Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. I don't think "difficulty of handling Kanji" is the explanation for the late entry of western machinery to Japan in any powerful ior dominating way. "Hanzi," both as Chinese and as Japanese characters, originated at University of Wisconsin long before they existed in any mass-market way in China and Japan.
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  2. Some do, some don't. The forests of Lebanon were probably killed by the Romans and the Hebrews of temple-building time -- but it was the goats that kept those forests from growing back.
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  3. But hurry up. While there are still some Russian tanks left...
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  4.  @Asianometry  Booo! Yeecchhh! Disgusting! Horrible! Um, other than that, rather good work. Well done and thank you.
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  5. I'm sorry, we don't have any grizzled tree kangaree around here. What is one grizzled tree kangaroo in, say, maple syrup buckets?
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  6.  @kospencer1  Hunh?
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  7. Houghton ==> HOW'tn.
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  8. Australia is an advanced industrial country and society. It follows that its economy is based on services. If somebody wants to say "Yes, but that's on a base of mining and farming," that would be incorrect. Australia was a service-based economy from the start: penal services.
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  9. Great article. Note, however, that the Velvet Revolution did not "happen" in 1989. It had been trying to burst out for at least 20 years. In 1968 a then well-known Czech "Futurist," (in this case the word meaning a follower of the French Betrand de Jouvnal) visited the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.cy were fobbed off on mecause I was known to be a perhaps de Juvenalian. Their leader was killed in an auto accident in Czechoslovakia that winter, and we have all been around Stalinism just enough to be suspicious of the accident. Somewhere in there they all visited Toronto, my long time home town, and I happened to meet them there. I took them to The Brunswick House, at that time a somewhat jazz-oriented drinking hole in what was still a very conservative city, and over a few still fifteen-cent a small glass draft beers they told me their plans: Velvet Revolution. 1969. It was all very precise and detailed, somewhat idealistic with hippy tinges. But it was also highly intelliggent, decent, and democratic in outlook. But it took 20 years to happen.
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  10.  @jaychung1380  Yes, Jay, but that's the traditional Asian, largely Buddhist or Confucian, view of things. South Korea is the most Christian country in the world.
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  11. This is false. Asians are as individualistic as anybody on the palent. Westerners strongly tend to divided ourselves up into commercial sports team, music, and movie star fan groups -- and then tell themselves that they are creative individuals for making these vital life choices. In fact we are just sheep being led around by paid promoters.
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  12. Good work! (Important toppic.)
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  13.  @peterfireflylund  I think the question is, Where to dive? Just a simple "The X company Foobar 92" would help.
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  14.  @wizardman1313  " thanks, do you have any project suggestions..." In English, "Thanks but no thanks, A-hole."
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  15. To this day I can't hear the words "Have a nice day" without internally finishing the pestilential refrain "Yay-yay, yay-yay, Fujicolor!"
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  16. No, light does not travel through fibre at "the speed of light." The speed of light through a transparent medium is equal to c divided by the refractive index of that material, e.g. roughly 1.5 for glass. Thus, though an optical cable it's substantially slower than c, the roughly 299,000 km/sec of light through a vacuum.
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  17.  @DLL-y4p  Quite right -- and doing very well at it, despite the ver-ree tough competition from Shanghai and Tientsin, modern, post-industrial economies almost as advanced as Hong Kong's Central itself.
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  18. "A single image of America's airspace"??? Um, Canada, fella. Oh, yeah, plus Alaska, not yet a state.
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  19. At 1:28, you mean "her FATHER," not "HER father." It was her father, after her husband, who was killed, not her father after somebody else's father. English, just like Japanese, puts great importance upon intonation.
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  20. The diagram at 13:00 is not quite right. ARPAnet had seven connections in 1969, two of them in Britain. The name DARPA, to "comply" with the Mansfield Amendment which forbade the spending of DOD money on civilian computer research by making ARPA suddenly "military," was kicked around in September or October of 1971, but I don't think it was formally adopted until 1972.
