Yin to the yang

The amazing growth of Beijing continues. Construction cranes everywhere, miserable traffic, mundane and mind-bending architecture all mixed together. In some far-future time when urban archaeologists are excavating the once-mighty Chinese capital they will be able to date it like a tree merely by counting the number of ring roads.

I haven’t given Chinese public toilets — and by that I mean putrid holes in the ground — much consideration, but then this is the first real working trip I’ve had here with a female teammate — and she ain’t happy. Doing the right-angle levitation thing seems tricky indeed. I suggest two innovations:

(1) How about a belt-like waist harness that attaches to the door of the stall (if there is a door) which allows you to lean back, almost as though you were sitting throneward? Heaven help you if the harness breaks, but would be a lot easier on the calves.

(2) Disposable plastic heel protectors, like reverse sandals, in case your bombadier skills are lacking.

It did occur to me that Westerners must seem like the dirty ones to Chinese accustomed to hole-squatting. A skilled squatter never touches his/her skin to any surface whereas we occidental types must actually come in contact with germ-laden toilet seats. While it has been noted that levitating over a toilet is easier than levitating over a hole, I think this might be psychological. (My co-worker’s blog Why We Work has much more on this.)

Speaking of excrement, I climbed the Great Wall again a few days ago. On my descent from the top I encountered a small child being urged to take a crap in a plastic bag. (See photo.) Gross, but that’s about all you could do up there. When he finished the mother packaged up the bag like an urban dog-walker — and then proceeded to pitch it over the wall! But the wind caught it and blew it right back on to the poor kid! The gods of the Wall had the last laugh. But I had the second-to-last laugh.

On a brighter note, I haven’t yet been barfed at on this trip. (Hey, it happens.) Still some time to go though.

Much of meal conversation has been about language. (Thought I’d say excrement or something, didn’t you?) We were talking about regional differences and the difficulty of using idioms when the topic of sun showers came up. Specifically, the ways different cultures refer to the phenomenon of rain when the sun is shining. I always called them sun showers but was recently intrigued to learn that some people in the American South refer to this as “the devil is beating his wife”. The Chinese loved this euphemism. In China a sun shower is known as “love-not love” or unrequited love. I like that a lot. In Russian (according to a Moldovan teammate) this phenonmemon is known as “blind rain” because the rain cannot see that it is also sunny out. See, conversation like this is good when you’re not in the mood for the duck tongue that’s just been served.

I played in a small ping pong tournament at the Forbidden City a few days ago. Me and three colleagues — two Chinese, one American — took on the best that the Palace Museum could offer. We got killed. I mean, these people had ping pong shoes on, for god’s sake. Scary part was that after the whomping they brought out two “professionals” who they clearly had waiting in the wings in case by some miracle we didn’t suck as bad as they figured we would (and did). They played an exhibition match and it was exactly what you’d expect: standing ten feet back from the table, paddles upside-down, smacking the hell out of the ball, forty-hit rallies. My neck was sore from watching.

See also new phonecam pics at Flickr.

Anxiety of influence

It takes a very bold person to admit that Rave ‘Til Dawn, one of the first compilations of rave electronica in the 1990’s, is on his favorites list of the last twenty years. Or maybe just realistic. Kottke is just this person.

This is the worst album on the list but may be the most influential in terms of my future listening habits. For a kid who grew up in the country and went to college in a small Iowa city, hearing rave music for the first time was a complete revelation for me. I had no idea people were making music like this, so fast, so joyous, so unlike anything that anyone I knew would enjoy listening to. I loved it immediately and have been a huge fan of electronica ever since.

I remember a few years ago when I was digitizing all my music, selecting certain CD’s that I wouldn’t bother with. I dumped nearly all the post-RTD rave compilations (not sure there ever was a rave album by a single artist) either because it was simply too cheesy or of no redeeming music value whatsoever. But I couldn’t quite let go of Rave ‘Til Dawn — and it certainly fit both those criteria. Maybe I just accorded it some respect for where it led me.

Perhaps the best thing about this album is that I smile whenever I think of the looks that my too-cool fellow DJ’s at the college radio station would throw my way when I pulled it out of my bag. What, no navel-gazing?! How dare ye?!

Fuel for thought

Gotta admit I was selfishly pleased to see the launch scrubbed. It ain’t easy catching a mid-afternoon launch when you are Houston +13. That fuel sensor problem really seems like the undead issue. Can’t kill it.

I bet the commander, Eileen Collins, had deja vu when the window cover fell off on the launch pad — and not because of the falling foam that doomed Columbia. Collins had her foot on the gas for the scariest ride up in recent shuttle history, STS-93, when three cooling lines were ruptured by a falling pin during main engine ignition. Collins and her crew ended up short of their orbit, but the mission was a success. I’m pretty sure NASA had this in mind when they selected her for the program’s return to flight. She’s apparently quite cool under pressure.

I really wish NASA had a shuttle alternative in the functional prototype phase in the next year or so. By my calculations, even if the shuttle makes it to the 2010 mothballing date there will be several years — akin to the post-Skylab pre-shuttle era — where the US has no operational manned space vehicle program.

Ironic that that the two bright areas in manned spaceflight are private industry and communist China. What an odd space race.

Sidenote: You can get uncluttered live video and often telemetry data from United Space Alliance, the contractors who provide many of the ground operations to NASA.

Sidenote II: Does anyone know of any good space blogs? Why can’t I find this?

Anti-bacterial

Never read this blog before in my life, but I really liked this assessment of the extremist tendencies in political blogs.

Conclusions: The left is full of crop circle paranoids. The right is full of stupid angry people. The sheer volume of information in both does manage to strip things to bare bones facts, but not by virtue of intelligence, just volume – like a colony of bacteria feeding on a corpse.

