Hofstede & Cultural Differences

Geert Hofstede is a Dutch writer who wanted to measure cultural differences. He came up with five continuums:
Low vs. High Power Distance
Individualism vs. collectivism
Uncertainty avoidance
Masculinity vs. femininity
Long vs. short term orientation
This is interesting for me because, while cultural differences are clear, actually measuring them makes obvious what is normally passed on through personal experience or anecdote.

Below are three graphs showing where familiar countries fall on three of these continuums.



Uncertainty Avoidance measures a culture's acceptance of ambiguous situations where the outcome is unclear. A more structured, rules-based culture has a low rating; many Islamic countries lie at the low end of this scale. Interestingly, the higher the rating, the generally less acceptable it is to express emotion within that culture.




Countries with a high Power Distance set clear hierarchical boundaries between people with high and low status. In low Power Distance countries like Holland, it is not unusual to see the Prime Minister in the next tent over on a camping holiday. This does not happen in China.




The Individualism continuum measures the importance of collective identity vs. individual identity. Countries like Guatemala have very low ratings, indicating identity 'clumps' (family/village) and far less individual ambition.


Many of these characteristics are driven by a shared religious identity. Catholic nations within Europe are more similar to one another than to a closer Protestant neighbour. Common media and ethnic origin is also key. It is clear on these indicies how similar the English-speaking countries are culturally.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about Hofstede's work in his book Outliers, illustrating how power differences led to airplane crashes: a co-pilot from a high Power Distance culture phrased key information meekly to his superior, only to have it ignored, just minutes before disaster.

The remaining two continuums are less interesting from a Western point of view. In terms of 'Masculinity vs. femininity', Japan occupies one end, Sweden the other. For 'Long vs. short term orientation', China are the ants while Pakistan are the grasshoppers.

I was hoping that the data would shed some light on the differences between American and our antipodean culture, but there is, relatively speaking, very little difference. They are slightly more individualistic, we slightly more relaxed.
Where this data really works hard is in seeing broader trends, similarities and differences. South Koreans, for examples, are far less individualistic than Japanese, and much more regimented than China. I can see that now, looking back on my experiences, but I wouldn't have been able to point it out before. This is one of the key benefits of education: getting more resolution from what you see.

Why I hated 'Watchmen'

Every few years, a film comes along which truly divides communities. The placarding throngs outside The Last Temptation of Christ would not be resolved with those inside; Kung Pow inexplicably landed in the Bottom 100 list of both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic despite the fact it was retarded in a good way; and no-one will admit publicly that Gone With The Wind was truly awful and should be burned in town squares. In 2009, Watchmen is the film which divides the movie-going public.

For those unfamiliar with the graphic novel (n. a comic book purchased by an adult), it breaks down like this: a naked blue god, plus a few people in out-of-fashion costumes, used to be in a crime-fighting squad. One becomes wealthy, another refuses to age, a third remains an enormous douchebag, a fourth is Norman Rockwell gone wrong covered with a Freud-gone-wrong mask, and the fifth represents the homely everyman found most often in his mother's basement. The naked blue superbeing divides his time between dissembling nuclear reactor cores and sitting quietly on the moon.



All of this was hugely popular with the kind of neckbeards who construct anime costumes to wear to conventions, and the success of mainstream superheroes at the box office encouraged Hollywood to throw money at characters not under licence to the cabal of American comic book publishers. They then hired the director of 300 and instructed him to continue in his fine tradition of masochim and slow-motion homoeroticism. Thus was the film adaptation of an unfilmable comic book delivered to ten thousand screens worldwide.


Dr Manhattan in one of his less-nude poses.

The first crime of Watchmen is that it is two hours and forty minutes long. Action movies are usually about the 1:40 length, which is long enough to for cursory character development, back story, blowing up things three times, and a sprawling finish. It is a terrible, terrible sign when a story which originated in marker pen stretches beyond the two-hour mark; it means that somebody, somewhere, decided that this tale was different; that this tale had a sophistication requiring lengthy exposition, and that illustrated a point broader and more resounding than, "Blow up bad guys good, blow up good guys bad." It did not have this point. It had a point in the way that a stoned teenager at a party thinks he has a point. It had a point the way that the idiot lovechild of Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres has a point. Its point was: - .

There has been a disturbing trend in films to mirror the Peter Parker Principle of Pathetic Primaries: make the main character as inept and tone-deaf as possible so that his transformation to beautiful swan may be more blindingly radiant. The problem is that, as Steven Spielberg continually demonstrates, the perfect form for the neophyte hero is an 8-year-old boy. Older characters are required to be mentally or socially retarded to fit the bill. The bill-fitter in Watchmen is well into his 30's, and wears the puzzled expression of someone who has been hit in the face with a spade.

Very little about the plot development makes sense, nor how the group formed or stayed together. When you have an uber-being who can pop soldiers like microwaved grapes simply by pointing at them, what the hell do you need anyone else for? The characters, perhaps sensing this, undertake a series of ludicrous non-sequiteurs which are presented with a completely straight face as narrative. The agony is akin to sitting through a primary-school violin recital. Oh, there's a false note. Well, maybe... oh, there's another one. Perhaps the next musician will be better--uh oh, they began with a flat sharp, then skidded across two octaves. Time becomes a treacly, visceral thing.

