New toy

It's the short interlude between "too hot" and "too cold" which means we have started running a bit more properly again. Over the summer the temperature meant it was impossible to do much, and the rare times that we tried just resulted in injuries. But over the past few weeks we have gradually built up to managing the run to work which is a fun start to the day. Every weekend, we now see lots of people jogging along the beach in their new Shonan Marathon t-shirts in preparation for the upcoming event. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get an entry in for it this year. It must have been blind luck that we got in last year, as it is oversubscribed and if you don't log on at the right time, too bad. There are plenty of other events, of course, but none so convenient for us.

I was shopping for some bicycle related stuff from my favourite on-line store (crazy, I know, but it's often cheaper, and certainly much easier, to get even Japan-manufactured stuff sent from the UK than go shopping for it here) when I realised that I could justify adding new toy to the order due to the offer of free postage and  a money off voucher. In the past I'd vaguely considered getting a heart rate monitor and/or GPS watch, not that either is particularly essential, but the Garmin Forerunner 110 seemed like reasonable value as a combined package, and I know that Stoat seems to quite like his. It duly turned up and this morning I took it out for a little jog. In place of the Shonan Marathon, we have a low-key 5km event next weekend so thought it would be a good idea to try running quite fast (well, by our standards) to remind ourselves what it feels like. Unfortunately it was lightly raining which makes the shiny stone paving along the prom very slippery. But at least it wasn't baking hot :-)

The distance seems acceptably close to that estimated by walkjogrun.net which I have used in the past for measuring runs, even though the route doesn't quite match the reality. It certainly seems a lot more convenient than my previous approach of measuring and pacing runs by hand!

The new Apple iCovet

Apparently it is being unveiled overnight (Japanese time). No-one knows what it is, or what it does, but like a good fanboy, I obviously need one, even if I don't quite know why yet.

I can hardly sleep.

Spend for the planet!

You know how that old "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan of the environmental movement is embarrassingly inconvenient for conventional economic growth?

Well, Japan has recently solved this conundrum with a truly brilliant idea. They have miraculously turned grotesque over-consumption into an environmental act by creating the "eco-point"! Each "Eco-point" is worth about 1¥ (which you can use for yet more consumption), and you get awarded more points for buying larger, more power-hungry appliances. The largest flat-screen plasma TVs, with a power consumption of about 5 times greater than a typical old-style CRT model, get the max 36,000¥-worth of points. Buying larger air-conditioners and refrigerators will save the planet too! Why didn't Al Gore think of it sooner? The "eco-point" greenwash site can be found here, but it seems a bit knackered at the moment.

Coming next: eco-coal, which neutralises its CO2 emissions by prepending the "eco" prefix to ordinary coal.

Eco-genius invents the dehumidifier

Surely I can't be the only one to have realised that this new machine that can magic water out of thin air is little more than a humble dehumidifier, the like of which has been around for....well I don't have a clue actually but it is hardly a new invention. They are very common in Japan (either as a function of an air-con or as a stand-alone unit) where the summers are extremely humid. I wouldn't fancy drinking what comes out of the back end, mind you, but that only requires a bit of sterilising and filtering.

As for the cost of the resulting water, at $0.30 per litre...I do not know how that compares to existing dehumidifiers but it makes a nonsense of the breathless claims that this gadget could make a useful contribution to water production. The claim of paying for itself in a couple of years is clearly absurd and refers only to an alternative of living off bottled water - and who does that?

Desalination plants can generate water at about a thousandth of the price (random google).

Damned with faint praise

Were I looking for a way to describe a new electric scooter, "to rival the Segway" is not a phrase that I would put on my marketing materials.

Just do it

This story has has surprisingly little coverage IMO, considering how significant it could be:

"The [Japanese] government will aim for 30 percent of all households to have solar panels installed by 2030"

That's 40 million people. Japan is already one of the world-leaders in this area, at about 1% household coverage. 30% is a lot. Japan is blessed with a lot of sun, but is otherwise short of energy resources. Their nuclear power industry is large but the climate for that isn't great, so the country is heavily reliant on imported oil and likely to remain so for some time. We are also right at the limit of generation capacity here, with official Govt advice (eg on air-con use) aimed at cutting peak demand in the summer. So obviously promoting solar power could brings substantial benefits both in energy security, and avoiding new power station construction. Of course the massive cash injection into research will also cement Japan's position as the world's leading producer. I'm not sure if I've written it before, but I've long thought that one of the best reasons for increased investment in renewable technology is to get at the forefront of the technological advances. It hardly takes a genius to see which way the wind is blowing on this in the medium term.

IMO spinning this policy as primarily a global-warming issue is probably as much political convenience as hard reality. The Japanese happily pay massively inflated food prices on the grounds of food security (probably that's got a lot to do with buying the support of the agricultural sector), so it is hard to see them objecting at support for energy security too, if it was presented in those terms. But doing something about emissions certainly makes you one of the "good guys" internationally.

Either way, I hope it's the sort of action that people at all positions in the spectrum can agree is a good thing. OK, maybe hard-line libertarians could argue that the Govt spending taxpayers' money is less efficient than the private sector doing it by themselves. But compared to (say) wasting trillions of dollars on an unwinnable war in the Middle East in the vain hope of securing a couple more decades of affordable oil, it's hard to argue that the Japanese approach to energy policy is worse!

I want one

Well, I don't quite want one like this, but I can see a time in the future when they are a practical proposition. It's encouraging to see people are actually developing these things commercially (as opposed to the odd home-brew like this). Of course for scientific meetings the ideal would be to rent one in-situ rather than own your own and post it around the world.

