Foreign Dispatches

Spring Show

DSC_8412-13-16, originally uploaded by Abiola_Lapite.

Barely 4 weeks ago I was complaining about the bitingly cold weather in the UK, and now it's so hot that wearing more than a t-shirt is likely to put one at risk of heat stroke, that's how abruptly the weather can change in this part of the world. Still, within the ridiculously short interval which passed for "Spring" this year, I did manage to accumulate a few photos of the local fauna in bloom, which you can have a look at in slideshow form: think of this as eye candy you can't get fired for looking at ...

Don't Be "That Guy"

Trust me, you really don't want to be the kind of guy in the background of this picture. As one Digg commenter put it, he might as well be muttering to himself "It rubs the lotion on its skin!"

What Drives Jeremiah Wright?

I've been struggling for quite some time now to find the right words with which to convey my take on Pastor Jeremiah Wright's decision to inflict the maximum possible damage to Barack Obama by going in front of the press and confirming all of white America's fears about the Angry Black Militant; now that I've read this Lexington column, however, any further agonizing on my part is superfluous, as the Economist writer puts across succinctly precisely what I've been thinking: Jeremiah Wright is an egomaniac riven with jealousy at the meteoric rise of his onetime congregant, and if it takes Wright reducing himself to a caricature before the media in order to torpedo the ambitions of an individual who looks set to move black politics away from the old, angry, oppositional style personified in the American public's eyes by Farrakhan, Sharpton and now Wright himself, then that is what Jeremiah Wright will readily do.

A Right to Sexual Happiness?

In light of the modern trend to enshrine as "rights" all sorts of notions which bear no recognizable relation to rights as traditionally conceived, it was only a matter of time before someone took a step like that made by a certain Ecuadorian senator.

A woman from the governing party in Ecuador has proposed that a women's right to enjoy sexual happiness should be enshrined in the country's law.

Looking Good

DSC_7041-15-30, originally uploaded by Abiola_Lapite.

As the days get longer and warmer, the quality of shots I'm getting goes up correspondingly. Perhaps I should just move to Miami and be done with it!

On the Profitability of Slave Labor

In debates about the American Civil War and its causes, one often hears the argument advanced that the efforts of the Northern abolitionists were unnecessary as slave labor was already on the way out, owing to its declining profitability. I've always found this argument preposterous on its face, but in the course of reading Götz Aly's "Hitler's Beneficiaries", I am struck anew by the utter mendacity of such an assertion: not only did the Nazi regime make slavery pay, but it paid on a truly colossal scale, something on the order of $100-150 billion in the space of a handful of years. If slavery could be made to pay so handsomely in 1941-1945, and in a Germany whose economy was already far more knowledge-intensive than the American South would be until perhaps the 1980s*, why are we supposed to believe that slavery would be abolished today without a war to force its abolition? Why would the South have been willing to go to war to preserve a soon-to-be obsolete institution in the first place?

Human slavery is and likely always will be profitable, at least until reality catches up with Blade Runner and artificial sentient humanoids can be made to do what men, women and children in chains would have (and even that would simply be replacing one type of slavery with another). Optimists might like to believe otherwise, and nothing will stop neo-confederate apologists masquerading as "libertarians" from continuing to make stupid arguments to the contrary, but the viability of slavery is something that will not change in the foreseeable future.

*To be perfectly candid, it isn't even clear that this is true today, considered objectively. 1930s Germany was a creative and innovative powerhouse on a scale that the American South just doesn't seem to be.

PS: A little searching turns up this paper on the economics of slavery in the antebellum South. As expected - and in contrast to the rubbish to be found on "Lew Rockwell" and similar sites - the paper gives every reason to believe that slavery would have continued to thrive had the American Civil War been averted.

Good Glass is Good to Find

DSC_6371-14-27, originally uploaded by Abiola_Lapite.

One of those new pieces of photographic equipment that I've been meaning to write about on here for ages is the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED, which I had the good fortune to acquire at a relatively low rate from a prior owner who wished to sell it in order to help pay for a Nikon D3.

Building Search Engines is Hard

Having built a search engine from scratch, I can verify that the task is far harder to do right than most people assume, and that's even leaving aside the need to do something cleverer than everyone else with all of the data you're busy gathering and indexing. Rather than go on at length about the precise whys and wherefores, I'll let this ACM Queue article do a little of the work for me; I say "a little" because it addresses only the basic technical aspects of the exercise, while even a stirringly successful development push will still leave the daunting task of commercializing the product. There's nothing to sour one on the competence and vision of the supposed leading lights of the financial world like dealing with venture capitalists who insist on telling you that "search is dead" just 2 years before Google goes public ...

