"Bring me my sword.
"
—Dr. Hans Rosling

Top–of–the–List Thinking from Edd and Alistair

A great link from Alasdair Allan about real-time interaction tracking for iPad apps set me thinking about the future of software usability. How long will it be before somebody figures out how to enable the front camera to do eye–tracking as well?

Pretty soon, our devices will be able to measure not just our interactions with them, but also our emotional responses. You can bet there’s a robot somewhere just about ready to do this.

But where does this take us? I’m somewhat wary of a world filled with sycophantic devices, cocky in their assurance that they can know me through measurement. In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—stay with me—a guy builds his perfect robot girlfriend, only to find he can’t love somebody programmed to be perfect for him.

I think the next step is personality. When we theme the iPads of our future, we’ll be selecting temperament as much as UI. (I know already I’ll be heading for the “wry, sarcastic” theme.)

Perhaps Iain M. Banks has it right in his Culture books. The drones and Minds are a very plausible rendition of the direction user interface is taking us.

When you read your iPad, will your iPad read you?

Cheers,
Edd Dumbill & Alistair Croll
Chairs, Strata

Strata Conference

Less Than Four Weeks Away

Making Data Work

February 28 – March 1, 2012 | Santa Clara, CA

Use code NEWS20 and save 20%.

Tracks include: Data Science, Business & Industry, Visualization & Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data.

Quick Bytes

Short Items of Massive Interest

Not Smart or Rich—or alas, even Pretty

You know that big data has come firmly into the mainstream when Fast Company allows an “expert blogger” Daniel Rasmus to write deeply on the subject while name–checking Isaac Asimov and exploring it as an existential phenomenon. He writes, “As Big Data becomes the next great savior of business and humanity, we need to remain skeptical of its promises as well as its applications and aspirations.”

Complexity Itself
Author Allen Downey can’t really wait for the March release of his new title, Think Complexity, so he’s releasing it bit by bit online. The book focuses on data and structure, Python programming, computational modeling, and nothing less than the very philosophy of science itself. In fact, he writes, “I think complexity is a ‘new kind of science’ not because it applies the tools of science to a new subject, but because it uses different tools, allows different kinds of work, and ultimately changes what we mean by ‘science.’” As Downey himself admits, he’s Probably Overthinking It.

Chaos Theories

“The heart of data science is designing instruments to turn signals from the real world into actionable information,” says Jetpac CTO Pete Warden. “Fighting the data providers to give you those signals in a convenient form is a losing battle, so the key to success is getting comfortable with messy requirements and chaotic inputs. As an engineer, this can feel like a deal with the devil, as you have to accept error and uncertainty in your results. But the alternative is no results at all.” In this conversation with Audrey Watters, Warden outlines different ways to embrace the chaos of raw data. Bonus? A great infographic.

Letter from Davos
Based in Switzerland last month, New York Times blogger Nick Bilton reports on what he terms the Davos Data Deluge, in a terrific piece from the Bits blog. EU countries are seemingly more concerned with the use of personal data than is the US, and the world economic forum released its Big Data, Big Impact report warning of dire consequences if data is misappropriated and compromised. Bilton writes: “As the World Economic Forum report says: ‘Concerted action is needed by governments, development organizations and companies to ensure that this data helps the individuals and communities who create it.’”

Data Docking

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon, making history and creating heros of the astronauts aboard. On January 9, 2012, that story was retold, animated solely by data.

Stats R Sexy
Edd recently helped to judge a unique contest, one that challenged entrants to create applications for R in business. Strangely, the top two were both concerned with air travel; the rest of them travel far and wide. It’s always fun to take a peek at how others approach cash-prize problems.

Hadoop Huzzah
Last week, we announced that Hadoop World would become part of the Strata NYC conference slated for this autumn. That doesn’t stop us from exploring all things cloud–based in Santa Clara this month. In fact, we have tracks on the Future of Hadoop, Hadoop and Big Data tracks, and Hadoop and Big Data applied sessions. Come join us up in the aerie!

