Thursday, December 27, 2007

投名状 The Warlords



Of all the stories about the crucible of China's 19th century tumult, this one manages to convey well the decadence, corruption, machination of politics, heroism, and the tragedy of power.

Particularly clever is the artistic license the movie used to portray the three heroes of this period: Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and Li Hongzhang. They are given different silhouettes and there are three old men in the movie who come across as corrupt bureaucrats. This pays homage to the theory that Zeng Guofan masterminded the assassination of Ma Xinyi in 刺马案, one of the four unsolved cases in the late Qing period.

What impress me the most is the incorporation of Beijing Opera in the movie. I like the nuanced expressions on the opera troupe's faces and how their intensity is transferred to the main actors. Makes me wish I studied about film and how to direct them.

And best friends shouldn't fight over a woman, because whoever wins everybody looses....Unless the woman in question is Xu Jinglei, in which case everything is fair game.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Google Notebook - Good but Not Perfect

I have been using it for quite a while now, and I have to say it is really good. The option that I really wish it has is to save pictures directly to Picasa so even if the source website does down, the notebook will still show the original pictures.

One effect of the notebook is that it cut down the number of my blog posts. But that can be both good and bad.

Course of a Christmas Dinner Conversation

Invited to the annual Christmas dinner at parents' friend's house. Every year, the conversations are somewhat embarrassing if not just out right hilarious. It made my day that I discovered that people of my parents generation have a good sense of humor when it comes to arranged marriages.

So the story went - a person (and if you think this is about to take a ethnocentric turn, you are not wrong. For how could it not? When you gather a bunch of people who were as weather beaten as those of the Cultural Revolution generation, and put them around a family dinner table in America, the subject inevitably turns to how good their descendants in America has it going), he went through three years of college in UoH, did not graduate, and went back to China to find himself a bride. There he listed four conditions in his er... request, I guess.

Bride candidates must be:

1) Not from a big city
2) Not from a cadre family (so no princesslings)
3) Not from a rich family
4) Not from an intelligentsia family

So he found a bride who came from a small and humble village in the Northeast and he and his children lived happily ever after.

This is all told by a person having married a well educated women from a big city. The conditions are a bit medieval, people around the table said, but then everyone went on to praise the person for his pragmatism and insight.

Merry Christmas! Love and well wishes all around, especially for bride candidates!

What Does It Mean to Be Modern?

The mantle of Lu Xun weights heavily, and those of us Chinese left to construct a modernity from a nation that is catching up all live in his shadow.

I think that the Chinese people of this generation is the best to take on questions of modernity. Tempered by a more open environment, all the while having inherited the spirit that passed on by the revolution: that our destiny lies in our hands. Not to say we haven't been confronting this problem for the past century, but if we fail to face this problem now, when we are just embarking on a true awakening of the Chinese people, then how would we develop? I think we should not expect this awakening to be uplifting, rather it would be the realization that we took a step, and another, and another, awaits.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Christmas Gifts

Merry Christmas!

Gifts/or somethings worth revisiting, current goal is to find new things next year, but some of these are due to repeat:

Books:
One China, Many Paths
To The Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (makes me feel like a child when I compare myself to the people in this book: intelligence, willpower, experience)
The Hedge Knight
A Game of Thrones (He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood)
Selected Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore

Blogs:
Danwei

Magazines:
The London Review of Books (seems like my education [the parts worth mentioning] consists mostly of this magazine)

Movies:
Bourne
Election, Triad Election
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Smiley's People

Language Police:
"Mikhail Mikhailovich, I challenge you to a duel!"

Monday, December 24, 2007

Revelations









Miss the opening music from Eve: Revelations so here it is.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Tenku Senki Shurato

old anime

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Al Jazeera - Moving China

Al Jazeera has some surprisingly good China reporting



Reporting on the urbanization's effect on the countryside.

This loneliness is familiar, yet different. After moving here, my parents are always present but ever distant. Perhaps gripped by uncertainty while dealing with the lost of security back home, something like seeing a bridge start burning on both ends while three quarters of the way across. You need to experience it to understand.

My mother is a doctor who would have done well had she stayed in China. I think she dealing with her lost must have be harder than myself dealing with my descend from perfectionist to mediocrity. I just realized that it is no surprise that after coming here, I stopped receiving praises and encouragements and instead only admonitions and terse reminders to do well. So it merely took one year, 3rd grade to fourth grade, for me to transform from a energetic and talkative trouble causing child to a shy and quiet person. Finer points of parenthood was lost somewhere.

Time grew, and inevitably I became detached from my parents emotionally and intellectually. There was nothing I saw in the admonitions other than they being the only efforts that can be afforded from emotional exhaustion. And there is no way I can intelligently tell them what how I think since I refuse to speak to them in English out of habit. Eventually, I just wanted to get away from it all, the choking weariness and the lack of encouragement. But after four and a half years in school I have come to understand what it feels like to have your ambition atrophy and be on life support. Now I appreciate what it feels like to be weary and tired.

Some of us only do well in the most optimum environment, that might be going to the right college, or just having parents around. It is not so much regret as a loneliness.

Drugs bring Beijing into Burma

One of Lindsey Hilsum's thoughtfully written columns

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Koyaanisqatsi



I love this movie. It will be the first thing I play once I get a 1080p LCD TV.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Bai Chongxi

Bai Chongxi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I always heard that Bai Xianyong's father was a famous KMT general, but I didn't really know how significant he was until I started doing research on Du Fu's identification with Zhuge Liang. One thing led to another and I stumbled upon Bai Chongxi.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Metamorphosis One







梦中之情何必非真

"Love in dreams need not be unreal."

In many ways, writing about dreams is about the intimation of something that need not be unreal.

What promise? What shadows? Why such sadness?

Papers of Yesteryear

Was just reading over some of my high school papers and wow... they are so terrible yet so good at the same time. Nowhere has an amalgamation of Victorian style diction explained simple things with such pretense and naivety. The first steps of writing are so incoherent, messy, and infantile. In all respects expressing myself more genuinely as a person than the last minute hacked together papers I write in college.

We don't write for ourselves anymore, even this.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Hedge Knight



"You are no knight.
I know you. You are Florian the fool."
"I am, my lady. As great a fool as ever lived, and as great a knight as well!"
"A fool and a knight?
I have never heard of such a thing."
"Sweet lady, all men are fools, and all men are knights, where women are concerned."

Monday, November 26, 2007

The insanity of France's anti-file-sharing plan

L'État, c'est IFPI

Things look ill for the relevance of France's existence in the 21st century. It's conservative attitude about preserving "culture", and the tendency for it to exercise state power for arbitrary interests will be the cause of its demise.

Books versus documents: what's wrong with so-called "e-books"

Almost spent money to buy a Kindle, which in retrospect is still a pretension

Need to read: Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Peony Pavillion



What struck me about Bai Xianyong's lecture was the hilarious way he described the different junctures in the play where the audience clapped. The Taipei audience would applaud after an aria was sung well, but in Suzhou, the audience will start clapping when the male and female leads approach and make contact with one another.

the script

Friday, November 16, 2007

Die Meistersinger

Madness, Madness!
Madness everywhere.
Wherever I look . . . .
People torment and flay each other
In useless, foolish anger
Till they draw blood.
Driven to flight,
They think they are hunting.
They don’t hear their own cry of pain . . . .
When he digs into his own flesh,
Each thinks he is giving himself pleasure.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

So close to greatness...



