University Sues Artist

There is not much good to say about quasi-professional college football scene at large institutions. For most colleges, it represents a tremendous expenditure of scarce resources for trivial entertainment unrelated to the academic mission. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, recently gave a $30 million "gift" to its football team, in the midst of record-breaking budget shortfall and double-digit tuition increases.

This subsidy is a flimsy sham designed to allow pre-NFL players to train, at public expense, for a private media industry which will then reap obscene profits from their prematurely-ruined bodies. Th NFL could, like professional baseball, draw from farm teams they support, without having universities foot the bill for training their private employees.

Basing scholarships on athletic talent and body shape is about having the right genes, rather than the right study habits. Admissions policies giving preference to students who play a particular sport makes about as much sense as admitting students on the basis of hair color.

And notice, I'm not even bringing up the well-publicized official "turning a blind eye" regarding a child-rapist/coach at a certain college.

As if the college football scene couldn't get worse, the New York Times now reports that the University of Alabama is suing an artist, Daniel Moore, who creates paintings based on the University of Alabama football team. Mind you, he's not selling photographs--that would be legally different, as teams certainly have the right to control photographic representations, just as they do over other merchandise.

But here we're talking about paintings. Such pictorial representations, as interpreted by an artist, have traditionally been the product of the artist's mind. By asserting that they retain legal control over an artist's interpretation of football-related events, the University of Alabama is crossing a dark line into controlling the thoughts of artists.

Imagine a world where corporate entities could dictate what artists may or may not paint. What would stop Halliburton, say, from staking a patent on the representation of sunsets, and then requiring artists who painted a sunset to pay a licensing fee? What would stop the Koch brothers from patenting the idea of a nude figure, and then sending threatening cease & desist letters to artists who painted nudes? The principle is the same: the Univ. of Alabama insists it can control even the idea of a football game.

Let's hope the courts laugh this one out in favor of the artist.

Red Rock

Sitting in San Francisco Bay, just south of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, is a distinctive chunk of red radiolarian chert called Red Rock. I've sailed around this for years, admiring its geologic features, including some interesting chert banding and caves on the west side. Islands such as Red Rock reflect a deeper truth that the bay is, in fact, a recently flooded valley filled with a number of high peaks, some of which are submerged and some of which are above sea level. Red Rock is the only island that appears to be made primarily of radiolarian chert, and it is the only privately-owned island in San Francisco Bay,

Now, however, it is for sale.

With a price tag of only $9 million, I'm sure that some gentle reader will consider buying this for your intrepid geologist. I have thought often, as I sail near it, how fun it would be kayak there and have lunch atop its wind-blasted, 172 foot-high summit. Indeed, I have seen people lounging on its shores from time to time. It would be lovely to seal the shoreline, install "lasers" deep within its core, and use it to plot my nefarious schemes....

the Great Unconformity

This post about the Great Unconformity is really well written:

http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/01/great-unconformity-of-grand-canyon-part.html

Blacktail Canyon is a very special spot on Earth. You can put your hand on a 1.2 Ga gap in time, ages and ages of rocks that are just... gone.