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?

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 ?

To review, let’s look at the pros and cons of the traditional vampire (which I define as the most commonly accepted traits of vampires in various pre-Twilight fiction):
Pros:
Never grow old
Live forever
Superhuman strength, speed, etc.

Cons:
Never see the sun or sunlight again
Have to drink the blood of humans in order to survive
Killed by a stake in the heart
Sterility
Slowly become more and more detached from human emotion and the cares of mortals and their world
Having to avoid or kill vampire hunters or other groups that consider your very existence an abomination
Weakness to garlic (this has been steadily relaxed in more recent vampire mythoi, even before Twilight)
Weakness to crosses/holy symbols/faith (also steadily relaxed, although I thought that White Wolf’s World of Darkness dealt with this one well. It depended on the faith of the wielder of the holy symbol vs. the strength of will of the vampire.)

So you see there was a real serious price to pay for immortality, hence all vampires being crippled by some combination of guilt and ennui.

Now lets take the post-Twilight vampire:
Pros:
Never grow old
Live Forever
Superhuman strength, speed, etc.
Always be handsome and youthful
You sparkle!

Cons:
Have to drink the blood of humans in order to survive Not anymore! Now most mythoi have them either be vegetarians (i.e. drink animal blood), vampire researchers have developed an artificial ‘blood substitute’, or vampires run the blood bank.
….

And that’s it. There are really no cons to being a vampire anymore. So as the author of the rant points out, if there are no cons to being a vampire anymore, why are they all so angtsy and mopey! It just becomes poor fiction when characters have no motivation to act the way they do.

According to the Wikipedia article there still is an active community on the internet on Stunts. They make unofficial patches to keep it working on newer OSes, and have hacked the code to enable putting in new car models. There are also 2 free clones of the game currently being produced.

However, there is a much newer game that I am calling the spiritual successor to Stunts. Like Stunts, it is a free racing game with a track editor. However, it is much newer and very awesome. It’s called Trackmania, and since I started playing it a few weeks ago I have spent far too much time on it. There are several versions available, the free one being Trackmania Nations. As far as I can tell, the only thing that you get by purchasing the paid version is customizable cars and paint jobs. Otherwise it seems to have the exact same functionality.

For solo play the game has several dozen tracks for you to try out. Many of them have to be unlocked though: you have to score certain times on previous tracks to unlock subsequent ones. It seems to be a pretty good system, because by forcing you to improve your times on the previous tracks, it prepares you for the more difficult tracks ahead. And I must say, some of them are unbelievably difficult.

There is a large online presence to the game, and there are many servers across the world that you can connect to and race against others. One interesting thing that the developers have chosen is to make collisions nonexistent: essentially every other car on the track is a ghost: you can see it, but cannot interact with it in any way. Of course the track itself is a different story, and collisions there are all too frequent. At first I thought this system was a little strange, but then I saw the wisdom in it: without collisions, it means that it doesn’t matter what your ping time or lag is. Basically the server uploads the track to everyone connected to it, everyone races at (about) the same time, and then the server compares times at the end to declare the rankings. The only thing a fast connection with the server changes is how often your position is updated on everyone else’s screens. Also due to this lack of direct interaction, cheating is extremely rare, as is trash-talking.

Since the game also has a track editor, you can go here and download literally thousands of fan-made tracks or of course make your own.

Finally, here is an example track in a youtube video:

In East Asia though, there is another type of cyber-bullying that hasn’t really been noticed so much here in the west yet. It’s called internet vigilantism, and this is where seemingly the entire internet attacks someone online, leading to real-life consequences.

There are cases of internet vigilantism in the west, but there has been almost no backlash against it because it’s almost always directed towards individuals that have committed fraud, theft, or pedophile crimes. 419 Eater is famous for baiting Nigerian scammers, and Anonymous/4chan (No link for 4chan. You don’t want to go there. Really, you don’t.) has baited and outed pedophiles in the past. Similarly there have been internet blitzes against people that have thrown dogs off of a cliff. Generally this kind of internet vigilantism results in people working to 1) identify the perpetrator 2) make their identity public, and 3) alert law enforcement. Especially in the case of the dog-throwing soldier there were also numerous death threats, etc., but overall the internet vigilantism served to bring the criminals to justice.

This isn’t how it’s been working in Asia, especially Korea. This article calls it ‘witch hunting’, which is perhaps a better term because many of these cases were not against criminals, but against normal people that had done something that people found offensive. The above article mentions the ‘loser girl‘:

Lee Do-kyung, a Hongik University student, appeared on a popular KBS TV show “Misuda,” or “Chatting with Beauties” on Monday and said, “I don’t like short men. Height is competitiveness these days, and I think short men are losers. Men should at least be 180 cm tall.”

