I must confess, one of the features of the new Wordpress that has directly contributed to the vitality of my resurrected blog is the “scheduled post” feature. Basically, I can write several posts at once when my creativity is high (typically on the weekends, when my mind is fresh and clean instead of worn out from a long day of selling my creativity for money)—and then schedule them to be posted on some day in the future.
Lately, I’ve been writing a week’s batch at once, then setting them to publish every other day throughout the week. This is handy because it only takes three posts two get through a week, and it also leaves every other day available in case I see something interesting that I want to publish right then. Otherwise, if creativity strikes during the week (or something vaguely interesting happens in my life), I just add it to the end of the scheduled posts queue. I’m writing this post, for example, more than a week before it will actually get published.
It’s definitely a useful feature, in a number of different ways.
Today I discovered an interesting new Internet phenomenon. You know how the IM generation has all these abbreviations and slang that would be completely incomprehensible to an English speaker of a decade or so ago? (Like “w00t! pwned j00, lol. gg, thx. omg, ttyl, gtg.”) Apparently, a similar thing has been happening to Chinese, although of course producing different fake-ola words and in different ways—and recently, the word they’ve been using to describe this Chinese “‘leet speak” is 火星文—literally, Martian.
Some of the words are created by using a combination of Roman letters and numbers that sound similar to Chinese words. For example, “3Q” means “thank you”, with the three pronounced in Chinese as “san” (making “san-kyu”). “QK” means “take a break”, because it sounds similar to “xiu xi”, which is Mandarin for the same.
Other words are pictograms or emoticons, much like how a semicolon and parenthesis can become a smiley-face. “VoV” represents a person (the “o”) holding up two V-for-victory signs with either hand. “Orz” means “I bow to you in thanks”, with the “o” again representing the head, the “r” the torso, and the “z” the kneeling legs. This blog has a lot of different examples and explanations.
According to pinyin.info, some of these neologisms were actually “included in the Chinese-language section of this year’s college-entrance exam for Taiwan”. Needless to say, that didn’t last long.
But who knows—will English exams someday require knowledge of “wtf” and “omgz0rs” to pass? Well, maybe when Chinese Martians attack.
I’ve never been particularly proud of my home state of Arkansas. I like it and all—it’s particularly beautiful in the fall—but I wouldn’t want to live there myself. The summers are too hot and humid, and I really do like the big city lifestyle. Little Rock just doesn’t cut it. But last week, my home town made me proud.
You may have heard of Westboro Baptist Church, the Jesus-loving folks who picket military funerals and protest at various events with signs such as “Fags Doom Nations” and “You’re Going To Hell”. It turns out that on September 19th, the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a nonprofit group of professionals that exists “to promote high standards among opinion writers and editors”, was having a conference in Little Rock. The WBC, of course, decided to show up with the usual signs and pickets to protest those evil editorial writers, who apparently are “responsible for the satanic milieu in this evil land”.
Well, it turns out that September 19th also happens to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Now, the Central Arkansas Pastafarians, worshipers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, consider Talk Like a Pirate Day to be a religious holiday of sorts, as His Noodly Greatness has decreed that “full pirate regalia” is the official religious dress of the sect. So, these FSM-fearing Pastafarians decided to get to work.
Dressed (of course) in their official religious attire, both commemorating the holiday and showing their religious devotion, they staged a counter-protest. Armed with signs such as “God Hates Shrimp” (quoting Leviticus) and “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, they “waved swords and growled ‘Arrghh!’ in a manner that would have made Abbie Hoffman proud.” (Arkansas Times)
With cars honking and waving at the pirates and a TV crew giving them all the attention, the Phelps group … picked up their “fag” epithets and went away.
“They didn’t know what to do,” a pirate named Boatswain (aka Gerry Schulze) tells The Pitch. “We decided that the best way to handle them was ridicule. They had not earned our hatred, only our ridicule and perhaps our contempt.”
Thanks, Arkansas Pastafarians, for making me proud. May His Noodly Appendage bless you and keep you, Ramen.
Last week, I hobnobbed with all the “who’s who” of Seattle’s Japanese community. My conversation partner invited me to be his guest at a formal reception at the Japanese Consulate for the most recent addition to the list of Japanese astronauts—Akihiko Hoshide.
When we arrived at the Consulate, it was a little different than we had imagined. Nearly everyone else there was dressed in a full suit and jacket. The Consulate itself was not a large office building, but rather a very charming Tudor-style mansion, with a garden in the back overlooking the Sound. The room where the reception was being held contained about a hundred fancy chairs, a grand piano, a large buffet table featuring a gourmet mix of traditional Japanese cuisine, and a handful of caterers, wandering around offering people drinks. We had arrived fairly early, so we grabbed a couple of drinks and went outside to the garden, to enjoy the view and avoid some of the suffocating atmosphere.
Finally we gathered up our courage and found seats right in the front row—right behind Mr. Hoshide himself, in fact. The Japanese Consulate-General introduced Mr. Hoshide, in a long and carefully-prepared English introduction. He told of Mr. Hoshide’s birth in Tokyo, his early few years in New Jersey, his visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida when he was four years old that first hooked him on the idea of space flight, his return to Japan and education in Singapore, and joked about his name (a pun for “to the stars”) being fate.
Mr. Hoshide himself had a video presentation showing—from take-off to touch-down—his trip to the International Space Station. He narrated it himself, describing the purpose of his mission—to add a new Japanese-designed module (room) to the space station—and sharing amusing anecdotes about the flight and the experience. I had previously thought that the primary reason people went into space nowadays was just to walk around and stuff, so it was fascinating to me how his two weeks on the space station were packed solid with important things to do (from repair work to adding the new module to the station to all sorts of things) nearly every hour of the day.
