Last Day in Tainan

In the past 2 years, I have spent more than 12 months studying Chinese in Tainan. I know that I will never be "fluent" in Chinese as it is as difficult language as English.(3 "as" in one sentence!) But I like studying Chinese even if some ultimate goal will never be achieved.

June in Tainan is graduation time, with black robes and graduation ceremonies. The graduation colors for Cheng Da(Cheng Kung University) are a beautiful orange/yellow.

These are the colors of the Feng Huang,鳳凰,Pheonix tree that blooms in May/June in Taiwan. The Feng Huang tree is also known as the "graduation tree" as it blooms at the time the school year is over. It blooms in May in Southern Taiwan and a little later in Northern Taiwan. It is something that everyone in Taiwan associates with graduation.

I feel I have graduated too. I am still a student of Chinese but ready to go some place new. Another sheepskin for the wall.

The same is true with blogging. I have logged almost 300 blog entries in the past 2 years. It's been fun but eventually everything gets stale. Blogging makes you think of your audience, but without much feedback I just started writing for myself rather that the audience. Lately the blog has been more for me than any audience.

I like writing, but the blog entry mode is confining, I should try a new mode. I'm thinking of writing a novel or some short stories. Anyway this blog is over.

"A rolling stone gathers no moss", I want to keep rolling, moving. I don't want to be like these paving stones that have grass grow up around them and prevent them from moving on.

Again I have to say thank you to Florence who has made this all possible. Getting married to her was the best decision of my life.

Over and out.

Math Projects

I know you are all dying to know what interesting mathematics I have been doing in Tainan. Well I can summarizes my progress at:

1. Data structure now handle links previously only knots
2. The graphical engine LOGO has been replaced with gnuplot
3. Checkerboarding of each knot is complete
4. The database of knots and links is past 100
5. Computing the Tait number and the Kauffman bracket polynomial, gives me the Jones polynomial.WOW!

That's the great thing about living outside of the US. Your day is not caught up in the trivial day to day, you have hours and hours to do your own thing.

Here's a movie of some results.

Women

Women in Taiwan have an interesting situation. The traditional role is as wife and mother but the new reality is that they are equal to a man in the academic world and the workplace. The Taiwanese system of emphasizing academic testing has actually worked to improved the position of women as they suffer no discrimination for their sex on national exam test results. The same is true in the workplace, if they produce results(money) then their sex is irrelevant.

So the best method of birth control is equal education for women. If women have more options than wife and mother then each child is born of a conscience decision of both parents. What could be better?

But the marriage business is big business in Taiwan. A typical marriage in Taiwan might cost 1,000,000NT or about $30,000 US. A once in a lifetime gamble on eternal happiness.

Most all the fixings(like a wedding dress) are rented but still the cost is high.

A further complication is the Chinese superstition of good and bad days, this makes planning the date a tricky matter. If the day is good then all the available venues are booked in advance. But we all know a good day by number of marriage vehicles on the road.

Taiwan is a country in transition.


In my dorm there is another interesting situation. Single rooms are for one person with no overnight "guests". But Taiwanese have a habit of taking off their shoes outside of the room. On my hallway I can tell who is in or out from the shoes at the entrance to their room. I can also tell who has had a "guest' stay overnight. Women's shoes are different than men's. I may have led a sheltered life, but at least I know this.
The guys feet will not fit these Cinderella slippers.

This guy does not wear boots.

Slippers again.

Cohabitation.

  Privacy .vs. cleanliness what a choice.

Fan Art

While visiting in New York City last year we went to the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA). They had this interesting performance art/display.

Still shot

Here is the movie of the "performance" art.

 

 In mathematics we call the behavior of the loops of tape is chaotic but chaotic within limits. This is a case where the global constraints allow chaotic movement within a boundary area. This is a hard problem in mathematics to describe let alone solve.

