Vitamin C overdose

I suppose it might be the same in all those exotic countries in which citrus grow easily, but I find it odd that Japanese people don't eat the fruits of their own trees. Instead, like in the photo, the fruits remain on the garden trees as decoration all winter long. A British person did once tell me that he walked the lanes and successfully gained access to his neighbours' trees in order to make marmalade. Japanese people do eat a lot of citrus at this time of year. There are many different varieties of delicious satsumary things available, and a family may have a big boxful to work on during the New Year holiday. I'm not sure if what my Japanese friend told me can really be true - that children sometimes turn orange from eating too many!? I also don't know why the Japanese do not grow grapefruit - they are available but imported from the USA. The grapefruity thing in the picture is probably a yuzu, which is generally smaller and sweeter and less juicy than grapefruit. The tree was growing in someone's garden in Kamakura, with the boughs overhanging the road. I could have picked it if I was James' height.

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Spot the difference

For those who found the last puzzle too difficult...

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Spot the odd one out.

Unless I have got my birds all mixed up, andrewt will get this in a trice.
Photos made posisble by Lan's lovely Nikon (now sadly returned to him). Great crow cam...

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Affording the new Nikon

I have a plan! Having seen that these Rhine horizontals recently fetched more than 4 million USD (that's 4000 Nikons!) at auction...

How about some Kamakura horizontals... Anyone like to buy a print? I'll do you a great deal.

Actually, after looking on Wikipedia I found out that the expensive picture may actually be quite different from how it appeared at that first link above. Looks like I need not only more horizontals but also brighter colours before I hit the big time for real... I suppose one would actually have to see the original for real to actually appreciate the true work of art uninterpreted by pixels. 

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Quackers

After our quackers week being Alice Through The Looking Glass at work, Lan was kind enough to lend me his lovely new camera for recovery and relaxation. I think it is amazing, but am having a hard time convincing James to support Nikon this Christmas. 

[Northern Pintail and Mallard ducks at Hachimangu, Kamakura]

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Let's bizarre

The best thing about Japan is the way it keep surprising with its bizarreness, even after a decade of continuous study. Today was particularly bizarre. I won't explain - you wouldn't believe it anyway. But here is James, with his hippo, hoping that the internets will make it all better.

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Let's (not) Marathon

While a walk in the park is harmless enough,

and can even be fun, the reasons not to run a full marathon are legion... Worse, these are the good (sub-3hr) guys, natural runners, who should have been having fun... There was a shuttle bus back to the station which followed the course, from where we saw the carnage of the 4 hour-plussers... stumbling zombies, bodies piled by the roadside, wheelchairs, ambulances etc. But here's jules, happy to have beaten 1500 (wow) men! And I had a cold.

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Denver

We started as we meant to carry on (elk 'n' Guinness)...

The next day we explored downtown,

with Rob and Amity.

Rob is, officially, even cleverer than James, and he's almost as tall, but here he struck a deliberately daft pose in order to try and crack my lens. The lens survived and thus he is blogged! 

Denver is the capital of the state of Colorado. Here is the centre of power.

 

The day was amazingly clear, and, looking the other way, the Rocky Mountains could be easily seen 40 miles away.

The leaves were also looking very autumnal.

Unfortunately, this was the only cowboy we saw.

Denver generally shows signs of gentrification with sculpture,

 

and prettied up old buildings

like the massive brick REI cathedral (of which this is just one end).

Next day it was down to the basement to play with our phones,

 

 and before long we were flying home on a chikinorbeef airline

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Let's Merry

Let's Merry, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Clearly we're not in Denver any more...

You might hope this is the Christian response to Let's Zen, but actually "Let's Merry" appears to be the slogan for St. Arbucks Japan's winter campaign.

Oh it's so nice to be back to normality...

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Climate Science explained - by GooBalls

On Friday we were fortunate and unfortunate enough to be invited to sit in on a committee meeting. The picktur explains what I learned during this 2 hour revelation.

The snapshot is taken from World of Goo, the best game ever until the next one, which I completed last week while not sleeping, due to jet lag. The idea is to build structures made of gooballs and have enough free gooballs roaming through the structure left at the end, that some are sucked up when you reach the spout.  The arrow points the way to the spout.

I've labelled the structure with some of the acronyms from the meeting. I do not know what they all stand for, how they work, or how they are interrelated, but mostly these acronyms represent committees of people that may or may not have access to some limited funds. Mostly they are pretty powerless, except they can "endorse" science that they like, and enable scientific meetings. So the structure is really built upon mutual endorsement.

In the way of our goal lies the fly-wheel of death. I've written climate deniers on the flywheel, but I suppose it could also be any normal thing that gets in the way of climate science and funding - competing interests/ economic collapse etc. Touch your gooball structure against that and the whole thing is smashed to pieces. So we have to build a huge structure of endorsement all the way around the top of the fly-wheel and down the other side, absorbing innocent sleeping gooballs which we use to build an even bigger structure as we go along. The sleeping  GooBalls are the free-thinking climate scientists, who do science and write papers, naively expecting them to be read and built upon. They mistakenly think that they are building a structure - one made of scientific knowledge. They are unaware of the real structure of endorsement hanging below. When the structure hits a sleeping gooball, they wake up and a "!" appears and then they roll up and join the structure.

By the time we get wherever we are going, will there be any free thinking scientists left to actually do the science?

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