Calm down: not my coming-out.

Beside, ever since these pictures of me, in my favorite electric blue vinyl pants and see-through mesh shirt, dancing to Ellen‘s set at the Stud have made it all over the internet, there’s scant little to Come Out of.

Indeed, loose morals and sexual deviance run rampant in the family, and my attention-whore of a little brother decided to up me one: he finally operated his carefully and anxiously planned official Coming Out to both of our loving, yet expectedly old-school, parents.

Even though we were both raised with open-mindedness and respect as core values of our education, this isn’t exactly an easy news to break to the people who are by now routinely asking him when they’ll get to meet “the lucky one”…

So I thought I’d seize the occasion to congratulate him on his courage, on the important life choices and decisions he made, tell him that I am as proud of him as any big brother could ever be and wish him lots of happiness in love as in many other things.

Oh, and you may wonder why it happens that two brothers are blogging in two different languages? Well, it’s a long and complicated story, and I’ll spare the spoilers to the rare few out there who still haven’t downloaded seen Episode 3 (hint: he is the one with the ridiculous Bavarian hairdo, I am the one who gets to blow things up).

Contest is Officially Over!

I know I said I would post the solution this week-end, but things didn’t go as planned. Far from the comfort of my home and my little computer on Sunday night, I did try to sneak out of bed to send a quick post, around 4am, but was sharply reminded of House Rules regarding computer use, by the most evil phosphorescent glare, this side of the Pacific. I figured I’d rather be one day late on my promise than end up with a ritual katana neatly inserted between shoulder blades.

Without further ado:

The Answers

By order of appearance in the entry (I’ll leave it up to you to match translations and text).

• La Traviata: “Noi siamo zingarelle” (“We are the gypsies”) – Verdi, on a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave
• Carmen: Acte 1: “Quand je vous aimerai?… L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (“Love is an undomesticated bird”) – Bizet, on a libretto by Meilhac and Halévy (based on the novel by Prosper Mérimée).
• La Vie En Rose – Original lyrics composed and sung by Edith Piaf. Though the only version I have on my hard drive is the cover by Grace Jones.
• La Traviata (again): “Ah, fors’è lui che l’anima”
• Chan Chan – Compay Segundo – Calle Salud
• Le Tourbillon – sung by French actress Jeanne Moreau, written by Cyrus Bassiak: this song is featured in François Truffaut’s famous movie Jules et Jim.
• She’s Lost Control – Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures (1980)
• Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen
• Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux – Georges Brassens – Les Amoureux des Bancs Publiques
• Die Lorelei – Schubert (many other versions) based on a poem by Heinrich Heine
• Kyrie – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Requiem: Κυριε ἐλεησον means “Lord, have mercy!” in classical greek. What? No, I’m not joking. I did mention greek in the rules, did I or did I not?

For your ears only, and very temporarily, I have uploaded all the ones I have on digital support, here. But hurry up, as I’ll probably remove these very much not-copyright-safe files within a day or two.

The Winner

All right, now for the man who shall be getting our unrestrained admiration, as well as a bottle of that nasty paper glue solvant the locals refer to as “alcohol” (comes in a cute bottle) [a picture will soon follow]:
Well, there is no surprise and Mr. Tuitui (helped by family) is the lucky winner. With an impressive 77% result (perhaps a bit less, as I suspect he only spotted the Traviata once, but let’s not be picky) or 10 tracks out of 13. Being French helped, seeing how it was heavily represented with four tracks. But then again, English would have been just a bit too easy.
Congratulation, Mr. Tuitui, my people shall be contacting your people and arrange for delivery. Preferably on a drier day than today.

Another One?

I think I may, when I have a sec, do another one. I’ll try to spend more than 10 minutes this time and make an entry slightly less nonsensical. In fact, perhaps you won’t even notice it’s there. Keep your eyes peeled.

Nine concerts, hundreds of artists, millions of spectators all over the world…

I think the G8 bigwigs got the message loud and clear: this generation as a whole is still able to stand up, rise, and demonstrate its love of pop music concerts. especially free ones.

Oh, and also they think poverty’s bad and people dying of starvation during evening news is like, so not cool, you know.

I think we are nearly there.

Update: All right, maybe I was a bit hasty in my conclusions. Three billions telespectators, ought to show that this generation does not merely love attending pop music concerts: it is also perfectly happy sitting at home on a couch and watching them on the telly. Wow, take that poverty!
And yea, I think this figure is pure bullshit too, but I read it on the interweb, so it must be true.

As part of an elaborate not-getting-laid-at-all-cost strategy, I spent the best of my Friday night hacking at home on a whim, bravely ignoring 1am drunken phone calls from a lonely ex, I didn’t stop until I basically had a working prototype.

