If you read Russian, you'll read Macedonian in no time!

(This is my review of the Makedonsko russkij slovar by R.P. Usikova, Z.K. Shanova, M.A. Povarnitsina, E.V.Verizhnikova [Moscow, 2003] on amazon.com)

Modern Macedonian is a curious little language: it is a literary standard created in the 20th century for a group of South Slavic dialects spoken by people whom Bulgarian officials call "Macedonian Bulgarians", and Serb politician used to call "Southern Serbs". The actual language is a lot like Bulgarian, but there are a lot of differences in spelling between the standard written forms of the two languages (e.g., Macedonian often has a v or an f, or nothing at all where Bulgarian has an h), as well as some specifically Macedonian words, so that trying to look up Macedonian words in a Bulgarian dictionary would not be practical for most people. It is also nice to have a concise "cheat sheet" for Macedonian grammar, explaining the conjugation of verbs, the forms of pronouns (which, too, are often different from Bulgarian), etc.

There are good Macedonian dictionaries on the market, such as the weighty English-Macedonian, Macedonian-English Standard Dictionary (ISBN 9989809356), which is more complete than Usikova's volume, but also is a lot heavier; there is also a very good online dictionary. There are textbooks and grammars targeted to the English-speaking readers as well, such as a good academic grammar by Olga Mišeska Tomić (ISBN 089357385X). The fact is though, if you already grasp Russian grammar and have a good Russian vocabulary, you don't need to read the 500 pages of Tomić (or a similarly sized book on Macedonian grammar, in Russian, authored by Usikova herself). The 40-page grammar reference in the back of Usikova's dictionary, with handy conjugation tables etc, together with the dictionary itself, would let you read pretty much anything published in the Republic of Macedonia fairly easily. In my experience using this dictionary with a couple of Macedonian books or articles, I'd run into a stumbling block maybe once in 5-10 pages, and then a reference to a bigger (online) dictionary (if I can't guess the meaning of a word) or to Tomić book (if the grammar is particularly tricky) would often be helpful. And a major advantage of Usikova's book is that, while certainly not pocket-sized, it is still small enough to be fairly convenient for travel use.

Obviously, the book is written primarily for native Russian speakers, but anyone who's achieved a decent reading proficiency in Russian and now wants to "diversify" to another Slavic language can make a good use of it as well.

From a user's point of view, one certainly can slightly expand the vocabulary contained in this dictionary. Among possible candidates for additions I can list, for example, some words frequently used by Krste Misirkov in his famous "Za Makedonskite Raboti" (pretty much the first book ever written in modern Macedonian), such as arno ('good'), as well as some recent Serbian loanwords (?), such as točak (originally 'wheel', but seems to usually mean 'bicycle' in Macedonian). But, overall, the dictionary is quite adequate.

Igroörets

When reading (or trying to read) a Macedonian book, I encountered a cool looking word, игроорец (igroorets; in the New Yorker's orthography, that could be transcribed igroörets). Looking it up in the dictionary, I saw that its meaning was just what I'd expected from the context, "Тој што добро игра во оро", i.e. "one who is good at dancing horo [a Balkan folk dance]". The word also exists in the Bulgarian spelling, игрохорец. (Macedonian frequently drops the h found at the beginning of Bulgarian words and word roots).
A web search confirmed that it's a real word, in fairly active use. Among the top search results was a 2008 article from the (now defunct) Macedonian Service of the BBC, Најстариот игроорец во Македонија (The oldest horo dancer in Macedonia), about one Dimitar Stanoevski (Димитар Станоевски) from the village called Dramche Delchevo (Драмче Делчево). At the time of writing, Dedo Dimitriya (Granddad Dimitar) said that he was 94 by his own account, even if other people said he was only 92. He had first organized a horo troupe in 1951, performing at numerous festivals in Yugoslavia and abroad, and taught many horo dancers over his career; at the time of the publication, his troupe only included 6 people.
In 1984, he had one of his kidneys transplanted to his daughter. He attributes his longevity to the clean air and milk of his village.
The article also taught me another cool word, ороводец (orovodets), "one who leads the horo", which can also be used figuratively.

