Moroha　諸刃

Two posts ago I showed how many coin flips it would take in order to have a 98% confidence of getting 92 heads in a row (à la Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead). The answer turns out to be coin flips, which if you tried to do by yourself, it would take 100 billion times longer than the current age of the universe. Since I mentioned that only Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged could pull off such a stunt, I think it’s only fair that any other solution also be Adamsian, at least in practicality if nothing else.

My friend Spencer proposed a Dyson sphere to power a huge number of coin-flipping robots. I think he’s on the right track and I had similar thoughts, however my ideas are a bit larger in scale and less detailed. I won’t go into detail on what kind of Dyson Sphere is best or such, since even simplistic models are fraught with difficulties and instabilities (a nice page talking about Dyson Spheres and some simple analysis is here). Instead, let’s just say that we can build some kind of large Dyson network in order to capture a significant portion of the Sun’s energy. We’ll be conservative and say that after light capture, conversion to useful energy, and then maintenance, etc. we can use 10% of the Sun’s radiant energy to power an array of coin-flipping robots.

Spencer also mentioned the concern that once you have good enough robots, that coin flipping is no longer random: exactly precise robots flipping exactly precise coins in the exactly precise way will give the exact same result every time. That may be the case, but we’ll assume that the robots and coins are made imprecise enough that there will be enough random variance in between all the robots to make the system truly random and fair (this is in all reality probably impossible, but we’re in Adam’s universe so we’ll assume it can be done anyway).

Since the robots don’t have to do anything but flip coins and report the outcome, we’ll say each robot consumes about as much power as a toaster oven, or 1000 W. The sun’s luminosity is , so assuming we can use 10% of the sun’s energy we have:
robots
This many robots would give us the same number of flips every second, so that will give us the required number of flips in:
11 days and 14 hours.
Now that is a considerable improvement.

This potential solution does have some problems though, the most obvious being whether there is enough useful material in the entire solar system to build robots, plus the Dyson power grid to run the whole thing, plus a maintenance system to keep it all in good working order, etc. If we limit ourselves to just the easy to use material, like just the asteroid belt, that limits us to about kg of mass. Assuming a total of 10 kg for each robot (including Dyson network power generation, infrastructure, maintenance, etc.), that limits us to just robots. This number of coin-flipping robots would then take 6.14 years to get the required coin flips, which still isn’t bad at all. It might take several millenia to build the coin-flipping robot Dyson network, but once it was up and running you’d have your 92 heads in a row in just a few short years!

So lets say we let our coin flipping Dyson array keep running, say, until the Sun becomes a red giant in about 5 billion years, destroying our Dyson array. We would have

coin flips.

From this can we calculate how many coin heads in a row we can expect to get during this time? Our initial equation is

where F the confidence probability we we desire (we’ve been using 0.98, or 98%), n is the number of heads in a row, and f is the number of coin flips. Rearranging this for n we have:

For some various confidence probabilities we have these results:

So what does this mean? You have a 99.99% chance of getting at least 120 heads in a row, pretty much guaranteed. However, you only have a 50% chance of getting up to 124 heads in a row. What gives? We go from flipping coins for 6 years to 5 billion years, and the only improvement we get is an additional 28 heads in a row? That’s because each additional head in a row has half the probability of occuring, so the probability decreases exponentially with a linear increase in number of heads required. Conversely, for an exponential increase in the number of coin flips, we see only a modest linear increase in number of expected heads in a row.

Last Wednesday my family and I returned to Austin from our (so far) annual trip to Japan to see Ryoko’s family. Since Ryoko’s mother passed away last year, this year is one of the important anniversaries of her death where a special memorial service needs to be held. So we went to Ryoko’s home for two weeks to attend the ceremony and then to spend some time with her family.

The afternoon after the ceremony (held in the morning), all of Ryoko’s family was gathered together and chatting, and the subject turned to exotic foods. When asked for my two cents, I said that I’m always willing to try something at least once, and that I like new culinary experiences. Then Ryoko’s cousin Akihiro chimed in: “I know a place not far from here where you can eat deer meat and wild boar! I’ll take you there this evening!

So that’s how I ended up going here to eat:

That’s Ryoko’s father and older sister about to go inside. It’s a tiny little place that I can most easily describe as ’seedy’. The outside looks a little run-down, and inside a little more so. Here’s the front of the restaurant:

Basically the large white sign says, “All natural: Wild boar stew, game fowl dishes, wild deer dishes.”
I didn’t bother taking any pictures of the interior of the restaurant, but it isn’t hard to describe: low light and dingy, old faded posters of actresses and Enka (basically, Japanese country music) stars. There was even a calendar with a nude woman on it hanging on the wall. (I took it down, rolled it up and set it behind the old dusty karaoke machine when the cook was back in the kitchen. He never noticed.)

