Russians, Canadians, and Barns

Rus
A bunch of the people I work with are Russian, for some reason. On my team of 10, 6 (and the primary drivers of our project) are Russian. We had a 7th, but everyone hated him, and he hated everyone, but particularly me. I guess I stole his keyboard or something. I give you this background to explain why, when I saw and article about campaigns by the Rus in the Caspian Sea, I was interested. I'd heard of the Rus, the tribe that founded Russia, and decided to read up on them.

Apparently, the Rus were a Scandinavian tribe (also known as Vikings!) who were drawing tribute from a group of different tribes, mostly Slavs, in present day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. At some point, the Slavs threw out the Rus, but fell to fighting amongst themselves. A charming little passage, which I think is a great example of the victors writing history, tells the story of how the Slavs invited the Rus to come rule them.

The four tribes who had been forced to pay tribute to the Varangians — Chuds, Slavs, Merians, and Krivichs drove the Varangians back beyond the sea, refused to pay them further tribute, and set out to govern themselves. But there was no law among them, and tribe rose against tribe. Discord thus ensued among them, and they began to war one against the other. They said to themselves, "Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to custom. Thus they went overseas to the Varangians, to the Rus. These particular Varangians were known as Rus, just as some are called Swedes, and others Normans and Angles, and still others Gotlanders, for they were thus named. The Chuds, the Slavs, the Krivichs and the Veps then said to the Rus, "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come reign as princes, rule over us". Three brothers, with their kinfolk, were selected. They brought with them all the Rus and migrated^[1].

HAHAHAHAHA oh that's rich. But no really, that's their story and they're sticking to it. Good for them. But when was the last time in world history where you were able to find a nationality who invited another nationality to come rule them? Oh, those Russians, they're so good at re-writing history.

Red Barns
When Cougar, Flipper, and I went to Canadia for the Vancouver Half-Marathon, we saw a ton of barns along the freeway, and we started wondering my they're traditionally painted red. According to the Wikipedia article on barns, it's probably because the ferric oxide that was used to create red paint was the cheapest coloring available. It might also be because the ferric oxide acts as a barrier against molds and fungi. So there you are.

Canadian migrant workers
When we actually got to Vancouver, there was a noticeable lack of people of Mexican ethnicity. It surprised me because there are plenty of Mexican people all over Washington, and Vancouver has large populations of other immigrant ethnicities, including Chinese, Punjab, Sikh, and Filipino. Why wouldn't there be more Latin American migrant workers? If we have such huge numbers of them in the United States, why don't they in Canada? Wikipedia is mostly silent on this issue. All I could find was a blurb stating that there is no good source of information about illegal immigrants in Canada. That seems strange to me since they have better social benefits than the US, lots of agriculture, and are not difficult to get into from the US. Strange. I can only speculate that the Canadian government is more effective in enforcing labor laws then the notoriously lax US government.

Genocide or Progress

There was a short segment on NPR (National Public Radio, pretty much the only radio I listen to) the other morning about Cambodia, talking about how the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime is hardly taught in schools anymore. In ninth grade, Cambodian students have all of 5 sentences about the genocide in their textbooks. It's unbelievable that an event as huge as the genocide of the uh...Khmer Rouge? should be glossed over like that.

Who are (or were?) the Khmer Rouge? And why is their genocide being glossed over? Why do I not really know much about them?

The Khmer Rouge weren't killed off, they did the killing. They were a Communist party that ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979, and, as a function of percentage of population, were the best regime in the 20th century at killing off their own citizens. Of an estimated population of 7.5 million, they are estimated to have killed between 850,000 to 3 million people through starvation, execution, or forced labor. Wow. That's anywhere from around 10 to more than 33 percent.

There's a few disturbing links between the U.S. and the Khmer Rouge in the article, although it's lacking attribution for them. According to Wikipedia, the Khmer Rouge would not have gained power if it weren't for the carpet bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. More disturbingly, the article claims that the US assisted Cambodia during their preemptive invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which ultimately led to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime at the hands of the Vietnamese. (Talk about irony!) I know that the US was blindly anti-Vietnam at the time, but to support a regime that was killing off a minimum of 10% of their population?

Why were they killing off so much of their population in the first place? They wanted to turn Cambodia into a classless agrarian utopia. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't want to be farmers. Solution? Kill some of them, and force the others to become farmers. Of course, since they don't know anything about farming, a lot of them might die of starvation. Oh well. It's all in the name of progress!

I started wondering...if the Cambodians were the most lethal as a percentage of population, where do they stand on the list of genocides judged sheerly on scale? They couldn't be too far behind the Nazis, could they? Turns out they are pretty hum-drum as far as genocide goes on a sheer numbers scale. The Turks killed an estimated 2 million Armenians, about 1 million died in Rwanda, and Americans killed at least 1 million Filipinos in the Phillipine American War. Still, it's nothing to sneeze at, as people got all upset about Bosnia, and there were only 8,000 killed at Srebinicia. Even high estimates of casualties from the Bosnian genocide are only 200,000. Pshaw.

No, for a real idea of what's possible in mass fatalities, we have to look to China under Mao, for the estimated 20-30 million who died during the Great Leap Forward, and the Soviet Union under Stalin, where through a combination of executions, famine, and forced labor, up to 30 million are thought to have died. An interesting note is that both Mao's and Stalin's high death scores are due to attempting to rapidly industrialize their nations, where Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge's impressive score came from an attempt to de-industrialize and return to some fanciful agrarian ideal.

