All coin leads to China

On Feb 26 issue of The New York Times, there is an interesting article to view the Chinese trade surplus in a historical perspective. Here is the link to the article,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/weekinreview/26bradsher.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Silk road: Ancient Rome imports tons of silk and other goods from China, but have no many products that Chinese are interested in buying except glass.



A gold Byzantine coin excavated from a Chinese tomb.

Today's China exports six times more of goods to the USA than to buy from it. This high trade surplus has caused a lot of trade conflicts, but not much on the price of the Chinese goods and services at home, except the inflation of the real estate price. This one way cash flow also happens at the silk road time before the dark age of Europe. However, the cash surplus does not cause the inflation in China in that time and now. People think the reason is that those surplus does not go into the circultation. Or the economy of China expands at a roughly same rate as its incoming cash. In today's circumstance, the central bank of China invests in Treasuries and mortgages on American homes and stacks up the US dollars. Even though that the US goverment has imposed high pressure on China to increase the value of the Chinese yuan, it has no much effect to this trade inbalance. This re-evaluation seems not the final solution of the problem. China has a big pool of cheap labor, although the price of the labor is going to increase now and in the near future. However, the increases is still quite small compared to the trade scale. In the century of 1800's, British sustained its high trade surplus by positioning millions of Chinese with optium. But today, China wants high-tech stuff from the United States that the states won't sell. Reasons? China is not a 'democratic' country, and its bad record of human rights and intellual property protection issue...

Niels Bohr is Right!!

There is an interesting article on Oct 2005 issue of Notices of the AMS, titled 'Ground Control to Niels Bohr: Exploring Outer Space with Atomic Physics.' It describes how the study on the atomic scale (esp. the highly excited Rydberg electrons' is applied to design the orbital of Genesis, which was launched on Aug 8th, 2001 to collect the solar wind. Especially interesting is that the transition state theory in chemical dynamics is applied to study the celestial dynamics or the comets and spacecrafts, etc. From electrons to comets, planets and stars, all share the same equations and many-body problems make them hard to grasp. Chaos is an inevitable result. 'Transition state theory' in chemical dynamics explains the reaction rate from reactants to products based on the potential energy surface of chemical reactions.

'Transition states' are surfaces in the many-dimensional phase space (the set of all possible position and momentas that particles can attain) that regulate mass transport through bottlenecks in the that phase space; the transition rates are then computed using a statistical approach developed in chemical dynamics. In such analysis, one assumes that the rate of intramolecular energy distribution is fast relative to the reaction rate, which can then be expressed as the ratio of the flux across the transition state divided by the total volume of phase space associated with the reactants.

Trajectory for the Genesis spacecraft.


Resonance of the Jovian comet Oterma
in heliocentric coordinates


in rotating reference frame


magnified of the bottleneck region.

Snow on Latern's Day

Snow started from yesterday afternoon, and there are still snow flakes falling. When it snows, the world is always like a fairy tale
kingdom. (A fox ran before me last night. That was a surprise.) The snow flakes are very light but big, just like 'goose feather' as I used to call them in the compositons at my primary school. So innocent looking and beautiful. As people started to shovel snow, the black road surface was exposed. It seemed I have losted something in that removed snow.

Look from inside.


'Black pearl'.


Remember cotton flowers grown at home long time ago.


People skiing on the slope.


A fairy world.


Trees.

In Vivo Crystals

To have kiney stones stucked in your urine tract is not a good experience for anybody. I could not forget how awful it was when it happened to me in the summer of 2002. Four morphine shoots helped to smoothe the pain. Kidney stones in people is just one example of crystals growing in vivo. Crystals even grow in the plant cells. Calcium oxalate is a typical one. Although it is largely unknown for how the crystals form and what are their functions, it is thought to regulate the calcium concentration, to sequester poisonous heavy metals, to provide mechanical support, to regulate ionic balances, to help gather light, and to protect themselves. The crystals exist quite ubiquitously in plants, in the form of raphides, crystal sand, druses, etc. Sometimes, the crystals do cause trouble for the consumers of the plants. For example, a handful of dinners at a cafteria in Chicago had their mouth burning and string, facical swelling etc, after they had a 'Chinese braised vegetable' entree. Later, it was found that tiny javelin-shaped crystals in the vetegable most likely cause the troubling symptoms (The investigation results were published on Clinical Toxicology, 2005,1, 17).

Tsuneo Watanabe

from New York Times
Shadow Shogun Steps Into Light, to Change Japan
Published: February 11, 2006

Mr. Koizumi worships at a shrine that glorifies militarism, said Mr. Watanabe, who equates Tojo with Hitler. He added, "This person Koizumi doesn't know history or philosophy, doesn't study, doesn't have any culture. That's why he says stupid things, like, 'What's wrong about worshiping at Yasukuni?' Or, 'China and Korea are the only countries that criticize Yasukuni.' This stems from his ignorance." Like many of postwar Japan's leaders with wartime experience, Mr. Watanabe is suspicious of the emotional appeals to nationalism used increasingly by those who never saw war. In his high school in Tokyo, he said, military officials visited regularly to instill militarism in the young. "I once instigated my classmates to boycott the class and shut ourselves in a classroom," he recalled. "We were punished later."

When he entered the army as a second-class private, the war was in its last stages. The military began dispatching kamikaze pilots, whom the Japanese right wing now glorifies as willing martyrs for the emperor. "It's all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, 'Long live the emperor!' " he said, angrily. "They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into the plane by maintenance soldiers."