Dammit Jim!

I finally finished up my masters (on migration and tagging effects in leatherback sea turtles). Once I get a little free time (and I feel like looking at it again), I’ll have to write up a few posts about it. Anyway, it sure is good to be done. It took a bit too long but it was a really good experience.

In other news, I got engaged. I found it pretty funny that the day after xkcd came out with this cartoon:

So I’m off to China to visit the future in-laws and do some touring. Apparently almost all Western sites are blocked by default on the residential network where I’m going. So any responses may be a bit slow.

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’ve been using LaTeX a lot recently and I thought I would write a quick post since I wish I would have found out about it earlier. LaTeX is a really powerful document (pdf and others) creation program. It’s sort of like HTML and CSS for paper publishing. As a first warning, LaTeX, like HTML, is not WYSIWYG. You have to code in things like \textbf{This will be bold}. This takes some getting used to after programs like MS Word but after using LaTeX, I really can’t stand working in Word for anything longer than a page or two.