Iron Chink

Iaman reports from Vancouver B.C.:

This surprised me. My land lady, a Canadian born Chinese woman whose father was a Canadian WW2 hero has introduced me to a rich multi-ethnic community. She lent me a book of poems by Jim Wong Chu - Chinatown Ghosts. [Here's one Iaman recorded:]

Equal Opportunity - Jim Wong Chu 

In this book of poems I saw a picture of an "Iron Chink", a old heavy iron mechanical contraption.

 

Iron Chink

I thought "wow,  that's bold, someone's not worried about being called a racist". Deciding to check myself I googled "definition Chink"  google returned
"a narrow opening or crack, typically one that admits light."
What?
And then another definition, "A slight, metallic sound, as of coins rattling in a pocket."
Then saving my sanity Wikipedia returned details of what I thought of as a ethnic slur,  which led to an article about Salmon canneries:

"Afterwards, many workers were replaced or reallocated with the invention of the iron chink, a butchering machine said to replace up to 30 Chinese workers" 

 Iron Chink

1000s of pictures of  Iron Chink's 

I've been around enough to know it is best to judge a person on their own merits.   But being raised in white communities,  then as a 16 year old entering the nascent world of integrated military  I have seen my share of overt racism, and see how easy it is for the unthinking to rely on racism for a quick ego boost..
Now having inserted myself into the Chinese dominated culture of Burnaby  I wonder about living in a society that is overwhelmed by another culture.
Canada and China are of equal size yet China has 36 times the people, 1,300 Million vs  Canadas 36 Million.*
I experience a bit of this influx at the pools here, many times a lap lane will have 5 swimmers,  often all Chinese.  I do get a ego boost when swimming with the typically smaller chinese doing a breast stroke with their short arms,  No matter how quick and fit they are , I often lap them with my 10% longer reach doing a crawl.  Of course I am not swimming with >6'5" Olympic caliber Chinese swimmers.

*I thought two instances of 36 might be an error, so I checked. Turns out 36 squared is 1296, which is almost 1300.

Update September 2022 added caption

Russia

Dmitry Enteo pelts representatives of Moscow's LGBT community with eggs

Came across this picture without a useful caption and I wondered who these people are. I imagine that throwing eggs counts as assault or maybe even battery, at least in the USA. It's rude, but no where near as bad as hitting someone with a baton.

A little digging turned up this page where I found this bit:

When a commenter asks on his VKontakte page if he means to say that Putin will sit next to Christ's throne in Heaven, Enteo says, ‘Maybe.’ So why would something so obviously idolatrous, be put forward by a self-professed Orthodox Christian? Part of the answer lies in a tradition of Church-State relations that goes back to 4th century Constantinople. In the Byzantine Empire, the Emperor, and not the Pope, was regarded as God's steward on Earth. ‘In the nature of his body the king is on a level with all other men, but in the authority attached to his dignity he is like God,’ wrote the 6th century deacon, Agapetus, in what appears to be part political doctrine, part flattery directed at Emperor Justinian. Over a millennium later, in Russia, with its Byzantine heritage, Tsar Alexei's clerk, Ivan Timofeyev, would pen the following: ‘Although the Tsar is as a human in his essence, he is by his power equal to God, for he is above all, and none on this earth is above him.’ Popularising this idea was government policy – a 17th century Russian etiquette handbook instructs the pious to respect and fear their Tsar just as they would God.
Enteo, in other words, was putting a post-modern spin on thousand-year-old propaganda.

Which is just one more brick in the wall that keeps democracy out of Asia.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

The King

The King - Timothée Chalamet | Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix Film
Great movie about Henry the 5th, based on stuff written by Shakespeare. Well, that's what the dialog sounds like. There is a great depiction of the battle of Agincourt. What makes the movie great is the way it handles the conflicting motivations of the characters, which I suspect is also what makes Shakespeare so great.

I just realized I used the word 'great' four times in the preceding paragraph. Maybe I need to use other words, but none come to mind that I find suitable. Any one of the women whose blogs I link to could probably write a better summary, but they aren't here, so this is what you get.