To be fair, neither Mao nor Stalin were "genocide" so much as "politicide". No, to find longest running and highest death toll in actual "genocide", in history, we need to look at the Native Americans in the post-Columbus period, notably including the United States. Oh yes. Once again, we're number 1.

Oh, and since we're thinking about such an uplifting subject, don't forget that up to 2 million people have been killed, and more than twice that displaced, in Darfur in the Sudan right now.

Popcorn, Dietary Fiber, and Scabby Bronchioles

I recently moved upstairs to a new office, and it turns out that the kitchen on the 3rd floor has a popcorn machine! Not one of those cheesy air poppers that my dad would buy once a year at a garage sale, but a big monstrosity of glass and metal that you'd see in an old movie theater. I've been eating popcorn almost every day at work ever since moving up here. "What sort of effect is this having on my body? Is popcorn nutritious at all?" I asked myself. "Check Wikipedia!" I answered myself.

Turns out that popcorn has been around for a long long time. Archealogical samples of popcorn have been dated back 1800 years. Before I even got to the nutrition section I assumed it must be good for me if the Native Americans were eating it, but then I don't really know if they also ate deep fried buffalo rinds. Popcorn really is pretty good for you, it's 15% fiber. Of course, the way that Americans eat it, covered in artifically butter flavored grease, detracts a little from the health benefits from eating popcorn.

So it's 15% fiber...so what? What does that really do for you? I hear all the time about how we need to eat more fiber and get more whole grains in our diet, but why? Insoluable fiber just passes through and softens stool (which is good because no one likes anal fissures!) but soluble fiber gets fermented in the large colon and turns into short chain fatty acids that are really good for you. Luckily it also turns into flatulence, which makes me giggle. So ha! Farting really is good for you.

Back to the concept of popcorn only being good for you if you're not putting a ton of artificially-butter-flavored-grease on it...you don't have to worry about the affects of butter flavor on yourself, but also on the poor sods who are putting it in your microwave popcorn. A chemical named diacetyl is often used for butter flavoring, and it causes a condition called Popcorn Lung in workers who are over exposed. It causes the the bronchioles, the little tubes in your lungs that let air get to your air sacs, to grow closed. Gruesome! It's often misdiagnosed as emphysema. Only treatment? Lung transplant. Next time your annoying coworker cooks up that microwave popcorn, make sure to warn them.

Don't go getting all angry at diacetyl, however. It's a naturally occurring byproduct of yeast fermentation. Still, it's a shame to think that when it's taken out of it's natural context and introduced to popcorn, it's can cost some poor yokel a lung. Crazy.

Woo hoo! First post!

I can't promise I'm going to update this with any sort of frequency, but it can't hurt to write something up and throw it into the blogosphere. I was just talking with my friend Cougar today about how much information I take in from heterogeneous sources and subsequently incorporate into my world view. The internet in general has been one of those biggest heterogeneous sources, and Wikipedia has become a great source for instant gratification of curiosity.

By writing up this blog I'm hoping to illustrate how the free and open flow of knowledge and information can lead to exciting new viewpoints of the intellectual landscape. The ability to crawl along a web of knowledge like a synthesizing spider is so exciting!

Today I had a pretty tame Wiki experience...I read about the origins of the word "Frak" that is used as an expletive replacement for "fuck" from the show Battlestar Galactica. Apparently the new "re-imagined" series actually took it from the original series. I don't remember hearing it as a kid at all; weird. Anyway, it lead me to learn about Thomas Bowlder, whose name has been made famous for prudishly censoring literature. He created an edition of both Shakespeare and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that he considered fit for women and children.

Interesting that women back then needed some jerk to censor their literature for them. I guess that both the dispositions and the intellects of the fairer sex have come a long way since the early nineteenth century. It's also amusing that Shakespeare was censored for kids, considering that the first time I read Romeo and Juliet was when I was in 8th grade English class.

Growing up as I did, with one unusually liberal minded and one unusually conservative parent, I was frequently aware of censorship. Somehow, however, I'm still often surprised by it, just as I am frequently surprised to hear that women still make consistently less in the workplace than their male counterparts. Is it myopic of me to be surprised? I shouldn't be surprised; Lord of the Flies was required reading for me in 8th grade, and yet just a short time (by history's standards) ago it was considered unfit. Still, I'm consistently boggled when confronted with censorship. I don't think that most people are aware of the breadth and ubiquity of it. The American Library Association has a Banned Books Week that it uses to highlight the issues of censorship, and when I checked it out I was amazed at some of the books that are currently being challenged!

Harry Potter is a perennially challenged series. A book about gay penguins is being challenged. Books by Toni Morrison are being challenged. Notably absent this year are Of Mice and Men, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye. I just want to shake these people. How can they think that the world would be better without this literature? How can they think that their children's lives would be better off without these pieces? I posit to you that if someone is truly going to be swayed by a piece of literature, they would do far worse by reading the Bible. How many times in the Old Testament did a man lie with a woman outside of wedlock, or did God tell his people to go forth and commit genocide? At least Steinbeck gave insight into the characters and motivations that led to bad things happening in Mice and Men, whereas in the Bible it's just horrific things happening for no reason.

Wow, this first post turned out to be a lot longer than I intended. I promise in the future to keep them shorter. It's not my place to tell you what to think, and not my intention. What I'd like to do with this blog is just to demonstrate a direction that a mind can end up going in when presented with a nearly infinite fount of knowledge. Have a great day and I'll see you next time the inspiration takes me.