24 Feb 25 Monday Briefing
A year in a weekend
News Roundup
We headed into the weekend just past with the perfectly-legal sacking of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and woke up on Monday to Zelenskyy saying he would resign immediately if it meant Ukraine could be admitted to NATO, which is one of the most stupidly desperate things I’ve heard so far, and these are desperate times. Merz has to contend with Weidel trailing just 8 per cent behind his already conservative party, which seems to be a “how much right are we?” situation. All this while Pope Francis appears to be fighting for his mortal life.
Watch/Scroll
Hot, accurate, screamingly funny take on pickleball.
Another screamingly funny and historically accurate take on Elon Musk’s harem of baby mamas.
Quantum computing, in my lifetime? Looks like it.
Read
Is Sun Weidong the new Gavin Menzies? (Good luck convincing most Chinese people that their civilisation came from ancient Egypt.)
The US used to make chips on its own soil. Guess why it doesn’t any more.
Ponder
What book I’m reading next, described on its webpage:
While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese. In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese language knit the region together in a common intellectual enterprise that encompassed religion, philosophy, historiography, political theory, art, and literature. Literacy in Classical Chinese set the stage for the adaptation of Chinese characters into ways of writing non-Chinese languages like Vietnamese and Korean, which differ dramatically from Chinese in vocabularies and grammatical structures.
Because of its unique status in the modern world, myths and misunderstandings about Chinese characters abound. Where does this writing system, so different in form and function from alphabetic writing, come from? How does it really work? How did it come to be used to write non-Chinese languages? And why has it proven so resilient? By exploring the spread and adaptation of the script across two millennia and thousands of miles,
Chinese Characters across Asia addresses these questions and provides insights into human cognition and culture. Written in an approachable style and meant for readers with no prior knowledge of Chinese script or Asian languages, it presents a fascinating story that challenges assumptions about speech and writing.