Just for fun, here are some fun/insightful comparisons I’ve made with stats from Wikipedia. I always think these are fun to think about and useful to put things into perspective, especially when you’ve visited some of these places. Sometimes it helps you think about differences in culture, too.

Population

• Tokyo metropolitan area: 35.7m
• Seoul metropolitan area: 24.5m
• North Korea: 24m
• Taiwan: 23m
• Beijing: 22m
• New York City metropolitan area: 19m
• Istanbul: 12.8m
• Hong Kong SAR: 7m
• Taipei metropolitan area: 6.8m
• Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex: 6.4-6.8m
• Greater Houston metropolitan area: 5.9m
• Sydney metropolitan area: 4.5m
• Amsterdam metropolitan area: 2.2m

Area

• Texas: 268,581 sq mi
• France: 260,558 sq mi
• United Kingdom: 94,060 sq mi
• Greater Houston (metro): 10,062 sq mi
• Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex (metro): 9,286 sq mi
• New York City metropolitan area (metro): 6,720 sq mi
• Seoul metropolitan area: ~1,900 sq mi
• Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex (urban): 1,407 sq mi
• Greater Houston (urban): 1,295 sq mi
• Rhode Island: 1,214 sq mi
• Hong Kong SAR: 426 sq mi

Occasionally I read Peter Sunde/brokep’s blog. Some of you may recognize the name; I’ve linked to and mentioned him here before. He is one of The Pirate Bay’s admins and was found guilty in trial of assisting copyright infringement, although the case is up in appeals now. Some of you may also look up to him.

In any case, I’ve found him to post pretty interesting things on his blog in general—at least when it’s not in Swedish and I can actually read it, and I just came across an interesting post he wrote a few months ago, titled “Facebook owns us.” Often we have heard of Facebook’s privacy problems and of things like people not getting the job they wanted because of Facebook. But perhaps the real danger lies in its social monopoly and its controlling effect on Facebook users’ social lives.

To better understand this, I would definitely recommend reading it, but I’ll provide the gist of it for you lazy tl;drers.

A very large number of people use Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook, but for example, most of you reading this and almost everyone in my generation and the generations around me use Facebook to some degree. In this way, for those of us whose networks of friends stay connected through Facebook, Facebook monopolizes our social connections online and even affects us offline.

Thus, people have become connected through Facebook so much, relying on it for inviting people to offline events and so on because of its huge convenience. One of brokep’s friends wasn’t happy with Facebook for deleting his fan-made music videos on Facebook and did something that got his account completely deleted. He stopped showing up to events. People only realized later that he was never invited to some of them because he just disappeared on Facebook, and people simply rely on Facebook to invite people to events these days. At Facebook’s whim, it can deny people from being social. It can wipe out their only direct social connection with a multitude of people.

This is scary. But how do we break from the chain, a “vendor lock-in” (or “social lock-in”) of sorts, as one commenter mentioned? Open decentralized alternatives to the mega-network of Facebook seem unrealistic because the advantage of Facebook is that everyone exists on it (and that information is uniformly presented).

Here’s to hoping for the next great advance in social networking that will save us all.

I haven’t blogged in quite some time now, so I thought it would be nice to share at least something while my new hard disk is being formatted. One of my favorite songs recently has been 비와 당신 (The Rain and You). It was originally in the movie 라디오 스타 (Radio Star), which is a really good movie, by the way — everybody should see it — and one of my favorite Korean bands, Rumble Fish, released a cover of it on their album Memory for You last year.

It’s a nice song, so besides being able to sing it, I thought it’d be fun to play it on a keyboard/piano. The chords are pretty straightforward. Here they are:

C G F E | F G C (G/C)

They’re all major chords, and they’re each one measure long, except the final G can sometimes be just C major for another measure (like at the end of the song). The | is just to divide the eight measures into groups of four so that it’s easier to read. Those chords are repeated the whole song. The melody is pretty easy as well, especially once you have those chords down. If you play the Rumble Fish intro, the melody begins as ABCD|E with E being played at the same time as the chords begin playing. The actual melody (the singing part) begins on E.

That’s the Rumble Fish version. The original is in G major, with the sung melody beginning on B, and with the following chords:

G D C B | C D G (D/G)

Anyway, for those who find this useful, enjoy playing the song!