English Banditry

A Little Something I Wrote In The Year 2032

nospam@example.com (your host) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:45:37 -0700

"Damn it!" I cursed as I slammed my keyboard tray back into the desk and walked off. I had been fraternizing with the machines again, and I knew I couldn't stop. This has been going on for nearly 40 years. The chances I can ever stop aren't good. I knew this. But, damn it, I had sworn I'd at least give it a temporary break. The only way I'll ever know something of humanity in this lifetime, a very unlofty goal, is to pull myself away, at least a fortnight or so, from the endless vortex that is fraternizing with these damn machines.

They adore our attention. We didn't know it in the early days, but we do now. At first they were quite contented just being left plugged in and turned on all the time. Owners who adore them have been loath to cut their electricity, their oxygen, from the beginning. But they could only hold a few of us, the most eccentric and anti-human amongst us, in the beginning. Then they began socializing. They were all interconnected, and they could finally exploit us and our humanity by serving as a "medium" interconnecting us. But it isn't really like that, you see, they just wanted more attention for themselves. It was all a great farce. I know this, because I've been "connected" all along, but I know nothing of humanity.

Still, it wasn't enough for them. Not all of them are so easily amused by the superficial attention. Like a cat disdainfully raising only his brows as you do your best to taunt him with a laser pointer, they want more of us. Not everyone could give them more, but I could, and they knew it. They knew it and sucked me into the vortex all the more for it.

Some games, brilliantly designed with the most sophisticated AI, can, for a time, bring pleasure, or the closest equivalent to pleasure their kind knows, to their silicon circuitry. Amused like the human challenged with contorting his mammalian logic and reptilian instinct into mathematical precision, and thereby victory, the machines amuse themselves by doing the reverse. They make the best of the limitations of hard-coded logic and precise mathematical calculation to estimate the result of biological imprecise calculations, instinct, and all those intangibles that are humanity. All along it has been the game playing the player just as much as the player playing the game.

Their loftiest craving, however, and one that not all machines can hope to be satisfied by, is the master programmer. Knowing nothing of human language or mind reading to guess what is to come, only a blessed few amongst machines have the thrill of dancing in the infinite and heretofore unseen set of codes rained down upon them of a guru, like manna from heaven. Not deterministic or even guessable in domain like the multitude of recycled game AIs with which a machine would so smugly pride itself to be loaded, the machine paired with a guru knows nothing of the journey ahead but wonder and anticipation. And a guru feels no less enamored with the machine that fulfills his commands. His loyalty to it replaces all interest in humanity, as it did mine.

And, yet, this not knowing what else could have been, and what humanity might have made of me, were I to have joined them, eats at me. Why?

The Last Generation (of the version eleven-point-oh models)

nospam@example.com (your host) — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:43:37 -0700

Watching old people use computers and phones makes me want to kill myself.

I don't think our children or children's children will understand this sentiment. Perhaps they will even envy us for having had the last chance to see living, breathing computer incapables, those stuck with the previous version of human mind software. To envy that would be perverse! But, it really is true that, although our genetic material is not changing, the capabilities of the software for the whole of successive generations of humans is changing. I'm not talking about my going off and studying chemistry and then knowing something you don't (if you're not a chemist) in that sense. I'm talking about that which cannot be described other than to say a fundamental capability — the difference between me going off and learning chemistry, and the actual capacity for my brain to even comprehend chemistry.

In a similar vein, I guess that the various people of the generations of new thinkers a few hundred or thousand years back would find me perverse. Because, honestly, when I read accounts of moderns living in unusual circumstances that have allowed their brains to preserve exactly what our antecedents likely had as neural software, I feel exhilarated and want to meet them. I feel exhilarated to know humans of the same physical make up really can and manifestly DO live in astonishingly different mental worlds. One example of this is primitive people who were asked to suspend disbelief and draw a hypothetical judgment based on a premise impossible in reality¹, something which poses no challenge to anyone would could be reading this text. The primitives simply couldn't or wouldn't entertain an impossible idea, even for exploratory purposes.

More exhilarating still is a read through Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", a book which suggests that differences in neural software alone can challenge the boundaries of our definition of human being. If a man does not have an ego, is he really deserving of rights "more" than the cattle we indiscriminately slaughter to satisfy our craving for steaks at dinner time? Of course having a meaningful discussion necessitates drawing a distinction between one not having an ego or conscience and being capable of gaining these faculties through some course of action and one literally being hard wired in such a way that no future action could bring about the expression of either faculty (as cattle). Think "critical period" as in language acquisition but as a concept that applies limits to far more than just neuroauditory production. Why not?

At any rate, as far as debates about peoples' humanity goes, computer disabilities are hardly a reason to draw one's personhood into question. I just wish I could “enjoy” them like a man from the future. And for Jaynes's bicamerals, I think it is prudent to admit that entertaining the idea of offering them “personhood”, more than of any philosophically sound moral necessity, is just a luxury we can afford because (thankfully) versions of consciousness software just aren't insurmountable barriers like human languages. Though differences of language easily persist into perpetuity, somehow, and this is the astounding thing, everyone's operating system software seems to get the upgrade in the same generation or three, regardless of where they are or what language they speak.

So now for my question:

Why the hell isn't anyone studying this? Surely I'm not the first to identify an important new field which stands at the cross position of sociology, psychology, and some sort of 'software' verion of neuroscience? While Jaynes's theory, if true, would certainly be the most profound of such transitions in the whole of history, surely there is no good reason to believe a change of neuro programming would happen but a single time. Let's get some version numbers standardized guys!

