Micah Sittig

Moved

2010-09-28T23:20:00.002+08:00

Since Blogspot is still blocked in China, I've given up blogging here. Now I'm posting (irregularly) at note.wubi.org. You can update your RSS feeds as well.

Daimei for hotpot

2010-06-23T00:52:00.003+08:00

Daimei is so cheap it's hard to resist.

The only bad thing about Daimei is that after dinner you inevitably smell of cigarette smoke or of hot pot.

2010-06-15T23:56:00.003+08:00

I haven't written an old-school China post in a while, which supports the thesis of this post, but it still makes me feel funny about writing it.

Something I noticed at the recent Shanghai barCamp and that came back to me while reading the Laowai Wenshen blog^† is the feeling that these days I meet more and more foreigners who have been in China for 5, 6 or more years. These folks are usually somewhat conversant in Chinese and don't think much of it, or still don't speak much but are cognizant of this as something to regret. They've moved beyond the "China contrasts" stage, the "China is so different" stage; they're done "experiencing China" and instead are focused on getting on with their lives, building careers and families, investing in friends and lifestyles, and living constructively making things that are worthwhile.

I'm not saying that people like this didn't exist before. They did, but they were always the exception, a novelty.

This all makes me feel really comfortable and satisfied. Maybe it's because I grew up abroad that I feel like I had a leg up on this, and it's been something I've been looking forward to for a while now. I don't have to fake the "China is so strange" conversation with people as often; I don't have to explain Chinese words I drop into conversations; and I don't feel like I'm imposing on people when I recommend things to them that require interacting with locals, moving around the city/country, or letting themselves down off the magic carpet ride of "China" to deal with the mundane business of Real Life. Let's talk about hospitals where you had your baby! Let's talk about local politics or something you read in the newspaper! Let's complain about the cost of living and how we'll never own a house! Let's talk about your latest project that isn't some expat-focused website guide to Shanghai. This is the kind of stuff I find satisfying these days, and it's getting easier to find.

^† And also at Julen's BBQ party, and writing for Shanghaiist, and...

Flower girl

2010-06-07T22:56:00.002+08:00

Maryann at the Expo:

Jodi was given two tickets and a day off to visit the Expo by her preschool. She took her mom, and Charlotte and Maryann for a few hours in the afternoon. They had a good time, but it was hot and tiring. Some pavilions let them in the "fast lane" line because they were pushing strollers (US, Egypt), but others were more strict and would only give passes to children under 1 (Australia). Jodi's mom saw enough, but Jodi wants to go back some evening.

Subway Volunteer II

2010-06-07T01:26:00.003+08:00

I went to the Metrofans' Saturday volunteer activity again this weekend. I got put on the ticket machines in Line 8, then switched back to the same turnstiles as last week. Jodi and Charlotte dropped by on their way to class.

Mostly it was the same deal as last week: answering questions (exit 19 is Nanjing Rd, exit 3 is Fuzhou Rd), helping people insert tickets or sending them to the service center, and steering people away from turnstiles that stopped accepting single-trip tickets due to mechanical problems. Mostly this happens because the turnstiles are getting old, but also 3 times I caught people trying to stick stuff other than subway tickets into the turnstiles:

Expo one-day ticket
Hotel room key card
Travel agent business card

After the two hours were up we took a group photo:

Then some of the forum members went out to Yunan Rd for dinner.

The restaurant was Sichuanese, but these kids (yeah, I'm probably the oldest by 4 or 5 years) are all Shanghainese so of course we also had dishes like 娃娃菜 and 红烧肉.

We rounded off the night with a couple rounds of the 三国杀 card game.

Good times.

Two texts that caught my eye

2010-06-01T00:32:00.003+08:00

I'd like to share two interesting pieces of text that I read today. The first comes from the Metrofans BBS subforum for the Zhangjiang Tram. A few days ago there was an incident where a car crashed into the tram, which lead people to discuss the safety of the new tram line (incidentally, the car was totaled but the tram came off with only a few scratches). Some posters suggested that tram-only lanes should be demarcated on wider streets and that narrow roads, including the horrible mess at Guanglan Rd near our house, are responsible for the accident and for the elimination of Shanghai's historical trolley buses. This poster thinks otherwise:

你知道什么？当年浦西的有轨电车是很多的，有十几条线路，而且，有轨电车都在一些很窄的路上的开的，如浙江路、湖北路，重庆南路，四川路等，事故很少，大家都避开轨道就没事。被拆的原因是极左思想，认为这是英商和法商电车公司留下的东西，有租界的烙印，所以就拆了，当时是文革时期，自然没人敢反对，其实，许多上海人都觉得很可惜！

You know what? Back in the day Puxi had lots of tram lines, more than ten, and all of them ran on very narrow streets, like Zhejiang Road, Hubei Road, Chongqing S Road, Sichuan Road, etc. Even so, there were very few accidents; people just knew to stay out of the trolley's way. The trolley lines were dismantled due to far-Leftist thinking, that they were shadows of the Concession era and the British and French merchants that used to run them. That was back in the GPRC, so of course nobody dared speak out against it. Actually, a lot of Shanghainese feel it was a shame to lose the old trolley lines!

That's sorta cool. Makes me want to go look for evidence of the old trolley lines.

The other is from a series of posts by Jiang Xueqin on The Diplomat's China weblog about Chinese education and the former principal of Shenzhen Middle School, Wang Zheng.

By far, Principal Wang Zheng's biggest impact was on student life.　He divided the students into eight different houses, and each house had its own student management system. With the house system, imposing and intimidating Shenzhen Middle School (with a campus the size of three city blocks and 2,400 students spread over three grades) became friendly and intimate. Helping the lowerclassmen adapt to this new education system were the Prefects, upperclassmen mentors who liked to organize surprise birthday parties for the lowerclassmen.　And organizing activities and competitions among the houses was student government.

Student life was vibrant and diverse, but its most striking characteristic was that it was entirely student-built and managed.　Student cadres were not just the glorified hall monitors found at other Chinese schools—they were democratically elected representatives who served the interests of their classmates. They solicited corporate sponsors for basketball and soccer tournaments (one student was so charming that he received $30,000 from China Mobile). They organized masquerade balls and "American Idol" competitions. On December 31st of each year hundreds of volunteers stayed up all night to organize the school's annual winter carnival; on New Year's Day, over 100,000 Shenzhen residents would come to buy goods and play games, listen to concerts and watch performances.

This reminds me a lot of the house system at Caltech but better, and I think that this kind of grade-to-grade interaction would lend a lot to a high school. Read on for a fuller description of Wang Zheng's reforms, and the reaction from parents to changes at one of Shenzhen's top middle (high) schools.

Also, for some more background reading on the subject, see these links:

Shenzhen Middle School website
"Green Room" is the monthly English magazine of the Special Curriculum at Shenzhen High School.
Jiang Xueqin's professional weblog, detailing his relationship with principal Wang Zheng.
Google Cache of a classified ad for AP teachers to teach at Shenzhen Middle School. Contact is Ohio grad Patrick MacAloon.
Columbus Culture, Patrick MacAloon's educational consulting company.
Baidu Tieba post hinting at dissatisfaction with Jiang Xueqin's plans for a Special Curriculum
Wang Zheng and Jiang Xueqin currently back at the Middle School Attached To Peking University.

Busy day

2010-05-29T23:24:00.005+08:00

Today was an eventful and busy day. On the way to school this morning I stopped by the Service Desk to request a repair to our hot water heater. Cold shower this morning, BRRRR! Why was I going to school? It was our annual International Day, most for the elementary school students to put together some rocking country-themed classrooms and performances. First thing, though, was playing sumo wrestler for the middle school, which mostly just plays sport and games. Those sumo costumes are heavy and hot! I was exhausted after a short two-minute match. After a rest in the office I met Jodi and Charlotte for a tour of the elementary school, checking out the different countries and snacking on their finger-foods.

Back to the office, I worked on the school internal wiki for a while, editing and designing a new stylesheet with the Stylish extension for Firefox. I had lunch from the coffee shop in the rec center, and then arrived at home to find Maryann napping.

Once she woke up, we changed her clothes and all headed out the door. Jodi met Sandy on the subway, and I took the girls to Zhangyang Rd to pick up a present for the wedding tomorrow. After a quick but worthwhile purchase, we went ahead with my plan to walk all the way to the Huangpu River and boat across. If you walk straight west on Zhangyang Rd you basically can't miss the ferry station, which is where the road reaches a T-intersection at the bank of the river.

Once across in Puxi, we explored the area below and around Fuxing Rd until we found one of my new favorite roads and restaurants, Sipailou Rd and the 蒸功夫 Hunanese restaurant. The friendly waiter recognized us from last time and watched oru stroller while we ate inside. Both girls did a great job eating all of their food, staying neat, and spilling a minimal amount of food and dishes (0) on the floor. For dessert we had a piece of cantaloupe on a stick. Then we further explored the small alleyways of this still-preserved neighborhood south-east of the Yu Gardens, which we eventually spilled out onto.

We spent about 45 minutes at the Yu Garden neighborhood, window shopping, crossing the windy bridge, and buying magnets. Then we grabbed a bus back to Nanjing East Road and took Line 2 directly home, watching a downloaded episode of Ni Hao Kai Lan on my cellphone.

One note: Today I had about half a dozen random people help me getting the stroller up and down stairs, completely spontaneous and of their own volition. This is a high number for Shanghai.

Random photos:

A punny noodle store along the backside of Yu Gardens: "Don't ask (smell) our name, instead see our noodles (face)."

From the Yu Gardens, a view of the World Financial Center. (I know I know, these "contrast" photos are the purview of FOBby foreigners, but I thought this one had minimalist artistic merit too.)

A KFC imitator, ostensibly "Country Chicken".

Ka ora te tangata

2010-05-29T00:37:00.003+08:00

Last Saturday I was a Shanghai subway volunteer.

For a few years now I've been a 超级潜水员, a super-lurker, as somebody recently described me, on Metrofans, a Shanghai-based web forum for subway system enthusiasts (compare: 117 posts on Metrofans since 2006, and 287 posts on Zhangjiang BBS in less than 2 years). A couple years ago I attended an outing organized by the BBS to celebrate the opening of Line 6, had a good time and met some cool people. Lately I've been thinking about practicing my Chinese and getting out of the house a bit more, so I'd been looking for a chance to join another activity. It just happened that on a night I was thinking about this sign-ups for last week's biweekly volunteer activity were opened. After a quick post and private message to the organizer, I was added to the list and noted the time and place on my calendar: People's Square main hall Expo countdown at 2:45.

Sure enough, by 2:30 a group of young people had formed and I introduced myself to the organizer, who goes by 周瑜的地铁 on the forums. A couple people recognized me from the last time, but most faces were new to me. The volunteers tended to be male (there were 2 girls out of 20-something total), college students or fresh graduates, and very nerdy. There was also a sociology student from ECNU who is carrying out research on this kind of community who I chatted with for a bit.

Volunteer vests were handed out and we were directed toward the light blue line.

We dropped our stuff off in the Line 8 control room back room which, by the way, is full of Buddhist paraphernalia: calendars, altars, statues…

And then the real work began.

By design, first-timers are assigned to stations with more experienced volunteers, so I was at a larger set of turnstiles with two other forum moderators who had volunteered before. Other volunteers helped passengers buying tickets at the ticketing machines, and some were assigned to wander the station and answer questions. Interesting things about manning the 'stiles:

The volume of people exiting the station can be high, so the key is to anticipate who will need help inserting their ticket or dealing with ticket trouble. A couple criteria: young, urban people are generally OK; people with public transportation charge cards are generally OK.
Common card trouble includes: not knowing where to stick the ticket, trying to swipe a single journey ticket, having a ticket rejected for not inserting it properly, having a ticket rejected for not having the right fare or being demagnetized.
Most common question from people asking for directions: "Where is/which way to People's Square?"
There are police patrolling the People's Square station on Segways. They come in pairs.
Being a white person volunteering, it was amusing that locals and urban people tended to go to my partners for directions or questions, while WDR and rural people did not discriminate, expecting me to be able to speak Chinese as naturally as if I was a local. Also, being white and smiling at people as they exit has a tendency to make them forget to take swipe their card and run into a still-engaged turnstile.
A reporter from the 青年报 stopped to interview us.
Things you may have wondered about: it doesn't matter if you insert your ticket upside-down or rightside-up; and the turnstiles are smart enough to count N swipes and tickets, and then let N people go through. Still, don't tailgate the person in front of you because they could miss and then would exit on your swipe!
The sketch I made of the People's Square subway station and the location of its exits came in very handy. Most people figure out which line they need to take, but a lot of people need directions about which exit will take them to their final destination.

Obviously I didn't want to take any pictures on the job, but here's an example of another volunteer who was still going as we walked back to the meeting point at the end of our two hour shift.

Here's a group photo taken before we said goodbye for the day:

Something cool is by the next day there was an active post on the forum where people reflected on their volunteer experiences and shared funny or moving stories that had happened to them that day. It was a fun way to vicariously live out other people's volunteer experiences.

If you're interested in doing something similar, I suggest that you sign up for Metrofans and spend a while learning about the community. Also, you must be 18 years old and it really helps if you can speak good Chinese.

