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This American Life: Americans in China
Was listening to the Americans in China podcast. Includes the requisite discussion on search engines and censorship.
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YUM Seeking to Acquire Majority Interest in Little Sheep
YUM! Brands, Inc., which operates KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver‘s and A&W All-American Food Restaurants, is seeking to acquire a majority interest in Little Sheep. From the YUM! most-recent quarterly report: We currently own 27% of the outstanding shares of Little Sheep Group Limited (“Little Sheep”） a Hot Pot concept headquartered in…
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Google Books Ngram Viewer: Peking v. Beijing
Google Books Ngram Viewer is an interesting application for looking up the frequency of phrases in books over time. For example, I recently ran a search from 1800-2000 for the different spellings of 北京: Peking, Beijing, Peiping and Beiping. As expected, Peking is the dominant English name for 北京. Peiping appeared at some point in…
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é²æ±æ‰£è¾½å‚
Thank goodness for the photo because I could not read the Chinese and the English was utterly incomprehensible. At first, I thought the dish was named after a Chinese senator named Bao Zhikou. It could be possible, much like how Dongpo Pork 东å¡è‚‰ bears the name of è‹ä¸œå¡. From the photo, the pièce de résistance…
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木瓜炖雪蛤
Not sure how 木瓜炖雪蛤 ended up as The Chinese Flowering Quince Cooks the Snow Clam Synopsis. As far as I know, 木瓜 is papaya, not the Chinese Flowering Quince. I can see how 雪 which means snow and 蛤 which means clam ended up together as snow clam, but where did synopsis come from? Google…
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CIA Prisoners in China
Central Intelligence Agency: Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952–73 Beijing’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau is an amazing story that too few know about today. Shot down over Communist China on their first operational mission in 1952, these young men spent the next two decades…
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China 2010
I first visited China almost 30 years ago. Back then, China was defined more by its past than its future. Everything that amazed me during that initial trip had an age that could be measured in centuries if not millennia. During that visit, the economic gap between the United States and China could not have…
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China Hotel Internet Access
First, the good news. When I visited China, all the hotels i stayed in had in-room broadband internet access. Now, the bad news. Unfortunately, only the hotel in Nanjing had in-room wireless internet access. For the rest, online access came in the form of an ethernet cable. If I was lugging around a MacBook Pro,…
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iPhone Video Panorama App
The Video Panorama application for the iPhone offers a simple method for generating panoramic photos. First, use the app to take a video across a panorama. The app then generates a panoramic photo presumably by stitching together still images from the video. When Video Panorama works, it generates a decent panoramic photo, such as the…
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2010 Expo ä¸Šæµ·ä¸–åš Dining
Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China offers many dining options. However, because the expo grounds are so expansive, I found it difficult to plan for a meal at one of the famous restaurants featured at the expo. Instead, when a meal time arrived, I just opted for the closest dining option. This meant a cafe for…