Birthday thoughts

I recently had another birthday. This brings to mind that posting on my blog that I recently had a birthday makes it somewhat easier for complete strangers to answer my security questions, particularly when my blog also contains my real name (it probably does). So here you go, complete strangers.

I suppose some folks would therefore carefully avoid mentioning birthdays, but honestly, that isn't the world I want to live in. It's much the same reason that I don't want to carry a gun--I prefer to live in a world where I don't need one. Of course, people do steal identities, and people do get mugged, but I think I prefer to trust by default.

Perhaps I'll get burned for that someday, but when you trust someone, I think it often creates in them a desire to live up to that trust. It makes everyone happier--and a little more honest. I think that's worth the small risk of getting burned occasionally.

Organic chicken is superior

Claiming that organic food is somehow "better" is frequently given the same sort of raised eyebrow that accompanies a claim that "snake oil cures cancer." There is something somehow luddite about refusing to use modern advancements in fertilizer and pest control. Can one actually taste the all-natural?

In the case of organic chicken, the answer is officially yes. I remember some years ago noticing that the chicken bits we were buying were getting, well, bigger. And importantly, this enlargening was also making them taste a great deal like water. Chicken flavored water, to be sure, but somehow less good.

Anyway, we've been interested in trying out organic chicken for a while, and we finally found some at Sunflower market. It's more than twice as expensive by weight, but I think of this kind of like the difference between Kool-Aid and fruit juice--it's an entirely different food. I tried a piece before we added it to the pasta, and it was amazing. Rachel described it as being more "chicken-y," which I think is an apt description.

Dinner was whole wheat linguine with pan-fried chicken breast, parmesan, alfredo sauce, dried tomato bits and broccoli. It was so good that I blogged about it.

The outside world

I've been trying to figure out a way to more quickly transfer pictures from my phone to the blog. This post is an experiment; if Koko shows up in it, then it worked.

Navajo Food for Lunch

I had lunch at the Black Sheep Cafe in downtown Provo recently. It's on University Ave., right next door to the old Los Hermanos building. The theme of the cafe (really, more of a restaurant) is "Navajo food." You could call it ethnic food, but arguably it's the only thing around here that isn't. The actual dishes reminded me of eating out in New Mexico -- lots of roasted green chiles, slow roasted meats, soups, and stews.

I ended up getting a pork and green chile stew, and it was very good. I apologize for the poorly lit photo; the broth in that stew is a light green. It came with either fry bread or a Navajo flat bread. Apparently the flat bread is a bit less, um, deep-fried, so I went with that. I assumed I was being healthier this way, but after trying the flat bread, I'm going to say "just barely"--it had a rich, soft, almost buttery flavor, with hints of being charcoal grilled. It's pretty indulgent stuff.

As for whether it was delicious, you might have missed the important phrase earlier: roasted green chiles. Those things are addictive, and you can get them in Provo now, apparently. They also had several variants on the theme of Navajo tacos on the menu, which is what I'm likely to try next time. Because yes, there is definitely going to be a next time. If you're up for lunch and looking for something to remind you of Albuquerque, you should give me a call and we can meet down there.

Democrats and hamburgers

Hello, what's left of my followers. All two of you? I don't know, really.

Anyway, there are two items of news, as my headline so cleverly notes. Firstly, I went to a caucus meeting, for the first time in a while. We decided to give the Democratic caucus a try; it's a lot smaller (ha!), and seemed like it could be fun. Actually, it wasn't terribly small, largely because they lumped about 40 or 50 precincts into a single high school auditorium; they weren't expecting especially high attendance.

Although the attendance was, indeed, pretty light compared to what the Republican caucus is likely to get, it was much, much more than they're used to. There was a letter read in church a few weeks ago asking people to please go to a caucus meeting, complete with the usual note that "principles compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ can be found in all major political parties," which was a polite way to get the "Mormons may only be Republican" crowd to keep quiet.

Anyway, after everyone sat around in the precinct meeting for 20 minutes without anything getting done, I took over and made the agenda happen, which ended up with me getting elected precinct chair. So I'm now officially responsible for persuading locals to vote Democrat. Hey, locals! Let's try to be just a tiny bit more like a battleground state! They get more money!

