That said, far and away most of my idle internet cycles have been ploughed into Quora lately (my profile being here).

Luckily so far the only 2:30 games I’ve been really anxious to see have fallen on days where I didn’t have work the next day, and so, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a really entertaining experience to be in a bar at 3 in the morning surrounded by equally enthused people chanting USA. It’s even more fun, I think, when the other half of the bar is English and has much more creative cheers only to get drowned out by an even louder round of U!S!A! Thankfully, the experience was a pretty fun feel rather than one of unveiled hostility or contempt. I was standing next to this Brit and he had the good humor to answer some of my rooted-in-ignorance questions (mostly about the lineups of both teams since I really don’t know anything).

I’ve started reading The Goal Post since I can’t be bothered to go out and find commentary myself, I’m relying on their “Best of AM/PM” digests to keep me somewhat informed. So far so good, I guess.

GOOO USA! (ps thx Green)

As such we’ve chatted about it a bit as I’ve played around with it. I am definitely a subvocalizer and so presumably that is limiting my reading speed in a major way. I read something like 500-700 wpm. This is about as fast as a friend of mine here in China reads English as her second language. I guess I pause less to look up words I don’t know but the notion of reading as fast in Chinese as I do in English seems impossible enough as it is. Her Chinese reading speed is probably faster than her English by a significant factor too.

When I asked if she subvocalizes, I first had to explain what I meant by that, and when I felt like I had succeeded, the answer was a clear no. I asked a few guys at work too (those adjacent to my desk, basically) and after struggling to explain to them as well, the answer was again mostly “no” (that or “I don’t understand”.

The sample size is obviously too small but I wonder if most Chinese readers do not subvocalize what is it about Chinese education or culture or ideographs or whatever that causes them not to develop the habit as I have for reading?

I don’t mean that the songs sound exactly the same, but only that maybe the same sequences of notes are used.

The whole thing reminded me of a Gladwell article I recently read, Something Borrowed, about plagiarism.

It is called Strictly Game and is apparently the single off of some new album. I think my sister told me about this band, Harlem Shakes (blocked in China? why?), before but I never got around to listening to anything before today.

When I have the time or inclination I’ll come back to writing stuff here, I always do.

The article talks about how as people use technology to store information such as phone numbers and the like more and more, they are getting worse and worse at remembering them.

This strikes me as a pretty obvious thing to happen, but apparently, given the response to the article I saw, it’s getting interpreted and twisted around to imply that by not memorizing phone numbers and birthdays, brains are atrophying because if we’re not using that part of our brain for remembering that minutia, we’re not using it at all.

Much of it seemed like a huge overreaction to not being able to remember a birth date (who cares, seriously?). I was reassured that the whole world isn’t crazy, though, in reading the comments threads where there is a variety of different people explaining that by not filling one’s head with that junk, we can instead spend our time thinking and remembering other more useful things. I’m confident that if I suddenly found myself in a situation where I didn’t have the same access to technology that I have now, I’d still be just as capable of memorizing and recalling things, they’d just be different things.

As for the notion of an outboard brain, I think it’s a neat idea. A quote from the Wired article:

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I’m using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I’ve never seen it, but in 10 seconds I’ll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.

Having read that, I went looking for the likely response from some other blogs I read occasionally, and as expected found one or two. From there, I saw linked Thomas Friedman’s Generation Q column.

Given how late seem to be on these, (3, 4 days? My, how quick things have become), I don’t think I’ve got a lot to add to the posts and comments from above and from here, which I saw in the same post I saw Generation Q.

I would like to add that I am quite tired of the myriad labels for this generation I feel like I keep hearing. It seems tired and old to characterize this cohort as generation whatever, but still people do it. Generation this, generation that, blah blah blah.

I guess I am a one such recent graduate who is in the midst of my would-be odyssey years. I guess the column does fit with my own experience. I too do not really know what to make of these pronouncements though.

I’m less sure of what to make of the Generation Q article. Mr. Friedman calls for some sort of more… active demonstration of the pursuit of what’s important.

I don’t really get it. What kind of action does he expect students to take, and more importantly, what kind of response is he hoping to get? I’ve been quite apathetic myself, I can’t deny that. One excuse I can think of is that I’ve sort of given up. Having never really been witness to any sort of profound demonstration and action as a result, I just don’t bother. Instead I’m in China and expecting them to steal the thunder on the world stage sometime soon, and rather than be stuck in an ungraceful transition to number 2 in the US, I’ll be here.