China is the best!

Of late, I’ve been stationed at one of the many factories of one of the East-Asian electronics conglomerates.

This afternoon, I returned to our company’s little regional office to do some online work (made 2 comments on Facebook status updates, surfed through BBC news, and updated some drawings and sent a few email) as the client would not allow outsiders to plug into their computer network.

The accountant’s husband strolled into the office late in the afternoon to wait for his wife to finish work. In general, he is a friendly man, but he suffers from a severe case of the widely-prevalent disorder: the China-is-best mentality. Below are excerpts of our conversation:

[typing a text message on the phone to the gf]
[walks by behind]
It seems quite tedious to type using English isn’t it?
It’s ok, I’m used to it.
Yeah but it’s not as efficient as Chinese. You get half as many characters for each message, but each word only requires one character ².
True.
I think… that English is not as sophisticated as Chinese. Have you studied classical Chinese? Each word conveys so much information, that a short sentence is able to convey a very deep meaning.
Mmm...
And English is more of a mechanistic languages. There are only 26 letters, and words are formed by combining different letters¹. For sure, it’s well suited for the purposes of computing, but for communication between persons, Chinese is still the better language.

[truncated]

Well, you can’t really tell if you don’t study it in detail. For example, if you use only conversational-grade English, it is impossible to judge the level of refinement in the language.

[...]

There must be a significant difference in the level of civilisation between the Chinese culture and the Malay culture right?
Well of course it’s different. The Chinese culture is from China and the Malay culture is from the Malaysia-Indonesia region.
So how old is the history of the Malay culture? (here it comes, a set up move for the all conquering 5000-years-of-civilisation trump card.)
[I somehow answered that question in a sideways manner and we got distracted by the details about how old other civilisations are, including European and North American. So no mention of 5000 years.]


At end of the business day he offered to drop me off at the train station, thus saving me an hour-long ride in a bus with no air conditioning (temperatures in mid afternoon is 30 to 36 celcius these days).

Thus, I shall not further vilify him here, tempting as it may be.


Footnotes:

2. I am convinced all well developed languages contain a measure of combinatorics. For example, the expression “I need to have sex with a BMW” is conveyed by picking several words and grouping them into a sentence. The words, in turn, consist of a group of smaller objects lumped together.

In English, words consist of a series of letters arranged in one dimension. In Chinese, words consist of sub-words arranged in 2 dimensions. These sub-words consist of a certain grouping of strokes, also arranged in 2 dimensions.

The fact that English words are constructed in 1 dimension makes it easy to spell words by arranging the letters along the time dimension.


1. which brings me to the second point, how one can squeeze so much more information into a 70-word message compared to a 140-character English message.

Mobile phones contain a standard dictionary of common Chinese words (which is probably not a huge amount). Assuming that there are 16,000 common Chinese words, this requires 14 bits of information to correctly assign each word to a unique number.

Assuming that each character for the mobile phone carries 7 bits of data, this is enough for 128 unique symbols (26 lower case letters, 26 upper case letters, 10 numerals, and about 30 symbols). 6 bits can only give 64 unique characters, which is definitely not enough.

As above, assuming that each Chinese word requires 14 bits to encode, it will need 2 character’s worth of information to be transmitted.

This is advantageous compared to the regular way English is transmitted: 2 characters is enough to encode a word, while English requires up about 5 characters to encode a word (sometimes up to 22 characters, such as counterrevolutionaries)

Can this method be used to give a higer information density to alpha-numeric based text messages?

A proposed mechanism is described as below.

[ok I’m getting ahead of myself, this is supposed to be a footnote, not an essay. Next entry, perhaps]

Young man, do you want to have some fun?

When I went hunting for photo opportunities over the weekend, I arrived at a little area I had seen many times while cruising in the elevated light rail.

Access was through many little lanes connected to the main road. Each of these lanes fork out several times, but the paths inside do not connect.

The first lane I entered was pretty normal looking, because a police station was located inside the area.

The second lane was located just across the road from the long distance bus terminal, and most of the buildings were converted into motels and hostels.

The third lane looked rather normal, except for a woman loitering about at the entry of the lane. When she saw me approach, she asked, “young man, do you want to have some fun?”

Naturally, I ignored her. My idea of fun involves listening to instrumental music and sipping coffee while stroking a purring kitten in a BMW 7 series, so I walked ahead without acknowledging her presence.

Most touts would give up on you and find another target if you ignore them and gave them no hope of having any business out of you. Not so for this woman. She followed a few steps behind me, continuously asking if I wanted to rest, if I wanted to play, if I wanted to have a look at the girls first etc.

I stormed ahead without acknowledging the parasol-carrying woman. I wanted to take photographs, not have sex with strangers.

Further into the area, I noticed something different- there were women loitering around the streets. These were not the housewife-kinds that sit on little stools outside their kitchens plucking vegetables or watching their grandchildren play. These women were standing in the lanes with a bored look waiting for something to happen.

Shit, I seem to have stumbled into a vice den of sorts.

