Photos of The Statue of Liberty’s construction in Paris

• Dumbstrucking on so many levels: Under congressional questioning the DEA’s Administrator doesn’t know if meth and heroin is more harmful than marijuana
• Convict testifies: Solitary confinement ‘is driving men insane’
• Supreme Court awesomely rules: ‘Fuck it, swearing on TV fine by us’ (essentially)
• Game designer Kim Swift on why Portal is a toy and toys are awesome
• Gaming distraction of the day: Gare
• The American Swedish Institute offers it’s Twitter to Stephen Colbert
• Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers: The People at the Center of the Universe
• Scientists Block Excess Aggression in Mice (haven’t they seen Serenity?!)
• How to blow $6 billion on a tech project
• Warsaw museum digitally recreated the destroyed city during WWII
• Photos: Recovering from disaster
• Video: Game of Thrones political attack ads are odd (but funny)

Also, making Easter Island moai heads “walk”.

From an upcoming PBS programme America Revealed, this visualisation of just how that one pizza (and its ingredients) make it’s way to your doorstep.

So a few days ago, an NPR intern wrote this blog entry on being part of a generation ‘raised digitally’ and how as a music lover at the age of 21, she owns over 11,000 songs but can admit to only ever paying for 15 CDs.

This in turn has lead to a shit storm of comments from all sides through forum debates, blog posts and most prominently, this 3,800-word open letter response by academic/musician David Lowrey who argues his perception of a ‘lost morality’ that lies at the heart of internet piracy today. It’s a very eloquent piece that raises some profound notions on how today’s artists are being effected and well recommended worth a read.

Of course, this popular rebuttal had then lead to even more comments, tweets, write ups, re-responses and a interesting introspective post by musician Jonathan Coultan whose music career owes its own foundations to that of the early sharing culture of the internet. The argument over internet piracy is certainly nothing new, but what’s interesting here is that the cases on either side make for a much stronger representation of the ‘who’ that are involved in this issue; as opposed to the usual rhetoric of on is ‘file-sharing pirate’ and the other a ‘monolithic music corporation’.

Whichever sphere of thinking you consider yourself in, this is an issue that’s getting progressively heated with each iteration and… okay, so maybe online reactions to passionated internet writers is hardly a step up from the excessive lengths taken to get a file-sharing website founder arrested; but going from the gross misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the creation of extremely unreasonable and impractical laws like SOPA and PIPA, social media has greatly simplified our online culture’s process of sharing (which is a good thing), but it appears that simplification has blurred enough of the ethical (not legal) distinction of what’s okay to share and what is really having an adverse effect on the livelyhood of the artists themselves.