Neverness

South Africa’s first electric car

greenman — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:59:14 +0000

I keep telling my son that by the time he can drive, cars won’t be the destructive beasts farting all over our planet they are now, but will run on clean electricity, and you’ll be able to stand behind one breathing clean air.

The first part of the puzzle is being put in place with the arrival of the first fully electric car in South Africa later this year, the Nissan Leaf.

I hear lots of arguments against electric cars. “They’re more harmful to the environment because they displace the energy production from the car to the coal power station.” This argument is simply nonsense, because, even in South Africa, where, sadly, almost all the electricity produced is with coal, the energy efficiency gains in producing power centrally in a power station far outstrip those of the highly inefficient internal combustion engine. And of course, as the energy production swings to renewable, the gains are dramatic.

More convincing is “the pricing is a ripoff and you’ll never make back in fuel savings the extra you pay upfront.” This is true in many cases, particularly for the early hybrids. But when it comes to pure electric cars, how do things stack up?

Edmunds.com have done extensive calculations on payback periods in the US of various hybrid and electric cars against their conventional equivalents.

Remember that calculations like these are based on quite rigid assumptions. The exchange rate will fluctuate, petrol prices will change, electricity prices will change, car prices will change. So extrapolating them over a long period of time is interesting, but will come nowhere near predicting the actuality.

However, at present rates, the payback period for the electric Nissan Leaf against the equivalent conventional, Nissan Versa, priced at $10,000 less, is 9 years if petrol is $3 a gallon, and 5 years if petrol is $5 a gallon.

That’s based on the US rates for petrol (ranging from $3 to $5 a gallon in the comparisons) and electricity ($0.12 a kWh), and an average usage of 15,000 miles a year. The sales prices are unknown, as are any possible government incentives, but assuming the same hefty R100,000 price difference, how does this compare in South Africa?

Petrol here is more expensive than in the US, a $4.69 per gallon according to my calculations at current rates, and certain to increase quite substantially in July. Electricity prices vary according to the city and other factors, but are generally slightly cheaper here. That means that the payback period is already at the better end of the scale (5 years), and only likely to improve.

So an electric car, or the Nissan Leaf at least, seems to make both environmental and financial sense in South Africa.

The only argument against it is the limited range, quoted as “up to 200km” by Nissan. For the vast majority of most people’s trips, it’ll do just fine, but it will require a change in habits for longer trips, especially for the early adopters, when the fast-charge infrastructure won’t be widespread.

My son’s still got quite a few years to go before he needs to worry about driving, but I’m positive that by the time he starts thinking about it, the cars and cities of his time will be much cleaner than today’s.

And perhaps his first car will be a 10-year old Nissan Leaf.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Hei Hei Hei

greenman — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:21:20 +0000

It’s been a while since my last “I’m learning” post.

Let’s see. There’s been:

Learning Toki Pona (December 2009)
Learning Languages Revisited (March 2009)
Tune Xhosa with Ian (December 2007)
Learning Mandarin Chinese, and some insight into my brain’s inner workings (June 2007)

So what’s the latest language I can add to the “learned and have forgotten everything” list? Buryat? Karelian? Maybe even Mi’kmaq?

The most important factor in learning a language is motivation, so while I’m sure those three languages are great fun to learn, I’m not going to be using them to speak to anyone in the forseeable future. If I was going to learn a totally useless languages, it would have to match Toki Pona’s 120-root word vocabulary, and the to-the-pointedness of lesson two’s “mi wile unpa e ona”.

I’m off to Finland later this year. The Finn’s mostly speak great English, but, in spite of the fact that after my two months of Finnish, I’ll be saying “hei hei hei” (hei is hello) and smiling maniacally, and anyone who hangs around will immediately switch to English, learning Finnish still sounds fun.

The Defense Language Institute has four levels of language difficulty for English-speakers. Category one, the easiest to learn, consists of other European languages with a shared vocabulary, such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as linguistically simple languages such as Swahili. Category two includes languages such as German, Hindi and Urdu. Finnish is in level three, up there with Russian, Vietnamese and Amharic. So, not easy. Category four is the shortest list, containing the most challenging languages for English speakers, such as Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic.

