Micah Sittig

I worked on my China taxes today.

Micah Sittig — 2010-03-08T14:14:00Z

I worked on my China taxes today. Last year my company coordinated the filing process and gave us the chance to turn in the form at school. I decided to try turning it in at the local 张江行政服务中心 Zhangjiang Administrative Service Center, a set of government offices across from the company that issues all sorts of permits and deals with taxes. It was pretty easy: I took the form and my passport plus a copy to the office, had my identity checked against my passport, and received a receipt to show I filed.

Turning the form in by hand is one of the three options you have if you live in Shanghai:

File by Mail:

Download/print/fill out the filing form.
Go to the post office and get a special envelope.
Send by registered mail, wait for confirmation letter.

File in Person:

Download/print/fill out the filing form.
Go to the local tax office, turn in form, get confirmation letter.

File Online:

Download/print/fill out "online tax application form".
Go to the local tax office, verify identity, get password application form.
Go to another window, get a personal password.
Go home, submit taxes online, wait for digital confirmation.

Look at the last option. Who is going to go through that whole rigmarole just to file online? I might try it this year just for fun.

Just a couple pieces of family news.

Micah Sittig — 2010-03-05T16:13:00Z

Just a couple pieces of family news. Today I registered Charlotte to begin at the SMIC preschool in the fall. Actually we'd rather she go to the local public preschool but we're not sure if we qualify (zoning/residence status questions) so we are keeping SMIC as a backup.

Also, Jodi started working this week. She's at a preschool in Pudong off of subway Line 6. She team-teaches a class of 3rd year students (~5 years old), taking on responsibility for Art and English. She's glad to be back in the classroom but still getting used to the daily grind.

Maryann is still Maryann, and I'm starting the second semester by leading planning for the Science Fair and chairing the Academic Calendar Committee in addition to my regular duties as teacher and department head.

That's about it.

At the Babela on Tianyaoqiao Rd, Charlotte and I met...

Micah Sittig — 2010-02-15T16:45:00Z

At the Babela on Tianyaoqiao Rd, Charlotte and I met a very friendly young man from Beijing. I gave him my website address so I hope he sees this message. Hi!

Here's China Telecom inserting ads into random webpages on me:...

Micah Sittig — 2010-02-15T16:06:00Z

Here's China Telecom inserting ads into random webpages on me:

x

Hoho, writing me a couple new rules for Adblock+.

Back in mid-January I retweeted a link from POPOEVER about...

Micah Sittig — 2010-01-31T19:33:00Z

Back in mid-January I retweeted a link from POPOEVER about a web standards meeting in Shanghai on Jan 30. Quietly, I registered, added the event to my Google Calendar, and when the time came I made the trip to Ctrip's Shanghai office to attend.

It turns out that the event is connected to the 蓝色理想 BBS, a set of web design forums with a long (in internet time) and influential history on the Chinese internet. The event was an interesting format: first the host introduced a topic with three short bullet points which were discussed as a group, and then a speaker took the stage with a prepared talk on the topic based on their experience as coders or designers; this was repeated three times. I arrived a few minutes after the meeting started, but the topics I heard covered were workflow for daily and special projects (with a speaker from Taobao), using/developing Javascript libraries and frameworks (with a speaker from Ctrip), and the feasibility and future of HTML5 & CSS3. Discussion generally stayed on topic and drew from a wide range of experiences: large and small companies, professionals and hobbyists.

