serinemolecule

[serinemolecule]

It does have to do with people. It comes from 人 hito + 手 te, because the five-pointed star looks like a human hand. 人手 is also an alternative way to write starfish in Japanese.

One thing to note about Japanese is that frequently the written word and the spoken word have completely separate etymologies (the technical term for this is jukujikun or nankun). It's a good guess that's what's happening, whenever you can't figure out how the pronunciation and kanji are related.

[serinemolecule]

These are stamps you might get on your homework in a Japanese elementary school. I love how relentlessly optimistic they are. From left to right:

really good job

good job

you tried

let's try

[serinemolecule]

Japanese/Chinese both want "walk a step" [1] or "step a step" [2], and "do a decision" [3] (Japanese also accepts "do a step" and "decide a decision" [4]).

[1] 一歩を歩む / 走一步 [2] 一歩を踏む / 迈一步

[3] 決定をする / 做个决定 [4] 決定を下す

"Take" and "make" are both ungrammatical for both phrases in both languages, except "do"/"make" are the same word in Chinese, so "make a decision" is a valid parse of the Chinese.

In French we say "take a decision" and "make a step", while it's the opposite in English

[serinemolecule]

Hi, I'm just making my about page into a pinned post.

L-Serine is a proteinogenic amino acid.

…

I always feel weird talking about myself, I guess I worry that it makes me seem conceited or something, but I like learning about people through their About pages and pins so I guess I should talk more… so.

Hi! I’m Emily. I’m a huge nerd, which is mostly what this blog is about.

“I’m a huge nerd” means, among other things, I’m infatuated with the Chinese and Japanese languages, and can seriously infodump at you for hours about them. I’m also like this about a lot of other school-related and generally-nerdy stuff (like amino acids, if you couldn’t tell from the blog name/URL).

This blog is probably approximately 50% linguistics.

Popular posts I’ve written include:

- Kanji, an overview of how weird Japanese kanji is

- Racist map projections, the story of the Gall-Peters projection

- Names in Japan, an overview of how people name their kids in Japan

- The Book Test, an opinion on whether viruses are alive

- How to credit card, a practical guide on how to credit card

- Copyright notices are not clocks, about how © is used wrong

- Tiananmen, thoughts and context

- Diacritics in English, about how accents like “é” exist in English, too

Sometimes, this blog veers into politics. I’m left-libertarian: I think markets are a good way to reduce suffering, but the important part is reducing suffering, not protecting property rights or anything like that.

Other things… I’m Chinese and blog about being Chinese sometimes. I’m approximately utilitarian. I’ve lived all across the world and blog about the differences of living in different places. I’m probably a LW-style rationalist. I don’t really talk about myself much but if you’re curious, you should feel free to ask me about me.

I have a sideblog at @serinemisc – a mix of stuff that I think are too spammy for the main blog, including hot takes on programming, quiz results, really casual chatter, and contentless reblogs of stuff I like.

[serinemolecule]

Speaking of bad Japanese translations, I started learning Japanese because I fell in love with the song 恋の印 Koi no Shirushi, and it has this line which is very tricky to translate:

平凡すぎる毎日にピリオドを打ったの

Probably the most common translation is something along the lines of "In my boring life, you hit the periods". It doesn't particularly make sense, but, hey, song lyrics.

The trick is that "hit the period" is a Japanese idiom, it should be interpreted in the sense of "hit the period key on a keyboard". Which is a metaphor, "you hit the period key" as in "you put an end to it, like you hit the period key to end the sentence". So this line actually means "you put an end to the boring part of my life".

But I don't think I've encountered a single translation (other than my own, which is the one in the Kaminomi wiki and the one on Animelyrics), not even paid translations, that got that one correct.

In Japanese, there's a verb イメージ image, which very frequently gets translated to "image". This is arguably understandable because, like, yes, this is a true cognate, the English word "image" became the Japanese loanword "image". On the other hand, no, "to cast a spell, image it in your head" is not how English works. "Image" as a verb doesn't mean that! You're looking for "visualize" or "imagine".

