Month: March 2007
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How to Pick Names
I had a new student today, who wrote an essay about a professor of robotics at Tsukuba University, who has designed a powered exoskeleton called HAL, and founded a company called Cyberdyne, Inc, to work on cybernetics, robotics, and medical engineering. All for the good of humanity, it says on the home page.
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Growing Up with Two Languages
Since learning that Yuriko is pregnant, I have been reading books about child rearing. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a lot of stuff you can’t learn from books, or indeed from any source other than personal experience, but there is still quite a lot that you can learn from reading. So, recently I read Growing…
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Mother-Child Health Record Book
The Mother-Child Health Record Book is a small book issued to all pregnant women by the Japanese government. The actual records go in the first half, which is set by the national government, while the second half, written by the local government, contains additional useful information for parents-to-be. The book covers the time from becoming…
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Earthquake, but not here
As people are likely to hear from the news, there was a big earthquake in Japan this morning, a bit over an hour ago. However, it was in Ishikawa-ken, which is the other side of the country from Tokyo, so we hardly felt it. (Go west across the width of Japan; that’s Ishikawa-ken, roughly.) So,…
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Walking to Shibuya
Yesterday I walked to Shibuya. All told, it took me about four hours, but that included popping into a couple of shrines I passed on the way, and a shop, and getting a bit lost around the Tama river, and eating lunch just as I arrived in Shibuya. Looking at the map, it’s about ten…
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Word Choice
From the book on childhood neurological development I’m reading at the moment: “Obviously, Timothy’s auditory system did not develop in a vacuum.”
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More Baby Pictures
So, one of things I couldn’t write about while my access to my blog was broken was our visit to the Ob/Gyn clinic for a check-up on Saturday. I just got to sit there and nod and smile, but Yuriko seems to appreciate me doing that. We had ultrasound scans done again. The first was…
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No Longer Broken Blog
My blog has been broken for the last few days, in that I haven’t been able to connect to add entries. It now appears to be fixed again (whether due to something my webhosting company did, or due to the vagaries of Shub-Internet, I know not), so normal service will be resumed as of today.
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Man in the Middle
Well, I read all of John Amaechi’s autobiography this afternoon. See the previous article, “As Others See Us”, for my reaction to the bit about me. Since the book isn’t about me, I’ll try to keep this post about him. It was very interesting. He worked very hard to achieve something he wanted to do,…