5 posts tagged “farming”

What did I write on my first-year Chinese course evaluation?

I thought the course could make use of both Unicode and YouTube :)

I think there's also a lot of room for improvement in teaching students how to chunk 汉字 better, at a higher granularity and with more applicability than just reviewing a few dozen radicals. Given the few hundred characters covered, a student ought to be able to decompose most characters into nameable substructures.

For example, this is how I remembered how to write 喜欢音乐 (as in 我喜欢这个很有名的中国音乐).

Non-canonically, 喜 can be expressed from the top-down as 土, 口, ?, 口 -- earth, mouth, carrot, mouth. Or, the earth opens its mouth to eat a carrot and then spit it out. Carrot is my invention -- the three stroke thingy between mouth-to-mouth. 欢 is made up of 又 (as in 朋友), and the literary radical (as in 吃饭). 音 is, top-down, roof, carrot, sun. roof as in 宿舍 -- a roof over a hundred (百) people (as 他们) = dormitory. 乐, I just remember.
 
earth, mouth, carrot mouth,

roof, carrot, sun. roof, carrot, sun.

Piece of 生日蛋糕, ne?

(Anyone hacked a (image) sketch-based hanzi neighborhood search engine? Hmm.

As an aside, one or more of these pieces break when I'm editing this Vox post on Camino (or Firefox 2, which I use less these days) and switching between hacking hanyu (Chinese) and yingyu (English). Sometimes the location of the blinking text cursor doesn't actually match up with where the point, in the Emacsen-se, is.)

One of the reasons I learned more about J2ME this quarter was to try to write a program like this -- a portable flash card system. I didn't get to it, but there ought to be an easier way to sync Unicode-d text between my MacBook Pro and my J2ME-enabled phone by way of Bluetooth, in an extensibly usable way.

Today on TheFarm was like so.

今天上午，I had first-year 中文 with 林老师, chatted with BrianO about his start-up ideas, and skimmed through the Dinosaur book for some last minute review.

After dinner on the Ave, I went to see a friend performing in "The Cherry Orchard", had a macademia nut cookie (two actually), a mini-cheesecake which looked like it could have been a baby-bite sized cupcake (wasn't), and walked home in high spirits, ready to fly home.

Orientation week is rolling onwards here at TheFarm, or so it seems to me, a now-first year PhD student.

I am, once more, on the outside looking in. Graduate housing lines the outer-rim of campus, which gives us quicker auto access to El Camino, and affords family space for graduate students with younger children to take care of.

I spend some time these days thinking about class vs income, and wonder if it is really true that your grandparents' level of wealth is the best predictor of your SAT score, or if your class really is more determined by your parents' parents' wealth rather than the household income They use to score us all.

In the States, where social mobility isn't, I suppose household income is not a bad first-order approximation to your class, but class is so much more than that...

On the other hand, household income is something that the greenheads can tax.quantify, can legislate, can mandate for general purpose use-abuse.

These days, I see even more how immigrants change this picture, how mobility occurs at the intersection of two+ cultures, where soso many things are traded up and down, likesome social arbitrage, when We chose to (star)migrate.

I was walking to Gates this afternoon, Wednesday, and it was Partly Sunny, seventy nine F degrees.

Someone passed by me, picking up a can of soda from an almost empty bin of ice.

It was after 2PM, which meant that lunch was long over, and I decided I would take a bottle of cool spring water. After all, would they really mind? Nobody was within sixty feet of the abandoned lunch-ing site.

Seventy steps away, a redhead stopped me.

"Are you taking the classes?"

What classes? I said, guessing where this was headed.

"We spent a lot of money on food here. Did you open the bottle?"

No. Would you like it back?

"Yes," said the not-that-tall woman with red hair, sunglasses, and khakis pants.

I gave it back to her.

!

Yes, they Spent A Lot Of Money.

I was tempted to go back and ask her, what's your name again? Professional Development? Okay, I'll try not to work with people like slash such as you.

Truly, yes, I am on The Farm, and Money swirls 'round, like green leaves in-visible.

My roomie and I moved into grad housing yesterday, and I spent some time last night trying to convince my router to work in NAT-less no-no-DHCP mode. Alas.

After we moved in, we wandered around this barbecue, where I ran into a bunch of aerospace engineers, some bio-E's and double-E's, an environmentalist, two physicists, a lawyer, and someone who studies The Classics.

Today, I walked through campus, cutting through some ugrad dorms, and saw some blobs of frosh and kin, ready to explore and shop with colored plastic bags in hand.

I passed by an empty bike cage near the hospital -- the only bike cage I've seen so far -- and got my eyes checked at the clinic U on the other side of campus.

I don't yet have a bike, but I still have my two feet, my four Toyota wheels, and the skates I'm getting used to. I'm getting used to driving everywhere, outside of campus that is, but it occurs to me that being able to chose not to drive, and walk or bike instead, is a privilege in several ways.

It means (or at least suggests) you live in an area where your job, your kids or family, your schools and your shopping malls are close enough to be accessible through bipedal locomotion (plus public transport). It means that you probably have enough money to afford a car, and that you're not pressed for time when you need to get from point A to Phi, which means you have a certain amount of timespacemoney slack in organizing you and your family's life.

Frosh on the Farm, on the other hand, aren't even allowed to park on campus, and are discouraged from bringing cars. Makes sense, I suppose, as there is construction and parkingsqueeze enough.

I suppose this is the week where I'm supposed to say, gee, they look so Young, but I haven't, I think, said that to myself just yet.