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Is this right? Is this moral?
I'm sympathetic to any viewpoint that leads to an increase in concern for animal welfare, be it in the form of reduced factory farms, free-range animals, and reduction of meat-intake for various environmental or health regions. However, in the end, I don't think it's enough - I don't believe it's right to kill animals for human consumption. This op-ed in the New York Times, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable, summarizes the situation and the reasons for being vegan, which I'm in complete agreement with.
Also in the NY Times, a look at vegetarianism in literature (including Jonathan Safran Foer's recent book Eating Animals, which looks interesting) - Mau-mauing the flesh eaters.
Posted some photos in my photo gallery 照片, from my 2008-08 whale watching trip. For those contemplating going on a whale watch, you can read about my experience and advice, under knowledge 知識.
Interesting reads:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with blog posts and TUF Aftermath from episode ten.
On a related note, a cool video with best friends Anderson Silva and Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira: The Spider and the Minotaur.
The recent controversy in the animal rights/welfare community concerns the decision by the ASPCA to euthanize the dog Oreo. Some background: As I posted back in August, a dog, Oreo, was thrown off of a roof (Dog hurled from roof of Brooklyn housing project, Man is indicted on charge of throwing dog off building), survived, and was rehabilitated by the ASPCA.
However, the dog turned out to be violent and unpredictable, not surprising given the owner (certainly not the dog's fault). The ASPCA made the decision to euthanize Oreo, which led to some outcry (Deluge of pleas to spare Oreo, dog thrown off roof) but ultimately the ASPCA carried through with their decision (Oreo is dead).
I agree with the decision and the reasoning presented in their press release on the issue. In addition, PETA also wrote a cogent letter to the editor supporting the ASPCA's decision.
So while I am understanding and supportive of this decision, I am willing to consider alternate viewpoints. What disappoints me though, is that the "no-kill" side really makes no attempt at an intelligent, rational discussion. Rather they are completely based on emotions and bashing the ASPCA and PETA and accusing them of not really caring about animals. They completely fail to see or consider that there are many worse things an animal can have to endure than being peacefully euthanized, and thus believe that anyone who would do such a thing cannot possibly be motivated with the animal's best interests in mind.
The head of the movement seems especially egregious in this respect, having been charged with animal abuse in the past, due to a complete inability to take care of the animals.
One of the other canards that always gets mentioned by such groups is that PETA wants to kill all pit bulls. This is simply not the case, as can be seen by actually reading and understanding PETA's views on this issue: PETA's position on pit bull bans, PETA files: Position on pit bulls.
Posted the rest of my photos 照片 from my 2008-11 trip to Taiwan 台灣, part 2.
Posted some photos in my photo gallery 照片, from my trip last year around this time to Taiwan 台灣, part 1.
Very interesting research: How single parents affect the brain:
"When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain... preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents."
This article raises two important points. The first is obviously the importance of raising children in a two parent family. Although conservatives tend to be the group that ostensibly cares more about family values, the fact is that most seem more concerned with irrelevant issues such as gay marriage, and are themselves hypocritical when it comes to marriage and fidelity.
The other point though, is again the lesson that animals are not so different from humans. Or really, to properly phrase that, non-human animals are not so different from human animals. Consider the care animals have for their offspring: "degu mothers and fathers cared for their pups in similar ways, including sleeping next to or crouching over them, licking and grooming them, and playing with them. The fathers even exhibited a 'nursing-type' position."
Interesting articles:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with posts from episode nine.
Stephen King just released his latest novel, Under the Dome, which seems to be an epic in the style of The Stand, It, and Needful Things. I'm pretty excited to read it, not sure if I'll be able to hold out for the paperback or not...
I gathered up some of the recent reviews, as well as reviews for his latest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset, which recently came out in paperback, on my Knowledge 知識 : Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page.
君子之於禽獸也，見其生，不忍見其死；聞其聲，不忍食其肉。是以君子遠庖廚也。
- 孟子, 梁惠王上
So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter-house and cook-room.
- Mencius, King Hûi of Liang
In my opinion, (assuming I understand the context correctly), halfway there...
More on the abilities of animals: In pig cognition studies, reflections on parallels with humans (note the number of comments on how this makes it difficult to eat meat or makes one re-think eating meat), and Fowl, but photogenic, the beauty of chickens.
Also updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with TUF Aftermath from episode 8.
Interesting reads:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a posts from episode eight and filled in some older missing posts. Although I have not been updating Mike Wessel's posts, I did add his blog from the eighth episode, where he fought.
This makes me proud to live in Amherst: To Amherst, via Guantanamo Bay. "Under a petition Hooke submitted to the town’s Select Board - approved by a 2-1 vote Monday night - the town will call on Congress to rescind its ban on detainees resettling in the United States, and will welcome Ahmed Belbacha, originally from Algeria, and Ravil Mingazov, arrested in Pakistan, to Amherst."
Now if we can just do something about the bad roads and drivers...
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, another article on the incredible abilities of animals, this time: Good dog, smart dog. Consider one Labradoodle named Jet:
"He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall."
Most Americans are horrified at the thought of eating dogs, while at the same time not giving a second thought to having a hamburger or some bacon. Does this really make sense? Is this moral?
Fascinating article on dolphin intelligence: Why dolphins are deep thinkers. For instance, dolphins at an institute are trained to hold onto litter that fall into their pool, to give to trainers in return for fish, in order to keep the pools clean. However, one dolphin figured out the following strategy:
"When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification."
The article is full of other amazing examples of dolphin intelligence, but to me, the take away message is larger than just dolphins. The more we understand animals and their capacity for thoughts and emotions, the more we realize that they are not so dissimilar from humans, and the less we can justify our current treatment of them.
(credit: article originally seen on Letters From Taiwan)
Articles worth reading:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with all the existing episodes of TUF Aftermath. I found out Spike.com had a better listing of all the episodes than UFC.com, so I switched to that.
More interesting articles, from Slate:
One everyday thing that really annoys me is litter. Litter is all over the place - soda cans, water bottles, food wrappers, paper, not just in large cities but even all over areas like college campus. I've realized though, that this is just one manifestation of a larger phenomenon that really lowers my general impression of humanity - carelessness and indifference when it comes to actions that affect others. I wrote a short essay on carelessness, under my diatribes 謾罵 collection.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a few posts from episode seven.
Some interesting articles:
One thing at the top of my to-watch-list is Leaving Fear Behind, a 25 minute documentary about Tibetans living under Chinese rule (which I believe can be watched in full toward the middle of the above page).
Unsurprisingly, the filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, is now being tried for subversion. His lawyer was barred from the court. "Before he was forced to drop the case, the lawyer, Li Dunyong, said Mr. Wangchen had told him that he was tortured and that he had contracted hepatitis B while in custody. Since then, he has been held incommunicado."
So far, the Obama administration has been pretty disappointing on this front. This best sums up the failure of the administration's overly conciliatory approach: "'Beijing is emboldened by such moves,' said Ms. Tethong. 'They see a weakness in the U.S. government, and they’re going to exploit it. This idea that you’ll gain more through some backroom secret strategy does not work.'"
You'd think people would have learned something from the complete failure of the Olympics to bring about any tangible change in human rights in China.
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Afghanistan on the mind:
Other interesting reads:
Joe Lieberman: Hard to believe he was ever considered a Democrat. He really puts the lie in Lieberman.
Other idiocy:
Interesting articles:
Something I hope to write more about later - given our innate poor intuition when it comes to statistics, contrasted with the immense importance of solid statistical reasoning, means that statistics courses should be required coursework in college for all students. Here's just one example:
Interesting gadget articles, from Gizmodo:
Ereaders, books, and book-related:
On North Korea:
Two more updates to my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a few posts from episode six. Strangely, episode five of TUF Aftermath from last week isn't in the UFC video page (and so I don't know the direct link) but can be viewed directly on the main page.
More Carl Sagan Auto-tuned awesomeness:
On China:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
One of the best sites to go for desktop wallpaper is interfacelift.com. I'd like to have some of my photographs accepted to there, but unfortunately my sole submission to date was rejected. So for the time being, I'll be posting my wallpapers here, under Knowledge 知識, while I hone my craft.
Articles on animals:
Interesting:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with two more posts from episode five.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with some posts from episode five.
Added Rain Man and Monsters, Inc. to my list 清單 of favorite movies.
I also recently watched the movie Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman's novel. I thought it was pretty good, but a little more geared for adolescents without the same amount of charm for adults as Monster's Inc., and just short of my favorites list.
Added a link to TUF The Aftermath Episode 4 to my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page (in Knowledge 知 識).
More on driving:
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with the posts from episode four.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with the latest TUF Aftermath.
The Beauty of Airscape in Taiwan 福爾摩沙 空中散步 (make sure to watch in HD).
A while ago, in this post, I pointed out three interesting books mentioned in The Economist. One of the books, The Age of Empathy by Frans de Wall, just got a longer review in Slate.
It seems like a very interesting book, and is definitely on my to-read list. In particular, this passage in the review really struck me: "Joshua Plotnik, one of de Waal's colleagues in Thailand, witnessed one elephant try to push her dying friend into a standing position. When that didn't work, she stood supportively by her dying companion for days, even as humans tried to tempt her away with food."
To me, this just highlights how amazing animals are, and that the gap between humans and other animals is not so large as to justify the way we treat them. Just compare this behavior to the driver in Amherst recently, who drove into two bicyclists, killing one, and simply fled the scene rather than stop to help.
On a loosely related note, today I had the misfortune of running into this website - Conservapedia. It's as asinine as it sounds. Honestly, if someone were to create a comedic exaggeration of conservative America, it probably wouldn't end up that different from this page. Get the real news here.
My thoughts - 憂天憫人, 更憫動物
On Taiwan:
Added a few more links to The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs under Knowledge 知 識.
Updated my listing of The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with some blogs from episode 3 and links to The Ultimate Fighter: The Aftermath, a fifteen minute Q&A video segment airing each Monday following the show, hosted by Amir Sadollah with guests from the show.
Awesome:
If I was the kind of person who believed in seeing the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, based on the evidence - This peanut looks like a duck - I would get down on my knees and pray to the duck god.
(site seen on cute overload)
Bonus: why the grocery store checkout aisle should depress you, as explained by Stephan Pastis.
After hearing that Google added various sports calendars to Google Calendars, I looked around for a calendar of MMA events. I wasn't able to find any that I could add to either Google Calendars or iCal, so I decided to create my own.
This MMA calendar lists events from UFC, WEC, Dream, Sengoku, and Strikeforce. Here are the various flavors: XML, ICAL, HTML.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
Added a section to Knowledge 知識 with an organized set of direct links to all The Ultimate Fighter Season 10 fighter blogs.
Taiwan:
Interesting:
The Ultimate Fighter, Season 10:
In past seasons, I think starting in season 6 with Mac Danzig (see here), although perhaps earlier, fighters on The Ultimate Fighter have written weekly blogs, with each post giving their behind the scenes take on the just aired episode.
Unfortunately, these different posts are usually scattered about the internet with no clear listing anywhere, and worse, often times it is difficult just to find all the posts that one particular fighter has made.
Fortunately, for season 10, a list of the fighter blogs is being kept on this forum page, at least giving a link to the first post. In addition, if you go to the UFC or Spike page, you can also find The Aftermath, what appears to be a fifteen minute or so video with questions and answers hosted by Amir Sadollah and featuring guests from the show. There's also a podcast, apparently with Rashad Evans, that you can find and subscribe to on the iTunes store.
I may try to put a clearer listing later.
More on animals:
On safety:
Some numbers from the UMass Parking Services and UMass Police Department: In 2007, 4,654 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in the US, and 70,000 were injured. For reference, that is more than 1,000 over the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks, and ten-fold the number of people injured.
Despite this, people don't really seem to care. We try to multitask more and more as we drive, and get impatient with trying to get to our destinations as fast as possible with little regard to safety. Just this month, two UMass students were hit while cycling, and one died, yet the driver simply fled the scene and is still at large. Hopefully, they will find him or her and bring him to justice. This is not an isolated incident, however. Just this past summer a UMass worker was also killed while bicycling by a reckless driver.
Follow-up to my last post, which I will keep at the top for now, as I feel like that's the most important thing on this page.
First, here's a direct link to the video in Youtube. Here's the full story at the Huffington Post: Chicks being ground up alive video.
This quote really killed me: "Mercy for Animals says it will call on the nation's 50 largest grocery chains to include labels on their eggs that say, 'Warning: Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry.' Head [spokesman for United Egg Producers] called that proposal 'almost a joke,' saying the group had no credible authority, and had questionable motives."
Questionable motives? Mercy for Animals is completely up-front about their motives, they're not trying to trick people into becoming vegan. Credible authority? United Egg Producers aren't even contesting any of the assertions, they readily admit that all male chicks are ground up alive.
Lastly, here's a Slate article on Glenn Beck and Cass sunstein. The fact that people can care more about contraception and abortion than the senseless grinding up of 200 million male chicks every year, just for our own enjoyment of eating eggs, blows my mind.
Noticed this over the weekend as well - New York Times website was victim of a malicious ad swap, and What to do if you saw an 'antivirus' pop-up ad.
Bottom line is, always be careful and suspicious. What is more likely - that you actually have a lot of viruses and an intrusive pop-up ad is actually telling you about them, or the ad is just playing an animated gif file and wants you to download a fake program that will actually end up giving you spyware or viruses?
Mark Helprin seems a bit dense, arguing for unlimited and perpetual copyright. I guess we already knew that though.
More multimedia:
Also, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for Britain's treatment of Alan Turing, as a result of an online petition.
Multimedia:
Video trailer for Richard Dawkin's newest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
Animal articles:
Interesting links:
On Taiwan:
Some interesting art-related links:
Problem: Missing Richard Nixon [on health care, due to the improper influence of corporate money]
Solution: Change Congress
Also, three interesting books mentioned in the Economist, going on my wish list:
A little old now, but one of those stories from Typhoon Morakot that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry:
First, the story, particularly Cabinet Secretary-General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan (薛香川), eating out at a fancy hotel while the rest of the country was preparing or already in the midst of the typhoon.
Next, the actual video of the call-in defending his actions to a news show (2009 8/17 TVBS 2100全民開講 薛香川的call in).
Lastly, the remix.
Signed the World Turing Petition calling on the British government to apologize for its treatment of Alan Turing (#3333 on page 67).
Here's the petition for British citizens, the blog of the John Graham-Cumming, who started the original petition, a podcast interview with Graham-Cumming, and a story from CNN on the issue.
Finished reading Stephen King's Rose Madder, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Go Taiwan!
Congratulations to Kuei-Shan, Taoyuan, Taiwan on taking second at the 2009 Little League World Series and being the international bracket champions!
Posted another comment on Jon Taplin's blog, this one on Your Entertainment Future. It seems quite similar to the previous posts that I have disagreed with, in that it seems like Taplin is angry about some particular issue, be it Google or Chris Anderson, and puts together a little bitter sarcastic post without presenting a coherent, logical argument.
Two interesting laws:
Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
What do these say about our work habits and productivity?
Inspired by this blog post on the interesting blog The Endeavour.
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of July days in Amherst.
Taiwan:
I recent saw this bits of news: No charges likely in New Zealand dog barbecue. It was another timely reminder that our attitudes toward food and very much based on culture, not morality. Here's another perspective on this issue - New Zealand Koreans criticise 'barbaric' case of barbecued dog.
This article - Why I don't eat dog - I think represents how many people feel, as they attempt to think through the issues and ultimately come to a resolution that lets them feel good and moral while at the same time not have to give up eating meat. Basically it's a case of cognitive dissonance, except for most people, assuming they think hard enough about the issue, realize that their justifications are very weak.
On the other hand, there are those people, namely Peter Singer, who are not only intelligent and logical, but willing to follow through on the consequences despite the changes in lifestyle that are necessitated. He lays out a very good case for forgiving Michael Vick and how much of the hatred directed toward him is hypocritical (for those who eat factory-farmed meat).
Other animal articles:
This interview from the Rachel Maddow Show on US health care is interesting for several reasons: first, the interviewer actually gives the guest a chance to talk without jumping in and interrupting (something Colbert parodies well on his show), and the guest actually seems intelligent and cogent. I guess Stanford grads can accomplish anything.
The guest, Frank Schaffer, is himself a very interesting guy - son of a famous evangelist, who has now ended up almost a direct 180 from his views growing up. Here's an interview he gives on NPR's Fresh Air, and his book, Crazy for God: How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all (or almost all) of it back.
More interesting articles:
The things China apologists and cheerleaders ignore:
More:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Interesting:
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of April days in Amherst.
Another day, another blog post bashing Google, another rebuttal:
I still don’t understand the chain of logic that goes from Google search dominance to devalued web ads, in particular web ads of big sites like NYT. Can you lay out a concrete, step-by-step argument for that implication?
The infinite supply, finite demand argument has several problems. First, what does it have to do with search? The article you referenced points out that, while Yahoo is getting out of search, one area they are focusing on is display ads. So where’s the connection?
Second, how is breaking up Google going to decrease the number of ads being served? Google Adsense is just the technology that is serving up the ads – if webmasters don’t put ads on their pages with Google, they’re just going to use some other system. It’s not going to reduce the total number of ads at all.
Lastly, even the notion that the total supply of ads is infinite isn’t really correct, or more precisely, not really relevant. If there are an infinite number of television channels, but almost everyone only watches channel number 1, then ads are obviously going to be very valuable on channel 1. The fact that there are a lot of other channels only becomes relevant as more people watch the other channels as alternatives to channel 1.
That points to the fact that the “supply” is really people’s aggregate attention, or in other words, the potential for people to see and look at an ad, which is quite finite. That’s why advertising on the big sites where most people spend their time is still going to be very valuable, and not terribly affected if I and thousands of people like me use Google Adsense on personal websites that draw in an insignificant number of readers.
The comment from Thompson that Google Adsense doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads is also rather silly. Online ads are beneficial for the companies doing the advertising, since they can paid directly proportional to how much effect their ads are having, as measured by either views, clicks, or anything else. Thus, ads on sites with heavy traffic will be more valuable, and if anything, web ads become more valuable because of the greater ability to measure their utility. The only way Thompson’s comment makes sense is as a critique of the masses, that people are not smart enough in general to know good content from bad content and hence drive traffic and ad revenue to sites with bad traffic.
Taiwan links:
First, a very moving account from White Terror period:
Wrote another follow-up on the "Google devalues everything it touches" issue from three days ago:
“There is no logical reason that the New York Times (in NBC’s Jeff Zucker’s words) should be “trading dollars (in print ads) for dimes (in web ads).” The ability of the web to target the ad to the individual reader should be more valuable. But because of Goggle’s infinite inventory, the web ad is much less valuable.”
What does this have to do with Google? If you force Google to stop serving ads, all that will happen is that others will step in with systems to serve up ads. Over supply is not an over supply in the number of ads Google can potentially serve, it is an over supply in the number of spaces one can potentially put ads on the web.
It really has nothing to do with Google, but with the number of available resources to get information. If everyone went to the NYT for news, then web ads on NYT would be very valuable, regardless of how many web ads Google or anyone else was serving up on any other webpage.
As a result of all this, I've also been thinking a little more about the nature of advertising and the promise of web ads to produce information that's actually useful. This article - Ads follow web users, and get deeply personal - mainly highlights the privacy concerns, which I don't want to downplay and agree need to be handled with care. On the flip-side though, I'm willing to give up a certain amount of information about myself if it means that the ads I see have a higher probability of being useful to me and the ad revenue helps keep sites I like free.
To me, traditional advertising is completely stupid and a waste of resources. I generally ignore all ads I see on television, for instance, because more often than not, I'm not even in the relevant demographic, and more often than not, the ads shown are more about branding or mindless slogans than actually conveying any useful information.
On the flip side, think about the coming attractions trailers that play just before you watch a movie in a theatre. Just the small piece of information, that you are in the demographic of people who like the movie that will be playing, dramatically increases the relevance of the ads you are shown. When I went to see (500) Days of Summer yesterday, I actually saw trailers for movies that I would be interested in seeing. Thus the ads were useful and not annoying. It would have been stupid to show me a trailer for an ad for a dumb comedy like Funny People, but when Taplin writes nostalgically for a time when advertisers were fighting over a small number of ad spots in the early days of television when there was only a choice of three networks, he's essentially arguing for this dumb strategy of showing everyone the same ad.
Given how much the knowledge that I probably will like the feature attraction playing helped in deciding which trailers I should see, now imagine that there is full knowledge of all the movies I've seen, how I rated each movie, and on top of that, how everyone else rated those same movies and other movies. The promise of what that could achieve is what Netflix is trying to reach in its Netflix Prize competition. This is the kind of win-win situation that advertisers should be striving for: allowing people to find out about movies that they would enjoy but otherwise not know about, while benefiting themselves at the same time.
Just finished watching (500) Days of Summer. I highly recommend it, and put it in my list 清單 of movies I enjoy.
When I first read this article - A.P. cracks down on unpaid use of articles on the web - I wasn't surprised: more companies envious of Google and thinking they deserve more money for no real reason. They complain, but the truth is they could opt out at any point, they want Google to be linking to them but on top of that want more money.
Unfortunately, some people, whom I think should know better, agree with this point of view. I was unpleasantly surprised to read "Google devalues everything it touches" on Jon Taplin's blog, which most of the time I tend to agree with. Fortunately, a number of commenters pointed out the many flaws in the argument, for example, pond, and I added my own two cents at well toward the bottom, with this quote from the article and follow-up:
"News organizations already have the ability to prevent their work from turning up in search engines — but doing so would shrink their Web audience, and with it, their advertising revenues. What The A.P. seeks is not that articles should appear less often in search results, but that such use would become a new source of revenue."
So, Google puts in hard work, produces a product that lets people find the information they want, at the same time driving up traffic and ad revenue for the A.P., all the while giving the A.P. an option to not have their work indexed, yet the A.P. thinks they should be able to ask for everything to stay the same but just be paid more despite not putting in any additional work that would justify it.
After writing that, I came across this article: YouTube wedding video spurs music sales. Basically, a viral video using a song as background music led to a surge in sales of the song. The company owning the copyright to the song could easily have forced YouTube to silence the audio, or ask for money from YouTube since they are benefiting from a video using one of their songs. Instead, old media and new media are actually getting along, the video popularity on YouTube is driving up sales for the song, and YouTube is even earning a commission on the sales. This is how it should be.
Animals:
On the Obama birth controversy:
On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, noted atheist writer Sam Harris had a very well argued op-ed in the New York Times, Science is in the details, arguing against Obama's nomination of Francis Collins as next director of the National Institutes of Health. Here's a choice quote:
One of Collin's beliefs: "If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?" That's typical shoddy logic. If you want my viewpoint on it, check out on diatribe 謾罵 on why I am an atheist 為什麼我是個無神論者.
Maru is too cute.
The wolf slaughter photos Alaska doesn't want you to see.
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Interesting:
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of May days in Amherst.
China:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of June days in Wisconsin.
Wrote some thoughts on UFC 100, adding them to my overall diatribe 謾罵 on MMA fans.
Interesting reads:
Big update on China:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of June days in Amherst.
On animals:
Related: Think a vegetarian can't be healthy? Guess you haven't heard of Bill Pearl.
My final two cents on the Supreme Court case concerning the firefighter exam:
First, this New York Times editorial on the ruling, Firefighters and Race, illustrates why I have to break with the liberal orthodoxy on this issue. The key point for me is when the editorial stated: "She [Ginsburg] noted that New Haven’s test was flawed". The fact is that, no one could come out and say exactly why the test was flawed or how it was racially biased, other than some far from clear cut issues with the weighting of the two components of the exam. Fortunately, many other people pointed this in the NY Times letters to the editor: Firefighter's test: Flawed or fair?
Even more than that though, this other article in the NY Times really illustrates for me my problem with the liberal viewpoint of this issue: For Hispanic firefighter in New Haven bias suit, awkward position but firm resolve - The people who should be commended the most, the minorities who worked hard, studied hard, and did well on the exam, are instead blamed as turncoats and white apologists: "Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom".
The other thing that really gets me is liberals complaining that the test included, gasp, reading. Guess what, one of the white firefighters who posted among the top scores was dyslexic, and studied probably harder than anyone, buying tapes to help with his studying. Yet that kind of behavior ends up being labeled as being white. More than that though, the test does what seems to be quite a good job at picking out smart, capable people who really care about being good firefighters. As the article quotes Vargas: "'When I leave the firehouse, I bring it home with me,' he said. 'I read about it. Think about it. I love this job. I don’t think there’s anything else I could do better.'" (Note he says he reads about it.)
Lastly, before you go away thinking this is a case of someone just looking after himself, consider this: "The results had been posted by race, without names, and when Lieutenant Vargas learned that a Hispanic firefighter had scored sixth among 41 lieutenants on the test to become a captain, he joined the suit. Only later did he discover that the score was his."
Garfield Minus Garfield is a feel good story about a cool, interesting play on someone else's work, where the original creator was nice, sane, and didn't just come out angry with a cease and desist letter. My impression of Jim Davis shot up a lot after finding this out.
Before I became a vegetarian, I went through a phase of buying mainly organic and free-range meat and cage-free eggs. Part of what put me over the edge was the realization that organic and free-range certifications don't necessarily mean anything, and to the extent that they do, may not really be that nice for the animals any way. This article is a good example of this: What you should know about free-range pigs. Unfortunately, some people didn't seem to completely get the point. Here are their posts in the fray, and my responses: [#1], [#2], [#3], [#4], [#5].
After installing Java Update 4 on my Mac OS X 10.5.7 machine, I discovered that my java programs, which I had bundled from a jar into an app, stopped working. This was rather vexing, as running the jar files directly still worked. Fortunately, I managed to google out the solution.
First, let me briefly say how to create a Mac app from a java jar file that you can then directly click on to open, and also drag to the dock. Basically you just need to use "Jar Bundler.app", which you get by installing Xcode 3.0. Jar Bundler used used to be in /Developer/Applications/Utilities, but installing Java Update 4, it is now in /usr/share/java/Tools. (I'm not actually sure how to navigate to that folder in Finder, other than going to using Go to Folder under the Go menu in Finder.) It's fairly self explanatory how to use, but here's the guide if you need it. If you want to create an icon for it, google how to create a .icns icon file.
Here's the info on how to fix your jar to app files. Basically, cd into the .app folder that you created, go into the Content/MacOS folder, and issue this command: "lipo -remove x86_64 JavaApplicationStub -output JavaApplicationStub". Apparently it is a 64-bit issue.
Quick notes:
Updated my diatribe on Anthony Bourdain's irrational dislike of vegetarians with a quote from Bourdain on how killing a pig was "one of the most difficult things [he's] ever done".
Added a short diatribe on chef, writer, and television host Anthony Bourdain's irrational dislike of vegetarians.
Some Stephen King news/updates:
Also see Knowledge 知識 : Stephen King 史蒂芬·金.
Tiananmen round-up (articles I missed the first time around):
Other human rights abuses in China:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Taiwan news:
Notable pages:
Lastly, Bird fail, or bird house fail? Maybe we're just not making those comfortable enough.
Finished King's earlier novel, Christine. See where it ranks in my view among the other King books I've read on my books page.
Also, that page has a plot of my enjoyment of King's books versus the year they were published, as I was wondering if there was any long term trend (liking the books more or less as time progressed) or if there was any period from which I didn't like King's books as much. See the books page.
More on animal cruelty:
Other animal articles:
More on China's ridiculous censor software:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
More on the Uighurs:
On Taiwan:
Other interesting reads:
The situation with the Uighurs being released from Guantanamo to Palau is a little complex. Essentially, they're getting screwed over by two factors: China's irrational demands and claims that they are terrorists, meaning they can't go back to their home for fear they'll be tortured and executed by the Chinese, and making it difficult to move them to other countries because of the diplomatic pressure China will put on the country, and the irrational fear of the U.S. and other countries that these Guantanamo prisoners are super dangerous (even though there's no evidence that they're guilty of anything). So there's plenty of blame to go around - blame the Chinese government for the situation they are creating in Xinjiang and the way they would treat these Uighurs, blame for other countries for not standing up to China, blame to people for their unjustified fear of Guantanamo prisoners. In the end, it looks like most of the Uighurs will end up in Palau, which incidentally recognizes Taiwan, not China.
Here's hoping the two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea are released soon and safely.
China's ridiculous censoring software:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
On animals:
Interesting reads:
Finished reading Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Potpourri:
Just finished reading Stephen King's From a Buick 8, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books. After finishing reading it, I saw this article in the news about two Pennsylvania state police troopers shot and seriously wounded. I guess that is just a case of not noticing something until you first become aware of it, and then see it everywhere immediately afterward.
On animals:
Worth reading:
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
On Taiwan:
On animals:
Other interesting reads:
Finished reading Stephen King's book (as Richard Bachman) Thinner. It was quite a gripping read, coming in (currently) at 18 on my ranking of Stephen King novels.
It reminded me a lot of the recent movie Drag Me to Hell, judging by the plot description on Wikipedia, from the Gypsy's curse to the potential for the lifting of the curse and the final resolution. If you're thinking about seeing the movie, my personal advice is to go out and get the book instead. As with Cujo, as I've mentioned before, Thinner is much more than a simple horror story. It also includes biting social commentary and raises serious questions about justice, morality, and endless cyclical violence.
生死樂苦
Spring is supposed to be a time of life and rebirth. Unfortunately, three recent events have reaffirmed the fact that spring can also be a time of death, and that nature is not like a Disney movie.
The first incident, separate from the other two, is a recent bicycle fatality in Amherst that happened right outside of Gold's Gym at the same time I was inside working out. Here are the most recent details at this time.
Obviously, this particular woman should not have been driving. How she could swerve across a lane of traffic going the opposite direction, and then strike a bicyclist going the other direction, and not have the sense of mind to stop and get help, is beyond me.
More generally though, as a society, we are much to cavalier about driving. When I see people tailgating (even on the highway), going way over the speed limit, driving while talking on their cell phones, really drives me crazy.
Consider: motor vehicle accidents are the 7th leading cause of death in the United States, outnumbering all deaths due to firearms. About 45,000 people die from traffic accidents each year, causing about 2% of all deaths. That's more than 15 times the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks. That's more than 20 times the number of people who died from all airline fatalities since 1970.
All that is a bit of an aside (for the time being) from my main stories, both of which involve baby birds and pulled hard at my heartstrings. Some of the female ducks in the campus lake have now become mother ducks in the last few weeks (at least four new moms). The most prodigious by far is this mama, who had 16 new ducklings:
Unfortunately, 16 ducklings are not very easy to take care of, and when this group ran into another mom and her ducklings, after a bit of mutual hissing between the two moms, one duckling got confused and tried following the wrong mom, getting lost from his 15 siblings. Soon it was lost and cheeping morosely for its mother. Eventually he found himself all alone in the lake:
Fortunately, he swam around to the bank, and I was able to herd its mother into the same area of the lake, where they were reunited:
Here they are all together again, swimming away:
Here, a Disney film would say, they all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, I checked back on them a few days later, and the mama only had 14 ducklings, even after more re-counts than a Minnesotan election.
Yesterday, I saw more heartbreak. A young baby fledgling house sparrow was chirping on the sidewalk, struggling to move. I was able to lift it with a sheet of paper and move it to the safety of a garden a foot over, so that it wouldn't get trampled over. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only comfort I was able to offer it, and its mother was nowhere to be seen. I checked on it a while later, and it was still all by itself, lying on its side, mouth opening and closing slow, and leg twitching slowly. Needless to say, there was no Disney ending for this young baby either - it was dead by the next morning.
All this reminds me of this interview of Peter Singer by Charlie Rose. He mentions one of his primary objections to the Judeo-Christian conception of a loving, omnipotent god is just the sheer amount of suffering in the world, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Tsai Ing-wen's opening speech at the 517 rally.
Plus, Marking June 4 [in Taiwan] is not 'inconvenient'.
Edifying reads:
More on Taiwan:
More worthy reads:
On Taiwan:
Worth reading:
This doesn't fail to cheer me up:
More catch-up:
On Taiwan:
On animals:
Other articles worth reading:
A long catch-up post:
First off, of course, the DPP protests in Taiwan today:
Good recent Saletan essays:
More on China's government: (copied to diatribe)
On animals:
Miscellaneous interesting articles:
Some juxtaposition:
New knowledge 知識 entry on recommended Taiwan Blogs 台灣部落 格.
President Obama at this year's White House Correspondent's Dinner. Looks like Obama can always fall back on being a stand-up comedian after he finishes his eight years. To be fair though, Bush could be funny (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) as well.
Where Obama really distinguishes himself is in his ending remarks on the importance of journalism for a functioning democracy and the very fact that he took the time to praise the media. This is in sharp distinction to Bush, who took pride in not reading newspapers and actively looked down upon them, saying he wanted to "speak over the filter" of the media.
在很多方面上, 比如多聰明, 多壯, 我應該算是比上不足, 比下有餘.
但有一方面, 我真的是獨一無二, 那就是我有最好的父母親和家人.
今天我要感謝我媽媽, 阿媽, 和乾媽. 母親節快樂!
(明天會回到一般的素口罵人).
If you take a look to the left, you'll notice a new image joining the rest of my icons: the cover of the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.
It's one of the most important books that I've read, and if there was just one book I could get everyone to read, it would be this book. It was unsurprising for me to learn that it was the book that inspired the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I find it hard to believe that a rational, intelligent person could read this book and not be strongly moved to become, at least, vegetarian.
As I've mentioned earlier, Singer's essay, All Animals are Equal, closely follows the first chapter of Animal Liberation, and is a very good start to thinking about the problem of animal rights.
In his essay and in his book, Singer draws parallels to racial and gender discrimination. He also addressed the issue of equality, which touches on the controversy over whether intelligence and mental ability should be tested for various racial groups. Singer makes the point that it doesn't make sense to consider two racial groups to be "equal" because, on average, the two groups have the same intelligence level. For one, this might not be true, which is something Saletan worries about and McWhorter assumes is not true, without (I would argue) being really sure of it.
More importantly, it doesn't make sense for equality to depend on intelligence, since it would simply lead to discrimination based on intelligence, which runs counter to our notions of "equality".
