So it looks like I've managed to free myself from eXtwitter.

So it looks like I've managed to free myself from eXtwitter.

From their point of view, I suppose, I've managed to get my self in eXtwitter jail.

Some joker was handing out a lot of inane insults to anyone who disagreed with him, and his "friend" congratulated him. And he bragged that it was "fish in a barrel".

Really inane insults. Like 

We say it's so, and we are always right, so you're dumb!!!!

level inane. And worse.

Just to remind anyone who reads this, "fish in a barrel" is short for something along the lines of 

It's as easy as for me as shooting fish in a barrel.

 So I responded with 

So you think it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, do you?

Well, you just shot yourself in the face.

Good thing your ammunition was only paintballs.

Except I abbreviated a bit:

"fish in a barrel".

Shot yourself in the face.

Good thing it was a "paintball"

Even in full grammar, yeah, it's pretty savage criticism. I acknowledge that. But a breech of rules? Abusive? Violent? Compared to the usual insult fest?

And apparently eXTwitter has some automatic bad language recognizer that can't parse English tenses and (not surprisingly) can't parse metaphors, and flagged it, automatically freezing my account. Said it was violent and abusive.

What?

If I had said

Go shoot yourself in the face!

that would be violent and abusive. But you have to be unable to parse past tense to read it that way.

I suppose the very topic of "shooting" is a dangerous topic, but, if that's the case, how is "fish in a barrel" allowed? Unless the bot is so illiterate as to not know where the expression "fish in a barrel" comes from. Maybe it associates the phrase with fesikh, or maybe with kingyo sukui. Or maybe it just has no semantic linkage for phrases at all.

Then it sent me an automated email telling me that, if I wanted to be a good little eXtwitterer and get my account back, I could delete the offending post.

Or I could appeal, but the language style (I fun my computer in Japanese.) indicated that appeals are frowned upon.

So I tried an appeal, but the whole process was in Japanese, leaving me unclear as to whether to use English or Japanese, and the appeal itself is length-limited like eXtwitter is, and whatever human examined my appeal apparently had just as much problem parsing English grammar and metagrammar as the automated gadget, or maybe just decided she (or he) didn't like my point of view.

So my first appeal was rejected.

Now, I will acknowledge, when people make inane comments at the level I am describing here, it's probably wisest to assume they can't parse abbreviated grammar, can't deal with strong metaphors, etc.

And since eXtwitter conversations tend to descend quickly to that level of inanity, I should not use abbreviated grammar, and I should choose less strong metaphors, unabbreviated, like 

You just shot yourself in the foot.

Although I'm not sure I want to hope eXtwitter's auto-nanny 'bot is capable of recognizing that's a metaphor, either. How do you teach a 'bot what metaphors mean?

But, as a metaphor, the problem with this hypothetically easy target game is 

• one, it destroys barrels of fish;
• two, salt water and fish fragments and possibly barrel fragments tend to splash back at the wielder of the gun;
• and, three, if there's enough water, the fish are swimming and the water gets in the way. You're not really guaranteed to hit the fish unless they are dead and packed fairly tightly, and, if they are packed tightly, fish fragments really splash all over.

And fish fragments turn smelly really quickly.

So, you get wet, covered with fish guts, and quite possibly injure yourself from barrel flack. 

And your face is the part of you that is most likely to get the splashback.

So,if you make a habit of shooting fish in a barrel, you're quite likely to shoot yourself in the face.

And if you make a habit of confusing paintballs with bullets -- or with fish, well, ...

Anyway, ...

Yeah, if I value my eXtwitter account, I would swallow my pride and say, all the above is not a reason to have to have my account frozen. 

Even if it amounts to giving in to the eXtwitter nannies and letting them continue believe they don't really have to think to do their jobs.

But, you see, it's been about a week, they haven't replied to my second appeal, and my account is still frozen, and ...

I've been significantly more productive and happier with life over this past week.

No useless arguing with people who aren't interested so much in arguing as asserting that they, themselves, are the rightest of the right. Or the baddest of the bad or whatever. It would allow me much more effective use of my time, and much less need to be exasperated with how so many people seem to be satisfied with living uninspired and uninspiring lives.

I'm not sure I want back on eXtwitter.

If I do, though, I need to commit myself to a different approach. Telling people how wrong they are is a fool's game.

[JMR202410040632 addendum:] 

I'm inclined to delete the post, and get back on just long enough post the above as my final post, and turn my back to eXtwitter permanently.

Microblogging really isn't appropriate for anything but headlines and vanity. 

People try to use it for 'blogging, dialog, and such, but the format is too short, and the threading is too opaque. 

You really can't have a conversation, much less follow it. The most you can do is pretend to argue, but since it's about making short vanity pronouncements. It's all one-way.

And the moderation is the same -- their way or the highway. That's the archetype of abusive relationships.

It's not unreasonable to assert that eXtwitter is one of the root causes of the current fractious and tendentious political climate.

Could Elon fix eXtwitter? Could he make it a medium of actual eXchange?

Hard to say. Make microblogging an index to other services? 

Maybe have it offer to switch to a full blogging platform (WordPress?) when a reply starts exceeding the microblogging limit? 

Maybe let it index out to a dialog platform (something like slashdot) when the thread gets longer than five replies?

Definitely get the moderators to learn how to parse and communicate in English and the language they are supposed to be supporting. Arrange for on-the-job training, if necessary. Management probably needs to have the same kind of training, though, is my guess.

in it's present form, it just needs to go away. 

[JMR202410040632 addendum  end.]

 [JMR202411052002(JCST) addendum:]

Let's see if I can steer clear of the factionalism this time.

I feel like I'm being forced to "admit" the post was somehow against their rules. 

But they have not responded to my requests for a review. Been more than a month, and I need to update my profile.

Or maybe just delete the account and really get myself free of the twits. . Something to think about.

[JMR202411052002(JCST) addendum end.]

You Don't Have to be a Sexpert to Think Meaningfully about Sex

You don't have to try every kind of alcoholic beverage to know that people who drive under the influence tend to cause accidents in which other people die.

You don't have to try every kind of tobacco to understand that second-hand smoke is harmful to yourself. Nor do you have to have first-hand smoking experience to watch the effects of tobacco on your coworkers.

I personally can tell you a lot about that. It's one of the reasons I left the software industry. Watched too many companies get dragged to the ground because management and the board of directors had the engineers so focused on getting the job done that they failed to make sure that the job should even be done, much less that it was being done correctly. (Witness Bruce Schneier waxing eloquent on Crowdstrike.) 

And one of the tools engineers use to focus themselves on deadlines instead of safety is tobacco. Coffee is another. And pornography.

You don't have to experience every possible sexual position to understand that sexual position is not what sex is all about.

And you don't have to have sex with every person on the planet, or even just every attractive person you meet, to understand that quantity is not better than quality. Neither do you need to have sex with a whole lot of people to understand that carefully sculpted and painted-on beauty can hide some serious hideousness behind the endomorphin-induced haze.

Sometimes it's easy to see a whole lot of trees and miss the forest.

I'm not an expert on sex like Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny. But I have observed people getting hung up on sex and gender for over half a century, and with so much public focus on the topic these days, I'm re-exploring my previous analysis and understanding of sex.

Sex is an especially difficult topic, since even talking about it seems to make those endogenous (naturally-produced) opiates flow, and the flow alters the brain processes.

Even a single can of beer is said to be enough to cause professional drivers to become sloppy in the places they need to be not sloppy, and yet make them feel that their driving improves under the influence of just that little beer.

In much the same way that it's probably not wise to try to evaluate your ability to drive under the influence when you are under the influence, it's probably not wise to evaluate the effects of sex on you while you are under the influence of those natural peptides.

Unfortunately, being human, living in bodies that naturally produce those peptides, it can be nigh impossible to escape their influence.

Maybe it's best to admit up front that our perceptions on sex are going to be bent.

Since it's probable that the cold light of morning never really comes, maybe it's best to try to reexamine our impressions, logic, and conclusions under the influence of different groups of those naturally produced peptides.

