I finally broke down and subscribed to XM Radio because the trial that came with my new car ran out a couple of months ago. It comes in handy on my 25 minute commute to work since dodging advertisements and the other distractions of commercial radio is annoying. It's handy to have a dedicated traffic station for DFW, a wide variety of great music stations and a few more news sources such as CNBC and CNN among others to augment KERA on FM.
But the most fun is choosing from the huge variety of music styles. It's taken at least a couple of weeks to audition several music stations of various styles for presets and I only covered about half of them. The ones I have so far include Real Jazz, Classical, Classic Vinyl, Coffee House, The Groove and a Bluegrass channel.
Classic Vinyl is the album rock from the 60s and 70s. Coffee House is a songwriter channel with an acoustic folk tendency, but also includes covers of big hits done in an unplugged style. The Groove combines classic soul from bands like The Temptations to a variety of Funk, Hip-Hop and danceable tracks with a Funk, Soul or R&B flair. The Bluegrass channel was a random find that is very enjoyable. Fast picking banjos and fiddles full of improvisation is great fun listening.
Auditioning the various music channels reminded me of some styles long forgotten. I do like several of the Country channels, but have not been able to choose one for a preset yet. Outlaw Country features styles like Merle Haggard and others. Willie's Place spins a lot of Willie Nelson and Austin City Limits genres like Asleep at the Wheel. Then there are more mainstream Country-Rock channels.
I have about 3 presets still free after choosing the ones mentioned here plus the 3 news, weather and traffic channels. Maybe I'll toss the smooth jazz slot, Watercolors, that is currently renting a spot but very close to getting booted due to lack of passion. No Kenny G yet, thankfully, but the resemblance to muzak may be too close for comfort.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
First Take on the Kindle
I've had a Kindle for a couple of weeks now. So far I have read a couple of articles in PDF form, browsed the Kindle store, chosen some previews of a few best sellers from the store and purchased one book to read on the Kindle.
Learning to use it was a breeze. Scanning the Kindle User Guide, which is provided once the device is registered, was more than enough to understand how to use the basic functions. There was a little confusion when trying to re-size the text on PDFs but that was because you really can't do that.
The PDFs I tried to read displayed in very small typeface - too small to read. The re-size text feature is not provided for PDFs as it is for Kindle books. However, you can rotate the orientation to landscape, causing the PDF to re-size itself to fit the available area. This results in text large enough to read, but very small pages vertically. It was usable though.
Browsing the Kindle book store is easy. You can select books of interest and load a preview to your Kindle. The size of the preview is specific to the book, but the ones I loaded ranged from a very generous preface + two full chapters to as little as part of the first chapter for another.
While I am not a book purist, since I already read a lot of documents on my laptop, online, PDF or Word documents, I wondered what the reading experience on the Kindle might be like. So far, it's different but in a good way.
First, the amount of text displayed on the screen is less than a true book page (at least on the model I have). This is usually a paragraph or two. This can be changed if you go to a different text size, but so far I have stuck with the default as that seems to be fine.
This smaller amount of text seems to make me both read faster and also be happy with only reading short amounts of the book at a time. With a real book, I typically push through to complete at least a chapter at one sitting. With the Kindle, I feel much more satisfied to turn it on, read a few screens for 5-10 minutes or so, then put it away.
For non-fiction, this has the effect of snagging a few ideas in spare minutes rather than pushing for a bigger picture idea of the entire chapter. I am sure this has pluses and minuses, but so far does not seem to negatively affect my ability to discuss and describe what I've read with friends.
The compactness of the Kindle is also attractive, although I have not yet experienced being able to take scores of books on a trip or flight on a single slim, light piece of plastic.
Since it is not back-lit, but uses electronic paper technology, you will need a light to read in bed, which is different from a laptop. The advantage is that the digital ink technology does not use power to keep the screen refreshed, so, once painted, the power consumption is low.
I believe, but do not know yet, that e-book technology will encourage re-reading of at least parts of already consumed books or periodicals, since it is very quick and easy to locate a chapter and read a few ideas to refresh your memory on a particular topic.
