Category: general

Just so you know.

Reuters: Tiny, frozen Pluto adds to its moon family

Some three billion miles from the Sun, Pluto, the ninth planet, is the only one not yet to have been visited by a spacecraft.

Its first known satellite Charon was not discovered until 1978. With a diameter of 1,200 km, it is half that of Pluto — abnormally large for a moon in relation to its primary.

But now, using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Southwest Research Institute and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology say they have found two more tiny orbiting satellites, P1 and P2.

Both are travelling outside the orbit of Charon and are tiny by comparison, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

I bet there are all kinds of tiny things orbiting Pluto. Would an object the size of a baseball still be considered a moon? ;>

I haven’t been a normal, full time employee since last April, but it’s only been recently that I’ve booked full time contract work. The experience has really changed how I think about my time.

As a contractor I am paid solely for the work I do. This means that if I take a break to read webcomics or check out the news or write on my blog, I lose money. And so I’ve started to think about everything I do during the day as “billable time” and “non-billable time”, and constantly asking myself, “Can I charge for what I’m doing right now?”

It’s kind of thrilling to be completely responsible for my time. If I slack off, the consequences are different. For example, if a job takes me 20 hours, but I spread those 20 hours out over a week, then I’m only getting half as much money as I could be getting. I have to fill my time with projects in order to make a profit.

There are so many organizational things, like creating rate sheets and designing pricing packages, that I can’t charge anyone for. And I don’t charge for consultations and rough drafts on principle. So the more time I spend on those things, the more money I lose. (I may have to set a time limit for free consultations and drafts.)

Ultimately, this is all very interesting. The control freak in me is enjoying herself heartily, while the slacker is wondering if this sort of thing is too stress-inducing. A regular job is safer, providing steady income no matter if I’m moving slowly or tearing through my work.

The control freak has a response to that concern, though: I can’t choose my projects in a regular job.

Language Log likes to point out President Bush’s verbal mistakes, likely for the same reason that news outlets have been rabidly piling onto the recent Cheney quail hunting accident. However, sometimes something interesting comes out, like this piece from my hero Mark Liberman:

In this case, I’d like to point out that our president has put his finger on a real problem. In the first place, the British Isles have got the most confusing nomenclature around. There are at least 15 names of major overlapping political and geographical entities here, ignoring all the counties and bailiwicks and islands and the like. But the real problem is the endemic shortage of adjectives. Of the 15 names, 8 have no adjectival form, as far as I can tell. One (Scotland) has three different adjectival forms: Scots for the language and (mostly) the people; Scotch for the local distilled liquor; Scottish for everything else, more or less. There are four other (ambiguous) adjectives, all irregular formations with -ish or similar endings: British, English, Irish, Welsh. But the large-scale formal political entities centered in London — United Kingdom, Great Britain — are entirely bereft of corresponding adjectives, except for the jokey UKish and the irregular, ambiguous and confusing pair British and Britannic.

Check out the crazy table included below this paragraph in the post, and the helpful Venn diagram from the Wikipedia.

Dude, I am all about crazy tables and Venn diagrams.

Plus, Liberman is teh funnay.

But over the past few centuries, the English have been creating a bewildering agglomeration of half-digested acquisitions and new organizational initiatives — a sort of political Enron — while completely neglecting their duty to supply these entities with adjectives. The NGOs are nowhere to be seen; U.S. unilateralism is out of style, so an adjectival Marshall Plan is not in the cards; this is clearly a case for U.N. intervention.

About.com has a cool feature on the top baby names in Japan for 2005. Here’s the list of the top ten, and here’s a discussion of things that affect name popularity.

I find it interesting that “Hinata” and “Sakura” are so popular. They are Naruto characters. Do you think that had any effect? :>

I also think the changes in name selection are interesting. For example:

In the past, it was very common and traditional to use the kanji character “ko (a child)” at the end of female names. Empress Michiko, Crown princess Masako, princess Kiko, and Yoko Ono, all end with “ko (子)”. If you have a few female Japanese friends, you will probably notice this pattern. In fact, more than 80% of my female relatives and girlfriends have “ko” at the end of their names (including me!).

However, this might not be true for the next generation. There are only three names including “ko” in the recent 100 popular names for girls. They are Nanako (菜々子)and Riko (莉子, 理子).

Instead of “ko” at the end, using “ka” or “na” is the recent trend. Haruka, Hina, Honoka, Momoka, Ayaka, Yuuna and Haruna for example.

Here is a huge list of Japanese baby names.

Mainichi correspondent wins major Japan-U.S. journalism prize

Sumire Kunieda, the Mainichi’s Los Angeles correspondent, has won the prestigious Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist Prize for 2005, organizers said Wednesday.

Kunieda receives the prize in recognition of her 2005 coverage of unpublished reports by American reporter George Weller on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. Her story on the reports was carried in the June 17, 2005, morning edition of the Mainichi Shimbun.