Famously, English speakers are always tempted to say "excited" in Spanish as "excitado", which is funny because it actually means "horny". It's a true cognate! It just doesn't have the connotations you think it does. But this is famous because it's a mistake students make all the time. Meanwhile, it's translators making the "image" translation!

[serinemolecule]

In Japanese, there's a verb イメージ image, which very frequently gets translated to "image". This is arguably understandable because, like, yes, this is a true cognate, the English word "image" became the Japanese loanword "image". On the other hand, no, "to cast a spell, image it in your head" is not how English works. "Image" as a verb doesn't mean that! You're looking for "visualize" or "imagine".

Famously, English speakers are always tempted to say "excited" in Spanish as "excitado", which is funny because it actually means "horny". It's a true cognate! It just doesn't have the connotations you think it does. But this is famous because it's a mistake students make all the time. Meanwhile, it's translators making the "image" translation!

[serinemolecule]

You know, if it's not Chinese or Japanese or Korean, how did we come up with "go"?

The name Go is a short form of the Japanese word igo (囲碁; いご), which derives from Middle Chinese ɦʉi gi (圍棋, Mandarin: wéiqí, lit. 'encirclement board game' or 'board game of surrounding').

We were so close.

The Japanese name for go (game) is igo which, unlike go, is not already a common English word, and so would be far less confusing. Genuinely baffled by the choice to anglicize it this way. English has had the word go forever, surely it was immediately confusing!

[serinemolecule]

Do you have opinions on the Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature Card? From an initial scan, it seems like mostly just a straightforward upgrade over the Citi Double Cash—Visa rather than MasterCard and so marginally-broader acceptance-range, and no foreign transaction fees—but it seems worth asking just in case there are hidden traps you're aware of which would make it nonetheless worse-on-net.

Oh no I think I forgot to answer this! (Well, I answered in our DMs and forgot to answer is publicly.)

Anyway, the 2% card I recommend these days is the Wells Fargo ActiveCash. It's similar to the DoubleCash except 1. it comes with an intro bonus, and 2. it's a Visa so you can use it in US Costcos.

There've been some other 2% cards but they all have some sort of constraint. The Fidelity's constraint is that it requires a Fidelity account. But if you have one, it's not a bad choice.

[serinemolecule]

I think my main objection here is that the "Pluto is a planet" people tend to say things like "I learned there are 9 planets, therefore there are 9 planets".

Like, we did learn something new about the world: we learned that Pluto is tinier than we thought, we learned that Eris is basically the same thing as Pluto, and we learned that Pluto was part of its own "asteroid" belt, so the reason we used to remove Ceres from the list of planets would, if applied fairly, also make Pluto not a planet.

Valid to say there are 8 planets, valid to say there are 16-18 planets, valid to say there are thousands of planets. But "there are 9 planets" is... I guess you could argue that it's technically not denying science to say "the only valid definition of planet is a member of the list I learned when I was 6 years old, even though the reasons we used to make that list turned out to be wrong" but it sure feels like denying something important.

I've noticed something I find somewhat concerning and it's that for a lot of people, 'pluto is a planet' has fallen into the stock list of examples for what one might call 'science denialism', along with things like antivaxx, denying the existence of feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs, and flat earthers

there's a sentiment that goes like 'well, sure, you learned in school that the solar system has nine planets, but Science Marches On and we now know it has eight' and while certainly people should not take what they learned in school to be immutable law they should also like. have a concept of the rather significant difference between 'we've learned something new about the world' and 'we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines'

slicing up the world into categories is one of the basic operations of human thought and if you do not understand it well enough that you think 'people used to think the earth flat -> now we know better' and 'astronomers used to call pluto a planet -> now they don't' are analogous processes then you fucked up somewhere.

and if you don't think they are analogous, if you understand the difference i am pointing out and think it does not matter to the quest of listing stock examples of people disagreeing with things scientists say, well. you fucked up in a different place, probably.

