Thanks for clarifying a matter I've been wondering for a couple of years.
I came to know about Red Bull in '94 or '95 as something sold in Europe. And finally had chance to drink it in the U.S. last year.
It tasted surprisingly familiar to me. I am from Japan and energy drinks like Red Bull had been around all my life.
So, I am not surprised that Red Bull came from Thailand.
I did a little research and found this. According to other pages I found, the first energy drink was Lipobitan something in 1962 in Japan.
No wonder Red Bull tasted familiar. It has been part of the Japanese life to see commercials of energy drinks on TV everyday. The memories of those commercials are in the oldest layer of my memory. (I was born in '64, so Lipobitan predates me.) There are many kinds of those drinks in Japan. Some of them are only available in pharmacies, and could cost something like $20-$50. The strongest one I remember having (in 1989 or so) cost about $20 and it was only like 50ml. But the drink kept me going working for a disco with a flu and having not slept the night before.
I'm glad that drinks like Red Bull are available in many countries now. I'm drinking a can right now in Germany:)
No. Some people have never looked at the actual numbers, or they would know that the firebombings of Dresden
and Tokyo were definitely more destructive than the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More casualties,
more area destroyed, more total explosive yield, etc. Here's one sample link.
You don't seem to have looked up the real numbers. Out of my head, about 200,000 died on Aug. 6, 1945 in Hiroshima and about 150,000 on Aug. 9, 1945 in Nagasaki.
The article you quoted says 100,000 in Tokyo in March 1945.
I always wondered if the A-boms were as devastating as said to be and after seeing the numbers, I was convinced.
I did my own little research and found this article. (Dresden around 20,000.) Seems the poster of the parent article was more accurate. I've also seen a History Channel documentary about Dresden in the same vein.
Ironically, I am living in Hamburg now because my father survived Nagasaki.
Since I haven't lived in Japan for a long time, things may be different. But...
I cannot say if Japan is where Linux is thriving most. Many Japanese kids who think they are into computers dream of being employed by Microsoft.
Microsoft is so big, and Bill Gates is (was?) the richest man on the planet, therefore, it must be good, kind of logic. Japan has had a tradition to view Big Company == Good. But it's more or less present in most cultures.
On the other hand, the Japanese have been much into technologies. Just take a look at all the gadgets a Japanese kids have. This is because anything new is viewed as good. Many think that they have to get that ``new'' stuff at any cost. Here New == Good.
Japan at some point was where Mac had the biggest market share (~20%?). When I went to Akihabara in the summer of '97, there were huge piles of boxes of OS-2 Warp!
Already in '93 or so, a magazine called Unix Magazine had a CD-ROM each month loaded with Slackware and FreeBSD. (Ironically, when Windows NT was getting mature, the magazine became a WinNT magazine, without changing its name. I do not know the current state of affairs.)
As with most other countries, information from the US flows to Japan in a skewed manner. When someone reports that Linux is big in the US, then most Japanese think that everybody in the US must be using Linux. They assume that the Linux is the future. In order not to be left in the dust of the US, they think, we have to do everything to catch up. This mentality also is in the works, I assume.
Thus, it is not that the Japanese are objectively evaluating the alternatives. But it seems to me that Linux's seemingly thriving in Japan is a combination and/or balance of all the cultural tendencies mentioned above.
Off course the all the above are my personal view.
Furthermore, the losses to the Atomic Bomb were in the region of 35,000 (IIRC). The number of civilian
losses in the Tokyo firebombings that occurred a few weeks earlier were in the region of 250,000. Order of magnitude
higher. If Japanese leadership was willing to continue the war after that, why would the loss of 35,000 faze them?
Um, that's actually 350,000 or so.
But I agree with most of your points. If they hadn't used the bombs, the war in Japan would have been something like Vietnam. Could have been worse in order of magnitude (for both the Japanese and Americans). The battle in Okinawa should also be in perspective when we deal with the decision to use the bombs. If I were in charge of American military, I wouldn't dare to risk my soldiers' life to fight with such a military force who do not care the life of enemies, themselves and even the civilians they are supposed to protect.
