对不起，更多的是我发现，汉语成了我的友语，我的爱语，本来只是某一种语言，只是课的内容，但是怎么可能还算是这样呢？我的生活是汉语，我的媒体是汉语，我的初恋是汉语，我就是汉语。我用汉语来写下来我最深的感觉！我想不到一个不会说不会写中文的我。我如何能忘记她，我的爱？怎么会忘记我写过的情书呢？想不到，我想不到啊。。。
april: Is 2012 the end of the world? [she usually asks in chinese; english means it's an Extra Important™ question]Oh, and in case you don't know what she's referring to, have a look at this.
me: 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈 [hahaha]
april:你是笑我傻吗？我宿舍的人一直在说这个事，我本来不信，但现在觉得好恐怖啊！ [are you laughing 'cuz i'm stupid? the people in my dorm keep talking about it, i didn't believe them at first, but now i'm getting really freaked out]
me: 对不起，回答是否定的，但需要一个解释，到我们见面时再说吧 [sorry, the answer is no, but this requires an explanation, we'll talk when we meet next]
april: 那一定给我好的解释。 [then you better give me a good explanation!]
me: 别着急，这个我很有研究 [don't worry, i have a lot of experience in this area]
april: 那好啊！幸亏你有研究，我都快被我们宿舍的人弄疯了。[that's good, thankfully you know about it, i’m being driven crazy by my roommates]
Even most girls don’t consciously realize the POWER of the male voice. They don’t say “wow, this guy has such a hot voice”, instead they say, “wow, THERE’S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT HIM that TURNS ME ON”. In fact they’ll even rationalize it with other things, just because they have to have some reason to explain how HORNY they are whenever this guy speaks, and, like I said, most people are unconscious to the power of the voice.The author is completely right. In fact, I have never read anything more correct in my life. It explains my tremendous success with women (when I apply myself, that is).
I’ve known guys. Who look pretty average or even below average. But when they open their mouths… BANG. One, two, three… K.O.! There’s a famous saying, “the word is more powerful than the sword”, well this is where that saying came from.
Oh, guys have some idea about the power of the word, alright. But they focus on the wrong aspect. Guys worry about saying THE RIGHT THING… there is no such thing. That’s ridiculous if you think about it for just a moment: the idea that if he just says THE RIGHT THING, a guy can seduce a girl? Like she’s a robot or something? Yeah whatever. No, there is no “right thing” and no “wrong thing”. The semantics are utterly irrelevant when boy meets girl, it’s how the words are said. It’s the VOICE. The TONALITY. The VOLUME. The AUTHORITY. As far as the words themselves are concerned, a guy with a SEXY VOICE could introduce himself by saying, “Hi I’m a paint scraper, I scrape paint for a living and live with my grandma!” WORDS DON”T MATTER!
Don’t believe me? Watch the typical guy when he first meets his girlfriend’s family. It’s almost comical. He’ll be so nervous about saying THE RIGHT THINGS that he’ll end up sounding like a malfunctioning robot. Now swap him with a guy with GREAT TONALITY and VOCAL DOMINANCE who just SPEAKS HIS MIND. Suddenly the girl and her mom are battling it out on Jerry Springer fighting over this guy!
It even transcends language. A guy with a killer voice can go to a totally alien culture. Where he and the girls can’t speak a single word in common. He can even be totally ignorant of that culture’s norms and protocols. But he just starts talking and the GIRLS ARE ALL OVER HIM. He could be reciting the phonebook for all it matters. Hell, his foreign accent will be a BIG PLUS.
There are a lot of other factors that play a role when it comes to a guy being ATTRACTIVE. Things like body language, good posture, confidence, willingness to TAKE what he DESERVES.
But guess what. These things are all directly correlated to the man’s VOICE. When the man learns how to speak better, EVERYTHING else about him NATURALLY BECOMES GOLD. It has been said that public speaking is the most common fear. So of course a man who can publically speak is the MOST CONFIDENT MAN IN THE WORLD.
Guyper: Do you think it's English which has the largest vocabulary than others?
Zerocrossings: Im pretty sure its Chinese.
FalcoLX: Yeah, I think every cyllable is a word. I could be wrong.
Guybrush_3: Chinese is really funky. It's more of a language family with a bunch of different dialects.
Shad0ki11: Thai and Khmer have pretty big vocabularies.The Khmer language has has 33 consonants and 24 vowels. Thai is similar with 44 consonants and 30 vowels.
irrelevant: you seem to have Vocabulary confused with consonants and vowels, nubcake.
