Here are some links I’ve found in a morning of web-wide wanderings. CIA interest in blogs seems to be rising. Machine Translation is beginning to develop phrase-based systems, supposedly to help eliminate ambiguity. What’s the connection? Both seem to me to open the doors for some pretty scary stuff. The CIA monitoring blog content is one thing, but with the rising rightwing’s neglect of things like, say, civil rights and freedoms, I think the possibility of Chinese-styled censorship is not necessarily a thing only of SF… not in the the mid-range future, anyway. Of course, it needn’t be full-on suppression, …
Author: gordsellar
Iraq Insanity
Yeah, everything’s under control. Sure. I’m wondering what’s in the water being drunk by people who still think this isn’t a madhouse mess.
Hey, Look!
Yeah, this has to be a joke. I hope. Or they’re doomed.
Strange Afghani Expedition
There’s a weird but interesting expedition being documented over at a page calledTravel Afghanistan. A small proportion of Afghan children have a distinctively European appearance, sometimes blonde or red-haired, quite different from the dark Asian looks of most Afghans. Western explorers have always wondered whether they might be descended from the Greek soldiers in Alexander’s army whom we know settled in Asia. The Afghans themselves are proud of this tradition: Marco Polo records that in the thirteenth century the Kings of Badakshan (the remote eastern part of Afghanistan that abuts China) claimed descent from the Greek conqueror. These people may …
Weird Exciting News
This is almost too unbelievable to be true. I was at the hospital to get a new splint because the one I’d had on for two weeks had begun to smell a little. After a conversation or two in the waiting hallway with some ajummas and halmeonis and ajeoshis (listed in order of interest), I finally got in to see a different doctor than the one I’d seen two weeks ago. Well, when I did get in to see him I told him explicitly that I just wanted a new splint, and would return in a week for an X-Ray …
Too Many Boys
I realize reading this article, “A Dangerous Surplus of Sons?”, that while I thought I was being negative about the sex-imbalance in Asia—the fact that there are going to be far too many more men than women in places like China and India—I was being a little too optimistic, in fact. One question occurs to me. If skewed sex-selection is going to engender a global epidemic, might it become necessary for families outside of these countries to select female children proactively? Could some kind of immigration system be set up to defuse the situation? This might sound crazy, but after …
Dyson On Green
A review of Brian Green’s latest physics popularization by Freeman J. Dyson. I have a book in my bookshelf waiting for me to read, by this Green guy. Hm. I wish I had more books by Dyson, actually. He’s fascinating. Especially The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet, which I think is the title of one of his monographs. Ah, yes, it is. My old online acquaintance Stefan sent me a tape of the title lecture of this book and I loved it dearly. Wow, Stefan’s written a lot of reviews over at Amazon.
The Flagellant
There are a lot of wonderful things to say about Christianity and Christians. I’ve said some of them before. So now I’m going to sternly warn a small segment of the population that is not-so-wonderful. For its own good. Among the many sane and normal and wonderful Christians of the world, there is a specific group of Christians who are mad. They are insane. They seem like the average sort who are concerned with keeping up with the Joneses, meaning they’re not especially pious or concerned with that scripture actually means. They’re almost never antimaterialist, they’re almost never anticapitalist, though …
Homogeneity, Culture, Conservativism, The Rebel, and Korea
Not sure to what degree any of this is true, but here are a few lines that occurred to me and I may (or may not) use it in that essay I’m writing about interracial relationship politics in South Korea. Criticism of this is welcome and invited; and I am thinking I need to borrow those Camus books about the Rebel from John so I can write this properly. Anyway, here it is: In Korean culture, it often seems as if nonconformity must take on a form of guerrila warfare in order to survive the generalized pressure to conform. By …
Two More Lovely Moments
You’re sitting in the theater waiting for the Turkish movie to begin and the two Korean guys sitting next to you hear you talking to one of the film festival volunteers in simple Korean and decides to strike up a coversation with you, and it’s actually mostly comprehensible both ways. One guy’s a waiter and the other, the one more into it, is a farmer. They stumbled onto this Turkish movie by chance, knowing nothing of the film festival, and decided to give it a go. They’re amused by the fact a Canadian foreigner doesn’t mind being mistaken for an …