We just thought we were going out for a nice night with my parents and my aunt and uncle. Last night we went to the Capitals vs. Sabres hockey game and it was great fun until just about the end. The Caps were winning 4-3. We were sitting in the front row, near the opponents' goal, and somehow the puck flew over the glass, just glanced off my glasses without damaging me, and slammed into my wife Yuki's head... Thankfully, she had seen it coming and ducked, so it hit her right on top of the head, rather than some possibly more sensitive part.

So... ;( She had to get stapled up — we didn't get home to sleep until 2:30am... What a crazy night. At least the Caps still won... ;) Yuki is now resting and recuperating... :)

Actually, they used to give everyone who got hurt by the puck a plaque with the puck and their name on it, etc., but I guess they stopped after a girl was killed at a hockey game somewhere last year. Unfortunately, we didn't even get the puck in all the commotion.

Welp... I’ve decided to start going back over some of my 大学の教科書... in anticipation of becoming a 特許弁護士... I may have to get back into doing some EE stuff, so linear algebra と differential equations をちょっと復習してる。結構おもしろいんだけど、I've forgotten so much ちょっと残念... まァ~ しょうがねーなー... If you don't use it at work とか、多分 you'll start to forget it だろ？ 特に languages も math もそうだな...

十二月十一日は俺のお誕生日だった。今回は廿七歳、と言う不思議な歳をむかえた。何が不思議かと言うと、最近は色々なことに対して考え方が変わってきている。

先ず、一つは子供の事。Denver で親しくなった友達の coder、Chris Saam の妻は十日前に穏やかな赤ちゃんを生んだ。Chris は俺より６年ぐらい年上だとしても、友人の内の初めての子供だからこそ革命的なイベント。俺も彼の妻が妊婦して以来、驚くほど子供の事が頭に浮かんできている。特に新たな人間に特別な知識と世界観を与えるチャンスとして見れば、すごい魅力を感じるでしょう。勿論、面倒くさい点も多いのだが、やはり今の歳になると其の価値が少しずつ浮き彫りになってくる。

大学を出て数年、数多くの友達が日常生活から振り向いて、もう一度と歩むべき道を確かめているらしい。そして、仕事も分野も家族も変わって来るかも知れない。うまく言えないんだけど、どうしてか変化の多い時期だな。

俺にとって、子供はまだまだ早いんだけど、いつの間にか欲しくなって、又も自分の心の変化に驚かされるだろう。まッ、曖昧な post だけど、こういうのも偶に blog に不可欠だな。;)

On a personal note again, I'm going up to Pittsburgh for a couple of days to see my friends Carl and Al... Paul will also be there, so we'll all go to have breakfast at one of the two amazing and incredible "Pamela's" restaurants there.

In case you've never been to Pittsburgh, I'll fill you in. I went to Carnegie Mellon University there, for Computer Science. As most geeks know, this is a great place for Computer Science, tied for #1 with MIT when I was there... This is where CERT does their job, Lycos began its life, and many other interesting tidbits...

But the important thing is Pamela's. ;) There's one in Shadyside, and one in Squirrel Hill, 2 areas of Pittsburgh near CMU. They have the most incredible pancakes you've ever had, so don't miss them if you're ever in the 'burgh. ;)

Another choice spot is "Mad Mex", near UPitt and CMU. It's a Tex-Mex restaurant/bar, and is always 1/2 price after 11pm or so. :) They have the best massive nacho pile this side of the Mississippi... ;)

My favorite cafe, where I spent countless hours studying and chillin' during college, was Kiva Han, at Forbes and Craig Streets near CMU. I've heard it's gone way downhill since we were there, but I'm sure it's still a pretty nice place to hang out anyway...

If anyone is in the area and wants to hang out, drop me a line and we'll let you know what we're up to... ;)

After reading Joi Ito's mention of this book, I decided to pick it up and read it. I must say, I read this book faster than I've read any book in recent memory. It doesn't even look like anyone's read it yet. I could probably even return it still ;) Anyway, I liked it. There are many points lacking throughout, but all in all, I think it's high time this book was written, and people begin to try to understand that Japan has serious chronic and systemic problems. Many of these are almost impossible to see even within Japan; many of them are invisible precisely because they are always in plain sight.

