Tokyo Blog

Recently I’ve been noticing a few different ways in which the internet has been important. Last week, I went to Tachikawa in the Western suburbs of Tokyo. In order to find my way from the station to where I was going, I checked the place out beforehand on Google Maps. Furthermore, I opened Street View and ‘walked’ from the station and around the surrounding streets to get a feel for what the area looked like and any landmarks. When I stepped out of the station a few days later it was weird, because I recognised the location. Which makes perfect sense, because I already spent some time exploring a virtual version, albeit paused at last winter.

If your localisation of Google hasn’t got Street View yet, I’m sure it’s coming. Tokyo was one of the first to get it, and the amount of data that is required must be enormous. It’s really useful for navigating.

The other thing I noticed in a recent news story was the prevalence of the internet in a shocking child murder case in the UK. The case of Baby P involved the baby’s mother, his step father and a lodger. The three of whom have been repremanded over their likely involvement in the boy’s death. What happened though, is that underground news sites and unofficial sources leaked the names and addresses of the three on the internet, which eventually found their way onto popular social networking site facebook. An angry mob soon assembled in cyberspace ready to lynch the individuals responsible for the child’s death (which was horrific). The saddest thing for me is that the child’s death could have been prevented if it wasn’t for the negligence of the UK authorities.

The internet played a big part in exposing the identities and, as it so often does, put the power (of knowledge) back in the hands of the people - good or bad.

There’s a couple of reasons why I want to post about something as seemingly mundane as this, the first one being the price: Only ¥6700 for this Canon printer (£47, $69), which I thought was super cheap. The second point is the wrapping and prepping service I received at Yodobashi, Ueno. I had to wait several minutes for my printer to be ready, but I watched in amazement as the guy got busy getting my printer ready for transportation. You can see from the picture above that a lot of love went into it. One thing you won’t notice is that the entire box has been hand-wrapped in clear plastic and secured with sellotape. After that, the other things you can easily see from the photograph. For exmple, there’s a Yodobashi Camera branded sheet of paper attached to the top of the box to prevent damage from the hard plastic handle that you can just make out in the picture. After that, the box is wrapped in both directions with strapping which is stretched around the box and heat sealed using a special machine at the end of the counter in the store. The handle they use has a groove along the top, the perfect size for the strap to fit into. Once the final strap is tightened and sealed, the handle is extremely solid. But it doesn’t stop there. In order to prevent any discomfort from the handle or strap cutting into my fingers, a piece of bubblewrap is wrapped around the handle and taped. Finally, the guy doesn’t pass me the finished product over the counter. Instead, he walks around until he is on my side of the counter and hands me the box, bowing deeply. I propel myself down and out of the shop via the escalator, having been put in a better mood by the outstanding customer service in Japan (it was a dark, rainy day that day, hence the clear plastic wrap on the box).

I have to admit, I don’t understand everything (anything) on the Japanese Television News. I also don’t find many of the stories very relevant. When it comes to keeping abreast of developments in science, technology and the media I always get it on my desktop. Due to the existence of the internet, I find buying newspapers a bit wasteful, both in terms of money and trees. So, when I want to read up on Apple, or recent developments on the web, I open up msnbc.com’s Spectra Visual Newsreader. I’m no fan of the msnbc network, but I can’t help liking the Spectra Newsreader. It looks beautiful, feels futuristic, and is fun to interact with, and you learn stuff to boot. It’s now the first thing I do in the morning when I switch on my laptop.

FireFox 3.0 has been released, but the mozilla site has been inundated and is now down (as of the morning of Tue 1st July 2008). You can still get it from various mirrors though. I got mine from Mac Update. Get yours today, it’s well worth it. Gone now are all the things that used to irritate me about older versions. Mainly the UI and the awful form controls (buttons, radios, checkboxes, etc.). The new UI is a little twee in my opinion, but a major improvement on the old one, and the new features make it my new browser of choice over Safari. It loads pages really quickly, and the Netscape legacy image loading placeholders are finally done away with.

