In LA

Wow. Someone out there has a sick mind, and has put it to productive use –designing kitchen tools for the good of society. Hopefully, disturbed individuals will get a cathartic release from stabbing knives into their “Voodoo Knife Holder”, and will thus not need to stab actual people, animals, or anything else that looks squishy. If I was the sort of person who spent that kind of money on kitchenware, and lived in a spacious and well-lit euro-style apartment, I’d maybe consider buying something like this.

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Guess who’s face glowed on the marquee of the Crest Theatre in Westwood Monday night (as well as from a billboard across the street)? That’s Henri Lubatti there, second from right, and he positively shined in the premiere episode of Showtime’s Sleeper Cell. It’s very nice to see an extremely talented friend get such recognition after he’s worked so hard for years. Apparently, sometimes the whole karma thing actually works out the way they promise in the manual.

Someone out there had a bright idea, and created OfKourse.com, a site at which you can register as a student and pay to take a class with a language teacher using Skype. You can also register as a teacher and maybe earn actual money, although it’s difficult to actually determine what the teachers are paid — I can’t find that info on their site.

In any case, it’s a cool idea.

For years, conscientious people have worn tinfoil hats (actually aluminum foil) to ward off radiation and government mind-control waves. A group of scientists at MIT earlier this year tested the efficacy of tinfoil hats using state-of-the-art equipment and published a paper (to the internet) entitled On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study. I fear their shocking conclusions may cause a panic.

Sometimes, like when you run out of pages in your notebook and pull out your laptop to take notes in Mandarin class, you just need to enter some pinyin (transliterated Chinese) with accent marks. With additional software, such as Wenlin, or the PC-only NJStar, this is easy. But in a pinch you can also enter pinyin with accent marks on a mac with without installing any additional software.

First, you must activate the U.S. Extended keyboard, then with that keyboard selected in your input menu, you can key in one of 4 accent mark key combinations followed by the letter that gets the mark. The accent mark key combinations for pinyin tones 1 through 4 are (in order):

• option-a
• option-e
• option-b
• option-`

For example, to type “wŏ”, you’d type a w followed by option-b followed by o.

It’s not as easy as those dedicated Chinese applications I mention above, in which you can enter input tone markers by number, but at least it makes it possible to type pinyin in any unicode aware application.

Now I can write wonderful sentences like “wŏ bù xiăng hē dōngxi” until I plotz from happiness.

PS. more info on entering other accent marks.

I was just watching Real Time with Bill Maher and Mr. Maher was discussing bird flu with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. It was more of a debate than a discussion, with Dr. Gupta stressing how big a deal the bird flu could be and that it makes sense to get freaked out about a disease that “kills 1 in 2 people”. Bill Maher, on the other hand, was really enthusiastically pushing the idea that the pharmaceutical companies are evil (yeah, there’s some truth to that) and that people should have healthier lifestyles (yeah, there’s some truth to that), and that somehow improving our lifestyles and diets would boost our immunity so that we can’t catch things like the bird flu (uh, no. I’m not aware of any evidence that olympic athletes catch significantly fewer viruses than couch potatoes, although they do probably have less chronic back pain).

But getting back to Dr. Gupta’s statement about the possibility that bird flu has killed 1 out of every 2 people infected with it. This 50% mortality rate meme rears its head in almost every sensational article about bird flu, and I think this number is not such a reasonable assumption. The real statistic, the way it should be discussed in a responsible press, is that out of all the confirmed human cases of H5N1 infection, 50% of them ended in death. But that sounds much less sensational and is thus a much less likely bit of information to spread so easily. My presumption is that the “50% mortality rate” may be wrong because it’s not unlikely that there are many unconfirmed — it may be likely that the vast, vast majority of people who come down with the avian flu think they just have a bad case of the normal flu and don’t die and don’t go to the hospital and are hence, not confirmed cases. My doubt is fueled by the fact that there is no recorded incidence of any influenza virus that caused anywhere near a 50% human mortality rate, even considering past flu epidemics that killed millions.

