Stuff Leo has Seen Lately

2011-12-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

A Good Time to be an Ukiyo-e Fan in Tokyo

This is a particularly good time for Ukiyo-e lovers in Tokyo, since we have two exhibitions running (both in Roppongi): a Hiroshige exhibit at Tokyo Midtown, and a spectaclar Kuniyoshi exhibit at Roppongi Hills. Below are some comments on both.

"A Road Traveled by Feudal Lords and Pet Dogs: Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido" at the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo Midtown

The pieces that catapulted Utagawa Hiroshige to fame were his depictions of the 53 way stations along the road linking Tokyo and Kyoto in Edo-era Japan. This exhibit centers on two complete editions of that collection, one the earlier Hoeido edition and the second the later Reisho edition.

"Edition" is probably not the correct word for these, since in fact they are not in any sense revised versions of each other. Hiroshige simply produced a work by this title and theme twice in his lifetime, each time re-doing the images completely. Comparing them side-by-side is mostly instructive in two ways: first, it shows that the two work are really unrelated; and second, it shows the Hoeido edition is much more interesting from almost any viewpoint. The artwork is better executed, the linework is more interesting, and the printers, especially in the early press runs of the Hoeido editions, were working much more closely in accord with Hiroshige's intentions (or at least, were exercising a lot more care in the printing).

For me, I really wondered why they even bothered to present the Reisho edition so exhaustively. It's likely that the answer is because the Reisho edition is from the collection of the Suntory Museum of Art (the host institution), whereas the Hoeisho edition was kindly leant by the Nakagawa-machi Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art. Reisho was the home team here, otherwise they might not as gotten as much airtime.

I got the audio tour (available in English or Japanese) for this exhibit, which I rarely do. It probably made me take a little longer to get through the exhibition, but it definitely had some information I wouldn't have known, especially about the cultural references and self-promotional advertisements embedded in the series. While every piece was labelled in both English and Japanese, the explanatory text next to each piece was mostly Japanese-only, so you might want to get the audio tour if your Kanji isn't up to snuff.

On the other hand, the audio kept waxing rhapsodic about the beauty of the prints and execution. The truth is, I've never really felt that strongly about the beauty of Hiroshige prints; the reason I've always liked Hiroshige is because of his skill at gesture drawing and in particular at capturing the gestures of everyday people. While they didn't talk about that much, the audio text did agree with me that the best piece of the series is the "Shower at Shono" image from the Hoeisho edition, seen below. This is my favorite Hiroshige, and I own an original of it. It really captures the rush and gesture of the folks running to get shelter from the rain, and the execution of the background trees in woodblock printing feels layered and alive.

There's a bit of other material in the exhibition, including some of the keep-the-relatives-out-of-hock paintings; Hiroshige is said to have done over 150 painting for his relatives to be used as payments or gifts to their creditors, since like many samurai retainer families they were seriously in debt to merchants during the late Edo period.

"Kuniyoshi: Spectacular Ukiyo-e Imagination" at the Mori Museum of Art, Roppongi Hills

A much more impressive exhibit has been assembled a few minutes' walk away at the Mori Museum or Art, presented a huge breadth of work from a contemporary of Hiroshige's, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (they were both affiliated with different branches of the Utagawa school). While I greatly admire Hiroshige's gesture drawing, it's amazing to look at these two artists and think of them as contemporaries: Kuniyoshi's work feels much more modern in its compositions (he frequently breaks the frames with his figures) and use of color (bold splashes of color like the piece above are common in his work).

Unlike the Hiroshige exhibit which focuses on a single title, the Kuniyoshi exhibit has a huge assortment of work from Kuniyoshi's career sorted by theme. The first section is the heroic prints, next the famous places, etc. This categorization reflects the major print genres which all of the working print artists of the time were expected to know and work between.

This opportunity to compare these two artists (I went to both exhibits on the same day, which is easy since they're 15 minutes' walk apart) really reinforced that Hiroshige's strengths were in his gesture drawing and naturalistic poses, whereas Kuniyoshi's strengths are in design, 2D posing, and depiction of faces. The facial work, especially in the heroic prints of Kuniyoshi's, is dramatically more compelling than the typically symbolic faces in the Hiroshige drawings.

Another thing the direct contrast made clear is that it's really Kuniyoshi who's the visual inspiration for modern manga and anime. The strong sense of design, the strong (but often unnatural) posing, and the stark colors are all reflected in modern Japanese anime.

I strongly urge anybody with any interest in manga, anime, or Ukiyo-e to get up to the 52nd floor of Roppongi Hills before the exhibit ends on February 12th!

A linguistic interpretation of the moralism thread in the Euro crisis

2011-11-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

There's a thread going around about the Euro crisis suggesting that rather than a lazy-south vs. industrious-north problem, it's more informative to look at it as a balance of payments problem. Basically, the Portugal-Italy-Greece-Spain group of countries are running a balance of trade deficit with the Holland-Germany group. Check out Paul Krugman's writeup on the NYT for the basic idea.

There are two reasons it's useful to think of the problem this way. One, as Krugman points out, is that the balance of payments problem is quite recent. It's not true that Spain, Portugal, or Greece had historically In particular, the creation of the Euro in 1999 is directly correllated with the beginning of the balance of payments problem, as this graph from Krugman's post points out:

Correlation is not causality, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that something about the creation of the Euro is actually what gave rise to a problem that didn't previously exist. Germans like to blame Greece's rigid labour markets, leaky tax systems, and large public sector for the Euro crisis, but somehow those things didn't cause a crisis before 1999.

And that leads directly to the second observation, best described in the Economists' follow-up to Krugman's article. If two American states have an asymmetric balance of payments, we think of it as something that exists; not as a moral failing. While a balance of payments problem has to be corrected long-term, it doesn't lead to moral approbation. Why then is Germany so insistent on condemning Greece?

The easiest answer is political: Germans want the pain of fixing the crisis to mostly be assigned to Greece and as a negotiating tactic paints the other side as lazy/evil. However, in the Economist post referenced above and you see a more intriguing cause: in German (and Dutch), the word for "debt" and the world for "guilt" are both "schuld". In those languages (or more precisely, in those cultures), to say someone is in debt is to say they're to blame. While it's easy to overstate the influence of language, it's easy to think that the subtle influence of the linguistics are keeping the two sides even farther apart.

This gets more important given the likelihood that Germany continuing on the current course will lead to a severe recession in the debtor states. See the post which started the thread, which strongly suggests that a continuation of the de-facto transfer union would be the only way to avoid a serious recession.

Intersections on Stilts (and Real Estate)

2011-10-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

So for the last several years there's been construction outside the east exit of Shibuya station. You notice it particularly if you bicycle through there because there are metal plates on the ground with light metal washers in the corners, and when you ride over them it makes a very distinctive noise.

After awhile I heard (separately) about the fact that they're going to join up the Tokyu Toyoko line and the Fukutoshin line to run through at Shibuya (this means that Toyoko line trains won't terminate at Shibuya, but will just continue, becoming Fukutoshin line trains. They use this system a lot in Tokyo and it is very efficient). I eventually put two and two together and realized this must be what the construction outside the east entrance is about; they're building the new part of the Toyoko line to meet up with Fukutoshin line.

But then I realized the Fukutoshin line is deep; it has to be below the Den-en-Toshi/Hanzomon line, which is perpindicular to it under the ground at Shibuya. And that's when I realized the entire east exit of Shibuya station must currently be suspended about 60 feet in the air. Those metal plates are covering the top of a steel latticework that goes all the way down to the level of the Fukutoshin line, so literally all of that traffic is currently driving around on a causeway 60 feet in the air.

Sure enough, if you poke around at the edges of the construction, you can find some cracks that verify this is indeed what's going on! It made me a lot more queasy about riding through there to think that the entire east entrance including the road I am riding on is 20 meters above the actual ground.

Last week I moved out to Shimokitazawa, and I live quite close to the Odakyu line near Setagayadaita station. By reading the signs out here, I've realized they're also doing a big construction project on the Odakyu line as well. After staring at the signs for awhile, this project is even more amazing: they're taking the entire Odakyu line and burying it under the current, fully operating train line from Higashikitazawa station to Setagayadaita station. And they're not just burying one train line down there, like in Shibuya; no, for most of the length they're creating two train lines, one on top of the other, under the current line; an upper line for local trains and a lower line for express trains.

At Setagayadaita station, both of the new buried lines have to dive even deeper underground to get under the underpass of Kannana-dori. So just a minute and a half from my house, when I walk across the grade crossing the railroad currently has, I'm actually walking across a 27-meter high trench with three levels of train tracks in it. All this while the line is in heavy operation (the Odakyu line is a major commuting line). At this intersection, it's really easy to look down in and between the girders you can catch a glimpse of the fact that yes, you are close to 100' above the ground.

Check out the page here, in Japanese to see diagrams of how complex this track-burying process is.

Now, why would they go to all this trouble? The reasons cited on the linked page (oh, we can improve train service by running more expresses; oh, having no grade crossings makes things safer and more convenient for local residents) are, as far as they go, true. But they can't possibly justify the huge expense of these projects (the track burying construction project on the Odakyu line I'm describing was started in 2004). What can explain the willingness to spend the crazy amounts of money needed to bury these rail lines? After all, Odakyu is a private company.

The answer, of course, is real estate. By burying the tracks, Odakyu will come into possession of a huge amount of real estate, much of it conveniently located near major railroad stations. So despite the mind-boggling amount of investment, afterwards they'll own the most conveniently located, eminently developable land in Shimokitazawa.

Going back to the original topic, in Shibuya the motivation for the Tokyu Corporation is even more blatant. The current Shibuya Toyoko line station is huge: it's a four-platform terminal station that takes up a ton of space. While the through-running system undeniably helps Tokyo trains be admirably efficient, it's more likely that the real reason Tokyu is motivated to bury the Toyoko line is because when they're done tearing down the current station at Shibuya, they will have possession of dozens of acres of land directly adjacent to Shibuya station. It's almost incalculable what the development rights to that land will be worth.

Items Available

2011-10-02T01:23:00.000-07:00

These things won't be needed at my new place so they're free if you want to come grab them! Please let me know you want them by Wednesday so I won't throw them away; you'll need to pick them up before October 14th.

Refrigerator

Fujitsu 305 liter (yes you read that right, this is big for Japan!) refrigerator/freezer.
Model ER-M305-Y-C 60cm (w) x 70cm (d) x 147cm (h)

This is too big for the refrigerator spot in my new apartment!

From Scrapbook Photos

Curtains

Brown curtain, 145cm (w) x 185cm (h)

From Scrapbook Photos

Green curtain, 155cm (w) x 185cm (h)

It looks like it's a sheer curtain in the photo, but it's actually opaque.

From Scrapbook Photos

Blue Curtains (2). Each on is 75cm (w) x 90cm (h)

The horizontal pattern is the result of my lamp; there's no actual pattern on the curtains.

From Scrapbook Photos

Vancouver & SF Food Roundup

2011-08-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

So between SIGGRAPH in Vancouver and a week with my foodie friends in SF I had an awesome vacation of eating! Here were some highlights:

Steamworks (Vancouver)

Brew pub at the entrance to Gastown. The food wasn't remarkable but the beer is solid, good place for a party or getting together a group of friends. The Vancouver answer to Gordon Biersch (with both the good and bad points that implies -- definitely a bit loud).

Revel Room (Vancouver)

New Southern-influenced small plates. This place is where the Lighter/Darker party was on Wednesday, and the party was so loud that I lost my voice for a couple days even though I was only at the party for an hour. Came back with Carmi on Thursday for dinner and was pleasantly surprised to get yummy small plates including cornbread, hush puppies, beef ribs, and so on to go with our local microbrew. Definitely an easy choice in Gastown.

Locavore (Mission, SF)

MJ picked this for my arrival-day dinner. Despite a lost-key episode giving rise to a 90-minute delay (Sorry MJ!) this place is fantastic. Locally-sourced ingredients as you might guess from the name make anything you order an excellent choice; we shared around and didn't have one miss in anything we ordered.

Little Chihuahua (Divisadero, SF)

I had lunch with Dave Moore at his neighborhood Mexican (lucky dog!), Little Chihuahua. Great unpretentious Mexican food at Divisadero and Page.

Little Star Pizza (Mission, SF)

One of my rituals when heading to the Bay Area is to get some Chicago-style pizza, usually at Little Star, still the best Bay Area option IMHO. Went with Nick and Naoco on a Saturday and just barely beat the rush (I was the latest arrival since there were no taxis in all of SF this weekend due to the Outside Lands concert!).

Ben & Nick's (Oakland)

Great neighborhood craft beer bar. Two new IPAs for me and a whole host of catching up with Ben Thompson!

T-Rex (Berkeley near Gilman)

Met Ewan and Sonoko for yet more new-southern-esque food, this time with an emphasis on the BBQ. Their cornbread is even better than Revel Room, and the Mac 'n Cheese, Beef Ribs, and Brisket meant that we couldn't finish it all so E&S got some take-home food. I predict they made their cats happy with it ;-).

District (SOMA, SF)

Met Melissa Bachman here to catch up on life events, dirnk excellent wines and grab a light dinner. All the small plates are good, the wine is awesome, and the divan seating is fun.

Pixar Cafe (Emeryville)

It seems weird to review a corporate cafeteria... but I have to call out the Gazpacho here! Green tomatillo, garlic... it packed a punch in the mouth and was as satisfying as twice the quantity of something else would have been. Got to catch up with Jeff P. and Ken Lao, ran into Andrew Stanton and Craig Good as well.

Sidebar (Oakland)

The whole week I was in the Bay Area it was sunny, clear, and fair (temperatures in the 60s). It's pretty hard to beat Sidebar as a place to meet for drinks under those conditions: Oren and I sat at a window table and looked out at Lake Merritt. The Paprika Fries are a pretty good choice to munch on while chatting too.

Aziza (Outer Sunset, SF)

As hard as it is to pick one, this was the food highlight of my entire trip. Not surprisingly, Charles picked this place out and guess what he's a regular there (we even got his favorite waiter). I pushed for the tasting menu, which is slightly pricey but oh-my-god good. Aziza is new Moroccan and man have they got it down.

Their cocktails are a revelation. I'm not really a cocktail guy -- beer or wine depending on the food -- but at Aziza the cocktails are a must. Pretty much every single one is a revelation combining ingredients you know in a way you don't, balanced to perfection. Charles had the gin/pilsner/beet and I had the rye whiskey/absinthe/bitters/grapefuit -- both were incredible (beet cocktails! who knew). It seemed like mine tasted more like lemon than grapefruit, Charles was guessing it contained the pickled lemon used in North African cuisine.

The tasting menu takes you on a pretty thrilling run through the menu. I didn't take notes but the highlight was probably the off-the-menu refresh course which was a three-layer with (IIRC) a tomato ragout on the bottom, goat cream in the middle and whipped potato on top. The entrees we went for were the exquisite lamb shank and the squab with fig; the only complaint was that the lamb shank was a bit too much to eat at that point. Fantastic restaurant.

Darwin (SOMA, SF)

But was I done? No! Steph and I met for lunch at Darwin, in fact just around the corner from District. Darwin is a pretty humble sandwich place, but since the sandwiches are *awesome* the lines get pretty long at lunchtime. I had the pastrami, Steph the roast beef. We got lucky and scored a table so we didn't have to use the curb chairs ;-) but definitely be prepared for lines 12-1.

Local Mission Eatery (Mission, SF)

The last stop was this place with Ruby and Axel. When Ruby first mentioned it, I thought it was a description not a place name! Again they emphasize local sourcing and the result is sweet; Ruby's Beef Tongue was good but the Albacore, Beef Stroganoff, and Ratatouille all got great reviews. I skipped the dessert but the really perfect French Press coffee made for a awesome capper to my week of eating my way through SF!

Movie and TV Roundup

2011-08-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the entertainment system in the Airbus A380, I saw a bunch of stuff on the plane and tried to watch 2 more...

Big Bang Theory

The best thing I saw was not a movie, but finally getting a change to check out some episodes of this TV series. It's awesome (as much as I like musicals, this might grab top spot from Glee in my limited TV-watching time). Like many of the awesome series work on TV, this is very much writing-driven, with the actors gleefully each pushing their characters to the extreme of their role. So fun to watch, very light although the characters stay real enough to keep you coming back.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

As all friends who've seen it reported, this is a really fun movie. The videogame tropes come fast and furious and despite our hero's relatively lackadaisical approach to life it's a fun ride to watch. The visuals are awesome, completely having fun with the situation (as does the movie in general -- you're clearly meant to believe in the emotional journey, not the literal events).

Fast Five

So, I'm not a huge fan of this franchise but this was a totally entertaining caper movie. In this case, calling up the testosterone warhorses (Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson) and putting them in roles suited to them lets them just have fun with their toys (many of which explode very satisfactorily). A host of fun ensemble members round out the banter. Opening prison break sequence is awesome, as is the train heist sequence. I kinda wish I had seen it in the theater, this is a loud summer popcorn movie.

Kung Fu Panda 2

It had a subtitle, but it doesn't really matter: the plots are going to be pretty interchangeable in this series from now on. This is an OK sequel (seeing on a plane was optimal), the additions to the character list mean that no character really has time for actual character arcs. They're still having fun with the concept though (Michelle Yeoh joins as a soothsaying goat with a tendency to eat whatever paper is in front of her), and both the opening and ending credits are beautifully designed (someone finally figured out that scrolling text is a bad idea!).

Bands I saw at Fuji Rock (Part 2)

2011-08-01T05:30:00.001-07:00

And more....

Fountains of Wayne - Really good show. Yes, they were playing all these hit songs you've heard on the radio, but they changed things around a bit, worked with the crowd throughout, and I wasn't bored at any point.
レ・ロマネスク / Le Romanesque - Oh so don't ask. We made the trek out to the farthest venue at Fuji Rock called Cafe de Paris, which was supposedly a cabernet/burlesque sort of venue. Unfortunately, after the second continuous day of rain, the path to get there was an neverending slog through the deepening mud and the act that was performing was a Japanese guy in drag with a fake French accent. They did a couple funny bits in between the acts, but it didn't make the 40 minute trek to the back end of Fuji Rock feel worthwhile.
It's sort of a shame because the Cafe de Paris venue has a couple good ideas (you can join in a drum circle), but the access situation made it pretty brutal.
Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra - Just awesome. Super high-energy full (12 or 14 people) Japanese ska band. As it turns out, language doesn't matter at all for ska... no one sat down during this show!
Digitalism - We only caught a little bit of this show because we were headed to the next one, but while electronica isn't my particular favorite, they were doing the music/video integration thing pretty well!
Faces - If you haven't heard of them, it's worth reading the Wikipedia article about this influential band. My friend Ken was very excited that I would get to see this show. Ken, I'm sorry to tell you that the reformed band has it's strong points (bass, guitar, and keys were all rocking) but it definitely has its weak points (vocals... after this show you can put me down as a Mick Hucknall non-fan, and frankly the bass player was so good that when the drummer didn't play it was better). They were all having fun playing loud roots rock, though. Probably it suffered because the next thing we saw was...
Incubus - OK, so I had heard enough Incubus songs that I wanted to go to this show, but it's not like I was a huge fan. That all changed pretty much in the first song. Incubus, it turns out, is a live band -- the stuff on the radio isn't the point. First of all, they were incredibly tight (although at Fuji Rock, that was hardly rare). Next, they had the best sound mix of any band we heard... you might think that was a coincidence, but they also had the best video performance on the big screen -- it looks like they brought their own video guy with them. I didn't realize that Incubus has (always) included a DJ -- but seeing them live we realized how important it was to the show. They didn't just play the songs from the record, they made every song a little different and interesting. Brandon Boyd is really interesting to watch on stage, and did a good job of both letting everybody in the band have some time and of interacting with the audience. Even on "Drive", which is probably the song they were least interested in, they simply gave it to the crowd, having the audience sing most of the choruses. This is a band that understands what a modern concert needs to be, works all aspects of that experience, and delivered a great show. The best performance I saw at Fuji Rock.
No Age - We saw this two-person outfit more or less by chance. They're pretty noisy-punky but high-energy and lots of fun. Impressive to see two people make that much noise!
Cornershop - I was really looking forward to seeing this English band which mixes a lot of Indian themes and sounds to their pop (you may know their song Brimful of Asha). They turn out to be a 10-piece band with the guest Japanese DJ they had on board and did lots of extended jam songs, completely obviating my worry that they would just play their hit songs. Unfortunately, their frontman Tjinder Singh, while he writes cool songs and sings well, is just not very dynamic on stage. He ended every song by running back to get some water and generally stood perfectly still exactly behind the microphone. Again, no slight to him for the musicianship but...

