(identity 'myron)

Fri, 31 Oct 2003

Gender Genie [/tech]

Gender Genie can predict the gender of an author, given a piece of text. It's pretty good, and seems to be able to peg my posts as male every time. This is interesting since I always thought written English was fairly neutral. Hmpf.

// posted at 14:10. permalink   comments

XML specs [/tech]

Ever found the insane number of xml-associated specs confusing? Now there's an easy diagram that can clear up all your confusion! Truly impressive, this is the future, people.

// posted at 14:04. permalink   comments

Tue, 28 Oct 2003

Astrology's take on pickup lines [/misc]

Subject matter has gotten a little too serious of late, so... go learn your pickup line according to astrological sign. Mine's (pisces) pretty lame, but at least it sounds honest: "Are you as beautiful on the inside as you are on the outside?"

Some moronic ones include Aries', "I'm on fire. Can I run through your sprinkler?" and Aquarius', "You're hot. You must be the reason for global warming."

// posted at 00:38. permalink   comments

Mon, 27 Oct 2003

Iraq [/World]

The occupation of Iraq begins to resemble the Gaza strip, in terms of resistance. Except in Iraq, the US needs the help of others in order to rebuild the country, but no one is willing to do so because it obviously entails the risk of being blown up. The similarity lies in the use of force: it's likely that the more resolute Bush claims to be, the more resolute Iraqi resistance will be too. And the more force he applies, the more resistance he will meet.

This once again raises the question of how valid this "War on Terrorism" is, exactly. The term itself doesn't make sense, as the Iraqi occupation shows that war sows the seeds of terrorism. In essence, they're claiming to be fighting the concept of terrorism, but likewise catalysing it by using violent force to accomplish their goal. This is patently stupid.

// posted at 17:16. permalink   comments

Sat, 25 Oct 2003

Suzuka Race Circuit [/announcements]

Suzuka Race Circuit and amusement park. Day trip with Nagata and Shutou. Be warned, as is usual with me, some badly lit photos and some that are completely out of focus. Was too careless to compose decent shots.

// posted at 06:36. permalink   comments

Thu, 23 Oct 2003

Re: Chris [/personal]

Ok, I was typing out a response to Chris' comment to the previous post and it eventually grew to be a rather long rant, unwieldy for the little comment box format. So here is my reply:

Very true (this comic). Although I was going off mostly for the sake of morality--that no matter what, war is never "right". And that engaging in war, even if justified by circumstances, often unnecessarily involves killing of innocent and guilty alike. And if one could peer through the eyes of an innocent child, I would say that they would never understand what truly justifies such destruction and hatred. It is the mutual failure of all those involved.

For the record, I tentatively supported the war, but not on the grounds that it was eventually initiated. And from that view, it's rather arbitrary that we chose to depose Saddam and not some other rotten dictator. This is especially apparent now, when the USG is not so sure about WMD and is rather mum on the issue in stark contrast to its pre-war call of, "They have WMD; they are a threat to our security. Attack!"

Essentially the argument was, "Iraq is an evil country that has WMD or is producing WMD that can kill us or our allies. Disable them before they can act." They acted on the basis that they were sure, beyond a doubt, that these WMD existed. Now they are not so sure. Subtract the WMD from the argument and you get, "Iraq is an evil country. Disable them." This makes Iraq irrelevent to the argument and you can even drop it to make an adlib:

"__ is an evil country. Disable them."

Fill in __ with evil country of your choice.

If I can make such a mockery of the reasons for going to war, then it's quite likely that the reasons weren't particularly good....

But as you seem to be implying, despite all this, one can't pretend that screaming, "Peace not war!" will actually win us anything. The all-out anti-war argument does tend to be naive, but then, it also serves as a reminder that there's no true moral justification for war. And that if we act rashly and forget this, we could be plunging headfirst into an unnecessary war or worse, precipitating a third world war. Indeed, I don't think people were so worried of us attacking Saddam, the malevolant tyrant that he was, as much as the fact that we were rushing forth to war in a very sudden and arrogant (since the US ignored the UN) fashion based on very shakey claims of WMD.

Also, again, naive as it might've been, the anti-war opposition was the first time that the world saw so many people rise up and speak out against war. That people were so widely moved to do this gives us hope that maybe one day, war won't be needed at all.