Besides, I am not sure if my father could have survived if the war had not ended in August 1945. He was 14 and his brother (a couple of years older) was being trained for a suicide attack by a wooden boat.
From what I hear, there was a bigger chance of being starved to death than being killed by bombing, if the war had prolonged.
He was in Nagasaki on that day. He was supposed to get rations for his family. He was pulling a cart near downtown Nagasaki, when he saw a lone B-29 (should have been three, but he only saw one) flying away after releasing what looked like a canister with a parachute.
Next thing he knew was that he was blown to a narrow path between buildings by a blast. (Well, this actually saved his life.) He thought there was a bomb exploded right next to him, which it didn't. It was 2.5 km away.
He was keeping a journal in those days, and he had an entry for that day. The most impressing thing I read there was his completing remark:
``What a shame I could not get the ration.''
They were starving, and he did not know the significane of the event he was experiencing. Or, being able to eat was what survival was for him.
I do not want to judge what happened in the history. But I feel a little wierd that my existence might be dependent on what killed 150,000 people with a single blast.
Re:no its a valid alternate historical perspective
on
Antimatter Propulsion
·
· Score: 1
I think one DID detonate, but it landed
in the middle of a ploughed field and caused no major damage. At the time, the farmer and authorities had NO
IDEA wtf was going on.:)
I believe a school teahcer and a couple of students were killed or injured with the balloon bomb.
The article is basically about Victor Maier. Since I knew Victor Maier (I got my doctorate from his deparment, not in Cinology, but in Indology), I guess I have a little personal feeling.
First of all, as other posters have pointed out, the European looking mummies have long been known. Especially one mummy of blond, blue-eyed young woman discovered by Stein had attracted people's attention. (The article mentions the Beuaty of Loulan). There was a popular novel written about her in Japan. I think they made a movie out of the novel.
The point of the article is not as quite simple as Europeans in China. But it seems to relate to the Aryan homeland. (The article talks about this toward the end.)
Since the discovery of Sanskrit (from the Westerners point of view), the disciplines of comparative linguistics, historical linguistics were formed. They theorized that languages of Europe and India (South Asia) had common origin.
I am sure that every linguist you meet will say that linguistic families and races/ethnicity do not have anything to do with each other. But many people confuse, and I do not think scholars of the 19th century and the early 20th centuries were as cautious as today. As such, the search of aryan homeland has been heavily debated, and having been attracting interests.
One of very early theory was that Indo-European speaking people came from North Europe that includes Germany. I guess everyone knows the implication of this in the history of the 20th century, so I will not touch this.
As notionalists and revisionists in all countries are in rage these days, it is not surprizing that the theory that Indo-European speaking people came from India is becoming popular in India.
But I think currently popular theory among linguists is that they came from somewhere around Black Sea. The problem has been that there has been not much archaelogical evidence that suggests a large settlement or a civilization in that area. For this reason, I have been paying attention to the outcome of this expedition.
Anyhow, Victor Maier wants to suggest again that Indo-European came from currently German speaking region. I am sure that his intention is purely academic, but it does have a huge politidcal implication.
For one thing, I have trouble understanding the whole situation. Humans with European features (physically) have been living in Europe for.. much more than 10,000 years? And the beginnning of the spread of Indo-European languages is postulated somewhere like 7,000BC, IIRC. So, the use of the word ``European'' in the article is not only vague, but quite misleading, especially it talks about ``the homeland'' later in the article. Finding peoples who lived in Central Asia, and share ancestors, does not make them Europeans. As I am not familiar with the date when Europe was Indo-Europeanized, the date 2,800BC of the earliest mummies could also mean that they conquered Europe. Were the residents of Europe Europeans if they did not speak any of Indo-European languages? Or, they and Europeans might have shared common cultures, and the Tocharians who spoke an Indo-European language might have been the decendents of those mummy people, there is no guarantee that they also spoke Indo-European language. Are they still Euroepans?
I would certainly avoid entering the mine field which is Aryan homeland problem. But I am not an Indo-European speaking person.