I had to be at work first thing Monday morning so that was Fuji Rock for me this year! I did learn a few important things for attending Fuji Rock:

You must must must must must come to Fuji Rock prepared for rain. Next time it's the full-on Japanese rubber work boots for sure, not to mention a better tent.
Don't bother to come up Thursday unless you're the person grabbing the campsite. Take a half-day off Monday instead (stupid, stupid, stupid me, I had to miss the Cake and Chemical Brothers shows).
The bigger the group of friends, the better!

Th-th-th-th-that's all for Fuji Rock 2011!

Bands I saw at Fuji Rock yesterday

2011-07-30T01:54:00.000-07:00

The Vaccines - BritPop, a couple interesting songs but didn`t liveup to the article I read about them
The Kaiser Chiefs - A British rock band I hadn`t heard of, delivered agreat set andreallyknew how to work the audience. Best large concert of the day!
Manu Chao la Ventura - didn`t realize I knew them from the Once Upon a Time in Mexico soundtrack. These guys rock out, fantastic high-energy show and I would love to see them again!
Jimmy Eat World - You know, when they played their hits they were really great and everybody liked it. But playing any other songs they were... not so great.
Arctic Monkeys -- Came highly recommended and definitely know how to play their brand of hardish rock. But all the songs sounded the same and the rhythm section sometimes seemed like they were playing a different song than the leads. Farthest below expectations of any show of the day.
uhnellys -- My favorite show of the day. A Japanese guy playing guitar and Coronet, and a Japanese woman on drums and backing vocals (and we were suspecting, a third critical person coordinating all the loops). He would lay down some loops on guitar and vocals, she would drum to them and sing along, and then he would play/sing over them improvising along the general theme of the song. As we said, we saw more creativity in his first song than Arctic Monkeys` whole set. Will definitely be looking out for them again!
Widespread Panic -- Hadn`t heard of them below, but they seem like good ol` (southern?)rock and roll. Enjoyable, especially since they were in the mellow venue at Fuji Rock.
Big Audio Dynamite -- great show, these guys are looking kind of old but you wouldn`t know to listen to them!
Four Tet -- Dylan had heard some good recorded stuff from them but their set last night wasn`t amazing to listen to.

...and that was just the first day!

Super duper super strings

2011-06-25T20:36:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which attempt to explain the newest bit of theoretical physics, Superstring Theory, to non-physicists. The elegance in the title comes from the fact that the real quest of superstring theory is to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics in one elegant theory, instead of the messiness of currently having two not-quite-reconcilable ones. I think the book succeeded at this goal, in fact this post is mostly about my reactions to the content of the book rather than a critique of the book itself.

One reason the book was very satisfying to me is because ever since I learned about the lengthening list of so-called elementary particles (bosons, muons, etc.) my first thought has been, "hey, you don't really understand this yet, and when you do, that list suddenly all turn out to be something simpler."

That's exactly what string theory purports to do. It posits that everything is made up of tiny (but not infinitely tiny) loops of string, and that the different forms of matter can all be derived by looking at the different fundamental vibration modes of the string. Just as a guitar string when plucked has a fundamental, first harmonic, second harmonic, and so forth, these hypothesized tiny strings can only give rise to a finite number of expressions. Due to a mathematical trick involving nearly-self-canceling probability waves, the string theorists are able to show they can rise to expressions that look like quite a number of the basic particles in the catalog .

This also resonates (get it?) with me. Another of my thoughts way back was that particles would all turn out to be just periodic waves. String theory is actually a lot better than that (the fact that string are not infinitely small but rather just small helps with a lot of things in quantum mechanics that are otherwise mathematically intractable) but it's at least along the same lines.

Quite aside from the string theory portion of the book, it's also a good explanation of the basic of 20th century physics, namely relativity and quantum mechanics. In particular, while I spent time in college calculating Lorentz contractions and time dilations for homework assignments, I never encountered as satisfying an explanation as Greene's of exactly how to think about both Lorentz contraction and time dilation as simple consequences of treating time as a fourth dimension.

So far so good. However, there are several other qualities of string theory as explained in the book that make one go "Eh?"

The big one (which to his credit Greene does not shy away from or obscure) is that we have no idea if string theory is correct or not. The math is so complicated that there aren't many ways that scientists can actually calculate the predicted properties of string theory with enough precision to verify that it's a complete explanation of previous observations (more about why the math is so complex in a minute). As Greene says after spending an entire chapter showing how five competing. branches of string theory actually are just the same theory expressed in different math - a happy conclusion that was greatly to the relief of all involved - he points out, "of course, we still have no proof any of these theories describe the world we live in."

Related to this is the fact that string theory has so far failed to be able to make any predictions about the world that we don't already know. That is, string theorists are busily working away trying to advance the math to the point where they can explain all the measurements of the world that have already taken place. However, so far they haven't been able to use it to make a verifiable prediction about anything we haven't measured yet. Greene points out how this predictive ability was a big factor in making both relativity (with the prediction of light rays being bent by gravity) and big bang theory (being ably to accurately predict the at-that-time unmeasured strength of cosmic background radiation) turn into accepted knowledge.

Finally, string theory as currently formulated contains one of those "Eh?" moments that's so strong you have to ask for the evidence again (and as mentioned previously the evidence is not yet forthcoming). Namely, current string theory posits that the world is 11-dimensional (10 dimensions of space plus time). Why does the world seem three-dimensional in space to us?

To even explain the answer I have to make use of Greene's excellent analogy from the book. Suppose a tiny snail-like creature lives entirely on the surface of a garden hose. The surface of a garden hose is two-dimensional, that is, it takes a minimum of two numbers to explain where on the garden hose the snail is: one giving where the snail is along the length of the host and one giving where the snail is around the circumference of the hose.

However, unlike x, y, and z in our world, the two dimesions of the snail's existence are very different from each other. The distance around the circumference of the hose wraps back on itself, so if the snail travels in the direction around the hose they get back to where they started.

So, now we go back to why we don't see the other dimensions of our world. The answer according to string theorists is that the other dimensions are firstly, curled up like the circumference of the garden hose, and secondly are very very small (i.e., the radius of the equivalent of the garden hose is very small) and so we haven't seen them yet.

Frankly, "Oooooohhhhhhhkaaaaaaayyy..... Ssssssuuurrrrreee." is a pretty reasonable reaction to that. However, implausibility doesn't make a theory wrong either (let's remind ourselves we're in the same discipline as general relativity and quantum mechanics here). However, it does make you long for some actual predictions about the world that would make this theory testable. Since unlike quantum mechanics (which for all it's implausibility has actually succeeded in predicting stuff that goes on at the micro-scale pretty well) we don't have a lot of predictions out of string theory yet, skepticism is still justifiable.

And this cuts to the biggest worry I have about string theory after reading the book. In a lot of ways string theory is very elegant - it derives all of the fundamental particles rather than taking them as assumptions. If correct it will provide an integrated theory for understanding both microscopic and cosmological phenomena. And scientists and engineers both really like elegant theories.

But elegant theories can be wrong in sufficiently complex systems. Actual systems have a way of requiring somewhat inelegant solutions. But the intellectual appeal (and mental convenience) of elegant theories still gives them a powerful appeal. While my elegance-admiring side (which I am as prone to as anyone else) revels in the possibility of string theory explaining everything, my experience with humans suggest we would pursue this theory vigorously even if it was wrong because of its elegance.

I hope the string theorists do keep going, and it will be neat if they're right. I'm all for it! But... Let's just say that after reading this book, I'm even more convinced that there is no pressing need to spend billions and billions building the Superconducting Supercollider just yet. This feels like an area where we need the theory to advance quite a bit before it will have any impact on the world outside of intellectual stimulation.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Black Swan

2011-05-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Saw "Black Swan" today. The Oscar for Natalie Portman now makes a lot of sense. I really liked the film with its Hitchcockian atmosphere, awesome on-stage cinematography and use of Tchaikovsky (not sure any film has ever used classical music better). A little less of the off-stage handheld would have made it even better.

Having now seen both "King's Speech" and "Black Swan" I don't understand the directing Oscar at all though. I think it's arguable that "King's Speech" is the more enjoyable film, and thus maybe it deserved Best Picture; but as an achievement in directing it's miles behind "Black Swan." "King's Speech" is a extremely well-done person-overcomes-handicap-in-time-of-need story that's been done many times (not faulting it for that, just pointing it out); the only direct antecedent I can point to for "Black Swan" is Satoshi Kon's "Perfect Blue", and "Black Swan" is quite a bit beyond that work.

There are haters, and then there are haters

2011-03-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

I try to avoid reading user comments but this thread (from RT) regarding Rango was too good.

The original commenter posts:

XXXXX#1 on 03-6-2011 05:40 PM
Omg..is so funny some persons are trying to change people minds..Rango is AWESOME,great and fantastic movie and sure it gonna be nominated for best movie too.And Johnny is wonderful,his voice is unique and so sexy,the best and nobody can't deny that.I really want Rango will be NUMBER ONE again here and all around the world too!

Your uninteresting hater just takes the bait:

XXXXX#2 on 03-6-2011 05:57 PM
".And Johnny is wonderful,his voice is unique and so sexy,the best and nobody can't deny that." I can haz grammar?

The hater whose hate we like takes a different approach:

XXXXX#3 on 03-6-2011 09:31 PM
So, what are your thoughts on Twilight?

Nokia is explaining that they're doomed

2011-02-15T23:28:00.001-08:00

I rarely feel compelled to comment on business news, but Nokia's recent announcement that it was adopting Windows Mobile 7 contained an item that's breathtaking.

As reported in a number of places including here, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop acknowledged that Nokia looked at adopting Android, but concluded Nokia "couldn't differentiate products" from other Android manufacturers. They decided to go with Windows Mobile 7, where they obviously feel they can do a better job differentiating themselves from other Windows Mobile devices.

Wow, this is classic. Uh, differentiating yourself from other Windows Mobile 7 devices isn't the point. Smartphone consumers are madly buying iPhones and Android phones now. Your job is to convince us your products is better than an Android phone or iPhone, not that it's better than the current Windows Mobile 7 phones that we don't care about and aren't buying.

To put it another way, if you can't compete with HTC or Samsung by selling a phone that runs Android, you're really screwed, because you certainly won't be able to compete with those same phones when you don't run a competitive operating system.

Elop has a reputation for being honest (and I certainly give him credit for being able to acknowledge that Symbian and MeeGo weren't awesome options). But if he really wanted to face up to the new world he should have chosen Android and admitted that to thrive Nokia needs to be a competitive hardware maker to HTC or Samsung.

Nihonga Avant-Garde at National Museum of Modern Art

2011-02-06T00:59:00.001-08:00

I went to the "Nihonga Avant Garde 1938-1949" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art (東京国立近代美術館）today. In Japanese, nihonga refers to "traditional Japanese painting", which really, by the era covered in this exhibition, could only be distinguished from "youga" or western-style painting being done in Japan by the formulation of the pigments used (earlier on, the styles were somewhat more distinct).

Really, not the greatest art exhibit ever. Very few of the paintings spoke to me in any way or contained much that I felt was noteworthy; indeed, were it not for an academic need to study and classify art, and thus be able to focus on a ten-year-period of "nihonga", I don't really think many of these paintings would be exhibited a lot.

As always, there were a few paintings really worth seeing. Toyoshiro Fukuda's "Scenery of a Mine" stood out for capturing a little bit of the spirit of 1930s muralism. The most powerful piece was 山崎隆 / Takashi Yamaziki's "Impression of Battlefield / 戦地の印象", a completely abstract room-panel-sized piece which contains absolutely fascinating details that suggest rather than state what's going on, and only when viewed close-up (for the exact reason, seeing a scan of "Impression of Battlefield" is pretty pointless).

On the way out I ran into the book "The Hiroshima Panels" in the bookstore. A husband-wife team spent thirty years painting a series of panels about the horror of Hiroshima and eventually other events; again high-quality scans are critical, the versions available on the web don't capture what was shown in the printed book I saw. The artists had an unblinking eye for documenting tragedy: in addition to the deaths directly from the bomb, the fate of the American POWs in Hiroshima (tortured to death by enraged captors) and the Korean forced-labor workers (bodies never buried) are both included in the series, and later they painted a panel about the Rape of Nanking. Apparently the gallery for their work (they're both deceased) is out in Saitama, I'll need to make a point to get out there.

Japan Media Arts Festival 2011

2011-02-05T00:53:00.000-08:00

I went to the Japan Media Arts Festival today. More so than in previous years, there was a lot of stuff I hadn't seen before. Here's a few things I thought were particularly awesome.

The Eye Writer: Inspired by an artist friend of their falling prey to ALS, and put off by the U$10,000 price for commercal eye-tracking devices, an international group of artists came together to develop a super low-cost eye-tracking system and develop a suite of software around it to allow their ALS-stricken friend TEMPT1 to continue to create. They had two stations set up where you could actually use the system yourself (it requires a MacBook and a tiny amount of camera hardware) and it actually worked pretty well, although freeform drawing is probably the outer limit of what it can accomplish -- basic UI control was actually quite straightforward, with none of the "my head hurts" aspects of a lot of gaze-driven UIs; but drawing a little tougher.
The Men in Grey: A great bit of agitprop about the meaning (or lack thereof) of "privacy" in the digital age. The moment you click on the above link, information about you will be recorded.
Succubus by Peter Tilg: This sonic sculpture, controlled by electromagnetic forces, doesn't come across in pictures all that well, but live it truly conveys the sensation of being a living being. Unfortunately, in the JMAF venue I couldn't really hear the faint sounds it allegedly emits.
100 Years Sea: Every time I go to a festival like this there's at least a couple artworks I react to as being ludicrously pretentious and under-executed. This video-cave-like projection of simplistic wave graphics intended to gradually swallow up the audience and eventually produce a space where "reality and unreality and inseperable" was clearly one of the qualifiers in that group this year. Other qualifiers including "Edge of Love 3" and "Rugged Timescapes".
Nuit Blanche: I've seen this several times not least at the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival, but if you haven't seen this amazing indie visual effects short yet, go watch it now.
The Johnny Cash Project: A crowdsourced music video for the song "There Ain't No Grave" from Johnny Cash's American VI album. This is totally worth checking out to see bot the potential and the limits of crowdsourcing a creative endeavor. Personally I don't think Mark Romanek's career is threatened but it truly is an interesting experiment.
Crowbot Jenny: Awesome. Robot crow attempts to interact with real crows.
The Faddist: Reconstruction of famous western art with, uh, stuff.
Arukuaround / Sakanaction: One-take music videos rule. Especially when packed full of Japanese typography. The great thing about music videos is that they're all on the web.
iPad Magic: It turns out, you can do magic tricks with iPads. Even on the first day they're released! Destined for YouTube greatness worldwide, it has already achieved that in Japan FYI, when he holds the iPad up to reveal his brain scan, the Kanji characters are the ones for "woman" and "money".
Kamikara Papercraft Dinosaurs: Kamikara makes all sorts of really cool Japanese papercraft (cut out and tab-slot together paper sculptures), but the new dinosaur collection has an unbelievable number of action features. Yes, action features. To see them in motion, search for this phrase on YouTube: カミカラ恐竜編. The egg is probably the coolest but a lot of them are neat.; If you want to make them youself, you need to buy the book (go to this page and scroll down to see the image with the dinosaurs) , but unfortunately it's only published in Japan so far.
Fumiko's Confession: This is not earth-shaking, but man it's funny. By the way, the setup is that at the beginning the girl does a classic Japanese-schoolgirl "declaration of love" to the guy and is rebuffed. It was produced by a third-year college student -- thank goodness there are some Japanese art schools finally loosening up enough to have anime programs. Some other anime mentioned at the show I haven't seen yet but want to check out include "Colorful", the latest from the director of "Summer Vacation with Koo" and "Mai Mai Miracle", which was directed by the assistant director of "Kiki's Delivery Service" and looks more like a Miyazaki movie than most recent Ghibli films.

The New Left-handed Guitar Saga

2010-12-29T18:56:00.000-08:00

So, as most of my friends know, I started playing acoustic guitar about five years ago (switched from piano).

I'm left-handed, and being a lefty guitar player means it's always challenging to buy an instrument. Lefty guitars usually are the same price as right-handed ones, but since the vast majority of guitar players are right-handed you don't have a lot of choices at the music stores (Jimi Hendrix, as well as some other famous left-handed players, played right-handed guitars upside-down).

When I started, I got a perfectly nice Fender Chinese-made plywood acoustic. It was about $300 at Gelb Music in Redwood City, and honestly I think I chose pretty well. It's not too hard to play (some acoustics have a big gap between the strings and the frets, making them tough to learn on) and sounds really nice. I'm still playing that guitar every day and liking it, but I decided over a year ago it was time to pick up a second, nicer acoustic.

In particular, I decided to give myself more options by picking up an acoustic-electric (these are acoustic guitars with factory-installed pickups that can be plugged in to an amp if desired). Like any good consumer, I then spent a lot of time reading internet reviews of possible acoustic-electrics.

Now, there are a ton of great guitar makers out there these days. Unfortunately, the left-handed thing means that for guitars in the range I was looking at, unless I get fantastically lucky and find a shop with a lefty in stock, I'm probably going to be special-ordering. That in turn means it's tricky to buy from a smaller company, since I probably won't be able to try a left-handed guitar from them. It's a real limitation: when I try to play a guitar right-handed, about all I can do is strum G, C, D. However, knowing I was likely to end up special-ordering, I focused more on full-line guitar makers.

From the internet searching, the two guitars I focused on were the Taylor 110ce/210ce/410ce/etc. series and the Martin DC-1E. However, I also knew it would be good to try an Ovation and to try and find a chance to try some Takamines, a well-known Japanese brand.

The first stop for any left-handed guitar search is Tani Guchi Gakki, the world's only (as far as I know) left-handed guitar store. They're here in Tokyo in the Ochanomizu music store district. I went to Taniguchi and spent some time trying every acoustic-electric they had (that's only about 7 guitars). The Takamine they had in stock wasn't overwhelming, nor did I like the other Japanese brands the staff suggested. They did have a Taylor (I forget if it was a 110ce or a 210ce). I tried it and was surprised to find that I didn't like it at all, whether unplugged or plugged in. The sound was actually thinner (less bassy) than my Fender, and the electronics didn't offer much control and didn't even incorporate a tuner (the tuner itself doesn't matter much, but if you're gonna have electronics in the guitar there's no excuse for not putting in a chromatic tuner).

The surprise of the day at Taniguchi was the Ovation. They had a Chinese-made low-end Ovation that actually sounded nice whether plugged in or unplugged. I was surprised at how pleasant the Ovation sounded played unplugged. However, one offputting thing about buying the Ovation there was that the price was almost twice what the same instrument costs in the US, and there are a lot of slightly better Ovatoin models available that weren't in stock at Taniguchi. Still, it's a great store for lefties and it was very educational to spend the day there.

Since I was going to the US anyway about a month after (and I'm not in a hurry to buy the guitar), I decided to wait.

When I went to the US, I visited several guitar stores in the Bay Area and even went to a guitar fair at Marin Country Civic Center. I saw a lot of beautiful guitars, but almost no lefties at all and nothing I was interested in. But, when I was in Los Angeles I went to McCabes. McCabes is a legendary guitar store that support the music community in LA, and it's such a pleasant place. After touring through the store, I found the "lefty corner" where they had about 12 acoustic or acoustic-electric lefties. I went to find a staff person (in a different room) and said I wanted to try one of them; she looked at me and said, "OK, you should do that." You're always welcome to pick up any guitar at McCabes and try it out; this is the utter opposite of the attitude at most music stores. It's a really welcoming, warm place.

