tokyokevin on Japan. Language. Learning. Tech. Culture. Women.
Associate Professor at a Women's University in Tokyo.
OK, since they serve fortune cookies at the end of the meal in Chinese restaurants, you figure fortune cookies are from China. Wrong. They don’t even have fortune cookies in China (trust me, I lived there for a year. Almond cookies yes, fortune cookies no.)
So where did they come from? Japan. Kyoto, specifically. Find out more at the New York Times article: Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
That’s what a study done at MIT says. East Asians and Americans were asked to make both absolute and relative judgments about shapes and length of lines in a drawing. The Americans used more of their brain for relative judgments, and the East Asians used more of their brains for absolute judgments. Reported in PsyCentral online magazine.
I use Firefox as my browser, much better than Internet Explorer. One of the add-ons I use is a spell checker. But many people don’t have a spell checker in their browser.
What if I could put a nice spell checker on my web site? Well, I can. Spellify is an Ajax based web 2.0 software application that you can add to your domain hosting site so that everyone can have their form input checked for spelling. I have to try this out and see if it works with other programs like Moodle.
William Deresiewicz writes a stupendous article, Love on Campus, for the American Scholar in the style of a literary critic about how English professors are portrayed in the movies these days; weak, philandering, selfish, pompous, self-pitying. He goes on to stipulate how wrong this is, and that in reality, intellectual intercourse is a goal of the university, and since WW2 a number of social and cultural trends have made this kind of “brain sex” more and more illusory or taboo.
The article borders on the absurd at times, with thick prose (I had to look up the word demotic), and used the words luftmensch and parvenu in the same sentence. But his logic is impressive and he reaches a surprising conclusion; that lust, or eros, has its place on campus. Between your ears, and not your legs.
I just heard about the Asus eee, a micro laptop at a great price. Out of Taiwan, this company has been making video and sound cards, and motherboards, for years. They often have solid products.
Running Linux OS, it is small(about B5 size), light (less than a kiogram) and cheap (initially set at $200 but is now selling at New Egg for $400). See the video review on YouTube.