[serinemolecule]

I think poor people and rich people have the same problem w.r.t. bonds, in that they don't actually "have the cash" in cash form.

Like, say you own a house worth a million dollars, and you're asked to put up a million-dollar bond. Would you rather:

a. move all your stuff into storage, find somewhere else to live, sell the house, post the bond, and then a year later hope that you can buy the house back for the same price or at most $1.1M and repeat the entire process of moving? or

b. borrow the money and pay it back later, for a $100K fee?

Also, if you forced someone to sell their house ASAP because you want the money now, they're going to get a lot less money for it than if you give them a few months to find the highest-bidding buyer for it.

When we say rich people have lots of money, only a tiny percentage of that money is in cash; we mean they have valuable things that are like houses – you're going to lose a ton of the value if you're forced to immediately convert it into cash, and it'll be a huge hassle, and also it's valuable to you in other ways, and what if the person who buys it destroys it and you can't get it back later, or what if they don't want to sell it back? Etc, etc.

Now, a lot of rich people just get around this by just, you know, getting a loan, with their house-or-whatever as collateral, but my understanding is that Trump has spent a career lying to banks about how much his stuff is worth and not paying money he owes, so this is coming to bite him.

Trying to keep up with the Trump Bond news but I feel I'm a bit confused in that I'm not sure why anyone would use the bond middleman for this if you actually have the cash. I got the idea of the bond when it was about a way of using property as collateral for cash without selling it unless you have to, but if you can just pay the cash and get it back if the judgement is appealed, then I thought you would just do that?

[serinemolecule]

It is a sign of great personal growth that I put the AirTag in my checked luggage rather than my carry-on.

My 16-year-old ADHD self would be mindblown that I'm less likely to lose my backpack than some airline employees explicitly paid to do that one job.

[serinemolecule]

Yeah, I'm aware of all this having gone down. The last time I checked, Underwood Ranches's sriracha recipe was noticeably sweeter than the old Huy Fong recipe – Huy Fong sriracha has always been much less sweet than "real" sriracha and it was a thing I really liked about Huy Fong sriracha.

I took this as reason to look into this again, and according to some random redditors, Underwood Ranches has tweaked their recipe a lot over the past few months and the current batch is no longer too sweet, so I'll probably give them another try soon.

(Also according to some random redditors, Underwood Ranches is no longer making their sriracha only with their own jalapeños, though.)

WHY SRIRACHA WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND AND NOW TASTES BAD

If you like hot sauces and the like you probably have been a big fan of sriracha... specifically the sriracha made by Huy Fong Foods. But, you may have noticed that since 2020 there have been noticeable times where it was sold out for months and months. Even worse - now that it is back on shelves it tastes like crap.

I did some digging.

All of the peppers for Huy Fong Foods Sriracha were grown on Underwood Ranches in Ventura County, CA. Family-owned farm (since the 1800s) that grew along with Huy Fong Foods. Starting at 400 acres and growing to almost 4000 to support the popularity of sriracha. This was when it tasted good. In the late 20-teens Huy Fong decided to demand money back from the farm for... no one really fully understands why. They then severed the contract leaving Underwood with 4000 acres of hot peppers and no one to buy them.

Meanwhile Huy Fong approached a number of other farms scattered across southern California and had them quickly spin up pepper concerns. This put a massive dip in their supply and they lost a year of sauce-making basically. Then bad weather knocked out a lot of these farms and they lost another season or two. Also the quality and flavor across multiple farms was inconsistent.

Meanwhile Underwood sued Huy Fong, won, received 23 million dollars, hired back their workers, and got back to growing. Additionally they were able to mitigate a lot of the weather issues the last few years through better technique and had bumper crops.