I haven't made these arguments here as clearly, formally, or convincingly as Singer, so I encourage everyone to at least try reading the essay, and giving the book a shot as well.
For some reason, I find this story of a Korean man who died homeless with $100,000 in the bank to be inordinately sad.
A little while ago, I wrote about the Supreme Court case concerning a firefighter test for promotions that was rejected for being racially biased. Here is a good argument by John McWhorter on why that was wrong and counterproductive for blacks.
McWhorter and William Saletan have got into a bit of disagreement over the report that No Child Left Behind is not closing the racial gap between black and white students. Here is Saletan's original response to the article, arguing against the need for such race-based testing, then McWhorter arguing for the need for such testing, and Saletan's response to McWhorter.
One interesting point that comes out of this is whether there really is a statistically significant difference in races when it comes to abilities like intelligence, and what implications this might have from a practical or ethical perspective. I'll have more to say about this tomorrow on a closely related issue.
Other interesting links:
Lawrence Lessig's book Remix can now be downloaded for free (Creative Commons license), from this page.
Even more stuff:
Lots of stuff:
I saw Earth, and it was good. I'll have more to say on this later, but for now I will just say that I highly recommend it.
Quickie: Animal rights activists, UCLA researchers square off at protest.
While I don't think that humans should be hurt or targeted by violence, and I don't think trying to intimidate researchers with the threat of violence is the right way to go, I am sympathetic to the fact that no humans have been killed or even hurt by the animal rights activists, while on the other hand, the researcher in the article is killing numerous monkeys in the course of his researcher.
UCLA's argument that research done on animals has led to various medical advances misses the point that animal activists are trying to make. Would you kill a human being for research purposes if it would lead to breakthroughs on cancer research or other types of research? How about a mentally disabled human being with the same or lesser cognitive ability as a monkey? If not, then such a viewpoint that monkeys can be used for research but not equivalent humans is contradictory (speciesist, as Peter Singer would put it). I agree with Singer's view in Animal Liberation, namely that research on animals should not be carried out unless the potential benefit is such that the research would also be carried out on equivalent mentally-disabled human beings.
The Supreme Court is certainly hearing some interesting and important cases these days. Yesterday it was the right of schools to perform strip searches on students, today it's a case of reverse discrimination after the city of New Haven threw out a test for firefighters because none of the top scorers were black. This is one of those times were I disagree with the New York Times editorial, which supports the city's decision. In fact, sadly, I think it's one of those times where I agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial.
The test was designed to be race-neutral. There are a lot of explanations for why the top scorers may have been all white, that has nothing to do with race. As this article mentions, the top scorers were just deeply interested and motivated in fire suppression manuals and studied hard for the test. Now they are being punished because the test didn't meet some silly 80% rule. Where is the evidence that the test was racially biased? So far the only thing I've heard is that one question on the test used the terms "uptown" and "downtown", which don't make sense in New Haven. If that's the best evidence they have, I think this should be a fairly clear cut case.
I also don't buy the argument that the test doesn't have anything to do with firefighting, and that promoting based on the test will lead only to firefighters who test well but aren't capable of doing anything else. That just sounds like the whining of those who didn't bother studying hard for the test. One person against the test said that such tests only measure "the ability to read and retain". That seems like a pretty important qualification for most things, including being a firefighter.
I think throwing out the test without having really strong evidence of actual racial-bias in the test itself (not just looking at the results) is doing a great disservice to everybody. Obviously it does a disservice to the white and Hispanic firefighters who should have been promoted. It does a grave disservice to the public if the best firefighters aren't the ones being promoted. Clearly, one could just promote people at random in proportion to the number in that particular ethnic group, which would be race-neutral, but that would be horrible. Lastly, it does a great disservice to minorities, who should be promoted based on their abilities and learn to do well on the tests, rather than being promoted just to fulfill some quota.
Supreme Court Justice Breyer on the Savana Redding court case - "In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear."
Wow. This is our Supreme Court? Apparently they take failing to get it to a new level in a strip-search case. Sigh.
A follow up on Jackie Chan: thankfully he's been dropped from Deaflympics (sort of).
On top of everything else, weight lifting is also good for blood pressure.
This is a pretty interesting article on why deforestation should be more of a concern than global warming. I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy though, as there's no reason why we shouldn't focus on both, as this poster points out. Also, as this post mentions, some of the evidence presented was not really accurately considered.
On Dubai:
I recently read a piece on the "dark side" of Dubai, and was quite appalled. To gauge the validity of the original article, I dug around a bit, and what I found seems to confirm the many unsavory aspects hidden beneath the surface of Dubai. Since I didn't know much of anything about Dubai in advance, and suspect many others are in the same boat, here are the articles I found:
On Jackie Chan:
I have disliked Jackie Chan since his ignorant, dumb remark on democracy in Taiwan. It was thus unsurprising to hear his thoughts on democracy in general. (Of course there has been no reporting of his remarks in the Chinese media.)
On or related to the "tea parties": (these people range from the mere ignorant to the seriously disturbed)
Random:
Assorted links:
我是素食者.
我也會罵我覺得應該被罵的人. (謾罵)
所以我算是素口罵人嗎?
Just for fun, here is how Google Translate handled that:
I am a vegetarian.
I think I will curse those who should be scolded.
Su-I as I curse you?
Not terribly bad, but obviously machine translation still has a long way to go.
Another animal article to get people to appreciate the wonder of animals: Taxing, a ritual to save the species
The article is about sharing, e.g. "taxation", in animal societies. Includes amazing facts, like monkeys are expected to give a food call after stumbling upon high quality food in order to allow others to share, or else face repercussion later, and bats are expected to regurgitate food for those in need, and seem to rub each other's bellies to gauge who should be sharing.
Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times on humanity even for nonhumans, a good look at the encouraging trend of greater consideration for animals. Most of the comments on the article also seemed encouraging as well, but of course there were the few inescapable idiots.
I've also started reading the book mentioned in the essay, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and so far, it's been very good. If you don't have time for the book, or are looking to be convinced that it's a worthwhile read, here's an essay by Singer, All Animals Are Equal, that seems closely related and partial overlapping with the first part of the book.
Toxic pet food, toxic children's toys, toxic toothpaste, and now, toxic drywall. There are just the things that China has managed to export to the U.S. Never mind the tainted milk, shoddily constructed school buildings, and countless other things being inflicted upon the Chinese domestically.
On Vitamin World:
When I first started buying protein powder, I originally purchased it from GNC. However, I have since switched to Vitamin World, and I've been really happy with it. Not necessarily in terms of price, which seems comparable, although Vitamin World doesn't require paid membership and the sales seem to be on par with what you get with GNC membership.
The main thing for me, now that I generally make my purchases entirely online, has been the quality of Vitamin World's customer support. I've had occasion to contact them twice so far. The first was due to a mix up that was my fault (due to an overly aggressive spam filter), and that particular time I called customer support and managed to talk to someone fairly quickly, who spoke natural English, and quickly helped me resolve the problem.
The second time just occurred, as the original package they sent me was somehow destroyed by the US postal office (who sent me just the top flap of the original cardboard packaging with a brief note they were sorry for any inconvenience caused by the damage). This time I emailed them, and not only did they understand the problem (I hate when I email customer support and the response I get back makes me suspect that they don't quite understand English and didn't completely grasp what I was saying), they apologized (not really their fault) and said they would immediately send out a new package by priority mail.
In today's model of fighting to the bottom and cutting costs with utter disregard to quality, this was very refreshing, and I thought I should take a moment to publicly commend them for it.
For an example of a company apparently on the other end of the spectrum, check out these Best Buy horror stories: Dear Best Buy, if you're going to cheat grandmas, don't leave photographic evidence, and Best Buy sells egregiously crappy, 9 year old hard drive as new, then refuses refund.
Three thoughts on ethics:
Yesterday I pointed to an essay by David Brooks about how much of our morality seems to be driven by innate emotions, likely put in place through evolution, rather than an actual reasoned calculus of morality. One thing that Brooks doesn't really seem to appreciate though, is that these emotion-based moral judgments are only correct from an evolutionary viewpoint, which might not necessarily correspond to what we actually believe should be moral if we were to think things over more from a logical perspective.
This article, Iraq's newly open gays face scorn and murder, is a dramatic illustration of that. The people opposed to homosexuality are very emotional in their hatred of it, calling it "disgusting" and saying that such people should be "killed in the worst, most severe way of killing". Obviously, such sentiment could have been useful from an evolutionary standpoint, and thus would have a reason for existing in many cultures and religions. Just as clearly, however, a large number of people today reject such sentiment. We realize that, although we may find homosexuality to be distasteful at first, that is no reason to condemn others for it, especially when they are born that way and given that it doesn't harm anybody. Thus, while we may rely on our emotions as a moral guide, in the end we should be using logic and reasoning as the ultimate deciding factor.
Another issue where I feel our ethics and emotions are somewhat out of sync is when it comes to animals. Actually, to be more precise, in many cases our emotions point us in what I believe is the right direction. We are turned off by cruelty to animals, and most of us I believe would not want to see animals killed. The problem, though, is that we live in a society where we are rather insulated from what it actually takes to get dinner on our plate, insulated to the conditions animals endure on factory farms and insulated from the fact of their deaths to provide our dinners.
Part of the solution, then, is to break this barrier by spreading information and awareness about what animals go through. Another part though, is to simply learn more about animals, to realize that they are not so different from us, that it is a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind. Hopefully such knowledge will make us slightly less prone to being arrogant and assuming we should "control" other animals.
What brings this to mine are these recent articles about ants. This is an interesting article, Wisdom of crowds, that talks about the remarkable organizational structure of ant colonies. That led me to these two amazing articles about ants that actually farm fungus: Ant and its fungus are ancient cohabitants, and First fungal farmers of the Americas. As the second article mentions, let's try to keep in mind that humans were the fourth animal to discover farming, and remain humble when it comes to our position in the grand scheme of things.
That brings me to my last point, immorality as a failure of perspective. This article, Killing for respect, talks about crime in Oakland, CA. As the title suggests, part of Oakland's crime problem is rooted in "respect killing", where "a wrong look, casual gesture, can lead to a full-blown shootout". How ridiculous is that? What it really signifies is an intense and unwarranted arrogance, a feeling that you are so special that no one should disrespect you in the slightest way. Compared against the vast backdrop of the history of the universe and the history of all living things since life first started on earth millions of years ago, it's really a cosmic joke that anyone would care so much about themselves to get so angry over how another person looked at them. Finally, to wrap this up, let's keep in mind that it's equally ridiculous to care so much about the sexual orientation of others.
There are some Westerners who like to defend the Chinese government by saying that we shouldn't be imperialists and try to force our Western notions of democracy and free speech on China, and that we should just leave the Chinese Communist government alone. Whenever I hear that, I can infer that the person in question either has the IQ of a turnip, has an intense Asian fetish that blinds him or her from reality, or is very greedy and wants to make money off of China without really caring about anything else. Obviously these three things are not mutually exclusive, and chances are that all three apply at the same time.
Clearly I have great disdain for such people. On the other hand, I have the highest respect for those Chinese people who stand up for democracy and free speech within China, knowing full well the likely consequences. These people are the clearest counter-arguments to the claims of the Chinese government-apologists mentioned above.
Here is just one recent example: a 75 year old retired professor entered a cemetry on tomb-sweeping day to honor a former Communist party member punished for sympathizing with the Tiananmen Square protesters. He was then set upon by four or five thugs, thrown into a ditch, and beaten for more than 10 minutes. Although other people were watching, none tried to help him.
The next time you hear a Chinese government apologist sprouting on about how we should leave China alone, realize that what they really mean is that we should just let the Chinese government have its way. In light of incidents like these, it makes you realize that such apologists are not just stupid, they are morally repugnant.
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Even more links:
More links:
Random links:
Other things:
After reading this article about a 9 year old being raped in Brazil by her stepfather, only to have more condemnation be directed toward the girl and her family for getting an abortion rather than the stepfather for raping the girl, I was appalled. Of course, it fit in exactly with my essay on why I am an atheist, and I've updated that page with this reference.
I just finished reading Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon, by Nick Trout. It's quite an interesting look into a day in the life of a veterinarian, and thoughts on modern day veterinary practice. There's also an interesting video embedded on the Amazon page showing Trout at Angell Animal Medical Center. Nick Trout was also had an interesting interview on NPR's Fresh Air. (Added this book to my books 書 page.)
Finally, I also found this Stephen King interview by the BBC. I've read and heard a lot about Stephen King, but I think there were a few new things for me in this interview (all of which conveniently escape me at the moment...). (Added this to my Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page.)
It's back - the third or fourth iteration of my diatribes 謾罵 : Why I am an Atheist 為什麼我是個無神論者. I think the origin of the document was a very simple, barebones webpage I made in high school after learning some simple html and how to ftp it over to my webspace on my local ISP. The webpage only had the quote, "Religion is the opiate of the masses", and a link to American Atheist. The next iteration came after a discussion in undergrad with a college friend, and this version is more or less what I wrote my first year in grad school in an attempt to get these thoughts more in order.
More random links:
Added Victor Borge to the list of famous people I admire. You can find a good number of his performances on YouTube. Apparently he also wrote an autobiography, but it's either not in print or hasn't yet been translated to English.
Another person on my list, William Saletan, just wrote three articles on Slate that caught my attention. The first, Lady parts, in which he describes his view on abortion and how he approaches other similar moral questions, reminds me of why I became interested in and admired his views.
However, a second article, Inhuman Revenue Service, about traffic cameras, I thought was rather weak and unconvincing. If he had argued that the current system was flawed, for instance, because people were not getting notified early enough to prevent repeat infractions, I would have agreed with him, but he seems to be picking out individual, correctable flaws that, once fixed, would lead to a system where people commit less traffic violations, leading in turn to a more safer driving environment.
He won me back again though, with a third article, Organ Rewards, on the question of how to best reward people for donating organs without creating a system in which poor people become compelled or coerced to sell their bodily organs just to survive.
After watching the recent Academy Awards and looking into La Maison en Petits Cubes, the film that won the Animated Short Film Award, I started getting interested in short films and started tracking down a few to watch.
A lot of the short films (with the current notable exception of La Maison en Petits Cubes) can be found and downloaded from iTunes for only two dollars (of course with the dreaded DRM). I've added a section on my movies page, listing the films I've watched, in order of enjoyment.
In other news, I copied over the long 3/10 post on Tibet over to my page on the Chinese government under diatribes 謾罵, and added these two recent links:
China blocks YouTube for about a week, most likely due a video circulating about the situation in Tibet
Rejoice, damn you - China's motto when it comes to Tibet
Here's an interesting article titled, controversially, Picking Vick Over PETA, e.g. the author would rather see his dog in the hands of Michael Vick rather than PETA.
I actually have no problem with most of what the author writes in the first half of his article, but I find his criticisms of PETA to be rather lazy - instead of really trying to understand and explain PETA's position, he just takes a knee-jerk approach, misrepresenting and distorting what PETA believes in and then acting confused at how anyone could take such a crazy view.
Anyway, the whole article, as well as the comments (including a reply by the original author), are quite interesting. I'll write up my thoughts on this later, but for now, for the interested, here's PETA's explanation of their position on euthanasia.
Here is an excellent explanation of the current economic crisis: what are CDO's, CDS's, how they contributed to the crisis, who the key people responsible are, who was responsible for the deregulation that led to the crisis, what the specific deregulation was, etc.
I'm guessing that most people's blood will be boiling by the time they finish reading the article; mine certainly was. What can be done about it? Well, for one thing (perhaps one might say, the first thing), let's Change Congress and get the corrupting influence of money and lobbyists out of our government.
Updated my Knowledge 知識 page CangJie 倉頡.
Uploaded pictures taken at Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory in South Deerfield, MA, to my photo gallery 照 片. In addition to being a great place to take photos, it's also possible to experience having a butterfly rest on you if you stand perfectly still and think plant thoughts. In addition to butterflies, it has various other animals, including birds, reptiles, and fish in a koi pond.
Unfortunately, there are two negatives. It can become crowded in the conservatory, with many people all trying to take pictures and little kids generally breaking rules about not trying to actively touch the butterflies. The other negative is that a few people on the staff are rather unfriendly. To be specific, there was a coupon for 2 dollars off the admission price, which I presented to the cashier on my Ipod Touch, only to be told that I "had to have it printed out", which really didn't make any sense at all (it wasn't as if there was a barcode on the coupon, it was just some text off their webpage). Anyway, if you should ever find yourself planning a trip to Magic Wings, I suggest first checking to see if there are any coupons, and then printing out a hundred or so and passing them out to everyone just in front of the building. If any one on the staff confronts you, just tell them it's retribution for spiting the guy with the Ipod Touch.
Other random links:
Random links:
Even more on China and Taiwan:
Reading ebooks on the Ipod Touch:
I recently tried out the Kindle for Ipod Touch and Stanza, another (free) ebook reader for the Ipod Touch. I was pleasantly surprised by how well both worked; I'd say that reading on the Ipod Touch is no worse than reading on a full-sized monitor, with the convenience of having many books available in your pocket whenever there's any down-time (waiting in line, etc.). Of course, I'm sure it can't compare to reading on the e-ink of a real Kindle, but on the other hand, it's still smaller and more easy to have on you at all times.
One brief digression - I'm puzzled by people who view the fact that one can read books on the Ipod Touch in the dark as a positive point in comparison to the Kindle, which cannot be read in the dark. First, how often are you going to need to read in the dark? And why would you want to? Just turn on a light. Reading in the dark can't be good for your eyes, and moreover, the fact that you can't read a Kindle in the dark is a consequence of the fact that the e-ink more closely mirrors the experience of reading an actual book, as the screen is not lit and causes less strain on the eyes.
Anyway, back to the Kindle and Stanza. One neat thing is that you can download a lot of samples (I think generally the first chapter of books) from Amazon and read them for free on the Kindle, which is a good way to decide if you want to buy the book or not. In addition, there are a lot of good books in the public domain that you can download directly from Stanza, like Dickens, Twain, Swift, HG Wells, etc.
(copied to tidbits)
Added yet more images to the random album of my photo gallery 照片.
Other random stuff:
New interesting TED talks:
Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab demonstrates "sixth sense" ubiquitous wearable computing, very cool.
Bill Gates on the two big problems that interest him now - solving medical problems that the free market ignores (affecting poor countries) and education
Monkeys not only figured out how to floss, but are now teaching their children how to floss as well.
What happens when an engineer discovers a mouse in his house? He sets up a trap along with a remote trigger camera to document the experiment. And of course, being the humane sort, he buys a little mouse home for the mouse to stay the rest of the winter before being released in the spring.
I thought I was done writing about Tibet for a while, but more articles keeping popping up, some even more aggravating than usual.
Tibet Atrocities Dot Official China History
Tibet prospers under China: Wen
Friends of Tibet march in Taipei
(copied to the 3/10 post as well)
Unregulated materialistic capitalism meets totalitarian thought control:
Chinese grease the wheels of power with luxury gifts
Seeking justice, Chinese land in secret jails
Dissident reflects after 8 years in Chinese prison
Disappeared rights lawyer's family defects from China
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Is Ma Ying-jeou naive, stupid, or traitorous?
Ma 'naive' on PRC ['anti-secession'] law: forum
Beijing promises to 'never waver' on independence
Added yet another three Tibet related links to 3/10's post, copied here as well:
After 50 years in exile, the Dalai Lama seems close to despair
China protests a US resolution on Tibet
US Congress pans China over Tibet
By the way, if you look in the last article (Taipei Times), you'll find that the only representative voting against the resolution urging China to end repression in Tibet was Ron Paul. Go figure.
Presumably everyone has know read about the incident with the Chinese ships harassing a US surveillance ship. If not, here is some background:
China says US ship violated international law
US and China quarrel over sea confrontation near Hainan
First, just listen to the conduct of the Chinese sailors: "Chinese sailors used hooks to try to snag cables the Navy boat was using to tow sonar equipment", "Chinese sailors dropped pieces of wood in its path and wielded hooks", "the Impeccable's crew sprayed some of the Chinese sailors with a fire hose, causing some of the sailors to strip to their underwear", "two of the Chinese ships stopped directly ahead of the USNS Impeccable, forcing the Impeccable to conduct an emergency 'all stop' in order to avoid collison".
Man, what a bunch of yahoos.
As for China's ridiculous claim that the US ship was in their territorial water, take a look at the map on this page, and look at the huge discrepancy between what China thinks is their territorial water and what everyone else in the world thinks. They have their territory going all the way down past Vietnam! Ridiculous.
Added three more Tibet related links to yesterday's post (highlighted).
Other, random links:
This is very cool - ThruYOU, a remix of various YouTube videos into new songs.
Apparently the British are just more sophisticated. A belief map of the UK, indicating how Britons feel on creationism versus intelligent design versus evolution. I shudder to think of what the same map would like for the United States.
The Daily Show shows just how crazy Republicans are these days.
This is one smart chimp - his planning ahead capabilities include stockpiling rocks to throw at visitors.
Apparently people are actually starting to prefer low quality lossy compressed music, according to a study by a Stanford music professor.
Yushan (Jade Mountain) is in Taiwan, not "Chinese Taipei", for god's sakes.
The Formosan Serow, a cute animal native to Taiwan.
A Hakka television series is going to tell the story of Taiwanese restaurant Din Tai Fung 鼎泰豐, famous for their xiao long bao 小籠包.
Yet another example of Taiwan's current administration trampling the rights of its people - High school student arrested for asking Ma to step down. Ridiculous.
Don't fall for fake fiber. Apparently there's no evidence that fiber additives to things like yogurt do anything, you need to get your fiber the old-fashioned way, from fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
50 years after revolt, clampdown on Tibetans
Dalai Lama harshly condemns China
Dalai Lama says China has turned Tibet into a 'Hell on Earth'
NY Times editorial on the Dalai Lama's speech
China heaps scoren on the Dalai Lama
After 50 years in exile, the Dalai Lama seems close to despair
China protests a US resolution on Tibet
US Congress pans China over Tibet
Tibet Atrocities Dot Official China History
Tibet prospers under China: Wen
Friends of Tibet march in Taipei
Added more images to the random album of my photo gallery 照片.
Added more images to my photo gallery 照 片, this time scenery from my trip to Alaska.
Here's a completely unrelated picture on why the CECA (Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement between China and Taiwan) is really just an FTA.
For my more visual-inclined visitors, I've updated my photo gallery 照片 with a new album, an autumn day on UMass campus.
On a different note, I came across this interesting article on the psychology of charity in Newsweek written by Peter Singer, one of the people on my people I admire page.
Singer is known for the following thought experiment (related in the beginning of the article as well): Suppose you were walking along a beach, and you saw a child drowning in the water. You're the only one around who can save the child, but there's no time to take off the expensive pair of shoes you're wearing. Do you ruin your shoes to save the child?
Most people would find the question ridiculous - of course you would save the child, who cares about the shoes? Yet the fact of the matter is that there are millions of children who die each year from causes that each of us could help to prevent, for less than the price of a pair of expensive shoes. So how are the two situations any different?
His new book, The Life You Can Save, seems like an interesting consideration of this question. I'm also interesting in reading his book Animal Liberation, which seems like one of the seminal books on animal rights.
I thought I was done writing about it for the while, but the Chinese government still remains in the news, so I've updated my diatribes 謾 罵 page again on the Chinese government.
To show that I'm being fair about this, I'm happy that the US State Department also pointed out ways in which Taiwan can improve on the human rights front. Also, Taiwan has big problems with Ma Ying-jeou trying to sell it out to China, the latest controversy being the "comprehensive economic cooperation agreement" with China, which this editorial deals with.
An unrelated link - here's a guy trying to grow MMA into a responsible, positive influence on society. Honor and discipline have always been core components of martial arts, and there's no reason why this shouldn't be the same with MMA.
Animal-related links:
Chimps shouldn't be kept as pets.
In fact, chimps seem to the ability for empathy, leading to some sense of morality:
This is how horses are killed at slaughterhouses? (I wouldn't guess that it's much better for cows, chickens, and pigs.)
The vulture deserves our respect, not our disgust.
More on Clinton's comments on human rights and the Chinese government in my Diatribes 謾罵 section.
Also, Jon Taplin posted an interesting entry on the future of print newspapers, advertising, and Google, to which I posted a comment that innovation in web advertising may be (at least part of) the solution.
Fake kumquats!
More random links:
It's good to see some reporting in the mainstream American news media of the troubling developments in Taiwan, specifically concerning corruption and political influence in the trial of former president Chen Shui-bian. Other related issues are laid out in this open letter to President Ma from a group of western academics. One egregious thing the NY Times article didn't mention is that the original judge of the Chen Shui-bian case was removed and replaced because he let Chen go free from his detention. Of course the first thing the replacement judge did was to put Chen back in detention. Here's a good summary of the situation from the Freedom House.
This is good.
This is ridiculous. (More on this tomorrow.)
Demetri Martin's new show, Important Things with Demetri Martin (Wednesdays 10:30pm Eastern), is quite good. Here's the NY Times review, and here's the Metacritic aggregate review. Given Jon Stewart's hand in producing it, it means Wednesdays nights are a one and a half hour block of Stewart programming (Important Things with Demetri Martin, The Daily Show, the Colbert Report).
A very interesting proposal for how to fix the NFL overtime coin toss system with something more fair and less reliant on luck of the toss.
A couple of notes: I personally don't see why the NFL doesn't go with the college football system of allowing both teams to attempt to score from a shortened field. The one objection I've heard is that this system doesn't leave any room for the special teams, namely kickoff and punting and the corresponding return teams. While true, I think this is more minor than potentially having a game end without one team's offensive coming on the field, just because of the coin toss.
Another potential solution I've heard, which is somewhat appealing just on its simplicity, is to still have the coin toss but do it in advance, right at the start of the game, along with the initial coin toss. That way, at the end of the regulation game, if a team knows that they won't be getting the ball at the start of overtime, they may be more inclined to go for the win at the end of regulation rather than settling for a tie. It's an interesting idea, but I still think I prefer the balance of the college system.
Speaking of football, this NY Times blog entry links to some interesting articles about sports players. In particular, this series on University of Washington football players repeatedly getting away with crimes because of their value to the football team is rather distrubing. It's just another stark reminder that sports aren't everything, and that a vast swath of the general public could stand to take sports less seriously.
Added a page on CangJie 倉頡 to my Knowledge 知識 section.
If you take a look at the menu bar on the left of my webpage, you'll notice I've put up a link to photos I've taken and uploaded to Picasa. More to come as I upload more photos.
Two days ago, two teenagers filmed themselves abusing a cat, throwing it against a wall and repeatedly punching it, and uploaded the video to YouTube. Fortunately, people on the Internet managed to do some detective work, uncovering the identity of the teenagers (one Kenny Glenn), and now the two will face charges of animal cruelty. More information and videos on this page.
I have two thoughts on this. First, normally I would be wary of this kind of vigilante justice. Mobs have a habit of either getting out of hand and doing things individuals on their own wouldn't do, or attracting crazier fringe people that go too far. In this case though, these two teenagers were just asking for it - they took delight in torturing something weaker than them, and filmed it for others to see. I doubt they'll get anything close to what they really deserve, and on top of that, animal cruelty is one of the biggest indicators of future criminal psychopathic behavior, so if anything, hopefully the fact that people managed to discover their identities will lead them to getting the help they need.
My second thought, one that I've made before, concerns what this issue says about how we treat animals in general. It seems like the vast majority of the people who watched the original video of the cat being tortured were disgusted and angered. Yet farm animals are forced to endure the same and worse pain and indignities, and are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain as cats and dogs. I think what it comes down to is that people are just unaware of and don't think of what it actually takes to get the hamburger patties, chicken wings, and pork they eat. On the other hand, the fact that people react so strongly to the original video gives me hope that one day, when most people do make the connection, that society will look upon the way we eat meat today the same way we now look upon practices like slavery and torture of humans.
Random links:
Funny: Thesaurus proposes to dictionary.
For thought: Magnet schools: more harm than good?.
I can agree with the claim that removing the top students from schools is harmful to the upper middle level students, since the top students will raise the overall level of class and push the other students to try to work at the same level. On the other hand, the editorial doesn't even discuss the flip side, which is that putting top students together is also beneficial, whereas they may similarly be brought down by other students the same way the middle level students are brought down by the bottom students.
Maybe it says something that the only comment that I thought really added something to original editorial was written by a student who attended a magnet school:
On animals: how social animals like ants and bees make collective decisions, and implications for humans.
Waggle dance!
For primates who still don't believe in evolution: The Origin of Darwin.
Or, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it:
Lastly, for those who think Ma Ying-jeou is doing accomplishing anything other than selling out Taiwan: China increases missiles pointed at Taiwan to 1,500.
Good to know that I am not alone in my love for peanut butter.
Apparently there's going to be a new Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. Yikes. For my money, there is only one Sherlock Holmes (but I guess two (1, 2) Dr. Watson's).
賢^2. I found out about this game, KenKen, from a New York Times article, and I've been hooked since.
It's similar to Sudoku, with the same constraint that there should be one of each digit in each row and column, but with the difference that the grid, instead of being subdivided evenly, is separated into different "cages" of arbitrary shape and size, where each cage has a target number and arithmetic operation. For instance, 24x means that the product of the cells in the cage should total to 24.
There are six games daily of varying difficult availble on the New York Times.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
Added to my diatribe on MMA fans after watching WEC 38 and observing more egregious fan behavior.
Thinking back, the two things that stick out most in my mind about Obama's inaugural address are the censoring of some of his remarks on TV by the Chinese government and his inclusion, perhaps a first, of nonbelievers as an important goup in America: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth." (full transcript)
Equally refreshing is this piece by Randall Balmer, Episcopal priest and professor of American religious history. He praises Obama for reaching out to nonbelievers, and stresses the important of religious freedom in America's development, in contrast to tiresome letters to the editor I remember reading in my hometown newspaper, endlessly repeating the tirade that America was built as a Christian nation and how nowadays Christians are the only ones being discriminated against and "persecuted".
Well, I now have the Windows 7 beta installed on my Macbook (model 4,1). It's been pretty neat to play around with. I followed the instructions on this page without too much trouble, but I did learn a few things in the process that I thought I'd share.
Of course, the first thing I did was to set up Time Machine to back up my data. Since I still use Windows and Linux at times, I have an external hard drive I keep formatted as FAT32 to use under any OS. (The fact that FAT32 is the only format option to use with all three OS's is a separate gripe of mine.) After I finished getting Time Machine set up to back up my laptop, I took a look at the options to get it to back up my external hard drive, and I found that it was put permanently on the Time Machine ignore list and I couldn't remove it. In the end, after some searching, I found the disappointing truth: while Time Machine can be used to back up external drives, it only works with the native Mac hard drive format, not with FAT32.
To deal with this, I've resorted to using JFileSync to create a mirror copy of my external hard drive on my Time Machine drive. Inelegant, but the only solution I have at the moment.
There's one point in the Windows 7 installation process, I think just after the first time that it needs to reboot itself, that it appears to get somewhat stuck, and I was a bit worried, wondering whether I should do a forced reboot. The last item in the list, "Completing installation" is highlighted, and the green completion bar at the bottom doesn't move, and only the periods after the words are animated. Fortunately, I just waited, for at least 15 minutes, and then it got moving again.
After getting through the installation, I got to the point where I put in the Macbook disc to run BootCamp and install all the proper drivers. Following the directions on the webpage, I allowed the auto-run setup.exe to run, only to get an error that the 64-bit setup wasn't allowed on my computer. D'oh! I had only installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on a whim (no real reason, since I only have 2GB of RAM anyway). I did some more searching, and eventually found out that there's a 64-bit version of BootCamp, helpfully titled BootCamp64, that can be found and run manually under Drivers/Apple. Running that did the trick, fixing among other things the sound, which hadn't been working (despite Windows 7 thinking it had the correct driver installed).
One last note, after installing Windows 7, setting up the drivers, and installing the free version of Avira AntiVir (which seems to work alright and not be too resource heavy), I've used up about 12GB on my Windows partition. Something to keep in mind when setting up the initial partition sizes with Boot Camp Assistant.
(Filed under knowledge 知識.)
Alright, I suspect this will be my last Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe related update, as I have now posted scores that I don't think I will be able to top: SCGMD 2 amateur, pro; SCGMD 3.
Added my high scores on Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 to tidbits - amateur, pro.
Finished Stephen King's Cujo a little while ago in a quick three day burst of reading. It took me a while to get around to reading it, in part because I had worried that it might be a little one-dimensional, just a simple story of a possessed dog that wrecks havoc. After getting into it, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was completely wrong.
The book is not actually supernatural: the dog is rabid, not possessed in any way. (Although there are a few King-style hints at the supernatural.) I think the Amazon.com Review of the book is spot on:
The review points to two things that surprised me most about the book.
First, there's a lot more going on than just the dog threatening the
people trapped in the car. Instead, it's a nuanced story about two
families and the daily domestic struggles and conflicts they have to
deal with. Second, although on first appearance Cujo is the "monster"
of the book, in actuality, you really feel sorry for him, due to the
well written point of view sections from his perspective.
This is the third Castle Rock novel of King's that I've read (although out of order, having read Needful Things first). It looks like The Dark Half will be next on the to-read list.
Added Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe to my tidbit on tests/games, along with my new high scores on SCGMD 3.
Recently finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (added to books). I have to say, it makes a lot more sense than the Kubrick movie.
It's been a while since I watched the movie, but from what I recall, the beginning was rather slow and only semi-comprehensible, leading to a middle that was only slightly better, only to end in an even more boring and completely incomprehensible manner. In comparison, the beginning and ending of the novel make sense, and, if anything, are the most interesting parts of the book.
I realize that some people like Kubrick's film version, ignoring the fact that it's impossible to understand what is going on at the end. Kubrick's defense, that he wanted people to interpret the movie on their own and not want to "spell out a verbal road map" is, in my humble opinion, rather lame.
Made a small addition to my web feed explanation page.
Football wild card weekend!
Cool analysis by the NY Times.
My picks.
A little history of the game: The Miracle at the Meadowlands, leading to the creation of the kneel formation.
Way back in the beginning of the year, I made a new year's resolution to update this webpage at a rate of at least twice a week. Despite some rough periods of inactivity, I actually managed to keep that resolution, woo hoo!