So how am I learning Finnish?

The most well-known language sites online, such as Busuu, Babbel and Duolingo don’t list Finnish. LiveMocha does, but it’s friendly “We don’t work in Linux” web app doesn’t inspire much hope.

So, my strategy so far has been:

1) Surface Languages – the standard sort of course, ranging from “hello” to, er, whatever comes next

2) Memrise – a learning tool I think has great potential, but which I’ve never had reason to try until now. Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting. A “Grand Master of Memory” is an award given to people who have achieved three feats. Memorise 1000 random digits in an hour. Memorise the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour. Memorise the order of one deck of cards in under two minutes. There are 196 million grand masters of memory in the world at the moment. No. No there’re not. There are 131 in the world as of the end of 2012, including two South Africans.

Memrise uses memory association in quite an innovative way, and spaced repetition, so seems to make great sense as a tool.

3) Finally, most fun of all, Youtube. I don’t mean people at their webcam counting to 1 million. So far I’ve watched Joki, a very good film, and An Unfinished Movie. This is probably the equivalent of watching Trainspotting to learn English, but I’m having fun.

Ask me in September how it went.

Wiki Cape Town, Joe Slovo and a storyteller

greenman — Sun, 26 May 2013 18:42:06 +0000

There was a Cape Town Wikimedia meetup this week, and I got to meet a couple of new people. Victor, a Wikimedia storyteller from San Francisco, is in Cape Town, mainly to document the inspiring story of a school in Joe Slovo Park that have successfully lobbied FNB Connect for free access to Wikipedia pages. A few people from Wikimedia ZA will be going to the school this week to tell people more about the project, and teach people to edit.

I also finally got to meet Dumisane Ndubane, who’s the president of Wikimedia South Africa. We’ve interacted online for quite a long time, so it was great to meet in person. Dumisane lives in Jhb and is passing through Cape Town after coming back from the Chapter’s Conference in Milan.

Oarabile Mudongo was also there, one of the few active Tswana editors. He’s hoping to get a Botswana Chapter started. Here’s a great video of Oarabile speaking about the impact Wikipedia has had on his life.

The Wikimedia South Africa board seems to be doing some good work, and the Joburgpedia project, which aims to encourage heritage institutions (government and private) to contribute high-quality content sounds like it’s making good progress.

WordPress spam, Akismet and Cookies for Comments

greenman — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:07:10 +0000

This blog gets about 1 spam comment a second.

Not bad for an obscure blog with, as I write this, only one post open for comments.

Akismet, the spam plugin does a great job of keeping the spam out, although recently a few more spam posts have been sneaking through for moderation, perhaps two a week. Still considering I get about 600 000 spam comments in that week, a miss ratio of 1 in 300 000 is rather exceptional.

The volume of spam shot up markedly after this post, which in retrospect, isn’t so surprising, since it contains every about spam phrase out there.

A feature I’d like to see in WordPress is the ability to automatically delete spam after a certain period. Apparently this is automatically set to one month, but since in that month I’d get about 2.5 million posts, and have to up the space on my backup server, I prefer to delete spam posts manually a little more often than that.

Deleting spam posts isn’t entirely smooth. If the number is too large, the script times out and I have to re-run a number of times. Since the spam arrives so quickly, I never have an empty spam folder, as by the time the deletion has happened, but before the page reloads, there’s normally a couple more posts.

After coming back from the weekend to 40 000 spam posts, I decided to look for a solution. It’d be easy enough to adjust the period in the code manually, but since I’d have to re-implement the change each time I upgraded, I prefer to look for an existing solution.

Enter Cookies for Comments. The solution is simple – the plugin sets a random cookie, which, if it doesn’t exist when a comment is posted, is almost a sure sign that the comment is being placed by a bot.

