The Amazing Race 17.01

We’re back with another season of TAR. Right off the bat, I was struck by how strong the teams are on paper. I think this is the strongest season so far. Multiple celebrities, teams in professions traditionally associated with intelligence, and physically competitive teams. There’s eye candy as usual, but this eye candy seems capable too. No spoilers for this week’s post.

For celebrities we have home shopping tv show hosts (of watermelon headshot fame – which has to go down as one of the best TAR moments ever), Miss Kentucky, Asian YouTube celebs. There’s a couple doctors who work together (one with diabetes), a couple Princeton undergrads, and a team of actors (one of which is a Stanford alum). The standard team of hot blondes have been playing beach volleyball together for 5 years, the generic boyfriend/girlfriend pair is pretty fit (guy is a football player), and the tattooed couple look hard core. The human interest team are a biological mother/daughter pair (who only recently met each other – the daughter was given away for adoption at birth). Lots of strong all female teams this season… could this be the first time 17 seasons for one to win? This is their best chance yet.

(But come on, how can you not have heard of Stonehenge? And, “Thats right, the country of London.” Thick as bricks.)

And, next week: Africa. Excellent.

Sidenote: casting started for an Australian version of TAR. Should be interesting if they run it like the US version.

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Through the Language Glass

I bought Through the Language Glass after reading this excerpt. The book is a mostly interesting read, tracing the shifting history of views of linguists on this question over time. The excerpt pulls out the most interesting bits so I’m not going to repeat them. However, in the book Deutscher does go into a lot more depth about how linguists’ thoughts have changed over time about how language influences the way we perceive the world (and how hard it is to figure this out). How different cultures “see” color is examined particularly closely, and Deutscher also keeps bringing us back to the insightful point that what’s important in the analysis is not what a language is capable of expressing, but what a language forces its speakers to express (e.g. in English we are forced to express time; Hebrew speakers are forced to express gender; and Chinese speakers are forced to express neither time nor gender).

If you can look past the author’s needlessly flowery language, and you have an armchair interest in languages, this is a decent read.

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What happens if you refuse to answer an immigration official’s questions?

Paul Lukacs, a US citizen, flies back into the US and, exercising his Fifth Amendment rights, refuses to answer any of the immigration officer’s questions. He is detained for about 90 minutes and then released. He blogs about it. The blog post receives many comments after appearing on BoingBoing and other sites. He answers the comments en masse.

Why were you in China?” asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.

“None of your business,” I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

A few observations from me.

1. A lot of people criticizing Lukacs point out that although he is within his rights to do this, it’s disrepectful to the customs officer (who’s just doing their job) and other passengers (who are delayed). These are all valid points, but I must admit it is heartening to know that the system works. It’s no good having a right if you can’t exercise it. The ability to exercise a right with pragmatic results is as important as having the right itself.

2. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re playing with fire. Sure, you have a right against self-incrimination, and you can’t be convicted for merely exercising that right. But there seem to be all these laws floating around these days which allow the government to detain people without charge for a short period of time (I think the US is maximum 24 hours? Sixth Amendment/habeus corpus etc.). One misstep and you could have caused yourself much more trouble than it was worth.

3. Don’t try this in other countries. I’ve heard Japan can detain for up to 23 days without charge, and without access to a lawyer or the proverbial phone call. (How scary is that?)

4. A country can’t prevent a citizen from re-entering his or her own country. Citizenship is regarded as a basic human right, and as part of this right, is the right to enter the territory of your country. Statelessness can leave someone in legal limbo, and there are more problems with this than you might initially think.

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Stealing from the wrong person

Amanda Enayati’s belongings were stolen after her husband left their car unlocked in San Francisco. Instead of turning immediately to the police, she decided to track down the thief herself, with interesting results. Enayati herself has an interesting background, which made the thief’s decision an especially bad one.

See, aspiring thief, you just never know what you’re stepping into when you hit up a random car on a random street. However badass you think you may be, there is someone on the other side of the robbery. And in this particular case it was someone who escaped the Iranian Revolution as a child; who roamed the world alone for five years because her parents couldn’t get out; who watched from a dozen blocks away as the twin towers crumbled; who had just barely clawed her way out of that concentration camp known as late-stage cancer, if only because she was intent on raising her babies, come hell or high water. And all of this before she even turned 40. Can you see how that someone might be way more twisted than you?

There must be some sort of horror movie that’s based on this premise. Like, stealing-from-a-gypsy-and-getting-cursed kind of horror movie.

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A bird’s back view

A doco crew stuck a camera on the back of a peregrine falcon and watched it pull a 250kph dive with a 10g turn at the end. Then they watched a goshawk speed through a forest like the speeder bike scene in Return of the Jedi.

Very cool footage – I think when we look at birds flying through the air we probably underestimate their speed because there’s no audio cue, like the roar of an engine on a plane (which is why they also have to simulate engine noise on electric vehicles).

  1:22am  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Manic entrepreneurs

The NY Times has an article about entrepreneurial personalities:

The attributes that make great entrepreneurs, the experts say, are common in certain manias, though in milder forms and harnessed in ways that are hugely productive. Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell.

But contrast this with Gladwell’s New Yorker article earlier this year, who say that successful entrepreneurs aren’t really risk-takers.

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Survivor: Nicaragua ep 1

Gonna be an interesting new season. The old/young split is different. It’s tempting to write the old people off but there are no certainties with Survivor. The young team has a lot of really hot girls, and I found it hilarious how the male model immediately earned the nickname of Fabio. Having the first amputee (leg) on the show’s history will be very interesting… but being different tends to make you stick out in Survivor and that’s rarely a good thing – just look at all the heat on the Superbowl-winning coach. Too early to make predictions at this stage. I thought it was unfortunate that the goat rancher was the first to go – she seemed bubbly, slightly neurotic, but pretty harmless and I suspect she would have made a good ally for someone who knew how to handle her.

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Brothers

I ordered a copy of Yu Hua’s Brothers after a friend referred it to me as “one of the most brilliant books” he’s ever read.

The 600-page story recounts the divergent paths of two Chinese step-brothers as they grow up through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, and burst into today’s age of rampant capitalism. During it, we get an insight into the Chinese culture and mindset, as well as multiple glimpses of how totally fucked up things can become.

I’m by no means a Sinophile, but there are some cultural aspects I can understand, if not empathize with. This book, however, takes things to extremes. I was warned it was a brutal read, and that it was. Many of the scenes depicted in the book are so extravagant, so excessive, so intense, so bizarre, and so surreal, that it seems a completely fanciful work of fiction. The opening chapter, for instance, starts off with the tale of our protagonist “Baldy” Li who is caught peeping at women’s butts in a communal toilet. His mother is distraught, since her husband had died years ago while doing the same thing (except that he slipped, fell into the muck and drowned). After enduring a lengthy public shaming, Baldy Li instead capitalizes on the event, telling his story to lecherous men in exchange for bowls of house-special noodles. The book is filled with stories like this.

Yet, I got this sneaking suspicion that in China especially – land of 1.3 billion and flush with money – truth is stranger than fiction and many of the events in the book – if they have not already happened at one point in history – are at least feasible.

Brothers is sometimes painful, often entertaining, and always interesting. It moves from tragedy to tragedy, interspersed with periods of fun, happiness, hilarity, and “WTF” moments. Black humor is pervasive. And you will never read phrases like “artificial hymen” and “straw-embedded bun” as many times as you will in this book.

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