More on Mears

I mentioned Lt. Arthur Mears, of Britain's Indian Army, who in 1898 published a small English-Russian / Russian-English military dictionary. For the curious, here is his biography, in The Cyclopedia of India (1908). By that time he was already a major - and he certainly had had an interesting service record! (Born in Madras, trained at Sandhurst, sent to study Russian in Russia, doing survey work in Burma...).

A genealogy site mentions that apparently the same Arthur Mears died in 1941 in England. So he well may have served in WWI in his late 40s, and lived into the early years of WWII.

Ahead of its day

From the OUP blog, thanks to Language Hat:

One of these [dictionary proposals] ... was decidedly for a niche market. “A Russian-English and English-Russian Military Vocabulary” was proposed in 1896 by a Lieutenant A. Mears. .. [A]ccording to the files the proposal was declined “in the absence of any intimation that such a work would receive the patronage of the War Office”.

One can't help thinking that the War Office was rather myopic nixing Lt. Mears' proposal - just 8 years before the Russian-Japanese War (of considerable interest to British and American observers) and 18 years before the outbreak of WWI (which was to be followed, of course, by the British and US involvement in the Russian Civil War...). Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885) (of the Ride to Khiva fame), had he been alive, probably would not have appreciated that!

---

UPDATE: Actually, it appears that Arthur Mears was successful with publishing his dictionary, after all! At least Google Books is aware of it: Arthur MEARS, English and Russian Military Vocabulary, London, 1898. 127 pages The text of the dictionary is not available for viewing on Google Books, but here's a contemporary one-page review by Arthur A. Sykes.

It is mentioned elsewhere that the cloth-bound volume, published by David Nutt, could be purchased for 5 shilling.

"Geographie De L'Espagne Morisque" by Henri Lapeyre (1959)

(This is a book review posted to amazon.com)

Most people probably are familiar with a sad episode of Spanish history: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Fewer people are aware that another large group of people were expelled from Spain a century later. They were the nominally Christian descendants of the Spanish Muslims, known as the Moriscos, as well as any not-yet-converted Muslims (the Mudéjares).

Unlike the expulsion of the Jews, the expulsion of the Moriscos was carried out in many stages. Typically, when the Spanish took over a Muslim city during the Reconquista, they allowed the local Muslims to stay; but a few years later *something* would happen, and the tMuslims of that particular region would be told to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. A few decades later, something else would come along, and those "New Christians" of Muslim origin - a.k.a. the Moriscos - were thought to be dangerous for the state, and were to be relocated to another part of Spain, or to be expelled from the country altogether. And so it went through the 16th century, until the total expulsion of 1609-1614.

In his books - probably, one of the first "fully modern" books on the topic - Henri Lapeyre covers most of this sad history. His focus, however, is on the historical and geographical detail: he studies all census records, inquisition reports, ship manifests etc to figure how many people were actually expelled from each town or county and when; from which port (or Pyrenean pass) they departed, and where they went. The amount of statistics is somewhat excruciating for most non-specialist readers; however, if you have an interest in the history of some particular locality, here you can find all the relevant Morisco facts (or numbers) for it.

If Lapeyre were to write this book 50 years later, it probably would not be a paper book at all; these days, something like this could have been more easily published as an Excel file. (Incidentally, most of the pages in the copy of his book that I saw had not even been cut in 54 years since it had been printed). The books has plenty of fairly detailed maps, too - these days, that probably could have been done with a Google Maps layer.

Anyway, besides the dry statistics (totaling up to about 300,000 Moriscos and Mudéjares in Spain on the eve of the expulsion, and about 275,000 expelled), the book does have a lot of interesting detail. For example, the official motivation for the expulsion of the Moriscos was of the national security kind ("What if there is a war with Turkey?") and religious kind ("crypto-Muslims" - and their children don't join the clergy or monasteries, so their population grows way too fast!). But the more real, popular, motivation, was apparently different: it is said that in the popular view, at least, the Moriscos were working a bit too hard, and, even worse, spending much less money than their "Old Christian" neighbors. (Half as much, as per some ecclesiastics' reports). Thus they kept growing rich, despite often holding non-prestigious jobs in Spain's cities. So it seems to me that in the century after the expulsion of the Jews, the Moriscos took the same role in Spanish society - or at least in the popular mind - that Jews did elsewhere in Europe.

