Terrible acronym

Hey everyone, spring is here and so is deadline craziness, which is one of the reasons I haven't been posting lately.

I just got an email today about this event... I thought laser plasma acceleration sounded cool, so I checked out their website. Nice acronym. :P

Japan is awesome.

Lonely Snowflakes

On my way home tonight, I saw about fifteen lonely snowflakes as they spiraled down past a streetlight, tossed around by the wind, and sailed off into the darkness. The chill in the air today certainly took me by surprise, after this weekend's springlike weather, but this was something completely unexpected.

They were beautiful.

Work Ethic

Working conditions and management in Japan suck

(Please note: I'm not ranting about my particular situation here. I think I'm luckier than most in this country.)

Ok, can I just say? The work ethic in this country is perverse. Almost everyone I know is forced to work ridiculous uncompensated overtime hours, has vacation days arbitrarily taken away, and has to submit to the most unreasonable and irrational of demands and policies. This doesn't seem to be an artifact of any one company, or any one industry, or even any social class. Everybody is forced to work way too hard here, and for no good reason.

One thing that bothers me is that this does NOT lead to an introspection and improvement of management practices, when there are SIMPLE solutions and ways to make the system better for everyone. Instead, it just leads to people going through more and more unnecessary pain.

Of course this isn't just a problem in Japan. It's happening everywhere, but Japan seems to be particularly bad, maybe because they're still stuck in their "work harder not smarter" mindset. It's like they seek out hardship here.

The BI-I-IG PICTURE - Technology fuels evil.

I'm going to go to bed now because I think I'm starting to catch a cold, but in short I think that the worldwide problem of overwork is a direct result of (a) the centralizing effects of technology putting far too much power in far too few hands and (b) the global interconnectedness of trade and communication increasing competition to an extreme level, throwing the entire system out of balance in favor of corporate power at the cost of humanity.

Technology widens the gap between rich and poor.

I'm not saying that we try to stop "progress"... that's impossible. I'm just saying that we need to try and spread it around. It's the gap between the time when technology is developed and the time when its benefits finally filter down to the poorest people that fuels so many of this world's problems. We as a world need to redirect our resources from developing technology to distributing that technology.

I know this tirade against technology sounds hypocritical, being that I do robotics research for a living. I love my job, but I also see the bigger problem. Anybody have any solutions?

This is kind of a long, three-part essay, but it presents exactly the problems I'm concerned about. You can just jump to part 3, and then read the other parts if you're still interested...

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

The awesome thing is that I found that in the list of references in the back of a paper I was reading today on high-speed algorithms to fit data to lines and curves...

Awesome comic!

I'd like to announce that xkcd.com is my new favorite internet comic. I've already gone through and read every panel. Twice.

Some aspects of it are reminiscent of Piled Higher and Deeper, in that there are some jaded caricatures of grad school life interspersed with nerdy humor, but I like this one better. It's not a continuous story, but rather a series of insights and snapshots of life, and random yet poignant philosophical comments.

Here are a couple pics from the site. Note that each panel has "title" text that comes up as tooltips when you mouseover the comics, which usually has something witty or interesting to say as well.

Be warned that these are addictive, so don't stay up too late reading them. ;)

Here are just a few of my like 60 favorites, just to give you a taste of what it's like:

I love the creativity of this one:



And I'm sure you all know THIS feeling:



This next one made me laugh so hard it hurt and I couldn't breathe... this is SO TRUE!!



But the thing that I love the most is that some of the comics are just really romantic. I want to dedicate this one to a certain somebody, although she probably won't understand the English. :)

"Shippo."

Every day brings with it more hilarity.

#3 - Late Valentine's ... Fish?

Yes, you read that right. I received a Valentine's gift about three weeks late, and it was ... a fish! Dad - can you tell me what this is... a trout, maybe? Leave a comment on my blog if you can identify it. :)



Anyway, what an awesome concept. It's got crunchy chocolate balls inside, some of which are colored sort of disturbingly like fish eggs.

No idea how I can possibly come up with anything equally as unique for White Day...

#2 - Anonymous smiles on the train.

So I was taking the loop line home tonight... I think it was the second-to-last train. Lots of people, and everybody was so sleepy. A couple stations down from Umeda, this one dude down the row from me totally zonked out and dropped his ticket on the floor.

