In an interesting linguistic study published in June, Tyler Schnoebelen of the language data company Idibon looked at hundreds of languages and evaluated them against one another according to 165 features shared by at least 100 languages. What he came up with was a "Weirdness Index" -- downloadable here -- that ranks 239 languages according to how odd they are, i.e. how different one is from the others. (Perhaps a better word would be "distinct.")
It's been a while since our friends at Xinhua have done something truly absurd, but today, China's official state-run news agency has really outdone itself. The culprit this time is not Xinhua's English-language slideshow, but a Chinese edition, which recently published 40 pictures that appear to be screenshots from a fetish porno.
On Saturday, more than 100,000 people marched in Taipei, as citizens remain furious over the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of 24-year-old conscript Hung Chung-chiu on July 4.
And then they gathered on a square and sang Les Miserables.
A friend of ours, Neil from Hong Kong, had quite the interesting post office experience in Mong Kok this morning.
He was standing in line, minding his own business, when a woman approached him and said, “Fucking white man is pig, you steal and you need to return the loot to its original owner.”
Utterly flabbergasted, Neil -- who is, by the way, one of the coolest, nicest people we know -- pulled out his camera phone and began recording. “Return the loot to its original owner,” the woman says, followed by:
On August 3 at 2:50 pm, the influential political blogger and journalist Michael Anti tweeted that Wall Street Journal's Chinese website, cn.wsj.com, had been blocked within China. That afternoon, after testing on multiple browsers, we emailed WSJ for a comment, then posted a story announcing WSJ Chinese had been harmonized, i.e. could only be accessible in China with a VPN.
Two hours ago, Kathy from Dow Jones's Hong Kong office emailed back:
The first time you watch this, you'll likely not catch what exactly happens. Youku user Wanku, who posted the above video, certainly didn't.
But after returning home and studying the footage, Wanku realized something: he/she saw a robbery happen in broad daylight, and in front of the city hall in Binhu district of Wuxi, Jiangsu province, no less.
Here's some rather harrowing footage of a bus crash in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province on August 2 around 9:52 am, as seen from inside the bus. Reports are that the driver was backing up on the highway (don't do that) when an oncoming semi plowed into it.
