Typing my name

Typing in Japanese isn't as hard as people usually think it would be. You actually just type the sounds of a word phonetically, then select the correct characters for the word you mean from a list of homophones. Since there are no spaces in Japanese, the space bar is conveniently repurposed to cycle through this list.

So if I want to type "kyoudai", which means "brother", I just switch into Japanese mode and type the word phonetically:

kyo-u-da-i -> きょうだい

Then I hit the space bar to cycle through all the words pronounced "kyoudai"...

強大 - powerful
京大 - Kyoto University
鏡台 - dressing table
兄弟 - brother

... and hit "enter" when I've got the right one.

Once you get used to this, you can type in Japanese about as fast as in a phonetically spelled language.

Ironically, it's when I want to spell my name phonetically that Japanese typing becomes a pain. This wasn't a problem before I got married - the romanized phonetic spelling of Benjamin Rooney in Japanese is ben-ja-min ru-u-ni-i (ベンジャミン・ルーニー). Stürmer, though, is a whole new story. It needs a special phonetic character to show the "tü" sound, which doesn't exist in Japanese. So I have to type shu-te-li-ru-ma (シュティルマ), which tangles my fingers up every time.

And despite this effort, Japanese people still can't pronounce my last name, so they all just call me Benjamin.

-嵐紅

My own thoughts on Michael Jackson's death

I don't have any profound insights or juicy gossip into the circumstances or meaning of Michael Jackson's death, but I've been thinking a lot about the way his life and death have played in the media and in conversations I've had with friends about him in the last few days.

I find it absolutely fascinating that while he was alive, the most recent events in Jackson's life seem to have been the most heavily weighted in a typical person's perception of him. That is to say, his accomplishments as a musician were overshadowed by the last ten years in which his strange lifestyle, plastic surgeries, and accusations of child molestation were the only handles the public were given on his life.

But then he died and the meaning of the individual moments of his life suddenly seemed to gain equal weight. Now that he's dead, he has no present, and we seem to see each part of his past as equally important. Media coverage and the conversations I have observed acknowledge that the man was a very odd character with serious problems, but that seems to be overshadowed by respect for what he accomplished as a musician and a showman.

Why do react to death in this way? Why is it that a person's past is less important than their present when they are alive, but equally important after their death? I think it's because death ends the story of a life, and makes it possible to step back and contemplate the whole with more detachment than is possible of a story we're still observing in the unfolding.

The relativity of significance

My side project today is reading through a text written by an associate professor at my old university and making sure the English is in good shape. The text in question is about the European Under-17 Championship (my fingers spell "champtionship" every time I try to spell that...), and he mentions the fact that with a crowd of only 70,000 spectators and only Eurovision carrying the games live, the event isn't as significant as something like the World Cup.

This is certainly true, but it got me thinking about the meaning of "significance." We tend to tie the significance of an event together with the number of people observing, experiencing, or affected by it, and 70,000 just isn't that many people. But if you went back a few hundred years to a world with a much smaller population, I imagine that an event attended by 70,000 people would be considered of immense significance – consider that the Roman Colosseum had a seating capacity of 50,000. The actual number of people directly impacted by the event is identical, but the narrative is seen as less significant because that number is a smaller proportion of the greater mass of people to which the attendees belong.

It also occurs to me some events that are attended or experienced by relatively few people (Woodstock and the TED Conferences are two examples) nonetheless have a huge indirect impact on culture and thought.

A sickly Umlaut

No worries, a post is indeed forthcoming. Just imagine Friday stretched to a more reasonable 40 or so hours, and this week's blog update will be right on time. The problem is, between last Thursday and Saturday I exchanged (I have calculated this) well in excess of 300 hugs with 92 people. At least one of them was carrying a virus that proceeded to demonstrate the effects of exponential growth in the cozy environment of my respiratory system. The end result was that I got two more days off work, and that anything I might have written yesterday wouldn't have been fit for human eyes.

I've got a bit of work to do on a side project today, but once I've made satisfactory progress with that I'll get to work slapping together a report of everything that happened in the ten minutes or so that existed between all the hugs and handshakes.


Image courtesy of Quiplash!

Fly, my legions!

I have a favor to ask of those of you who read my blog. There's a professional networking site called LinkedIn that has evidently gotten huge in America. It lets users give each other "recommendations" to vouch for their awesomeness, and this is where you all come in.

I want to apply for a one chance in a million job in Seattle that I can only apply for using the service, but because I live in Germany, I wasn't even aware that this site existed until yesterday, and I suspect most of my peers here won't know it, either. The company offering the job will only look at applications from applicants that have recommendations, though, so I'm asking you to hop over to LinkedIn and recommend me!

I think this link will get you to my profile. Many thanks in advance!