so my sister got sick in china. she went to the emergency room, got a doctor immediately, got a blood test, 3 iv bags, and 1 weeks worth of three different types of medicine (intestine, fever, something else). all this cost under $25 US, no insurance.

in america, she waited 1 hour, saw a doctor who didn't do any tests, looked in her ear with an otoscope, prescribed some medicine (which needs to be picked up and paid at a pharmacy), got 1 dose of pain relief medicine. and this costs hundreds of dollars, after insurance.

apparently, they don't even take credit cards at chinese hospitals. why are american hospitals so odd? maybe america has quality otoscopes. surpasses the world.

i just woke up from an afternoon nap. i had a dream that a lot of high school classmates were in pokemon costumes last halloween.

2 days ago, i was cutting a mango. i'm a little allergic to mango. the skin around my mouth gets rashy and dry if i eat it too messily. so i usually just make sure the mango doesn't touch outside my mouth and i'm fine. too bad. apparently, the skin has a poison chemical and i was cutting the mango. and it got stuck on my hands and now my face is rashy. ugh. it contains urushiol, which is the same chemical in poison oak and poison ivy. great! what kind of guy decides to peel a fruit that gives off poison oak chemicals and then eat it!? and then now the world eats it! and i suffer.

i was checking my website's statistics and stuff. and i was looking at the countries. it's been mostly the same except a little bit (which is why i would talk about it here). usually, i get united states (duh), then japan, then canada, and some random european countries or australia. china is always down near 10-15. suddenly it is 3rd this month. it's really weird. maybe it is because i'm talking about them? or maybe they are watching me! i don't want to be banned! well, it would be cool. i would be a revolutionary. it's okay though. if i get banned, it is for the harmonious society.

so i'm reading about the differences between taiwanese mandarin and the "normal" mandarin that's from beijing. (not really all normal because southern china also has differences.) anyways, one of the funny differences is 搞 (gao3). in taiwanese, it is "to carry out something insidious, to screw (vulgar)", so they never use this word in government or whatever. and in china, it just means "to do a task", so this word is used all the time. maybe this is why china and taiwan are fighting all the time. the chinese are always telling the taiwanese to go screw things.

and in taiwan they call a tomato 番茄, which apparently literally means "barbarian eggplant." and in china they call it 西紅柿, which literally means "western red persimmon."

recently, i have been reading about the debate of universal healthcare, because the president is pushing for it, it is summer, and i'm bored. and i guess i'm ending up in healthcare eventually, so i should have an opinion or at least be somewhat educated on these issues. so here is some list for my own summary. i hope i don't have much of an opinion because i'm just an idiot 20 year old who doesn't know real life yet.

- healthcare is not a right. healthcare is like any other service, like plumbing. that should be free too.
- healthcare is a right, because people can die from illness. people don't die or get sick from clogged toilets (debatable? ha). constitution says we have right to life.
- then the government should buy me a new car with all the safety features, so i can have a safe life. the right to life doesn't mean that we have to pay for everyone else, especially the people on poverty and the people that make themselves sick from lack of exercise, eating unhealthy food, etc.
- maybe we should privatize everything then! for example, public education: i don't want to pay for other people's bad students.

- can ERs refuse people if they cannot pay?

- people will abuse the system by seeing the doctor for very little things and ask for a lot of lab tests and stuff.
- copay solves this?
- what amount of copay?

- every industrialized country has universal healthcare except for america. they don't spend as much money on healthcare and have better service.
- just because they have it doesn't mean it works well. many borrow money to support their systems. and many don't have populations as large as america. america is huge. america has no money.
- raise taxes.
- no.
- yes.
- no.

--------------
other problems:

- everything becomes a lawsuit in america, so doctors are forced to perform a bunch of expensive tests to make sure nothing can be sued for.
- too many people and middlemen. drives prices up.
- insurance. people pay for it. they want to get their money's worth. they order a bunch of tests, whatever they can, whatever is covered. insurance counters by raising rates. repeat. (positive feedback on trying to profit.)

