Brendan Fraser speaks rather authentic-sounding Japanese (to this non-speaker anyway) as he plays down and out Philip Vanderploeg here, a struggling actor who gets pulled into a gig with a 'rental family agency'. Instead of ads and bit parts, he plays stand-in roles for strangers – a professional roleplayer of sorts. And it's a role that Philip soon takes on with aplomb.

Everything is pretty low-stakes, though this is not to say it is treated frivolously. Philip gets called out for getting too emotionally involved with one of the clients, but he is allowed a graceful ending and – that rare and precious thing – forgiveness.

Brendan Fraser's big brown eyes carry a LOT of weight in this. His earnestness saves the whole thing from being too twee.

Loved the glimpses of everyone else in the agency – wished they got a bit more time.

#films

2h 20min, dir. Derek Cianfrance.

A motorcycle stunt rider considers committing a crime in order to provide for his wife and child, an act that puts him on a collision course with a cop-turned-politician.

This is... less than accurate, I think.

The blurb is all about Luke Glanton, motorcycle stunt rider (Ryan Gosling), who makes what can be best described as a series of bad but 'sounded good at the time' decisions. Proportionally, though, it's more about Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), the police officer who kills him.

It goes all over the place, really. The first strand of the story is about the family Glanton discovers, which he never really gets back into, but which serves as the catalyst for his subsequent decisions. His death is the pivot, after which we see the generational trauma in his son, Jason. There is a bit about the police corruption that allows Cross to benefit from Glanton's death – with little said about the actual circumstances around it.

In the end, there is no shining moment of justice. There is no truth revealed, no comeuppance for a wrongful death. In its place, just a tender moment between Jason, Luke's son, and his adoptive father Kofi; and half a reckoning for Cross. Thematically – probably appropriate – snap decisions with drastic consequences abound on all sides.

Aesthetically: Philip Glass features in the soundtrack; grey landscapes to really grind in the poverty and inescapable social circumstances. (3/5)

#films

It's long been my goal to play with music—to riff on it, expand or embellish or change or add stuff to songs I like. There's like 1.518e7 youtube videos about jamming with a guitar, and basically nothing with flutes, so I'm having to figure out stuff by myself. I'm not skilled at any of this so take it with grains of salt, but:

1. There's a saying, “the wrong note on rhythm is jazz; the right note with the wrong rhythm is noise”. Rhythm makes the difference between boring arpeggio exercises clashing with the music, and music; much more than any complex harmonic theories. Pay attention to the drums and percussion. Tune in with the rhythm with your whole body and keep that in your bones, that will put you in sync with the music.

2. Easy mode: Backing tracks. The type that shows the chords on screen is ideal: look up the notes on each chord, and a pentatonic or other improvisation-friendly scale to play on that key. (For the miyakobushi scale, “Phrygian” backing tracks work well.) First play only the root note of each chord; then try arpeggios or a few free notes of each chord as they come, in rhythm. Don't get overwhelmed trying to hit all of them, one or two notes are fine – instead, focus on staying musical from the get-go. Then experiment with the rest of the scale. Don't be afraid to break the rules and play passing notes fully outside what you're supposed to play, oftentimes they sound sick.

3. The purpose of all the harmony rules and stuff is to describe which notes sound good together. More important than that is to develop your sense of what notes sound good together. If you think they sounded good, then they did, you're making music that you like. I find the theory useful because if I just play random notes with no restrictions whatsoever it doesn't sound like “music” and I don't like it, and the theory gives me a starting pack of things that are easy to make work. But don't let the theory and the rules distract you from the need to exercise your own musical sensibility, to pay attention and tune your ear.

4. When you find a thing that worked, milk it. Repeat that little successful riff a few times.

5. Sometimes your intuition will want your fingers to do something with lightning-fast speed, and you have no idea why. It comes from some instinctive, sub-rational place. That place is the fountain of music; give your fingers to it.

6. When playing with finished music, the bass is your cheatcode. In the large majority of cases the bass of each measure is informing you of the root note of the chord, right at the first note. The rest of the bass riff gives you a little bag of notes that are guaranteed to work on that passage. It's much easier to pinpoint the bass notes than trying to reverse-engineer chords from harmonies. A bass tab gives you a map of stuff you can use to jam safely, and from there you can experiment. Moreover, the bass is lowkey percussion; paying attention to bass will automatically put you in the rhythmic vibe of that song.

