A Bite of China

After months of recommendations, I finally watched my first episode of the CCTV documentary A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国) and I was not disappointed. It’s a well-produced, professionally filmed tour of Chinese food.  There are seven one-hour episodes, each going into rich detail about various aspects of the cuisine from harvest to table.

One of the first things a serious China visitor learns is the incredible diversity of Chinese cuisine, with in reality bears no resemblance to the “sweet and sour pork” dishes you’ll find in most restaurants in America. This documentary isn’t a substitute for actually trying the wonderful flavors, but it’s a must-see for any foodie.

All episodes are now available dubbed in English, viewable free in HDTV. My favorite segment from  Episode 1: “Gifts From Nature” was the discussion of salt-cured Nuodeng ham from Dali.[start at the 18:00 mark]. The special salt used, high in potassium, has been harvested there for more than a thousand years and results in a rich flavor that puts Jamón ibérico to shame.

You can watch the whole series on Youtube, but you might have a better experience streaming directly from CCTV (in English) site.  Chowhound publishes links to all the English stream locations, and there's even a Wikipedia entry with more references and links.

Highly recommended.

[Book] Epidemic of Absence

  Ecosystems go all the way up and all the way down. Just as humans affect -- and are affected by -- the bigger world of animals, forests, oceans, and sky, we are also part of a deeper micro-sized world of bacteria and viruses, many (most?) of them far older than we are, and constantly adapting to all the harshness of life, including the new realities of human-made antibiotics and hygiene. Control over nature is an old goal of science, but nature is never fooled forever. The great bridges and dams that make one side of our lives better can have unforeseen consequences to other parts of our world. 

So it is with the micro world too. Even the simplest steps we take to keep clean or warm, conveniences like indoor plumbing or heating, induce changes to the unseen world of microbes, which not only outnumber us but out-class us in diversity and complexity. Eliminate one from our lives and who knows what will happen.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff presents an intriguing and sometimes terrifying survey of what little is known about the microbes around us. Focusing on allergies and autoimmune diseases, he writes in detail about the "hygiene hypothesis", that as the world gets richer and cleaner, our under-stimulated immune systems get bored and turn on the body itself. A whole range of new diseases, from hay fever to asthma to Crohn's disease, all seem to co-occur with modernity. Even people of the same genetics and culture -- Finns separated by the Iron Curtain, for example -- suffer these diseases at very different rates. Even zoo animals develop afflictions unknown in the wild.  The more "clean" and "modern" you are, the more you invite previously unheard of conditions. 

Even more intriguing is the "old friends" hypothesis, that having co-evolved with us, many of these microbes are actually necessary for health. From digestion to mood, when you take away the organisms that have covered us for millions of years, you invite trouble. Sadly, by driving many of these creatures to extinction -- an inadvertent result of hygiene practices intended to wipe out other afflictions -- we may be adversely affecting our human ecosystem in ways we don't yet understand. Wipe out a wolf population to spare human livestock and the deer begin to trample wild plants, carving the forest in unpredictable directions. There is some good, of course, but some bad too, and the scary part is that science knows way too little about which is which.

I am extremely fortunate to have been spared many of the awful afflictions presented in this book: hay fever, peanut allergies, asthma, eczema and more. So little is known about how to treat the sometimes terrible discomforts involved, and if you suffer from them, you may understandably be willing to try just about anything, including treatments with parasites like hookworm, so mainly you want to know: does it work?  The answer is maybe, but not definitely, and you may also introduce other problems. The author recounts how he self-inflicted in a Tijuana clinic (sadly, the treatment is illegal in the US) and yes, it helped. But the side effects (headache, diarrhea) were no picnic, and the treatment is no cure: to maintain relief from allergies, he needs to continue taking the worms. With no independent auditors in place, you run the risk of acquiring other diseases along with the worms: HIV maybe or hepatitis -- the cure can be worse than the disease.  

This was one of the best science books I've read in a long time, and if you or a loved one suffers from autoimmune diseases, you'll appreciate the well-written and thorough survey of what is known (not much) and unknown (a lot). I doubt there is any work nearly as good; I think this is one of those areas of science that is so new, and so potentially different from centuries of medical progress, that you need somebody like this author -- not a scientist, but a science journalist -- to look into the issues and present them for you (which he does, well, and with the right amount of both optimism and skepticism).

