Over at The Gaping Silence, Phil Edwards picks up the challenge of listing “a favorite album for every year of your life.” I’m definitely game for this game, though, like Phil and for precisely the same reason, I’m going to begin the list a few years after the year I was born. There are two restrictions: only one album per year (painful!) and no repeats of artists. Here goes:

1965: The Beatles, Rubber Soul

1966: The Yardbirds, Over Under Sideways Down (aka Roger the Engineer)

1967: The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico

1968: Van Morrison, Astral Weeks

1969, The Stooges, The Stooges

1970: The Grateful Dead, American Beauty

1971: The Faces, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink … to a Blind Horse

1972: The Rolling Stones. Exile on Main Street

1973: Mott the Hoople, Mott

1974: Roxy Music, Country Life

1975: Neil Young, Tonight’s the Night

1976: David Bowie, Station to Station

1977: The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols

1978: Wire, Pink Flag

1979: The Undertones, The Undertones

1980: X, Los Angeles

1981: Squeeze, East Side Story

1982: Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights

1983: REM, Murmur

1984: The Replacements, Let It Be

1985: Husker Du, New Day Rising

1986: Elvis Costello, King of America

1987: The Smiths, Strangeways Here We Come

1988: John Hiatt, Slow Turning

1989: De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising

1990: Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella

1991: Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend

1992: Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

1993: Cracker, Kerosene Hat

1994: Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand

1995: Oasis, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

1996: Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister

1997: Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind

1998: Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue

1999: Supergrass, Supergrass

2000: Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of Bewilderbeast

2001: The Strokes, Is This It

2002: Beck, Sea Change

2003: Kings of Leon, Youth and Young Manhood

2004: Arcade Fire, Funeral

2005: Sufjan Stevens, Come on Feel the Illinoise

2006: Cat Power, The Greatest

2007: The Thrills, Teenager

2008: My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges

Note for precisionists: Pink Flag came out in UK in late 77, but I think the US release was in 78, which allows me to sneak it in. If I’m wrong, let me know.

Having taken the Water Wiennies and the Jarts out of the closet, now seems like an ideal time to put Rough Type on ice for the summer. Posts will be rare for a spell.

The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user’s home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud.

And yet does the location of the data center really matter? I was listening recently to comments by an executive from Mozy, the online backup service. Noting that Mozy allows its customers to use a personal encryption key to encrypt the data that they store with the company (making it impossible for Mozy or anyone other than the owner to decipher it), he asked whether such encrypted information resides legally where the data is stored or where the encryption key is held. It’s an interesting and important question, as encryption promises to separate “information” from the bits of data that carry it.

Back in 1993, Eric Schmidt, then the Sun kid, now the Google dad, wrote in an email to the telecosmic George Gilder: “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.”

The Economist closed its recent article on cloud computing by sketching out a picture of where this technological trend is leading:

In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.

Bill Thompson has noted that, as governments and corporations become more aware of, and either more nervous or more excited about, the ability to shift data and data processing effortlessly across borders, the “computing atmosphere” may get very foggy very fast, with the cloud turning “into a miasma … heavy with menace.” Through the noxious mist, Thompson can even hear hounds baying.

James Urquhart describes how the idea of the itinerant computer – a feather of software code wafting from data center to data center – is rapidly becoming, at a technical level, a reality:

The concept of “moving” servers around the world was greatly enhanced by the live motion technologies offered by all of the major virtualization infrastructure players (e.g. VMotion). With these technologies (as you all probably know by now), moving a server from one piece of hardware to another is as simple as clicking a button. Today, most of that convenience is limited to within a single network, but with upcoming SLAuto federation architectures and standards that inter-LAN motion will be greatly simplified over the coming years.

Once you’re able to “move your complete processing state from place to place as processing requires, without losing a beat,” a kind of legal arbitrage becomes possible:

So, run your registration process in the USA, your banking steps in Switzerland, and your gambling algorithms in the Bahamas. Or, market your child-focused alternative reality game in the US, but collect personal information exclusively on servers in Madagascar. It may still be technically illegal from a US perspective, but who do they prosecute? … I know there are a million roadblocks here, but I also know both the corporate world and underworld have proven themselves determined and ingenious technologists when it comes to these kinds of problems.

Gregory Ness suggests that the world’s new spice trails may be computing trails:

Over the last thousand or so years we’ve seen spice trails generate massive wealth in the Middle East, shipping lanes open up sizable agricultural and mining projects in less-developed regions; and steam, factories and electricity generate yet another wave of disproportionate winners. The wealth of North America in the last two decades has increasingly come from information technology and energy as manufacturing has chased low cost labor to nations with lower standards of living.

When spice trade routes shifted to the ocean the overall Middle East economy went from optimism to despair, from science and enlightenment to xenophobia. Factories gradually replaced artisans around the world and agriculture went through a series of cycles depending on access to trade routes and distances from markets (in addition to weather and practices, etc). A coming shift to cloud computing could be as influential in wealth distribution as any previous shift in factors of production and access.

Ness concludes: “It may only be a matter of time before we hear a politician talk about the evils of ‘cloudsourcing.'” For the moment, though, they’re celebrating in Lenoir, under an almost cloudless sky.

Wikipedia has long promoted itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” But Jimmy Wales offers a new, circumscribed slogan in a column in today’s Observer. Wikipedia is now, according to Wales, “the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic.” The old slogan was the language of the bazaar. The new one is the language of the club.

(Disclosure: I’m on Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.)

Alan Taylor’s photojournalism blog, The Big Picture, has been receiving some well-deserved praise. Check it out.

If supermarkets today decided to give away hot dogs for free, then more people would consume hot dogs at their cookouts this weekend and fewer people would consume hamburgers – even if people in general like hamburgers a bit more than hot dogs. Demand is elastic, and it tends to move in the opposite direction from price. Make something cheaper and people will buy more of it, often substituting it for something else they would have actually preferred to buy if the price hadn’t changed. Give something away, and the effect will be magnified. We turn into gluttons, stuffing free hot dogs into our mouths until nausea sets in.

The price elasticity of demand applies to information as well as meat products. Make information free, and we’ll become gluttons of information, as Rob Horning notes in an interesting post today:

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind—often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities – like, say, thinking – shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can’t stop because – hey – it’s free.

And, yes, your brain does look fat.