For anyone who is honestly interested in politics... here is a great resource. It's the Canadian equivalent of the CSPAN channel we have in the Usa.

This is called CPAC - and you can watch the proceedings of the federal government in Ottawa 24 hours a day.

It's incredibly refreshing to see how learned, and conscientious the government in Canada is when you compare them to the fools in Washington DC.

Remember, that Canada is a bilingual country from its core - with a big portion of the country - Quebec - speaking french as their main language. So all proceedings in parliament need to be translated in real time between the two languages. Usually parliamentarians will talk in the language they are most comfortable with. I think this kind of bilingualism is really good for the social dynamic in a government. Always to have multiculturalism front and center before your eyes is a really good thing for folks in government to think about.

• Watch CPAC here

You can also pull the broadcast at any time, directly into windows media player, by cutting and pasting this into the "Open url" box: http://www.cpac.ca/asx/cpac1eh.asx

The other day, I was talking with a college student, and she mentioned her desire to join the peace corps. She also brought up the fact that you can't choose the country where you are placed, when you join up.

I realise that young nurturer/thinkers often feel the need to have an adventure. It's important for them to see the other half of the world in a very intimate way. I certainly had this need myself, as a young man.

I would suggest that young people consider the idea of going to India. This is a popular attraction for young folks in Australia and New Zealand, because they hear a lot more about India through their mass media. India has squalor, and poverty, it has oppression, and it has a whole lot of history. They invented mathematics and the "arabic" numerals for example. And they're a very philosophical society. Furthermore, they're also going to be a very important economic force in the next few decades. India and China are going to eclipse the Usa at some point in global influence. If you have spent time in India, you will be in high demand by many Usa companies who are doing trade with that country.

China would also be an interesting adventure. However, the poverty is less pronounced there, it seems to me - and it might be hard for a young thinker to stomach the idea of trying to live for awhile under the auspices of a government like that one - because of all those heretical thoughts that are flooding a person's mind when she or he is a young thinker ;-)

Here's a link to a BBC article published today, of a 16 year old in Bengal who started a school for kids in his backyard. The school has grown to 800 students.

Here is an interview with an author of european ethnicity who spent a lot of time in India.

There's an interesting movement which has been afoot since the 1930s or so, called "Humanism" - and it's an affiliation of different community groups who are made up of very deep thinking people. The vision of the founders seems to have been to try to supplant the christian churches of the West through providing the same kind of social services and celebrations which churches provide. Today, it dawned on me that this might not work... and that in fact, both buddhism and christianity might have evolved, centuries ago, out of the failure of this very kind of group to ever really accomplish what it set out to do.

Religious people always try to trace their own history in a way that I believe is somewhat disingenuous. Religion serves a purpose in a community and that purpose and that niche has changed and evolved over time. Some people would say that Christianity started with the life of Christ, or that Buddhism started with the life of the Buddha. But honestly, I think it might be more accurate to say that there are people who wanted to form a tradition and a social group at certain junctures in history, and they drew on old stories and folklore which seemed to work for them as they pursued their goals of creating a civic group of a certain nature.

Somewhere back in 2000 or 2001, there was a fascinating article in National Geographic Magazine about Tibet. My impression from that article was that in that year, Tibet was one of the last very quaint and ancient civilisations still around. I think it has changed over the course of this first decade. China has made a lot of effort to integrate Tibet into the greater Chinese society. But one thing that struck me was that their religion would have been similar to what Christianity was a thousand years ago. Religion institutions were both the schools and the charity organisations of every town.

So this shows how religion's niche has evolved and changed over time in societies.

Anyway, my realisation this morning, to put it bluntly, was that perhaps the nurturing thinkers could not get the posturers interested in being part of a do gooder community where the nice successful man or woman was up there teaching about life's lessons. My thought is that perhaps these thinker/nurturers would have been encouraged by their experiences with children; they found a very excellent social dynamic that could be established as an adult leader of a group of kids. And then they tried to impose on adults this same formula of working with kids. And it didn't work. And so someone had the wild idea of taking a different tack: "Let's tell a story about a good smart caring person who suffered rather than succeeded." And that story piqued the interest of the townspeople.

It's an interesting commonality that both Buddhism and Christianity have as their central figure a very smart and charismatic figure who suffers. In the one case, the guy is put to death wrongfully - and in the other he voluntarily gives up all of the pleasures of this world, in a gesture of altruism.