I also a little trouble about the use of the word China in the article. Although the area (vast) has been part of People's Republic of China, I would call that area Central Asia. As it may be noticed, the inhabitants of the area do not very much look like what you think of the Chinese. The area had traditionally been considered outside China. The use of the word China in the article seems to carry some unneccesary connotation to the discussion. (The article does talk about independent movement in the area.)
Caste system is what the Portuguese (sp?) thought Indian population was practicing.
South Asia had had systems to distinguish people. One was a system of Varna, which means color (so they say, but I haven't seen any usage of this word to mean color, btw). The system of Varna seems to have been around since the youngest part of the Rgveda was composed. However, it is less than certain that how strongly the system was observed (such as the movability in the system, which is quite difficult in so-called Caste system).
On the other hand, there is another Sanskrit word that may be considered to refer to the caste system---jati, which means birth. That system basically seems to have referred to ancestry, clan, family, hereditary occupation, etc. In practicie, this perhaps closer to the caste system.
However, the difficulty in talking about the caste system is that South Asia is vast! and with a long history. The practices is apparently different from region to region, time to time.
In the newer tombs at Saccara in Egypt, they seemd to have a dislike for the black africans as well as the indians
since it was common to show these two races being kinifed by the person in the tomb. The odd thing is they knew
about 4 races other than their own but I haven't tracked down which ones.
This sounds interesting, since around that time, India (or South Asia more precisely) was perhaps seeing the Indus Valley Civilization. And the majority of population might not have looked very much like South Asian population today. Indo-European speaking people are supposed to have arrived around 1200 BCE. Or do you mean Native Americans?
So, I appreciate if you could supply some more info on this, especially who concluded that the persons depicted as being killed included Indians, and who concluded that those peoples being killed depicted 4 races, i.e., as if the Egyptians had a notion of races, etc. (I semll some New Age, though:)
According to your logic, the Chinese had colonized the Americas long before the Europeans finally succeeded.
The problem is the notion of Europeans, Chinese, etc. Who are Europeans when they were not living in Europe, or when they did not speak Indo-European? Who are the Chinese when there was no China?
If you've ever taken a course in anthropology or history, you may have realized that the notion of races as you seem to hold have long been questioned. It is a convenient notion but who are Caucasians? Archaelogy has been showing that peoples have always been moving. In many cases mixing with local populations. The inhabitants of any peace of land on earth today are all immigrants, or more likely, a mixture of immigrants.
I do think those findings of blue-eyed mummies in Central Asia are fascinating. But they are fascinating because humans have been traveling a long distance beyond the area today we think they were confined, probably trasnmitting cultures.
Oh, and Ainus are not more closely related to current European populations than they are to the inhabitants of Pacific islands. In my life time alone, the view about the ethnicity of Ainus has been changing. The most outrageous of them I remember was some encyclopedia entry that said that the Ainus are not related to any modern humans but to Neandeltars:(
One of the surprises of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is how thoroughly the radiation-exposed survivors recovered. (Of
course they were sick as dogs while the damaged cells were dying off, essentially everybody who was pregnant
aborted, and there is a higher incidence of cancer and other problems later. It's just that they was not anywhere near
as much long-term health problems, or sterility, as were expected early on.)
There also was a great concern if DNA damage would be inherited, or the children would have gentic problems that were not seen in parents. They even invented a word for those second generation survivors (Nisei==second generation).
But it seems that the concensus after 56 years is that the children were not more affected than their parents.
A little sad side of this whole nisei thing was that some second generations wanted to have the same benefit as the first generation survivors who get any medical treatment for free. (They have certain ID that you can show on trains and at hospitals.) For them, parents' exposure to the atomic bomb may not affect their helath was not quite welcome.:(
We're all mutants. You just might have a couple more recent mutations than the rest of us. B-) If so I expect they'll
get sorted out in a few generations. Figure that most of 'em were already sorted out, in the form of brothers and sisters
who weren't born. B-(
I thought that my being relatively smarter might have something to do with it:P I also wished I had some supernatural power:)
By the way, the first movie ``Godzilla'' reflected the Japanese' fear of atomic bombs. As you may all know, Godzilla was a mutant lizard.
