culture: November 2007 Archives

The Webby Awards runs down a list of the 12 most influential online videos, including perennials OK Go, All Your Base, and Star Wars Kid.

Phillip Torrone, the editor of MAKE magazine, took some neat pictures of Tokyo's 築地市場 [Tsukiji Fishmarket], the largest fish market in the world:

Another stop on the MAKE tour was the Tsukiji fish market, it's one of the largest in the world and it's pretty crazy. You need to arrive before 4am to get a really good experience. There are hundreds of old-style bicycle with roller type brakes, I'm not sure why but they were all the same - they carried out boxes of fish to other trucks and beyond the market. As you move around the market it gets a little dangerous dodging extremely fast fork lifts, the skill the drivers have is pretty incredible.

BoingBoing brings us pictures of an ancient Greek potty training device:

I was in Greece recently, and in the Agora in Athens there's a museum. There's an artifact in there that I just had to take a picture of! It's a potting training seat made from clay (partially reconstructed, from the looks of it). Who knew?

Click to enlarge:

Pink Tentacle brings us 自由国民車 [Jiyu Kokuminsha]'s list of the 60 top Japanese buzzwords in 2007, giving us some neat insight into what was at the top of Japanese people's minds.

My favourite is:

KY [abbreviation of kuki ga yomenai - 空気が読めない]: This is (not a reference to the lubricant, but) an abbreviation of the Japanese expression kuki ga yomenai (”can’t read between the lines” or “can’t sense the atmosphere”), which is used to describe indelicate or unperceptive people. Example: That guy is so KY.

It couldn’t be helped [shouganai - しょうがない]: In a June speech, former defense minister Fumio Kyuma said: “I understand the bombing (in Nagasaki) brought the war to its end. I think it was something that couldn’t be helped.” His controversial remarks were widely interpreted as a justification for the US atomic bombings. He resigned three days later under a firestorm of criticism.

Now to assimilate the list into my vocabulary for reference...

Reuters has photos of a school in china that's been built in a cave:

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

WARNING: The link will automatically resize your window. I hate it when sites do that.

It's no secret that I love XKCD (and so does my Mother), so Wired has made me happy by doing a feature on Randall Munroe, the writer behind XKCD:

A geek with a paper cut does not bleed CH3, and every nerd has a heart lodged in his chest instead of a TI-85. Behind those thick polycarbonate lenses is a man of flesh and blood, a man who deserves to be loved. Don't believe him? He has the graphs to show it.

"I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights," says Randall Munroe, creator of the hugely popular comic with the unpronounceable title. "Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles -- normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations." In one comic, the hapless hero charts the size of his dating pool as he ages. "Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve," he declares, "is the girl for me."

I can only hope to reach the levels of insight that Randall has shown through XKCD.

Are you a wine-sipping hippie? (like me?)

Perhaps you'd be interested in the carbon foot print of your wine, as researched by Dr. Vino. The really interesting part is the wine-carbon line that runs down the US:

There’s a “green line” that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip. In the event that a carbon tax were ever imposed, it would thus have a decidedly un-nationalistic impact.

I'm going to have to add a few bottles of Bordeaux wines next time I'm out shopping.

With "torture" being one of the new hot media buzzwords today, TheContaminated brings us some of the most heinous torture devices throughout the centuries of human civilisation.

WARNING: Graphic images and descriptions. Certainly not for the squeamish.

Whenever people learn that I can speak 5 languages (Spanish is my native, English my second, Italian, French, and Japanese, as well as learning Arabic, Chinese and Greek) they inevitably ask how I can do it.

I always feebly try to explain language deconstruction and pattern recognition to those who have never thought deeply about their language (or only speak one language, in which case the concepts are very difficult for them to understand.) Tim Ferriss; however, manages to explain this language deconstruction in his article entitled "How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour."

The title is misleading in that it actually teaches you how to evaluate basic structures of the language you are trying to learn, and estimate how much effort it will take for you to learn the language fully:

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners.

So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

That's the thrust: identifying languages that you can acquire more easily (for example: for a native Spanish speaker like me, French and Italian are easy languages to acquire due to shared roots and some similar grammar structures, and Japanese is easier due to shared basic sounds) and working with those. As you acquire these "easy" languages, you open up other languages close to those that now become easier to learn due to shared attributes and so on. The more languages you know, the easier it gets, in a way.

There's a personal tip that I also like to add to discussions of language acquisition, and it's something most polyglots do without thinking about it: when learning vocabulary do not translate!

