José Bruno Barbaroxa

CAFÉ PARA VESTIR por Mexido de Ideias

Já ouviram falar em casas construídas com borra de café, mobílias feitas com o grão e até carros que andam a base de café. Mas vestir café é coisa nova! A ideia da empresa esportiva Virus, da Califórnia, EUA, é vender roupas especiais para aquecer em baixas temperaturas.

Não estamos falando de roupas tingidas com a bebida. Aqui, os grãos de café são reciclados e se tornam a própria fibra do tecido. Chamada de “Coffee Char”, a tecnologia tem a função de aquecer o corpo de atletas em condições úmidas ou de muito frio. Convenhamos, praticamente o mesmo que uma xícara quente da bebida quanto se está com muito frio.

De acordo com a empresa, “o café em contato com a pele aumenta a temperatura da superfície em 3ºC”. Paracontribuir com seu poder, há ainda tecnologias de secagem rápida do suor. Recomenda-se que os atletas usem roupas como barreiras para o vento junto de outros  produtos cafeinados.

Para quem quiser pagar para ver e testar os produtos com o “Coffee Char”, as roupas estão à venda no site da Virus. Você terá que desembolsar uma média  de US$39 (cerca de R$80) à US$67,50 (cerca de R$138), dependendo do produto.

Conhece mais algum uso divertido ou criativo do grão? Deixe um comentário contando ou envie um e-mail para nós pelo endereço contato@mexidodeideais.com.br.

 

Por: Lucas Tavares

CAFÉ PARA VESTIR por Mexido de Ideias

Held only once every twelve years, the cleansing ritual of the Maha Kumbh Mela sees up to a hundred million Hindu devotees symbolically bathe away their sins in the holy Ganges River. It is thought to be the largest gathering of humanity on earth. For 55 days devotees wade into the river to bathe, and join other religious observations on the banks of the Triveni Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers. Various sadhu and sadhvi (holy men and women) abound. The Maha Kumbh Mela began this year on January 14, with preparations starting weeks earlier. [Editors' note: The Big Picture will not publish on Monday, January 21, as we observe the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. We will return on January 23 with regular posts.] -- Lane Turner (37 photos total)
Hindu devotees bathe in the waters of the holy Ganges river during the auspicious bathing day of Makar Sankranti of the Maha Kumbh Mela on January 14, 2013 in Allahabad, India. The Maha Kumbh Mela, believed to be the largest religious gathering on earth, is held every 12 years on the banks of Sangam, the confluence of the holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. The Kumbh Mela alternates between the cities of Nasik, Allahabad, Ujjain and Haridwar every three years. The Maha Kumbh Mela celebrated at the holy site of Sangam in Allahabad, is the largest and holiest. Celebrated over 55 days, it is expected to attract over 100 million people. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Ours, Ryan Heshka

ianbrooks:

You Are A Saint by Yochai Matos

Forget the good deeds and being heavenly ordained, all you really need to achieve Sainthood is a set of fluorescent tube lights cleverly arranged on the wall. After that, it’s just up to you to decide what you’re going to advocate in Heaven… personally, I’m going to be the Patron Saint of Pizza Rolls.

Artist: Website (via: Lost at E Minor)

New business cards, what do you think?

travale:

At school we are all busy putting together our portfolios to apply for co op placements this summer and one of my teachers keeps talking about ‘making art you want to get hired to do’. Well I would love to be hired to illustrate a kids book one day and man would I ever love to work on a Tolkien adaptation! 

Who knows if that will ever happen! So I decided to attempt it on my own and plan out a fake ‘golden book style’ Hobbit, inspired by the Unexpected Journey movie. These were all painted with acryla gouache on watercolour paper and the book cover was edited with some photoshop. 

I have a few more illustrations for this ‘Little Tokien book’ project on the go but homework is piling up so it might be a few weeks before I can dedicate some time to get the rest done. I’m not really sure if this is anything I can use in my looming portfolio but it was so much fun to do! There is really something nice about taking a little break now and again to rejuvenate your creativity with a personal project! 