The unpublished reports were the first reports from a Western journalist following the U.S. nuclear attack, but Allied censorship prevented them from being published. They remained unpublished until Kunieda unearthed them.

“Her reports helped people both in Japan and abroad to recognize once again the misery of atomic bombs,” the prize’s selection commission said.

I heavily quoted Sid’s remarks on the censored articles here.

Asahi: Yahoo Japan to establish lawmaker-comparison Web site

“Political manifestoes have grown in popularity and importance, but there are still not many criterion in which voters can compare the achievements of a policy submitted by each party or lawmaker,” an official at Yahoo Japan’s service management department said. “We’d like to establish an information infrastructure over the Internet that can serve as a reference for making decisions in future national elections.”

The database can be accessed from a link called “Yahoo! Minna no seiji” (politics for everyone) on Yahoo Japan’s site < http://www.yahoo.co.jp/ >, according to the officials.

The information includes the lawmakers’ parties, posts held, as well as their backgrounds and constituencies. The lawmakers will also provide their own political activity reports, similar in form to Internet blogs, the officials said.

Such information is largely available on the Diet members’ official Web sites managed by their political parties. But Yahoo Japan added a search function to enable users to compare several lawmakers’ opinions on an issue in a single Web site.

I am, as always a n00b…do we have anything like this for the US? I guess we would have to trust 1) the portal to be balanced and 2) the politicians to provide accurate information…

These four headlines are in my CNN RSS feed right now:

Explosion destroys al Askariya ‘Golden Mosque’

Explosion damages al Askariya ‘Golden Mosque’

Explosion hits al Askariya ‘Golden Mosque’

Explosion destroys golden dome

They all link to the same article on CNN, which is currently titled

Shiite ‘Golden Mosque’ heavily damaged

I like seeing how people revise their headlines, and thinking about why they might have done so. It’s like being a part of the newsroom. Obviously, this process is transparent in print newspapers.

(I commented on Reuters headlines here.)

From BoingBoing:

The president of Canada’s Lakehead University, Fred Gilbert, has banned the use of WiFi on campus because he’s worried that inconclusive studies have failed to show that chronic exposure to radio waves won’t cause long term harm:

“All I’m saying is while the jury’s out on this one, I’m not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students,” he said. “Admittedly that’s highest around the locations of the antenna sites and the wireless hotspots, but those are the places people tend to gravitate to because they get the best reception.”

Um, how about mobile phones, 2.4GHz walkie-talkies and microwaves, dude?

Actually, I have wondered about that myself. I’m more worried about mobile phones than I am about microwaves, because you use microwaves infrequently while the mobile phone is always on and always right near your person. (When I was growing up I was taught to never stand right next to the microwave while it was cooking.)

I guess I’m a n00b, but how do we know that sending new signals through the electromagnetic spectrum isn’t harmful to humans? Heck, I worry that just being around electronics in general (that generate electromagnetic fields) might be harmful.

It seems to be a pattern for humans to introduce something new into our environment and only later, after society is dependent on it, determine its effect. Is this the way the world will end?

:>

Have you seen these things?

Scary!

I honestly don’t know who would want a talking character on their website. According to this particular one (who has a British accent), talking characters are proven to boost sales on e-commerce sites. (After she said that, I made her say “I highly doubt that.” Then she said something incomprehensible, so I had her say “What the fuck did I just say?”…but she said it with different intonation than I intended. She sounded like an angry, obscene schoolmarm.)

In any case…talking websites suck. So please, don’t make your website talk to me. I will close the window instantly and curse you to a doom worse than having Shinou orchestrate your life down to the very last detail. (Which really sucks; just ask Conrad!)

I want this.

If I end up sticking with freelance design, I guess I will need to invest in it, actually.

For some reason it occurred to me to check and see if the Robin Williams Popeye movie is available on DVD. It is–and there are zillions of cartoon DVDs as well.

But I also found these:

Saints preserve us.

So I woke up to 480 new emails this morning @_@

At first I thought someone had gone crazy with my contact form, but it turns out that a spamming poker joker went crazy with smugmug. Here’s a thread about it over on dgrin.

Thankfully, smugmug had all the spam comments deleted before I even saw them! Yay smugmug!

I was afraid that something horrible would happen, so I read the description for the last episode.

I’m so bad :>

But at least I know that the horrible thing does not happen. And actually, I like the resolution they chose. (Of course, I don’t know how exactly it ends, but I have a good idea now.)

I guess I can look forward to the subs, and the DVDs, and hope for another OST, and look into the manga and novels…

But man, I’m going to miss it.

Just one episode left to complete my obsession.

Okay, so yeah, the next episode will be the last one.

Wow.

That was awesome.

I mean…Morgif!

And of course Murata…but I had a feeling about that.

I’m not sure how it’s all going to be resolved, but I imagine it should be open-ended, so there could conceivably be more story…even if they’re not going to make any :/

You know what would suck?

No, I’m not even going to go there :P