Adèle Blanc-Sec

We're back. Don't expect any long posts about the trip just yet; I'm off on another conference in a couple of days and it's going to be a while until I've scanned or processed the pictures I've taken. And of course we timed the trip to one of the most interesting events in recent Japanese political history, with Ozawa finally making a direct run for the prime minister post, possibly breaking up his own party in the process. To me it feels like a combination of an old warhorse doing a final charge, and a cornered politician trying the Italian gambit of getting immunity from his crimes by assuming high office.

The flight to Paris is about 13 hours, and the flight back is a bit less than 12. An eternity when strapped into an airplane seat. I feel like I've been stuck in a sack and beaten with sticks for a whole day. The Air France flight was a bit of a letdown; you'd think that if any airline would get the food right it would be this one, but frankly, none of it was very good. Both Finnair and Lufthansa are much better in this regard.

On the other hand, they have a good selection of French movies, including Adèle Blanc-Sec. I'm quite ready to forgive them the food just because of this. Adèle is a French adventure comic set in the early 20th century - steampunk before the term was invented, with a cynical and dark tone. A few of them have been translated to Swedish, and I read them over and over in our city library as a child. It was turned into a movie by Luc Besson recently. Normally I'd be quite wary of such adaptations, but hey, it's Luc Besson - how could it go wrong¹? And he pulls it off.

It's a film adaptation, so of course there's less material there than in a comic. But the lead character is spot on, and the story and cinematography has much the same blend of the mundane and the fantastic. There's less of the grotesque darkness than in the comic, but there's enough of a hint to make it work without (I guess) falling afoul of film censorship laws and making it an adults-only movie. Fun movie, if a bit uneven. Worth seeing.

#1 OK, so Le grand Bleu could have been cut down to about ten minutes without missing anything of the actual story, but he's improved since.

Terabyte

We're still in Paris for another couple of days. But to tide you over:

I had one of those "whoa" moments a while ago. Ars Technica (good site; I read it often) had a write-up about the latest generation of hard drives being too big for current computers. They've reached 3Tb (terabytes), and current-generation computers can't handle more than 2.1Tb per drive.

I hear that and I think that "oh, that's interesting I guess, but nothing to do with me". After all, we're talking Terabytes here; who would ever need a terabyte or more on their own machine, right? It's a near-mythical size. This is a problem for big datacenters, not for ordinary people. I mean I only have a 250Gb drive, which is.. a quarter of a terabyte.. in my laptop.....

A quarter of a terabyte, in a laptop the size of an A4 paper.

My current laptop. I know I've used the picture before, but I like it.

And 1/4 Tb isn't even very big, come to think of it. My desktop has a half-Terabyte drive, and so does our networked backup drive. So "terabyte" has silently moved from being near mythical to become humdrum and I haven't even noticed. Between my laptop, desktop and network drive I have a terabyte and a half of personal storage. 1.5 Terabytes. It's a magical number to me - and now, pedestrian. Ordinary. What's next - Exabyte? I didn't know, honestly; I had to look it up.

It's not all empty either. I use about 39% of this laptop drive at the moment. When I got this computer, Ubuntu (try it; it's good) and all my data from my previous machine took about 35%, so I've used up another 4% (about 6 gigabytes) since May.

Where does it all go? I have a lot of work-related data, research papers and so on, but a lot of my data is pictures. I store more pictures over time of course, but the size of each image increases too. My first digital camera gave me jpeg images less than a megabyte in size. The K10 gives me raw images of about 10 megabytes. And a good-quality 24-bit color scan from my Pentax 67 takes 400 megabytes. Needless to say, I don't keep the scanned files (I can always rescan the negative after all), but even the processed and compressed Jpeg files takes about 10Mb each. And while I process such an image I may have a couple of gigabytes worth of intermediate files laying about.

But even with this growth of data, disk space seems to grow even faster. I used to be really careful about saving space on my computers. I'd clear out old data, uninstall applications I don't use, and make backups to free some extra space. And still, when I got a new computer the disk on the old one would be almost completely full.