The Withcer is a kick to the teeth of normative high fantasy genre. Its storyline is steep in its observation of Eastern European folktales and legends. What sets it apart from its neighboring Western cousins is the unflinching narrative of grimness.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Small town melancholy and the errors of travel

Driving to Austin-Bergstrom evokes all sorts of associations, one of them is the feeling that you are without doubt in a small town.

Peering out of the windows in the plane while in transit, I wondered how will skylines look at night when cities switch over to 5500k incandescent lighting? I tried to imagine night cities transforming from gold to silver, like this:

Monday, November 05, 2007

色,戒 Lust, Caution

In some ways the times we live in are similar to those of Eileen Zhang. Dying for a cause, being a pawn for a higher power, where decisions such as choosing who we love is affected by nationalism. And sometimes, we make mistakes that we do not regret.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

The music behind Triad Election


A view of the music production process behind the modern rework of the triad genre



‘For the residents of the island, to be “Hongkongese” has never meant being Chinese,’ he explains. ‘The political upsets of the past century have given rise to a major dichotomy between these two notions. Over the past nine years, changes seem to have gradually filled the gap that separates us. China has freed itself from the yoke of an archaic communist regime to become an economic superpower. The policy of One Country/Two Systems guaranteed Hong Kong political autonomy [but] the residents of Hong Kong look upon all these changes with concern, fear and confusion. Under the veil of economic stability, questions concerning political autonomy remain unanswered. In the shadow of that ambiguous giant known as China, what does being Hongkongese mean? In Election 2, even the gangsters ask themselves questions.’

Crocodile detained

Australian crocodile kept in cell

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

现实一种

Criticism of Chinese society, a people suffocated by its environment, where it sharpens the physical sense and intellect but leaves empathy and compassion undeveloped.

Is it fair if we use it as a explanation for behavior of some Chinese people in the U.S.? Where we are often perceived as intelligent but emotionally cold people?

How do we reconcile it with our experiences? The community and kinship within a extended Chinese family? That, against the isolation of the suburbs in another country? Of teamwork and call-you-by-your-first-name-while-stab-you-in-the-back type of false courtesy that exist among one's colleagues?

Questions, questions...

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Inviting Writers to Drink

"So I urge you to cease your songs of the snow,
and in turn drink sadly the rose-cloud wine.
When we sober up, we cannot pass over
this ocean of sorrow, vast without shore."

- Meng Jiao (751-814)

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Froth and Bubble



The Museum of Broken Relationships Storms Berlin

Piano

Wish I know how to play the piano, "just like almost every Asian kid".

Funny, I still remember who said that (approximately).

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Marat/Sade

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Directions of The Marquis de Sade

Marat:
[speaking to Sade across the empty arena]
I read in your books de Sade
in one of your immortal works
that the basis of all of life is death

Sade:
Correct Marat
But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature's compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created
Death is simply part of the process
Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
[rising]
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts
[breathing heavily]
Haven't we always beaten down those weaker
than ourselves
Haven't we torn at their throats
with continuous villainy and lust
Haven't we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution
Let me remind you of the execution of Damiens
...
...
...
That
was a festival with which today's festivals can't compete
Even our inquisition gives us no pleasure
nowadays
Although we've only just started
there's no passion in our post-revolutionary
murders
Now they are all official
We condemn to death without emotion
and there's no singular personal death to be
had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes for all life
to be extinguished

Marat:
Citizen Marquis
you may have fought for us last September
when we dragged out of the gaols
the aristocrats who plotted against us
but you still talk like a grand seigneur
and what you call the indifference of Nature
is your own lack of compassion

Sade:
Compassion
Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat
Compassion is the property of the privileged
classes
When the pitier lowers himself
to give to a beggar
he throbs with contempt
To protect his riches he pretends to be moved
and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more
than a kick [lute chord]
No Marat
no small emotions please
your feelings were never petty
For you just as for me
only the most extreme actions matter

Marat:
If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same
way as you
Against Nature's silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don't watch unmoved I intervene
and say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes

Monday, October 22, 2007

Rain began three in the morning. By nine the wind started and my glasses, being large as they are, would catch the perspiration of breathing. It is a bit chilly outside and I had to run back home from the bus stop to put on a jacket.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

爸爸爸

I grow tired of this preoccupation with backwardness, corruption and provincialism in Chinese popular culture and contemporary literary memory. Having said that, I despised reading yet another satire, 爸爸爸. It is no different than watching the mindless dramas and TV shows, except just imagine having that told to you as a story in a mocking tone as oppose to watching:

1) nasal gazing historic dramas which falls further into two categories:
a) costume dramas that dulls the viewer's senses, that which not only do not encourage people to look to the future but glorify a backward, hideous, and pitiful past where China was shut off to the outside world
b) pre-civil war 1920-30 Shanghai, whore of the orient, how good it was for the rich and corrupt that pay no attention to the nation's survival. You too, as oppose to the intended revulsion, will secretly admire their decadence
2) imitation of the worst type of schadenfreude western reality TV shows

With a TV I can alway skip it, the unfortunate thing with a novel is that you don't realized how much time was wasted until after you grind through parts or all of the reading. Utterly lacking in the Chinese literary memory are science and pluralism. The world is spinning too slowly. I wish it were fast as to throw Chinese people out of their seats.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

To the Last Salute

Was expecting something more from this book, but oh well.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Emergence of the Market that is the E.U. Subsumes Democracy In Its' Wake

Just finished reading Perry Anderson's article on the delusions of Europe as the new city on the hill.

Pensée unique - an ironic description and a critique of the tendency for French opinion to align with those of the European Union.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

How to make money off oil companies

1. Find a productive well
2. Buy up all the land around it
3. Find out how much the well is producing, potential reserves would also suffice
4. Take your findings to court
5. Count your monies as they roll in
6. Repeat


Disclaimer - you can only do this in Texas

Sunday, September 23, 2007

How they fare over the Atlantic

This financial crisis could be a historic chance for Brown

"In the long history of Labour as a governing party, nothing - but nothing - has been as politically destructive as financial crisis. The slump of 1931, the devaluations of 1949 and 1967 and the IMF bail-out of 1976 inflicted mortal wounds that destroyed four Labour prime ministers and sent four Labour governments to their electoral graves. Collectively these events had an even more devastating effect, cumulatively undermining the plausibility of the entire 20th century Labour governmental project and barring the way to a sustained British social democratic settlement on European lines."

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Drunk in Autumn Woods




“In olden times Hutou (Gu Kaizhi) had three incomparable attainments; now I have three kninds of madness: I am mad, my words are mad, and my painting is mad. How can one achieve true madness? Now I shall present this piece of madness to my venerable elder, Mr. Song; then I shall have achieved true madness.”

He ends, “This is only to provoke a laugh…” and signs it.