Most people would agree that this girl is shallow and vapid, especially in a country where 180 cm (5’10″) is a full 2″ above the average male height (173.6 cm or 5’8″). She could have just said “I prefer taller men because I find them attractive” and nothing would have come of it. But because she called short men ‘losers’ she unleashed an internet firestorm upon herself. Soon she had been googled and all her personal information was made public, people at her school were constantly following her and posting her every move and action online, etc. Eventually the producers for Misuda and her school officials had to step in and ask people to leave her alone. As all memes do, eventually the firestorm died down, but I bet Ms. Lee wishes she had never been on that TV show.

Another incident in Korea back in 2005 is known as ‘Dog Poop Girl‘ where an attractive and well-dressed girl is riding the train with her expensive toy dog, who proceeds to poop on the floor of the train. She refuses to clean it up, even after (first helpfully) being offered paper towels, etc. and (later more angrily) given demands that she clean it up. Someone snapped a picture of her with their cell-phone, posted the picture and an explanation of the incident to the web, and the rest you can figure out on your own: people figure out her identity and she is hit with a hurricane of hate. (You can read details about the incident here) It only winded down when she posted online threatening to kill herself if it didn’t stop. Considering how hateful people can be when they are shielded by the anonymity of the internet, you would probably assume that the story ends with her killing herself. However, the Korean media had gotten wind of it and reported on the story. This seemed to bring it out of anonymity, so to speak, and so the firestorm died down. The girl ended up quitting her studies at her university, but did not do anything as tragic as taking her own life.

On a similar note, there was the girl in China, Zhang Ya, who posted a 4-minute video of herself whining about how much media attention the Sichuan Earthquake was receiving. From wikipedia: “An intense response from Internet vigilantes resulted in the girl’s personal details (even including her blood type) being made available online, as well as dozens of abusive video responses on Chinese websites and blogs. The girl was taken into police custody for three days as protection from vigilante death threats.”

I find these incidents interesting because I can’t really think of equivalent incidents in the west. Though there are of course numerous, nay, countless incidents of people committing similar social gaffes here in the U.S., I can’t think of an incident where a non-public person has been so thoroughly crucified for it.

An interesting consequence is that people in Asia are much more hesitant about disclosing any personal information on the internet. I can’t speak as well for other Asian nations, but this is especially true in Japan. As this survey shows, the vast majority (or at least of those on the internet) are ‘very reluctant’ to reveal their real name online, for any reason whatsoever. This survey was prompted by Facebook looking to do a full-scale launch in Japan, and their requirement for using real names. (My verdict: if facebook stood a chance in Japan, it would have caught on already. In Japan mixi is the king of social media). Asking my wife why Japanese are this way, it turns out Japanese are very paranoid about ID theft, cyber-stalking, and internet vigilantism that I’ve been talking about.

Case in point: I recently got around to getting an account on Facebook, and twice my wife has made me amend my info page because she thought I had put too much information on it: once because I had included the names of our daughters, and the second because I wrote a brief summary of what I have been doing after high school. If this were a post on my blog I wouldn’t have put that detailed of information there in the first place, but this was information that is only available to my friends! Even then she felt it was too much information.

(joke)So…. does anyone know how to change your settings on Facebook so that changes to your info page aren’t alerted to everyone on your friends list?(/joke)

Update: Here’s an internet vigilante incident that occurred (or at tried to) in Japan last year: when TV crews showed up to report on the incident last year where a man attacked 17 people and killed 7 last year in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, a bunch of people behind the news reporters were grinning, laughing, waving, etc. because they were on TV! 2chan (the Japanese website that 4chan was modeled on) quickly declared a vigilante war to identify and shame the people, but I don’t know if anything really came of it. I couldn’t find much else mentioned in English anywhere at least, and I don’t feel like going to the source and digging through 2chan archives in Japanese. Maybe they just had to be content to shame them in anonymity.

This process is sometimes called handwaving, back-of-the-envelope calculation, guesstimate, or a ballpark estimate. They are also sometimes called Fermi problems, since the physicist Enrico Fermi was renowned for being able to perform such simple estimates and get within a factor of 2 or 3 of the actual answer (this is extremely good for a simple estimate). Two famous examples of are his calculation for how many piano tuners there are in Chicago, and his estimation of the energy yield of the first atomic bomb test by dropping some scraps of paper and seeing how far the blast blew them.

Often times when you are making such estimates, you simply round (logarithmically) each number to it’s nearest power of 10. This is because your estimates are off by factors at least that large anyway, so there’s little point in carrying through precise numerical calculations. A personal favorite anecdote on this principal came from my brother Porter when explaining why he replaced with the number 1, “Why did I make equal to 1? Because it’s not 10.” (In actuality though, since and , is right close to the dividing line between assigning it to the value of 1 or 10. You can choose either, or just make it 3, which is what I usually do.)