This is no longer the case. When I got my current computer, the disk on the ond one was only 2/3 full, and I had never once made a real effort to clean out old data. Abundance has crept up on us. When was the last time any of us worried even for a moment about the size of a software package, and how to clear out disk space for it? Storage has become unlimited for most of us today, and nobody's even told us.

Dusk

Everyone loves summer sunsets, with their riots of reds and yellows flowing across the sky. But when the sun has set comes dusk, that dwindling twilight as evening turns into night. It's never attention-grabbing the way the sunset is, but the cool blue colors give the mundane streets an otherworldly, almost magical quality.

Sakaisuji and Honmachi, right where I take the subway every day.

Office workers are rushing home by bike as the sun disappears.

A group of friends are having a simple dinner at an improvised table outside a back-street izakaya.

An office worker on the phone while waiting for his ride near Honmachi.

Our very convenient convenience store.

A robata restaurant sign, caught just as the intense blue dusk starts fading to black.

Election - one month ahead

We're packing our things and leaving for Paris tomorrow. Meanwhile:

The Swedish election is one month away. The two major coalitions - the somewhere-around-center-right and the vaguely left - stand completely even at around 46-47% in recent polls. Neo-nazi outgrowth Sweden Democrats now hover below the 4% limit. The Pirate Party doesn't register enough support to be listed separately. Ho hum.

But 22% of voters are undecided. Three coalition parties - the Communists on the left, and the Center party and the Christian Democrats on the right - are below 6%, and have all hovered right at the 4% limit at one time or another. Failure by any of them to get into parliament would completely alter the election and probably give the opposing coalition a comfortable majority.

The past few months have seen political triangulation at its finest - to the point where, if the election rhethoric could be believed, it wouldn't matter much which coalition ends up winning anymore. The opinion polls reflect this: for all the polling hype, the two coalitions have been in a dead heat for more than a year, with nary a blip to relieve the tedium.

There's been a bit of fireworks this summer. A minister in the center-right coalition resigned when accused of going to a prostitute by Aftonbladet, a left-leaning gutter press that later turned out to have made it up. This week, two Social Democrat candidates where caught by police in an LO¹ apartment with a couple of prostitutes. Entertainment for the public, and wrecked lives for everyone involved and their families, but largely irrelevant for the election.

I voted this week, ahead of the trip. Postal voting makes it easy to vote wherever you are so there's no real reason not to. What did I vote on? None of the coalition parties. I feel no close affinity to any of them, and I have an enduring dislike for the Communists and the Christian Democrats and will not vote for any coalition if either is a member. And I would slit my wrists rather than vote for the racist bigots of the Sweden Democrats.

Instead, I vote for the Pirate Party. They focus on open government, freedom of information and communication, intellectual property reform and privacy issues. It is a one-issue party of course, but as issues go this is important, and becoming more so every year. How we resolve these issues now will help determine what kind of society we live in a generation from now. And it's of course more important than tenths of percentage points in the building tax rate or the number of ATMs in Stockholm subway, which is the kind of thing the two coalitions are bickering about. Do I agree with everything in their program? No. But I do feel strongly for many of the important issues, which is more than I can say for either of the two coalitions.

Will they get into parliament? Doubtful. But that doesn't mean my vote is wasted - voting for a coalition I don't actually agree with, on the other hand, would. And it's not like the chance of making it is zero; they managed to get two EU parliament seats against all odds after all.

If you're Swedish, vote. And if you don't much like either of the two main alternatives, you can do much worse than the Pirate Party.

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#1 LO is the largest Swedish worker's union, theoretically separate from the Social Democrats but in practice they're two wings of the same organization.

Bertie Wooster as Batman

I'm really, really busy trying to prepare for the SAB conference next week. Then, right after returning to Japan I'm off again for NEURO 2010 in Kobe where we're showing a poster; a poster I have to finish before leaving for Paris since it's too late by the time I return. At least Kobe is close enough that I can go home every night instead of having to stay at a hotel.

Anyway, while I'm tearing my hair out¹ over this, you could do worse than visit MightyGodKing.com and especially what it'd be like if Bertie Wooster was Batman. Enjoy.

