I’ve noticed on recent trips outside London that being a “Londoner” tends to make you a bit of a snob towards the rest of the UK. A few weeks ago I visited a mid-sized town approximately 1.5 hours north of London. Upon arrival at the tiny railway station there could be seen a group of around 10 middle-aged men all looking rather dishevelled and bored. OK, I thought, they must be waiting for the next train out of this middle-of-nowhere hole. Two hours later when I returned to take the train back to London I was surprised to see that they were still there - upon closer inspection I noticed they were all carrying small notepads and some had cameras - this could only mean one thing: Trainspotters, otherwise known as Anoraks (persons with unimaginative/dull hobbies). What brings people to spend their free time watching trains and record useless trivia about them I will never know but unfortunately this sort of activity only reinforces the idea that there isn’t much life outside the capital (even though this isn’t really true… with a few exceptions)!
In Japan they have a word for similar sorts of behaviour: Otaku - a term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly in anime and manga, but can also refer to any fan of, or specialisation in any particular theme, topic, or hobby. The author William Gibson defined Otaku as “pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit” which is an interesting take on the way people collect data as opposed to objects in the information age. There are of course different extremes to which this can be taken and I guess we all are collectors to an extent…
I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow but will be back later next week and will hopefully have a bit more time over the festive season to post more frequently
If you have international roaming on your phone enabled (most people do) you should be able to send SMS text messages to people abroad, right? Not if you’re with O2 it turns out.
Having switched to O2 at the beginning of the month, because they’ll be the sole iPhone carrier in the UK, I found out to my great annoyance this week that you can’t SMS people in South Korea and visa versa… if you’re on O2 anyway (Orange works fine). Several missed text messages later, which mysteriously vanished into a black hole somewhere, I called and emailed customer services who eventually came back with this:
“Thanks for emailing us about not being able to send text messages to a South Korean mobile number. I understand it’s important for you to send text messages to your friends in South Korea. We don’t have an agreement with SK Telecom, so we can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to send text messages to any mobile numbers of this network”
What?!!! “Can’t guarantee” - it simply doesn’t work!
On their website O2 boldly proclaim “our international coverage is unsurpassed” - clearly not if they don’t have an agreement with the biggest provider in South Korea, the most digitally connected country on the planet. This is a pretty annoying state of affairs and I can only imagine how many other gaping holes there are in their international coverage.
Came across these cool infographic cultural comparisons from Chinese-born German designer Yang Liu. Depicted are some typical East versus West cultural differences, some possibly a little stereotypical, but nevertheless very true!
Here’s a small selection (pictures from the actual exhibition here):
Weekend Street Scene
Shower Time
Queuing
In many ways German and Chinese culture are about as far apart as you could probably get and for me that’s a large part of the attraction of Asia from a Western perspective. It’s about as close as you can get to visiting an alien planet but sad to say that these differences are diminishing by the day. Pseudo-American culture is engulfing all corners of the globe via the upwardly mobile youth - ask any young person in Asia what their favourite TV show is and a large proportion will probably reply with an American drama or sitcom.
Funnily enough the respective governments have noticed this phenomenon and in some countries have gone out of their way to cleanse the TV networks of American exports but this has done little to diminish peoples appetites who have simply gone elsewhere to consume - via the internet and pirate DVD’s.
The homogenisation of the world through globalisation seems to be somewhat inevitable but I can’t help but wondering that when we look back in 50 years time at the desertified wastelands of the 21st century we’ll be known as both environmental and cultural vandals by our children…
I hate to sound like a broken record but this is getting ridiculous - in further efforts to “create a harmonious and prosperous society” China has begun to block RSS feeds in addition to their other draconian internet censorship measures [via]. From the communist party’s perspective this makes perfect sense as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to stay up to date with the latest news and up till now has flown under the radar.
At the beginning of the year you could read and subscribe to my blog in China with no problems at all. Now both images and feeds are blocked. I wonder how long before the whole thing’s out-of-bounds? It really makes me mad to see the internet being abused like this, after all, its founding principles were to create a platform for free information exchange without boarders or controls.
Along with blocking other major sites like Wikipedia, BBC News, & Flickr this just marks another blow to the governments credibility, especially in the run-up to the Olympics.
How about a nice propaganda video to round it all off:
United States Population: 298,444,215
Chinese Womens’ Army: 324,701,244
Check out my post here about how to get around the “Great Firewall of China”.
Why is it that the Japanese have had bullet trains (Shinkansen) for decades which can travel at over 300 km/h (186 mph) and experimental Maglev trains which have set a world record of 581 km/h (361 mph) while here in Britain our ageing trains rarely reach 130 km/h (80 mph)… are overpriced… unreliable… and overcrowded… you get my point!
Considering we invented the railways it’s a pretty depressing situation. Sometimes I wonder if we just gave up after the Industrial Revolution and decided to leave it to the rest of the world to invent the future!
This is how it should be done!
Interestingly a group called UK Ultraspeed are proposing a network of high speed Maglev trains based on the German Transrapid technology, first used in Shanghai, which would link the major cities of Britain at speeds up to 500 km/h (311mph). Sadly their website is a rather amateur affair which doesn’t add much credibility to their cause, but all the same we painfully need some like this to bring our rail infrastructure into the 21st century.
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