After finally seeing them on the eve of the new year, I have proof that multiple people besides me like the Mates of State.

I may be the only one who will appreciate this, but this was taken during one of the triumphant "ye-yeah-eah" moments in the song "Proofs," hence the comical pose of the drummer's arm. I took several other pictures at the show, including some of the excellent band Versus, and some in the 'rock-and-roll' blurred style, which I am forcing myself to put up as a gallery by saying in this entry that I will do so.

Later that night I attended a party that could have served as a poorly attended high school reunion. I don't think any of the people I didn't already know recognized me. That's probably the way I prefer it.

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I'm not going to make any resolutions, but I am redoubling my efforts in studying Japanese. In my end-of-year push I made my 'first pass' up to the 400th Kanji, and ensured that I 'know' the first 300. I intend to know the first 1000 by the June-July period, also known as Summer. That is the number that Japanese sixth-graders are supposed to know. Meanwhile I've acquired several wonderful books to aid my quest, and here's where it becomes interesting to the casual reader who for some reason is reading this. I'm also forcing myself by saying so to put up extremely thorough reviews of all the books I've used.

Today I made a return to watching the Japanese TV that the International Channel shows on Sundays. In place of the utterly incomprehensible and boring political talk show "Hodo 2001" they had one whose banner I translated as "love story, then the birth," that doesn't really fit any category we have here. Several people in their 20s and early 30s sat with the hosts, and watched a filmed dramatization of how their parents fell in love and gave birth to them. Sometimes you would see the person the story was about in a corner of the screen, for their reactions. After each film the person would discuss the story with the hosts for about 15 seconds, then they would move on.

I was rather puzzled when the first film seemed to depict an alcoholic and abusive father, and the true-life child's reaction was to laugh hysterically. From there on it was more predictable, with the women getting teary-eyed and such. I was expecting that at the end they might have some sort of contest of which story was most interesting, or at least something involving horrible pointless torture of the guests, but no, the show just ended.

Later was the classic "Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ," which featured the talents of male Japanese pop star Gackt. I couldn't help but wonder how they came up with a name like that.

I've just returned from a business trip to Dallas, TX, where my boss and I presented a completed grant project to the National Science Foundation. We did something similar in Maryland last year, but at one day in duration, this was the true business trip.

The first thing to notice about Dallas is that it was a lot colder than it should have been, in the 30s just like New York. The second thing was that the locals were not dealing with it very well. The woman who helped us get a taxi from the airport was bundled up like a Muslim. The taxi driver had the heat up so high in the taxi that even I was uncomfortable, which is to say it was comparable to the car being on fire.

The hotel was huge and pretty fancy; it had a nice art collection, and one of only three five-star restaurants in Dallas, the rather poorly named 'Nana.' Instead we chose the Mexican restaurant for dinner, and it was extremely good. The place had a strange internet setup: there was wireless but only in the public and meeting areas, and you had a buy a day of usage at the front desk. Every room had a DSL modem/router attached to the bottom of the desk, with a little connector coming out onto the desk that they wanted us to use. We couldn't imagine what this tiny thing did, but it was clearly meant to look like something other than just a connector; in fact though it didn't work at all, so instead we bypassed it by plugging the cable directly into the router. To do so we had to get around a piece of plastic attached specifically to prevent this possibility. Then we still had to pay for it.

Before bed we explored the hotel a little. There were a couple of other events, one of which was something called a "Lifetouch" seminar. There were also a large number of high school graduation pictures put up. These were incredibly involved pictures, obviously taken by professionals with plenty of soft glow. Some of them had whole sets that had been built to illustrate who this kid is; sometimes the kids were in elaborate costumes. Many of the males were holding guitars or in athletic regalia. The pictures had often embarrassing titles like "football dreams" or "lookin' hot." Ah, but a gem in this rough--one girl used the title "Oh, Inverted World." A Shins fan in Dallas!

The next morning was the conference. It felt a bit strange being the 'guy in town for the conference,' but I had plenty of company: over 500 projects were being presented here. Presented is perhaps not the best word: this was something called a poster session, in which everyone brings posters showing their project, and stands by them, and everyone circulates and chats about their projects. Since everyone is not there at the same time, it was not too crowded, but the sheer number of projects with posters was still overwhelming. Walking among them was a quick education in visual design principles: many of the posters provided a real chore in even finding the name of the project. Several were square grids of 8.5x11 printouts of Powerpoint slides. Not the way to go for at least two reasons: the grid effect is enhanced by having the same template for all the slides, and hides the information in them; and after starting on the top left slide, one doesn't know whether to go right or down! Our posters were not perfect, being so large that we could only fit two of our five into our strictly allotted space. But I can safely say that unless one has no idea what a scrub nurse or a robot is, one could look at our posters and understand the project very quickly, which is something you could say for perhaps 2% of the posters.