This may turn into a short series of blog entries behind my modesty barrier. If so, I'm inviting everyone along for the ride.

Kakaa Denka （かかあ天下）Wikipedia Page Translated with Google's Help

Feeding the Japanese Wikipedia page on かかあ天下 (Kakaa Denka) through Google Translate produced a remarkably readable translation, if you interpolate some of the weirder translation artifacts. ("We", for some definition of "we", used to talk about "translationisms", but that bit of coinage has been usurped by some weirdness of its own, so I'll use the term "translation artifacts" here. It's probably more technically accurate anyway.)

Note that the Japanese Wikipedia page is flagged as having problems due to lack of reference material and evidence of personal research, or whatever that is in English.

Note also that this is the translation of the page as I am reading it now, and if the page itself is later edited, those edits will not be reflected here. 

(If someone else doesn't beat me to it, I guess I'll clean the translation up eventually and eventually add an English page for it myself. I wish I had more time to participate on Wikipedia.) (Cleaned-up translation below the results of Google Translate.)

Again, the Wikipedia page in question: 嬶天下 (Kakaa Denka)

Original output:

---

Kakaa denka refers to a family where the wife's authority, power, and dignity exceed that of her husband.  

It is said to be a specialty of Joshu, along with ``Karakkaze.''  This is because the area once known as Joshu (Gunma Prefecture) had a thriving sericulture industry, and there were many households where the wife had higher economic power than the husband. On April 24, 2015, the Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that ``Kakaa Tenka - Gunma's Silk Story'' was selected as one of the first 18 Japanese heritage sites.

overview  

Originally, it meant ``a strong wife who protects the house (from winds, etc.) while her husband is away'' or ``My mother is the best in the world (hardworking)'', but it also means ``to protect my husband from the wind.'' It is most often used to mean ``strong wife'' and is sometimes used as an antonym for ``hushu kanpaku''.

Kakaa Tenka in Joshu  

The reason Kakaa Tenka is considered a specialty of Joshu (Gunma Prefecture) is that women in Joshu were responsible for the silk industry, including sericulture, silk spinning, and weaving, and had higher economic power than men. The word is used to describe active and hard-working Joshu women, based on impressions of Joshu's harsh weather environment, such as thunder and wind, and Joshu's harsh temperament (specific examples of prefectural characteristics #prefectural characteristics). .  

Kakaa Tenka as seen in ancient tales  

In archeology, the wife of Kamitsuke no Kimi Kanojo Katana (Kamitsuke no Kimi Kanojo Katana) is mentioned in relation to Kakaa Tenka. Cornered by the Tohoku Ezo, Katana is now weak, so they give him a drink and give him encouragement, while at the same time holding a bow and making a sound on the string, they use their wit to give the opponent the illusion that a large army has arrived. I helped. Judging from the custom of tooth extraction during the Kofun period, it is thought that women could become the head of a household until the 5th century, and the strong position of women is thought to be a vestige of this.

---

First pass cleanup, with original Japanese for reference:

---

かかあ天下（嬶天下）（かかあでんか）とは、妻の権威・権力・威厳が夫を上回っている家庭を指す。
Kakaa denka (かかあ天下・嬶天下) is a term in para-colloquial Japanese for family structure in which the wife's authority, power, and dignity exceed that of her husband. 

[I'll note here that, in my understanding, it's broader than just family-specific structure, and should be legitimately considered a local social structure in which the women's authority, power, and dignity exceed that of the men.]

「からっ風」と並んで、上州名物と言われる。かつて上州と呼ばれた地域（群馬県）は養蚕業が盛んであり、妻の経済力が夫より高い家庭が多かったことによる。2015年（平成27年）4月24日、文化庁は日本遺産の最初の18件の一つとして「かかあ天下 ―ぐんまの絹物語―」を選んだと発表した。
It is said to be a special characteristic of the Jōshū (上州) area, in association with karakkaze (からっ風 [extreme drying/freezing, downburst leeside winds from the nearby Jōetsu region mountains]). This is because the area once known as Jōshū (primarily Gunma Prefecture) had a thriving sericulture industry, and there were many households where the wife had greater economic power than the husband. On April 24, 2015 (Heisei 27), the Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that Kakaa Denka - Gunma's Silk Story was selected as one of the Eighteen Primary Cultural Properties of Japanese Heritage [English page here].

概要 Overview

本来は「夫が出かけている間の家を（からっ風などから）守る強い妻」や「うちのかかあは（働き者で）天下一」の意味であるが、「夫を尻に敷く強い妻」という意味で使われることがほとんどで、亭主関白の対義語として用いられることがある。
Basically, kakaa denka indicates "a strong wife who protects the household (from the strong karakkaze downburst winds, etc.) while her husband is away", or means "the lady of our house is the best (most hardworking) in the world''. But it also generally carries the semantic of "a strong woman who takes the lead" [or, literally (but politely), "... who positions her husband behind her backside", thus, taking the brunt of the wind], and is sometimes used as an antonym for teishu kanpaku [loosely, Japanese version patriarchy, or the tradition that "the lord of our house is the emperor's representative"]. 

上州のかかあ天下 Kakaa Denka in Jōshū

かかあ天下が上州（群馬県）の名物とされる理由として、上州の女性は養蚕・製糸・織物といった絹産業の担い手であり、男性よりも高い経済力があったことがあげられる。雷や空っ風といった上州の厳しい気象環境や、気性の荒い上州人気質（県民性#県民性とされる具体的な例）に対する印象から、活発で働き者の上州女性を表す言葉として用いられる。
A reason given for considering kakaa denka a special characteristic of Jōshū (Gunma Prefecture) culture is that the women in Jōshū took the lead in the silk industry, from sericulture to silk spinning and weaving, and had greater economic power than the men. From impressions of the thunder and karakkaze winds typical of the harsh climate of the Jōshū area, and from the rugged disposition of the people of Jōshū (see Specific Examples of Personality Characteristics Considered Typical of the Various Prefectures -- 県民性#県民性とされる具体的な例), kakaa denka is used to describe the energetic and hard-working women of Jōshū.

古代説話に見られるかかあ天下 Kakaa Denka as seen in tradition

考古学では、上毛野君形名（かみつけのきみ かたな）の妻が、かかあ天下との関連で引きあいに出される。東北蝦夷に追い詰められ、弱腰になっている形名に対し、酒を飲ませ、叱咤激励すると共に自分達は弓を持ち、弦を鳴らすことで、相手に大軍が来たと錯覚させる機知を行い、手助けをした。古墳時代における抜歯の風習からも、女性が家長と成りえたのは、5世紀までと考えられており、女性の立場が強いのはその名残とも考えられる。
In Japanese archeology, the wife of Kamitsuke no Kimi Katana (上毛野君形名) is brought up as an example of kakaa denka. When Katana is weakened and cornered by the Tohoku Ezo armies, she gives him sake for drink and a scolding for encouragment [and gathers and arms the women]. Using their wits, they help [turn the tide] by noisily lifting their bows and strumming the bowstrings to give the enemy the illusion that a great army has arrived. Also, based on customs of tooth extraction [dental work] during the Kofun period, it is thought that women could become heads of families through the 5th century [CE], and the tradition of strong women [in the Jōshū/Gunma area] is thought to be [corroborating] evidence of this.

---

First clean-up pass complete.

Correlation between IQ and ...

I'm being stupid enough to argue with someone who claims a positive correlation between intelligence and all sorts of theoretical "good" things, like longevity and not doing criminal things and wealth and health and ...

One problem with trying to measure intelligence is that there are many kinds of intelligence -- many kinds of smarts.

One kind of smarts is when someone leaves a chair in the middle of the kitchen and you stub your toe and say, quite calmly, "My goodness, that smarts."

Another kind of smarts is when you decide you're going to avoid walking too close to chairs from now on.

Yet another kind of smarts is when you start planning a campaign to outlaw chairs.