Hopefully I'll manage to keep this up in 2009. I'll also have to ponder some new resolutions for the next year, which will probably include a few that I failed to keep this year, d'oh.
I recently read the short article "Salvation" by Langston Hughes, as my dad thought I would like it. It's actually a chapter of Hughes's early life from his autobiography The Big Sea. As far as I can tell, that work is still under copyright, but (at least at this moment) you can read "Salvation" online here.
In case it gets removed later, "Salvation" is about Langston Hughes attending a religious revival as a child, where there is a special meeting for the kids to be saved and see Jesus. One by one, all the other kids except Hughes and one other boy claim to see Jesus. The other boy eventually turns to Hughes and says, "God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved." Finally, the whole congregation is just waiting on Hughes, and since the other boy pretended to see Jesus without anything ill happening to him, Hughes follows suit. However, he feels bad about it later and cries in bed, only to have his aunt think the reason for his tears is his happiness at being saved. The piece ends, "But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me."
Time compression:
This guy took a year's worth of photographs from the same location and and turned them into videos showing a year go by in 40 seconds and a year go by in 2 minutes. Very cool. He's also made the original images available for others to use.
Slate Video has been creating a series of "Power Recaps", humorously condensing politics into a few minutes. Here are the archives, and here are the currently available videos (re-live the campaign from the conventions to election night in just 11 minutes):
Playoff prediction time!
AFC
Colts (5) beat Chargers (4)
Ravens (6) beat Dolphins (3)
Colts (5) beat Steelers (2)
Titans (1) beat Ravens (6)
Colts (5) beat Titans (1)
NFC
Cardinals (4) beat Falcons (5)
Eagles (6) beat Vikings (3)
Panthers (2) beat Cardinals (4)
Giants (1) beat Eagles (6)
Super Bowl: Giants beat Colts
As a convert to vegetarianism, temptation can be hard to fight, especially when eating with others who aren't vegetarian. For instance, I used to love eating pork pot stickers, especially when they're made long and skinny with a nice char on the bottom. So now, if other people order such food in front of me, and I'm confronted by an urge to wolf them down, I conjure up in my mind images like these, then imagine in graphic detail what it would take to go from that to the plate of food in front of me. By then I've generally lost my appetite.
It's fair to say then that Cute Overload has played an integral role in keeping me vegatarian.
On a completely different topic, if I had more money, I might consider getting a game like Guitar Hero. Since I'm a poor grad student though, I'm pretty happy with this poor man's Guitar Hero:
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3
Assorted interesting links:
Encouraging news:
Americans believe religion is losing clout
Americans believe other religions (and atheism) can still lead to eternal life in heaven
The changing role of kickers in the NFL?
The influence of the Internet on:
book sales and
comic strips (includes photo of Stephan Pastis).
Hopefully both have learned the lesson from what happened with the music industry and try to adapt intelligently rather than belligerently fight to keep the old way no matter what.
An interesting article on consumption and leisure.
Count me firmly in the $100,000 preference category.
I'm all for a gax tax, and the New York Times seems onboard with the idea of a gas tax as well.
Ah, the good old days when such monstrosities were the firm minority
of vehicles on the road...
Given the time of year, there's been a lot of talk recently about donating to charities. For instance, Kristof at the New York Times has two recent columns on the subject, one comparing liberals and conservatives when it comes to donatations, and another on the topic of for-profit charities.
I won't go into those now, but I did want to plug two organizations that I donate to, ASPCA and World Wildlife Fund. Check out these videos, it would take a heartless person not to be moved:
ASPCA
WWF
These are reputable charities, both getting 4 stars from Charity Navigator (ASPCA, WWF), and meet the 20 standards for charity accountability by the Better Business Bureau (ASPCA, WWF).
Finished the rest of my article on web feeds, adding in some info and links on how to manually create your own Atom web feed.
It's alive!!!
That is to say, my Atom web feed is now live and running. Here's the link to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/garybhuang.
Tomorrow I'll fill in more of my article on web feeds and how to create your own manually.
Going through my browser history, I've apparently visited 781 pages on Wikipedia in the past half year, just on my laptop.
I mention this because I just saw this appeal from founder Jimmy Wales for donations. I've donated, and if you find Wikipedia as useful as I do, I hope you'll consider contributing as well.
First, I read Peter Straub's Ghost Story. While I thought it started off a little slow, it really picked up the pace and had me hooked by the end. It is similar in style to King's It and Dan Simmon's Summer of Night (in a good way, not as a mere knockoff), though with a band of old men gathering to defeat ancient evil instead of children, and with an atmosphere similar to King's Salem's Lot (which Straub acknowledges), in the way you see into the lives of an entire community.
After finishing Ghost Story, I picked up King's Duma Key, which recently came out in paper back. It's one of my favorite of his recent books. Here's a review of the book in the NY Times. See where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Most recently, I read King's earlier novel The Dead Zone while dealing with a bout of illness. Reading the book was pretty much the one highlight of being otherwise miserably sick for a week. The book feels like a Bachman book. Part of it is that it is not overly supernatural. Another part is the scale of the book, the way it is one main character dealing with a problem on a more global scale, whereas it seems like more traditional King novels are on a more local scale. Here's where The Dead Zone falls in my King book ranking.
I'm eagerly awaiting the paperback release of King's new short story collection Just After Sunset.
How do you fare? Here's the exam. The overall average was 15 out of 33, for elected officials 14 out of 33, and for college educators 17 out of 33. Fortunately, I managed a 31 out of 33, so I can decry these results without being a hypocrite.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
Gerald's Game was an intense page-turner. I don't know if it was because I was reading it on a plane, but I definitely felt a little light-headed when reading how the main character escaped her handcuffs.
Next up for me is Peter Straub's Ghost Story. I have high hopes for it, as it has a strong Stephen King endorsement and is apparently similar in style to King's It.
Added to the Election '08 page:
Added an update to my diatribe on MMA fans, in the wake up Seth Petruzelli's upset over Kimbo Slice.
Added the following links under Scott Adams on my people I admire page:
The eyeballing game - test how accurately you can bisect an angle, draw a right angle, and other tasks. My first attempt led to an average of 3.51. I seem to be doing best on bisecting an angle and worse on determining the center of a triangle.
On my second attempt, I improved to an average of 2.57 (screenshot). For each trial, I averaged 3.31, 2.10, and 2.30. I was best at "bisect angle", averaging 0.73, and "right angle", averaging 1.23. I was worst at "circle center", averaging 4.23, and "midpoint", averaging 3.93. For the rest, for "parallelogram" I averaged 3.07, "triangle center" I averaged 2.73, and "convergence" I averaged 2.07.
BBC Science & Nature Sex ID - take a series of test to determine how "male" and "female" you are. I got 20/20 on the angles task, 64% on the spot the difference task, 5/10 on the eyes task, 12/12 on the 3D shapes task, and an astounding verbal fluency of 2 words for the first task and 5 words for the second.
(copied to tidbits)
To give proper attribution, I took the table design from this page on Wikipedia, which itself uses MediaWiki for the underlying design.
I'm amazed by the number of interesting people who have come to give talks at Google. In particular, I'm amazed because, as I found out from watching Peter Sagal give his talk, apparently Google does not pay speakers to talk at Google, in fact, they don't even pay for travel expenses. Despite this, a number of interesting people have come to Google, and you can watch them all on YouTube.
Here's the main page - AtGoogleTalks.
Here's some talks that I've watched and recommend -
and here are some talks I plan on watching -
(copied to tidbits)
Also added Saving Face to my list of favorite movies.
Started building a Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page under knowledge 知識.
It's an interesting read, and made me see if I could find any of his stand-up online. I managed to find this clip on Youtube. Here's one of the lines I liked best:
.
Basically, you're free to share and remix anything here that I created so long as you give attribution (e.g. link back to http://people.umass.edu/ghuang).
(copied to tidbits)
Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader for Windows is slow, often unresponsive, and the plug-in for web browsers causes a lot of problems as well. Here are two very good alternatives that are more stable and render a lot more quickly:
Foxit Reader: I use this as my first choice. A nice new feature is tabs, so multiple open PDFs all show up in one window.
Sumatra PDF view: This is available as a standalone executable, which is good for portability as it can be put on a USB drive. The other nice feature of Sumatra is that it automatically detects changes in the PDF file and reloads it when necessary. This makes it ideal when editing LaTeX files, which is good since there don't seem to be any good DVI viewers for Windows.
China new additions:
Some more light-hearted fare:
The largest problem was that my <blockquote>'s had text and other elements directly inside, which is not valid. Instead, you need to put them inside a <div> or <span>. Fixing this problem seems to have made my blockquote formatting appear worse, but that's a problem for another time.
I also had some &'s in URLs and such that weren't properly encoded as &'s.
Added this to tidbits:
My favorite (sounding) words:
On the okapi note, it seems we finally have photographs of the elusive okapi.
This quote is attributed to Winston Churchill. I think it explains a lot about why McCain is slightly up in the polls against Obama. McCain has shown himself to be right at home with the Republican/Rovean tactics of distortion and lies. Just within the past few days, we've come to find out that Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, that, contrary to the facade of McCain/Palin being pork-busters, McCain in fact previously critized Palin for her earmarked projects, and now the fake outrage over Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment when in fact McCain had used the exact same phrase to describe Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan.
Well, it's time for the truth to put its pants on. Watch this video on McCain's ad lies and spread it around.
Also, cows seem to have some interesting behavior of their own.
Meat's no treat for those you eat!
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China
So now we see the real purpose of these "protest zones" - a trick to give the illusion of free speech while actually serving to root out dissidents and imprison them.
Protesters, journalist detained in Beijing
China Steps Up Scrutiny of a Minority in Beijing
China falls short on Olympic promises, critics say
and more...
See tidbits for all links.
A reminder of why I don't like Hillary Clinton:
A refreshingly sane defense of evolution.
I recently had the opportunity to go on a whale watch out of the New England aquarium. For those contemplating going on a whale watch, here's what I've learned from my experience:
The biggest issue to be aware of on a whale watch is motion sickness. The extent to which motion sickness becomes a problem varies a lot on the particular conditions when you go. For instance, the day I went, a sign at the dock listed the conditions as being 2 to 3 feet waves. On the way out to see the whales, the waves did get to be around that high. A decent number of people were throwing up (the boat provides ample bags and trash cans), and a good number more were looking ill and trying to sleep. However, on the way back, the water was completely calm and motion sickness wasn't an issue. It can vary a lot.
I took two pills of Dramamine - this is the kind that is less drowsy - and I ended up feeling fine, other than a small headache from taking pictures while the boat was rocking. Even though the medicine is a less drowsy formula, I started feeling tired about 4 hours after taking it. Speaking of which, it's important to take the medicine an hour before going on the boat, or it won't be as effective.
Also, staying on the outside of the boat really helps. The combination of the fresh air and looking outside at the horizon made me feel a lot better than trying to cope in the cabin.
As far as the actual whale watching, while it was a lot of fun, and we got to see quite a few whales, or at least the same whales multiple times, (the aquarium guarantees a whale sighting, or you get to go on another trip for free), I was hoping to see the whales a little closer than we did, and I really was hoping to see a whale breach, but it was not to be. Given that, I'm not exactly sure if I'd go again, or if I would go if the company I'm working for wasn't footing the bill.
Pictures later...
More on China:
Potemkin Olympics hide misery
Chinese abuzz over lip-syncing singer in Olympics opening ceremony
The Dissident Within: What a book about China's great famine says about the country's transformation
From an interview:
Engaging More Effectively with China
China Lets Child Workers Die Digging in Congo Mines for Copper
China 'is fueling war in Darfur'
See tidbits for more.
China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change
See tidbits for more.
(copied to tidbits)
這本書的主題之一是人不可貌相.
This is cute - Discovery Channel: I Love the World.
An addendum to the Interactive Guide to Bush-administration lawbreaking. It's not quite time to let bygones be bygones. Reading all the things Bush and his administration has done to destroy the image of America in the world, 真令人髮指.
An Interactive Guide to Bush-administration lawbreaking
Stephen King's
Richard Bachman's book Blaze today, to start on now that I've finished Childhood's End.
An interesting question (an old Microsoft interview question): why are manhole covers round, as opposed to say, square?
hint:
Childhood's End touched on a number of interesting issues, like animal rights, religion, and nationalism. On that last topic, here's a scary story about rising nationalism in China. More on this later.
Also a good op-ed in NYTimes about how America is different from China and Russia.
It's not just my opinion though, the GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test ranked Massachusetts as the 4th worst state, coming in at a rank of 48 (including D.C.). In comparison, Wisconsin came in at 12th best.
In fact, Massachusetts has come in at 48 the past four years in a row, whereas 12th is actually the worst for Wisconsin in the past four years, coming in 4th best last year.
In high school, I read the first two books of Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, but now I don't really remember any of it. I should re-read it soon...
Looking forward to reading Duma Key and Blaze in the near future...
Bonus: 101 reasons to go vegetarian.
Come out!
Resolution: update webpage 2x / week
Expected Number of Updates by July 05: 54
Actual Number of Updates: 18
Yikes, just passed the halfway point of this year. To make my expected number of posts this year, I'll have to average an addition 1.44 updates a week...
The full story behind Clinton's Bosnia lie.
Summary: Clinton deliberate lied multiple times about the incident, refusing to admit the lies until a mountain of irrefutable evidence built up.
Excerpt:
The full story on the Bosnia trip.
Summary: Hillary Clinton was instrumental in delaying American intervention in Bosnia, only visiting after the war was over, yet tried to bury the truth and glorify the incident to pass it off as "experience".
Excerpts:
(channeling Lawrence Lessig's <style>...)
<honesty>
Here's how Clinton described her landing in Bosnia in 1996:
Here's what actually happened.
If that wasn't bad enough, here is her excuse after being caught in the lie:
"if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire"? Saying, "I remember landing under sniper fire" does not leave much room for confusion. Passing it off as a simple slip of the tongue doesn't cut it either - this is something she has repeatedly said on at least three occasions all the way since December.
Her explanation of meeting with the 8 year old girl doesn't hold water either. She makes it seem as if she was risking her own safety to not disappoint the girl, yet if there was actually a risk of sniper fire, wouldn't she worry that the girl and her mother might be killed in the gun fire as well?
</honesty>
<ethics>
This is Clinton describing the pledged delegates as being up for grabs:
Remember, these are the pledged delegates that were awarded based on primary voting in each state. There was enough of an outrage just over the prospect that the super-delegates could overturn the voice of the American public and award the nomination to Clinton. Now she's saying the pledged delegates themselves should go directly against the votes of their state?
She can't possibly be ignorant of the effect this would have on all the people who voted for Obama, the voters who have answered Obama's call for hope and participation in the process, voters like me who were already jaded and cynical about "politics as usual" in Washington. The only explanation is that she just doesn't care.
</ethics>
<Rove>
So what's the difference between Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove? I don't know. So count me in among the 20% of Obama supports who will be voting against Clinton should her under-handed techniques actually win her the nomination.
</Rove>
(source)
woohoo!
Aside:
Resolution: update webpage 2x / week
Expected Number of Updates by Mar 23: 24
Actual Number of Updates: 15
Reaction: D'oh
Not directly related with the above item: as time goes on, the more I believe that Clinton really is a monster...
Unrelated: Ang Lee should follow Spielberg's lead after China's ridiculous blacklist of Tang Wei [original article about blacklist].
Radio 收音機 page added to <li>'s 清單
I think the outrage over this (which I think is justified) indicates that, deep down, people care about the well-being of animals. For instance, recently I read a section of Isaac Asimiov's autobiography, I. Asimov, about a course he took in zoology:
Yet most people (to my knowledge, Asimov included) don't seem to have any compunction ove reating meat. I think that speaks to the disconnect between eating meat and realizing fully where it comes from. My first (short-lived) foray into vegetarianism came about because I reasoned, if I couldn't bring myself to actually slaughter a cow or a chicken or a pig, I shouldn't be eating meat.
Added television page to <li>'s 清單.
One final thought for today: During the candidate's speeches tonight, Clinton's supporters were chanting, "Yes she can!" Obama's supporters were chanting, "Yes we can!" Doesn't that say everything about the difference between the two?
With regard to the second letter, I feel his last paragraph is a rebuttal to his own point of view. Why not Tehran? Why not Havana? Then why not Sudan? Why not 1930's Germany, or 1980's South Africa as the final letter mentions?
As Mr. Ramirez writes:
So, to the second letter, I ask, how is that not legitimizing the government of North Korea?
Aside: Hoping for a big day for Obama tomorrow...!
In particular, I really admire Lawrence Lessig, and so I was a little sad to hear he isn't going to be running for Congress at the moment, though I completely agree with his reasons for doing so. Hopefully he'll consider running in the future, and in the meantime, I hope people get behind his Change Congress movement.
More reason why I dislike Clinton.
On a more uplifting note, Lessig is considering running for Congress...
This Tuesday is the Wisconsin primary. I'm sending in my ballot for Obama, and I'm fervently hoping he wins.
On one hand, I think Obama would be a great president. I wholeheartedly agree with the reasons Lawrence Lessig gives for supporting Obama, and his follow-up argument on why, even if you're concerned with the practical issue of who is more electable, you should vote for Obama.
As excited as I am by the prospect of a Obama presidency, my vote is equally fueled by my disdain for Hillary "lobbyists represent real people" Clinton. I've been appalled by her Rove-like tactics of attempting to distort Obama's record against the Iraq war and deliberately misinterpreting Obama's comments on Reagen.
Her recent actions have just been an escalation of this trend. Her attempts to down play Obama's victories as an excuse for superdelegates to vote against the popular vote are insulting. Her attempts to get the delegates from Michigan and Florida seated are particularly galling given one of her key supporters voted in August to strip the two states of their delegates for violating party rules.
Jon Taplin has a nice summary of the big problems with Clinton in his open letter to the New York Times on their endorsement of Clinton, namely her lack of financial transparency and her delegate tactics. In fact, shortly after, the New York Times made the same call for financial transparency, adding only Obama has made his full income-tax returns public.
One final shot - Clinton may believe she stands for change just as much as Obama, but to most Americans, change doesn't include being one of the top 10 recipients of earmarks in the Senate. I mean, even Bush is trying to get Congress to cut down on earmarks, but Clinton is not apologetic, but in fact, proud of her earmark spending. If Clinton is nominated, don't think that this won't be a focus of McCain.
Bonus:
The john.he.is McCain follow up to the will.i.am Yes We Can Obama video.
Bonus 2:
Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Anyway, I've updated my books list with two Stephen King books I recently finished, Misery and The Running Man. I also added a little note to the lists section explaining that recently added entries are marked by different bullet styles.
The judge should get a medal and parade for jailing a drunk, a reckless driver, a bigot, a homophobe, and a complete idiot all in one shot.
So now I'm in the process of transitioning all the old contents that used to be here over to the new format.
I'm sympathetic to any viewpoint that leads to an increase in concern for animal welfare, be it in the form of reduced factory farms, free-range animals, and reduction of meat-intake for various environmental or health regions. However, in the end, I don't think it's enough - I don't believe it's right to kill animals for human consumption. This op-ed in the New York Times, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable, summarizes the situation and the reasons for being vegan, which I'm in complete agreement with.
Also in the NY Times, a look at vegetarianism in literature (including Jonathan Safran Foer's recent book Eating Animals, which looks interesting) - Mau-mauing the flesh eaters.
Posted some photos in my photo gallery 照片, from my 2008-08 whale watching trip. For those contemplating going on a whale watch, you can read about my experience and advice, under knowledge 知識.
Interesting reads:
- Donaldson Institute Study details struggles of Korean adoptees
- Can a prisoner request anything for his last meal?
- Big sensors + little cameras = amazing photo quality
- A Falcons player gets on the good side of PETA
- Fox Valley author, toy designer declares war on office boredom using spitball weapons
- Salk Institute scientists research how animals regrow body parts
- Botanists debate the benefits of assisted migration
- Hacked Roombas used to play pac-man
- Compassionate masters of Jain
- Wally, a connected wallpaper changer for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- More examples of why I read Scott Adams blog
- Go-go Google Gopher - Google invents its own programming language
- Murder, looting, pizza theft, and other hazards of cooperative video-gaming
- Executive privilege - "The family’s lifestyle over the past year and a half has been propped up by a $200,000 severance package and another $100,000 in savings — funds the family has burned through rapidly. By Mr. Joegriner’s own calculations, the family will be out of money in six months if he doesn’t find work." It's enough to drive a person crazy...
- Especially in light of things like this - Poor nutrition is killing children, stunting growth
- Dr. Tererai Trent - Kristof
- Stunning Milky Way's heart image combines three space telescope views in one
- Crowdsourcing comedy on Amazon reviews
- Four killed in car-train crash in S.C. - "It appears that the vehicle tried to go around the gate arms ... to beat the train across the tracks"
- Psychologists have been watching us on the subway. Here's what they've learned.
- New Super Mario Brows Wii Review
- Doomsday isn't coming, NASA says, at least not in 2012 - "In an e-mail message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012."
- Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan - Hitchens
- President Obama's bow to Emperor of Japan and racism in media
- Imprisoning a child for life
- The lessons of 1989, Hitchens
- Selling out abortion rights for health care reform, Saletan
- If women can defend Fort Hood, they can defend America, Saletan
- Napping, sex, and abstinence - Saletan
- Bio-diversity
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with blog posts and TUF Aftermath from episode ten.
On a related note, a cool video with best friends Anderson Silva and Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira: The Spider and the Minotaur.
The recent controversy in the animal rights/welfare community concerns the decision by the ASPCA to euthanize the dog Oreo. Some background: As I posted back in August, a dog, Oreo, was thrown off of a roof (Dog hurled from roof of Brooklyn housing project, Man is indicted on charge of throwing dog off building), survived, and was rehabilitated by the ASPCA.
However, the dog turned out to be violent and unpredictable, not surprising given the owner (certainly not the dog's fault). The ASPCA made the decision to euthanize Oreo, which led to some outcry (Deluge of pleas to spare Oreo, dog thrown off roof) but ultimately the ASPCA carried through with their decision (Oreo is dead).
I agree with the decision and the reasoning presented in their press release on the issue. In addition, PETA also wrote a cogent letter to the editor supporting the ASPCA's decision.
So while I am understanding and supportive of this decision, I am willing to consider alternate viewpoints. What disappoints me though, is that the "no-kill" side really makes no attempt at an intelligent, rational discussion. Rather they are completely based on emotions and bashing the ASPCA and PETA and accusing them of not really caring about animals. They completely fail to see or consider that there are many worse things an animal can have to endure than being peacefully euthanized, and thus believe that anyone who would do such a thing cannot possibly be motivated with the animal's best interests in mind.
The head of the movement seems especially egregious in this respect, having been charged with animal abuse in the past, due to a complete inability to take care of the animals.
One of the other canards that always gets mentioned by such groups is that PETA wants to kill all pit bulls. This is simply not the case, as can be seen by actually reading and understanding PETA's views on this issue: PETA's position on pit bull bans, PETA files: Position on pit bulls.
Posted the rest of my photos 照片 from my 2008-11 trip to Taiwan 台灣, part 2.
Posted some photos in my photo gallery 照片, from my trip last year around this time to Taiwan 台灣, part 1.
Very interesting research: How single parents affect the brain:
"When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain... preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents."
This article raises two important points. The first is obviously the importance of raising children in a two parent family. Although conservatives tend to be the group that ostensibly cares more about family values, the fact is that most seem more concerned with irrelevant issues such as gay marriage, and are themselves hypocritical when it comes to marriage and fidelity.
The other point though, is again the lesson that animals are not so different from humans. Or really, to properly phrase that, non-human animals are not so different from human animals. Consider the care animals have for their offspring: "degu mothers and fathers cared for their pups in similar ways, including sleeping next to or crouching over them, licking and grooming them, and playing with them. The fathers even exhibited a 'nursing-type' position."
Interesting articles:
- Faith-based discrimination
- Laser creates 'false memories' in fly brains
- Researchers create artificial memories in the brain of a fruitfly
- Calculating emissions is problematic
- 1000 cellphones and 2000 text messages playing Tchaikovsky
- Church sign Fail
- Halloween costume Win
- Two biographies of Ayn Rand
- The United Nations' shameful complicity in htis year's corrupt Afghan elections - Hitchens
- Thugs attack two men in dresses... who turn out to be cage fighters
- A defense of jaywalking
- xkcd - Movie narrative charts
- More classic garfield minus garfield
- Teach your teachers well
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with posts from episode nine.
Stephen King just released his latest novel, Under the Dome, which seems to be an epic in the style of The Stand, It, and Needful Things. I'm pretty excited to read it, not sure if I'll be able to hold out for the paperback or not...
I gathered up some of the recent reviews, as well as reviews for his latest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset, which recently came out in paperback, on my Knowledge 知識 : Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page.
君子之於禽獸也，見其生，不忍見其死；聞其聲，不忍食其肉。是以君子遠庖廚也。
- 孟子, 梁惠王上
So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter-house and cook-room.
- Mencius, King Hûi of Liang
In my opinion, (assuming I understand the context correctly), halfway there...
More on the abilities of animals: In pig cognition studies, reflections on parallels with humans (note the number of comments on how this makes it difficult to eat meat or makes one re-think eating meat), and Fowl, but photogenic, the beauty of chickens.
Also updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with TUF Aftermath from episode 8.
Interesting reads:
- Lawrence Lessig: Plain sight corruption: Senator Burr and rape victims
- Change Congress!
- Your mood, one year later - NYT reader word train
- Only 3 percent of Americans think it should be legal to text and drive
- Poll shows support for ban on texting while driving
- Picked from a lineup, on a whiff of evidence
- Unhealthy America - Kristof
- Chemicals in our food, and bodies - Kristof
- Jon Taplin blog
- North Korean wins human rights award
- Creativity and criticism
- Funny characters in unicode
- Why doesn't exercise lead to weight loss?
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a posts from episode eight and filled in some older missing posts. Although I have not been updating Mike Wessel's posts, I did add his blog from the eighth episode, where he fought.
This makes me proud to live in Amherst: To Amherst, via Guantanamo Bay. "Under a petition Hooke submitted to the town’s Select Board - approved by a 2-1 vote Monday night - the town will call on Congress to rescind its ban on detainees resettling in the United States, and will welcome Ahmed Belbacha, originally from Algeria, and Ravil Mingazov, arrested in Pakistan, to Amherst."
Now if we can just do something about the bad roads and drivers...
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, another article on the incredible abilities of animals, this time: Good dog, smart dog. Consider one Labradoodle named Jet:
"He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall."
Most Americans are horrified at the thought of eating dogs, while at the same time not giving a second thought to having a hamburger or some bacon. Does this really make sense? Is this moral?
Fascinating article on dolphin intelligence: Why dolphins are deep thinkers. For instance, dolphins at an institute are trained to hold onto litter that fall into their pool, to give to trainers in return for fish, in order to keep the pools clean. However, one dolphin figured out the following strategy:
"When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification."
The article is full of other amazing examples of dolphin intelligence, but to me, the take away message is larger than just dolphins. The more we understand animals and their capacity for thoughts and emotions, the more we realize that they are not so dissimilar from humans, and the less we can justify our current treatment of them.
(credit: article originally seen on Letters From Taiwan)
Articles worth reading:
- Losing net neutrality: the worst case scenario
- TED talk: Beau Lotto: Optical illussions show how we see
- Scientist re-creates Turin Shroud to show it's fake
- The Ares I-X rocket in pictures, from birth to launch
- One reporter's lonely beat, witnessing executions
- Fossil skeleton from Africa predates Lucy
- Fossil skeleton known as Ida is no ancestor of humans
- The cult of the vintage Honda motorcycle
- The beauty of artificial virginity
- Driving should be more like Northwest Flight 188 - interesting, but I wouldn't hope for automated driving any time soon...
- In defense of the 'Balloon boy' dad
- A language of smiles - Olivia Judson
- To harvest squash, click here
- Singer, David Carroll, uses video to complain about United Airlines
- 7.3 billion years later, Einstein's theory prevails
- Favre return leaves Packers fans seeking directions
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with all the existing episodes of TUF Aftermath. I found out Spike.com had a better listing of all the episodes than UFC.com, so I switched to that.
More interesting articles, from Slate:
- Can you tell if a man is dangerous just by looking at his face?
- Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good
- The high court looks at religious symbols on public lands
- The health effects of discrimination against fat people
- Obama's right. It's time to stop taking Fox's skewed news seriously
- Why Wall Street bonuses won't go away
- How does the music-identifying app Shazam work its magic?
- Your tax dollars at work, penalizing fat people - Saletan
- How does fair-use law work? - Tim Wu
- Ambulances for the ample - Saletan
- Why the House health reform bill is better than the Senate's
- Did the Congressional Budget Office just kill the public option?
One everyday thing that really annoys me is litter. Litter is all over the place - soda cans, water bottles, food wrappers, paper, not just in large cities but even all over areas like college campus. I've realized though, that this is just one manifestation of a larger phenomenon that really lowers my general impression of humanity - carelessness and indifference when it comes to actions that affect others. I wrote a short essay on carelessness, under my diatribes 謾罵 collection.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a few posts from episode seven.
Some interesting articles:
- Privacy - Scott Adams
- Brett Favre and the interception myth
- Favre wearing purple in Green Bay will be a strange sight
- Jury hears boy, 7, describe how mother attacked him and his brother
- Afterglow, from 13.1 billion light-years away
- Internet animation: Draw it yourself
- Jon Stewart calls Fox out: "Not even close to news" - more on Fox being a fake news network
- Toyota engineers unique flower species to absorb Prius manufacturing emissions
- Canon S90 Review: It'll never leave my pocket (except when I'm taking pictures)
- Giz explains: Why every country has a different F#$%ing plug
One thing at the top of my to-watch-list is Leaving Fear Behind, a 25 minute documentary about Tibetans living under Chinese rule (which I believe can be watched in full toward the middle of the above page).
Unsurprisingly, the filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, is now being tried for subversion. His lawyer was barred from the court. "Before he was forced to drop the case, the lawyer, Li Dunyong, said Mr. Wangchen had told him that he was tortured and that he had contracted hepatitis B while in custody. Since then, he has been held incommunicado."
So far, the Obama administration has been pretty disappointing on this front. This best sums up the failure of the administration's overly conciliatory approach: "'Beijing is emboldened by such moves,' said Ms. Tethong. 'They see a weakness in the U.S. government, and they’re going to exploit it. This idea that you’ll gain more through some backroom secret strategy does not work.'"
You'd think people would have learned something from the complete failure of the Olympics to bring about any tangible change in human rights in China.
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Afghanistan on the mind:
- Matthew Hoh resigned in protest over direction of Afghanistan war policy - Jon Taplin
- More schools, not troops in Afghanistan - Nicolas Kristof
- Afghanistan and the typical pathway to democracy - Scott Adams
Other interesting reads:
- The pension for punishment
- 32 planets discovered outside solar system
- Scientists discover massive ring around Saturn
- When parents are too toxic to tolerate
- The song decoders (Pandora)
Joe Lieberman: Hard to believe he was ever considered a Democrat. He really puts the lie in Lieberman.
- Did Joe Lieberman just kill the public option?
- Joe Lieberman's stance on health care reform makes him even less popular among Democrats
- Lieberman pledged support for health reform. Liar.
Other idiocy:
Interesting articles:
- More than 1 billion going hungry, U.N. says
- Chronic hunger: Feeding the world
- Democrats and schools (Kristof)
- Boy saved from fire in dramatic rescue
- 3 Americans share Nobel for medicine
- The non-tragedy of the commons
- Larry David explains the Nobel in economic science
- How nonsense sharpens the intellect
- The public (health) plan, continued
- Migrants going north now risk kidnappings
Something I hope to write more about later - given our innate poor intuition when it comes to statistics, contrasted with the immense importance of solid statistical reasoning, means that statistics courses should be required coursework in college for all students. Here's just one example:
- Are women discriminated against in graduate admissions?
- Simpson's paradox (more explanation from Wikipedia)
Interesting gadget articles, from Gizmodo:
- Giz explains when not to use your camera's flash
- Giz explains why you can't get decent earphones for less than $100
- Panasonic GF1 Review: I (heart) Micro Four Thirds
- Canon G11 Review: Makes you feel like a real photographer (almost)
Ereaders, books, and book-related:
- A new electronic reader, the Nook, enters the market
- Blog: Barnes & Noble unveils ereader
- Barnes & Noble's dual-screen Nook: $260, eats the Kindle's lunch
- 8 reasons you can finally love Ebook readers
- Ebook fans keep format in spotlight
- Libraries and readers wade into digital lending
On North Korea:
- South Korea: North Korean gulags hold 154,000
- China sends North Korean refugees back to North
- Banyan: Hell on Earth: The West still turns a blind eye to the world's most brutal and systematic abuse of humans rights
- U.N. envoy slams North Korea over human rights
Two more updates to my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with a few posts from episode six. Strangely, episode five of TUF Aftermath from last week isn't in the UFC video page (and so I don't know the direct link) but can be viewed directly on the main page.
More Carl Sagan Auto-tuned awesomeness:
- Carl Sagan II - 'We Are All Connected' ft Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye (seen here)
- Carl Sagan I - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos remixed) (seen here)
On China:
- 6 sentenced to death in Xinjiang riots
- Beijing battles online 'disharmony'
- Empire State Building goes red and yellow for China - "Is this to honor Mao Zedong, whose euphemistically-named Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution led to the mass starvation and mass murder of 40-70 million Chinese, a death toll perhaps surpassing that of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined, and led him to declare, 'China is such a populous nation, it's not as if we cannot do without a few people?'"
- Hong Kong retailers plan for one holiday and two worlds
- China's other face: The red and the black
- China's National Day parade: public barred from celebrations
- Journalists in Hong Kong condemn curb on press freedom
- A spirit of enduring optimism
- Chinese tests reveal lead in children near a plant
- Lead poisoning found in 121 children in China
- China's Wu Jinglian keeps talking
- China bars foreigners from making visits to Tibet
- Dalai Lama calls for democracy in PRC
- China and India dispute enclave on edge of Tibet
- China web sites seeking users' names
- Chinese doctors say some claims of needle-stabbings are mistaken
- New protests reported in restive Chinese region
- What is wrong with the "China should not be 'lectured'" mentality
- Lead poisoning of children in China leads to disturbance - "At least 615 out of 731 children in the two villages have tested positive for lead poisoning... Lead levels in the children were more than 10 times the level China considers safe."