But as a final note on the subject, as sad as it may be, our history seems to show that each period of peace is essentially only won through war. Remembrance day exists for that very reason. And that I'm sitting here at all typing this message, especially considering that I'm in Japan (no offense), is only because we settled WWII. It's thus entirely possible, in contrast to the above, that we will never be able to give up war until the day we simply blow each other to smithereens. And even then, I don't know.... Einstein's famous quote comes to mind: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

// posted at 04:43. permalink   comments

Wed, 22 Oct 2003

Hell has frozen over [/World]

India is launching a peace initiative to normalise ties with Pakistan. What next? Peace for Israel - Palestine? US - World (kidding)? Forgive my cynicism and blasphemy, but fetch me my ice skates for when I go to hell for surely it has frozen over.

Seriously though, if you watch and read enough news, sometimes it seems like the world is full of nothing but people who want to kill all the other people around them. That motives only differ by religion, race, or non-existant WMD makes absolutely no moral difference.

Jose Saramago, in his Nobel lecture, said he wrote Blindness to "remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures." Go read his original lecture and the subsequent banquet speech for his Nobel prize. They're interesting, to say the least.

A nice quote:

"This same schizophrenic humanity that has the capacity to send instruments to a planet to study the composition of its rocks can with indifference note the deaths of millions of people from starvation. To go to Mars seems more easy than going to the neighbour."

// posted at 23:19. permalink   comments

Hello enjokousai [/Japan]

"Who needs the sites when you've got five dirty old men ready to pay you at all times?"

Quote comes from japantoday of a 16 year-old high school student, in response to new laws prohibiting those under 18 from using Internet matchmaking sites.

As always, the comments are even better than the quote itself. One interesting bit was a comment on a linguistic issue:

I think part of the problem lies in the language...

Anywhere else in the world selling sex for money = prostitution.

Here, it's 'compensated dating'

There is no stigma attached to the term when in fact, they are prostitutes.

In other countries they'd be considered 'hookers'.

Same thing goes for cheating; here it's called 'cunning', which lends itself more towards being clever, albeit in a deceptive way... the definition of cheating is much more harsh and direct.

He's a cheater!
He's cunning like a fox.

There's a difference...

That "compensated dating" term is especially intriguing. It sounds like something North American political correctness could cook up. Yet the intention of using the term is clearly not political correctness, as we understand it, at all. PC is meant to remove discriminatory and so connotated terms, but it isn't also meant to remove moral connotations. It's really throwing the baby out with the bath water. This would be akin to calling drug addicts the "narcotically inclined" or something.

The craziest thing is that there was no political correctness movement here. If these words are indeed used for these meanings, then they are a part of the language itself, not some creation of an overzealous minority group.

Update: According to WWWJDic, the term commonly used for teen prostitution really does translate to "dating with compensation". See here.

// posted at 21:43. permalink   comments

Land of the Rising Sun [/Japan]

Sunrise. For the first time, it's foggy here and it's nice. No more electrical wires as far as the eye can see, they're all concealed by a thick white blanket. And the sun is prime for some good photography, if only my camera handling skills were more willing.

// posted at 15:30. permalink   comments

Sun, 19 Oct 2003

Korean speech levels [/misc]

Following up on my recent interest in Japan, Korea and China, I was talking to Nakakita-kun about Korean yesterday. On top of 2 honourific forms, there are no less than 7 verb "levels" each with its own unique set of verb endings, conveying different levels of politeness. According to Wikipedia, "Taken together, honorifics and speech levels form a cartesian product of 14 basic verb stems".

And we both thought Japanese was politeness-heavy... little did we know.

// posted at 02:27. permalink   comments

China-Japan-Korea [/Japan]

I commented earlier on the DRPK's latest response to Japan's plea for the return of its abducted citizens, saying that Japan, China and South Korea have uneasy relations mostly based on financial gain. I'm happy to note I might be proved wrong, as this Tuesday, the leaders of the three countries will announce their "first-ever joint declaration, seeking cooperation on economic and security issues".

First ever! Spectre of history aside, it's about fucking time. :)

// posted at 02:07. permalink   comments

Sat, 18 Oct 2003

New bin Laden audiotape [/Japan]

Al-Jazeera once again breaks the story on a new audiotape from bin Laden, this time threatening countries participating in Iraq, including Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Japan and Italy. So hey, with the inclusion of Japan, that's two for two on countries I've lived in and care for.

