Counterblasted

2011-03-25T23:31:00.001+08:00

“UN says 6 million North Koreans are in urgent need of international food assistance”

This is an impossible situation. It is a feature of Communist regimes with brainwashed populations that the people will not revolt (at least not on a large scale/successfully) even if they are starving, even if people start dying en masse -- they didn't during the Holodomor, they didn't during the Great Leap Forward, and they didn't during the 1995-8 North Korean famine. We have no choice but to feed them; not doing so will not cause the regime to fall, it will cause millions to die. At the same time, however, we should have extricated ourselves from this situation long ago by invading the country. Probably would have been a better place to go into than Iraq/Afghanistan.

Free Will Does Not Exist

2011-03-10T11:58:00.000+08:00

In a defense of free will that falls flat, William Egginton says the following:

“The point to stress, however, is that this catalog [of our past events] is not even legible in theory, for to be known it assumes a kind of knower unconstrained by time and space, a knower who could be present from every possible perspective at every possible deciding moment in an agent’s history and prehistory. Such a knower, of course, could only be something along the lines of what the monotheistic traditions call God.”

Egginton assumes that all past events that have ever occurred are factored into the decisions we make, and thus, absent a God, we have no way of determining what a person will do at any given moment. The first part of this statement is certainly true, but we don’t need to have a “God” to uncover and untangle the relationships between past events that determine our present mental states, we just need a machine capable of examining the brain at a sufficiently deep level, for every neuron is in its current position because of past events. There is no reason such a technology could not be built. Free will does not exist.

The Prosperous Time: China 2013

2010-10-20T11:10:00.001+08:00

The Prosperous Time: China 2013

Part 1

The Near Future

The First Long-Lost Friend

A month is gone. I mean, a whole month is gone, it’s just vanished. Usually January is followed by February, which precedes March, which comes before April, and so on, but now it’s different, now March comes after January, now February is April, it’s skipped a month.

I said to Fang Caodi, forget it, don’t go looking for it, it’s not worth it, life is short and bitter, just live it well.

A man of greater ability would not have been able to convince him. But to tell you the truth, if you really wanted to find that lost month, Fang Caodi would be the man for the job. Throughout his life, he has had many months disappear, or perhaps have their existence be reduced to non-existence – his experiences resemble a strand of fragments, unable to be organized into stories. He appears at odd times in odd places, or, many years after having seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, he returns triumphantly from the brink of eternity at some unexpected hour. Such a person might be likely to do things that are behind the times, such as going to find a missing month.

I hadn’t noticed its disappearance at first, and despite other people saying it had indeed vanished, I am of a skeptical sort. Every day, I read the papers, go on news websites, and watch China Central Television and Phoenix Satellite Television, and so I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable person when it comes to these kinds of things. Could such a major event so easily slip under my nose? I trust myself, my understanding, my intelligence, and my ability to make independent judgments.

On the afternoon of February 17, I had left home and, as part of my daily routine, was walking towards the Pacific Century Place Starbucks when someone suddenly ran in front of me and shouted with a gasp, “Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen! A month is gone! It’s been two years!”

He was wearing an unassuming baseball cap; I couldn’t make him out.

“Fang Caodi, Fang Caodi.” He said his name twice and took off his hat, revealing a bald head and a ponytail tied with a rubber band.

“You’ve started calling me ‘teacher’ now too?”

With an air of importance, he added, “A month is gone! Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen, what do we do? What do we do?”

“It’s not just a month that’s gone now, is it?”

“No, no. Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen, a month is missing, you know too! What do we do?”

Speaking with this man is tiring indeed. “When did you get back to Beijing?”

He sneezed. I gave him a business card: “Don’t get sick. It’s colder now, don’t go running around like this anymore. Let’s meet up later – my phone number and e-mail address are on the front.”

He put his cap back on and took the card. “We work well together; we’ll find it.”

It was only as I watched him run off in the direction of the foreign embassies that I realized he wasn’t exercising.

He was running somewhere.

Pay me $5,000 and I’ll translate the rest of it. Only half-joking.

Want to read the 诗经 (Book of Songs/Classic of Poetry) in Latin?

2010-09-30T09:26:00.001+08:00

Head right here, my friend.

Genetics, culture, and success

2010-09-13T01:30:00.001+08:00

Barbados is a country that's 80% black but that has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and one of its lowest crime rates (on par with Japan). Not coincidentally, the smartest black people by far I met in Beijing were Barbadian*. Yet these blacks are the descendents of African slaves brought over en masse from Ghana and Nigeria. This suggests to me that culture is far more important than genetics in determining success of countries and populations.

*One of them, having studied Chinese for a mere two years, was getting an engineering degree from a Chinese university. His curriculum was entirely in Chinese. This is, needless to say, extremely impressive.

Genetics/practice in developing high-level skill

2010-09-02T09:56:00.001+08:00

Interesting post here. Comments are good too; check this one out:

This is also seen in the shows about various elite military units. The "selection" process isn't really about training. It's about whittling down 125 men to the 13 genetic and psychological freaks that possess the required skills.

THEN the training begins.

This was hammered home in a different TV special that demonstrated the ability of various special forces members to control core body temperature in extreme environments. They soaked one in ice water for an hour, and baked another under heat lamps. Environments that would cripple a normal person in 10 minutes had no detectable impact on performance after an hour of exposure.

And, different specialists were selected for different abilities. The pilot couldn't endure the apoxia, the ranger couldn't handle the disorientation of spinning maneuvers.

In other words, the people who make the news, in either sport or combat, are not like you. No amount of training will ever get you there.

Beijing Subway

2010-08-07T20:28:00.001+08:00

Spent some time studying the subway today. Two observations:

*The conductor does nothing but push a lever to make the train go forward. He also gets out of the train at every stop to make sure no one is crushed in the doors. Everything else is done automatically.

*The doors open for exactly 20 seconds at every stop, an amount of time longer than it feels.

The Beijing Subway is more technologically advanced and much cleaner than the New York City Subway, but it lacks its character. In particular, no one plays music, sings, or performs, with the exception of some singing beggars you’ll come across every so often. (They’re not very good, though.)

Languages By GDP

2010-08-02T14:49:00.001+08:00

Came across a very interesting chart over here:

“This short article provides one picture of the economic significance of different languages, with a breakdown of the percentages of world GDP by language. Not only does it show the current breakdown, but it also provides data for the years 1975 to 2002 to show modern trends. The most notable feature is the steady rise of Chinese and slow relative decline of Japanese and most European languages. Korean and Indic languages also show growth over that period, though slower than Chinese.”

Now here’s the same chart over the period 2003-2010 (projected from 2003):

More current data can be found here:

Total GDP per language area in 2008 in billion US dollars at market exchange rates (as a % of world GDP in parenthesis) >> population in 2008 (UN figures for the countries and territories making up each language area, not the actual number of speakers) :

1- English: 19,837+ (32.6%+) >> 481.7 million+

2- Chinese: 5,210 (8.6%) >> 1,358.1 million

3- Japanese: 4,924 (8.1%) >> 127.2 million

4- German: 4,504 (7.4%) >> 96.4 million

5- Spanish: 4,364 (7.2%) >> 416.8 million

6- French: 4,097 (6.7%) >> 426.7 million

7- Italian: 2,332 (3.8%) >> 60.3 million

8- Russian: 1,959 (3.2%) >> 189.0 million

9- Arabic: 1,914 (3.1%) >> 342.1 million

10- Portuguese: 1,913 (3.1%) >> 249.2 million

11- Dutch: 1,267 (2.1%) >> 24.6 million

12- Korean: 973 (1.6%) >> 72.2 million

13- Malay-Indonesian: 931 (1.5%) >> 263.7 million

14- Turkish: 729 (1.2%) >> 71.5 million

15- Hindi-Urdu: 570 (0.9%) >> 720.8 million

And perhaps the most interesting of all, GDP by number of speakers:

GDP per capita per language area (at market exchange rates):

Dutch: 51,466 US dollars

German: 46,703

Japanese: 38,722

Italian: 38,699

Korean: 13,472

Spanish: 10,471

Russian: 10,365

Turkish: 10,200

French: 9,602

Portuguese: 7,676

Arabic: 5,596

Chinese: 3,836

Malay-Indonesian: 3,530

Hindi-Urdu: 791

I’ve been saying all along that the Netherlands was awesome. Sort of surprised to see Italian so high up, though.

China's First Internet Gaming Law / 中国第一部网游专项法规实施

2010-08-01T11:29:00.001+08:00

中国第一部网游专项法规实施各方详解四大看点

Saw this on CCTV this morning, the caption, of course, being "保护未成年人是核心" (protecting the children is the core [of the law]). What will the law do? A lot of good stuff:

1. People are going to be required to provide their real names (backed up by ID) when gaming.
2. Forced player killing is now banned, due to fears that killing other players in video games will lead to killing other people in real life. ()
3. New restrictions on online markets.
4. You have to have at least 10,000,000 yuan in registered capital to be a gaming company. The point here is to reduce the number of online games. If there are only big companies, the games are easier to control.

Whether this law can be enforced effectively/will have an effect is questionable, but it reveals the government's increasing eagerness to control the internet. "Protecting the children" my ass.

More Bible Fun

2010-01-02T11:31:00.001+08:00

Anyone read Judges 19:1-30 lately? I mean, reading the Old Testament every Saturday kinda steels you to some of the more "inappropriate" stories, but I was nevertheless surprised to stumble upon this, which I had somehow missed. Basically, here's what happens:

A Levite (a member of a certain Jewish tribe) goes and gets married to this woman in Bethlehem. She ditches him (they don't say why) and goes back to her dad's house, with the guy in hot pursuit. He stays at the dad's house for a while, eating and drinking, and then starts off on the journey to bring her back to his place. They stop off at a town along the way, where a nice old man lets them stay at his house. Then, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the attempt at gay gang rape in Genesis 19, a mob surrounds the house and demands the man come out (so that they can anally rape him). Instead, the old man, like Lot, offers his virgin daughter and the Levite's wife up to be raped. The Levite then gets fed up and gives the relentless mob his wife (I assume she consented), whom they proceed to rape all night long. She dies on his doorstep the next morning. He takes the body back to his house, where he dismembers it and sends a piece to each tribe of Israel, as a reminder of how terrible things have gotten in the country.

This is almost as fun as the time where Moses kills all men and women in the city and gets the Israelites to take the little girls as virgins "for themselves" (yeah, I wonder what that means...). Oh, and then they sacrifice some of them to God. Sweet.

How To Keep A New Year's Resolution, And Also Informational Content

2010-01-02T00:27:00.001+08:00

I've figured it out -- life. How stuff works. How you can use a program like this not only to do well in school and master Chinese, but also to run your life and brainwash yourself. Here's how:

Have you ever read a really good, moving book, movie, or motivational speech? You felt really good about yourself for a few days afterward, resolved to change your ways, but inevitably failed -- am I right, or am I right? (Right. In fact, I'm always right -- get used to it.) Why? Because the enthusiasm faded away. But if you've got an SRS program to remind you of why you felt motivated in the first place, then everything's chill, right? Theoretically, you can maintain a consistent level of motivation all the time, making permanent change inevitable. SRS the quotes, mister! You can SRS quotes! SRS images, moving content, audio! Whatever the hell you want! It's your life -- do what the shit you want with it. Just like you do with Chinese -- remind yourself not of words but of ideas. Like advertising. But for good things.

And the cooler thing is, you can do the same thing with arguments or facts. Want to become a debate master? Just memorize your arguments and your facts -- most debates are just repetitions of old debates anyway. The winner is simply he who's memorized the most steps. (The same with chess; the best players are those who've studied the most old games.) You forget stuff, but you don't have to -- not with your brain in a file on your desktop, you don't! And interestingly, this way, you won't be as easily able to brainwash, because when you caught up in a whole new set of facts or theories or a certain school of thought, you'll always have the other ideas in your SRS to serve as a buffer, keeping you safely away from radicalism and firmly anchored to reality. You'll become a composite of ideas, rather than a parrot of one. I mean, you'll have all the facts at your disposal! You can make your own ideas with them even after you've long forgetten the original arguments! Isn't that cool?!

