Idioms #1: 杀鸡给猴看

English, from its very beginning, has borrowed elements from other languages. 

One class of such elements is the 'idiom', 'proverb' or 'wise saying'.  A good example would be a quote from... Caesar I think... who said as he crossed a river and really committed himself to a battle: "ALEA IACTA EST", which transfers to English quite neatly as "The die is cast". 

Equivalent sayings in English for some foreign idioms are not always equivalent literally.  There's sometime a more popular way of expressing something which appeared first (cf. "founder effect" of biology but not quite the same) or have some other neat associations which don't exist in the other language (such as a pun).  However, there are some perfectly equivalent idioms.

This is the first in a series of entertaining (for me), but serious and practical translations of some idioms.  The main theme for this series is Expressing Concern. 

Format:
[idiom]
"[a decent existing equivalent idiom, or, taking a shot at one]".
"[less appropriate graphic translation]".
[literal but well-tuned and fleshed-out translation] Essentially, "[functionally substitutable explanation]"

杀鸡给猴看
"Public crucifixion".
"Crucifying a cat to warn the Christians".
Killing a chicken for the monkeys to see.  Essentially, "creating an example of".

指鹿为马
"The emperor's new clothes suit his taste".
Pointing at a deer and calling it a horse (knowingly).  [There's a historical story behind this.]  Essentially, "s/he's bullshitting and s/he knows we know it and have no choice but to take this shit".


无风不起浪
"There's no smoke without fire". (perfectly equivalent)
Without wind there's no wave generation.  Essentially, "rumours are sometimes true".

托裤子放屁 (... 多此一举)
" Bringing a gun to a sword-fight (... is nice but not necessary)".
"Foreplay (... in a whorehouse is nice but not necessary)."
Taking pants off to pass wind (... is one unnecessary step).  This is self-explanatory.

说曹操 (... 曹操就到)
"Speak of the devil (... here he is)." (perfectly equivalent)
Speak of 曹操, (曹操 arrives).  Essentially, "what a surprise (... seeing as how we were just talking about it)".

螳螂捕蝉 (... 黄雀在后)
"Rabbit-hunting (... in sniper territory)"
A praying mantis hunts a cicada (... while there's a yellow finch right behind it) .  Essentially, "hunting while being unaware of being hunted".

瓜田李下
"Practising magic in a dairy".
Looking for lost shoes in a melon patch, looking for a lost kite in a plum orchard.  Essentially, "being forced to be in a suspicious position while allegedly pursuing something else".



To Be Continued

Trademe auction #2: 2.5 kg sprouting potatoes

Other than the fact that they're sprouting, the potatoes are your usual edible multi-purpose supermarket potato. There are around 25 potatoes in the sack. Pick up would be from Auckland CBD, and it would be the wisest choice.

Since they are not at all green, they are quite edible, though the texture would probably approach that of yams. For what purpose would you buy a 2.5 kg sack of sprouting potatoes?

Here's some calculations. Assuming each of the 25 potatoes produces one potato plant and each plant produces 1 kg of potatoes (dependent on your soil conditions, with compost being the ideal soil), the yield after a year is 25kg. At 0.5 kg of potatoes per meal, that's enough for someone to have potatoes for dinner once a week for a whole year.

This operation can even be carried out on a patio. $2 10L buckets and compost are readily available and after drilling drainage holes in a bucket, one potato plant would grow quite happily. Tomatoes can even be grafted directly onto the potato to save even more floor area.

Personally from my past experience, I think for families with kids, it's more fun to dig for potatoes out of the soil, kind of like searching for pirate treasure, and have baked jacket potatoes afterwards. A small 1 x 10 metre stretch of lawn can easily be converted to garden space, and as mentioned before, tomatoes grafted on top.

Among my most treasured memories are of baking potatoes I dug up myself and self-caught brown and rainbow trout by wrapping them in tinfoil and burying them in the hot ashes of a bonfire. The trout was caught from the river just a couple hundred metres away, and the potatoes were growing wild as weeds in the surrounding field. The firewood was dead radiata pine used in the windbreaks on the edge of the field. Tinfoil and matches were more or less the only consumables that weren't supplied by the land. Make the most of our fair New Zealand, contribute to our economy and reduce foreign debt, by planting your backyard with productive crops like these potatoes!

Trademe auction #1: (Live) Daphnia carinata

Fresh, live food is widely regarded as being more nutritionally complete than synthetic feed. There's also pride in growing your own food to feed yourself and all your pets, and peace of mind in knowing what goes in it.

The auction is for a species of freshwater zooplankton native to New Zealand and many other places. Give it standard aquarium or pond water conditions, add a source of nutrients to support the growth of suspended microorganisms, and then you can support yourself (or your fish/axolotls/utricularia) with a perpetually-renewing source of food.

In truth all you need is one LIVE female individual to guarantee yourself a colony, however having an auction for just one daphnia seems a little unconventional. I'll stick with convention to keep conventional people happy; this auction is for between 20 and 100 daphnia (population will more than triple within a week). More can be added (up to 100 small ones per litre by courier) but will result in quicker asphyxiation during transit.

I once had a colony of Ceriodaphnia or Moina spp. which grew to an ideal size for small fish (~1mm max, c.f. ~4mm D. carinata). If you know of anyone culturing them or in a local water body I'd be glad to know.

