Stuff I’m now deleting from my configuration that others might find useful. GNU GPL v3 with exception of the AHK script at the end; please attribute to me and let me know if it was useful.
This is the fifth post in a series. First post; Next post
Members of all cultures have a set of stereotypes about their own culture in their heads that they’ll roll out when they’ve got nothing else to say to a foreigner. I suspect that they’re only slightly more likely to be correct than the stereotypes about that culture held by foreigners. For example, British people will tell you that British people are always talking about the weather. And Korean people will tell you that Korean people are always very busy. It’s like “Korean food is spicy” and “Korea has four seasons”: things that you hear over and over again from Koreans when they’re trying to be friendly. Fair enough. Small talk has its purpose, and especially in someone’s second language I don’t blame them for not having anything interesting to say. However, the busy-busy culture in Korea is actually just an expression of self-pity in a culture that often encourages self-pity instead of action.
For my first six months here, I operated under the impression that Koreans are the busiest and hardest working people on earth. At some point during my first semester, that illusion fell apart.
In the west, image is important. But we’re taught that being dependable and producing quality work are the way to cultivate a positive image at the office. In Korea, image is everything. Quality of work and efficiency are relatively unimportant here. Convincing others think that you are a hard worker is far more important than actually working hard. (source)
This is the fifth post in a series. First post; Next post
All over the world people try to make things look better than they are. Marketing is perhaps the most systemised example. But in Korea, it feels like half of all adult activity is making things look good for other adults who know very well that everyone is spending a big chunk of their time on making just-good-enough jobs look good. It’s quite strange, and also deeply ineffective and stifling. I’ll give three examples from my elementary school.
This is the the sixth and final post in a series. First post.
The Korean word for Korea is Hanguk, though you won’t hear this much in the TV News. Instead you’ll hear woori nara which means ‘our country.’ I asked a friend about this and she reckons that a TV news presenter who didn’t say woori nara would be thought not to care enough about his own country, and that’s not acceptable. Perhaps, though, woori nara is just a turn of phrase that doesn’t carry nationalist connotations. I don’t think that’s true. Recently a plane crashed and the news was occupied with establishing how many Koreans were on board. British news is just as bad in this regard but Koreans take it a step further. The formal Korean word for a Korean person is Hangukin. But the TV news presenter reporting on the plane crash was talking about woori Hangukindeul (’deul’ is a suffix indicating plurality). That is, translating non-literally, “our Korean brothers and sisters”, must more important than the several hundred other people on that plane.
What the World Will Speak in 2115
A nice antidote to thinking that simplifications necessarily reduce expressive power or beauty.
I know that lots of people refuse to subscribe to Sky because of its connection to Rupert Murdoch, but News Corp owns only 39 per cent of BSkyB and the Murdoch family owns only 12 per cent of News Corp. That means that more than 95 per cent of Sky is owned by not-Murdoch, which as far as I’m concerned puts it in the clear. Murdoch’s 4.68 per cent of Sky is only a fraction more than Libya’s 3.27 per cent share of Pearson: I’ve never heard of anyone refusing to buy a Penguin book because of Colonel Gaddafi.
(source)
Taken altogether, the data suggest that Americans manage to have sex about 30 times per year—or once every 12 days.
Sex can be quite fun. Why do we have so little of it?
Google searches suggest one predominant reason: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced.
This summary figure of thirty times a year isn’t so useful because it ignores, most obviously, the distinction between those who are single and those who are in committed relationships. And as everyone knows, how much sex most people want to have decreases the older they get and the longer they’ve been with the same partner.
I had thought my intuition was that that it was safe to assume that people in relatively new relationships are having sex every day and middle-aged married couples are having it once a week, but this should give an average lower than once per 12 days. So either my intuitions about sexuality are wrong or my statistical instincts are misguided.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ideas of genius and of the tortured artist which are often called out as myths, at least as they are in popular culture. I’m never sure what to think because American hyper-positive you can do anything if you really try is strictly false, but on the other hand I find myself faced with anecdotal evidence of both natural talent and longterm effort shining through on particular occasions.
Maybe they’re both just ways for most of us to feel better having given up on our creativity. But I’m suspicious of the idea of wide swaths of the population having given up their creativity. People like to contrast ‘content’ consumers and producers and say that you’re missing out on human reality (or something) by being one of the former and failing to be one of the latter. Yet there are plenty of misguided people on both sides, whether or not it’s a distinction on which eudaimonia turns.
I had a very stereotypical post-gap year experience on visiting home for two and a half weeks this month: I felt like nothing there had changed in the slightest and they couldn’t possibly understand all the changes I’d been through!!!11 Well not quite. I felt as though nothing at home had changed, and any respects in which I might have changed vanished, and I was back to being a half-child again, living with my mother and step-father in between university terms, occasionally visiting my father’s house out of guilt and then just abusing him. Living in Korea has of course made me much more adult, but all my adulthood vanished on returning home.
I recently wrote a series of blog posts commenting on contemporary Korean society after a year living here, and I was disappointed by the way about half of them came out. Further, I didn’t write down my current assessment of my year in Korea for my own self and life. I intend to do that briefly here.
So why not just learn Common Lisp first? Coming from a procedural and OOP background, my experience has been that I didn’t really understand functional programming until I had to use it exclusively. Once functional programming is comfortable, you can add the rest of the tools that Common Lisp makes available, and use whatever tool is best at the task at hand. Larry Coleman on Stack Exchange
When I write LISP to configure Emacs, I don’t know whether it’s better to use functional idioms (the few of which I know) or procedural ones. Seeing how pure functional programming works thus seems like a good idea. I’ll try (again) to learn Haskell before I try to get more serious about LISP than my current abilities to wrench my Emacs configuration into shape.
My mother complains from time to time that I’m hard to buy for and makes me feel that it’s my responsibility for me to make it easier for her to spend money on me. This seems wrong. She shouldn’t feel under an obligation to buy presents at certain times of the year. And it’s a virtue of mine because it suggests I’m materially content without being a millionaire which is good. But can we have an institution of gift-giving without the obligation? So long as people feel disappointed at not getting something when they expected to—so long as people expect to get things at certain times—it seems not.