A Trumpeter's Shadow

(from an gallery in Wired on iPhone photography. Link in post title)

What a pretty photo:

百度

So, in case I haven't told you, I'm working at Baidu this Summer. It's a bit of an interesting story: I was originally going be a code monkey for a guy who used to work for Google, but then that company went under (it was a start-up) two or so days before I was to start. After a week or so of frantic job hunting, I ended up here:

The second picture is the subway station five minutes from the 大厦 (building) . The picture doesn't really capture the insufferable heat and humidity, nor the pungent and incredibly recognizable 臭豆腐 ("stinky tofu," a kind of tofu that's tasty but smells awful) smell that's always around. It's a really nice place to work. Baidu, I mean, not the subway! It's not as big a deal to be an intern there, in comparison to being at Microsoft or Apple or Google, though. My friends there tell me that the interns all have activities together and volleyball and get free phones and stuff. My group of six people and I have money to get ice cream from 楼下 to eat together, though, haha. Here's my 工位, with all the sticky notes of characters I didn't know before starting here:

The food in the 餐厅 is absolutely heavenly. I can't even begin to describe how tasty it is. I eat dinner there, too. It's also, like, 11块 (~$1.60) per meal. 's kind of hard to go wrong with Chinese food in China, I think:

And they have these rooms for people to rest in, with the most incredible (and the first one I've ever been on) massage chairs in the entire world in these super-futuristic - looking giant luminous eggs which usually have the lights off inside but are on at the time I 下班, so I could take a picture of the chairs. The chairs! You know the ones, the ones with, like, a control panel the size of a laptop and over forty buttons:

Anyway, that's Baidu. It's awesome. I'm working on an company blog that'll go up in about a week. The blog will be in English, but the work environment is completely Chinese, of course, and all the searching I do to find interesting things to write posts about is in Chinese, too, of course, so I'm getting a lot of character practice. One is never done learning characters, see. There are always more.

I finish work in two weeks, though, so most of my time here will have been spent setting it up instead of writing. Oh, well.

张家界

I just got back from two days in 张家界！Some family friends from the US, my godparents, came to visit their son who's teaching English in Korea and stopped by our place in Beijing for a bit.

张家界 (Zhang1Jia1Jie4) is in 湖南：

It was incredibly gorgeous. Parts of it were actually kind of touristy, but Chinese touristy, so no Club Meds or Kodak huts, just fruit stands. The food, of course, was delicious. They don't like 饺子 (dumplings) much down there; it's more of a Northern thing. But the spicy food was delicious. Best 茄子 (eggplant) I've ever had in my life. In retrospect, I really should have taken some photos of the food.

The hiking trails were virtually deserted, too; it was just the base that was so crowded. Here are some photos:

We also ran into these really, really strange spider webs. It turns out they're (probably) St. Andrew's Cross Spiders, which exist all over the world and aren't venomous. From Wikipedia, on the X-part of the web in the first picture (called a "Stabilimentum"):

There is much controversy surrounding the function of these structures, and it is likely that different species use it for different purposes. Some people believe that they provide protection to the spider by either camouflaging it or making it appear larger. Another theory is that they make the spider visible and therefore animals such as birds are less likely to damage the spider’s web. Originally the decorations were thought to stabilize the web (hence the term stabilimentum), but this is dismissed nowadays. One more recent theory is that web decorations attract prey by reflecting ultraviolet light. Light in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum is known to be attractive to many species of insects.

Finally, there were some nice Chinglish signs there:

Sasha and Dima

Tomorrow I fly back to China! This means I get to see my dogs for the first time in six months. I just about literally can't wait.

Here are some photos of them, including a few puppy photos.

Sasha's (the white-ish one) about five, now, and Dima is her half-brother, now about four years old. They're the sweetest dogs anyone could ever have :)

Clouds

Undulus Asperatus

In 2009, a previously unclassified type of cloud became official, the first since 1951: Undulatus Asperatus. It looks really cool: 

The Cloud Appreciation Society has a whole bunch of pictures. The only explanation I've found so far is they're caused by "Turbulent motions between differing air masses."

Hole-Punch Clouds

From Wired: "As propeller or jet airplanes pass through the right atmospheric conditions, they make liquid water droplets freeze and immediately drop as snow, leaving a circular fissure behind... Normally, snowflakes or raindrops need a speck of dust or another imperfection to form around. But supercooled water can freeze instantly, if it cools quickly to around minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit."

Kelvin-Helmholz Waves

These are some of the coolest clouds I've ever seen. They're formed when two layers of air of different densities move past each other at different speeds, creating shearing at the boundary.Parts of the boundary move up and parts move down. Because one layer is moving faster than the other, the shear causes the tops of the waves to move horizontally.

Mammatus Clouds

Cloud physicist Patrick Chuang's got some words: "They are some seriously weird looking clouds."

He goes on to say, "In mammutus clouds, evaporation causes pockets of negative buoyancy as it cools the air inside the cloud. This makes the clouds puff downward instead of up like cumulus clouds, and they end up being like upside-down bubbles."

Night-Shining (Noctilucent) Clouds

These ones are by far my favourites. Noctilucent clouds are ice crystals about 45 nanometres thick (that's 4.5 x 10^-8 metres) . For comparison, the diameter of a DNA helix is  2nm, the height of a hark disk head over the disk, 3nm. 40nm is the wavelength of extreme ultraviolet waves. These ice crystals form at around -145C without needing dust particles, 80 kilometres up -- that's way up near the end of the friggin' Mesophere, higher than any other clouds around. You get the most during the Summer, when the Mesophere is coldest (see why) .

Here's a diagram to show at what time of day you can see them:

The article where I found most of these shows a few other cool clouds, too. It's worth checking out.