Quote of the Day (32)

9 April 2011 - I read this quote from Herman Hesse's Siddartha on Facebook and I really like it: "When someone is seeking...it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything...because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal." Chapter 12, pg. 113

Tweeting for Dollars

7 April 2011 - Twitter may not yet have found a way to make money for itself but it is doing a good job of generating cash for its users, research suggests. A study conducted by a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich found that investors following stock market tweets could have achieved an average return rate of 15%. Timm Sprenger analysed 250,000 tweets sent over a six-month period. He predicts Twitter will increasingly offer specialised information to users. Thousands of stock-related messages are sent every day via tweets. Tweeting investors mark tweets according to company stock symbols. There was "a striking co-ordination" between what Twitter was saying about shares and other information from investors and analysts, he found. "I don't think it is the Holy Grail to make millions but it is a very credible and legitimate source," he said. He also found that more valuable information was retweeted, meaning that it reached a wider audience. The study formed the basis of the website TweetTrader.net where the real-time sentiment for individual stocks can be accessed. The site is currently in beta (trial).

From Here to Eternity Gay

6 April 2011 - An original version of 1951 novel From Here to Eternity is to be reissued digitally, with previously censored references to homosexuality restored. The heirs of author James Jones have struck a deal with ebook firm Open Road to put out a new edition that includes two scenes with gay content. Jones's novel, about US soldiers serving in Hawaii in the months prior to Pearl Harbor, was filmed in 1953. The uncensored version will be made available online from 10 May. It will include a scene in which Private Angelo Maggio - the character played by singer Frank Sinatra in the film - reveals he is paid to have oral sex with another man.
Another scene referring to a military investigation into possible homosexual activity will also feature in the text.

The restored version will also include profanity that was considered too extreme for Eternity's original publisher Scribner. Jones, who served in Hawaii before World War II and fought at Guadalcanal, had objected to the cuts but eventually acquiesced. "My father fought bitterly to hold on to every four-letter word in the manuscript," his daughter Kaylie told the New York Times. "The publisher was concerned about getting through the censors."

Easter Bunnies

5 April 2011 - The Swiss chocolate firm Lindt and Spruengli has won a marathon court battle to protect its golden Easter bunnies from an Austrian rival. A Vienna court has told the Hauswirth company to stop making its own chocolate rabbits wrapped in gold foil. The legal battle dates back to 2004. The Lindt bunny, sporting a red ribbon and bell, first appeared in 1952 and was given EU trademark status in 2000. The Vienna court said Hauswirth's bunny could be confused with Lindt's. A Lindt manager, Adalbert Lechner, said the judgement had confirmed his company's view that "Hauswirth harmed our trademark". "We hope the legal proceedings are finally closed with this judgement," he said. Hauswirth had argued that Lindt was using its trademark clout to crush competitors.

April Fool's

4 April 2011 - It almost went unnoticed because of the Mongolia trip, but April's fool's day has quietly passed.  Usually, it is the day when newspapers compete to come up with the most inventive spoof stories - but not every bizarre report on 1 April is fictitious. The Metro newspaper in France carried an article about French President Sarkozy and many morninng commuters thought it was an April fool's prank. Not so, as the story is in fact, entirely true. It was reported that Sarkozy uses a £10,000 armour-plated umbrella to protect him from attackers. Carried by the head of state's security guards, the rainproof device is allegedly coated in high-strength Kevlar so it can reduce the force of bullets and resist knife attacks. April's fool? Non Monsieur.

Great Pictures (32)

3 April 2011 - I am back from Mongolia, but because it's such an inspiring place with fantastic people, I publish this picture. I had a great time.

Letters from Chopin

2 April 2011 - Six letters written by Frederic Chopin, thought to be lost in 1939, have been found and donated to a Warsaw museum dedicated to the Polish composer. The letters, written by Chopin to his parents and sisters between 1845 and 1848, were believed lost after the outbreak of World War II. After it emerged in 2003 that they still existed in a private collection, moves were made to secure them. Chopin was born in Poland in 1810 but spent half of his life in France. According to museum curator Alicja Knast, the letters were last displayed in public in Poland in 1932 and were still confirmed as being in Warsaw in 1939. It is thought the letters went missing, like many other cultural artefacts, after the Nazis invaded Poland. The museum was assisted in their recovery by Marek Keller, a Polish art dealer now based in Mexico. He acquired them directly from their owners, who Knast said wished to remain anonymous. In the letters, written in Polish, Chopin describes daily life and his cello sonata in G minor, one of his few non-piano works.

