The Creative Commons officially opened for business today when it released its first licenses. Why does this matter?

The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses — but only on certain conditions. You're probably familiar with the phrase "All rights reserved" and the little © that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: "Some rights reserved" and our "CC Creative Commons" logo.

If you prefer to dedicate your work to the public domain, where nothing is owned and all is permitted, we'll help you do that. In other words, we'll help you declare "No rights reserved."

This promises to be a fascinating experiment, and one well worth supporting. If I ever produce any original content – as opposed to piggybacking on the work of others by writing a weblog! – then I'll certainly look into releasing it under one of the CC licenses. (Of course, if the writers of the sites with the original content I want to link to start using CC licenses I'll have to make sure I respect their wishes too. Hopefully the majority will default to using the Attribution license, or else the weblogging ecosystem will be in big trouble!)

Gender Bending: giving celebrities a sex change, with a little help from Photoshop.

I think Patrick 'Cowgirl' Stewart looks most disturbing of all, slightly ahead of Buff Nat(alie Portman).

Warren Ellis interviews Justine Shaw, creator of a fine online comic, Nowhere Girl.

The web gave me near-complete control, only having to rely on hosting facilities. I'll be the first to admit I have trouble trusting people, so just putting it online and skipping the "middle-man" was very appealing to me. And, though I didn't think about this at the time it's very clear to me now: if I'd published NG in print, I'd be out several thousand US$, and no one would have read it. Online, people from all over the planet have seen it.

Did you ever see anything sadder-looking than a bear losing its hair?

Anja got a big surprise when she helped a colleague figure out why her PC was running so slowly.

I've talked before about switching to Apple. If I do, it will be in part because of this page of parodies of the Apple Switch ads.

My starship … used to run on Windows…
but I had to re boot during a battle with the klingons.
I    HAD    to reboot.

Now I use … Macintosh…
and my battles are always won.

I … never trusted Microsoft and never will,
after the death of my boy.

My name is James T Kirk,
and I'm a Starfleet Captain.

I mean, if it's good enough for Yoda, the Swedish Chef, Captain James T Kirk and Neo, how can I not switch?

It turns out I'm Olaf Stapledon. I'd rather have been Arthur C Clarke, but this isn't that far off. So, Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?

The BBC reports that there are plans to build a 50-metre high stainless steel "Sky Vault" across a stretch of dual carriageway in the East Midlands. The idea is to create a landmark to match the Angel of the North.

I think it's a tremendous idea, especially if it's to be lit up at night. Contrary to the reservations expressed by the Highways Agency, I can't see how it would be any more distracting to motorists than driving across a well-lit bridge.

I'm indebted to Michele for bringing to my attention the finest outdoor Xmas decoration I've seen so far this year.

Icy Bay, Alaska looks lovely by moonlight.

It's the sort of view that makes me glad I'm sitting typing this in front of a PC in a nice, warm room with a hot drink by my side.

Google's 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist does exactly what it says on the tin. More information than you ever wanted to know about what the world looks for on the web. (What I'd really like to see is that ability to generate longitudinal stats on the popularity of any search item on the fly. But that's probably just me.)

I'm a little surprised to discover that David Beckham was the world's most searched-for athlete in 2002. Presumably in a year without a World Cup tournament he, Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane would have been well outside the top 10.

I'll be fascinated to see what this sort of thing looks like a decade from now, when Google can really put together a substantial timeline. Will Britney, J-Lo and the rest have disappeared from the lists? Will the weather still be one of the most popular search items in the UK? Will Linux still be ahead of Microsoft in the list of technology searches?

Further to my comments the other day about a return to the Moon, here's an article by economist Paul Krugman on the economic uses of outer space. Sadly, he's probably right.

It's a crime that the full, illustrated version of this article isn't available online somewhere.

Effective as the strapless evening gown is in attracting attention, it presents tremendous engineering problems to the structural engineer. He is faced with the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it will fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety. Some of the problems faced by the engineer readily appear from the following structural analysis of strapless evening gowns.

