This is a great interview with Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple computer with Steve Jobs. He gives a brief rundown on his background leading up to the founding of that company. It's very educational to hear a person tell his own story in this way. What I have posted here is only a preview, and actually Steve doesn't start talking until about halfway through. If you want to see the whole ½ hour presentation, you can watch it at the fora tv website: here.

I have always had a strong distaste for the idea that the ability to figure out riddles and to do puzzles is an indicator of greater or lesser intelligence. And it dawned on me today, that this custom which is today carried on by people like those in Mensa, and even by psychologists who design IQ tests is rooted in the ideology of people who believe that reality is self-evident. the reasoning goes something like this:

"Reality is self evident, therefore, the answer to these puzzles ought to be self-evident, because these puzzles are a part of reality. But they are hard for most people to figure out. Those who can see through the twists and turns of the puzzles must be smarter than most, because they have a keener sense of reality."

From my perspective, being of the camp that believes that we have to reason things through, and that reality is certainly not self evident - that in fact, many core truisms about the world can be counter-intuitive... I would think that's a laughable way to test intelligence. These are puzzles which are designed as a game of outwit. And so matching your wits against the puzzle maker is not an accurate test of how well you will succeed in life, where you match your wits against the situations you come into contact with.

Recently, I have realised something very centrally important in life in the West. Not having recognised this divide between two kinds of people has been really detrimental to my life. Most people believe that reality is self-evident. Other people believe that you have to reason things through, in order to learn about them. The former set of folks just like to chat about what's there around them. A certain subsection of them will be silly sometimes because in their estimation, it doesn't matter what they say or do, it doesn't change the fundamental environment other people live in, daily. The second set of people will reason together, rather than just chat together. And they like talking and thinking in philosophical ways about life. And there's a big rift between these types of people. The differences extend from lifestyle choices, to taste in music, to expectations of what makes a good friend, to any number of different things. Those who believe that we must understand things in the world by reasoning stuff through are what are known as "critical thinkers." People often have a mistrust for those kind of people. One day I felt steamed when hearing a parent who was a child psychologist say in a tongue-in-cheek manner that there wasn't a "problem" with her own children being too smart. But that was a telling little point of humor on her part.

A person who is an avid thinker - who loves getting in there and sucking the marrow out of life by learning about new things and seeking to influence social trends is going to have to really watch for this rift between people like him, and people who just believe that the world is the way it is, and that we just need to get on with going about our own actions within that world.

Plato had a very cynical story which he presented to folks which reflected his very bad experience with this social divide. This is called the "allegory of the cave."

A reader of my blog may or may not begin to take note over time, that the progress of my reasoning kind of comes in levels of realisations - it's kind of like a staircase with landings at various interim points that you can rest on if you wish. I wrote another piece about this difference I'm describing today, when I talked about "nurturer/thinkers" as compared to "posturers." That was my earlier assessment of the same social divide.

This is a little bit of a darker blog entry today. But I find it very disturbing to see this story in the British press about violence done by children over there to some of their peers and to see how the narrator of the video embedded on the page wants to put the story in the frame of reference that the child was evil.

I have a very simple answer for the British people. If you don't want children to learn violence, don't allow their parents to do violence to them. Every Western country has laws against assault - but most of them make exceptions when it comes to children. Laws allow children to be assaulted - in the usa we call this "spanking," and in New Zealand they call it "smacking".

Extend the laws which forbid assault so that they protect children, and you will never see this sort of thing happen again.

Parents who spank their children are not correcting them - that's an old wives' tale. Instead, they are teaching them to do violence. And violence they will do.

I have seen this effect myself... I lived for a while with a family where the father was spanking his child regularly... and I saw clearly how mean the young boy was when he played with his peers.

I have been very bemused about the fact that there has been this new push towards LCD screens. I still have a 21" CRT (box shaped monitor) screen which I bought at a yard sale years ago when someone was switching over. The color has generally not been as good on LCDs as it was on older monitors like mine. The color and contrast ratio of newer screens has improved a lot in the last year or two. My brother in law bought a macintosh recently with an absolutely huge and very attractive glossy high contrast lcd screen - it must be about 32 inches from one corner to the opposite corner. But still, I don't believe the resolution goes as high as what I typically use - which is the highest resolution on XP or Vista: 2048 pixels in width by 1536 pixels in height (although, I had to bend a monitor cord pin out of the way in order to get my windows Vista to display at 2048x1536). They don't even make CRT screens anymore from what I can tell from looking at my favorite tech websites. I have a preview version of Windows 7 - which will be coming out sometime this autumn perhaps.. and I couldn't get that to display the high resolutions I'm accustomed to. That's quite a dealbreaker for me. I would never use a computer system without being able to go up to the highest resolution which I've been accustomed to using. I just need the work area. A bigger desktop makes me a lot more productive.

