Posted by Chuck Vose
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:39:00 GMT
I have nothing of interest to post today but out of a dedication to keep people reading I post regardless.
Over the last week I’ve been spending a lot of time studying and researching for thesis, a requirement for graduation from this Chinese program. My thesis is vaguely related to the Internet as it exists in China; naturally it is pretty much a front for me to spend a lot of extra time playing video games in the Internet cafes (wang ba).
But the wang ba is a different beast from the Internet cafe entirely. In a wang ba there is no wifi (or if there is there’s no reason and nowhere to sit to use it), instead there’s row upon row of computer desks. The one we go to must have 150 computers in the main room. Each of these computers is networked to a fast network storage array with plenty of space for… you guessed it, VIDEO GAMES GALORE! I’ve hit the jackpot! Except I can’t read Chinese and the icons are usually different so I end up just trying random games every day. Those icons that I do recognize though I’m getting quite good at.
Now here’s the real difference between a wang ba and a LAN (local area network) center (which would be the American equivalent), all the games are 100% illegal which means that there’s no way to play online, right? Wrong! Through a clever loophole most games still allow LAN games even if they’re illegal. So there are multiple services in China that will allow you to set up a “LAN” game across the entirety of Shanghai so that any number of people can hook up to your “LAN” and play together. How freaking cool is that workaround?
Classtime. Fly safe everyone.
Posted in Life | Tags ba, China, clever, games, Lan, video, Wang | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:15:00 GMT
Tale of three monks
In the beginning there was one monk on a mountain. There was a lake at the bottom of the mountain but his studies were at the top. When he was thirsty, and he usually was from carrying the water so far, he had to hike down and carry the heavy bucket all the way up the mountain.
At some point a second monk arrived and they lashed the bucket to a bamboo rod and balanced it between their shoulders. Their studies improved and they were less tired.
Thinking that more of the same would be a good thing when a third monk arrived they rejoiced but found that there was never any water when they wanted it. Everyone trekked down the mountain at some point but there was always some conflict about who would stay and rest while the other two hiked.
This is a loose telling constructed from what Ben told me. It may have missed some of the points but it came up when we were talking about why the dishes never get done. I believe the numbers are approximate and pretty much always work for numbers > 1. We see this all the time when we live alone versus living with one or more others.
What is the moral? Find a way to lash the task to a bamboo rod so that it is easier no matter how many people are in the house/group. When everyone works together at once there is no conflict. Of course this doesn’t scale at all unless by some fluke everyone in the house is home and not exhausted at the same time (a rarity in most college houses I believe).
There’s a lot of depth to this, lots to think about.
-Edit-
Ben suggests that maybe the answer is to sign a contract or kick one of the monks off the mountain. Watching him smile after he’s launched a very successful joke is just about the best thing I can think of.
Warm feet, cool head
This was something that Ben hadn’t heard of but when I told him about it he said that it made perfect sense considering the Chinese views on foot warmth.
The meaning is roughly that the way to success isn’t through rash actions but can be achieved through calmness and good self-care (self-care is a major part of Chinese life). The feet are the locus point for many acupuncture points and as such if they are cold perhaps your organs are suffering.
Interestingly enough, my Econ teacher independently confirmed the value of good foot care recently as well. He mentioned that in pre-college and in many areas of life sandals are considered poor form, not just because of the obvious fashion formality problems, but also because it shows a lack of respect to the person speaking. If you don’t take care of your organs then you can’t pay attention which means you don’t really care enough. So sandals are a sure-fire way to piss off your teacher and show them just how you feel!
773861 army
This isn’t a proverb, just interesting. When people started migrating to the cities for increased wages they say that the only people left in the towns were members of the 773861 army.
- 77 is a symbol for old people. Possibly related to the first day of the second Sino-Japanese war but I’m not sure about that. Ben says this is a plausible explanation but he’s also unclear.