Shad0ki11: You can make so many different words out of those though.
irrelevant: yea, but with more vowels and consonants, you need less words.
Shad0ki11: Bah. Fine.
jointed: at the people saying English. I'd say one of the Asian languages. Just look at Japanese and Chinese...they've got different words describing one thing depending on your mood.
efrucht: So does english. English has everything.
BaraChat:Well I think it's french. It's widely considered one of the hardest language to learn and master, waaay more than English or Spanish or even Arabic.And as far as I know, French has much more words than English. But that's just me. There are over 7000 languages across the Earth.
munu9: REALLY? I shouldn't have taken french in highschool
BaraChat: Yeah I agree I can't put myself in other people's shoes. But I said that French is "widely considered" one of the hardest language to learn.
Firefighters found six bodies inside a burning car in Tijuana, and 15 people were killed in three separate shootings in another northern Mexican border town besieged by drug violence, authorities said Tuesday. Near Mexico's southern border, meanwhile, the bullet-ridden bodies of eight men suspected to be drug traffickers were found in a Guatemalan frontier town. In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, four bodies were found in a burning compact car's seats and two in the trunk, according to a police report Tuesday. The victims' identities and the motive for the killings were not released, but the Mexican city is on a major route for drugs heading north and has recently seen a wave of violence between warring gangs. The bodies were found Monday night. In Ciudad Juarez, gunmen killed five people at a car wash Tuesday evening, including two brothers who owned the business, said Vladimir Tuexi, a spokesman for the regional attorney general's office.Ha ha, such harmless fun!
A third group of Jews in China consists of the "foreign friends," people like Sidney Shapiro who came from the West in the 1940s, particularly from North America, to join the Communist revolution. While these foreign friends were by no means all Jewish a large percentage were.They're not kidding.
Switzerland knocked the United States off the position as the world's most competitive economy as the crash of the U.S. banking system left it more exposed to some long-standing weaknesses, a report said on Tuesday.I met a guy from Switzerland here; he was kind of weird. Smart, I think, but weird.
The WEF study named African countries Zimbabwe and Burundi as the world's least competitive economies.I also met met a Zimbabwean. Nice guy. His country, though, has a few problems:
In the case of Zimbabwe, the WEF noted the complete absence of property rights, corruption, basic government inefficiency as well as macroeconomic instability as fundamental flaws."[C]omplete absence of property rights" gets me every time. But we shouldn't be so quick to judge: according to the prestigious African Studies Quarterly, Zimbabwe's "alternative structures of property rights" (how deliciously euphemistic) are such that "[the] writer does not believe that we are ready to be property rights engineers or even if we should be".
As simplified characters are helpful to new students [of Chinese] and aid in advancing the cultures of [Chinese] ethnic groups, they have been welcomed by all.Oh really, Chinese government? Must explain the resounding success of round two, I guess. Or that people everywhere but those in the glorious People's Republic use traditional characters. Nothing at all to do with the massive, single-minded state apparatus behind their promotion.
（简体字有利于初学者，也有利于提高全民族的文化水平，因此受大家的欢迎。）
The short term solution is to migrate to a more amenable country. Long term is to choke government monetary routes e.g. via en masse taxation circumvention by harnessing the support of those involved with the Ron Paul campaign.What is the problem to which this "solution" is suggested? Good question. See here.
You may find the keys to your puzzles and questions there.On "laws and school regulations":
No religious activities or gatherings are permitted on campus. [Includes private prayer, I guess...]
Distribution or posting of propaganda materials is forbidden on the camps.
Also forbidden on the campus are gambling, excessive drinking, fights and scuffles, taking drugs... [Bye bye Benadryl, cheap-ass bottles of this stuff...]On "awards and penalties":
Once the student receives disciplinary probation, the BLCU [yeah, "the BLCU"] will not only inform the students himself [yeah, "the students himself"] but his embassy, agency, office or parents. [Oh no, not mom and dad!]On "holidays and leisure":
What is more, the university will also organize international students in Beijing or from all over China to take part in various cultural activities each year. The purpose is to make your life in China livelier, to enhance friendship among students from different countries and to leave a wonderful memory of your life, study in BLCU and in China. Therefore we expect your active participation. [...for make benefit glorious nation of China! Reminds me of this a bit:Oh, and there's also a "Purified Water Shop". Water of all shapes and colors, I guess...Singaporean television is big on explaining Singaporeans to themselves. Model families, Chinese, Malay, or Indian, act out little playlets explicating the customs of each culture. The familial world implied in these shows is like Leave It To Beaver without The Beave, a sphere of idealized paternalism that can only remind Americans my age of America's most fulsome public sense of itself in the mid-1950s.
