The Normans - A Timeline

+heroes of nusantara: multatuli

YES, I, Multatuli, “who have suffered much,”—I take the pen. I do not make any excuses for the form of my book,—that form was thought proper to obtain my object…. I will be read! Yes, I will be read. I will be read by statesmen who are obliged to pay attention to the signs of the times; by men of letters, who must also look into the book of which so many bad things are said; by merchants, who have an interest in the coffee auctions; by lady’s-maids, who read me for a few farthings; by governors-general in retirement; by ministers who have something to do; by the lackeys of these Excellencies; by mutes, who, more majorum, will say that I attack God Almighty, when I attack only the god which they made according to their own image; by the members of the representative chambers, who must know what happens in the extensive possessions over the sea which belong to Holland….  

Ay, I shall be read!

Eduard Douwes Dekker was born in Amsterdam, March 2nd 1820. His father was a ship’s captain and intended for his son to have a career in trade. This humdrum prospect disgusted Douwes Dekker and in 1838 he obtained a post as a civil servant on the island of Java. During the period between 1848 and 1851 Douwes Dekker eventually rose to serve as assistant resident in various regencies in the Indonesian archipelago including Natal, North Sumatra, Manado in Sulawesi and Ambon in the Moluccas. In 1857 he was transferred to Lebak, in the Bantam residency of Java (now Banten province). By this time, however, all the secrets of Dutch administration were known to him, and he had begun to openly protest about the abuses of the colonial system. Consequently, he was threatened with dismissal from his office for his openness of speech. Douwes Dekker resigned his appointment and returned to the Netherlands.

He was determined to expose in detail the scandals he had witnessed, and he began to do so in newspaper articles and pamphlets. Little notice, however, was taken of his protestations until, in 1860, he published his novel Max Havelaar under the pseudonym of Multatuli. Douwes Dekker’s new pseudonym, which is derived from Latin, means, “I have suffered much”, or, more literally “I have borne much” referring to himself, as well as, it is thought, to the victims of the injustices he saw. An attempt was made to suppress the inflammatory book, but in vain; it was read all over Europe. Apologists for colonialism accused Douwes Dekker’s horrific depictions of being exaggerated.

[ his statue in amsterdam ]

Although it was translated into English in 1868, the text wasn’t available in the author’s home country until over a century later in 1972. Collectively, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar has been translated into 34 different languages worldwide since its initial publication. Credited as the stirring initiation of the nationalist movement responsible for the termination of Dutch colonization of Indonesia following World War II, Max Havelaar’s legacy is not confined to literary accomplishment, but can be considered a work of great political success and inspired social liberation. Max Havelaar’s influence on the national movement ultimately culminated in the passionate command to end decolonization worldwide. The story of Max Havelaar illuminates the inhumane and political injustices brutally imposed upon the native peoples of the region.

Sigmund Freud listed Multatuli as one of his favorite writers. Multatuli’s brother, Jan Douwes Dekker, was the grandfather of Ernest Douwes Dekker (also known as Danudirja Setiabudi, a National Hero of Indonesia). There is a museum for him in Amsterdam. Multatuli is also known as the person who coined the term emerald of equator, a poetic nickname of Indonesia.

This book is an introduction….  I shall increase in strength and sharpness of weapons, according as it may be necessary.    Heaven grant that it may not be necessary!…    No, it will not be necessary! For it is to thee I dedicate my book: WILLIAM THE THIRD, King, Grand Duke, Prince,… more than Prince, Grand Duke, and King,… EMPEROR of the magnificent empire of INSULIND, which winds about the equator like a garland of emeralds!…    I ask THEE if it be thine IMPERIAL will that the Havelaars should be bespattered with the mud of Slymerings and Drystubbles; and that thy more than thirty millions of SUBJECTS far away should be ill treated and should suffer extortion in THY name!

source: wikipedia; culture trip

quotes from bartleby, excerpt of max havelaar

further reading: paper on multatuli

Look! A scientist who says more scrutiny is needed! Yea!

AND - “Don’t try this at home!”

Cadaver study casts doubts on how zapping brain may boost mood, relieve pain

Earlier this month, György Buzsáki of New York University (NYU) in New York City showed a slide that sent a murmur through an audience in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Midtown Hilton during the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. It wasn’t just the grisly image of a human cadaver with more than 200 electrodes inserted into its brain that set people whispering; it was what those electrodes detected—or rather, what they failed to detect.

When Buzsáki and his colleague, Antal Berényi, of the University of Szeged in Hungary, mimicked an increasingly popular form of brain stimulation by applying alternating electrical current to the outside of the cadaver’s skull, the electrodes inside registered little. Hardly any current entered the brain. On closer study, the pair discovered that up to 90% of the current had been redirected by the skin covering the skull, which acted as a “shunt,” Buzsáki said.