The reason why I’m talking about this is because today I stumbled upon this page for a class at MIT that deals entirely with this subject. The name of the course? “Lies and Damn Lies: The Art of Approximation in Science”. I skimmed through the first chapter and it was very well-written and interesting. You could learn a lot about this skill just by reading the chapter and working through the problems yourself.

Another closely related but slightly more accurate method of estimation uses dimensional analysis. The wikipedia article I linked to is a bit obtuse for the uninitiated, but the two examples halfway through the article are fairly simple to follow and stand well on their own. For dimensional analysis you use your knowledge of the underlying physics of a system to make reasonable assumptions about what parameters are pertinent in your analysis. A more mathematically formalized version of this is called the Buckingham π theorem, and is an extremely useful and versatile tool for the initial analysis of a system.

My favorite example is at the end of the article, where it shows how Geoffrey I. Taylor used the Buckingham π theorem to estimate, again, the energy output of the first atomic explosion. A summation of his original paper with his analysis can be found online. Basically he was able to determine the following relationship:

,

I have no hope of reading this ancient Japanese/Chinese, but that’s actually not what I’m referring to. I’m instead talking about the old way to write the characters. Just like how vocabulary and grammar for a language evolve and change over time, so did the way of writing the characters. In this picture from Wikipedia you can see the evolution of the character for tiger.

So even if I’m not trying to read ancient Japanese or Chinese texts, the old style of writing still shows up fairly frequently (similar to how old Gothic and Latin scripts and such still get used in English), but they can be nearly impossible to read, even if you can read the modern form of the character! One place they show up fairly often is in seals. In Japanese legal documents, instead of signing with a signature, you place a red stamp with your official seal (think of royalty using their signet ring to seal letters and documents). In order to prevent forgery, ideally your seal is hand made by a licensed seal craftsman so that it is unique, and then the seal itself is registered in your name at the government offices. The characters often used on these seals are called seal script, and it is the style that evolved during the Qin dynasty of ancient China. Some examples of seals using the seal script I got on google search are here, here, here, and some here.

For example, here are two seal script characters:

If I hadn’t looked up these specific two characters, I would have no chance in reading them even though their modern forms are characters I am very familiar with. In fact, the modern form of these two characters is:

Which is in fact the name of my blog, moroha.

So the question is, where did I look these up? Japanese dictionaries invariably never have them, but I did find a Chinese/English language site that has them. Just put the kanji you want to look up in the blank and click the button that says Etymology, and it will give you the modern character in both traditional and simplified Chinese, in addition to all known variants of seal script, bronze script, and oracle bone script (the really old stuff). As long as you’re using unicode the characters are interchangeable, so you can still do the input in Japanese.

For some real craziness, check out all the old variations for the character of horse, one of the oldest. All this craziness about having many different ways to write the same character was one thing that the 1st emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, tried to do away with when he standardized the writing system for all of China.

I can however, comment on the lyrics for the theme song. According to Wikipedia, the song is ライジング (Rising), by the Japanese band アンビエンス (Ambiance). Here are the lyrics and my attempted translation in parenthesis:

Shock!　嘘で固めたナイフ切り付け (Shock! Cut with the knife hardened by lies)
Shock!　夢を飲み込み街は輝く (Shock! Catch the dream as the city shines)
争いや憎しみで　その身削られてゆく (The conflict and hatred cut away at you)
真夜中襲いくる　人知れぬまま (They attack unseen in the night)
Break Out!
ライムライト　光るざわめき (Commotion in the limelight)
リアルタイム　濡れた幻 (Real-time wet illusion)
Cry for the moon

The translation is quite hard (for me, at least) because as often happens in song lyrics and poetry in general is that many particles (similar to prepositions, they identify the part of speech the word or phrase is) are completely omitted, so I have to guess what the relationship is between the different words. Those last two lines are the hardest, as they don’t make any sense to me, especially the 濡れた幻 (wet illusion). What in the world is that supposed to mean?

Although, that “Cry for the moon” at the end is pretty awesome.

I first heard about L. B. Rayne over at TR though, where they showed his newest video, Skywalking.

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I showed numerically at least that it converges upon a single value in the complex plane, but then I speculated about what would happen if I did the same for other numbers? I thought it would most likely be a fractal like the Mandelbrot set or the Julia set, but I never got around to actually solving it.

Well, for the class that I’m TA’ing this semester (intro to computing for Chemical Engineers), I got hold of some simple code for making the Mandelbrot set in MATLAB to show the students a fun and interesting example of using for loops. After I did that though, I figured that it would be fairly simple to modify the code to see if taking a complex number to it’s own power created a fractal or not. So my algorithm was the following:

For any point c in the complex plane, let

.
In the limit as n goes to infinity, if z remains finite, then c is within the set. Otherwise it is not in the set.