I know someone who still calls MRI NMR (he is one of inventors of it). I thought it was some kind of trademark thing.
Anyhow, I think you're right.
I always get into fight with my girlfriend when we talk about anything nuclear. She is a German and I am a Japanese, a son of Nagasaki suvivor. I grew up exposed to the experiences and learned quite a lot, I guess.
As such (or despite that), I am rather pro-nuclear. OTOH, my girlfriend is just scared of anything nuclear.;P
OK, so you're saying that an exposeure to a ``CONTINUOUS, LOW LEVEL of ionizing radiation'' is good for health.
I was always wondering why my father is so healthy. He is a Nagasaki survivor. I know a couple more people who are extremely healthy. I was wondering if they survived because they were extremely healthy or they were healthy because they survived.
My father told me that he has about a half of white blood cells of average. Could anyone explain this?
No? You think this will sell 20,000 copies? You live in a fantasy land where there are dragons and faeries too.
That's where Sony is going to sell this kit---Japan.
The Japanese are known to buy anything cool regardless of the cost. Linux seems to be a big buzzword there these days.
They also buy anything ``limited.'' So, I think Sony is clever first to sell only 1000 copies. I guess there will be nerds staying in front of some shops in Akihabara the week before the launch date. Which is my concern. I would like to get one myself and I am a Japanese living abroad:(
Also, any clues as to the size of the HD included?
40GB.
This is such a cool system. My first response was to get a PS2 as my desktop machine. I was thinking of getting a PS2 for playing GT3 anyway. But I was also thinking of getting a computer for desktop. Now I can justify getting a PS2. (The amount of RAM can be a problem, though.)
This is one of few times that I'm glad I am a Japanese. I'm living in Germany. So, another consideration apart from justifying getting a PS2 was whether to get a German PS2 or to ask a friend to get one of those Japanese PS2s. The PAL/NTSC could have been a problem. (This can be solved by attaching the cosole to a VCR, it seems.)
But now I decided to get a Japanese model. Luckily, one of my friend is going to visit Germany in June. Hope he can have a hand on that thing.
Did you intentionally exclude the possibility that the original poster may have meant Su-27/31? Those are superior to any air superior fighters the West has developed.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I thought that the West had a chance to buy some of those without spending billions of dollors to develop their counterparts.
However, it has not happened.
It would be interesting if the USAF buy some of them as a cheap substitute in the meantime (before they can develop their own air superior fighter).
While that may be true, the Russian pilot that flew his FoxBat to Japan in the 70s said that they could not stay at
M2.5 for very long because their engines would get too hot and sieze up. As a result, anyone who tried to go that
fast would be subject to disciplinary action. It was more for chest thumping and to be able to claim that their main
interceptor was faster than the US F-15.
If my memory serves, it was more like the following.
The West measured the speed of the Foxbats in Syria or somewhere (an air show in Moscow?) with the rador and the measurement was something like Mach 3.0.
As a response to this threat, the Americans developed the F-15. Not the other way around. Note the similar design. (Agian the two-tail-fin two engine design seems to have been perfected by the Su-27/31.)
The Foxbat that flew to Japan was thoroughly analyzed by the Americans (not very much unlike what the Chinese are doing these days) and they concluded that it couldn't do as fast as Mach 3.0. More like Mach 2.5 or so. And the West realized that they were chasing the ghost.
I was 12 or so when the MiG-25 flew to Japan. I remember watching the TV news live. The incident may have had something to do with my becoming an aviation enthusiast later.
First, what about the Cocoa / Interface Builder tool on OS X? Talk about powerful GUI building & rapid app development.
I agree. When I first saw the Interface Builder on NeXT, I thought, ``Wow, souped-up HyperCard!''
Since it's right there in the Mac OS X, who needs HyperCard any more? I thought when Apple discontinued Compact Macs, the days of HyperCard were over. Stacks only look good on those monochrmoe 9 inch monitors. Anything larger than that did not look good. I wish my SE/30 is still in my parents' house so that some day I can play around with HyperCard on it.
The earliest clear reference to base ten notation using zero (which was a dot) is found in the Yogabhaasya (a commentary on the Yogasutra), which was composed perhaps around the 5the century. The usage suggests that the notation was in wide use already.