"Gosh, dad, I'm really glad you took the time to explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts to us in such minutely comprehensive detail."
"Look, son, here comes your mother with a nutritious low-cholesterol treat of fat-free lup cheong and skimmed coconut milk "
Good news and bad news at the dentist this morning. The good news is, my teeth are fine. The bad news is, the dentist told me I should give up Tom's of Maine and Nature's Gate in favor of Crest and Colgate.Surprised it took him this long. I have instinctively trusted Colgate ever since I read the list of ingredients. Tetrasodium pyrophosphate? It heartens me to know that I am brushing my teeth with such an awesome-sounding, artificial (I presume) chemical, that I do not have to rely on coconut oil* or similarly ineffective nonsense.
I pressed him on it because I know sometimes people have knee-jerk reactions about green products, and he insisted that he's only come to the conclusion after observing many people's teeth. In fact, he went so far as to say that I'd be better off brushing my teeth with just water. He said the big C's of dental care have "lots of artificial ingredients in them that are great for your teeth."
And so it is with much dread that I will be reuniting with the tacky blue goop of my youth. The dentist did give me permission to go with the plainest, simplest version of a mainstream paste: No microbeads or built-in mouthwash needed.
Indians are a ugly semi primitive monkey race. The west should do something about these extremely ugly mutant people. They should all be forced to wear burquas (both men and women) so that other civilised humans do not have to puke on seeing their ugliness. Bollywood should be banned as they give a very false idea about India with their European looking celebs. 99.999% of Indians look nothing like their Bollywood stars but look like pig monkey hybrids.Hilarious, fascinating thread here. More gems:
North East Asians are definitely far better looking and intelligent than the primitive caucasoid-australoid hybrids of South Asia and the primitive Mongoloid-Australoid hybrids of South East Asia.And:
Nguyen is a vietnamese name, they are the dirtiest shithole on earth, they smell of shit and seafood, they represents the poorest people in the western world. I have not seen them using any toilet paper either, becuse they eat shit. They eat raw seafood and crawling reptiles still very primitive. Chinese, vietnamese, malaysians, koreans, all come from third world countries, their claim to higher intelligence is hallucinatory and come out of inferiority complex, they are more closely related to Orungutans a primate just like Africans are closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas.Nguyen should have to see and Orangutan to see the reflection of his face, he would never resent looking to the mirror instead. Also these east Asians are characterised by smallest of penis on the planet, all Chinese girls run towards westerners, Middle eastern and Indians to get sexual satisfaction, leaving there male Orangutans.Also, Jews are Mongolian:
ews in Europe and US are no longer pure Jews, and their major components in their blood are from whites, mongolian or both.Almost forgot this one:
Indians are, on average, so unintelligent that all Bollywood films are required to include interminably boring song-and-dance-round-the-Banyan-tree routines (which, in a Euro milieu would be considered fodder for gays) in order that the government meets its objective of demonstrating to the decidedly dim double-digiters that cinema is not, in fact, reality.This too:
A caucasian woman more like a monkey with Gook features in this image, flat face, flat nose and slant eyes, so primitive like ape, there countries are communist slums, they have invented nothing just steal and copy what their White masters invent. The reality is Caucasoids racial group is the best looking and most intelligent even the computer and internet you are using was invented by them, East Asians are working in factories for less than $2 a day for their white masters. It is China and Japan which have export dependant economies to the western nations mainly to the US, not the other way round. Most Chinese live with world class inferiority complex and thats why they try to cheat the world with their low quality and fake consumer goods, toys with lead paint, laptops with exploding batteries, poisonous pet food, vegetables with toxic pesticides, even toxic milk and baby food. Chinese can’t b e trusted they are dodgy and corrupt people with nefarious designs. High IQ my foot?? Most educated Chinese wants to immigrate to western countries, with labour rates one of the lowest in the world and standard of living so poor. These Chinese even fake their Olympic fireworks, can you trust them, they might have paid one or two Western Psychologist and Anthropoligist to improve their profile in the western world, to market them as high IQ people. East Asia can hardly be classified as developed when majority of its population works on less than $2 a day, the healthcare is poor, no social security, pollution is choking, standard of living are poor. These countries are just serving the western interests by providing them facilities and factories to manufacture consumer goods using them for paltry wages.Part I was here.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I never figured out the point of all that other stuff -- laudanum? candles? Wax? Rope? What?