And thus here you go:
Dr Dave’s Keitai Kanji Multiradical Dictionary!

Of course, you can use this dictionary from any browser, but it has been made especially compact, so as to offer convenient browsing on a small keitai screen.

Why bother making yet another multiradical dictionary when Jim Breen (and many others, most likely) already offers a very decent one on his site?

Two reasons:

1. I wanted one that be easy to use from a keitai. Jim Breen’s is still a bit heavy to load and browse with a small screen.
2. I wanted a smarter system for radical selection. All the systems I’ve seen so far let you choose your radicals from a checkbox list of all common radicals. Such a list can be quite long. This makes finding each radical quite tedious and particularly cumbersome on a keitai. Mine use a slightly different approach, that requires at least some knowledge of basic kanjis, but make it much faster then.

Instructions

Fairly obvious, really:

• Screen 1: enter a string of kanjis. Can be any kanjis containing one of the radical you want to match or directly a radical. In practice, this means you should pick kanjis that look similar to the one you are trying to match… Say, you want to figure out [汾], you could enter [分] and [海]…
• Screen 2: you will get a list of all radicals matching any of the kanjis entered previously (in our example, you’d get: [ハ], [刀], [母] and [汁]). Select the ones that belong to the kanji you are looking for (e.g. [ハ], [刀] and [汁]). Optionally, enter a number of stroke, with a margin of error (if you want to get any stroke count, do not change the ‘all’ value).
• Screen 3 will give you a list of all kanjis (if any) containing all the radicals selected in the previous screen, ordered by frequency and stroke count (in our example, you’d get only the kanji you were initially looking for: [汾]). Along with the kanji, you are given stroke count and unicode value. Clicking on the kanji will do a word search in WWWJIC (translations). Clicking on the unicode value, will give you WWWJDIC’s Kanjidic entry (kanji pronunciation keys and data).

This script has been successfully tested with AU’s EZweb, but should work on any net-enabled keitai, please let me know if you encounter any problem. Suggestions and general comments most welcome.

Hope you’ll find it useful, I know I will!

Note: As usual, this project uses extensively the amazing amount of data gathered and made available by the EDRG on Jim Breen’s website.

Remember that contest I started a while back?

You know: “Guess the songs and win a sample of refined Japanese spirit, straight from my own personal cellar“…

You thought I’d forget? I most definitely haven’t. Neither have a handful brave, who’ve been communicating to me all along their level of advancement through various means and methods.

So far, most contestants are staling at a puny two or three songs. And by most, I mean all. Save for two gentlemen who have made their strides to within close reach of the goal: the favorite, Mr. MacTuitui, seems well positioned to get that bottle, which might save me on postage stamps, seeing as we happen to be sharing residence on the same island in the Pacific.

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I finally caved in and got myself a Mixi account.

I am not exactly a big fan of so-called “Social Networking” software. Overall, services like Friendster, Orkut et al. have always seemed more of an attempt to make up for years of high school unpopularity, than actually trying to establish meaningful connections between people.

Well, that’s a whole other debate altogether, but frankly, the mere idea of “Social Networking” kinda irks me. That pragmatism of friendships that contend to be mixing mutual feelings of appreciation with some sort of social ladder climbing scheme. You no longer have “friends” on miscellaneous degrees of closeness, you have “contacts”, rated on their ability to help you reach your own social goals. Back when I experimented with Friendster, shortly after it was hailed as the dawn of a new digital age of human interactions, things went a bit like:
Step 1: create a semi-anonymous profile with hobbies, likes and dislikes. Mention that you like to play with electronic music production. Watch the level of activity hovering close to zero outside of the friends you already knew before joining.
Step 2: add a mention in passing that you actually release records, organize parties in SF, and mix for some of them. Watch as over a hundred “friends” suddenly pop-in, add you to their contact list, quickly start trying to sell you their own demo mix or grab guest list comps.

If anything, this laughably caricatural episode taught me one thing: never mention in too much of a positive light any of my professional activities outside of purely professional discussions. If we are having a friendly chat in a social context and it turns out I may be able to help you or we may enter in a mutually beneficial partnership, I’ll be the judge of that, but please save me the fucking faux-friendly courtship that wastes everybody’s time and does nothing to convince me of your professional qualities. Yea, I guess I’m not exactly much of a schmoozing PR guy.

This post-dotcom brand of opportunism, along with the equally ridiculous concept that the friends of your friends ought to be cool people (let me tell you something about the friends of my friends: to an overwhelming majority, they are drug-addled, self-centered, alcoholic pricks. I certainly don’t want anything to do with them) is why I can’t wait for this braindead concept to go down the dot.com drain.

