just curious
Just took an interesting test by a guy called arocoun. It’s a website where everybody can create quizzes for the public. Take a look at the top ten, I liked this one.
“You scored as Utilitarianism.” Justice (Fairness) and Existentialism were the next highest results, Nihilism and Divine Command the lowest.
Aha.
The last project is done, had a marathon of over nine hours yesterday and finished it a few minutes ago. My wife checked and doublechecked everything.
I hope it’s going to attract new students from South Korea. With a short glance over the documentation of this and last years courses, I’d say there are already many students from Japan and South Korea coming to learn German here, but with the current government change and the new policy for academic tuition fees the numbers might decline in the long run.
We’re living in Düsseldorf, close to an old goods station that’s not used anymore except for S-Bahn transit. The area is huge, some 50-60,000 sqm lie idle since the 80ies. A few weeks ago mfi, an estate company opened an information tent for the citizens in the area, informing them about their plans: They’re going to build a shopping mall, 39,000 sqm of space which is twice as big than the Schadow Arkaden in the city. I’m sceptical that Bilk, which is not part of the downtown can use that much shopping space at all – it would be about 60% of the size of Europe’s shopping mall #1, the Centro in Oberhausen (70,000sqm). The train station is planned to be expanded for regional transit as it was the case a few decades ago, but even with a new subway line Bilk is hardly going to compete against downtown. For the curious of mind, the local Green office informs about the construction site and alternatives here.
Since we’re back to one name for our successor, we started looking around for inspiration. If you google for baby names you get more results that anybody could possibly want. Here’s a fun script we tried for kicks. Enter your name, choose the gender and the main personality trait
and there you go. A list of names the randomizer offered:
Better don’t use the script to actually decide your baby’s name, after a short look into by junk folder, I got the impression that spammers use those combinations. My new newphew’s name is Julian by the way, in contrast to the script suggestions which offered always two names he has just one.
Buzznews reports that Hossein Derakhshan from hoder.com decided to return to Iran to watch the upcoming elections. Since his critical reporting about the Iranian government, it is probable, if not likely, that his plan will get him into jail as this was the case with Sina Motallebi, an Iranian journalist. Hoder asks for help on his website for his trip and in case he gets into trouble. Keep an eye on his weblog, publicity is one of the things that could keep him safe.
How many Joe Average processors do you need to accumulate the equivalent of 22.8 teraflops (one trillion computations per second) of calculating power? I have no idea, but this one can do it alone – and simulate a human brain. One of the benefits the science team aims at is cracking the neural node, which basically means to understand how the brains works, how it uses electrical signals, how our memory works. It might even help to answer question like how selfconscience and our perception of reality are constructed, how intelligence works? Questions philosophers thought about it and tried to answer and give definitions for thousands of years. The project is not about creating a thinking brain, some kind of computerized artificial intelligence, but still, just the thought of being able to simulate the brain was pure science fiction a few decades ago. You’re mentally ill? Let’s take a closer look…
It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, …
[...]The end product, which will take at least a decade to achieve, can then be stimulated and observed to see how different parts of the brain behave.
Blue Brain project: Mission to build a simulated brain begins
We had an appointment with a doctor at Praenatal as mentioned last month. My wife’s gynecologist sent us there to find out more about a possibly inherited heart defect I had as a child as well. (Absolutely not) Funnily enough, today the first thing the doctor told us was that at the current stage of the pregnancy, there’s no way to tell whether there’s this defect or not. Looks like the gynecologist sent us to the examination all for nothing. Nevertheless, he examined the baby throughly, we could see lots of details on a big screen. After ten minutes of concentration and focusing on the screen, the doctor chose to change the perspective to a view directly at the baby’s genitals and seriously asked us whether we want to know the gender: It was all there and obvious to see on the screen – nothing at all left to unveil. Perhaps he thought we would want to know anyway. I don’t know, the situation was almost comical, because he was absolutely serious when he asked us.
We had to interrupt the examination twice though, the baby chose a position which made it impossible to check if everything is alright with the head, so altogether we were there for over two and a half hours. Oh, by the way, it’s a boy. And his nose is definitively Croatian, too.
Today’s lunch: South Korean Bibimbap with improvised ingredients: Rice, farn, salad, gingko, chongak-kimchi, zucchini, onions, sesame leaves and doraji. Here are a few more recipies for Bibimbap.