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  21. Re-viewing this later, I see the reference is to 1979. By that time, yes, DARPA was the correct name. At some point a ittle bit later than that, the military stepped away from it completely, instead of being benignly in the background. There was a "complete" break in the Obama Administration, but I'm not sure what this means because the 1984-ish break had supposedly been total, too.
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  22. "The overarching goal" is a singular noun phrase. It takes a singular verb. "The overarching goal of these reforms" is also a singular noun phrase, even though it ends in a S. It also takes a singular verb. The goal is for both noun phrases.
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  23. In 1970 (and perhaps for some time on either side of that), Roger Levien of the RAND Corporation produced a Gestetner newsletter, "Soviet Computer Review." He printed 1600 copies, half in English, half in Russian -- and shipped most of the Russian ones off to Russia, where they were hailed as better informed than anything the Soviets produced themselves.
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  24. The greatest Russian genius at the time was the amazing Regus Patoff. Uh, Reg. US Pat. Off.
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  25. Sake: sah-kay'. Two syllables. Emphatically not "sayk."
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  26. Early photograph shows semiconductor company HQ with a parking lot full of Trabants. Hmmm. I think they're onto something here. Is the rest of the video really necessary?
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  27. Richard, you call yourself "a HKer." Where do you hike? If you ever get interested in the economy of Hong Kong, you might want to take a look at a map of the place. The British military reservation is all empty land. Most of the islands of Hong Kong are fertile cropland. All the land on both sides of the railway, up north to the border with the peoples' Republic, is farm- and woodland. Each of those three classes of land is larger in area than the skyscraper-laden land of Central, where the very prosperous and productive financial and manufacturing industries are located -- and even Central is surrounded with parks and woodland which stop only at the Shenzhen border. You're quite right that the land sells for very high prices. This is because buyers want to put it to profitable use, and land owners either want the money now or think it more prudent to hold out for more later. I hope you'll get a chance to visit and get to know the place some time.
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  28.  @charlesmadre5568  You get an important half-truth into your two sentences. This makes you a couple of planetary orbits closer to reality than most of the silly posters here. A small number of people here are, like you, in the same universe as Hong Kong itself. Nevertheless, the lunacy, ignorance, stupidity and stumblebum inability to see and think which characterize most of the posts here are a wonder to behold -- as I'm sure you agree.
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  29.  @olafschluter706  Never forget: Jobs was one of the world's all-time most successful thieves: Apple's software is straight out copied from Xerox's.
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  30.  @weltvonalex  Overrated maybe?
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  31. "Giuliano" (around 4:15) has a soft G. It begins like "jewel" or "junior," not the hard g of "government" or "gone."
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  32. Superb article. Well done and thank you!
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  33. I used to work on a computer like that at Tech Squar at MIT. The tape drives are out of sight in the other room, right? I betcha that big mother has a CPU that can access, well, maybe, lemme see now, 128K or RAM? And that screen thingie? It's leased from some bunch of wealthy dentists for $2,000 a month because your university can't afford to buy it, I bet.
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  34.  @andersjjensen  Anders, Have you tried driving a Russian tank into Ukraine lately?
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  35. Bad photograph: the first IBM PCs had the notorious "Chiclets" keyboard, remember? And the Mitsubishi Hit-Bit sold 700,000 units before the IBM PC came on the market. Is that included in your "Other"?
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  36. Kurchatov: koor CAToff. Branagh: bruh NAG
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  37.  @KensaiLazarus  OK. A terminal g is always and everywhere a light glottal stop (including where it's in an '-ing'), and you'd have to try very hard to get it wrong. (There's an exception, of course. 'IG' is pronounced eye gee. 😅)
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  38.  @bestintentions6089  Bad news for you, Intentions: they've retired the Nobel in Stupidity. You woulda been a contender, but...
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  39.  @justsomeguywithoutamustang6436  Right. That's why we don't have anything invented in China. No abacuses, no umbrellas. No canals and irrigation-based agriculture. No compasses. No, uh, Chinaware. Right?
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  40.  @zomgneedaname  The word you're looking for may be "Sputnik."
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