The new, unpublished cadaver data make dramatic effects on neurons unlikely, Buzsáki says. Most tDCS and tACS devices deliver about 1 to 2 milliamps of current. Yet based on measurements from electrodes inside multiple cadavers, Buzsaki calculated that at least 4 milliamps—roughly equivalent to the discharge of a stun gun—would be necessary to stimulate the firing of living neurons inside the skull. Buzsáki notes he got dizzy when he tried 5 milliamps on his own scalp. “It was alarming,” he says, warning people not to try such intense stimulation at home.

Buzsáki expects a living person’s skin would shunt even more current away from the brain because it is better hydrated than a cadaver’s scalp. He agrees, however, that low levels of stimulation may have subtle effects on the brain that fall short of triggering neurons to fire. Electrical stimulation might also affect glia, brain cells that provide neurons with nutrients, oxygen, and protection from pathogens, and also can influence the brain’s electrical activity. “Further questions should be asked” about whether 1- to 2-milliamp currents affect those cells, he says.

Buzsáki, who still hopes to use such techniques to enhance memory, is more restrained than some critics. The tDCS field is “a sea of bullshit and bad science—and I say that as someone who has contributed some of the papers that have put gas in the tDCS tank,” says neuroscientist Vincent Walsh of University College London. “It really needs to be put under scrutiny like this.”

Frogs and toads in Scotland

In 1992, a man named Wu Anai, near a Chinese village in Longyou County, based on a hunch, began to pump water out of a pond in his village. Anai believed the pond was not natural, nor was it infinitely deep as the local lore went, and he decided to prove it. He convinced some of his villagers and together they bought a water pump and began to siphon water out of the pond. After 17 days of pumping, the water level fell enough to reveal the flooded entrance to an ancient, man-made cave!

The cave has twenty-four rooms. There are pillars, staircases, and high ceilings over 30 meters (98 ft!) up. The work was done by humans, we know, because they left visible chisel marks in uniform bands of parallel groves. With over 30,000 square meters of space, all meticulously chiseled, this would have been a huge undertaking. Even if people were simply enlarging caves which already existed, it would still have required a lot of manpower working in a coordinated system for a long period of time.

Since the project would have been so large, it seems amazing that no record of it exists in China’s extensive written history. But there is not a word. Based on the cave alone, it is estimated to have been completed around 200 BCE, near the Qin Dynasty or Han Dynasties.

Dau lun o weithwyr G P Lloyd & Co, Dumballs Rd, Caerdydd, gwneuthurwyr coesau pren i offer, c. 1930, ond beth yw'r gwahaniaeth rhwng y ddau?

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Two photos of workers at G P Lloyd & Co, Dumballs Road, Cardiff, manufacturers of wooden tool handles, c. 1930. Can you spot the difference?

From the archives at St Fagans National Museum of History.

The Fibonacci sequence can help you quickly convert between miles and kilometers

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where every new number is the sum of the two previous ones in the series.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The next number would be 13 + 21 = 34.

Here’s the thing: 5 mi = 8 km. 8 mi = 13 km. 13 mi = 21 km, and so on.

Edit: You can also do this with multiples of these numbers (e.g. 5*10 = 8*10, 50 mi = 80 km). If you’ve got an odd number that doesn’t fit in the sequence, you can also just round to the nearest Fibonacci number and compensate for this in the answer. E.g. 70 mi ≈ 80 mi. 80 mi = 130 km. Subtract a small value like 15 km to compensate for the rounding, and the end result is 115 km.

This works because the Fibonacci sequence increases following the golden ratio (1:1.618). The ratio between miles and km is 1:1.609, or very, very close to the golden ratio. Hence, the Fibonacci sequence provides very good approximations when converting between km and miles.

Oval Eggs

The word egg was a borrowing from Old Norse egg, replacing the native word ey (plural eyren) from Old English ǣġ, plural ǣġru.  Like “children” and “kine” (obsolete plural of cow), the plural ending -en was added redundantly to the plural form in Middle English.  As with most borrowings from Old Norse, this showed up first in northern dialects of English, and gradually moved southwards, so that for a while, ey and egg were used in different parts of England.

In 1490, when William Caxton printed the first English-language books, he wrote a prologue to his publication of Eneydos (Aeneid in contemporary English) in which he discussed the problems of choosing a dialect to publish in, due to the wide variety of English dialects that existed at the time.  This word was a specific example he gave.  He told a story about some merchants from London travelling down the Thames and stopping in a village in Kent 

And one of theym… cam in to an hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys, and the goode wyf answerde that she could speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a-nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.

The merchant in this story was only familiar with the word egg, while the woman only knew ey, and the confusion was only resolved by someone who knew both words.  Indeed, the woman in the story was so confused by this unfamiliar word egg that she assumed it must be a French word!  The word “meat” (or “mete” as Caxton spelled it) was a generic word for “food” at the time.

The word ey may also survive in the term Cockney, thought to derive from the Middle English cocken ey (”cock’s egg”), a term given to a small misshapen egg, and applied by rural people to townspeople

Both egg and ey derived from the same Proto-Germanic root, *ajją, which apparently had a variant *ajjaz in West Germanic.  This Proto-Germanic form in turn derived from Proto-Indo-European *h2ōwyóm.  In Latin, this root became ōvum, from which the adjective ōvalis meaning “egg-shaped”, was derived.  Ōvum itself was borrowed into English in the biological sense of the larger gamete in animals, while ōvalis is the source of oval.

