Moroha　諸刃

I just got back from 3 months working in Japan on an assignment. It was a very interesting experience, but I’m glad to be back with my family.

One thing I noticed that I had never seen before: looking to buy a souvenir for a coworker back in Austin, my boss and I were in a high-scale department store in Fukuoka. Since we were looking for something for my bosses admin, we were were in the beauty/bath section. It was a little strange, since were 1) the only males I could see anywhere, and the only foreigners I could see anywhere.

One other thing that I thought was strange though: I saw a girl wearing HUGE plastic horn-rimmed glasses, that quite obviously had absolutely no lenses at all. I had no idea what to make of that, but evidently I’m not the first person to notice this trend.

Most people have heard of the Bacon number, the number of degrees of separation an actor has from Kevin Bacon, based of the Six Degrees of Separation idea. Well, this concept of looking up and assigning numbers based on the separation distance was actually borrowed from the Erdős number, which gives the degrees of collaboration between the person and the mathematician Paul Erdős.

I was thinking the other day that there is a good chance I have an Erdős number. I have published a peer-reviewed paper while in grad school, and my co-author has published dozens of papers in several fields, and his PhD advisor and then his PhD advisor are/were very famous in fluid dynamics, which is closely tied to mathematics, so there is a good probability of me having a fairly low Erdős number. You can look up the Erdős number for a person here, but since it only indexes from mathematics journals it’s not nearly as robust and complete as it could be. So while myself and my PhD advisor aren’t listed as having Erdős numbers, his advisor is, so I can just add 2 to that number to get my Erdős number. So my Erdős number trace is the following:
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My flight from Seoul back to Fukuoka was at 6:30 pm, so that meant I had until about 2:30 to 3:00 to do something on Saturday morning. At one of my friend’s suggestion, I decided to go on a guided tour of the DMZ, the border with North Korea.

During my short trip there I was constantly seeing things that reminded me of Japan, but there is one way that South Korea is totally unique: having a border with North Korea. It’s strange to think that after 50 years the war is still technically ongoing, i.e. there has never been a formal peace accord, just a cease-fire. As the tour bus slowly approached the DMZ, there were obvious changes that the tour guide pointed out to us: fences topped with razor wire along the Han river (the river starts in North Korea and becomes the border as it flows south and then west, so it has been an popular method for saboteurs, commandos, etc. to try and slip into South Korea), guard posts and pillboxes every 500m with ROK soldiers standing guard. Another method that the North Koreans set up was tunnels, and one of the discovered tunnels was the first stop on the tour. Before we got there though, we had to pass a checkpoint at the entrance to the army-controlled zone. Though still outside of the actual DMZ, no one goes in or out without the soldiers checking your ID (passports for all of us on the tour bus) and that you have a reason to be there. Although farms are maintained in the area, there is a curfew so that the farmers there can only work during the day and have to leave before nightfall.
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June 1st, 1:00 pm: So I finally made my way to Yongsan station. I had a general map of the area that I had printed out from google maps, but I had difficulty orienting myself inside the station, so I just followed the largest group of people, assuming they would heading towards the same destination as me. Well, it turned out that assumption was wrong. It took me a while, but I finally made my way to the big electronics department stores. The biggest surprise? There were hardly any customers. Maybe it’s because it was still early Friday afternoon or something, but there just weren’t a lot of shoppers. Also making things difficult was that although everything was in the same building, it was in actuality a whole bunch of very little shops all lined up together. They were at least grouped by genre though: all the stores selling cameras were together, all the stores selling PC’s were together, etc., so it wasn’t too hard to navigate.
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And by short, I mean short. I’ve been in in Kumamoto, Japan on an extended business trip for most of the summer (since mid-May, in fact), working on a project here. In fact the trip is so long that I had a problem: one week before I left my wife pointed out to me that my scheduled stay was about 95 days, and I can only stay in Japan 90 days without a visa. Unfortunately the travel office for my company didn’t realize it either: I guess they generally deal with people going to Japan for a week or two, or a year or two, but not around 3 months.

It was too late to apply for a visa, so the alternative plan was for me to briefly leave Japan for a day or two while I was there, and when I get back my 90 days should reset. So I ended up with a ticket to go to Seoul, South Korea on July 1st and then fly back to Japan on July 2nd. I asked some Korean friends of mine for suggestions as to what I should do while I’m in Seoul for a whopping 24 hours. So here was how my trip began:

June 1st: 10:30 am: Leave from Fukuoaka airport on Korean airlines flight. The stewardesses (or flight attendants, if you insist on PC), were without exception, young, friendly, and very attractive. I reminded me a bit of Singapore airlines, although I don’t think anything comes close to those dresses the Singapore airlines stewardesses wear. All the Korea Air stewardesses had very good English, and impeccable Japanese that was so good I had trouble distinguishing it from native fluency.

June 1st: 11:30 am: (Just a 1 hour flight, and they still served a meal and drinks!) Arrive at Incheon airport. No problems with customs and immigration, I just have the clothes on my back and a backpack with a change of clothes. As soon as I leave customs and enter the public area of the airport, I must have had an unmistakable ‘wide-eyed lost foreigner’ look, because I’m immediately accosted by an older unkempt man with broken English asking if I need help getting a bus or taxi. It was tempting, since I was there as part of a business trip I could probably expense it, but I wanted to do it the hard way.