There was a group of three ladies sitting across from him - two young ladies probably in their mid-twenties and one elderly woman. They were looking back and forth among themselves, and finally the old woman got up, picked up the ticket, woke the dude up, and gave it back to him.

He apologized profusely, of course, and then they all sat in silence for another couple stations. Then, when it was his turn to get off, he bowed to them, mumbled another apology, and staggered out the door off-balance. The guy must have been SO sleepy.

Anyway, I watched this whole exchange transpire and thought it was kind of heartwarming. Then one of the ladies happened to look over in my direction, and I gave them a big grin because I thought it was great that they had helped the guy. The two younger women started giggling amongst themselves and the older woman was just beaming... she seemed so excited! Maybe it was my white boy charm, or maybe it was the fact that everyone else on the train was zombied out and she thought it was cool that someone had noticed, but from there until my stop we just kept exchanging silly smiles. :)

#1 - "Shippo"

Not 15 minutes later, I stepped into the elevator of my building, next to another elderly woman. I'd guess she was in her 70's, although I'm not very good with ages. Anyway, she had a little dog with her with the UGLIEST haircut ever and little hair accessories and things dangling off its head. I wasn't quite sure how to react... I mean, dogs aren't allowed here, and it was awfully ugly...

So, with my best tatemae smile, I commented on how cute the dog was.
"Kawaii desu ne!"

The old woman smiled at me, paused for a moment, and then, still smiling, held up the dog's tail.
"Shippo."

That means "tail."

Um... ok... not quite sure how to respond to that. Was she trying to show me something? Was it an unusually long tail for that species? Was she trying to teach me the Japanese word for tail (without even exchanging greetings or anything)? I had no idea what she was trying to communicate to me.

"Shippo desu ne..." ("Yep, that sure is a tail alright.")

Another pause...

"Erai ossan desu ne. Shigoto?"

That's a little tricky to translate in one swoop. "Erai" describes when somebody does something honorable or praiseworthy. "Ossan" sort of means "middle-aged man"... but the image that goes with it in my mind is like a sort of greasy middle-aged businessman with a faraway look in his eyes and graying hair who slurs his Osaka-ben and drinks a lot of shochu at the tachinomi bar in the train station with his sarari-man buddies so he can squeeze out that last five minutes away from his family before he has to catch his train home. I don't think I'm an "ossan" yet, although there are certainly some who would disagree. :P

Anyway, the last word, "shigoto," means work, and she was asking me if I was coming home from work.

I was actually coming home from a concert, and I was wearing a blazer over a garish t-shirt with blue jeans and my big silver bling-bling G-Clef necklace on. I don't know what kind of a job she thought I was coming home from. :P

So I said no, I was coming home from singing. And then she nodded, saying

"Ah, karaoke! Wakarimashita!" ("Oh, karaoke! I see!") and got out on her floor.

Weird weird weird. Haha, I love these little exchanges.

T5A!

Ok, so now that I've got you all in my T3A groove, it's time to change things up a bit.

No, actually I just had a crappy day today, so to offset that I'm going to juice my T3A with an extra 2A.

I wanted to start with a "new old adage", such as "There are no crappy days, only crappy ..." but I couldn't finish that one. The best I could come up with was "There are no crappy days, only days on which you choose to let your perception of the balance of the universe skew in the direction of crappiness" but that was a bit long.

Then I came up with "Life is like an enormous box of chocolates, in which the removal of any single chocolate does not significantly affect the overall statistical distribution of the contents, and in which an unknown fraction of the chocolates are actually little chunks of polished-up and lovingly wrapped dog turds. When you happen to choose a dog turd or two from this box rather than the luscious chocolates you had hoped to get, the resultant shift in perception is what we call 'having a crappy day.'" This, of course, was far too long, and although I had a particular fondness for the simplicity with which it illustrated the fact that crappy days are subjective reactions to a more or less unchanging objective reality, I quickly abandoned that train of thought entirely, in favor of the simpler, more succinct solution of simply extending today's post by 2.

#5 - Something learned.

There's a beautiful quote from T.H. White in The Once And Future King... Let's see if I can Google it up.