- Chinese public-interest lawyer charged amid crackdown
- Chinese rights advocate charged with tax evasion; Tibetan sentences
- Taiwan-based HK businessman behind murder plot: trial - "A Hong Kong businessman living in Taiwan was behind a plot to shoot leading democrats Jimmy Lai (黎智英) and Martin Lee (李柱銘), a report said yesterday."
- China warms to new credo - business first - it's amusing that the NY Times sees two examples of where China did something crazy, with the web filter and the allegations against Rio Tinto, then took them back very slightly, and paints these as examples of China growing and learning to put business ahead of its authoritarian dictatorship. It's like saying .01% is infinitely better than 0%.
- China scales back software filter plan
- China scales back fight against online political dissent - but not in any way that really matters, and probably not even permanently.
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
One of the best sites to go for desktop wallpaper is interfacelift.com. I'd like to have some of my photographs accepted to there, but unfortunately my sole submission to date was rejected. So for the time being, I'll be posting my wallpapers here, under Knowledge 知識, while I hone my craft.
Articles on animals:
- Dinosaur-bird relationships: Are birds really dinosaurs?
- Paper challenges ideas about 'early bird' dinosaur
- The terrible consequences of Egypt's swine slaughter - "A world without pigs would be a world in which humans had destroyed some close kin and some very serviceable fellow creatures. Yet two of the great monotheisms are committed to irrational hatred and even fear of the pig."
- Custom camera rig allows for a stunning vertical panorama of a giant redwood
- Is ocean seismic testing endangering the dolphins?
- Where tasty morsels fear to tread
- Give
birds a break, lock up the cat
- 2 letters to the editor - the second letter is wrong on a variety of fronts: First, it is true that humans should respect birds more, but part of that means keeping pet cats inside. Moreover, inside cats live longer and healthier lives. Lastly, no one is recommending simplying keeping cats cooped up with no stimulation. It is the owners' responsibility to meet the cats needs, through interaction, creating a screened-in area outside for the cat, or training it to walk outside with a leash and harness.
- A third of dinosaur species never existed?
- Bird-eating frog among 163 new species found in Mekong region
- Animal rights and speech
- Two monkeys get the gift of color
- More cows, more milk, but more headaches
- Montana: Protections for grizzly bears are restored
- Cat survives kick in face with steel-toe boot
Interesting:
- Let Congress go without insurance
- Taking aim at god on 'Blasphemy Day'
- William Saletan on Polanski
- Oldest human skeleton offers new clues to evolution
- Ardi, humans, and primates
- Why it's so hard to put sex in the dictionary
- A massacre in Guinea: The Dadis Show turns nasty
- When (not) to use your camera's flash
- How to best a Master Lock
- Maximum PC Primer: Lightweight netbook computing with Linux
- Hey blogger! The consumer protection police would like a word with you - not sure I really agree with this article. Seems like it is saying: (existing rules + new rules) leads to contradiction, therefore new rules bad, but never justifies that the existing rules are good. Also it seems to be complaining about the vagueness of the rules rather than the rationale, which begs the question, why not just fix the implementation instead of scrapping it altogether?
- The GOP
- Will books be Napsterized? - my partial answer: learn from iTunes, drop the price on books (with no printing costs, why should ebooks cost so much?), and remove DRM or at least have one standard across all ebook readers
- Dad's life or yours? You choose - Kristof on our health care system
- Health care lobbying - which lobbyists are influencing Max Baucus, and who they represent, in diagram form
- MIT scientist explains OLEDs by electrocuting a pickle
- Save the Google Book Search deal
- Whatever happened to acid rain?
- Whatever happened to the ozone layer?
- The story of my teeth - first in a series look at dentistry in America
- A burst of technology, helping the blind to see
- Fewer feet, smaller footprint
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page with two more posts from episode five.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with some posts from episode five.
Added Rain Man and Monsters, Inc. to my list 清單 of favorite movies.
I also recently watched the movie Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman's novel. I thought it was pretty good, but a little more geared for adolescents without the same amount of charm for adults as Monster's Inc., and just short of my favorites list.
Added a link to TUF The Aftermath Episode 4 to my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page (in Knowledge 知 識).
More on driving:
- Driven to distraction - The problem: "On average (when not in recession) 42,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year... Last year, 5,870 people (16% of overall fatalities) were killed on American roads as a result of driver distraction, and 515,000 (22% of the total) were injured."
- Victims, relatives press for action on distracted driving - The human cost: "Teater's focus isn't only on texting. He said that his son Joseph, 12, was killed in 2004 when a Hummer ran a red light and hit the Chevy Suburban his son was riding in... Zaffke, whose mother was killed a week before Mother's Day, summed up the issue in stark words: 'Distracted drivers destroy lives.'"
- Thumbs on the wheel - Engineering solution? "When a cellphone is used in a moving car, its signal must be handed off from one cell tower to the next along the route. This process tells the service provider that the phone is in motion. Cellphone towers could be engineered to not transmit while a phone is traveling."
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with the posts from episode four.
Updated my The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with the latest TUF Aftermath.
The Beauty of Airscape in Taiwan 福爾摩沙 空中散步 (make sure to watch in HD).
A while ago, in this post, I pointed out three interesting books mentioned in The Economist. One of the books, The Age of Empathy by Frans de Wall, just got a longer review in Slate.
It seems like a very interesting book, and is definitely on my to-read list. In particular, this passage in the review really struck me: "Joshua Plotnik, one of de Waal's colleagues in Thailand, witnessed one elephant try to push her dying friend into a standing position. When that didn't work, she stood supportively by her dying companion for days, even as humans tried to tempt her away with food."
To me, this just highlights how amazing animals are, and that the gap between humans and other animals is not so large as to justify the way we treat them. Just compare this behavior to the driver in Amherst recently, who drove into two bicyclists, killing one, and simply fled the scene rather than stop to help.
On a loosely related note, today I had the misfortune of running into this website - Conservapedia. It's as asinine as it sounds. Honestly, if someone were to create a comedic exaggeration of conservative America, it probably wouldn't end up that different from this page. Get the real news here.
My thoughts - 憂天憫人, 更憫動物
On Taiwan:
- Wall Street Journal getting it right on Taiwan
- Documentary on Kadeer will screen at film festival
- Film screenings and freedom of speech - summary of the whole situation with Taiwan, China, and Rebiya Kadeer
- Internet users slam Kadeer visa denial
- Government prevents visit by Kadeer
- Rejecting Kadeer - and credibility
- Kadeer 'very disappointed' by Taipei
- Kadeer = No Visa
- China's 'terrorists' are now Taiwan's
- US academics decry unfair treatment in Chen trial
- Former envoy to US Joseph Wu warns on Ma policies
- Mobilize - now!
- Johnny Neihu's News Watch: Now this will hurt Chicom feelings
- It's [China's "celebrations"] scaring the neighbors - also see this and this
- Who cares about human rights when the world needs China so badly
- The clampdown will be subtle, pervasive, and plausibly denied
- DPP's Liu wins by landslide in Yunlin
- Education disparity in Taiwan
Added a few more links to The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs under Knowledge 知 識.
Updated my listing of The Ultimate Fighter 10 fighter blogs page, under Knowledge 知識, with some blogs from episode 3 and links to The Ultimate Fighter: The Aftermath, a fifteen minute Q&A video segment airing each Monday following the show, hosted by Amir Sadollah with guests from the show.
Awesome:
- Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos remixed) (seen here)
- J.S. Bach -
Crab Canon on a Mobius Strip
(seen here)
- also see crab canon, table canon, and A Musical Offering
If I was the kind of person who believed in seeing the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, based on the evidence - This peanut looks like a duck - I would get down on my knees and pray to the duck god.
(site seen on cute overload)
Bonus: why the grocery store checkout aisle should depress you, as explained by Stephan Pastis.
After hearing that Google added various sports calendars to Google Calendars, I looked around for a calendar of MMA events. I wasn't able to find any that I could add to either Google Calendars or iCal, so I decided to create my own.
This MMA calendar lists events from UFC, WEC, Dream, Sengoku, and Strikeforce. Here are the various flavors: XML, ICAL, HTML.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
Added a section to Knowledge 知識 with an organized set of direct links to all The Ultimate Fighter Season 10 fighter blogs.
Taiwan:
- AFP awesomeness, Chinese childishness
- Statements on Chen verdict
- Our predictable establishment commentators: Cossa in SCMP
- Is jailing an ex-president a blow against corruption in Taiwan or a sign of persecution?
- White House adviser visits with Dalai Lama
- Taiwan democracy in peril: US senator
- The DPP's struggle for one voice
- Taiwan must fight bor recognition
- Diane lee charged with fraud, forgery
- Fidel, Che, 9/11, and a call for radicalism in Taiwan
- Chen should be released during appeal: Ma's [US law school] mentor
- Taiwan deserves better justice from Chen trial
- Chen gets life - The View from Taiwan
- Chen Shui-bian gets life
- What's chaotic about it? - "you might hear the best indicator of being deep-Blue, which is invariably, 'Taiwan is too free.'"
- A feckless opposition made a harsh ruling against Chen possible
- Suspicion rife in US of meddling in Chen trial
- Visit by the Dalai Lama a test of democracy
- The rise and fall of Lee Teng-hui
- Typhoon Morakot, a painful reminder of Ma Ying-jeou and the Peter Principle - a good comparison of Ma after the typhoon with Lee Teng-hui after the 921 Earthquake
- Behold China's network in Taiwan - the KMT, the media, and religious organizations
- Ma no longer ruler of his domain
- Taiwanese Falun Gong criticize Hong Kong court ruling
- Prime Minister of Taiwan quits over typhoon response
- Liu resigns, Wu Den-yih to replace him
Interesting:
- Where have all the women gone?
- Yemeni girl, 12, dies in painful childbirth
- Engaging with Iran is like having sex with someone who hates you - Hitchens
- The disappearing boundaries of cigarette prohibition - Saletan
- Bathing, but not alone - on bacteria
- Cracking the spine of libel - laws in Britain
- Stewart mocks the 912 Fauxtrage
- Tuning in a zippier Zune
- Why don't doctors wash their hands more?
- Text-to-speech technology reaches an inflection point
- Traits - Scott Adams on the potential outcomes of selective breeding
- The body count at home due to poor health care - "Nikki White would have been far better off if only she had been a convicted bank robber." Instead, she died. "After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?"
- Glenn Beck and "Diversity is a disease"
- The Glenn
Beck-inspired protesters who descended Saturday on
Washington
- Cass Sunstein, hated by the mob mentioned in the previous article, seems like a decent guy. No wonder.
- Betsy McCaughey, not so much.
- Why the public option matters
- The creation of Charles Darwin
- What's for lunch? Enter the Bento Box, a touch of Japan
- Vague cyberbullying law
- Asus peers into e-reader market - seems interesting, although my opinion of Asus has gone down a bit as a result of their response to China's proposed censoring software
The Ultimate Fighter, Season 10:
In past seasons, I think starting in season 6 with Mac Danzig (see here), although perhaps earlier, fighters on The Ultimate Fighter have written weekly blogs, with each post giving their behind the scenes take on the just aired episode.
Unfortunately, these different posts are usually scattered about the internet with no clear listing anywhere, and worse, often times it is difficult just to find all the posts that one particular fighter has made.
Fortunately, for season 10, a list of the fighter blogs is being kept on this forum page, at least giving a link to the first post. In addition, if you go to the UFC or Spike page, you can also find The Aftermath, what appears to be a fifteen minute or so video with questions and answers hosted by Amir Sadollah and featuring guests from the show. There's also a podcast, apparently with Rashad Evans, that you can find and subscribe to on the iTunes store.
I may try to put a clearer listing later.
More on animals:
- Peter Singer - It's time to stop exploiting animals for food - "For us to cause avoidable suffering to animals is wrong. Even religious people ... would generally agree that stewardship doesn’t mean taking 20,000 chickens and putting them in a single shed with a very small amount of space per bird and treating them like they’re merely things to convert grain to flesh. That’s not stewardship, that’s simple exploitation of sentient beings."
- New giant rat species discovered - "'The animals inside this crater were unafraid of humans, pretty much because they hadn't seen them very much,' McGavin said." That's sad to me, that animals needn't have a fear of humans, but only do because they've learned from experience to fear us.
- Speaking of which, Wolves aren't making it easy for Idaho hunters - "Hunting stores, outfitters and guides, even hotels and restaurants have been hurt by a belief that wolves have made hunting less worthwhile." Typical, putting petty concerns in front of the life of animals.
- 'Harvesting' the highways: Roadkill becoming trendy - "On British roads, the People’s Trust for Endangered Species estimates that 1 percent to 2 percent of the national population of hedgehogs dies each year."
- Five plead guilty in largest dog fighting crackdown in U.S. history - see pictures
- With the above in mind - Free speech battle arises from dog fighting videos
- Not there on salmon - Insufficient effort to protect endangered salmon, with no changes to the most significant problem of the eight damns the salmon must cross.
- Belatedly, Egypt spots flaws in wiping out pigs
- Daring rodent shows puzzled leopard exactly who's boss by stealing its lunch
- Injured duck gets helping hand at the California shelter
- Bear trackers use GPS in bid to preserve the animals
- 'Lucky' tortoise survives busy motorway
- For a type of songbird, bats are on the menu
- Taipei Zoo to ink pact on rare tortoises
- Bird steals from sad wallaby
- Documentary looks at plight of the honeybee
- ASPCA Happy Tails: Stray cat strut
- Tiger Ranch Raid Update: Rescued cats now up for adoption
- Web goes nuts for 'crasher squirrel'
On safety:
Some numbers from the UMass Parking Services and UMass Police Department: In 2007, 4,654 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in the US, and 70,000 were injured. For reference, that is more than 1,000 over the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks, and ten-fold the number of people injured.
Despite this, people don't really seem to care. We try to multitask more and more as we drive, and get impatient with trying to get to our destinations as fast as possible with little regard to safety. Just this month, two UMass students were hit while cycling, and one died, yet the driver simply fled the scene and is still at large. Hopefully, they will find him or her and bring him to justice. This is not an isolated incident, however. Just this past summer a UMass worker was also killed while bicycling by a reckless driver.
Follow-up to my last post, which I will keep at the top for now, as I feel like that's the most important thing on this page.
First, here's a direct link to the video in Youtube. Here's the full story at the Huffington Post: Chicks being ground up alive video.
This quote really killed me: "Mercy for Animals says it will call on the nation's 50 largest grocery chains to include labels on their eggs that say, 'Warning: Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry.' Head [spokesman for United Egg Producers] called that proposal 'almost a joke,' saying the group had no credible authority, and had questionable motives."
Questionable motives? Mercy for Animals is completely up-front about their motives, they're not trying to trick people into becoming vegan. Credible authority? United Egg Producers aren't even contesting any of the assertions, they readily admit that all male chicks are ground up alive.
Lastly, here's a Slate article on Glenn Beck and Cass sunstein. The fact that people can care more about contraception and abortion than the senseless grinding up of 200 million male chicks every year, just for our own enjoyment of eating eggs, blows my mind.
Noticed this over the weekend as well - New York Times website was victim of a malicious ad swap, and What to do if you saw an 'antivirus' pop-up ad.
Bottom line is, always be careful and suspicious. What is more likely - that you actually have a lot of viruses and an intrusive pop-up ad is actually telling you about them, or the ad is just playing an animated gif file and wants you to download a fake program that will actually end up giving you spyware or viruses?
Mark Helprin seems a bit dense, arguing for unlimited and perpetual copyright. I guess we already knew that though.
More multimedia:
- NASA
- Birds on wires are secretly composers
- State fairs, farms take steps to protect pigs from us - note the not-so-subtle hint that some fair-goers are more concerned with protecting themselves from animals than vice-versa, only washing hands afterward despite large signs stating the need for washing hands prior.
Also, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for Britain's treatment of Alan Turing, as a result of an online petition.
Multimedia:
- New images from the Hubble Space Telescope
- Classic Garfield Minus Garfield
- xkcd gives out the secret flow chart for solving tech problems on your own
- Only a week until The Ultimate Fighter 10 - Meet the Heavyweights (looks like it's going to be a good one...)
Video trailer for Richard Dawkin's newest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
Animal articles:
- Myanmar - rare turtle rediscovered - (wikipedia page)
- In taming dogs, humans may have sought a meal
- Can birds sing in flight or must they be stationary?
- Wolf season begins
- Two great white sharks tagged off Massachusetts coast
- tick-borne illnesses have Nantucket considering some deer-based solutions - "'I think there are a lot more people who want to reduce deer numbers than want to snuggle with them,' said one committee member" - that's the problem with people.
- World's oldest dog dies in NY at 21
- The connection between domestic violence and animal cruelty
- Pit bull cruelty
- ASPCA statement on Michael Vick
- Staten Island man arrested in beating death of 5-pound dog
- Endangered in South Africa: Pimp my ostrich - why, when humans see an animal, do they think about the myriad ways they can use and abuse it - meat, fashion, riding - rather than simply enjoying them for what they are?
- The long and short of it - Judson
- Saving the flying fox
Interesting links:
- Rosa Parks in Khartoum!
- NYT op-ed on Obama's health care choices
- Fantasy Genome Project
- Reporters tell of North Korea arrest
- What torture never told us
- Respect Your Children - NYT editorial weighing in on the craziness over Obama's planned speech to school children
- some parents oppose Obama school speech
- Innocent but dead
- Not Innocent Enough: the elusive search for the sufficiently innocent death-row victim
- Until medical bills do us part
- How to beat Amazon's Kindle
- Health care fit for animals - Kristof, interesting, despite the title
- The torture papers - NY times op-ed
- An unfit judge - "Judge Sharon Keller, the Texas appellate court judge who closed the clerk’s office before a death row inmate could file a last-minute appeal, is fighting to keep her job."
- Frank to oman comparing Obama to Hitler: What planet are you from? - god damn crazies, part 1
- Woman yells Heil Hitler to Jewish man at Las Vegas Town Hall - god damn crazies, part 2
- Why the public option isn't dispensable
- Yale University Press capitulates to religious extremists
- A library's approach to books that offend
- Schools or prisoners? - since I ripped on Jon Taplin a while ago on the issue of web ads, I feel I should say I agree with most of this stuff that he writes. This piece, looking at the change in California from model prisons and schools to what it is today, is a good example.
- Public option in health plan may be dropped
- The Swiss Menace - Krugman
- U.C. professors seek changes to Google Books deal
- Lawrence Lessig - Google Book Search settlement: Static good, dynamic bad?
- Women at arms - living and fighting along side men, and fitting in
- Speaking of which, Gina Carano
- Can UFC survive the absence of the world's best fighter, Russia's Fedor Emelianenko?
On Taiwan:
- The Dalai Lama reads the Taipei Times
- Rehabilitating Ma Ying-jeou? - President Ma the Brave? please...
- Mirror, Mirror - reporting in an alternative universe
- Dalai Lamaze: Breathe Deeply and Relax
- [Taiwanese film] Festival to screen Kadeer documentary
- Dalai Lama rose above the hacks
- Propaganda overshadows Dalai Lama
- Dalai Lama under 'gag order' from Taipei
- Dalai Lama, Ma will not cross paths
- Ministry of National Defense asks former brass to rethink Beijing visit - man, that is ridiculous, allowing former military officials to attend national day celebrations of the country that is the greatest threat...
- Referendum decision bodes poorly
- Ma heckled on visit to Baolai village
- Taiwan's leader faces anger over storm response
- Beijing's stinking hypocrisy
- Blunders, buck-passing, and a web of lies
- Notes on Morakot emergency
- Did politics undermine rescue efforts in Taiwan?
- Morakot: The politics of aid
- Ma Ying-jeou in the most crucial hours of Morakot
- Tkacik on US "One China" policy
- Ma administration typhoon casualities
- President Ma lambasted in major international media
- Political winds blow
- The serious lack of concern of the Ma-Ying-jeou administration
- The Ma Ying-jeou myth perishes
- Dalai Lama invited to comfort victims
- China opposes plan for Dalai Lama to visit Taiwan
- The View from Taiwan blog rips apart this poorly written Economist piece on the Dalai Lama's visit
- More debunking of poorly written, pro-China articles in the mainstream press by the View from Taiwan
Some interesting art-related links:
- How National Geographic photographer Steve Winter captured the elusive snow leopard on camera (bonus positive mention of the Dalai Lama)
- Delhi 2 Dublin music group - wikipedia page, segment on PRI's The World
- Pentatonic scale demo with Bobby McFerrin (wikipedia page on pentatonic scale)
- Song writer of the 1960's Ellie Greenwich died Aug 26 (NPR segment includes clips of her most famous songs)
Problem: Missing Richard Nixon [on health care, due to the improper influence of corporate money]
Solution: Change Congress
Also, three interesting books mentioned in the Economist, going on my wish list:
- The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. By Richard Dawkins.
- Direct Red: A Surgeon’s View of her Life or Death Profession. By Gabriel Weston.
- The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. By Frans de Waal.
A little old now, but one of those stories from Typhoon Morakot that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry:
First, the story, particularly Cabinet Secretary-General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan (薛香川), eating out at a fancy hotel while the rest of the country was preparing or already in the midst of the typhoon.
Next, the actual video of the call-in defending his actions to a news show (2009 8/17 TVBS 2100全民開講 薛香川的call in).
Lastly, the remix.
Signed the World Turing Petition calling on the British government to apologize for its treatment of Alan Turing (#3333 on page 67).
Here's the petition for British citizens, the blog of the John Graham-Cumming, who started the original petition, a podcast interview with Graham-Cumming, and a story from CNN on the issue.
Finished reading Stephen King's Rose Madder, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Go Taiwan!
Congratulations to Kuei-Shan, Taoyuan, Taiwan on taking second at the 2009 Little League World Series and being the international bracket champions!
Posted another comment on Jon Taplin's blog, this one on Your Entertainment Future. It seems quite similar to the previous posts that I have disagreed with, in that it seems like Taplin is angry about some particular issue, be it Google or Chris Anderson, and puts together a little bitter sarcastic post without presenting a coherent, logical argument.
Two interesting laws:
Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
What do these say about our work habits and productivity?
Inspired by this blog post on the interesting blog The Endeavour.
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of July days in Amherst.
Taiwan:
- Human factors slowed typhoon rescue efforts: analysts
- US helicopters to join rescue effort
- Taiwanese baseball players celebrate victory in New York
- Typhoon Morakot and the many names of Ma Ying-jeou
- Me, Freddy Lim, Chiang Kai-shek, Art and Taiwan's Identity
- Taiwan president takes blame for typhoon response - after screwing up royally and trying to pass the blame to everyone else first
- Taiwan leader says typhoon toll may exceed 500 - "When a weeping man who described himself as a supporter complained that he had been repeatedly blocked by bodyguards, Mr. Ma did not hide his annoyance. 'Now you’re seeing me,' he told the man."
- Terrifying ride to safety for survivors in Taiwan
- Taiwan president is target of anger after typhoon
- What's behind Taiwan media bias?
- Taiwan and China: Reunification by trade? - "Many Taiwanese, including the pro-independence opposition party, fear that the proposed accord is really a ploy by China to bring about unification by stealth. They also argue that once the pact is signed, there is no guarantee that China will not lean on members of other FTAs to keep Taiwan out anyway."
I recent saw this bits of news: No charges likely in New Zealand dog barbecue. It was another timely reminder that our attitudes toward food and very much based on culture, not morality. Here's another perspective on this issue - New Zealand Koreans criticise 'barbaric' case of barbecued dog.
This article - Why I don't eat dog - I think represents how many people feel, as they attempt to think through the issues and ultimately come to a resolution that lets them feel good and moral while at the same time not have to give up eating meat. Basically it's a case of cognitive dissonance, except for most people, assuming they think hard enough about the issue, realize that their justifications are very weak.
On the other hand, there are those people, namely Peter Singer, who are not only intelligent and logical, but willing to follow through on the consequences despite the changes in lifestyle that are necessitated. He lays out a very good case for forgiving Michael Vick and how much of the hatred directed toward him is hypocritical (for those who eat factory-farmed meat).
Other animal articles:
- Oh, sting, where is thy death? - very well written and interesting piece on animals, pain, happiness, and life
- Monkeys share human preference for imitation
- Family has pet blue jay
- Horses being killed in South Florida - for their meat
- Dog hurled from roof of Brooklyn housing project
- Man is indicted on charge of throwing dog off building
- Dying doves rescued from NYC park
- The death of sharks - "Humans kill 73 million sharks every year, nearly all for consumption, mainly in shark fin soup. The fins are cut off and the bodies dumped overboard, a barbaric practice known as finning".
- Exotic Animals as Pets - big no-no
- Feral cats FAQ
- Research undermines dog domestication theory - it seems a little bit like there's some faulty logic here. The new data only suggests that the origin is not necessarily East Asia, but the wording toward the end seems to suggest that some people think the new data rules out the possibility that the origin could be East Asia. The alternative explanation is that the article left out some details.
- Some birds thrive in noisy neighborhoods
- Roaming free in Florida, a pig gains local fame - "'It has been fed by people and chased by some teenagers,' Mr. Crosby said". Go figure, someone always has to go and harass animals.
- ASPCA responds to release of suspended NFL star & convicted dogfighter Michael Vick from federal custody
- ASPCA asks court to direct Helmsley money back to dogs
- The dog will have his day in court
This interview from the Rachel Maddow Show on US health care is interesting for several reasons: first, the interviewer actually gives the guest a chance to talk without jumping in and interrupting (something Colbert parodies well on his show), and the guest actually seems intelligent and cogent. I guess Stanford grads can accomplish anything.
The guest, Frank Schaffer, is himself a very interesting guy - son of a famous evangelist, who has now ended up almost a direct 180 from his views growing up. Here's an interview he gives on NPR's Fresh Air, and his book, Crazy for God: How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all (or almost all) of it back.
More interesting articles:
- squirrel crashes a photograph - side note - the amount of roadkill one sees during every day driving is just appalling. I guess people barely even give a damn for other people when they drive, so it shouldn't be too surprising, but my blood boils nonetheless when I see a squirrel crushed to death, guts splayed over the pavement, likely caused by some moron rushing off to protest at some town hall meeting on health care...
- Republican death trip - Krugman
- Meet the deathers - video on the far right
- False 'death panel' rumor has some familiar roots
- DNC web ad: "Enough of the mob"
- Beating the homeless is cruel, not cool - the title may seem obvious, but sadly that does not appear to be so: "The August issue of Maxim, a youth-oriented magazine targeted at college-aged males, joked about last weekend's National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, in a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless.' The journal quipped 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'"
- To Microsoft, basic research is good insurance
- Fatty foods affect memory and exercise
- US tests system to break down foreign web censorship
- Iran and human rights: the crackdown
- Killings in Chechnya: Zarema's end
- Sony plans to adop common format for ebooks - good to see ebook technology converging to something good for consumers. Now to do something about DRM...
- Humpty Dumpty and the ghosts
- Lego rejects a bit part in a Spinal Tap dvd
- Farmer versus 'Agri-intellectuals' - credibility fail - "Let turkeys roam outside and they’re prone to attack by weasels, or drowning by their own upturned beaks in downpours." - as usual, snopes as the truth
The things China apologists and cheerleaders ignore:
- Chinese artist reports being barred from trial - "Earlier this year, Mr. Ai, the artist, sent volunteers to Sichuan to collect the names of students who had been killed. He began posting the names on his blog and kept a running tally. Government censors then blocked his blog, Mr. Ai said, while police officers in Sichuan detained some of his volunteers and beat a few of them."
- Chinese polic detain 11 who planned to attend activisit's trial - more here - "'I insisted on them showing me their police identification and during the chaos I was punched on my chin.'"
More:
- China arrests 4 from Rio Tinto, but no spying charges
- Overseas and under siege - "Within China, there is little distinction between nationality and ethnicity; even when ethnic Chinese hold a foreign passport both the government and the wider public tend to view them as citizens of China." - one of China's problems, the inability to differentiate between the people and the state/party
- China's protest of Melbourne International Film Festival suggests the future for similar events - "Some members of the Melbourne City Council, apparently fearful of the potential economic impact of China’s threats, supported banning the film", "Zhou Yu, a 24-year-old computer programmer from Nanjing, said he hacked into the festival’s Web site and defaced it with a Chinese flag to defend his country’s honor... a recent poll asked visitors to weigh in on Mr. Zhou’s actions but gave only two choices: 'support' and 'super support.'"
- Activist's detention shakes China's rights movement
- China says $100 billion was bilked by Rio Tinto
- Behind China's accusations of spying against Rio Tinto
- Rio Tinto spied for years, Chinese report concludes
- China backs off Rio Tinto accusations
- Rio Tinto says China hasn't backed up spying allegations
- China urged to cancel trials of men seeking quake inquiry
- Tibetan dissident disappears
- Tour the collapsed building of Shanghai
- China sentences women held after protest attempt - "The case is one of several that starkly illustrate how the Summer Olympics and the Paralympics in Beijing last year failed to expand freedom of speech in China, despite assertions by the international organizers of those games that the events would push the Chinese government toward more democratic policies."
- Abortions surge in China; officials cite poor sex education - "More than 13 million abortions are performed each year in China, according to statistics disclosed by Chinese health officials on Thursday... When unreported and medication-induced abortions are counted, the actual number is substantially higher".
- Hepatitis group is harassed in China - "A similar clampdown took place in the months before the 2008 Summer Olympics, when security officials in Beijing stepped up the harassment of dissidents and encouraged thousands of migrant workers to return to the countryside."
- Two ROC citizens 'arrested' in China - "At about 6am on Friday, security officials showed up at the house where a woman and her 10-year-old daugher were staying and took them away".
- China's tally of 718 arrests in July riots is questioned
- Falun Gong practitioner home after China ordeal
- Another Chinese activist charged with subversion - "A Chinese activist who questioned why so many schoolchildren died in last year’s massive earthquake has been charged with subversion and will stand trial in the middle of this month".
- Hundreds more Chinese are rounded up
- Chinese workers say illness is real, not hysteria - "Not so, say Chinese health officials who contend that the episode is a communal outbreak of psychogenic illness, also called mass hysteria... 'I come here every day, and do I look sick?' he asked with a broad smile. 'If we were spreading poison, the government wouldn’t allow us to continue production, and I have faith in the government'". Sickening, the bullshit people can spew between their lips.
- Hackers target Australian festival showing Uyghur film
- Uighur leader raises new accusations
- Open Constitution closed - "On July 17th government officials descended on one of the best-known legal research groups and took away almost everything it owned—files, desks, computers, even the water cooler. To make matters worse, the tax authorities slapped on the group a colossal bill, ordering it to pay 1.42m yuan ($207,900)."
- China fears ethnic strife could agitate uighur oasis - "The uncertainty and sense of isolation have been only magnified by the blocking of access to the Internet and shutdown of text messaging and international phone service that has severed communications in Kashgar and the entire region... some of them say they have been told that Internet and phone service will be curtailed until at least October, when China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution.", "Like Urumqi, which has been flooded with soldiers since July 5, Kashgar is patrolled by young men in military camouflage, many of whom ride through the city day and night, their green army trucks draped with ostensibly calming slogans like 'National Separatists Are Our Enemy.'"
- Files vanished, young Chinese lose the future
- More detained in Xinjiang, Kadeer's family accuses her
- Chinese Internet addiction camp beats teen to death
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Interesting:
- Admired in class, a scholar falters in court - I'd be interested to hear Lessig's views on this in more detail. Then again, I'd pretty much listen to anything Lessig has to say. He's one of those rare people who can write on any topic and make a cogent argument, unlike many people, whom even if I agree with, I find bits and pieces that don't make sense.
- Specter faces hostile audience at health care forum - "One man defended the rowdy behavior of the audience. 'I don't think we have bad attitudes,' he said. 'We're just being Americans.'"... sigh
- Sarah Palin is afraid Obamacare will put a price on human life. But we already do
- Chechen activist, husband found dead - "Kadyrov denied the allegation on Monday, saying in an interview with Radio Svoboda, the Russian service of Radio Free Europe: 'Why should Kadyrov kill a woman who was useful to no one?'"
- Palin's poison
- Stephen King's screen addiction
- Could changes in advertising kill television? - an article on the future of advertising actually worth reading
- Was Bill Clinton's visit to North Korea worth the time, energy, and prestige? No way - Hitchens
- Evolution's place in a created universe - Saletan
- Scott Adams blog - exercise is useless for weight loss - the referenced article, Why exercise won't make you then, is somewhat interesting but in the end just suffers from poor logic and sloppy argumentative style. For one thing, it doesn't even mention that muscle is more dense than fat, so one could easily maintain the same overall body size, increase in weight, but actually be stronger and fitter.
- [Korea] After torture and betrayal, reconciliation
- The town hall mob - Krugman
- Raw video of wingnuts disrupting Tampa health care event
- Sony to cut ebook prices and offer new readers
- Sony's Pocket and Touch ebook readers priced to move, promises wireless next
- Amazon's ebook rival, Barnes and Noble, a paper tiger, for now
- 10 instant tips to be happier now
- Dawn at the museum
- What a Japanese community festival tells us about America's gift for reconciliation - Hitchens: "Well, my point is that under the azure blue skies that prevailed all of last weekend, you would not have known that any of the bitterness and misery had ever taken place... All could meet under the great roof of a secular multiethnic democracy, and all did, sharing the food and the music and admiring one another's children."
- Wu must nurture the humanities - Peter Singer
- Is Energy Secretary Chu too smart? - "people of average intelligence often make better managers than super-smart people. The general idea was that average people are better at listening, weighing off competing views, and deciding judiciously." - I think that's more trading on an unfair stereotype of smart people.
- For today's graduate, just one word: statistics
- Argentina's meaty diet: the discreet rise of vegetarianism in the carnivorous capital of the world
- Asperger's syndrome, on screen and inlife
- South Korea police try again to evict workers from auto factory
- Workers end standoff at South Korean auto plant
- Rethinking North Korea, with sticks
- Four days in North Korea - "On one occasion, I drew a banana on a piece of paper and showed it to a waitress; she had never seen one. She knew about apples, but she had never eaten one."
