I spent a day out with the family today and ended up going on a short walk around a wildlife park north of Gillingham, by the Medway estuary. The tide was out which was a pity as the views at high tide would probably have been quite pleasant, even if the estuary is quite an industrial area, home to Kingsnorth power station and other huge concrete installations.

Still, the weather was pleasingly autumnal and the tidal waters were still visible in the distance, so it wasn't too bad. I snapped this picture of water traffic towards the north of the estuary; there were hundreds of boats out on the water today, making the most of the good weather no doubt. If you look carefully (click to zoom), you should be able to make out the Waverley, a restored paddle steamer, paying a visit to the area. It was packed with passengers.

I'm still working through a huge backlog of things I need to do caused by work taking nearly all of my free time this week, so I don't expect I'll be around much for a couple of days. Everything should be back to normal after that though. I have a string of posts I've been planning to make for a while and hopefully next month I'll finally be able to find the time to make them.

It's been another "fun" week at work so I've had to put my life on hold again for a few days. A hardware failure of one of our remotely hosted servers killed it and brought down everything else in the rack early on Tuesday morning, so my time since then has been spent setting up a shiny, new replacement. The good news is that the replacement works much better than the old one ever did, so I may end up getting more time back over the next year that would otherwise have been invested in maintenance than I've spent fiddling with things over the last day or two.

Anyway, all of that is the reason that this post is being made some time after the more enjoyable events of the weekend.
 

On Saturday, I journeyed up to Spitalfields market in London with friends for the Japan Matsuri, an event organised to commemorate the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations and trade between Japan and the UK. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day out. The three stages played host to a variety of performances, my favourites being the taiko and yosakoi demonstrations by the Acton-based Japanese School as well as the very visual, offbeat musical act by Frank Chickens. There were also a number of food stalls, but most of the popular ones had queues that looked at least half an hour long, so I had to forego my yakisoba — which should put the post I made the following day in context. I did have some fried cheesy rice balls that were yummy, although quite rich.
 

Apparently the event was a big success with over 30,000 attendees (around 15,000 were expected) visiting over the course of the day. The organisers are already planning another event next year. For videos and photos of the day, take a look at this recent post on the Japan Matsuri website. I may put up a gallery page with a few snaps once I've looked through them properly; it depends on whether I can find enough that aren't too dire.

At last! And I didn't even have to queue.

Hunting for food at the Japan Matsuri. I'm not a tako fan, but I must admit that they do look yummy.

I finally found the courage to try my carton of beans this evening so this will be a short review on what I ate for dinner. Whatever did I do before technology allowed me to share this drivel with the world?

The combination of chocolate and a chilli-like concoction had me a little worried. I've seen many chilli-flavoured chocolate bars and avoided every single one because to my ears the combination sounds so wrong. It does seem popular though so perhaps I am actually missing out on something good. I have a feeling it will be a long while before I feel brave enough to find out. The ingredients list claimed that the mixture in the carton was less than 1% chocolate which reassured me a little; at least at that concentration I hopefully wouldn't be able to taste much of it.

So, into the saucepan it went. It smelt safe which was another good sign. Once it was done, I dished it up and took this highly staged photo of it sitting in a bowl on my table - before taking it to my desk so that I could devour it in front of my keyboard in a very unrefined fashion while reading the news.

The verdict? Quite nice, actually. The strangest thing was that I couldn't taste the chocolate at all. I imagine it did contribute to the flavour in some way, but I couldn't isolate it. The overwhelming flavour was one of tomatoes, which makes sense looking at the list of ingredients. Otherwise it was quite a pleasant and warming, if slightly heavy, chilli-based soup. Probably an ideal one for the winter. When it will no longer be stocked because this month will have been and gone. >_>

An alternative title for today's ramble could be "Why I don't want a motorbike."

