Blog Archives 060716 to 060617

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

060716 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I really like Jianbing (煎饼, jian1 bing3, "Chinese crepe"). Essentially, it is a crepe, with an egg cooked as a thin layer upon the crepe and chopped scallions dusted over that, along with some soy sauce, some hot sauce, and the whole thing wrapped around a crunchy, crisp, thin fried bread. They are fried up by street venders while you wait and then handed to you in a (heat resistant) plastic bag. Really tasty and only about 3 RMB each. I have eaten them a lot and now I have favorite vendors where the sauce or batter quality seems slightly better. There is one vendor right near work who seems to have the best-tasting jianbing. She is there in the evenings and so I will stop by and have a jianbing when I am leaving work late enough that it is essentially dinner time. She only charges 2 RMB and provides some pieces of paper as insulation so you can more easily hold and eat the hot jianbing. Since she has tastier jianbing and provides the little slips of paper, I had expected that she would charge at least the standard 3 RMB, but she doesn't. At one point, I had tried to pay her 3 RMB rather than 2 RMB, but she refused the extra.

I have noticed this a fair amount: poverty does not change honor. Sometimes the people with the least money are the ones who are most careful to avoid taking advantage of others. It means more to them and so they are more strictly fair about it. Of course there is the flip side, with some people being more desperate and therefore showing far less scruples, but that just makes the differences shown more clear. I wish there were some way to reward the more scrupulous people by paying them more when I recognize they are refusing to take advantage, but it would be insulting to simply give them more money; that would be giving hand-outs rather than earnings. So, I simply frequent the people I see as scrupulous and hope that is reward enough.

060715 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
There have been one or two films I have wanted to see in the theaters in the last few months, but I don't find it overly satisfying to watch something that has been dubbed in Chinese and subtitled in Mandarin. A lot of the other foreigners here have been watching huge piles of movies... Because they have been buying huge piles of pirated DVDs at an average price of roughly one US dollar for a recent Hollywood blockbuster. I have refused to buy any pirated stuff and it is kind of hard to find legitimate copies.

Piracy and copyright violation is all over the place here. A few months back, I went to a big, brand-name, foreign-owned store and bought a computer game. I have no idea if it was a legal copy or not. It seemed legal, I registered it, but the manual was for a different game and I couldn't download updates. A friend loaned me a DVD she said was bought in a big department store. It looked legal and official, with all the ususal anti-piracy and copyright information before the movie, but if you turned on subtitles, you would notice that the subtitles were for an entirely different movie. I'm doing my best to avoid pirated stuff, but even the legitimate stores are chock full of illegal or highly questionable products.

More or less, the piracy "crackdowns" that have happened are equivalent to using buckets to bail out the Yellow River... Very showy and noisy, but utterly ineffective.

060714 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Work has been consuming me again. However, I did make the time to write up a few tips for the friends of new parents. You see, some friends of mine have just had a new baby and I thought their friends would like some advice. There are lots of books for new parents, but very few guides for their friends. As a five-time uncle, I have the experience to fill this clear need. Take a look and let me know what you think.

060713 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I went to a Classical music concert last night. The manager of my hotel had received a block of tickets from a friend of his and offered them to many of the long-term guests. They were really good seats; I was in the second row, two seats over from the exact center. The orchestra was a touring group from Taiwan, sponsored by Chimei Museum and they were using several of the violins from the museum's collection, including a Nicolo Amati, a Jacob Stainer, an Antonio Stradivari, and a Guarneri del Gesu.

The orchestra was fairly young and the conductor (Chinese, but Austrian-trained) lead them through a series of energetic and famous pieces: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Mascagni's Intermezzo Sinfonico from Cavalleria Rusticana, Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" Suite No. 1 Op. 71a, Yuankai Bao's Chinese Sights and Sounds (a modern Classical composition inspired by Chinese folk music), and Bizet's Carmen Suite. The strings-heavy orchestra was very good despite their relative youth. The only weakness was in the horn section sounding a little too technical rather than emotive. The audience seating was not large and maybe only 75% full, but the audience was enthusiastic and there were were two oncores, Strauss's Die Fledermaus Overture and then Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 1.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy such concerts. It has been a few years since I last attended one. During this concert, I was reminded of some concerts I attended with my mother when I was a teenager. Being a teenager, I had a messed up sleep schedule and would stay up too late so there were several times I would doze through big portions of the program. Fortunately, my mother found it funny (rather than insulting) that I would sleep through the concert and still want to go to the next one. I think I'll have to remember this is something I like and plan on attending more concerts in future.