- Are organic veggies better for you?
- 70 murders, yet close to going free in Pakistan
- Shake, rattle, and roll: Why so few Japanese pagodas have ever fallen down
- Crisis in the operating room - "Shazia lived. The baby died... Outside, her husband, Allahdita, was grieving but philosophical. 'It is God’s will,' he said, shrugging. 'There is nothing we can do.'" There's a lesson for those who think religion is ok because it gives people comfort.
- How to lick a slug
- A man's home is his constitutional castle - Hitchens
- NPR moves to rewire its approach to the web
- From 'gladiator' to headline, Carano has chokehold on fame
- iPhone maker in China is under fire after a suicide
- Amazon faces a fight over its ebooks - "Randal C. Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says he thinks Amazon was right to delete the improperly sold versions of '1984' and argues such systems can also allow companies to better enforce copyright laws. He notes that the harm to the Orwell book buyers was minimal, since their money was refunded after copies were deleted from their Kindles." That's true, but it rather misses the point. This issue is larger because of what potential it has for the future rather than the specific case of the Orwell book buyers.
- Google's big plan for books
- Is it OK to impregnate a 60-year-old woman? - Saletan
- Van drove wrong way for 2 miles man...
- Drivers and legislators dismiss cellphone risks
- Three-body problem:
- On vampires:
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of April days in Amherst.
Another day, another blog post bashing Google, another rebuttal:
I still don’t understand the chain of logic that goes from Google search dominance to devalued web ads, in particular web ads of big sites like NYT. Can you lay out a concrete, step-by-step argument for that implication?
The infinite supply, finite demand argument has several problems. First, what does it have to do with search? The article you referenced points out that, while Yahoo is getting out of search, one area they are focusing on is display ads. So where’s the connection?
Second, how is breaking up Google going to decrease the number of ads being served? Google Adsense is just the technology that is serving up the ads – if webmasters don’t put ads on their pages with Google, they’re just going to use some other system. It’s not going to reduce the total number of ads at all.
Lastly, even the notion that the total supply of ads is infinite isn’t really correct, or more precisely, not really relevant. If there are an infinite number of television channels, but almost everyone only watches channel number 1, then ads are obviously going to be very valuable on channel 1. The fact that there are a lot of other channels only becomes relevant as more people watch the other channels as alternatives to channel 1.
That points to the fact that the “supply” is really people’s aggregate attention, or in other words, the potential for people to see and look at an ad, which is quite finite. That’s why advertising on the big sites where most people spend their time is still going to be very valuable, and not terribly affected if I and thousands of people like me use Google Adsense on personal websites that draw in an insignificant number of readers.
The comment from Thompson that Google Adsense doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads is also rather silly. Online ads are beneficial for the companies doing the advertising, since they can paid directly proportional to how much effect their ads are having, as measured by either views, clicks, or anything else. Thus, ads on sites with heavy traffic will be more valuable, and if anything, web ads become more valuable because of the greater ability to measure their utility. The only way Thompson’s comment makes sense is as a critique of the masses, that people are not smart enough in general to know good content from bad content and hence drive traffic and ad revenue to sites with bad traffic.
Taiwan links:
First, a very moving account from White Terror period:
- Remembering the White Terror: Letters - "'Don’t come to claim my body. I want it to be given to the National Taiwan University College of Medicine or another medical training institute. When I was a student, we dissected bodies in practical anatomy classes and learned a great deal of medical knowledge by doing so. If my body can be dissected by students and help them gain a deeper knowledge of medicine, that will be something really meaningful.'"
- Acer's everywhere in the PC world
- Is Ma oblivious to China's abuses
- Will Barack Obama stand up the same way for Taiwan as Honduras?
- Yonaguni plans raise questions of Taiwan - the US and Japan's actions speak loudly on what they think of Taiwan's China-friendly trajectory
- Is Ma Ying-jeou becoming the kiss of death?
- When it comes to national identity, Taiwanese can be their own worst enemy
- Why the name of Democracy Memorial Hall should not be changed back to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, letter from 1947 following 2/28, [part 1], [part 2]
- The tyrant is back in the hall
- The shame of restoring a memorial to a killer
- Chen Chu: caricature killer with afro
- Taiwanese should blame themselves
- Games show improved China ties: Ma - please...
- Let's play a game: slap our president
- DPP gives ministry three days to pull 'racist' comic - "According to his profile, Yi-ge is a vocational school graduate who speaks 'Taiwanese Mandarin' and knows very little about the proposed ECFA... 'For example, if he were ever accidentally short-changed by a clerk at a breakfast restaurant, he would do almost anything to get the money back, even if it is just NT$5,' the description says, adding that he was the kind of person who talks tough but never takes action." - WTF?
- Activists angered by ministry's use of 'Minnan' for Hoklo
- Taiwanese flag is proudly displayed at World Police and Fire Games in Canada
- The KMT's calculated deflection: the unjust and unconstitutional trial of Chen Shui-bian
- Maritime Taiwan, a new book with a different perspective on Taiwan
- After Ma in Power, Taiwan's public service is full of Anti-Taiwan, Pro-China employees - "That's what a GIO editor does at Taiwan’s taxpayers’ expense, at 9:09am, first task in the morning when he entered his office was to troll the pro-Taiwan blogs, making pro-KMT comments on our Taiwan Matters group blog".
Wrote another follow-up on the "Google devalues everything it touches" issue from three days ago:
“There is no logical reason that the New York Times (in NBC’s Jeff Zucker’s words) should be “trading dollars (in print ads) for dimes (in web ads).” The ability of the web to target the ad to the individual reader should be more valuable. But because of Goggle’s infinite inventory, the web ad is much less valuable.”
What does this have to do with Google? If you force Google to stop serving ads, all that will happen is that others will step in with systems to serve up ads. Over supply is not an over supply in the number of ads Google can potentially serve, it is an over supply in the number of spaces one can potentially put ads on the web.
It really has nothing to do with Google, but with the number of available resources to get information. If everyone went to the NYT for news, then web ads on NYT would be very valuable, regardless of how many web ads Google or anyone else was serving up on any other webpage.
As a result of all this, I've also been thinking a little more about the nature of advertising and the promise of web ads to produce information that's actually useful. This article - Ads follow web users, and get deeply personal - mainly highlights the privacy concerns, which I don't want to downplay and agree need to be handled with care. On the flip-side though, I'm willing to give up a certain amount of information about myself if it means that the ads I see have a higher probability of being useful to me and the ad revenue helps keep sites I like free.
To me, traditional advertising is completely stupid and a waste of resources. I generally ignore all ads I see on television, for instance, because more often than not, I'm not even in the relevant demographic, and more often than not, the ads shown are more about branding or mindless slogans than actually conveying any useful information.
On the flip side, think about the coming attractions trailers that play just before you watch a movie in a theatre. Just the small piece of information, that you are in the demographic of people who like the movie that will be playing, dramatically increases the relevance of the ads you are shown. When I went to see (500) Days of Summer yesterday, I actually saw trailers for movies that I would be interested in seeing. Thus the ads were useful and not annoying. It would have been stupid to show me a trailer for an ad for a dumb comedy like Funny People, but when Taplin writes nostalgically for a time when advertisers were fighting over a small number of ad spots in the early days of television when there was only a choice of three networks, he's essentially arguing for this dumb strategy of showing everyone the same ad.
Given how much the knowledge that I probably will like the feature attraction playing helped in deciding which trailers I should see, now imagine that there is full knowledge of all the movies I've seen, how I rated each movie, and on top of that, how everyone else rated those same movies and other movies. The promise of what that could achieve is what Netflix is trying to reach in its Netflix Prize competition. This is the kind of win-win situation that advertisers should be striving for: allowing people to find out about movies that they would enjoy but otherwise not know about, while benefiting themselves at the same time.
Just finished watching (500) Days of Summer. I highly recommend it, and put it in my list 清單 of movies I enjoy.
When I first read this article - A.P. cracks down on unpaid use of articles on the web - I wasn't surprised: more companies envious of Google and thinking they deserve more money for no real reason. They complain, but the truth is they could opt out at any point, they want Google to be linking to them but on top of that want more money.
Unfortunately, some people, whom I think should know better, agree with this point of view. I was unpleasantly surprised to read "Google devalues everything it touches" on Jon Taplin's blog, which most of the time I tend to agree with. Fortunately, a number of commenters pointed out the many flaws in the argument, for example, pond, and I added my own two cents at well toward the bottom, with this quote from the article and follow-up:
"News organizations already have the ability to prevent their work from turning up in search engines — but doing so would shrink their Web audience, and with it, their advertising revenues. What The A.P. seeks is not that articles should appear less often in search results, but that such use would become a new source of revenue."
So, Google puts in hard work, produces a product that lets people find the information they want, at the same time driving up traffic and ad revenue for the A.P., all the while giving the A.P. an option to not have their work indexed, yet the A.P. thinks they should be able to ask for everything to stay the same but just be paid more despite not putting in any additional work that would justify it.
After writing that, I came across this article: YouTube wedding video spurs music sales. Basically, a viral video using a song as background music led to a surge in sales of the song. The company owning the copyright to the song could easily have forced YouTube to silence the audio, or ask for money from YouTube since they are benefiting from a video using one of their songs. Instead, old media and new media are actually getting along, the video popularity on YouTube is driving up sales for the song, and YouTube is even earning a commission on the sales. This is how it should be.
Animals:
- When you find a baby bird on the ground, what should you do to rescue it?
- Firefighter faces jail for killing dogs - The old canard again: "It's the same old story. They couldn't care less about people and they love animals."
- Orangutan and dog are best pals
- The life story of a snapping turtle
- Cats 'exploit' humans by purring
- The only zoos in the world where the animals are smuggled through tunnels
- Efforts to ban the international trade in bluefin tuna
- Floating garden freshwater aquarium naturally filters fishpoop into fertilizer
- Escape from New York slaughterhouse: a runaway goat's survival story
- A man with opinions on food with a face
- Administration seeks to restrict antibiotics in livestock
- Farms and antibiotics
- 5000 pound shark washes ashore on Long Island
- About 150 birds seized in fighting investigate
On the Obama birth controversy:
- Crazy people in Delaware
- Crazy senator who admits the controvery is fake yet blames it on Obama
- Republic congressmen refusing to dispel, or even clearly state their position on, the controversy
On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, noted atheist writer Sam Harris had a very well argued op-ed in the New York Times, Science is in the details, arguing against Obama's nomination of Francis Collins as next director of the National Institutes of Health. Here's a choice quote:
| “ | Dr. Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to his perfectly moral character and to his desire to have fellowship with every member of our species. But when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery. | ” |
One of Collin's beliefs: "If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?" That's typical shoddy logic. If you want my viewpoint on it, check out on diatribe 謾罵 on why I am an atheist 為什麼我是個無神論者.
Maru is too cute.
The wolf slaughter photos Alaska doesn't want you to see.
| “ | While we overlook our own savagery, we exaggerate that of other animals. The notorious wolf for instance, villain of so many folk tales, has been shown by the careful investigations of zoologists in the wild to be a highly social animal, a faithful and affectionate spouse - not just for a season, but for life - a devoted parent, and a loyal member of the pack. | ” |
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Interesting:
- Why we must ration health care - very interesting article by Peter Singer
- Microbes 'R' Us - "If you were to count them, you’d find that microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. On a cell-by-cell basis, then, you are only 10 percent human."
- Barnes and Noble gets into the ebook business - hopefully some competition will be beneficial for ebook technology...
- Scott Adams:
- Driving while interrogated: How to stop cell-phone use behind the wheel - Saletan
- The truth about cars and cellphones
- His maternal instinct - "Here in Pakistan, a woman dies every 35 minutes because of problems from pregnancy or childbirth, according to United Nations figures."
- Not a victim, but a hero
- Speechless: Dilbert creator's struggle to regain his voice
- Cellphone gripes worthy of congress's time - "Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising. Why doesn't it occur to them that they’d attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable? By being less greedy and obnoxious?". Amen.
- Face It - Saletan on waterboarding
- Vocal minority insists [moon landings] was all smoke and mirrors
- Typography on the Web is basic and dull. A startup called Typekit will fix it.
- When to schedule ebook releases - a new worry for publishers
- Race, genes, and cancer - Saletan - "People are afraid that if we acknowledge genetic differences along racial lines, we'll become blind to discrimination and socioeconomic inequality, and we'll lay a scientific foundation for segregation. That isn't true."
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of May days in Amherst.
China:
- Countering riots, China rounds up hundreds - "In a sign of the sensitivities surrounding the unrest, the Bureau for Legal Affairs in Beijing has warned lawyers to stay away from cases in Xinjiang, suggesting that those who assist anyone accused of rioting pose a threat to national unity."
- Bad business in China
- Chinese question police absence in ethnic riots - "Separately, party officials and police officers down to the county level have taken part in training for managing civil unrest. The drills include teaching them to disable local Internet service during an outbreak"
- China shuts down office of volunteer lawyers
- Beijing, in snub to Taipei, boycotts a sports ceremony
- At a factory, the spark for China's violence
- China and the Rio Tinto detentions: The steel fist of government
- Falun Gong march marks decade-long persecution - "As the protesters marched [in Taiwan], several Chinese tourist groups were either getting ready to enter or leave the Taipei 101 building across the street. Most of them stood and watched, took pictures or simply ignored the protest. One complained that it was 'bad luck to run into something so disgusting.'"
- Falun Gong, 10 years after the ban
- China's ability to ignore the obvious
- Graft inquiry in Namibia finds clues in China - "But mere reports of the charges have already prompted Chinese government censors to block Internet surfers from searching for news about the younger Mr. Hu, Namibia or Nuctech"
- Fuse of fear, lit in China, has victims on 2 sides - "Abulajan and many others in the area said there were about 30 armed paramilitary soldiers standing near the mouth of the alley that day, presumably to stop any violence. 'But the soldiers did nothing,' Abulajan said. Next, the mob descended on the lame shoeshine boy outside the Light of Dawn hotel. He was hit in the head and stabbed in the back, said a grand-uncle, Muhammad Jan."
- Rumors, lies, and ethnic hatred: Welcome to Shaoguan, China - "Squatting on his haunches in the shadows of a half-constructed apartment block, the Han man — who gave no name — said the government was lying about the death toll. He claims he helped to kill seven or eight Uighurs, battering them until they stopped screaming. He thinks the death toll is more than 30, including a few Han."
- Intellectuals call for release of Uighur economist
- Rumbles on the rim of China's empire
- Wang Lequan is China's strongman in controlling Uighurs
- China's dentions of executives rattle investors
- Elderly vigilante becomes Internet sensation in China - I hate bad drivers as much, or more so, than anybody, but throwing bricks at cars?
- Chinese expand Rio Tinto allegations
- Gray areas loom large in China's steel industry
- With Rio case, China puts Australia in a tight spot
- Rio Tinto and China: Behind Chinese walls
- China broadens steel inquiry beyond Rio Tinto
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of June days in Wisconsin.
Wrote some thoughts on UFC 100, adding them to my overall diatribe 謾罵 on MMA fans.
Interesting reads:
- Children: self-control presages math gains in young
- Perceptions: a customer bias in favor of white men - Not having read the actual paper, I can't say for sure, but from the summary, the study seems to not be very rigorous. They only seem to have three video clips, leaving it entirely possible that there were nonverbal or other cues leading to students rating the white man's performance the highest.
- How the food makers captured our brains
- It's time to learn from frogs
- When our brains short-circuit - on our inability to handle the complexity of the problems that face us today
- The intersection of adultery and technolgy - Saletan
- A green way to dump low-tech electronics
- Book review - 'The evolution of god' by Robert Wright
- Video of church's 'casting out' gay 'demon' in teen sparks anger
- Paleontology and creationism don't mesh - The end of this article is brilliant: "Dr. Sato likened the museum to an amusement park. 'I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Disneyland,' she said. Did she enjoy Disneyland? 'Not very much,' she said."
- Breaking your legs to make yourself taller - Saletan. Man, we really are this superficial...
- Mind - Why the imp in your brain gets out - why consciously not thinking of or saying something is so hard
- On fire - do some plants desire fire for evolutionary reasons?
- Interracial roommates can reduce prejudice, campus studies find - "those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves." sigh.
- Wank Thyself: The pro-life case for masturbation - Gotta love William Saletan, mixing in science with a humorous destruction of the Catholic Church's inane positions.
- Dieting monkeys offer hope for living longer
- Extending lifespan: Of mice and monkeys
- Survey shows gap between scientists and public - "Almost a third of ordinary Americans say human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time, a view held by only 2 percent of the scientists." ... sigh
- Hannity chops video to turn Obama quote upside down - what a loser
- Married to the machines - Saletan
- After Sanford, let's end hypocrasy and promot equality - "Mark Sanford voted repeatedly against abortion rights; against gay marriage, civil unions, and gay adoptions; and for posting the Ten Commandments."
- What to say about Mark Sanford? - don't miss the John Kerry limerick at the end.
Big update on China:
- Chinese dissident charged with subversion - and the Olympics were supposed to give the Chinese more human rights...
- Despite law, job conditions worsen in China - "'When we got his body, his whole head was crushed,' Ms. Liu said. 'We couldn’t even see his eyes.'"
- Chinese artist urges online boycott
- Microsoft and Chinese censorship - sigh
- Damned if you do
- How the Internet helps Iran silence activists
- U.S. objects to China's web filtering
- Beijing adds curbs on access to Internet - "Internet cafes must be wired to the nearest police station and provide a continuous, instantaneous record of who is using what computer. If an e-mail message from a cafe’s computer later catches the attention of investigators, the police can review the video records to see who was using the computer."
- Hong Kong's pro-democracy march draws thousands - "Beijing officials have ruled out direct elections for the chief executive until 2017 and the legislature until 2020. ... When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government initially held out the possibility of full democracy after 2007, ... but stopped short of an unequivocal promise of how and when to achieve universal suffrage."
- PC makers voluntarily supply web filter in China - man, my Taiwanese companies are really disappointing me here...
- Speaking of disappointing - Nokia, Siemens helped Iran rig networks for government control
- Entire new 13-story building tips over in Shanghai
- China holds Australian executive on spying charges
- China arrests Rio Tinto employees on spy charge
- China spy case linked to mining price dispute
- On the Urumqi riots:
- The trigger of Uyghur-Han clash in Xinjiang - Chinese killing Uyghurs in Guangdong
- If you read nothing else, you should at least watch the video on the page above, or directly in YouTube here
- 'No Rapes' in riot town
- The trigger was apparently a false rumor that a Han woman was sexually assulted by Uyghurs, leading to at least two Uyghurs being killed
- Ethnic clashes in western China are said to kill scores
- New protests in western China after deadly clashes
- In latest upheaval, China applies new strategies to control flow of information
- China points to another leader in exile
- Another round of ethnic violence in Urumqi as Han Chinese and Uighurs clash
- China official threatens death penalty after riots
- NY Times editorial - Now Xinjiang
- A family heeded China's call to resettle but found only grief in a region's ethnic strife
- Exile in the U.S. becomes face of Uighurs
- Chinese nationalism surfaces amid Xinjiang conflict - "'We will not accept these separatists wrecking our national unity,' said Han Yi, an employee with an Urumqi courier company. Han spoke as he watched a mob of about 200 Han, some holding small Chinese flags, chase several Uighur men on Wednesday, severely beating two of them."
- Riots in Xinjiang: Beijing's nightmare
- Riots in Xinjiang: Is China fraying?
- China's president vows to 'deal a blow' to protestors
- China bans mosque meetings in strife-torn region
- What the US needs to do: combat information suppresion:
- Freedom vs. the firewall: the Senate can help fend off authoritarian censorship
- Senator Arlen Specter: Attack the cyberwalls! - good to have him as a Democrat.
- The trigger of Uyghur-Han clash in Xinjiang - Chinese killing Uyghurs in Guangdong
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Posted some more photos in my photo gallery 照片, of June days in Amherst.
On animals:
- Tigers say 'bye, mom' to dog that raised them
- Operator? Can you put me through to ant nest 251? - more fascinating information on ants
- Blink twice if you like me - fascinating info on fireflies
- A helpful FAQ on puppy mills from the ASPCA
- Why they club seal pups - bashing animals on the head just for fashion
- Accused cat killer took anatomy class, police say - Exhibit A for people who think humans are so superior to animals. I would feel less distress at hunting and eating this guy than an animal.
- Dog medicine and dog breeding - Saletan on the negative effects of what we're doing to dogs
- Thailand cracks down on elephant begging - people using and abusing elephants as beggars to get money, and all for a lousy $30 a day
- Wildlife photography fail - I really hope that doesn't happen to me...
Related: Think a vegetarian can't be healthy? Guess you haven't heard of Bill Pearl.
My final two cents on the Supreme Court case concerning the firefighter exam:
First, this New York Times editorial on the ruling, Firefighters and Race, illustrates why I have to break with the liberal orthodoxy on this issue. The key point for me is when the editorial stated: "She [Ginsburg] noted that New Haven’s test was flawed". The fact is that, no one could come out and say exactly why the test was flawed or how it was racially biased, other than some far from clear cut issues with the weighting of the two components of the exam. Fortunately, many other people pointed this in the NY Times letters to the editor: Firefighter's test: Flawed or fair?
Even more than that though, this other article in the NY Times really illustrates for me my problem with the liberal viewpoint of this issue: For Hispanic firefighter in New Haven bias suit, awkward position but firm resolve - The people who should be commended the most, the minorities who worked hard, studied hard, and did well on the exam, are instead blamed as turncoats and white apologists: "Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom".
The other thing that really gets me is liberals complaining that the test included, gasp, reading. Guess what, one of the white firefighters who posted among the top scores was dyslexic, and studied probably harder than anyone, buying tapes to help with his studying. Yet that kind of behavior ends up being labeled as being white. More than that though, the test does what seems to be quite a good job at picking out smart, capable people who really care about being good firefighters. As the article quotes Vargas: "'When I leave the firehouse, I bring it home with me,' he said. 'I read about it. Think about it. I love this job. I don’t think there’s anything else I could do better.'" (Note he says he reads about it.)
Lastly, before you go away thinking this is a case of someone just looking after himself, consider this: "The results had been posted by race, without names, and when Lieutenant Vargas learned that a Hispanic firefighter had scored sixth among 41 lieutenants on the test to become a captain, he joined the suit. Only later did he discover that the score was his."
Garfield Minus Garfield is a feel good story about a cool, interesting play on someone else's work, where the original creator was nice, sane, and didn't just come out angry with a cease and desist letter. My impression of Jim Davis shot up a lot after finding this out.
- Is the main character missing? Maybe not.
- When the cat's away, neurosis is on display
- Jim Davis likes Garfield Minus Garfield
Before I became a vegetarian, I went through a phase of buying mainly organic and free-range meat and cage-free eggs. Part of what put me over the edge was the realization that organic and free-range certifications don't necessarily mean anything, and to the extent that they do, may not really be that nice for the animals any way. This article is a good example of this: What you should know about free-range pigs. Unfortunately, some people didn't seem to completely get the point. Here are their posts in the fray, and my responses: [#1], [#2], [#3], [#4], [#5].
After installing Java Update 4 on my Mac OS X 10.5.7 machine, I discovered that my java programs, which I had bundled from a jar into an app, stopped working. This was rather vexing, as running the jar files directly still worked. Fortunately, I managed to google out the solution.
First, let me briefly say how to create a Mac app from a java jar file that you can then directly click on to open, and also drag to the dock. Basically you just need to use "Jar Bundler.app", which you get by installing Xcode 3.0. Jar Bundler used used to be in /Developer/Applications/Utilities, but installing Java Update 4, it is now in /usr/share/java/Tools. (I'm not actually sure how to navigate to that folder in Finder, other than going to using Go to Folder under the Go menu in Finder.) It's fairly self explanatory how to use, but here's the guide if you need it. If you want to create an icon for it, google how to create a .icns icon file.
Here's the info on how to fix your jar to app files. Basically, cd into the .app folder that you created, go into the Content/MacOS folder, and issue this command: "lipo -remove x86_64 JavaApplicationStub -output JavaApplicationStub". Apparently it is a 64-bit issue.
Quick notes:
- Hope this duck knew what it was doing and not being foolhardy.
- Scott Adams throws out a lot of good ideas on his blog. Some of probably been done, and some are probably infeasible (at least at the moment) or not good in the first place, but I bet there's money to be made in some, like his reliable product review system, and it sure would be doing a service to a lot of people.
Updated my diatribe on Anthony Bourdain's irrational dislike of vegetarians with a quote from Bourdain on how killing a pig was "one of the most difficult things [he's] ever done".
Added a short diatribe on chef, writer, and television host Anthony Bourdain's irrational dislike of vegetarians.
Some Stephen King news/updates:
- Stephen King short story "Morality" in July's Esquire magazine - gripping "what would you do for money" story
- King interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation on his Dark Tower epic being adapted for graphic novels
- The Flu, Stephen King, and You - an interview with GQ
- Print books are targets of pirates on the web - Thankfully Stephen King seems to be sane on this issue: "'The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,' Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. 'And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.'"
- Misty Bassi recalled as wonderful, unique - the bicyclist in Amherst, run over and killed, loved Stephen King. What a senseless tragedy.
Also see Knowledge 知識 : Stephen King 史蒂芬·金.
Tiananmen round-up (articles I missed the first time around):
- Ma Jian on the great Tiananmen taboo - if you only read one thing about Tiananmen, I recommend it be this.
- Tiananmen amnesia, indifference - Far-eastern Sweet Potato blog
- Summary of links from June 4th - Taiwan Matters blog
- Twenty years since Tiananment Square - two articles linked from Letters from Taiwan blog
- Time to end the KMT/CCP's myth of China - article and thoughts from Taiwan Democracy Movement blog
- Tiananmen Square Massacre Anniversary - some links off Nascent Liner Notes blog
Other human rights abuses in China:
- Tear down this cyberwall!
- Web pries lid of Iranian censorship
- Tibetan monks tell tale of escape from China - "A half-dozen monks brought out a Tibetan flag and scrawled slogans on three white banners. 'We have no freedom of speech,' read one. They wrote their wills on the back of the flag because they thought there was a good chance they would be killed by Chinese security forces, Jamyang said."
- China Creates Specter of Dueling Dalai Lamas
- Paris honors Dalai Lama despite fury of Chinese leaders
- Group accuses China of ‘attack’ on lawyers
- Activists in China say police beat rights lawyer - "Zheng has been detained 62 times since he was released from prison in June 2006 after serving a two-year sentence, but the latest incident was the most violent, Poon said, after speaking to people close to Zheng. Police officers slapped Zheng’s face repeatedly, hit the back of his head and tried to burn his lips and eyelids with cigarettes, Poon said."
- Palau says Gitmo detainees still fear China
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Taiwan news:
- China is no heaven for businesses - "According to media reports, the employee [in China] had been working at the company for less than a month when he lost his right hand in a work-related accident. Although the Taiwanese company paid his medical fees and continued to pay his salary, he was not satisfied with the compensation. The angry worker went around the factory, stabbing people and yelling: 'All Taiwanese should die.' According to the victims’ families, the worker attacked others for almost 20 minutes, while almost 200 passersby, security guards and workers stood around watching and did not offer any help. Although a police station was less than 200m away, law enforcement officers did not arrive until the worker had been subdued."
- Ma Ying-jeou's mentor [Jerome Cohen] remains depressed over what he sees in Taiwan
- The civil war that was never ours - good article by Jerome Keating
- Ma Ying-jeou's government undermines promotion of democracy
- More details on Hsiao Bi-khim standing up to the CCP in a banquet in Japan
- A comparison at the way the U.S. treats two of its allies, Israel and Taiwan
- Beijing makes itself an 'indispensable' ally - The Chinese government behaves like it's using Orwell's 1984 as an operating manual, so it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that they want to keep the North Korea nuclear issue as a perpetually unresolved status quo
- Taiwan needs justice not persecution - good post on the Chen Shui-bian trial by a level-headed writer
Notable pages:
- John Hodgman roasts Obama as First Nerd President - humorous yet deep
- Court orders file-sharer to pay $80,000 per song to RIAA - this is why people hate record companies
- Just say NO to fundraising requests from politicians - more good stuff from Lawrence Lessig and Change Congress
Lastly, Bird fail, or bird house fail? Maybe we're just not making those comfortable enough.
Finished King's earlier novel, Christine. See where it ranks in my view among the other King books I've read on my books page.
Also, that page has a plot of my enjoyment of King's books versus the year they were published, as I was wondering if there was any long term trend (liking the books more or less as time progressed) or if there was any period from which I didn't like King's books as much. See the books page.
More on animal cruelty:
- ASPCA against cruel chaining and confinement of circus elephants
- Teen charged in Miami's 19 serial cat killings
- Felony charges dropped against deer-kill suspect - apparently you can kill deer by running them down with snowmobiles and get away with animal cruelty on the technicality that you're "hunting".
Other animal articles:
More on China's ridiculous censor software:
- Experts say Chinese filter would make PCs vulnerable
- China orders patches to planned web filter
- China intent on requiring Internet censor software
- China disables some Google functions
- Google's censorship struggles continue in China
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
More on the Uighurs:
- Johnny Neihu gives a recap of the Uighur situation
- Uyghurs to Palau? Why not my Neighborhood?
- The myth of the $12 million Uighur
- Freed Uighurs relishing life in Bermuda
On Taiwan:
- DPP member Hsiao Bi-khim stands up to PRC bullying during Japanese banquet
- DPP accuses Ma of reshuffling TFD to please China
- Must pro-Taiwanese flee again - the KMT used to hate CCP, now they fawn on them. Their hatred of Taiwanese, however, is nothing new.
- Faulty science and faulty politics - the old racist Chinese nationalism of the KMT
- What's next - toy soldiers? - more of Ma selling out and endangering Taiwan
- Taiwan, Asia's Supposed Voldemort, That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named
- Ma Ying-jeou's Police State? A Follow Up on the 5/17 Protest "Accident"
- Turning a blind eye to oppression
- Wild Strawberries slam indictment of NTU professor
Other interesting reads:
- Iran:
- Sex selection through abortion, even in the U.S. - sigh
- US births hint at bias for boys in some Asians
- Sex selection: Nobody's business? - Saletan on this issue
- Health-care head fake - Change Congrees gets Sen. Ben Nelson to switch on health-care public-plan option. Go Lessig!
- Gitmo detainees said abuse sparked lies, transcripts reveal
- On web and iPhone, a tool to aid careful shopping - how harmful is the product you're about to buy to the environment?
- Raise my taxes - our overly complicated tax system and the fact that the most visible support for raising taxes on the rich is from the rich
- Religious freedom versus sanitation rules
The situation with the Uighurs being released from Guantanamo to Palau is a little complex. Essentially, they're getting screwed over by two factors: China's irrational demands and claims that they are terrorists, meaning they can't go back to their home for fear they'll be tortured and executed by the Chinese, and making it difficult to move them to other countries because of the diplomatic pressure China will put on the country, and the irrational fear of the U.S. and other countries that these Guantanamo prisoners are super dangerous (even though there's no evidence that they're guilty of anything). So there's plenty of blame to go around - blame the Chinese government for the situation they are creating in Xinjiang and the way they would treat these Uighurs, blame for other countries for not standing up to China, blame to people for their unjustified fear of Guantanamo prisoners. In the end, it looks like most of the Uighurs will end up in Palau, which incidentally recognizes Taiwan, not China.
- Tiny island of Palau to take 17 Uighurs held at Guantanamo
- Palau to take Guantanamo Uighurs
- China protests moving of detainees
- 6 detainees are freed as questions linger
- Uighurs in Paradise?
- Palau citizens unhappy about taking in 13 Uighurs
Here's hoping the two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea are released soon and safely.
- N. Korea Sentences 2 U.S. Journalists to 12 Years of Hard Labor
- Life in North Korea's gulags
- Obama working on plan to free jailed journalists
China's ridiculous censoring software:
- China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs
- China faces criticism over new software censor
- China defends Web filter mandate amid Microsoft concerns
- China's computer folly
- Surprise! China's "porn filter" has political opinions
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
On animals:
- Six month old Formosan black bear
- Return of the once-rare beaver? - I haven't seen any of these supposedly common-place beavers.
- Can an animal ponder what might have been?
- Tonka the Bionic Tortoise
- Humans and animals, who are the true "animals"?
- Pet's death linked to Miami's serial cat killer
- Teen kills kitten in oven; faces 10-year sentence
- If mice could talk, what would they say?
- Rare yellow lobster avoids boiling pot - will still be imprisoned in a viewing tank in a restaurant
Interesting reads:
- Can memory loss be prevented?
- This time, we won't scare - on health care in America versus Canada - "Nothing was seriously wrong, and the hospital discharged her after five hours. The bill came to $8,789.29."
- A decent explanation of the impending switch to Digital TV from Slate
- Poultry is no. 1 source of outbreaks, report says
- videos:
- On ebooks and DRM:
- Crazy parents:
Finished reading Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Potpourri:
- Entries from two of the best, for my money, humor/general interest bloggers around:
- New Super Mario Bros - this looks cool
Just finished reading Stephen King's From a Buick 8, see where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books. After finishing reading it, I saw this article in the news about two Pennsylvania state police troopers shot and seriously wounded. I guess that is just a case of not noticing something until you first become aware of it, and then see it everywhere immediately afterward.
On animals:
- Brain echidna proves looks aren't everything (cute fella)
- German zoo says gay penguins now proud parents
- World's biggest fish are dying
- Videos renew debate on military use of animals
Worth reading:
- Five ways to fix America's schools
- Connecticut district tosses algebra textbooks and goes online - one point made in this article is that students often forget a lot of the math material over the summer and time is wasted reviewing it the next year. This goes back to the point in the first article that summer break should be considerably shortened.
