gn0sis's New Writeups

Editor Log: December 2003 (idea)

2003-12-13T03:34:01Z

Why I'm Moving To Wikipedia

It took a lengthy server break to make me see it, but I've finally realized that Wikipedia is what E2 will never be.

Content, content, content. Wikipedia already has much, much more information than Everything2 and is evolving much more rapidly.
All content is free under the GNU Free Documentation License. No risk of it all being lost if E2 dies or decides to take its marbles and go home; there are already completely legal and completely separate copies floating about.
Lower barrier of entry. No need to craft 20 writeups from scratch acceptable by the esoteric criteria of E2, anybody can plunge in and fix a typo -- without even logging in!
No silly power structures. Everybody can edit everybody's writeups.
- Actually, there are admins, but they are a non-exclusive group (134 members as of this writing) and their powers are largely restricted to temporarily freezing pages subject to an

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Editor Log: November 2003 (idea)

2003-11-03T15:23:41Z

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Cem Uzan (person) by tolon
Tokyo (place) by eclip5e

C (idea)

2003-11-03T12:02:18Z

C Through Space and Time

The letter C is one strange duck. Historically, its precursor first popped up in the Phoenician alphabet, where it was used to represent the sound 'G'. This was then ported over to Greek, becoming the third letter in the Greek alphabet: alpha α, beta β, gamma γ, delta δ.

So far, so good... but then the Romans messed up. Initially, they used gamma for both the 'G' and 'K' sounds, but this was too confusing so they decided to split it up. Henceforth the letter C would always be read 'K', and a C with a little hook added to it -- today known as G -- would be read 'G'. Simple enough, although people ignorant of the finer points of Latin orthography still insist on ordering their Caesar salads as see-zer salads, instead of the original keh-sar. O tempora, o mores!

Then came the Dark Ages, and Latin was fragmented into dozens of dialects. In many, a phenomenon called…

Chinese currency (thing)

2003-10-24T08:25:58Z

Official Terms: 元角分

The official currency of the People's Republic of China is the renminbi (人民币), or "People's Money". This word can only be used in the abstract: "Do you have any renminbi?", for example. The British sterling is a similar concept (thanks JudyT).

The official base unit of this currency is the yuan (元), international currency code CNY. All prices in China are denoted in yuan, usually either as ￥5 or 5元; and yes, the ￥ symbol can confusingly also mean the Japanese yen. However, people tend to find the difference between the currency and its unit a little hard to grasp, and it's not uncommon to hear lao wai speak of something costing "5 renminbi" or "10 RMB". Strictly speaking, this doesn't make sense (how much is "5 Chinese money"?), but evidently some people still find "RMB" easier to say than "yuan".

The official subdivisions of the yuan are the…

Editor Log: October 2003 (idea)

2003-10-20T16:14:06Z

Mundian tho bach ke rahi
Ni thu hunay hunay hoeyi mutayar
Mundian tho bach ke rahi
Ni thu hunay hunay hoeyi mutayar
Mundian tho bach ke rahiiiii---oyyyy

Mundian tho bach ke, Panjabi MC

Hanzified

Kanjified

Mumon
Shinto
sufu
tofu (linked too, bad sensei!)

Praise be to Mozilla and Gjiten on Red Hat Linux 9.

Fujitsu (thing)

2003-10-20T15:31:42Z

There's an interesting meme floating about the Net these days: "Look up Fujitsu in a Japanese dictionary! You'll never buy a Fujitsu hard drive again!" And sure enough, if you punch fujitsu in romaji into WWWJDIC, you'll be rewarded with:

不実【ふじつ】 (adj-na,n) perfidiousness; faithlessness; inconstancy; insincerity; falsehood

Ouch. Unfortunately for the meme, the company's name is Fujitsû with a long U instead of a short one, a significant difference in Japanese. Now, I could just tell you that "Fujitsu" (富士通) is just short for Fuji Communications (富士通信) and be done with it... but it turns out there's an interesting story after all.

Shoguns and Disasters

Our story starts off in Japan's feudal age. Deep in the misty mountains of Toshigi to the north of Tokyo, the Tokugawa shogunate had…