7. Do like the bass and become percussion. E.g. pick a single note and go like “tuh-tuh-tuh” or dunno “tuuh, tuh-tuh / tuuh, tuh-tuh”, or whatever fits that song. Instead of trying to add melodies, add to the rhythm of the music.

8. On a similar note: drones. Instead of adding melodies, become atmosphere. My wind instruments like the flute, the xūn and the melodica work great for this. Swell in and out of long notes on the back, like a backing vocal going “aaahhh…”, and find out how that harmonises with the passage, or doesn't. Often a single note will be common to many chords and therefore work for very large passages (someone pointed me that almost all chords of “Hey Jude” have a C note, and the ones that don't have a D note, so you can “aaaahhh...” through the entire song by singing a C and changing to D when you feel like it doesn't fits; it works and it's very fun).
   A good example of this is Otonoha's shinobue adaptation of Cosmo Canyon – not the more obvious main flute melody, but notice the “backing flute” layers playing long notes in the background.

9. Call-response. Instead of trying to play alongside a singer or lead guitar, let them draw a melody, then try to repeat it on the flute an octave higher, or repeat it but change it a bit. Listen to jazz jamming to get a sense for how they do it.

10. Counterpoint! I mean I can't do counterpoint on the fly with my flute lol but at a super simple level: when the singer is going up, try playing along but going down instead. See what happens.

11. I have to take my own advice on this: just do the thing from the get-go. Since I want to play with existing songs, to embellish or change or add to them, try it. Yeah it doesn't sound very good but doing it regularly starts sinking in some skills. Just be sure to stay deliberate—pay attention to what worked and what didn't; experiment and keep what works.

This is just a straight-up republication of an article from the Toronto Star by Northrop Frye. It's increasingly difficult to find this piece so I took the opportunity to liberate it upon finding a copy and am now posting it here.

Don’t You Think It’s Time to Start Thinking?

By Northrop Frye

A STUDENT often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure.He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus.

Yet, in spite of his limited verbal skills, he firmly believes that he can think, that he has ideas, and that if he is just given the opportunity to express them he will be all right. Of course, when you look at what he's written you find it doesn't make any sense. When you tell him this he is devastated.

Part of his confusion here stems from the fact that we use the word “think” in so many bad, punning ways. Remember James Thurber's Walter Mitty who was always dreaming great dreams of glory. When his wife asked him what he was doing he would say. “Has it ever occurred to you that I might be thinking?”

But, of course, he wasn't thinking at all. Because we use it for everything our minds do, worrying, remembering, day-dreaming, we imagine that thinking is something that can be achieved without any training. But again it's a matter of practice. How well we can think depends on how much of it we have already done. Most students need to be taught, very carefully and patiently, that there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it.

They have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don't know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.

The operation of thinking is the practice of articulating ideas until they are in the right words. And we can't think at random either. We can only add one more idea to the body of something we have already thought about. Most of us spend very little time doing this, and that is why there are so few people whom we regard as having any power to articulate at all. When such a person appears in public life, like Mr. Trudeau, we tend to regard him as possessing a gigantic intellect.

A society like ours doesn't have very much interest in literacy. It is compulsory to read and write because society must have docile and obedient citizens. We are taught to read so that we can obey the traffic signs and to cypher so that we can make out our income tax, but development of verbal competency is very much left to the individual.

And when we look at our day-to-day existence we can see that there are strong currents at work against the development of powers of articulateness. Young adolescents today often betray a curious sense of shame about speaking articulately, of framing a sentence with a period at the end of it.

Part of the reason for this is the powerful anti-intellectual drive which is constantly present in our society. Articulate speech marks you out as an individual, and in some settings this can be rather dangerous because people are often suspicious and frightened of articulateness. So if you say as little as possible and use only stereotyped, ready-made phrases you can hide yourself in the mass.

Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure. By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together. Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction. This is the kind of thing that George Orwell was talking about, not just in Nineteen Eight-Four, but in all his work on language. The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.

The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking. It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness.

