"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive." - William F. Buckley Jr.

***

Battleship Island - Japan’s rotting metropolis - "These days the only things that land on Hashima Island are the shits of passing seagulls. An hour or so’s sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers. It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot."

Future Dangerousness: The tricky sex offender case that could trip up one of the judges on the short list to replace Souter - "Doe is a tough one: It's about a convicted sex offender who cruised a park in Lafayette, Ind., admitting to "having urges" about a group of kids he saw there, although he didn't actually molest them. The city banned him from its parks. The district court upheld the ban based on his criminal record, his own deposition, and his psychologist's testimony that while she thought he'd learned to control himself, she couldn't guarantee he wouldn't offend again. The ruling Wood joined, and Williams wrote, defends the rights of what may be the most despised minority of all: pedophiles. But John Doe's thoughts took him right to the brink of harming real kids. Williams and Wood framed the case as being about Doe's freedom of thought and his right to some procedural protection. The other judges, who eventually overturned their ruling, framed it as being about his dangerousness. Which was it?"

My Day With The Google Goats - "I went to go visit the Google goats today — you know, the goats that were brought in to replace lawnmowers in Google’s ever-expanding quest to go more green." The environmental cost of transporting the goats probably outweighs that of lawnmowers

Kill Your RSS Reader - "RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you've got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don't want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It's like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read... A year or so ago, I dumped RSS and began to look for a new way of reading stuff online. Eventually I found a system that works much better for me: bookmarks, browser tabs, and the middle mouse button. My technique allows me to scour the Web for great stuff far more efficiently—and with less guilt and more fun—than I could from the dull outpost of my RSS reader."

UK's bizarre holiday complaints - "The list even included one where a tourist complained that his honeymoon was ruined after he saw an aroused elephant, leading to feelings of inadequacy... In another complaint a British guest at a Novotel hotel in Australia said his soup was too thick and strong, not realising he had been supping from the gravy boat... One of the oddest complaints came from a female traveller who blamed her hotel for her pregnancy. "My fiance and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room."... Other complaints included 'there are too many Spanish people in Spain' and 'too much curry served in restaurants in India'."

Founder of Islamic TV station accused of beheading wife - "The founder of an upstate New York TV station aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has been arrested on suspicion of killing his wife, who was beheaded, authorities said."
“Obviously, This Is The Worst Form Of Domestic Violence Possible”

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece - "Of Britain, at least, Burgess was certainly right. He extrapolated from what he saw in the prime manifestation of the emerging youth culture, pop music, to a future in which self-control had shrunk to vanishing, and he realized that the result could only be a Hobbesian world, in which personal and childish whim was the only authority to guide action. Like all prophets, he extrapolated to the nth degree; but a brief residence in a British slum should persuade anyone that he was not altogether wide of the mark."
In slums of all ages and societies, Burgess would've been right.

The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving - "Traditional characters and simplified characters never were two separate and autonomous language systems — they have always existed on a continuum. Many simplified characters are adaptations from common usage in Chinese cursive script; on the other hand, the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s... A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive... Many of the simplified characters had been in existence for more than a millennium. Manuscripts unearthed from ancient tombs and medieval caves suggest that some simplified characters now used were already in currency then. The reform in the 1950s only officially legitimated these underground “outlaw” vernacular characters... Calligraphy, the quintessential aesthetic form of Chinese writing, in fact favors simplification... every society has the division of labor between bankers and poets."

Doh! Pirates captured after attacking the wrong ship - "From a distance the large ship on the horizon looked like the perfect target, ripe for a successful spot of piracy. But as the Somali pirates sped toward the vessel sailing near the Seychelles, they were horrified to see two boats and a helicopter set off from their target and launch their own counter-attack. They had failed to spot, in the dazzling sun, that the 'merchant ship' they thought they were intercepting was, in fact, a French naval ship bristling with cannons, radar technology and armed commandos... Only one pirate was left on board the mother ship which had nothing on board except fuel and potates"
FAIL!

Study: Female Bisexuality Distinct Orientation, Not a Phase - "Women’s definitions of lesbianism appeared to permit more flexibility in behavior than their definitions of heterosexuality. For example, of the women who identified as lesbian in the last round of interviews, 15 percent reported having sexual contact with a man during the prior two years. In contrast, none of the women who settled on a heterosexual label at that point reported having sexual contact with a woman within the previous two years. Diamond wrote: "This provides further support for the notion that female sexuality is relatively fluid and that the distinction between lesbian and bisexual women is not a rigid one.""