Aggltinative Language

1 April 2011 - The Mongolian language  is tthe best-known member of the Mongolic language family. It sounds a bit weird, but really beautiful and musical. It may have about 5.2 million speakers, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region of China. In Mongolia, the Khalka dialect of Mongolian, written in Cyrillic, is predominant. Mongolian has vowel-hermony and a complex syllabic structure for a Mongolic language that allows up to three syllable-final consonants. It is a typical agglutinative language that relies on suffix chains in the verbal and nominal domains. While the basic word order is subject-object-predicate, the noun phrase order is relatively free, so functional roles are indicated by a system of about eight grammatical cases. There are five voices. Verbs are marked for voice, aspect, tense and epistemic modality. In sentence linking, a special role is played by converbs. It almost like science.

100 Words

31 March 2011 - England's Italian football manager Fabio Capello claims he can manage his players with just 100 words. So how far could you get with a vocabulary of that size? Despite his sometimes colourful language, communicating with Wayne Rooney does not require a Shakespearean command of English. That's just as well, as the England manager has admitted he's having problems learning some of the basics. "If I need to speak about the economy or other things, I can't speak," he told reporters. "But when you speak about tactics, you don't use a lot of words. I don't have to speak about a lot of different things. Maximum 100 words." In Capello's defence, his vocabulary appears to be far wider than 100 words. But how far would such a limited knowledge take you? For Peter Howarth, deputy director of Leeds University's language centre, Capello's defence of his language skills looks shaky. "It's a ridiculously small number, you could learn 100 words in a couple of days, particularly when you're in the country surrounded by the language," he says. "People do say that from a learners point of view, English is relatively easy to use without too much grammar ... but Fabio Capello needs a range, presumably, and to communicate emotions and a bit of nuance."

UB Fashion

30 March 2011 - Now here is something you did not know about Mongolia: there are a number of fashion shows that take place in Ulaanbaatar throughout the year. The biggest and most well know is Goyol which takes place in December over a whole weekend at the Cultural Palace. It showcases the best of Mongolian and international designers and models and normally sets the trend for the coming year’s look. Tickets for each day cost around Tg6000 but it’s well worth it for the show. Unfortunately one can’t take photographs without a photopass but a few shots from the aisles shouldn’t be a problem. Moda takes place in the State Drama Theatre and costs around Tg4000. It concentrates a little more on traditional wear than the latest cutting edge fashion but is still worth a look – especially as the show is not your standard runway fair but incorporates scene from famous Mongolian plays and also opera signing.

Cable Bill

29 March 2011 - You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000--the list truly goes on and on and on. Now the outrageous bill receivers club has a new member. Yes, based on the cable bill that an American man received this week, he's either the king of pay-per-view, or the victim of one of the most extreme computerized billing glitches in the history of computerized billing glitches. Fortunately for him, it looks like it's the latter. When the Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million. "All I want to do is watch March Madness," Mr DeVirgillio said. A local newspaper reported that DeVirgilio did the math and concluded that he'd have to order 1.6 million on-demand movies or a pay-per-view fight 400,000 times to accumulate $16.4 million in charges.

Genghis Tomb

28 March 2011 - For Mongolians the remains and burial place of the great leader Genghis Khan are sacred. From the period of reconstruction the desire to remember the heritage of Mongolia has resulted in an increased feeling of pride over their great Khan. The Mongolians and Japanese jointly held a prospecting expedition which made a search for the burial place of Genghis from 1990 to 1993. The expedition did not produce any results. People’s thoughts were divided on the subject and some Mongolians were angry about the expedition so the searching work was stopped. Since 1993 the Academy of Sciences has not given a grant to make a new search. In fact the expedition did not fully search territory of Khentii aimag which is thought to be his final resting place. There is a legend that if one touches upon Genghis remains, much trouble and hardship will follow.

Mongolian Customs

27 March 2011 - Mongolians traditionally were afraid of misfortunes and believe in a variety of good and bad omens. Misfortune might be attracted by talking about negative things, or by persons that are often talked about. They might also be sent by some malicious shaman or enraged by breaking some taboo, like stepping on a yurt's threshold, desecrating waters or mountains, etc.The most endangered family members were children, and that's why they would sometimes be given non-names like Nergui (Mongolian for: without name) or Enebish (Mongolian for:: not this one), or boys would be dressed up as girls.Before going out at night, young children's foreheads are sometimes painted with charcoal or soot in order to deceive evil spirits that this is not a child but a rabbit with black hair on the forehead.

Kanamara Matsuri Festival

26 March 2011 - The Kanamara Matsuri Fstival is an annual Shinto fertility festival held in Kawasaki, Japan in spring held in the Kanayama shrine. The exact dates vary: the main festivities fall on the first Sunday in April. The penis forms the central theme of the event that is reflected everywhere—in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade.The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating shrine once popular among prostituteswho wished to pray for protection against sexually transmitted diseases. It is said that there are divine protections also in business prosperity and the clan's prosperity, easy delivery, marriage, and married couple harmony. There is also a legend of a sharp-toothed demon that hid inside the vagina of a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. As a result, the young girl sought help with a blacksmith, who fashioned an iron phallus to break the demon's teeth, leading to the enshrinement of the item. Today, the festival has become somewhat of a tourist attraction and is used to raise money for HIV research