The teaching of humanities is, therefore, a militant job. Teachers are faced not simply with a mass of misconceptions and unexamined assumptions. They must engage in a fight to help the student confront and reject the verbal formulas and stock responses, to convert passive acceptance into active, constructive power. It is a fight against illiteracy and for the maturation of the mental process, for the development of skills which once acquired will never become obsolete.

• Reprinted from University of Toronto Columns.

Copyright 1986 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.

म्हणती विश्वगुरू विश्व नका फिरू

दोन महिन्यांनंतर उघडती डोळे एरवी तर साजरे युद्धविरामाचे सोहळे

देशहित सर्वोपरी म्हणतात संघी निवडणूकांनंतरच दिसते आम्हा तंगी

मजबूत म्हणे होईल रुपया – डॉलरचे सुत्र यांचे धुर्त साधूमित्र आता म्हणती तेलगॅस जपून वापरा मात्र

For any teachers heading back to school next week worried about how to deal with the proliferation of AI use by students at home, you might want to remind yourself about “Flipped Learning”

If student use of AI for homework is making it hard to assess how much learning there has been, then setting classroom style learning tasks for home study may be helpful. The classroom activities can then revolve around homework style tasks and problems, and short assessments, which will be a more reliable method of formative assessment because AI can't be used.

This doesn't have to be a complete teaching style change — normal homeworks can be set, but only mark them for completeness or effort, and restrict grading to tasks that are done in the classroom.

=> https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/what-flipped-learning

Note: I am not a believer in BadWrongFun™. I do not think that you are a bad person if you like things that I don't like. This is not a hit piece on your taste. But it might be a hit piece on your frugality. Read on.

A stellar tea described

As I sit here in my office, I'm sipping a lovely cup of 南京雨花茶 (Nánjīng Yǔhuā chá, Nanjing Yuhua tea). This is a famously subtle, light tea that needs patience to allow flavours to build up before they can be fully appreciated. When you first take a sip it's almost a disappointment. The liquor is pale like spring straw, and the taste is thin, almost watery. A hint of sweetness, a touch of nuttiness like chestnut, maybe a ghost of toasted pine. It's clean, cool, vegetal, and it vanishes almost immediately.

You could be forgiven for thinking this tea's reputation is grossly overrated.

But then you wait. You take a second sip a while later. And things have changed. The flavour is now clear; the thinness has fattened up. The sweet chestnut nuttiness now builds on a foundation; a kind of tingly basis on the middle of the tongue. The pine note has sharpened, giving ghosts even of dill weed: bright and resinous. And at the back of the tongue a strong umami note is beginning to build.

Sip after sip the taste develops. The sweetness transforms into a cooling finish that coats the back of the throat. The nuttiness develops into something stronger: think almonds, but raw, not roasted. The umami strengthens into something like a delicate vegetable soup's broth. Every sip layers over the previous, changing the flavour with each exposure.

This tea is not loud. It is patient and requires patience to appreciate. As you sit with it, patiently sipping, it shows off the molecules it arranges on your palate sequentially, one after another. The finish stretches for almost half a minute: a faint, sweet, yet astringent dryness that makes you reach for the next sip.

It's a tea that begins as nothing, but slowly, patiently, becomes everything. It is a true world-class green whose reputation is well-deserved.

...unless...

Unless, of course, you put milk into it. Or sugar. Because milk and sugar do to fine teas what the law at the end of Rush's “The Trees” does:

And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.

Milk in particular is the great leveller of tea. It is the hatchet, the axe, the saw, the chainsaw, and the forest fire that keeps all trees equal by force. If you're a fan of milk in tea, however, you likely won't understand this or believe it. So today I'm going to give you the science. And if you still want to drink your tea with milk and/or sugar (and there is nothing wrong with this!), I'll be saving you a lot of money in the bargain!

The lesser ruination

The addition of sugars to green tea has a direct, measurable negative effect on its “phenolic” compounds, the very core of its flavour profile. Sugar cuts away approximately 1% of the free radical scavenging activity of tea's phenols per 1% of sugar added. So you are, in effect, paying for a full symphony orchestra, but then smearing glue over the instruments that play the notes.

If you are the kind of person who brews the tea together with the sugar, instead of adding it afterwards, there's another effect that may come into play.