Visionaries

Producing nerd–tastic glasses that mimic the pocket-protector beauty of 1950s geekdom with their thick black frames and blocky forms is Warby Parker’s specialty. The retro look, however, is the only old–fashioned thing about this forward–looking company. They donate one pair of glasses to a needy person for every pair purchased by a fortunate person and customers have the luxury of trying on five pair at home at a time. They’re doing everything they can to be transparent to their customers and stake–holders, and to that end have created an infographic that allows anyone to peek at any aspect of their 2011 fiscal year, something we find both brave and beautiful.

Talking It Out

Informative Blather

Conf Confidential
Not everyone who wants to attend Strata will be able to, so we have a nice slate of free live webcasts planned for February that anyone can watch and learn from.

On Feb. 10 at 10amPST, digital business analyst Kord Davis presents on The Ethics of Big Data: Value Personas in Practice. Davis explains: “Value Personas offer an organization a means of capturing a common set of values which can be used to encourage organizational alignment, acceptable business practices and individual behaviors based on a common set of values. They help to identify shared values and create a vocabulary for explicit dialog, thereby reducing risk from misalignment and encouraging collaboration and innovation across working teams.”

On Feb. 17 at 10amPST, 10gen director of product marketing Jared Rosoff gives an hour–long tutorial titled, MongoDB Schema Design: How to Think Non-Relational. The normal rules don’t apply to MongoDB, Rosoff says, adding: “The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema–free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense.”

And on Feb. 21 at 10amPST, scientist Maksim Tsvetovat leads a discussion on Analyzing Social Media Response to Elections. Tsvetovat promises, “In this webcast, I will present a simplified methodology that one could use as a jumping-off point to automated discourse analysis at scale—and apply to real-time data streams coming from electoral politics of the 2012 Republican primary.” Sounds like one we won’t want to miss.

Archived and Quantified
On Jan. 25, we hosted the Strata Santa Clara Preview – Towards the Quantified Society – as a free online conference. If you missed it, each of the disparate sessions by

John Wilbanks, Bitsy Bentley, Edd and Alistair, Paul Dix, and Noah Illinsky are patiently archived for your rare free moment.

Wot Is the Wat
Just Trust Us: Gary Bernhardt’s CodeMash 2012 lightning talk is hilarious.

The Final Bit

Our weekly cherry topper

Dr. Rosling’s Fact-Based World

Dr. Hans Rosling uses LEGO blocks and IKEA boxes to explain the world. He employs the specter of a washing machine to mark global dips below and above poverty. A TED favorite, he also happens to enjoy swallowing swords. With his Gapminder foundation, Rosling aims to “replace devastating myths with a fact-based worldview.” Gapminder’s mission statement continues: “Our method is to make data easy to understand. We are dedicated to innovate and spread new methods to make global development understandable, free of charge, without advertising. We want to let teachers, journalists and everyone else continue to freely use our tools, videos and presentations.” Gapminder is always glad for donations, but you can enjoy the collective wisdom there free of charge.

Looking for more? Visit oreilly.com/data.

In this Issue:

• Emotional Rescue
• Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair
• Quick Bytes
• Talking It Out

• The Final Bit

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"didn’t shower today, avoiding all things SOPA sounding…#StopSOPA…"
—Tweet reprinted in the Winnipeg Free Press

Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair

“Today, advantage and innovation depend on filtering large amounts of information to create insight from data so plentiful and diverse it often looks like noise,” Edd says, framing a big announcement. “Offering the ability to cheaply analyze such big data, Apache Hadoop technology has already played a pivotal role in bringing big data analysis to industry, and it continues as a key foundation for the future IT landscape.”

O’Reilly Media and Cloudera announce that Hadoop World and the Strata Conference have merged. O’Reilly and Cloudera will co-present for the first time at Strata Conference in New York City, Oct. 23-25, 2012, combining two of the premier data science events into one program. The call for proposals for Strata Conference New York opens Feb. 28, 2012. We’ll be certain to keep you up on the details here. It’s fair to say we’re excited. . . .

Cheers,
Edd Dumbill & Alistair Croll
Chairs, Strata

Strata California 2012

Making Data Work

February 28 – March 1, 2012 | Santa Clara, CA

Tracks include: Data Science, Business & Industry, Visualization & Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data.