So I tried most of the acoustic guitar they had! It has big fun. Although I had already decided on an acoustic-electric, I tried the Art & Lutherie acoustic lefty which was awesome; if I was starting again, it would have been a great guitar for about $400-500. More relevant to my search, McCabe's actually had in stock a Taylor 710ce, one of the higher-end models in the Taylot series I tried the low end of in Tokyo. It was a very nice guitar, but even though McCabes offered a fantastic deal on it, it was a little out of my price range. Still, I was definitely thinking hard about whether to get that guitar or not. I finished trying all their lefty instruments, and gathered up my stuff.

I noticed that one rack over, they had a right-handed Martin DC-1E, the other guitar I had originally targeted from my internet searching. I figured I should at least hear what it sounded like strummed, so I picked it up and plugged in to the little demo amp at McCabe's. I contorted my left hand into a G chord and strummed across it, and with the first straggly chord I knew this was the guitar I wanted. Martins are famous for having a strong, full bass sound, and that's true even with the cutaways like the DC-1E. It was the full, emotional sound I love guitars for. In that one moment, all the other guitars pretty much passed away.

So now I knew *which* guitar I wanted, it was just a matter of *how* to buy it. There was no lefty DC-1E in stock, so this was gonna be a custom order, meaning I would be back in Japan. No one at McCabe's that day knew whether they could ship overseas or the procedure for custom-ordering a Martin, so they suggested I call back and talk to Louis or Nancy. I got caught up in other business for the rest of the trip and didn't deal with it until I got back to Japan.

I knew that generically I had two options: either I could custom-order through the Japanese Martin dealer, or I could try and get McCabe's or some other store in the US to custom-order it and ship it to me. The US route had two challenges: shipping (although DC-1Es do come with a hard case, so at least shipping was *too* dangerous); and customs duty (I would be importing the guitar, so it really was validly dutiable).

Both routes take a lot of trouble to investigate from Tokyo, so I let things slide for a few months (and in the meantime picked up a Fernandes travel/practice guitar, which is perfect for weekend trips out of Tokyo). Finally, last week I made the trek to the primary Martin dealer in Japan. I explained what I wanted, and found out:

it will take 3-4 months (that's about what I expected)

there's a 10% surcharge for custom orders (well, if you say so)

there's a 10% surcharge for left-handed (this is contrary to what Martin explicitly says on their site)

they charge full list price for the guitar (US dealers commonly discount guitars; the DC-1E goes for $1050-1100 on major discount websites)

and lastly, I don't think they've updated their prices based on the yen fluctuation. This is sadly common here: when the dollar drops, the price of many imported things should drop. But it doesn't, the distributor are pocketing the difference in most cases. Japanese retail is *painfully* inefficient compared to the US.

Bottom line: buying a DC-1E from the Japanese dealer would cost over $2000.

OK, that knowledge prompted me to get up in the middle of the night and call McCabe's to get a hold of 'Louis or Nancy'. It took two tries, but when Nancy came on, I explained what I wanted and she instantly said, "Oh, we can't ship out of the country."

"Oh" came my disappointed reply. But then Nancy showed why McCabe's is McCabe's.

"You need to try Elderly in Michigan, or Mandolin Brothers in New York. I think they both have international shipping."

Well, now that was useful. Indeed they do! Elderly is a dealer in Lansing, Michigan (about 40 minutes' drive from my hometown) which not only can ship internationally, they have published prices, rates, and conditions ($185 to Japan). Mandolin Brothers is another wonderful-looking dealer on Staten Island in New York, but I'm giving hometown advantage to Elderly.

Even with shipping, this was sounding a lot cheaper than $2000. But what about duty? The ever-helpful interneet found this page on the Japanese customs site. Duty rate for musical instruments: 0.

So, I'll be calling Elderly when they open (late tonight Tokyo time) to verify the total with them. Stay tuned for the final outcome but from the numbers they're showing my total cost will be about 1/2 the Japanese dealer... sure seems like a guitar will be coming to me in Tokyo via Michigan!

Hello?

2010-11-11T18:42:00.000-08:00

So, I just got an email from JR East (the train system here) with an "important notification" about Eki-net (the online system for buying domestic train tickets). The notification was that you will no longer be able to use a password that's the same as your user id. Yikes, they just figured out that's a good idea? It's a good thing most of the Russian cybercriminals can't read Japanese...

Trying to use Trac...

2010-09-24T00:28:00.001-07:00

So, in part because at work we have a need for task/issue management software, I've tried to get educated on the various open-source options in that area. It seems like there are two main choices: Trac or Redmine (I also ran across one with a beautiful user interface called Integria IMS but because of various internationalization issues I didn't explore it much).

Trac is the standard issue tracker in the Python open source world, and since I'm blessed to be able to spend virtually all of my time writing code in Python these days, it was the first thing I looked at. Naturally, like almost all issue/bug/task trackers, Trac has all the standard features like entering a ticket, having types, statuses, and so forth. From the fact it's widely used and the fact that it's implemented in Python, it was definitely my default choice. Whatever system we use at work we'll probably spend a lot of time customizing, so the Python thing is big.

Then a co-worker here in Japan mentioned Redmine. Redmine is newer than Trac but has a lot of the same features (as do the others). In general the interface to Redmine feels a lot more up-to-date than Trac's (it's not that Trac's interface is bad, it's just a pre-Web-2.0 kind of feeling, whereas Redmine used a lot of more interactive widgets in it's UI).

When I started looking realistically at what we would need to do in order to adopt either one of these company-wide for managing the tasks of 300 people, I realized that a lot of the things we needed were related to scale. While open source projects can have scale in terms of users, I don't think either project is really set up for creating thousands of tasks per month. In particular, we clearly need to have:

Ability to create new tasks by importing from spreadsheet (it just doesn't make sense for anyone to have to click "Create New Task" 1200 times)
Ability to batch edit tasks (when the above goes wrong, you have 600 tasks to change from "New" to "Assigned")
GANTT charts (i.e., a graphical representation of tasks over time). Open source projects are notoriously lax about schedules. We work in production, and our production managers need good ways to see exactly what's going on.
Task dependencies. If you know about about CG production, it's very pipelined: the animation can't start until the layout is done, etc., so you want a way to declare that Task F depends on Task C.

None of the above are particularly specialized; they're certainly all features that have been implemented in project management software (e.g., Microsoft Project or FastTrack Scheduler) for decades. But, surprisingly, Trac has zero of the above features (Redmine by default has all except the import).

To be fair to Trac, Trac pushes a plug-in philosophy, and there are sure enough plugins for all of the above (more about that in a minute). I read through several discussions on the Trac site where every one of the above features was pooh-poohed by a Trac developer as "just not important enough to be in core." There are two big problems I had with that.

Issue Management Should Have Scale

Seriously? Ability to multi-select items is considered "not core"?

Maybe it's just because Trac comes from the world of tracking open-source projects; it's fair to say that they probably rarely need to create 600 tickets at once, or update the status of 150 of them. But that's not actually an unusual thing to want to do if you're tracking short-term tasks for a group of 300 people. Those basic, simple software features like multi-select/batch edit or the ability to establish relationships are absolutely central.

I'm totally understanding of the fact that time and attention are limited, and if it was simply a case of "we haven't gotten to that yet" I would have no problem. But a lot of the Trac core developers seem to think they *shouldn't* actually have standardized way to establish a relationship between two issues, which is insane.

Plug-ins Are a Terrible Way to Standardize Architecture

None of that would really matter if Trac's plug-in approach worked well enough, to be honest. OK, sure, you have to download some plug-ins, but hey, all the functionality is there, right?

There are a lot of cases where that would be true. But it's not true in real life, because the core architecture of a system needs to provide the base data items for the plug-ins to manipulate.

Here are the specific ways Trac fails to provide enough common infrastructure to actually make plug-ins to support core features useful:

For batch edit, the most common batch edit plug-in only works with custom queries. If you just go to the normal "Show me the isssues" default query you can't do a batch edit. This is because there's no extensibility of the individual item UIs.
For issue dependencies, Trac doesn't provide the plugins a standard way to store relationships between issues. Because of this, the plugins try to work around this by using the custom field support which Trac does have. Unfortunately, the custom field support doesn't include a type system, it's easy to fail data integrity (your list of dependent tasks is being stored as a comma-separated text field; there's no way to use the real relational data model).
For the spreadsheet-import feature, again, because Trac doesn't provide a type mechanism for custom fields, while the import plug-in does its best to try and support custom fields, there's no way for it to know what the type of the fields added by other plug-ins is. Thus, when you try to import a spreadsheet which records that your task is dependent on Task #1, the text field "1" gets interpreted as a float and becomes "1.0" which then fails the referential integrity check. Your bug tracker is now broken and cannot be repaired from the UI; it's MySQL Query Browser time for you.
A group here in Japan called Shibuya Trac wrote a GANTT chart generator for Trac. Unfortunately, it's out-of-date for versions so you'll be Googling for awhile if you want to install it, and for a longer while if you don't read Japanese, the native language of the developers.

Oh and, It's not based on a real ORM

When I actually started looking through the Trac database schema and source code to see why some of the above things were true, I got much more depressed. I realized that just because of history, the Trac project is old enough that it had to grow its own solutions to a lot of problems. They have their own ORM, their own templating system, their own database abstraction layer, etc.

I've spent a lot of time writing apps against Django, the absolutely awesome Python database toolkit. Especially when used with South, Django is a complete Python equivalent to Ruby on Rails. The ORM problem (how to map Python classes to a relational database), the database schema migration problem, and the database backend problem are completely and throughly solved by Django (as they are by Ruby on Rails). And the templating problem is pretty well laid out too. For Trac, they were building an app, so they've solved all those same problems but not as elegantly or cleanly as Django. Their database adapter isn't quite as complete, the ORM is a little more manual, and of course none of those subsystems are as well documented ("Look at the code" is frequently mentioned in the Trac developer docs; Django has awesome documentations even without looking at the code, which I'm now convinced is one of the best signs of quality in a piece of open source software.

Looks like Redmine from here

While Redmine doesn't have spreadsheet import built in, they in general have taken a much more expansive view of what is "core": they treat multi-select as a core UI ability, they treat the ability to declare relationships between issues as a core data structure item (although the core package doesn't specify what type of relationship it is); and they have always had time-oriented views into the data.

I really wish I could use Trac, among other reasons because I don't have any particular desire to use Ruby (nothing against it, I just already know Python very well). But the well-integrated easy-to-support features in Redmine and the lack of same in Trac mean it's just not practical. Either Trac needs to make a much more realistic set of decisions about what features are "core" to their stated mission, or they need to significantly beef up their core data infrastructure so that independently developer plug-ins can truly build on each other without dozens of referential integrity problems cropping up. Given that Trac is a relatively successful project, whose core developers seems pretty happy with the way it works now, I guess I'll have to learn a little Ruby.

15 Albums That Will Stick With Me

2010-09-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

My friend Michelle Coulter started this thread on Facebook. My contribution got kind of long, so it migrated here.

Windham Hill - Legacy, a Collection of American Folk
Windham Hill has faded from memory pretty quickly, but not only did they totally evoke the Northern California feeling for me, they also found and promoted a lot of truly talented musicians. Whereas most of WH was new-age-y light instrumentals, this collection was gritty folk music by unknown performers from all over the country. The quality of the songs and performances were so good that several of the songs from this collection are still stuck in my mind decades later (I even learned to play "Dodging the Blues" by John Gorka on guitar). The interests sparked by this album led me eventually to Butch Hancock/Joe Ely/and the Austin New Folk movement on one hand, and Uncle Bonsai and other eclectic west coast folk on the other. Listening to guitarists like Kaki King always reminds me of Windham Hill's early days.

Bangles, All Over the Place
The Bangles are of course most famous for the "A Different Light" album. I loved that album too, but the best thing about it was that it made me go back and find this album, which much more accurately represents the hard-rocking LA girls they started out as. While "Walk like an Egyptian" from "All over the Place" is definitely a good pop song, "Hero Takes a Fall" from this album is a great *rock* song. This album got my car going way too fast down the 101 far too many times. Among other reasons to like the Bangles, their bass player, Michelle Steele, used to be in the iconic band The Runaways. This album also has the Bangles covering "Going Down to Liverpool", which was written by and would eventually be released by Katrina and the Waves. I've always wondered how an up-and-coming LA band heard about a B-side from an (at the time) obscure Cambridge, England band in order to cover it.

Chicago II
Probably most people remember Chicago as the schmaltzy balladeers they indeed became. But the formation of the band was as a jazz ensemble with some rock influence, and if you go back to those albums (basically Chiacgo I and Chicago II) they're anything but pop music. 11-minute long jams, extended jazz arrangements, and intense inner monologues fill out those first few albums. There are a fair number of bands that can and do perform this stuff live in concert, but there weren't many that made it their debut album. It's the opposite of internet-friendly.

The Beatles, 1962-1966
My sister was an original Beatlemaniac, and while I liked the Beatles jut fine growing up, it wasn't until I got this compilation album many years later that I felt like I really became a Beatles fan. The sheer quantity of infectious, well-written, pop music they put out in these productive years is unique in music history, even without counting what they would go on to produce in the following albums. Many years later I'm learning more and more Beatles songs on guitar.

Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend
Hee-hee, compared to the rest of this list this is the guilty pleasure zone. Matthew Sweet writes unapologetically pop songs in an undeniably narcissistic way (he performs almost every instrument on his albums). When I first heard this album (like The Bangles, it frequently powered my highway driving) I hoped that kind of hard-driving pop music would be a category I could fill out my record collection with. But in the end, I had to content myself with other Matthew Sweet albums (of which there are quite a few). Sadly, it didn't seem to lead anywhere for Matthew Sweet either: I haven't heard anything interesting from him in a long time, but I keep hoping he'll have some awesome late-career comeback.

Not an Album, but a place: KFJC, 89.7FM
I can't draw up a list of "musical influences" like this without talking about KFJC, even though it's a radio station rather than an album. Specifically, it's the college radio station at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. Now, college radio, while it can bring you some new music you've never heard, is more often unlistenable dreck. What makes KFJC special is that many of the DJs, rather than being this semester's freshmen, are actually Silicon Valley employees who love music and who have been doing their weekly show on KFJC for 20 years. They're not only volunteers, they pay for the privilege (I believe they have to register for one class at the college to be eligible). The result is shows run by a DJ with an encyclopedic knowledge of some sub-sub-sub-genre. Phil Dirt's instrumental surf hour, The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack show, the reggae show… there's so much musical knowledge here available to you, all for flicking your dial (on the Peninsula) or getting your URL correct (anywhere in the world via http://www.kfjc.org/) that you have no excuse not to partake.

Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food
Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
Into the dinosaur environment of 70s album-oriented rock came four Rhode Island School of Design students (OK, three RISD students and Jerry Harrison) who proved that rock could not only be intelligent and interesting, it could be intelligent, interesting, and danceable! Who knew! The visual and musical amalgam the band provided was a godsend. In some sense, these two albums are the beginning and end: More Songs… was the first time I heard about the band and started listening to them; and Stop Making Sense was really their swan song as a band, after which individual projects would take off and the general rise of Alternative Rock meant that their approach was no longer as unique. Stop Making Sense has a particularly fond place in my heart because the old Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto, a classic single-screen movie house, used to have midnight showings of Stop Making Sense. Only 50-60 people would come, and since the Varsity actually used to host plays, there was a large stage where the majority of audience would end up right in front of the screen dancing for the entire movie. Alas, not so possible at the modern multiplex. The Varsity, meanwhile, is now a Border's bookstore.

Juluka, Scatterlings of Africa
I actually don't remember anymore how I first happened to listen to Johnny Clegg (Juluka was a partnership between him and Sipho Mchunu), but I was instantly hooked. Juluka was extremely well-known in South Africa as a biracial band in the apartheid era, and as a result of that fact, had to play underground and couldn't release their albums on the official South African radio or music channels. They became a world-of-mouth hit with their combination of rock influences, zulu guitar style, and explicitly political anti-apartheid lyrics. What you wouldn't know from the albums are the extent to which their performances are organized around Zulu dance as well as zulu guitar. Both times I've seen Johnny Clegg live the band did one exhausting 1:45 set in which they continually sang, played, and danced (those folks are *in shape*) without a break; there's some good tracks on YouTube. For me, not only does Juluka's music hold up well, it was my gateway to discovering the whole range of African music (the South African compilation series "All the Hits 2xxx" which is issued each year is especially recommended if you run across it).

Music Man, Original Broadway Cast Album
My parent's taste in music ran mostly to Rachmaninoff and Debussy, whereas even within classical I'm more partial to Mozart or Bach. However, the one place where our tastes enthusiastically overlapped was in musicals. As a kid, the album cabinet built into our (wall-sized) "hi-fi" was stocked with the soundtrack albums for every big broadway production -- Camelot, Oklahoma, Sound of Music, and eventually A Chorus Line. But really, I didn't spend as much time with any of them as with Music Man. The combination of the good-old-Iowa setting (my mom's home) plus a bunch of great songs for the genre meant hours and hours in my room singing along to "Seventy-six Trombones." To this day I can still recite "Trouble in River City" from memory.

The death of naive entertainment made musicals a lot harder to sustain. The modern equivalents in "Rent" or "Chicago" are great entertainment but somehow don't give rise to memorable songs in the same way (can you hum the tune to any song from "Rent"?).

Bonnie Raitt, Luck of the Draw
This is a good album, but that's not why it's listed here. It's listed here because I went to see Bonnie Raitt in Santa Cruz at the Catalyst just before Nick of Time and this album were released. Bonnie Raitt was a musician well-known as a touring musician but not someone who had ever achieved massive success at that point. But, she had been touring and playing music for her whole life (she was probably around 40 at the time). Seeing her live, I was absolutely dumbstruck by her skill as an entertainer. I had the epiphany that all live musicians who've had a long career are extraordinarily appealing to see live -- they have a ineffable quality of being relaxed and welcoming to the audience. Bonnie Raitt had just recently recovered from drug and alcohol abuse problems, and you could see that history. But the sheer humanity of her performance was incredibly moving. Thus, when Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw came out, it felt very satisfying that her years of toil finally paid off for her (and they have some catchy songs, too).

It's also good to have this in the list as a reminder that there are tons of musicians who spend their whole career without ever getting their "Nick of Time": they've done great work and been successful enough to stay in the business, but never really had their breakthrough hit. John Hiatt (who appears on Raitt's albums), Richard and Linda Thompson, Allison Kraus, Blues Traveler, J.J. Cale, Joe Craven…

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
When I first moved to Northern California, I started studying piano (I didn't play any instruments as a kid) and I was lucky enough to attend the ensemble workshops at Stanford Jazz Camp. This is just an unbelievable resource for people lucky enough to live in the Bay Area who also happen to like Jazz; musicians of any level are welcome to enter the ensemble classes. We met in the Braun Music Hall's "small auditorium" where the piano I practiced on was a 1927 Steinway grand, and so I learned why Steinways are, well, Steinways.

But the music we did for the workshop was mostly Miles Davis. And why not? His classic recording occurred in a time when he was legendary not only for his playing, but for his scouting of great musicians to play with. Every tune on Kind of Blue is a classic, one that jazz musicians should and do study and reprise. I had listened to Kind of Blue before the Jazz Workshop, but of course after learning and playing the tunes, my appreciation of the musicianship recorded on the album was of a different order.

Grateful Dead, Touch of Grey
This is probably the Dead's best studio album, but let's face it -- I'm really just putting it here as a stand-in for the experience of attending a Dead concert. Fortunately, I got to attend three Grateful Dead concerts. They evoked a feeling of communal happiness, goodwill, and freedom from worry more than any other group experience I've had (Burning Man is close, but Burning Man has an intellectual edge which Grateful Dead concerts distinctly did not). I don't use drugs, so that's not where I was getting the feeling at Dead concerts (although the same can't be said of all my fellow concert-goers). The combination of the band and the Deadheads who followed them around created a true group good vibration; swaying back and forth to the music seemed like the only reasonable choice, and everybody did it. It didn't hurt that I always saw the Dead outdoors in the summer -- at Frost Amphitheater and Laguna Seca. I hear the modern equivalents are Phish, so even if the studio albums don't sound great to you, catch a concert sometime.

