JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- 秘書及び業務サポート
- 加治金属工業株式会社, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥4.0M / Year
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- English Instructor (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe)
- Berlitz Japan, Inc. (ベルリッツ・ジャパン株式会社), Kansai
- Salary: ¥125,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month
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- ALT - Mie Prefecture - Yokkaichi City - June start
- NPO法人グローバル教育推進機構（GLAD), Mie
- Salary: ¥230,000 / Month For a full working month. Some months differ.
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ivarwind
"Meat is what the human digestive evolved over million of years to eat."
This is just plain wrong! Humans are omnivores to some extent - like some of the big apes, we can eat meat in limited amounts, particularly if fresh - but if we had evolved to live on meat, we would have digestive systems more like carnivores. We don't, our stomachs are nowhere near acidic enough. I don't recommend it, but if you really believe it, try living on raw unrefrigerated chicken breasts and pork chops for a month.
What has evolved - over a much shorter timescale - is our ability to process the meat so we can stomach it (i.e. cooking).
Personally I like meat, and gladly eat it - and I'll just as gladly eat vegetarian, which I guess I do at most meals. Also if there is vegetarian food at a party I'll try it, because it's often more interesting than the standard "stuff yourself with meat" dishes. From my viewpoint the meateater/vegetarian/vegan distinction is unimportant, what really matters is using what you have and making good food. This sounds like an interesting book.
Posted in: Celebrating Japan's vegan and vegetarian traditions
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ivarwind
If it was a pylon obscuring a pagoda, it might be ugly - here it's beautiful, and makes for a far more interesting photo than the sunset alone would.
Posted in: Sunset
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ivarwind
You don't go to McDonald's expecting the food to have any taste - why would anyone expect the service to be any better? (In Japan or anywhere)
(Exaggerating) I've had more customer service in Japan in a month than in the rest of the world in a lifetime, free extras, custom variations, help and guidance, but then I don't go to American chain stores. Maybe it's also that I know how to behave. If you think you're a king, expect to be treated exactly according to the most inflexible reading of the rules. (Again, not just in Japan but everywhere)
Posted in: In Japan, the customer is not king
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ivarwind
I don't know about Japan, but in England it seems, they can currently do a DNA analysis in eight hours, in the future it may be as little as three.
"Why does it take so long to report this crime to public?" - 7 hours to get on JT? Is that a long time?
Posted in: Knife found near scene of Kobe high school boy's murder
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ivarwind
Fine actress, fine movies, at least the ones I've seen, though Caterpillar, good as it is, may not be one of Wakamatsu's very best.
The beginning of the article is a little confusing though, I'm not quite sure who says what about Memoirs of a Geisha. However - with all due respect to the usually very good Chinese actresses in it - just about any Japanese woman, actress or not, could have played those parts better. They didn't MOVE the right way, they simply couldn't do the motions like someone who's quietly shifted around on the floor all her life.
Of course nobody cared about acting ability of any kind, as none was needed for the inept script, the actresses were chosen only for the posters. They weren't chosen for English proficiency either, Zhang Ziyi was only just learning it at the time, and Gong Li doesn't really speak it at all.
Posted in: Shinobu Terajima talks about cinema, sex scenes and why she hates doing commercials
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ivarwind
Even on the ridiculous assumption that there was a strong prefecture/personality-correlation, the statistical basis is both too limited to make any real conclusions (as opposed to arbitrary headlinefriendly generalizations) and has a selection bias of unknown but probably quite large magnitude.
Surveying only business people could lead to any number of errors. Imagine for instance that people from Miyazaki come in two main categories - one of them warm and easygoing, the popular subordinates found here, the other maybe larger category completely useless and unpleasant creeps, who if they ever got a job, would lose it again in a week (this is of course only a hypothetical example and like the article has nothing to do with real people from Miyazaki or anywhere else). The result would be as stated, because only the nice people would be included in the survey. Anyone who then went out and employed people from Miyazaki because "they are good subordinates" would get a nasty surprise.
Anyway the basis is too small. With an average of 40 people per prefecture - which already isn't much - some prefectures no doubt are represented by less than ten, way too little to reach any statistically significant conclusions (like Tottori, he most likely only has one or at most two bosses from there in the entire survey, statistics from hell, not bosses from hell). It's not even enough to say confidently whether someone from a given prefecture would be likely to have two legs and a head (there are other ways of predicting that, if needed).
