Day 293 : Growing Chair

I wrote about the first chair for my daughter in May, but actually we rent the chair at that time.

Recently, my wife found a good wooden chair, and it looked very cool for me too.
So, we bought it. :)

Here is a piece of picture of my daughter enjoying(?) the chair.


The chair is 'mobo' by 'Timkid', a German company.
'mobo' is a kit of knock-down chair, and the below are pictures during the assembly process.
Actually, the chair is highly flexible in adjusting its height, and so it seems to be usable from 7 month to 10 years old. Actually, the chair also grows with babies. :)

One thing I felt happy is not the do-it-yourself activity but that my daughter crawled to me and pecked my arm. :o

Day 293 : Stand Up! (Soon)

Well, recently my daughter shows surprisingly rapid progresses. :)



I'm looking forward to walking around with her soon. :)

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

I have to confess that I didn't know about Professor Randy Pausch in neither his speciality area nor his last last lecture. :(

Today, I read that finally he past away in a news paper and listened to his last lecture at CMU, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

Here is an excerption from his slides, "Important Advices":

• Be good at something: it makes you valuable
• Work hard... "what's your secret?"
• Find the best in everybody; no matter how long you have to wait for them to show it
• Be prepared: "luck" is where prepration meets opportunity

I like the first one best, and now I'm wondering what kind of advices I can give to my daughter. :)

Time to Say...

Today, I heard that one of my colleagues would leave our workplace next month.

I'm working for a special organization for one of the most bureaucratic and legacy company in Japan, and its purpose is putting together engineers working on the same kind of technology area from its subsidiaries and make their activities more efficient for all of the group companies.

The colleague is excellent in terms of skill driving an organization for a practical direction. Furthermore, he understands wide range of technologies sufficiently including from emerging ones without working on the new ones by himself to legacy ones. But, sad to say, according to traditional way of career track of the company, a person especially on the fast career track would stay at one place at most five years or less, and he is. Thus, he was also to move to other workplace. In a sense, it's time to say good-by for him.
Anyway, I hope he can get a challenging workplace from next month.

Here, recently I'm wondering what kind of actions should I do in my career path.
I quit a company about five years ago, and one reason why I did so was that there was actually no career path being an engineer not a manager in the company, and one of my bosses who interviewed me told me that they were trying to design a career path for those engineers. But, after all I'm feeling it's was an illusion.

Thus, I'm wondering if it's time doing something also for me recently.

Day 288 : Crawling

Hoho, my daughter finally began to crawl around the room. :)

One thing I and my wife are talking about is that we have to do up our rooms.
Especially, there are a lot of cables and PC related things in my room. So, it's the most dangerous(?) area in our house. But, my room is also a lumber room, and I'm wondering if I really can find any room for gadets there. :o

Day 288 : A Tooth

Finally, my daughter got a tooth. :)



To tell the truth, we found the tooth yesterday at Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama, but it was difficult to take pictures of that. The above picture was taken when she was in a good humor after taking a bath and had milk enough. :)

Day 287 : Anpanman

Anpan-man is one of the most popular cartoons for children in Japan.
Today, we went to Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama and found the below at a bakery shop there.



My daughter does not understand Anpan-man yet, but I'm wondering someday I take her to cartoon movies such as Anpan-man. :)

BTW, Anpan means a Japanese original style bun with read bean paste.
That's why it makes sense that a bakery creates those things for advertisement. :)

Day 279 : One-piece Dress

Today, we had guests and it's the first time that my daughter wore her Sunday's dress presented by her granduncle. :)

BTW, the guests were colleagues of mine at work, and they are well known around me that they are very much education-minded. I was a bit surprised that their 5 years daughter created a toy credit card by paper craft during their stay our home. Especially, she recognized lines printed on the back side of the card as "patterns" not "characters" and copied them. The characters were of course Japanese Kanji.
A great pattern recognition engine... :o

Day 275 : 9 Months

It's my daughter's 9th month birthday today. :)

In the above picture, she wares Jinbei (甚平, じんべい) which is one of traditional casual Japanese clothing presented by her grand mother. It's made of gauze, and very good for this Summer season. :)

BTW, today I was very busy and stucked bya trap colleagues of mine at work (Hey, Furuta-kun, Morisa-san. I'm talking about you guys. :o)
Although I've kept taking a bath everyday with my daughter since she got back from my wife's home town to Tokyo(*1), the record was terminated today. :(

(*1) The only exception is my business travel to New York in the last month.

