links: war, D&D, drugs, creationists, homophobia

[mindstalk]

* Sahara Mart has sun-dried strawberries in the bulk section. They're pretty good.
** ETA: though given their gumminess and color, I suspect sugar and sulfur dioxide additives. Pure dried (e.g. freeze-dried) strawberries should be darker red. No brand, but some stuff online has strawberry flavor added as well.
* Domo seems to have turned into Ami, long AWOL from Fourth Street. Rumor is that Domo lives, somewhere... don't know where. Gain a Japanese restaurant, lose a Japanese restaurant?
* Is Leela the most useful Doctor Who companion ever? Discuss.
* Anti-noise earmuffs: useful again.
* Did Darwin Get it Right?, John Maynard Smith. Nice collection of essays, somewhat dated. A bit amusing to read old thoughts on sex, before parasite theory or the handicap principle. He has a nice paean to Dawkins's reason and clarity that I should type in.

Link dump.
* War Before Civilization
* Someone's thoughts on D&D 4e
* Planescape Society of Sensation. I thought it was cute.
* Steampunk theme for Firefox
* transgender bank commercial in Argentina
* Dealing with bugs from Mars
* DEA: better to live in agony than risk taking too many opiates.

* The prime minister of Japan has problems with kanji. So do many Japanese, apparently. I say this not to make fun of them but to say "maybe your system is too frigging complicated".
* History and growing abuse of the filibuster
* Won't let me expand my business? Have a sex shop
* Krugman on rent control and how the more economists actually agree on something, the less the world listens to them.
* 2007 letter on land tax
* Med schools and Pharm money

* The Mormons, not having violated the apolitical conditions of their tax-exempt status enough in California, are opposing civil unions in Illinois
* More homophobia in North Carolina
* Creationist War on the Brain

Comments

[mlc23.livejournal.com]

On the Kanji article. I have two thoughts:

a) The characters make much more sense in Chinese. Encoding morphemes instead of phonemes is still cumbersome, but at least has consistency. A single one syllable pronunciation per character and "clues" towards pronunciation embedded in the character make Chinese a whole lot easier. When in Japan I often found myself reading in Chinese (what little I can read) and then translating the meaning directly to English.

b) Simplified Chinese characters may stand as perhaps the one real positive achievement of the communist leadership. So much nicer than traditional and most think it does a great job of preserving the unique cultural heritage of the written language while improving literacy.

Bottom line - other than tradition I don't understand why you would stick to Chinese characters when you have something as simple and easy as Hiragana.

[love]

Simplified Chinese characters may stand as perhaps the one real positive achievement of the communist leadership. So much nicer than traditional and most think it does a great job of preserving the unique cultural heritage of the written language while improving literacy.
I just had an exchange with a Taiwanese who disagrees 100%!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

a) Yeah, I dimly remember your blog story, kanji to Chinese to English back to hiragana or something.

b) And North Korea did away with characters all together, moving entirely to hangul! (alphabet) Meh -- seems to me that simplifying characters gives you the worst of both worlds, having the high-buy-in literacy system of learning a character for each word, with only modest phonetic help, while losing the easy connection to that cultural heritage, i.e. you'll have to learn more to read well anything from pre-Communist era. Of course, that could be part of the point...