Why have I joined Mixi then?

A few reasons:
1) I need to practice my Japanese more, and Mixi being 100% Japanese is a good way to force me to read and write regularly.
2) The communities and calendar functions make it an infinitely more useful tool than the “You have 3 millions friends-of-friends” traditional Friendster feature.
3) It’s pretty fucking well done altogether.

And here is my account if you wanna be my friend.

You are stuck in Japan, it’s oppressively hot and you don’t have a yen to your name. You decide to do the obvious and rob a cab.

Sure why not: the rich bastards must be carrying like a million yen on them at all times. Sounds like an easy one, right? Right?

Well, no.

You see, the incidence rate of mad bank robbing ending in wild taxicab chase and hostage situations through the streets of Tokyo is so high (Bogota of the East, that we call it) that officials have had to come up with a solution. Unbeknownst to you, from the moment you hopped on the cab with your gun, the taxi driver has been pressing a secret button on his dashboard that turns on an emergency distress signal light on top of the car, thus warning any law enforcement agent in the vicinity that something fishy is afloat.

In your face, evil taxicab robbers!

Well, that is, unless you actually take the time to poke your head out the window, spot the blinking red light, shoot the driver and escape.

But taxis are not the only ones that have received special care regarding the endemic hijacking problem in Japan: all public buses are also equipped with such a special emergency light that can be turned on in case a crazy lunatic would suddenly decide to re-enact the best moments of Su-ppee-do, the movie. I feel so much safer already.

Why do I have the feeling some lawmakers in Japan watch too much TV?

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My friend and former neighbour/roommate Tracey forwarded me this:

Widow, 84, a prisoner in her own apartment Police allege 6 gang members dealt drugs from her S.F. home, even ate her senior meals.
SF Chronicle, May 24, 2005

We used to live in that building, two floors above (it was only four stories high). Yep, neighbours were always a bit weird…

Ah, joys of Mission street…

I used to hate weddings; all the Grandmas would poke me and say, “You’re next sonny!”
They stopped doing that when i started to do it to them at funerals.

My friend Nordine is getting married this Friday.

As you can see in the photo beside, tradition has been duly respected, pre-wedding pictures in traditional outfits included (you should see the one with the katana). Can you sense a certain Watanabe Ken complex? yea, me too…

Anyway, the photo studio probably thought Nordine was sufficiently ridiculous cute manly in his hakama to feature the shot on their portfolio website. Although maybe Masako’s smile may have helped a bit too.

Considering the bride is a flight attendant on JAL, half the wedding guests will consist of Japanese air hostesses. Which makes an invitation to the reception worth at least a couple hundred thousand yens on Tokyo’s black market. But I don’t think I’ll sell mine: much more to be made with hush money paid not to tell a single of the groom’s stories, back in his Roppongi days.

You know you’ve lived in Japan too long, when…

• … you keep complaining that nobody serves real rice anywhere in Europe (only that crappy non-sticky thai version). Yea, I’ve become a rice snob.
• … you manage to find yourself with two slices of whitebread and scrapes of Nutella for sole dinner, because it’s Sunday evening and you forgot that there isn’t a 24h combini on every streetcorner in Paris.
• … you burst into inextinguishable laughter, to the stupefaction of everybody else on the bus, when that big stocky white dude gets in with his cool-ass Japanese t-shirt proudly proclaiming「ホワイトトラッシュ」in bold letters on the back.

Otherwise, it’s good to be back home. I think I even missed the mushy weather.

Years ago, in a galaxy far far away, I once co-wrote a 20-page college paper on the study of quantum vortex and EPR condensation in superfluid ³He.

Our choice of topic was essentially guided by these insanely cool videos depicting blobs of superfluid helium making their way out of a container all by themselves, so lively you’d expect them to jump at the experimenters and start hatching eggs.

Unfortunately the equation part was much less exciting, leading us very naturally to cook up a few results through the tested and approved algorithm of “resolution through ultimate obfuscation”. This is the method where you fill half a page with crazy developments up to a point where it is quite painfully clear you are not getting anywhere, then pull some random bullshit argument out of the closest cavity at hand, and jumps to the result you were out to prove in the first place. I had a few incredibly talented teachers in this particular technical skill.

A basic example might be something like:

Step 1: 1 + 1 = 2
<=> Step 2: 4*∫₀^+π/2cos(x)dx + Σ .9(1/10)^k = 2
<=> Step 3: ∫_{- ∞}^+λψ(x,y,z)dx * δ(1.2) + Σ ρ^e = δ φ#$@#$(*&&&(#!~%$%42))

[...]

