Osutori

In Japanese Austria and Australia basically sound identical. I usually have to mention that I am from Europe, and that there are no Kangaroos where I come from. Sometimes it also helps mentioning Vienna or Mozart :-)

Anyway, seems as though there is finally a solution to the problem. Austria's name in Japanese will be changed from Osutoria to its original form: Osutori. Dropping the last "a" will make it sound different from Osutoraria (which is Australia's Japanese name).

There is more information at ORF.at (German). And Matsusaka has also sent me the official document (PDF, German and Japanese). However, this seems to be somehow unofficial and some are objecting to this change... anyway, I think it's a great idea.

Playing Instruments Differently

Martin found this on the web:



What's next? :-)

Wearable Guitar

Australian researchers embedded sensors in the arms of a t-shirt to create a wearable musical instrument [...]

(Found at Boing Boing.)

Now all we need is wearable amplifiers! :-)

Small World

I love Google Earth! I just traveled around the world visiting places of which I have special memories. Can you guess the places? :-)









In case you are wondering what Tsukuba looks like, I've posted a Google Earth picture here.

Autumn

Tsukuba is a lovely place in autumn! Flowers everywhere (as in all seasons so far), colorful green/yellow/orange/red leaves, fresh air, and sunshine! Here is a picture I took on my way to work. I think this is my most favorite season :-)



If you are a last.fm user try snappradio. A wonderful idea by Paul. It makes the music twice as enjoyable! He automatically links images to the music you are listening too. Web 2.0 seems almost as good as autumn in Tsukuba! :-)

Fujisan is Back!

Mount Fuji has returned again! The summer haze is gone, and the cooler autumn weather has cleared the air. The last time I had seen Mount Fuji was my first morning at Ninomiya house. Since then I had only seen the haze. I had forgotten what a wonderful view it is :-)

23 Days

The graph shows the download statistics for my PhD thesis... a nice way to measure its decay. The dotted red line is a fitted exponential curve. The estimated half-life period is about 23 days, which is somehow comparable to the half-life of the rare cosmogenic isotope ³³P.



The outlier in June might be related to the discussions on the MIREX list. In October the MIREX results were published. In both cases I was often looking up things in my thesis, either to support arguments, or to create my posters.

Actually what I was really looking into was how easy it is to use processing to plot simple curves. The anti-aliasing is really nice... but I can do the same plot with 10 times less lines of code in Matlab and plus I get the axis for free...