Books that I've read and I'll read

I've read some interesting books for the last few years. At first, I read it because it was required for my job and class, but after read a few pages, I think those books are really interesting. Here's the list of some books that I've read, and I'll read. I'll try to give some reviews of the books later in the end of the semester, because I have a lot of things to do now.

Indonesian/Malay Language

Indonesia, as the biggest Muslim country in term of population, and the world's 4th most populated country is an important country, especially, in the south east asia region. Now, Indonesian language is become pretty important in the region, and hopefully, will be important in the world later. Indonesian language is similar to Malay language, so, if you can speak Indonesian language, you can talk to people in Malaysia and Singapore who speak Malay.

Some schools in Australia teach Indonesian language, and you can even apply in big universities in Australia to get a degree in Indonesian language. According to kaskus.us, more and more people are getting interested to study Indonesian language in Vietnam. In arenaonline.org, Yoon Hwan SHIN recommended Indonesian/Malay language to become the official working language of the East Asian community, because it can "contribute to narrowing and closing political, economic, and cultural gaps and discrepancies that stand in the way of integrating Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia" (arenaonline.org). Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia would be ASEAN +3.

Chinese were also recommended to be the official language, however, Indonesian/Malay language is still easier to learn. Here are some of the positive points to studying Indonesian/Malay language from arenaonline.org:

-Among thousands of languages and dozens of national languages found today in Asia, the Malay language stands out with easiness to learn, richness in vocabulary, and equality of speakers. It also has the largest numbers of speakers in Southeast Asia and, in East Asia, the second largest next only to Chinese.

-Throughout its life, Malay has been enriched by the introduction of all major civilizations with new words and expressions full of knowledge, wisdom, and beauty. Indian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, and English loanwords abound in contemporary Malay and Indonesian. The language will continue to adapt itself to the development of science and technology.

-Unlike languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and Chinese, Malay does not have tones. It is not a tonic language. Unlike English, stress on syllables is not distinct or not important.

-Unlike most languages, Malay verbs never change in the ending according to tense and subject. Changes between transitive and intransitive verbs are simple and consistent.

-All put together, Malay was being spoken by at most 10 million when WWII was over, while the number has grown to be now estimated at almost 300 million. It has been one of the most rapidly spreading languages in the world since World War II. Malay has now the fourth largest numbers of speakers after Chinese, English, and Hindi/Urdu.

- Over ten thousand overseas and ethnic Chinese have taken root or reside in Malay-speaking countries. They have developed their own version of Malay called Chinese Malay or Baba Malay. Now there are also found tens of thousands of Japanese and Koreans as sojourners. These groups of East Asians could play a bridging role in transmitting and disseminating Malay to Northeast Asia.

-A large number of Arab and Indian descendants, immigrants, and business people have long frequented and lived in Malaysia and Indonesia. The two countries have a larger Muslim population than West Asia (Middle East). Malaysian and Indonesian cultures have been heavily influenced by Indian and Arab worlds. Such contacts and traditions would help Malay to move beyond East Asia to the whole Asia to become a truly Asian language – and even a global language in the future.

After the whole reading, I think Indonesian/Malay language is pretty important, and luckily, it is easy to learn. So what do you think? Interested to learn more about Indonesian/Malay language?

100 Year Old Lady With Her iPad

I found a post in phonedog.com, a website that doing reviews of gadgets, about an old lady. She was an avid reader, but with her eyes problem, books were not working for her. Now, with her iPad, she can read again, because she can control the brightness of the screen and the font size of the texts. Let's forget about which gadget is better than others, let's forget about the patent and suing cases of those high tech device producers, and just watch this video, a video that, like Adriana Lee from phonedog said, "... a great reminder of why technology in general exist in the first place."

Soil Snack???

Tuban, a village in the East Java province of Indonesia, might be the only place on earth where you can find people who eat baked soil as a snack. How do they make a soil into a snack? Just find some gravel-free soil from the village's rice paddies, pound it by a stick into a solid block, roll it with a bamboo dagger and baked it for an hour. Rasima, a Tuban villager, takes it to the village market. Usually, she gets $2 from selling the soil snack. The villagers believe that the soil snack have the effect as a natural pain killer, and if eaten by a pregnant mother, can soften the baby's skin.

Here's some pictures of the soil snack

Population in China

China is a big country, a raising economy power with large population. People all around the world try to learn Chinese, and they are waiting for China to take Japan's place as the world's second largest economy. The Chinese big population and low wage rate attract big companies from all over the world to build their castles there.

Now, let us talk more about their population. As we all know, China is the most populous country in the world. The 2009 World Population Data Sheet write that China has 1,331 million people. One of every five person in this world is Chinese. That means 20% of the world's population. They projected that in 2050, China will have 1,437 million people. How China become so populous? Is it because the fertility rate of Chinese women are high? Is it because their culture urge people to have a lot of kids? The questions about Chinese population are really interesting, because no matter what, they will affect the world.