I didn't have much to contribute myself, having only been a hobbyist and out of the web development scene for quite some time. When I left, though, I felt like I should have said something like this:

I began working with HTML and CSS in college. After graduating in 2001, I spent a year in Tianjin at a low-pressure job that left me a lot of time in the evenings, which I spent on experimenting with personal web projects. At some point I signed up for the css-discuss mailing list. Now, style sheets and semantic markup had long been a part of the early vision for the web, but were neglected by website and (certain) browser developers for many years. Css-discuss was a mailing list made up of independent web developers, students and hobbyists who were passionate about harnessing the ideas of style sheets and the semantic web to create a more powerful, more flexible World-Wide Web. And so css-discuss came to be a "voice in the wilderness" calling for a return to that original vision, and ran in the face of a by-then entrenched tradition of using tables for layout and FONT tags for styling. The individual members of css-discuss, working together, analyzed and documented the HTML and CSS rendering behaviors of different browsers, invented CSS hacks for targeting specific browsers, and pressured browser developers to code to web standards through an active blogosphere presence, professional involvements, and the founding of organizations like WaSP and publications like A List Apart. Over time, people and organizations came around to see the benefits of web standards. Now, the knowledge of web standards is widespread to the point of complacence, and no longer the cause of a small minority.

This isn't true in China though. Due to the late start of the web in China and the widespread piracy of software from Microsoft (a perennial offender on the web), web standards are still a cause worth promoting. Technically, I have nothing to add to the cause. Personally, what I can offer is support through my presence, and the experience that I described above, from which I derived a lesson that I summarize in this diagram:

No matter whether you're a small minority working against the tide of mainstream ideas or whether you're part of a movement of many people, progress in the cause will come from motivated individuals who commit to a praxis: the combination of thoughtful reflection and confident action.

To the W3CTech group, thank you for letting me sit in on your meeting and best wishes for you and the work ahead of you.

Just a quick note.

Micah Sittig — 2010-01-08T09:31:00Z

Just a quick note. Tonight I'm holding an Open Observatory night, 8pm-10pm. It's (near) FREEZING, but it's the first Open Observatory advertised to faculty through e-mail, and students by poster, so I'm expecting a turnout nonetheless. Actually it's open to anybody, so if you see this post on time you are welcome to drop by: Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, 19 Qingtong Rd (near Guanglan Rd). That's Pudong of course. If you need more specific directions, text me (number is on my Facebook); my phone is wonky and calling doesn't work. Dress warmly please.

The menu for tonight is the following:

M42/M43 (Orion's Sword)
M45 (Pleiades)
Mars
M44 (open cluster)
Sirius
M41 (open cluster)
M79 (globular cluster)
M37 (open cluster)
M35 (open cluster)

Orion's Sword is a must; saw it at Uncle Steve's observatory a couple weeks ago and it is as impressive as advertised. I doubt we will get as good an image but I'll try. The Pleiades is a favorite of mine; it's visible in city-lights with the naked-eye, and it's not something you notice because it's not huge or bright, but once it's pointed out to you it's easily recognizable. Next is Mars, which is very close to Earth these days and showing a lot of detail. It will be my first time observing it through this telescope. M44 is a brightish open cluster close to Mars in the sky. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky these days, it also has a pair of blue and orange stars right next to it that might be fun to compare and contrast. M431 is an open cluster close to Sirius. M79 is a bright and concentrated globular cluster. And M37 and M35 are rather ordinary open clusters that we can target if we have leftover time and are not frozen stiff.

To design the list of targets I mined three sources: my own memory (it is getting better!), a post on the Riverdale Astronomy weblog, and Tom Flanders' guide to the Messier objects in Early Winter and Late Winter.

See you at 8pm.

1 .

Micah Sittig — 2010-01-04T01:26:00Z

My short-list for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, March 5-21, 2010:

1. Tash Aw "The Harmony Silk Factory" (Whitbread First Novel award, Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel)
*2. Terry Bennett "The History of Photography in China"
**7. Leslie Chang "Factory Girls"
*12. Andrew Field "Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919- 1954" (2010)
**17. Peter Hessler "River Town"; "Oracle Bones"; "Driving Lessons" (2010)
**21. Tess Johnston "Permanently Temporary: From Berlin to Shanghai in Half a Century" (2010)
*26. David Leffman "Rough Guides" China author
31. Mo Zhi Hong "The Year of the Shanghai Shark" (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book)
*33. Chen Murong "Leave Me Alone Chengdu"
36. James Palmer "The Bloody White Baron"
**41. Su Tong "Rice Wives and Concubines" (adapted to Raise the Red Lantern); "My Life as Emperor". 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize for "The Boat to Redemption" (not yet published)
42. Alice Pung "Unpolished Gem"
*45. Donata & Christoph Valentien "Shanghai’s New Botanic Garden"

My interests tend toward history, Shanghai, South-East Asia, and the Asian diaspora. A asterisk means an author is on my short² list; two asterisks means short³(!) list.