Meep Meep

25 March 2011 - It is official: China will overtake the US and dominate global trade by 2030, a leading accountancy firm says.China's global trade is set to surge past the US' by 2030, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Currently, China's international trade is worth $2.21 trillion (£1.36tn), compared with the $2.66tn (£1.64tn) for the US. China was confirmed as the world's second-biggest economy earlier this year, overtaking Japan. According to the report by PwC, the coming years will see global trade undergo "fundamental change" as emerging economies such as China and India begin to "dominate the top sea and air freight routes". PwC's findings are in line with the World Bank's prediction that China's economy will eclipse the US by 2030, if it can sustain its growth. Its chief economist Justin Lin said on Wednesday that, if China continued to grow at an annual rate of 8%, it would be twice the size of the US economy in 20 years.

Famous First Lines

24 March 2011 - Maybe this falls under the "Quote of the Day" category, but let's look at some famous opening lines:

• Telegram message, 1844: "What hath God wrought"
• Telephone, 1876: "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you."
• Wireless communication over open sea, 1897: "Are you ready?"
• BBC Radio 1, 1967: "And, good morning everyone. Welcome to the exciting new sound of Radio 1".
• Moon landings, 1969: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
• E-mail, 1971: Qwertyuiop [probable]
• Text message, 1992: "Merry Christmas"
• Google, Jan 1996: no record of first search term, it says
• Facebook, Feb 2004: no record of first post
• YouTube, 2005: Video called "Me at the zoo", with first words: ""Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants"
• Twitter, 2006: "just setting up my twttr"

Elizabeth Taylor

23 March 2011 - Dame Elizabeth Taylor, one of the 20th Century's biggest movie stars, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 79. The double Oscar-winning actress had a long history of ill health and was being treated for symptoms of congestive heart failure. Her four children were with her when she died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, her publicist said. In a statement, her son Michael Wilding called her "an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest. We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it." He continued to say that "Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts."

.XXX Domain

22 March 2011 - Internet overseer Icann has given final approval to the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography. The move to create a top level ".xxx" domain - similar to ".com" and ".org" - ends a 10-year battle over the virtual red-light district. Icann gave initial approval last year, but carried out further consultation checks over the application. It is now poised to sign an agreement with the ICM Registry, which is backing the domain, to make .xxx a reality. Supporters say the domain will make it easier to filter out inappropriate content. But many pornographers worry that the move could ghettoise their content. Religious groups have argued that giving pornography sites their own domain legitimises the content. Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said in a draft paper ahead of approving the decision: "The Icann community has engaged in extensive debate as well, with this single issue generating higher volumes of community comment than nearly any other issue ever faced within Icann." The organisation oversees the internet's addressing system and demands that new top level domains, such as .biz, must be "sponsored" in that they must serve the needs of a defined community. ICM said last year that it had more than 110,000 pre-reservations for .xxx domains.

American Idol Dollars

21 March 2011 - American Idol made more money from advertising revenue than any other US TV show in 2010, according to a survey by Forbes magazine. The singing contest raked in an estimated $7.1m (£4.4m) every half hour during its last series. Far behind in second place was Charlie Sheen's former comedy show Two and A Half Men, with $2.9m (£1.8m). Data was taken from Kantar Media, who surveyed all regular prime time shows, excluding sports events. American Idol's 2010 figures were down $1m (£620,000) on the previous year. Simon Cowell was still on the judging panel in the last series, accompanied by Ellen DeGeneres, Kara DioGuardi and Randy Jackson. Following Charlie Sheen's sacking from Two and A Half Men, it remains to be seen whether the show can continue to generate as much revenue, Kantar's Jon Swallen said. "The show is built around the interplay between two contrasting characters," Mr Swallen said. "If you remove one, it fundamentally makes it a different show. If it comes back on the air there will be a curiosity factor but after a few episodes it will have to rise or fall on its own merit. "Desperate Housewives was in third place with an estimated $2.74m (£1.7m), with medical drama Grey's Anatomy at four with $2.67m.

Ulaanbaatar

20 March 2011 - Next week I will go to Ulaanbaatar. UB has a long history, and is only now undergoing an industrial revolution. I read that UB is one of the most drab looking cities on the face of the planet, a travesty really, considering it's the capital of one the most beautiful and hospitable countries on earth. Still, as traditionalists, Mongolians love their capital. They understand that it is not an Asian beauty, but in their hearts they are aware of the city's history, culture and many struggles. Foreigners who take the time to get to know the faces that are hidden behind the gray walls will discover a hospitable and warm-hearted people. One is invited to explore the city from different angles, while at the same time do not ignore the abject poverty of many of the ex-nomads who in recent years have come to the city to find work after severe winters have killed their livestock. In this way, one will learn to unlock the city's many secrets and discover an Ulaanbaatar that is not initially revealed to the casual visitor.