Osaka Groumet?

Today, I was sent to Osaka in order to do a kind of trouble shooting work.
It's a damn all-night work :( , but it's not the point of this entry.

It's my second visit to Osaka, and there were some discoveries for me.
For example, in Osaka there are good and cheaper plate menu restaurants than Tokyo. :)
The below is a photo of tonight dinner.
Well, the plate has a hamburger stake, a cream croquette, some pieces of fried chickens and a boiled sausage. It seems to be more than 1600K calories! :o

In addition, free for another bowls of rice.
Anyway, I had a happy dinner time tonight. :o

The below picture is a barbecue restaurant I saw on my way to the destination.
The red signboard says "情熱ホルモン" (Jo-netsu Hormon) in Japanese which roughly means "A Passion Barbecue." :o



If it was not before the work, I must have had a happy dinner with beer at the restaurant. But, unfortunately it's not... :(

Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, NY

I wrote several times about the Tokyo branch of Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, and I love the bar veeery much. :)

Today, finally I had a chance to go to the head quarter in New York. :)



Oysters were good, but the catfish plate I had was too well-done and actually it was a mistake. :(
According to a Japanese guy with me there who lives in New York, the Shinagawa branch is better, and now I'm feeling he is correct...

Day 258 : Oversea Communication?

Well, now I'm in New York (Of course, it's a business trip :o), and I had an oversea communication with my daughter.

The above is a snapshot during the communication via Skype at the hotel room which I'm staying at. :)

BTW, it's on June 22 for me, not 23 in New York local time. But, the day counter is based on my daughter's daily ife basis, thus the timestamp is June 23. :)

Day 254 : A Reverse Position?

My daughter moves well when she is sleeping.
In short, she is an untidy sleeper.

Today, I saw a funny scene after my daughter fell asleep, and the below is a snapshot. :o

Day 251 : Mama Down

My wife got a fever last night, and today she was in her futon whole day.
It's not so serious one and we're expecting she will be better soon.
But, anyway she was down today, and I was my daughter's baby sitter. :o



In the above picture, my wife is of course taking a rest, and my daughter is taking a siesta, untidily. :o

OpenSolairs 5/08

Well, about 8 years ago, I worked on SPARC/Solaris.
In those days, it was Solaris 2.6 which nowadays means Solaris 6.

Recently, I was trying to install OpenSolaris inVMware Workstation 6.0 running on Windows XP using ThinkPad X61. But, I got troubles and finally gave up it. :(

At first, I configured a VM with 512MB memory and saw progress bar of the OpenSolaris installer (which says transferring LiveCD image) stopped when it showed 84%. :(
After I read this discussion and gave the VM for OpenSolaris 1280MB memory, it passed the 84% barrier, but the installed instance of OpenSolaris never booted up. :(

So, I gave up VMware and tried VirtualBox which SUN recently acquired because OpenSolaris people mentioned that there many successful installations using VirtualBox.

The below is the first grub screen after my installation on VirtualBox.



The below shows the first OpenSolaris kernel message.
As you can see, the first line says "SunOS 5.11" that means Solaris 11, not Solaris 10 which SUN recently released the latest version of. In short, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris is like the one between RedHat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.
That's why I wanted to try OpenSolaris. :)



BTW, there is one more thing I don't like.
The first line above says "32-bit," and this might be because of VirtualBox's limitation. :(



The above is the login screen of OpenSolaris, and I'm wondering if I can make time playing into Solaris Zones before setting for New York. :o
Well, yes, I'm looking into Solaris deeply (again) from a view point of virtualization.
Reading "Solaris Internals", sometimes I feel deja vu and at other times I'm concerned with the progresses of the years I was absent there.

BTW, I found that I forgot almost everything about Solaris system administration. :o

On VMI, Again

3 days ago, I saw linux console messages which says "VMI Rom detected" for the first time using VMware ESX Server 3.5U1 and vanilla linux kernel 2.6.25.

The below white paper by VMware says that we can get better throughput even using DBMS benchmarks such as sysbench.

• Performance of VMware VMI
  

I did a kind of DBMS benchmarks, and I expected lower CPU consumption rate against the same macroscopic workload because in general lower CPU cost is one of the major advantages of para-virtualization. But, what I got was almost the same CPU consumption rate and I was a bit disappointed. :(

But, there is only 32bit mode of VMI support and I guess it's still early stage.
That means there can be a room working on that area. :)

BTW, for me, the biggest problem is that reducing sleeping time is the only way for me working on such issue. I'm wondering if someone can employ me instead of my current employer ... :o

Day 247 : Ayako Notes

My wife takes very much detailed notes of our daughter.
Of course, I also write lines sometimes such as, "Today, she began to laugh out loud and express emotion somehow."

