So, I've been pretty delinquent about these, but at least I've had the decency to keep stashing things I found worth reading at Reading Feed, with backlogs at Reading Feed (March 2015) and Reading Feed (February 2015).

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WSJ | China to Start Keeping a List of Badly Behaved Tourists sounded pretty scary -- until I read the article and realized that the measures are directed at Chinese citizens abroad, not visitors to China. And then it all sorta made sense, conditioned on China being, 'yknow, China.

Said Chinese president Xi Jinping:

Don't throw water bottles everywhere, don't destroy people's coral reefs and eat fewer instant noodles and more local seafood. (...)

On the topic of environmentalism, I'm on the record opining that pressuring the Harvard Management Corporation to divest from fossil fuels is a red herring, but that doesn't mean that digging up all of the of the known deposits of fossil fuels and burning them would be exactly as horrible as you'd expect: (all numbers Fahrenheit)

The next set of fossil fuels in line is referred to as resources, rather than reserves. The difference is that they are recoverable with today’s technology, but not at current prices. There is 3.1 degrees’ worth of warming if the oil and natural gas in this category are utilized, which would lead to a total increase in global temperatures of 7.6 degrees.

This warming does not even consider our coal resources. A middle-of-the-road estimate of the coal that qualifies as resources indicates that its use would lead

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I had a surreal moment today. At about 8pm, and OGPS janitor walked in to find me still in the classroom, and asked "Aren’t you too old to be playing with Legos?"

You see, I was busy finishing the FLL game board models (that is, obstacles and scoring objects for the FLL Robot Game) and was completely engrossed in constructing a six-inch-long truck. Now, there are a few answers I could have given:

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No, I’m not too old. No one’s too old.

I was, after all, completely relaxed for the first time in several days. Though I’ve not had a serious Lego project for years, I had managed to slip back into the flow of pieces fitting together the way they should, and the way I knew they were going to.

Incidentally, I’d encountered the same nostalgia earlier in the day, when I was preparing a few demo robot routines for our "Intro to Programming" lesson. I had had my father ship to me the bulk of my family’s FLL collection, and had unpacked the Chocobots '08 competition bot (still in pristine condition) to use for the demo. Now there was a beautiful design. Our team really knew how to build by the end there, and our final season’s robot was compact, robust, versatile, and capable of attempting every mission on the board that year, if I recall correctly. We weren’t winning, but we were being clever, and doing it in style.

I may be too old by far to be an FLL competitor, but I haven’t fallen out of love with problem-solving with my

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This is the last post on my first try at polyphasia. For convenience, I've listed all four of my previous polyphasic posts here:

• Greetings, Polyphasic Sleep, Chives (an introduction)
• Theory of Poly Sleep, Reports From the Field (some musings and a progress report)
• Tired, Dreams, Sunrise, BSG (some errata, and more field reports)
• Errata, Food, Reductionism (I try to explain why violating conventional wisdom on sleep is at all a good idea)

After missing two naps in a single day, I realized that this polyphasic thing wasn't going to work in China.

1. We didn't have breaks at the right times in the day.
2. I was incurring approximately 100% overhead on walking back to my dorm to nap.
3. The utility of my time was extremely phase-sensitive, which is to say that having extra hours during the night didn't help anywhere near as much as extra hours during the day.

So I stopped. Re-transitioning to monophasic wasn't precisely effortless, but it was still pretty easy (after all, I've had nineteen years practice). Oddly enough, I had this conversation with my (Harvard summer) roommate a few days before I left for China:

"We're doing pretty well, it seems."

"Don't be so confident; next week is when most people fall off the wagon."

Oh, well. We're not all abnormal all of the time.

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In other news, I decided I was going to eat meat while abroad. It seemed pretty common-sense to me: if I put down every dumpling that turned out to have pork inside, I'd probably starve. I'm only sort of joking -- in a place where you can't speak the language and are

I've got a few not-China-related posts drafted that I'd like to have out there sooner rather than later. Specifically, I'd like to have them posted before I touch on one China-specific topic in particular, and no I'm not telling you what it is.

In case you only want to read about my China posts, and don't care about anything else I care to write about, I'll keep an (approximately) up-to-date list of posts I've tagged [China] running here.

• Departure, Arrival (six vignettes from New York to Beijing)
• Internet ("The engine room for internet is under construction...")
• Looking Backwards (seven billion people and the blue marble)

Challenges in writing about events from the perspective of afterward: Getting things down while they're still fresh in the mind. And so, I figure I'll start with that which is most fresh: returning home.

On the morning of the 23rd, I woke up early enough to see my friends off on their trip to see the Great Wall. I never did get to see it, or the Forbidden City, or the Summer Palace, or the 798 District, or anything else of real cultural interest in Beijing. But that's probably alright; I'll be in China again in the not-so-distant future. It's not like I'm going to see (most of) any of these kids any other time in my life. And so I don't feel so bad about missing a few sightseeing opportunities if it means I got to spend more time with a crop of truly fantastic students.

People ask me "How was China?" or "What did you see?", and my answer to either is "I didn't see much of the country; I only really saw three hundred gifted schoolchildren." Then they say "Oh." and I hastily clarify "But the kids were great, really fantastic." They don't get it, but I really do mean it; they were worth all of the opportunity cost.

My grandfather is fond of saying: "Most things, they can take away. But they can't take away what's in your stomach, or in your head." Which is to say, of course, that when the North Koreans came back to take away your money, they couldn't so easily rob you of what you had invested in your

The engine room for internet is under construction without power and cann't be used until 18August. Sorry for inconvenience.

...and oops, there went my blogging plans. Once the engine room was back up and running, it turned out that the uptime was too slow for my Harvard VPN to connect more than half the time, and of course, once the 14-hour workdays began, I didn't have the time, energy, or werewithal to sit down and blog. Besides, there were too many wonderful people around me to spend my time-units away from them.

I tried my best to keep a running journal of things that struck me as good things to post about, so I hope to reconstruct many-to-most of the posts-I-would-have-written over the next week or so. Perhaps it's not as genuine, but I'll try my best to write while it's still fresh in my mind. I figure I owe you guys at least that much for the head-fake I gave you before leaving for far-away places.

For the next ten days, I'll be in Beijing, China (specifically "The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China", I kid you not...) as a part of HSYLC, the (Harvard Association for US-China Relations) Summit for Young Leaders in China. Yeah, it's a mouthful.

More specifically, I'm here to teach math. I'll be teaching 3day*1.5hour seminars to four groups of 10-15 gifted students from high schools around China. In addition to that, I'll hold office hours, run a workshop on applying to college in the US, and lead extracurricular activities. (Mine will very likely be something dance-related.)

If you're curious about my actual curriculum, then rest assured that I'll write about it...later. Today's post is just a series of travel-journal snapshots from the past day-and-a-half-long day. Tomorrow, we begin checking in students, and on Thursday, we'll actually start classes. Until then, I'm adapting to life in a country where I literally can't communicate with most of the population... (On the bright side, they have air conditioning here, which couldn't be said of Cambridge.)

11-12 August

(1) JFK Airport

I walk up to the cash exchange. "Three hundred Chinese." The teller is bored half to death. "Three hundred dollar to Chinese?" "No, three hundred renminbi." I slide a credit card through the cash slit. "Cash only." Of course. "How much?" Sixty-six. Which is a problem, because I think I only have...sixty-nine. Okay.

There's still time to kill. Shopping list: power adapter, money belt, pepto-bismol. The store clerk tries to give me an all-in-one power adapter; I return it to the shelf in favor of