indessed roscivs

The day after was the worst in terms of pain. The next day I still took an Ibuprofen from the pain in the morning, but it wasn’t nearly as bad. I’m not sure if that’s because I was accustomed to it or what. I also had soup for lunch, rather than the more ambitious soft-ish foods I’d tried the previous two days. I’m sure that helped as well.

Yesterday, though, I didn’t need any drugs—the pain was pretty much gone. When I chew, there are still a few sensitive teeth, but anything mushy I can get down pretty easily. I even ate some potato chips last night! I needed something crunchy. And I figured they were very unlikely to do any damage to the braces. It worked out pretty well!

At home I’ve mostly been eating eggs and mashed potatoes—both of which I love, which makes it easy. Hopefully I’ll be able to move to something a little more solid soon, though. I feel like my teeth have stopped shifting around for the moment (even though I can’t see any visible progress). But it’s only been a few days. Here’s what I look like now!

Yesterday, I got braces. Orthodontic brackets, plastered to my teeth, hooked together with a wire intended to straighten them out. Yup.

Getting them put on was surprisingly easy. Unlike a dentist’s appointment where they have to reach all over inside your mouth, all the orthodontist needs access to is the front of your teeth—and typically the biggest barrier there is just your lips. So they have this device that pulls your cheeks back (lifting your lips a bit in the process), but you don’t have to hold your mouth open forever—you can pretty much relax with your mouth open an inch or two.

Then they just stick the brackets on your teeth one by one, shine a special light on them to harden the glue, stick the wire up against the brackets and snap’em shut. The only uncomfortable part was before the braces when they wanted to take an impression of the teeth to make a 3-D model of them. (I hope I get to keep that when everything’s done!)

At first it wasn’t painful at all. Since everyone says braces hurt a lot, I figured something was wrong. I felt fine! I was bouncing around, showing everyone at work the new braces. (Disappointed several times because people didn’t even see them from a distance, because they’re the ceramic/clear kind. But close-up they’re pretty obvious.) Lunch, an hour after they were put on, wasn’t painful either—but it was pretty awkward! It felt like half the food was getting stuck in my braces. “Hey, I want to eat that!”

By the evening, though, I started to feel something going on. I told my wife that it felt like someone stirring my brain with a big wooden soup spoon—but from underneath. I guess it’s just the teeth shifting around. But it made me feel weird, almost slightly dizzy. Two teeth in particular felt a bit tender.

Sleeping was the worst part, though. Just as I was about to fall asleep, some weird pain jolted me awake. I think it was my teeth trying to go back to their normal, bizarre clenching pattern I mentioned a while ago, but because of the braces they weren’t able to. I woke up in the middle of the night and my teeth hurt something fierce. I thought (perhaps in a dream) that one of the brackets had come off my tooth (one of the particularly tender ones). By morning, several teeth were in full-fledged pain.

So, I took an Ibuprofen and less than an hour later I felt fine. Yay for drugs! Eating breakfast (right after the Ibuprofen) was still a bit tender, but lunch was no problem. By dinner, though, the drugs had worn off and I had four sensitive teeth now. I tried to chew my peas in the few non-sensitive parts of my mouth, but no cigar—the sensitive teeth would still make contact with the bottom teeth and that was not comfortable at all. I think how my teeth fit together is already changing significantly. Because of the shape of my bottom teeth, it doesn’t take much of a change in the top teeth to make a big difference!

I contented myself with mashed potatoes and gravy (yum!), which didn’t give me any difficulties. I was able to slurp that down pretty easily. But I hope this tenderness doesn’t stay for long. They say the worst is usually over after the first five days or so. I’m already looking at the Ibuprofen bottle to see what the maximum intake is …

The UK National Lottery has apparently pulled one of their recent contests because of some numerical confusion among their populace. The game involves buying a lottery card, then “scratching away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on the card”. Unfortunately, because the UK has foolishly chosen to use the metric system for temperature, that means negative numbers are common. And that just leads to disaster.

