It’s the year of Italy in China, actually also the year of Russia and the Year of the British Poems in the Shanghai subway, but I digress.
There are pasta exchanges (the jury is still out on who invented the long pieces of dough), and other cultural feats.
From the Year of Italy in […]

This is what a panda looks like after having been inseminated. Seems she’s shagged out.

Source: SH

The first meeting of the China-Brazil High-level Coordination and Cooperation Committee aka the CBHCCC is happening right now.
CCTV 9 (aka The Closed Content Television) here in China had some promising news.
I quote Hong Kong presenter James:
“Brazil and China will promote cooperation in various fields”
I am sure you didn’t want to miss that one.
To […]

China is going to tax the chopstick.
According to the Dutch radio

5% will be levied on wooden chopsticks from next month.
Yearly about 1,3 miljoen m3 wood is used to produce 15 billion (pairs of) chopsticks.
A couple of years ago, 2001 to be exact, the number according to the Washington Times was
45 billion pairs […]

Three opinions in todays Shanghai Daily. Up to you whether you agree with me or with them:
1. Free flow of ideas with Internet in China
“A strong government under the leadership of the Communist Party, with one feature being state ownership of the news media, is by no means necessarily antithetical to the free flow […]

Search engines have been in the news lately for their preference to filter their results to please the Chinese government.
I don’t want to go into that discussion again.
I want to point you to a nice project by Mark Meiss and Fillippo Menczer from the University of Indiana School of Informatics.

They have created a […]

It’s Wednesday morning, March 15, and it seems things are back to normal, as far as that means anything.
Update 2:
Down, Down, Down

Update:
It’s 10 minutes after my post and guess what… G is there again…

It’s one of these days. Gmail….. no access, Google.com … no access. Google.cn … yes, that’s soo available I start thinking it’s […]