Studies in Thought

Hello and Welcome.

These studies in thought represent a lifetime of reflective thinking and an immense labour of love. Before the era of the internet and the personal computer they would never have seen the light of day. Now it is possible to share our thoughts and ideas worldwide from the comfort of home, at a very reasonable expense.

The first essay, the Challenge, sets out what I wanted to do, and I have stuck with these objectives throughout my writings. These essays have been sketched in the order of presentation, except for the twelve short essays "Europe bnw", which were sketched during the height of the cold war.

All my works are presented complete and free of charge.

Since I published my work on this web-site, about two years ago, I have been polishing my essays and each one of them has been replaced at least once. However, this process is coming to an end and I do not foresee any further changes in these essays. I have also decided against entering into a discussion with my readers. I really have nothing further to say.

For the foreseeable future, I will maintain my web-site, but I will not advertise my work. (Nov 05)

Sept. 08. I have prepared an alternative presentation of my work with a bit of history about the development of my contacts with the internet. In the late 90’s I bought my first electronic Encyclopedia Britannica, and I bought also a used computer with Windows 98, because my Gateway would not allow the installation of the encyclopedia. In order to make use of the many links in this encyclopedia I acquired a dial-up internet connection which included 5mb of personal web-space. I used the tools available to me to convert, rather laboriously, the text of the first five essays to HTML and put it on-line as a sample of my work.

Several years later I acquired an IBM Netvista, which gave me access to Lotus 1-2-3. I started then on a project to convert all my works to html, which was a little easier with the help of Lotus wordpro. I worked with microsoft’s Winword 2.0 ever since I got my Gateway, but I also used a few other tools to format and correct my work, especially after it had been converted to html. After I rented web space from my current host to publish all my essays, I used primarily the web-browser to read my work and I used FrontPage Express and AOLpress to format and correct the text. These tools I worked with till my review had been completed by Nov 05.

Since then, I have changed the OS of my Netvista from Millennium to Windows XP and I also acquired Word 2003. The long period of polishing my essays, from 03 till 05, was carried out primarily on the html text. I tried to keep-up by making parallel changes in Winword, but this became so cumbersome that I gave-up on it. When I decided to prepare my essays for another print-out on paper, I used Word 2003 to convert the html text to Word and then reconstituted the formatting, including the headers and footers

This process has now been completed. However, I have noted that converting the formatted text from Word to html and then back to Word leads to a certain loss of formatting information; especially, the page-breaks were not maintained properly. Therefore, I down-loaded a Word-pdf converter and recorded all my essays in pdf format as well. This seems to maintain formatting perfectly. I have continued to correct errors and oversights whenever I found them, but I am sure that I have overlooked many more. The main difference with the original html version is the fact that I have numbered the paragraphs in order to ease the process of referral and/or retrieval.

For those readers who want to create a paper print-out without the need to reformat the text in a word-processor, I have included pdf files, which can be accessed on the pdf page of this Google site. I may still decide to replace files, especially some of the spoken files, if I feel that I can make an improvement. For the time being, I will maintain my website, but I will not advertise, since I want my work to spread through word of mouth, regardless how long this may take.

Oct. 2012. I have been sketching a bit since my retirement from writing. If I have something I feel is worth presenting, I will put it on-line in a folder called “Additional Works”.

July 2017. There is now also an MP3 file on-line of every essay, spoken by me. It is a partially edited sound-track with most of the coughs, sneezes, throat clearings and other extraneous noises still audible, but I think that it serves the purpose; nl. to show my readers how the text should be read, if you have any difficulties following the somewhat complex text of these essays. If I felt that I misread the text or stumbled over a word, I repeated the sentence or word.

I chose the lowest quality MP3 recording in order to make the files as small as possible, but I believe that they are still good enough to understand me and follow the text. I have worked from my word documents with the numbered paragraphs. These texts, as well as the PDF texts follow very closely the layout of the original word documents, and I recommend that you follow these texts when listening to my spoken text recordings.