My boss made a sociological observation that I recognized as very accurate: if the goal is for people to pay attention to our poster, the best approach is to be nowhere near it. This is because when standing by one's poster, it is impossible not to look desperate for attention and watch people to see if they are looking at your poster. The passerby really doesn't want to get roped into a conversation, or have the representative say anything at all to them, unless they are truly interested in the project, which they know is very unlikely. The safest thing is to simply skip over the posters that have representatives by them. I did this many times.

My favorite poster was undoubtedly for a project called "Advanced Question Answering," that appeared to have no further explanation of the technical nature of the project, if there was any. Since the representative was standing in front of it, I couldn't linger on it, but noticed their list of technical objectives. "Answering specific questions" was checked off. "Response time < 1 second" was labeled "in progress."

We cut out after lunch. On the flight back, I was served a British can of coke. The measurements in Kilojoules caught my eye, then I noticed the rather vague ingredients list, including "sugar" and "flavourings." I tried to detect a difference in taste between this can and American ones, like there is between the American one (using corn syrup as a sweetener) and those from Montreal (using cane sugar). As far as I could tell, the British one was actually further along the spectrum than the American one, in terms of 'realness of sweetness' (the Montreal version being the most real). But this impression may have been affected by the slightly warm temperature of the can. I'll have to do some more research into this.

last night: I am attending a solo live show of the comedian David Cross. He is wearing the same yarmulke that he wore and then threw away in frustration on the show "Celebrity Poker Showdown," obviously forming the inspiration for this. I'm with a friend who's acting sulky for some reason. I believe I try various things to cheer them up, but they are unresponsive. Then Cross comes out. It is evident that there will be some kind of audience interaction, and he has cards that each of us filled out on our way in with information about ourselves. He picks mine and starts talking to me. "Let's see, you said you like various guitar players...such as 'the guitar players' [everyone chuckles, apparently this is the name of some hip band in this dream's universe]...and various chord players [everyone chuckles again]." Then the phone wakes me up.

The night before: I had been reading something right before going to sleep that briefly mentioned someone owning a gun purely as protection from bears. This transformed into a dream in which I was in this guy's house, and suddenly he knew there was a bear because some bear droppings came in through a chute next to his door. We ran to get his bear guns, and sure enough the bear came pounding through the front door. The guy shot it with a rifle, and the bear slumped onto the ground. But I was suspicious, it didn't seem like such a weak gun should take it down that quickly. And just as we were starting to relax, the bear leaped back up and started beating us around. It then turned into a very cartoonish fight that kept going back and forth, with the bear beating us senseless, then I throwing a five-pound hand weight at his head, but the guy never managing to get another shot off. It seemed like we should all have been dead or unconscious after a bit of this, but it simply kept going. After a while it began to seem pointless, and that's when the dream ended.

The night before: Vague recollections, but it seems worth mentioning as a rather complex bit of self-reference. In the dream I wrote a blog entry about a dream within the dream that I had had. I don't remember anything about the dream within the dream, or if it even happened in the main dream, but I was very happy with the entry I wrote about it, because having written it right after I woke up, it sounded like the language of a dream, with odd logic and sudden skips. In fact it was close to gibberish, but the fact that I had written it without trying to sound like gibberish was very cool to me.

The made-up term with which this entry is attitled is the source of the classic story about eskimos having 20, 47, or any other large number of words for 'snow.'

When building a robot, one tends to say a lot about making minute adjustments. And my coworkers have sprung into action with a plethora of words I don't recall ever hearing before.

The first one I noticed was 'scoche,' pronounced like 'scotia' without the 'uh,' and used as a noun as in "I think we need to move that over juuuust a scoche."

Next came 'cheech,' used more often as a verb, as in "I think later on we can cheech this over a bit," but later showing up occasionally as a noun, synonymous with 'scoche.'

A slightly different usage was selected for 'jot,' as in "It didn't make a jot of difference."

In another category, but impossible not to mention, was 'whopperjaw,' used in the passive to mean broken or messed up, as in "Somehow this got completely whopperjawed." Needless to say this is another topic often needing expression in the process of robot-building.