Some scholars think (or used to think) that Naagaarujuna's concept of emptiness (I guess many of you have heard of this: evrything is empty, etc.) had something to do with the notion of zero.
Paa.nini's grammar (around 5th century B.C.?) uses an idea of zero substitution. A grammatical element is substituted with nothing (zero). Some think it is the invention of zero, in the sence ``nothing does some function.''
Note that Aryabha.ta was not from the 7th Century B.C., (as another poster suggested) but from the 7th century A.D.
By the way, Paa.nini's grammar pretty much sounds like a OO computer language. Declarations, short statements, classes, inheritence, functions, etc. Some linguists (I believe) tried to write Paa.nini's grammar program.
Yes, it is kind of rusting away but in Philadelpha. You can see it evryday at a little south of Penn's Landing, if things haven't changed in the past 6 months (I left Philly in August.)
I kept hearing a paln to make some kinf of marine museum with the SS United States and the USS New Jersey. They are on either side of Delaware river.
I happened to meet two people who traveled on the SS United States. One is an American (my landlord, a professor and a gold medalist in 1952 Olympic Games in sailing!) and the other a German (a woman who works at a port museum kind of place in Hamburg).
I have been out of Japan for a long time, so I cannot tell how exactly it is like there. However, a friend of mine who visited the US in May had a G-Shock with MP3 player built in.
She also said that everyone knows what MP3 is these days, and there is no trouble getting MP3 files of the most recent hits from the Internet. The said G-Shock model apparently was the most popular model at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
I came to know about Red Bull in '94 or '95 as something sold in Europe. And finally had chance to drink it in the U.S. last year.
It tasted surprisingly familiar to me. I am from Japan and energy drinks like Red Bull had been around all my life.
So, I am not surprised that Red Bull came from Thailand.
I did a little research and found this. According to other pages I found, the first energy drink was Lipobitan something in 1962 in Japan.
No wonder Red Bull tasted familiar. It has been part of the Japanese life to see commercials of energy drinks on TV everyday. The memories of those commercials are in the oldest layer of my memory. (I was born in '64, so Lipobitan predates me.) There are many kinds of those drinks in Japan. Some of them are only available in pharmacies, and could cost something like $20-$50. The strongest one I remember having (in 1989 or so) cost about $20 and it was only like 50ml. But the drink kept me going working for a disco with a flu and having not slept the night before.
I'm glad that drinks like Red Bull are available in many countries now. I'm drinking a can right now in Germany :)
The article you quoted says 100,000 in Tokyo in March 1945.
I always wondered if the A-boms were as devastating as said to be and after seeing the numbers, I was convinced.
I did my own little research and found this article. (Dresden around 20,000.) Seems the poster of the parent article was more accurate. I've also seen a History Channel documentary about Dresden in the same vein.
Ironically, I am living in Hamburg now because my father survived Nagasaki.
I cannot say if Japan is where Linux is thriving most. Many Japanese kids who think they are into computers dream of being employed by Microsoft.
Microsoft is so big, and Bill Gates is (was?) the richest man on the planet, therefore, it must be good, kind of logic. Japan has had a tradition to view Big Company == Good. But it's more or less present in most cultures.
On the other hand, the Japanese have been much into technologies. Just take a look at all the gadgets a Japanese kids have. This is because anything new is viewed as good. Many think that they have to get that ``new'' stuff at any cost. Here New == Good.
Japan at some point was where Mac had the biggest market share (~20%?). When I went to Akihabara in the summer of '97, there were huge piles of boxes of OS-2 Warp!
Already in '93 or so, a magazine called Unix Magazine had a CD-ROM each month loaded with Slackware and FreeBSD. (Ironically, when Windows NT was getting mature, the magazine became a WinNT magazine, without changing its name. I do not know the current state of affairs.)
As with most other countries, information from the US flows to Japan in a skewed manner. When someone reports that Linux is big in the US, then most Japanese think that everybody in the US must be using Linux. They assume that the Linux is the future. In order not to be left in the dust of the US, they think, we have to do everything to catch up. This mentality also is in the works, I assume.
