09:16 pm - These don't all look practical
But many of them are pretty.
nicked from badgerbag
But many of them are pretty.
nicked from badgerbag
Enough with the gratuitous fan-service already.
If I wanted to read more analysis and commentary on manga, what sites should I be reading?
People who read this blog have probably noticed that I like writing, and research, quite a bit. It's my raison d'être, I suppose, the thing that took me through my educational career, the structure that helped carry me and guide me when I needed to be carried and guided. The art of written language is fun: why not indulge in it?
There are other arts. At intervals when the long long grayness let up, I'd a passing interest in other arts. From Grades 4 to 6, I played music, violin for three and then recorder for one year. I took part in UPEI's debating society for several years. I own an untouched calligraphy set. Most recently, a few years ago I bought a sketch book and some pencil crayons with the intent of doing something. Why not do something? ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bitterlawngnome asked me almost five years ago? Why not indeed.
Photography has become my new art. It operates as a sort of art therapy for me, helping me frame and phrase the things I see around me, giving me another way to communicate my environment in its various glories. It's an enjoyable art, something that's respected despite its ongoing assimilation into the realm of digital imagery. I don't think I'll ever become more than a talented amateur, but who knows?
That's my experience. All of my readers have their own passions re: the arts, I'm sure. What new arts would you like to pick up? I've been thinking myself of opening up that calligraphy set, and not only because I'd like to improve upon the handwriting that deteriorated so very badly once I began my university career.
Discuss.
AmericaBlog turns us on to one of the stupidest arguments against health care reform yet:
... Let's just not pretend, as some healthcare reformers would have us do, that we can easily get more equality without paying the price in efficiency.Because goodness knows efficiency is so very much more important than the health of your workers and their being able to enjoy some leisure time. I mean, it was right there in the Declaration of Independence -- "illness, wage-slavery, and the pursuit of efficiency".
Put simply, the healthcare reform bill would make the United States more like western Europe. That may mean more security about healthcare, but it also means that future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure.
Aria (gondoliers on a massively terraformed Mars) or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (A robot runs a teahouse in a largely empty Japan after what seems to have been a very low key The End of the World as We Know It)?
I should cite Aria the next time the Comparatively Utopian Settings Problem (CUSP) comes up. Although I suppose there's a large fraction of readers who would find the pace at which nothing really happens in Aria excruciating.
Not that Aria is supposed to be hard SF but would giving the place a 1 bar atmosphere like Earth's and covering almost all of the planet with oceans provide enough to provide enough of a greenhouse effect to keep the world warm or would we need to fiddle with the atmospheric composition as well?
Poll #1491510
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 73
Are the Japanese as a whole more tolerant of cute than people in Canada and the USA?
Yes
9 (12.3%)
YES! GOD YES! (Feel free to explain in comments) 20 (27.4%)
No, not really 0 (0.0%)
I protest at the idea that it's possible to make a useful comment about the preferences of tens of millions of people 34 (46.6%)
Some other option not listed above 3 (4.1%)
I would like to complain about this poll 7 (9.6%)
Two stone lions, originally from a 17th century Beijing palace, guard the Royal Ontario Museum's rotunda facing Queen's Park.
I took two photos of the southerly lion, using different settings for each. The first photo shows what the lion looks like in the 11:30 light, but the second looks more vibrant. Which do you prefer? and why?
Unlike Sean Connery, he's against it.
Nicked from lilairen
I have absolutely nothing to say today. (I should probably stick to Twitter.)
Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.
The "ice cream" that was on sale turns out to be on closer examination "frozen dessert".
The change in inclinations through the section indicates that North America moved almost 30 degrees - around 3000 kilometres - southward in just 11 million years of volcanic activity. This means that the plate that it was located on was travelling at a speed somewhere between 20 and 40 centimetres a year, which is significantly faster even than India prior to its collision with Asia.
One nice thing about LinkedIn is that I was able to run into London-based blogger Mark Dandridge, and yes, his blog is now on my blogroll. This Monday, he made a post referring in part to the volume of one's cultural product output, prompted by the discovery of an old digital photo memory card, that made me think.
