Snowy scenes and more

OK, so let's talk about these photos.

In the mountains outside of Toyama, which is North West of Tokyo and on the Sea of Japan, there are the "historical villages of Gokayama", known for their old, thatched roof houses.  I think it fair to say most  people probably visit them in any season other than winter, and it seems you certainly won't be overrun with other tourists if you do go while they are covered in snow:  

In the smaller village we went to, there was a house set up as a small museum (second photo above), and it contained this example of old style "winter footwear".  I am curious as to how warm they might keep feet.  

Truth be told, I thought the effort put into the on site history stuff was pretty minimal, but it was interesting to learn that the local industry in these old settlements used to be silkworm raising (in the attics of the houses), and making saltpeter for use in guns.

 

I didn't go into the mini "saltpeter museum" house, but this is how it was made (and the process is very  different from what I would have guessed): 

Below the floorboards, around the irori sunken hearth, people would dig holes 2.7 meters deep, and fill them with soil, mugwort and other mountain plants, and silkworm waste. Over the following four years, this mixture would decay and undergo further processes, eventually becoming saltpeter. Saltpeter was then used as the main ingredient for gunpowder for rifles. 

I need to understand this better: 

Traditionally, one of the main industries in the Gokayama region was the production of
saltpeter (potassium nitrate) from the mineral niter, an essential ingredient in
gunpowder. The saltpeter industry operated for over 300 years during the rule of the
Kaga domain in Gokayama, growing exponentially after the introduction of European
matchlock guns in 1542. The production of saltpeter in the area was kept secret even
from the shogunate (the ruling military leadership of Japan) in order to strengthen the
defense of the Kaga domain, which bought up large amounts of saltpeter every year.
Gokayama was an ideal location for secret niter production as the area was isolated and
much of it remained unexplored.

 

Saltpeter was created in a hole up to 2 meters deep under the irori fireplaces of the
gassho-zukuri (steep thatched roof) houses of the Gokayama region. The hole was filled
with a mixture of materials including straw, soil, mugwort, and silkworm excrement,
then left to ferment for around five years. The irori fireplaces were used to keep the
materials warm during the fermentation process, and the materials in the hole were
mixed together once a year to expose them to air and to add in extra ingredients. Over
time, calcium nitrate formed in the soil through the nitrification of bacteria. To extract
potassium nitrate from the soil mixture, water and soil were mixed together, and the
water into which the calcium nitrate had dissolved was concentrated through heating.
Grass and wood ash were then added to the concentrate to remove impurities. The
potassium carbonate contained in the ash reacts with the calcium nitrate in the
concentrate to form potassium nitrate and calcium carbonate. The calcium carbonate
precipitates because it is insoluble in water. The liquid is then filtered, boiled down and
condensed, and then cooled to obtain coarse saltpeter crystals. The collected saltpeter
crystals were sold to the Kaga domain and delivered to their warehouse in Kanazawa. 

 

Man, that's complicated!  And who worked that process out??   The Wikipedia entry is very badly written, and doesn't explain it.   In fact, it's rather hard to get a single site that explains it clearly - this one notes that England got the manufacturing idea for it from a German engineer (who got paid by Elizabeth 1 for the process);  this site says China invented gunpowder, and Japan got the use of it in guns from the Portugeuse, but doesn't explain how the Japan learnt the method of in-ground fermentation for making saltpeter.  

 

Oh well, I digress.

 

Another nearby town had several guesthouses you could stay in, and as such, the place seemed a little more "lived in" than the first small village:  

 

 

It's all very, very pretty, of course.   I might add more photos later...

Back to Brisbane - and the hero of the journey

I got back last night from my travel to new (for me) parts of Japan (and an overnight stop in Taipei on the way back).

I will make a stupid triva post first.   

A few trips back, while in Singapore, I decided to do something other than putting dirty washing in flimsy plastic garbage bags and went to a cheap "dollar store" type place (in Katong) and bought this:

 

It folds flat when empty, has a zip at the top, stands up neatly in the corner when you start putting dirty clothes in it, and conveniently hides the contents from the hotel room cleaner or when you are walking to the laundry/laundromat.  (If its a laundry service, they are happy to put the clean clothes back into it.)