Step 99: By using a nabla decomposition, we then easily extract the following result:

<=> 1 + 1 = 1

etc.

As you can imagine, the final result, albeit quite impressive by its depth and the sort of topic covered, was very much sub-standard, scientifically speaking. We managed to blow enough smoke in the room during our lengthy presentation to get a tired nod from our supervisor, who knew a thing or two about resolution through ultimate obfuscation himself. Quite obviously, the perspective to skip lunch mattered more to him than the potential reasoning flaws in our work.

Yet, the blatantly poor level of research of this paper didn’t prevent it, through some bizarre quirk of fate, from littering the darker recesses of the Intarweb, whence it was regularly pulled by hopeful young students in science who would then proceed to track me down and contact me to inquire about the very interesting way we seemed to get to that result on page 14 and these incredibly useful properties exhibited by the results on page 17, not to mention, these potential applications, heretofore unheard of, discussed on page 18…

Of course, I felt bad for the poor guys and their crushed spirits when I had to tell them that, actually, black magic and distilled alcohol played a major role in the way these results had been obtained, but on the other hand, there was little I could do.

Yet I knew that karma would come and byte me nasty in the arse one day. And it did.

It probably sounded like a good idea to my esteemed professor to ask me to present this as a validating paper to my previous years of monkeying around.

One of the burning question of these past few months has been then: Will I be able, either through acting class or with personal help from the manes of Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr, to make a sufficiently convincing adaptation of that brilliant piece of work, sustaining a second, possibly more critical observation, come the end of June?

The answer, in short: No

I will be spending a very studious Summer, busy figuring out new and inventive ways to amend the laws of physics to fit my needs.

In other news, I’m boarding my flight for Nihonland tomorrow. Get the sake ready. loads thereof.

Tokyo’s shock rocker extraordinaire has recently been spreading noxious germs memes batons, and kindly asked for my participation in the process.

Unfortunately, I will have to decline, seeing how:

1. I have already posted enough list/sample/endless ranting around the theme of music, digital version thereof included, to fill a few medium-sized encyclopedia. I am sure all the answers to the questionnaire are already there, in one form or another.
2. I like kittens.

However, not one to stay on a grumpy note, I went extra miles to participate in another of her cool ventures and add my contribution to her neat flickr group idea.

Yes, it’s a picture of myself. And I’m naked. So what? other people have done it before. There’s no shame.

What can I say, I was a sexy mutherfucka in my youth… Can you sense that raw sensuality oozing from my bare muscular buttocks?

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Don’t mind the noise in the background: still a few Apple fanboys around the world finishing themselves with WWDC keynote reruns. Man, what a mess the conference hall floor must have been.

A few thoughts to dump on top of the 20 millions (conservative estimate) blatantly unqualified comments on Apple’s recent decision to stick it to IBM and go with Intel:

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I flipped a coin, and between blogging about health, cats or the Deeper Meaning of Life, the latter won.

Then I realized I had very little to say about the Deeper Meaning of Life tonight.

…

Health is good.

I’m told it’s a good sign that I have stopped spitting blood.

Damn, I meant to mention: if you are planing on reading, you may want to stop eating now. If you are planning on eating, you may want to stop reading now…

Of course, I’d appreciate this news even more, had it not been replaced by recurrent bouts of blood sneezing. It would appear that, despite near-seasonal-record temperatures registered all over Europe for the past two weeks, I have managed to catch, of all things, a cold.

I think I know exactly when I caught it. Right after my surgery. Not only were the conditions memorable, but they also featured some very strange insights in the utterly fucked-up way my poor excuse for a brain seems to work:

Dunno if that was due to the longer-than-expected duration of the surgery, but apparently, my post-op wake-up was a bit more shaky than should have been…

The usual procedure goes something like this:
1) open eyes 2) say “hello world” and give my bravest sickly-young-boy smile with a thumb up worthy of the most ridiculous afternoon soaps 3) feel intense pain in every parts of my body, barely mitigated by the horrible aftertaste of anesthetic in the back of my throat 4) give the International Sign Language version of “please more painkiller in my I.V. drip” 5) go back to sleep…

Instead, it went something like:
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[Blogger Advisory: unspeakable nerdery, use of foul language.]

As promised: the answer to yesterday’s riddle (I know, suspense is killing you)…

Upon closer inspection, maybe I went a bit ahead of myself when I postulated the solution was “really easy”. Note that the explanation below, while somewhat tedious and longwinded, should be perfectly intelligible to anybody with very basic notions of arithmetic and a few sober neurons. If you don’t fit either criteria, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.

The Question

Does one stand better chances of: 1) getting at least one ace with 6 throws of a die, or 2) getting at least two aces with 12 throws?

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