Since you can’t really evaluate it to infinity, what you do instead is implement an algorithm where you perform the iteration a large but finite number if times, and see if the iteration stays inside a set radius. So here is my fractal. The first plot shows the the complex plane from -20 to +20 on both the real and imaginary axis:

Here the blue football-shaped region in the center is centered at the origin. These points are considered to be ‘within’ the set, since a large number of iterations did not give numbers that were outside of the convergence radius (I set the number of iterations to 50, and the convergence radius to 1000). Any points that are not that deep blue are considered to be ‘outside’ the set, with the color being an indication of how many iterations it took for that point to leave the convergence radius. The dark red points took the least iterations, with the orange, yellow, green, and light blue areas taking progressively more iterations.

I think the feathery wing structures going in the positive and negative imaginary directions are really interesting. They continue up and down seemingly without end, or at least I didn’t see any end for even large plots that I made. This is in sharp contrast to the Mandelbrot and Julia sets which are confined to a finite area.

But the center looks the most interesting, so let’s get a closeup of that.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in this area, with some really beautiful feathery wings, and a jumbled area that just looks like ‘static’. Here’s a zoom-in that let’s us see a little bit of both better.

Wow. Those feathers really are quite beautiful if I do say so myself. That random static-looking area bugs me though, since random noise really isn’t a feature of fractals. Instead they exhibit more of an ‘ordered chaos’ showing infinite complexity. So for my last image here is a much closer zoom on the static-looking area.

This last image has a width and height of just 0.005. Here we can see that it really is infinitely complex and not just random noise. I did another with a width and height of 0.0005, and it looks very similar, so there is some degree of self-similarity, much like we see in other fractals.

So the only thing this set is missing is a name. In reality probably someone has calculated this set and given it a name, but on the slight chance that no one has, I hereby name it the Bassett set. (How’s that for hubris? I bet Benoit Mandelbrot didn’t name the set after himself, but that someone else named it after him in honor of his discovery)

That’s a good start, but any self-respecting geek has to take things a notch further. First I needed to derive a formula that let’s me calculate how high of a stack I can complete in a given time given a rate of how many disks per second I can move. The original equation we can rearrange as:

,

.

This formula let’s us do some basic calculations. If we take t to be the age of the universe in seconds (about ) then we have the following number of disks we can expect to complete within that time for the given number of disks moved per second:

So the next question is what kind of energy/power requirement would we need to move the disks at these kind of rates? First we’ll need to make some assumptions on mass and distance. One typical move is shown in the animated gif below (if someone knows how to set it so that it will repeat more than once, please let me know):

In terms of mechanics, to move the disk from column one to column two the disk has to do six steps: 1) accelerate up until its halfway up the column, 2) decelerate until it comes to a stop having just cleared the column, 3) accelerate horizontally until its halfway to the next column, 4) decelerate until it comes to a stop above the new column, 5) accelerate down until it’s halfway down the new column, and finally 6) decelerate until it comes to a stop in the new position.

Now you may say that we don’t need to decelerate the disk as it reaches its resting point and just let it smack into the resultant stack, but when the speeds become really fast the energy will be enough to obliterate any disk, so we’ll include the final deceleration. We’ll also assume this is done in a vacuum so we can ignore wind resistance, otherwise the heat would be more than enough to ionize the disks (those that have read the well known Physics of Santa will be familiar with this). At some point the acceleration alone will become greater than the structural integrity of the disks, as well as relativistic effects at some point coming into play. We’ll get to those in a moment. For now though, we’ll simplify the 6 steps above by making them all the same length for every step. We can do this by putting the three columns in a triangular arrangement and then saying the disks are thin enough that we can neglect the change in the height of the stack as we make progress. We’ll say the columns are 10 cm apart and 10 cm high, so each of the 6 steps will be 5 cm. Also we’ll say each disk weighs 100 g.

Using classical mechanics (ignoring relativistic effects), the time to complete one step is simply 1/6 of a move, so that is:

.

.

.

.

.

How does this highest frequency look with our other limits on velocity and acceleration? We should be OK on velocity, since is still only 1/5 the speed of light, slow enough that we can still ignore relativistic effects. As for the stress that the object undergoes due to acceleration, that’s fairly simple to calculate too. Stress is simply force over area, given in this simple formula:

.

Assuming that we could make disks out of impossibilium that can take any amount of stress, then for The Flash to complete a Tower of Hanoi with 88 disks, he would need to move 1 billion disks per second at a speed of about 1/5 the speed of light for 10 trillion years, and he would require the constant power output of about 1/3 of the sun (or a series of equivalent-sized stars, since a single star won’t last that long).

That’s it for this post, in the next post I’ll try to include relativistic effects for even faster speeds.

