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Why are Norwegians so cold and unapproachable?
Positive Politeness vs Negative Politeness.
What say you Wikipedia?
- Negative politeness: Making a request less infringing, such as “If you don’t mind…” or “If it isn’t too much trouble…”; respects a person’s right to act freely. In other words, deference. There is a greater use of indirect speech acts.
- Positive politeness: Seeks to establish a positive relationship between parties; respects a person’s need to be liked and understood.
Negative politeness, which is the norm in Northern Europe, is all about respecting people’s space—literally and figuratively. Which is why Southern Europeans think they’re a bunch of emotionless drones.
Positive politeness, which is the norm in Southern Europe, is all about eliminating space between people—literally and figuratively. Which is why Northern Europeans think they’re a bunch of obnoxious psychos.
What is the scariest thing about living in Australia?
That we are still, 52 years after the book was published, The Lucky Country. Which is meant to be a bad thing: prospering through luck, rather than competent planning.
The original indictment the author intended was that the luck was inertia in following British habits—Australia Forrest Gump’d it into prosperity. The popular understanding is that he meant natural resources. (The idiot popular understanding is that he meant “luck” as a compliment.)
The most appalling excesses of Britishist inertia have been curbed, Tony Abbott notwithstanding. But the popular understanding remains valid. We had a chance to become Norway with a nice future fund, and we blew it.
The scariest thing about living in Australia is its future.
Europeans: would you feel emotionally disappointed if the UK left the EU?
Just to chime in with Achilleas Vortselas’ answer: I’m not sure Brits know how big a deal it has been for Greeks to embrace a European identity. Or Germans or Spaniards or Poles, but it was a seismic shift for Greeks.
Because of that investment, Achilleas is spot on: continental Europeans will feel massively betrayed. Not just because of blocking the free movement of Europeans—but because, even now, they remain invested in a European identity, and they see Brits that aren’t.
I’ll add an unasked-for perspective: Australians’. Australia in its postwar stupor assumed it was still part of the Empire long after there was no Εmpire. Britain joining the EU was a massive shock to Australia, who until then assumed the UK would always trade with the Empire first. It was part of the requisite shock to get Australia untethered from its British identity.
Australians won’t remember the shock now. And politically and culturally, the Anglosphere is real—more real for its members (obviously) than the European Union is.
But economically, the “mother country” can get stuffed. The UK made its decision to turn to its own neighbourhood for trade; we have too. To the extent that we don’t want to be too vociferously allied to the US, for fear of upsetting China. And a Brexited Britain should not expect to swap its European partners with Commonwealth partners in commerce. That ship sailed long ago.
That too is an emotional argument.
What do you know about Finland?
Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours.
After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.”
The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!”
Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as we call it in my country, an arsehole) before the Revolution at a dinner, and a Finnish diplomat eventually broke down in tears and yelled like a wounded walrus, in broken Russian, Много! “Too much.” I always found that scene very poignant.
Best education system in the world, even if Sam Seaborn says so: they pay their teachers gajillions, and even respect them.
They reinvented themselves from a dependency on forests to a high tech hub. Nokia, rest in peace.
I had a cousin work for Nokia a while back. There was no point ringing central office in Helsinki in July: everyone was south for the holidays.
Uralic language. Long agglutinated words. Gemination, which means the language sounds a bit like Dothraki.
Swedish minority, including Sibelius and Linus. And that kickarse general dude, who recorded Hitler.
Lordi, Santa Claus impersonators. Lakes.
Got out of the Russian Empire just in time. Had to be careful with how they handled their Eastern neighbour. Gave the Red Army what for.
They sneer at Greece these days, but then again, all of Northern Europe does.
How’d I do?
What do Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland think of each other?
Answering as a Greek.
The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν):
The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Swedes do not adore the Danes and the Norwegians, and the Norwegians do not adore the Danes and the Swedes.
The Swedes will not forgive the Danes for Sweden once being their colony. The Danes will not forgive the Swedes for Sweden no longer being their colony.
The Norwegians don’t like the Danes because they beat them in soccer. The Danes don’t like the Norwegians because they have a lot of mountains. The Danes and the Norwegians don’t like the Swedes because they have a lot of money.
[…]
When a car and a bicycle cross paths, the car goes back. When a car and a bicycle cross paths with a dog, the car and bicycle go back. The dog is a sacred animal in Denmark.
In general all animals are sacred in Denmark, so long as their blood is not contaminated with Swedish or Norwegian blood.
[…]
The Danish national inferiority complex is that they have no mountains. Their tallest mount is the Mountain of Heaven in Jutland, which is 157 m tall. Danes say proudly, “It’s a wonderful view from there”.
