I had an amusing encounter in the grocery store just now. I was all set to write about it, and then I realized that the simple, natural, accurate way to describe the other party could lead to accusations of racism. And sexism. And ageism. And classism. And probably a few other -isms under development by a crack squad of victimologists in San Francisco.

So, anyway, “a person of intoxication lacked sufficient funds to acquire three 40-ounce alcoholic beverages and a bouquet of flowers”.

Hope you liked it.

When I took my car in for service this morning, they gave me a 2010 Lexus RX-350 as a loaner. It includes their new “Remote Touch” controller for the navigation system, climate control, radio-station selection, etc.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a car. It’s a mouse. A five-button mouse. That drives an honest-to-gosh giant hand cursor on the display. Your right hand naturally and comfortably rests on a goddamn mouse that is active while you’re driving. And the “intuitive” user interface it’s controlling? Draws your eyes off the road, because even though the mouse “clicks” when you pass over a button, you still have free X-Y movement that can take you off of the buttons. And the UI has modes. Buttons aren’t in the same place in different modes. Functionality isn’t the same in different modes.

When I first heard about this gadget, and Lexus called it “…as natural to the driver’s hand as a computer mouse”, I just made a joke about car-pool tunnel injuries, but they’re serious, and so is the risk of distracting drivers.

Do. Not. Want.

(and, um, if you see someone driving one of these things, “steer clear”)

From 3,200 miles up, dots are visible representing the major population centers of Japan.

From 3,000 miles up, I can see the country’s name in English, as well as labels for the dots: Kōbe, 大阪, 神戸, Nagoya/名古屋, Yokohama, 東京, Saitama (yes, in this precise mix of kanji and romanization), and I gain one lonely dot in Hokkaido. Amusingly, I also gain two labels for the body of water to the west of Japan: East Sea, and Sea of Japan.

Just below 3,000 miles, that dot in Hokkaido gains the labels Sapporo and 札幌. Also, prefectural boundaries begin to fade into view.

At 1,700 miles, Chiba/千葉 gets a dot and two names. Since I’m centering the main island in the viewport, so does Fukuoka/福岡, and four islands get names: Shikoku, Kyushu, Hirado-shima, and Tanega-shima.

(note: mousing over any of the points highlights it for the renderer, so if my mouse passes over 大阪, it will gain the label Ōsaka, which will persist out to 3,000 miles until I highlight something else; after discovering this feature, I’ve been careful not to disturb GE’s natural selection mechanism…)

Just above 1,500 miles, the 東京 dot adds the name Tōkyō. The main island Honshu joins the list, as do Awaji-shima and Fukue-jima. We also pick up Seto Naikai, the inland sea.

Just below 1,500 miles, a dot and a name for 横浜, and off in the corner, lonely little Okinawa-jima gets a name. From here on in, I can’t keep everything from Okinawa to Hokkaido in view, so I’m going to center on roughly where I believe Kyōto to be. I can’t see it yet, but I know it’s near 大阪, whose label just disappeared. When I center it in the viewport, I don’t get 大阪 back, but the point is now labeled Ōsaka, so onward!

400 miles up, and still no sign of Kyoto. 300 miles, 200 miles, still nothing.

Just under 200 miles up, I get prefecture names for Osaka, Nara, Wakayama, and Mie. Perhaps if I shift the view a bit? Success! Moving Ōsaka to the bottom third of the viewport gives me prefecture names for Hyogo, Kyoto, Shiga, Fukui, and Gifu (and, yes, the prefecture names lack the long-o).

100 miles up, still no dot for Kyōto; the prefecture name is in the upper third of the screen, but it looks pretty sparse up there; that can’t be where the city is.

Below 100 miles, city boundaries start fading in, but still no new dots.

50 miles up, and the dots for Ōsaka and Kōbe are nearly offscreen, and the Kyoto prefecture name is soon to follow. Still no new dots.

40 miles up. Ōsaka and Kōbe gone, Kyoto prefecture name gone, no more dots, no more labels. There are two city-looking areas on the map, a small one near the center and a bigger one off to the right. Let’s center the big one in the viewport. Nope, still nothing.

25 miles up, and I’ve got ku! Within a single unlabeled border, I see Kita-ku, Kamigyo-ku, Nakagyo-ku, Shimogyo-ku, Higashiyama-ku, Yamashina-ku, Minami-ku, Kishikyo-ku, Fushimi-ku. Nearby bordered areas gain the labels Muko-shi, Nagaokakyo-shi, Uji-shi, Oyamazaki-cho, and Shimamoto-cho. I’ve got all the wards of Kyōto, but not the city itself.

12 miles up, and I’ve got new dots. Most of them add detail and kanji to my previously-known ku’s, but one of them actually says 京都市. Also, off in the corner, I now see Ōtsu/大津市.

