Zhang Ziyi

I don't usually dabble in things showbizzy, mainly because I don't know the first thing about such stuff, but here goes, my first and probably last piece of showbiz punditry:

Zhang Ziyi attended the world premiere of "Memoirs of a Geisha" in Tokyo tonight. It is the first big-budget Hollywood movie to have an almost entirely Asian cast.

Whether or not it is any good, I've got a feeling that Zhang Ziyi, who also starred in the Chinese hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", may become one of the biggest female stars in the history of cinema. It is a ridiculous claim, but she has come onto the scene at a time when China is becoming an economic powerhouse and when Hollywood is showing increasing signs of wanting to cater not only to that international market but to its prosperous domestic Asian market. Zhang Ziyi, who undoubtedly has star quality, has a potential fan base of billions of people.

For those with ten minutes to waste...

..., and I mean waste, this is quite fun. You have to drag and drop things at a few points in the animation. The instructions are in Japanese but it is pretty obvious.

This is fun too. You have to try to get cherry blossoms on the tree by passing your mouse cursor over buds and avoiding knocking them off. "Hanami" is a custom in Japan. Everybody has picnics under the cherry blossoms.

Rubbish revisited

Shortly after arriving in Japan, I whined about the gomi (waste) disposal system here in Japan. To remind you, in our house we have to have six different rubbish receptacles and there are four different days a week on which we take the various types of rubbish to the communal waste disposal area. The New York Times has covered the ridiculousness of it.

Anyway, as with all things, one eventually gets used to life as an outsourced rubbish sorter. I have begun to take for granted the small rubbish disposal facility taking over a large part of our kitchen. One thing still plagues me though: the ineffable fear of a "category mistake". You see, if you put the wrong type of rubbish in the wrong category of waste the bin men will refuse (ho!ho!) to collect it. It will just sit there forever at the collection spot or until the errant householder becomes shamed enough to take it back again and attempt a recategorisation.

And yet, without taking a PhD in Gomi Categorisation, there are so many objects that I have no idea how to categorise. At least once a day I find myself taking a fearful blind guess at whether some anomalous object is "purakuru" (recycleable plastic), moeru gomi (burnable rubbish), moenai gomi (unburnable rubbish) etc. etc.. What the hell is an earbud, for instance? There is a burnable cottony substance and some distinctly burnable looking ear wax on it but then a plastic stick! There doesn't seem to be much logic to it. It is more like learning the catechism. For instance, cassette tapes and nappies are both considered burnable whereas a cotton futon is non burnable.

Anyway, today's category dilemma was over Doraemon. He went into recycleable plastic but I fear he may be waiting at the collection point a long time. He is a pencil top made of a kind of rubbery substance.

Church abuse

For years, I have been dimly aware of the fuss about child abuse by members of the Catholic church and, to be honest, have not been particularly interested in it. This, however, is an excellently written and thought provoking article.

Theoretical physics

Was just listening to an interview with Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist, on an NPR podcast.

The Multiverse as a bath of soap bubbles and our Universe as the surface of one of those bubbles:

Kaku: Think of soap bubbles. We live on the surface of an expanding soap bubble and if you jiggle a soap bubble sometimes it vibrates and splits in half and then you have two soap bubbles. So, one soap bubble buds of another or sprouts off another and this is called eternal inflation. And so of course we can't prove all these theories but the experimental data is coming in in the direction of inflation, which does support the idea of a multiverse: that is an ocean of bubbles, each bubble then fissioning off and creating more bubbles and so we have a Genesis taking place in an eternal Nirvana.

What is Dark Matter? And how does it relate to the Multiverse

Kaku: There is something called dark matter out there. We now realise that dark matter is about 10 times more plentiful than ordinary matter except dark matter is invisible ... There are two theories as to dark matter, both of them coming from something called string theory which is what I do for a living ... One is that dark matter is shadow matter just like the invisible man: gravity from another universe. The other theory is that dark matter could be made out of 'sparticles', super particles; that is higher octaves of the super string. Now, we believe, though we can't yet prove, that all matter we see around us is nothing but musical notes, musical notes on tiny tiny little vibrating strings. So, the laws of physics are the laws of harmony and when the strings bump into each other they create chemistry, so chemistry would be the melodies played out on these strings. The universe would be a symphony of strings and the Mind of God, that Einstein eloquently wrote about in his memoirs, the Mind of God would be cosmic music resonating not through ordinary space but through hyper space, perhaps 11 dimensional hyperspace. And so the other theory is that dark matter is nothing but the next octave of these vibrating strings. So, both interpretations of dark matter require the introduction of multiple universes.

