Category: General

Maybe it’s because I work in computers for a living and know firsthand the perils of Version 1.0 (of anything), but when it comes to technology, I’m no early adopter.

I’m a Mac specialist, but I learned to use OSX only when I had to support other OSX users. I’m a musician and a music fan, but I only checked out filesharing when I finally felt obligated to have an informed opinion about it. My wife and I were probably the last among our friends to get a DVD player, and we just bought our first digital camera.

We’re even waiting to have kids until technology can make sure they don’t come out depressed. 😉

I think I’m accelerating, though. I just downloaded my first BitTorrent file – a mere four years after the technology debuted.

No, I didn’t really need a collection of 700-odd music files contributed by this year’s crop of South By Southwest (SXSW) festival bands, though I’m happy to have it. And yes, someone could have collected all these MP3s on a single DVD and distributed it by old-fashioned mail. But that would have been a waste of plastic and postage. And more important, it would have been much less cool.

BitTorrent is a true P2P (peer-to-peer) technology. Shared files are served up from the users’ hard drives, not a central server. All you need is a lightweight piece of software and a small text file (the .torrent file) that serves as a pointer to the large file you wish to download. There are other P2P providers such as μTorrent
or Tixati. They all perform the same function and can use the same .torrent files so in the end it’s really down to your preference.

There are BitTorrent “tracker” servers, but they do not host files; rather, they assist your computer to search the Internet for other computers that are sharing or acquiring the same file you want. (A new iteration called eXeemâ„ ¢ even eliminates the tracker servers.) Your computer joins the “swarm” and your client software starts to download bits and pieces of the file from its various sources and put them together on your hard drive. Simultaneously, your computer begins to “serve up” to other members of the swarm the bits it has already downloaded. “Seeding” is encouraged. “Leeching” is not.

I don’t expect to be using BitTorrent to download files that weren’t intended to be shared this way. To download files with BitTorrent you may need to use the best vpn for torrenting just so you don’t get into any trouble with your ISP. I feel guilty downloading songs (though I’ve been known to do it), and I expect I’d feel proportionally guiltier downloading something much bigger, like a movie. Getting my feet wet by downloading a huge (2.6 GB) collection of music by artists of no doubt highly variable quality, most of which I probably won’t have time to listen to anyway, seems rather appropriate, in fact. I contributed to my first swarm, and I contributed to the argument that P2P’s legimitate uses justify its existence and necessitate its availability.

BitTorrent is an incredibly useful and clever technology. It’s being used to distribute magazines like this one, operating systems like Linux, jam band concert recordings (with the blessing of the artists), and, in commerce, as a way for folks with limited bandwidth at their disposal to distribute their digital products more widely than they otherwise could.

It’s also being used extensively for infringing purposes – notably, to share movies. But don’t do that. 🙂

A final note: I also tried downloading a small pornographic Torrent file. Purely for research purposes, you understand. But to view my downloaded file I had to go through such a rigamarole of digital red tape that I gave up. If the governments of the world really want to protect us from cybercrime and cyberterrorism, they should just ask those who run websites like www.fulltube.xxx and the rest of the Internet porn industry how it’s done.

Shame on me. For all my complaints about Maureen Dowd, I somehow failed to notice that she was the only regular female columnist at The New York Times. For that, shame on the Times. In her column today Dowd points out that the Washington Post also has only one female regular.

The situation is actually worse than Dowd thinks, for the number of good female columnists at the inappropriately nicknamed “Grey Lady” is actually zero. Double shame on The Times. Her call for more female columnists is worthy of heeding. And I won’t deny there’s some truth to her complaint that

[w]hile a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it’s seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I’m often asked how I can be so “mean” – a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get.

My personal observation is that this gender bias has been reduced since the advent of the blogosphere. Maybe the popularity of forums where men and women can post and comment on an equal footing, without having to worry about making a boss or editor happy, has encouraged more opinionated women to speak out (anonymity can be a benefit too), and maybe men are seeing that they can have heated discussions with female antagonists just as easily as they can with fellow men.

Whatever the cause, I believe Dowd is wrong about bloggers. Female bloggers may not equal their male counterparts in numbers (yet), but the female contributors to the blogs I follow (such as the multiblog Blogcritics and the wide-ranging Making Light) are at least as vociferously opinionated as the men.

