Author Archive
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}
Easement
iPhone owners are up in arms about the fact that Apple blocked third party applications. Personally I think these people should focus their wrath squarely on the practice of SIM card locking which should arguably be illegal. I think the Brazilians have the right idea, with their anti-SIM locking campaign.
As John Gruber points out, the […]
Model Minority
This NY Times story made me wonder: Do Indian-Americans really want to have a small vocal minority whose views diverge strongly from their own represent them? But then I realized, its the other way around - its this small vocal minority who want to speak for all Indians. Too bad the NY Times can’t tell […]
All Together Now
I’ve been meaning to write about training Juno for a while now, but never got around to it. To make a long story short, Juno wouldn’t win any obedience contests, but she is much better behaved than before. Lately, however, she’s picked up some cute-but-annoying new habits. For instance, she used to be perfectly happy […]
Moon Map
Via How Design: “Moon Mapping from the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Research Project.”
{design, maps, moon, astronomy}
Matching Funds
Although it draws attention to his laggard fundraising, Edwards decision to accept matching funds means he’ll have more money than either Obama or Hillary currently have (although they are both raising money faster than Edwards). 22 million to the approximately 19 million that the others have each raised. It also shows him to be less […]
Media Transparency
If you don’t know Cursor or the Center for Media Transparency, you should. Cursor is the premier alternative news aggregation site. Since the start of the Iraq war they have been playing an important role aggregating the best of the blogsphere, making it easy for the rest of us to know what’s out there. Similarly, […]
Tweets vs. Lifelog
As of now I will stop posting tweets to this blog. Once again this blog will become a space reserved for long-form blogging. You can continue to read my tweets in the sidebar on the right, or over at my Twitter page.
At the same time, I’ve stopped using Twitter as a feed aggregator to create […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
