Magma Soda

Here's the most interesting soda I've had in years¹. We found it in an antenna shop along Midōsuji street in Osaka this morning, as we were out looking for lunch.

Sakurajima — an active volcanic island near Kyūshū — Magma Soda. It's your basic sugary soda — quite good and not too sweet — but spiced with Japanese chilies. It's somewhat spicy, though not so much that it dominates. Flavour as much as heat if you will.

No, the interesting thing is that the chili heat combined with the carbon dioxide bubbles really irritate your throat and nose. Not so it hurts or anything, but the moment I took the first sip I burst into a coughing fit. Another sip, another cough. The third sip hit the back of my nose and triggered an impressive sneeze attack. My wife tried a little and started coughing as well.

I've never before had so much fun just drinking soda. But, I do understand why they're selling it only in small 200ml bottles, and why they advise you to keep it away from children. Try it, if you happen to come across it.

---

#1 Not that I actually drink much soda, mind you. I loved it when young, but it's usually too sweet for me now.

Comment Changes

There's a small comment change happening on this blog. Google has (finally!) made it possible to lump together blog comments posted here, and those posted on G+. Why is this good? Because there's sometimes a fairly active discussion on posts happening on G+, but it wasn't visible here.

So if the comment fields look a little different from now on, and if there seems to be more comments around here from now on, now you know why.

Use Passive Voice

today has been declared "passive voice day" in some quarters. Fun idea, I guess; language games are always entertaining. And since it's Friday morning, let me spend a few minutes about the use of passive while waiting for my coffee.

• "Passive voice" is when the recipient or victim of an action is also the subject. The effect is the focus of the sentence, not the cause. It's tricky to get right, and since passive works differently in other languages, non-native speakers of English, like myself, can have a real problem using it.

"Somebody opened the window" has the mysterious "somebody" as the focus of interest. "The window was opened" has the effect on the window as focus; we don't care how or why or who did it, but only that this (and not something else) happened to it.


• Passive voice can sometimes sound more impartial, but also mealy-mouthed and weasely. The important thing really is if the focus of the sentence matches the content.

"Mistakes were made" is a prototypical I-take-responsibility-for-nothing-I-did passive statement. Who is responsible is a major issue, but this puts the focus away from that. The grammar and the content doesn't match.

"I got vaccinated" is proper use of passive. What happened to me is important. Who did it — my usual doctor, a nurse at a vaccination center, a medical student temping at a health clinic — doesn't matter.


• Many people (me included) frequently get the definition wrong, and believe some sentences that really are not passive is, while some passive sentences are not. "The window is open" is not passive, for example, as there's no change to the state of the window. This may or may not be a problem.

If your focus is on grammar or language structure, then it matters a lot, of course. If you don't get your definitions right you can't discuss properly with other linguists or do any systematic data analysis.

But if your focus is on practical writing style, then you can treat the term "passive" as a wrong-but-convenient shorthand for grammar that avoids naming the actor or cause. It's good enough for discussing style, and as a bonus you will incense any nearby grammarians, which will be good for their circulation and mental agility.


• People like using passive voice in scientific writing. And quite often it is the best way to describe things.

"The rats were placed in a water maze." What happens to the rats is the important part; we don't care who did the placing.

But researchers — and young researchers especially — sometimes go overboard with this, and express every sentence in the passive. It is, I think, a combination of wanting to sound "professional" and not having the confidence to stand up for your own work.

"The data was analysed." is not wrong, but I certainly prefer "We analysed the data." Using "we" as shorthand for "one of more of the people listed as authors" is common and accepted.

"That the proposed method is effective and useful is concluded." No. Stop. Don't do this. Any guess, estimation, proposition, conclusion and so on are opinions, and who makes those is part of the semantic focus.

You didn't care about who placed the rats above, since it doesn't affect the outcome; you do care about who is drawing conclusions or making guesses. You don't want to find out that it was the lead authors mother or the guy at the hot dog stand around the corner that thought it seemed effective and useful. "We conclude that the proposed method is effective and useful." Stand up and take responsibility — and take the credit for the work.


It's worth noting, I think, that the older and more successful a researcher becomes, the more they insert themselves into their papers. Papers by big names frequently use "we" or "I", and can feel very readable and informal, sometimes even a little chatty.

If you want to sound like a successful scientist, avoid overusing the passive voice. But do use it; it's sometimes the best way to express an idea, so don't shy away from it. Use it in moderation, but use it.