Meanwhile, the AGU is offering a handful (only) of presentations from the upcoming meeting on webcast (see here), and Nature is doing something on Second Life to coincide with Bali. I can't see the latter catching on - the only reason the bureaucrats have international meetings at all is so they can go somewhere exotic (I'll eat my hat when the UN has a conference in Scunthorpe or Wigan). JAMSTEC has a "booth" there, apparently (Bali, not Scunthorpe). Pity the poor sods who have to man it...not. Not that I'm in a position to throw stones, heading off to the AGU tomorrow. Honestly, I would pay good money to avoid travelling there in person if there was a viable web-based solution.

The future face of conferences?

Having just flown around the world for another meeting, I can't help but wish that someone would put this into production. It's good to meet people occasionally, but given the option, I'd generally prefer to save the cost, carbon emissions, and travel time (or more likely, I'd "attend" more meetings if I could do so virtually).

Mind you, even a decent web-cast of the presentations would be a start, and this would substantially cut down on the technical problems of multi-way communications. Why isn't anyone doing this already (at least, not that I know of in climate science)?

New Sharp Zaurus!

Sorry to lead on any Zaurus fans with the title - it's not truly a new Zaurus, but merely new to me. The Zaurus line is long since defunct (indeed even the last few models were little more than cash cows to milk some more profit out of the design, with very little innovation), and my old SL-C860 is a little long in the tooth with the hinge now starting to misbehave a little. With this in mind, I thought it was time to upgrade before it was too late. So a few weeks ago we headed off to Akihabara where I expected to pick up the newest (least old) SL-C3200 for about ¥50,000 or a little more. You can learn more about the 3200 model here BTW.

Rather to our surprise, we managed to find a small Sofmap shop which sells 2nd hand stuff, which we had last visited several years ago (in fact I might have got my 860 there). Things often change over that sort of time scale here, and our memories were hazy about its location anyway. But it is still there, and had the full range of Zaurus models (along with all sorts of PDAs and cameras). I hadn't really gone looking for the older 3100 model, but I vaguely remembered that it was almost the same as the 3200 - just a slightly smaller disk, and less software for English learners, neither of which I am bothered about. So for a further saving of about ¥8,000 compared to their 3200s (which were already well below the best "new" price I could find), I chose the former. Although nominally 2nd hand, I think they must be unsold shop returns as they are in near-immaculate condition.

So now I've got a new Zaurus to install all my favourite software, and an excuse to have another look at the full range of software available (which to be honest hasn't changed much). The machine is clearly better than the 860 in many minor ways - better keyboard feel and layout, a nice Japanese-English dictionary and encyclopedia (especially now I can read it a bit), obviously massive disk space (comparatively speaking) and a slightly more elegant base shape. There are some other minor updates to the bundled software which are moderately useful/entertaining, like a train timetable/planner. It is also now very clear that my 860's battery was getting rather weak - the new machine lasts much better. Mostly it's the same however, which is what I wanted.

As well as gaining a shiny new SL-C3100, I have of course also gained a spare disposable SL-C860, which means I can play at being a Linux geek and install new distributions like pdaXrom on it - this is a full X11 windows manager thing with huge number of applications available. Installing the basic package was straightforward, setting up things like the internet connection rather less so, but I've even got (one method of) that working OK now (ok, jules fixed the last bit for me). I'm not sure that it is really that useful to me, especially since it means losing a lot of Sharp's inbuilt Japanese language abilities (and/or losing a lot of hair trying to install enough bits and pieces to get back roughly to where I started). But it's something new to play with.

Second childhood

Partly as a reward to myself for passing the JLPT 2 test, and partly to help with further learning, I decided some time ago to get a Nintendo DS lite. This took some time as the Yodobashi stores have been permanently sold out (and not even taking orders) and I didn't want it so much as to actually go to Tokyo and pay over the recommended price at the handful of shops that were price-gouging (yeah, "matching supply and demand").

By chance, I wandered in to the Yokohama store on Friday evening just as they had a batch in, so I joined the queue and am now the happy owner of a blue plastic child's toy :-)

As I said, it's for study really, and I've got a couple of kanji-learning applications, this Kanji Kentei drill program and this new release "Nazotte oboeru otona no kanji renshuu" (trace and learn kanji practice for adults"). Both of them go through the 1945 jouyou ("daily use") kanji in the standard order that every schoolchild takes about a decade to learn. The former application is aimed squarely at a series of kanji exams that this organisation organises, with lots of questions in that style. The latter is (despite the name) more like a children's learn-to-write program with patterns to trace over.

Although I had to learn to read about 1000 kanji for the JLPT test, that was just multi-choice with no writing required, so I'd hardly learnt any writing at all. In fact writing is completely irrelevant to my daily life in Japan (I've never found anywhere that normal Roman characters are not usable) and even native Japanese often struggle a bit when forced to write by hand. However I'm sure that the action of writing will help to embed the shapes in my memory and I'm also tempted to have a go at one of the kanji tests this year as the JLPT1 is too big a jump in one step and the Kanji Kentei tests are more finely graded.

I was rather surprised on starting up the Nazotte oboeru program that the first practice set of kanji which it presented me with were rather difficult ones which I had no idea how to read or write. It turns out that the program judges your starting level based on your age - I had thought it was a little intrusive to ask for date of birth along with name to personalise the game at the start, but hadn't thought it would really matter. So now according to the machine I am James aged 5 again :-)

Both the programs are aimed solely at Japanese, not foreign learners of the language. They rely on the user knowing a lot of vocabulary (written phonetically), and as such they are not really suitable for beginners. They certainly do not replace my home-brewed English/Japanese flashcard program but should augment it usefully. There's certainly plenty of japanese reading practice in the programs! I'm also going to try some graphic novel/adventure games, of which a select few are available in dual language Japanese/English versions.