Interviewer: Ok, that makes... Ha, ha... I don't have a clue what any of that means but I ...

Kaku: I can try again ...

Interviewer: No, no, no. You have.... I think that's ... I think that for someone of my scientific knowledge... I think that is about as good as it is going to get.

I'm so glad the interviewer said that.

I couldn't help but feel, when listening to Kaku, that his use of metaphors, in talking about bubble baths and the laws of harmony, was really very like the old tradition of the use of religious metaphor to help the ignorant masses of the medieval church. I mean ideas like Jesus as a shepherd, God as a geezer with a big white beard and hell as a very hot place with lots of tongues and spikes. Such religious metaphor is not employed by the speaker to illuminate a particular aspect of a reality the listener understands. It is used to allow the hopelessly unenlightenable listener to live in an alternative conceptual reality which, though not really the same as the reality that the theoreticians are struggling with, has something of the same shape. I suppose it reassures the theoreticians at least.

Apparently, in 2011, they are going to be sending up "the most ambitious satellite [mission] of all time", called LISA, which may be able to test these theories. LISA will be three satellites connected by laser beams five million kilometres long. They will make a triangle in outer space and be able to pick up gravity waves from the instant of creation that are still circulating around the universe. String theory and inflation theory make predictions about what the vibrations from these waves will be like and so, for the first time, they will be able to be tested. Meantime, I'll carry on imagining a string section sitting in a bubble bath.

For those less befuddled than me, Michio Kaku's book on all this is here.

US invents time machine

"So, Genghis, how does one go about invading a country properly?"

Martin Jacques

Hooray! Martin Jacques has written another of his wonderfully uninformative commentaries on Japan and China in the Guardian. I have rarely read anything quite so perfectly suited to become chip paper as Jacques's articles about Japan. I just wish the Guardian could send the relevant pages straight to the chip shops and cut out the newsagents.

I say that Jacques has written "another" of his articles, but he actually just seems to recycle the same spectacularly unoriginal article every three months and manages to get it accepted over and over again [1 with responses here, here, here and here.
,2,3,4].

Infact, why don't you get in on the act? You too can write a Martin Jacques article about Japan. You might even get a nice cheque from the Guardian opinion editors. All you need is a pair of scissors and some Copydex. Just cut out the shapes below and rearrange them to make whatever pretty picture you want! Maybe if you add a bit of that glittery glue and a few nice crayon drawings beside the cut outs, the Guardian editors might like it better:

God photoshops

My parents found this in their garden a couple of days ago.



Here is another view.



A little shrew had tried to climb up the spout, got itself wedged and froze in place.

I promise these images has not been manipulated. Please ask for permission to use it. My email is at the bottom of this blog.

You've been warned

Went for a check up today at the university medical centre. While I was about it, I picked up a few leaflets, including this one about the evils of alcohol. Apparently, this is the actual medical diagram of what happens when you drink:



There was also a section on the latest research into the dangers to cats of drinking too much:



And, in related news, Tokai University has recently imposed a complete ban on the setting of child pickpockets' hair on fire with cigarettes:



Spoil sports.

Hold the front page! The Ridings School is rubbish shock!

I hear the Ridings school is back in trouble! Interesting that because, in reality, it never was out of trouble.

Some of you may wonder what I am talking about. Way back in the dim and distant past, when I was a cub reporter on the Halifax Courier, I broke a story about chaos at the Ridings School in West Yorkshire which became big national news. Basically, the kids were rioting and the academic results were absolutely abysmal (only 8 per cent of children got 5 A to C grades). The national newspapers followed up my story and had a field day, labelling it the "School from Hell", "The Worst School in Britain", and "Grange Hell".

The Ridings was closed down, its leaders were chucked out and it was reopened under a new and charismatic joint headship. The story ran for months and became the focus for a national debate about failing school leadership. This approach, that schools were bad because their leaders were bad and that schools could be saved by new leadership, has defined the Labour Government's basic approach to education policy since. Tony Blair is particularly attached to it. I once heard him say he could tell how good a school was without even entering it, but simply from his first impressions of the head teacher. What a load of toss!