Pisang Tanduk in Two Ways

Pisang Tanduk is a cooking banana, a variety of rhino horn plantains. They're starchy and not very sweet when raw so you generally cook them. The Tanduk banana (I guess "tanduk" means horn in Malay) is big. Really big. We found one in a speciality market in Tokyo last month, and it was the length and girth of my forearm. Sorry to say, I didn't think to take a picture of it in time, but it really looks just like a regular — but big — green banana. A Malay grower has a post and a couple of good pictures here.

There's not a whole lot of information out there, but it seems that when green you can use it much like potatoes in stews and curries. If you wait until it ripens it'll turn slightly sweet and be good for more snack-like dishes. Ours was still green so we waited. And waited. Aaaand waited. It finally turned yellow this weekend, three weeks after buying it.

We've never even seen a plantain in our lives, and we really didn't expect anything edible to come from this experiment. We peeled the banana and cut off six chunky slices, about 1.5cm thick, for tempura. Then we thinly sliced the rest (using a cheese slicer) for banana chips.

For the chips we heated the frying oil to 170°C and simply dumped the sticky banana slices into it one by one, a dozen per batch. We did try to rinse a few slices in water, then dry them off (you do that for potato chips), but it didn't seem to make any practical difference. When they just started to partially brown we picked them up and dumped another batch into the frying pot. The time is a little tricky; you want them still mostly yellow with a little golden browning, but if you're too quick they'll still be partially soft. Wait a little too long and they'll lose the yellow colour and some of the banana flavour.

The tempura was just as easy. Mix up a bit of tempura batter, dip the slices, and dump them in the oil (which we set to 180°). After a few minutes the exposed bits of banana will start to brown nicely while the tempura batter is turning just slightly golden.

Left, banana tempura. Right, banana chips.

Both turned out really excellent. The chips are crispy but not hard, with just a hint of sweetness and banana flavour. They're nothing like the crunchy, heavy "banana chips" sometimes sold as snacks. They're already tasty from the pot, but toss them with a bit of salt and they turn great. Ritsuko really liked to also add a bit of brown sugar to enhance the sweetness, while I prefer them with just the salt. We ate more of them than we really should have yesterday, and we still have a whole jar full; one banana gives you lots of chips.

The tempura was, I think, even better. A very pleasant balance of sweetness, savouriness, and saltiness (dip them in a bit of salt when you eat). The surface is slightly crisp and fluffy while the inside is soft and just a little creamy. There's just enough flavour to give it character and never becomes overpowering. You could make this as part of a tempura dinner, or as a really good side dish with fish or fowl. I suspect it's a little too delicate to mix well with a heavier meat dish, though veal or ham might work nicely.

We did this as a one-off experiment, and really thought we'd fail. As it turns out, though, both the chips and the tempura was delicious. We'll certainly make this again when we can. Finding Tanduk bananas in Osaka is difficult of course, but not impossible; if nothing else we can probably order one through a greengrocer. And it's good enough that we should.

The Wisdom Of Teeth

Wisdom teeth. Not the greatest invention in the evolutionary history of mankind. At least we¹ only have four of them, so there's a limit to how much trouble they can get us into.

Three of mine are OK. I had the two in my upper jaw pulled years ago, with minimal fuss. One of the lower ones is fine as it is. The last one, though, has given me more trouble than the other three combined.
 

Problem is, the tooth never appeared. It was sitting horizontally in the lower jaw, and pushing against the next tooth (this is called "impaction", and is quite common). Worse, it was causing a small gap between that tooth and the gums, so it was all but certain to get infected and damage the other teeth over time. The tooth had to go.

 Not the actual chair.

And yesterday it went. I spent a few quality hours in an Osaka Dental University Hospital chair getting it out.

The major problem for this surgery is a sensory nerve called the inferior alveolar nerve. It innervates the teeth, lower lip and chin on that side, and can run very close to a wisdom tooth, or even pass right between the roots of the tooth if you're unlucky. If you damage that nerve you can lose the feeling in part of your lower face and teeth. Not good. Fortunately there was plenty of space between the nerve and my tooth.

Less good news was that this was a big tooth, with three roots that had all grown together into a large potato-shaped lump. To get it out, it had to be split into multiple pieces. According to my dental surgeon this was a difficult extraction, and it took over an hour and a half of prying and chiselling to get it out.