However, when it comes to new trends on the internet, sometimes I can be quite a Luddite. I still have yet to register on facebook/myspace (I can’t remember which one is considered ‘cool’ and which is considered ‘stalker’s playground’), and I have no desire whatsoever to ‘tweet’. I blog is only intermittently updated, and its traffic is somewhere near the bottom of the internet. I’m fine with that, since notoriety on the internet is definitely a two-edged sword.

A couple of days ago though, I finally decided to start using RSS feeds for checking websites. My morning internet routine has grown to include several dozen websites, and many of them only update every few days. There are other sites that update less than once a week, and I always forget to check them by the time the next week comes around. (The ones that update many times a day, like Fark, Reddit, and Digg I had to quit cold turkey. They were just sucking up too much time).

So I broke down and registered on google for their google reader service, and started registering for RSS feeds. It’s amazingly simple and it works very well. I just wish I had tried it earlier. Another thing that I found it is great for is keeping track of the latest research. Not only do many research journals have RSS feeds, but some of the larger databases for scholarly research will let you do an RSS feed on search results, so that if a paper that matches your search criteria is published in any of the journals in their database, they will send a link to you. I think it’s a great idea and I hope I can get a lot out of it.

That’s why I like the light novels. They are very similar to young adult fiction here in the U.S. in that they are (more so in the U.S.) generally marketed towards a younger audience, the books are shorter, and the language is simpler than what you would find in a real ‘literature’ novel or a newspaper article or such. Another nice feature is that many of the more difficult words it does contain also have furigana, which gives the phonetic pronunciation of words using kanji, making it easier to read, or at least much quicker to look it up in a dictionary.

What got me started reading them was when Ryoko started buying and reading the novels for Full Metal Panic!, because she loved the anime so much. I started reading them myself and found that although I read them much slower (It can take me several days or weeks to finish what she can do in 4~5 hours) I was able to pretty much fully comprehend everything with frequent help from a dictionary.

So when we went back to Japan, I decided I would try some other series. The problem is though, there is almost too much to choose from. The light novel section in any bookstore is quite large, and is generally surpassed only by the manga section. (Helpful tip: while most bookstores have taken to shrink-wrapping the manga to keep loiterers from spending hours just reading manga in the bookstore, they don’t do that with the light novels. Yet.) Without knowing what to look for, I just kind of chose some at random. (Although I was able to avoid the ones that are more risque, they’re easy to spot by their cover art.)

The three I picked (this was last year) were all the first book from 3 different series. The first was a vampire story called Black Blood Brothers, the second was a high fantasy series called ダークエルフの口付け (Kiss of the Dark Elf), and the third was called とある魔術の禁書目録（インデックス） (A Certain Magical Index).

Those of you in the know on anime will recognize the first and the third since they have subsequently been produced as anime series, but probably not the second since it doesn’t exist in any other form.

This may actually be unfortunate for Black Blood Brothers, because the consensus I’ve heard about the anime (I haven’t seen the anime myself, only the novels) is that it was done cheaply by a low-quality studio and hence pretty much sucked. I think that’s too bad because from what I’ve read so far (the 1st 2 volumes, and there are many more to go) it has a lot of potential. The author sets up a really interesting premise (read the blurb in the wikipedia page linked above) and goes with it. I think this author’s strong point it the action scenes: they were really exciting and fun to read, and I kept on cursing my slow eyeballs, wishing I could read the Japanese faster.

As for Index, the premise is a little strange. The protagonist is your typical “Ordinary High School Student“, but lives in a world where psychic powers and actual magic seem to exist simultaneously. I’ve heard the anime based off of this series was done pretty well, so I’m looking forward to watching it after I’ve read it.

The Dark Elf series has two protagonists: The title character is a dark elf named Bela (they always use the word ‘dark elf’, it seems that the word ‘drow’ has never made it over into Japanese fantasy vocabulary), and Amadeo, your typical young, eager, and inexperienced human male adventurer. I should mention that this story takes pace in the Sword World official campaign world, similar to how here in the US we have fantasy books that take place in the Forgotten Realms or Dragon Lance world. The author spins a very complicated web of intrigue and conspiracy that involves the two characters. In fact it gets so complex that by the second novel in the series, the author provides a diagram so that you can keep track of the characters and their relations with each other. (Oh how I wish the Wheel of Time had such a study aid. A google search for ["wheel of time" "too many characters"] gives 387,000 hits.)

So these books aren’t exactly Nobel Prize quality literature, but they are good for my level of Japanese. I can read them just fast enough that I’m able to stay interested in the story.

For simple phrases it does pretty well. But for more complicated ones it can come up with some really bizarre results. Here’s a tough one I gave it, a couple of lines from the Camelot song in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

“In war we’re tough and able, quite indefatigable, between our quests we sequin vests, and impersonate Clark Gable.”