- 3/8 is women’s day
- 6/1 is children’s day
Conclusion
China is cool. All those things about getting in trouble because of some weird thing are really true here. Also, never mention pork in Xi’an, there’s actually a chance that you’ll get beaten to death. It’s happened before.
Posted in Life | Tags 3, 773861, army, China, monks, numerology, pork, proverbs | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:35:00 GMT
Okay, I’ve been writing little notes to Erica for the last couple weeks and I feel bad because I’m leaving out a bunch of awesome people. So with that I unleash to the world my twitter account. Please read my little thoughts there and I’ll try to continue to update the blog as well.
http://twitter.com/vosechu
Posted in Life | Tags twitter | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:18:00 GMT
It’s been about two weeks since I last wrote, I’ve been trying to spend most of my freetime with Erica on the phone but I just don’t get much freetime anymore. So I apologize but I’m also really far away so what are you going to do about it punk?
At rate, last night I had a dream. I’ve been calling it “Screw Ritalin” all morning and I would like to share it with you. Many years ago there was a woman in my life who constantly inspired me to do wild new things. She still inspires me on occasion just by looking back at how life was at the time, it was some of the best years of my life I think. I was utterly sexless (at least for a while), I was interesting, inspired, and I had a job that worked relatively well with my Adhd.
Last night in my dream I was at a new college. Every morning I would espouse my opinions, I forget what she called them but it was incorrect word choice I remember, something like ‘marketing’. And every morning she would fawn over me and respect me. However in the dream at some point during the year I started taking Ritalin and she disappeared. When I finally found her I asked why we didn’t speak and she told me that she missed my morning speeches, that when I started Ritalin I stopped making those wild speeches to her.
This is not the first time someone has told me this and unfortunately I believe the times match up perfectly to blame Ritalin completely. What worries me is that I wonder if I’ve changed also and Ritalin just facilitated the change. What if I’m actually boring off of Ritalin too and I’ve permanently made myself dull and uninspired?
In keeping with the title I’m stopping Ritalin today. I still need a stimulant of course, I’m American afterall, but I think that my stimulant of choice will be tea for a while. I’m eager to see how this works out.
Posted in Life | Tags adhd, inspiration, Ritalin, stimulant, tea | 9 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:30:00 GMT
Today I had an exam that went well, at least the written part seemed to go well. But the spoken part was fairly dull and my teacher lambasted me for not speaking Chinese enough outside of class. Specifically she said that while all the other students are learning new words outside of class I am not, nor am I learning new grammar structures. Of course she is right so I’m going to make an attempt to speak only Chinese and keep a book handy for new phrases I learn. Maybe next exam will be better.
When a subject matter is inherently multi-person it doesn’t help to be self-taught.
Posted in Life | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:54:00 GMT
Stepping off the plane in gloomy Pudong airport I was assaulted by feelings of strangeness mingled with familiarity. My biggest concern, typical for any computer scientist, was that I might be unable to access the Internet during my stay in China. Maybe the firewall was too restrictive or maybe Ethernet is implemented in a different way, that I would regret not bringing my cable crimper. Maybe everything I could access would be in Chinese and I would be unable to integrate without help from locals. Stepping off the plane I immediately recognized the familiar and comfortable signs for Wifi, cat5 jacks in the walls, and many, many laowai using the Internet in the terminal. Now that that was sorted I only had to convince a Chinese taxi driver to drive me to my apartment an hour away in a town that I had never been to where few people speak languages I can recognize; easy in comparison I think.
In a few days I will celebrate my two month anniversary of being in China and I’m proud to say that I can now order food by myself. Naturally, only food that I’ve had often and know the name of (I can’t read the menus) and only at a few restaurants (where they tolerate my pointing at other people’s food). But while I’ve lost some weight from not eating well and not eating any vegetables, which are a luxury here, I’ve not spent any less time on the Internet than I would normally. When I set out I had my concerns about the “Golden Shield” or the Great Chinese Firewall, but it turns out to be pretty easy to circumvent with a proxy. But while I had my concerns I was also very curious to find out how much Chinese people know about their own informational prison, whether they know how to circumvent the firewall and if they do, and how it’s affected their use of the Internet in general. But when it comes down to it China is basically the same when it comes to tech so my general experiences in China end up being much more interesting.
