The cicadas are loud this year. Quite loud. At least they are where I live in Pudong. Their sound, which is almost indescribable – not a buzz, more a pulsating chatterous skeez – fills the air day and night. The high point came a couple weeks back when they set up a truly deafening, almost three-dimensional roar. They are trailing off now. Day by day the sound thins, like the tide going out leaving small islands here and there. Soon there won’t even be islands – just silence. Now there are are only a few left. You probably won’t even notice they’re gone, just like you barely noticed they were there. How can something so loud be so invisible?
Category Archives: Science
A Wellbeing Journey
I’ve lived in China for 18 years, but I didn’t start taking my health seriously until 2008, just after the Olympics. This had nothing to do with the Olympics, though, and everything to do with the fact that I suddenly found myself in my mid-30s, choked by the Beijing smog, and staring reality hard in the face.
Computer Kind
Sometime in the early months of 2002, when I was trapped in a Montreal apartment by a wall of snow and lack of money, I wrote a story about artificial intelligence called Computer Kind. After recently reading this interesting–if excitable–blog post which lays a convincing case for real-deal AI coming on the scene in 2040 with a superintelligent form of it right around 2060, I revisited the story. I found that it’s relevant. Very relevant. And so here it is in its entirety.
Alternate Energies
In response to my thoughts about the environment, I received this very interesting thought-provoking response from a friend in Beijing. I requested permission to publish it, and so here it is:
Rain Delay: Let’s Talk about the Environment
It’s a good week to think about the environment and talk about the environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just a few days ago released a summary of the first part of its big climate report. The contents were not surprising: the earth, the air, the seas, the lakes everything is getting warmer, mainly due to carbon added to the atmosphere and most of that coming from human activities.