Wasabi!

Check out this video of Natalie Portman rapping, courtesy of my officemate Richard. I have newfound respect for Natalie.

Follow this link for a great presentation on the US economy and the CA housing market by a professor in UCLA. It's about an hour long.

I made my bi-weekly trip to the dry cleaners last week only to find a whole section of the strip mall they were located in all boarded up. Apparently four businesses had been gutted overnight by a four-alarm fire that started at the cleaners! I felt so bad for the owners, especially after chatting to the folks moving out of the business next door who had heard that they hadn't paid insurance in the last 2 months. Here's the report from the Mercury.

I guess KK and I will be doing some shopping soon, as that fire also destroyed 33% of his business shirts. 

I happened to read an old email from a friend who sent me this article worth a second read:

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
The Associated Press
Monday, August 22, 2005; 10:58 PM

WASHINGTON -- Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students _ 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese _ to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it."

The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.

And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.

Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.

So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.

Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did.

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

<snip>

Hmm... it's an interesting take on things, but recalling the amount of pushing and shoving around I suffered at the hands of the Chinese during my recent trip to Beijing, I'm not sure we are living up to our calm, harmonious, zen master ancestors.

I've gotten feedback from my officemate Richard that my blog has misled tons of people to thinking that I'm married to an Asian dude and have a baby. For the record, those pictures are actually of my brother and my niece. Here's my real hubby KK and me on a hike to North Dome in Yosemite. No babies, just a few dead plants in our house.

It's been close to a year since I moved to the Bay Area from Seattle and much as I love being back here, there are friends that I miss hanging out with in Seattle... and the little things. I decided to make a list:

1. Gorgeous view of the water and Space Needle when going west down 520

2. View of Mt. Rainier on a clear sunny day

3. The color green. Everything is so green and smells green.

4. Listening to jazz on KPLU 88.5. as I drive in the misty rain. Somehow jazz does not sound as good when the sun is blazing into your eyes. Sun goes better with alternative.

5. Pink Grapefruit Talking Rain.

Lucky for me, I get to visit ever so often to relive these memories.

I've neglected my poor blog for almost a year now... but there's nothing like an Academy Award upset to propel me to vent here. Argh! This is worse than the year Shakespeare in Love with icky Gwyneth Paltrow won over Elizabeth. There must have been some heavy political manoevering going on for such a two-dimensional, artificially constructed, subtle-as-a-hammer-banging-on-my-head movie to win Best Picture. I haven't even seen Brokeback, but any other of the 4 would have been a better choice than Crash. The only saving grace was Don Cheadle. That man shines in every movie he's in.