The earliest and primary proponent of an all animal-based diet was Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer who lived with the Inuit for some time and who witnessed their diet as essentially consisting of meat and fish, with very few carbohydrates during the summer in the form of berries. Stefansson and a friend later volunteered for a one year experiment at Bellevue Hospital in New York to prove that he could thrive on a diet of nothing but meat, meat fat and internal organs of animals. His progress was closely monitored and experiments were done on his health throughout the year. At the end of the year, he did not show any symptoms of ill health; he did not develop scurvy, which many scientists had expected to manifest itself only a few months into the diet due to the lack of Vitamin C in muscle meat. However, Stefansson and his partner did not eat just muscle meat - they ate fat, raw brain, raw liver (a significant source of vitamin C and others), and other varieties of offal. It is believed that ketosis prevents the depletion of vitamin C from the body by stabilising blood sugar.Man up, bitches; it's raw brain from here on out. Chillin' with the Inuit eating only bloody caribou? That's some hardcore shit right there.
The Inuit ate primarily caribou meat, “with perhaps 30 percent fish, 10 percent seal meat and 5 or 10 percent made up of polar bear, rabbits, birds and eggs.” The Inuit considered vegetables and fruit “not proper human food but they occasionally ate the roots of the knotweed plaint in times of dire necessity.”"[N]ot proper human food" is right -- we're not rabbits. More on this here:
My host was the seal-hunter whom we had first approached on the ice (...). [His wife] boiled some seal-meat for me, but she had not boiled any fat, for she did not know whether I preferred the blubber boiled or raw. They always cut it in small pieces and ate it raw themselves; but the pot still hung over the lamp, and anything she put into it would be cooked in a moment. When I told her that my tastes quite coincided with hers--as, in fact, they did--she was delighted. People were much alike, then, after all, though they came from a great distance. She would, accordingly, treat me exactly as if I were one of their own people come to visit them from afar...Seal blood soup -- sounds delish!
When we had entered the house the boiled pieces of seal-meat had already been taken out of the pot and lay steaming on a side-board. On being assured that my tastes in food were not likely to differ from theirs, my hostess picked out for me the lower joint of a seal's fore leg, squeezed it firmly between her hands to make sure nothing should later drip from it, and handed it to me, along with her own copper-bladed knife; the next most desirable piece was similarly squeezed and handed to her husband, and others in turn to the rest of the family....
Our meal was of two courses: the first, meat; the second, soup. The soup is made by pouring cold seal blood into the boiling broth immediately after the cooked meat has been taken out of the pot, and stirring briskly until the whole comes nearly (but never quite) to a boil. This makes a soup of thickness comparable to our English pea-soups, but if the pot be allowed to come to a boil, the blood will coagulate and settle to the bottom...
In algorithmic information theory (a subfield of computer science), the Kolmogorov complexity (also known as descriptive complexity, Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, stochastic complexity, algorithmic entropy, or program-size complexity) of an object such as a piece of text is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. For example, consider the following two strings of length 64, each containing only lowercase letters, numbers, and spaces:abababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababab
4c1j5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7uraqbjfdppa0q7nieieqe9noc4cvafzf
The first string admits a short English language description, namely "ab 32 times", which consists of 11 characters. The second one has no obvious simple description (using the same character set) other than writing down the string itself, which has 64 characters.
This image illustrates part of the Mandelbrot set fractal. Simply storing the 24-bit color of each pixel in this image would require 1.62 million bits; but a small computer program can reproduce these 1.62 million bits using the definition of the Mandelbrot set. Thus, the Kolmogorov complexity of the raw file encoding this bitmap is much less than 1.62 million.
Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family’s, a farmer with a vision. He began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I suppose, what we would now call “free range” turkeys. Turkeys raised in a natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass, and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys, at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with his dream, and his farm.And this:
We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I've seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.Oh, and this:
We can do that, and we may be a better society for it, but we can't change nature. Pigs will be allowed to "return to their mire," as Kipling had it, but they'll also be crushed and eaten by their mothers. Chickens will provide lunch to any number of predators, and some number of chickens will die as flocks establish their pecking order.Go and read the whole thing. While you're at it, check this out:
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.Add to that the often extreme inefficiency of organic farming and the utter bankruptcy of the "food miles" argument, and you've got a pretty convincing case that supporting organic food is not only not especially more ethical than not supporting it, but also that in many cases it is actually morally abhorrent.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
Yeah yeah yeah authentic is good OBVIOUSLY but lately I have been craving middle-america food court, americanized, generic chinese food. i can't help it! it's the nostalgia factor! I'm talking like one-note but tasty thick chow mein, crispy mandarin chicken, etc. I live in the nob, so i have had plenty of chinese food in chinatown, but now i want old school. well, my old school. help!!Tsada K. follows up with:
What I miss is New York Jewish Chinese food.And then:
This means:
Lo Mein
Fat Muthafuckin Eggrolls (filled with sawdust and floor sweepings)
Chow Mein (the kind that is just snot, bean sprouts, celery, and shrimp, with the fried bucket of crackery noodles on the side)
I'm pretty sure you can't even get that in New York anymore.Yes, Tsada K., in fact, you can get exactly this kind of food in Great Neck. Yum. Talk about old school, though. Straight out of the 1970s.
Maybe in Great Neck.
A friend of mine gave me this advice once :Is this related?
"If you pic the ugly ones, they'll do what ever you want and you can treat them as bad as you want because their too scared to lose you, she cant do better. You can giver it to her anally and she'll still suck you clean, begging for more."
His exact words, and he's one of the happiest guys I know.
The problem with Twitter I found was that the more people became interested the higher the noise to signal ratio, which made following something like #IranElection rather frustrating, though still interesting. So, while Twitter is a great input device, there is noise, possibly incorrect/misleading tweets, and so cross checking and all that great journalistic stuff still needs to be done…. which some news outlets (like ABC) seem to be doing better and more quickly than CNN at this point.Add to that innumerable language barriers, the fact that in many places of interest hardly anyone uses the internet (they’re still working up to CNN, guys), and the reluctance of the average Joe to invest time in reporting original news*, and you have reason to be extremely suspicious of claims that a proprietary blogging platform each of whose posts can be no longer than 140 characters is the future of news.
But what of the world of the sciences? The answer is maddeningly incomprehensible to a Westerner. It is as if the Chinese periodically dipped into the world of science and effortlessly pulled out a few gems, then ignored them. Some of these Chinese discoveries have become the stuff of conventional wisdom -- gunpowder and paper being the most famous. But the recountings by Westerners give these discoveries the flavor of accidents, as if the Chinese stumbled onto something and then didn't know what to do with it.It is curious indeed how even today the Chinese (and East Asians more generally) are so successful at copying Western technologies and sciences (perhaps more than Westerners themselves) but not at, in the words of LSE professor Satoshi Kanazawa, making "original contributions to basic science". From "No, It Ain’t Gonna Be Like That":
Unsystematic the discoveries may have been, but there was nothing accidental about them. Rather, they represent sheer cognitive ingenuity of a remarkable order. When next you read the cliché that East Asians are intelligent but lack creative flair, consider, for example, Chinese mathematics. China had no Euclid, no body of mathematical logic that started from first premises. Nonetheless, by the middle of the 3rd century the Chinese already knew the value of π to five decimal places; by the end of the 5th century, they knew it lay between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927 (the best the West had done was four decimal places). By the middle of the 7th century, Chinese mathematicians had methods for dealing with indeterminate equations, arithmetical and geometric progressions, and the computation of otherwise immeasurable distance through a form of trigonometry. Chinese mathematicians of the Song Dynasty knew how to extract fourth roots, deal with equations containing powers up to the tenth, and had anticipated a method for obtaining approximate solutions to numerical equations that would not be developed in the West until 1819. None of these accomplishments was produced from a theoretical system, but through the creativity of individual scholars.
By the time of the Song, Chinese astronomy could call on a thousand years of observations of sunspots. The armillary had been fully developed for 900 years in China, as had planetaria. Centuries before the Song, the Chinese had identified the precession of the equinox and knew that the year is not exactly 365.25 days. During the Song itself, Chinese astronomers correctly demonstrated the causes of solar and lunar eclipses. But again there was no theory, no Ptolemaic characterization of the universe. The Chinese simply discovered certain things. Shen Gua, writing in 1086, outlined the principles of erosion, uplift, and sedimentation that are the foundation of earth science, principles that would not be developed in the West for centuries, but his book, Dream Pool Essays, sits alone, an anomaly.
