Han Chinese

Um, rats produce oxytocin which is, uh, typically associated with bonding.

This new study I think is really interesting because they looked at groups across a number of different countries, so there was Chinese people, Dutch people, Greek people, and they found a real similarity in the number of people that have been tickled which is really high, like 98% or something, and who do tickling.

But I think the interesting thing was this idea that there are certain parts of the body that the body map of where people are ticklish seems to be the same in all of these different groups and it seems to be areas of the body that we typically wouldn't touch on a daily basis, so your armpits for example, and they seem to be more sensitive.

It's not just about them having higher pain threshold or being sort of more sensitive, but, but it's something to do with the element of surprise and the fact that that area of the body's not normally touched.

They say that insiders and outsiders, you see things easier.

That's what we found out last week with the Chinese thing when you thought that's what AI said.

What? That's what AI said last week when we looked it up when you said all Chinese people think that even Chinese people think they look the same.

I think they do.

No, they don't.

Only as we approached Blagoveshchensk they became restless.

Kanshina, the Chinese brandy, is cheap there, they reasoned with deep sighs.

We are sure to get into trouble.

It's cheap, and it knocks you over in no time from want of being used to it.

Water rushes into hundreds of branches and lakes which spread in the lowlands along the main channel.

And when a fresh wind blows from an eastern quarter, against the current, tremendous waves, higher than those which one sees in the estuary of the St. Lawrence, roll up the main channel as well as up its branches.

Still worse is it when a typhoon blows from the Chinese Sea and spreads over the Amur region.

We experienced such a typhoon.

The Oregon tribes have spirit doctors and medicine doctors.

The Chinese historians relate that the shamans of the Huns possessed the power to bring down snow, hail, rain, and wind.

In all nations in the infancy of growth, social or mental, the power to coax from reluctant clouds the fructifying rain has been regarded with highest approval and will always be found confided to the most important hierophants or devolving upon some of the most prominent deities.

Almighty Jove was a deified rainmaker or cloud compeller.

Similar altars or tracings were made by the medicine men of Guatemala when they were casting the horoscope of a child and seeking to determine what was to be its medicine in life.

This matter of sand altars has been fully treated by Matthews in the report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1883-84, and there are several representations to be found in my snake dance of the Moquis.

Writing on sand is a mode of divination among the Chinese.

Padre Boscana represents the puplum, or medicine men of the Indians of California, as making or sketching a most uncouth and ridiculous figure of an animal on the ground, and presumably of sands, clays, and other materials.

It's like Trump on stilts.

It's the Han Chinese.

They've crushed the Tibetans.

They've crushed the Uyghurs.

Well, to some extent it does.

But the piece of test, because it's international, you give it out, say, to the Chinese and the Asians who are much more serious about learning maths than your standard Western students.

European or American, for that matter.

So they tend to do better.

So the top scorers would be the Chinese, the Japanese.

They still, especially the Chinese, they tend to cheat a bit as well because they tend to concentrate on asking their students from, let's say, the big cities like Beijing or Shanghai and not the rural backwaters.

Yes.

You know, so...

I didn't really know many working writers in my life.

I had two parents who were doctors and I had a very helpful Chinese father who's very practical and did point out when I might have raised the idea of being an artist that perhaps that was a good hobby, but may not make a lot of money or like enough to survive, which, you know, he's not wrong.

Definitely not wrong.

And so I did end up going down the path of studying medicine.

So in between the longer works, they're almost like a palette cleanser for me.

I really enjoy returning to the short story form.

So I've had a few short stories out with Kill Your Darlings and they got... picked up in Chinese publications, actually, and translated.

That's the first time I've had that experience, which was really great.

Their economy went nowhere for a long time.

Then they had to eat up the shock of, of China, uh, taking over every single industry, uh, where Japanese had dominance at a level where, you know, the Chinese production costs were, like, a third of the...

Like, it, it was not something that you, "Oh, we're just gonna be more productive." No.

[laughs] You, you can't be that more.