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Haha, love that blockquote tag. Anyway, I learned something today. It has nothing to do with why the world wags, but it resolved something I had been confused about for a long time.

See, there's this new train line that goes out to near ATR. I take it every morning, actually, and as far as I could tell, it was called the "Keihanna Line" ("Kei-han-na" is a word formed using alternative readings of characters that make up the names of Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, respectively). But sometimes, in their advertising, they'd call it the "Yumehanna Line" ("Yume" means dream, and the "hanna" just comes from "keihanna" - no second meaning there, as far as I know).

Anyway, I had always thought that this was just some silly advertising thing, but some people still called it the "yumehanna line", and I wondered whether there was more to the story.

Here is what I learned today: The Keihanna Line is the new extension that goes from Ikoma to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka (I wonder if they came up with this wonderfully succinct name by asking the same subway consultants who came up with the "Nagahori Tsurumi-Ryokuchi Line"). The existing extension of the Osaka Subway Chuo Line that goes as far as Ikoma is apparently just considered part of the Chuo Line now, even though I always thought it technically ended several stations before that, at Nagata. Now, to top all that off, the combined line, encompassing the subway line from Cosmosquare to Ikoma and the Keihanna Line going from there out to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka, is referred to in its entirety as the "Yumehanna Line".

So there you have it. A valuable lesson.

#4 - Poems on the train

Is it evidence of the fact that I now spend two hours a day commuting that my first two posts today are about trains? Or is it an artifact of the "primacy" and "recency" phenomenons in the brain, where we have better retention for the first and last of a series of experiences than for those in between? Being that those are the times of day when I ride the train, that could well be a possibility.

Anyway, tonight I was riding home on a later train than usual. Incidentally, time here is measured by the percentage of passengers on the train who are drunk salarymen -- a monotonically increasing function over time. In my train car tonight it was just over 50%, a sure indication that it was time to start stepping up my efficiency at work.

While sitting there, pointedly ignoring the rambunctious crew, I noticed some interesting posters. Counting the syllables, yes... several of them were haiku! Some were tanka, a slightly longer poetic form using lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The topic of all of them was ... the train system. I suppose the Osaka subway system must have put on a poetry contest as part of a publicity campaign.

Anyway, most of them were what you'd expect... talking about manners on the train, don't use your cell phone, don't rush in while the doors are closing, etc. One said something I don't quite remember about how "when you have a warm heart, every seat on the train is a priority seat" which I kind of liked. And then there was this one.



I had to stretch over some crazy drunk salarymen to get that pic, so please forgive the substandard quality.

Roughly translated, it goes "Without pretending not to see, but speaking up instead, to stop perverts from feeling up ladies in the train, the great bravery." Ok, that was a REALLY rough translation, but you get the point. I just thought that one was a gem of Japanese culture.

#3 - "To be late"

Learned a pretty cool thing today about Japanese. The word "okureru" has two different kanji. I'm not talking about "to send"(送れる) and "to be late"(遅れる), which are both read "okureru", but rather two different ways of reading "to be late".

The first is "遅れる", which is the reading I have known for years. The one I learned today was "後れる", which I think in the back of my mind I knew was an alternative way to write it, but which I never really understood.

Finally today I got the lowdown on the distinction between them. The first one is the sort of standard "to be late". The nuance of second one, though, means to be late in the sense that everything around you has accelerated, and you haven't kept up, such as not keeping up with a fashion trend. I thought it was really interesting that they have a separate way to write that.

#2 - Noren

They put a new door in my room at work, because some people are running experiments in one half of the room while the rest of us are doing robotics development on the other side, and we need to stay out of each other's way. The door is great, and one side benefit of it is that we get better ventilation now.

Unfortunately, the girl who works in my room has her desk right in front of the door, and she's very self-conscious about people looking in at her while she's working. So we came up with an interim solution of stacking a bunch of crates in front of her desk, but that was a really ugly solution.

So I came up with a better solution - noren! Yes, the cloth curtains they have at sushi shops and bath houses. I happened to have an extra noren at home (how do you say that in English? Pair of noren? Like curtains? It's just one piece of cloth, but then again so is a "pair" of pants...) so I bought some hooks and a bar for it and hung it in our room! The color goes well with the walls, too.



