Has Linux got your attention yet? One of the liveliest questions around the Microsoft break-up court order is whether Linux-based software can seize any ground Bill Gates is forced to give up. The Linux operating system turns Microsoft’s model on its head: it’s open-source, meaning all its recipes are public; it’s free instead of overpriced; and it’s based on shared information instead of patents and copyrights.

Techies have been hooked on open-code software for years, but plain folk are adapting to it, too. Linux users have multiplied from 1000 in 1992 to over 9 Million today; about 35% of internet sites now run on Linux-based servers; major companies like IBM consider Linux a big player.

Open-source software may be free, but Wall Street has its eye on profits built on it. The puzzle now is how exactly a market based on community values and a free product would work.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bob Young, Co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat

Miguel de Icaza, Founder of Helix Code Inc.

Andrew Leonard, Senior Technical Writer for Salon.com.

When Beethoven premiered his 9th symphony, the then deaf composer thrashed his body and flailed his arms as part of his conducting. Hector Berlioz was still buying strings for violas and mutes for violins the day his Symphony Fantastique premiered. Igor Stravinsky’s first audience for the Rite of Spring booed and jeered so loud, the music was inaudible, even to the pit musicians.

The Harvard Music professor Thomas Forrest Kelly says famous pieces we know today have a history worth telling. It’s unlikely if you were in the audience for Handel’s Messiah or Monteverdi’s Ofreo, you would get much enjoyment, he says. These first nights were not necessarily best nights. But over hundreds of years, musicians have changed tempos, switched keys, and used modern instruments to create what we now consider the classics of classical music.

Bring down the lights, raise the curtain.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Thomas Forrest Kelly, Professor of Music at Harvard University, author of First Nights.

It was a rare project for a rare architect. The client, the Community of Jesus, wanted a modern interpretation of an early Christian church. The architect chosen, William Rawn, is a recovering lawyer who’d won big design prizes for low income housing in Charlestown’s Navy Yard and for Boston Symphony’s summer concert hall in the woods.

The Community of Jesus, an abbey in the Benedictine monastic tradition made up of families, priests and nuns, had outgrown its quaint New England chapel. But rather than dot the skyline with another steeple, this community had ideas of its own.

They wanted a big church, an accoustically perfect church and an early Christian church — like around 1,700 years ago. So William Rawn built the Church of the Transfiguration, a 55-foot high, stone basilica that seats 540 and rises off the shores of Cape Cod Bay. A community and its building, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Rawn, architect of the Church of the Transfiguration.

The Microsoft judge Penfield Jackson cut the electronic monster in two yesterday, and twisted the knife a little: the problem with Bill Gates and Microsoft, Judge Jackson said, is that even now they don’t admit that they’ve bullied the competition and stifled the software explosion; they’re just the sort of tyrant you can’t have stalking this marketplace.

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and the Babe Ruth of the computer era, so far, will go to the Supreme Court with the argument that he did well by doing good for all of us. He knows that for all the monster talk, he’s a popular hero, too: the people, he believes, would rather break up the government.

He’ll insist, to the end, that you can’t have the government writing the business plans of a dynamic new economy. It’s the dynamism in that economy he’s got to worry about–all those other eager players who want to be a Bill Gates, too, on an open playing field.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jonathan Zitrain, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Ron Cass, Professor at Boston University Law School

Steve Johnson

Philip Greenspun

Martin Amis is known as “the best American writer England has ever produced. The enfant terrible of the Brit lit scene, Martin Amis had a midlife crisis five years ago when he left his wife for another woman and his long time British agent (and wife of his best friend, Julian Barnes) for an American agent who secured him an unheard of advance of $800,000.

When he spent $30,000 of the advance on dental surgery and reconstruction, he got skewered in the press for his vanity, his disloyalty, his arrogance.

Now the most unabashedly competitive of writers has stepped forward to reclaim his life from the hands of his tormentors. “Experience” is the result — his first memoir and an attempt to set the record straight, “to speak, for once,” Amis says, “without artifice.” Martin Amis’ “Experience” is a reflection on his father, his teeth, loss, divorce, friendship, love and death.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Martin Amis

Oscar Wilde knew it was only shallow people who do NOT judge by appearance. It takes a mere two seconds to make or get a first impression. In that time, landlords judge prospective tenants, employers rate job applicants, lawyers decide the innocence or guilt of recently arraigned clients, blind dates decide whether they can make it through an entire dinner, and newly engaged couples conclude whether their future in-laws will ruin their entire life.