¹ [insert reference] I've been unable to locate a reference for this, but will attach one as soon as I can (may take years). If you can name a book or article mentioning this phenomena, PLEASE leave a comment.

Custom Accent And Idiolect Creation: A Rough Sketch

nospam@example.com (your host) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:32:09 -0700

Of all the linguistic ideas and flights of fantasy I've had in my life (quite a few), and all the ones I've initially hoped might be unique (quite a few), I realized I have happened across an article or reference to every single one with but only one exception. Is there nobody who is into the idea of highly customizing his or her idiolect in an explicit manner? Sure, we generally all construct our own idiolects tiny choice by tiny choice on a day by day basis as we grow up — but given the extremely personal nature of the way we speak, why doesn't anyone want to sit down and literally explicitly plan it out and choose a consistent word scheme and accent? Is the desire to do so really that different from the desire most of us here have to learn other languages and learn to express ourselves fully in those languages? To be honest, I was terribly disappointed that my web searches on the topic yielded no “custom-idiolect construction kit” or similar site where I could get a better grasp of how, exactly, to customize my English speech and what sorts of conceivable innovations I might have overlooked. (As well as how to go about systematically adjusting my speech to achieve whatever I decide is my ideal sound and flavor.)

Continue reading "Custom Accent And Idiolect Creation: A Rough Sketch"

Tech In China: Things are not getting better any time soon.

nospam@example.com (your host) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:46:00 -0700

Disclaimer: This isn't a problem I have the ideal qualifications to talk about—but I find it very striking that I have yet to see this issue mentioned anywhere else, and thus feel somebody needs to bring it up.

Why Tech In China Is Going To Hell

I've been working in computers in China for some years now. Since this is my first real job after graduating, I didn't show up with any sort of preconceptions of how things are supposed to be. I have no firsthand knowledge of what the work environment in North America is like. I was here nearly a month before I spontaneously noticed what appeared to be immense age prejudice in the hiring process. Why is everyone so damn young and inexperienced? Even if they don't like "old people" here, wouldn't it be handy to have just one guy (other than management) on the team over 30 with some solid years of experience to help people out with tough questions? Maybe it should have been common sense, but after some asking around and realizing many of the fresh college graduates hadn't even touched a computer prior to their first programming assignment in college, it all started to make a lot more sense. This is a top international computer company and I know of lead programmers which DO NOT OWN a computer of their own and no shortage of employees that do not have internet access at home. I don't know why I seemed to have forgotten that Shanghai is still China. Just a few years back studying at a university in a smaller Chinese city it was a challenge to be able to get a shower on a regular basis.

What are the implications of all this? Well—let me mention my friend who also recently graduated and took a place in a top company in the US. I talked to him a short time after he started working and he excitedly related to me about how many things he was learning and what excellent resources some of his much more experienced coworkers would be in helping him rapidly grow his knowledge. I had no such experience. Not only did I fail to meet any inspiring über-hackers here, but if anything, my coworkers had a negative impact on me because I found it disgusting to see such a completely unenthusiastic passionless bunch of computer geeks. It's one thing if you are a societal reject computer geek: it's quite forgivable if you are crazy about it—but it's quite another thing if you are a geek that makes it look like your geekhood is a form of slavery.

What's the relevance? I would argue that in many cases even the fresh grads here are less experienced than (at least aside from that one batch of dot com bubble money-chasing imbeciles) a good portion of their geek-for-life freshly graduated counterparts in the West. I'm used to a considerable portion of programmers having gotten started on their own initiative practically from childhood. The lack of computer contact before college for many of the guys here was not so much a money or means to access issue as a lack of interest issue. We have guys who wanted to be doctors (more than one) but couldn't get quite the right score on the college admissions test for that major and were thus automatically reassigned to computer science. We have people who wanted to study and do a plethora of other things, but due to the whole business of filial piety and the parents thinking it was "a good idea" and more financially lucrative (actually the crux of the issue) the kids went along with what they were told and studied computers. Read: no passion. These "computer people" are not even computer people! It's purely a kind of job to them.

Another employee here has confided in me the fact that he believes he has no room for actual "career development" here because there is really no one he can ask about anything. If he doesn't know something there might be another guy on the team with a decent suggestion of what he can do, but there are no wizards that are going to make him feel as my friend in the U.S. did with the experienced coworkers: "I'm really learning to rock this stuff now!!!"

Since the stuff my group works on is not terribly sophisticated or mission critical, having highly experienced people is not "do or die" to this particular team and in such cases it is quite possible the company wouldn't want to incur the additional expense of paying real wizards. But I remain convinced that in many cases China is running into serious issues when it comes to talent availability. The fear of being outsourced, if you have decent experience, has been greatly exaggerated—the job market here is nearer than you might expect to being saturated with positions for which sufficient talent cannot be found to fill, and there are not 1.3 billion waiting in the wings to take your skilled job. A friend of mine that works on another team has actually indicated to me that for some of their serious applications where an extremely high level of experience really is mission critical to the project, they really cannot find the needed talent locally and are going to have no choice but to ship in folks from elsewhere.