Coverage on VoA. Hit google news for global coverage.

// posted at 18:40. permalink   comments

Fri, 17 Oct 2003

DPRK vs Japan [/Japan]

The ping-pong game that is diplomatic relations in Asia....

To be fair, if the DPRK really wants to take the moral high-ground here, they'd submit to the request to return the abducted, then point out the sex slaves issue and the lack of settling for past crimes. I wonder what exactly the reaction was of other countries in the UN though?

On the other hand, Japan is still in negotiations with China over reparations for lives lost to Japanese mustard gas weapons left in China.

// posted at 18:36. permalink   comments

Science [/misc]

I love science, but I love it even more when it can't answer a given question. You can practically here the Nelson Muntz-like Ha-ha when the best science can come up with is a big "I don't know". What am I talking about? The brain.

Can software engineers hope to create a digital brain? Not before understanding how the brain works, and that's one of the biggest mysteries left in science. Brains are hugely intricate circuits of billions of elements. We each have one very close by, but cant open it up: it's the ultimate Black Box.

The most famous engineering brain models are "Neural Networks" and "Parallel Distributed Processing." Unfortunately both have failed as engineering models and as brain models, because they make certain assumptions about what a brain should look like.

Read the rest in the article.

// posted at 16:42. permalink   comments

Thu, 16 Oct 2003

Makiko Tanaka [/Japan]

Controversial former foreign minister of Japan, Makiko Tanaka is running in the Lower House election later in November. She's seen as the most popular politician in Japan.

"Most party elections are like a garage sale full of senior politicians who've been in office too long."

"Explanations by Foreign Ministry officials always sound as though they have something stuck in their mouths and debate often misses the mark of what the general public is interested in."

Mmm, controversy. Go kick some ass, Tanaka.

// posted at 18:34. permalink   comments

Tokyo pics [/Japan]

Tokyo pics are finally up, although there's only 6 of them. I got lazy and didn't want to lug my camera around.

As usual, the photo taken by nice passers-by is completely out of focus. Stupid me for buying a non-point-and-shoot camera. I should really just set the focus before handing over the camera or something. Interesting photo, nonetheless. :)

// posted at 06:11. permalink   comments

Wed, 15 Oct 2003

Japan Today Pop Vox [/Japan]

Interesting opinions on a boy beaten and verbally abused by a teacher in Fukuoka. In case you're not acquainted with the incident, the long and short of it is that a teacher repeatedly told a 9 year old boy of partial american ancestry to go kill himself, using quotes like this:

"You have filthy blood. Go jump off from your condo building and die."

"You haven't died yet. Do it today, OK?"

The family is claiming post-traumatic stress disorder, and rightly so, given the child is quoted as having said, "I'd like to have my blood replaced. I don't see any sense in living."

The pop vox opinion page shows some rather interesting views, some rather scathing and somewhat cynical:

In the Fukuoka case, I also note that Japanese lawyers are supporting the boy, which I suspect is only because he actually has Japanese nationality. If he were Chinese or Korean, I bet there would be no support group to defend his case. The lawyers smell money and believe they can win if it's an America-related issue, involving a Japanese.

This view is echoed again by another Japanese:

Since many Japanese people do not experience much discrimination, the law against discrimination is almost meaningless. In fact, there are many second and third-generation Chinese, Koreans and other nationalities in Japan today who get discriminated against all the time. [...] On the one hand, it is good to hear 503 lawyers are willing to protect the boy but why can't they stand up for Chinese and Korean kids as well? I guess the boy does not need more than 10 lawyers to win. Anyway, we all have to learn to live with one another.

Of course, none of the opinions expressed support the teacher.

// posted at 18:18. permalink   comments

Critique of OOSC2 [/tech]

A Critique of OOSC2 by Betrand Meyer. Picked this up in Slashdot comments today, and I'm skimming through it. A nice quote:

In my opinion, strong typing tends to result in conversion and adapter clutter to the code. It is harder to work with code that has more clutter not directly related to the problem solution at hand. Strong typing is sort of like a crash helmet that blocks part of your view. On the one hand it might protect you from injury, on the other, it distracts and detracts from you "reading the road".

Better than I could ever say it.

// posted at 01:39. permalink   comments

Tue, 14 Oct 2003

Tokyo [/personal]

Back from a short weekend trip to Tokyo. Mixed feelings about the place. Although realistically, it's pretty challenging to warm up to a city that's so large and impersonal in the space of 2.5 days.

