Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Uncategorized
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Do Japanese cats understand cats from Australia? Is feline a universal language? Do they understand “get off there you bastard” in any language? This birthday card from my cat to me shows he speaks the language of his household , though hiragana are visible if you squint. Perhaps he is bilingual but lacks the manual…
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Tonight I discovered a restaurant called sharaku (projecting happiness) in Shinjuku, near the southeast exit, that sells 10 types of Japanese craft beer. Sharaku is the name of a famous ukiyo-e artist from the middle of the Edo era (I didn’t know this till I looked it up in Wikipedia). They also stock a range…
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Takao Mountain (高尾山), on the western edge of the Tokyo metropolis, is a low (approximately 500m high) peak on the edge of a small nature reserve, easily accessible on the Keio line or the Chuo line. The mountain top hosts a temple, Yakuoin (薬王院), and some hiking paths, and although it is a steep climb…
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Wikileaks member Julian Assange has put up an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, decrying the findings of a recent court victory over right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt, by a group of Aboriginal Australians. The court victory is being widely spun as an attack on free speech, because the Aboriginal Australians in question (henceforth, the…
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Returning to Hearts of Iron 2 after a long hiatus, I finally struck the motherlode and annexed the USA after months of trans-atlantic hide-and-seek. The forces of imperialism and racism refused to surrender, showing much more bravery and persistence than my top social researchers had credited them with, and after I captured all of mainland…
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When I was a student of physics I remember having to answer a question about what faster-than-light travel would look like, from the windows of a spaceship. I think it was in Mathematical Methods and Classical Field Theory[1], though it may have been Relativistic Field Theory[7], and I vaguely recall the answer involved stars from…
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Back from Beppu and continuing my reports on the book War Without Mercy that I introduced here before my travels commenced. I’ve finished the section on allied and Japanese war atrocities, which were numerous and terrible on both sides, and which I briefly mentioned in my previous post, and now I’ve also read the section…
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The hardest battle of my war so far has been the occupation of Pearl Harbour, which took just over a year and was bitterly fought on both sides. Final victory came after a year of fruitless land battles, a near-successful starvation campaign on my part, the death of probably 30000 merchant seamen, the near total…
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The UK is having a referendum soon on whether to change their voting system, from First Past the Post (FPTP) to Alternative Vote (AV). Under the latter system, you get to give some kind of preference statement, so if you are e.g. faced with a choice of Stalin, Hitler or George W. Bush but Bush…
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Today is the first day of my statistics classes, so it seemed appropriate to engage in a statistically-themed deception. The classes are for graduate students, and consist of twelve, three hour long lessons, with the last hour or so intended to be practical. Unfortunately, Tokyo University doesn’t have a shared computer room (at least not…
Compromise and Conceit 