How is everyone? Its been about a year since I have seen most of you guys. Sometimes the times seem to pass by quickly, sometimes it seems to pass by slowly. I thought it would be good to just give a brief update about my life here. Basically, life here in Shanghai boils down to work, the politics and dramas associated with that, my mishandling of numerous relationships, as well as befriending other overseas Chinese such as myself. My typical day starts with work at 9am. I usually get off between 6pm through 8pm. Every other day, I go to a local gym for about 1 hour and a half.

Most week nights I go to dinner with random dates or a girl that I am seeing at the time. Once ever so often I find myself free to enjoy dinner by myself, this is actually one of my most peaceful times. I would take a book and eat somewhere alone. I am currently reading Moby Dick, I wanted to get away from the science fiction and quantum mechanics stuff that I was reading last year and shift more towards literature. But as you can imagine, once every week or so does not leave me with much time to progress much through the book, I believe I am still within the first 50 pages or so.

I have been running more ever since last year. Every other day I run about 30 minutes at the gym and then maybe go to weights. I am starting to see my age, if i am not careful or eat too much, I can gain a few kg within 2 weeks and develop a small gut. Notice I have already shifted to using kg rather than pound.

I am usually never home until 10pm on weekday nights. Once I am home, I sometimes watch a DVD and then go to bed around 12:30.

On weekends, I usually spend the nights with friends having dinner, in bars, and sometimes in clubs. Karaoke is big here and I actually find it enjoyable now that I have learned the lyrics to a few songs. I suppose I am becoming more Chinese. We play ultimate frisbee on Sundays fairly regularly, then afterwards we usually go for a big buffet dinner, often involving Japanese food.

At nights when I have nothing to do I still go on Kongregate to play those addicting tower defence games. Although I have to say Desktop Defender is still the best (others include Gemcraft, Protector, etc).

Oh and sometimes I still watch Starcraft proleague replays as well as SC2 replays. I have a Xbox360 at home hooked up to a nice samsung HD tv, although I havent had much time to play it.

For the children.

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Q4U (2002), Feng Mengbo

Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his melding of video game culture with imagery from the Cultural Revolution. As you can probably guess, he is an obsessive online gamer.

more artwork after the jump.

only in china would a researcher be willing to openly study this:

[BGI] is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

(first seen at steve hsu’s site)

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. – Aristotle

there’s a bit of unrest in greece lately over the planned austerity measures. greece’s misfortune is almost wholly their own fault as their government had no spending restraint for the past decade. the rest of europe, including a very grudging germany, bailed the greeks out, but only after imposing severe economic austerity on the nation. the greeks learned that they don’t have many friends in the supposedly lubby-dubby EU even though they share a single currency. the germans only agreed to the bailout when they realized the fate of the euro itself depended upon their bailout funds. greece was, in effect, an island.

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in a story sure to get the attention of the rpg crowd, a harvard study has shown that a person who believes he is good or evil actually enhances their physical strength.

“People perceive those who do good and evil to have more efficacy, more willpower, and less sensitivity to discomfort,” Gray said. “By perceiving themselves as good or evil, people embody these perceptions, actually becoming more capable of physical endurance.”

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• Artwork: Fang Lijun, No. 1

• Artist: Fang Lijun, 方力钧

• DOB: December 4, 1963

• Beijing-based

• Member of Cynical Realism Movement (1990s)