And vice versa.

A first impression IS a lasting one. People focus on what’s in front of them — skin and eye color. Clothes. Age. Body language. Facial expression. Facial hair. Tone of voice can be a turn on or a turn off. Impressions also come through the nose, and too much deodorant or not enough both leave their mark. Apparently people don’t need to know someone in or order to BELIEVE they know someone.

Is what you see what you get? First Impressions this hour on The Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Nalini Ambady, experimental psychologist at Harvard University.

When that legendary apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, the question was how fast it was travelling, if its speed was increasing with every foot it fell. The answer required Newton’s and his rival Liebnitz’s greatest invention: the calculus, as Liebnitz called it, or the mathematics of variable motion, or the accelerating apple. It is the geometry of curves and their properties like tangents, arclengths, curvatures and centers of gravity, which the Greek geometry of straight lines couldn’t calculate.

Calculus is the student’s big leap after algebra, introducing Liebnitz’s long lazy S, the integral sign. It’s the jungle gym of the mathematically swift and supple, the quicksand of numerophobes without number. More important, it’s the arithmetic in all the arcs of astronomy, and artillery, too. Even in the age of the pocket calculator it’s a metaphor in all that moves. Robert and Ellen Kaplan’s short course on The Calculus on the first hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert and Ellen Kaplan, co-founders of “Math Circle.”

Ronald Reagan’s famous star wars initiative has a sequel in this political campaign and in the final act of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Son of Star Wars is a smaller weapons shield designed to protect Americans from missile attacks from the so-called rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

Like the original, it’s spawned a box office bonanza for defense contractors and politicians and lobbyists even though the system has yet to be proven and most scientists don’t think it could ever work reliably. And also like version one, the new star wars could set off another new arms race with Russia and China, even with Bill Clinton’s promises the technology wouldn’t be aimed at them. So how did a Cold War technology and a Cold War ideology get to be center stage in the first campaign of a new century? Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back or Phantom Menace?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ted Postal

Bill Hartung

Brian Kennedy.

The singer Nina Simone — in her eclectic repertoire, her international standing and her inter-generational appeal — lives where Duke Ellington placed all his favorites: “beyond category” in the musical world. She burst in on musical celebrity in the 1950s as a pianist and singer with a fresh and electrifying take on “I Loves You, Porgy” from the Gershwins’ “Porgy And Bess.”

In the civil-rights sixties Nina Simone became something like the movement’s singer, with her own protest song, “Mississippi Goddam,” on the assassination of Medgar Evers. She exiled herself in the seventies to Africa and France. But then she conquered Europe and the U.S. anew in the eighties when her version of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was adapted to sell Chanel No. 5 perfume on television.

The husky voice that crosses from blues and jazz to church music and show tunes is freighted with experience, politics and passion.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Nina Simone

Diamonds may just be a Guerrilla’s best friend and Africa’s worst enemy.

Since the KGB and the CIA stopped financing civil-wars, African rebellions have turned to diamonds for cash. Exchanged for arms and supplies, smuggled under tongues and in the soles of shoes to markets from Antwerp to Manhattan, diamonds now finance the brutal wars raging in Sierra Leone and Angola. Diamond-lust has also drawn six African countries into Congo’s civil wars.

Africa’s abundant natural resources have often worked against Africa’s people. Congo’s rubber and ivory made Belgium rich, gold and diamonds sustained apartheid South Africa, and it was Rhodesia’s diamonds that made it Cecil Rhodes’ colony. De Beers has been working for a century to keep the stain of blood and greed off the diamond, but now, the 50 billion dollar industry worries that the gem of romance could become the forbidden animal fur of the new century.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steve Morrison, director of Africa Programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC

Mark Von Bockstael, with the Diamond High Council in Antwerp, Belgium

and Christine Gordon, journalist and independent diamond expert.