Webcam coreography

This music video for "Hibi no neiro" by the Japanese band SOUR is simply amazing. This must have taken weeks of work.

Company name of the day

I've spent the last weeks visiting about 400 companies' web pages. I just encountered the one with by far the best name:

The Dr. O. K. Wack Chemical Company.

This would also be an excellent band name.

Fall to your knees before WISCHTUCH!

German is a beautiful language, dripping with flavor and full of big fat vowels and rumbling, deep-throated rs and phlegm-clearing glottal consonants. Sometimes I learn a new word, and I can hear just the sound of the word, and it conjures a beautiful image in my mind completely disconnected from the word's actual meaning.

Just a few minutes ago I encountered the word Wischtuch, pronounced vish-took, but with the k coming from just south of your diaphragm. It immediately conjured the image in my mind of a mighty Norse god, standing at the head of his centaurian army with a battle axe the size of a villa slung over one mail-clad shoulder.

And then I looked up the word in the dictionary. Wischtuch - moist towelette.

Well, it was better my way.

Typing my name

Typing in Japanese isn't as hard as people usually think it would be. You actually just type the sounds of a word phonetically, then select the correct characters for the word you mean from a list of homophones. Since there are no spaces in Japanese, the space bar is conveniently repurposed to cycle through this list.

So if I want to type "kyoudai", which means "brother", I just switch into Japanese mode and type the word phonetically:

kyo-u-da-i -> きょうだい

Then I hit the space bar to cycle through all the words pronounced "kyoudai"...

強大 - powerful
京大 - Kyoto University
鏡台 - dressing table
兄弟 - brother

... and hit "enter" when I've got the right one.

Once you get used to this, you can type in Japanese about as fast as in a phonetically spelled language.

Ironically, it's when I want to spell my name phonetically that Japanese typing becomes a pain. This wasn't a problem before I got married - the romanized phonetic spelling of Benjamin Rooney in Japanese is ben-ja-min ru-u-ni-i (ベンジャミン・ルーニー). Stürmer, though, is a whole new story. It needs a special phonetic character to show the "tü" sound, which doesn't exist in Japanese. So I have to type shu-te-li-ru-ma (シュティルマ), which tangles my fingers up every time.

And despite this effort, Japanese people still can't pronounce my last name, so they all just call me Benjamin.

-嵐紅

My own thoughts on Michael Jackson's death

I don't have any profound insights or juicy gossip into the circumstances or meaning of Michael Jackson's death, but I've been thinking a lot about the way his life and death have played in the media and in conversations I've had with friends about him in the last few days.

I find it absolutely fascinating that while he was alive, the most recent events in Jackson's life seem to have been the most heavily weighted in a typical person's perception of him. That is to say, his accomplishments as a musician were overshadowed by the last ten years in which his strange lifestyle, plastic surgeries, and accusations of child molestation were the only handles the public were given on his life.

But then he died and the meaning of the individual moments of his life suddenly seemed to gain equal weight. Now that he's dead, he has no present, and we seem to see each part of his past as equally important. Media coverage and the conversations I have observed acknowledge that the man was a very odd character with serious problems, but that seems to be overshadowed by respect for what he accomplished as a musician and a showman.

Why do react to death in this way? Why is it that a person's past is less important than their present when they are alive, but equally important after their death? I think it's because death ends the story of a life, and makes it possible to step back and contemplate the whole with more detachment than is possible of a story we're still observing in the unfolding.

The relativity of significance

My side project today is reading through a text written by an associate professor at my old university and making sure the English is in good shape. The text in question is about the European Under-17 Championship (my fingers spell "champtionship" every time I try to spell that...), and he mentions the fact that with a crowd of only 70,000 spectators and only Eurovision carrying the games live, the event isn't as significant as something like the World Cup.

This is certainly true, but it got me thinking about the meaning of "significance." We tend to tie the significance of an event together with the number of people observing, experiencing, or affected by it, and 70,000 just isn't that many people. But if you went back a few hundred years to a world with a much smaller population, I imagine that an event attended by 70,000 people would be considered of immense significance – consider that the Roman Colosseum had a seating capacity of 50,000. The actual number of people directly impacted by the event is identical, but the narrative is seen as less significant because that number is a smaller proportion of the greater mass of people to which the attendees belong.

It also occurs to me some events that are attended or experienced by relatively few people (Woodstock and the TED Conferences are two examples) nonetheless have a huge indirect impact on culture and thought.

A sickly Umlaut

No worries, a post is indeed forthcoming. Just imagine Friday stretched to a more reasonable 40 or so hours, and this week's blog update will be right on time. The problem is, between last Thursday and Saturday I exchanged (I have calculated this) well in excess of 300 hugs with 92 people. At least one of them was carrying a virus that proceeded to demonstrate the effects of exponential growth in the cozy environment of my respiratory system. The end result was that I got two more days off work, and that anything I might have written yesterday wouldn't have been fit for human eyes.

