Today my current RSS reader of choice alerted me to an article at one of my favorite publications, the Christian Science Monitor. The title of the article says it all:

“Top five greenest nations on the planet.”

Naturally, whenever you read something like that, your bullshit detector should be beeping and flashing, because apart from the fact that such a thing is essentially impossible to rank, generally the media will take something like a study, over-simplify it in order to break something complex down into bite-sized chunks that the masses can easily digest, and then declare it in such a way that it sounds like “fact”.

I checked out the article, linked through to the study itself, conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. Called the 2010 Environmental Performance Index, it left me troubled by one thing: the study almost completely ignored what is perhaps the biggest contributing factor to “greenness”: consumption.
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I am a twitter user and a facebook user. On facebook, I have it set so that the status message is automatically pulled from my twitter stream. Recently, I’ve noticed that many of my tweets don’t make it onto facebook.

One reason I like the twitter messages going to facebook is that facebook has a superior comments system, and often my friends say interesting things about my status messages; otherwise, I have friends on facebook that are not following me on twitter, and they might like to hear what’s roaming around in my brain every now and then.

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As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s somewhat rambling post on the subject: even if the government expels the company, Google won’t be leaving China.

Seemingly lost amidst all the windbaggery on this topic is the fact that according to Alexa, google.cn is as of this writing the #3 most-trafficked website in China. google.com, though, is #6.

I’m now beginning to think that Google’s strategy here might have something to do with the fact that google.com is already one of the top websites in China, with or without google.cn. Sure, by exiting the country entirely, they lose some leverage with the government, but monetarily, one would guess that at least some of the viewership and revenue from the Chinese operations will transfer back to the mothership.

Of course, the Chinese government could block Google’s domain entirely, like they do with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and they well might, but I would rate such a prospect as somewhat unlikely, since the GFW can already filter particular search queries when it wants to begin with.

The Chinese expat net-o-sphere is abuzz this week with Google’s challenge to the Chinese government. I’ve seen commentary ranging from mindless protestor-like exaltations of a company “sticking it to The Man” to the more patronizing and pragmatic “why would Google want to give up all the money they can make?”

First, as someone living in China, I’d like to explain some things. Google operates in China as a separate entity from Google’s main headquarters in the USA. I’ve frequently seen this misunderstood by people who post on sites like slashdot, whenever there is a story about Google censoring information. In the past, Google has agreed to censor information on google.cn (from Tiananmen Square, to Falun Gong, to the Dalai Lama, and so on).

However, these same searches are not censored on google.com, and google.com is not blocked by the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, though, does detect your search queries, and will itself block access to information coming off of google.com (and others) if it finds material it has flagged as objectionable. (Of course, it should be said that anyone who gives a shit about free access to information in China uses a proxy, VPN, or some other secure means of avoiding the Great Firewall entirely.)

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As an expat I don’t do much driving in the U.S. these days, but in May I went back for a visit, and after a little drive through 5 states, I was reminded of a problem that needs to be addressed: civilian Ford Crown Victorias.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone wants one anyway; they’re huge, unattractive, gas-guzzling beasts, and unless you’re getting the policeman’s special in a used car auction, they’re not especially fast or nimble, either. As far as I can tell from my admittedly unscientific study of the situation, three groups of people buy Crown Vics: police departments, NY taxi companies and old men.

Image courtesy of JLaw45

So, I have a message for my fellow Americans: stop buying Crown Vics. Like the picture above, leave them for the Secret Service and police. You’ll be doing a service for the rest of us.

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I was going on with a normal day, getting work done, listening to music, and now, here I am drowning my sorrows in beer and questioning the significance of my existence.

I visited a site that I never visit today: Walmart. This screen capture is a portion of the site’s header.

But it was this bit that caused me to trip and fall into the endless pit of despair:

Hey, wait a minute, Walmart! I am not null. No no, I am not! I am much more than that! And furthermore, now I’m confused: should I click “not null”, or should I “Log out”?

Agh…what to do, what to do…

McDonald’s China has fairly recently launched 24-hour delivery service in Beijing, to most parts of the city. That’s good news for those of us who need a dose of heart disease at 2:00 AM.

Here’s a portion of the flyer they’ve been stuffing under people’s apartment doors to advertise the service:

My question is: what, exactly, is going on this image?
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After reading Trent Reznor’s expletive-filled mini-rant about Apple’s App Store approval process, which I basically agreed with, it got me to thinking: why does Apple want to be the decency police in the first place?

Apparently, when you submit your app to the App Store, they have people using it and looking for naughty words interspersed in the language, or looking for bare breasts (oh no…the horror), or they are judging the overall functionality of the App based some loose and unknown standards. You can probably guess that my personal opinion is that any and all apps should be allowed, unless they are violating specific laws, but I am not conceited enough to think that my standards should be applied to everyone else, so I agree that there needs to be a solution.

Personally, I think what Apple does well is write great software and build great products. I also think they suck at determining what is offensive and what isn’t, and quite frankly, I think everyone sucks at that. More to the point: putting themselves in this position only brings them bad publicity. Either they will piss off conservatives who think they are allowing too much horrible stuff that scars the children, or else they will piss off free speech advocates who believe that responsibility for judging decency falls on the individual and are paranoid about a 1984-esque future. In short, from the corporate perspective, there’s no way to win.

Rumors are that version 3.0 of the iPhone software addresses this issue to some degree. But, in the meantime, here’s how I think this problem should be solved.
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So, just like everyone else, I failed.  I did not stick with my resolution to post a new Mandarin word every day or two.  However, I have been making a slightly more concerted effort to improve my speaking, and hey, it’s still 2009, so I can come back to it.

I’ve been enjoying www.google.cn/music, which is the first officially sanctioned (by the idiotic music labels) free music download service I am aware of.  Note to those outside China: you’ll need a Chinese IP address to download stuff.  But, for the most part, it’s pretty well done, and it’s been a great way to discover Chinese music, in particular, though I’ve also used the service to download a bunch of western stuff, too.

The only headache, on the Mac, at least, is that the MP3 files’ ID3 tags appear to not be Unicode-encoded, which mangles all the Chinese, so there’s some work to be done to properly tag the Chinese music that comes down.

All this made me realize that I did not know the word for “album” (in the music sense), so it’s a good opportunity to do some further study.

The previous narrative has been abandoned (I’m sure you’re sad not to know what happens with the 震动棒), which kills part of my plan to reinforce the learning by using the words twice, but maybe a new one can start.

专辑
zhuān jí
(record, music) album
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I’ll continue the “5 great” list with these 12″ gems from the 1980s. They may not necessarily be my favorite 12″ tracks of the 1980s, but these are instances where the remix of the song improves markedly on the original version. And this also means it excludes tracks that were issued on 12″ first, or 12″ only (like Pump Up The Volume, for example).

What makes a great remix? Well, that depends on what type of remix it is. In this case, the criteria is remixes that don’t stray so far from the original as to be essentially a completely different song, but which alter the original enough that it really adds depth, or goes in a new direction

When I was in high school in the 1980s, remixing was what I really dreamed of doing, although I never pursued that path. Consider this my homage to some good engineers.

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