cat /proc/claus | java

Recently I saw in a forum this very neat flash based game. It is a geography quiz, where you have to try and get right the position of many cities in the world.

Try it!

My everyday commute goes something like:
Komagome->Nippori by JR yamanote
Nippori->Kitasenju by JR joban
Kitasenju->Kashiwanoha Campus by Tsukuba Express

This is an inverse commute, in the sense that I leave tokyo to study in the suburbs, while the vast majority of people leave the suburbs to work/study in tokyo. So I almost never get full train.

The “Nippori->kitasenju” leg of the trip, though, is particularly full in the opposit direction. If I happen to exchange trains in Nippori before 9:00 in the morning, I can see what is literally an army of commuters marching in my direction, as they leave the joban line to go to both sides of the platform. You can hear their footsteps ressonate.

Anyway - today I saw an interesting sign at Nippori - “passengers to Akihabara, please change trains at ueno, and not here”. To get to akihabara from Nippori, you can finish riding the joban line until ueno, and then change to the yamanote line, or you can just get off here and change to the yamanote line right away.

So I was a bit puzzled by this - Nippori is a much smaller station than ueno, with much less lines going through. It is much easier and faster to exchange trains here. Until I read today’s newspaper - it seems that the yamanote line in this section has been determined as the most packed train line in all of Japan, with a 211% fill rate of the train wagons.

News (in portuguese)

I’m so glad to do reverse commuting

An interesting article where scientists compare the memorization abilities of chimps and humans - the test is to try and memorize a sequence of numbers that briefly flash across the screen.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071203/ap_on_sc/chimp_memory_1

I wonder if the fact that humans try to process the meanings of the numbers affects the results. I hope that they also do a test where, instead of numbers, meaningless symbols are used.

Browsing Slashdot this morning at the lab came up with this nifty piece of news:

Japanese scientists use brain heat sink to reduce effects of epilepsy

The idea is that if you install a heat sink into your skull, it can reduce the effects of epileptic seizures - similar to the idea of putting extra coolers in an overclocked machine. Another way to link our brain to the computer analogy, another way to turn humans into cyborgs for health reasons. All around cool.

Of course, the news is very coarse regarding details. I tried to look for the research page of this Takashi Saito (a very common name), in yamaguchi university, and didn’t find it. Won’t this heat sink make it easier to bring infections into the brain? Are there any side effects in changing the temperature of the skull?

Other than that, the mandatory wikipedia surfing after reading the article brought me some new insights regarding epilepsy. For instance, did you know that dogs can be trained to accompany epileptics and warn them when a seizure is about to happen? That dogs can sense this, and warn their owners, is extremely cool.

Well, that was some “productive” procrastination - but it is time to work.