The first dish was some wild fowl fried with some onions. I didn’t even take a picture of it because at the time I didn’t realize it was anything but ordinary chicken. Neither the taste nor texture disabused me of that notion. It was pretty good though.

The second dish was grilled deer meat with onions:

It had a slightly gamy flavor to it, but it was pretty heavily salted and peppered so it didn’t stand out much. It wasn’t very tough, and I thought it was quite tasty!

The third dish was none other than roasted wild boar with salad:

This meat was really, really tough. It was hard to chew, and there was tons of fat on every cut. The flavor wasn’t too bad though. Sort of a cross between pork and something really really gamy. I don’t mind gamy flavor so once I could chew it until it was soft enough I had no trouble eating it, but someone without a high tolerance for gamy tastes might have trouble getting it down.

Overall it wasn’t too bad, but the atmosphere definitely left a lot to be desired.

A couple of posts ago I talked about how laughably improbable it would be to get 92 heads in a row on a fair coin. To sum up, the probability is:

The probability of this happening is so abysmally low that you could flip coins your entire life and never expect to see this happen. Or could you? How many times would you need to flip a coin to see a reasonable chance of this happening?

A pointless question? Most certainly. But trying to answer pointless questions that can be solved by math is one of the trademarks of a geek. So a quick review of probability and statistics lead me to the Geometric Distribution, which gives the probability of an event occurring after a given number of trials.

Here p is the probability of the event occurring once in one trial, i.e. . k is the number of trials, and P is the probability of the event occurring once within k trials. However, this equation doesn’t quite give us the probability distribution we need. This function will give us the probability of getting exactly one event (heads 92 times in a row) out of k trials (flipping a coin 92 times in a row k times). We’re not interested in the probability of exactly one success, we’re interested in the probability of one or more successes. For that, we need the related Cumulative Distribution Function. Basically it’s the sum of the probabilities of 1, 2, 3,… up to k successes out of k trials. It’s actually pretty easy to derive without performing sums for arbitrarily large values of k. Since we want one or more successes, that means the only thing we don’t want is a failure for every trial. The probability of a single failure is simply , so the probability of k failures is . Since we want every possible combination except every trial a failure, we just subtract this from one (the sum of all possible combinations is of course equal to one). This function comes out to be:

Choosing a reasonable number for F, we’ll select 0.98. Solving the above equation for k we get:

This equation is exact, but it has a big problem. No normal calculator or computer is going to be able to calculate the answer because of the denominator. The logarithm of one is zero, so the logarithm of a number very very close to one is a very very small number. But no normal calculator is going to be able to handle
(Note I said no normal calculator. I used Mathematica for this and it works fine. But anything limited to double-precision arithmetic isn’t going to get you there.) Fortunately there is a convenient Taylor series expansion for . It is

The first term in the series will give more than sufficient precision in this case, so we have

This tells us how many trials we we will need to to have a 98% confidence of getting 92 heads in a row, but it doesn’t tell us how many coin flips we will need. Now a trial is defined as 92 coin flips, and if all 92 are heads it is a success, otherwise it is a failure. However, we don’t need to do all 92 flips each time, as soon as we get our first tails, we already know that the trial is a failure and we can start over. Since a fair coin is going to result in tails half of the time, then that means on average we will have two flips for every trial. So if f is the total number of coin flips we will need to get a 98% confidence, then:

This is a very very big number. If we flipped a coin once a second, how long would it take us to get this number of flips?

And how long is this? This is really, really long. Astronomers estimate the current age of the universe to be years old. That puts it as 100 billion times longer than the current age of the universe. This is a feat that could only be pulled off by, say, Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged. According to this fascinating article on the eventual heat death of the universe, at this point there will be no matter left in the universe but white and black dwarfs (and black holes, but I don’t know if they’re considered to be matter within our universe or not), and they will be flung from their orbits due to gravitational radiation.

So is all lost? Is there no way to get 92 heads in a row? For all practical purposes, yes, there is no way. As for impractical purposes though, in a subsequent post I’ll detail a way that we could accomplish it long before the death of the universe using a scheme that in all reality would only make sense in a Douglas Adams’ universe.