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This past New Years Eve my family and I were invited to the home of some Japanese friends of ours to watch Kouhaku Utagassen, a TV show that NHK broadcasts every New Years Eve where all the year’s most popular musical groups and artists get together for a big concert-disguised-as-singing-contest. Basically it’s seen as a “who’s who” of the music industry: getting invited to sing at it cements your status as one of the years hot artists. This is the first time Ryoko and I were able to see it live instead of bittorrenting it days later (actually we saw it 15 hours later due to time zone differences, but close enough) since we were first dating over 10 years ago.

As we sat and chatted while we watched the show, I came to realize several things I hadn’t noticed before:

I really detest Johnny’s Jimusho. Not just for the business practices of the studio, and the ruthless nature of its head, Johnny Kitagawa (not to mention the fact that he abuses the boys in his employ, making him look like some kind of cross between Machiavelli and Michael Jackson), but because all the boy bands in his employ share the exact same three qualities:
1.) They are all very handsome, bordering on androgynous/beautiful
2.) They are talented entertainers
3.) They can’t sing
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Friday night I got back from a two-week trip to Japan, my first business trip for my new job. It was an interesting experience, I’ll do my best to blog about it without revealing too many details about specifics, since my job is very sensitive about IP issues.

I work for a Japanese semiconductor company that makes various tools used by the major chip-making companies: Intel, Samsumg, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, etc. In this case ‘tool’ generally means a huge machine that’s 10′x20′ or larger and performs various processes on hundreds of wafers per hour. To put in perspective, a single tool can cost millions of dollars. One thing that has been consistent in the semiconductor industry over the past decades is that they are continually trying to make things smaller, faster, and cheaper. This requires constant innovation, which means that there are never a shortage of new and difficult problems to work on. My company has all of its production facilities in Japan, several large factories where it makes the tools that are then sold to the various companies. It also has a few research facilities and such too, where they try and work out problems with current of future tool implementations.

A lot of the various processes that our tools perform involve transport phenomena: coating, baking, drying, spinning, cleaning, etc. Some of these processes can get very complicated, and understanding all the pertinent physics at play can be a bit too complicated for a regular engineer with a B.S. Add to that the fact that Japanese industry traditionally does not hire a lot of people with advanced degrees, and you end up with a shortage of knowledge that could be helpful in solving many of these problems.

That’s where my group comes in. My boss had built/nurtured a group of researchers in America, most of us with PhD’s and/or years of experience working in the semiconductor industry, and we essentially work on the most difficult problems they are dealing with in the factories or research facilities back in Japan. When I started in September my boss gave me two introductory projects to start on, and for me to report my progress in Japan in October.
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Some of you might have seen this video last year as a promotional video for the up-coming star wars mmorpg, Star Wars: the Old Republic by Bioware. I have little to say about the game because I doubt that I will ever in my life play a mmorpg. I find the concept of having to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of playing a game I’ve already bought to be downright insulting. However I have to say that the cinematic trailer that Bioware made for the game is absolutely awesome, and is (to me at least) the most entertaining thing to come out of the Star Wars universe since Genndy Tartakovsky did the Clone Wars cartoon back in 2003 (not the current one, which is quite inferior, imho), and much better than anything in the prequels.

Well, Bioware just released another cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. After watching it, all I can say is this: can we just have Bioware make a movie set in the Star Wars universe?

How is it I have never seen this before? This is totally awesome.

My blog, since it has a posting frequency and readership in the single digits, doesn’t generate a lot of traffic or original viewers. But like any blog, comment spam is a continuous problem. I use the Akismet and WP-SpamFree plugins which seem to do a very good job of keeping out the spam, even without captchas. However recently I have been getting a few comments which I can’t really determine if they are spam or not. Here are some of them:

This sort of details will need to be valued by everyone – it is some thing that I believe we can all draw upon. I very significantly like the theme you’re applying right here which I consider is wordpress isn’t it? I have been searching all around for one thing simular but have yet to uncover anything suitable for my site. I looked at the link on your footer and will try and download a copy of it for myself – thanks.

I just wanted to let you know that I learned a lot from your post and I really enjoyed reading it. I was doing some research on google and I’m happy I discovered your blog. Again, thanks for the info.

Wonderful Blog :) Very Entertaining and I love your perspective. I’ll be adding you to my feed reader and be back again the next time you update. Regards

Hi, I thought I would drop you a line and inform you that your web site layout is really screwed up on the Firefox browser. Seems to work good in IE though. Anyhow keep up the good work.

So I’m not too sure what to make of comments like these. They’re not blatant spam, I mean, they obviously aren’t shilling for viagra or Texas hold-em’ or pump-and-dump stocks or some such. However, what makes them so suspicious is how generic they are. Any one of these comments could be put on almost any blog post anywhere, and they wouldn’t seem out of place… But not quite. That first one is suspicious because the specific post it was commenting on was not really a diary of personal experiences like the comment was alluding to. Also the English seems a bit non-native to me. The last comment there is bogus because I only use Firefox and I know the layout is fine.

So here’s my theory. I think these are all spam, but their initial purpose is not to put blogs in comment spam hell. I think that these are essentially ‘tracer’ rounds in the arms race between spammer and spam blockers. In other words, the spammers are just testing to see what kind of comments can make it through the spam filters, so they can more finely tweak their spamming programs.

I don’t want to help the spammers, so I’ve decided to think of these comments as the appetizer that comes before the main course: a main course of spam. Spam + appetizer = spametizer ?