Finding the memory card got me thinking about some old undeveloped film catridges I have that date back at least 6 years. I keep meaning to get them developed. They may have faded to grey by now. It'll be interesting to find out one of these days what I had photographed back then. I'm sure when I see the developed pictures it will be easier for me to work out how long the film catridges have been hanging around in a cupboard. The old days of taking photographs was a very different experience to the non-stop, click-fest that you often see these days. It would be interesting to take an old SLR out along with a digital camera and take a maximum of 24 or 36 pictures with each. Of course, with the SLR camera it would be functioning in the way it has always done but things would be very different for the digital camera.
The forgotten memory card, upon which I found the flower picture, is the smallest memory card I have. That's probably why I had forgotten all about it. It wasn't lost, just overlooked. It's 256MB which is still capable of holding around 69 pictures on the finest quality. Somehow the digital revolution has made less seem, well, even less, than it really should. I think 69 pictures is quite a lot. Just one look at a Facebook picture upload of a drunken night out, a wedding, a new born baby and you can often see way more than 69 pictures, where quite often, just 9 would be ample. I must start that '36 Exposures Only' Facebook Group. It may already exist. I'm off to check.
So, I was in my friendly local comic book store (Comic Book Ink in Tacoma, WA), glancing at a recent novel from a bestselling author.
I was informed that, while I might like the novel, I'd probably be best to check out one of the author's earlier works before I decide to tackle her more recent (and recently popular) forays.
So, it appears I need help, particularly from friends of a literary bent, because when an author isn't delving into the topics of zombies or sea monsters, I'm really not sure where to start.
I'm also between books at the moment. (Specifically, I'm between books 1 and 2 of Octavia Butler's Patternist series.)
So, to anyone who's read them, and with a mind to prepare myself for trying her recent bestsellers, which Jane Austen book or story should I read?
(Also, Hi! It's been a while.)
I had a hell of a drive out of Nevada today. I left mid-morning to beat the "possible showers PM" but still got caught in the start of a snowstorm while coming down the Sierras. Someone had crashed up ahead so the traffic stopped for a half hour when the snow started coming down, which didn't improve road conditions; I hit three patches of ice on the way out on a road that had been dry until then. It helped that there was a big truck with double wheels in front of me to clear a path through the slush, at least until a point where trucks were required to leave the road to test their brakes. Then there were a couple of rainstorms west of Sacramento that were so heavy that I couldn't see the lines in the road past about ten feet ahead. All the while the car's windshield wipers were streaking like a '70s frat boy. Sometimes when the rain was light I would run the wipers and they would make the view worse. It felt very good to get home.
One of the first news reports about the weather says there were two dozen crashes on the highway. No major injuries, fortunately.
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/okay.gif){kind=small}
blahThere has been a second attack on a Sinhalese Buddhist temple in Toronto, a half-year after the first one in the immediate aftermath of the Tamil Tigers' defeat.
An early morning fire that damaged a Buddhist temple used by Toronto’s Sri Lankan community for the second time in six months has been classified as an arson.
Toronto police have increased patrols in the area and are consulting with the hate crimes unit after flames engulfed part of the building at around 2 a.m. on Friday.
There were no injuries.
While police have not yet made any arrests, investigators are almost certainly examining whether the attack was connected to the Tamil nationalist conflict in Sri Lanka.
The Tamil Tigers rebels fought a three-decade civil war for independence for Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority until May, when government forces wiped out the guerrillas.
Despite the end of the fighting, some expatriate Tamils have continued to agitate for independence. In Toronto on Wednesday, a Tamil activist gave a fiery speech that urged violence against the Sinhalese Buddhists who make up the majority in Sri Lanka. Following his talk, he was arrested and threatened with deportation unless he left Canada on his own.
The temple attack occurred on Tamil “heroes’ day,” the birthday of the deceased leader of the Tamil Tigers, when Tamil nationalists commemorate fallen rebels.
The Maha Vihara Temple was founded in 1978 by Sri Lankans, who practice the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. The same temple was torched in May but no arrests were made.