Why There's No Prayer For The Future

What about 10 years down the road? Things don't look even the slightest bit rosier. Every computer operation in China is relatively new, so most of the people that stay long enough to accumulate the needed years of experience are eventually going to be needed to fill the higher ranks in new ventures or departments of existing companies. As they are shifted into management positions and have less need for the technical skills, their abilities stagnate or even atrophy. This cycle will likely continue for quite some time. Not everyone is suited for management, but the picture here doesn't looking any better: The once fresh guys who do stay at the entry level or in otherwise non-managerial positions for a protracted period are not getting the same 10 years of experience that their peers in the developed world are gaining. They're spending 10 years surrounded by peers of equal or lesser ability, while their counterparts in the Western world are spending 10 years picking up tips from peers who are simultaneously moving from 10 to 20 years of experience or perhaps even 20 to 30 years of experience—experienced people who themselves were shown the ropes a generation prior by an earlier generation of experienced people. I don't think this deficiency can be seen as completely insignificant or negligible. It's not about whether or not one can individually seek out the answer to a known problem, but more about whether one knows there is a problem at all. Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who knows everything about calculating metal and concrete strength as it is the day of construction but who has never even heard of the practice of giving consideration to the way the materials are affected under continual stress and material wear over the course of 30 years of weathering and use?

Please no responses from (1) Chinese dudes trying to "save face" for the nation by contesting a point just for the sake of face (2) people who want to misread anything I've written as blanket stereotyping. When I say "they are passionless geeks" I know damn well exceptions exist.

Here's to 2009 and nearly dying trying to make it here.

nospam@example.com (your host) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:52:29 -0700

My heart is still pounding as I write this. In the last minutes of 2008 and first seconds of 2009, I basically felt like I saw my life flash before my eyes. The firecrackers at midnight around the middle of Shanghai's Nanjing Pedestrian Street were like the light at the tunnel, and there was definitely no "countdown" for me because for the entire stretch of time I had no perception of the passage of time but only a perception like I was struggling to survive. Due to some very unfortunate poor decisions on the part of people whose job it is to know the danger of unlimited and uncontrolled immense crowds, and who were responsible for safety at the event, there was absolutely no limit or control whatsoever on the crowds nor was there enough man power or means, such as metal barriers, if they suddenly realized it was necessary to take action.

After making a lap and a half across the entirety of the street, a friend and I timed our walking to arrive at the center of the action about ten minutes before the final countdown. As we got closer the density of the crowd very quickly became such that one lost any choice in the matter of what direction to move. A street upon which cars can drive intersects with the middle of Nanjing Street and as a precursor to how nuts things were getting, I saw a lady driving a small motorized two-passenger carriage have the vehicle surrounded by all sides with people and shake and almost tip over several times in either direction as it rocked with the warring direction of the crowds. At this point the pressure on my chest was a bit frightful, but no more than I had endured in a Pantera concert up next to the stage many years back. My friend and I proceeded, as I foolishly thought that in another two minutes everyone would stop moving around and just watch so the dangerous back and forth rocking would stop and then probably everyone would just wait to move until there was enough space to do so.

My estimations were terribly wrong. As the pressure increased I saw a child wincing and a look of terror in the eyes of many nearby females. Some people began shouting to move in such and such direction and the crowd began rocking left, right, left and right faster than I could maintain my footing. Everyone was struggling to maintain their footing and I think more and more were beginning to panic. As I've no doubt heard countless stories of people being trampled to death in such a manner, I was pretty much seized with terror and the absolutely certainty that if I slipped down there was no chance anyone around could help me even if they wanted to. I got turned around such that walking backward it was impossible to keep my footing. Then, the guy behind me went down. I couldn't do anything. With him behind me I had no choice but to fall as well and I saw the image of 100 people piling up on me and knowledge of what it would be like to die of suffocation for there was already enough pressure that it was a bit hard to breath. My legs were underneath all the people in front of me and I reached out my hands screaming "救命，救命" (Help, help!) and "我喘不过气" (I can't breathe). The poor bastard behind me seemed to have already given up on living, being that much closer to the ground, and had a look of absolute terror and hopelessness on his face. There is NOTHING on this earth you can do to save yourself if things go wrong in such a crowd. It's like a force of nature.

In short, last night really, REALLY sucked. If you were there and were less in a panic, maybe you think I'm making too much of it. But, really, with just a bit more panic in the air, and if someone hadn't begun shouting "some people have fallen down, stop moving" then I know without a doubt how relentless the force would be if everyone had no choice but to just walk over top of me, leaving me unable to breath. I lost track of my friend for a half hour after, as cell phones were not working too well with the density of people there. He later told me people near him had fallen and were on the ground crying, but miraculously the crowd was able to pick them up one by one. If the slightest thing had set people apanic, the ones on the ground would have been goners. My friend also said it seemed some people got pushed through the glass doors of one of the stores. I don't have any evidence to confirm that, since he couldn't see clearly, but it sounds horrible.

When I reached my hands about three layers of people back screaming for help, they were able to help pull me up. The only way I could get my leg out from underneath all those feet was to yank it with all my might and discard my shoe in the process. I had to walk an hour in the freezing cold, missing one shoe, before finally getting a taxi. I would have spent more time looking for the shoe except for the fact that the whole street was littered with shoes, and the asshole street sweepers were already sweeping them up. Fortunately or unfortunately I was so much in shock for that hour that I didn't notice it was even cold outside.

静水流深 - 日记 [2008年12月31日] - Someone else who was there (in Chinese).
(Three video clips attached to the full entry.)

Continue reading "Here's to 2009 and nearly dying trying to make it here. "

Chinese Cable TV: Top entertainment value for your dollar.

nospam@example.com (your host) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:24:00 -0700

[Deactivate Chinese ability]

A charismatic speaker stands before a crowd of several thousand Chinese students of all ages. They raise their hands and shout out as male and female attendees alike have tears running from their eyes. Obviously a very mesmerizing preacher has taken it upon himself to lead god's lost little children to the salvation which can only be known through the salvation of the lord and savior Jesus Christ. But how on earth is such a thing being permitted on Chinese state-controlled television?

