My wife and I almost had a fight, but it turned out just to be a mistranslation by Google of my wife's last blog entry. I had recently said the Google translations had gotten much better, but now that they translate into recognizable grammar a mistranslation can really lead to a terrible misunderstanding.

She emailed me that she had just blogged and I should read it right away, this coming the day after she had complained in our nightly phone call that I didn't try hard enough to talk about sensitive romantic issues.

Here is her last blog post:

Hope

I hope you can understand the loneliness and the separated you, I hope you and your hand will be happy

And here is her email reply to my email response that I was hurt by her words:

What I wrote there is:

"Please to understand how lonely I am because we are not together
Please to understand how anxious I am to have you besides me"

If you can read Chinese and know Chinese, or if you are a Chinese, they are definitely really sweet sentences to read.

Apparently there is a common Chinese idiom that uses hand to suggest closeness whereas you can guess how I took hand to mean in the botched English translation.

My wife had little patience for me last night when I mentioned that Bin Laden was rumored to be dead. Not that she is a fan, just that I'm sure she thinks we Americans obsess too much about fighting the war on terror, a war she feels we half invited by meddling too much in the world abroad.

Still if Bin Laden did die of typhoid in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan that might the best outcome for the world rather than some Islamic-roiling event like a live capture or to die from a bullet or bombing which would enhance his image as a martyr. To die sick and isolated without having reeked follow up vengeance on America after five years would certainly take away some of the charismatic charm.

It seems unlikely but if Bin Laden were dead and Ayman al-Zawahri and Abu Hamza al-Mujaher were killed in quick succession it would certainly take the wind out the sails of Islamic extremism.

Americans are amused by how easily Muslims are offended by cartoons, books, or the Pope quoting the 14th Century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Al Qaeda responds to criticisms of the Koran's passages about converting by the sword with a long outraged tirade that ends proclaiming the world will convert to Islam or die by the sword. I guess they don't really disagree with the factuality of the criticism, just that while accurate it cannot be uttered in a critical way.

And yet the assumed superiority of tolerance by the West is put to lie by Americans getting similarly upset by disparaging even less important symbols, say like the U.S. Flag. Over 50% of Americans think there should be laws against burning the American flag. A certain not insignificant portion will get violent when observing such an event. There is a cry in Boston to bring down legally owned Citgo signs because they don't like Hugo Chávez's words in the UN recently. Boston politicians are looking to pass laws to make it happen, I'm sure vandals around the U.S. are already taking the matter into their own hands.

American's deplore the action of Islamic terrorists, insurgents, and others working outside the legal and political system of the countries they operate in. So I'm a little taken aback that we are planning to increase support for Iranian radicals. If Iran has no business covertly interfering in Iraq, I doubt covertly interfering in Iran will make them stop.

Terrorism is the sad symptom of failed attempts to deal with class struggles and inequities. As Americans we have become so obsessed with fighting the symptoms we have lost sight of the fact we need to fight the causes as well. Which is where I will end this post tonight, though I promise a follow up post with greater specificity as to where inequities are rising.

I can't get a hold of Nian on the phone yet tonight so I'm watching the season premier of ER. I've been watching ER since its first episode 12 years ago. It didn't seem strange to watch it alone last season, but this season it is a reminder that Nian and I still aren't together and another year has gone by. Its scary when your favorite shows get so old, I think it makes the years seem to blur by.

Nian just called, I put ER on pause (it's nice to have a DVR). Nian and Aiai are at the hospital. The coincidence is not lost on me. Aiai has a high fever, but it isn't assumed serious. The hospital on Jinan's campus is close by and easy to get into so there is little reason not to go. Nian dragged me to the same hospital when I had some kind of stomach-flu on my first visit to Guangzhou China.

Nian really just called to assure me everything was OK and let me know what was going on. Now I'm back to my solitary life of watching TV and blogging. I think Nian would like ER if she could get past the brief surgical scenes, which I'm not sure she could, because to be honest they are quite graphic.

I'm having trouble getting deep into studying for the GRE subject test. I was scheduled for Jury Duty this week and I had assumed it would involve a lot a waiting during which I could really crack the books. Jury Duty however was a bust. After the orientation on Monday they cut us loose without any cases needing jurors; so back to work for me. Every night I called to see if I'll be needed in the next day, every night the answer was no. Tonight's phone-call no exception. My wife had been mildly impressed that I had this serious responsibility. Not even sitting in on one trial takes a little of the responsibility glow off.

