unique elegance and nimbus

For your next holiday, China's own Dead Sea: Yuncheng Salt Lake. "Compared with the bath place at the Dead Sea in lsrael,it is endowed with more vitality and unique elegance and nimbus." Perhaps so:


From the November 30, 2002, Ottawa Citizen:

The potential of Yuncheng Salt Lake as a tourist area was not spotted until the president of the Nanfeng Chemical Industry Group, which mines the lake for salt, read an article about the Dead Sea.

Wang Mengfei flew to Israel last year and returned with mineral compounds which were subsequently found to be similar to those at Yuncheng.

But tourism experts said the similarities with the Dead Sea ended there, and predicted bosses of the Yuncheng Salt Lake resort would struggle to capture the public's imagination.

Zhang Guangrui, director of the Tourism Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Shanxi has few tourist attractions in comparison with Israel's appeal as the birthplace of Jesus.

"It is also far from big cities. Affluent Chinese people will travel to nearby places for recuperation, but not hundreds of kilometres."

Wang was not discouraged.


Apparently Nanfeng is Nafine these days. Their Chinese website is much more fun; be sure to have the sound on. Here you'll find commercials for their many household products.

All your translation are belong to us

From the quality control page of Shanghai Ju Peng Translation Co., a representative sample:

★1．We have a sound and stable pool of translation team, tasks of translation are strictly selected and assigned in accordance with languages and specialty fields.

★4．We track up and monitor text pieces in the course they are being translated, and deal with and resolve all the way those key points and pitfalls involved; project team is so created whenever for any large project of translation work and senior translators, professors or foreign experts are initiated to be in charge of jobs of aligning, tuning glossary and of ensuring texts consistent to the style of overall work translated.

★5．Once pieces of translation completed, there are other translators assigned to conduct follow-up proofreading in order to eliminate occurrences of usual errors as letter omission, mistranslation, wrong figures and improper typeset.

If you need work, offer to clean up their copy....

More piratey stuff

If you thought my pirate post was interesting, check out EagleSpeak, who really gives the topic a working over.

And if Pirate Jack Muller (at right) catches your fancy, go here.

HPV isn't cervical cancer

An AP story today says 1/4 of all US teen girls have received Merck's vaccine against human papilloma virus, Gardasil. HPV causes genital warts; it also predisposes a woman to cervical cancer, hence the recommendation that girls be vaccinated. But just how do you think /women are exposed to HPV? Holding hands with other females? Sex with men, obviously; who almost certainly were exposed via sex with women. So: why aren't boys asked to get the vaccination?

I think it's odd that feminists haven't made anything of this.




The question becomes even more pressing when you consider that as of July, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service requires girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 looking for permanent residence to be vaccinated against HPV. The requirement does not apply to males. As a consequence, women must fork over $300 to $1400 more than men, according to this article.

Worse, the committee responsible for the new regulation was unaware that "Under a 1996 immigration law, any vaccination recommended by the U.S. government for its citizens becomes a requirement for anyone seeking permanent residency in the U.S." when it recommended Gardasil for girls ages 11 through 26 in 2006.

Officials at the CDC say that the agency’s Gardasil recommendation was not meant to make the Gardasil vaccine mandatory for immigrants. A CDC spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the vaccination committee did not realized the way its Gardasil recommendation would impact immigrants.

Arrrrrgh! Avast! D'oh!

Stupid stupid stupid, or desperate. Pirates off the Somali coast have become such a problem that major shippers are refusing to transit the Gulf of Aden. Tankers make easy pickings. Unless they're military tankers. It's too bad the US Navy's too humane to sink the pirates outright.

Heavily armed Somali pirates have hijacked more than 30 merchant vessels of the Horn of Africa country this year, with attacks off its coast and the Gulf of Aden almost every day.

Ordinary tankers are completely unarmed. Apparently it's cheaper to pay ransom and lose product than to keep a viable security team on board.

