I'm often amazed at our natural ability to handle information. I know that we make a big deal out of google's ability to find things (and it is a bit deal). But our natural ability to contextualize, and just as crucially to hide information, is unlike anything man has built so far. Just imagine what would happen if your brain showed you all the information it has, spread across the living room floor. You would not only completely forget what you were doing, you'd also never be able to find anything ever again.

We have tried to emulate this contextual ability through what we like to call modes, or profiles, or presets. Fancy cars have the ability to tune the ride either for speed, or for comfort. Digital watches have modes of operation, so when you want use the stopwatch all the other displays vanish and you're in stopwatch mode. The idea is that you change one setting, the mode, and that triggers a whole range of sensible contextual settings appropriate to that mode.

There is definitely a lot of modal functionality in our visual perception. For instance, we can't perceive a very wide spectrum of luminosity, so when you go into a dark you room your eyes need to adjust. And in that mode, if you look at something very bright, it will blind you. You won't be able to see anything else. Another example is the way we see patterns. Most of the time, when you have your eyes open, you see the same level of detail all the time. It might be interesting to ask whether your eyes might be seeing more than your brain decides to "show" you. Again, hiding unnecessary information is valuable. But if you really look closely at something, even from the same distance, you begin to notice things that your "regular" vision doesn't see. Little details appear, details that are not generally "important" to the way you look at it, but since you've switched to detail mode, you now see them. Patterns in the material, shadows on an uneven surface, spots where the material is scratched.

I like to call this mode the cleaning eye. Have you ever noticed that when you start cleaning everything looks different? The cleaning eye is one particular mode that has to do with analyzing the surface and spotting things on the surface that are not part of the surface. We are not very sophisticated at this, there is one way to make a determination. It's called the cleaning test. Try to clean it, and if it comes loose, it's dirt. If it's dirt, then you know that everything else on this surface that looks like that is also dirt. This test can give misleading results. (Have you ever used a cleaning liquid that was too potent, and you ended up damaging the surface you were supposed to be cleaning?)

What's interesting to me about the cleaning eye is the emotional responses that go with it. There are two opposing forces. On the one hand, you want to spot dirt, because that's the only way to justify what you're doing. Why am I cleaning this, there's nothing to clean here, what a waste of time. But once you switch to cleaning mode, it doesn't take long before you find dirt, no matter how clean the thing is. So you start cleaning, and once you exhaust the supply of dirt, you move on to another area.

Now comes phase two. Your eyes have been focused on finding dirt for so long that you start noticing that in this new area there are spots of fine dirt that you didn't notice before. You think to yourself huh, that's weird, I didn't see this in the first area I was cleaning. So you go back, and suddenly, there it is. You got the big, obvious specs of dirt, but you missed these smaller ones. Now you have to make a decision. Do I ignore this, and hope that noone else will notice it either, and I'll be in the clear? Or do I do a thorough job and clean as much as I can?

Let's say you choose the latter option. So you're cleaning and it's really getting boring, cause there is so much more fine dirt than there is obvious, big dirt. Emotionally, there is no satisfaction from cleaning, because the more you clean the more details your eyes find that you didn't see before. Once you get rid of the really fine dirt and move on, you invariable notice you missed something over here. And over there. And everywhere.

In theory, the process of cleaning proceeds until there's no more dirt visible. But you'll never get there, because there's always more dirt, smaller dirt, or dirt that won't come off easily. You could clean your bathroom until it's completely pristine, and spend the whole weekend doing that, but would that really make you happy? In a week there will be dirt again, and in a month the dirt will be visible on a regular basis. All this time and effort you spent one weekend, and for what?

The truth, of course, is that it's impossible to get anything completely clean. You would have to actually remove all the molecules that don't belong.

So at some point you reach your limit. That's enough, I'm sick of cleaning. You stop cleaning, you sit back and relax for a minute. You're not feeling happy, because you know there is still more dirt over there. But how long can you go on cleaning? Alright, forget it. Your mind drifts off to something else you'd rather be thinking about. Cleaning starts to fade in your mind. Fifteen minutes later your mind is completely occupied with something else.

Now something interesting happens. Someone goes into the bathroom. Wow, it is really clean in here! Woh, what? You go in yourself. Hey, look at that, I don't remember the last time it was this clean. Interestingly, the pay off comes not from cleaning "until it's clean", but from giving up on it. You switch from cleaning mode and stop using your cleaning eye. Now the image before you is contrasted with the way you remember the bathroom, and you see the difference. Hey, it looks clean.

So everyone knows KDE is a mammoth. And that it's very configurable. The problem is when you have to configure something for which there isn't a gui. For all I know, KDE's system of config files is completely sane and reasonable, but as a user I've never known how to understand it or where to read the explanation.

One thing that has always annoyed me across operating systems is mime types/file associations. You need some kind of mapping between file types and associated applications, and it always ends up being a kind of registry that's a pain to maintain. KDE is like that too.

Here's what I've found out. The application entries that appear in that gui are defined in .desktop files that live in /usr/share/applications. So to get your app in there, you clone an existing .desktop file and edit. In my case, I like to play all video media in mplayer, the non-gui version. Because it's non-gui, it's usually not set up through the package. Instead gmplayer, which I don't want, is. So I've made my own mplayer-nogui.desktop file.

[syntax,mplayer-nogui.desktop,bash]

Now, to make your app appear under the file types you want, you just put this in the .desktop file. Once you've done that, you have a reusable mplayer-nogui.desktop that you can push into /usr/share/applications on any distro that fails to set up mplayer without a gui.

