cbracken

While most developers may dislike the imperial calendar, all of my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.

On a similar note, I recently requested a list of historical transactions from a brokerage and found that transaction dates continued to be annotated as Heisei all the way through Heisei 36 (2024), a full 5 years after Heisei officially ended in Heisei 31 / Reiwa 1 (2019). Late in 2024, transactions finally started being annotated Reiwa 6.

If you enjoyed 1Q84, and haven't yet read the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, there's a little bit of a connection you might enjoy.

The first Murakami book I read was Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and it's still one of my favourites, with a new translation by Jay Rubin coming out later this year. The book of his that's always spoken to me the most is South of the Border, West of the Sun.

If you're ever in Tokyo, consider visiting the Murakami library at Waseda University. It's got a small cafe downstairs, sometimes with live music performances, and lots of nooks and corners for sitting and relaxing with a book. There are copies of all of his books, and tons of translated copies in many languages.

In Japanese it’s called both 小型月着陸実証機 (roughly: small moon lander probe) pronounced “ko-gata tsuki chakuriku jisshōki” or スリム (SLIM). It’s not uncommon to have an English name alongside the Japanese one for some scientific projects but not always the case — e.g. I don’t recall hearing the Hayabusa probe referred to by any name other than Hayabusa (which means falcon) in the news.

Hey there - Flutter team member here. Support for integrating arbitrary non-flutter views/widgets (referred to as PlatformViews in Flutter terminology) is something we're actively working on at the moment, once we've got them landed, web views and video player support are top of our list in terms of views to add support for. We know people can't wait for this to land, and believe me, I can't wait for it to land either :)

PlatformView support is one of our top desktop priorities this year (along with multi-window support).

The process that caused the light we see as the CMB happened everywhere in the universe roughly all at once. At the time, from any given point, you'd just have seen blinding light but as things cooled, you'd see a sphere expanding around you where this light was dimming, as less and less, and finally none was being emitted around you, but due to the finite speed of light, light from outside that sphere would still continue arriving in your eyeballs. That's the situation we're in today; that sphere's just really big now.

During recombination epoch ~400,000 years after the Big Bang, this light would have been visible. Due to expansion, over time that light has stretched to longer and longer wavelengths, and we currently see it as microwaves.

Note: It's been ~30 years since I was actually studying physics & astronomy; others may be able to offer better explanations or correct me.

Edit: for some reason I'd interpreted the question as being about cycling. Leaving in case it's useful for cyclists or motorcyclists.

I've done a lot of cycling across various bits of Japan, from shorter day trips on the order of 150km to longer 1000km+ trips. One thing to keep in mind for visiting cyclists on longer road trips: this may seem obvious but Japan is very mountainous which means a lot of narrow roads with little/no shoulder, and long (sometimes multi-kilometre) tunnels. Fortunately drivers are in general, very considerate and careful around cyclists.

For shorter day trips, many large rivers/lakes in Japan have cycling/walking paths along one or both sides and make for really nice riding. In Tokyo, the Tamagawa or in Kyoto Kamogawa and Katsuragawa have paths. Lake Biwa has a really nice cycling trail as well.

One of my favourite longer routes was along the north coast of Japan between Tsuruga and the north end of Fukui. The mountain pass along no. 8 through Takefu has some nice views but a lot of climbing and tunnels. For something shorter but pretty, follow the Tamagawa from Tokyo up to Lake Okutama. As someone else mentioned, I find travelling in rural Japan a lot nicer than cycling in/near big cities.