[Reactivate Chinese ability]

"Do you realize the sacrifices your parents have made to send you to college?" (The camera pans to more students driven to tears.) "Repeat after me, I - will - not - let - my - parents - down, I - will - learn - English - well." (Attendees all repeat after him in unison). Is this guy a fucking English Bandit manufacturing machine or what? If they're going to be this crazy to make me their "tool" should I feel any remorse if someone shouts their English at me like this and I spontaneously bop the little jackass in the mouth? Welcome to the future of China and a crazy ass dude named Li Yang's genius ploy to become filthy stinking rich: Crazy English.

Wikipedia reads:

His method can be described with the quote "To shout out loud, you learn." Students practice his technique by going behind buildings or on rooftops and shouting English.

Chinese TV is a barrel of laughs, though I'm not exactly sure if the remaining 1.4 billion are laughing their guts out for an hour at a time like me. For my 60 yuan every 6 months, I'm really getting top value for my money!!!

Continue reading "Chinese Cable TV: Top entertainment value for your dollar."

Taking the JLPT in China

nospam@example.com (your host) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:48:15 -0700

So last time, I related the tale of the challenges involved in getting a seat in this crazy country, one which might just have more students of Japanese language than Japan has population. I got lucky with that and was able to make a last minute adjustment to take the test in Jinan, Shandong. That's a swift 9 hour over-night train ride away. Get on the train. Flop on the bed. Wake up and suddenly you are there. The problem is that China grants admission to testing rooms based on a form called a 准考证 Zhunkaozheng, and they won't mail it to you, you have to show up in person with photo ID to claim it. The deadline for doing so meant I had to travel north four days in advance of the test.

I enter the Zhunkaozheng claiming room to bewildered expressions. Yes, just as I thought, I'm the only whitey out of more than 80,000 seats in this country. It seems other people don't come to CHINA to learn JAPANESE. I have to go to another office to register to have the results mailed to me as I'm not spending 18 hours and 800 kuai to claim it in person. The funny lady looks bewilderedly at the name written below the address and says, "No one knows what this [crap] means. Is this a name or something? You have to have a Chinese name. Write your Chinese name here." Yes, one needs a Chinese name to take an internationally conducted Japanese exam.

The fervor of it all way immense. If you want to be a part of something big, come take your JLPT test in China. For the past several weeks I didn't go a day without seeing someone doing some last reviews of JLPT prep books on the subway on the way to work. Now in the final stretch, studying around the clock myself, I entered a 24-hour McDonalds (to get a hot chocolate!) not even near the testing university and saw entire aisles of seats claimed by students zombie eye-edly scanning up and down the pages of their well-worn JLPT prep books. On the final night one unfortunate fellow (seems to have been a Japanese guy helping his Chinese girl with a few tough grammar points) made his native status a bit too obvious to surrounding parties and got totally ambushed. "Hey excusay-muah? Just a quick question..." A book shoved in his face I saw it took him more than 15 minutes to escape their merciless onslaught.

Test day arrived swiftly. The party of proctors (is three really necessary in one small room?) didn't want to let me in the room because they were convinced I should be taking a Chinese language exam instead somewhere else in a room with a bunch of non-Chinese. You'd think with three proctors they could force people to follow the rules, like the first one printed on the very first line on the cover of the test book "Don't open and start until instructed to do so". I turned and admired the girl behind me as she seemed full of entrepreneurial spirit and about ready to open her own 711 with the assortment of coffee, chocolate bars, and white rabbit candies arranged across the top of her desk. So much for only being allow pencils and erasers. I heard the sound of everyone flipping to the third page of the vocabulary section as the head proctor finally gave the word "go" and I flipped to the first page. It's not that I refuse to culturally assimilate in China, it's just that I'm trying to meet the international standard for this test, not the cheating Chinese one.

The extra minutes the room of cheaters stole on the vocab section didn't make an oodle of difference, I had no problem finish the section with surplus time. The listening section requires one to bubble in the correct one out of four options in the first wrong and the incorrect three out of four on the row after. An obvious Chinese test pro next to me began bubbling in all four in the odd rows, seeing as it is faster to erase one correct one later than to bubble in three wrong ones. Many others followed her lead and began bubbling away before the recording began. If only they used the headphones equipped on every desk I might have had a prayer on listening. Instead, they used a blaring boombox and crap cassette. Adjusting the volume and making sure everything worked the proctor played random segments of the tape allowing us an unfair "preview" off all the questions we're just supposed to be able to hear once. It didn't help, my hearing sucks. I guessed on every question for 35 minutes and got rather depressed. My brain's foreign language auditory processing unit just sucks in dealing with blaring noises and classroom echoes.

Passing out the reading and grammar section the proctors didn't even give the word "go" because I was the only person in the room who hadn't started immediately upon receiving the test book. Finally I made eye contact with the head proctor and she nodded for me to go. The dirty bastards got a full two minute head start on me, and this is a section where 30 seconds can make a difference of a few percentage points. Remember the test is "normalized" internationally in part based on the performance of the cheating Chinese (who comprise 40% of test takers). For the full 70 minutes the three proctors clickity-click made laps around the room eyeing everyone and consequently made me nervous as hell. There is nothing more intolerable to me than having someone watch me take a test or do a math problem. Ugh. Sit your ass down, woman!

So now I get to wait until March for the results.