Tea brewing relies on diffusion. Flavour compounds move from an area of high concentration (the leaf) to lower concentration (the water). Dissolving sugar into the water changes the osmotic environment that the tea is diffusing into, subtly altering the extraction dynamics.

The result could be (the physics is sound, but there has not been any direct study of it in tea that I've seen) that fewer of the tea's volatiles are extracted. You have to make up for it by brewing for longer. And that causes the more unpleasant flavour elements to concentrate, ironically turning your tea more bitter because of the sweetener being present.

The greater bringer of devastation

Sugar in tea is ketchup on cordon bleu cuisine. It's a negative, but it doesn't stop the flavours from appearing. It merely reduces our experience of them.

By comparison milk in tea is a wrecking ball swinging through a garden shed. It leaves nothing worthwhile in its wake.

Let me explain.

At the heart of milk's devastation lies a class of proteins called caseins, which make up about 80% of milk's total protein.

These caseins form large colloidal structures known as casein micelles. Their surfaces are rich with proline residues, which have a unique affinity for phenolic compounds. And this isn't a weak affinity. It's robust, multi-point, non-covalent cross-linking acting through hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonding. Which is an appropriate pair of words to end that sentence on since the effect is vaguely like a hydrogen bomb in its impact on flavour.

The subtle complexity that forms the unique signature of each fine tea comes from tea polyphenols (TPP). When milk is added, the casein micelles sweep in and bind to these polyphenol compounds, effectively removing the “free” polyphenols from the tea infusion. This forming of larger complexes decreases the availability of free TPP. What is perceived as “smoothness” in the mouthfeel is, in actuality, the erasure of the fine-grained profile that gives the tea its depth and complexity. The tea's delicate astringency (the building block of that flavour development I described above) is chemically neutralized at the molecular level.

Even worse, the TPP-casein binding doesn't just affect taste perception, it also suppresses and traps aromatic molecules using the same mechanism. The aerial release of the many tea volatiles is significantly suppressed by the simple addition of milk; the very aroma of the tea gets locked up before it can ever reach your nose.

As a final kick in the teeth (yes, from a wrecking ball) there's some scientific evidence that the binding of caseins to tea flavonoids reduces their antioxidant capacity and potentially their bioavailability. So not only are you flattening the flavour of a fine tea and trapping its aromatics to reduce its lovely scent, you are also paying a premium for the bioactive compounds you're about to remove anyway.

Moneysaver

The tea I started with, Nanjing Yuhua, sells at time of writing for US$55 for third-grade tea to almost US$200 for the top grade per 500g (roughly a pound) at one randomly-selected online shop. And that's the grades you can buy outside of China. The very best grades, from specific sites, picked and processed by famed masters, etc. will sell inside China (basically unavailable outside) for an order of magnitude more. It's expensive, is what I'm trying to get across.

And the flood of casein assassins your milk has unleashed into it has taken everything that makes the tea worth that cost and removed it. Indeed it may have even reduced that tea to a quality that is lower than a robust cheap green (the kind of coarse, bitter autumn chop from unnamed plantations that sells for next to nothing). Even the lowest grade of the Nanjing tea is ten cents per gram, while the highest grade you're likely to get outside of China is almost half a dollar per gram. An autumn chop is fractions of a cent per gram. And with milk, the autumn chop might actually taste better. And sugar isn't much better. Maybe the sugared Nanjing tea will taste a bit better than equivalently sugared autumn chop, but it won't be two orders of magnitude better.

So if you really do like to drink your tea with milk and/or sugar (and again I have to stress: there is absolutely nothing wrong with this!), save yourself a lot of money and buy the cheap autumn chop. It will likely taste better, and the money you save on the tea could be put to better use buying some really nice silk wall scrolls or something.

Preamble: Words have meaning. Grammar signals meaning. Pay very close attention to the title. I worded it the way it is for a reason. Make sure you understand what I actually wrote in the title, instead of what you wanted it to read, before moving on. Note also that much of the discussion here is based on Chinese sources because—get this!—only Chinese sources have anything meaningful to say about what a term “really means”. Westerners trying to claim what it “really means” are just making idiots of themselves and revealing more about their thought processes than they reveal about Chinese ones.