Now that Charlotte is back in the states with the...

Micah Sittig — 2010-01-02T13:17:00Z

Now that Charlotte is back in the states with the grandparents and crazy aunt Lolo, and since Jodi's mom is still available to take care of Maryann for an afternoon, Jodi and I have been freer to get out of the house together lately. We took advantage to enjoy life a little on New Year's Day with a trip to a packed Babaiban and shiny Lujiazui.

First off, thanks to Aaron and Jessica for the new camera. Great Christmas gift, I'm sure we'll get a lot of use out of it.

In the afternoon we realized that it was the opening day of the Zhangjiang Tram, so we took it to the subway station. Naturally on the first day of operation it was packed. It's futuristic looking and novel, but the ride is far from smooth and it takes a long path looping through southern Zhangjiang. I'm not sure we'll be taking it very often in the future.

One cool thing about the tram is that it maximizes the use of glass, including ceiling-to-floor glass doors to the outside and to the driver's cabin. This means you can see the ground whizzing by outside and a clear view the road ahead.

At Babaiban we took my phone to the Samsung Service Center to get it checked out and passed by Bifengtang to pick up pineapple buns for a snack. The whole area was a mass of people out shopping on the first day of the Western new year. I hear that the mall had a big sale until 2am the previous night as well!

I thought about trying out the new Line 9 from Shangcheng Road to its temporary terminal station and connection to Line 2 at Century Avenue, but the Dongchang Line tempted us with its route directly to the back door of our home. So we took the bus home to check in with Grandma and Maryann, and to inquire at the service desk about moving into the new apartment. We're upgrading: same set of apartments, but a 3-bedroom layout.

A couple hours later and we were on the road again to a Korean dinner I'd promised Jodi at a favorite of hers, 明洞, in the Super Brand Mall. Since we were anticipating a big dinner we let our stomachs settle and tried something we'd been intending to take, the Lujiazui tourist bus. It's the double-decker bus that you see sometimes stopped south of the Oriental Peal Tower when you take Exit 1 out of the Lujiazui subway station.

We had been anticipating this ride for a while now, but after completing the experience we come down firmly on the side of: "don't bother, it's not worth it". Contrary to our expectations, the "tourist" part of the ride is minimized and the "bus" part is emphasized. Narration is limited to pointing out the Huangpu River ferry, the Thompson Riviera apartments (ah, Shanghai and real estate), and a few famous landmarks like the Oriental Pearl Tower, Jinmao Tower, and the Int'l Financial Center. The route is limited in scope, the complimentary milk tea is watery and tasteless, and a lot of time is spent at multiple stops waiting for passengers to board and disembark. Cheap at RMB 15 a person, but not worth the price or time.

Our consolation prize was a sizable and filling spread at 明洞 on Super Brand 6F. We barely managed to get through everything, and we let the waiter cook the meat for us or it would have taken forever. At RMB 298 for the 2-person combo it wasn't cheap but for a special occasion it hit just the right spot.

Full and contented, we headed home.

It's a pretty decent webcomic .

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-16T16:26:00Z

It's a pretty decent webcomic.

From our textbook on "Multicultural Education": Bahai believers advocate...

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-16T15:11:00Z

From our textbook on "Multicultural Education":

Bahai believers advocate for peace, justice, racial unity, economic development, and education.

Does that sentence mean anything?

Today nationwide the format of train tickets is being updated:...

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-10T03:40:00Z

Today nationwide the format of train tickets is being updated:

Well, that was anticlimactic.

