paternalOn a totally unrelated topic, I just want to note that Xta and I walked about 12 miles yesterday. Also, Stanford's Lake Lagunita is very silly. On the one hand, it's named "Lake Little Lake". On the other hand, its name is not at all false advertising -- there's very little lake there; it's more like a field of slightly moist grass with banks around it.
Oh, and on another unrelated topic, I saw Hero over the weekend. It was good. Very mythic, very Chinese. The cinematography, costumes, and scenery are all amazing. And I quite like the way the plot was done, with the flashback storytelling. (BTW, it's worth noting that the Qin dynasty's reorganization of the provinces of China, and the bureaucratic structure they created to organize things, persist to this day, though of course in greatly modified forms. The Qin themselves were overthrown in the generation following the great unifier, but the Han Mandarins were smart enough to keep their basic structure while putting a veneer of Confucian respectability and Taoist tradition over it to make it more palatable to the masses. And hey, it worked for something like two millennia, and even the Maoist dynasty of the modern era still looks an awful lot like Imperial China.)