This entry is already getting too long, so I'll sum up the burger bit: We ate at Station 22, to celebrate the conjunction of white day and pi day (this happens every year). I'm friendly with the owner, Richard, who asked that I try his burger and give an opinion. The result: sadly, it was too salty, but putting brie on a burger definitely has some potential. I think the ratatouille sandwich is still the best thing I've had there. Rachel liked the chicken-basil sandwich, and enjoyed the fries, but was not a huge fan of the barbecue-flavored fry sauce. She did like the spicy ketchup. The decor is fun and hipster-ish, but they need to wipe off the tables a bit more reliably (several were grubby). It's a good place with really interesting food ideas, but there are things they could improve.

Yet Another Japan Post

It occurs to me that travelogues are primarily interesting to the person giving them. This is one of the things I find so fascinating about travel--you can't really share. Photos and videos are nice, I guess, but there's just nothing to compare with the heady cocktail of excitement, nervousness, tiredness, and just plain being there that one can only get first-hand. On that note, I'm probably going to stop doing Japan trip posts after this one.

I have vastly more photos and videos than I've posted, but despite my considering them very interesting, I imagine that most others do not. So, in keeping with the general theme of travel-posts-as-narcissism, all of today's photos will be pictures of me.

The first one was taken in the gardens in front of the old imperial palace in Kyoto. It's a very nice palace; its main downside is that, being built entirely of wood, it has a habit of burning down all the time. As such, it's fairly new. The palace buildings themselves are very nice--they build the roofs out of a special kind of cedar tree bark, which is great for natural air conditioning. The roofs are fairly hardy as untreated wood goes, but they do need to be replaced every 20-30 years. The inner gardens are beautiful as well.

Speaking of gardens, the silver shrine has, I think, the nicest. The golden shrine gets its reputation from being plated in gold, whereas the silver shrine's silver plating was one of those good intentions that ended up disappearing in the face of a wartime budget (something medieval). Despite never having been plated in silver in its entire history, the name stuck. To make up for the lack of metallic sparkle, the shrine goes all-out on their large gardens. There is both a zen rock garden, which consists of big piles of rocks raked into razor-sharp precise shapes, and then grounds filled with flowers, carefully sculpted trees, rivers, and colorful bushes.

Incidentally, the silver shrine is generally famous as a cultural development center. Among other things, this shrine's culture is largely responsible for the development of the tea ceremony and flower arranging as quasi-religious experiences in Japan.

The final picture shows me outfitted in full tourist regalia--camera pouch, sweatshirt tied around the waist, and water bottle in hand. Most of my wardrobe isn't fashionable enough to compete with your average Japanese person, and I didn't really try. In the background is the Fushimi Inari Taisha, or at least a miniscule part of it--there is a large main shrine, dedicated to the fox-god of rice and prosperity, and that's not it. This photo was taken in front of one of the thousands of small shrines lining the trails. The trails are probably several miles all told, most of which are bridged by large orange shinto gates. At first this is impressive, but after hiking up the steep trail for a while, it blurs into kind of an orange haze. This shrine will punish you for slacking on your exercise program, it seems.

By the way, those little statues off to the side are, in fact, frogs wearing bibs. I'm not sure which god this is, but I asked about the bibs, and they really are bibs for eating. Since Japanese gods are frequently given gifts of food, I guess there is probably some relation between the bibs and the offerings.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm never going to get over the jet-lag if I don't go to bed. So good night all, and thanks for tolerating the travelogue. The videos were a bit too big to post, but if you're curious, try to catch me sometime when I'm near my laptop. I have a walking tour of some underground tunnels, baby dolphins, close encounters with a whale shark, cute children feeding deer, juggling, and panoramic shots of both an 11-floor train station and downtown Osaka. I think they're cool, but who knows -- maybe I'm just biased.

We're in Kyoto!

First observation about Kyoto: It is much easier to find coin-operated laundromats here. I am not sure why this is, but there are lots of them. Next observation: There are these large, amazing shrines all over the place. After putting on our laundry, we found a big complex less than a block away. Then walked past another one holding some kind of carnival on the way back. All told, I think we walked past half a dozen or so shrines today.

So, it is possible to take a bullet train from Osaka to Kyoto. Indeed, we actually passed through Kyoto on our way to Nagoya about a week ago. It's worth observing, however, that on a bullet train, the distance between Osaka and Kyoto is maybe ten minutes. Which is to say, it's not very far. So, figuring we'd save some money to spend on food or books or something, we bought regular tickets, and loaded up all our luggage onto a regular old train. The train was packed, which meant we had to stand for forty-five minutes, but we arrived in Kyoto a little footsore and about fifty bucks richer--the tickets for the both of us cost (roughly) twelve dollars on the regular express train.

