Day 838 : Stand Up!

Recently, I take my daughter to a park almost every week end.
Today, she succeeded to stand up on a swing. :)

But, I'm not sure if she was really enjoying that.
I mean perhaps she could be scared on the swing ... :o

La plus belle historie du monde

"La plus belle historie du monde"
Le secrets de nos origines

Hubert Reeves, Joel de Rosnay, Yves Coppens and Dominique Simonnet
ISBN 4-480-42176-9

This book looks like a best seller in France.
There 3 famous scientists give talks on the origins of Universe, Life and Human Beings led by a famous journalist.

Actually, there were several points which I was not sure if they are really established theories or not, but anyway the book is easy to read and a very good popular science book.

Shamisen

Today, I found a great video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK6XwrZB0tY



Fascinating... isn't it? :)

Funny Font

I found a funny font today while net surfing...

http://blog.designed-by-kenji.com/?eid=613862

I thought the designer is a genius. :o
It's a pity that it's difficult to create Japanese version of the font because kanji characters have more complicated shapes. Maybe it's possible to design a Hiragara funny font. :)

BTW, I'm wondering what if I wrote a academic paper using the font... :o

Unbroken Arrow

Unbroken Arrow
Chohei Kambayashi
ISBN 978-4152090515

This is the third book of Yukikaze series.
Kambayashi is one of the most discriminating Sci-Fi authors in Japan.

For years, Kambayashi has been seeking for a bit philosophical things.
"What is reality?" for example.

Yukikaze series is a story about a battle between human beings and aliens called Jam which look like machinery life form, especially forms of combat airplanes.

In the first book of Yukikaze series, Kambayashi wrote mainly on relationship between human beings and machines.
In the second book, he tried to describe differences between human beings and Jam, but still the main focus was on the earth side. Actually, the relationship between human beings and Yukikaze, the most cutting edge artificial intelligence optimized for battle.
Here, the point is, the alien, Jam, was described as completely 'alien' throughout the two books. Anyway, too different to understand each other.

Here in the third book, Kambayashi steps into a new stage.
The story begins when a journalist received a mail from the planet Fairy, the battle field, connected by subspace corridor in the Antarctica. The sender is a human, a renegade commander of the earth side force in the planet, and his message was a proclamation of war on behalf of Jam...
Thus, there are not so many dog fight scenes of airplanes like the previous two books, but it's full of dizzy but meaning a great deal scenes which Kambayashi is good at.
I assure you that the book is worth reading. :)

Chaos Phenomenology

Chaos Phenomenology
Hiroshi Serizawa
ISBN 978-4489004223

A plain introduction to classical chaotic dynamics with sample programs.
But, they are based on TurboC (!) and depend on Borland's Graphic Interface (BGI).
Nowadays, a bit obsolete... :(

Prime Obsession

Prime Obsession -- Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest Unsolved Problem
John Derbyshire
ISBN 4-8222-8204-X

This books is a plain expository on Riemann Hypothesis.
Actually, I didn't know well how good describing distribution of prime numbers the hypothesis and related theorems are.

I believe that you can do good mental gymnastics reading the book even if you don't have enough background knowledge on number theories. Actually, I didn't have almost at all. :o

Guin Saga 130

Guin Saga 130
A Fathomless Future
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030975-6

This is the very last book of the Guin Saga series.
It's a great pity that Kurimoto could not complete her greatest work.
But, as her husband writes in postscript of the book, Kurimoto left us great amount of information about overall story line of the series. So, even I can imagine my own version of Guin Saga story, and now I'm wondering if my daughter would have interests on the series. If she does, it must be a happy time chatting various topics of the Guin Saga world with my daughter. :)

Day 783 : Reading Girl?

Above is a snapshot of this afternoon. :)
She is reading a poetry by Tozo Haraguchi (原口統三), a charismatic Japanese poet, who committed suicide when he was 20 years old. I'm not sure if she understands what she is reading. :o

One more thing what came up with me looking at the above photo is a French film, "The Reader." I hope that she won't fall into a strange situation like the heroine of the film. :)

Day 775 : Spaghetti Girl

Ha ha, above is a snapshot of this afternoon. :)
Both myself and my wife was very sleepy, and we fell asleep earlier than our daughter.
15 or 30 minutes later, we found an entangled ball of spaghetti like the above. :o

XORG

Today, I attended at a kind of network operators and researchers group inside my employer's companies group. Here, X of XORG is one of 26 alphabets. Above is a snapshot at the party after the meeting.

There I made a short presentation about cloud computing and actually I was not sure if audience there were really interested in cloud computing movement because most of the audience are working for network carriers. But, after all, it turned out that not a small number of the people are interested in the huge hype of cloud computing and thinking their business seriously.

