a-cubed.info

The Now Show included a wonderful piece this week about Net Authority, a group which attempts to claim the right to specify the acceptable use policy for the entire internet. With the age-old cry of censors “Think of the children!” they decry the inclusion of, amongst other things, “materials concerning bestiality, including interracial relationships.”
Among the websites they claim violate their acceptable use policy is that of the UK’s Labour Party .
I wonder if there’s another net censorship site which attempts to get racist material removed from the net. Maybe I can get these groups so interested in each other that they’ll stop bothering the rest of us.

Autopope wrote a post that attracted over a hundred replies, trying to explain to believers what it’s like to be an unbeliever. I was one of the repliers, with something I’ve been meaning to post something about for a while.
My favourite book is “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny. This is for a number of reasons. One is his absolutely wonderful writing. Anyone who can write a line as simple as ” Yama poured more tea. Ratri ate another sweetmeat.” and have it perfectly convey an immensely complicated mood, was an utter genius.
Another of the reasons I love this book is that Zelazny encapsulated my feelings on religion so well:
“I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not…”
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool, and I have no use for either.”

A BBC news website education report included the following quote from Anne Kiem of the IFS School of Finance:

She said: “We’re not talking about high finance – it’s things like how do you open a bank account, how do you pay a cheque”.

This may be a journalist’s mistake or it may be her mistake, but you don’t “pay a cheque”. You can “pay by cheque”, you can “pay in a cheque” or “pay a cheque in”, but you can’t “pay a cheque”. This, in a report about the lack of basic skills needed for employment, such as being able to speak/write in clear, accurate and understandable English, is pretty ironic.
Then again, the BBC news website is often littered with spelling mistakes (including ones which should be picked up by a basic spell-checker) and poor grammar, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

As if the sirens and the unsilenced motorbikes weren’t enough, one of the neighbours of the guest house decided today that 6:40am on a Sunday was an appropriate time to go out and trim the undergrowth of something that would appear to be not even his land. By the looks of it, he lives in the old house on the corner on the other side of the river and he was using a petrol-powered brush cutter (think strimmer but with an eight inch diameter circular blade instead of two string as the cutter head) not to do his own garden, but to chop down the undergrowth along the river/feeder on the opposite side of the “stream” which feeds into the river from his house (I can’t believe this would be an employee of the private after-school education place that occupies the fenced in land outside which there is untended, until today, undergrowth by the side of the “stream” and “river”. Of course while using such a machine he was oblivious to my shouting across the river to him from my balcony so I had to go out and around to the car park of the “after school school”.

He seemed to understand immediately when I pointed out to him that it was before 7am on a Sunday morning and that other people would like to sleep. He stopped immediately. Not that this includes me now, having been dragged up out of a relatively sound sleep the irritation has produced too much adrenaline for me to go back to bed.

Polite in many ways the Japanese may be, but considerate they often aren’t.

Back in April it became clear that Meiji University was messing up my forwarded post. Since I wasn’t sure when I came here whether I’d be staying at the University Guest House for my whole visit, I arranged for my post from Reading to be forwarded to the main University address. Initially this was delivered internally to my host, Murata-sensei. When I had an office of my own for six weeks or so, I also had my own pigeonhole. When I had to move out of that office, the pigeonhole went away and rather than enquiring with the international office or Murata-sensei someone (as is typical in Japan no one has been identified nor have I had any kind of apology) decided I’d left and started returning my post to sender. It took a few weeks for me to realise that this was happening and it then took four more weeks for the mail room in the University to sort things out and start delivering my post to Murata-sensei again.

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Showing exactly how much they regard CD sales as a god given right to charge high prices to customers, representatives of the music industry have thrown their toys out of the pram at a deal by Prince to provide the Sunday Mail with copies of his new album “Planet Earth” for distribution as a “free” gift with the newspaper sometime soon.

“Free” CDs and DVDs with newspapers have become standard fare in the UK in recent years, but these are usually older material which has long been available, including compilation albums of well-worn “classics” as well as B&W movies which have typically been available for a few years on DVD.

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I’ve definitely been here too long. I got my first piece of “junk mail” today.

OK, so it should have been expected. When I first arrived I bought a digital camera from Yodobashi camera. At the time, I signed up for one of their “loyalty cards” which give a ten percent bonus from each purchase which can be used on future purchases. Since I’ve bought a moderate amount of stuff from them, this has been a decent deal. But, to sign up I had to give them an address. Their summer catalogue arrived today, my first piece of junk mail in Japan.

One of the Nippon 2007 committee just posted a brief English email to the staff mailing list. A message to an large list in Japanese would have started with “???” (that’s a made up name, not the name of the person who posted), giving the name of the originator. I’m not sure why this etiquette exists on Japanese lists. Possibly it dates back to when email systems couldn’t hold kanji/kana characters in headers. Anyway, when writing in English, this staff member translated “???” as “I’m Akira”, which in isolation is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Japanese. Unfortunately, in context, it’s very odd English. I had to manfully resist the temptation to reply with one or all of::

“I’m Spartacus”

“I’m Sparkey Tickets”

“I’m Brian, and so’s my wife.”

Bonus points (scored by the lovely Samantha) to anyone who can name all three references.

This brings me to the point of this post. One of the downsides of living in Japan, for an Englishman like me, is the lack of opportunity to make puns and other word play jokes. On the odd occasion when I can’t resist doing so, I’ve always got to explain it. If you have to explain it, it’s not funny. My Japanese isn’t nearly good enough to make Japanese puns, either. <Sigh>

The Luddites broke up machinery that was transforming their (often dangerous and ill-paid) jobs into something that could be done by far fewer people, sometimes though not always in a safer way, and sometimes though not always turning tens or hundreds of low paid jobs into one better paid job.

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I’ve not been posting as much on here lately as I’d have liked, because I’ve been having trouble with the blog. I’m hoping it’s now sorted out. One of the admin pages still looks awful, but it’s not one I actually need to go to and if I need to I can work with it. I was having trouble posting some entries and editing a lot of them. After hunting and hunting and hunting for the solution, I finally found something on the WordPress troubleshooting site about turning off Apache’s “security filtering module” in the .htaccess by adding this:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterScanPOST off
</IfModule>
As ifby magic, suddenly I can post and edit again. The original thread discussed certain words triggering this module. Dangerous words like “biopsy” and “autopsy”. I’m not sure what words in my Museums review post it didn’t like, but this shows how bad security can be in getting in the way of the purpose of software. The biggest problem is that I wasn’t getting an error. No, I was just getting booted back out to my home page.