A few weeks back I woke up at 6:30 in the morning to a phone call. “I would like to buy your domain froginawell.net. $500, what do you say?” I instinctively tried to answer in a voice that did not reveal the fact I had just been jolted out of deep sleep. There may have [...]
On Monday I joined in the Student Solidarity March for Occupy Boston together with a few friends and I thought I would share a few notes. I don’t have much experience with protesting. Though I consider myself active politically, I have joined less than half a dozen large protest rallies and marches, and almost all [...]
Google has made an unprecedented threat to end the censorship of its search results in China and, if this is unacceptable to the Chinese government, even contemplate leaving the Chinese market. The announcement has been combined with the admission that there has been a massive coordinated attack on Google’s security and the potential targeting of [...]
I have been doing research in Asia for two years and during this time I have sent back about twenty boxes to the US. Most of these have contained books and a few, especially from Korea, contained important documents that I photocopied in the archives. Before sending them, I take pictures of their contents, make [...]
Wenlin is the the best piece of software around for students of Chinese. Among other tools, it has a powerful and handy offline dictionary with very flexible and fast search options as well. I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard software. Most recently I [...]
I have just posted the Sixteenth Asian History Carnival! Check it out over at the Frog in a Well – Japan history weblog.
In the past I have repeatedly complained about claims of copyright protection where no such protection exists. I have talked about this problem on Google Books, where books are not given full view when they are fully in the public domain or where public domain books republished by Kessinger Publishing are used which wrongly claim [...]
I just spent two days at the US National Archives at College Park, MD. It is a truly wonderful place to work as a researcher. Sunlight streams through the windows in the wide open reading room on the second floor where researchers sit at well spaced workstations with their happily plugged in laptops and work [...]
I’m waiting for my flight to Stavanger here in the beautiful and extremely expensive Oslo airport (Bottle of water: $3.17, Strawberry Yoghurt $2.70, Small Cheese and Ham Roll $7.77, etc.) and reading today’s Dagbladet (I think it is usually considered a somewhat leftist Labor party supporting and populist paper). In a series of articles entitled [...]
I’m looking for an obscure 1917 book by the philosopher and Unitarian minister W. Tudor Jones called the Spiritual Ascent of Man. W. Tudor Jones is mentioned by a Japanese philosopher and pragmatist Sugimori Kôjirô in a separate 1917 book I’m looking at here today in the rare book collection at Harvard. I’m doing some [...]