I won't go into the origins since I didn't come up with them, but March 5th has been identified as the Square Root of Christmas and March 14th is Pi day. The discoverer of the Square Root of Christmas has expanded on his work to further dub the week between the two geeky dates as Nerdigras.
I guess this may become only an American holiday, as our nerd brethren in the rest of the world insist on silly dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd orderings for representing their dates.
In any event, in celebration, the commenters over on Ned Batchelder's blog are composing an official Nerdigras carol. Here, I reproduce in its entirety, the 012-days of Nerdigras (sung to the tune of the 12-days of Christmas):
On the oh-first day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
A hash map in a B-Tree.
On the oh-second day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Two Turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.
On the oh-third day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Three unmatched parens,
Two Turtle Functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.
On the oh-fourth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two Turtle Functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.
On the oh-fifth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.
On the oh-sixth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Six trees sp-laying,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.
On the oh-seventh day of Nerdigras, my girlfriend gave to me,
Seven pointers dangling,
Six trees sp-laying,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.
On the oh-tenth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Eight bits a-zeroed,
Seven pointers dangling,
Six trees a-splaying,
Five golden ratios,
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.
On the oh-eleventh day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
A printout of Graham's Number
One corrupted byte
Seven pointers dangling
Six trees sp-laying
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks
Three unmatched parens
Two turtle functions
And a hash map in a B-tree.
On the oh-twelfth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
[insert lyric here]
A printout of Graham's Number
One cornipted byke
Seven pointers dangling
Six trees sp-laying
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks
Three unmatched parens
Two turtle functions
And a hash map in a B-tree.
(Song by Jonathon Duerig, Robert K., et al)
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Procreation Propaganda
The current fashion in Japan is babies.
For the past 2 or 3 years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the Japanese government to fight Japan's shrinking population by encouraging more women to have kids. At first, they tried the obligation and duty angle: news was that the Japanese people needed to produce more children to maintain Japan's status as the second wealthiest country in the world. Then, the government started providing more services to ease child rearing; some of these were long overdue, such as maternity care programs and day-care centers for working parents.
Let be reiterate that because the concept may be unbelievable to readers from modern nations: until just recently, day-care centers were few and far between in Japan; what few there are were very expensive and, until deregulation in 2000, run by the government. The concept of a babysitter is still foreign here. Of course, things are changing, but Japan has gotten an awfully late start.
I wish I had taken a picture of it, but I recall a poster on the train a few months back that sent the clear, if not implicit, message that if you have kids then people will be nice to you. In a country in which people rarely acknowledge your existence, that's a pretty bold statement. We're going to skip the courteous stage and jump right from the treating-you-as-an-obstacle stage to the being-kind-to-you stage...all you need is a kid.
There has been much internal discourse in Japan about the ramifications of a shrinking population. By and the large, the message is "have more children" because "shrinking is bad". I have not read the multitude of books on the subject, but the message sent by the in-train posters, celebrity magazines, and "talent"-riddled Japanese television shows is "kids are cool".
Don't get me wrong: kids are cool. What is uncomfortable to me is the idea of the government intervening in my personal life to support an official policy to counter the shrinking population.*
The pretext to all this commotion is that a shrinking population is bad. However, Professor Akiko Matsutani disagrees and in 2007 wrote a book titled "Shrinking Population Economics" in which he claims the shrinking isn't bad, but rather provides an opportunity for Japan to improve the quality of life for its smaller population. In his book, he argues that Japan should not focus on producing a new army of alcohol-numbed workaholics, but rather let workers enjoy more time with their family, take up hobbies, and unwind on holidays.
Which actually brings the argument around full circle. Perhaps the 12-hour+ work days, 3+ hour commutes, semi-regimented drinking parties, etc. with little or no time left to spend at home are as much to blame for the current "baby crisis" as anything. You can't be a family if you are never home. If the only time you see your spouse is for a few minutes as your drag your groggy butt back home after a long day at the office, is it really any surprise you don't have more kids.
The government solution: use propaganda to encourage people produce another generation of workaholics with no time or energy to have children themselves. Professor Matsutani's solution: make life enjoyable, kids or not. Life is to be enjoyed, not frittered away in some Orwellian dystopia. And the irony is, happier couples are more likely to have children.
* I use the phrase "my personal life" empathetically with the Japanese people. As a foreigner in Japan, the government couldn't care less whether I have kids or not.
