think or thwim

• Most rural Chinese wear their coats inside. No heat.

• 2/3 of rural Chinese are women. The men have gone to the cities to work.

• A lot of houses in rural villages have stairs sticking up through the roof to eventually add another level for the kids, but because the young are moving to the cities the upper levels are never being built.

• 49% of Chinese judges do not have college degrees. Its not as common now, but in the past some have started as clerks or cleaning people and worked their way up.

I watched China From the Inside (DVD at Amazon)

From Eddie Izzard | Dress to Kill

Robert Thompson is a violinist living in China. He was reading Phillip Greenspun’s blog:

A friend got a water buffalo for Christmas from her dad. She won’t actually take delivery of the animal. The Web page says that it will be given to a family in Asia. If you read the fine print on the page, however, it turns out that there is no actual buffalo and no actual family and you won’t get a photo of your family and your buffalo. The money simply gets dumped into the common fund at the charity. We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present.

Thompson acquired a real water buffalo and found a real family that could use it. He made an 8 minute video of the whole thing.

:: Kottke

Have you ever noticed that when you’re sick you feel really terrible right after sundown? I do every time. Once, during a hospital stay, I asked a nurse if she knew why that happens. She didn’t know why, but she said it is a fact. They get a surge of requests for pain medication every day when the sun sets.

Unbelievably, I can’t find anything about it on-line. That’s two strikes in two weeks. I also couldn’t find how many runners were on the track at once during an ancient olympic running competition. The hive mind still has some major holes to fill in.

I’m going to crawl back to bed. By the way, if I don’t pull through, this is what I’d like to have on my tombstone:

Thanks.

Yahoo collects over 12 terabytes of data every day. That’s half the size of all the books in the Library of Congress.

“All of this complexity is derived from iterating this simple equation: z -> z^2 + c, where ‘c’ is a complex number such as (x+i) and I is the square root of -1.”

-Dave Kliman

Music: Big Pig | Breakaway

There are sites where you can buy and sell established websites. They even have a “buy it now” button.

In 1969, Donald Rumsfeld hired Dick Cheney as his assistant in the Nixon Administration Office of Economic Opportunity.

These are pretty informative:

Google Map

• In Firefox 2.0, double-clicking the blank space on the tab toolbar opens a new tab.

• In her book A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths describes a spice clock that emits different scents for each hour. You can smell the time in the middle of the night without opening your eyes.

• Google has acquired more fiber optic bandwidth than any other company, and they’re sneaking around building data centers all over the place. What do you think they’re up to?