Next day he added another quatrain:

“In a moment, smoke and clouds can return to their previous form:
The whole sky is full of red trees spreading fire all over heaven.
I invite you to get drunk with my black brush strokes;
To lie and watch the frosted forest where the falling leaves spin.”

Monday, September 17, 2007

Ministry of Miscommunications

One of my cousin thinks that I am a gambling addict:

5:59 AM 青: Hi,最近好吗?
me: 还可以
现在在学校吗?
青: 是啊。
6:00 AM 你现在那边应该是早晨吧?
me: 早上6点钟
6:01 AM 青: 好早啊。你不用睡的啊。
me: 还没睡呢
6:02 AM 刚刚才回家
青: 哦,做什么去啦?
6:03 AM me: 打牌
青: 晕!!!!!!
你在堕落啊。
6:04 AM me: 什么?
6:05 AM 青: 就是你为了打牌通宵不睡。给我就不行。
6:06 AM me: 不是你平时打的牌
6:07 AM 是游戏牌
叫做什么magic - the gathering

棋王

"I very much regret using oil to express my discontentment toward life, and using books and movies, these types of things that could be had or could not be had, to express my dissatisfaction toward life, because he honestly looks at these as things beyond baseline. He wouldn't worry for these things. I suddenly feel drained, partly agreeing to his statement. Yes, what else is needed? Am I not feeling pretty well? No need to eat this meal and worry about the next. No matter how dilapidated the bed, it is still one's own, no need to scurry around for places to find a place to spend the night. But for what am I often worried about? Why am I predisposed to want to read some particular book, film, these types of things. Just turn on the light and people will fully wake up, what am I getting at/what purpose am I trying to achieve? But I faintly have these desires in my heart that cannot be fully explained, yet I can convey they are related to some things in life."

Thief: The Dark Project

One of my favorite games of all time:











Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Art, science, industry, Ayn Rand, megalomania


"A man chooses, a slave obeys."

Rapture - the towering achievement of "objectivism", laid bare to those of us who want to pluck the mind, and the abyss, of genius. Unfettered from petty morality, and held up by the gods of art, science, and industry...



Monday, September 03, 2007

Down with the second round of simplification!

Even Simpler Than Before--化 境 神 似

Just came across 象 in place of 像. My immediate reaction is, life without blood?! What travesty!

Thursday, August 23, 2007

The wellspring of our nightmares

It seems our goal in life is to put more distance between us and every other human being.

Lived in an apartment most of time so far. Childhood apartment in Nanyou/Zhanjiang, 5th floor, the sea breeze, view of the hospital and the rice fields. 2 bedrooms, 1 dining, plus kitchen and bathroom, all subsidized by CNOOC. Personally didn't know how great the neighborhood was in comparison to the other crappy districts, it didn't matter. My parents' goal in life was to get to somewhere better.

Grandparents' house, transit point. three generation under one roof and 3 floors, which only two have living spaces. Spaces didn't mattered because we have friends and family. Being a kid didn't require a lot of spaces back then. But now, with 3 kids and 3 families living in just 4 bedrooms, you can just feel the tension grinding down the kid's emotional development.

Irving, 1994, second floor, loud air conditioners on first floor makes a quiet night of sleep a luxury. A downgrade from 3rd world first class to first world 3rd estate. Another apartment closer to high school, but what did it mattered? High school for many was not the infinite American possibilities in Friday Night Lights.

Being stuck, from generation to generation, in lower middle class is the wellspring of our nightmares.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Bought an iPod. Was struck by how consumer hostile the whole thing is. Scrambling of music files, refusal to organize by user's existing folders. No drag and drop, lack of seemless transfers between computer and player. Ugh, the thought that I actually paid for this thing makes me sick.

Just give me a mp3 player that I can just drag and drop folders to play music, in addition to the ability to use it as a mass storage device.

Monday, August 13, 2007

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello





It was like this: you were happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

You were innocent, or you were guilty
actions were taken, or not
at times you spoke and at other times you were silent
mostly it seems you were silent
what could you say?

Now it is almost over
like a lover your life bends down and kisses your life
it does this not in forgiveness
between you there is nothing to forgive
but with a simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished
with transformation
eating too is a thing now only for others

It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days
they will be wrong
they will miss the wrong woman
miss the wrong man
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

- Jane Hirshfield

Friday, August 03, 2007

Rises and Rises Again

The Bourne Identity (2002)

There are some espionage writers who use the form as a way of probing troubling geopolitical realities and vexing ethical dilemmas. Ludlum, who died last year, was not one of them. But at a moment when big, dumb thrillers like ''The Sum of All Fears'' find themselves suddenly burdened with expectations of relevance, the utter and systematic irrelevance of ''The Bourne Identity'' to anything currently or formerly happening in the world comes as something of a relief.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

As an action-movie travelogue, ''The Bourne Supremacy'' is unusually evocative. From its beaches of Goa to Berlin's clotted skyline to Moscow in the snow, its city lights glowing, it imparts a glamorized sense of tourism under duress.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

For Bourne, who rises and rises again in this fantastically kinetic, propulsive film, resurrection is the name of the game, just as it is for franchises.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Friends, conversations, legacies, declines, self renewing ideas

Companies increase pay rates at lower rates than inflation, so overtime the value of what people actually get paid become less and less. Employees fight back by working slower, accomplishing less, and become generally lazy. The phenomenon that starting salaries for companies are non-negotiable is a sign of this "matured" labor market.

The only counter example in recent memory to this gradual, but inevitable, decline into economic malaise is Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. It was just a few years before the dot com bubble that the labor market saw much fluidity. Everything: salary, benefits, stock options for joining a high tech company can be negotiated. Yet it was only a brief respite, then the labor market regressed back to the mean.

The British train system, built by Empire wealth and money, and if it breaks down today, the contemporary U.K. economy cannot afford to build a new one.

The U.S. highway system, the best in the world and built back in the 1950s. There are no projects of such magnitude that the U.S. government is investing in today.

In a sense we are living on inherited legacies. The government no longer invests, yet collect the same amount of taxes. Ex. the telephone tax. If the private sector is suppose to supplant government investment, where are the tax cuts to the people?

Perfect markets, rational behaviors... the stuff of dreams.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Those funny Austrians

Mises.org just published an article titled:
The Death Camp of Communist China

it begins with: A hysteria of sorts has been generated by reports that some of China's products lack quality control. Some cat food has been tainted. A few cell phone batteries have blown up. Cough syrup contained stuff that makes you sick. And so on. In response, the Chinese government actually executed its regulatory head of food and product safety, Zheng Xiaoyu.

hmmmm, a most pertinent subject matter, yes? but wait for the bait and switch

it goes on to saying: It's a scandal, in fact, that few Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong.

Ok... so the opening was just polemics to support the body of the work. Maybe there is merit, let's read on

Having read the above, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history. Many more people today know more about China's exploding cell-phone batteries than they do about the hundred million dead and the untold amount of suffering that occurred under communism.

therefore we arrive at the morally virtuous conclusion that: When you hear about shoddy products coming from China or wheat poorly processed, imagine millions in famine, with parents swapping children to eat in order to stay alive. And what do China's critics today recommend? More control by the government. Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it.

