Gullevek, there actually is some order to it. The block numbers (which come after the place name if there are no numbered "cho", or if there are "chome", right after that number) go in a boustrophedon-like snake pattern, so you might have something like:
-1 -2 -3 -4 -5 10 -9 -8 -7 -6 11 12 13 14 15
...with various complications if the blocks aren't square. Then, within each block, the lot-numbers go clockwise in a circle, so 8-24 and 8-25 should be next to each other, but of course if there's more than one building on lot 8-24, they'll both have the same number. (Three levels of Russian-matryoshka-doll-like numbering and each building still isn't identified uniquely!)
This system will make much more sense when looking at a map with a bird's-eye view than when actually on the streets!
I think my main quibble with this system lies in wnat a strain on the mind the block/sub-block/sub-sub-block numbering is. The location "3-23-8" is easily confused with "3-2-38" because of the breaks in between the numbers. If they called the eighth lot in block 23 "2308" and the 38th lot in block 2 "2038", it would be quite a bit easier. Some places do this very thing, such as Shiomi-dai in Kochi city; I hope it becomes more common.
(The mathematical psychologist Stanislas Dehaene has discussed the mental strain of breaking telephone numbers into two-digit blocks, French-style, as opposed to a string of digits. I wonder what he would think of these addresses!)
The idea that buildings are numbered in the order they were built is a famous canard and isn't actually seen very often at all.
Anoraknid, that's an amazing site you've developed; I'd seen it before. I still think more use could be made of names -- how about in Ichigaya where they append neighborhood names after the main name (as in Ichigaya Kora-cho, Ichigaya Kaga-cho, Ichigaia Sanai-cho, etc.)? Easier to learn than Ichigaya 1-chome, Ichigaya 2-chome, etc., and you still know what area you're in.
To say that it's perfectly logical and easy to use is to ignore how much more logical and easier it could be.
(More information that most people will want, so feel free to skim.)
Back in the 700s, when the capitals at Nara and Kyoto were built, they began using an extremely logical addressing system that lets you know exactly where to go when on the streets, and also tells you exactly where things were when looking at a map: they built a square grid of streets, the east-west horizontal ones bearing numbers, and locations are described as being on such-and-such street, followed by the nearest cross street, and then the direction from that intersection. So the Kyoto prefectural office is on Shimotachiuri street, west from Shinmachi, for example. Now in modern times, they usually add a neighborhood name and building number after that, for redundancy. (And Google, to their discredit, displays these near-meaningless neighborhood names much more prominently than they do the street names, which is what you actually need. Hopefully this will be remedied soon.)
This system was far ahead of anything in Europe at the time, but unfortunately future Japanese cities didn't take it up. Instead, they used neighborhood names, like Katamachi above, and it must be admitted that when streets don't go in straight lines and are sometimes little more than alleyways, it might be better to settle on a neighborhood or district and then number the buildings in that area. It also has the advantage of being compatible with buildings atop mountains and in isolated countryside where there aren't necessarily roads.
Where the problems began with the neighborhood system was in the 1960s when the government, taking a top-down, bureaucrat-favoring approach, decided to eradicate thousands of venerable old district names and amalgamate addresses into very general area names followed by a chain of numbers.
In Shinjuku -- an excellent example -- a massive number of districts all had their names taken away from them, replaced by simply "Shinjuku", districts 1 through 7.
When looking at a map, you can find Shinjuku 7-38-17 easily enough by homing in on it, spotting district 7 and then sub-block 38, followed by sub-sub-block 17 inside that. There might be more than one building on that lot, but at least you're in the right area.
This is great for bureaucrats and developers, but no fun at all for the person on the street looking for a given house. And it's also no fun when you're trying to memorize an address -- you have to learn not just the digits, but where the breaks are. The least they could do is call it "73817"!
In the eastern half of Shinjuku ward, thankfully, the people rose up against this and managed to preserve their old block names. In the process they got to keep their easy-to-remember numbers. So if I want to find the gas station at Yarai-cho 43, or the school at Waseda Minami 25, I can find it on a map and remember the number easily, and won't be totally lost if I miss a digit.
For the rest of the big cities that don't use streets like Kyoto or Sapporo, Google Street View is a godsend since the streets often don't have names and the addresses are hard to commit to memory. You can actually line the camera up at the train station and check out the exact buildings you'll be passing by on your way to your destination.
Street View is not nearly as important as having a regular map, I admit, but until they start using more human-oriented addresses, we need all the help we can get. I say they just blur out people's faces, NHK TV-style, and let us keep our virtual street tours so that we don't get hopelessly lost trying to find "Central 2-18-3" and "Riverside 4-1-25-A-106". Or petition the government to get some sense into the address system -- or get them to issue us with car-navigator-style GPS devices that give us live directions!
Supposedly Hatfield noticed that it would frequently rain on battlefields somewhat after the fighting had died down. Extrapolating from this, he considered that perhaps something in the explosions was affecting clouds overhead.
Unfortunately, his chemical formula died with him, but it's an inspiring story if he really did come up with this idea himself and actually put into practice.
I first saw this as a child reading Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", and, knowing nothing of the scroll format or anything other than modern books, took quite a while to figure out just what all those little circles jutting out of the walls were, and where all the books could have been.
My memory is spotty now, but I think in the television series (which I saw much later) Sagan walked past these shelves, and there were subject names written nearby in Greek.
The format in the photo certainly doesn't seem ideal for those poor scrolls on the tops of each diamond-shaped area, since they'll have to be lifted aside over and over. But I'm sure, given that it was Alexandria, that they put the most frequently used scrolls on the top, or had some other efficiency-oriented scheme. You don't gather that many great minds in one place without coming up with good ideas.
Solely for the trivia buffs, but "Shiretoko" is the Japanified pronunciation of the Ainu word "sir-e-tok", where the letter s can be either an English "s" or "sh" sound -- the Japanese language can't handle consonants other than "n" at the end of a word, and with Ainu they repeat the previous vowel at the end. So Ainu "kiror" (strength) and "yukar" (tale of the gods) become "kiroro" and "yukara".
The same word "shir", meaning "land", is found in the place "Kunashir", called "Kunashiri" by the Japanese.
There's another word "siretok" in Masayoshi Shibatani's The Language of Japan (an excellent book about Japanese and Ainu), which means "beauty", but this might not be the same word.
In any case, it sure would be cool to see a Firefox with a name in the genuine endangered Ainu language. How about we call it "Shiretok" instead? The few hundred remaining speakers of Ainu would be honored.
I really don't see the problem here. It seems like a great alternative to text messaging, which I absolutely hate.
I think it's great too; I work overnight and am completely out of sync with most people's waking hours. I can't call them when they're sleeping, and most people have ringtones even for mobile e-mail, so I risk waking them up. I want them to be able to get my message and listen to it at their leisure without having to be disturbed by my odd schedule.
Similarly, I leave my own cell phone on, for emergencies, when sleeping in the day. The side effect is that I have to tell people not to call me until a certain hour.
Now this service supposedly makes the phone ring once, which makes it useless in my case, but if there were no rings at all, it would be a great way for time-shifted people to stay in touch with their ordinary-waking-hour friends, and vice versa.
Would you mind being governed by the United States? You're welcome to join up, provided that you bring the word "ratbaggery" with you and use it whenever possible. Up here, this word isn't used nearly as often as it deserves to be. Just think of how much more fun it would be to read the newspaper!
"One possible option for this contest is to hide information in the lower bounds of each pixel (stenography like)"
Pedantry, I admit, but it's steganography that hides the information in that way. Stenography would be copying the RGB values on a piece of lined yellow paper.
In Asia we still use fax machines regularly. In the 1980s, typing Japanese text into a computer was not trivial, and there were competing encoding systems that still haven't been completely ironed out. Even ten years ago, there were many business people who couldn't type, and today you'll occasionally see older people glancing over at a kana-to-Roman conversion chart while in front of a keyboard.
Writing something out by hand and then faxing it was the most efficient way to send information reliably -- snail mail was and is far too slow.
As for the other pieces of modernity that the US still hasn't adopted, consider also how much easier it is for a smaller nation of a few million to agree on something in comparison to getting the same from a vast land of 300 million, most of whom have a healthy distrust of central authority. This isn't limited to the US -- Great Britain's far-flung empire took much too long to dump their 240-penny, 20-shilling pound while the smaller, nimbler USA had "metric" money from the beginning.
The fax is on its way out. If "the entire world is laughing at" the US, they need to find other sources of humor.
:::The early years tended to be batting competitions (in some ways like today's) rather than pitching competitions
::If by "early years", you mean 1920 and later, yeah.
:Otherwise, buddy, you're way off base.
The only one off base is yourself -- check your own link (baseball-reference.com is an amazing site and I recommend it to anyone) and pay extra attention to the 1890s.
In the years immediately after the pitcher's mound was moved back to its current 60 feet 6 inches, offensive totals soared far beyond what we're used to seeing. Given that you're familiar with the lowering of the mound for 1969, I'm surprised that you're not familiar with when it was fixed at its current distance.
The article even mentions that the record was most likely to have been set in 1894, when the National League ERA was well over 5.00, and there were 11.6 hits per team per game, more than 20% more than we see now.
Look at those ERAs pre-1920. Before 1920, the ERA on the NL never significantly exceeded 3.00.
I'm looking at them. The "5.32" for 1894, which is somewhat more than three, is particularly striking.
After 1920, it never dropped below 3.3 or so, with the exception of a 2.99 in 1968, after which MLB made changes to the rules, amongst them lowering the acceptable height of the pitcher's mound.
...
You need to research "dead ball era", and the response by baseball to "Black Sox". (Hint: just like the response to the 1994 strike, it involves the ball...)
While he's doing this, perhaps you could research what came before the dead ball era: namely, the high-offense 1890s. Teams were taken off guard by the increase in the pitching distance and continued to play an 1880s game in a new environment. It took several seasons for adjustments, such as four-man pitching rotations and the occasional use of relief pitchers, to balance the sudden advantage that had been given to the batters. It is not surprising that 1894 would be the year in which a long hitting streak would have been most likely -- the single-season record for runs scored, 194 by Billy Hamilton, was set that year and still stands today.
The fact that you got a +5 out of such a demonstrably incorrect post is a major indictment of the baseball knowledge of the Slashdot faithful.
No, Martin is right -- the 1890s, while not as famous as Ruth and Gehrig's 1930s, were one of the most offensive eras in baseball. His simple analysis is much more forgivable than the insults you throw his way even while being completely ignorant of an entire decade of baseball history, the data from which are right on the web page you so callously direct him to visit.
Japan did indeed see DST as something not worth doing, but even before that comes the problem of what time zone Japan actually lies in.
Look at a time zone map and you'll see most zones leaning over to the west as people try to get a little more sunlight in the evening. France and Spain are particularly noticeable. Japan, on the other hand, leans to the east. Japan's time is the same as Korea's, despite lying well east of that country, and Vladivostok lies west of Japan, yet is an hour ahead! Why did Japan do this?
Answer: Since there are 24 time zones around the globe, and thus a new one every 15 degrees of longitude, Japan decided to base theirs on the point in their country that lies on a multiple of 15 degrees, which is a point in Hyogo prefecture. The problem is that the vast majority of the population of Japan, including almost all the big cities (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Sapporo) lie east of this line.
Nobody in Okinawa clamors for DST, because the time zone positioning is just right for them. It's the people up in Sapporo whose kids are walking home from school in darkness at 4 PM who want it.
What Japan really should do is break the country into two time zones, with the Kyushu/Shikoku side keeping the current time, and the rest of the country jumping an hour ahead. Barring that, just have the entire country jump an hour ahead and stay there permanently. It would even give them the chance to distinguish themselves from the rival Koreans just a little more!
What we're stuck with is a country where we have to endure 28-degree (83 deg F) indoor office temperatures in the summer for the sake of power conservation, yet no thought is ever given to fixing the clocks. The cynical, conspiracy-theorist answer is that they'll never do this because the electric companies make too much money from people using their lights in the early evening!
Very informative data! I live in Japan and know that people don't sleep much here, but still, less than five percent of the people sleep for eight hours or more!
In Japan, sleep deprivation is practically the national pastime -- may office workers, myself included for several years, can't sleep eight hours per day even if they climb into the futon the moment they get home from work. When you've got an hour-long commute and a 14-hour work day, this is what happens. Japanese husbands are often called inconsiderate pigs who only say three words to their wives when they get home: furo (bath), meshi (food), and neru (sleep). The problem is not that they're rude -- they're so exhausted that that's all they have the energy to say!
My co-workers think I'm hopelessly lazy for wanting to sleep eight hours or more every day to keep my brain sharp -- they suggested sleeping in the nine minutes between getting on the train and changing lines!
Yes, you're expected to be able to sleep in any position, in any environment. I supposed people with their level of chronic sleep deprivation can indeed fall asleep anywhere.
Fortunately in my own situation, I got placed on the overnight shift. Now I have to endure sleeping in daylight, but at least I get eight hours or more every day!
Sleep needs to be respected. You wouldn't try to live on 300 calories a day, would you? Even prisoners aren't treated that badly. So why are companies permitted to do comparable things to people's sleep?
Hey, in August, you can never spend enough time in the server room. Especially if your tightwad boss tells everyone to turn their ACs up to 78 (or you don't even have AC in your room).
Try living in Japan, where it's national policy ("Cool Biz", they're calling it)to keep rooms at 83 (28 Celsius) in order to stop global warming.
The women can endure because they wear sleeveless tops, skirts, bare legs, and sometimes even sandals, but not so for the men. I've never felt as sluggish and miserable as I did around September of last year. Hot outside, hot inside. You'd think that businesses would start to think about the productivity lost when people are so hot all the time -- you get sleepy and your brain just turns off.
Keep the room at 21 C and keep us looking good in our suits!
Not the point of the article, but... seven million patents in the USA. Seems like just a little while ago they were in the four-millions, but then the "...on the Internet" patent revolution got going.
And kudos to the US for using a simple sequentially-numbered system for the patents instead of an indecipherable code involving numbers, letters, and probably hyphens in between every few of those other symbols.
Let's hope human ingenuity doesn't slacken in the coming years, and that patent number ten million is coming soon.
That's actually what led me to it. In a math book long ago it said something about the Egyptians or Archimedes (can't remember now) using 255/81 as an approximation for pi, and 255 jumps out at you as being one less than 2^8, and 81 is of course 9^2.
And since there are plenty of more accurate close-to-pi fractions, why not go for the palindromesque symmetry and make one that looks great? Fortunately 2*pi gets plenty of use in math too, so it doesn't look as contrived as it might!
"requiring citizens to produce federally compliant identification before purchasing some over-the-counter medicines "
That would give non-citizens more rights than citizens, since they can hardly make it illegal for resident aliens to buy medicine. Or will they be forced to show green cards or the like? What nonsense.
AC, you haven't experienced it because it only began in November of last year.
The Japanese police are well-known for their mistreatment of not only convicted criminals (whom some will say deserve it), but also criminal suspects, who can be "detained" without evidence in prison-like conditions for up to 23 days before charges are laid. Non-citizens cannot expect an opportunity to post bail, as they supposedly are a flight risk. (From an island nation? With ID checks upon leaving from any port?)
The most galling thing about the Japanese fingerprinting when compared with that of the US is that once you safely enter the US legally, you can walk the sterets unmolested and fully protected by law from harassment by police. Not so in Japan, where non-citizens have to carry ID cards 24 hours a day. Rest assured that beat cops will stop foreign-looking people on the slightest pretext. With fingerprinting ostensibly preventing anyone from entering the country illegally and catching past deportees, the alien card system no longer serves any purpose. Yet you don't see the government scrapping it any time soon.
Japan knew exactly what it was doing when it instituted this fingerprinting. With the United States' image being what it is now, they knew they could sneak this bit of creeping totalitarianism in while a much bigger target took all the criticism.
Surely some kind of discrimination lawsuit could be mounted against establishments that specifically require a driver's license for service?
While "we refuse the right to refuse service to anyone" is often featured in windows, "we refuse to serve blacks" or "we refuse to serve people who look Mexican" would be legally andmorally unthinkable.
Effectively, these stores are refusing service to anyone who hasn't learned to drive, the handicapped who physically can't drive, and especially non-US-residents, who can't have driver's licenses or any other kind of substitute state ID.
I myself don't have a driver's license in my adopted nation (Japan), and thus can't use the vending machines that require a license swipe in order to be activated.
How can their policies remain legally unchallenged? Is it just that the vast majority of people drive cars, and those who don't don't have much legal power?
Also, in Vista there's something I like. If you simply don't update, the shutdown button turns into a "update and shutdown".
This should have been implented many years ago. My XP machine at work literally interrupts you every half hour to ask you if you want to restart now. You'd think that after three or four "no, not now" clicks, it would get the message. No one likes to have their work interrupted, and even if I have time to flip over to Slashdot and take a little break, that doesn't mean I have the luxury of closing all my open windows. Adding a third button with "do it when I shut down, and don't remind me again until then" would make security updates a lot more tolerable. Users might actually begin to see their usefulness instead of being annoyed all the time.
Absolutely true, and the fingerprinting is only the beginning.
You would think that if such fingerprinting measures were taken at the border, any foreigner admitted to the country would be considered not to be a criminal, but in fact the Japanese government doesn't start trusting you even a bit.
All non-citizens -- even permanent residents -- are forced to carry Alien Registration Cards at all times. These cards alone contain enough information to offer any mugger the opportunity to become an identity thief: bearer's name and Japanese kanji/kana name, if there is one; date of birth; sex; place of birth; nationality; home municipality and state/province in home country; current address; name of householder at current address; passport number; date of issue of passport; date of first landing in Japan; visa type and expiration date; job title; employer's name and address, and finally, signature (if issued after early 2000s) or fingerprint (if issued earlier).
All of this is printed in plain text easily visible to the eye. This is an identity theft disaster waiting to happen, even if the data obtained forcibly by immigration inspectors hasn't been sold off to unknown organizations.
Ostensibly there are rules in place about when these cards can be demanded and who can see the data on them, but in practice police officers will ask to see them on the slightest pretext, and if you're not carrying yours, they can take you to the police station, make you sit in detention until the Ministry of Justice can verify your identity, and possibly impose a fine.
The report mentions CCTV cameras as a threat to privacy, but doesn't mention what Japan has: good old-fashioned live police officers on the streets arbitrarliy accosting people and demanding papers! I'd much rather walk past a CCTV camera than a Japanese "police box"!
The police also keep non-citizens under surveillance by using illegal "policy creep" such as getting hotels to demand these cards (and make copies!) for all foreigners staying with them, despite the law stating that only non-residents have to provice such information. Employers, real-estate agents, mobile phone companies, and even places like video stores will also demand copies of these cards as a condition of service. There are even rumors of adding chips such as RFID to these cards and setting up scanners in hotels, train stations, and other public facilities.
No one protests, because non-citizens can't vote and the average Japanese person is too busy and too apolitical to care. "Become a citizen" isn't good advice either, as it takes many years of residence to be eligible and your data doesn't get destroyed if you become Japanese (and police will hassle you on the street anyway, if you don't look Japanese).
I'm disgusted that Japan's rating was as high as it was. Japan takes only the most totalitarian parts from the US, Great Britain, and the EU, and counts on the voices of the "it's their country; they can do whatever they want" crowd to drown out civil-liberties advocates. Japan is fading into irrelevance on the world stage, I'm sad to say, and this creeping totalitarianism is one reason why.
Slashdot Mirror
-1 -2 -3 -4 -5
10 -9 -8 -7 -6
11 12 13 14 15
...with various complications if the blocks aren't square. Then, within each block, the lot-numbers go clockwise in a circle, so 8-24 and 8-25 should be next to each other, but of course if there's more than one building on lot 8-24, they'll both have the same number. (Three levels of Russian-matryoshka-doll-like numbering and each building still isn't identified uniquely!)
This system will make much more sense when looking at a map with a bird's-eye view than when actually on the streets!
I think my main quibble with this system lies in wnat a strain on the mind the block/sub-block/sub-sub-block numbering is. The location "3-23-8" is easily confused with "3-2-38" because of the breaks in between the numbers. If they called the eighth lot in block 23 "2308" and the 38th lot in block 2 "2038", it would be quite a bit easier. Some places do this very thing, such as Shiomi-dai in Kochi city; I hope it becomes more common.
(The mathematical psychologist Stanislas Dehaene has discussed the mental strain of breaking telephone numbers into two-digit blocks, French-style, as opposed to a string of digits. I wonder what he would think of these addresses!)
The idea that buildings are numbered in the order they were built is a famous canard and isn't actually seen very often at all.
Anoraknid, that's an amazing site you've developed; I'd seen it before. I still think more use could be made of names -- how about in Ichigaya where they append neighborhood names after the main name (as in Ichigaya Kora-cho, Ichigaya Kaga-cho, Ichigaia Sanai-cho, etc.)? Easier to learn than Ichigaya 1-chome, Ichigaya 2-chome, etc., and you still know what area you're in.
To say that it's perfectly logical and easy to use is to ignore how much more logical and easier it could be.
(More information that most people will want, so feel free to skim.)
Back in the 700s, when the capitals at Nara and Kyoto were built, they began using an extremely logical addressing system that lets you know exactly where to go when on the streets, and also tells you exactly where things were when looking at a map: they built a square grid of streets, the east-west horizontal ones bearing numbers, and locations are described as being on such-and-such street, followed by the nearest cross street, and then the direction from that intersection. So the Kyoto prefectural office is on Shimotachiuri street, west from Shinmachi, for example. Now in modern times, they usually add a neighborhood name and building number after that, for redundancy. (And Google, to their discredit, displays these near-meaningless neighborhood names much more prominently than they do the street names, which is what you actually need. Hopefully this will be remedied soon.)
This system was far ahead of anything in Europe at the time, but unfortunately future Japanese cities didn't take it up. Instead, they used neighborhood names, like Katamachi above, and it must be admitted that when streets don't go in straight lines and are sometimes little more than alleyways, it might be better to settle on a neighborhood or district and then number the buildings in that area. It also has the advantage of being compatible with buildings atop mountains and in isolated countryside where there aren't necessarily roads.
Where the problems began with the neighborhood system was in the 1960s when the government, taking a top-down, bureaucrat-favoring approach, decided to eradicate thousands of venerable old district names and amalgamate addresses into very general area names followed by a chain of numbers.
In Shinjuku -- an excellent example -- a massive number of districts all had their names taken away from them, replaced by simply "Shinjuku", districts 1 through 7.
When looking at a map, you can find Shinjuku 7-38-17 easily enough by homing in on it, spotting district 7 and then sub-block 38, followed by sub-sub-block 17 inside that. There might be more than one building on that lot, but at least you're in the right area.
This is great for bureaucrats and developers, but no fun at all for the person on the street looking for a given house. And it's also no fun when you're trying to memorize an address -- you have to learn not just the digits, but where the breaks are. The least they could do is call it "73817"!
In the eastern half of Shinjuku ward, thankfully, the people rose up against this and managed to preserve their old block names. In the process they got to keep their easy-to-remember numbers. So if I want to find the gas station at Yarai-cho 43, or the school at Waseda Minami 25, I can find it on a map and remember the number easily, and won't be totally lost if I miss a digit.
For the rest of the big cities that don't use streets like Kyoto or Sapporo, Google Street View is a godsend since the streets often don't have names and the addresses are hard to commit to memory. You can actually line the camera up at the train station and check out the exact buildings you'll be passing by on your way to your destination.
Street View is not nearly as important as having a regular map, I admit, but until they start using more human-oriented addresses, we need all the help we can get. I say they just blur out people's faces, NHK TV-style, and let us keep our virtual street tours so that we don't get hopelessly lost trying to find "Central 2-18-3" and "Riverside 4-1-25-A-106". Or petition the government to get some sense into the address system -- or get them to issue us with car-navigator-style GPS devices that give us live directions!
This guy supposedly did it a century ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hatfield
Supposedly Hatfield noticed that it would frequently rain on battlefields somewhat after the fighting had died down. Extrapolating from this, he considered that perhaps something in the explosions was affecting clouds overhead.
Unfortunately, his chemical formula died with him, but it's an inspiring story if he really did come up with this idea himself and actually put into practice.
You can see an artist's conception of how the scrolls might have been arranged in this photo:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/images/alexandria/library/reonconstruction-storage-rooms-cosmos.jpg
I first saw this as a child reading Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", and, knowing nothing of the scroll format or anything other than modern books, took quite a while to figure out just what all those little circles jutting out of the walls were, and where all the books could have been.
My memory is spotty now, but I think in the television series (which I saw much later) Sagan walked past these shelves, and there were subject names written nearby in Greek.
The format in the photo certainly doesn't seem ideal for those poor scrolls on the tops of each diamond-shaped area, since they'll have to be lifted aside over and over. But I'm sure, given that it was Alexandria, that they put the most frequently used scrolls on the top, or had some other efficiency-oriented scheme. You don't gather that many great minds in one place without coming up with good ideas.
Solely for the trivia buffs, but "Shiretoko" is the Japanified pronunciation of the Ainu word "sir-e-tok", where the letter s can be either an English "s" or "sh" sound -- the Japanese language can't handle consonants other than "n" at the end of a word, and with Ainu they repeat the previous vowel at the end. So Ainu "kiror" (strength) and "yukar" (tale of the gods) become "kiroro" and "yukara".
The same word "shir", meaning "land", is found in the place "Kunashir", called "Kunashiri" by the Japanese.
There's another word "siretok" in Masayoshi Shibatani's The Language of Japan (an excellent book about Japanese and Ainu), which means "beauty", but this might not be the same word.
In any case, it sure would be cool to see a Firefox with a name in the genuine endangered Ainu language. How about we call it "Shiretok" instead? The few hundred remaining speakers of Ainu would be honored.
I really don't see the problem here. It seems like a great alternative to text messaging, which I absolutely hate.
I think it's great too; I work overnight and am completely out of sync with most people's waking hours. I can't call them when they're sleeping, and most people have ringtones even for mobile e-mail, so I risk waking them up. I want them to be able to get my message and listen to it at their leisure without having to be disturbed by my odd schedule.
Similarly, I leave my own cell phone on, for emergencies, when sleeping in the day. The side effect is that I have to tell people not to call me until a certain hour.
Now this service supposedly makes the phone ring once, which makes it useless in my case, but if there were no rings at all, it would be a great way for time-shifted people to stay in touch with their ordinary-waking-hour friends, and vice versa.
I agree completely. What's the fuss?
Would you mind being governed by the United States? You're welcome to join up, provided that you bring the word "ratbaggery" with you and use it whenever possible. Up here, this word isn't used nearly as often as it deserves to be. Just think of how much more fun it would be to read the newspaper!
"One possible option for this contest is to hide information in the lower bounds of each pixel (stenography like)"
Pedantry, I admit, but it's steganography that hides the information in that way. Stenography would be copying the RGB values on a piece of lined yellow paper.
In Asia we still use fax machines regularly. In the 1980s, typing Japanese text into a computer was not trivial, and there were competing encoding systems that still haven't been completely ironed out. Even ten years ago, there were many business people who couldn't type, and today you'll occasionally see older people glancing over at a kana-to-Roman conversion chart while in front of a keyboard.
Writing something out by hand and then faxing it was the most efficient way to send information reliably -- snail mail was and is far too slow.
As for the other pieces of modernity that the US still hasn't adopted, consider also how much easier it is for a smaller nation of a few million to agree on something in comparison to getting the same from a vast land of 300 million, most of whom have a healthy distrust of central authority. This isn't limited to the US -- Great Britain's far-flung empire took much too long to dump their 240-penny, 20-shilling pound while the smaller, nimbler USA had "metric" money from the beginning.
The fax is on its way out. If "the entire world is laughing at" the US, they need to find other sources of humor.
The package says "for all DVD players". Does that mean there's no region code on these things? I sure hope so.
Who would steal a focus?
An Internet Explorer-equipped dashboard?
Or just playing practical jokes on people (like flipping all of the characters in Chicago upside down, back when the System 6 used it for the UI).
The much-less-labor-intensive, Unicode-based cousin of your plan is available here:
http://www.sherv.net/flip.html
Now, if only Slashdot supported characters beyond the masic ASCII plane...
:::The early years tended to be batting competitions (in some ways like today's) rather than pitching competitions
::If by "early years", you mean 1920 and later, yeah.
:Otherwise, buddy, you're way off base.
The only one off base is yourself -- check your own link (baseball-reference.com is an amazing site and I recommend it to anyone) and pay extra attention to the 1890s. In the years immediately after the pitcher's mound was moved back to its current 60 feet 6 inches, offensive totals soared far beyond what we're used to seeing. Given that you're familiar with the lowering of the mound for 1969, I'm surprised that you're not familiar with when it was fixed at its current distance.
The article even mentions that the record was most likely to have been set in 1894, when the National League ERA was well over 5.00, and there were 11.6 hits per team per game, more than 20% more than we see now.
Look at those ERAs pre-1920. Before 1920, the ERA on the NL never significantly exceeded 3.00.
I'm looking at them. The "5.32" for 1894, which is somewhat more than three, is particularly striking.
After 1920, it never dropped below 3.3 or so, with the exception of a 2.99 in 1968, after which MLB made changes to the rules, amongst them lowering the acceptable height of the pitcher's mound.
...
You need to research "dead ball era", and the response by baseball to "Black Sox". (Hint: just like the response to the 1994 strike, it involves the ball...)
While he's doing this, perhaps you could research what came before the dead ball era: namely, the high-offense 1890s. Teams were taken off guard by the increase in the pitching distance and continued to play an 1880s game in a new environment. It took several seasons for adjustments, such as four-man pitching rotations and the occasional use of relief pitchers, to balance the sudden advantage that had been given to the batters. It is not surprising that 1894 would be the year in which a long hitting streak would have been most likely -- the single-season record for runs scored, 194 by Billy Hamilton, was set that year and still stands today.
The fact that you got a +5 out of such a demonstrably incorrect post is a major indictment of the baseball knowledge of the Slashdot faithful.
No, Martin is right -- the 1890s, while not as famous as Ruth and Gehrig's 1930s, were one of the most offensive eras in baseball. His simple analysis is much more forgivable than the insults you throw his way even while being completely ignorant of an entire decade of baseball history, the data from which are right on the web page you so callously direct him to visit.
Japan did indeed see DST as something not worth doing, but even before that comes the problem of what time zone Japan actually lies in.
Look at a time zone map and you'll see most zones leaning over to the west as people try to get a little more sunlight in the evening. France and Spain are particularly noticeable. Japan, on the other hand, leans to the east. Japan's time is the same as Korea's, despite lying well east of that country, and Vladivostok lies west of Japan, yet is an hour ahead! Why did Japan do this?
Answer: Since there are 24 time zones around the globe, and thus a new one every 15 degrees of longitude, Japan decided to base theirs on the point in their country that lies on a multiple of 15 degrees, which is a point in Hyogo prefecture. The problem is that the vast majority of the population of Japan, including almost all the big cities (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Sapporo) lie east of this line.
Nobody in Okinawa clamors for DST, because the time zone positioning is just right for them. It's the people up in Sapporo whose kids are walking home from school in darkness at 4 PM who want it.
What Japan really should do is break the country into two time zones, with the Kyushu/Shikoku side keeping the current time, and the rest of the country jumping an hour ahead. Barring that, just have the entire country jump an hour ahead and stay there permanently. It would even give them the chance to distinguish themselves from the rival Koreans just a little more!
What we're stuck with is a country where we have to endure 28-degree (83 deg F) indoor office temperatures in the summer for the sake of power conservation, yet no thought is ever given to fixing the clocks. The cynical, conspiracy-theorist answer is that they'll never do this because the electric companies make too much money from people using their lights in the early evening!
Very informative data! I live in Japan and know that people don't sleep much here, but still, less than five percent of the people sleep for eight hours or more!
In Japan, sleep deprivation is practically the national pastime -- may office workers, myself included for several years, can't sleep eight hours per day even if they climb into the futon the moment they get home from work. When you've got an hour-long commute and a 14-hour work day, this is what happens. Japanese husbands are often called inconsiderate pigs who only say three words to their wives when they get home: furo (bath), meshi (food), and neru (sleep). The problem is not that they're rude -- they're so exhausted that that's all they have the energy to say!
My co-workers think I'm hopelessly lazy for wanting to sleep eight hours or more every day to keep my brain sharp -- they suggested sleeping in the nine minutes between getting on the train and changing lines!
Yes, you're expected to be able to sleep in any position, in any environment. I supposed people with their level of chronic sleep deprivation can indeed fall asleep anywhere.
Fortunately in my own situation, I got placed on the overnight shift. Now I have to endure sleeping in daylight, but at least I get eight hours or more every day!
Sleep needs to be respected. You wouldn't try to live on 300 calories a day, would you? Even prisoners aren't treated that badly. So why are companies permitted to do comparable things to people's sleep?
Hey, in August, you can never spend enough time in the server room. Especially if your tightwad boss tells everyone to turn their ACs up to 78 (or you don't even have AC in your room).
Try living in Japan, where it's national policy ("Cool Biz", they're calling it)to keep rooms at 83 (28 Celsius) in order to stop global warming.
The women can endure because they wear sleeveless tops, skirts, bare legs, and sometimes even sandals, but not so for the men. I've never felt as sluggish and miserable as I did around September of last year. Hot outside, hot inside. You'd think that businesses would start to think about the productivity lost when people are so hot all the time -- you get sleepy and your brain just turns off.
Keep the room at 21 C and keep us looking good in our suits!
Re: US Patent 7003500
Not the point of the article, but... seven million patents in the USA. Seems like just a little while ago they were in the four-millions, but then the "...on the Internet" patent revolution got going.
And kudos to the US for using a simple sequentially-numbered system for the patents instead of an indecipherable code involving numbers, letters, and probably hyphens in between every few of those other symbols.
Let's hope human ingenuity doesn't slacken in the coming years, and that patent number ten million is coming soon.
SO why not 2^8/9^2 = pi?
That saves you the division. Only a 0.6% error.
That's actually what led me to it. In a math book long ago it said something about the Egyptians or Archimedes (can't remember now) using 255/81 as an approximation for pi, and 255 jumps out at you as being one less than 2^8, and 81 is of course 9^2.
And since there are plenty of more accurate close-to-pi fractions, why not go for the palindromesque symmetry and make one that looks great? Fortunately 2*pi gets plenty of use in math too, so it doesn't look as contrived as it might!
My personal favorite: 2^9/9^2 almost equals 2*pi.
That would give non-citizens more rights than citizens, since they can hardly make it illegal for resident aliens to buy medicine. Or will they be forced to show green cards or the like? What nonsense.
AC, you haven't experienced it because it only began in November of last year.
The Japanese police are well-known for their mistreatment of not only convicted criminals (whom some will say deserve it), but also criminal suspects, who can be "detained" without evidence in prison-like conditions for up to 23 days before charges are laid. Non-citizens cannot expect an opportunity to post bail, as they supposedly are a flight risk. (From an island nation? With ID checks upon leaving from any port?)
The most galling thing about the Japanese fingerprinting when compared with that of the US is that once you safely enter the US legally, you can walk the sterets unmolested and fully protected by law from harassment by police. Not so in Japan, where non-citizens have to carry ID cards 24 hours a day. Rest assured that beat cops will stop foreign-looking people on the slightest pretext. With fingerprinting ostensibly preventing anyone from entering the country illegally and catching past deportees, the alien card system no longer serves any purpose. Yet you don't see the government scrapping it any time soon.
Japan knew exactly what it was doing when it instituted this fingerprinting. With the United States' image being what it is now, they knew they could sneak this bit of creeping totalitarianism in while a much bigger target took all the criticism.
Surely some kind of discrimination lawsuit could be mounted against establishments that specifically require a driver's license for service?
While "we refuse the right to refuse service to anyone" is often featured in windows, "we refuse to serve blacks" or "we refuse to serve people who look Mexican" would be legally andmorally unthinkable.
Effectively, these stores are refusing service to anyone who hasn't learned to drive, the handicapped who physically can't drive, and especially non-US-residents, who can't have driver's licenses or any other kind of substitute state ID.
I myself don't have a driver's license in my adopted nation (Japan), and thus can't use the vending machines that require a license swipe in order to be activated.
How can their policies remain legally unchallenged? Is it just that the vast majority of people drive cars, and those who don't don't have much legal power?
Also, in Vista there's something I like. If you simply don't update, the shutdown button turns into a "update and shutdown".
This should have been implented many years ago. My XP machine at work literally interrupts you every half hour to ask you if you want to restart now. You'd think that after three or four "no, not now" clicks, it would get the message. No one likes to have their work interrupted, and even if I have time to flip over to Slashdot and take a little break, that doesn't mean I have the luxury of closing all my open windows. Adding a third button with "do it when I shut down, and don't remind me again until then" would make security updates a lot more tolerable. Users might actually begin to see their usefulness instead of being annoyed all the time.
Absolutely true, and the fingerprinting is only the beginning.
You would think that if such fingerprinting measures were taken at the border, any foreigner admitted to the country would be considered not to be a criminal, but in fact the Japanese government doesn't start trusting you even a bit.
All non-citizens -- even permanent residents -- are forced to carry Alien Registration Cards at all times. These cards alone contain enough information to offer any mugger the opportunity to become an identity thief: bearer's name and Japanese kanji/kana name, if there is one; date of birth; sex; place of birth; nationality; home municipality and state/province in home country; current address; name of householder at current address; passport number; date of issue of passport; date of first landing in Japan; visa type and expiration date; job title; employer's name and address, and finally, signature (if issued after early 2000s) or fingerprint (if issued earlier).
All of this is printed in plain text easily visible to the eye. This is an identity theft disaster waiting to happen, even if the data obtained forcibly by immigration inspectors hasn't been sold off to unknown organizations.
Ostensibly there are rules in place about when these cards can be demanded and who can see the data on them, but in practice police officers will ask to see them on the slightest pretext, and if you're not carrying yours, they can take you to the police station, make you sit in detention until the Ministry of Justice can verify your identity, and possibly impose a fine.
The report mentions CCTV cameras as a threat to privacy, but doesn't mention what Japan has: good old-fashioned live police officers on the streets arbitrarliy accosting people and demanding papers! I'd much rather walk past a CCTV camera than a Japanese "police box"!
The police also keep non-citizens under surveillance by using illegal "policy creep" such as getting hotels to demand these cards (and make copies!) for all foreigners staying with them, despite the law stating that only non-residents have to provice such information. Employers, real-estate agents, mobile phone companies, and even places like video stores will also demand copies of these cards as a condition of service. There are even rumors of adding chips such as RFID to these cards and setting up scanners in hotels, train stations, and other public facilities.
No one protests, because non-citizens can't vote and the average Japanese person is too busy and too apolitical to care. "Become a citizen" isn't good advice either, as it takes many years of residence to be eligible and your data doesn't get destroyed if you become Japanese (and police will hassle you on the street anyway, if you don't look Japanese).
I'm disgusted that Japan's rating was as high as it was. Japan takes only the most totalitarian parts from the US, Great Britain, and the EU, and counts on the voices of the "it's their country; they can do whatever they want" crowd to drown out civil-liberties advocates. Japan is fading into irrelevance on the world stage, I'm sad to say, and this creeping totalitarianism is one reason why.