See this post on my blog - Follow me on Twitter

Something to learn here, kids - create work that you’d WANT to get hired to do. This is smart thinking. And hopefully, this’ll get Rosemary Travale hired by Little Golden Books to illustrate one of their books. I’d certainly buy one. 

Anna Anthropy's autobiographical game of going through hormone replacement therapy  

Cabel Sasser writes about messages hidden in old games, and tracks down the authors  

What it’s like being friends with non-geeky girls:

Friend: Why did you just send me a picture of an angry vagina?

me:  I didn’t.  I sent you a picture of a kick-ass cake.

friend:  No.  It was a hat.  With an angry vagina on it.

me:  It’s a cake with the Eye of Sauron on it.

(via Geekosystem.com)

quickly-becoming-not-my-friend:  The what of what?

me:  The giant, flaming eye.  From Lord of the Rings?

friend:  Really?  Looks like a vagina hat to me.

me:  Great.  Now all I can see is an irritated vagina.  You’re goddam contagious.

Friend:  Angry.  The damn thing is furious.  And why is it surrounded by Arabic?

me:  That’s Elvish.

Friend:  Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends.

me:  Sometimes I wonder the same thing.

The Wolfram|Alpha math team adds new and exciting content to Wolfram|Alpha on a daily basis! In fact, over the past few months we’ve added a wide range of features and we will be introducing them in a blog series here. Lately, we’ve made an effort to make Wolfram|Alpha a powerful learning tool for those learning arithmetic! If you are either teaching or learning addition, multiplication, or basic math word problems, Wolfram|Alpha can help you.

Let’s start with addition! We will start easy, 4+7.

As you can see, users can follow the number line to see that 4 + 7 is 11, or they can count the Manipulatives in the pod below.

The number line is especially useful when you are adding negative numbers.

You can even add (or subtract) three or more numbers. Let’s check it out:

Of course, Wolfram|Alpha can also help with adding and subtracting fractions. How about 3/4 + 2/3?

In this case, you can use the pie charts to help visualize what this problem really means. You can also use the Step-by-step button to see the steps to adding these fractions.

Don’t worry, if you are already learning multiplication, we’ve also added some visuals for you!

Let’s start with 5*3.

In the Illustration pod, you can see that a 5 by 3 rectangle contains 15 boxes. Of course you can do this with bigger numbers as well.

You might not want to sit there and count the boxes, but I promise, there are 100 little squares in a 10 by 10 square. Of course, in this example, you also have the ability to see the steps for multiplication of 10*10.

And if you have mastered simple arithmetic and are working toward word problems, we have support for simple word problems as well. Let’s check out the following example: Bob has 11 apples. He gives 3 to Sarah. How many apples does Bob have now?

Once you have become a pro at arithmetic and word problems, don’t worry, Wolfram|Alpha’s math support goes FAR beyond this. Be sure to continue exploring Wolfram|Alpha for all of your math help!

Rabanada com panetone por Mexido de Ideias

Quem ainda tem panetone rolando pela casa? Se você acorda todas as manhãs e dá de cara com as sobras das festas, essa é uma boa receita para consumi-las com outro sabor. Eu costumo fazê-la com café expresso. Mas quem quiser ter o sabor mais aproximado da tradicional, pode colocar leite.

O importante é não mergulhar a fatia toda do panetone no líquido, pois sua massa é muito aerada e ele se desmancha. Se você tiver um borrifador de líquidos para uso culinário, também é perfeito. É só borrifar a fatia com café/leite e passar nos ovos batidos.

Vamos lá modificando, transformando e criando novos sabores com nossos velhos conhecidos.

Receita de Rabanada com panetone

Tempo de preparo: 10 minutos

Rendimento: 4 porções

Ingredientes

4 fatias grossas de panetone

Café ou leite na proporção de seu agrado

2 ovos batidos

Açúcar ou canela para peneirar por cima

Óleo para a fritura

Modo de Preparo

Misture o café ou leite em um prato na proporção de seu agrado.