David Cronenberg interviewed by Danny Leigh for The Guardian.

For a walking affront to decency, he's looking pretty dapper in all-black garb and immaculately coiffed silver hair. But then confounding preconceptions has always been his trademark. How else could you explain a career full of cerebral, deeply reflective movies that just happened to involve rampant sexual parasites (Shivers, his feature debut), the outer limits of gynaecology (Dead Ringers), exploding heads (the infamous Scanners) or insectile typewriters spurting orgasmically at the use of random words and phrases (the predictably crazed William Burroughs tribute The Naked Lunch)? "Weird" doesn't even begin to cover it: the long, productive marriage of a peerlessly gooey aesthetic and an ardent fixation with the overlap of evolution, technology and death.

I was surprised by the article's emphasis on how difficult it is for Cronenberg to get the money to make his films nowadays. I suppose it's because his films have shown up every three years for some twenty-odd years now, seemingly regardless of subject matter or the box office appeal of the actors involved.

I wonder how different Cronenberg's career would have been if he'd directed Flashdance.

Nick Nunziata reviews The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and gives it 9.3 out of 10.

Like a glass of wine that's been allowed to breathe a little, The Two Towers shows the creative team and the story finding their flavor and blossoming. All of the characters evolve here, and while the story is considerably darker the emotional core of the film remains consistent with the first film. These are characters to care about and ones who care for each other, and because the first film (especially the superior extended cut on DVD) defied convention and allowed things to unfold at a more leisurely pace, this film allows the growth to happen more organically.

Sounds promising. I'm especially pleased that Nunziata confirms that Gollum comes off as a credible CGI character. He's so important to the narrative than it would be dreadful if he'd turned out to be the bastard spawn of Jar Jar Binks and The Mask.

Jon Carroll has a little fun with fundamentalist notions about the sanctity of life before birth. Reflecting on the notion that by certain lights male masturbation is presumably morally equivalent to murder:

On the other hand, female masturbation is just fine. This may be the Good News the fundamentalist Christians are always talking about. Menstruation, following the same logic, is morally questionable. One pictures God in heaven weeping: "And that one was going to cure cancer too, damn it."

(In passing, I should note that I'm indebted to Mr Carroll for the explanation of why Dorothy Parker called her parrot Onan.)

Thirty years ago Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were walking around on the lunar surface, the last men to visit the Moon.

Isn't it about time someone paid another visit to our nearest neighbour?

New experiments in searching from those nice folks at Google Labs: Google WebQuotes and Google Viewer.

WebQuotes seems fairly hit-or-miss, in that it's easy to come up with a topic which produces a series of links with no comments at all. But if you hit the right topic then I can see this being pretty handy. For example, if you look for Sluggy Freelance you get a fair number of useful (and overwhelmingly positive) comments.

I didn't get on with Viewer, and I'm not sure what advantage it really offers over my ability to open a link in a new window. At least then I don't have to watch my results scroll past and frantically hit a button when the one I'd like to follow up appears.

It's official. The oddest book title of the year is Living with Crazy Buttocks, a compilation of cartoons by an Australian by the name of Kaz Cooke.

Myself, I'd have gone for either After the Orgy: Towards a Politics of Exhaustion or The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy: Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking. Either would have been a worthy successor to last year's winner, Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service.

Steven Johnson says that Apple and Microsoft are heading in opposite directions when it comes to how to improve on the desktop metaphor.

The problem with a one-size-fits-all metaphor is that there are inevitably occasions where the approach which works well for one class of information is distinctly sub-optimal for another. Furthermore, I have a sense that Microsoft's approach would be to tie all the different types of information on my computer in some horribly platform-specific way which would make it hellish difficult to use other applications to play with the same data, let alone transfer that data to a non-Windows platform. (See, for example, the fun and games if you try to use the Save As HTML option in any Microsoft Office application.)