Scared Straight

So I done gone caught the flu, and done gone forgot to sleep last night (what a time to not sleep!) so I'll be honest, I'm not feeling great.

On the upside, I got to see a car crash into a cyclist today.

On the downside, it was a planned event on school grounds whereby a group of 'stuntmen,' were deliberately hit by a foam padded car in order to show how dangerous cars are.

On the upside it was cool, and the bike was mangled pretty badly.

On the downside it was super hot outside.

On the upside, I'm not outside anymore.

Three ups, two downs.  Ups win.

Anyway, the premise is simple: show the kids what a crash is like and they'll be perfect citizens for the rest of their days.

I quite like the idea of showing something like a crash for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, most of these kids will have never, and likely will never, see something like this in the wild.  It puts a real consequence to a theoretical they've been taught all their lives.  If they ever do find themselves as a spectator to something like this, the 'I know this,' effect will kick in, and all the people will be saved from the bald dinosaurs.

 

It's a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but at least they ask the students what the emergency service numbers are during the presentation, so a conceivable benefit has been realised.

 

The other benefit is employment.  A troupe of unemployed actors get to roll around destroying bikes.  Cool.

 

 

So they teach the kids how to be safe, don't ride without a helmet.  Don't cross the street until the man is green.  Don't stand near the edge of the pavement.

 

And all this great advice will improve the safety of the younglings not at all.  They're taught how to act, (great word incoming) unilaterally, unthinkingly.

 

If the man is red then you wait.  Implied in waiting in modern society is looking down at your phone, headphones in, entirely oblivious to the outside world.  And then you cross on the green man, head down, oblivious to the outside world.  But the green man said go.  I assume you can see where this is heading.  And it stands for so many aspects of Japanese society, working all the way through the corporate favour system they employ, to running a household.

 

Keep your head down and go when the man says to.

 

I would have stayed out longer and watched a few more stuntsmen pretend to get run over, but for some reason it's about a million bajillion degrees outside and I have a legitimate flu' (if it's influenza, why is the flu not 'flu' on account of missing letters on either end of the word?).

 

Also the name.  Statistics show that the death penalty doesn't work, and that's the ultimate in scary straighteyness, so who are they trying to impress with a name like that?  (P.S. It's in English so no fucker knows what it means anyway.)

 

If you think I'm stretching, take this somewhat less extreme example of this principal in action: taking bad kids to a prison to straighten them right up.  The article shows it's an ineffective strategy to say the least.  I wonder if there have been any studies translated into Japanese?  Then again, this little circus employs eight or so people, so best not to rain on their parade.

 

 

 

 

Side note:  Is it just me, or has tech suddenly become interesting again?  For the last decade there's been an incredible amount of stagnation in the tech space, the last great innovation was the move to parallelism in computing then nothing seemed to happen, and now bam.  VR.  3D printers.  Drones (I don't think anyone actually cares about drones, but they have a cool connotation, pew pew gonna' bomb yo' non-European/American freedom hating free speech fuck yeah 'Murica ass).  Space travel  (One way trip to Mars.  Cool!).  4K.  Self Driving cars that only try to kill people a little bit.  Fusion generated electricity within the next two decades (it's only taken fifty years, what's waiting another twenty?).

 

Of these things I want VR and a 3D printer.  4K is a natural evolution and will happen equally naturally.  Who cares about drones?  Who has the space for one in their home when it's not flying around spying on the neighbours?  Or maybe you can mid air refuel them.  100 foot battery change, eternal flight.

 

I would sign up to be the first man on Mars even if it meant I was never coming back.  In a heartbeat.  But that's not going to happen, so I'll settle for the first two.  In a strange way they're entwined, as both require virtualisation in 3D space, and you could conceivably work a design for your printer with VR.

 

I've watched the evolution of VR into a viable product for a few years now, and the obstacles they've overcome have been pretty interesting.  Latency, resolution, fit and feel, brightness - all things that have been designed around and the results look great.  I've only tried static 3D headsets up to now, no tracking with head movements and certainly no controllers that map to the 3D space of the virtual world (punching yourself in the face while trying to scratch your nose is a reality.  I did it.) but they are all things that have been added to the pot.  With the first release of occulus, vive and morpheus (facebook owned, valve owned and sony owned respectively) we'll see a brand new format war that I'm entirely ready to embrace because up until this point, much like 3D in cinemas, VR has been a gimmick.  I want to see what it can do.  Plug the internet straight into my brain goddamnit.

