About me

Hi, I'm Adam. I'm a home-schooled student. On this blog you will probably eventually see commentary on the stuff I'm doing, and perhaps even some psychological ramblings. :) As, a Christian, I may start a few theological threads. I just find that sort of thing very interesting. It's great learning more about God and his creation. That's if I ever get time to write!

Welcome to my blog!

June of this year will mark the 10 year anniversary of the Napster file sharing service. When the Napster client was originally released in 1999, it changed the world of music forever. It was the one of the first file sharing services, and most importantly was the first to focus on music sharing.

What is the meaning of music sharing? The Napster Client allowed users to share music ripped off of compact discs over the internet. This illegal practice has been made worse over the years by other methods of file sharing, such as Bittorrent.

Why is it such a problem? The ultimate goal of artists in the music industry is to make money. Albums can be worth millions of dollars, and the goal of copyright law is to protect the rights of the owner. When you download a song without paying for it, it costs the owner money. Many fallicies have been invented by pirates to condone their actions. Some of them are listed below.

Music artists make enough money!
Maybe they do, maybe they don't. That's not for you to decide. At any rate, pirating music will cause the labels to increase their prices, making it more expensive for non-pirates to buy music. If you like an artist, why would you steal from them?

The music belongs to me now, I can do what I want with it!
Wrong. In the U.S. at least, the right of ownership belongs to the creator of the music. Buying a CD essentially gives you the right to listen to the music, and make copies as long as you personally keep all copies of the album.

Music should be free!
Music costs money to produce. If it was supposed to be given away, no one would be in the music business. There would be nothing to listen to - and it would all be free.

If I listen to the artist's music for free, I'm more likely to buy their CDs later!
Although this doesn't solve any moral issues, it seems to make some sense. Unfortunately for pirating proponents, this is statisticly wrong. They average Ipod owned by a teenager has 800 illegal tracks. There is no way that this money will ever be recouped by the artist later.

It's only one song! It can't be hurting that much!
Though one song may not hurt the music industry a great deal, the effects of music sharing have been enormous. Also, the average person takes more than one song! Take a look at the data below.

Click the chart to view it full size.

The chart has two main features. One shows the GDP of the United States. The other show the total amount made by the music industry. The vertical bar you see shows date when the Napster client was released. It triggered the begining of the music sharing era. The results are obvious.

A successful industry should increase in value at least at the rate of the US GDP. Better industries will increase faster, and poorer industries will increase slower. A failing industry will usually decrease in value even when the U.S. GDP goes up. The graph seems to forecast doom for the music business.

Why am I addressing this issue? It may seem unimportant to you, especially if you are one who does not steal music. I am blogging because I can safely say that at least 75% of the people I know pirate music. The problem is considerably more widespread than many think.

Do your part. Don't steal music. It's wrong.

Sources:
Chart by me. :)
Teen pirating data by The Times.
US GDP values by MeasuringWealth.org.
Music Industry values by the RIAA.

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Recently on a popular news station, a story aired giving an idea on exactly how much money a trillion dollars really is. The numerical value for "trillion" is 1,000,000,000,000. It made me think - if we could print out a trillion dollars in regular $1 bills, how much space would it take up?

According to the U.S. Treasury, a bill is 0.0043 inches thick. This means that a stack of one trillion bills would reach almost 70,000 miles into the atmosphere. It also means that a stack of 1's representing the deficit generated under the Obama budget for eight years would reach the moon. You could build the Washington Monument using only dollar bills - twice.

Interestingly, one trillion dollars was spent a few days ago. It was to buy bonds sold to Americans by the government. The Feds printed it because they needed to pay off the bonds. Unfortunately, the only thing it costed the government to pay its debts was the paper they printed it on. Who payed for it? When the money was printed, the value of the money I had in the bank went down. It is rather a clever version of  taxation. One trillion dollars was taken from Americans, and no one batted an eye.

I find this rather unfortunate. Not only is our money being taken, the deficit will be enormous years from now, and it will take monumental taxation to correct it - for generations to come. That means we taxpayers (All 138 million of us), would (after 10 years of the Obama plan), each owe $72,464.

That's a lot of money to be owing when you don't control the one spending it. Think about it.

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Pi Day 2009 is coming everyone! On March 14th (3.14) the 32nd celebration of "Pi Day" will occur. It is sometimes commemorated by recitation contests and pie eating. Check out this pi pie right here:

I know the first 100 digits by heart. They are 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

Last year I created a poster that contains a million digits of Pi and displays them in a colorful way. I've placed the poster online in case anyone wants a copy. Here's a preview image!

The quote at the bottom of the poster is by the author Simon Singh: "Although knowing pi to a mere 39 decimal places is sufficient to calculate the circumference of the universe accurate to the radius of a hydrogen atom, this has not prevented scientists from calculating pi to as many decimal places as possible."

The poster was designed to be printed as a 4 by 6 foot wall poster.
Private message me if you want the poster

Warning! The file is nearly 100 mb. Don't download is you have dial-up! The poster itself is very large. Don't open it unless you have at least 500 mb of free memory. Most decent computers purchased in the last 12 months will have at least this much.

~Adam

P.S. If these clouds will clear up around here, there should be some photos coming soon!

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