Notes from China-Japan trip

The following are my unedited notes taken on my iPhone on a two week trip through China and Japan: Beijing, Chengdu, Yangshuo, Honk Kong, and Tokyo. Reading through them I notice a few autosuggest errors, but also some that look like autosuggest errors but are really intended, just me being weird. I also notice that there is quite a bit that is not here, either because we were too busy doing things for me to type up, or because I didn't think of it as a thing to write, despite my memory now realizing it was a thing.

The actual itinerary was:
Day 0,1 Fly from Boston to Narita, Narita to Beijing, taxi to hotel
Day 2 Beijing morning - Tiananmen square, early aft - lunch, late afternoon Acrobats/magic show
Day 3 Beijing free day, walking around SanLiTun, local hu tong
Day 4 Beijing morning Mu Tian Great Wall aft/eve flight to Chengdu
Day 5 Chengdu morning Jin Li St, lunch Szechuan cooking, aft People's Park, evening Chinese opera
Day 6 Chengdu morning Panda Zoo, afternoon Chengdu to Guilin flight
Day 7 Guilin to Yangshuo, morning drive from Guilin hostel to Yangshuo, aft Li river cruise
Day 8 Yangshuo morning - bike ride along rivers, climb Moon Hill arch
Day 9 Yangshuo to Hong Kong travel
Day 10 Hong Kong morning - Victoria Peak, aft - Peninsula Hotel high tea
Day 11 Hong Kong, Lantau Island morning Buddha, aft - Tai O fishing village.
Day 12 Hong Kong to Tokyo flight
Day 13 Tokyo - WTC and bus/boat tour
Day 14 Tokyo - Joypolis amusement center
Day 15 Tokya to Boston flight

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China Japan

Day 0 (Jun 25-26)
Flight
A little more room than domestic
Ian port asks to trust. Cables everywhere.
Two people in back cabin w face masks. 3, no 4
1/2 of area of plane is 1st and business class
Already annoyed that I can't look up what actor that is in imdb

Day 1 crosses the date line in flight. Lots more flying.
Narita airport
By the time at Beijing airport I think I've seen every possible JAL entertainment option. Every movie even Japanese and Korean ones.
Fried rice at place downstairs from hostel.

Day 2 Beijing
Tian an men square huge but still people everywhere.
Women wear more dresses. Men spit. Some People sit on their ankles. Iranian and Nigerian tour group.
Guys rolling up their shirts to cool off. Ugly
Among the throngs of tourists. After TAM lots of hawkers but also lots of people asking for money. Guy with one arm
Restaurant not organized looking.
Little girls all dressed up
Big areas, but then smaller garden areas very nice.
Young Woman w cat ear head band
So many Chinese tourists. I thought I was special.
Breakfast bao zi, jiao zi, banana
Lunch kung pao chicken, chao Cai, vegetables, frog legs.

Bathroom at hotel has an toilet w water saving two flushes. Shower to open floor.

Dinner Peking duck, cabbage. Cauliflower, salt duck bones

Day 3
Breakfast at hotel. Meh.
Complicated subway trip to sanlitun mall area which ended up everything we wanted to see being closed. Complicated trip back. Raining hard by the time we got out.
Lunch at place across st duck and fried noodles. Really good.
Ping pong in public
Lao Beijing, I heart BJ, lots of public spitting by old men, clear g of throats
Small groups wearing monks or karate clothes
Electric mopeds that are entirely soundless

Day 4
Breakfast at place next door.
Road out of Beijing lots of nice new and old skyscrapers buildings. Plants decorating highway.
Cars look identical
English/pinyin everywhere almost always.
Everybody has an iPhone (everybody, or Samsung)
Lexus dealer
Road out of city is all tree and shrubs growing for sale.
Closer to mountains, very touristy but not many tourists.
Lots of isolated shrines (serious well decorated) just sitting in a field or on top of a small ridge

Great Wall - amazing. Someone forgot a level when building

Lunch - subway. Tastes the same everywhere.
I saw grape leaves growing. I smell... Cows? Pigs?
Lots of brightly colored exercise equipment next to playgrounds
Two camels sitting in bright green river basin. No water.
Our bus driver really likes passing everybody no matter what. He might slow down or speed up if a car comes the other way.
Roof top water heaters.
Everybody growing a very small crop of corn outside their walls
Gas stations seem empty even though highways full of cars
More people smoke but not everywhere. Female truck drivers

