Sunday, February 29, 2004
Tech Talk
(or at least finally a chance to write about something that doesn’t involve massive stupidity and evil, at least most of it ;-)
- Bob Woods
I’ve just never got around to talking about tech stuff. It’s what I’ve done for work for years and what I like to play with. I admit I have a weakness for gadgets, particularly ones I can hack and dink around with to personalize and to do things differently. What I really like is what I call “liberating technology”, stuff that’s seamless and empowering and elegant - whether it’s computers that are simple to use, or wireless gizmos that all talk to each other, or software that’s intuitive. What I don’t like is lowest-common-denominator stuff that’s barely designed, with an attitude of “good-enough” or that leaves you feeling soiled and used.
My favorites:
Macs -
I’ve owned computers since about 1980 or so, Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga, a couple PCs, but finally settled in on the Mac as my tool of choice. I’ve owned a series of Macs over the last 15 years, from the IIcx to the 8500 and in the last several years, laptops. When my last PC died a few years ago, there was no looking back. No more virii, zip, zero, nada! No more “You’ll go where WE want you to go”, or my data being held hostage to proprietary Microsoft software.
Computers that work elegantly, with attention to aesthetics and detail. Integration of hardware and software that makes things work seamlessly, thoughtful design and ergonomics. Things that just work, right out of the box. Plug-and-Play, not Plug-and-Pray. Not mass-market made-of-the-cheapest-components destined-for-the-landfill in 2 years stuff, but a machine that still runs fine 10 or 15 years down the line.
When you use a machine that has such attention to “experience” and nuance, you not only feel like there’s a respect for the technology involved, but more, a respect for you as a customer and a creative person. The machine simply gets out of your face and lets you do what you’re trying to do, not worrying about the latest “critical” software patch ad nauseum, or the virus du jour.
Wireless technology-
This stuff is just the coolest. I got an AirPort hub way back in ‘99 when wireless wasn’t even a blip on the radar screens of the PC world. Today it’s known as Wi-Fi, and it’s the hottest thing since sliced bread. I’ve used it with my iBook and later, my PowerBook G4. It’s definitely a piece of “liberating technology” when you sit down on the couch or out in your backyard and have a broadband net connection without wires.
The other cool wireless is Bluetooth. My Sony Ericcson cell phone has it, and I have a Bluetooth adapter for my PowerBook. Now, I can sync up my phonebook from the Mac to the phone and vice versa. It’s much faster to enter it in on the computer, on a real keyboard. But the cool thing is wireless headsets and being able to control my Mac from the phone. I can keep my phone safely in my bag while riding my bike, and use the headset under my helmet. Controlling the Mac is pretty handy, too. When recording my harp music or playing along with other music, I can control the volume, and fast-forward and rewind from across the room, like having a wireless mouse. If I’m listening to music in iTunes, it’ll pause the music if I walk downstairs and resume when I get back, automatically, via proximity sensing.
More on music-
That hardware/software integration thing. I loved iTunes when it first came out, and have encoded almost my entire CD collection as AAC and MP3 files. When they brought out the iPod, it totally changed how I listen to music. 30 gigs of music means about 6500 songs, about 600 CDs worth. I use the iPod while working, bike riding or driving, I jack it directly into the car stereo. I normally play my CDs only once - to rip them into iTunes and then sync them to the iPod. And the iTunes Music Store has changed how I buy a lot of my music. Cheaper than CDs and instant gratification.
Now the Mac is changing how I make music as well. I’m getting ready to record a CD myself, and will be contributing to a CD of SCA musicians as well. GarageBand is a wonderful recording tool, I find I use it more than ProTools these days. My Celtic harp, bodhran (the Irish drum), keyboards, Irish pennywhistle, guitar - I play them one at a time into GarageBand, combine them with some audio loops and I’m a one-man band…
What I don’t like-
Software that locks your work into proprietary formats, that can’t interchange with other software companies’ products. Your files end up “dead-ending” in a program like this, instead of going on to bigger and better things.
Companies that treat you as a probable abuser of their software, instead of their customer. It’s why I gave up on Quark and switched to InDesign. Between the $200 every 8 or 10 months for upgrades that added one or two features, and never addressing the long-standing faults of the program, and the “user-hostile” attitude of their tech-support policies, I voted with my feet.
Like I had years before with Microsoft. Although I have several good friends who work for them or are IT folks who work in MS shops, I have nothing but utter contempt for Microsoft as a company. They have a good PR face - on the surface, they seem progressive and humane - but deep down, their business practices are sleazy, unethical and techno-fascist.
