I’m really not sure why I’m so interested in Japan, or the Japanese language. It’s easy enough to find the point of entry of my interest; it was when I started to match sounds to subtitles in the anime I watched in college. However, that was little more than a passing fancy; it doesn’t explain [...]
We on hold are required to sit in place all day. We have no duties other than to be here, and perform miscellaneous tasks as assigned. In the last five weeks, we have received exactly one such task, which took us all of two hours. Some of us read, some play computer games, some watch [...]
One of the worst things about living in a representative democracy is that when you become fed up with your representatives, it can take ages to actually change them out. The citizens of the US have wanted for years to get out of Iraq. The citizens of Iraq want to know when we’ll leave. The [...]
It seems that the ALSE people rock. Aviation Life Support Equipment is a small, but heavily-trafficked office just outside the briefing rooms at the stagefield. Before every flight, one of the pilots goes to ALSE to check out life-support vests to wear in-flight. The vests are packed with goodies which are only useful after having [...]
Say that you are buddies with a top computer scientist. He has been working for DARPA on an AI project. He succeeds! True AI! Over the period of a few months of shakedown trials and training of the new AI, you befriend it. This time ends when your buddy announces to DARPA project success, so [...]
A doctor’s predictions about whether or not various victims of assassination could be saved with modern trauma medicine. Casualty rates in american wars. The importance of medicine in keeping people alive is hard to appreciate. It’s easy to say that the US life expectancy has more than doubled since the nation’s inception, but it becomes [...]
My contract in Japan specified that I would stay one year at that company, and that nine months into the process both the head office and I would determine whether the contract was worth renewal. If we both decided that I should stay, I would get a raise of about $1000 annually and an automatic [...]
Japan has been crowded for as long as anyone can remember. Even in prehistoric times, when the very first boatload of proto-japanese people landed and set up a settlement, they built their town in an area the size of a basketball court and reserved the rest of the land for a mixture of golf courses [...]
One of the nicest things about living in Japan was that there was always something new and unique to see anytime I felt like going out to find it. Going to a new country, you expect to be surprised and delighted by the differences at first, but for the novelty to gradually fade. I suppose [...]
The internet is awesome! The book I had been looking for: Don Quixote, U.S.A by Richard Powell, published in 1966. I wonder what it was like back when people had to exert effort to locate information?