Of course, it's not like everyone wanted the Moriscos to go. For example, in Granada, the city government petitioned the Royal authorities to let some Moriscos stay: at least a dozen of plumbers (because nobody else knew how to maintain the 's plumbing in the Alhambra and elsewhere in the city), at least a dozen of silk dyers (so that they could teach some Christians how to produce the right colors), and, surprisingly, a dozen of real estate experts. In Valencia's countryside, too, 6% of all rural Moriscos were allowed to stay behind for some time in order to transfer the irrigation systems in good order to the new Christian settlers.

The children also became a thorny issue: in some areas (Valencia), children under 4 years old were allowed to stay behind, with parents consent, presumably to be adopted by good Christians. In Castile and Andalusia, Morisco children under 6 years old *had* to be taken from their parents stay behind if their parents were leaving for Muslim countries, but could be taken along by the parents if they were leaving for Christian countries. This rule, apparently, resulted in some rather strange itineraries.

I wish this book had a better coverage of what happened to the Moriscos once they landed in Africa - after all, some of them weren't even speaking Arabic anymore, 3-4 generation after the end of the Reconquista! This is obviously outside of the scope of the Lapeyre's book, and he only discusses the post-expulsion very briefly in the "Conclusion" of his book

¡Buscamos Nueva York!

The Internet Archive has published an interesting map geocoding the locations of the place names mentioned in US television news (actually, San Francisco and Washington, DC television news) over several years.

Parsing the data to extract place names, and then geocoding them, must have been quite an effort. However, as the authors themselves have noted, there is plenty of space for improvement.

It seems that once you go outside of the US borders, it's not "a lot of errors" (as mentioned in the original post); rather, almost everywhere, the noise greatly outweighs the signal! This is not entirely surprising, of course: San Francisco or Washington, DC, television programming does not have a lot of reasons to mention small towns in China or El Salvador, so pretty much every time a map has a small dot in one of those countries, it is the result of misattribution.

The gazetteer for El Salvador, for example, must have included lots of towns (and villages) whose names are common Spanish nouns ("La Nueva", "La Union", "Los Campos", "Libertad", "La Puerta", "La Reina", "Los Canales", "Los Blancos") ... as well as a town named "Nueva York" (guess what place that word usually refers in Spanis!) and another one called "Chiapas", which must have absorbed some hits meant for a state in Mexico. The same situation prevails in the neighboring Guatemala and Honduras. In Spain references to "Madrid" are (hopefully) genuine, but almost everything else - "Los Alamos", "La Copa", "El Canal", "Las Cuevas" - you must have guessed their source. Even the Albanian capital Tirana reveals itself, most of the time, as a typo for "Tehran"!

In China, it seems, the gazetteer includes lots of small places which are homonymous with personal names occurring in the news reports, and that's how they got mapped.

In Russia, it's a rather interesting mixed bags of misattributions. The comparatively large dot on Nizhny Novgorod looks so reasonable, until you click on it and see that most occurrences came from phrases such as "Gorky Park".

In a lot of cases, it seems, the system makes wrong dismbiguation choices, assigning a hit for X to location X1, even when there is a much better known place X2 with the same name. For example, Italy gets hits for "Monte Carlo"; Russia, for "Balkan", "Bogot" (Bogotá?), as well as for "Yalta" and "Rovno", and for "Strasb[o]urg" too!

