Haha, BK Marcus posted this the other day and I couldn’t help but laugh because I am so headstrong when it comes to apriori versus aposteriori.
For instance, during my oral exam for my masters, the committee chairman asked me what I thought of social sciences in general — if I had changed my mind about Likert scales. I told him that despite all of the statistics classes and various case-studies we had dissected, interval methodology was invalid for anything but anecdotes in social sciences.
For example, I thought the most recent episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia was 4.5 out of 5. You think it is also 4.5 out of 5. However, the problem is, our values are entirely subjective and cannot be averaged or quantified as if it were one concrete opinion. Sure sites like Amazon or NewEgg usually create useful generalizations with user ratings, but you can’t use the interval scale as an ironclad law because subjective minded humans do not have the same internal preference scales.
It’s one of the reasons that Quant funds on Wall Street were decimated this past year because they attempted to quantify human action (or in their case, artificial incentives) using inherently incomplete equations — using false assumptions to fill in for a continually changing series of individual preferences (or in their case, risks/demand).
See also: Chapter 1 of Human Action
Back in one piece, though I did attach myself with a very friendly head cold. Don’t play drinking games with soldiers again, bad idea.
So I spent about 4 days out in a city with some college students I know. They wanted to practice English and I can’t read much Chinese — so it was a win-win friendship.
We stayed at a Home Inn which I recommend to anyone that likes the comfort of the West (e.g., no squat toilets, clean bottled water) and it’s fairly cheap. There are tons of things to see, both from a modern and historical perspective (just look at the list of things on the Wiki entry).
The nightlife at 1912 (here and here) was fun, memorable, but kind of expensive (you have to buy bottles of liquor, not just glasses). Music was performed by live DJs and everyone wants to hang out with the foreigners — to do a dance off (I managed to pull off the sprinkler and shopping cart).
There were some Korean restaurants that were sandwiched in between the thousands of local Chinese eateries (none of which are “chain” restaurants… all mom and pop). Mexican food sucked, don’t eat at Tucos (the beef tastes like gerbil meat). If you are dying to eat some Western cuisine, check out Golden Hans buffet. It’s relatively cheap, food is plentiful and everyone dresses up in 18th century-period German attire.
On to the pictures:
Don’t let the smiles fool you, they are rabid, heartless anti-Americans that had to be carefully monitored 24/7. They carried around miniature pictures of Betsy Ross and burned them at dusk and dawn. Oh and they like Edith Wharton, Gossip Girls and World of Warcraft. Damn commie scum!
This is along side the Qinhuai river. It’s slightly blurry because it was raining that night. The entire area is a fairly modern tourist trap with all sorts of stereotypical Chinese architecture. Oddly enough, while there were lots of Chinese wandering around, there weren’t many Laowei (foreigners) out and about. Definitely worth checking out. More on the “bazaar” night market here and here.
This is the outer wall of the old Presidential Palace used by various entities including the Heavenly King and the Kuomintang. Look at all those horses and rickshaws in the street!
This is the first courtyard you come to inside the palace. It’s one of the few that wasn’t burned down by either the Japanese or British. The British burned down the Old Summer Palace because the Chinese policy makers didn’t want to buy opium. And the Japanese had the dubious distinction of doing similar acts during the 1930s.
I’m standing in front of a throne (replica, as the original was purportedly made of gold) of Hong Xiuquan who said he was the brother of Jesus Christ — and you thought that only Westerners like Mormons or Davidians made such claims! Be sure to read up on the Taiping Rebellion. That’s a lot of dead people.
That’s a bronze bust/carving of Hong’s motley crew. If you get a closer angle they all look like they came from the movie 300, big and ripped.
This is just one of the million pagodas inside the palace. The porous rocks had something to do with a guy named Confucius, whoever that was. See also the Nanjing Confucius Temple.
Yes yes, I know, dreary gray skies. It rained later that day, but the construction crews kept building whatever evil communistic Armageddon device that lays behind the bamboo scaffolding. This is right across the road from the Palace.
This is the new Nanjing Library which is also next to the Palace. You don’t want to know what happens to people that return books late!
What, no signs in English? Actually, nearly all of the road signs are also written in English. Most of the signs in the Palace were written in English, Japanese and Korean. The sign at the very top points to Albuquerque.
I’ll try to upload some more photos. I also visited a few other sites including Purple Mountain, Linggu Temple and Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. Yes, I know, a libertarian that visited government temples. Sue me.
