Timely Snow

Popular Chinese Internet Slang, Expressions, & Acronyms | chinaSMACK

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.

This is very cool.

From The Beijinger.

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
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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to imagine 13,000 hospitalized babies due to the milk contamination scandal in China.

And even “big white rabbit” candy, which I’ve been eating since my first trip to China in 1983, has melamine.

Tomorrow Adobe will announce the next version of their video processing software (CS4, if you’re keeping score at home). It’s supposed to include AVCHD support (hurray!) and include Adobe Soundbooth, which will provide automatic speech to text conversion (hip-hip-hurray!). I just downloaded the Soundbooth beta and may play with it tonight to see if it might be a useable tool for us. Not holding my breath, but this is something that could be very far from perfect and still useful. Or not…

Nvidia to Offer Its Chips in the New Cray Desktop – GigaOM

Now just for political video, but I’m glad to see that this is in development.

My Buffalo Terastation network attached drive seems to have a broken drive. I’ve ordered a new one (or as close to the original as you can now get), and I guess I’ll have a chance to find if RAID 5 is all it’s cracked up to be.

I’d already been considering getting a DROBO, which has its own RAID-like setup (probably bad) and allows you to upgrade drives one by one (very, very good).