This is a wonderful series of podcasts that was broadcast last autumn on the BBC. You can see the BBC's description page for more info. There is some lead-in and lead-out audio which you may have to fast forward through.

An abridged audio book read by the author, herself, Bettany Hughes (in mp3s):

• episode 1
• episode 2
• episode 3
• episode 4
• episode 5

The above downloads are unavailable temporarily, as I transfer my files to a new webhost.

If you like it, you can support the author by buying the full book on Amazon.

It's really intriguing for me to watch or listen to BBC programs on European history. Our sense of history in the USA is so short and partial. We Anglos here don't have any sense of our cultural roots in Europe. It seems to me that there was a huge cultural shift under Constantine when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity after being a pantheistic society where everyone had their own household gods. This book gives us a glimpse through this window in time into this inspiring other world - the Athens of Socrates' day.

I have just, in the past week or two, discovered the BBC in Britain. It's possible to watch their programming over the internet if you pay for an internet proxy service. It's amazing programming. If the BBC would ever see fit to sell television licenses overseas, it would change the world. People in the USA always bemoan the fact that you can spin through hundreds sattelite and cable television channels and find nothing of value to watch. I think anyone comparing BBC programming side by side with the fare you can get in the States would be astonished at the difference in quality; and this competition from across the pond would force usa broadcasters and usa newscasters to improve the quality of their programming.

I was impressed when I discovered Australian television... the ABC and SBS do broadcast some of their programming freely to overseas netizens. However, the BBC just blows me away. I'm in awe. Here, I see the standards in film that I have always longed to see in mainstream media in the USA. In British and Australians I see the kind of reasoning which I admire and which I wish academics in the USA would adopt.

I've seen so many monumentally amazing programs over the past few days. One particularly interesting one that I feel I need to write about today, revolves around a relic which was produced from someone's attic in Britain. It was a child's skeleton that was mummified. Imagine keeping that kind of relic out in the family shed for two hundred years! There's a joke about that, which has even become a metaphor: we talk about people having skeletons in their closet - things in their past which they don't want to publicize to their friends and aquaintances.

So the BBC designed a television program where they researched the history of this skeleton. Apparently, there was no documenation preserved along with this relic. This program was a wonderful glimpse into all these different corners of Britain and British history. You got to see this art supply shop which still had all these traditional materials that were listed in the old books of the anatomists who wrote recipes for embalming in the latter 1700s. You got to see this church with a cemetary which was directly across the street from a hospital, and learn about how the grave robbers would provide fresh corpses for the anatomy students across the way.

The biggest thing I learned from this program, was that it gave me a chance to build a model about why British people reason differently than USAers. I have spent seasons over the past year and two and three studying different English speaking countries through their mass media - television and radio programming - which is often available over the web. And one thing that has really jumped out at me is the vast differences in how people in anglophone countries discuss their national issues, and how people reason about these things with eachother. Here, in the USA, every discussion about national issues is political in nature - that is to say - people take sides and use hyperbole and other debate tactics to win for their side in the discussion. In Canada, people defer to scientists and academics. In Australia - there is a prime directive people have, which is caring for their society - and upbuilding their communities. In Britain there's far too much complaining going on - there seems to be a conception they have that critical thought and deep intellectualism is only found in the midst of earnest complaint; however, the Brits' critical thinking abilities are amazing.

So, I'll go on to talk about my model about why the Europeans and the British reason differently than people in the States: My conclusion is, that one reason for this is the sheer amount of history in the country. The BBC researchers could not have used the "scientific method" to pull together the narrative about where this boy came from, and what happened to him. The folks working on this project needed to induce and deduce. Europeans have this wonderful history which is not always documented well; it seems that there can be these egregious holes in it. It turned out that this little boy whose skeleton they were studying was embalmed and used as a medical student specimen in the late 1700s before it was legal to collect children's corpses. Naturally, because of the illegality of the trade in corpses - the records about where his body came from would have been lost.

