朝起きたら、ちゃんと鏡でご自分の顔、髪型をチェックしますか？チャックしなきゃいけないのよ。時間がないから、これでいいじゃといったらだめだ。朝鏡でみる自分は、一日の気分を影響するから。

人間は常に鏡で読み取った自分をイメージしながら生きていくのだ。

鏡であるような人を見たら、その人になるのだ。だから、朝鏡で自分を見ているのは、芝居の脚本を読むのと同じ。今日起きたら、この役に当たった。こんな顔のやつなら、こんな人生を過ごすべきですね、と。本当の格好よさは、人が見るものではなく、自分が見たものだ。だから、明日も、ちゃんと鏡を見ていて、この人になりたい、といっていてね！

言葉は
感情的で、
残酷で、
時に無力だ。

それでも
私たちは信じている、
言葉のチカラを。

Words are so emotional, so cruel, and at times, so feeble.
Still, we choose to deliver that power of words in which we believe.

とは、電車でみた朝日新聞「ジャーナリスト宣言」キャンペーンのキャッチコピー。なんて力強いと思う。ジャーナリズムの原点に戻す言葉だ。そして人間の生きる勇気を呼び出す言葉。信じていることを言う。信じている生き方で生きる。僕は僕らしく生きていけばいい。すばらしい言葉だと思う。人生を改めて、信じましょう。

I love these words from Asahi Shinbun's "Journalists' Declaration" compaign. Full of power, even returning journalism to its roots and calling forth the courage to live. The strength to speak one's mind, and to live the life that one believes in. To live just as one is. Despite all that is happening around us, it calls us to believe afresh, in life itself. Do not go gently into that good night / Fight, fight against the dying of the light!

time freezes at airports. it's funny, because it is exactly because everying is timed to the minute that time is frozen there. flights come in and go out all the time. and the florescent lighting doesn't give you a clue whether the sun was up outside. people of all races walk around you, some sitting around, as if waiting for eternity to begin, sometimes rushing like fish shooting themsleves at a floating bait. it is like the gears in a clockwork, that, by precisely being the mechanism on which time is built, alienates itself from the substance of time. the gears rotate, and maybe some arms move, but inside the clock, twelve midnight is just as well as any second that gives way to the next eternity. Four flights in five days, and my time stil hasn't seem to have thawed.

mascular memory

amazing. i'm at the airport and tried logging into the public teminals with my password... and suddenly i couldn't log in... panicked and wondered what happened overnight because i had just logged in the night before... sat down with my notebook plugged into the free ports and tried and tried... until i tried logging into an account i log in everyday and my fingers just did it...

passwords are mascular conditioning, i tell you... your fingers remember them better than you do... give them a chance!

「ほたるの墓」を見てきた。よく頑張ってきたな、日本人は。戦争の時の辛さが映画中でしみじみに描かれ、戦争の世界の幻のような、現実のような生と死。そして、大自然がその苦しんでいる人たちを支えてあげていること。家族というもの。愛する人との別れ。苦しんでいる子供の辛抱。生活の選び方。心の中に隠すなくなった人に対しての思い出。人生の希望。

いっぱいいっぱい描いてくれたね、宮崎せんせい。ありがとう。

it's been raining the whole day today, and it's still raining. love rains, and today it rained the kind of rain i love. i love rains because, unless we live underground, it is one thing that remains that still connects the city back to nature. i love rains, because when it rains, the whole land is at rest.

today's rain was particularly restful. big fat soft raindrops breaking on drooping leaves and the hungry earth. even the wind was still. and even my eyes wanted to close, calling me to lie down and slow myself down to the rhythm of the earth and join it in its rest.

maybe it's just the too many agendas and too many appointments that we have that we forget how we ought have lay down and let life take its pace. surely, a rain this pretty coudln't have been an inconvenience?

internationalisation vs evolution

i would suppose that the creation (c) of information has at least two factors: the way we think (f), and the information around us we are exposed to (i). That means something like this:

f:i -> c

this means that to maximise c, we will need to maixmise both the range of i and the size of the function class of f. this has two implications:

(1) information needs to be shared as widely as possible
(2) the way we think need to be as varied as possible

which IMHO are somewhat contrary to each other, in the sense that, to achieve (1), we need to branch out and internationalise our horizons; but globalisation inevitably brings in some degree of homogenisation, which does not agree with (2). It is then the challenge for every knowledge economy to absorb the world's wealth of information, and somehow, choose not to conform. Only then can it become and remain a creator of information instead of being a receipient.

some countries have done well in this, others haven't. Those that do well, do a lot for themselves - not just because information sells, but i think this has a lot more to do with identity. or at least attitude - because they have seen the great wealth of information out there, yet for some reason, chosen not to give up their own set of thinking frameworks. only then would their thinking be given a chance, to evolve.

