|
|
This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» Finally, I have before me, some physical evidence of this summer’s adventure. On my desk is an exchange order for a 21-day rail pass, which allows free travel and seat reservation on any Japanese train, including the Shinkansen (bullet trains), apart from the Nozomi; These are the trains which directly connect the major cities, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo. They don’t travel much faster than the other Shinkansen, but the fact you don’t have to switch trains speeds up the journey times. I get the feeling this is because the Japanese want to reserve the high-speed intercity trains for businessmen. When we land as Kansai airport, the first thing we have to do is find the ticket office and collect the pass, using the exchange order. Luckily enough, the pass comes with maps of every station and where to find said offices.
The Japan Railways Group quotes the pass at ¥57,700 (Yen), which at time of writing, equates to £377, but adding VAT and the fact it’s actually flown in from an office in Australia, hence two currency conversions, brings this to £441 including P&P, meaning I’ve now spent slightly more than £900 on this trip and I’ve not even arrived yet. This may sound a lot, but the Japanese trains are notoriously expensive. For example, an average journey, such as Kyoto to Hiroshima would cost ¥11,290, or £74. Now considering we’ll be travelling almost every other day for three weeks, and some days may involve more than one journey, it suddenly becomes clear how much this is actually saving.
There are some journeys which will go on through the night. I learnt the benefits of this from travelling around Europe. Travelling through the night costs are as much as an expensive youth hostel, with the benefit of waking up in the morning where you want to be, rather than having to wake up, pay and book out of the youth hostel, and then waste the morning travelling to where you want to go. This means a careful selection (with much research) of the trains and timetables. A night train may arrive at your location at 5am, or take eight hours when a bullet train could make the journey in two. There’s also a big variance in prices and sleeping arrangements. Some trains offer a matted floor to sleep on, which are free with the pass, or beds, typically at ¥9500 with the pass (more than double without).
No, in response to people such as Anna and Sandi; I haven’t read the book. I didn’t even know there was one, in-fact I hadn’t even heard of the film and had no idea what I was going in to watch, and I prefer it like this, I always find trailers give too much of the film away, let alone books.
I didn’t even know that the term “Angels and Demons” was meant to be metaphorical. I was half expecting the opening scene at CERN to show the opening of some portal that brings Hades himself to single handedly slaughter the world.
What actually happens is this: Some dirty scouser from the Illuminati manages to steal some explosive anti-matter and uses it as a bomb against the Vatican. In the meantime, the four favourite cardinals to become the next pope are taken hostage. Tom Hanks is called in to solve century old riddles to rescue the cardinals and retrieve the explosive.
It did seem a little unnecessary for him to point out Christianity’s flaws at every opportunity, and then go on to explain them. Everyone knows why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, I don’t need to be reminded. This is a film, not a history lesson. The film did however, always manage to justify these flaws, not just for Christianity but religion in general. This leaves just two beefs:
- Why not just use a normal bomb? Why did they have to bring the element of sci-fi in with this explosive created from an experiment at CERN? I’m quite sure A-Level physics taught me that anti-matter bomb just wouldn’t work, the amount of energy radiated by annihilation (collision between matter and anti matter) is no where near as much as the energy required to make anti-matter in the first place. I’m always the last person to point out scientific flaws in films, and I never dis-recommend a film because of it, it just bugs me that they brought this in when a stick of dynamite would have fitted just as well in the storyline, making the climate of the discussion of science vs religion totally plausible.
- So it turns out the goodest of good guys (I’m really sorry to spoil this for whoever hasn’t seen the film yet, but it seems an old cliche which I personally always anticipate in every film I see anyway, and it always annoys me when I’m right) is actually the villain, and he planned the whole thing for his own glory. Sorry, there are so many elements that could not be planned. The main thing being the timing. With the bombs timer being so ambiguous, as it used a battery with an “approximate” lifetime and was affected by the temperature of its surroundings, he still managed to time the conclusion of his master-plan so perfectly by heroically taking the device in a helicopter and letting it detonate high up away from everyone. Again, they could have done away with this whole conspiracy, the film would have still achieved its same goals, while making more sense at the same time.