I came across a few interesting if morbid statistics the other day, published by the UK Department for Transport about a decade ago, comparing the safety of different modes of transport. The statistics themselves have been reproduced in a number of locations including a study on railway safety and the Wikipedia article on air safety, which was where I originally came across them. To me though, the most surprising figures have nothing to do with trains and planes but rather the safety of the humble two-wheeled contraption I mentioned above.

The DfT do have more recent (2008) statistics available, but there isn't a huge amount of difference in the numbers between then and now and I'd rather not figure out all of the derived numbers, so I'll use the statistics from a decade ago in the following charts.

Let's begin with a look at fatalities per billion passenger journeys for each mode of transport - that is, given one billion passengers and if we assume that the trends will continue, the number of passengers likely to snuff it on any given journey.
 

 
I'll talk quickly about the other modes of transport before starting on the one at the bottom that stands out like a sore thumb and is obviously the subject of this post. There aren't any real surprises if you ignore the last row. Bus/coach and rail are predictable winners, being vehicles of mass transit that trundle around on a fixed route. Due to their size, they're also quite likely to come off reasonably unscathed when they happen to encounter lesser vehicles. Interestingly, car and foot both seem to carry the same per-journey risk.

The more eccentric methods of transporting people from place to place that involve a vessel floating on or in a medium subject to the whims of nature - water and air - don't fare quite so well, although neither is particularly high. Some might be a little surprised by the figure for air given the airline industry's often-quoted adage about being the safest way to travel, but depending on how you interpret the numbers they are correct - we'll come to that later on. I take on average perhaps two flights per year (counting the return), which would carry the same level of risk as six journeys by foot. Since I've been walking daily for close to three decades and haven't yet (to the best of my knowledge) suffered a fatal accident doing so, travelling by plane once a year doesn't particularly trouble me. Next to last, we have bicycles; presumably these are the lesser vehicles the coaches and buses sometimes encounter.

So, the motorbike... No, I didn't make a mistake when typing up the statistics and accidentally put an extra digit in there. According to the DfT, the risk of death per passenger journey really is an order of magnitude greater than the next most dangerous mode of transport, the motorbike's non-motorised cousin. The combination of weaving in and out of traffic and low visibility probably accounts for a large number, although I'd bet that unsafe behaviour factors heavily in there too. Living just down the road from a motorcycle garage, I often see riders doing well over 60mph in what is supposed to be a 30mph zone, doing wheelies and sometimes coming dangerously close to having a nasty accident. One day someone's luck is bound to run out. In which event I shall take photos and blog about them here as a prime example of human stupidity. It suffices to say that I can quite believe this number, high though it may be.

Anyway, next chart - fatalities per billion passenger hours.
 

 
Not too many surprises. Bus/coach and rail stay in the lead with air close behind. Car and foot don't do quite as well as before, falling towards the bottom. The two-wheeled contraptions yet again claim the last two rows of the chart though. The numbers tell a very sobering story. On average, you are over 400 times more likely to die during an hour spent travelling by motorcycle as you are during an hour on a bus.

Last one - fatalities per billion passenger kilometres.
 

 
You may recall my comments earlier about the airline industry's safety claims not matching up with the evidence in the first chart. The third chart is the one they will refer you to if you ask for numbers. When distance is taken into account, air travel leaps ahead. Statistically, you are 60 times more likely to die per kilometre covered in a car than in an aircraft.

The rest of the chart is unsurprising, although human-powered travel (foot and bicycle) does rather badly - I suppose because it takes far longer to cover the distance. But wait! What's that at the bottom? Gosh, it's the motorcycle again. Whoever could have predicted that? It isn't a long way off the end this time as it's being kept company by foot and bicycle. The fatality rate is still over two thousand times higher than that of air travel though, which is a big, scary number.

I've only ridden on the back of a motorcycle once - my uncle's - on a long, winding road down the side of a steep hill. It probably only took minutes but it seemed to last much, much longer. I've felt more secure on the back of a horse that didn't want me to be there; it was really quite a terrifying sensation.