And then there is the smarts that just decides to get rid of chairs in your own home and start sitting on the floor like certain Asian traditions have it.

Another kind of smarts redesigns the chair with a circular base and a single supporting leg in the middle where you would have to try pretty hard to stub your toe.

And then there is the smarts that finds out who left the chair there and fines or sues that person for endangerment.

And then there is the kind of smarts that just grabs the chair and sits down and rubs the toe until the circulation returns, then pushes the chair back under the table, out of the way.

I know which smarts I would prefer to exercise, if I am fully in control of myself.

But it takes all these kinds of smarts to make up a world. Yeah, I suppose even the smarts to sue and/or outlaw chairs.

Which of these smarts are tested on IQ tests?

Why I Haven't Returned to Teaching English

I really don't have time to be writing this, and I'm sure friends will just roll their eyes and say I'm using avoidance tactics again. And they probably wouldn't exactly be wrong.

But there's something that seems to really need to be said.

I apologize for the length of this, and for not doing the expository thing where I tell you up front and then tell you in detail, and then tell you again. If I approach it directly, most people's immediate reaction will be to argue with me.

Yes, I am a good teacher. Yes, I have the skills teach English, certain science fields (particularly computer science), and math, among other things.

Japan, just like the US, just like much of the rest of the world, needs good teachers -- I mean, really, really needs good teachers, in all subjects -- except the current most popular subjects. (Actually, that's, except the subjects that were most popular two-to-six years ago. There's a delay between demand and supply called getting the degrees.) 

Why? Where are the good teachers and why aren't they teaching?

There are three parts to answering that question, and I'll start with the easiest one first.

There are a lot of mediocre and bad teachers in the education industry. (Don't argue with me on this, education has become an industry.)

And when they see a good teacher at work, they become jealous, and fearful for their jobs. And they start resorting to defense tactics -- mostly subconsciously, I think. I hope.

What defense tactics?

• Reports and other paperwork are not inherently evil. But they can easily be overdone in volume and style, and other aspects. Overdoing such things eats away at preparation time and other important resources.
• Likewise, meetings and evaluations are not inherently evil. Likewise about volume, structure, and goals, and about eating resources.
  
• Inventing new approaches is a good thing. Trying to enforce them on everyone else is pure evil.
  
• Praise and critique are important and good. Faint/false praise and hidden sniping are evil.
  

For some reason, mediocre and bad teachers are very good at turning attempts to improve things into defense tactics.

And, truth be told, the mediocre and bad teachers could be good teachers if they would actually engage with their subject matter while engaging in defense tactics, and if they would actually dare to engage with their students in meaningful ways (and not just in discussing whatever the currently popular topics are and otherwise currying student favor and encouraging teacher's pets).

Why are so many teachers willing to undermine the education systems?

Here's where I really get into controversial stuff.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said it. I'm not sure. It was one of those guys who worked on the US Constitution and played an important part in the birth of the US of A.

Public education should be for children who don't have family who can pay for their private education, was part of the idea. And it should be limited to three years, just enough to get the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. From there, from about the age of nine, ten, or eleven, education should be primarily the responsibility of the individual, initially guided by parents or legal guardians -- individual students, individual children choosing their own courses through the school of life.

I may be remembering that wrong, as well, but I think that's the gist of it.

Education is a lifelong process, and there is nothing more suppressive to education than to force people to study what they have no preparation for and to delay them unreasonably from studying what they are already prepared for. Public education programs can't avoid both pushing students too far ahead and holding them too far back. It's simply in the nature of systems.

The education industry itself engages in defense tactics. Schools are by no means the only source of what they advertise as their main products -- knowledge and education. And I'm going to refrain from repeating myself in analyzing what the industry does, by means of those who run it. 

Wait. If it's true of public education, why isn't it true of private education?

In Japan, Juku has this problem in spades. The Ministry of Education has been trying to reform the entrance examination systems for several decades, but teaching for the tests is viewed as the lifeblood of the juku. 

Teachers who have not yet obtained tenure do not want to risk their safety net if the don't get re-hired next year, any more than those juku teachers who have not had public education experience. Nor do tenured teachers want to risk their post-retirement options.

Thus, teaching the tests has become entrenched in private education.

Teaching the tests is not education. Can't we finally get past that?

Tests are supposed to be opportunities for the students to stretch and evaluate their mental muscles, but they have primarily been perverted to gate-keeper roles where there should be no gate-keepers -- or, rather, where gate-keepers should be there to help, not prevent.

Tests are being used as tools of exclusion, which is in direct opposition to the only valid purpose of both private and public education.

In Japan, three years is not really enough to master reading and writing.

In the modern world, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are no longer enough.

But we wouldn't be asking them to master anything at school. Mastering things would be done in real world. 

If we want to solve the teacher shortage, we need to integrate the education industry with the real world.

Anyway, since the bike-car accident I had about five years ago, I just don't have the energy to engage in the constant battles that go on between what should be and what is in the education industry.

If I Won the Lottery --

I don't play the lottery, as a matter of principle. But if someone I trusted bought me a lottery ticket --

It would have to be someone I trusted who bought me the ticket, because "free" money does things to people. 

If it were someone I didn't trust, I would have to waste a lot of time and probably most of the winnings buying off the interest of the giver of the ticket.

Money always comes with obligations. It's an economic principle. It's in the nature of what money is. 

You can never really have "free" value. Value must be generated, and generating value incurs obligations. 

Rich people simply ignore the obligations, saying they know better what to do with it, burning their charisma to get room to exercise their own will on the value.

And money is a (poor) proxy for value.

And I have never been able to simply ignore obligations when I had any means to respond to them.

-- So, if someone I trusted bought me a lottery ticket, and it hit a jackpot, what would I do with it? 

(This is hypothesis contrary to fact. It ain't gonna happen. But what you do with your free time, what you do with your excess, that's what defines you as a person. That's what demonstrates your true priorities. So what I'm doing here is thinking about what I'd do if I had excess. I'm trying to figure out my current priorities.)

First, I'd make sure my taxes and national retirement/social security obligations would get taken care of. Then I'd pay into as much retirement funds as the tax laws allow, both for myself and for my wife. Then I think I'd pay off my children's school loans. Maybe I'd have enough to fund them in going back for advanced degrees. Maybe I'd invest some in the companies they work for. Maybe I'd send my wife to Europe to study nutrition and cuisine. Family obligations.

But that is not what this is about.

If I had a lot of wealth to use as I saw fit (hypothesis contrary to fact in so many ways), I would use it where I think some gaping holes in our society exist, where I think I could apply myself in meaningful ways. 

It would be tempting to provide extra funding for various Free/Libre software: 

• Gramps, 
• the GIMP, 
• Inkscape, 
• gnu compiler collection and Clang/LLVM, etc. 
• and more niche software, like CAD, circuit design and such
  
• etc. 

But even just ten thousand here, a hundred thousand there, and a million over there would tend to fritter the money away, so that would not be the first thing I'd do.

It would be tempting, and useful, to start my own distributions of Linux and *BSD operating systems. But, again, it would be easy to try to set up a competitor to Ubuntu and Apple, and that would definitely be an easy way to fritter money away.

It would be tempting to start an English as-a-foreign-language company doing it the right way. So many ways the current approach to teaching English as a foreign language are just fundamentally wrong. But it would be a hard sell, and if I succeeded in the sell, Japanese copycats would spring up all over. That might not be a bad thing, but it would burn money.

It would be more than tempting to start my own social media service, with a fundamentally different business model. Or perhaps buy OSDN for the infrastructure. But focus on making it reasonable for the customer to own their own

• domains
• servers, including mail, authoring, financial transaction, etc.
  
• authoring and archiving tools
• publishing
  

and to provide a base community for the customers to reach out from. But I'd basically be trying to take on Google, even if I'd be doing it right as opposed to them. And if I succeeded, I'd have to fight off Microsoft's attempts to buy me out and/or to embrace and extend me.

I'm getting old. I don't have time for all of that.