--------------
well, i don't know. it's just sad that the healthcare system has moved away from the original goal, which was to help people (i think). now, business and economics (and reality) have forced it to become a system where people only care for themselves.

i guess that's what happens when one's job would ideally eliminate its own customers. the idea already doesn't make sense. it creates evil.

altruism doesn't exist, huh?

i think this is pretty cool news. it's time to be god.

Researchers produce cells they say are identical to embryonic stem cells

Scientists in China use cells from adult mice to breed new mice. The breakthrough results are hailed as an advance toward eliminating the need for fetal stem cells in a variety of applications.

By Thomas H. Maugh II
11:16 AM PDT, July 23, 2009

Two groups of Chinese researchers have performed an unprecedented feat, it was announced today, by inducing cells from connective tissue in mice to revert back to their embryonic state and producing living mice from them.

By demonstrating that cells from adults can be converted into cells that, like embryonic stem cells from fetuses, have the ability to produce any type of tissue, the researchers have made a major advance toward eliminating the need for fetal cells in research and clinical applications.

Researchers first produced this new type of cell, called induced pluripotent stem, or iPS, cells, two years ago, but there have been lingering doubts about whether the cells are truly identical to embryonic cells or instead are capable of producing only some types of body cells.

The new results, published online today by the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell, appear to erase those doubts. The results also open the door to a variety of applications beyond producing stem cells for medicinal purposes, including the production of endangered species and the reproduction of prized farm and other animals.

The reports "show that iPS cells are identical to embryonic stem cells," said biologist Kathrin Plath of UCLA's Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, who was not involved in the research. "It hadn't worked before, so it wasn't clear that it would ever work." The approach the teams used was "the gold standard because it is the only assay [test] that proves the cells are pluripotent."


The results are "comforting, because there has been a lingering concern that iPS cells had failed in this particular assay," added biologist Robert Blelloch of UC San Francisco's Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, who was not involved in the research. But he cautioned that the teams were ultimately successful in only a few out of many attempts. "What's missing, which will really be key, is whether there is anything about the cells that did pass the test that is different from those that didn't."

Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass., who was also not involved in the studies, cautioned that the results "revive many of the same ethical issues as reproductive cloning." Although generating fetuses with iPS techniques is technically different from cloning, the bottom line is the same -- the generation of an organism that is genetically identical to the source of the donor cells. "We have gone from science fiction to reality." Because the process works in mice, it should also work in humans, he added. "We now have the technology to create iPS cells from skin or hair follicles. Combine that with showing that they can actually create a living organism, and that's pretty scary. All the pieces are here for serious abuse."

Adds Plath: "That's an experiment that shouldn't be done" in humans.

The technique that the two teams of Chinese researchers used is called tetraploid complementation. When researchers first started studying iPS cells, they would assess their properties by injecting them into a blastocyst, a very early embryo. What they found in those studies was that the iPS cells and the host embryo's cells would contribute to the resulting animal, producing a chimera - a mosaic of genetically different cells.

More recently, researchers have fused the cells of the host blastocyst so that each cell contains double the number of chromosomes, making them tetraploid. When that is done, the host cells can form only the placental tissues; all the animal's tissues must come from the injected iPS cells. But researchers have never been able to produce living animals by this technique, creating doubts that the iPS cells were truly pluripotent.

In the new studies, "the method of producing iPS cells didn't change," Blelloch said. "They used the same methods and materials everybody else is using." He characterized their efforts as a "brute force effort" in which they simply looked at a large enough number of attempts to finally find one that succeeded.

The more successful of the studies, by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, created 37 iPS cell lines that could be grown in the laboratory. Three of these lines produced 27 live offspring by tetraploid complementation, Fanyi Zeng of the Shanghai University told a telephone news conference. Some of the mice have successfully mated and have produced second and third generations.

But Zeng cautioned that some of the first-generation living mice had abnormalities, although she did not say how many and what those abnormalities were. That, she said, will be the subject of a future paper.

The second team, from the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, achieved only four births, with only one mouse making it to adulthood.

Both teams emphasized the large number of failures required to achieve the few successes and argued that it would be unethical to attempt the technique with human cells.