In short, according to this article: regulation of food safety in China, or any type of quality control mandated by the Chinese government would be in essence a return to totalitarian control, and *gasp*, first step on the slippery slope back to communism!

Think of all the people that will die if the Chinese government have its way and force the food companies to adhere to food safety! Pleasssssse, save the children!!!!!~

Friday, July 20, 2007

Austin

Back in Austin this weekend. It was suppose to take 3 hours, I drove here in 2. The weather here is unusual in what seems in Houston as completely normal, endless rain.

Don't miss school anymore. At least, with no reason to. Internship is going very well, and I want to start working full time, learn for a few years and go work overseas - in London, Amsterdam, or Dubai. There is no one here at the moment for whom I would stay for. All I need to do is to take a deep breath and finish.

And what was the last 4 years but holding a long breath. People, their insecurities and fears have moved on while I stood still. Now it seems the path before me stretches into the horizon without a single person in sight. What remains feels... like exhilaration.

Time to start running... going to grab this opportunity and run as fast and as far as I can, until nothing around is recognizable, until the faces of people are no more than mists in memory.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Rice and Political Autarky

I was curious as to the dietary staples of the Middle East. Upon inquiring a Jordanian friend of mine, Rami, on whether rice is grown and eaten in huge quantities in the region, the answer was "no".

Why doesn't the Middle Eastern countries grow rice? Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent is one of the earliest areas to cultivate rice, yet one ponders why the present day Middle East does not continue this tradition.

At first I thought it was a shift in life style, something like the Second Consonant Shift in the German language, but instead of a change in language, there was a change in diet. One could come to the conclusion that the present state of food in the Middle East is just a natural evolution of habits, cultural interaction, climate. Upon closer examination, perhaps only the first two explanation can withstand scrutiny. Modern day Middle East is fully capable of growing rice, despite people routinely mistakes the Middle Eastern countries as being full of deserts.

When I posited habits and cultural interaction as factors in the change of diet in the Middle East, I wasn't expecting the answer to be so cynical. Today, the only Middle Eastern country that grows rice is: Iran. Another country is just starting to grow rice again: Syria. Rice growing is a method of exerting independence from foreign powers. When you start to grow your own food from the land, as oppose to relying on subsidized food imported by the express policies of the regime, the population gains a degree of autonomy.

Iran under the Shah did not grow rice, but now it is the biggest rice growing country in the Middle East.

Syria is only growing rice because it is afraid that the U.S. will embargo them.

The regimes in the Middle East lack the willpower to invest in their own agricultural system. Or anything else for that matter; no agriculture, no industry, everything is imported. The populace is kept dependent on the autocratic regimes that put the whole country on perpetual life support.

Monday, July 02, 2007

A Friend Whom I still Remember and Wish to Know

Six months ago I asked one of my female cousins about how her best friend is doing. The three of us went to the same elementary school back in Gaozhou, and I had a crush on her best friend. I had my hopes.

I found out that she was studying to become a clinical psychologist. It was an odd choice, my cousin mentioned, because the recognition and treatment of psychological disorders is not widely talked about in Southern China. Reminiscing about her, it didn't seem odd at all. She was quiet, had good grades, and hid a tremendous will. The imagination that one can change things and people around her for the better is a universal dream. Becoming a clinical psychologist is a... romantic way of realizing it. But why not? If a person can be happy in changing society for the better, then they deserve pleasure in their choice of jobs.

"She has a boyfriend", my cousin said. Ok, fair enough, I thought to myself - when you really want to know, then the truth is inevitable.

"Her boyfriend is wealthy too, he comes from a family that is pretty successful in commerce" Right, directly to the business then.

After struggling to word everything carefully, I asked my cousin if she had a picture of her friend. She asks, puzzled, "For what?"

When I said it was for reminiscence, cousin retorted back, "What is there to reminiscence about?"

I had to chide my cousin to get away with it all. Yet... what is there to reminisce about?

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Five Four

Had it been spurred mainly by economic grievances, it would have little resonance in today’s China, where the standard of living in the cities is so much higher than it was then. If it had been moved by a desire for things American, satisfaction has in many ways been more than granted: fast food, Hollywood films, television quiz shows are everywhere, business principles are exercised more vigorously at all levels of administration than in the US itself. The reason the memory of 4 June still haunts officialdom is that it was about something that high-speed growth and giddy consumerism have not altered. For despite all the economic records it is setting, China today is not a sea of social calm.

Diary - Chaohua Wang

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Raining pretty hard these few days. A welcome respite in this region. Roommates and work group went to Schlitterbahn and San Antonio for the weekend, but I didn't want to go to the water park again.

This week, traveling abroad came up during work. Nigeria came up simply because it is so dangerous. Separated by distance and fascinated by colleagues who had been there, people talk about it with equal measures of relief and envy. This is a country that looses almost half of its oil income to corruption and theft. Daily, people try to tap into pipelines by blowing part of it up or drill holes in them. And when they get injured or killed, the oil company gets blamed.

One has gotten accustomed to thinking that the Middle East is not safe. But the most problematic country, Saudi Arabia, has kicked out every other foreign company a long time ago. Its state oil company, Saudi Aramco, dwarfs all the Majors. It single handedly controls all the oil in the kingdom. The kingdom, meanwhile, has become a buffer in the Middle East. It separates the Israel, Iraq, and Turkey hot zone from the relatively stable southern Arabian peninsula.

Everyone wants to go to Oman. The safest country in the middle east. It would not be an exaggeration to say it is safer than Houston. One can drive at any time to the beautiful interior, or enjoy the beaches. Dubai is mere hours away by plane...

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Making of an EVE industrialist - part deux

The strip miner business is going smoothly. Since last month, I have been able to reduce waste on the laser manufacturing process by 12% by training up my production efficiency skill. A miner that use to have a 25% waste factor has been reduced to merely 13%, and sometimes 9% for parts that require the rarer, more expensive refined minerals. This means margins have increased. Before, it used to take 1.5 million ISKs to create a miner, now it takes 1.35 million ISKs; an 10% cost reduction on every unit I make.

Marketing and distribution

Manufacturing is the easiest part of this enterprise. It take no more than collecting the required materials in the appropriate amounts, a blueprint, and clicking on a button. Setup cost and running cost of production is negligible. Anyone can use a manufacturing spot on a space station, the availability of which is driven by supply and demand.

The real cost is in the time it takes to transport materials into the manufacturing station and selling the finished products. I use to manufacture in large bulks and sell them in bulks with a single price. However, In EVE, products have no brands, and therefore distribution and pricing are the only strategies. I discovered that I can make more money if I produce in fewer batches.

By producing in smaller batches, I can price my products according to the supply and demand at several different points in time as oppose to one point in time. Smaller batches are also easier to sell because the market lists the sellers from the least amount of a product on escrow to the most amount of a product on the market. I was able to achieve 80% sales within the first hour of putting my products in the market as oppose to days when placing them in bulks.

