Category: Miscellaneous

Osaka 2: USJ

  • January 12, 2020

Today I went to Universal Studios Japan! Apparently I had picked a good day to go since all of Osaka – perhaps even all of Japan – seemed to be there today as well 🙂

I had a very early start this morning (due to slight jetlag) but even though I got to the park 45 minutes before the gates opened the throng of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see. Once I was inside I made a beeline for the Harry Potter section and quickly joined the longest line for a ride I’d ever joined:

Yes the ride is in the castle, and the line is not supposed to stretch out this far. But this morning it did, and the employees scrambled to open up extra line space to accommodate us all. In actuality it wasn’t that long a wait (maybe 20 minutes) and when I rode the ride itself it was just as good as I remembered from Florida last year.

I then methodically went around going on the other available rides (skipping the log flume and the ones that would make me sick) – that’s my wearing the 3D glasses for Spider-Man above – which didn’t take long since there’s not that many and three were closed today! Eventually I joined the line for this:

It’s called The Flying Dinosaur and is apparently an amazing roller coaster. Unfortunately the very strong warnings of motion sickness scared me away and when I mustered courage and returned later I was confronted by this:

By this point the park was inundated with people and almost all the lines were excessive. So in quick succession, I watched the three special effects shows 🙂

Since they are all based on old films – Waterworld, Backdraft and Terminator 2 – each is showing it’s age. And yet I very much enjoyed all three. The vision of the future in Terminator is laughable now but the show mixes video and live action skillfully and the 3D is very good. Backdraft was two very long ‘making of’ movies (narrated entirely in Japanese) followed by an astonishing demonstration of (real) flame effects in movies.

But the real star was Waterworld. It was beyond good: it was amazing.

The arena as you can see was enormous, and the show was basically live action Mad Max with boats. The explosions and effects were ridiculously over the top and I loved it. Probably the highlight of my day!

I would have liked to ride the big coaster and stay for the light show, but early afternoon I was ruined and left the park to return to the hotel for a break. While those that know me are thinking “He rested?!?” I can assure you that a bit later I went back out and did some shopping!

That’s an original Ultraman suit used in a TV series, on display at an official store. I had my Ultraman shirt on and the employee saluted me 🙂

Now – it’s just after 7 – I’m so tired I can barely type, so an early night it will be. I’ll need lots of rest for tomorrow, since I’ve planned an equally full itinerary…

  • Posted in Miscellaneous
  • Robert

Last Night In Oz

  • January 10, 2020

I’ve mostly finished packing on this last night of my Australia vacation. I’m absolutely exhausted from endless active days but my mind is full of many happy memories from these past three weeks.

Thanks to my parents for putting up with me for so long. Thanks to all my friends – AW, SMC, KB and MMC – for giving me their time. And thanks to Australia for – as always – welcoming back its emigrant son.

But my vacation is not over, since tomorrow I fly to Japan where I will stay for the next ten days. If you’re wondering what I’ll get up to… so am I! You can bet the otaku madness will be unfettered though, so look forward to lots of weird and wonderful on this blog (hopefully) every day starting tomorrow…

The Stuff That Had Anakin Panicking

  • December 30, 2019

I went for a big long walk today along the beaches, and I thought many things. One of those things – and it’s something I’ve thought before – was just how many sand grains are actually on this beach?

Let’s work it out.

That’s Newcastle beach. It’s gently curved, 650 meters long and as best I can estimate using satellite photos, has about 140 feet (~42.7 metres) of sand width. Estimating the depth of the sand is difficult, so I’ll go with a likely conservative average of 2 metres.

Doing the math gives a volume of sand of approximately 55,500 cubic metres. However all this volume isn’t occupied with sand, since there’s gaps between the grains. To work out the actual volume of sand the packing constant (ie what percent of the volume is the media of interest) is needed.

This is difficult to calculate. In fact it’s very difficult since the grains are of varying size and shape. So as an estimate I’ll assume they are spheres (they’re not) and that the sand is mostly settled which gives a value of about 74%

So that gives us about 41,000 cubic metres of sand grains.

Now to calculate how many discrete grains. Once again approximations are needed. The sand on Newcastle beach is very fine but not silt-like, so we’ll use the industrial classification of ‘fine sand’ and treat each grain as a cube with sides 0.25 millimetres.

Diving the total volume by the volume of a single grain gives us a final answer: I estimate there are at least 2.624 quadrillion grains of sand in Newcastle Beach.

To put that into perspective, that’s about 340,000 grains for everyone on Earth, which would fill a volume about as big as a golf ball. So yes, everyone on earth could easily take a handful of sand from just Newcastle Beach without it running out. In fact there’d likely be a lot left over since I probably overestimated sand grain and underestimated depth.

And that’s just one beach. Australia has over 10,000 of them 🙂

(Thanks AW for the title pun…)