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Chinese defend Einstein's portrait of their people as 'filthy' and 'obtuse'

Chinese internet users have defended Albert Einstein’s recently published travel diaries in which the physicist calls the Chinese “industrious, filthy people.”

[...] While some internet users called for a “boycott of Einstein” and said his observations proved “all humans, even Einstein, have a stupid, shallow side,” most said the China Einstein witnessed is nothing like it is today. “Einstein went to China at the wrong time,” said one Weibo user, describing the early years of the Chinese republic, established in 1912, which came after centuries of imperial rule. “Hunger, war, and poverty all pressed on the Chinese. How could Chinese people at the time gain Einstein’s respect?”

Many were in strong support of the scientist: “This is called insulting China? That’s ridiculous. Did the Chinese in that era look dirty? When I see the photos from then, they look dirty, Einstein depicted the true state of that era.” Others compared the scientists’s observations to that of Lu Xun, considered the father of modern Chinese literature, who was best known for his scathing satire of Chinese society in the early 20th century. “We praise Lu Xun because he pointed out our disadvantages. Why should we blame Einstein for this?”

[...] The state-run Global Times published an editorial on Friday praising the level-headed response of Chinese internet users. The author, who goes by the pen name Gengzhige, wrote: “I’m curious what Einstein would write now if he saw the open attitudes most Chinese show today toward his private diary.” The editorial elicited over 2,000 comments. One of the most liked responses said: “Dignity is earned by oneself, not given by others.”

But there were some dissenting voices amongst the comments: “This is just racism. We can see that Einstein is strong in physics but he doesn’t understand humans at all.”

Some Chinese Are Actually Defending Einstein's 'Racism' Against Their Ancestors

Previously: Albert Einstein: Racist

Tooooo much fun!
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/watching-this-8-year-old-girl-play-led-zeppelin-on-drums-will-make-your-day-1.4704537

Einstein's travel diaries reveal 'shocking' xenophobia

Einstein’s travel diaries reveal racist views of Chinese: industrious, filthy and obtuse

Albert Einstein’s best ideas came when he was aimless. Yours can too

I appreciate Ubuntu. After dabbling with Devuan, I appreciate Ubuntu more.

I'm a techie, and like playing with things - including different Linux distros - but ultimately I use by computers to get work done. It's time to move on from my old Xubuntu install, so I figured I would try Devuan, since they just released Devuan ASCII. A new version ought to be up-to-date, being a Debian derivative, it ought to be reliable, and not having systemd can only be an advantage. So...

First, the installation process is needlessly confusing. It clearly has only been tested by people who have installed Devuan before. It defaults to wanting to take the whole disk (dangerous). When you insist on manually picking a partition, it doesn't display the partition names (dangerous). Then some of the options are just weird: picking my swap partition (there's already a linux swap on the disk), it offers to format it to ext3, ext4, etc..

During installation, I am informed that some hardware components of my system require non-free drivers. I have no problem with that. But I am asked to "insert the media" with the drivers, "ok or cancel". Um...what media would that be? If the drivers aren't in the ISO image, I have no idea where to get them. But if they are in the ISO image, why ask me to insert media? What will happen if I cancel out? Very confusing.

People who know the installer inside-and-out, and are just testing functionality, won't see any problems with any of this. For people new to the distro, there are a lot chances to seriously screw up along the way. The experience is totally unsuitable to people who aren't extremely technical.

This continues into the next phase of installation. You were able to pick the installation language, but there was no way to pick the next level of detail. Lots of us in Europe install in English, but we don't want US time/date/currency formats and we need an international keyboard. XFCE is installed, but is completely empty - there's not even an application menu. Seriously? A freshly installed system, and the user can't even start an application? Great user experience!

Want to hook up to a wireless network? It was set up during installation, but those settings aren't carried over into the installed system. Instead of detecting what the network actually supports, the user is confronted with a huge list of all possible security protocols. The individual access points are listed - do you have to set up each individual AP? Um...

Ok, we can get past all of this. LibreOffice it pre-installed, that's nice. But not the languages, and the installation process in LibreOffice itself is painful (Ubuntu has a Language Support setting that handles this nicely). And...what's this? LibreOffice 6 has been out for months now, but Devuan's brand new release only has LibreOffice 5.2, which was end-of-life more than a year ago?

This is the point I stopped. Xubuntu 18.04, here I come...

Goodbye to my brain. Justin Case for the lose; the minions of evil triumph.

Will the demons celebrate the long hard win for my soul at last? Will there be a special unholy blood lust rite as they portion out my still beating heart?

Or will the mindless maw grind me to oblivion, unheeding, nothing but more fodder for the enormous undead machine?

I can hold out no longer. They win. Even though I know in exquisite detail -- better than 999 out of every thousand victims -- how they will proceed to rape me, I can't stop them any more.

I'm going to be forced to buy a "smart" phone.

In a final indignity, I will be required to "agree" to the terms of my raping and pay for perpetual abuse.

Any last farewells or words of condolence? Even if only to nod that I put up a good fight and no human can last forever against forces like these?

Feel free to share this with others. Perhaps my words can warn someone who still has time.

If I only had money to invest with (hey SoylentGreens (it's people!!!); anyone want to buy me a share?

https://www.startengine.com/mycroft-ai

I can't even afford to get a Mycroft-box, though my raspi Mycroft works fine...love the fem-voice.

But yeah...if I had spare cash, I'd love to get in on this (but currently Canadians can't invest anyways due to startengine goofs).

"Hey mister, buy me this, I sucky sucky so good, me so horny!"

Holy war? Holy crap! Forget all the distractions in the news. Erdogan is apparently going off the deep end.