Sorry, got a bit sidetracked there -- the important point is that we humans only have a limited time here on earth, so we've got to take in as much shit as possible. This is not a trade-off situation here: this is fucking zero-sum, my friend. You waste time watching no-content cartoons, you simply loose time. Boom. Gone. Never gone get it back. It is striking how much time we waste when we could be absorbing information -- while walking (put some informational content on your MP3 player to absorb), while watching TV (watch something fun and at least somewhat informative -- military channel's my pick), and even SRSing (maximize your time -- you're doing Chinese sentences, so make those sentences facts about 70s pop stars; learn about them and Chinese at the same time!).

Maximize. Beat the boss. Win the game.

Regarding That Chinese Stuff Back There

2009-12-20T19:53:00.002+08:00

I do want to start writing in Chinese, but Blogger, blocked in China, is not the suitable platform, especially as I will be writing in simplified Chinese. So expect to see more posts from here:

http://arieh.blog.sohu.com/

I will continue to post here in English.

Yours,
Me

你好！

2009-12-10T22:55:00.001+08:00

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。。。

bye

2009-12-10T17:41:00.001+08:00

I've been doing some thinking lately. A lot of thinking. About how we don't get choose the language we were born with. about how we are so willing to let ourselves be its slaves. About how this is unacceptable, and about how this is not freedom. if i want to be free, really Free, i have to choose the language i speak and write. my choice.my goddamn choice.

not to say i dont like english i like it. but it was forced on me.i had no say.i might have picked english anyway but i might have not

so im going to write in chinese now,.
why mostly for this reason
everything i do is already chinese
mightaswellstartwritingmybloginchinese
canigomorethanthis
isitpossible
yes
好

好玩贺卡等你发，邮箱贺卡全新上线！

Your New Favourite Band(s): In Chinese! (Awesome Chinese Music! Keep Reading!)

2009-12-04T15:49:00.003+08:00

No good Chinese music, right? It's all stupid love ballads, right? Nothing to listen to while you're studying nearly 17/7 and are unwilling to listen to English music, right? Wrong. Trust me, dude, you're wrong. Well, not about the stupid love ballads: there are a lot of those, and I've actually found that if you force yourself to listen to them, they start to grow on you*. But see, you don't have to force yourself to listen to crap, because there is awesome Chinese music out there: awesome, creative, weird, inspiring, original, sublime, etc: you simply haven't found it yet. You're not looking, and what's worse, you're just making excuses to listen to your sweet, sweet, Backstreet Boys. So where is it, you ask? Hey! Don't talk to me like that! Be patient and it'll come to you!

Haha, I'm kidding. (Couldn't you tell?) Here are some fantastic bands, followed by some neat tracks to get you started:

二手玫瑰 (Secondhand Rose): My favorite of all on the list. Their music is a combination of traditional Chinese crosstalk-like banter and modern rock tunes, with a whole bunch of weird sound effects (and occasionally throat singing – I've heard kids and choirs singing a few times too) and offbeat instrumental flairs thrown in. Rather unusual, but the singer's voice rocks those tones like you wouldn't believe – from one note to the next with such sharpness it's breathtaking. (At least to me. I dunno if you guys get turned on by stuff like this.) It's like he's singing Beijing opera with a backing band. What's more, a lot of the lyrics are actually pretty funny and very, very sharp. And tremendously original: there are very few bands as original/crazy as these guys. (Well, good crazy: there are plenty of bands that are crazy but just suck. Like this one.)

What should you start with? Well, basically all of their songs are worth a listen. (And I really do mean that; there are no filler tracks.) But first, a word of caution: a lot of them start off kind of slow or silly, but then get really deep and plain freaking nuts towards the end. (坚持就是胜利!) And most change so quickly from one melody/genre to the next that's it's often hard to find continuity.
Take 公益歌曲; it's a lighthearted, summer beat at first, but they throw in these Nirvana-like riffs every 30 seconds or so, and it's got this killer, epic finish.
娱乐江湖 is in the same vein, but it's even better. Probably my favorite song of theirs, actually. If you're impatient, skip to 3:20 for the good stuff.
野史 is a little too weird, but it gets nice at the end, almost like System of a Down.
因为所以 is nice; they do this cool bagpipe thing.
允许部分艺术家先富起来 is badass. Listen to it.
春天的故事 is nice, real slow, and beautiful.
命运 is just real cool.
A song that I’m not particularly fond of is 伎俩, but it's got the lead singer's voice at its best.
起飞 is kooky.

扭曲的机器 (Twisted Machine) is a heavy metal band. ~~It's not exactly my cup of tea, but there aren't many Chinese bands like these guys, so they're worth a mention.~~ Scratch that; these guys are great.
别惹我 is sick. Badass-action-movie-soundtrack sick.
存在的意义 is pretty cool, and not quite as heavy as 别惹我.
镜子 is similar, real smooth. Can't really put in the same genre as 别惹我.
理想的背后 is another sick, sick song. I would enjoy it more if its lyrics were vehemently anti-American. (I'm actually serious about that; for some reason, some songs just sound better as anti-government pieces.)
我快不会照你们说的去做 actually is an anti-establishment song. It's not really so good, but I'm putting it on the list because it's really interesting to hear songs like this from a *PRC* band. (Nothing explicitly anti-China, though.)
TV秀 is another song with lyrics that I'm sure try the patience of the Chinese government. It is, however, actually a pretty sweet song.

The band 刺猬 (Hedgehog) got me really excited, because they play beautifully, but then I heard the lead singer sing. Ugh. At the very least, they've got some brilliant opening riffs.
春天来了's is fantastic, end-of-the-world-grade material. Real nostalgic feel.
电影 is so light and fragile, so lovely – mmm!
They have quite a few songs in English, too, so if you're into English music, give that a try.

Carsick Cars. Chill alternative stuff. They're like China's Arcade Fire. I mean, I don’t actually like Arcade Fire, but they're all low-fi and stuff; I'm probably just not cultured enough. Anyway, this isn't my favorite type of music, but I really do like 广场, one hell of an epic song.

The album 谁是崔健; no, not a band, but it's got a bunch of really awesome songs, so go out and get it.
The first 10 seconds or so of 浪子归 are incredible; the rest are decent, with the exception of this really neat electrobeat at 2:20.
一无所有 is the best song on the album by far. Yes, that good.

The Hero soundtrack – some insane instrumental pieces on that one. No lyrics, but feel free to add your own.

Random, neat tracks I've discovered: 新长征路上的摇滚 (反光镜乐队 – awesome punk feel), 不是我不明白 (挂在盒子上 – electronic riot grrl!), 狐狸 (万晓利 – simply a sick, sick song), and 机器猫 (新裤子 – again, just a really neat song).

For the first few weeks of listening exclusively to Chinese music, I put up with Jay Chou, J.J. Lin, S.H.E., 邓丽君, 胡彦斌, etc. Alright, I shouldn't say “put up”; they're all pretty good, actually. Jay Chou is magnificently talented, 邓丽君 is obviously delightful, and 胡彦斌 has...well, some awesome socialist songs. But you have to go beyond the pop surface, because there is actually a lot behind it.

Now where to get them? Well, if you're in mainland China, get yourself straight to the incredible, thank-god-for-unlimited-legal-free-downloadable-nondrm'd-music Google Music. If you're not, well, sucks to be you. Try Baidu, because you're almost certainly not going to find physical CDs in the West (or anywhere else, for that matter). Bittorrent should have them too, if you want to break the law.

P.S. I'm just covering rock/metal/alternative music here. I highly recommend instrumental classical music, which, again, you can your own lyrics to. Give 成公亮 a go.

*Who can't help liking 姑娘我爱你? Srsly.

Swordsmanship

2009-11-24T23:46:00.002+08:00

Have you guys seen the movie Hero? You know the scene where the emperor looks at the character painted by the best fighter of them all and goes, “Where’s the swordsmanship in that?” And then later he looks at it and finally gets it? You remember that scene? It's so plain, the character. So plain. Looks like it was made by someone with no skill at all. The artist has mastered the sword, the brush, so flawlessly that he unwilling to use it. He has reached a stage of such utter perfection that he is beyond compare entirely. A state so profound that he realizes its purposelessness. Why?

You know, life is a *lot* like this. A lot. I'm not trying to be really deep or anything, I'm just pointing out that things really work like this. Think about it.

Chinese Girl Texts Me (In English): "Is 2012 The End Of The World?"

2009-11-09T23:21:00.004+08:00

I swear I'm not making this up. I suppose I should feel honored to be asked such a deep question; to them, I am the all-knowing god, the colossus standing proudly astride their provincial little world, etc. (Sort of like this awesome dude and his non-existent Korean skills.) Anyway, without further ado:

april: Is 2012 the end of the world? [she usually asks in chinese; english means it's an Extra Important™ question]
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]

Oh, and in case you don't know what she's referring to, have a look at this.

Joke I Heard On Chinese TV

2009-10-29T20:07:00.001+08:00

There's a school, right? And there's an Egyptian student and an Indian student in the same class. They start talking about their countries' ancient civilizations. The Egyptian goes to the Indian, hey, back in my country I was at the pyramids, and I found buried in the ground phone cables! This proves that Egypt invented the telephone first.

The Indian goes, well, I was chilling by the Indus river valley, and I dug a hole and found nothing.

The Egyptian retorts, ha!, you see, this proves the superiority of Egypt!

The Indian replies, no, it proves that India was the first to invent wireless!

Some More Thoughts

2009-10-27T21:02:00.002+08:00

Why are you in China if you're gonna sit around and speak Indonesian all day?! Jesus Christ...

Why do we feel free to give kids amphetamine but not marijuana?

I got this bread thing with dates in it. Whole dates. With the large seeds still in them. I had to throw it out, because it was basically literally inedible. (It was also disgusting.) I can't imagine who came up with that brilliant idea...

How To Get Any Girl You Want

2009-10-12T23:08:00.002+08:00

I can't keep the ladies off of me. Extraordinarily, jaw-droppingly beautiful Chinese girl, five minutes after meeting me, goes "do you have a girlfriend?" I say no, she says "let's go to karaoke. But first, we have to get drunk." What do I do in this situation? And why am I in it in the first place?

It's all in the voice. I'm incredibly good-looking, of course, but the main thing is the voice. This explains it all:

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.

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.

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).

For this is not an isolated incident. I pick up the chicks like there's no tomorrow here. My physical attractiveness and whiteness draw them in, my astonishingly good Chinese gets them horny, and my insane sense of humor seals the deal. Oh, and dropping the "I'm Jewish" line doesn't seem to hurt either. (Chinese girls upon realizing you're Jewish: have a look.)

I have come to the conclusion that I am simply a tremendously attractive human being. And it's not out of some ulterior motive, either; I have the same luck with Japanese/Thai girls.

Oh, and in case you haven't realized by now (from the tone, the sidebar on the right, the tags), this post is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Still, I think there's something you all can learn from it -- I wasn't kidding about that voice stuff.

Me, Matt, and Luke Go To White Castle

2009-10-07T14:50:00.003+08:00

We went to buy meat skewers (串儿) at a place right outside our university at 10 o’clock. We discovered that the usual people selling them weren’t there, and as stuff was scattered around on the ground, we assumed they left in a hurry. (The street vendors can because their equipment and supplies are all mobile.) We suspected that they were kicked out by the police, who don’t like these people selling food on the street, both because it’s not sanitary and because they want foreigners to have a favorable impression of the city. (As if what attracts us here is something other than ghetto shit like that.)

So we walked around a bit, and about a block away we caught sight of one of the guys who usually sells fruit near the gate. A little more walking, and we came across the woman who sells the 串儿, who told us to wait a bit for her to come back and sell. So we started walking around again, and we bought some pancakes (煎饼) from this one woman who was pushing this cart around. (I think she usually sells at the same spot as the 串儿 people, also.) We kept walking, and in the meanwhile I got a potato from another vendor who sells the goods with a measure that I guess she uses to give the appearance of honesty. We ran into the woman peddling the pancakes a few more times, as we were following the police car that seemed to be trailing her. (The ultimate goal of this whole endeavor was to find 串儿, but it turned into “chat with the Chinese people”.) At last we found her stopped near the police station. We thought she was in trouble or something, and we resolved to start up an actual chat, which we did, and pay any fines that she might have incurred, which we didn’t (she wasn’t fined). We began talking about lamb, which she revealed was mostly pork in Beijing, even at actual restaurants (sometimes it’s duck). Then she told us that the potato we bought should have been 4 Yuan, not 7. Then we started talking about how her goods weren’t overpriced, because there’s no way to fake eggs, but somehow that the street vendors who sold buns often had 200% profit margins, which I didn’t quite understand. She was from the south, and her Mandarin sounded a bit funny, but we managed to catch most of what she said. When she moved onto how they skewered meat and then tripled or quadrupled the price, I lost her.