It cost, I think, $5, and it just stays in my main suitcase between trips, so it's never forgotten.

My wife thinks it's vaguely ridiculous that I am so greatly impressed by the improvement it has made to travelling, but I strongly recommend everyone acquire one.

I am happy to be sponsored on a Singapore trip to buy them for readers who take my advise and acquire this particular design of bag.  Please send me your interest...:)

 

Scenes from Japan

Tomorrow it's supposed to be 38 degrees in Brisbane. 😬

But where I am at the moment, as noted the last post, the days are not breaking 0. Some photos....

Quite a change in the weather

Forecast in my home city for the next 7 days:

 Forecast for a city in Japan in which I should be by Saturday (and this is still on Honshu: it's not even Hokkaido):

 😬

 

 

The algorithm wanted me to revisit this

Maybe if I look at my video viewing history I might get some idea as to why Youtube put this old video in my recommended list.  I have mentioned it here before, many years ago, and it remains the most magnificent celebrity cringe ever created: 

 

Oddly enough, in the shower last night it suddenly came to me that Shatner doing a spoken word, slowed down, version of They Might Be Giants first hit "Don't Let's Start" could be hilarious. I started hearing it in his voice in my mind: 

You are the cat, 

you are the phone,

you are an .... animal

The words I'm singing now

Mean nothing more than

meow?

to.... an animal

A ridiculous man in the most ridiculous presidency

I never thought I would be living in a period in which I can wake up every morning and wonder "Did the US invade a European ally overnight?"   

The appalling Republicans and Presidential excusers in Right wing media world would be beside themselves if a Democrat explicitly tied a threat of military aggression to not getting an award, like a cranky 5 or 6 year old.  But here we are:

Store confirmed Trump’s leaked message in a statement Monday. He said Trump was responding to a text that Store had sent on behalf of Norway and Finland, conveying opposition to U.S. tariffs against European nations rejecting a takeover of Greenland. “We pointed to the need to de-escalate and proposed a telephone conversation,” Store said.

The attempt to defuse tensions seems not to have worked. Trump’s reply came shortly after.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote in the text, which was first reported by PBS.

Store said he made his support for Greenland and Denmark clear, and that he has repeatedly explained to Trump that it is up to the Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government, to award the annual peace prize.

Then Bessent does he "no, don't listen to what my boss says, this is what he's really thinking" act:

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sought to reframe the narrative. “It’s a complete canard to think President Trump’s action on Greenland is due to” not receiving the Nobel Prize, he told reporters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

European retaliation, he added, would be “very unwise.”

 

Sounds like a rort

The latest in Trumpian weirdness:

President Trump’s “Board of Peace” is billing itself as a new international peacekeeping body — and permanent membership won’t come cheap.

Mr. Trump is inviting countries to join beyond a three-year term, if they’re willing to cough up more than a billion dollars in cash within the board’s first year, according to a draft of the board’s charter reviewed by The New York Times.

And while the board was conceived as part of Mr. Trump’s plan to oversee Gaza, there is no mention of Gaza in the charter. That omission added to speculation that the group may have a broader mandate to cover other conflicts and could even be aimed at creating a U.S.-dominated alternative to the United Nations Security Council. 

Yeah, the alternative that believes in forcing other sovereign countries to hand over huge swathes of land to the USA... 

Not that I care, but...

A self indulgent post here. 

I've noticed on some recent Googling for this blog just using "Opinion Dominion" that it now lists first the podcast called The Opinion Dominion that started in 2020 and is about this:  

Two old Linux/Unix/OpenSource guys talk about the past and future of *nix, Open Source and other Tech related things.  

They have put out 67 episodes, and while I can't tell for sure how much of a following they have, I note that a Youtube channel where they posted their first episodes has 18 subscribers.   Searching for any comment about the podcast anywhere, I'm not turning up anything.   Hence, I'm suspecting it's a hobby for two guys to make it, but I seriously doubt that they have much of a listening audience.  

(By the way there is also a The Opinion Dominion Youtube channel that was created in 2014 and has no content, at all.   It also has a completely inactive Twitter/X account.  Odd, hey?)  

Not long after they started, I actually tried to send a message to the podcast saying that people searching for them might get confused, as my blog has been around for a long time and comes up high on Google search, so maybe the name might be changed?   I didn't get a reply.

