Archive for June 30th, 2003

Date: June 30th, 2003
Cate: Regular

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House: They won’t fix everything we want, but we’re taking it anyway. Closing in T-31 days…

Class: Just had the midterm. During the second half of the class, we have to form “teams” and work on a “project” “together” which is not my preferred way of doing things. We’re supposed to take an existing program and refactor it to be chock full of patterns. Maybe we can use this one?

THE LONG AWAITED OFFICIAL MESSY-78 POSITION STATEMENT ON RSS, PIE, VALIDATION, <)) ECHO ((>, SSF, XML-RPC CHARSETS, AND WHATEVER ELSE IS GOING ON: I dunno.

Date: June 30th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day
1 msg

右

右 – You4 – Right

And 左 – Zuo3 – Left.

They look pretty similar. Inside right you can see 口 – Kou3 – Mouth, and in left it is 工 – Gong1 – Work. Not sure if there is any deep meaning there.

Date: June 30th, 2003
Cate: Regular
5 msgs

New excuse: atrophied right lobe

More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English

Using brain scans on volunteers, Scott discovered that different areas of the brain are used to interpret words and intonation.

The left temporal lobe of the brain is active when English speakers hear the language but Mandarin speakers use the left and right lobe, which is normally used to process melody in music and speech.

Intonation is important in Mandarin because it gives different meanings to the same word. The word “ma” for example can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp, depending on the tone.

“We think Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken word,” Scott said in a statement.

She believes the research could provide insights into what happens when people are forced to re-learn speech comprehension following a stroke.

“It seems that the structure of the language you learn as a child affects how the structure of your brain develops to decode speech. Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin,” Scott said.

Date: June 30th, 2003
Cate: Geekism
6 msgs

FoF 0.next

By the way, I am still working on the next version, with categories and users and CSS and all that stuff. Here’s a top secret preview:

FoF 0.next

Yes, eventually the unread/total items will sum up under the folders. Eventually.

Date: June 30th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day

個

個 – Ge4 – (a measure word)

One of the charming features of Chinese is the measure word. If you want to say a quantity of a certain kind of thing in English, you just say

(number) (thing)

Like “one duck” or “five people” or “ten minutes”. Not so in Chinese, instead you have to say

(number) (measure word) (thing)

For example

五隻豬 – Wu3 Zhi1 Zhu1 – Five (measure for pigs and some other kinds of animals) Pigs

There are different measure words for all different categories of objects. 個 is the most common one, and is used for people, and seems to also be used when no other one fits. But there are HUNDREDS more, for all different seemingly random categories of things. Sometimes one measure word is used for multiple unrelated things. Here’s just a few to give you the flavor:

把 – Ba3 – handfuls, things with handles, and some abstract things
顆 – Ke1 – small spheres
棵 – Ke1 – trees, cabbages
口 – Kou3 – population, mouthsful, wells
挂 – Gua4 – string-shaped things, strings of things
班 – Ban1 – crowds, classes, scheduled transport vehicles
臺 – Tai2 – performances, engines
具 – Ju4 – tools, corpses

Yes, even corpses get their own measure word, for all the times you need to refer to great stacks of dead bodies. This whole business is so complicated that Jenny isn’t even 100% sure that 隻 is the right one for pigs. It probably depends on the breed or something like that.