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday strongly criticized Austria’s move to close mosques and expel Turkish-funded imams, slamming the decision as anti-Islamic and promising a response.

“These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world toward a war between the cross and the crescent,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul.

Hello, liberals, progressives, and fellow travelers! Wakey, wakey! Are you woke?

This is exactly the thing that many of us have been warning against, for the past ten years, and more. Islam is most certainly NOT a "religion", and absolutely not a "religion of peace". Islam is a complete society, with a religion, politics, military, and everything necessary for a complete civilization. And, Islam is intolerant of EVERY FORM OF religion, politics, military, and all else that is necessary for a civilization.

Austria decides to crack down on Muslim activists, and Erdogan is talking about a holy war.

His comments came the day after the Austrian government announced it could expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families and would shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on “political Islam,” triggering fury in Ankara.

Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), the junior partner in Austria’s coalition government said the move concerned imams with alleged links to the Turkish-Islamic Cultural Associations (ATIB) organisation, a branch of Turkey’s religious affairs agency Diyanet.

Isn't Erdogan supposed to be the head of a "secular government"?? WTF is he talking about, "holy war"? I guess he has put the lie to that old claim. The Turkish army has failed in it's mission to safeguard secularism.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/erdogan-warns-austria-imam-crackdown-will-lead-to-holy-war/

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1318351/middle-east

“Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalization have no place in our country,” Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the ruling center-right People’s Party said.

http://indianexpress.com/article/world/austria-to-shut-down-mosques-expel-foreign-funded-imams-5209799/

The moves follow a “law on Islam”, passed in 2015, which banned foreign funding of religious groups and created a duty for Muslim organisations to have “a positive fundamental view towards (Austria’s) state and society”.

“Political Islam’s parallel societies and radicalising tendencies have no place in our country,” said Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who, in a previous job as minister in charge of integration, steered the Islam bill into law.

This topic only came to my attention, several minutes ago. It popped up in my news feed, at OneAmerica - http://www.oann.com/austria-plans-to-shut-down-mosques-expel-foreign-funded-imams/ Newsfeed says the story was posted at 4:30 AM, but when I click it at about 11:00 AM, it has been taken down. A web search turns up many hits, almost all of them on foreign nations. None on America's mainstream media. Search terms used are "austria expel imam". Try it - Duckduckgo gives me pages of results, none of them from abc/nbc/cbs/cnn/fox/turner/hearst. None.

Helluva thing, if the whole Korean thing gets defused, while Islam is busy launching a holy war against the rest of the world.

What say the apologists?

My wife and I have been looking to get a campervan for a couple months. We have been keeping an eye on Kajiji for vans, and looked at a couple.

The first was a 1986 28' motorhome. $4,500. We drove 1/2 way across the city to go take a look one evening. This thing was in great condition. Diesel. Nice kitchen, small bathroom with shower, and enough beds to sleep 6.

I poked around and we took it for a test drive. Brakes were a little sketchy and this thing was slow. I think it could do highway speeds on a flat road with no wind. It was pretty awesome. My daughter loved it. She liked looking in all the little cupboards and sitting in the back while we drove around.

It was a really good deal, so we were really thinking about buying it, but it was too big to store at our house comfortably, so we ended up passing on it.

Last Thursday, we looked at an actual campervan on the other side of the city and we ended up buying that one. She's a 1985 Dodge B250. We are pretty excited! It's in pretty good condition. The interior is 80's brown plaid. It's got a stove, oven, fridge, heater, small solar panels, and a little toilet in the back. It's got a high roof so I can fully stand without banging my head on the ceiling. Yesterday I was out trying all the stuff out to make sure everything worked. I got everything working except for the oven. The pilot would light fine, but the burner would not turn on. I think the thermostat needs replacing on that.

I need to take the van into a mechanic to get the shocks replaced. Also, the brakes pulse, so I want to get the front pads and discs replaced. The van doesn't warm up, so the thermostat needs to also be replaced.

So, she needs a little work, but she's almost as old as I am, so that's understandable. We paid $8,700, and I'm pretty happy. I can't wait to load her up with all our stuff and take her out camping!

Vaping essays: E-cigarette sellers offering scholarships

Regarding grouping of digits (outside of specialized fields); do _not_ use either "," or ".".
During my hiatus I did have reason to look into this and found a nice little thing issued by NIST(warn: pdf)

To cut-and-paste sections 10.5.2 and 10.5.3 from it:

10.5.2 Decimal sign or marker
  The recommended decimal sign or marker for use in the United States is the dot on the line [3, 6].

For numbers less than one, a zero is written before the decimal marker. For example, 0.25 s is the correct form, not .25 s.

10.5.3 Grouping digits

  Because the comma is widely used as the decimal marker outside the United States, it should not be used to separate digits into groups of three. Instead, digits should be separated into groups of three, counting from the decimal marker towards the left and right, by the use of a thin, fixed space. However, this practice is not usually followed for numbers having only four digits on either side of the decimal
marker except when uniformity in a table is desired.

Examples:
76 483 522 but not: 76,483,522
43 279.168 29 but not: 43,279.168 29
8012 or 8 012 but not: 8,012
0.491 722 3 is highly preferred to: 0.4917223
0.5947 or 0.594 7 but not: 0.59 47
8012.5947 or 8 012.594 7 but not: 8 012.5947 or 8012.594 7

Note: The practice of using a space to group digits is not usually followed in certain specialized applications, such as engineering drawings and financial statements.

On a personal note I'm fond of doing the groupings the way that Ada (the language) encourages, by an underscore (i.e.: 10_000 , which would make a US-decimalized number be like 10_000.00 and in comma-countries 10_000,00)