“On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

I phoned [the lottery company] and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.

You know, I’ve always said that the lottery is simply a tax on people who are bad at math—but this isn’t exactly what I meant!

Remember many months ago when I wrote a post called The Tradeoffs of Copyright?

The “sweet spot”—the length of copyright that I think is optimal—is when you take a look at the cost to society of X, compare it to the benefit to society of Y, and maximize the result: in other words, max(B(Y) - C(X)). Where is that sweet spot?

It turns out that a PhD student at Cambridge University has attempted to plug in some real numbers and see what comes out. Ars Technica reports:

He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).

Interestingly enough, the original length of copyright terms when the United States was founded was 14 years (although renewable for another 14 years, for a total of 28). But over time we’ve been moving further and further away from that optimal number, closer and closer to forever minus one day.

(Rufus Pollock’s paper, full of equations and calculations, can be found in its entirety on his web site.)

“Gah! That’s why they’re so light, it’s been turned down!” I was talking about the toaster, of course. The dial, usually at around five or six, was now sitting at two. My English muffins were not quite toasted to their usual crispness. “You know, I never look at the toaster settings before making toast. That’s my only weakness.”

DW began to guffaw. And by guffaw, I mean laugh. Uproariously. For about twenty minutes.

Seriously, she laughed through about four rooms in the house, collapsed on the bed laughing, and returned to the kitchen still out of breath from laughing so hard. Her side began hurting from laughing so hard, and still she kept on. Finally, when she managed to sneak in a few breaths during the pauses, she crowed, “The saddest part is I think you think it’s true!”

She then proceeded to injure herself even more due to excessive laughter. I must say, I don’t feel one bit sorry for you!

Happy 2008 everybody! Can you believe how time has flown? Nine years ago was the first New Year’s Eve that DW and I spent together. The year after that was Y2K, when people weren’t really sure whether the whole world would fall apart. Soon after that, I was celebrating New Years’ by going to the beach in the middle of the summertime. Last night we brought in the new year with music, dancing, and champagne. Who knows what next year will bring—or, in the words of ABBA,

In another ten years time
Who can say what we’ll find
What lies waiting down the line
In the end of eighty-nine

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. …We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.

—Richard Dawkins, courtesy of Dinosaur Comics.

In last Wednesday’s post, I linked to a New York Times editorial entitled, “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” I found the article maddening to say the least. Here’s how it starts out:

What if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society … to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation. … That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.

Oh my. Where to begin!

First off, the comparison with taxation is completely off the wall. Copyrights are not “taxed at 100%” after life-plus-seventy. That would be equivalent to the copyright still existing in perpetuity, but with all royalties going to government coffers.

Expiration of copyright is an entirely different thing—it is restoring the creative work back to its original state, where it can be copied freely by anybody. The shackles of copyright are a temporary nuisance for the greater good, not some natural state of things.

One might assert that the same argument could be made for physical property as well. The natural state of a piece of land is that anyone can use it freely, and only by the use of force can you restrict that use to a single person.

But, unfortunately, the natural state of a piece of land is not that anyone can use it freely. Land and physical property, unlike creative works, are rival goods. My use of a piece of land reduces your ability to use it—I can’t build a house on it at the same time that you’re planting crops at the same time as somebody else is building a parking lot.

The opposite is true with intellectual goods. I can read a copy of 1984 at the same time you’re reading a copy without diminishing anyone’s enjoyment. In fact, if there were some magical way to copy a book instantaneously for free to every person on the planet, it still wouldn’t diminish in any way my ability to appreciate that book.

Furthermore, someone can, at the same time, be creating a musical based on the book, producing a movie version, translating the book into dozens of different languages, and writing music based on the book, all without stepping on each others’ toes.

So Helprin’s analogizing falls flat. Physical property is just plain different from intellectual “property”. The public good from expired copyright and the public good from government-seized physical property are in two totally separate realms.