Boris is an Imbecile

This post was originally going to be about funny Japanese mispellings, but then Boris Johnsson (I don't care if that's how you spell his name) came to Japan and that was that.  He's such a bumbling idiot that, at this point, it's become clear it's an act.

After buggering all those decapitated pigs heads, him and his chums must have done some serious drugs, and whereas stick-up-ass cameron decided to try a sober humanoid persona to cover his blattodean for, boris went in the other direction.  He chose the buffoon overalls.

I will freely admit it worked on me for a while, what with the actively harmful peers he mingles with being impossible to respect, his artificial stupidity is the least threatening of the lot.

But it's worn off now.

Grow up Boris.

Aurora

So I read a book recently called 'Aurora,' by Kim Stanley Robinson (I think I've spelled that correctly).

It's sci-fi, so if you don't like that genre you can move along.

It's also about an ark, a generation ship travelling through space.

It's pretty good.

The premise is the usual, humanity expanding towards the stars.  The difference is that this isn't an omnipotent ship, the settlers aren't living inside a God like in so many other stories.  Their home is breaking down, as are their bodies at the genetic level.

There's no real explanation for why humanity is failing onboard (genetic deviation is the official cause) but it results in an interesting problem - humanity struggling to move beyond our own system.  This is in direct opposition to almost all other sci-fi where our destiny is to move beyond Earth.  It sets up an interesting situation, and one that almost works throughout.

The problem I have with this book is the main character.  She is said and proven to be rather less intelligent than the previous generation of travelers, and this manifests in her being unable to help fix the ship at all.  She's so stupid that she can't do anything mechanical, theoretical or physical at all.  Instead, she's demoted to being a pep talker, keeping morale high.  It might not sound like a big deal written here, but the tonal shift from technical sci-fi to moralising parable is one that's not handled particularly well.  It only worsens towards the end of the book as it finds new ways to preach.

And that's my summation of the book.  It starts incredibly strong, when the main character is essentially retelling the story of another character, and then it goes downhill from there.

It's worth a read if you like this author and the style, or if you like dour (some might say, non-fantastical and entirely realistic) fiction in general.  Or if you're a baby and like to be preached at.  If not, I'd suggest avoiding it.

England vs The World (Cup)

So there have been a million column words written about how poor the England performance against both Wales and Australia were.  A few dodgy decision by the referee in the Wales match lost us the game, along with our inability to keep out of our own half.

A weak first half gave Australia the win (has anyone ever come back from a twenty point deficit in a world cup game?), despite a thousand line breaks and half chances.  We weren't clinical enough, we have no finishers.  We have no threats, no pace setting players.  England is a team of average players, working above their collective abilities.

Stuart Lancaster will probably get fired, but I would like to see a new backs coach, and another forwards coach to supplement Rowntree.  I doubt they have the money to hire two dedicated forwards coaches, so he'll probably get axed as well, which is a shame, because he's done well, bringing us from where were were, to where we are.

Anyway, I wasn't surprised to see the ribbing on facebook and the internet by the Australians, we do the same thing once every six decades when we beat them at a sport, but the vitriol from entirely unrelated nations is eye opening.  Everyone knows kiwis have no sense of humour, but the dog dirt they come out with on the internet - what's the antonym of classy?  Because that is them.

The islanders I can understand; they are the whipping boys of the IRB and their relative paucity of resources makes us a target for contempt (fair enough, I can't argue with that), so they're obviously laughing at our expense.

One or two Australians have gone overboard, relating the victory to death, cancer related death and  pope death (I don't understand either), but most have been cool about it.

The surprise winner in the humanity on the internet awards, the one nation you would never expect?  South Africa.  A lot of well thought out, insightful discourse about why we failed, and not a single comment relating our loss to school shootings or gods retribution.  Stay classy guys!