One reason is that Japan has a severe labor shortage, so ways of retailing without staff are explored to the fullest. My local dvd rental store now has 4 automated kiosks to allow people to rent their videos without ever dealing with a person. While there are still areas where the number of workers seems to go against all notions of efficiency (like at the post office, though there is something special going on there because it is the target of privatization) getting something done with a machine rather than a person is often the preferred option. Another reason is that vandalism is relatively low. There used to be beer vending machines (they've disappeared with concerns about young people _buying_ the beer) that had a timer switch so they would stop selling beer at a particular hour and newly arrived British acquaintances of mine would marvel at the fact that there would be these vending machines with beer in them that had not been pried open late at night. I'm sure there are other reasons but those two come to mind.

Thanks Hartmut, that puts it in an interesting perspective, in that it is not that Myanmar is bizarre, just that they haven't moved to thinking of money as a token. Admittedly, there are probably lots of people in developed countries who don't think of money as a token, but it is surprising to come up against it suddenly.

There are ATMs, but there are only 2 or 3 that accept foreign cards in all of Yangon. This thread has this: For those of you who are coming in Burma, do not forget to bring brand new undamaged and unfold dollar notes. The slightest "damage" or marking will make your note unusable. This is absolutely crazy. They are also refusing notes from "old" series. Take this very seriously, otherwise you will get in trouble here without money and without possibility to have some "fresh" one.

Well, since I can't easily get the book, I can really only have a discussion about how some people who actually can read the book but didn't are screwing up. Actually, that applies to about 90% of the discussions I have on the internet.

"If I rubbed his shoulders just the right way, he’d sigh and stretch with happiness, wiggling his little pink fingers in the air." I cannot tell you how many times I have read that line and I still smile when I read it. I hope I'm not overstepping or revealing too much, but Laura is in the process of taking the stories she's written and making them in a ebook thru Kindle direct. Hopefully, Kindle will fix the update problem with mac iOS soon and I hope Laura will allow me to note here when it is done.

Laura, send it to libjpn at gmail and I'll put it up as a guest post if you like. I'll sort the formatting out.

The rats or Treviño?

Great post. Being at a Japanese university, in the twilight of Japanese demographic decline, provides a similar atmosphere to the curia, I think. Hartmut's comment touches on something that interests me, which is retirement age. Here at my university, every year, at the end of the year party, they announce who is retiring and they come up on stage and it always seems like the guys (it's almost always guys) who I think must be leaving don't go up, and these energetic ones who I think might be around 60, but no way can they be around 68, come up to say goodbye. There is also this interesting rule at our uni that in the last 3 years of work, you no longer have to attend faculty meetings. I mentioned to someone that this was a nice gesture, and he said, the real reason was that people who were coming up to the end of their career would be able to argue for changes based on their seniority, and wouldn't be around to deal with the aftermath. And while I can see some people making some truly idiotic suggestions, one can also see how this keeps a seniority based system as conservative as possible.

Btw, Chinese vampires are in essence very old zombies where the decay has stiffened the joints => they hop and do not walk, beyond a critical stage they become totally immobile. Not so sure about that. The reason I've heard is that Chinese vampires lack the 'life energy' (transliterated variously as ki, qi, chi and is the ki in aikido, though not the chi in tai chi). That's why their hands, while held out in front of them, hang down because of a lack of animating force, so it is not decay that is stiffening their joints, it is the absence of animating energy that locks their joints up.

" Principle 3: Instant Feedback Improves Learning.… Implementing this advice involves frequent evaluation… eliminating waiting periods before questions can be answered" I don't think this is really a constant principle. As learners confronted with some very difficult problem, I think we've all experienced the 'a-ha' moment, and that often comes after some period of time. If learning were just a matter of asking questions, it would be a lot easier than it is. It's asking the right question at the right time. The example they give underlines that. There is nothing worse in sports training than someone giving you too much feedback. Sometimes, good feedback is letting you make the same mistake several times and then correcting it. This shouldn't detract from the other points in the paper.

With that, there is absolutely NOTHING romantic about zombies. Hence, zombies are for boys, vampires are for girls. ;^) (does irony and romance go together? How about sarcasm and romance?)

Yep, here is the full video Also, the red car getting hit at 1:07 is from this

I think it got caught on a tram or trolleybus cable that was hanging down. You can see it on the road just before the car runs over it, I think.

Interesting stuff Russell. Went to my daughter's solo and ensemble contest and some of the high school percussion groups were really hot, and level of 'keyed percussion' (just made that phrase up, is there a term for percussion that is melodic? Tuned percussion could include timpani I guess) was really amazing. However, all the jazzers I know here who went to Berklee are pianists, and they play gigs in these impossibly small venues where I cannot even imagine getting an extra glockenspiel in there. Looking up Berklee, they have an online ear training course in their offerings, which is tempting until I looked at the price. I should also note that there was an offlist suggestion about organizing an IRL get together in Boston, so both your post and dr ngo's are serendipitous, but the person wasn't volunteering, just wondering.