Dinner on airplane - measly Lang pao chicken. Seaweed salad muffin yogurt-thing sweet rolls (called bao zi)

Day 5 Chengdu
Breakfast baozi rice porridge bean sprouts savory flan
Jin li st cicadas yak meat rabbit heads, crossbow

People's Park-100 things

Cars go one way on one way streets but everybody else does what they want. Nobody is driving crazy but lanes seem optional. Safe but worrisome. Not speeding at all just questionable choices and behavior by cars, bikes, peds all.

Stores - 100 things to say

Chinese opera -
Taxi cheap
Cheng du fancy, so many new buildings, luxury stores
Post-modern story within a story
Mask changing
Grating female opera voice,
Very traditional music and dress mixed with very modern music and effects.
Chinese english Korean Japanese subtitles
San guo, 108 stories

TV - stupid, just like US
Motorcycle repair on the sidewalk.
People tend to try to speak minimal English if they can.
Skyscrapers go on and on.

Day 6 Thu - cheng du Pandas
Tibetan restaurants/stores
Lots of subway stops
Business skyscrapers give way to apartment skyscrapers. I see a spot where they missed.lota of construction. Lots of mopeds
Cicadas at panda zoo
You want to hug a panda

Lots of kids with shaved heads but a heart or circle.

Huge outdoor mall area as first couple floors of skyscrapers

Taxi driver left us off a block away and then continued on past front of hotel ahead.

You can see the sky in Chengdu (not in Beijing)
People walk across the st without a care with cars coming on either side.
Roads have lanes for bikes/scooters.
Free condoms in lobby of hotel

Day 7 Guilin to Yangshuo
Raining
Potholes
Beautiful streets in Guilin (riverside hostel really nice along river)
Guilin dirt is red
Everybody has a smart phone
Banks everywhere
Motorcycles and scooters in rain doesn't stop them
Rice
Constant change in crops. Beautiful mountains
Patchwork crops

B landscape totally flat but scattered with limestone hills

Nice cars from everywhere. Volvo Skoda Mitsubishi BMW



Etc toll ezpass

Yang shuo new built buildings with no siding look abandoned in the middle

Li river cruise amazing. Pictures are a weak copy of reality.
Trash in water at harbor
Selling dried fish onboard
Taking pictures of the 20 yuan with li river landscape on bill and in background.
tourists are almost entirely chinese (again I thought I was special)
Talked with older couple about kids. A younger man tried to talk (in sorry but I'm shy. The language thing or the social situation)
Water buffalo, bamboo, edging on river, cormorants, houses along river,

Day 8 Yangshuo
Breakfast - noodles

Raining off and on humid

Bike ride/moon hill - too much to see
Rice paddies, continuous cultivation of everything, small villages w new concrete roads, poster with alternative medicine flames, dams, pet dogs not saying hi, fruit trees, melons, grapes, lotus, wildflowers, Palm trees bamboo exercise parks other tourists, mao shrine in house. Talking with tang up mountain steps


Moon hill natural arch - easy short climb through bamboo etc forest so muggy can't tell if rain or sweat.

Lunch - Ian said best yet, taro chips, peppers not as spicy as claimed, egg and tomatoes, potatoes, beef w onions and veggies

Driving - people drive very slowly. But don't seem to follow right of way, or rather they do but not lines on street. Horn honking is loud but meaning is polite, to tell you that I'm about to pass

Got a lift with a motorcycle 3 on. Totally safe except very questionable
Truck filed with dogs of same type
Shopping in Yangshuo - 'local market' of touristy things snack aisle had all sorts of vacuum packed fish or meat things, chicken feet.

Dinner - Nolan fried rice, Shohreh fast food buffet. Ian spicy noodles. Faux tiramisu, Black Forest cake, bowls in plastic vs buffet confusing.