There are times, however, when an industrialist with a better researched blueprint flood the market with hundreds of units of strip miners at fire sale prices. No other prices come even close and the other products takes days, even weeks to sell. Eventually, when those cheap miners gets sold, there is a surprising lull in the market as the other manufacturers have basically gave it up for a few days. During this time, the rest of the products gets slowly cleared from market and a shortage occurs. I stumbled on to this lull one or two times and was able to price my miners at ridiculous prices and have them sold within 2 to 3 hours.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Lectures about Heaven - Thomas Laqueur

Stern’s ancestors stood at the pinnacle of the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated middle class, who regarded culture generally and Wissenschaft – science in the broadest, purest sense – as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. All four of his great-grandfathers, both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held out the promise of a dispassionate, unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced this calling: at the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 2 per cent of German doctors were Jews; by the early 20th century, at a time when Jews constituted something like 1 per cent of the population, they provided 16 per cent of all doctors. The proportion was far higher in big cities. Excluded from the higher ranks of the civil service and the military, medicine offered them entry into the life of the nation.

Forgiving Germany

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Foreigners surveyed about Chinese cinema

So how do you factor in?

After coming to China, what do you think the greatest difference is between China in the movies and China in reality?

2. It's not a bunch of fighting all the time - you never see people who know kung-fu or who can fly: 18%

Thursday, May 24, 2007

EVE

Playing EVE itself is a constant lesson in market capitalism.



I started a strip miner manufacturing business with the help of some capital donation. Since I have no compunction to generate a return right away, I squandered a few million ISKs just shopping around, buying a few frigates and fitting them to my fancy. By the time I started manufacturing, the business is under tremendous financial pressure from daily operating activities.

Another mistake was inadequate research: I got into the strip miner manufacturing business because EVE's economy is based on mining; strip miners, along with their tech 2 cousins, Strip Miner II, are the most powerful mining lasers in EVE. My logic was to tap into this constant demand and go for a steady stream of income... but a variety of factors proved that the initial optimism is simply nativity.

One, I chose to manufacture and sell in the most competitive solar system in the game: Jita. It is the biggest market exchange in the universe with 500 players buying and selling on average and 700 on peak time. The pricing arbitrage that takes place is a killer. Not only are input prices high due to the fact a lot of rich players shop here, but the margins for end-user products are extremely low because of the price competition.

Two, the capital involved for strip miner manufacturing is tremendous. Aside from the blueprint, the materials involved in making a strip miner costs more than 1 million ISKs. As an upstart industrialist researcher, my character's low manufacturing skills means that the production process is very wasteful. Around 25% of the input materials are discarded as waste. This puts the manufacturing cost of one unit of strip miner around 1.5 million ISKs. At one time, the prices for strip miners in Jita are little more than 1.5 million ISKs, recouping the initial capital will take weeks at this rate.

Three, time and distance is a big factor in buying and selling. Since all the public manufacturing facilities are already in use in the region, I had to establish my base of operations in a system one jump away from Jita. The difference in this one jump is between night and day. Because the new system is not in The Forge region as Jita, the products do not show on the Jita market. Here the demand for mining tools is really erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes it takes weeks to sell one product. In addition, materials are just as difficult to procure as for end-user goods to sell. Transporting the finished good is not the problem, but getting the raw material input to the location is a huge headache. By myself, I had to spend hours in my destroyer hauling the materials purchased in Jita. Later I was to mitigate this factor by learning the skills and purchasing an industrial for the hauling. One problem is apparent: the operation is going to face big scaling challenges.

The Stasi on Our Minds - The New York Review of Books

The Lives of Others

Liked this movie very much, despite its faults.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

when the petals depart from the flower
当花瓣离开花朵

the faint aroma remains
暗香残留

the aroma fades after wind and rain
香消在风起雨后

and no one comes to smell
无人来嗅

if love tells me to continue on
如果爱告诉我走下去

I will press forward to the end
我会拼到爱尽头

if heart dies in the splendor
心若在灿烂中死去

love would revive in the ashes...
爱会在灰烬里重生


难忘缠绵细语时
用你笑容为我祭奠
让心在灿烂中死去
让爱在灰烬里重生
烈火烧过青草痕
看看又是一年春风
当花瓣离开花朵
暗香残留

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Erinnerung an die Marie A.

On that day in blue-mooned September
Quietly under a young plum tree
I held her there, that silent pale love
In my arm like a graceful dream.
And above us in the beautiful summer sky
was a cloud, which I saw for a long time
It was very white and immensely high
And when I looked up, there was no longer a sign.

Since that day many, many moons have
Quietly swum down and past.
The plum trees probably have been chopped off
And you ask me, how is it with the love?
So I say to you: I cannot remember.
And yet, sure, I do know what you mean
But her face, I really do not know it anymore
I only still know: Once I kissed it.

Even the kiss, I would have forgotten it long ago
had the cloud not been there
That I still know and will I always know
Very white it was and came from above.
Perhaps the plum trees are still flowering
And that women now perhaps has her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed only for minutes
And when I looked up, it already was disappearing in the wind.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

In the lovely month of May

Haven't written a real post in a while.









Probably read more books outside of class in the last four years than in class. The bad news is that the total number of those books are not many. The more interesting authors are Naipaul, Borges, various contributors of the LRB. At the moment I feel like reading nothing in particular and just something in general.

Some occasions, realized that the girl in front of me is a pale imitation of the woman I want. It is hard to imagine less when you think you have seen your ideal.

Staying another year in school. Why? To take ballroom dancing, read a bit more outside of class, build the resume a bit more, take a few more Chinese lit classes.

Wish there are more peers with the same interests and more lofty ideals. Most people just want to get by and not leave their mark on the world; they scoff at the notion of contributing something back to society, of making it better through sheer will and intellect. Even in this day and age of specialization and free exchange of ideas... disappointed.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Apocalypto

"My son... don't be afraid."

Monday, May 07, 2007

Spiderman 3

Too much exposition; where is the inquiry? where is the subtlety?

Rushed. Good overall, but the other points prevented it from being great.

Friday, May 04, 2007

安静 - 周杰伦

...
你要我说多难堪
我根本不想分开
为什么还要我用微笑來带过
我沒有这种天份
包容你也接受他
不用担心的太多
我会一直好好过

你已经远远离开
我也会慢慢走开
为什么我连分开都迁就着你
我真的沒有天份
安静的沒这么快
我会学着放弃你
是因为我太爱你
...






Monday, April 30, 2007

Regression toward the mean and cruel

In the marketplace of ideas, competition creates virtue.

Some people here at the business school have no maturity to participate in an open academic environment. Their grades might have gotten them here, but grades alone shouldn't keep them here. Trying to silence dissent and claim sole credit for teamwork is not only petty, but worst of all - against the spirit of the marketplace of ideas. The best part is that they end all their speech with a quote about how great a leader they are. How they can afford to live with that attitude and intellectual dishonesty just baffles me.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Necons in the Treasury

In Gold Digging, China Matters writes:

"Glaser injudiciously escalated the confrontation by promising further investigation of mom-and-pop banks in Macau, possibly an indictment of BDA’s directors for being knowing conspirators (something that was bruited about in the Macau press) and, most unwisely, threatened to make it known that Treasury considered Bank of China Macau to be implicated in the North Korean money laundering web.