Anyway, the media have periodically revisited the Ridings in the decade since it became infamous and have told a heart warming story of a struggle against the odds, in which charismatic leaders have dragged a down-and-out school from the depths to something approaching respectability. Millions of pounds have been poured into this flagship project. The two headteachers who took the helm after the Ridings disgrace, Peter Clarke CBE and Anna White CBE, have been hailed as heroes and showered with plaudits and honours for "turning the school around". Successive education secretaries and Blair himself have made numerous visits to the school to trumpet this example of how the worst can be made, if not into the best, then into the just below average.

So how shocking to read that headline on the BBC website this week: "Ridings School 'inadequate' again"! The article continued breathlessly:

The Ridings School in Halifax has been given notice to improve after Ofsted inspectors said it was "performing less well than could be expected". The report said pupils were disruptive and capable of achieving more, and that teaching quality was "variable".But it praised the new head teacher and leadership team, saying they had made good plans to raise standards.

Well, as the person who broke this story, I must say I'm not surprised at all that the Ridings school is inadequate "again". The plain fact is that it always has been inadequate and always will be. All this talk about great leadership, while no doubt true, has completely missed the point.

That terrible 8 per cent of students getting 5 GCSE A-Cs became 6 per cent in the year after the "rescue" of the school, then 3 per cent. Fair enough, you might say. This might be put down to the inadequacies of the old regime playing themselves out. But never, between 1996 and 2003 did the number of good GCSEs top 13 per cent. Then, in 2003, a great set of results: 25 per cent good grades! Still absolutely appalling by national standards, but an improvement. Head teacher Anna White said this marked the "long-awaited turning point". To mix metaphors, the turning point seems to have been a false dawn. Last summer, the figure was back down to 14 per cent. The Ridings never was "the worst school in Britain". However, despite the nice fairytale the Government and parts of the media have told in the decade since it was "rescued", it always has been a poorly performing school.

Why? The real issue was and is that the structure of education in Halifax inevitably means that the Ridings will always be in the Doldrums. A vicious selective education system exists in the town. It is a small place with two grammar schools in it and a hierarchy of schools beneath them, which exist to cater for the various grades of "failures" who didn't get into the flagship schools. We are not just talking a "Grammar School" and "Secondary Modern" system here; we are talking "Grammar School" and then "Secondary Modern, level 1", "Secondary Modern, level 2", "Secondary Modern, level 3" ... etc. etc... and then "The Ridings" at the very bottom of the pile. That is a bit of a caricature, there is a bit of localism in the system, but I think it catches the flavour of what is going on. The Halifax situation is particularly vicious because the size of the town means anybody can try to attend any school, but the elitism is the same as with any selective system. The grammar schools raison d'etre is to reproduce success. They take the best children, mix them together in an elite environment, and their results are excellent. The Ridings, at the very bottom of the hierarchy, is arguably set up to fail, to safely accommodate "failing children" for five years well away from the children who have some hope of success. Of course there are children in this group who have tons of potential but any success they do achieve is really remarkable in the Ridings context. The Ridings takes these worst performing children at 11-years-old, mixes them together with no sight of any students who were in any way successful at that age, and its results are terrible. Surprise! Surprise!

If people want to do something about the quality of education offered to the children of Halifax, they should quit looking at the leadership of the Ridings and start looking at the grammar school just 300 metres down the road from it and the other one about a mile away. They should ask themselves whether, in a small town with such a hierarchical structure of education, we can ever expect the school(s) at the bottom of that hierarchy to be any good? The stuck record that is the Ridings story suggests not.

The problem is that looking at such structural issues requires good leadership at the highest level, ie. national politicians. In truth, the leadership at that level on this issue has always been "inadequate". They have, quite consciously, avoided making any decision on an issue that would be politically problematic. Like any bad head, they have avoided the difficult call and preferred to blame their underlings for poor performance.

Oh dear

Look out Tokyo!

More men and flying machines

Went to the beach again today and came a across a team of synchronized kite flyers:

Another one of my incredibly poor videos from my mobile phone.

They were an unlikely bunch - a geeky looking fellow in a yellow v-neck and corduroy hat, an old codger who looked like a zimmer frame would soon be replacing the kite handles, an accountant on his day off and a man with an excess of hair - but they flew their kites like the Red Arrows fly jets: swooping and diving in unison, a kite peeling off the main group and then diving through the pack unscathed.

G. was transfixed. He kept pointing at the sky and looking back at me, as if to say, "Why can't you do that Dad?"

Cheese

Ok, so we've got the bread making licked. Now for the cheese making!