A Japanese Lady

A work of my friend Kaye.

Life and Virginity

BBC: Egypt anger over virginity faking:

A leading Egyptian scholar has demanded that people caught importing a female virginity-faking device into the country should face the death penalty.

Compensating people's lives for virginity? How unbelievable this is.

New Proof (wonkish)

There is a lemma proposition for the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem, namely, a sequence converges to a number if and only if any and every subsequence of that sequence also converges to the same number (technically a trimmed-down version of this proposition, i.e. only the necessary condition part, also suffices to prove the B-W Theorem). Traditionally, this proposition, or theorem by nature, can be possibly proved with a deduction occupying one page or so. However, I discovered today that my schoolmate Ling Hao from the Math Department has a better solution to verify the sufficient condition part (from convergence of subsequences to convergence of the original sequence). He simply picks the original sequence as the selected "any" subsequence and it is obvious that this subsequence has a limit, and consequently the original sequence, which is exactly the same as the subsequence, also converges to the same limit. Proof complete. I advised he write an academic paper for this.

New Computers

I just realized the true reason why the printing service in the residence computer room is faster than before. It is not that the printer server has advanced its memory, but the whole set of computers has been replaced with new ones (though the operation system stuck with Windows XP).

China's Century?

In per capita terms, China is still a poor poor country; and it still faces numerous problems. Read more from FT.com.

Eliminating Pirated Online Western Films

 Economist.com: Public morals and private property:

In mid-September the China Internet Video Anti-Piracy Alliance, a group comprising both big Chinese internet portals and foreign rights-owners, including the Motion Picture Association of America, announced a broad legal attack. It said that it had begun collecting evidence against more than 1,000 suspected violators of intellectual property and would start filing lawsuits, with the first target being 503 videos found on Youku, an increasingly popular website, that the alliance claims are pirated...

Websites that pay for content are understandably upset about losing a war to rivals that do not always do so. If Western entertainment were no longer widely available, they might regain the initiative. Bereft Chinese consumers, in turn, might help to achieve what foreign pressure could not, by persuading their government to allow more legitimate imports.

It will be a big step in protecting intellectual property in China if to succeed; but I do not think "bereft Chinese consumers" will persuade the government to allow imports. Such persuasion does not make sense in China.

Flea Market in BU

Hi I'm thinking about creating a Google Group where every BU student can freely visit and view and post to buy or sell stuff. One thing nice about Google Groups is that it allows everyone to participate and it facilitates the common need to browse and even search through all the posted information in the group. Also you can choose to subscribe to (bundled) updates about any new information posted in this group. I want your opinion before actually carrying it out. Thank you for your time.

If you have a minute, please help me fill out a questionnaire here.

Last Words from a Prisoner to Be Executed

From NY Times.

What the Age of Information Has Brought Us

Days ago, when the new Marie Digby album was released worldwide, I wrote on Twitter:

Marie Digby's new album is out today. Still thinking about whether buy one.

8:39 PM Sep 14th from HelloTxt

The next day, I received this retweet:

mariedigby@hanrizon i was pondering the same thing ;) ... actually i think i am going to get it, i hear it's pretty okay.. lol

1:47 PM Sep 15th from web in reply to hanrizon

FYI, I've checked that this author is indeed Marie Digby herself.

How to Free Your Twitter Feed

Twitter has installed a mandatory user/password verification in every user's homepage feed a few months ago, making it incompatible with Google Reader. I understand that there are other ways to free this. One of them from the Google search result, says that there is a website dedicated to reburn your feed to be an unsecured one if you can provide your user name and password to them. Well personally I am doubtful about the credibility of that website, as it seems to be a small company. So now I've found another method to free your feed: using Feed Burner (now a service from Google). Insert "username:password@" after the "http://" and before anything else in your feed URL and burn it with Feed Burner. It's quite simple. As Google is (presumed to be) a trustworthy company (at least it's big and care about social influence), there should be less worry about the safety of your Twitter account.

No Room for Heterodox Economics

Notre Dame Plans to Dissolve the 'Heterodox' Side of Its Split Economics Department.

Does merely the inability to produce large number of top PhD students mean a failure for a university department? Does the fact that nowadays the field of economics is overwhelmed by neoclassicism and econometrics mean that these are the only and correct ways to do economics? Having just gone through an economic crisis that is rarely seen throughout decades, why cannot people demonstrate some openness toward a wider array of methods to study economics? A university can teach both traditional and modern medicine, then why not both mainstream and heterodox economics?

School Life

Vivid depiction of school life in China. This video is for those from my generation raised up in China.

New Way to Learn Math

Though I finally decided to take Numerical Methods in a later semester, Differential Equations already requires some mathematical analysis knowledge that I do not have (and this course is deem most intensive even by math majors). Dr. Xue will only teach linear algebra in this whole year during his Saturday sessions, which is not much to my current interest. Reading textbook by myself is kind of boring and requires hard effort to persist. Therefore I think I'd better to come up with some new ways to acquire this with the aid of something similar to a classroom.

Emperor Norton

Did you know that the United States once had an emperor?

The Third Blueprint

Rapper Jay-Z is back with his The Blueprint 3.

Chrome 3 Is Out

Google launched the third version of its browser today. It is claimed by Google, that Chrome 3 is 25 percent faster in rendering JavaScript than the previous version and 150 percent faster than the original Google Chrome (reported on Computer World). Also, this new version is equipped with the long-awaited themes feature (gallery). Try it on!

Dan Brown Has New Book

It's called The Lost Symbol. The Da Vinci Code has been my favorite movie as well as novel but I am kind of tired of such plots after watching Angels and Demons.

Dads' Maternity Leave

BBC:

New fathers will be able to take six months' leave under plans to "split" maternity leave... The plan would allow mothers to return to work after six months and fathers to stay at home with the baby.

I am not sure why the British government is carrying this out but it will inevitably discourage discrimination over young ladies in the job market significantly.

Fast Flip

Want to try a new news reading experience? Google has launched a news service called Fast Flip. It aggregates news from major media and allow users to view the screen shots with speed. Google would like it to help the newspaper industry currently in struggle. More information on BBC.

Facebook Retweet

Facebook has announced a new feature: status tagging. Basically it is linking to your friends, pages, or other connections by typing their name following an "@"while updating your status. Sounds familiar?