bilingualnews-3.txt

So on May 26th at 2am, three club executives at the club Vanity in Roppongi were arrested. About 50 cops showed up and arrested them. And they were charged with violating The Entertainment Business Law. And Entertainment Business Law is that basically you can’t dance after 1am, but they had registered as a restaurant, so they were kind of exploiting a loophole, but the cops decided that they were gonna... they weren’t gonna let that fly so they showed up arrested these executives. They were going ‘til 5am, right?

Yeah, it’s really strange that they have this signs in there saying, no dancing, but you know everyone is dancing and it’s kind of what do you... what constitutes as dancing? Like, is bobbing your head dancing?

So do the cops show up and see if people were dancing first or did they just assume that people were dancing?

I wonder why Vanity and not some of these other establishments?

I mean you can go to karaoke or you know, there’s other things to do.

Yeah, you’re clearly from Tokyo. I don’t, you know this seems like they don’t have that law outside of Tokyo, do they?

So Yahoo auctions ended up sending the info of, the private information of a thousand four hundred and twenty- seven people to eight hundred and thirty- five people. And we don’t really know how this happened, right?

Yeah, like how does that happen? How does one individual have access to all that stuff? Was it just e-mails or account information?

That stuff is really, it’s really tricky, though. I’m surprised that there aren’t more mistakes in IT like this. It’s so complicated. You know, it’s so complicated, there’s so many things going on and so dynamic, they are always having to update their systems and there are so many security issues and there’s so many like really clever hackers out there. And it’s just a, it’s such a zoo.

Yeah, that dude was sweating bullets.

So basically these cockroaches are evolving. And the way that they are evolving is we have these little pesticide pellets that have a little glucose covering on them, which is what entices the cockroaches to eat these pesticide pellets and die. And these cockroaches have, they are beginning to no longer eat the pellets and we’re calling it evolution. But you know what’s really happening is that all the cockroaches that had a sweet tooth are, they’re dead, you know.
So as the ones that didn’t have that sweet tooth for that glucose covering on the pesticides as they survive. You know, they’re the ones that are repopulating, so it has kind of shifted that way. It’s kind of similar the way that viruses, not viruses, but bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics. You know if you kill off all the ones that it’s effective against, but it’s not effective against all of them, then all of the strong ones survive and you know, that in a sense is evolution.

It’s really interesting because we tend to think that evolution is an entirely natural process and that doesn’t continue... it’s not really going on anymore. You know because of the way that we’ve, because of human intervention. But in a way we’re actually causing the things around us to adopt, possibly in a more rapid way than they would have otherwise. I imagine this is going to happen to not just that, that particular type of cockroach, but I imagine it’s happening with all the varieties of cockroach that we use pesticides against.

South Korea shut down two more nuclear reactors over fake certificates. This is something that also happened last November. They shut down two reactors then. Basically these certificates for, they’re certificates kind of insuring the parts of the reactors are up to par that their quality is high enough to withstand stresses of being part of the nuclear reactor. And the certificates were fake, so they are having to go through and get the proper parts, in this case it’s cables. So they are going to experience electricity shortages and rolling blackouts like never before and the nuclear reactors are about the third of South Korea’s power mix, and they’re gonna be closed for about four months.

Yeah, I think it’s, I think this just goes to show that this is what people do, I mean this is what humans do. We’re always gonna cut corners on these sorts of things. You know it was a very similar situation with TEPCO. And they’ve had similar problems in the United States.

Yeah, they have the sort of issue with earthquake proofing, too. Earthquake standards.

Yeah. So, I mean it’s really not what you want to be cutting corners.

So, some 600 year-old plants are basically coming back to life. These are ancient plants. They were trapped underneath glaciers, and as with the climate change, a lot of these glaciers are moving and revealing things that have been covered for the last 600 years. These are bryophytes, the plants. Bryophytes are like little ferny like not trees or anything, like smaller plants. And they were previously assumed dead. Scientists had assumed that all the plants that were underneath this, that were in this sub glacier region were dead. But as the glacier moved, they realized that these plants are actually still alive and they are actually reanimating. And these glaciers have been there since the little ice age which was 1550A.D.

Yeah, it’s nuts, they’re definitely gonna be studying these plants to see if there’s anything weird about them. Because we don’t have anything, I don’t think we have anything that old that is alive.

I wonder, I mean they wouldn’t still be alive if the glaciers weren’t there, right?

On May 31st, it’s World No Tobacco Day.

This was created in 1987 to promote awareness of the I guess not just the deaths, but all the, obviously tobacco is not good for you, so an awareness of all of those negative effects maybe try to inspire some people to quit smoking. As of the latest studies, it’s estimated that tobacco causes 5.4 million deaths every year. That’s a pretty big number, it’s bigger than pretty much every other number out there.

Yeah. 5.4 million deaths.

Well, that’s ‘cos you’re eating, It’s not because you’re not smoking. I mean supposedly there are some cognitive benefits to nicotine, but the cost far outweighs the benefits. It’s pretty clear at this point.

I mean if they came out with tobacco today, like it would never be approved. There’s no way.

There’s no way! And you know, there are so many other substances and drugs that are illegal but none of them are as bad as tobacco. None of them as harmful or none of them kill as many people, none of them are as addictive. They say that tobacco is more addictive than you know even the hardest drugs out there.

Yeah, it’s pretty mind blowing. So don’t smoke on May 31st.