This is a great BBC film which follows the lives of several Chinese children in various parts of the country. The producers had British child actors translate what the children wanted to say to the world about their ideas and their daily lives.

You can download it here: "In My Shoes - China" (635 megabytes - one hour)

If you're having trouble, right click and choose to "Save as". Then play it from your hard disk.

For a bit over ten years now, I've been studying my eating habits and the effects on my health very closely. I think that modern medicine often "doesn't see the forest for the trees." This is especially true here in the USA where academics at universities train up generations of students who see the world from within models that are specific to their specialty, without any sort of a broader interdisciplinary perspective. I would argue that a lot of ordinary everyday illnesses are not caused by microorganisms, per se, but would be better understood as being caused by our life habits.

Generally, I think I have a good controlled observation of my own health (a sample of one) over the course of many years.

Before I started my lengthy self study I used to eat quite chaotically... and voluminously... and yet I stayed very lithe. In retrospect, I understand now that the reason is that I wasn't digesting my food very well... I often had diarreah... simply because the foods weren't mixed properly in my gut.

Now, that I've learned quite a bit about myself, I have found that I can even adopt a mostly vegetarian diet and be quite healthy. It takes a lot of skill. I believe that people who just glibly argue that we should all be vegetarian are really misguided in their efforts... because it takes a lot of knowledge that most people don't have. After all, a good section of society relies heavily on processed prepackaged food, and their mother's recipe files just to keep themselves in bounds when it comes to healthy balanced meals.

At any rate, these are the things I've discovered:

The human body does not need a wide variety of foods to be healthy. It has been very important to me to adopt a simple diet in order to better study the effects of food combinations, and I've found that I always feel robustly healthy, when eating this way. The more kinds of foods you put into your stomach at once, the more chance there is of indigestion; after all, you're doing chemistry in your gut every time you sit down to a meal. You do need a balance of food stuffs from all the "food groups." You need meats (or other complete proteins), milks, fats, sugar, greens, fruit, grains, and salt. If you have a robust combination of these things, your body will be able to manufacture everything it needs for the health of its tissues.

One foodstuff that I think my fellow Americans certainly don't get enough of is chloryphyll that is in its raw form. There's only one vegetable on most frozen food aisles that really has enough umph to do the job - and that's spinach (And they do freeze that stuff fresh. If you thaw it without cooking it, it's just like eating a spinach salad). It irks me that almost every salad dressing on the grocery store shelves in the USA is brimming full of vinegar. What an awful way to treat greens! It's almost as if people want to train themselves not to eat more fresh greens. I make my own simple salad dressings with oil, a bit of sugar and an herb - sometimes I'll add things like peanut butter or coconut milk.

Chlorophyll seems to me to be an important factor in moderating the effects of salt and citric acid at a metabolic level. It also seems to reset the body's metabolism and digestion somehow, and it promotes appetite.

Citric acid, especially if you eat very little meat, is a very touchy substance. A tall glass of lemonade if I haven't had meat for a couple of days can cause explosive diarreah all night long. One should be very careful about how one selects one's fruits. Apples (and juice therefrom), even though they may be sweet are highly acidic. Pears are not acidic. Meat and fruit is a great combination. If you have a constant problem with an acidic stomach - just try drastically cutting down the amount of acidic fruit you are eating and see what happens. Alternately, you can buy calcium carbonate powder and pack it into gel capsules. This is active incredient in over-the-counter antacids, and I've found it far more effective by itself than when it's combined with sucrose and all the other things that go into a chewable tablet like those which the Tums brand makes.

Salt is very important to human health. This is especially true in dry or hot climates. There's a reason why Australians are such big fans of vegemite. I agree that processed food in the USA is way too salty. I personally have no taste for it because my tongue is especially sensitive to such sharp flavors. However, good doctors will always remind people that there's a "recommended daily allowance" for salt, because it is a vital nutrient. During my young adulthood, I was eating far too little salt; my health-conscious single mother had indoctrinated me well. I have since discovered that it is very helpful for my digestion, and of course it's important to replenish the body's store. Basic cell functionality - receiving and disposing nutrients and waste products through osmosis and diffusion - depends on a proper salt balance.

Saturated fat is something I think of as a centrally important part of my diet. I've found it's a great thing to have if you want to maintain or grow your weight slowly with very little food intake. This can save you a lot of money in your grocery bill.