A few months ago on Sakeriver there was a discussion about the best SF TV series. I submitted the following which I’m reproducing here because I’m lazy:

Talking about the best SF series is fun and all, but I personally much more enjoy talking about the worst of SF (we’ll limit ourselves to TV series for now). I’m sure that well-known turds like Voyager or Excalibur will be mentioned, but due to nostalgia I’m somewhat partial to 80’s TV shows. Here are some examples:

Manimal
Just the name of this show alone is distateful…

The Invisible Woman
I think it was a TV special and not a full series, so it may not technically qualify.

Misfits of Science
Notable for including Courtney Cox long before her Friends fame.

The Ghost Busters
Not what you’re thinking. This is long before the movie Ghostbusters. This was a children’s live-action show in 75-76. Columbia actually licensed the name from Filmation to make the movie. The movie was so popular that Filmation then came back and tried to cash in with the horrible cartoon Ghostbusters (some of you may remember this one). Columbia was none too happy about that since they had made the franchise a hit, so they hit back with The Real Ghostbusters, which is probably the one you think of when you think of a Ghostbusters cartoon. However this one sucked too, since the actors in the movie raised a lot of stink about their likenesses in the TV show, so they ended up being drawn differently, Lorenzo Music (who also did the voice of Garfield) got replaced with Dave Coulier for Peter Vankeman’s voice, etc. Slimer was changed from a gluttonous villian to an extremelly annoying slapstick sidekick, and then later usurped the actual main characters not unlike how Fonzie usurped Happy Days, Urkel would usurp Family Matters, and Elmo would usurp all of Sesame Street a decade later. But I digress.

Small Wonder
Ugh. I don’t think I need to say much about this show.

Not Quite Human (go to 3:20, this is all I could find)
Coasting off of his (relative) success from The Boy Who Could Fly, Jay Underwood starred in this made-for TV movie back in 1987. Co-starring a phoned-in performance by Alan Thicke as Chip’s father, he must have needed an extra paycheck in between seasons of Growing Pains or something. They actually made a couple of sequels for this, Not Quite Human II and Still Not Quite Human.

Out of This World
Not to be confused with the video game that had no relation, this was a crappy Saturday afternoon sitcom cut from the same mold as Small Wonder (and started around the same time, it ran from 87-91). The girl has a human mother and alien father, and her father grants her the ability to stop time at will. Instead of doing the logical thing anyone with this power would do (i.e. steal anything you want, take over the world, be a totall bad-*ss, etc.), she generally used it just to get out of stupid farcical situations that seemed straight out of Saved by the Bell.

No list of horrible Sci-Fi shows would be complete without some Super Sentai series and their derivatives. Instead of focusing on the well-known Power Rangers (which are certainly worthy of inclusion on this list), I’d like to introduce some of the less well-known copycats and spinoffs.

VR Troopers
This show, like Power Rangers, was produced by taking the action suit scenes from a Japanese Super Sentai show and re-shooting all the other scenes with new actors. What made this different though, is that they actually combined three different Japanese shows: Super Machine Man Metalder, Dimensional Warrior Spielban, and Space Sheriff Shaider. This of course produced a convoluted and unintentionally hilarious plot (Fans of Robotech and Voltron are knowingly nodding their heads here).

Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad
Yes, that really is the name of the show. Another Tokusatsu adaptation like Power Rangers and VR Troopers (and Big Bad Beetle Borgs, but I don’t even want to mention them…), this one actually had lower production values than the others, if you can believe it. Notable for the supporting cast role of Troy Slaten who would later go on to play Jerry Steiner in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.

My favorite of all though, has to be…
Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills
Instead of licensing inexpensive footage from a post-run Japanese TV show, this show was actually 100% original, as far as it wasn’t a complete rip-off of Power Rangers and its derivatives. But as you might surmise by the name of the show alone, it was really, really bad. How it survived for 40 episodes I’ll never figure out, because my brother and I would laugh our way through Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad because it was so horrible, but TTAFFBH wasn’t even very watchable to make fun of. I do remember one episode where Zsa Zsa Gabor had a cameo, though (the heroes were sent to an alternate universe where Zsa Zsa had just been elected Governor of California or something to that effect). There was another humorous episode where they broke the monster-a-day format. In this episode, the big evil boss left for a while and left his lieutenant in charge. The lieutenant, wanting to prove himself by defeating the heroes, keeps on sending monster after monster after monster instead of just giving up for the day after the first one is defeated. The heroes get overwhelmed and are about to be defeated when the big evil boss comes back, recalls the monsters, and berates his lieutenant for not ‘doing it correctly’ by not following the monster-a-day formula. Years later it reminded me of Dr. Evil talking with his son Scott in Austin Powers about being defeated because of following standard bad-guy clichés.