Learning to use it was a breeze. Scanning the Kindle User Guide, which is provided once the device is registered, was more than enough to understand how to use the basic functions. There was a little confusion when trying to re-size the text on PDFs but that was because you really can't do that.
The PDFs I tried to read displayed in very small typeface - too small to read. The re-size text feature is not provided for PDFs as it is for Kindle books. However, you can rotate the orientation to landscape, causing the PDF to re-size itself to fit the available area. This results in text large enough to read, but very small pages vertically. It was usable though.
Browsing the Kindle book store is easy. You can select books of interest and load a preview to your Kindle. The size of the preview is specific to the book, but the ones I loaded ranged from a very generous preface + two full chapters to as little as part of the first chapter for another.
While I am not a book purist, since I already read a lot of documents on my laptop, online, PDF or Word documents, I wondered what the reading experience on the Kindle might be like. So far, it's different but in a good way.
First, the amount of text displayed on the screen is less than a true book page (at least on the model I have). This is usually a paragraph or two. This can be changed if you go to a different text size, but so far I have stuck with the default as that seems to be fine.
This smaller amount of text seems to make me both read faster and also be happy with only reading short amounts of the book at a time. With a real book, I typically push through to complete at least a chapter at one sitting. With the Kindle, I feel much more satisfied to turn it on, read a few screens for 5-10 minutes or so, then put it away.
For non-fiction, this has the effect of snagging a few ideas in spare minutes rather than pushing for a bigger picture idea of the entire chapter. I am sure this has pluses and minuses, but so far does not seem to negatively affect my ability to discuss and describe what I've read with friends.
The compactness of the Kindle is also attractive, although I have not yet experienced being able to take scores of books on a trip or flight on a single slim, light piece of plastic.
Since it is not back-lit, but uses electronic paper technology, you will need a light to read in bed, which is different from a laptop. The advantage is that the digital ink technology does not use power to keep the screen refreshed, so, once painted, the power consumption is low.
I believe, but do not know yet, that e-book technology will encourage re-reading of at least parts of already consumed books or periodicals, since it is very quick and easy to locate a chapter and read a few ideas to refresh your memory on a particular topic.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
A Short History of Human Thought (Cliff Notes)
Ok, so I may be a little off-center to attempt to boil this down into a blog, but I'll give it a shot. Sometimes the constraint of trying to fit a complex topic into the constraints of a spontaneous, one-take-no-redos kind of format helps to focus the mind. Maybe a little extra diet coke will help :-)
Way back in the dawn of human consciousness when the cave people drew pictures on their walls we lived in the time of mythology. Myths were created and maintained because the stories pointed to a more profound truth that could not be expressed. Also, our ancestors of a few hundred thousand years ago (or longer) had no scientific explanation for anything. So, myths were numerous and served as the science as well as the religion of the day. We have come to discover with fascination how similar many of the myths were across pre-historic cultures.
Out of this foundation of mythology, gradually religions began to be formed. Nowadays we refer to early religions as Earth, Pagan or Mystery Religions. Many rituals were created, observed and passed down through generations. Many of the religions co-opted the appropriate myths that supported their beliefs. Many Mystery Religions contain some of the same creation and messiah stories we inherited in some of the great World Religions.
Eventually, as humans became more logical, a group of ancient thinkers, sometimes called the Ancient Sages, began focusing on the wisdom of living the good life. How to be happy and fulfilled. How to live correctly. This formed the basis of the great Eastern World Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism. A parallel track of development occurred in the Middle East resulting in Judaism.
The golden period of classical Greek thought produced such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many more. This sober morality, precise deductive logic and naturalist inductive logic created a body of thought that has formed the basis of Western Thought for the last two millenia.
Christianity was born out of a mixture of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Mystery Religions and the teachings of Jesus. Christianity developed initially along a Neo-Platonic line of thought resulting in a strong metaphysical base and later incorporated the Aristotelian line of thinking with the work of the Medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Christianity also developed a significant list of arbitrary doctrines during the early centuries that were motivated by political power and influence.
