A short list of long articles (at Medium.com)

A number of my articles (old and new, in English and in Chinese) have been posted or re-posted at medium.com, often after appearing elsewhere.  In many cases, I've posted the text at medium.com because I'm concerned the articles could eventually disappear from other websites that have hosted them.

This seems to be the most useful link (click) if you want to rapidly scroll down the list.

Snapshot of San Francisco

舊金山市. They still worship 地藏 there, on a regular schedule, at the top of that staircase on the right.

Chinese before the squares became square

Chinese before 口 became 方.

Vaguely dated to the late Zhou Dynasty (周朝), i.e., earlier than 221 B.C.

Click below for larger images that zoom in (allowing you to see the text clearly).

Endangered Languages, Chatter (On Youtube)

Endangered languages (克里語的美洲原住民語 & 閩南語).  Some informal chatter on Youtube, and a link to an informal article (examples from China, Canada & elsewhere).

Click: http://youtu.be/VLgFAXB1vZ4

千字文 (One Word at a Time)

Despite its lofty reputation, the 千字文 is, really, just a vocabulary list.

Chinese etymology and the logic of the modern language

Or, perhaps, "Chinese etymology vs. the logic of the modern language".

On Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg4rKt8Sv1g

Poverty and Participation

Currently, Taiwan hovers around 4% unemployment (and people complain that it is not 3%).

That is an amazingly low number from a European perspective or a Canadian perspective, however, we can view it with a difference sense of scale when we place it alongside the labor-force participation rate.

The Many Strange Uses of the Meat Radical

On Youtube: Chinese isn't vegan (the many strange uses of the meat radical).

Click: http://youtu.be/Z9neHifdGbc

Measuring Poverty Through Overcrowding

The overcrowding rate is an extremely useful statistic, even though the subjective notion of what "overcrowding" really means will differ from one culture to the next (and baseline values will reflect the distribution of urban-vs.-rural population, the availability of cheap rental housing, and numerous other factors unique to each milieu).

I've disaggregated the data (for each country) into two lines: (i) the darker line shows the overcrowding rate for families with children, and (ii) the brightly-colored line shows the overcrowding rate for households without children.  So, at a glance, we can see that the direction of the change is very different for each of the countries shown (in the last few years), and, also, we can see that the gap between the two lines is different in each case.

How I Ended Up Learning Chinese (Part Three)

How I Ended Up Learning Chinese

~or~

Divorce and Consequences.

Divorce can mean different things in different circumstances.  When I accepted that we should get divorced, my assumption (initially) was that I would just rent an apartment elsewhere in the same city, and that we’d continue co-operating in raising our child, at least for a significant period of time, or until one or the other of us had a better idea.  I assumed I would still be seeing my wife 6 or 7 days per week, partly just because she would need my help (on a daily basis) with caring for my daughter, and in helping with a range of trivial duties (that become difficult when your hands are always busy with a small child).

There was no such period of time.  I agreed to the divorce on January 10th, and my wife was on an airplane (with my daughter) on January 14th.