YCQ #7

Clean cup, clean cup! Move Down! The theme song of the day is 中国话[mp3], by S.H.E, a Taiwanese girl band. It's one of the most popular hits these days, occupying place number 7 in Baidu's list of most popular songs. Play it the video below, or open the mp3 link above.

So what is it about, you ask? Here is a complete translation, but the chorus says

全世界都在学中国话
孔夫子的话越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话
我们说的话让世界都认真听话

The whole world is learning Chinese
Confucius's words are gradually globalizing
The whole world is speaking Chinese
The language we speak makes the world all listen carefully

It's celebrating the rise of Chinese as the next global lingua franca! (In case you missed the CCTV news, it's just a matter of time. China is doing a lot to promote Chinese language and culture worldwide, most notably the Confucius Institutes. Many of my students major in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, a field that is growing, but not as quickly as the government and these students hoped.) The more off-the-wall lines in the song are references to tongue twisters, classical tone scansion, and philosophy parables.

So what were we doing here again? Oh yeah, the question!

If you could live perfectly well without sleeping at all, what would you do at night?

Well, I have often wished I didn't have to sleep so much. I've never managed on less than about 8 hours of sleep average, unlike some older brothers we know. This means that they have dozens more hours each week to make bank working long hours, read lots of books, shop online, and still have time for a family/social life. All I seem to have time for is reading the internet and watching youtube movies. If I didn't have to sleep at all, I might find the time to grade papers, write a thesis, or even take a shower occasionally.

[Edit: 中国话 is actually the top song in the list of popular new songs.]

It's on the tip of my tongue twister

Suppose you can't remember the name of that art movement that was fascinated by speed and steel, or that word that starts with 'p' and means liking to fight. Or perhaps you are looking for words that would fit into a tongue twister you're writing.

I still can't find that word that sounds like bremsstrahlung though.

In other news, Blogspot is a hive of barbarians again. But it's in good company. Livejournal, Xanga, and Wordpress are also barbarian hordes, and of course everything Wikimedia.

万事随转烛

Which is to say, "The myriad matters [of the world] are as the wavering of a candle flame."

I feel obligated to inform the world of the annoyingness of the Great Firewall. The firewall doesn't fully block anything, but it makes a lot of things troublesome. It's more like something out of a Monty Python sketch than a serious defense against toxic memes. Instead of building a wall, they have built an obstacle course, and instead of lying between civilization and the barbarians, it winds through the whole world, and changes course every weekend.

For example, to post a comment on MySpace (admittedly deep in barbarian territory), you first attempt to load some MySpace page, and MySpace will prompt you to log in. So you login, and are taken to your "Home" page. If you can remember which links you have to follow to get where you were headed, you can do such things as read new messages, read friends' bulletins, and view your long list of MySpaceFriends. If you try to look at any person's profile, however, (including your own), something is triggered in the firewall, and the connection is dropped. So, you try your favorite proxy service. That one might have MySpace's kind of web magic reserved for paying users, so you use another service. It can load the profile page fine. But then you click the 'post comment' link, and you get MySpace's "You must be logged in to do that!" page (which I have in the past gotten when I tried to log in: apparently at times you have to be logged in to log in.) So you have to log in again, which will take you back to your "Home" page, from which you again have to navigate back through the link maze to post a comment.

Or again, suppose you want read your sister's blog. She, like you, uses Blogspot to host her blog. She writes a pretty funny blog that you read pretty often, so you have her blog bookmarked, and you load that bookmark. ... After several seconds of waiting for your computer to contact the server you remember that this week Blogspot is officially a hive of barbarians. Nice barbarians, maybe, but barbarians none the less. So you might go to your favorite proxy service, or since you are subscribed via Bloglines, you can read her posts there. And what if you want to post a comment? Well, if you are using the gladder Firefox extension, when you click on the post link, you are automatically redirected to a proxified page. Then you can click on the "comment" link, and type in your comment. Then you scroll down and find... the word verification magic doesn't work with the proxification. (That is a real word. There are 452 Google hits as of this writing. 453 once Google finds this one.) Ah! But you know that the Great Firewall has no problem with Blogger.com. Blogspot is a hive of barbarians, but Blogger, from which the barbarians produce the Blogspot drivel, is safely within civilization. So you cut and paste the web location into a new tab, and edit out the proxifying part, load the page again, paste in your comment, and fill out the word verification. 哎呀，这么麻烦！ (which is to say, "Aiya! So irritating!")