I have lots of novels I'd really like to finish and publish. That would not take nearly as much money.

And one thing I'd like to do before I die, if I could somehow arrange the money and time, is to define extensions and revisions to my four favorite CPUs

• 6805
  
• 6801 
• 6809
  
• 68000
  
• 6847

Wait. Why is the 6847 in this list? It's not a CPU. It's a video display generator -- a VDG. (I will explain.)

But, why? you ask. You think you understand why I want to avoid Intel x86 and AMD64, but we have ATmega and ARM. They're cheap, can be had in a variety of small, medium, and large packages, and they can be programmed in C and other high-level languages.

But you need the high-level languages. ATmega, ARM, RISC-V, and other modern CPUs are hard to work with at the assembly language level. Sure, they have a lot of development tools to help, but you don't want to work on them without the tools. That means you really don't understand what's happening at the low level. You only think you do, and I don't think that's a good thing.

Motorola's CPUs were easy to work with at the assembly language level. Maybe too easy. But it is actually possible for ordinary people, with a little coaching, to read the assembly language source code and get an idea of what's happening in the code. Other CPUs, especially modern CPUs, not so much.

The one problem with Motorola CPUs is that they each had small design flaws that meant that, as you extended and redesigned your product, you eventually hit walls. And getting past those walls meant using programming techniques that made it hard, again, to understand what was going on.

The 6847 VDG was similar. it was really simple to design display controllers with it and it was really simple to program. It was great for getting output on an ordinary TV (back when more homes had TVs than telephones). Which meant you didn't have to buy an expensive monitor to get output from a computer that used one. 

But the display window was small, barely large enough to display even a small paragraph of text. And Motorola never extended the design. (Radio Shack/Tandy did, but that was too many years down the road.) (Oh, well, actually, Motorola did do some design work to extend the 6847 design, a couple of years after they should have, and in the process of trying to play catch-up, the design ended up overkill, too expensive, and too hard to design for and to test. I'll have to try to remember to link something about that here, next time I see the relevant pages out there on the web somewhere.)

  |12345678901234567890123456789012|
  +--------------------------------+
 1| HOW SMALL WAS THE DISPLAY      |
 2|WINDOW ON 6847-BASED DESIGNS?   | 
 3|THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH WOULD NOT   |
 4|FIT IN A SINGLE SCREEN. AND THIS|
 5|PARAGRAPH ALONE WOULD TAKE      |
 6|ALMOST HALF THE SCREEN.         |
 8|                                |
 9| THE SCREEN SHOWED EXACTLY 512  |
10|8-BIT CHARACTERS. THAT'S 16     |
11|LINES, EACH 32 CHARACTERS WIDE. |
12|THE ASPECT RATIO WAS BETTER THAN|
13|WHAT YOU SEE HERE, SINCE THE 32 |
14|CHARACTER WIDTH SPREAD ACROSS   |
15|MOST OF THE TV SCREEN, GIVING   |
16|CLOSE TO 4:3 WIDTH-TO-HEIGHT.   |
  +--------------------------------+
  |12345678901234567890123456789012|

That's a tight screen. 

And lower-case characters were not available in most 6847 designs until about 1985, unless the design included an external character ROM, or unless you switched to graphics mode and wrote all the bits for each character to the screen yourself.

The 6847 was great in 1979 or even 1981. Not so great in 1985.

This is really what I mean by flaws and hitting walls. Motorola could have extended each of these, so that the walls could be easily gotten past by the time the average user was hitting them. 

Wait. If you are familiar with the 68HC- and later series processors, you are saying, but Motorola did exactly that.

Well, yes and no. Except for the 6805 series, Motorola was always on the trailing edge of the market window. They were too slow in extending the designs. And when the entire industry took a hard right turn and ran off into the weeds on the question of where to store parameters, Motorola just ended up following, in spite of the fact that the designs of the 6809 and 68000 were such that it didn't need to happen.

Which is where I want to focus on in my attempts to redesign these.

6805:

The original 6805 could only use the hardware stack to keep return addresses. If you wanted a parameter stack, you had to do that as a software stack, and that meant juggling the software stack pointer with whatever you might have in the X register. Used time and code, and required you to be really careful about interrupts.

So I want to give the 6805 an additional stack, moving the return address stack out of the direct page (the first 256 addresses) and replacing it there with the parameter stack.

Motorola sort-of fixed this in upgrades to the 6805, the 146805 series and the 68HC05 and 68HC08 series and beyond, but what they did was just allow parameters and temporaries to be mixed with return addresses on the return stack, which is exactly where the entire industry veered hard right. It's a dangerous practice. (You can easily end up trying to store return values on top of return addresses and trying to return to data instead of code, and this is exactly one of the easiest places for bad actors to hack their unauthorized way into your system.) And it ends up a bottle-neck in code, since the code has to continually tip-toe around the return address.

Other obvious extensions -- 

Extending the X register, as is done in the 68HC08, is useful, but not the first lack I'd address. 

Also, adding the ability to index off the stack pointer, as is done on the 68HCS08, is very useful, but I'd do that to the parameter stack, which means the parameter stack comes first.

6801:

The 6801 inherited its pushes, pops, and so forth from the 6800, with which it is object-code compatible, which means a single mixed stack unless you want to synthesize a software stack. Being able to push the X register on the return stack helped a little when using software stacks, but it really needs a separate parameter stack as well.

In addition, the 6801 has an add B to X (ABX) instruction which is sort-of useful for accessing fields in records and such, and for deallocating large stack frames, but it doesn't have the matching subtract B from X (SBX), which would have been useful for allocating stack frames.

Furthermore, the unary instructions on the 6801 (like the 6800) do not have direct-page address mode opcodes. If you want to increment or decrement a counter in the direct page, you have to settle for using extended (or absolute) mode, which takes six cycles instead of four, so you end up preferring to pull counters into X or an accumulator instead of fully utilizing the instruction set.

These are the three flaws in the 6801 that I want to fix. They are not even addressed in the 68HC11.

Giving the 6801 wider addressing is definitely a useful feature. This is addressed in the 68HC16, and I think I might address it in my upgrade to the 6801, but, where the 68HC16 gets only four extra bits of indexing (for each of its index registers) and four bits to extend the extended (absolute mode), I'd tend to add an eight-bit extension register for the X register and for the extended addressing mode. I'm not sure whether I'd add eight bits to either stack register, since it doesn't seem too unreasonable to keep both stacks within the first 64K of address space.

 

6809:

The 6809 has direct-mode unaries and two stacks. It's almost perfect. But it has a funny omission in the indexed-mode addressing modes. Where it is able to use an indexed mode to do memory indirect addressing on extended (absolute) mode addresses, there is no such indexed mode for the direct page. That means that indirection through pointers saved in the direct page must be done by explicitly loading the variable into a precious index register. It also means that taking the address of a direct-page variable can't be done with just a LEA instruction. You have to use three instructions, to bring the DP register into the A accumulator, move the offset into the direct page into the B register, and use LEAX D,X or likewise the Y index. 

This severely limits the use of the direct page register as a base for per-process static variables, which is something you really want in processors as capable as the 6809.

I'd definitely widen addressing on the 6809 by 16 bits, either by 32-bit segment registers (similar to the 8086's segment registers, but done right from the outset) or by simply adding 16-bit extension registers similar to the 68HC16's four-bit extension registers. But that's less a design flaw and more an extension feature.

I could then create a true 16-bit version of the 6809 as a follow-up, but not the way it's done in Hitachi's unofficial 63C09 extensions. Those are rather haphazard, and ignore the design of the 6809, tending, rather, to make it look more like the 8086.

68000:

One flaw in the 68000 is in the exception stack frames. This is fixed in the 68010. 

But another flaw in the 68000 is that constant offsets in indexing are limited to 16 bits. This means that relative branches and module tables have a natural limit of plus/minus 32K addresses, which becomes too tight when modules exceed 32K in size. Getting around that requires using an address register, which is not completely bad, but it does tend to discourage good programming practices. This flaw is not addressed until the CPU32.