~~~
As a timely addendum to my ramblings:
Canon has taken the initiative to send its workers home at 5:30pm (only twice a week, mind you). But it sends them home with homework: to make babies. I wonder if they get performance reviews.
For the past 2 or 3 years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the Japanese government to fight Japan's shrinking population by encouraging more women to have kids. At first, they tried the obligation and duty angle: news was that the Japanese people needed to produce more children to maintain Japan's status as the second wealthiest country in the world. Then, the government started providing more services to ease child rearing; some of these were long overdue, such as maternity care programs and day-care centers for working parents.
Let be reiterate that because the concept may be unbelievable to readers from modern nations: until just recently, day-care centers were few and far between in Japan; what few there are were very expensive and, until deregulation in 2000, run by the government. The concept of a babysitter is still foreign here. Of course, things are changing, but Japan has gotten an awfully late start.
I wish I had taken a picture of it, but I recall a poster on the train a few months back that sent the clear, if not implicit, message that if you have kids then people will be nice to you. In a country in which people rarely acknowledge your existence, that's a pretty bold statement. We're going to skip the courteous stage and jump right from the treating-you-as-an-obstacle stage to the being-kind-to-you stage...all you need is a kid.
There has been much internal discourse in Japan about the ramifications of a shrinking population. By and the large, the message is "have more children" because "shrinking is bad". I have not read the multitude of books on the subject, but the message sent by the in-train posters, celebrity magazines, and "talent"-riddled Japanese television shows is "kids are cool".
Don't get me wrong: kids are cool. What is uncomfortable to me is the idea of the government intervening in my personal life to support an official policy to counter the shrinking population.*
The pretext to all this commotion is that a shrinking population is bad. However, Professor Akiko Matsutani disagrees and in 2007 wrote a book titled "Shrinking Population Economics" in which he claims the shrinking isn't bad, but rather provides an opportunity for Japan to improve the quality of life for its smaller population. In his book, he argues that Japan should not focus on producing a new army of alcohol-numbed workaholics, but rather let workers enjoy more time with their family, take up hobbies, and unwind on holidays.
Which actually brings the argument around full circle. Perhaps the 12-hour+ work days, 3+ hour commutes, semi-regimented drinking parties, etc. with little or no time left to spend at home are as much to blame for the current "baby crisis" as anything. You can't be a family if you are never home. If the only time you see your spouse is for a few minutes as your drag your groggy butt back home after a long day at the office, is it really any surprise you don't have more kids.
The government solution: use propaganda to encourage people produce another generation of workaholics with no time or energy to have children themselves. Professor Matsutani's solution: make life enjoyable, kids or not. Life is to be enjoyed, not frittered away in some Orwellian dystopia. And the irony is, happier couples are more likely to have children.
* I use the phrase "my personal life" empathetically with the Japanese people. As a foreigner in Japan, the government couldn't care less whether I have kids or not.
~~~
As a timely addendum to my ramblings:
Canon has taken the initiative to send its workers home at 5:30pm (only twice a week, mind you). But it sends them home with homework: to make babies. I wonder if they get performance reviews.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
In Love with iTunes Movie Rentals
I've been meaning to try it for a while, but for the first time, on Tuesday night, we rented a movie from iTunes. Yet again, it was another impressively easy-to-use product from Apple.
Living in Japan, we often don't get movies for months after they come out in the states. And when they do finally come out here, they usually either dubbed into Japanese or have subtitles added. Frankly, dubbing sucks in more ways than I care to list. The subtitles aren't so bad, but they do detract from the movie a little. The most important selling point to us, though, is that we don't have to get dressed and walk 30+ minutes to the video rental store (and another 30+ minutes to return it when we're done).
So Tuesday night we basked in the warm glow of my wife's 24-inch iMac and watched WALL-E. Yes, not a new release, but I had only seen it on the airplane and my wife hadn't seen it all yet. It took all of 30 seconds to rent through the iTunes Store and the download began immediately.
On the downside, it took 2 hours to download the movie. While we could have started watching it immediately (while it continued to download in the background), since the movie was only about an hour and 20 minutes long, we didn't want to risk playback catching up to the download and ruining our movie-watching experience with "buffering" breaks. So, we watched a couple of episodes of The Daily Show online to let the download get a little over an hour head start.
With an hour left to finish downloading the movie, we started watching WALL-E full screen on the computer. The image quality was fabulous; there were no visible encoding artifacts at all. The sound was similarly superb. Even with the download continuing in the background, the movie played smooth with no hiccups. It was exactly what I would have expected from renting a title on physical HD-DVD or Blu-ray media.