Day 9 travel Yangshuo to hk
Yu long river
Building everywhere
Potholes!!!
Cell usage everywhere
Shohreh says How dare they have tolls on roads in China
G65 off 543
Less pinyin in guilin, lots in Yangshuo
How did hills in guangxi develop?
Xanadu Putao 535
Gas station teardrops on highway Sinopec
Hills go on forever in every direction
Little terracing of rice paddies I guess because everything is so flat between the hills
Scooters and motorcycles with umbrellas either attached or holding
Highway 2 yrs old
Bamboo scaffolding looks flimsy
Highway sparse
Red dirt
Er 508 exit near G72
Tree planting in grids like France
Rumble strips 3 3 2 2 1 1
Now lots of hills far off in the distance
Cloudy consistently so no sun, have to use compass
Hard to balance typing and looking
Hills shorter and less steep, connect together
Individuals working in fields not so quaint. Hard work
Cars mostly new. Mini work trucks look much older
Gravestones at base of limestone hill
Exit s22 01
Store fronts entirely open everywhere we've been, even large hardware groceries toys motorcycle repair
Shrubs along highways
Wide bike scooter paths along main roads

On train to Shenzhen
Little villages nestled within tall hills. Lots of new bldgs they don't want to put siding on many, some dirt roads
I see a non-chinese person and want to stare.
Big empty train platforms (Guilin was full)
Guangdong flat broader bigger fields more taller bldgs
Large ponds with pumps in the middle
We had the kindergarten car. So many excited singing kids

Shenzhen metro
Little kid outed me as meiguoren
Littler kid has uber alles t-shirt

HK
2 customs
Ian says why do they need the same info that's in the passport copied onto a form?
Great air conditioning
So many mountains on the mainland side of HK

Jordan - like NYC smashed into 10squarr blocks. A seller in the night market swore at a customer for walking away. Great Japanese candy store.
Pakistan halal, Thai Vietnamese, doner kebab.
Multicultural: Malaysian, African Indian, southeast Asian.

Day 10 HK
Breakfast dim sum fulun restaurant
Cruise ship, modern mall
People are mostly very curt ad humorless
Skyline of HK island
Lunch at peak restaurant (noodles, turkey club, fried rice)
Peninsula hotel tea
No dinner (Ian had fried chicken, cucumbers, noodle soup) I had milk tea.

Day 11 HK
Bfast - McD's
Metro real nice try
Lantau islandvoiin
Cable car to Buddha - enlightening
Bus to Tai O fishing village - bust, false advertising. So many squid related food products.
Ian wonders that people still love like that.
Drivers are 'normal' here, drive faster, follow rules
Scenery great
Infrastructure for rural env really modern. Feels European.
Squat toilets ok w shorts.

Lunch
Subway (I had mango lassi and samosas from Ebeneezer's)

Dinner
Fulum fisher mans wharf restaurant
Yao had us wash our glasses and bowls and cs
Waitstaff surly and miffed by other waitstaff, walk away in the middle of the order
All mostly retired peopl

Misheard: ff7 sadder than titanic

Had laundry done at a chinese laundry

Day 12 HK to Tokyo
Bf cheap buns
Lunch on Cathay pacific al, sns pork
JR Narita line
Japanese rice fields much neater larger and fuller than Chinese
People dressed less casually (not formally at all) wait... It's rush hour, everyone is coming back from work.
A handful of masks


YMCA br room very 69's looking
Guy with masked sneezed terribly in elevator

Searching for sushi conveyor place we ended up at a ?hibachi? place

Dinner Sukiyaki - the travel shows never showed that at some places, pay at machine

7-11 had mostly people looking for convenience dinner

Day 13 Tokyo
Breakfast YMCA turnip/fish broth soup rice kimchi mini mushrooms
Always pay somewhere else first

Lunch at Hamamatsucho bus station cabbage salad

Everybody dresses the same. Everybody. Black pants, white collared shirt black or blue business suit. All work people.

2 Indian restaurants

Bus tour - 12m Tokyo, 30 area, 127m country
WTC
7-11 covers Tokyo too
Convenience stores, small restaurants everywhere
Clean clean clean
ATMs have english, but lots of places want cash or don't take
cc
Few bikes
Very modern concrete and steel bldgs (not much mirror siding)
Tour fact: most people follow both Shinto and Buddhist practices/beliefs

It raining constantly but people (and tourists) are still out.

