Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow there were/are/will be huge snow storms! The blizzard has stopped the city. A normally 15-minute taxi ride took 2 hours. A friend told me after midnight that her friend who left work at 6 o’clock was still in her car driving home!
I took some videos which I will post later.
In the mean time, check out my album In and Around Kanzawa! Crazy stuff!
Ars Technica has opened its Soap Box bulliten boards until the end of the month. One thread I am participating in concerns God and the reasons for his (non) Existence.
In responding to a comment suggesting that religious experiences occur when emotional neurological pathways are excited, I brought up autism and Oliver Sacks.
I highly recommended familiarizin yourself with the psychologist Oliver Sacks, especially his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. It is a hysterical read. The title comes from a man who was otherwise normally functioning with the exception of an inability to distinguish between inanimate objects and people, hence grabbing his wifes head which he thought was his hat on a coat rack.
Anyway, the related story deals with two Autistic twins/brothers who were unable to speak except in the language of mathematics. They would communicate by vocalizing very large primes off the top of their head and then pausing to revel in its beauty. Within mere minutes they were able to outwit Sacks who was armed with a book of all the largest known primes at the time.
Relating this to religious experience, there is no reason to assume that a man inflicted with seizures effecting the emotional response portions of his brain is not thereby able to experience a higher truth in the same way Austistic children can. Furthermore, just because religious experiences and feelings of emotional significance coincide, one cannot assume that emotional attachment causes religion any more than we can assume that religion causes emotional attachment.
Strong Bad’s fishing secrets are sweeping the globe! This highly effective means of trapping fish is employed in the Mississippi as we speak!
Gotta love Dean! Can’t wait until I have GarageBand to make my own Dean mp3.
My friend, Will, sent this hilarious email to me about Canadians. It was too good to pass up
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Dick Gephardt is a great speaker. I really wish his policies were as good as his concession speeches.
Edwards has the Southern Drawl thing perfected. He also sounds like he is from the Home Shopping Network. The man needs to slow down! But his ideas are good. He focuses on empowerment.
Howard Dean’s supporters sound like the cult members that they are. Just what does Dean think he is doing grabbing a US flag? And he is way too FIRED-UP. Hand this guy a prozac. Is he selling politics or the Gazelle?
Quite the opposite is Kerry. I guess he wants to woo everyone with his soothing voice. This guy needs to come to NOVA for come intontation work. He is clearly happy though. Katsup for everyone! I couldn’t be bothered listening to the whole thing though, O’Reilly sex stories sound much more interesting. Forget Catsup, “erotic parties” and “environmental performances” for everyone! But remember, its “burlesquing” not “stripping”. Palasia is insistent…but, uh…this paragraph was about Kerry or something, wasn’t it?
Ars Technica sends word that various internet sites will test new ads with full 30fps video. All I can say is:
Thank god! The USA needs a reason to give people bigger download/upload pipes. If Pepsi and AT&T expect to make their internet tv ads worthwhile, they will put pressure on service providers to increase the amount of crap they can pump into our computers. We all know nothing sucks up bandwidth better than video, so that means 256,512Kbps “broadband” will find its rightful home in the dustbin of history.
Living in Japan, I get an advertised 26Mbps DSL connection for about $40/month. Back in the states I was lucky to get 768Kbps. Here, my upload speed is near 1Mbps. That is right…I can upload faster than you can download (those of you in the USA). Likewise, YahooBB’s homepage already has said advertisements.
I changed the look of the site. I am now using the “trendy” style. What do you think? Prettier no?
I plan to design my own at some point. But I am a lazy bastard and figured that for the time being I should use a premade one that not only has a calendar on the right, but has a calendar on the right that doesn’t overlap with the body. Score one for “float: left”, eh?
The Iowa caucuses are being held today. The top four candidates, John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards and Dick Gephart, are all in a statistical dead heat.
My feeling is that Edwards will win the nomination. On paper, he looks like a mediocre candidate at best. Having been a trial lawyer is also a big negative. However, he has what Simon Cowell would call the “X-factor”. I have listened to him speak and there is something soothing and reassuring about him and the things he has to say. He has remained positive and focuses on making life better, empowering “YOU”. DeanCo seem unable to do anything besides blast Bush and his policies. America is about optimism. Pessimism is for those losers in “old Europe”. Edwards remembers this.
In other news, the people at Self-Gov have a great model of political ideology. Perhaps you are American and still think about politics in the tired, left-right model. Perhaps you are Japanese and aren’t sure how politics are represented in America. At any rate, check out their 10 question quiz. The quiz is created by Libertarians, and therefore pushes libertarianism (if you wind up being libertarian you are encouraged to sign up for email announcements, etc), but I gave the quiz to my high school Government class and the results seemed to match reality (mostly liberals).
Here are my results:
Today I appear to be a somewhat moderate libertarian who is just slighly liberal leaning. When I started college four years ago I was more extreme, rating 100% on both categories. A couple years later I was borderline conservative/libertarian, but now I am a little more left leaning.
This all makes sense. I had just discovered libertarianism at the end of high school and was inthralled with the concept and how closely it fit my views. In college the psychopathic communist professors and their mindless clone drone students following them drove me to the right. Now, after years of reading the moderately liberal Slate and starting living in a different (and nonexistent) political bubble (Japan), I have moved more towards the center.
Yahoo has a story detailing IBMs plans to move programming jobs to China and save $160 million.
As an advocate of free trade, this seems like a good thing. Companies will be healthier and products will be cheaper/stay as cheap.
However, as opposed to say steel factory workers, this strikes really close to home. I do not want the kind of $56/hr job at IBM I hope to one day get replaced by Chinese clones working for $12/hr! Time to think outside the box! Maybe I should be learning Chinese? Being able to communicate with all these overseas workers gives me a huge advantage back home that knowing Japanese will not. Japan is facing the same outsourcing problems we are.