The Internet Gods Read my Blog

A week or two ago I discovered that I can now access the English Wikipedia (though not the Chinese version) without going through a proxy or using the secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
service. This morning I discovered I can access the Stanford application page. Just now I discovered I cannot read my own blog without going through a proxy. The verdict is clear. The internet gods have read my blog and took some hints from it. Just not all the right ones. I checked Youtube just now. It's fully accessible, and I was sucked into watching the Llama Song. Beware.

The Great Firewall

As you may have noticed, I have been able to access *.blogspot.com and blogger.com from beyond the firewall. I can also visit flickr, youtube, and bloglines, all of which I thought might be blocked. However, there are a few things I've noticed are being blocked, and I'm having trouble figuring out their rationale.

Wikipedia

This one is particularly annoying, because everyone links to it everywhere, and so at least once a day, I'll try to load a wikipedia page. My first hypothesis was that the powers that be want to protect people from polluting their brains with all the mundane trivia available there. However, everything available at wikipedia is also mirrored at many other sites across the web. I think the difference is that though people can go look up snakes on planes, Pirates versus Ninjas, Tencent QQ, Salars, or Jingjing and Chacha, they are protected from wasting their time arguing on the Wikipedia talk pages.

Many news sites

Some of the foreign news sites are blocked, but not all. Earlier, I'm pretty sure that CNN and BBC were blocked, but right now CNN seems fully accessible, and it looks like www.bbc.co.uk is accessible, but news.bbc.co.uk is not. VOA News is also blocked. (I wouldn't have noticed except their overly articulated broadcasts are nice for English learners.) Also, the dynamic part of the wall seems particularly sensitive to words that appear in the news. You can load news.google.com once, but reloading it is likely to be interrupted. (This dynamic part might have been what was affecting my efforts to load CNN and BBC pages earlier.)

HRIC

This one makes a lot of sense. This is just one of many blogs I occasionally read, but it's often critical of the government here. The curious thing from my perspective is that several other blogs, especially Global Voices >> China and the blogs that feed into it, are not blocked. GV has a much wider repertiore than HRIC, but also contains similar content.

*.wordpress.com

Again this is a question of why single this one out. Blogspot is accessible, Typepad is accessible, Livejournal and Xanga are accessible. But Wordpress is not. Dunno.

Google cache

Google is only occasionally unaccessible, likely when too many bad words appear in the results summaries. But Google cache, both from Google.com and from Google.cn, is always unavailable.

Stanford graduate application

And finally, the graduate application for Stanford University is blocked. Frankly I'm stumped on this one. I thought at first the host itself was down, but I can reach it fine if I go through SDSU computers. The application won't be available until the 15th, but it could be a slow process if I have to go through the SDSU computers or a proxy. Perhaps this is just the internet overlords' way of telling me I shouldn't go there.

I'm also surprised they aren't blocking youtube. There's some serious spiritual polution there, like Ask a Ninja, Angry German Kid vs. Numa Numa Boy, Bush covering U2, Hannes Coetzee playing spoon slide guitar, and the Snakes on a Plane music video.

(Okay, the Hannes Coetzee clip doesn't count.)

almost internet famous

Today, instead of writing my thesis or even writing a wikipedia article as thesis-writing warmup, I made shirts. Aren't they swell?




I've promised myself I'll write that wikipedia article after dinner.

Site of the week

In the category "What are they teaching kids these days!"
Duda Hart Stork Baby Toys & Clothes

Up-to-the-minute Encyclopedic Knowledge

Thank you, Wikipedians