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)

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 those of you following along at home, I've re-named this here weblog. I wrote the first few posts under "Turtles and Turtles", which might be a fine title, were I writing about physics. ("Turtles all the way down" is a common metaphor for infinitely recursive layers of increasingly precise physical theories, each model of the universe underlain by a "deeper" physical law.) But I'm not a physicist (nor writing about physics). Depending on the day, my mood, and the transit of Venus, I may be a mathematician, computer scientist, or aspiring rationalist, but in any case, physics is a hobby, not my art.

The new title, "My Faults My Own" is firstly a (not-so-humble) litany for humility, and secondly a nod to the great popularizer of mathematics Vi Hart (autoplay warning: youtube channel). Her brilliant piece, Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots (a lament of the state of twenty-first century mathematical education, masquerading as a lesson in curiosity-driven mathematical exploration, masquerading as a lesson on constructive geometry in the cartesian plane, masquerading as the ramblings of a student bored by an uninspiring high-school math class) concludes with a rallying cry for rationalists, explorers, and doodlers alike:

Here's the thing about connecting dots. You can have all the steps laid out for you, taking whatever next step is easiest and closest and be sure of what you're getting the whole time. This way is safe and comfortable.

Or, you can try new ways of connecting dots and not know what you're going to get. Maybe it will be something great, maybe it will fail. And when it fails it will be your