James’s Blog

The recent news about the riots in Tallinn is a little depressing. From this video footage, it looks to be mostly riled-up young men destroying stuff, as usual. The Russian government response pisses me off. The Estonian Prime Minister has the proper response to Russia:

We don’t consider it necessary to hold deep discussions with the Russian authorities over the internal affairs of Estonia.

It annoys me when big countries with influential culture can be so insecure and feel the need to mess with neighboring small countries, like the Chinese with Taiwan or, to a lesser extent, the Americans with Cuba. It’s the 21st century; stop the world domination game already.

I’ve added some nice pictures from Tallinn, from a more peaceful day, during my trip there in summer 2005.

There were few takers for a long-haul hike, so there are now alternate plans for a shorter hike. Since everyone around me seems to be born in the midwest or lived here for years but have never been to Lake Superior, I feel a Pictured Rocks trip is in order.

I have been there 5 times now (see pictures from Trips 1-3, Trip 4, Trip 5; I’ve uploaded more pictures) and know the place pretty well. A map is available for reference. Here’s a possible itinerary.

Day 1: Drive to Lake Superior from Chicago (about 7 hours); camp at the western part of the park or stay at a motel.

Day 2 (and 3?) Explore the western portion of the park, including: Miner’s castle, the Chapel rock, Grand Portal Point, Spray Falls, and nice beaches. Move camp to Hurricane River.

Day 3 or 4: Explore the eastern side of the park, including the Au Sable Lighthouse, Log Slide (and running down it), shipwrecks, and more nice beaches. Drive home afterwards.

The plan is to do this a bit before or a bit after Pride, possibly weekend of June 15 or June 29. We’ll probably leave on a Friday or Saturday evening and come back early the next week. Depending on people’s schedules, there might be different arrival days at the park.

This page has quite a few more hilarious mistranslations. Nothing quite beats the following one, I think.

From a NYTimes ariticle today about the Beijing Olympics. The Chinese sounds kind of dirty, too.

Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Update: photo of the full ad.

It’s April 11 and we had a snow storm. So this is now officially a bad winter. It had the latest snow (April 11) and the coldest temperatures (a high of 2° F during the Superbowl) I’ve exprienced since I moved to the Midwest in ‘99.

I exited the building this morning to find Irving Park deserted. The police had cordoned off the section of Irving Park between Pine Grove and Lakeshore because of falling ice from Park Place. I realized this when I heard a big thwap well behind me; I looked back as a few guys giggled and darted into the building. I thought, great, just let me make it to the bus stop alive. This closure was mentioned in today’s CTA press release:

Several bus routes…had to be rerouted in both directions due to falling ice from a building on Irving Park and Pine Grove.

That’s us! Hardcore highrise living in Chicago. If only I could stay in the highrise until winter goes away.

This Villiage Voice article analyses the hit song This Is Why I’m Hot by Mims. The song is, of course, available in Youtube, at least for now. The lyrics are available here.

The popularity of songs like this makes me have fleeting naughty, unpatriotic thoughts about America. I learned a few new words from it though, words like hyphy and guap. The article is a fun read; I particularly enjoyed the photo caption:

But its analysis of the refrain

I’m hot ’cause I’m fly/You ain’t ’cause you not

is way too complicated (see fig. 3). Note that we have

and

If a conditional statement and its inverse are both true, the two conditions must be equivalent, so being fly is the same thing as being hot.

Jim told me about a Chinese-to-English translation plugin: When you highlight a bunch of Chinese characters, the plugin provides instant translation and pronounciation of the characters. Works for both simplified and traditional characters. This is what the result looks like on a previous blog entry.

The plugin only works in Mozilla Firefox. It doesn’t look like they have a tool like this in Opera.

This looks like a scary picture of housing prices. From the NYT:

Someone made a roller coaster animation of the graph.

I’m wondering how were the historical prices in Europe and in Asia, and whether this recent increase happened only in the U.S.