Lectures on the Poincare Conjecture

And now for something completely different! It turns out that Terence Tao's recently begun teaching a class at UCLA on Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture, and for the benefit of all those of us who can't be there to enjoy the benefit of his teaching, he's been putting up his lecture notes on his weblog. If you have the requisite background to appreciate what Tao's writing about, I think you'll find his notes wonderfully lucid. Highly recommended.

A Contagious Mood

DSC_4729-15-47, originally uploaded by Abiola_Lapite.

There's a small story behind this photo, but as I've already written it on the photo's Flickr page (which you can reach by clicking on the image), I'll only add here that when Korean women are cute - which, like with any other people, is hardly all of the time - they are really cute. Why that is I don't know (and no, I don't agree that surgery has everything to do with it).

The Genetics of Height

Physical height is one of those human traits which nearly everyone seems to care about, with most people either wishing they had a little more of it or wishing they could find a partner who did. In addition, height - unlike a nebulous concept like "intelligence" - is one particular trait which is quite easy to objectively measure, and it is beyond dispute that how tall one will become is heavily determined by one's genetic inheritance. As such, one would think there'd already be a huge body of work out there which nails down the genetic variations which primarily contribute to this trait, but the surprising thing is that very little was actually known about its genetic determinants until very recently (subs reqd).

But That's What Polar Bears Do!

I've always found the whole media circus around "Knut the Polar Bear" intensely stupid, particularly because I knew from the start how it would end once the animal had ceased to be a cute little pup ignorant but sentimental spectators could fawn over. As this BBC story shows, what I anticipated is precisely what has come to pass.

Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.

A Letter to Google

I've noticed that during the last few weeks, Google has made some tweaks to the way its search engine works, tweaks which effectively destroy its usefulness for those of us who aren't completely technologically illiterate. I've become so fed up with the breakage caused by these changes that I dashed off the following message.

God Bless England!

To be completely candid, my personal opinion as to the attractiveness of the typical English female is less than enthusiastic: outside of a few enclaves in which well-born and raised "Sloane Ranger" types are to be found, your average English woman in her 20s or 30s is all too often either an obese and overpainted hussy, a foul-mouthed drunken chav, or some lethal mixture of the two categories, and what one usually finds upon encountering a striking beauty in London who knows how to carry herself like a lady is that she is usually from continental Europe, whether from Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, or some other such place.

Real History in Korean Textbooks

I've said my bit in the past about how utterly false the claims Koreans make about the era of Japanese rule tend to be, only to be met with lots of angry but empty-headed nonsense to the effect that I must be wrong, facts be damned, because Imperial Japan could never have done anything positive for its colonial acquisitions: after all, the Koreans say so loudly and angrily all the time, right?

Picture of the Day

DSC_4483-14-27, originally uploaded by Abiola_Lapite.

Over the past few months I've made some significant upgrades to my photographic setup, and as such I've been meaning for some time now to share on here my impressions of the new equipment, but work - and a strong preference for taking pictures over merely talking about taking pictures - has repeatedly gotten in the way. It will be a little while still before I'm able to write up my review of the new kit, but for now I'll just say that I can no longer point to my gear when I fail to get results that measure up against skilled competition.

14 Reasons to Love Hillary Clinton

To say that I "love" - or even "like" - Hillary Clinton would be a gross misrepresentation of the truth; on the contrary, the opposite of "love" would be much closer to the mark. That I find the woman detestable is not to say that I feel the same way about her continued run for the Democratic Party nomination, however: unlike Mark Halperin, I think Hillary's indifference to both mathematical probabilities and the greater interests of her party happen to be wonderful things - for John McCain - and that is why I am able to derive so much pleasure from watching her batter Barack Obama with all of the fear-mongering and race-baiting that my preferred candidate would be far too honorable to stoop to himself*, even as I can't help loathing her tactics as a black man. Halperin thinks he's providing reasons for Hillary to quit the race, but from my standpoint every one of these reasons looks to me like justification to keep her in the running.

Disgusting on Multiple Levels

This extremely disgusting story manages to combine two of Japanese society's most distasteful features into one ultra-repulsive package.

Fans of Japan's pedophilic Rorikon genre are turning their penchant for pre-pubescent cheesecake toward a website filled with footage of Caucasian teens decked out in Japanese fetish costumes, according to Cyzo (April).

