Year: 2025

Journey to the West Chinese inside-painted glass ball

Item description / significance
This is an inner painted (inside painted, reverse painted) glass ball depicting the character of Monkey from the beloved Chinese classic Journey to the West. It is an adaptation of one of the “Havoc in Heaven” series of 8 paintings by Liu Jiyou. In this painting, Monkey has escaped from a furnace.

Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app (from a seller in Nanjing, Jiangsu, eastern China)

Age and origin
Painted in 1996, according to the inscription, probably Hengshui, Hebei Province, in northern China

What I like about it
What attracted me is the quality of the painting (the level of detail)—and the low price, to be honest! Now that I am more familiar with the Liu Jiyou paintings, I like it more than I did originally.

Other notes
The seller also sent a tassel with an inside-painted hulu gourd on a tassel:

See below for information about the inscription and the painting this adaptation was based on, as well as photos of the sphere, including photos from the seller.

Continue reading Journey to the West Chinese inside-painted glass ball

The Consciousness Instinct by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Two ideas that stood out when I read The Consciousness Instinct:

Consciousness does not have a location in the brain

“For sure, the holy grail of science is to find consciousness in the brain, but trust me, it would have been found by now if there were such a thing to find.” (page 134)

“Simply trying to locate the structure that produces consciousness, as Descartes and many of his predecessors have attempted, will not unveil the Holy Grail, because consciousness is inherent throughout the brain. Cutting huge chunks from the cortex does not disrupt consciousness, but only changes its contents.” (pages 230-31)

Brains aren’t like machines, so it’s unlikely machines will ever behave like brains

“[T]he traditional deterministic classical machine analogy for life is exactly backward. Brains aren’t like machines; machines are like brains with something missing…. [H]umans evolved through natural selection, whereas machines are made by humans.” (pages 226-27)

“I now think we humans will never build a machine that mimics our personal consciousness. Inanimate silicon-based machines work one way, and living carbon-based systems work another. One works with a deterministic set of instructions, and the other through symbols that inherently carry some degree of uncertainty. This perspective leads to the view that the human attempt to mimic intelligence and consciousness in machines, a continuing goal in the field of AI, is doomed. If living systems work on the principle of complementarity—the idea that the physical side is mirrored with an arbitrary symbolic side, with symbols that are the result of natural selection—then purely deterministic models of what makes life will always fall short.” (page 236)

When and Why I Read The Consciousness Instinct

Another brain book.

Genre: cognitive science
Date started / date finished: 23-Mar-25 to 19-Apr-25
Length: 259 pages
ISBN: 9780374538156
Originally published in: 2018/2019
Amazon link: The Consciousness Instinct

Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

This historical novel, published in 1869 and set in the late 1600s, is satisfyingly long, entertaining and suspenseful, and thoroughly wholesome.

I love the narrator, John. He feels really honest and solid. But he’s not dumb, even though he says people say he’s slow. As a narrator, he’s full of observations about people and circumstances, and a bit of poetry, too. Interestingly, he still counts as an unreliable narrator! I usually don’t like those. But he’s not unreliable very often. I noticed it only in some scenes where the author indirectly suggests that a woman loves him but that he hasn’t noticed.

It’s a challenging book from the standpoint of the dialect passages, which you kinda have to squint at, and because there are some old words, or words relating to the country setting, that are unfamiliar even to me, and I read a lot. But these vocabulary-related challenges are welcome, in my view.

I kinda wished I knew more about the historical setting, but actually you don’t need to, because the focus is on the main characters. You don’t really have to care about the other stuff that’s happening.

When John goes off to find a friend of the family in the middle of a small war, I kept thinking it would be great to see a Steven Spielberg movie of the book, like  the one he made of War Horse, which has some of the same themes. The movie War Horse was absolutely gorgeous. There have been several TV and film adaptations of Lorna Doone, but I haven’t seen any of them. It probably makes more sense as a TV series, given the length of the story. A movie would have to cut a lot.

See below for some passages that stood out.

Continue reading Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

When and Why I Read Lorna Doone

Another public domain classic. A long one this time!

Genre: Classic English literature
Date started / date finished: 31-Mar-25 to 17-Apr-25
Length: 606 pages
Originally published in: 1869/2006/2023
Source link: Lorna Doone

12 Chinese zodiac animals inside-painted glass ball

Item description / significance
This is an inside-painted (inner-painted, reverse painted) glass ball depicting the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig).

Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app (from a seller in Yingkou, Liaoning, northeast China)

Age and origin
Painted in 1996, according to the inscription, probably Hengshui, Hebei Province, in northern China

What I like about it
What attracted me is that the quality of the painting (the level of detail) is high, and the fact that the subject matter is the 12 zodiac animals. Many inside-painted balls are similar to each other (there are lots depicting the Qingming festival, for example), but this is one of only two I have ever found of the zodiac animals, and the other one is not, shall we say, an attractive quality level. (See for yourself.)

See below for information about the inscription, the Chinese characters that accompany the animals, and photos of this sphere, including photos from the seller.

Continue reading 12 Chinese zodiac animals inside-painted glass ball

Big Qingming Festival Chinese inside-painted glass ball

Item description / significance
This is an inside-painted (inner-painted, reverse painted) glass ball depicting an adaptation of the Song dynasty handscroll painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival.”

Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app (from a seller in Beijing)

Age and origin
Painted in 2000, according to the inscription, probably in Hengshui, Hebei Province, in northern China

What I like about it
What attracted me is that the quality of the painting (the level of detail) is high. Also, the seller discounted the price, haha. But, get this: I have another inside-painted glass ball depicting this same scroll, and it was painted by the same guy!!! This one was painted 8 years later, has more detail, and (I think) is bigger.

See below for more photos of this sphere and the other one I bought before, photos from the seller, and photos of other spherical renditions of this painting.

Continue reading Big Qingming Festival Chinese inside-painted glass ball

Two wood bears

Item description / significance
These are two small painted carved wooden bears, one white, one black.

Both were described as hand-carved, but I’m a little suspicious about that. The listing for the white bear said it’s made from beechwood.

Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app

Age and origin
New!

What I like about them
The lifelike poses. I’m not an expert on bears, and these are a little abstract, but they still seem to contain an accurate kind of bear spirit somehow. These bears seem friendly and curious. (I would not approach a “friendly and curious” bear in real life!)

Other notes

So apparently now I have a collection of 3 wooden bears, including the Japanese bear I bought in Longquan, Zhejiang, China.

See below for more photos of these two, including photos from the sellers.

Continue reading Two wood bears

Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)

Ever since arriving in Hangzhou in December 2022, I’ve been noticing stuff about cars here, and I’ve been meaning to share my observations.

Therefore, here are some facts about the automotive landscape in China (especially Hangzhou):

In addition to imported vehicles and vehicles produced in cooperation with foreign automakers, China has a lot of domestically produced car brands. I’d heard of them because I edited news articles for China Knowledge, an English-language news portal offering business, financial, and real-estate news about China. But to see all the different designs in person is dizzying. Never knew there could be so many different shapes of taillights. (LEDs have changed the world.)

There are “cars” on the road that are tiny, some with only three wheels. These glorified golf carts are mysteriously ubiquitous despite not being road legal. (Apparently, they have recently been officially banned in Beijing.)

Some courier vehicles have no driver. These may start to replace the much more numerous three-wheeled courier vehicles that do have drivers. (But who unloads them, I want to know??? Seems like you’ve still got a last-mile problem.)

There are many consumer model vehicles with AI self-driving features. “Already today, a quarter of all newly registered vehicles in the Chinese market are equipped with a Level 2 driving system for highway scenarios.”

There are often mechanical shelves for cars in underground parking garages to increase capacity. (They are super annoying to park in because you have to back in, and you have to do it very precisely, because there’s only about 6 inches of space on either side of the car. Miss and you damage your tire or rim—happened to Siqi twice.)

There are no vanity license plates, but sometimes the license plate kinda spells something by accident. My brain constantly wants the alphanumeric inscriptions to be real words; they’re usually not. Electric and hybrid cars have green/white license plates, whereas petrol cars have blue license plates. There are a lot of EVs in Hangzhou, maybe 20%-30%. (Here’s a 2022 report with some statistics.)

The highway infrastructure continually amazes me. It’s new, it’s massive, and from what I’ve seen, there’s no graffiti.

Intrigued? See below for 25 photos of vehicles and vehicle infrastructure.

Continue reading Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)