For the past three days our company has been in southern california showing off our robot to the Army and a whole lot of MDs, PhDs, and in several cases MD PhDs. Some stories:

We anticipated having to pay some fees for taking our 7 huge boxes of robot parts on the plane. But a curbside check-in guy walked up to us quickly and said in the most suspicious way possible "if you work with me, I'll work with you." As he confidently put our boxes onto a cart, we all wondered whether he had any real power to decide what was checked baggage and what would be considered excess baggage and slapped with fees. He also assured us that taking 2-3 bags each as carry-on wouldn't be a problem. In the end all we could do was hope for the best, as we 'worked with' him to the tune of $20 (after handing him $15, he assured us "that's not gonna do it"). Fortunately, we got through unscathed, so it was a good deal after all.

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant the first night, and when the waitress came up she said "wow, this is going to be a big bill!" She wasn't wrong, but I've never heard a restaurant employee comment on that before. I suppose parties of 4 are not very common. When she brought us the check she made another comment, this time "hey, I guess you didn't spend too much after all." I for one appreciate her financial candor.

One of the exhibitors is a pair of scientists from Kodak, presenting a stereoscopic image system. Apparently the benefit of it is that one doesn't have to wear goggles or special headgear to view it. Of course, one does have to put one's head in front of a giant plastic case that contains two LCD monitors, with the whole setup inside a black-walled enclosure to keep out reflections. But hey, no goggles! One of my coworkers got a 'special' demonstration of the system that featured stereoscopic images of nude women, which he described as 'kind of disgusting.' Science, huh?

There are a couple of other interesting/bizarre exhibits that I would not be doing justice if I did not wait until I can upload and include photographs of them.

Today another attendee who spoke at length with us told me of a project she had worked on which sounds to me like the hardest natural language processing task I've ever heard of, to an extent that it is nearly unfathomable. It was a telephone intepreter system, in which one user would speak into the phone in english, a speech recognition system would take the speech to text, a machine translation system would translate it into japanese text, and then a text-to-speech system would speak the japanese text to the other user. In this way, each user would be carrying on a conversation in their native language. So this includes two NLP tasks that are incredibly challenging (the STT and machine translation), one that is not too hard to do, but very hard to do well (TTS), plus it's using English and Japanese, two very difficult languages to translate between in about 100 different ways. For one, there is the problem of information being left out. The complete Japanese sentence "ikimashita." literally means "went," and the machine translator would somehow have to know who went to include it in the English version. Meanwhile, the English would contain no information about the relationship between the two speakers, except in very subtle ways. This might not be a barrier to understanding for the Japanese speaker, but it might leave them a bit shocked. The difficulty of these issues alone is insane, and as this woman told me, basically requires the software to have a knowledge base including everything about both users and their respective cultures. But it's cool that it was even attempted nonetheless.

In fact one cool aspect of this conference is seeing that women are breaking into science and heading up some of these projects, and that they have more degrees than the temperature in new york right now. When I last saw my stepbrother the philosophy professor, he asserted that philosophy, not computer or any other science, is the most bereft of women at high academic levels, but that no one seems to care!

Here now, the promised pictures of a couple of the other exhibits at the conference.

This first one isn't all that amazing, I just wanted to have more than one.

This dummy's having a bit of trouble with his leg. The tank sort of visible at right was providing simulated breathing. This was a US Army exhibit. Also note the macs running it. Ugh, have I become a mac person? No, I don't think so. Just pointing it out, that's all.

Now the piece de resistance.

If you have a sick mind, the thing coming out of this machine at left is exactly what you think it is. This is an advanced ureteroscope something-or-other, so the idea is it teaches you to stick a tube up that, and then the screen presumably shows you what's happening. I didn't get a chance to try it, but it was making beeping sounds throughout the conference that made it seem like I was in an arcade. Surprisingly and perhaps disturbingly, the one person laughing the whole time at this was my boss, a doctor. It was he who demanded I take a picture of it. He found it particularly amusing when the two women presenting it had to wheel it down the hall from one room to another, and one of them seemed to be walking with the express purpose of covering up the embarrassing part. As he said many times, "they didn't have to make it look like that!"

Finally, while we're on the topic of photography and juvenile humor--sometimes you don't have to leave the country, or buy anything made outside it, to find some amusing misuses of the language.

Most people don't know this, but Californians are quite kinky when it comes to snacks. Also, I think they mean yogurt covered pretzels. The genetic engineering of pretzels to taste like yogurt is at least a couple of weeks away. There was also a Mexican brand of snacks called "Bimbo." One of their products was called "Pinguinos," with an umlaut over the 'u.'