The flaw in the 68020 is excessive complexity, which is why I would not go that direction. Actually, the CPU32 might be sufficient, by which I mean I would not really need to do anything in particular about the 68000.

6847:

Extensions to the 6847 include gradually more capable versions. Sprites are not necessary for every application that wants 64 characters or more per line or 512 by 384 graphics modes, more colors, lower-case characters, etc.

Also, since I'd want to use these in modern devices, I'd want to add circuitry to directly control LCD or OLED displays.

Tools:

All of these need developer tools -- assemblers, compilers, debuggers, emulators, hardware design tools, and such. Tools also take money to develop.

Conclusion:

If I were making enough at my current job, and had the energy left over at the end of the day, I could work on my novels, or work on a 6805 emulator. I shouldn't really need to win the lottery to do that. If I had the energy. If I were making enough at my current job.

What I probably need to do instead of daydreaming about this kind of stuff is figure out how I can teach private English classes during my days off.

Examining Japanese Semantics: ゆるす (yurusu -- to permit or forgive) -- 日本語の意味を探る〜「ゆるす」(permit もしくは forgive)

Japanese has several words pronounced 「ゆるす」 (yurusu), and, together, they present an interesting take on the concept of forgiveness.
日本語には「ゆるす」と発音される語彙は複数あります。併せて考えれば、（英語の) forgiveness について面白く語るのです。

* The first set of semantics I offer, sometimes written with Kanji as 緩す、 means to loosen (transitive), as in loosening a pet's collar. It is of course related to 緩める (yurumeru), which is a more general word meaning to loosen.
最初に取り上げたい意味としては漢字では「緩す」とよく書かれるのです。これはペットの首輪のようなきついものを緩めるのようなことですね。「緩める」という方が一般的と思います。

* The second, which is the more generally referenced meaning, is usually written as 許す、 or sometimes as 聴す、 when using Kanji. The latter writing refers particularly to 聴く (きく - kiku)、 which means to listen carefully, as you might listen to the music in a performance, or to a defendant's testimony at trial.
その次に取り上げるのは漢字では「許す」もしくは「聴す」と書かれるのです。後者の字は特に注意深く聴くことに関連し、演奏の音楽や裁判の被告人の証言にじっくりと耳を向けることを参照するいみです。

In this set of semantics, ゆるす (許す or 聴す) means
この意味の場合の「ゆるす」（許す・聴す）の意味は次のようなものです。

• to hear, recognize, and accept a person's requests, desires, requirements, etc.,
  人の願いやら希望やら要求などを聴き、認めて良しとする、
• to adjust things or allow them to be adjusted so as not to inconvenience said person,
  不都合がないように物事をその人に併せるか、その人に合うようにしておく、
• to allow said person to do as he or she pleases or thinks, to give license or permission,
  その人の趣味通り、思い通りやっても良いように許可を与える、
• to put a captive at liberty,
  捕らえ人を開放させる、
  
• or to give a degree of freedom to. (This meaning can also be used in engineering and physics when talking about the degrees of freedom an element of a machine has an a particular axis.)
  自由度を与える。（この意味は工学や物理学に使用される意味です。特に、ある機械の一部がその機械の中で特定の軸に対しての自由度です。）

This is the semantic referenced in the word 許可 (きょか - kyoka)、 which is permission, often formal permission. For example, when I need to deliver mail to the huge apartment blocks around the train station, I must go to the police station and get a 駐車許可書 (ちゅうしゃきょかしょ - chūsha kyokasho) -- a parking permit.
つまり、許可そのものです。正式・公式許可も暗黙の許可です。例としてあげれば、駅周辺の大きいマンションに郵便配達に行く前に、警察署に行って仮駐車許可書 (temporary parking permit) をもらっておかないと行けないのです。

The key meaning here is that permission is given or recognized in advance.
「事前の許可」が決め手の意味です。

* The third set of semantics I offer is related to relaxing one's guard, to allow oneself to be set at ease, to open up.
三目のその意味合いは気をゆるす意味、警戒感・緊張感などを緩めることです。落ち溶けることも。

* The fourth is to extend recognition, including in some senses, recognition of value.
四つ目は、受け入れる、認める意味です。場合によってはものの価値を認めるのです。

* The fifth, usually written as 赦す、 generally refers to things which have already happened. The meaning here is to allow one to be forgiven of sins, mistakes, offenses, crimes, etc., which are in the past -- to agree not to seek revenge or further recompense or punishment.
５番目の意味合いは普通は「赦す」で表すのですが、できてしまっているもの、つまり、過去の出来事に対して言うのです。これの意味は過去にある罪、過ち、侵害、犯罪などを赦すのです。つまり、赦す時点よりはもう、報復、賠償（及び返礼）、処罰（または処置）などを求めるのをやめるように承知する。

* The sixth, also usually written as 赦す、 is the resolution, removal, or dismissal of existing responsibilities and/or duties, and the forgiveness of debt.
六番目も「赦す」と書き、既存の責任や義務を解除もしくは解消することも、負債も借金も借りも取り消すことです。

Speaking broadly, we can say that
一般的にまとめると、次の通りに説明できます。

• 許す has more to do with permission and license on an on-going basis,
  「許す」はこれから先（将来的に）許可や免除を与える意味ですが、
• where 赦す has more to do with forgiving things that have been done and putting them in the past.
  「赦す」とは過去に在ったものを、終わっているものとし、赦して、これ以上の償いを求めないことです。

I'll note here, that English has parallels in common usage. Informal dialog often fails to distinguish between forgiving things which have happened in the past and giving permission for them to continue in the future.
ここに云っておくけど、英語の普通会話の言葉遣いにすると、似た作用があります。一般的に喋っていると過去に在ったものを赦すことと、諸らいにできるかも知れないものを許すことの区別はしないのがよくあります。

Sometimes, the distinction is not necessary. Every now and then, the ambiguity can defuse a dangerous situation.
場合によっては区別しなくてもいいです。稀にその曖昧性で緊急な危険状況を和らげることもあります。

But making a habit of allowing serious abuse in the name of forgiveness really is not forgiveness at all, even if there seems to be a similarity. There is nothing redemptive in doing so.
但し、赦しを唱えて、習慣的に虐待や不当扱いを良しとするのが、赦しに見えても全く赦しではありません。贖罪と関係ありません。

It's a false similarity. (And I suppose, having said this much, I should write further on how such permission to do evil is actually the opposite of forgiveness, but I'm out of time tonight.)
偽類似です。（ここまでこの話を進めれば、悪を行うようことを良しとするのが赦しの真反対になることを説くべきですが、今晩にしては時間がゆるしません。）

(Erm, actually, last night. Translation took until this morning, and I am really out of time, now. ええっ、実は昨晩でした。訳すのを今朝にかけておわり、今はもう、本当に時間がゆるしません。 I did get some sleep, though. と言ってもある程度の睡眠ができまして、ご心配不要。)

Link to Government Report on Lack of Scientific Standards in Government Reporting

Want to put an unedited link to this for reference.

I mean, I'm not surprised, but I am surprised. And I'm sure this is going to get "explained", and swept under the rug. This is a government organization reporting on the lack of scientific standards in reporting from government organizations:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-104613.pdf

One of the reasons I'm not surprised is that scientific standards are a lot harder than most people who bandy the phrase about seem to think. (Not really any easier to pin down than "religious standards".)

 

Beauty Is Only Skin Deep

There's a rather ironic saying in the southern states of the USA --

Beauty is only skin deep.

Ugly is to the bone.

What you have to recognize when you hear someone say this is that they are presenting a partition they have heard: 

Divide this world into beauty and ugly.

That's it. Nothing else. 

It's the partition of the advertising world. 

And those who say this saying are implicitly rejecting what the advertising world calls beauty.

The beauty used in this world to sell stuff, the beauty that goes on with cosmetics or with personal training or whatever, that's only skin deep.