Candy Doll, the site, is packed with images of young, blonde European girls in their pre-teens prancing through mystical forests, giggling and accompanied by soppy background music.

Why Men Want Younger Women

The answer is pretty much a restatement of the obvious, but I feel it needs repeating in light of the numerous nonsensical explanations I've seen floating around for why Eliot Spitzer would pay out more than $80,000 to sleep with women not much older than his daughters. Say what you will about Ashley Alexandra Dupre / Ashley Youmans, but at 22 the young woman is either at or very close to her peak of fertility: not that Spitzer had any intention of actually having children with her, but in the days before contraception that would have been the almost inevitable result of what he did want ...

No Wonder He's Without a Throne

The following remark has got to be the stupidest statement I've heard from a European politician in the entire year, on a par with Geraldine Ferraro's nonsense about how "lucky" Obama is to have been born black and named Hussein at a time when couples like his parents would have been thrown in jail across much of the US:

Otto von Habsburg, 95, the son of Austria's last emperor, told a commemorative meeting [on the Anschluss] that no state in Europe had "a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim".

Austria as greatest victim of Nazism? Talk about chutzpah! If Austria is a "victim", what does that make prominent Austrians like Adolf Eichmann, Odilo Globocnik, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Alois Brunner and Adolf Hitler himself, martyrs? Whether we're talking whites accusing others of "racism" for pointing out the racial prejudices implicit in their remarks, or prominent Austrians pretending that their fellow countrymen were anything other than enthusiastic Nazis for the most part, its awfully strange how fond enablers and rationalizers of prejudice tend to be of presenting themselves as its victims ...

Spam and Culture

What does it say about the American and Japanese cultures that the spam I get from English-speaking sources* is overwhelmingly about phallus enlargement, while in the Japanese language case it's almost always either about hooking up with other men's wives or finding sex-starved schoolgirls? Does it mean American men are obsessed with the size of their organs while Japanese men want what they aren't supposed to have? I have the feeling that there are weighty socio-cultural issues to be explored here ...

*Like it or not, 99.9% of English-language spammers are ultimately American.

Kol Nidre

I actually discovered this video in the course of a search motivated by my lamentation about the dearth of decent pop music to suit baritones, but I was so impressed by the quality of the singing - especially that of the cantor - that I just had to share it.

That's some incredible melisma there, wouldn't you agree? The human voice sounds best when it isn't drowned out by orchestration, but is treated as a first-rate musical instrument in its own right - oh, and by the way, this is just one more example of how tenors seem to get all the best parts ...

More Experience by Osmosis

I've tried to go out of my way to avoid commenting on every twist and turn of the Democratic Party's ongoing campaign to pick a Presidential candidate, though Lord knows I've been severely tempted to do so on many an occasion in response to the many absurdities to issue from "Hillaryland". If there's one claim regularly made by Hillary Clinton which sets my teeth on edge, though, it is her assertion of a claim to a supposed vast stock of "experience" of which Barack Obama can only dream: if sleeping next to the powerful were to be regarded as constituting "experience", then Dennis Thatcher would be one of the more "experienced" men in British politics, and Gennifer Flowers would probably deserve a seat in the Arkansas legislature. Hillary Clinton's claims to "experience" are outright preposterous, and it astonishes me that the American media continues to take it all at face value, but not everyone is willing to play along with the charade, Northern Ireland leader David Trimble being a noteable counterexample.

Alcohol and Character

One belief I've held for many years now, and which I have seen no reason to alter in the slightest, is that alcohol is not an instigator of misbehavior but an enabler of it: if people are given to engaging in aggression, promiscuity or bigotry after a few (or not so few) drinks, it is because these are things they've long wanted to do anyway, with alcohol just providing the courage to indulge one's baser instincts.

HD-DVD Officially Dead

Via Itai News (in Japanese), which seems to have picked up Toshiba's official announcement on NHK (though neither of the two articles linked to can currently be reached).

PS: Actually, the Yomiuri Shimbun has an article on Toshiba's announcement that it is now adopting Blu-ray in favor of its own HD-DVD format. Sony's PS3 gamble has finally paid off, but it is a sad day for those who care about being able to create backups of their home movies, as the Blu-ray format has a much more robust copy-protection system than HD-DVD (which had already been cracked).

PPS: Reuters is now carrying an English-language article on Toshiba's announcement.