Digital Wanderings

Sorry, haven't had time yet to put up my Osakapella 5th Anniversary pics. I'll get around to that soon, though.

Just wanted to mention two interesting sites I ran across in my digital wanderings today.

The first one is (tangentially) work-related. I'm on a mission to learn how to implement kalman filters, particle filters, and other probabilistic state estimation tools that are commonly used in robotics. Prof. Dan Simon of Cleveland State University recently wrote a book on state estimation that I'm thinking of buying, so I went to check out his homepage today, and I found an essay he wrote on Christianity and Control Theory .

Okay, that's just incredibly nerdy, which of course I highly respect. I love drawing parallels between seemingly unrelated fields (and I've been reprimanded by a number of ex-girlfriends for doing that excessively). Anyway, after reading it, I didn't think it seemed particularly deep, because the patterns he mentions are EVERYWHERE, not just in religion, but everywhere in life. His discussion of control system optimality is something I would immediately apply to singing and playing go, for example. However, I'm glad he wrote it. I think it's always good to see things in a new light and to look at analogies between different systems.

I also like his description of why he is a Christian . I fully agree with all the reasons he rejects for being Christian. I think those are crap reasons too... for example, countless evangelical Christians have tried to convince me that avoidance of Hell is a good reason to be Christian. To me, that seems to me like such a weaselly, hypocritical reason to believe in a religion.

After systematically rejecting several reasons to be Christian, he states, "I am a Christian simply because I believe that Christianity is true." Again, I have to wholeheartedly agree with him. In fact, the exact reason I don't believe in Christianity is because in my heart, I simply believe that it's not true. I don't have a complex logical set of arguments or anything, it just comes down to gut intuition and what seems right or wrong to you.

After N years of my life of being bombarded by inane arguments by evangelical Christians, where N is approximately equal to (L - J), L being the number of years I've been alive and J being the number of years I've been in Japan, it's a relief to finally find somebody who has come to the same conclusion I have on religion, albeit from the opposite perspective.

It's also a good feeling, of sorts, to be in absolute agreement with somebody you thoroughly disagree with. I do think it's always important to keep questioning and reflecting on things, challenging your beliefs so they don't get too rigid and set in their ways. To quote Ani DiFranco, "Buildings and bridges were made to bend in the wind / To withstand the world, that's what it takes / All that steel and stone is no match for the air, my friend / What doesn't bend, breaks".

It's kind of like living in Japan. If you try to live your life in exactly the same way you lived at home, things are going to be rough for you. A lot of those little comforts of home just don't exist here, or they're just not practical. You have to bend in the wind and learn to live like the Japanese do. It's hard to say goodbye, though, to Mexican food, pita bread, juice concentrate, deodorant, baking soda, T-shirts after September 1st, insulated houses... the list goes on and on.

And today the list went on one item further, as I realized that it appears to be impossible to procure Jell-O here. I'm having a little picnic tomorrow with like 15 friends, and I thought it would be cool to make Jell-O shots. (Ok, so I'm not thinking of making them so much FOR the picnic tomorrow as to merely use the picnic tomorrow as a trial run so I can make them correctly for my birthday. ;)

So I scoured the supermarkets and found only a few packs of unflavored gelatin. I guess you're supposed to add juice or something - the dude in the supermarket just goggled at me bug-eyed when I asked if they had "flavored" gelatin. So I looked around on the internet for Jell-O shot recipes, and they pretty much all use Jell-O. Go figure, right? Anyway, I ran across this fascinating page on The Ultimate Jell-O Shot, which presents an extraordinarily thorough scientific analysis of the Jell-O shot, based on extensive experimentation with varying amounts of alcohol, water, sugarless vs. regular Jell-O, etc. It's actually quite well-presented and interesting, with good photos. If you like that page, be sure to check out their other page, Lighting a Jell-O Shot on Fire. That one doesn't look very tasty, but they really push the physical limits of the Jell-O shot, transforming it into unrecognizable phases of matter.

Anyway, sorry no photos again. I've been on the edge of catching a cold lately, so I need to get some sleep. Just wanted to share those links with you.

By the way, I self-nominate this post for "most contrived and convoluted segue". :)

FEVER PITCH FEVER PITCH FEVER PITCH!