Management plan during the Expo

2010-05-22T00:15:00.007+08:00

The following post has been pinned at the top of each Metrofans subforum for over a month now. The translation is mine:

世博期间论坛管理方案
为配合相关部门要求，并结合本站实际情况，更好的管理论坛。本站即日起，实行世博期间（4月19日到11月15日）临时管理方案，具体如下：

关闭游客访问本站功能。

即日起，本站发现不和谐内容的帖子将直接删除，删除时若写名删除理由的，以删除理由为准。若没有写明理由的，则为上级要求批量删除。

因内容不和谐而被被删除的帖子，不接受任何投诉，反复纠缠者，直接禁发言。

即日起，关于安检的内容，只得发布合理的建议和意见或者是工作不足的监督。不得在本站发布任何关于安检的负面消息，例如质疑、批判、抵制、内部揭发。任何版主有权利删除安检负面信息，且不接受投诉。

即日起，加强对会员的监督管理。凡是对论坛非重要问题反复纠缠的；挑拨会员情绪、破坏论坛气氛的；对管理成员故意挑刺、挑衅的等，都将被直接禁止访问。被禁止后不接受任何投诉，注册马甲再纠缠的，直接封马甲。

新发帖子，世博会不得使用有歧义的字母，如需要使用拼音，请使用“shibo会”

各版均会加强审核与管理，若发生不便，请给予理解。本规定不接受任何评论，若无法接受，可自便。

希望各位会员积极配合与支持。

上海轨道交通俱乐部
2010年4月17日

Management plan during the Expo

In order to cooperate with the relevant departments, in light of this website's actual status, and to better manage the forum, effective immediately and for the duration of the Expo (April 19 to November 15) the Shanghai Metrofans site will implement the following policies:

Close the site to unregistered users.

Beginning today, unharmonious posts will be summarily deleted. A written justification may be given. If no written justification is forthcoming, it is because the post was recommended for bulk deletion by the authorities.

No appeals will be entertained regarding posts deleted for being unharmonious; repeat offenders will be banned.

Beginning today, all posts on the topic of baggage inspections/X-rays must contain only reasonable recommendations and opinions, or reports of insufficient care in inspection work. Posters must not publish on this site any negative information on the topic of security, such as questions, criticism, boycotts, or exposés. Moderators have the right to remove any negative information on security, and will not entertain any complaints.

Beginning today, the forums will strengthen the supervision and management of members. Posters who repeatedly brings up irrelevant problems; provoke other posters and pollute the atmosphere of the forum; and deliberately create run-ins with moderators will be banned without warning.

When posting about the Expo, do not use characters with double-entendres. If pinyin is required, please write "shibo会".

All subforums will be stricter about approval and moderation. Please forgive any inconveniences. These policies are not up for discussion; if you find them unacceptable you are welcome to leave.

We appreciate the cooperation and support of all members.

Shanghai Metrofans
2010.04.17

November 15 is two weeks after the Expo finishes.

Third Culture Parent

2010-05-20T22:47:00.002+08:00

Went to a very relevant and well-done PD session today on Third Culture Kids. I have complete notes on my laptop. Four comments I want to record here:

First, I keep a list of courses that I would teach in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. One of these is an American culture course for graduating seniors. This is similar to what the speaker mentioned today about having a transition program for arriving/departing TCKs, except her idea was broader and more ambitious. I really liked that idea. But I have no time.

Second, one untapped resource at our school (and this made it a shame that the PD session was one-way) is the large population of grown TCK teachers at SMIC, including myself. It really shouldn't be hard to get a dialog going about the needs and potentials of TCKs, and the different options available to TCKs as they go through life.

Third, it's fun being a TCK father of TCKs. A lot of literature about these kids treat them like an other, to be observed, studied and treated. For our family, being third culture will be part of a natural continuum. One thing I observe already is that strangers who comment on Charlotte and Maryann focus only on the benefits of being a TCK ("oh, they are so lucky to grow up speaking two languages", "they can span both eastern and western cultures"), while blissfully and sadly unaware of and non-conversant in the downsides ("so, what's it like having to change friends every few years", "how do you cope with being an outsider in both of 'your' cultures"). So it's going to be especially important that we have a running dialog about the latter in our household.

Fourth, during the PD presentation the speaker interpreted an episode on the Expo field trip where English-speaking Asian SMIC students refused to answer questions in Chinese from curious bystanders, as evidence of the Screamer mentality. Screamer is one of the three identity coping strategies, where a TCK tends to take on the identity of the other culture in order to differentiate and define themself. I see the episode a different way — so many people are curious about TCKs and yet can't understand them, that it gets tiring trying to explain yourself all the time. Add a bit of Taiwanese-mainlander attitude, a pinch of adolescent reticence, and you have a recipe for the situation described above.

An Expo gift from the city

2010-05-20T21:32:00.008+08:00

First, I heard news that said the city of Shanghai would be giving a free Expo ticket and public transportation card to each household in the city. Then I heard that foreign households that had lived in Shanghai for 6 months or more were included. But another source showed photos of city-block-long lines said to be people waiting to claim their free ticket. So I effectively gave up on the idea.

When a notice went up in our apartment lobby, my curiosity was re-piqued. A co-worker mentioned that a friend had taken their passport and employee ID to the front office of our apartment complex and then received tickets through the mail. So a couple evenings ago I grabbed our passports and headed out with Charlotte and Maryann in tow.

Ten minutes later, I walked out of the office with an Expo-themed envelope in hand. It turns out that there were two policemen waiting at a table specifically for this purpose. They recorded our address, the number of people in our household, and our length of stay in Shanghai, asked me to fill out a satisfaction survey about the ticket distribution process, and then handed us the goodies:

A thank-you letter to Shanghai residents

What's inside?

A map of Shanghai.

A small folder titled "2010 Shanghai World Expo". Inside is…

A thank-you note from the city government and CCP Shanghai Committee, and…

A commemorative public transport card in one pocket.

And an Expo ticket in the other.

I hear that these tickets are being distributed on a rotating schedule by district and that Pudong was scheduled early, so keep your eyes and ears open for your chance to claim one. Comparing it with our other tickets, it's no different from the other regular entrance tickets: good for one adult for the ~~entire duration of the Expo except the May and October holidays~~ month of June only. I suspect that tickets for other districts will be for July, August, and so on.

The funny thing is that Jodi and I are collecting Expo tickets like crazy without meaning to. Originally I bought four discounted pre-sale tickets through my school, then the school gave us one ticket as a gift, then the school's social committee used their budget to buy each teacher another ticket, then Jodi got two tickets free from her school, and then the city government handed us the ticket shown above. That's a total of 9 tickets. And if my recent visit to the Expo was any indication, we'll use every single one of them.

We all scream

2010-05-09T23:24:00.003+08:00

Here's a flier that was dropped in our mailbox recently. It's from an ice-cream wholesaler who probably typically sells to small stores, but is trying to tap the B2C market as well. Full-size is available on click-through:

A lot of familiar names on there because we like ice cream! It's tempting to order a box of 21 Magnum bars for RMB 100, I think we're going to pass. I'm sure we'd eat them all eventually, but… actually that's the very reason!

Wrong again

2010-03-22T00:47:00.003+08:00

Didi Kisten Tatlow in the New York Times, Navigating Child Policy in China:

To avoid gender-based abortions, fetal ultrasounds are illegal in China and she had never seen her first child on an ultrasound.

No, they are not illegal. It is illegal to use them to tell the sex of the fetus. The hospital will gladly give you an ultrasound if the equipment is available and you can pony up the cash/insurance/社保卡, but the nurse administrating the procedure is prohibited by law from telling you what she sees "down south."

This is why Americans' view of China is stuck in the 30-years-ago.

2010-03-08T22:14:00.000+08:00

I worked on my China taxes today. Last year my company coordinated the filing process and gave us the chance to turn in the form at school. I decided to try turning it in at the local 张江行政服务中心 Zhangjiang Administrative Service Center, a set of government offices across from the company that issues all sorts of permits and deals with taxes. It was pretty easy: I took the form and my passport plus a copy to the office, had my identity checked against my passport, and received a receipt to show I filed.

Turning the form in by hand is one of the three options you have if you live in Shanghai:

File by Mail:

Download/print/fill out the filing form.
Go to the post office and get a special envelope.
Send by registered mail, wait for confirmation letter.

File in Person:

Download/print/fill out the filing form.
Go to the local tax office, turn in form, get confirmation letter.

File Online:

Download/print/fill out "online tax application form".
Go to the local tax office, verify identity, get password application form.
Go to another window, get a personal password.
Go home, submit taxes online, wait for digital confirmation.

Look at the last option. Who is going to go through that whole rigmarole just to file online? I might try it this year just for fun.

Nuggets of News

2010-03-06T00:13:00.003+08:00

Just a couple pieces of family news. Today I registered Charlotte to begin at the SMIC preschool in the fall. Actually we'd rather she go to the local public preschool but we're not sure if we qualify (zoning/residence status questions) so we are keeping SMIC as a backup.

Also, Jodi started working this week. She's at a preschool in Pudong off of subway Line 6. She team-teaches a class of 3rd year students (~5 years old), taking on responsibility for Art and English. She's glad to be back in the classroom but still getting used to the daily grind.

Maryann is still Maryann, and I'm starting the second semester by leading planning for the Science Fair and chairing the Academic Calendar Committee in addition to my regular duties as teacher and department head.

That's about it.

2010-02-25T11:28:00.003+08:00

Here's online journalism in China.

Yesterday was the opening day of Shanghai's new Line 2 eastern extension towards Pudong Airport. Since the new terminal station, Guanglan Rd, is three blocks from my house, I woke up early and took my camera to get some pictures of the new stations. At work that morning I uploaded the pictures to Flickr and then posted them in a thread on the Metrofans BBS, Shanghai's largest BBS for fans of the city's subway.

Reaction to the new extension has been mixed tending towards negative. One of the focus points of criticism is that the new Zhangjiang High-Tech Park station isn't equipped to handle the high throughput it needs to as the first (and previously, only) station in the area. This includes the charges that the exits are misplaced, that there are too few turnstiles, and that the stairs down to the platform are too narrow. Criticism on this last point was particularly heated because the stairwells really are very narrow compared to all other stairs across the Shanghai subway system and it's a structural problem that should have been easy to foresee and will be hard to correct.

To address the criticism, the Shanghai Metro has added 11 new turnstiles to the station overnight and promised to redesign the stairwells to handle more passengers. This news came to me through a Google News RSS feed in my Google Reader, an RSS entry that features the graphic used by Sina.com to report the news.

Hey, that picture looks familiar.

Oh yeah, it's a black-and-white resized version of one of the photos I took on my morning trip yesterday. Here it is in full color from Flickr:

See the guy on the platform below framed by the stairwell? See the people hunched over the turnstile that was broken and being repaired in anticipation of the morning rush hour? Same image.

Obviously I don't know the chain of posts, reposts (转载), and downloads that lead the Sina editors to my photo. But there are some clues. Obviously the first step was when I posted my photos to the Metrofans BBS and captioned that particular photo with a comment reflecting the already existing opinion that the stairwells were narrow. Next, a link was posted to an article with the inane suggestions that the handrails be taken down as if that would make the space wider, to which another user took my photo and reposted it with the handrail circled for emphasis.

Then, one of the board's super-moderators reposted the modified photo in his own thread with a rant about the Shanghai Metro's ability to create their own "natural wonders". From there, it seems as if the photo was reposted to other BBSs because the Sina photo, though reduced in size, still shows a visible watermark from (I think) bbs.online.sh.cn, one of Shanghai's largest web forums. Looking at the Sina byline, though, shows that the Sina article is actually a reposting of an article from the Dongfang Daily, a Shanghai morning newspaper which had the photo on a page 2-3 spread (PDF) about the troubled Line 2 opening. Incredibly, the print-version of the Dongfang Daily used a cropped version of the same photo. This suggests that reporters at the Dongfang Daily source uncredited photos from online sources, prepare the photos and articles for posting online, edit/crop them for the print version, after which the online version is copied/distributed to other sites across the internet.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining about all this. I'm actually very happy that my photo was used to enrich the discussion across the internet of the Zhangjiang station troubles. My Flickr photos are licensed under a CC-license only because Flickr doesn't offer a copyleft/public domain/no license option. My preferred license is the WTFPL, and my personal policy is to always credit for things I use (ie Postel's Law).

Pleasant intersection

2010-02-16T00:45:00.000+08:00

At the Babela on Tianyaoqiao Rd, Charlotte and I met a very friendly young man from Beijing. I gave him my website address so I hope he sees this message. Hi!

No thank you

2010-02-16T00:06:00.001+08:00

Here's China Telecom inserting ads into random webpages on me:

<html><head><title></title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://202.96.199.51:80/1.css"><script type="text/javascript">var g="http://www.taobao.com";var location;window.onerror=function(){document.URL=g;}</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://202.96.199.51:80/1.js"></script></head><body id=b rightMargin=0 topMargin=0 leftMargin=0 scroll=no onload="pos()" onresize="pos()"><iframe src="http://202.96.199.51:80/a/p?s=1482644398" style="display:none"></iframe><table id=t width=100% border=0 align="center" ><tr><td><iframe id=a src="http://sh.vnet.cn/ad/ejia/hw_0212.html?param=YWNvdW50PWFkNTE4MTkwMTEmdXJsPXd3dy50YW9iYW8uY29t" width=100% height="240" frameborder=0 scrolling=auto></iframe></td></tr><tr><td align="right"><span id=x onmouseout="d(this);" onmouseover="d2(this)" onclick="h()" title="Close"><a href="#" onclick="h()">x</a></span></td></tr></table> <iframe id= c name=cn src="javascript:parent.w" frameBorder=0 width=100% height=100% scrolling=auto></iframe></body></html>

Hoho, writing me a couple new rules for Adblock+.

Web Standards in Shanghai

2010-02-01T03:33:00.004+08:00

Back in mid-January I retweeted a link from POPOEVER about a web standards meeting in Shanghai on Jan 30. Quietly, I registered, added the event to my Google Calendar, and when the time came I made the trip to Ctrip's Shanghai office to attend.