Well, we finally asked what she was doing in front of the police station, and she said there were no problems, that the police didn’t care, which we somewhat suspicious of, as they seemed to be following her and the others all night. Rightly suspicious, as it turned out; literally 5 seconds later, these two officers came up, and started getting increasingly angry with her; she protested that she wasn’t selling anything, but they kept at it, and shit started to look pretty serious. We got out of there pronto.

Glass Of Concentrated Stupid In The Morning

2009-09-27T20:01:00.002+08:00

This thread is really one of the dumbest I've ever seen. Read some of it here:

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.

I Am So Awesome

2009-09-21T13:48:00.001+08:00

Chinese girls whispering behind my back again and giggling. Can't say i'm surprised -- it's that certain je ne sais quoi, that animal magnetism that makes me all but irresistible to women. But it is nice every once in a while to be reminded of it.

Then I looked back as I turned the corner, and our eyes met at the exact same time. Coincidence? We both knew that she wanted me -- bad.

I tell you, I've got a career in romance novels if this whole Chinese thing doesn't go through.

If You Smoke Marijuana, You Probably Help Murder Innocent People. Congrats.

2009-09-16T16:18:00.005+08:00

Ha ha, hey man, let's get high. It's totally harmless, marijuana, don't you know?

You know where most of that marijuana comes from, right? And you know where your money goes, right? News flash:

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!

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine being brutally raped, shot in the head, and then tossed unceremoniously into a ditch somewhere? Evidently not, you little shits. This is what your marijuana habit leads to. I'm gonna be real fucking serious and real fucking judgmental for a minute. Why? Because people talk about buying drugs as if it's the most casual, consequence-free thing in the world, and I've had it with it. Strikes me as a bit funny that the people who express such concern about buying from multinational corporations never, ever bring this inconvenient little example up. When drugs are discussed, the conversation is typically: "drugs? yeah, i can do what i want with my body!"

So, if you have ever purchased marijuana from a drug dealer, I'd like to tell you a few things:

1. It's quite possible that marijuana came to you from Mexico. If it did, you probably gave the gangsters a couple of bullets that are now resting in some rotting corpse somewhere. Thanks, bro. Hope you had a good time.
2. If you don't want to keep funding fun stuff like murder and rape, please stop buying from drug dealers.
3. Yes, this means no buying marijuana unless you are sure it doesn't come from drug gangs. Today, this usually means buying only those illegal drugs that you made or that were made by someone you know personally. If that's impossible, then you can't buy drugs at all. Too tough for you? Then either your brain is too small to appreciate even the simplest moral arguments, or you completely lack self-control.*

This post is related, if not in content then at least in spirit.

*If you're addicted, that's another story. If you argue that the more we buy drugs and the more violence we create, the more the government will be pressured to legalize drugs and thus reduce violence, you're smarter than I thought you were. (And if you then make a Singerian argument that not spending all your money on drugs is morally equivalent to murder, then you're way smarter than I thought you were.) I don't quite agree with you, but it is an intelligent counterblaste.

Nothing in this post is to be construed as an argument for not legalizing marijuana, which would solve all these problems. Marijuana should be made entirely legal, along with a lot of drugs. At the age of 18, I should be able to walk into a store, buy hashish, and sit outside and smoke it. The illegality (and the violence, which obviously stems from the illegality) is indeed the fault of the government. While marijuana is illegal, however, buying it usually funds drug lords, so I contend that buying it is usually immoral. And I have utterly no moral objections to responsible marijuana use, nor do I think the world would be a worse place if everyone were smoking marijuana. (In fact, in some ways it would probably be a better place.)

Chinese Communism And Jews

2009-09-16T15:41:00.001+08:00

From JCPA:

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.

Most And Least Competitive Economies

2009-09-08T23:01:00.002+08:00

News from the world:

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".

African Studies Quarterly, meet Cato.

More Sinoagitprop

2009-09-08T22:10:00.002+08:00

My Chinese textbook includes the following line, which I kindly translate for you here:

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.

（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。）

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.

Also, I don't get that bit about "advancing the cultures of [Chinese] ethnic groups". It's not a linguistic issue, it's a cultural one; we don't talk about "advancing culture" anymore. The Chinaman's Burden?

[Click here for my somewhat comprehensive takedown of simplified characters.]

[Sinoagitprop = a word of mine own coinage. You heard it here first, folks. At the time of writing, Google records 0 hits.]

Are Squat Toilets More Hygienic?

2009-09-05T18:03:00.001+08:00

This is certainly the claim. Is it true? In a theoretical sense, perhaps; when you use a squat toilet, your buttocks don't make contact with a seat, and feces leave your anus more easily. However, if you've used a squat toilet in a poor country before, you'll quickly see that this is outweighed by several other factors. Tissues must be disposed of in the trashcan, so fecal matter is more likely to be present on the floor and walls. (This also contributes to a terrific smell in most squat toilets. In rural areas, there are no drains in the toilets/troughs, so feces just built up and are cleaned at the end of the day -- I can only imagine what these places smell like.) You're more likely to miss when in the act of defecating. Also, your clothes have a good chance of touching the floor. Most squat toilets, then, are not especially hygienic.

However, there are some nicer squat toilets in wealthier countries like Japan, which leads me to believe that a lot of the problem is that the toilets are in poor countries, not that they're more disgusting by design (save for the clothes-touching-the-floor bit).

Also, there's some evidence that squat toilets are healthier to use, so the verdict is still out (at least in my mind!) as to which type of toilet is superior.

Highest Poverty Rate In The United States

2009-08-31T22:11:00.003+08:00

The poorest place in the country by far? Must be a black ghetto in Chicago or Detroit, right? Wrong. It is a ghetto, though -- a Jewish ghetto.

What Is The Problem?

2009-08-29T14:16:00.002+08:00

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.

I sometimes read stuff like this and wonder just who these people are.

BLCU's International Student Handbook

2009-08-28T18:41:00.003+08:00

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

On the orientation meeting:

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:
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 "

Oh, and there's also a "Purified Water Shop". Water of all shapes and colors, I guess...

Funny Microsoft Photoshopping Job

2009-08-26T06:10:00.002+08:00

Check it.

"Chemicals" Are Not Always Bad

2009-08-25T21:13:00.005+08:00

I've told you this several times, internet, but you never seem to believe me. Some come around, though:

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.

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.

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.

Most of the time, "non-green" products are safer, more effective, and/or tastier than "green" ones. Why are there preservatives in snack products? To preserve them. Take those out and your food goes stale after a day or two. Chemicals like these are responsible for simple advances in human welfare. Ironically, without them we would be quite unable to suffer such luxuriantly indulgent movements as the "green" one, which is fundamentally reactionary and Luddite -- its proponents, however, do not understand that the world they wish to live in, one at once perfectly green and perfectly comfortable, cannot exist. We cannot revert to a medieval world without simultaneously reverting to medieval comfort and medieval technology (and, of course, medieval life expectancy), but the only people who think we should are those who are the products of an overly developed middle class. (Ever heard an African complain about the destruction of the rainforest, excepting those obviously aiming at a Western audience? No? That's because they want to rip it all down.) So does material comfort sow the seeds of its own reversion? No, because companies are smart enough to realize that people are stupid enough to fall for a "natural" product that's made in a factory with man-extracted chemicals and gums. "All-natural" has become an advertising technique, and, thank God, not much more. A truly all-natural world is not one I want to live in.

For more on how earth cannot naturally support all of humanity, read this Norman Borlaug column.

For more on how organic food is wildly overrated, read this.

And for more on how religious sentiment always finds an outlet, even when traditional religion is dying, read this.

*Is it just me, or does every green product there is have coconut oil? I guess it just makes some people feel all warm and fuzzy inside to use something probably not more effective than placebo in their hair or whatnot. Me, I prefer those delicious, man-made chemicals. I thought we all got over the bogeyman when we were, like, 5.

Internet Cesspool, Part II

2009-08-25T05:25:00.003+08:00

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.

Oregon Trail

2009-08-14T12:52:00.004+08:00

Raise your hand if all you did in that game was buy bullets and go hunting.Yeah, that's what I thought. I never figured out the point of all that other stuff -- laudanum? candles? Wax? Rope? What?

Funny English

2009-08-11T15:54:00.002+08:00

I saw a girl wearing a shirt that said "Little Miss Rehab", with a picture below it of a smiley face with Xs for eyes.

My teacher wrote "kingdergarden" on the board. That's where I'm sending my kids.

Also, she called Chinese girls 溫柔, and said it meant "soft and tender". The class of four boys got silent for a little while, and then started laughing. The teacher protested that what she said was completely innocent, but we, of course, knew better.

Real Men Eat Meat And Nothing But Meat

2009-08-10T19:50:00.004+08:00

Check this guy out:

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.

Seriously, though -- nothing but animal? For a year? In the name of science?! Jesus Christ, that's pretty fucking beast. (But with a name like "Vilhjalmur Stefansson", what would you expect?)

Speaking of the Inuit, here are their thoughts on the matter:

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...

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...

Seal blood soup -- sounds delish!

Kolmogorov Complexity: My Life In Two Words

2009-08-04T21:20:00.000+08:00

This is it. Kolmogorov complexity. I've been obsessed with this idea for as long as I can remember, but only now do I know the name; in fact, I never even knew there was a name. For all I knew, it was an idea entirely of my own devising, my own little secret in a universe otherwise devoid of sentience. But it's pretty simple, really; let Wikipedia explain:

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.

This has a lot to do with compression, and in fact, what got me thinking about it was the idea of a "compressed" file, which is not like a compressed physical object; the latter is not truly "compressed" (its elements do not take up less space), while a computer file seemingly is -- how tremendous an idea! Something out of nothing! But it's all just an illusion, a blueprint, simple repetition. You're not "compressing" (for there is no such thing, you know), you're just eliminating redundancy, just as you do when you write 10^9 instead of 1,000,000,000, replacing 13 places with 4**. In fact, what you're doing is returning to the original formula that produced that number. (There is not always one, of course; those strings (i.e., everything in the universe) that are not redundant are completely incompressible.) You are creating the blueprint from the product, if you can, and then distributing the (hopefully much lighter) blueprint.

Finally, this is all just a summary. The main thrust of my thoughts has been what sort of data are compressible and what are not, which is covered in detail on the Wikipedia page.

*There's a catch; you need a language, whether natural (English) or artificial (C), to understand it. But this is irrelevant to the notion of complexity, because a language has rules for interpreting many things, and its rules can be "smaller" than their products.

Industrial Agriculture

2009-08-02T13:49:00.003+08:00

I was arguing once with a friend about the morality of factory farming. I said that not eating meat, or eating only "free-range" meat, actually increases the suffering of animals, because a life in the wild is incomparably more brutal than a life in the cage. Support for this assertion comes in the form of a brilliant article in The American that utterly demolishes these "pro-organic" arguments that we've been hearing for years (and that I've been railing against for years):

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.

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.

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.

