Random trivia

I just saw that Wikipedia news stated that China announced the discovery of the tomb of Cao Cao. This is probably not relevant to anybody, but when I was teaching English in Beijing, I played a variation of 20 questions and Botticelli with my coworkers as an "exercise." Basically I wrote down the name of someone famous that we would all know on a card, and gave the card to someone to have as their person. Its very interesting to see what the pool of known figures is between you and a person raised on the other side of the Earth, and I guess I was surprised by how small the pool was. At the time, in the summer of '08, even Barack Obama was only known by like 75% of my coworkers. My favorite people to use ended up being people like David Beckham, Hilary Clinton, LeBron James, Mao Zedong, Kim Jung-Il, Thomas Edison, the Pope, Sun-Yat Sen, Pu Yi, Bruce Lee, etc.

Red Cliff was a popular movie at the time, a Chinese made film that crossed over to the American audience moderately well. It was about famous battles during the Three Kingdoms Era, and especially this famous general Cao Cao. So I had my coworkers explain these stories to me and started incorporating Cao Cao into my 20 questions game. There's my 2 cents. Now if only I was the hero in Slumdog Millionaire and went on a quiz show and was asked a question about Cao Cao for $1,000,000.

I have just come back from back to back trivia nights actually, the first at Johnny D's in Somerville, and tonight at Joshua Tree in Allston. They both use Stump Trivia, which I have learned is a game produced uniformly by a company and distributed to bars nationwide. So the questions are very professional and its organized quite well, and pretty different from Tombs Trivia. Either way, there are questions and you have to answer them. At Johnny D's, me and my Belmont Hill friends did pretty well for ourselves, but finished around the 30th percentile. The highlight of the night for me was getting "Valhalla" correct on a pseudo-guess, and then answering the question about what "female head of the Washington Post during the watergate scandal later ran a Fortune 500 company?" I didn't really know but I remember Katherine Graham, I believe from a Time Magazine article way back a decade ago, and guessed her and got it correct.

Tonight, it was just me and 2 other people. Somehow, our skills complemented each other enough for us to be in contention heading into the final round, when one of our trio had to leave to catch a train. So it was up to my friend Chris Jarrell and I. We were able to guess Ford Field for the location of the 2009 NCAA final four, and Jack Nicholson for the home of where Roman Polanski's sexual assault took place. Then in the final round, there were 2 questions where you wager an even number from 2-10. If you get it correct, you get that many points. If you get it wrong, you lose half that amount. The first question we didn't know and lost 2 points. The second question was what country assumed the presidency of the EU council after the Czech Republic in April of 2009? Well I took a course on the EU while studying abroad in the EU, went to most of those countries, and saw President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic speak at Georgetown in October! And....I didn't know the answer. I knew that I had read it somewhere and could cross off a bunch of countries, say Portugal and the UK, but I didn't know. Chris was thinking France or Belgium and was desperate enough to try to call for help, but in a rash move I put Sweden down, wagered 10 points, and ran the question in before Chris could change it. Then I heard from someone that the answer was Belgium, and was like, ah fuck. Oh well. 5 minutes go by before the trivia presider, who in a bizarre coincidence was a former acquaintance Katie Pope, announces the answer: SWEDEN. I actually jumped up in the bar, it was kinda embarrassing.

Recursive behavior

Have you ever wondered where the word etymology comes from? And then did you think about how weird or ironic that was? I mean it's like defining a definition, I don't know what the best word to describe this phenomenon is but it's something recursive. For the record, etymology comes from Greek, etymos meaning true, and logos meaning word. Here are some other examples of this: (WARNING: Some of these have been rumored to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe)

1) http://www.google.com/webhp#hl=en&source=hp&q=google&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
3) Using an easy button to find an easy button.
4) Studying how to study.
5) Using a time machine to go back in time to create the first time machine.
6) Fixing a problem on a microscope by using another microscope.
7) Putting CROSSWORDANSWER as the answer in an Crossword. I know, where do I think of these?
8) Having a robot create robot copies of itself.
9) Drawing yourself drawing.
10) Giving out an award for the best award.
11) Philosophizing about philosophy.

EDIT: I guess the word I'm looking for is that these things are META.