Anyone else got some really bad SF TV shows, preferably with videos so that all can enjoy in the campy badness?

I ran across this page that is an outline for a lecture given by a professor of statistics at Berkeley. The title of his talk is “The top ten things that math probability says about the real world”, but he just glosses over six of them and spends the majority of his lecture discussing the last four. Still, all of the points are valid and important, in fact a lot of his lecture covers subjects that are pet peeves of mine. But the one that never ceases to amaze me is is the title of my post: people are predictably irrational in actions involving uncertainty.

Take for example the opening scene in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where they are flipping the coin. Rosencratz (or is it Guildenstern?) gets heads something like 92 times in a row. Now assuming a fair coin, the odds of that are laughably improbable: . You’d have a millions of times better chance of winning the lottery than achieving this feat. In fact, given a lottery that has a one in one billion chance of winning, you’d have a better chance of winning said lottery 3 times in a row then you would of getting 92 heads in a row on a fair coin.

Proof: .

But that’s not what’s important here. The issue in question is what people will predict the next coin flip to be. If they see the large number of successive identical coin flips, and you then ask them what the probability of the next flip also being heads is, they will usually give one of two answers: 1) It is most likely to be heads, because the coin is obviously ‘on a roll’ of heads. 2) It is most likely to be tails, because it’s had so many heads in a row that there is a ‘negative balance’ of tails that needs to be met. This is despite any and all assurances that the coin is perfectly fair. So the real answer is of course, 0.5 probability of heads, and 0.5 probability of tails. This is always true, no matter what the previous record of instances may be. The thing that many people fail to realize is this:

In any simple game of pure chance, every turn/round/instance is completely independent of previous turns, and and every single turn has the exact same probability every time. This is how casinos make the majority of their money.

So why are most people so predictably irrational in such situations? Obviously I’m not a psychologist (or other such similar profession, but see this slide from the end of the lecture), but I think it has to do with the fact that as humans, we almost never have to make judgments in situations where the outcome is truly random. Such situations have only arisen quite recently in human history with the advent of gambling. And even then there is only a subset of gambling games that are purely random (like craps or roulette, assuming they are truly fair) while many have a combination of chance and skill (card games fall into this category) and some are flat out not fair (slot machines).

In most everything that we deal with in daily life, even when there are events that seem random when we we observe them, they are almost never random. For example, take my daily bus commute. Even though the bus has a regularly scheduled time to arrive, from my perspective it appears random within a time frame of +/- 10 minutes. Also how long it take to arrive at school or home also appears to be random, with a total time of anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, depending on traffic. But in reality, both when the bus comes and how long it takes to arrive at my destination are not random at all. The problem is that the number of variables that go into determining these two times are so vast and unpredictable that the end result may as well seem to be random when it isn’t.

Back to my former point though, I think we as humans tend to find pattern and correlation in many things (even when they don’t exist) because finding correlations and patterns is extremely useful. Such thought processes have fueled man’s scientific progress, and help humans navigate the dangerous minefield of social interaction. It has its downsides though. People losing lots of money in gambling is obvious, but also things like finding pictures of Mary or Jesus in just about anything, or the existence of most every pseudoscience out there (numerology, cryptozoology, paranormal phenomena, etc.).

My wife pointed out a very interesting article to me this morning about the Taishō Emperor, who was the emperor of Japan from 1912 to 1926. Specifically, the Imperial Household Agency released some of the official records from his reign. What makes the releasing of the documents news-worthy is that it is the first time the Imperial Household has ever admitted the mental and physical deficiencies of the Taishō Emperor. I couldn’t find the article at all anywhere in English (no surprise, the various Japanese news outlets seem to be very selective about what news they release to the ‘rest’ of the world), so I’ll give a quick translation.

大正天皇　「実録」３度目公開　病状の深刻化記す。
Newly released documents reveal health problems of the Taishō Emperor.

宮内庁は４日、大正天皇の動静を記録した「大正天皇実録」の一部（複製本）を公開した。０２、０３年に続く公開で、１９２１（大正１０）年７月から、死去して多摩陵に埋葬される２７（昭和２）年２月までが対象。深刻化する病状のほか、２１年に摂政となった裕仁皇太子（昭和天皇）の動静などが記されている。
On the 4th of this month, the Imperial Household Agency released reproductions of official Imperial records from the Taishō Emperor that contained details about the Taishō Emperor’s health. The released records cover a period of 2~3 years from July of 1921 until the burial of the Emperor at Tamaryo. In addition to the Emperor’s worsening condition, the documents also revealed that due to those conditions in 1921 Crown Prince Hirohito (later Showa Emperor) was placed as Regent on the Imperial throne.