Simplified Characters Are Barbaric

2009-07-31T23:56:00.004+08:00

The more one studies Chinese, the more one realizes that the introduction of simplified characters in mainland China was a mistake, an abject and utter mistake. I have come to conclude that there are absolutely no logical arguments that can be made in favor of the system. Its biggest practical flaw? It wrecks written intelligibility across time and space. Your average mainlander has quite a bit of difficulty in reading books using traditional characters, which are still found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas communities. Time? Yes; when Chinese people can’t go to a gravesite and read the inscription, your system is quite clearly fucked up. Next up? The Chinese government, in the pursuit of increased writing speed and ease of learning, simply lopped off parts of characters, threw around radicals, merged various pieces, etc*. What does this mean? Only that it is now more difficult to tell what a character sounds like or means from the character itself. Consider the traditional character 廣. Its phonetic component, 黃, sounds like the word it’s a part of, and the radical, 广, gives you a clue as to its meaning. But the simplified version (广) simply has no phonetic component, leading to possible confusion with the character 廠, simplified 厂. Other simplified characters remove or change radicals, accordingly altering the ancient meaning; 買, meaning “to buy,” has as its radical the cowry shell (the pictographic 貝), providing an interesting insight into Chinese civilization through characters. The simplified? 买, whose radical is 乙, the second heavenly stem. Yeah, certainly more insight there. Or scare, 驚, whose radical “horse” has been replaced in the simplified with the less interesting “heart.” (To say nothing of the simplified characters that have replaced multiple traditional characters, a wrench in the cog of automatic computer translation.) To be sure, many of these forms have been in use for ages, but the key here is that they have never been considered formal. It would be as though, in the interest of improving writing speed and literacy, the American government promoted “kthxbye” in place of “okay [itself a simplification of, by some accounts, “all correct”], thank you, goodbye [itself also a simplification, here of “God be with you”].” This would certainly improve speed and at-a-glance learnability, but ability to recall? Ability to peer into the lives of the ancients**? Ability to understand? Certainly not. (This is a zero-sum game, as I have heard it called; the more you eliminate “redundant” barriers to memorization [and thus improve writing speed], the more you make the written language ambiguous and harder to read.) I do not object to their use to speed up writing and to abbreviate, but to replace the formal equivalents? Aesthetically and pedagogically troublesome in the extreme. Why formalize the abbreviations? They are designed to speed up writing, and are not to be used to educate children; first the complex (accurate) forms must be learned, and only then can the shortcuts be taken. You can’t just go straight to the shortcuts, skipping right over the understanding; you must know the rules before you can break them, as the proverb goes. So all the government has done is to add to the burden of the Chinese student and the Chinese themselves.

And the saddest of all is that when people study the characters, what they’re studying is often some bureaucrat’s idea of what meaning should be. It thus becomes more difficult to acquire a proper understanding of Chinese character components, and it’s so frustrating to see people who’ve studied Chinese for months or years and still can’t figure out the way Chinese characters are formed (yes: the natural forms, despite or rather because of their complexity, followed real, easily perceptible rules).

So why promote simplified characters? Becoming proficient in both is rather difficult, but knowledge of both is absolutely necessary to have a serious understanding of Chinese culture. This fucks with the foreign student who wants to study Chinese, for he has to study both. As for writing speed, the only possible advantage, it is fitting here to emphasize again that yes, many of the simplified versions were already widely used before the government stepped in, meaning that the only speed advantage is in formal writing, now mostly done on the computer and therefore negated (in mainland China, characters are typically entered into the computer by the way they sound, not the way they look).

Of course, the real reason is that power-hungry maniacs, who otherwise lack the merit to be remembered after they die, seek to imprint their insignia onto whatever they can get their hands (or pens) on. Thus simplified characters.

*Now, this isn’t quite fair, because they apparently did follow some systems, but so haphazardly as to be completely ridiculous. You can’t figure out the rules by studying the characters.
**If you doubt how interesting this can be, consider 好 [good] and 姓 [family name]. The first combines the words “woman” and “child,” the second “woman” and “born.” Good is a woman and her baby, last name is woman and giving birth. Possible evidence of matrilineal naming in ancient Chinese society? I don’t know, but it’s fun to think about!

Look, don't hate me, but I want generic American Chinese food. Help me!

2009-07-26T17:07:00.002+08:00

Shannon V. says:

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.

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)

And then:

I'm pretty sure you can't even get that in New York anymore.
Maybe in Great Neck.

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.

Plus, it'll probably be kosher.

"Indescribably Thrilling" Is A Description

2009-07-26T12:13:00.000+08:00

Is not the act of describing something as "indescribably thrilling" an act of description?

I Love You, Digg

2009-07-25T23:30:00.001+08:00

From Digg:

A friend of mine gave me this advice once :

"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.

Is this related?

The Beggars Of Beijing

2009-07-25T21:58:00.003+08:00

The beggars of Beijing are so famous only because everyone who visits goes to the same places, all filled with beggars, of course, many of whom hawk the same (I mean identical) wares and tell the same stories. I saw one lady with a gruesomely disfigured child, evidently seeking monetary sympathy -- I was kind of surprised at first, but I've come to realize that this is a common tactic. In places like Tiananmen, which really isn’t so great, you can’t walk five paces without being accosted by vendors and “art students” and every variety of salesman. This is no Beijing to experience. My advice: if you plan to visit, don’t spend too much time at Tiananmen or Wudaokou or Sanlitun. (The Great Wall is, however, one site you must visit, regardless of, as they call themselves, the 這裏的農民 [local peasants], who sell overpriced drinks*. Walk around, try the street food, and buy stuff in the market – you'll have a blast, as the non-touristy areas are actually, at least in my opinion, more exciting than the touristy ones.

A note of caution: in these places, practically no one will speak English. You should learn at least the number terms and characters to get the most out of them.

*It is very fun to bargain with them. After I complained to one about the price, she noted, rather fairly in my estimation, that she had come this far down the wall to provide foreigners with water, and wasn’t going to sell for less than 十五塊 (15 yuan, a little over two U.S. dollars, a ridiculous price for a bottle of water in China). I eventually got something for 7 yuan from another vendor, still around four or five times the average cost of a small bottle of water.

Forgetting America

2009-07-25T21:07:00.006+08:00

A little Chinese boy was talking with his mom on the subway. He asked her why we weren't speaking English (in Chinese), and a little while later he asked me in his own (clear) English, with the cutest accent, "where do you come from?" I returned a broken "America"; a second later I realized the word sounded so unfamiliar. America? Did I mean 美國? I dunno; I ran it through my head again. "America". How odd.

I don't know -- which is it?

Also, did some more bargaining today; I'm getting pretty good at this. Breaking out the Chinese and watching their jaws drop is indescribably thrilling.

"buying food in a cafeteria"

2009-07-23T20:43:00.006+08:00

China’s English T-shirts are nuts. Today I saw a woman wearing one that said “buying food in a cafeteria”, with the “i”s hearted, of course. (I want this one, actually; kinda cool in a super*-ironic way. What made it even cooler was that she actually was buying food in a cafeteria, though I doubt she put it on just for that purpose.) It’s as though throwing English on T-shirts automatically makes them cool, regardless of how meaningful the English actually is. (The Western equivalent is this.)

And I keep seeing this one T-shirt that has “British culture”, “Enquired”, and “Ask” emblazoned on a British flag, as though the cultural characteristic the British rally around most is an extremely minor and completely insignificant spelling variation (“enquire” is the more British cousin of “inquire” -- maybe the shirts are referring to an even more obscure usage distinction, but that's even more ridiculous). In fact, I doubt most Americans get this one, or even if most British do.

*This has got to be, like, super^3. I mean, this is mad super.

Yogurt In China

2009-07-19T15:32:00.000+08:00

Yogurt and yogurt drinks are very popular in China, and I'm not quite sure why, especially since it is rare to see dairy products in dishes or milk for sale. Asia Times says the reason is "consumers' increasing preoccupation with personal health", but I suspect there is another: this stuff is just really, really tasty. And cheap. Cheap and tasty. Like everything else here. I love you, China.

Bargaining At Yashow Clothing Market

2009-07-19T10:38:00.001+08:00

I went with a Chinese friend (who is not a native speaker of Chinese and is at my level in the program) to the Sanlitun Yashow Clothing Market to buy stuff. Well, at first we hadn't really intended to buy anything, but the place soon won us over with its astonishing selection of items. There were four floors: the first and the second seemed to have mostly clothing, which we weren't really too interested in, but the third had these awesome Chinese knickknacks, and we soon relented, whipping out our cash-flushed American wallets. But of course, as the place is packed with foreigners of all kinds (mostly continental Europeans and Africans; I didn't spot any other native English speakers), the asking prices are very high, so we had to engage in China's national pastime: bargaining.

At the first stand we visited, the shopkeeper was already engaged with a man whose English was decent and who could speak a little Chinese (from his accent, I guessed he was Israeli), so we had time to browse the wares unmolested. There were jade objects, huge swords, opium pipes, etc; presumably they were mostly fake, but they were awfully beautiful and high-quality. I broke out my Chinese, and I was delighted to receive compliments from both the shopkeeper and the Israeli -- how I have improved in a month! My friend wanted a jade buddha, I wanted a lovely wooden dragon pipe, and we managed (using exclusively Chinese) to halve the asking prices. (Protip: Saying you're a poor student, you only have 90 kuai, and you need at least 10 kuai for the cab ride home works wonders.)

At the next stand, after receiving more extremely generous compliments (and no doubt genuine; the shopkeepers were very friendly and candidly joked with us about their prices and what we could afford), the two of us whittled down the price for these two huge statues that my friend wanted to give to his mother. Here there were more swords, and also a pair of awesome spiked gloves with metal nails -- oh, China...

Chinese And The Great Wall

2009-07-19T08:45:00.000+08:00

(Posted here too.)

On being a foreigner in China:

The Chinese still are not especially accustomed to the presence of foreigners. Or they are, but if they are, there is an odd sort of dissonance that you begin to notice – on the one hand, they are extraordinarily genial when engaged in conversation*, even if your Chinese is not so great, but on the other, they will often take a second glance at you on the street, chuckle, and nudge their friends. Sometimes, you feel completely and utterly Chinese, in lockstep with everyone around you, but sometimes you feel a little off. (But then again, I’m sure it's partially contingent on where you are and whom you are with.)

*I love talking with Chinese people. My Chinese is good enough that I can initiate small talk and sustain it, but not good enough that I can withhold opportunities for smiles from native speakers. Fortunately, they’re usually smiling at the novelty of the experience, not at the mistakes I make; all in good taste. And most of the time, at least where I live, you’re treated as any other Chinese would be in your situation, which is a really refreshing sort of immersion – it’s very nice.

Of course, I love this country.

Great Wall:

The Great Wall is magnificent. It stretches on for miles and miles, vanishing into the misty distance. To think – a gigantic, indefatigably long wall in the middle of nowhere, with seemingly no purpose. It makes you wonder. The farther sections from the start are in disrepair and are somewhat dangerous; I almost lost my balance once or twice. But it was worth it. The Great Wall of China is a magnificent structure, and it is something you must visit while in China. You can disregard the other tourist attractions entirely for the sake of this one. (It was quite exhausting, though, and I nearly vomited at one point.)

Not Quite, Actually

2009-07-18T23:31:00.000+08:00

“Unless you’ve got money to burn, paying 99¢ or more per tune can add up."

Whether or not you've got money to burn, 99¢/song "adds up", the only difference being in how you perceive it.

Also, spending "$3 or $4 for coffee—over and over, day after day" is nothing but a brutally callous and disgustingly flagrant waste of money, and it's a fucking shame we tolerate it at all, or even consider it within the realm of normal behavior. You're addicted to caffeine? Fine -- get that shit pure, like the slimy drug-addled crack baby you are. Or if you like the taste, take it straight -- real straight.

Drinking In China, Again

2009-07-18T23:27:00.001+08:00

Drinking beer? Openly? On the street?! With no paper bag?! No guilt, paranoid glances?! Gasp! Think of the children!

At least there's one country that treats me like an adult. Even communist China begrudges me the simple pleasure of relaxing with a cold bottle of beer (few drinks in China come cold, so here cold beer is an especially lovely treat), so why the fuck doesn't the U.S.?

(Of course, in China, the internet is not free. No, not like that.)

Black Coffee Makes You Cool, Right?

2009-07-18T23:26:00.000+08:00

You think you're a badass 'cuz you get your coffee "black"? Try putting 1.8 grams of instant coffee mix on your tongue and swallowing with a gulp of water. Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure does work, though...

Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant?

2009-07-18T23:18:00.000+08:00

No, it's not. You try leaving meat out in the sun. It attracts flies, of course.

Pure ethanol works much better.

Heh. I'll be here all night, folks.