A capsule history of 白左's proper meaning

In 2010, the pseudonymous “Li Shuo” coined the term 白左 (lit. “white left”) on the social platform Renren in an article titled “The Pseudo-Morality of the Western 'White Left' and China's 'Patriotic Scientists'”. At birth the term referred very narrowly to young western leftists who sympathized with the communist revolution pre-1949 and came to China to assist it. It was very much a pejorative term but it was very specifically applied to a very small number of people.

It was also a term that came from a self-identified right libertarian. Put a pin on that. We're going to circle back around to this.

As is usual in language, and doubly so in the modern Internet era, there was a rapid shift in meaning, starting in about 2013. It no longer referred to this one, specific group from history, but rather became a generalized label. The implied criticism morphed into the subtext of people out of touch with reality; people who spout lofty ideals while being blind to the real-world problems around them.

The big explosion in usage started in 2015 as bewildered Chinese netizens watched the social fallout from the refugee crisis in Europe. It is unfortunate that, from my perspective, they derived the wrong conclusion from this, criticizing, for example, Germany's “open door” policy as a case of bleeding-heart saviours ignoring reality to everyone's detriment. (Note: I don't think that Germany handled the crisis well, but I don't reach the conclusion that some Chinese netizens reached that Germany shouldn't have accepted the refugees at all.)

This big explosion continued in 2016 as bemused Chinese observers divided on which was worse: Hilary Clinton's so-called “political correctness” or Trump's populism. (Note: both were considered bad. They weren't deciding on which they supported, they were deciding on which of the two was the worst.) In that period, 白左 finally settled in a relatively stable meaning as a criticism of western identity politics.

Now let's add the wrong meaning

Here's where we circle back to the origin. In 2017 the term was added to the Urban Dictionary with an already divergent meaning. It was largely correct, but it already contained the seeds of how the term would be read in the west: right wing. UD rapidly had definitions added that included equivalents to “libtard”, “woke”, and other very American views on life. This is the unfortunate product of people not understanding several key things and instead focusing on the first use of it by a self-proclaimed libertarian right-wing guy.

However it wasn't until 2021 that Tucker Carlson's use of the term to attack Democrats that 白左 became part of mainstream western political discourse. Ironically on the right wing. (I find it personally hilarious that a 电视脱口秀演员 like Carlson, a veritable 流量奸商 or 右壬, didn't introduce other terms from Chinese that were as harshly critical of the right like 川建国 or 懂王 being used to describe Donald Trump. It's almost as if he was cherry-picking Chinese criticisms of the west to only attack one side. Almost.)

This is why most westerners believe that Chinese people are right-supportive. Because one Chinese political epithet that was poorly-understood and badly-translated was weaponized by the Anglophone right and used as an unsubtle bludgeon against their opposition. All while ignoring the far less subtle open critiques of the American right.

For purposes of this essay we will be sticking with the correct usage. And if you don't think the Chinese usage of a Chinese term used in Chinese net haunts is the correct one, get out of here. This blog isn't for you. I'm sure there's some white supremacy sites you'll like better. Like Faux News or the New York Times. Or maybe Storm Front.

Note: I'm not saying that study of the term's evolution and abuse in Anglophone circles is not a valid field of study; that's sociolinguistics in a nutshell, in fact. I'm saying I'm focusing on the Chinese usage of a Chinese term because the abuse of language by barbarians is out of scope. (Yes, the use of “barbarians” is a joke.)

The interesting spin-off

While the American left was reacting badly to the American right weaponizing a foreign term that neither side fully understood, the Chinese use of the term, with the rise of 网左 (Internet left) as a concept, started to be applied domestically as a criticism of overly dogmatic Chinese leftists. Observers tracking trends in Chinese cyberspace consistently document 白左 and 网左 appearing across political discussions, with trend reports confirming this usage as recently as late 2025. Being branded 白左 was in effect saying “you're so dogmatically left that you're like a white person”.

So a term that started life as a criticism of a historical group of people by a right-libertarian, that then mutated as a criticism of perceived impractical leftists in the west (getting internalized at that stage by the west), and then mutated further is now a domestic criticism of Chinese people by Chinese people.

But ... why? Why is this term so long-lived and so adaptive?

