World Is Round

非洲人对波诺: “看在上帝的份上请打住吧！

My "Africans to Bono" piece, translated into Chinese by a friend of mine.  My inbox is already starting to curse me for writing it.  我想知道中国人对这个话题的看法。请你请你说一下你的意见。

            作者：Jennifer Brea   写于2007年7月3日，星期二

是让非洲想象它自己未来的时候了。

坦桑尼亚阿鲁沙——非洲是一个让人绝望的洲。在这里，八岁大的孩子背负着AK-47s冲锋枪屠杀整个整个的村庄，而他们古怪的独裁者把反对派的器官摆上筵席，相信那会滋壮他们的阳刚之气。采采蝇啃啮着饥饿的孩子们的眼睑，它们运动着张大的腹部，似乎那是它们生来的权利；更不必说当你读完这篇文章的时候，已经又有六个非洲人死于疟疾，五个死于艾滋，十七个死于贫穷和饥饿的事实了。同时，这里野生动植物很美，而且这里的人们喜欢唱歌跳舞。

这就是非洲，它迫切地需要我们的帮助。幸运的是，已经有一些来自美国和欧洲的开明巨星来救助它。

奇怪的是，并不是所有的本地人都对此心存感激。

Precision in fly patterning

I just wanted to give a shout out to a certain biophysicist who is first author on two papers appearing in this month's issue of Cell, one of the world's leading molecular biology journals.  You can probably count on one hand the scientists who have been double published in Cell. 

Check out "Probing the Limits to Positional Information" and "Stability and Nuclear Dynamics of the Bicoid Morphogen Gradient" in this month's issue of Cell (subscription only).

Or read about it in the The Scientist:

Precision in fly patterning

New findings suggest a surprising level of accuracy in regulation of protein controlling body plan development

The mechanism that sets up the basic body plan of the developing fly is surprisingly precise, according to two papers in this week's Cell. The finding contradicts earlier studies that suggested that expression levels of the key protein were only loosely controlled.  (Keep reading)

The Known World

My First Chinese Blog Post / 我第一个汉语博客贴子

I've recently gotten the mad idea of trying to revive this blog by writing about China from the perspective of a foreigner for a Chinese audience rather than a Western one. (At the moment I'm not altogether comfortable with the idea of "interpreting" China for the outside world.)

There is so much about China that I don't understand and so much about the world I come from that I wish my Chinese friends understood better.

Why mad?  Because that idea implies writing my posts in Chinese.  I apologize in advance for my poor Mandarin.  The English and the Chinese versions of posts will differ for as long as English remains my stronger language (i.e., always and forever).

Thanks for reading!

 

*  *  *

我最近在思考怎么复活这个博客而想到一个比较疯狂的办法。大部分老外的博客是为了给别的老外解释中国的状况写的。 

我对中国的了解还不如当这样的角色。我对中国的了解在各个方面还不够。同时，我想帮我的中国朋友更好得了解美国，更好得了解西方人的思想和文化。因此我想跟中国人直接交往比跟美国人还重要。

这个注意为何疯狂？因为它的意思就是我必须用中文写贴子。  首先，强迫大家看我很糟糕的中文，非常抱歉。 到我的中文水平超过我的英语为止（i.e., 永远），英语译文和中文译文会有点不一样。

谢谢你来看我的博客．

(This will be an interesting experiment :-)

Le Revenant (I haven't picked up Les Fleurs du Mal since high school, but did today and love this poem)

Le Revenant

Comme les anges à l'oeil fauve,
Je reviendrai dans ton alcôve
Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit
Avec les ombres de la nuit;

Et je te donnerai, ma brune,
Des baisers froids comme la lune
Et des caresses de serpent
Autour d'une fosse rampant.

Quand viendra le matin livide,
Tu trouveras ma place vide,
Où jusqu'au soir il fera froid.

Comme d'autres par la tendresse,
Sur ta vie et sur ta jeunesse,
Moi, je veux régner par l'effroi.

— Charles Baudelaire

"Inhaling the Spore"

So beautiful, I had to reprint it. Originally found here.

"In Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, the first image is of ants foraging for food on the rainforest floor, who every once in a while accidently inhale the spore of a fungus. The spore lodges in their brain and they start to behave oddly. They leave the forest floor for the first time in their lives, climbing up the tendrils of surrounding vines, and eventually impale their mandibles on the stalk of vine and wait to die. "

"They die because the fungus has actually been eating away their entire nervous system, and two weeks after their death, a horn, laden with spores, erupts from out of their heads. The spores then rain down onto the forest floor and the whole process starts again. "

Earthquake?

I sat in front of the computer starking blankly at the screen.  I was nursing my flu with Echinacea tea and fighting the urge to crawl back into bed where it was warm and the world didn't have to exist  Fragments of old dreams floated in and out of my subconscious, the barrier between the waking world and the unseen world still permeable.  The scary man dressed in shadows who gives chase in slow motion as you try to run away in spite of your leaden feet.  Or the one where you wake from bed in the middle of the night to the ground, the walls, the sky, the whole world rumbling around you...

Oh wait.

My Five

David Sasaki just tapped me to play this meme game, which has apparently been circling around the Global Voices family for quite some time.  Ethan, Rebecca, Neha and Ndesanjo have all played. 

Many GVers, I found, have presidential ambitions.  Ethan ran for president in 1988 and Ndesanjo still hopes to become the first dreadlocked president (you mean there hasn't been one yet?). Rebecca almost became a violinist, Neha will, if you slap her three times, slap you six, and David is Arachibutyrophobic.

And me?

In India

I'm traveling in India at the moment for the Global Voices conference. Hope to be back to blogging after the New Year. In the meanwhile, you can check out my India photos at my Flickr page.

By Jove He's Got It! Or "I Heart Drosophila"

Two-photon imaging of early Drosophila embryos expressing GFP-tagged proteins

The World is Flat...and Thomas Friedman Just Slid off the Deep End

I saw Thomas Friedman speak at the Bookworm last week on his "prophetic" newish book, The World is Flat.  When I said saw, I mean saw the first 10 minutes of his talk on telecast before promptly falling asleep with my head nuzzled between the wall and my second cappuccino.

Google Blocked in China?

Starting at around 9pm last night I realized that I could no longer access my gmail.  It has now been nearly 14 hours and although I can occasionally log-in and see the titles (headers) of the new emails I've received, I cannot read any of them.  I get one of those Oops....error code 008 messages popping up.  I do not think this is necessarily a gmail problem as not only can I not access my email, now it appears that with the exception of http://www.google.cn, I cannot access any Google pages (including http://www.google.com) without using a proxy server.  Unfortunately, the web-based proxy servers I've been using do not work with gmail or probably any secure sites.

I will never get Chinese internet filtering.  I understand that the internet poses a very real threat for the government en place, but it is ridiculously easy to circumvent the firewall and access sites with content on "sensitive" issues.  The tangible effect of the firewall is only its inefficiency-creating pain in my ass.