Homosexuality and Male Superiority

2009-07-18T23:14:00.001+08:00

If you think that homosexuality is morally justified by the widespread existence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, you should also think that male domination of women is justified by natural mammalian male social and political superiority. The idea that the "male power structure" among humans is somehow socially constructed is dealt a death blow by the same argument that animates discussions of the immutability of homosexuality. (In fact, having watched my fair share of BBC documentaries, I can tell you homosexuality is far less common in the wild than male domination, despite the fact that this piss-poor Wikipedia article has been cleansed of the term "alpha male" and remains pitifully undeveloped. Compare it with Wikipedia's extensive and well-documented article on homosexuality in animals, and you have a pretty clear example of bias.) The answer is that the existence of homosexuality and male superiority among animals means only one thing: the eradication of these behaviors among present-day humans is impossible. But morally speaking, these facts are simply not relevant.

Well, not if your morals are to follow nature. And even if they are to maximize happiness, it's possible that many women are equally happy under male "domination" as under liberation (see here). I think the best case can be made for the following proposition: Women should be free to select for themselves family life or working life, because though most women probably find the former more fulfilling (in the absence of truly societally constructed "feminist" opinions, that is), many do not, and they should have the opportunity to compete as men can. Women should not be subjected to societal pressure to choose either path.

The same applies equally to homosexuality.

China Is Fast

2009-07-18T23:13:00.001+08:00

(For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I'm currently living in Beijing, China. I will be here for at least a year. I'm sorry I haven't been able to write much of anything lately; Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, and often Google are blocked here.)

(This is also posted here.)

It’s a little hard to describe the overwhelming speed and efficiency of this country. I’ve been here for a mere three weeks, and I’ve already come to realize that much of the culture shock – which exists, make no mistake – has to do with the simplicity and timeliness you encounter in daily interactions. Your building’s janitor will fix your room’s problem not only in less than five minutes, but more importantly, within five minutes of when you hail him. The cafeteria lady will serve your food and have the price on the screen almost before you order. And your teachers will have your homework, tests, and other assignments graded and corrected before you leave class. There is none of this indulgent nonsense we put up with in the United States – women doing hard manual labor? Under a week to get your room fixed? Goods served quickly? Shocking, really.

(Nor is this an observation restricted to the Chinese in this country. I have noticed similar tendencies in overseas Chinese in the United States, especially among University of Chicago Chinese teachers, who have the habit of grading all the assignments of everyone in the class in one night and returning them all the following day.)

Walking and bicycling* are things the Chinese love to do, and they can because most places are well within walking distance. (“Walkable communities” is a novel idea in the United States, but in China it is fulfilled. Down with zoning laws!) Everything is extremely convenient; I think because of the incredible density**, the Chinese are forced to maximize efficiency, and it shows. There is no "fast food" in China, because every restaurant beats McDonald's when it comes to speed. The Chinese can't afford to wait. There is no time to be lazy.

*This includes things like three-wheeled motorized pickup scooters, odd contraptions the Chinese seem to be fond of. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet.
**On some nights, every inch of Beijing is packed with men, women, and children. It’s striking, because even in New York (to say nothing of Chicago), once you leave Times Square, everything gets dark and deserted. How odd it is to see little kids playing in a public square at ten o’clock.

A Couplet

2009-07-18T23:12:00.001+08:00

The throes of ecstasy in which conceived,
Unto me grant a rather long reprieve.

Twitter Is Not The Future Of News

2009-06-17T20:54:00.007+08:00

Partially crossposted here.

Isn’t anyone else a little skeptical? Can anyone point to a demonstrable instance where Twitter proved superior to CNN in breadth, timeliness, and accuracy of coverage? It takes you what, 5 seconds to go to CNN.com and see what’s up? Twitter? I don’t know; there are maybe three actual Iranians who’ve posted about this (Twitter’s blocked there, no?), and probably only two of them substantially and/or in English. The resulting noise makes it impossible to find what you want without spending hours on Twitter. It’s simply not efficient.

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.

Remember how it used to be that blogs were the future of media? That posts written by average people on the ground would create a web of news and content that would replace traditional news? Hasn’t happened. In fact, for a trend so supposedly irreversible, one might reasonably expect at least a partial takeover of media, especially after 5 freaking years of blogging. Sure, you have lots of great opinion and analysis, but basically no original reporting unconnected with large organizations. These ridiculous, masturbatory “citizen journalism” fantasies aren’t reality in even the United States; how can we expect otherwise for Iran?

Now, maybe Twitter-like** news services are the future. If so, the following substantial requirements must be met:

1. Everyone must have a phone with constant internet access and picture and video capabilities.
2. Everyone must be eager to post to a server somewhere when something eventful happens.
3. Everyone must be around everyone; that is, the population must be dense enough that a car crash, for example, will be noticed immediately.

Once these are realized, we can begin to talk seriously about Twitter as the future of news. But nowhere on earth do they all currently obtain. Most countries don't even have step 1 met yet, and those that do, like Japan, don't have populations that meet 2. It is unclear whether 2 and 3 will ever apply anywhere. But even if they will, I still doubt Twitter-like news services will be able to replace traditional ones. What are today's important stories? They consist mostly of political analysis, not the reporting of events. Twitter may someday be used successfully to report, say, car accidents***, but North Korean provocations? I have my doubts. At this point, it's a safe bet that such predictions as these are little more than furious circle jerking around an object of some, but not unlimited, promise.

*Wikipedia is the counter-example. But Wikinews, the more accurate comparison, has gone absolutely nowhere. It seems there is a limit to our willingness to contribute free content, and that limit is on-the-ground, original reporting.
**Twitter is just a proprietary network of servers -- it is the concept that's valuable.
***Even these, though -- original reporting of even small events is hard to come by. Old News dominates here too.

Chinese Science

2009-06-13T04:56:00.003+08:00

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment:

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.

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.

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":

[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.

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.

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:

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.

Mobile Twitter Stalking

2009-06-11T10:57:00.004+08:00

There was a woman in front of me at the airport. She was typing on her phone. I peered over to get a better look, and saw that she was typing a Tweet. Immediately, I whipped out my own phone and searched for what she had entered, and I was delighted to find her account -- I learned her name and life history (well, day history) in literally 10 seconds.

To think. That's pretty fly, wouldn't you say? The wonders of technology thus revealed.

Blame The Ninjas

2009-06-09T11:11:00.000+08:00

Atomic Nerds:

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.

Terrorist Attacks Since 9/11

2009-06-03T08:05:00.007+08:00

Rush Limbaugh:

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.

Bing!

2009-06-02T09:48:00.004+08:00

I never thought anything would wean me off Google, but I thought wrong; Microsoft's Bing is really a surprisingly good search engine. It's unobtrusive, useful, lighting-quick, and most importantly, gets me what I want. Previewing videos is awesome, as is the image search. Oh, and Wikipedia integration is equally fantastic; it's possibly my favorite feature. Heretofore no search engine has been as good as Google's, but we now have a true contender.

May the best engine win.

P.S. xRank is cool too.

A Dream, Part II

2009-06-01T22:51:00.004+08:00

I above her, she below me, dangling atop a bed of mystical height. We tangled in cosmic embrace, twirling endlessly in our several ecstasies, spinning furiously in our singular ascent. Mad though we were, her smile was divine, and such uncertainty as there was -- oh that striking face! oh unhappy fate!

It was kinda hot, though.

That's Fucking Retarded

2009-06-01T08:20:00.005+08:00

From an article about Disney's new black princess:

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.

“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.”

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**.

Killing myself in 3, 2, 1...

*According to you, it is more of a racist crime not to have a black prince than not to have a black princess, because Disney is racist despite the fact that they have a black princess.
**If the prince were black, wouldn't you deem it just as racist? "Blah blah blah, blacks can breed with Latinos just as well as with blacks, blah blah blah."

There Is No Difference Between "Luck" And "Hard Work"

2009-05-30T03:29:00.003+08:00

Cornell Economist Robert Frank says:

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.)

Dreaming Of Lucid Dreaming

2009-05-20T06:14:00.005+08:00

Last night I dreamt that I was having a lucid dream, and in the dream I was actually excited that I was having one. I can't make this stuff up. It was weird, too; something about killing cockroaches and eating at fast food restaurants. And I barely slept -- for some reason I got up at 5:30, not tired at all.

Just another footnote, I guess. No more crack before bedtime from now on.

Western Civ Isn't Bad After All

2009-05-19T09:26:00.001+08:00

western science and society [] already contribute[] to the dehumanization of human beings

On 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.

One-Way-Hash Arguments

2009-05-15T08:24:00.002+08:00

Very smart post here:

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.

It's what keeps me in business!

The Jewe

2009-05-10T04:30:00.004+08:00

It is of common opinion, that whensoever a Jewe shall find an object of certain worthe, he shall endeavour posthaste to acquire it; and be that withal, that if it be to his fancy, he shall faster sell than retain it; for there is to the Jewe a spirite of commerce, that by it's singular vyrtue, is unlike that of any race now upon the Earth.

Sorry guys, just practicing my 16th-century English. My goal is to write my whole blog in it one day.

Microsoft Thinks I'm Black

2009-05-10T03:33:00.005+08:00

This is the default icon for the Windows 7 RC home folder. If I recall correctly, the comparable icon in Vista had both a white person and a black one. What gives, Microsoft? Political correctness getting you down? I don't even understand why you feel the need to enter this debate; don't even use a person. Do what Apple does, and just use a home. It's as I tell people -- if you want to avoid using the singular they or the generic he, just use a plural noun as your example. Write "if students wish to enroll, they must" rather than "if a student wishes to enroll, he [she, he/she, they] must".

What's That Doing There?

2009-05-05T09:20:00.002+08:00

Is that a -- gasp! -- simplified character on Gu Kaizhi's famous Orchid Pavilion Preface?!

Justice Or The Law?

2009-05-02T12:11:00.005+08:00

"I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives," said the president in a surprise appearance in the White House Press Room moments after speaking with Souter by telephone.

This is a straw man. The President is of course correct that justice is not about abstract legal theory, but I know of no legal scholar or philosopher who would claim the reverse. In fact, the argument Obama wishes to criticize is not that "justice is[] about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book", but that "law is[] about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book". Law certainly is about legal theory, for that is all there is to law; there is quite a difference between the reason why laws are created (justice, we would hope) and how the laws are interpreted (abstract legal theory and footnotes in case books, I would hope).

It's History!

2009-04-28T11:44:00.008+08:00

But in spite of Said's insistence on a reading of Michael Foucault that situates discursive formations in historical processes of institutional domination and hegemony, much recent critical theory has merely gestured toward history -- no sooner completing the gesture than appropriating history to support ahistorical -- and even antihistorical -- readings of texts.

What is this shit? Nonsense Marxist poststructuralist garbage, that's what; I'm so tired of this pseudo-intellectual "historiography" business. Such readings go on endlessly about these ridiculous theories that are so evidently irrelevant to objective history -- shut up already! Study history, not historiography! Study society, not sociology! Of course bias exists -- it's hardly news. The best we can do is to try to surmount it as far as we are able, not to write ceaseless diatribes about how it renders any proper study of history impossible. And don't you dare tell me there is no such thing as history: Things happen in the past. Your task as a historian is to record them as best you can. Do feel free to add a little flavor, though. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days of flagrantly racist and gleefully partisan history books; they're a blast to read! This trash? Not only is it completely unrelated to history or anything else, it's also extremely tedious and not worth anyone's time. I'd take Nicolás Monardes over Foucalt any day of the week:

[...when they wished to] make themselves drunk and [...] out of judgment [they chewed a mixture of tobacco and coca leaves which ...] make them go as they were out of their wittes [...]

Fun, fun, fun! See why people did history once? There was no "history" -- history was a doctor writing about coca chewing, a missionary writing about his travels. I think a good bit of contemporary drivel of the type above can be traced to the academization of history, for when your job is contingent on how seriously you take yourself and how much you publish (and how many "novel theories" you can come up with), the incentives to create pretentious noise greatly multiply.

The Middleman Fallacy

2009-04-25T04:11:00.003+08:00

Obama said he wants to eliminate the "middle men" lenders that he says add inefficiency to the system — "that's a premium we cannot afford, not when we could be reinvesting that same money in our students, in our economy and in our country."

