Archive for October, 2007
The Manhattan Project
Turns out there’s a reason they called it The Manhattan Project.
In “The Manhattan Project” … Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — […]
Gmail IMAP
I am very excited about IMAP support on Gmail. Maybe it isn’t healthy for someone to be so excited about e-mail … but this is huge.
Why? Especially when I already have a reliable IMAP service I’ve been happy with for years?
Well, first of all, lets talk about why IMAP is different from POP. Most people […]
Yes Logo
One of our main goals for the film is to create awareness about the plight of India’s Denotified Tribes, but we also want to turn that awareness into direct action. To this end we’ve been working hard to set up a US-based 501c3 nonprofit which can collect donations on the behalf of the communities we […]
Stagnation
From Krugman’s blog:
One of the big but little-noticed economic stories of the past few years is the sharp slowdown in US productivity growth. Dean Baker and John Schmitt are on the case; their recent article is definitely worth reading.
Baker and Schmidt argue that the era in which US productivity was surging ahead of productivity in […]
Ivory Tower vs. Real World
[Cross-posted at Savage Minds]
In our discussions about anthropologists in the military the term “ivory tower” has come up again and again, as has its antipode, “the real world.” These terms work rhetorically to oppose academic elitism and detachment against the difficult moral choices one must make in everyday life. A couple of things really bother […]
Camera Shopping
(Click here to see a side-by-side comparison of the cameras discussed in this post.)
Buying a compact digital camera is always a trade-off. In such a small box, if you stuff a feature in one side, another feature pops out the other end. That wouldn’t be so bad if companies were honest about the trade-offs they’ve […]
Wisdom of the Crowd?
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki relates an anecdote about “Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered … weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.” While individual guesses varied widely, the median of the crowd’s guesses was spot-on. The implication being that […]
BBQ
This is one of those “only in Taiwan” stories: Police in Hsinchu 新竹 captured an escaped convict when they noticed a man attending a police-sponsored BBQ.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 almost every Taiwanese family has a BBQ, sort of like the Fourth of July in the US. The practice has become so wide-spread that […]
Föhn
The typhoon currently cutting across the northern tip of Taiwan didn’t hit us too hard in Hualien, but we did get something I’d never experienced before: a föhn (fénfēng 焚風 in Chinese).
Paraphrasing Wikipedia, a föhn occurs when a deep layer of prevailing wind is forced over a mountain range. As the wind moves upslope, it […]
Free Burma
{Burma, activism}
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