You can set the plugin to either automatically mark the comment as spam (effectively catching the two or so comments a week Akismet misses, but not solving my problem), or automatically delete the comment.

I set it automatically delete comments. Boom! Blissful silence with my recently-cleared spam folder now not moving from 247 comments.

You can play further and use an Apache rewrite rule to block the requests from even reaching WordPress, which I haven’t implemented yet, but looks hopeful in reducing unnecessary load further.

What’s that? You’re suspicious of cookies and have disabled them, and now you can’t comment on my blog? I doubt you can do much else on the internet either…

May 2013 African language Wikipedia update

greenman — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:53:22 +0000

There’s a current proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia for lack of activity, so I thought it’d be a good time to see the progress of the African and South African language Wikipedias.

Heading the list of African-language Wikipedias by article count, Malagasy is still racing ahead in creating new articles, mainly thanks to articles automatically created by bots. These articles aren’t always ones that you’d imagine would be high priority. There are currently over 200 galaxies with their own article, some with broken templates, for example the one on the NGC 953 elliptical galaxy in the constellation Triangulum. But no article on Nelson Mandela, or Omer Beriziky, the prime minister of Madagascar.

So it’s a somewhat artificial indicator, but there is still a reasonable level of activity, and it would be interesting to measure whether bot-activity helps encourage human activity.

Second is Yoruba, where the huge burst has slowed (again, many are bot-related, and the first random article I clicked on was minor space body 3011 Chongqing), but there’s still steady progress. Afrikaans in third continues well, and is probably in the best shape of any African-language Wikipedia. After being overtaken by Swahili, it has seen consistent activity, has a healthy community, and is growing far faster than Swahili.

Swahili and Amharic are still growing steadily, while Egyptian Arabic is growing quickly, and is on track to pass Amharic. Of the others with more than 1000 articles, only Kinyarwandahas has stalled, while Kabyle and Shona have seen good growth.

Language	1/1/2007	11/2/2011	13/4/2012	16/11/2012	9/5/2013
Malagasy		3806	36767	38753	45361
Yoruba	517	12174	29894	30158	30585
Afrikaans	6149	17002	22115	24821	26752
Swahili	2980	21244	23481	24519	25265
Amharic	742	6738	11572	11806	12360
Egyptian Arabic			8433	9341	10379
Somali		1639	2354	2525	2757
Lingala	292	1394	1816	1951	2025
Kinyarwanda			1501	1807	1817
Kabyle				1144	1503
Shona				1272	1421
Wolof		1116	1814	1129	1161

So overall, in Africa, some good progress.

Of the South African language Wikipedias, outside of Afrikaans, the state is as dismal as ever. Three have actually lost articles (usually due to removing spam), while a proposal has been made to close the Xhosa Wikipedia. Xhosa is the smallest-remaining African language Wikipedia still open. A number of smaller languages have already been closed. Growth in Zulu has slowed, Venda has shown flickers of activity, while Sotho has grown by 37 articles, although it’s still second-smallest, ahead of Xhosa.

Let’s not forget Ndebele, which as the least widely spoken official South African language, still has no representation.

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	1/10/2007	19/11/2011	13/4/2012	16/11/2012	9/5/2013
Afrikaans	8374	20042	22115	24821	26754
Northern Sotho	0	557	566	686	685
Zulu	107	256	483	568	579
Tswana	40	240	490	497	495
Swati	56	359	361	363	364
Tsonga	10	192	193	243	240
Venda	43	193	190	194	204
Sotho	43	132	145	151	188
Xhosa	66	125	136	141	148

Neville Alexander, a champion of multi-lingualism in South Africa, recently died, and there don’t seem to be prominent leaders taking up the mantle. While there are eleven official languages, English seems to be becoming ever-more dominant, there’s a dearth of local literature and language departments are shrinking in the country’s universities. A recent Wikipedia workshop at the University of Cape Town was co-ordinated by one of the Wikimedia South Africa board members, Douglas Scott, and in spite of being a standard lecture as part of the curriculum, not a single native-speaker turned up. The article-counts reflect this situation, so it seems unlikely there’ll be a change anytime soon.