- Happy Negative Christmas
- My Milk Toof - very funny blog about someone's baby teeth coming back to visit after a stay with the tooth fairy, haha
- Wolfram Alpha: Hated, sure, but ridiculously useful
- I recently rewatched The Shawshank Redemption, so these two news items seem particularly memorable:
- China detains prominent dissident
- Wang Dan has no regrets over his role in 1989
- To shut off Tiananmen Talk, China disrupts sites
- China blocks Twitter service ahead of anniversary
- Twenty years after Tiananmen: Silence on the square
- China said to harass rights lawyers
- Tiananmen now seems distant to China's students
- How the family of a dissident fled China
- Openness in China about memoir proves short-lived
- Tiananmen square scars soldier turned artist
- After Tiananmen and prison, a comfortable but uneasy life in the new China
- Bullets over Beijing
- Chinese activist tries to surrender
- China's Great Firewall blocks twitter - read the comments if you want to be depressed by the stupidity of Chinese nationalists and their western apologists
- China's new rebels - example: "those who support Falungong are wilfully make troubles and stand facts on their heads" by "a chinese". sigh.
- Behind the scenes: Tank man of Tiananmen
- Police swarm Tiananmen Square to bar protests
- Study slams China on democracy - a good look at the many ways in which the CCP seeks to undermine democracy
- Democracy activists criticize Ma over massacre statement
- Understanding Chinese youth
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
On Taiwan:
- KMT caucus blocks Tiananmen resolution - if Taiwan can't stand up for democracy activists in China, then how can it expect others to stand up for it against China?
- DPP unhappy with government over Tiananmen snub
- Remember history, PRC dissidents say
- Chen Chu leads, Wu kowtows
- Wu shrugs off criticism over 'island' remarks
- Something sinister on the horizon
- Facing three more years of shame
- Beijing easily outmaneuvering Ma, analysts say
- Taiwan's democracy runs deep, says Chinese scholar
- Nazism in the China Post
On animals:
- Pepper, the stolen dog that changed American science - a five part look at medical research on animals
- Tool use by non-tool-using animals - rooks learn to use sticks and stones to get food - "On top of all this they were able, in a different sort of test, to bend a piece of wire into a hook to retrieve a bucket containing a waxworm. These last two tasks—stick modification and hookmaking—are equivalent to the sort of tool construction that chimpanzees engage in when they go 'fishing' for termites in their nests."
- New research on Malaysia's odd, elusive tapir
- 'Crazy Turtle Woman' transforms graveyard into maternity ward
- The consolation of animals
- A human language gene changes the sound of mouse squeaks
Other interesting reads:
- Wisdom in a cleric's garb; why not a lab coat too? - a look at science v. religion in the movie "Angels and Demons"
- Saletan - Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?
- Iraqi abuse photos depict graphic rape, torture: ex-general - "'I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops,' Taguba was quoted by the Daily Telegraph. 'The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.'" This is ridiculous on several levels. First, what better reason is there for releasing something than a legal reason? Is he suggesting we should just ignore the law whenever it is beneficial to do so? Secondly, what principle is he espousing, that we should avoid saying or doing anything if it could conceivably harm our troops? Then why he is going around saying the "the mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough"? What if someone uses his quotes to inflame sentiment against American troops? And what if he had the opportunity to keep the entire Abu Ghraib scandal from the public? Would he have done so in the name of protecting the troops?
- Loves me, loves me not (do the math)
- Tinkling in the pool causes disgust and discomfort - nice
Finished reading Stephen King's book (as Richard Bachman) Thinner. It was quite a gripping read, coming in (currently) at 18 on my ranking of Stephen King novels.
It reminded me a lot of the recent movie Drag Me to Hell, judging by the plot description on Wikipedia, from the Gypsy's curse to the potential for the lifting of the curse and the final resolution. If you're thinking about seeing the movie, my personal advice is to go out and get the book instead. As with Cujo, as I've mentioned before, Thinner is much more than a simple horror story. It also includes biting social commentary and raises serious questions about justice, morality, and endless cyclical violence.
生死樂苦
Spring is supposed to be a time of life and rebirth. Unfortunately, three recent events have reaffirmed the fact that spring can also be a time of death, and that nature is not like a Disney movie.
The first incident, separate from the other two, is a recent bicycle fatality in Amherst that happened right outside of Gold's Gym at the same time I was inside working out. Here are the most recent details at this time.
Obviously, this particular woman should not have been driving. How she could swerve across a lane of traffic going the opposite direction, and then strike a bicyclist going the other direction, and not have the sense of mind to stop and get help, is beyond me.
More generally though, as a society, we are much to cavalier about driving. When I see people tailgating (even on the highway), going way over the speed limit, driving while talking on their cell phones, really drives me crazy.
Consider: motor vehicle accidents are the 7th leading cause of death in the United States, outnumbering all deaths due to firearms. About 45,000 people die from traffic accidents each year, causing about 2% of all deaths. That's more than 15 times the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks. That's more than 20 times the number of people who died from all airline fatalities since 1970.
All that is a bit of an aside (for the time being) from my main stories, both of which involve baby birds and pulled hard at my heartstrings. Some of the female ducks in the campus lake have now become mother ducks in the last few weeks (at least four new moms). The most prodigious by far is this mama, who had 16 new ducklings:
Unfortunately, 16 ducklings are not very easy to take care of, and when this group ran into another mom and her ducklings, after a bit of mutual hissing between the two moms, one duckling got confused and tried following the wrong mom, getting lost from his 15 siblings. Soon it was lost and cheeping morosely for its mother. Eventually he found himself all alone in the lake:
Fortunately, he swam around to the bank, and I was able to herd its mother into the same area of the lake, where they were reunited:
Here they are all together again, swimming away:
Here, a Disney film would say, they all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, I checked back on them a few days later, and the mama only had 14 ducklings, even after more re-counts than a Minnesotan election.
Yesterday, I saw more heartbreak. A young baby fledgling house sparrow was chirping on the sidewalk, struggling to move. I was able to lift it with a sheet of paper and move it to the safety of a garden a foot over, so that it wouldn't get trampled over. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only comfort I was able to offer it, and its mother was nowhere to be seen. I checked on it a while later, and it was still all by itself, lying on its side, mouth opening and closing slow, and leg twitching slowly. Needless to say, there was no Disney ending for this young baby either - it was dead by the next morning.
All this reminds me of this interview of Peter Singer by Charlie Rose. He mentions one of his primary objections to the Judeo-Christian conception of a loving, omnipotent god is just the sheer amount of suffering in the world, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Tsai Ing-wen's opening speech at the 517 rally.
Plus, Marking June 4 [in Taiwan] is not 'inconvenient'.
Edifying reads:
- Oldie but a goodie - Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society, My Turn column for Newsweek + follow up on pigeon shoots
- Shellfish, not selfish - the importance of oysters
- An even better Hubble
- The Abu Ghraib we cannot see - while I agree with most of this, I find the main argument to be slightly logically flawed. Photos may not give the whole story, and they even may distract from the real story, but that does not justify suppressing them. In a democracy, you should present all the information without censorship, and be able to make your point that there are more important issues at hand than just the photos and not too much weight should be put upon them, without outright suppressing them.
- Opera #2 YouTube video by Russian pop singer Vitas, plus this awesome parody, Taiwan Vitas
More on Taiwan:
- A first hand look at police repression in Taiwan
- Taiwan and the WHA, a gift horse to be examined? - Jerome Keating
- The Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan, not ROC official, can represent Taiwan in WHO - very good read on the details of Taiwan's observer status at the WHA.
More worthy reads:
- The hidden hunger - combating poverty and malnutrition. After reading articles like this, I find it hard to give any credence to contrarians like this, who believe Western aid to Africa is a bad thing.
- Our tacit approval of torture
- Obama's
call on photos saved lives - I think this guy is completely
wrong. Following his logic, we should never have released any
photos of what happened at Abu Ghraib. That kind of mindset
completely misses the point and misses what makes America a great
nation - the ability to look into its mistakes and move forward, not
to simply cover them up because it is convenient in the short
term.
What is going to inspire more confidence in America and Western values in the Middle East - hiding photographs of abuse, leaving people to wonder what other abuses went on, or making it all public, showing our dedication to rooting out the problem and never letting it happen again?
His swipe at the ACLU is particularly telling - it's organizations like the ACLU, that stand up for the right of people to free speech and assembly, even when they're saying things that people in the ACLU would personally be against, that makes American the nation it is today. If all you care about is "stability" and "harmony" regardless of the cost to freedom, then you ought to consider moving to China. - Abortion and Economics - William Saletan. I think everyone on both sides can agree that we need better family planning though, so that people make the financial decision about whether they can support a child before they get pregnant.
- Fail Blog - some recent gems:
On Taiwan:
- Chen Chu praised for saying President Ma in China, showing more courage than anyone from the KMT (of course censored on CCTV). Politics from Taiwan has more
- Will Taiwan defect to China? - "Incredibly, Beijing appears to maintain that the entire South China Sea is an internal Chinese lake, thereby impinging on the right of free passage on, under and over international waters." Tying the issue with the recent confrontations with American ships.
- Taiwan belongs only to the Taiwan people
- Show Mr Yeh the way to go home
- Regarding "Ma defends his administration", this line was truly ridiculous: "If sovereignty was lost, I can get it back." - Ma Ying-jeou. Letters from Taiwan puts him in his place.
- The View From Taiwan on the ubiquitous bias in the western media on the Taiwan/China issue, and the Taipei Times agrees
- The KMT and Chinese democracy
- 'Chinese Taipei' name at WHA a scam, says DPP
- An obvious invitation to national humiliation
Worth reading:
- When did cowboys get wimpy? - on the irrational fear of holding Guantanamo inmates in the U.S.
- On waterboarding:
- Flash back to Christopher Hitchens - Believe me, it's torture (video)
- Now conservative radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller experiences it for himself and agrees that it's torture
- Cheney v. Ventura: The Torture Debate Smackdown
- Lessig reviews Helprin's Digital Barbarism - Lessig 1, Helprin 0. I'm continually amazed (and depressed) by how many people try to make the claim that Prof. Lessig is against copyright. In my opinion, if you can't even get that straight, it's clear you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.
- American University Center for Social Media video on "Fair Use and Online Video"
- Gorillas and now leatherbacks
This doesn't fail to cheer me up:
More catch-up:
On Taiwan:
- One year down the drain
- Open letter to Taiwan's president
- Taiwan moving backward in time
- Ma defends his administration
- Ma finds himself under fire
- Critics question commitment to rights, press freedom
- Protest will keep the Ma government on its toes
- Taiwan at the WHA
On animals:
- Animal personalities: Unnatural selection - do we really want to be eating things that have personalities?
- A bird quickly learns to tell urban friend from foe
- Elephants suffering in Mali drought
- Early skeleton sheds light on primate evolution
- After wars, mass rapes persist - are humans really so superior to animals?
Other articles worth reading:
- As tasks at Hubble end, no tears, but it was close
- Math and the city
- A chili sauce to crow about
- The Earth wins one
- O'Reilly: Americans should be able to go out in public without being harassed by people with cameras - what a hypocrite
- Biblical quotes said to adorn Pentagon reports, sigh
- This mom didn't have to die
- Guns, geysers, and Mr. Reid
A long catch-up post:
First off, of course, the DPP protests in Taiwan today:
- Taipei Times coverage
- Taiwanese vent anger at Ma policies
- Protesters find novel ways to voice discontent
- The right to demand better
- Lee Teng-hui attacks Ma government
- Responding to Ma's hasty China tilt
- History will declare 'Mr' Ma a criminal
- A 'secret' everyone knows but Ma
- Chinese police are not welcome
- John Tkaclk on Taiwan: Taiwan's 'undetermined' status
- Annette Lu, Promoting a 'two China' policy
- DPP English-language blog
- Coverage on the View from Taiwan blog
- Coverage on David on Formosa blog
- Coverage on Letters from Taiwan blog, and comments on Ma's convenient exit to Hsinchu during the protests
Good recent Saletan essays:
- Abortion:
safe, legal, early
- Follow up: Three men and a baby
- Inequality control: a
conversation about race, genes, bias, and fairness (a
continuation of essays I've previously mentioned)
- and more - Bias and biodiversity
- Zero
tolerance for cell phones
- Amazingly, the union representing the MBTA operators is trying to fight a ban on drivers having cell phones during work.
- I agree with Saletan on this one, we should regulate cell phone while operating any kind of heavy machinery aggressively. I don't even trust people with driving cars safely under normal conditions, let alone while talking on a cell phone. To put it simply in four words: 心無二用.
- Redefining food - on banning trans fats, salt in processed foods, and sugared beverages
- Selling organs in the recession
More on China's government: (copied to diatribe)
- The Sichuan earthquake: Salt in their wounds: Bereaved parents treated like criminals
- Chinese manufacturing: Poorly made: Why so many Chinese products are born to be bad - The lifecycle of a Chinese product: get a contract with a Western comopany to manufacture their product, figure out how to make the product more cheaply by bypassing safety regulations and using imitation products, and at the same time start producing knock-off pirate versions.
- Pentagon official charged in leak of classified info to China
- Tibetan culture under 'death sentence': Dalai Lama
- Chinese boats harassed U.S. ship, officials say
- Amnesty criticizes China's harassment of quake survivors
- Year after China quake, new births, old wounds
- China reports student toll for quake
- Get out of house with Chinese drywall, doctor tells family
On animals:
- Can you die from lack of sleep - "In the 1980s, a University of Chicago researcher named Allan Rechtschaffen conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments on rats. After 32 days of total sleep deprivation, all the rats were dead." Things we would never do to other humans, even terrorists and criminals, because it would be torture, we do to other mammals without a blink of an eye and hail the experiments as "groundbreaking".
- Seal hunting: political animals
- Carole C. Noon, who founded save the chimps, dies at 59
- PETA on the Google Goats: Let them eat grass (but they need perks)
- Egypt's persecuted pigs - porcicide
Miscellaneous interesting articles:
- Can vegetarians save the world?
- What a little vitamin A could do
- Blocked ads, clean conscience - bonus: read the comments posted in the Fray to be put into despair by people on both sides of the issue
- Unofficial software incurs Apple's wrath
- Star Trek: The Next Generation's eerily prescient torture episode
Some juxtaposition:
- Army to kill 6,000 kangaroos due to overpopulation / Nadya Suleman
- Goose being trapped and gassed / monagamous goose family
- Oprah coupon craze leaves KFC customers hungry for more / Boba: a city chicken goes country / What does "humane" mean to you?
New knowledge 知識 entry on recommended Taiwan Blogs 台灣部落 格.
President Obama at this year's White House Correspondent's Dinner. Looks like Obama can always fall back on being a stand-up comedian after he finishes his eight years. To be fair though, Bush could be funny (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) as well.
Where Obama really distinguishes himself is in his ending remarks on the importance of journalism for a functioning democracy and the very fact that he took the time to praise the media. This is in sharp distinction to Bush, who took pride in not reading newspapers and actively looked down upon them, saying he wanted to "speak over the filter" of the media.
在很多方面上, 比如多聰明, 多壯, 我應該算是比上不足, 比下有餘.
但有一方面, 我真的是獨一無二, 那就是我有最好的父母親和家人.
今天我要感謝我媽媽, 阿媽, 和乾媽. 母親節快樂!
(明天會回到一般的素口罵人).
If you take a look to the left, you'll notice a new image joining the rest of my icons: the cover of the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.
It's one of the most important books that I've read, and if there was just one book I could get everyone to read, it would be this book. It was unsurprising for me to learn that it was the book that inspired the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I find it hard to believe that a rational, intelligent person could read this book and not be strongly moved to become, at least, vegetarian.
As I've mentioned earlier, Singer's essay, All Animals are Equal, closely follows the first chapter of Animal Liberation, and is a very good start to thinking about the problem of animal rights.
In his essay and in his book, Singer draws parallels to racial and gender discrimination. He also addressed the issue of equality, which touches on the controversy over whether intelligence and mental ability should be tested for various racial groups. Singer makes the point that it doesn't make sense to consider two racial groups to be "equal" because, on average, the two groups have the same intelligence level. For one, this might not be true, which is something Saletan worries about and McWhorter assumes is not true, without (I would argue) being really sure of it.
More importantly, it doesn't make sense for equality to depend on intelligence, since it would simply lead to discrimination based on intelligence, which runs counter to our notions of "equality".
I haven't made these arguments here as clearly, formally, or convincingly as Singer, so I encourage everyone to at least try reading the essay, and giving the book a shot as well.
For some reason, I find this story of a Korean man who died homeless with $100,000 in the bank to be inordinately sad.
A little while ago, I wrote about the Supreme Court case concerning a firefighter test for promotions that was rejected for being racially biased. Here is a good argument by John McWhorter on why that was wrong and counterproductive for blacks.
McWhorter and William Saletan have got into a bit of disagreement over the report that No Child Left Behind is not closing the racial gap between black and white students. Here is Saletan's original response to the article, arguing against the need for such race-based testing, then McWhorter arguing for the need for such testing, and Saletan's response to McWhorter.
One interesting point that comes out of this is whether there really is a statistically significant difference in races when it comes to abilities like intelligence, and what implications this might have from a practical or ethical perspective. I'll have more to say about this tomorrow on a closely related issue.
Other interesting links:
- Saletan - Exposing executioners
- Saletan - Surrogacy and the state
- Saletan - First they came for the Mexicans
- Chrysler's bondholders are whining about Obama's deal. Don't listen to them.
- The tricky sex offender case voted on by Judge Diane Wood
- Waggle dance!
Lawrence Lessig's book Remix can now be downloaded for free (Creative Commons license), from this page.
Even more stuff:
- Chinese government (copied to diatribe):
- A manifesto on freedom sets China's persecution machinery in motion
- Ex-Tiananmen prisoners still struggling to survive
- Chinese dissidents seek apology
- China still presses crusade against Falun Gong
- China quak survivors still wait for word
- Chinese enforcers are 'worse than mobsters': bloggers
- China 'acting like a child,' Dalai Lama says
- Tibet as 'Hell on Earth'
- Senior Tibetan cleric faces prison in China
- China: government blocks access to YouTube
- Japan's prime minister in China - "For Chinese who have seen 'City of Life and Death', what stands out most is its sympathetic portrayal of a Japanese soldier. This is a novel twist for Chinese treatments of the subject, and the film’s official sanction suggests a desire to promote more nuanced views. But the time may not be ripe. Lu Chuan, the film’s director, has received death threats and accusations of being a traitor and a stooge for Japanese revisionists."
- More traditional versus simplified characters debate
- Jackie Chan:
- Animals:
- Let's hear it for the bees - "In the dark of the hive, they transpose the location of a food source in the horizontal plane through the famous 'waggle' dance into communication in the vertical plane of the hive."
- Jain followers in New Delhi offer free treatmnet for birds and vow of release
- Taiwan no longer a killing field for rare butterflies
- Free speech versus animal cruelty videos in high court case
- Dancing parrots, Snowball fight
- Astronauts pay respects to 'space chimps'
- As bats die, closing caves to control a fungus
- Extravagant results of nature's arms race
- Google - Mowing with goats
- Hobbits and hominids
- Taiwan:
- Academics slam Ma's treaty claim
- DPP skeptical about WHA invitation
- An Obama Taiwan Policy Review: too little, too late?
- Taiwanese hold the key to deciding on statehood
- PRC media suppresion reaches out to Taiwan
- Tsai slams Ma for praise of Hu's 'six points' speech
- PRC visitors have a right to know
- ECFA will do Taiwan more harm than good
- Why Taiwan human rights history must be preserved
- Nicholas
Kristof: A
nation of Typhoid Marys
Here's the article on Senator Collin's website: 02/05/2009 - "After meeting with Mr. Obama, Sen. Collins expressed concern about a number of spending provisions, including $780 million for pandemic-flu preparedness.". - Nicolas Kristof: Time to come clean [on torture]
- Russian mayor walks into chess master's trap - I admire Garry Kasparov's stand for freedom and democracy in Russia, and added him to the list of people I admire.
- More atheists shout it from the rooftops
- Representative Joe Barton from Texas stuns Nobel prize winning Energy Secretary Steve Chu with inane question
Lots of stuff:
- Harm school - interesting article by William Saletan that cuts down one of the conservatives arguments on why waterboarding and other such acts don't constitute torture
- Glenn Beck is crazy.
- A Culture Soaked in Blood - an excellent editorial by Bob Herbert in the NY Times on our gun culture and the toll it has taken
- cute NYU robot-human interaction experiment
- On the Kindle
- With Kindle, can you tell it's Proust - somehow the Kindle always seems to inspire insipid articles like this. Maybe it says something about humanities majors who try to write something intelligent about a technology. If enough people care about actually showing off what book they are currently reading, all you would really need to do is add a small simple display on the back of the Kindle to display that information. That would invalidate the entire article.
- The amazing Amazon Kindle is bad news for the publishing industry - a slightly better article about the Kindle, but it still treats the current status quo as if that was best, rather than focusing on how to get the benefits of the Kindle and solve the downsides, like DRM.
- How the Kindle will change the world - another slightly better Slate article on the Kindle. This one spawned some rather silly comments in Slate's Fray, which I felt oblidged to respond to.
- More cool Vimeo videos
- Earth in HD from the Space Station
- How long will our world last?
- 10 "instruments" that have no business playing music
- Report: Poor Latinos face abuse, racial profiling in South - I really hate it when people try to excuse worker abuse in areas like Dubai, as I mentioned previously, by saying that it happens everywhere and we should just live with it. What it means is that we need to be that more vigilant in doing something about it.
I saw Earth, and it was good. I'll have more to say on this later, but for now I will just say that I highly recommend it.
Quickie: Animal rights activists, UCLA researchers square off at protest.
While I don't think that humans should be hurt or targeted by violence, and I don't think trying to intimidate researchers with the threat of violence is the right way to go, I am sympathetic to the fact that no humans have been killed or even hurt by the animal rights activists, while on the other hand, the researcher in the article is killing numerous monkeys in the course of his researcher.
UCLA's argument that research done on animals has led to various medical advances misses the point that animal activists are trying to make. Would you kill a human being for research purposes if it would lead to breakthroughs on cancer research or other types of research? How about a mentally disabled human being with the same or lesser cognitive ability as a monkey? If not, then such a viewpoint that monkeys can be used for research but not equivalent humans is contradictory (speciesist, as Peter Singer would put it). I agree with Singer's view in Animal Liberation, namely that research on animals should not be carried out unless the potential benefit is such that the research would also be carried out on equivalent mentally-disabled human beings.
The Supreme Court is certainly hearing some interesting and important cases these days. Yesterday it was the right of schools to perform strip searches on students, today it's a case of reverse discrimination after the city of New Haven threw out a test for firefighters because none of the top scorers were black. This is one of those times were I disagree with the New York Times editorial, which supports the city's decision. In fact, sadly, I think it's one of those times where I agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial.
The test was designed to be race-neutral. There are a lot of explanations for why the top scorers may have been all white, that has nothing to do with race. As this article mentions, the top scorers were just deeply interested and motivated in fire suppression manuals and studied hard for the test. Now they are being punished because the test didn't meet some silly 80% rule. Where is the evidence that the test was racially biased? So far the only thing I've heard is that one question on the test used the terms "uptown" and "downtown", which don't make sense in New Haven. If that's the best evidence they have, I think this should be a fairly clear cut case.
I also don't buy the argument that the test doesn't have anything to do with firefighting, and that promoting based on the test will lead only to firefighters who test well but aren't capable of doing anything else. That just sounds like the whining of those who didn't bother studying hard for the test. One person against the test said that such tests only measure "the ability to read and retain". That seems like a pretty important qualification for most things, including being a firefighter.
I think throwing out the test without having really strong evidence of actual racial-bias in the test itself (not just looking at the results) is doing a great disservice to everybody. Obviously it does a disservice to the white and Hispanic firefighters who should have been promoted. It does a grave disservice to the public if the best firefighters aren't the ones being promoted. Clearly, one could just promote people at random in proportion to the number in that particular ethnic group, which would be race-neutral, but that would be horrible. Lastly, it does a great disservice to minorities, who should be promoted based on their abilities and learn to do well on the tests, rather than being promoted just to fulfill some quota.
Supreme Court Justice Breyer on the Savana Redding court case - "In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear."
Wow. This is our Supreme Court? Apparently they take failing to get it to a new level in a strip-search case. Sigh.
A follow up on Jackie Chan: thankfully he's been dropped from Deaflympics (sort of).
On top of everything else, weight lifting is also good for blood pressure.
This is a pretty interesting article on why deforestation should be more of a concern than global warming. I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy though, as there's no reason why we shouldn't focus on both, as this poster points out. Also, as this post mentions, some of the evidence presented was not really accurately considered.
On Dubai:
I recently read a piece on the "dark side" of Dubai, and was quite appalled. To gauge the validity of the original article, I dug around a bit, and what I found seems to confirm the many unsavory aspects hidden beneath the surface of Dubai. Since I didn't know much of anything about Dubai in advance, and suspect many others are in the same boat, here are the articles I found:
- The dark side of Dubai
- Dark side of Dubai's boomtown
- Sludogs and Millionaires
- Human Rights Watch - Building towers, cheating workers
- 'We need slaves to build monuments'
- Sun, sea, and sewage in the playground of the rich in Dubai
On Jackie Chan:
I have disliked Jackie Chan since his ignorant, dumb remark on democracy in Taiwan. It was thus unsurprising to hear his thoughts on democracy in general. (Of course there has been no reporting of his remarks in the Chinese media.)
- Jackie Chan wonders about freedom
- Jackie Chan says Chinese need control
- Jacke Chan receives verbal beating
- DPP says Jackie Chan not welcome
- Jackie Chan: Friend of repression
- US activists back Chinese dissident - Jackie Chan's words spit in the face of everything Chinese activists like Liu Xiaobo do despite the immense danger from the Chinese government.
On or related to the "tea parties": (these people range from the mere ignorant to the seriously disturbed)
- Obama is just not their cup of tea
- Angry Chicago tea bagger calls Obama a fascist
- Live mic catches Fox host inflating crowd estimate by 300%
- Crazy conservative rant at Glenn Beck 9/12 get-together
- Rick Warren lies
- The Daily Show on right-wing paranoia
- Ed Schultz rips Bachmann's psycho talk on 'flying Imams'
Random:
- donkey ball stubbornly holds on despite criticism - the top picture pretty much says it all: the idiotic look on the person's face, which would look quite different if the person and the donkey's positions were reversed.
- Big fish are 'tortured' in Asian seafood restaurants - keeping a fish in a tiny tank where it can barely turn around ought to constitute cruelty to an animal.
- Cool Stop motion with wolf, pig and 1300 pictures
- The culture of Taiwan: President Ma Ying-jeou's sybmolic gestures matter
- Corruption stains the KMT's history
- US court sidesteps Taiwan's sovereignty
- Another lethal April, another failure to ask why
- Colbert on the death grip special interests have on Congress
- The life of a slug
- Why there is no iTunes for movies
- Creator of web cartoon xkcd writing a paper book
Assorted links:
- Conservative hypocrisy about Obama's proposal to limit charitable tax deductions for the rich
- PRC dissident detained on sensitive anniversary
- Tibet will be free when China is
- Graft in China covers up toll of coal mines
- Professor [who said Chinese petitioners are nearly all mentally ill] draws more protests
- Farm Sanctuary: Spring brings second chance for piglet - "Written off as acceptable losses by farmers, who also breed sows to give birth to unnaturally large litters, the piglets who become sick are typically culled — often by being violently killed, or simply left to die without receiving individualized veterinary care."
- HD radio crying out to be heard
我是素食者.
我也會罵我覺得應該被罵的人. (謾罵)
所以我算是素口罵人嗎?
Just for fun, here is how Google Translate handled that:
I am a vegetarian.
I think I will curse those who should be scolded.
Su-I as I curse you?
Not terribly bad, but obviously machine translation still has a long way to go.
Another animal article to get people to appreciate the wonder of animals: Taxing, a ritual to save the species
The article is about sharing, e.g. "taxation", in animal societies. Includes amazing facts, like monkeys are expected to give a food call after stumbling upon high quality food in order to allow others to share, or else face repercussion later, and bats are expected to regurgitate food for those in need, and seem to rub each other's bellies to gauge who should be sharing.
Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times on humanity even for nonhumans, a good look at the encouraging trend of greater consideration for animals. Most of the comments on the article also seemed encouraging as well, but of course there were the few inescapable idiots.
I've also started reading the book mentioned in the essay, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and so far, it's been very good. If you don't have time for the book, or are looking to be convinced that it's a worthwhile read, here's an essay by Singer, All Animals Are Equal, that seems closely related and partial overlapping with the first part of the book.
Toxic pet food, toxic children's toys, toxic toothpaste, and now, toxic drywall. There are just the things that China has managed to export to the U.S. Never mind the tainted milk, shoddily constructed school buildings, and countless other things being inflicted upon the Chinese domestically.
On Vitamin World:
When I first started buying protein powder, I originally purchased it from GNC. However, I have since switched to Vitamin World, and I've been really happy with it. Not necessarily in terms of price, which seems comparable, although Vitamin World doesn't require paid membership and the sales seem to be on par with what you get with GNC membership.
The main thing for me, now that I generally make my purchases entirely online, has been the quality of Vitamin World's customer support. I've had occasion to contact them twice so far. The first was due to a mix up that was my fault (due to an overly aggressive spam filter), and that particular time I called customer support and managed to talk to someone fairly quickly, who spoke natural English, and quickly helped me resolve the problem.
The second time just occurred, as the original package they sent me was somehow destroyed by the US postal office (who sent me just the top flap of the original cardboard packaging with a brief note they were sorry for any inconvenience caused by the damage). This time I emailed them, and not only did they understand the problem (I hate when I email customer support and the response I get back makes me suspect that they don't quite understand English and didn't completely grasp what I was saying), they apologized (not really their fault) and said they would immediately send out a new package by priority mail.
In today's model of fighting to the bottom and cutting costs with utter disregard to quality, this was very refreshing, and I thought I should take a moment to publicly commend them for it.
For an example of a company apparently on the other end of the spectrum, check out these Best Buy horror stories: Dear Best Buy, if you're going to cheat grandmas, don't leave photographic evidence, and Best Buy sells egregiously crappy, 9 year old hard drive as new, then refuses refund.
Three thoughts on ethics:
Yesterday I pointed to an essay by David Brooks about how much of our morality seems to be driven by innate emotions, likely put in place through evolution, rather than an actual reasoned calculus of morality. One thing that Brooks doesn't really seem to appreciate though, is that these emotion-based moral judgments are only correct from an evolutionary viewpoint, which might not necessarily correspond to what we actually believe should be moral if we were to think things over more from a logical perspective.
This article, Iraq's newly open gays face scorn and murder, is a dramatic illustration of that. The people opposed to homosexuality are very emotional in their hatred of it, calling it "disgusting" and saying that such people should be "killed in the worst, most severe way of killing". Obviously, such sentiment could have been useful from an evolutionary standpoint, and thus would have a reason for existing in many cultures and religions. Just as clearly, however, a large number of people today reject such sentiment. We realize that, although we may find homosexuality to be distasteful at first, that is no reason to condemn others for it, especially when they are born that way and given that it doesn't harm anybody. Thus, while we may rely on our emotions as a moral guide, in the end we should be using logic and reasoning as the ultimate deciding factor.
Another issue where I feel our ethics and emotions are somewhat out of sync is when it comes to animals. Actually, to be more precise, in many cases our emotions point us in what I believe is the right direction. We are turned off by cruelty to animals, and most of us I believe would not want to see animals killed. The problem, though, is that we live in a society where we are rather insulated from what it actually takes to get dinner on our plate, insulated to the conditions animals endure on factory farms and insulated from the fact of their deaths to provide our dinners.
Part of the solution, then, is to break this barrier by spreading information and awareness about what animals go through. Another part though, is to simply learn more about animals, to realize that they are not so different from us, that it is a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind. Hopefully such knowledge will make us slightly less prone to being arrogant and assuming we should "control" other animals.
What brings this to mine are these recent articles about ants. This is an interesting article, Wisdom of crowds, that talks about the remarkable organizational structure of ant colonies. That led me to these two amazing articles about ants that actually farm fungus: Ant and its fungus are ancient cohabitants, and First fungal farmers of the Americas. As the second article mentions, let's try to keep in mind that humans were the fourth animal to discover farming, and remain humble when it comes to our position in the grand scheme of things.
That brings me to my last point, immorality as a failure of perspective. This article, Killing for respect, talks about crime in Oakland, CA. As the title suggests, part of Oakland's crime problem is rooted in "respect killing", where "a wrong look, casual gesture, can lead to a full-blown shootout". How ridiculous is that? What it really signifies is an intense and unwarranted arrogance, a feeling that you are so special that no one should disrespect you in the slightest way. Compared against the vast backdrop of the history of the universe and the history of all living things since life first started on earth millions of years ago, it's really a cosmic joke that anyone would care so much about themselves to get so angry over how another person looked at them. Finally, to wrap this up, let's keep in mind that it's equally ridiculous to care so much about the sexual orientation of others.
There are some Westerners who like to defend the Chinese government by saying that we shouldn't be imperialists and try to force our Western notions of democracy and free speech on China, and that we should just leave the Chinese Communist government alone. Whenever I hear that, I can infer that the person in question either has the IQ of a turnip, has an intense Asian fetish that blinds him or her from reality, or is very greedy and wants to make money off of China without really caring about anything else. Obviously these three things are not mutually exclusive, and chances are that all three apply at the same time.
Clearly I have great disdain for such people. On the other hand, I have the highest respect for those Chinese people who stand up for democracy and free speech within China, knowing full well the likely consequences. These people are the clearest counter-arguments to the claims of the Chinese government-apologists mentioned above.
Here is just one recent example: a 75 year old retired professor entered a cemetry on tomb-sweeping day to honor a former Communist party member punished for sympathizing with the Tiananmen Square protesters. He was then set upon by four or five thugs, thrown into a ditch, and beaten for more than 10 minutes. Although other people were watching, none tried to help him.
The next time you hear a Chinese government apologist sprouting on about how we should leave China alone, realize that what they really mean is that we should just let the Chinese government have its way. In light of incidents like these, it makes you realize that such apologists are not just stupid, they are morally repugnant.
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Even more links:
- Another good essay by Christopher Hitchens, on Telling the truth about the Armenian genocide
- Another good essay by William Saletan, on Poverty, biology, and intelligence
- An interesting article about Vimeo, the YouTube for artistes. Here is the bird video mentioned in the beginning of the article.