Overall, the 1 hour lead time before we could start watching the movie was a little disappointing. But being able to sit comfortably at home and not hoof it down to the video store more than made up for that little setback. Next time, we'll probably either download the movie a day or two ahead of time or my wife will start the download when I leave the office so it is ready to play when I get home. Other than that, we were extremely pleased with the convenience, the quality, and the ease-of-purchase.
Apple nailed the user experience aspect again; there wasn't a single moment where I felt like we had to sacrifice something in order to gain convenience by purchasing online. The rental fee was commensurate: $4 to rent a recent release. I seem to recall Blockbuster charging $4-$5 to rent recent releases. So for roughly the same price as an old-school movie rental, I gained convenience but lost nothing. Even without our unusual circumstances, that looks like a decent deal to me.
So Apple iTunes' movie rental feature gets 4 thumbs up. As expatriates, we'll throw in 4 big-toes too, for a total of 8 digits up.
In case you are curious, there are services vaguely similar to NetFlix here, but they all require a) a Japanese credit card and b) postal delivery. I'll save my rant regarding trying to get a credit card in Japan for another day, but suffice to say we don't have one and aren't likely to get one during the remainder of our stay here.
Living in Japan, we often don't get movies for months after they come out in the states. And when they do finally come out here, they usually either dubbed into Japanese or have subtitles added. Frankly, dubbing sucks in more ways than I care to list. The subtitles aren't so bad, but they do detract from the movie a little. The most important selling point to us, though, is that we don't have to get dressed and walk 30+ minutes to the video rental store (and another 30+ minutes to return it when we're done).
So Tuesday night we basked in the warm glow of my wife's 24-inch iMac and watched WALL-E. Yes, not a new release, but I had only seen it on the airplane and my wife hadn't seen it all yet. It took all of 30 seconds to rent through the iTunes Store and the download began immediately.
On the downside, it took 2 hours to download the movie. While we could have started watching it immediately (while it continued to download in the background), since the movie was only about an hour and 20 minutes long, we didn't want to risk playback catching up to the download and ruining our movie-watching experience with "buffering" breaks. So, we watched a couple of episodes of The Daily Show online to let the download get a little over an hour head start.
With an hour left to finish downloading the movie, we started watching WALL-E full screen on the computer. The image quality was fabulous; there were no visible encoding artifacts at all. The sound was similarly superb. Even with the download continuing in the background, the movie played smooth with no hiccups. It was exactly what I would have expected from renting a title on physical HD-DVD or Blu-ray media.
Overall, the 1 hour lead time before we could start watching the movie was a little disappointing. But being able to sit comfortably at home and not hoof it down to the video store more than made up for that little setback. Next time, we'll probably either download the movie a day or two ahead of time or my wife will start the download when I leave the office so it is ready to play when I get home. Other than that, we were extremely pleased with the convenience, the quality, and the ease-of-purchase.
Apple nailed the user experience aspect again; there wasn't a single moment where I felt like we had to sacrifice something in order to gain convenience by purchasing online. The rental fee was commensurate: $4 to rent a recent release. I seem to recall Blockbuster charging $4-$5 to rent recent releases. So for roughly the same price as an old-school movie rental, I gained convenience but lost nothing. Even without our unusual circumstances, that looks like a decent deal to me.
So Apple iTunes' movie rental feature gets 4 thumbs up. As expatriates, we'll throw in 4 big-toes too, for a total of 8 digits up.
In case you are curious, there are services vaguely similar to NetFlix here, but they all require a) a Japanese credit card and b) postal delivery. I'll save my rant regarding trying to get a credit card in Japan for another day, but suffice to say we don't have one and aren't likely to get one during the remainder of our stay here.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Damn spammers
As much as I don't like it, spammers have forced me to disallow comments from anonymous posters.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
It's the End of the World as We Know It
And I Feel Fine.
Living in Japan for the past year, I largely missed out on the 24-hour coverage of the presidential election. In fact, even though I registered to vote absentee, I never did get my ballot. In any event, I never got that caught up in the presidential election. To be honest, though, while I was impressed with Obama's message of optimism after 8 years of fear, I didn't have a whole lot of faith he would follow through with his promise of change.
So while I was happy the Obama won the election, more for what it said about my fellow Americans than what it said about Obama, I was hesitant to believe in "change" until I saw it. In particular, I wanted to see Obama make his first act as president be to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. That, more than anything to me, would signal the Obama is serious about restoring American ideals.
