Lafcadio Hearn (aka Yakumo Koizumi) was born of Irish parents and had a difficult upbringing by most standards. He became a writer and journalist, but was captivated by Japanese culture that he experienced at the World Exposition in New Orleans. Shortly after, he traveled to Japan in 1890 at the age of 40. He soon made Japan his home, married, raised a family, and found continued success as a writer.
One of his favorite subjects was Japanese ghost stories. Japanese ghost stories are interesting because they are heavily influenced by Buddhist thought, and often carry a hint of moral elements. He collected and translated several works on the subject. Kwaidan is probably his most famous collection of ghost stories – stories which were even turned into a movie.
It turns out there are at least 3 different Lafcadio Haern museums/homes in Japan. Hopefully I’ll see them someday, but until then I’ll be happy just reading the stories.
This biggest issue with the Ghibli theme locations is the need for advanced purchase tickets. No tickets are for sale onsite and tickets often sell out months in advance.
Ghibli Park outside Nagoya. Advanced tickets are required and purchasable on their website.
Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. Advanced tickets are required and they often sell out MONTHS in advance.
My Neighbor Totoro
Satsuki and Mei’s house from Totoro – A nearly perfect re-creation of the house from the Totoro movie. I wrote about this amazing house here.
Ghibli Park – location of Satsuki and Mei’s house along with a forest and other movie inspired attractions.
Totoro Forest -In Sayama, Saitama Prefecture is Totoro Forest. It also holds Kurosuke’s House which is Japanese traditional house which was built over 100 years ago. You can see a big Totoro sitting in the house and walk the grounds. (more here)
Princess Mononoke
Yakushima – registered as natural world heritage site. You can go there by plane or ferry.
Shirakami-sanchi – world heritage site and it is mainly filled with greenery such as Japanese beech. There are some famous lakes called twelve lakes which means you can see twelve lakes at once from the upper side of the mountain.
Seiseki Sakuragaoka – Seiseki-Sakuragaoka suburb is conveniently located just outside of Tokyo. The highlight of the town is the staircase to the top of the hill where you can enjoy a typically Japanese nostalgic night view.
Ponyo
Tomonoura (Hiroshima) – This beautiful cityview of Tomonoura in Hiroshima is another spot not to be missed. Ponyo’s house is believed to be inspired by Naramura Museum.
Secret World of Arriety
Seibien (Aomori) garden – Seibien is a western style house with Japanese garden in Aomori featured in ‘Arrietty’. Its garden is counted as one the three greatest gardens of Meiji-era and is an attractive sightseeing spot.
From Up on Poppy Hill
The city of Yokohama is depicted in ‘From Up on Poppy Hill’
Yokohama
Minatonomieru oka koen (Kanagawa) – Harbor View Park
Negishi natsukashi koen – (The Old House of Yagishita Family) reminds of Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house overlooking the port in the film.
Yamate seiyo-kan (Kanagawa) – There are 7 western style houses collectively called Yamate Seiyoukan in the area where you can read different edition of Weekly Quartier Latin, the newspaper featured in the film, at each house
Only Yesterday
Saffron fields of Takase District – Taeko travels on her own from Tokyo to Yamagata in this animated film. There are many sufflower fields in Takase District like the one depicted in ‘Only Yesterday’. Maybe you can even try out a Yamagata farm stay like she did.
Did you know you can visit Mei’s house from Totoro in real life?
A painstakingly realistic re-creation of Mei’s house was created in what is now Ghibli Park outside of Nagoya in Aichi Commemorative Park. In the park, you can visit Satsuki and Mei’s housein the park.
The house has been recreated in extraordinary detail. You sign up for a time slot and they give you a tour. That, however, is where similarities to other tours end. Unlike normal recreated gems like this, the tour allows you to open drawers, Mei’s backpacks, look in books and really explore the space. They have a strict no photography policy – which I think is great as it probably makes you really enjoy the space more instead of focusing on the perfect Instagram shot.
Tsundokuis the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Its morphology combines tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dokusho (reading books).
I personally love that I have a pile of books I have bought but not yet read. Probably for the same reason that others have suggested – that it creates a sense of wonder and excitement there is so much more yet to learn:
These shelves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.
People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone.
It seems Oregon, and specifically Portland, have lost their luster. Portland and Oregon went from being the #1 place to move in the US to having a net LOSS of population in just 2 years.
Part of this is due to people moving out of urban areas during the pandemic and remote work – but Oregon has faired even worse than other metro areas. Much worse. Multnomah county (which encompasses most of Portland) declined by 12,494 people, or 1.5% along with a more modest decline (0.2%) in the Portland metro area (Beaverton, Vancouver, etc).
