User Comments - bill
bill
Posted on: Teacher Salary and Perks
December 6, 2007 at 5:04 PMMark makes a good point. If you work in the US and stay in the US the salaries are excellent and one can live very well. The problem over the past 5 years or so is traveling outside of the US to Europe. We do that all of the time. A pound in the UK spends like a dollar. With the exchange at 2:1 ($:£) things are super expensive. Our hotel room was about $500/night. On the other hand the Croatian Kuna is 6:1 (Kuna:$). We went to Croatia last Summer, stayed in a 5 star hotel on the Adriatic and paid about $200/night for a room with a balcony overlooking that beautiful sea. I'm quite sure that in the US you only receive your salary in $. If you make say $50,000/year, and begin to play with exchange rates, then what's the point of running to the bank for your £25,000 and paying a % for the exchange in any case?
Posted on: Winter Fun
November 30, 2007 at 6:18 PMHi Jenny, When my daughter was in the 2nd grade it snowed all day in Palo Alto. She wanted to stay home. I told her next time. It hasn't snowed since and that was in Feb. of 1976!! Her daughter is now in the 2nd grade. 也许要下雪了！这里很冷 ... Bill
Posted on: Just Say Yes
November 29, 2007 at 3:41 AMI'm not always sure whether I should use 真 还是 真的 for "really." Are there any grammatical rules one can use? This might be a good 请问 lesson. Bill
Posted on: Just Say Yes
November 27, 2007 at 5:59 PM我常常问我自己为什么我这么喜欢Cpod. 我现在觉得我知道: The spontaneous enthusiasm and sincerity of the teachers is contagious. It's a spark that ignites the desire to learn in each of us. When one combines knowledge of the subject matter with such presentations something magic happens. And, this magic reveals itself in the Cpod的博客。Yes, you manage to do this on the Web ! 多谢你们， Bill
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 2, 2007 at 5:37 AMHi casie, 谢谢你！When I see these newbie lessons I always try to guess the dialog before listening. I thought right away, "你还好吗？“ So, I wasn't actually wrong ... which expression is more commonly used?
Posted on: Pumpkin Food
October 27, 2007 at 5:42 AMHi andrewm, We have all of those here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Toss in some 南瓜冰淇淋 (bing1qi2lin2)。很好吃！ Bill
Posted on: Opinions on Poetry
October 19, 2007 at 3:15 AMHi Tangmoo, 我也喜欢中国的古诗. 我要能读李白的诗. Translations are OK but I know I am missing something critical. The old "Lost in translation." When I was at Stanford there was a prof. of Chinese literature from Chine whose name I forget. He was translating some poems of 李白 and gave me copies his preprints. That really peaked my interest. This was around 1978 or so. Time flies. One remark on the Chinese software engineers here: Most did their undergraduate work in China at Universities like 青岛大学， and then their masters or doctorates here or at Universities like Cambridge. I can assure you that they are here by the 100's and over the past 20 years contributed significantly to the advances in computer technology here in Silicon Valley. 请保重， Bill
Posted on: Opinions on Poetry
October 18, 2007 at 9:29 PMI'm not sure where all of this is going. We drifted somewhat from Chinese poetry into the history of science. It is important to note that during what we call the dark ages in Europe serious mathematical discoveries were taking place in Asia in India: Negative integers, 0, irrational numbers, etc., and these transitioned to Baghdad, and things got going in Europe again around 1100. The work in mathematics in India was indeed systematic. Now if we look closely at Sun Tzu's work: Sun Tzu or Sun Zi was a Chinese mathematician, sometime between the third to fifth century CE. Interested in astronomy and trying to develop a calendar, he investigated Diophantine equations. He is only known for authoring Sun Tzu Suan Ching 孙子算经 (pinyin: Sun Zi Suan Jing; literally, "Sun Tzu's Calculation Classic"), which contains the Chinese remainder theorem. This seems systematic to me. And given the time this occurred, it goes beyond pragmatic to pushing the edges of what was known in the 3rd century AD with respect to what we today call number theory and abstract algebra. Why this did not continue isn't clear to me except that my guess is politics played a serious role. No matter, one does not have to look to far today to see the tremendous role that the Chinese are playing in all aspects of scientific discovery. While my formal background is in mathematics, I've worked some 43 years as a computer scientist and most of that in the heart of Silicon Valley (20 years at Stanford University and 10 years at Sun Microsystems). Chinese computer scientists and software engineers are 2nd to none today, and have played a large role in the computer revolution that took place here during the latter part of the last century. My feeling is that all cultures are intellectually equivalent and capable. We are looking a few thousand years of history and 1,000 years from now who knows where the major revelations will have come from. I would not bet on the "West" myself. History is capricious. That is something in which the Chinese philosophically have always taken delight! Bill
Posted on: Opinions on Poetry
October 18, 2007 at 4:47 PMHi Gang, A few things to note on this interesting discovery: First, there is a very interesting article in Science News on the relationship between Chinese children learning 汉字 and IQ: Science News for the Week of Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7 Asian Kids' IQ Lift: Reading system may boost Chinese scores Bruce Bower A new study of Chinese and Greek kids suggests that a Chinese IQ advantage over Westerners stems from superior spatial abilities, possibly because the Chinese learn to read pictorial symbols that emphasize spatial perception. Another interesting fact on science in China. Most of you are probably unaware that each time you see https://.. and use a secure http connection, that you are using cryptography that itself uses the Chinese remainder theorem. This was discovered by Sun Tzu, a 3rd century Chinese mathematician: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_remainder_theorem goulniky is probably aware that the 17th and 19th French mathematicians, Fermat and Galois, also contribute significantly here. So, yes, there has always been important contributions to what we "westerners" call science coming from China. Getting back to poetry. This book should interest goulniky. I bought it at La Place de St. Germain in Paris in Feb., 1996. It's entitled, "Tu Fu, une mouette entre ciel et terre." It is French translations of many of Du Fu's poems. The classical 汉字 is included. A beautiful book. The title translates as, "Du Fu, a seagull between heaven and earth," and comes from one of his famous poems. The final lines in the poem say: "My poems, will they thus finish by forging for me fame? At an official post because old and sick, I've from now on renounced, wandering, wandering, what do I resemble? Between heaven and earth, on the sand, a seagull." For those of you who have studied Tu Fu, you know that he lived during very difficult times in China, and many of his poems recount in a biographical sense what passed at that time. Finally, the poems are beautiful when read in Chinese. There is a rhyme scheme along with many other subtleties I don't have time to go into. Super lesson, Bill
Posted on: Hold the MSG
December 9, 2007 at 6:07 AMGood ol' 味精。I'd never heard of it until the Summer of 1968. My wife and I were marching in the "Peoples' Park Parade" in Berkeley, CA. Afterwards several of us went to a Chinese restaurant in the area. During the meal my back felt like it was on fire. This lasted quite a while and I let it pass. About 3 years later I had the same experience in another Chinese restaurant and my face turned bright red and really burned. It somewhat freaked out my lunch mates. I timed this one. Exactly 11 minutes. My reaction was to MSG. Ends up I'm somewhat allergic to it. Still, I was willing to endure the 11 minutes because I adored Chinese food! As time passed, the "Chinese restaurant syndrome" became well known and I knew the cause. Happily, 味精 is rarely used here in the SF Bay Area any longer. Every once in a while I get a little reminder, and the next time I visit that restaurant I always say, 请不要放味精。It works very well (-: Fun lesson, Bill