25. Kayak across the Pacific Ocean 6,243 km...40. Kayak across the Pacific Ocean 4,436 km
The Japanese have a gleeful fascination with American traditions. It was thus even before World War II, and got even more so after. Given the opportunity, they will celebrate life unlike most any other people in the world. We would do well to emulate them.or #70 (which - like some others - is also a commentary about Japan)
Cute video, but we all might want to think twice before dismissing certain ethnic groups as "weird," even jokingly. It's also probably not very wise to form our opinion of entire cultures based around the creepy porn we downlo... err, that one of our friends saw once.or #87, which carries some traditional (although slightly back-handed, imho) leaf-turning New Year's sentiments:
Yah know, 63 years ago, we hated these peoples guts, and with good reason. Now we're all singing together. My new year wish is that it doesn't take 63 years until we're singing something equally silly and fun with the people of the middle east - and beyond.or #98, which is a straight-up commentary on the video:
I can only send out this message of hope to the world and try to live it every day.
More holiday stormtrooper, please.In the second category, we have commentary #5:
yep, this is what my christmas is like this year. i've already seen a gigantic christmas tree with a full-scale light-up crucifix on top. from the description my japanese friends gave me, japanese christmas is almost exactly like a more extravagant version of valentines day.or commentary #65 which describes the fleeting quality of Japanese Christmases:
on the other hand, new year is generally more significant, and more like the family-orientated western christmas.
There's two great things about christmas here in Japan: it's pure essence of schlocky commercialism, undiluted by any religious meaning to ruin the fun; and the morning of the 26th there is no trace of the holiday whatsoever.Commentary in this category led to some "Pharyngulites" trying to figure out whether they should have a meet-up in Japan, like comment #24. (Oooh, I like it when I act as a social catalyst! Who knew that I might be able to be one for a group of people I never met?)
Really - you walk down Shinsaibashi shopping street on the night of the 25th and there's big, gaudy christmas decorations everywhere, christmas-themed shop windows, christmas music, christmas billboards and commercials. The next morning it's all gone, replaced by the symbols and music (and commercials) of traditional New Year celebration. From bossanova versions of "RUdolf the red-nosed reindeer" to Koto music - it's enough to get cultural whiplash unless you're careful.
So, how many Pharungulites are in Japan? I take it [#14] is, so that makes at least two of us. We should organise a meetup.and in response:
...
I'd be interested. We would need a neutral site to share contact information / organize. Something like meetup.com. I can't imagine there are too many of us but maybe if we reach critical mass we can have semi-regular events. I'm in Tokyo, btw. Nerima to further narrow that down geographically.and another:
Debito is a pretty interesting character and his site is a good general resource for foreigners living in Japan. A somewhat depressing (at times infuriating) site, but highly recommended.
One more here, but in Sendai.There were several other responses, ranging from, "That would be awesome!" to "I would love to, but I can't, because the cost of travel/my income/etc. would not allow me to do so..." However, if some of these people do get together, then a Pharynguloid Christmas-in-Japan party was done, thanks to little ole me!
I will, however, be in Tokyo in Early April and late May, also in Nagoya and Osaka in March.
Of course, it is possible to shoot down to Tokyo almost any weekend - it's not so far.
ljirving[at]gmail.com
If someone is organizing...
http://www.ratemyeverything.net/image/1748/2/JAPAN.ashxor commentary #2 - an immediate response to the accusation of "wierdness"
^Picture is very relevant to the topic under discussion.
Japan is ... weird.
Not always in a bad way, they have some good food, music, movies, etc... But they're very frequently very weird.
Who do you mean by "they", [#1]? People like me?!which requried a response post in the commentary #4 position:
[#2], if you had a hand in the making of some of the music film television and such that I've watched(and frequently enjoyed) from Japan, then yes, you :PSee? "Hey, it's weird!" "If that's weird, you are calling me weird! Are you calling me weird?" "Not unless you are weird, but I consider lots of things as weird!"