I took only a handful of pictures, and I'm too lazy to put them up, so there'll be no fanfare and no celebration about the whole thing quite yet.

Oddly enough, in a part of Tokyo, there's a replica of the Statue of Liberty. I say odd, since what it means to Americans probably doesn't really carry over for the Japanese given the difference in history. Still, it's there and it looks pretty, so hurrah. IMO, I like the statues of Justice more:

There might not be some huge version of it like Liberty, but it more than makes up for that in number, considering some form of it sits outside almost every courthouse in the western world.

Personally, I've always liked it for its strong symbolism. There are few other images I can think of that give the same sense of equality and impartiality. Were it not such a heroic ideal to strive for, it would almost be funny that Justice is meant to be blind to the influence of the world, yet simultaneously administered by humans themselves. *shrug*

// posted at 00:34. permalink   comments

Fri, 10 Oct 2003

MLP [/misc]

Continuing with the mindless link propagation, find out your pirate name! Mine's Iron Tom Kidd. Nice to meet you.

// posted at 04:27. permalink   comments

Ghettopoly [/misc]

Apparently there's some outrage over a parody of Monopoly, Ghettopoly. Drawing cards from the Hustle and Ghetto Stash piles yields things like, "You are a little short on loot, so you decided to stick up a bank. Collect $75," or, "You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50 from each playa."

Houses and hotels? No more. 40 Crack houses, 17 Projects. And the game pieces: pimp, hoe, 40 oz, machine gun, marijuana leaf, basketball, and crack. And the website advertises Hoodopoly, Hiphopopoly, Thugopoly, and Redneckopoly for as future releases.

// posted at 00:34. permalink   comments

Thu, 09 Oct 2003

Quickies [/misc]

Some quickies:

• InstantVoodoo.com -- Funny.

• The first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck -- Who knew? Also a winner of an Ig Nobel prize this year.

• Click here, you idiot -- What the recent ruling in Eolas vs Microsoft means for the next IE update.

• Jumpers -- A New Yorker article about "the fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge". There's one quote in there that's incredibly haunting, though I won't ruin it by revealing it here. (Via Crooked Timber)

• Evolution of Alphabets -- Neat animated gifs depicting the evolution of alphabets.

• Colour scheme picker -- My new favourite tool for picking colour schemes. Invaluable.

• C++ Reference Guide -- By far one of the best and most concise reference guides to C++ that covers many topics other resources don't even touch.

That's it for now, I guess. :)

// posted at 18:15. permalink   comments

C++ revisited [/tech]

I've just finished a substantial piece of coding in c++ and I think I'm finally starting to get a handle on c++. Key points:

• Memory management. It's no wonder mistakes can creep in given the number of different contexts different types of memory management come into play, not to mention syntactical gotchas like delete vs delete [] and so on. It's nice to have choice, but not when the selection overwhelms the programmer and simplifies the act of making mistakes.

  Some people say just strictly follow some convention with managing pointers and you'll never go wrong. I don't buy it. If everyone's following some unwritten rule for managing pointers you might as well not give us the gun to blow a hole in our feet and encode the protocol in the language itself. It's not like anyone purposefully wants their program to segfault?

• C++ can be fun. Hah, imagine that. It can be fun, but most of this is derived from using STL algorithms and other functional programming concepts. The only thing that sucks about this is the awful syntax you have to use, and at times it's overly verbose or clunky (consider functors vs plain higher order functions in functional languages).

• Some people use C++ strictly as a better C with the occasional class thrown in even though Stroustrup books almost repeatedly warn against it. But I don't see what he expected considering the name of the language and the requirement he set in being backwards compatible with C. Maybe this is a historical mistake and Stroustrup didn't think it possible to do what Java eventually did with its C-like syntax but non-compatibility.

• Without any doubt, I prefer dynamic languages. The leverage they give you for quick prototyping or exploratory programming is completely unmatched by static languages. Other people have said it before, and I agree that static languages go hand in hand with a false belief that you can pre-plan everything in your program. The resulting feeling you get is like you're building some monolithic building that you need plans for right down to the tiniest detail. Dynamic languages feel completely different--they're fluid and they encourage a Zen-like process of manipulating the ideas in your head... though this probably just goes to show how subjective language preferences are and the fact that for me, dynamic languages map better to how I think about and solve problems.