Quick Bytes

Short Items of Massive Interest

Survey Says

Some 100 kind souls agreed to take a survey for us after our Dec. 7 Strata Online Conference. We asked them about various questions and probed their relationship with big data. The big take–away is that this couldn’t be a better moment to be a big data vendor. This is the time to be fighting for mindshare.

Solutions, Solutions

Microsoft has placed Apache Hadoop at the core of their big data
strategy. In this article, Edd Dumbill takes a look at what’s inside Microsoft’s Big Data Solution and explains Microsoft’s commitment to the open source big data platform.

Data Privacy Day
You probably already knew that Jan. 28 is Data Privacy Day, but there’s a good chance that your Mum does not. Help her and others stay safe.

Stunning Stamen
Stamen Design’s year in review shows how elegant and gorgeous data visualizations can be. Take the quick moment to rest your eyes.

Elephants in the Room!
Because the big data ecosystem is quite naturally evolving, we’re always looking for ways to better understand it and to pass that understanding along. Much of what we post about data on O’Reilly Radar we intend to pull together into a short book that will help us and others map the space. Edd just posted a new piece, Big Data Market Survey, that catalogues the Hadoop sphere, the players in it, and where each fits in. It’s worth a bookmark.

Common Good

Good news for innovation and research! Common Crawl is a free crawl of the web, and it’s now being hosted gratis along with the rest of Amazon’s public data sets. It also reinforces an important aspect of tomorrow’s data centers: as well as computing power, redundancy and the usual features, customers are going to look for proximity to key data sets. Access to the Twitter firehose or web crawl will be a key feature for cloud providers and data centers.

Be Here Now
Have you heard of SenseiDB? SenseiDB is an open-source, distributed, real time, semi-structured database with real time being the real draw.

Presidential Analysis
Having trouble convincing colleagues, higher–ups, and your spouse that “data scientist” is a real job description? Why don’t you introduce them to Rayid Ghani, President Obama’s personal Data Scientist.

The Final Bit

Biz Viz

Want to keep an eye on the progress of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) now that the great Jan. 18 blackout protest is over? Drew Conway has created a handy chart that shows the cumulative daily reference to SOPA and PIPA by democrats and republicans in the U.S. Congress. Doesn’t look like they thought about it much in December.

Looking for more? Visit oreilly.com/data.

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"Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies."

—Linus Torvalds

Salutations

Earlier this month, developer
Cosimo Streppone pulled his notes together to report on his time at Velocity Europe, held last fall in Berlin. Streppone captures a nice part of what makes the Velocity audience so unique. “One of the most frequent comments I heard was that people found my talk honest,” he says. “That is the single thing I appreciate the most, because that had been one of my goals since the start. To tell an honest and detailed story of how things went, without pretending to be the super awesome heroes that know everything and can fix anything in no time.”

That makes him a pretty super awesome hero in our book. Honestly.

Cheers,
The O’Reilly Media Velocity Team

Speed Reads

Fast Takes You Don’t Want to Miss

Built on Sand
O’Reilly online managing editor Mac Slocum recently grumbled: “The Washington Post doesn’t have an innovation problem. It’s got a web ops and performance problem.
I wasn’t expecting to see a Velocity connection in this interview with ombudsman Patrick Pexton, but that’s precisely what I found.”

The WaPo is notorious for its slow downloads; readers in September wrote in comparing the relative speediness of porn site loads. Pexton naturally became vexed. He says, “I think No. 1 is the lack of progress at the Post in getting the Web site to download faster for readers. This has been, and is, such a technological challenge, that readers probably mistakenly blame the new innovations for that, when in fact it’s the technological infrastructure, and the tremendous addition of ad plug–ins, etc., that make the site slow to load.” What’s more, it’s been the subject of several news stories.

Google Corner

Do you keep up with the Google Code Blog? It’s not updated with fierce daily attention, but what is there when it’s there is worth a look. Also, Google’s quarterly online mag comes highly recommended, titled Speed—some even relevant to the Internet—and all of it is interesting.

Teamwork!
We point you to a fascinating read from Velocity chair John Allspaw about cooperation and collaboration at Flickr. He writes: “While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about how things worked at Flickr, and why.” Read on.

