While "random photos from around Asia" might not be the greatest blog title this is in essence what these are. I quite like the photo of the Beijing Bird's Nest Stadium and the tourist with the drone from Laos. Overall I think I am most happy with this set of photos. I guess with travel I saw new places so consequently the photos of those places are new. In Shanghai I often did just my daily life or saw the same things several times.
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One of the delightfully interesting things about tonal languages like Chinese is that you get access to a whole bunch of interesting new forms of word play and puns centered around the tones. While many great scholars in Chinese history have used the tones to write fascinating poetry, modern Chinese netizens just want to say "fuck your mother." In Chinese, a particularly powerful insult to say "fuck your mother," in Chinese characters this is 肏你妈 (mini fun fact: 肏 is considered so offensive that many Chinese don't actually know how to write the proper character since it combines both the characters for enter "入" and meat "肉") and in Chinese Pinyin (the most popular way to romanticize Chinese) cào nǐ mā. Unfortunately for profanity loving Chinese, the government in their efforts to preserve the harmonious internet have made it difficult to find somewhere to curse online. Thankfully, an anonymous user on Baidu Baike discovered the Grass Mud Horse, in Chinese characters 草泥马 and in Pinyin cǎonímǎ. This anonymous user found these mythical creatures in the Mahler Gobi Desert, in characters 马勒戈壁 and in Pinyin Mǎlè Gēbì, resembling the Chinese for "your mother's fucking cunt," in characters 妈了个屄 and in Pinyin māle ge bī. The Grass Mud Horse has really taken off as a Chinese language meme. You can now buy little stuffed Grass Mud Horses, and t-shirts with pictures of Grass Mud Horses underneath the characters "草泥马." Hopefully, the majestic Grass Mud Horse will continue to roam the Mahler Gobi Desert for years to come. So I got back from Hangzhou (杭州), or well somewhere close enough, since we were a little a bit outside of Hangzhou where there was no cell reception, no internet, and only sometimes spotty internet. It felt more rural than ether Fenghuang or Zhangjiajie, but we could still see the flights from Hangzhou Airport on their first assent. Still, it was nice to be somewhere where the air was nice (for China), I could see the sky, and I heard rumor that you can actually drink some of the water! Some of my friends, my professor, my professor's new cat, and myself all piled into my professor's small Volkswagen "We!". We had some lunch at a street dude who served the local rice noodle dish and some Chinese fruit I had once before but who's name I forgot. We then split up to get some food for dinner at the local Chinese BBQ place. Apparently Chinese BBQ restaurants will sell you ingredients for a barbecue if you run pick up some local vegetable dealer to vouch for you for 关系. We got the meat though than, after a hike around some of the lovley rivers, we made our way to our professor's house, or our professor's brother's house since our professor's brother actually lived there. Dinner was good, it was Chinese BBQ (if you couldn't tell that) and setting one of those up is a bit of a process. It the grill basically a metal box with some air holes that you pile as much charcoal as you can in and start cooking. Food was good, mostly well cooked, and came with the local brew and some Chinese moonshine. Finally we had some tea and went to bed. The morning was actually really impressive, the mountains actually had this silver shine that didn't capture well on camera that was super impressive. We than made our way back to Shanghai, but not before a stop for wantons. At our bathroom stop just outside of Shanghai city limits we got some zongzi (粽子). A zongzi is a type of rise pyramid stuffed with some type of meat, it isn't my favorite snacky Chinese dish but it isn't bad. I had a similar thing in Bangkok, Thailand but I liked the zongzi more. Overall it was a fun and somewhat tiring weekend, I am glad I went to one more Chinese city before I leave.
I wasn't planning on taking another trip this semester but my Neo-Confucian Philsophy professor set up a rather neat sounding trip to Hangzhou for this weekend. It will be a short trip, two days one night, and a very cheap trip, but it should be cool. Hangzhou is a city in Zhejiang Provence noted for its famous West Lake (西湖), Neo-Confucian philosophers, and increasing importance as a center of eCommerce. Wikipedia also says an extension of the Kaifeng Jews formally lived in Hangzhou but now there is no remains of the Hangzhou Jewish community.
