Rice Paddy Art

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan.

But this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly planted.

Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields.

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.



A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan.

The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993.

The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals.

Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.



Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning between villagers and farmers in Inkadate



Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa, Japan

And over the past few years, other villages have joined in with the plant designs.

Another famous rice paddy art venue is in the town of Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture.

This year's design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives feature in television series Tenchijin.

Various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan this year, including designs of deer dancers.



Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers

The farmers create the murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields.

From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.

Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.



Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen



The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year.

But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.

In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.

A year later, organisers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.

Is This the Droid for Which I'm Looking?

At first I was impressed with the screen, the quick interface and the impressive package. But when you get just below the surface, Motorola's (and by association, Google's) new Droid is guilty of chasing the Apple inspired fashion of sizzle over substance, of image over content. For me, it's not as much about how it LOOKS. It's more about how it WORKS.

I've always held the position that one shouldn't "upgrade" just because there's a new release of anything. I generally wait until there is significant improvement. Because of this, I'm often "pushed" into upgrading just to remain compatible with critical applications. Such was the question last year when Palm introduced their new Web OS, and turned their back on the classic Palm OS. I can hold off for a while, but it's just a matter of time until I will have to move to something new.

I've been using the Palm OS since 1996 when I bought a Palm Pilot three days after introduction. The Palm WAS a significant improvement over my Sharp Zarus. The most impressive thing was it's ability to sync my content with my desktop computer. I can't remember how many times over the last 14 years either my computer or my phone crashed and had to be reformatted - but NEVER at the same time. Yes, I still have files from 1996 on my current Palm Centro.

I spent about an hour with the Pre and was also dazzled by it's UI. But Web OS didn't support memos - nor their syncing. Plus the screen and keyboard were small compared with the state of the art. Also, Palm, like Apple had made the development less open. When I heard that you were REQUIRED to upgrade Web OS within one week of any new release or your phone was disabled, that was the deal-breaker. My hope was the Droid would offer a significant advancement using a more open approach, and finally take me away from my old Palm.

You may have guessed where I'm going with this. Even though Google's Android (and the Droid phone) do a great job of syncing the Calendar and Contacts, they too forgot all about Memos. Not only did they forget to sync them, they didn't even INCLUDE an application to edit text. That's right, there is no memopad, notepad or wordpad included with the Droid. Sure, you can compose an email to yourself in Google's cloud, but then things get mixed up with thousands of other emails.

Has America quit writing? It seems so. And Apple's partly to blame. The first iPhone didn't even have Copy, Cut and Paste. I guess we're now supposed to express ourselves in 160 characters or less. I obviously haven't yet learned how to do that. So far, memos are the missing sync of the Droid.

But what about all the sizzle of Flick, drag and pinch? Yes, the Droid (and Palm Web OS) deliver in this area. Well, except for pinch to zoom like the iPhone does, which I'm sure Droid will add shortly.

And the Droid does indeed dazzle. The music, the movies and all the media deliver. Sky Map is amazing. And everyone's talking about the nav features, which ARE impressive. But where are the topos for hiking? With such a beautiful screen, GPS can finally deliver on it's promise in the wild.

Like the iPhone, web surfing on the Droid is indeed a significant improvement, even though much slower than a PC. Still, it's fast enough to be useful and way ahead of the Centro. The camera and the keyboard are not as bad as all the reviews suggest, but can be improved.

That's what I have so far. I'll continue to update this post as I discover new features.

And failures.

A Balanced Diet

This has been a topic I've wondered about for years - what is the optimum balance between fat, protein and carbs. I'll have more to say later, but for now here's an interesting link on the protein part...

Moderate amounts of protein per meal found best for building muscle

Whole Foods Health Care

As an employer, health care is an issue I've had to deal with for years, with increasing frustration.

The single biggest problem with health care is the de-coupling of payment from the patient in medical purchases. This started with government price and wage controls during World War II. In order to attract and keep talent without increasing pay, employers began providing health insurance. This created a layer of insulation between the need for health care and it's purchase decision. HMOs, co-ops and other government programs have all added more layers which just made things worse.

Many of you have heard me say, "Only insure risk you CAN'T afford to take". The natural exception would be if you are a worse than average risk, but we all at least TRY to live a healthy life, right?

The positive inverse of this rule is, "SELF-insure as much risk as you can". This allows YOU to keep the profit of the insurance company. It makes no sense to "insure" minor medical care such as eye or dental visits, unless you are a group of blind people with bad teeth - but then the insurance company would reject you anyway. The point is, stay connected with your purchase of health care as much as possible. Shop your doctors. YOU are the most likely person to control health costs.

John Mackey has reached the same conclusion at Whole Foods. And he's found an effective solution. He has not solved ALL of health care's problems. There is still litigation, end of life triage and defensive medicine to deal with. But he's made a start. THIS is the model we should be studying. Health care is NOT something with which the government should be involved.

John Mackey Solution

Let me know what YOU think!

Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

Here's an interesting post on the topic on Gompertz Law of human mortality, dealing with predicted aging and the mathematics of telomeres.

It also links to a cute death calculator based on if you were born today, but it's missing the function most people would be interested in. The question to answer is, if you've ALREADY lived to a certain age, what are the odds you'll HOW much longer? The data's all there. We just need someone to code it up. Let me know if you find it somewhere in cyberspace.

Gompertz Law of human mortality

Thanks to Roamer, here's the link I was looking for...

Predicting Death

Plus the parent site is an excellent source for risk analysis of stories in the media...

Understand Uncertainty

Pull to the side, Segway. YikeBike Coming Through

Remember all the hype just before Segway was introduced? It was suppose to change forever the way people traveled. Except for a few mall cops and airport security, the future hasn't turned out quite the way they planned.

While not very good for standing around, the YikeBike may actually live up to Segway's hope of useful personal transportation...

YikeBike in Action