A sampling of some ideas:  how pregnancy is central to the passing of important microbes.  Yes, you should lick your baby's pacifier, and chew their food for them if you can -- the microbes in your saliva are highly optimized for your genes and environment.  Even autism may have a microbe component: some kids reverse their symptoms when fighting a fever, or an infection. H. pylori, the strange bug whose role in ulcers earned its discoverers a Nobel prize, may actually be necessary in many of us.  

In fact, the lesson of h. pylori or the Epstein-Barr virus is a good summary of many of the bugs around us: often they are neither all good nor all bad. Nature is not a fight between pure good and pure evil, but rather a constant tension among multiple constituencies vying for power. Rather than focus on permanently vanquishing one or another "foe", we need to consider the entire ecosystem and realize how little we really know after all.

Notes from Puget Sound

We went today on a five-hour Pacific Marine Research cruise through Puget Sound operated by MarineScienceAfloat.org and I highly recommend it. The class was very well-structured, with trained instructors who managed to pack in a lot of learning in a short time. We were there with a group of fifth graders from Sanislo Elementary school, which has apparently been sending kids to this tour for at least fifteen years.  At $40/person, to continue such repeat visits so long is a big endorsement and I know why. I would highly recommend this trip to anyone interested in hands-on oceanography.

Here's what we did during the time we were onboard the ship:

Measuring the ocean: the class dropped real Nansen and Niskin bottles into the water, the same instruments oceanographers use for collecting seawater at different depths. These devices have special triggers that can trap water at its existing temperature and pressure, so that it can be measured carefully when brought to the surface. The water today was 49 degrees (brrr!) and the salinity was about 28 -- quite a bit less than the low-30s you'd see if we were out on the open ocean, where the saltwater is less diluted by various streams and rivers that flow into the area we are patrolling today.

Plankton nets: we dropped two kinds of nets, one for smaller organisms and another faster for larger ones. Even at a reasonably shallow depth of twenty-five feet or so, it was surprising how many living organisms come up in the nets.

Microscope station: after filling some cups with seawater collected from nets, we looked at them under the microscope. At 10x to 30x, you see tons of interesting lifeforms: some (photosynthesizing plankton) that just sit there, and others (zooplankton) whose small flagella let them move quickly through the water. Many of the organisms looked like small shrimp or crabs (and some probably were!)

Hands-on with animals: at the top of the boat, the instructors set up stations with small water tanks containing many interesting larger creatures: starfish, sea anemones, California sea cucumber, crabs, and more. They let the kids touch them and see up-close the various features on the animals. I hadn't heard of the marine pill bug before, for example, though apparently it's quite numerous just outside the tidal basins.

Environmental protection: the scientists who run the cruise obviously care a lot about the environment, and Puget Sound in particular, so they devoted return part of the ride to a discussion of the problems facing marine areas near Seattle. Nobody pollutes the ocean on purpose, but there are many ways we pollute without knowing it, just by not being aware of the little ways our carelessness can hurt. 

The key word of the day, Watershed, describes the area in which all Northwest people live: all land areas between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades where waters flow into the Puget Sound. Until a hundred years ago, the Sound was protected by marshland and the various habitats that naturally recycled water and more from the land. Now that half or more of the marshlands are gone, much of the rainwater goes directly -- too directly -- into the Sound, producing muddier rivers that scare away salmon, which in turn create problems for the sea creatures, like Orca whales, that eat salmon and other fish.

I left feeling like I understand more about oceanography in general, and looking forward to another trip like this one.

http://goo.gl/maps/sF4Cc

A humbling look at the future of Los Angeles

In 1988, the Los Angeles Times Magazine interviewed dozens of experts and published their predictions for what the city would be like in 2013.  Many of their predictions came true (computers everywhere, GPS in cars, video conferencing from home, interactive classrooms), but plenty of predictions were wrong (robots everywhere, ISDN video tellers instead of internet banking).
Futurists know that the easiest predictions relate to demographics, since people age in a linear way.  The article didn’t get it completely wrong, although some of the measures are pretty far off.