Norwegians, who have a surfeit of tall mountains, usually reply: “Of course it’s a wonderful view. So long as you stand on a chair.”
People who spent a long time out of their country, what was your biggest surprise when you came back?
Jocular answer:
When I was spending three years in the wilds of Orange County, US, I was hankering for the culinary variety of Old Melbourne Town. I kept telling anyone who would listen (and that wasn’t many) about how when I’d go back, eat at my favourite Malay-Chinese restaurant on Lygon St, and swim on a sea of latte.
When I got back after three years, I headed straight to the now sadly defunct Nyonya’s, had a satifsying noodle dish, and topped it off with my then favourite dessert of lychees and vanilla ice cream.
My biggest surprise when I came back: how god-awful Australian ice cream is.
(2001, it’s gotten better since.)
Somewhat more serious answer:
After six months in Greece: how standoffish and undemonstrative Australians are. I was actually surprised my thesis supervisor didn’t hug me to welcome me back.
More generally: reverse culture shock. It makes sense that the foreign culture is exotic. It doesn’t make sense when you’re alienated from your home culture.
Which is the most peaceful civilisation that ever existed?
The warlike Māori arrived in New Zealand in the 12th century. Around the 16th century, some Māori left and settled in the Chatham Islands. That offshoot is known as the Moriori people.
The Chatham Islands are not New Zealand. They are small, and cold, and you can’t grow the crops you are used to as Polynesians. With limited resources, you could continue to practice tribal warfare and/or one-upmanship, like the Easter Islanders did, and end up with an ecological disaster and mass starvation. Or, you could adjust to your new circumstances.
And the most important adjustment the Moriori made was when their chief Nunuku-whenua, quite early on, decided they should become pacifists. Their situation simply did not allow the kinds of protracted feuds and tribal warfare that they could afford back in New Zealand. Disputes were settled by duels, and the duel was over at the first sign of blood. Nunuku’s Law was that the Moriori shall not kill, shall not wage war, and shall not practice cannibalism.
So, back in New Zealand, the warlike Māori continued to be warlike Māori. When the Europeans came to town, the northernmost warlike Māori got guns. Which they turned on the next tribe south. When the next tribe south got guns, their northern neighbours stopped massacring them; and benefitting from the new balance of terror, the southern tribe turned their new guns on the third tribe south. This continued on all the way down the North Island, until a raiding party went across to the South Island. With guns.
The current Māori population of the South Island is not very large.
About the same time that North Island Māori with guns started killing South Island Māori, some displaced North Island Māori with guns hijacked a whaling ship, and hitched a ride to the Chatham Islands. They then proceeded to eat a seventh of the Moriori, and enslave the rest. They forbade them from intermarrying with each other, and from speaking their own language. Thirty years later, the Moriori were down to a tenth of their pre-invasion numbers.
And here’s the thing: when this was going down, some Moriori begged their elders to let them fight back.
A hui or council of Moriori elders was convened at the settlement called Te Awapatiki. Despite knowing of the Māori predilection for killing and eating the conquered, and despite the admonition by some of the elder chiefs that the principle of Nunuku was not appropriate now, two chiefs — Tapata and Torea — declared that “the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.”
The pacifism that Nunuku-whenua bequeathed the Moriori was absolute. And it saw them decimated.
Why was bronze chosen as a third place signifier?
The ranking Gold > Silver > Bronze > Iron (> Lead) dates from Hesiod: see Ages of Man. Bronze for toolmaking in common use is older than Iron; Hesiod was aware of that, which is why his Bronze Age is earlier than his Iron Age. Gold and Silver would have outranked Bronze and Iron, because they were precious metals (better suited to describe an ideal past), and Bronze and Iron weren’t.
Per Wikipedia: Bronze, the ranking in Olympic medals derives from Hesiod’s ranking, but was only put in place in the 1904 Olympics; before that, it was 1st place Silver, 2nd place Bronze.
What is the best biography of Richard Nixon?
For time depth and sobriety, the first biography I read is still the best: Nixon by Stephen E. Ambrose. The in-depth coverage of his vice-presidency (from an historian who was an Eisenhower fan) explains a lot.
Of the others, I wanted to like Fawn M. Brodie‘s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, but it was disappointingly farfetched.
Using UML, can we model life itself with everything in it?
UML Class Diagrams can express hierarchical ontologies, and associations.
Upper Ontologies are intended to model all entities that can be hierarchically related. So if you’re ambitious enough (see: Douglas Lenat), upper ontologies can model life itself with everything in it; and associations can model (at least at first approximation) all relations between with everything within life.
So yeah, sure.
That’d be an awfully big wallpaper diagram though…