Forget brain radiation

Yikes! Three possibilities come to mind.

(1) The phone itself makes you more likely to get hit. (But what cellphone today has a significant enough amount of metal on it?)

(2) Lightning bolts can follow the invisible paths of cellular radio signals right to the handset. That’d make a great urban legend.

(3) Standing under this tree using a cellphone makes you more likely to get hit. But then why this tree? (There were other signs around following no discernible pattern.)

Seems to me that it must have something to do with the phone being on, otherwise why note anything?

This reminded a colleague of mine of a story of a woman in a park in London killed when lightning struck her bra underwire. Only one way to prevent that, I think. Be safe, ladies.

Macro-genealogy

A little while ago I posted the results of my participation in the Genographic Project, a comprehensive attempt to fill the holes in our knowledge of human migratory patterns around the globe based on genetic evidence. I just finished Spencer Wells’s short, accessible introduction to this topic and, coincidentally, spent a 14-hour plane flight sitting next to the producer of a documentary who is using this data to help African-Americans determine their home areas in Africa in the absence of genealogical information. (Sitting next to him wasn’t coincidence; he’s with me on business. That we’re both interested in population genetics is coincidence.) So I understand things a lot better now.

The first realization is how incomplete the picture is. The Genographic Project looks for markers (chromosomal mutations passed on from generation to generation) in the Y chromosome for men and in mitochondrial DNA for women. What this means is that my information only reflects my lineage via my father and his father and his father and so on (called the “patrilineal line”). At the very least I’m missing the story from my other three grandparents. Three of them are deceased, but luckily I have relatives who can be tested.

Here’s what I know so far. My patrilineal line comes from the second migration of modern humans out of east Africa after what is known as The Great Leap Forward, an evolutionary moment where homo sapiens, through a truly lucky genetic mutation, acquired long-term memory, which allowed for the development of language (since thoughts could be strung together linearly), and thus to the ability to think more complexly. They made their way to Mesopotamia over the millennia and then 10,000 to 15,000 years ago my people — my exact line descended from a single person — were the instigators of what is is called the Neolithic Revolution, the birth of agriculture. My ancestors were the first farmers. They were the peoples who expanded into southern Europe and northern Africa, literally sowing the seeds of modern society.

The marker that denotes all this is called M172. It is relatively rare in Europe, occuring in only 20% of peoples in southern Italy; 10% in Spain. My ancestors were sedentary and Meditteranean-hugging. Somehow agriculture was transmitted via this line to the rest of Europe. (How this happened exactly is hotly debated.) If this isn’t fascinating, I’m hard-pressed to describe to you something else that is.

But, again, this is only my Dad’s male line. There’s more to be learned. For instance, my paternal grandmother has always said there is Native American blood in her. This test will prove or disprove that right away.

Get ready, Grandma, cheek swab incoming!

Hey, what’s the food like in China?

Here’s a partial dissection of a truly wonderful lunch in the Imperial Kitchen of the Forbidden City. (Click for notes.)

Today was a scorcher full of meetings in Beijing. I started the day in a coat and tie and ended in an undershirt and sweaty socks. Fill in what you like.

Toot toot

Eternal Egypt is Macromedia’s Showcase Site of the Day. Thanks, Macrodobe! (Remember when Cool Site of the Day was a must-visit web destination in the Netscape era?)

Might as well mention that the site also won a Webby Worthy award recently and, from a while back, a Best of the Web at Museums and the Web 2005.

Toot.

London strong

In World War II the subway tubes were used by Londoners to escape the inferno of Nazi aerial bombardment. Today a new enemy made the Tube itself a hell.

londonbomb.jpg

If anyone can look this ghastliness in the face and not blink it is Londoners. Not only because of the decades of domestic terrorism that they have lived with but because of their resolve during WWII. I’m finding myself awed by the British people’s organized and strong response to the tragedy.

Viva Britannia.

Win Ben Stein’s seat

Recently I saw Ben Stein in the airport. He looked like any other business traveller, harried, laden with luggage. Except that he was at a pay phone, which I thought was odd. Who except a philandering spouse, a scrooge, a luddite, or someone who just left their cell at security would use a pay phone? Certainly no seasoned traveller. Imagine my perplexity, then, to see that Ben Stein has written an article full of tips for business travel in the NYT. And I disagree with nearly all of them. I’ll summarize.

  • Pay for or upgrade to first class if you can. Well, no disagreement there, except that I would say that often times the exit rows and bulkheads have just as much legroom as first class so if you’re not in it for the free champagne there is often an alternative to upgrading.
  • Get the aisle seat. I hate the aisle seat. Your elbows get clocked, you have to get up to let your seatmates out (stow laptop, etc.), and worst of all there’s no good way to sleep since you run the risk of laterally dumping into the aisle or the stranger next to you. Better to take the window where you will be undisturbed and can nuzzle against the wall.
  • Use a travel agent. I have no great experiences with travel agents to convey. Unless you are in a complete bind with no access to a computer or direct access to the airline why would you go with an intermediary? Like real estate agents, the era of travel agents having information that their customers do not is coming to an end.
  • Make friends with your fellow passengers. Stein advises this so that it is less awkward when you have to ask them to stop kicking you. I disagree. The last thing I want on a plane is smalltalk. Who knows what hell you’re in for on an international trip if you drill a bit too deeply and hit a motherlode of incessant chitchat? And if you have to ask someone to stop kicking you, just ask. Must you have befriended them?

His hotel tips are a bit more in line with my thinking, but it still leaves me wondering: do you trust someone who travels this much and uses a pay phone?

See also: Stuff in my backpack, international edition | Travel tip