Trying to improve the name identification quality in a real-life system like this could be an interesting topic for a computer science student's term paper (and maybe even for a master's thesis). Some Bayesian statistcs could be helpful. For example, for words like "la nueva", "el canal" or "la unin", one can estimate the prior probability of them occurring in a text as a place name vs. a common noun or adjective. (As a rough idea of the likelyhood of the former, one can look at the size of the Wikipedia article for a place with a given name; if there is no article for a given place name, then, most likely, it is not going to appear in TV news. )

December 28 - a big day for China Railways

Today (December 28, 2013) a new schedule comes into effect on China's railways. Schedules, of course, are updated a couple time every year, but this time there are a lot of changes, because a number of major railways open on the same day:

• The Xiashen (Xiamen-Shenzhen) High-Speed Railway, which completes the high-speed corridor along the country's southeastern coast (Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo-Wenzhou-Fuzhou-Xiamen-Shenzhen-Guangzhou). One probably will see the introduction of direct Shanghai-Guangzhou high-speed service (although, actually, it could have been introduced several years ago, via Shanghai.
• The Yuli (Chongqing-Lichuan) High-Speed Railway completes the first east-west high-speed mainline, Changdu-Chongqing-Lichuan-Yichang-Wuhan-Hefei-Nanjing-Shanghai. However, news reports say that the Lichuan-Yichang section (which opened a few years ago) won't have high-speed train (D or G type) yet, just regular passenger trains. Supposedly, some signalling issues etc need to be taken care of first. So the long-standing promise of a day train from Shanghai to Chongqing will have to wait a while yet.
• The Xi'an-Baoji high-speed line. Baoji itself is not a major destination; this project is merely a step extending the western terminal of another east-west high-speed mainline (now from Baoji to Xi'an to Zhengzhou), which eventually will be extended in the west to Lanzhou, and into Qinghai and Xinjiang.
• High-speed (D and some G) trains will start running on an upgraded rail line into Guangxi: from Hengyang (on the Beijing-Wuhan-Guangzhou mainline) to Guilin, Nanning, and Beihai.
• Direct high-speed service starts between several existing high-speed railways. For example, direct high-speed service from the Northeastern China (Harbin, Dalian, etc) to Shanghai, Qingdao, and elsewhere on the nation's high-speed rail network is started. Elsewhere, direct service from Guangzhou to Qingdao opens.
• For "regular" passenger trains, somewhat symbolic is the extension of one of the overnight Urumqi-Yining trains all the way to Khorgos (Khorgas), near the border with Kazakhstan. On the Kazakh side, there is already an overnight train from Altynkol to Almaty. (So this is obviously not a "timed connection"). Incidentally, the track development in Khorgos looks pretty impressive for a place that only got its railway 3 years ago. Obviously, trade with Kazakhstan is a fairly major business...
  Khorgos area - View Larger Map
• The Wuhan-Xianning commuter railway, the first line of Wuhan's future commuter rail system opens. This is a specifically Chinese development. In most countries, commuter trains - like Metro-North and New Jersey Transit around New York City, elektrichka in Russia, or Cercanías in Spain share tracks with long-distance trains, often not without some detriment to both services. In China this is apparently considered impossible, due to the heavy load (especially freight) on the "regular" rail lines, and rather inconvenient track alignments on the new high-speed lines. So if Hubei wants to introduce service similar to New Jersey transit, with frequent and more or less conveniently located stops, it build a completely new system of tracks and stations. Except that, unlike New Jersey, commuter trains in Hubei will run at speeds up to 200 km/h...
• Ah, yes, there are also subway news. Wuhan opens Line 4 of its subway system, so now they will have three lines in total (Line 3 does not exist yet), connecting all three gigantic train stations of the city (Wuchang, Hankou, and Wuhan).

On another important east-west railline, Nanning-Guangzhou (Nanguang), the testing stage starts for the high-speed service. Revenue service is probably still a few months away.

(Based mostly on materials from http://news.huochepiao.com/ )

Panamá bus weirdness

I was looking on the internet for a bus map for Panama City (as in "Ciudad de Panamá" in the Republic of Panama, not Panama City in Florida). There actually is one, created by Anson Stewart. Unfortunately, even though recent, it depicts the system that is no more: the one of the unregulated Diablos Rojos (the "Red Devils"), the last of which was apparently put of service last March.