#1 What little is left of it.

To Paris

We're going to Paris next week. I'll be attending SAB 2010, a biannual conference on the simulation of adaptive behavior. It was the first real conference I went to as a newly-baked doctoral student, and it's still one of my favourite conferences. It's the only place I know where you can hear about ant foraging communication, simulation of lizard spine movement, cockroach brain implant-controlled robots, visual segmentation and human exoskeleton development, all in one conference.

A conference, by the way, is not just - or mainly - about the presentations. True, they're the meat of the event, but if they were the only reason you could might as well do a teleconference, or just email the research papers to everyone. No, the chance to meet people is at least as important.

You gather tens or hundreds of researchers from around the world to network and to socialize. You meet old friends and co-workers, and you meet new people in your field. This is where collaborations begin, where people find their next job, and where new research projects get their inspiration. Conference dinners and get-togethers aren't frivolous extras, but as important as the presentations themselves. A conference really is a dating service for research projects. You show your project through your presentation or poster, and with any luck you'll find a few kindred spirits interested in the same thing. It may lead to a brief exchange of ideas, or to a long-term collaboration lasting for years.

Anyway, while I work, Ritsuko will be doing Paris. See famous sights, browse street markets and department stores, sipping coffee at a sidewalk table watching the world pass by... It sounds fun, and I hope I'll get the chance to do the same someday. This time I'll just add to my experience of conference centers and meeting rooms around the world.

Now, what camera to bring? It's a work trip of course, but still, Paris is Paris. The conference itself is at the museum of natural history, and should be pretty photogenic. Also, I'll have a chance to do some street photography in the mornings and evenings.

The Pentax 67 is right out, unfortunately - it's just too big and heavy to lug around at the conference. My digital SLR actually takes as much space and weight as the medium-format Pentax once you add the batteries and all the other stuff you need. Besides, this is Paris - it practically screams for black and white film.

Ritsuko will probably bring her digital pocket camera and her film SLR. I could bring a 35mm camera of course, but if we already have one then a second one feels a bit redundant. Besides, I really, really like medium format film.

So I'll probably bring the Yashica. It's light and compact so I can just stuff it in my bag at the conference. It's no Rolleiflex; the lens is pretty crummy wide open and the mechanics aren't all that reliable. But the camera is neither rare nor expensive so if something would happen to it it's not a disaster.

I can't bring a tripod and I want to avoid using that lens wide open so a decently fast film is a good idea: HP5 shot at iso 800 should do me nicely. I've used it before with good results. The Yashica, three or four rolls of HP5¹ and a roll of PN400 in case I feel like shooting color. Should be fun.

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#1 A whopping total of 36 pictures! But you shoot a lot less with film, and you take a lot more care to think through each picture before wasting a precious frame. I can take a hundred digital shots or ten film shots over a day, and in either case I end up with about 4-5 really worthwhile pictures at the end. And I'll spend a lot less time both taking and processing the film shots afterwards.

So Quiet

It's Obon, when most Japanese take time off and hit the road to go back to their hometowns, see old relatives and visit the family grave. Which means that out there is a circus of backed-up traffic, overflowing trains and frayed nerves right in the hottest part of summer, with the first typhoon of the season making landfall across half the country. But in here it's cool, it's still, and it's so very quiet.

My mornings normally look something like the shot at the top. The picture at the bottom is from yesterday. Practically empty.

The reason being, I'm the only one at the office today. There's a couple of heavy deadlines breathing down my neck, so I'm not taking any time off this year. A lone doctoral student was working over in the common room yesterday, but today I'm all by myself.

This suits me just fine right now. I like having people around, but when alone I can sit and argue loudly with myself, play music when I feel like it, and generally act out. It helps me focus when I'm stressed, and right now I need all the focus I can get.

I miss Obon, though. Last year we saw the World Press Photo exhibition, dried our homemade umeboshi and went up Rokko mountain in Kobe for sightseeing and dinner. No such fun this year.

I did manage to help Ritsuko spread out the umeboshi to dry this morning. And we'll be meeting friends for dinner tonight, so Obon's not all devoid of fun this year.