Links: Chinese, martyrs, Jews, babies, and why lists of links are bad for you

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-chinese-youth/

Longish article on Chinese young adults and their relationship with their parents. Their parents survived the Cultural Revolution, and are described as obsessed with security to the point of amorality; lots of bribes, and approval of selling fake drugs to hospitals, and such. The youth are regressing to the secure human mean and want more normal lives and values, and get along better with their grandparents.

"Next door, in prosperous South Korea, with the longest unbroken
Confucian culture in the world, the elderly are poorer, more likely to
still be working, and four times more likely to kill themselves than the
already suicide-prone Korean young. The suicide rate among older
Chinese lags just behind Korea?s, and has tripled in the past decade."


"A Chinese acquaintance of mine, now in his fifties, once described
having to kill his own brother to stop him turning in their parents for
owning banned books."

***

NYC subway rider behavior http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/nyregion/subway-riders-quirks-studied.html

Austerity policies (austerian) may rest on bad arithmetic and accidentally missing data:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/holy-coding-error-batman/
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems#.UW14rDQo2L4.twitter

Myths of Christian persecution and the Age of Martyrs http://chronicle.com/article/The-Myths-Behind-the-Age-of/137423/

URL says it all: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/how-we-got-all-this-great-data-on-american-baby-name-popularity/274989/

***

News is bad for your brain?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

"In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension
declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why?
Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the
choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an
intentional interruption system"

Transportation options in Jane Austen's world http://www.jasnanorcal.org/ink9.htm

***
Samaritans, the true Jews
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/jewish-or-not-the-samaritans-celebrate-passover-but-a-month-later
most inbred population

Karaites; also Torah+Joshua only, but use standard Passover date
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/karaites-who-are-they-and-where-do-they-live
Samaritans pre-Diaspora, Karaites 8th century Baghdad spinoff?
patrilineal
oldest synagogue in Jerusalem
The largest Karaite community in the U.S. (though mostly of Egyptian
rather than Crimean Karaim origin) resides not far from the GeoCurrents
base, in Daly City

Jews of India
http://geocurrents.info/population-geography/the-jews-of-india

Heterodox Zone
http://geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-heterodox-zone

Tolkien's Goblins

I was just looking at _The Hobbit_, particularly when they've been captured by goblins and are about to be presented to the Great Goblin, and noted a couple of things. One, goblins are said to eat horses and ponies and donkeys as well as more dreadful things, and I realized that AIUI English culture has a particularly strong abhorrence of eating horse, so this probably seems far worse to an English child than it did to me. I thought it was sad and practically unfortunate if their ponies got eaten but it wasn't "OMG ewww they eat horse!!!"

And the next paragraph is a decent piece of evidence for anyone who supports the "Tolkien thought technology was evil" thesis; it's also an interesting contrast to RPG goblins and orcs. Goblins are described as making not beautiful but clever things, especially axes, swords, tongs, pickaxes, and elements of torture. So... weapons and tools? They mine as well as the dwarves, if not neatly. They take particular delight in wheels, engines, and explosions, and avoiding work with their hands. So, labor saving devices? Honest Men of the West grind grain and remove rocks by hand, they don't use mills or dynamite! Goblin Industrial Revolution indeed...

(Not that goblins get much grain, I'm sure. "We Do Not Sow.") (And the *Shire* had a watermill. Saruman somehow replaced it with a polluting one...)

Relatedly, I was long impressed by when Merry and Pippin are prisoner: the orcs apply fast-acting (magic?) healing salve and a drink that tastes foul but energizes like miruvor. RPGs commonly treat orcish stuff as crude and badly made, but by the source material it should arguably be as effective as elvish stuff, just unpleasant. Hard to convey aesthetics in an RPG or nethack though, not like you have to taste the stuff your character does. And we see no orcish magical weapons or armor, for all their cleverness.