I mentioned it a few days ago, there are two projects I’m working on at the moment (and another one, connected to #2). The second one just got finished, and is going to be published tomorrow or sometime until Friday:
The IIK Düsseldorf is one of the companies I work for (and a very good one if you want to learn German). This time I got to fiddle around with a new language for the online registration form. A few years ago, I already worked on the French and Russian versions, but the Japanese one was more fun – I actually got to use my Japanese language education in a work context. My 2 1/2 years of school French and Cyrillic my parents tought me twenty years ago didn’t get me that far I have to admit.
It doesn’t happen often – in fact, for the first time since I have DSL, two times within a week my internet connection fails me. Last week there were some damages from a storm, this saturday at 12:14 the light on my modem went dark. I’m in desperate need of a fallback system, luckily, there’s Ebay with affordable alternatives…
This weblog is going to get a new home soon. I reserved the domain grabic.name, since my internet provider, 1 & 1, supplies its customers with one free top-level domain. I’m also thinking about using WordPress, NucleusCMS or Serendipity in the future. Blogger is a great – free – service, but it’s too limiting.
Charles Lane, staff writer on national affairs at The Washington Post published an insightful article about the death penalty in Japan at Foreign Policy. A few excerpts:
Unlike capital punishment in the United States, Japan’s death penalty is on the rise. Japanese officials keep state executions out of public view and shrouded in secrecy. Not even the condemned prisoners know the day they will die. Step inside the gallows for a rare look at how Japan takes a life.[...]
Not only is Japan the only member of the Group of Seven industrialized countries other than the United States to retain capital punishment, it is also increasing its use of the death penalty.
[...]
In Japan, death row prisoners are not told in advance of their execution dates—a practice international human rights organizations condemn as a form of psychological torment.
[...]
Perhaps the most notorious such miscarriage of justice involved Sakae Menda, who in 1948, at the age of 23, was convicted of a double ax murder. The conviction was based on the contradiction-riddled testimony of a prostitute and Menda’s own confession, extracted after spending 80 hours in a police station without sleep.
[...]
…it seems incredible that confessions are not given to the court as either tapes or verbatim transcripts. Rather, they are rewritten and summarized by the authorities themselves.
[...]
Toyoko Ogino, an interpreter I worked with in the coal-mining town of Omuta, was surprised when I told her that prisoners were hanged. “I thought that was just an expression,” she said.
[...]
Polls indicate that public support for capital punishment is even stronger in Japan than in the United States—more than 81 percent in a February 2005 survey.
[...]
Five guards press separate buttons simultaneously. Only one of these is the button that actually opens the trap door. And all of this takes place outside the witnesses’ field of vision—offstage, as it were. There is a hanging, but no identifiable hangman.
I’m really irritated by the Japanese people’ high support for capital punishment. I’ll try to find some information about what were the pro and con reasons given. Can’t say for sure whether it’s for real, but I found a picture of the gallows in the Osaka detention center here. I assume Toyoko Ogino’s misunderstanding of the expression
was most probably a reference and mix-up to 首を切る
(kubi wo kiru), which directly translated means something along the lines of to decollate s.o.
. This expression is used when somebody loses his job, but 絞首する
(koushu suru) doesn’t actually carry a metaphoric meaning except to decollate s.o.
.
There’s further information about the death penalty at www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. This information is from their website:
In 2004, there were at least 3,797 executions in 25 countries around the world. China, Iran, the United States, and Viet Nam were responsible for 94 percent of these known executions.
The vast majority of them in China, though. In regard to the death penalty, Japan and the United States are among countries such as China, Iran, Viet Nam, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Egypt, Singapore, Yemen and North Korea. Amnesty International has more facts about the issue here.
Just had a talk with my brother’s mother in law: I became uncle once again! They were expecting a girl, but yesterday a 54 cm, 4000+ grams boy decided to take a look at the world.
My brother and his wife didn’t decide the new baby’s name yet, since their gynecologist accidently used a female possessive pronoun once and they prepared themselves for a girl. The mother in law told me they were thinking about “Dejan”, but I guess that was a joke since it is a Serbian orthodox name. 
Until Sunday, Yoshitomo Nara und Hiroshi Sugito exhibited about three dozen paintings in Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung, a.k.a K21. The works itself weren’t that interesting, although I failed to understand their distinctiveness. My new Japanese language exchange partner, who is a student of Thomas Ruff and a passionate photographer, mentioned that the way Nara’s and Sugito’s works are painted makes them special. One of the pictures was a drawing of Afro-Ken, a figure I haven’t seen for at least four years.
I liked one of the permanent exhibitions better, expecially a work by Katharina Fritsch: “Man and Mouse” is, as I read, actually a statement about unfulfillness of contemporary love
– but also reminiscient of Francisco Goya in a clever and very amusing way.
