Kitsuneippiki

COVID-19 Polar Express

2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Arctic Ocean

Several hours after leaving bed, I was above the Arctic Ocean. It was like a dream.

Before going on the trip back to China, I had been trapped, or prisoned, at my residence in Baltimore for almost half a year.

We have been used to the “illusion” of modern time. We have been used to measuring distance in terms of the time our modern transportation tools takes to travel from one place to another. We have also been used to the regularity delicately contrived by such tools and the infrastructure underneath.

Such multifold illusion was easily stripped out. Regularity first, then distance measured by modern travel-time. Normally it would take

It was not a dream, but a blend of dream and reality. The concept of “illusion” is deceptive. Just like the virtual reality is only virtually virtual. What the world has are difference kinds of realities, and our life constantly jumps from one to another.

Picture time and reflection time. As an attempt to re-discovery a different measurement of distance, I tried to locate the photos on Google Maps as accurately as possible. Photos were taken as the plane (flight number: DL159) moved along its trip from Detroit to Incheon, South Korea.

Hudson Bay (Google Maps link)

The Chersky Range in Northeastern Siberia (Google Maps link)

Aldan River (Google Maps link)

Ytyk-Kyuyol and road network (Google Maps link)

Somewhere in the Aldan Basin (Google Maps link)

Aldan Plateau and River (Google Maps link)

Aldan Plateau (Google Maps link)

A river valley on the Aldan Plateau (Google Maps link)

Leaving the Stanovoy Range (外興安嶺) (Google Maps link)

Zeya River near Ovsyanka, Amur Oblast (Google Maps link)

Heilong/Amur/Sahaliyan River黑龍江 (Google Maps link)

Songhua/Sunggari River 松花江 and Lalin River 拉林河 (Google Maps link)

Changchun City長春市 (Google Maps link)

And near destination:

Near Seungbongdo Island 승봉도(昇鳳島) (Google Maps link)

Review material for Scientific Revolution survey course at JHU

2018-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

I prepared this document for the Scientific Revolution survey exam at JHU. This page was converted to markdown from a docx file using Pandoc. Something went wrong with the format. The original document can be downloaded here (docx or PDF).

A preview:

Continuity and discontinuity¹ (the established versus the revolutionary)
1. The question of how “revolutionary” the Scientific Revolution is: the actors own consciousness of doing something new²; the historiographical discussion about continuity and discontinuity³; appears to be more revolutionary in the theoretical aspect than the methodological aspect
2. The issue of boundary-drawing: general discussion⁴; examples such as those in natural magic, alchemy-medicine (Paracelsianism, Helmontianism, and derivative chemical philosophy⁵), and astrology;
3. The case of astronomy and astrology

……

Henry, 1-2 ↩
Henry, 2 ↩
Henry, 3-5 ↩
Henry, 5 ↩
Henry, 61 ↩

Sort tags and categories by post count or alphabetically in Jekyll without plugins

2017-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

This post introduces a solution of sorting tags and categories by post count or alphabetically in Jekyll without plugins. Since no plugin is needed, this solution works on Github Pages. Preview it on my site. Because liquid template does not support direct sort of array by a value (here the post list in site.tags)’s property, I have to do some dirty work by passing tags’ name and post count, separated by delimiters, to a string and sort the string by post count or alphabetically. Anyway, liquid is good at dealing with strings.

Tags are sorted by post count correctly if the count is less than 100. Christian Specht’s answer on Stackoverflow works with count < 1000 and has the same way of implementation as this solution. His code does not deal with tag having space properly, but this problem can be easily solved by replacing the ‘ ‘ delimiter in the string with another character.

Here is the code. If you want to transplant it to your site, remember to use your own css style. The style I used here comes from Codinfox’s GitHub Pages site.

These codes sort and list tags by post count in a tag.html page. A list of tags with related posts is then generated below the tag list.