On Friday we drove through LA and up to Santa Barbra, experiencing the Friday afternoon LA rush hour first hand, and had the honor of meeting with one of our few fellow small surgical robotics companies. Actually it's the company run by the former runner of one of the first surgical robotics companies. The new company isn't so much surgical. They make a robot that is piloted by a doctor sitting in their office. The robot has a camera, and a screen which shows the doctor's face as captured by a camera above the doctor's computer. This allows the doctor to make rounds and observe patients and such without leaving the office. Ater being around for just a few years the company has about 100 times as much space as ours, and a lot more robots, so it was inspiring in that respect.

Two dreams about Cosmo Kramer. The first time I thought I was watching a uniquely dramatic episode of Seinfeld, but by the second one I was pretty sure it was a separate show or movie with him. The first one took place in the subway. The platform was extremely crowded, in fact some people seemed to be camping out there. Kramer suddenly saw the police arresting some guy and tried to help out. There was some kind of serious wound involved. Then the police got some communication on the radio that there was a big problem on a train coming into the station, a guy with a gun. Sure enough the train came in and a guy was standing in one of the doorways holding it open, and firing a gun repeatedly. Kramer managed to evade him but the guy shot at least one person on the platform. Then the dream/episode ended with Kramer somehow helping out and then looking up and seeing the sky through a street grating.

In the second dream Kramer was in the house of some friend or stranger. This man was somehow disturbed or lonely. His house was a cylindrical or maybe a hexagonal room that was extremely tall, perhaps infinitely so. The walls were partly covered with white drawing boards and picture boards on which the man had long been writing a kind of journal or life story, continually going upward. The man was talking to Kramer and telling him to read the boards. Then he said Kramer should go up and keep reading. Kramer said, how? The man made a cryptic commment about using the story. But then Kramer notoiced that there were plates attached to the walls in some places that could be used as rather insubstantial footholds. And so they climbed, the man going ahead of Kramer, and they read the story. The man made a lot of strange and curmudgeonly comments, and Kramer was trying to understand him and his story. They kept climbing and climbing and the story was getting more and more tragic. Then finally the man got to one board and read it aloud, and then let go of the boards and dropped to his death. It was getting very hard for Kramer to climb, but with much effort he managed to reach the board. There was more height in the room, but this seemed somehow to be the end of the story. Kramer read the board. There was a phrase that seemed to ring out, something about "you in your multi-picture board room." It must have been about the man's wife or daughter and the room he built for her. Then Kramer got the point, and he also let go of the boards and dropped.

Recently I saw a sign in the subway listing rules of conduct. One read "no graffiti or scratchiti." I was curious about this strange word, clearly referring to the vandalism of the subway's easily scratched windows with knives, keys, and the like, but later forgot about it. Then yesterday on the way to work someone got on my otherwise empty car and made some scratchiti, while his girlfriend critiqued it ("you made it all ugly"). This time I checked the OED, and didn't find it, though it's an established word elsewhere on the web. What I did find out from the OED is that graffiti, an Italian word, is actually the plural of graffito. This places it with 'data' in that rarefied group of words whose plural is almost always used in place of its singular, and whose singular form can be employed to great pretentious effect. Also, it originally referred to art on walls in ancient Rome and Pompeii that wasn't vandalism at all, and in fact was sometimes specifically stuff scratched on walls to reveal another color below the paint (or whatever they had then). So it was really quite unnecessary to invent 'scratchiti.'

* * *

Sometimes words and phrases pop into one's life in the strangest ways. The other day two people who don't know one another both used the phrase "cockles of your heart" in my presence, which I had heard for the first time a few days before, but I don't even remember where. OED Time: there are actually about 10 completely different words that are all called "cockle:" 8 nouns, 1 adjective and 3 verbs. It's a plant, a bump or pucker in a surface, and a misspelling of "cocke" (now cock) in Samuel Johnson's dictionary that persisted. But for our current purposes, it's the English name of a bivalve mollusc, perhaps more commonly known as the cockle-shell, first citation 1393. In the 1600s it was extended to be other things shaped like the cockle-shell. In the same century, someone decided to say "did inwardly rejoice the cockles of his heart." The OED doesn't bother defining what exactly the cockles of one's heart are, but they are always referred to as the part that is rejoiced or delighted or warmed. It gives two eminently reasonable explanations for the phrase: that the cockle-shell rather resembles the heart in shape, and that the zoological name for the cockle is "Cardium." It seems likely to me that the latter itself was caused by the former.

The Cockle-Shell

As part of my Japanese study I've been watching the Japanese TV shows shown on the international channel on Sundays. Recently they started showing another pop music show, "PopJapan.tv," in addition to "Hey!Hey!Hey! Music Champ," much to my delight.