Which sounds horrible, but the actual experience was remarkably good. I sat down in the chair surrounded by a dozen people (this is a teaching hospital). The assistant anaesthesiologist hooked me up to a pulse, blood oxygen and blood pressure monitor², placed an IV in the back of my hand and told me this would be the sedative.

By this time I was working myself into a panic. I started feeling lightheaded and a little dizzy, so I nervously asked him if this was the sedative taking effect? He smiled and told me it probably was. Good, I thought, it's probably working then. And …

…and the next moment the surgeon says to me "モレンさん、終わりました。お疲れ様。" ("It's over, Mr. Morén. Well done.³") . They used only local anaesthesia, but thanks to the sedatives I slept through the entire procedure. I apparently tried to talk — in Japanese — a few times during the surgery but I don't remember a single thing.


My face and jaw was swollen and sore — it still is, though my beard conceals it nicely — and it hurt a fair bit that evening, especially after my dinner of lukewarm minestrone soup and Finnish pirogs (when they say you'll have trouble chewing, they mean it). The pain killers knocked me right out at bedtime.

The swelling will take a week to subside completely. But the bleeding stopped during the night⁴ and the pain was already almost gone this morning. Haven't needed the painkillers at all today, in fact. I still can't chew today, so both breakfast and lunch was oatmeal porridge with lingonberries and mashed banana. Tonight we'll have kare-raisu, and by tomorrow I should be able to eat as usual again.


Most people will have at least one impacted wisdom tooth, so chances are that you will too. An impacted wisdom tooth is serious business, and likely to be the most extensive oral surgery you will need.

But the actual experience is not nearly as bad as your imagination can make it out to be. I would rate this as slightly less painful than when I had my ordinary wisdom teeth pulled, and definitely preferable to when I cracked a tooth in half a year ago.

So yes, impacted wisdom teeth suck. But getting rid of them turns out not to be all that bad. Don't worry.

#1 Not counting the 20-30% or so worldwide that never get wisdom teeth. Lucky bastards. This, by the way, is quite possibly human evolution in action.

#2 I've seen these elsewhere too, and they're really cool. They even go "beep". Would be fun to have one at home.

#3 お疲れ様 ("otsukaresama") literally means "you must be tired" or something similar, but is really a stock expression that doesn't have a straight translation. The implied meaning is that you must have worked hard or endured a lot, and it's finally over for now. It's the stock phrase to anybody that leaves work at night for instance.

#4 Protip: cover your pillow with a fluffy towel after something like this. Unless you like washing blood stains from your pillow covers.

On the impermanence of the online life.

Google is discontinuing Google Reader, a service I, and many others, have been using to follow large amounts of RSS feeds. It got "spring cleaned", as it's isn't a core part of their online business. Fair enough, though a major pain for me.

Also, Google just announced Google Keep, an online note-taking and keeping service. This is not part of their core business either, and was preceded by Google Notebook, which was much the same thing but discontinued about a year ago. In my mind it's not a matter of if  Keep will disappear, but when. Just Like Google Notebook or Google Reader — Or, for that matter, Apple Me; all cloud companies do this.

I rely on Gmail Tasks, but that overlaps quite a bit with Keep. And it has not seen any updates or attention in a long time. Google Sites, which I use for a landing page, is similarly semi-abandoned, so both seem destined for the trash heap shortly. If you rely on Tasks or Sites directly or for syncing apps you probably need to look into alternatives very soon.

A specialized online service like Evernote will not cancel their main product of course, so they may seem safer. But they can go bankrupt; they can get bought up and disappeared (Evernote for Windows phones only?); and they can change direction, turning their app into something you don't need and don't want. With online-based systems we have no control.




We have no control. When it's online, when it's in the cloud, all decisions are out of our hands. Fair enough, you might say; it's these companies that foot the bill. True, but that doesn't change the basic fact that you can't rely on online services for anything that is really important. And especially so if it will be important for years to come.

I'm not thinking about games or social media or things like that. We can lose our G+, Twitter or Facebook accounts without losing anything very important. But would you want to keep your financial records or email love letters from your wife with an online service that might not be around next year? If you deposit hard-won experimental data to an online repository — or make use of data stored there — can you really trust you can access it in twenty years?

I'm also becoming afraid of the trend towards computers or software that can only be used online. Google Chrome is the prime example — I would never rely on it for anything of importance as you can't know any of the tools are available a few years from now — but Apple and Microsoft is rapidly moving in the same direction.