The PIE root is generally though to derive from the root *h2éwis, “bird”, which is the source of Latin avis “bird”, source of English terms such as aviation.  This word may also be related to *h2ówis “sheep”, which survived in English as ewe.  One theory is that they were both derived from a root meaning something like “to dress”, “to clothe”, with bird meaning “one who is clothed [in feathers]” and sheep meaning “one who clothes [by producing wool]”.

Types of mooncakes

Right now(is festival for chinese singaporeans) is the mid-autumn festival. According to the ancient Chinese legend, the story of Chang Er, the wife of a merciless king who downed the elixir of immortality he had intended to drink, to save her people from his tyrannical rule.The tale goes that she ascended to the moon after that, and has been worshipped by the Chinese as a Moon Goddess ever since. 

Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival. In singapore, we have main five different chinese dialect group(hokkien,teochew,hakka,cantonese,hainanese) so of course, there are five different types of mooncakes.

CANTONESE MOOKCAKE

This is the most common style of mooncakes sold by bakeries and hotels. The round pastry, which is about 10cm in diameter and about 4cm thick, comes from south China’s Guangdong province and is also eaten in Hong Kong and Macau. The traditional mooncake is filled with lotus seed or red bean paste with egg yolks inside. 

However, there are the modern snowskin mooncakes which contains anything from durian to champagne. (below are champagne mooncakes)

HOKKIEN MOONCAKE

They were known as Scholar Cakes in the past and given to those taking the Imperial Examination to fill junior and senior administrative positions in the Imperial Court. The filling usually comprises winter melon, tangerine peel and melon seeds. Sesame seeds are sprinkled on the white pastry to make it fragrant.

HAINANESE MOONCAKE

Hainanese ones are filled with dried fruit such as tangerine peel as well as sesame seeds and melon seeds. It has two verision with a salty and pepper version. The.The slightly flaky skin is made with pork lard and salt. According to a blog, they are actually only found in singapore as the story goes that the hainanese community in singapore was very poor and could not afford the normal mooncakes sold so they made their own type of mooncake.

TEOCHEW MOONCAKE

Yam-filled mooncakes with a flaky crust are the most common Teochew mooncakes sold in Singapore. Another type is la gao, which is a steamed black sesame cake. It comes plain or with green bean paste or yam filling. There is also another type of Teochew mooncake, a white disc that looks like a big biscuit and is filled with tangerine peel and sugar, flavoured with five-spice powder and topped with sesame seeds.

HAKKA MOONCAKE

This is actually uncommon and almost unheard of in singapore but moon cakes in Hakka regions of china, apart from common moon cakes, have “five-kernel moon cakes” and a kind of round cake made with glutinous rice flour and sugar, compressed into different size. (I can’t find an exact picture of the hakka mooncake so) 

Everyday Phenomena: The Maillard Reaction

At first glance, steak, French fries, bread, milk caramel, and soy sauce don’t have very many similarities. However, the preparation of these foods all have one thing in common: browning that occurs via the Maillard (my-YAR) reaction.

The Maillard reaction was first discovered in 1912 by Louis-Camille Maillard, and refers to a long chain of reactions that ultimately leads to browning of food. This chain typically begins with the condensation of an amine (often the amino acid lysine) with a reducing sugar (containing an aldehyde); one example of this Amadori rearrangement is shown above with lysine and glucose.

This Amadori product can react in a variety of different ways, including dehydration and deamination to produce a diverse array of molecules that give browned food a distinctive flavor; a few of these compounds are shown above. At the end of the sequence of reactions that occur during browning is a class of polymeric compounds known as melanoidins, which lend a brown color to the food.

Below about 140°C (280°F), the Maillard reaction does not proceed at an appreciable rate, although alkaline conditions (such as the lye used to make pretzels) can accelerate the process. Without this reaction, many foods we enjoy now wouldn’t be nearly as tasty!

Further Reading: Hodge, J. E., J. Agric. Food Chem. 1953, 1 (15), 928-943 (Full text)

Don’t play, play - Singlish is studied around the globe

Blogger Wendy Cheng’s Web video series Xiaxue’s Guide To Life and Jack Neo’s Ah Boys To Men film franchise are well-known shows among Singaporeans. For one thing, they are filled with colloquial terms, local references and copious doses of Singlish terms such as “lah” and “lor”.

But they are not merely for entertainment. In recent years, such shows have found a place in universities around the world, where linguists draw on dialogues used in these local productions to introduce to undergraduates and postgraduate students how Singlish has become a unique variety of the English language.

This comes even as concerns have been raised over how Singlish could impede the use of standard English here.

From Italy and Germany to Japan, at least seven universities around the world have used Singlish as a case study in linguistics courses over the past decade. This is on top of more than 40 academics outside of Singapore - some of whom were previously based here - who have written books or papers on Singlish as part of their research.