Babbly Lucy

I'm in New Zealand and this blog is in stasis!

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:42:07 +0900

I'm in New Zealand and this blog is in stasis!:

Yes, I’ve safely left Japan and finally updated my main website. This blog will be around for posterity, but it probably won’t see (m)any updates from now on. Click the big link above to see the projects I’ll be working on instead.

Earthquake and tsunami

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:59:00 +0900

By the mouth of the Kushiro River, lumber washed away from a mill near my house is floating out to sea as higher-than-normal swells continue to lap at the shores here in Hokkaido. Roads are closed and some towns further east towards Nemuro and southwest towards Hakodate have been flooded by the tsunami, but none of it compares to the damage and loss of life down in Tohoku.

The earthquake here felt like a gently rocking boat, which was not much more than we usually get here, but it was the length of it that really unsettled myself and my fellow teachers in the office at school. Not a filled coffeecup was unsettled, but when the shaking continued for several minutes, we really got concerned. We all realized there was going to be a tsunami for a shake that strong.

The word soon came that it was a major earthquake off the coast of Sendai and we were to send students home as most major forms of public transportation shut down. Teachers turned on the TVs in the lounges and crowded around cellphones to watch digital broadcasts, while others scoured internet news and announced the reported earthquake magnitudes and tsunami warnings.

I continuously reloaded a live webcam feed from downtown Kushiro and watched as the river—the same one that goes by my apartment—slowly swelled over its banks and flooded the touristy Fisherman’s Wharf building. I wondered if my apartment was safe.

Our school began to take in people who had evacuated and I finally decided to go home to make sure nothing had floated away. My house was fine, but the evening was filled with distant sirens and echoing loudspeakers telling residents to go to higher ground and stay away from the water’s edge.

While we didn’t suffer the damage and loss of life here in Hokkaido as in Tohoku, many residents of Hokkaido were probably watching the devastation unfold on TV and wondering if a wave or aftershock would mean we would have to flee our homes with a moment’s warning and watch our lives float out to sea. It was a stressful and restless night for many.

The sunlight of the next day showed the world exactly the extent of the destruction. Coastal towns in Fukushima look like they had been flattened by atom bombs (not to mention the very real threat of nuclear plant meltdowns there), cars are lying on top of trees on top of boats on top of planes, Miyagi is on fire. I answered a flood of emails from friends, asking if I was okay. I’m much more okay than some people, I replied, can you help them?

Richard Feynman on learning Japanese

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:59:43 +0900

While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.

One day he was teaching me the word for “see.” ”All right, he said. “You want to say, ‘May I see your garden?’ What do you say?”

I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.

“No, no!” he said. “When you say to someone, ‘Would you like to see my garden?’ you use the first ‘see.’ But when you want to see someone else’s garden, you must use another ‘see,’ which is more polite.”

“Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?” is essentially what you’re saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella’s garden, you have to say something like, “may I observe your gorgeous garden?” So there’s two different words you have to use.

Then he gave me another one: “You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens…”

I made up a sentence, this time with the polite “see.”

“No, no!” he said. “In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to ‘May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?’”

Three or four different words for one idea, because when I’m doing it, it’s miserable; when you’re doing it, it’s elegant.

I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.

At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, “How would I say in Japanese, ‘I solve the Dirac Equation’?”

They said such-and-so.

“OK. Now I want to say, ‘Would you solve the Dirac Equation?’ —how do I say that?”

“Well, you have to use a different word for ‘solve,’” they say.

“Why?” I protested. “When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!”

“Well, yes, but it’s a different word—it’s more polite.”

I gave up. I decided that wasn’t the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.

From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! …Richard Feynman is awesome. And Japanese still baffles and confounds me after all these years.

Awesome. (In the spirit of thisanimalisawesome.)

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:54:02 +0900

Awesome.

(In the spirit of thisanimalisawesome.)

— Tom Toles (via savingpaper, inothernews)

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:45:09 +0900

— Tom Toles (via savingpaper, inothernews)

Hey, Now BP Is Doing Stuff In Alaska That'll Piss You Off

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:44:02 +0900

Hey, Now BP Is Doing Stuff In Alaska That'll Piss You Off:

Via savingpaper:

BP is moving ahead with the controversial project to drill for oil three miles off the coast of Alaska in spite of the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling. The project, called Liberty, has been classified by regulators as an “onshore” project because it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.

And then there’s what those Bush-era regulators chose not to regulate:

Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write its own environmental review for the project as well as its own consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act, according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.

The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.

“The whole process for approving Liberty was bizarre,” one of the federal scientists said.

Pumzi, a 2009 Kenyan short film, looks amazing. (Via io9)

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:08:19 +0900

Pumzi, a 2009 Kenyan short film, looks amazing. (Via io9)

AP Analysis: BP Spill Response Plans Severely Flawed

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:15:35 +0900

AP Analysis: BP Spill Response Plans Severely Flawed:

savingpaper:

BREAKING NEWS, EVERYONE.

jstn: NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf coast...

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:47:05 +0900

jstn:

NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf coast as of October, 2006. Katrina and other hurricanes sank or otherwise disabled over 100 of them the year before.

I was surprised to see how many there were, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. Prior to this calamity my two main sources of knowledge regarding oil production were There Will Be Blood and certain scenes from Armageddon. I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with some actual data.

