2008
98 posts under this date.
My mental image of cells is of balloons, stacked, drifting or bumping but always discrete. Now it seems it’s a shifting tendril jungle at the bottom. Staggering!
 [In] one of the biggest discoveries in biology of recent times.. using video microscopy [!], they watched adjacent cells reach out to each other with antenna-like projections, establish contact and then build the tubular connections. The connections were not just between pairs of cells. Cells can send out several nanotubes, forming an intricate and transient network of linked cells lasting anything from minutes to hours.
 ...there’s a whole subculture of youngsters who have been ALL OVER the world.
Israeli chicks are straight talkers and have beautiful hair and are very hot.
The main purpose of giving you clean sheets is NOT having to clean the mattress cover or the blanket, so use them!
A segregation naturally occurs between staff and guests, owing to the latter’s transiency.
Tourism isn’t transformative or enlightening by itself, it’s just an opportunity.
English is, to an astonishing degree, the world’s second language.
Kids these days are, like, REALLY into Facebook.
Tokyo suits me. It’s just as enthralling, crazy, frenzied, urban and media-saturated as I expected. But it’s also a marvelously liveable city. Public transport is excellent. The streets are safe to a degree I didn’t think humanly possible (with millennia of uninterrupted experience, Asia far outclasses the West at organizing huddled millions). The skirts are short (by anatomical necessity thighs are the Japanese cleavage). The people really are unfailingly polite and graceful. The food’s amazing and there’s a little cheap restaurant at every corner. On top of it all, I find it surprisingly cheap (some disagree though and my only experience spending my own money is from SF, which is as expensive as it gets).
To be sure, I still miss San Francisco, the feeling at ease in a language and culture I own and love, the tangibility of the web, startups, the singularity. Never before had I been so clueless of the language or felt so markedly foreign. On the other hand, I’ve found a language and a culture I’m just as intrigued by and EAGER to own and love. And as for feeling foreign, you need the help of so many people and infrastructure to get by every day, and it all works so smoothly and organically most of the time, that soon enough, in an unsettling way I hadn’t experienced before, you just feel a part of the city, a cell in a huge organism.
I haven’t yet tried the mythical 100mbps broadband speeds (it’ll probably have to wait till I get my own place), but even my hostel has far faster and more reliable web than at Mexico so I’m content for now. Neither have I tried a local keitai (cellphone), though to be honest, what I’ve seen has been quite underwhelming. I’m sure they’ll have incredibly fast data speeds and you can indeed watch TV or pay the subway with’em, but far as I can tell the iPhone’s still head and shoulders above them in terms of usability, design, elegance, interface and screen. That common refrain that cellphones here are 10 years ahead of the States is (or has become) quite misleading.
Perhaps the most important thing I’ve realized coming here though is that Asia is for real. I had never entirely believed the reports of its boom and bloom but if Japan’s any indication, Asia will indeed be the driving force behind the 21st century. Everyday something new makes me think of all the BILLIONS of lives that are going out from subsistence farming to this—and I’m happy, it really is one of humanity’s most breathtaking successes, inconceivable in its scale. There’s energy in the air in a way I had never felt before, the oldest world becoming the newest one as it reinvents the West. And this is comparatively staid Japan, I can only imagine what China or India or South Korea might be like at places.
I was frustratingly sidetracked with my hard drive collapsing and then with the incredibly time consuming, stressful but mercifully successful process of recovering my data, but I’m back on my digital feet again with barely a hiccup. There’s still some prior commitments to attend to (family websites…) but soon enough I shall do nothing but learn Japanese and craft up web experiments!
In the meanwhile, new pics on Flickr with lots of captions!
大人 = big people = adults
小人 = little people = kids (this and above like in toki pona)
写真 = reality copy = photography
売買= sell buy = trade
靴下 = shoes under = socks
台訶= pedestal talk = speech
赤ちゃん= little red (one) = baby
西日 = west sun = setting sun
姉妹 = older sister, younger sister = sisters (older/younger sister are basic concepts!)
One of the coolest things about an idea-sign language, which motley Japanese at times is, is that it encourages making new words by combining simpler ones. It does this as a necessity (there are only so many signs you can remember), by making of words stable roots (idea-signs tend to be more stable than letter bundles—for one thing they don’t reflect pronunciation changes), and by not allowing for sound loan words (“Bon weekend!”), where meaning is lost in grafting a word from one meaning net into another.
Here a couple of interesting, basic examples:
火山 = fire mountain = volcano
下女 = down woman = maid
電話 = electricity talk = telephone
出口 = out mouth = exit
入口 = in mouth = entrance
The much feared hard disk eating monster finally visited me and my backup shield proved assailable. My fellow new squire, Sam of the Macbook Pro clan, fell victim and much of our memories from the past month are gone. It’ll take a week for the wizards to bring her back.
In the meanwhile, my scroll work (webdesign) interrupted, the Tokyo kingdom beckons—though you’ll hear from me even less for a while.
One day in Tokyo and I already know the answer to one of the main questions that set me around the world. The answer is yes, THERE IS at least one city I like at least as much as San Francisco. I’m in love.
(Unfortunately, the prospects of being a free agent here even slimmer.)
Pictures of it all in my Flickr Japan set.
Ah, these are going to be some exciting 5 months!
Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?
Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Foretelling MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)
Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science: THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.
Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Same thing may happen with finance:
Any understandable glimmer of it is too good an opportunity not to be instantly complicated away in the efforts to milk it.
This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
your inability to foretell things foretelling abler (smarter) than you.
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.
Virginia Postrel back to writing with a vengeance. Here my favorite of her latest essays. Most liked the comparison between simple economic hypotheses, cleverly verifiable, and the “unfalsifiable tautologies about differing tastes” all around us. (Such straightforward, plain-language hypotheses pretty much the only subset of economics that feels real to me.)
...with only a broom stick, a wire hanger, and a roll of toilet paper—fear not!
(MAKErs are a bunch of 1st-world pampered playing at 3rd-world make-do ;)
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