Fleetwood Mac, Rumors
While I think objectively this is one of the highlights of the album-oriented rock era, it doesn't date all that well (I doubt anyone will become a new fan of Fleetwood Mac by reading this). For me, though, it's a shoo-in for this list because of the role the song "Go Your Own Way" (talk about a paean to 70s individualism) played in my high school life. I was a nerdy shy and overweight kid for most of my childhood. Early in high school, my mother passed away from cancer and I started trying much more actively to get attention at school. By the beginning of my senior year, I had finally lost weight, bought some non-polyester clothes, and knew enough people to be comfortable. Then, the honor society got a presentation by a woman from the local Muscular Dystrophy Association about a new type of benefit event: the Dance-a-thon. You had music playing all night and got pledges of a certain amount of money for each hour you danced. The promotional video MDA made for this showed inspirational scenes of MD victims being helped to get their lives in motion again, and the soundtrack was "Go Your Own Way" from "Rumors".

Somehow, my friend Si Steinberg and I immediately took to this idea. We blitzed the Honor Society into being the sponsor, convinced our principal into letting us have an all-school assembly to pitch the idea to the students, and roped virtually every other student organization into playing some part in the production: the Student Council was in charge of soliciting for prizes, the Home Ec club made and sold food all night, the DECA (business) club handled the accounting, etc. It was like something out of a Andy Hardy movie. The event went off, we raised IIRC $7000K+ for MDA, and everybody had a good time and went home exhausted.

In the course of pitching, organizing, and running that event, I must have watched the "Go Your Own Way" promo video over a hundred times. It indelibly imprinted Fleetwood Mac on me and kept me inspired and excited over those hectic months. Most everyone has probably forgotten the Dance Marathon, but it and Fleetwood Mac had a huge part in my life.

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
After all the personal stories on this page, really, the reason for "Running on Empty" being here is because it's a great road album. Musicians write about being on the road because they spend a lot of their life there, and I still don't think anybody's bested this album as a record of that combination of boredom, tedium, and exhilaration. And certainly Jackson Browne has every right to pen the classic road album: he joined Nitty Grity Dirt Band at age 18 and has been a performing musician continuously since then.

2010-07-13T20:01:00.001-07:00

19:29 Leo is at work #

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2010-05-08T21:55:00.001-07:00

I just finished "Bursts" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Like a lot of non-fiction books I've read lately, it promises a lot more than it delivers, although it's still a fairly enjoyable ride.

The complaints about this book are only two, but both are pretty serious for this sort of weighty non-fiction book:

The entire research-based content book can be summarized in one dry sentence: when you measure the rate of various human activities, you will find that they usually conform to a power law, and only occasionally to a gaussian or more rarely Poisson distribution. OK, that's fine, but it's a far cry from the subtitle of the book, "The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do." Barabasi spends the book ruminating on the implications of this finding for predicting human behavior, and of course in a statistical sense it can. However, as has been observed of the weather, I don't want to know in a statistical sense whether it will rain this afternoon, and in exactly the same way Barabasi never shows you can predict individual humans on individual days -- only that you can predict percentages based on groups of humans on average days.

Barabasi intertwines the tale of this recent research into human behavior patterns with the 14th century tale of György Székely, a Transylvanian who by an unlikely turn of events became the leader of a Hungarian revolt. Now, I'm a sucker for history, and this story definitely made me want to read some more about Hungarian history (they're got quite a bit over there). Furthermore, he has an excellent motivation for including this particular story -- an ancestor of his figures into it.

However, the problem is that the analogy around which he's trying to build the parallel between the two narratives is that in the historical story, a noble named Telegdi made a speech in which he seemed to forsee exactly the unlikely turn of events that came about. See? Even in the 14th century they could predict human events, and now we're using digital technology to recreate this.

Except that no, that doesn't hold any water. Barabasi is clearly a smart guy whose research is reasonably interesting, but in the desire to create a cohesive theme for his book he reaches much farther than his logic supports. As even he points out, fortune tellers are right part of the time not because they're predicting the future but because they make a lot of predictions. Yes, after the fact you can often find someone who foretold the outcome. However, as anyone who's made a risky move and had it pay off knows, those people are wrong as often as they're right. In fact, of all the players in the historical drama, most felt differently, meaning that there was absolutely no systematic way of predicting anything. Unfortunately, the intellectual justification for including the (fascinating) history in the book is incorrect.

Really, the key questions Barabasi's research (and thus the book indirectly) raises are about this question of how much we can predict the future actions of a population of humans. Surprisingly, Barabasi doesn't talk about what to me is the glaring counterpoint: chaos theory. Barabasi makes reference to having read chaos theory, but in the book he never discusses the very salient implication of it for his main theme. Chaos theory shows that in many cases (including among other historically significant activities elections and wars), the outcome is dramatically sensitive to initial conditions and thus even given statistical bounds on the input, the outcome is not subject to meaningful prediction. To me, this is a happy thing (I don't want to know the outcome of an election before I've voted in it) but I wish Barabasi had dealt with this - he may well have an answer to it, but he didn't include it in the book.

I don't mean to say I hate the book; like Freakonomics it does present some interesting research on human behavior patterns to read about, but unlike Freakonomics, which absolutely admits it has no unifying theme, this book tries to have a unifying theme but in my opinion fails to find a meaningful one.

LDAP, she is a beach

2010-05-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

Several techy posts coming out in the near future.

Yesterday I finally cracked an annoying problem I've been working on off and on since I came to Japan -- how to have you web app authenticate against ActiveDirectory. It wouldn't have been so hard except that our SysAdmin insisted it was absolutely impossible, would require buying another piece of hardware or two etc. etc. Of course, that's all totally untrue -- every AD server is an LDAP server. But man, LDAP, despite the "L" standing for "Lightweight", is the last of the dinosaur protocols. Everything is wrapped in five levels of obscurity and indirection with a verbose syntax. If you ever had any exposure to the OSI protocol stack or X.400 mail protocols you'll feel right at home. Should you be cursed to figure this out in your own network environment, start by downloading the Apache Directory Studio, it will save lots of time.

Expressions are the best part. When building a filter expression, you need to express a search query, not unlike SQL. Their solution is indeed logical but produces the oddest text since full-on LISP. It's a prefix notation where every level of the epxression tree is enclosed in parentheses. Thus, for "object representing a user whose account name is mary or bob and whose account is not expired" we get

(&(objectType=user)(|(aASAccountName=mary)(aASAccountName=bob))(!expire=*))

SQL has never looked so good.

Lost in Translation redux

2010-04-19T00:10:00.000-07:00

Remember that scene in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray asks whether to hold the glass to the right or the left, and the commerical director goes off on a 5-minute tirade about something in Japanese (his philosophy of directing, as it turns out), and afterwards the translator translates the entire 5-minute speech as, "to the left?"

The actor who plays the commercial director is actually an 80s rock'n'roll star and actor who goes by "Diamond Yukai." Last weekend I met his manager, and he's still gigging! He had a show yesterday in Shibuya at O West.

Japanese Health Care FTW

2010-02-13T04:03:00.000-08:00

Today I had an experience which, while it's normal here, is inconceivable in the US. For those of you who still hold the delusion that the US has a functional health care system, wake up.

Last night I realized I needed to get some more contacts because I was almost out. So today I went to the contact store (no appointment, no calling ahead). They asked me about my order and then, because this was only the second time I had bought from them, told me I had to get my eyes re-checked (normally, you only need to get your eyes re-checked once a year, similar to the US).

Now, if I was in the US, first of all the eye doctor would probably be somewhere else than the contact lens store, and secondly, getting an appointment at my eye doctor in the US meant calling a week ahead -- or three weeks ahead if you want a Saturday appointment, since today was a Saturday.

However, here in Japan, they just said, "Go to the 5th floor." I went to the 5th floor where the nice receptionists took a look at my insurance card (health insurance is mandatory in Japan btw), and asked me to wait. I waited about 3 minutes, had my vision checked by an assistant, took my contacts out, waited another three minutes, had the actual eye doctor check my retinas and other things, waited another about 5 minutes (while watching the Olympics) and got a new pair of contacts. Total time: 20 minutes; co-pay: 380 yen (about 4 dollars).

Then, back downstairs to buy the contacts. Now, you would think the price for all this convenience would be that the actual contacts are more expensive. And you would be wrong. My contacts cost about 20% less than 1-800-contacts did back in the US.

My fellow Americans: your health care system is f*&%ed. Please get on with fixing it. It doesn't have to be like this, and the solution *does* have to involve the government.

Twentieth Century Boys

2009-12-30T18:39:00.001-08:00

Based on high recommendations from my friend Gilles, I just rented and watched 20th Century Boys (Pt. 1) last night.

The basic idea of the story is that a group of school friends make a secret clubhouse out of grass one summer to have a place to look at manga, listen to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and so forth on the radio, and share what passes for porn in junior high school. As part of passing the time, they make up a symbol for their group (an up-pointing finger over an eyeball) and create a group sketchbook that shows a series of attacks on the world that the friends come together to defeat. 25 years later, world events seem to be eerily echoing the sketchbook from their childhood, and they're forced to come together again to deal with this fact.

It's an interesting take on storytelling, since the story spans the time from the early 70s through 2015. It pops back and forth in time a lot, although they're pretty consistent about using a supertitled date to tell you where you are. That was absolutely essential towards the end of the movie, when they started jumping around by a few days instead of 20 years. The basic idea is interesting, and in the story the characters try to access 25-year-old memories to attempt to reconstruct the details of that long-ago summer, so cutting back to those scenes lets the audience learn the memories as the characters relive them. Also, the casting is awesome; they did a fantastic job of getting child actors who all plausibly look like the child versions of the adult actors.

They picked well for the central character to tell the story through: Kenji was a close to a leader as the group had back in the day, with personal style that eventually led him into a career as a rock'n'roller -- which in turn caused him to drink his way down out of society. Now he's a convenience store clerk (the initial scenes of the manager exhorting him to practice the chain's greeting more sincerely is just one of the many little societal commentaries in the film) who's raising his niece as a single parent.

Unfortunately, I think the weakest point of the story is the one widely shared among Manga adaptations, whether animated or live action -- the storytelling is frequently elided. That is to say, there are just scenes you need to have that aren't there. Towards the end, the enemy (ironically named "Friend", he heads up a cult/political party called "Friend Party" / 友民党) has sent a giant robot into Tokyo and our group gets together and heads out to stop him. Cut to, shot of one of the group tackling Friend from behind on the top of a building. How did they get there? How did he know where Friend was? etc. is never explained. Another member of the group, for equally unknowable reasons, happens to be watching from the next rooftop.

This shortcut storytelling is so widespread among Manga adaptations it must be a fairly conscious choice (if you watch standard Japanese TV dramas or live action movies, they don't suffer from this problem, so it's not like storytelling is unknown here). I've always assumed that it comes from the fact that the main audience in Japan for a Manga adaptation is people who are already fans of the Manga -- thus, the filmmakers assume the audience already basically knows the story, and wants to get to the "good parts", i.e., the scenes where the characters' emotions are clearly on display and/or the action scenes, rather than actually clearly retell a story the audience already knows. In terms of the domestic market for a film like this, that makes perfect sense; unfortunately, and to the great detriment of the industry here, it severely limits the market for the film outside the Manga's pre-existing fanbase. Most worldwide audiences do prefer their stories clearly told rather than needing to guess at the missing pieces.

Please get wasted at home

2009-12-12T00:59:00.001-08:00

From Tokyo

There's a public service campaign going on right now about not putting on your makeup, drinking soda, etc. while riding the train -- the tagline is always, "Please do it at home." The latest poster addresses a different behavior to be practiced in the home, though.

Note for those not living in Japan: this is not a joke, these posters are really up all over Tokyo right now.

How to Attend the Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009

2009-11-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

こんにちは、
（English follows the Japanese)

僕は今年の横浜のシーグラフアジアの
コンピューターアニメーションフェスティバルチェアーで,
フェスティバルの主要なエベントはエレクトロニックシアターです。

エレクトロニックシアターの上映の予定は、
１２月の１７日の木曜日の夕方のプレミアショーと１８日の金曜日の夕方のショーを行いますが、
１９日の土曜日の上映も二つ予定されます。午後の 16:15 も夕方の 19:00 もあります。
エレクトロニックシアターは２時間ぐらい掛かります。
エレクトロニックシアターの内容とは、下記のリンクを参照して
「エレクトロニックシアター」にクリックしてください。
エレクトロニックシアターは横浜パシフィコのメインシアターでやって、
ソニーマーケティング日本に上がって頂いた４K のディジタルシネマプロジェクターを使います。
フルHD の変種の作業はイマジカでやっています。

CAF ET Program

他のシーグラフのエベントに参加しなくてもエレクトロニックシアターに出席したい方は、
下記のリンクを参照するとクレジットカードでチケットの何枚を買えます。

ET Tickets

エレクトロニックシアターに上にシーグラフアジアの登録したい場合は、
一般的なシーグラフアジアの日本語のサイトを参照して下さい。

SIGGRAPH Asia Registration

そのメッセージは他の興味がある方に自由に転送すると幸いです。
質問または不明な点になればぜひ私にご連絡ください。

宜しくお願いします。

レオ

Hi all,

I'm the chair for this year's SIGGRAPH Asia Computer Animation Festival in Yokohama, and the main event of the festival is the Electronic Theater.

The schedule for screenings for the Electronic Theater includes a premiere show on the evening of Thursday, December 17th as well as a show on the evening of Friday the 18th, but there are also shows scheduled on Saturday the 19th, at both 4:15pm and 7pm. The Electronic Theater lasts about two hours. For the contents of the Electronic Theater, check the web page below and click "Electronic Theater". The Electronic Theater will be presented via a 4K Digital Cinema projector donated by Sony Marketing (Japan) in the Main Theater at Pacifico Yokohama. The full-resolution HD edit is being carried out at Imagica.

CAF ET Program

For people who don't want to participate in other SIGGRAPH events but just want to go to the Electronic Theater, please go to the link below, and you can purchase any number of tickets via credit card.

CAF ET Tickets

If you want to go to other SIGGRAPH Asia events besides the Electronic Theater, you can of course visit the main SIGGRAPH Asia site:

SIGGRAPH Asia Registration

Please feel free to forward this message to any other interested people, and if you have any questions, or if anything is unclear, please get in touch.

Yours,

Leo

Disappointing Books #1, "Castles, Battles, and Bombs"

2009-10-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

I've read two disappointing books recently, so in the interest of helping others avoid the mistake, I'll share.

"Castles, Battles, and Bombs" by Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll has a very clear concept: the authors attempt to study military history through the tools of standard (aka neoclassical) economics. They choose six periods of history, pair them with six principles of economics (opportunity cost, substitution effects, marginal cost vs. marginal beenfit, etc.) and attempt to use the economics principle to understand the period of history.

It's a neat idea; too bad it doesn't add much to the understanding of history. Now, I'm not saying the authors are wrong in their observations. Yes, clearly, building castles in the High Middle Ages reduced the funds kings had available to devote to maintaining field armies. But what was true in pretty much every one of the six chapter of this book is that the economic principle, while at least somewhat applicable, is not key to understanding the period in question.

For instance, they study Renaissance Italy via the economic question known as the principal-agent problem, which is to say, when you hire something to do something, how do you know they (your agent) are doing what you (the principal) want? Since Italy was constantly at war through most of this period, and that war was primarily conducted via hired mercenaries, the condottori (literally meaning contractors), it's easy to see why they matched the two.

While the book goes through the considerable lengths the Italian city-states went to in order to mitigate the principal-agent problem, all of which make sense (essentially, an auditing corps of city employees were used to keep track of the activities of the condottieri, as well as a tendancy for longer-term relationships), it's not believable that the principal-agent problem was a cause for the commencement or ending of this era. The principal-agent problem has to be managed any time you engage in a contract, yes; but since the problem existed throughout the era in study, and roughly equally for all participants, I felt like I learned nothing new about the era by studying these. The real reasons why the mercenary system existed during that era, why the city-states chose it, and why they eventually chose otherwise, all lie outside the area of study.

Every chapter suffers from this failing, in that while the principle does apply, it doesn't offer key insights. In the fifth chapter of the book, they go over the well-trodden data showing that (non-nuclear) strategic bombing is not economically justifiable. That is to say, the total economic costs to an aggressor country of building and operating a combined-arms air force capable of conducting a strategic bombing campaign is greater than the economic damage done to the enemy by said campaign (factories, surprisingly, turn out to be pretty easy to repair). They use the extensive data on WWII's air campaign against Germany to show this. Unfortunately, as they acknowledge, even the post-war analysis within the US military reached the same conclusion about cost-benfits 60 years ago. They claim this is a lesson in marginal cost vs. marginal benefit, but in fact what the data show is that it's simply a bad military investment in the first place, you don't have to think about marginal cost vs. marginal benefit. Allocating those resources to tactical air support of operations instead of conducting strategic bombing at all is the conclusion supported by the data.

The worst case of this is the chapter on castle-building vs. field army maintenance in the High Middle Ages. They attempt to pitch the preference for castle-building as causing a lost opportunity, in that the monarchs couldn't also maintain a field army. But what their data shows is that the cost of castle-building, even for aggressive castle builders like Edward I in England, pales beside the costs of war. Their own data shows Edward spent £90,000 on Welsh castles, but £1,400,000 on fielding armies for his wars against Wales, Scotland, and France. Castles are so cheap relative to armies that it's distorting the data to say they represented a lost opportunity.

In the end, this book does explore its thesis. Unfortunately, I think the book shows that the thesis isn't worth taking much farther. Is it helpful for a historian to understand the basic principles of economics? Yes. But will they be a primary guide to understanding past actions? Based on these examples, no.

The Death and Rebirth of a Laptop

2009-08-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Chronology of An Ordeal

Over the last 2 1/2 weeks, I've dealt with dropping my MacBook Pro and the various fallout from that. I'm writing down the full experience, for that cathartic "getting over it" benefit -- that way, this can be my last post on the topic!

Aug 11 afternoon

While seeing "Up" at the Kabuki Theater in SF, my MacBook falls out of my backpack from a height of about 3 feet. The person behind me squealed as it was happenning, so I turned around in time to see it happen. It was very depressing. In order to avoid thinking about it during the movie, I didn't test it at all at that point.

Aug 11 evening

Got back to hotel, verified something was Very Very Wrong. The machine was still awake and I could activate various apps, but they all went into wait cursor state.

Aug 11 evening 2

In order to connect to the rest of the world while the Mac was on hiatus, I went to Best Buy in San Francisco and bought a netbook (Eee PC in particular). For $300. Incredibly cheap. Since planned dinner didn't happen, I spent much of the evening installing Firefox/Pidgin/etc. The trackpad's buttons are *incredibly* irritating -- the left mouse button sticks unless you imemdiately push a little on the other side.

Aug. 13

On the plane back to Tokyo, I realize that since I bought this MacBook Pro at SIGGRAPH 2006 at Boston, it is exactly two weeks out of extended warranty. Hah hah hah, isn't that funny.

Aug. 14

evening Make appointment with Apple Store for Sunday morning.

Aug. 16

Off to Labi in Shibuya, bought a Bluetooth adapter for the Netbook. This thing is hilarious, it's literally the size of your thumbnail. It worked flawlessly: XP recognized it immediately, and I could then pair the EeePC with the wireless keyboard and mouse I used with my laptop. Using the mouse meant I didn't need to use the incredibly annoying trackpad button on the EeePC, eliminating the biggest reason to hate the thing.

Aug. 16

The Geniuses at the Apple Store confirm that indeed my hard drive is dead. They have two pieces of good news: the first-level diagnostic at least say everything else is fine; and, hard drive replacement is only Y35170 (about U$350). There's also a kind of ironic piece of news: my hard drive was 80GB, and Apple Service doesn't stock hard drives that small anymore. Would it be OK if I got a 200GB hard drive instead? Yes, that would be just fine. They took my number and said they'll call when it's done, which should be about a week.

