The Daily Cow

Don't want to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but guess who made it. :)

... is huge. I have never felt so small and insignificant in my life. Why is there only one section of Econ 1?

I guess I'll find out at the end of the semester.

Here's wishing our head cow a very special day ahead, full of warmth, love, friendship, and milk! :) Here's to 19 years of wonderful you, Jinghao Yan, and hope that this year ahead will be marked with achievement, curiosity, contentment, pride, bench presses, and racial misunderstandings. :P

Place your birthday greetings in the comments, everybody! :D

India got a bronze medal yesterday, and another possible gold/silver medal!

Just wanted to shout out some of my joy to the world. :-)

UPDATE(082208): Another bronze medal. Woohoo! You rule, Abhinav, Vijender and Sushil! :-)

Last night, I had a vivid dream. That's not new, because I have vivid dreams every night, and they're very very weird. Like, last night, I remember dreaming that I was in a school. And a teacher had gone crazy and was starting a massacre, killing everyone in school with a machine gun, and I remember hiding behind a desk. And one schoolmate -- I don't know who -- rose up from behind another desk with his own gun to defend the school, but was shot down brutally. And then I remember standing, but I moved 'out' -- I floated away. And it turns out that I was watching myself on TV, watching the final episode of a TV show about a school. Wow, that was a weird way to end a TV show. Then I woke up. I had been dreaming. I told my brother about the dream... and then I woke up again. And told my brother. I had been in a TV show within a dream within a dream. Four levels of reality deep. That was really creepy. And the creepiest bit is... I could still be dreaming right now.

I was shopping with my mother yesterday evening for clothes to take back home to Berkeley. Yes, I will admit it: clothes here are infinitely cheaper than they are back in Berkeley. Want anything?

I was passing a shelf full of underwear, and generally, the packages are attached to pictures of scantily-clad men (showing off the results of gym) and women (showing off the results of anorexia). And, of course, there is underwear for kids too, boys specifically. But I was shocked to see that the kids were, well, scantily clad also, and they're... well, cut.

OK, to be fair, the boy was actually really skinny, and so he seemed cut, six-pack and all. But then I remembered a few weeks ago, when I was still rooming in Jinghao's house, glancing at the TV screen while his mom and sister were watching, and there were previews for a talent show. And there was this Chinese kid, who was well-built and muscular, flexing. He couldn't have been more than 10 years old or so. What are the Chinese doing over there? :P

This troubles me a lot, however, because it means that the media portrayal of bodily images affects not just anorexic girls, but kids of 10 years and younger. I remember myself being 10 and being troubled by the way I looked. Who's to say that people suffering from food disorders today did not have the seed planted when they were really young? And although it's another matter altogether that it's always good to start keeping fit young, these kids aren't really keeping fit, are they? They're just ... trophy kids, if you'll excuse the term. Looking built and being fit are sometimes mutually exclusive.

Addendum: OK, fine, I'm jealous as well. These kids achieved in 10 years what I couldn't achieve in 20. I wonder if they can give me some tips. >_>"

So I'm on my way back to Muscat for a week before school begins, stopping at Amsterdam and Dubai along the trip, and I've made a few observations about the trip, which I'm going to type out now as I wait for the gate in Dubai to open.

• The Dubai airport has toilets with sinks that have Chinese labels on them. The faucet has the pictorial representation of washing hands, and above it is Chinese for what can only be 'Auto'. (I know because there are other toilets that have English labels on them.) This is weird, considering the Middle East does not have a significant East Asian contingent. I can only assume it's because they were made in China? This should get the Chinophiles pleased.
• The customs at the San Francisco airport is annoying and thoroughly rushed. Loads of people bearing down on a few security machines does not bode well for the passengers. And I wasn't allowed three carry-ons, just two, so I had to hurriedly repack, sort, and throw away. Ironically, no one detected anything wrong with me, nor did anyone ask to see my rucksack.

  In Amsterdam, however, with the same amount of people, the crowd was much less rushed and the security check much more dignified and thorough. The security detected a pair of scissors in a box in my rucksack (which I had no idea was there, since I had only touched that box at the very beginning of Fall 2007) and confiscated them politely.

  This struck me as very odd; in a country, where the security level is orange, the security checks are rushed and discomfiting, and potentially un-secure items not found. In a country where there is no such up-amped terror level, the security checks are polite, and detected a pair of scissors. And in Dubai, the security checks found a screwdriver (which, in my defense, I didn't know was there either). I would imagine terrorists would have far less success in the Netherlands than they would in the US, but I haven't heard of a terror attack on Netherlands yet.