We bought breakfast in the train station. Rachel had a big old sushi/onigiri tray, and she bought me a bag of bread sticks while I watched the luggage. Add in a carton of milk each, and voila: breakfast. It left us a little full for lunch, so we just grabbed snacks from a Circle-K across from the laundromat. Combie [convenience-store] food is a little predictable and processed, but since we're tourists, it's still new and interesting. I ended up with some kind of cream cheese/caramel concoction and a Calpis water (a lightly sweetened milky-white soda), while Rachel had some kind of tapioca-strawberry milk and some manner of bread.

I forgot to dig my camera out the luggage before we went exploring Kyoto, so all the photos on this post are actually from yesterday, when we went to Nara. The first one is Rachel pretending that she's holding something to catch the deer's attention--they sell special crackers formulated for feeding deer. They seem to like them, but these are some of the fattest deer you've met--they get a bit overloaded sometimes. The second one is a picture of Todaiji from the outside. I was told by our friend who met us in Nara that it is the largest wooden structure in the world. This seems possible; those little white specks just below the door are the people standing around, waiting to enter. The building contains a really large statue of Buddha (not the world's biggest, but it's up there), and various other very large statues as well.

After visiting the statue, we were joined by some of our friend's family members, which is where we have this third photo from (I'm leaving out stuff for privacy reasons; if you ask me in person, I have more photos and videos). This is a little boy who was taking a picture of his aunt. I thought he was kind of cute, handling the gigantic camera, so I took a picture of him. His aunt, struck by the general humor of the situation, in turn took a picture of me taking a picture of him. It was one of those recursive moments.

As three-year-olds are wont to do, he got a bit tired and cranky after a while, so our guides headed home. Rachel got some more photos of manhole covers--there are lots of neat ones, many of them colored--and we shopped around for souvenirs. Eventually, we headed back to Osaka, and since we went past Dotonbori, I decided to stop and try get a night-time shot of the big central area.

Dotonbori is something like Osaka's Times Square, and fittingly for the city, it is all about shopping and restaurants. There is a mind-blowing number of shops here--they just go on for block after block, thousands of stores of all different types. The nicest of the shopping arcades have rain shields over the top, creating a weird, hybrid indoor/outdoor feel to the place, something you can only pull off with year-round pleasant weather. This advertisement of the running guy is one of the classic symbols of Osaka. It's an ad for a candy company, who appear to have gotten really lucky with the popularity of this ad. The advertising in this area is entertaining and over the top -- huge animatronic crabs, dragons, drum-playing clowns, giant octopuses wielding cleavers, that kind of thing.

We spent ... quite a lot of money here.

Aquariums and Sundays

Despite it being the single most- photographed thing I've done on the trip so far, I somehow managed to completely miss mentioning the Kaiyukan in my last post. We've been going at a pace of about two tourist attractions a day, which is pretty exhausting but fun.

Kaiyukan is the name of a really big aquarium found in Osaka. It is themed around the ring of fire, and has a lot of fish in it. This is actually my second time going, and I was sad to realize that after the first time, the only photo I have of the first time is of a block of acrylic glass that's on display. I repented, and now have an enormous number of photos and videos of fish. I've included one where I'm hanging out with some jellyfish, thanks to the magic of acrylic glass.

Another highlight of Friday was eating Okonomiyaki for dinner. The traditional okonomiyaki involves putting it together yourself and cooking it at your own table. Apparently, this ideal is a little too free-form for most Japanese restaurants, so they find various ways to subvert it. In this case, the okonomiyaki was delivered to our in-table grill fully cooked, ready for sauces to be stuck on top. The grill itself was only slightly warm, and really just served as a way of keeping the food hot. This isn't really a complaint though--this stuff was amazingly delicious. I had some kind of pork/noodle/cabbage mix that was great with soy sauce, and Rachel's was a squid/onion mix that tasted good with mayonnaise.

It was a bit interesting trying to find church -- there are only a handful of wards in Osaka proper, and they don't exactly locate the buildings in the major tourist centers. After fighting with lds.org a bit, which insists on giving driving directions, we figured out a method of getting to church that involved a bit of walking. It ended up being not too bad--we did need to walk ten blocks, but these ended up being very short blocks. I'll also note that most streets in Japan are narrow -- I think I might be able to jump between sidewalks with a good running start. Maybe I'd have to get in slightly better shape first, though. The photo here was taken as we approached the church building.

Church was good, and I found I was able to follow along with the testimonies and the lessons pretty well, which is great progress. I'm still missing a lot, but at least I can follow along. Lots of members and an investigator or two kept us company, and the ward has a friendly, family-like feel, a point mentioned in a few of the testimonies. Several people expressed surprise that I hadn't served a mission in Japan, and subsequently wondered how I'd manage to learn the language; I guess that's a compliment.