060709 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
There is a 7-11 nearby, right on the way to where I pick up the bus for work. They have my favorite Chinese breakfast things, a cup of hot sweet soymilk (热豆浆, re4dou4jiang1) and steamed buns, ready fresh each morning. When I first arrived here, I tried the various steamed buns and settled on my favorite, a big braised pork bun (酱肉大包, jiang4rou4da4bao1). Thereafter, I would go in most mornings on the way to work and get a cup of the soymilk and a steamed pork bun. Same thing each time. It only took them about a week before they would see me walk in and head for the right things. Now, they'll spot me heading for the door and they'll have my order ready by the time I reach the counter, waiting for my nod before they ring it up. Since I'm a regular, it doesn't take me any time at all. If other people are in line, or being rung up, the 7-11 workers know my order and the total price so my stuff still appears on on the counter by the time I reach it and I'm able to just drop the payment and walk out with breakfast in hand. Even if I'm running late for the bus, it takes almost no extra time to pick up breakfast on the way.

Of course, I need to reward the efficiency by continuing to get exactly the same thing almost every time. Also, if I wander in on a weekend morning, looking for something else, they will prepare the order. I like to reward this by buying the order (in addition to what I actually wanted), to keep things clear. It's just a nice service that they have noticed my habits and are catering to them.

In different places in the USA, I have tried this sort of training of the employees, going into a place at about the same time on a very regular schedule and buying the exact same thing in the exact same way every time... It doesn't work. One time, I spent three months going to the same coffee shop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between 8:00 and 8:10 AM, and getting a large house coffee, no sugar, no cream every time. I even told the two people who worked there my schedule and my order, telling them that it would never change. Still, every time I walked in, it was like my first time there. I would have to specify everthing over again ("No, no sugar") and answer the same questions.

I'm sure that there are places in the US where the workers will pay attention to customer habits and habitual orders, but it is not a widespread trend. It is a trend here (and in Taiwan) and I really like it. I have heard discussions about the Chinese service industry and the attempts to improve it for more Western-style service. It is true that the Chinese servers do not do several things that are more or less expected of "good service" by the Western standards: they don't remember to smile, there is no "would you like anything else", etc. Still, I far, far prefer it that they remember my habitual order and don't bother with the false smile. I wish it were more of a trend in the West.

060706 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Decision time is coming soon for the permanent posting and it is still unclear how much influence I will have in the location selection. I know that the boss in China is very interested in getting the other program scientist to return to China permanently, so it is pretty unlikely I will be asked to move here. I know the bosses in North Carolina want me quite a lot, but I don't know that status of position opportunities in California or Denmark.
I think that whenever I am finally at my "permanent" posting I will request a Food Chemistry training course. It is complex as all get-out and pretty interesting.

Sorry for the lack of interesting posts of late: I have been doing web stuff but it is mostly adding in Chinese phrases (e.g. "In the middle of an experiment, do not change these settings.") or one or two Danish phrases (e.g. "I want a raise."). I have been transcribing them from the scraps of paper where they were noted. Lots of the language stuff I put on the web is there not because it will be interesting to you, but simply so that I won't lose it.

Oh, wait. I thought of one thing that might be considered vaguely interesting... In some ways I am a Luddite. Even thought we have phones at all the desks, internal instant messaging, and fast internal email, I still choose to walk over and speak to someone in person even if they are a floor away and on the other side of the building. Many of my colleagues choose to use the phone if the other person is even just three desks away in an open office. I can't argue with the practice: it is clearly more efficient than my habit of walking around to talk to people in person, but it just seems distancing. I'm not sure how clearly explain my reasons, but I think I will continue making the low-tech choice and communicating face-to-face whenever reasonable.

060704 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Happy 4th of July, Americans. I celebrated by reading a bunch of US Op-Ed pieces on politics. I dedicate this 4th of July, to the nation's public libraries and librarians. The utopian ideal of free access to knowledge is embodied at the local level by the public libraries. Support 'em and use 'em.

060703 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I started an experiment last week that goes for several weeks. It requires about 20 minutes of work every day and several hours of measurements every other day, so I'll be coming to work every day, including weekends, for most of this month.

I'm debating doing another code overhaul on this site... Some of the language setting specifications from CSS2 are starting to see implementation and proper annotation of the various foreign language bits I have scattered in on the site could be handled better if I hard-coded which portions were which languages. Then again, most of you would see no changes whatsoever and the language implementations are mostly useful once CSS3 is implemented, and that specification is still a few days away from publication and many, many months away from general implementation.

