November 21 2009 — you mean the media distort the truth?
115 years ago today, during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese attacked) a Chinese coastal city in Manchuria.
While most correspondents [...] described a wide scale and cold-blooded massacre, Amédée Baillot de Guerville alleged in the pages of the New York Times that no such massacre had occurred. The dichotomy of the accounts is illustrative not simply of how American rivalries to sell newspapers boiled over into reporting, but of divergent Western views of the period regarding Japan. While some idealized Japan as the "Civilizer of Asia" or "Britain of the East", others saw in her the "Yellow Peril" that threatened to overrun Asia. The fact that at the time of the war Japan was in the process of renegotiating the unequal treaties forced upon her by Western powers in the 1850s and 1860s lent further impetus to attempts to both elevate and denigrate her in the foreign press.
The more I learn about relations between the West and Asian countries from the 19th and early 20th century, the less proud I feel for us in the West.
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Today we had the Universe's first Baltic Perl Workshop. I held a talk about my sekkrit project, a Perl 6 port of PGE, now no longer sekkrit. There's even source code online, that's how sekkrit it ain't anymore!
jnthn++ held two talks, one 40-minute one, which was possibly the most compact-yet-accessible introduction to Perl 6 features I've ever experienced, plus a hilarious lightning talk about LolSQL. I think I took a little something away from all the other speakers too, which is very good considering the scale of the event (20-ish attendees). We followed up with socialising at a nearby restaurant, with good food and pleasant nerdy dinner topics.
I think my public service to Perl 6 today will have to stop at giving that talk and reporting on BPW, because I'm frankly a bit worn out by only sleeping for two hours between slidescrafting sessions.
Warm greetings from a cozy, semi-hibernated Riga. The weather is Novemberish; wish you were here.