Starches in the form of American style bread (or potatoes in Germany, or rice in the Orient) serve a vital dietary purpose. They mix with other foods in your gut - they even things out and help promote a more efficient digestion of all the various nutrients within the foods.

I've always been a big milk fan. It's especially helpful now that I'm eating a largely vegetarian diet.

This is a very charming film I stumbled upon, on the net, where a handful of kids who were adopted from an orphanage in China by Swedish parents went back to see where they used to live.

Today, I was doing something I rarely do. I was watching an American film. It happened to be showing on the BBC's Iplayer, and it's such a really good representation of quintessential American values and life. It's Steve Martin's comedy: "Father of the Bride 2."

After some months and years of earnestly putting out my feelers and learning about other countries using the internet my personal computer, this film made me realize something very important about Anglo society.... and something that's perhaps more broad about Western society.

This idyllic middle class family life which is portrayed is what everybody in my country aspires to have - the beautiful suburban house with the nice landscaped garden... the kids, the job... the whole nine yards. My own older brother is doing this right now... and I really admire his life. I love my nephew and the wonderful mother he has and I wish I could have it myself someday. I don't know that I will. I haven't met the woman with whom I think I can do that kind of thing.

However, what I do take exception to, is the way Americans think to defend this lifestyle against what I see as being only imaginary threats. For example, my own mother got a lot of flack from her friends about her divorce from my father - because, in the 1970s divorce was still perceived as a big threat to middle class American life. In the 1980s and 1990s and even into this first decade, homosexual marriage is deemed a threat to the sanctity of middle class American life. There have been other things in the past, and other things in the future which will also fit the bill and become seen as specters in the same way. Turn back the clock to the 1950s and 1960s, and miscegany was similarly considered a threat to the middle class lifestyle.

What I love about Japan and China, is that these countries are always trying new things. There was a funny little social interchange I saw the other day on an Australian public television news segment, where the host was interviewing a Chinese academic about China's economy... and the comparison came out that China always is trying new experiments... whereas the host chuckled that his country of Australia is kind of the opposite. I knew exactly what he meant. Aussie policy-makers feel compelled to justify the ramifications and outcomes of any policy measure and debate those things hotly with their peers across the aisle in Canberra. Australia is in some ways a very progressive and forward thinking, but it is also a very moralistic one.

You can see the differences when it comes to religion, too. Japan has Shinto religion, which is a collection of hundreds or thousands of different systems of belief which compare somewhat to animistic systems you find among traditional peoples in places like Africa. There isn't one right way of doing things - and Shinto religion doesn't teach doctrine or morals, per se. In contrast to this, in monotheistic countries, there have been millenia, where people have felt the need to defend the one right way of life that everyone aspires to against innumerous outside threats - some tangible and some existential.

It's interesting to take this model and lay it across a continent like Africa and think about what kind of collection of cultures it will have in fifty or a hundred years. It's also a very monotheistic continent, all in all.

Generally, I think that a tradition of monotheism tends to train a nation to think far too simplistically about the world. I think that the age-old Taoist idea that there is both good and bad and that in many cases you should roll with it, rather than try to fight it has a lot to teach us. Why are the East Asian economies so successful? Because they don't try to avoid the bad when doing the good. They accept that there are costs and benefits... that there are downsides and upsides. South Koreans would never be minded to do what the Scottish did when they rallied to reject Donald Trump's golf course because it would destroy the landscape. Despite the hot debate in those countries about "conformity" I think that these countries provide the environment where people doing things in quirky new ways is much more accepted than it is in the West. The variety of walks of life becomes the strength of these nations.

I finally found a very detailed explanation of the situation surrounding this controversy in China. Every major news agency in the West that I visit failed to provide this - including the BBC. Instead opting for "anti-China" stereotype fear mongering stories which reflect this odd sensibility in the West that China is similar in nature to the former USSR.

So, if you wish to understand the ins and outs of politics in China, and aren't averse to spending a few tens of minutes poring over the complex systems which the writer is describing, read on.

• What's REALLY happening with Bo Xilai

I was an exchange student in Germany when I was in high school... and just now I've decided to start brushing up on the language. Since my experience in Deutschland, I have always been able to speak at about level 3 on the 6 point standard European language scale. The difference between where I am now and complete fluency is really only a matter of adding to my vocabulary. That's what I'm working on, therefore.

Right now, I'm particularly fond of Switzerland and I found a great website which has video, audio, and textual news in English - http://www.swissinfo.ch. I also found a place to watch Swiss television programming: http://sf.tv. News broadcasts work well for me because they show me the things they're talking about, and the people most often speak in the Hochdeutsch dialect.

