2. 10y aged Taiwanese oolong: quite sweet flavored and salivatory-making. Very smooth and drinkable, though a little too simple and un-nuanced for my tastes.

3. 2009 loose-leaf black puerh (puerh leaves, but fully oxidized like a black tea). Interesting! The dry and wet leaves smell like a black tea, but the liquor smells and drinks like a puerh. Fruit notes.

4-8: A series of plantation and wild puerhs, drunk in progression from younger to older (2009 down to 2005). These ran the gamut of smokey to mild, sweet to bitter (though none of that bile lincong, thank God). Part of the motivation for this series was to differentiate between plantation and wild tree, and also the effects of aging (however, I felt there was enough variation between the individual teas of each type that they outweighed any inter-type variation we might have seen).

9-11: Older puerhs (2001, 1994, 1988 in succession). The 2001 tiebing puerh, wild tree, from a mountain (near yiwu) I didn’t get the name of. Smooth and bitter (in a good way). It was a nice break from the younger puerhs we’d been having. The biggest improvement was in the mouthfeel rather than the taste (full and thick, whereas the younger stuff had been closer to water).

The 1994 had an improved mouthfeel, and a good earthy flavor. The 1988 (Qiwu) continued this trend with a sweeter, smoother earthiness. It was slightly faded tasting.

With these finished, we moved to the final two teas of the day…

12. 1975 7572 Orchid-scent: Sweet and full, but in an indirect way. Subtle on the tongue. A sweet huigan (most of the character of this tea doesn’t come in the taste, but in the aftertaste, which I absolutely love). The mouthfeel is thick and smooth, with a menthol coolness after swallowing. Brimming with qi.

13. 1960s hong yin
Even more depth of character. Deep earthiness and menthol. Louder and direct, while the 7572 was more indirect (though just as strong, in its own right). While this is a wonderful, wonderful tea (and the “better” one, if you count by price alone), the subtlety of the 7572 was by far my favorite of the day.

(Sorry, my last two teas I was too busy to enjoying to take any real notes…).

Random tea notes:
* My uncle’s Chinese is heavily-Taiwanese-accented, so it’s sometimes hard to follow. He doesn’t say lu cha but li cha. It’s not guoyu he speaks, but goyi.

* There’s a distinction between hand-picked and machine-clipped when harvesting leaves, and you can tell pretty easily by the edge of the leaf’s stem. Not sure how much effect this has on taste (other than the manually-harvested being perhaps of better quality).

* The puerh bubble started peaking in earnest in 2007. So teas especially in 2007 (and, to a lesser extend, from following years), are overharvested (and some fake). It you can (and if you can afford it) it’s best to buy teas before then.

* Ugh. Was up until 4am the night after, from all the caffeine. But very, very worth it.

Public vs Private: Fences: The archetypal American fence is the white picket fence. More symbolic than practical, it’s waist-high, non-imposing and it doesn’t do much to impede visibility of the interior for outsiders. The typical Taiwanese fence is a bit more imposing: seven feet high, cement, 6 inches thick, and (as if that wasn’t enough!) shards of broken glass embedded into the top to deter burglars. (And, no, this isn’t motivated by higher crime rates, though that was my first guess, too).

Private vs Intimate: Home layout. The typical American home has a bunch of bedrooms, separate from one another. When I was growing up, lots of kids would even close/lock their bedroom doors, to get that extra bit of privacy. The traditional Taiwanese home (not the modern flats, but rather the ones out in the countryside from 50 years ago) has bedrooms all connected. The master bedroom is in the very back, and to get through it, one has to walk through all the other bedrooms in series.

So, knowing this, what are the repercussions of public vs private vs intimate on use of the internet, social networks, and social software in general? Do we need to design for different cultures differently, especially in forums where people interact?

[some thoughts after spending a few weeks in Taiwan over the holidays, partially inspired by seeing a local Taiwanese parody of an American white picket fence, that reached less than knee-high]

• First it was an excellent conference on computer aided language learning, hosted by the computational linguistics folks over at Ohio State University. Lots of interesting ideas gleaned and interesting people met. Perhaps more on this later
• Then it was 2.5 days back in Los Angeles, enough time to adjust to Pacific Standard Time, run some errands, wrap up the semester of research, unpack my conference bags and pack my international bags…
• Now it’s 1 week into a 2 week trip in Taiwan. Playing translator/tour guide to my parents, and having a 1-year wedding anniversary dinner for all of the friends and family over here that couldn’t attend our original wedding ceremony and reception. Taking lots of pictures, maintaining a constant state of being totally stuffed with food, and having a great time in general. But it’s totally draining—So far I’ve had more than one night filled with dreams in which I’m constantly translating to ppl around me what is happening, into either Chinese or English. And these kind of dreams make me wake up even more tired!
• Still haven’t made my requisite “tea run” this trip—my stashes at home in Los Angeles are running low, and the selection here is wonderful, of course. I’m especially interested in stocking up this trip, because I’ve found my tastes have matured quite a lot lately…
• After I get back, it’s a weekend of getting over jetlag, then I’m up to Mountainview for “new employee training week” at Google.

.

Life is anything but dull, at least. Phew!

Looks to be from about 15 years ago, but it’s a timeless masterpiece–from the rakish, bandana-wearing gaijin to the M.I.A.-esque techno soundtrack to the serene happiness on the aerobics dancers’ faces.

Or… if you’re a foreigner who would like to learn Japanese…

The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with regional coloring based on density of news events in that area. You’d need a few hacks to make things look nice (normalization for standard-level-of-news per area (different areas of the world have different minimum levels of media coverage) … smoothing so that local news-concentration influences regional news-concentration). And a gradient would do a lot more for visualization than these discrete news-event-bubbles (but I realize that the google maps api limits you to location bubble markers, and remixers are limitted to the tools at hand).

I love to see non-art becoming art. To this day, one of my favorite random conversations was with Tom and danah at a conference a year or so ago, where we discussed a fellow information addict who had covered all the walls of his house with bookshelfs full of books. Information, knowledge became art–and it evolved so both organically and unobtrusively.

Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence.

When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google’s core philosophy of “Don’t be evil” guides all its actions.

“I think that goes back to the concept that these technologies can actually be empowering and good for the world if the companies implementing them are good,” he said. “Could some of these technologies be used for bad purposes? Yes. But will they by us? No.”

Hehe. As someone who works with AI every day, and who knows the prenatal state of natural language processing and so-called “strong AI”, it cracks me up to see public fears of “omnipotent and malign computers”.

Sigh.

An interesting idea.

More on their about page. Transaction.net has a good summary and set of related links, and Paul Grover has a good article on the subject, Grassroots Economics .