It turns out that the event is connected to the 蓝色理想 BBS, a set of web design forums with a long (in internet time) and influential history on the Chinese internet. The event was an interesting format: first the host introduced a topic with three short bullet points which were discussed as a group, and then a speaker took the stage with a prepared talk on the topic based on their experience as coders or designers; this was repeated three times. I arrived a few minutes after the meeting started, but the topics I heard covered were workflow for daily and special projects (with a speaker from Taobao), using/developing Javascript libraries and frameworks (with a speaker from Ctrip), and the feasibility and future of HTML5 & CSS3. Discussion generally stayed on topic and drew from a wide range of experiences: large and small companies, professionals and hobbyists.

I didn't have much to contribute myself, having only been a hobbyist and out of the web development scene for quite some time. When I left, though, I felt like I should have said something like this:

I began working with HTML and CSS in college. After graduating in 2001, I spent a year in Tianjin at a low-pressure job that left me a lot of time in the evenings, which I spent on experimenting with personal web projects. At some point I signed up for the css-discuss mailing list. Now, style sheets and semantic markup had long been a part of the early vision for the web, but were neglected by website and (certain) browser developers for many years. Css-discuss was a mailing list made up of independent web developers, students and hobbyists who were passionate about harnessing the ideas of style sheets and the semantic web to create a more powerful, more flexible World-Wide Web. And so css-discuss came to be a "voice in the wilderness" calling for a return to that original vision, and ran in the face of a by-then entrenched tradition of using tables for layout and FONT tags for styling. The individual members of css-discuss, working together, analyzed and documented the HTML and CSS rendering behaviors of different browsers, invented CSS hacks for targeting specific browsers, and pressured browser developers to code to web standards through an active blogosphere presence, professional involvements, and the founding of organizations like WaSP and publications like A List Apart. Over time, people and organizations came around to see the benefits of web standards. Now, the knowledge of web standards is widespread to the point of complacence, and no longer the cause of a small minority.

This isn't true in China though. Due to the late start of the web in China and the widespread piracy of software from Microsoft (a perennial offender on the web), web standards are still a cause worth promoting. Technically, I have nothing to add to the cause. Personally, what I can offer is support through my presence, and the experience that I described above, from which I derived a lesson that I summarize in this diagram:

No matter whether you're a small minority working against the tide of mainstream ideas or whether you're part of a movement of many people, progress in the cause will come from motivated individuals who commit to a praxis: the combination of thoughtful reflection and confident action.

To the W3CTech group, thank you for letting me sit in on your meeting and best wishes for you and the work ahead of you.

2010-01-08T17:31:00.002+08:00

Just a quick note. Tonight I'm holding an Open Observatory night, 8pm-10pm. It's (near) FREEZING, but it's the first Open Observatory advertised to faculty through e-mail, and students by poster, so I'm expecting a turnout nonetheless. Actually it's open to anybody, so if you see this post on time you are welcome to drop by: Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, 19 Qingtong Rd (near Guanglan Rd). That's Pudong of course. If you need more specific directions, text me (number is on my Facebook); my phone is wonky and calling doesn't work. Dress warmly please.

The menu for tonight is the following:

M42/M43 (Orion's Sword)
M45 (Pleiades)
Mars
M44 (open cluster)
Sirius
M41 (open cluster)
M79 (globular cluster)
M37 (open cluster)
M35 (open cluster)

Orion's Sword is a must; saw it at Uncle Steve's observatory a couple weeks ago and it is as impressive as advertised. I doubt we will get as good an image but I'll try. The Pleiades is a favorite of mine; it's visible in city-lights with the naked-eye, and it's not something you notice because it's not huge or bright, but once it's pointed out to you it's easily recognizable. Next is Mars, which is very close to Earth these days and showing a lot of detail. It will be my first time observing it through this telescope. M44 is a brightish open cluster close to Mars in the sky. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky these days, it also has a pair of blue and orange stars right next to it that might be fun to compare and contrast. M431 is an open cluster close to Sirius. M79 is a bright and concentrated globular cluster. And M37 and M35 are rather ordinary open clusters that we can target if we have leftover time and are not frozen stiff.

To design the list of targets I mined three sources: my own memory (it is getting better!), a post on the Riverdale Astronomy weblog, and Tom Flanders' guide to the Messier objects in Early Winter and Late Winter.

See you at 8pm.

SILF 2010 Short-list

2010-01-04T09:26:00.006+08:00

My short-list for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, March 5-21, 2010:

1. Tash Aw "The Harmony Silk Factory" (Whitbread First Novel award, Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel)
*2. Terry Bennett "The History of Photography in China"
**7. Leslie Chang "Factory Girls"
*12. Andrew Field "Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919- 1954" (2010)
**17. Peter Hessler "River Town"; "Oracle Bones"; "Driving Lessons" (2010)
**21. Tess Johnston "Permanently Temporary: From Berlin to Shanghai in Half a Century" (2010)
*26. David Leffman "Rough Guides" China author
31. Mo Zhi Hong "The Year of the Shanghai Shark" (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book)
*33. Chen Murong "Leave Me Alone Chengdu"
36. James Palmer "The Bloody White Baron"
**41. Su Tong "Rice Wives and Concubines" (adapted to Raise the Red Lantern); "My Life as Emperor". 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize for "The Boat to Redemption" (not yet published)
42. Alice Pung "Unpolished Gem"
*45. Donata & Christoph Valentien "Shanghai’s New Botanic Garden"

My interests tend toward history, Shanghai, South-East Asia, and the Asian diaspora. A asterisk means an author is on my short² list; two asterisks means short³(!) list.

Micah and Jodi: Out and About on the New Year

2010-01-02T21:17:00.003+08:00

Now that Charlotte is back in the states with the grandparents and crazy aunt Lolo, and since Jodi's mom is still available to take care of Maryann for an afternoon, Jodi and I have been freer to get out of the house together lately. We took advantage to enjoy life a little on New Year's Day with a trip to a packed Babaiban and shiny Lujiazui.

First off, thanks to Aaron and Jessica for the new camera. Great Christmas gift, I'm sure we'll get a lot of use out of it.

In the afternoon we realized that it was the opening day of the Zhangjiang Tram, so we took it to the subway station. Naturally on the first day of operation it was packed. It's futuristic looking and novel, but the ride is far from smooth and it takes a long path looping through southern Zhangjiang. I'm not sure we'll be taking it very often in the future.

One cool thing about the tram is that it maximizes the use of glass, including ceiling-to-floor glass doors to the outside and to the driver's cabin. This means you can see the ground whizzing by outside and a clear view the road ahead.

At Babaiban we took my phone to the Samsung Service Center to get it checked out and passed by Bifengtang to pick up pineapple buns for a snack. The whole area was a mass of people out shopping on the first day of the Western new year. I hear that the mall had a big sale until 2am the previous night as well!

I thought about trying out the new Line 9 from Shangcheng Road to its temporary terminal station and connection to Line 2 at Century Avenue, but the Dongchang Line tempted us with its route directly to the back door of our home. So we took the bus home to check in with Grandma and Maryann, and to inquire at the service desk about moving into the new apartment. We're upgrading: same set of apartments, but a 3-bedroom layout.

A couple hours later and we were on the road again to a Korean dinner I'd promised Jodi at a favorite of hers, 明洞, in the Super Brand Mall. Since we were anticipating a big dinner we let our stomachs settle and tried something we'd been intending to take, the Lujiazui tourist bus. It's the double-decker bus that you see sometimes stopped south of the Oriental Peal Tower when you take Exit 1 out of the Lujiazui subway station.

We had been anticipating this ride for a while now, but after completing the experience we come down firmly on the side of: "don't bother, it's not worth it". Contrary to our expectations, the "tourist" part of the ride is minimized and the "bus" part is emphasized. Narration is limited to pointing out the Huangpu River ferry, the Thompson Riviera apartments (ah, Shanghai and real estate), and a few famous landmarks like the Oriental Pearl Tower, Jinmao Tower, and the Int'l Financial Center. The route is limited in scope, the complimentary milk tea is watery and tasteless, and a lot of time is spent at multiple stops waiting for passengers to board and disembark. Cheap at RMB 15 a person, but not worth the price or time.

Our consolation prize was a sizable and filling spread at 明洞 on Super Brand 6F. We barely managed to get through everything, and we let the waiter cook the meat for us or it would have taken forever. At RMB 298 for the 2-person combo it wasn't cheap but for a special occasion it hit just the right spot.

Full and contented, we headed home.

2009-12-17T00:26:00.002+08:00

It's a pretty decent webcomic.

2009-12-16T23:11:00.002+08:00

From our textbook on "Multicultural Education":

Bahai believers advocate for peace, justice, racial unity, economic development, and education.

Does that sentence mean anything?

2009-12-10T11:40:00.001+08:00

Today nationwide the format of train tickets is being updated:

Well, that was anticlimactic.

2009-12-10T11:13:00.006+08:00

It's time for curmudgeon-Micah again: the General Office of the State Council just released the schedule of national holidays for 2010 (as usual, at the last minute).

一、元旦：1月1日至3日放假公休，共3天。
二、春节：2月13日至19日放假调休，共7天。2月20日（星期六）、21日（星期日）上班。
三、清明节：4月3日至5日放假公休，共3天。
四、劳动节：5月1日至3日放假公休，共3天。
五、端午节：6月14日至16日放假调休，共3天。6月12日（星期六）、13日（星期日）上班。
六、中秋节：9月22日至24日放假调休，共3天。9月19日（星期日）、25日（星期六）上班。
七、国庆节：10月1日至7日放假调休，共7天。9月26日（星期日）、10月9日（星期六）上班。

As the chair of the academic calendar committee at my school, each year I look forward to getting my hands on this schedule and how it matches my predictions for the second half of our current academic calendar, as well as how it will affect our planning for the next schoolyear's calendar. And each year I gnash my teeth and stomp my feet at the decision of the State Council regarding the distribution of the days off during the year and/or surrounding the holidays.

Most of the holidays are scheduled in a way that suggests sanity. The Chinese New Year doesn't affect us as the school takes 3/4 weeks off around that period anyway. The Tomb-Sweeping Holiday in April and Int'l Labor Day in May are reasonable 3-day weekends, both taking off a Monday following the weekend. And the National Day vacation in October is back by its lonesome self (it coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival this year) with a similar schedule to this year's, working a Saturday before and a Sunday after to leave a 7-day-long vacation.

As usual, though, this calendar has a couple zingers. The Dragon Boat Festival falls on a Wednesday in June next year, so that State Department has decided that people should work through the previous weekend and take off Monday through Wednesday (see below). On my calendar for the school I had simply made the Wednesday a single day off in the middle of the week; since summer vacation follows just a couple weeks later, we don't really need a 3-day weekend at this point. I'm hoping we won't have to change my original plan.

Also, the Mid-Autumn festival falls on a Wednesday in late September; this time people are scheduled to work the previous Sunday and following Saturday to take off Wednesday through Friday; yes, this means that vacation ends on Friday, people work Saturday, then take Sunday off before resuming the regular workweek schedule. (see below) Guess how many people are going to be calling in sick on that Saturday! And guess what I'm going to be doing for the school calendar? I don't know yet, but I'm thinking that we don't need a 5-day holiday just 3 weeks into next schoolyear.

Argh.

2009-12-08T16:48:00.004+08:00

In regular Physics class, we're coming up on the study of gases, including Bernoulli's principle. I'm looking up examples on Youtube to show in class (curving a soccer ball kick, tornado tearing the roof off a house) and I find myself getting deeper and deeper into the fascinating world of... F1 aerodynamics.

From what I pieced together, early-on racecar designers figured out that having a racecar that would stick to the track meant that you could go around corners more quickly without skidding. The downward force that stuck the car is called the Ground Effect, and has lot of other applications.

As I understand it, the earliest groundeffect was achieved by using tunnels under the car that were narrower at the middle and wider at the edges so that the air was compressed and then decompressed as it went under the car. This creates a low pressure zone at the middle bottom of the car, keeping it "sucked" onto the track. In physics we call this the Venturi effect. Diffusers, which spread the air at the back of the car, act in a similar way but get around new rules against tunnels on the underbody of the car.

Pretty soon every car had these tunnels. Then a wider engine came along that didn't have room for these tunnels, so one car team installed a fan on the back of their car (the "fancar") that served to cool the motor as well as suck the air through the bottom of the car and create a lower pressure zone there.

The fan was so effective that other teams complained, but by then the aerodynamics teams that started using aerofoils, basically inverted airplane wings that provide "reverse lift" to push the cars down. Wings are attached at the front and back of the cars in positions that maximize their contact with air flow and provide an even downforce. The position and angle of the wings can be customized to the curviness of different tracks. Now everybody wings too.

An interesting thing is that "ground effect" in the world of flight refers to an increase in lift that winged objects experience when they fly close to the ground due to the vortices coming off the ends of the wings interacting with the surface of the ground. It's a force in the opposite direction to that desired by racecar designers.

Another interesting thing is the social dynamics in the aerodynamics "race" for the fastest car. As one astute interviewee said, each time a racing team makes another technological breakthrough that allows faster racecars the other teams simultaneously rush to get the same feature on their cars and make a stink about it to get it banned by the governing body, who usually either bans or limits the use of the new technology in the name of safety. And by safety, they mean ensuring driver safety by keeping cars from going too fast! Amazing.

(I'm thinking this would make a good MetaFilter front-page post.)

