Autumnal Drab

Well it's not quite autumn yet, still a few more days, but the weather is beating the calendar. Grey and rainy again. Yikes, and I have to go out for a meeting downtown in this. On rainy days everyone drives and the parking is tough, so I take the bus, but the rain might make that icky too.

Didn't blog yesterday, as other projects (2,3) were keeping me busy. I upgraded the pump yet again (on my pond) and did some tweaking to increase the noise generation. Twice as much water flow - about 1000gal/hr now, and I have a gurgle where the water enters the pond as well as where it escapes the top overflow bowl area. That added to a bit more movement among the stream stones means it's a little better for noise. Might have to resort to a fountain next year as well... but that starts to diverge from a natural looking environment toward a las vegas show... so perhaps I'll avoid that.

A bit of a lingering migraine today too - I think tipped off by a nice glass of scotch yesterday after so much bend-over work with P3. I also planted all the shrubs, and moved a few day lillies from the big growth areas around the yard into the berm. I spread some more cedar mulch, but still need to spread another couple of bags.

The pond was low on water, but, thinking ahead, I left it for the rain to top up, and it's worked well. Looks like it's within a couple of cm of the top now.

Did some P2 resume circulating today. Targetting a few interesting places within walking distance which would be nice. It would be a 20min walk, but that's fine for nice days. An easy bike ride too. Would be a nice work situation, even if the companies are probably marginal. One makes some crappy software, the other some hardware with limited market share. It would be fun to help make them bigger successes.

Outdoors
Had some great (P4) hiking on the weekend. A group of us got out into the little known back end of a nearby park and had a nice exploration, including lunch on a rocky plateau. We went further on in search of a tiny lake seen from satellite pics and this time found it. Last time hiking here, without compass or GPS, we explored around without finding anything. Turns out we just missed a trail turnoff.

What an explosion of mushrooms and lichen since the last hike out that way. What a difference some heavy rain makes. Quite spectacular some of the colonies.

Wanted to go camping last week, and put it off due to heavy rain. Might be an opportunity mid-week this week, but hard to say. Everythings going to be quite damp though.

Multilingus Maximus
Worked on P13 - japanese yesterday too. Discovered that furigana is likely the key to my success. I was learning Kanji with no sense of which of the dozens of bits of info associated with each symbol I should try to remember. Furigana shows me how the characters are used in everyday usage, so I can start to memorize some of that stuff and see how it goes from there. My kana are pretty strong, but I still have a difficult time with Katakana's "so" versus "n". "Tsu" versus "Shi" are a little more obvious - but here's how the culprits look:

so: ソ
n: ン

So you can see my challenge. I guess "so" is a bit more curvey, but from font to font and in handwritten script it's more difficult to tell when your vocabularly is weak. Maybe that's another hint at next steps.

Oh yeah, here's tsu and shi: ツ　シ　
They are a little easier, because you can remember tsu has the ticks on the Top, and shi has the ticks on the side: t-top, s-side. Not too bad, but sometimes hard to read quickly without stopping to think.

Writing
Project P10 is partly sated with this blog, but there are a few fiction projects on the go. I've got a roughly 100kword story that needs an overhaul still. More recently I've got some fiction in blog form going that I'm quite enjoying. Taking it a bit at a time, but it flows easily. Should do more on that when I get a chance this week.

The flip side of writing is of course reading. Plato's The Republic is pretty entertaining just now (P5). He's outlining screwed up societies and political systems. The descriptions of timarchy are quite entertaining as they encourage one to cast their eyes south. I wasn't familiar with timarchy before. I see it as a variant of oligarchy though, but where just being a monied elite isn't the main criteria, but rather some sense of honour among the clique is most important. Of course, I think that almost goes naturally with the money and ownership part of oligarchs. But it's particularly a propos when you think of the neo-con structure with the religious-right overtones. There you have a structure of perceived "honour" which gives participents entrée into the ruling elite class.

There's a particularly great passage where Plato describes the timarchic society. Lets see if I can find the passage online (to save me the typing)....
Here we go - look at this great passage describing who would succeed in such a society:
What, then, is the man that corresponds to this constitution? What is his origin and what his nature?"
“...He will have to be somewhat self-willed and lacking in culture, yet a lover of music and fond of listening to talk and speeches, though by no means himself a rhetorician; and to slaves such a one would be harsh, not scorning them as the really educated do, but he would be gentle with the freeborn and very submissive to officials, a lover of office and of honor, not basing his claim to office on ability to speak or anything of that sort but on his exploits in war or preparation for war, and he would be a devotee of gymnastics and hunting."
Ha! Hunting perhaps with a shotgun and not being a very good shot when acquaintances walk into range? An perhaps submissive to officials might include the Veep who calls the shots?

That was pretty entertaining. But it will be interesting to read the next chunk as we get into his analysis of democracy. I'd heard that Plato was not too fond of democracy as a system, so I wonder where he's see fault.

Just to pre-empt him, my issue with democracy lately has been how it doesn't stand up well when you get a two party system and the votes start getting split 49-51 or there abouts. Then you have a polarized society with 45-49% of the population strongly opposed to the rulers. If you also take into account that an unhappy person is more active than a marginally happy person, you probably have a situation where 60% or 70% of vocal people are against the government. That doesn't bode well for successful government.

It's even worse if the government wins under circumstances where they may actually have LESS than 50% of the vote.

We're lucky (so far) in Canada that we still have 3 reasonably strong parties, and a fourth emerging and growing stronger (at the federal level). Seeing our crappy leading (albeit minority) party blindly emulating the mess to the south is a bit disconcerting though, especially when they start removing elements of the structure of government, like normal media access, and crossing the line with civil servants, ordaining that they should refer to their employer as "The new government". That's scary stuff.

Well, some more reading there - probably about 20% of the book left to read. It's been more readable than I suspected it would be.

Wrap
So on to my meeting I guess. Hey - your assignment for today is to go to a katakana table and find out how to spell your last name with katakana characters, which the Japanese use for foreign names. If you are Japanese, then you've probably already got that figured out, huh?

You can find a table http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhere. The table shows how sounds combine. So for example, the character at the intersection of "s" and "o" is the character pronounced "so". The one at "k" and "i" is pronounced "ki" (like key). And so on. Write out your name and admire your multilingual handiwork.