Trains on time to the minute, and scheduled often

Chinese restaurants

Dinner at sushi manemura conveyor belt super excellent and cheap kind of loud 'not crappy'
People talk in restaurants, not on pub trans
Mistook tea for wasabi powder. Mixed with soy, really not the same

Review of Hanemaru ( in the Kitte building across from Tokyo station):
Conveyor belt sushi is a crass gimmick, like sprinkles on donuts or strobe lights at fireworks show.
But there's also the accompanying atmosphere and quality of the sushi. We were foreigners here but the conveyor belt was very practical for us, just take what looks good. Everything looked good.

And the war zone that was our table at the end with random stacks of miniplates and dribbles of soy sauce, all of us stuffed beyond imagination, only $15 a person. Luxury eating at regular prices


Day 14 Tokyo
Breakfast seaweed soup at y
Joypolis
Huge landfill developed area full of buildings k.

Urinals have video games, measures volume

Every so often a woman in a kimono or a young couple (just married)

Kabuki theater is such kabuki theater

Every joke has been made before

Dept store basements have the food shops

English (not just roman) on all transit.
Joypolis had written english instructions. Taxi drivers and info people and waiters very polite about no japanese speaking

Dinner selection of foods from food shops.

Day 15 Tokyo to Boston
TV shows have a small box in lower left or right of someone watching the same show and giving their reactions, just facial expressions

Cars just have a slightly different body shape.

Commercial Parking lot with space for two cars. That's it.

nobody has driers, everyone hangs laundry to dry

'Blonded' hair

House rooves some regular some 'chinese'. All small and shallow.

Taking pictures on a train is hard. By the time you realize there is something interesting to take, it's already gone.

Street and rail crosswalks everywhere and all used

I am what I eat or don't eat on purpose

I grew up in Richmond, VA, a southern town but not deep south. As I grew up (1970's suburban white), I never felt southern (or northern, or anything), and people outside of Virginia asked my why I didn't have an accent. I don't (sez I!) but every so often I'll let through a "y'all" or "hunnert" (for 'hundred') and think it is the height of articulate speech to say 'Et-lanna' for Atlanta (I just say 'lanna'). And as to food, I grew up on McD's hamburgers and Taco Bell and HoHo's and DingDong's and bagel and baloney sandwiches and frozen mini pizzas like everybody else in every suburb in the US. Sure, there were a noticeably greater amount of pine trees, below the top two inches of topsoil the dirt was orange, and I got chiggers (once, and only when I came back to visit as an adult).

But I now realize there were a number of things I ate (or decidedly didn't) that say 'Southern':

