Timely Snow

This is very interesting (thanks to Simon Elegant) from a report on cleaning up China’s air:

One of the most surprising findings was that “the kinds of technology
currently being adopted in China are not cheap. They’re not buying
junk, and in some cases the plants are employing state-of-the-art
technology.”

The findings suggest that emissions levels from Chinese
powerplants, he said, “depend almost entirely on the quality of the
coal they use. When they’re hit by price spikes, they buy low-grade
coal.” Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur
emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade
anthracite comes mostly from China’s northwest and must travel long
distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost. Contrary to what
many outsiders believe, the Chinese state has substantially improved
its ability to implement and enforce rules on technology standards. It
has been slower, however, to develop such abilities for monitoring the
day-to-day operations of energy producers.

I’m not sure where it was, but I read that the medical changes that actually increase longevity have been due less to breakthrough treatments than to the calibration of doses and regimens, etc. I suspect that there’s a more general moral here that applies to education as well.

On the one hand, I’m really glad no one is transcribing what I say. On the other hand, I have no idea what this means:

You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena.

from last night’s debate.

It’s hard to imagine 13,000 hospitalized babies due to the milk contamination scandal in China.

And even “big white rabbit” candy, which I’ve been eating since my first trip to China in 1983, has melamine.

Tomorrow Adobe will announce the next version of their video processing software (CS4, if you’re keeping score at home). It’s supposed to include AVCHD support (hurray!) and include Adobe Soundbooth, which will provide automatic speech to text conversion (hip-hip-hurray!). I just downloaded the Soundbooth beta and may play with it tonight to see if it might be a useable tool for us. Not holding my breath, but this is something that could be very far from perfect and still useful. Or not…

Nvidia to Offer Its Chips in the New Cray Desktop - GigaOM

Now just for political video, but I’m glad to see that this is in development.

My Buffalo Terastation network attached drive seems to have a broken drive. I’ve ordered a new one (or as close to the original as you can now get), and I guess I’ll have a chance to find if RAID 5 is all it’s cracked up to be.

I’d already been considering getting a DROBO, which has its own RAID-like setup (probably bad) and allows you to upgrade drives one by one (very, very good).

Last night I saw a very interesting play, “A disappearing number” by a theatre (they’re British) group called Complicite. It was loosely about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy, along with another story about the star-crossed relationship between a British mathematician named Ruth and her mathematically illiterate Indian American businessman husband. It was very, very well staged, using blackboards and spatial dimensions in ways I haven’t seen before.

You can see a discussion of the play on YouTube here.

There was a weird math phobic vibe to parts of the production, particularly an introduction that included a few tricks and expressed wonder that someone might know the sum of the series 1+2+4+8+16.

In the relationship between Ruth and her husband much was made of the fact that the sum of the series 1 + 1/N converges on 2, and much was made of convergent and divergent series. It seemed odd to me that they didn’t just use the series 1/N, which sums to 1 as N approaches infinity, which could have an E Pluribus Unum vibe to it.

Well worth seeing if you get a chance.

from Language Log:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn’t win it, but rather it was stolen from him. (loosely adapted from this page)

This would have been appealing as we waited to be screened in Berlin…

I think the Obama campaign could appropriate the University of Illinois’ slogan, “Always Thinking,” which apparently they no longer use…