2009-12-05T01:09:00.003+08:00

Widescreen and worth it! I just spent the last four hours learning how to upgrade my computer to support the new 19" widescreen Samsung LCD monitor we bought to replace the old Viewsonic that finally kicked the can a couple days ago. This involved re-installing a couple sets of drivers, figuring out that the drivers were already up-to-date in the first place, learning that the problem lay in something called the video BIOS, or vBIOS, building a bootable USB stick, and then using it to flash my computer's BIOS with 1) the manufacturer-released BIOS update that wasn't recent enough, and 2) a version of the BIOS that had been hacked to include support for the monitor's optimal resolution. The moment I saw "1440x900" in the Display control panel I was as ecstatic as you can be after sitting at the computer for 4 hours, but when I flipped the switch it was all worth it: crystal-clear type on seemingly horizonless screen space in vivid and beautiful color. Hooray.

2009-12-01T13:22:00.003+08:00

Where will the moon be tonight? That a simple question but it can have a complicated answer. The simplest would be, "about 15 degrees behind where it was last night." The more complicated ones start with "depends what year it is." Today I got curious so I searched around and found a web-page that scratched my itch and gave me a new idea.

The page is on the University of Massachusetts Amherst's website, and is called "MOON TEACHINGS FOR THE MASSES". It has nice diagrams like this:

and this:

that help explain the paths of the Sun and Moon across the sky.

The easiest way to track the paths of the Sun and Moon is by the positions where they rise and set on the horizon. These positions swing back and forth like a pendulum, north and south and back again, according to where they are in their cycle around the Earth (remember, the Sun's cycle lasts 365 days, while the moon's is only 29.5 days).

On the summer and winter solstices, the Sun will rise at its maximum northern position or maximum southern position. This corresponds to the point of the pendulum swing where it comes to a rest and turns around. On the equinoxes, the sun will rise and set on the cardinal points E and W. This corresponds to the middle of the swing, where the pendulum is moving at its maximum speed.

At both equinoxes, the Sun reaches a maximum declination (height above the horizon) of 90° minus your latitude. The max altitude at the solstices is 90° minus your latitude, plus the tilt of the Earth 23.5° in the summer and minus 23.5° — tilt in the other direction — in the winter. If your home latitude is greater than 90° - 23.5° = 76.5° degrees, then in the winter the sun will have a maximum altitude of less then zero degrees and you get to experience the 24 hour darkness of polar night!

In Shanghai we are at a latitude of 31.2° and HeavensAbove says the sun will reach a max altitude today of 37° at 11:42 this morning. This makes sense because we're getting close to December 22, the winter solstice, when the sun will reach an altitude of just 90° - 23.5° - 31.2° = 35.3°, it's lowest path across the sky this year. This is also the well-known shortest day of the year. On December 23 the sun will rise just a bit more northerly and earlier as it begins its return to summer.

The moon goes through a similar cycle but much more quickly. The Moon's "equinoxes" and "solstices" happen every two weeks! (29.5 days / 2) Since the Moon's orbit is tilted at 5° from the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, we see its maximum and minimum altitudes vary from the Sun's by that amount. Furthermore, the moon has a noticeable 18.6-year cycle due to relatively quick precession, meaning that the Moon's "pendulum" swings wider than the Sun's by 5° every 9.3 years, and shorter than the Sun's by 5° after another 9.3 years. Stack onto this that the Sun outshines the Moon when both are in the sky — the Moon is mostly visible only at night — and this means that what you see in the sky can range from high moons to low moons, to moons of different phases, to no moons at all!

Currently, we are just starting the backwards motion of the Moon's 18-year pendulum swing: in 2006 the Moon was ranging a full 23.5° + 5° = 28.5° above and below the Sun's path, but now in 2009 we are swinging back towards a minimum and, for example, beating it at most by 25.8° tomorrow night, December 2, for a full altitude of 90° - 31.2° + 25.8° ≈ 84.6° (HeavensAbove says 84.5°). This is why you may have noticed the Moon being so high in the sky for the past few days, not to mention that we're one day away from the full moon! But remember the moon's quick cycle: just two weeks from tomorrow the Moon complete half of its cycle and have a max altitude of only 90° - 31.2° - 25.8° ≈ 33.0°. And two weeks later we'll be back to a bit less than the current 84.6°, as the moon continues its precession.

All of this to say that it would be a neat project to map the rises and settings of the Sun every day to see the progression from solstice to equinox and back again. Not that I'm contemplating setting up a new Stonehenge in my backyard (thought a mini-one would be nice), but it might make a good addition to the observatory or school garden.

(So Dad, to answer your question: the moon is high in in the sky because ➀ we're coming off of a precession maximum, ➁ it happens every 29.5 days, and ➂ it's happening at the same time as the full-moon so it's particularly bright.)

(Disclaimer: these are the study notes of an amateur astronomer, so don't take anything here for granted. Follow my links to more authoritative sources.)

2009-11-26T12:14:00.002+08:00

Since the Leonid meteor shower just passed and the Geminids are coming up mid-December, and since I've never observed a meteor shower, today I took the light pollution map of East Asia from the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Inquinamento Luminoso's (Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute) "The night sky in the World" website and super-imposed it on a Google Map of the 长三角 Yangtze River Delta area. Click on the map below for a full-size view:

So it's true what they say, a dark sky isn't that far away. I think a weekend trip is in order later this winter.

2009-11-24T23:14:00.002+08:00

Yesterday I got all excited about epassportphoto.com and making my own passport photos, and all angry about how Walgreens and Rite-Aid charging passport-photo prices for printing self-generated passport photos.

Today I take my new passport photos to the Zhangjiang Carrefour Fujifilm shop, and guess what: the lady wants to charge me RMB 15 (2 bucks) per page for printing them out because they are ID photos! And she had the gall to tell me she was giving me half price because I took them myself.

I just walked out. I'll print them online.

2009-11-16T14:28:00.003+08:00

About 7 kilometers away in spacetime:

2009-11-16T01:25:00.002+08:00

Charlotte and I went to Shanghai Stadium this afternoon to see the NFL's flag football league play on the practice fields outside of the Stadium itself. We didn't talk to anybody in depth, on account of the rain and Charlotte being anxious to leave. Some notes:

About the time we arrived, a little after one, it began to rain lightly and the games continued unaffected.
Play was smooth and all the players were good sports. The referees seemed to be unfamiliar with some rules, but were not afraid to ask for help so things stayed on track. There was one Chinese guy in black running around with a clipboard that seemed to be the go-to man for questions. There was an injury, but a first aid kit was on hand and play stopped while the player was being attended to.
About 1 in 10 of the players were white; another 30% had Asian faces but spoke fluent American English. The refs were all locals, and included several women.

Overall, it was a very low-key event.

2009-11-14T02:25:00.000+08:00

Tonight on a whim I went back and listened to the Pizzicato Five (P5) Happy End of the You remix album. The most notable thing about the re-listen was how my position relative to the album has changed since I first listened to it back in college.

The first time I heard the album was during my studies at Caltech. In college I pursued music, among other things, as an escape-valve for the incredible pressure I was feeling academically. In high school I had latched onto Pizzicato Five to supplement my Japanese studying; Shibuya-kei was more accessible than other J-pop genres in a pre-Youtube, pre-Napster time, because Matador Records distributed their albums and brought them to the US for tours. Eventually I joined the p5ml, a mailing list for English-speaking fans of Pizzicato Five. When Happy End of You came out I interpreted it as being a big deal to the list because here was a bunch of western DJs acknowledging and possibly having been inspired by Pizzicato Five. Still reviews of the album from the list were mixed; p5ml members had eclectic tastes that tended towards pop, rock and oldies (there was an overlap between prominent members of p5ml and the Exotica list, a list "for fans and collectors of weird and unusual music from the early LP era forward").

By the time Happy End of the World was released I was a P5 collector, so I picked up a couple of the vinyl releases of the individual mixes at Moby Disc in downtown Pasdena, and eventually the entire CD. My own reaction was similar to the list's: I preferred the more upbeat tracks and was disappointed by the slower, more unstructured mixes. I didn't have a good perspective on those compositional styles; my background so far had been pop and techno in Spain, hip-hop and rock in high school, and then some exotica and world music during college. The sounds I was hearing on these remixes were foreign and almost unconnected to anything I had ever heard.

How is my listening different now? In the years since then, influenced by my brother's progressive musical tastes, by DJ friends and classmates at Caltech, by the documentary on techno called Modulations, by Kraftwerk (through P5) and their influences, through Cornelious, the Plastics, the Boredoms, through "graduation" night from Princeton in Beijing 2000, through marveling at the curious club scene of Shanghai, and through the influence of Mr Zambrano, Mr Hogue and NoiShanghai, I've picked up a few things here and there about the more fringe, exploratory, theoretical facets of music and exposed myself to more ideas about what music can be. Listening to Happy End of Youd this second time around I find myself navigating the styles with a greater familiarity and being able to appreciate all of the musical extremes, from 808 State's bouncy synthesizer-packed remix of Trailer Music, to Gusgus's moody, building whomp-whomp remix of Porno 3003, to the dissonant plunderphonic remix of It's a Beautiful Day by John Oswald; they all have elements that I recognize or can categorize with other music I've heard and learned to enjoy.

I can't help but connect this to my thoughts about teaching. If my goal as a teacher is to make my kids more fully appreciate physics, my work has to include exposing them to memorable experiences that they can analyze using the scientific principles I teach them. But that's a topic to be developed on another day. It's time for bed now.

(One of my colleagues told me that today, Saturday, is Childrens' Day in India, and that her daughters are performing for thousands of Indian expatriates in Shanghai today. I am jealous.)

2009-11-08T22:25:00.006+08:00

We had a delayed birthday dinner of sorts for myself tonight. Charlotte, Maryan and I met Jodi at People's Square after Jodi's Sunday afternoon classes and we walked to the 干锅居 at the entrance of Huanghe Rd. I had forgotten how good the Guizhounese restaurant is: we had the tea-mushroom chicken pot (茶树菇干锅), the spicy-sour greenbeans (酸豆角炒肉末), a honey-rice cake (风味小米喳), and a stir-fry of mixed vegetables (小炒皇). Even with the girls making messes and causing a ruckus I still enjoyed every bite. In fact, I felt like I liked it even more than before, having grown more accustomed to eating chicken off the bone and spicy foods. Although we didn't wait for a window seat tonight, in the past we've sat next to the glass and had a decent view of People's Square lit up at night, looking straight down Nanjing East Road. For the money, it's one of the better views of the Square. With our VIP card, the meal came out to RMB 90 for the four of us.

2009-11-01T18:10:00.002+08:00

“It’s All Sermon Prep to Me”, comment by rpage:

I read a story recently about a desert father who was visited by a hermit who had heard of the abba. The hermit began to talk about scripture and theological things. The abba turned away from him. When the hermit asked the mutual friend who introduced them, the friend asked the abba why he ignored someone who had traveled hundreds of miles to talk with him. The abba said that he knows little about scripture or theology. If the hermit wanted to talk about the internal life that loves and needs healing, he would be happy to talk with the hermit. The abba and the hermit had a long and mutually satisfying conversation after that. I have looked upon the sermon as a way to reflect on how God is present and healing in lives and what the scriptures collected by the church tell us of these things in the past to help us understand the present in faith terms.

This is pretty close to how I see it.

2009-10-29T11:34:00.000+08:00

George Orwell, from "Homage to Catalonia":

In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on.

I think this applies to teaching as well.

2009-10-26T23:22:00.004+08:00

Tonight I finally set the stage for an evening of "Sidewalk Astronomy". The place: the square outside the Science and Technology Museum subway station, for its high evening traffic and wide-open sky. The time: right after dinner on October 26, about 8pm, when Jupiter and the half-full moon were less than 15° away from each other.

On the way there I think I scared some people on the subway. First, the telescope I use belongs to the school so I carry it home in a long, black bag that looks just about the right size for carrying a firearm. I actually felt pretty spooky carrying it around, with my hoody and black jeans on. Second, I also brought along a homemade accelerometer and took some measurements of the subway acceleration and deceleration going from Longyang Rd to Century Park. It's just a piece of cardboard with a protractor made of paper taped on it, and a metal nut on fishing line hanging down, but I had placed it up against the wall and was staring at it intently trying to line it up to 0° as people were getting on at Longyang Rd, so it probably looked strange. The good thing is that the top acceleration I calculate based off the measurement falls within the ranges I found online; 1.2 m/s² is between 1.0-1.5 m/s².

At the Science and Technology Museum square, I set up just off the bridge where people cross over to walk toward the taxi line. The spot was central-ish, away from lights, and off to the side from where bikers and rollerbladers tend to ride. When I pulled out the telescope I immediately drew a small, curious crowd, which I satisfied with some conversation and a chance to look at the moon through the telescope and binoculars. Then when things settled down I lined the scope up with Jupiter on the higher power eyepiece and demonstrated what we were seeing in Stellarium on the laptop. Most of the people who stopped by were either older couples or families with kids; usually they drew near and smiled, at which point I asked them to take a look and they universally accepted. This usually lead to a bit of chit-chat about why I was there, or about astronomy. One grandfather was very cute; as his wife and their son and grandaughter walked away he ran back with… "One more question. Why can't we see so many stars these days? When I was young the sky was filled with them!" so we chatted a bit about the atmosphere and light pollution. Another man visiting Shanghai from Fujian got to talking about the time he had spent up north in Heilongjiang and how the sky up there was so vast and yet so near, the he felt like he could have reached up and touched it; he also recommended getting out of Shanghai and shared with me about how, American is great and all but, his dream is to first go to Tibet to find peace for his heart. By nine o'clock I was spending a lot of time on the laptop and practicing navigating the sky with the binoculars, and visitors were getting less frequent, so I closed up shop and took the subway/bus home.

Overall I consider the trip a success, but felt like the major advantage of the site, a wide open sky, was lost to the fact that light pollution (and a possible light cloud cover) washed out pretty much the whole sky, especially near the horizon. With that kind of sky I could just as well go to a more peopled site like People's Square or somewhere with more buildings, as long as I had a clear line of sight to the interesting objects for that night. This is a success I'd like to repeat.

