Chinese UFO Is Just A Rocket
Jul 17, 2010 China, Chinese censorship, Gibson's Law
During launch, a rocket produces a cone as it passes through the point of maximum dynamic pressure. The atmosphere bleeding off the shock cone is visible in this photo of a shuttle launch:
HuffPo reports on the hysteria:
A second China UFO sighting has residents on edge, just seven days after an unidentified flying object shut down a Chinese airport.
The new UFO sighting took place in Chongqing in eastern China on July 15. Witnesses told Shanghai Daily they saw the same thing: “four lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape that hovered over the city’s Shaping Park for over an hour.”
The “four lantern-like objects” is a reference to the glow of engines. The Chinese Long March-5 rocket comes in a four-engined design:
Not too much mystery here, I’m afraid. What is interesting, though, is that news of the sighting escaped China and wound up embedded at the Huffington Post. Admittedly, the time of day and atmospheric conditions absolutely lent themselves to video:
What’s happening here is standard authoritarian procedure: experiment without notice, deny failure, announce success. (Just so we’re clear, the same is true of contractors.) The only mystery is how the communist party continues to believe that formula is even possible in the world they have manufactured. It is almost impossible to keep a secret anymore.
Tags: China, chinese ufo, NASA, rocketry, rockets, space, ufo, unidentified flying object
How to make $1000 a week with no experience.
Jun 14, 2010 China
What an average white guy might look like.
1. Be white.
2. Go to China.
3. Get hired as a “quality control” expert.
4. Profit!!!!
Companies in China will hire Americans to pretend to be business owners.
Apparently, “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
See The Atlantic for more on this. I’m tempted to apply myself.
Tags: China, Morning Awful
GoDaddy Joins Google
Mar 25, 2010 China, Chinese censorship, Virtual Reality Living
The internet is leaving China one company at a time as government efforts to erect a Great Wall of Technology repel investors. First Google, now Danica Patrick:
In December, China began to enforce a new policy that required any registrant of a new .cn domain name to provide a color head shot and other business identification, including a Chinese business registration number and physical signed registration forms. That data was to be forwarded to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. Most domain name registries require only name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.
“We were immediately concerned about the motives behind the increased level of registrant verification being required,” Christine N. Jones, general counsel of the Go Daddy Group Inc., told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Wednesday. “The intent of the procedures appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.”
Until recently, Chinese authoritarianism seemed to be finding its way into the information age. No longer — the trend is away from cooperation with obsessive security and towards the exit door. This doesn’t necessarily mean the party is going to implode, but it does point to a future in which China’s internet doesn’t resemble ours.
Globalizing Football
Feb 6, 2010 China, NFL, globalization
Remember what I said a while back about the NFL’s (really rather clever) efforts to bring the game to China?
The National Football League has tried and failed to build international audiences, but now they’ve set their sights on China with a new strategy: a reality show starring a Chinese rock band. WaPo buried the money quote on page two:
It was obvious after watching one taping that the reality show will not have the usual sheen of an NFL Films production. But then, it doesn’t have to. The intent is to produce a campy, lighthearted program that will convince Chinese children that if they want to learn the essence of America they must come to understand American football. (Emphasis mine)
They might have a point: George Will once described football as “a combination of the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.”
Turns out the NFL’s strategy has as much to do with Sun Tzu as rock’n'roll:
Morning Video
Feb 3, 2010 China, Morning Video
Hu Jintao reviews the troops. China has replaced Maoist ideology with nationalism…and utterly impractical whitewall track wheels on its tanks.
Google vs. China
Jan 14, 2010 China, Chinese censorship, Google, globalization
James Fallows weighs in at The Atlantic:
In a strange and striking way there is an inversion of recent Chinese and U.S. roles. In the switch from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the U.S. went from a president much of the world saw as deliberately antagonizing them to a president whose Nobel Prize reflected (perhaps desperate) gratitude at his efforts at conciliation. China, by contrast, seems to be entering its Bush-Cheney era. For Chinese readers, let me emphasize again my argument that China is not a “threat” and that its development is good news for mankind. But its government is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world. To me, that is what Google’s decision signifies.