The limited sample and the selection bias in combination make it impossible to determine any difference between the sexes - several prefectures may not be represented by any women at all - and the extension to love compatibility is utter nonsense.
Posted in: Each prefecture breeds a different personality type
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ivarwind
Chotto got it right.
Waking up your child to drag it around while you buy something from the drugstore with the other arm, would be more of a crime than not doing so.
Posted in: Baby girl taken from car while mother shops in Nagoya
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ivarwind
"So the photog in these cases has to compromise"
May very well be true, but not for the stated reasons.
The neon lights are blurred because the entire picture is blurred, Fuji silhouette and all. Hard to tell why in this resolution, could be post-processing - certainly the jpeg-compression has not been kind to the details - could be camera shake, but maybe the photographer really did have to make a compromise - the compromise between not making a picture or making a picture under sub-optimal conditions (atmospheric irregularities, dirty windows, small camera, whatever.)
Except for a few neon lights that really are overexposed, the reason you notice it more on the lights is not that they're overexposed - it's that they have the highest contrasts, but it's also very obvious in the outline of Fujisan, also a high-contrast border.
Posted in: Tokyo sunset
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ivarwind
Good for the Kyoto restaurants, I say, would have been better if Michelin had just stayed away. But then I'll take two empty taxis outside the ramen place over two Michelin stars any day.
A Michelin listing is very much a mixed blessing. A restaurant can make a lot of money while having it, but if they happen to lose it again, they'll lose their new customers - that maybe they never wanted - and have none of the old left.
Also the Michelin people have a very specific taste - fortunately they don't have nearly as much impact on food as Parker has on wine. If they had, the world would be an even poorer place.
Posted in: Prominent Kyoto restaurants say no to Michelin
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ivarwind
"Pfft, if your lucid enough to commit the crime than you should expect swift retribution."
That's the whole point! But you missed it. If the death penalty is to be carried out, it should not involve first subjecting the convict to twenty years of daily mental torture, driving them to madness.
This is old news by the way, AI are not the first to note the mentally debilitating effects of the Japanese death row.
As for the deterring effect, there is none - or rather, if there is any correlation at all, it is the other way, with executions resulting in a slight increase in the murder rate in society.
Posted in: Amnesty International says Japan executes mentally ill prisoners
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ivarwind
Could be interesting, for several purposes. For example to research what it is that makes people able to recognize emotions in others. But for that purpose - and indeed for most other purposes I can think of, short of standing in for an extrovert anime character in a school play - it seems they've overdone it by a long way.
Surprise? Opening up the eyes may be right, but keep the hands down.
Disgust? I don't know exactly what happens, but some slight movement of the facial muscles.
Sadness? If it implies dousing your hands with tears, the world must generally be an exceptionally happy place.
Posted in: Robot expresses human emotions
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ivarwind
Skinny? Maybe a little, and I'm sure she could gain a pound or two without harm, but she's contracting her muscles and stretching her tendons throwing a pitch and the photograph is a momentary glimpse of that process. That can make anybody look weird.
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ivarwind
It may not resemble the real thing as much as it does old illustrations of the Milky Way (from the days when everybody knew what it really looks like from Earth), but it does look beautiful, and I'm sure it looks great when you're in the room.
As for stars in the Milky Way, Noripinhead is right about the total number in the galaxy (if current estimates are correct), but less than ten thousand of them are visible to the naked eye and at any given moment you'd be lucky to see more than about 2000. How many planets noone knows, and only (some of) those in the Solar System can be seen unaided. Pretty amazing anyway :)
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ivarwind
Polarization may go through 360 degrees (180 actually), but for practical purposes I very much doubt using more than two directions (which stores one bit) is feasible. It would require more reading heads each of them with a more powerful laser. It all boils down to the nature of polarization, any given measurement can only test for one direction (and by exclusion the perpendicular), and the photons can not subsequently be tested for other directions of polarization.
Mathematically it may be termed a dimension, but it bears very little resemblance to the spatial ones usually associated with the word. (In this terminology, normal pictures are also five-dimensional, as each point has both a hue, a saturation and an intensity in addition to the two plane coordinates. With polarization you get six.)
But then, why would I want to pay for an additional 1992 movies, just to get the eight interesting ones that happen to be on the same disc - even at ten yen per title, it would be rather expensive...
Posted in: All your movies on a single DVD