Last week, I encountered a dilemma of the sort that I’m really not qualified to deal with… and yet I had to. A new virus has been all over the news in Taiwan. To me, it doesn’t seem like much more than a particularly nasty flu, but a few children have already died [...]

This is the second part of The Enemies of Reason, in which Professor Dawkins interviewed various practitioners of pseudo-science. In this video, Dawkins focuses on the booming alternative health business:
It’s the hottest alternative health fad. It boasts and impressively vast and well-stocked medical cabinet; it’s endorsed by royalty and the stars, and is [...]

It’s not a tuuummor! Not after China Medical (NASDAQ:CMED) is done with it, that is!
Beijing-based China Medical Technologies (中国医疗技术公司) is the premier medical device company in China. Their business generates the most money from their ultrasound tumor therapy system and their in-vitro diagnostic business, though they have a wide variety of product lines. [...]

Milton Friedman, who passed away less than a year ago, was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of our time.
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American Nobel Laureate economist and public intellectual. An advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, Friedman made major contributions to the fields of macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic history and [...]

MSG must be one of the most maligned and misunderstood food components of the modern world. Superstition and fears about it are ubiquitous in the west, and yet, as Jeffery Steingarten, the great American food critic once put it,
“If MSG is bad for you, then why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?”
[...]

(For those of you who can’t wait for the answer, it’s wulong tea.)
Today, I stumbled across a page called Tea From Taiwan, via Angelica’s blog. At first glance it seemed to be suffering from a serious case of over optimizing for search engines. Search engines from 1997, that is. On the home [...]

While living in Guatemala, before I came to Taiwan, I developed something of a cast-iron guy. Sure, I was sick, really sick, for the first month or so. But after that, it seemed like I could eat just about whatever I wanted to there and I didn’t get sick anymore. I tried [...]

This week was “Walk to School Week. The 國語日報 had an article on it:

為了宣導小朋友走路上學的好處,臺北縣市,高雄市選定本週作為”走路上學週”,昨天一大早,台北市教育局長吳清基就站在文昌國小校門口,一一為小朋友的”走路上學週護照”貼上認證貼紙; 台北縣長周錫瑋也到江翠國小擔任一日導護志工.
…
許多原先騎車,開車帶著小朋友上學的家長,遠遠的就讓小孩下車,讓小朋友經由”安全走廊”自己進入校園.

This is great! The government has decided to declare “Walk to School Week” to draw attention to the benefits of walking to school. Top officials are even standing at the gates of schools to give the kids who [...]

I haven’t started my diet yet, but I have been taking advantage of my gym membership now that I live in a city that actually has gyms. I have two basic sorts of weightlifting workouts. My “pushing” workout consists of bench presses, dumbbell shoulder raises, dips, and a tricep isolation exercise. My [...]

Tomorrow, I turn 28. That means that one more year of my life is gone, and that I can’t have it back, ever. All my decisions, conscious and unconscious, have taken what was once an infinite tree of years that could have been, and ruthlessly pruned them down to a single year that [...]