The system no in operation, called MiBus, is more like a typical US system, but it has some strange features too. For one, as their route maps seem to indicate, the routes are only identified by names, not number - and that's in a city of about a million! And yes, they only have individual route maps on their site; there is no overall system map.

After checking on site, weirdness continued. The main bus terminal (Albrook, next to the domestic airport) and the downtown terminal (Cinco de Mayo / Marañon) are huge, and bus bays have signs with the general indicators for direction ("Corredor Sur", etc), but no specifics such as route numbers. (Hey, we don't have route numbers!). Neither terminal has a single system map or route map (or, for that matter, a map of the terminal itself) posted anywhere. Besides the route name displayed on the front of the bus, buses carry no route information whatsoever. A great contrast to China (where the board with the bus route would typically list all the stops) or even Russia (where you'd usually find a rather cryptic, but informative, route map posted somewhere inside each bus).

If you try to actually ride a bus, you'll find that they seem to spend most of the time going in loops, getting on or off highway, or into or out the Albrook and 5 de Mayo terminals. It seems that once they are out of the terminal area and on the highway or a major city street, they are pretty fast.

Istoria Naturalъ

Another strange find on Google Books: Natural History in Romanian in... Cyrillic script! We are not talking about the Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republic: rather, the year is 1837 and the country is [Western] Moldova (Iași - Ешiй) under the Ottoman domination!

The language of the work is described as "Лимба Ромънѣскъ" (Romanian language) in Romanian, or "langue Valaque" Wallachian language) in French.

Apparently, a rather old-fashioned looking Cyrillic alphabet was the standard for Romanian until ca. 1860.

Mësojmë Kinezishte!

I was a bit surprised to find out that, forty years later, China Radio International still has an Albanian service, complete with a web site. Included, naturally enough, are Chinese lessons for Albanian speakers (Mësojmë Kinezishte).

This is how you'd offer your business card, in Chinese and Albanian:

  
  这是我的名片。
  Zhè shì wǒ de míngpiàn.
  Kjo është kartëvizita ime.

Lelystad to Amsterdam

August 19 was the last day of my Copenhagen to Amsterdam ride, which started on August 2. I had camped in a forest strip near a canal a few miles east of Lelystad. It started raining hard just as I started to pack, so I had to fold the wet tent, to dry it once I am in Amsterdam.

Lelystad, the capital of the Flevoland Province, is sort of an experiment in futuristic architecture, 1970s vintage. There are no street names (other than for several highways crossing the city); rather, buildings are addressed by the name of the neighborhoods they are in. Direction signs are numerous, but often they all have the same work (the name of the neighborhood) in them, with various numbers appended to it. (Referring to building numbers? subsections? God knows...) Asking for directions is rather frustrating; after several "... to the right, and then to the left again..." the informant would conclude, "you see, it's so simple!". I don't know how I could conveniently operate in a place like this, but I figured it probably would not be an obstacle for somebody like my Mom, who has managed to have lived in the same city, on and off, for 40 years, without knowing the names of most streets. (Of course, communicating with my Mom about directions can easily get rather frustrating too).

The downtown Lelystad skyline is dominated by a monument that strangely resembles many a Lenin statue in Russia. However, this is not Lenin, but Lely. Unlike Lenin, Cornelis Lely had his new society created in an area that was previously occupied by the sea (rather than an old society).

There is a major civic center downtown; actually, it seems most of it is dedicated to real estate sales: one of the reasons of draining ("poldering") the Zuider Zee and creating the province of Flevolands on the land that emerged was to relive the population pressure in the rest of the Netherlands... so the local government (or is it a crown corporation of some kind? whoever runs this place...) is still busy selling houses and apartments to prospective migrants.

There was a city library in one of the corners of the center. Although it was closed on Monday, in a wonderful Dutch fashion its free Wi-Fi service was fully operational... and there were even electric outlets in the public areas! Finally I was able to do as much Internet "work" as I needed. I placed an ad on Craigslist.org to sell my bike (as much as I liked it, there was no way I could get it back to North America at a reasonable cost), and got a response right away.