Thus, it is not that the Japanese are objectively evaluating the alternatives. But it seems to me that Linux's seemingly thriving in Japan is a combination and/or balance of all the cultural tendencies mentioned above.
Off course the all the above are my personal view.
But I agree with most of your points. If they hadn't used the bombs, the war in Japan would have been something like Vietnam. Could have been worse in order of magnitude (for both the Japanese and Americans). The battle in Okinawa should also be in perspective when we deal with the decision to use the bombs. If I were in charge of American military, I wouldn't dare to risk my soldiers' life to fight with such a military force who do not care the life of enemies, themselves and even the civilians they are supposed to protect.
Besides, I am not sure if my father could have survived if the war had not ended in August 1945. He was 14 and his brother (a couple of years older) was being trained for a suicide attack by a wooden boat.
From what I hear, there was a bigger chance of being starved to death than being killed by bombing, if the war had prolonged.
He was in Nagasaki on that day. He was supposed to get rations for his family. He was pulling a cart near downtown Nagasaki, when he saw a lone B-29 (should have been three, but he only saw one) flying away after releasing what looked like a canister with a parachute.
Next thing he knew was that he was blown to a narrow path between buildings by a blast. (Well, this actually saved his life.) He thought there was a bomb exploded right next to him, which it didn't. It was 2.5 km away.
He was keeping a journal in those days, and he had an entry for that day. The most impressing thing I read there was his completing remark:
``What a shame I could not get the ration.''
They were starving, and he did not know the significane of the event he was experiencing. Or, being able to eat was what survival was for him.
I do not want to judge what happened in the history. But I feel a little wierd that my existence might be dependent on what killed 150,000 people with a single blast.
I believe a school teahcer and a couple of students were killed or injured with the balloon bomb.
The article is basically about Victor Maier. Since I knew Victor Maier (I got my doctorate from his deparment, not in Cinology, but in Indology), I guess I have a little personal feeling.
First of all, as other posters have pointed out, the European looking mummies have long been known. Especially one mummy of blond, blue-eyed young woman discovered by Stein had attracted people's attention. (The article mentions the Beuaty of Loulan). There was a popular novel written about her in Japan. I think they made a movie out of the novel.
The point of the article is not as quite simple as Europeans in China. But it seems to relate to the Aryan homeland. (The article talks about this toward the end.)
Since the discovery of Sanskrit (from the Westerners point of view), the disciplines of comparative linguistics, historical linguistics were formed. They theorized that languages of Europe and India (South Asia) had common origin.
I am sure that every linguist you meet will say that linguistic families and races/ethnicity do not have anything to do with each other. But many people confuse, and I do not think scholars of the 19th century and the early 20th centuries were as cautious as today. As such, the search of aryan homeland has been heavily debated, and having been attracting interests.
One of very early theory was that Indo-European speaking people came from North Europe that includes Germany. I guess everyone knows the implication of this in the history of the 20th century, so I will not touch this.
As notionalists and revisionists in all countries are in rage these days, it is not surprizing that the theory that Indo-European speaking people came from India is becoming popular in India.
But I think currently popular theory among linguists is that they came from somewhere around Black Sea. The problem has been that there has been not much archaelogical evidence that suggests a large settlement or a civilization in that area. For this reason, I have been paying attention to the outcome of this expedition.
Anyhow, Victor Maier wants to suggest again that Indo-European came from currently German speaking region. I am sure that his intention is purely academic, but it does have a huge politidcal implication.
For one thing, I have trouble understanding the whole situation. Humans with European features (physically) have been living in Europe for.. much more than 10,000 years? And the beginnning of the spread of Indo-European languages is postulated somewhere like 7,000BC, IIRC. So, the use of the word ``European'' in the article is not only vague, but quite misleading, especially it talks about ``the homeland'' later in the article. Finding peoples who lived in Central Asia, and share ancestors, does not make them Europeans. As I am not familiar with the date when Europe was Indo-Europeanized, the date 2,800BC of the earliest mummies could also mean that they conquered Europe. Were the residents of Europe Europeans if they did not speak any of Indo-European languages? Or, they and Europeans might have shared common cultures, and the Tocharians who spoke an Indo-European language might have been the decendents of those mummy people, there is no guarantee that they also spoke Indo-European language. Are they still Euroepans?