Cosmic Clock

Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor By Stephanie Osborn

By way of promoting Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor By Stephanie Osborn, Sarah A. Hoyt has posted a timeline of how the disaster unfolded.

I recently connected the rotation of our galaxy to the ages of long ago events. If you look at the galaxy as a clock face, each hour of galactic time consumes about 19 million Earth years, so this event, that happened 66 million year ago happened about 5:30 this morning, galactic time, assuming the current galactic time is the same as my local time.

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure. The coastline is shown as a white line. A striking series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. White dots represent water-filled sinkholes (solution-collapse features common in the limestone rocks of the region) called cenotes after the Maya word dzonot. A dramatic ring of cenotes is associated with the largest peripheral gravity-gradient feature. The origin of the cenote ring remains uncertain, although the link to the underlying buried crater seems clear. - Wikipedia

Northwest portion of the Yucatan Penninsula, site of Chicxulub impactor
Not much evidence of the event on the satellite map, though you there seem to be some semi-circular swaths of clear areas surrounding Merida, which is pert near the center of the impact.

Brains

I am reading Fall by Neal Stephenson. I'm about half way through. It's kind of interesting but not exactly gripping. The story is about a rich guy who dies and has his brain digitized and uploaded into a giant computer system. My first problem with the story is that they start up a simulation process without connecting any input or output devices, so this 'brain' is just running around loose in this virtual space. It eventually starts creating a world from its memories. Now everything in this world needs to be simulated. I suppose this is reasonable, after all your brain creates a complete environment when you are dreaming, and it holds a model of the real world when you are awake. It's reasonable in that if you could create a digital model of a human brain, that digital model should be able to create a digital simulation of the world. But without any communication with the outside world, you would have no idea what is going on in there. In the book, they are relying on traffic analysis to try and paint a picture of what is going on, but it's kind of like trying to follow politics by looking a satellite image of the Earth using Google Maps. (Yes, the Democrats have set fire to California and cut off the power to the Northern half of the state, which must be populated by Republicans.)

Communicating with digitized brain is going to problematic. Shoot, digitizing a brain is going to problematic. I got the impression that the scan in the story makes a map of all the inter-neuron connections (a 'connectome'). This might be a good way to model a brain, IF you had a good model for a neuron. But neurons are complicated. The standard model says that neurons communicate with electrical signals, but recently someone discovered that they also send bits of RNA to other neurons which can then incorporate that into their structure, kind of like adding an app to your smartphone. It can add a new capability, modify an current one or completely change that neuron's personality. So if you really wanted to digitize a brain, you could not get by just by making a connectome, you would have to scan every stinking atom. And that wouldn't be enough either, because the brain you are scanning is dead, so you would need to clean it up, reverse all the decomposition and any damage done by freezing that was done to delay the decomposition, which is going to be very tricky because once complicated molecules break apart, they don't carry any markers that tell you where the pieces came from. Like if you take a giant Lego castle and smash it. Can you tell what the structure was by looking at the pile of pieces?

Communicating with a digitized brain, assuming you can do that, is not going to be easy either. You would have to model the signals that the various sense organs generate, construct analogous devices and wire them into the connectome. Likewise for output, you would need to model the signals coming out of brain and translate those into something could perform an action. Making a manikin walk around might be easier than making it talk.

In the book, the overall approach to this business is to just keep adding more processors and more memory. Since the people who are getting their brains digitized are all billionaires, they can afford lots of processors. There are like 3 million data centers in the US. Whether that would be enough to simulate a digitzed brain is open to debate. Billionaires could be building every larger data centers, kind of like the Pharoahs built pyramids. Not because they are good or useful, but because they can.

Blast from the Past

Vietcong woman with M72 LAW

We presume the woman is with the Vietcong because she is dressed in black, but she's wearing a dress. What's up with that? And the M72 is an American weapon. What's she doing with it? Who knows? It was a long time ago and far away. The LAW is a single use Light Anti-tank Weapon, fire it once and throw the launch tube away. So she might be just be holding a discarded launch tube without the rocket. Via Liberalguy

All your base are belong to us

Base under a salt

For Stu. Title explained here. Via a Home on the Range post about the invention of smokeless powder and the development of the first semi-automatic handguns.