cat /proc/claus

One of the pillars of scientific method is Peer review. This week, my advisor asked me to help him review a paper for a conference - it was my first time reviewing someone’s else work. Too bad the paper’s quality was not up to standards… bad english, lack of bibliographical review, proofless statements. The idea even seemed kind of original, but I can’t shake the feeling that some grad student just read a few books, quickly put a program together, and tried to publish it like that.

… Just like me :-/

At night, I went to Akihabara to relax… I lost myself in the “laox hobby store”, where they have materials for all kinds of japanese nerds… there was a floor exclusively for train-maniacs, with information sheets about trains all over japan, and even CDs with recordings of trains announcements:

“mamonaku, ichiban-sen ni densha ga mairimasu”

wow.

We got lost in many other places, but I have to go back to work now. :-/

Well, it is that time of the year again, when I change my wallpaper to match the season. I’ve decided to make it a habit to take pictures of the nearby Kashiwa no Ha park, and use them as source for my wallpapers.

The new look of my workspace can be seen in the “desktop” image in the right column. You can also notice the running program. That is a demonstration of my current research topic - ant clustering. If you want to try and run it yourself, feel free - here is the link. You’ll need to install the swarm library, though.

Changing the subject, recently I got from many sources (friends from Brazil and slashdot.jp) about a “cellular ringtone that only teens/young adults can hear”. Quite interesting history, I couldn’t hear, and in my lab, out of 15 people, only 2 could… what about you? Try it.

Time for class.

Paulo wrote in his blog that I was going to explain to everyone what the Golden Week is all about. Well, time to put on my “sempai hat” and make a brief explanation. (A very brief one)

Golden week is The first week of May, when there is a cluster of holidays in Japan. 29 of april is Green day, May 3 is “constitution day”, may 5 is “children (boys) day”, and may 4 (the best one) is “free day” - officially “public holiday”. If one of these days fall in a sunday, the day off is moved to the next monday, and if we have any workdays between the golden week, we usually take a day off. In this particular year we had a great golden week, for the arrangment of weekdays meant that only 1st and 2nd of may, monday and tuesday, were regular days - which, of course, were given away by most schools and companies.

The funny thing about golden week is that these days offs were moved around a lot just for the sake of golden week itself. “Public Holiday” day and “green day” were created specially for the golden week, and from 2007 on, green day will become “emperor showa” day, and “public holiday” will become “green day”.

All for historical accuracy, I’m sure

Yay.

And since I haven’t posted in a while, here is another link:

Panda in china has 16 babies last year.

Don’t click if you’ve got Diabetes.

One of my standing questions of japanese culture is about their main works of literature. Not knowing enough japanese to even read a simple book in the language, my knowledge about it is quite mediocre.

Sometimes I’ve asked myself what are, if there are any, the traditional romantic works of japanese literature. Romantic in the sense of a man in love with an idealized woman, for whom he suffers or perform great feats.

Today I was asking a japanese friend over the internet about that. She told me that she couldn’t remember any, only stories about filial love, or doing good deeds and receiving good rewards, but no stories about the love of a man and a woman.

Then she delivers this:

“I think there are no stories about “boy meets girl” [in japanese literature]. Sex and love were pretty taboo to talk about back then, I think. Well, there is the Tale of Gengi, which is pretty old and famous, but in truth Genji was just a worthless playboy”.

(the word in japanese was “fugainaipureiboi”)

For those not in the known, “The Tales of Genji” is actually THE first ’story’ written in japanese, and probably one of japanese most famous literary’s work. I’ve heard many things about it (yes, i need to grab an english translation and read it some day), but this is the first time I’ve heard anything like that about old Genji.

Cheers!