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Here's a little something to make you think about the engineering that goes into controlling the destructive power of a traffic accident.

15 year old Volvo versus a modern subcompact

The plural form in English is very difficult for many language students to master, especially if their native language has no plural form. Most of the time it just sounds wrong, but plurals have some very subtle connotations that can change the meaning of a sentence substantially. Read the following sample sentences:

I like dogs.
I like dog.

The first is a statement about pet preference, and the second about your choice of cuisine. Sometimes the difference is more subtle:

Hamburger is enjoyed by many people.
Hamburgers are enjoyed by many people.

In this case it works, because "hamburger" is both a type of meat and a discrete countable food item. But usually it doesn't work:

Is pen used in outer space?
Are pens used in outer space?

The second sentence uses the plural form to express generality; a "pen" is a generic type of object which may or may not be used in space. But the first sentence doesn't use a plural, so when a native speaker reads the first sentence a specifier is required. Which pen? This pen? Your pen? The sentence as written is incorrect because that information is missing.

The complicated part is that some objects are discrete and countable, while others are not. This leads to much confusion. "Sushi" for some reason is not countable. Neither is "money"-- but you can count "dollars". "Rice" isn't discrete, but we can count "grains of rice". Animals are countable, but the meat product derived from them is not. Liquids are not countable, but containers and measurements of them are (and we go to great lengths to make plurals like "bottles of soda" or "gallons of gasoline"). Water of course isn't countable, but the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers combine to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Quite confusing, isn't it?

This morning I actually taught a middle school lesson as I wanted to for the first time. It was to a class of one, a "troublesome student" who doesn't want to study with the rest of her class. In my mind she's one of the smartest first years I've met; she's already figured out that the school system is largely a load of crap. The trouble wasn't that she thought this way-- many students slack off in class, fall asleep, or otherwise just tune out. But she actually said something about it, and she quietly maintains her position despite a lot of pressure from above. For this reason she's been put into a separate room by herself, because while she still comes to school I guess nobody really knows what to do with her. Another English teacher at the school described her as "haughty, with a superiority complex". She's a true independent thinker in a sea of drones.

The vice principal, figuring she's a lost cause and at least I couldn't do any harm, asked if I wanted to go in and talk to her this morning. I didn't speak a word of Japanese. Like any student I've met here she was nervous and afraid to make mistakes, but her pronunciation was actually pretty good. Using only hand gestures I got her to start thinking in English, just for a moment. The moment of clarity struck when I got her to not just repeat "My book, your book" but to use them correctly in context. After that I had her write her name on her textbook (which she hadn't opened or used yet) and taught her how to write uppercase and lowercase letters on a sheet of primer paper.

About halfway through the lowercase letters, after the vice principal had left the room, she stopped and made a remark in Japanese that she hated studying. I chuckled and agreed that studying was annoying, and asked her what her long term goals were. We talked for a bit about short term and long term goals, and I mentioned that in order to reach her long term goals, in the short term she would need to learn certain things in school and use those as stepping stones. I told her about my long term goals in teaching her English: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and while I think she grasped the necessity of learning to write the alphabet, she also said that she has trouble keeping both her long term goals and short term goals in mind. We finished up quickly, and I told her that tomorrow we'd practice speaking some more.

I think that motivation is going to be the toughest part. Since she doesn't want to study, I think the best tactic is to couch things in a manner that isn't normal studying. Speaking and listening should be easy, but writing is going to be tough; I'm going to avoid directly using the textbook. I'm going to try to put into practice all the things I've wanted to-- speaking practice, using the language in context, phonics, getting her to think on her feet.... If I expect a lot I should get a lot. For the first time in awhile, I feel challenged.

Last Saturday, during the Golden Week break, I went to the Uesugi festival in Yonezawa. They hold a parade in Yonezawa every year with a parade and reenactment of a famous 1561 battle between the Takeda and Uesugi clans, the fourth battle of Kawanakayama. (Here's a wiki article with a really cool painting of it.)

