Archive for August, 2005
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Factory Tours
this is a neat site – http://factorytoursusa.com/.
And here’s the Michigan one: http://factorytoursusa.com/StateList.asp?state=MI
I guess we’ll have to hit this one before Sujai leaves….
Thanks to Brad DeLong for the link
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Skunked!
Putting our compost pile as close to the house as we did may turn out to have been a big mistake. It’s surrounded by a fence, but there’s at least one skunk that manages to get in. Even worse, our dog went out and confronted her with sadly predictable results.
We did learn (thanks to Sujai, Linda, David Sims, and the TV show Mythbusters, to trace back the chain of information) that there is an effective way to get rid of the skunk smell (and also that the old standby, Tomato Juice, does not really work—it just covers the skunk smell with a new one). A solution of 1 quart hydrogen peroxide, 1/4 cup baking soda, and 1 teaspoon liquid dish soap. We mixed them together in an empty gallon milk jug, worked it into our dog’s fur, and then rinsed it off in the bath tub. Seems to have worked quite well.
The best place to find the recipe, by the way, is the Wikipedia entry on skunks.
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How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons
How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons
Courtesy of Chris Correa, this article by a Washington Post staff writer on the difficulty of learning Chinese. He was lucky, I suspect, in having as his instructor the daughter of the most famous modern Chinese linguist (who, I believe, wrote the tongue-twisting poem he cites). That poem is a very unrepresentative example, it turns out.
I think he also somewaht overstresses the role of memorization in learning to read Chinese, contrasting learning 26 letters with learning a couple of thousand characters. As every American 5 year old discovers to his or her horror, after you’ve learned all those letters you still can’t read. And with Chinese characters, the more you learn the greater the chance is that a new character will have a regular structure and be made up of components you already know. A good example of a Matthew effect.
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Computational environment coming into focus
For about the last year and a half, I’ve tried to run my life from a laptop (a very nice one, too—an IBM Thinkpad T41 with a big screen (1500×1200) for a laptop and a very nice keyboard. It worked well during that transitional time—it’s been to Europe twice, to China three times, and accompanied me on the big move from Champaign to Ann Arbor. It lost a few keys along the way, victim of a box I was packing for the move, but it’s served me well. But laptops are still compromises and the costs of that compromise became more evident as time has gone on.
Now that I’m settled, I’ve decided to set up a different environment. I bought two small but fast Dell computers (Optiplex GX20 computers for my office and home), (named Lan Tian (蓝天 lan2 tian1, blue sky) and Huang di (黄帝, huang2 di4, or Yellow Emperor), to go with the U of M Maize and Blue theme and have a very nice 24” flat panel display for my office. For a laptop, I now have one of the new IBM/Lenovo X41 tablets. The tablet is very nice, working well in both convertible and tablet mode. I’ve christened the tablet 万能笔 (wan4 neng2 bi3, literally “10,000 capabilities pen,” or “magic ink”), which strikes me as a very good name for a tablet and struck at least one native speaker as a very funny name for a tablet, so close enough).
黄帝 (Yellow Emperor) is homophonous with 皇帝 (Emperor) and differs only by the tone on one syllable from 荒地 huang1 di4, or wasteland. We’ll see what the name means in practice.
I’ve also set up a Buffalotech Terastation, which is a network-attached storage system consisting of 4 250-gigabyte drives set up as a RAID 5 array (so with about 750 gigabytes of usable space). I’m hoping to convince a colleague with a lab across campus to set up a similar array so that we can each use part of the other’s as an off-site backup. The Terastation is impressive; it’s a bit slow to write (because RAID 5 involves writing a checksum for each byte so that you can recover from the loss of any one of the drives without losing any data), but reading speed seems fine. The redundancy won’t save us from theft or catastrophic loss of the device, so I do hope that we’ll be able to get the offsite mirror plan working.
In order to keep my calendar and contact data synchronized, I think I’ll need to move to an Exchange server, but the college of Literature, Science and Arts runs one of those, and I have access to it as a Psychology faculty member.
Otherwise, it seems like smooth sailing. IBM keyboards are very nice, for laptops, but it’s nice to go back to a full-size keyboard and it’s nice to have a small, minimalist laptop to carry around with me.
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Member for: 17 seconds
The Ann Arbor District Library is very neat. It allows one to check out framed prints for two months (something my wife takes full advantage of), and has a very nice online site. I just created a login and was impressed when I went to my account page to see the following at the bottom:
History
Member for:
17 sec