Finally, Helprin skims right over what I consider one of the core issues surrounding copyright. He quotes Jefferson,

ideas are, “like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

“But ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright,” Helprin dismisses Jefferson with a single sentence. I find his glib rebuttal amusing.

While ideas are not copyrightable (only the tangible expression of them is), Jefferson’s point goes a little deeper than that.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

The natural state of creative works is to be easily copyable, enriching all of humanity in a way that only nonrivalrous goods can. When you place restrictions on them, you reduce the freedom people have to produce derivative works of ideas that came before them.

The only reason we have such a wealth of new creative works being created every day is because of the rich source of public domain ideas and creativity that prefaced our existence. Do you honestly think that, if every tangible expression that existed in the world today were fully copyrighted, from Mozart’s symphonies to Plato’s volumes, you could manage to eke out the tiniest bit of non-infringing creativity?

I’m ambivalent on the topic of copyright. Not on its current length, of course—I believe the Founding Fathers meant it when they said “limited Times“. I think in today’s fast-paced world, anything past twenty or thirty years would be way beyond the maximum benefit to society.

What I’m conflicted on is where that optimal length lies. At times, I’m tempted to say zero—people are creative animals, and will produce creative works even without guaranteed compensation (I certainly do). And even then, there are many ways to guarantee an income even without copyright (such as the kind of creative work I am employed to do).

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

But then I think of Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, and certainly the most prolific. I cannot deny that he probably would have been less prolific had the copyright terms of his day not existed, providing him with a near-constant stream of steady income from a very young age, leaving him free to do what he enjoyed—that is to say, write.

Perhaps he would have even ended up as a chemist at a university, only occasionally writing bits of fiction here and there. Which of his works would I give up for a shorter copyright term? Would I sacrifice his Foundation series to the gods of the public domain? His autobiographies? Murder at the ABA? My heart shudders to think of giving up even the most mundane of his titles.

But then I think of the flip side of the coin. How many creative works do we daily give up because of copyright’s restrictive terms? I learned just recently that David Bowie, back in the 70s, had planned to write a musical based on Orwell’s 1984, but abandoned the idea “after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel”. A David Bowie musical 1984! The mere thought of it excites me at its potential. And yet it is lost forever—a still-born idea, stolen from the wisps of time by the cruel mistress of copyright.

Where does the optimal point lie? Is it somewhere in the middle, taking a bit of life from both Asimov and Bowie? Is it closer to one extreme? Is it closer to what’s familiar and old, or is it something radical and revolutionary? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I’ve been to so many doctors and dentists in the past few weeks I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a hypochondriac. I was never raised to visit the doctor on a regular basis, much less for every little ailment that comes my way. But in the last month, I’ve seen my regular doctor, an allergy specialist, my regular dentist, a sleep apnea specialist, and an orthodontist! That’s quite the gamut.

The results of all that? My dust and cat allergies have been scientifically confirmed, nobody has any idea what’s causing my winter cough, and … I’m getting braces!

Yup, it’s official! I have an appointment set up for January 8th. I’m going to get clear brackets on the top first—they won’t be able to put brackets on my bottom teeth for a while, because I have such a severe overbite that I’d shear the brackets right off my bottom teeth if they attempted to put them on now.

The expected length of treatment is 24 to 30 months, which is pretty normal for adults. It seems like a long time, but now that I realize it could provide me with more than just a prettier smile and easier-to-clean teeth, it definitely seems worthwhile.

Of course, when I was initially setting up the appointment, and they said they have openings this coming week, I said, “You’re just taking a cast of my teeth on that appointment, right? You’re not actually putting anything on my teeth?” “Oh no!” they laughed, “We’ll be putting on the braces on that very first appointment.” Eeep! It definitely seems worthwhile, but … next week … seems so sudden … I need a while to adjust to the idea of roscivs-with-braces. So January 8th was the first opening they had in the new year. Apparently procastinating until after Christmas was quite popular.

I’ll post pictures as soon as I’ve got’em!