Aug. 16-28th

An intense two weeks of catching up from SIGGRAPH and working frantically on the SIGGRAPH Animation Festival, all while holding down my regular job as well. After two weeks with the EeePC, I have pretty much all the software I would use on a Windows machine installed: Firefox w/ various plugins; OpenOffice; FileZilla; Pidgin; QuickTime/iTunes; Putty; etc. I actually tried to install XAMPP but it didn't work. Some extra things I learned about the EeePC in this time:

OpenOffice feels sluggish on it, although that's kind of true on any computer
Firefox 3.5 runs just absolutely fine. You can't tell the speed difference at all.
Not all videos I want to see play OK. YouTube at standard resolution does, but even downloaded videos don't play if they're bigger than half-size.
The small screen is OK, but does feel a little crowded in Google Docs Spreadsheet or Gmail. The fact that web apps don't use screen real estate quite as efficiently as local apps matters in those cases.
Speaking of Gmail, of course during this time I switched entirely to Gmail since I didn't want to store mail locally on the EeePC. I doubt I'll ever switch back, this having-all-your-email-online thing is pretty handy.

Really, I'm impressed with the EeePC. It cost me less -- even with the Bluetooth adapter -- than the repair on my MacBook, and it's a perfectly convenient way to connect to the internet. It's also really light & small. After this experience, I suspect that when I'm traveling, it'll usually be the Netbook and not the MacBook that's in the backpack, although for things like my class lectures, video editing, or 3D Apps the laptop still has a place in my computing life.

Aug. 28

Afternoon finally get a chance to call and ask what's happening with my laptop since they haven't called me. This leads to the single highly frustrating experience I had with Apple in this process: Call Center from Hell. I call the Apple Shibuya store, try to navigate the Japanese-language call system. It clearly says repair is 3, then Mac is 2, then repair is 3 again. 10 minutes' waiting on the phone (at least they gave an estimate; unfortunately the estimate isn't updated after the initial one). The guy finally gets on the phone and asks for my name.

Now, in Japan, being asked for my name on the phone is a problem. My name isn't an easy one even in English, and it's Japanese it's almost impossible to spell for someone over the phone. Japanese aren't that good at recognizing English letters on the phone to start with, and worse yet, my name has the dreaded letter 'v' in it. Japanese, even today, are not used to the letter 'v' (it's a complicated history based on how they usually imported English words into Japanese; under that system, all 'v's got changed, usually to 'b's). So, trying to get someone to recognize the letter 'v' in a spelled English word is just an exercise in futility. We tried three different times, and he was never able to find me in the database (undoubtedly because he was hearing one or two letters wrong).

After ten minutes of this, he thankfully suggested we switch to serial number instead. It's mixed letters and number, but no 'v', so it went much better. He then confirmed various different things with me, then announced he didn't have the information there, but would try to call and get it; would I please stay on the line? Another wait wait wait.

He came back with the piece de resistance. He couldn't find out what the status of my laptop was. To find out, I would have to, according to him, call the Apple Store in Shibuya.

I was so dumbfounded at this bit of call center idiocy that I had a hard time coming up with the appropriate Japanese for "I did, that's how I was lucky enough to be transferred to you." Oh, he said, he doesn't work at the Apple Shibuya Store. I had figured that out already, but telling me to start the process over again to get back to him wasn't going to help any, especially if it took another half an hour. I was pretty unhappy with all call center operators at this point even if they speak perfect keigo (Japanese polite speech).

Finally he put me on hold again (I wondered if he was going to transfer me to the manager for upset gaijin). When he came back, he told me to call the Apple Shibuya Store, and instead of choosing 3 for repairs, choose 5 for Other. Oh, that's obvious -- to call and ask about a repair, instead of picking the option for Repair, I should choose Other (admittedley, "keep hitting 0 until you're speaking to a person" is a good first order rule for call center interactions).

OK, I reluctantly hung up, called the exact same phone number again, and hit 5. About forty times. The nice person from the store came on, asked for my service ticket number (thankfully not my name) and confirmed in 5 minutes that my laptop was ready.

Aug. 28 evening

I go into the Apple Store to pick up my laptop (you don't need an appointment for pickups). It appears to be working fine, and I ask how to do the restore from my TimeCapsule backup. The guys shows me how one of the default screens in the install lets me migrate data from a backup. Sweet! (I think at the time) I have to work late that night on Animation Festival stuff, so no change to start the restore.

Aug. 29

I spend much of the day trying to get the restore to work. The process, which I ultimately repeated about five times, is:

Boot Mac
Wait for annoying marketing "welcome to Mac" movie to finish (you can't skip to end if you want the menu)
Click through choosing language, keyboard, etc.
Aha! Finally! Choose "transfer information from a backup"
At this point, you plug in/connect the TimeCapsule to the MacBook.
A list of one item appears; you click on the entry for your TimeCapsule
A wait of about one hour ensues while the screen is hung on "Checking contents of TimeCapsule"
During this wait, you have to keep coming by and poking the keyboard to prevent the Mac from going to sleep. If it goes to sleep, it concludes it can't use the backup, and you have to force power-off and repeat from Step 1.
Finally, the check is done and you can choose "Transfer". A dialog appears that has four item (they're something like "Users", "Files and Folders", something like that). It prints the size of the first two, then display "Calculating Size" next to the third and fourth.

I got to that point, I think, four times. I waited about 90 minutes the first time, and the bar still said 0%. I kept trying minor variations -- nothing changed. Finally, since I had a party to go to Saturday night, I set it off again about 8pm and left. Even when I got home, I just let it run.

Aug. 30 Morning

After 17 hours, it still said "0%". I concluded this just wasn't going to work. I didn't really want to go back to the Apple Store with my MacBook and my TimeCapsule, so I tried another tack.

Boot system
Insert OS install CD
Hold down option to force CD boot
Wait for screen to come up (about a minute)
Choose language, keyboard again
Ooh, look, among the options in the utilities menu is "restore disk from backup". Let's try that.
This utility has a quite different menu for picking a backup. It correctly displays that there are two backup images on the TimeCapsule. A little poking around lets me verify which one has the most recent (July 30) backup.
Pick that. It says, "Calculating size of backup". Uh-oh, I think here we go again.
But no, after about ten minutes it displays the size and offers a "Restore" button!
I press that. A progress bar appears. It's slow, but only expectedly so -- it claims the restore will take about 4 1/2 hours.
The restore actually takes only about 3 hr 45 min.
Exciting! Reboot, and we're done, right?

August 30 Afternoon

OK, I hit reboot. The good news is, it reboots! And, when it comes up, it even recognizably is my desktop, with my files on it! Hallelujah!

...but not quite. The system is "unresponsive" as in, clicking the Apple menu produces a 15 second wait before the menu actually appears. Every action is infinitely slow. It's so painful I can't even get to Activity Monitor.app to see what's going on, but after ten teeth-pulling minutes I get to a Terminal window and type top. A minute or so later a display appears. From the intermittant updates on the display, it looks like the machine is 60% idle, but something called 'mdserver' is taking up a fair amount of the time getting used.

Back to the "trusty Netbook" as I was now calling it. Google for mdserver, and find a hilarious site called "the great crusade against mdserver." It turns out it's the server process that indexes your disk "in the background" (that's funny) to enable Spotlight searches. One user described almost the same phenomenon I was seeing, and a snarky know-it-all replied, "Well, if you've changed a lot of files lately, this is expected." Hello, Apple? Locking up my machine after a restore... is not expected.

I was glad I looked things up before just killing the process, not because killing the process would hurt anything, but because the mdserver processes, like zombies, just keep coming back even if you kill them. That information saved me some extra frustration. OK, looks like the machine belongs to effing Spotlight for the next while... time to go to the gym.

August 30 Evening

When I got back from the gym a couple hours later, then played a few soothing rounds of Flower on the PS3 and taken a shower, in fact, Spotlight had decided it had consumed enough of my computer time and quiesced. But then GDClent-something was active. Oh right, once upon a time (when Spotlight really didn't work well at all) I installed Google Desktop Search. Off to hunt through System Preferences.app for the place to turn that off completely (only two places needed in the end), and finally my machine is responsive.

The network is still kind of slow, but that's not Apple's problem -- it happens whenever it's rainy here in Tokyo (we have a typhoon right now).

The Bottom Line

In the end, I got off pretty lightly. The fact my backpack was unzipped that day cost me:

$300 for a netbook
$15 for a netbook Bluetooth adapter
$350 for the disk drive replacement (but it's bigger now)

My backup as of July 30 ultimately worked, despite the above trevails.

The Good Things

Actually, the MacBook Pro is pretty tough. None of the electronics were bothered by the drop.
Time Machine is a really really good thing. All Mac users should be using it.
Apple Repair Service is effective, and not that terribly expensive. I've partially dissembled my MacBook before, and like most laptops I didn't want to go any farther. But call them, don't wait for them to call you.
The Netbook is really pretty effective. I doubt I'll take the laptop on the road much anymore.
I have learned to live by Gmail, and love it. The days of Mail.app are pretty much over for me.

The Bad Things

Apple's Voice Mail menus suck, just like every other large corporation's customer support.
The restore option in the default installer.... not so good. Anything that takes 4-8 hours per trial -> Boooooo.

Some people never learn

And now, off to install Snow Leopard!

Cool tricks with the Django admin interface

2009-08-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

At work we've been doing lots with the Django toolkit. One of the things we've been looking at lately is whether we can (without overriding lots of code) have a different admin interface for inserting an object versus updating an object. The answer: yes, trivially.

I don't have space for a full Django tutorial here, so I'll assume you know all the Django lingo. This example assumes you have a project set up, and within that you have an application called AssetVersions, and within that you have a class called Asset (all of which, I have, in fact). What if you wanted the insert interface to have the field 'name' and 'project', but wanted the update interface to have all fields except 'project'? (this makes 'project' an insert-time-only property).

In your admin.py for AssetVersions, create a separate AdminModel class for Asset, and add it to a separate instance of the AdminSite class. We'll stick that instance on admin.create_site for convenience:


import models
from django.contrib import admin
from django import forms

class AssetAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    exclude = ( 'project', )
admin.site.register(models.Asset,AssetAdmin)

admin.create_site = admin.AdminSite()

class AssetAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    fields = ( 'name', 'project', )
admin.create_site.register(models.Asset,AssetAdmin)

Then, in the urls.py for your project, override the url for the specific application and Model class to access the alternate AdminSite:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()


urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^', include('AssetVersions.urls')),
    url(r'^admin/(AssetVersions/asset/add/)',  admin.create_site.root),
    url(r'^admin/(.*)',                        admin.site.root),
)

Voila, the create and edit interfaces are now decoupled, and yet each AdminSite is pretty much largely ignorant of the other.

"If I want to see the future of gaming, I go to South Korea. If I want to see the past, I go to Japan"

2009-08-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

Very interesting interview with Rich Hilleman. Although his current title is Chief Creative Officer, he's in fact a die-hard programmer who used to run the training program for programmers at EA. He has been developing games for a long time, and is a hardcore gamer himself.

http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/08/26/eas-chief-creative-officer-describes-game-industrys-re-engineering/

I thought he nails a lot of the things that are changing in the business right now.

Saw "Up"

2009-08-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

Before I left the US last week, I saw Up in 3D at the Sundance Kabuki. It was awesome. That said, I now understand this post much better (warning: language and lots of it).

Awesome interface at SIGGRAPH 2009

2009-08-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

I just tried this about an hour ago, and it's totally awesome (and a little bit freaky):

I know it's popular in America but still...

2009-08-01T23:51:00.001-07:00

...the sign in Dallas airport that said, "Y'all roll on in for some Fresh Sushi!" still surprised me.

...fresh sushi in Dallas comes from where exactly?

Best Web UI Feature ever

2009-07-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

Yelp totally takes the cake for my favorite little bit of Web UI. In their site, they have a map widget in the right-hand column which autoscrolls to stay on the screen. I always find these autoscrolling web widgets annoying -- they slow down the page, and make the UI jumpy. Apparently I'm not alone, because Yelp's widget has a special checkbox on it:

Now that is appropriate UI text!

Discussion about 3D tool development and mainstream development

2009-07-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

In the course of a discussion on a SIGGRAPH alias about something else (Plone), someone asked the question below, and my response got kind of long. While I'm sure most people's eyes will simply glaze over (a perfectly justifiable response), it reminded me of many a Sunday morning conversation on a ridgetop above Marin, so I'm forwarding here.

------------------------

Gustavo's question:

This is Gustavo, I am working on the migration to Plone 3. Quick question, reading your post I found this line quite intriguing:

"develop web apps in Django all day at this point -- computer animation pipeline programming is converging with mainstream development frighteningly quickly"

I am quite intrigued about that, what sort of applications are you talking about? Do you have any pointers or links to pages that talk about it? I am really interested on it

Thanks,

Gustavo

---------------------
My answer:

Hi Gustavo,

Sure, here's what I was referring to. None of it is exactly public, so I can't point you to web pages or anything, but it's not exactly secret either.

The previous generation of CG pipeline tools was largely implemented inside of the DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools (Maya, Max, XSi, Modo, etc.). Those tools all have pretty robust scripting environments nowadays, so you can implement tools in some high-level scripting language with some UI toolkit available to you. And I mean, really pretty robust environments -- we use Django as a object-relational mapper for our code that runs in Python inside of Maya.

That's all good, but when you think about it, that's fundamentally implementing tools in the client/server approach that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. Those tools (including what Polygon was using up until this year, and the tools I implemented at EA before that):

connect to the data source via a LAN connection
use a storage-level protocol (usually SQL supplemented by file system access via CIFS/NFS)
require that the code be propagated out to the client machine

For sure there are huge advantages to the DCC integration, and it's still what I recommend for artist-facing tools. However, it has some problems that are becoming especially apparent as the computer animation production world becomes more outsourced and more collaboration-oriented:

the storage-level protocols are inappropriate to extend outside the company (you don't expose your MySQL or Samba/NFS server to the public net these days)
for a lot of the legitimate stakeholders in your project (notably project managers) the Maya interface is not a preferred means of use
updates to the code require that the updated code be pushed to the clients
those tools are not well-connected to the rest of the computing environment -- notably Excel. Getting data in or out required custom development in every case
the tools are very dependent on the client OS/environment

So, increasingly, we're putting a lot (not all) of our tools into a web-facing mode. While the files themselves are still saved via the standard Maya interface, we're moving our status-tracking apps (that keep track of the status of every model, animation, and rendered shot) to be web-facing. This means:

extending the app to be accessible from other companies is straightforward -- the security model for web-facing applications is very well-understood
you get to use modern development tools. There's nothing running inside any DCC that compares to the productivity of developing with Django/Ruby on Rails/ASP.NET inside Kodomo/Eclipse/Visual Studio
users have a lot more ad hoc means of data integration (when we haven't had time to code a custom query report for you, just copy-and-paste out of the HTML table into Excel)
apart from that, it's easy to integrate with community software (wiki/forum/etc) to pick up the benefits thereof
printing, etc. is free (I've never seen an in-Maya application that supported printing)
we're out of the software installation business, notably including not caring whether you run Windows or Mac OS X or Linux (different studios have different answers), which version of those OSes you're running, and largely not caring even which version of Maya you run

In a CG production environment, web-facing apps still have some drawbacks, notably:

you cannot send the actual 3D data over http -- it's just too heavy (a few hundred megabytes for a set is not unusual). So the metadata travels over http but the actual data can't
UI development on the web is harder than locally (IMHO)
in return for getting out of the software installation business, we have to deal with the browser wars. If it wasn't for toolkits like jQuery or YUI, it almost wouldn't be viable to do this

What made me comment on the convergence of application development is that most of the above comments (maybe absent the data volume) apply to almost any kind of custom tool development. I'm very firmly convinced that except for very data-heavy applications (video, 3D scenes) web-facing application development is a huge win.

Regarding the data-heavy stuff, we did something I think is pretty interesting this year. When you have multiple companies participating in CG production, you have to share the model assets, and as I said, those are fundamentally heavy, so you won't be uploading them over http. The traditional solution to this is production managers doing a lot of FTP or running around carrying hard drives between locations; the high-end solutions (which we couldn't afford) are the companies that sell you high-bandwidth shared workspaces that you can use online.

I implemented an interesting solution this year for version control of these massive data assets -- it's like a hybrid between CVS and git. There's a shared server holding the assets (accessible via SFTP) and a web-facing status-tracking application. It's like CVS in the sense that checkout is a global operation -- to be able to edit an asset, you need to check it out on the global web-facing database, either via the web interface or via a web services call from the in-DCC tool. However, it's like git in that the actual asset is assumed to take considerable time to propagate from the committing party to all parties. The artist uses an in-Maya tool to actually check in; that tool both copies the asset to the local file server, and updates the checked-out status on the global web-facing database. Then, it kicks off an asynchronous transfer of the asset data from the local file server to the shared SFTP server. Thus, while the metadata about checkin is instantly propagated via the central server, the actual asset transfer happens later. In the current implementation, downloading from the central server to the local file server is a periodic task kicked off once a day at each company. Of course, the checkout tool enforces the constraint that you can't check out an asset unless your local file server currently holds the version known to be the latest version, and no one else has that asset checked out on the central web-facing server.

Implementation-wise, by making some assumptions about the directory structure, we created a protocol that is atomic for both upload and download even when using nothing but standard FTP operations.

Again, putting this on the public internet is very straightforward: you're only dealing with http and SFTP security (we didn't even bother to use https although it wouldn't affect the architecture at all obviously). For the same reason, you can deploy this on any generic web server, it doesn't take a fussy installation or full virtual server -- just Apache and SFTP. For users, all of their file reads/writes are happening to the local file server, so they get a very high level of service. It uses a lot of disk storage -- but that's the cheapest element of the equation these days.

Sorry, that's probably way more answer than you wanted!

Take care Gustavo,

Leo

From some poking around I did for work: Animation Feature Market 2009

2009-07-06T04:26:00.000-07:00

All data from public sources as cited.

Digital Animation Feature Film U.S. Box Office Revenue (and Market Share) by Year
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/ProductionMethods/DigitalAnimation.php

Note that 2009 is incomplete.

2005 $553M
2006 $1,082M
2007 $1,179M
2008 $1,032M
2009 $463M

If I try to make an estimate for 2009 overall, it looks like it's going to be about the same as last year:

Monster vs. Aliens $195M (actual)
Coraline $75M (actual)
Up $300M (actual $263M to date)
Bolt (released in 2008) $4M (actual)
The Battle for Terra $1M (actual)
The Tale of Despereaux $7M (actual)
Ice Age 3 $170M (actual $68M in first weekend)
Ponyo $10M
Sita Sings the Blues $2M
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs $100M
9 $20M
Fantastic Mr. Fox $30M
Astro Boy $60M
Planet 51 $35M
The Princess and the Frog $100M
Total $1109M

Traditional animation is excluded from the above but is trivially small. Admittedley, Coraline's category is open to interpretation.

There's really nothing there that would allow one to analyze the effect of 3D screens across the whole market, but for individual films it appears to generate the majority of their revenue. Here are some quotes from www.boxofficemojo.com about some particular films and weekends:

Coraline conjured $18.9 million over the four-day weekend... Coraline's 3D gross was down only seven percent, accounting for an estimated $14 million of the four-day weekend at 1,060 sites. The tally stands at $39.1 million in eleven days, around 72 percent of which coming from 3D presentations. [February 17]

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs gathered $67.5 million in five days (55 percent of which from 1,606 3D venues). [July 5]

... with the release of Up. The adventure comedy swooped in with a $68.1 million start... the [3D] format accounted for $35.4 million of Up's gross. [June 1]

Animated Features Released to Theatres in the United States

by Jerry Beck (well-known animation historian)

2005 11 films
2006 21 films
2007 13 films
2008 20 films
2009 13 films known at this point (includes anticipated releases for remainder of year)

from http://www.cartoonresearch.com/movies2005.html.

2009-06-26T20:03:00.001-07:00

12:20 Today is the last day for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Computer Animation Festival submissions... watching the counts, answering emails... #

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Great Optical Illusion (courtesy of GMSV)

2009-06-25T10:10:00.001-07:00

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/24/the-blue-and-the-green/

Great Product Ideas on YouTube

2009-06-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

If you've ever had to deal with British standard plugs, you will apprecitate this a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6DvjKkGT6s

Awesome - Become a Socialist Hero

2009-06-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

Have your face painted into a Chinese propaganda poster

Not sure what I think about commissioning all these Chinese art school grads to paint the posters. But the idea is awesome!