It's time for curmudgeon-Micah again: the General Office of the...

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-10T03:13:00Z

It's time for curmudgeon-Micah again: the General Office of the State Council just released the schedule of national holidays for 2010 (as usual, at the last minute).

一、元旦：1月1日至3日放假公休，共3天。
二、春节：2月13日至19日放假调休，共7天。2月20日（星期六）、21日（星期日）上班。
三、清明节：4月3日至5日放假公休，共3天。
四、劳动节：5月1日至3日放假公休，共3天。
五、端午节：6月14日至16日放假调休，共3天。6月12日（星期六）、13日（星期日）上班。
六、中秋节：9月22日至24日放假调休，共3天。9月19日（星期日）、25日（星期六）上班。
七、国庆节：10月1日至7日放假调休，共7天。9月26日（星期日）、10月9日（星期六）上班。

As the chair of the academic calendar committee at my school, each year I look forward to getting my hands on this schedule and how it matches my predictions for the second half of our current academic calendar, as well as how it will affect our planning for the next schoolyear's calendar. And each year I gnash my teeth and stomp my feet at the decision of the State Council regarding the distribution of the days off during the year and/or surrounding the holidays.

Most of the holidays are scheduled in a way that suggests sanity. The Chinese New Year doesn't affect us as the school takes 3/4 weeks off around that period anyway. The Tomb-Sweeping Holiday in April and Int'l Labor Day in May are reasonable 3-day weekends, both taking off a Monday following the weekend. And the National Day vacation in October is back by its lonesome self (it coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival this year) with a similar schedule to this year's, working a Saturday before and a Sunday after to leave a 7-day-long vacation.

As usual, though, this calendar has a couple zingers. The Dragon Boat Festival falls on a Wednesday in June next year, so that State Department has decided that people should work through the previous weekend and take off Monday through Wednesday (see below). On my calendar for the school I had simply made the Wednesday a single day off in the middle of the week; since summer vacation follows just a couple weeks later, we don't really need a 3-day weekend at this point. I'm hoping we won't have to change my original plan.

Also, the Mid-Autumn festival falls on a Wednesday in late September; this time people are scheduled to work the previous Sunday and following Saturday to take off Wednesday through Friday; yes, this means that vacation ends on Friday, people work Saturday, then take Sunday off before resuming the regular workweek schedule. (see below) Guess how many people are going to be calling in sick on that Saturday! And guess what I'm going to be doing for the school calendar? I don't know yet, but I'm thinking that we don't need a 5-day holiday just 3 weeks into next schoolyear.

Argh.

In regular Physics class, we're coming up on the study...

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-08T08:48:00Z

In regular Physics class, we're coming up on the study of gases, including Bernoulli's principle. I'm looking up examples on Youtube to show in class (curving a soccer ball kick, tornado tearing the roof off a house) and I find myself getting deeper and deeper into the fascinating world of... F1 aerodynamics.

From what I pieced together, early-on racecar designers figured out that having a racecar that would stick to the track meant that you could go around corners more quickly without skidding. The downward force that stuck the car is called the Ground Effect, and has lot of other applications.

As I understand it, the earliest groundeffect was achieved by using tunnels under the car that were narrower at the middle and wider at the edges so that the air was compressed and then decompressed as it went under the car. This creates a low pressure zone at the middle bottom of the car, keeping it "sucked" onto the track. In physics we call this the Venturi effect. Diffusers, which spread the air at the back of the car, act in a similar way but get around new rules against tunnels on the underbody of the car.

Pretty soon every car had these tunnels. Then a wider engine came along that didn't have room for these tunnels, so one car team installed a fan on the back of their car (the "fancar") that served to cool the motor as well as suck the air through the bottom of the car and create a lower pressure zone there.

The fan was so effective that other teams complained, but by then the aerodynamics teams that started using aerofoils, basically inverted airplane wings that provide "reverse lift" to push the cars down. Wings are attached at the front and back of the cars in positions that maximize their contact with air flow and provide an even downforce. The position and angle of the wings can be customized to the curviness of different tracks. Now everybody wings too.

