The Japanese writing system has a long and deep history, tracing back to the scratching on Oracle Bones in ancient China. This depth of history thus carries a huge weight of etymology behind it. This etymology is not just frivolous either. The old forms of chinese are used in Chop Seals which are effectively signatures of legal documents.

The difficult thing with the etymology of a given Kanji is actually quite problematic. When Han'zi characters were imported to japan, they were (generally) imported as their "traditional" version. During the communist revolution in China, the government simplified a great number of characters. Thus, there are currently two versions of a given Chinese character. For example, the character for "see" is 見 in Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, but 见 in Simplified Chinese. To make it even more confusing, there are a few characters of exclusively Japanese origin (called Kokuji). Finally, the Japanese went through their own simplification process.

What this boils down to, is that if you are wanting to study the Etymology of a Kanji character, you might have a couple of places to look. The first step is to take a peak at this great Chinese etymology database put together by Richard Sears. You can feed it a simplified or traditional chinese character, and it will come back with results. The only time that it doesn't come up with any results, is when you try and input a kokuji, or even just a Traditional Chinese character that the Japanese simplified (if that is the case, you can search for the kanji you are looking for at the link I just provided).

On a completely different angle, the writing of Kanji has progressed in a different direction, which is to say, calligraphy. I'll be talking about that more in another post, but I thought I would mention 2 great calligraphic dictionaries I have found:

http://www.font.com.cn/fontzd/

http://www.9610.com/zidian/index.asp

Both dictionaries are on Mainland China, which means they are exclusively simplified Chinese. This means that if you want to look up a traditional chinese character, you need to find its simplified equivalent. This isn't too hard, because Thats where Richard Sears saves the day again. It provides a good amount of information on any Chinese character you feed it. Simplified or Traditional.

Even if you are not studying Japanese (or Chinese!) you should go have a look at these sites, some of them have quite beautiful imagery, and it it is quite interesting to see the etymology of a few different characters. If you need some example characters, you can use these (you'll just have to copy/paste them):

• Sun 日
• Moon 月
• Mountain 山
• Stream 川
• Tree 木
• Gold 金
• Soil 土

I just finished a remix of Nine Inch Nails "Dicipline". It took maybe a total of 8 hours from start to finish, which is an incredibly short time.

As it just so happens, Mr. Reznor has released his entire catalog under a Creative Commons license. This is pretty awesome for some pretty obvious reasons. On top of that, for select tracks, he has provided either the multitrack format, or the component pieces.

Enjoy: www.jonnay.net/music/AcidTechno/Nine-Inch-Nails-Dicipline-Jonnays-Infinite-Acid-Mix.mp3

As an early Christmas gift, I got my domain re-registered via Albert and Traci.

Thanks you guys. You rule!

Boy have I not blogged in ... FOREVER!

This will change.

I found this article via Architectures of Control from Adrian Short titled The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park which had a lot of interesting things to say about communities, curfews, and law and order. The real kicker is this paragraph:

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship.

Which basically sums it up. Which then refers to the title of my own blog entry. You can't have a functioning community (a group of businesses and residences) without a community (a group of people working, interacting and living together). At the same time, an online community has similar, but different problems from a property based community. You have people interacting and possibly even working together, but they are so far removed from each other that arguments and misunderstandings run rampant. See the Internet Fuckwad Theory

The piece of social-software that can successfully solve for that would be a killer app.

And you don't even need a stamp.

First, go here: http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook/

Then fill out the form. Copy the preview result and print that out. Finish the groovy webapp, then send off the hardcopy.

Seriously, it takes 10 minutes. It it accomplishes nothing, then you've only lost 600 seconds of your life, 1 sheet of paper and an envelope (not even a stamp!)

But what happens if it could accomplish something?

If only I had a few bales of money... it appears that The catbus is (was?) for sale.

Damn.