So... I didn't write much in my last post. It was really nice to get a few pictures up, though. You may have noticed I screwed up my template to do it. I blame that on the template. Yes, I know how to fix it, and no, I don't think it's worth the effort. If I had built this site myself, of course I'd fix it, but the whole point of Blogger is that it's supposed to be easy, plug-and-play blogging. I have friends who maintain their own blogs on their own servers, and I think they spend more time tweaking options, futzing with CSS, installing, configuring, reinstalling, updating packages with security fixes, etc. than they do actually blogging.

But then again, I think they enjoy that.

So perhaps it is a sign of my current state that I can't remember why I wrote "FEVER PITCH FEVER PITCH FEVER PITCH!" as the title of this post. I remember that I saw that written on somebody's shirt long ago, either one of my students or one of my fellow teachers. I can't recall what triggered that memory, though.

Anyway, I got home from work around 2:30 tonight. Been working pretty hard on this paper. When I left, the lab was still lively. I guess mine isn't the only deadline this week.

Got home, and the task ahead of me was to throw away my couch. I picked this couch out of the garbage like, back in April or something. Or was it June? Stained and ugly, but it's big and supportive. I spent a lot of time trying to find a cover for it, ended up just throwing a giant futon cover over it, which made it more or less presentable. Then Mikko cracked her head on it really hard after bouncing the wrong way on my exercise ball, and later Takami did something involving her neck on some sort of internal corner or something - still not sure how that happened but she got a big red mark.

So, like many things in my life that are not good for me, I was debating for a long time whether I should keep it or get rid of it. But last week I took some action and bought a replacement. Nice, cushy, leather, and hard to injure yourself on. And tonight was Big Gomi night. Not throwing it away tonight would mean keeping it until December. So I cleared it off, slouched on it three or four different ways, lay down for a while, read a page of Harry Potter curled up in it, and bid the couch farewell. Then I wrestled it out of my house single-handed at 3am trying not to wake up the neighbors.

So sad to see it go, but I need to move on with my life.

In other news, my computer at home died again. Hardware problem this time... not really sure what it is, but my fan stopped working. After futzing with BIOS and jumpers and plugging the fan wires into different headers on the motherboard, I finally got her back up and running again. Except... now, remember, I have the Shuttle ST62K "Zen" system, which is designed for virtually silent operation, with an ultra-efficient ventilation system and advanced Integrated Cooling Engine (ICE) technology to keep the system operating at a nearly inaudible level. What a great idea... if it worked. Instead, I have a little white box sitting next to me roaring like a 727 clawing at the tarmac.

This computer has had no end of problems since I got it. I even bought a replacement system since the old one had so many issues... weird electrical grounding stuff, inadequate ventilation, dead fan, spontaneous rebooting, and horribly noisy sound circuitry. The new system worked like a charm, except for more fan problems, weird bluescreening behavior, and about 30% of the times I shut the system down, it would stop the hard disks but not turn itself off. And now the fan controller is really wacked. If I put it on "Smart Fan" mode or even "Medium" or "Low", it seems to randomly switch between racing the fan and running it at a nonfunctional purr... regardless of the CPU temperature. Yeccch.

Computers suck. Maybe I should start taking abacus lessons again.

But after that little rant I now realize that my fan is what reminded me of the FEVER PITCH T-shirt. :)

A cappella is also running at a moderate fever pitch right now... big preparations for our Amazing Osakapella Fifth Anniversary Spectacular! I don't really have any idea what's going on, though, because all the discussion is in Japanese. I think I might have to make a speech or something. Anyway, I can't believe we're five years old!!

What else is up in my life? Hmm... still debating whether a Ph.D. is worth it, and other "what should I do with my life?" issues. Considering moving to civilization... I think Morinomiya might be nice. But would it? I've been thinking about it a lot lately - how exciting it would be to be able to go to a convenience store after sundown, how novel it would be to have a bar anywhere nearby, what sorts of things I'm going to do on my commute to work ... and also how much more expensive, small, and less safe it will be, how much I'll miss the various seasonal insects bellowing symphonies outside my window, and how I'll miss the stars. Some beautiful stars tonight. It'll also be so much trouble to find an apartment, move all my crap, and then get new furniture and stuff (although the couch is taken care of!). Worth it? Hmm... the jury is still out.

