We may think we see the world around us clearly, but our view is distorted by the powerfully magnetic influence of natural selection, our genes' insistent push to see everything in terms of passing themselves on to a new generation. "Natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly. It designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes," Wright writes in his new book, "Why Buddhism is True." Click to Read More...

Labor Day weekend I was in Venice Beach, and did not do much of anything. I napped on the beach, ate Cheerios, and got my Zen on. I procured and then sun-and-surf faded a baby blue Venice Beach tee. I knew no one there; I was completely anonymous. It was my three favorite days of this past year. Roaming about, I found a $240 backpack that promised to survive out the remainder of my travels on this planet. Click to Read More...

We saw Tanya Tucker play in Hopewell, Virginia, about a 30-minute drive out of Richmond. What was in Hopewell? Not a lot, it looked from the town as we drove in as the sun was going down. It is one of those many small towns in the U.S. that were vibrant a century ago, but whose picturesque storefront shops look sadly empty these days, their main streets quiet of the activity they so richly deserve. Click to Read More...

Our understanding of time has always been closely intertwined within culture. This is the basic premise of Frank Adam's book "About Time." The idea requires a close reading of both history and our understanding of time, which has changed and grown more exacting through the centuries. Adam follows this very closely through the centuries, though loses focus somewhat as he enters into the modern era. Click to Read More...

Linux file permissions in octals, or a set of three numbers in Base-8 (that is to say a number system that uses only 0 through 7). You can specify changes using octals in the command to change permissions, chmode. These octal permissions will be three digits. From left to right, the first digit represents the permissions for user, the second one is for the group and the third one is for others. I will show you an easy way to derive this number. Click to Read More...

In many cases with Linux, if you want to view the contents of a file, using the cat command works just fine. However, cat will not work for binary files, because binary files contain non-printing characters (Or non-ASCII characters). Run a cat on a binary program, such as sed, will only get you a screen full of gibberish, and may even destroy the terminal session itself. What Octal Dump (od from the command line) does is display the contents of a binary file, including an execution files, as sets of octals. Click to Read More...