So they made their own sauce - Underwood Dragon Sriracha...

and lord strike me down if it doesn't taste much more like the older sriracha than whatever Huy Fong Foods is making now. Anyways, they don't seem to sell to stores but you can buy directly from their website. I did and I've been putting it on everything.

I wasn't paid to write this... I just like doing exhaustive research about things I enjoy.

(EDIT to adjust Underwood Farms to Underwood Ranches, and change location from Ventura to Ventura County)

Source: https://www.facebook.com/sean.baptiste.125/posts/10159735977401881

[serinemolecule]

Unless you're asking why I care at all, enough to write a post about it, which, idk what to tell you, I'm a nerd. I'm just like this.

why do u care sm abt a fuckin flag 💀

(context)

I don't actually care that much. Performatively strong emotions are popular. For good reason; it makes text more fun. Between "man, this sucks" and "I moderately dislike this", the former is just more interesting to read.

[serinemolecule]

why do u care sm abt a fuckin flag 💀

(context)

I don't actually care that much. Performatively strong emotions are popular. For good reason; it makes text more fun. Between "man, this sucks" and "I moderately dislike this", the former is just more interesting to read.

[serinemolecule]

This post got a lot of attention, so I figured I'd post the follow-up, that after a lot of time in committee, this is the flag that we ended up with:

Reddit hates it, but I'm a fan. I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I wasn't.

The monochrome blue is a little plain (especially since the seal-on-blue flags are all mostly blue), but I think it's distinctive enough that I like it. Plus, I think "it's cold here" is more distinctive of Minnesota than "we have land". The official reasoning is also that if you tilt the flag down it looks like the Mississippi River flowing out from under the north star, which I think is cool.

The star was replaced with a Lakota star, which is usually oriented at an angle that makes it easier to see all the parallel lines, but was oriented to have a top point (to represent "north star" as in "North Star State"). I suppose I'm neutral on this. I'm a huge fan of four-pointed stars (which would also look much less like a round blob at a distance) but I think choosing a star with history is pretty valid too.

Reddit mostly just calls it "boring", but I do like simple designs in flags, and this flag really is simple.

(The designer says he loves it, and gives a pretty cool story about the process, too.)

I'm so frustrated by every flag redesign using blue and green.

"This green represents our land, and this blue represents our sky" please! Every state has land and also sky! Please pick something that actually represents your state and not every state ever!

This post brought to you by the Minnesota state flag redesign finalists.

Oh yeah, plants, rivers, the existence of stars in the sky, these sure are things that scream "Minnesota" to me.

I actually do want to give the stars specifically a pass because "The star of the North" is Minnesota's state epithet.

But like you compare these to, for instance, Washington's proposed flag redesign:

Come on, please, I beg of you, find some colors to represent your state more interesting than "it has land, and also it has sky".

[serinemolecule]

In the US for some reason we have this law (I think the ADA?) where there's a minimum amount of time the elevator must stay open, and you can't press the door close button to shorten it for some asinine reason, so it does nothing.

But in Japan the door close button actually does make the door close earlier, so now I have a thing where I reflexively do it when I'm in Japan or I've been in Japan recently, and when visit Japan it takes me some time to pick up the habit again.

thinking of becoming the kind of guy who presses the "close doors" button after getting in an elevator

[serinemolecule]

your blog description is incredible. that is all.

Thanks! Which one? I guess you mean the subtitle?

in this house our infodumping is anti-inductive

I don't know how I feel about it, these days. "Anti-inductive" is a reference to the SSC article "The phatic and the anti-inductive".

I think of it mostly in the sense of "I try not to write phatic things, things that everyone else is already saying". This is, like, a common autistic thing, where you were told that it's not very meaningful to just repeat the same thing everyone else says, and then you absolutely suck at small talk because you can't think of anything original to say because of course you can't, it's small talk.

Or do you mean my About page?

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with it. I haven't really edited it in, like, years, but I think it's still me.

I used to have a blurb about loving everyone, but I feel like people who talk about that are kinda culty, so I just keep that sort of thing on the down-low these days.