The Telegraphic

I have been informed by the friendly staff of the international centre that I do not exist. There is no such student as Daniel Price. There is however a Danikoru.

Basically, I made a mistake when I was filling in my application form for Himeji Dokkyo- I spelt my name incorrectly in katakana (Japanese characters), but spelt it right in English on the same form. The logical plan of action is to correct the mistake – that’s why there is such a thing as administration; if things didn’t change and mistakes weren’t made there would be no need to administer anything.

In Himeji however mistakes do not get corrected. I first noticed this when I received my homestay contract. Naturally, as I didn’t want to commit fraud, I corrected my name before signing it.

A month later, they say there is a problem with my name on the contract and that they would print out new ones – which sounds good – but the problem they had was that there was no such student as Daniel Price. So I was forced to sign a contract with someone elses name on which as far as I’m concerned isn’t legally binding in any way, shape or form.

I haven’t been escorted off university grounds for tresspassing yet however.

For the last week, which happened to be golden week, I’ve been pissed off. That is, I’ve been steadily above a 5 on the pissed-off-meter. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg situation, as I think I inadvertently created a feedback loop where the more pissed off I am, the more pissed of I was getting. It started with the bugs.

Ah well. Im better now although I did have a mild allergic reaction to scallops yesterday.

Speaking of ‘the chicken and the egg’ – I think I’ve solved it, by applying the theory of evolution. It all comes down to the definition of a chicken – and any mathematician will tell you that ‘chicken’ is not well-defined. (i.e. defined in an unambiguous way using a logical set base of axioms). In short, it’s not precise enough. The real question is – “when does a egg, or series of evolving organisms* become a chicken?“”. I’ll break it down into three questions:

1. What is the definition of ‘the chicken’?
2. What is the definition of ‘the egg’?
3. Which one of these objects existed in an earlier point in history?

Now you see the problem lies in your definition of a chicken, which is difficult if not impossible. So, let’s avoid defining ‘a chicken’ and ‘a chicken egg’. We can just say that there was a proto-chicken, an egg** and then a chicken (in that order). You don’t need to define a chicken as ‘something that lays chicken eggs’, or define a chicken egg as ‘something from which a chicken hatches’ – those definitions suffer the problem of not being well-defined.

So there you have it according to me.

* It has been ‘proved‘ by geneticists that the domestic chicken evolved from Red Junglefowl, a tropical member of the pheasant family.

** I hasten to add that this egg isn’t defined as a ‘chicken egg’ or a ‘proto-chicken’ egg – just ‘the egg’. It is implied in the question that a chicken hatched out of it, not that it is a egg laid by a chicken.