OLED with blue methyl alcohol fuel

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy... Jedimaster

Spacing out on the bus. Missing my stops.

foreign authors win 4 of 6 major French literary prizes

the Yangtze freshwater dolphin (baiji) appears to be extinct

Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind - NYTimes

狼图腾

Getting Rich - Pankaj Mishra reports from Shanghai

‘Alternative modernity’ and ‘institutional innovation’ may also sound like mere slogans. The New Left belongs, after all, to a very small and powerless minority of intellectuals. But its growing appeal suggests that the post-Mao reversals of ideology and politics – based on a simple moral opposition between socialism and capitalism, the free market and the state, private and public property – are beginning to lose their force as the storm of progress blowing through China continues to scatter debris everywhere.

Is this what the final frontier has become? A golf course?

It is a troubling symbol of humanity's aspiration: the latest installment in our great space quest saw an astronaut tee off

Dégringolade
Union Sucrée

The first article I read about the decline of France. The scholarship of which, and many more self critiques made me believe that there is still hope for France in the future. If it wasn't for the alacrity with which these authors continue to seize the problems at hand, I would have given up on French long ago.

I offer something more with these thoughts, which only you will notice. Do you remember that moment by the banks of the Ganga? That silent dark? Those wanderings in imagined worlds? Those deep discussions in low, serious voices? The two of us sitting silently, saying nothing? That breeze at sunrise, that evening shadow! And, once, those rain-bearing clouds, Sravan’s downpour, the songs of Vidyapati? . . . I have concealed a handful of contentment and grief in these thoughts; open these pages once in a while and look upon them with affection, no one but you will be able to see what’s in them! The message inscribed into these words is – there’s one writing that you and I shall read. And there’s another writing for everyone else.

Selected Poems by Rabindranath Tagore

The prophecy of Saro-Wiwa

11 years after the Ogoni leader's brutal hanging, violence is erupting in the Niger delta region

P. W. Botha, Defender of Apartheid, Is Dead at 90

SHOCK-WORKERS AND LOAFERS.

"Как живут ударники?
Ударники живут хорошо.

How do shock-workers live?
Shock-workers live well."

Alexander Lipson. A Russian Course

Scientist at Work: Shing-Tung Yau

A Tell-All’s Tale: French Politicians Stray Early and Often

“When I was president of the republic, I was in love with 17 million French women,” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said in an interview taped for the television show “Private Life, Public Life” to be broadcast Wednesday. He added, “When I saw them in the crowd, they felt it and then they voted for me.”

Added the froth and bubble category, hope you like it.

Kindest regards,

  

Defcon: Everybody Dies has one of the best ambient atmospheres for a game.

You must listen to the soundtrack. It is a background of recycled air, radio chatter, static, and a soprano singing... perhaps of your loneliness. You can't help but feel like you are in a remote bunker pushing the button to end millions of lives. Then suddenly, you hear the faith sounds of a women crying... is she crying about someone who just died?

Disturbing.

China’s New Leftist

sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.

Comparison between Singapore and Hong Kong as the financial center of East Asia

On Gentlemen Giving
iPods as Gifts

I am speechless, how could I have been so foolish all along! Miss Keira you are mein guardian angel!~

Portal

You maybe required to perform simple tasks... these tasks will be supplemented with insurmontable obstacles...

French try woman as president - but first on a sitcom

The president of France has problems: plummeting approval ratings, few political allies, an outbreak of pimples before an important speech, and now this. She's barely past her first 100 days in office and she's pregnant.

Catastrophe!

Internet's future in 2020 debated

"The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent."

Biofuels: Green energy or grim reaper?

Competition in the food market by biofuels is an interesting point that I hadn't thought about.

"Governments also need to provide leadership in the form of economic incentives to minimise competition between food and fuel crops, and ensure that water, high-quality agricultural land, and biodiversity are not sacrificed on the altar of our convenience."

In China, Children of the Rich Learn Class, Minus the Struggle

“At the top of the pyramid will be exceptionally strong graduates from top American or European universities who become a sort of ‘international freemen,’ ” said Qiu Huadong, an author and editor who has written about the new elite. “They work several years in China, and then they go abroad for a while, shifting locations every few years. At the bottom of the pyramid will be those who didn’t get such an outstanding education, and they’ll be sweating and bleeding for China and globalization.”

