Archive for January, 2008
Firefox Reloaded
After spending one week trying to use Safari as my default browser, I decided to go back to Firefox. I was able to find numerous substitutes for my favorite Firefox plugins and features, but they never lived up to the real thing. First of all, although Safari was generally faster, I assume that Firefox 3, [...]
Parallel Voting
Schee posted a link to this article on the new voting system which so affected the Taiwanese legislative elections. (See my last post on this.) Several countries now mix proportional representation with voting for individual candidates, as Taiwan now does. However, it turns out there are two different models for how the mixing works: the [...]
Disenchanted
Almost every single American newspaper ran stories about the Taiwanese election attributing the DPP’s defeat to “broad disenchantment among Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants over the combative pro-independence campaign that has been the centerpiece of Chen’s two four-year terms as president.” I don’t know what motivated the average Taiwanese voter to support the KMT’s sweeping victory, [...]
Firefox vs. Safari
Firefox is much more than a web browser – its a platform. Numerous applications run on Firefox’s XUL framework, mostly as plugins. This extensibility gives you greater control over how web pages appear by blocking ads, turning off automatic flash animations by default, and offering site-specific customizations for some of the most popular web apps. [...]
Bonus Army
I’ve been thinking a lot about Obama. According to Ezra Klein: his answer to arguments against consensus rhetoric [see my earlier post] is that his rhetoric is behind that success, it brings in more voters and thus intensifies popular pressure for his agenda More specifically, his approach is that of Occupying the moral high ground [...]
Recession
I forget where I read that looking at how often the word “recession” appears in the newspaper is as good a method as any of determining whether we are actually in a recession or not, it might have been the Left Business Observer, but I after seeing the word pop up a few times recently, [...]
Love – ING
Over at Pinyin.info Mark Swofford notices a new trend of inserting “ING” at the end of Chinese verbs. When I twittered about this, Zonble pointed me to the above song by MayDay, the title of which is 戀愛ing (Lianai – ING), meaning “loving” or “romancing.” Interestingly, if you listen to the song they don’t pronounce [...]
Lists of 2007
Photo by Chaabee Dheefa. Here are some noteworthy year-end lists from 2007: Highlights from Savage Minds (my other blog). List of Scandalized Administration Officials. The Bush administration’s dumbest legal arguments of the year. The year in media errors. Top 25 Censored Stories. A year of world changing ideas. Some of the best photos on Flickr [...]
Year of the Dog
While it is still officially the year of the pig, for us 2007 was the year of the dog. Juno was already seven months old when we met her in December of 2006, and we took over full time ownership of her in February of 2007. Young retrievers are a handful, and despite her age, [...]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