The German language is constructed very differently from English. It was one of the first European languages, and I believe it was probably one of the first to be written down. I can see how the linguists in the country at that time thought of language differently than we English speakers view things, today. I don't think there would have been a concept of casual ways of saying things as opposed to specific ways of saying them. I was musing yesterday about the words annehmen and abnehmen, which I was surprised to encounter in my physics class in Germany - they mean "accelerate" and "decelerate" respectively. It's as if those who were writing down the words for the first time with ink on paper looked at how people spoke casually and said to themselves, "Oh, that's the word!" The casual phrase was "take on" for speed up, and "take off" for slow down. That became the formal wording, as well.

In this manner, the Germans created families of words around common roots. Using prefixes like an, ab, auf, aus, ent, hin, hinter, her, ver, vor, and zu... they created a variety of different meanings out of the basic roots such as hören, gehen, treten, Druck, Stand, Spruch, and so forth. Those who have dabbled in computer programming, will know what I mean when I tell you that in this manner they created "namespaces."

Maybe a good example to look at, would be "ziehen."

"Ziehen," by itself, means "to draw something out." However, you can spin the word into ten different directions and give it a new meaning by adding one of the prefixes:

• abziehen - to detach
• aufziehen - to raise a child or educate someone
• umziehen - to move house
• verziehen - to pet (eg. a cat)
• vorziehen - to prefer something to something else
• ausziehen - to extract
• anziehen - to dress someone
• hinziehen - to protract
• entziehen - to deprive someone

You can see how each of these words can be related back to the physical motion of "drawing something out or across." It's fascinating.

I don't know how they're teaching German these days, but I highly recommend that when you see a word which starts with one of these prefixes - look up every variation you can find at the online dictionary http://leo.org. It's really prudent to learn all the variations of the root in one go. Otherwise, if you're barely familiar with a word like "ausgehen," from your last vocab test - you might forget what it means when your weekly memorization vocabulary now includes "vergehen," or "hintergehen." The one word will sort of take the place of the other in your mind. It's overwritten - kind of like what used to happen with a palimpsest. However, if you learn all the variations of the root at once, the meanings of each of them will stick with you better.

I've just done some big upgrades to my desktop computer, including buying my first SSD, which is lightning fast. I decided to give the Ubuntu distro another shot, so I installed Oneiric Ocelot. You really need to have top-of-the line equipment to fully enjoy the luxuries afforded with this operating system. One of the coolest of those luxuries is Compiz. Ubuntu when it is first installed looks like a throwback to Mac OS 8. It's really homely. However, after installing the "Compiz CompizConfig Settings Manager" (or CCSM) you can really make Ubuntu sing to your soul.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge bug which you might experience when you load or unload Compiz plugins. The entire desktop will crash simply by clearing or checking one of those check-boxes.

Here is my advice (thus far) for those who are in my shoes and who want to make CCSM work for them:

If you have the screen flash and Compiz restart (or not) every time you load or unload a plugin (clear or unclear a checkbox on the main page), try this:

1. First of all, before you get your feet wet, you'll want to be able to recover the default Compiz settings (or whichever ones you have in there currently) in an emergency. To prepare for this, go to the "Preferences" (orange text on the left), and export your profile somewhere you'll be able to find it again. When it asks whether you want to "skip default options while exporting your profile", answer no. Then, you can simply import the settings file back into Compiz whenever you need to.

2. Secondly, you're going to need to be able to rescue your desktop quickly if it has a tendency to crash every time you load and unload a plugin. Go to the Ubuntu system settings (the gear icon in the Unity taskbar). Choose "Keyboard Layout", press the "Options..." button, find where it says "Key sequence to kill the X server", and check "Control + Alt + Backspace." This means that whenever your system hangs, all you have to do is press that key combination in order to automatically log off. Then you can log back in without having to reboot your computer. If worse comes to worse, you can also log into Ubuntu classic mode from that screen.

3. Place a Compiz configuration icon on the desktop so you can quickly access it. Simply drag the icon out of the launcher after you search for "Compiz."

4. Fourthly, know that the problem with CCSM crashing every time you load or unload a plugin seems to be specific to the Unity plugin. If you go down to the "Desktop" section and uncheck "Ubuntu Unity Plugin" you will lose your taskbar, and your top bar - however you can then make any adjustments at all within Compiz, and you'll never crash it. Afterwards, you can simply replace that checkmark next to the "Unity" plugin, and you're good to go.