Etsy Etcetery

And speaking of high volume sales of homemade goods, the High Scalability Blog recently posted a talk by Ross Snyder, Senior Software Engineer at Etsy, titled The Etsy Saga: From Silos To Happy To Billions Of Pageviews A Month. High Scalability advises: “Ross gives a detailed and honest account of how Etsy went from a raw startup in 2005, to a startup struggling with their success in 2007, to the mean, handmade, super scaling, ops–driven machine they’ve become in 2011. 
There’s lots to learn from this illuminating story of transformation.”

Steve’s Speed

Have you seen, read, and memorized Steve Souders’ 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites? What are you waiting for!

Another helpful tip comes from Steve when browsing the Perfection Kills website. He points to a “great article about CSS performance optimizations,” titled Profiling CSS for fun and profit. Optimization notes in which kangax asks perhaps the ultimate question: “I could see by scrolling and animations that things are just not as quick as they should be. Was styling to blame?”

Velocity—China

Brilliant Beijing

O’Reilly editor Mike Hendrickson reports

“Fast and reliable” can be elusive measurements for any web and enterprise developer. These concepts were the focus of the second Velocity China, held in Beijing Dec. 6–7. There was a noticeably different vibe this year. There seemed to be more questions being asked and more people looking for tips, tools, and ideas for speeding up Chinese networks.

There were developers from large Chinese companies and those representing more start-up types of companies. Regardless, the expectation was that this was the place for answers. During two days there were plenty of great talks that met the needs of the most demanding DevOps engineers in the world.

The Velocity wagon began rolling in Santa Clara early in 2011 and then moved to Berlin in November and Beijing in December. I think each event just got better and better as the talks delivered what each audience expected—and more.

Global Speed, Global Vision

Meet-ups and groups the world over

If you’re still looking for your perfect user group—or if you run a group and are looking for sponsors, resources, or help—drop a line to Marsee Henon, O’Reilly’s User Group Manager: marsee@oreilly.com.

End Zone

Dept. of Sneaking Stuff In

Pull My Finger
OK, it’s actually Guess the Color. Honey to the CSS/HTML obsessed.

Want More?

The Velocity website has a wealth of videos, photos, and speaker slides, while lively conversations continue via #velocityconf. As always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback. Please email us velocity-newsletter@oreilly.com. Don’t hesitate to speed this newsletter to friends who need to know about Velocity.

In this Issue:

• Linus Torvalds
• Honest Talk
• Speed Reads
• Velocity–China
• Global Speed, Global Vision
• End Zone

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"A so-called ‘blackout’ is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals."
—Chris Dodd, CEO of the MPAA, ringing a belt full of buzz words on the SOPA/PIPA protests

Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair

Some days it feels as if wrapping your head around the very concept of data, large or small, is impossible. In a series of fresh posts for O’Reilly Radar, we’ve been trying to bring some clarity to the space. In a new piece titled “What is Big Data?” Edd writes: “The emergence of big data into the enterprise brings with it a necessary counterpart: agility. Successfully exploiting the value in big data requires experimentation and exploration. Whether creating new products or looking for ways to gain competitive advantage, the job calls for curiosity and an entrepreneurial outlook.”

We’re always aiming to stay agile in every way. Hope you are, too.

Cheers,
Edd Dumbill & Alistair Croll
Chairs, Strata

Strata Conference 2012

Making Data Work

February 28 – March 1, 2012 | Santa Clara, CA

Use code NEWS20 to save 20%.

Tracks include: Data Science, Business & Industry, Visualization & Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data.

Quick Bytes

Short Items of Massive Interest

Cyto SOPA

“When I heard that Tyler Gray at Public Knowledge was looking for someone to do some analysis on tweets that mentioned SOPA, I thought I might try Cytoscape (an open source tool used for biomedical research, but handy for large scale data visualization) to show some of the relationships between people discussing the controversial bill on Twitter,” writes Fred Benenson. The result is astounding. Benenson admits that analyzing data that large is more an art than a science.

