On one of the first trips down, I went up to a bar on the beach to get a soda. I had my line “Hola senior! Una coca cola por favor” practiced, poised, and ready.

The bartender asked the guy in front of me what he would like, and the man replied “Get me a beer.” I thought that was pretty rude, but then he followed up with “extr-o lime-o please-o.”

At that point I thought, “I will never, ever act like that, ever.” Seriously, I couldn’t even fathom what the guy could possibly be thinking, and I was about 13.

When I travel now I do research on where I am going, and try to dress, act, and speak (as best I can) like the people of that country. Because it’s someone else’s country.

“Someone else’s country”, I’ve come to discover over the years, is a lost concept on a good portion of Americans (let alone languages other than English American). I find it very sad when I see Americans who just can’t grasp that they are not “at home”. I hope I get better marks than the usual traveler, and I try to do my part to kill off that stereotype.

So when I almost insulted my teacher over the use of a Chinese dragon image, I wanted to punch myself.

I am making a board game to help practice Chinese - it’s kind of like candy land meets trivial pursuit. For the main path for the game, the part where the pieces advance, I used a Chinese dragon.

It turns out that the Chinese dragon has some meanings and specific symbology. For example, 5 toed dragons where traditionally only used by the Emperor and if a commoner use the image it was considered treason punishable by death (wikipeida) - of course, I drew the dragon with 5 toes.

I also used the character 完 for the finish position (it’s the only word I currently know for “finish”), and I put that position on the dragons head. 完 can also mean “to die” and the dragons head is closely linked to China - so basically it said “die China” - man…

Also each part of the Chinese dragon has a point to it. The horns, the feet, the scales - some of which I just didn’t draw because I didn’t feel like it - thereby somewhat desecrating the image.

The whole thing was an utter disaster, but at least everyone involved knew me and knew I didn’t mean any harm. I just didn’t understand or look into it. I accidentally became “that guy”.

extr-o lime-o please-o.

If you’ve ever been to Capitola you’ll know there should be a beach in this shot:

but, alas the beach is gone. Here is a gallery of our quick walk: Gallery

It’s stopped raining, and I hope those waves subside, but it still has a ways to go to cause any real damage. Fingers crossed.

The class is being taught by Pan lǎoshī (潘老师), and he stresses the use of pinyin and hitting the proper tones (as I am sure most teachers do). The tones are key to speaking Chinese well, he says.

So I needed to find a way to type pinyin with the correct tone marks (so I can print stuff out, and to get used to placing them properly). Openvanilla.org (which is fantastic at typing pinyin to get the simplified characters) doesn’t support typing accent marks on romanized characters, but after a bit of digging I found that Mac OS X does it out of the box (why am I not surprised).

You simply have to enable the U.S. Extended keyboard instead of the standard U.S. one (assuming you are using a U.S. setup that is).

To enable it go into System Preferences then International then click on the Input Method tab. Scroll all the way down and enable the U.S. Extended keyboard set (as seen in the following image)

Once you have the U.S. Extended keyboard enabled you can use the following key strokes to do the accent marks:

• Alt+a for the first tone - ā
• Alt+e for the second tone - á
• Alt+v for the third tone - ǎ
• Alt+` for the forth tone - à

If you find these hard to remember, you can open the keyboard viewer for a while until you get used to it. When you hit the Alt key you can see which accents will stick to the next character you type. Here is a picture of the Keyboard viewer open while I am holding down the alt (aka option) key:

OpenVanilla.org lets you type pinyin (Chinese in English style characters) like shù (it even works with just shu), and then it creates Chinese characters - 树.

At first I thought it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I find it fantastic. It’s helped me match sounds to characters better than I thought it would. And I can print out the characters for object and tape them to stuff (and it’s legible).

While I do want to learn how to write the characters by hand, I figured learning to write Chinese properly might be better tackled after I can actually read the characters.

Short movie on how OpenVanilla.org works / how to set it up:

This application has helped me out tremendously. So far I’ve been doing self study, but I start a proper Chinese class this Friday. Wish me luck.

(If you’re curious about the self study bit, ChinesePod is a good resource (you can get the pod cast in iTunes), and a Chinese => English => Chinese dictionary is a tool you can’t live with outshouldn’t be without.(There is a wonderful widget that does Chinese to English and English to Chinese available on apple.com). I bought a simple Barnes & Noble one.)

As my mom can attest, I actually did something like that when I was a kid. Classic.

The thing about trying to type Chinese with an American style keyboard is you have to use like 3 or 4 keystrokes to do one character. Plus, being a noob, I am not totally sure how to find the right character (I think they are based on radical but I am not sure).

In order to learn a bit easier, I've been trying to find a Mac keyboard in Chinese. I've looked on ebay and done some searches, but to no avail.

