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I don’t think those two were related.

ANA has draconian baggage restrictions (checked: 20kg total, US$10/kg thereafter) and I don’t own a scale. Problem solved!

Verdict: suitcase 18kg, guitar 6kg. I think I’ll make one more box to send at the post office tomorrow morning.

I feel like a caveman. THAT IS ALL.

Perhaps with increasing restlessness to find increased variety in my diet or perhaps by hanging out with Aaron more, I’ve been eating some great food recently. Here’s a documentation of some great food in Taiwan (Yilan and Taipei) and where to find it:

Best Curry Udon ever (Yilan)

I’ve been craving some good udon noodles, called 烏龍麵 (wūlóngmiàn) in Taiwan which originally confused me as those are the characters for Oolong tea.[^3] I haven’t found great soup udon in Yilan but I did find some fabulous fried curry udon.

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A week ago a reporter from the China Times came and interviewed me on teaching in Nanao and learning Atayal. The article was in the paper today in the education section: 服務偏鄉 外師學會流利泰雅語.

Speaking of t-shirts, I’d been toying with a t-shirt idea for the past year or two: a Beijing Pirate t-shirt. Let me explain…

A distinctive feature of Beijing dialect of Mandarin (and, indeed, most northern Chinese dialects) is the very frequent rhoticization (adding to or replacing the end of a word with “arr”) whose function is often glossed as a diminutive suffix. This phenomenon is called 儿化 (érhùa) in Chinese. Here are some examples, blatantly stolen from Wikipedia:

• 公园(gōngyuán)(public garden) →　公园儿(gōngyuánr), pronounced “gōngyuár”
• 小孩(xiǎohái) (small child) → 小孩儿(xiǎoháir), pronounced “xǐaohár”
• 事 (shì) (thing) → 事儿(shìr), pronounced “shèr”

The result of this variation is that it makes you sound like a pirate… and thus my t-shirt idea was born:

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Purchased yesterday in Taipei at NET, the wannabe GAP of Taiwan.

I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.

I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]

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I like many others am a big fan of John Gruber’s Markdown, a simple typesetting spec for entering text in a clean, legible plain-text fashion and outputting to (X)HTML. Michel Fortin did the fabulous job of porting the Markdown engine to PHP, making it a plugin for WordPress, bBlog, and TextPattern.

I’ve been using Markdown for all my blog posts here. Recently, though, I was in charge of a bbPress bulletin board (the “less is more” sister project to WordPress) for the Shoreland Scav Hunt team, and wanted to use Markdown formatting there. And I wasn’t the only one wanting to do this.

With some experimenting and research into the filters in the bbPress text flow (different than the WordPress one), I was able to make Markdown work in bbPress. This involved adding a special bbPress plugin wrapper to Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra. I’ve rereleased this plugin as Markdown for WordPress and bbPress, available at both wordpress.org and bbpress.org. Enjoy!

As Google adds ten more languages to its machine translation service, it seems to be on its way to becoming the most convenient universal translator of the world’s popular languages. Google’s handling of languages of course isn’t perfect, however—in particular, I’ve been complaining to friends for a while about the weaknesses of Google’s handling of queries in Chinese character (漢字/汉字) scripts. In this post, I run some tests using Google’s Language Detection service to try to better understand its handling of Chinese character queries.

Background

Chinese characters have been used all across East Asia, most notably in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (the “CJKV”). Prescriptivist writing reforms in Communist China and Japan have simplified many characters, though. Some characters were simplified in the same way, some in different ways, and some in only one country but not the other. For more information, there’s Wikipedia or Ken Lunde’s CJKV Information Processing.

The problem

The issue comes up when you try to search for a word in Chinese characters which clearly came from one Chinese character-using language. From my experience, Google doesn’t consider which language you are a user of, based on the query, and returns many results in other Chinese character-using languages as well.[^1]

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A couple weeks ago I went to Chiayi (嘉義, pinyin: Jiāyì) to present a paper at the Linguistic Society of Taiwan’s National Conference on Linguistics.[^1] I got a chance to meet some wonderful and kind Taiwanese linguists, make friends with some linguistics students, as well as explore the city of Chiayi.

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Introduction

It’s that time of the year again—Mother’s Day weekend—and that means Scav Hunt! Every year at the University of Chicago we have a huge Scavenger Hunt (a.k.a. “Scav,” or “The Hunt”). On Wednesday night at midnight, a list of roughly 300 items is released in some obfuscated fashion. The items are to be presented three days later, on Judgement Day (Sunday). While some items are simply rare and must be found, most are some sort of construction, production, or art project. There are also some other scav staples: some of the items make up the Scav Olympics, the Party on the Quads, Scav All Stars, and the Road Trip.

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Sports day

Three Mondays ago, Nanao had their annual sports day.[^1] The sports day reminded me of the years of Japanese school sports days I used to go to, complete with the representative student’s pledge of sportsmanship, a three legged race, and concluding relay, though it was only half a day.[^2] It also was billed as the Nan’ao town and school joint sports day (村校聯合運動大會) and indeed many parents, families, and other miscellaneous townspeople were there to join in the festivities.

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Just a quick announcement: Inspired by one of my favorite phrases from Barack Obama’s compelling speech on race in America, I created a website called The Children of America which gives you a random photo of a child of America. The importance of investing in our future as a nation through investment in our children is often only glossed over in politics… it’s always good to be reminded of what we’re working for.

Visit The Children of America

The project also acts as my foray into the Flickr API… I’m particularly proud of the dynamic submission chooser. Use it to submit your own creative-commons-licensed Flickr photos of American children.

From Old Man on Campus:

The Shoreland’s 13 floors, hundreds of rooms, will be a dorm for another year or so before it’s transformed into high-end condominiums. Meanwhile, plaster sifts from the ceilings, and the lobby is a mishmash of couches, stacks of student publications, a big-screen TV and handbills covering the walls. A friendly, bored staff of desk attendants watches as students — listless, sleepy, harried, running late, dressed to the nines, falling down drunk, depending on the day and hour — file past.

Accurate. I can vividly visualize the scenes he describes. Funny, I miss the Shoreland.

(via Bailey)

Here’s my (and Aaron’s) latest favorite night market food… 抓抓餅 (zhūazhūabǐng). Here’s an iMovie video which explains the process.¹