This woman was apparently the winner of the "Ukraine's got talent" show. This is a very moving "sand animation" which she did for the audience.
This is an excellent extended interview which shows a glimpse into the daily life of this man.
There's a really odd social effect which I've studied privately for a few years. It seems to me that people who go out eloquently preaching the gospel of critical thinking, and sharing their unique new ideas can end up unintentionally furthering a sour social dynamic in places where they have influence.
It has to do with this rift that I've noted elsewhere on this blog between people who see reality as being self evident, and people who believe that issues need to be reasoned through.
I have spent years writing longwinded comments at a website called "reddit" - and I've found it to be a very effective place to toss out the seeds of new perspectives on issues. And I've seen trends of these new ideas grow around these topics... and eventually spreading to people who write within the mass media. But I've also seen that those of us who have tried to use reddit for this purpose seem to have created a sour kind of social interaction among those people who aren't that deep in how they muse about life.
I've also begun to recognise that this effect which disturbs me is something I'm seeing in New Zealand as well. I have followed events there for the past several months through the lens of the journalism which is available over the internet. I was initially very entranced with New Zealand. From the way that organisations like the New Zealand Herald, and 3news report on their country it seems to be a liberal paradise in some sense. But then, I encountered a discussion board which is a place where disillusioned expatriates go to chat about their experiences in New Zealand.
And I began seeing what they are seeing, as I looked closely at video which I watch out of New Zealand over the internet. I believe it's the same effect I see at reddit. There's a complex social effect where groups can tend to become mean and petulant when they feel the rug has been pulled out from under them in respect to how they see the world. They lose their earnestness and their conscientiousness in how they participate socially with others. And I think there is resentment that they get no support from the powers that be, when it comes to the reality that they and their peers see as being around them - they see "bad people" that they want to have put in their place by the authorities. And the idea of bad and good people just isn't the paradigm that is fixed upon by the caring and nurturing intellectual. On the other hand, this type of liberal thinker is sometimes inclined to a laissez-faire attitude towards things.
Canada is kind of the opposite of New Zealand. It seems to me to be a very conservative society. People there have designed lots of government infrastructure and policies which are intended to keep a very strong handle on the social dynamics of the society. News anchors for the CBC television programs seem to be honestly very scared and nervous about crimes and wrongs which they are reporting on. And I wouldn't say that they are judgemental, but their emotions are very obvious... and their earnestness when it comes to believing in the need for more government involvement to solve the problems they're reporting on, is very evident. This very detailed set of firm government policies I think makes conservatives feel that they have a society that makes sense. Liberal thinkers, on the other hand tend to believe in the innate inner goodness of human beings.. so they sometimes err on the side of laissez-faire policies.
So, this makes me think about the kind of effect I want to have as a person who has a passion for writing about deep philosophical topics. There are two kinds of journalism which I think are very healthy for a community. One, I see in the Boise Idaho newspaper. That newspaper seeks to skip over controversial areas of discussion altogether as they write their articles. And instead they focus on talking about the vision their community has for itself. The other example is the Oregonian newspaper (aka Oregonlive) in Portland Oregon. Their tack is that they are passionate in presenting both sides of any controversial issue. I think both papers are guided by this nurturer/thinker ideology... however the way they write doesn't leave other people with different worldviews bemused. It seems to me that in both cases, there are good outcomes in the way people act and think in those cities. I need to qualify my remarks by saying I haven't spent any time in Boise. One very brief experience there really impressed me. I was traveling through on a greyhound bus... and downtown as the bus came to a turn - two kids on bicycles (maybe ten years old or so) cheerily rode across the street from corner to corner. I think it was a brother and a sister. And those children's attitudes, coupled with where they were riding - downtown in a major city - really struck me as something of a litmus test as to the social health of that city. So you can say I don't have enough information to work with... and you'd be right. However, I have developed a practice of keeping an eye out for these kinds of indicators as I look at the world around me.
New Zealand is a very unique kind of place. There is a big debate right now about changing the name of a city so that it's more faithful to the original native name which was used. The city is Wanganui... and the decision has been to change it to Whanganui. The extra "h" is significant because it effectively should change the pronunciation from a "W" sound to an "F" sound (although apparently it won't, for now).
There was a 77% vote of the citizens of the town in favor of keeping the original name. However, apparently the edict has come down from on high, that the name will be changed.
Imagine if the government of the state of Washington or the federal government of the Usa would order the city of Seattle to change its name to "Sealth" so that it is more faithful to the native name of the chief for whom the city was named.
The mayor of Wanganui (Michael Laws) has been adamantly opposed to the name change. New Zealand government policies seem to involve a lot of power vested in the federal goverment which tends to override the right for communities to have self-determination. For example, another big event happening currently is that Auckland is extending its boundaries to encompass a lot of outlying areas. Again, the citizens of those districts are not allowed to choose whether they will join Auckland or not. The federal government is making the decision for them.