While we still needed food and travel, we did our level best to only mildly crack the sabbath, and spent much of Sunday in our room or walking around the neighborhood. I've also used some of the time to update the last few blog posts with long-promised pictures; if you've already read them, you can run back through and browse. While walking around, we did run into an honest-to-goodness grocery store (something like Macey's), so we'll definitely be heading down there tomorrow to load up on candy and so forth. Bye for now!

Lots of Ramen and a Castle

It's pretty late, and I don't want to miss church, so just a quick update. I've gone through and added photos later, so if you read the original post, just scan for pictures this time...

First thing in the morning, we went to a ramen museum. Most of the activities were free or reasonably priced, and we ended up only spending money on a T-shirt. The museum would be a lot more fun if our reading skills were better, but we did borrow audio guides, which at least gave us an audio track for two of the exhibits. I'll note that we're talking specifically about instant ramen here; the museum is basically a giant advertising stunt for Nissin, the original makers of "Cup Noodle" and inventors of instant ramen in general. The original shack in which Nissin's founder invented instant ramen is one centerpiece, and there's also a movie theater where they tell a heavily animated story about how ramen was invented. You can sign up for a course where you make your own ramen in a big, commercial kitchen upstairs, and there's a make-your-own Cup Noodle, heavily geared toward little kids. We did neither.

Of course, I left craving ramen, so we picked some up at the tourist trap ramen place conveniently nearby. It was good stuff, although I think Rachel prefers the pork broth to the soy broth that I ordered (she wasn't hungry, and just ordered gyoza). I've got a photo here now -- this was really good stuff, possibly even worth the ten bucks I paid for it. The noodles are decorated with green onion, a bit of seaweed, crispy onion bits, several slices of grilled pork, and an entire soft-boiled egg. There are a further half-dozen things you can add to adjust the flavor along the back counter.

Next stop was Osaka castle. It's got enormous stone walls around it's base, and a windy entrance path that traverses fully two moats, both wide enough to sail a steamboat down. There are ramparts overlooking the path all along the way, loaded with murder holes and all the usual castle features. The castle itself doesn't have any windows for the first several floors, and the walls are made of enormous stone blocks. The lowest ornamentation and windows are perhaps 60-70 feet off the ground. There's a well out front, covered with a heavy wooden grill which also, presumably, is defensive. Of course, the one time it was invaded, the castle fell, but it looks impressive, and the defenses did kill quite a lot of people before eventually not working well enough. There's probably a message in there somewhere.

Incidentally, we finally tried takoyaki. They're kind of like fritters, but with octopus and onions in them. They're also not deep fried, but rather shallow fried in cup-shaped pans. Alas: the dough was raw. We'll probably try again some other time, but probably not in the same place. The frying trick is really interesting, and probably both uses less oil and goes faster. I wonder if the same trick would work on fritters.

Anyway, church tomorrow, and I need to sleep. The images on this post were added after the fact.

Doing business in Japan

I'm going to lump days 2 & 3 of our Japanese trip into a single quick post, because it's getting late and I need to get to sleep.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I went to Nagoya to get ready for the seminar I was helping to present on Thursday. I ended up spending a lot of the time developing subtitles for the two videos we wanted to show -- the last of the subtitles were typed out on Thursday morning, while the first sessions of the seminar were running. The final system we worked out was for me to take a machine transcription and fix it to be proper English; then, Luna would convert it to Japanese, and I would fix any linewrap and timing problems in the Japanese. Doing it that way, we managed to get about 4 minutes of subtitles done in a little less than an hour.

Lunch in Nagoya was "Hokkaido" cuisine, I think. In my case, that meant slices of seasoned pork on rice, and in Rachel's case that meant fried chicken. Probably the most interesting dish was the "Hokkaido Oyakodon." Oya means parent, and ko means child, while don is short for donburi, which refers to a rice bowl. Normally, oyakodon is chicken with egg, but Hokkaido oyakodon is salmon and salmon roe. Luna thought the name was funny and clever, so she ordered it. By the way, Luna has been a huge help this trip; I did my best to give her a pile of gifts, but it's really hard to say thank you enough.

After we were done with business stuff in Nagoya, we went sightseeing with Ikeda-san. He took us to see Nagoya tower, and then we went for kaiten-zushi (that's conveyor-belt sushi, the first time we've had it!). It was good; I've discovered that tuna sushi can indeed be delicious, you just need to get the high quality stuff.

The next day's seminar went fine; I did some of it in Japanese, but the modeling I did in English with Luna interpreting. I wanted to do it in Japanese, but I just didn't have time to memorize enough terms. It was a pretty big stretch just getting the videos ready. There was one glitch ("Matches perfectly, you can join it! Oh, apparently you can't, sorry"), but we worked out what was going wrong before the end, and use it to illustrate a common mistake ("This is what compatible mode is for! So if you also see this problem, switch to compatible mode!").

After the seminar, we wandered around Osaka with Luna, visiting the massive shopping district of Dotonbori. I have a video of Dotonbori, but no photos, sorry! Various random things were bought, and we ate dinner at Luna's teenage hangout, a kind of all-you-can-eat pizza place. Available pizzas included ham/pineapple, squid ink/squid/onion/tuna flakes, chicken/corn, and shrimp/corn. Yes, the Japanese really do put corn on pizza. It tastes fine, really--the squid ink on pizza probably deserves more attention, although it mostly makes it black and tastes vaguely of ocean (of course I tried it, don't be silly). We're planning on meeting Luna again in a couple of days for a trip to Nara, her parents' current hometown.

A new word for you: Shokuchuudoku

Here it is in kanji:　食中毒. It's pronounced shoku-choo-doku and the literal meaning of the word parts are food/by means of/poison (food poisoning), and it's a pretty good summary of my flight over the Pacific from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.

It might not have been food poisoning -- it might have been me getting too hot in the overly warm plane cabin -- but at any rate, I had a miserable time which I won't describe in detail. As a sidenote, I have discovered one way to get transferred to a business class seat! If you just get so miserably sick that you can't sit up anymore, and if there's turbulence so you can't lie down in the back anymore, they'll move you! I cannot recommend this method, however.

I was still unable to walk for more than a few seconds at a time when I arrived, so they bundled me into a wheelchair and we went running around Haneda airport, with a rapidly shifting escort of similarly uniformed Japanese women pushing me around. We only had about an hour to get to our next flight, and the stewardesses felt that I was so badly sick that I needed to be reported to quarantine, so I had an interview with a doctor as soon as we landed. The doctor decided that whatever I had probably wasn't infectious (he guessed it was probably food poisoning as well), and said I could go ahead and catch our next flight.

On the following flight, they moved me to a row where I had 3 seats in a row, so I could lie down and sleep a little more. All the sleep helped, I think. Then they stuck me on a wheelchair when we reached Itami airport as well, complete with a fresh complement of helpful uniformed Japanese women to push me around.

We had been going to take a series of trains to get to the airport, but that sounded too complicated by this point, so we went by a direct bus to Osaka train station, which is very close to our hotel. While at the train station, Rachel spotted an escalator that looked cool, producing the only photo I have from this section of the trip. Sorry about that, but I was really not in a good state of mind for taking photos. Once we got to the hotel, I decided to try and eat something; if I could do so without dying, then I thought I'd try to keep going for the rest of the day. We had planned to go and see the cherry blossoms in Yoshino, a high-altitude area where they bloom later, and I still hoped to go. We went and bought breakfast at the hotel cafe, wherein I dropped about twenty dollars for, um, a tiny glass of apple juice, two small croissants, and a glass of warm milk. Rachel had a brief episode of sticker shock and decided to go for the six-dollar croissants only. After that cafe, all the food has looked pretty cheap!

I was still a bit woozy from the flight ordeal, but I felt better after breakfast, so we decided to risk the trip to Yoshino. We called Luna (normally a resident of Seattle, but visiting her parents), who had offered to be our tour guide, and set off. She had never been to Yoshino either, so this was new for everyone.

The cherry blossoms here are at least partially growing wild, so there are many different types, and they bloom at different times. Most of the forest consists of enormously tall cedar trees, with little tufts of greenery at the top, making it look like you're driving through a vast hall of pillars, but every so often there are cherry trees blooming among them. We went for a short hike to get to the best area, called the "upper thousand trees" (okusenbon), which is where a passing man dressed entirely in purple took a photo of the three of us.

The purple man was very friendly, telling us about his wonderful trip to the Atlanta Olympics, and the friendly Georgians who told him that they had been told by God that they should be nice to visitors. He said they were indeed very nice. He gave Rachel a cat-shaped bookmark as a memento.

The photo here is a pretty good idea of what most of Yoshino looked like -- scattered cherry blossoms among the cedars. Mind you, some of these cherry-blossom trees are over 100 feet tall, so they're by no means an insignificant part of the forest.