Chinese medicine, unlike Chinese science, was backed by abundant theory, but that theory is so alien to the Western understanding of physiology and pharmacology that Western scientists even today are only beginning to understand the degree to which Chinese medicine is coordinate with modern science. It worked, however, for a wide range of ailments. If you were going to be ill in the 12th century and were given a choice of living in Europe or China, there is no question about the right decision. Western medicine in the 12th century had forgotten most of what had been known by the Greeks and Romans. Chinese physicians of the 12th century could alleviate pain more effectively than Westerners had ever been able to do -- acupuncture is a Chinese medical technique that Western physicians have learned to take seriously -- and could treat their patients effectively for a wide variety of serious diseases.
[Asians] certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science.On the other hand, according to Geoffrey Miller, Asians are just as creative as Americans and Europeans:
Nobel prizes aside, is it really true that there is an Asian ‘creativity problem’? Charles Murray (2003) did a massive cross-cultural review of human creative accomplishments. He found high agreement among historians that there were at least the following numbers of truly significant figures in each domain of Asian creativity: Chinese art (N=111), Japanese art (N=81), Chinese literature (N=83), Indian literature (N=43), Japanese literature (N=85), Chinese philosophy (N=39), and Indian philosophy (N=45). Although these numbers are smaller than he found for Western art, literature, and philosophy, he admits his figures were biased by easier access to English-language histories and biographies of Western figures.These are interesting arguments, and I'm not especially swayed in either direction. I will say, though, that Miller does not answer Kanazawa's most pressing question:
Murray’s (2003) comparison of creative navigational feats is especially instructive. Italian captain Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World in 1492 with 90 men on 3 ships (the largest about 85 feet long) in a 7-month voyage. Chinese captain Zheng He ‘discovered’ Java, Sumatra, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia, and east Africa in 1433-1435 with 27,750 men on 317 ships (the largest about 444 feet long) in a two-year voyage. Ever since Joseph Needham’s pioneering 7-volume work Science and Civilization in China (1954-2004), Western historians are gradually realizing that almost everything Europe did, China did earlier, on a larger scale, with better technology. Throughout the middle ages, many of China’s and India’s innovations trickled down to Europe through the Indian Ocean trade routes and the Silk Road. China’s recent tendencies towards conformism and anti-intellectualism – explicit goals of Mao’s 1968 Cultural Revolution – must not be mistaken for a pervasive national lack of creativity.
Asia’s alleged ‘creativity problem’ can also be assessed from a psychometric perspective. Creativity seems to depend on the cognitive trait of general intelligence (IQ) interacting with the personality trait of ‘openness to experience,’ according to my reading of the creativity literature (e.g. King, Walker, and Broyles, 1996; Simonton, 1999, 2003) and my own research (Haselton and Miller, 2006; Kaufman, Kozbelt, Bromley, and Miller, in press; Shaner, Miller, and Mintz, 2004; Tal, Miller, and Swegel, 2006). This creative interplay between intelligence and openness seems true in both Western populations (Carson, Peterson, and Higgins, 2005; Dollinger, Urban, and James, 2004) and Asian populations (Chan and Chan, 1999; Zhang and Huang, 2001).
So, Asians may have higher intelligence, but do they have lower openness? McCrae (2001) reviewed cross-cultural research on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits, based on a sample of 23,031 people from 26 cultures. Average openness scores were calculated for each culture, controlling for sample age and sex, with the American sample as the reference group with mean 50 and standard deviation 10 (McCrae, 2001, p. 835, Table 3). To make the figures more comparable to IQ scores, I re-normed these figures (right column of Table 1 below) to yield a U.S. openness mean of 100 and SD of 15.
Japan, for example, has been a major geopolitical and economic power for most of the 20th century (Small and Singer, 1982). Yet it has produced only 12 Nobel laureates, the same number as Austria, which has one-sixteenth of Japan's population.Japan is an extraordinarily impressive country in many, many ways, but Miller's few paragraphs in response that make an analogy to German science on the cusp of the 20th century get it wrong for a couple of reasons. First, Germany's scientific research achievements, despite U.S. dominance, still handily outstrip Japan's year after year, and per capita, even the United States'. Second, Japan in the 20th century was in a far better (more technologically and scientifically advanced) state than the U.S. in the 19th, and so to suggest that Japan's scientific achievements are as yet forthcoming strains credulity.