An interesting thing is that "ground effect" in the world of flight refers to an increase in lift that winged objects experience when they fly close to the ground due to the vortices coming off the ends of the wings interacting with the surface of the ground. It's a force in the opposite direction to that desired by racecar designers.

Another interesting thing is the social dynamics in the aerodynamics "race" for the fastest car. As one astute interviewee said, each time a racing team makes another technological breakthrough that allows faster racecars the other teams simultaneously rush to get the same feature on their cars and make a stink about it to get it banned by the governing body, who usually either bans or limits the use of the new technology in the name of safety. And by safety, they mean ensuring driver safety by keeping cars from going too fast! Amazing.

(I'm thinking this would make a good MetaFilter front-page post.)

Widescreen and worth it!

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-04T17:09:00Z

Widescreen and worth it! I just spent the last four hours learning how to upgrade my computer to support the new 19" widescreen Samsung LCD monitor we bought to replace the old Viewsonic that finally kicked the can a couple days ago. This involved re-installing a couple sets of drivers, figuring out that the drivers were already up-to-date in the first place, learning that the problem lay in something called the video BIOS, or vBIOS, building a bootable USB stick, and then using it to flash my computer's BIOS with 1) the manufacturer-released BIOS update that wasn't recent enough, and 2) a version of the BIOS that had been hacked to include support for the monitor's optimal resolution. The moment I saw "1440x900" in the Display control panel I was as ecstatic as you can be after sitting at the computer for 4 hours, but when I flipped the switch it was all worth it: crystal-clear type on seemingly horizonless screen space in vivid and beautiful color. Hooray.

Where will the moon be tonight?

Micah Sittig — 2009-12-01T05:22:00Z

Where will the moon be tonight? That a simple question but it can have a complicated answer. The simplest would be, "about 15 degrees behind where it was last night." The more complicated ones start with "depends what year it is." Today I got curious so I searched around and found a web-page that scratched my itch and gave me a new idea.

The page is on the University of Massachusetts Amherst's website, and is called "MOON TEACHINGS FOR THE MASSES". It has nice diagrams like this:

and this:

that help explain the paths of the Sun and Moon across the sky.

The easiest way to track the paths of the Sun and Moon is by the positions where they rise and set on the horizon. These positions swing back and forth like a pendulum, north and south and back again, according to where they are in their cycle around the Earth (remember, the Sun's cycle lasts 365 days, while the moon's is only 29.5 days).

On the summer and winter solstices, the Sun will rise at its maximum northern position or maximum southern position. This corresponds to the point of the pendulum swing where it comes to a rest and turns around. On the equinoxes, the sun will rise and set on the cardinal points E and W. This corresponds to the middle of the swing, where the pendulum is moving at its maximum speed.

At both equinoxes, the Sun reaches a maximum declination (height above the horizon) of 90° minus your latitude. The max altitude at the solstices is 90° minus your latitude, plus the tilt of the Earth 23.5° in the summer and minus 23.5° — tilt in the other direction — in the winter. If your home latitude is greater than 90° - 23.5° = 76.5° degrees, then in the winter the sun will have a maximum altitude of less then zero degrees and you get to experience the 24 hour darkness of polar night!

In Shanghai we are at a latitude of 31.2° and HeavensAbove says the sun will reach a max altitude today of 37° at 11:42 this morning. This makes sense because we're getting close to December 22, the winter solstice, when the sun will reach an altitude of just 90° - 23.5° - 31.2° = 35.3°, it's lowest path across the sky this year. This is also the well-known shortest day of the year. On December 23 the sun will rise just a bit more northerly and earlier as it begins its return to summer.