Watching the movie clip several times, I got the following requirements:

1. Industrial power fans

2. 35mm film

3. 2 connected loops of film(topologists would call the

the configuration a hopf link)

The rise of political power in the South and the Southwest of the US is completely due to the availability of AC(Air Conditioning). Before AC, living in these areas of the US was problematic but with AC possible. So the political influence(to the determinet of the US) is due to the availability of AC. Just my theory.

In my dormitory, each room has it's own air conditioning unit. But each room pays it's own electrical bill, so you use your AC at your own expense. I was determined not to use AC this time, so I bought 2 fans for my room. Two Fan! a chance to do ART! 

I got an old VHS tape that I decontructed to make my art. I don't think the world art scene is less for my cannibalization of this tape.

I think the world is better off with one less tape like this.

With 2 fans and a tape supply, I can create art too. Here is the setup:

And the movie:

I could have done a better job but my main problems were:

1. VHS tapes is lighter than 35mm tape.

2. My fans were not as powerful as the industrial versions.

But there are several areas for further investigation:

1. What is the maximal direction of the fans.(I know direct opposition is not as sustainable as an off center direction.)

2.The interconnection of the two loops definitely has an effect on sustainability. More interconnection is compensating.

DuanWuJie - Procession

The three top holidays in Taiwan are

Chinese New Year's    - Last week in Jan or first 3 weeks of Feb

MidAutumn Festival   - Last 3 weeks of Sep or first week of Oct

Dragon Boat Festival  - June

with the Chinese Lunar Calender these three are:

Chun Jie             - Beginning of the Lunar Year
Zhong Qui Jie     - 15th day of the 8th Lunar Month

Duan Wu Jie       - 5th day of the 5th Lunar Month

These dates are exact by the Chinese Lunar Calendar but vary when matched up to the Western Solar Calendar they vary within the range of a month.

Duan Wu Jie celebrates the death of a famous Chinese poet/philosopher/government official Duan Yu who died in 278 BC. So the 3rd most important festival in Chinese world is 2300 years old, it speaks to the long continuous history of the Chinese. How many Westerns celebrate the death of Socrates(who dies under similar circumstances) at about the same time?


There is a Daoist Temple in the neighborhood of my dormitory and as part of the DuanWuJie festivities the temple god goes on a parade around the neighborhood and then back to the temple. I caught the parade on the way back from class.

The sound truck has to announce the god's coming.

Here is the god him/her self(this is a joke, of course the god is a guy!)

Got to have a retinue of fancy dressers.

Fireworks to wake everyone up(and make the asthma sufferers choke).

I think this is the throne of the god.

And I got the movie(with sound)

This parade is remarkably similar to the parades in Bali but here it was the Daoists and in Bali it was the Hindus.

Searching for True Neon

Neon lights were available at the turn of the 19th century and for maybe 50 years they were the dominate specialty display lights. About 1950, florescent lights became available.

Neon lights have neon gas at low pressure in a glass tube between two electrical poles. The current goes through the gas exciting the neon atoms to a higher energy state, when they fall back to the ground state they release of photon that is the characteristic red/orange color. Other noble gases( helium, argon, xenon, krypton, radon) can be used in such a fashion but the color they produce is an unappealing color( argon(pale lavender), helium(pink to orange) ) or the gas is too expensive( xenon(60X neon), krypton(400X neon), radon(4000X neon)).

In the 1950s fluorescent lights became available, they work on the same principal but in this case the tube is filled with argon and a small amount of mercury. The mercury is excited by the electrical current and radiates in the ultraviolet range which has no color to the human eye. But the inside of the fluorescent tube is coated with a "phosphor" which adsorbs the ultraviolet light from the mercury and reradiates the energy at a visible wavelength. By using different coatings of "phosphors" on the inside of fluorescent tube almost any color can be produced. With multiple coatings the color produced can be changed according to the voltage used to excite the mercury vapor. Only the red in the photo below could be true neon(which it is).