If that's what beauty is, maybe it's interesting for a little while, but it's not what they want. It's not what we really want.

Maybe I was up too late when I originally posted this to a Facebook group, but I've had plenty of sleep since then. It's still meaningful.

Watch what you buy and what you believe.

True beauty is what the salescrew calls ugly, because they can't make a profit on it.

Are You Meeting with Acephobia? Do People Say You Must Be Asexual? Unemotional?

(This is for people who get questioned over their lack of interest in sex.)

Don't ever believe that you don't have human emotions. Whoever tells you that is either lying for their own power or gain, or trying to use metalanguage you don't use to say something else. 

You can hope for their sake it's the latter, but that's not your problem. Just don't believe them.

The whole social conversation about sex is so skewed that you really can't tell what people are trying to say any more. People claim to be gay or lesbian or even bi-sexual, and yet they claim not to be practicing -- not sexually active. 

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but how can they know if they even have preferences if they don't? It's like saying you prefer the 68000 over the 80x86 (microprocessors) when you've never programmed either. Or like saying you prefer caviar to foie gras when you can't afford either. 

(Okay, the expensive food analogy reveals something about me that some might call bias. Cancel that. Even the CPU analogy will meet criticism, unless you understand that, in my opinion, low-level computer programming is a hobby everyone should try. Hmm. Every analogy I can think of falls a bit short.)

So some people claim to affiliate with the cause of the LGBQT community as a matter of principle more than practice. 

There are other people who claim to be defending the rights of the homosexually inclined, but they themselves are practicing bi-sexual. What do they mean?

Machiavelli and de Sade were not the first, nor were they the last, to assign far more meaning, and less, to sex and gender than can be justified.

It can be sort of understandable sometimes. For too many people, the hormonal flux is the only thing they've experienced that makes them feel good about either themselves or life. Maybe nobody ever hugged them except to try to force them to feel better. Or maybe words of praise were always attached to conditions. Or some other such. So many ways we pervert natural affection.So many ways we pervert love.

There are many ways to express human affection, so many colors. I think that affection which is dependent on gender, on rank in society, on social affiliation, on family connection, or on similar external stuff tends to be tinged with gray. 

Affection of vibrant colors and tints will be born of caring about the other person as a person, not as a member of some artificial group.

Anyway, human emotion has lots of colors. Lots more colors than human sexuality, even.

(And the rainbow flag is now often being used to mute those, even. If you wave it, please be careful not to use it to mute others' colors.)

(Originally published in my talk-about-sex blog: https://joel-rees-about-sex.blogspot.com/2022/02/are-you-meeting-acephobia-do-people-say.html.)

 

何か発生すると、削除！

------（２週間前）------

ライン共　　　しっかりしろよ

「何かが発生すると、削除！」

と言う安全性への姿勢（セキュリティポリシー）は安定でも安全でもセキュアでも何でもないやんか

だから、ラインペイポイントなど、なんかの価値がないに等しいと思うしかない。

（ごめん）

ラインのグループが連絡網でした。友達のリストを作り直す暇がない。それがなくなると一番困る。

組と相手の情報を継続できるまでやってくれへんだからこそ、ラインに金なんか任されへん。

わかるかな？

------

というのは、乗っ取られたと言われて、ラインのアカウントが自動的に削除されたようです。乗っ取られたようなことあるはずはなかったけど。

（ああ、明日予定のビショップとの面接はライン上できません。 Zoom でやるしかないかな。直ぐに eメールしないといけない、な。）

------（数日後）------

面接は Zoom上できました。

一応、ラインに連絡して、返事を待っていました。

ラインに依存したくないな。まだ使い続けるほど信頼するかどうか決められません。

------（結局）------

屈服

教会との連絡はラインがなければ難しい、とのこと。

また、ライン（適当な侮辱こちらに想像して）らはアカウントの意味がなんとなくわからないようで、全部のアカウント情報を削除（だけど本当は中途半端なの削除）してから登録し直しました。それ以外の手がわからなかった。

（苦笑） 

削除のボタンを押してから、バックアップの手順がどこかに秘めているようなメッセージが届いた。はっ。削除のボタンを押してからだった、な。

（そう、よ。中途半端。妙に残っている。タブレットの前の電話番号を現在もらっている電話会社の客さんがもしかして、その妙に残っているような情報が見えるかな？）

原因の説明と成り立て：

1. 以前にタブレットに電話モデムのSIMカードを有効にしていてそのタブレットにラインのアプリ入れてライン連絡ように使っていました。
2. タブレットの契約を安くするために、電話そのものは違う電話会社の貝殻携帯で続けていた。 
3. その後、タブレットがパンパンなって、ラインは使えなくなって、スマホン買った。そして、ラインをタブレットから削除してスマホに移動させた。
4. （タブレットの（電話にならない）電話番号の情報がラインのアカウントに残ってたようです。）
5. 去年の秋頃その毎月払っていた３千円がもったいなく、シムの登録をその電話会社に返納しました。（関連情報を削除する必要があるということがわからなく、そんなあるはずとは期待もしませんまま。）
6.  数カ月後、その電話番号が誰か、違う人に使用されることになって、その方は矢張りラインに登録しました。
7. ラインがその登録を「怪しい！」と判定し、予告も容赦もなくイキナリボクのスマホの登録までさえ、取り消してくれました。セキュリティです、と。 

あのね。ライン共よ。デザイン上の DOS という意味がわかりません？ Denial Of Service. 提供される供給を客さんの依頼無く切断。ネットの悪奴らがマルウェアを利用してやるようなことを、このサービスを提供する御社がわざわざやってくれています。

だから、情報がパ、と、文句を言わしてもらいます。

さて。家の娘に頼んで家族のライングループに招待してもらって、家族に回復。

だけど、職場や教会は対面しないと回復できません。

ああ、それは理由がある。以前に参加していたグループを検索するに、ライン社は年齢確認を要求する。…

その年齢確認はね、携帯電話の受話器のパスワードを（courgh）ラインのアプリが出してくれている画面に（...）入力しないと行けないのです。

つまり、ライン社のアプリにそのパスワードを任せるのです。

預けるのです。

良い、ね。いいね。ライン社を信頼してるよね。

not.

というわけで、ラインでの連絡ができなくなった私の友達、ごめんけど、顔と顔を合わせることができるところまで、FBでも携帯電話でも、eメールでもお願いします。（Twitterはそれほど使っていないけどツイッターでも。）ラインはしばらく、ごめんください。

------

（友達の観察ボット GIFへの返事： ）

Probably not inappropriate, but I still don't like typing my password for one service and tool into a dialog offered by another service and company that I have discovered I have reason not to trust.

I know, I know, we have nothing to protect and no way to protect it anyway, but you have to set limits and this is one of the places I choose to set mine. 

（和訳）不適切でもないかも。ただ、一つの供給サービスのパスワードを信頼できないとわかってきている別の供給会社のアプリが差し出してくれるダイアログに打ち込むのが兎に角、ためらうもの。 

まさにわかっている。何ひとつも守るべきものもないし、たとえあったとしても守る手段もない。保護できない。だが、線をどこかに引かなあかん。こいところにボクが線を引くことにしています。

More Driving in Japan, and Some about Why I Live Here

Here's an intersection I regularly pass through, looking north. I passed through it on my bicycle today and thought, well, I drive through lots worse than this every day. Let's take a picture and post it. (If I were driving, I'd be on the left side of the road, not the right side where this picture was taken from.) It's a little weird, but not so weird here.

Unless you're looking really closely, it looks like a psi (Ψ) intersection. 

But hidden over on the left is another road:

This is looking west.

Here's what it looks like across the intersection, looking south.

Here's a rough diagram of the intersection:

 

(You may note that it looks something like the intersection where I got ticketed several months back. Not really, but sort of. 

On that one, the crossing roads are offset from each other, and there is a crosswalk between with a light, and, in spite of the shape of the roads, the main road goes straight instead of curving to the left. And there is the major intersection to the west that often becomes the locus of traffic snarls. Maybe I should draw a diagram of it and insert it in that post. Not today. I have other things I think I need to do.)