China and U.S. involvement in Sudan

Unable to explain its awkward, unrealistic, and now disintegrating flirtation with this terrorist state, the White House understandably looks for a scapegoat:

China.

The title of the Washington Post’s September 6 editorial Responsible China? Darfur exposes Chinese hypocrisy pretty much conveys the political line of frustrated administration policymakers.

The United States and its European partners have called upon Sudan to let the U.N. force in. But China, which has enormous leverage over Sudan because of its investment in Sudanese oil fields, has failed to push the Sudanese into accepting the "realistic option" of a U.N. deployment.

Rather ironic that Sudan, which was supposed to serve as the keystone of Bush administration engagement with Africa, has turned into an exclusive sandbox for the Yellow Peril.

一江春水向东流

pictures of great libraries

The 9/11 report: a graphic adaptation

Gathering of friends, cooking, boisterous conversations, football game. Didn't care much about the football game, but all the others are dear to my heart.

An interview with Wang Guangya, China's ambassador to the U.N.

HP-10C series

Reverse Polish Notation ftw

Avatars and external memory

A symphony of civilizations

"It is the studio of an artist in the 17th-century Netherlands. In the foreground there are a tapestry, an empty chair and a table. A seated painter is trying to catch the essence of his model, a demure young woman, Clio, the Greek muse of history. On the wall, as a backdrop, is a large map of the Seventeen Provinces printed in Amsterdam. The scene is quiet but inspiring."

UT stuff

For now we see through a glass, darkly

一盘没有下完的棋

Filled with dread, you read the words she just inscribed: "The fields of battle lie in the hearts of men..."

  
I-No

  

I-No

   I-No

The Rest of the Lenna Story

Danube steamboat captain's hat

As a most irksome matter, I fired my memory module with manual memory timing. Now I must RMA both the motherboard and the memory. Curses! Why must my attempts to build a new computer be foiled at every turn?!

Currently contemplating getting a black 13.3" Mac Book sometime in August when Merom comes out.

Went to Chicago this last weekend. Tried Taste of Chicago, which is good but expensive. Got soaked in the two public fountain columns. The faces on them reminded me of Bladerunner. The city is lovely. I wouldn't mind living here if I am working for the right company. Unlike other city archtectures of empty downtowns, Chicago has residential complexes throughout the entire city. Which translates into more public events, more social gatherings, and more culture. At night, watched the Orchestra play "Battleship Potemkin" in the open air concert stage. Later watched fireworks at Navy Pier.

Repaired to a suburb of Chicago at dawn and slept wondering when was the last time I went to bed with the windows open.

Went to Chinatown the next morning and ate at Joy Yee's, which tastes even better than the food in Houston. The picturesque buildings of the Chinatown unsettled me somehow. Especially this one building facing the new plaza... There is something about it that gives me pause. Old Chinatown reminded me of the non-existent spaces between the buildings.

The Nurse

I am watching Deadwood right now, so naturally, this interesting peice about the evolution of the Western genre caught my eye - The Legacy of Sergio Leone

So what justifies the enormous price difference? The majority of the costs result from customer support and driver development. No OpenGL workstation user is allowed to be left alone with his problems, where it's the complete opposite for the gamer. Additionally, it takes a long time before OpenGL drivers can be certified as "stable", so the manufacturers pass these increased costs on to the customer. Why does no-one complain? That's easy: workstations for engineers and designers make a considerable contribution to creating value in the production process. Procurement costs are of little importance, since the workstations are a business expense, and mostly pay for themselves within a short time.

LRB | Alain Supiot : The Condition of France

"Having made the fight against delinquency the main plank of his electoral programme, he (Nicolas Sarkozy) had referred to young people in the banlieues as ‘riff-raff’ whom he intended to ‘power-hose’ off the streets. The fact that a minister could talk like a gangster and so put a match to the powder that had long been collecting in the most deprived neighbourhoods of the Republic, is not simply a sign of incompetence. It is first and foremost a sign that an age-old achievement of our Western juridical systems – the distinction between a public office and the person who occupies it – is being called into question."