実録は全８５冊で、今回は巻７７から巻８５の計９冊が公開された。宮内庁によると、「個人情報」を理由に塗りつぶした部分は、今回公開した全約１６万字のうち２％程度。これで即位から死去までが公開され、未公開は生まれてから即位までの４７冊となる。
The complete records contain a total of 85 volumes, of which the 9 volumes from number 77 to 85 have been released. According to the Agency, of the 160,000 characters contained in the released records, about 2% have been removed because it contained ‘personal information’. Including those just released, now all the records from the Taishō Emperor’s enthronement until his death have been released, leaving 47 more volumes covering the Emperor’s birth until his enthronement that have yet to be released.

今回公開分によると、２１年１１月２５日の裕仁皇太子の摂政就任時には「大正三年頃ヨリ軽度ノ御発語御障害アリ、其ノ後ニ至リ御姿勢前方ヘ屈セラルル御傾向アリ」「殊ニ御記憶力ハ御衰退アリ」などと病状について記されている。２３年９月１日の関東大震災の際には大正天皇は栃木県日光市にいたが、被災者のため１０００万円を寄贈したとの記述もある。
The released documents contain the following statements that detail the Emperor’s health problems around the time that Crown Prince Hirohito was inaugurated as the regent (note from Derek: these direct quotations are really hard for me to translate, because of the archaic style used in the official record, sorry if they’re not up to snuff): “His majesty’s speech impediment has become slightly worse since the the 3rd year of his reign (1915)、and recently his posture has shifted forward with a tendency to lean over.” “His majesty is developing pronounced memory problems.” The volumes also contain an account of the Taishō Emperor donating 10 million yen to victims of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when the Emperor was residing in the city of Nikko in Tochigi prefecture at the time.

実録は、天皇の動静や政治、外交上の重要事項などを記した文書。大正天皇については、死去後の２７年７月に当時の宮内省が編さんに着手し、３７（同１２）年１２月に完成した。
The released volumes contain accounts of the Emperor’s condition and important political and diplomatic matters during the Emperor’s reign. The Imperial Household Department began compiling the official records in 1927 after the death of the Taishō Emperor, and were completed in December of 1937.

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Since we speak mostly Japanese at home, most of the children’s books we have for our girls are also in Japanese. Recently we received some older children’s books from another Japanese family whose children are older and have grown out of them. Among them were 4 Sailor Moon storybooks. For those who haven’t heard of it and can’t be bothered to look it up, it’s essentially an all-girls Power Rangers kind of story. My girls currently love watching episodes of Pretty Cure 5 which is pretty similar, so I figured they would like Sailor Moon too.

So the other night I was reading them some books before bedtime, and Karisa asked me to read one of the Sailor Moon books we had just got. I thought the whole experience was so strange that I scanned the whole thing and put it here. So here we go!
(Note: you can click on the small images to see the full-sized ones. They are really big, but with the readership of this blog the bandwidth shouldn’t be a problem.)
I’ll do a simple text translation in italics, and then my comments in normal text.

Episode 27 of Sailor Moon S (Super): Haruka and Michiru are also Sailor Scouts!

Usagi (Sailor Moon’s secret identity) and her friend Minako (Sailor Venus) run into their friends Haruka and Michiru outside of the gym. However a suspicious woman in the car has followed them! “They must have the Talismans I’m looking for!”

(Upper-left corner) The bad guy, Unknown Professor, tells his underling Yujial, “get the Talismans, and the world will be ours!”

OK. the only thing that really wierds me out here is the girl in the far left, Haruka. She looks more like a pimp then she does a girl, and in fact you can’t tell she’s a girl at all until she transforms later. I also like how the mysterious bad-guy is a professor. Way to enforce negative stereotypes concerning academic achievement to young girls. Sailor moon is hardly the first to do this though, in Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets in English) the ultimate bad guy was Professor X.

Yujial chases them into the gym, where they are trapped in the locker room. First she attacks Minako. “Your spirit is mine!” (shoots her with purple light syringe-thing). They try and run away, but are trapped by Yujial and her ally, Diamond Door-nobu-da!