• Airports are not the best places to try and take a nap, and neither are airplanes. You tend to just sit there and gape out into the wide abyss. It's weird doing it; it's scarier seeing other people do it.
• The Dubai airport has a UFO. Never figured out why.
• The Amsterdam airport has liquor stores and gambling places, and an aqua-massage facility. And there's a museum. And a picture of a fly in the bathroom stalls to help men aim properly. No, really.

* facepalm * I laughed so hard when I first saw this, and I had to laugh silently, because my roommate showed signs of waking up. And I still can't stop laughing at it, even though I've seen it around twenty times already. Maybe I should stop clicking on the play button?

A little research goes a long way. Please do your research, writers. It's probably the reason why I prefer to watch 'NUMB3RS' to 'CSI'. (This clip came from 'CSI: NY'). Our country has some serious technological knowledge issues, without TV adding to the mix.

Just in case you might have missed it, we received a quasi-official response from WFP over our FreeRice AutoClicker endeavor. Least to say, they're not happy:

Dear Jinghao,

After reading your Blog, I am writing to you on behalf of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), official partner and beneficiary of FreeRice, with an urgent request to please withdraw the FreeRice Autoclicker programme. It is undermining FreeRice.com’s efforts to help the world’s 852 million hungry people on three fronts:

1. Limiting the number of people who can play the game;
2. Weakening efforts to raise awareness of global hunger;
3. Claiming, without proof, that FreeRice is a scam.

By overloading the FreeRice servers, the Autoclicker is making it more difficult for would-be supporters to play the game, learn vocabulary and, ultimately, click to donate. You might respond that Autoclick replaces manual clicks with guaranteed automatic clicks, but a computer programme can never replace the real long-term benefit of FreeRice.com: raising global awareness of hunger among millions of real people.

One of WFP’s biggest battles in its efforts to feed the hungry is getting the issue on the agenda: it is a little known fact that hunger kills more people every year than tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined (a World Health Organization statistic). At the moment, by blocking the FreeRice server, your programme is denying people the right to learn about the world’s hunger problem – and also the right to play the game.

Autoclicker is also having a second negative impact on FreeRice. Without the guarantee that real people can access the game, it is no longer cost-effective for companies to advertise. Without advertising, there can be no donation and, ultimately, no rice.

I appreciate that your motivation for encouraging fellow bloggers to download AutoClicker may be well-meant but, as WFP’s web manager, I can assure you that it is based on a false premise --- that FreeRice is a scam.

WFP is an official partner of FreeRice and fully endorses the work of John Breen. Each month, Mr.Breen donates the cash equivalent of the grains collected on FreeRice.com to our organisation. The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names appear on the bottom of the vocabulary screen.

Mr.Breen has used WFP's standard costs to calculate the value of the rice raised and the number of beneficiaries. These WFP costs include the value of the rice purchased and the associated costs, such as transport, storage, distribution, etc, to deliver the rice to our beneficiaries. John runs his site on his own. It's true that he is not registered as a charity, but he runs FreeRice "at no profit", giving all the money he raises to WFP – and is already making a difference.

WFP can vouch that rice purchased with FreeRice donations has helped feed refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh. Our own website currently carries a video (http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2740) showing this rice being distributed to the refugees and includes a quote from an extremely grateful aid worker. More rice is being purchased for pregnant and nursing women in Cambodia and school children in Uganda – all less than six months after FreeRice was launched.

This Blog, our website’s special FreeRice section (http://www.wfp.org/english/?n=681) and, ultimately, the hungry children in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Uganda all represent irrefutable evidence that FreeRice does donate rice to the World Food Programme. Please withdraw Autoclicker from your Blog and stop encouraging people to use it – at the moment you could make no bigger contribution to helping the world’s hungry.

With best regards,
Chris Endean
Web Content Manager
United Nations World Food Programme

So... now what? We've heard from the authorities, and both our side and their side have pretty valid proofs for the other's shortcomings. Best we shake hands, ignore everything and anything that happened, and move on with our lives? FreeRice does seem to be working, after all, and who best to tell us that than the web content manager of WFP?

Historians believe that they have finally cracked the secret of Mona Lisa's deceptive smile. Earlier guesses included a model, the artist's mother, the artist's lover, or indeed, even the artist himself. But notes scribbled by his contemporary dictate that it is almost certainly the model.