Learning Arabic in France

But the ‘first true Orientalist’ according to Irwin was Guillaume Postel, who travelled to Constantinople in 1535 on a French royal commission to collect Eastern manuscripts, and promptly learned Arabic, Turkish and Coptic (among other languages) to add to the Hebrew he had mastered as a schoolboy. Postel wasn’t a Christian evangelist: his beliefs were weirder. They included the opinion that world peace could be achieved if everybody spoke Hebrew; and a conviction that he had met the Shekinah (a manifestation of divinity) in the form of a Venetian woman whose X-ray vision allowed her to look into the Earth’s core and see Satan. For this he was officially declared insane (but not a heretic) by the Inquisition in Venice. He spent much of his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably incarcerated in a Paris asylum.

Two hundred years later, it was not much easier to learn Arabic in France.

Texas Connie and the Desert Roses

György Ligeti is dead! Long live György Ligeti!

24 Science Blogs:

It was ignored and abandoned as an early, failed experiment in the politics of personal destruction and orchestrated national security hysteria - So Long Wen Ho Lee

If covering video games sounds like all play and no work, think again - A day in the life of an analyst

"I have done what was possible - I have made friends" - Tagore in China

King's 'Dream' Plays in Beijing - New York Times

Lost in translation

"An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."

"Commander, we've got incoming …"

"How many?"

"My screen is full of bogies"

"Prepare our response. What is your prognosis?"

"I envision Total Annihilation."

The contest for memory

Wired News: The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool: "Semantic Traffic Analyzer"

France Debates Downloads, With Teenager as Top Expert - New York Times

Last word - Books - Times Online

"Tightly plotted Has a beginning and a middle, and you find out whodunnit at the end."

Inside Business - 07/05/2006: Gold price to kick into full gear: Faber

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Cloaking device' idea proposed

Essays: 'Hammer & tickle' by Ben Lewis | Prospect Magazine May 2006 issue 122

"It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert—somewhat tenuously—that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves."

Internet culture spells doom for strait-laced orthographers

The tyranny of choice

qatsi

External links:

Koyaanisqatsi

Powaqqatsi

Naqoyqatsi

A man apart

Read Fateless in 2002.

HKLNA-Project (Hong Kong's Neighbors)

Registration time

A time of farewells. Even though we've been only here for 3 years, people are already leaving. The sad part is that they became good friends just recently. And just like that, we meet and then we disburse into the world. I hate saying goodbyes, especially when you might never see them again in this life time.

Prof. Gustafsson wants us to remember one thing from the course, even after we have forgotten everything else, the question "what is the center of awareness of our time?"

In Soviet Russia, You hit the Bus.

Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Alan Berg in class. Heard "Rite of Spring", No. 8 "Night" and watched parts of "Wozzeck". I can't help but be fascinated by these three pieces, especially the scene in wozzeck when the protagonist returns to the river bank:

"Murder! Murder!"
"They are on to me! Wait, that was my own voice, ha..haha"
"Murder! Murder!"

Death is a master from Germany indeed.

The Ruby Ford

Elfen Lied and Gustav Klimt

Elfen Lied and Gustav Klimt

Elfen Lied (pronounced 'lead') it is an anime redemption story with your typical senseless dismembered body parts and a love triangle that (conveiently) keeps the protagonist safe. In actuality the whole series is a gigantic fan service with pathetic attempts to build a plot. It suffers the same problems that animes today seems to suffer. They include, but not exclusively: attempts to build humor by showing women in various stages of undressing, use of German to cover ignorance and superficiality of the artists, and flashbacks.

The only redeeming quality is the opening music cutscene with the main characters transposed into Gustav Klimt's pictures.

Eduard Mörike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One China, Many Paths - Chaohua Wang

Good book. Read it from cover to cover.

FT.com / Business life - Lessons in life and leadership

'Earthly Powers,' by Michael Burleigh - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

Techdirt: Ubisoft's Use Of The (Star)Force Lands It In Court

Tom Stoppard Quotes - The Quotations Page

Arts Unlimited | Arts | Keynotes archive

Rainy day

Last night/ this morning, my LCD sponaneously combusted. I was playing Oblivion when the whole screen start flickering black and white and smoke started billowing out of it.

