Taiwan: A Study Abroad Heaven

Sayaka has written a wonderful little summary (in Japanese) of why she thinks Taiwan is a fantastic place for students wanting to study abroad. It is mainly geared towards Japanese students but I have to say that personal experiences from a few short trips to Taiwan confirm almost all of her points, both positive and negative.

Also, don’t miss her posting (in English) about some Japanese Fanta commercials that came up during her Chinese language class. You can watch the commercials with Chinese subtitles here. UPDATE: Matt has a great posting explaining each of the Fanta commercials.

SCOTS

You can now search The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech database (Tip to Language Hat). It is a relatively small database which is of most use to linguists rather than historians but I’m always happy to see these kinds of projects grow in number. Although the project seems to be motivated by a growing Scottish national consciousness, they take a very pluralistic approach to their approach and want to provide a reference source on the languages instead of a single national idiom.

What is in an Aquarium?

I had some Kimchi Sundubu at a little Korean mom and pop restaurant in a mall north of my dormitory. As I tried to eat without splattering the bright orange soup sauce onto my copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (a task I ultimately failed), I watched a couple approach the restaurant, the father holding an infant child. At the entrance of the store is a large blue aquarium. Inside the aquarium were various coral like decorations, a bunch of brightly colored tropical fish swimming about, and a stream of bubbles flowing from out of the rocks in the center to the top where their release at the top created an expanding star like shape.

The father held the infant near the glass of the aquarium and moved it here and there so that it might get a good look at the passing fish inside. I noted with great curiosity that the infant wasn’t the least bit interested in the fish. No matter where the father moved his child, it (he? she?) would focus its attention on the stream of bubbles in the center, and especially the top of this stream where the bursting of the bubbles created that bright star-like shape when viewed from an angle below the water.

The couple left after only a minute or two, but I kept staring at the aquarium. At first I felt sorry for the father who totally failed to get his infant to recognize the fact that various colorful living creatures were swimming about in the glass box full of water. However, when I actually took the time to look closely at the stream of bubbles, I shared, if only for a moment, that infant’s sense of delight and enchantment. I would go so far as to say that it pretty much made my day. It made me remember a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.”

What is so interesting about fish anyways?

Switched to WordPress

Some of you may already know that on November 1st, many the web sites belonging to my family and friends disappeared and over the next few weeks have only slowly begun to reappear. My own Muninn site was one of them, and there were various files missing from my backup (fortunately, all blog entries and the database was intact). Until today, I only partially restored the Muninn blog and decided that when I had the time I would go through with a switch to WordPress, something I have been wanting to do every since Movable Type abandoned the free software movement.

The short version of the story behind this saga of website downtime is that the horrible host we were using lost all their files, including backups (if they ever had them). You can read more about my horrible experiences with Blutekhosting if you like, but suffice to say that I have switched hosts for all the projects and continue to try to get the various projects I hosted up and running while not letting my studies suffer as a result.

I’m still in the process, however, so expect fewer postings, and a few glitches here and there at Muninn while I put a few hours aside every few days to restore a feature or fix a few bugs. In the meantime I’m also borrowing a site design (made by Alex King) that I’m also using at Frog In a Well until I can get some time to work on the design for the site.

UPDATE: I’m slowly working on the design. I have switched to another design, this time by Michael Heilemann and modifying it. I’m going to change the colors to a dark green eventually, but one thing at a time…