 

Mergulhe as fatias de panetone, uma a uma, com o auxílio de uma espátula.

 

Embebede somente a parte inferior da fatia no líquido.

Passe o panetone na mistura de ovos batidos.

Frite em óleo quente.

 

Coloque as fatias sobre um papel toalha para que a gordura seja absorvida.

 

Peneire o açúcar ou a canela por cima.

Rabanada com panetone por Mexido de Ideias

Chocolat - Turns all text into Comic Sans after your trial has expired. 

/via @codepo8

how appropriate, you fight like a cow  

Rob Harrison

Languages form the terrain of computing.

Programming languages, protocol specifications, query languages, file formats, pattern languages, memory layouts, formal languages, config files, mark-up languages, formatting languages and meta-languages shape the way we compute.

So, what shapes languages?

Grammars do.

Grammars are the language of languages.

Behind every language, there is a grammar that determines its structure.

This article explains grammars and common notations for grammars, such as Backus-Naur Form (BNF), Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) and regular extensions to BNF.

After reading this article, you will be able to identify and interpret all commonly used notation for grammars.

Click here to read the rest of the article

i’ve been saying for a while now that supposedly lgbt-friendly game developers like bioware only see queer people (lgb people, at least) as consumers. nothing could make the point more clearly than bioware’s decision to add gay romances to star wars: the old republic – on a single planet in the galaxy, which players have to pay for the privilege of visiting. pay to enter a dystopian future where queers are exiled to a far-off, backwater planet!

my usual spiel is to talk about how the only real queer representation we’re going to see in games is going to come from queer people making their own games and telling their own stories. and wouldn’t you know it, porpentine and merritt organized a twine jam for this weekend! and i was just this same weekend freed from a terrible obligation that’s been sapping a lot of my creative time and energy.

so i made a game, my first in a while.

EDIT: you can download the twine source for HUNT FOR THE GAY PLANET here.

The last 24 hours have been an emotional roller coaster. I woke up yesterday to find that a friend of mine – Aaron Swartz – had taken his life. My Twitter feed went into mourning – shock, sadness, anger, revenge. I spent the day talking with friends who were all in various states of disarray. I watched as many of them poured out their hearts on their blogs, a practice we’ve all been doing for over a decade. And yet, I couldn’t find the words to express what I’ve been feeling. When I tweeted yesterday about being angry, well-meaning friends and mental health experts who didn’t know Aaron wrote to me about how I couldn’t be responsible for someone’s depression. This made me want to scream. I decided to write this blog post instead. It is raw and imperfect, but that’s where I’m at right now.

For better or worse, I’ve known a lot of people over the years who have committed suicide. I’ve watched people struggle through serious depression and then make that choice. Having battled my own demons, I understood. Part of why Aaron’s death hit me like a rock is because this time it was different.

There’s no doubt in my mind that depression was a factor. I adored Aaron because he was an emotional whirlwind – a cranky bastard and a manic savant. Our conversations had an ethereal sense to them and he pushed me hard to think through complex issues as we debated. He had an intellectual range that awed me and a kitten’s sense of curiosity. But when he was feeling destructive, he used his astute understandings of people to find their weak spots and poke them where it hurt. Especially the people he loved the most. He saw himself as an amateur sociologist because he was enamored with how people worked and we argued over the need for rigor, the need for formal training. He had no patience for people who were intellectually slower than him and he failed to appreciate what could be gained by a university setting. Instead, he wanted to mainline books and live in the world of the mind.

I’ve known Aaron for nine years and I both adored him to pieces and found him frustrating as hell. In recent years, our connection grew more sporadic because I loved the ups but really struggled with the downs. But when the arrest happened, I grew very worried about him. We decided never to talk about the case itself, but amidst brainjams, we’d joke about him finally getting his degree in jail as a way to relieve the pressure. I promised to curate an educational plan built off of great pieces of scholarship and told him I’d send him a printout from JSTOR each day. I knew he was struggling, but he was also a passionate activist and I genuinely thought that would see him through this dark period.

What made me so overwhelmingly angry yesterday was the same thing that has been boiling in my gut for the last two years. When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren’t treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power. In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we’ve seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy.

Reasonable people can disagree about tactics and where and when a particular approach pushes too far. Like Lessig, I often disagreed with Aaron about his particular approach to freeing the world’s information, even if I never disagreed with him about the goal. And one of the reasons why so many hackers and geeks spent yesterday raging against the machine is because so many people in power have been unable to see past the particular acts and understand the intentions and activism. So much public effort has been put into controlling and harmonizing geek resistance, squashing the rebellion, and punishing whoever authorities can get their hands on. But most geeks operate in gray zones, making it hard for them to be pinned down and charged. It’s in this context that Aaron’s stunt gave federal agents enough evidence to bring him to trial to use him as an example. They used their power to silence him and publicly condemn him even before the trial even began.

Yesterday, there was an outpouring of information about his case, including an amazing account from the defense’s expert witness. Many people asked why people didn’t speak up before. I can only explain my reasoning. I was too scared to speak publicly for fear of how my words might be used against him. And I was too scared to get embroiled in the witch hunt that I’ve watched happen over the last three years. Because it hasn’t been about justice or national security. It’s been about power. And it’s at the heart and soul of why the Obama administration has been a soul crushing disappointment to me. I’ve gotten into a ridiculous number of fights over the last couple of years with folks in the administration over the treatment of geeks and the misunderstanding of hackers, but I could never figure how to make a difference on that front. This was a source of serious frustration for me, even as SOPA/PIPA showed that geeks could make a difference.

So here we are today, the world lacking a prodigious child whose intellect scared the shit out of everyone who knew him. He became a toy for a government set on showing their strength. And they bullied him and preyed on his weaknesses and sought to break him. And they did. All for the performance of justice. All before he was even tried in a society that prides itself on innocent until proven guilty. Was depression key to what happened on Friday? Certainly. But it wasn’t the whole story. And that’s what makes it hard for me to stomach.

There is a lot of justifiable outrage out there. Many people want the heads of the key administrators who helped create the context in which Aaron took his life. I completely understand where they’re coming from. But I also fear the likelihood that Aaron will be turned into a martyr, an abstraction of a geek activist destroyed by the State. Because he was a lot more than that – lovable and flawed, passionate and strong-willed, brilliant and infuriatingly stupid. It’ll be easy for folks to rally cry for revenge in his name. But not much is gained from reifying the us vs. them game that got us here. There has to be another way.

What I really hope comes out of this horrible tragedy is some serious community reflection and a deep values check. Many of the beliefs that Aaron stood for – the liberation of knowledge, open access to information, and the use of code to make the world better – are core values in the geek community. Yet, as Biella Coleman astutely dissects in “Coding Freedom”, this community is not without its flaws. Nor was Aaron. He did things his way because he believed that passion and will and action trumped all. And his stubbornness made him breakable. If we want to achieve the values and goals that are core to the geek community, I don’t think that we’ll ever make a difference by creating more martyrs that can be used as examples in a cultural war. As we collectively mourn Aaron’s death and channel our anger into making a difference, I think we need to look for an approach to change-making that doesn’t result in brilliant people being held up as examples so that they can be tormented by power.

Beautiful geometric anatomy created with thread and nails by Rome based art director Alan Dindo.

 

Huffington Post:

By 1992, federal agents were closing in on Kevin Mitnick, the FBI’s most-wanted hacker. But he already knew this; he was watching them.

Mitnick broke into the local cell phone network, allowing him to detect when agents were near his apartment. When they were close, he removed evidence but left behind a box of donuts in the refrigerator, labeling them “FBI donuts” to annoy his pursuers.

