"We have a big-ass gym."

She was courteous, beautiful, and professional. I managed to avoid laughing; I couldn't, however, suppress a big-ass smile at the Beijing Kerry Hotel receptionist's suddenly-familiar phrasing while describing the hotel's other amenities. She's correct: "big-ass" appropriately describes the size of their gym. I didn't have the heart to explain her moment of incongruity.

This receptionist speaks good English. She's probably heard that Americans are informal by Chinese standards. I'm probably not the first person she's described the gym to this way. Previous patrons also probably stifled a laugh and most of a smile, but their eyes likely lit up. She may have marked this response as a moment of rapport. She might also just think that American businessmen really like their gyms.

We arrived at the hotel at around 9:30pm Beijing time. I fumbled around for a tip for the bellhop, who I tried to refuse. I would have carried my own bags but I wanted to accept the tea they offered me at the front desk. After fumbling for some time with RMB that all seemed exactly the wrong denominations, I settled on a $5 bill. I flipped through the TV channels for a few minutes to see if I could pick out any characters or syllables, then set an alarm and went to bed.

The hotel was luxurious. Major chords were the elevator chimes. Do-not-disturb signs are operated by a switch instead of a placard hung on the door. I discovered this when a note informed me I had left the do-not-disturb signal on, preventing the servicing of my room. There were a lot of switches on the wall.

The room's toilets were push-button operated for flushing, bidet-ing, and drying. There were even buttons for raising and lowering the seat. The thought, unbidden, arrived in my mind as "and here we are in America, raising our own seats like chumps!"

I wasn't able to find an alarm clock in the room, so I installed an alarm clock app on my laptop instead. The bathroom mirror had a built-in digital clock. My stay was at the height of luxury, and not what I expect is the normal standard of living in most of China. Or most of America, for that matter.

Base ten is an obstacle to international harmony.

A rough approximation of the dollar cost of an item in Beijing would be to divide it by six. This should be much easier than it is, but for the brutish choice our species has made to use ten as the base for international commerce.

The philistine critics among are surely waggling their manual digits in support of this accident of biology enshrined beyond its post. Let me parry their defiance of common sense with a solution for counting to twelve on one's fingers. If you refuse to grant arguments beyond this seeming convenience, this should prove a switch to twelve at least yields no ground as far as the mathematically illiterate are concerned:

(not my video)

Now for the sophisticates among you, I submit to you these grand properties of twelve as a base: We enjoy the convenience in our digital (that is, base-ten lives) of dividing easily by 2, and 5. The astute among you will see that the dozenal revolution is asking us to sacrifice convenient division by 5, but hear me! The rewards are great, for in return, we receive easy division by 3 and 4.

Division is easiest for the proper divisors of the radix.
For ten, this means 2 and 5.
For twelve, this means 2, 3, 4, and 6.

In base twelve we replace the convenience of division by 5 with the convenience of division by 6 and introduce convenient division by 3 and 4 as well.

In the meantime, dividing everything by 6 was a bit of an inconvenience while in China. I'm still withholding my support of the metric system until it switches from base ten to base twelve.

Windburnt on the Great Wall

My Saturday in Beijing, 8 of us hired a tour guide. We went to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, a jade factory, a copper-something-pretty-stuff factory, a silk factory, and a tea place.

The advice people gave me about visiting China (wear masks and avoid pickpockets) was not very necessary. The pollution was noticeable but not apocalyptic. People on the street seemed to wear them more for warmth than for health. Avoiding pickpockets at the Forbidden City was trivial, as the bitterly cold weather meant we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We were told this was Beijing's coldest winter in 30 years, and that Saturday when we were outside playing tourist was supposed to be the coldest day. I didn't pack gloves, but I did, thankfully, pack a ski mask. I got a pair of North Fakes^TM gloves for ¥20 ($3) on the street that did an okay job for the rest of the day.

The tour guide gave us a lot of facts about the Forbidden City. He wanted us to guess how many rooms there were in the Forbidden City (9,999. Nine is a lucky number). With the same enthusiasm, he asked us to guess how many concubines the emperor would have. The Forbidden City is a very large moated area. Concubines would live just outside the walls. Houses that were aligned with the north/south axis of the city would bring good luck to the inhabitants, and concubines would live there. After several large concubine count guesses from the group and Kevin (our guide) responding "more" or "less," I offered, "Zero! The emperor loved his wife very much."

I got pretty windburnt on the Great Wall. Although the temperature was colder there than it was at the Forbidden City, we were at a section that was pretty much just stairs straight up the mountain. My FitBit said I had something like 275 floors for the day (and 20,000 steps). Two others and I reached the top. The other five didn't get quite so high and patiently sipped coffee, awaiting our return. I noticed the coffee shop advertised an "American Latte." I imagine that was to properly set expectations for Italian tourists. The Great Wall had a great amount of graffiti on it. I was embarrassed to see English graffiti, even though it was alongside Chinese, Russian, and several other languages. It's just not classy. Graffiti your own country, filthy tourists! The mountains near the Great Wall rise more steeply than the Cascades. The Wall was a great way to climb up and get a good view of the surroundings. It also made the pollution situation clear. The temperatures were just a few degrees above zero (booger-freezing) and the humidity was maybe 10-20%, but towards the city it still looked foggy and slightly yellowish. That is smog, and it's sad. One of our Beijing contacts told us most masks are placebos and thinks within about 20 years they should be able to clean it up. I hope he's right and I agree with him. On the plus side, I made it up the Great Wall without breaking a sweat.

Digital life inside the Great Firewall

My week in Beijing was a week without my smart phone, a week without Facebook, a week without texts, and a week without Gmail; so, in spite of the pollution and the anarchy of their dog-eat-dog rules of the road, my trip to Beijing was very relaxing.

I was able to send email through my work laptop, so I used that to send daily messages to keep my mom from worrying too much.

The Beijing locals seem to be well-connected. WeChat in China seems to be about as pervasive as Facebook here.

While it was comfortable to return to my friends, family, and language, I did not relish the reintroduction of Facebook.

The "welcome home" from my News Feed. I missed you too, America.

My week without social media reminded me of when I took a break from a toxic relationship. That feeling of weight off my shoulders...it clarified everything. The relationship was over. It's not supposed to be that comfortable to be without something that's supposed to be so important. So, Facebook News Feed: I don't need to scroll through you any more. You're not a positive presence in my life. You are a machine that is designed to keep mankind scrolling, clicking, and commenting for as long as possible. You're a time-waster. Freedom is sweet.