Okay, if you’re a normal person, you had enough of Michael Jackson news approximately 2.4 hours after his death. It took me considerable time to ignore every single headline with his name in it the past week, but I ended up reading one article and it turned out to be fascinating: LINK
That is all.
Category: Society & Culture
Vietnam destiny
Found this crazy story over at Monkeyfilter about a Vietnam vet who met up, through a series of highly impossible yet seemingly predetermined events, with the daughter of a man he killed during the war: One veteran heals through a battlefield keepsake
The accompanying video contains an unnecessary soundtrack but is heart-wrenching:
PETARDED
PETA doesn’t like fishmongers tossing fish at the Pike Place Fish Market
PETA wishes Obama hadn’t swatted a fly on live TV
PETA needs to hurry up and merge with the Church of Scientology so we all have a single entity to hate and ridicule.
Animals are delicious, biotches.
DMFTW
The new Danger Mouse album is going to turn the record industry on its head – mark my words, this is the tipping point.
Banning “Dzongkha” – Microsoft hates the Dalai Lama and Bhutan, but Loves Chinese Money!
In October 2005, an internal Microsoft proposal blocked the term “Dzongkha” from all company software and promotional material, substituting the term “Tibetan – Bhutan” instead. The International Campaign for Tibet cites the memorandum as saying Dzongkha “implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China”. The Bhutanese, who have never been under the rule of the Dalai Lamas, even if they revere the 14th Dalai Lama, were dismayed by the decision. Linguists have pointed out that the word “Dzongkha” has no particular association with the Dalai Lama. Ironically, the government of the People’s Republic of China continues to use the term “Dzongkha” in its official publications.
Oh well, Chinese gold still glitters I suppose… And Microsoft isn’t exactly known for taking the ngyen khag* route.
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* risky (Dzongkha phrasebook)
Asymmetrical warfare
An interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell over at the New Yorker that sort of reads like an inspirational speech: How David Beats Goliath
Jared Diamond sued by alleged pig thief
Natives Telling Stories
I heard about this last week but I thought it was an anthropologist’s joke.
Better Place
I’ve been through a lot of the archives, and Shai Agassi probably gave the single most important talk at TED this year:
Successful Ambush
Turning Tables, U.S. Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift and Lethal Results
“Sergeant Reese gave his rifle to another sniper to cover him while he tried to cut away a Taliban fighter’s ammunition pouches with a four-inch blade. The fighter had only been pretending to be dead, the soldiers said. He lunged for Sergeant Reese, who stabbed him in the left eye.”
Sometimes it’s easy to forget we’re still fighting a war with a defined enemy and objectives.