Timely Snow

I decided not to ask the woman in line in front of me at Espresso Royale why she had the Chinese character for “chicken” tattooed on her arm, but I haven’t been able to come up with a good explanation on my own.

So this is what the Beach Boys were singing about. Truly, I didn’t know what they got…

How Ford Brought Power to the People – New York Times

classified under: things you learn when you read the newspaper…

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Tibetan-style Chinese

This post on Danwei.org has some nice examples of writing Chinese in a Tibetan style.

Whenever I think about Tibet, I’m reminded of Porfirio Diaz’ famous comment about Mexico:

¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!” (Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!)

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Hyman Bass is one of the people I met on the “Adding it up” NRC panel, and who became a colleague when I moved to Michigan. There is a long tradition of serious mathematicians who have gotten deeply interested in mathematics education, reaching back to at least Hans Freudenthal (and I’m sure much farther, although [...]

I’ve got a new 15” Macbook Pro, and so life is taking a productivity hit. I got it because the School of Education here is heavily Macintosh-dependent, there seem to be issues with running Vista on laptops (although I’m enjoying it on my desktop machines), and they’re noticeably cheaper than the Thinkpads I’ve used the [...]

A scholar at another university sends me this quote from a book by a journalist named Rob Gifford,

“The fact that the characters cannot change gives the whole language an inflexibility that even Chinese scholars admit can stunt originality.”

and asks for scholarly papers on the topic.

The idea that the fact that Chinese is written with characters [...]

How to Win in Iraq

...not that that’s saying much.

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I almost always end up disagreeing with Victor Mair, including with much of what he says here, but here’s an interesting discussion of the slogan for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which he argues was translated from English:

remarks on the slogan for the 2008 Beijing Olympics
...once Beijing won the right to host the 2008 [...]

Interesting commentary, which I’ll think about in more detail later. It is worth noting that this is a problem in all professional domains (e.g., medicine). Finding ways to both provide a theoretical background to people who often think they don’t need it and to ensure that that knowledge is a) tempered so as not to [...]

A useful way to lookup demographic and other information on schools, courtesy of IES:

Search For Schools, Colleges and Libraries

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