It strikes me that this historical time when they robbed graves in order for med students to have cadavers is a lot like this problem we have today with the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the USA. When something that should be legal is made illegal - you end up having organized crime evolve around it - and with that organized crime, you have lots of terrible things happen.

The program series is called "History Cold Case" and the segment I watched appears to be "Episode 2: Mummified Child."

It's available for streaming as long as the BBC chooses to keep it posted on their website: here

One of my favourite movies of all time is this 1968 British version of Oliver Twist. I watched my DVD of it again, last night, and then I was delighted to see that someone had posted the first half of it (the best part, in my opinion) on youtube.

I'd like to share it with you.

If you want to watch the entire first half of the film, touch on the title text of this post, or here. For part five, you'll have to go to youtube. I don't know why, but the person who uploaded the film disabled embedding for that one scene.

The opening credits are here:

Progressives of the Usa, listen up. This is a film talking about one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's important policies. Roosevelt created the economic juggernaut which we have seen so much wealth from over the course of the 1900s. We, the progressives, did that. We were the ones who wanted high stock prices, who wanted to get the nation off of the gold standard, who were savvy about business. The republicans try to be seen as the people who support the free market, and who are best for business interests. In fact, the reason they are able to claim that, is only because we on the left, have forgotten that we were the parents of this wonderful process of wealth creation. It was our plan and our doing.

Do you know why the nation faltered under the Bush policies - why the financial market crashed? Because those in the right wing do not understand business. After all, they were the ones who favoured staying on the gold standard. They were the ones who have been against many other policies throughout the decades which have produced so much good fruit for our nation.

This film is fascinating for me, in other ways. It seems to me that intellectualism tends to thrive in times where people feel they're struggling. The phrasings this narrator uses show a lot of insight, and a lot of caring, and a lot of zeal which you don't see in discourse in the Usa, today. The people in these pictures look happy and as if they have direction and feel that they have a purpose in life, in a way that people in our cities today often don't.

I think that we nurturing thinkers are kind of still geared up for that mode of working. We tend to know what to do for our society when times are rough. There were some wonderful films and other intellectual material which came out of postwar Britian, and now British discourse seems to be degenerating, in the same way ours did across the pond when we became wealthy.

I remember growing up in the 1970s, how everybody who was a nurturing thinker in my life - english teachers, sociologists, progressives etcetera - identified as democrats, and were excited about things like the civil rights movement, they like the poet Ezra Pound, and the writer Susan Sontag. Today, the same thing seems to be true. Caring thinkers are associating themselves with the netroots movement to get Barack Obama elected, with peace rallies, etcetera. And I myself find that I spend a lot of time at sites with rollicking raucous debate like reddit.com - where very smart people are trying to get some traction with their ideas using the passions of struggling, hurting people to facilitate social change.

I was very disgruntled about this practice as a teenager. I would have pointed to two other areas that nurturing thinkers should focus on, instead:

• Children - because children are the future.

• Media organisations - if we are so smart, why can't we use that intelligence to make money, and start to build a media empire?

I think that we nurturing thinkers need to shift gears. For thousands of years, we have lived in a society which was very poor and struggling. And we have taken a certain role in that society. We have been successful.

It seems to me, however, that when a society develops a middle class, the old strategies we have been accustomed to using, in order to spearhead social trends and to inspire people, and to impart wisdom to people don't work anymore. People who are doing well for themselves, with their children, and their job, and their house in the suburbs don't see a need to learn new things, or to make their world a better place by implementing new ideas.

Therefore, I think that focusing on kids is a really good way forward for us. Kids are very appreciative of those who care about them and who wish to impart wisdom to them. Kids are like little beacons of light in a community when they have good teachers and mentors and adults in their lives who have taught them how to be ethical and how to be smart. The incubation time for ideas which are imparted to groups of children might be longer. But the overall effect on society over the decades is much larger as well.