When you learn a new language what do you always start with? Probably something like, “Hello, my name is Chen Se.” Really, a hello world program for natural languages. But do you know the first thing you need to learn to say when you get into a foreign country is really not a greeting, probably the first is more like, “I speak no Chinese but I am very hungry, please bring me something to eat, I really don’t care what.” We rarely consider our needs when they’re being met, I have no idea how to say, “I need air!” in Chinese, the need has always been met, but I know a hundred ways to ask for particular foods and drinks yet I barely know how to converse. Friendship and companionship is so much farther down the list of needs compared to food, water and air that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of that language.
When you begin to program most people make a “Hello World” program which exposes us to the essential grammar of a language, but like learning “my name is…” it is completely useless to the programmer. This leads me to believe that formal languages like natural languages must also have a way of learning a new language in an intensive way. If I ever learn spanish I will smack my teacher if he tries to teach us “my name is…” I don’t care, I want to learn, “What is that food? Waiter, please bring me this, it looks tasty”. What is the equivalent for a programming language? Is computing Fibonacci recursively closer to what’s needed or are there particular exercises that are necessary for a particular language in order to learn quickly? In Ruby I think monkey-patching String to print out all strings backwards would be a good “Hello World”. Naturally, some languages just shouldn’t be used so there is no “Hello World” program that will help someone program well in that language (cough, PHP). Maybe this is just a case of premature optimization, that “Hello World” has its place and things like Project Euler are there to take us farther.
In my Student Originated Software class we asked what it was that separated natural languages and formal languages, our answer was that ambiguities were the separation. However now that I’ve studied natural language more I’ve come to realize that even if a natural language was specified with EBNF it would still have the spoken component which formal languages do not typically have. For all my training in learning languages, I have learned at least seven programming languages, I am completely incapable of remembering how to say things. My vocabulary is excellent, my handwriting has been praised many times, in fact, anything having to do with the visual representation of the language has been a strong point but the spoken part is consistently difficult. I was unaware that the spoken language section of the brain was different from the written language part, my assumption that study of formal languages would make the study of natural languages easier has only been partly correct. What would be interesting would be to study Chinese Sign Language and see if that’s easier or if we have another language area of the brain for physical representations of language.
This makes me want to create a spoken programming language or a manual language but I’m not sure what these would look like.
As I write this last journal entry the Internet has crashed again. I can no longer communicate with America and I find myself wondering whether the Internet actually crashed or if google was just blocked, you always have to check multiple sites when in China because google has no more political clout here than anyone else; in this way it is a very equal-opportunity country. My understanding of the Firewall is that the border routers, the last routers before the end-user, have filtering software which searches through requests and responses before delivering them for illegal words. If a border router finds something it dislikes it will sever the connection and the user is presented with a generic network connection error. Further connections will be blocked for a few minutes however if the border router finds the bad text again from that website it will block for (a few minutes)^2, each time doubling the amount of time the border router blocks the entire site.
CCCP has been pretty brilliant about their scheme. A big warning page about illegal searching would be intrusive and scary, would scare a lot of people off the Internet entirely and sow discord. As it is now institutions that publish politically sensitive things just appear to be unreliable, which would make me question the sites ability to present accurate information also. As it is a blacklist system there are always holes and ways around the firewall, but they are a pain in the ass and for most things there are other news agencies and websites that may present the information in a way less objectionable to the border routers; this allows CCCP to make certain websites preferred. In addition China has been know to change the DNS of major ISPs so that their preferred sites are represented. For several months, when Google and China were fighting, all requests to google.com pointed directly to baidu.cn the search engine that the CCCP likes best.
The CCCP is masterful at minor manipulations which change people’s opinions, under Mao the second most powerful and prolific organization was the department of propaganda. While this department is significantly less powerful now the knowledge remains and students who graduate from college with art degrees are well versed in the psychology of propaganda. In the US I believe we call this Advertising or Marketing but the differences are not large.
