Where the Japanese Came From

This article is long (I'll admit, though I've had it up in browser a couple days I've still only read half of it) but it's a really fascinating survey of current research into where the Japanese people came from, both historically and linguistically. This is an unusually charged question, as linguistic and archeological questions go, because a great deal of Japanese (and Korean) national self-identity is caught up in the question. And evidence is intriguingly sparse and contradictory. (For instance, linguistics would suggest that the Japanese language split off from Korean -- it's apparent closest cousin linguistically -- at least 4,000 years ago, yet genetically Japanese are very similar to mainlanders, suggesting a fairly recent divergence.)

On a slightly related side-note, one of the things that's always struck me watching Japanese anime is that there seems to be a cultural perception in Japan that Japanese are "the white people of Asia". Japanese characters often look, to American eyes, very nearly European or American, while Korean or Chinese characters have very strongly Asian features. There also seems to be a real fascination with settings (more often fantastic than historical) which are clearly patterned on or explicitly set in turn of the century Europe -- though often Japanese names are mixed in freely with vaguelly Germanic ones.

What Jack Hath Wrought

In case anyone was wondering, "Gosh, why doesn't MrsDarwin post that much anymore?", it's because I live in a house where five minutes of an unattended 14-month-old nets you this:



That would be Jack taking his revenge for the tea party and lunch we had while he was napping, and on the bookcase just for being there. I was in the kitchen the whole time, chopping onions and adding them to soup. The lad is fast.

No wonder he's so worn out.

The Banal Evils of the Police State

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many who lived under the communist regime of East Germany have taken the opportunity to go to the state archives and view the files which the Stasi secret police kept on them. Stasi files were not kept only on spies and political dissenters, but on ordinary people whose "offenses" were almost shockingly mundane, and whose betrayers were often friends or family:

A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution.

Even worse, the family later found out that they had been turned in by a close friend. "She was watering the plants and went through the cupboards to find a Dr. Oetker dessert," Vera Iburg, who has worked with files kept by the East German secret police for the last 20 years, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to the snoop. "What was she doing? She had no business there!"

It's an interesting example of the corrupting power of temptation that the availability of the means to easily hurt those around you by reporting others to the police motivated many to inform merely for the satisfaction of it:

The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

"More often than not, the Stasi did not need to apply pressure at all," he says. "In fact, many often felt snubbed if their information was deemed to be of no interest." The real motivation behind these acts of betrayal was much more humdrum than one might think. "People informed for personal gain, out of loyalty to the East German regime, or simply because they wanted to feel like they had some power," Ziehm says.

Often we think of repressive regimes' primary evil being what they do to the people of a country, yet it's perhaps more important (and more disturbing) to think of how the tools of such a regime corrupt many of the people themselves.

Bobby McFerrin sings Bach

I Want One Of Them Stimulous Jobs

There is something in me which, when it sees to related numbers, wants to immediately do a calculation, so when I saw a news story stating that the $215 billion in stimulous money given out thus far had resulted in 640,329 jobs, my first question was, "How much is that per job?"

Answer? $312,339.44

Not too shabby, eh? I'd like one of them jobs just fine.

Now that I've had my sticker shock fun, let me be fair: if you're going to try to create jobs by flooding money into a set of projects, the cost if obviously much more than the cost of a salary. Say I decide to help a bakery create jobs by buying doughnuts. Buying $5000/month worth of doughnuts doesn't create a $60k/yr at the doughnut shop, because although there's need for more work, there's also need for dough, and cooking oil, and glaze, and more doughnut machines, etc. I might well have to spend $200k per year at the bakery in order for them to add $100k to their payroll, perhaps even more.

But what that emphasizes is that simply spending money like a drunken sailor (no disrespect to our naval readers) is not a very efficient way to help people who are out of work in the near term. The two most direct ways to help people out of work would be through providing longer unemployment benefits (and more programs to help people in problem industries to get new training) and to provide companies with direct payroll relief by reducing employer contributions to payroll taxes.

This is something we'll do well to keep in mind as Democrats on Capitol Hill start to get itchy for a second round of stimulous in order to emphasize that they are "doing something" about the increasingly grim job numbers.

La Guadalupana

While looking for a version of the Mexican folk song La Guadalupana, I came across this remix by Mexican father-and-son pop stars Emmanuel and Alexander Acha and thought it catchy. Our Spanish-speaking readers will have to let me know what the rap in the middle says; hopefully I'm not putting up something crazy offensive.

