Dammit Jim!

For a while, I’ve been a bit annoyed with WordPress losing pings (those automatic links on your blog when someone links to you) that should be coming to my posts. I noticed that when I or an external blog link to more than one of my posts only one ping would register in my comments. For example, if someone writes that:

Scott has written WordPress plugins to make it easier to write about code, generate monster avatars and generate unique geometric shapes for each commentor.

I would want a ping to appear on each of those linked posts, both to thank the linking blog for writing about me and to provide useful information to the reader (and to increase my comment counts). Yet WordPress only puts a ping on the first linked page.

It took me a little while to figure out why WordPress kept losing my pings since I wasn’t even sure if it was a problem on the sending or receiving end but it turns out WordPress is filtering pings because it thinks the comments are coming too fast. I’ll put the details below but if you just want to make sure all the pings intended for your blog actually reach it then here is the plugin for you.

Watching Letters from Iwo Jima reminded me that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was 62 years ago today. I think Orac covers the moral and historical perspective of the bombings pretty well. What I wanted to talk about was the current city of Hiroshima.

I spent a year as an exchange student in Hiroshima University. I still get some odd questions when I say I stayed in Hiroshima. It seems some people think it’s something like the abandoned quarantine zone of Chernobyl (perhaps with added Godzilla). But in fact, by the time Americans entered Hiroshima less than two months after the bomb, radiation levels were barely above the US health guidelines for acceptable radiation exposure (well below the guidelines for occupational exposure). In any case, current radiation levels are indistinguishable from anywhere else in the world and the city is home to more than 1,100,000 people.

So now that that’s covered, I thought I’d list a few things worth doing and seeing in Hiroshima (it’s been a few years now so my apologies if anything has changed):

I just watched Letters from Iwo Jima. I thought it was a really good movie. Quite a bit different than (and in my opinion better) than Flags of Our Fathers and definitely worth renting if you get the chance. It’s currently the 141st best movie on IMDB and there’s many reviews out there so I’ll leave the review at that but I did want to point out a couple things I found funny (one fishy, one comical).

One thing that bugged me was that the part of Saigo, the guy who just wants to go home, seemed to be written for an older man and the actor they picked looked quite young (in fact he’s currently only 24). In the special features, the commentators were even talking about how he was being drafted late in the war because he was old. In any case, he did do a good job acting so it’s only a minor nitpick.

Anyway, what I found amusing is that the title in Japanese is 硫黄島からの手紙 (you can see it in the poster to the left) with “硫黄島” meaning Iwo Jima (sulfur island) and “手紙” meaning letters. The word for letters is made up of hand (手 – kind of looks like a hand with the fingers to the right or maybe the 5 points are fingers) and paper (ç´™ – this ones not quite as clear, the left bit means thread and I suppose the right part could look like a sheet of paper). That kind of makes sense since letters are paper with hand writing on them. Anyway the funny part is that the complex characters of Japanese can also be read by Chinese speakers but sometimes with shifted meaning. In this case, Chinese has a quite different meaning for the combination of hand and paper: bathroom tissue. Somehow ‘Toilet Paper from Iwo Jima’ just doesn’t have the same ring.

Thanks to Xiaofen for the Chinese translation