Overall I’d still recommend it. As an action film, the perfect balance is achieved, where there’s not so much going on that your eyes dart around the screen struggling to take it all in, and at the same time, there’s enough to keep the film moving at a good pace. As a philosophical film, it does well to openly study the debate between science and religion. As a romance film, there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about it… See what I did there?
This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» So the time came, I refreshed and refreshed across 1:29 to 1:30AM, (9:30AM Tokyo Time), waiting for the tickets to fly out to Amami Oshima to become available; refresh, still not available, refresh again, and, sold out. I was expecting a rush, but not to be gutted in a single instant. The question remains what to do now? Ferry’s are cheaper, but take 11 hours either direction, and we could be stranded on Amami for days before being able to get back to the mainland. To make matters worse, I’m away on holiday when the ferry tickets become available, and the process isn’t in English either. This is gonna be a tough one, but if it really comes to it, I’m sure we’ll be able to bribe a fisherman to take us out to a visible location.
If you’re tech enough, you could probably have guessed what this topic was all about, if not, then two words: Wolfram Alpha. Despite it’s initial, general appearance, it’s not a search engine, but a “a computational knowledge engine”. Instead of gathering information from the Internet, it has it’s own internal knowledge base, and hence returns factual answers based on what you ask, rather than opinions.
This can be anything from share prices to, well, as someone put it this morning:
The integral of x^2 dx from 0 to the population of Jordan divided by the GDP of japan in British pounds per second.
And there I was surprised I still remember what an integral is from A-Level maths. In English, the question is asking, if you were to draw the graph of X^2 (which is a curve that gets steeper as you increase X, as the result goes 0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 etc for every increment), up to where X = Jordan’s population, and then work out the area under this curve, and divide that figure by the Japan’s annual economic output in terms of sterling per second.
The answer is in fact 7.569*10^14 persons cubed seconds per pound sterling, which I’m still trying to decipher. The best bit is it even gives a graph based on how the figure would have changed over history based on Jordan’s population growth and Japan’s economy (though, it’s failed to account for change in exchange rates between Yen and GBP), and then cites its sources.
As it turns out, this kind of calculation is just a smidgen of what it’s capable of. I was going to give some more examples, but you might as- well just look at the ones already on the website.
I tried a few experiments of my own, and found that the average global wage rate for each person is approximately £1.17 per hour, (the flaw here is that not everyone in the labour force is actually employed, so the actual figure is just a little higher). Furthermore, the world labour force only makes up 45.99% of the world population, meaning that if the world were communist, everyone would earn a whopping 54 pence per hour, which is still greater than my average salary between last October and last month.
This is why commy-dictator Kim Jong Il should be put in charge of the British M.o.D., we’d all have a pay rise, and on another plus-side I’m also sure he’d do a better job of brainwashing us into thinking our troops are fighting for a noble cause.
This entry is part of a series, NotMyBase.com WIP» OK, so I’m really procrastinating now. I’ve still not started any serious revision for Monday’s exam, and I just have the urge to do everything else, evident by the rise in posts per day on my site from less than one to around sixty-two.
When I first worked on this new site, I came up with a series of goals, and some of them have been fulfilled. I’ve redesigned the header, and the colour makes the search box a little more obvious then when it was purely white like the search box itself. I’d still like a status in the header, and I promise it wont be as obscene as my Facebook ones.
As for sidebar widgets, I’m still getting used to the site management so I’m still figuring out what is genuinely useful and what is just clutter. Speaking of clutter, I need to tidy the menu up a bit.
But I now have a new issue, allow me to explain. Take a look at everything I’ve posted about this years tour of Japan (I still get all giddy when I say that), what I’d really like to do is have the map stickied to the top half of the page, and for the bottom half, have a slide-show of the other posts in the topic. I already have a few idea’s on how to do this, but I really should get revising.
|
|
