Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

This week’s links may not all be Beijing or Sounds, but they are achievements of some of the aspirations here at the studios, e.g. to…

• be analytically precise, like Miles O’Brien: “Shuttle launch coverage has degenerated into little more than a deathwatch for the astronauts” [update: here's an example of his analytic powers, one day after the recent airplane crash in New York]
• provide an inside look, like Far Outliers: “Western music had made its entry in Bakumatsu times, sometimes under unlikely circumstances. The captain’s clerk aboard Commodore Perry’s Saratoga wrote that Japanese guests who were treated to a band concert in 1854 courteously asked to hear the first number again, but proved to mean the tuning-up period, whose sounds they found more interesting than the marches that followed.”
• build on other people’s work, like Stian’s Mandarin-English term/concept dictionary hacked out of Wikipedia: “All I had to do was download the latest Chinese database…. I then ran the Ruby script below, to extract all the titles of articles, and their interwiki links, to a separate, tab-separated text file…. This generates an output file that looks like this
  

  设计模式	Design pattern
  中华人民共和国	People’s Republic of China
  克利斯登·奈加特	Kristen Nygaard
  黑客	Hacker (computing)
  林纳斯·托瓦兹	Linus Torvalds
  理查德·斯托曼	Richard Stallman
  自由软件基金会	Free Software Foundation
  2003年7月	July 2003
  操作系统	Operating system

And not to forget. Beijing Sounds on this date a year (and two days) ago: Wàiguórén xué Zhōngguóhuà