Well, Miss Jiwaku and I are paying close attention to the news about Japan’s ongoing crisis in Fukushima, and the good news is that it seems to have stabilized. (The bad news is that it still doesn’t seem to be getting better, so the stability is probably precarious and it’s stable but at a very dangerous point.) It seems a little self-indulgent to worry too much, since compared to a lot of people in Japan we’re insanely lucky right now. But unlike some people around here, we’re both acutely aware that national borders, as fictions, do nothing to block the …
Tag: Japan
Where are the Robots Indeed?
I was thinking the other day, when work by human workers at Fukushima had to halt completely due to radiation levels, why the hell no robots were being used to continue work onsite. Seems I wasn’t the only one to think of this, and now even BoingBoing had picked up on it. I want to recall my recent post about robotics for a moment. If you look at the article above, the point is made that Japanese robotics research has lately involved building robots that do things like run marathons, play the saxophone– –and I’ll confess I’m not in principle against …
What Have We Done?
UPDATE (16 March 2011): Well, at least someone’s finally talking about wind currents as if it’s worth considering. I’m a little dubious about how much to trust the specific claims, but at least people are now talking about it… a little. ORIGINAL POST: Well, here we are, a mere few weeks into the semester I think of as “the semester I ended up staying in Korea.” Last semester, North Korea began throwing a missile-fit (which is what happens when adult-children with missiles throw hissyfits) and bombed the crap out of a South Korean island, thereby elevating the tension in North-East …
Got a Kick Out Of…
A few things I got a kick out of in the last few days: Seeing a drunken old man jogging in place on the express commuter train out of Seoul. He jogged for ten or fifteen minutes, stopped, rolled his head around for a while, then jogged some more. I seemed to be the only person taking any notice at all of his performance. It was amusing. Seeing my name on a few of the “Here’s who I nominated!” lists for the Hugos and Campbell Award. I didn’t see a lot of these, but I saw a few, which is …
Back in One Piece, More or Less
I’m back in Korea. I should have left my camera at home: Fukuoka was rainy and grey, and though being there was pleasant, I didn’t feel like shooting any pictures, so the camera was just unnecessary weight. Will never again travel with my big huge brown briefcase: it’s just too heavy. One other annoyance was that my netbook was useful for writing, but not for getting online. With the exception of my (landline, not wifi) hotel room, I couldn’t get online anywhere in town. Granted, when I got home I discovered that the wifi capacity on my iPod touch had …