This is what I call the middleman fallacy, which has led again and again to the persecution and murder of such economically successful groups as the Jews and the Armenians. People resent success, but more than that, they resent those individuals that serve as middlemen. As the argument goes, these people are barriers to direct exchange, and they hike prices to take a cut off the top, becoming fabulously wealthy by doing no real work at all. Of course, it's complete nonsense; the role of middlemen is critical in any modern society. Experts at getting goods from place to place and identifying demand and supply (the efficient allocation of resources), they free producers from worrying about efficiently transporting items and consumers from seeking out distant sources. In short, they reduce costs for both parties involved.

But the argument is not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong, and it's a shame to hear it from Obama.

Expensive Waste

2009-04-15T04:41:00.001+08:00

My new piece runs in the Maroon today.

Chinese On The Internet

2009-04-01T09:59:00.005+08:00

On the one hand we have this:On the other we have this:Despite the fact that only 10-20% of Chinese use the internet, the language is its second most popular. With China's increasing modernization, these figures are set to explode, and I predict with some confidence that within twenty years Chinese will become the internet's #1 language.

Conclusion: Although I am decidedly reserved about the prospect of Chinese overtaking English as a global lingua franca (in fact, I do not think it will ever happen, for reasons I make clear here), I think learning Chinese is a solid investment if only for the reason mentioned in this post.

"I Never Thought He Would Do Something Like That..."

2009-03-30T11:26:00.003+08:00

You know how it works. Someone shoots up a school/classroom/office building for no apparent reason, and police interview people who knew the person. They usually give variations on "he was the sweetest guy; I never would have imagined he could do this". So it was a total shock to read this in an AP story about a man who murdered seven residents and a nurse at a nursing home today:

Griffin said Stewart had once been a painter. She said she had no idea whether her ex-husband was somehow connected to the nursing home or why he would shoot people there.

"He did have some violent tendencies from time to time," Griffin said. "I wouldn't put it past him. I hate to say it, but it is true."

You wouldn't put it past him to go into a place reserved for sick octogenarians and kill them all?! What kind of a man is this?!

NYLC

2009-03-28T07:03:00.002+08:00

Listening to this is like listening to this.

"Umm, so, and I think, such as, because, but, umm..."

It's kind of like a bloody car accident. You know it's terrible, but you just can't stop watching.

The Pedagogical Purpose Of Text Memorization Finally Revealed!

2009-03-13T04:03:00.003+08:00

In Chinese, we are given substantial passages of text to memorize each week. I always wondered what the purpose of this was. It seemed terribly silly, really; I did not understand how my Chinese could possibly improve by reading passages over and over again. Possibly, I thought, they were targeting pronunciation, and I still think that this is the primary purpose. But what a waste of time for just pronunciation, right? Well, I realized just now that there is another, much more important reason for them -- they give you prepared, rapidly usable phrases. Think about it: Generating sentences with grammatical structures you haven't used in a while is hard enough in English ("umm, umm, but, umm, like"), and so it's naturally even harder in a foreign language. Dialogues and narratives effectively serve contextualize words and grammar, such that if you're in a conversation and you need to use the word "progress," but forget how to say "progress very quickly," you're in luck; when you think of the word, your brain searches that memorized lexical database you've stored up and brings back phrases that contain the word. In other words, you don't have to think about how to say "progress very quickly," because you have a freeze-dried phrase that will do it for you.

Lexical Prolixity Is Asymptomatic Of Morphological Fusionality

2009-03-13T03:29:00.004+08:00

Oh, hi. No, I don't have anything to say; I just thought that was a really smart-sounding title. (It's not a meaningless one, though. I doubt it's true -- in fact, even if the two are somehow correlated, the link is probably not causal. But I had better stop or risk exploring a question I posed without realizing it. Funny how that works.)

Mensa? Pshaw.

2009-03-09T08:27:00.004+08:00

Mensa? LOL. 1 person in 50 qualifies. That's easy pickings: There are six million people in this country alone who can join. But you still think you're smart, eh? Try qualifying for Mega Society membership, for which only being in the 99.9999th IQ percentile suffices. That's one in a million.

Take it with a grain of salt, especially when their fancy schmancy journal includes garbage like this. Also see this partial refutation. This too (third item down). Oh, and this (scroll down).

My Moral Realism Is As Justifiable As Your Morally Skeptical Morals

2009-03-01T09:47:00.003+08:00

Moral skeptics (those who question the existence of moral truth) have it easy. Obviously there's no such thing as morality; prove it exists, they argue. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

Opponents often accuse moral skepticism of leading to immorality. However, skeptics about justified moral belief can act well and be nice people. They need not be any less motivated to be moral, nor need they have (or believe in) any less reason to be moral than non-skeptics have (or believe in). Moral skeptics can hold substantive moral beliefs just as strongly as non-skeptics. [...] All that moral skeptics deny is that their (or anyone's) moral beliefs are justified. This meta-ethical position about the epistemic status of moral beliefs need not trickle down and infect anyone's substantive moral beliefs or actions.

Moral skeptics must claim to be following moral principles that they cannot justify, or risk being unable to argue against torturing babies for sexual pleasure. But how can they follow unjustifiable moral principles? Is this not as absurd as being a moral realist, ostensibly an equally unjustifiable position? Occam's razor, my friend.

(I do believe that "morality" exists, but I just thought I'd take a little wind out of the skeptics' sails.)

Anti-Obama Broadside

2009-02-24T11:52:00.003+08:00

Don't blame me, I voted for McCain!

Count me among the cynics. ‘Tis always better to doubt than to believe, and there is no shortage of reasons to doubt. We seem to be stuck in a timeless universe, living in a moment that knows no past and no future. The boundless enthusiasm for Barack Obama is simply not proportionate to what he has done or plans to do, nor can the nation hope itself out of the mess it is in. Can the President bail the country out by resuscitating failed industries, by spending on projects that cannot possibly commence until the “crisis” has passed, by using our money better than we ourselves can? Can he outlaw partisanship and “unify” government, an idea that I hope sounds as scary to me as it does to you? We were promised “change,” an end to partisanship. (Not to say that partisanship is a bad thing; “unifying” government sounds awfully scary to me. "Working together" is often a recipe for disaster, especially when those working together have more collective power than any other body in the entire world.) But the stimulus bill was voted for along very partisan lines. We were told there would be an end to earmarks and special interest lobbying, a veritable political revolution! This is obviously impossible when only a few hundred people have a say in where billions of dollars are spent. Blinded by the magical brilliance of the inauguration, we seem to have forgotten that what goes on in Washington is very real and very serious. There is a reality here that few of us wish to confront – we should never expect salvation from lofty platitudes, nor that hopeful change is some unalloyed good.

“Theoretical nonsense!” you cry. But from the botched and throttled nominations to the pork-laden, gleefully partisan shopping spree (the long-suppressed aspirations of the Democrats thus revealed), there are plenty of real things to be upset about. Watching the administration mollycoddle the American people with such patronizingly clichéd phrases as “get people back to work” makes me wonder how many people actually believe that it is the government’s task to run the economy. How this “stimulus” is even supposed to work, I don’t know – how can you prime a pump when you’re destroying the pump for material with which to prime it? Frédéric Bastiat gives us a classic example of this fallacy; breaking the window of a house will give a job to a window maker, but it will take away a job from a worker whom the owner of that house would otherwise have paid to do some other task. Good, solid infrastructure spending is one thing, and there’s a cool $70 billion in the bill for exactly this purpose; but the rest of the money is mostly going towards projects that don’t pay back monetarily and can hardly be called “stimulating.” “Democrats as deficit hawks” is now ancient history, a fading curiosity of the Bush years.

And yet! You see, there’s an odd pleasure some get from watching the misery of others – some call it schadenfreude, others epicaricacy – that is precisely what I think is happening now. As conservatives watch pained liberals wincing at the failures of the new administration and at the realization that their lobbyist-hating hero is a man after all, they find solace in a sort of perverse bliss. Rush Limbaugh hopes Obama fails, and for what other reason than to say “I told you so”? This is disgusting and wrong; either call out Obama or cheer him on. Don’t relish in his mistakes.

But this is no license to give him a pass. Obama has been proclaiming for months now his absolute dedication to changing the “politics of fear” into the “politics of hope.” How can anyone take him seriously when he’s been practicing the politics of fear from the beginning of his term? If we don’t throw caution to the wind and spend nearly a trillion dollars (roughly equivalent to the entire federal budget in 1984) on programs whose value in stimulating the economy is extremely questionable, we’re all going to die, or something. That seems awfully similar to “pass the Patriot Act right away, or we’re all going to die” or “invade Iraq right away, or we’re all going to die”. Fear, not hope; expediency, not caution. But politicians are necessarily professional obfuscators. It is a requirement of their profession that they be so – it is simply impossible to get elected by listing all the caveats ad nauseam (what politics is). And so I think that more than a dose of economic “stimulus”, we need a dose of reality. Take two and call me in the morning.

Crazy Animals

2009-02-23T07:49:00.004+08:00

Skull of a rare, ancient, long-extinct species found today:
Pretty nuts, huh? Wouldn't it be great if you could see what this animal looked like in the flesh? Well, you can! I was lying; this is actually the skull of a hippopotamus, which is an extremely aggressive, vicious, and dangerous animal. Weird-looking, too:Then you have this thing:Funky. It looks like a dinosaur.

Job "Creation"

2009-02-22T03:49:00.003+08:00

There's been an awful lot of talk about job creation lately. I think a lot of it is absurd; when the government pays a firm to renovate public buildings, it may be "creating" some construction jobs, but it's "creating" those jobs by spending taxpayer money. Ultimately, the government must take money from some other source to fund such job creation, and by taking that money it reduces investment and spending on other sources (which themselves "create" or create -- see below for more -- jobs). Frédéric Bastiat provides a classic example of this fallacy; breaking the window of a house will give a job to a window maker, but it will take away a job from a worker whom the owner of that house would otherwise have paid to do some other task. Alas, we see only the job created; we do not see the job lost. (You should not, however, take this to imply that government spending cannot produce jobs. Non-marginal investments on substandard infrastructure, for example, can increase efficiency, grow the economy, and yes, create jobs when private money is not being spent on that infrastructure. If you can't drive on the roads, you can't do things as quickly, can't get things to places as quickly -- you slow down the world. Also, if people are unwilling to spend, it's certainly possible that forcing them to spend -- by taking their money and spending it yourself -- can stimulate growth, despite the fact the money must be paid off eventually. I'm only saying that we should be very careful about how we think about job creation.)

In a similarly illogical vein are the gloomy proclamations that technology and outsourcing destroy jobs. As the reasoning goes, new technologies that don't have to be manned eliminate jobs. Here, too, the reasoning is wrong; we see positions for couriers vanish with more efficient communication tools, but we don't see the people hired by new companies whose expenditures have dropped because of increasing efficiency. So it's refreshing to read from one economist, who proclaims that spreading rural broadband will "eliminate 266,000 jobs", that "[t]echnology that helps fewer people get more work done may be good for the economy in the long run, but it makes extra workers redundant". This redundancy drives up cost and reduces efficiency; it results in job loss.

But there's something in the argument thus far that doesn't work. In other words, you can't believe everything I've written without the next step. Why? Well, how can I talk about "real", or net, job creation in the first place? If we're all just ceaselessly moving money around, there can be no actual job growth -- we're all players in a grand zero-sum game. But this is where it gets interesting: Economics is not a zero-sum game. The global economy is not a closed system in which wealth just shifts around. The real wealth is the mind, the output of which is potentially infinite and often productive -- some thoughts produce (in real-world terms) more than they cost (in time), the second law of thermodynamics be damned. When you think a thought, you are actually producing something! This is so profound a concept that it's astonishing that more people haven't heard of it (or at least don't talk as though they have). Read this. Yes, the whole thing -- I know it's long, but trust me on this one. It's one of those rare ideas that will change how you think about the world. A taste:

Hanging out at the beach one day with a distant family member, we got into a discussion about capitalism and socialism. In particular, we were arguing about whether brute labor, as socialism teaches, is the source of all wealth (which, socialism further argues, is in turn stolen by the capitalist masters). The young woman, as were most people her age, was taught mainly by the socialists who dominate college academia nowadays. I was trying to find a way to connect with her, to get her to question her assumptions, but was struggling because she really had not been taught many of the fundamental building blocks of either philosophy or economics, but rather a mish-mash of politically correct points of view that seem to substitute nowadays for both.