A little mosque on the polder

After having a lunch running a few other errands and having, I finally left the Lelystad area only around 5 pm. Fortunately, days in the Netherlands in August are still along, and the road ahead was pretty nice.

On the Oostvaardersdijk between Lelystad and Almere, looking back (east). The Ijsselmeer (which is at the sea level) is on the left, the Oostvaardersplassen (part of the Flevoland polder system) in on the right... and it is visibly lower!

When I was in the Netherlands the first time, some 7 years ago, I wondered if I can get to a place where you can actually see, from a single point, both the sea (or at least some waterway at the same level) and some dry land that's below the sea level. An iconic Netherlands picture, as I'd imagine it. I did not have a chance to get to a location like that on that occasion... but now I finally had a full day of it! I rode on the Oostvaardersdijk, the dike that forms the northern border of the Flevoland polder system. And it certainly did look like that the polder is below the sea level!

Riding on the Oostvaardersdijk was one of the most pleasant sections of the trip: obviously, the dike is straight, and its top is flat... The road surface is smooth, and there are no crossing roads. As you pass Almere, signs start showing distance to destinations on the "mainland", including Amsterdam.

Now, on to Amsterdam!

Everything good ends eventually. So did the Flevoland. The last 20 km of my route went through cute little towns (with cobblestone roads) and some of Amsterdam's grittier suburbs... but by around 10 pm I finally got to my hotel, on Amsterdam's west side. The person who responded first to my "for sale" ad (when I was still in Lelystad) got there too, just a few minutes later... at 50 euro, the bike was good enough deal even in Amsterdam (this was less than half the price I has bought it for at Amsterdam 3 weeks before, 1000 Danish kroner), so at least I did not have the bicycle parking problem on my hands for my last day in Europe.

Fehmarn Sound Bridge

About the scariest travel experience I had in the last several years: crossing the Fehmarn Sound Bridge (Fehmarnsundbrücke) between Fehmarn Island and the northeastern tip of the German mainland (Holstein). Everything that you'd want from a bridge: the railway (single track) on the left, the roadway in the middle, and a walking/bike path on the right.

The western wind is quite strong in this area even at the ground level (Fehmrn Sound forms a part of one of the few comparatively open east-west corridors between the North Sea and the Baltic). The bridge is quite high, to accommodate fairly large ships. As a result, the wind strength at the bridge level is just incredible.

I mean, the bridge itself is sound, the handrails are tall and strong, so one of course could not be literately blown off the bridge by the wind. Nonetheless, the wind is so strong and unrelenting that you pray that none of the numerous ropes, lanyards, strings, and bungee cords that hold your kit together breaks: you feel that if it does, anything that has been held by it - your backpack, tent, camera - would surely fly across the roadway and into the Baltic Sea.

Note the wind sock - it does not hang or flatter; it's just stretched horizontally and stays steady, like a steel pipe! The sign on the mainland side apparently says that the access to the bridge bike path is closed in winters. (Interestingly I did not see a sign like this, or a closable gate, anywhere at the northern [island] side, though...)

Bert the Turtle teaches to duck and cover, in Japanese

Readers in the English-speaking world are used to seeing American and British scholars publish books on history of culture of other countries. But this, of course, is not a one-way process: scholars in the rest of the world are also publish results of their studies of all things American.

Recently, while browsing in a university library I've run across a volume that can be fascinating reading for someone who reads Japanese (I don't). Hiroko TAKAHASHI's compact, but densely packed volume, 封印されたヒロシマ・ナガサキ―米核実験と民間防衛計画 (Classified Hiroshima and Nagasaki: U.S. Nuclear Test and Civil Defense Program), published by Gaifusha Publishing, offers what appears to be a Japanese view of the civil defense programs started in the US in the late 1940s - once it became apparent that the USA would not be the world's nuclear power for long. The book's appendix contains lots of documents the authors obtained from US government archives using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) - or, in some cases, the government's responses indicating that a requested document can't or won't be released.