Since I joined to the current employer of mine, I was not sure if the companies under the same holding company are sharing the same goal or not. Frankly speaking, I thought they are competing each other. :o But, today I felt some kind of sense of unity. :)

Day 769 : Paperback Girl

Haha, above is a snapshot of this evening.
From yesterday, she began to show interests on books, and today she looke like attracted paperbacks.

But, the problem is the title. It's William Gibson's Idoru (ISBN 0-425-15864-0). :(
You can find a book review article of the book by Hiroo Yamagata here, and I do not recommend that she tries it as her first paperback...
My recommendation is a juvenile book such as Harry Potter or Lion Boy, but anyway today the cover art looked like attracted her. :o

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
Tom White
ISBN 978-0-596-52197-4

Today, I made a 6 nodes small Hadoop cluster finally.
In also Japan, recently everybody and his brother of IT industory is interested in Hadoop and similar technology, and I am not an exception. :o

Around me at work, there seem to be a lot of people who indeed have interests on Hadoop but do not know what they can do using Hadoop. :o
In case of me, the situation is a bit different. I'm working on a national R&D project related to cloud computing, but actually I'm not sure if the technology is really useful or not. :o So, as a use case of it, I began to work on Hadoop/MapReduce recently. :(

I know it's like putting the cart before the horse, but what can I do?? :(

VIMPL#20

I attended at the 20th meeting of the Virtualization Implementation Technology Workshop (Meeting?) tonight.

Today, there were 4 speakers, and three of them gave us reports of SOSP '09, and the other one talked about Japan Linux Symposium.
For me, the most interesting topic was about formal verification work of L4 microkernel(!?), seL4. Although the authors from NICTA, Australia, had to assume various restrictions, but anyway they won the best paper award.

BTW, I attended at another meeting yesterday evening. It was a really really boring and fucking one. It was a waste of time. :(
But I had happy time about 3 hours today, and I can go to bed with happy feeling. :)

Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow

Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow
Roger Penrose (commentaries by Ken-ichiro Mogi and Kaoru Takeuchi)
ISBN 4-480-09006-1 (Japanese edition)

This book is not just a translation of Penrose's articles, but a collection of commentaries and discussions about Penrose's ideas on consciousness. Thus, Japanese title of the book is "ペンローズの量子脳理論" which means "The Quantum Brain Theory of Penrose."
Readers are required to have knowledge on not only Cognitive Science but also Computability, Mathematical Logic including Goedel's theory and contemporary Physics or background to understand them at least.
But, the translators, Mogi and Takeuchi, have wide variety of knowledge covering them, and their additional writings help us greatly understanding the original Penrose's idea. In this sense, the book is a unique work on the theme.

BTW, at least for me, I'm feeling that I need to read some more books to have enough understanding on the concept :(, and I'm looking fora good book on Mathematical Logic now....

Day 757 : Shopping

Haha, above is a snapshot when we went out for a walk this evening.
She wares a helmet which we bought on the last Sunday at a bicycle shop. Actually we set for the walk after my wife did test run of the bicycle, and she asked me taking a stroll with her. In addition, she looked like loves the helmet, and so she kept waring that. :)

At first, we had nothing to buy there, but her mother asked me to have two apples by cell phone, and she enjoyed shopping this time. :)

Day 757 : Gymnastic Club

In Japan, November 3 is a national holiday, and I went to a gymnastic club that my daughter attends on Tuesday.

It was a delightful time and she looked like enjoying various gymnastic apparatuses there at first. But, I had to face reality that my daughter did not listen to coaches almost at all and went her own way all the time there ... :o

Now I'm wondering if she listens to what other people are talking about someday...

Day 755 : Friends

Today, we went to a bycicle shop with my daughter's friend and her mother.
Above is a snapshot on our way back home.

The right above girl is younger than my daughter by one month, but I was a bit surprised that she was speaking some senseful phrases. My daughter seems to understand what we are talking about, but she speaks only a few words. So far, I didn't care that my daughter does not speak senseful phrases yet, but looking at other children speaking I became anxious a bit. :(

An Introduction to The Human Sciences

An Introduction to The Human Sciences
Takeshi Yoro
ISBN 4-480-86064-9

This book is worth reading.

Yoro, author of the book, defines Human Sciences as explaining something by using a human being as a criterion defined in scientific and universal way. I think Yoro is trying to reconstruct the way to build up a world perspective in a bit different manner from the modern western science.

Why can a human being, a highly objective thing, be used as a criterion for having perspective of the world, the most subjective thing?
It is because the perspective must be expressed by a language which is a collection of commonly understandable symbols among human beings, and it's a human brain which processes the symbols and gives senses to them. Thus, the world perspective cannot be separated from the nature of a human being.

Anyway, I think readers can see a bit new approach to this very old problem.

Day 748 : A Cold Day

In Japan, we had cold days this week end.
Above is a snapshot when we went out for shopping this evening. We were worrying that our daughter might catch a cold and felt it too cold outside, but actually she looked like enjoying shopping. :)