Afterwards, the chairs were cleared away and a toast was announced. Shouts of “kanpai” filled the air as glasses were lifted, and the astronaut was given a cheer of celebratory congratulations. At that point a line started for the food, but N. and I sought out Mr. Hoshide’s wife. N. had earlier mentioned that he had glanced at Mr. Hoshide’s face during the video of the rocket launching into the air, and he had a look of sublime rememberance in his face. I mentioned that his wife must have similarly been remembering the experience, and it was probably a less sublime experience for her!
So N. and I managed to chat with her for quite a while about her thoughts on the flight—all in Japanese, of course! I understood the general topics of conversation, which was encouraging, but I must confess I didn’t add much myself. We got a chance to talk at length on a number of different subjects, until finally she was called away for pictures. N. and I waited patiently and we too had our pictures taken! I had never imagined that I would someday have my picture taken with somebody who had been to outer space. It was actually quite thrilling!
One last highlight of the evening—my old Japanese teacher (あかさか先生) was there! I spoke with her, half in Japanese, half in English, talking about the presentation and catching up in general.
All in all, it was a thoroughly unique, enjoyable, exciting experience and opportunity. ありがとうございました。
Fall is my favorite season, by far. That first day after a long, hot summer, when you step outside and feel a bit of a chill in the air that makes you step back with surprise—the sound of crunchy leaves, swirling here and there in little piles, colors golden brown and red and yellow—curling up on the couch with a good book and a warm blanket—the joyous realization that you’ll never be unbearably hot again for a long, long time—
it’s a beautiful time of year. It feels festive! It’s harvest time, and the colors of nature and the brisk cool feeling remind you of that fact in every moment.
According to J., this is the same story I tell every autumn—but then, when winter comes, I insist that winter is and always has been my favorite season, and that although I love fall, I never thought of it as my favorite. (How faithless and fickle!) But right now, at the cusp of the change in seasons, such a claim seems ridiculous. “Winter?!” I ask, incredulous. Certainly winter is a wonderful time of year, and I love nearly everything about it. But how can it compare with the magic of autumn! I can’t ever imagine loving winter more …
So, you all are my witnesses—right now, at least, I firmly believe that fall is my favorite season of all. If January comes along and I’m going on about how fall was never really that great, but winter! that’s the most wonderful time of the year—feel free to point me towards this post and feed me a healthy dose of my own words. (J. is planning on taking a screenshot, just so I can’t retroactively alter this post. That might not be a bad idea.)
Apparently there is a language, spoken in parts of Scotland, called Ulster Scots. It could be considered a variant of the Scots language, or a dialect of English. Here is an amusing job listing, requiring someone who is fluent in both English and Ulster Scots:
I didn’t even realize he was still president of South Africa. He was going on ten years as president, there. I mean, that’s not exactly Robert Mugabe lengths, but it’s still longer than I expected. Thank heavens we have term limits in the US …
Back in high school, “Wol Emulov” was my rock music stage name. I’ve finally set up my “home studio” here and recorded a couple of songs under the same alias. They’re nothing that impressive, but if I’d waited until they were perfect, they probably would never get recorded. So, here are a couple of imperfect recordings of yours truly:
Managing and modeling a lot of data in a usable way is a hard problem. In my current project, I have a lot of information from various sources about Japanese characters (kanji). Every character has a list of “readings”, or pronunciations. Every character has a list of basic meanings, and then some of the readings have additional (different) meanings.
Most characters are composite characters—they’re a combination of other characters with other meanings. Sometimes the meanings of the other characters are related—for example, “bird” + “tree” means to flock or gather together. Sometimes the connection isn’t immediately obviously, but it makes a good mnemonic—such as “woman” + “child” means to like or be fond of. Others seem completely unrelated—such as “new” + “axe”, which means place or location—but you can still form a reasonable mnemonic (e.g. “Using an axe, I make a new place for myself to live”).
To further complicate things, some of the components are not characters themselves, but “radicals”—combinations of strokes that, by themselves don’t really mean anything, but are present in many kanji. These radicals have names and meanings too, but often they’re more related to the shape or look of the radical than any meaning they give the kanji of which they’re a part.
Then there’s all the stroke information about the characters. How do you draw this character? Which strokes go in which order? How many strokes are there? And what’s the best way to represent a “stroke” in a computer format, so I can display it later? And, finally, other miscellaneous tidbits of information, such as the approximate frequency with which this kanji appears, or the Unicode value of the character.
Currently, my kanji quiz program has all this information, but it’s all scattered in dozens of different text files from numerous different sources. Every time a bit of information is needed, my program scans through the text files, slowly hunting for the thing it needs. This makes the program hideously slow in some cases (up to five or ten seconds to display all the information about a single character).
So, I’m working on a way to represent all this data in a consistent, easy to manipulate, easy to read format—preferably, a format that can be eventually stored in a database for fast retrieval. That should speed up my program by at least an order of magnitude (much less than a second to display the most complicated kanji).
But it’s a hard problem to figure out the best way to store all this information. I’ll probably be working on it for quite some time.
The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day they felt ready.
The Japanese won by a mile.
Afterward, the American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.
The consultant’s finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering.
After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the consultants concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the American team. So as race day neared again the following year, the American team’s management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.
The next year, the Japanese won by two miles.
Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.
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