The first notebook was "10 Little Rubber Ducks,"
the second was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

As we are finishing the second notebook soon, my wife ordered new ones several days ago, and today delivered! :)

The new notebook is "The Pippi Longstocking." :)

VMWorld 2008

As I have written several times recently, I'm working on virtualization at work.

At this moment, we are in a research and planning stage especially on gathering best practices of applying virtualization technology for production systems.
Thus, I often have meetings with engineers from various departments of my employer and various companies these days, but I got almost no useful information. :(
For example,

• What is the typical successful use case of virtualization?
• Can we say simple horizontal consolidation is one of best practices?

or so.
I just want to hear something from their actual experiences, but anyway they usually clam up as if they were being interrogated. :o

Today when I was searching presentations given at VMWorld 2008 Europe, I found a lot of presentations which give me what I wanted.
I'm wondering if engineers in Japan working on (at least) VMware read them...

BTW, here comes to the point.
Hey, Uchikawa-san, Ushida-san,
I want to be there at VMWorld 2008 held at the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, in September because there are many important and attendees only technical sessions. :)

Weight

Well, since I turned 30 years old, I kept getting weight almost monotonically.
It's more than 85Kg when I got married about 3 years ago, but since then my eating habit was greatly improved.

Today, I was astonished with my wife when we found that my weight is less than 80Kg now. :o



Hey Jade, are you reading?
I guess I lost about 10Kg since I met you in Tokyo last time. :o

Engrish

Well, I do not speak English natively, and I know there are a lot of mistakes in my English.
But still, today I thought the below was too silly. :(



Of course, what they wanted to say is, Ladies'.

BTW, the title comes from an web site, www.engrish.com, where they collect funny (and of course, wrong) English expressions found in Japan.

One more thing.
I wrote "natively" in the first line above, and Blogger's spell checker says it's wrong.
But, Merriam Webster indeed says it's an adverb of "native."
I'm wondering why...

Guin Saga 121

A Foul Flower
Guin Saga 121
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-03092705

Hahaha, 121st book! :)
Guin got a big trouble (again) !

On VMI

Here, VMI stands for the "Virtual Machine Interface," not Vendor Managed Inventory, nor Virginia Militia Institute. :o

As I wrote several times recently, I'm working on virtualization these days.
At work, I did some benchmarks and saw not negligible CPU cost using VMware ESX Server.
But, I've been thinking paravirtualization using VMI would improve the situation greatly.

Since then, I got a draft version of VMI and tried to run VMI aware Linux kernels on top of that.
Although I'm still struggling doing so at work, today finally I saw VMI ROM detection message using VMware Workstation 6.0 and Fedora Core 9 (i386).
Hoho, what kind of benchmark should I do? :)

BTW, reading the VMI 2.5 specification, I thought why they didn't include a special I/F intended for SMP configuration, something like a 'SpinLock Ops.' As early implementation of Virtual Iron did, that can be a good clue for constructing SMP virtual machine.
I heard that a VMware guy mentioned at VMWorld 2007 that they made a design choice forcing to schedule all virtual CPUs of a guest simultaneously mainly because of spinlock consideration. But, I think the spinlock ops could be a clue for them.

Day 239 : Egg Allergy

Today, my daughter had the 8th month medical check.
Well, she suffered from eczema on April 25 just after having egg based baby food, and we were afraid that she could have an egg allergy. Unfortunately, that's the case. :(

But, it seems that usually the allergy will be cured till about 15 month.
I'm looking forward to eating egg based sweets with her. :)

Day 237 : The First Piggyback Ride

Today, we tried to give our daughter a piggyback ride.
I'm not sure saying the above "a piggy back ride," but my dictionary gave me the expression.
Maybe "on my shoulder", not "on my back" which I guess usually means "a piggyback ride."
Anyway, my daughter looked happy, and of course we were. :)

Day 236 : Piano

It's a rainy day today, but we went out for shopping by car.
Today's destination was originally Toysarus, but their parking lot was full and the replace was Yamada Denki Fuchu.

