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MM tzai SI


2006
07.26

Posted in Standards, Technology, World | 1 Comment »

“The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them.”

ISO 639 language codes and ISO 3166 country codes can get a bit confusing:

For example, Sweden (the country) is “se”, but Swedish (the language) is “sv”.

On the other hand, the code “my” refers to Malaysia (the country) and Burmese — the language locally known as Bamar spoken in Myanmar (country code “mm”), formerly know as Burma (deprecated code “bu”).

“Mm tzai si,” by the way, is Hokkien — Fujien, Min-nan — (language code “zh-min-nan”) meaning “ignorant of death”. Besides the “mm” debacle above, “si” means Slovenia (the country) and Sinhalese (the language).

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Wannabe explorers, take note


2006
07.09

Posted in Books, Experience, Indigenous Peoples, Society, Travel, World | No Comments »

Tahir Shah’s “Expert’s Picks: Travel & Adventure” in this Sunday’s Washington Post book reviews:

Thesiger’s lesson for me, a young wannabe explorer in search of a mentor, was to search for people rather than places. Find great people, he would say, and you will find great places.

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Jolly Roger


2006
05.22

Posted in Experience, World | 1 Comment »

The International Maritime Bureau’s weekly piracy report makes a ripping good read. A recent example from the sea lanes of Mauritania:

13.05.2006 at 2125 LT in posn: 19:04N – 017:09W, Nouadhibou roads, Mauritania.

Pirates in an unlit boat approached a refrigerated cargo ship drifting 60 nm [nautical miles] off coast. Master raised alarm, took evasive manoeuvres, crew mustered and activated fire hoses. Unlit boat increased speed to 17 kts [knots] and continued to chase the ship. Master increase speed to maximum and found another boat tried to block the ship’s course. Boats pursued the ship for almost three hours and then aborted the chase. Master tried to contact local MRCC [Maritime Search and Rescue Co-ordination Centre] but could not communicate due to language difficulties.

http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php

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What’s so lonely about this planet?


2006
05.10

Posted in Books, Experience, Society, Travel, World | No Comments »

“Lonely Planet is the bible in places like India,” Mark Ellingham, the founder of Rough Guides, the cheeky British series, says. “If they recommend the Resthouse Bangalore, then half the guesthouses there rename themselves Resthouse Bangalore.” The series’ authority is such that the team accompanying Jay Garner, the first American administrator of occupied Iraq, used “Lonely Planet Iraq” to draw up a list of historical sites that should not be bombed or looted. The writers Marianne Wiggins, Jilly Cooper, and Pico Iyer have used Lonely Planet guides to immerse themselves in the feel of a far-off locale for novels set in, respectively, Cameroon, Colombia, and Iran. And, in perhaps the greatest tribute, the Vietnamese have begun to manufacture ersatz Lonely Planet guides to complement their line of fake Rolexes.

More about the Lonely Planet guidebook empire and its founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, in the New Yorker piece, “The Parachute Artist: Have Tony Wheeler’s Guidebooks Travelled Too Far?”.

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RMA Hubris


2005
12.20

Posted in Books, USA, Warfare, World | No Comments »

Jonathan Clarke reviews Stephen Walt’s Taming American Power (2005) in December 2005 issue of The Washington Monthly:

There are no two bricks anywhere in the world, one resting on top of the other, that American cruise missiles cannot knock over, on a 24/7 basis under all weather conditions. But, however impressive this capability is in terms of technology, does it really translate into an ability to impose America’s will? Walt writes of “hubris” and the persistent overestimation of this power capability by the American foreign-policy elite. Somewhere out there (preferably not from one of the usual anti-American suspects), there are fundamental questions to be asked about whether the so-called “revolution in military affairs” — the fusion of information technology and airborne platforms to deliver a global precision strike capability — is anything more than a will-of-the-wisp. This would lead into a discussion of how powerful America really is, power being defined as the ability to secure America’s long-term interests, not just in terms of knocking over buildings.

Read more at “New Balance: What other countries can do about American power”.

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