This kind of threat against the reputation and viability of Bank of China Macau is the best explanation I can come up with for China’s remarkably harsh and pointed subsequent summons to Treasury...

If the sanctions against BDA were removed explicitly to facilitate the Six Party Agreement, then the legitimacy of Patriot Act Section 311 investigations—and their intimidating aura of implacable, inexorable malice—would be lost.

And Daniel Glaser and his boss, Stuart Levey, would look like jerks who had been using the pretext of supposed U.S. law enforcement obligations to promote a secret, unilateral, destabilizing North Korea policy under false pretenses...

Given the general contempt for North Korea and the credulity and sloppiness of most Western reporting on this subject, the only reason that we know or care that the Treasury Department is out to screw the North Koreans no matter what is the embarrassment and chaos its intransigence has brought to American diplomacy."

Friday, April 13, 2007

Ignorance Collides With Political Naïveté, and the Olympics become the Sandbox for the Promulgation of the Yellow Peril

"One possibility that activists are weighing: trying to get Olympic athletes to carry a replica of the Olympic torch from Darfur to the Chinese border."

Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields - New York Times

Perhaps Steven Spielberg should read The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan and redirects his letter to the Bush administration.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

The Good Tinker

Just watched The Good Shepherd. It reminded me of Smiley's People.

It seems the people who prefer discretion are the ones end up leaving their mark in the world.

Monday, April 02, 2007

April Fools from the Chinese media

Better than anything you read in the U.S.

some examples are: PhD holders are exempt from the one child policy, China would return to Daylight Savings Time, the Qianmen Tower had been sold off, Jinan had installed pipes for beer distribution, and counterfeit goods could be legally purchased with counterfeit money

and of course there is the other stuff about problems of higher education in China

Accountants, the soldiers of modernity

There is a Chinese saying, "Don't use good steel to make nails; don't use good people to make soldiers." We hear that from our parents, we hear that from our peers. If there is a profession that suffers the same level of under appreciation, it would be the accountant.

I suspect the hierarchy of the prestige ladder for Chinese people all over the world looks something like this:

1. Doctor (U.S. ones, of course)
2. Lawyer
3. Engineer (hard sciences)
4. Scientist
5. Entrepreneur (in China)
6. Engineer (software)
7. Accountant

For Chinese expats in the U.S.:

1. Doctor
2. Investment banker
3. Lawyer
4. Engineer (hard sciences)
5. Engineer (software)
6. Scientist (professor)
7. Entrepreneur
8. Accountant

The scientist is less desired by the Chinese community in the U.S. because they are so badly compensated. You spend your whole life to get a PhD and then end up getting paid $50,000 a year doing research in a lab.

The entrepreneur is lower on the ladder because the Chinese community here is conservative. Chinese parents prefer their kids to get jobs in big MNCs for job safety and also bragging rights "Oh yeah? my son works in the #3 Fortune Global 500 company!"

But, those who become scientists and entrepreneurs are true idealists, admired for their technical mastery and daring visions. So that leads me to the last on the ladder, the accountant.

Let me clarify the previous Chinese saying, one would not "willingly" use good steel for nails, nor "willingly" use good people to make soldiers. So, in this day and age, who would "willingly" become an accountant?

The idealist? Sure, young Chinese people dreammmm of becoming a number cruncher sitting in front of a general ledger.

The materialistic? I could start as an analyst in an investment bank for $100,000 a year, or I could be an accountant, working the same hours, and getting paid 50% less. The latter sounds like a deal!

To be sure, those who know a bit more about the accounting profession would say that Due Diligence and Compliance work approach the same level of respect that lawyers get, but doing anything meaningful in these work require you to be a Partner in any well respected accounting firm.

In short, there are very few people in the Chinese community who would willingly become accountants because the profession is perceived as equivalent of becoming a soldier. Indispensable? yes, like nails, but also commodity, expandable. Who would let their good sons and daughters become that?

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Study says: leave the multitasking to your computer

it took an average of 15 minutes to return to the task they were working on after being interrupted

our context-switching penalty is extremely high

Even a small distraction such as a noticeable sound playing in the background can hamper the formation of "declarative memory," which is necessary for a full understanding of a new idea.

Yu Qiuyu: why book reading is a waste

Unlike the yearnings of literati of old, I do not believe that reading is an important affair. Investigation, travel, experience, and creativity are more important for cultural insight.:

"Literature is somewhat different, but the American author Singer said that one sign of a mature writer is that he no longer reads books. For the highest plane of writing is consulting one's own soul and facing the silence of nature."

Saturday, March 24, 2007

黑社会 Election





I was really impressed by this movie. The knife fight scene(probably the only real fight scene in the whole movie) is intense in an movie that is filled with battles fought with wit.

I did not imagined the sequel: 黑社会2以和为贵 - Election 2 could best the first movie, but it surprised me. The ending message is just chilling. Just imagine that everything you do is really the whim of a greater power.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

The unbearable weariness of being

=( on recruiting. My self-esteem right now is like an old man who keeps yelling, "Oiy-my knees!"

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Amazon's Series of Fortunate Events

Computing power finally becomes a commodity

"...a high school student can rent one of the best, most proven, storage platforms of them all -- for a little less than $.50 per month. If he or she is willing to lay off the occaissional candy bar, he/she can be on an equal web infrastructure footing with the richest technology companies in the world. If I was an investor in MSFT, I might even ask if investing $200 million in Amazon makes more sense than $2 billion on your own technology and starting from scratch."

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

As Far as Florence







Netvibes RIP



Google finally puts its weight behind personalized homepage, and the result is beautiful.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Interview with Lego CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp

Lego finishes restructuring

sorrowing, as water streams without

I could speak to her on a day like this,
on a day when it rains as heavily.
You can open your heart on a day like this –
when you hear the clouds as the rain pours down
in gloom unbroken by light.

Those words won’t be heard by anyone else;
there’s not a soul around.
Just us, face to face, in each other’s sorrow
sorrowing, as water streams without
interruption;
it’s as if there’s no one else in the world.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Chinese financial magazines and media

From personal experience, Chinese magazines, TV talk shows regarding finance are much more technical than their U.S. counterparts.

The financial magazines and talk shows in China engages with the audiences very well. In this regard they mix investigative reports, common people reactions from the street along with technical exposés by famous financial figures in the U.S. It is no wonder then, these finance magazines and talk shows are ranked rather highly in the reader and viewer ratings.

In some aspect, this detailed technical focus reflects a tremendous curiosity and desire on the part of the audience to learn everything about the market.

Gmail outages



What is with the erratic outages lately? If Gmail turns out to have the same amounts of problems as blogger has, it is really going to hit Google's reputation. I couldn't access Gmail for over 30 minutes in just the past week. That puts Gmail's reliability around ~99.8%. This means I wouldn't want to use Gmail to communicate if I were the Navy or doing anything important, like pulling a major presentation that is worth 30% of my grade on Gmail for backup... oh wait, I just did that. Luckily I have a backup on flash drive.