Halfway Done with Senior Year

It's winter break and I'm home and want to blog. It's been another great year and I really feel the need to encapsulate it. First semester senior year started off a bit like first semester freshman year - except that we knew what we were doing. There was all the newfound excitement of being 21 in Georgetown, reuniting with previously abroad friends, and taking in the benefits that come with being the premier class on campus. This culminated in either Senior Dis-Orientation, a thoroughly enjoyable shitshowvaganza, or the seemingly never ending Halloween weekend. There was one point where classes seemed easy, people were optimistic about getting jobs, and every night seemed like a good night to go to Tombs. Then classes started getting hard, the crossword became an anchor weighing me down, lots of friends didn't find jobs, the Red Sox got eliminated and the year ended too quickly. Still though, I will remember it as a great semester that, though my 7th, involved a lot of firsts. Since I love making lists, here goes.

Among the firsts: going to AASA's Fall Ball, renting a car, getting dim sum in DC, going to Tombs Trivia, stealing flowers from NSO, visiting College Park, Outdoor Education trip (horseback riding), visiting old town Alexandria, going to a Chinese grocery market in Tyson Corner, tutored for cash, ran to the National Cathedral, sampling numerous restaurants, going to a Bill Simmons book signing, attending a dinner thrown by the Greek club, mopping up a floor of shit, getting a keg, waking up 10 minutes into a test, writing a crossword not for the Voice, being a food judge, and throwing a party (twice).

Overall it was a semester of senior leadership in Ultimate, continued Ramen consumption in pots, job applications, catching up with all the people I always got along well with but never got to hang out enough with, trying to get off campus, working on math homework with Maggie, Liz and Emmie, working on computer science homeworks with Emmie and Henry and bugging DJ, watching less sports, going to 21st birthdays at Tombs (at least 10), great ultimate parties, forgetting people's names, and Tombs Trivia.

It's been a great semester but not without its flaws. Like all times at college, I feel we can all get so caught up in our busy lives that we don't do the things we do agree are most important, but are more often luxuries we put aside. For me especially, I have a hard time doing things that are perpetually low priority, and as a result we didn't have cable for 3 months after we ordered it. In addition, this was a semester that I feel I really could have had all A's. I don't have my transcript yet but it probably won't be the flat 4.0 so that's less than ideal, but I'm also at a point at which grades aren't too big a deal.

So it wasn't a semester of crazy adventures and lots of traveling, but it was one of hanging with great friends. Other people really made this semester happen and it's made me realize how strange friendship really can be, how little we might really understand of it and how much we sometimes take it for granted.

Song Lyrics

Every year during exams, I choose an exam song. I then listen to this song lots and lots of time during the period, including right before any given exam. This tradition dates back to I believe junior year of high school. While I won't reveal these songs, several of them are present in the lyrics that I have chosen.

Random song lyrics that are meaningful to me:

"Well I've traveled around, I've been all over this world,
Boy, I've never seen nothing like a Galway Girl." -Steve Earle, Galway Girl

"This is our decision, to live fast and die young,
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah it's overwhelming, but what else can we do?
Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?" -MGMT, Time to Pretend

"And my tires were slashed and I almost crashed, but the Lord had mercy,
and my machine she's a dud all stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey." -Bruce Springsteen, Rosalita

"She used to run track back in high school,
Now she tricks on the track right by school.
She takes the loss cause she don't want to see her child lose,
So respect her, or pay up for the time used." -Wyclef Jean, Sweetest Girl

"And you know it might not be that bad,
You were the best I ever had,
If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago,
I might not be alone." -Gin Blossoms, Hey Jealousy

"One minute I held the key,
next the walls were closed on me,
And I discovered that my castles stand,
on pillars of salt and pillars of sand." Coldplay, Viva La Vida

Winter weather

It was snowing the other day, first of the year, which meant that everybody is updating their Facebook status. Most people were really excited, which is a general reaction to the first snowfall in a while, but I wonder how many of them have actually stepped outside. I'm no eskimo, but I know that this is not the good kind of snow. Its hitting the pavement and instantly turning into slush, and there seem to be scattered raindrops intermixed with the snow. Snow is fun, slush is terrible. That's basically defined my winters wherever I've gone. It does remind me how miserable winters back home could be, and though I'm very glad to have grown up where I've grown up and had seasons and blizzards, done some sanding and salting and all that, there were some bad times in there.

