Vomitoriums are the gates/exits of the colloseums. Vomit means mouth.

FYI: The chinese character for “exit” is the concatination of “out” and “mouth”. Notice how we have the same thing orally: execute, exibit, express, excommunicate all create “away/remove” images; whereas intrance, inhibit, impede, enchant all generate “toward/add” images.

Chinese characters are built using image building blocks, called radicals, to create words. Combine the radicals for person and tree to get rest/vacation/break. Combine big and sheep to get beautiful.

I would imagine sounds like “ck/x/cc” work as our atomic building blocks like radicals do in Japanese. Combine “in” and “glue” to get include (or maybe in and clue). Combine away/show and pressure to get “express”. Combine away/leave and pressure to get “oppress”. How about op/por/tune? Is this tun the same as in tunnel?

Unsurprisingly (given the attitudes of my students), people in Japan watch more TV than any other country. The five hours a day is more than half an hour more than the second place country, which the US holds with its 4:28 of daily TV viewing. This would make sense if Japanese are the most group oriented country in the world.

We as humans are becoming more of a collective entity. Individuals from each generation rely more and more on their peers than previous generations had. Television has accelerated and enabled this reliance because it can tell such a large number of minds what to think in such a short amount of time and with such little effort.

Thus it is hardly surprising that the country we Americans view as the most collective in the world, watch the most TV. But less we make any wrong conclusions, we should take the time to notice how widespread the phenomenon is. Japanese watch the most TV but are hardly unique in that regard. Americans sit behind their TV and get told what to think (or at least what to think about) for four and a half hours a day–90% of what Japanese do. Humans in every country watch at least 50% of what the Japanese do–2.5 hours daily. Think about that.

Japanese are far from the only ones heading towards a more collective structure. Everyone is headed in that direction. Japanese are merely unique in that they appear to be farther along than the rest of us. But the trend is clear. Our future societies will be more and more like ant society.

You can continue reading if you are unconvinced about this direction, its current progress or why TV enables it.
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Apparently the eye-glass and contact industry is feeling downward revenue pressure from more people getting eye surgery. They have therefore commissioned fashion experts to pimp glasses that fit through a nose-bridge piercing.

Just what, exactly, would you do with that piercing after you get eye surgery?

I have come to believe that computers are poorly designed from the ground up. Intel and AMD spend so much effort on things like multithreading when Apple stumbled across an amazing solution with AirTunes. Instead of bothering with all the issues of interrupts and timely instruction scheduling so that the sound happens uninterrupted, just make the computer a very expensive hub. Have the computer dump audio data to another processor (in this case my WAP) and let it figure out how to make uninterrupted sound with it.

With some changes (and overhead), we could make it easy to plug in a special device for each task. Create a pluggable port system like USB or firewire for processors. Need audio? Plug in an audio-processor. Need more base? Plug the audio-processor into the amplifier and plug the amplifier into the central unit. Apparently then there would be two classes of devices: devices that solved a problem and devices that modified the problem.

As such, the way we program would be changed. Instead of a bunch of dumb electronic bits flying around a billion times a second, you would have a bunch of dumb bits clumped into packets with meaningful problems attached to them. Components/Processors plugged into the system could decide for themselves whether they should solve the problem or let someone else do it. In other words, capitalism for processor networks. Components could bid on how eager/willing/able they are to perform various tasks based on the estimate of time required to solve it, current overload, etc. Create a stock market by making some in charge of delegating who is passed each problem and all of the sudden you have a smooth functioning computer system that is amazingly scalable and easy to upgrade.

I think this is also how software should be engineered. Feature number 8 for the Future Fejta OS ^_-p.
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