Humans are perhaps not the only creatures blessed with theory of mind , but we are certainly the only ones who spend so much time inside the heads of other creatures, including our fellow humans, but also other animals -- especially dogs. Walking a dog is basically taking a furry avatar out for a run. You are constantly picturing how the world is experienced from the (imagined) dog's point of view. This is a ton of fun in a dog park, where your furry avatar is having a really great time. This dolphin pup came to check us out in the open ocean. I was wondering what it would be like to be a dolphin -- fun i guessed. Was he wondering what it was like to be me? Meanwhile the adults were just a few meters away, watching out for their child, seeing what he was seeing and a thousand more things than I could see or even imagine. Frankly my mind doesn't stretch to picturing what is like to be three dolphins at once, but that was clearly what was going on.

This is how I set up my stream "Cloudy Mountain Radio". There are other ways to do it, but the basics will be the same for everybody. You need a way to build or capture your stream. This will be a desktop application, running on your PC or Mac or whatever. Depending on the type of content you are sharing, this may specialize in live capture, audio editing for podcasts or DJ applications. You need a way to push your stream out to the Cloud. This will probably be integrated with the capture software, but you should see it as a separate piece of software. The main business of this program is to connect to the outside world. You need a way for your listeners to pull in your stream. It's possible to push your stream directly from your computer to the listeners, but this is not really practical if you have more than 1 or 2 listeners. So ... I'm using Nicecast on my mac computers. It's amazingly easy to use. Among other things, you can stream ... iTunes -- p...

I've started quite a few blogs since this one. They all target specific audiences. This one is aimed at the general audience of friends and relatives, online or otherwise.  One of the first posts describes my home base in general terms. See Places in Mind I'll provide a bit more detail here. "Home Base" is a parcel in Second Life. It costs $L 9000 per month (37 CDN). This provides me with 1500 "prims", which is a measure of the number of objects on the property. That's ample for a nice house and space to play with building ideas . Hardware At home in "real life", I can put a lot of machines online: Desktop PC (2 monitors) . This Gateway DX 4320 machine is has been my main machine for quite awhile. At the heart of this machine is an AMD Athlon II X 635 processor and an ATI Radeo HD 5570 Grapahics card with 2807 MB of graphics memory. I think it cost about $500 (special deal). It's an excellent platform for Second Life and gen...

Those of you who are comfortable with the Internet, but have never visited Second Life can think of this as my 3D home page. It differs from a home page in many ways. I can walk around in the house, hang up my favourite pictures and meet my friends. Office in Home (Real World) Two computers with 2 monitors each appear in this picture. The two monitors on the left usually run Second Life and Chrome (the Internet Browser--a window to the conventional Internet).  The PC is and HP running Winows 8 with a 8M of memory and an Intel I7 Processor.  The Mac Book Pro is running iTunes and broadcasting over the Internet stream "Cloudy Mountain Radio"  86.105.198.224:36600. The beach house and gallery Most of the beach house is an art gallery -- It has "Gateway" to other many other art galleries in Second Life While we work hard to make these places look real, this house is really "just" a wonderfully shareable computer document in a ...

I'm totally addicted to blogging and here I go starting another blog! I travel around a lot while sitting on my rear end. I'd love to share the places I visit with you. First stop is the "real world". I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Being born in this city was the first of a long series of very smart decisions I have made in my life. When I tell people I'm from Canada, the first thing they think is "cold" and it does get cold! Here's a video I shot out my front door with the camcorder my wife bought me for Xmas, 2012. What people don't usually realize about Canada is that there are places where winter is much more bearable. This video was taken just a few days earlier on the West Coast -- Vancouver Island .

It's quite easy to see why Richard Dawkins regards what we teach children  as  child abuse. You better watch out  You better not cry Better not pout I'm telling you why Santa Claus is coming to town <<  1 Thessalonians 5  >> New International Version 1984 1 Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you,  2 for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.  3 While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. He's making a list And checking it twice; Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice MATTHEW 25:31-46 31. "When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33. And He will set the she...

The most moving documentary I've seen in a long time is on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9DMiy_DVok It's little more than a collection of amateur video shot of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which claimed at least 250,000 lives in a single day. Sadly, such catastrophes are not uncommon. 20 million in World War II, 100,000 in Gulf War II.  We're always digging up the remains of entire civilizations that were swept away and utterly lost. What is different about this catastrophe is that it was caught on film by the survivors -- we share the happy days in tropical paradise, the horror of the event, the immediate aftermath and the long term effect on real individuals. It gets you thinking. One of the things that impressed me is how our ability to understand the universe is stretched to the breaking point in these situations. The philosophies that are handed out by the religions of the world are put to the test and found wanting. In interview after i...

From " Being Wrong " p 318 "When Socrates taught his students, he didn't  try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to full them with aporia with a sense of doubt,  perplexity, and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace out fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt ... an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't so much divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three black birds and the entire Bronx Zoo.This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error -- the doubt of curiosity, possibility and wonder" This passage perfectly captures what it is to be Skeptical and open to wonder. To many, Christianity (or any religion) is all about "belief" or "faith" -- things accepted without evidence. That is not the way I see it. The part of ...

Irshad Manji provides a link to a readable version of the Koran here ... https://www.irshadmanji.com/reformist-quran This translation represents an important step in opening Islam to the kind of discussion, liberal interpretation that has been going on in Christianity for (only!) a little over a century.