Here's where I get personal

The reason is ... white people don't really have a great reputation in non-white circles. It's a shock, I know, but you don't. And yes, right now, I'm addressing white folk. Even the white folk that have “good intentions”.

See the problem is that a whole lot of white people have good intentions. But they also have a degree of arrogance that is staggering. It was white people, for example, who set back queer culture in China, losing three decades of careful diplomacy that was paying dividends in recognition and acceptance ... until an arrogant LGBTQ+ group in the USA convinced a group in Shanghai that a pride parade, one that didn't have permission from authorities, was how you get results.

And they weren't wrong. There were definitely results. And the queer community in China has suffered for it nationally. About 40-70 million queer people (according to UN-aligned estimates), who were finally making positive steps toward recognition and acceptance, are back being suppressed, closeted, and and viewed with intense suspicion and revulsion. The only thing that hasn't been reversed as a result of that disastrous American intervention is the medical position on homosexuality, et al. We're thankfully not reverting back to the stage where being queer is a mental disorder that can be “cured”...

Did they mean to do this? OF COURSE NOT! Hell, I'll go a step farther. They weren't the whole reason. Rather like how there's a whole host of machinery inside a gun that has to work in concert to expel the bullet from it, there was a whole host of public security frameworks and public opinion shifts that were part of the sudden reversals in LGBTQ+ rights in China.

The thing is, that machinery in guns needs a trigger to be pulled to put it into action and send that bullet on its way. And the same was needed for the sudden shift in LGBTQ+ rights in China. The Shanghai affair was the trigger. The Chinese state, in its modern form and in much of its imperial past, has operated on a simple premise: unsanctioned public confrontation is not a tactic of persuasion, but a challenge to authority. The methods of response have shifted; the underlying logic has not. The pattern is consistent across history: method matters as much as or more than the message. Even when the state was leaning toward acceptance of queer culture, despite the already dubious status it had as “foreign ideological infiltration”, the open defiance of holding a public protest without permission was a uniquely potent trigger that led to the sudden, drastic, tragic reversals.

The sad fact of the matter is that good intentions and five bucks gets you a small coffee at Starbucks. What matters is outcomes, and the outcomes of the 白左 set are largely negative. The “white left” believes that just being “in the right” is enough; they're generally living in safe environs (by world standards) and think they know things better from their cruising altitude of 30,000ft than boots on the ground.

They're very much a model of people out of touch with reality, who think that having their heart bleed is enough for them to be a force for good, who ignore reality in favour of ideals and slogans. They're the Red Guard, in short. They spout slogans and ideals, without regard to physical reality, and leave misery and death in their wake.

On the title

The title of this rant is On the toxicity of “白左” or “white left”. Note that it's not the white left. It is the quoted term.

That, in the end, is what this essay is really about. Yes, it contains vituperative criticism of white “liberals” and “progressives”. (And, naturally, of the white right.) But I want to focus back on the term. I am, quite self-awarely and ironically, using the term to diagnose a pattern even as, starting now, I warn against its reification.

I've explained why the term has proven so long-lived and adaptive. But the more important question is: should it be? It gained traction because it described a real phenomenon. It was short, pithy, and largely accurate from the perspective of its original users. And it could be deployed across a wide variety of contexts.

That, however, is precisely where the problem lies. Its adaptability allows it to serve legitimate criticism of a genuine political tendency, but it's just as easily wielded as a bludgeon by the Western right (but who cares about barbarian duckspeak?)¹ to attack ideological opponents: “See, even Chinese netizens think libtards are bad, LOL!” And it's used, too, to beat down sincere leftists who need guidance in praxis, not dismissive labels and silencing. Its very pithiness makes it, in my view, a textbook example of Orwellian “duckspeak”: catchy, universally deployable, but ultimately a substitute for thought.

It becomes an excuse to shirk our duty to educate, to guide, and to build toward a more coherent, humane future. Just like the sloganeering of the 白左 themselves.

¹ I will personally send 500g of my favourite tea to the first person who figures out this deep cut of a joke!

