Chinese protests

This past week, the Dalai Lama has been at the University of Washington, and there have been an interesting series of protests. Most notably, Chinese students who seem to be historically in-active in American politics, have shown up in big numbers to protest what they see as Anti-Chinese sentiment, and a mistreatment of the facts by Tibet and the American media. I was never really sure what this all meant...

There are a lot of issues under the surface here. China is one of the biggest, fastest growing, most prosperous countries in the world; but yet the US people seem to hold a certain stigma against the country as they reap the benefits with another hand. While we throw around phrases like "imperialists" and "human rights violators", the Chinese (government controlled media) does a pretty good job of stifling these stories. Meanwhile, the US has the same allegations against us (rightly so). Well, amidst all this, there are quite a few Chinese people in my class and they all seem really good on a personal level.

Point being, the NY Times put a pretty decent article about this up today, which shed some light on the issues. It still remains to be seen, though: is this just the process of disillusionment of Chinese expatriates with their gov't, or is this a valid rebuttal to US sentiment? (Some of the anti-Tibet arguments: the Daily Lami is a Nazi and China has put a lot of money into the infrastructure of Tibet) That last one reminds me of Iraq.... I think China and the US have a lot in common, so we should be better friends, no?

Helicopters make life better

School getting you down? (it is me...) Well, this great song by Guided by Voices should cheer you up. Off their latest album, they're echoing what is by now common knowledge: life would be better if you could just take a helicopter everywhere...

Guided by Voiced - Everywhere with Helicopter




(I was honestly looking for a music video.... hoping for some excellent helicopter shots... someday I'm sure)

Monster cables about to tuck its overpriced tail between its legs

Monster cable, the over priced over hyped, super litigious audio cable company has just been pwned by a small cable manufacturer Named Blue jeans cable. Monster sent off a cease and desist to Blue jeans in an attempt to force a lisencing agreement due to likely imaginary IP infringement claims. It turns out that the CEO of Blue jeans is an Ex lawyer with 19 years experience litigating cases large and small with an undeniable slant for truth, no matter the cost. Read his response to Monster here. Nothing like watching a massive company get slapped down by the little guy.

Daft Punk - Harder better faster stronger

She dances for you...

It's 3am and Youtubes down...where are your movies?

The quality people over at Lifehacker brings you Youtube fanatics in the crowd a way to download the new higher quality MP4 format that is being pilot tested by Google for their most popular videos. Lifehacker offers tips, scripts and snips of advice about grabbing the latest and the self made greatest. Don't let Youtubes maintenance cycle get you down ever again.



Technorati Tags: youtube

xkcd

Everyone who doesn't read xkcd's webcomic needs to start. Today's is so hilariously meta-comic (I almost feel embarrassed using that term, but it is) that you need to take a look here.

Polite Dance Song

I was looking for this song by The Bird and The Bee to show to someone (since its pretty decent... pretty catchy) and found the video... downright disturbing, definitely watch it to the end. The independent music industry seems to take the artistic-license to make some of the most out-there videos, the kind of stuff you'd never see on TV...

the passage of time....

Just read an interesting series of posts at the Cosmic Variance blog titled "Incompatible Arrows". It talks about the various ways time may or may not flow making use of various books by various authors, all excellent, to explain several cases. Each example is followed by deeper discussion in the comments. All very interesting.

Incompatible Arrows I: Martin Amis
Incompatible Arrows II: Kurt Vonnegut
Incompatible Arrows III: Lewis Caroll
Incompatible Arrows IV: F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is a test....

I'm testing out a new-ish extension for firefox called Scribefire that allows you to open a dialog box and post on the fly, instead of logging into your blogging software manually. So far so good. Once you set up your account it lets you add tags, images and other tasty menu items with hopefully few problems.Everything seems solid at the moment. Heres hoping it stays that way. I'll keep you updated as to the quailty as the days go by.


Technorati Tags: mozilla firefox software extensions

Random House!

Just posting up this pretty cool feature the Random House, Inc. website offers for some of their books' webpages. Here's a demo:




You can preview a book just click on its face and you get a pop-up window.