Hopefully I'll be able to really concentrate on studying for the GRE Computer Science Subject Test this weekend. I had bought a book at Borders published by REA on studying for it, but I came across four or five errors on the first 3 pages so I took it back. Seriously, they couldn't even get the math notation correct. They even misspelled input as imput. ETS, the GRE administrators, offer some study materials. I think Borders would have taken the book back without question, but I insisted on showing them the errors against the official ETS source material that I printed out from the website. If REA can't even COPY the notation key correctly (and I assume it was copied, since it had the same definitions and order, just with the symbols mixed up or missing.) then I'm not going to trust the rest of the material in the book. There appear to be only 2 books published on studying for this test, the REA in 2005 and a Princeton one in 1999. So I am forgoing both and will have to self educate. I do have a BS in Computer Science, but the test appears to be a real graduate level torture session and I am way rusty on the theoretical stuff.

Yep, this post is entitled "Direct to Inertia Propulsion" and I'm sticking with it.

Actually this is just a notice on a new blog entry in my side blog project "Brink."

Not sure what to think of my scores: 680 verbal, 720 analytic. I had expected to do far better on verbal and hoped to do a little better on analytic, though both are still quite a bit above average. The written portion scores and overall score will probably arrive in about 2 weeks by mail. Now I need to focus on the GRE subject test coming up in November, but I may take the general test again in January as my practice tests show I am capable of far better.

My wife's blog seems to be getting unexpected visitors from Britain and Canada, most likely from following the Google.com translation link on my blog. For those interested, I've noticed the Google translations have bumped up quite a bit in quality. Don't expect perfection, but at least now the gist of her posts come through. Even the poetic posts now have some degree of understandability, a sort of haiku-ness, rather than what used to look like completely random words when translated.

I've really dropped the ball with my Brink coming breakthroughs blog, having essentially stopped posting when I started studying for the GRE, but there is something in the news I hope to post about soon -- a far left field discovery I listed on possible future topics, but never expected to come along so soon.

I wish the week was less busy -- that I had more time to explore the complex emotions I feel today. Though I have a strong memory of where I was when I found out the planes had hit the World Trade Center; a more poignant memory for me is of visiting my wheelchair bound father a week later back in my hometown. The news was still near continuous and his arthritis-crippled body seemed a metaphor for America's sadness and weariness in dealing with what seemed a world gone insane. The world seeming to be a place where when one bad actor passes from the stage there is always another to fill the role.

My father is gone now. He never got to see me marry or bounce a grandchild on his knee. I can never think of 9/11 without thinking of the loss of my father or the loss of my father without thinking of 9/11. As long as my wife and daughter are alive I know I will never again feel that same sense of loss.

The company picnic came and went today, a slightly depressing affair by virtue of its meager turnout and lack of revelry. Still the barbecued ribs were pretty good. Deb, who organized the affair, insisted on sending me home with a container of ribs and chicken wings which, had the event been better attended, probably would not have been left over.

I had planned on practicing with the GRE word processing software today. My Barron's CD tutorial didn't actually contain a copy of this software, which it informs me should have been mailed to me by ETS, the company that administers the GRE, but which most certainly WASN'T. Fortunately the software is available for download off the GRE site. Unfortunately once downloaded our company computer would not allow me to install it. A sensible, if annoying, precaution to keep people from installing viruses or unapproved software on company machines. It never even occurred to me that this would be a problem. Alan the sysadmin will probably allow me to install the software Monday with a password key.

I had hoped to practice over the weekend with the software. Once home I tried to download the software to my home machine, but the ETS-GRE site is experiencing networks problems. After filling out the damn questionnaire over four times to get to the download screen, still no PowerPrep software downloaded. Arrrrrggggh!

This is the same site that botched charging my credit card the first time for the General Test. Since the credit didn't register they sent the bill by mail along with an extra $20 charge for the failed credit card charge attempt, which I don't believe is my doing. I sent the payment back over a month ago, but still no CD with PowerPrep software. Now tonight I can't get the software to download off the website. I'm really starting to hate this company. I am going to call on Monday to make sure I really am registered for the day I signed up for and to complain about the additional $20 charge and the CD that wasn't mailed and the download portion of their website going down and since this is FREE software how about listing a mirror site to obtain it and how you have to fill out forms over and over again if you just want to repeat an action like a download.

I may be able to copy the software at work (from the earlier download that didn't install) bring it home and install it. At least I plan on giving it a try.

One way or another at least, comes Wednesday night; I'll have the General GRE Test behind me. Today's practice tests (vocabulary and quantitative) went better and worse than I expected -- 780 and 650 (800, 800 would be perfect). I really feel I need to do at least 700 on the quantitative to get into a good graduate program in my field.