Cold

Cold, in more than one way. The venue - Seaside House - is very enthusiastic about its state of the art air conditioning. As a result I'm freezing as I sit in the seminar room, then get beaten up by a wall of humid heat once we step outside. When you go back in the sweat and humidity condenses and chills you even further.

And now I've caught a real cold, with sore throat, aching joints and all. The AC is partly to blame but of course, if you grab forty people from all over the world and stick them in one building for three weeks you're creating a great breeding ground for any virus that happens to pass by. Happily, Japan allows the sale of over-the-counter cold medications that could club an elephant so I feel reasonably symptom-free at the moment - though not particularly alert, or rational, or awake.

Random images:

Student and tutor in a discussion about his project. The seminar rooms have glass walls that are perfect as whiteboards.

Lunch buffet. The food is good. Problem is, it's pretty much the same food every day, morning, lunch and dinner. I think I might have actually lost a little weight these three weeks, simply because I really can't summon much enthusiasm for the meal times any more.

A typhoon passed by to the west of us; we caught only the edge of the storm zone, fortunately. We got some dramatic weather changes as it cleared up.

Cooped Up

We're coming up to the end of the second week at OCNC, and I'm starting to feel a little cooped up. We spend every day in the same building, with the same people, working, discussing and going to lectures. It's a beautiful building and fascinating discussions, but after two weeks you do wish for a bit of change.

The food - buffet delivered from a nearby hotel - is excellent, but buffets can only be so varied. We're in a semi-rural area so there's really nowhere to walk and there's nowhere you can go without a car.

Most of all, though, I miss Ritsuko. Two weeks is a long time to be apart. I miss making dinner together, talking about our day in the evening, walking through Osaka on a weekend. Life is much better when she's around and I get unhappy when she is not.

Don't read this wrong; being here is immensely rewarding. I'm very happy that I get to spend these three weeks at the summer school. But I'm also happy that it's three weeks only, and that I'll be back in Osaka before long.

Churaumi

We had sunday off, and went on a group excursion to Churaumi aquarium north of here. I haven't been to many such places, but I have a hard time believing there are many others as impressive as this one. We had two hours and that was not nearly enough. Four hours would have been much better, and I could happily spend a whole day there given the chance.

There are many, many small tanks throughout the aquarium, with sea-living insects, amphibians, coral reefs and, as here, crabs. Photography is explicitly allowed as long as you don't block access for other people, but of course, you're shooting through thick acrylic glass and the tanks are generally not well lit so getting a good, well-focused image is a challenge.

A ray at the large sea tank.

The large shark tank is ridiculously large; I didn't bring a wide enough lens to actually show the entire wall. There's space enough for a couple of whale shark in addition to all the normal-sized sharks, rays and various fish.

There's a small sea turtle exhibition off away from the main building. Not as well presented, I think, but it does give you a fairly good look.

My Work Done, It is Time to Relax

One of the main jobs of the tutors at OCNC was to give afternoon tutorials on various simulation software; general tools like Python and Matlab as well as specialized packages such as NEURON and Nest. The students use those software packages for their own projects so the tutorials have all been crammed into the first week.

Preparing and holding the tutorials have eaten up a lot of time, but now they're all done and life here is settling down a little bit. We are of course helping the students with their projects but now there's time again for some of our regular work. I've poked at my simulation code for the first time in a week, and a few of us found time to go to nearby Maeda point for a bit of snorkeling. I have to get fins and a good underwater camera.

OCNC I

Things start fairly late here; breakfast is from before eight and the sessions don't start until 9:30. I get up before seven as usual, and that gives me some free time in the mornings. Many people go swimming in the morning, and it's a good time to take a walk along the beach before the morning shower and breakfast.

The main campus is in the mountain away from the coast - sensible, considering the constant risk for typhoons - but Seaside House, the conference building, sits on the cliffs overlooking the beach.

This is the kind of view we have to put up with during the theoretical sessions. Truly, woe is me.

Lots of small life along the beach itself. Here a small (~3cm) crab kindly froze for long enough for me to get a picture.

To Okinawa (again)

I'm going to Okinawa tomorrow - yes, again, but this time it's all work, not play. I'll work as tutor at the OCNC summer school at OIST for the next three weeks. Every year OCNC brings together graduate students and post-docs for a three-week intensive course in computational neuroscience. There's a series of lectures by some of the big names in the field, tutorials on commonly used software tools and the students work on a project of their choice.

I use the NEST simulator quite a lot, so my job will be to introduce it to the participants, and to help the students that use NEST for their own projects. It's also a great opportunity for me to follow the lecture series, learn about other software tools and techniques, talk with other neuroscience modelling people and generally learn a lot of new stuff. Of course, I'll still work on my "day job" - my ongoing project - while I'm there.

I've been running ragged trying to get everything prepared in time; that's partly why posting has been light lately. It's not just the tutorials; I've also tried to bring my project to a point where I can easily work on it away from my desk. I'll try to make a point of writing shorter posts while at OIST that don't take me so much time to finish.

Nazar

Nazar is a good Turkish restaurant in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. We go there now and again, though not very often - we unfortunately don't have the time to go anywhere regularly. The owner opened another restaurant in Umeda some time ago so the food can vary a fair bit depending on who is working in the kitchen at the time, though I'm sure the menu will settle eventually.

They celebrated an anniversary a few weeks ago, with a buffet, drinks and belly dancing. It was fun: the food was good, the belly dancer managed to really engage the audience, and the people were interesting.

The interior is pleasant, with plenty of Turkish accents without ever falling into kitch.

The bellydancer - Japanese, by the way, not Turkish - got people up and dancing along with the music. And no, it was not a costume party.

Bellydancer, part of the buffet, and in the background Atatürk. It's not a big restaurant.

One group of regulars are military otaku, with an eclectic mix of mostly European uniform pieces - the pike helmets are Polish, apparently, and the white flowerpot thing is colonial British. One of them sported a monocle and an iron cross. We had no idea what they were about at first; Ritsuko thought they could be comedians still in stage costume, while I thought they might be right-wingers that'd lost their minds. But no, they simply dress up in uniform and meet over dinner from time to time.

As a fellow geek I certainly understand and sympathize with such an obsession in general, even while I'm firmly opposed to the tasteless idea of treating military items as something positive or worth glorifying.