There is so much to talk about with regard to this book, it's truly overwhelming. Just quoting the facts and figures that shocked me would take pages and pages. I know a lot about Japan, but I honestly can't imagine how Mr. Kerr managed to find out about some of the more sensitive issues without resorting to 'watergate' methods... ;)

If you can overlook the author's sometimes repetitive aesthetic judgements and prejudices, in the end you will see a picture difficult to swallow. Difficult, mostly because it is a sad state of affairs, and it is hard to see any easy way out. Well, there is no easy way out for Japan — the nation will at some point have to face these issues and change the way it does business.

I'll be writing more about the interesting things I found in this book, but for now, I'll just say this. The author at one point raises the specter of the failure of the Japanese movie industry. The industry is currently bleeding cash, and there is no real hope of a renaissance soon. Mr. Kerr talks about how one of the big three Japanese movie companies depended for so long on the proceeds from endless sequels of "Otoko wa tsurai yo." Japan is in a state of stagnation partially because of this mentality — the obsession with riding cookie-cutter scripts for success to their grave, then beating them to get up for years before realizing they're actually dead.

All is not lost for Japan. Anyone that would say so would have to be fantastically short-sighted. But the first step to fixing problems is always opening them up to the light of public scrutiny.

I've come across an amazing project. It's really too bad they haven't been promoting it more, but here it is. Submit your 4-page magnum opus to the denizens of Earth, 52,000 A.D. Deadline December 31st.

What I love about this is that everyone is allowed and encouraged to participate. We can give so many different accounts of our lives, what is important to us, and how we see the world... Imagine what it would be like to read this much information from ancient mesopotamian civilization. This project just boggles my mind. :)

This weekend I happened to go check out a Japanese bookstore and pick up some calligraphy gear. I love calligraphy — it has a life to it that really reminds you how much meaning is in the information we write down...

Periodically I'm reminded in these moments of a theory I have about human society, intelligence, tools, and their interaction.

Fundamentally as we know from our experience with computers, there are three important elements to processing information: processing power, information storage (memory), and communication (protocols). Each of these requires hardware to implement it, and organization or software to keep it running correctly, and working together with the other components.

We can view the human race and it's leaps forward in these terms as well. The advent of human intelligence was a revolution in processing power. This allowed us to figure out many new things, but there were of course limits. Our discovery of language was a second revolution, this time of communication, allowing us to pool our processing power to achieve even more than before. It also effectively increased our memory because we could share information stored in the memories of various people.

Writing was really the third major revolution in our history, as it vastly increased our capacity for information storage and recall, or our collective memory. Various innovations in filing, printing, etc, served to further increase the utility of this information storage system.

Now, computers are allowing us to simultaneously stretch all three of these capabilities. Currently, processing power is increasing steadily, but we are really experiencing revolutionary new capabilities due to vast increases in our memory and communication capacities. Hard drives of 100 Gigs and more will soon allow us to carry with us vast libraries of not only documents and music, but video. Important communication hubs are forming in the great cities of the world, wherein anyone can stop in at a café and communicate with people all over the planet. And the pipes continue to get fatter to accomodate our huge hard-drives.

But really, why is all this revolutionary? Because it allows us to process vastly more information than we ever could do alone. It allows us to recall and use vastly more information than we ever could do alone... In fact, I believe that the faster we get used to the idea that our human capacities are limited, that we must depend on computers to reach our full potential, the better we will be prepared for the future. Our ability to manipulate massive stores of information effectively is becoming much much more important than what we know, or can do, as an individual.

These are all reasons why I believe there is an ancillary social revolution in the works. When people finally begin to realize what I'm talking about here, there will be a massive change in the way we approach education. Rather than teaching a wide variety of facts, trying to create well-rounded individuals, we will finally realize that we should just give students the tools they need to do this themselves, saving them years of off-topic memorization, and then move on to specifics quickly. We may also allow them to return to school to change fields later, without stigma or unnecessary difficulty.

Hmmm. ;)