It's probably pretty worthless, but who knows... one day this sort of groundwork may let me do some cool things with the text. Probably, figuring out how to RSS the entries would be more useful.

060701 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Not a huge amount to report. I think I found a fellow westerner here who might be willing to try playing Chinese Chess with me. So, I finally wrote up the notes I had on the rules, including the minor rules variation used in Taiwan and the extremely altered Korean variant an old roommate had taught me. You can find my write-up of the Chinese Chess Rules by clicking the link. As always, unicode-encoding a pile of Chinese characters is a pain, but I'm getting faster and faster at it.

060629 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Hooray for modern medicine! By 32 hours after taking the first dose of Cipro, I am feeling much better, almost human. Thought you all would like to know.

I found the cartoon versions of the Chinese classics (works by Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Sun Tsu, Zhuangzi, etc.) recently. They are in English, with the Chinese text printed on the margin of each page. I'd found them in Taiwan, 12 years ago, but I had not seen them again until now. It's nice to have found them again. I'll have to buy a set or two.

060628 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
So, I took a risk yesterday: I ate some strawberries. They looked good and they smelled good, so I carefully scrubbed them and ate them... they tasted great... and they must have still been contaminated with something because a sleepless evening of pain, mess, and horror ensued. The last time I had sharp, shooting pains in my gut this bad, I had to go to the hospital and have my appendix removed. So, now I'm taking Cipro (Ciprofloxacin) to kill off whatever boogum I ingested and I will not be risking fruit I can't peel ever again in China. The food is always tasty, but there are really no enforced health codes so far as I've seen. I have had more encounters with intestinal unpleasantness in the three months here than I've experienced in any four years elsewhere.

Er, I'm now at work. I figured that I could be exhausted, in pain, and ill at home with nothing to distract me from the unpleasantness, or I could be at work where there are distracting demands to help me focus on other things. Since it's not a transmissable illness and my system is pretty well emptied out after last night, here I am feeling miserable but keeping up a good front (I think). Bleah. Never again will I touch berries in China.

060627 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Two unrelated topics today. For the first topic, my buddy Ed sent me a link to an interesting article, looking at sleep deprivation and naps for medical interns. I thought it was quite interesting for what it mentioned about patient loyalty and differential treatment of cross-covered patients.

Now the second topic: Back in entry 060620, I babbled a bit about the desire for permanency. Apparently, it concerned my parents (who follow this blog pretty closely). So, I had to reassure them that it was nothing intense; just a musing I have had for a while that I decided to finally write down. I wasn't having some sort of existential crisis. Remember: before this, I was doing the Post-doc thing. Post-doc-ing is a series of short term, transient posts with the expectation of moving every year or two. Even though I stayed in Utah for 4 years, it was a temporary posting the entire time. There was no feeling of settling and no guarentees for the future.

My current job is much more unsettled in terms of location but far, far more settled in terms of having a future career path. It is only because my future is more settled that I can sit and discuss the far more minor quible of where I will put my stuff. Trust me, in the grand scheme of things, shifting locations this frequently is a minor annoyance and a really great opportunity.

060626 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Had a bit of an interesting conversation with a fellow I met here. He was part of the democracy movement from 15 years back. He was going for a Masters in Biochemistry at the time. I asked him about it and he said everyone studying in Beijing at the time was pretty much part of the movement. Swept up in the excitement, he and his friends would nap during the day and join the demonstrations at night... This is why, when the demonstrations were crushed, no one in his class was allowed to move on: they were all considered "tainted" and, while the government could not claim their Biochemistry studies were somehow incomplete or incorrect, they were all reassigned to scattered schools throughout the countryside and required to complete the "good citizenship" portion of their studies.

Needless to say, his carreer plans were derailed or badly delayed. His hopes of being able to go on for a PhD or study in the United States were extinguished. It is now 15 years later and he sounds philosophical about it... But he has never left China and never continued with his studies. I don't know if he was like this before or if this is a result the "good citizenship" training and the death of his plans for the future, but now he never wants to talk about the "big picture" of anything, be it science or life. Any work that can not be completed in a week or two is called "too complicated" because "things happen, you can't take everything into account".

The Universities of Beijing have always attracted the best and brightest from across China. Fifteen years ago, an entire generation of those students was taught some important lessons by the government. I'm sure many of them have learned those lessons well and will never do anything again that is of interest to the authorities.

