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Posts Tagged ‘China’

Mao's Little Red Aircraft Carrier

Freakonomics readers know that a baby’s name reveals more about its parents than about the baby. That’s also true of naval ships. The Christian Science Monitor reports that China’s online community has taken a strong interest in naming that country’s first aircraft carrier — if it ever gets built. The most favored name? Mao Zedong. China’s state newspaper approved, with one caveat: if an aircraft carrier named after Mao is damaged in battle, “it might hurt ordinary people’s feelings.”


China: More People, Fewer Names

Go ahead, complain all you want about living in America — but at least you can name your kid whatever you want, whether it’s Temptress, Yourhighness, or even Marijuana Pepsi. In China, meanwhile, the government is cracking down on uncommon names. From today’s Times: Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau . . .


Was It Something We Posted?

| Google doesn’t know why, but China blocked the entire YouTube site on Monday, cutting off access for all Chinese citizens. Maybe, posits Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk, one of China’s censorship workers mistakenly blocked the entire site (instead of just select URL’s, as had been done in the past); maybe a single video really offended the Chinese government; or maybe . . .


China's Great Depression

| As the economic slowdown wallops the “world’s factory,” some people think China is like the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, or like Japan in the 1990’s. James Fallows has a more sobering comparison: America as it entered the Great Depression. If so, is the upcoming production of Das Kapital — The Musical China’s answer to The Cradle Will Rock? . . .


The Truth About Peking Duck and Other Beijing Reflections: A Guest Post

Earlier this week, Nathan Myhrvold gave us his thoughts (and photos) from a visit to Shanghai. Here, as promised, is the second installment of his China trip, which takes him to Beijing. You will probably never look at Peking duck — or the Bird’s Nest — quite the same way again. His earlier posts on Iceland and Greenland can be . . .


Is Shanghai Turning Pro or Just Building High? A Guest Post

Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, now runs the invention company Intellectual Ventures. He is a polymath’s polymath: a physicist by training who practices many feats of technology as well as dinosaur-hunting, intensive cuisine, photography, and other, more esoteric pursuits. Earlier this year he contributed three guest posts about his visits to Greenland and Iceland. Now he . . .


The FREAK-est Links

45 percent of Chicago doctors recommend placebos, survey says. What’s the secret to China’s economic success? “Five Myths About How Americans Vote.” Which science topics are the presidential candidates dodging?


How Is a Ginkgo Tree Like a Discarded Computer?

This time of year in New York City, it’s easy to find elderly Chinese women in Central Park stooped beneath trees, gathering up what look like small plums. The trees are ginkgo trees, which drop their fruit when ripe; the fruit has long been prized in China and Japan as both a food and a medicine. A helpful friend tells . . .


The Latest China-Related Product Recall: Mine

A few weeks ago, I gave a bookstore reading for my new kids’ book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. I was sitting on the floor, reading to a bunch of kids, when suddenly something seemed wrong with the story — it didn’t track, didn’t make sense to me at all. Befuddled, I stopped reading. I remember thinking, “Wow, has . . .


Warning: Racially Offensive Furniture

Some Red Sox fans are doubly happy this week: not only did their team win a World Series, but they also get a rebate on the furniture they bought during a special Red Sox incentive deal last spring. Hopefully none of them got a brown couch whose color is described, on its tag, with the use of the n-word. That’s . . .


The FREAK-est Links

“Anti-groping Appli” on cell phones now available for Japan’s female commuters. Will the growing wage gap affect elite colleges’ admissions? (Earlier) Coal-fired plants dominate electricity in China. (Earlier) Monkeys may have cognitive dissonance. (Earlier)


The FREAK-est Links

Is the U.S. “war on cancer” focusing on the wrong things? Britain studies the economic impact of higher education. Chinese-made Cub Scout badges recalled for lead. (HT: Consumerist) Identity data: the newest hot commodity for businesses. (Earlier)


George Will on Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s Econo-Man

In today’s Washington Post, George Will profiles Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago and an economic adviser to Barack Obama. (You can see what we’ve written in the past about Goolsbee here.) Will’s piece contains Goolsbee’s interesting take on imports from China and elsewhere, with facts that I am sure most Americans don’t know: As . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Man who “sold his soul” on e-Bay speaks out. (Earlier) Baby named “Wrigley Fields” by Cub fan parents. (Earlier) Low on pork, China opens its strategic pig reserves. Can 25 divided by 5 equal 14? Spot the faulty logic.


The FREAK-est Links

What’s the solution to air pollution in China? Becker and Posner speak. (Earlier) Also in China: man dies after three straight days of online gaming. (Earlier) More than a quarter of a billion people to use mobile dating services by 2012. Does smoking marijuana have long-term effects?


The Golden Age of Chicago Prostitution: A Q&A with Karen Abbott

Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .


What Are We to Make of Junky Chinese Imports?

There are a lot of things to think about, and a lot of ways to assess the stream of flawed and dangerous Chinese imports, the accumulation of which has lately captured the public and media imagination. (We touched on the issue briefly here; a new book by Sara Bongiorni, A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure . . .


The FREAKest Links: WarCraft Twelve Steps and Thomas the Tank Imprisonment Edition

In light of our recent discussion of Internet Addiction Disorder, let it be known that the London Free Press reports that U.S. doctors are lobbying to have video game addiction classified as a psychiatric disorder. Online Gamer’s Anonymous, meanwhile, is packed with postings from gamers seeking control of their habits. Via the Wall Street Journal: Parents-to-be are putting more time . . .


Gold Farmers on the Web

It seems that there are few things more fun than playing massive multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. I don’t play these games, but an incredible number of people do, investing significant amounts of time and money in them. Last week, the New York Times Magazine published an article on what it seems to consider the dark side . . .


How Much for That Pint of Blood?

A reader named Jeff Stier wrote to inform us of the upcoming Angels in Waiting Third Annual Blood Drive in Memory of Joel Kirshner, for which Stier is the project director. Last year, the event was the largest mobile blood drive in the history of the New York Blood Center. For the past two years, the organizers have offered donors . . .


“Lucky 8s” Extend to Stock Trading in China

Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article by James T. Areddy about the influence of numerology on Chinese stock trading. As we’ve blogged about before, belief in lucky numbers is a huge aspect of Chinese culture. The article highlights how the value of a stock can hinge on the presence of “lucky 8s” in numeric ticker symbols . . .


Boycott the Beijing Olympics?

At this moment, a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would seem pretty unlikely. It took a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. (The Soviets repaid the favor in 1984, staying home from the Los Angeles games.) On the other hand, a lot of people around the world harbor feelings of . . .


Adoptive Parents May Also Face the Decision to “Abort”

Last week I blogged about the decision to abort when faced with a diagnosis of Down Syndrome. A similar issue arises, perhaps in an even more intense way (if such a thing is possible), with foreign adoption. When you adopt from, say, China, they send you information about the baby that’s been assigned to you, including health information that is . . .


More stories about Sophie and Chinese labor

I wasn’t trying to be pejorative in my last post when I said that in China/Hong Kong there are five people doing the job one American would typically do. I didn’t mean that the five Chinese workers necessarily did no better than the one American worker, it was more a statement about how workers are allocated. At our hotel in . . .


On the topic of epidemics, a story about SARS

At the Hong Kong airport, you are required to pass through an area that uses some sort of technology to detect body temperature. If you have a very high fever, they pounce on you and presumably quarantine you because of fear of SARS. I adopted my daughter Sophie from China. She had two defining traits when we first adopted her. . . .