I picked up a handful of sand, and said "this is almost pure silicon, virtually identical to what powers a computer. Take as much labor as you want, and build me a computer with it — the only limitation is you can only have true manual laborers - no engineers or managers or other capitalist lackeys".

She replied that my request was BS, that it took a lot of money to build an electronics plant, and her group of laborers didn’t have any and bankers would never lend them any.

I told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I will give you and your laborers as much as you need. The only restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel, land, silicon - in their crudest forms. It is up to you to assemble these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make me my computer.

She thought for a few seconds, and responded "but I can’t - I don’t know how. I need someone to tell me how to do it"
The only real difference between beach sand, worth $0, and a microchip, worth thousands of dollars a gram, is what the human mind has added.

Chinese Is Stupidly Hard

2009-02-16T00:27:00.004+08:00

There's a really sharp essay here. It's mandatory reading for anyone considering the study of Chinese or undertaking it currently. Read the whole thing. For your consideration, a few choice paragraphs:

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

[...]

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

[...]

Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

I really could not agree more. The Chinese writing system (and consequently, as Moser points out, the entire language) is by far the most difficult in the entire world. Studying Chinese takes an extreme amount of effort. I am taking four classes this quarter, one of which is Chinese. The work I have to do for that class exceeds the work I have to do for all of the other three combined.

There was an Economist article a while back (you can read the full text here) that generated a lot of controversy. It calls learning Chinese a fad (which it is) that it is not worth the effort. Indeed, Chinese is the Japanese of the 2000s; the language has been tremendously hyped. There's a Chinese bubble going on right now that will pop in ten years or so when people realize that Chinese businessmen are much better at learning English than American businessmen are at learning Chinese. See, as soon as China's economic boom subsides (and it will -- the only question is when), people will start learning some other language that's completely overlooked now (my bet's on Portuguese, Hindustani, or Indonesian). Chinese will never overtake English as the world's new global language -- it is simply too difficult. If your goal is just to get a job, don't waste your time on Chinese. Seriously. Study economics, math, or computer science; those are far more profitable fields. Simply put, the costs of studying the language are just not worth the monetary benefits.

But Chinese is valuable for other reasons. The language opens up an entire world of literature and culture to its students -- if your goal is to enter this world, then by all means, study Chinese.

Scat Humor Or Fine Art?

2009-02-15T05:07:00.001+08:00

If I didn't know better, I'd say this was some pretty brilliant satire:

The contributors to this volume are all aware of and seek to understand the mental and physical distance that separates us from the experience of Early Modern excrement.

Is It "Ethnocentrism" If They're Barbarians?

2009-02-12T07:52:00.003+08:00

I say no. Via CNN:

A city official in the remote Brazilian Amazon village of Envira told CNN that five members of the Kulina tribe are on the run after being accused of murdering, butchering and eating a farmer in a ritual act of cannibalism.

The village's chief of staff, Maronilton da Silva Clementino, said Kulina tribesmen took the life of Ocelio Alves de Carvalho, 19, last week on the outskirts of Envira, which is in the far western part of Brazil that bumps up against Peru.

Portal Amazonia newspaper reported that the Indians escaped after being held for a few hours in the city's police station.

No arrest warrants were issued. Brazilian law does not allow the military or civil police to enter Indian lands, Portal Amazonia reported.

It is still unknown how many people took part in the alleged cannibalistic ritual, although several Indians have fled into the jungle fearing prosecution, the newspaper Diario do Amazonas reported.

Clementino said the victim was herding cattle when he met with a group of Indians who invited him back to their village.

"They knew each other and they sometimes helped one another. They invited him to their reservation three days ago and he was never seen again," Clementino said.

"The family decided to go into the reservation and that's when they saw his body quartered and his skull hanging on a tree. It was very tragic for the family," he said.

The news of the incident came from the Indians themselves, who apparently bragged about eating the man's organs, Clementino said.

Members of the tribe told residents of Envira -- where 190 Kulina families brush shoulders with non-tribal Brazilians -- that they held a cannibalistic ritual in which they cooked the victim's organs, Clementino said.

He said Kulina Indians began surrounding the police station where the suspects were briefly interrogated.

Villagers told authorities they are incensed by the lack of response from FUNAI, Brazil's National Indian Foundation.

"The family is very frustrated with the law here, which protects the Indians and doesn't help protect us," he said. "They start drinking and local farmers here are afraid who could be next."

Clementino said groups Indians -- often outnumbering police -- pose a security threat to locals.

In other news, please don't go on and on about the superiority of your culture because of its alleged antiquity. There is a number of problems with this line of reasoning:

1. Most obviously, the antiquity of a culture does not imply its superiority. Most of us would deem liberalism superior to despotism, but the fact remains that liberal "cultures" are much younger than despotic ones. (Whence the scare quotes? See my next points.)

2. It is often hard to define what a culture is and what continuity is. Can we call 3,000 years of Judaism, for example, a unified culture? In some respects, perhaps, but not in others; the original Semitic Hebrews would have little in common with the reformed Caucasian German Jews of today. The two are bound by a book and some language (classical Hebrew can usually be understood by speakers of resurrected modern Hebrew), but the former would strike us as closer to the Muslim Bedouin than the Germans in dress, culture, philosophy, and even religion. In fact, the vast majority of cultures barely share language with their predecessor cultures; in what respects can modern Indians be said to share culture with their ancestors when Hindi is as related to Sanskrit as Italian is to Latin? In what respects the Chinese when spoken classical/old "Chinese" (for it shares mostly the script, and even that becomes less true before the 5th century) cannot be understood by most speakers of modern Mandarin? The modern Indians are indeed far more culturally similar to the ancient Indians than the modern Chinese are to them, but it is important to realize that a continuum is present; it is exceedingly difficult to call 2,000 or 3,000 years of various religions, philosophies, dresses, languages, and ideologies one culture.

3. There is no such thing as a culture that does not borrow from others. Chinese culture was profoundly influenced by Buddhism for thousands of years, and it is now almost inseparable from it. Buddhism, however, originated in India; its earliest, post-pre-sectarian form is Theravada Buddhism. But what is most common in East Asia is Mahayana Buddhism, a somewhat different religion from what the Indians established. The mark of Persian and Arab culture on India runs deep; to use an example other than the obvious Arab/Muslim conquests of India, the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled northern India for centuries, was very much a Persian institution. There is no progenitor civilization (important for our purposes, that is): Nearly all advanced "cultures" are extraordinarily impure.

My point is not that there is no such thing as superiority and inferiority in cultures, nor is it that some cultures can be called superior or inferior to others. What I mean to say is that some aspects of cultures can rightly be called barbaric, just as we call criminals barbaric. I would not be called ethnocentric for calling Jeffrey Dahmer an anthropophagic pig; why, then, might I be called ethnocentric for calling the cannibalism of the Kulina tribe disgusting, or the appallingly common female genital mutilation of Somalia disgusting?

N.B.: I am not calling the Kulina barbaric; I am calling these cannibals barbaric. Cannibalism is probably more common in this tribe than in others, but surely not every Kulina is a cannibal.

Salvia

2009-02-09T11:54:00.006+08:00

I tried Salvia a few months ago (in New York -- legally!) for the first time. 10x. Went into the woods with a good friend, placed a big pinch of extract on the pipe, and took two hits. I later realized that I had consumed the whole thing. I estimate that I smoked about a milligram of salvinorin A.

I wasn't sure it hit me at first. I was sitting upright, but found my body moving backwards. It acted on its own -- I had no control over my movements. As I stared up into the white sky, I marveled at the beauty of the silhouetted trees and the contrast between light and dark.

Then I started laughing hysterically and sweating. I remember wondering why I was laughing -- what was so funny? What I was laughing about, I realized, was the hilarity of the experience -- this is incredible, I thought! That it was working was somehow tremendously funny.

But what was I feeling, exactly? I don't quite remember, but I will say that I remember seeing the world as clips, as a big painting, a dream. The sky was an image, not a motion. Everything in the world was connected. What I was looking at wasn't something else, it was something self. Time became episodic, not linear, and everything became profoundly magnified. (The word "magnified" may seem strange here. I used to experience some odd auditory hallucinations before falling asleep -- breathing sounded overwhelmingly loud. What I felt on Salvia was similar but visual.) The world was fundamentally close. I was in a body, but there was a distinct, dualistic separation between flesh and mind. Only mine eyes were mine -- my body was somehow not. There were frames around my eyes, like glasses, that separated the mind's eye (and "I") and body's eyes from the body.

I can't recall much of the first few minutes -- I was completely gone. My friend says that I kept commenting on the brilliance of the white light. My friend responded, "It's a strange light." I didn't know what to make of that at the time, but I vaguely remember it being said. Throughout the trip, I kept insisting that it was over, only to "relapse" immediately thereafter. (I remember my friend saying that he thought it came in waves.) I remember watching my friend build a fire. I kept questioning my friend's actions. "Why?" suddenly became very important, as did the question of reality. I asked my friend whether the fire was real. I wasn't sure whether it was or not -- it was so strange. A fire? Here? Was anything real? I simply did not know.

Consciousness became almost animalistic. The simplest things suddenly became perplexing. My friend was building the fire from sticks; I thought they were the matches we had brought. I was disappointed that my friend had wasted all the matches. I questioned my friend, only to come to the disappointing conclusion that he was just a dreamlike blur.

The intense experience lasted for about 5 minutes. Strong residual effects lasted for about 10 minutes afterward. During the comedown period, I was completely and utterly stoned; I was supremely relaxed. I was leaning against a tree and could hardly move. Indeed, I was a stone. I noted the beauty of the smoke coming from the fire. At one point, I proclaimed that I was not hallucinating, that what I was seeing was real, as though this were some astonishing realization.

I loved the trip and would unhesitatingly experience it again. It was fun, enjoyable, pleasant, mind-bending, and an utter joy to live through. I can't believe that some people experience dysphoria from this drug -- it has only the most beneficent of intentions. I felt utterly no fear or dread throughout the trip. My friend says that I, when I was able to talk, spoke of the brilliance of Salvia and urged him to try it. Indeed, I am still of the same mindset. The trip was pure bliss. Not a physical bliss, but a mental one. I recommend that you prepare extensively; I think that my trip was so good both because of the environment and because I had read an insane amount of literature on the drug before using it. (During the trip, I knew what to expect, and was continually assessing the experience during and after.)

I am, needless to say, very impressed.

Who's Provincial Now?

2009-02-09T04:42:00.002+08:00

Via Mankiw comes a list of senators who voted to remove the "Buy American" provision from the "stimulus" bill. Every single one, with the exception of Lieberman, is a Republican. The Democrats are the cosmopolitans indeed!

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Bunning (R-KY)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Hatch (R-UT)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Wicker (R-MS)

Red Bull Doesn't Taste Good?

2009-02-03T11:14:00.004+08:00

Wait, what?

I have seen the flavor of Red Bull panned all over the internet and in person. This makes no sense to me. I think that Red Bull is extremely delicious; in fact, I'd go so far as to call it more delicious than any other carbonated beverage. I can say less for its effects; I don't really feel much after drinking a Red Bull, and I usually drink things much more quickly than most people (I finish a large can -- 16 oz., I think -- in about a minute). Red Bull is almost identical in taste to other energy drinks (Monster, Rockstar, &c), probably because the ingredients are just about the same; they all taste like guarana.

In other news, a few days ago, I downed a Red Bull and a 5-Hour Energy together and was surprised at their synergy; I experienced a remarkable lift that lacked excessive edginess. Everything came together in sharp clarity -- the borders of objects were sharper and contrasted more with their backgrounds. Reading became easier, and my mood was elevated too -- this was a feeling that was sustained for several hours. Those 5-Hour Energy shots are awfully expensive*, but they sure do work.

*$4.00 for a tiny bottle filled with caffeine and B vitamins? Come on. What's the profit margin on that like? Niacin and caffeine are stupidly cheap in bulk.

Fill in the Blank

2009-01-29T08:07:00.001+08:00

_________'s next leader will be an openly gay former flight attendant who parlayed her experience as a union organizer into a decades-long political career.

The answer? Iceland!