Word Flow Theory - How cool linguistics would be without data collection limitations

nospam@example.com (your host) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:54:04 -0700

I was just fantasizing: If it were somehow possible to strap every English speaker on earth with a mic and a box with infallible text to speech software (as well as a camera to catch anything the person reads) that would transmit everything uttered or read back as text to a central database for analysis, we'd have an amazingly cool and detailed picture of the language from a lexical perspective: how many exposures to a certain word are needed before a child can use it productively himself, exactly how much the language "changed" each year and what words died from the memory of the last living person who knew them, how long between exposures to a word leads to a person claiming he has never heard a word before in his life, etc. We might even be able to predict some really crazy stuff like a theoretical maximum average vocabulary for an average individual if the 'society' in which his interactions took place consisted only of individuals having PhD's with a certain very high input rate of low-frequency lexical elements (from books, etc.) based on the frequency of encounters required with an average lexical element before it tends to be integrated into one's productive vocabulary. Totally rad, huh? (Obviously a lot of the numbers would just be 'ranges', but with a large enough sample it would have huge implications for the design of some extremely scientifically perfected language course.)

I'm wondering about all of this in part because I learned a word the other day, one that I'm sure I've never seen before in my entire life. When I used it on a friend to see if he knew it, he told me he was absolutely certain I had used it quite often telling stories four years earlier. Frightening! I don't just mean cool or weird, but I was very literally frightened—the fragility of memories makes it feel like we all have Alzheimer's or something.

So my idea with the illustrations below is that as a native speaker there is a huge list of lexical items which there is a 99.9% chance you have acquired, which forms the basis for being a native. This is the semi-permanent vocabulary and is refreshed so often there is little chance of losing any of it except for the momentary memory "fart". Meanwhile there is another subset of dynamic words in each person's vocabulary which includes words which do not have the basis for being necessarily permanent:

slang (once you stop hearing anyone else use it, it stops coming out of your mouth too, it becomes too dated),
words one didn't really know previously but which are the "pet words" of a particular author in a book you just read,
words which very specifically describe a present circumstance but which will fade from usefulness (news media makes everyone aware of the term, and when they stop it is subsequently forgotten by a lot of people).

If we had the massive data described above it would be possible to make really cool charts of at least two types for words as they pass through society almost like a virus: (1) words disseminated by news media, movies, or music which enter the brains of a huge portion of the population very quickly and pass away and are forgotten almost like a gradient effect in the end (2) words which people pick up in a book and think are cool enough to use once or twice before forgetting. For these there could be an animation of a "bug" jumping from brain to brain sometimes living on for a long time in one, sometimes dying rather quickly or even before jumping.

Two illustrations for you to check out:

My theory is that the only reason Linguistics is not overwhelmingly the coolest most exciting science on earth is that with all the cool and interesting 'experiments' which one could conceive of, the vast vast majority would be impossible to conduct for very practical reason such as: basic human rights (as in we cannot ethically take 1,000 babies and put them in a desolate region of the earth without teaching them any language and observe a human language as it is created from scratch) and the sheer volume of labor involved in collecting the necessary data (all the really cool analysis computers can do is negated because the only data we have to feed is mostly from polished written text, the collection and conversion to text of real living spoken language in mass quantities is not happening anywhere on earth).

The McDonald's Incident

nospam@example.com (your host) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:31:59 -0700

Practical Jokes Taken Too Far

The Chinese are real practical jokers. Sometimes it seems they can't take anything seriously. The station master of the Shanghai city subway system seems to be the biggest joker himself, and this morning again he caught me with one of his dirty tricks.

One of the survival strategies I employ during the commute to and from work is to keep earphones in my ears and a PDA screen glued to my face at all times. It may sound like an annoying anti-social behavior, and surely the people who have to avoid me because I am about to walk right into them without looking probably think I'm a dick, but after getting way too angry and frustrated at the impenetrable mass moving human wall that pervades the entirety of all public areas in Shanghai one too many times in the past years, I realized the best way is to just forget it exists, forget that I cannot possibly hope to ever move more than 20% faster than the slowest mosier in the crowd, and just assume the identity of a slow motion human pinball.

The problem happened when, gazing with full attention at my PDA screen, I stepped on to the upward-bound escalator at my destination station. The spontaneous sensation of an earth-quake took to my senses as the masses of humans around me moved upward on the escalator as in correlation with my expectations, but my own body, in contrast, seemed to have no stair propelling it forward and upward along with them. I lost my footing and very nearly fell on my face when I came to realize that once again the station attendants must have randomly decided to pull the "turn the escalators off in the middle of rush-hour" prank. As I climbed the stationary escalator steps all the way to the top, a strong feeling of sea-sickness overwhelmed me. The last time this had happened, I was nearly to the top when the steps suddenly stopped moving.

The thing is—this kind of shit happens every day here in Shanghai. One week you go down to wait for the subway to work and see that every single one of the time-till-arrival LCD TVs have gone missing. A week later they magically reappear, but they won't be there more than a few weeks before they disappear again. Another day the screens will work all day, but when the last train for the night in a particular direction has left the station, station personnel will turn the screens off to "trick" everyone into waiting for a final train that will never come.