2009-06-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

Many people wonder what it's like in the Japanese animation industry. While in the 3D part of the industry, where I work, things are slightly better, in general it's quite different from the impression westerners have of working conditions at Pixar or DreamWorks.

A recent Harvard Business School report focused on innovation in Japanese companies looks at three case studies: packaged software, mobile phones, and animation. Their comments about the animation industry are devastating, and accurate. Here are a few select pull quotes, but it's well worth downloading the original from their website to read for yourself.

The Japanese anime market was worth ¥234 billion (approximately $2.3 billiion) in 2005 in revenues.

That is to say, the entire anime market in 2005 was smaller than the revenues of Uniqlo, a single Japanese clothing retailer. Anime revenues have been slowly shrinking, so in 2009 the comparison wouldn't even be close.

Toei Animation, the largest animation production company in Japan, had revenue of only ¥21 billion ($175 million). Whereas Disney and Pixar spend in excess of ¥10 billion to produce one anime movie; Japanese anime production companies’ average budget is ¥0.2-0.3 billion (Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is an exception: it invests ¥1-3 billion in one production). And while Japanese animes are omnipresent in global markets, Japanese anime production companies have virtually no international business presence.

Death of Newspapers, cont'd

2009-06-08T18:19:00.001-07:00

More good (if somewhat rant-y) words on the newspaper industry's accelerating their own decline:

The Newspaper Suicide Pact

The Great Japan Beer Festival

2009-06-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

I think Japanese beers taste just fine (especially with Japanese food), but they all taste virtually identical -- light lagers. Since I came to Japan, I've been on the lookout for more interesting beers comparable to American craft or microbrews.

It helped a lot when I found Ushi Tora in Shomikitazawa, which always has 17 microbrews on tap, many of them Japanese product. It turns out that although craft brewing started late in Japan, it has given rise to quite a number of local breweries. Those breweries came to show off their product at The Great Japan Beer Festival.

The festival format is that you pay a fixed fee to get in, receive a small memorial glass, and are then free to sample as much beer as you like. The event lasts four hours, so if you get there early your stomach (or alcohol tolerance) will probably run out before the time does.

The Tokyo version was held in the Ebisu Garden Hall (ironically next to the Tokyo headquarters of one of the big three generic breweries) and it was packed -- in fact, the single worst thing about the event was that getting around the hall was brutally difficult. There was a place to buy food from Dean & Deluca up front, but other than that area the lines waiting for sample crossed all the way across the room. I ran into some people from Otaru and some people from Ushi-tora there, and generally had a pleasant couple hours before wandering back down the hill to home (fortunately the event is held ten minutes' walk from my house!).

I had quite a few tiny glasses of beer, but the best beers I tasted today were:

いわて蔵ビール / Iwate Zou Beer's IPA
From Gotenba Kogen Beer (御殿場高原ビール), both the IPA and the Aijiwai Ale
and the big winner,
箕面ビール / Minoh Beer's W-IPA: this was a "real ale", a phrase used in Japan for hand-pumped beers. It was delish!

Fantastic Photography Exhibit

2009-06-06T07:33:00.001-07:00

From now through July 5, 2009 there's an exhibit called "Press Photographer's Story" at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in Ebisu. It's a great show featuring 5 photgraphers who were all associated with the Asahi Shimbun during their professional careers. Most of the photographers worked during the Speed Reflex era, when press cameras were giant boxlike objects that openly stated the profession of the holder, and that's spirit of the exhibition.

Kouyou Kageyama / 影山　光洋 is the first photographer featured. He worked starting in the militaristic era of the 1930s, but he photographed his family constantly -- he was clearly paving the way for Craig Gilbert and An American Family a few decades later. However, his story is especially poignant as his third son lived only five years, and he collected the photographs taken over this time into a photo album called "Life with Yo-chan", excerpts from which were some of the most powerful photographs in the show.

Gen Ootsuka / 大束　元 is a contemporary of Kouyou's and the second featured photographer. He was heavily influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and would eventually organize the first shows of Bresson's work in Japan, as well as taking several famous shots in which Bresson appears. Despite the emphasis on the moment of the photo you would expect, his photographs are amazingly well-composed; balance, perspective and focus all coinciding with the perfect moment.

The postwar political photography of Senzou Yoshioka / 吉岡　専造, the 'photographs from high places' of Katsu Funayama / 船山　克, and the striking Vietnam War photography of Keiichi Akimoto 秋本　啓一 comprise the rest of the featured work. As a final section, the Asahi Shimbun archives yielded up a trove of photographs from the Japanese War in China in the 1930s, as well as the paper's coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

The exhibit is only 500 yen and takes an hour or two depending on your interest level. It's well worth it and recommended for all.

These are the Good Old Days

2009-06-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

In discussions of movies, I frequently take the usually-unpopular point of view that the era since I've been in the business (roughly since 1995) have been a relatively good era for movie in general. I was reminded about this today because I noticed that in the current weekend's Top 10 Box Office there are 3 movies rated higher than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes:

Up, 98%

Star Trek, 95%

Drag Me to Hell, at "only" 94%

I can't remember the last time that happened.

Usually, people respond with some variation of, "Oh, they made so many more great movies back in the 30s/40s/50s" (perhaps so, although I'd still dispute whether the number of great films per year was really higher: now we're operating from the benefit of picking things over) or more commonly, "But most films are such crap!" That is true, but in fact most films were always crap: Hollywood made a lot of movies back in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1937 Hollywood released 778 movies, a number that's never been equaled.

In particular, for animation I don't believe there has ever been a 20-year period to correspond to the time from 1989 to now. Not only does that include everything in the Disney revival (Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.) and the entire Pixar oeuvre, we get Henry Selick/Tim Burton, Wallace and Gromit, and occasional winners like Kung Fu Panda thrown in as well. Seriously, enjoy the bounty!

P.S. Very interesting statistics page on Wayne Schmidt's Box Office Page.

Flat Out the Coolest Flash Site I Have Ever Seen

2009-05-24T18:18:00.001-07:00

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

It doesn't just enable interactive play, it demands that you play with it. Anyone with an interest in music+interactivity should go experience it now (you may have seen it, looks like its been around since November).

As much as I love the site above, the site of the company that made it, HerraizSoto & Co., shows exactly why I hate Flash. Non-standard UI for no reason, inscrutable navigation, overly clever. But maybe if they keep producing things like the above once in a while...

Design Festa Link Roll

2009-05-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a few links/images for artists I saw at Design Festa today. I'll say that at least all these folks had something interesting enough to make me stop and chat a minute!

Unfortunately, the absolute coolest thing I saw at Design Festa I couldn't get a meishi from (there was no one at the booth and I didn't want to take their one and only remaining meishi). It was a piece with two aquariums that had various pumps in them creating currents in the water. Then, they put these "sea creatures" (I think they were made of strips of rubber folded and attached to themselves to look like fantastical jellyfish) in the aquarium, and as they got pushed around by the water it completely looked like they were living creatures.

From DesignFesta2008

O ½

Debo Factory

闇月創房 / Yamitsuki Soubou (cool handcrafted metal jewelry)

From DesignFesta2008

Hell's Kitchen (I really appreciated this woman because gave me a cool little fan which amused numerous other exhibitors throughout the day. Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to be working)

Moscow Kogei handmade Very cool highly articulated little wooden animals. The limbs are mostly attached with elastic bands so you can pose them up!

From DesignFesta2008

村上　萌 / Moe Murakami (very ironic that her name is Moe)alternate site

川室　鷹嶺 / Kawamuro Takane

Yorke

Microu

ミつの森のサーカス / Mitsu no Mori no Saakasu (lit. Three Forests Circus) event at Shimokitazawa's Space Sprout 17-22Sep

The ever-trusty B-Side Label from Osaka, my main source of stickers. Their stickers come with a two-year guarantee (to do what, stick?).

ミカジキ / Mikajiki Girlspunk Illustrator

Tosakamania

Dynabite

illustrator INAZUMA

Tyabo "One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests"

Roomscape Order-made furniture

Mitchy Castle

yuuki kikuchi (jojo)

O Project / Ruins Anthem Like the Land's End magazine I found last year, this is a project that goes around taking pictures of ruined and abandoned place in Japan. Totally fascinating, I got their special issue on 軍艦島 / Gunkannjima

がんばれコーポレーション (lit. Going All Out, Inc.) These guys were actually giving away DVDs of their latest video project, which even given the non-profit nature of most things at Design Festa was pretty impressive.

OXOXO "The inifinite creativity in oxoxo toybox"

VIRUS presents Gray Zone A group of seven friends who produce experiential art, alternate link

坂本　道夫 / Michio Sakamoto Totally, totally cool insects made by cutting and folding a single sheet of paper with no tape/tabs/etc

From DesignFesta2008

mofuwa She cut every one of her business cards out by hand (they have a series of scallops in one corner)!

Coffe Brown Design Stars The only way to explain it is that, it's coffee art.

marco

Cavity vol. 03 Event in Aoyama 21Jun with various live art etc.

Interest Rates, Koushin, and Japanese Place Names

2009-05-10T00:59:00.000-07:00

While the bursting of the real estate bubble is helping Americans rethink attitudes to real estate, I've wanted to write for awhile about the weird approach to real estate in Japan, how it's enabled by interest rates, and how it influences place names here (honest).

The image of many famous cities is associated with their traditional housing stock. Whether the sturdy brick buildings of Dublin, the mansard roofs of Paris, or the Victorians of San Francisco, traditional housing has a big influence on the ambience of a city.

Except here in Tokyo. When you first come to Tokyo you're impressed with the skyscrapers, subways, and the occasional truly idiosyncratic building, but if you actually go out looking for apartments here, like I did two years ago, you'll find the strangest thing: there is no such thing as housing more than about 25 years old. This is really not an exaggeration: my building was built in 1988 and is thus considered "old".

This isn't limited to housing: hotels, office buildings, factories, and so on are all torn down and rebuilt about every 20-25 years. The word they use for this is koushin 更新, which means 'renewal'. Interestingly, that same word is also used for updating software or for replacing the display in a department store.

Of course, I find this kind of sad: I like classic old housing, that's why I own a San Francisco Victorian. But after looking around awhile, I realized that sort of thing just isn't an option in Tokyo: either you get recent high-rise precast-concrete construction, or recent poorly insulated, noisy low-rise wooden construction. As much as I had visions of a wonderful Japanese-style apartment, I opted for the high-rise.

But apart from my emotional reaction, it seemed frighteningly inefficient to me: why in the world would you tear down a perfectly good 25-year-old building, and replace it with essentially the same thing? Right now the former Motorola office building down the street from our office is in the midst of being koushin-ed. They tore down the old 7-story office building, cleared the site, and are now building a new 7-story office building. This is quite normal for koushin: whereas in America we might think of tearing something down and building a bigger, taller building on the site, it's quite normal in Japan to tear down a building and build a new building of about the same size. It's just newer.

The builders will say this is because Japanese prefer new construction. Of course, most people in most countries prefer new construction: the question to me was, why is it pervasive here? The key answer lay in interest rates, combined with demographics.

Japan, as everyone has heard, is a very savings-intensive nation. Because of that, interest rates here have been lower than America for many decades, but it became even more true after the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in around 1990. Since then, the BOJ interest rates (the equivalent of Federal Reserve rates) have been around 0%. Even at the retail level, a normal home mortgage goes for 2-2.5%. In other words, if you can manage to qualify for a mortgage loan here, you won't pay much on it.

Secondly, the population of Japan is actually shrinking. Although the Japanese are very long-lived, the birthrate here is very low (second-lowest after Italy). The birthrate has finally caught up to the longevity, and each year there are fewer Japanese than the year before. Combine this with the fact that Japan does not permit large-scale permanent immigration, and you realize that the aggregate demand for real estate is also falling. This weak demand is most pronounced in rural areas, where real estate is becoming almost valueless, but it's true everywhere.

As you would expect given declining demand for something, that means long-term prices are weakening. Even in Greater Tokyo, the long-term expectation for the growth in value of a piece of real estate is zero. That is, if you've done well, 20 years from now your house or apartment will be worth the same as what you paid for it. If you're unlucky, it'll go down -- my boss lost 30% of his equity on the first apartment he ever owned.

What does this combination of low interest rates and long-term declining real estate prices mean? Well, first of all, it means you have no incentive to view real estate as in investment. You buy real estate to lower your rent (if an individual) or for the sake of the rental cash flow (if an investor). Either way, you look at real estate purely from a cash-flow point of view.

Secondly, Tokyo is famous for real estate being expensive. But mostly what's expensive here is land. The underlying land parcel for a building is expensive, but the building on it isn't considered to be worth much. Why? Well, it's a depreciating asset since everyone wants new construction.

So here's how that all connects to the koushin phenomenon. Let's say you're the owner of a 25-year-old apartment building. It's considered kind of drab, so you're not getting the highest rents in the neighborhood. Let's say the land is assessed at about $10M US, and the building at U$5M. If you've done a good job of marketing, our building is covered its expenses, meaning your getting about U$1M per year in total rent. Here's what the breakdown looks like for koushin vs. not koushin:

Don't rebuild: Your rents continue to slowly decline. You have no new capital expenditure to put in, though.

Rebuild: You have to borrow U$5M to build a new building, but at 2%, that only costs you U$100,000 per year. However, because your building will then be brand new, you can charge among the highest rents in the neighborhood.

So in other words, if spending U$5M to renew the building means you can increase your rents by 10%, it's a good economic deal for you. Given the prediliction of Japanese for new construction, I think 10% is way conservative: new construction easily commands a 20-30% premium here, I think.

But isn't there a third alternative? In America, the owner often choose to remodel: give the building a new lobby, replace all the elevators, repaint the walls. Why isn't that a good option? Well, let's say we could remodel for $1M. That would only then increase interest costs by U$20,000 per year, meaning you only need to justify a 2% rent increase. That's also economically compelling, but the question is, why do that when you could just rebuild? They're both a lot of trouble, and the rebuilding option can get you much higher rents.

For single-family houses, the only thing different from the above analysis is the timing. Most people don't tear down and rebuild their house while they're living in it. However, when the original family moves out, the same tradeoffs apply: a builder can buy the old house, raze it, build a new one, and get a higher price than simply reselling the existing house. Because most of the cost of buying a piece of property is tied up in the value of the land, not the structure, so rebuilding the house just isn't that big a deal economically.

So the unholy combination of declining real estate prices, low interest rates, and a market that prefers new construction (combined with the utter lack of historical preservation or zoning laws -- neither of which exist here) results in the total teardown and rebuilding of everything on the surface of Tokyo every 20-30 years. It's really shocking given how admirably efficient the rest of the society generally is.

And finally, how does this relate to Japanese place names? I noticed when I got here that a huge preponderance of the place names are temples and shrines (and a second major category are the names of elementary, junior high, and high schools). Eventually I realized why: those are the only buildings that aren't torn down regularly. Thus, it makes perfect sense to name a bridge, subway station, or intersection after a shrine, template or occasionally a school: those are the only things you can be sure will still be here in 30 years.

"Bad Videogame Movies" considered redundant phrase

2009-04-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

We had been talking this week at work about the difficulty of making good movies from videogames. Apropos to that, Time magazine has a feature on the Ten Worst Videogame Movies, which as they observe, "is like shooting fish in a barrel with a plasma canon."

My observation is that there is actually a specific reason videogame movies are hard to do, which has to do with a fundamental limitation of game characters. In linear narrative, any screenwriting book or teacher will tell you to demonstrate the personality of the characters to the audience by the choices they make. A well-written screenplay continually forces the character to make choices, and from those choices we learn more about who they are. At the beginning of the movie, those choices are small: what do they do after work? Does he remember to buy flowers for his girlfriend? In a well-written screenplay, the choices both become harder to make and larger in consequence as the movie goes on. But the point is, the character is defined by the choices they made.

In a videogame, particularly for the main character, the choices that occur during the game are typically made by the player. Thus, nothing about the character can be defined by those choices. Typically in a videogame, the key choices that have made the character who they are, were all made prior to the beginning of the game. For a game to be fun, the choices made during the game need to be up to the player, meaning they can't define the character since every player plays differently; or, there have to be no meaningful character-defining choices made at all, and the player simply focuses on skills. The second one is actually more common, as it's much easier to develop. Either way, the actions taken by the character in the game cannot define who that character is, as far as the overall property is concerned.

Thus, almost all videogame characters fail the "of course he would" test. With a well-drawn movie character, you should know (by the end of the movie) how they would respond to a whole range of moral dilemnas, whether you saw them face that particular situation or not. Would Luke Skywalker lie on his resume to keep his job, at the expense of a co-worker? Of course not. Would Han Solo? If the money was good!

But can you project that on to most videogame characters? Almost all videogame characters are known to us from the following: their boss/organization/syndicate gives them a job to do. It's hard and there are complications. If we play the game long enough, we finish it. We don't get a chance to learn much about their moral dilemnas because either we're busy shooting aliens or because we rather than they make the choices. Would Lara Croft flirt with a friend's boyfriend? Well, how we would know, it doesn't come up much when killing bears with a pair of pistols.

Anyway, none of this proves that it's impossible to make a good movie from a videogame, it's just that even very well-known videogame characters don't give screenwriters much to go on if they want to craft a story. Personally, my guess is that the good videogame-based scripts (surely there will be some someday) will start by taking the world of the videogame and finding a side story in it; the main characters, the Marios, Laras, and Sonics of the world, are of necessity too shallow to work well.

...but they do have taste

2009-04-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Economist's obituary this week was for Helen Levitt, a great photographer in the Henri Cartier-Bresson mold. I was lucky enough to encounter some of her photographs when I was in grad school in Boston, but most people have never heard of her. Featuring her or others worthy but not especially known shows the good side of erudition.

The Economist quote #1

2009-04-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

From the April 4th issue's leader on "The Rich Under Attack". This is probably more delicious if you know just how pro-business the Economist usually is.

Yet, even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as this one has to admit that there was something rotten in finance: the basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risktakers are allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it all. Hence the anger.

"Gang", "King".... whichever.

2009-04-18T03:11:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "Gang Leader for a Day," by Sudhir Venkatesh. If you read "Freakonomics" you'll remember the chapter called "Why do Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers?" in which they looked at the economics of the drug trade. Most of the data they analyzed there came from a Indian-American grad student who had spent time in the Chicago housing projects hanging out with a drug gang. Sudhir Venkatesh is that grad student, and this book is his autobiographical account of the five years or so of his life that he spent around the Chicago housing projects, primarily in the company of "J.T." and his branch of the Black Kings drug gang.

This isn't really the kind of book you read to get a grand conclusion, all tied up and made clear; but it's a gripping journal of his life inside a world I really don't know much about. There are a ton of fascinating and harrowing moments along the way (such as when he witnesses, and the Black Kings are on the receiving end of, a drive-by shooting), and there is a sense of closure to the book, since updated housing policies catch up with the Robert Taylor projects by the end of the book (as they have, thankfully, to most high-rise projects in San Francisco).

However, Sudhir spends a lot of the time in the book trying to understand what the tenants think of the gang, and ultimately that provoked an interesting realization for me. J.T. sees the gang as beneficial, keeping order and establishing the boundaries in the projects, since for all practical purposes the police in that era did not come to the projects. At one point he declares, "there is no difference between the gang and this building." Of course, Sudhir wonders, given the gang's predilection for violence and drug abuse, whether the tenants really see it that way.

He attempts to branch out at one point and interview other residents about the economic tricks they use to survive in order to get some of that perspective. The mechanics who fix cars on the street, the woman who runs a candy store out of her apartment: he chronicles many of their adventures in ghetto-scale entrepreneurism. He's surprised by how much both J.T. and the building's tenant association president, Ms. Bailey, are interesting in hearing him retell these fascinating stories.

Of course, that interest is because they (in various combination) extract money from all such activities. Sudhir's information allows them to tighten up quite a few places where they weren't extorting as much money as they could. As one of the mechanics says angrily to Sudhir afterwards, "Man, J.T. is all over these n-----s."

On the one hand, this incident does point out that the combination of the gang and the tenant association are effectively the government of the housing project: they levy 'taxes', the gang is responsible for physical security, and the tenants' association for what passes for social services in that brutal environment. But they have the characteristics of corrupt government as well: the gang members who abuse their women get no punishment because of their position in the gang; the money is skimmed off for the organization.