OK, this Door-nobu-da has to be the stupidest monster I have ever seen in any sentai series, and I include all of the original Power Rangers in that statement. She has a doorknob sticking out of her forehead, two more wrapped doorknobs for hair buns, a locker door attached to her left hand, and for a right hand she has what looks like a giant crappy Swiss army knife.

Yujial realizes that Minako’s spirit isn’t the Talisman she’s looking for. “I’ll destroy this worthless thing.” “No, don’t! She’ll die!” Yells Usagi. What can Usagi do? She can’t transform into Sailor Moon in front of her friends, they’ll find out who she is! While Usagi hesitates, Door-nobu-da attacks Haruka and Michiru!

So Door-nobu-da’s attack consists of… shooting doors at people.

Usagi has no choice. She transforms into Sailor Moon! Haruka and Michiru are suprised. “Usagi is Sailor Moon??!!” Usagi uses her special attack to return Minako’s spirit. “Moon Spiral Heart Attack!”

If you think that special attack has a wierd name, just wait.

“Destroy these girls!” Yujial commands. Door-nobu-da shoots door after door at Usagi, knocking her down. Haruka and Michiru come to her rescue. They are actually Sailor Scouts too! Haruka transforms with the words “Uranus Planet Power Makeup!” Michiru transforms with the words “Neptune Planet Power Makeup!”

OK, this has to be coincidence, but it just seems weird. The somewhat gender-ambiguous Haruka is… Sailor Uranus. I’ll just leave it at that. Also, take a look at the weapon that Yujial has pulled out. It looks like a chopped vacuum cleaner (complete with motorcycle handlebar on the bottom) and says ‘Turning 360 degrees’ on that half, and then connected with some hoses to another cylinder with a picture of an ear of corn on it. I have no idea what to make of this.

Usagi is shocked to find out that Haruka and Michiru are secretly Sailor Scouts. The duo then unleash their special attacks against Door-nobu-da, “Deep Sub-maji!” “World Shaking!” Door-nobu-da is destroyed! Then Yujial attacks. “I’ll show you my power! Fire Buster!”

OK, I have no idea what Sailor Neptune’s attack here is supposed to be. It’s written ディープ　サブマージ (diipu sabumaaji), but I have no idea what it’s supposed to be in English, assuming it comes from some English word in the first place.

When Yujial is about to finish the two off, Minako comes to the rescue! “Venus Star Power Makeup!” She then attacks Yujial. “Venus Love-me Chain!” Now surrounded by four sailor scouts, Yujial runs away. “I’ll get you next time!”

‘Venus Love-me Chain’ doesn’t seem like a name for a very potent finishing move, but I guess if it works you can name it whatever you like.

“Usagi is overjoyed to find out that her two friends are also Sailor Scouts. “Let’s fight together from now on!” she says. However Uranus and Neptune refuse. “Our mission is to find the Talisman. That has nothing to do with you two.” And before Usagi and Minako can answer, Haruka and Michiru leave. “Why can’t we be friends?” Minako asks. “I don’t know, but I think we’ll see them again.”

The mysterious allies disappear! Will we ever see them again? As long as the ratings hold, you better believe it!

“Hey girls! Get your parents to buy all these other Sailor Moon books!”

(Note from Derek: my wife Ryoko has a small blog of her own in Japanese. She posts a lot of pictures and stories of our family, but my mother is unable to read them. So I will be adding some English translations of Ryoko’s posts for those that may be interested.)

Today is Mother’s Day.

I slept in and when I woke up I heard Derek making breakfast. He made oatmeal, and with yogurt, juice, and some chocolate put it on a tray and gave me breakfast in bed!

Thank you, Derek! But I’m not very good with mornings and didn’t have much of an apetite… When I got out of the shower, Karisa and Eren said ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ and gave me a card that Derek had helped them make. They had done their best to sign their names too, with Derek’s help.

At church they gave a rose to each of the mothers’ after Sacrament meeting, and the children sang a song for all the mothers.

Derek also made dinner for me, Spaghetti with a spicy tomato sauce, with some spicy Italian sausage and garlic. Karisa helped cut the onions. It made me really nervous, but Karisa seemed really happy to try and help.

From morning to evening everyone tried to make the day relaxing for me. I’m really thankful to have such a wonderful family. Thank you!