As I pass the 10-mile mark and the display switches to feet, there it is at last, the label Kyōto. From this distance, I can see that Kyoto Station is neatly centered in the viewport.

Of course, I could have just typed “kyoto” into the search box and flown there in an instant, but where’s the fun in that?

Oh, and when I let GE find Kyōto for me, it took me straight to City Hall. When I zoomed in close and turned on the Panoramio layer, I found a photo insisting that City Hall looked a lot like Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion. I logged into Panoramio and suggested relocating that one 3 miles northwest.

Yukie Kawamura is a successful model in Japan. She has a nickname, ゆっきー, derived from her first name, ゆきえ.

If you can read hiragana, you can see where this is going. For the rest of you, her name should be pronounced as if it were three syllables yoo-kee-ay. Her nickname was formed by replacing the “ay” with an extension of the “ee”, and adding a glottal stop before the “k”, for “yook-(pause)-eeee”, which sounds precisely like something a devoted fan would shout upon sighting her.

What does it look like romanized on a mildly-NSFW DVD cover?

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I thought you said that accounting rules required you to charge for iPod Touch software updates. So why is it that the big iOS 4.0 update showed up for free for me?

Not that I’m complaining, you understand. Perhaps if iOS 4.0 makes my iTouch more iuseful, I’ll eventually be persuaded to ibuy an iPad, a device that hasn’t yet caught my ifancy.

Fontographer 5.0 is out. I knew they’d done a cleanup release after acquiring the old code, but I hadn’t expected the FontLab folks to do major new development on it.

Safari 5’s url-entry bar now searches through your history and bookmarks. This is annoying. It does a substring match on the complete URL and title of every entry in your history and bookmarks. This is stupid and broken and useless.

Want a perfect example? Let’s say I just got email that included a UPS tracking number, and I want to go to UPS. When I start typing the string “ups”, what does Safari 5 “helpfully” append to it?

ell-widgets/click.html?ie=UTF8&id=IzuMqjLyzABOgXIyvBfq%2Bb4Thlnt8bTV7mga4c387gBUh2iRceLRXyomIKkOqOwVt3Ls7s%2BXyUX%2F3K9ODY3sNS1N31swH02jL9e94x8tKmHptCn2WgLY1glo3Pjt6JsyfGmIkaAYQvXrtZF7iDSlpbLQ6v4CpAI7LCrB28mooRdPZqrKQ7jVzq2B1ajW6M9X

In the right half of the URL bar, in gray text, it shows the beginning of this amazing string, which turns out to be the result of clicking on one of the “people who bought X” buttons on Amazon. Yeah, that’s exactly where anyone who types “ups” wants to go, every time. Stupidstupidstupid, and no way to disable it.

Flickr user Eric Fischer has done a very nice bit of data-mining in his Locals and Tourists set, analyzing geotagged photos and overlaying them on city maps, color-coded based on how much time the photographer spent in the city (blue for “locals”, red for “tourists”, yellow for unknown).

The details of his data sources and processing are not included, but the background street map can be used to overlay his images on Google Earth, making it possible to visually survey the hot spots, and the results can be quite interesting.

Random notes about Tokyo:

• Only tourists take pictures from the top of Tokyo Tower; locals shoot from nearby.
• His source data includes many pictures from Japan's train-otaku community.
• There are a lot of very photogenic temples and gardens that tourists rarely find.
• The residential district north and west of Youga Station (west edge of the map) must have an incredible smartphone density. I'm guessing lots of upwardly-mobile young couples live there, judging from the number of women with strollers that were captured by the Google street view car. [Update! Almost all by one very busy guy on Flickr]
• The area south of Musashinitta Station is probably similar. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all those pictures are being taken by stroller-equipped young mothers. [Update! nope, it's another very busy guy]
• The Shiomi Koyama Building is an inexplicably popular location for locals taking pictures. Good views of Sazanami Bridge? Mitsubishi employees taking pictures during lunch hour? Product testing? Dunno. [Update! The pictures are actually from the apartment building next door, and are all of someone's cat]
• Yasukuni Shrine gets a lot of traffic from all three groups. Also, the current view in Google Earth comes from late afternoon on December 31st, so the place is packed for New Years Eve.
• Only tourists take pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan.
• Tokyo Disneyland leans a bit towards tourists, but also gets a lot of traffic from locals and unknowns. The nearby Kasai Seaside Park, however, is for locals.

So far, I’ve had less success getting a precise match on his Kyoto map, but I’m off by less than a block in most parts of it, so I can still see some interesting places to explore.

[Update: Something I found around Kyoto, by looking for isolated clusters of locals. It was taken at Yoshimine Temple; not an easy place to get to, but obviously worth the trip.]

[Ah, and found his data]