2009-10-26T23:15:00.002+08:00

Signs that "Maryann (our one-year-old) Was Here":

Cucumber crumbs on the floor.
Magazines stacked on the bathroom stool.
A particularly stinky trash can.
Shoes strewn around the entryway.
The remote control is missing.

2009-10-10T22:28:00.003+08:00

Adam Minter just posted a photo and a question about a game he spotted being played in an older Shanghai neighborhood. Since my research turned up a real Shanghai connection I thought it'd be good to put it here and just share the link back.

Photo by Adam Minter.

I replied on his post that I knew the game as Carrom from playing it as a kid in the US, but looking at his photo I suspected something deeper because of the workmanship that went into the board; the ones I'd played had always been flimsy things mounted on tripods (though I'd seen some more durable ones at a park near my grandparents' house in Buena Park, California). Wikipedia has this to say about the history of Carrom:

The origins of carrom are uncertain, although western sources suggest that the game is of Indian, Portugese, or Burmese origin.[1] Variations of the game played with a cue stick similar to those used in billiards-type games may have independently developed in several cases as a mixture of billiards and shuffleboard.
The game is very popular in India, and in Punjabi it is called fatta. Similar games are played throughout the world, and may or may not share common origins with carrom. In Denmark a similar game called bob is played with cues rather than fingers.[citation needed] There is a carrom-like game also played with cues in China. Games similar to carrom appear all over Asia, for example vindi vindi in Fiji and szhe szhe in Israel. Some variants make use of discarded objects instead of fashioned playing pieces; bottle caps are used for games similar to carrom in both Mexico and Java.[citation needed] Various North American games bear a resemblance to (and may be related to) carrom, including crokinole, pitchnut and pichenotte.

The Japanese Wikipedia page for Carrom yielded the Chinese 康乐棋, and googling with that phrase turned up 康乐球. That last variation combined with 上海 turns up a lot of links that suggest that Carrom is embedded in and particular to the local Shanghainese culture. Among the search results was the blog of one 露香园, who had this to say about the history of Carrom in Shanghai:

康乐球始于民国时期。康乐球借用桌球的一些用语，早些还有形似桌球六洞布局的康乐球。这两点都说明康乐球出现在桌球之后。据资料记载在印度殖民统治时期，驻印度的英军官发明了桌球，不久又从印度传到中国。是不是模仿桌球的康乐球也跟着传到了中国呢，还是中国人见了桌球而自制了康乐球呢，现在还没有可以肯定的说法。上海开埠较早，也是国内最早有康乐球的。有位老上海说早年老北站附近的康乐路上一家木器店老板制作了击打棋子状木子进洞取乐的木质方盘。当时参与的人都觉得很好玩。为了说话方便，就以路名来给这玩艺儿起了名。在康乐路上打球成了打康乐球。这可能就是康乐球名称的来源吧。在那个年代，桌球是贵族的游戏，而康乐球当然是平民的游戏了。

So it seems likely that the British brought it over to Shanghai from India, either in the form of Carrom or as its predecessor snooker (Wikipedia confirms the Indian origin of the latter). The "Kangle Rd" theory seems like it may hold water, but I'd be interested to know if the game has another name in Shanghainese that might sound closer to the Punjabi "fatta" mentioned by Wikipedia, or some other Indian variant. Another site talks about the rise in popularity of Carrom in Shanghai after the closure of snooker halls in the 1950s, roadside Carrom rentals as sources of income for the unemployed, and the organizing of neighborhood Carroom tournaments during the SARS quarantines.

康乐球在上世纪40年代传入上海，因其不登大雅之堂而未能传开。而到了50年代后，由于弹子房先后关闭，康乐球一度成了上海娱乐的主角，当时一只普通的康乐球盘约15元，仅相当于一个普通工人三分之一的月收入，高档的红木盘约60元。无业的居民或无所事事的家庭主妇花些钱购几只盘，就可沿街设摊了。当时租盘以“盘”（即一方胜局为一盘）算，小盘每“盘”一两分，大盘三四分，老板娘有两只盘，一天收入三五元是不成问题的。

The site also attributes the 康乐球 name to the English "cornerbool", a word Google says is used exclusively by Chinese manufacturers trying to sell Carrom equipment to English-speakers; so I'm not too sure about that one.

In any case, it appears that Carrom is indeed a Shanghai institution. SMG's Sports TV channel did a short report on it, interviewing a Mr Li who credits it with keeping him healthy and improving his sight to the point where he stopped wearing glasses. The report does note that the average Carrom player is 50 years old, so this is likely an institution in decline. Which means that now is a better time than any to order yourself a custom-built Carrom/康乐球 board, only RMB 1200 and made in Shanghai.

2009-10-02T22:22:00.002+08:00

A random sampling of interesting things from around the city, captured by my cellphone.

Wheel of mops at the Zhangjiang Carrefour.

One of those 2-D cellphone codes on a People's Square subway exit sign.

My favorite Shanghai skyscraper: that wavy one.

Great vocabulary builder for kids.

I've said before that photographs of clouds are cheating, it's just too easy to get beautiful shots.

The Concordia Int'l School middle high school cafeteria converted for a college fair.

The Shanghai American School (SAS) Pudong front gate.

Walking through the front gate, an elegant Chinese-style courtyard (SAS Pudong).

The courtyard outside of the cafeteria (SAS Pudong).

The cafeteria has a Starbucks-style coffee shop (SAS Pudong).

A bit of wishful thinking; saw this trio on several models of magnets in shops at Chenghuangmiao.

2009-09-29T11:52:00.002+08:00

Pretty cool:

Shanghai is at 31° of latitude so this chart should be relatively accurate.

2009-09-28T14:56:00.002+08:00

Here's a great example of what we spend about half of Chapter 1 studying in physics:

I have a whole slew of scientists mad at me this week – and I will admit that I am pretty irritated back – because none of us cool rational analytical scientists can truly separate our emotions and our egos from the reality-based science that we do. In this current dispute, I get to claim the scientific high ground, at least. My scientific paper that just came out this week unarguably demonstrates that their scientific paper has some rather embarrassing errors.

From Mike Brown's inimitable weblog (who else can blog about discovering new dwarf planets from Caltech?), Mike Brown's Planets (also on Twitter as, love it, @plutokiller).

2009-09-13T18:54:00.003+08:00

Today Charlotte and I went to the Shanghai Museum while Jodi was in class. Afterwards I was resting and Charlotte was playing on the fountain in People's Square, when a young man approached me to take a survey on the environment of People's Square: how often did I come here, how long did I stay, for what purposes, what kind of feeling did the area give me, what could be improved about it, what things would I like to see more/less. One interesting question asked which buildings on the Square are good-looking and which ones are ugly (among the Shanghai Museum, the Art Museum, City Hall, City Planning Museum, and Grand Theater). In our conversation as I filled out the survey, I mentioned that I would like to see more activities on the square organized by the city and by city residents; I feel like, for a "People's" Square, the square doesn't have a lot of popular culture: no buskers, no hobbyists, no cultural activities. I also let him know that the people selling DVDs, watches and roller skates on Nanjing Rd aren't a big problem; what the city needs to focus on controlling are the art students and tea houses that hide their motives and prey on trusting tourists. Finally, I suggested that the city open one or more tourist information offices with the familiar white on blue "i" that appears so often in touristy European cities, a place where tourists can get information on hotels, tours, city landmarks, and pick up trustworthy maps. I hope my suggestions will help make People's Square a more friendly and constructive place.

2009-09-13T10:24:00.002+08:00

Early China/East-Asia related memories:

As a young boy in southern Spain, buying firecrackers for pennies at the corner kiosk and examining their exploded carcasses. At that point I recognized the script as Chinese characters thought I'm not sure how.
In the setting, reading Ibañez comics like Mortadelo y Filemon and seeing the occasional buck-toothed, yellow-faced Chinese character wearing a Manchu hat and braid. Spain not having been a world-power in several centuries, the characters were intended to be more exotic and humorous than threatening.
Living in Madrid, my first memory of a family outing for Chinese food. The dishes I remember clearly were the lemon chicken (I've only ever seen this once in China) and broad, crunchy pastel shrimp chips.
Waking up early on Saturdays to watch Japanese people do crazy stunts on Humor Amarillo ("Yellow Humor"), a show I looked up a couple years ago as being called "Takeshi's Castle".
In the eighth grade, still abroad, playing table tennis nearly every day at lunch with a Korean classmate. I wondered how many summer camps (the only place I had ever played table tennis) he had attended to be so good at the sport.

2009-09-11T17:15:00.002+08:00

Just got back from the US Visa Processing Center here in Shanghai. We applied for Maryann's passport so she can make the trips back to the US with us in December and February. I had assembled some notes before we went to make sure I would have everything; the one thing that I did not take was the documents to prove residency but the consular officer decided to trust me on that one (thanks US Consulate!) and passed us. Charlotte's picture is still up on the baby board after almost 3 years, Obama and Clinton are on the wall next to the Clinton Flag (or was that the Consular Flag?), and the consulate staff once you're inside are as friendly and helpful as ever. Cost was RMB 1035.

2009-09-11T08:24:00.002+08:00

This article shows what a joke hunting can be:

Even as Idaho has sold more than 14,000 wolf-hunting permits, the first 10 days of the first legal wolf hunt here in decades have yielded only three reported legal kills. [...] Mr. Rachael, the state wildlife manager, said he thought it was unlikely that hunters would reach the quota of 220 wolves that Idaho game officials have said could be killed this season.

Fourteen thousand permits sold, 220 wolves to be killed, and only 3 successes. What kind of hunter produces these numbers?

[Mr. Rachael, the state wildlife manager] recalled talking to hunters who recently called looking for advice after spending a couple of days in futile pursuit: “You know,” the hunters confessed, “we don’t know how to hunt wolves.”
Neither did J. D. Hagedorn or his father, Marv, a Republican state representative. They did enjoy trying, though.
First light lined the Sawtooth Mountains as Marv Hagedorn, a 9 millimeter strapped to his thigh, a rifle ready, howled with hope into the foothills.
Nothing howled back.
He spotted an elk at ease on a ridge. A grouse ruffled. The sun rose. Canis lupus, if he was out there, kept quiet. He leaned toward his son, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran, and whisper-giggled, “I don’t hear anything, but I don’t know if my howl’s worth anything.”
He added, “This has never been done.”

Hmmm.

2009-09-06T21:32:00.001+08:00

My mother-in-law walked into the kitchen and said she had thought I was watching xiangsheng on the laptop. I was watching Conan O'Brien.

2009-09-05T23:42:00.003+08:00

Today we had Maryann's first birthday party for friends at Zhongshan Park. We seem to like that place for important family celebrations. Lunch afterward was at the Yuhuayuan 御花园 Restaurant inside the park.

For dinner we went to the newly opened Carl's Jr in Raffles City. They really do have 19 different kinds of burgers. We got the Teriyaki Burger and a Ranch Chicken Burger; pretty good stuff. Great service: the ice maker on the soda dispenser seemed to be out of order, so a server ran into the back and got me a cup full of ice. Never had that happen at Ikea.

We caught the Shenhua vs Changchun game at Hongkou Stadium. That area is very 热闹 lively at night and we got decent tickets so we had a good time.

Now it's 12 midnight and Jodi has already hit the sack because she has her first class of the new semester tomorrow. I'm getting ready to retire as well.

2009-09-03T11:45:00.001+08:00

No school assemblies this week... by government order!

Mandatory temperature checks too.

2009-08-30T17:39:00.002+08:00

A few photos from the past couple weeks:

The large sanctuary of the Thanksgiving Church here in Zhangjiang.

Us on the subway this morning, headed to Puxi.

The Shezhuang 社庄庙 Temple near Sanqiao, about a five minute walk from CEIBS.

Charlotte checks things out at the 2009 Shanghai Book Fair.

People's Square subway station volunteers.

2009-08-26T00:22:00.003+08:00

So yeah, we were on TV on Monday night. We got a call on Friday morning from the show's staff, who had seen us on another show where we had participated as audience members a couple months back through a friend who works at SMG. We went to the TV station Friday night for an interview and planning session. On Saturday a crew came to our house and filmed for over 2 hours. Sunday we spent working on homework, as Jodi is near the end of her summer program and I'm getting ready for school next week, and practicing for the program. And Monday was taken up working/in class in the morning, and rehearsal beginning after lunch at the SMG TV station headquarters on Dongfang Rd. The dress rehearsal started at about 6:30 and the live show ran from 9:15 to 10:30. We did OK; I think we got 2nd or 3rd place. We were hoping not to win because it would have meant going back to tape on Wednesday and were just too busy for that right now. Overall, it was a nerve-wracking and very mixed experience that we probably won't repeat.

