Michael

Here on Techdirt, we write a lot about patents. Mostly, it's about their huge downsides -- the stupid patents that should never have been awarded, or the parasitic patent trolls that feed off companies doing innovative work. The obvious solution is to get rid of patents, but the idea is always met with howls of derision, as if the entire system of today's research and development would collapse, and a new dark age would be upon us. It's hard to refute that claim with evidence to the contrary because most people -- other than a few brave souls like Elon Musk -- are reluctant to find out what happens if they don't cling to patents. Against that background, it's great to see Aarhus University in Denmark announce a new open science initiative that will eschew patents on researchers' work completely:

The platform has been established with funds from the Danish Industry Foundation and it combines basic research with industrial innovation in a completely new way, ensuring that industry and the universities get greater benefit from each other's knowledge and technology.

University researchers and companies collaborate across the board to create fundamental new knowledge that is constantly made available to everyone -- and which nobody may patent. On the contrary, everyone is subsequently freely able to use the knowledge to develop and patent their own unique products.

According to Aarhus University, Danish industry loves it:

The idea of collaborating in such a patent-free zone has aroused enormous interest in industry and among companies that otherwise use considerable resources on protecting their intellectual property rights.

The attraction seems to be that an open platform will make it easier for companies -- particularly smaller ones -- to gain access to innovative technologies at an early stage, without needing to worry about patents and licensing. Aarhus University hopes that the approach will also allow researchers to take greater risks with their work, rather than sticking with safer, less ambitious projects, as has happened in the past. The first example is already up and running. It is called SPOMAN (Smart Polymer Materials and Nano-Composites), and has a project page hosted on the Open Science Framework site:

In this project, you will find minutes from the Open Science meetings, current status of the initiative, general presentations etc. More importantly, this project has links to the individual activities and research projects under Open Science. In these projects, the research progress, lab journals and more are found.

Combined with the no-patent promise, you don't get much more open than that.

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Redditor ipee9932cd couldn't find a keyboard to their liking, so they built the casing of their dreams—out of cement. The brutal board weighs in at 12 pounds (yes, heavier than an IBM Model M) and "it takes some force to move it."

Being my first concrete cast, I chose not to put any rebar and want to see what happens over time. I know nothing about concrete, just did some research and went for it so we'll see what happens. It's not moving off my desk, even if I try, and when I do move it I never hold it from one edge. I was thinking about trying basalt rebar or glass fibers for the next cast...

the full gallery has 5 glorious shots of this brutal contraption, and there's an accompanying how-to gallery to show each step of the way. (Not shown is dismantling a keyboard and installing the important bits, but I guess if you're that far into custom keyboards it won't be a problem for you.) [via r/MechanicalKeyboards]

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Often shared as a map of Europe at midnight from the International Space Station (or with some other cosy story) this is actually a composite produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealing a decade in European economic development and decline.

"Europe at night, showing the change in illumination from 1993-2003. This data is based on satellite observations. Lights are colour-coded. Red lights appeared during that period. Orange and yellow areas are regions of high and low intensity lighting respectively that increased in brightness over the ten years. Grey areas are unchanged. Pale blue and dark blue areas are of low and high intensity lighting that decreased in brightness. Very dark blue areas were present in 1993 and had disappeared by 2003. Much of western and central Europe has brightened considerably. Some North Sea gas fields closed in the period."

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Nothing says garden-party like glowing walker heads dangling over the patio -- $25 for a string of ten heads. Read the rest

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Allison Schrager proposes that America should end Daylight Savings and consolidate its timezones into just two -- the Eastern zone goes back, Central/Mountain do nothing, and Pacific goes forward. She makes a persuasive argument that the nation already conducts its business on coastal time, and cites the safety and coordination costs of losing sleep, de-synchronizing with the rest of the world, and generally suffering from confusion and disorientation from a system designed in 1883.

It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce. According to Time and Date, a Norwegian Newsletter dedicated to time zone information, America started using four time zones in 1883. Before that, each city had its own time standard based on its calculation of apparent solar time (when the sun is directly over-head at noon) using sundials. That led to more than 300 different American time zones. This made operations very difficult for the telegraph and burgeoning railroad industry. Railroads operated with 100 different time zones before America moved to four, which was consistent with Britain’s push for a global time standard. The following year, at the International Meridian Conference, it was decided that the entire world could coordinate time keeping based on the British Prime Meridian (except for France, which claimed the Prime Median ran through Paris until 1911). There are now 24 (or 25, depending on your existential view of the international date line) time zones, each taking about 15 degrees of longitude.

Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found American’s schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here's a Simple Plan to Fix It [Allison Schrager/The Atlantic]

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