Guess what was waiting for me at the lab this morning?

A boxful of Australia, courtesy of the ever-lovely Miss Amanda.

If, like me, you delight in advance at the possibility of one day being diagnosed with an incurable disease linked to a gene named after the world’s most famous blue hedgehog, feel free to circulate the following petition:

Dear fellows at the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Guidelines Committee,

It has recently come to my attention that you have decided to do away with names deemed “inappropriate or offensive” found in the existing international gene nomenclature.

I couldn’t agree more: I always thought that the officially registered name for gene kill-all-the-Jews-and-drink-their-blood was a bit politicised for a scientific setting.

Whatever you do, however, keep your hands off gene SHH, otherwise officially known as sonic hedgehog homolog (Drosophila) gene. We like it the way it is (blue, spiky and running very fast). Beside, what better way to break the news of some potentially fatal gene mutation disease to a kid, than by introducing a beloved computer game mascot!

PS: and for chrissake, drop the Comic Sans font: it makes your world-class gene database website look like it was coded by a 1st year CS student in 1991 (yes, I know: it probably was).

Love,

First sakura blossoms on the Kamogawa

Most unfortunate quote of the week, courtesy of some economist quoted by the Guardian:

[...] One should not forget the great depression, and that the way we got out of it was a world war. Germany, Japan and China have to do more. [...] Heiner Flassbeck, Guardian.co.uk

Of course, this is taken entirely out-of-context for comic relief. I still did a double-take upon reading that sentence.

Am I the only one absolutely befuddled that a multi-billion dollar company that has had over two decades to iron out the details of its poor excuse for a enterprise-standard word processor, has never managed to come up with one single passable built-in template for business letters?

And I am not talking about their “Fantasy” or even “Elegant” letter templates, which would make my niece’s MySpace page seem sober and sophisticated by comparison. No: I am referring to their most basic, no-frills, “Business modern” template, which still manages to look like the caricature of a “don’t” example in a primer on business etiquette and communication (pro tip: the fact that your monitor has colours, and possibly so does your printer, doesn’t mean you should try to stuff the entire rainbow in your official print documents).

Time to start writing my mail with LaTeX.

In Paris (and Europe at large) for the week… Should be back in the Kyo just in time for hanami.

Sensei: Blah blah blah… international collaboration project… blah blah blah… grant submission accepted… blah blah blah… Five year budget.

Dave: Great. But, huh, how does it affect me?

Sensei: How would you feel about going to Berlin or Boston for three months? All expenses paid, of course.

Dave: Sure, what’s the schedule and which project would I be working on?

Sensei: Oh, it’s entirely up to you, just pick the faculty and project you’d like to work on and a time during this fiscal year you’d like to go. Where would you prefer: Berlin or Boston?

Dave: Dunno. Both are nice. Does either include daily spa and massage, by any chance?

Sensei: If you want, you can do one country this year and the other next year.

Dave: You don’t say.

Sensei: We’ll also send you to their workshop in Boston this Summer anyway.

Dave: Recession hasn’t hit our lab yet, has it…

Since about age 5, I have come to grasp with the notion that staring at an oven timer doesn’t make it cook a cake faster.

And yet, I still seem to think that staring at the live output of my painstakingly slow linear optimization program is gonna make it spit its final value faster.

When I first arrived to Tokyo, I noticed that, come the end of winter, weather forecast screens (in trains, on TV, wherever…) would start adding an extra line under the main sun/cloud/water-drop pictograms. Since the new icons usually depicted lovely little pink flowers or trees blowing in the wind, I naively assumed that this had something to do with upcoming sakura blossom (which wasn’t completely far off, considering most local newscast do have an official daily progress report around sakura season).

It is only a couple years later that I finally understood what this seasonal indicator actually referred to. The infinitely less enjoyable season of eye-puffing, nostril-irritating, headache-inducing, Japanese hay fever. The main reason behind these infamous surgical masks you see people wearing in every damn last “Nippon culture” TV reports.

However, it wasn’t until I moved to the Kansai countryside last month, that I started experiencing for myself what it might feel like. Apparently, my city-dwelling organism was sufficiently immune to Tokyo’s own brand of pollution-laden pollen to go through Kafunshō season unharmed, but much less happy about living in the middle of the woods. Woods no doubt entirely planted with deadly cypress and cedar.

If you happen to be walking in the hilly area surrounding Kyodai’s research campus in Ōbaku, these days, and spot a gaijin with puffy red eyes on the verge of tears, rest assured it does not [yet] have anything to do with feelings of sadness or elation at living more than 20 minutes away from the closest place selling proper balsamic vinegar or non-ersatz chocolate, it’s just the damn neighbouring conifers trying to copulate with my mucous membranes.