We rank third in oil production in the world and that a third of our production happens off shore. We account for about a quarter of world consumption and a tenth of production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia). Almost half our supply is used to make gasoline. BP is the fourth biggest company in the world but the third biggest oil company after Shell and Exxon.

I was horrified to read about another spill that happened earlier this month in Nigeria that seems to be amongst the worst ever and has yet to receive much media attention at all. That’s apparently par for the course there.

The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the “Library of Congress” to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One “Exxon Valdez” is reasonable shorthand for “enough oil to fuck shit up”.

The exact quantities are always fuzzy, of course. The NY Times reports a range of anywhere from 2.25 Exxon Valdezes all the way up to 9 for the Gulf so far, and that’s under the glare of the American public. The one in Nigeria was supposedly 2.5, but who knows. The US produces 19.5 EVs every day.

Not that it’s any comfort, but we still haven’t reached the proportions of the Gulf War spill, which was an astounding 43 EVs. If the one in our own gulf keeps going through August at the most pessimistic rate we could easily see another 20, totaling three times as much as now.

CNN has a good map and USA Today has a good article illustrating the current offshore leasing situation by state. It’s easy to imagine oil executives seeing the planet’s surface as a real life Starcraft map. If we’re lucky, someone will tell them about the hundred billion dollars for every human being on Earth lying in the minerals of the asteroid belt.

Is it asking too much for underwater aliens à la The Abyss to reveal themselves to humanity and show us the error of our ways?

(via karmcity)

drewgilbert: Thanks Neal!

Wed, 26 May 2010 19:30:57 +0900

drewgilbert:

Thanks Neal!

kiameku: Paola Pivi Untitled (donkey) 2003 Photographic print,...

Thu, 20 May 2010 18:31:19 +0900

kiameku:

Paola Pivi
Untitled (donkey)
2003
Photographic print, aluminium, frame / Photographie couleur, aluminium, cadre
71 x 88 inches / 180 x 224 cm

I wasn’t even around to see this photo hung on Brown University’s science library, but school lore is strong enough that it instantly reminds me of my alma mater. Well, now I know who it’s by!

drewgilbert: This 8-Bit attack on NYC is the greatest thing I...

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:25:18 +0900

drewgilbert:

This 8-Bit attack on NYC is the greatest thing I have seen all week. YOU MUST VIEW IT.

Tumblr informs me that my blog has turned 2! This is perhaps the...

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:47:00 +0900

Tumblr informs me that my blog has turned 2! This is perhaps the longest continuous blog I have ever kept! Woohoo!

In other news, I’m going to Taiwan in the morning (driving out at 5:30am, but my flight’s not until 3pm… there’s something ridiculous about this…). I’ll be flooding this thing with photos after April 4.

drewgilbert: ALIEN VS POOH. Hilarious! Thanks to Nick Locking!

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:36:20 +0900

drewgilbert:

ALIEN VS POOH.

Hilarious!

Thanks to Nick Locking!

The only Lady Gaga spin-off I will...

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:33:20 +0900

The only Lady Gaga spin-off I will reblog.

goodolddays:

fuckyeahladygaga:

(via starfucks)

Cake Versus Pie: A Scientific...

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:22:54 +0900

Cake Versus Pie: A Scientific Approach

(via savingpaper, misterpatches, bestrooftalkever)

McSweeney's: A Short History of the Norse Occupation of Dublin, for Bostonians

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:19:32 +0900

McSweeney's: A Short History of the Norse Occupation of Dublin, for Bostonians:

savingpaper:

So fuckin’ like 1200 years ago, mostah the young guys livin’ ovah in Nahway were havin’ a real tough time, just sittin’ ‘round the fahm thinkin’ tah ‘emselves, “All the good land’s already been takin’ here in Nahway, dad’s gonnah leave the fuckin’ fahm tah my oldah brothah since he’s oldah ‘en me, n’ if I don’t go n’ get myself signed up with one’ah the union guys down at the docks I’m gonnah end up livin’ the restah my life like some poor kid from Dahchestah who nevah got outtah the fuckin’ projects.” So there’s all these young Nahwegian guys hangin’ ‘round down at the docks n’ whenevah they get enough’ah ‘em, they’d put tahgethah a crew n’ then they’d just set sail on tah wherevah the fuck they felt like goin’ n’ then when they got tah whereevah the fuck it was they were goin’ they’d do some plundah’n n’ pillage’n fah awhile.

Not Bostonian enough to have the accent, but Bostonian enough to want to post all things like this for giggles.

tatsurokiuchi: bestiario: Kenichi Kuriyagawa Illustration 2...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:50:40 +0900

tatsurokiuchi:

bestiario:

Kenichi Kuriyagawa Illustration 2 (via sandiv999)

:-) Current home.

pibbplusredvines: Host: For 100 points, complete this famous...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:50:25 +0900

pibbplusredvines:

Host: For 100 points, complete this famous saying, “Better late than…”
Blanche: Pregnant!
The Golden Girls 3x16 - Grab That Dough

(Via goodolddays, leatherpumpkin, unicornery)

My camera and the lens I want… because I just discovered...

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:53:00 +0900

My camera and the lens I want… because I just discovered this lens matching site.