Anyhow, it's no great skin off my nose, as I don't worry about who reads this:  but it is interesting to check how the Google search algorithm treats me.

The answer:  not very well, given I now have to go to page three of the Google search results to find myself.  Even searching "Opinion Dominion blog" doesn't help, with the AI part sometimes still referring to the above podcast as a blog - which it definitely isn't.

AND BY THE WAY:      I know from professional experience that the Google/Gemini AI search answers to specific questions in my line of work are quite often specifically (and confidently) wrong.   I have had a client ring me to check something because of what they had seen in the AI search answer.   Perplexity, on the other hand, was perfectly correct when asked the same question, and I keep recommending it to people as the most accurate and check-able AI service I know.

Oddly enough, searching "Opinion Dominion" on Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo search engines brings my blog as the first answer and the podcast below me.   That's how things should be (ha!); but what I find peculiar is that Google search dropped me despite being a blog hosted on their own site (Blogspot), and as I noted in September last year, it seems this place has bursts of hits from bots and crawlers (half a million in a day!), perhaps related to training LLM's, but this hasn't helped at all in search rankings.

So, I just find this all pretty peculiar.  Maybe trying to go back to posting every day might help?  :)  

Meh, doesn't matter... 

  

  

The weight loss miracle drugs that you have to take forever?

I don't know, but I would have thought that a "miracle drug" for weight loss isn't that big a miracle if it has unpleasant side effects and you're likely to put the weight back on pretty quickly if you stop taking it.  From the New York Times:

Weight-loss drugs like Wegovy require a lifetime commitment. Stop taking them, and you’ll almost always gain back the weight you lost.

But many patients don’t want to hear that. Dr. Padmaja Akkireddy, an endocrinologist at Nebraska Medicine, estimated that more than half of her patients don’t want to stay on a weight-loss drug long term. And data shows that most Americans quit the drugs within a year of starting them.

Even Oprah Winfrey said that she stopped taking a weight-loss drug “cold turkey” for a year, then gained back 20 pounds. “I tried to beat the medication,” she told People magazine. It was then that she realized “It’s going to be a lifetime thing,” she told the magazine.

Many people have to stop taking the drugs because they can no longer afford them. Others grow tired of side effects like fatigue, nausea and constipation. Some just don’t want to rely on a drug forever. 

Medical authorities at the highest level have pushed that misconception. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for one, has said weight-loss drugs can allow people to “reset,” suggesting they are a temporary bridge, not a long-term tool.

But research has repeatedly shown that most people need to stay on the drugs to maintain weight loss or other health benefits. This month, the latest big study to demonstrate people regain weight showed that the average person who used weight-loss drugs returned to their starting weight around a year and a half after stopping them.

People who go off the medications typically follow a pattern: When the medication wears off, food cravings and appetite can surge back. And, as with any diet regimen, when people lose a lot of weight quickly, their metabolism slows down, raising the risk they will regain weight.  

Democrats and Greenland

There has been some gnashing of teeth on social media of polling that indicates that, despite mayhem in America, Democrat's favourability polling is quite low - lower than Republicans!:

 

But - surely that reflects dissatisfaction within Democrat voters with the loss of obvious and strong leadership in the party.  (It is really surprising that no one has risen from within Congress to be the obvious charismatic face of the party, above the current oldsters who feel worn out.)

So, what's more important is actual voting intention, and that looks better:

 

And polling on Greenland is not looking good at all:

WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Just 17% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's efforts to acquire Greenland, and substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans oppose using military force to annex the island, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

The two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, showed widespread concerns over Trump's threats to NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, which has been a Danish territory for centuries.

So, why don't the Democrats organise themselves to announce this:   "There is no point in Donald Trump forcing a takeover of Greenland militarily.   Such a step would be repulsive to the vast majority of the American public, and the world.   Democrats, on regaining power, would immediately repudiate it, and completely reverse the move.   So why waste your time even threatening it.  Act in accordance with the will of the American people and international law, and simply negotiate if you want additional bases or facilities on Greenland.  That has always been the sensible way to address any security concerns."   