Zombies?

I'm not necessarily sure where to believe the real story lies in all this, but this lengthy article on zombies in Haiti is fascinating.

...
About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.

Shortly after that incident, I started taking Creole lessons from a motorcycle-taxi driver named Lucner Delzor. Delzor was married with four children, but he kept a mistress on the other side of town. He told me that he had never so much as drunk a glass of water at his mistress’s house for fear she might lace his food with love powder. He loved his wife and children far too much to risk that.

One of my first complete sentences in Creole was “Gen vréman vre zonbi an Ayiti?” Or: “Are there really, truly zombies in Haiti?”

“Bien sûr,” Delzor said. He had even seen them: affectless men and women with a deathlike pallor, high nasal voices, and the characteristic drooping at the chin — men and women who he knew for a fact had died and been buried.

“Ayiti, se repiblik zonbi,” Delzor added. Haiti is the republic of zombies.

I was eager to meet a zombie for myself, and began making appropriate inquiries. Several weeks later, my wife came home from a judicial conference. Making small talk, a local judicial official mentioned the strange case of zombification that his courtroom had seen not several months before. The case was, he said, “un peu spectaculaire.”

I met Judge Isaac Etienne a week or so later at his unfinished concrete house in the village of Roseaux. Roseaux is on the sea, and the fishermen, their nets already in, were stretched out on the small grassy town square, drinking rum and playing dominoes under a dazzling midmorning sun. The judge was a boyish-looking man of 42, slender, wearing baggy surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said — but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.
...

If one accepts the author's theory, this might be an interesting example of a situation in which both practictioners and victims of "magic" believe that real sorcery is being performed, while there remains a natural (though weird) explanation for the whole thing. Or could could go to either positing real sorcery or writing the whole thing up to hysteria amoung a poor and uneducated population.

More Than Intentions

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek makes a good point which is too often glossed over in political debate:

Writing about health-care, Paul Krugman asserts that “conservatives … don’t want Americans to have universal coverage” (”The Defining Moment,” Oct. 30).

Among the earliest lessons that I teach my freshman economics students are (1) intentions are not results, and (2) to oppose a government program is not necessarily to object to the intentions stated by that program’s advocates.

Paul Krugman obviously teaches his students differently, for he clearly believes that (1) if government intends for Americans to have universal health coverage, then the result will be that Americans actually get universal health coverage, and (2) anyone who opposes a government program promising universal health coverage is a person who objects to Americans actually getting universal health coverage.

This is perhaps the most common fallacy of all in political argument for people to follow the form: I support bill/candidate X because I think it will have good result Y. You don't support X. Therefore you don't care about Y.

Generally speaking, Y is a very general positive sentiment while X is a very specific prescription. Examples:

"You don't support abolishing NAFTA, because you don't care whether ordinary Joes can make a decent wage in America."

"You don't support school vouchers, because you don't care whether poor kids can get a good education."

"You don't support the current health care reform legislation, because you don't care whether poor people can see a doctor when they're sick."

What this approach ignores is that the topic of dispute in politics is often not whether some general good should be achieved, but whether a particular proposal will actually contribute to the general good -- and if so whether its effects will be more positive than negative. This type of intention-based argumentation is an attempt to shut down any discussion on whether a proposal will have the desired effect (and whether its negative side effects will outweigh its intended benefits), and as such it strikes at the very root of reasonable political discussion.

Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest

We've been delighted here at Chez Darwin by Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest. It's the story of two boys, brown and white, raised as brothers on tales of the captive Djinn Fairy, then cruelly separated by Azur's coldly aristocratic father. When they grow up, each vows to rescue and marry the fairy himself. There are voyages, scoundrels, magic keys, and the most enchanting princess I've seen on screen in ages. You can watch it in the original French and Arabic, but we chose English (the Arabic is subtitled, not dubbed, which the non-reading three-year-old didn't seems to mind).

The animation style is almost completely unrelated to the Disney and Pixar stuff we've become accustomed to. It's flat and bright and highly textured and gorgeous. There are intricately patterned Arabic backgrounds that are so hypnotic and dazzling that it takes a moment to adjust the eyes. And there are NO SASSY TALKING ANIMALS. Need I say more?

Note to parents: you might balk, but here we were quite pleased that the first shot of the movie was the Arabic servant quite obviously breast-feeding first one, and then the other boy.

