Cat and Shanmao's blog

Text messaging is sending written messages via your cellphone. Doesn't seem to be that popular in North America except perhaps among teenagers. There have been advertising campaigns on tv about good rates for text messaging and teens are presented as the primary text messagers.

In China, text messaging is hugely popular. One of the reasons is that in Chinese 1 character usually equals 1 word. Compare this to English where multiple characters must be typed in even with abbreviations developed for text messaging. The compactness of Chinese writing makes it ideal for text messaging.

This reminds me of CISC vs RISC computer instruction sets. Your computer's CPU, central processing unit, understands a small set of instructions. All computer programs are written in languages that are human readable and then converted to this set of machine instructions. Over the years people have designed different machine instruction sets.

CISC stands for Complex Instruction Set Computer. The set of machine instructions is complex, the sizes of the instructions are non-uniform and vary (1 byte vs 2 bytes vs ...), some of the instructions are special-case operations and arcane.

RISC, Reduced Instruction Set Computer, was developed in the late 70s and early 80s. The idea was to design an instruction set where all the instructions were really simple operations and all of the same size and all taking the same time to execute and all used relatively frequently.

See these pages for more indepth discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISC

Nowadays, RISC CPUs have been abandoned mostly.

So we have an analogy here. An older style of encoding of language, Chinese characters and CISC instruction sets, followed by a newer more verbose but simpler encoding, alphabets and RISC instructino sets, followed by the older, compact style of encoding making a comeback.

Watched the Oscar's last night with Gui, Jean, Mi, and Jean's mom. Some yummy crab, fried rice, cucumber salad, and onion buns.

The ceremony wasn't that exciting. The host was mildly funny, the staged events were alright, and there were no flashy or controversial speeches. The post-Oscar machine was ridiculous in it's play by play analysis of dresses, accessories, and similar stuff.

Quite a study to see the celebrity machine at its premier event :)

I was forwarded the following link to a 1h 20m video documentary that presents an alternate opinion of what happened on September 11, 2001.

http://saturn9.ws/loosechange.html

Having finished writing up a document at work yesterday, I felt like taking it easy so I took some time to watch the video this morning and found it interesting. But had some concerns and didn't quite buy the conclusion of the video.

911 has spawned a conspiracy theory subculture that rivals JFK conspiracy theories. 911 is one of those big events like the JFK assasination, the Iranian revolution, fall of the Soviet Union, attack on Pearl Harbour, but it is the first big event to harness the power of the internet to have information, stories, opinion, and research disseminated widely and be easily available for the average person.

The idea behind the video is that the standard 911 story is flawed.

The 19 insane, boxcutter-wielding, freedom-hating Arabs weren't on the planes. Some of them are still alive and had no role in the plot other than as patsies. They were at best mediocre pilots incapable of pulling off the advanced, sophisticated manoeuvres required to steer planes into the Pentagon or guide them to the world trade center. The damage to the Pentagon seems to be a clean surgical strike and bears no resemblance to any jumbo jet/building collision previously recorded. The damage to the world trade center from the plane impacts shouldn't have brought the towers down. The cell phone calls from the planes don't add up since cell phones have a fixed minimum time required to establish contact with local cell phone tower and planes travel too fast and too high to allow reliable communication. Flight 93 created a clean hole too small for a jumbo jet in an Ohio field leaving no trace of the plane or any bodies. Etc.

I'm open to the idea that things are not exactly as they've been made out to appear by the government and media. However, I don't back the idea that there was a conspiracy. But I don't rule one out either. My opinion is that the average person has no way of knowing whether or not there was a conspiracy. If something is unknowable then there's not much point getting worked up about it.

I do support the questioning of what information we receive and researching yourself so that you are satisfied with whatever explanation you come up with.

The part of the video that I find very unsatisfactory is the hypothesis that the purpose of the conspiracy was money. There's mention of insider trading, buying of put options on airplane stocks, some large quantity of gold being held in the world trade center below ground (billions of dollars worth), and an insurance policy taken out on the WTC by its owner.

The problem I have with the hypothesis is that this seems like too trivial a reason to pull off such a sophisticated conspiracy. Many people would have to be involved, the highest levels of the military and government would have to play a role, and these people who would be involved are the people who are architects of the economy and the world financial system. Sure individuals could be interested in making billions, but the government and military will not do something like this for the sake of 1, 10, 100 or a 1000 billion dollars. There are non-lethal, non-destructive ways of wringing money out of the system.

The motivation for a conspiracy that I would nominate is the subject covered in the Hollywood movie Syriana - global rivalry for the lifeblood of modern, industrial civilization and the reality that modern, industrial civilization is the only option for now. A guaranteed presence in the Persian Gulf, development of sophisticated weapons and defenses, spy technology, and information processing, carte blanche for the government to carry out affairs as it sees fit. All perhaps preparation for a global game of musical chairs.

But if I think about it, I don't really buy that there's any conspiracy - yet.

I simply don't give the top brass enough credit. I suspect that while our system (and most others for that matter) selects the best liars (the best liars are generally not known to be good liars), the most opportunistic, the most calculating and power hungry, I can't imagine them having the critical mass of certainty of impending crisis, shared vision, organizational excellence, ability to cover-up, etc to really believe that what happened is something other then a fortunate windfall for those who would rule by jackboot.