So, all this leads me to a certain conclusion. I think that humanism is good as a group where people can gather who have common interests and passions, and a love for reasoning and acting in caring ways towards others. And it's also good to have groups like the TED conference where these kinds of thinkers show off their ideas to eachother. But in all of these things, I think it's best that we support eachother, rather than try to press our ideas into the minds and hearts of others.

Those people who themselves so value the power of independent and critical thought, should not be trying to think on behalf of other people, or they might end up with bad results.

I was reading a short children's novel today because this winter I am helping to direct a play which is based on the book. I haven't read a fiction novel for many years. Instead, I read a lot of articles on the internet about the latest scientific discoveries, and news from various parts of the world. The last novel I read a few years ago, to reminisce about my childhood, was EB White's trumpeter of the Swan... before that, the last one would have been Peter Pan in 1992. I was a voracious reader as a child, and my mother was very curious about why I didn't want to read when I became an adult and left the nest. I told her I wanted to just live life, and not read about it. In recent years, my reason would have been slightly different, but similar - I wanted to look at the world, and learn about it - not look through the funhouse mirror/lens of someone else's perspective on the world.

I was pleasantly surprised though, with how much I learned from reading this very simple story. It's called "the best christmas pageant ever" by Barbara Robinson. It's a very trite and simplistic story based around a traditional event which happens in churches all across the country on christmas night. The author is clearly a very face-value kind of person, and she writes from within that sort of perspective about the world. The fact that she used such a stock narrative, and a stock set of characters (some children who interact with eachother both at school and at church) gave me a lot of insight into this mindset that is so foreign to me - that of the person who just sees the world as being a self evident place.

Particularly fascinating, was a character where the author was able to show her own feelings towards the smarty pants kid in class. This rift I have written about between reasoners, and face-value people happens early - even in elementary school. In this story, there is a character named Alice who is misconstrued as being arrogant. And she becomes the one character in the book who the whole school makes fun of. No one else suffers that level of unanimous reaction from the kids on the playground.

I was volunteering at a school a couple of years ago... and it was so interesting to encounter this very effect the moment I walked into that fourth grade classroom. The first thing that one of the boys said to me was that his peer who was right next to us was "gay." The boy who was the brunt of this social attack was very good natured about it. He smiled when he heard his classmate say that. But what do you think it does to a person to have that constant battering from your classmates throughout your twelve years of school? Different smart kids would exhibit different effects from this kind of constant abuse during their young years. But unless they're really agile, socially, and know how to pick their friends wisely, they will suffer these kinds of social problems. It's bad for their social development.

A young male teenager I was working with this last spring on a different community theatre play also had the same kind of senseless teasing and indignation which had developed around him from the other teens. He was ready to quit the play at one point, because of it. I had to address the older teenage girls pointedly and tell them they were being sexist in how they talked about boys.

That's only one of several thoughts that came to me as I had the pleasure of diving into this woman's mindset for the morning. That mindset of the face-value kind of person who sees the world as being self evident, is one of these last pieces of the puzzle, and I found two or three big models about the social dynamics in the world around me, crystallise in my mind today as I read this book.

I also had some big epiphanies about the field of political science, the beginnings of both the christian religion and the buddhist religion, how women's perspective on men has shifted between the original publication date of the book (1972), and today, and I also had a thought about the nature of love.

Here's to reading, I suppose.

I've made a series of posts of my musings about a very important rift we ought to see in our society. That rift is one which lies between those people who see the world as being something which is self-evident, who are just going to do the best they can for themselves pursuing their own endeavors within that world on the one hand - and on the other hand, those who see the world as being something which is like a puzzle which needs to be figured out using reason.

With different blog posts, I have put different labels on these two groups, and I have looked at this thing from several different angles.

This film is one thing that one of my college-age friends gave me to look at a while back, after kind of a long series of conversations where I was being a bit overbearing in how I was trying to give him advice:

He told me that this was how he felt about humanism... more specifically, this is what he felt happened to people who tried to follow the teachings and advice of those who call themselves humanists. And this is a very important thing to see, I think. I have come to the conclusion that people who care a lot about their society, and want to help it, by sharing their insights and acting in a caring fashion might actually be causing disruptions to the social dynamic around them. I wrote a little about that here.

And this film would show how that might occur - even the kindest, gentlest, least didactic and least overbearing way of giving advice, might not work when someone tries to put it into practice.

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.

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.

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

download it here

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.