Mid Life

Many will doubtless consider it rather cheeky (or else simply self indulgent) for someone who is only thirty years old to write on the topic of middle age, yet the topic has been somewhat on my mind of late. As I was enjoying the cool autumn air the other day, it occurred to me that I was already more than half the age my father was when he died. This, combined with the fact that I married rather younger than my father and had children sooner often leaves me with the feeling that I am already advanced well upon life's road -- and by implication wondering if mine is shorter than most.

The above may make me sound rather morbid, but it's not really any fear of death that I'm thinking of here. Dante may have found himself, midway through life's journey, in a gloomy wood (even Dante was jumping the gun less -- he was about to turn 35 when he found himself in the gloomy wood in Lent, 1300, at the beginning of Inferno) -- by my experience is more of finding myself hurdling along at tremendous speed and wondering exactly I'm going, and how soon I shall arrive. We measure ourselves by the patterns we know, and so it seems natural to measure my life by that of my father. Yet having got married earlier, had children earlier, bought a house earlier, and settled on a single full time job earlier, I can't help an odd sort of feeling of: What happens later?

To add to the effect, outside the small splinter culture in which we live in our private lives, the people I know professionally have moved in the opposite direction, with most of them having first children in their mid thirties. The picture of the four kids on my desk marks me (depending on how people choose to analyze it) as being either a very young looking 38-40 or else quite dangerously insane. (For my part, I try to provide supporting evidence for both alternatives.)

In a world in which most people seem to expect to have college age children when in their 50s and being "father of the bride" in their sixties -- there seems little precedent for someone whose children will range form 27 to 20 when he turns 50 is supposed to do with the rest of his life. In a sense, it's rather exhilarating. Uncharted territory. Age-ward ho! Yet because it's uncharted, one can't shake the odd feeling that pretty soon all the path will be covered, and one will be left standing around saying, "Well. Here we are. Where are we anyway?"

For your Halloween viewing pleasure

Here's a little scooby snack for you. Ruh-roh!



And they might have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those darn kids.

Grow Up, Don't Dress Up

Perhaps I'm overly cranky after two weeks which have been busy enough at work that I've been virtually unable to blog, but it strikes me as particularly foolish that a number of people around the office building were so crestfallen at the idea of missing out on a chance to wear their Halloween costumes to work that they decided to dress up on the 30th. Somehow it seems doubly pathetic when this is combined with a fear of actually looking too un-ordinary, and the reveller thus shows up wearing medical scrubs and a stethoscope to your desk job so you can be "in costume" without looking weird.

I was starting to think we had an invasion of doctors and nurses there were so many people in colorful scrubs, until I saw some brave (or foolish -- you pick) soul parading about in black robes, pointed hat, and carrying a broomstick. (Alternatively, maybe that's just the product manager everyone has been calling La Bruja.)

I'm down on moving holidays at the best of times, but a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s being so attached to the idea of wearing costumes to work that they spontaneously move it just strikes me as pathetic.

Growl.

Anonymous

Here, by popular demand, is a photo of Anonymous, chroniclers of the kings of Hungary. Sorry about the quality of the picture -- I stood on a kitchen chair and took a shot of it in its frame. But you can still see that the tip of his pen has been rubbed golden from all the visitors who touch it to bring themselves a bit of Anonymous's vast literary success.

Historical importance, indeed

This one is for Christopher, whose memories of the cathedral in Cologne prompted me to tell my own anecdote about our visit there.

Darwin and I visited Cologne in the spring of 1999. Our train trip into Germany was an ordeal by non-reservation -- after tooling about laid-back Austria and Italy, no one had told us that the Germans would reserve every seat on the train. We squeezed in the corridor (along with everyone else who didn't reserve) and spent all night trying to melt into the wall to let a group of drunk Americans tromp back and forth to the lavatory. A memorable, if not comfortable, ride.

The press had lightened by the time we were approaching Cologne. Finally able to sit down in a compartment, we glued ourselves to the window, thrilled by the sight of the spires that suggested an end to our journey. But as the miles of fields stretched onward and the spires loomed ever larger and larger, our impatience to be there paled before the realization of the massive scale of the dom. The fact that we could see it meant not that we were close, but that it was mind-bogglingly, humblingly huge.

In the paved plaza before the cathedral, we strolled about amidst the other tourists, feeling dwarfish. And then, we saw it. At our feet was stone, almost indistinguishable from every other stone in the plaza, except that it was engraved. In English. We reached for the camera.


