Olympics!!
I don't care about sports.

What exactly make people Chinese?

I have asked many people and most don't have the same definition for Chinese and some don't even have a definition for Chinese. Even Wikipedia don't know if for sure!

Some common interpretation of Chinese:
1. Citizen of PRC and/or ROC
2. People whose offspring of Chinese people
3. People whose offspring of Zhonghua minzu

1. I can't believe all Chinese citizen can accept if a Japanese(how to define Japanese??) person become Chinese citizen and refer himself as Chinese.
2. The second one is clearly a recursive definition without the base case. and define a base case is not likely to fit usual needs.
3. It's a bit better because Zhonghua minzu is more rigorously defined by ethnicity, but the definition make people say "WTF". Some people with Russian heritage are part of Zhonghua minzu, but not others.

Is there a function f(p) that result 0 when one is not Chinese and 1 when one is Chinese?
There is no such universal function.

Assumptions:
At least one can find 2 people have different views on what is considered Chinese.
Set are determined by characteristics.

My theory for the set of Chinese people.
There is a certain set of characteristics to determine a set. Call the set of characteristics C, each element c. One of the element is excluded from the set(see below) for details.
W(c) is the weight of an c, can be negative.
V(c,p) equals 1 or 0. 0 means the person p in consideration doesn't have the c.
A person is considered to be Chinese when
Sum of W(c)*V(c,p) > x (which is THE characteristic of the set Chinese, and it's not part of the set C.)
1. W(c) is different for each individual because different people have different views
2. so is x.
A person at a different time(1 second ago) is considered different as that person. so A can think B is Chinese today, but it's not Chinese tomorrow.

Conclusion:
Chinese people cannot be rigorously defined without first find W(c) and x, which depends on the person who evaluates if a person is Chinese or not.
There can only be a function f(p1,p2) that result 0 when p1 think p2 is not Chinese. and 1 when p1 think p2 is Chinese.

But that doesn't mean there isn't any universal Chinese, there might be a person p, where f(x,p) always result 1, where x can be any person. But if such p doesn't exist. Then if we take the intersection of all the considered Chinese for x, we get a empty set.
Then that means there are no such thing as universally recognized Chinese people. Chinese people don't exist!
Of cause, one can define a universally recognized Chinese person is recognized as Chinese by x% of the population, but now, x is depend on different people, and thus require another level of universally recognized universally recognized Chinese people... and it will go on and on...

Can anyone prove a universal Chinese person exist when universal = all population in the world recognize him as Chinese at the year 2008. Btw, the word Chinese here has no meaning, it is a symbol in a formal system refer to a set that no one can define rigorously.

Thus Chinese people is a ambiguous term. It's just an isomorphism for something else we can't define.
Maybe this can be generalized to almost every word in existence.

Hegel disagree that the work of many Chinese thinkers(like Confucius) are philosophical work. But I will call it philosophy, by the definition of teachings on the way to live life and see the world.
How to learn Chinese philosophy? Since Western culture and values are different from Eastern ones, reading long texts can take some amount of time. It's much better if there are visual aids.

I came to know about philosophy at a young age(eight?), when I first get a hold of two comic books by Tsai Chih Chung.
These books are not like the comic with superheros, but the essences of philosophy expressed with intuitive images.

The two book I had found from my dad's book shelf:
One is about the man Zhuangzi and his philosophy.
Another is about Zen, with Kōans[All the ones in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is also in that book].

I was fascinated, mostly with pictures, but I can't understand the deep meanings of the work.

I remembered the books while reading something about the dream argument

Can't wait to see them again and dig the insights.

Anime-like smilies are in so much demand these days, like the onion smilies.
Another popular emotion in China is the YoYo CiCi smilies. It has 220 emotions.
A few for a small taste.

See all of them here or Download the rest here.

In the title, "Harmonize" does not mean "to bring or come into agreement or harmony", but "to completely erase one's existence, thus there is nothing to be agreed upon."

The Chinese government, under the control of the Chinese communist party, pin point a goal,"构建社会主义和谐社会(Building a socialist harmonious society)". at w/e random meeting1 their had. After this, in Chinese slang term, "被和谐了"("Got Harmonized") means got blocked/erased/taken down/redirected by the government.

I thought I have to use a proxy to visit my site for the next 2 months. Thx to samon127, who recommended me use OpenDNS instead of using the DNS from my ISP (yep, under the influence of the Chinese government.).
MEGA GOOD WORK! I feel my site loads faster than before :)

I also got the Loox 600 I wanted. More on that on later posts because I'm playing the PSP my dad borrowed from some very kind person.

1. 1. 十六届六中全会, abbreviation for "The sixth plenary session of the sixteenth elected Central Committee group.

Chinese people does not have the benefit of using 26 letters for all words, that's where the IME fill the blank. For years, PinYin is the most popular method to input Chinese because it follows the pronunciation word instead of the character structure(Believe me, those Chinese characters are COMPLEX). Google isn't doing so well in China because Baidu, No.7 most high traffic site in the world ranked by Alexa, have more market share according to this report in Search Engine Journal. The release of it's Google Chinese PinYin IME already caused over 1.5 million download in 2 days, even I got a piece of the treat.

In my opinion Google could slowly gain the market back by this product, at least it have a amazing feature of store the common phrase you type in the Google server so you can syndicate with your Google IME.
BTW I got featured in Getthemlaid.com