I realize that I'm more exposed to this problem than I like. Some online things like Google+ or file sharing are either just fun diversions or generic and easy to replace. But this Blogger blog or my Flickr account would be very painful to lose. It would be a lot of work to move somewhere else, and I'd lose all the links and regular visitors. Gmail would also be painful, but it's more or less the public junk drawer of my online life, so abandoning it would probably turn out as a blessing in disguise.

So, what to do? From now on I will make a point of using mainly offline tools when I can. Desktop notes rather than online, for instance, and choose applications that sync in a generic or standardized way, rather than rely on a single company's service.

For things that must be online, I think that perhaps a server of my own might not be a bad idea. A debian server image with my own domain name can be hosted anywhere; could even keep it at home, though we'd have to change our ISP for that. I could have a photo gallery and a mirror of my blog there, along with a calendar, RSS reader, home page and file synchronization. With my own domain name, I could replace most of Gmail with my own address, and leave Gmail for public-facing junk. I wouldn't replace this blog or other online things so much as keep a live back-up just in case.

Has anybody set up something like that? I want to regain control over my digital live; I'm not sure of the best way to do so.

Permanent Residency

I've just returned from the immigration center in Osaka, where I received my permanent residency permit. This makes me happy.

So far I've stayed here on Researcher or Professor visas. They are time-limited — usually to one or three years — and tied to your employer. I can work only in research or teaching¹, and if I don't have a job when it's time to renew it I'm out of luck.

The permanent residency permit doesn't normally expire. You can take any job, with a few limits², and you're not dependent on a guarantor for staying here. For many purposes you have the same rights and obligations as a citizen. Also, people will take you a bit more seriously in some situations; it's apparently easier to qualify for loans and to find a job when people know you intend to be here for the long term.

I don't normally have to renew the permit, and with the new immigration system the permit is only recorded on your residence card so I don't have to do anything when I renew my passport. The residence card has to be renewed every seven years but I can certainly live with that. I can leave Japan for up to a year, and with a re-entry permit I could live abroad for three years at a time without losing the residency.

To get the permit you must have lived here for ten years or longer; not been arrested; and been working, paying taxes and earning enough to support yourself. If you're married to a Japanese citizen you can get permanent residency without the ten-year time and without fulfilling all other requirements. As I'm married to Ritsuko it didn't matter that I've been here only nine years so far.

We applied last June and got it now in March, so it took about nine months. It can apparently go as fast as six months or take up to a year, so it's important that you keep your normal visa up to date while you wait. I think there are seasonal aspects to this; going over New Year probably slows down the process, and I suspect it's not a coincidence that I received it in mid-march, when people try to clear out work before the end of the fiscal year.

It's not really difficult to apply for it yourself, but it involves a lot of forms and documents and a fair amount of legwork. We chose to hire a paralegal rather than do it all ourselves. Basically, he made sure to get all supporting documents, filled in all forms correctly and made sure the office would be satisfied. We only had to check the finished forms and visit the immigration office once to submit the application. To me it was well worth it to avoid the stress and having to take time off work multiple times.

So, am I here for good? We'll stay here in Japan, but for how long we can't know. At least until retirement is my guess — but then, I thought I'd return to Sweden after one year when I first arrived, and see how that turned out. And if anything, permanent residency would make it easier to leave, since you can stay abroad for years without losing your right to return as long as you have a valid re-entry permit.

Having permanent residency is convenient of course. and it can be useful for job hunting and things like that. But what this mostly means to me is peace of mind and a sense of stability. My life here with Ritsuko just got a little more permanent, and that makes me happy.

Me, feeling very peace of mindy. Aren't you happy you let this guy into the country?

#1 I get asked to sell rights to a picture now and again but usually turn people down, partially for this reason. I'm technically not allowed to make a living as a photographer, and the rules seem fuzzy enough that I'd rather not take a chance on this. The other reason, by the way, is the difficulty of receiving small payments from abroad. The only way I've found are bank transfers, and the transfer charge is almost as much as the typical cost of an image license.

#2 The exception is public-sector jobs limited to Japanese citizens only. It surprisingly includes grade- and high-school teachers, while anybody can teach or do research at national universities. Come to think of it, this is generally the case: grade-school teachers need years of training and practice, while any PhD student with a pulse can lecture at a university.