While in the book store last week, I picked up A History of Japan, by Conrad Totman. I didn’t make it past the preface before the bullshit was too deep to wade through. Quoting:

Today we find ourselves at a point where the level of human exploitation of the ecosystem appears to be throwing the entire global biome into crisis. The Earth is now home to well over six billion people, but in fact this small planet's current biological production is not remotely capable of sustaining those people in the manner to which they are accustomed, much less the manner to which they aspire.

This, he says, is why he decided to write a book about Japanese history. Skimming ahead and checking the reviews, it appears his “ecological” approach to history taints the contents from cover to cover, coloring both which facts he chooses to include, and how he interprets them.

I have rarely felt the urge to return a book to the store based on its content, but a historian who so thoroughly injects his personal politics into the material simply isn’t worth reading.

I’ll be watching it through again once I’ve recovered from the first time, but meanwhile I can’t help thinking about it. Much of my speculation is sure to change as I watch again and argue with others (coughcough), but this is where I’m going with it now.

Beware! Spoilers abound.

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Got three of these today so far:

Subject: Best prices for complete Thundercats and more
Subject: Sabrina the Teenage Witch DVD giveaway
Subject: Whole series of transformers on dvd

They’re selling bootlegs, obviously, but there were no concealed URLs, no viral attachments, no embedded images. For junk mail, they’re positively wholesome; the closest thing to obnoxious porn was that they listed “The Nanny” as an available series…

If you’re wondering where the DVDs of Haibane Renmei went, they’re being closed out in anticipation of the box set release in October. So, if you don’t want to wait six weeks for the $120 set ($90 at Amazon), and you haven’t already bought most of the discs for $30 each, you can currently get the entire series at Anime Corner Store for $30 plus shipping.

Me, I’m stuck looking for disc 2, because I already have the others…

[Update: Cox & Forkum agree…]

What could possibly go wrong?

Scientists are proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago.

My favorite line is this one, which tells me that they’re shoveling elephant dung disguised as “science”:

Reintroducing the modern relatives of the Late Pleistocene losers to North America could spark fresh interest in conservation, contribute to biodiversity and begin to put right some of the wrongs caused by human activities.

No mention of the fact that elephants are incredibly destructive to the environment, and that their populations are exploding in parts of Africa that forbid hunting.

No, wait, I lied. This is my favorite line:

"Free-roaming, managed cheetahs in the southwestern United States..."

Sounds like they’re really trying to manage the ecotourist population. :-)

By golly, the collected propaganda of the North Korean news agency really does sound like the stuff you hear from the American Left. Sample quotes:

The South Korean authorities will face a stern punishment of the nation for their flunkeyist deeds.

Minju Joson today exposes an ulterior intention of the crafty Japanese reactionaries to legalize overseas expansion for aggression under the pretext of "coping with emergency on the Korean peninsula."

As already reported, the U.S. State Department in a recent "annual report" on the world human rights slandered the DPRK again. The "annual report" does not deserve even a passing note as it is full of absurd view on value and logic reversing black and white. Because the United States is not qualified to say anything about the human rights situation in the world.

When delivering a package to someone’s house that requires a signature, do not gently tap on their front door, wait 12.7 seconds, and then leave a little note. Doorbells were invented for a reason, and if you’re unable to locate them, it’s possible to put a little oomph in your knocking. Done properly, the customer who’s spent the entire day at home waiting for you will not be forced to drive 20 miles to your depot to claim his package.

I might be more forgiving if this were the first offense, but you’ve done this to me several times this year, and the only suggestion you’ve offered is “sign a waiver so I can leave packages without a signature”. Not being a fool, I refuse to consider this a viable solution.

Besides, I remember when you pulled the same stunt a few years ago, and decided to deliver my expensive new computer to a neighbor across the street whom I’d never met, without leaving a note on my door…

Love, J

PS: the formal complaint is in the mail.

[update: after all that hassle, the item being shipped turned out to be bad, and now has to be returned. Sigh.]

A Japanese-language online radio show I like, 6Sense, is published in an annoying way. They keep more than a month’s worth of archives online in MP3 format, but each episode is split into 60+ audio files, accessed through a Flash interface.

Examining the Flash app told me very little. Examining my Privoxy logs gave me the regular-but-unpredictable naming convention for the audio files, and a little more digging turned up the URL that the Flash app calls to get the list for a specific day. After that, I simply used wget to download the complete show… as 60+ MP3 files.

Knowing that someone had to have written a Perl script to concatenate MP3 files, I googled and found mp3cat, part of Johan Vroman’s mp3cut package. Making the results into a podcast required the use of another Perl script, podcastamatic, and a web server to host the results. I just turned on web sharing on my Mac, moved the files into ~/Sites, and typed the appropriate URL into iTunes.

With the latest version, iTunes supports podcasts directly, but the integration is kind of peculiar, and carries over to the iPods. Both correctly track what you’ve listened to, and where you left off in the middle of an episode, but otherwise they’re not treated like regular audio tracks.

In iTunes, if you finish listening to one episode of a podcast, instead of moving on to the next episode, it skips to the current episode of the next podcast. On iPods, there’s no concept of “next” at all; when a podcast ends, it just stops playing. If you’ve set it to repeat, it repeats the episode you just heard. Unfortunately, not all podcasts are an hour long; some are quite short, such as ナナライフ, which averages about 90 seconds.

Ironically, the least sophisticated iPod handles podcasts the best right now. The iPod Shuffle just treats them as sound files, and syncs up the play count when you connect it to your computer. When you delete an episode from iTunes, it’s deleted from your Shuffle. Not perfect, but better for long drives (and I’m driving 150 miles a day right now, as I settle in to my new job…).