We wanted a toy piano and got the below. :)



Fun Fun Keyboard, Toyroyal, \1,243-
It's very cheap but turned out to have very rich functions.
Actually, her parents rather than herself enjoyed it a while after unpacking it. :o

4D2U and Mitaka

I found an interesting article.
It's about a project, called 4D2U, of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

The URL is below:

• http://fmnd.seesaa.net/article/95241417.html

4D2U means "the Four Dimensional Digital Universe Project, and their English home page is here.
Roughly speaking the project is developing visualization tools showing how our universe looks like. Especially, one of their works called "Mitaka" is great. Using Mitaka, we can see our universe at the scale of tens of billion light years!
Really, fascinating. :)

BTW, I have to confess that I found the article while I was searching web pages related to Maaya Sakamoto. Yes, I was looking for information about her song, "Gravity". :o

One more thing.
"Mitaka" is name of the place where the observatory is located.
But, Mitaka is an impressive place for me in two more senses.
First, I'm working for a system integrator now, and in Mitaka there is one of the biggest (and possibly most legacy) IT systems in Japan. Of course, they always have bunch of troubles, and that the system absorbs(!) a lot of engineers. :o
Second, in Mitaka there is one of the biggest institute in Japan mainly working on information technology. At work, I sometimes get help calls from the institute, but often the help calls are really poor ones. :(
I'm always wondering where their speciality went away?

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Today, I attended at a small party of Japanese NetBSD freaks (hackers?) held at Akihabara.

Well, it's a honour of me to see Mr. Fujiwara and other famous *BSD related people, and it's a great pity that I had only one hour there because I have to go home to take a bath with my daughter. :(
But anyway, thanks Tokuda-san for inviting me! :)


BTW, during the party I was feeling that I have almost nothing to talk about my works.
Granted that I have worked on operating systems about 10 years, but actually there are almost not public works of me. Also, because of my experience on operating systems, I worked on various software including Linux/Xen/Apache/JVM/UltraMonkey/OpenSSL etc. and did well (I think, at least) for these several years. But, I realized (again after several years interval) that I haven't had done any notable works at all. And to make matters worse, I've not fixed nor concentrated my main interest area.

In Japanese, there is a phrase, "器用貧乏" (Kiyou-Binbou), which roughly means "Jack of all trades, master of none". The phrase describes me exactly.
On my way back home and since then, I've been in a depression. :(

Maybe it's better to consider changes of circumstance (again).

Linux World Expo Tokyo 2008

Today, I went to the Linux World Expo Tokyo 2008 held at Tokyo Big Sight.

I attended at two sessions.

One is about a cloud computing project of a Chinese city located close to Shanghai.
Although it's a presentation about overview of the local goverment driven project. I mean, not so technical one. But, what impressive for me was that the speaker mentioned they are producing 6000 IT engineers a year! :o
Amazing, and it's impossible to compete with them... :(

The other is a talk about a case study of server consolidation using Linux and Xen given by a famous guy in Japanese open source community. His presentation was very good, and the presentation is available below:

http://www.virtualtech.jp/download/080528LinuxWorldCaseStudy.pdf

At work, I'm also working on virtualization recently, and I was wondering if I/O could be really bottleneck when we try to do server consolidation. Actually, I was feeling network would be more serious bottleneck than I/O after looking into source codes of Linux and Xen.

But, I'm feeling I've understood the point.
Indeed we often see I/O bottlenecks at server consolidation scenes, but it's mainly because system integrators forget to scale up I/O capacity appropriately, not I/O is more troublesome than network from a viewpoint of performance.

Day 229 : Picture Book

Recently, my daughter began to show interests in picture books.



I'm dreaming that one day I and my daughter would tell stories each other. :)

Solaris Internals Second Edition

Solaris Internals, Second Edition
Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro
ISBN 0-13-148209-2

Recently, I'm working on this book.
Especially, the following chapters are high priority ones.

• Chapter6 : Zones
• Chapter7 : Projects, Tasks, and Resource Controls

I need to skim popular virtualization techniques quickly before having a business trip to New York next month, and I'm not sure if I can have enough time without reducing sleeping time.
Of course, it's mainly because my daughter keeps me busy everyday. :o

Delivered on 2007/12/16
Still working on 2008/05/24.

The Elegant Universe

The Elegant Universe -- superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory
Brian Greene
ISBN 4-7942-1109-0 (Japanese Translation)

About 15 years ago, I was a graduate student and majored in theoretical physics of elementary particles.

In those days, it was a dream to have the Theory of Everything which can make predictions that make sense. But, 15 years is long, and I was surprised to know that there were great progresses past 10 years and now we can say the goal is hopefully approaching.