On a side note, this same fellow mentioned to me that Russia, Korea, and Japan all actually belong to China. I told him I was pretty sure that the Koreans would probably debate him while the Japanese and Russians would probably be quite surprised to here this novel news. He replied "Well, we never occupied Russia or Japan, but they sent us tribute and they did what we told them." (Actually it was not Russia; it was parts of what is now Krygyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, but I didn't bother with correcting him.) I told him that, using those standards, he ought to claim parts of Africa and India as Chinese as well (see note below) and he really ought to claim Poland (since Ghengis Khan made it that far). He said "No, no. Those are not really Chinese." Since his claims were not based on history or logic, I did not bother pursuing it. Essentially, his claims are the typical party line that everything that borders China is really China's territory although the maps do not reflect this.

This has the same implications for China's neighbors as it did for the neighbors of the United States when the USA claimed an entire hemisphere as it's realm of influence around the start of last century...

Now for the note:
I was refering to the Ming dynasty naval expedition of Zheng He. A massive flotilla was sent out repeatedly over the period of 1405-1433, with the general goal of visiting everything within sailing range. This flotilla visited something like 37 countries, through Southeast Asia to faraway Africa and Arabia. At that time, China had by far the biggest ships in the world and the Chinese were more scientifically and socially advanced than the people they were running across. They would pull up on some small harbor city, disgorge many hundreds of men, and ask the locals if they were willing to swear loyalty and give tribute gifts to take back to the Emperor. The badly outnumbered locals would happily give them food, water, some treasures, and a few exotic animals in return for the Chinese leaving them alone. The Chinese would then get back on board their ships and sail off, confident in their superiority.
After having "conquered" all the surrounding lands that they came across, the Chinese never again bothered sending out exploring missions. The belief was that they had seen everything the world had to offer already and they knew that the world had nothing to offer that the Chinese did not already have. This sets the stage for the horrible shock China received a few hundred years later when advanced foreign (Western European) military troops suddenly showed up and proved they were capable of beating the Chinese.

060624 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Yeah, I have been posting a lot of late. Don't think it is because I have had a lot of free time: I have been busier than a one-handed orangutan at a lice convention. It's just that I decided to make up for a couple of slow weeks.

The most important thing to mention is that I have now downloaded and installed Skype. It's a VOIP (Voice over IP) thingy which I'll be trying out for the next little bit as a way to increase communication while avoiding the truely brutal phone bills I have been experiencing. I installed it on my home computer and found that its microphone stinks, so I installed it on my work computer and it seems to be clear and have decent volume. My Skype profile name is "MABakunin" and my full name is also part of the profile and searchable. Oh, and I added a paragraph to the About me page to explain why I chose "MABakunin" as a profile name.

You have to love the web for all the truly random little bits. There is even a page dedicated to cats who look like Hitler. That's a really useless (but funny) bit of web fluff, but I ran across one or two things that might be interesting to you all. In the Yahoo New sections, I saw a bit on Music search sites that learn your taste in music. This was nothing new to me; I was already familiar with the sites and their means of estimating preferred music types. However, I had not previously heard about www.liveplasma.com. This site is pretty interesting because it shows a graphical map of related groups. Clicking on different groups, you can see that there is some differential reciprocity in the maps: The "Led Zeppelin" map has Neil Young practically on top of Led Zeppelin, but the "Neil Young" map has Led Zeppelin quite a bit further off. Anyway, I think it looks like an interesting way of pulling out new groups to which you might like listening. You can search for anything from Madonna to VNV Nation and look for similar music by groups of which you have not heard. Clicking on any group gives its "discography", which is not a complete listing, but a link to the music available for purchase on Amazon. It's nice.

Ken saw my mention of Net Neutrality and forwarded me a few links, including a very interesting one by I, Cringely. He avoids emotional appeals and instead discusses the direct and indirect results of manipulation of data traffic flow on the overall speed of that traffic flow. From his admittedly limited and preliminary tests, it looks like impact of an end to Net Neutrality could be slower data flow for everyone... Not good. He also points out what amounts to an Inductive Fallacy in the arguments by the telecom giants against Net Neutrality (it's a Fallacy of Exclusion; the telecoms already have the cable in place for greater bandwidth).

