Jacques Parizeau died not too long ago. He infamously commented that the 1995 Quebec Referendum was lost due to money and the ethnic vote.
I was in high school, in Toronto, during the referendum. I remember my school following the whole thing very closely. I remember feeling relief when the No side won (by a hair) and I remember the uproar that his statements caused afterwards.
Many years ago I read a book called The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. The backdrop against which the story occurs is a relatively near future society where traditional notions of country and state have been largely supplanted by notions of "phyles" - tribes or groups having similar ethnic or cultural characteristics. One of the main characters, a Mr. John Hackworth, belongs to the Neo-Victorian phyle who, like their namesake, are a somewhat prudish lot who follow a rigid and absolute moral code.
Have you ever wondered why the separation of church and state is good idea?
I'm assuming, of course, that most everyone in my immediate social circle actually thinks it's a good idea, though since I read about that fiasco involving the mayor of Saguenay, this assumption is perhaps on shakier ground than I would have liked.
In a previous blog entry, I described various solar system simulations I played around with in high school. These were perhaps more properly termed "gravity simulations" since what I simulated was not a solar system per se but rather Newton's laws of gravity and motion as applied to a bunch of swirling rocks, which would produce a solar system if the conditions were set up correctly. The orbits that you saw in these programs appeared naturally out of the math, as emergent properties of the equations - they were not explicitly programmed.