Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Meat Life
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Madonna’s little incursion into Africa has failed, while Bill Gates has single-handedly stamped out Polio in India. Well, not quite single-handedly – he had help from the World Health Organization (WHO), and pretty much every major aid-giving nation on the planet (including Australia). It’s a little unfair to compare him with Madonna, even though she…
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I learnt a strange new Japanese word today, while scanning through the commencement documents for my new job. In Japanese one can add the word “ka” (化) to a noun to add the meaning “-ification” to the end of the noun. For example, the word ango means “cipher, code” so angoka is “encryption.” The word…
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I have become involved in research on Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in Nigeria, as part of my work, and in preparation for this work I had to read a report on the prevalence and distribution of the practice in Nigeria. This report makes for interesting reading, and in particular it seems to run counter to…
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How can they lose with inspiration like this?
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Yesterday (2:46pm) one week elapsed since the earthquake of north eastern Japan wiped out a large portion of the eastern seaboard and threw half of Japan into (orderly) chaos. This post is a roundup of some of the things that have happened in that time, as seen from inside Japan. As foreign media become increasingly…
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Recently for some reason there has been discussion of the dangers of nuclear power. People have been casting their memories back to that most famous of disasters, Chernobyl, when things went slightly pear-shaped in a communist dictatorship, and a rather backward and poorly-designed, badly-run nuclear plant went critical. Now there is a 30km wide exclusion…
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This is the story of my flight from Tokyo. On Monday my University decided it would be easier and safer for us all to stay home because the municipal government had introduced rolling power cuts (5 hours a day!) and the train system had switched to electricity conservation mode, which meant queues of two hours…
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Well, that wasn’t the experience I had in mind when I came to Japan. I was at work when this little nugget of chaos hit, and the trains immediately stopped so I spent all of yesterday evening (6.5 hours!) walking home, from Hongo to Kichijoji. The route is in the map above, it’s between 16…
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Apparently there has been a hundred year quest to find them, ever since Darwin’s contemporary discovered the first Zombie ants, but lost all records in a mysterious fire that destroyed his ship. Some new researchers have discovered them in Brazil. But will they, too, be ruined by a strange curse?
Compromise and Conceit 