One last thought: In Utah, when you go hiking, you're on your own. We don't have bathrooms on our mountains. We don't have running water. We don't have a little cafe at the top where you can kick off your boots and sit down to chat with the other hikers over a cold Gatorade. This, then, would be a difference between Utah and Japan. The last photo is the takoyaki stand at Okusenbon. So once you're done traipsing around the mountains, you can stop here for some fried octopus dumplings and a can of green tea. It's a pity they weren't carrying water, or we'd have bought something!

Spanakopita, games, etc.

I made spanakopita today. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture, so you'll just have to believe my claim that it looked nice. It didn't really look like the photo on that Wikipedia entry; ours was a lighter gold color, and had a bit higher pastry-to-filling ratio. It tasted great; we splurged on some really nice quality feta cheese, and it was definitely worth it. I've had a roll of phyllo dough wasting space in the freezer for months, and this was both a great way to use it up and a fun experiment with a dish I've never made before.

I mentioned some ideas for games I'm working on in my last post. Brian offered to help out with a web game, but I'm not sure how to get hold of him anymore. So Brian, if you're still reading: Send me an email and I'll run my idea by you.

I tried out Minecraft today, although that poor guy probably doesn't need any more links. Penny Arcade did a couple of comics about what a great game it is, and since they're one of the most popular gaming comics on the web (they're #1 or #2), the Minecraft web-site immediately crashed under the load of interested gamers going to try it out. The basic idea seems to be that you wonder around, punching trees, which gives you wood, which you use to make tools, which you use to dig a hole, where you can find diamond and ore, which you use to build a castle and weapons to defend yourself from the zombies. Also: You can build roller coasters, just because. It is, in fact, fun.

Minecraft is also yet another example of publisher-less publishing, and the value of getting attention--the guy managed to get a few thousand registrations over the past 6 months, but in the past few weeks I believe he's made somewhat more than a million dollars. His Paypal account was frozen because they were worried something fishy was going on (600,000 euros in a week!), but as soon as he can get that taken care of, he'll be independently wealthy. Good luck to him.

A New Post

At the encouragement of my wife, who is a good person, I'm posting another blog post. I don't know that I really have anything especially interesting to say. I suppose I will just sort of blather and hope that it works out.

I've been thinking quite a bit about hobbies lately. There's quite a lot of things I'm interested in doing. I enjoy writing music, writing video games, and writing stories. I suppose all of these things have "writing" in common. However, at the moment, I'm kind of between projects -- I have some old, half done things that I could pick up again, or I could try and start something new. I've though of trying to do some software work to help make next year's GEEX conference better, for example. I've also thought of trying to start my own online web game (a major obstacle there being that I would need to learn quite a lot, so it would have to be something really simple). I've also got a bunch of half-finished video games lying around, waiting for a little more attention to make them playable. The same goes for songs -- I've got a whole bunch of rhythm tracks, bass tracks, and interesting chord patterns sitting on my computer, waiting for a little more attention.

Arguably, the trick is to focus on just one thing, so that I can make a lot of satisfying progress with it. Right now, the most likely candidate for getting more attention is an old scripting language/game that I was working on a while back, and which has some really interesting stuff that I could expand on. I don't know. I guess I also feel like, even if I were to push this stuff through to completion, would anyone ever actually play with it, listen to it, or read it? Self-motivated projects are fragile things.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about today.

I'm Engaged!

I proposed today, so it's official -- I'm going to be married sometime this summer. Precisely when this summer, and precisely where the marriage will be taking place, and precisely what kind of reception there will be, etc. etc. is all undecided.

It's still a little over 3 months away, so it's not like there's a huge rush, but there certainly is a ton that needs doing.

For some reason, I'm very cheerful. This is probably related?

Almost Democracy: The Death of Hukou?

If you read the title, you may be wondering: "What is hukou?" In China, there is a system where everyone is classified according to where they are supposed to live: In the countryside, or in the city. It's a form of segregation, except that instead of being divided along any kind of racial lines, it's built around where you were born.

This system's been around for around sixty years, and it's heavily entrenched in China's socialist legal code. If you're from the countryside, your benefits, medical care, and welfare all assume that you work as a farmer or similar. People who live in the city get corresponding city benefits.

The problem is that most of China's progress has been in the cities. The cities are where the economy is growing, it's where the prosperity is improving, it's where you can get an education, and it's where you can get ahead in the world. The countryside, by comparison, has stagnated. In a mirror of the west's urbanization, rural Chinese have migrated en masse to the city to find work and a better life.

The problem? Their documents do not entitle them to government-provided services in the city, and under communism, that's pretty much everything. These "migrant workers" live anywhere they can, get medical care however they can, and get an education wherever they can, if at all. In short, they are the city's second-class citizens, and they have the second-class wages to prove it. The Chinese government didn't intend for them to be in the city--their destiny was to become farmers. It's a long-standing problem, and something really ought to be done. And that's where it gets interesting.

Just recently, several newspapers in China called for the abolition of hukou. There are a few notable points here: The editorial was printed by more than a dozen newspapers, which sends a message of solidarity; if it were just one paper, it could be classified as a dissident voice, but it isn't. So this is interesting on a lot of levels -- firstly, it's the press criticizing government policy in a communist country. Secondly, there is a reasonable expectation that the government will listen -- the editorial is hardly a call to arms, but rather an appeal to authority to act. Thirdly, it suggests that China may be evolving mechanisms of policy correction, even in its nigh-total absence of democratic institutions.

In our own political theory, the free press is considered a vital corrective force, a check against governmental abuse. It's interesting to see the press function that way even in a society where the press is not particularly free, and where the general population can't vote to throw out officials they don't like.

I have no idea for a post

This post is largely free of any intellectual content whatsoever. I just dropped by and noticed "wow, it's sure been a long time since I last posted!" So I figured I'd just type something out, stream of consciousness style, edit lightly, and hit the orange button.

It has long been an observation of mine that when my friends acquire girlfriends, the vast majority of their free time disappears. "Fascinating," I thought, "girlfriends appear to eat nearly all of one's free time." Then, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself girlfriended, and surely enough, the vast majority of my free time immediately evaporated. "Where did it go?" I wonder to myself, sometimes. I'll have to ask her if she knows.

I'm going to go and help a coworker move tomorrow. If anyone would like to come along and help, I could use the help. Since he's moving within the Salt Lake valley, I plan to also spend some time in Salt Lake, possibly acquiring chocolate and/or Ikea furniture. These are both things which are more interestingly obtained in Salt Lake.

Badly spoken English is something of a pet peeve of mine. For some reason, this seems to hold true even when the English is, strictly speaking, French. I present this specimen: voila. This French word means something like "look there!" It is often accompanied by pointing. The problem is that, in the hands of non-French speakers, this word is frequently mutated into "viola," a pleasant but totally unrelated musical instrument. Today, I actually heard someone SAY viola when they MEANT voila. I winced.

Thus, I invent this rhyme:

I before O is played with a bow,
but swap them around to show what you've found.

Perhaps you can think of a better one. My brother once told me about an online text-adventure game he played, in which one could find a character called "the ghost of the English language." The ghost could confer upon you the power to use the public chat channels, but before it did so would give you a quiz about proper English usage. Players were not allowed to speak on the chat channels until they had achieved a full 100% score on the quiz, which they could take as many times as they liked. When one succeeded at the quiz, the ghost would say "now go forth, and avenge my death!"

That is all.

Greetings, oh vast public.

Ever had one of those nights where you don't sleep much so you end up falling asleep really early the next day and then you wake up around 10 PM and you can't sleep at all the following night? Yeah, me too. And since I've completely run out of RSS feeds to read, web-sites to visit, e-mails to respond to, missionaries to write to, and web games to update, I have resorted to the bottom of the barrel, and you are getting a blog update.

The photo-shopped church sign, by the way, is mine. I don't know if I've posted it before, but I liked the result so I've had it sitting on my desktop for ages. If it made you smile in vague amusement then it has done its job.

Speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'm a regular Kiva user. I have a hundred or so dollars which I regularly flip through their loaning machine, and which is used to provide small loans to entrepreneurs who are trying to create a livelihood (usually in other countries, but sometimes in poorer parts of the U.S.). Kiva allows users to count their loans toward teams, and maintains a ranking of which teams are providing the most loans. "Kiva Mormons," the team which I usually count toward, is just a handful of loans behind the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" team, and there's some competition to try and recruit more people so that we can pull ahead.

There have been some people in the team that worry that competitiveness is not a good motivation for charitable work. This got me thinking, especially since I heard of this verse in the Koran:

For every one of you [Jews, Christians, Muslims], We have appointed a path and a way. If God had willed, He would have made you but one community; but that [He has not done in order that] He may try you in what has come to you. So compete with one another in good works.

