alex chiang: web 6.0

gatos de Toledo

It’s Wednesday and changes are afoot. Things are coming up milhouse. Not really ready to reveal anything yet, so instead, let me distract you with pictures of cats.

Rawr!

One of the advantages of strong central rule: The Forbidden Game: China’s on-again, off-again war against golf.

The bulldozers arrived at dawn in early December. There were more than a dozen lined up outside the gate of the Anji King Valley Country Club, 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. The convoy drove past the fountain, the bronze knight, and the Tudor-style clubhouse, and arrived at the multimillion-dollar 18-hole course that had been open for little more than a year and was scheduled to play host to a Ladies European Tour event this October. For 10 days, the excavators ripped up turf and snapped irrigation pipes in the soil below.

I can think of few worse uses for land.

We’re coming for you next, Arizona.

Sorry Mom and Dad.

Now that’s a seriously sartorial platypus.

Happy Friday!

I have mixed feelings on this PSA.

Both of my grandfathers were KMT (paternal g-pa was a colonel, maternal g-pa was a 2-star general officer (equiv. to a 1-star American general)). Both fled to Taiwan, and that’s where both of my parents grew up (before moving to the States independently and meeting here). Does that make me Taiwanese?

We’re ethnic Hans, not indigenous Taiwanese. I speak Mandarin with a Taiwan accent, but I don’t understand a lick of actual Taiwanese.

And if you were to ask me my my lao jia (勞嘉), I’d respond Jiangsu province (江蘇) which is on the mainland, not Taiwan.

I understand that it’s a political fight to get Taiwan recognized in the shadow of the rising Chinese hegemon. And I think it’s important to continue to recognize Taiwan’s independent sovereignty.

But I don’t know if fighting that fight on the US Census form is the best field of battle. And I’ve never identified as a hyphenated American.

On the third hand, since I do usually mark “Asian/Pacific Islander” on most demographic surveys, maybe writing in “Taiwanese” isn’t so bad after all.

Oh the frabjous joy of American racial identity politics!

Edit: corrected maternal g-pa’s rank; I originally wrote 1-star, but my Auntie Yun-Dong corrected me to tell me he was a 2-star general.

Absolutely the best 3:53 you’ll spend today.

The petition to make hella- an official SI unit is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

Thus, we believe that the SI system can not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California by formally establishing “hella-” as the prefix for 10^27.

Under this designation, the complexity of high-magnitude nomenclature would be greatly reduced. For example, the number of atoms in 120 kg of carbon-12 would be simplified from 6,000 yottaatoms to 6 hellaatoms. Similarly, the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts, rather than 300 yottawatts.

Seriously. I love units. And I love unit humor.

I estimate I’ve blogged .00000000042 hellawords since 2002.

Slate has run a few stories this week about oversize air travelers (fat, tall, etc.) and what can be done about them.

The first story is a little ridiculous. They want me to feel sorry for tall people?

4. Treat height as an in-flight disability.

6. Many tall and wide people can’t afford bigger seats.

Sorry, but no. If you fly economy, you get what you deserve. If you want comfort on a flight, pay for business class or better. It’s that simple, really.

The second story has some ideas on how to alleviate the problem.

5. Pay people to switch [seats with extra space].

6. Give tall people the first option to buy leg room.

7. Put some wide seats on each plane and give wide people the first option to buy them.

News flash, the airlines already do this: it’s called business class.

And here’s a real gem:

One common complaint in the forum was about short people in exit rows. “There is nothing more frustrating than seeing a short person in the exit row bragging about how much room [they] have to stretch out while I cram my legs into a regular seat with my knees going numb,” writes Jennifer.

Dear Jennifer, you must not understand how the air industry works, so let me help you out. Those rows are reserved for the airlines’ best customers. The short person sitting there in glorious comfort is at an earnings disadvantage of $798 per year per inch compared to you, and had to work that much harder to afford that seat.

Jennifer, you have only yourself to blame, for being too lazy to work hard to earn enough money to purchase a seat that fits you.

Rest assured, my kids will not get an overdose of hugs which is the gateway to an overdeveloped sense of self-entitlement.

woman with grandson, Lijiang, China

Photographic spring cleaning.

I’ve been sitting on quite a few photos from various trips, etc. that I never got around to posting because it was just too painful to process them with an ancient Mac mini G4 with a mere 1GB of RAM.

Old Lijiang city in China was one of the best days of our tour because it truly felt like wandering around an ancient pocket of antiquity.

A delightful practice is still carried over from days of yore: using the stream flowing through the city as a natural refrigerator.

[As always, photos are clickable for larger resolutions.]

old man with a cane, Lijiang, China

This is what I feel like after this particular week of employment. On the other hand, if my facial hair looks that amazing some day, sign me up. I may have to stop shaving for the rest of my life beginning… now.

The WSJ quotes Bernanke as saying:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a “platypus,” saying they were “neither fish nor fowl.” He suggested strongly that the companies should be privatized during his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee.

Yes, I too, agree that platypus Friday is becoming quite a stretch.

[As always photo is clickable for large resolution.]

I’ve recently switched from fish oil to krill oil for several reasons, all of which can be found on Michael Eades’s Protein Power blog post Why krill oil?.

The summary is that it’s much more potent than fish oil because the good omega-3 fatty acids it contains are the same shape as the fats in your cell walls, and thus much more absorbable.

Think of a round peg going into a round hole, vs. fish oil, which is a square peg whose shape has to be changed to fit into the round hole.

Read the whole article. He describes more of the benefits, including lowering LDL, increasing HDL, reducing pain, and in a nice bonus for the ladies (and their significant others, I suppose), reduces effects of PMS.

The one thing that Eades doesn’t mention is that krill are at the bottom of the food chain compared to top level predators like salmon, cod, etc. that we harvest for fish oil. Not only is it more eco-friendly to harvest from the bottom of the food chain, but you get a side benefit that krill do not accumulate toxins such as mercury the way that the big fish do. Although the fish oil producers claim to filter or distill their product to eliminate toxins, it seems better to not have to do that step at all.

Which leads me to this 2008 NYT article about scary amounts of mercury in bluefin tuna at NYC sushi restaurants. Good, scary article; go read it, not too long, but the summary is that eating more than 6 pieces of tuna sushi per week might turn out to be a real — not theoretical — danger.

The most surprising fact in the article must have come from the NYT’s department of meaningless statistics:

Six pieces of sushi from most of the restaurants and stores would contain more than 49 micrograms of mercury. That is the amount the Environmental Protection Agency deems acceptable for weekly consumption over a period of several months by an adult of average weight, which the agency defines as 154 pounds.

At first, I was surprised that the average adult weight is 154 lbs. but then I realized that the number must include both genders. Which seems like a useless way to think of a population, since that number will be equally misrepresentative for both males and females (too low for males, too high for females). Oh well.

In other news, following a mostly strict paleo diet since mid-January has seen me steadily lose weight, about a pound per week, and I now weigh as much as the average adult.