Archive for October, 2008
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I think this is a joke…
but maybe not: China’s 6th peasant Olympics...
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Insurmountable new transit opportunities in Beijing
A boss that I had when working at IBM for a college summer job used to talk about “insurmountable opportunities.” After using the amazing new transit system that Beijing built for the Olympics to try to commute into and out from the city, that’s kind of how I view the current state of the system, at least looking out from my particular well.
I’m staying with my daughter in the Shunyi section of Beijing, near the airport. Today I tried out some new transit possibilities to get downtown and back. It’s about an 80 kuai taxi ride to Beijing Normal, so I was interested in cheaper ways. To get downtown, I first took a cab to the terminus of the new Line 5 line, and then transferred to the old circle line (#2), and walked from Jishuitan. The first picture shows the view toward the East from just North of the Jishuitan subway station, showing the new bike parking and the lovely restored moat.
It was getting dark by then, but the train ride to the airport was really impressive. You soar far above the traffic over a very modern-appearing city, and pull into the new airport terminal alongside a tollbooth covered with a sweeping high-tech sail. It’s not a cheap ride (25 kuai, or about $3.65), but it’s one I want to do again in the daytime.
These aren’t really viable commuting strategies, though. There’s a commuter bus that goes from a housing development near Ruth’s apartment that I’ll try tomorrow, although the last bus goes at 8:30 in the morning.
Beijing is on the verge of having an amazing transit system, with a little bit of everything, including a Bus Rapid Transit System near where I got on the #5 subway system. But the last few miles of connection to this system seems wanting, at least out in Shunyi.
Coming back home, I walked North with Yan Ming to the new subway line that follows the moat along the old Mongol earth wall. That neighborhood has built up quite a bit since I was last there. I took it to the new, fancy subway line to the airport. The train is pictured here:
By the way, the newer subway lines now have a display that, among many other things, shows when the next train (and the train after that will arrive). It seems to update based on actual progress (i.e., sometimes it goes up rather than down), but this is interesting to me because I was so impressed with the information displays on the Berlin subway system (that one goes this one better—when you get off the train to transfer to a new one, you can see when the train you’re heading toward will come, so you know whether to saunter or run).
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useful dictionary of Chinese (mostly internet-related) slang
Popular Chinese Internet Slang, Expressions, & Acronyms | chinaSMACK
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水管工乔
I’m in Beijing for about 2 weeks. Yesterday I bought a newspaper (青年报, or Youth Daily, which seems to be one of the best and most lively, although a bit above my reading level) to see what they had to say about the US election, and also what they called Obama (奥巴马:ao4 ba1 ma3) and McCain (麦凯恩: mai4 kai3 en1). I was caught by a subheading with the 4 characters: “水管工乔” that I tried to make sense of as a cheng yu (成语), one of the 4-character phrases common in Chinese (sometimes crudely translated into English prefaced with “Confucius said…”). Didn’t work. It wasn’t until I looked it up that I realized that “水管工” (water pipe work/worker) is a plumber and 乔 “qiao2” is a surname pronounced somewhat similarly to “Joe.”
So the article did capture the heart of the ultimate 2008 U.S. Presidential debate.
Sigh.
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Sim city style map of Beijing
From The Beijinger.
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Due diligence
This is very interesting (thanks to Simon Elegant) from a report on cleaning up China’s air:
One of the most surprising findings was that “the kinds of technology
I’m not sure where it was, but I read that the medical changes that actually increase longevity have been due less to breakthrough treatments than to the calibration of doses and regimens, etc. I suspect that there’s a more general moral here that applies to education as well.
currently being adopted in China are not cheap. They’re not buying
junk, and in some cases the plants are employing state-of-the-art
technology.”
The findings suggest that emissions levels from Chinese
powerplants, he said, “depend almost entirely on the quality of the
coal they use. When they’re hit by price spikes, they buy low-grade
coal.” Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur
emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade
anthracite comes mostly from China’s northwest and must travel long
distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost. Contrary to what
many outsiders believe, the Chinese state has substantially improved
its ability to implement and enforce rules on technology standards. It
has been slower, however, to develop such abilities for monitoring the
day-to-day operations of energy producers.
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Sarah Palin on education
On the one hand, I’m really glad no one is transcribing what I say. On the other hand, I have no idea what this means:
You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.
Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena.
from last night’s debate.