Also, recently Karisa has shown a lot of interest I playing the piano. Derek studied the piano for 8 years, and is showing Karisa some basics. Of course she couldn’t concentrate for more than about 10 minutes, but it’s great that she was having fun! I hope some day she can play a duet with her father…

This is out of chronological order, but I thought I would talk a little about my adventure in getting to the conference. I left on Jan. 11, and my itinerary was to fly to San Fransisco, then fly to Taipei, and then stay the night in Taipei because I wouldn’t arrive there until 9:00 p.m. and I didn’t feel like spending another 3~4 hours getting to Kenting late at night and jet-lagged. Fortunately the organizers of the conference provided a nice pdf of our different travel options and how to get there. They had arranged with a few hotels in Taipei for us to have discounts, so I chose to stay at the Monarch Plaza Hotel since it seemed to be fairly close to the airport.

However, things didn’t go quite as planned. A huge storm rolled into San Francisco that morning, and I ended up missing my flight from SF to Taipei. There is only one flight a day, so I ended up having to stay the night in SF and catch the same flight the next afternoon. Not great, but my travel expenses were being covered, so I made the best of it.

The next day the flight from SF to Taipei went fine, and I arrived at the airport a little later, around 11:00 pm. I wasn’t sure how to get to the hotel, but when I went to the taxi terminal all I had to do was show a print-out of my reservation that had the hotel’s letterhead at the top, and the the cab driver nodded acknowledgment and took me to my destination. Arriving at the hotel though, I was a little surprised. It was really nice hotel, much nicer than anything I had ever stayed in before in my life (turns out it’s a 5-star hotel). From what I could see, the other guests were either foreign businessmen or airline pilots and stewardesses. After forcing myself not to gape at the Singapore Airlines stewardesses, I managed to find my room and get some sleep.

The next day my real adventure began. I was in kind of a unique situation trying to navigate my way around, because although I do not speak a word of Chinese besides she she, I can read well over a 1000 Chinese characters due to my Japanese experience. So every sign I saw I could often get an idea of what it was talking about, even if the whole meaning escaped me. Getting a taxi at a 5-star hotel is no problem, and every staff member there spoke excellent English so I was able to make sure the cab driver knew I wanted to the high-speed rail station. Once there I was on my own, but it turns out that Taiwan is very cosmopolitan and foreigner-friendly in this respect. Every sign had English and Chinese, and getting from Taoyuan to Zuoying (the last stop) was quite simple.

To go to Kenting though, I couldn’t take the train as it was simply too rural. Now if I had made my original flight, then there would have been a shuttle bus for me and all the other conference attendees to take from Zuoying station to the hotel. I was a day late and by myself though. After descending from the train station at Zuoying though, I was instantly mobbed by about 5 taxi drivers, trying to convince me in very broken English that I needed to go with one of them. Now, according the travel itinerary pdf I had printed out, there were a couple of tour bus companies nearby that could also take me to the hotel. So my conversation with the taxi drivers went like this:

Taxi 1: Where you go?
Me: To Kenting, Howard Beach Hotel.
Taxi 2: We know this place! We take you there!
Me: How much?
Taxi 1: 2000 dollar. (meaning New Taiwan Dollar [NTD], with exchange rate of about 30 NTD to 1 US$)
Me: (looking at bus information, I see that the bus fare is less than a quarter of this price, and I point it out to them) I’ll take the bus.
Taxi 1-4 (shaking heads vigorously) : No, bus too slow! You need taxi!
Taxi 2: I take you for 1600 dollar!
Taxi 3: 1500 dollar!
Taxi 4: 1400 dollar!
Taxi 2: 1000 dollar!

I wait for moment, seeing if the other three are going to underbid him. I also consider my situation: I didn’t speak the language, and frankly didn’t even know where the bus station I needed was. My travel expenses were being covered, and he was willing to drive me for about 2 hours and charge only the equivalent of $30. I shrugged and said, “OK, lets’ go!”

The first thing he said was, “ok, I also drive my father, mother. ok?” He doesn’t wait for an answer before he waves at an elderly couple sitting nearby who then stand up and begin following him. The taxi driver takes my suitcase, and I shrug and start following also. His taxi is parked a couple of blocks away. It’s clean and smells good, right up with the Japanese standard in taxi cab excellence. I breathe a small sigh of relief. In the end I’m sitting behind the driver’s seat, with an elderly Chinese lady to my right, and an elderly Chinese gentlemen up in the passenger seat.

Now the driver’s English seemed to be limited to price negotiation, so he didn’t have much more to say. I took a chance though and asked his father in Japanese if he understood Japanese. After a short pause, he responded back in Japanese, “Yes, but it’s been a long time.”