Perhaps I am paranoid, but I see cracks everywhere on Google's services. Google spreadsheet being out competed by best of breed applications like EditGrid down the road. Lack of progress on natural language search and vertical search (although Google blog search is a good start). Blogger still remains behind the curve in terms of offering features that its competitors have for a long time. Now Gmail is having weird problems. Blogger and Gmail both have reliability issues. So instead of buying into Google when the stock price were at $440, I put my money into the S&P index.

Google really needs to refine its products now that they are mainstream, and focus on providing value added services for these products. It needs to do so in order to differentiate itself from all the upcoming startups, and must offer quality in order to survive.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Things

Things. In deluges.

Openings and closings, some are just the way I imagined them to be. I always smirk about the saddest things.

Time will pass you and this post by, and you would have gained nothing but a sense of your own mortality. Could there be a more sorrowful thing in the world?

The Buena Vista Social Club!

is awesome.

The Hardest Heart - Blank and Jones









Let the morning sun proclaim
The light of the world
Let the golden day unfurl
On every wave
On every hill

Each angered fist uncurl
Caress the hardest heart
Stir the sleeping earth
Each stone
Each blade of grass

The soul of the world
Ignite a brand new day
Let the morning sun proclaim
A brand new start
Caress the hardest heart

Caress the hardest heart

The soul of the world
Ignite a brand new day
A brand new start
A brand new way

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Parenting Advice from a Polish Holocaust Hero

Janusz Korczak

Search engine arbitrage and the decline of Google

R/W mentions that California is home to quarter of top 100 alt search engines. What is amazing about this news is not that California is the center of web innovation, rather, it is striking that there are 100 alternative search engines (and them being mentioned).

Other search engines like Naver are gaining strength in the local and vertical search markets. What puzzles me is that there are so few news about Google's search engine innovation in comparison to the torrents of startup specialized search engine companies. If Google fails to keep up in areas of natural language searches and vertical search, then it will loose its technology leadership. Furthermore, this might pave the way for best of breed products to replace Google in different industries. Result: erosion of Google market share.

Where is my termocline transducer?!

Wave farms

renewable energy from the oceans

Friday, March 02, 2007

Liechtenstein invaded!

Fri Mar 2, 8:51 AM ET

ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.
ADVERTISEMENT

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

雷场相思树




1986年电影《雷场相思树》片段 - 胡亚捷媒体资源

The Lives They Left Behind is the title of the movie.

Low quality, heavily abridged version. The files are in Real Player format.
http://kmyc.gbaopan.com/bt/e0/e07b622a92214cbe938a6e62aacfc25f.torrent
http://kmyc.gbaopan.com/bt/12/1267099c5eb44c9e8f9b4876533cf4aa.torrent

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Windows for Warships nears frontline service

For a Type 45 to be even vaguely worth having, you really do need five-nines, rock-solid dependability. A 90 per cent punt won't do here. Against six sea skimmers, that equates to only a 53 per cent chance of survival.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Monday, February 26, 2007

Al Qaeda has a China problem

Al Qaeda has a China problem, and no one is watching. Despite al Qaeda’s significant efforts to support Muslim insurgents in China, the Chinese government has succeeded in limiting popular support for anti-government violence.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Wednesday, February 21, 2007



YouTube - Real battle field video from Chinese Army (1984) part 1 of 7

Documentary. About The Second Sino-Vietnam war of 1984-1989. Part 1 of 7. The series shows the team taking a hill in 15 minutes.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Google defeated in Belgian copyright case; everyone but Google loses
Ma Ying-jeou resigns

My guess, the DPP controlled judiciary will find Ma guilty, sentence him to maximum number of years in jail, therefore giving the DPP victory in the next election.
don't want to sleep yet but must in order to wake up early. can't wake up early because I am forcing myself to lie in bed

Monday, February 12, 2007

If GRRM were to write the story of the Knight of the Laughing Tree, it would be the greatest story of all time. Until then...

His is the song of ice and fire

Sunday, February 11, 2007

What makes a master?

A Chinese air conditioner tycoon

A singing workforce, Mongolian millionaires in Porsches, and saving the planet—inside the empire of a Chinese tycoon with more than money on his mind

Zhang has never wavered from this technology, even when, in the early 2000s, market conditions temporarily turned against it and his sales force begged him to add normal, electric-powered air conditioners to Broad’s offerings. Its advantages all involve energy savings. Compared with typical compression systems, nonelectric air-conditioning as Broad makes it will always require less energy per unit of cooling, because when energy is converted from one form to another, some of it is lost. Electric-compression cooling requires more stages of conversion—fossil fuel to electricity at the power plant, electricity to mechanical power at the compressor, both stages very wasteful—than does using natural gas to boil liquid. Nonelectric cooling will also always be more adaptable to other sources of energy, since it is easier to apply a variety of heat sources, including solar power and biomass burning, to do the boiling than to use them to generate electricity in a remote plant and transmit it to the air-conditioning site. And this method of cooling helps reduce the costly peak loads imposed on the power grid, because natural gas is cheapest and most abundant in the summer, exactly when the demand for air- conditioning goes up. Indeed, since storing natural gas is expensive and difficult, in many countries the available gas is simply burned off—wasted—during the summer, when no one needs it for heating. In China, air-conditioning accounts for as much as 50 percent of the electric load during peak times in the summer. Zhang pointed out to me—as he has noted in countless speeches, and as is emphasized by the Harvard Business School case study—that with all of these advantages, his kind of air-conditioning can make both the electric and the natural-gas networks less wasteful while still keeping people cool in the summer. And while we’re at it: the nonelectric systems use a relatively benign natural salt (lithium bromide) rather than using—and inevitably releasing—Freon and other chlorine-based products that erode the Earth’s ozone layer.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Chinese refusal to recognise the authority of the Vatican is an "act of war", Hong Kong's cardinal tells the BBC.

Er, ok.

I think the cry of English kings down the centuries was, "Who runs Britain - the government or the Vatican?" Or in this case, "Who runs China - the government or the Vatican?"

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Costume dramas sing the main theme

As Ming Dynasty 1566 was being broadcast, an official in SARFT's TV show department revealed that starting in February and lasting for at least eight months, all cable TV stations would have to broadcast "main theme" television shows during prime time. As the news circulated, many local stations expressed confusion over the concept, not understanding where the line would be drawn - for example, would Ming Dynasty 1566 be considered main theme? Subsequently, an official at SARFT explained that "main theme" should be interpreted broadly, that it would primarily be a look at the value orientation of a show; as long as a show had a positive, uplifiting attitude toward life and expressed desirable emotions, there would, in general, be no problems. This could be a very innovative definition. Judging from this interpretation, Ming Dynasty 1566 ought to fall under the "main theme."

This is not an imperial drama that preaches reverence for royal power. What it describes is not the "rise of a great nation," but rather the lessons of a great nation's fall. This is the critical era when feudal Chinese society moved from prosperity into decline. Here, we see the corruption of the political system and the loss of humanity, we see the rulers issuing decrees and the insecurity of the common people, and we see the long-absent Hai Rui - he lambasted the emperor, was dismissed from office, and 400 years later even became the fuse that set off the Cultural Revolution - at odds with the bureaucratic system. The show discovers the impotence of morality yet praises moral beauty. It seems to lead us to believe that the just, upright, filial Hai Rui is the backbone of the Chinese people, a representative of outstanding culture, the hope of modern China. There is no question that the Hai Rui of Ming Dynasty 1566 is yet another performance of the "main theme" of the traditional spirit of the Chinese people.