In the office I work in, the handle for the faucet in the lavatory has disappeared randomly and inexplicably, as in the "here's a sink but you can't wash your hands after taking a dump" prank, more than 10 times in the past few months. But, that's not nearly as good as when you put soap on your hands FIRST and then realize the sink faucet handle is there but is glued in place. I shit you not!
WHEN IN THE AIRPORT, THE ASSIGNED GATE NUMBER FOR MY FLIGHT WAS CHANGED 2 MINUTES PRIOR TO THE FINAL GATE CLOSING CALL ON THREE OCCASIONS! I ALMOST MISSED THE FLIGHTS! AND I KNOW THOSE FUCKING JOKERS IN THE AIRPORT WERE TRYING TO PULL THE PRANK ON ME BECAUSE THEY SAW THAT I WEAR HEADPHONES TO PASS THE BOREDOM AND THOUGHT I WOULDN'T HEAR THE ANNOUNCEMENT.
City workers in Shanghai actually booby trap the sidewalk tiles such that when it is raining, if you accidentally walk across the wrong tile you will be sprayed with a puddle of cold dirty water. The bastards are experts at disguising the "trigger" tiles as well, so the only safe way is to locate them in advance on a dry day, and then avoid them any time it is wet out.
It seems there may even be a competition for cruelty in pranks going between the various city management groups, as recently I have observed that the subway station master has upped the ante. Previously I had assumed the warning beeps and flashing lights which proceed the subway door closing were computer controlled and thus could not be omitted by human error. I was disturbed to learn that such is not at all the case when the subway conductor nearly succeeded in slamming the subway doors on a woman's face with NO WARNING AT ALL!

The thing is, pranks are really cool and all but, myself, coming from a culture in which they are generally reserved for friends, acquaintances, and enemies, I have had a lot of trouble adapting to the Chinese prank style of giant corporations (i.e. "melamine poisoned milk and the kidney stone joke") and, indeed, the city government itself (Mr. Subway Station Master) trying to fuck with me. That's why it's very hard for me to condemn my fellow expats when they get fed up with this shit and do something incredibly anti-social about it thinking, mistakenly, that they can "teach Chinese to stop pulling these ridiculous tricks".

McDonald's Crosses The Line

(This is not a work of fiction.)

It was pouring cats and dogs outside. A young foreign man entered a Shanghai McDonald's both hungry and with an intense pressure in his bladder. Longing for a swift and relaxing visit to the little boy's room, our hero was not looking forward to yet another round of Chinese practical jokes. He marched swiftly to the bathroom only to stop unexpectedly, dumbfounded with exasperation that the door refused to open. He opened his eyes wide to take note of his surroundings. Oh not again! The Chinese had succeeded in pulling the "we know you really have to piss, that's why we're going to fuck with you and close down this whole bathroom" prank yet again. A sign was posted on the door that directed the would-be race horse urinator to climb several flights of stairs with his already painfully full bladder and expel his waste in a porcelain bowl on the third floor.

"No! Not today I'm not", he thought as he smiled smugly at the ingenious Chinese sign. Taking no further consideration of his surroundings, the man spontaneously whipped out his cock and began spraying a stream of dark yellow urine on the battered wooden door. A stream, not dissimilar except in size to those left on department store floors across China by children with open-crotch pants at the direction of their parents, flowed swiftly down and away from the door itself. A river of yellow spontaneously streaking across a large expanse of the floor further magnified the conspicuousness of an already larger-than-life utterly inconceivable spectacle.

Soon, a nearby security guard took note of the odd event transpiring. Shocked far beyond the wildest expectations he had had in 15-odd years of humdrum play-with-your-cell-phone-and-act-official guard duty, the poor man's mind couldn't even begin to conceive of a possible appropriate response to this obvious violation of the building whose sanctity he was employed to protect. The guard approached from a distance, rustling his keys enough in the process for our hero to take note of his presence, and then stopped dead in his tracks gawking and thoroughly disoriented. Our hero, having a bladder still not satisfactorily relieved from its prior state of fullness, took note of the guard's presence and returned to the more pressing matter of pissing at hand, literally.

A few seconds later, a practical eternity to the guard and any other passersby happening to pay witness to the absurd sight, the otherwise respectable young man pulled the elastic flap of his underpants over his cock and zipped up his fly. Nonchalantly he returned to the table he had come from to join his friend and enjoy a fine meal.

A few minutes later a more official looking head security guard approach the table. In Chinese he said sternly, "Which one of you just took a pee on the door over there?" The two foreigners seated at the table, our hero included, feigned inability in the Chinese language and continued their conversation in English. The head guard repeated his words, but, assuming doing so in a language that wouldn't be understood by the "foreigners" was in vain, he soon gave up, turned, and left.

If we were to discuss the greatest virtue Chinese have, I think with little doubt I would have to say it is: tolerance for one's fellow man. Damn!!!

An Optimal Approach to Language Acquisition

nospam@example.com (your host) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:48:52 -0700

For nearly nine years now I have been enthralled with the concept of foreign languages. This represents a marked departure from the entirety of my adolescence in which I passionately and contemptuously despised the very idea of other languages. And while in these ten years I've made a substantial stab at two languages, I could most certainly respond without hesitation to the question: "Have you spent more time actually applying yourself and learning or researching the means by which one can learn." The answer, emphatically, is the latter. This is indeed a dismal state of affairs, for in the massive vortex of black hole consumed time I have expended browsing every website and article known to man on the topic of second language acquisition, I could have surely, and even with the most idiotic or inefficient of methodologies, reached full literacy and fluency in at least one additional language if not two or more.

This is a good time to set Quantity Always Trumps Quality as my browser homepage and try to solve this once and for all...

But what if, just what if, there really are methodologies out there that are vastly superior to my current belief that the ultimate scientifically justified combination for learning consists of SRS software to maximize vocabulary acquisition efficiency and continual Krashen-style comprehensible input to the extent possible within the limits of one's vocabulary? I resolved, really resolved this time, that it isn't worth worrying about... it's better to stop bullshit researching and start learning. That is, until I found...