I'll hasten to add that I don't think that weird is a bad thing, it just means something unusual. People with genius level IQ are weird. People who are over 200 cm tall are weird. And the people who make certain manga? REALLY weird.
There were also comments about whether Japan was a racist country:私も神戸市に住んでいる。もう１５年間が中級の日本語を話せます。ところで、日本人はおかしいと思っているか。アメリカにウッピ・ゴルドバーグの「ﾀﾞ・ビュウ」は大ヒットだ！それはおかしいじゃないか？
loose translation -- I also live in Kobe. I have spoken intermediate Japanese [sic] for 15 years. By the way, do you think Japanese are weird? In America, Whoopie Goldberg's "The View" is a big hit! Don't you think that [show's] weird?
or:More "naive" than "racist" in many cases - foreigners are exotic (and by extension, dangerous (and this is a prejudice not without some justification, their murder rate is two orders of magnitude lower than the US)).I can't speak for accuracy of the source (it seems fairly recent) but according to this site Japan's murder rate per capita is an order of a magnitude lower than the U.S.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
I would wager that the low murder rate has nothing to do with Japan's largely homogeneous society but more to do with the lack of firearms.
Th average Japanese person, much like the average American, is not an over racist or card carrying member of the KKK / Japanese ultra-right equivalent. I wouldn't characterize Japanese people as extremely racist, but there is a fair amount of institutionalized racism and xenophobia in Japan.
Don't take my word for it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4671687.stm
Japan has a nation has a less than stellar record in this arena.
Japan would be a great place if it weren't for the racism and sexism.What takes the cake in terms of comment length and depth (and personal agreement) is #108:
Re the comment: "And that the Japanese, who seem to be effortlessly combining bits and pieces of shintoism and buddhism, would add a little western x-mas kitsch to the mix - that too would seem [weird]."
That's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. We have people in Japan taking native traditions from Shinto - a pretty mundane and harmless religion, as those things go - and later adopting some traditions of Buddhism, a religion that famously fits very comfortably with other faiths. Then in modern days, residents of Japan see all that nifty stuff about Santa and Xmas trees and presents, and decide to join in on the fun - just the easy secular bits, not the difficult religious stuff. The kind of Xmas that I, an atheist, gleefully enjoy myself.
Sounds simple enough to me. Yet I'm constantly told that this this is "strange" and "weird" and even, according to some, "boggling to the Western mind".
Meanwhile, what about religious traditions in "the West"? Well, let's look at Christmas itself:
The holiest day of Christianity celebrates the birth of a Jew who added new teachings to traditional Jewish ones. The holiday actually originated in pre-Christian pagan winter solstice celebrations, borrowed its date from an ancient Roman sun-worship festival, picked up Germanic and Scandinavian pagan elements like trees, wreaths, and "Yuletide", and is jam-packed with things like Santa and reindeer and presents and blowout sales that have no connection to Christ/God whatsoever. (Trivia: This year, Christmas falls on a day named in English after the Norse god of thunder.)
This "Western" mish-mash is arbitrarily labeled as _not_ weird. Why? The best reason I can come up with: Because it's much more fun to say that the foreigners are doing weird, inscrutable things.
Or take another comment, "Japan is rather conformist and collectivist". Well, nothing wrong with that as a casual opinion, but is it factual? What are the definitions, and how do we measure? Is the rest of the world _not_ conformist and collectivist? How about the amazing groupthink regarding religion in the US, which makes Christian identity a practical requirement for public office? Is that not conformist? If not, why?
And so on. I've been inspired by "rationalist" sites like Pharyngula to blog about "cultural comparison" ( http://www.homejapan.com ). Like faith and superstition, it's a field just packed with irrational thinking: confirmation bias, correlation/causation confusion, received knowledge, and so on.
Granted, these "cultural difference" claims are mostly quite harmless, and pretty trivial compared to the havoc wreaked on the world by religion's sloppy thinking. But as an exercise in critical thinking, if nothing else, I find it interesting to look at "cultural comparison" through a skeptical lens.