The thought that dawned on me this morning, though... that perhaps most people have the opposite situation with their eyes. I am slightly nearsighted - I believe my vision would be rated at about about 20/40. But my reading vision is fine. I wonder if most people are slightly farsighted. The standard for what most people can see at 20 feet away doesn't tell you what most people can see at 3 feet away, now does it? Perhaps I should redesign this website to make it easier to read my text - the background texture is maybe best left to the edges of the page.

I'm not accustomed to writing reviews about companies. I haven't even done this for my own sister's web business though she asked me to, a couple years ago. I hate doing it, because it looks really bad on a website - and a lot of people who write these kind of articles are doing it disingenuously. But I just had an excellent experience ordering glasses from a company which is called Zenni Optical. They basically sell you glasses with relatively inexpensive frames at bargain prices. Their lowest priced glasses are $8.00 - and that includes both the price of molding the lenses, and the cost of the frames. I got a rimless pair with titanium metal ear and nose pieces for $50. The frames are fair to middling in quality - nothing special really - but they are respectable... and the lenses are just as good as any pair you would buy for a lot more money. You need to have your prescription (they don't check the date ;-) ), and also what they call a "pd measurement" - which is the distance between your pupils in millimeters. If you walk into your local big box store's optical department, they'll probably give you a pd measurement for free. It's really a company which is well worth checking into. A new pair of glasses can be a real burden financially for some folks who live meagerly like myself.

I have spent many months immersing myself in the news media of other english speaking nations through the fare that is available on the internet. Today, I was listening to NPR, which used to be my favorite news source. I've made a little custom computer program that allows me to pull the stories off of their websites, so I can find just the ones I want to listen to, really easily. At any rate, I was reflecting on all the common ways in which people in the Usa look at the world and talk about the world. It's good to have that kind of perspective you get from seeing how other people in other parts of the world think.

What dawned on me today, is that in the usa, people look at the world and chat about it. They tend to think that reality is self-evident, and they will look about and talk with their neighbors casually about what they see. I would like to invite any of the (one or two?) readers who read this website to consider a different paradigm. This is an approach I saw very clearly when paging through the works of Western philosophers like Descarte, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche some years ago. This approach to looking at the world assumes not only the idea of reality, but also the idea of perspectives and narratives that people have as they talk to eachother about their world.

Reading the history of the development of scientific ideas and opinions over the last two thousand years is really a fascinating thing to do.. because you see that one thing is common in every generation - most people (even scientists) err in the way in which they perceive the world around them. That's a pretty heavy thought, isn't it? Given that has been the case in every century over the past two millenia, it isn't too much of a stretch to ponder that perhaps the worldviews we have today are also in error to one degree or another.

What those philosophers I mentioned did in their day, was to simply go away and have some solitary time, and think independently about things, setting aside their preconceptions before they began. They deduced and induced stuff. They used logic, to try to understand the nature of the patterns in the world around them.

So this is my invitation to anyone out there who reads this blog - this, my message in a bottle - ponder this very different approach to looking at the world around you. Would it be good for you?

I love innovators. I am excited by people like David Sanborn Scott 1 2, who insists that we need to switch over to a hydrogen based energy infrastructure. I also like following the work of the folks over at Aptera. But innovators don't get rich. They die poor. Think of Leonardo da Vinci, or Nikola Tesla. Innovating takes time. The people who get rich, and who actually change the world in their day, are those who use existing technology and ideas prudently. This is a video about a guy talking a large australian audience about his company's proposal to change the world. (There's a short ad you'll have to bear with at the very beginning of the video. And to watch the full video, you'll have to visit the Fora.tv website, here).

I was raised by a feminist mother. I remember when I was 13 years old that this new writer by the name of "Andrea Dworkin" was publishing some of her very influential works for the first time. I remember how disappointed I was in my single mother that she believed in Dworkin's ideas about men. I was just entering into adolesence and I realised I could be in a tight spot trying to grow up and become a man when my mother was somehow subscribing to all these really odd ideas about the nature of men.

