Normally, my taste in architecture is traditional, but I’ve been trying to broaden my range. For example, San Jose’s new City Hall, which had its grand opening today, is decidedly modernist: clean lines and an absence of ornament. This is no surprise given the architect, Richard Meier. But it is an impressive space: the all-glass rotunda is striking, as are the views from the 18th floor, the tallest vantage point in the city. Dare I say, it’s a good place to bring visitors from out of town. Now if only the surrounding downtown blocks could get spiffed up a bit… [photos]
12 Girls Band
Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News, I am tuned into the Asian music scene. Or something like that. Case in point: the 12 Girls Band (女子十二樂坊), a band of classically-trained 13 women (originally 12) from China who use classical Chinese instruments to play contemporary Chinese and Western songs, including a cover of Clocks by Coldplay. I am intrigued…
Chinese spreads in classrooms
New York Times: Classes in Chinese Grow as the Language Rides a Wave of Popularity
With encouragement from the Chinese and American governments, schools across the United States are expanding their language offerings to include Chinese, the world’s most spoken tongue, not to mention one of its most difficult to learn.
IBM Research’s 60th anniversary
Yesterday IBM Research celebrated its 60th anniversary, quite a remarkable achievement when you think about the fate of other fabled labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. At Almaden, we had watched video from the main celebration at Yorktown.
Fred Brooks was one of the speakers at Yorktown, and he’s a very good speaker. A smooth delivery with a gentle Southern drawl, he talked about the lab in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s and had some wonderful anecdotes about Gene Amdahl (pioneer in mainframes), John Cocke (“father of RISC”), Ted Codd (inventor of the relational database), and Ken Iverson (inventor of the APL and J programming languages), among others.
We also had had a guest speaker of our own: David Patterson, Berkeley CS professor (Go Bears!), and president of the ACM. I liked what he had to say about what he considered to be the most pressing research needs in computer science: security, privacy, usability, and reliability (SPUR). He pointed out that the human experience is central to all four of these topics, and it’s refereshing to hear a person not in HCI recognize the importance of the human experience in computers.
Taiwan-Google Maps brouhaha
I was surprised to learn that Google Maps was referring to Taiwan as a “province of China.” After all, how can there be room on a map for such a long label? It turned out the map itself only ever labeled Taiwan as Taiwan, but up until Monday, there was a space to the left of the map that listed the “official name” of a region if the map was zoomed out that far. And Google presumably got those official names from sources such as the ISO. Now that Google has removed that space, those official names, and the source of the controversy, are gone.
But, despite protests to the contrary, it is actually true that Taiwan is technically a province of China. The real question is: which China? The government that rules Taiwan is officially called the Republic of China, which was founded in 1912 after the emperor was overthrown. Even though it lost control of mainland China in 1949 to the communists, for decades it claimed it was the sole legitimate government for all of China, which the United Nations and the United States recognized until the 1970s. The only parts of China that the Republic of China currently rules is Taiwan province and a few bits of Fujian province.
Of course, no one thinks of the Republic of China when they think of China. “China” is, for all intents and purposes, synonymous with the People’s Republic of China ruled by the communists. Even the current government in Taiwan thinks so, and it is now promoting a “Taiwan”-based identity ahead of the “Republic of China.” Therefore, calling Taiwan a “province of China” is just asking for trouble, and I’m glad Google got rid of it, even if it was indirectly.
Kepler’s Books reopens
A miracle happens: Kepler's Books is saved! And in a timely article, the San Jose Mercury News describes how several independent bookstores have adapted to survive the chain bookstore and Internet era, including the Berkeley institution Cody's taking the gutsy move of opening a branch in Union Square.
Blue Angels
My mom and I went to see the Fleet Week air show today, including the Blue Angels. What a show! The weather was perfect, and the view was great from Crissy Field, with plenty of parking at the Main Post in the Presidio. I haven’t seen the Blue Angels for about nine years, so I’d forgotten how much fun they are to watch. Even some of my photos and videos came out.
Also, we took some not-so-popular streets within the city, to try to dodge traffic going to Fleet Week, or the Columbus Day parade, or the golf tournament at Harding Park, or the Colts vs. 49ers game, skirting Laguna Honda Hospital on the way there and Diamond Heights on the way back. Let’s just say I went through parts of San Francisco I’d never seen before.
Microsoft Office user interface blog
I mentioned last month that Microsoft is overhauling the user interface of the next version of Office. Now member of the Office user experience team, Jensen Harris, has a blog all about Office’s UI, both its past and its future. It contains some good insight into how Office’s UI has evolved, how they are designing the new UI, and what issues they’ve already run into while testing it.
Ubicomp city
From the New York Times:
A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.
Sounds like a ubicomp researcher’s dream.
Hillary’s journey to the center
What’s Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton doing hanging out with Newt Gingrich, co-sponsoring bills with Rick Santorum and Bill Frist? Pundits say that she’s drifting to the center in preparation for a presidential candidacy. But Matt Bai argues in the New York Times that she is being true to her ideology, shaped by a Methodist upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago.