As you may recall, I broke the fifth metatarsal of my right foot last December, and it’s been taking forever to heal. Since it did not heal well by the beginning of June, I started with an ultrasound therapy, and that seems to be doing a much better job. Check out the image below: my foot when I broke it on December 3, again in April (five months later, not very well healed), and then just the other day in mid-July.

The doc told me that the bone is now 80% healed, so with the new therapy, it might be all the way back by the end of August. That ultrasound pulse stuff seems to actually work. In fact, they seem to be finding more uses for it–including growing new teeth. The article, which I noticed a few weeks ago, details the exact same treatment that I’m using for my feet, except instead of SAFHS, it’s called LIPUS, and has a much smaller and automatic pulse generator.

How about that?

I was watching a little segment on YouTube about two guys who pulled a strange and unfunny stunt on a live Fox News program. It was about two brothers who made Internet videos about how easy it is to steal a bike even when chained; as one of them demonstrates by using a portable saw to cut through a heavy chain, the other fakes getting injured, falling to the ground screaming, which supremely pissed off the Fox reporter.

Why mention this? Because I recognized them. They are Casey and Van Neistat, the same clowns who made a big splash two and a half years ago by wildly exaggerating iPod battery deficiencies. In short, they used their iPod almost constantly over one and a half years, and then were outraged when the rechargeable battery lost its ability to maintain a long charge (something that would be obvious to and fully expected by anyone who has used rechargeable batteries before). They claimed that it was impossible to replace the battery, and so started defacing iPod ads all over New York; they became famous when their video of this defacement became popular on the Internet.

When it was demonstrated that the iPod battery could be replaced, they countered by buying the most expensive one and badly botching the replacement job, then claiming that an overpriced $100 replacement was impossible to do anyway–when in fact, replacement kits could be bought for $50 and were easy to perform flawlessly.

None of that seemed to matter as the Neistats launched to fame–for at least a while. Now they’re in the news again after having made videos of themselves stealing bikes from all over New York, and the Fox segment made a bigger splash–not because their badly-performed decapitation prank was funny at all, but because of how the reporter, Jodi Applegate, reacted to the prank.

Frankly, as much as I detest Fox News, I couldn’t find much fault in Applegate’s reaction aside from her rather sophomoric use of language for a network news reporter–“That was totally uncool!” “That was not cool, dude!” “They’re jerks, and we were totally not part of planning that!” I probably would have reacted much the same way, though with slightly more dignified vocabulary. That said, it is still somewhat her own fault for having these two guys on the air without first checking them out; she could have easily figured out that they were nothing but juvenile publicity hounds.

Here are some web sites I regularly visit, but don’t link to on my sidebar, at least not at present. They’re good regular visits:

Cosmic Buddha: Japan blogger with a good sense of humor.
Crooks and Liars: why the heck don’t I have them up on my sidebar yet?
Engadget: a good general tech blog.
FG: a good blog on Japan’s happenings (don’t make me print their full title).
Pharyngula: a good science blog; often takes on the creationists.
SeanPAune: some good stuff here.
The Straight Dope: fun facts for the day.
TUAW: The Unofficial Apple Website, good Apple tech blog.

Most of these will probably get on to the LinkBoard, once I find the time to clean up the blog some. Should be soon–I just taught my last class of the semester, and with just one final exam to give, some grading to do, and the graduation ceremony, there’s not much left before my one-month summer vacation. Ah, the college professor’s life!

Here’s a YouTube post of a segment from The Colbert Report, where Colbert takes the morning news shows to task. Two such shows had bits on Colbert making politicians look bad, and they both asked the question, why would politicians be so stupid as to go on to a show that would ask them questions that could make them look bad?

GOOD MORNING AMERICA’S JAKE TAPPER: But with the reputation-damaging risk associated with an appearance on The Colbert Report, why do politicians keep going on the show?

TODAY SHOW’S MATT LAUER: And yet they keep on coming!
CO-HOST: Why? Why?
LAUER: They think they’re being hip, I don’t know.

Underlying that question is a dark truth about journalism today: no one on television, radio, or in the print media is willing to ask hard questions to politicians for fear of the politicians avoiding them. They are unwilling to ask questions that might stump the politicians or make them look bad, and when the politician is obviously lying or is avoiding answering a question, they let them get away with it. It also shows up the unwillingness of most politicians to face the public in a setting where their hypocrisy or ignorance could be revealed.

Watching Colbert’s segment with the “news” people saying what they said makes this fact evident; they are clearly stumped as to why any politician would appear when the interviewer is not some emasculated softball-thrower. Although Colbert did not mention this aspect of it specifically, the subtext is frighteningly–and comically–clear. And you gotta admit, it’s huge fun to see Colbert get Robert Wexler to say, “I enjoy cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do!” and to see Colbert absolutely destroy Lynn Westmoreland by pointing out that he was pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in the House and Senate–and then asking him to name the Ten Commandments. Westmoreland could only get out three.

Maybe part of the reason the politicians agree to go on the show is that they think they’ll be treated with kid gloves, like with most interviewers. Now, Wexler seems to be pretty hip here–he knew what was going on and easily could have refused or sidestepped Colbert’s request–other politicians have done so. But Westmoreland appears to have had no clue as to what he was getting himself into. And that’s probably why most people, not just politicians, agree to appear in segments on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show: because they simply don’t know what they’re in for. The shows are popular, but not so popular (especially with certain segments of the population) that a lot of people who agree to appear don’t know what they’re agreeing to. That these people tend to be un-hip and often clueless just makes it funnier.

So, Microsoft was trying to to show off one of Vista’s cool new features, speech recognition, by having one of their people give a demo.

DEMO GUY: “Dear mom, comma.”

VISTA: “Dear Aunt,”

DEMO GUY: “Fix aunt.”

VISTA: “let’s set”

DEMO GUY: “Delete that. Delete that.”

VISTA: “so”

DEMO GUY: “Delete that. I think it’s picking up a little, I can hear… Delete–select all.”

VISTA: “double the killer delete select all”

At this point, the computer screen reads: “Dear Aunt, so let’s set double the killer delete select all” as the audience has a good laugh.

DEMO GUY: (as he manually selects all the typed text and deletes it) “OK, I’m glad you’re enjoying this.”

Microsoft complained that the software was picking up ambient noise, but that’s not much of an excuse–ambient noise is going to be present in most real-life applications. The story and a video (with a huge, distracting watermark on it) are here Update: here’s a clean version of the video.

This is simply yet another example of Windows getting stuff long after Apple has. Apple has had speech recognition for many years, and Vista’s looks like nothing really new. I sometimes demo the Mac’s speech recognition (though the Mac doesn’t have dictation, it does allow you to give speech commands) for my Computer classes, and sometimes I have the same problem this guy had; it’s a matter of how much background noise is getting to the mic. Though this demo guy must have been wearing a mic headset, ideal for this kind of application, whereas I was speaking into the built-in mic on my Powerbook. So really, I’m not impressed by this. Personal computer speech recognition still has a long way to go before it is really feasible for most users.

Since it’s an election year, GOP politicians are trying to find a way to blunt the Democratic weapon of the minimum wage. Since the GOP has consistently, for the past nine years, killed repeated attempts by Democrats to get a minimum wage hike passed, it’s pretty clear in the minds of the working class who’s on their side.

The GOP, however, hopes to muddy the waters by introducing a $2.10 (40%) increase to the minimum wage, but only if it is tied to slashing the estate tax, which would represent the Nth tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Since Democrats have vowed to kill an such estate tax cut, Republicans in Congress know that the minimum wage tax is likely to fail, and so it’s safe for most of them to vote for it (though some vow to vote against it anyway, being diametrically opposed to anything with a minimum wage hike in it).

The estate tax cut proposed would boost the exemption from $2 million to $5 million (from $4 million to $10 million for couples), and would cut the tax rate beyond the exemption to 15% up to $25 million and to 30% beyond that.

Hopefully the Democrats will be able to shoot down the GOP poison pill, and the voters will not be fooled by the inevitable subsequent campaign ads portraying Republicans as the champions of the poor and the Democrats as the villains who shot down their pay raises. Whatever the outcome, it was probably the best political move the Republicans could make–their forte (always better at politics than at serving the people’s actual needs), and they’ll need it since polls are increasingly showing that voters are ready to show the GOP the door this November.

Update: Apparently, Republicans are not being too subtle about all of this being a manipulative political ploy: from the NYT, via TPM:

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

Microsoft seems to be giving itself some elbow room in their claims that Vista will not suffer any more delays. While they still predict a late-2006 release for businesses and early-2007 ship date for regular people, they are at the very same time saying that “Vista will ship when it is ready. Quality is job one,” and that Vista will be evaluated “milestone by milestone.”

So, essentially, they’re saying that they hope to ship it when they said they would, but there might be problems, and if there are, there will be yet another delay.

Short-short version: It’ll ship on time, or maybe not.

Well, that’s encouraging! Already, the very late OS is still suffering from problems, including core features being axed to save time and late release dates for beta versions foreshadowing more delays; many analysts and businesses are already preparing for the release date of the final product well into 2007. My bet is that they’ll release it late and slightly buggy. And even if it does come out on time and is not buggy, who wants it? What features will really be useful for the end user? Mostly new eye candy, some patched security holes, and new versions of Microsoft applications–mostly stuff that’s been available with the Mac OS for a few years now.

Other complaints include the fact that the Digital Rights Management is geared for businesses, and not the end user, meaning you will be inconvenienced on the assumption that you’ve stolen your software and content. The eye candy is reported to take a big hit on computer resources, slowing things down; even for the basics, most existing computers won’t be able to run Vista very well at all. And the security upgrades, while not as good as those on the Mac, are already annoying beta users as they are too much in the way. This is the best Microsoft can do after six years of work, and it’s probably going to be late and won’t work great out of the box.

For this you should pay for an upgrade? Hrmph. Stick with XP for the time being.

What went wrong with these guys?

My luck with web hosts has not been spectacular, though it has probably been about par for the course. Although my current web host has done the best so far, two that I stuck with before had to treat me pretty badly before I left. In every case, the thing that has torn it with me with web hosts has been flaky service–site outages and things just generally falling apart. But the two hosts that really let me down went farther than that.

If you like to read people who vent their whining, read on below the fold–I won’t inflict my incessant whinging on those visiting the main page. Essentially, I go into detail about how the two web hosts were very, very sucky, and how I had to revisit one of them just the other day, in a way that brought back all my memories of just how sucky the suckers sucked. If you for some bizarre reason don’t like to read other people moaning and bellyaching (what’s wrong with you?), then just go on to the next post.
Read more…

From Wikipedia:

The Chuo Line, one of Tokyo’s major train lines, is so infamous for people committing suicide that many English editorials in Japan have taken to using the word Chuicide to refer to the means. Its relative popularity is partly due to its practical ease, and to avoid causing a nuisance to one’s family, though families are often charged or sued by the railway companies to compensate for the trouble caused by the accident. A typical suicide may cause delays between one and a few hours on one or more lines and is certainly unpleasant for onlookers who may be present.

Another interesting trend related to train suicide is to wear a brightly colored cap (orange) to help shield your face. This is done out of concern for the train conductors, so that they may not be caused any trauma by seeing the face of the person about to be hit. It is also useful as a sign that the person is indeed intending to commit suicide, and that no one should risk their life in order to save them.

The costs to the surving families by the railway companies’ “delay fee” is often in the 100 million yen (approx. 850 thousand U.S. Dollars) range. [Mainichi Shinbun, August 18, 2002]

Now, that last bit is cold. Your family member commits suicide, and the train company bills you close to a million dollars for their inconvenience as a punitive measure. It brings to mind the Chinese government’s practice of billing the families of executed criminals for the cost of the bullet. I’m not sure if the billing works as a disincentive–probably not, considering that people keep on doing so in such large numbers–but even if it did work, I’d be squeamish about being so cruel to those who have just lost people they love.

This article in Wikipedia reports that of the 1,210 people who have committed train suicide in Japan since 1995, 156 of them, or about 13%, have done so on the Chuo Line. The article claims that the “high speed and frequency of the trains” is what draws people to it. But such things have their quirks. For example, more than a thousand people have committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge–but only one or two of all those jumpers chose the side of the bridge facing away from the city. It may be a matter of access, but if you’ve seen both sides, you’ll know that the city side is indeed a far more desirable view than the ocean side–although it’s an interesting question as to whether such a thing matters to someone about to leap to their doom.

I hadn’t known about this, but during the 2001 census for many English-speaking nations, hundreds of thousands of people gave an interesting response to the query of what their religion was. This was most popular in Great Britain, where fully 390,000 Brits said that their religion was “Jedi.”

As such, the Jedi belief ranked fourth, after Christian, Muslim, and Hindu, not counting the responses of “no religion” and “no response.” As such, followers of “Jedi” outnumbered those of “Buddhism” (sorry, Paul). Apparently, one out of every forty people in Brighton are members of the Jedi order. The results of the nationwide census:

• Christian: 72.0%
• No religion: 14.8%
• Chose not to respond: 7.7%
• Muslim: 3.1%
• Hindu: 1.1%
• Jedi: 0.7%

I think this is a brilliant idea, and for the next U.S. census, we should pick this one up and run with it.

A few more quotes that I liked on the topic. These are less about what I believe, and more about how religion should more be recognized as. I’m an agnostic, by the way.

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

–Stephen Roberts

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”

–Edmond and Jules de Goncour

“A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism”

–Donald Morgan

“It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.”

–Ilka Chase

“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

–Bertrand Russell

“I don’t want to see any religious people in public office because they’re working for another boss.”

–Frank Zappa

And this last one is for fun:

“It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.”

–Calvin, in “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Waterson

Addendum: Interesting. I just looked up the 2000 census numbers, and apparently, the fastest-growing belief system is… “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic.” Christians dropped from 88.3% of the population in 1990 to 79.8% in 2000; the fastest-growing Christian group is “non-denominational Christians” (+2.5%), with “non-denominational ‘other’ religions” following close behind (+1.2%).

But “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic” grew from 8.4% of the population in 1990 to fully 15% in 2000–more than doubling in just a decade. The “no religion” crowd apparently clusters mostly in the northwest, with the greatest number being in Washington state, fully 25% of the population. I wonder how that will look in 2010…

At my heaviest, I weighed in at 206 lbs. (94 kg); that was about three or four years ago. I stand at 5′ 10.5″ (roughly 179 cm), so that’s a bit on the big side. (One doctor, maybe three years ago, didn’t speak English very well, so he just looked at me and said, “obesity!” I didn’t take that too well.) Before I started my newest slimming-down drive, I was down to about 196 lbs. (89 kg), which was mostly due to mild dieting, but nothing serious.

Starting at the beginning of the year (no, it wasn’t a resolution–it was the broken foot that started all this by showing me how out of shape I was), I started on a serious health kick, pretty much eschewing beef, pork, and almost any sugar product. I started eating oatmeal in the morning (okay, that stuff has sugar in it) with berries, a 6″ sub sandwich (mostly veggies) for lunch, and chicken and salad for dinner. Along with that, I worked my way up to half an hour of Karvonen-Formula exercise most days of the week, and more general exercise-style hobbying, like my birdwatching.

Put that together, and you get weight loss. I had an initial drop to 83 kg (183 lbs.), but that seems to have been the easy part–heck, that was even before my foot healed and I could exercise. After I could start working out, I got down to 81 kg (178 lbs.) without too much trouble, but then on a visit to the doctor, I was told to drop at least three more kilos, to help get my triglycerides down (I still have a bit of a cholesterol problem, why I don’t know). So I lost the weight. From what I understand, the slow way is best–I dropped only a few pounds a week, but it worked and stayed off (except for the temporary salty weight gain, all gone now), and upon seeing the same doc a month later–today, that is–I weighed in at 78 kg (172 lbs.).

Apparently they didn’t expect me to actually do that; the nurse who weighed me (and took blood) couldn’t speak English, so after I went back to wait in the lobby, she came out with a nurse who spoke English, and they asked me if I was feeling okay–they were actually concerned that I was losing weight unhealthily fast. That was nice. But it was also based on a misunderstanding–the nurse subtracted a kilo for my clothing weight, which the nurse a month ago didn’t do, so they were under the impression that I lost a bit more than four kilos (almost 10 lbs.) in four weeks.

The preliminary blood work came in by the time I got in to see the doc just a few minutes later, and my blood levels were all within normal range. The doc even calculated my ideal body weight–at just one kilo, or a few pounds, below what I am now–how about that. I certainly am slimmer than I’ve been since my early thirties, but that’s not to say everything is perfect–still too much of that “ideal” weight on my waistline, not enough in the places where it should be. Buff I am not.

Hey, it’s something else to work on.

You know one other thing that’s better about Japan relative to America? No rebates. I hate rebates. They’re nothing but a sucky scam. At the very least, they represent a dishonest economic trick: speed up the money coming in, slow down the money going out. Instead of actually being a savings of some sort, it’s a way to keep money in the hands of the seller for long enough so that in large volumes, they’re making a lot of money off of the interest by keeping you from getting the rebate back for as long as they can manage to. Not to mention that they make more money from direct marketing by getting all your personal information and whatever else they can con you into adding to the rebate form.

But it doesn’t stop there. They also depend on laziness, impatience and disorganization to simply walk away with your money. They make a big deal about how you get this incredible saving, even to the point of advertising the price-after-rebate in huge numbers, and the fact that it depends on a rebate in the smaller print. That makes you lean towards buying their junk because you now believe in the after-rebate price and usually go for the lower figure. But then you have to fill out forms, get all the required bits and pieces together, mail the stuff, and then you face a 2-3 month wait, minimum (some people wait half a year). If you sent everything in before the time limit written in very small print. A lot of people will say the hell with it, and just eat the $50.

Sometimes people can’t get the rebate because they buy the product and throw out the bag and the packaging, leaving the rebate for later–and when they get around to doing the rebate paperwork, they realize that they need the receipt and some obscure tag from the discarded packaging. Not to mention receipts with more than one rebate item on them–you have to choose just one, because they each need to include the original receipt, not a copy. Not that all of this is made clear, you usually then have to go through major hoops to figure out how to handle non-straightforward situations.

Sometimes the rebate process is even more convoluted than that. One of my first experiences with rebates was with Warner Bros. DVDs, but it was so serpentine and confusing that I just gave up on it. Look at the people in this thread… first buy a whole bunch of expensive DVDs, then buy another set, but it has to have a sticker, and there are some forms inside, but not all sets have them, and there’s a web site, but it doesn’t work… and that’s just getting started. You know that there’s a very good chance that the rebate will be late or just won’t come and you’ll have more pain and frustration if you try to track it down. That’s when most of the people who paid for the crap in the first place throw up their hands and declare that’s it’s not worth the freakin’ hassle.

This article in Slate goes into some of the details of rebate scams. Ever wonder why most rebates are for $50 for electronic goods? Probably because it’s a cutoff point. Some rebates see 90% of buyers fail to cash in; the more lucrative the rebate, the more people ask for their money back. Some rebates fool you with dates, some require near-instant cashing… the scams are varied and creative. You know that every time a “rebate” is constructed, experts figure out the best way to maximize the chance that buyers won’t get their promised money. And the scam is growing, worth $1 billion in 1999, and $4 billion in 2003. Rebate scams abound.

That’s why I’m glad they haven’t caught onto the whole rebate deal in Japan, and when I see a “rebate” deal in the U.S., I treat it as science fiction, and add the rebate to the price to see what I’ll really be paying. Frankly, I’d sooner try to check out what that Nigerian oil executive wants with me.

Kevin Drum noted this story in the New York Times:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

So the message from the Bush administration to wealthy people is, sorry we couldn’t get the estate tax repealed like most of your other taxes, but don’t worry–just don’t even bother paying taxes in the first place. We won’t audit you. We fired all the auditors, see? Cheat away!

Why doesn’t the Bush administration just drop all pretenses and tell everyone who makes a million dollars a year or more that they just pay no taxes whatsoever, and they’ll get a rolling amnesty for as long as the party can swing it?

This violation of the Executive duty of upholding the law is brought to you by the people who have already ignored half the Constitution and most of the laws passed by Congress. Have a nice day.

Who needs an alarm clock when they start jackhammering outside your window at 8:30 am sharp every single weekday morning? They’ve been doing that for so long now, I woke up at 8:28 without an alarm. They’re installing decorative tiles. Swell. Why can’t they start at 10? And it’s been weeks, and they’ve just been doing the foyer right below me. There are about a dozen more in the building. So apparently, I have a lot of incredibly noisy mornings to look forward to without the chance of sleeping in. With vacation coming up, too.

Who needs %#*$@ decorative tiles?

I always do it this way, figuring it out at the last minute. This time, I was washing dishes, and heard some loud pops, like fireworks. It was still light out, late afternoon, so I figured that maybe it was a local display, maybe something inconsequential. But it reminded me that I had not yet found out the fireworks schedule for the summer, and so I checked.

In the U.S., we have fireworks displays usually only at special times–the Fourth of July being the most notable. Sometimes at New Year’s, and at special events, maybe at some ballgames, and Disney does it a lot, I hear. But in Japan, it’s an all-summer thing. There are big displays, usually on the weekends, throughout July, August, and sometimes later months.

Near where I live, there’s an annual fireworks show by Chofu City, on the other side of the Tama River. The display is actually held on the river itself, and is one of the biggest local shows. And all too often, I forget to find out when it is, and miss half of it. This time, I didn’t expect it because it was so early–usually this show is later, and once it was in October even. But when I checked the schedule after hearing the booms, sure enough, this was it–and just 20 minutes from when I checked. So I made sure I had a clean flash memory card, packed up the tripod and the camera, and took off. This time, they blocked off the river street entirely, so I had to take back roads in, and got settled maybe five or ten minutes after the show started.

And got these shots. Enjoy.

Often they include smaller shaped shells, including hearts, stars, cats, mice, and as pictured here, smiley faces.

There always seem to be more trains than usual going by during the display–I think that in itself is considered an attraction, to be on the train while you ride by the show.

The people along the river nearby as we watch the show.

I won’t say much on it today, because I already made my case in this post seven months ago; if you want to see my full opinion on private schools, vouchers, and how to really make the school system work, then read that post.

But I will note today that the whole private school voucher push from the right wing is not about giving your kids a better education. That was made clear by the fact that the Bush administration is still pushing vouchers even though their own studies say that private schools offer little or no advantage over public schools.

So why are they trying to privatize education? A lot of reasons. One is religion. You can’t push religion in public schools because of that damned First Amendment, but privatize and you can proselytize to your heart’s content. It’s also religious subsidization: churches will boom in the private school market, receiving a lot of money and a lot of new converts. Another is class warfare: privatization and vouchers will finish off the job conservatives have been doing for decades of tearing down public education, leaving a hellish shambles left for those who won’t have enough money to add to vouchers to get into a private school. Authoritarians in government and religion have always benefitted from a poorly educated population, with the better-educated living within their own fold.

This is a common theme in the Bush administration, and Republican government in general: dismantle environmental protection and call it “clean air and water”; destroy social security and medicare and say you’re “saving” them. The same goes for education. Every system the conservatives want to utterly destroy they first say they will rescue.

There’s a VoiP program called “Gizmo.” They’re offering a deal that will likely ratchet up the VoiP war, namely free calls from a computer to a regular telephone. I just tried using it, and frankly, I’m not all that impressed.

First of all, you have to read the fine print. The free calls only apply when you and the recipient are registered with Gizmo, the recipient is in your contacts list, and is in one of 60 countries on the free-call list. I didn’t see the first two of those three points until after I made a call to a number in Japan, and after 6 minutes got a robotic and incomplete “You have… seconds!” message twice during the call. After hanging up, I noticed that a charge of 24.5 cents had been noted. Upon researching, I found out that you get 25 cents free–so I was just about to get cut off when I ended the call, it seems.

The thing is, now that I’ve used it, I don’t think I’d really want to. The reason: the quality is really bad, like a bad cell phone connection. Lots of streamed audio artifaction. Even Gizmo points out that Skype–what I’m used to using–has great sound quality in comparison. But the question would be, if I’ve got Skype, why use Gizmo?

I guess the answer would be, if I needed to call a phone number instead of a computer–like, if I wanted to call my father in the U.S. on his cell phone while he was out of the house. But where Skype is usable, it is of far better quality.

Still, Gizmo has an interesting idea–and it may be a good solution for some of my Japanese students, who will go to live in the U.S., and whose parents may not be tech-savvy enough to allow Skype to work.

From IMDB Studio Briefing:

The executive editor of Frontline, produced by Boston’s WGBH for the Public Broadcasting System, has taken exception to a new directive from PBS on how programs are to deal with language that could result in an FCC fine. Writing in Current magazine, Louis Wiley Jr. noted a paragraph in the directive saying that “if the F-word or the S-word were uttered to camera so that viewers could recognize it from the speaker’s mouth, the lips must be pixelated.” Wiley speculated that at first he imagined such pixelated scenes turning up on the late-night talk shows. “My next thought? If public television producers are forced to not only bleep words but also to pixelate lips, most will simply cut the scenes, no matter how powerful or relevant, rather than see them turned into a joke.”

Seems strange to me; with the technology available with today’s television broadcasters, wouldn’t it simply be easier to do a little Photoshopping? I would think that the main objection by broadcasters would be the ridiculous appearance of lip pixelation, not the offense to deaf people and lip readers. The area of the speaker’s mouth, saying a non-offensive word, could be lifted from some other part of the interview and superimposed on the swear word. Unless the available footage had no extra material using the same camera angles and lighting, it wouldn’t be too hard, and the end product would be good enough to fool anyone but the experts–and the lip readers, who would see the strange juxtaposition of the non-offensive word (“I don’t know what the horse I was thinking!”)

Of course, this all is within the context of living in a country with such stupid censorship laws, and such ridiculous fines that can now be imposed. But let’s not get into that.

As it turns out, Hirohito strongly objected to the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni shrine in the late 1970’s–so much so that he stopped visiting the shrine. The information came from interviews between Hirohito and the former Imperial Household Agency Grand Steward Tomohiko Tomita. Ironic that Yasukuni and the people who most strongly support the war criminals being enshrined there also profess fealty to the Imperial throne. But as is usually the case with people of that stripe, there is little doubt that they will easily find a way to ignore, explain away, or otherwise reconcile this information while still retaining their views.

Update: I was right, but it looks like they’re not even trying to explain how they reconcile the fact–they’re simply ignoring it:

When asked if the reported note will affect his decision on whether to visit the shrine before he steps down in September, Koizumi replied: “No, it won’t. (Whether to visit Yasukuni) is up to each person. It is a personal matter.” …

Asked how he felt about the fact that neither Emperor Hirohito, now referred to as Emperor Showa, or his son, Emperor Akihito, have visited Yasukuni since it enshrined the war criminals in 1978, Koizumi said he could not comment on their decisions.