• barbeque - I never liked this as a kid but love it as an adult. The only experience of this I had as a kid was a drive up that my mom liked. I got the burger. But now I really appreciate it.
• cornbread - The kind I had as a kid was dry and dense, almost peppery, coming in small fingers made from a metal indented pan to make them look like corn cobs. What I consider edible cornbread now is almost cake, sweet and thick.
• greens - collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, creamed kale, I loved them all, cooked with with salt pork.
• fried chicken - my mom was into health and stuff, so she didn't make it with batter or skin. Popeye's is the best ever, but you can't have it too often without having a piece of your heart die. Literally.
• okra - never had it as a kid and rarely as an adult. Some people hate it and some love it. I don't care.
• brunswick stew - the best way to burn your tongue. Great from a can or made from scratch.
• mac and cheese - never had it as a kid (did I mention my mom was into health and stuff). I still don't understand what's so great about it. But this is southern?
• watermelon - it was around -all- the time as a kid. It was OK, but made a sticky mess, sort of like cotton candy but wet. also seeds are a pain. I'm still ambivalent about it
• Krispy Kreme donuts - like Kleenex, these are the canonical donuts. But I didn't care for them. Again a little messy. DD donuts are real donuts. Sorry, South.
• grits - hell yeah. As a kid I had the instant kind where you add boiled water, which if you add the a little grated cheese and hot sauce are great (ooh and a boiled egg).  Waffle House and diner grits have so much extra ... something... that they feel like something else. Not bad but just ... too much.
• roasted tomato halves - best thing ever at fancy buffet events (after all the others). Fried green tomatoes is just weird like some foreigner thought it would be a good idea for the title of a quirky movie, and then people thought it was an actual thing. It's not a thing. Roasted (red) tomato halves are a thing, a real thing that is actually good.
• sweet tea - ugh...who would put that much sugar in their tea? I mean, unsugared is a little too ascetic but sweet tea? ugh.
• crab cakes ... ugh.
• pecan pie - that's southern? I thought it was just pie. Anyway, banana pudding kicks its ass. Not that pecan pie is bad. Just if you had to choose.
• fried pickles - ? hunh? That's a thing? And a Southern thing? I've never heard of that. Ever. Why try to gild the lily?
• hush puppies - mmm. Only ever had them on vacation, Virginia Beach or Nagshead at a seafood restaurant
• sweet potatoes and yams  (there's a difference?) - ugh. These things look funny! And taste funny! No way! Potato or sweet potato? Take the potato.
• tofu - a versatile basis for any... haha, just kidding. That stuff is so bland, you add it to dishes to take away taste. Also, not Southern.
• pig maw - eww. pass.
• black-eyed peas, lima beans, just beans - I avoided these every New Year's. Ugh. It's not that they taste bad, it's just that they don't taste good.
• biscuits - these are southern? They're not universal? I have nothing against them, they're OK (when not greasy)
• chitlins - that's just a funny word that people use on old west shows. Nobody actually eats that stuff. 
• smithfield ham - as a kid, tasted funny, why would you ruin a biscuit sandwich with weird meat. Now I appreciate it a lot.
• apple butter - if this is at all a southern thing, it's great. It's great anyway.
• deviled eggs - also, this is southern? They're great, but don't have too many, especially if they've been lying in the sun

Some of these items were off the top of my head. Some I was reminded of by the wiki list. Those on the list that are not here I just don't recognize, didn't think of as southern, or just don't care about. Also, I find it funny to go to a 'soul food' restaurant and wonder what's going on because it's just food.

Effect size versus statistical significance

One of the major tropes in the p-value wars is the difference between statistical significance and effect size. The usual (important) observation is that you can have a calculation on data that results in very small p-value, meaning very high statistical significance, but very small effect. And often this can be effected by increasing the number of instances: the more instances the smaller the p-value can be guaranteed, that the phenomenon is really not due to chance, no matter how small the scale phenomenon actually is. This is not to say that the phenomenon is not real, just that the phenomenon doesn't change that much in one direction.

This difference is presented often laconically ("Using Effect Size—or Why the P Value Is Not Enough") as:

Statistical significance is the least interesting thing about the results. You should describe the results in terms of measures of magnitude –not just, does a treatment affect people, but how much does it affect them.(Kline RB)

This makes it sound like you have two things that can be presented, and one is much more important than the other. But it's a false dichotomy. You want both. The magnitude is descriptive stats - how big it is. In an experiment on n individuals, fish oil tablets increased memory performance by 10%. If you don't know the effect size, what exactly beyond 'better' do you know about the phenomenon? Statistical significance is trust - how (mathematically) representative the sample is of the population. You can claim something is better but can you really trust the claim?

It's very easy to see how to manufacture a high statistical significance but low effect size - increase the number of instances. In fact, as you increase n, almost all statistical tests asymptotically approach statistical significance (for real world phenomena). Chi-squared is the worst!

A consistent high effect size (over samples) leads obviously to high statistical significance.

But it is possible to have high effect size and low significance.

So in the end, it is not one or the other. Both should be presented. The effect size tells you how different the sample shows phenomenon is, and the p-value tells you how much you can trust the sample that showed the phenomenon.

Annoying Sciency Tropes: Big effing number

Here's a really annoying pattern that comes up in science journalism (OK really any news story that involves a number) and it involves so many fallacies and misdirections and insults to intelligence that I can't over underestimate it. It is the presence of a Big Number.

The yearly output of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere is 50 bajillion tons. Wow, that must be bad because a bajillion is a lot. (Also 'tons'. You can have a ton of air? (of course you can that's physics, but it is counterintuitive enough to simply leave the reader with the simple incoherent feeling of 'wow').

