One thing I like about Japan is how seriously many Japanese take their playing.

One day I got a mail from a friend here: “Hey look at this you tube video I found, isn’t it cool?”. The video was about a guy who prepared a set of pendulums so that they swung in very pretty patterns.

That video was indeed cool. But then my friend send me a message “Let’s do the same thing!”, “sounds fun, why not?”, “Ok, how about next week?”.

Next week?

It turns out my friends was perfectly serious about this. We contacted three other people. One was responsible for making the necessary calculations, the other for buying the needed materials, and another one for finding a suitable place to conduct the experiment. We all met here in Tsukuba, walked around a little bit, and started on the task of setting up our own furikko:

Well, as you can see, our version of the pendulums were not quite perfect, but we were able to find out where we did wrong, and what we could do to improve the next time we tried that. More than anything else, I was happy that we could get this going in such a short notice!

Oh, next time my friend wants to try the “Coca-Cola/Menthos” rocked experiment :-P

On other news, I have moved to my new apartment. Expect more news about that soon-ish!