The photographic proof of this is now matted and framed in the kitchen. Every day we see it, in the triple frame between the statue of Anonymous from Budapest and the fountain from the same plaza. And almost every day we wonder: What does it mean? Who put it there? And why didn't he know whether or not it was a place of historical importance? Was he implying that one day it would be a place of historical importance? That at this moment it was a place of historical importance and he just didn't know it yet?

The one who laid the stone was a careful man, hedging his bets. He allows that historical importance might spring from, yea, this very moment, and yet he does not assume that the moment is already historical. He leaves a monument in case one day history will come back to vindicate his cautious assessment of its possible progress. And yet he leaves no name, so he will not be blamed if history proves to be a bitch and fails to provide that place with any import.

Here's some interesting history on the Cologne cathedral as well as a fascinating historical image.

The official cathedral website -- the English page, I think. There's a 3o minute documentary which one can watch in English with lots of great history and pictures.

Not exactly...

We had a long hard week last week, and the coming one doesn't look to be any lighter. Working late, meetings, dentist appointments, checkups, the baby's toe turning black (his own fault) -- lots going on here. But still, it isn't exactly brain surgery.



Thank you, thank you, CMinor, for introducing us to Mitchell and Webb.

Elitist Bumper Sticker

Waiting to be made: "Non cogitas, ergo non es."

When the Two Become One

I always find myself a bit surprised when people find it hard to tell my and MrsDarwin's writing apart. After all, I never have this problem. And we so often measure others by ourselves, even when we have little right to expect similarity.

If it doesn't seem revoltingly naval-gazing to ask:

1) Do you find Darwin and MrsDarwin posts hard to tell apart some or all of the time?
2) Does it seem to you natural or odd for spouses to seem hard to tell apart in print?



And if it does seem revoltingly naval gazing... Well, sorry. It's Tuesday and I'm already talking about it having been a long week at work. All I can say is:

Listen up, hep cats

Heard this on the radio and was transfixed: Take Five played by a string quartet.



For comparison, here's Dave Brubeck playing his original version. Four guys in suits and skinny ties, as cool as all get out.

Coming up next on Nick: fallacies!

I know there are a lot of things to watch out for in what passes for kid's TV programming these days, but never did it cross my mind that commercials on Nickelodeon would be actively promoting formal logical fallacies. And yet: catching a minute of daytime TV at a location that was not my home, I viewed this Time Warner commercial with my eyebrow creeping higher and higher.



"Here's something DirectTV won't tell you: they hate puppies.

FACT: They charge you every month for HD service.
FACT: Time Warner Cable HD is free. Saves you what could be hundreds of dollars.
FACT: You could spend those hundred dollars on, like, a mountain of dog food.
FACT: Puppies love dog food.

THEREFORE: DirectTV hates puppies.

Who hates puppies?"

Whoa. Whoa. The toddlers are watching! Next thing you know, the three-year-old is going to be coming into your bedroom early Saturday morning, spouting off false syllogisms. Some things are worse than language and violence.

Bollywood Bleg

Here's a Friday entertainment post to see how diverse in movie taste our readership is.

MrsDarwin and I recently attempted a foray into Hindi film. I have a certain interest in Indian culture, working with so many Indians at work, and we'd seen several Indian-made or themed movies made with a mainstream, English-speaking audience in mind. (Monsoon Wedding, Bride and Prejudice, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsmbObwStSQ) We'd seen the epic Lagaan -- nearly four hours about love, colonialism, and cricket.

However, the other night we mis-stepped badly while sitting up late with NetFlix instant play -- striking out with both the crossover Bollywood/Hollywood:

Which was simply flat, and a bit too much like an Indian-Canadian remake of Pretty Woman as a musical.

And then with the Hindi movie Race:

Which featured eye candy, music video style songs with even less relation to the plot than usual, and a plot whose swerves went far beyond hair-pin. It had a certain rogue-ish charm, but we remain mildly flummoxed by why we watched the whole thing.

So, clearly looking at the capsule summaries on NetFlix (and the number of stars from user reviews, which all seem to range from 3-4 anyway) is not the way to select quality movies. Do we have anyone out there who is familiar with Bollywood cinema and can recommend a top five or ten favorites? (I think we're looking more for the romantic comedy musical genre, than the seemingly endless number of hopeless epic historical love-story musicals -- a surprising number between Indians and Pakistanis. One can only be hopeless and epic so much of the time.)