I don't own a printer. Somehow, I overlooked that small detail when buying a computer last year. But how often, I asked myself, will I really need to print things out?

A lot, it turns out. So I often frequent the computer labs here on campus. Here, you've got the choice of using a PC or using a Mac. But how do you choose? As most of us have PCs at home, we usually equate them with familiarity and ease of use.

Macs, on the other hand, are unfamiliar and perceived to be difficult. Most of the time these designations work.

But during rush hour, the PCs in the labs become saturated. Now, as new students walk in, they are presented with the choice of waiting in line (sometimes for 10 to 20 minutes) for a PC or hopping on a Mac.

I've noticed that about 90 percent of the time people opt for the former. As I'm already sitting at a Mac, I kind of laugh to myself, because I know virtually all of the applications these people need -- an Internet browser, MS Word, access to their U-drive -- can be accessed right from where I'm sitting.

And as far as operating systems go, in spite of the popular opinion that they're like night and day, there is really little difference between Microsofts and Apples.

In fact, Windows' graphical interface was modeled from Mac's. With perhaps the incentive of a banana, I'm sure a monkey trained on Windows could learn to use a Mac in the time it would take him to throw feces at another monkey.

But even though switching is this simple, people just can't seem to get past their initial perceptions, even if it's to their advantage.

According to a clinical psychologist I once heard on the radio, this is due to a duality filter -- a striving to understand life through dualities: good and evil, black and white, positive and negative.

It's really not that novel an idea; writers have been exploring it from time immemorial.

But she went further, offering the reason we see the world in binary: to make decisions quicker and more manageable.

This probably made evolutionary sense, like when our ancestors were hunting saber-toothed tigers: There's not that much time to think, so I'll limit my choices to attacking or retreating. No in-betweens.

However, just like any analog-to-digital converter, anytime we reduce our knowledge down to two states, we lose information.

In today's complex world, this sometimes obscures facts and leads us in the wrong directions.

For instance, we often make decisions about our government based on simple good or bad logic.

The algorithm for voting, for instance, is pretty simple: if A, then not B, where A is your party affiliation and B is the opposite party. In other words, we vote not based on issues, but party lines. It's simpler.

And we label people as liberals or conservatives, making it that much easier to agree with them or just write them off.

But the choices we need to make are so much more complex than this suggests. There are not just two mutually exclusive ideas for every issue. Instead there are gradations, nuances, shades and contradictions. But because of the way our political brains are wired, we miss out on them.

We miss out on the fact that Bush's Social Security plan may be a good idea or that John Kerry had a right and responsibility as a Vietnam veteran to protest the war when he returned from duty.

Our binary thought isn't only limited to election season, though, it also informs our everyday perceptions of people: are they intelligent or unintelligent, athletic or unathletic, attractive or unattractive, moral or immoral? If the answer to each of these questions isn't right, we might not talk to or get to know the person.

In general, we don't obtain truths or realities from any of the aformentioned examples, but get a crude caricature of the way things appear to be; that Bush is evil or that using a Mac is more difficult than trying to do calculus homework in a mirror.

Instead, we need to exit out of these mindsets and get better-rounded perspectives on issues. Then, we won't have to wait in line to print.