It starts at the top with Gates and trickles on down through the management. Win every battle. At all costs. In every market. No matter the cost to innovation and collateral damage to the entire tech industry. Scorched earth for your competitors. Once Microsoft has gotten a monopoly in a market, innovation ceases in that area as their attention turns to their next prey. No venture capitalist will put a penny at risk in any market that MS is likely to someday enter.
This is the chilling effect, the shadow that Redmond casts over the tech world. The “air of inevitability” that somehow MS will, by simply announcing an intention to enter another market, automatically “own” that market. 90+% market share in operating systems, word processors, spreadsheets, databases, web browsers, mail systems and on and on.
Not on the merits of the software, but by the fact they’ve leveraged one monopoly into another and another. Not by quality, not by intuitive design, not by being in the least bit secure or bug-free. But by bullying their partners and competitors alike, by settling antitrust suits out of court, stalling legal actions until their competition goes broke and dies, “cutting off their air supply” and “knifing the baby”, using secret APIs, and getting into bed with the Bush administration, since they seem to think the only thing better than a monopoly is an abusive monopoly. Department of “Justice”, my ass!
I won’t play their game, or give them one red cent. People don’t or won’t consider the alternatives available. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve sent at least as much money Apple’s way as most PC users send Microsoft’s way. The difference is that I’m willing, not coerced; and frankly, for what you get, Apple earns it.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Scientists counter Bush view - Families varied, say anthropologists
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 2004
The primary organization representing American anthropologists criticized President Bush’s proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage Thursday and gave a failing grade to the president’s understanding of human cultures.
“The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution,” said the executive board of the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association.
Bush has cast the union between male and female as the only proper form of marriage, or what he called in his State of the Union address “one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization.”
American anthropologists say he’s wrong.
“Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies,” the association’s statement said, adding that the executive board “strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.”
The statement was proposed by Dan Segal, a professor of anthropology and history from Pitzer College in Claremont (Los Angeles County), who called Bush’s conception of the history of marriage “patently false.”
“If he were to take even the first semester of anthropology, he would know that’s not true,” said Segal, a member of the anthropological association’s Executive Committee.
Ghita Levine, communications director for the association, said the issue struck a nerve in the profession.
“They feel strongly about it because they are the people who study the culture through time and across the world,” she said. “They are the people who know what cultures consist of.”
Segal pointed to “sanctified same-sex unions in the fourth century in Christianity” and to the Greeks and Romans applying the concept of marriage to same-sex couples, not to mention the Native American berdache tradition in which males married males.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader, an expert in anthropology and the law who played no role in drawing up the association’s statement, called it a “correct assessment.”
Nader, who is an association member, said Bush’s proposal “serves the views of the religious right, and that has to do with getting votes.”
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Stations of the Crass
By Maureen Dowd
N.Y. Times
February 26, 2004
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Mel Gibson and George W. Bush are courting bigotry in the name of sanctity.
The moviemaker wants to promote “The Passion of the Christ” and the president wants to prevent the passion of the gays.
Opening on two screens: W.’s stigmatizing as political strategy and Mel’s stigmata as marketing strategy.
Mr. Gibson, who told Diane Sawyer that he was inspired to make the movie after suffering through addictions, found the ultimate 12-step program: the Stations of the Cross.
I went to the first show of “The Passion” at the Loews on 84th Street and Broadway; it was about a quarter filled. This is not, as you may have read, a popcorn movie. In Latin and Aramaic with English subtitles, it’s two gory hours of Jesus getting flayed by brutish Romans at the behest of heartless Jews.
Perhaps fittingly for a production that licensed a jeweler to sell $12.99 nail necklaces (what’s next? crown-of-thorns prom tiaras?), “The Passion” has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western. You might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, “A Fistful of Nails.”
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, scorns it as “a repulsive, masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film” that uses “classically anti-Semitic images.”
I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. “The Jews may have killed Jesus,” he said. “But they also gave us `Easter Parade.’ “
The movie’s message, as Jesus says, is that you must love not only those who love you, but more importantly those who hate you.
So presumably you should come out of the theater suffused with charity toward your fellow man.
But this is a Mel Gibson film, so you come out wanting to kick somebody’s teeth in.
In “Braveheart” and “The Patriot,” his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history . . .
Like Mr. Gibson, Mr. Bush is whipping up intolerance but calling it a sacred cause.
At first, the preacher-in-chief resisted conservative calls for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He felt, as Jesus put it in the Gibson script (otherwise known as the Gospels), “If it is possible, let this chalice pass from me.”
But under pressure from the Christian right, he grabbed the chalice with both hands and swigged — seeking to set a precedent in codifying discrimination in the Constitution, a document that in the past has been amended to correct discrimination by giving fuller citizenship rights to blacks, women and young people.
If the president is truly concerned about preserving the sanctity of marriage, as one of my readers suggested, why not make divorce illegal and stone adulterers?