Curiously, in my survey of foreign students 77% have known about the Chinese Firewall while only 13% knew how to get around the Firewall with a Proxy. Among the four Chinese people I was comfortable talking to half have known about the Firewall and one quarter have known how to get around it. I believe that the number of people who know about the Firewall is significantly lower in China because all information about the Firewall has been blocked (including my blog) and because it affects US sites much more than Chinese sites.
But do we know much more in America? I find myself questioning the American government much more here than I did at home. In many ways China is exactly like America, we both have a lot of corruption, we both have egregious human-rights violations, we both have the death penalty, but China is more blatant about these things. If Chinese people don’t know about the Firewall, because the CCCP is so good at what it does, does it make sense that the American govt. is any different? How do we know that there isn’t a Great Firewall around America? We had behind the excuse of the free-market but China’s market is much, much more free than America’s so I have to wonder whether our freedoms are being restricted without us realizing it. And if we do realize it are we really capable of doing much more than the Chinese citizens? We can demonstrate, something the Chinese people can’t do, but this seems to be effective at removing small players from politics when something really tragic happens like the WTO protests. The WTO still exists, the only thing that happened was a lot of Americas got gassed and hurt and one mayor lost his job.
When I stepped off the plane I stepped into a country remarkably similar to America. The Internet is the same except slightly more annoying in some regards, the animals we eat are mostly the same except they may have some more bones, and the government is still intrusive. My journey to China has taught me many things, but mostly it has shown me a little more about myself, my country, and my government that I hadn’t seen before. Only when you learn a powerful programming language do you finally understand how impotent your previous languages were in comparison and vice versa. It’s the comparison that is enlightening, not the new language. Visiting China has given me perspective on America, has shown me the things that I love and dislike and has made me question the motives of the US Government, whether they have our interests in mind and whether we are even capable of influencing policy. It has been enlightening.
Posted in Life | Tags China, exam, internet, plane | no comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:55:00 GMT
Someone pointed out the other day that most people in Shanghai have been driving less than a year, many for around nine months as that’s how long the test takes to prep for (iirc). Imagine a city with about 1 million cars on the road, all of which are driven by people with the same experience level as an average 16 year old. Now try riding on the back of a taxi-motorcycle! :)
Posted in Life | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:29:00 GMT
Today is a free-day and I am feeling a little lost. I woke up at about 2pm or so but unlike Saturday I’m not hungover and unlike Sunday I slept until 2pm, something the cleaning ladies regularly (and thankfully) prevent me from doing. But no hangover and no cleaning ladies today. My anchors are gone and I’ve been plunged into a radical world to fend for myself.
Like all heroic men I have been playing video games and reading Wired all afternoon.
Tomorrow we have a test and Friday I will embark on a journey with my fellow alliance people to the city of Nanjing. Nanjing is a few hours outside of Shanghai but from what I’ve heard is a wildly different place. It’s also the place where the Japanese invaded China to rape and pillage wildly. Japan still denies this and China still wants an apology so I worry about our friend Go who is pretty obviously Japanese. I know that he can handle it, he tells stories sometimes about his time in Wuhan (inner China) where people would give him crap for being Japanese and some of his students quit his class after finding out he was Japanese.
In other news I was playing with a Hanzi lookup program which sorted Hanzi characters by their parts (called radicals). I spent probably two hours doing this and got through 2 sentences of a book but today I looked at characters and instead of seeing images all wrapped around each other I saw each individual radical. I still don’t know what any of the Hanzi mean when I see them, but like being differentiate words from each other when I hear them I was excited to transition into a new stage in my Chinese language.
For today’s mind-blowing experiment please look no farther than the following link. I fully intend to try to build a TSM and at the very least participate in the OpenStim project to see what other people discover about themselves. This is the first project that I’ve been truly passionate and curious about in a long time and my housemate will hopefully be able to help me in my endeavors.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/03/neuroengineering2
It is a 2 part article but the previous part describes a method of brain alteration much more complicated than I am party to.