Heather had told me about this festival a few days beforehand, and she convinced me to go along with her to see it. As it was also the first day of the Golden Week holidays, I was worried that the expressways would be crowded. So we wound up leaving at 6am, and got there 2 hours before the parade even started. We used the time to walk around and take photos of temples, but of course you've seen those before. At 10am the parade started, and then we had to wait around in the hot sun until the actual battle started around 3pm. But let's take a look at some authentic costumes, shall we?

Click on any cropped photo to view the full image.

The large matchlock gun these soldiers carry is called an "arquebus". In Japan, it came into use as a sort of field artillery in the 1500s before its use was banned during the Tokugawa era.

The face mask, or men, is quite a rare sight, as is the huge headpiece on the helmet.

Smoke and noisemaking arrows were often fitted to signal troops. Smoke from fire arrows could also provide concealment for troop movements.

The arquebus was a heavy and loud matchlock weapon, sounding more like a cannon than a modern firearm. As guns of that era lacked rifling the arquebus was very inaccurate, but if it hit at close range the shot would often pierce armor. Guns were never wielded by samurai; instead they were given to common foot soldiers who were then trained in their use.

Click on any cropped photo to view the full image.

With spring in the air again and the weather warming up, almost every town is celebrating with their own festival. Yesterday was the Toramai festival for my town, the tiger dance. I took some photos last year but with the new telephoto lens it was possible to get close shots of the tigers doing their thing, even from the back row. (The guy next to me had a white Canon 70-200mm L series lens and a stepladder. But he wasn't using a tripod; he's gonna be pissed when his long shots turn out blurry even with image stabilization. I like to think my photos turned out just fine and I spent about a sixth the price for my lens.)

(I can't take credit for this one; Heather took this photo while I was fixing my shirt. I'll have to ask her to hold my camera more often.)

You know, sometimes there are moments in the staffroom when you're sitting around and there's no students to interact with and everyone is doing their best to look busy so the boss doesn't yell at them. It's moments like these that are just ripe for a good prank.

I've been recording my voice for a set of video tutorials and at one point in the middle I paused, sneezed loudly into the headset microphone, and then continued. I cut it out of the tutorial of course, but that same isolated sneeze was too perfect to just discard. I added about 7 seconds of silence to the beginning and saved it as an audio file. Then I walked over to one of the "public" staffroom computers and set that sound to pretty much every built-in Windows sound. I unmuted the volume control, fixed the speakers (which had been plugged into the wrong jack) and turned up the volume. I then walked back to my desk.

What I didn't expect was for some automated program to trigger the "exclamation" sound on its own about every hour or so. Every so often the computer would emit a quite convincing sneeze, at which point everyone looked around, and assumed it was someone else. It worked so well because the sound was so brief that nobody could tell where it was coming from. After several hours of this someone walked over and started using the computer, and the trap was sprung. A short while after a program was opened, the computer would sneeze. When a program was closed, the computer would wait and then sneeze. The sound was distant enough from the triggering event that nobody figured out they were associated, and in fact the poor sap using the computer was having a tough time convincing everyone else he wasn't actually sneezing. Eventually they figured out it was coming from the computer. As the murmuring in the staffroom grew and the resident computer expert fiddled through menus trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, the desktop went through a sort of digital hay fever; every 7 seconds a sneeze was heard. Finally a rather bright English teacher turned off the speakers, and the joke was played out.

Much better than taping aluminum foil to a cubicle.

A rather nasty bug has been found in Flash which allows a malicious website to run arbitrary code-- for all intents and purposes what this means is the site owner can take complete control over your computer. I won't explain botnets here, but typically computer taken over in this fashion function normally to the person using them but are also twisted to send out massive amounts of spam to both email hosts and to comment forms on sites like this one, host web sites used in online fraud (phishing), run hacking operations, and run extortion rings based on distributed attacks which can take down pretty much any website. This is done without the computer owner's consent or knowledge. Pretty much every piece of spam you get is from one of these compromised systems. And we all hate spam, don't we?

If you're a responsible computer owner, you should make sure your browser and operating system are patched up, but usually the Flash player is neglected in these upgrades. (Flash is used to display videos on YouTube, ad content on websites, and interactive stuff like online games.) You can check here if your Flash player is up to date, and if the version is less than what's listed on the chart you should download and install the latest version immediately.