 

Scott Adams meets his maker

I did a search on the side bar for my past posts on Scott Adams, who died today, and was surprised at the number that I had written about him, especially from around the time of his alt.right (as we used to call it) conversion.

I had earlier posts in which I noted enjoyment from, and interest in, some of his blog entries (the links to which are now dead - unlike this blog which will last until the heat death of the universe - provided enough readers contribute to the Opinion Dominion Foundation, which will be devoted to that task, as well as creating a robotic reincarnation of me that will continue tapping away on a keyboard.)   

But man, it's hard to think of another minor celebrity who seemed relatively likeable at first, but became so cringe-ily, casually offensive and so readily dislikeable.   It's funny how my posts of around 2016, when he was giving ridiculous assessments of Trump vs Clinton, speculate that perhaps it was all a giant troll:  that he was going to claim it was his outstanding powers of persuasion* that conned everyone into thinking he had gone all ga-ga for Trump.  Of course not, he would say.  Ha ha....ha.

But no, it was not to be.  And he just went on to become of more and more ludicrous opinion (and, basically, full of himself) as time went on.    Remember this?: 

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams made a fearful prediction about the 2020 presidential election on Twitter on Wednesday, telling his Republican followers that if Joe Biden is elected to the White House, “there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year.”

“Republicans will be hunted,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet, later adding, “Police will stand down.” 

Or his views with which you can imagine permanent race-baiter Elon Musk nodding quietly to:

Over the past week, the hugely successful cartoonist Scott Adams experienced a swift downfall over inflammatory remarks on his YouTube show. The artist referred to Black Americans as a “hate group” and suggested that white Americans should “get the hell away from Black people” and avoid helping them. In response, his “Dilbert” comic was canceled by nearly every newspaper that carried it, including Newsday. Adams was then dropped by his syndicate and his book publisher. 

But of course, his sucking up big time to Trump made him a hero to MAGA, who are outraged now that normal people are remembering what a jerk Adams became.  

Gee, just what 'til Trump leaves this mortal coil... 

*  His carry on about how he was a trained hypnotist and this gave his incredible powers of understanding of politics and people and virtually everything was one of his most wanky repeat themes. 

Update:   some conservative, religious types on Twitter are saying that they don't care for his death bed "acceptance of Christ"; and whatever the theological argument about whether such a mantra can be effective, the fact that he was doing it performatively is, at the very least, somewhat cringe-worthy.    

But it did remind me of my "salvation polypill" post, which, if he was smart, he should have read and then taken all options for potential salvation! 

The hotel manager who invented an alien genre

Well, let's get away from the American descent into fascism for a minute, and note that Erich Von Daniken, who presumably made a squillion dollars from inventing a whole genre of amateur speculation about aliens in history, has died.

Here's the lengthy New York Times story about him.   I mean, I suppose he gives hope to anyone who thinks their crackpot theories might make them very rich:

When Erich was 17, his father pulled him out of the Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit secondary school in Fribourg, Switzerland, and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier. Erich never returned to school of any kind, but the biblical passages that the Jesuits forced him to translate from Latin and Greek into German propelled him to a larger examination of the world’s religions and mythologies. That deities across cultures so often revealed themselves to humans from the sky, he said, led him to formulate his astronaut-god theory. (He later acknowledged that others had proposed similar theories first.)

He wrote the manuscript for what became “Chariots of the Gods” while managing the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. At the hotel’s bar one day, he met the editor of a Swiss science magazine, who introduced Mr. von Däniken to an executive at Econ-Verlag, a Swiss publishing house. Econ-Verlag agreed to print 6,000 copies of what was originally titled “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft,” or “Memories of the Future,” but only after hiring Wilhelm Roggersdorf, who had edited the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to rework much of it. 

By December 1968, the book was a best seller in Germany. An English translation appeared the next year.

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.

 I think the book and his ideas only became popular in the rest of the world after this:

In 1973, NBC aired a documentary based on Mr. von Däniken’s theories, and more than a quarter-million copies of “Chariots” sold in two days. 

I guess that is the documentary I have a vague memory of watching as a 13 or 14 year old on Australian TV.  (Or was there a movie release of a documentary?  I can't remember.)   Whatever I saw, I remember it was big was on the spooky music and atmosphere.

