I tried yoga for the first time the other day. I walked into the studio and saw three guys warming up by doing the splits. My way-too-perky instructor confirmed that this was, in fact, Introduction to Yoga, I grabbed a mat from the pile, stretched what muscles I could, and prepared myself for the inevitable upcoming groin-pull.

Fortunately, the next 45 minutes did not involve any strianed muscles or dislocated joints, but turned out to be physically exhausting. I never imagined that not moving could be so tiring. I’m going back again next week.

I definitely have to invite three or four of these girls over for a game of Twister.

After conclusively proving that water is wet and grass is green, researchers at Oklahoma State University demonstrated that single women are more attracted to married men then to single men. Scientists told 200 students they were participating in a study on online dating, but their “match” was fictitious. He was perfectly crafted to match their interests. All girls were shown the same picture and told the same name, job description, etc. The only difference was that half the group was told their perfect match was single and half were told he was married.

Of the girls who thought Mr. Right was singe, 59% wanted to meet him, but when the girls were told he was married 90% wanted to pursue a relationship.

I grew up Catholic, and today I attended the the Buddhist one-year anniversary funeral rites for my grandfather-in-law. The Catholic and Buddhist approaches to life and death could not be more starkly different.

The Catholics are up front with you. While you are alive, the Catholics endeavor to make you feel as guilty as possible. Not feeling guilty enough is actually considered a sin. They then leverage this guilt to extract the maximum financial return from you in the brief time they have. After you die, however, you are fully amortized, and the Earthly church is done with you. You are considered to be, no matter how long the odds, “with God”.

The Japanese Buddhists play the game in reverse. You can do what you want to in life without guilt. I’ve been out drinking (and more) with a number of priests here in Japan and believe me, they are pros. Aside from the isolated blessing of a building site here and the occasional festival there, the Buddhists don’t demand much in the way of contributions.

After you die, however, the extortion begins. The assumption seems to be that your loved one has screwed up and will be waiting for reincarnation for quite some time. If you want to avoid problems, the priests need to intervene on your behalf. You need to pay up or the dearly beloved will suffer for it.

First, the deceased needs to be given a new name, and “good” names cost millions of yen. The priesthood is not too specific about what happens if they decide to give the soul a “bad” name, but I’m assured it’s something horrible. Not that the priests want to give anyone a bad name, you understand, but a lack of sufficient cash upfront can affect their concentration and, hey, they obviously can’t be held responsible for what happens if the family is preventing them from concentrating.

The shakedown doesn’t stop there, of course. The family needs to come up with additional protection money on the 7, 49 and 100-day anniversaries of the funeral as well as the 1, 3, 5, 7 and 13-year anniversaries to ensure that the now wandering soul does not “have an unfortunate accident” while waiting for their next incarnation.

Back in college I had one an original Mac. You know, the one that looked like a toaster and that Burke Brethard made come to life and torture a penguin. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are too young. Your loss!) The one where you could fit the Mac OS, MS Word, and a few dozen Word documents on a 400k floppy disk.

Seems some enterprising chap pitted an old MacPlus against a dual-core 64-bit AMD machine. It’s a very fair test in that the benchmarks he set up are realistic and meaningful. It’s interesting much much things improved over 20 years.