The result? “Patience in the war, KURAKUGEBURU spangles to impersonate a good idea to explore is difficult.”

The all-caps KURAKUGEBURU is just Clark Gable. For the first Eng->Jap step it does a pretty good job translating the proper noun into its katakana equivalent, but evidently the English dictionary does not have Clark Gable in it, so it just leaves it in all caps and anglicizes the Japanese pronunciation.

I’ve blogged a little about Fukui Prefecture before a few years ago, when we went to visit the nuclear power plant located on one of the many peninsulas there. Interestingly enough, that is right next to the city of Obama, which has gained some notoriety due to the name of the U.S. President. We didn’t go to Obama (I’ve been there before though when my father came to meet Ryoko’s parents. There isn’t much to the city, to tell you the truth), but I did manage to take the following picture as we were driving through Tsuruga, a nearby town:

That’s an advertisement for Obama Ramen. Unfortunately my timing was a bit off and the right edge is cut off by a telephone pole.

The first place we went to was the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. It turns out the only place where dinosaur fossils have been found in Japan are in Fukui Prefecture, and to commemorate it the prefecture has built what I can only call a truly, truly excellent museum. I like to go to natural history museums anywhere I go, and this is one of the best I have ever seen. It’s built inside of a giant metallic sphere, which makes the museum easy to spot from several miles away, and makes for a really impressive ceiling once you get into the main body of the museum.

Ryoko took a lot of pictures of the museum, but the inside is somewhat dark and flash photography was forbidden, so all the pictures there look like crap. So I’ll try and describe what made it such an excellent museum.

First of all, if you go to a dinosaur museum, you want to see lots of dinosaur skeletons. Well, they are there a plenty. All the famous ones like T. Rex, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, etc. One of the big attractions was several full-size dinosaur facsimiles with skin, eyes, etc. that were animatronic! There were 3 velociraptors attacking a medium-size dinosaur. There were speakers inside too so that they also roared as they moved around. Eren (she turns 3 in September) was absolutely terrified. I had to pretty much run through the exhibit with her to go see the rest of the exhibits.

Also all the exhibits had very detailed explanations and didn’t ‘dumb down’ the science at all. This would have been problematic for me since ‘dumbed down’ science would be much easier for me to read in Japanese, but almost every exhibit had English right next to the Japanese. 100% of everything wasn’t translated into English, but probably at least half of everything was, and it was excellent scientific English, none of this ‘Engrish’ that is all too familiar to Westerners in Japan.

For me the most interesting part was that the special exhibit, as many museums have special exhibits that change every few months. The theme of the special exhibit was “Did Dinosaurs See Flowers?”, and was about the evolution of flowering plants as compared to the dinosaurs, mammals, and insects. What made it so excellent was that there was a graduate student on hand that would answer questions about the exhibits. We spoke in Japanese for Ryoko’s sake, but he had excellent English and could immediately give me the English terms for difficult vocabulary that I didn’t know in Japanese (i.e. the names of the geological epochs, the various biological classifications, etc.).
Aside: I would have been lost without his help, since some of the Japanese technical terms are very non-obvious to a Westerner. The names of the dinosaurs are fairly easy, since they’re just the English names pronounced in Japanese. The epochs though, are strange. Triassic is 三畳紀, which translates to ‘three tatami period’ (tatami are the woven grass mats that floors are made of in Japanese homes, although the character can also be used as a measurement of area, where 1 jou equals the area of one tatami mat, about 3 feet by 6 feet). I’m not really sure where that translation came from. The 3 is obvious with the ‘tri’ in Triassic, but I don’t know Latin to guess the meaning of the suffix, and I don’t have internet access to look it up. Jurassic is a little easier in that it’s just ジュラ紀, or the Jura Period. Cretaceous is again strange, being 白亜紀, which means ‘chalk period’ in Japanese. I would guess that creta means chalk or something similar in Latin and that there is some good reason why the geological period is named after chalk (lots of chalky mineral deposits associated with that period, perhaps), but since such things are not generally known, it means that these words do not have obvious translations that you can guess by just looking at them.

Anyway, I talked to the grad student for almost an hour, asking him about all sorts of things that have always bothered me a bit about dinosaurs. How were dinosaurs able to get so big when there aren’t/weren’t equivalently-sized land animals in other periods? Were dinosaurs slow, lumbering behemoths, or were they quick and agile like we saw in Jurassic Park? About the size of dinosaurs, the grad student told me that a lot of the paleontological community views it as a silly question. He pointed out that first of all, the dinosaurs did exist and flourish for millions of years at their size. So the questions of how they were able to stand, walk around, etc. are pretty silly because they obviously did. Now as to why there aren’t any animals of that size today, he pointed out that even the biggest dinosaurs, like the brontosaurus, supersaurus, diplodocus, etc. weren’t that much larger than the current largest land animal, the African Elephant. In a way, he’s right. The brontosaurs have their extremely long necks and tails, but the actual main body of the dinosaur is maybe only 50% larger than an elephant’s body.