I would certainly avoid entering the mine field which is Aryan homeland problem. But I am not an Indo-European speaking person.
I also a little trouble about the use of the word China in the article. Although the area (vast) has been part of People's Republic of China, I would call that area Central Asia. As it may be noticed, the inhabitants of the area do not very much look like what you think of the Chinese. The area had traditionally been considered outside China. The use of the word China in the article seems to carry some unneccesary connotation to the discussion. (The article does talk about independent movement in the area.)
The parent post doesn't deserve to be modded down. Someone mod it up?
Caste system is what the Portuguese (sp?) thought Indian population was practicing.
South Asia had had systems to distinguish people. One was a system of Varna, which means color (so they say, but I haven't seen any usage of this word to mean color, btw). The system of Varna seems to have been around since the youngest part of the Rgveda was composed. However, it is less than certain that how strongly the system was observed (such as the movability in the system, which is quite difficult in so-called Caste system).
On the other hand, there is another Sanskrit word that may be considered to refer to the caste system---jati, which means birth. That system basically seems to have referred to ancestry, clan, family, hereditary occupation, etc. In practicie, this perhaps closer to the caste system.
However, the difficulty in talking about the caste system is that South Asia is vast! and with a long history. The practices is apparently different from region to region, time to time.
This sounds interesting, since around that time, India (or South Asia more precisely) was perhaps seeing the Indus Valley Civilization. And the majority of population might not have looked very much like South Asian population today. Indo-European speaking people are supposed to have arrived around 1200 BCE. Or do you mean Native Americans?
So, I appreciate if you could supply some more info on this, especially who concluded that the persons depicted as being killed included Indians, and who concluded that those peoples being killed depicted 4 races, i.e., as if the Egyptians had a notion of races, etc. (I semll some New Age, though :)
The problem is the notion of Europeans, Chinese, etc. Who are Europeans when they were not living in Europe, or when they did not speak Indo-European? Who are the Chinese when there was no China?
If you've ever taken a course in anthropology or history, you may have realized that the notion of races as you seem to hold have long been questioned. It is a convenient notion but who are Caucasians? Archaelogy has been showing that peoples have always been moving. In many cases mixing with local populations. The inhabitants of any peace of land on earth today are all immigrants, or more likely, a mixture of immigrants.
I do think those findings of blue-eyed mummies in Central Asia are fascinating. But they are fascinating because humans have been traveling a long distance beyond the area today we think they were confined, probably trasnmitting cultures.
Oh, and Ainus are not more closely related to current European populations than they are to the inhabitants of Pacific islands. In my life time alone, the view about the ethnicity of Ainus has been changing. The most outrageous of them I remember was some encyclopedia entry that said that the Ainus are not related to any modern humans but to Neandeltars :(
What you say? Maybe it's because your language are not belong to us.
However, it should be ``Tokyo tokkyo kyoka kyokku (chou)''= the head of the Tokyo patent office (or something.)
But it seems that the concensus after 56 years is that the children were not more affected than their parents.
A little sad side of this whole nisei thing was that some second generations wanted to have the same benefit as the first generation survivors who get any medical treatment for free. (They have certain ID that you can show on trains and at hospitals.) For them, parents' exposure to the atomic bomb may not affect their helath was not quite welcome. :(
I thought that my being relatively smarter might have something to do with it :P I also wished I had some supernatural power :)
By the way, the first movie ``Godzilla'' reflected the Japanese' fear of atomic bombs. As you may all know, Godzilla was a mutant lizard.
Anyhow, I think you're right.
I always get into fight with my girlfriend when we talk about anything nuclear. She is a German and I am a Japanese, a son of Nagasaki suvivor. I grew up exposed to the experiences and learned quite a lot, I guess.
As such (or despite that), I am rather pro-nuclear. OTOH, my girlfriend is just scared of anything nuclear. ;P
I was always wondering why my father is so healthy. He is a Nagasaki survivor. I know a couple more people who are extremely healthy. I was wondering if they survived because they were extremely healthy or they were healthy because they survived.