Rainy day today; UT is on a hill so every step is an oncoming stream of water. Decided to skip class so I can get back to the apartment and empty out the gold fish in my shoe.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Sinister secret of snail's escape

Granta: 'We Love China' by Lindsey Hilsum

The Chick-Lit Pandemic - New York Times

[暴笑]一个馒头引发的血案（改编《无极》） - ≮礼尚网来≯

一个馒头引发的血案

Stem cell experts seek rabbit-human embryo

· Hybrid will hasten research, say scientists
· Grey area exposed in regulation procedures

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian

British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. If granted consent, the team will use the embryos to produce stem cells that carry genetic defects, in the hope that studying them will help understand the complex mechanisms behind incurable human diseases.

The proposal drew strong criticism from opponents to embryo research who yesterday challenged the ethics of the research and branded the work repugnant.

Plans for the experiments have been put forward by Professor Chris Shaw, a neurologist and expert in motor neurone disease at King's College London, and Professor Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh University-based creator of Dolly the sheep, as a way of overcoming the shortage of fresh human eggs available for research.

"The fertility of rabbits is legendary," said Prof Shaw. "The most important thing is that with animal eggs, we have a much better chance of generating stem cells and if we wait for human eggs, it's going to be maybe a decade before we can do this. If we can use animal eggs, we could maybe have stem cells within one or two years," he added.

Scientists use eggs in research to create cloned embryos, from which they harvest stem cells. By producing stem cells that carry the genetic defects of diseases, researchers believe they will be able to unravel how a cell's molecular machinery goes wrong, potentially leading to new cures for disease. But the research is progressing slowly, hampered by a severe shortage of "spare" eggs donated by couples undergoing fertility treatment.

Prof Shaw's team will need a licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority before they are allowed to pursue the research. "As with all research involving human embryos, the research team would have to show that the research is both necessary and desirable, and that any embryo created could not be allowed to develop for longer than 14 days or be implanted in a woman," said Dr Chris O'Toole, head of research regulation at the HFEA.

If the researchers are granted consent, they will not be the first to fuse human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2003, Huizhen Sheng at Shanghai Second Medical University published work in which she claimed to have extracted stem cells from hybrid embryos made from rabbit eggs.

To make a hybrid embryo, a human skin cell would be taken from a person with motor neurone disease and injected into a hollowed-out rabbit egg. The resulting embryo would contain only a tiny amount of rabbit DNA in a microscopic structure that generates energy in the cell. The rest of the DNA would be human. If the experiment is successful, within a week, the egg will have divided to form a tiny ball of a 200 or so cells, from which stem cells could be extracted.

The embryos could not legally be implanted into a woman's womb and the stem cells would not be safe to implant because they would be rejected by the immune system. "They will never grow beyond the 200 cell stage and they will have no human features," said Prof Shaw.

The proposal exposes a grey area in British regulation, however, as officials at the HFEA admitted it was questionable whether the resulting embryo was human. "That's the question and it's for the government, the HFEA and lawyers to work out," said Prof Shaw.

Josephine Quintavalle of the lobby group Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: "There is a lot of innate wisdom in the yuk factor, or repugnance as it is also known. My question is: what will they actually create? It is simplistic or deliberately deceptive to say they are simply making stem cells. In order to obtain stem cells they surely have to go through the blastocyst stage; they have to create a 'something' from which to derive the new cells. What is this something? It must be human to be of any use to researchers."

Professor Sir John Gurdon, a Cambridge University researcher, already uses similar technology to investigate how eggs appear to be capable of converting adult cells into stem cells that can potentially grow into any tissue in the body. His experiments have so far focused on injecting DNA from human cells into frog eggs.

He said: "I don't see there's any ethical problem with what they are proposing. I don't see it as a human embryo, but it all comes back to the question of when you think life begins. Scientifically, though, I'm not persuaded it will work. If you put cells from one species into the egg of another, the egg may divide, but you could get a lot of genetic abnormality that won't lead to good quality stem cells."

Flame Warriors Home

On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense - Nietzsche

"It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually in flowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it."

The Bayeux Tapestry

Hidden Agenda

Beijing Censors Taken to Task in Party Circles - New York Times

Give me zlygl back fools!

Denmark's new values

Interesting, wasn't it in the 1990s that Denmark changed its language to less resemble German?

The Wild Hunt