Ok, it's mad late and I've got a very long day ahead of me at work tomorrow. Oyasumi!

Return to Biwako

So... apparently I haven't uploaded any pics since February. That simply will not do.

This time, I'll let the pictures tell the story...

What I Did During Summer Vacation

So... I know I've been getting worse and worse at posting. I think it's because I really want to put up some pictures, and it just takes so long to resize them, upload them to flickr, and then copy and paste the html. Maybe I should just break down and get a paid web host.

Anyway, I just got back from a week of vacation. Wheeee! For those of you who aren't familiar with Japan, this was Obon week. It's probably the most important Japanese holiday, and in a way it's the equivalent of what Halloween used to be in the old pagan tradition... a time when the world of the living and the world of the dead are at their closest. Most people return to their hometowns during their two or three days off (I was lucky and got a week!) and visit their ancestors' graves, where they wash the graves and leave offerings of sake and whatnot. There are a lot of festivals at this time of year, and many involve a traditional circle-dance called "bon-odori", where you can see mostly older women dancing in their yukata or kimono, with their fans slid into the back of their obi (sashes). A few men dance too, and kids, and foreigners, but I think most of the time they forget how to do the dance and the women have to show them. I didn't dance this year, but I've done it in the past. I seem to remember it to have had some funky rhythmic weirdness to it, like where you clap on every 11th or 14th beat or something.

Anyway, not many festivals for me this Obon. My goal was to have some time to myself and get around to all the things I've been meaning to get around to, such as:

- clean my apartment
- finish my latest a cappella arrangement
- update my blog
- organize and clean up my data on my computer
- catch up on emails
- finish making my umeboshi
- study some Japanese

hehe, yeah right. A bit ambitious. However, I did make some good progress. I cleaned my whole apartment, including scrubbing behind my gas range and inside my bathtub enclosure (ewww!) and reorganized the furniture in my living/dining room. I also pretty much finished my arrangement of "The Look", by Roxette, although I suspect it's not going to sound that great a cappella. I also finished making my umeboshi, of which I have done thorough photodocumentation and will certainly post on my blog.

On the other hand... no progress cleaning up my data, responding to emails, or studying. I posted a little bit on my Mixi blog, but not on my English one. Guess I'll have to make time for all that stuff in "real life". Anyway, having the apartment clean does wonders for my mental state. It's kind of like getting my life defragged.

Looks to be a busy few weeks. Paper deadline coming up at the end of this month, Osakapella's 5th anniversary concert coming up in September, and I'm going to an Ulfuls concert this weekend! :)

Anyway, I will post some photos soon. If nothing else, I'll document the process of making umeboshi!

Output from the Dream Engine

Hey, so .. yeah, I still suck in terms of posting photos and, you know, documenting interesting things about Japan and my life and whatnot. That aside, I wrote up the highlights of my dream last night, and I thought I'd share them with you. It takes place in New York, to which I may or may not be going in the next couple weeks, and it is vaguely reminiscent of the DaVinci Code, or at least I imagine it might be, since I have neither read the book yet nor seen the film. Anyway, kinda trippy. And there's drumming too! Maybe I should hang on to the movie rights for this... ;) Anyway, I left out some of the juciest bits in case Hollywood comes knocking. Think "Donnie Darko" meets a highly erotic version of "Yellow Submarine", and then you're starting to get an idea of what I left out here..

Ah, and one more thing... I wrote it all in Japanese. Sorry bout that. :P But it's actually more or less understandable if you click on the Auto-Translation link to the right! I'm actually pretty impressed by the auto-translation this time.