Currently I'm co-culturing a cyclopoid copepod and a Physid snail with a pretty shell that does a great job keeping the sedentary algae down. The cyclops is around Moina size or smaller so is good for smaller egg-layer fry once they get past the infusoria stage. I can add a pair of cyclops or Physid snails to the daphnia bottle.

Original source was PNBHS biology department, before then a stock trough in the Manawatu region most likely. My NCEA Level 3 Biology internal some years back was a report on the response of these to different wavelengths of light.

To allow for the inter-semester break the next auction will be on the 9th of July. Good luck to those who have exams.

Just an aside, baby WCMMs do indeed look like neon tetras. It's quite entertaining to watch them stalk infusoria dots.

The Colour Blue

Are you blue?  Or are you red?  

Physicists have over the past four hundred years or so formulated a very convincing basis for our visual perception of colour being around the 400-700 nm wavelength range of electromagnetic waves.  What most folks call “blue” is typically around a 450-495 nm range, and what most folks call “red” is around the 620-740 nm range.  Note that the colour “blue” in ordinary parlance is a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a vague range of perceived concepts.  It is not, and I repeat not, a reflection of one unique absolutely special single wavelength number for “blue”.  Again I repeat, in ordinary parlance it is a blanket statement for the purposes of communicating a range of perceived concepts.

What’s your favourite musical note? 

Vibrations in the air (then in the ear) are audible in typically the 12 Hz to 20 kHz range.  Music theory nowadays labels the pitch of sounds with common names based on the first seven letters of the Roman alphabet.  The “A” above middle C is particularly special.  1955 marks the official date that 440 Hz was adopted as the official international standard for this particular “A”.  However, the common folks’ idea of this note is of a range around 440 Hz, and for the more tone-deaf folks, it’s quite a large range.  About this “A”, or the particular number 440, there’s nothing absolutely special about it.  Musical notes are again, convenient blanket statements for the purposes of communicating with other people a range of perceived concepts.

Are you a religious person believing in a “single thing”?

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define the scope of monotheistic religion to be a belief in a “single thing” which gives wise advice and asks that religious followers follow a set of rules.  This “single thing”, and here’s another contentious area to be contented, is typically accepted to be an omnipotent omniscient benevolent single thing.  Say if it were not an omnipotent omniscient benevolent single thing, it would be pretty chaotic for some folks, same as trying to divide by zero.  However, as all you calculus-loving maths and engineering folks know, dividing by zero without actually dividing by zero is a pretty damn useful thing to do for real-life calculations to solve some very special problems.  But for now, let’s get back to the “single” status and “thing” status of this “single thing”.  To understand this simply, I ask you a question about your existence that you should be able to answer quite easily:

Are you a “single thing”?

Let’s cut to the chase.  “Single thing” is a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a range of perceived concepts.  Physically, “you” consist of cells, the cells consist of molecules, the molecules consist of atoms (and so on and so forth), and these various components form a whole system by their interaction with each other and their surroundings.  Interactions between components known as cells in your brain are the basis of your conscious experience and your conscious and unconscious processing of the incoming sensory data from transducers which convert electromagnetic waves, mechanical waves, thermal gradients, the binding of molecules to cell receptors into electrical and chemical stimuli, and this processing of these stimuli is responsible for your perception of colour, sound, pressure, temperature, taste, smell of your surroundings.  “You” are an emergent behaviour of a system, existing due to the interactions between your components.  To say that you are a single stand-alone thing is merely a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a vague range of perceived concepts.  Physically you consist of more than one component, whose interactions with each other and the surroundings typically (there are exceptions) gives rise to a system which perceives itself as one individual “you”.

Then similarly, you might call the interacting behaviour of the components of your physical surroundings and yourself a “single thing” (system) which you name “the world”.   

Some people go one step further and assume (due to a variety of reasons) that there are also non-physical components acting as another “single thing” (system) which can not only perceive all the interactions going on between the physical components of our physical world (omniscience), but can also control the interactions between physical components and control the existence of physical components (omnipotence).  In addition, it happens to have the best interests of “the people” at its heart (benevolence).  It gives wise advice due to its omniscience and benevolence, and has a set of rules to follow as part of this wise advice.  If you follow it, it will omnipotently apply its benevolence and on rare cases it will guarantee “your” continued eternal existence.

About the continued eternal existence, I think that also sounds a bit too good to be true in many ways.  The only way I see it working out is with guaranteeing the continued eternal existence of some components of the system I perceive as “me” such as my values, my personality, my genes, by passing them on to others.  The physical components in their current configuration certainly will not exist unchanging.  But then that begs the question:

Are you the same person you were one moment ago?  If not, what aspects of you are continuous?

As you may have heard, you are what you eat.  The atoms which constitute the system known as “you” at one particular instance are often not the same atoms at another particular instance.  Today’s vegetarian salad could have been yesteryear’s T-rex coprolite.  Over time, if the interactions between components constituting the self-aware system “you” that you consider yourself do not depend on the internal detail of the components, consider yourself continuous.  If you value most dearly only such things as can be passed on to other people, and people continue to exist eternally, you may then consider not yourself, but your will eternal.

Do you strive for an eternal will?

By Andi Liu (1992-) of Palmerston North, New Zealand.  2012-10-08