The number of deaths due to the Iraq War of 2003 was approximated at 600,000. Of course that is terrible (any such death is terrible). But is it reliable? Is the scale right? How was the number arrived at? What groups are in that number? Is it overcounted? Undercounted? Adding a zero hardly changes the impact of the story but is still wildly inaccurate.

Million, billion, trillion are hard to distinguish. They're mostly 'really a lot', 'really really a lot', 'that sounds like a lot'.

I realize I'm giving these without context, but the point is that often news stories lack all context too.

There's a little bit of technical obscurantism going on (is a nanometer bigger or smaller than a picometer?) which expects education; that is, it is questionable whose fault this is, the one using the technical term or the one reading it. If the reader were educated, this is the best most accurate communication, what technical language nuances are created for. If the reader is not educated in these nuances (which are not nuances to the initiated), then what?

Part of the annoyance is that this is usually combined with a Base Rate Fallacy; usually no comparison data is given - no comparison with the total or comparable items, no context. For example, the debt of the US government is given (latest number) in news stories as $14 trillion. Obviously this is a big unfathomable number, but also there is nothing to compare it with, either the historical debt (what the trend has been over the past few years, what the debt in other countries is like).

What's the solution? For the reader, look outside the article for the base rate or trend. For the writer, supply that! Give something to compare with.

Bullshit

Bullshit. There's no better word for things that sound true or plausible but have no connection to or no support in reality or any attempt by the speaker to make that connection. The metaphor is weak but it captures the feeling of the realization about what someone else has said.

Usually a statement is called bullshit if it stretches the bounds of plausibility. If it turns out to be a falsehood, it is considered a lie. Harry Frankfurt wrote an entire book on the subject, trying to solidify it (ugh, metaphors) as a statement by a person who is not intentionally trying to lie but rather has no concern at all for its truth value. That is, a bullshitter doesn't care whether a statement is true or false. Frankfurt is a philosopher and is trying to shoehorn a word into his own internal concept or into one that is more logically amenable, which is to say I think that usage is charitable. A bullshitter is trying to lie; if the statement turns out true, they would be surprised.

But the label is problematic. Bullshit is a little taboo (or a lot given the context). What are the alternatives? There are many but they have their problems, too.

All the following words fit the syntactic pattern, in response to something said, "That's X".

The first category is the anachronistic nonsense words:

• balderdash
• bosh
• bunk
• bunkum
• claptrap
• codswallop
• fiddlesticks
• flapdoodle
• folderol
• guff
• hokum
• hooey
• malarkey
• piffle
• poppycock
• tosh
• tommyrot

What do any of these words mean? They're entirely opaque nonsense words, made up by someone long ago out of random sounds to sound like what they're describing. Another thing they all have in common is that currently (and for the past fifty years at least) no one in their right mind would utter these in sincerity, given that they sound like an old man smoking a cigar mincing an oath. All of these words are idiomatic, inexplicable. This description is almost the meaning, which may be the originally intended psychological effect.

Moving closer to reality, the next is the most populated category (and likely most thought of if not used), the actual shit category. Shit itself really isn't (metaphorical) bullshit - metaphorical shit is just worthless, but metaphorical bullshit is a damned lie. Many are minced (crap for shit), but at least they are analyzable.

• bullshit
• crap
• crock (of shit)
• horseshit
• horsetwaddle
• horsefeathers - minced horseshit, so to speak
• twaddle

Now there are real, relatable but still not literal, for mixed up messes, trash or sausage metaphors:

• garbage
• hogwash - sounds like nonsense to me but actually is pig slop.
• rubbish
• baloney

Actual literal non-onomatopoeic words that are close in meaning but just not quite bullshit and still somewhat old fashioned:

• blather
• bombast
• drivel
• trumpery

And finally the list of actual, literal words:

• nonsense

Of all the lists of related words I've seen for bullshit, 'nonsense' is the only direct literal word for it.

And that is the real problem here. Bullshit is not nonsense. Nonsense is words that make no sense. Bullshit makes sense, may be true or not, but may be misleading. Word salad (a salad made of words), gibbering (of an idiot), unconnected train of thought (of someone distracted) are all nonsense. Bullshit makes sense entirely. Just the intention (or reception) is different from usual truth valued statements.

Therefore there is no good alternative to bullshit.