South Africa slumps in the 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

greenman — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:38:41 +0000

The 2013 World Press Freedom Index came out recently, and sadly, South Africa has slid alarmingly since I last blogged about it in 2007, and even more so when compared with its peak rating in 2003. Note that a lower score is better.

Year	Score	Ranking
2013	24.56 (-12.56)	52 (-10)
2012	12 (0)	42 (-4)
2010	12 (-3.5)	38 (-5)
2009	8.5 (-0.5)	33 (+3)
2008	8 (+5)	36 (+7)
2007	13 (-1.75)	43 (+1)
2006	11.25 (-4.75)	44 (-13)
2005	6.5 (-1.5)	31 (-5)
2004	5 (-1.66)	26 (-5)
2003	3.33	21 (+5)

Although the country still has a robust and critical press, it’s mainly the threat of the “Protection of State Information Bill” that sees South Africa slump well away from “good” to deep into the “satisfactory” category.

Sadly, things are even worse for the other BRICS countries, with Brazil (108th, -9) falling after a number of journalists were killed, India (140th, -9) also seeing increasing violence against journalists and increasing censorship, China still oppressively imprisoning many journalists (173rd, +1) and Russia (148th, -6) down too after an increase in repression.

Finland remains top for the fourth consecutive year, with a number of other Nordic and European countries filling out the “good” category, along with New Zealand and Jamaica.

Among African countries, Namibia and Cape Verde top the charts and are rated “good”, with Ghana, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Comoros all ahead of South Africa with satisfactory ratings.

A number of other African countries saw big gains, including Malawi up 71 and the Ivory Coast up 63. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, recovering from its crackdown on the Occupy Movement, gained 15 positions up to 32nd in the world, while Canada lost ground after its obstruction of journalists during the “Maple Spring” student movement, and increasingly oppressive legislation, leaving Jamaica as the freest country in the hemisphere.

The gains are offset by a number of countries seeing worsening situations. Mali, after the coup and insurgency there, fell 74 positions, and Tanzania 36 positions after the murder of two journalists. The other big faller was Japan, down 31 positions after restricting all access to information about the Fukushima disaster.

Here’s hoping that, wherever you are in the world, 2013 will see you a little freer to have your say.

Read the full report on the Reporters Without Borders site.

MySQL, MariaDB and relative asymptotics

greenman — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 02:13:08 +0000

In 2002 I wrote a book on MySQL. At the time, I was working crazy fulltime hours for IOL and I was exhausted by the end of the process. I’ve been approached quite a few times since to write an update, or to write other related books, but have never had the energy, time or interest. The most recent approach, by a publisher I won’t mention, was for a hilariously obscure topic. I’ve deleted the email, so can’t recall the exact topic, but it was along the lines of “Asymptotic Relative Efficiency in Python”. Not only have I hardly used Python, but I’m relatively inefficient in asymptotics. It did make me wonder about the quality of the rest of their books.

It’s obviously taken 10 and a half years for the memories to fade because although I’m as busy as ever, I’m considering an update to the book. I’ve been watching MySQL’s progress with interest, from the company’s purchase by Sun to the Oracle takeover.

With concerns about the direction of MySQL under Oracle, MariaDB is gaining widespread prominence, and it’s been good to see that Fedora and OpenSUSE are the first two Linux distributions to announce that they will move towards replacing MySQL with MariaDB.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but contains a number of enhancements and has been reported to perform better. Wikipedia were the first high-profile entity to begin switching, and their move has probably triggered similar moves elsewhere. MariaDB is administered by the non-profit MariaDB foundation in a much more open and transparent manner than MySQL currently, and employs some of the original MySQL developers.

Where Fedora goes, Red Hat follows, and it’s only a matter of time before MariaDB is widely available as a standard on most server setups.

Although I still use it myself regularly as a reference, the old book is quite dated now, so it’ll be interesting to get to grips with all the enhancements that MariaDB offers.