Data Science a Sport

Want to determine which new car is the safest vehicle, how much dark matter is in the universe, and which patients are at risk of going to the hospital this year? So did Allstate Insurance, NASA, and the Heritage Health Foundation. They each did the same thing: They appealed to the 20,000 or so data scientists who make Kaggle their steam–blower site, their downtime time-waster, the place of their fiercest competition. Jeremy Howard of Kaggle presents at the upcoming Strata Conference to discuss how his site brings together the best and brightest minds in data science while everyone else is scratching their heads wondering how to find a single data scientist.

So Negative It’s Necessary?
Considering the social use of negative feedback, Peter Coffee sees an unusual tension, “As we move into the era of the social enterprise, we need to find convergence rather than contrast: we need to build social systems that are predictably useful and effective, which means we need to engineer them without making them inhuman.”

Possibility Thinking
The Cloud U group on LinkedIn is a robust community of well–informed folks who take huge delight in good-natured discourse. (Yes, they love to argue.) A recent thread on the topic of cloud complexity and the concealment thereof prompted a rousing discussion. Admitting that he arrived somewhat late to this particular party, Alistair adds his two cents, harkening back to 17th century mathematics, before bringing the discussion back to the current day: “Gottfried Leibniz spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the best of all possible worlds was. He concluded that it’s the one of plentitude, where the fewest starting conditions give us the most outcomes. In his words, the best world would ‘actualize every genuine possibility.’ I suspect Leibniz would have considered today’s connected, abstracted, service-oriented Internet a better world than yesterday’s islands of client-server and mainframe computing. Biology and cloud computing are complex. They’re messy. And according to Leibniz, they’re also better, because they allow more possibilities.”

Viz Biz Intel

Funny how one thing leads unnaturally to another. O’Reilly author Stephen Few was listening to Science Friday, considering asthma, and pondering placebos when he was struck by something about data visualization. Perhaps, he thought, a clever visual can have as little effect as a mere placebo. He wondered: "If people enjoy your infographic, isn’t that enough? Or in the realm of information dashboards, if the CEO has fun looking at the flashy gauges, isn’t that enough? No, it isn’t. Both are meant to inform. To understand the story of an infographic or an organization’s performance on a dashboard requires real information. Enjoying a pretty picture and feeling like you’ve been informed is not the same as the actual understanding that’s needed to make better decisions." Made us think.

Dept. of Backbone

Despite its power, PostgreSQL has always been slightly obscured by the shining glory MySQL attracted, says Edd. But while we weren’t looking, it has quietly moved to be a major backbone of database innovation: not least in big data products. Curt Monash’s article is an interesting catch-up on why PostgreSQL is important, and why it needs strong leadership.

Just the Factuals

“I’ve just had a fascinating conversation with Gil Elbaz of Factual,” Edd recently wrote on his Google+ page. “If you’re a developer and want geo data for your apps, they’re a great place to look. As well as underpinning some very large web sites, they also offer a regular API to developers, which is free to trial. Gil’s emphasis isn’t just about selling data, though. Factual is engineered to be both a commercial concern and a data community. Consumers can also contribute, improving the data set for everyone. After talking with me, Gil headed over to This Week in Startups, where he is archived talking about the CommonCrawl project with Nova Spivack." It’s all well worth your notice.

Free Strata Online Conference

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Strata Online Conference
Wednesday, Jan. 25, from 9am–11am PST

The Final Bit

Cycle-After-Cycle

I’m quite impressed with the range and different tone of content on PandoDaily, a new publication launched by ex–TechCrunch staffer Sarah Lacy, says Edd. This edit team is some Internet royalty, with OnlineBlackjack.com going to the trouble of crafting an infographic explaining who’s got what skin in this game. Good reading regardless.

Looking for more? Visit oreilly.com/data.

In this Issue:

• MPAA/SOPA/PIPA
• Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair
• Strata Conference 2012
• Quick Bytes
• Free Strata Online Conference
• The Final Bit

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"Hadoop clusters are sprouting faster than patent lawsuits between smartphone manufacturers, proving just how fertile open source software can be when the community falls in love."
—Peter Wayner, InfoWorld, on Hadoop’s Technology of the Year award

Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair

The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating—fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies—and our visibility about the future is declining. The future of business is pure chaos as demonstrated in a highly recommended cover feature from Fast Company that includes many of our favorite thinkers, including LinkedIn founding data scientist DJ Patil, shown here with danah boyd.

