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When I am alive, my last name is Liao (廖). When I am dead, my last name becomes Chang (張).
The complete history is obviously much too long to recount, but the short version is this: The Liao family had only one female heir left, and to pass on the thread of life, they found a guy whose last name is Chang, and stipulated that the first child (male, obviously) will have the last name Liao and the rest will have the last name Chang. Unfortunately, the couple only had one child, hence the compromise. On the web, the best resource that I have seen is in the Chinese wikipedia entry 張廖家族. I also corrected some misinformation (and put in the correct ones), in the English wikipedia entry Chinese surname.
Following in Kai von Fintel’s footsteps, here is a guideline on how to cite me. I realize this is obviously ridiculous because I am unpublished and alive, but I thought I’d just throw it out there, in case one of those two things change. When I am alive, I’d like to be cited as
Liao, Shen-yi (20xx). “Blah blah blah,” Journal YY:zz-zz.
but after I die, I’d like to be cited as
Chang, Shen-yi (20xx). “Blah blah blah,” Journal YY:zz-zz. Originally published under the name ‘Shen-yi Liao’.
Thanks.
P.S. For completeness, here is some other important information about my lineage:
堂號: 張廖家廟 承祜堂
主祀: 六世天與公
座落: 西安街205巷
P.P.S. Note that the ‘y’ in ‘Shen-yi’ is not capitalized. That’s just the way it is.
In case you were planning to throw a Great Depression theme party in the coming months, I’d like to be given credit for a sophomoric column I wrote back in my sophomoric days. Many things I say, unfortunately, remain salient today.
Recently, a perfect-pitched colleague informed me that I am tonedeaf. In fact, not only can I not reproduce a pitch, as most people with relative pitch could do, I cannot even recognize whether my reproduction is higher or lower than the original sound. It was suggested that my tonedeafness is so severe that it comes not from lack of musical training, but poor genes. Furthermore, it’s apparently a lot rarer for people who speak tonal languages, e.g. Mandarin for me, to be tonedeaf. I am really one-in-a-million!!
Fascinated by my brain, I embarked on more research. So I found the following tests:
- Tonedeaf Test
- Adaptive Pitch Test
To my surprise, I actually did quite well on them. I got 88.9% correct on the tonedeaf test (93rd percentile) and discriminated pitch up to 0.225Hz (99.1st percentile). Maybe I am not tonedeaf after all.
On the Rhythmdeaf Test, on the other hand, I only got 68% correct (31st percentile). So I still can’t dance.
I guess I also now have less of an excuse for listening to bad music. Recently I’ve been listening to the sappiest song in the world (translation). My only excuse is that I don’t really understand German, so my bad taste in that domain barely counts.
P.S. I still do badly on the relative pitch test when given a middle C.
Today I got a fortune cookie. It said:
You deserve every respect
and will eventually get it.
What is crusty philosophy? We just don’t know. But suffice to say, it is the opposite of core philosophy. So whatever it is that core philosophers do, I do not. This blog will be about all the non-core stuff I do.