The next step is to make MPlayer nogui the preferred app for every file type that it's associated with. This is stored in ~/.kde/share/config/profilerc. The file is easy to figure out, and ideally I'd want an easy way to just select all and then override with MPlayer nogui. But to do that I'd have to write a parser, and it's frankly not worth the effort. So I just go through the list of video filetypes and manually move MPlayer nogui to the top. It would be nice to automate this.

In terms of maintenance, linux is not the jungle that Windows is, which means apps you install later won't generally try to steal the preferred status. But they might. So again, it would be nice to automate reseting that (or maybe locking down the preferences somehow).

It would be nice if the KDE guys came out with a gui that made it possible to set up your file associations in 30 seconds, but until then this is the best I got.

It is classic Hitchens to examine the unexamined. He says of his endeavor to investigate the life of Mother Teresa that he would rather judge her reputation by her words and actions than to judge the words and actions by her reputation.

It would seem culturally counter intuitive to so much as suggest that Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for starters, isn't entirely equal to the admiration she received in her lifetime and continues to receive posthumously. Hitchens has an explanation for this. He argues wealthy people living comfortable lives in rich countries want to believe that somewhere out there there is someone who is doing something for the poor.

Mother Teresa was self proclaimed for this role, of course. Hitchens paints a picture of a person so consumed by the conviction that for the poor there is glory in suffering that her whole organization is dedicated to enforcing it. Her clinic in Calcutta is void of appropriate medical equipment, despite the fact that through the numerous donations to her cause she would have amassed the funds to upgrade it.

Essentially, Hitchens says that Mother Teresa is using the poor and the suffering to power her operation, a sort of "poverty in practice". Her aim is not to empower the poor to propel them out of poverty, or even to end their suffering, but rather for them to endure their poverty and suffering, for such is the will of god. All the while preaching the strictest of Catholic doctrine. We know that Jesus devoted his end to suffering, although whether he was a real person or merely a philosophical character is not established. Mother Teresa, then, was dedicated to a reenactment of sorts through the poor in her clinic, who had no power to refuse.

It is a rather different view on the world renowned character, for which Christopher Hitchens unsurprisingly received much criticism. Is it because he is twisting the facts or because we in this world are so unwilling to blemish the image of someone who was supposed to be through and through noble?

So I've been sitting here all this time, twiddling my thumbs. Obama or McCain, tough choice. I was waiting for a sign. A sign, you might say, from god. It came. Obama and McCain both had rallies in Pennsylvania. McCain canceled his, Obama didn't.

"A little rain never hurt nobody", said Obama, as McCain headed the stampede to the nearest shelter. Damn right, Barack.

Europeans, take notice. Rain is water. Most of your bodies are water already. You're carrying around water bottles to counter balance dehydration. Stop being so schizophrenic.

Disclaimer: I am not a special interest contributor to the Obama campaign. Obama merely chose to point and laugh at people who are scared of rain for the fun of it.

The Netherlands, a paradise for bikers. Twelve million bikes on seventeen thousand kilometers of dedicated bike paths. And a country so flat that you'll never be pushing your bike uphill because the hill is too steep - there is no hill. There's basically no corner of the country that isn't accessible to a biker, the place sometimes looks like a bike track with a country attached to it.

And yet, something is wrong. Very wrong.

You might think "Hey the Dutch are nuts about biking, I bet they have great bikes over there!". You'd be wrong. The bikes in use in this country are something out of an old Soviet factory. Single speed, pedal brake, black paint (or painted a bright color to conceal rampant corrosion), with a regular chain for locking. Often you can hear them coming, wheels spinning unevenly on the axle because the rims are slightly bent, lights fastened poorly and about to fall off, crank screeching against the panel that conceals the chain. Not surprisingly, bike repair is a thriving business in this country, repair shops are everywhere.

In fact, these old bikes are so dominant that it's difficult to find a bike that isn't one of these historical exhibits. Furthermore, bike theft is so widespread that people don't even want to own anything worth stealing. (A guy once told me he loses roughly one bike per year to theft.) Dutch people love to joke that the lock usually is worth more than the bike is. That's true, I just don't see why that is supposed to be funny. I wouldn't want to live in a house where the lock on the front door is worth more than the house itself.

Then there are the bike lanes. Yes, they are dedicated to bikes, and yes they are separate from motorized traffic. What you probably don't expect, however, is just how boring it is to ride on them. They are completely flat, they have their own traffic lights, and even indicators for traffic going in different directions. It's no wonder bikes don't have any gears, there's no way you could build up any speed before you have to stop at the next light. It is the experience of urban biking with the added bureaucracy of driving a car

Not only that, traffic regulations for bikers not only exist, they are enforced. That means you have tax collecting traffic cops just waiting to write you a ticket for any number of trivialities, like riding on the sidewalk (even when it's void of pedestrians), riding a light when there's no traffic, or riding without lights. Lights which, of course, will be stolen unless you obsessively remove them every time you park the bike. (Unless the whole bike gets stolen instead.) It's almost a wonder you don't have to fill in a form every time.

Then there is the terrain. When you're not biking in a town, which is about as much fun as driving a car in heavy traffic, you will find yourself somewhere on the grid of bike lanes that connect towns, out in the great outdoors. What fun! Well, at least until you realize that every slice of the country looks almost exactly the same, and the only thing there is to see anywhere is grasslands with canals crossing them. If you're lucky you might spot a forest, but they are very uncommon. And it's completely flat, so not only is there nothing to see here, you're well aware of the fact that 10km down the road there's also nothing. Scenery wise, this country is as close as you get to a desert.

The Dutch response to all of this? "Biking was never supposed to be fun, it's transport." Well, there you have it, it doesn't get more depressing than that. "Music an art form? We just needed a beat the soldiers could march to."