Away from Blogging

Been away from blogging for a while.... Have been busy staying up and helping at the Monastery at Ukiah, and involved in a bunch of projects. But I should reboot back up my blog. In the mean time, please enjoy some pictures of lolcats.

Yam-Seal

My mom thinks this yam looks like a seal, and excitedly showed us. Now it sits on the kitchen counter as an ornament and proudly surveys all that is cooking.

NPR, "All Things Considered" @ Sichuan Earthquake, updated

The NPR Radio News crew, "All Things Considered" (with familiar names like Robert Siegel, Melissa Block, Andrea Hsu, etc.) were already at Chengdu (near the epicenter) producing a series for next week about the lives of everyday life in mainland China when the 7.9 Richter Earthquake hit. For a first account of the earthquake, check out their Chengdu blog page. Includes an interview interrupt by the earthquake. By looking at earlier entries in the blog, it looked like a very good series that will be pre-empted by disaster.

NPR Chengdu Blog

Update May/16/2008: A heartbreaking story filed by Melissa Block, the audio is even more heartbreaking.

Where to Donate, see network for good for the latest update.

• AmeriCares
• Direct Relief International
• Doctors Without Borders
• International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent
• Save the Children
• UNICEF
• New charities involved in China, 5/16/2008 (not a comprehensive list, for that, see here and here)
  
• Tzu Chi
  
• International Orthodox Christian Charities
• World Vision
• U.S. Fund for UNICEF
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

It looks like from New York Times that China is allowing certain foreign relief teams to directly participate in relief operations. The article mentions Tzu Chi, certain Russian, South Korean, and Japanese teams. I'm personally familar with Tzu Chi's volunteer work here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and relief work overseas. Its Taiwanese manufacturing/business/organizational energy transformed to compassionate relief work is pretty impressive (these guys make fleece blankets out of recycled plastic bottles). Good luck to all volunteers of all NGOs out there!

A battle of wits between Man and Crow in Japan

Crows can be pretty be smart. Japan is currently wrestling with an burgeoning crow population, who have been increasingly causing blackouts by shorting out transmission wires with their nests.

Still, the crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

.... “Japanese react to crows because we fear them,” said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.”

Unfortunately, because of their inability to control the population, cities have been turning to lethal means of control.

source

Hundreds of thousands need help in Burma

Reports are now trickling in about the degree of devastation in Burma caused by a Super Cyclone, Nargis.

With more than 40,000 still missing and as many as 1 million possibly left homeless, the international community was struggling to deliver aid in the military-ruled country, which normally seeks to shut out foreign officials and restricts their access inside the country.

If you want to help, you can donate to World Vision here to provide family survival kits.

Update (May 7, 08):
Other Aid organizations working in Burma (source nytimes.com)

• Americares
  
• American Jewish World Service
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
• CARE
• Catholic Relief Services
• International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent
• International Orthodox Christian Charities
• Save The Children
• U.N. High Commission for Refugees (US site)
• U.S. Fund for UNICEF
• World Food Program
• World Vision

Heidi's concert in Berkeley

I attended Heidi's concert, this Saturday night in Berekeley. It's held as part of the Trinity Chamber Music Series, and was set in a small, intimate church (that could seat maybe 50 people).

She would first explain the piece, the composer, the context, the mood for about a couple of minutes, then play the piece.

Here's the program:

• Piano Sonata No. 32 - Haydn
• Prelude, Chorale and Fugue - Franck
• Arabesques on Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz - Schulz Evler
• 12 Preludes Book 2 - Debussy

I particularly like her piece on Franck's Prelude, Chorale, Fugue, which was a very intimate and sensitive portrayal of his spiritual journey. There's a part in the piece, which I think was the chorale, which was my favorite.

There was a wonderful after-party that was kindly hosted by Heidi's husband's coworker and his family.

New light sensor technology

Using solar cell technology, Japanese researchers in Rohm and government institutes have prototyped light sensors that are 100x more sensitive than existing tech like CCD or CMOS. Instead they are using CIGS. This totally makes sense, since efforts in solar cells is to maximize the energy collected from the light sources (namely, the Sun).

In theory, if the performance is that much better, you can take multiple signal points and average them out to reduce noise, and it’ll still be way faster than a regular CCD I think.

So, how does this affect me? Digital camera will take sharper pictures under lower light conditions, since the exposure time of each shot will be much shorter. This is help you take better pictures, but also help machine vision for suboptimal light conditions.

And from a Science perspective, microscopes will be able to take images more quickly. This is important for imaging enhancing technique that require high volume of images, deconvolution, and signal averaging, and other tricks to get by optical limitations. link

principles of teaching and ZZZZzzzzz

Here's funny and observant blog post from a teacher in a low-income school in Chicago.

The sleeping student body phenomenon would be oft repeated in my literature class for years to come. “The Scarlet Letter”? Snoozers. “The Catcher in the Rye”? Can’t relate zzzzzz! “The Old Man and the Sea”? Counting sheep. “1984″? Like eating ribs before bed. And don’t even get me started on the whole of British literature. Dickens, Shakespeare? Imagine a roomful of students simultaneously entering REM.

I think this post really illustrates the need for seeing and teaching to the conditions of the student. If one can't do that, they are not really reaching the student.

Bjork music video on recursion

I recently saw a wonderful Bjork music video, bachelorette, directed by Michel Gondry, who also directed one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The video cleverly illustrates some of elements of recursion that I also see in the Lotus Sutra (there's a recursive loop into the book, the book about being about the spontaneously about the reader). Not bad for a 5 minute music video.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8700243660640496152

One of the glaring difference is the melancholy unsustainbility of the recursion is the base case. Since each loop is more artificial than the next. The recursion eventually collapses, and that is the base case for popping out of the loop.

Lamentations of the decline of American culture

Harold Bloom, Yale literature professor and cultural critic, laments the state of the Country.

"I am 77 years old and I have never seen this country in such a bad state. It is madness. What we are seeing is the fall of the Roman Empire, only now it is the fall of America, the glory of our Empire. This war is what Parthia was to Rome....

In this kind of climate, nobody is interested in the critical voice. You ask about the role of the intellectual in America today and I have to say: What role? What intellectuals? There is no room for them in the simplified and dumbed down world of today's media. We used to play a role, and there are still a few left, but we are a dying breed. Nobody seems to be interested in nuance anymore."

How do we educate the future generation to be better participants in democracy? Is it possible to roll back the anti-intellectualism brought around in the 60s? Food for thought.

Keeping up with the Jones

A few years ago, Bill Cosby set off a firestorm with a speech excoriating his fellow African-Americans for, among other things, buying $500 sneakers instead of educational toys for their children....

But notably absent from the Cosby affair have been the underlying economic facts. Do blacks actually spend more on consumerist indulgences than whites? And if so, what, exactly, makes black Americans more vulnerable to the allure of these luxury goods?

Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, "Conspicuous Consumption and Race."

The geist of the study is homogenity of income level of one's peers is what causes the upward spiral of conspicuous consumption.

link