The use of "phosphor" coatings(some don't include phosphorus) is so flexible and useful that they are replacing the original neon lights that used only neon gas. So finding "neon lights" that actually use neon is a challenge. I'm up to it.

We're looking for the reddish/orange, everything else is florescence, but not all reddish/orange in neon. To find the true neon you have to see the tube when it is unlit. In this case the tube is colorless, if it uses phosphors then the unlit tube looks like any fluorescent tube with a coating of white powder on the inside.

In the photo below we have lots of colors but which one is neon?

 When the lights are off, we can see that only the violin has clear tubing, it's the true neon.

 Neon is the old technology so looking for old signs is where to go. Like this one, true neon.

With binoculars, I see the tubing is clear.

(Should get back to looking for a cure for cancer, but this is more fun.)


All these tubes are at pressures less than atmospheric pressure so when they break they implode(in), not explode(out). They have mercury(a poison) and "phosphor" powder inside. Let experts dispose safely.

DuanWuJie - Dragon Boat Festival

As part of the DuanWuJie festival there are Dragon Boat Races. When Du Yuan commits suicide by throwing himself in the lake, the villagers supposedly race to keep the fish from eating his body by feeding the fish zongzi(sticky rice packets). This is all unbelievable but a good story always has some fuzzy details. So this supposed race to save his body from the fishes is the motivation for the Dragon Boat races.(You can't get into Heaven without a complete body, I think the Catholics also believe this.)

In Tainan(and in most Taiwanese cities) there are Dragon Boat races. In Tainan, almost any school or organization that can get 20 rowers can sponsor a team. At the Cheng Da Chinese Language Institute we sponsored 3 teams. We has a few practices and our teams are made up of a very international groups. My team had maybe 5 Frenchmen, 5 Spanish speakers, 4 Americans, Koreans, Thais, ... Outside of class we all revert to our mother language instead of Chinese. So our boat could have been called "The Boat of Babel".

We had tons of fun and that was the main point. We won our first heat against two other boats. But I have to report that one team was a high school girls team( their high school boys team was good) and a team from Japan(they had good looking outfits). On the second day of competition we were smoked. The other two teams were boat lengths ahead of us at the finish.

Here's the equipment.

Here's my team.

Here's me.

This is from the first heat that we won, we are in the far lane. I am the last rower on the nearside.

These pictures were taken my one on one teacher.

This was great experience, I really appreciate her signing me up for this activity.

Movies

For more than 5 months I haven't watch TV in Taiwan. The cable in my room has BBC news, CNN news, National Geographic, Discovery, some Travelogues and Movies in English with Chinese subtitles. I can definitely say that doing without TV wouldn't kill you.


But I do have a membership in a movie rental store. I paid about 30NT($1US) for a five day rental. The rental store has a few movies from Taiwan and China that have English subtitles, if they don't have subtitles it is a waste of time as my Chinese is not good enough.

I know some people don't like to see the same movies again(and again) but I like to see the details I missed the previous times. Here are my recommendations:

Best Taiwanese movie:     Cape #7
Best Chinese movie:         Not One Less
Best NonChinese movie:   Apocalypto

Here are my comments on other movies I have seen in Tainan:

Not One Less            一个都不能少
    Totally a sad story, the life in rural China

Raise the Red Lantern     大红灯笼高高挂
    China's old attitudes towards women

To Live                    活着
    Great story of China in to Communist times

Happy Times            幸福時光
    Commentary on life in China, the blind girl is a metaphor for China

Taipei Au Revoir
    Cute, young people in Taipei

Manga
    Gangster movie in Taipei

Green Tea                    綠茶
    When they start talking about fortune tellers it just turns me off, I didn't finish the movie

Winds of September        九降風
    HS days in HsinChu, Baseball scandals

Eternal Summer            盛夏光
    Broke Back Mountain between HS and University

Prince of Tears                淚王子
    White Terror and the Waishengren - Ang Lee

