Archive for November, 2007
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Where have all the gerunds gone?
I’ve noticed, in education school settings, what is for me a jarring tendency to drop the “-ing” suffix on gerunds. Students do a “two day teach” and I just heard someone complain about the “quality of the think” in a body of work. Is this something going on more generally, and just one more indicator (like the vanishing “less/fewer” distinction) that I’ve fallen off the bandwagon of linguistic evolution?
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Fishilicious
John Pasden has a very good discussion of how to order food in Chinese. I did something like this with McDonald’s (which has very odd translations of its food) when Ruth came on a long-term visit to China with me as a child, and then with more di4 dao4 de restaurants later.
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Coolest web video application I’ve seen
Check out this example of web video / transcript / navigation tools. Pretty slick. I haven’t watched the whole thing, so I don’t know if Chris’ question was picked.
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Yan can cook
Martin Yan visited Ann Arbor today and gave a cooking demonstration at a local appliance store. It was a busy day, but I’m glad I took some time to go to this. His cookbooks were my entree into Chinese cooking, and I really have enjoyed the TV shows of his that I’ve seen (not many). I also learned some things today—a quick way to debone a chicken, and a good solution to a problem that comes up in stir frying. Typically the food gets dry after a while as it absorbs the oil. I usually add more oil, but it can end up being quite a bit of oil. Yan keeps some stock/broth around and adds that instead, which is a smart idea.
As with all Chinese cooking, more than half of the demonstration consisted of cutting, and he demonstrated some neat techniques. One I can’t quite believe, which involves dicing ginger and garlic by smashing a piece of garlic or slice of ginger and then kind of smearing it with the knife at the same time. I’ll have to try it, but I can’t quite see how that would work. He also showed a neat way of cutting a red bell pepper by continuously slicing and rotating it (almost like peeling, except cutting all the way through), as a prelude to julienning (making sticks).
He passed around a brochure of his cooking school in Shenzhen, where you can visit China and learn to cook at the same time (a very big, lavish place).
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I’ll stick with the traditional burnt rubber…
Could this really be true?
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Reinhard Pekrun
I’m listening to a talk by Reinhard Pekrun about the impact of emotions on learning and achievement. Nothing very surprising—negative emotions cause people to narrow their attentional focus, rely more on extrinsic motivation, etc., but some fairly elegant studies.
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International Affective Picture System
I didn’t know this existed—a good way of inducing various emotions.
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