My brother forwarded me a New York Times article that mentions the desertification of large sections of China's arid northwest. It properly points out that much of the blame for the desertification can be laid at the feet of poorly-thought-out big government engineering projects. What the article doesn't mention is that in some areas peasants have been having success stopping desertification by simply planting vast areas with hardy desert grasses that then aid in trapping dust and moisture. These efforts are not "prestigious", like building giant (useless) resevoirs, so the simple grass-planting work receives no government support. Papers here have mentioned this as a problem, but the officials are rated on metrics like "buildings constructed" and "goods exported" so they are punished rather than rewarded when they spend money on things like planting non-food-crop grasses. Until the system for rating performance changes, the officials will continue to choose non-viable "solutions" like building "sand retention walls" rather than doing what works.

A coworker sent me a link to a article on cellulosic fuel ethanol. It's nice to see the mainstream press picking up on technical innovations that could really help the environment and fuel situation.

060623 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Random thought theater again. Random thought one: Music in my head. I live my life with a bit of soundtrack. I don't mind silence; I just usually prefer music. Because of the highly varied constant listening, when I'm not listening to music, it doesn't take a lot for something I see or hear to bring a tune to mind.

Random thought two: Music on web pages. I know someone who recently joined MySpace (www.myspace.com). So, I decided to poke around MySpace for a little bit and see what is the deal. After having visited a handful of pages on MySpace, I have to say that I really don't like those web pages that start playing music. It feels like an invasion, an annoyance. There is a good reason for this. Think about it: People have generally voiced their discontent with most of those forms of web interaction that fail to stay within the box of the web page (i.e. pop-ups, push technology, etc.). The only groups on the web these days who put automatically playing music as part of their web experience are a few incompetent professionals and the herds of newbies occupying MySpace. Everyone else has figured out that most internet-viewing people appreciate options and the page designers offer these options, granting the choice between flash or non-flash and offering links so that only those people who chose the experience will see the movie or hear the music. Push is dead. Long live choice.

Random thought three: Choice on the net - the Net Neutrality question. Right now, there is a bit of an even playing field on the internet: how fast you get a page or hunk of data in the US mostly depends on how quickly the owning server can send it to you. The company who owns the communications lines (telephone, cable, etc.) does not get to pick and chose how fast to send the data. This even playing field has its roots in the US's "common carrier" rules that require telephone companies to transmit data without interference. The current FCC head has apparently decided that we no longer need these rules. Because of this, number of large companies are very excited about the opportunity to no longer worry about having an even playing field. They are part of a campaign claiming that the end of regulation means that the internet is being freed from regulation in a way to allow a "robust, competitive market". Then again, if companies were freed from other forms of annoyingly even-handed regulation, then they could form "robust, efficient monopolies" and develop exiting new products without having to worry about minor details like consumer protection slowing them down. I'd rather keep the common carrier rules and net neutrality, thanks.

Random thought four: Remember your logic. You've heard my opinion on the Net Neutrality issue, but you may want to do some poking around for yourself. Go ahead and dive on in to reading the various pieces on the subject, but you probably ought to first refresh your memory of the common Logical Fallacies. In reading one editorial, I counted one case each of False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, and Appeal to Consequences, all before leaving the first paragraph. Sorry, buddy, but if your argument lacks logical validity then I have to discount it no matter which side you are on.

060622 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I will occasionally make a note or two of things I want to remember to mention. These notes are on random scraps of paper, in the back of notebooks, on the edge of a newspaper, etc. I don't necessarily find the note when I finally decide to type a little bit about the topic. Anyway, here are a few notes I located from during my parent's visit.

I think my parents are pretty fit. At 64, my dad is fit enough to indulge in "macho bull" when he feels like it; jogging up long flights of stairs to race past people on the escalator, etc. My mom, at 62, was pretty unhappy about scrabbling up a steep, loose, dirt track (I led her on a really wrong short-cut in the gardens of the Summer Palace), but she could do it and she had no problems with some long sections of pretty big steps on the Great Wall (short legs plus tall steps equals one heck of a work-out). I hope to be in as good a shape when I'm 60-something.

Touring with the folks had me looking at China with fresh eyes again. It is massive, building, modern, commercial, yet has no social net. Begging and scavaging the trash for recyclables is pretty common. When looking at China, you have to throw aside all the concepts of Communism, or at least all concepts of Communism as Marx or Engles envisioned it.