宅

gravity is always pulling. 9.81 m/s^2. (well, that is average. let us not add more variables.) escape velocity to infinite: 617.5 km/s. too fast. unachievable. but it is. in little steps. first orbit. then shoot out there. lower escape velocity out there. but other planets and rocks to avoid.

so i like to hold conversations with myself in my head. but recently, the conversations have been in chinese. weirdest thing ever. must be because of recent trip to taiwan. it's like switched parts of my brain. apparently, learning chinese changes parts of your brain because different parts of the brain that detects tone differences need to be stronger. mine aren't so good, so some words get confusing. maybe with these mind conversations, i can develop a strong area of that brain! too bad my chinese isn't that good, so i'll probably run out of things to tell myself. sigh, this post makes me sound insane. but i'm perfectly normal! maybe.

i am a pineapple. pine all day. longing to be an apple. but alas, i am a pineapple.

i watched "yi yi" by edward yang. this movie is so great apparently. so i went to watch what the big deal was. it's 3 hours long and it's about life. that's it. it's about a "typical" taiwanese family and all the problems they encounter. (of course, it is a movie, so typical is exaggerated a little.) there's no climax. just 3 hours of people living. a lot of scenes. a lot of talk that seems deep (but i'm too lazy to think too hard about that.) like a lot of taiwanese movies, it shows a lot of melancholy of life and stuff like that. this movie does that amazingly by showing the taipei city life through a reflection in the window with the characters behind the window. it was a quite amazing. artistic movie. too bad it was 3 hours long. it didn't seem that long to me, but my dad was so bored.

i am a pinetree. all i do is make pinecones and pine all day. pine pine pine. what a funny word. i wonder what pinetrees yearn for. oh, so painful. maybe the pineneedles are causing pain.

started reading an article about the riots in uyghur or xinjiang. people are angry there because of differences between han chinese and uyghur people. anyways, i started reading about china time zone. i knew china had one time zone, but since uyghur is on the very west side of big china, they have their own unofficial time zone which is 2 hours slower. then i started reading about daylight savings. and then UTC, which was acronymed because english people wanted "CUT" for coordinated universal time. and french people wanted "TUC" for temps universel coordonne (with an accent thing on the e). so they agreed to use UTC, which stands for nothing. anyways, apparently the world is slowing down, so they eventually will have to add leap seconds. at the end of the 21st century, we'll need to add one second every 250 days. that sucks. they should just save those seconds and add a day instead.

anyways, uyghur is a huge area of china. and it's so far away that the people there aren't even "chinese". they are closer to turkish people. it would be weird if they broke off from china. and then tibet breaks off too. it's okay though, china will add taiwan. great

some things must be let go. everything? hopefully not. it's just a joke. what is happening?

"why do you want to die?"
"why do you want to live?"

need confidence for achievements. but can't have confidence without achievements. which one should be broken first? i think the second one.

so i asked my mom about the "jin" measurement in taiwan. i read it was about half a kilogram. my mom said it was 600 grams. so i went to research this confusion.

apparently its called a "catty" in america.

The catty is traditionally equivalent to around 1⅓ pounds avoirdupois, formalised as 604.78982 grammes in Hong Kong, 604.79 grammes in Malaysia and 604.8 grammes in Singapore. In some countries, the weight has been rounded to 600 grammes (Taiwan and Thailand).

In mainland China, the catty has been rounded to 500 grammes and is referred to as the market catty (市斤 shijin) in order to distinguish it from the public catty (公斤 gongjin), or kilogram.

what a big mess

G.E. executives spent more than a decade trying to win a contract to build such a power plant in China. During the numerous delays, they shared extensive technical information with Chinese power engineers on how they would go about it.

But at a ceremony in Tianjin on July 6, Chinese officials announced they were ready to build the power plant themselves and would no longer need to buy Western technology.

i laughed.

when i see the word pliable. i think of the word pry. and add an -able , which doesn't make any sense. i'm just being asian, i guess. confusing my r's and l's.

