Bear in mind Wikipedia may not be the site of choice for users in these countries: searches on Chinese google or Baidu don't always return wikipedia at the top. The most popular search engine, Baidu, often returns results from Baidu Encyclopedia (a clone of Wikipedia, in functionality). The Baidu Baike entry for Heilongjianghttp://baike.baidu.com/view/2647.htm?fr=ala0 is much longer and more complete, and seems to have more activity than the Chinese version. Also, Wikipedia was censored for a period of time, which might have affected usage.

Computer gaming is already heavily integrated into CS1.5 and 1.6 courses! I fully support expanding professional training to all versions of CS, as to reduce the number of noobs populating the servers.

The downside is, naturally, that the courses focus *too* heavily on games, and thus while it builds incredible enthusiasm for CS, tends to bring about overall slippage of GPA, and a waning interest in actual coursework.

Just get them "Typing of the Dead" and watch their (typing) speed and accuracy increase dramatically.

At first I thought someone should make fun of people in the military as already being brain-damaged, or else they would not join in the first place.

Then I realized that that wasn't true; there are many intelligent people who simply needed money for college who joined the military.

Then I realized this was the military's response to NCLB: use these helmets to give brain damage to soldiers, bringing their intelligence down to the same level as the average jarhead, thus saving them having to pay for college, as no college will now accept them! A brilliant scheme that enforces mediocrity and prevents them from having to pay for college for ex-soldiers!

But here in Beijing, all I could see was a think cloud of haze. I couldn't even find the bloody sun. So I went back inside and went to sleep.

On the contrary, wars and competition have fueled human innovation. The need to become more technologically advanced than the country next door fueled science for much of history. Religion (which I personally don't like) helped inspire early mathematics and physics, as astronomy was the the root of much early mathematics (here, religion played the role of the false hypothesis that was proved wrong by rigorous inquiry).

But as much as war sucks, the drive to dominate through war has probably speeded up human development. The Chinese considered themselves as the Middle Kingdom, with only culturally and scientifically inferior countries surrounding them. They invented gunpowder and the trebuchet, and used them as toys as entertainment, for what need did they have to go on conquering inferior kingdoms? Noone to fear, and thus no pressing need to invest resources into perfecting new weapons to upset the status quo. Once the Arabs got a look at these Chinese toys, they figured out fairly quickly they could be used to knock walls down. Once they started tinkering around and knocking walls down, the Europeans had to figure out how to A) build better walls B) knock walls down better.

On the other hand, Europe and the Arab world were constantly in an arms race. The Renaissance may not have occurred had the fall of Constantinople not kicked all those Greek scholars out of (former) Byzantium. DARPA wouldn't have gotten the funding needed for the internet without the Cold War; indeed, space exploration was initially a pissing contest between the US and USSR.

Quick survey of the Beijing internet cafe I'm in now: most Chinese don't know who he is, at least among the computer/wang ba/internet cafe crowd. If they do, it's as an artist/saw his name on the list of Bird's Nest designers. And they don't care. They're not installing the software, mandate or mandate, and if it comes preinstalled, they don't care as long as they can still play games/surf the net/etc. They were more pissed by the idea that this schmuck (artist and designer though he is, once you tell the youth to get offline, he's a schmuck) would tell them to get off the net for 24 hours. A few pointed out that any protest would be a drop in the bucket of hundreds of millions of internet users.

If there's 400 million people online, and a few million dont log on for a day, does anyone notice? Or even care? Just an annoyance for those participating, proposed by some artist who is now meddling with government shtuffs. If you're gonna protest this, this isn't the way to go- it harms the participants and achieves nothing (unless the software uninstalls itself if not used in the 1st 24 hours on that one day). Demonstrating the flaws of the program would change the government's mind more than anything- but Chinese computers as so full of holes it hardly matters (Xunlei, ubiquitous unpatched pirated windows running IE6).

Yes, they do. Posting from Beijing, I can verify that Western Porn and Japanese porn is very much in demand. More than one Chinese friend has asked me to introduce him to well-endowed Western girls.

Not a trend, by any means, but men will be men, the world over. And let's face it, Japanese porn is WAY too fucked up to survive on.

