Ran into Yoshi and Ka-kun at an Indian restaurant. Who said Tokyo was a big annonymous city?
〓Tracey〓

Thanks to Kristen, my office is now clean and organised. Also thanks to Tod for setting up our WiFi network.
〓Tracey〓

In chinese restaurant - Kabukicho.
〓Tracey〓

〓Tracey〓

Yesterday, a session of the French senate was interrupted when a young man suddenly jumped from the public balconies, onto the actual senate floor, wearing but a thong, adorned with the colors of the French flag.

This [somewhat prudish] streaker managed to briefly voice his position on an upcoming national referendum, before being manhandled to the door. For added visibility, said position (a very unequivocal “NON” to the adoption of a European-wide constitution) was written all over his body, including his bare buttocks.

The man got out with only a few bruises (it’s a good 10 feet drop), a stern warning from the authorities and a newfound popularity on the evening-show circuit. Quite a good deal, if you consider how many bullets the coroner would currently be extracting from his corpse, had he tried a similar trick in the US.

Yuki recently blogged her experiments with FaceAnalyzer.com. It sounded fun, I decided to go see for myself.

FaceAnalyzer is a website that claims to be able to give you, from a mere picture, an automated breakdown of your “race” (which, may I remind you people, in the case of humans, is mostly a social construct, with hardly any ground in biology), along with an estimate of your “Intelligence”, “Ambition”, “Risk” (whatever the hell that may be), “Gay Factor”… complete with, I kid you not: Income bracket…

Now I know what you think: quite a bit of pseudoscience, mixed in with a whole lot of outright quackiness…

Only one way to know, right?

Upon submitting a fairly broad sample of my likeness, in various states of drug-induced haze, hair color and cheekiness, the results were rather mitigated:
While I can certainly accept the possibility that I may have a fair share of East-Indian or Chinese blood in me (please no “ever had some [insert ethnicity] in you?” joke here), I find it a bit harder to accept that I’d be a woman (as the system insisted on pointing out, in every single case)… Although that would explain a certain fascination for lace undergarments and a secret passion for knitting I always attributed to my deviant morals… But in that case, wouldn’t all the lesbian action give me a “Gay Factor” at least somewhat above average?

Obviously not very conclusive. But science makes mistakes… One should not draw hasty conclusions and bluntly discard such breakthrough technology as “money-making snake’s oil scheme” without at least a second chance…

So I bravely submitted a picture of my brother’s cat, and I must say the results are troubling.

• Indeed, the cat is FEMALE! Most definitely has a good deal of middle-eastern ancestry, in fact, her lineage can probably be traced to every other urban slum of the Eurasian continent, with the odd pedigreed tomcat here and there…
• Frankly not sure about that “Low Promiscuity” rate: I mean, before she got spayed, the girl could be quite a little trollop around the neighbourhood.
• It is a bit disappointing that she only displays “Average” ambition, but I guess we will have to find solace in the fact that she is destined to make at least $30,000 a year… not bad for a cat who doesn’t even have her high-school degree.

I’ll be contacting my brother shortly and urge him to stop wasting her talent on stupid things like chasing rats and rummaging around the neighbourhood: that cat has potential (Beta Academic potential!), she needs to be put to work!

By the way, physiognomy is not a new idea. It hasn’t been given the slightest bit of scientific credibility over the past 50 years, though.

As for how the website gets its “uncanny” success rate regarding geographical phenotypes: any first-year computer science student can get the same results with a big-enough sample database and some very low-grade face-matching algorithm. Any rating merely suggest a match with existing pictures of a certain ethnicity, which is well below the crease of scientific procedure, hence the wild margin of error. In fact a properly trained neural network would probably give vastly superior results on some criteria (such as gender, for example).

Needless to say that detection of personality traits such as “Gay Factor”, “Promiscuity” or even “Intelligence”, through face analysis, is complete and utter bullcrap. The last people with an academic background to have given it some sort of scientific credence ended up cracking capsules of cyanide in their mouth, approximately sixty years ago.

UltrBob and friends
〓Tracey〓

Eric Meyer (CSS God) and his fangirl!
〓Tracey〓

WordPress 1.5.1 is now officially released. If you are a WordPress user, you really ought to upgrade. This version fixes many of the bugs and shortcomings that were introduced with the botched release of WP 1.5. It takes seconds to upgrade from 1.5 (just overwrite everything in your blog directory except the wp-content directory). Shout out to all WordPress developers and contributors… Great job guys…

With this, I am glad to announce the official release of Spam Karma 2’s first public beta.

In fact, it is pretty much final-grade quality and could probably do without the “beta” label… I’m just a big fan of the greek alphabet.

Many of the lingering issues with the last alpha have been fixed, a few missing features have been added (it now supports curl for those whose host doesn’t allow url_fopen). Check out the dedicated page for details.

Now go and spread the word! there are still far too many clunky SK1.x in the wild out there…

Also, feel free to contribute to the newly-opened official Wiki page for SK2: your help is much appreciated!

Update: Ahem, it would appear I spoke a bit fast. There is a rather nasty bug in this update that can bork your RSS feed. I do recommend updating nonetheless (and follow instructions in the link above to fix the bug).

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Tokyo Tower: Perhaps the most prominent example of modern “Japanese Touch”… that incredible instinct to improve on old concepts and go just one step too far…

E.g.: take the Eiffel Tower, a concept with a somewhat proven viability… add 13 meters and drop it in the middle of Tokyo, so far so good… Then paint it a pattern of red and white stripes… You got the Japanese Touch…

I mean, I can so totally picture the Japanese construction engineer uncovering, at the time, the plan for the new and improved Eiffel Tokyo Tower: “And now, you see, ladies and gentleman, we have increased its visibility by 3200%… by turning it into a giant lollipop!”

Last week-end was the start of a string of holidays known as Golden Week in Japan. All the happy wage-slave masses left Tokyo for a week-long exodus to some exotic location. And because I was stupid enough not to pick Medieval German Poetry, Sociology or some equally bulshittable major, back in the days, I was stuck meditating and doing equations in my garden, fighting with the cats over the few sunbeams that could make it through Tokyo’s many layers of pollution…

Seeing no reason I’d be the only one having an awful time, I figured I would use some time on the side to bring you my thoughts on the heaviest and most uninviting topic possible: Sino-Japanese Relations Through the Twentieth Century to our Days.

Sounds fun, innit?

Actually, this is kind of a trendy topic these days.

To be fair, the “trendy” part is rather limited, and even more so, depending on which side of the Japanese Sea you live on. But around here, this was most definitely the talk of the month, in Japanese news and all over the English-speaking nipponoblogosphere… Hell, even this guy stopped staring at his dick long enough to write a reasonably thoughtful entry on the topic.
Another very interesting read is Michael Panda’s transcription of the incriminated textbooks (you need to scroll way down to the end).

I figured I would just add my own two yens, and if possible extend it past the perspective of personal-level anecdotes: not that they do not have their place in the debate, but there should be a little more to it than the usual “oh yea, here is what the few Japanese I know say about it”…

If you are looking for a fun and entertaining read to kill the next 20 minutes, this most definitely is not it…

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I posted a pic of this sign, a while back…

Trying hard not to laugh at the evocation of how this inscrutable piece of wisdom may have descended upon the guys who first wrote the sign (picturing the scene where a dirty gaijin tells the cashier he’ll be right back and gets the hell out).

My friend Hoi the breakbeat DJ at a Shibuya gig.
〓Tracey〓

Great food! Fun little Izakaya in Dogenzaka with the Rowburys and friends.
〓Tracey〓