Time to talk a little about my dinner tonight. Skipping the silliness, the high of the event was a talk by Ken Burns. Not being a person that is very into documentaries, he is a very good documentary maker, focusing on American history. His objective in life is to understand what Americans are by studying their past.

It is an interesting initiative. He uses what he calls a "bottom-up" approach to see the historical events. He goes to the details and tries to build something from that. It's kind of a dangerous way to procede because it may bias your vision to wherever you are, but it's is very important nevertheless.

His most famous documentaries are about the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz.

He talks very well, he is able to make people follow his line of thought, even this being kind of chaotic and moving from one place to the other. Well, he must have given this same speech a number of times, and this helps a little. He did loose me a couple of times when he was talking about important facts of the history of Baseball and the Civil War, but that was more than expected.

Overall, it was really a great experience. There are some things that I don't really agree with his line of thought, though. First, you cannot understand the uniqueness of the American society without studying other societies. Second, I really don't think that the current American society is still going by the same "laws" as the society during the civil war. You may think that a thread still remains, but just think about all the imigration that happened between that time and now, imagine the influx of culture that this country went through. You cannot disconsider this in any analysis you make to try to understand what the "real American" is.

History is extremely important for you to understand the present and the future, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Reality changes. Sometimes much faster and deeper than expected.