No, this is not a "LOOK HOW TERRIBLE JAPANESE ROADS ARE!!!" post. If I wanted to do that, this is not the poster child intersection I'd use, by far. And that is not what I want to say, so I'm not going to take the time to run out to where I work and take pictures of the three or four or five locations that I think are most dangerous on my daily mail route. Be aware that, compared to those, this intersection is no problems at all.

What I want to say is, well, it's going to take me a few paragraphs, please bear with me.

When I first came back to Japan with my wife, I thought I was a pretty decent driver. Not that I thought I was equal to the roads and traffic in Osaka, but I thought I was pretty good at it. Two years driving as a job in the States in addition to what, fifteen, sixteen years of regular daily driving? You know, pride.

I knocked around for a couple or three months looking for work, then friends at church gave me some of their private English students they didn't have enough time to teach. But that was out in the country, and I was teaching in their homes, so I had to drive.

So I went and got a Japanese license. 

At the time, all I had to do was go to the local Japan Automobile Federation office and get my existing Stateside license translated, then take the translation to the nearest office of the Hyōgo Prefectural Police that handled new drivers' license applications for foreigners -- the police office in Akashi. 

About four months later, they changed the law, and I'd have had to take the written test. I think that would have been okay, I had looked over the materials, and I was pretty sure I could pass the written test with a high enough score. Probably. But I would have had to study for a couple of weeks first, and I might have not passed on the first try.

Nowadays, they also require a skills test (driving test). That probably would have been okay, too. Maybe not on the first try, though. Probably would have taken me a couple more weeks, which might have been long enough to have missed the opportunity to take over teaching those classes.

Technically, they don't require attendance at a driving school in Japan, even for true first-timers. But they strongly recommend it for those with no driving experience, and it can be difficult navigating through the application process if you don't have a school to prepare your paperwork for you -- even for those born and raised here. At least, that was how it was. 

I should check if it still is.

Yes, it still is, as of the date I am writing this. You can skip the school if you can pass the tests, even if you were born and raised here. JAF even has web pages detailing two ways to do it. But it is not easy.

Am I glad I didn't have to do any of that?

Yes. I even consider it a blessing that I was able to avoid the tests. I didn't have time or money to fail either test, much less attend a driving school in Japan.

(A blessing, you say? Wasn't it just a matter of timing and chance?)

Well, when my job search Stateside wasn't going well after graduation and my wife said, let's go to Japan, you can always teach English, I -- 

I don't know how to describe this. It was more than a hunch to me, but agnostics and skeptics would see no reason to call it anything but a hunch.

I knew better than to move to Japan, you see. 

I had spent two years in Japan as a missionary. I knew how different the language and customs are here.

And I understood the difficulties a primary breadwinner would have in a foreign country, living with unfamiliar customs, trying to learn a foreign language for real use -- not just to pass a college exam. That is, I had some idea of just how bad it could be.

I have, at some points, compared it to going back to kindergarten and having to do all that again. 

You get a lot of "You should understand this, with your experience." Then, when the language and the hidden assumptions have you doing what they think is the exact wrong thing, and you don't have the words to explain in their language why it's actually the right thing, they start treating you like a kindergartener. And then some of your coworkers start treating you like deadwood and trying to get rid of you. 

I'm not going to tell you just how bad it got with a couple of the companies I worked for when I was determined not to give up, but it got bad enough to sour me on both software engineering and teaching English.

And I had some idea of how bad it could be from experience. I grew up in west Texas, and some of my friends' parents were from the other side of the border. I saw what they experienced. We do the same things to foreigners in the States, even though we have a lot more experience with the melting pot, and we know we should not.

Coming here was completely illogical. Completely against reason. Completely inadvisable.

But I knew I should come with her and I knew it was then, no waiting. 

The license was not the only reason, but it's the only reason I'll bring up here today.

Call it a hunch. Call it guidance. Call it inspiration. Call it revelation. Call it crazy.

It was crazy. Crazy according to the wisdom of man.

No, I do not recommend cross-cultural marriage. Talk to me privately, and I can tell you all sorts of reasons not to do it. 

But God's wisdom surpasses that of mortal man. -- Name those verses? Isaiah 55 and Doctrine and Covenants 1, just off the top of my head. -- I apparently needed this struggle, or something like it. I apparently still need it. Talk to me privately, and I can tell you something about that, too.

Back to driving in Japan, there are all sorts of things that are just different from wherever you learned to drive, unless you learned here. Driving on the left is not even the beginning of it. (Use your horn to say, "Thanks"?)

Those first two years, when I was driving around to teach English, I really was not driving wrong -- or it wouldn't have been wrong in (most of) the US. But I was lucky. No, I had angels watching over me, to keep me from doing myself and others harm by what I didn't understand. 

No, I'm not talking about the time I went on the off ramp and found myself facing traffic. 

Well, I had protection that time, too, and the mistake was partly a result of not being familiar with the roads enough to recognize I was reverting to the US side of the road before I actually made it onto the highway. So I guess I'm talking about that time, too.

But driving for the Post Office these last two years has given me an appreciation for all sorts of little things that work here to make driving here safer and an overall better experience for everyone, many of which would simply not work in the US.

Each country has it's own road rules. 

If I had had a chance, had the time and money, I think I would have liked to have gotten my license here the way my wife did -- take a month to go to driving school and take the practice tests, both driving and written. If I had the time and money now, it would be nice to go back for the equivalent of a commercial license, although I really do not want to drive 20 ton trucks for a living here. It would be a chance to learn more of the language, both verbal/written and non-verbal/non-written, and it would help me figure out better what to do when I get in awkward situations.

On the other hand, constant awareness that I should avoid awkward situations is not a bad strategy at my age, either. 

And, back again to Pharisees and the habits we humans tend to have of depending too much on rules, life is full of stuff where we don't have time or other resources to take the path that appears most optimal. 

We shouldn't deliberately make things harder on each other by choosing less optimal paths when we have a choice, but when the most optimal path is not available, it's better to take a path that is available.

And (as my wife says, I always say one thing too many) this, by the way, is the difference between "The perfect is the enemy of the good." and "Human ideals are no match for the wisdom of God."

ベランダから、日の暮れにお月さまと金星さま The Moon and Venus from the Veranda at Sunset

妻の提案、 sunset （日本語で何だった？忘れた、太陽の暮れるところ。調べたら出てくるやろう。調べたくない。ああ、）夕焼け、日没時の写真。

 左上の隅、物干し台の上に微かに見える月さま。拡大すると三日月だとわかる。携帯は矢張り、星等がきれいに映らへん。

 

外に出て、月の左上にまた星が見える。（調べたらわかるだろう。調べたくあらへん。）美星ではなく、金星だそうです。Venus. 美星にはなっているはずではない？だって、美の女神だっただろう？愛美神？さあ。

拡大するとぶれて、丸には見えへん。

正に、皆様のブラウザーの負担にならないように、縮小して投稿しています。元の解像度でも一緒。しかたない。ぶれたからです。

明日もまた郵便配達。

 

[JMR202111091947 -- in English, by request --

Google Translate (LOL):

My wife's suggestion, sunset (What was it in Japanese? I forgot, where the sun goes down. I'll come out when I look it up. I don't want to look it up. Oh) A photo of the sunset and sunset.

The moon is faintly visible on the clothesline in the upper left corner. If you expand it, you can see that it is a crescent moon. The mobile phone does not show the arrows, stars, etc. beautifully.   

-----------------

Go outside and see another star in the upper left corner of the moon. (If you look it up, you'll know. I don't want to look it up.) It's not Venus, but Venus. Venus. Shouldn't it be a beautiful star? Because it was the goddess of beauty, right? Aimi God? here we go.

When enlarged, it blurs and does not look like a circle.

-----------------

I'm posting it in a reduced size so as not to burden your browser. Same with the original resolution. it can not be helped. Because it was shaken.