How did this happen? How did a city go from the #1 place to move to just about last place? Some of the top posited reasons:
The last audit of PPS in 2019 (even before Covid) revealed that despite high funding, Portland public schools deliver dramatically poorer educational results for students, have very problematic spending, serious issues with financial waste and abuse issues due to lack of oversight, and 26 other specific problem areas identified that need to be remedied.
Tax rates for anyone earning over $100,000 a year are now the second highest effective tax rate in the country – only behind New York City millionaires by 0.09%. We will become the highest tax rate starting 2024 when city taxes are slated to rise another 1-2%.
I wish we had more radio dramas like this one from the BBC by Robert Barr.
Set on an island in the Outer Hebrides in north west Scotland, a fisherman discovers what appears to be a torpedo washed up on a deserted beach. Upon closer examination, the container is found to contain materials for a spy and a couple of army officers go under cover to investigate.
Game development is now as much art as science, or rather the art of science. Even something as simple as how and when to use randomness can profoundly impact the fun of a game. Enter the observation of two different kinds of randomness: input and output randomness.
Input randomness is randomness that is decided BEFORE a player makes their strategy and decisions. Examples would include having a random number of enemies generated before the fight starts. While the number is random, knowing how many will show up actually lets the user decide to use different strategies and feel more in control.
Output randomness is often a big contributing factor to frustrating parts of gameplay. Examples here would consist of attacking an enemy, only to find out your attack completely missed out of sheer bad luck or an usually bad hit roll. This kind of behavior, while mathematically correct, often leaves users feeling like they were ‘robbed’ and that the game is cheating.
Games are increasingly using input randomness as a way to give users control. Even games that rely on output randomness often put their thumbs on the scales so that you do not lose as often as you’d like. In Civilization, if your unit with a 33% chance of hitting misses twice in a row, it’s guaranteed to hit on the 3rd try – even though real randomness wouldn’t behave like that.
Anyway, this is a great video about the different kinds of randomness.
Old firehouse converted to home (and Ghostbuster’s Vacasa)
Just down the street from me is an old firehouse. It was retired years ago and now serves as a private residence. This last year for Halloween, they actually partly converted it to a Ghostbuster themed Vacasa complete with props and even a really cool replica ghostbuster ambulance. How’s that for cool?
He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.
His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.
Since Gödel’s discovery, mathematicians have stumbled upon just the kinds of unanswerable questions his theorems foretold. For example, Gödel himself helped establish that the continuum hypothesis, which concerns the sizes of infinity, is undecidable, as is the halting problem, which asks whether a computer program fed with a random input will run forever or eventually halt. Undecidable questions have even arisen in physics, suggesting that incompleteness afflicts not just math, but—in some ill-understood way—reality.
Well, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics may just be another nail in the coffin for determinists.
2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was just awarded to scientists that just proved one of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century: the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—i.e. an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. This means that the influence of a particle can’t move faster than the speed of light. Investigations of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.
Many determinists held out the idea there were ‘hidden variables’ – or a lower level of reality we haven’t found yet – that would somehow be communicating between the particles and keeping the idea of realism (locally real) alive. However, in 1964 Bell released a paper showing that quantum mechanical behaviors do violate the idea that there could be ‘hidden variables’ – and even described the ways those violations would show up mathematically. What remained to be done was to develop an experiment to prove or disprove his assertions.
To disprove this idea of ‘hidden variables’ and prove Bell’s assumptions, they did this by using experiments on entangled particles that keep their state linked. Particles that are entangled (in this case photons with a certain polarization) and sent in two different directions yet still remain entangled in state.
They devised a clever experiment in the dungeons under Vienna’s Hofburg palace over the space of kilometers. They analyzed the results of passing these entangled photons through different filters and found that they do indeed adhere to Bell’s equations – and hence disprove particles adhere to the properties of being locally real (both at the same time).
The work does not prove which of those two principles (local or real) are false. Just that at least one (or both) is false.
Confused? Here’s a video that also describes the conundrum and what is going one really well:
Side note: Reading the state of one entangled photon determines the state of the other – but this state is always completely random (which is why faster than light quantum communication is not possible – you still need to compare the two results independently of the system to know if the random result was the ‘correct’ bit in the original message or the ‘wrong’ bit. Otherwise you just get a string of bits each random set to being correct or incorrect – which as it turns out is the only truly safe and unbreakable cipher).