So I was able to talk to his father in the taxi for about an hour. He of course learned Japanese in school during the Japanese occupation. He didn’t seem very forthcoming on any details about that period, and I didn’t want to pry in a potentially touchy subject. He at least didn’t seem to mind speaking it with me though. The conversation was interesting in that his vocabulary was very limited in certain ways, especially in loan-words. He didn’t seem to understand any katakana words that I used, even though they are now definitely part of the standard Japanese lexicon. I can only assume that they either weren’t adopted into Japanese yet 60 years ago, or that he was simply never exposed to them in his Japanese education. Also he used words like 家内 for his wife, where I am much more used to 奥さん for the same.

It turned out that the taxi driver was just taking his parents home, which was in a small village about half-way to our destination and not really out of the way. As we got farther away from the industrialized west coast and things started to get more and more rural, things also seemed to look more and more run-down. It was really strange compared to my impression of Taoyuan and Zuoying, which was that if you added some hiragana and katakana to all these signs, you’d never know you weren’t in Japan! I have visited and lived in many very rural areas in Japan, but I had never seen whole towns in Japan that looked as run-down as this area was. It reminded me of places in the US that used to be big tourist destinations, but have now dwindled down as people’s interests took them other places. When we got to the father’s home he thanked me very much and invited me to visit and stay for a couple of days if I ever had the opportunity. I thanked him very much, but I knew I would almost certainly never be this way again.

After that the drive was mostly silence, but as we got to the coastal road the scenery was really beautiful, so conversation wasn’t really needed. Once we got to the southern shore area, there were really only two kinds of places: large resort hotels, or small towns that looked like the main economy was catering to tourists. I finally arrived at the Howard Beach Resort safe and sound. I was a day late and had actually missed that morning’s conference talks, but it was a fun trip to get there all the same.

Next post I’ll show some more pictures of the hotel and nearby town, with my observations.

So, I’m going to try and get back up a bit with my blog again. Back in January I had the opportunity to go to Kenting, Taiwan for a conference/symposium called Beyond Moore’s Law. There were about 100 students from the US, Korea, and Taiwan attending a series of lectures and presentations given by guest lecturers that are currently on the forefront of next-generation computer/semiconductor technology. Some of the presentations were really interesting, even though a lot of the subject matter was way over my head. Some dealt with new and emergent physics like spintronics, superconductors, and quantum computing with qubits. All of these are still in the discovery phase and are still many years from having actual devices made with them. Others dealt with up and coming devices, like higher density CMOS using different and new techniques, and there was one very interesting lecture on making programmable integrated circuits that would have the same connection density as mammalian brains - considered one of the necessary breakthroughs for development of strong AI. And of course there were several lectures that were way over my head and were very, very boring. I don’t remember much about those.

Ryoko’s one request was that I take a lot of pictures, since I wasn’t able to take my family with me. I’ll put a lot of them here on this blog, we’ll see if they eat up too much bandwidth or not.

First let me show you where the conference was. It was at the Howard Beach Resort near Kenting. Kenting (Chinese characters 墾丁) is at the very southern tip of the island, and is a famous resort area in the middle of a large national park.

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There is a top view of the hotel itself. It’s quite a large complex, with probably close to a thousand rooms. However, January is definitely the off-season at this place. Out of the 150 or so students, professors, researchs, and staff that were there for the conference, there probably weren’t half as many additional guests at the entire hotel. For it being the off season though, the weather was absolutely wonderful. High 70’s to low 80’s the entire week.

Here’s the front entrance to the hotel:

Here is another picture about 50m down the road:

You can’t see the details very well in this small picture (I have much larger pictures, but when I try and post them on the blog it cuts off the edge at 500 pixels and I don’t know how to make it wider…), but that is a sign for a restaurant on the left, and a 7-eleven sign on the right. This hotel/resort complex had all sorts of things. A convenience store, 3 restaurants, a bar, a beach, a gaming center

with a bowling alley,

and carnival rides.

What was really strange was that since we were there on the off season, everything was almost deserted. The arcade and bowling alley was staffed by one person total, but half of the games weren’t even turned on. There was a pool hall in the next room, but the lights weren’t even on in there. There were a couple of concession stands that were unmanned, and next to this whole area was a souvenir/gift shop area with a dozen stores. I walked by them once and was cheerfully greeted by the shopkeepers, who frankly looked bored out of their minds because I was probably the first potential customer they had seen in a week. I assume they make enough profit during the peak season to sustain them through the year, because otherwise there is no way they could have lasted more than a month in that condition.