Shanghai                    上還
    All the big names John Cusack(USA), Chow Yong Fat(HK), Gong Li(China), Ken Tanaka(Japan). Gong Li was good

Forever Enthralled            梅蘭芳
    Beijing Opera

Parking                        停車
    The tough life in Taipei, life's random events

It frosts me when the movie case has lots of English but the movies itself doesn't have English subtitles, whether there are English subtitles are hidden by the store labels. These movies are without subtitles, but with lots of English on the cover. Watch out.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop  三枪拍案惊奇
City of Sadness                                 悲情城市
The Puppet Master                            戲夢人生
Seven Days in Heaven                       父後七日

Shan Gri La and planes

The tallest building in Taiwan is:

It is right next to the campus and sometimes when I am lost on the streets of Tainan, I can get my bearings by finding this building on the skyline.

I had my most expensive meal in Tainan on the restaurant on the top floor. I could look out over my city. It was a new perspective.

As I reported before there is an airport to the south of Tainan. It is both an airport for local flights and the Taiwanese Air Force. The older F16s fly out of this airport and some weeks in Tainan it feels like the Blue Angels are in town. Even though I hear them almost everyday I have been slow on the draw to get a picture of them. Recently, I got some shots. Here's a single.

Here's two in formation.

I've tried using the zoom feature but no luck. China has 1600+ missiles pointed at Taiwan. So much for friendly relationships.

While walking the street of Tainan, I did find Shangrila, but it was closed.

Fun Stuff3

The current law in Taiwan is that any building with 5 floors must have an elevator.  But many buildings were built before this law. NYC is also famous for such "walkups". So there are ad hoc solutions, many older buildings have a  crane off the balcony.

But there are other solutions like an outside elevator.

And for moving day we bring in the big equipments.

But the fifth floor in Taiwan is actually the fourth floor in US thinking. There is no ground floor/main floor that corresponds to zero. In Taiwan the first floor is the ground/main floor. (For mathematicians, zero is a very important number, it is not nothing!)

The new word in Taiwan for "cool" is "kui"(the letter L is hard to pronounce) pronounced as "coo".

Do we every outgrown our need for bathroom humour?  I think not. These two have a problem.

 She seems to have solved the problem.

 He seems to be quite proud of his accomplishments.

This last picture was one of the hardest shots, the sign is on Plexiglas spaced from the wall. The camera kept focusing on the wall and so unfocused on the sign. The "back-lighted" option seemed to work the best.

Fun Stuff2

I was at a dinner in Taipei and there were these two child performers that went about the restaurant with a 15 minute dialog that held all the Chinese speakers spell bound. That they talked for 15 minutes without a script and with animation was just amazing to watch, even though I didn't know what the hell they were saying.

I suppose, nowadays with all of our computers as memory aids, personal memory isn't as important as before, just like being able to compute isn't needed as much with computers doing the donkey work.

I have been happy with the English books at the NCKU library but I recently visited the Tainan Municipal Library.

As could be expected, they didn't use the Dewey Decimal system, there is another classification system and it is the one used with the Chinese books at the NCKU library too.

The classes are:

    * 000 – Computer science, information and general works
    * 100 – Philosophy and psychology
    * 200 – Religion
    * 300 – Social sciences
    * 400 – Language
    * 500 – Science (including mathematics)
    * 600 – Technology and applied Science
    * 700 – Arts and recreation
    * 800 – Literature
    * 900 – History, geography, and biography

I was recently visited by alien being but he was strangely silent.

On the trip to Ali Shan, our tour bus stopped at one of the many rest stops for a bathroom break. This sign caught my eye.

The translation is a little unclear. The first line says this lowered sink is for children to use, the second line says not to put your feet with pressure on the sink. So it's OK to wash your feet in this lowered sink but don't stand on the sink. Also it's a good idea not to beat the children.

Who knew that Tainan has a Jewish spopts equipment store?

And a preschool for love babies. I didn't think there were that many "love babies" in Tainan. Who doesn't like burgers and pudding?