a-cubed.info

The Geography of Prejudice, maps of the world according to cultural or other sterotypical viewpoints. Absolutely brilliant!

Catching up on a bunch of blogging here. Sorry for the post-spam in your friend filters on LJ or your RSS feeds.

I seem to have levelled up in my swimming the last couple of weeks. I’ve hit a personal best three times in a fortnight and come pretty close to it a couple more. Unless there’s a problem (usually getting into the pool late during the 55 minute slot and having to stop at n:55 and either splitting my set or giving up partway through) I do 50 lengths (of a 25m pool). Mostly since I moved to 50 lengths I manage to do it in under 30 mintues, though sometimes if I’m tired (not enough sleep) or have done a lot of other moving around that day I’ve been over the 30 minutes or feel bloated because of swimming too soon after eating (anything less than 90 minutes and I’ll be a bit slow). Lately I’ve been hitting under 28 minutes even when I feel a bit slow and my personal best is no 26:38. I’m usually one of the fastest in the pool, though there are people slightly faster around sometimes. Some of them are faster on individual lengths but they take breaks whereas I just keep going through unless there’s a problem (either with overtaking or when a pair of goggles are losing their seal). The other day, though, there was a young chap who was almost twice as fast as me over one length. He was probably doing 5:3 or better. He was taking some breaks and when doing crawl was using a float between his thighs but even so he was impressively fast and it looked effortless. I was so envious. I may look like I’m putting in less effort that I am doing, to others who are slower than I am, I suppose, but this guy was just impressive. Still, I think 50 lengths in 26:38 isn’t bad going for a middle-aged guy.

Yesterday I ran my pre-paid card for the local pool down to zero. I do this a lot but this was an exact count down to zero. I’ve done this before, and meant to mention it but didn’t get around to it. Here’s a little bit of arithmetic about the swimming cards.

Entry to the pool for an adult is Y380. Pre-paid cards of Y1,000 and Y3,000 are also available at a (I assume non-refundable) discount of 10%. Since I got most days I buy the Y3,000 cards, which cost me Y2,700. The LCM of 380 and 3,000 is 57,000 which is 150 visits using 19 cards. So I’ve been to the pool 150 times since I last flatlined a card exactly. This has cost me Y51,300 (remember the 10% discount for the pre-paid cards).

Doing this has taken me a little more than 150 days because:

• my local pool is closed on Tuesdays each week for maintenance (and a staff day off, I suspect);
• it closed for about ten days over the new year holiday period;
• it is occasinally closed, or only open inconvenient times (it doesn’t open normally until 9am and sometimes is closed to the public from 2pm because it’s a shared facility with a local school who sometimes claim sole usage);
• I am occasionally ill/convalescent and don’t swim;
• I don’t swim when travelling;
• I sometimes don’t swim because I just can’t make the time, such as when acting as your guide for Alastair Reynolds on his first day in Japan.

On days when my local pool is closed and I can arrange it, I swim at a pool once stop away on the JR Sobu line at Kinshichou. I did this for a couple of days at new year, though I did also take a couple of days not swimming when that pool was open.

So far as I can recall I last flatlined a card sometime last autumn, maybe October.

That’s a lot of swimming and, when one adds it up, quite a lot of money. Still, it’s paying off. More about that hopefully within a month or so.

A reuters report has some interesting numbers about Pew surveys of US citizens’ attitudes to religion and politics. There’s some encouraging stuff in there, with now a bare majority of respondents (even within the error margins) saying that they feel there is too much religiosity in elections. As with much American (and, as pointed out in the article, other industrialised countries’) politics there is polarisation going on as well, with people like white evangelicals and white catholics increasingly paranoid in their views of those with different religious views and seeing themselves as a persecuted minority (that’s a dangerous place to have a significant portion of your population and leads to the potential for radicalisation amongst a small proportion of that group). What bothered me the most about the piece, though, was the image from a Mitt Romney (I think it’s a Romney) rally showing him and his audience publicly praying. Look at the man on his right (left hand side of the photo) and at the back row of the audience visible behind him. That’s awfuly close to a nazi salute they’re giving, or is this just me and Godwin’s law comes into play?

Your Brain on Fiction (New York Times): excellent article giving brief details of recent(ish) results showing that reading descriptive text (not just fiction as the title suggests, but travelogues and descriptive biographies as well I would think) stimulates the parts of the brain involved in controlling movement and sensing things in much the same way as actually moving or sensing things stimulates them. Many years ago akicif described reading as “text-only cyberspace”. It seems he was very right.
Science fiction and fantasy, of course, are brilliant for this, as you can “experience” things which are impossible in reality.

After my mammoth session of catching up with Alastair Reynolds books, I decided to move on to something a little lighter for a while. This is the first of two so far in a series (I’m now reading the sequel, Ghost of a Smile) by Simon R. Green. Green is another author who throws in ideas left right and centre, rather like Stross and Reynolds in that regard. He also mines his own past work and that of classic authors for throwaway links, somewhat like Kim Newman (Ano Dracula, Diogenes Club). In particular this series is probably set in the same world as both his Nightside sequence and his Secret Histories sequences, both also contemporary hidden-world urban paranormal. I say probably because although the Nightside and Secret Histories are clearly linked, this one hasn’t been brought in directly yet. Anyway, this book introduces the Carnacki Institute, who deal with ghosts and related weirdness. The name is drawn from William Hope Hodgsen’s classic tales of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (as is the name of the series “Ghost Finders”) which stories I have also read and enjoyed. As Hodgson died in 1918 his works are out of copyrght and Green is able to include his characters and settings (though bringing them up to date) without worrying about copyright problems. He throws in many other similarly-sourced things in the Nightside books particularly and even some where he skates close to the edge such as the “Travelling Doctor” (clearly The Doctor from Dr Who, but very carefully described at a distance in such a way as to avoid over-zealous copyright lawyers).

