Tokyo’s average annual temperature has increased by about 3.0 °C from ~1876 to ~2019. This includes both global warming and additional warming due to urbanisation and continued loss of green spaces. Meanwhile, Tokyo Met Gov’t is felling hundreds of mature trees in downtown parks for redevelopment.

Been trying to read some isekai lately.

The massive kokeshi in Nishi Park here in Sendai pleases me every time I see it.

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

BBC News captures Doctor Who himself Sylvester McCoy at the Trump protest seemingly unaware of who they're interviewing.

I feel this needs to be said again but LLMs are not implementing usage-based theories of language unless one interprets the latter in the shallowest, devoid of their most interesting assumptions, way. “Usage” is not just frequency ffs.

guess what stage of moving this is

If you see this, repost with a vampire that's not Dracula

tfw you need to get a cardboard box home (and a bunch of other stuff), but you came by road bike today

When I think about the fact that universities are ALSO supposed to be repositories of knowledge and expertise you can't get elsewhere (and not just job training or even educational enterprises) I immediately go to ancient languages. I don't think ppl realize you can just lose them

From Darkness to Hypervisibility! A one day symposium on the promotional and creator cultures of social media at UQ in November. CFP and details here: hass.uq.edu.au/event/sessio... @bradyjay.bsky.social @antmandan.bsky.social

I recall really enjoing Tim Wise’s piece "Forget STEM, We Need MESH” (media literacy, ethics, sociology and history) pre-pandemic and thinking and talking about it often. Link. medium.com/our-human-fa...

Part of me really wants to go to the Osaka Expo, but given *waves hands* all that, it seems mostly like a nightmare with small children. An experience that's 95% waiting in line in the sun? And crowds? That sounds like immediate and persistent misery.

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

People on two wheels are trying to reclaim the streets for human beings from deadly, huge, overpowered four-wheeled metal boxes.

R.I.P. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), you wolde have lovid "Kyoto" (2020) by Phoebe Bridgers.

another way in which LLMs make me feel like an alien as compared to their many fans: I find their default fawning conversational tone to be intensely, viscerally repulsive and suspicious.

We headed to Moomin Valley to celebrate :)

I'm always happy that I live here in Japan, but today I am especially happy, because I left my backpack with most of my important possessions in it on the train, and it turned up within the hour completely unscathed at the final stop.

I...

Chappell Roan, welcome to the @thewaroncars.bsky.social

Folks, there is currently a tsunami warning for the West Coast: tsunami.gov Good idea to let family and friends in the zone know. I'll link to to maps for WA in next post.

A tsunami warning was in effect for a portion of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain Tuesday after a magnitude 8.7 earthquake struck off of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

NHK is covering: www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...

Looks like there's a tsunami warning for all of East Japan, give or take. (8.7 magnitude earthquake off of Kamchatka, it seems)

Me: Drivers almost kill bicyclists through their recklessness and don't give a shit This person: But one time, I had to slow down for a bike! Once again, our "entitlement" is us not wanting to die. How dare we, right?

I'm a broken record preaching to the choir, but I do think it's worth emphasizing that cyclists (and pedestrians) are afraid drivers will kill them. Drivers are annoyed that bicyclists will slow them down or be rude to them.

Tokyo has way too many people living in it for so many people to lack basic situational awareness. It's untenable.

This is obviously awful, but that aside, I am literally never going to run out of research material.

Cowboy bebop is a utopian future because the characters don’t use a smartphone

I'm trying to think about how I would have reacted if shown this headline five years ago

This is my most confrontational post of the day: please watch Armond’s video & think on it. It isn’t at all progressive or leftist to spread disabling disease in an ongoing pandemic. There are more Armonds than you know, & folks who don’t mask are making more each day bc most spread is asymptomatic

This came up, specifically, because I also learned that the Japanese title of the Jersey Shore is ジャージー・ショア　〜マカロニ野郎のニュージャージー・ライフ〜 which raises its own set of questions.

I learned today that マカロニ野郎 is a thing characters call each other in Japanese dubs of mafia video games, and honestly I have so many questions.

As part of our "do a bunch of Kanto stuff while we still live here," we popped up to Chichibu for the weekend and the weather was 💯💯💯

Getting the election candidate newspaper in the mail is always a fun chance to see which candidate has the most deranged platform, and wow, there is some pretty racist competition this time around.

it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.

These cuts are absolutely devastating. The EALC program and Folklore/Ethnomusicology programs are incredibly well regarded, and to just cut them (or "merge" or restructure them or whatever language they're pretending to use) like they're nothing is gut wrenching.

I did it. I finally achieved my final form. I rolled into class today with not one, not two, but three separate beverages.

It's just too bad there was no way to anticipate this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e...

Now that all the paperwork is taken care of, I'm pleased to announce that I am officially joining Tohoku University in October as a tenure-track assistant professor. 🎉

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

One of my biggest gripes in recent Japan Studies is the tendency to force an economic lens on research that really doesn't need it. Sometimes things can just be interesting! We don't need to constantly reference the recession.

A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).