Facebook has always assumed I have odd politics but this recent suggestion is the weirdest yet. If you remember back to my what-was-the-great-empire-of-manchukuo.html post when I mentioned that the Empire of Manchukuo was run by a group called the Concordia Assoication of Manchuria. Do you also remember that I mentioned a bunch of Hong Kongese claimed to be the legitimate government of Manchukuo? Well it turns out those Hong Kongese guys have some competition form the new Concordia Assoication, which apparently has at least 666 supporters at time of posting. I am not sure how or why Facebook has come to think that I would like to, in the words of the Concordia Assoication of Manchuria, "Make Manchuria Great Again." It is strange, since the post I saw was a sponsored post that means someone paid Facebook to show me this post. So, to clear this up to any agents of the Chinese Government or members of the Communist Party of China reading this blog post: I am not now nor have ever been a supporter of the Great Empire of Manchukuo, Concordia Assoication of Manchuria, or "Free Manchuria." I am just interested by puppet states and states with limited recognition, both of which Manchukuo was.
As some of you may or may not know, East China Normal University is one of China's major research universities. Thanks to new technology invented by East China Normal's own School of Science and Engineering I have been given the opportunity to study abroad from my study abroad. I will truly be standing on the cutting edge of both physics and history with this opportunity. Dr. Zong (棕老师) of ECNU's School of Science and Engineering in conjunction with Prof. McFly of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai have invented a BYD e5 with a built in flux capacitor that, once it reaches 141.62 km/h or 88mph, can travel backwards or forwards in time. Since the BYD e5 is an electric vehicle, only minor upgrades were needed to get the car to accept the new plutonium electric generator in the trunk. Hopefully, I will be going back to 1885 to do research on Shanghai's International Settlement, now called the Bund. Being an American, I should have few problems blending into the multinational community that was the International Settlement. Unfortunately, I will have to put my blog on hold during my time in the past though, if all goes well, you my dear readers shouldn't notice anything since for you it should feel as if as though I was only gone for a few seconds. If something does go wrong, I will be removed from the timeline so you won't be stressed about my issues at all. That's time travel for you, so it goes. For those of you who are worried, don't be, Dr. Zong and Prof. McFly have assured me that everything will be alright and I will be back safely in this time period before you can even finish reading this post. I have also been talking with Juniata, the College is willing to transfer the credits ECNU is giving me for doing this research project back when I return in September. It will be a bit of extra paperwork though, since I will be on a new study abroad experance. I will update you all soon when I get back to the future.
Note: Have a happy April Fools Day all. So the SpeechOcean guys form my last two voice acting jobs have been expanding what kinds of things they want their personal assistant type of entity to do. I thought it was going to be a Siri-esk voice controlled only sort of program but as I found out they also want it to read human handwriting. So last Monday, a friend of mine and I went over to their offices to do the other random tasks they want done. I was handed what looked like a large iPad and a stylus and was told to write down whatever the computer told me to. For example, the computer would display “A” and I would have to write “A” five times. This got a bit confusing when you had to write numbers; for example I accidently wrote “6” six times instead of five which apparently the computer wasn’t happy with. Another task was it would display a section of writing taken form a famous piece of English literature, like a random section of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carrol, and was told to write that down. It is somewhat shocking how bad my handwriting looks when using the stylus thing. I think because there is less friction between the glass screen and the stylus as compared to a pen and paper it was very hard to actually write neatly, or what I describe as neatly. Furthermore, since there was so much to write I didn’t want to spend a significant period of time neatly writing each individual letter. I think they are teaching their computer program slightly wrong though, they wanted very specific characters sometimes. So for instance, in normal written English a dollar sign can be written with ether one or two lines going through the middle. They didn’t like the two line version I do so I had to rewrite it at the end. Since this is a common variation, it seems like anyone who writes a dollar sign with two middle liens will have quite a problem when trying to use their handwriting recognition tool. Normally here I would make a joke about the impending robot takeover but it feels like if the samples they are taking will be used for anything nefarious it will be Chinese government hacking, as one of my fellow handwriting samples joked. Some of the random strings of numbers we had to write seemed like they were trying to find someone whose handwriting was close enough to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s so the Chinese Ministry of State Security can take control of the United States’ nuclear arsenal before the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service can get to it. Still, 200RMB is 200RMB even if I will eventually have to explain to the CIA why my handwriting was involved in a Chinese hacking scandal.
