Thomas Education

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami My rating: 3 of 5 stars A rather bizarre alternate-world fantasy novel of particularly Japanese sensibility. I was curious at several points about the Japanese-language original version of the Japanese names and foreign loan-words used in the text, as they would have more significance to an original reader -- the translators explained some of the significance of the unusual characters' names. And those characters were indeed unusual and memorable, so precisely described at length (this is a long book). The chapters are episodic and specific to each main character in turn, such that this could well have been serialized, a la Dickens! I raise the language/translation points because I am also reading Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Does she consider Murakami to be great modern Japanese literature, I wonder? I think ...

One of the very specific items in the U.S. Constitution from its beginning is the requirement to enumerate the population every ten years.  The decennial census is a big undertaking, made even more challenging this year by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately they had already planned to get most of the information by online questionnaires (which I already filled out), so they can more easily limit human contact and virus transmission. An interesting side effect of the constitution’s simple wording -- that makes no mention of citizenship or national origin in the count -- is that we must reach out to residents in their own language.  They have determined that there are twelve languages with at least 60,000 households that do not speak English well enough to complete the survey; so they translate all the questionnaires into those twelve languages.  Further, there are 59 languages with at least 2000 households (that do not speak English well enough to understand the pr...