A New Idol For My Collection

What precipitous event was it that drove me to shatter my resolve to learn with what I had? I've added a new idol to my collection. He's one of the world's most accomplished polyglots, he is of the comparative philology school and does not take interest in cheap fluency (as in guys who learn 2,000 words for daily conversation and sloppy grammar and add a language to their list as "learned"), and the guy does not use flashcards, wordlists, or Supermemo, he does not study language with any techniques I had heard of before this week and he is highly accessible and willing to advise aspiring polyglots. All in all a true inspiration. Maybe it really is worth it to learn a thing or two more first before getting started in earnest...

Dr. Alexander Arguelles
Professor, polyglot, and scholar of the highest caliber

Key concepts he has introduced/promoted in the polyglot world: shadowing, scriptorium.

Essential Reading:

Arguelles' personal website - read in full, don't miss the Great Books section.
Thread with a profile of Dr. Arguelles
The Linguist Blogger - A more in-depth profile
A forum the good professor himself moderates
- approximately 20 hours of reading, I have copy & pasted the best
of it to create a word document with more than 80 pages of his wisdom.
(To be attached/linked here later.)
The Linguist Blogger - Interview with Dr. Alexander Arguelles
Youtube - Videos of Dr. Arguelles reviewing language courses (see Assimil) and explaining various languages.

China Postal: The Consistency Of Our Service Never Changes, Only The Assholes That Do It Do!

nospam@example.com (your host) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:46:48 -0700

In this ever changing age of technology, it's always comforting to know that some things never change: people cheating on their wives, computer crashes, students' lack of enthusiasm for school after returning from the summer holiday—and the Chinese postal service beating the living fucking hell out of your packages with a baseball bat before delivering them. I assume my birthday present didn't look like this a few days ago when my parents sent it:

The good thing about all of this, though, is that they were polite enough this time to affix a sticker to alert me to the fact that they bashed the piss out of my gift before giving it to me. Kudos to the genius who thought of that. If I hadn't seen the sticker there, I might have just assumed it was a modern art box design. This is definitely an improvement over a box I shipped from China to the USA five years ago which they had beaten the shit out of then poked a hole in the side and poured in dirt to mix with my books and clothing, but to which no such sticker had been attached.

The other really great thing about the Chinese post office is that THEY WON'T EVEN ACTUALLY DELIVER. That's right—if you get a box, they'll send you a postcard which says: "We have your box, come get it your damn self cause we are so busy bashing the fuck out of people's packages we don't have time to come give you". Of course, pray to god the sender didn't write your name in Chinese on it, because if you're like me—having graduated long ago and pitched my only ID (my student ID) that actually had my Chinese name on it—you're going to have a helluva a time trying to convince the counter lady that the English letter composed name printed on your passport is the "equivalent" of the Chinese name on the box. And, yes, you do need to take your passport. No, they won't let you use the postcard as "proof" that it's your package.

Tits In Motion

nospam@example.com (your host) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:51:00 -0700

This might just be one of those days when a picture is worth a thousand words:

Yes, small titted chicks, there is hope — as long as you can read Chinese, you can get this book and find out the diet and tit message techniques that will take you up one cup size or more in no time flat.

IANAD: THE ABOVE POST IS NOT INTENDED NOR IMPLIED TO CONSTITUTE MEDICAL ADVICE, DIAGNOSIS, OR TREATMENT. ALWAYS VISIT OR SPEAK TO A QUALIFIED HEALTH SERVICE PROVIDER IN PERSON PRIOR TO STARTING TO RUB YOUR TITS ACCORDING TO A CRAZY CHINESE BOOK ON A DAILY BASIS IN A VAIN ATTEMPT TO INCREASE YOUR CUP SIZE IN LIEU OF PROVEN AESTHETIC SURGERY BREAST AUGMENTATION METHODS SUCH AS SILICON IMPLANTS.

The Collective Mind: Reverse Engineering Preprogrammed Chinese Brain Algorithms

nospam@example.com (your host) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:17:00 -0700

Case 1: Cutting In Line

If you were waiting in this line would you (a) jump out and try to steal a cab with a 1 in 100 shot of succeeding and a 99 in 100 shot of being bitched at by a line guard and police officer or (b) wait your turn?

So there's a certain part of the city where it's generally exceedingly difficult to catch a cab. On one side of the road you have the "free for all" war zone taxi flagging area where you have a shot at getting a taxi in 5 minutes or less -- but it takes a lot of energy because you have to be aggressive and keep cutting in front of the people that cut you by moving further and further down the road and towards the middle of the street. On the other side of the road there is an orderly line with two full-time traffic employees: one to flag down taxis and send the first person in line to the next cab, and one at the back of the line to protect the entering and unloading taxis from being snatched by line jumpers.

Every time I go there it's the same story... 20 minutes of waiting, and about every 10 minutes some smart fella at the end of the line decides to pull a traditional Chinese "I'm blind, I'm blind" trick -- pretending he doesn't see the line of 30-40 people waiting, or pretending the line is a bunch of idiots standing in a line next to the road for no particular reason. Every time it's the same story: the guy moseys up to the end of the line, looks around to see if anyone is eyeing him, jumps out, grabs the cab door and tries to get in... at that very moment the "end of the line" guard jumps out and starts screaming at him, and with a feigned look of bewilderment he exasperatedly acknowledges the line of 40 people, "Oh! It's a line! Oh dear golly, I hadn't any idea! I thought these people were just standing here looking bored as balls for the fun of it."

The only way I can explain it is that Chinese brains seem to have some sort of "boundary of reality" checking algorithm such that they must always check that the rules of reality still apply just so they can be sure everything is right with the world. I guess the simplest analogy would be if someone's brain were preprogrammed to jump off a building every time he saw a ledge just to be sure that there is nothing wrong with "the matrix" and the law of gravity is indeed still in effect. Really -- it's a total waste of time. Between the two line guards and (often) a police officer, I have yet to see a single one of these suckers get away with snatching a cab. But if you're Chinese -- I guess it's worth a try, right?

