Timely Snow

Zingerman’s is a famous Ann Arbor-based delicatessen, now complete with bakery, creamery, restaurant, and probably more. I like their food inordinantly, but what they’re really good at is marketing. Among the Ann Arbor birthday deals listed on the Arbor Wiki is an offer of 6 free bagels from Zingerman’s. Today I took advantage of this, [...]

Sanyo has announced (just in Japan for now) their “eneloop” Electric Hybrid bicycle, with regenerative braking and a 2:1 assist ratio. Hopefully the basket is optional. Thanks to a local Ann Arbor weblog.

Toward Better Tones in Natural Speech | Sinosplice: Life

A very interesting discussion of Mandarin tones by John Pasden (based on a talk by Rongrong Liao). Of course, you need to know which characters are stressed, which I don’t always know…

From “Inside-Out China,” Melamine and “toxic assets”

There are some odd parallels between America’s financial crisis and the
tainted milk scandal in China. In each case greed, combined with a lack
of proper governance, caused the crisis. In each case there were laws,
bank oversight and credit evaluation standards, or food purity
regulations, that should have prevented the crises.

...

The [...]

Very interesting analogy by Stan Collender. Here’s hoping!
The world changed suddenly and dramatically for Americans in October 1957, when the headlines screamed about the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik I, the world’s first man-made satellite. That change became even more real for Americans a month later, when the much larger Sputnik II, which carried [...]

Courtesy of Andrew Gelman’s blog, is an interesting discussion of an odd posting by the economist Gregory Mankiw, who’d been chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for George W. Bush. The posting is: Greg Mankiw’s Blog: My Personal Work Incentives, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it consists of whining [...]

Feature Photo: Engineering a better brake | The Michigan Daily

I live about 2 miles from my office, which is a nice walk or a fairly quick bike ride. In between the two, though, is a very substantial hill, so I’ve dreamt of a regenerative braking system for my bike, which could store some of the [...]

The idea of a Linux-based system for working with video has always seem intriguing. Getting rid of the overhead of the Mac OS or Windows would mean that those computer cycles could be put to better use. Pure:dyne is an effort to do that. Perhaps I’ll repurpose an old windows machine and give it a [...]

I’ve been looking for something that will manage a personal library of PDF files and citations, and have found something promising (after using Endnotes off and on for many years, trying Yep, trying Devonthink and looking at a few others). Because I work on multiple computers, having something that can be synchronized across them is [...]