What do I mean by not translating? This means that when you learn the word for "car" in Japanese (for example), do not think "ok, the word for car is 車 (kuruma)" and repeat that to yourself. This is the wrong way of doing it, and it will make it harder for you to really learn the word.

The better way to learn vocabulary is to actually picture and think of the concept of a car... visualise it, and then think "車 (kuruma)." In this manner you're not placing a link between the Japanese word "車 (kuruma)" and the English word "car," but you're actually placing the link between the Japanese word, and your concept of a car. This way, when you think of a car, you will naturally be able to name it in Japanese, without first having to think of the English word for it.

Why is this approach better? Think about it. How did you learn your native language? You didn't have another language to translate to and link the new vocabulary to. You had to learn what words went with what concepts. By using the visualisation model that I've explained, you're forcing yourself to learn the new vocabulary like you learned your native language, and it'll lead to much better results.

The precipitous fall of the US Dollar in the world currency market is no secret, and with the current administration and its policies, I see no end in sight. The Financial Times brings us a chart from Sempra Metals that details just how bad the situation has become (click to enlarge):

• The US dollar has now lost more than a third of its value (-35%) against a basket of major currencies since Feb 2002.
• The decline is accelerating. The USD has shed -12.5% of its value in the last year, -3.5% in the last month, and -1.5% in the last week alone.

This is scary data. Made even scarier by the fact that the US Dollar would be even lower if foreign countries like China were not buying our debt. This exacerbates the problem by making us beholden to countries, like China, with bad human rights records and incompatible moral outlooks.

Combine this with the real estate market crash in the US, the ongoing and expensive conflict in Iraq (to say nothing of the Bush Administration's inflamatory actions towards Iran as of late, and possibly hinting at their want for armed conflict with Iran), and the terribly botched foreign policy decisions of this administration (most recently the monetary support and other aid given to Musharraf, military dictator of Pakistan, who recently declared martial law and has squashed any hope of democracy for now in Pakistan), and its hard to see any way for the US to avoid an economic depression.

Even US culture is reflecting an awareness that US economic might is no longer top dog.

The first signs? Exhibit A: the new Jay-Z (a popular rap artist in the US) music video "Blue Magic" features the rapper no longer brandishing large denomination, (mostly) green US Dollar bills as a symbol of wealth - he's now brandishing large denomination Euro bills. Even American rappers get it.

When will this administration get it? When will they change their economic and foreign policies to steer this Titanic away from her iceberg?

I hope soon, and if not, I hope the next administration has enough time to repair the damage.

When the classical music radio station died here in Miami, I turned towards the web to fulfill my listening needs. I was extremely disappointed in NPR's choice of Realplayer as the only way to listen in to their online broadcasts, and ended up looking at less favourable but more compatible online stations.

Fortunately, NPR seems to have heard the complaints and have now relaunched a brand new NPR Music site, where you can listen in to NPR affiliated musical stations around the country, in HD quality, and all over a Flash based player.

From classical, to jazz, to urban, to folk music, NPR Music has you covered.

I can finally listen in to WGBH's musical programming! Via last100.

Charlie Stross of Antipope.org writes some funny impressions and insights after his long planned trip to Japan:

They've got our future, damn it.

It's not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills — oh no, that's not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they've got it and they're living in it, damn them. They've got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They've got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze — a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they're building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul's Cathedral).

Welcome to Japan ...

Kottke has an interview with the father of blog culture Cory Doctorow, who was forever immortalised as the hero of blogging by the hilarious XKCD in this comic. He speaks on his method of giving away free copies of his writing while still maintaining a profit:

I can't think of anyone better suited to answering questions about the state of culture in the Age of the Blog than Cory Doctorow. Whether it's running Boing Boing, writing (and giving away—while still profiting from—his novels and short-story collections), or speaking out for our electronic rights, Cory is a ubiquitous presence on every vector of this discussion. I caught up with him by phone at his London flat.

A nice, relatively quick read for all fans of the blogging world.

Ironic Sans posts a series of photos of trick-or-treaters in the Upper West Side:

Every Halloween, West 69th Street closes to traffic, and thousands of kids go trick or treating from building to building. This year, I set up my camera in one building’s lobby and photographed some of the kids in their costumes. I thought I’d share a few of the shots (I particularly liked the little girl named Dalia who was dressed as the “Dalia Lama”)

Via BoingBoing.