BTW, I love StarTrek, and I'm wondering if we can say
"Let's seek out the final frontier!" someday. :)

Day 222 : The First Chair

The first chair of my daughter. :)

New York

Haha, I got a chance visiting New York. :)



I'll be at this conference in June.

It's more than 3 years ago when I went abroad, and I lost the chance attending at Xen Summit 2007 Fall last year. I'm really looking forward going there. :)

BTW, I want to go to also VMworld 2008 held at Las Vegas.
But, I need to negotiate with my boss. :(

Chance and Chaos

Chance and Chaos
David Ruelle
ISBN 978-4-00-005266-7 (Japanese Translation)

To tell the truth, I bought this book more than 10 years ago, just after
finishing the graduating school where I studied elementary particle physics.

Ruelle is not only an excellent scientist but an extremely good story teller,
or if it's not suitable saying so, anyway an very good author in popularizing
natural science.

Especially, the book covered various areas of natural science now
very much important such as game theory and their
interdisciplinary relationships more than 10 years ago!

I should have worked on the book immediately when I got that. :(

Day 216 : Baby Danone

Today's baby food was yogrut by Baby Daone.



Actually, it's the first yogurt for my daughter, and she looked like as if she had something terrible. :o
There are several variations of Baby Danone such as spinach taste!
I'm wondering what if we gave that her...

The Stew

Today's dinner was one of my favorites, stew. :)



BTW, I love also "The Stew" by Akiko Yano, and I'm dreaming someday I sing the song with my daugher. :)

Day 210 : On the Back of Gramma

Well, this is another snapshot on the Boy's Day.
A grand child on the back of Gramma.
We didn't expect the beaming smile. :)

Day 210 : Something Strange

Today, May 5, is a national holiday, Children's Day in Japan.
We celebrate children by displaying an armor (or just a helmet) of samurai and having rice cakes wrapped in oak leaves.

My daughter looks like happy in front of her father's samurai helmet...



But!
The above picture is something strange.

Yes, actually May 5 is Boy's Day. :o

Day 209 : Fell Asleep from Exhaustion

This is a picture taken at her gramma's house.


Well, in short, she looks like an untidy sleeper. :o

Day 209 : Here we go up, up, up!

I'm not sure if the title explains what I want to say.
Seems to come from Mother Goose, and I hope English speaking readers understand that looking at the picture below.
Anyway, she likes this. :)


BTW, I took the picture at the Kotono-Mama-Hachiman-gu (事任八幡宮)" in Kakegawa city, Japan where her great grand mother lives. I'm looking forward to taking her to the summer festival held there in every September for the first time this summer. :)

Ransho

Ransho (濫觴, らんしょう) is a small but very good china shop in Toyohashi city, Aichi, Japan.
It's located close to JR Toyohashi station, and today I went to the shop with my wife, her mother and my daughter. Well, in this sense, it's Day 206 today. :)

As is common in the world, women loves shopping.
Of course, my wife and her mother are addicted in shopping.
Thus, I was waiting them holding my daughter about an hour hanging around the shop.

I'm wondering if my daughter also loves shopping in the near future... :(

Note: The above picture was taken on May 6, 2008 after getting back to Tokyo.

Archimedes' Revenge

Archimedes' Revenge
Paul Hoffman
ISBN 4-8269-0057-0 (Japanese Translation)

This book is a collection of very good articles on several interesting areas of mathematics for example:

• Theory of Numbers
• Topology
• Computer Science
• Game Theory

Hoffman explains interesting topics in easy to understand way, and I think readers of this book can enjoy it even they didn't major in natural science. :)

My wife majored in psychology, and I believe she can also enjoy the book.
But, I guess she would say "My brain rejects that!" as usual. :(

Day 205 : Hair Salon

Today, my daughter went to a hair salon for the first time.


The left above is "before" and right above is "after". :)

The before picture was taken about a week ago.
Looking at the "before" hair style, a colleague of my wife called her, "Ochi-Musha(落武者, おちむしゃ)" which roughly means a samurai who lost and on his way around.
You can find sample pictures of Ochi-Musha here.

Now, she looks like a boy, I think. :o

L'attentat

L'attentat
Yasmina Khadra
ISBN978-4-15-208805-5 (Japanese translation)

No salvation.
That's what I and my wife felt when we finished the book.

But, I don't think the situation described there is not rare in the world.
The world is full of tragedies, and we have to see them directly.
Especially, peace-addicted people in this country.

Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
ISBN 0-14-023749-6

Finally finished.
Now I'm feeling that I should have read it by Japanese translation. :(

Bought on February 4, 2007.
Finished on April 24, 2008.

Kadoman : A Violent Soba Restaurant

Perhaps, the title might not be correct.
I mean a soba restaurant which offers violent soba. :o

Here, soba is a sort of Japanese noodle, and usually its noodle is thin.
But, as you can see in the picture below, it's like Udon. :o



Violent! Isn't it? :o
You can enjoy that at Kadoman (角萬 station of Tokyo Metro ) which is located along Kokusai-dori avenue near IriyaHibiya Line. It's worth trying once. :)

BTW, noodle freaks in Japan would bring Ramen Jiro to mind easily looking at the picture.
I found an interesting article (in Japanese), and actually some people say Kadoman's soba
"Kadoman is Ramen Jiro in the Soba world." :o

Thanks Tokuda-san for letting me know the violence at lunch time. :o)

Itakimodo

Today, I saw an interesting clinic on my way to lunch.

Here is the photo.


Well, Seitai (整体) is a kind of Japanese traditional chiropractic, and their general image is very good for backache or so but veeeeery painful. :o

The point is its name, Ita-Kimo-Do(いたきも堂).
Of course, it a Japanese phrase, and it's difficult to explain the nuance in English.
But, anyway it has double meanings in a sense.
First of all, "Ita" comes from "itai" which means painful.
Second. "Kimo" comes from "kimochi-ii" which means feeling good.
The last "Do" is a typical suffix of names of shops and clinics and so on.

One more thing is the clinic is close to Yoshiwara area in Tokyo which was famous for a lot of brothels about 100 years ago. In the picture above, on the right side of "いたきも堂", there is "女整体師" which means "a woman bone-cracker." I'm not sure why they want to emphasize "woman." :o

Anyway, Yoshiwara is an interesting area.

Day 198 : Aya Bauer?

Recently, I and my wife often say, "Again, it's Aya Bauer!"

Well, of course it comes from Ina Bauer, and the below is a sample photo. :o

A Simple Periodical File Content Recorder

At work, I often want to record content of some special files of operating system (e.g., '/proc/stat') without calling system provided utilities such as 'sar' because they often cook information too much.

Of course, it's easy doing so by writing a simple shell script which calls 'cat', 'date', etc.
But, under high loaded situations, shell scripts are often delayed, and I wanted to do so as atomic as I can.

Thus, I wrote a small stupid program again. :o

It's available here at this moment and will be moved to this sourceforge project soon.

Hey Mori-san, you can replace your(?) /proc/meminfo and /proc/vmstat sampler by this small utility, 'pfr'. :)

A Beautiful Math

A Beautiful Math

Tom Siegfried
ISBN 978-4-16-370010-6 (Japanese Translation)

This book reminded me of what I thought when I wrote about "The Selfish Gene".

About 2 years ago, there was a discussion on a mailing list. There a
guy asked if people in open source communities can challenge Windows
dominance by cooperating each other or not. What was impressive for me
was that another guy insisted on strongly that altruism is against the
theory of evolution in response to a phrase "collective optimization
of the society" which the first guy said.

I felt something wrong at that time on the second guy's argument.
The point of my thought was about the choice between selfish strategy
or cooperative one.

Genes drive organisms selfishly, but human behavior in their various societies
is not simple. In other word, a society is not a simple prisoners' dilemma
game, but an iterated one at least. Also, participants there can
communicate/negotiate/intrigue... and be tied with each other.
Thus, the best optimum strategy is usually mixed strategy.

Reading Dawkins' book in those days, I thought "Meme" could be the key
to explain my feeling of wrongness. I mean what the first guy should
have have bean a meme not a gene.
But, after all, it's simply because the discussion was just too primitive.

Siegfried's book reviews progresses in game theory focusing on
interdisciplinary aspects of them including even quantum mechanics!
As an old physics student, it's a fun to see that what I studied those days
got various new aspects to work with other areas of science,
network theory, evolution theory, economics and even sociology etc.

BTW, more more reason why I like Siegfried's work is that he is familiar with
Sci-Fi. When I was a child, I pored over Isac Asimov's works, and it was
beyond my expectation seeing the name of Hari Seldon. :)

Bought on March 6, 2008.

Finished on April 20, 2008.

Day 187 : An Armadillo?

Recently, she began to bend her body like the above.
She's like an Armadillo, hahaha... :o

BTW, the above armadillo is not this one. :o