Law
No Smoking
I’m glad that Taiwan is going smoke-free in public spaces and offices, but this PSA just made me laugh. Its so Taiwanese somehow …
Human Rights Day
This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by […]
X-Ray
In 2000 Shashwati and I travelled to Iceland for our honeymoon. We had a fantastic trip, but the flight back was very early in the morning on the last day, and we were still pretty groggy when we got to customs. Actually, we were the very first travelers to arrive at customs, which was otherwise […]
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 […]
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 […]
Treo Woes
The Palm Treo is a decent device, but it costs twice what it should and it hasn’t been significantly upgraded in years. Unfortunately, I need one. I need one because I dearly depend upon my Pleco Chinese-English dictionary, which I use several times a day. I also need one because my Treo 650 suddenly died […]
Caging
From an interview with Greg Palast, where he argues that both the media and congress are missing the real story behind the US attorney scandal:
[Monica Goodling] was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of perjury. […]
Disenfranchised
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.”
Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in […]
Free Choice Act
The Employee Free Choice Act passed the house vote, now it is going to the senate. If you are a US citizen, please go here to tell your senator that they should pass this important bill!
Why is this important? The standard method (NLRB elections by secret ballot) are much more prone to coercion by management:
During […]
Public Record
Just how many different ways has the Bush Administration tried to hide once-public information sources from the public record? Help us count the ways.
{Bush, secrecy, war on terror}
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