So your loved one just accidentally died in an autoerotic asphyxiation mishap. It’s gotten out to the press and public, and that’s just adding stress to the already bad situation. What on earth could you do to help resolve this terrible situation?
Blame ninjas.
Just days after David Carradine was found dead with a cord around his neck and nuts, the family lawyer, Mark Geragos, made a statement on CNN’s Larry King Live:David was very interested in investigating and disclosing secret societies. … What that means is connected to martial arts and his interest in martial arts,” he continued. “And so there is a suspicion that if there was some foul play, that that may be the first area where they should look.The amount of sheer brass-balled brass-ballery it takes to say with a straight face on Larry King Live that ninjas killed him and made it look like he died jerking off is utterly breathtaking. I mean, I’ve pulled what I consider to be one or two fairly brazen examples of “Oh god, I hope this works”, but never have I gone on national news and blamed a secret society for the consequences of a risky fetish behavior.
Frankly, I stand in awe.
We have not had a single attack on our soil since 9/11, 2001.Thomas Friedman:
[W]hy have there been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11?As far as I can tell, there has been one certifiable, international terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002. It is not known whether the 2001 anthrax incident constitutes international or domestic terrorism, but it certainly was terrorism. Honorable mention goes to the 2006 Seattle Jewish Federation shooting, which, although classified as a "hate crime," is not especially different from the second shooting in the motivation of the shooter, only in that he was an American. Since 9/11, however, there have been numerous plots, and of course, many terrorist attacks around the world, quite a few of them serious.
After viewing some photographs of merchandise tied to the movie, which is still unfinished, Black Voices, a Web site on AOL dedicated to African-American culture, faulted the prince’s relatively light skin color. Prince Naveen hails from the fictional land of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor; Disney says that he is not white.This is astonishingly stupid. In fact, it's one of the dumbest things I've ever read on the internet, and that's saying a lot. Only a person whose mind is so entrenchedly addled with the result of years of politically correct brainwashing and Marxist victimization theory could possibly make such a dumb, illogical statement. Let me get this straight: Somehow, not having a black prince is racist, even though Disney already has a black princess. Somehow, having a Latino prince marry a black princess is racist. So somehow, Ms. Helm, you're not only a sexist*, for you think that women are inferior to men, but also a racist, for you hold that blacks can only marry blacks**.
“Disney obviously doesn’t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,” Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. “His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage.”
Although people are often quick to ascribe their own success to skill and hard work, even those qualities entail heavy elements of luck. Debate continues about the degree to which personal traits are attributable to environmental and genetic factors. But whatever the true weights of each, these factors in combination explain nearly everything. People born with good genes and raised in nurturing families can claim little moral credit for their talent and industriousness. They were just lucky. And they are vastly more likely to succeed than people born without talent and raised in unsupportive environments.Hard work "entail[s] heavy elements of luck"? Professor Frank, hard work is entirely luck. There is no difference between the source of hard work and talent, which is of course the brain, however affected by external events. In other words, there is no such thing as free will -- it's a wrong idea and always has been. Even if we disregard modern biology for a moment and say there's some soul that is enabled to make decisions, how does this make sense? We make decisions based on our biases and the data we gather from the world; to say that any action is not perfectly predicted by another is magical thinking. (Perhaps even if you're a quantum physicist.)
western science and society [] already contribute[] to the dehumanization of human beingsOn the contrary, Western science and society contribute to precisely the reverse: the humanization of human beings. The more we are freed from material cares, the more we can afford to make ethical decisions unencumbered by self-interest. In this vein, Peter Singer likes to talk about the "expanding circle" of moral consideration; increasingly, sentient beings of all sorts are falling under the ethicists's purview. First slaves, then women, then racial minorities; those in the third world and animals are surely next.
Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”Also:
Most fallacies aren’t really fallacies when you reinterpret them as Bayesian reasons to give an idea more credence rather than iron-clad syllogisms. Without the “argument from authority” and the “ad hominem fallacy”, you would either never get lunch or you’d give all your money to Nigerian spammers.That's exactly right. Logically such arguments may be fallacious, but they're so common because they work (produce the right answer) maybe 70% of the time. See, most of the time and in most fields, simple heuristics beat strict logic on a correctness-to-time ratio. Battleship-caliber armor is not necessary (and in fact counterproductive) on the vast majority of ships.