Web or sex? Nearly half of women would rather go online
Nearly one out of two women would rather give up sex for two weeks than go without the Internet, according to a survey released Monday.
Far fewer men would choose to go without sex, according to the survey of 2,119 adults carried out by the online research firm Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel Corp., the world's biggest computer chip maker.
Forty-six percent of the women polled said they would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up access to the Internet for the same period of time, according to the survey, "Internet Reliance in Today's Economy."
Only 30 percent of men said they would rather forgo intimate relations than cyber ones.
Ninety-five percent of those surveyed said it is "very important, important or somewhat important" to be able to access the Internet.
Sixty-five percent of those surveyed rated Internet access above other discretionary spending items such as cable television subscriptions (39 percent), dining out (20 percent), shopping for clothes (18 percent) or a health club membership (10 percent).
Sixty-one percent of the women surveyed said they would rather give up watching television for two weeks than give up access to the Internet for one week.
Harris Interactive and Intel said the survey was conducted November 18-20. They did not provide a margin of error for the results.Now if this is something that is inherent in human behavior, then it might have a significant impact on human selection pressure - by diminishing it. What do you think? I mean, if 46% of women and 30% of men said they would forgo intimate relations than cyber ones, then that could mean that there could be a maximum of 30% of the population not procreating. And this is of people surveyed in the United States. What if this was rolled out to the rest of the world? I mean, governments could give greater internet access to people as a means of population control! And if the internet and computing continue to advance toward a neural-integrative state, then virtual lives could become even more important and facinating than real lives. That number of 30% and 46% could increase even further!
Steven Chu of Lawrence Berkeley Labs is reported to be President-elect Obama's nominee for Secretary of Energy.
While much will be made of his Nobel Prize and his aggressive advocacy for science-based solutions to the climate crisis, his nomination is important for another reason.
Chu is Steve 75 on NCSE's Project Steve. Project Steve is a humorous mockery of creationist lists of scientific supporters. The 987 signers of the Project Steve statement are all PhD scientists who support evolution, and all are named Steve (or Stephen, Stephanie, Istvan, etc.) Since Steves represent roughly 1% of the US population, we can extrapolate those 987 signers to roughly 100,000 scientists who support the teaching of evolution, and oppose the teaching of creationism.
As Wikipedia points out: "Both Nobel Prize-winning Steves in science, Steven Chu and Steven Weinberg were among the first 100 Steves." Weinberg was Steve #6.
Also via Loom (formerly on Scienceblogs):
It is encouraging to see an advocate of strong science education in charge of one of the largest science funding agencies.
Barack Obama has picked Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley as his Secretary of Energy. This will be interesting–what happens when you put a Nobel-prize winning scientist in charge of a government department? Here’s one prediction: expect a lot of synthetic biology. Practically nobody has heard of synthetic biology today, but that will probably change.And Questionable Authority:
If the latest set of transition leaks are as accurate as the previous few have been, President-Elect Obama will announce the nomination of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary.
Chu's background is a bit light on the politics side - no DC job, no elected political office - but even if you consider that to be a down side, the rest of his resume more than makes up for the lack. He's a career scientist. He's a world-class physicist, one of the 1997 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004.He understands the scientific process. He knows what it takes to do good science, and how to get in the way of that as little as possible. He's been an effective head of a national laboratory. He's served on international panels on a variety of issues, including climate change. He's an advocate for the use of good science in public policy, and for better science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. All of those things are good indications that this is a guy who might just be able to rebuild the Department of Energy.
And finally from Cris Mooney at The Intersection:Possibly the best thing about Dr. Chu is this: not only does he understand just how much we know about the relationship between climate, energy efficiency, and the environment, he also understands just how much we don't know. He understands how important it is to close that gap, how little time we have to do it, and just why these issues are so important[.]
Chris Mooney also reminds us that Chu was one of many scientists who endorsed the ScienceDebates 2008:Apparently it's going to be Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Steve Chu. I heartily applaud the pick. It's especially noteworthy that Chu has been a big proponent of action on global warming and clean energy.
Hmmm... Now, I know that many of the commenters on PZ's blog like to make snarky remarks (and I like to do that too), but his post provided me a good opportunity to actually productively procrastinate on a subject that I was wanting to poke with a stick to see what happened. So I did calculations and posted a response:Oh, boy — get out the model airplane glue and little bottles of paint: you can build a model of Noah's Ark! And it's only $74! (The price of plastic models has sure gone up since I used to buy them with my lawn mowing money).This injection molded plastic model kit measures over 18 1/2" long and includes 3 separate interior decks with embossed wood texture and many details including ramps and animal cages and corrals. The kit offers several building options. Modelers may display the Ark in cross section to reveal the internal decks or in the full-hull version. Additional building options include: constructing the Ark with or without the deck cabin and a choice to include the "moon pool" (an open center well allowing access to water and waste disposal). This deluxe kit also includes a figure of Noah and 8 pairs of animals!Cute. Check out these details:
- Museum-quality replica
- Highly detailed tooling
- Accurately scaled to the cubit
Portions of Ann Street that are oneway. (Only a few more blocks to add to the scheme!) 
The first warning sign for motorists. (Gotta like the flags.) I wonder how long this will be up, though.
I can understand the "No left" sign on the left side of Division, but what's up with that one on the right? Do they really think people are going to make a left-turn from the right lane, across two lanes of traffic?
As a cyclist, I like that they extended the bike lane from Main Street, but it ends here. (And it is apparently one-way also.)
I wonder how good people will be in following these instructions while also remaining between the parking lines.
I wonder about the sense of having the bike lane on the right side of the street. I can see someone pealing out of their parknig space (since they are faced the correct direction to begin with), not see a cyclist coming down the street, and plow into that person at full acceleration. Of course, the police station is right there, too, so this type of action might be subliminaly moderated. However, a cyclist might well be hit when an incompetent driver is trying perform a maneuver that he or she has only seen done on a green sign in their rear-view mirror to back into the space.The evidence of a downturn has been widespread for months: slower production, stagnant wages and hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. But the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, charged with making the call for the history books, waited until now to weigh in.Hmmm... How do the fundamentals of the Bush economy look now, Johnny Boy?
...
The committee noted that the contraction in the labor market began in the first month of 2008 and said that the declines in most major indicators, like personal income, manufacturing activity, retail sales, and industrial production, “met the standard for a recession.”
...
The announcement came as the stock market fell sharply, its first decline in five sessions. The Dow Jones industrial average was off more than 430 points or 4. 9 percent as the last hour of trading begin. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 5. 9 percent.
...
Investors may also be playing defense ahead of Friday’s report on the job market, one of the most important monthly indicators of the health of the economy. Analysts expect that employers shed more than 300,000 jobs in November, underscoring the problems facing American workers and businesses.
...
A separate report from the Commerce Department showed that spending on construction projects fell 1.2 percent in October, after staying unchanged in September. Private construction dropped 2 percent with a sharp drop in the residential sector, offering few signs of relief from the housing slump.
I just got paid, and to celebrate, Koskie and I went to the Blue Tractor. Having gone there before, I decided that - yes - it would be a good idea to go to try more of the food there. Koskie ordered the smoked chicken & sweet corn chowder ($4.95) and the fried catfish ($11.95). I ordered the creamed wild mushrooms ($12.95) and a side of butternut squash soup ($2.95 as a side).
It's beginning to look a lot like winter... But altough it's snowing, I'm still riding my bike (!?!), and it's not that bad right now. Of course, accumulations could make it "fun" to ride home...
The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.Methinks, "Not really."
The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.
The EU's new Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage, was forced to close temporarily on its launch Thursday after it was swamped by Internet users, a spokesman said.
"We had 10 million hits by the hour of interested Internet users across Europe and that led to the fact that at 11:30 am, we had to take temporarily the site down to double the computer capacity," spokesman Martin Selmayr said.
The site, which allows access to more than two million digital objects like films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers, documents and books had only been open a short time.
Selmayr said six computer servers, instead of three, were now in action.
"It is now up and running again," he said. "We hope we will be able to survive the next storm of interest."
With 14 staff members and at an annual cost put at around 2.5 million euros (3.15 million dollars), Europeana -- which can be found at http://www.europeana.eu -- currently has around two million digital items online.
By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available.I wonder how much bandwidth they allotted, and how much is actually needed.... This seems to be something common... Why don't they just over-allocate, and then cut back when they recognize that there is less space required. Hell, if they knew that they were going to have this huge unveiling, why not - say - provide much more bandwidth than expected for everyday running. (Maybe they did, but merely under-estimated the popularity of European culture?) And maybe providing more than 14 staff members to take care of tech-related issues would have been a good idea too...
But there remain many obstacles to making this a viable industrial process. For one thing, the hydrate remains stable only if kept cold. It must be refrigerated to about minus 70°C at atmospheric pressure, although this temperature threshold is higher if the hydrate sits within an environment of pressurized methane. The methane is released again if the material warms up.So not very useful as a preventative for global warming, then. Still, though, quite interesting.
A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph.
...
A video demonstration of the Google Mobile App on the online giant's website shows an American engineer successfully asking for pictures of the Golden Gate as well as cinema timetables and temperature conversions.
The website also includes a link to a video showing people with Irish, British and Chinese accents asking for relatively complicated searches, with apparent success.
But British iPhone owners had less luck when speaking the word "iPhone" into the application -- a Scottish user was offered a porn website after it mistook his search for "sex," the Telegraph reported.
A user from Surrey, south of London, had his request mistaken for "myspace" and "Einstein" was another option offered for "iPhone" spoken with a Kent accent, it said.
The only British accent which correctly understood the request was for a user from Yorkshire, northern England, although he was also offered "bonfire."
...
"I've got a traditional Kentish accent and the thing kept on spitting back ridiculous things," said Roger Ellinson, 26, from Maidstone in Kent, southeastern England.
"I asked it to find my nearest pizza take away and it came back with something about volcanoes," he added.
"I asked it to find my nearest pub and it gave me a link to some kind of weird dating website," said Ellinson. "I'll have to try to put on my best American accent to get it to work."
...
One British user, Edward Parsons, says on the site's comments board: "This is fantastic, except for the North American accent bias.
"It actually works pretty well, but I have to disguise my (North London) accent with a terrible folksy Texan tourist voice to get results. I can see this is going to be the source of much amusement and confusion."This is humorous since I am now imagining British people desperately putting on horrible fake American accents in a vain attempt to use their voice recognition software. It speaks, though, to imposed language and accent norms because of the overwhelming American technology bias (one more way in which the US is a cultural imperial power and likely doesn't even know about it).
The computer mouse may someday become an endangered species. Instead of rolling a mouse around to move a cursor around on the screen, more and more users will gesture with their fingers on touch screens and multi-touch trackpads, analysts say.I personally think that my labmate had it right when he said, "That will be a great way to spread germs." True, if you let a person who is all germ-y touch your keyboard or mouse, you will likely to pick up those germs yourself. No difference from a touch-screen, right? Well, let's think about it. How many times have you been sitting there, and someone is trying to explain something on the screen to you? It's a pain in the butt to move out of the way and let the other person sit in the chair to operate the keyboard and mouse. (And if you are all phobic about germ contamination, you are not likely to let them sit and touch your keyboard and mouse.) However, if the screen is the interface... (Don't you have hands-y labmates or co-workers who come over and actually touch your monitor? Think now how often they will do it when it's touch-screen!)
...
"The demise will be hastened by the move toward 3D environments, which encourage a more complex range of movements to move around, and by the growth of multimedia applications and manipulation, which encourage a more natural user interface," he said.
Already, Hewlett-Packard makes a TouchSmart personal computer with a touch-screen monitor. Apple's new laptop computers have trackpads that support gestures with two, three or four fingers. And the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7 will also support multi-touch.
...
A glimpse of the future can be found at the Microsoft Technology Center in Manhattan, where visitors can get their hands on a Surface table.
The Surface computer, which debuted for commercial use in July, has a 30-inch screen on which users can tap, drag, spin and zoom in and out with their fingers or an object such as a paint brush.
Hell's bells, if this were done... then the cost of gold would plummet further! (And the cumulative cost to human health of the current e-waste metals extraction process would be much lessened, thus hopefully costing the world economy less in the long-run than a drop in gold prices.)A Japanese university professor developed a technique to selectively recover precious metals from the fluid of melted electric/electronic parts by using adsorbent made from biomass waste.
The new technique can reduce the cost of recovery and environmental load because it can reclaims metals such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium by using, for example, used paper and rotten fruit. The technique was developed by Hidetaka Kawakita, an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry of the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Saga University.
There are several methods to recover precious metals from waste including solvent extraction process, which uses activated carbon, and other extraction processes that use polymeric resin adsorbent made of ion-exchange resin or chelating resin.
However, the adsorption capacity of these methods is as low as 1-3mol/kg. And, if a metal identification block is designed to selectively extract specific metal, the cost will increase to more than double. Furthermore, solvent extraction processes require a large scale wastewater treatment system because they use organic solvents such as toluene.
In regard to the extraction process based on polymeric resin adsorbent, the absorbed metals and the resin are separated from each other by burning the resin. This leaves tar, coke or other waste material, which requires cumbersome treatment, after the incineration.
In the new method, on the other hand, an adsorbent is made from biomass waste. Specifically, selected constituents are extracted from waste paper containing cellulose or lignin, or waste fruits, such as persimmon or lemon, containing a large amount of polyphenol. Then, those constituents are adjusted by an amination reaction. In this way, the new method can reduce the cost to 1/10-1/2 that of the existing methods.
In an experiment where a fruit-derived absorbent was used for the waste fluid made of electric/electronic parts melted by hydrochloric acid, the recovery rate of gold was 100%. Also, it was observed that a waste paper-derived absorbent selectively recovered platinum, palladium and rhodium depending on the kind of functional group used in the experiment.
The recovery rate of platinum and palladium reportedly exceeded 80%. The absorption capacity of the absorbents range from 3 to 10mol/kg, which is three times higher than that of activated carbon or polymeric resin. And the new method can reduce the environmental load because it does not use any harmful organic solvents.
This research was conducted as part of the Industrial Technology Research Grant Program promoted by Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
No wonder there are so many females at high schools and universities (especially Ohio State). Not that that's a bad thing, but in order for a population to sustain itself, the sexes need to be in balance as much as possible.I understand that this might have been a facetious comment, but to the point of "in order for a population to sustain itself, the sexes need to be in balance as much as possible" I have to say, "Ummm.... No." In order for a population to maintain itself, it has to have enough source from the limiting gamete-type. In most cases in nature, it is usually eggs that are limiting. In humans, especially, eggs are the limiting factor (roughly only one egg per woman per month). If there was only one man in a population of multiple women (lets use a ratio of 1:10 here), there is a possibility for continued population (possibility of up to 10 children per ~nine months). However, if the future ratio of males to females doesn't change, inbreeding will likely occur, since all offspring in the first generation will be 1/8 related to each other.
"Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm [sic], ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target."Ummm... It should have read, "... Pan Am, ITT and Montgomery Ward ... Southwest, Microsoft, and Target."
"First, what interest rate would be charged on the $700 billion borrowed to fund the bailout. That interest expense and not the $700 billion would be added to the national deficit. And second, if the bailout funds were spent to purchase assets (whether bad loans or shares of stock in banks) that were at least equal to the value of the amount paid, then that purchase would not produce an expense and in that case the deficit would not go up."