I think a name change from Wanganui to Whanganui is really irrelevant when it comes to the interests of the Maori being served. If they honestly want to honour the treaty of Waitangi, the best way to do that in my view, would be to give a portion of land back to the Maori and make a separate nation - independent of New Zealand. But if you aren't going all the way and doing what needs to be done when it comes to righting the wrong of the europeans having stolen the land - I think that you need to generally honour the right of self-determination of the people who populate that area, today.
For several years now, I have really enjoyed using the Sonique audio player. When I first downloaded it - it had already been discontinued. It seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle when another company bought its owner - Lycos.
It's really artfully designed, with some very unique features. In this mode you see here, the length of the song is actually displayed in a circle of lights which surrounds the lower section, while an animation appears in the upper section. The buttons are all animated, and they have great lighting effects on them.
If you press the up arrow from this point, you get to another screen - a square version of the program, and from there, you can choose three or four layouts - one which gives you a playlist, another which gives you an equalizer, or one which gives you a more traditional playbox more reminiscent of windows media player.
Since it was always free, and since it has been discontinued by its maker, I have taken the liberty to upload it to my website, and you can
It runs great on windows '98, windows XP, and windows Vista.
The most fickle piece of equipment one has to buy in order to build a computer is the hard disk. I will relish the day when we can transition completely to solid state disks. Taking out moving parts will really increase the reliability of the personal computer by leaps and bounds. I just spent the weekend dealing with an unforeseen problem. I had two Western Digital Caviar Green series disks fail on me. One was a 750GB box, and the other was a one Terabyte box. Needless to say, I will never buy that particular series of disk again, and Western Digital has lost me as a loyal customer. I latched on to Western Digital after years of being a loyal Maxtor customer. I felt I needed to find a brand I could trust - and in this case, that trust was misplaced.
My sneaking suspicion is that hard drive manufacturers find it cheaper to leave the production line running, and sell a few palettes of bad disks when they find an error and then accept them back under RMA. This happened recently with AMD processors - except in that case that company was honest enough to be transparent about the problem - it was a series of early quad core cpus which had what was known as a "translation lookaside buffer" problem (or TLB bug).
My practice for buying parts for my computer is to use the Newegg store. This company has places for hobbyists and technicians to leave feedback and information for other customers to read about the quality of the goods which they purchased. This allows you to see where there might be a bad batch of stuff before you encounter the same problems other people have stumbled upon.
The thing I look for most is overall enthusiasm on the part of the customers who bought the product. When I was looking to buy a notebook computer, I chose the asus eeepc - because there was an entire fan website set up for really happy customers - and these people were very knowledgeable technically about the product.
The other thing I look for is: are there failures of the product, or drawbacks - and what are they? Know that you are buying something with the drawbacks which are listed by people. Don't hope that you can magically avoid those problems which they discover.
In the case of hard disks, it seems to me that every brand has a bad batch which they sell, occasionally. The key is to see are there any failures written about on the first couple pages of comments ; and if so... how does the disk fail? I can deal with a disk arriving and being completely unusable a lot easier than I can deal with a disk that fails after thirty days or six months. I can also deal more easily with a disk which fails slowly with write errors, than a disk which fails suddenly with that clicking sound which means a head has entirely broken off the apparatus.
For other equipment, I try to steer clear of what people call the "bleeding edge" (or what is commonly known as "the cutting edge"). My experience is that the newest most exciting technology is often immature, and I've seen a lot of things in this world sold to very wealthy customers which are really prototype kinds of equipment that doesn't work very well. The general rule with computer equipment is that things will come down in price dramatically when the production quantity goes up... and at that point, the manufacturing processes will be perfected. So I earnestly disagree with the popular idea that you "get a better product for a higher price."
And in general, there is a certain ethic of high quality workmanship which some companies have that others don't. This expresses itself in a thousand little usability details being taken care of. I just splurged and bought this mouse after having held it in my hand and pined after it at my local office depot store. The rubber grips, and the smooth mousewheel all scream at you the notion that it is high quality workmanship.
I want to mention my favorite tool for creating a computer which can boot into different operating systems:
It's called Xosl.
The only other multiboot tools out there that I've been able to find are text based systems. There's the standard microsoft tool, and then there is something linux afficiandos call "Grub."
Apparently the original author of the tool, Guert Vos, isn't anywhere to be found these days, but XOSL is still a great thing. The only update I really would like to see is for it to support NTFS partition labels. It's difficult to see which partition is which without labels.
A word to the wise: Don't try to install a second operating system on your computer without knowing exactly what you're doing. You need some background knowledge about what a "master boot record" is, and what a "partition boot record" is - and you have to know how the computer boots up.
Dan Goodell gives a great overview of how to set up several different versions of microsoft software here.
There's a uk organisation which has mapped out all the quirks about multibooting with Vista, here.
To get linux to boot, I simply have xosl pointed to a partition where the grub bootloader is installed.
