Citizendium, the other free encyclopedia.

I was wrong. Congratulations to the Citizendium Foundation on choosing a free content licence (CC by-sa 3.0 unported) for Citizendium!

Free content, like free software, is about freedom — the freedom for anyone to use, study and apply, change and redistribute the work, for any purpose. "Non-commercial" isn't free enough to be called free. "No derivatives" isn't free enough to be called free. As Brianna Laugher notes, "The right to fork that is created by free content licensing keeps the parent organisations honest."

The big news here is that the choice of a free licence furthers the public expectation that educational content (Wikipedia, Citizendium, Encyclopedia of Earth, Open Site) will be under a proper free content license. Scholarpedia and about.com need not apply. Google needs to think carefully.

Citizendium and Wikipedia, or at least the more foolish members thereof, have their periodic pissy bitchfights. But we're on the same side in deep and important ways.

(Is Citizendium good for anything? Well, their history of the BSD Daemon is the best article I've seen on the subject. There's excellent stuff there worth linking people to.)

I'm doing science and I'm still alive.

• The Greenpeace whale is now called Mister Splashy Pants. Go give him some money.

Lovely evening down the Pembury last night, guzzling pints with pndc and hazyjayne, who was particularly luscious. I fear I shall never participate in your Sunday geeky pub card games (if I want to play games where the rules change each move, I'll do more Wikipedia), but the beer and company are top notch. redcountess and I intend to be there for New Year's Eve, just a train ride away, while arkady and Freda are in Wales.

I've been cleaning out the eMusic account: Martin Rev first album and Clouds Of Glory and Killing Joke 25th anniversary live album. Many years ago, I was in a failed band. I'd come home after hours of musical torture and want to hear an actual good record that was rock'n'roll but didn't actually involve guitar, bass or drums. Clouds Of Glory is that record.

I have also been finding and playing every possible version of the Portal theme "Still Alive after playing the Weebl and Bob version for Freda. (Spoileriffic ending fight.) Lyrics and chords, piano 1, piano 2 (mp3), cello, indie rock, EBM (mp3), NES, 8-bit, Japanese, Swedish, Engrish, YouTubeSports (hear his voicebox disintegrate), YouTube stereotype, by the songwriter (in concert), transcription.

redcountess is playing Freda awful '80s charity videos. Hear'n'Aid, oh dear God.