Timely Snow

China goes to college - in a big way | csmonitor.com
Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then president of China, spoke on the 100th anniversary of top-ranked Peking University and issued his bracing call for change, overall college enrollment in China has roughly tripled. The country now outpaces leaders like the US, India, Russia, and Japan [...]

WSJ.com - To Master the Art Of Solving Crimes, Cops Study Vermeer
One Monday earlier this year, when New York’s Frick Collection was closed to the public, about 15 New York police officers were ushered inside. The officers, some wearing their holsters, solemnly gathered around a conference table in an ornate, wood-paneled room. Having no idea [...]

Oneaday
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(da4 qi4 wan3 cheng2)
…now, why don’t the characters show up?

Bloglines
I’ll need to check this out sometime — interesting way of putting together a personal newspaper.

How Do Cycling Teams Work? - What Lance Armstrong’s “domestiques” do. By Daniel Engber
This is the first time I’ve had access to TV coverage of the Tour de France. The Outdoor Living Network broadcasts the race each evening, and it’s fascinating. What is most fascinating is that the announcers often say things that seem to [...]

Google Maps Transparencies
This is really neat. I don’t know why Google Maps and Google Earth use a pretty inferior aerial photo of Ann Arbor, though. The one that USAPhotoMaps uses is much sharper. I was particularly disappointed that Google Earth uses the same inferior view — I subscribed to the full version because it’s possible [...]

Experimental Travel - Lonely Planet Online

E.R. for Hard Drives - New York Times
Mr. Gaidano says that hard drives are so unreliable that they “should not exist today.” Yet they are ubiquitous - in laptops that are tossed onto airport security belts, and on iPods and camcorders used while jogging and maneuvering around moguls. When they fail, panic is often the [...]

I’ve spent the last 24 hours digging out from a computer crash, with more success than usual. But it’s not a fun experience. I’ll describe what happened and what I did, more to remind me than for any other reason.

Spoken Alexandria Project - Creative Commons Audio Books
This could be interesting — free spoken books.