I can't refuse myself the pleasure of reproducing one of the book's illustrations: the early 1950s Duck and Cover comic strip, teaching American kids to be prepared in case of a nuclear explosion nearby. Somehow, it seems strangely appropriate to see it with Dr. Takahashi Japanses translations of the captions, where Bert the Turtle becomes 亀のバート (Kame-no bāto)...

In the 1960s, people used to make lots of fun about the "duck and cover" drills, but in reality they weren't utterly useless. Apparently, during the recent meteor (bolid?) event in Russia's Chelyabinsk a quick-thinking teacher who must have remembered her own duck-and-cover drills was able to save her own 40 pupils from being hurt by breaking glass.

Pawnshops have some competition!

Until recently, I did not realize that Amazon.com has entered the second-hand goods market more directly. They, of course, have always welcomed vendors who, in effect, want to run their own small second-hand shops via Amazon.com web site (much like Ebay vendors do). But now Amazon.com actually invites customers to sell goods directly to them: when you browse the web site and look at a product page, you often see an offer to buy this particular product from you - the line of business which, in which, in the US at least, has been mostly reserved to pawnshops so far.

How good a deal do you get, compared to the retail price of a particular product (new or used)? Not always very good. For example, the web site offers to sell you a Nokia N900 cell phone / pocket computer for $160-190, and they can buy it back from you for $3.25. (That's three dollars and twenty-five cents). And, by the way, the payment is not in cash but in the form of an Amazon gift card.

Noah and Zheng He

Smaller than Noah's Ark?

Perhaps the one most heavily disputed issue is the scholarly and popular literature about the Zheng He's expeditions from the Ming China to India and Africa is the size of his fleet's flagships, the so-called "treasure ships (宝船). The literalists go along with the length preserved in the literary tradition, 444 chi, cobbling together various circumstantial evidence in its support. The skeptics argue that the traditional sizes just does not make sense, on a variety of grounds (e.g., comparisons to the sizes of the reliably documented largest wooden ships from other cultures, and the existent evidence about problems people had handling those other vessels). One can see an overview of various positions e.g. in Edward L. Dreyer's book, Zheng He: China and the oceans in the early Ming dynasty, 1405-1433 (2007); for a good exposition of the views of skeptical naval architecture historian, see e.g. Christopher Wake "The Myth of Zheng He's Great Treasure Ships" (International Journal of Maritime History, vol 16 (1), pp 59-75, (2004).

In any event, no one is sure exactly how long the chi used by Zheng He's shipwrights was, but it was somewhere around a foot - making the recorded length of the treasure ships about 450 feet, or 135 meters, give or take 10% or so.

Faithfulness in reproduction can only go so far...

The controversy does not of course stop the builders of scale models of Zheng He ships, and, on occasion, full-scale models as well. (Admittedly, the treasure ship constructed in Nanjing's Treasure Boat Shipyard Park, celebrating 600th anniversary of Zheng He's expeditions, is "merely" 63 m (210 feet) long; but the on-site signage explains that it is supposed to represent merely a "mid-size" treasure ship, rather than the largest one. Incidentally, the stationary vessel is actually built from concrete, merely lined with wood on the inside and outside. I guess this will guarantee the modern treasure ship greater longevity than the original could boast...)

While Zheng He's treasure ships may be the most famous maritime vessel of the Chinese historical and literary tradition, throughout the rest of the world this role is played by an even older - and even more poorly documented vessel: Noah's Ark. The Biblical description of the ark is, of course, not much more detailed than that of Zheng He's flagships, and the archaeological evidence is, uhem, scarce. But that is not stopping the believers from building full-size a replica ark, although not near the Biblically appropriate Mt. Ararat, but in the Biblically named Hebron, Kentucky. (The money may be an obstacle, however). The length of the venerable ship? The Biblical 300 cubits became converted to 500 feet (150 meters), just a tad more than the traditional size of the Chinese Treasure Boats!

