Dave Brown

Mind-blowing scientific discovery

Mantis shrimp have way way way way better eyes than people do.

Consider me humbled.

Traffic report

Driving to work today, heading into the Yamate Tunnel, I noticed that the pixel boards were warning me of a broken-down car inside the tunnel. Specifically, they said “WARNING: BREAKDOWN 5km AHEAD”, and the number kept decrememnting as I passed them.

Naturally I was driving carefully so as to avoid having BREAKDOWN turn into ACCIDENT, and keeping my eyes wide open for signs of the breakdown.

Turns out it was a guy in a little white van who’d gotten a flat, and was in the breakdown lane. The van wasn’t even the width of the breakdown lane at that point, so he wasn’t really holding up traffic any.

What was holding up traffic, though, was the line of flares 200m away, the police van with a big LED signboard on it saying PLEASE USE THE RIGHT-HAND LANE, THIS LANE IS CLOSED, the two police cars and the police motorbike, all dispatched to keep the guy installing the spare wheel from getting run over by passing motorists. They closed the whole lane almost entirely un-necessarily.

On the way home, I was pleased to note that the usual traffic jam that happens at the bottleneck on the way out of the Yamate tunnel was apparently not as bad as usual. However, in between me entering the expressway and me getting up to the end of the Yamate tunnel, an impatient driver in a BMW rear-ended a not-impatient-enough driver in a van. Cue the motorcycles, vans, flares, signs, and whatnot else.

Once I’d gotten past the crash, mind, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way home.

Troll hat on

This horrible horrible privilege-abusing entitled man has some problems with those equality-minded folks at the Liberal Women’s Caucus.

I don’t think Mr. Kay realizes just how badly-off Canadian women are.

A sign that winter's on the way

After a solid day of nonstop pouring rain yesterday, today was beautiful and clear. And for the first time since the winter, I hopped onto the expressway from home and clearly saw Mount Fuji ahead of me.

In the summer time, it’s too hazy to see that far.

On why bicycles get hit by cars so much

Someone on Reddit today went off on a rant about bicyclists, and why they don’t deserve as much attention as they really should get in order to not be hit. It got me to thinking.

This video was mentioned in the discussion thread. Basically the video starts out by telling you to pay attention to a specific detail: team members wearing white passing the ball. Then it went on, “ha ha, you missed the moonwalking bear” (wearing black, thereby escaping the viewer’s attention).

Which is exactly why bicycle riders get nailed all the time. When you’re in traffic, what you’re paying attention to is traffic. I’ve seen so many bicycle riders talking about how they don’t get treated as traffic.

Here’s my easy solution: act like traffic. If you ride on the wrong side of the road, at night, with no lights on, and wearing earphones and texting on your phone (actual example from my ride home tonight), you’re not being part of traffic. If you insist on not being part of traffic, at least pay enough attention to the traffic around you so that you don’t get hit by it. But really, if you want to be considered part of traffic, then act like it. Stop for red lights, ride on the proper side of the road, and put lights on your bike.

The standard set of lights for a member of traffic is a steady white light on the front, and a steady red light on the back. You might think that a blinking light on the back of your bike makes you more visible, but it doesn’t. It immediately brands you as Not Part Of Traffic. Blend in, and you will be treated accordingly. Do something weird, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll be treated as an obstacle. If you’re not, you’ll just be edited out of the drivers’ field of view, and someone will drive through you.

Now, if only (orange, natch) turn signals were widely available for cyclists.

Oh dear

This guy failed the Turing test.

Thousands and thousands of people enjoyed a really good laugh at his expense.

Fortunately, he was a good sport about it.

Japan Rail fails

On my way home tonight, there was what is known in JR Excuse-ese as “signal trouble”. This generally means that a light bulb burned out in a train traffic light, and they’re waiting for a replacement.

In my train’s case, that meant that the train was stranded in the station for a good solid half an hour. And while I was waiting for my train—the next train—to come, I came to a horrible realization.

A guy with flags would make a great replacement for a burned-out traffic light. And I haven’t the foggiest idea why this has never occurred to Japan Rail, because in Japan, labor-intensive manual solutions to easily-automatable problems happen all the damn time.

I eventually ended up taking a taxi home (I happened to get the most law-abiding taxi driver I’ve ever had—he only hit double the speed limit once, where most taxi drivers cheerfully hit triple the speed limit; he signaled at least 75% of his turns and lane changes, and even almost came to a halt at a stop sign) because there was no sign in the immediate future of a proper train home.

Tried a new restaurant tonight

A new kushiage (deep-fried stuff-on-a-stick) restaurant opened in the summer, and I finally got around to checking it out to see if it was any good.

To save the impatient the trouble of reading further, my verdict on the place is: meh. I won’t be back there.

There’s one extremely good reason I won’t be back there, and I won’t tell anyone else to go there: it has whale on the menu. That’s an excellent way to guarantee I never do business with you.

But apart from that, instead of calling out “Irasshaimase!” (“Welcome!”) when I entered the place, all the staff called out “Otsukaresama deshita!” (“Good work!”). And I thought that the Starbucks-enforced “Konnichiwa!” (“Hi there!”) was excessively-chummy.

But it didn’t stop there. When I received my beer, the waiter grabbed a tankard full of plastic beer (literally—a plastic model of beer) and insisted on doing the whole “KAMPAI!” thing with me.

For all that, the food was okay, but the general trying-too-hard atmosphere of the place, with all the forced jocularity, just put me off it. It was too artificial—kind of like those American-style restaurants where the waitresses all have to be pretty 18-year-old girls who look good in shorts.

A bit of mindless sexism I found

Get out the brain bleach. Can you imagine what sort of reaction this rant would provoke if the sexes in it were reversed?

Parking

The construction project that happened in the empty lot next door seems to have been to turn it into a parking lot. This will go nicely with the parking lot next to it, the parking lot next to that, the parking lot next to that, the parking lot across the street, the parking lot across the street from that, and the parking lot across the street from that.

If there’s one thing Higashi-Omiya has, it’s parking.

Oh and there’s the two floors of parking at the pachinko parlor around the corner. This seems to be a pretty good place to have a car nowadays.