• Likewise with the above, I strongly dislike static typing. It is definitely worth--ah, what the hell, screw the politeness: static typing sucks. I'm sorry. I'd trade type safety for rapid prototyping and flexibility any day. Maybe it's better if there's type inferencing like in ML? But that'd probably just relieve the burden of declaring types, not in manipulating them.

All in all, it's enlightening learning more and more C++, but then many of its features are present in other languages in more elegant forms anyway. In other words, I don't really like C++ but I don't really hate it either.

// posted at 01:58. permalink   comments

Tue, 07 Oct 2003

You little hoochees! [/misc]

Discovered this site a few days ago, Super NES Endings. Game endings, screen by screen. I've looked through a few endings to games that I'd played but never finished. Lufia 2 has a pretty nice ending that leads into Lufia 1 quite well. The kicker is this one line, though: "You little hoochees!" Way to scare the good guys, Daos.

This is almost--almost, but not quite--as good as the classic line from Final Fantasy II/IV:

Classic.

// posted at 22:27. permalink   comments

Engrish [/Japan]

Saw this in passing on a lisp website:

In support of General McArthur's run for presidency, the Japanese people displayed a sign that read, "General Macarthur, the people of Japan pray for your erection.

I have no idea if it's true or not but a quick googling does turn up some results.

// posted at 01:17. permalink   comments

Sun, 05 Oct 2003

Road to Lisp [/tech]

Hmm, I filled out this Lisp survey a while ago and now I'm in the top ten list.

I guess it is pretty funny how they kept pulling the rug from under us in high school, switching languages no less than 3 times for the comp sci curriculum. We were probably the last generation to have learned Pascal as our first language and I still have fond memories of it.

Still, the best memories I have are how quickly me and my friend gobbled up C++ syntax and felt like we were on top of the programming world. Then my teacher decided to throw a curve ball at us and nudged us into learning Scheme. He handed me this ancient book, dog-eared with the cover hanging off loose pieces of masking tape. I still remember the first conversation about it:

Teacher: Here, you should try and learn Scheme, they teach it in first year at UBC and I had a pretty tough time learning it. It'll help you if you get a headstart. It's what they teach at MIT too.

Me: Scheme?

Teacher: A dialect of LISP--ever heard of it? Lots of irritating superfluous parentheses. *chuckle* Just kidding.

Later, me and my friend, who really thought we'd be able to grasp anything in CS looked at it and were completely dumbfounded.

Her: What the hell? Why is everything backwards? (prefix notation isn't quite backwards, but hey, this is highschool.)

Me: I don't know? It's like they went out of their way to do everything different. But at least this way you never need to worry about order of operations.

Her: Oh yeah, but why would they do that?

Me: *shrug* There's something else too. He [the teacher] says there's no real loops in Scheme. He keeps laughing and saying "just use recursion".

Her: She looks at me like I'm undergoing self-torture.

Me: Yeah I know, I don't get it either.

In retrospect, I'm really glad he exposed us to it. It seemed to have humbled us and broadened our horizons a bit. Although later on she went into engineering and never did any programming beyond some assembly, some C and some Java, and I ended up at a university intent on being practical and teaching Java, then C and C++....

I now realize I neglected to mention one thing in the survey. Perl. I picked up the syntax quickly and worked my way through the camel book. What stood out was how Larry Wall would draw parallels between his language and natural languages. But the syntax was undeniably terse and oftentimes unreadable, which makes you wonder... how can he justify his design choices through natural languages when there's no language you or I speak that's incomprehensible and confusing to another native speaker? Or where you write something and can't read it a month down the road?

The bad taste it left in my mouth ended up being one of the reasons I went off to learn Lisp again.

// posted at 18:37. permalink   comments

Parable of the languages [/tech]

Starts out a little cheesy, but ends in a very nice surprise ending--The Parable of the Languages.

LISP would have spoken, but it had caught a glimpse of itself in the pond and fell in when it tried to meet itself coming. And Java was too busy trying to clean a bag out of Babbling Creek.

// posted at 05:36. permalink   comments

Fri, 03 Oct 2003

Blindness [/personal]

You were never more beautiful, said the wife of the first blind man. Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain.

-- Blindness, José Saramago

// posted at 02:20. permalink   comments