By Melinda Liu
Newsweek International
June 4, 2006

The rainy season has come to northern China, and it’s a brave new world out there. Actually the natural rainy season doesn’t start until July. But the season of man-made rain is upon us, and Chinese rainmakers have been busy. Over the past month they've mobilized cloud-seeding aircraft, artillery and rockets to enhance rainfall. "We've ordered technicians to try to make it rain again today, but so far they haven’t reported back on the results," says Zhang Qiang, a businesslike woman who heads the Beijing Weather Modification Office (yes, that’s the official name of a real Chinese government agency). "We did it many times last week to increase the rainfall."

Not content with simply making it rain, now China's weather modifiers have taken on another meterological mission: to help guarantee perfect weather when Beijing hosts the Olympic Games in 2008.

Zhang's office, which employs 30 people, is part of the Beijing municipal government and the nationwide China Meteorological Administration. Her unit uses two aircraft and 20 artillery and rocket-launching bases to help modify weather around the city. Springtime is the busiest season for agricultural purposes. But more and more, Zhang and her colleagues are experimenting with weather modification to try to create blue skies. Toward this end, they’ve spent nearly a month and a half total researching the effects of certain chemical activators on different sizes of cloud formations and at different altitudes. Chinese meteorologists claim that similar efforts helped create good weather for a number of past VIP events in China, including the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

And why not? The central-government leadership—dominated by engineers—has been messing with Mother Nature ever since the Chinese Communist Party came to power. They’ve built the world’s biggest dam, the world’s highest railway and even the world’s biggest Ferris wheel (in Nanchang, still awaiting verification from the Guinness World Records). Why not perfect the science of climate control?

Today Chinese rainmakers are among the world’s busiest. Beijing's nationwide weather-modification budget exceeds $50 million a year. The communist regime’s 11th Five Year Plan, which kicked off this year, calls for the creation of 48 billion to 60 billion cubic meters of artificial rain annually (somewhere between 12 trillion to 16 trillion gallons of water). Beijing needs it. Right now is when fruit trees and crops need life-giving water; the parched North China plain has been stalked by drought since 1998. Normal precipitation is between 22 and 24 inches annually, says Zhang, but Beijing had only 18 inches last year.

Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me.
Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me!
Gangsta: Man, what are you excusing me about? Fck you!
Old Chinese lady: Fck me? Ok, take-a off the pant.

Stairway in silence.

Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me!
Gangsta: Sure thing, ma'am. I'm sorry.
Chinese kid: And that's why we respect our elders.

– Canal St station (Sharon: Near Chinatown)

I've been watching the HBO mini-series Rome lately. It is an excellent drama that depicts the city in a way that is vastly more grim than it was in popcorn movies like Gladiator, but is more consistent with the ancient Rome that we see from the remnants of its arts and writings.

The series drove me to look more deeply into the lives of the people who are so convincingly represented on screen. I began encountering statements like "She married Marcus Junius Brutus, a relative nobody in the political scene. From this marriage, Servilia had one son: Marcus Junius Brutus." or "Atia Balba Caesonia married the Macedonian governor and senator Gaius Octavius. Their children were Octavia Thurina Minor and a younger Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus."

I was maddeningly confused by the naming conventions, so I looked them up as well. Here, you like it or not, you'll be treated to an introduction of the Roman naming conventions.

In the naming convention used in ancient Rome, derived from that of the Etruscan civilization, the names of male patricians normally consist of three parts (tria nomina): the praenomen (given name), nomen gentile (name of the gens or clan) and cognomen (belonging to a family within the gens). Sometimes a second cognomen (called agnomen) was added. A male who was adopted also showed his "filiation".

The praenomen roughly equates to the given, or Christian, name of today. Compared to most cultures, Romans used a tiny number of different pranomina: most people were given names from a list of fewer than forty, reduced to about 18 in the late Republic. This form of "first" name, except for familiar or friendly use, was relatively unimportant, and was not frequently used on its own. The more common names include: Flavius, Gaius, Gnaeus, Lucius, Marcus, Titus.

The second name or nomen gentile is the name of the gens (the family clan), in masculine form for men. The original gentes were descended from the family groups that settled Rome. These eventually developed into entire clans, which covered specific geographic regions. The more common second names include: Aemilius, Claudius, Cornelius, Domitius, Julius, Antonius and Valerius.

The third name, or cognomen, began as a nickname or personal name that distinguished individuals within the same gens. During the Roman Republic and Empire, the cognomen is inherited from father to son, serving to distinguish a family within a Gens. Often the cognomen was chosen based on some physical or personality trait, sometimes with ironic results: Julius Caesar's cognomen meant hairy although he was balding, and Tacitus's cognomen meant silent, while he was a well-known orator.

A distinction could even be made in families with an agnomen. A few of these were inherited like the cognomen, thus establishing a sub-family within a family. The majority, however, were used as nicknames. A few examples include Africanus, Augustus (for Emperors), Britannicus, Caligula, Germanicus, and Imperator.

(I won't complicate things by introducing the conventions for females at this point)
So, let's at look the name of one of the few military geniuses in the Western history, who extended the Roman world to as far as Britannia and who catalyzed the breakdown of the Roman Republic. The first season of Rome focuses on this man.

Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC)

• Praenomen (sort of like a nickname): Gaius
• Nomen gentile (name of the gen): Julius, an important patrician family of ancient Rome supposed to have descended from Julus, son of Aeneas (one of the princes who were defeated in the war of Troy and fled to Italy). The name is also seen as Iulius.
• Cognomen (name of family branch): Caesar. It originally meant "hairy", which suggests that the Iulii Caesares, a specific branch of the gens Iulia bearing this name, were conspicuous for having fine heads of hair. The change of Caesar from being a familial name to an imperial title occured around AD 68, several generations after Julius Caesar. At that time the word was pronounced as "KAI-sahr" in Classical Latin. It spawned imperial titles in other languages such as Kaiser in German, Czar in Russian, and Qaysar in Arabic.

God bless Wikipedia! The majority of this post is compiled with information from the greatest source of knowledge on the Internet.

God I love this guy. Of course he enjoys an enormous home advantage over Bill Bennett; and the thunderous pace of a late night show is not conducive to political debate. But just from the way he puts points across:

Bennett: Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between man and woman.
Stewart: I disagree, it's a debate about whether you think the gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Not even Dick Cheney has the heart to publicly oppose gay marriage. It is a shame that we are still debating this issue in this age.

This lady pops a baby without breaking a sweat. Goes back to looking like Miss L Croft a week after giving birth. How does she do it???

And having your picture where you looked like a mouse fetch US$4.1 million... The kid will need a shrink at age 4.

For those of you who are zealously preparing for the start of World Cup 2006, here is an excellent list of readings:

• The World Cup and Economic 2006
• The Homeless World Cup
• Legal Determinants of World Cup Success
• Impact of Overwhelming Joy on Consumer Demand: The Case of a Football World-Cup Victory
• The Football Wars: Bono Says the World Cup Is a Peacemaker. Not Quite
• The Beautiful Game: Why Football Rules the World
• World Cup is going green

七成受訪者望政府播世界盃

一項調查發現，近7成受訪市民希望政府開放大型場館及社區中心，播放世界盃揭幕戰及決賽。

民協月初以電話訪問了250人，調查結果顯示，9成受訪者知道六月中會舉行世界盃，6成人表示會觀看直播賽事；另有3成多人支持巴西隊獲勝；1成半支持英格蘭隊。

調查也發現近7成人希望政府開放大型場館及社區中心播放世界盃開幕戰及決賽，讓市民可以觀賞球賽。

超過8成受訪者認為，世界盃將吸引更多人參與足球賭博，也會導致市民睡眠不足而影響健康，以及導致食肆、酒吧噪音滋擾及醉酒駕駛的問題更為嚴重。

Cool finds of the day:


Netvibes – A truly customizable web-based homepage that lets me pool many of my RSS feeds and random snippets.

(Via The Top 100 of The Museum of Modern Betas)








Shredding scissors – Five-scissor blades on one handle. If it works as advertised, it's an excellent idea!

(Via Boingboing)