So the museum was great. I would have liked to have spent several more hours reading all the exhibits, but the girls were tired and getting restless. If you’re ever in Japan and go over to Fukui prefecture (no one goes to Fukui prefecture, everyone goes to Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka), this museum is great. I would have loved to have my brothers and parents there, they would have all loved it too.

This is Karisa and Eren at one of the children’s exhibits, where they have a robotic baby dinosaur that you can play with. I was really impressed with its programming, it would react to being petted by cooing and wagging its tail, when you picked it up and held it it would fall asleep, and it would avoid bumping into walls when it walked around.

This is one of the full-size dinosaurs. That tree is 50’ high!

With the poor lighting it’s not a very good picture, but when I tell you it’s a circular dome, from the curvature of the wall you can get an idea of the size of the place and the impressive unsupported ceiling. Also if you stood in the right place you could easily hear a conversation at the other end of the hall, and whenever you spoke you would hear your own voice echoing.

Having exhausted all my options, I actually went to a computer store and just asked, “Where might I have a chance of getting an internet connection?” The guy there was pretty sympathetic to my plight and gave me a couple of ideas: McDonald’s and the local posh hotel, the Sun Bridge Hotel. Going to McDonald’s it turns out you have to have some kind of contract with Yahoo, but they weren’t too helpful with giving me information about how to acquire such a contract. I tried the outside of the Sun Bridge Hotel, but there were not wireless networks in range. I might try putting on my white shirt and tie and going in pretending to be a businessmen waiting for an appointment or such, but haven’t done it yet.

Having exhausted all those options, there was only one other option that I could see: wardriving. So Ryoko took me on a drive through Imazu, just seeing what wireless connections were available. It turns out there were 2 or 3 connections almost everywhere. I was really surprised. I had thought of Japan as having a low rate of home internet penetration because I thought that the majority of people access the internet only through their cell phones. Perhaps I was wrong. Anyway, most of the connections had security enabled, didn’t broadcast the SSID, or both. Here is what my computer shows from within Ryoko’s house:

What's with all these long numbers for wireless network names?

In driving around looking for networks though, I thought that maybe Ryoko was driving around a little too fast to really catch what networks were available. So Ryoko and I then just went for a walk around her neighborhood. We were on a back street behind the local gas station when a non-secured wireless connection showed up. I connected, got an IP address, and next thing I knew I was on the ‘net!

I felt more than a little suspicious standing in the street using a laptop though. I don’t know Japan’s laws on wardriving (or warwalking, in this case), but if I remember correctly it is illegal in the U.S. Regardless if it’s legality, it wasn’t really very honest either, so I quickly just checked my email accounts for anything important (there wasn’t much), and then closed the connection.

So that is the only internet I’ve had so far. I don’t really want to do any more warwalking if I can avoid it, so maybe tonight I’ll try going to the Sun Bridge Hotel and pretending to be a businessman. My limited experience in nice hotels is that if you look and act like you belong, then you will be left alone. It may be a little more difficult since I stand out as a foreigner, but the worst that can happen is they ask me to leave.

It turns out that my problem of internet access is not unique. According to Ryoko, on the website patanouchi, which is an internet community for Japanese living abroad (mostly for Japanese wives living in America) there are many many examples of families that visit their parents back in Japan for a few weeks during the summer, and don’t have internet access because there is not internet at their parent’s house. You don’t want to pay for installing an internet connection to your parent’s home when you’re only there for 2~3 weeks, especially if all the ISP’s require a 6 month contract or such.

Update: I’m right now sitting in the lobby of the Imazu Sun Bridge Hotel. There are two available networks here, but neither of them are open and available without knowing an authentication password. If I were better at social engineering (i.e. B.S.’ing my may into things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, I believe this is the term used by security professionals for when people are able to talk their way past security by acquiring passwords and such) I might try and something, but I don’t really have the skills, the inclination, or the disposition for such. I’ll stick around for a few more minutes and then walk around a bit (i.e. use the bathroom, etc.) so as not to arouse suspicion, and then go.

One more adventure: to get here I drove the car myself. I don’t have a license to drive in Japan, so what I did was technically illegal, but it’s only a 5-minute drive so the risk is minimal. Ryoko called the police department to find out what is needed for an American with an American driver’s license to legally drive here in Japan, and it turns out there are 2 ways: I could get an international driver’s license in the U.S. before I come to Japan and I could use that, or once I am here if I can pass the written and practical driving test I can then also drive here. It’s much easier to get the international driver’s license, since all it involves is a fee and some paperwork if you already have a valid driver’s license, but we didn’t research it before coming here. I don’t have the confidence to try the written and driving test, so I’ll just get the international license before we come next time.