We finally reached the level of scientific thinking around the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment period. This followed primarily from Aristotle, was helped along by Francis Bacon, Copernicus and Galileo and came to a head with the work of Isaac Newton and others. Here, we took the logical, naturalistic tendency of Aristotelian thought and developed the scientific method. Science because very inductive and experimental resulting in the industrial age with all its advantages and disadvantages.
The 19th and 20th century saw an incredible creation of new scientific theories that overturned many existing theories in the fields of physics, biology, astronomy and chemistry. Albert Einstein is the poster child for using deductive thought to create grand theories of Relativity, time and gravity that are very non-intuitive, but turn out to be true and have been proved. Charles Darwin used induction to discover the Theory of Evolution.
It seems that as the 21st century dawns, we are entering a time where physics and metaphysics are converging. Many of the current physical theories such as M-Theory cannot yet be proven by experiment and it may not be possible. Much of what we are creating as the Theory of Everything is supported by a deductive system of logic rather than inductive, real-world experiments.
Perhaps we are reaching the End of Science as we have known it for the last 500 years or so and are entering a new era where Science and Metaphysics work hand in hand, moved forward by our increased use of intuition and higher consciousness that transcend traditional ways of knowing. If this is true, we are called upon to use more of ourselves than at any other time in human history.
Way back in the dawn of human consciousness when the cave people drew pictures on their walls we lived in the time of mythology. Myths were created and maintained because the stories pointed to a more profound truth that could not be expressed. Also, our ancestors of a few hundred thousand years ago (or longer) had no scientific explanation for anything. So, myths were numerous and served as the science as well as the religion of the day. We have come to discover with fascination how similar many of the myths were across pre-historic cultures.
Out of this foundation of mythology, gradually religions began to be formed. Nowadays we refer to early religions as Earth, Pagan or Mystery Religions. Many rituals were created, observed and passed down through generations. Many of the religions co-opted the appropriate myths that supported their beliefs. Many Mystery Religions contain some of the same creation and messiah stories we inherited in some of the great World Religions.
Eventually, as humans became more logical, a group of ancient thinkers, sometimes called the Ancient Sages, began focusing on the wisdom of living the good life. How to be happy and fulfilled. How to live correctly. This formed the basis of the great Eastern World Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism. A parallel track of development occurred in the Middle East resulting in Judaism.
The golden period of classical Greek thought produced such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many more. This sober morality, precise deductive logic and naturalist inductive logic created a body of thought that has formed the basis of Western Thought for the last two millenia.
Christianity was born out of a mixture of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Mystery Religions and the teachings of Jesus. Christianity developed initially along a Neo-Platonic line of thought resulting in a strong metaphysical base and later incorporated the Aristotelian line of thinking with the work of the Medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Christianity also developed a significant list of arbitrary doctrines during the early centuries that were motivated by political power and influence.
We finally reached the level of scientific thinking around the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment period. This followed primarily from Aristotle, was helped along by Francis Bacon, Copernicus and Galileo and came to a head with the work of Isaac Newton and others. Here, we took the logical, naturalistic tendency of Aristotelian thought and developed the scientific method. Science because very inductive and experimental resulting in the industrial age with all its advantages and disadvantages.
The 19th and 20th century saw an incredible creation of new scientific theories that overturned many existing theories in the fields of physics, biology, astronomy and chemistry. Albert Einstein is the poster child for using deductive thought to create grand theories of Relativity, time and gravity that are very non-intuitive, but turn out to be true and have been proved. Charles Darwin used induction to discover the Theory of Evolution.
It seems that as the 21st century dawns, we are entering a time where physics and metaphysics are converging. Many of the current physical theories such as M-Theory cannot yet be proven by experiment and it may not be possible. Much of what we are creating as the Theory of Everything is supported by a deductive system of logic rather than inductive, real-world experiments.
Perhaps we are reaching the End of Science as we have known it for the last 500 years or so and are entering a new era where Science and Metaphysics work hand in hand, moved forward by our increased use of intuition and higher consciousness that transcend traditional ways of knowing. If this is true, we are called upon to use more of ourselves than at any other time in human history.
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