But on the actual subject, yeah, it sounds like they're just picking on Google China. Baidu's image search also has a "suggestion" function, where after you search it lists similar search terms at the bottom of the page. Try searching for anything with the character for "female" in it, and see what Baidu suggests......

How much of this probe was Chinese-designed, and how much is from the Russians? The Chinese have made a lot of progress in their own tech, but most is based heavily off old Soviet/Russian technology.

The probe itself also doesn't seem very ambitious- more of a test run, before attempting landers or anything more complicated. Anyone with the knowhow care to educate us on the difference in difficulty of landing a probe on Mars vs. doing atomospheric experiments?

Not necessarily, eBay.com pretty much pwned Auctions.com, just like Amazon.com pwns books.com. If your company is well recognized and people link to it and use your site, it should rise up in the rankings; you can always try google-bombing and just link to your site like crazy from blogs and review sites.

Math and physics have always built off of each other and inspired each other. Physics problems inspire new math, mathematical solutions inspire physics.

Math is actually well ahead of physics right now, I think. Physicists are still working to prove what mathemeticians have predicted via the standard model and others. Perhaps soon physics will catch up, and observe some interesting phenomena we don't have the math to explain and analyze yet.

Not.

Chinese internet users aren't stupid, they know what is going on. In many cases, all it does is call attention to the anniversary, perhaps more than would have been paid otherwise.

In any case, most Chinese I know seem fairly cynical about it. A translated conversation from Xiaonei, in response to a blog post by a friend about the economic crisis:

AAA: Well written!! But why can't I share it? (think Facebook sharing, posting a link to it on your own homepage)
BBB: Yeah, I can't share it either. Must be because it's today!
000(the author): Well, I can post it, you guys should be able to share it....
CCC: (a few comments about the actual content of the article)
DDD: I guess Xiaonei is having problems recently. Anything with numbers seems to run into problems.
AAA: Anything with certain numbers runs into problems around this time of year....
EEE: I'm sure this maintenance is perfectly normal, as it is for all other Chinese websites right now.(sarcasm)
BBB: There is no spoon~~! (this in English)
FFF: Wow, nice word choice guys.
Bad translation, there was a good pun or two in there I couldn't figure out how to translate. In any case, they're masters at not using any words censors would find suspicious. But they're all at least aware of it, even if its a minor annoyance.

And it will probably remain just that: A minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don't care that much. The ones that really want to protest will just use text messages or IM anyway, and even they hardcore democracy types know where the line is drawn. For the most part, it seems really unnecessary. If they really wanted to organize protests, they'd have been organized long before the 3 days before the anniversary, and then use texting or cells or IM to expand. I doubt there will be any protests to speak of anyway- the Chinese sort of have a silent agreement here, they know where to draw the line.

Just tried it too, same error. "Please don't post anything related to politics, etc....."

Also, Xiaonei is definitely experiencing other problems- many of my friends have reported problems with the "sharing" feature, and most also know the reason why sample response: "Oh, that's because its today, didn't you know?"

So, I think most Chinese know, or they can guess the reason why.

I'd try posting a few other things as experiments on XIaonei and Tudou, but I'd rather not risk getting my visa revoked, thanks.

As the Times article pointed out, and from the looks of the PDF, most of this stuff was public domain already. All they did was assemble it into a nice condensed form for the IAEA. While documents that aren't supposed to be getting released getting released is clearly a process failure, this one doesn't seem particularly serious. On the scale of data leakages, far less harmful than the British government's loss of data discs containing personal information.

Given that most of the data was already public domain, beyond knowing specifically where the stuff is, what is new here? Figure out where the publication process went wrong, and how it got approved, and then take steps to fix the problem. Gov't snafu's are par for the course, and givin it was a civil report for the IAEA, looks like a minor leak if that.

I hardly forsee people trying to make dirty bombs from this stuff. As WikiLeaks notes, this information is far more useful to environmentalists than terrorists or foreign governments (to whom we're handing the info anyway via IAEA).

It may give us access to 100% of the sea floor, but given the expense of sea exploration, how much will we actually explore? Setting records is nice and all, but it takes time, effort, and money to map the deep sea floor in any kind of detail.

It should be able to take samples and such, but what about repeat dives? The artile was a bit lacking, but hopefully google will turn up the juicy details on this particular little bot....