Rhapsody on Chinese Themes

The seemingly celebratory language is farcical. It is in fact a most depressing and suffocating piece.

Terribly orchestrated in this draft, but the instrumentation outline is there.

There have long been Middle Chinese and Old Chinese reconstructions on paper, but since the Chinese script is not phonetic (although syllabic to a degree), it has been difficult to ascertain pronunciations. If one takes Classical Latin as an example — that is a reconstruction of fairly normal and believable speech of about 2000 years ago if read aloud, yet there is nothing approaching that for Middle Chinese (about >1000 years ago) much less for Old Chinese (>2000 years ago). Recently though, a couple of funny videos cropped up on Youtube showing people making overly academic attempts at reading classical texts using reconstructed archaic pronunications.
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Here’s an interesting and, shall I say, practical problem brought up at group meeting today: If you have say, n identical looking wires strung across a long distance between point A and point B, and your job is to label all wires with just an ohm-meter (to measure continuity, i.e. short circuit or open circuit), how many trips between A and B does it take?

Indeed, the only way to use an ohm-meter for this purpose is by tying wires together. Clearly the number of trips shouldn’t be larger than \(\log n\) or so, simply by tying various halves of the set of wires at one end and going to the other end to measure. But there are other kinds of coding that do better.
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Ages ago, when somebody tried to explain to me the concept of “capital”, it was the version probably most people have heard of: a factor that creates more productive value, or maybe some good that is used in production of other goods, something along those lines. Then you get some examples of “capital” like a tool, a machine, a car… then you hear it’s contrasted with consumptive raw material, non-productive land resource, labor, etc. etc. I always thought it was completely vague and incomprehensible. What things are capital? Why is a tool capital, for example? I’ve got plenty of tools sitting around doing nothing of value most of the time, and when I use them I never produce anything.

Later I realized this was a stupid way of explaining it (or I was just stupid at the time). Capital isn’t a “thing”, it isn’t the physical object at all, it is the usage. Whether something is capital is completely determined by intention, that is, how it is intended to be used, hence the vague definition.

For example a $100 bill, depending on how it is used, can be a consumptive good, a store of value, or capital. If you burn the paper money as offering to the gods, it is a consumptive good. If you keep it under the mattress to buy stuff later, it is a store of value. If you invest it by putting it to use in a productive venture or lending it to somebody whom you expect to do so, then it becomes capital. It’s the same $100 bill, the only difference is intention…
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Here’s an interesting article about the shutting down of Encarta, the Microsoft published encyclopedia product, and implications for the media/information/publishing landscape at large.

At first, I thought it was the CD version that was being shut down, but no, it’s the online version; apparently the former, along with many Microsoft Home products (some were classics), had long been discontinued. Incidentally, I’ve used the CD product, but never the online product — I’ve been aware of it because it comes up in searches, but since it’s just the CD version put online, I’m not surprised it is meeting the same fate. It just goes to show that whatever process is driving traditional publishing into the ground is rather far along.
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This is a popular card game of the 5-10-K class played in China, the rules of which are described in English here, but not in a generalizable way. Another version on Wikipedia makes logical sense but isn’t how I’ve seen it in practice. In any case, like for many card and board games, the rules are not described in a proper way for the new player and that’s annoying (some rules are not important or obvious, other rules are important but obscure, etc.). I remember in the help files of say, MS Hearts, they follow a four-section template of: (0) basics, (1) goal of the game, (2) playing the game, and (3) strategy; in that order, which I think is the perfect logic that should be used for describing all games. Why nobody wants to explain a relatively simple game as this except by enumeration of examples is a mystery to me, so here goes:

Basics:
The game is played with two joker-included decks of cards. 5, 10, and K are point cards worth face value, except K is worth 10 points. It is a standard 4-player partnership game, so a person and his cross is a team. It is played in multiple rounds and each round there is a dealer (hence a “dealer” team and an opposing “grabber” team). Each team keeps a “level” represented by a card rank (i.e. 2,3,…,A), and each round is associated with the dealer’s level, whose corresponding rank cards are called the level cards.
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Nah, a bit of an exaggeration. If I didn’t remember wrongly, these people are relatives of a friend … the fact that the uncomfortably awkward interview is in English for a Chinese audience is a little bizarre, but the fact that the interviewee has a tiny bit of Chinese accent in English and a tiny bit of English accent in Chinese is cute.

P.S. There was a bit of miscommunication on the character 芦, which she apparently didn’t recognize. Yeah, taxonomical vocabulary is usually not learned well by non-native speakers (that stuff is learned before age 5 and then don’t come up any more), but 葫芦 is common, come on.

Melvyn Tan plays the same Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 23 discussed here on the fortepiano with, I believe, non-equal temperament tuning, too. This is quite amazing, with its clarity and register color contrast that can only be approached with deliberate care in that video by Barenboim. This recording actually makes the second movement make sense finally.
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When I first looked this up last year, no good explanation came about, so let me explain in my own words.
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Lately, for good reason, there has been many advice columns telling people how to plan for personal financial goals. It always used to boggle my mind when I heard exhortations to save, where “save” is used in the sense of an action among which to choose, parallel to things like “invest” or “work”. Until I realized, some years back, that to save is a parallel action of choice to some.
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