The moon goes through a similar cycle but much more quickly. The Moon's "equinoxes" and "solstices" happen every two weeks! (29.5 days / 2) Since the Moon's orbit is tilted at 5° from the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, we see its maximum and minimum altitudes vary from the Sun's by that amount. Furthermore, the moon has a noticeable 18.6-year cycle due to relatively quick precession, meaning that the Moon's "pendulum" swings wider than the Sun's by 5° every 9.3 years, and shorter than the Sun's by 5° after another 9.3 years. Stack onto this that the Sun outshines the Moon when both are in the sky — the Moon is mostly visible only at night — and this means that what you see in the sky can range from high moons to low moons, to moons of different phases, to no moons at all!

Currently, we are just starting the backwards motion of the Moon's 18-year pendulum swing: in 2006 the Moon was ranging a full 23.5° + 5° = 28.5° above and below the Sun's path, but now in 2009 we are swinging back towards a minimum and, for example, beating it at most by 25.8° tomorrow night, December 2, for a full altitude of 90° - 31.2° + 25.8° ≈ 84.6° (HeavensAbove says 84.5°). This is why you may have noticed the Moon being so high in the sky for the past few days, not to mention that we're one day away from the full moon! But remember the moon's quick cycle: just two weeks from tomorrow the Moon complete half of its cycle and have a max altitude of only 90° - 31.2° - 25.8° ≈ 33.0°. And two weeks later we'll be back to a bit less than the current 84.6°, as the moon continues its precession.

All of this to say that it would be a neat project to map the rises and settings of the Sun every day to see the progression from solstice to equinox and back again. Not that I'm contemplating setting up a new Stonehenge in my backyard (thought a mini-one would be nice), but it might make a good addition to the observatory or school garden.

(So Dad, to answer your question: the moon is high in in the sky because ➀ we're coming off of a precession maximum, ➁ it happens every 29.5 days, and ➂ it's happening at the same time as the full-moon so it's particularly bright.)

(Disclaimer: these are the study notes of an amateur astronomer, so don't take anything here for granted. Follow my links to more authoritative sources.)

Since the Leonid meteor shower just passed and the Geminids...

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-26T04:14:00Z

Since the Leonid meteor shower just passed and the Geminids are coming up mid-December, and since I've never observed a meteor shower, today I took the light pollution map of East Asia from the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Inquinamento Luminoso's (Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute) "The night sky in the World" website and super-imposed it on a Google Map of the 长三角 Yangtze River Delta area. Click on the map below for a full-size view:

So it's true what they say, a dark sky isn't that far away. I think a weekend trip is in order later this winter.

Yesterday I got all excited about epassportphoto.

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-24T15:14:00Z

Yesterday I got all excited about epassportphoto.com and making my own passport photos, and all angry about how Walgreens and Rite-Aid charging passport-photo prices for printing self-generated passport photos.

Today I take my new passport photos to the Zhangjiang Carrefour Fujifilm shop, and guess what: the lady wants to charge me RMB 15 (2 bucks) per page for printing them out because they are ID photos! And she had the gall to tell me she was giving me half price because I took them myself.

I just walked out. I'll print them online.

About 7 kilometers away in spacetime:

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-16T06:28:00Z

About 7 kilometers away in spacetime:

Charlotte and I went to Shanghai Stadium this afternoon...

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-15T17:25:00Z

Charlotte and I went to Shanghai Stadium this afternoon to see the NFL's flag football league play on the practice fields outside of the Stadium itself. We didn't talk to anybody in depth, on account of the rain and Charlotte being anxious to leave. Some notes:

About the time we arrived, a little after one, it began to rain lightly and the games continued unaffected.
Play was smooth and all the players were good sports. The referees seemed to be unfamiliar with some rules, but were not afraid to ask for help so things stayed on track. There was one Chinese guy in black running around with a clipboard that seemed to be the go-to man for questions. There was an injury, but a first aid kit was on hand and play stopped while the player was being attended to.
About 1 in 10 of the players were white; another 30% had Asian faces but spoke fluent American English. The refs were all locals, and included several women.

Overall, it was a very low-key event.

Tonight on a whim I went back and listened to...

