BitTorrent — an idea whose time has come

A mark of a great idea is that you always have the “Why-didn’t-we-think-of-that-before?” moment when you first encounter it. BitTorrent is like that. It’s a file-sharing system which discourages ‘leeching’ — i.e. downloading but not uploading. Or, as John Markoff puts it in the NYT, “Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance. BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).

The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original ‘seeder.’ That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source.”

The interesting thing about BitTorrent from my point of view is the way it illustrates the non-infringing potential of P2P technologies. This is a great way of distributing large files (for example, operating system upgrades) and of making much more efficient of the resources attached to the Net. There’s a nice diagram illustrating that here. It’s also Open Source software, written by a guy who lived on credit cards while he was creating it — and who then gave it to the world. What a gift!

Academic niceties — and savagery

George Steiner: photo (c) Vernon Doucette.

One of the cruellest genres is the acerbic academic review. Here is Joseph Epstein on George Steiner’s latest book (the print edition of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard):

Quote 1: “My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner’s of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.”

Quote 2:”So high does Steiner come at things, so greatly does he dramatize (and self-dramatize) ideas and all experience, that one may lose sight of the fact that he is himself a very considerable clichémeister. Most of his clichés, of course, come from books. One finds little evidence in Steiner’s writing that he knows either man or life. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James that he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Steiner’s is a mind that seems to have been violated by just about every idea he has encountered.”

Monty Python on Immanuel Kant

While we’re on the subject of Kant, remember the lovely Monty Python sketch where a timid English academic joins the philosophy department of an Australian university where all the lecturers are called Bruce and, er, short on sublety. They have a departmental song which goes like this:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya
’bout the raisin’ of the wrist.
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
‘alf a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
and Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
“I drink, therefore I am.”

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.

Immanuel Kant died 200 years ago today

The anniversary is marked by a rash of new biographies. According to the Guardian they show the great man in an unexpected light. “He has been famously portrayed as a bore, a man whose habits were so regular that housewives could set their watches by his legendary afternoon walk.

But according to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher … was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes.

He had a sense of humour, and there were women in his life, although he never married. On occasion, Kant drank so much red wine he was unable to find his way home, the books claim.”

Hmmm… I’m a bit disappointed by these revelations. I’ve always thought old Immanuel was impressively serious, as befits a proper philosopher. Just look at that portrait above. One of my favourite quotes is his observation that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Not sure I like the idea of K as a raver and a billiards fiend. Another illusion bites the dust. Sigh.

The ‘Intelligence’ paradox

In the Second World War, the phrase ‘Military Intelligence’ was famously ridiculed as an oxymoron. But we have our own contemporary paradox in this area. On the one hand, it’s clear that the ‘intelligence’ which was used to justify attacking Iraq was deeply inadequate or just plain wrong. Yet the same agencies which produced it are still producing the ‘intelligence’ which is leading the Western democracies — led by the US — to demolish civil liberties and lay the foundations for Orwellian states.