Update: So you’re probably wondering how I got internet access in the first place. Well, we’ve gone to Yokohama for a few days to spend some time with Ryoko’s sister who lives there. She has an internet connection at her house (which I couldn’t get to work with my computer, their computer is connected directly to their cable modem and so it requires specific software to use correctly), so I was able to get a map of Yokohama with free wifi locations courtesy of freespot.com. There is a 24-hour internet cafe nearby, and the lobby has free wi-fi with a power plug, so I’m good to go.

The one thing that I really, really liked about this series is that it has just about the best production values of any anime I’ve ever seen. All the backgrounds are fully drawn, all scenes are fully animated, and they really went the extra mile on the action scenes. The voice acting is top-notch, and the music is excellent as well. There are some digital effects interspersed which are also done very well.

So don’t take my word for it, here’s a link to watch episode 1 online:

You can see all the episodes online here (scroll down towards the bottom), but to really appreciate how beautifully done this anime is, I would recommend downloading the full series via bittorrent.

After a bit of google searching, it turns out the Moribito was done by Production I.G., the same studio that did the also excellent Ghost in the Shell series.

Also, there is another series that I’m starting, but I can’t give it a full-hearted recommendation like I can for Moribito. It’s called GARO, accompanied by Japanese characters of the same pronunciation that read ‘fanged wolf’. It is not an anime per se, but falls smack withing the tokusatsu genre (i.e. Power Rangers and their derivatives). However, it’s not really a kid’s show, at least not in my opinion. I happily watched last years Power Ranger incarnation, Jyuken Sentai Gekiranger, with my daughters, but there is no way I am letting them see GARO. It is simply way too dark for young children.

One thing that interested me in this series is that the action is done on an obviously limited budget, but I think they do pretty well with what they have. The fighting sequences are what I would describe as ‘anime-esque’ even though it is filmed and not animated. So overall this show is not as high of a recommendation because I have a soft spot for tokusastu shows that most people don’t share, but if you are interested here is the first episode:

Watch Garo ep 1 eng subs in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I ended up getting 2 books with some of his short stories, and I also got Variable Star: by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson. I had heard of this a couple of years ago, how Heinlein had 4~5 pages of notes on an idea for a children’s novel that he never go around to writing, and Spider Robinson got permission to write a book based on the notes.

I won’t give a summary or even set up the book because it’s pretty much impossible to go over any part of the plot without majorly spoiling it. There are some other aspects about the book I can discuss, however.

I think overall Spider did a good job of making a decent SF story, and it does have the feel of Heinlein in many ways. I haven’t read much by Spider so I can’t really say how much of it is his influence. What I can say though, is that I think he maybe tried a little to hard to make it ‘Heinlein-y’. For example, all of the following are mentioned in the story: TANSTAAFL and line marriages as found in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, polyamory and free love as found in, well, almost every book of his after 1960, and a society where everyone has come to realize how silly and unproductive organized religion are. The thing is though, absolutely none of these things are particularly important to the story. All of these things could be removed from the story and it wouldn’t effect the plot in the least.

Especially since this was intended by Heinlein as a children’s novel (like Have Spacesuit Will Travel or Citizen of the Galaxy), those aspects I mentioned in the previous paragraph were almost certainly not in the original notes and were instead added by Robinson. I can see some reasons why he might have added them, they certainly are themes that are ever-present in a lot of Heinlein’s work. However since they aren’t necessary to the story or the plot, I think it would have been better without them.

There is a throwaway reference to 9/11, but I think it was done pretty well. Spider also takes a potshot at current U.S. foreign policy, but it doesn’t detract too much from (or add to, in my opinion) the story.

Ignoring these minor complaints though, the story itself is very interesting and well-done. The end was very surprising, and satisfying. It’s hard to ask for much more than that from a fiction book.

Spencer’s suggestion that this would be easier where everything is posted in a central location made me think that this might be easier as a play-by-post (PBP) format. I had no idea how to set up a bulletin board or forum for a website, but in looking around the administrative options for my website, it turns out there was already software for a bulletin board included, I just needed to install it and set it up.

So, the forum that I’ve installed is located here. Go ahead and go there, create an account, and then go to the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game forum and post a comment in the OOC thread introducing yourself (in RL) to the group. I know everyone that’s playing, but all of you certainly don’t know each other so short introduction would be nice.

I’m going to set up one more thread there for the characters and their background, and then once character selection is done we should be ready to go!

P.S. In the future I want to make a direct link at the top of the page to the forums, but I don’t know how to do that yet. In the meantime there is a link to Moroha BB to the right. Use that for the time being if you don’t remember the URL.