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-13T18:25:00Z

Tonight on a whim I went back and listened to the Pizzicato Five (P5) Happy End of the You remix album. The most notable thing about the re-listen was how my position relative to the album has changed since I first listened to it back in college.

The first time I heard the album was during my studies at Caltech. In college I pursued music, among other things, as an escape-valve for the incredible pressure I was feeling academically. In high school I had latched onto Pizzicato Five to supplement my Japanese studying; Shibuya-kei was more accessible than other J-pop genres in a pre-Youtube, pre-Napster time, because Matador Records distributed their albums and brought them to the US for tours. Eventually I joined the p5ml, a mailing list for English-speaking fans of Pizzicato Five. When Happy End of You came out I interpreted it as being a big deal to the list because here was a bunch of western DJs acknowledging and possibly having been inspired by Pizzicato Five. Still reviews of the album from the list were mixed; p5ml members had eclectic tastes that tended towards pop, rock and oldies (there was an overlap between prominent members of p5ml and the Exotica list, a list "for fans and collectors of weird and unusual music from the early LP era forward").

By the time Happy End of the World was released I was a P5 collector, so I picked up a couple of the vinyl releases of the individual mixes at Moby Disc in downtown Pasdena, and eventually the entire CD. My own reaction was similar to the list's: I preferred the more upbeat tracks and was disappointed by the slower, more unstructured mixes. I didn't have a good perspective on those compositional styles; my background so far had been pop and techno in Spain, hip-hop and rock in high school, and then some exotica and world music during college. The sounds I was hearing on these remixes were foreign and almost unconnected to anything I had ever heard.

How is my listening different now? In the years since then, influenced by my brother's progressive musical tastes, by DJ friends and classmates at Caltech, by the documentary on techno called Modulations, by Kraftwerk (through P5) and their influences, through Cornelious, the Plastics, the Boredoms, through "graduation" night from Princeton in Beijing 2000, through marveling at the curious club scene of Shanghai, and through the influence of Mr Zambrano, Mr Hogue and NoiShanghai, I've picked up a few things here and there about the more fringe, exploratory, theoretical facets of music and exposed myself to more ideas about what music can be. Listening to Happy End of Youd this second time around I find myself navigating the styles with a greater familiarity and being able to appreciate all of the musical extremes, from 808 State's bouncy synthesizer-packed remix of Trailer Music, to Gusgus's moody, building whomp-whomp remix of Porno 3003, to the dissonant plunderphonic remix of It's a Beautiful Day by John Oswald; they all have elements that I recognize or can categorize with other music I've heard and learned to enjoy.

I can't help but connect this to my thoughts about teaching. If my goal as a teacher is to make my kids more fully appreciate physics, my work has to include exposing them to memorable experiences that they can analyze using the scientific principles I teach them. But that's a topic to be developed on another day. It's time for bed now.

(One of my colleagues told me that today, Saturday, is Childrens' Day in India, and that her daughters are performing for thousands of Indian expatriates in Shanghai today. I am jealous.)

We had a delayed birthday dinner of sorts for...

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-08T14:25:00Z

We had a delayed birthday dinner of sorts for myself tonight. Charlotte, Maryan and I met Jodi at People's Square after Jodi's Sunday afternoon classes and we walked to the 干锅居 at the entrance of Huanghe Rd. I had forgotten how good the Guizhounese restaurant is: we had the tea-mushroom chicken pot (茶树菇干锅), the spicy-sour greenbeans (酸豆角炒肉末), a honey-rice cake (风味小米喳), and a stir-fry of mixed vegetables (小炒皇). Even with the girls making messes and causing a ruckus I still enjoyed every bite. In fact, I felt like I liked it even more than before, having grown more accustomed to eating chicken off the bone and spicy foods. Although we didn't wait for a window seat tonight, in the past we've sat next to the glass and had a decent view of People's Square lit up at night, looking straight down Nanjing East Road. For the money, it's one of the better views of the Square. With our VIP card, the meal came out to RMB 90 for the four of us.