Hopefully, it won't be long before I actually discover a real fix. When I do, I'll post it here.

I recently bought this really wonderful $37 4-watt pocket system, shown here. It's interesting how hard it is to get basic electrical information about these things on the internet. So I decided to write a brief post, here.

First of all, how is electricity measured?

As most of us English speakers are from the USA, we have little to no understanding of electrical engineering. It isn't covered in the standard curriculum in primary and secondary education; nor is it required coursework in the general ed at universities. So, we'll start with the basics, here.

Imagine a river:

• Volts are like the width of the river. How much space is there through which water can pass at any given time?

• Amperage is like the speed with which the water passes that mark.

• Watts would be the gallons of water per second which flow down through that bend in the river.

As you see, the really important measurement here is watts... and that's why all solar panels are measured by how many watts they can give you. If you change the voltage, using some electronic trickery, you will raise or lower the amperage - but the watts will remain constant.

If you buy a little USB charger solar panel set like I did, that will likely give you a little bit over five volts (in my case, it was 5.26 volts). That should remain consistent no matter how little or how much sun is shining on the panel. If you buy a large table-top size solar panel, it'll probably natively output in twelve or twenty volts.

Now, one ampere of current means the wattage is equivalent to the voltage. This means, of course, that if you have a panel like mine that gives out power in the 5-volt format, one amp of current will be five watts. Similarly, if you are measuring a 12-volt power supply, one ampere will be twelve watts. It's very easy to remember, once you know how it works.

Because of this, you can use a pocket calculator to quickly figure out what is what, using this simple equation:

• Watts = Volts x Amperes.

Next, how much power can you expect to get out of a solar panel?

Well, that depends on the amount of light. Human eyes are incredibly adjustable. We can see indoors under incandescent lights with no problem. We can also see outside in the full sunshine. One doesn't realize, therefore how much difference there is in the sheer amount of light in different environments. The standard measurement these days of how bright it is, is "lux". However, I happen to have an old photography device which measures in the English system of "foot candles.". As you can see from the tables on the lux Wikipedia page, you have only about 2% to 4% of the light on an overcast day, that you have on a bright sunny day. According to my measurements, this is comparable with what you will get in the shade on one of those bright, cloudless days.

My little solar panel was advertised to give about 880 milliamps maximum output (4.63 watts). I live at 6000 feet in the sunny southwestern USA, and that's where my measurements were taken.

I found that the short-circuit current maxed out at about 720 milliamps (3.79 watts) or about 80% of the advertised amount in bright sunlight with the panels tilted perpendicular to the rays of the sun. This is enough to charge my smartphone quite quickly.

In the half-sunlight of a day with thin cloudcover, I was getting about 100 to 200 milliamps (.5 to 1.0 watts). This is still enough to slow-charge a mobile phone.

In the shade on even the brightest day, I only got about 24 milliamps out of the device.

I would guess that these percentages would hold true across a wide range of monocrystalline panels (that's the technology behind my panels). This means that if you live in an area with lots of greenery and rain, and where the sun is frequently veiled by clouds... you can expect to get 10% to 20% of the rated output of your panels on those days of half-sunlight which are so common. If you buy an 8000 watt solar array for your rooftop, you might expect to consistently get 1000 to 1500 watts out of it during the daytime. If you live in a bright, sunny area like I do, you can expect a lot more electricity.

Battery capacity

You'll see that batteries in your cell phone in other electronic devices (and even rechargeable NIMH AA cells) are rated in milliamp-hours ("mAh") or milliwatt-hours. This simply adds the dimension of time. How much power is in that battery? A 1500 milliamp-hour battery might be able to offer you 1.5 amperes for one hour, or a hundred milliamps for fifteen hours.

(One note about multimeters: Buy the cheapest you can find when you're first starting out. There are models available on Amazon for about us$5. I've gone through several in my naivety. If you're measuring power output in amps of even little things like AA batteries or small solar panels, you'll need to use the special setting that allows you a range going up to five or ten amperes. When you're just playing around, it's easy to make the mistake of hooking up too much power to the sensitive circuitry, and you'll burn out the meter (or blow a fuse which is somewhere inside the housing). These multimeters are really meant for people who are hobbyists designing their own electronic circuit boards, and the amperage in between their components will be measured in milliamps rather than amps.)