HK TV dramas 1

Never thought one day I would start pimping for HK serial dramas. But A Step Into the Past is funny enough to merit an entry. What? are you expecting a synopsis or something? That would defeat the whole purpose.

My overall critique of HK dramas in general is the film stock used. Given the amount of attention and details going into costumes, filming the series with a stock that preserve the colors would add much to the production values. Although I could see how more vibrant colors would detract from the historic aspect of dramas in general. Both are artistic directions that I'm ambivalent about.

Reason and Imagination

"The leading group of 1930s poets, other perhaps than Empson, admired technology (all those pylons in poems), but, unlike the Romantics, seem to have had no sense of living in an era of scientific wonders."

The interwar years in general, Needham in particular and China peripherally.

Hobsbawm's description of the 1930s era inadvertently describes a feeling that I can't quite put my finger on, and that is whether Chinese language and culture is a determinism, and of science in particular.

If we look, even now, majority of (public) Chinese intellectuals (as measured in the audibility of their opinions and ability to stir debate) are not engaged in the sciences but in the arts. This is the Chinese version of the gap between reason and imagination that Hobsbawm writes of interwar Cambridge. Except in China's case, the gulf has yet to be bridged...

Progress

Summary of the progress of internet and freedom of speech in China

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The guilt of being fantastic

These messages were sent while you were offline.

3:38 AM basti:
I just woke up with this story idea: the guilt of being fantastic..

I was thinking about political frustration on the part of the liberal mass in this country and how their attempts at political expression are subordinate to their party's tendency to political expedience. For example, opposition to the Middle East conflict. A very large number of voters oppose it on moral, ideological grounds, and they see that they have only a single political choice in the system, no other. But the political situation limits the ability of this party to provide substantive objections. The best the party can do is object on empirical rather than theoretical grounds that mismanagement and inefficiency are the problem; nothing about moral violations.

Well the story idea is something about the guilt of someone who is fantastic. What if the conflict had been executed fantastically but with great tragedy morally? A cynical observer of American politics would suggest that opposition to the conflict would then be marginalized. What if this person in the story is a personification of this… someone who is so fantastic at everything he does that he begins to lose track of substantive ideological objection, because it stops having practical meaning to him.

And maybe the guilt from this…

Bleh

nVidia's CEO recently had this piece of fool's gold for everybody.

“We’re all trying to figure out what a netbook is. From my perspective, anything that has an X86 processor and has Windows running on it is really a PC”

Huh? Aside from being the industry's only profitable product in the current economic climate. The incredibly mobile form factor and the attractive pricing range... Sure, a netbook is just like your PC, the same way that a mainframe is just another 'PC'.

Here I was thinking to myself, Jen-Hsun Huang can't be stupid since he is CEO a company that lives by innovating on the cutting edge. On closer look nVidia has yet to make any money from the netbook craze. And now he drum up plenty of FUD to avoid begging Intel to give him a ticket on the last lifeboat.

That leaves his remarks as disappointingly dishonest from an intellectual viewpoint. He knows full well the importance of netbooks otherwise he wouldn't be so enthusiastic about the 'Ion' platform. His style of sales pitch is repulsive to the neutral observer.

We want our independence... and a U.S. passport too!

In December 2006, Lin hired Charles Camp to represent this case in the US legal system. Lin cited the fact that Japan merely gave up its power over Taiwan and the Pescadores after surrendering in World War II and that it did not return Taiwan’s sovereignty rights to China. He also said that the San Francisco Peace Treaty did not deal with the sovereignty issues of Taiwan and the Pescadores, adding that the US was still Taiwan’s principal occupying power.


And God Bless the United States of America!


Full disclosure: I am a U.S. citizen.

Dream sequence

in episode 3...