“It’s All Sermon Prep to Me”, comment by rpage :...

Micah Sittig — 2009-11-01T10:10:00Z

“It’s All Sermon Prep to Me”, comment by rpage:

I read a story recently about a desert father who was visited by a hermit who had heard of the abba. The hermit began to talk about scripture and theological things. The abba turned away from him. When the hermit asked the mutual friend who introduced them, the friend asked the abba why he ignored someone who had traveled hundreds of miles to talk with him. The abba said that he knows little about scripture or theology. If the hermit wanted to talk about the internal life that loves and needs healing, he would be happy to talk with the hermit. The abba and the hermit had a long and mutually satisfying conversation after that. I have looked upon the sermon as a way to reflect on how God is present and healing in lives and what the scriptures collected by the church tell us of these things in the past to help us understand the present in faith terms.

This is pretty close to how I see it.

George Orwell, from "Homage to Catalonia": In practice the...

Micah Sittig — 2009-10-29T03:34:00Z

George Orwell, from "Homage to Catalonia":

In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on.

I think this applies to teaching as well.

Tonight I finally set the stage for an evening of...

Micah Sittig — 2009-10-26T15:22:00Z

Tonight I finally set the stage for an evening of "Sidewalk Astronomy". The place: the square outside the Science and Technology Museum subway station, for its high evening traffic and wide-open sky. The time: right after dinner on October 26, about 8pm, when Jupiter and the half-full moon were less than 15° away from each other.

On the way there I think I scared some people on the subway. First, the telescope I use belongs to the school so I carry it home in a long, black bag that looks just about the right size for carrying a firearm. I actually felt pretty spooky carrying it around, with my hoody and black jeans on. Second, I also brought along a homemade accelerometer and took some measurements of the subway acceleration and deceleration going from Longyang Rd to Century Park. It's just a piece of cardboard with a protractor made of paper taped on it, and a metal nut on fishing line hanging down, but I had placed it up against the wall and was staring at it intently trying to line it up to 0° as people were getting on at Longyang Rd, so it probably looked strange. The good thing is that the top acceleration I calculate based off the measurement falls within the ranges I found online; 1.2 m/s² is between 1.0-1.5 m/s².

At the Science and Technology Museum square, I set up just off the bridge where people cross over to walk toward the taxi line. The spot was central-ish, away from lights, and off to the side from where bikers and rollerbladers tend to ride. When I pulled out the telescope I immediately drew a small, curious crowd, which I satisfied with some conversation and a chance to look at the moon through the telescope and binoculars. Then when things settled down I lined the scope up with Jupiter on the higher power eyepiece and demonstrated what we were seeing in Stellarium on the laptop. Most of the people who stopped by were either older couples or families with kids; usually they drew near and smiled, at which point I asked them to take a look and they universally accepted. This usually lead to a bit of chit-chat about why I was there, or about astronomy. One grandfather was very cute; as his wife and their son and grandaughter walked away he ran back with… "One more question. Why can't we see so many stars these days? When I was young the sky was filled with them!" so we chatted a bit about the atmosphere and light pollution. Another man visiting Shanghai from Fujian got to talking about the time he had spent up north in Heilongjiang and how the sky up there was so vast and yet so near, the he felt like he could have reached up and touched it; he also recommended getting out of Shanghai and shared with me about how, American is great and all but, his dream is to first go to Tibet to find peace for his heart. By nine o'clock I was spending a lot of time on the laptop and practicing navigating the sky with the binoculars, and visitors were getting less frequent, so I closed up shop and took the subway/bus home.

Overall I consider the trip a success, but felt like the major advantage of the site, a wide open sky, was lost to the fact that light pollution (and a possible light cloud cover) washed out pretty much the whole sky, especially near the horizon. With that kind of sky I could just as well go to a more peopled site like People's Square or somewhere with more buildings, as long as I had a clear line of sight to the interesting objects for that night. This is a success I'd like to repeat.