Cheers,
Edd Dumbill & Alistair Croll
Chairs, Strata

Strata Conference 2012

Making Data Work

February 28 – March 1, 2012 | Santa Clara, CA

Early Price discount ends tomorrow, January 12.
Use code NEWS20 and save an additional 20%.

Tracks include: Data Science, Business and Industry, Visualization and Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data.

Quick Bytes

Short Items of Massive Interest

C’ing Data

Writing on the smart data collective, Tom Anderson shares C-level predictions for a new data year. Funny thing is, when you’re discussing data, you’re almost always discussing humans, too.

Taming the Weasel (Words)
Aiming to improve English-language writing, Benjamin Beckwith uses minor mode for Emacs aims to improve English writing, and for that we cannot thank Benjamin enough. His code, currently found on GitHub, looks for the voice of the passive and and duplicated words, cleanly them cleaning them up so that suddenly, everyone is a better writer.

The Fanatical Experience
Last week, Rackspace announced the open sourcing of Dreadnot, what they assure is “a piece of technology that enables the continuous deployment of software. . . . Our maxim is that a new engineer should be able to push code into production on their first day on the job.” W00t!

Let it Flow

Last week, Nathan Yau proposed FlowingData Memberships for just $25 a year to support, mentor, and nurture blossoming data visualization artists. And if you haven’t yet gorged yourself sick on end-of-year lists (or even if you have), his best data visualizations of 2011 roundup is well worth a look.

Details, Details
Hadoop’s been production-quality for some time, but the 0.20 style versioning didn’t really make that clear. This 1.0 release is a signal to the broader industry that Hadoop’s ready to use. Amusingly, 1.0 is now older than Hadoop 0.24, but that’s a little detail the project team will figure out soon I’m sure.

Beep!

Surely you have one moment just to read for pleasure? Marconi’s travails make for a fascinating 15 minutes of leisure for learning about hacking, turn of the last-century-style.

Stat Central
Aside from the very annoying (we thought they were a joke) Tweet This! entreaties after each stat, this list is kind of fascinating, at least good enough to convince your Mom to get a twitter account. Will more than three-quarter of all U.S. citizens be online next year? If so, who will watch the babies?

BuddhaBrot

Edd recommends this link, saying: “This story’s been doing the rounds on Hacker News, but it’s worth re-sharing even though most readers here will have seen it already. Plotting fractals was one of the things I remember abusing my high school’s computing power for, and it feels like a great place to start understanding Clojure from.”

Patient, Heal Thyself
Writing on the O’Reilly Radar, author Fred Trotter expands on the idea of an ‘epatient,’ with the ‘e’ standing for ‘empowered.’ He urges patients to get health data and info for themselves, arguing that, “It is very tempting to just check out and trust that the healthcare system is going to take good care of you. But please trust me on this: That’s a bad idea. The default settings on the healthcare system really suck.”

All Shook Up
Also on Radar, Strata chair Alistair Croll writes on the feedback economy, stating: “Companies that get themselves on a feedback footing will dominate their industries, building better things faster for less money. Those that don’t are already the walking dead, and will soon be little more than case studies and colorful anecdotes. Big data, new interfaces, and ubiquitous computing are tectonic shifts in the way we live and work.”

Free Strata Online Conference

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Strata Online Conference
Wednesday, Jan. 25, from 9am–11am PST

The Final Bit

Cult of Copy and Paste

The 19-year-old philosophy student Isak Gerson made a striking win last month when his Church of Kopimism was ratified by Sweden’s oldest government agency as a true religion. The sacred symbols of Kopimism are the “copy” and “paste” commands, because, according to Gerson, “Kopimism [is] the philosophical belief that all information should be freely distributed and unrestricted. This philosophy opposes copyrights in all forms and encourages piracy of all types of media including music, movies, TV shows, and software.” We assume that Gerson is counting on a heaping helping of Kopi-him-ism to ensue.

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