mandarine

I do not know whence the contagion originated, but I know I caught it from Charlotte who had been infected after visiting a Kitten.
Here are ten things I liKe, ten things the mandarine blog is about:

• The letter K. Those who know my name will understand why.
• Kant: (as an icon for philosophy, which does not start with a k). I love rational thinking. The broad rational thinking that does not stop at the obvious immediate conclusions but embraces unintuitive facts and digs up unexpected truths. The mandarine blog is an attempt to prove that original conclusions can be reached with simple conceptual tools: essentially, philosophy is everyone’s.
• Kindergarten: in France, we call it ‘maternal school’. That’s where my 2 1/2 year-old son has been going for two months now. When we chose to restore an old farmhouse and move to the countryside, I cannot say we had not been influenced by a blockbusting documentary about rural schools. The movie was ‘Etre et Avoir‘ (to be and to have) and a vivid portrait of a single class rural school. The humanity and peace that emanated from the movie made us think this was the right thing to do for our kids if we wanted to escape the decrepit public school system in large urban areas. A lot of our (sometimes leftist) friends had given up and turned to private schools. As often in these matters, we escaped sideways: our son goes to a public school where violence is not on the agenda, where all kids have equal chances, where the class is not overcrowded, where the teachers have time to care for individual children, and where the playground has a 360° view to the countryside. For free.
• Kilimandjaro. The legendary eternal snows of Mount Kilimandjaro are dying. One more symbolic item in the endless list of clues pointing at global warming. I have two fundamental worries for the years and decades to come: the oil crisis and global warming. We will have to transition to a post-oil era without triggering the third world war. I am certain that with the current wisdom, knowledge and technology, a world economy without oil or nuclear energy is sustainable, but I am not confident that humanity will manage to reach this sustainable state without a terrible crisis first. If this crisis is too terrible or too long, it may well be that we lose all the technology, the knowledge and the wisdom, and return to the middle-ages in a devilish spiral. As for global warming, the crisis will probably be less violent, but it will last. Some models predict it will accelerate and diverge to the point no life on Earth can remain. We dreamed we could change Mars into a second Earth, when in fact, we are changing the Earth into a second Venus.
• KDE (standing for K Desktop Environment) is a very nice (and efficient) graphical user interface for Linux. (unfortunately, Linux does not start with a K). Just to think that Linux, a distributed collaborative endeavour from thousands of volunteer developers can take 5% of market shares from the richest man in the world gives me a lot of hope for mankind. If you trust mankind, use Linux (and vice-versa).

To be continued…

This entry is filed under epicureanism, miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.