060621 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Now that I finally scanned in some pictures, I will mention them: seals. Specifically, the Chinese name seals (aka chops). Even in modern times the name seal is still in use on official documents. While there has been a general switch over to the Western habit of accepting signatures on various documents as a form of authentication, the more official activities (e.g. opening a bank account, buying a home) usually require the use of a seal stamped with red ink. There is no central registry for name seals; when one is used, typically the other person or organization involved in the document or contract will visually inspect some form of ID (e.g. a driver's licence) and confirm that the name on the ID matches the name on the seal. It is possible for the same person to use several very different-looking seals. Despite this, there is a prevaling attitude that a document without a red seal stamp is less official and less valid than a document that has a red seal stamp. Essentially, this is a hold-over from old imperial times.

The stamps appeal to me in the same way the old European wax seals appeal to me; they are a "fancy" anachronism. I have been going down to an old art district near Tiennamen square looking at paintings. The area also has numerious shops selling the name seals, jade artwork, inkstones, momento mori, and other carved stone art pieces. I have, of course, been tempted by the idea of getting a name seal. I have one from Taiwan and the stamp is shown at the top of this web page. It is a nice, light, small, square one. Very practical. At first, I just wanted to get a stone version of the wooden one. I picked a little stick of jade with carvings of lotus leaves on the top and had the store carve a replica of the wooden seal's mark on the bottom. I think it came out pretty close, although there are one or two minor deviations due to the difference between machine-carved wood and hand-carved stone. If I had used a high-resolution picture, then you could probably see the difference, but I have chosen to reduce bandwidth for the web and so the pictures I post here are all pretty low resolution. (This is a blog, not an art site, so the picutures are just good enough to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.)

So, mission accomplished, right? I now have a stone version of the wooden one. Well, I had also thought about the fact that the Chinese characters are pretty much unreadable by most of the world. For the books that I take to gaming conventions or regularly loan out, I have my name on the inside cover and I have also been marking them with the wooden seal (mostly because I think it looks nice). Anyway, I was thinking that having a seal done as a sort of Ex Libris stamp would be nice. So, I picked a bigger stick of stone, one with a carving of a dog on top (I was born in the year of the dog) and had a stamp made up with my full name on it. The layout was my design. The carvers are willing to carve anything you want, but (since it is carving by hand) if you do not specify exactly what you want, then you will get whatever was easiest to carve, typically block lettering with sharp straight lines. If it is a soft stone, then it is reasonable to get greater detail and curved lines. If it is a very hard stone, then it can be quite difficult for someone carving by hand to get a high amount of detail. For the name seal, I chose a relatively soft stone, measured it, and then designed the seal with specifications of letter heights, etc. I think it came out pretty well.

At the same time as I'd been looking at a stone for the English name seal, I'd found a really pretty chunk of stone. No carving on the top; it was just a cylinder of mostly black stone with veins of translucent stone and a sort of starburst pattern of green inclusions. I'd bought the stone, but I didn't have it carved yet. Still, it seed silly to have a blank seal, so I decided to come up with a design for it. I like interlaced letters from the Italian wax seal I picked up in Florence: (yeah, I know it is kind of an indistinct blob in this picture, but you'll have to trust me that it has the letters K and M interlaced). So, I thought it would be nice to recreate that sort of design using all three of my initials. Such a design could potentially be used for wax seal as well a seal stamp. I went through a bunch of different drawings, being careful to keep the whitespace at least as thick as the lines, and aiming for something that would look clear, rather than being too complicated or messy. Here is the result: .

Unfortunately, that could not be carved in the pretty hunk of stone I'd bought; that stone was far too hard and the carver refused to even attempt it. I had to choose a softer stone for the carver. So, since I still had the cylinder of really hard stone, I decided to go for one more design: the characters for Lin An Shi in the very very old oracle bone script. This, I was able to have done in the hard stone. And, so long as I had "Lin An Shi" done in the very oldest of Chinese characters as well as the old style characters, it seemed appropriate that I should have it done in the modern characters as well.

And with that, I found I was done. I could come up with no more excuses to buy seals. I have a handful of different seals, all in different kinds of stone, some with decorative carvings on top, and I have to admit they are of no use whatsoever. Hmm. Useless, but I like 'em anyway? Must be art.

So, do any of you want a name seal with your name on it? I know where to get them done...