As for her audience, Dowd notes that although she gets a lot of mail from male readers wanting her comments on their opinion pieces but that “women hardly ever send their own rants.” I suspect that’s because the women are too smart to waste their time corresponding with an intellectual pipsqueak like Dowd. Maybe it’s only men who’ll waste their time reading and reacting to the poor writing and unclear thought processes of such a pundit-wannabee. Only men – like, um, me. Hey – did I just prove my point, or refute it? Hmm…

The use of performance-enhancing substances by baseball players and other athletes raises ethical, legal and medical questions aplenty. Angry sports columnists like this one are having their say, as are athletes past and present. But commissioner Bud Selig’s announcement that baseball won’t be modifying its record books based on revelations about steroid use reminds us that this is an existential matter as well.

If someone cheats and sets a home run record, it isn’t quite like cheating at poker. The artificially enhanced slugger really did hit that many home runs, unfair advantage or no. Should we simply consider steroid and hormone use as an evolutionary change in the game, like harder balls or smaller ballparks, as Mike Schmidt seems to be suggesting? A pitcher who pitches in a hitter-friendly ballpark, for example, is going to give up more homers. That’s an accepted reality of a game that doesn’t have standardized ballparks, and it’s just too bad for that pitcher that his circumstances will be reflected in his record; analysts and fans will note it informally, but the record books won’t.

Using steroids is unfair in a fundamentally different way, however. If you take steroids, having bigger muscles than the other guy isn’t a matter of luck any more than it’s a matter of hard work. It’s clearly cheating. What a Pandora’s box would be opened, if authorities like Selig decided that record books should be rewritten! But what an open sore of unfairness remains if they’re not! We will always have seen the games we’ve seen, but what was their meaning? What reality will the record books, not to mention our memories, reflect?

I went to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s huge Central Park installation today. Tomorrow they take it down and I didn’t want to miss it. I had the following three reactions in quick succession while walking through the orange canvas arches:
1) Big effing deal.
2) In sheer quantity and scope, impressive.
3) Bored now.
The best thing about “The Gates” was seeing the hordes of humans who turned out on this beautifully sunny, cold day. It’s nice to see the city drawing so many tourists, and to see so many thousands enjoying the Park.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers has released the full transcript of his controversial remarks about the paucity of women in tenured positions in science and engineering. A quick reading shows that Summers posited three primary causes of the disparity, as follows in decreasing order of importance: the “high-powered job” hypothesis – that the disproportion comes from choices women make; “availability of aptitude at the high end,” which is the controversial point; and “different socialization and patterns of discrimination.”

The question of aptitude ought to be scientifically testable. What I find more interesting, and surprising, is Summers’s low ranking of socialization. Many of the women I know, from many walks of life, strongly believe that as children they were “socialized” out of – in effect, discouraged from – taking an interest in science and math. And not just older women who one could say were raised in a different era; their discouragement may have taken more active forms than occur today, but passive forms seem to have persisted.

Can these women be wrong? Is this anecdotal evidence leading us astray? I’m finding that very, very difficult to believe.

Another point:

Larry Summers: women may not have the same aptitude as men in certain mental areas. Buffy Summers: The Vampire Slayer. Coincidence?

Max Schmeling’s death at the age of 99 conjures up a rainbow of feelings. Joe Louis’s famous knockout of Schmeling occurred in 1938, right around when my parents were born and exactly a generation before I popped into the world. Schmeling was born in 1905, the same year as my grandfather Martin Panzer (whom I seem to resemble in more ways than I could ever have thought).

As a child and teenager in the 1970s I was fascinated by the great heavyweight boxers of the day, the mythic figures Frazier, Foreman, Ali, even Ken Norton and Leon Spinks. The end of my adolescence coincided with the ascendancy of Larry Holmes, a great but boring fighter about whom there was nothing – except for his longevity – remotely mythic. Holmes seemed almost a corporate entity, blandly efficient, compared to the rascals and characters who preceded him. Not until Mike Tyson did character return to the heavyweight arena in a big way, and unfortunately that character was nearly 100% despicable.