My father told me that he has about a half of white blood cells of average. Could anyone explain this?
The next question would be if I am a mutant...
That's where Sony is going to sell this kit---Japan.
The Japanese are known to buy anything cool regardless of the cost. Linux seems to be a big buzzword there these days.
They also buy anything ``limited.'' So, I think Sony is clever first to sell only 1000 copies. I guess there will be nerds staying in front of some shops in Akihabara the week before the launch date. Which is my concern. I would like to get one myself and I am a Japanese living abroad :(
This is such a cool system. My first response was to get a PS2 as my desktop machine. I was thinking of getting a PS2 for playing GT3 anyway. But I was also thinking of getting a computer for desktop. Now I can justify getting a PS2. (The amount of RAM can be a problem, though.)
This is one of few times that I'm glad I am a Japanese. I'm living in Germany. So, another consideration apart from justifying getting a PS2 was whether to get a German PS2 or to ask a friend to get one of those Japanese PS2s. The PAL/NTSC could have been a problem. (This can be solved by attaching the cosole to a VCR, it seems.)
But now I decided to get a Japanese model. Luckily, one of my friend is going to visit Germany in June. Hope he can have a hand on that thing.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I thought that the West had a chance to buy some of those without spending billions of dollors to develop their counterparts.
However, it has not happened.
It would be interesting if the USAF buy some of them as a cheap substitute in the meantime (before they can develop their own air superior fighter).
The West measured the speed of the Foxbats in Syria or somewhere (an air show in Moscow?) with the rador and the measurement was something like Mach 3.0.
As a response to this threat, the Americans developed the F-15. Not the other way around. Note the similar design. (Agian the two-tail-fin two engine design seems to have been perfected by the Su-27/31.)
The Foxbat that flew to Japan was thoroughly analyzed by the Americans (not very much unlike what the Chinese are doing these days) and they concluded that it couldn't do as fast as Mach 3.0. More like Mach 2.5 or so. And the West realized that they were chasing the ghost.
I was 12 or so when the MiG-25 flew to Japan. I remember watching the TV news live. The incident may have had something to do with my becoming an aviation enthusiast later.
Since it's right there in the Mac OS X, who needs HyperCard any more? I thought when Apple discontinued Compact Macs, the days of HyperCard were over. Stacks only look good on those monochrmoe 9 inch monitors. Anything larger than that did not look good. I wish my SE/30 is still in my parents' house so that some day I can play around with HyperCard on it.
The earliest clear reference to base ten notation using zero (which was a dot) is found in the Yogabhaasya (a commentary on the Yogasutra), which was composed perhaps around the 5the century. The usage suggests that the notation was in wide use already.
Some scholars think (or used to think) that Naagaarujuna's concept of emptiness (I guess many of you have heard of this: evrything is empty, etc.) had something to do with the notion of zero.
Paa.nini's grammar (around 5th century B.C.?) uses an idea of zero substitution. A grammatical element is substituted with nothing (zero). Some think it is the invention of zero, in the sence ``nothing does some function.''
Note that Aryabha.ta was not from the 7th Century B.C., (as another poster suggested) but from the 7th century A.D.
By the way, Paa.nini's grammar pretty much sounds like a OO computer language. Declarations, short statements, classes, inheritence, functions, etc. Some linguists (I believe) tried to write Paa.nini's grammar program.
I kept hearing a paln to make some kinf of marine museum with the SS United States and the USS New Jersey. They are on either side of Delaware river.
I happened to meet two people who traveled on the SS United States. One is an American (my landlord, a professor and a gold medalist in 1952 Olympic Games in sailing!) and the other a German (a woman who works at a port museum kind of place in Hamburg).
I have been out of Japan for a long time, so I cannot tell how exactly it is like there. However, a friend of mine who visited the US in May had a G-Shock with MP3 player built in.
She also said that everyone knows what MP3 is these days, and there is no trouble getting MP3 files of the most recent hits from the Internet. The said G-Shock model apparently was the most popular model at that time.