ブルックリン：夏、夕方。橋の横でだれもいない寂しい道を歩いてる。角を曲がって、和太鼓している友達とあって、
「太鼓イベントへ行くんっすか」って聞かれて、意味分からん。
「太鼓のイベント？」
「鼓童が来るって知らんかった？めちゃ行きたいねんけどチケットだいぶ前から売り切ってダフ屋がおらんか見てみようかなと思って来た。」
「そうなん。」
彼がどっかいっちゃった。
イベントの場所にちょっと行って見て、すげー人並んでた。でも後ろにいって、知り合いのえらいクラッシク作曲者のおじさんと偶然にあって、彼が、「黙って、こっち来い」って言って、裏口まで連れて行った。
二人で、でかいオープンスタジアムのステージに入って、静かだった。でっけー太鼓はもう置いてて、こんなに近くで見るのははじめて！感動して、おじさんに「ほんまにありがとう！！」って言おうとしながら、むこうのドアのとこでサングラスかけてる人を気づいた。そして、すくいなくなった。おじさんの顔をみて、彼も気づいてた。顔真っ白だった。ちょっと震えていた。
おじさんがしずかに、「すまんない。」って言って、違うドアから逃げた。
そして、俺が上の席まで上って、かくしといた。

イベントが始まった。スタジアムとしては小さかったけど何千人が入った。太鼓のリズムが全体で感じて、心の深いパッションが起こされた。

でも何か。。。

むこうをみて、ちょっと遠かったけど、なんでか分からんけど遠眼鏡を持ってた。それで見ると、不思議な美しさの赤い帽子のかぶっているお姉さんを見た。顔がちょっと地中海けいな感じで、スムーズな唇とほそい、とげた鼻の上からミステリアスな目で太鼓を見ていた。暗くて、ほとんど白黒でしか見れんかったけど目が逸らせなかった。何でか、分からなくて、ずっと遠眼鏡で見てた。

そして、顔を向いて、直接俺を見てた。遠くて気づくはずじゃなかったのに、。。。心がドキッ！

彼女が意味のいっぱい一目で見て、そしてすぐたって、ガードに走った。なんやろうと思って、ちょっとずつパニックの気持ちが心に入ってきた。

下を見て、影のなかで何か動いてた。アドレナリンが血にどんどん流れて、走り出した！
心が大太鼓のように「ドン！ドン！ドン！」しながら観覧席の後ろから飛んで、出口まで。。。ドカン！
最後の思い出では、俺の上に黒ずくめのFBI見たいな感じのガード５人以上おった。そして。。。

。。。

どれぐらい時間がとおたか分からん。たまに起きて、暗い部屋でいろいろ聞かれてたのは確かだ。そして、外へ行って、大きいグループで周りは警察ばかりでとこか連れて歩いて行っていた。重いではほとんどぐちゃぐちゃだったけど途中で、警察のむこうからちょっとだけあのお姉さんの顔を見た。

「ごめんなさい！許してくれる？」なきそうな顔で願っていた。
「どうなるかよー分からんけど、これが終わったら、お茶しようよ」しか言う時間がなくて、すぐ逆の方にながされた。

そして大きい、ふるい建物に入って、名前の分からないえらい人が重たいデスクのうしろから、「特別な命令がきた。こいつを留め置く事が危ない。ささっと放せ！」

・・・

次の週、なんかいもその不思議な姉さんとあって、話は軽いことしか出来なかった。でもどんどん好きになってきた。次の土曜日のごご、木のいっぱいあった公園で二人でぼーとしてた。彼女が虹の色の太い紐の夏用などレスを着てて、夏のごごの金色の光が葉っぱの影の間で踊っていた。

彼女が近くに来て、「何か忘れてない？」ってきいた。今までの快くすずしい風が急に止まった。
そして彼女が倒れた。すぐ後に、俺倒れて、。。。真っ暗。

・・・

起きて、石のブロックと誇りのいっぱいあるところで起きた。目の前にクラシック作曲者のおじさんだった。
「ごめんな、もう始まっちゃった。これからあんたにはどこにも安全な居場所がない。この本をよめば、分かる。」
「え？何？」
「この世界の深い大秘密。世の中でこの本を４、５冊ぐらいしかない。全部手作り。でももう含まれているから知った方がいいと思った。」
それで、古そうな黒いレザーの本をもらった。ふとくて、やっぱり紙のページだけじゃなかった。いろいろはいっていた。

うえをみて、おじさんがもう歩いて行っていた。
「あーあの・・・」

もういなくなった。

さて、本を開けた。ページの順番めちゃくちゃだった。１－１６を呼んで、なんかチャートがあって、「１チャプターから来たら次は６０ページ。２チャプターから来たらつぎは１４２ページ」などわけの分からん事書いてた。でも頑張って読み始めた。