I just finished a really rollicking debate about Dworkin's polemics over on a link sharing site I frequent a lot called reddit.

I take issue with the kind of stereotypes, hatred, hyperbole, and sexism which Dworkin sought to infuse the study of gender relations with. A case in point is this very fascinating chapter by her.

I see Dworkin as being very much in error, because she is trying to say that analogies represent proof. I would answer those models, with a simple overview of what I see in the problems that the West has when it comes to our gender relations.

Here in a nutshell, is that overview - which I penned, in order to reply to my conversation partner at reddit:

___________

OK... I see where you're coming from now. You adhere to that very standard conception of gender relations that has become so common in the West, in recent decades.

So now I have a point of reference to work with here, when discussing this with you. That makes me feel better.

In my estimation of things, to attribute all these negative things to men is a very sexist thing to do. And it's a very hurtful form of sexism... as hurtful as racism is, when expressed against ethnic minorities. These kinds of stereotypes, when internalised by the stigmatised group, can lead people to get stuck, to where they lose their ability to change the things that they're doing wrong. The banter at reddit is a prime example of how self-hating young men talk with eachother.

The fact that men take up leadership positions more often than women honestly is solely a result of the choices that people make in their lives. I was talking to a young woman on reddit the other day about this problem we have in our society where a large number of young women wish to marry men with a decade more life experience than they have. This leads to a social dynamic in our society between the genders which reflects this maturity gap within these marriages.

Being expected to take a leadership position when you're not ready to do so, is not a fun thing. I have been promoted to a managerial position a time or two in work situations. And I have discovered that there is a curse associated with being in a leadership position. It's that you make mistakes. And the mistakes you make have consequences for those you have power over. And those who suffer from your mistakes have every right to lambast you. But this effect occurs, no matter who is in those positions of authority. It is not a male problem. It's a problem that's always going to occur whenever there are leaders.

It's interesting to study cultures where women are in charge - there are some old silent monochrome documentary films, for example, which show the social dynamics in the Hopi and Navajo tribes. One sees that in a society where women are expected to take the leadership roles, the genders actually switch personalities. Women get these masculine personality attributes - they show stress in their body language, they become overbearing. Men appear more gentle, and meek. Another more modern example of this can be seen by studying the personality of New Zealand's Helen Clark - who just finished nine years as prime minister there.

I insist that women would make as many errors as men would in leadership positions... if we were to see a change over a long period of time where women were to be expected to be self sufficient and take leadership roles, and men would be expected to look for a cougar to marry when they turn 18. However, I agree that there would be a progressive transition period - because people who bring a new perspective to a field, can often initially solve a lot of problems. But there's nothing innately sour about men, or innately good about women - that was a big error Dworkin made as she portrayed the genders.

I was taking a look at wikipedia today and learning about the study of angles, circles and triangles. To study a system like that, you have to get your hands into the business. You have to measure things and study them as they are.

Yesterday, I was having a long discussion at reddit about the polemics of Andrea Dworkin with two men who were avid fans of her work. I can see one thing so clearly in her work: hatred, stereotype, sexism (and even deception)..

These two men were admonishing me that if I don't read Dworkin's work in depth, I don't have the right to discuss her impact on society, or the quality of her reasoning.

And it dawned on me today that the way I'm approaching studying gender issues is like folks who study circles angles and triangles... I look out there and see things, and study the system. It's not at all constructive to go out and start reading someone's quaint polemic about odd shaped lines in order to learn how the systems of standard triangles, circles and angles work.

Imagine someone writing a book about scattered lines and curly cues, who presents ideas that look similar to the effects you see when looking at standard arcs, and circles and triangles. Then, that writer tries to reason with the reader, saying "Because my concepts look similar to the things that we see when looking at standard circles arcs and triangles, therefore that's logical proof that I am right."

So this is the very profound error that academics in the West have made in the 1900s and in this first decade of the new century:

They reason that: "Because something looks analagous, there is logic to prove a point."

To say that men make war, and men are in positions of governmental power, therefore Dworkin is right about men being inherently violent is like saying a circle spins over on its diameter 4 or 5 or 6 times. It simply wouldn't be true. A circle spins 3.1415926535897932384626433832795... times. And you can't simplify that, or you will be seriously in error, and your models will have no value - you won't be able to apply them anywhere to tasks you wish to engage in.