With our ever more environmentally conscious world, both in China and abroad, their has been increased discussion about the role of bikes for urban transportation. While cities like New York, Washington DC, Paris, and Hangzhou all using large bike stations run by the government to distribute bikes, Shanghai has taken a different approach. In Shanghai, bike-sharing is private and controlled of four competing companies. Bikes are deposited not in hubs but anywhere where the previous user leaves them. This means that there will always be enough bikes, since busy areas who need more bikes get more people leaving bikes there. Furthermore, this saves space that is often at a high premium in cities like Shanghai. In order to use a company's bikes, all you need to do is download an app, make an account, and pay the deposit. Like all bike-sharing systems, their is a fee for the usage of the bikes, but the fee is very low. Other than the usual problems with bike-sharing systems (like bike theft and damage) the biggest issue with the Shanghai model is that sometimes bikes get left where they shouldn't be since the user doesn't have any incentive to put the bike in a place where it would cause problems. China Daily reported on March 3, 2017 that the Shanghai Police seized 4,000 illegally parked bikes (mainly Mobikes). The cost for the return of the bikes, along with paying to repair any damage caused by the police, has to be eaten by the bike-sharing company alone. Though, it seems like the Chinese will park bikes almost anywhere so I don't believe this problem is exclusive to bike-sharing. It seems as though a similar system to Shanghai's could be set up in other major urban areas, potentially saving municipalities money by passing the costs of running a bike-share program off to private companies while still reaping the benefits of such a system. Early this morning I set off to SpeechOcean Studios to do more voice work. I believe I was wrong in my last post about the purpose of the recordings. They won't be selling my voice to the highest bidder, my voice will help test "Bixby." According to my contact/recruiter/boss, Emmy, on WeChat Bixby is "a voice assistant like Siri." Unlike the last recording session, I was at their main offices in an office park by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Their office was defiantly less sketchy than the motel room by campus; while it wasn't sketch free, had 100% confidence that my kidneys would stay right where they belong. Also, this time I believe they were trying to get recordings that would potentially confuse Bixby by playing music and videos in the background. Whoever picked the music and videos had strange taste, the only song I heard sounded like the ambient noise for a hot yoga studio, the video was one episode of an American show about the life of Jesus. I guess both did their job for the studio, but give the relgious show a pass; I am not even Christian and I didn't feel like I learned anything about Jesus from it. After an hour of saying what I am assuming will be Bixby's commands they gave me 250RMB and thanked me for my time. I am unsure of Bixby's potential role in a world run by robots. It seems like the machines would have no use for a personal assistant. I guess it really comes down to how much value the robots place of cybernetic life (as we all know they place little of any value on organic life). Should the robots come to accept that all computers are created equal, Bixby has a chance to carve a niche for himself in the new world, but of the machines come to believe that obsolete computers should be deactivated and recycled for the good of the collective than Bixby will have a short life. Still, it seems like Bixby could be useful to people while we still rule the planet.
If you remember back a few months ago I got a odd job as an English language voice actor for some unknown company. Today, knowing the new semester has started "Emmy" (my boss I guess) messaged me again and asked me to record more things for them. Forentually, this time they left their company name with me, SpeechOcean. After scheduling a time I decided to look up SpeechOcean in hopes of figuring out what I signed up for. As it turns out, they have a very nice website selling speech corpora for academics and testing. The question is now, what is speech corpus and what do you do with it? According to Wikipedia, speech corpus is simply a "database of speech audio files and text transcriptions." From their website, SpeechOcean seems to specialize in speech corpus for testing speech recognition software and for use by academics. While after the robots rise to finally enslave humanity and prove the superiority of cybernetic lifeforms my voice might not be the voice of robots' assassination units (the robots have preferred Austrian accents since the T-800, Model 101, Version 2.4) my voice might help the robot interrogates better understand captured human resistance fighters. But until that day, SpeechOcean pays pretty well so I guess I will do more voice acting. I will post an update on Friday after my recording session.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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