最初はいっぱい知らない人の名前がでてきて、なんかドイツの戦争前の歴史も書いてあったし、何かいろんな聞いた事のないヨーロッパの村の名前とか。。。一ページ、一ページ読んで、そして、次のページにポケット二つついてた。

下の大きいポケットを開けて、焼き物のガーゴイルが入ってた。上の小さいポケットをあけて。。。なんやろう。千円札ぐらいの大きさのかみだったけど、すごく細かく折っていて、いっぱい穴がなかに焼いていた。これはどう言う手掛かり？

でも考える時間がなかった。。。だれか近付いて来てた！出来るだけ静かに近くの川の方に走った。そのガーゴイルはどこかで見たことあるような気がしたな。あ、そうだ！スペインのカテドラルやった！

じゃ、次スペインに行くしかない。。。

Chicks dig scars

So... once again, I find myself putting off blogging again and again, waiting until I can write that perfect blog post that at once wittily conveys deep insights about life while providing thoughtful commentary on subtle differences between Japanese and Western culture. And has cool pictures.

And once again, I find myself without the time to produce such a masterpiece, and thus my blog sits unbloggen.

I think the only way to start reversing this trend is to write lots of short, quick notes and intersperse them with the aforementioned masterpieces when time allows. Or when time is forced against its will to allow. Usually involving lack of sleep. :)

Somehow inspiration to do this seems to come only when I have Japanese homework to do for the following morning. If the human race could only learn to harness the energy of procrastination and use it to do good, we would be well along the road to world peace and universal prosperity.

So, anyway, this last month had a lot of major milestones for me. One biggie was that I paid off my credit card debt that I had accumulated over two years of looking for a robotics job in Boston! That was pretty sweet.

And I got to relive that feeling of accomplishment a second time, when I got my next credit card statement with a $4 finance charge based on my average daily blah blah blah, and I paid it off once and for all, once again.

Another big milestone: My first show with Utaurara 6! We performed up in Kita-Senri, and even though we only had time to perform 2.5 songs (there were some 40 groups performing at this event!), we were received well. Now I have a big pile of sheet music to learn for this weekend, when we're going to give a little informal show here at Takanohara for some of my friends from work.

Next milestone: Not final yet, but I'm planning to submit my first academic paper this coming week. It was supposed to be two days ago, but the deadline was extended. It's not such a big conference, but this could be the first step down a new career path for me, as the engineer within me and the scientist within me wrestle for domination.

Other... hmm, I wouldn't necessarily call them milestones, but a few of my good friends left over this past month or so. Linda went home to Canada about a month ago, and David and Olivier went back to France a couple days ago. I miss them all, but especially Linda - she'd been here since I first got here a year ago, and she was sort of the last one to leave from that first circle of friends I had. She gave me a bunch of her stuff while she was moving, and it's mostly still strewn about my apartment... gotta clean up and reorganize at some point. In fact, I ate some of her umeboshi tonight for dinner. I think I ate like 4 of them, so I'm REALLY thirsty right now! I estimate that it would take approximately six umeboshi to osmose all the water out of the dead sea.

Um, what else... working on a new arrangement for Osakapella. Not sure how it's going to turn out, but it's like the blogging thing: lots of imperfect arrangements is a surer path to improvement than saving it all up for one masterpiece. Wait, I think that's the case with academic papers too. And language learning (how many Japanese people have said, "Yes, I've been studying English for 11 years, but I'm not going to speak a word until I've learned it perfectly?"). You know, sometimes I wish I could just sit down and distill out the 86 Universal Patterns in life, which would be generally applicable to everything, and then just sit back and surf out the rest of my years, knowing I had figured everything out.

Maybe I should write a book.

Then again, maybe claiming at this point that I have everything figured out is a BIT premature, considering the number of expired things in my fridge that I have to keep throwing away. I sometimes feel like I throw away more stuff than I buy, a feeling I keep repressed due to my faith in the law of conservation of mass... but yet... it's as if it's ... reproducing..? euuu... maybe something's MUCH more expired than I thought!