Bob, do you know about the kine Japan list? http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/kj.html While it doesn't have a lot of discussion, when something does surface, it is really interesting. Not sure if those joining instructions work, but you can sign up here https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan.

Does that opinion extend to climate change? -byomtov FOR. THE. WIN. I took this as evidence that deep down in his heart of hearts, Brett is a reasonable guy...

Etymologically, regulate and regular actually come from two different sources, with regulate coming from Latin and regular coming from Old French. Based on that etymology, I don't think that regulate never meant 'to make regular'. My OED is at school, so I can't check, but I'd be interested to see a usage where regulate meant 'to make regular'.

The lead hypothesis is really interesting, and the point that it is not lead in China is well taken. Given that the link to violence is correlative, we really don't know if other heavy metal poisoning would produce similar effects and the pollution in China is all the heavy metals, not just lead. However, since China is the biggest producer of refined lead, there are other routes for the population to be affected by lead in particular. This article notes that a lot of these incidents are lead, though aluminum, mercury, cadmium, copper and antimony among others are in the mix. Yellow sand is a problem here, though the consensus from most researchers is that the heavy metals drop out earlier. I hope...

Brett, I'm not sure if this will make any difference to you, but your notion of constitutional interpretation is to take one notion and make it do all your work. In this case, sovereignty is a good example. While a definition of sovereignty is, as you say, that one governmental entity has the final say, you suggest that somehow, that understanding of the term dictates everything else in the document. I have students who commit a similar error in interpretation, finding one concept in a piece of writing and focussing on that to the exclusion of all else. At the risk of being dismissive, your definition of sovereignity mirrors the George W Bush reply at the Unity Conference in 2004.

Mendacity speaks to a state of mind where the person knows that s/he is wrong, but refuses to let it matter. Based on that, I don't think that it is mendacity, but a firmly held belief.

From the news I see, the problem is not peer to peer problems (non military have a lot more problems, I think), it is faculty-student. 'Faculty' is not quite correct, because the stories are about 'trainers' and people who would not be regarded as faculty at a regular university. However, because of the military hierarchy, they have much more power over a student, so the student doesn't have the option of walking away and signing up for another section.

You have to blame every Republican for Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Also, strictly speaking, Josef Stalin did not ever belong to the Democratic party, despite suggestions to the contrary.

It might be language attrition on my part, but "You don't have to advocate or plan violence, in order to have a problem with it." does not equal "everyone is only responsible for their own actions."

"You don't have to advocate or plan violence, in order to have a problem with it." Gee, I hope you hold gun owners to the same standard...

You've got me thinking about what the parameters of 'violence' are. And while it is distasteful to link non-violent protest to anything celebrated by Frank Miller, what the college kids did at UC Davis is, in one aspect, no different that the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Legionnaires at Camarón, which in a sense, makes it a question of strength, resolve and will. And added to that, the framing of the concepts of bravery and cowardice makes the whole thing doubly strange. Think of the examples where commentators noted that suicide bombers are 'brave' and the opprobrium that results. This is not to say that they are revealing some home truths, it is just to note that we have an interesting problem in using the word brave. It is hard to say that it means standing up to an overwhelming force but it must necessarily be accompanied by an analysis of whether the force being resisted is for good or for evil. As soon as you have two sides, and someone puts themselves in a position where the other side can overwhelm them or they can point to some sacrifice on their part, out pops 'bravery'. It is what gives anti-vaccine folks, anti-abortion protesters and climate change denialists the wind beneath their wings. If you really think about 'showing' non-violence, what exactly does the audience see? My first aikido teacher (a westerner) told this story about about watching a high ranking aikido practitioner doing a lesson and the person who was chosen for the demonstration, a really big bruiser, was taking the fall, and when it came to the final part of the technique, because this guy was resisting in a particular way, the practitioner had to resort to basically a trick to finish it. (with aikido demonstrations where you have someone visiting and teaching, the ranking person will choose different people to show the techniques and then have everyone try them) But what the bruiser didn't notice was that thru the whole course of the technique, there were all of these opportunities that the old guy had to really hurt him that you could see if you were watching and understood, but if you didn't (like the bruiser), you didn't. To show those explicitly, the technique becomes an exercise in violence. So it becomes a paradox, in that you can only 'demonstrate' the non-violence if you show where you have the opportunity to lay out or incapacitate your opponent, but you choose not to. So, in this analysis, Peter Jackson can't really 'show' that Bilbo is non-violent, because it would mean explicitly highlighting the chances he has to be violent and showing that he doesn't take those chances. Face it, if someone starts listing all the ways s/he can hurt you in order to make the point that s/he's not going to do it, I have a feeling you aren't going to think of him as 'non-violent'.