Ugly Betty [More Chat]

2009-01-27T11:18:00.011+08:00

[21:14] A: OMFG
[21:15] A: UGLY BETTY IS NOT UGLY
[21:15] A: SHE'S FUCKING HOT
[21:15] A: just had to say that
[21:16] M: no shit sherlock
[21:17] A: but even in the "ugly" makeup
[21:17] A: like, even hotter in the ugly makeup
[21:17] M: wat

IMHO:

Song of the Day

2009-01-27T10:05:00.002+08:00

Electric Version by the The New Pornographers:

I Like Obama?

2009-01-26T23:11:00.002+08:00

This is gonna be published somewhere; I'll let you know where when it is. In the meantime, read it; it's good.

Count me among the cynics. ‘Tis always better to doubt than to believe, and there is no shortage of reasons to doubt. We seem to be stuck in a timeless universe, living in a moment that knows no past and no future. The boundless enthusiasm for Barack Obama is simply not proportionate to what he has done or plans to do, nor can the nation hope itself out of the mess it is in. Only when we understand this can we confront the very real nature of policy, and what Obama has promised does not look promising. Can the President bail the country out by resuscitating hopelessly failed industries, by spending on projects that cannot hope to commence until the “crisis” has passed, by hoping to use our money better than we ourselves can? Can he hope to outlaw partisanship and “unify” government, an idea that I hope sounds as scary to me as it does to thee? Can he hope to surmount the vitally imperfect nature of our government, to avoid redundancy and waste when only a few hundred people have a say in where billions of dollars are spent? The answer is no, of course, and this is a reality that few of us wish to confront. Blinded by the magical brilliance of the inauguration, we seem to have forgotten that what goes on in Washington is very real and very serious. We should not expect salvation from lofty platitudes, nor that hopeful change is some unalloyed good.

Given the nature of my convictions, you would not expect me to have been moved by Obama’s speech. Yet you would be wrong, and I hold out hope yet. I was touched, indeed surprised, by the rising line in which he proclaims to the terrorists, for all the world to hear, that “our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken,” that “you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” I was glad to hear my president submit a declaration of strength, not weakness, proud in the knowledge that my country would not succumb to the trendily radical sapping of the human spirit, a sapping that surrenders any claim to the right, that preemptively declares the scum of humanity the victor. A vigorous defense of liberty, a defense that fiercely recoils from the disgustingly pusillanimous equivocation that grips the souls of cowards, is the only way to halt the moral advance of terrorism. Any friend of liberty is a friend of mine. So I say: Mr. President, with trust in God, defend freedom; fight for good!

What Is Essential And What Is Not?

2009-01-23T06:04:00.006+08:00

The lede of another tepid article from Yahoo! HotJobs:

In just 60 minutes, you could earn enough to pay for a tank of gas, the cable bill, gym membership, or dinner out. Thirty dollars still covers some of life's essential costs. Earn that much in just one hour on the job, and you have enough to build a comfortable life.

Why are we awash in foreclosures? Because we don't know how to live. Not one of the items above is one of life's "essential costs." Tank of gas? The bus is too low for you, I guess. The cable bill? Why do you have a fucking TV? What is so compelling about the television that you must have one at the cost of $50/month, especially when you can see most of the shows on the internet? Gym membership? I can't believe this. It's called a sidewalk.

Sidewalk: use it.

Dinner out? Jesus Christ, I want to gouge out my eyes; make your own food! Invite people over to your house! Unless someone else is paying, don't go to a restaurant for food at ten times the cost of what you could make or purchase yourself!

My philosophy is this: If you don't need to do something costly, don't do it. "But Ari," you protest, "these are just life's luxuries! Treat yourself once in a while! These are indulgences; some people just can't live without them!" Honestly? That's your reply? Your willpower isn't strong enough not to eat ice cream, get a gym membership, or watch TV? Set this as your desktop background, and maybe you'll change your mind:

Another starving child in Africa. I'm sure the cable bill is a real priority.

I Was Right: Biden Is President

2009-01-22T08:33:00.007+08:00

You heard it here first, folks [SFGate]:

Several constitutional lawyers said President Obama should, just to be safe, retake the oath of office that was flubbed by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The 35-word oath is explicitly prescribed in the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, which begins by saying the president "shall" take the oath "before he enter on the execution of his office."

The oath reads: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

In giving the oath, Roberts misplaced the word "faithfully," at which point Obama paused quizzically. Roberts then corrected himself, but Obama repeated the words as Roberts initially said them.

A do-over "would take him 30 seconds, he can do it in private, it's not a big deal, and he ought to do it just to be safe," said Boston University constitutional scholar and Supreme Court watcher Jack Beermann. "It's an open question whether he's president until he takes the proper oath."

The courts would probably never hear a challenge, and some might argue that Obama automatically took office at noon because that's when President Bush left the office. But because the procedure is so explicitly prescribed in the Constitution, Beermann said if he were Obama's lawyer, he would recommend retaking it, just as two previous presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur, did under similar circumstances.

"The Constitution says what he's supposed to say," Beermann said. "... It's kind of surprising the chief justice couldn't get it right."

The only reason not to retake the oath would be to prevent further embarrassment of the chief justice, he said. "It would seem appropriate for the president of the United States to take the oath specified in the Constitution," he said. "It's the same oath all 43 of his predecessors took. He ought to take it."

Charles Cooper, head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under President Ronald Reagan, said that the oath is mandatory, that an incorrect recitation should be fixed and that he would be surprised if the oath hadn't already been re-administered.

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, was hosting an inauguration party at his home in McLean, Va., Tuesday and did a mock swearing-in of 35 children. When Roberts erred, one child shouted: "That's not right!"

"He should probably go ahead and take the oath again," Turley said. "If he doesn't, there are going to be people who for the next four years are going to argue that he didn't meet the constitutional standard. I don't think it's necessary, and it's not a constitutional crisis. This is the chief justice's version of a wardrobe malfunction."

They laughed at Galileo and Copernicus, and now at me! Hate to say I told you so, but, well, i don't: I told you so!

UPDATE: Obama's taken the oath a second time!

Chief Justice John Roberts has administered the presidential oath of office to Barack Obama for a second time just to be on the safe side.

The unusual step came after Roberts flubbed the oath a bit on Tuesday, causing Obama to repeat the wording differently than as prescribed in the Constitution.

White House counsel Greg Craig said Obama took the oath from Roberts again out of an "abundance of caution."

The chief justice and the president handled the matter privately in the Map Room on Wednesday night.

Obama's probably an avid reader of this blog; Obama or the Supreme Court, that is. Okay, so Obama's definitely president now, but I still hold that Biden was acting president there for a while! What's more important is that Obama didn't have the power to create a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation. I therefore refuse to celebrate it on the grounds that it's an unconstitutionally created holiday.

Sufism and Zen

2009-01-21T12:56:00.002+08:00

This is a short paper I wrote for a history class. I think it is of general interest, so I post it here.

Schimmel very briefly discusses the possible influence of East Asian thought on Sufism. I think that the parallels between Sufism and Zen are so numerous as to warrant more than a short mention. The parallelism is more than superficial; while most religions have mystical elements, Islam has a mystical strain that is profoundly Zen-like. Whether this is indicative of Islam’s borrowing from Buddhism is another question; I am merely pointing out the similarities.

Sufism is that which cannot be named. “A Sufi does not ask who a Sufi is”; Sufism is an indefinable philosophy of contemplation of the timelessly infinite. The Kashf al-Mahjub describes Sufism as purity. And what is purity? Purity is the seeing of the sun and moon, the seeing of and absorption into the ethereal, the endless sky of God. Men are exhorted to escape the confines of “stations,” stations that bind us to the world and to the finite chain of causality. Causality figures very importantly in Sufism; it marks the line between this world and the next. The concept of a “next” world is misleading here; Sufism focuses on the escape from this world into a state of purity that finds bliss in brutal hunger. Hunger and asceticism cause joy because they remove the veil.

The essence of Zen is namelessness. Kōans about Zen are designed to “shock” the listener into contemplation with the sheer force of their discord; Sufi tales are likewise described as being not literal (yet importantly not figurative), as being designed to propel the reader beyond that which is known. The Chinese character 無 is used as a reply to riddles that are not riddles; it represents the state of ultimate negation, the “off” state. There is no question; the question is not designed to question, but to induce contemplation. The concept of Zazen, or the clearing of the mind to become oneness with everything, is startlingly similar, in both practice and metaphor, to Abu Amr Dimashqi’s instruction to “shut the eye to the phenomenal world” – as Daito says to sweep away thoughts that are like clouds, so do the Sufis say that the “eye cannot see the light of the sun and moon with complete demonstration”; the heart sees only the empyrean.

The goal of the Sufis is to have an existence that is without cause and without end, an existence unaffected by time or the thoughts and actions of man. I argue that the practitioners of Zen have precisely the same goal.

Joseph Robinette Biden: Our New President

2009-01-21T10:18:00.008+08:00

If Professor Ken Katkin's analysis here is correct, then Condoleezza Rice was the interim president from 12:00 to about 12:01.

(1) The 20th Amendment provides that "[t]he terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January...."

(2) Art II., Sec. 1 Cl. 8 provides that "[b]efore he enter on the Execution of his Office, [The President] shall take the following oath...."

(3) President Obama did not take the Oath of Office until about 12:03 pm today, after Vice President Biden took it at about 12:01 p.m. (Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman were still fiddling at noon).

(4) Therefore, there was a brief window (just after noon) when George Bush and Dick Cheney were no longer President and Vice President, but Barack Obama and Joe Biden also were not yet qualified to enter on the Execution of their offices.

(5) The Presidential Succession Act, 3 U.S.C. sec. 19(a)(1), provides: "If, by reason of ... failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, upon his resignation as Speaker and as Representative in Congress, act as President." Section 19(b) states that the President Pro Tempore of the Senate shall act as President (under the same terms and conditions) if the Speaker of the House fails to qualify.

(6) Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Robert Byrd actually resigned their seats in the Congress. Thus, neither of them qualified to become Acting President under the Presidential Succession Act. Plus, interbranch appointments might be unconstitutional anyhow. See Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, Is the Presidential Succession Law Constitutional?, 48 Stan. L. Rev. 113 (1995); but see Howard Wasserman, Structural Principles and Presidential Succession, 90 Ky. L.J. 345 (2002).

(7) Section 19(d)(1) of the Presidential Succession Act provides: "If, by reason of ... failure to qualify, there is no President pro tempore to act as President under subsection (b) of this section, then the officer of the United States who is highest on the following list, and who is not under disability to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President shall act as President: Secretary of State ...."

(8) Notably, Section 19(d)(1) does not condition the Secretary of State's assumption of the powers and duties of the office of President on resignation of her current office, nor does elevation of the Secretary of State raise any constitutional issue of interbranch appointment.

(9) The term of office of the Secretary of State does not automatically terminate at noon on the 20th day of January.

(10) On January 20, 2009, Condoleeza Rice was (and is) still the Secretary of State.

(11) Accordingly, from 12:00 noon until 12:01 p.m. (when Vice President Biden took the oath of office and became Vice President), Condoleeza Rice was momentarily the Acting President of the United States, our first African-American President.

Although Volokh thinks the analysis is rendered "moot" by the discovery that Joe Biden took the oath of office before 12:00 P.M., it is not; it actually implies that Biden was the acting president before Obama was sworn in. (Although Barack Obama was at the time and still is the president under the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, he had not yet assumed the powers of the office.)

Fine. Joe Biden was the acting president, but as soon as Obama swore, he acquired the powers of the presidency. Right? Wrong. In fact, Obama never actually swore the oath of office. What he said, confirmed by video footage, was this:

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the Office of President of the United States faithfully, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To paraphrase Bill O'Reilly, "I don't know what that is, I've never seen that." What the Constitution requires is this:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The word "faithfully" must precede "execute" for the oath to be valid. Therefore, Barack Hussein Obama does not currently have the powers of the president; rather, Joseph Robinette Biden does. Until Obama recites the oath correctly, Biden is acting president.

Hail to the Chief!

No Peeking!

2009-01-16T10:10:00.003+08:00

I like how he's kinda peering over the taskbar. The All-Seeing is pleased.The background is the new, gorgeous, high-resolution official portrait of Obama. Get it here. Even (and maybe especially) if you don't support Obama's policies, you can't deny the ironic and aesthetic value of such a desktop.