060620 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I know I've mentioned it before, and some of you are probably tired of hearing me babble about it, but the longer this roving life goes on, the more I dream about something "permanent". Yeah, "permanent" is in quotes for a reason. I want someplace that is home, someplace that is mine, despite the fact that it is a concept more than a thing. Having someplace to call home is having someplace that is familiar, someplace where you belong. As a concept, it works well. As a practicality, a permanent home is really just a "permanent" home; even taking that big step of accepting massive debt to buy a house does not make the home any more permanent. Many things necessitate moving: changing jobs, shifting locations while at the same job for career goals, moving to a better school system area for the kids, retirement, etc., these all are reasons for people moving. Also, even if you manage to stay in the same city for a long time, the house may not be permanent. There is the "starter" house for young couples, the bigger house for bigger families, and then the smaller (easier to maintain) house for retired folks. So, a permanent home is an illusion, just like permanency in general... Even knowing this, I still want one.

060619 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I really dislike the "open office" layout. There are many reasons to dislike it. For one, it has its roots in a distrust of employees. It more or less assumes that employees need to be watched or else they will goof off or otherwise abuse the trust of their employers. In my company, it is not the Western managers who have chosen the open office layout; it is the Chinese managers who insisted upon it, even though my company has very good employee-employer relationships.

From what I have heard, the typical Chinese employee-employer relationships are not ideal. Especially for the lower-paying positions (food service industry, construction, etc.) it is more or less common practice for the employers to "forget" to pay their workers for a week or two and then eventually pay them too little or incomplete amounts. You see, most employees don't know their full legal protections and most employers see nothing wrong with doing this to their employees. Essentially, the employer is deliberately holding several weeks pay hostage as a guarentee that the employee will work hard and not simply quit. It is harder to walk away from a crappy job if you keep being promised that back pay and you know you will never get it if you leave. Also, it is easy for the employer to "fine" an employee for slacking off or not being "respectful" if the employer has several weeks back pay to draw on. As you can imagine, with this sort of treatment from the employers, many employees consider it merely balancing the equation if they have the opportunity to slack off or "borrow" a few supplies. This lousy relationship needs to change, of course, but it is not something that is easy to change overnight and it is part of the environment here. That is probably a large part of why even those companies in China with good employee-employer relationships tend to have open office layouts and very tight tracking of even minor office supplies.

Anyway, I don't really care about the lack-of-trust thing; I dislike the open office plan because I don't have book shelves for reference books and I don't have a whiteboard or cork board for diagrams or notes. It's bloody annoying to have to dig through desk drawers every time I want to find my copy of Advanced Statistical Analysis or Fersht's Kinetics. Usually, the books are buried pretty deep; every time there is a group of outside visitors coming to see the site, I have to sweep all sensitive materials (i.e. everything I work on, notes, lab books, papers, etc.) into desk drawers until the visitors are gone. It'd be nice to be able to simply close an office door.

060618 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
One of the things that my mother bought while she was here was a rather nice tea set. It has the proper bits for the traditional Chinese way of preparing tea; one tea pot for the tea leaves, one tea pot for holding the brewed tea (you don't leave the hot water on the tea leaves for too long), a set of small cups, and a "dump pot" for containing the rinse volume. While most westerners can immediately see the benefit of two tea pots, to avoid over-extracting the tea, the practice of rinsing the tea is likely unfamiliar. The first aliquot of hot water dumped over the tea leaves is allowed to sit very briefly before being poured into the second pot and from there into the tea cups. This is not drunk, but dumped into the decorative pot provided for this purpose. You see, that initial shot of hot water extracts a lot of the bitter volatile tannins and is kind of nasty. The Chinese noticed this and so they typically just use this first bit of hot water just to wash away the nasty-tasting tannins and warm up the tea pots and tea cups. The second brew of tea (with a steep time of 3 minutes or so) is the one that everyone actually drinks. One set of tea leaves will be extracted 4-5 times before the tea leaves are considered "used up". Served in this way, small aliquots of separate brief extractions, you can really notice the pleasant shifts in flavor as the hot water extracts different profiles of polyphenols, proteins, and carbohydrates over time.

Now, as interesting as I find this, my intent was not really to discuss proper tea extraction. My intent was to discuss the practicality of purchasing a tea set. You see, I know that the tea set my mother purchased was a good one because it was one that I'd looked at myself. However, I kept thinking "When the heck would I use that?". After all, a person is unlikely to break out the full tea set for just oneself. If you are alone, it is most likely that you'll just throw some tea in a cup and not worry about the details. If you are having friends over, then it is often for some sort of activity like watching a sports game or a movie or something. A tea set is meant for those tranquil occasions where you have people over and you all are just sort of sitting about and visiting. You need to have the time to sit and fiddle with the tea pots and the hot water pot and preparing multiple tiny cups of tea.