Speed Comparison of South African Media Websites

greenman — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 18:54:45 +0000

I’ve noticed that each time I’ve visited IOL recently my browser takes a noticeable performance knock. Trying to browse it by opening lots of tabs, as I do with most sites I visit, is out of the question, and it’s probably the worst-performing site I have visited recently.

I decided to run speed tests of the major South African news sites, and a few well-known international ones, to see how the performance shapes up.

I ran Yslow, which, along with Google’s PageSpeed alternative, is one of the more well-known speed tests. YSlow is a Firebug addon, both addons for Mozilla Firefox.

Here are the results. Higher scores are better – I only visited the front pages of each.

Site	Grade	Score
IOL	E	55
News24	E	57
New Age	E	60
Business Day	D	61
Times Live	D	62
Guardian (UK)	D	64
iafrica	D	66
New York Times (USA)	D	68
City Press	D	69
BBC (UK)	C	71
Mail & Guardian	C	73
Cricinfo	C	74
Daily Maverick	C	75
Facebook	C	80
Twitter	B	89

It’s no surprise that IOL comes in last, close behind the nearly-as-clunky News24, while at the other end of the scale, the Daily Maverick comes top, closely followed by the Mail & Guardian. The South African news websites are generally slower than the most popular international alternatives, ironic in a country with relatively slow and expensive bandwidth. Although Facebook and Twitter aren’t news sites, I’ve added them as two of the most popular sites for comparison. Twitter is unsurprisingly light, with it’s minimal interface, but Facebook comes out well, probably due to the hefty resources it devotes. It can by no means be called a light site, and the front page is filled with content, but it performs far better that any of the local sites.

You like my blog?

greenman — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:07:47 +0000

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Happy New Year by the way. And Christmas.

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But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with
it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 pictures.
Maybe you could space it out better?
Hi, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot
of spam comments? If so how do you prevent it, any
plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately
it’s driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.
This design is spectacular! You most certainly know how to keep a reader amused. Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Great job. I really loved what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it. Too cool!
I’m really enjoying the design and layout of your website.
It’s a very easy on the eyes which makes it much more pleasant for me to come here and visit more often. Did you hire out a developer to create your theme? Fantastic work!
Hey! I could have sworn I’ve been to this blog before but after checking through some of the
post I realized it’s new to me. Anyhow, I’m definitely glad I found it and I’ll be book-marking and checking back often!
Hey there! Would you mind if I share your blog with my zynga group? There’s a lot of folks
that I think would really appreciate your content.

Please let me know. Many thanks
Hi, I think your blog might be having browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your blog site in Ie, it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.

I just wanted to give you a quick heads up!
Other then that, wonderful blog!
Wonderful blog! I found it while surfing around on Yahoo News.
Do you have any suggestions on how to get listed in
Yahoo News? I’ve been trying for a while but I never seem to get there! Many thanks
Hey! This is kind of off topic but I need some help from an established blog. Is it very hard to set up your own blog? I’m not very techincal but I
can figure things out pretty quick. I’m thinking about creating my own but I’m not
sure where to start. Do you have any points or suggestions?
Appreciate it
Hello there! Quick question that’s completely off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My blog looks weird when viewing from my iphone 4. I’m trying to find a
theme or plugin that might be able to correct this issue.

If you have any recommendations, please share. Thanks!
I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up!
I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back down the road. Cheers
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you create this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to construct my own
blog and would like to find out where u got this from. appreciate it
Incredible! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a entirely different topic but it has pretty much the same layout and design. Outstanding choice of colors!
Hey just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t
loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same results.

Whats up are using WordPress for your site platform?
I’m new to the blog world but I’m trying to get started and
create my own. Do you require any html coding knowledge to make your
own blog? Any help would be really appreciated!