In many of his books, the Nightside and Ghost Finders series particularly, Green seems to subscribe to the Moorcock approach to fantastic fiction writing described by Moorcock in “Death is No Obstacle” by Colin Greenland (interviews of Moorcock by Greenland). These are short books by modern standards (about 250 pages) and the action races along. No more than three pages of description without something happening. Also in contrast to Reynolds work which typically covers months, years, decades, centuries, millenia or even aeons of subjective and/or objective time, the 250 pages here comprise of one half hour introductory episode followed by three or four hours or so of the main plot (the second book seems similar). In some ways this read more like a novelisation of a TV show episode than your usual novel. Green makes all of this work and I’m a big fan of his books. They’re not deep or highly stylistic. They are fun, light reads with well-drawn characters that you can get along with (but who have their own quirks). As another reviewer once wrote of David Eddings, these are two dimensional characters, but they’re certainly drawn in exquisite detail in those two dimensions. A distinct contrast to what I’ve been reading lately, but well worth it, particularly if you’ve read the earlier works in this oeuvre by the likes of Hodgson, Wellman or other modern heirs like Newman. Green seems to be churning these three series out one in each every year, but their quality doesn’t seem to be suffering at all, and he doesn’t seem to be running out of ideas, either.

This shows what can be done when the ridiculous excesses of copyright are removed from the equation, and a good modern writer gets to remix ideas from classics of the genre.

I’ve been meaning to post this quick one for a while. $WIFE was reading a biography of Agatha Christie last year and found one comment on Christie’s habits a bit odd. The translator had reported that her favourite drink was half-cream half-milk. $WIFE thought this sounded incredibly rich. Half’n”half may be fine as a whitener in coffee but it would be a bit rich. After thinking about it for a while, I realised that the translator must have mis-translated “half-cream milk” (an older term I remember from my childhood for what’s now in the UK called semi-skimmed milk). The translation was fairly recent, though I’m not sure when the original was written, so this may well be a case of an earlier term confusing the translator who know the usual current terms of whole, semi-skimmed and skimmed instead of the old “full cream”, “half cream” and “no cream” terms.

SO I’ve now been sudying Japanese for eight years. In the first few years I was only so-so committed to spending the time on it. After my sabbatical here in 2007 I got much more committed to it and since moving here I’ve started using the Anki flashcard system which encourages me in a number of ways to study quite hard (1-2 hours per day typically, self-study, plus a one hour personal lesson every week). With both my teacher in the UK and my new teacher here, sometimes I’d feel like I was making no progress. That’s because they’re good teachers and are always pushing just beyond my confort zone, so I always feel like I’m working hard, and sometimes I’m failing at things. $WIFE and $COLLEAGUES do tell me I’m improving, though. Certainly I can read more of the kanji I see on the street and occasionally I can keep up with (some of) the substitles (part of the normal broadcast) on news programmes that $WIFE watches. I can even sometimes figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word and its pronunciation because I already know its constituent kanji characters from other words (or on their own).
Today I managed something that I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to. When I bought my current laptop the store didn’t have extra power supplies available, and when I enquired later they don’t stock them as standard and advised going direct to ASUS. Before Christmas I checked with ASUS and they didn’t have stock. Today I checked their website and they had stock in, so I ordered two extras (I need one for home, one for the office and one for the bag). Yes, I do need these – once in the past three months I forgot to unplug the power supply at home when heading into the office – luckily I was able to keep things short in the office anyway and come back home for the rest of the day. Why this is relevant to my improving Japanese is that the Asus Japan website is entirely in Japanese and I was able to find what I was looking for, check they had stock and go through the whole ordering process, while being absolutely certain I understood everything on the way and without having to look any words up in a dictionary. I’ve done similar things before, though I usually have to ask $WIFE to help or at least look a few things up in the dictionary. Now, this is obviously not fluency. I have a long way to go yet. According to my Anki studies I’ve only completed the JLPT2 vocabulary and have another 3000 words/phrases to learn to get to JLPT1 (the highest level and supposedly equivalent to high school gradate Japanese, at least in listening and reading, with some claim to “writing” ability but no speaking test). However, it is progress. I was also able to have a real conversation with $FATHER-IN-LAW and $MOTHER-IN-LAW at the New Year family party without needing interpretation by $WIFE. My grammar used to be ahead of my vocabulary. I think it’s now the other way around and I must add appropriate grammar cards to my Anki deck and interleave new vocabulary with the grammar. I think it will take me until 2015 to be basically fluent and maybe 2017 before I think I could even approach doing my job in Japanese. But, it’s nice to feel progress and have confidence that the work I’m putting in is paying off.

Medical TMI

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A Magnitude 4.7 quake off the coast of Honshu at 10:40am. This is the first time I’ve been in an earthquake (that I could feel) in my office. That wasn’t much of a shake here in Tokyo, though. A larger one (larger at my location) hit at 12:20pm, now showing on the earthquake monitors as around magnitude 5.7(USGS)-5.9(EMSC/GFZ). Anyway, no problems for me, though as this is off the coast up towards Senda, I suspect people up there are feeling more nervous again. The Japanese Met Agency haven’t issued a tsunami warning, which is good.

Things had quietened down in November and December from the afterschocks of last year’s big one in March. I wonder when a region like Japan is regarded as stopping having aftershocks and is back into normal mode where a new earthquake is regarded as its own event.