To find more information about population in China, I found these two videos. These videos are very informative, and in the future, I will post more of these kind of videos (depends on what topic that I will post later) and other videos or information about important or interesting things in our world.

Li Wei

Li Wei is a Chinese artist who make a lot of unbelievable pictures. Unbelievable because he said his pictures are not computer montage, and he only use material such as mirror, metal wires, etc. And of course, he also use acrobatic. Check out some of his pictures.







To see more of his works, go to www.liweiart.com

Unshooling?

Imagine this world without textbooks, teachers, without schools. Seems fun? Sounds impossible? Well, some people actually do that. It is called unschooling, which is a growing trend. Around 150,000 students in America are estimated to be unschoolers.

Parents let their kids to do whatever they want. The key is to trust the kids that they will do something worthy on what they are interested in. In the process, some parents take their kids to the museum, capitol building, etc. When the kids get bigger and want to attend to college, they can take GED or write an essay.

I personally agree that children's interests can lead them to study, but it is not that easy. Some people are just as motivated as other people. For those who are not really motivated to study, or do not know what their interests are, what should they do? Are their parents able to introduce and guide them to a lot of study fields as good as the schools do? For example, we can see an unschooling child wakes up at 9 a.m., have his/her breakfast and stuff, and then study Chinese, Math, Geography, and watch science on Discovery channel. But let's face it, not everybody is like him/her. We can absolutely find kids who wake up at 1 p.m., have their lunch, and then they turn on their Play Station 3, finish a game, and they are done for the day. Do you really think these kids who do their unschooling only when their parents at home should not go to school?

We know that the positive points of unschooling are that the children can explore their point of interests freely, no school bullying, etc. Now, let's take a look at some of the negative points:

-In most American family, both parents are workers, so they leave their children everyday for work. By the time they got home, they are tired or in a less fit condition from all the work. With that condition, teaching their kids could be very challenging.

-Limited social life for the kids. You do not have as many connections as those who go to school. Social life is a very important part of our human life, which can lead us to find, life time friends, our future husband/wife, jobs, or build a business together, and so on.

-Knowledge. Ok, you have the Discovery channel in your TV, Internet in your computer, etc. But it does not change the fact that go to school also gives you a lot of information, which then, lead you to search more about it, grow your interests, and make you an expert in that particular stuff. School gives you a lot of new information from every activities such as the traditional textbook reading, field trips, or watching videos that you have never thought about before. It gives you the universal information that you should know about the world (I think that is one of the reason why we have curriculum and why sometimes we renew it). Someday, you might find your dream guy/girl and you do not know what to talk about with him/her beside the things that you are interested in, because you didn't go to school, and didn't even know the basic information of other stuff in this world. This example may sounds stupid, but it could happen you know.

-Can parents really teach their children? Let's say your mom is an accountant, and your dad is a lawyer. Are you sure they can teach you other stuff as good as the teachers in school? Oh, you do not care about biology, math, and chinese? Well, back to the point above, we still got a lot of information from school, and it gives you the universal information that you should know about the world.

Ok, I'm sorry if I criticized unschooling to much, maybe it's because I'm a little conservative about this stuff. However, I believe unschooling have some positive effect, kids can concentrate on their interests since their early childhood. But I do think that go to school is still the best thing to do, because in school, you learn how to do a lot of things, even if you do not like it. In life, there are times when we have to do things that we do not like, and go to school helps us to understand and how to deal with it.

Yes, Bill Gates and a bunch of other drop outs make a lot of money, but those are different cases. Not everybody is like them, and besides, a lot of them attended school right? At least they graduated from high school.

Last thing that I want to mention is, school is not perfect. We need to do a lot of changes, depending on the development of the world. Back in 1950s, no body learned computer science. Now, you can see a lot of people study computer science. School needs to develop, and so do we - and so far, school is still one of the best place where we can develop ourselves.

So, what do you think about unschooling?

$600 Car?

What would you do if you have $600 in your wallet? Buy a cell phone? iPad? Branded cloth? Go out with all of your family, your friends' families, and their families' families to Burger King? Now what if I tell you that you can buy a car with that money?

This is a new VW one seater car, coming this year to Shanghai, priced around RMB 4,000 or $600. With speed up to 120 km/hour and fuel consumption only around 0.4 gallon/100 miles (235 miles/gallon), it is your dream car (well, of course we dream for it to have a bigger space, 4 seater, etc, but for $600, this is still a dream come true right?).

Still don't believe this car priced only $600? Neither do I. I saw an article in the internet that was posted 2 years ago that this car will be priced around $31,000 - $47,000 (http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1023641_vw-1-liter-tandem-city-car-tipped-for-2010-production), however, I also got the news saying the price will be $600 (http://www.dinomarket.com/newsreview/612638/2010/04/15/MOBIL-SEHARGA-RP-5-6-JUTA-DARI-CHINA-SEGERA-MASUK/)

Are you interested?