i have come to believe quite a bit in human evolution. not the darwinian one, but rather evolution as opposed to revolution. i think people change in two ways - they either change so that they can make their surroundings suit them, or they change so that they will suit their surroundings. while changing one's surrounding sounds heroic and all, one must remain powerful enough to drive all this change, and to continue driving it; on the other hand, changing oneself to suit his surroundings requires that the practioner remain flexible enough to continue adapting. the advantage here, though, is that even when you're up against someone who is adapting in a direction different than you, you are still used to adapting to your surroundings - but one who must drive change, must drive others out of their change as well. if you're up against the world, that could be quite a big drive you will need.

the difficult thing about human evolution, though, is in adapting constructively. that means, every change should add to, and not remove, adaptability. and this, as you can imagine, can be quite a complex problem with no standard answer. but this is what makes it worth its while - when everyone evolves independantly, everyone would represent an isolated ecosystem of information. and this is what i mean by maixmising (f), the way we think.

we need to make our surroundings a self-sufficient ecosystem of information. if you americanise too much, you would lose some of your thought-identity. you would become american. but surely, there's always more than one way to do things. live, and let live.

お正月
教会だけは
行きました

大晦日
泳ぎに行こう
行こうかな

Not that I know the origin of this typeface, but IMHO, this is the worst accident in typography and a blatant display of an ignorance of asian culture.

To start with, what analogy is it using to make its reference to asian culture? Which asian culture uses a cuneiform writing instrument? I can only find two possible conclusions:

1. The motive is actually cut bamboo leaves
2. The motive represents the slitty eyes that are typical of asians

In the case of (2), I would find it an insult. In the case of (1), if bamboo leaves were an important motive, then why don't I see native asian fonts using much of it?

Someone must have gotten something wrong somewhere.

the meaning of "publishing" or "publication" is lost on this generation, and it's all the Internet's fault. the Internet is like an abstraction layer between the "physical world" and the "logical world". not that the logical world is ideal or anything, but what it does do, is remove the physical (aka real-world) boundaries from eye. at this point, in 2005/6, when Internet is at most gigabit for the everyday user, experienced users can still notice the difference between a server in USA and a server in Japan, but let's just say this is a temporary technial problem that will be gone by 2010.

my point is this - that the difference between a blog and a diary, is summed up in the world "publish". where a diary is a personal record, for one to find one's own tracks, a blog is a published statement, one's offerring to the world. but nowadays, people write about their private thoughts online as if it made no difference. maybe it really makes no difference to them - but maybe too, that it's not that they want their private lives to be examined, but that, they want a space to shout. to shout back at the world that has pushed them into little cubicles and pigeon holes. it is the peasant living in us, trying to throw stones at the palace walls of a tyrannical king.

so much for civilisation and industrialisation. every year, i come back to the same conclusion - that the world hasn't changed much since prehistory.

anyway, this entry has been sponsored by my new dairy. Proceeds from clicking-through will go to NKF.

現実から逃避しようとはしていない。でも本当に手にしたいものは、もう何かをしたらもらえるものではない。買えるものなら、買ったらいい。見えるものなら見たらいい。わかるものならわかったらいい。でも僕に欲しいものは、「なる」ものだ。顔だけじゃなく、人間そのものを変えたい。前も言ったが、「無駄のない人間」になりたい。いろんな人のいろんな性格の一部を自分の中に取り込みたい。「似ているもの」ではなく、本物になりたいんだ。そんな術、そんな技、どこから習えるのかな。そ、そう。人間ステムセルになりたいです。無限なポテンシャルを秘める存在。それが、僕の生きる駆動力となっている。

だから、僕の道は違うんだ。その道を先に歩んだ先輩、僕にもその道を教えてください・・・

Digital Doodle

水泳が好き。その水に入ったら、すべてが溶けられ、すべてが癒される気がする。潜り込もうとしても、その水面は誰一人も拒否せず、すべてを抱擁してあげる。そんな水が好き。水のような人間になりたい。誰一人も拒否しないですべてを守ってあげる水。優しいながら、普通見えないパワーを秘める水。いくら虐めても、虐められない。強く打ち当てたら、その襲撃を同様に返す力。癖もなし。無駄のなし。そ、そう。僕の目指しだ。

無駄のない人生を。癖のない人間に。

それが僕の目指し、僕のフィロソフィーだ。

好きな人に好かれるのは、すごくすばらしいことですね・・・そんな感じを感じたのは、いつだったっけ？他のものもう要らないと。そんなこと、僕にも二度と来るかな。もう、あきらめたいね。愚かなのは、この心か、この頭なのか・・・

This got me stumped - should I be excited about the possibilties of neural computation, or angry about animal testing?

It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.

The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

Full story here