The realization I had was that this is the form of government not just of brutal Chicago housing projects, but that in practice it was the form of government practiced in much of medieval Europe. As much as afterwards, all kings, dukes, earls, and lords cloaked their actions in the language of divine right, that level of government came from physical domination: the strongest, meanest guys got together, won some battles with other strong, mean guys, and as a result established the local government. If you read about the Welsh Marcher Lords or the events of English interregnums as fictionalized so well in Ken Follet's "The Pillars of the Earth," you can find that that pattern was operating even in relatively civilized England at various points: the people best-organized at wielding the violence and keeping the discipline amongst their thugs take over.

Sadly, seeing those parallel made me wonder whether, at a certain point between subsistence and prosperity, this kind of organization is a spontaneous feature of human societies. Happily, we can rise (and most current societies have risen) above this, but seeing the similarities between 12th century thugs and southside Chicago ones makes both of them seem like slightly more than just anomalies of their respective historical periods.

Great Rube Goldberg

2009-04-13T18:56:00.001-07:00

On a Dutch shopping site

A good article about the newspaper meltdown

2009-04-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

Not that we really need a lot more of these, but...

Death a la Carte at Big Money

Sakura, sakura

2009-04-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

Another fantastic year of cherry blossoms along the Megurogawa (where I live)!

From Sakura 2009

Quaint 50s-style marketing alive and well in Japan

2009-04-03T18:20:00.001-07:00

On the side of a poster stand near Meguro station:

From Tokyo

Fun Words You Might Find on a Japanese W-2

2009-04-03T06:13:00.000-07:00

It's April, and apart from Cherry Blossoms that means I have to pay my American taxes! In my mood of helping those who live in Japan, here's another vocabulary post, this time "Words you might find on your Japanese pay stub":

勤務状況＝きんむじょうきょう＝work situation
出勤日数＝しゅっきんひすう＝days worked

支給＝しきゅう＝payments
基本給＝きほんきゅう＝base pay
通勤手当＝つうきんてあて＝commuting allowance
通常外支払給＝つうじょうがいしはらいきゅう＝extraordinary payment
支給合計＝しきゅうごうけい＝total payments

控除＝こうじょ＝deductions
健康保険＝けんこうほけん＝health insurance
介護保険＝かいごほけん＝nursing insurance
厚生年金保険＝こうせいねんきんほけん＝welfare annuity insurance
雇用保険＝こようほけん＝unemployment insurance
所得税＝しょとくぜい＝income tax
地方税＝ちほうぜい＝local taxes
家賃＝rent
差引不足税額＝さしひきふそくぜいがく＝deducted amount of insufficient taxes
控除合計＝こうじょごうけい＝total deductions

計算資料＝けいさんしりょう＝calculation data
会社保険料計＝かいしゃほけんりょうけい＝company insurance amount
非課税支給額＝ひかぜいしきゅうがく＝tax-exempt allowance
課税対象額＝かぜいたいしょうがく＝amount subject to taxation
振込支給額＝ふりこみしきゅうがく＝bank transfer amount
現金支給額＝げんきんしきゅうがく＝cash payment amount
差引支給額＝さしひきしきゅうがく＝deducted payment amount

Hangin' at the Love Sculpture

2009-03-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

There's a reproduction of the famous Philadelphia LOVE sculpture near Shinjuku. It's a popular meeting place, not least because of the unusual circular traffic light fixture in front of the sculpture. This couple ambles past on a chilly night.

From MyokoSuginohara-Mar2009

The Japanese Face of Abandonment

2009-03-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

It took me quite a while to tune into it, but there are a lot of abandoned building in Tokyo.

The Japanese abandoned building movement was pioneered by the irregularly-published magazine Land's End, which I was lucky enough to meet the publishers of at Design Festa. But, once I started watching closely, there are abandoned buildings all over Tokyo. There's a huge former corporate reasearch center sitting empty right near Hiro-o station, and closer to home, there's an abandoned junior high school just down the street from my house:

It's very Japanese and all: the place isn't overflowing with garbage or anything. In fact, that's what makes abandoned buildings relatively hard to spot in Tokyo: they look a lot like any other building, except no one goes in or out.

The sign says, basically, "Keep Out."

It's not hard to figure out what's going on with this particular building: the Japanese birthrate is incredibly low (only Italy is lower among developed countries), and so there's just no need for a lot of former schools. And this is in suburban Tokyo, which is doing relatively well in terms of number of children: smaller and more rural areas are really lacking in kids. So, at some point, they just decided to lock the place up and hope more kids show up someday. It'll probably be this way for 20+ years.

You deserve a hot dog today... and it's what's for breakfast!

2009-03-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

McDonald's Japan has a new ad campaign here. They really don't impact on my life much (I'm not a big fast food eater), so the last campaign (the introduction of the Quarter Pounder to Japan) didn't really catch my eye. But this one is too good to ignore: they're introduced the McDonald's hot dog:

Better yet, it's (wait for it)... a breakfast food! That's right, the hot dog isn't on the normal menu, it's on the breakfast menu, available only until 10:30am. So the next time you wake up in the morning, run on over to MickeyD's for a hot dog! Who needs cereal anyway.

Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"

2009-03-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

This started as reactions to my Facebook status, but my response got a little long, so I moved it here. In an attempt to, as Dan said, categorize my discontent, here are my ripostes to several sections of the book.

The Hockey Example

In the initial hockey-player chapter, Gladwell points out a huge statistical anomaly associated with top-end sport figures in many sports and countries: their birthdays are not randomly scattered throughout the year, but rather concentrated in a 3-4 month period. His theory is that when elite teams are first formed (for the sports and countries in question, around the age of 10), the fact that the kids born just after the eligibility cutoff date are older and therefore bigger gives them an advantage. This initial advantage is maintained all the way through the school experience (since it's judged by cutoff date) and is strongly reinforced by the extra training, coaching, and practice received by the athletes chosen for those initial elite teams.

This all seems pretty reasonable, and he argues his case well; as he says, kids born in the second half of the eligibility period have a much lower chance of getting into elite teams in sports and countries where those teams form early, such as Canada's hockey leagues.

But... so? At one point Gladwell states, "If we took coutermeasures such as running hockey leagues twice a year, Canada would have twice as many top-level hockey players." That statement is a stunning example of what he later calls lack of practical intelligence!

No, we wouldn't have twice as many top-level hockey players; the number of such players is by definition constant. It's limited by the number of elite junior hockey teams, the number of elite junior hockey coaches, etc. There are only be one champion, no matter how many compete. So, running a second set of hockey leagues (which would lead to playing hockey all summer, by the way) wouldn't affect Canada's supply of hockey stars at all - it would, logically, raise the level of skill of those stars slightly.

But how much would it even do that? As Gladwell points out, the initial difference among players is very slight; most of the reason hockey stars are better than lower-level players is the additional coaching, support, and practice time. Since those effects wouldn't change, the huge overhead of adding a second season would only address inequity within that small initial difference. In practice, the overhead of running the alternate leagues would probably dilute the effectiveness of coaches and training, and the net result might well be a lowering of the level of play at the end of the program.

Gladwell states that hockey is not a meritocracy because of its prejudice towards people born in the first part of the year. Actually, all meritocracies have rules, and people are advanced on the basis of those rules. For example, the Chinese mandarinate favored those whose minds were well-suited to rote memorization, and systematically discriminated against those who practiced innovative thinking. That may have been bad for the country in the long run, but it was still a widely recognized meritocracy.

Gladwell is correct that the rules for Canadian hockey contains clauses that favor those born in the first few months of the year. That doesn't make it invalid, or not a meritocracy.

The Self-made Man Story

Gladwell has a strong aversion to the story of an individual succeeding on their own merits. In the first chapter, Gladwell baldly declares that "In 'Outliers', I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work." Instead, he shows how personal computer entrepreneurs of the late 1970s, American industrialists of the 1830s, his own grandmother, and New York Jewish lawyers of the 1930s were all born at the right time and place to have the best chance of success in their chosen field. He writes, "What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities."

I read through his examples and stories and come away with the utterly opposite conclusion. To me, what distinguishes all of the people he examines, very notably his maternal grandmother, is their individual actions and drive, and the way they took advantage of their opportunities. The individuals he studies were demographically advantaged for various reasons; there were accidents of timing and history that gave them opportunities not available to their peers just a few years in either direction. In fact, virtually every person he studies is quite aware they were lucky for their opportunities and says so.

But does that means what distinguishes them is their luck? I have been around elite schools for a fair portion of my life, I've come to realize that a lot of people have pretty amazing, lucky opportunities. Few of us take advantage of those to achieve stunning levels of success (and many fail to even achieve moderate levels of happiness). While those of us who have worked around Steve Jobs or Bill Joy may have either liked or disliked the experience, few will assert that these are ordinary individuals, even if ranked among those with the opportunity to attend elite schools.

In the end, it probably comes down to the question, "distinguishes them from who?" If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from a peasant tenant farmer in Laxmangarh village in India, you would have say it was that Oppenheimer was born into a middle-class family, and that he was smart. If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from the tens of thousands of other smart, middle- or upper-class men who graduated from college the same year he did, Gladwell's explanation no longer suffices.

The Practical Intelligence behind the Self-Made Man Story

An even bigger thing I think Gladwell misses is the question of why we are fascinated by the "Horatio Alger" stories that surround many of these people (or to use his phrasing, why we focus on what these people are like, rather than focusing on the time, socioeconomic class, and place of their birth). The reason that we humans focus on those aspects of the stories is simple: we can't change our birth year, birth country or native culture. We can only change our future behavior.

Knowing that to be a billionaire Silicon Valley success story I need to have been born five years earlier than I was is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Knowing that had I been born in China I would likely have learned to count earlier in my childhood is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Etc., etc. I believe the reason we're more interested in stories about successful people's personal habits, business strategies, and so forth is fundamentally because those elements have potential applicability to our own lives; knowing that their junior high school had access to free timesharing terminals, or that they were born in a certain year, has no applicability to our future choices.

On the other hand, knowing that in his senior year of high school, when Bill Gates got an opportunity to go onsite for three months to write commercial software at Bonneville Power Station, that he grabbed it and managed to talk his high school administration into classifying this as "independent study," is valuable. It provides a lesson in taking advantage of opportunities even if they seem impossible.

The Unasked Question about the 10,000-hour Rule

One of the sections of the book I liked somewhat better is the section about the 10,000-hour rule: the idea that true mastery of a skill requires 10,000 hours spent honing that skill. I haven't specifically run into this number before, but it certainly resonates with me.

However, this chapter, especially the section about music students at Berlin's Academy of Music, leaves the most important question unanswered. For review, the basic finding was that the teacher's evaluation of the student's talent level correlated nearly perfectly with the total number of hours the students had spent practicing their instrument: students evaluated the highest had spent 10,000 hours; students in the next stratum 8,000 hours; and the lower-ranked students 4,000 hours.

Gladwell then makes the classic statistics mistake of equating correlation with causality: he assumes that the reason the top-ranked students are top-ranked is because of their playing time. In fact, he never asks why those students got the most playing time.

In fact, as anyone who's played an instrument and especially anyone who's been forced to take music lessons they didn't enjoy can attest, a very plausible reason is that when you're good at something, it is usually more intrinsically enjoyable. It was true from the time I began to program that I was better at programming than virtually everyone around me. Thus, my intrinsic rewards for programming were higher than virtually anyone else in my peer group, and thus I spent more time programming.

Music is an incredibly clear example of this: while probably anyone can learn a certain level of achievement in music, unless you intrinsically enjoy it, you will plateau quickly. The realization that actually, the intrinsic quality of the person drives how much time they put into their endeavor seriously undercuts Gladwell's argument that the individual qualities of the person are unimportant.

The Good Parts of the Book

The parts of Outliers that I liked the best, and the places where I think it's recommendations have the most weight, is when it veers closest to public policy. It's hard to look at the results in part 3 of the "Marita's Bargain" chapter and not conclude that more school is an unequivocally good thing for children from low-income backgrounds. I find it very hard to argue with the cultural background theory described in the "Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes."

Though I don't personally like the fact that the "concerned cultivation" parenting style discussed in part 3 of "The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2" is so much better-suited to our modern world than the older parenting style, this isn't the first book I've read explaining it's advantages.

In Conclusion

In the end, I think the biggest reason the book doesn't sit well with me was its avowed ambition to prove that the personal explanations of success don't work. I found that on the contrary it showed just how important personal drive and ambition are in making use of cultural and demographic advantages. I don't have an issue with the idea that personal explanations of success are insufficient, that we also have to look at cultural backgrounds and demographics as well as the individual to achieve a balanced understanding, but Gladwell aims for more than that.

I think nothing expresses the limits of Gladwell's thesis more than the story of his own grandmother and mother. Gladwell describes the various steps by which his maternal family climbed up the social ladder in Jamaica, with his grandmother taking many steps which eventually propelled his mother and aunt to college overseas. In particular, he notes that the establishment of the all-island scholarships which enabled his mother to attend an elite high school came in 1941, and that were she just a few years older the scholarships wouldn't have been available.

And yet, everything about this story suggests that the key actor in it is not the parliament's establishment of the scholarship, but the grandmother's will to give her daughters every possible measure of advantage. His maternal grandmother is described as a force of nature, and while I have no doubt that the all-island scholarships were a boon for his mother, I also am left certain that the grandmother would have found some other way to get her daughters a high school education had the scholarships arrived too late. To me, this seems to fly in the face of his central argument in the book.

Convergence is Over

2009-03-04T17:38:00.001-08:00

As a Media Lab alum, I have to follow this stuff at least a little bit, so I appreciated Paul Graham's post:

Why TV Lost

Sleeping in Japan

2009-02-17T16:28:00.001-08:00

My friend Karen asked this question, and I thought the answer might be interesting to others, so I'm reposting the answer here.

On Feb 17, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Karen wrote:

Is this true? People sleeping in public like this in Japan? Seems so weird when the idea behind about leaving your shoes at the front door of a house is to keep from tracking in the dirt from the ground outside.
http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1096/Japan+Public+Sleeping.html

Leo replied:

Well, here in Tokyo the only people sleeping on sidewalks most of the time are the homeless. That said, yes, seeing people asleep is much more normal here than in the west.

The biggest category is sleeping on the train. To understand that, you have to remember that in Tokyo train commutes that take 1.5 to 2 hours each way are considered quite normal. Given that the Japanese also work reasonably long hours (this sure isn't France), where do they get the time? Answer: they sleep less at home. And, when you're only sleeping 4-5 hours a night at home, it's important to use your train time for extra sleep. Everyone here has had the experience of the person sitting next to you on the train falling asleep on your shoulder (certainly, everyone with broad shoulders has had this experience). So, seeing somebody asleep on the train isn't considered noteworthy.

The next biggest category I've seen is sleeping at the office. Of course, some of this is because of the reason above. However, another reason for sleeping at your desk has to do with the Japanese concept of work: a typical Japanese feels compelled to be at work for about the same amount of time everyone else at work is at work. My friend Beth came up with the perfect phrase for this: in a Japanese company, it's not about how much you get done; it's about how much you are seen to be working.

Because of that, there will be times when a Japanese person feels compelled to stay at work, even though they're so tired they realize they're not going to get anything done. And thus, sleeping at their desk is a rational response. It's very widespread here: the first time I ever visited an Anime studio, I came into a room of about 20 desks, and three people were full hard asleep with their heads plopped down on their drawing table. "Oh wow," I said, "you must have just had a big deadline."

"No," my host replied, "it's actually a pretty light week, why do you ask?"

In terms of the pictures on that blog page above, the traffic monitor asleep on his scooter, or the couple asleep on the bench in the park are just extensions of sleeping at one's desk. Of course, the other big difference in Japan is that there's basically no crime, so you can fall asleep in public without worrying your wallet will be gone when you wake up. The people asleep on benches are probably catching a few lunchtime ZZZs.

Last but not least, and most relevant to the people asleep on the ground, Japan has an incredible tolerance for public drunkenness. The first time I ever visited Japan, I got to my hotel about 11pm and decided to take a walk. Unbeknownst to me, the street I was walking down led towards one of the major train stations where people need to catch the last train of the day (for their two-hour commute home). The street was filled with drunken Japanese businessmen staggering towards the station. There was a group of three where the middle guy was being literally carried by his buddies on either side. I saw several people casually taking a leak at the side of the road, and evidence of numerous people getting sick as well. And it was a weekday night!

If people are in that condition and not in the company of friends, they may well find themselves asleep on a piece of sidewalk somewhere (the guy asleep with his briefcase at the bottom of the stairs is a classic). While that blog would make you think it's extremely common, I find that while it's not unusual to see drunk people asleep on the sidewalk, it's not an every-night kind of thing (unlike sleeping on the train, which is very normal). Perhaps in southern Japan where the climate is milder things are different?

Anyway, yes, in general I see people out in the world asleep here more often than I did in America! Probably a longer answer than Karen wanted...

iPhone Japan Upgrade - Address Book problems

2008-12-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

I just upgraded from a different Softbank phone to an iPhone here in Japan (and so far, I love it). One glitch I encountered that may bite other people, though, is the character encoding of the address information file.

Softbank, if you ask, will upload all of the address information from your old phone to the Softbank website, where you can download it as a CSV file. First off, you have to do that from the Japanese-language website, so it's not trivial for English readers: go to http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/iphone/sync_memory/ and click on the button near the bottom that says "今すぐ移動する".

This will take you to a login screen. Although I had a printout of the username and password from the Softbank store, that's not the username/password it wants. You should have received a message on your phone which contains the username/password you actually need. Once you enter that, you can download your information as a CSV file.

The basic idea here is a good one: now that you have a CSV file, you can import those contacts to your Address Book application on Mac OS X, and from there you can sync with the iPhone. The problem I encountered is that the file from Softbank is in Shift-JIS character encoding, but the Address Book app on Mac OS X wants UTF-8 encoding. If you try to directly import it, you'll get garbage (or at least, I did).

There are probably some utilities that can convert it (on Windows, I would have used SakuraEdit). But, since I know Python, I just used a tiny python script:


% python

import codecs
# SAB_20081228.csv should be changed to whatever name you downloaded
# from Softbank
f = codecs.open("SAB_20081228.csv",'r','sjis')
fo = codecs.open("SAB_20081228_utf8.csv",'w','utf8')
fo.write(f.read())
f.close()
fo.close()

Now I could import the converted file to Address Book and I was off and running!

And the App Store is really cool.

Only in Japan

2008-12-21T05:29:00.000-08:00

So today I took a long bikeride up the Tama river, turned back at Noborito and followed the Odaku-sen back to Shimokitazawa. At Chitose-funabashi, I saw a form of entertainment that surely must be limited to Japan.

They were having an opening ceremony for the new "hiroba" (wide place), and there was a stage with a performer and a crowd of a couple hundred standing around (like a lot of suburban stations on weekends there were also an assortment of vendors selling various things from stalls). The performer's main gig was... he could imitate (very well) the announcements that you hear in trains and train stations when you travel in Japan.

"doa ga shimarimasu" -> The doors are closing
"densha ga mairimasu" -> The train is arriving
"kore wa nagano yuki joetsu shinkansen" -> This is the Joetsu Shinkansen bound for Nagano
etc.
etc.

Sometimes he just sort of riffed on these, other times he would simulate a complete journey (he took everyone on the Shinkansen to Osaka at one point). For the shinkansen especially, he threw in sound effects of the Shinkansen at various speeds. He could do both male and female voices, although he mostly did male; he could also copy the English announcements you get on the Shinkansen and other major lines.

The crowd applauded politely after each segment. Sorry to those of you dying to go see him yourselves, I didn't get his name ;-).

Coolest Projector since 1990

2008-11-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

In 1990, I picked up a tiny Sony video projector which was the hit of parties for years. TI has the new new, though:

TI Pico at Engadget

Sold through the iTunes store, natch.

Design Festa Recap

2008-11-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

On my website. Enjoy!

Cheap Thrills

2008-11-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

I feel guilty for enjoying these trailer recuts as much as I do.

TS2 + Dark Knight

Beware of Peacock

2008-11-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

I was in Singapore in early October and saw this awesome warning sign. I have to admit it's not something that would have occurred to me to watch out for!