Mail delivery again tomorrow.

 

============

What I (think I) said:

At my wife's suggestion, sunset. (What is that in Japanese? The sun going down. I forget. It should be easy to look up, but I don't want to. Ah, yeah,) 夕焼け (ゆうやけ yū-yake == sunset sky)、日没(にちぼつ nichi-botsu == setting sun -- A photo of the sky painted colors by the setting sun.

The moon is barely visible in the upper left corner, above the laundry rack. If you enlarge the photo, you can see that it is a crescent moon. My phone doesn't take good pictures of the stars, no surprise there.

Going outside, there's another star visible above and to the left of the moon. I'm sure I could find it if I look it up. Don't want to look it up.) Venus. Not 美星 (びせい bisei == beautiful star), 金星 (きんせい kinsei == Venus). Shouldn't it be the beautiful star? She was the goddess of beauty, wasn't she? 愛 (あい ai == love) 美 (び bi == beauty) 神 (じん jin == god) Goddess of love and beauty? Well, ...

If you enlarge it, it's blurred and does not look round.

I'm posting these in reduced resolution so they don't load your browser down too much, but it's the same in full resolution -- blurred. No help for it.

Back to delivering the mail tomorrow.

]

Moving Violation in Japan -- No Left Turn

 Got a ticket for a moving violation while I was out delivering mail a few days back. Here's the controlled crosswalk just before where it happened:

DANGER! DANGER!

I tried pull out the color in the traffic light with GIMP, but there was just too much ambient light for the cellphone camera to pick it out in the original image. The traffic light doesn't really have anything to do with it, anyway.

If you look carefully, there are two roads going left ahead of me here. 

(There's also one more road going right, just beyond the crosswalk, but it isn't relevant to what happened.

Also, I took this picture from the sidewalk, not the microvan I drive. You can see my empty box on its side there on the walk in front of the tree in the image above. 

The traffic officer, by the way, is standing behind the trees so I can take the picture, or perhaps around the corner on the left.)

Here's the first of the roads to the left:

Too tight to park.

This is from the other side of the crosswalk, and now you can plainly see it. The second to the left is a bit more visible on the other side of the trees. Again, the officer is standing either behind the trees or around the corner, to leave me free to take the picture.

This first road to the left is fully legal to turn on. If I were one of the motorbike crew, I'd turn left here and park right in front of the front entrance of that apartment building on the left, where I deliver between twenty and a hundred fifty pieces of mail each day. But I drive a microvan, and it'd block traffic even if I parked half on the sidewalk.

So, like a good driver, I haven't been parking there. I've been going to the next road and turning in, which means I have to walk about forty meters. But I can avoid blocking traffic. 

All good, right?

If you look carefully about the center of the above image, you'll notice a blot of blue. Here's what that blot of blue is:

What is that spot of blue?

I've been missing that sign, almost every day since they gave me this route. (Sometimes I come from the other direction, depending on what I'm  carrying. In that case, this sign doesn't matter.) 

Again, these pictures are from the sidewalk. (I'm not going to take pictures as I drive past. Playing with a camera while you drive is dangerous.) This sign is going to be more visible from the driver's seat of a vehicle. 

Not seeing and paying attention to signs like this in Japan is a no-no.

Here's where I've been turning in to park and deliver the mail, the street the white truck is about to pass, that seems to have the entrance slanting in on the left:

Go straight, young man!

If I took more pictures I could show that there are no one-way signs. This is not a one-way street coming out or anything, so turning left won't have you going the wrong way on the street. If you don't notice that sign, you're thinking that intersection is built for turning left into, right?

Well, that's what I have been thinking for the last six months or so. (My failing to obey that sign was probably part of the reason the officers were there.)

The traffic officer is standing out of the picture here, again, for me. Friendly, but firm. She even pointed up to the sign as I drove past her (about twenty minutes before I took this picture), so I would have a chance to see the sign and change my mind about turning. And not get ticketed.

If an officer is trying to tell you something, try to figure it out as fast as you can.

Here's a close-up of the sign:

Yes, that means you.
No Left Turn!

Straight arrow with no turning arrows means, "Go straight."

"Do not pass Go. Do not collect ..." No, that's a different game.

The kanji beneath it say, 「自動車・原付」 -- "JIDŌSHA/GENZUKI".

That's "AUTOMOBILES and MOTORIZED BIKES" (essentially, all motorized vehicles). 

(How you Latinize/Romanize 「原付」 is a bit subject to vagueries -- By consonant column, the second character is read in the D column, so it would be "GENDUKI" or "GENDZUKI", but the hard D goes away when you read it out loud, so it's usually Romanized as I did above, without the D.)

So. No turns. There's no road to the right at this point anyway, so it means no left turn.

Even though the street is not one-way. Even with the street built the way it is.

Yeah, the sign's a little hidden in the trees. But I've been driving past that sign every day. I've even been walking beneath it going and coming every time I park back there.

Somehow, maybe because of the construction of the road, I've just not been seeing that sign -- or maybe not been paying attention to it or not thinking that it must mean me, too.

Well, so I have to go pay a JPY 7000 fine today. Don't have to appear in court if I pay the fine. (Would I try to contest it? More below.) Just drop by a Post Office or Bank and they can transfer the money for me.

Oh. And I'm two points down for a few months. Gotta be extra careful now.

No. Points or no points. I can't afford the USD $70 equivalent any more than I can afford points. I've gotta be more careful, period.

(Oh, and, in addition to the fine, the Post Office (my employer) requires me to write a little 「始末書」 -- "shimatsu-sho"  => "take-care-of-it-note" -- a semi-formal hand-written note (in Japanese) that briefly explains that I got the ticket, that I understand why, and that I'm committed to not making the same mistake again. Unfortunately, the 始末書 will have an effect on my bonus, as well. Part of the reason I'm writing this is to help me figure out what to write in that note. Brief. Not detailed like this post at all.)

I got lucky a little later that day, and had to stop for the crosswalk signal coming from the opposite direction, right in front of the intersection in question. There was just enough time to pull out my cell phone, flick the camera on, and get this without taking the picture while I was actually moving:

Right turn okay, but watch out for pedestrians and bicycles.

(Yeah, I know. Taking pictures while stopped at a light is not something to get in the habit of doing, either.)

If you're seeing it like I've been seeing it for the past six months, there doesn't seem to be any hint of a reason for unusual controls on the intersection. It's nice and wide, and even wider coming in from the direction I had usually been coming in from.

Again, if I took more pictures, I could show that there is no sign controlling turns when traveling in the direction I was traveling when the crosswalk signal stopped me and I took this picture. Right turns in from this direction are perfectly fine, as long as you properly yield to pedestrians and bicycle riders.

Bicycle riders --

If you notice, even though I've blurred out the faces and other identifying details, there are four young school-age guys riding bikes in this picture.

This intersection is on a piece of road between an academic/shopping/light industry center and a major shopping center. Both are several hundred meters away, but the foot and bicycle traffic are both pretty heavy here. I've even had the presence of mind to think there should be more controls on the intersection because of the foot and bicycle traffic. 

But I guess I was thinking of traffic lights, not no-turn-left signs.

Upshot? Moral? Lesson?

A year and a half ago, when I started this job, I hadn't driven regularly for some ten years or so. Just making sure I didn't do anything overtly dangerous while I was getting the mail out was pushing my limits. Luckily, I didn't have too many of these more obscure kinds of traffic control situations to deal with back then. 

I've had a lot of help from co-workers and management on this job (and God), or I wouldn't have made it through the first year without getting a lot of tickets like this.

Now I've got to look harder for those blue signs while I'm driving, and be more careful to read and understand them. And watch and learn more about the less-obvious road conditions.

Either that or get my block-buster (cough) novel finished and make scads of money (cough) on my writing so I don't have to work this job to pay rent and put food on the table.

Sigh.

Better focus on understanding those road signs more better. Uhm, more carefully. Better.

(English is my native tongue. Really. Or maybe Texan.)