Nu, Encre, Triangle, Gaetan Henrioux

There is no way to express the sadness of this day. There will be many words, eventually, to express its anger. This story will infuriate you. For now, to the co-creator of RSS, of the Creative Commons architecture, of part of Reddit, and of endless love and inspiration and friendships, rest. We are all incredibly sorry to have let you down.

open-source voxel game toolkit for modern browsers  

lonelysandwich:

Aaron Swartz 1986-2013

Today, we lost a great mind to suicide, goddamn it. Who knows why. I just wanted to hear him speak and keep speaking so I went to YouTube. This was a good man—watch him express himself and you can tell. He had a good heart and expected the best of the world.

I never met Aaron, but he was one of my first Internet heroes—one of the first bloggers I read when I realized that people make the Internet and some of them have elegant and beautiful voices. Today, I’m sad.

Here are some nice words of advice from Aaron in 2007:

1. Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
2. Say yes to everything. I have a lot of trouble saying no, to an pathological degree — whether to projects or to interviews or to friends. As a result, I attempt a lot and even if most of it fails, I’ve still done something.
3. Assume nobody else has any idea what they’re doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don’t know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you’ll do pretty well.

Aaron, thank you for all you’ve done for the world.

My heart is broken right now.

at indiecade in october, i gave a presentation entitled NOW WE HAVE VOICES: QUEERING VIDEOGAMES. it was recorded, but as i have been unable to get an answer from the indiecade organizers as to when the recording will be online, i present here the text and slides (represented as numbers in brackets – click on them to see the slide) of my speech. what’s missing is the question & answer session following my presentation and the amazing discussion that came out of it. (an audience member asked my opinion on a criticism he’d received on the way a game of his presented what, according to the critic, were false gender choices; as i answered, i realized i was talking to aaron reed, and that i was the critic he was referencing.)

also, here’s the text of a speech i gave in november at the sf art institute.

NOW WE HAVE VOICES

[1]

queer games are important. we’re going to stop and meditate on this slide for a moment. read it to yourself, mouthing it silently. or read it out loud. internalize it, absorb it into your mind-brain, allow it to influence the discussions and conversations you are going to have here at this conference and after you leave.

queer games are important. i think there are people who recognize that fact, because a number of queer games [2] were invited to be part of this games festival, to be recognized as being among the most important games of 2012. Or, rather, the most important INDEPENDENT games of 2012. Each of these games was, in fact, produced by a handful of people each. [3] almost all of them.

queer games, it may shock you to discover, are NOT coming from the mainstream videogames industry. that’s because the industry’s model doesn’t allow for them. that model is:

[4] straight white developers produce games [5] that straight white games journalists market to [6] straight white “gamers,” some of whom will be recruited to be the next generation of game developers and produce the next generation of the SAME VIDEOGAME for the next generation of straight white gamers.

this is the industry model, or, if you prefer, we could call it a VORTEX, or maybe a BLACK HOLE. but when i think of all the amazing things we COULD be doing with games, “prison” seems the most accurate.

naturally, a system that privileges only a small minority of people – in fact, the one group of people that has the least experience of oppression – is not one that’s going to produce art informed by a very wide range of human experiences or perspectives.

[7]

mainstream games are monolithic.

[8]

in fact,

[9] i wrote a book about it. [10] the most that the mainstream games industry has to offer queer folks is [11] tokenism.

mass effect presents a world where the bro-dude commander shepard is more thrown by someone claiming to believe in god than by a man casually speaking about his ex-husband. in this world, “gay” is a checkbox on a character sheet, a boolean, a binary bit, not an experience that greatly changes one’s life, identity, and struggle. token characters are not the product of queer experiences.

actual queer experiences offer perspectives on identity, on struggle, and on romance that could be entirely different. [12] my friend mattie brice wrote about this very thing: she argues that most straight games are interested only in the pursuit. once the girl (or if you’re playing a bioware game and you’ve hit the right checkbox, the boy) has been won over, the game stops being interested. whereas queer games tend to explore the actual dynamics within the relationship.

her sample games were christine love’s DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY, BABE, IT JUST AIN’T YOUR STORY and my ENCYCLOPEDIA FUCKME AND THE CASE OF THE VANISHING ENTREE, both games with tremendous names.

oh, and mass effect 3 was the control group.

games by queer people, people of color, people who aren’t able-bodied, people who are women – because in 2012, women are still a marginalized voice in the games industry – have a great deal of perspective and experience to offer an industry [13] that is incapable of producing games from those perspectives.