Our soldiers are being killed in Iraq; Osama’s still on the loose; jobs are being exported all over the world; the deficit has reached biblical proportions.
And our president is worrying about Mars and marriage?
When reporters tried to pin down White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday on why gay marriage is threatening, he spouted a bunch of gobbledygook about “the fabric of society” and civilization.
The pols keep arguing that institutions can’t be changed when, in fact, they change all the time. Haven’t they ever heard of the institution of slavery?
The government should not be trying to legislate what’s sacred.
When Bushes get in trouble, they look around for a politically advantageous bogeyman. Lee Atwater tried to make Americans shudder over the prospect of Willie Horton arriving on their doorstep; and now Karl Rove wants Americans to shudder at the prospect of a lesbian — Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary, say — setting up housekeeping next door with her “wife.”
When it comes to the Bushes’ willingness to stir up base instincts of the base, it is as it was.
As the Max von Sydow character said in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” while watching a TV evangelist appealing for money: “If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.”
Monday, February 23, 2004
Déja Vu, All Over Again...
1992- In a re-election campaign and facing declining popularity due to the aftermath of a war against Iraq that didn’t quite go according to plan, and an economy that frankly, sucked, despite tax cuts for the wealthy that were supposed to create jobs, but didn’t - President George H.W. Bush tried to divert the public’s attention with a call for a Constitutional amendment. This was something that had no business being written into the Constitution, and was a blatant attempt to deliver a sop to his far-right constituency. An amendment to ban flag-burning as a form of protest. As if you could somehow protect the country by stopping people from burning a piece of cloth. People yelled and screamed and pontificated, but in the end, the amendment went nowhere and Bush lost the election.
2004- In a re-election campaign and facing declining popularity due to the aftermath of a war against Iraq that didn’t quite go according to plan, and an economy that frankly, sucked, despite tax cuts for the wealthy that were supposed to create jobs, but didn’t - President George W. Bush tried to divert the public’s attention with a call for a Constitutional amendment. This was something that had no business being written into the Constitution, and was a blatant attempt to deliver a sop to his far-right constituency. An amendment to ban marriages between persons of the same sex. As if you could somehow protect marriage by stopping people who love each other from getting married. People yelled and screamed and pontificated, but in the end…
- Bob Woods
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Scientists: Bush administration distorts research
Thursday, February 19, 2004 Posted: 9:33 AM EST (1433 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP)—President Bush’s administration distorts scientific findings and seeks to manipulate experts’ advice to avoid information that runs counter to its political beliefs, a private organization of scientists asserted on Wednesday.
The Union of Concerned Scientists contended in a report that “the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.”
“We’re not taking issue with administration policies. We’re taking issue with the administration’s distortion ... of the science related to some of its policies,” said the group’s president, Kurt Gottfried.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had not seen the report but that the administration “makes decisions based on the best available science.”
White House science adviser John Marburger said he found the report “somewhat disappointing ... because it makes some sweeping generalizations about policy in this administration that are based on a random selection of incidents and issues.”
He added, “I don’t think it makes the case for the sweeping accusations that it makes.”
Marburger acknowledged that the complaint was signed by a wide assortment of prominent scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the National Medal of Science.
That, he said, is “evidence we are not communicating with them as we should and I’ll have to deal with that.”
“We need to have a dialogue about what is actually happening, but this report does not do it,” Marburger said.
F. Sherwood Rowland, a Nobel prize winner for his studies of ozone in the atmosphere, was particularly critical of the administration’s approach to climate change.
He said the consensus of scientific opinion about global warming is being ignored and that government reports have been censored to remove views not in tune with Bush’s politics.
The union’s report came at the same time the National Academy of Science was releasing its own study that commends the administration’s plan to study climate but also expresses concern that the research was underfunded and not being pursued vigorously enough.
Asked if they had seen any political interference in the climate program, Thomas E. Graedel of Yale University, chairman of the academy committee, said his group did not look for that. But, he added, he had not seen anything that would suggest the research plan had such political concerns.
A commission member, Anthony L. Janetos of the John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, noted that the climate program involves high level members of the administration.
That’s a two-edged sword, Janetos said. It means scientists are dealing with people who can make decisions and provide resources, but it also creates a challenge in maintaining scientific credibility.
Among the examples cited in the union’s report:
• A 2003 report that the administration sought changes in an Environmental Protection Agency climate study, including deletion of a 1,000-year temperature record and removal of reference to a study that attributed some of global warming to human activity.
• A delay in an EPA report on mercury pollution from some power plants.
• A charge that the administration pressed the Centers for Disease Control to end a project called “Programs that Work,” which found sex education programs that did not insist only on abstinence were still effective.