There are three things that stick out in my mind from the whole debacle:

It drove home for me the point that I'm far from fluent in Chinese in a way I hadn't thought of before. As part of the filming process I had to memorize a lot of Chinese and I found that I'm still missing a lot of the probabilities models that I've built up over the years in English (what words could come after "stormy"? easy in English, not so in Chinese for me). Also, during the home filming time I was often given a general idea of what I was supposed to say and asked to come up with a sentence on the spot and on camera. What I found myself doing was asking for the exact wording and trying to memorize it. It's easy for me to translate from a concept to words in English but I still struggle in Chinese, especially when under pressure and trying to be concise. Finally, during the rehearsals I found myself reacting very slowly and missing a lot of lines because I hadn't cued up the right sentence in my mind. I'm sure this is partly because I'm a slow person by nature, but there's also some sort of connection between the language I'm using the way I process non-linguistic signals that slows things down. I think the best way to get over these weaknesses is just practice. Having gone through the show made me aware of them and knowing is half the battle.
Chinese can't plan or coordinate. That's a horrible generalization, I know, but it proved true once again in this situation. Our routine was constantly being changed around by one director or another. We kept getting asked for or told the same information by different members of the show staff. We kept getting updated information about the show that contradicted earlier information. We couldn't find out what day we'd go on the show until the day before, and weren't told the correct time the show would start until the day of the show itself. We got calls from staff members as late as 1am when they held late-night planning meetings — they are lucky that Jodi and I are night cats (夜猫). This all could have something to do with the median age of the staff being 20-something, but the directors were middle-aged so they really have few excuses: they should be setting the tone. Also, we found them to be really inconsiderate of the guests on the show: wasting our time, keeping us in the dark, and making us feel very unwelcome at the taping of the show. Like I said above, this is a generalization and there were some staff members who were fairly competent. But this is one of the two main reasons we're never going back to do a TV show on an SMG channel without a really good reason. (Hunan TV, are you looking for contestants? Call us!)
Mediocre TV show directors, like mediocre reporters, will tell the story that they want and not the one that reflects reality. I think that a good TV show director would work with the guests to bring out their strong points and tell the special stories that everyone has to tell. In our case though the director was stuck on telling the story of a foreigner who came to China fated to marry the spicy Hunanese girl, and who tries ineptly to burrow into the local culture; I was willing to go along with a little of it (ask me in person why much of that story is fiction), but they were lucky they didn't ask me to dress in a Tang jacket or sing Beijing opera. I might have gone off at them. I choose my battles.

The few highlights were Charlotte getting to shake hands with a giant walking Haibao 海宝, and seeing our friends cheer us on both on stage and at home. Thanks Chris & fam, HCY & friends, and Andrew and Michael & Co! And the Liba crew! 谢谢你们的支持！我们努力了！Also, we did end up with consolation prizes: a case of 盗版王老吉 called 吉吉高 and a deluxe bottled water dispenser. Hmm...

EDIT: a heavily edited video of our appearance has been posted on Youku. It may not be worth your time to watch.

2009-08-23T23:37:00.002+08:00

I saw some tweets about this earlier today, but I only ran into it just now myself: China Telecom injecting ads into webpages as I browse. And I mean, big honking intrusive ads. The funny thing is that they chose to put my first ad on a password-protected upload form that I use the put pictures on my server. The first picture I put up after seeing the ad? This one:

2009-08-23T23:36:00.002+08:00

If you're into watching professional sports, you might wonder (like I did) when during the year China's professional sports teams play their games. Here in Shanghai we have three main professional sports teams: the Shanghai Eagles in baseball, the Shanghai Sharks in basketball, and Shanghai Shenhua in soccer. For my reference and yours, I've mapped their latest seasons along a timeline:

As you can see, we are nearing the end of soccer season. Shenhua's next game is at 7:45pm this Wednesday at Hongkou Stadium.

(Sources: Baseball, Basketball, Soccer.)

2009-08-20T01:10:00.004+08:00

Visible wavelength astronomers are disappointed:

2009-08-19T16:37:00.003+08:00

I feel like I'm off to a really great start to the teaching year, mainly because of having gone through the MEd program over the past six months. First of all, I've been able to put all of my ad hoc theories and gut feelings into viable frameworks from which to build actual practices. And second, I have so many more resources in terms of teaching models and strategies to help students learn, and learn to learn.

I feel like a kid on Christmas morning, going through each toy one by one and figuring out what they do. For example, this morning I attended the Language Exchange Program introduction session. Besides getting signed up to have a language partner this year (getting back into the study habit), I got a chance to analyze some of the teaching methods that May used when she did a quick lesson on basic Chinese.

First lesson was on the importance of pre-testing. This year I know that we have an inordinately large amount of teachers who already have experience in China, and in fact some of them were here specifically to study language. So would giving them a lesson in beginning Chinese be meeting their learning needs? Instead, it would be great to start by finding out what the students actually need to learn and taking it from there. Don't teach redundant knowledge if you don't have to, it's a waste of everybody's time and can be a motivation killer. This point was also driven home to me at the Living in Shanghai/Culture Shock talk yesterday; there are so many facets to Shanghai and to Chinese culture, how do we know that we are hitting the right ones? Wouldn't it be better to have input from the learners themselves?

Second lesson was on the importance of understanding your students and how they understand the same knowledge in different ways. Myself, I'm a person who works well with rules and patterns (see the science connection?) and it would drive me crazy to be taught the way that May was doing the lesson: by repeating words from the pinyin without any explanation of the characters behind them. I am used to learning what each character/phoneme means, finding patterns, and making connections between the different words. On the other hand, I realize that there are people who aren't interested in such a thorough understanding of the backstory, and just want to buy an apple and get the correct change. Finding the analog in my physics class, I would anticipate that I have some students who need to experiment, to prove things for themselves physically, and who love to play with manipulatives. For others, the text or simple memorization is enough; as long as the lesson solves a problem or earns them points, they will be satisfied and motivated. I'm not saying that it's not good to stretch people and ask them to think about learning in new ways, but it's a process that needs to be scaffolded differently for each person.

Finally, context makes a big different in the language you use, as it does in how you talk about or carry out operations in physics. One example May gave was the shortening of 我要一杯啤酒 down to 一杯啤酒 or just 啤酒 in the context of you sitting at a table being listened to by a waiter ready to take your order. Similarly in physics, there are shortcuts to solving certain mathematical or conceptual problems that can be used in the right context, namely after the student has mastered the complete expression and it is implicit that the full operation could be carried out if the situation so demanded.

So it's really fun to play around with these ideas, and it's great to see how they carry over into both my classes and into other areas of education and communication.

I also had a very productive talk with Chris today about our syllabus for Physics 11/12, which we are teaching together. Chris is a very experienced teacher and I had always been a little intimidated talking to him but when we met today I felt so much better equipped and was delighted to find that he shares a lot of the same frustrations that I do and is gung-ho to change around some of the ways we teach and assess our students' learning. It's gearing up to be a very busy and productive year. I'm looking forward to school like I never have before.

From James Kochalka's American Elf: Book Two.

2009-08-15T01:53:00.004+08:00

Grandmas are great!

2009-08-15T01:40:00.001+08:00

Sisters:

2009-08-15T01:00:00.001+08:00

This is actually from earlier this month; after a blustery day I got a great shot of a sun-crowned Lujiazui.

2009-08-09T20:00:00.003+08:00

Photo by sayid on Flickr

Since this information isn't anywhere on the web that Google can find it, I'd like to note that English services at the Thanksgiving Church affiliated with SMIC in Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, Shanghai are held at 8:30 in the morning on Sundays in the small chapel, and that Chinese services start at 10am but you should get there early to get a seat in the main chapel or you will be part of the overflow into the small chapel.

That is all.

2009-07-31T22:53:00.001+08:00

Photo by a friend:

2009-07-30T16:32:00.002+08:00

From our apartment in Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, after a rainstorm:

A close-up of Lujiazui, to show the clouds gliding past the World Financial Center and the Pearl Tower. Wonder how it must be to have an office above the clouds.

2009-07-30T14:42:00.003+08:00

Over the past few weeks I've been hearing reports by people on ShanghaiExpat and Twitter that they couldn't access certain sites even through a proxy or VPN. I ran into the same problem recently over my SSH tunnel to a server in California: strangely, I could load Facebook and Twitter on my home machine but my eeePC couldn't get through.

Trying to get to the root of the problem, I opened the puTTY console and looked at what the SSH tunnel was doing. On my home computer, it was opening connections to the websites that I wanted. But on the eeePC it seemed to be opening connections to random IP addressed, regardless of what I typed into the URL bar. For example, I would type "twitter.com", hit Return, and puTTY showed a connection being opened to some IP address; I copied the IP address and did a reverse DNS lookup in the shell, and found that it was some residential IP in New Jersey — definitely not Twitter!

So I suspected that it was a DNS problem. Typing "about:config" into Firefox's URL bar and then filtering by "dns" showed me the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns option set to false, which told me that Firefox was doing DNS lookups domestically before trying to open the webpage itself (accessing a website is a two-step process: ① finding the IP address of a URL, and then ② asking for the page itself from that IP address). Toggling that option to true fixed the problem and I was back on Facebook/Twitter seconds later.

I began to suspect that all of the people I heard complaining about access were having the same problem as me, though I don't know if the same solution will work for everybody. My suspicions were further confirmed today when I followed a tweet by shizhao to a blog post in Chinese by Antonio (yeah, me too) showing how the GFW is now hijacking DNS queries to a certain subset of sites that it wants to block. Before, the GFW had been blocking sites on step ②, returning the correct IP address and then resetting requests for the webpage. Now, it has been upraded to block access on step ①, returning random, incorrect IP addresses for blocked sites!

Confirming Antonio's post, here's a critical example:

You can see that the first two DNS lookups, "nslookup twitter.com", return different IP addresses for Twitter. The third command asks for a reverse DNS lookup on the second IP address, and the result is that this is an address that doesn't actually exist. If you continue to run nslookup twitter.com over and over (just hit up arrow and Return) you will continue to get random, incorrect IP addresses. If you were a web browser, you would try to connect to one these addresses and get nothing.

Let me translate the conclusions to Antonio's post:

This new upgrade contributes to the worsening state of the Chinese domestic internet:

When you surf to a blocked site the browser will show a "connection has timed out" message, which is even more deceptive than before.
Right now the GFW doesn't use this method for all blocks (for example, the Chinese BBC site still gets the right IP) but it's clear that as this method gains acceptance it will be used more and more due to its effectiveness.
This method trumps OpenDNS, making it even harder to reach blocked sites; you can still edit the /etc/hosts file manually but it's a pain, and setting DNS queries to happen through a proxy makes the process even more complicated:
- HTTP and Socks4 (except Sock4/a) don't support DNS lookup by proxy, so that's out.
- The IE family of browsers (including Maxthon and The World Browser) do local/domestic DNS queries by default, even with a SOCKS proxy configured. [This doesn't match my experience —Micah] DNS over the proxy can be forced with software like Sockscap.
- Firefox also does local DNS queries by default; the solution is to set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true. If you've installed FoxyProxy and are using a Socks proxy you can go into settings and check "Perform DNS lookups over proxy" [Or something like that; translating back from the Chinese. —Micah].

Back to my own commentary, as far as I know this upgrade happened a month or two ago.

UPDATE: Commenter Nart has been seeing this happen for a while now. It must have only recently been applied to the more popular sites that caught my attention. See his weblog:
http://www.nartv.org/2008/09/03/dns-and-the-gfw/
http://www.nartv.org/2007/07/10/dns-tampering-in-china/

2009-07-24T13:15:00.000+08:00

No explanation needed! Ikea for dinner and Tudou housewarming party tonight.

2009-07-24T07:55:00.003+08:00

People I met at the 29 Giraffes opening last night: Ben, Jutta, Lisa, Lindi, Shane, Michael. Ice creams consumed in the post-show father-daughter soiree: 1 (Baskin Robbins Rocky Road). Note: if you go see the exhibit, the directions say 796 Julu Rd, but you should enter through 786 and turn left.

Top Floor Circus Show coming up August 9. It's now 9:30am, time to take Charlotte swimming.

2009-07-18T00:19:00.002+08:00

Tonight Jodi, Charlotte and I went out to dinner at a little Vietnamese place behind Longyang Rd (would go back again!), then to visit the home of the prof for a class that Jodi finished up this last semester. On the way home we stopped in at Coldstone for desert. They're doing a 2-for-1 deal for customers with a student ID. Jodi had forgotten to bring hers, but we didn't want that much ice cream anyways. We got a frozen yogurt with blueberries and chocolate chips.

2009-07-17T22:49:00.002+08:00

Peijin:

IT’s not only about me carving out a niche for myself, but somehow creating and maintaining that kind of environment.

"Falling" into a community that suits you is lucky, boring and unsatisfying.

2009-07-17T00:56:00.003+08:00

Tonight I made my first trip to the Boxing Cat Brewery for a meetup with some blogger friends from around Shanghai. Topics of conversation included airplane disaster near-misses, environmental horror stories, and Dan Washburn's hotel room.

Then I hopped over to Yuyintang to hear Lindi/Miyadudu's collaboration with the French duo Lost Data. Most of her/their songs were new, moody and awesome, but they also did a "cover" of a Cold Fairyland song with added digital effects and it blew me away. Too bad I had to leave halfway through the set to catch the metro back home! That was disappointing.

2009-07-15T20:34:00.003+08:00

Since John shared his summer reading list and I'm also doing a lot of reading this summer, I thought I'd join in with my own.

First, a bit of background. Back in May near the end of the schoolyear, I came across a link to Paul French's weblog and read his commentary on The Independent's "Black and white and red all over: Left-wing reads". Since I have socialist sympathies (China, Christianity, etc), I decided to check out a few of those. By the end of the schoolyear I had finished Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" (great book, it's now on my list of books to give to Charlotte to read when she turns 16) and had read almost all the way through Tressel's "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" (by 2/3 of the way through this monster I was wishing for an abridged version).

At about that time, the AskMetafilter post on the Great American Novel caught my eye because it overlapped with Paul French's recommendations and because I like to read book recommended to me by people I know (or "know," in the case of internet communities). From these sources, and from an off-hand remark by Adam Minter, I built my summer reading list:

F. Scott Fitzgerald - "The Great Gatsby"
Willa Cather - "My Antonia" (finishing this now)
John Dos Passos - "U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money"
??? (will have more time, still looking for recommendations)

Of course this summer I'm also completing 4 intensive week-long Masters courses in Education, so I'm reading and writing a lot for those. Otherwise my list would be longer, trust me.