I turned to leave, and faced the woman who had been muttering her offers to set me a play date. I pretended to see her the first time, listened to her ask if I wanted to have fun, acted dumb and watch her rephrase her question into an invitation of “lets go and see the girls.”

I gave her a puzzled expression and asked her in exasperation, what are you asking? She skipped around embarrassing question and suggested I go take a rest, cocking her head in the direction of her brothel (presumably).

With a look of mock horror, declined her gracious offer and left, leaving the sex with strangers to other desperate souls.

Me, I just want architectural photographs and sex with a BMW.

Old Shanghai (2)

On Sunday, I took a walk to another group of old buildings, this one located near the long distance coach terminal.

It is similar to the other area I visited previously, with quaintly crooked lanes, disorganised groups of houses and women washing vegetables along the lanes.



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However, this area is earmarked for demolition. The process of evicting residents from their decades-old homes is common practice in Shanghai. The city government kicks everyone out and pays them a hefty sum to cover the astronomical cost of getting a new home, and these residents generally feel quite lucky to be able to get a free upgrade in housing.



More than 2/3 of the buildings in the area have been made inhabitable. The roofing has been removed, the upper level floors completely smashed through, and everything of possibly any value has been scavenged. Roof tiles, window panes, doors, washroom fixtures, wooden stairs, electrical fixtures… everything that can possibly be reused has been taken away by successive scavengers. What remains among the standing structural members (these are too difficult to break without machinery) are huge chunks of concrete, masonry and other odd reminders that someone used to call this home.





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This used to be a kitchen- the window has a little square frame where an exhaust fan used to reside, and decades of hot oily air had deposited a film of disgusting black muck on the frames.



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News in 120 seconds

Fuck this shit.

Yet another engineer has resigned. Guess who will be doing all the work now.


***

Moving on to a less miserable topic...

Chocolates!



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At 28 RMB for a box of 8 pieces, it is not a trivial matter. That it consists of a smallish biscuit entombed in a chunk of milk chocolate is a redeeming factor.

The beautiful Super-Takumar 50mm/1.4 is there as a reference for scale, seeing that it is a familiar object and most people would have an intuitive grasp of its size.


***

And now, some updates from the fashion capital of China, Shanghai.

Three-quarter length stockings have become quite popular here, the owners proudly assaulting the eyesight of the general public with their frightful aesthetics.





Designs vary, ranging from plain translucent material throughout, to more complex patterns such as opaque nylon above the knee, translucent nylon below the knee, and finished with a bold lace trim at mid-calf height.

Now to wait for the rest of the world’s sense of fashion to catch up, and we’ll see an explosion of these things from Milan to New York. Delightful.

When the visual cortex stops working

Today, I watched my brain turn itself inside-out. A thoroughly frightful experience, but very “interesting” (but only in the way a scientist would use the expression).



I had just disembarked from the overnight sleeper train from Tianjin, and was making my way out of the Shanghai train station towards the metro station. All of a sudden, I felt faint. After I climbed a flight of stairs up to ground level, it felt much worse. I was wobbly, and had to stop walking to hold on to a wall to prevent myself from falling over. My vision blacked out completely- I could see nothing. This lasted for about 10 seconds.

My sense of balance was failing rapidly, and even the wall was not helping me keep upright. I had to squat down and brace my head in by hands. All this while, I was worried my condition would deteriorate further causing me to keel over and pass out on the wet pavement in the rain (and lose my computer, passport and phones). This lasted for approximately 10 seconds until my sense of balance and vision returned, just barely.

I became aware of a motorcycle-taxi behind me asking if I needed a ride. I told him my address, he quoted me 15 yuan. It was a slaughter (a normal taxi would have cost 11 yuan), but I was in no shape to haggle.

I was able to get on the bike and keep myself in balance without problem, but my vision was still bedlam. In hind sight, this is not very surprising as the visual cortex is of substantial size, and visual processing is a very resource intensive task.

Below is a Photoshop recreation of my rather useless sense of vision at that time.



Normal view

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WTF view

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Allow me to attempt to describe what little I could see.

It was an overcast day with light drizzle, so the sky was entirely white. My field of vision had returned to normal, however, everything was in very very low resolution. In the middle of my field of vision, I could ‘see’ some detail, but everything else was a blur of white and splotches of dull colours.

When I look at buildings, I see it as if it was a pencil sketch on white paper. I could perceive some of the edges of buildings- these edges were rendered in a plain purplish colour. The rest was mostly white in colour. It appears that the perceived edges were moving with respect to my field of vision. This is consistent with findings that moving objects are easier to detect compared to stationary ones ¹. Conceivably, the perception of moving objects is given a higher priority in the visual processing part of the brain.

Over the course of 5 minutes, I regained my sense of vision. I could walk and keep balance as if nothing had happened.


Footnotes:
1 – This is important for the survival of many species. A moving object could well be a predator, and being able to detect a predator early would increase the creature’s chances of not being eaten.