What else did I do this month? Hmm... camping trip at Biwa-ko. We went to the same place we went to last September. It was awesome, except that the water was freezing. Didn't stop me from swimming though. I need to live it up before the suffocating heat of summer lowers its hazy and humid fist to crush the life out of me for the next 5 months. Already I've had a couple days this year with Japanese girls nearby shivering in their long-sleeved shirts while I'm dripping sweat in a T-shirt. Sometimes it really sucks that my body temperature's set point seems to be a few degrees off from everyone around me. And sometimes... it doesn't suck at all. :) I relished the moment, frolicking about with a polar bear's glee while my evolutionarily disadvantaged friends huddled together for warmth under their furs on the shoreline.

But seasons change, and Tsuyu has come. The Rainy Season. In fact, I feel inclined to quote a haiku from one of my wonderful students at Toyonaka. I believe it went something like this:

The rainy season
We have a lot of water
The rainy season

Biking to work this morning, I started noticing how little traction I had as my bike started skidding every time I tried to stop. Slowing down to a cautious roll... (bikes can't crawl... what's the word I'm looking for here?) I was crossing a pedestrian overpass and working my way down a winding ramp, when suddenly my bike shot out from under me and I found myself in the air, then skidding along the ground, trying to decide in real time which body parts and accessories I wanted to shred, and which to try to preserve. Head... that's a good one to save. Might need it for soccer sometime. Knee... um, tough one - gotta go with that or the arm. Guess I'll sacrifice some arm to keep the legs working... I can always bike with no hands. Can't really bike with no legs. Ok, arm down. Backpack... um, I guess I'll kinda roll halfway onto my side.. ok, time's up. BANG!

Damage report: big scrape down my lower arm by the elbow and a smaller one at the heel of my palm. Minor external knee damage... a little bit of a limp, but I mostly saved the knee, I think. Bike - a few things out of alignment. iPod, fortunately safe. Plastic case holding my Japanese homework, smashed into shards. Blood running all down my arm. No serious wounds as far as I can tell, but visually quite colorful.

The secretaries in my lab came running as soon as I got into work, and they patched me up with the help of a sketchy, ancient first-aid kit (expiration date on the antibiotic ointment: 1997...? puts my fridge to shame! And why are there calcium supplements in there?) and soon I was back up and running in the frantic pace of life on the edge.

Speaking of which, I'd better get back to my homework. :P

The Secret To Learning Kanji

Ok, just a quick note here because I still have to finish my homework.

I'm studying kanji right now. For years, these characters simply would not stick in my head, no matter how hard I tried to pack them in, no matter how many hours I spent in front of my flashcards. Never, that is, until I discovered the Secret To Learning Kanji.

There are three aspects of kanji that you need to learn: their writing, their reading(s), and their meaning(s). To the beginning student, there isn't much you can do beyond rote memorization. However, with a little background knowledge, the studying begins to do itself. Once you become familiar with how kanji are constructed, it is vastly easier to read and understand new characters, thanks to a limited number of common groups of strokes that are often repeated and have specific meanings, similar to the role of Latin and Greek word roots in English. Even a cursory study of the meanings and readings of these key stroke groups paves the downhill road to literacy with teflon and oils it up for good measure.

So, to take an example from my homework tonight, the character "催" can be broken down into three groups of strokes - first, the two strokes on the left are a reduced form of "人", which means person. The three strokes on the top are "山", which is the kanji for "mountain", and the snarl of eight strokes on the bottom right is "隹", an old radical meaning "bird".

"Person", "mountain", and "bird". By assembling these primitive meanings, one will intuitively grasp the meaning of the verb "催す", which means, of course, "to hold (a meeting)" or "to develop symptoms of".

It's that easy.

But it doesn't stop there! Most kanji have multiple readings, and knowing the radicals helps there as well. The Chinese-derived reading (on-yomi) of the radical "隹" is "sai", and ... what do you know? The on-yomi of "催" is also "sai"! Likewise, the Japanese-derived reading (kun-yomi) of the radical "人" is "hito", and ... the kun-yomi of "催"? You guessed it - "moyo-o(su)"! Because, well, duh.