a Prius – totally worth it, btw).

The way we traditionally write large dollar amounts seems to me to be inefficient and confusing. Attempting to subdivide a 13 digit number into chunks I can understand is very difficult, and my guess is that most people don’t even try. So we have a government racking up debt on a scale that we can’t fit into our minds.

From now on, when talking to tech folks, I am going to make a concerted effort to talk about kilodollars, megadollars, gigadollars, and teradollars. It makes more sense, and if we all start using it, perhaps the impact of our financial decisions will be understood more clearly.

Interesting fact: The term “teradollar” currently comes up with 2,740 hits on Google, so clearly some communities have adopted it.