Atom Feed
January 24, 2003
I’ve been reading Halley’s series in defense of the Alpha Male with, let’s say, mixed emotions. I love the writing. I admire her resuscitation of virtues that we’ve become afraid to acknowledge. But as at best an Omikron Male (my math scores pulled me down), I’m pretty durn uncomfortable with the throwback sex roles.
In other words, the series is working splendidly in a genre that itself needs resuscitating: scandalous writing.
J.D. Lasica explains everything you wanted to know about aggregators — the RSS newsfeed sort — at the Online Journalism Review. And JD’s written a “Making of…” blog entry that explains why he’s posted the full interviews he did when researching the article.
January 23, 2003
Eric Norlin explains why the Liberty Alliance’s federated ID scheme is a step in the right direction.
“All Things Considered” last night had a report on the Bush administration’s attack on sex education programs that teach kids about contraception rather than only proselytizing for abstinence. The scary part was the degree to which our government is willing to ignore or twist science.
Hey, teaching kids that abstinence is an option is great. Still, if the government really wants to get it to stick, they should couple abstinence education with proselytizing for masturbation. It’s a winning combination!
Slate’s daily news roundup notes that W has nominated Jerry Thacker to his Aids Advisory Panel a former faculty member at Bob Jones University who has called AIDS “the gay plague,” etc. The offending phrases were recently removed from Thacker’s site, but Slate used the Web Archive to rescue the page before it was tucked into the closet, so to speak. It includes the following subheading:
Help for Homosexuals. A message on the nature of homosexuality and how Christ can rescue the homosexual. Includes statistics on homosexual behavior, tips for ministry to those practicing this “deathstyle” and information on the homosexual movement and its political agenda.
Paul Lehrman, on the music faculty at Tufts, writes first to say that he’s not convinced my article on Open Spectrum is technically correct:
Check out two columns I did for Mix magazine on this subject: here, and here.
But he definitely does want to correct the story about Hedy Lamarr’s involvement in the invention of frequency hopping.
Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil worked out the idea for their jam-proof torpedo guidance system not while playing four-hand music (she didn’t play the piano at all to my knowledge), but over several weeks’ worth of private dinners (which Antheil’s wife wasn’t very happy about). But there is an important piano metaphor in the invention: not piano duets, but player pianos.The receiver and the transmitter would have the frequency-hopping codes on a tape or roll, which was fed through a sensing mechanism, very similar to the way a player piano roll carries musical information. Antheil was well-versed in player pianos: his magnum opus of the ’20s, Ballet Mécanique, was supposed to use 16 synchronized player pianos (only he never heard it played that way, since the technology didn’texist during his life time). I’ve been working for the past five years with this piece, and have managed to produce several performances of it using 16 computer-synchronized player pianos. It kicks butt. (More at http://antheil.org)
Thanks, Paul. My OS white paper retells the Lamarr story explicitly skeptically, so it’s great to hear a more reliable version.
Ah, the distributed expertise that is the Web. Gotta love it.
Scott Bradner, one of the people who crafted this Internet thing we know and love, has an excellent article on the striking absence of the user/customer in Sony’s and Microsoft’s dreams of living room dominance.
Gary Stock is all over the GOP AstroTurfing brouhaha. His page sends us to DredWerkz were you’ll find a password by which you can roam free at the GOP site.
First go to: http://www.gopteamleader.com/index.asp. Next, log in. Use the username: [email protected] and the password gopgop.
Then Gary recounts how he used the GOP Citizen Spam engine to send a message to the editor of the Kalamazoo Gazette warning him/her to watch out for letters to the editor that are actually spam-for-points sponsored by the Republican party.
January 22, 2003
Mitch rants about file sharing in reaction to the court decision that Verizon has to give up the name of a user who uploaded music.
Dan Gillmor’s column warns that the lack of competition in the access provider market may well lead to a stifling of content itself.
The question boils down to something fairly simple… Should giant telecommunications companies — namely the cable and local-phone provider — have vertical control over everything from the data transport to the content itself? Or should we insist on a more horizontal system, in which the owner of the pipe is obliged to provide interconnections to competing services?
Hmm, let me think about which I’d prefer….
Jonathan is predicting that the result of the Highly Distressing ruling yesterday that Verizon has to identify a user the RIAA thinks is swapping files (No!) may be a protection racket: Jonathan foresees ISPs being forced to pay a fee per month per user of broadband or else face lawsuits.
Hmm, which would I prefer today, valium or hemlock?
Joho the Blog uses WordPress blogging software.
Thank you, WordPress!
