a-cubed.info

For those of you coming to Worldcon, here’s the list of panels that I’m scheduled to be on.

Sat 1000 The Inevtiable Google Panel
Participants: Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Eileen GUNN, Tom GALLOWAY, Adam RAKUNAS
Love it or hate it, more than half of all net users search via Google. Is it really the end all and be all of all human knowledge? Computer knowledge? Our panelists have fun and try to predict where it will be in 2 year? 10 20? 100?

Fri 1400 The Transparent Society
Participants: Charles STROSS, Chris COOPER, David BRIN, Dr Andrew A ADAMS
David Brin wrote “The Transparent society”. In it he claims that current information technology kills privacy and that we must all adjust. Related concepts are scattered through his fiction. Is it possible to put social and legal limits on the processing of private information, now and in the future?

Sat 1600 Sex and Technology
Participants: David D LEVINE, Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Patricia MACEWEN
The automobile…..the movie……the Internet……then? How has modern technology affected sex? What lies ahead – virtual reality harems? Computer-enhanced marital aids? The orgasmatron? What can we look forward to? (and is this all a Good Thing?)

Mid-June to mid-July is (usually) the hot rainy season known as tsuyu. This year it’s lingering on and on. It would normally be over by now, but it looks like the tail end typhoon that came through two weeks ago disrupted the weather. It’s right at the end of July now (where’s the year gone?) and we started the day with a thunderstorm and now we’re ending it with another one.

Outside my window today I saw a young woman with a small child getting on a scooter – the motorised kind that is. It’s difficult to judge kids’ ages, particularly when the Japanese are smaller in stature than Westerners, but I’d estimate the kid was no older than 8 at the most, and probably slightly younger. Now, OK, she had a seat that had obviously been adapted for a child pillion that had an across the lap belt, and the kid was wearing a crash helmet, but I am still not sure about the safety of this (the kid was wearing long shorts and a t-shirt for example).

Any of the bikers (e.g. Sparks and Liam) got any comments on this? Would this be legal in the UK? Would you do it even if it was legal?

While looking at hotels in Nagoya today I spotted one that reminds me of home (back on Merseyside where I’m originally from, not Reading). There is a hotel in Nagoya that on a map of hotels there is called the “Nagoya Liverty Tower Hotel”. I wonder if it has Liver Birds on the top?

As if the sirens and the unsilenced motorbikes weren’t enough, one of the neighbours of the guest house decided today that 6:40am on a Sunday was an appropriate time to go out and trim the undergrowth of something that would appear to be not even his land. By the looks of it, he lives in the old house on the corner on the other side of the river and he was using a petrol-powered brush cutter (think strimmer but with an eight inch diameter circular blade instead of two string as the cutter head) not to do his own garden, but to chop down the undergrowth along the river/feeder on the opposite side of the “stream” which feeds into the river from his house (I can’t believe this would be an employee of the private after-school education place that occupies the fenced in land outside which there is untended, until today, undergrowth by the side of the “stream” and “river”. Of course while using such a machine he was oblivious to my shouting across the river to him from my balcony so I had to go out and around to the car park of the “after school school”.

He seemed to understand immediately when I pointed out to him that it was before 7am on a Sunday morning and that other people would like to sleep. He stopped immediately. Not that this includes me now, having been dragged up out of a relatively sound sleep the irritation has produced too much adrenaline for me to go back to bed.

Polite in many ways the Japanese may be, but considerate they often aren’t.

Back in April it became clear that Meiji University was messing up my forwarded post. Since I wasn’t sure when I came here whether I’d be staying at the University Guest House for my whole visit, I arranged for my post from Reading to be forwarded to the main University address. Initially this was delivered internally to my host, Murata-sensei. When I had an office of my own for six weeks or so, I also had my own pigeonhole. When I had to move out of that office, the pigeonhole went away and rather than enquiring with the international office or Murata-sensei someone (as is typical in Japan no one has been identified nor have I had any kind of apology) decided I’d left and started returning my post to sender. It took a few weeks for me to realise that this was happening and it then took four more weeks for the mail room in the University to sort things out and start delivering my post to Murata-sensei again.

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I’ve definitely been here too long. I got my first piece of “junk mail” today.

OK, so it should have been expected. When I first arrived I bought a digital camera from Yodobashi camera. At the time, I signed up for one of their “loyalty cards” which give a ten percent bonus from each purchase which can be used on future purchases. Since I’ve bought a moderate amount of stuff from them, this has been a decent deal. But, to sign up I had to give them an address. Their summer catalogue arrived today, my first piece of junk mail in Japan.

One of the Nippon 2007 committee just posted a brief English email to the staff mailing list. A message to an large list in Japanese would have started with “???” (that’s a made up name, not the name of the person who posted), giving the name of the originator. I’m not sure why this etiquette exists on Japanese lists. Possibly it dates back to when email systems couldn’t hold kanji/kana characters in headers. Anyway, when writing in English, this staff member translated “???” as “I’m Akira”, which in isolation is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Japanese. Unfortunately, in context, it’s very odd English. I had to manfully resist the temptation to reply with one or all of::

“I’m Spartacus”

“I’m Sparkey Tickets”

“I’m Brian, and so’s my wife.”

Bonus points (scored by the lovely Samantha) to anyone who can name all three references.

This brings me to the point of this post. One of the downsides of living in Japan, for an Englishman like me, is the lack of opportunity to make puns and other word play jokes. On the odd occasion when I can’t resist doing so, I’ve always got to explain it. If you have to explain it, it’s not funny. My Japanese isn’t nearly good enough to make Japanese puns, either. <Sigh>

I’ve had to re-schedule some of my lectures because of a Measles outbreak amongst the students at Meiji University (at least one other Tokyo University closed, and I’ve heard rumours that many/most of them closed). They closed the university for a week and since I’m giving my lectures on a Saturday this ended up covering two days.

It just shows what happens when you don’t have good coverage of MMR in the population. Measles, like many so-called “childhood diseases” is a lot worse if you get it as an adult.

There are three science museums in Tokyo: The Science Museum (at Kitanomaru); the National Science Museum (at Ueno) and the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Since it’s not too far from the Surugadai campus of Meiji University, I visited the Science Museum a little while back. Today I visited the Science and Innovation museum. I’ll get around to the National Science Museum at some point and add it to this review. There are photos of the Science Musuem and the Emerging Musuem in my gallery.

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