Anyway, the thing that made this truly "awesome" was that there's this older guy who comes over to use our machine shop sometimes - he's probably in his 60's, I'd guess. Anyway, the first time he walked in through the noren, he made some comment about how "you see, this is how you can really tell we're living in Japan". LOL!

#1 - My hotel.

So today I finally got around to booking a flight and a hotel for my trip to Rome next month. Kinda late to be making plans like that, I found out. I fortunately got the last available seat on the same flight out that some other guys in my lab are taking. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky with the hotel booking. Rome is a popular place, and with the conference in town it's hard to find hotels at any sort of a reasonable rate. The place where the other guys are staying was already booked up, and a lot of the other recommended hotels were quite far away from the city center.

I poked around here and there online, and finally found this service called "Haystack" which is one of the Lonely Planet's online services. Essentially their function is to help you reserve hostels and hotel rooms at recommended places for travelers without inflating prices.

Anyway, I managed to find a place there that not only is cheaper than any of the conference's recommended hotels, it's right near the Vatican! I'm so psyched! I've already got things mapped out in my mind - waking up early to catch the sunrise at some elegant square adorned with ancient steps and fountains, a cool stroll through the spring morning past the wonders of ancient Rome, with a stop at an elegant Italian cafe, perhaps, for a cappuccino before I meander back to the hotel, suit up, and go engage in academic discourse on robotics technology. I am SO PUMPED for this trip!

Haha, I'd better get crackin' on putting together my presentation though... ouch.

#0 - Google

Ok, I was going to stop at #1, but something happened about halfway through writing this... My computer bluescreened. Yes, in response to the inevitable questions, I was doing some things to my computer that I shouldn't have been doing. But I didn't expect it to crash when it did.

Anyway, I was really bummed out at the prospect of losing this elegant quilt of prose that I had already been working on for well over an hour. I booted into my more stable system, hoping that something would remain in my automatic Google blog cache, and ... nothing.

Nothing? I was devastated. All of my enthusiasm for writing drained out of me like fish broth from a leaky plastic bag (it happened to me last night, ok?). I was about to give up and just go to bed depressed, when I decided to boot back into my experimental, unstable, bluescreening Windows installation...

*insert choir of angels here*

Restoring my Firefox session, lo and behold, I was greeted with nearly the full text of my blog post! Google had pulled through after all! I could have kissed Google at that moment if (a) it weren't a large, faceless, abstract entity, and (b) if a certain someone wouldn't be jealous. ;)

Anyway, I just saw a video on Google's plans for world conquest, and I thought they deserved some praise for good design. If they can keep coming up with useful, free applications and excellent user interfaces, then I might even be happy with them taking over the world.

So there you have it. T6A. I never knew I had it in me. And with pictures, no less!

End of an Era

So, I haven't written here in a while, and, as usual, I'm sleepy and want to go to bed. So here's another quick one:

#3 - David is famous!

So my friend David was at a Chinese New Year festival in Paris, and he was interviewed by some national news channel! Here's the link to the video, although he says it's only going to be available for the rest of the day : http://jt.france2.fr/20h/index-fr.php?jt=0&start=1411

[ed - you can see this until the end of the week, apparently - see comments.]

#2 - Mad expensive vending machines.

I never in my life thought I'd put $1500 into a vending machine, but here it is - the machine I bought my 6-month train pass from. I felt a little nervous putting that much cash into a machine with no human operator, but my faith in the Japanese system carried me through. And now I have my very own teiki-ken commuter pass! Just like a real salaryman!



#1 - Love is in the air!

So ... it has happened at last. "Crazy" Yuki is getting married! This is a day I don't think I'd ever prepared myself for ... my old drinking and clubbing buddy is tying the knot. It's really like the end of an era for me. Of course I'm incredibly happy for her and Florian. They're a wonderful couple.

I guess the reason it's hitting me so hard is that through the past seven years a lot of people have been coming in and out of my life, but Yuki was the one constant. It's not like she's going away or anything, but there is definitely somewhat of a wall between married and unmarried life. Maybe it's finally time for me to think about growing up.

Or just find some new party friends. ;)