Dammit Jim!

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

To continue in the unintentional theme of bug mating rituals and to see if I can work out how to embed a video here is a cool video of a male jumping spider courting a female:

The sound is half the fun so don’t forget to turn up your speakers. It seems like it must be a part of some research project with the fancy recording set up but I’m not sure who made it. Anyway it seemed pretty cool, so I took a quick look at the literature to see what was going on.

I was looking to create a fake page in a WordPress plugin I’m working on in my (all too limited) spare time. It may seem a little silly to try to create a fake page with a plugin but this could be useful for any plugin that will display information to the readers of the blog (outside the admin panel), like statistics, contact pages or about pages. Luckily there is a handy tutorial for creating a fake posts. But although the plugin cleverly tricks WordPress into displaying a post created dynamically by the plugin itself, WordPress is clever enough to know something is wrong and sends a 404 error before sending the plugin-created content. Although many browsers will still display the page, this is a problem for any text-based browser or if you want the page to be indexed by search engines and (for me at least) just kind of grates to know my magnificent new plugin isn’t actually performing correctly. Anyway, this happens because WP->handle_404() called by WP->main() in classes.php checks how many posts were found which, in this case, is 0 since there is no real post for the requested URL. To get around this problem, we need to make sure we trick WordPress before this function is called. Luckily we can catch WordPress immediately after it (unsuccessfully) looks for posts before any other function can figure out anything is wrong by using the the_posts filter.

I’ve been burned a few times in WordPress when posting something like:

This is how you make text italic: This is italic.

when I actually wanted:

This is how you make text italic: <em>This is italic.</em>

Of course it’s not too hard to remember to encode the special characters but this is WordPress and things are supposed to be easy. So I thought I would throw together a simple WordPress plugin to convert HTML special characters inside <code></code> tags. That was a few months ago and I got the plugin most of the way done and then got distracted with other things. But after reading about another person having the same annoyance, I decided I should finish the plugin.