I think "compete with one another in good works" is a great way for religions to relate to one another. If you believe you are God's true church, make an argument with deeds rather than words. I can also think of a nod to this in Christianity:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

This is more advice for those who are trying to discern true religion from false, but it's also a reminder to those of us who call ourselves the true religion -- we ought to be producing good fruit. So yes, I think that competing in good works has a sound basis. And with that, just 93 more loans to pass the spaghetti people!

Height = prosperity

I found this article a while back, and thought it would be fun to share. It has some relevance to my earlier post about health care--specifically, how do you measure the quality of a country's health care? In short, one answer is "measure how tall they are."

Differences in height between two people living in the same society are due to genetic differences. However, the difference between the average height of populations is due to the quality of life in each society. Height is strongly affected by a combination of nutrition, disease, and environmental stress; thus, societies with lower quality of life will be, on average, shorter. When I was first reading the article, I was a bit skeptical; it seems like there would be other factors that matter. However, you'll find that most of these have been considered, and the premise still works very well: height = prosperity.

One interesting point is that Americans used to be the tallest people in the world. It was true around the time of the revolutionary war, and our height gradually increased all the way into the 1950's. However, something happened around then -- the average European heights kept increasing, while ours stayed pretty much the same. The average European is now significantly taller than we are. Sure, we win out on average income, but it's not translating into a lifestyle that makes us taller. The biggest contrast is in the Netherlands; we are 3-4 inches shorter than the average Dutch person (average height for men and women are 6'1" and 5'8" respectively; for Americans, it's about 5'10" and 5'5"). This is comparing American Caucasians to European Caucasians; if you include our immigrants, the difference increases by another inch.

The full article is here, and summarizes a lot of neat studies. I loved the study about serving the World War 2 rations of corned beef and cabbage for school lunches. It's a fun read, so enjoy it :).

Holiday specials and tacos

There's an hilarious xkcd post about bad movies in general and the Star Wars holiday special in particular. "How," I wondered, "could anything possibly be that bad?" So I asked YouTube.

At first, I stared in disbelief. Then, I started laughing. Then, from the deep recesses of my soul, some tortured voice started calling out: "What are they doing?" it said. "This isn't right!" it said. "Make it stop, please make it stop!" it cried. So I closed the browser window, hoping that some vestige of my sanity remained.

I had watched for very slightly more than 60 seconds.

In other news, I went to Taco Riendo in south Provo (it's one of those cursed restaurant buildings that can't make up its mind -- the genealogy so far is Wingers->Tandoori Grill->Taco Riendo). It was really good -- I'm hopeful that it might hang on. So far I've only had the tacos ($1.59 each--you get a soft corn tortilla, a pile of meat, and free access to the taco fillings bar). It has very little in common with Taco Bell, which is a good thing. I also got a piece of flan, being that I am a sucker for flan, and it was really good. It dwells somewhere between custard and cheesecake.

Zeno's paradox

One of the more famous Greek puzzles is called "Zeno's paradox," named after the philosopher who conceived it. The problem goes something like this:

"Achilles, the great warrior, was to compete in a footrace with a tortoise. Because Achilles is so much faster, the tortoise was given a large head start. Supposing that Achilles started 100 meters behind, and is ten times faster than the tortoise--well, he should run 100 meters, but in that time the tortoise has moved 10. So Achilles runs another 10 meters, but in that time, the tortoise has pulled ahead by 1. So he runs 1 meter, but in that time, the tortoise has stayed ahead by a tenth of a meter. As he runs a tenth, the tortoise holds his lead by a hundredth. Achilles must cover an infinite number of such smaller distances; and since no mortal can complete an infinite number of things, surely it is impossible for him to catch the tortoise!"

It's an interesting paradox. The thing that's so interesting about it, however, is that it also has quite a simple solution. To begin, this paradox tells a lie: "No mortal can complete an infinite number of things." But if the infinite number of things is ever smaller and smaller, then sometimes we mortals can do precisely that. Suppose I try to solve this problem first:

"I wish to sum up all of the distances which Achilles will travel: First the hundred meters, then then 10, then the 1, then the tenth, then the hundredth, and so on, forever. How large a number shall I have when I am done?"

Well, the answer will look very much like this:

111.11111111111111...

except of course that the string of ones shall go on forever. But this number is not infinite. In fact, consider the decimal representation of 111 and 1/9 (one-hundred-eleven and one-ninth). If you do the long division, you will soon realize that it is 111 followed by an endless string of 1's after the decimal point. Thus, the sum of the earlier infinite series is precisely 111 and 1/9 meters, which is the point in the race where Achilles will pass the tortoise.

And there you go: How to answer Zeno's paradox. I hope I said it clearly enough.