何必

苦瓜在燜燒鍋
爛掉
好爛

空
天空
空天空
空
太空
太空

so some girl fell into a manhole because she was texting and wasn't paying attention to where she was going. now her parents are going to sue for not having signs and stuff. this is what america is all about.

so i watched jackie chan's new movie, "shinjuku incident". it's about illegal immigrants from china running to japan. so jackie chan runs to japan. he does illegal work since he's an illegal. there's also a lot of gangs in japan. they are all from different areas of china. there's also a taiwan gang. (they really emphasized this one. and made them look the most evil.)

one day, the japanese yakuza guy is getting attacked. so jackie chan saves the guy's life. so they make a deal. jackie chan does a job for japanese guy and he gets a japanese citizenship, and some territory. jackie chan wins. and jackie chan unites china! (including taiwan. or at least, he gets the territory)

then he leaves to get a legal job. he splits up the territory among his members. he goes off and does his job, but then everyone becomes evil and sells drugs, especially hong kong and whatever area daniel wu was representing. so the harmonious society that jackie chan set up turned out to be a big mess. and now taiwan is like "wowowwo, i want my land back" and they attacked. (in the movie, taiwan is bullying china.. hahaha?). japan is pissed because a chinese organization is becoming powerful, so they attacked. then everything falls down.

so what does this mean for the real harmonious society of china?

this would have been a great propaganda movie for chinese unification and all that (if they stopped before the downfall). too bad it's not going to be released in china and would probably be banned if it ever was.

so apparently they are raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25. is that really a good thing? businesses are losing money. people are unemployed. doesn't this make businesses lose more money and less likely to hire extra workers? prices are dropping and worker's wages are increasing!? kill off businesses more. i think this only helps people that already have jobs. it also pushes people over the poverty limit line if they are working minimum wage. that means the government doesn't have to help them anymore. oh well.

i spent so much time playing with php. now i can php include variables that i sent over the url. or whatever. it's pretty crazy. and pretty easy. too bad my website will probably never need it. it is probably more efficient for me to make static websites instead of that dynamic php ajax and all that other crazy stuff now. one html page for every possibility.

so google announced that they are making a operating system called google chrome os based on linux kernel. it's supposed to be a lightweight os, unlike windows. i guess it is good they are competing against microsoft. microsoft has been really lazy and has been depending on new hardware to run their new operating systems. probably because there is little competition. except apple seems to be gaining and linux is always there. i guess they just don't care about that small competition. but if google makes a new operating system, it's going to be huge. then google will own everything, and monopolize things worse than microsoft did. they already own the whole earth.

in china, there was a white guy buying some chinese fan. it was originally 100 RMB, but he said he wanted it for 40 RMB. the girl didn't want to sell for that low, so the guy walked away. the girl kept lowering the price and eventually it dropped to 40 RMB, so the guy came back to buy it.

we also went to a place that sold jade. one of the women in the tour group showed some interest, so they kept pestering her. the jade bracelet started off at 12000 NT, but when she didn't want to buy it, the price dropped. it kept dropping until it was at 6000 NT. at taiwan's jade market, bracelets that looked the same were sold for 500 NT. (maybe they are lower quality, but to simple people like me, there is no difference.)

from these two incidents, it made me really wonder what was the real value of these chinese products to have so much room to slash prices. they make everything cheaply and lie about the value to increase profits over 100%.

originally, my mom and my sister were going to go with me to taiwan and china, but my sister got sick and we went to the hospital. now that i'm back, my mom told about how expensive the hospital bill was. my mom called them and told them it was too expensive and they dropped the price to 1/3 of the original price. the prescription was $10 at the pharmacy, but when my sister took one dose at the hospital, it turned out to be $50. seems like a lot like china. so what is the real value?


a problem with the hospital is that there were so many people just to treat a middle ear infection. when we went to the hospital, there was a woman at the front desk. then there was a women that called people in. then there was a nurse that took her temperature and weight and stuff. then sit back down. then another nurse called her in and assigned a bed. then doctor finally. then a woman to collect insurance information. and then a nurse to give that one dose of medicine. that's seven people. is that really efficient? assembly line is good, but only when everyone is paid low wages. not in healthcare, when everyone thinks they are a god, especially the doctors. what a waste.

am i being used? i hope not. why so negative? is there no more good in this world?

7 year old sister: do you like history?
me: no, i hate history. it's just about a bunch of old dead people.

later.
me: i'm going to go die.
sister: then you'll become history!

back in america. back to reality. reality is harsh.