Intertanko, the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, isn't too happy:

INTERTANKO’s Executive Committee meeting recently has expressed its extreme disquiet over the escalating number of violent attacks against shipping in the Gulf of Aden. They are especially concerned at the apparent failure of the Coalition naval forces to protect merchant shipping and seafarers in the vicinity of Somalia and their relative ineffectiveness in intercepting the terrorist groups involved.

The Committee noted that UN Resolution 1816 (2008) calls upon states to ‘Use, within the territorial waters of Somalia, in a manner consistent with action permitted on the high seas with respect to piracy under relevant international law, all necessary means to repress acts of piracy and armed robbery;’ and further ‘Calls upon all States, and in particular flag, port and coastal States, States of the nationality of victims and perpetrators of piracy and armed robbery, and other States with relevant jurisdiction under international law and national legislation, to cooperate in determining jurisdiction, and in the investigation and prosecution of persons responsible for acts of piracy and armed robbery off the coast of Somalia, consistent with applicable international law including human rights law.’

Information Dissemination has an interesting story, bizarre and disturbing, actually, where the pirates seem to have gotten much more than they bargained for from an Iranian cargo ship.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates - 50 onboard and 50 onshore. Within days, pirates who had boarded the ship developed strange health complications, skin burns and loss of hair. Independent sources tell The Long War Journal that a number of pirates have also died. "Yes, some of them have died. I do not know exactly how many but the information that I am getting is that some of them have died," Andrew Mwangura, Director of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Program, said Friday when reached by phone in Mombasa.

News about the illness and the toxic cargo quickly reached Garowe, seat of the government for the autonomous region of Puntland. Angered over the wave of piracy and suspicious about the Iranian ship, authorities dispatched a delegation led by Minister of Minerals and Oil Hassan Allore Osman to investigate the situation on September 4. Osman also confirmed to The Long War Journal that during the six days he negotiated with the pirates members of the syndicate had become sick and died. "That ship is unusual," he said. "It is not carrying a normal shipment."

Go read it, really.

Ranbaxy? Wow.

The effluent has finally hit the fan. Ranbaxy has stonewalled the FDA for ages to keep records relating to quality audits at its manufacturing facility in Paonta Sahib secret, but the FDA seems to have lost patience: yesterday it banned the importation of anything produced at Ranbaxy's plants at both Dewas and Paonta Sahib. From an FDA press release:

The Warning Letters identify the agency's concerns about deviations from U.S. current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) requirements at Ranbaxy's manufacturing facilities in Dewas and Paonta Sahib (including the Batamandi unit), in India. Because of the extent and nature of the violations, FDA today issued an Import Alert, under which U.S. officials may detain at the U.S. border, any active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) (the primary therapeutic component of a finished drug product) and both sterile and non-sterile finished drug products manufactured at these Ranbaxy facilities and offered for import into the United States....

Earlier today, the FDA informed Ranbaxy that until it resolves the deficiencies at each of these two facilities and the plants come into compliance with U.S. cGMP requirements, FDA's drug compliance office will recommend denial of approval of any New Drug Applications (NDAs) and Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDAs) that list the Paonta Sahib or Dewas plants respectively as the manufacturer of APIs or finished drug products.

That's shocking. As the FDA's press release says, Ranbaxy is one of the biggest importers of generics into the US. The action casts doubt on the standards of all Indian drug manufacturers, who have worked for years to improve their reputation. It was only months ago that the heparin disaster raised the possibility that offshoring might be proceeding to quickly. Anyone considering outsourcing the manufacture of their API to India will factor this example into their calculation of risk. They will already be considering the rising costs of India and China, where inflation is over 10%.

I wonder how Daiichi Sankyo feels about their acquisition now-- as if it hadn't been hard enough to get Japanese to use generics....

Not for the naked eye

Via David Thompson's great blog, this spectacular view of the sun joined to music.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.