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Despite the crazy, panicked reporting about people fleeing Tokyo, the latest information I can find (from the Wall Street Journal, citing the Tokyo Metropolitan Government) states that radiation there has been steadily dropping; now down to 0.05 microsieverts/hr, one 16th of the level reported on Tuesday. Apparently this is within the normal range of radiation… Read More »
Been meaning to post this for a while – the December 2008 issue of ‘The Army Lawyer’ containing, on page 66, an article entitled For All “Intensive” Purposes: A Primer on Malapropisms, Eggcorns, and Other Rogue Elements of the English Language, describing a range of common mutations of the lingo. Found one of my favourite… Read More »
Aftershocks up and down the country over night. Woke up once or twice, but they’re pretty mild up here. What’s interesting is the area over which they’re occurring – no longer confined to around the fault, they’re happening in four clusters; one under land in Nagano, another under the ocean west of Akita in the… Read More »
When the earthquake struck last week, it felt slightly disrespectful to write enthusiastically about anything else, let alone the little, joyful things in life, like food. In the face of such tragedy, they seemed so trivial. For a while I wondered: when is it OK to be happy again? To laugh? How soon is too… Read More »
Wow. Just, wow. For those who don’t know, my hometown of Christchurch just got hit by <i>another</i> large quake, this one “only” a 6.3, but right under the city, and extremely shallow (about 5km). Death toll’s at 75 so far, but there’s still 300 odd people missing, and many ruins yet to be searched. Buildings… Read More »
Reading through my Google Reader backlog, I found this poem in a Thanksgiving post on Get Rich Slowly. I think it serves just as well as a Christmas sentiment, so here you go: Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (1927) Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.… Read More »
Took a break from running my Cthulhu game tonight to go see a presentation by Bill Buxton for the Puget Sound SIGCHI entitled “Natural user interfaces: What’s in a name?”. Here are the key ideas I took away from it: Know your history – Bill talked a lot about history in design, how many of… Read More »
I’ve been reading the “Hagakure”, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo1. The name translates as “In the shadow of Leaves“, but you might know it as “The Book of the Samurai”. It’s a distillation of commentaries made by Yamamoto between 1709 and 1716, mostly about bushido, the samurai’s warrior code, but also about a fairly wide variety of… Read More »
Like many, I’m pretty incensed at the passing of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act (CERRA) in the last 24 hours or so. For those who need context, please read these two posts, one from Idiot/Savant, the other from KiwiPolitico. Basically, the act allows the governor-general (at the request of Gerry Brownlee, a Minister… Read More »
If you’re a classical music lover, you owe it to yourself to spread this around. Musopen, a website offering public domain classical music, is raising money via Kickstarter to have the works of several composers recorded, then released into the public domain (hosted on their website, archive.org, and elsewhere). At this stage, at least the… Read More »