- How the Internet got its rules - a good article on the importance of keeping technology as open and compatible as possible, something Amazon, Apple, and all other users of DRM should keep in mind.
- The end of philosophy - an interesting, but ultimately disappointing, essay on morality and evolution. The tacked-on, out of the blue attacks on atheists and scientists at the end were most disappointing. Refuting his claims is straightforward and left as an exercise for the reader. Those who desire a cogent treatment of evolution and ethics should consider Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
More links:
- Traffic deaths last year lowest since '61 - statistic of note: Massachusetts has the lowest rate of seat belt use, at 66.8%. Can't Massachusetts people do anything right when it comes to driving?
- Two interesting recent essays by William Saletan - Remote-controlled repo, A black market in children
- iPods, first sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England - an interesting look at whether Obama's gift to the Queen of England would technically violate copyright law
- Three
police officers killed in Pittsburgh, by a man motivated, in
part, by a fear that the US government would enact some kind of gun
control.
A look
at FOX news obsession with possible gun control
regulation.
All this is doubly ironic. First, if you are afraid of gun control regulation, probably the worst thing to do is to go out and shoot and kill police officers. Second, the fact is that Democrats, sadly, seem to be moving away from gun control legislation. Why? It sure seems like money is playing an inordinate role, as Democrats last year received 20 percent of the almost $1.2 million that the NRA gave in campaign donations.
It seems to be yet another issue that leads to the same place - it's time to Change Congress.
Random links:
- Prairie Home Companion dedicates a show to Appleton, WI!
- Taiwan rock factory - an overview of the modern music being produced in Taiwan. It seems to be fairly well researched and presented, though curiously lacks mention of probably the most talented and popular artist at the moment, Jay Chou 周杰倫.
- Are the police [in Taiwan] taking liberties?
- The radio silence continues as the far right targets Harold Koh - combating the ridiculous claim by the far right that Obama's pick for legal adviser to the State Department believes that Sharia law could apply in US courts.
- [Obama] Larger than life in London
- Dalai Lama thanks India for 50 years in exile
- Vast spy system [based in China] loots computers in 103 countries
- Google claims orphan books, raising alarm in academia
- 2010 Toyota Prius Review
- Hoping to make iPhone toys as a full-time job
Other things:
After reading this article about a 9 year old being raped in Brazil by her stepfather, only to have more condemnation be directed toward the girl and her family for getting an abortion rather than the stepfather for raping the girl, I was appalled. Of course, it fit in exactly with my essay on why I am an atheist, and I've updated that page with this reference.
I just finished reading Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon, by Nick Trout. It's quite an interesting look into a day in the life of a veterinarian, and thoughts on modern day veterinary practice. There's also an interesting video embedded on the Amazon page showing Trout at Angell Animal Medical Center. Nick Trout was also had an interesting interview on NPR's Fresh Air. (Added this book to my books 書 page.)
Finally, I also found this Stephen King interview by the BBC. I've read and heard a lot about Stephen King, but I think there were a few new things for me in this interview (all of which conveniently escape me at the moment...). (Added this to my Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page.)
It's back - the third or fourth iteration of my diatribes 謾罵 : Why I am an Atheist 為什麼我是個無神論者. I think the origin of the document was a very simple, barebones webpage I made in high school after learning some simple html and how to ftp it over to my webspace on my local ISP. The webpage only had the quote, "Religion is the opiate of the masses", and a link to American Atheist. The next iteration came after a discussion in undergrad with a college friend, and this version is more or less what I wrote my first year in grad school in an attempt to get these thoughts more in order.
More random links:
- The biggest of puzzles brought down to size - This is an interesting article about the type of problems physicist Enrico Fermi was known for considering, that require you to estimate such huge number to within an order of magnitude using common sense reasoning. For instance, two examples, one of which I believe was used in Microsoft interviews, are: How many gas stations are there in the United States? Or, how many piano tuners are there in the United States?
- We don't need government protection from controversial ideas - another article from a person I respect, Christopher Hitchens, defending free speech, even those of people, such as George Galloway, that he firmly disagrees with.
- NPR's This American Life on the liquidation of Circuit City - an interesting radio piece with quotes from Circuit City employees on the last days of the store, and how customers harassed them with little regard for the fact that they were losing their jobs and liquidators came in and inflated prices to make more money of the liquidation sale of Circuit City
- Japanese
'enka' singer performs in Washington - an interesting article of
a part-African American singer who learned Japanese enka music from
his grandmother and is now popularizing the genre again in
Japan.
Here is a CNN interview with Jero (part 1 of 2), and here is a video of him singing live, and here is MV 海雪. - Don't come crying to this airline - I think I'll stay away from Spirit Airlines.
- Parrot honored for warning that girl was choking
- Fox News's mad, apocalyptic, tearful rising star. Glenn Beck and his followers are crazy, right up there with Rush Limbaugh. When Beck was first starting off on CNN, and before I had an idea of who he was, I caught part of his show, and was immediately turned off. Check out this video - that's about enough to start questioning his sanity.
Added Victor Borge to the list of famous people I admire. You can find a good number of his performances on YouTube. Apparently he also wrote an autobiography, but it's either not in print or hasn't yet been translated to English.
Another person on my list, William Saletan, just wrote three articles on Slate that caught my attention. The first, Lady parts, in which he describes his view on abortion and how he approaches other similar moral questions, reminds me of why I became interested in and admired his views.
However, a second article, Inhuman Revenue Service, about traffic cameras, I thought was rather weak and unconvincing. If he had argued that the current system was flawed, for instance, because people were not getting notified early enough to prevent repeat infractions, I would have agreed with him, but he seems to be picking out individual, correctable flaws that, once fixed, would lead to a system where people commit less traffic violations, leading in turn to a more safer driving environment.
He won me back again though, with a third article, Organ Rewards, on the question of how to best reward people for donating organs without creating a system in which poor people become compelled or coerced to sell their bodily organs just to survive.
After watching the recent Academy Awards and looking into La Maison en Petits Cubes, the film that won the Animated Short Film Award, I started getting interested in short films and started tracking down a few to watch.
A lot of the short films (with the current notable exception of La Maison en Petits Cubes) can be found and downloaded from iTunes for only two dollars (of course with the dreaded DRM). I've added a section on my movies page, listing the films I've watched, in order of enjoyment.
In other news, I copied over the long 3/10 post on Tibet over to my page on the Chinese government under diatribes 謾罵, and added these two recent links:
China blocks YouTube for about a week, most likely due a video circulating about the situation in Tibet
Rejoice, damn you - China's motto when it comes to Tibet
Here's an interesting article titled, controversially, Picking Vick Over PETA, e.g. the author would rather see his dog in the hands of Michael Vick rather than PETA.
I actually have no problem with most of what the author writes in the first half of his article, but I find his criticisms of PETA to be rather lazy - instead of really trying to understand and explain PETA's position, he just takes a knee-jerk approach, misrepresenting and distorting what PETA believes in and then acting confused at how anyone could take such a crazy view.
Anyway, the whole article, as well as the comments (including a reply by the original author), are quite interesting. I'll write up my thoughts on this later, but for now, for the interested, here's PETA's explanation of their position on euthanasia.
Here is an excellent explanation of the current economic crisis: what are CDO's, CDS's, how they contributed to the crisis, who the key people responsible are, who was responsible for the deregulation that led to the crisis, what the specific deregulation was, etc.
I'm guessing that most people's blood will be boiling by the time they finish reading the article; mine certainly was. What can be done about it? Well, for one thing (perhaps one might say, the first thing), let's Change Congress and get the corrupting influence of money and lobbyists out of our government.
Updated my Knowledge 知識 page CangJie 倉頡.
Uploaded pictures taken at Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory in South Deerfield, MA, to my photo gallery 照 片. In addition to being a great place to take photos, it's also possible to experience having a butterfly rest on you if you stand perfectly still and think plant thoughts. In addition to butterflies, it has various other animals, including birds, reptiles, and fish in a koi pond.
Unfortunately, there are two negatives. It can become crowded in the conservatory, with many people all trying to take pictures and little kids generally breaking rules about not trying to actively touch the butterflies. The other negative is that a few people on the staff are rather unfriendly. To be specific, there was a coupon for 2 dollars off the admission price, which I presented to the cashier on my Ipod Touch, only to be told that I "had to have it printed out", which really didn't make any sense at all (it wasn't as if there was a barcode on the coupon, it was just some text off their webpage). Anyway, if you should ever find yourself planning a trip to Magic Wings, I suggest first checking to see if there are any coupons, and then printing out a hundred or so and passing them out to everyone just in front of the building. If any one on the staff confronts you, just tell them it's retribution for spiting the guy with the Ipod Touch.
Other random links:
- Tibetans attack police station [in protest], 93 monks arrested
- Linking the physical and digital worlds - related to the Sixth Sense TED talk (see 3/18 post), this time achieving ubiquitous computing using cellphones.
- Very cool pixelated graffiti
Random links:
- Obamas prepare to plan White House vegetable garden
- How many ways can Senate Republicans show breathtaking intellectual hypocrisy?
- One third of U.S.
bird species endangered, survey finds
“ Beyond taking part in counting efforts, the report urged ordinary citizens to assist conservation by drinking shade-grown coffee (coffee-growing in the shade helps preserve the winter habitat of species like warblers), donating unused binoculars for distribution to biologists in the tropics, reducing pesticide use, landscaping with native plants and keeping pet cats indoors. ”
Emphasis mine. The only widespread certification I've seen for bird-related coffee is the Rainforest Alliance, although that apparently isn't that rigorous of a certification. I'll most more information on this as I come across it. - "Spacebat Tribute" video
Even more on China and Taiwan:
- Prominent artist assails China on quake management
- Dissident warns Taiwan on China
- Former Chinese spy urges US to stand up to Beijing
- Yet despite all of this, Ma determined that ECFA (Economic Cooperation Framework Agreemtn with China) will be signed. Man... WTF?
- Thus, the people of Taiwan need to stand up for themselves. Now is not a time for a nation of sheep.
Reading ebooks on the Ipod Touch:
I recently tried out the Kindle for Ipod Touch and Stanza, another (free) ebook reader for the Ipod Touch. I was pleasantly surprised by how well both worked; I'd say that reading on the Ipod Touch is no worse than reading on a full-sized monitor, with the convenience of having many books available in your pocket whenever there's any down-time (waiting in line, etc.). Of course, I'm sure it can't compare to reading on the e-ink of a real Kindle, but on the other hand, it's still smaller and more easy to have on you at all times.
One brief digression - I'm puzzled by people who view the fact that one can read books on the Ipod Touch in the dark as a positive point in comparison to the Kindle, which cannot be read in the dark. First, how often are you going to need to read in the dark? And why would you want to? Just turn on a light. Reading in the dark can't be good for your eyes, and moreover, the fact that you can't read a Kindle in the dark is a consequence of the fact that the e-ink more closely mirrors the experience of reading an actual book, as the screen is not lit and causes less strain on the eyes.
Anyway, back to the Kindle and Stanza. One neat thing is that you can download a lot of samples (I think generally the first chapter of books) from Amazon and read them for free on the Kindle, which is a good way to decide if you want to buy the book or not. In addition, there are a lot of good books in the public domain that you can download directly from Stanza, like Dickens, Twain, Swift, HG Wells, etc.
(copied to tidbits)
Added yet more images to the random album of my photo gallery 照片.
Other random stuff:
New interesting TED talks:
Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab demonstrates "sixth sense" ubiquitous wearable computing, very cool.
Bill Gates on the two big problems that interest him now - solving medical problems that the free market ignores (affecting poor countries) and education
Monkeys not only figured out how to floss, but are now teaching their children how to floss as well.
What happens when an engineer discovers a mouse in his house? He sets up a trap along with a remote trigger camera to document the experiment. And of course, being the humane sort, he buys a little mouse home for the mouse to stay the rest of the winter before being released in the spring.
I thought I was done writing about Tibet for a while, but more articles keeping popping up, some even more aggravating than usual.
Tibet Atrocities Dot Official China History
| “ | As he left the exhibit on Tuesday, Dai Zhirong, an electronics salesman from Tianjin, said what he saw only reaffirmed his disgust for the Dalai Lama and his disappointment with the Tibetan people. "I don’t understand how they can eat our food and still hate us," said Mr. Dai, 57, who stopped by after seeing a promotional segment on television. "When I am reminded of the truth, and see what the separatists are trying to do, I hate them, too." | ” |
Tibet prospers under China: Wen
Friends of Tibet march in Taipei
(copied to the 3/10 post as well)
Unregulated materialistic capitalism meets totalitarian thought control:
Chinese grease the wheels of power with luxury gifts
Seeking justice, Chinese land in secret jails
Dissident reflects after 8 years in Chinese prison
| “ | Overall, Mr. Yang said that his treatment was far better than that of his friends, who have reportedly been ailing. According to Human Rights in China, Mr. Xu became mentally ill after being subjected to torture and hard labor, and Mr. Jin has been suffering from an untreated intestinal ailment. | ” |
Disappeared rights lawyer's family defects from China
| “ |
Gao, once a prominent lawyer and communist party member, has been an
outspoken defender of people seeking redress from the government,
including coal miners, underground Christians and the banned Falun
Gong spiritual movement. After he wrote an open letter to the US Congress in 2007, Gao said he was subjected to several weeks of torture including suffering electric shocks to his genitals and having his eyes burned by cigarettes. |
” |
(copied to diatribes 謾罵 - Chinese government)
Is Ma Ying-jeou naive, stupid, or traitorous?
Ma 'naive' on PRC ['anti-secession'] law: forum
Beijing promises to 'never waver' on independence
Added yet another three Tibet related links to 3/10's post, copied here as well:
After 50 years in exile, the Dalai Lama seems close to despair
China protests a US resolution on Tibet
US Congress pans China over Tibet
By the way, if you look in the last article (Taipei Times), you'll find that the only representative voting against the resolution urging China to end repression in Tibet was Ron Paul. Go figure.
Presumably everyone has know read about the incident with the Chinese ships harassing a US surveillance ship. If not, here is some background:
China says US ship violated international law
US and China quarrel over sea confrontation near Hainan
First, just listen to the conduct of the Chinese sailors: "Chinese sailors used hooks to try to snag cables the Navy boat was using to tow sonar equipment", "Chinese sailors dropped pieces of wood in its path and wielded hooks", "the Impeccable's crew sprayed some of the Chinese sailors with a fire hose, causing some of the sailors to strip to their underwear", "two of the Chinese ships stopped directly ahead of the USNS Impeccable, forcing the Impeccable to conduct an emergency 'all stop' in order to avoid collison".
Man, what a bunch of yahoos.
As for China's ridiculous claim that the US ship was in their territorial water, take a look at the map on this page, and look at the huge discrepancy between what China thinks is their territorial water and what everyone else in the world thinks. They have their territory going all the way down past Vietnam! Ridiculous.
Added three more Tibet related links to yesterday's post (highlighted).
Other, random links:
This is very cool - ThruYOU, a remix of various YouTube videos into new songs.
Apparently the British are just more sophisticated. A belief map of the UK, indicating how Britons feel on creationism versus intelligent design versus evolution. I shudder to think of what the same map would like for the United States.
The Daily Show shows just how crazy Republicans are these days.
This is one smart chimp - his planning ahead capabilities include stockpiling rocks to throw at visitors.
Apparently people are actually starting to prefer low quality lossy compressed music, according to a study by a Stanford music professor.
Yushan (Jade Mountain) is in Taiwan, not "Chinese Taipei", for god's sakes.
The Formosan Serow, a cute animal native to Taiwan.
A Hakka television series is going to tell the story of Taiwanese restaurant Din Tai Fung 鼎泰豐, famous for their xiao long bao 小籠包.
Yet another example of Taiwan's current administration trampling the rights of its people - High school student arrested for asking Ma to step down. Ridiculous.
Don't fall for fake fiber. Apparently there's no evidence that fiber additives to things like yogurt do anything, you need to get your fiber the old-fashioned way, from fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
50 years after revolt, clampdown on Tibetans
Dalai Lama harshly condemns China
Dalai Lama says China has turned Tibet into a 'Hell on Earth'
NY Times editorial on the Dalai Lama's speech
China heaps scoren on the Dalai Lama
After 50 years in exile, the Dalai Lama seems close to despair
China protests a US resolution on Tibet
US Congress pans China over Tibet
Tibet Atrocities Dot Official China History
| “ | As he left the exhibit on Tuesday, Dai Zhirong, an electronics salesman from Tianjin, said what he saw only reaffirmed his disgust for the Dalai Lama and his disappointment with the Tibetan people. "I don’t understand how they can eat our food and still hate us," said Mr. Dai, 57, who stopped by after seeing a promotional segment on television. "When I am reminded of the truth, and see what the separatists are trying to do, I hate them, too." | ” |
Tibet prospers under China: Wen
Friends of Tibet march in Taipei
Added more images to the random album of my photo gallery 照片.
Added more images to my photo gallery 照 片, this time scenery from my trip to Alaska.
Here's a completely unrelated picture on why the CECA (Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement between China and Taiwan) is really just an FTA.
For my more visual-inclined visitors, I've updated my photo gallery 照片 with a new album, an autumn day on UMass campus.
On a different note, I came across this interesting article on the psychology of charity in Newsweek written by Peter Singer, one of the people on my people I admire page.
Singer is known for the following thought experiment (related in the beginning of the article as well): Suppose you were walking along a beach, and you saw a child drowning in the water. You're the only one around who can save the child, but there's no time to take off the expensive pair of shoes you're wearing. Do you ruin your shoes to save the child?
Most people would find the question ridiculous - of course you would save the child, who cares about the shoes? Yet the fact of the matter is that there are millions of children who die each year from causes that each of us could help to prevent, for less than the price of a pair of expensive shoes. So how are the two situations any different?
His new book, The Life You Can Save, seems like an interesting consideration of this question. I'm also interesting in reading his book Animal Liberation, which seems like one of the seminal books on animal rights.
I thought I was done writing about it for the while, but the Chinese government still remains in the news, so I've updated my diatribes 謾 罵 page again on the Chinese government.
To show that I'm being fair about this, I'm happy that the US State Department also pointed out ways in which Taiwan can improve on the human rights front. Also, Taiwan has big problems with Ma Ying-jeou trying to sell it out to China, the latest controversy being the "comprehensive economic cooperation agreement" with China, which this editorial deals with.
An unrelated link - here's a guy trying to grow MMA into a responsible, positive influence on society. Honor and discipline have always been core components of martial arts, and there's no reason why this shouldn't be the same with MMA.
Animal-related links:
Chimps shouldn't be kept as pets.
In fact, chimps seem to the ability for empathy, leading to some sense of morality:
| “ |
Knuckles offers insight as the only known captive chimp with cerebral
palsy, which immobilized one arm and left him mentally unable to
follow protocols of chimp society. Normally, older chimps would put on intimidating displays with a juvenile male, screaming, grabbing and biting the youngster to put him in his place, said Devyn Carter, who has studied Knuckles and is presenting his research at the Lincoln Park Zoo conference. But even the alpha male tolerates and gently grooms Knuckles. |
” |
This is how horses are killed at slaughterhouses? (I wouldn't guess that it's much better for cows, chickens, and pigs.)
The vulture deserves our respect, not our disgust.
More on Clinton's comments on human rights and the Chinese government in my Diatribes 謾罵 section.
Also, Jon Taplin posted an interesting entry on the future of print newspapers, advertising, and Google, to which I posted a comment that innovation in web advertising may be (at least part of) the solution.
Fake kumquats!
More random links:
It's good to see some reporting in the mainstream American news media of the troubling developments in Taiwan, specifically concerning corruption and political influence in the trial of former president Chen Shui-bian. Other related issues are laid out in this open letter to President Ma from a group of western academics. One egregious thing the NY Times article didn't mention is that the original judge of the Chen Shui-bian case was removed and replaced because he let Chen go free from his detention. Of course the first thing the replacement judge did was to put Chen back in detention. Here's a good summary of the situation from the Freedom House.
This is good.
This is ridiculous. (More on this tomorrow.)
Demetri Martin's new show, Important Things with Demetri Martin (Wednesdays 10:30pm Eastern), is quite good. Here's the NY Times review, and here's the Metacritic aggregate review. Given Jon Stewart's hand in producing it, it means Wednesdays nights are a one and a half hour block of Stewart programming (Important Things with Demetri Martin, The Daily Show, the Colbert Report).
A very interesting proposal for how to fix the NFL overtime coin toss system with something more fair and less reliant on luck of the toss.
A couple of notes: I personally don't see why the NFL doesn't go with the college football system of allowing both teams to attempt to score from a shortened field. The one objection I've heard is that this system doesn't leave any room for the special teams, namely kickoff and punting and the corresponding return teams. While true, I think this is more minor than potentially having a game end without one team's offensive coming on the field, just because of the coin toss.
Another potential solution I've heard, which is somewhat appealing just on its simplicity, is to still have the coin toss but do it in advance, right at the start of the game, along with the initial coin toss. That way, at the end of the regulation game, if a team knows that they won't be getting the ball at the start of overtime, they may be more inclined to go for the win at the end of regulation rather than settling for a tie. It's an interesting idea, but I still think I prefer the balance of the college system.
Speaking of football, this NY Times blog entry links to some interesting articles about sports players. In particular, this series on University of Washington football players repeatedly getting away with crimes because of their value to the football team is rather distrubing. It's just another stark reminder that sports aren't everything, and that a vast swath of the general public could stand to take sports less seriously.
Added a page on CangJie 倉頡 to my Knowledge 知識 section.
If you take a look at the menu bar on the left of my webpage, you'll notice I've put up a link to photos I've taken and uploaded to Picasa. More to come as I upload more photos.
Two days ago, two teenagers filmed themselves abusing a cat, throwing it against a wall and repeatedly punching it, and uploaded the video to YouTube. Fortunately, people on the Internet managed to do some detective work, uncovering the identity of the teenagers (one Kenny Glenn), and now the two will face charges of animal cruelty. More information and videos on this page.
I have two thoughts on this. First, normally I would be wary of this kind of vigilante justice. Mobs have a habit of either getting out of hand and doing things individuals on their own wouldn't do, or attracting crazier fringe people that go too far. In this case though, these two teenagers were just asking for it - they took delight in torturing something weaker than them, and filmed it for others to see. I doubt they'll get anything close to what they really deserve, and on top of that, animal cruelty is one of the biggest indicators of future criminal psychopathic behavior, so if anything, hopefully the fact that people managed to discover their identities will lead them to getting the help they need.
My second thought, one that I've made before, concerns what this issue says about how we treat animals in general. It seems like the vast majority of the people who watched the original video of the cat being tortured were disgusted and angered. Yet farm animals are forced to endure the same and worse pain and indignities, and are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain as cats and dogs. I think what it comes down to is that people are just unaware of and don't think of what it actually takes to get the hamburger patties, chicken wings, and pork they eat. On the other hand, the fact that people react so strongly to the original video gives me hope that one day, when most people do make the connection, that society will look upon the way we eat meat today the same way we now look upon practices like slavery and torture of humans.
Random links:
Funny: Thesaurus proposes to dictionary.
For thought: Magnet schools: more harm than good?.
I can agree with the claim that removing the top students from schools is harmful to the upper middle level students, since the top students will raise the overall level of class and push the other students to try to work at the same level. On the other hand, the editorial doesn't even discuss the flip side, which is that putting top students together is also beneficial, whereas they may similarly be brought down by other students the same way the middle level students are brought down by the bottom students.
Maybe it says something that the only comment that I thought really added something to original editorial was written by a student who attended a magnet school:
| “ | I am firm believer that people of similar skills learn better together. It might sound condescending, but I don’t think that my educational background would be the same if I attended my local high school in Philadelphia. | ” |
On animals: how social animals like ants and bees make collective decisions, and implications for humans.
| “ | Among the bees that depart are scouts that search for the new nest site and report back using a waggle dance to advertise suitable locations. The longer the dance, the better the site. After a while, other scouts start to visit the sites advertised by their compatriots and, on their return, also perform more waggle dances. The process eventually leads to a consensus on the best site and the swarm migrates. The decision is remarkably reliable, with the bees choosing the best site even when there are only small differences between two alternatives. | ” |
Waggle dance!
For primates who still don't believe in evolution: The Origin of Darwin.
| “ | Before the “Origin,” similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, “Because.” Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves. | ” |
Or, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it:
| “ | Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. | ” |
Lastly, for those who think Ma Ying-jeou is doing accomplishing anything other than selling out Taiwan: China increases missiles pointed at Taiwan to 1,500.
Good to know that I am not alone in my love for peanut butter.
Apparently there's going to be a new Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. Yikes. For my money, there is only one Sherlock Holmes (but I guess two (1, 2) Dr. Watson's).
賢^2. I found out about this game, KenKen, from a New York Times article, and I've been hooked since.
It's similar to Sudoku, with the same constraint that there should be one of each digit in each row and column, but with the difference that the grid, instead of being subdivided evenly, is separated into different "cages" of arbitrary shape and size, where each cage has a target number and arithmetic operation. For instance, 24x means that the product of the cells in the cage should total to 24.
There are six games daily of varying difficult availble on the New York Times.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
Added to my diatribe on MMA fans after watching WEC 38 and observing more egregious fan behavior.
Thinking back, the two things that stick out most in my mind about Obama's inaugural address are the censoring of some of his remarks on TV by the Chinese government and his inclusion, perhaps a first, of nonbelievers as an important goup in America: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth." (full transcript)
Equally refreshing is this piece by Randall Balmer, Episcopal priest and professor of American religious history. He praises Obama for reaching out to nonbelievers, and stresses the important of religious freedom in America's development, in contrast to tiresome letters to the editor I remember reading in my hometown newspaper, endlessly repeating the tirade that America was built as a Christian nation and how nowadays Christians are the only ones being discriminated against and "persecuted".
Well, I now have the Windows 7 beta installed on my Macbook (model 4,1). It's been pretty neat to play around with. I followed the instructions on this page without too much trouble, but I did learn a few things in the process that I thought I'd share.
Of course, the first thing I did was to set up Time Machine to back up my data. Since I still use Windows and Linux at times, I have an external hard drive I keep formatted as FAT32 to use under any OS. (The fact that FAT32 is the only format option to use with all three OS's is a separate gripe of mine.) After I finished getting Time Machine set up to back up my laptop, I took a look at the options to get it to back up my external hard drive, and I found that it was put permanently on the Time Machine ignore list and I couldn't remove it. In the end, after some searching, I found the disappointing truth: while Time Machine can be used to back up external drives, it only works with the native Mac hard drive format, not with FAT32.
To deal with this, I've resorted to using JFileSync to create a mirror copy of my external hard drive on my Time Machine drive. Inelegant, but the only solution I have at the moment.
There's one point in the Windows 7 installation process, I think just after the first time that it needs to reboot itself, that it appears to get somewhat stuck, and I was a bit worried, wondering whether I should do a forced reboot. The last item in the list, "Completing installation" is highlighted, and the green completion bar at the bottom doesn't move, and only the periods after the words are animated. Fortunately, I just waited, for at least 15 minutes, and then it got moving again.
After getting through the installation, I got to the point where I put in the Macbook disc to run BootCamp and install all the proper drivers. Following the directions on the webpage, I allowed the auto-run setup.exe to run, only to get an error that the 64-bit setup wasn't allowed on my computer. D'oh! I had only installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on a whim (no real reason, since I only have 2GB of RAM anyway). I did some more searching, and eventually found out that there's a 64-bit version of BootCamp, helpfully titled BootCamp64, that can be found and run manually under Drivers/Apple. Running that did the trick, fixing among other things the sound, which hadn't been working (despite Windows 7 thinking it had the correct driver installed).
One last note, after installing Windows 7, setting up the drivers, and installing the free version of Avira AntiVir (which seems to work alright and not be too resource heavy), I've used up about 12GB on my Windows partition. Something to keep in mind when setting up the initial partition sizes with Boot Camp Assistant.
(Filed under knowledge 知識.)
Alright, I suspect this will be my last Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe related update, as I have now posted scores that I don't think I will be able to top: SCGMD 2 amateur, pro; SCGMD 3.
Added my high scores on Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 to tidbits - amateur, pro.
Finished Stephen King's Cujo a little while ago in a quick three day burst of reading. It took me a while to get around to reading it, in part because I had worried that it might be a little one-dimensional, just a simple story of a possessed dog that wrecks havoc. After getting into it, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was completely wrong.
The book is not actually supernatural: the dog is rabid, not possessed in any way. (Although there are a few King-style hints at the supernatural.) I think the Amazon.com Review of the book is spot on:
| “ | Cujo is so well-paced and scary that people tend to read it quickly, so they mostly remember the scene of the mother and son trapped in the hot Pinto and threatened by the rabid Cujo, forgetting the multifaceted story in which that scene is embedded. This is definitely a novel that rewards re-reading. When you read it again, you can pay more attention to the theme of country folk vs. city folk; the parallel marriage conflicts of the Cambers vs. the Trentons; the poignancy of the amiable St. Bernard (yes, the breed choice is just right) infected by a brain-destroying virus that makes it into a monster; and the way the "daylight burial" of the failed ad campaign is reflected in the sunlit Pinto that becomes a coffin. And how significant it is that this horror tale is not supernatural: it's as real as junk food, a failing marriage, a broken-down car, or a fatal virus. | ” |
This is the third Castle Rock novel of King's that I've read (although out of order, having read Needful Things first). It looks like The Dark Half will be next on the to-read list.
Added Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe to my tidbit on tests/games, along with my new high scores on SCGMD 3.
Recently finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (added to books). I have to say, it makes a lot more sense than the Kubrick movie.
It's been a while since I watched the movie, but from what I recall, the beginning was rather slow and only semi-comprehensible, leading to a middle that was only slightly better, only to end in an even more boring and completely incomprehensible manner. In comparison, the beginning and ending of the novel make sense, and, if anything, are the most interesting parts of the book.
I realize that some people like Kubrick's film version, ignoring the fact that it's impossible to understand what is going on at the end. Kubrick's defense, that he wanted people to interpret the movie on their own and not want to "spell out a verbal road map" is, in my humble opinion, rather lame.
Made a small addition to my web feed explanation page.
Football wild card weekend!
Cool analysis by the NY Times.
My picks.
A little history of the game: The Miracle at the Meadowlands, leading to the creation of the kneel formation.
Way back in the beginning of the year, I made a new year's resolution to update this webpage at a rate of at least twice a week. Despite some rough periods of inactivity, I actually managed to keep that resolution, woo hoo!
Hopefully I'll manage to keep this up in 2009. I'll also have to ponder some new resolutions for the next year, which will probably include a few that I failed to keep this year, d'oh.
I recently read the short article "Salvation" by Langston Hughes, as my dad thought I would like it. It's actually a chapter of Hughes's early life from his autobiography The Big Sea. As far as I can tell, that work is still under copyright, but (at least at this moment) you can read "Salvation" online here.
In case it gets removed later, "Salvation" is about Langston Hughes attending a religious revival as a child, where there is a special meeting for the kids to be saved and see Jesus. One by one, all the other kids except Hughes and one other boy claim to see Jesus. The other boy eventually turns to Hughes and says, "God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved." Finally, the whole congregation is just waiting on Hughes, and since the other boy pretended to see Jesus without anything ill happening to him, Hughes follows suit. However, he feels bad about it later and cries in bed, only to have his aunt think the reason for his tears is his happiness at being saved. The piece ends, "But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me."
Time compression:
This guy took a year's worth of photographs from the same location and and turned them into videos showing a year go by in 40 seconds and a year go by in 2 minutes. Very cool. He's also made the original images available for others to use.
Slate Video has been creating a series of "Power Recaps", humorously condensing politics into a few minutes. Here are the archives, and here are the currently available videos (re-live the campaign from the conventions to election night in just 11 minutes):
- From the Conventions to the First Debate in Three Minutes
- From the First to the Last Debate in Four Minutes
- From the Last Debate to the Final Week in Two Minutes
- The Campaign's Last Week in Two Minutes
- The Best Viral Political Videos of 2008
Playoff prediction time!
AFC
Colts (5) beat Chargers (4)
Ravens (6) beat Dolphins (3)
Colts (5) beat Steelers (2)
Titans (1) beat Ravens (6)
Colts (5) beat Titans (1)
NFC
Cardinals (4) beat Falcons (5)
Eagles (6) beat Vikings (3)
Panthers (2) beat Cardinals (4)
Giants (1) beat Eagles (6)
Super Bowl: Giants beat Colts
As a convert to vegetarianism, temptation can be hard to fight, especially when eating with others who aren't vegetarian. For instance, I used to love eating pork pot stickers, especially when they're made long and skinny with a nice char on the bottom. So now, if other people order such food in front of me, and I'm confronted by an urge to wolf them down, I conjure up in my mind images like these, then imagine in graphic detail what it would take to go from that to the plate of food in front of me. By then I've generally lost my appetite.
It's fair to say then that Cute Overload has played an integral role in keeping me vegatarian.
On a completely different topic, if I had more money, I might consider getting a game like Guitar Hero. Since I'm a poor grad student though, I'm pretty happy with this poor man's Guitar Hero:
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3
Assorted interesting links:
Encouraging news:
Americans believe religion is losing clout
Americans believe other religions (and atheism) can still lead to eternal life in heaven
The changing role of kickers in the NFL?
The influence of the Internet on:
book sales and
comic strips (includes photo of Stephan Pastis).
Hopefully both have learned the lesson from what happened with the music industry and try to adapt intelligently rather than belligerently fight to keep the old way no matter what.
An interesting article on consumption and leisure.
| “ | A more convincing answer is that we work hard because income is linked to our desire for status, which is collectively insatiable, because status is largely relative. A famous survey by economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway found that many Harvard students (although few Harvard staff members) would rather have an income of $50,000 in a world where most people were poorer than an income of $100,000 in a world where most people were richer. | ” |
I'm all for a gax tax, and the New York Times seems onboard with the idea of a gas tax as well.
| “ | But as gas prices declined between 1981 and 2005, the market share of sport-utility vehicles, pickups, vans and the like jumped from 16 percent to 61 percent of vehicle sales in the United States. | ” |
Given the time of year, there's been a lot of talk recently about donating to charities. For instance, Kristof at the New York Times has two recent columns on the subject, one comparing liberals and conservatives when it comes to donatations, and another on the topic of for-profit charities.