I imagine that few (if any) of the people planning Kentucky's "Ark Encounter" park are familiar with Nanjing's "Treasure Boat Shipyard", and vice versa. But I think that it would not hurt the designers and operators of the two facilities to compare notes and exchange experiences. For example, the Nanjing treasure ship's holds are mostly empty (the park's exhibits are in separate museum buildings), meanwhile the Kentucky ark will perhaps house some animatronic simulations... Zheng He's fleet is know for carrying at least some exotic animals from overseas countries to China (notably, giraffes), besides of course many thousands of its own men and horses; so here's one possibility for "enhancing" the treasure ship model...

Who needs an ark if you have a literate turtle loaded with xirang?

Incidentally, Chinese mythic/historical tradition has a Great Flood of its own, possibly even contemporaneous with the Biblical one. However, there is no ark involved. Instead of building a ship and waiting out for God to drain the waters, as Biblical Noah did, the human protagonist of the Chinese Flood story, Yu the Great, was busy handling the flood waters on the ground level, becoming the founder of the nation's flood control work. Like Noah, Yu, too, had some divine help at his work. According to one version of the story, in front of him, a yellow dragon was dragging his tail, cutting channels in the ground; behind him, a black turtle sent by the Spirit of the Yellow River was swimming, carrying xirang (息壤) - a magic substance using which dry land could be created. Pressing engraved characters on its lower shell (plastron) against the newly created land, the turtle was then giving names to the emerging mountains and rivers of China. Although I am not aware of any Great Flood theme park in China, there is apparently a Yu-the-Great-centered sculpture park in Wuhan.

Asparagus

The first shoots of asparagus emerged above the ground a couple days ago. It's a been a long, cold winter, and a later spring...

Is the voice of the (snapping) turtle heard in our land yet?

If it is, the spring must be hear. When planting tender plants, gardeners rely on the "average last frost" dates in their calendars, but an unexpectedly late frost, often ruinous, is always possible. Wise farmers have various rule of the thumbs to figure when one should plant in a particular year. None of them, however, sounds better to me than this piece of advice shared by Susan Weisand, who grows hot chili peppers in southern Indiana, in a recent issue of the 812 Magazine:

Animals know the land better than you do.
I don’t plant until I see that my snapping turtle has laid her eggs in the spring. If she’s not out, I’m not planting.

(Photo of the snapping turtle by Willy Logan)

Now, where do I get a snapping turtle?

"Shopping-enabled Wikipedia page on Amazon"

Now working for Amazon.com's benefit!

Everybody is probably aware of a panoply of "parasitic" web site whose entire content consists of a huge number of articles copied, usually with no changes (other than poor formatting, character set confusion, etc) from open-source web sites such as the Wikipedia. There are even a few publishers (or, more precisely, "publishers") which reprint assorted Wikipedia articles as books (or "books"), and sell them through various channels including Amazon.com. But do you know that Amazon.com itself has joined the game?

Hmm, Bixi (tortoise) - Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Page on Amazon... I wonder what suitable products are available on that topic on Amazon!...

Looking at a few articles, it turns out that the "products" on which shopping is "enabled" are mostly books (real books, that is) whose ISBNs are mentioned in the article. Well, even though a tad parasitic, that's at least reasonable.

Kangyuan Yellow River Turtle Farm Inc.

Strange things one can find on Youtube: a music video about Kangyuan Yellow River Turtle Farm Inc. (镇平县康苑鳖业有限责任公司) in Jiasong Town, Zhenping County, Henan Province of China. The facility, one of the largest of its kind, is said to raise some 6 million Yellow River turtles (a variety of the Chinese softshell turtle, Pelodiscus sinensis) annually, and occupies 600 mu (100 acres) of land and water. I wish the guy who took the video had a better camera, though!

It is apparently here on Google Maps.

The bear and the Littl Shyning Man

The city of Zheleznogorsk adopted a new coat of arms, which, according to the city councils, is described as a "bear or tearing apart an atomic nucleus argent". Considering the city's location and its main industry, the design is quite appropriate. But am I the only one who wonders if the emblem's designers have read too much Russell Hoban?