I don’t know if heavyweight boxing will ever again be as exciting as it was in the 70s, or during the time of Louis and Schmeling, when the boxers sometimes represented far more than their sport. Maybe these things come in waves. Schmeling’s death doesn’t mark the end of an era – his era ended many decades ago, and how many of us even knew he was still alive? (I didn’t) – but it certainly does make you reflect on how important boxing was to the culture of the whole 20th century – and before – and probably after.

The 5th Circuit has ruled in a battle between two rappers over the phrase “Back That Ass Up.” I can’t even think of anything to say about this. It’s just perfect as it is.

The National Organization For Women (NOW) has called for Harvard University’s President, Lawrence Summers, to resign because of his suggestion that women may be innately inferior to men in their ability to excel at math and science.

That disturbs me.

Summers’s statement was a suggestion, not a claim, and there’s evidence to refute it, but isn’t science supposed to ask all questions and consider all possibilities? We’re talking about the brain, one of the most complex and, as yet, least understood subjects of scientific study. As The New York Times reports:

Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women – in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

Summers may have spoken in a provocative manner to a sensitive audience, but he was doing what institutions of higher learning are supposed to do: seeking the truth by asking questions. NOW’s knee-jerk reaction serves neither science nor feminism.

When it comes to sports fandom, we’re all kids. And kids love superheroes.

We don’t just want our sports heroes to win. We cheer them on because their abilities go beyond our own. In an idealistic sense they may represent, as Olympic officials and other sports boosters profess, the best that humanity can achieve. But in their physical feats they are superior to us, and thus, to us, superhuman – just like Spiderman, Buffy, or Harry Potter. We enjoy seeing a slugger break a home run record or a runner achieve a record time in a race in the same way we enjoy seeing Spidey vanquish a super-powered foe.

If just a few athletes are found guilty of taking performance-enhancing drugs, fans’ sense of fairness will render harsh judgments upon them. This week’s New York City newspaper headlines excoriating Jason Giambi express this. But if many, most, or all the athletes in a sport are taking such drugs, now or in the future, there will be little if any outrage.

Today’s steroid drugs cause health problems, but in the future there will be better ones that don’t have adverse side effects. At that point there will be no medical disincentive to take them.

Get ready for a new world. This genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

A recent discussion on Blogcritics along with this New York Times article about the separation of church and state in Italy have prompted the following thoughts.

I live in Brooklyn, the Borough of Churches. There’s practically a church on every block, and where there isn’t a church, there’s a synagogue or temple. There are also mosques in the neighborhood.

My block has a Seventh Day Adventist church. Its busiest day is Saturday, not Sunday. Crowds of kids play on the sidewalk out front. I don’t know too much about what goes on there, since it’s a Spanish-speaking church. I do know they sponsor food drives and clothing drives, and generally have decent relations with their residential neighbors.

Like all the churches, they don’t pay taxes. Why? Is it because they’re a non-profit organization? I wouldn’t know anything about their finances, but I do know how rich some churches are. The Catholic church, for example, and some of the evangelical churches. It’s a stretch to think of these churches as not-for-profit.

I believe that the tax-exempt status of a religious institution should be proportional to its nondenominational charitable activities.

For example, a church that spends money on fancy cars for its preacher should be taxed on those expenses. A church that runs a soup kitchen but requires its beneficiaries to pray for their supper should have to pay tax on the portion of its income used to run that soup kitchen. A church that owns its building and uses the facility for both worship services and charitable deeds should be taxed according to a formula, the same way a person can deduct home office expenses from his income taxes. Better financial minds than mine could come up with the formula.

If you agree with me that such a proposal is unlikely to be taken seriously in America, you will also probably recognize that we are a religious country, in the sense that religious institutions are given special privileges withheld from individuals, private landowners, and businesses. I don’t agree with these special privileges. But my view is in the minority. It would probably even be fair to describe it as marginal.

Still, think about it next time you walk (or drive) by the churches in your area. What if they all had to pay property taxes the same way you or your landlord does, the same way the commercial building owners on Main St. do? Then your municipality would have more income and could lower property taxes. Your tax burden (or rent) could be less. Meanwhile the churches, if they had to account for every untaxed dollar they spent, would be better practicioners of what they preach.