Small thought of the week.
After years of Vending machine development, why haven’t they ever tried making drink vending machines that dispense the products a little bit higher? And if they did, why didn’t it take off? Anyone else ever thought about that?
I wonder at those japanese obaasans having to crouch down all the way to the ground every time they want some tea from the vending machines. At least I get annoyed from time to time.
Today I saw the master defense of a friend in my lab. To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed. Not on my friend’s presentation, which was allright, but on the professors who were watching. It seems to me from their questions that they didn’t took the time to at least peruse over my friend’s thesis before the defense.
I compare it with my own thesis defense, some 2 years ago. LM (one of the professors) opened his copy of my thesis, completely leafed through, and full of red ink. Made some insightiful remarks regarding my research, and after the defense handed me a page with 30 questions I should ask myself if I were to continue researching that topic (actually, 8 of those questions were answered during the thesis defense). The other professor also made questions more relevant to the content of the thesis, than that of the presentation.
In fact, my then advisor told me, when I asked how to prepare the presentation, “consider that the professors have read and understood your thesis”. I really hope they do the same this time around, for my current research is turning out to be much more interesting than my previous one.
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On an unrelated note, I have uploaded more pictures to PICASA. While it bothers me a little to use yet another online service to store my data (I would much rather have them on a local disk), the hosting service where this webpage is located is almost full, and I do not feel like putting my personal pictures on the Lab’s web server. But Picasa’s service is actually quite nice, in spite of not being able to exclusively search for tags, and the lack of a Linux Client.
Enough ranting, here is the link:
I have uploaded the pictures to my vietnam and hokkaido trips. Enjoy!
I spend the last week obscessing over this paper for GECCO07 conference. The deadline is supposed to be today, so since saturday I have been sleeping in the lab to get things done, and finally today at 3:00 am I submit the paper. I go the sleep with my work finally done, and in the morning my advisor send me an e-mail saying the deadline was extended to the 31st! Yarrrr!
Also, I received my first formal invitation to review a paper for a cientific journal! rAWR! So now I’m finally part of the peer review paradigm of science! 
It was a clear sunset today. Very beautiful.
Many people are moved by the full moon. But I think the crescent moon draws another kind of wonder from me.
I can always see the whole circle of the moon, its shadow and its light side, when looking at the crescent moon in the sunset. It reminds me that the moon is under the light of the sun, and that it casts a shadow on the nothingness of space.
The crescent moon, like nothing else, reminds me that the moon is but a giant stone in space. But when you think about it, it is a wonderful thing - more wonderful than rabbits, or cheese, or kingdoms of lunar goddesses. A flying giant rock, that actually exists. Two giant rocks, the earth and the moon, floading around each other in space. It brings to my mind the images of floating continents, images which we regard as nothing but scenarios of fantasy.
A real fantasy.
Then I look at the sky without clouds, and I realize how big it is. Why don’t I fall upwards towards the sky? Forever and ever and ever. If you free yourself from the prejudices that are built in your brain, and inside your ears, you’ll realize that up and down are equal directions, and the fact that we’re stuck to the ground should be no less fantastic than if we were falling into the nothingness that we call the sky.
I close my eyes, and I picture the solar system in my mind. Such a meaningless thing, this bunch of rocks that was composed by the aggregration of floating material. Yet hidden in a small corner of one of those rocks is my entire life, which passes as the blink of a cosmic eye. Then I wonder what lives pass at the blink of my eye inside myself at microscopic level.
This is not the first nor the last time that I stop to wonder at the world and the universe. But it was the first that I managed to hold onto these small cloudy fragments of my mind enough that I manage to write them here.
Every two weeks or so, I have private japanese lessons with this volunteer japanese gentleman. Maybe “private lessons” is a stretch, since all we do is to pick some newspaper and then he helps me read some articles, explaining kanji use and grammar as we go along.
So today I have another of these meetings, and due to my completely fucked up schedule, I didn’t manage to buy a newspaper. So I decide to print some articles from the online versions of the main japanese newspapers.
However, when I go to the Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri pages, all that I can get are VERY brief one or two paragraph news summary - as opposed to more full fledge articles you would find in a journal. Since I’m not one to turn to “default” new sources, at first I imagined that all traditional newspapers were doing that now - putting crippled versions of news into their webpages.
So I went to check O Estado de Sao Paulo (Brazil), The New York Times (US) and The Herald (UK), and, sure enough, all of them gave me full fledged articles when I clicked in their main news.
Try it yourself! Click in the most proeminent headline of the above links, and see what you get!
This really sucks.