It's an odd contraption when you think about it; not really designed for convenience or great comfort and, as the numbers show (however you add them up), is probably the least safe way of getting from A to B ever devised. But people do ride them by choice. It seems to be favoured predominantly by manly men who find that placing a throbbing metal beast between their legs and enjoying the countryside by tearing through it at ludicrous speeds reinforces their feelings of manly worth. I think it was Kiddy Grade that described motorbikes (albeit ones that hovered) as "mechanical horses for jocks" or something similar. I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly nice people who ride motorcycles too, and obviously there must be some appeal - I just don't know quite what that is.

Anyway, yes. I think I can safely say that I don't think I'll be buying a motorbike. Ever. And I should probably wave farewell to whatever motorbike-loving audience I had too since I doubt they'll visit again after I've flamed their mode of transport of choice.

In other news! ... Nothing much has happened. I've been doing quite a bit of clearing up and sorting out for the past week. I'm looking around at flats in the local area to see what's available as my contract on this place runs out in a couple of months. Although it's looking less and less likely that I'll be able to move in November (running out of holiday at work doesn't give me any days to look at flats or move), I want to be ready in case an amazing opportunity presents itself. And if nothing comes up, I shall at least be extra ready for the next contract expiration date in the spring when I will also have more than enough holiday to do my flat-hunting.

Today was nice and damp and grey for the first time in a while. The temperature was quite a bit cooler than last week too. With the clocks going back in a little under two weeks, I feel I can comfortably say that autumn has arrived.

It's choc full of them, apparently. Definitely one of the more unusual flavours. A verdict will be blogged when I feel brave enough to try it.

09-09-09 09:09 :) If I were Data and stuck in a temporal loop, I would wonder if my past self might be trying to tell me something.

The summer is supposedly over but it's been a rather warm start to the week, helped along by blazing sunshine. Thankfully the clouds are supposed to roll in today and stick around for the rest of the week, which is a nice relief as warehouse plus sun does not a pleasant working environment make. Not much sign of them yet though...

I haven't really been up to anything blogworthy recently. I've resumed working on a mini project that I started and then forgot about ages ago which is sucking up a lot of my time. I'll probably blog a little more about it in a few weeks when I have something to show.

I finally got around to watching Paprika a couple of weeks ago. I bought it last year, but whenever I thought about watching it, something would come up and get in the way. Admittedly I was a little fussy about what I would accept as a suitable time to watch it - it had to be a quiet day without any rushing about and I had to be awake; I know that doesn't sound hard but I seem to have had remarkably few days this year that would come close to qualifying.

Anyway, the recent three-day weekend at last gave me the chance to sit down and enjoy Satoshi Kon's latest motion picture. I'd managed to avoid gossip and spoilers - I hadn't even looked at the box - so the only thing I knew going into the film was that it had something to do with dreams. An hour and a half later, I was satisfied, if a bit dazed. I'd say it was one of Kon's more challenging works, closer in execution to something like Mousou Dairinin/Paranoia Agent than his other films which, while a little muddled at times, are quite well grounded.

A theme that has prevailed through nearly all of his works, from Magnetic Rose onwards, has been the symbiosis of dreams and reality. In a way, Paprika feels like the culmination of his work on this theme - what everything so far has been building to. This time, the exploration of the connection between reality and dreams is at the heart of the film, not just part of the story or a means with which to tell it. The story itself is a mirror of Kon's metapsychological musings and, in a fascinating display of recursion, the characters are as much a part of the film's exploration of the field as they are of their own. The title of Kon's next feature film, Yume Miru Kikai, appears to suggest that Kon doesn't feel he's reached a conclusion just yet though.

As I had expected to, I loved the film. It may require a second viewing to appreciate more fully though; it moves at quite a pace and there's always a lot going on, making it a little hard to follow and bits and pieces can easily be missed. It's certainly very different from something like Millennium Actress, for example, which has a unique charm and much slower pace. For anyone prepared to give it the time and attention it demands though, I think Paprika should prove to be a fascinating and rewarding film.