These are some fascinating three dimensional images of Japan before world war II. One popular thing at the dawn of photography was a little viewer called a stereoscope. People would take two photographs at the same time, and then you would be able to see the scene in 3d.

Somebody had the bright idea of just creating animated gif images with these old photos - where the picture switches back and forth between the two. This effectively gives you a conception of 3 dimensions, although it is a bit dizzying at first.

• See old Japan in three dimensions

An ancient Uighur city in western China is being destroyed because of earthquake danger concerns. It's fascinating how the government is using the opportunity to restructure how society works. They're taking people out of places with narrow streets big enough only for pedestrians and bicycles, and putting them into big apartment complexes. I think it's sad that the history will be lost, and also that the social dynamic will change so much for those people.

One vision I really admire, is that of the author of a series of books advocating car-free cities. I believe in small communities, where people know their neighbors, and where they aren't insulated from others in the same way folks in most Western cities are.

Years ago, when the usa military action against Afghanistan first started - back in 2001 - only a month after the tragedy which occurred in New York City - I wrote several faxes to different members of congress, imploring them to think of the good of the Afghans first and foremost as they went about this military agenda. I used the word "nation building" in those letters; it had not been a idea which had come up before then. Perhaps that phrase infused the discussion in Washington DC because of my letters. I will never know.

At any rate, I eventually gave up with the letter writing agendas as it dawned on me that the more the public became critical of the wars in the middle east, the more obstinate folks on capitol hill and in the Whitehouse became in regards to that agenda.

Just recently, I've started following the rss feed from Al-Jazeera English's youtube channel. And I've found it's hands down the best source of news about events all around the world in different countries. Recently, there was a two part segment about the politics of warlords in Afghanistan. It's very quaint to see the social dynamic around such people like Rashid Dostum. One can see in folks' attitudes around these people what would have happened a thousand years ago in europe with all the different kingdoms and fiefdoms. The main problem I see is that people don't feel a loyalty to the central government... but their loyalty and sense of civic pride has coalesced around these various warlords. People are so passionate about Dostum in some parts of Afganistan that they will tell you point-blank that if Dostum tells them to vote for Karzai, they will vote for Karzai, and that they will rally around and fight for Dostum's causes. In other parts of Afghanistan, people with one voice condemn Dostum as being the person who has destroyed their lives and sent them into refugee camps.

Afghanistan is a very quaint country in that way. Similarly, I remember early in this first decade reading a National Geographic article about Tibet - and it struck me that Tibet was a region which was a throwback in some ways to a thousand years ago, when monasteries and religious traditions had a certain prominent role in Europe. In the last five or eight years, however, China has been trying to railroad change into the region. And I think that Tibet is changing rapidly with more trade ties and more immigration of ethnic chinese folk into the region.

The answer that I see which would solve this problem in Afghanistan also will sadly destroy the old culture that they have there. What I would suggest, is that Afghanistan needs a very big infusion of communication technology - computers, telephones, the internet, and so forth. Those people who hate Dostum need to have some cultural exchange and some discourse with those people who feel loyal to Dostum. Folks in government tend to get big heads, and they believe that they govern the affairs of the country. In practical senses, however, governments have so few resources, that they can't do much to influence the course of a country. Really, it's the people in every town and city who decide what kind of country they will create - what kinds of civic live they will institute, and how they will live with their neighbors day by day.

For the Usa to try to influence the politics of Afghanistan - by playing off one warlord against the other, and what have you is never going to effectively create the needed change in Afghanistan. The only way things will change is if the people themselves see a need for change, and want to work on effecting it.

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.

This is a preview of an excellent film I just watched. It is basically a series of aerial video shot all around the world... with a emphasis on simple geometry. The narrative takes you through a very straightforward and simply worded history of our relationship to nature. And it prods one to think about the effect that we humans are having on our planet. You can watch the entire film at youtube, ---> here <---