I've got a bit of work to do on a side project today, but once I've made satisfactory progress with that I'll get to work slapping together a report of everything that happened in the ten minutes or so that existed between all the hugs and handshakes.


Image courtesy of Quiplash!

Fly, my legions!

I have a favor to ask of those of you who read my blog. There's a professional networking site called LinkedIn that has evidently gotten huge in America. It lets users give each other "recommendations" to vouch for their awesomeness, and this is where you all come in.

I want to apply for a one chance in a million job in Seattle that I can only apply for using the service, but because I live in Germany, I wasn't even aware that this site existed until yesterday, and I suspect most of my peers here won't know it, either. The company offering the job will only look at applications from applicants that have recommendations, though, so I'm asking you to hop over to LinkedIn and recommend me!

I think this link will get you to my profile. Many thanks in advance!

The nature of everything

I spent the day having strange thoughts about the nature of the world. I'm the kind of person who thinks about unusual things a lot, a tendency that was amplified today by my recent lack of sleep and the fact that I'm reading Salman Rushdie's Grimus, which is excellent and also very trippy.

My thought goes like this: Matter is composed, as we know, of atoms, which are themselves composed of electrons and neutrons and protons, which are composed of quarks, which are themselves, I understand, three dimensional expressions of a twelve dimensional string of infinite length vibrating through the frequencies of the first four measures of Pachabel's Cannon over and over again. Let's stick to atoms for the purpose of this discussion, though. When two objects interact - imagine a ball bouncing off of a wall - what is really happening is that the atoms in the two objects are repelling each other. We think of the ball as "touching" the wall, but really the electron clouds around the atoms in the ball are repelling the electron clouds around the atoms in the wall. If you consider matters from this perspective, no "touching" actually takes place. The closer two objects get, the stronger the repulsion becomes, until it equals the strength of the force pressing the objects together.

In fact, since all interactions between matter are really interactions between these fields, I'm not sure it would be possible to talk about two pieces of matter "touching," and the idea that's really gotten me thinking is that there's also no obvious way to say where a particular piece of matter is. We think of the borders of things as being the spot where their matter stops and some other matter begins. But how do we define where an object's edges are? The edges should ideally be the edges of the electromagnetic fields that are responsible for all interactions between objects that we experience, but electromagnetic fields have an infinite range. They get weaker at an accelerating rate as they get further from their source, but they never actually go to zero.

So where are our edges? Where do you stop, and where does your neighbor begin? To a certain extent, it seems, everything in the universe is really overlapping, and not nearly as defined and distinct as we perceive it to be.

I'm really not sure that there's any value in these thoughts, but they've been occupying my mind in its spare moments over the last week, so I thought I'd share them with you all.

A dialog in the style of B.G.T. Stürmer

I lay tonight in a tub of suds and warm water. All the time I spend in front of computers has left me with a constant nagging pain between my shoulders - nothing serious, the kind of thing that hurts just enough to make for interesting small talk with hypochondriacs and to excuse me when I don't feel like helping a friend move. I've slept the last two nights on the floor of a school, though, so my descent into the soapy broth was a little taste of heaven, which I accompanied with a loud, drawn out groan that I like to imagine made me resemble a miniature, pink Godzilla retreating clumsily into a tiny sea.

Rose poked her head in to check on me a while later, and found me lost in my new copy of David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed In Flames, which I finished this evening and immediately began re-reading. I closed the book and held it above my head in one hand.

"This is how I want to write."

Rose is accustomed to my sudden and urgent passions, like the week I devoted to learning to ride the unicycle or the month I devoted to drawing a comic strip. And she would never discourage them, though she doubtless recognized that my declaration that I want to write words like David Sedaris's was akin to an announcement of my ambition to hit golf balls like Tiger Woords. She sat down on the toilet across from me, and answered in a special tone that lets me know that she's there for me a hundred and ten percent and recognizes that this epiphany is real and serious and not at all like the other three ultimately short-lived epiphanies I've announced this week. Shallow and feckless epiphanies, those, but this one, her eyes told me, was here to stay. How she manages this every time is one of those mysteries one doesn't want to probe too deeply.

"You mean for your blog?"

"No, that's the thing. This stuff won't work for my blog. It's long, and it's involved and personal and polished, and it reaches far into the past. My blog is for now, and it's friendly and simple. Like a blog should be. But I want to write humor about the macabre and the ugly and the complicated, and I want to write about the past."

The more I talked about it, the more real it became, until I realized that I was talking about something I really needed to do. The solution was pretty obvious, but also really ballsy - I need to try to write something that's not just going to go out in a newsletter or self-published on a blog.

The shape of how I'm going to do this is still utterly unclear to me. The first step is obvious, though - I need to write something and get it rejected.