I've made the python scripts I wrote for counting the MIT ROCSA name referendum votes available here:
http://zeno.unixboxen.net/w/code.shtml

Went with CF to a concert today at the Boston Symphony Hall. The first time I've ever stepped into the place. The acoustics were pretty good (they had to be, I heard everything quite clearly and we were almost all the way at the back) but the seats were less than comfortable. I had been told that Bach was on the program.

It turned out to be St. Matthew Passion. Prior to finding out the name of the piece, all I knew about Bach was that Stephen Hawking listened to lots of it during one long depression spell. I was expecting an instrumental piece in a minor key - I wasn't prepared for something that heavy and wordy. I don't know if it was remembered images from the movie coming through, the mental strain of reading German in dim light and mapping it to the English in the next column, or just the warm air and the slightly soggy shoes from the drizzle, but reality sure took on a strangely high resolution during those three hours. It lasted forever.

I went to Frank Hsieh's talk today at MIT. He has really set self-determinism right at the center of his message, which is refreshingly principled in the light of how populist most Taiwanese politics tends to be. The thought process which he exposed really impressed me - he has a few axioms, being the goals (self-determinism and self-preservation) and a few heuristics for achieving those goals (his so called 'mutualism'). Everything else is up for discussion because it is all derived. Beautiful, I say.

One thing he mentioned is the importance of appearing to the global community as a democracy worth protecting - the soft power that Taiwan has. This occurred to me as a problem when I was helping with the ROCSA name change referendum fiasco. I feel like even the Taiwanese at MIT are in general not very aware of certain basic notions in liberal democracy, for example things like due process and constitutionality. To develop a medium/channel (I'm thinking of a website) targetted at addressing this deficit would be most beneficial, in my opinion. I think raising this awareness amongst Taiwanese in Boston is a good intermediate step towards developing a way to raise the same awareness in Taiwan.

I do not presume to have the expertise nor the mandate to carry this out, but have been floating the idea to various people. If you are interested, leave me a comment.