[14] so if mainstream games culture has no place for these perspectives, where do they go? [15] mainstream games having no space for them, marginalized people have to CREATE a space for themselves in videogames. and that’s exactly what they’ve done, by inventing new communities and repurposing existing tools.

[16] this is a program called TWINE. it was created in 2009 by a guy named chris klimas. [17] it’s a hypertext tool – chris used it mostly to make simple branching stories: click on a link, see another passage in the story. [18] this is what the program looks like on the inside. it doesn’t look like code, notice. the tech community is pretty famously misogynist, remember: women aren’t generally encouraged to pursue tech careers in the first place, and once they do, they’re discouraged from staying by a hostile culture of entitled men. [19] but twine doesn’t involve coding. it doesn’t require the author to create additional assets, like GRAPHICS and SOUND. and it’s free. if you can type a short story, you can make a twine game.

and queer and women authors, strongly discouraged from participating in mainstream games culture, have made twine their own.

[20]

[21]

[22]

[23]

i’ve been curating an ongoing list of twine games, [24] and what i’ve noticed is that most of the people who are making them are women, queer, trans, genderqueer. compare THIS [25] to this.

it’s an entirely different picture, a “videogames” that looks completely different. this “videogames,” informed by perspectives and experiences that are often very different from these guys’, deals with subjects [26] that are very different than those we usually see in mainstream games. [27]

communities like this exist because of the inventiveness of marginalized people and their will to be heard even when the system is committed to silencing them. [28] but they also exist because of programs like twine, because of free blogging services like twitter, because of the internet. all these things have contributed to the DECENTRALIZATION of the means to create videogames. and that’s what’s letting people outside the mainstream – outside the small minority who are allowed to make videogames – get their foot in the door.

the more people we allow to make games – the more people we EMPOWER to make games – the more voices we add to the chorus. and in a form that’s so homogenous, we need those voices so badly.

[29] in a form that’s so dominated by senseless, gratuitious violence, it took a game like [30] LIM, by merritt kopas, a simple, abstract game about colored squares, to remind me that violence in videogames can be harrowing, can make me FEEL, can connect with my own fears and struggles and experiences. violence doesn’t have to be chainsaws and aliens and sniper rifles.

LIM is a game about a color-changing square in a world where most squares are either brown or blue, and react with hostility when your color doesn’t match theirs. by holding a button, the player changes color to blend in with the squares that are closest, though this causes the player great psychological stress, and it becomes difficult to maintain the illusion indefinitely.

[31] it’s such an abstract game that i am reluctant to diminish its power by ascribing any one meaning to it. but to me, as a trans player, the metaphor i see is one about passing, about being slippery in a world of rigidly defined genders who will smother, silence, or destroy what doesn’t fit.

it is the kind of experience straight, white, able-bodied cis-gender men are LEAST equipped to give us. and our games, our form, the boundaries of our experience would be smaller, dimmer, without games like this. the more voices speaking, the more games begin to look like you, and me, and all of us.

for lack of voices, all we would have is silence.

i leave you with my closing thought:

[32]

I didn't know Aaron but I certainly read and followed him. It's a sad day and a big loss. Here's his Freedom To Connect keynote on stopping SOPA:

(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)

Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist:

Please don’t pathologize this story.

No doubt it is a certain crazy that brings a person as loved as Aaron was loved (and he was surrounded in NY by people who loved him) to do what Aaron did. It angers me that he did what he did. But if we’re going to learn from this, we can’t let slide what brought him here.

First, of course, Aaron brought Aaron here. As I said when I wrote about the case (when obligations required I say something publicly), if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

One word, and endless tears.