Prediction	Predicted	Actual
Population	18.3M	17.8M
Ethnicity	White (40%), Asian (9.3%), Latino (40%)	Non-hispanic white (28.7%), Asian (11.3%), Latino (48.5%)
Manufacturing Jobs	16.9%	10% (500K out of 5M)
Crime	Less than 7406 “index”	about 2800

Trying to guess the future twenty five years ago without knowing about the internet or cellphones makes the rest of the exercise not very useful. Also, not knowing about the rise of China (and thinking, as the article did, that Japan would remain strong) further clouds whatever tidbits of truth you might get.
Predicting the future is hard, and this guess is far better than many other attempts. Still, the more I see how actual predictions turned out, the more humbling it all seems.

(via Singularity Hub)

My Facebook Word Cloud

Summary of my wall posts from Facebook

(computed by Wolfram Alpha)

The Great Firewall really censors trade

My favorite weekly China-related podcast, Sinica, answered one of my questions on their latest episode, "Revenge of the Call-in Show".  Hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn, who are far more knowledgeable about China than I’ll ever be, conclude that the Great Firewall is first and foremost about censorship (or more precisely, social stability), and the fact  that it helps Chinese internet companies is a happy bonus, but not the goal itself.  Kaiser adds that non-Chinese competitors fail, even without the GFW, because they are usually late and poor competitors.  YouTube, he notes, was a distant runner up for video service, and Twitter/Facebook were plagued by poor performance relative to domestic competitors long before they were blocked.

But wait a minute...would Facebook, which is no government-resisting anarchist, really hesitate to give the Chinese authorities access to their servers if that’s what it took for admission to the world’s biggest market?  That’s why I’m not convinced this is just about censorship.

Facebook and YouTube and many others were once themselves behind the market leaders in other countries, including the US (MySpace, Friendster) when they started. They suffered the same poor performance and incumbency problems in Japan (hardly a place devoid of domestic competitors) and many other places but won anyway.

Countries rarely enact trade barriers explicitly “to prevent trade”. The Japanese bureaucrats who restricted US imports for so long had no shortage of good non-trade-related reasons:  Japanese stomachs are smaller, and they wouldn't digest well the larger Florida oranges; Japanese snow, which falls on an island, is different and might present a safety hazard for skis designed for continental precipitation like Europe or America.  Even in the US, small family farms are prevented from selling their goods to willing and educated buyers for "food safety reasons", not because the large politically-powerful agribusinesses don't want the competition (that's just a bonus).

Kaiser and Jeremy are right about the explicit goals for the Great Firewall (“promote domestic harmony”), but policymakers might be better off thinking about it instead as a trade issue and not a human rights one. China can argue that, as a sovereign nation, it should be allowed to control information within its borders, but blocking foreign competitors for purely anti-competitive reasons runs afoul of the spirit of the international trade organizations of which China is a part -- and big beneficiary.  That argument, it seems to me, is more likely to win in the end.

[Book] Restless Empire by Odd Arne Westad

This is one of the best books I've read about China in a while. It helped me think about China’s modernization as a long, still unfinished process of slowly-increasing engagement with Westerners like me. At some point I’ll write up my thoughts and opinions generally, but meanwhile since iBook makes it easy for me to dump direct quotes that I underlined while reading, I’ll leave the following excerpts.  .

Chapter 1: Empire

• This pervasiveness of the state was closely linked to dreams of expansion. Qianlong believed that Qing rule was in form universal, in the sense that its principles should be applied by all peoples who were culturally advanced enough to appreciate and use them.

Chapter 1: Metamorphosis

• The Protestant religious awakenings in Britain and the United States in the 1820s and 1830s, combined with the increase in trade, meant that many Christian missionaries were able to operate on the edges of the empire. The first complete Bible in Chinese was published in British India in 1822, and other versions appeared over the next thirty years.

Chapter 2: Imperialisms

• Its control of the key bases and depots for the developing trade—Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a large extent Shanghai—anchored its primacy. But while the British controlled the structure, the Chinese supplied the infrastructure—the depots for East Asian trade were all Chinese cities, run as much by Chinese networks as by British authorities.
• Few societies have ever put more emphasis on the value of education in its various forms than did Qing China. Basic literacy rates were reasonably high compared to the rest of the world. Between a third and a half of men and up to ten percent of women could read. There were many schools in major cities, but competition for entry was fierce.
• Building on the knowledge transmitted by pioneers who had left earlier—people like Rong Hong (known in the West as Yung Wing), who had graduated from Yale in 1854 as the first Chinese with a US college degree—both the government and individual families began sending young people to America and Europe, and, as we shall see, a bit later also to Japan.
• “The English and the Americans are closely related, they have much in common, but they also differ widely, and in nothing is the difference more conspicuous than in their conduct,” observed Wu Tingfang, one of China’s first ambassadors to Washington. The democratic politics in the United States puzzled those who came: How could there be, many asked, collective decision making on administrative matters, when there was such extreme individualism in economic matters?