And for some reason I want more. This thought came into my head this summer when I visited DC for a weekend. Surprisingly, I hadn't actually been to DC in the summertime since a week in high school when I went on a service trip and sweated a small person off me. It was hot and I was intimidated., and seriously, when factoring in summer plans, the hot DC weather definitely came up. It's not fun coming back from a pickup ultimate game on the Mall to Georgetown sweating profusely. Looking back on it though, this was pretty absurd because there are so many places hotter than DC, and even Boston can be pretty comparable in the summertime. But anyways, as should be eminently obvious from this blog, I spent the previous summer in Beijing, which is as hot or hotter than DC, as well as some time in Hong Kong, which is definitely hotter and more humid. When I visited DC this summer, I didn't find it bad at all. It simply didn't feel hot at all, and maybe it wasn't, but some of my friends still complained about it. In addition, spending time in Ireland has made me much more comfortable with being out in the rain. There were definitely some rainy ultimate practices this fall where some people were very uneasy about going out and I was like, hah, this was every practice at UCD.

The point is that the ability to cope with weather is not instilled at birth, it can change over time. I actually wonder how much scientific research has been put to the matter: is it like learning languages, where my "native weather" will always be Boston and all subsequent weathers that I learn will be "second weathers?" Or is it much more fluid and adaptable and you can easily lose your "native weather" if you leave it for a while? I'm more inclined to believe the second one, because I hear of people growing up in the cold, moving to California, and then being wusses around the cold. Bill Simmons is a prime example.

So how great would it be to spend one winter somewhere freaking cold, and just never being scared of winters again? Here are my top few, with approximate latitudes, average coldest month temperatures, population and comments. As always, all sources Wikipedia:

(For comparison purposes)
Boston, United States
Latitude: 42
Population: 620,000
Avg Jan low temp: 22

Edmonton, Canada
Latitude: 53
Population: 730,000
Avg Jan low temp: 3

Ushuaia, Argentina
Latitude: 54
Population: 61,000
Avg Jul low temp: 28

Anchorage, United States
Latitude: 61
Population: 280,000
Avg Jan low temp: 9

Stockholm, Sweden
Latitude: 59
Population: 825,000
Avg Jan low temp: 23

Murmansk, Russia
Latitude: 68
Population: 336,000
Avg Jan low temp: 7

St. Petersburg, Russia
Latitude: 59
Population: 4,568,000
Avg Jan low temp: 16

Trondheim, Norway
Latitude: 63
Population: 260,000
Avg Jan low temp: 20

Rovaniemi, Finland
Latitude: 66
Population: 60,000
Avg Jan low temp: 7

Reykjavik, Iceland
Latitude: 64
Population: 120,000
Avg Jan low temp: 28

Harbin, China
Latitude: 45
Population: 4,750,000
Avg Jan low temp: -12

Tromso, Norway
Latitude: 69
Population: 64,000
Avg Jan low temp: 20

Ulan Batur
Latitude: 47
Population: 1,067,000
Avg Jan low temp: -20

This research actually really surprised me. So I actually looked up all these cities and they passed my test for livability, or at least visitability. I've discovered that cities tend to look a lot cooler on Wikipedia then they are in real life - thus if a city doesn't even look cool on Wikipedia, it's totally not worth visiting. Of these, Ushuaia seemed the lamest, but I wanted to include a southern hemisphere city, and this is the southernmost city in the world and pretty cold. Note that the artic circle is at about 66 degrees latitude north, so the midnight sun can be seen in Tromso, Murmansk and Rovaniemi. Latitude really doesn't seem to be such a good predictor for cold and I doubt many people would have guessed that Reykjavik would be the warmest city in this list, and certainly Harbin and Ulan Bator's ridiculous coldness is pretty surprising. Ulan Bator is the coldest national capital in the world and Harbin is known for its standard Mandarin and where a large Georgetown study abroad program is based which must be such a hard program. Also, I really first came across these cities as a result of a trivia question from Tombs: What is the most populous city north of the arctic circle? The answer, which no one got, was Murmansk.

So of these cities, I actually think most of them I would not want to live in. The ones that are cool, like Stockholm, isn't even colder than Boston. Murmansk looks to be a very industrial port city and would suck, Rovaniemi is really just a tourist town for its natural beauty, Anchorage might be cool but once housed Sarah Palin, and I don't plan on ever living in Canada. I guess Reykjavik, Tromso and Harbin are the ones that really seem pretty cool to me.