To be frank, I am not even sure they exist - I would imagine they do as Apple has a Chinese site, but I can't order a Chinese keyboard from the US Apple store, and I have doubts I'd be able to order one from the Chinese store.

If you stumble on this entry and have any idea where I can get one please let me know.

(I know there are a few windows style Chinese keyboards on ebay, but I'd rather have a Mac one to match my computer (worst case I guess I'll get the windows based one))

When moving my blog to WordPress I lost the comments. In the comments on this post was a link to a useful piece of software: http://www.openvanilla.org. You can use this application on Mac to type in pinyin and the application will replace the pinyin text with Chinese characters.

His latest undertaking has made the cover of Clinical Cancer Research which is incredibly cool. Check out this abstract - it'll make most tech only people's head spin:

Purpose: To compare gene expression profiles of chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and benign oncocytoma, aiming at identifying differentially expressed genes.

Experimental Design: Nine cases each of chromophobe RCC and oncocytoma were analyzed by oligonucleotide microarray. Candidate genes that showed consistent differential expression were validated by reverse transcription-PCR using 25 fresh-frozen and 15 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tumor samples. Immunohistochemical analysis was also done for two selected gene products, claudin 8 and MAL2.

Results: Unsupervised hierarchical clustering separated the chromophobe RCC and oncocytoma into two distinct groups. By a combination of data analysis approaches, we identified 11 candidate genes showing consistent differential expression between chromophobe RCC and oncocytoma. Five of these genes, AP1M2, MAL2, PROM2, PRSS8, and FLJ20171, were shown to effectively separate these two tumor groups by quantitative reverse transcription-PCR using fresh tissue samples, with similar trends seen on formalin-fixed tissues. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed selective expression of MAL2 and claudin 8 in distal renal tubules, with MAL2 antibody showing differential expression between chromophobe RCC and oncocytoma. Functional analyses suggest that genes encoding tight junction proteins and vesicular membrane trafficking proteins, normally expressed in distal nephrons, are retained in chromophobe RCC and lost or consistently down-regulated in oncocytoma, indicating that these two tumor types, believed to be both derived from distal tubules, are likely distinctive in their histogenesis.

Conclusions: We showed that chromophobe RCC and oncocytoma are distinguishable by mRNA expression profiles and a panel of gene products potentially useful as diagnostic markers were identified.

Gene Expression Profiling Separates Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma from Oncocytoma and Identifies Vesicular Transport and Cell Junction Proteins as Differentially Expressed Genes -
Stephen Rohan, Jiangling J. Tu, Jean Kao, Piali Mukherjee, Fabien Campagne, Xi K. Zhou, Elizabeth Hyjek, Miguel A. Alonso and Yao-Tseng Chen

And you thought your job was hard…

Technorati Tags: Science

I've been doing it since May 5th, and I wanted to see if I could actually do it for more than a few days before I really told anyone I was giving it a shot. I dislike it when people try something for a day and declare “I am a so-in-so”. It's been a couple of weeks so I feel comfortable saying I am going to try to do this for the foreseeable future.

By the way, for those who don't know, a dietary vegan is someone who doesn't eat any animal flesh or animal products (like milk, eggs, cheese, etc). A vegan has the same diet, but also trys to not use any animal derived products (like leather, furs, etc), often because they do not want to support the explotation of animals.

I decided to try it because I had never tired it before, and I am a don't-knock-it-till-you've-tried-it kind of guy. Plus with all the weird stuff going on with meat nowadays - hormones, genetic manipulation, mad-cow, bird flu - it makes sense to me.

So if you are curious, here are my experieces so far:

I feel fantastic. Amazingly so. When people find out that I've been doing it and they ask how I feel, my initial response is, “I feel better” even though I never knew I felt bad in the first place.

The food is good. I thought the food was going to completely suck, but there are veggie burgers and veggie dogs that are really good. Organic fruits and vegetables are obvioulsy good. There are some tasty cereals, crackers, and soups. However, good food largely has to do with the fact that my wife is a great cook and is nice enough to make me some good veggie dishes.

It's hard to get B-12 and Iron with a Veggie diet. According to what I've read, Iron is best for your body from animal flesh. Which to me means that humans were designed to eat animals on some level (some people I've run into feverishly say otherwise, which is fine). I've started taking suplementes for those, which is a bit weird.

It's really easy to do in the Bay Area. I think I am pretty lucky to try this in this area. Most every restaurant has a vegetarian sections, and there are plent of Trader Joe's, Farmers markets, and Whole foods around to make the transition rather effortless. I don't know how hard it would be in other areas, but I assume it would be rather difficult.

The only think I've missed so far is Sushi. I was never a big red meat eater, but I did like chicken. I haven't missed either one at all, but man, veggie rolls are just not quite the same as a Philadelphia roll.

So there you go, weird as it may seem to those who know me… you may now commence calling me a hippy :-D.