I won't go into those now, but I did want to plug two organizations that I donate to, ASPCA and World Wildlife Fund. Check out these videos, it would take a heartless person not to be moved:
ASPCA
WWF
These are reputable charities, both getting 4 stars from Charity Navigator (ASPCA, WWF), and meet the 20 standards for charity accountability by the Better Business Bureau (ASPCA, WWF).
Finished the rest of my article on web feeds, adding in some info and links on how to manually create your own Atom web feed.
It's alive!!!
That is to say, my Atom web feed is now live and running. Here's the link to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/garybhuang.
Tomorrow I'll fill in more of my article on web feeds and how to create your own manually.
[96]12/23/2008
As you can probably guess by the
number of links I have to Wikipedia articles, I think Wikipedia is
amazing. Sure, it's not one hundred percent accurate. One mistake
caused me a fair amount of grief in my graduate research, but I
actually consider it a bit of an honor to have made a technical
correction to an entry. Going through my browser history, I've apparently visited 781 pages on Wikipedia in the past half year, just on my laptop.
I mention this because I just saw this appeal from founder Jimmy Wales for donations. I've donated, and if you find Wikipedia as useful as I do, I hope you'll consider contributing as well.
[95]12/22/2008
Added an item under
Knowledge 知識
on web feeds, what they are and how to set
them up, half-finished right now. Hopefully this will be the last
post prior to adding a web feed for this webpage.
[94]12/21/2008
Finished reading a few books. First, I read Peter Straub's Ghost Story. While I thought it started off a little slow, it really picked up the pace and had me hooked by the end. It is similar in style to King's It and Dan Simmon's Summer of Night (in a good way, not as a mere knockoff), though with a band of old men gathering to defeat ancient evil instead of children, and with an atmosphere similar to King's Salem's Lot (which Straub acknowledges), in the way you see into the lives of an entire community.
After finishing Ghost Story, I picked up King's Duma Key, which recently came out in paper back. It's one of my favorite of his recent books. Here's a review of the book in the NY Times. See where it ranks in my view among Stephen King's other books.
Most recently, I read King's earlier novel The Dead Zone while dealing with a bout of illness. Reading the book was pretty much the one highlight of being otherwise miserably sick for a week. The book feels like a Bachman book. Part of it is that it is not overly supernatural. Another part is the scale of the book, the way it is one main character dealing with a problem on a more global scale, whereas it seems like more traditional King novels are on a more local scale. Here's where The Dead Zone falls in my King book ranking.
I'm eagerly awaiting the paperback release of King's new short story collection Just After Sunset.
[93]12/20/2008
Sadly, it appears that both the American
public in general, as well as US elected officials specifically, have failing
knowledge of American civics, according to this article.How do you fare? Here's the exam. The overall average was 15 out of 33, for elected officials 14 out of 33, and for college educators 17 out of 33. Fortunately, I managed a 31 out of 33, so I can decry these results without being a hypocrite.
(copied to tidbits 雜感)
[92]11/01/2008
Finished reading two Stephen King
books, Different Seasons (a collection of four novellas, three of
which have been made into movies), and Gerald's Game. See where they
ranked among the other King books I've read on my books page.
Gerald's Game was an intense page-turner. I don't know if it was because I was reading it on a plane, but I definitely felt a little light-headed when reading how the main character escaped her handcuffs.
Next up for me is Peter Straub's Ghost Story. I have high hopes for it, as it has a strong Stephen King endorsement and is apparently similar in style to King's It.
[91]10/30/2008
Assorted updates:Added to the Election '08 page:
- Wassup 2008 (original)
- A very well written endorsement for Obama by the New York Times
- Garrison Keillor on the election and McCain
Added an update to my diatribe on MMA fans, in the wake up Seth Petruzelli's upset over Kimbo Slice.
Added the following links under Scott Adams on my people I admire page:
[90]10/23/2008
Updated the
Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page again, with
one more link to a Stephen King appearances on National Public Radio, two
transcripts, one of a King acceptance speech and another of an interview on Dateline,
and links to New York Times articles by King.
[89]10/22/2008
Updated the
Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page with
links to Stephen King appearances on National Public Radio.
[88]10/21/2008
Cool tests:The eyeballing game - test how accurately you can bisect an angle, draw a right angle, and other tasks. My first attempt led to an average of 3.51. I seem to be doing best on bisecting an angle and worse on determining the center of a triangle.
On my second attempt, I improved to an average of 2.57 (screenshot). For each trial, I averaged 3.31, 2.10, and 2.30. I was best at "bisect angle", averaging 0.73, and "right angle", averaging 1.23. I was worst at "circle center", averaging 4.23, and "midpoint", averaging 3.93. For the rest, for "parallelogram" I averaged 3.07, "triangle center" I averaged 2.73, and "convergence" I averaged 2.07.
BBC Science & Nature Sex ID - take a series of test to determine how "male" and "female" you are. I got 20/20 on the angles task, 64% on the spot the difference task, 5/10 on the eyes task, 12/12 on the 3D shapes task, and an astounding verbal fluency of 2 words for the first task and 5 words for the second.
(copied to tidbits)
[87]10/11/2008
I finally got fed up with the
<blockquote>'s not looking right across all browsers, so I decided
to go with Wikipedia's style, which uses tables instead of blockquotes.To give proper attribution, I took the table design from this page on Wikipedia, which itself uses MediaWiki for the underlying design.
| “ | Woo hoo! | ” |
[86]10/09/2008
While looking for an old video of
Lawrence Lessig on YouTube, I happened to come across a talk he did at
Google. I quickly also noticed that a lot of other people have given
talks at Google, all of which are posted online.I'm amazed by the number of interesting people who have come to give talks at Google. In particular, I'm amazed because, as I found out from watching Peter Sagal give his talk, apparently Google does not pay speakers to talk at Google, in fact, they don't even pay for travel expenses. Despite this, a number of interesting people have come to Google, and you can watch them all on YouTube.
Here's the main page - AtGoogleTalks.
Here's some talks that I've watched and recommend -
- Steven Pinker (Harvard cognitive scientist)
- Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor)
- Barack Obama (next President of the United States)
- Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great)
- Peter Sagal (host of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me)
- Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd)
- Ken Jennings (Jeopardy winner)
- James Randi (magician and investigator of the supernatural)
- Christian Lander (author of the Stuff White People Like blog)
and here are some talks I plan on watching -
- Noam Chomsky
- Paul Krugman
- Neil Gaiman
- Masuharu Morimoto
- Salman Rushdie
- Neal Stephenson
- Salman Rushdie (again?)
- Stan Lee
- Steven Levy
- Steven Levy (again?)
- Salman Rushdie (yet again?)
(copied to tidbits)
Also added Saving Face to my list of favorite movies.
[85]10/06/2008
Added a picture of a white-breasted nuthatch
peering into my room to my
bird feeder page.Started building a Stephen King 史蒂芬·金 page under knowledge 知識.
[84]10/01/2008
Came across an interesting
My Turn piece in
this week's Newsweek, by
an Indian Sikh comedian,
Narinder Singh.It's an interesting read, and made me see if I could find any of his stand-up online. I managed to find this clip on Youtube. Here's one of the lines I liked best:
| “ | I want to help society. So from now on, I'm going to match the color of the turban to the color of the national alert system. So for people who look at me, they won't just fear me, they'll know exactly how much to fear me. | ” |
[83]09/25/2008
Added a
Creative Commons license
for my webpage: .
Basically, you're free to share and remix anything here that I created so long as you give attribution (e.g. link back to http://people.umass.edu/ghuang).
[82]09/23/2008
Test your
color IQ.
On my first try, I got a 24, and on my second, a 3
(click here for spectrum results).
(copied to tidbits)
[81]09/22/2008
Added this tidbit on
Acrobat PDF Reader alternatives for Windows:Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader for Windows is slow, often unresponsive, and the plug-in for web browsers causes a lot of problems as well. Here are two very good alternatives that are more stable and render a lot more quickly:
Foxit Reader: I use this as my first choice. A nice new feature is tabs, so multiple open PDFs all show up in one window.
Sumatra PDF view: This is available as a standalone executable, which is good for portability as it can be put on a USB drive. The other nice feature of Sumatra is that it automatically detects changes in the PDF file and reloads it when necessary. This makes it ideal when editing LaTeX files, which is good since there don't seem to be any good DVI viewers for Windows.
[80]09/21/2008
Election '08 new additions:China new additions:
- Would-Be Protesters Find the Olympics Failed to Expand Free Speech in Beijing
- Empty Olympics Promises
- Medals and Rights : What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China
- Leaving Fear Behind [full documentary]
- Filler in Animal Feed is Open Secret in China
- China Begins Inquiry Into Tainted Baby Formula
- FDA warns against infant formula from China
- Beijing: Dairy knew milk was tainted
- China Details 19 as Toxic Formula Sickens Hundreds of Infants
- China inspects dairy farms over baby formula
- Tainted Chinese milk kills second child
- Conspiracy of silence feeds food scandals
- China's Baby Formula Scandal
- China Seeks to Calm Fears Amid Dairy Scandal
[79]09/16/2008
Added two new links to the
election '08 page:
[78]09/15/2008
Fixed up the blockquotes so at least they look
ok in FireFox. Added a little banner in the upper-right corner as well.
(The sprite images came from videogamesprites.net.)Some more light-hearted fare:
- Cat attacks printer
- Cat stalks camera
- Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld 2nd ad - new family - (worth watching just to see Gates do the robot at the end)
[77]09/14/2008
Created a page under diatribes for the
2008 election, to keep track of the numerous
McCain/Palin lies and distortions.[76]09/13/2008
XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid once again!The largest problem was that my <blockquote>'s had text and other elements directly inside, which is not valid. Instead, you need to put them inside a <div> or <span>. Fixing this problem seems to have made my blockquote formatting appear worse, but that's a problem for another time.
I also had some &'s in URLs and such that weren't properly encoded as &'s.
[75]09/12/2008
I realized today that my W3C XHTML 1.0 valid icon is ridiculously
wrong right now. Fixing all the XHTML is now on the to-do list.Added this to tidbits:
My favorite (sounding) words:
On the okapi note, it seems we finally have photographs of the elusive okapi.
[74]09/11/2008
| “ | A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. | ” |
This quote is attributed to Winston Churchill. I think it explains a lot about why McCain is slightly up in the polls against Obama. McCain has shown himself to be right at home with the Republican/Rovean tactics of distortion and lies. Just within the past few days, we've come to find out that Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, that, contrary to the facade of McCain/Palin being pork-busters, McCain in fact previously critized Palin for her earmarked projects, and now the fake outrage over Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment when in fact McCain had used the exact same phrase to describe Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan.
Well, it's time for the truth to put its pants on. Watch this video on McCain's ad lies and spread it around.
[73]09/10/2008
Added a diatribe on the
quality of MMA fans after watching UFC 88.[72]09/09/2008
New
favicon: [71]09/08/2008
Squirrel!
Causes havoc at baseball game.[70]09/07/2008
Took the tidbit about China and put it into its
own page under diatribes,
and added a few more links to recent articles.[69]09/06/2008
Wow, this is awesome. The Cat House on the Kings
video introduction and
website. I wouldn't mind working there...
[68]09/05/2008
Daily Show: Republican hypocrispy[67]09/02/2008
Interesting article about
animals and mortality.
| “ | In one famous case in Gombe, when a matriarch of the troop named Flo died at the age of 50-plus years, her son, Flint, proved inconsolable. Flint was 8 years old and could easily have cared for himself, but he had been unusually attached to his mother and refused to leave her corpse’s side. Within a month, the son, too, died. | ” |
[66]09/01/2008
[65]08/31/2008
This article really underscores the hypocrisy of McCain
simultaneously claiming that Obama doesn't have the experience to be president while choosing Palin
as his VP choice:| “ | The question should be whether McCain—and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign-policy experience—ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not. Many conservative pundits woke up this very morning fully prepared to harp on Obama's alleged lack of experience for months more. Now they face the choice of either executing a Communist-style U-turn ("Experience? Feh! Who needs it?") or trying to keep a straight face while touting the importance of having been mayor of a town of 9,000 if you later find yourself president of a nation of 300 million. | ” |
[63]08/30/2008
Seems like crows are pretty smart, and can
recognize individual human faces.
Guess that makes them smarter than all current face recognition algorithms...Also, cows seem to have some interesting behavior of their own.
[62]08/28/2008
What a speech![61]08/27/2008
Moved the whale watching tidbit to
knowledge 知識 : Whale Watching 鯨魚觀賞,
and added some pictures.[60]08/26/2008
Wrote a little
comment on the Olympics on Jon Taplin's blog.[59]08/25/2008
CangJie
typing tutor.[58]08/24/2008
More on CangJie: an English
tutorial.[57]08/23/2008
More pictures added to Cell phone pictures 手機照片
.[56]08/22/2008
All hail mighty Google. Searching for "Delta faucet leak" brought up
this page,
which led us to the culprit, a broken black rubber seal.[55]08/21/2008
Trying to learn Cangjie. Will put more stuff up
and move this to Knowledge 知識 later.[54]08/20/2008
Keeping an eye on the polls.[53]08/19/2008
Added Cell phone pictures 手機照片 to
Knowledge 知識.[52]08/18/2008
Now reading: Stephen King -
Different Seasons.[51]08/17/2008
Meat's no treat for those you eat!
[50]08/16/2008
Approval
Ratings: The Public v. McCain[49]08/15/2008
More on China:Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China
| “ |
Ms. Zhang, a Beijing resident who has been seeking redress for what
she claims was the illegal demolition of her house, applied for a
protest permit in early August and began planning her public
demonstration. On Aug. 6, police officers came to her home — not to
deliver the requisite license but to take her into custody. She is now
serving a monthlong sentence for 'disturbing social order,'
according to her family. ... Five days after the Olympics began, not a single demonstration had taken place in the official protest zones. The authorities have declined to say whether any applications have been approved, and they did not acknowledge the detention of would-be demonstrators. |
” |
So now we see the real purpose of these "protest zones" - a trick to give the illusion of free speech while actually serving to root out dissidents and imprison them.
Protesters, journalist detained in Beijing
China Steps Up Scrutiny of a Minority in Beijing
China falls short on Olympic promises, critics say
| “ |
'China's political reality is a place where no freedom of expression
will really be allowable ... this goes for the Chinese people and the
foreign journalists,' said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet
Project at the University of California, Berkeley. '[China] is always
afraid that if it lets its own people speak freely and spontaneously
organize by itself, the Chinese communist party could be endangered or
even be threatened.' Foreign journalists in China for the Olympics complain that access to report on anything that extends beyond sporting events has been severely limited. Xiao points to the recent beating and detention of two Japanese journalists who were investigating an alleged terrorist attack in northwestern China as a sign of a government that is not used to a free press. |
” |
and more...
| “ |
Although government readings on pollution have gone down in the years
since China won the bid, they still routinely far exceed World Health
Organization guidelines. And at least one American-based environmental
consultant believes that China has purposely manipulated its own
pollution statistics to give a false impression that more progress has
been made. 'Beijing's public air quality reporting has been a misinformation campaign,' said Steven Q. Andrews, author of a scientific report on China's air quality and two opinion-editorials on the topic for the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal. Andrews cites the closure of two air quality monitoring stations in heavily trafficked areas of Beijing in 2006 as the reason why the number of 'Blue Sky days' increased in the past two years. |
” |
See tidbits for all links.
[48]08/14/2008
Short addendum to my whale watching tidbit.A reminder of why I don't like Hillary Clinton:
| “ | Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama's big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012. She's obviously relishing Hillaryworld's plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read 'Denounce Nobama's Coronation.' | ” |
A refreshingly sane defense of evolution.
[47]08/13/2008
Tidbit on whale watching and motion sickness:I recently had the opportunity to go on a whale watch out of the New England aquarium. For those contemplating going on a whale watch, here's what I've learned from my experience:
The biggest issue to be aware of on a whale watch is motion sickness. The extent to which motion sickness becomes a problem varies a lot on the particular conditions when you go. For instance, the day I went, a sign at the dock listed the conditions as being 2 to 3 feet waves. On the way out to see the whales, the waves did get to be around that high. A decent number of people were throwing up (the boat provides ample bags and trash cans), and a good number more were looking ill and trying to sleep. However, on the way back, the water was completely calm and motion sickness wasn't an issue. It can vary a lot.
I took two pills of Dramamine - this is the kind that is less drowsy - and I ended up feeling fine, other than a small headache from taking pictures while the boat was rocking. Even though the medicine is a less drowsy formula, I started feeling tired about 4 hours after taking it. Speaking of which, it's important to take the medicine an hour before going on the boat, or it won't be as effective.
Also, staying on the outside of the boat really helps. The combination of the fresh air and looking outside at the horizon made me feel a lot better than trying to cope in the cabin.
As far as the actual whale watching, while it was a lot of fun, and we got to see quite a few whales, or at least the same whales multiple times, (the aquarium guarantees a whale sighting, or you get to go on another trip for free), I was hoping to see the whales a little closer than we did, and I really was hoping to see a whale breach, but it was not to be. Given that, I'm not exactly sure if I'd go again, or if I would go if the company I'm working for wasn't footing the bill.
Pictures later...
[46]08/12/2008
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.More on China:
Potemkin Olympics hide misery
Chinese abuzz over lip-syncing singer in Olympics opening ceremony
The Dissident Within: What a book about China's great famine says about the country's transformation
| “ | 'It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book' writes the author, Yang Jisheng, in the opening paragraph. | ” |
[45]08/11/2008
Added tidbit on
time management, organization, and motivation.[44]08/10/2008
Seems interesting:
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).From an interview:
| “ |
It's tough to put numbers on it, but I happen to feel, like many
people, that behavior has gotten qualitatively worse — surveys have
suggested, for example, that using the turn signal is an increasingly
optional activity. Leaving aside the issue that not signaling is
illegal (because, let’s face it, we’re never going to be able ticket
everyone who doesn’t do it, nor do we probably want to), it’s one of
those small things, requiring little effort from the driver, that
makes traffic flow more smoothly — I myself have honked countless
times at "idiots" slowing for no apparent reason, only to seem them
eventually make a turn. ... But a deeper reason, I suspect, may be seen in the surveys of psychologists who measure narcissism in American culture. They find, as time goes on, more people are willing to say things like "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place." Traffic is filled with people who think that roads belong only to them — it’s "MySpace" — that being inside the car absolves them from any obligation to anyone else. |
” |
[43]08/09/2008
More on China:Engaging More Effectively with China
| “ | As consumers, we might all begin to ask serious questions to the corporate sponsors of the Games, including Coca Cola, Manulife, Visa, Kodak, Samsung, Panasonic, Omega, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, General Electric and John Hancock. Silence from them and the many other business sponsors and partners to the Games--63 in all—implies acquiescence with what is going on across China. | ” |
China Lets Child Workers Die Digging in Congo Mines for Copper
China 'is fueling war in Darfur'
See tidbits for more.
[42]08/08/2008
[41]08/07/2008
Added this article to the list of good reads on China-related issues:China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change
| “ |
Li Datong, a former editor of a top state-run magazine who lost his
job after clashing with propaganda authorities, said officials in
charge of mass media and the Internet try to leave little to
chance. He said the country’s army of censors dipped anonymously into
the Internet debate by paying part-time writers 5 mao, or about 7
cents, to steer public opinion and monitor the tone of debate online. 'Their job is to post articles on the B.B.S. to balance public opinion,' Mr. Li said, referring to the Bulletin Board System where many Internet users interact. 'The netizens call them the 5 mao party. If they get a post on a B.B.S., they get 5 mao.' |
” |
See tidbits for more.
[40]08/06/2008
Good reads on China, nationalism, human rights, and the Olympics:- Beijing Taxis are Rigged for Eavesdropping
- China Revokes Joey Cheeks Visa
- Author Ma Jian on Beijing, Spectacle and Reality
- Chinese teacher held over quake photos: rights group
- Dalai Lama challenged by new generation of Buddhist activists
- China's Tell-Nothing Ethos: What the man on Mao's right doesn't say
- Beijing Under Wraps
- The Party vs. the People: What might the new populist protest in China portend?
- U.S. Cyclists Are Masked, and Criticism Is Not
- Before Guests Arrive, Beijing Hides Some Messes
- Angry Youth: The new generation’s neocon nationalists.
(copied to tidbits)
[39]08/05/2008
Randy Pausch,
Time Management Lecture[38]08/04/2008
Finished Stephen King's Blaze (史蒂芬·金 - 火海) and added it to my
book list. It came in at #13 on my list of Stephen King novels, just above another
Richard Bachman book, The Running Man.這本書的主題之一是人不可貌相.
[37]08/03/2008
Created the diatribes page and
added my first entry on Boys State.[36]08/02/2008
Added
Super Size Me to the movie list.[35]08/01/2008
Added a tidbit on the
safest metropolitan area in the United States.[34]07/31/2008
Getting acquainted with Mr.
Panasonic Lumix FZ-18 (link is to his
predecessor).[33]07/30/2008
The tidbits 雜感 page has been created,
containing the Massachusetts driving post below as well as two new tidbits involving Unicode.[32]07/29/2008
Let's not discriminate against the "lesser" but not second-rate
ape, the gibbon. It's time to stand up for the lesser apes.
This is cute - Discovery Channel: I Love the World.
An addendum to the Interactive Guide to Bush-administration lawbreaking. It's not quite time to let bygones be bygones. Reading all the things Bush and his administration has done to destroy the image of America in the world, 真令人髮指.
[31]07/28/2008
The Bush administration and all its cronies must be
held accountable. An Interactive Guide to Bush-administration lawbreaking
[30]07/27/2008
Picked up
[29]07/26/2008
Get yourself a
free Obama button![28]07/25/2008
Randy Pausch,
Last Lecture[27]07/24/2008
So this is what the world is coming to - people
stealing manhole covers.
世風日下An interesting question (an old Microsoft interview question): why are manhole covers round, as opposed to say, square?
hint:
[26]07/23/2008
Added Arthur C. Clarke's book Childhood's End to my
book list. Just finished reading it today, it's quite a good book.
I'm interested now in reading his other books and stories. I'll probably start with 2001: A
Space Odyssey.Childhood's End touched on a number of interesting issues, like animal rights, religion, and nationalism. On that last topic, here's a scary story about rising nationalism in China. More on this later.
Also a good op-ed in NYTimes about how America is different from China and Russia.
[25]07/22/2008
Massachusetts drivers are, on average, quite horrible. No distance is
too close to tailgate, and no yellow light is too far away to speed through. Driving in Massachusetts
always makes me a little bit more misanthropic.It's not just my opinion though, the GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test ranked Massachusetts as the 4th worst state, coming in at a rank of 48 (including D.C.). In comparison, Wisconsin came in at 12th best.
In fact, Massachusetts has come in at 48 the past four years in a row, whereas 12th is actually the worst for Wisconsin in the past four years, coming in 4th best last year.
[24]07/21/2008
Added Asimov's autobiography I, Asimov to my
book list, as well as Herbert's Dune.[23]07/20/2008
Added Dan Simmons to the list of authors I enjoy.
I recently finished his book, Summer of Night,
which I really liked. It's similar to Stephen King's It,
which is my favorite Stephen King novel. In high school, I read the first two books of Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, but now I don't really remember any of it. I should re-read it soon...
[22]07/13/2008
Added two books to my list
of Stephen King book list: Lisey's Story
(coming in at #12) and Carrie (#16).Looking forward to reading Duma Key and Blaze in the near future...
[21]07/13/2008
Sweet. Emacs
22.2.1
apparently now has support for Unicode. Now I can switch
over to it for HTML editing...[20]07/09/2008
Created Knowledge 知識 page, and added first entry Bird Feeder.Bonus: 101 reasons to go vegetarian.
[19]07/06/2008
Come out![18]07/05/2008
Nuts.Resolution: update webpage 2x / week
Expected Number of Updates by July 05: 54
Actual Number of Updates: 18
Yikes, just passed the halfway point of this year. To make my expected number of posts this year, I'll have to average an addition 1.44 updates a week...
[17]03/31/2008
Hillary Clinton Deathwatch: 9.7%:
| “ | So, with a dip in the polls, another superdelegate lost, mounting debt, and ugly numbers in Texas, the outlook in Hillaryland remains bleak. On Saturday, Clinton compared the race to a basketball game: "You know, we are in the fourth quarter and it is a close contest. We are running up and down. We are taking shots." The metaphor would work if she mentioned that Obama is up by 124 points, he has the ball, and Clinton has been missing shots all quarter. All she has now is hustle. | ” |
The full story behind Clinton's Bosnia lie.
Summary: Clinton deliberate lied multiple times about the incident, refusing to admit the lies until a mountain of irrefutable evidence built up.
Excerpt:
| “ | In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of "sniper fire" into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn't be true because by the time of the first lady's visit in March 1996, "the war was over." Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the "Today" show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: "I think the only 'red phone' moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?" | ” |
The full story on the Bosnia trip.
Summary: Hillary Clinton was instrumental in delaying American intervention in Bosnia, only visiting after the war was over, yet tried to bury the truth and glorify the incident to pass it off as "experience".
Excerpts:
| “ | Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves - the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people. | ” |
| “ | It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. | ” |
[16]03/26/2008
As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear to people on both sides of the spectrum,
from Maureen Dowd ("Hillary or Nobody") to
David Brooks ("The Long Defeat"), that for Hillary Clinton,
winning the nomination trumps all other considerations. Just to pick from recent events within the past two days, apparently
honesty and ethics are but minor obstacles in Clinton's drive to win.(channeling Lawrence Lessig's <style>...)
<honesty>
Here's how Clinton described her landing in Bosnia in 1996:
| “ | I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. | ” |
Here's what actually happened.
If that wasn't bad enough, here is her excuse after being caught in the lie:
| “ |
'Now let me tell you what I can remember, OK -- because what I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly
because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke -- I didn't say that in my book or other times but if I said something that
made it seem as though there was actual fire -- that's not what I was told,' she told the newspaper. 'I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left. Now that's my memory of it.' |
” |
"if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire"? Saying, "I remember landing under sniper fire" does not leave much room for confusion. Passing it off as a simple slip of the tongue doesn't cut it either - this is something she has repeatedly said on at least three occasions all the way since December.
Her explanation of meeting with the 8 year old girl doesn't hold water either. She makes it seem as if she was risking her own safety to not disappoint the girl, yet if there was actually a risk of sniper fire, wouldn't she worry that the girl and her mother might be killed in the gun fire as well?
</honesty>
<ethics>
This is Clinton describing the pledged delegates as being up for grabs:
| “ | Every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose. | ” |
Remember, these are the pledged delegates that were awarded based on primary voting in each state. There was enough of an outrage just over the prospect that the super-delegates could overturn the voice of the American public and award the nomination to Clinton. Now she's saying the pledged delegates themselves should go directly against the votes of their state?
She can't possibly be ignorant of the effect this would have on all the people who voted for Obama, the voters who have answered Obama's call for hope and participation in the process, voters like me who were already jaded and cynical about "politics as usual" in Washington. The only explanation is that she just doesn't care.
</ethics>
<Rove>
So what's the difference between Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove? I don't know. So count me in among the 20% of Obama supports who will be voting against Clinton should her under-handed techniques actually win her the nomination.
</Rove>
[15]03/23/2008
Number 1!!| “ |
Overall (252 Metropolitan Areas): Safest 25: 1. Appleton-Oshkosh-Neenah, WI |
” |
(source)
woohoo!
Aside:
Resolution: update webpage 2x / week
Expected Number of Updates by Mar 23: 24
Actual Number of Updates: 15
Reaction: D'oh
[14]03/11/2008
Girl seen in Clinton's '3 a.m.' ad supports ObamaNot directly related with the above item: as time goes on, the more I believe that Clinton really is a monster...
Unrelated: Ang Lee should follow Spielberg's lead after China's ridiculous blacklist of Tang Wei [original article about blacklist].
[13]03/05/2008
史蒂芬·金Radio 收音機 page added to <li>'s 清單
[12]03/04/2008
As of 9PM today, this is the sixth most read story on CNN:
Video appears to show
Marine abusing puppy:
| “ |
The military is investigating a "shocking and deplorable" YouTube video that seems to show a Marine throwing a puppy off a rocky cliff. The black-and-white puppy makes a yelping sound as it flies through the air. |
” |
I think the outrage over this (which I think is justified) indicates that, deep down, people care about the well-being of animals. For instance, recently I read a section of Isaac Asimiov's autobiography, I. Asimov, about a course he took in zoology:
| “ | The trouble was that we had to find a stray cat and kill it by dumping it in an ashcan which we filled with chloroform. Like a fool, I did it... But I never recovered. That killed cat lives with me, and to this day, over half a century later, when I think of it, I double up in misery. | ” |
Yet most people (to my knowledge, Asimov included) don't seem to have any compunction ove reating meat. I think that speaks to the disconnect between eating meat and realizing fully where it comes from. My first (short-lived) foray into vegetarianism came about because I reasoned, if I couldn't bring myself to actually slaughter a cow or a chicken or a pig, I shouldn't be eating meat.
Added television page to <li>'s 清單.
One final thought for today: During the candidate's speeches tonight, Clinton's supporters were chanting, "Yes she can!" Obama's supporters were chanting, "Yes we can!" Doesn't that say everything about the difference between the two?
[11]03/03/2008
The New York Times recently featured
this set of three
letters to the editor on the New York Philharmonic's concert in North Korea. I firmly agree
with the last letter by Mr Ramirez, and I'm relived to know I'm not the only one who feels that way.
With regard to the second letter, I feel his last paragraph is a rebuttal to his own point of view. Why not Tehran? Why not Havana? Then why not Sudan? Why not 1930's Germany, or 1980's South Africa as the final letter mentions?
As Mr. Ramirez writes:
| “ | Instead, the members of the New York Philharmonic played for well-off party dignitaries, while the real North Korean population is starving and living in sections of the Korean Peninsula that many foreign observers have described as almost prison camps. | ” |
So, to the second letter, I ask, how is that not legitimizing the government of North Korea?
Aside: Hoping for a big day for Obama tomorrow...!
[10]02/28/2008
Added people I admire 我欣賞的人 page. In particular, I really admire Lawrence Lessig, and so I was a little sad to hear he isn't going to be running for Congress at the moment, though I completely agree with his reasons for doing so. Hopefully he'll consider running in the future, and in the meantime, I hope people get behind his Change Congress movement.
[9]02/22/2008
| “ | Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in; it's change you can Xerox. | ” |
More reason why I dislike Clinton.
On a more uplifting note, Lessig is considering running for Congress...
[8]02/17/2008
Obama 08:This Tuesday is the Wisconsin primary. I'm sending in my ballot for Obama, and I'm fervently hoping he wins.
On one hand, I think Obama would be a great president. I wholeheartedly agree with the reasons Lawrence Lessig gives for supporting Obama, and his follow-up argument on why, even if you're concerned with the practical issue of who is more electable, you should vote for Obama.
As excited as I am by the prospect of a Obama presidency, my vote is equally fueled by my disdain for Hillary "lobbyists represent real people" Clinton. I've been appalled by her Rove-like tactics of attempting to distort Obama's record against the Iraq war and deliberately misinterpreting Obama's comments on Reagen.
Her recent actions have just been an escalation of this trend. Her attempts to down play Obama's victories as an excuse for superdelegates to vote against the popular vote are insulting. Her attempts to get the delegates from Michigan and Florida seated are particularly galling given one of her key supporters voted in August to strip the two states of their delegates for violating party rules.
Jon Taplin has a nice summary of the big problems with Clinton in his open letter to the New York Times on their endorsement of Clinton, namely her lack of financial transparency and her delegate tactics. In fact, shortly after, the New York Times made the same call for financial transparency, adding only Obama has made his full income-tax returns public.
One final shot - Clinton may believe she stands for change just as much as Obama, but to most Americans, change doesn't include being one of the top 10 recipients of earmarks in the Senate. I mean, even Bush is trying to get Congress to cut down on earmarks, but Clinton is not apologetic, but in fact, proud of her earmark spending. If Clinton is nominated, don't think that this won't be a focus of McCain.
Bonus:
The john.he.is McCain follow up to the will.i.am Yes We Can Obama video.
Bonus 2:
Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
[7]02/13/2008
周大俠![6]>02/12/2008
4 minor updates to this webpage in January. And February isn't starting very well either. sigh...
[5]02/03/2008
18-1[4]01/30/2008
I just noticed that this webpage doesn't render very well in IE6.
Hopefully that's not what you're using. It shows up fine in Firefox (at least version 2) and Safari
and Opera version 9 (though, I haven't gotten the blockquotes to completely behave yet), so consider
switching to one of those (or presumable IE7 show work as well) if you're still using IE6 (though
not just on my account, all are quite a bit better than IE6).Anyway, I've updated my books list with two Stephen King books I recently finished, Misery and The Running Man. I also added a little note to the lists section explaining that recently added entries are marked by different bullet styles.
[3]01/24/2008
Woman kills bicyclist when driving drunk,
gets 10 years in jail for laughing phone call.
| “ |
During the conversation, the man told Arrington that an acquaintance believed she should get a
medal and a parade because she had "taken out" a "tree hugger, a bicyclist, a Frenchman and a gay guy all in one shot." Arrington laughed. When the man said he knew it was a terrible thing to say, she responded, "No, it's not." |
” |
The judge should get a medal and parade for jailing a drunk, a reckless driver, a bigot, a homophobe, and a complete idiot all in one shot.
[2]01/05/2008
Despite a New Year's Resolution to update my webpage more often,
it still took me five days just to upload the changes I made earlier. Now this page is finally up,
and a few of the sections in <li>'s 清單 are up, but I'm still a long ways
away from getting all the old content converted over.[1]01/01/2008
Well, let it not be said that Gary Huang doesn't know when to admit
defeat. After many years of fiddling with web design, I've finally given in and just decided to work off of a publicly
available template (see the source if you're interested in the original template). I've also gotten over my previous
habit of trying to stuff everything on one single page.So now I'm in the process of transitioning all the old contents that used to be here over to the new format.