Trafik Kazası Kusur Oranınan İtiraz

Sistemlerin her zaman kusursuz çalıştığına dair o tuhaf inancımız, ufak bir trafik kazası geçirip de Tramer sisteminde “Yüzde 100 Kusurlu” ilan edildiğimiz gün paramparça olur. Bir makine, yoldaki o görünmez çukuru, karşı tarafın sinyal vermeden şerit değiştirmesini veya o anki fren refleksini göremez; sadece kağıttaki iki boyutlu krokiye bakar ve faturayı size keser.

Hukuk ise makinelerin bu kör noktalarını düzeltmek için vardır.

Hatalı bir kaza tutanağının faturasını ödemek zorunda değilsiniz. O %100'lük ağır kusur oranını, bağımsız bilirkişiler ve Sigorta Tahkim Komisyonu aracılığıyla değiştirmek mümkün. Olayın sadece metal bir çarpışma değil, bir hak arama mücadelesi olduğunu unutmayın. Sürecin nasıl işlediğine dair harika bir yasal döküm arayanlar için şu kaynak çok ufuk açıcı: https://www.tuvahukuk.com/trafik-kazasinda-kusur-oranina-itiraz/

#hukuk #trafikkazası #hakaramak #tazminat #tramer #adalet

Coming back from office yesterday (9th April) evening around 8.30 pm, as usual, I had my earphones plugged in listening to a podcast. I was just 10-15 minutes away from home walking on the footpath. A man approached with a usual pitiable expressions and said something in frail voice, which I couldn't understand as I had earphones in, and being apathetic that I am, I just passed by ignoring. After going few steps ahead I thought let's just check if he needs monies or information or something else. If he asks for money, I am out. I can try to help with information.

Once upon time, when I was waiting at a bus-stand, I had dodged a scam by offering to get a man a meal when he claimed to have stuck in Bengluru who refused the meal after walking with me for few minutes towards a restaurant. Point being, I was kind of ready and confident that I can dodge these kinds.

So I went back, he was around the same place only, but I noticed a woman and a girl child with him. I asked him “What? What do you need?” He said, “Hindi, hum marathi, hindi samazega kya?” (Here onward we spoke in Marathi only, following is English translation.) Me: “ohh, then let's talk in Marathi only. I can understand.” He: “wow, you have met like a god, no one here is understanding the language or helping. We had came a couple of weeks back here from Hyderabad and we worked at the construction site for last two weeks but contractor betrayed and is not paying a dime. It is now not possible to feed ourselves here, we are going back home but do not have means to carry out the long journey.” The accent seemed little familiar. Me: “Where do you want to go?” He: “Washim, Akola.” Now, to give a little context, Washim is just an hour drive from my hometown and thus I know area a little too well. I am at least familiar with major town names, have directional sense. I immediately thought to myself, how coincidental? Maybe I can probe more and make sure about the details. But being from nearby area there was already the development of a soft corner. He was winning, without even trying. Moreover, having traveled multiple times by train I know the how hectic and long the journey can be. It is a more than 24 hrs and there is no daily direct train to Washim. Me: “Where in Washim?” He: “Aasegaon Pen” I had in recent past visited Lonar crater and coincidentally a family friends in-laws are from a village named Maslaa Pen. That village was basically in-route from the Lonar to hometown. So I remembered the name well. Me: “Is it near Maslaa Pen?” (Because of same suffix, that was an obvious guess) He: “Yes, there is Karkhana (factory) there”. There was puzzled look on his face, probably saying, how do you know so better. Me: “I am from Pusad” They all got relieved hearing that. He reiterated that I have met him like a god ( now I think that could have worked too well). He: “I am embarrassed to even beg like this with (in front) of wife and a child. Never thought I will have to see this day.” And few more lines on the same line. The woman also pitched in now. She: “My sister was given to (married to a guy from) Kali Tembhi, but after her passing away we are estranged now. There is not much connection. (My guess, Kali Tembhi is supposed to be nearby Pusad, I am not particularly aware, there are multiple Kali nearby.) I think, by this time, I had already decided subconsciously to help, but still wanted to do more checks. Me: “So how are you going to go now?” He: “There is a train to Nanded at 11.” Me: “Hmm, it will take 24 hrs to reach” He: “Yes. Then from there another train to Washim and then bus to Aasegaon Pen” Me: “We have family friends from Maslaa pen, surname is Deshmukh” I got my phone out and searched for Aasegaon Pen on google maps. It showed around where I had hoped it would, and I also searched for Maslaa Pen and it was nearby, the details were checking out. I asked for the phone number, he gave a number, I called that number, that rang but it wasn't his handset. No one answered. That was a red-flag. He said, he might have made a mistake. Then he asked for my number and rang my number. I asked if he has UPI, he said he does not. I still copied the number and checked on the Gpay, and at least it was not registered there. I asked for name – he said – “Sunil Pawar”. Now I have saved this as 'Sunil Pawar Scammer? Aasegaon Pen', and the number is 9075**8790. He: “See help as you can.” He did not specifically ask for money or food or anything. Seeing that it is already around 9pm and train scheduled around 11.30pm, it was not prudent to offer dinner at some nearby restaurant, cause in here, it takes at least 1.5 hrs to reach railway station by city bus. I was still not so sure, and I remembered I only have a couple of hundred rupees notes in my pocket. He repeated the same sentence again a couple of times. The woman chiked in that it is already late and they need to reach station also. This was a case of 'an appeal to urgency' I did spot that and it did raise a red flag in my mind but I guess the my emotional self had already took over, I took out the pocket got 2 notes out. Told them I have only this much right now. I was kind of glad also and guilty at the same time, I wasn't so sure of my decision. Gave him the notes, told him I will call you to check if you reached. I immediately took the leave, thinking about the encounter. I thought, even if fraudster ₹200 is not going to kill me and make him millionaire, anyday better than indirectly giving away to some Vantara island. Make-believe to feel better about oneself. ₹200 in (अक्कल खातं) learning account.