Interesting news, although I'd be surprised if it was any more meaningful than the Union State that has supposedly united Russia and Belarus.
Russia signed a deal Friday to form a customs union with former Soviet neighbours Kazakhstan and Belarus.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev invited other ex-Soviet nations to join the union, hailing it as a “new stage in our co-operation.”
The union will come into force on Jan. 1, with the three countries using the same foreign trade tariffs and rules with one another, though it will likely take another six months for all tariffs to be synchronized, officials said.
Russia and Belarus already have an accord calling for close political, economic and military ties. The creation of the customs underscores Moscow's determination to shore up its influence among neighbours.
Analysts said, however, that the new deal could further stall Russia's 16-year-old effort to join the World Trade Organization, even though Moscow has backed off from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's announcement in June that Russia would scrap individual membership talks and insist on joining together with Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia is the largest economy outside the 153-member WTO.
Its prospects for membership are a “big mystery to everyone,” said Yevgeny Gavrilenkov, chief economist at Moscow-based Troika Dialog investment bank. He said the new customs union means Russia's WTO entry talks “are likely to get dragged out again.”
Friday's deal follows numerous attempts to forge closer economic ties among ex-Soviet nations that have been stymied by deep economic differences and fears of Moscow's domination.
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus called it a “big, historic step,” and Mr. Medvedev called it “a very important event.”
Mr. Gavrilenko said it would change little in practice.
“I don't see any fundamental changes coming from this agreement,” he said. The deal “must streamline trade between the three countries somehow, but borders between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are pretty transparent already.”
Thanks to Patrick Banks for linking to this interesting article.
In the previous century, our ancestors went to the moon.
They left Earth in antique capsules perched on top of a million pounds of explosives - the largest rockets ever built.
They navigated with wristwatches, slide-rules, and primitive computers with less processing power than a basic cellphone.
And they took pictures. America's first unmanned satellites carried chemical darkrooms on board, where film was developed, translated into radio waves, and beamed back to Earth. On the ground, the satellites' analog photographic data was stored on magnetic tapes.
And then we forgot about them.
The original data for our earliest pictures of the moon, like the one at left, were very nearly lost - the tapes were filed away, and the machines necessary to translate them into images again were discarded as government surplus.
But a few years ago, a team of technological archaeologists, working in an abandoned McDonald's restaurant, recovered the tapes and painstakingly re-constructed the antique equipment required to translate their data into images.
The Apollo-era tape-readers themselves had been saved by a former NASA planetary phtographer, Nancy Evans, who stored several of the wardrobe-sized machines in her garage for decades in the hope that someone, someday, would want to recover the photos.
It's a pretty remarkable project - as though the complete journals of Sir Walter Raleigh had been found written in an obscure Elizabethan code, and the only way to translate the treasure were by refurbishing a heavy cabinet full of derelict gears and pulleys that someone had found in a cobwebbed dungeon of the Tower of London.
I was trying to scroll up on something and the screen kept jerking back down to the bottom. Close examination of the mouse (a cheapee I don't much care for) I determined that
( Read more... )
If I am reading the figures right, there were about 370,000 babies born in Canada in 2008. Our infant mortality rate is about 5 per 1000 live births so presumably something like 1850 babies died soon after being born in 2008. The US infant mortality rate is about 6.9 per 1000 live births so if we adopted the US system and then had similar infant mortality rates, the net effect would be similar to if we kept our current system but began tossing 700 viable babies into the hyena enclosure in the nearest zoo. Sorry, that should be 700 per year.
[It was pointed out in comments I forget the financial benefits]
Instead of spendigng 11.9% of the GNP on health care, we would get to spend 17.6%. This means that we'd get much the same benefit from adopting the US system as we would if we kept out current system but set fire to a stack of currency containing about 88 billion dollars. Per year.
[Added later]
In comments it is suggested the actual figure would be closer to 100 billion dollars.
Why are infant mortality rates increasing in Nunavut?
[added later]
More importantly, does James understand the statistical implications of small sample sizes? The answer may surprise you.
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