Lone Signal

Author: operator

  • What’s the word?

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    From Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which I also mentioned over here and which I’m still reading: “Peoples of color” sounded awkward if translated literally, so I used the standard Chinese term for minorities: shaoshu minzu. Of course, that was just as odd in English: “small-number ethnic groups.” Perhaps somewhere in the world there was a language that handled this issue…

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    operator

  • On law, or how we view it

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    I’ve been reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a nonfiction work that’s part-memoir, part-journalism, part-travel writing about Hessler’s years in China. One of the more intriguing sections I’ve recently finished dealt with the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, a health system-cum-religion that gained millions of believers in the 1990s. Many of these adherents had a penchant for staging peaceful…

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    operator

  • As T.H. White’s Merlyn says,

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    operator

  • Radiolab on thinking trees

     Great episode from Radiolab on the vast underground networks that link trees together. Does that sound dull? It’s a testament to the Radiolab team’s skill that this remains one of the most riveting podcast episodes I’ve heard in months.

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    operator

  • Cross-posted from Tumblr: Unit 731

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    (In response to this post.) I’ve been interested in Japan’s Unit 731 since it came up in a bioethics class back in college. Recently, I read a journal article on the subject written by Tsuneishi Keiichi, one of Japan’s top biowarfare specialists, and several details stood out. “It is said that Ishii [Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, the…

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    operator

  • Futures Within Our Grasp

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    Pokémon GO has been all over the news since its launch, talked up everywhere from NPR and Forbes to regional and local news sites. Even my old law school blockmates have been posting about it on Facebook (Law students agog over a gaming app! Imagine that.), which isn’t surprising considering the numbers the game has been…

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    operator