Needless to say most of the music shown on both of these shows is pretty crappy, although the novelty of it being Japanese and often ridiculous in one way or another keeps me entertained. But one artist who has been featured on both shows caught my eye. Her name is Tommy February⁶. After catching her last week on PopJapan.tv, I realized that she is the coolest. Consider the facts:

-Her name has an exponent in it.

-She dresses like a White Stripe crossed with a schoolgirl (see picture).

-She sings into a microphone that's full of candy.
Corollary: She has a song called "Candy Pop In Love"

-She has a full-time backing cheerleader section that appears in all of her videos.

-She has an alter-ego named Tommy Heavenly⁶.

-In at least two of her videos she interrupts her dancing and singing to drink from a flask for some reason.

-She used to be in a band called the Brilliant Green (BuriGuri), which besides being one of the only non-unintentionally funny Japanese band names I've heard, rhymes with FuriKuri.

But there's something strange going on. Despite her apparent pop superstar status, information on the web about her is rather scarce, consisting mostly of an interview and several generic lyrics sites. More bizarrely, the best picture I could find of her from the official Sony Records site was this one:

Also strange, the episode of PopJapan.tv that I saw her video on seemed to be from around May of last year, and it turns out that the show is owned by...Sony Records. Is it all a big scam engineered to make her popular? Probably it partly is, but it seems like the whole thing is too disorganized to be a successful scam.

For some reason, although her music is straight up J Pop with lots of 80s synths and beats, and her alter-ego's music is pseudo-hard rock, I find it fascinating. The melodies aren't bad, and she actually does a decent job of the weaving together of English and Japanese lyrics, a staple of every single Japanese pop song. It almost seems that she 'gets it' and has a larger sense of the style as something not to be taken seriously. For her most over-the-top and intricate song check out "Love is Forever."

Watched Spellbound the other day. No one seemed quite aware of the how silly, at least to many people around the world, the whole concept of a spelling bee is. Two things about our language make it possible: non-phonetic spelling, and a gigantic vocabulary. I'm not sure how many languages fulfill these conditions, but I'd wager it's a small number. Of course, some others have their own sillinesses, such as Japanese and Chinese calligraphy contests, which aren't really silly at all and certainly have much more art in them than a spelling bee. I'm not aware of the estimated size of the Japanese vocabulary, but I know of one dictionary that comes in 20 volumes, so I think it must be more formidable than anyone generally likes to acknowledge.

I also found it funny that they use the system of a pronouncer saying the words, occasionally leading to an exchange in which the contestant keeps saying the word over and over until the judges feel they understand the pronunciation well enough to have a fair shot at spelling it. (There was one child in particular who, though appearing very intelligent in all other respects, had an extraordinarily hard time getting the pronunciation right--sometimes he would mishear an R as a T, and other bizarre combinations. I chalk this up to either nervousness or an obscure disorder.) I wonder if it wouldn't be more pure to let the child see the word written out in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is really no different from the current system except that it eliminates the possibility of the child mishearing the word without it being detected and corrected by the judges. The problem is this would be less dramatic, and no one knows the IPA.

The only experience I had with spelling bees after elementary school was at camp, during the color war. This is a great event to have in such a contest, because it's about the only one where the non-athletes such as myself have a chance to shine, and it takes place with the whole camp population watching. Each age group and the counselors compete in teams of four, with the words growing more difficult as the night wears on. And for 8 years, I was able to claim that I had never been eliminated from the spelling bee. In my ninth year, I was eliminated (on the word "inoculate," somewhat embarassingly), but my team still won, so my record was not entirely tarnished. In my tenth year I was a counselor, and at this level the words are really quite difficult. I did fine until the word "miniscule" came up, and several of us were eliminated, and quite shocked. Soon after that the round ended in favor of the other team, but I was not satisfied, so I went up and asked to look at the dictionary being used as a reference. Sure enough, I had been right about "miniscule." The scottish counselor who has for so many years served as pronouncer, a great friend, was dumbfounded. He had thought it was "minuscule:" it seems this is the original pronunciation, from which "miniscule" has evolved and now become accepted. Looking at the dictionary, he said after a while "that's not right... that's mini-skool... um..." Finally he had to admit defeat, and announced that the round would have to be done over at a later time. Despite the rather small number of points at stake, my teammates were extremely pleased with me for this. Since color war has a very tight schedule, especially for the counselors, we never did repeat the round and simply split the points. I was happy with this, for spelling bee was still my night.