<div class="tags-expo">
  <div class="tags-expo-list">
    {% for tag in site.tags  %}
      {% assign tag_size = tag[1].size %}
      {% assign tag_name = tag[0] %}
      {% if tag_size < 10 %} {% comment %} Add a '0' to the size section if size < 10. {% endcomment %}
        {% assign taglist = taglist | append: "0"|append: tag_size|append: ","|append: tag_name |append: "@" %}
      {% else %}
      {% assign taglist = taglist | append: tag_size|append: ","|append: tag_name |append: "@" %}
      {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
    {% assign sorted_taglist = taglist | split: "@" |sort|reverse %}
    {% for sorted_tag in sorted_taglist %}
      {% assign sorted_tag_array = sorted_tag | split: "," %}
      {% if sorted_tag_array[0].size == 2 %}
        {% assign sorted_tag_size = sorted_tag_array[0] | slice: 1 %}
      {% endif %}
      <a href="#{{ sorted_tag_array[1] | slugify }}" class="post-tag">{{sorted_tag_array[1]}}<small> ×{{sorted_tag_size}}</small></a>
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
  <hr/>
  <div class="tags-expo-section">
    {% for sorted_tag in sorted_taglist %}
      {% assign sorted_tag_array = sorted_tag | split: "," %}
      {% if sorted_tag_array[0].size == 2 %}
        {% assign sorted_tag_size = sorted_tag_array[0] | slice: 1 %}
      {% endif %}
      <h2 id="{{ sorted_tag_array[1] | slugify }}">{{sorted_tag_array[1]}}</h2>
      <ul>
        {% for post in site.posts %}
          {% if post.tags contains sorted_tag_array[1] %}
          <a class="post-title" href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ post.url }}">
          <li>
            {{ post.title }}
          <small class="post-date">{{ post.date | date_to_string }}</small>
          </li>
          </a>
          {% endif %}
        {% endfor %}
      </ul>
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
</div>

Sort and display categories with associated posts alphabetically.

<div class="tags-expo">
  <div class="tags-expo-list">
    {% for tag in site.categories  %}
      {% assign tag_name = tag[0] %}
      {% assign taglist = taglist | append: tag_name |append: "@" %}
    {% endfor %}
    {% assign sorted_taglist = taglist | split: "@" |sort %}
    {% for sorted_tag in sorted_taglist %}
    <a href="#{{ sorted_tag | slugify }}" class="post-category-tag">{{ sorted_tag }}</a>
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
  <hr/>
  <div class="tags-expo-section">
    {% for sorted_tag in sorted_taglist %}
    <h2 id="{{ sorted_tag | slugify }}">{{ sorted_tag }}</h2>
    <ul>
    {% for post in site.posts %}
      {% if post.categories contains sorted_tag %}
      <a class="post-title" href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ post.url }}">
      <li>
        {{ post.title }}
      <small class="post-date">{{ post.date | date_to_string }}</small>
      </li>
      </a>
      {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
</div>

Font display problem of Chinese characters in CJK languages

2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Currently, there is no good solution for simultaneous proper display of Chinese characters in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean in web browsers. Google’s Noto CJK (or Adobe’s Source Han 思源字体) covers all CJK languages, but how to display Chinese characters correctly in browsers is another problem yet to solve. In most occasions, this site displays Simplified and Traditional Chinese correctly but not kanji or hanja unless a Japanese or Korean font or a lang HTML attribute is specifically set. The latter may not work.

This Zhihu question is about cross-platform display of Chinese characters: 如何保证网页的字体在各平台都尽量显示为最高质量的黑体.

This article also helps: Languages and Chinese characters on the web.

The following table is for testing purpose 测试用 (no lang attribute or font set).

Language	Texts
简体中文（中国大陆）	为有源头活水来。编纂乘坐　云
繁體中文（中國大陸）	爲有源頭活水來。所編纂乘坐雲
日本語	源頭の活水有るが為よりして来る　所　編纂　乗る雲沢山　画面
한국어	문자 文字李世乭
English	first post.

沢山　画面　所来た　篇　乗る雲 (with lang attribute set to “jp”.)

沢山　画面　所来た　篇　乗る雲 (with font set to “MS Mincho”.)

My current font setting is:

$font-serif: "PT Serif", Georgia, "Times New Roman", "Source Han Sans CN", "Hiragino Sans GB", "Microsoft YaHei", "WenQuanYi Zen Hei", "ＭＳ Ｐゴシック", serif;
$font-sans:  "PT Sans", Helvetica, Arial, "Source Han Sans CN", "Hiragino Sans GB", "Microsoft YaHei", "WenQuanYi Zen Hei", sans-serif;
$font-font-awesome: FontAwesome;

The first post on my new site. Font test.