The interesting thing is that not one of these has been a paper book: every single one was downloaded to and read with Anyview on my un-smart Samsung cellphone. I've read more books in English in the past few months that I've had Anyview installed than in the last few years I've been in China.

2009-07-15T14:36:00.002+08:00

When I was first in Shanghai I used to do these cellphone photo posts where I would dump all of my cellphone pics onto the computer and describe each one. Now that it's summer and I have time again...

The other day after Jodi's classes I took Charlotte downtown to go out to dinner with Jodi and some classmates. We got there first, so we had some time to walk around the Jing'an Temple area. I knew there was a Baskin Robbins up the road, so we stopped to spoil our dinner. It was the first Rainbow Sherbet I've had in years, and it was delicious. Charlotte agreed.

This was our dinner. Lisa, one of Jodi's classmates that we both know from back when we worked together, is from Lanzhou and insisted on taking us out for Western food. When we reached the Jing'an branch, we found it closed, so we taxied over to the shopping center at Xietu Rd and Tianyaoqiao Rd and dined at 敦煌小停. Lisa ordered some snacks and the rest of us ordered main dishes, and it was delicious. Instead of making nebulous statements about the quality of restaurants, Jodi and I always phrase our judgments in terms of "would we go back again?" and the answer for this place is a resounding yes. Jodi had the Lanzhou lamian, I had lamb paomo, and we snacked on fried spiced potato slices, spicy cummin lamb sandwiches 羊肉夹馍, lamb skewers, doughy corn nuggets, and white translucent wheat noodles in peanut sauce and chili oil 凉皮. Prices were reasonable, too, probably about RMB 40 pp.

The 张江环线, one of two buses we can take from our house to the nearest subway station, just got a makeover. The "yellow bus" is now the "blue and white bus", with seats that feel a bit cleaner and wider, but otherwise about the same as the old buses: same layout, same station announcements, same saucy drivers.

2009-07-15T14:32:00.002+08:00

Good news. The screen in taxis are starting to get off buttons, some in hardware and some in software.

I was just learning to turn the volume off and throw a coat over the headrest when summer arrived, so this is good news to me.

2009-07-15T14:27:00.002+08:00

A morning at Jodi’s ECNU continuing-education Preschool Psychology class

The classroom
A long, air-conditioned, flat classroom, 15 rows of desks split by a central aisle, four students on each side. A projector screen behind the professor, a microphone system, big south-facing windows with closed curtains to block out the sun. Double-door at the very front and very back of the classroom. The prof sits at a desk on a slightly raised platform at the front of the class. The class is about 70% full.

The teacher
Middle-aged woman, speaking Mandarin with a Shanghainese accent and breaking into Shanghainese for examples of a sentence or so, about half the time repeating the words in Mandarin (I think). Likes to repeat phrases: “不一样的，对不对，不一样的，啊”. Teaching style is pure lecture, guiding students through the book/reading, supplementing it with examples. Points out definitions and explanations that will be test questions and gives students time to write down or underline. Occasionally asks questions of the whole class, students answer quietly to nobody in particular or among themselves.

The students
About 100 students, 2 male and the rest female. Median and average age pretty similar, probably about 24-25. Most students have brought some sort of drink in a bottle or tuperware, mostly tea or water. Back 5 rows are visibly more restless and chatty than the front rows. The teacher will occasionally in the same lecture-monotone remind students to pay attention, but generally leaves us (we’re 4th from the back) alone. Chatting is loudest in the early morning, gets quieter in the period before lunch. Most students are following along in their textbooks, underlining or taking notes in separate notebooks. Students are also (without the teacher caring, sometimes even commenting on): texting, sleeping with their heads down on the desk, working on sewing/crafts, chatting, absent-mindedly flipping through the textbook, snacking, staring through the window out across Changning district (oops, that was me).

2009-07-15T13:41:00.003+08:00

A friend just e-mailed me asking about my plans for the eclipse. Although the article in Shanghai Talk said I'd be at the Yangshan Deep Water Harbor (and I still think that's the ideal viewing place), I'm changing my plans to just stick around home and be on time to my Masters class that afternoon. The most common question I get is, can we go up to the observatory? The answer is that you could, but the fact is that the eclipse will be just as impressive with a small scope and the naked eye (and that the observatory computer is acting up and I don't know if it will be in working order by then).

I'll be back behind the elementary school from ~8am-10am with a telescope, camera, binoculars, and hopefully a pinhole setup. I ordered some eclipse glasses and filters for the telescope that should be arriving today. Maybe I'll send out an e-mail about that…

So if you want to join me out here in Zhangjiang, keep your ears open for more details. I'll post any info on the weblog too. Eclipse is next Wednesday!

2009-07-12T23:37:00.001+08:00

Hi girls!

And happy 3rd anniversary, sweetie!

2009-07-11T00:57:00.004+08:00

This is a pretty typical lunch by Jodi's mom. The top dish is a favorite of mine: green peppers, dried tofu and fatty pork fried up with spicy black bean sauce. It's especially good when you mix the dribblings with rice to finish off the meal. The other dish is simply stir-fried cabbage. Jodi's mom made a variation the other day and mixed it with sesame sauce, which was delicious. But then again I'm a sucker for sesame sauce.

Charlotte and Maryann out on the playground. Maryann is more mobile than Charlotte was at that age, but Charlotte made the transition from sitting to walking a lot faster than Maryann. The little one still needs somebody to walk her around or else she gets fussy. There's some things she doesn't mind just standing around hanging onto, like the springy whale on the playground.

Lots more recent photos on Flickr, and our trip home from Carrefour (Chinese).

2009-07-11T00:48:00.002+08:00

Taken at Carrefour:

2009-07-03T03:08:00.000+08:00

2009-07-02T00:34:00.000+08:00

Two quotes from recent reading material. First, from Tressell's "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists":

Work, boys, work and be contended
So long as you've enough to buy a meal
For if you will but try, you'll be wealthy—bye and bye
If you'll only put your shoulder to the wheel.

And from a recent Southern Weekly article, 《科教书：删得掉的文字删不掉的“机密”》:

现在，时隔十年后，当年的学生们才恍然大悟，自己的科教书曾被如此“花季护航”。

Reading this article on the "uncensoring" of public school textbooks since after Deng Xiaoping took over in the late 70s post-facto compounded my frustration at watching an obviously-censored version of Transformers 2: cut scenes and garbled words that interfered with the plot made the movie even less enjoyable than it would have been in its original complete form. Near the end of the article, another paragraph that puts Transformers into perspective:

比如《口技》中的房事，还要调查一下中学生的生理卫生课的开展情况；《葫芦僧判断葫芦案》被删的“酷爱男风，不好女色”，虽然同性恋已经一步步突破了法律惩罚、社会偏见和立法阻碍，但大部分中学生仍在农村地区。

That last line speaks to me the hidden prejudices that handicap us.

2009-06-30T08:55:00.005+08:00

It's local election time in our neighborhood. Banners are up entreating residents to "Seriously and studiously carry out the legal regulations regarding elections, and ensure the smooth running of an election according to the law."

Posted in the bulletin board at the gate to our community is the list of candidates for being elected representatives to the People's Congress, posted by the Congress 筹备组 (preparatory team?).

Since I'm a sucker for data, this name list is interesting to me.

	Sex	Year	Month	Ethnic	Party	Edu	Work
1	F	1950	6	Han	CCP	MS	gov
2	M	1964	7	Han	Peasants	BA	gov
3	M	1958	8	Han	CCP	AA	gov
4	F	1962	1	Han	CCP	AA	gov
5	F	1944	12	Han	CCP	MS	gov
6	F	1971	1	Han	CCP	AA	gov
7	M	1956	11	Han	CCP	AA	gov
8	M	1955	2	Han	CCP	AA	gov
9	M	1952	3	Han	CCP	MS	gov
10	M	1958	6	Han	Public	AA	com
11	M	1952	3	Han	CCP	MS	gov
12	M	1951	4	Han	CCP	MS	com
13	M	1962	2	Han	CCP	HS	com
14	M	1971	4	Mongol	Public	Masters	com
15	F	1949	5	Han	CCP	HS	gov
16	M	1958	10	Han	CCP	HS	gov
17	F	1941	9	Han	CCP	MS	gov

Some trends:

A majority of candidates were born in the 50s. The oldest will be 68 this year, the (two) youngest will be 38.
Education is inversely correlated with age, and the most common levels of education are completion of middle school and AA degrees (junior college/vocational).
Eighty-two percent of the candidates are members of the Chinese Communist Party. The only other party represented is the Peasants and Workers Democratic Party.
Three quarters of the candidates already work for the government, mostly on neighborhood committees, with titles like secretary, Party team leader, 留守人员(?), doctor at a health clinic, and Party branch committee member.
The private sector candidates come from middle and upper management.
The most interesting candidate — in that his background is very different from the rest of the group — is candidate #14. Besides being one of the youngest candidates, born in 1971, he claims Mongolian heritage status, is not a member of any political party, is the only candidate with any higher education (MA), and works as a manager in a consulting company.

It would take a lot of background information to explain these, which I don't have time for right now. The next step is a narrowing down of the list through discussion by the 选民小组, and then the actual election will take place. It's all laid out in the 上海市区县及乡镇人民代表大会代表直接选举实施细则 (Detailed Rules for the Shanghai Municipal District and Township People's Congress Representative Direct Elections), for those interested.

2009-06-17T08:33:00.003+08:00

Incredibly, the UI designers for our office printer seem to have geared it towards people who feel compelled to press the same button over and over again to communicate their urgency to the machine (like at crosswalks). Pressing the green ✔ button over and over again seems to solve any just about any problem aside from paper jams.

2009-06-01T15:56:00.003+08:00

From our Sunday outing to Jiaxing (嘉兴), a little Hangzhou with rice-dumplings. Forty-five minutes by train from Shanghai.

■ Departed SH at 1pm, RMB 13 for a 46 minute train ride to Jiaxing.
■ Taxi to Nanhu south gate.
■ Boat tour of Nanhu, island, pagoda, etc. RMB 60 pp.
■ Lunch at small local restaurant, finished off with rice dumpling from Wufangzhai.
■ Taxi to Yuehe Laojie (月河老街), a restored water-town street in downtown Jiaxing.
■ Dinner along the river at 月庭轩; good food, great service.
■ Taxi back to the station, 8:30 bullet train back to SH.

More photos on Flickr.

2009-05-18T17:22:00.002+08:00

I just sent this off in an e-mail, and thought it would make a good weblog post too:

I have to admit that I've been using the school observatory for a relatively short time, so it's not in great shape and I'm not totally plugged into "the scene" here in Shanghai. But I'm happy to share what I know, which I will summarize in a few paragraphs.

Shanghai today is NOT a good place to do astronomy. The earliest astronomers in Shanghai were the the Jesuits, who had an observatory by the St. Ignatius Cathedral in Xujiahui. Light pollution must have been a problem for them back then because they built a second observatory out on Sheshan (I'm not a historian; all this stuff is Google-able). When the local Chinese took over, they used the Shanghai location to build the offices of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, which includes an actual observatory, but they do all the serious work out in Sheshan. Even Sheshan is not far away enough to avoid the effects of the city lights, though; I hear it's being slowly phased out and a new observatory being built in Zhejiang to replace it. China is in a period of heavy telescope construction right now, with big telescopes just built or in planning for Beijing, Yunnan and Guizhou.

My school has an observatory, one of a few schools in the area to have one. It's the only international school that has one as far as I know. It's not big, a 220mm Cassegrain reflector, F13 or so. It's equipped to look at the sun, works at night for objects visible in the city sky, and came with a CCD camera for imaging faint objects (I haven't gotten it to work yet, though). Like I said, light pollution is horrible in Shanghai, giving the sky a tint of background light that washes out most interesting objects. Look at the Pearl Tower from Puxi on a smoggy day, and then imagine what would it would look like if it were hundreds of light years away. Zhangjiang High-Tech Park is particularly bad because it has lots of factories that work around the clock and keep floodlights on at the factory campuses.

Even though light pollution is bad, this doesn't meant that all hope is lost. There are still many things in the sky worth looking at. In the city, the best thing targets for observing are the Moon, the planets, the sun (if you have the right equipment!), the Int'l Space Station (ISS), and Iridium flares. The moon is great even just through binoculars. As it grows and shrinks, the terminator line between light and dark is the best place to view shadows from craters and other features. Planets come and go on the order of months, so they're good targets if you want to take things slow. Lately Saturn and its rings have been dominating the late night sky. The rings are slowly angling so that they'll be pointing directly at us and almost invisible in September, so catch them while you can. Venus is easy to see in the morning and evenings, lately favoring the morning. With the correct, quality equipment ("arc welder's glass"), it's possible to get a look at the surface of the sun during the daytime and hunt for sunspots. The Sun has been very quiet lately with zero sunspots, but we're supposed to be coming up to a maximum in 2012 (Mayan armageddon and all that) so it's worth keeping an eye on. The ISS and Iridium communication satellites are fun to look for; when they make certain angles to the sun they can look like very bright stars moving across the sky. The good thing about them is that their routes are predictable, so various websites will provide reliable forecasts of ISS passes and Iridium flare sightings. (I list some below.)

I've be happy to host you at the school's observatory, both day or night. As long as the weather is clear, I'm pretty sure there will be something worth looking at. Also, it'd be worth talking/researching a bit what telescopes/binoculars are best for city viewing.

If you're doing an astronomy article, it's almost a MUST to mention the eclipse coming up this July. I think it'd be worth making a daytrip out to Nanhui or farther to get the full effect.

