China Trip - Part 5

I will close my retelling of our China trip with our days in Hangzhou and Shanghai. (The Wikipedia articles have great pictures of many of the sites I took pictures of, including the tea plantations and Shanghai's waterfront.) In Hangzhou, we began with a boat ride on the West Lake and took a walk through the gardens nearby. We also visited a tea house and sampled traditional green tea. The next day, we traveled to Shanghai. There, Vanessa and I saw the new developments and skyscrapers which have sprung up over the past few years. It is a city which is growing extremely rapidly, yet all of the land is still owned by the government. They have started a lease program, in which an entity can get a lease from the government to use the land for 70 years. When property changes hands, the lease isn't renewed, you only have the remaining time on the original lease. Some of the real estate prices were outrageous (even by California standards) if you consider that you may only have your property for 50 years before the government can take it back. I imagine this system will seem extremely odd to most Americans. While we were in the waterfront we saw the construction of what will be the tallest building in the world, when it is completed before the 2008 Olympics.

In closing, I offer some reflections on the trip. We saw amazing sights, experienced a different culture, and met new and interesting people. Several thoughts occurred to me as I think over my journey, I noticed that their culture had common themes and ideas. Similar stories, values, and ideals, it seems that in some ways, the core of most societies is very much alike. I was also struck by the pace of growth, it seems that China is an economic force to be reckoned with, and they appear to be rapidly expanding. Perhaps I saw only the "good parts"; my view may be inaccurate. Perhaps my view was colored by the pessimism which people say is characteristic of my generation when it comes to our nation's future. Perhaps I was just tired of the Chinese food ;)

China Trip - Part 4

We begin this installment of our ongoing series on our China trip in my favorite location. The Lingering Garden is a masterpiece of architecture and oriental style gardens complete with bonsai trees (However, it was devoid of bonsai kittens). I'm not surprised that Chinese poets came to this garden to find inspiration in beautiful Suzhou. I could have easily spent a few more hours walking around the pond and I can't believe that the entire complex of gardens and buildings once belonged to one family.

The third picture in this post is from the leaning Huqiu Tower in Suzhou. The brick work on the structure was amazing and it is older than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Vanessa took this one from a plaza to the side of the tower. Next time, I'll write about the very end of our trip in Hangzhou and Shanghai.

China Trip - Part 3

There were only a few moments where we caught a glimpse of what everyday life is like for the people of China and a couple of them came on this day of traveling. We continued our journey with a rickshaw ride through some of the older areas of Beijing and then we took a trip to the Temple of Heaven. As we walked the long corridor to the temple, we saw a large group of people playing cards, dancing, and making music. It was a glimpse of life that I would like to have taken part in, but I felt like an outsider. I'm still not sure what card games they were playing. The Temple of Heaven was a breathtaking structure and from the top of the hill you could see the entire city.

China Trip - Part 2

   I'm picking up my narrative on the second half of the first full day in which we visited the Great Wall. It was absolutely breathtaking and the pictures don't do it justice. You could see the wall winding through the mountains for miles standing dark against the new fallen snow.

The next morning, we visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. It was extremely cold when the wind picked up, but the sights were impressive. The Forbidden city is quite a palace, and the bold colors and detailing have been recently restored in preparation for the Olympics. One of the largest buildings was still under wraps. I was struck by the size of the palace. As I walked through the last few corridors I thought I was nearing the end only to walk into a massive courtyard. I think it was about seven courtyards, but don't quote me on it. (Check out the satellite image on Google Maps.) In my next post, I'll write about our rickshaw ride through Beijing and our visit to the Temple of Heaven.

China Trip - Part 1

Vanessa and I just got back from our trip to China and I'm going to spread out some of the details over several days. We took over eight hundred pictures, so I'll be sharing a few from each of the days. In this first (of many) posts about the China trip I'll talk about our first day of sight seeing in Beijing.

It snowed on our first morning in China and it was a welcome if not shocking change from the weather back home. I've been missing the snow since I moved to California so it was good to be in it again, even if it made walking around a bit difficult. We started the day with a short tour of the Summer Palace, which was a gift from the emperor to his mother for her 60th birthday. It was quite a gift, a man made lake and acres of gardens.

After seeing the palace, we traveled to the Ming Tombs and visited the largest tomb. The buildings were massive and filled with artifacts buried with the emperors of days long gone by. The styles and designs of the ancient crowns and armor were very interesting and not quite what I was expecting. If you'd like to see more pictures, I'll point you to a place where you can view them. Tune in for more details from the trip in the very near future.

We're going to China

My wife and I leaving for China in the very near future. We're both really excited, I've never been to the eastern hemisphere before and I'm looking forward to experiencing a different culture. The trip will also give Vanessa plenty of opportunities to practice her Chinese.

I'll have a vast array of experiences to share with you, gentle reader, upon our return. So for now I'll leave you with some half finished thoughts. I started no less than three blog posts over the past two weeks, but they are all sitting as unfinished drafts. Here's a brief summary of one of the things I started to talk about. (In the end it turned out to be not quite so brief.)

Cellular Automata
I've been looking into Cellular Automata recently as a source for complex data interactions. There has been some discussion among cryptographers about the use of cellular automata as possible pseudo random number generators. The best known example of a cellular automata is John Conway's Game of Life and I think it illustrates the kind of complex interactions which can occur within a cellular automaton, even though it is a "universe" with very few rules.

I started to look at the behaviors in Wolfram's rule 30 and rule 110 cellular automata because those have been selected as possible candidates for cryptographic systems. I wrote a program to evaluate patterns produced by these rules in a finite two dimensional field which wraps on both ends. I think I may have found other rules which may also prove promising for cryptographic use, but I need to do more evaluating. I'd ultimately like to use a three, four, or five dimensional system to see if I could build a useful PRNG but I will need to spend considerably more time ensuring that the patterns created by the rules remain complex. In the 2D system I evaluated, the vast majority of rules produces very predictable patterns.

See you when I get back.