Posted in Life | Tags China, Hanzi, OpenStim, Radicals, TSM | no comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:50:00 GMT
Firstly I’d like to thank Panasonic for making such and excellent toothbrush as the Sonicare. Not only has it lasted almost an entire month without needing a charge, it’s also really good at what it does. Secondly, I’d like to thank Mitch Hedberg for giving me the humor to realize that like many electricity driven mechanical devices (escalators, toothbrushes,... okay that’s really it), when they break they still work for their original purpose.
This brings me to an excellent point: in America if an escalator was broken it would be roped off so that nobody could mistake it and stand there for an hour getting mad about their lack of movement. In China, except at Wal-mart (big surprise really), not only do people still use dead escalators, any efforts to rope them off would be ignored. The only thing that seems to stop people from using dead escalators is a huge blockade of shopping carts which can’t be navigated around. I’m still unclear whether this blockade was created by confused customers or employees.
(For background, the escalators at Wal-mart are inclined planes with some sort of attachment mechanism for carts so you don’t have to hold them all the way up or down the escalator. We’re unclear about how this works but I’m theorizing that it could have been confused customers trying to get up the escalator then getting their cart stuck on it, panicking, and ditching the cart for a nearby one and sneaking off into the shadows hoping any of the thousand people around them didn’t notice their snafu. Of course it could have been employees too but that’s much less amusing.)
Okay, so escalators and blockades: check. No wait, one more story about electric walls. It’s a little hard to explain the Chinese fascination with electric walls but I’ve come to believe that there is a deep-seated desire to surround yourself with glass or metal cages that beep at you when you’re too heavy, holding the doors open, or just because a beep is necessary. Usually the beeps are polite but sometimes the makers of the cages are more creative and build in a horrible wail or a screeching buzz just for added effect. In essence, I spend probably 2/3 of my travel time walking by/through, or riding in a very cramped metal cage that likes to beep, buzz, or wail at me at random moments. I think it will probably be one of the things I miss most when I go back to the states because there is nothing that keeps you on your toes quite the same way.
Today I’m going to the fabric market with a friend. I’m excited to see how the whole thing works though I lack the money to actually purchase anything at the moment until my paychecks come in the mail (crosses fingers).
I’m also going to start carrying around a little book to write down my realizations when I’m around town. I have lots of things to blog about but usually by the time I’m home they’ve all been forgotten. So instead I write about my electric toothbrush which is the only interesting thing I’ve seen in the last 20 minutes.
So yeah, in case you were wondering, things are going well. I’m broke but that will hopefully be fixed soon and my sister is coming to visit me on March 27th so I’m very happy. But of course this means that if you want her to bring something back you should put in your orders now. :)
Wishing you all well!
Posted in Life | Tags Beeping, China, DTA, Electricity, Shanghai | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:23:00 GMT
Today I learned several things, but the most important is a skill I think I will probably be able to use with success for the rest of my life: how to turn off my brain’s gag reflex. Tied to the important message of never asking what it is I’m putting into my mouth and who it used to belong to I believe that I will experience many, many more foods in the future.
Also, I didn’t know that real bananas are extremely small. I bought my normal amount of bananas today but it to get the required volume I had to buy like 30 bananas. Too big to be the weird purple tiny bananas I see in the states, too small to be the genetically modified things we call bananas in the states. I haven’t tried them yet but I’m getting excited about the prospect of it already.
Also, I saw a feral kitten playing in a grocery store. It was under a table playing with the table cloth like kittens do. For some reason I assumed that feral kittens didn’t play but I guess either my original assumption was wrong or it’s actually the clerks kitten and I just totally misunderstood the situation. I smiled either way and the clerk looked at my confused when I tried to tell her that the kitten was cute. Stupid tonal language: I probably told her that I loved the hat dispenser or something.
Posted in Life | Tags China, food, Kitten | 2 comments
