At its current rate of lazy, never-ending cheap self-one-upmanship it calls a plot, Heroes probably won’t make it past mid-season before its characters have all been made into equally indestructible super-human beings with god-like abilities. What then? Do they settle it with a tickle fight.

Is this show written by teenage nerds on ritalin, or did they just post a poll on the back covers of sci-fi mags?

It’s Saturday night, just past 4am.

Right now, I could be:

• In my bed, sleeping.
• In my bed, not sleeping.
• Somewhere in the world’s largest city, getting drunk, dancing to loud music, watching girls in Japanese schoolgirl outfits wrestle in jell-o. Possibly all of the above.
• In the middle of the desert, doing drugs and discovering my inner totem animal.

Instead: I am in the middle of an empty office lab overlooking deserted downtown-Tokyo, staring at a monitor, running Support Vector Machine simulations.

Something, somewhere, went very, very, horribly wrong with my life.

… at the top of Kyoto station…

The japanese version is a [rather weak] pun on the kanji for grass (葉 = Ha = grass).

1. Cicadas
2. Cat

The most common specimen of the area (Homo Sapiens Alcoholicus Imbibus) is conspicuously missing from this study…

Pros and cons of loading a 120-ft scroll of tracing paper into my typewriter and going on a frenzied 48h non-stop benzedrine-fueled Masters thesis writing session:

Pros:

1. It worked for Jack Kerouac.
2. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to edit and correct typos.
3. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to spend drunk in some seedy Golden Gai bar.

Cons:

1. Actually, it took him three weeks to write it. I don’t have three weeks.
2. Sleep deprivation-induced typos probably likely to include: entire paragraphs written in Urdu, random obscene expletives, obscure references to isomorphic transformations in alternate planes of reality…
3. Comparability of Beat literature masterpiece with Natural Language Processing project involving Machine Learning parsing of Rhetorical Structure Trees: dubious.

It’s a toss, really…

One of Kyoto’s less famous sightseeing destination. This former daimyo residence is filled with secret caches (to hide assassins), hidden folding stairways (to escape), “nightingale floors” (made to creak when walked on by potentially nefarious individuals) and uncannily low ceilings (to make it impossible to samurai to draw their katanas)…

Unfortunately didn’t have a chance to snap a shot inside (our tour asked us to refrain from taking pictures and felt conspicuous enough being the only gaijin amidst a dozen locals).

For a good English description, I just found this blog entry that describes pretty much the same tour I had. I can also confirm that the tour is exclusively in Japanese (in my case, spoken insanely fast by some little obachan) and they seem pretty serious about not letting in unaccompanied non-Japanese speakers (luckily my crappy language phone skills miraculously managed to fool them… mwahahaha).