I like it and I aspire to having that sort of time, but, really, when was the last time you had friends over for something like that? Perhaps the once-in-a-blue-moon dinner party would be an appropriate time to use the tea set... But how many of your guests are going to want to do "caffine shooters", in the evening? Let's face it, if you are going to have guests over and you are going to sit about and sample some sort of liquids, there are a whole range of choices that are far more convenient than tea. Wine is the most popular choice and wine fits better with evening gatherings.

So, I like tea sets. I like the whole je ne sais quoi of them, but I have to admit that they primarily are a thing of the past and are no longer practical dishware. Perhaps I'll get a tea set anyway, but it is harder for me to justify than if they were useful.

060617 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Man, what a week. I had the weekend to recover from the tour with the parents and then I had to fly right out to Qingdao for a job-related stuff this past week. Anyway, been dang busy and so I've had little time for blog stuff. Here is a brief description of the week with the parents (two weeks back):
Day 1 (Thursday) I work a regular day and the parents fly to Beijing, landing in the evening. They arrive at the hotel, and we have dinner out.
Day 2 (Friday) Walking tour of Houhai lake area and some hutong areas.
Day 3 (Saturday) Tiennamen square (no we did not visit Mao's body), the Forbidden City (too big to see it all before closing time), evening walking tour of a famous shopping area, and some silk and hat shopping.
Day 4 (Sunday) Lama Temple (Tibetan Buddhist temple), the Silk Market (a famous sales area, dedicated to ripping off all the tourists), art district walking tour.
Day 5 (Monday) Hike the entire Mutienyu section of the Great Wall.
Day 6 (Tuesday) Fly to Xian, tour the Terracotta Warrior digs, wander Xian, and visit the Bell Tower.
Day 7 (Wednesday) Fly back to Beijing, relax a little, take in Peking Opera.
Day 8 (Thursday) Tour the Summer Palace, then tea shopping.
Day 9 (Friday) Send the parents to the airport in the morning, then go to work.

This tour was in many ways more relaxing than the typical guided tour's plans and in many ways it was less relaxing. Often the tour companies will pack things together a bit more, with (for example) Tiennamen square, the Forbidden City, and The Summer Palace all on the same day. However, the typical tour company gives you only 2-3 hours in each place when they are large enough for you to spend all day in them and still not see everything. China is really big and many of the tourist sites are also really big. The Forbidden City is an old mini-city, with several gardens, multiple historical sites, and several small museums within its walls. The Summer Palace contains two lakes, two hills, several temple complexes, several administrative and living compounds, a few galleries, and a private canal flanked by an old shopping district. Xian, where we spent only one day, has literally hundreds of archeological sites.

So, it was more relaxing in that we hit fewer sites per day than the typical guided tour. However, we still saw a lot of sites and saw each in some slight depth. Also, It was probably a bit more tiring for me than for my parents, despite their jet-lag: I was the one attempting to make the arrangements and attempting communication in my crummy few words of Chinese.

As I mentioned before, I got to see plenty of new things during this touring around. I was quite pleased to go see some Peking Opera. You see, the famous pieces from Peking Opera are often the high songs by the lead female roles... These roles are played by men and the most appreciated art form is a highly stylized and fairly nasal song. Picture, if you will, a man singing in the highest falsetto he can manage, through his nose, with the notes being punctuated by pauses in order to summon the energy needed to make the notes ever more shrill and ever more nasal...

Bits like this are what I had heard as representative Peking Opera singing. I thought it was about as pleasant as listening to cats being electrocuted. Anyway, I was pleased to be exposed to Peking Opera because I found that this gawdawful singing was a very minor part of the performance. The theater to which we went had displays on either side of the stage, showing the text of the lines (in both modern Chinese and English), so we were able to understand the play and follow the plot. I thought it was pretty good, with a Shakesperian mix of broad comedy and drama.

All in all, it was a great visit, but my parents tired me out. They are 64 and 62 yet still managed to climb the whole length of the Great Wall section we visited and keep trucking along on all of the walking tours we did. I am about 30 years younger and not in terrible shape, so I was surprised that they were able to wear me out. I have some reasons why this might be so, but I'm not sure if they are facile justifications or actual valid reasons. One factor was the afformentioned energy spent on organizing and arranging and attempting to communicate. Another factor, I think, is just my current unsettled state. Being essentially homeless (most of my things are in storage, I'm living in a hotel, and my permanent posting has not been decided yet) is kind of tiring in of itself.

Page Last Modified: 2006 09 11, 14:26:57

 

 

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