An Exercise in Avoiding Boredom

Seen today on my way to work, on a car’s bumper, a sticker with the following message:
My car cost more than the education of your honor student.
(In the U.S. cars frequently have stickers on their bumpers saying “my child is an honor student at Podunk elementary school”).

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I just finished the characters and vocabulary for lesson 4 of Integrated Chinese. Please find it at its usual place, namely /learning-chinese/integrated-chinese.

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Tomorrow, Stanford will announce a new and revised financial aid program. Following Harvard’s recent announcement, Stanford’s revised financial aid program will make attending the farm significantly more affordable. Wow!! I should stop being cynical about this, it is a great move! Looks like you are home-free if you earn less than $100K a year and [...]

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I’m visiting my parents over the weekend and when they heard that I was learning Chinese, they posed the following challenge to me: Whether I’d be able to translate for them the text printed or painted on the following plate:

I think I can recognize only about one character! I’m not even sure this is traditional [...]

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I’ve been taking Chinese classes for a couple of weeks now. To aid my learning, I’m creating flashcards for the vocabulary of the Integrated Chinese textbook we are using. I’ve documented how to create these flashcards on a dedicated page, see /learning-chinese/integrated-chinese. Have fun, and let me know if this is useful!

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Steve Jobs, in his introduction of the MacBook Air, had this to say about Amazon’s Kindle, a reading device for electronic books:
“[It will fail ...] It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or [...]

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