Yesterday I passed my 7th kyu exam in KJJR jujutsu.

This is the first time my direct sensei was not present during the exam. He is currently temporarily unable to attend class, and in order for us not to be held back for an unknown duration, the chief sensei decided that he'd take the exam now so that we could move on.

Today I was following a discussion on dark matter, on slashdot, and the usual type of discussion happened. A handful of people brought up the Electrical Universe theories and the conspiracies surrounding the supposed suppression of those theories. Now, imo the EU theory is a load of bunk, because it assumes principles that violate everything we know about electricity, and it does not have a model describing mathemetically how the known universe came to be and how things like stars work. EU is like the toothfairy of science.

If you want to forge metal, you need a forge to heat the metal  to bright orange. That seems obvious. And if  you can throw some money at it and buy an actual forge, that will not be a problem. Otoh, if you are on a budget, it is not so obvious. However, building a DIY forge is not complex.

Last week, I passed my 7th kyu ninpo exam.

The sempai and I were already preparing for the exam, but due to unforeseen circumstances, we had had to do the exam either last week, or wait until February. Waiting was not a good option. The sempai and I will be teaching class several times in the near future, so it is good to have a higher grade, if only to make the distinction if new members come and watch a class.

Windows 8 will bring with it a new Internet Explorer, which will not support plug-ins. The standard IE (which would support plug-ins) will also still be available. However, the death of plug-ins could also mean the death of Flash. Imo this would be a good thing. Anyway, on slashdot someone posted the following funny dialogue

A couple of days ago I got a request from a software vendor to make screenshots of the files in the system32 folder of a machine for which we had opened a support call. The support contact asked to enable the 'details' view in windows explorer, and add the 'file version' and product version' columns. A quick calculation told me that that would take over 100 screenshots. And even then, the support persoon would have to manually examine each of them as a picture.

In short and polite terms, that was a bad idea.

Recently I've read something about how Christianity is over feminized these days¹. Books like 'No more Christianity Mr. Nice Guy' are selling like hot cakes. Speaking as a man, I can perfectly understand why men are increasingly staying away from church. Generally, men are not really into the huggy-feely stuff, holding hands with their neighbors and singing songs about shepherds and lost lambs.

One of the things which is important during martial arts practice is to determine the intensity level / contact level with which you train. When I was 15 years younger I did not always understand this, assuming that people would be training at the same intensity level as I did. Even after my sensei talked to me about this, I did not always get it right. Over the last years I've been training again, I thought some more about it. Since I am one of the more senior students, it is important that I get it right.

Last week I passed my 8th kyu jujutsu exam. I was only mildly nervous this time. The 8th kyu is relatively basic, the only complex part is the partner kata at the end. Not that the other stuff is trivial or so, but a part of it was already handled in our ninpo curriculum, so it was not entirely new.

As with ninpo, the first 2 exams in KJJR jujutsu are done in the same session. But in fairness, the jujutsu curriculum (number of techniques) is more limited than the ninpo curiculum. So all in all it is not that much to study. The most important part of the exam is without a doubt the Takagi Yoshin ryu kata 'Kasumi Dori' which a very formal demonstration of jujutsu techniques in kata format.