I did call that number a day later and later 2 times also, it rings but no answer. I was earlier not inclined to put out the number in the post, but I guess I don't care about the privacy of the individual.

Mercedes-Benz Aracınızı Neden Sıradan Bir Tamirciye Teslim Etmemelisiniz?

संदिप खरेंची माफी मागून सादर करीतो

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Long time no write! This is a blog to publish updates on my projects, so that's exactly what I'll do here.

Regex engine

Right now I'm writing a fast regular expression search engine in Rust. In case the reader doesn't know what a regular expression is, they allow specifying some rules about what some text should look like (e.g., think “starts with H”, “has 5 letters”), and then you can reason whether a text follows them (like the words “Hello” or “Hopes” do), or search for strings fulfilling the rules within a larger text. In our case, the regular expression to specify these rules would be H[A-Za-z]{4} (“H” followed by 4 letters).

There are quite a few software libraries that implement regular expressions in Rust. To name a few:

• regex: the most widely used, pretty fast.
• fancy-regex: supports more features.
• regexr: tries to get the best of both worlds, fastest implementation.
• resharp: quite custom-built, fast implementation.

I ran a benchmark consisting on generating various lengths of random sequences of A, C, G and T and then searching for all (possibly overlapping) matches of the regex ATG([^T]..|T([CT].|G[^A]|A[CT]))*T(A[AG]|GA) (which recognizes possible forward open reading frames). The results are these:

• regex: 8.8 MB/s, slowest.
• resharp: 65 MB/s.
• My crate in progress: 99 MB/s.
• regexr: 222 MB/s, fastest.

If we replace that regex with ATG(...)*?T(A[AG]|GA) (which matches the same regions but uses the lazy *? metacharacter for a more concise representation), then we get:

• regex: 8.8 MB/s.
• resharp: doesn't support that metacharacter.
• My crate in progress: 109 MB/s, fastest.
• regexr: 5.5 MB/s, slowest (why?).

regex and resharp had also the highest overhead, in the hundreds of microseconds, while both regexr and my crate could compile the regex in about 20 microseconds.

I would like to work a bit more on this crate. Specifically:

• Support capture groups, which the other crates do and I think is pretty much an expected feature of any regex library.
• Stabilize it some further. I'm using cargo llvm-cov and cargo mutants, but I may resort to cargo afl to weed out bugs even more aggressively.
• Make it faster. I have some tricks up my sleeve that could manage gains.

Career

I'm working as a Resident Physician in Psychiatry. Also trying to get a Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering. Pretty exciting stuff going on in that front.