However, in that age of exploding population, a calcified system, slack law enforcement, and an insular country, regardless of how pure or corrupt the officials or how worthy or foolish the emperor, the sun would ultimately set on the massive, once-flourishing empire that had exhausted its potential. Hai Rui used a Puritan-like moral self-discipline and lofty ideals as instruments to transform society, intervening in land rights, placing limits on the brutal gentry, and controlling corruption, but ultimately things could not be repaired, and things even turned out contrary to his desires. Morality evidently cannot replace the rule of law; public opinion cannot replace the rule of law; severe penal codes cannot represent a true legal system. Hai Rui used all his strength to sound the "main theme," but it was the "Guangling Melody"* of the old era, and ultimately never entered the powerful current of modernity.

Monday, February 05, 2007

The Kingdom of This World

In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the midst of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Disappointed by 龙应台's writings. She seems to think that Chinese people are sheep incapable of thinking or acting for themselves and therefore must be guided like children (shown in 中国人,你为什么不生气?).

She also helped promulgate the stereotype that Shanghainese men (and of course by extension - Chinese men) are effeminate.

This reminds of me of something in our 12th grade AP U.S. history book. It mentioned an American female (anti)feminist who urge women to wait for their husbands to get home from work by wearing an apron, "and that's all!".

Ok, the comparison is a bit crude and comic. So are 龙应台's writings.
Prejudice for all

Stereotypes of Chinese people from different regions of the country.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Is modern Chinese in need of a revival?

In this sort of outcome, the variety of unique perceptions and creative discovery stemming from individual observation have been obliterated. I am indeed speaking, but not my own words; rather, I am following the current thinking pattern, as if a steamroller has rolled across my heart.

Read the comments

Love is the Pulse of the Stars

Something from my childhood:













Monday, January 22, 2007

A gust of wind carried away the verses of the ages 一阵风 , 留下了千古绝唱

Back for a week now; school has started, I'll slowly recall my trip and write it down.

I find it hard not to despair a little after traveling. The enormity of China's problems are there for everyone to see. Here are some notes on the places I visited, in chronological order; I'll revisit them periodically and add details I remember.

Guangzhou:

Airport - Sleek, clean and awe inspiring. Impressed. Cousin jests that it is built with blood.




Smog, bridges, cars, traffic, new airport, and new metro. Living in Guangzhou is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Wake up in the morning, taxi around all day, and by the time you get back home your nose is all black. Pictures of the lungs of chronic smokers come to mind.




Not yet Hong Kong, but getting there. West side of the city have apartments like those towering buildings of Hong Kong. The environment is cleaner on this side too, well, all except for the half-black-half-brown river one can see during the day.




Real estate prices: 500,000 - 1,000,000 RMB - 2 bedroom 1 living room to 3 bedrooms 1 living room. that is $60,000 - $125,000. Consider the average income of Guangzhou is around $7,500 (for those who are well off), it takes a couple of lifetimes to pay off the mortgage. Actually the prices are pretty "reasonable" if one compares Guangzhou to the other less well developed big cities in China. A lot of overseas Chinese investors. They buy a unit, contributing to the price inflation, in hopes that one day they can retire here. In the meanwhile, they will rent it out and let the rent for for itself. Expected more Hong Kong investors and higher price inflation, but I guess they are all in Shenzhen, where the real estate are 2 to 3 times more expensive.

Metro - best subway system I've experienced. A marvel of Teutonic engineering. Cousin mentioned that the city's public servants' salaries were frozen for a couple of years to contribute the subway.

Food - when one thinks of Chinese food, it is actually Guangdong cuisine they are thinking about.


Ningbo:




Poor country side, reminds of the cultural revolution movies. Especially miserable because of the cold weather. As a general rule, the countrysides get poorer and poorer the further north one gets.

Home of Jiang Jieshi - didn't/don't care.

Place of Zhang Xuelang's first imprisonment - lonely, cold. worthy place of imprisonment for a hero.


Putou Shan - Monks try to rip people off, WTF. This is one thing that I am really furious about.

Uncle's high school classmate, now a PLAN captain, invited us to dinner. Got drunk. Never drinking with PLAN naval officers again.

Fast boat to Shanghai.



Shanghai: It's cold here. The winds cut to the bone, and even northerners complain about the freezing weather. Cousins sleep with windows open when it is 4 degrees Celsius outside...

Suzhou: Just another travel spot




Nanjing: Zhong San Ling, the steps become harder and harder to climb the high up you are. Sun Zhongsan is about 5'5''-6''. The city seems a bit desolate.

Hangzhou: Just another travel spot

Maoming: Didn't realize how poor it is until I saw it this time. Well, it is a developing city.

Gaozhou: second home. Even in a small (relatively speaking) such as this, there are huge wealth disparities. For example, Me and two cousins, including one of their parents and my grandfather and grandmother use to/still live in a 3 story/now 2 story (1st floor rented out) house. Whereas one of my cousins has two floors of his family's 7 floor house all to himself. Although, while living here I have never felt "poor". There were always things I would like, but I was too busy studying to begrudge.


Zhanjiang, Nanyou: Never saw Zhanjiang proper until this time. I grew up in a medium enclave called Nanyou, a bit south(?) of Zhanjiang proper. It is the base of operations (is it the HQ? I'm not sure) of CNOOC in the south.






The place I lived is still the same, fifth floor of a building bordering on: civilization, a hospital, a water pumping station, and the country side. #2-18. Even the discoloration on the building is still there. I wonder if any of my childhood friends are still there. They are probably in college, Winter Vacation don't start for them until the end of January. On second look, where I grew up is really not a bad place to live. Nanyou is pretty nice, palm trees everywhere, the park during night time is lovely, you can see the beach and occasionally, fishing boats. There was a French village here that my mom never told me about until I came home this time... I swear, some adults treat kids like they don't/shouldn't know anything...





The elementary school I attended has changed its name. From Nanyou Second District Elementary School to Nanyou Central Primary School. Just another way of saying it got upgraded. The arboretum is still the same: small. But the plants inside are as green as I remembered them. Green and brown. Leaves and dirt.



I remember digging up cicadas around here. During the summer, you can start digging on the dirt around the trees. About a few inches down you will find unhatched cicadas, sleeping. What is weird is that occasionally we find red, soft coral like flowers (they have no leaves, only the stem part that grows out like a flower). When we dig down we find that the root is actually a unhatched cicada. The plant sprout from the cicada's body. And like the Cicada flower, people in Nanyou are from different places in China, transplanted and sprout up in a protective body, and grow up to be beautiful but strange.

Perhaps it is the sea wind here, my aunt remarked that I was once very dark. Now I am all pale (relatively speaking). I think my complexion is once brown, from the sun and the palm trees. Of all the places, I never thought I would miss this place. I wonder when will I be back next time? If only to walk among the rocks in the park during sunset, and feel the sea wind.