Chapter 5: Foreigners

• The numbers of foreigners in China varied year by year according to conditions in the country and internationally, but it is likely that the average in the first half of the twentieth century was between 300,000 and half a million (maybe surprisingly, the figures in 2005 were about the same). Of these, about half were Japanese subjects; the British, who long were the most influential, were never more than 15,000.
• The Salt Administration, which collected the salt tax that the state levied on both producers and importers, in the 1920s provided close to twenty percent of the state income.

Chapter 6: Abroad

• 9,000 Chinese wives went with their American husbands back to the United States after World War II. A number had married at a time when US immigration laws still forbade them from ever living in their husband’s country.
  [World War I was] by far the biggest and most concentrated mass transport of Chinese workers ever to go to another continent. It would have major consequences in terms of spreading information about Europe into even the remotest parts of China.
• The US government banned Chinese immigration in 1882. It is the only restriction Congress has ever enacted directed against all citizens of a specific country. The ban lasted up to 1943.
• Kim Il-sung, who after 1945 became the leader of North Korea, had an even closer relationship with China. Born in 1912, he grew up in a Christian Korean family in Manchuria and studied in Jilin City, where he started his activities against the Japanese occupation of Korea.
• [M]ore than 350 million people of European origin live outside Europe today, while only 40 million people of Chinese descent live outside China. Of the 3.5 million Chinese living [in the United States and Canada] two-thirds were born abroad.
• More than half of those over twenty-five have earned a college degree (as against a quarter of the general population), and they have a higher-than-average family income.
• By the 2000s, Singapore, with 77 percent of its population ethnically Chinese, was rated top on the free-market index alongside Hong Kong, even though the government continues to control around 60 percent of the total GDP.

Chapter 7: War

• In this second Sino-Japanese war, begun in 1937, two very different images of China came into conflict. One, held by most Japanese, came out of the nineteenth century and saw China as less a state than a geographic region with different power holders: Rival governments, local strongmen, and foreign representatives combined in different ways to keep some semblance of order, while advanced powers, such as Japan, promoted development within China. It was the advent of a nationalist central government, in the form of the Guomindang, with the stated purpose of resisting Japanese policies, that imperiled the image of a quiescent, pragmatic Chinese approach to international affairs.
• The war [with Japan] made it possible for the party to mobilize in its new bases in the northwest and behind the overextended Japanese lines, where the GMD state had collapsed. When the war began, the CCP was a small group, but in 1945—with 1.2 million members and 900,000 men and women under arms—it was a force to be reckoned with. Even more important than its numerical expansion, though, was the ability the party had gained to work with all segments of Chinese society through a system of centralized decision making. The war had made it possible for Mao Zedong and the group who had promoted his leadership to achieve two very different goals at the same time: Make all party members obey a secret and cloistered Mao-centered inner organization but present a moderate and cooperative outward image.
  Japan lost 400,000 men fighting in China (and 1,500,000 more in the other wars that the war in China started). China lost at least two million men in battle, and twelve million Chinese civilians died as a direct result of warfare.

Chapter 8: Communism

• But the detailed understanding of capitalist modernity that Marx had attempted was not at the center of Chinese Communism. Das Kapital, Marx’s main work, had not been fully translated into Chinese before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.1 While the United States gave the GMD government more than $1.9 billion in assistance between 1945 and 1950, equaling more than $40 billion in today’s money, it could neither control its policies nor determine China’s political trajectory.

Chapter 9: China's Asia

• Koreans feel a cultural and historical closeness with China. In opinion polls in South Korea in 2005, China was ranked equally with the United States—South Korea’s long-term ally—as a country South Koreans viewed favorably. Among those under forty, China had a clear lead in terms of being seen as friendly In the 1980s seventy percent of all Japanese felt an affinity to China, far more than for any other nation.
• [China] for the first time since the fifteenth century [has] a blue-water navy, with fifty submarines (ten nuclear) and seventy major warships.