FaLun Gong

Last year was the first year that tourists from Mainland China because the largest group visiting Taiwan. The difference between the 2 countries is major in the area of governing. Taiwan is a democracy with elections and freedom of speech. China has a communist party dictatorship with no elections and pervasive censorship of newspapers, Internet, speech, ... 

When the Mainland tourists come to Taiwan, they must be shocked by the displays of protest that they could never see in their own country. In Taiwan, there are groups that set up their displays at the sites that are popular with the Mainlander tourists. For example, at the Alishan Mountain National Park.

Supporters of Tibet have a display at the Chiang Kaishek Memorial.

90% of all Mainland tourists go to the National Palace Museum. Most of the artifacts of the museum were moved from the Beijing Forbidden City by Chiang Kaishek to Taiwan in 1949. So the Mainlanders probably think that what Taiwan is displaying is the their stolen artifacts. But during Mao's Cultural Revolution such artifacts were smashed to destroy the old Chinese Culture to be replaced with the new Chinese Communist Culture. Nowadays, nobody in China mentions Mao Zedong, kind of like nobody in the Republican Party mentions that their last president was George Bush.

                                   

The displays are shown so that the Mainlander can read them, they are written in the simplified Chinese characters of Mainland China.

Another good spot for the Falun Gong to reach the Mainland tourists is at the E101 skyscraper.

Many of the posters are graphic with pictures of the tortured bodies of Falun Gong believers in Mainland China.

The tourists from the Mainland are like a wave washing over Taiwan, there's not much Taiwan can do to stop them. "Money doesn't just talk, it shouts". But I hope that at least some of the Mainlanders go back with a story they could never see in their own country.
Even at the Chikan Lou Exhibit in Tainan, there are the continual Falun Gong.

Waves

This time in Taiwan, I reread 2 great books:

"The Cloud Spotter's Guide" by Gavin Pretor-Pinney                 and
"The Wave Watcher's Companion" by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

With my current eyes, big things, like clouds are a good thing to be interested in. The second is a good introduction to the phenomena of waves, with examples takes from nature.  Although much of the book is about ocean waves, just reading it makes me more aware of the waves around me. Waves travel in time so many of the examples in this blog come with movies.


At the entrance to a restaurant in Xinnamen we have a little feng shui to set the mode for dinner. Flowing was has that calming effect, leaving the hectic for the relaxed.

The movie

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_yIUEvEeH7-emxYc3poUGd6WEU/edit?usp=sharing

How was this next wave made? I think the cement block was painted with a paint sprayer, the worker had to turn off the machine, but the switch was back at his truck, so he just ran back to the truck and let the nozzle of the sprayer rotate on the rubber hosing. All just speculation after the fact.

Looks a little like a sine wave but it is really a sequence of half circles.

Aquariums bring feng shui and keep out ghosts so there are very elaborate tanks in Taipei. This one has jets of bubbles illuminated with a sequence of LED lighting. Wow, if the ghosts get past this, then nobody is safe.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_yIUEvEeH7-bGFOMHBONzQ0ZFU/edit?usp=sharing

Neon - Camera as a Spectrograph

A spectrograph is an instrument for measuring the frequencies of a light source. I would guess that most spectrographs are calibrated by using known light sources. So for example, if you measured the frequency of an unknown light source and it contained the frequency of excited neon, then you could say that the unknown light source contained neon.

At the National Museum of Natural Science in TaiZhong they have a display of several exited gases. I took a picture of what I knew was neon.

 
























I then cut the red of the neon source and can overlap it on a picture of an unknown source with MS Paint and see it then matches up. For example, this Christian cross is not a neon light.

Whereas this TaiShan Buddhist Temple's backward twisted swastika is neon.

This method only works if the camera used is the same one used to take the reference shot. I know this cross is neon but the photo was taken with one of my past cameras.

There is still the problem of different glasses(with different absorption characteristics) and maybe the gas in the tube in not totally neon, but this method seems OK.

Motorcycles

We couldn't end this blog with some motorcycle/scooter pictures.

I think this guy's days on the road are over.

 

If somebody can get this motor running then I'll be surprised. In the mean time, it will stay parked on the street taking up valuable parking space until somebody realizes the inevitable.

 In Tainan, the weather is hotter, so the engines are less covered than in Taipei where it rains a lot. Maybe this guy came from the south and couldn't get use to the rainy weather.
 
 What's going on here? In front of a scooter repair shop we have all these scooters with the fronts off. Is there a scooter recall in the works. I don't know.

You don't often see a "chopped"  motorcycle in Taiwan. But if Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper from "Easy Rider" fame were in Taiwan then this is the kind of motorcycle they would ride.

 Actually in the US you would never see this one because nobody would ever "chop" a 125cc motorcycle.

 In the "bed" of this threewheeler, the owner/operators was sleeping. I guess that's why they call it a "bed".

Knot Program

As time has gone on, this blog has become less for about those that read it and more about what I want to record for myself.

Because of my eyes I have kept close to home these days, so I've done a lot of progamming on my knot program. It is now a full C++ implemetation. I doubt that I could have implemented some of the recursive  procedures of the resolving tree without using C++. Also C++ allowed me to implement the Laurent polynomials with overloaded operators.




I now have a collection of over 500 knots and links in my own format. This includes all knots upto 10 crossings.
 