For an example of a more easily believable mortality rate, check out one of the more recent and dramatic flu epidemics, the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 25-50 million people worldwide. It is estimated to have had a 2-5% mortality rate. The common flu varieties have mortality rates around %0.004 (PDF - I may be wrong in my math, but it’s at least somewhere below %1). So even if the avian flu has the same mortality rate as the 1918 flu epidemic that would be a huge jump above the normal rate and enough to be worthy of some level of panic.

I could be very wrong about this, and I’d even bet that the odds that I’m wrong are much higher than the real human mortality rate of H5N1.

Slime Forest Adventure is a Legend of Zelda style adventure game in which the character learns the meaning and pronunciation of Japanese characters during battles with agressive sentient slime creatures.

I used to play this shareware game a long time ago, and learned to recognize a few hundred kanji (as well as all katakana and hiragana) in a couple of weeks just by playing the game. I quickly registered it, not because there were any features to unlock but to help ensure that it would continue to be developed and to show some gratitude for the fact that the program had helped me learn all of those characters.

Playing Slime Forest Adventure is a bit like studying with flash cards, but is better and smarter in that it makes the repeat intervals just right, has kanji you’ve forgotten attack you viciously, and introduces new kanji in a very intelligent manner — all similar looking kanji are presented as a group so that you quickly learn the differences between them. I think the game currently can teach 800-1000 characters.

I hadn’t played the game for quite a while, mostly because I spend most of my computing time in front of Macs these days, and the game was Windows and Linux only. But I just checked out the website, and the developer has ported the game to OS X now. Hooray.

So if you’re trying to learn Japanese, give Slime Forest Adventure a try. I’ve downloaded the Mac version and have started playing again. The meaning of the kanji characters is in most cases the same in Japanese as in Chinese, so this should help me with both languages. Hopefully the fact that it now tests for pronunciation as well as meaning of Kanji won’t make it too much less relevant for my Chinese studies.

From the “your tax dollars at work” department: According to the Washington Post, the CIA has set up secret torture prisons in 8 unnamed foreign countries. No congressional oversight. A blanket approval from the President of all CIA actions related to counterterrorism made this possible.

Part of the whole “proud to be an American” concept gets a little sullied when it turns out that we too are whisking people away in the dead of night to sit in a dark solitary cell with no representation and be starved, sleep deprived, and tortured. And apparently this treatment has been given to people who are not terrorists, such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen wrongly accused of having attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

Before I get too depressed, I’d like to acknowledge that it’s nice to live in a country where the press can freely report on such things and the reporter and publisher don’t end up in the gulag. It’s obvious from the article that some in the CIA are not comfortable with these practices, and are probably risking plenty to leak some details to the press. And the fact that the CIA thought congress and the U.S. public wouldn’t stand for these shenanigans and thus had to keep them so secret is a hopeful sign — if the majority of the public were willing to accept such practices we’d be in an incredibly sorry state.

And now back to your regularly scheduled depression over “the human condition” as expressed in U.S. politics.

Figuring out how to enable ClearType, the fancy method Windows uses to nicely anti-alias fonts on the screen so that they don’t look all blocky, was fairly simple, but the option is in a non-intuitive location.

• First you have to open the ‘Display’ control panel.
• Then click the ‘Appearance’ tab.
• You might think there’d be a dropdown menu for ‘Text Antialiasing’ right under the one for ‘Font size’, but you’d be wrong. You are far too logical for this work.
• You might think that the option would show up if you were to click the ‘Advanced’ button. That’s a good thought, because it makes sense to someone in Redmond to hide options behind buttons in tabs, but you’d be wrong again. Not there.
• You have to click the ‘Effects…’ button to get to the ClearType setting. I kid you not. ClearType apparently doesn’t belong in the badly named ‘Settings’ tab (it would more accurately be titled ‘Hardware Settings’), nor is it an ‘Advanced’ setting in the ‘Appearance’ tab, but is instead classified as an Appearance ‘Effect’. I only found it because I was doing the exhaustive search that is apparently required to find any setting in the apps and control panels that ship with Windows.

Gripe gripe gripe. I know there are many good people up there at Microsoft, which makes it even more difficult to understand how the UI can get so muddled. At least it works and text does look a lot nicer now that it’s enabled.