By 2009 the powers that govern the internet will put in place a new system for dealing with domain names (web addresses). Companies and organisations having the money to do so, will be able to create their own custom suffixes. Instead of .com and .net, you will start to see a new range like .sport and .news, etc. This comes at the right time, because most of the current top level domains like .com and .net are already taken. This will create more possibilities for new combinations of words and suffixes used in urls. The first of these should start to appear towards the end of 2009.

Of a night time, I’ve been watching old episodes of BBC’s Horizon programme on YouTube. I’ve been getting a bit of a thing for outer space recently, so I was checking out the one on super-massive black holes, and I also saw the one about computer advancement, where the progress of computers was forecasted as was the mapping of the human brain. This was pretty scary in itself, because one of the possible scenarios was that we create a neural network capable of learning that supersedes humanity and then destroys it!

Actually, that was nothing compared to the stuff I saw on the Large Hadron Collider, the huge 27km round ring buried deep under the Franco Swiss border near Geneva. It’s the largest collider in the world, and also the most energetic. It will reenact the conditions found a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This is what’s so new about this collider. Normally fast moving particles are fired at stationary target particles and create a safer kind of phenomenon, but the Large Hadron Collider sends two beams of particles the opposite way around the enormous ring until they are travelling at the speed of light. Then, they align the beams and…

Well, that’s the problem. Scientists have estimated what might happen at the moment they recreate the beginning of the universe, but there is still much uncertainty. Scientists independent from CERN (the authority heading up the experiment), warn that one of several ‘doomsday scenarios’ could occur. What is almost certain is that the process will create micro black holes. Lots of them. These are expected to be short lived, based on the theory of Hawking Radiation - but this theory hasn’t been proven. What could happen when a MBH is created at a slow speed, is that it gets trapped by Earth’s field of gravity and (since it can pass through matter, and is incredibly small) will come to rest at the very center of the Earth. It is conceivable, therefore, that several of these could end up there. The immense heat, pressure and gravitational force at this location would start the black hole feeding. One scientist estimated that it would take less than 50 months for the black hole to accrete the entire earth. The other fear is that a ’strangelet’ is produced that turns everything it touches to ’strange matter’ in a chain reaction-type fashion, or that a ‘monopole’ causes a similar chain reaction catastrophe. More far fetched suggestions include a possible tear in space time that would result in either time distortions or a time loop local to the occurance of the experiment, the creation of a fully-fledged wormhole at the surface of Earth (not good), or even the creation of a new Universe at the expense of our own!

Either way, it sounds a bit risky to me. The thing that worried me most, is why do so few people know about it? It’s the biggest, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. It was actually due to go online this month, but it’s real start-up date is a bit of a mystery now. A law suit filed in the US may have set it back to 2009, but that is unconfirmed. All that is known, is that it’s finished and is being prepared (the chambers have to be cooled to 2k before it reaches it’s operating temperature). Please Google this for yourself.

AQ Interactive (no relation of AQ design works it would seem), have developed an emulation of a KORG MS-10 for the Nintendo DS! You interact with a ‘replica’ of the original real-world interface of the KORG MS-10 via the touchscreen. You can also hook up several DS’s via Wi-Fi. As if the original noise from this machine wasn’t lo-fi enough, now you can appreciate a new level of alarm-clock radio tweet through the insufficient built-in speakers of the Nintendo’s super popular handheld device!

If you’ve been to the Sony Building in Ginza recently, you might have stopped in the entrance lobby to check out these cards that you can pick up. If you take it over to the machine nearby, you can place it in the sight of an overhead camera in order to interact with the card! You have a screen in front of you, and as soon as the machine picks up the presence of your card, a 3D representation of the building appears in the area at the top of the card (where the grey and black spots are). Thus, tilting the card means you can view the 3D representation from different angles, and from that get a plan of the various attractions on all floors. You also use the printed buttons on the card (forward, backward, and enter) as an interface with which to navigate through the info. Whoa!

This has been all over Tokyo TV recently - it’s the new bullet train by JR rail called ‘Nozomi’. The advertisement only mentions the route between Tokyo and Osaka, but maybe it runs on other routes as well. Whatever, it looks cool.