cat /proc/claus

I was talking to a friend these days about our childhoods, and I heard something that stuck to my mind.

There is a holiday in Japan for the birthday of the emperor. Currently, this day falls on December 23rd. However, during the previous emperor’s reign, of course, the holiday was in a different day. After that emperor died, however, that date remained as a holiday, and it’s name was changed to “Green Day” or “Nature’s day” (and if you never knew where “midori no hi” came from, now you know).

Now, when she was a kid, this friend thought that, since the former emperor’s birthday was still a holiday, eventually, after a number of emperors had passed, most of the year would be made of holidays! So, in her kid mind, she wanted the emperors to die as quickly as possible, so she could have more days off school.

I found this pretty amusing

Today I woke up at 5:00AM because some Couchsurfers were leaving early to take a plane in Narita. Actually, I don’t mind it at all. I read some news on the net, put the trash out, and then after 1 hour went back to sleep.

When I went back to sleep, however, I actually started thinking about Sleeping. Sleeping is a fascinating function of most higher animals that we still don’t understand fully - what exactly is its function, how much sleep do we need, how it works. The second question in particular was grabbing my mind at the time.

How much sleep do we need? The common answer is about 8 hours of sleep per night for an adult. Some people live on 6 hours sleep routines (I did for a while). Yesterday, I went to bed around 1 in the morning, and, having woken up at 5, that puts me at 4 hours. Since I had no reason to stay awake, I decided to “fill my quota”, by sleeping another 2 or 3 hours before waking up for good.

But is it okay if we sleep 4 hours, stay awake 2, and then sleep another four? What about 4 hours sleeping, 4 awake, 4 sleep? What about breaking it in small intervals? Or one big 6 hour interval and three 1 hour intervals? I was thinking about that. I remembered a story about a famous scientist (was it Newton? or DaVinci?) who was said to live in a “sleep one hour, stay 3 awake” schedule (XKCD has a different suggestion). At these times I wish I had been a neurologist…

Eventually I went back to sleep, but now with the late spring sun rising early in the morning, I was up again by eight. Well, all the better for me to get to work, but now I must start taking care not to sleep too late if I want a full night of rest before the sun wakes me up

So, finally, I’m done with my “Test” Thesis Defence. For those not used to the Japanese system of graduate studies, six months before you graduate, you need to perform a “mock examination”, where you do your thesis Defence in the same conditions as your final Defence, including to the same commitee. This committee will judge whether your work should be “ready” by the end of the following six months, and tell you what they think you need to do to complete your thesis.

Unlike many of the “rituals” of Japanese academia, this is one that I don’t find to be completely useless. The professors don’t read your thesis anyway, but at least they have the chance to make some serious questions to your work, and you have the chance to address those questions, which makes a kind of “building together” feeling which pleases me.

So most of my late December and all of January was spent preparing for it, a time where almost all of my other activities where stopped or cancelled. But it was actually worth it. I managed to get rid of 90% of the “drudge” of my thesis, and stablish all that had already been done. The presentation itself was much lighter than I expected, the professors liked my thesis and my results, which gave me a boost in confidence. Instead of making any big criticisms of my thesis, they all just suggested extensions to lines of research that I had already drawn out in the first place.

Now, after a month and a half in this backbreaking pace, I go back to “almost” my normal routine. I got two papers I have to finish by the end of march, so the idea is to do experiments now in Feb, and writing the results next month. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’m now on “job hunting” season, which means getting my shit together to find out and apply to a few nice places to a post-doc/professor/researcher position. Of course, I also have to finish the changes to my thesis, but I got at least 4 months after these papers, so that is on hold. On the personal side, I want to return to regular geocaching, reading books, bi-weekly RPG games, and python programming. And writing a dozen of late blog articles I wanted to write about.

Heh, maybe I don’t have so much free time as I thought I would, but this is looking like a very interesting last year in Japan, if I can keep myself from procastinating too heavily

I woke up 2 in the afternoon today. Even when I was staying awake for days at a time when I was writing that article last month, I never had crossed the AM/PM line for waking up. I wonder if it is the cold - today was a constant 8 degrees during the whole day, and everyone I called for a coffee out said they couldn’t go, so I end up staying the whole day at home…

Which means that I had plenty of time to keep hacking away at my Python problem :-). Today, I tried a more direct approach by try and coding directly the functions I needed, stopping to google a concept or another when I ran into something I did not understand. This worked surprisingly well, as I managed to intuitively use the list constructs and function in python to easily implement my genome, mutation, crossover operations, as well as population mechanics, like elite, sorting, tournament selection, etc. I did find my share of bizarre bugs, like once when I got confused about instance and class scopes, and that resulted in a constructor operator which generated bigger and bigger individuals in geometric progression and ate up all my computer’s memory in just 4 generations, but by the end of about 6 hours I managed to have a fully fledged evolutionary system (although with a dummy evaluation function). Tomorrow I’ll try writing the engine for my ETD game/evaluation function.

Besides that, I also read up two chapters in the new book I have started “Here Comes Everybody”, by Clay Shirky. The book talks about and tries to explain the phenomenon of the massive, loosely linked community actions, like wikipedia or flickr, based on the idea that the cost to maintaining social connections has collapsed in the past few years, which allowed non-profit actions which were too expensive for informal communities to organize, but too unprofitable for formal companies to tackle, to flourish. Reading the book I can’t help but feel that I had heard all this talk in many different blogs, forum/slashdot comments, and Free Software talks, but it is always nice to see everything put together in one cohesive, well argued text, and with plenty of interesting anecdotes to illustrate the concepts.

Talking about books, last week I also read “A Wizard of Earthsea”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I really really recommend this book. I devoured it in less than 2 days. This book is one of the precursors of Medieval Fantasy, and the wizards and how the magic works in Le Guin’s world is too charming. The concept that a Mage is just as powerful as he knows and understand the world around him draws you into her world. I hope I can make my own D&D world as mystical and still consistent as hers.

And that’s for a very cold and gray Sunday. I got one of my three bases covered

I have recently fell in gastronomical love with this fungus:

It is called Eringi in Japanese, or “King Oister Mushroom” in english — wikipedia tells me it is originally a mediterranean fungi, so I’m a bit surprised that the Japanese name is simpler. It is deadly simple to prepare - just slice it, fry it in a pan with a bit of oil, adding salt and black pepper, and it develops a rich taste not unlike that of white meat. Very little work, and I can get big chunks of it in the 24h 100 yen store near my apartment, which means that at least for a while it will successfully replace sweets (and maybe even ice cream?) as a midnight snack.