Timely Snow

This is a picture from my window of the student dorms (the completed buildings) and continuing construction at the Beijing Normal University Zhuhai campus.

The whole idea is kind of amazing to me.

I’m just back from a trip to Southern China, including my first visits to Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Macao. The picture shows my colleague, Zhang Houcan, in front of the symbol of Zhuhai, the “fisher girl statue.”

I’ve long been curious to see this part of China, because it is certainly the most economically vibrant and a place [...]

While downloading some software this afternoon to (hopefully) set up a WebQ server, I came across this article by the ever-interesting Clary Shirky on the Semantic Web effort. It’s interesting both for the content and for the way in which basic philosophical approaches, in all their glory (?) are becoming concrete in a strange way. [...]

Sunday I will travel to Zhuhai (Pearl Sea, I think) with Zhang Houcan, to visit the branch campus of Beijing Normal University. The experiments seem to be going pretty well (wait: what’s that ominous music?), so it should be okay for me to skip town for a few days.

In preparation, I’ve been trying to find [...]

Tonight I watched the new Matrix (黑客帝国—hei4 ke4 di4 guo2—black guest [or “hacker”] empire] movie in a theater near campus. In order to premiere it at the same time here as elsewhere, it was released in English with Chinese subtitles, which I didn’t mind at all. Next week they’ll show a version dubbed in Chinese, [...]

This is a picture of the XinDong (“New East”—named after the Hong Kong benefactor who donated it) building where the Psychology department is located, and the big bell built to celebrate the centennial of BNU. A couple of inches of wet snow fell last night, and many trees and branches are down around campus, but [...]

Beijing is having its first snow of the season and I can hear students outside, even though it’s night, making a ruckus and acting like very young children.

The name of this website comes from the Chinese expression in the banner: 瑞雪兆丰年—ruxuě zho fēngnin—or “timely snow predicts an abundant year” (i.e., a good harvest).

I was struck [...]

Last night I went out to dinner with Fang Ge and Fang Fuxi and Jing Qicheng and his wife Wang Xingan. For some reason the restaurant was plastered with the double-happiness posters you can see in this picture of me, Jing Qicheng, and Wang Xingan. I asked the waitress and she said there had been [...]

I’ve got a cold, something I hate having happen over here. The picture has nothing to do with having a cold; it’s just something who’s English description caught my eye as I was shopping for some throat lozenges. As the Chinese name makes clear, It’s really fortified sugar for old people (i.e., “For the aged“). [...]

One difference in intellectual styles between China and the U.S. is the length of time people will sit in talks. Yesterday I attended a seminar in the lab, where a recent graduate, Li Hong 李鸿 or maybe 李红 gave a talk about the McGurk effect (effects of visual information on perception of sound) and on [...]