Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

Corea: Toe may toe Toe mah toe

looky

From an article by Barbara Demick at The Los Angeles Times on Sep 15, 2003
(reprinted here at The Boston Globe):

… Korean scholars and politicians … have begun a drive to change
the official English-language name of their country to Corea.

The seemingly arcane campaign is based on an increasingly prevalent belief
that the original spelling with the letter C was switched to Korea by the
Japanese at the start of their 1910-45 occupation of the peninsula, so that
their colonial subjects would not precede them in the English alphabetical
hierarchy.

“Has it ever occurred to Koreans that they’ve been duped by an urban
legend?” wrote one critic on an English-language site. “That Japan would
change the spelling so that it comes after in English is laughable. This
seems like an invented story by some who have too much time on their
hands.”

The debate is moot in the Korean language, which has an entirely different alphabet.

Notice they mention it’s moot in the Korean language, but never mention it is also moot in the Japanese language… maybe not as moot since almost everyone in Japan at least knows the Latin alphabet, even if they can’t read English.

Maybe it’s because pointing that out suggests there is some merit to this goofy conspiracy theory. Or maybe it’s because any deeper analysis leads to much much uglier conclusions.

Think about it: if renaming Corea to Korea was really to make the country come after Japan in the English alphabet, why stop there? Japanese Imperialism is not the anemic garbage we are used to from America and the British Empire. When the Japanese army occupied China, they blew up railways and blamed it on bandits. They enslaved Korean women into brothels.

And it’s not just Japan. China under Mao invaded Tibet and killed everyone in the Buddhist-run pacifist government, then they burned everything with Tibetan language on it, and then they forcibly resettled ethnic Chinese families to breed out the Tibetan culture. If you want the express summary in under 2 hours, go rent Scorsese’s
Kundun. Intra-Asian racial politics make the Balkans look like a kindergarten. They play for keeps over there!

So- do you really think the Imperial Japanese in the early 20th century are going to change just the spelling of Korea if it was that big a deal to them? They probably would have just renamed the entire country to something like “Western Colony”. Of course, if there still was a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the grateful citizens of that utopia would probably all be speaking Japanese anyway.

Why Are We Always At CostCo?

looky

I was in the bathroom and ran out of toilet paper. My brother was reading comics in the next room.

BRIAN: Dude? I’m out of toilet paper!
KIRBY: Oh yeah?
BRIAN: Can you pass me some from the closet?
KIRBY: How about paper towels? Would that work?
BRIAN: NO. Just hand me a roll man, I know we have some…
KIRBY: How about Q-Tips?
BRIAN: …
BRIAN: Are there a lot?

Jasper’s Car Wreck

looky

I sent out a notice on the company email last week about the critical blood shortage at Stanford Hospital. I tried to make it not too aggressive:

Public service announcement:

Stanford Blood Bank is desperately low on O-positive and O-negative blood. If you have this blood type, or know someone who does, your community needs you!

Note I am not organising a blood drive- you don’t need to tell me you are going to go give blood! Making an appointment is easy and you can do it on their web site-

http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/

If you don’t know anything about blood, this means if you’re of type O and you’re planning to get in a big car wreck, you’d probably want to do it somewhere besides the peninsula. So this morning I get this email from this guy at the company:

Hi Brian,

I understand you’re enthusiastic about this program, but I still think this is not the appropriate forum
for announcements like this. You might want to try Craig’s list or something like that.

Cheers,
Jasper

What an asshole!

Money in “Alien”

looky

In the Alien series, they talk a lot about “The Company” and its “shares” but they never rely on exposition. Why are shares so important? I have a theory.

“The Company” is the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, an immense corporate conglomerate based on real-life zaibatsu. The Company has an extremely diverse range of products and services, so they handle a lot of shipping, entire colonies on extra-solar planets, and even have their own military fleet. All the characters in the first, second, and fourth movies work for The Company, and the characters in the third movie are prisoners in a penitentary owned by The Company. A large part of Company employee compensation is based on issuance of “shares,” I am assuming shares in the company.

In the Alien setting, the economy of human civilization is dependent on interstellar shipping, but they do not have faster-than-light travel. The crew spends the majority of their multi-year voyages in hibernation pods, a notion popularised in 2001. What this means is the crew of any round-trip voyage is potentially gone for decades at a time and only ages a few months. When the main character “Ripley” (played by Sigourney Weaver) is lost in space in between the first and second movies, she is gone for 80 years and only has aged a few weeks. Upon her return she finds that her daughter has died of old age.

So, imagine you are one of these people on the crew of a freighter, and every time you complete a shipment you are gone for a decade. If you were paid primarily with a standard salary, by the time you get back your savings will be worth nothing, due to basic inflation.

But since a share of stock represents a partial ownership in the company (even a constant percentage of the company), as long as the company exists and grows with the economy, your stake is secure. Since Weyland-Yutani has a monopoly in a number of markets it will be around for a while. And since a share of stock usually has a dividend associated with it, this makes up for your crappy slave-level “normal” freighter crew salary. If the stock splits while you are gone for 20 years, you could be pleasantly suprised when you wake up on Earth.

See, it all makes sense.

In the Alien series, they talk a lot about “The Company” and its “shares” but they never rely on exposition.
Why are shares so important? I have a theory.

That Wacky AntiChrist

looky

How’s this for “Tinfoil-hat”? From an article at Cutting Edge, a web publication which calls itself “Spiritual Insights Into The NEW WORLD ORDER You’ll Find So Startling You’ll Never Look At The News The Same Way Again” (I like to call it “S.I.I.T.N.W.O.Y.F.S.S.Y.N.L.A.T.N.T.S.W.A.” for short):

The following article is part of a series of articles relating to an Illuminati plan to ignite Jupiter as a “sign in the heavens” that will herald the coming of the New Age Christ [Antichrist]. You should read all related articles to get the full picture and understand why we reported it….

Alright that’s enough of that…

The ten-second version: the bad guys are going to light up the gasses of Jupiter like a big beacon to signal the coming of the AntiChrist, which, yes, comes at the End Of The World. You have got to check out that page just for the diagrams alone. Awesome. Sort of evocative of Alex Chiu’s Immortality Device or the TimeCube.

There is something nice about the symmetry of signalling the coming of the AntiChrist with a big new star- just as the Star of Bethlehem signalled the coming of Christ, according to legend. So, style points there.

However this idea does sound suspiciously like Arthur C Clarke’s 2010, in which Jupiter gets turned into a new star by aliens, so I have to deduct some points for plagerism. Maybe someone got stoned while watching TNT and 700 Club at the same time and got mixed up or something.

And, if you want to get even MORE obscure, Arthur C Clarke wrote ANOTHER story called “The Star” in which scientists visit a remote world on which an entire civilization was killed by its star going nova- and they find out that star was the Star of Bethlehem. A theme of the story being, what kind of God kills an entire civilization to signal something? I guess you could relate this to the Quran’s mention of how the djinn were the first race created on earth, and were made out of fire, but yadda yadda.

SHAC: And then?

The ten-second version: the bad guys are going to light up the gasses of Jupiter like a big beacon to signal the coming of the AntiChrist, which, yes, comes at the End Of The World.