But, I was never convinced.  It wasn't long that the pushback from actual experts was out, within a year or two, and I felt justified in my original cautious approach.   

I am sure I have mentioned this before*, but I do remember being a little creeped out by another "aliens and religion are connected" idea, which struck closer to my Catholicism.  There was a book in my high school library about the "miracle of the sun" at Fatima in 1917 which pointed out that some descriptions of what people said they saw sounded awfully like a disk shaped object in the sky putting itself between the people on the ground and the sun.   Of course, this was 40 years before disk shaped UFOs became something in the popular imagination.   (It is also before the vastness of the universe was even understood.)

I can't find details of that book through Perplexity.  It notes that there was a book from Portuguese authors in the 1990s on the same topic, but it can't find a whole book about it from the 1970's.  But I am sure it was a high school library book I found - and therefore I am sure it was from well before the 1990's.

Perplexity does point out that famous UFO researched Jacques Vallee was the first to claim it was a UFO event as part of his 1970's books.   But I have never read them, and I am 100% sure that it was a book entirely devoted to the Fatima miracle.

This isn't an important topic, but its curious that such a book would be lost to AI....     

  

*  Now that I have checked, I mention it about once every decade or so! 

American shooting

Of course, we have all seen the video of the terrible killing of mother Good in Minnesota yesterday.  Of course, the online discourse mostly (but not entirely) follows political allegiance - to a really distressing degree, actually, starting at the top.

If everyone else has an opinion, I may as well put mine up:

a.    while the view of the shooter/killer was partially blocked, yeah, the lack of movement to his feet indicates that if he was touched by the car, it must have been the slightest glance.  I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't touched at all;

b.    the feet position in fact suggests that, if there was any chance of being hit at all, he only had to take one modest side step to be obviously clear of even a touch from the car; 

c.    when he fired again into her window from the side, it was at that time perfectly clear he was in no danger.  Especially if one of those bullets hit her, I don't see how that could be an act that carries no consequence;

d.    MAGA types have been putting up the blurry video (taken at great distance) of what happened from the front, and I suspect that some versions have been altered, as one version makes it look like the ICE person is actually pushed some distance by the car, which is entirely inconsistent with the clear video from the rear.   Either that or its a different incident, possibly; 

e.     It truly speaks to the fascist inclinations of MAGA supporters, and Vance and cos-playing ICE-Barbie Noem that they leapt to call her a "domestic terrorist" who intended to (or in the case of Trump, did) run over the ICE guy.   Trump is an idiot.  Vance is an appalling person.  Noem needs to go back to shooting dogs.  Basically, anyone who works for Trump is a terrible person.  (Speaking of which, Lindsay Graham could not possibly debase himself further if he tried.)

 We are all well aware that juries can be a soft touch to anyone (especially police) claiming to be "in fear of their life" and killing in alleged self defence.  But, if authorities decide to not press any prosecution to let a jury decide, when (I suspect) the majority of the country thinks he deserves punishment, it is going to cause further unrest.   (Comments on liberal videos and sites - and mainstream media - are running very strongly, in large numbers, against ICE and MAGA's pre-emptive exoneration.)

Update:

What a great online response from a Democrat:

 

Update:   The later video from the shooter's phone was immediately interpreted by MAGA types as proving the officer was justified, and many think it shows he was hit by the car.  In fact, it does not show he was touched by the car at all - you just can't tell.  The counter narrative is that it indicates that the shooting was triggered by liberal, non compliant, women mildly taunting him.  That does seems plausible, given the insult he gave after killing her, and his callous looking walk away from the scene.

Update 2:   Stephen Miller and his fascist fellows at the White House are itching to call protests against ICE operations an insurrection, no doubt as setting up the background for possible use of the Insurrection Act at some point in future, and it seems little remarked on that the officer White House spokesperson used it in a tweet in relation to this killing:

 And finally:   it is very difficult to interpret the reaction in comments to stories on the MSM, and on X and Bluesky, as indicating anything other than Vance, Trump and all their lackeys having shot themselves in the foot by their awful pre-emptive siding with the ICE officer.   It is not washing with most of the public. 

 

 

Philippe has a point

 

And this more recently....

This is exactly what we are seeing.

Fascists in the White House