Language Notes

So Saturday, emerging from a short shorts party and an epic collective apartment hangover, John and I descended to Virginia to watch Ireland play France in a World Cup qualifier. The place we had picked out was called the Four Courts and it looked great from the outside, classic Irish pub. We saw Guinness glasses and soccer on tv upon arrival. Unfortunately and to our incredulity, we learned that the Ireland match was not available to the pub. It was across the street though at this sports bar, for a whopping $20 cover. John and I elected to head home and watch it online from a stolen feed.

For some reason, the feed that worked best was in Romanian - I would have preferred English or even French, but this did provide some cool tidbits, including evidence of a Sprachsbund at work. Romania is surrounded by Slavic-speaking lands but is itself a Romance language. A Sprachsbund is basically when unrelated languages start to sound like each other, and Romanian sounds very much like a Slavic language to me.

Here are some random things I've picked up recently relating to language:
1) The Family Guy episode "Spies Reminiscent of Us" deals with Russian spies. In a closing gag, Meg gets hypnotized and makes a phone call to Vladimir Putin in Russian. Earlier in the show, Mayor Adam West delivers a much shorter line in Russian. If you think Meg's Russian sounds very fluent, it's because Mila Kunis, who plays Meg, was born in the Ukraine and didn't even learn English until her teenage years. Ukrainian is a different language, but very closely related to Russian and most Ukrainians speak both.

2) Some sports language notes. In a pretty random coincidence, two LA Lakers speak Italian: Kobe Bryant and Sasha Vujacic. It's well documented that Kobe speaks Italian, growing up there while his father played in the Euroleague, but I hadn't realized Vujacic is from Slovenia and played basketball in Italy, and can as well. Even more random is Ronny Turiaf, who played for the Lakers from 2006-2008, who also spoke Italian! He's from Martinique and spoke Creole natively, as well as French, English, Spanish and Italian. I think 5 languages is pretty impressive for a professional athlete and I'm struggling to find someone who has more.

3) Roger Federer speaks Swiss German, German, English and French. I'll give him credit for 3.5 there. Little known fact is that his mother is South African - he may have spoken English at home.

4) Yi Jianlian, from Shenzhen, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, and his English isn't bad. Unfortunately, his jump shot is.

5) 3 different main cast members of Friends spoke French.

6) Marco Polo claimed that he learned 4 languages, but didn't specify which. Reading different historical accounts, these are believed to be Persian, Uyghur, Mongolian and either Arabic or Chinese. It's hard to understand what these even meant in 13th century context but I think that's pretty cool.

Travel Quiz

One of the biggest parts of my senior year has been Monday night Tombs Trivia. I'm a big fan of trivia anywhere, spawned by the large database of useless facts I've accrued from years of Wikipedia-surfing, sports page combing, Sporcle-playing and crossword-making. As this would suggest, I'm pretty good, and I've found a group of people led by the indomitable Maggie Lonergan and Arthur Smith, my roommate John Curtin and the mysterious Henry Fingerhut to form a consistent contending team. The trivia is divided into 4 rounds of 10 questions. The first two rounds have some sort of theme that can be very random, ranging from 4 letter words to the month of October. The next round is a music round where a song is played for like four seconds and we have to figure out what the title and artist is.

As such, I'm in trivia mania, and I've composed a quiz based almost exclusively on things I learned while traveling abroad. Here are ten questions that someone who's really followed my blog, and has a lot of useless knowledge, may do pretty well on.

1. Though Chinese is the most spoken first language in the world, the Chinese Wikipedia only has over 200,000 articles, compared to nearly 600,000 for Polish and 473,000 for Portuguese.Although the number of articles does not always correlate too highly with number of speakers, what is arguably the main reason why there are so few Chinese-language Wikipedia pages?

2. What European city did Ronald Reagan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Michael Jackson and Usain Bolt all famously step foot in?

3. I passed by a covered kayak recently. On its covering, someone wrote Athens or Bust, but then crossed off Athens and wrote Qingdao. What did that all mean?

4. What is the least spoken official language of the European Union?

5. What are the four written scripts on a plaque in the entrance to the Forbidden City?

6. Where is Victoria Coach Station? Lake Victoria? Victoria Peak? Greater Victoria?

7. What novel written by an American author about a Polish city won the 1929 Newberry Medal?

8. What city’s main bridge was allegedly started on 1357 / 9 / 7 5:31am and with eggs mixed into the mortar?

9. What letter is strongly associated with a line in the UK and Ireland?

10. What European capital city has a psychological syndrome named after it?

Please post your initial answers or thoughts if you can.

