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President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on almost all of the U.S.‘s trading partners (ABC News). His list included Taiwan (which the U.S. typically avoids saying is a separate country to the People’s Republic of China) and an uninhabited island. It was, as usual, for Trump, both deeply embarrassing and deeply unsettling. As others have noted, the post-WW2 era has seen the greatest sustained improvement in human living standards, in no small part because of global trade. I fear the consequences of people this poorly organised messing with such a complicated system.
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Perhaps not coincidentally, there was a large amount of posting being done on Bluesky. My favourite thing I saw wasn’t a specific post but the user @proptermalone.bsky.social whose name is ‘post malone ergo propter malone’.
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On Saturday, I took Rowan to Tokyo Station in the—as it transpired—vain attempt to ride an E2-series shinkansen (Wikipedia). These trains are supposedly still running on the Tōhoku line but they’re infrequent and I couldn’t find an easy way online to determine the model of departing trains. I assumed they’d be able to work that out easily at Tokyo Station but no, they had to consult a physical book. I suspect it’s the same book that one of the websites I found advised you to buy if you wanted to work this out at home. Unfortunately, the next E2 would have necessitated a three-hour wait and so I opted to ride one of the more commonly departing models instead (an E5 as it turned out).
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Since Rowan and I were relatively close, we headed over to Noah Smith’s hanami party in Yoyogi Park. Rowan did his best but there wasn’t much for him to do and so after about half an hour or so we went home.
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While Rowan and I were riding the trains, I saw an advertisement for a utility provider that bundled together electricity and gas. In the advertisement they used the letter ‘x’ to mean ‘and’, something I first saw in the 1999 anime series, Hunter x Hunter (Wikipedia). I’ve always wondered how this came about. Japan uses ‘+’ to represent addition and people also recognise ‘&’ as being shorthand for ‘and’ so why ‘x’? I of course asked ChatGPT and it suggested that this usage came from English. When I told ChatGPT that I was a native English speaker and had never seen ‘x’ used to mean ‘and’ in English, it persisted that this usage was common in the fashion world. I asked the most fashion conscious person I know (Brandon) whether that was true and he said that it was but that he didn’t know if it had actually begun there. My quest might have ended there but it turns out that Brandon also happens to be the only person that I know who is paying for A.I. and he asked Perplexity about the etymology. Its report is here. Perplexity says the usage of ‘x’ to mean ‘and’ began in the Japanese fashion world before crossing over (ha!) to the fashion world more generally. Thanks Brandon! I have been curious about this for more than 25 years.
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It’s almost play-off time in the NBA and the Warriors (my adopted team while the San Antonio Spurs are still in rebuilding mode) are making a late push so I reactivated my account and have been watching some games again.
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I’m enjoying the most recent episode of Slate’s Hit Parade podcast about the forgotten music of the 1960s. Of course, host Chris Molanphy can’t help but mention the Beatles and, even though this goes against the spirit of that episode, that prompted me to listen again to The Beatles 1962–1966 (AKA the ‘Red Album’) (Apple Music). How absolutely ridiculous that this is (a) from a single band (b) across a 5-year period and (c) not all of their hits.
