Today started with a presentation about a divisive student group on campus, the “NJU Marxist Reading and Research Student Association”, and then I got lazy.

NJU Marxism Student Association

For our cultural class we need to prepare about 10 presentations over the semester, and today was my last. I decided to get the most sensitive (敏感) one out of the way first and talk about Nanjing’s main marxist group on campus, which I will refer to as Mahui (as its abbreviated version is “马会”). This organization considers itself a group to study marxism in its purist form, and has come to see many differences between “Xijin Ping’s New Area Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and traditional marxism. They could be considered a brand of 愤青 since these are angry youth that are nationalistic, and nostalgic about China’s “true” communist past. This came to a head when some chinese college students went to Shenzhen to support workers during the Jasic Incident and the schools subsequently disallowed these marxist organizations to register.

But I’ve been planning a full article about this for a while since I did get in some contact with the group and would like to do a detailed write-up sometime. Meanwhile you can see my powerpoint I made for the presentation here, or read some of the following sources:

• August 15th: China’s student activists cast rare light on brewing labor unrest (Reuters)
• September 27th: Officials in Beijing worry about Marx-loving students (Economist)
• November 11th: 南大学生学马列被禁 遭暴力清场(Radio Free Asia) – Specifically about the group at NJU, their protests, and the government reaction.

Genealogy

My dad forwarded me a 41 page pdf that outlines our family history from the first descendant that immigrated to Wisconsin from Bohemia. I started devising a way to use NLP or some python magic to parse this pdf to make a graph or graphical family tree, but realized that capitalism had a solution in the form of ancestry.com. Of course you need to pay to use it, but by looking at the data they tease me with it seems they have a much more accurate graph.

Nevertheless I did some more research and sent an email out to the Madison Historical Society Archives to see if I can get an obituary from a newspaper, and also got a screenshot of the first descendant’s gravestone from an ancient website. I spent maybe 3 hours delving into this side of the internet, looking at land record for counties and learning about Czech immigration into Wisconsin.

And did you know genealogies have their own de facto data format developed by the Mormons called GEDCOM?

Chess

I played a few today and finished up Playing Winning Chess. One 10+0 game to end the night ended up being the best game I’ve played on this account, with an interesting opening where I had two pawns rapidly advancing, and ended in a pawn I had on e6 since the sixth turn being the key to a checkmate. I did miss a potential checkmate (8: …Qh5#) though! It’s really intimidating to go through the analysis at the end and see mistake on mistake.

I’m also watching some youtube videos from John Bartholomew’s Climbing the Rating Ladder. I’m settling to somewhere between 800-1200 on lichess so it’s safe to start from the beginning.

What I want to learn about next is openings – How each one is different, what variations mean for the later game, and what openings are just plain bad.

In The News

This might be a good area to keep track of what’s interested me today. I’ll focus on recent events but maybe this could just turn into “recommended reading.” We’ll see.

• LIGO’s data stands up to scrutiny: I used to work for the UW-Milwaukee collaboration when I was an intern at UWM’s CGCA (as a computer monkey, don’t go thinking I know anything about astrophysics!), so it’s nice to hear that the recent scrutiny by Copenhagen didn’t ruin all that hard work done by the scientists.

Misc

After lunch at 2pm I took a nap that lasted until 6pm. I don’t anything mandatory to study for besides an essay due on the 24th, so it’s really easy to get lazy with Chinese nowadays. This is especially true since I know enough of the language to live daily life and communicate with strangers, but not enough to be taken seriously when talking about more academic topics.

I’ve given up on spacemacs for now because it doesn’t play nice with the ubuntu subsystem, where I do most of my programming work. I could run spacemacs in a terminal, but I lose all the best parts of running in a GUI like chinese rendering, font scaling, and different sizes for markdown headers. Plus the default WSL terminal is terrible, sometimes crashing when I enter chinese. I will be looking into wsl-terminal though, which seems to have been developed by a chinese guy to solve some of these problems.

They’re working on the water pipes outside again so there’s a small trench between the road and the front door. Luckily they work on the water pipes at night, so as long as I stick to the average Chinese lifestyle the water should only be out when I’m asleep.