Well, it wasn't his first act, but my eyes teared up this morning when I read the news: Obama orders Gitmo to close. 3 days into his presidency and he's committed to shutting down that black-eye of injustice and putting America back on the high road of morality.
In the words of the 2nd century philosopher Hierocles,
Living in Japan for the past year, I largely missed out on the 24-hour coverage of the presidential election. In fact, even though I registered to vote absentee, I never did get my ballot. In any event, I never got that caught up in the presidential election. To be honest, though, while I was impressed with Obama's message of optimism after 8 years of fear, I didn't have a whole lot of faith he would follow through with his promise of change.
So while I was happy the Obama won the election, more for what it said about my fellow Americans than what it said about Obama, I was hesitant to believe in "change" until I saw it. In particular, I wanted to see Obama make his first act as president be to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. That, more than anything to me, would signal the Obama is serious about restoring American ideals.
Well, it wasn't his first act, but my eyes teared up this morning when I read the news: Obama orders Gitmo to close. 3 days into his presidency and he's committed to shutting down that black-eye of injustice and putting America back on the high road of morality.
In the words of the 2nd century philosopher Hierocles,
We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.As an American, today is truly a proud day.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Open Plan Offices
The office that I work at, like many other offices in Japan, is what they call an "open plan office". If you search google images for "open plan office", you'll see page after page of images of hip-looking, airy spaces with lots of natural lighting and no walls. Japanese open plan offices are similar, but without the hipness, airy spaces, or natural lighting. Just long tables full of people sitting at computers under row-after-row of fluorescent lighting. My office consists of over 100 people sitting in 1 giant room. Cozy might be a good word to describe it.
And let me tell you, when the air conditioners shut down at 6pm, it gets mighty toasty -- even in the dead of winter.
I searched google images for some representative samples of Japanese open plan offices. You don't have to look hard, a simple search for "オフィス" ("office" in Japanese) yields almost nothing but open plan office pictures. Oddly, the pictures have tiny 1-foot tall dividers separating facing people for some semblance of personal space; I don't have that luxury at my office.
Anyway, having worked in this environment for over a year now, I took special interest in a recent study from Australia's Queensland University of Technology. In that study, they found that:
Now that is something I can relate to. I have found it impossible to concentrate on anything in this environment and my productivity has plummeted compared to the comfortable offices (or even cubes) I was used to in the U.S.
I can only hope that the real research and development institutions in Japan have the good sense to give their staff decent working conditions. Otherwise, I cannot fathom how Japan can hope to compete in knowledge industries.
And let me tell you, when the air conditioners shut down at 6pm, it gets mighty toasty -- even in the dead of winter.
I searched google images for some representative samples of Japanese open plan offices. You don't have to look hard, a simple search for "オフィス" ("office" in Japanese) yields almost nothing but open plan office pictures. Oddly, the pictures have tiny 1-foot tall dividers separating facing people for some semblance of personal space; I don't have that luxury at my office.
Anyway, having worked in this environment for over a year now, I took special interest in a recent study from Australia's Queensland University of Technology. In that study, they found that:
In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.
...
The high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity, there are privacy issues because everyone can see what you are doing on the computer or hear what you are saying on the phone, and there is a feeling of insecurity.
Now that is something I can relate to. I have found it impossible to concentrate on anything in this environment and my productivity has plummeted compared to the comfortable offices (or even cubes) I was used to in the U.S.
I can only hope that the real research and development institutions in Japan have the good sense to give their staff decent working conditions. Otherwise, I cannot fathom how Japan can hope to compete in knowledge industries.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas
While there are tons of decorations in Tokyo, Christmas isn't actually a holiday in Japan. As such, I had to work on Christmas. While I wasn't able to spend Christmas with my real family, I did spend some quality time with the people who, over the course of the past year, I've come to be pretty close to.Yep, I'm hijacking a light-hearted Christmas post to talk about trains in Tokyo.
I didn't actually take this picture, but it is pretty representative of how I spend 2 and half hours of my day, five days a week (Christmas included). Occasionally, especially in the evenings, it is so crowded I can't move or, worse, can't even stand over my own center-of-balance (meaning I'm just propped up by the surrounding crowd).
While I'm getting used to it, this was quite the contrast to the comfort of CalTrain, where I could almost always get a seat even when it was crowded. I've always been a big proponent of mass transit, but I now have I new appreciation for the comfort of one's own car. Even if you are stuck in traffic, at least you still have some personal space to call your own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)