Aku Aku

secret tunnel network under tokyo?

Oh, buddha knows, I love a good consipracy. Especially when it involves secret tunnels underneath an already exciting and mysterious sprawling urban landscape. Shun Akiba, a former war-time correspondant has potentially uncovered just such a scenario in Tokyo and thinks that there might be a conspiracy to keep the information hidden. Or maybe he's just drumming up book sales, but I still dig it :)

What changed his life was finding an old map in a secondhand bookstore. Comparing it to a contemporary map, he found significant variations. "Close to the Diet in Nagata-cho, current maps show two subways crossing. In the old map, they are parallel."

The journalist in him taking over, he sought out construction records. When responses proved defensive and noncooperative -- "lips zipped tight" -- he set out to prove that the two subway tunnels could not cross: "Engineering cannot lie."

From Fucked Gaijan

bon voyage pioneer

The Pioneer 10 space probe has sailed over the horizon. Bon voyage.

CBS news' Dan Rather just

CBS news' Dan Rather just had an interview with Hussein where the Crazy H challenges George W(ar) Bush to an international live TV and Radio debate. I have to say that was a smart move by Hussein. I mean it won't help avert the Iraq invasion at all, but it's really going to make Bush look bad in public opinion, especially in the international community becase of course Bush won't have the balls to actually debate him live. A total "I'm taking you with me" sort of move.

introverts

An article on The Caring for Your Introvert published in The Atlantic. Interesting. I'm an INTP with a solid 90% score on the I ...and I definitely agree with this quote: "the only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself."

"But you have a blog," you say, "you're yapping about yourself all the time."

Yeah, but not -to- anyone in particular. And I can't stand repeating myself; drives me nuts. I previously attributed that to a compulsion for efficiency, but maybe it has something to do with not wanting to talk so much in the first place.

mmm, bacteria

In a continuation with my fascination with all things strange and Japanese ...my girlfriend Mie who lives in Tokyo recently posted pics of a new health-craze thing she had told me about: rice baths. Or rice sauna, I don't know what you'd call it actually. But it's really not the rice, it's the fact that the rice is swarming with bacteria, which produces an amazing amount of heat. At the Exploritorium in San Francisco there used to be an exhibit which let you push your hand deep into a compost heap, the amount of heat just a few inches in was astonishing (to me anyhow). Well, it's something like that and a fifteen minute dip in a tub of rice bacteria is apparently quite a wonderful experience.

interactive kinetic art

I'm at CELLspace, an artist's collective located at 19th & Bryant for an event called At Least My Machines Still Love Me. It is a showcase for mechanized kinetic/robotic art put on by the folks at qbox. The warehouse space is alive with robotic contraptions that are producing a cacophony of digitized and amplified sound. I wish the hiptop had a mic.
--Dav via Danger Hiptop

iraqi children

A good article on the Guerrilla News Network website that tells of an international team that went to Baghdad to investigate the state of Iraq's children on the eve of war when over a decade of sanctions has already severely dimished the quality of life compared to before the 1991 war. It also has few paragraphs that speak candidly about what it is like to be a journalist in Iraq right now and the difficulty in getting citizens to give honest answers when their every utterance is monitored by the government.

It should come as no surprise that the mental health of Iraqi kids is not good. In response to the question, "Do you worry that you might not live to be an adult?" 96% of kids said yes, although the degree to which they worried varied from a little to all the time. The full results of this study are really worth checking out on the WarChild Canada website.

It is heartbreaking to see five year-old children talk about their fear of being bombed, especially when right after that they start talking about something really childish and you see how with these adult thoughts of war banging around in their head, the child-part of this isn't going to last very long. The threat of war is robbing them of a future. It is also sad to hear about the break down in communication between parents and children. Most things, we think in our Western-Oprah-therapy way will be better if we just get if out in the open and talk about it. This isn't really the case in places like Iraq. How do you explain to your children (when you are stressed-out and terrified yourself) that, yes, there may well be a war and, yes, you will be bombed and people will indeed die? There's no Dr. Suess story for that.

Collaborative Lat/Lon Database & Feb 15 protest pics from around the world.

Ben, the lead visionary of the blogosphere project emailed me a link to a collection of
180 pictures for over 125 February 15 2003 Protests. This looked like a good use for the globe applet I've been working on for the blogosphere project, so I wrote some perl code to scrape the data from that page, combine it with the world cities data I've been using and encode it as an xml file suitable for feeding into the globe applet. The results are here: protests around the world

It was fairly easy to do, and it successfully scraped 157 of the 180 photos (although a few are in the wrong locations).

This got me thinking about a free simple and useful sub-project service that we should attempt to provide at blogosphere: run a service via XML-RPC and plain CGI that takes a request string containing location info and returns a dataset of the probable lat/lon pair ranked in order of likelihood. Andy has also suggested it should take a variety of inputs (an RSS feed, a URL, etc).

The back end engine would be open source of course, and we could concentrate all of the AI-like parsing logic in one place. It would know (or learn over time) how to handle things like San Jose vs San Jose, CA vs San Jose, CR vs San Jose, CostRica vs S.J., Costa Rica vs San Jose, California vs USA-San Jose-CA ...etc

Make the service free to use for all non-commercial usage. Let people enter in lat/lon pairs and location attributes. Another subsytem could automate sanity checking the user-supplied data and use some sort of democratic/reputation system so that the system is self policing.

Seems like it would be a great service to have. Right up there with online dictionaries, translation services and time servers. Maybe it already exists?

nerds

Today I ran across a superb essay by Paul Graham titled Why Nerds are Unpopular.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

The essay goes in great detail deconstructing the systems involved in creating the modern secondary school experience (social, education and economic). It should be required reading for all parents, educators and policy makers.

we can win w/o war

More pics from the march. We're taking a break at the moment, bloody mary's not bloody wars!--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/