Henry Blodget at Advertising Age says “Google has played the overall China situation maturely and brilliantly:”
(B)y playing ball with China until it had some real leverage, Google has a much better chance of actually forcing the government to change.
And that’s the real goal here–change. If Google forces any change at all in China, it will have done more for China’s 1 billion-plus citizens than it would have if it had boycotted the country from the beginning.
Blodget suggests the outcome will be a new compromise of some kind. China’s ruling party should remember the way Europeans compromised themselves onshore once upon a time, and how that worked out; but they probably won’t treat Google like the evil round-eye.
After all, there are probably lots of party members using Google by now.
The Emperor’s New Map
Jan 13, 2010 China, Chinese censorship, Google, Political Geography, globalization, internet
The AP has stirred my inner map geek at exactly the right time. A million-dollar map is on rare public display:
The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s. Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli.
Ricci’s map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses and a region named “Ka-na-ta.”
Maps like this tell us a lot more about the makers than the world they mapped. This was an era when cartography was only beginning to resemble what we’d call a “science.” This is a European doing his best to describe the shape of the world to the Emperor of China; that Florida is prominently “the land of flowers” tells us the missionary understood his audience.
In order to give His Imperial Majesty the most effective view of the world, Ricci put China at the center — which makes it look smaller. To the Chinese dynasties of that time, the world outside China was unknown and therefore unmapped:
The message hiding in this map is that China was not the center of the world, or even the largest or most important state; that vast lands were still barely explored and filled with wonder. That the world surrounded Wanli. Based on the best work of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Venetians, it was a picture of expansion and limits at the same time.
China’s regime spent the next four centuries dealing with all the changes this map would see. Their faith in barriers and oceans proved misguided and shortsighted — a lesson for a more modern, American civilization that was hardly imagined yet, but still a lesson China hasn’t learned. The communist party has gone from the failed “Green Dam” censorship project, a kind of Great Wall of Technology, to a confrontation with Google in less than a year.
Google May Leave China
Jan 13, 2010 China, Chinese censorship, Google
After a spate of cyber-attacks aimed directly at Chinese human rights advocates and their foreign contacts, Google has had enough:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. (Emphasis mine)
China’s police state 2.0 has a choice to make. Either allow the connectivity that brings prosperity in the age of global, technology-driven economies, or disconnect and go back to the way things were. I doubt the communist party really wants to make the latter choice.
Green Becomes Strategic
Dec 27, 2009 China, Green Revolution
China is betting long on green, but also disturbing strategic planners in the way Germans and French played brinksman with coal and iron once upon a time, and Russia does with gas and oil. The irony is that these green metals have been mined in the most polluting of ways:
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a draft plan last April to halt all exports of heavy rare earths, partly on environmental grounds and partly to force other countries to buy manufactured products from China. When the plan was reported on Sept. 1, Western governments and companies strongly objected and Ms. Wang announced on Sept. 3 that China would not halt exports and would revise its overall plan. But the ministry subsequently cut the annual export quota for all rare earths by 12 percent, the fourth steep cut in as many years.
Here’s hoping China exercises quotas wisely. It would be a terrible irony to have a war over green tech.
Your Liberal Media At Work
Nov 18, 2009 Chairman Mao, China, Obama and China
Via RawStory, a study in CNN Drudge-link trolling?A CNN correspondent said Monday she was detained by Chinese security guards in Shanghai for two hours for displaying a T-shirt on camera depicting US President Barack Obama as Mao Zedong.Emily Chang, a Beijing-based correspondent for the US television network, said in a blog post on CNN.com that she hunted down the shirt after hearing they had been banned amid fears they “may offend the American president.”
You know what? I like the shirt. It’s my American right to collect leftist kitsch; I’ll assume that was Chang’s interest as well.
The Thoughts of Chairman Miaow
