…Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
— Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, in The GuardianTofu: you can run but you can't hide
I’m not sure why this little guy is trying to escape. The food at Junsei is excellent.
Make a wish
絵馬 (ema) are small wooden plaques purchased at shrines. You buy one, write down a wish (health, fame, fortune, romance, entry into a good school, etc), and hope that the gods will grant it. Eventually they all get burned up as offerings.
Hello, Buddha
The world’s largest bronze buddha lives in the world’s largest wooden building, Toudai-ji. He’s an imposing fellow:
In modern Japan, though, you’ve got to be cute to survive:
Local color
Our 8-hour layover on the way home gave us time to take the train into Narita-san and see Shinshou-ji. Allegedly there was a temple fair going on, but it just looked like a few extra souvenir stands. The temple complex itself was much more interesting.
Kawaii Tours, Inc.
I don’t know what company operates this tour bus, but I think I’ll give them my business next time.
Fake but accurate
These are “tourist maiko”, women dressed up as apprentice geisha to provide some local color. There was another pair walking around with a man who was holding up a multi-lingual sign reading “these are not real maiko”, and I believe they were members of a tour group who had paid for a makeover (among other things, they were a good fifteen years too old to be the real thing). These two were just strolling along the canal nearby.
The only real maiko we spotted was off-duty in a regular kimono, coming out of the Gion post office.
Apple Aperture: sluggish but useful
[Update: Grrr. Aperture won’t let you updateor create GPS EXIF tags, and the only tool that currently works around the problem only supports interactively tagging images one at a time in Google Earth. Worse, not only do you have to update the Sqlite database directly, you have to update the XML files that are used if the database ever has to be rebuilt.]
I’ve played with Aperture in the past, but been put off by the terrible performance and frequent crashes. Coming back from Japan, though, I decided to give the latest version a good workout, and loaded it up with more than a thousand image files (which represented about 850 distinct photos, thanks to the RAW+JPEG mode on my DSLR).
On a MacBook with a 2GHz Core Duo and 2GB of RAM, there’s a definite wait-just-a-moment quality to every action I take, but it’s not long enough to be annoying, except when it causes me to overshoot on the straighten command. The fans quickly crank up to full speed as it builds up a backlog of adjustments to finalize, but background tasks don’t have any noticeable impact on the GUI response.
My biggest annoyance is the lack of a proper Curves tool. I’m used to handling exposure adjustments the Photoshop way, and having to split my attention between Levels, Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, and Highlights & Shadows is a learning experience. I think I’ve managed so far, and my Pantone Huey calibrates the screen well enough to make things look good.
I have three significant wishes: finer-grain control over what metadata is included in an export, real boolean searches, and the ability to batch-import metadata from an external source. Specifically, I want to run my geotagger across the original JPEG images, then extract those tags and add them to the managed copies that are already in Aperture’s database. Aperture is scriptable, so I can do it, but I hate writing AppleScripts. I could have geotagged them first, but for some reason MacOS X 10.4.11 lost the ability to mount my Sony GPS-CS1 as a flash drive, and I didn’t have a Windows machine handy to grab the logs. [Sony didn’t quite meet the USB mass-storage spec with this device; when it was released, it wouldn’t work on PowerPC-based Macs at all, and even now it won’t mount on an Asus EEE]
For the simple case of negating a keyword in a search, there’s a technique that mostly works: the IPTC Keywords field is constantly updated to contain a comma-separated list of the keywords you’ve set, and it has a “does not contain” search option. This works as long as none of your keywords is a substring of any other.
I’ll probably just write a metadata-scrubber in Perl. That will let me do things that application support will never do, like optionally fuzz the timestamps and GPS coordinates if I think precise data is too personal. The default will simply be to sanitize the keyword list; I don’t mind revealing that a picture is tagged “Japan, Hakone, Pirate Ship”, but the “hot malaysian babes” tag is personal.