Answers

Here are the answers to the questions posted above, with an explanation of how I conceived this question.


1. Literacy in China is 90%, and while computers are not available to a large portion of the population and typing in Chinese is difficult, I believe the biggest factor limiting the number of Chinese-language Wikipedia pages is that Wikipedia has been banned in China. You can read about the details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia_in_mainland_China and actually the article states that currently the website are unblocked. The bans have mostly been to prevent people reading about topics controversial to the PRC government (Tiananmen Square). As a result, the website probably hasn't attracted a popular following and I'd be willing to bet that most of the articles on the site have been created by posters in Taiwan, Hong Kong or elsewhere in the world. Wikipedia's banning in China was a huge factor for me during my stay there.

2. This city is Berlin. Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech during the Cold War where he said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Joseph Stalin entered at some point after the Soviets conquered the city at the end of the European action in World War II. Adolf Hitler of course worked here. Michael Jackson dangled a baby outside the balcony of the Hotel Adlon right near the Brandenburg Gate. Lastly, Usain Bolt ran a 9.58 100m dash in the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, breaking the world record he set in Beijing. Like many great cities, many famous people will step inside it. I mean, who hasn't been to New York? But Berlin is special because so much happened there in the 20th century, and the fact that all these famous people did famous things in that city in so many different walks reflects why I find the city fascinating.

3. The owner of the kayak was evidently an Olympic hopeful who failed to qualify for the 2004 Games in Athens and set his/her sight on the 2008 Games. Now every reader of this blog will know that the 2008 Games were in Beijing. However, since Beijing was an inland city, all the sailing and kayaking events took place in Qingdao, a coastal city that was once a German colony and more commonly known on Western maps as Tsingtao. The Germans set up a brewery in the city and now Tsingtao beer is the most popular in China and I am very familiar with its taste.

4. Irish is the least spoken language of the European Union. The official languages of the EU are simply the official languages of its member nations, although this was a relatively recent policy and Irish was not accepted as an official language of the EU until January 1, 2007. Irish, a Celtic language often miscalled Gaelic, is obviously the official language in Ireland (along with English), and just about all official signs in Ireland are bilingual. Well known is city centre, which in Irish is An lar, because we would see that on the buses about 10 times a day. Irish is taught in the schools very early on and for many years. However, I found that most students only had a basic grasp on the language, even after nearly a decade of study. The official data is that Irish has 355,000 native speakers and another 1.8 million claiming to have some knowledge. Wikipedia states that Maltese had 371,000 speakers in 1975, but the country's population estimate is now 413,000 and you'd have to imagine that the vast majority of them speak Maltese. Another source I found has 500,000 for Maltese. Estonian has just over a million and no other language is really close. In fact, several unofficial languages including Catalan, Galician, Russian and even Corsican have more speakers than Irish. Since they are not official languages of any EU member state, even though some are protected languages, they are not official languages of the EU.

5. The plaque to the Forbidden City that I am referring to is on the right. I am 100% sure of the scripts, although I may not be matching them up correctly, but from left to right, they are Manchu, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian.

6. Victoria Coach Station is in London, Lake Victoria is the African great lake that touches Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya (although this has nothing to do with my travels), Victoria Peak is the main mountain in Hong Kong and a place I've gone just about every time I've visited, and Greater Victoria is the metropolitan area around the British Columbia capital in Western Canada.

7. Eric P. Kelly wrote The Trumpeter of Krakow while studying in the city. The legend of the trumpet call is murky which you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejna%C5%82_mariacki . Anyways, I had forgotten about the book until I was on the train to Krakow and realized that I was going to visit the city of the book. I did hear the trumpet tune break off abruptly but it didn't seem as if most people there were even aware of it.

8. Charles Bridge in Prague was constructed on the palindromic date/time by King Charles. The construction was overseen by the legendary Peter Parler and he allegedly found the mortar to be too weak and ordered eggs to be added to it. All this was written on a sign in my hostel in Prague. A scientific study was done recently and found that the Charles Bridge mortar does in fact have an organic component.

9. The Irish and British do not "line up" - instead they "queue." On rare occasions, I would see signs ordering people to Q here, and it took me quite a bit to understand what to do.

10. The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response where hostages sympathize with their captors, and was named so after a bank robbery in Stockholm.