What is shamefully clear about the film is how transparently comics push teenage power fantasies. There is nothing mature about any of the characters--they are punching, shooting, flying and zapping their way through a beige-black world with no more nuance than a Republican talking about Islam. The last film I saw which welled up such a bank of resentment in me was Hulk (the 2003 Eric Bana version), and I am gratified to see Watchmen's box office takings plummet in the same way Hulk's did after the frothy trumpeting of the opening weekend.

The lesson learned--and it is a lot to ask that Hollywood learn anything--is that overwrought, piecemeal tales of marginal fantasy characters do not make for good entertainment. With the two recent Batman films I had hoped that the genre had shaken off the overprecious straitjacket of Clark Kent-style heroes and recognised that a modern, conflicted character was not only good for business, but a genuine statement of our times. The thin motives of the Watchmen world are tumbleweed from the 1950's, and ring hollow.

Crime Pays: $58

A dastardly criminal rooted through our mailbox and stole my new credit card. He then went on a crime spree which comprised the following purchases:

Foodtown: $36
Kentucky Fried Chicken: $22
Cash withdrawal: declined

That's right, the wages of crime are $58 and slightly hardened arteries.

Linux & ease of use

Mark Twain once said,"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Yesterday, the slowest operating system I ever used was the fastest Linux distro, Puppy Linux.

It was meant to be easy, and fast, and kind of fun. Linux has been around in a staggering variety of forms for years, evolving like Galápogian birds. The open-source code encourages tinkering and reinvention by neckbeards worldwide. This has advantages and disadvantages, and at least one attempt -- Ubuntu Linux -- has been made to create a canonical version with regular releases. Unfortunately, this mentality is precisely what Linux enthusiasts demonize in corporations like Microsoft and Apple, so a plethora of species and sub-species evolve, swarm, mutate, enter death throes, and mildew.

The distro I chose was built for speed. It was created to run as quickly as possible, loading into ultra-fast RAM instead of residing on the slower hard drive. Selections and actions would be instantaneous; everything would be faster, with few lags or bottlenecks. And it was small. Windows XP uses at least 2GB, and Vista more than 5GB, but Puppy Linux was just 130MB. Tiny, fast, purpose-built. It sounded great.

You know what else is tiny and purpose-built? A Russian car.



When a proper company builds something, either an operating system or a vehicle, it brings with it a level of professionalism, of polish, of ease-of-use.
When some random guy assembles a contraption in their basement, it is a hodge-podge collection of compromises, workarounds, and makes glaringly obvious the creator's intimacy with the cold inner workings of the deathless machine.

In Puppy Linux (PL), there are two points of control: the start menu, and the command line.


The start menu has every application on the system, most being single-task and at least half being inscrutable to the new Linux user.


The command line allows you to screw up your system in multiple mysterious ways.

The first thing that a user notices when booting in to PL is the scrolling list of system actions. This takes a long time -- PL was never quicker than a full minute to boot. Suddenly the interface pops into view, without the grinding and cursor-spinning customary with Win/Mac.
Uh, OK, what now?
The taskbar at the bottom of the screen is hidden until I move the cursor over it. This would be fine if PL played nice with the trackpad, but -- no. It's like riding a bull. It flicks off one direction, jumps without warning, sways heavily, and there certainly must be a prize for staying on course for eight seconds or longer. Clicks are created from nowhere. To preserve my sanity, I plug in a wired mouse.

There is an app for everything. To look at files, I open an app -- just to bring up an active USB drive. The icons are closely spaced horizontally, but massively spaced vertically. The scrollbar on the side never goes away. A single click opens files. Control-X deletes.

There's a feeling of being very close to the coalface, of sharing a little too much information about how the computer does things, and not enough helping me do what I want to do. This is the difference between Tools and Interfaces: tools facilitate expert knowledge, but interfaces translate complexity to simplicity. An interface begins with a task: what does the user want to achieve? A tool begins with a process: how much feedback can be given?

Everything I did in PL was quick. Very fast. The slow part was comprehension, and that was all on me. Where was the initrd.gz file located? What kind of boot loader would work? What did that acronym mean? I was struggling to understand the terminology, and I'm someone who regularly EXPLAINS computer terminology to people.

The slowest part of any computer is the user -- the single most significant bottleneck. PL succeeds in raw technical speed, but fails to account for real-world problems. The fastest computer is one you can use.

Washington's Teeth

George Washington had false teeth. The regulation story is that they were made of wood, evidenced by portraits like this.



...even though you can't see his teeth, he don't look happy.

Anyway, the national fetish for preserving obscure relics of canonised leaders lead the National Museum of Dentistry to retain the former President's dentures upon his death, and recently it came to light that President #1 had some pretty weird stuff in his mouth.


Scanning a copy of very old false teeth. This is science, people.


The teeth were made from the following:

Gold.


Ivory (from hippos).


Lead (poisonous).


Human teeth (probably extracted from soldiers fallen on battlefields).


Horse teeth.


Donkey teeth.




Let's look at that expression again.



Damn right. You'd look like that too if you could play 'Animal Vegetable Mineral' for half an hour based on what was in your mouth.

There's a fine level of bullshit surrounding George Washington's legend. This video will explain everything.