Howdy this is somewhat of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or
if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding skills so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Hey! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any issues with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing many months of hard work due to no backup. Do you have any solutions to prevent hackers?
Hi! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that
would be okay. I’m definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to new posts.
Good day! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers? I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on. Any suggestions?
Hello! Do you know if they make any plugins to assist with Search Engine Optimization? I’m trying
to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not seeing very good success. If you know of any please share. Many thanks!
I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own blog and was wondering
what all is needed to get setup? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny? I’m not very internet smart so I’m not 100% sure. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Hmm is anyone else having problems with the images on this blog loading? I’m trying to determine if its a problem on my end
or if it’s the blog. Any feed-back would be greatly appreciated.
I’m not sure exactly why but this web site is loading incredibly slow for me.

Is anyone else having this problem or is it a issue on my end?

I’ll check back later and see if the problem still exists.
Hi there! I’m at work browsing your blog from my new iphone!
Just wanted to say I love reading through your blog and look forward to all your posts!
Keep up the fantastic work!
Wow that was strange. I just wrote an very long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again.
Anyhow, just wanted to say fantastic blog!

Sam Harris on Free Will

greenman — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 04:16:02 +0000

Sam Harris recently released a book on the topic of free will.

I haven’t read the book yet, but watched a presentation he gave of ideas from his book.

Traditionally there are three positions offered. Determinism, which essentially states that we could not have made any alternative choices, as our choices are determined by pre-existing conditions, and that therefore free will is an illusion. The second is compatibilism, which states that free will is compatible with determinism by defining free will not as the freedom to have acted differently, but as being able to act voluntarily. Finally, libertarianism, which claims that we do have free will.

I remember writing an essay at university arguing in favour of libertarianism, and I hauled it out from the moth-eaten piles of paper to reread it again, as I remember being quite proud of it.

Seventeen years later it’s very easy to pick holes in, but essentially I used quantum physics as a basis to argue for free will, much like the video below:

Even at the time I wasn’t satisfied with the argument, as indeterminate quantum events are a far cry from free will, but I saw none of the three positions are coherent, and most of my essay was spent arguing against determinism on the basis of its consequences, and against compatibilism on the basis of its weak definition of free will and arbitrary distinction between causes.

Sam Harris’s video below presents the best summary of the topic I’ve seen so far, essentially arguing against any coherent notion of free will.

I enjoy his video particularly because be undermines the argument I used in my essay against determinism, that of its unacceptable consequences, by making the important distinction between choice and free will, and by highlighting how removing free will from our concept of reality actually increases the love and compassion we show for others.

If we encounter a poisonous scorpion, we don’t assign free will and therefore blame the scorpion for wanting to sting us, but we will also take actions to avoid being stung. By not blaming the scorpion, we are also open to seeing things from the scorpion’s perspective, the basis of compassion.

Similarly, if a human wants to kill us, blame is neither helpful nor rational, and understanding this opens us to understanding, love and compassion. Harris uses the example of realising that a murderer had a brain tumour causing them to act that way. If we understood that, and knew that removing the tumour would take away the impulse to murder, we cannot reasonably blame the person, and our action would shift towards treating them, and we would likely feel compassion for the terrible circumstances of the tumour. Just because we don’t understand the causes of most actions shouldn’t change this understanding.

When asked a question about what sparked his interest in the topic, Harris responds by crediting personal observation, and earlier in the presentation discusses the nature of arising thoughts, and the lack of freedom this entails. Harris is the most interesting of the group of well-known atheists (he dislikes the label), as while some seem closed to any kind of spiritual experience, Harris has studied meditation and seems to have a greater openness and interest in the mysteries beyond our comprehension, all without the need to believe various incoherent explanations in response.

His comment about personal observation and his anecdote about arising thoughts matches what can happen in awareness meditation. At first, we may become aware of our thoughts and the train of thoughts we follow; later we can become aware of our thoughts as they arise, and then slowly get to understand even deeper into this process.

Harris points out that its these thoughts that are often claimed to be the basis of free will, but that a greater look at this process leads us to realise that these thoughts that arise are not free in any real sense.

Watch Harris’s full presentation here: