Chinese

I found a webpage that lists the 2,500 most common Chinese characters, in order of the frequency they are used. This is interesting to me, because it seems to mean that someone who is studying Chinese (such as myself) can effectively study the characters that are most useful in daily life. I decided this after the lesson in my Chinese book that was teaching us about Beijing and Shanghai opera - the stuff is marginally interesting but I kept thinking that for all the work I was doing to memorize characters and vocabulary, at least I should be doing it for something more useful than the remote chance I get into a discussion about opera with a Chinese person.

The site also has a table of how many characters one must know in order to reach a certain percentage of understanding of the language:

100 characters → 42% understanding
200 characters → 55% understanding
300 characters → 64% understanding
400 characters → 70% understanding
500 characters → 75% understanding
600 characters → 79% understanding
700 characters → 82% understanding
800 characters → 85% understanding
900 characters → 87% understanding
1000 characters → 89% understanding
1100 characters → 90% understanding
1200 characters → 91% understanding
1300 characters → 92% understanding
1400 characters → 93% understanding
1500 characters → 94% understanding
1600 characters → 95.0% understanding
1700 characters → 95.5% understanding
1800 characters → 96.0% understanding
1900 characters → 96.5% understanding
2000 characters → 97.0% understanding
2100 characters → 97.4% understanding
2200 characters → 97.7% understanding
2300 characters → 98.0% understanding
2400 characters → 98.3% understanding
2500 characters → 98.5% understanding
2600 characters → 98.7% understanding
2700 characters → 98.9% understanding
2800 characters → 99.0% understanding
2900 characters → 99.1% understanding
3000 characters → 99.2% understanding

It takes 1100 characters just to understand 90%, so it looks like I still have a lot of studying to do.

Good News!

In an email starting with "As one of the top candidates for the CNAPS internship position this summer..." I got my first interview scheduled for an internship this summer. The internship is non-research based, so it's not necessarily my first choice, but it is at the Brookings Institution in their Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. I'd rather take an internship that had me doing more research, but this is a great institution and I hope I make the cut. And since it's a phone interview, I won't even have to wear my suit.

Wall, Part 2

Remember our wall? Well, our building maintainence finally came last week, while we were snoozing in bed one morning, to fix our wall.

So far, this is how much they've done: they've scraped off the old paint on one side of the wall, and put down some sort of primer. They have yet to get to the worst part of it, which is in the bathroom.

Unfortunately, when our building manager said that they were going to do "demolition" I thought that meant they were going to be knocking out our wall and putting in a new one. Evidently, that wasn't what they meant. It's disappointing to be so undramatic, but also much less of nuisance!

The guy assured us he was coming back on Monday, so we'll see... 

Stories

Some good reading:

• Is the world going to the conservatives because liberals and modern city-dwellers are too busy to have kids? That's what Phillip Longman writes in Foreign Policy.
• Newsweek has an interesting article about "Continuous Partial Attention", describing when we are we so attached to the instantaneous communication world of email and cell-phones that we lose the ability to focus in the real world.

Blessing

I found the Lenten blessing in the Episcopal church yesterday to be quite profound:

Let your memory provide no shelter for grievance;
your heart no harbor for malice;
your tongue no accomplice for judgment.
May the blessing of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be with you now and always.
Amen

What I found most profound is that this is not an exhortation, but is rather a blessing, indicating that God will be the one doing those things to us. How interesting and comforting.

Another Black Mark

Suggested reading:

An article by the NY Times details Camp Nama, just a few miles from Abu Ghraib, where US soldiers turned a former Saddam Hussein torture chamber into one of their own. Prisoners were abused so flagrantly that even the CIA would not participate there, which is saying something these days.

The report gives serious ammunition against the claims that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was committed by "a few bad apples". Instead, it points to an intelligence system that has implicitly accepted abuse and torture of "those who are not like us."

As an American, it should be disgusting. If we claim to be representing democracy and freedom, then we are doing a very poor job of it. Torture and the wanton ignorance of human rights and international accords are not hallmarks of our country. We learned this in Vietnam. Do we have to learn it again?

The first page of the article

March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26
In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

Pocket PCs

For my birthday I got some money to buy a Pocket PC, but now I'm just trying to decide which one to buy. I know that I want it to have WiFi, so I can connect to the internet on campus and at home, and I want one with an attachable keyboard so I can type notes and emails on the go. Here are a few options:

• Dell's Axim X51
• HP's iPaq_hx2410

I'm leaning toward the Dell - it seems to do more for less money. Or I might look at used or older models.

Any suggestions anyone?

Design

I've played with the links on the right of the page a little bit.

I'm also hoping that over spring break (next week!) I might have a little time to put together an online photo album. My last one was so out of date that I took it down. Of course, I'll still have to keep working on my homework, since I have three papers coming up on me.

Water Damage

We've got a rather interesting problem in our apartment these days: our wall is collapsing. Or rather, it's peeling away. About the middle of last week we noticed that the wall that separates our bedroom from bathroom looked like it was getting water damaged, and by the end of the week it was so bad we called our building mechanic to take a look at it.

He confirmed that it was water, and that it was not coming from our apartment but rather from the one above us. No problem, he told us, we'll send someone on Monday to fix it.

Well, no one showed up Monday. On Tuesday, today, we got a note from our building manager saying that the master plumber would be around today to fix things up.

Well, no one showed up today either. So when I got home I called the manager and she gave me the story. Apparently the problem is huge - it goes down the same wall from the 4th floor to the basement! So "demolition" starts tomorrow, with the top floors going first, which should be interesting.

Supposedly it should take 1-2 days to get rid of the pipes, but of course, to do that they have to take out all the walls on five floors, and then they have to repair them when everything is finished.

So I have a feeling this place is going to be a disaster for a while. Our bedroom already looks like we are refugees, since all of our furniture is piled up on the opposite side of the room from the cracking wall. Fortunately, we haven't seen any actual leaks, but our wall does look pretty pregnant.

Good thing we're going to be away over the weekend. I'll try to take pictures if they knock anything out.

Secure Email

Everyone should get secure email. It's free, it's safe, every email program supports it, and it doesn't mean you're a bad guy if you use it. Let's think about it: Would you want everything you've ever emailed to be revealed? No, of course not! Would you rather send a postcard or a sealed letter (let's forget about the pretty pictures for a second)? I'd rather send a sealed letter, because then you at least have some protection about someone reading it along the way.

Email was never designed to be secure, but now it can be. So everyone, go out to one of these sites, download a free certificate, and start sending secure email:

• Thawte
• Comodo

Unfortunately these won't work if you're using any form of webmail.