From Singapore

Click to see larger version at Picasa.

Japan is a place where

2008-11-01T08:54:00.001-07:00

you can stand in the same location *, look one way and see this ultramodern scene:

From Tokyo

then turn around and see this one:

From Tokyo

* Meguro Atre

Moving Video

2008-10-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA

Hee Hee Nice Palin Video

2008-10-21T07:43:00.001-07:00

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=9nlwwFZdXck

Ghibli Layout Exhibition

2008-09-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Today I went to the Studio Ghibli Layout Exhibition at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, curated by my friend Tomoe Moriyama. It was awesome! They had 1300 pieces of layout art from Studio Ghibli, representing all the movies.

Most of the exhibit was, not surprisingly, forbidden to photograph, but at the end they had several *huge* reproductions of Layouts:

From Tokyo

(look at the floorboards to get an idea how big these were)

From Tokyo

This was the line to get into the the gift shop at the end. Talk about lost sales!

From Tokyo

They had a really cool activity at the end of the tour. They handed out little round paper stickers, and there was a table of black markers, so you could make your own "kurosuke" (from the dust bunny spirits in the movie My Neighbor Totoro).

From Tokyo

And then they had a lot of wallspace to put your korosuke up on:

From Tokyo

I mean, really a lot of wall space:

From Tokyo

This was a fantastic exhibition and a real opportunity for any Ghibli fans. Unfortunately, today was the last day, so you won't be able to go again! If you do get a chance to get one of the catalogs, though, go for it: it is fantastic. I'm not sure yet, but I think it actually has all 1300 layouts from the show.

Hyperrealistic painting site

2008-09-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

http://oekyo.org/06/

This site has painting of various qualities, and it looks like they were mostly done by copying photographs. But the cool thing is that you can watch the painting get made -- the software they use can do an auto-time-lapse of making the image. Click on the little button above each image that says ★動画 and, if you have Java installed, you can watch the painting get painted.

My favorite was DIR EN GREY, #2507.

Language Geeking - Equivalent of Japanese Counters in English

2008-09-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

One of the hardest things for a native English speaker studying Japanese (or Chinese) is the idea of counters, or as linguists call them, classifiers.

In Japanese when counting things, you can't just use the number: you have to append a counter to the number to refer to that thing. You can't see, "As for pencils, I had three"; you have to say, "As for pencils, I had three-long-thin-things". This is a generic rule, with lots of different counters for different kinds of things, which need to be memorized.

In fact, as Japanese teachers like to point out, we do have counters in English, but they're quite rare. The famous example is "sheets" for paper. You can't have "one paper", you have "one sheet of paper" (you can have one scientific paper, but that's a different use of the word paper). I recently realized that 'pair' is a counter for both pants and scissors; it functions exactly like 'sheet of paper' (and all of them are excellent analogies to how counters function in Japanese).

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's new book, "Words and Rules," and as you might expect from the most prominent linguist of this era, at one point he rattles off a whole list of English classifiers! I didn't want to lose track of it, so here it is.

blade of grass
piece of fruit (you can't have "two fruits")
strand of hair *
slice of bread
stick of wood
sheet of paper
head of cattle

* I think this is a weak example -- in the classic joke the customer says, "Waiter! There's a hair in my soup!" not "Waiter! There's a strand of hair in my soup!" I think people do routinely say "one hair", "two hairs" etc.

Do you need to characterize tactile pressure contact between mating surfaces?

2008-09-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Below is a message which is almost certainly the coolest piece of spam I've ever received.

Still, it's spam, so I wouldn't click on any of the links in it if I were you.

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Beach House Happiness

2008-08-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to maybe the coolest place I've been in Japan. My friend Yoko took me to the Blue Moon Cafe, a beach house out on the beach in Hayama, near Kamakura.

Beach house means it's not a real structure: it's a roof over the sand. In the case of the Blue Moon, it's actually done with bamboo for both the uprights and the roof (the more commercial beach houses near Kamakura are tin over a steel frame). Hayama is in general a lot less crowded and a lot less tacky than the more accessible beaches. I was there in the evening and it was raining, at some points intensely; but we just hung out underneath the bamboo roof.

Like the tourist season in Shonan in general, things are only happening during the summer. Blue Moon takes this to the full extent: it's only open in July and August, and the night we went was the next-to-last night for the year. It is seriously right on the beach, 20 yards from the surf. In addition to the bar/kitchen area and the stage, Blue Moon has a set of booths across the back of the beach house that range from selling hand-made locally-designed clothing, to promoting sustainable conservation measures, to a really good Chinese tea house.

Blue Moon has live music, dance, or other performances almost every night. Last night it was three guys who play traditional Okinawan music, with the lead musician and singer on sanshin, one guitarist (not visible in photo), and a multi-instrumentalist on the right who at various points played mandolin, violin, and even trombone! I really enjoyed hearing them, although I'm sure Okinawan folk music isn't for everybody.

The crowd at Blue Moon was great. For one thing, although it doesn't show in the pictures, in Japan there's effectively no drinking age and there are no laws about separating children from adults having a good time, so there were all sort of kids at Blue Moon running back and forth through the crowd and playing on the beach. And, the crowd was extremely friendly and mellow, lots of people said hi and we met a number of folks. There were a surprisingly large number of foreigners, which appears to be kind of true of Hayama and Shonan in general. However, they weren't the obnoxious foreigners that you sometimes find in Roppongi; it was more foreigners who seem to have settled into Japan for a bit and are comfortable there.

Blue Moon was a great experience and I hope to be able to get there for the 2009 version!

A Great Bit of Analysis, and Doomed to be Ignored

2008-08-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

This excellent article in the New York Times is about how the rich and poor fare under Republican and Democratic administrations.

But few outside the New York intelligentsia will read it, I suspect, for the article takes a fantastic lead ("New Study Confirms that under Republicans, the Rich get Richer and Poor Left Behind") and buries it under multiple layers of introduction that will drive away any but the most intellectual reader.

The headline is a question, implying that the issue is under debate. In fact, Bartels' book (which is what the article is about) is shockingly clear about the historical record that Republican administrations are bad for everyone but the rich.

The headline talks about history, which is one of the best ways to get rid of any mainstream readers (for better or for worse, most American audiences don't care about history; those that do, watch The History Channel). If this was an article about history, that would be fine, but it's not: this is actually an article about politics.

The first two paragraphs start out with a tour through history and end up at democrats vs. federalists. He doesn't actually get to the lead of the article until his fourth paragraph about the Great Partisan Growth Divide. My friend Bill Polson routinely sends around example of this new style of quasi-reporting from the LA Times. I don't know if it comes from new NY Times style guidelines or merely from the writers wanting to feel like they're prose stylists, but I think it clearly makes the article less accessible as a source of information.

I'm very much a math-friendly person and even I found the explanation of how many percentiles get measured, what the measurement intervals were and so forth to be very dry. I realize he's trying to ensure himself against innumeracy in the readership, but the result makes the article even less casually readable.

The reason the above things bothered me so much is that they talk to why, when objective measurement clearly shows Republicans are much worse for most of the people in the country, many if not most people vote Republican on a regular basis. The contents of this article should be a incendiary bomb to the majority of Republican supporters, middle-class voters who may be church-goers but who also want to see their children make it through college. Those Republican you put in office are denying your Children their Future!

But you can't pose that kind of urgent issue in terms of historical trends if you want to affect the people who most need the information. If you look at Bartels' various quantiles of families, the ones at the bottom are not the most likely to read an article that starts out talking about history. You need to frame the discussion in clear ways that affect people now, not by placing it in context as a continuation of a fundamental debate begun at the very founding of the country. It's not that the historical approach is wrong; it's that taking such a highbrow path to explaining the facts, rather than the likely consequences on the reader, means the message is much less likely to get to the people who would suffer the most from a Republican administration.

As a Democrat, I'm continually appalled by the way the Republicans in the last twenty years have been more successful at packaging the issues where they are strong (Democrats want to Deny you the ability to Practice your Faith!) than Democrats are at packaging the issues where they are strong (Study Confirms Republicans are good only for the Rich!). Alan Blinder is a smart guy and a good writer, but his article seems to continue in that bad-packaging tradition that has lost so many elections for Democrats.

The eternal question: Why?

2008-08-25T19:26:00.000-07:00

While looking for a good tutorial on object-oriented Python for my Python seminar, I found this excellent article on how to write a solver for all Sudoku puzzles in about 100 lines of Python. I great article, but unless you're particularly interested in programming just scroll down to the hilarious section titled "Why?".

Denial of service attack on human intellect, indeed!

Stratfor's Latest

2008-08-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

For some time I've subscribed to a free email blast from Stratfor.com, which I find very informative. In particular it has a lot to say about Georgia and how this crisis was clearly predictable from the resolution in Kosovo.

Georgia and Kosovo: A Single Intertwined Crisis

Say what you will about the Russian regime, I think if you follow Stratfor's analysis you'll see that Kosovar independence was very problematic in terms of international law, and Georgia is a surprisingly parallel situation (just not one aligned with the interests of the United States). When the Kosovo independence debate was raging, Stratfor's email blast noted that it would provoke a Russian reaction and correctly suggested that it would likely come in Georgia.

Why Hollywood is a Bunch of Idiots

2008-08-25T17:33:00.001-07:00

There's something about the Hollywood culture that produces behavior of such titanically bad logic that Spock's brain would explode. Today's exhibit:

Batman to reboot Superman

Mind-boggling logic error summary (other illogic is left as a fun exercise for readers!):

Because a Batman movie is successful, Superman movies will be successful.

Because the last Superman movie wasn't successful, it must be all Bryan Singer's fault. *

But the real kicker is...

Because 2 superhero movies were successful this year, we're going to make 8 superhero movies a year! That way we'll be four times as successful!

My god, does no one remember the gluts of movies past (westerns, scifi, fantasy et al have all had their turn at the plate)? Making 8 movies a year at Warner, plus whatever gets made elsewhere, is the surest way to kill the whole genre and make sure Warner loses money on 8 movies.

Quick advice for Mr. Robinov: write 8 superhero movie scripts a year. Make the one or two best ones into movies. You'll make more money, and we won't hate you.

I've never met Mr. Robinov, but I've met some Hollywood executives and they were generally smart people. That's why I'm always puzzled when I read these things: it seems like more than the individuals, there must be some aspect of the system that causes this sort of bad thinking.

* In the end, directors get a fair deal, though, since if the movie is successful everyone assumes it was all the director's genius.

Neat 3D Game

2008-08-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

Beautiful implementation of this idea!

http://www.bobblebrook.com/games/coign-of-vantage

Courtesy of Lori King's FB.

On my schedule for November

2008-08-05T19:11:00.001-07:00

Design Festa: www.designfesta.com/

For those who run websites

2008-08-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

Not particularly news, but I thought well-summarized. Quoted from the presentation at http://plone.tv/media/689203036/view:

Some Web 2.0 Characteristics:
A lot of users are accessing the top items with high bandwidth
The "Long Tail" is being accessed constantly (by web search crawlers)
A lot of personalization, stale content for logged-in users is no option

We're running into all of these even on siggraph.org (not a particularly high-volume site), which is why I was watching the video.

Why the Web was Invented, July 2008 version

2008-07-18T08:10:00.001-07:00

We've spent 13 years working on the web, so we could watch stuff like this. So sweet!

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/time_for_some_campaignin

Go Jibjab!

Awesome prints

2008-07-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

Fleet Street Scandal

The Continuing Death of the Phrase, "Photographic Evidence"

2008-06-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

Nice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/discoweasel/376062313/

Wedding Gifts... from San Francisco!

2008-06-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

So I attended a wedding here, and per custom I gave a gift of cash, but in turn received a gift. The major portion of the gift I received was the "Ring Bell Catalog Gift," a system for weddings where the recipient gets a catalog and a postage-reply card. You can pick any gift you'd like from the catalog.

I was browsing through the foods section of the catalog, and the World Food section looks like the Sunday paper in SF! They have a selection of items from Bi-rite on 18th, Scharffen Berger, California Harvest Ranch Market in Pac Heights, and Leonard's 2001 on Polk. Ah, food shopping in San Francisco...

Endorphin High

2008-06-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

With Nanke- and Nagasaki-san's wedding last weekend, I didn't get to the gym for a little bit. Man, every time you work out, it makes you feel so much better, you can't believe you ever skipped. Our bodies are hardwired to make us like it and still it's hard to get around to!

Why we make the tools

2008-06-19T06:58:00.001-07:00

Pretty awesome.

The_most_epic_GMod_Rube_Goldberg_video_ever

MacBook update

2008-06-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

Last week I was sad b/c my Mac kept crashing (kernel panic) and I had to take it into the Apple Store (happily I bought AppleCare for it so I wasn't worried about the charges). After keeping it for 5 days, they couldn't find any problems with it even though they could see the kernel panics in the panic log.

After I got it back, I tested a little more carefully, and I realized there was probably never any problem with the MacBook, but the Time Capsule I bought a few months ago has grown some data problem that crashes the Mac every time I try to access the incremental backup file. The reason I thought it was a computer problem is because the Mac automatically started a new incremental backup every 30 minutes or so, and boom.

So, really, I should take the Mac and the Time Capsule together to the Apple Store, sigh. I might do that eventually but for now I'll have to go without backup (yeep).

Just for the sake of people who might run into this and Google it, the kernel panic message is below the f. Not to be viewed by humans!

--------------------------------------------

Thu May 29 10:13:43 2008
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x0031678A): "btree_swap_node: about to write corrupt node!\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.4.31/bsd/hfs/hfs_btreeio.c:197
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbffffe68

Butter Shortage and Journalism or lack thereof

2008-06-07T20:21:00.001-07:00

The least-expected event of the year in Japan is the butter shortage. For a couple months now, it's been almost impossible to find butter in the stores. Japan is such a consumer culture that I assumed this was just a local phenomenon, but it isn't -- it's nationwide and several months old.

Sadly, almost all of the press reports I've seen, after reporting the basic facts, talk about how this is "one more example of the growing global food shortage." That makes for a good story... but one that doesn't actually jive with the facts. The Japanese English-language press actually has the most insightful reporting that I've found: see the Asahi Shimbun's summary.

Here are the facts that make me doubt this is "one more example of the growing global food shortage":

Japan's domestic dairy industry is long-established and well-organized.
The majority of Japan's dairy consumption is domestic -- for milk, approximately 100% (for cheese, it's mostly imported, which leads the overall figure to be 60% domestic).
For butter, domestic production accounts for 86% of production.
There is still plenty of cream in Japan. Those of you with the slightest exposure to dairy farms know that butter is made from... cream.
Japanese retail butter prices are high, about 2x American butter prices. Given that there's no butter shortage in the U.S. (at least not that I've heard about), this makes it seem unlikely that there's a global butter shortage.
Japanese butter tariffs are also very high in order to support those high domestic prices. According to WTO as referenced at this blog post, butter tariffs are 30% by value plus 1200 yen per kilogram. If you bought butter at U.S. retail prices and imported it to Japan, you would pay twice as much in duty as the butter cost you.
And here, I think, is the real keystone to the problem: since 2006, domestic butter production has dropped by 11%. This is expected to continue for another couple of years.

Really? What's going on with the last item? Well, two years ago there was a dairy glut in Japan. Farmers couldn't sell excess milk, and as mentioned above there's no infrastructure for a cheese industry, so the milk was being poured out. There was a calf cull (killing off some percentage of the dairy herd) in order to try and rebalance supply and demand coordinated by the government. As explained in this endearing blog post from a Japanese dairy farmer, it takes 2 years for a calf to become a productive milch cow... and coincidentally, it's about two years since the calf cull, so the results of it are hitting right now. By the way, in the long run the idea that Japan perhaps needed to cut back its dairy industry is not unreasonable: the low birthrate here means that the number of children is shrinking, and children are disproportionate consumers of dairy products.

In other words, the story as reported by the mainstream media (that this is merely one more part of the "growing global food shortage" story) makes no sense to me. What is much more clearly supported by the facts is:

Japan reduced their dairy supply two years ago in a way that took two years to reach the market.
This relatively small change disproportionately impacted butter rather than milk or cream (perhaps butter is the lowest-value-added choice for what to make from milk? Also, read the endearing blog post for a non-obvious connection between the butter shortage and the powdered skim milk glut)
Japan is prevented from availing itself of cheap international butter by a ludicrously high tariff, undoubtedly designed to protect those same domestic dairy farmers who had to kill all their calves two years ago.

I hate to sound like an Economist reporter, but the information I can find says that this is a clear result of government intervention in the dairy market. The tariff barriers are the fundamental cause of the shortage (Japan could easily afford to buy butter on the international market otherwise), and within those barriers they slightly underestimated the demand for dairy products.

With apologies to all those who (rightly) worry about a possible global food shortage and would like to use this as supporting evidence, this particular event seems like it needs to be marked up to domestic government actions. I'm disappointed but not surprised that it isn't perceived that way: the press likes tying this into the 'global food shortage' story because that story sells papers, and of course the Japanese bureaucrats would love to place the blame externally rather than admit it's the necessary consequence of the calf cull they organized two years ago.

This misdirection would also suit the Japanese domestic dairy industry because it avoids having anyone suggest the trivial fix: lower the tariff, and suddenly you'll have plenty of butter. The domestic industry doesn't want that in the long term because they're not efficient enough to compete with overseas producers.

Fly Derrie-Air

2008-06-06T18:56:00.001-07:00

Hilarious. If only...

http://flyderrie-air.com

Subways that harmonize with towns and are loved by people along the line

2008-06-05T22:31:00.001-07:00

You gotta love government works projects' slogans.

New Fukutoshin subway line

Random thoughts from Korea

2008-05-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Koreans have a very "flexible" approach to traffic. When a light first turns reds, all the cars stop behind the stop line. As the light goes on, though, the crosswalk area slowly fills with cars, pedestrians, and the ubiquitous delivery scooters, until the green clears everything out again.
Korea has a lot more space than Tokyo, and is car-oriented rather than train-oriented (even though the subway works very well).
Right turn on red is interpreted in Seoul to mean, "I should be able to plow through the intersection and turn right without stopping, and will honk at anyone who impedes my ability to do so."
Korean food is good. But I knew that.
I love all the 'unofficial' food sellers in Korea. Tents, trailers, and trucks are found anywhere there's a little space to pitch one. The last night I was in Korea we stopped at a tent in a parking lot and had (Korean beer and) a yummy light soup broth and a dish that combined a purplish tofu with a green Okra-like vegetable soaked in sesame oil. It was great, even though the tables were stamped sheet metal (with a Korean BBQ fitting, though!) and the chairs were basically overturned buckets.

When Jinny paid by credit card, they had a credit card machine attached to a cell phone, so they could accept credit cards without having wired power.
The Korean subway has this awesome station that's full of completely fake rock walls. It's a great idea but they could take some realism pointers from Caltrans:

Funny because it's true

2008-05-14T20:54:00.000-07:00

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx

Upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

Book Autopsies

2008-04-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

Way cool.

Book Autopsies by Brian Dettmer

A Eco-nomical Solution

2008-04-26T21:29:00.001-07:00

One of the great things about Singapore is that there are all sorts of yummy fruit drinks available everywhere you go -- Lime Juice is a staple. I was walking around last Sunday and dropped into a random cafe to put up a drink for "take-away" and instead of the full plastic cup, they had this ingenious solution.

The plastic bag weighs a fraction of what the cup does and of course generates way less landfill space and trash handling. And, the hanging strap actually make it more convenient to carry around to boot! Just be careful not to poke too hard with the straw...

There's a similar hanging strap they use there (I didn't get a picture of it) that they use for hot beverages like coffee, so you don't have to hold the hot cup (nor do you have to double-cup it). Why haven't these things spread, I wonder...

Awesome (and also, a pretty effective ad)

2008-04-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

On Apr 21, 2008, at 3:12 PM, Andrew G wrote:

> This 1-minute Discovery Channel ad beautifully merges technology with sheer joy:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BxymuiAxQ&feature=dir

Springtime in Tokyo / 東京の春

2008-04-09T18:38:00.001-07:00

Sakura along the Meguro river near my apartment.

アパートに近い目黒川の桜です。