I have implemented the Kauffman bracket polynomial algortihm and completely compute the resolving tree down to the Seifert circles and can plot any or all intermediate steps. For example:



I  reworked the gnuplot routine for plotting knot diagrams
they are now annotated with orientation information at each
crossing. Orientation is computed as a crossproduct.
 

I correctly enumerate all colorings of a know with elimination
of those that are a permutation away. For eample a coloring with not triple points.

I correctly checkerboard all knots up to 10 crossings.

The output is now setup to be imported into excel sheets.

Bugs, bugs, bugs, they must all die.

Arduino 2

It's easier to work on Arduino this year than last. Arduino is growing in popularity worldwide. Tons of good info on the web. In Taipei, there is an electronics store on the 4th floor of the big GuangHua building on Civic Boulevard.

They have a full rack of Arduino boards and accessories.

The Uno boards(Rev 3) are available for about $14 and a shield with a plug board is about $7. So this combo costs about $21. The prices are better than online in the States and without the hassle of ordering from web suppliers who rip you off on the postage.

I converted my Arduino project from a Mega that I brought to Taiwan, to this combo. The project is intended to control a xy stage like this one:

 The electronics all work, but it was getting a little hairy towards the end. Here it is with plug boards for the motors and the sensors modules.

There isn't much I can do to reduce the complexity of the peripherals but the combo of Uno and shield do help.

And on the flip side.(still using popsicle sticks, actually tongue depressors)

I brought a more complicated and expensive Arduino board to Taiwan, a Mega board. I was able to replace the Mega with the Uno because I serendipitedly found(accidentally decovered) a way of combining a sensor circuit with the limiting switch circuit. Probably every 1st year EE students knows this trick but finding it for myself was a real thrill.

I wrote up the description on my webpage.

https://sites.google.com/site/essmike/ 

Making Food

We can all go onto the web and see great pictures of food, but I like some of the equipment used to make that great food. At a lantern Festival Fair there were some MiddleEasterners using a wok in a novel way to make nan, the traditional baked bread. Underneath the upsidedown wok is the typical Taiwanese natural gas burner with its big blue flame.

 The best roasted chicken I ever have had was cooked this way. The chickens are put in these metal boxes and the boxes are put on top of a wood fire. The heat in the hot house is so intense that only unmarried men can work there. I think the problem is that the heat will destroy their sperm. If a customer can last one hour in the cook house their meal is free.

 We recently bought some chicken and goose eggs from an itinerant farmer. They bring their produce from the farms surround Taipei in to the city and sell them door to door.

 They sell by weight and what got me was their balance, it was a work of art. Probably the same designed as 2000 years ago and still works in a blackout.

 

Probably every culture has something that looks like a burrito. In

Taiwan it is call a "Rume Bing." When they make it for you, they ask you what you want on it, I don't know the individual names so I just say Everything!

 Another happy camper.

 

Discounts

Discounts(打折, dǎzhé) are computed differently in Taiwan than in the US. Where as in the US, they tell you how much they are taking off the original price( 10% off, 50% off ... ), in Taiwan discounted merchandise is marked by what fraction the original price(9/10th,  half priced ... ) is the sale price. Also in Taiwan, discounts are in tenths rather than in hundredths(.i.e percent). I doubt that anyone looking for a bargain will see a difference from 8/10 of the original price and 15%, 16%, 17%, 18%, 19%, 20%, 21%,  22%, 23% or 24% off the original price.

You don't need to know much Chinese to see that this store is selling at a 8/10s of the posted price(or 20% off). But if a store is giving a discount, then business must be bad(or else why give a discount?). If business is bad, what is the reason?

But you still have to be care and read the fine print. Like this add says the sale price is 6/10 of the orginal, but that's only on the second piece of bread.

Here is a quick quiz, which of these stores is offering the better deal:

Buy one, get one free:

  Half of the original price:

But there are somethings discounted that make sense. How valuable is day-old fresh bread and pastries? This bakery sells all items at 8/10 of the original price after 8PM.

The top 3 convenience stores in Taiwan and in the order of their business they are:

7/11              (called just "7" )
Family Mart
HiLife

The all sell the English language Taiwan newspapers for 15NT each. But HiLife sells them for 13NT after 8PM because what value is there in yesterday's newspaper?

Bus #52

This is the bus I take to teach one of my English students.

 I catch the bus 2 blocks away from our apartment and it drops me off across the street from where my student works. It costs 15NT with is about 50 cent, I pay with convenient debit card that works on all buses, the subway, 7/11, some taxis, ...

The bus is big and roomy

When I go to my session, it on time and fairly empty.

This a far cry from the buses of 30 years ago, when I first came to Taiwan. In those days, the buses were more like smaller school buses, sometimes the seats would be removed so that more people could be packed in standing like sardines in a can. Women had to be careful about the "gropers" on the bus. But there weren't any alternatives. Almost nobody had a car(or a place to park it) and taxis were too expensive. Bus drivers knew they were the only game in town and so they treated the riders badly. Heaven help the poor rider without exact change.

This situation reminds me of taking the bus to De LaSalle high school as a kid. When the bus is the only option, then you have to play their game.

But nowadays there is an alternative: the subway. In response, the buses have become more convenient, the drivers more considerate and the routes more popular. It is great to see what competition can do. The same goes for taxis, I feel the drivers are better than before. Now if we could just do something about the scooters.