Here are websites that I recommend for Shanghai astronomers:

http://www.calsky.com/cs.cgi?&Meteo= (weather; main site also has e-mail reminders for Iridium flares, ISS)
http://heavens-above.com/ (maps of the sky)
http://spaceweather.com/ (space "news")
http://bbs.astron.ac.cn/ (Shanghai astronomy BBS; Chinese)
http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=520 (Adam Minter on the Jesuit observatory)
http://www.shao.ac.cn/ (SH Astro Observatory site)

2009-04-30T02:04:00.002+08:00

Went observing tonight because the observatory is finally in working order, the sky was relatively clear, and I had some free time. Things I tried that worked: using SkyMap to obtain the coordinates of celestial objects and then using the telescope's Seek mode to automatically aim towards them (the Moon, Saturn, Alpha Leonis, Polaris); using a "found" object to recalibrate the telescope's position; photographing objects in focus through the finderscope. Things I tried that didn't work: photographing objects through the main scope; imaging objects with the CCD camera. To-do: put a thermometer in the observatory; characterize the unlabeled eyepieces in the observatory, which basically means all of the eyepieces; have IT check out why the computer doesn't recognize the onboard soundcard or the PCI video capture card; print out a list of the Messier objects and add it to the observatory handbook; lobby the school for one of those "city-lights filters," because the light pollution in Zhangjiang is just horrible.

2009-04-26T09:25:00.003+08:00

Last night for dinner I decided to take Charlotte out (Jodi stayed home to study) for a father-daughter dinner and to pick up diapers at Zhangjiang Carrefour. We took the Dongchuan Line bus to the Orchid Gardens (玉兰香苑) area on the outskirts of Zhangjiang to look for food. That area is an earthy, Chinese-diverse area that feels very vibrant and alive to me. There's restaurants from all over China, tons of people out on the street at night, and lots of "illegal activity", as in unlicensed taxis and street vendors. Two funny things I experienced: a guy wearing one of those "I ♥ China" T-shirt where the heart has the stars from the Chinese national flag, except it said "I ♥ Tibet"; and James Taylor playing over the muzak system in Carrefour. Been a long time since I heard James Taylor.

2009-04-14T08:13:00.003+08:00

Charlotte:

"Banama" (Banana)
"Piba-biller" (Peanut butter, rhymes with caterpillar)
"皮豆" (potato in Chinese)
"maminnow" (potato in English; also tomato)
"'Aika" (Micah; also calls me Daddy, 爸爸 and 老公)

Maryann:

"Bababababa" (???)

2009-03-24T23:54:00.002+08:00

2009-03-23T13:11:00.004+08:00

A while ago I wrote a post about English-language education in Shanghai. One of the resources that I said was available in print was a "book on the topic of Shanghai international schools." Today I finally went down to the school library and had our helpful librarian find it so that I can post the details here. The book is "Stadler's Education Guide", and is available in Beijing and Shanghai editions. It is split in two parts, the first consisting of articles covering international education in China in all its facets, and the second consisting of profiles of individual schools. After flipping through it for a few minutes, my impressions are that the writing is the same style as in China's expat rags, but the information is comprehensive and, at least for our school, relatively on target though without painting a complete picture. Since the edition in our library dates to 2006, I'd definitely recommend backing up any reading with a visit to the actual school before you commit.

2009-03-22T22:51:00.003+08:00

Since the beginning of the semester, Jodi has had class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and on Sunday all day. This means that I get Charlotte and Maryann all to myself on the two weekdays from the end of work until bedtime, and on Sunday from wake-up to about 5PM. It's been a challenge re-learning their habits, schedules, and needs, and taking care of them all by myself, but the process has its rewards. I've been getting to cook on Sundays, learning how far along the kids are in their development, and building Charlotte's fluency in English.

Today, for example, Jodi fed Maryann a bottle when she left at 8am or so, and put her back to bed. I slept in until about 9am when Charlotte started calling from the girls' bedroom ("'icah, 'icah!") to let me know that Maryann was awake. I threw on some clothes, changed a couple of diapers, and made breakfast for me and Charlotte consisting of a few steamed buns, apricot jelly and a couple mugs of milk. Maryann is now beginning to explore solid foods, so we had some fun feeding her pieces of steamed rice bun. Bundling up the girls, we hopped downstairs and across the street to the new baby supply store and bought a refill of baby formula for Maryann. Then back home we spent some time playing in the girls' bedroom, sitting on the bay window sill and watching the construction going on outside on the light rail line.

By 11:30 Maryann was getting restless so I fed her a bottle and put her to bed. Charlotte played music and drew on scratch paper, and I cleared out the RSS reader until about 12:30, when it was time to fix lunch. Charlotte pulled a stool into the kitchen and by 1:30 we were chowing down on simple spaghetti and carrot-raisin salad. Changed a poopy diaper and did the dishes while listening to techno on the laptop, and then Maryann woke up and needed a diaper change as well. After a little playtime in the bedroom, I took advantage of Maryann's good mood to jump in shower, but she started bawling before I even had my clothes off. No problem, she needs to learn to monitor her own temper, so I steeled myself to her cries and proceeded with the bath. Now clean and dressed, I fixed Maryann a bottle and sat down to watch cartoons on 哈哈少儿 with Charlotte for a while.

We played around with the 喜羊羊 balloons we bought at Metro on Thursday, and then I dressed up Charlotte and Maryann in coats and shoes and we took off on the dot at 5pm. A taxi to Zhangjiang subway station and a short hop on Line 2 got an awake me and two sleeping girls to People's Square by 5:50 or so, where we met Jodi for dinner at 老克勒 (thanks for the reminder, John). Charlotte was in a grumpy mood after a rough nap on my shoulder, so dinner took a lot longer than it should have. But we were back home by 9am, and a quick girls-to-bed process means that Jodi's reading threads on Liba and I'm checking e-mail, thinking about plans for tomorrow, and writing this post while enjoying the electric blanket in bed.

Signing off.

2009-03-17T02:40:00.001+08:00

2005

2009-03-13T12:06:00.001+08:00

A confluence of education, language, and sharism/open source:

(Collected by houshuang.)

2009-02-27T03:08:00.004+08:00

Tonight I'm doing some survey response analysis for the introductory course in the MEd program at school, and as I was grouping interviewees by age and skimming over their responses it dawned on me that I was doing a mental word frequency analysis and that there might be a more efficient and fun way to do this. Following that train of thought, I quickly recalled Wordle, the Java applet that does makes so-called "tag clouds" out of any text you give it. So I fired up the site, enabled Java and, voilà:

That's the word cloud for how elementary school students responded when asked about what teachers do. Nifty!

2009-02-20T00:16:00.002+08:00

This video had me in stitches: the combination of the music/lyrics, the woman, the location, the passers-byers' comments, and the note at the end. Shanghai's got class.

2009-02-19T23:55:00.002+08:00

Ever since Jodi got me a new phone for my birthday, I've been listening to music on my walk to school in the morning. The problem is that I walk about 8 minutes and I'm too lazy to load up the phone with new songs regularly, which means I ended up listening to the same old songs every morning.

So I decided to do something I've been talking about for a long time and start listening to the radio instead. My phone can do FM radio when the earphones are plugged in, and eight minutes is just enough to catch a few news stories. It's a good way to start the day; it takes me back to high school when I used to read the paper each morning over breakfast. Or back to when we live at Zhongshan Park and I read the paper on my morning commute. Language-wise, it's nice to have"news Chinese" reinforced orally, something I need to do since I spend so much time reading news stories online. The station I'm listening to is 98.1; I haven't caught the name yet but it seems to have a consistent stream of news stories when I walk to work in the morning and come home at about 4:45pm.

2009-02-13T16:32:00.002+08:00

I just updated the English translations of the Shanghai bus routes that I maintain. Since the last time I updated them, the Shanghai Traffic Administration changed the format of their website so I had to tweak my code to match it. In the intervening months, many lines have changed stops or changed numbers and I was getting more e-mails from people looking for lines that exist but weren't in the list of translations. Also, I made a few small tweaks to the translation algorithm so that some stop names have better translations this time around. There are still bound to be mistakes in the over one thousand routes; if they are major and keeping you from easily using the translations, then please e-mail me. If you can't find the route you are looking for or just want directions from one place to another, e-mail me as well. Happy traveling and thanks for supporting public transportation!

2009-02-12T09:07:00.006+08:00

A couple days ago in Physics class I had a group of students set up a regelation demo, and we observed the ice melting and refreezing as it was slowly sliced through by a metal wire. The block of ice came from a plastic take-out tub that I froze overnight, so the "cloud" that you usually see in the middle of ice cubes was large and very obvious. One of the students wondered why ice cubes have the white cloud.

The best hypothesis that I can synthesize from the information I found through Google is that the cloud comes from two sources: air that forms bubbles, and minerals or other impurities.

The solubility of air in water goes down as the temperature of water drops, so air comes out of the water and forms bubbles. Bubbles at the edges of the ice cube have a chance to escape to the outside, but after the edges freeze the bubbles in the core of the ice cube are trapped and embedded in the ice as it freezes the rest of the way. One way to avoid these bubbles is by boiling the water first to deaerate it. You can then try putting the boiling water directly into the freeze to observe the Mpemba effect: "in certain specific circumstances, warmer water freezes faster than colder water". Also, if you boil water, cool it, and then boil it again, you will notice air bubbles forming on the inside of the boiling container before the first boil, but not before the second boil because the water is already deaerated. We will try that in class today.

It's possible to eliminate clouding from minerals by using distilled water, or by using this interesting method used in ice manufacturing plants:

A technique used in most ice manufacturing plants that make large blocks of ice is to put a tube in the center of the container of water that is to be frozen. Through the tube they bubble a very low pressure stream of air. Before the tube becomes ice-bound, they remove it, and they pour or suction the water that is left in the center of the ice block away. All of the impurities -- dirt, dissolved air and minerals -- are forced into this water by the crystallizing ice. They fill the void with fresh water (or not) and continue freezing. The core of the block is clouded but the rest of the block is clear. If the core is not refilled and frozen, the entire block is clear.

See the white cloud?

2009-02-06T22:46:00.002+08:00

There's a few things that I ran across on the Chinese web today that caught my eye. First is Isaac Mao's re-ordering of the "Rules For Elementary School Students" published by the Ministry of Education in 1981 and revised in 2004. He makes changes like taking the #1 rule and making it #10. Read his post (in Chinese) for the full reasoning behind the re-ordering; it's good. Isaac got a cynical reception at the Danwei post where Adam S interviewed him at the Bloggercon, but I admire him a lot and I like to support him. My translation:

Revised Revised Rules for Elementary School Students

Love nature, cherish your living environment.

Be honest and trustworthy, one in word and deed, correct your shortcomings, and be responsible.

Love unity, unite with your classmates, help one another, and care for others.

Be filial to your parents, respect your teachers, and be courteous to others.

Work hard, be frugal and thrifty, do on your own what you are able to do.

Have self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and develop healthy and civil habits.

Hold life dear, be safe, excercise your body, and keep good hygiene.

Love science, study diligently, question and be curious, delight in investigation, take part in social practice and beneficial activities.

Respect the law, increase your awareness of the law, honor school discipline and punishments, show respect for social ethical values.

Love the motherland, love the people, love the Chinese Communist Party.

Another is this article copied on the Pro-State In Flames weblog about an earlier essay in the Xinmin Evening Post entitled "New Heroes Rush The Bund, An Elite Not Delimited By Hukou" containing an inflammatory quote that had the Shanghainese up in arms, something about speaking Shanghainese in Lujiazui being a mark of low-class because of the high concentration of non-Shanghainese that live and work there. From the post:

The article's publication lead to protests by the Shanghainese people. Even retired former national government leaders [*coughJiangZemin?cough* -Micah] expressed concern over the matter in a phone call to the Shanghai Municipal Committee Secretary Yu Zhengsheng. Yu himself gave the order to resolve the problem, and yesterday the Xinmin Evening Post convened a panel to discuss the issue, and also published an apology admitting that the essay "violated our relationship with the Shanghainese people."

At the Chinese Bloggercon in Guangzhou last November, I sat down to lunch one day with my frequent acquaintance at these tech events, Aether from Tudou. One of the people at the table was a stocky, jovial guy with a quick wit and clearly respected by his tablemates. Impressed, I later found out from John Kennedy that this guy blogs under the name Hecaitou. Adding him to Google Reader, I've found him to be one of the Chinese language weblogs to which I look forward to slogging my way through each new post. Take a look; today he has an insightful piece into one facet of the current crackdown on online content:

It's like the guy who got 20 years of hard labor in Xinjiang for "dirty dancing" in the 1980s. Today when he gets out he sees all the "saunas" and "KTVs" and all he can do is let out a long sigh: Fuckin' A, nowadays prostitution gets you a fine of a few thousand; me, I did a dance and got 20 years.

2009-02-06T12:09:00.003+08:00

(Back story: This week I am renewing my work visa, and since Charlotte is my dependent she had to have her picture taken to apply along with me. I took her to the photo studio three times, the third time bringing Mom along, before she would agree to take the picture. The first two times she fought and screamed her way out, and the third time took a lot of coaxing, pleading, and a candy from the photographer lady before she finally agreed to wipe the tears off and stand for a single photo. The above is a failed attempt from the third session. Then we went out for dinner at Jepsons (and get to stay in China another year), so it was all worth it.)

2009-02-04T03:40:00.002+08:00

(From GraphJam, via Zawodny.)

2009-01-27T21:06:00.003+08:00

Happy Chinese New Year

2009-01-23T00:33:00.001+08:00

According to an article in today's Xinmin Evening Post, the Waibaidu/Garden Bridge at the north end of the Bund will be back in place by the end of February. The bridge was removed and taken to Pudong for repairs a few months ago.