On December 12th, Stephen Colbert’s “Word” was ” Casualty of War.” You can watch it online here, but Colbert’s impeccable logic is so well crafted that I wanted to share this transcript (the text in brackets represent the text which appears in the on-screen box): Now I was burning the Iraq Study Group report the [...]
In his classical work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote that modern technology would free art from its “aura”: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art [...]
Teresa at Making Light has a great post about how deaf people are using YouTube: Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using YouTube as a public forum? This is transformational. Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be [...]
I’ve been delinquent in writing up the half a dozen stories on global inequality which I’ve been meaning to blog about, so here they all are in one go: “the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.” That’s looking at wealth, rather than income, but Michael Turton [...]
I’d like to briefly link to two great discussions about the origins of Taiwanese vegetable names: Prince Roy discusses the origins of the Taiwanese word for “cabbage” which is quite different from the rest of the Chinese speaking world. Here is a summary from Language Hat: There is apparently a popular theory that the word [...]
After making fun of the railway web site, I think it is only fair to give praise where praise is due. The International Community Service Hotline has an excellent bilingual web page full of just about every question a foreign resident might need to know. And, as the name suggests, they also have a bilingual [...]
[Be sure to see updated links at bottom.] Even if you aren’t a foreigner who’s vainly attempted to book tickets online in Taiwan, the irony of the following graphic from Taiwan Rail’s English language homepage is hard to miss. With its awful graphics and stilted language it certainly doesn’t instill confidence. Don’t get me wrong. [...]
As someone who has run several wikis, I know all too well that they are only as good as their user-base, so because I would really, really, like to see the East Asian Libraries and Archives Wiki succeed, I urge anyone who cares about research in/on East Asia to get involved! Here is the official [...]
Back in May I wrote a post implying that Adivasis were increasingly supporting the Naxalite movement in India. I’d like to amend that post, as a recent report makes it clear that the situation is much more complex: Since the launch of Salwa Judum, an anti-Naxalite campaign, in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh in June 2005, [...]
Thinking of building a better mouse trap? Now with Google patent search you can instantly browse 576 previous mouse trap patents. [via Boing Boing] {patents}