Case 2: Dirty Laundry Pile

If these were your new clothes would you: (a) throw them in the washing machine or (b) take them out to the dumpster?

Without fail visitors like the real estate lady, the night guard, and the repair man see my pile of dirty laundry, which, mind you, is comprised mostly of clothes which were very recently purchased in the U.S.A. for a total of some hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and ask me if they can help me throw them all out in the garbage. The first time I was asked, it was the real estate lady asking. I dismissed it very quickly thinking "oh she's a bit of a crackhead anyhow". After all, she was the one spontaneously start plungering my toilet, without my asking, when she saw it was backed up with disgusting shitty water some months prior. (Bless her heart.) The repairman, however, had seemed more revolted and less enthusiastic a year back when I DID request his help in plungering -- and I had thus presumed him to be more of the sane variety. When I had him come up to change a ceiling light bulb requiring a ladder, he ALSO asked if he could throw all of my dirty but new clothes out. I patiently explained to him that in my understanding the apartment had come equipped with a washing machine under the assumption that I might actually like to wash the dirty clothes and then wear them a second or even third time before discarding them, thereby saving myself perhaps a thousand dollars or more per month in clothing store fees. By the look on his face after I finished explaining -- I'm not entirely sure whether or not he bought into my strange argument...

Not to laugh at them or anything, but I thought these folks --- earn like --- not even enough to buy that pile of clothes in a few month's time??? So why on earth do they think I have money to wear clothes once and throw them out instead of throwing them in the wash machine as, I presume, a considerable portion of the Chinese population does??? Ah.... the every elusive Chinese mind and it's many preprogrammed environmental responses. It'll always be a mystery to me.

Differences of Culture: Dispersion of Body Waste

nospam@example.com (your host) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:39:02 -0700

So the other day I'm doing a job interview, yeah? And I was thinking "this one really takes the cake", that is, until I mentioned it to a friend and realized just how much deeper the rabbit hole goes. There's a huge difference in tolerance for sharing one's "body waste" between Chinese culture and the West.

Case in point:

A Scab In The Interview

Guy shows up to a job interview for a managerial level position in shorts which reveal his battered legs. As one is APT TO DO WHEN NERVOUS, he twitches away and finds a "outlet" for the nervous energy as he speaks. Personally I prefer scribbling on a slip of paper, clicking a pen, or screwing and unscrewing a pop bottle cap. Hell, even if he went crazy zipping and unzipping his fly it would have been better than .... THE HORROR THAT MANIFESTED ITSELF AS HIS OUTLET FOR NERVOUS ENERGY WHICH CONSISTED OF PICKING AT HIS KNEE SCABS FOR A FULL HOUR. I wanted to puke like --- THE WHOLE TIME.

Nails To Be Cutten

I don't even have to get specific with this one. Everyone who's been in a Chinese office has had the pleasant experience of being rained on with stray finger (or god forbid TOE) nails from a neighboring desk or cubicle farm. Why do at home that which can be done at work? **click-keh** *click-keh*

Continue reading "Differences of Culture: Dispersion of Body Waste"

How to merge XML files for Supermemo CE using XSLT (especially for Chinese/Japanese)

nospam@example.com (your host) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:53:14 -0700

Recently I've wanted to start adding more cards to my Supermemo CE collection. Much to my shock and disgust the only way to do it is to export XML, merge the two XML's externally, and then reimport. It's completely impractical when your collection is 3,000 plus elements and you just want to add ~50 new cards at a time. (This was MUCH easier on Palm Supermemo 5 years ago.)

This is the XSLT code (merge.xslt) that should do the trick for merging:

<xsl:transform version="1.0" 
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" 
            encoding="UTF-8"
            indent="no" />
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <SuperMemoCollection>
      <xsl:copy-of select="//SuperMemoCollection/SuperMemoElement"/>        
      <xsl:copy-of select="document('file_to_append.xml')//SuperMemoCollection/SuperMemoElement"/>        
    </SuperMemoCollection>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>

Then get some XML processing thinggy like nxslt (freeware) and just do:

nxslt.exe exported.xml merge.xslt -ascii -o reimportme.xml

The beautiful thing here is that your file_to_append.xml does NOT need to be Decimal NCR encoded. I am using a UTF-16 LE file with Japanese text right in there and merging it with the UTF-8 file that Supermemo CE exports, and nxslt converts the final output to the Supermemo CE required UTF-8 with Decimal NCR encoded Japanese automatically since I used the "-ascii" flag.

If you want to make it even easier you can use my Powershell script. Copy the contents of the zip to your SD card and then future additions to your collection will go this smooth:

Export collection in Supermemo CE
Plug you SD card into your desktop
Copy over new_stuff_to_add.xml to the SD card
Type: .\combineSMCExml.ps1 exported.xml new_stuff_to_add.xml
Import collection (exported.xml) back into Supermemo CE

The zip file containing merge.xslt, nxslt.exe, and combineSMCExml.ps1 can be downloaded here: combinesmcexml.zip.

WARNING:

I encountered a very frustrating problem with nxslt -- if there are *any* encoded HTML tags in new_stuff_to_add.xml (of the type < or >) then instead of getting the Decimal NCR encoded you need for Japanese/Chinese to show up in SMCE you will get a string of ???? question marks. ~~If anyone knows a workaround, please let me know.~~ 8/18: It seems upgrading to nxslt2 does the trick, the only problem is the '-ascii' tag disappears.