I made a lamp this weekend for Rachel as a belated Valentine’s Day gift. Made from balsa wood, vellum, hot glue and the electrical components, I got my inspiration from Instructables. It didn’t look well put-together, and so I made my own interpretation:
On 02.21.09, In miscellany, By Dan
On 11.18.08, In miscellany, By Dan
A little game I play with myself sometimes that’s somewhat along the lines of Desert Island is this (I don’t have a name for it): If you suddenly found yourself way back in time, what would you bring (intellectually, academically) back from modern times?
Try it for different time periods. For example, if it were 5000 B.C., would you, say, know how to smelt? I guess I try to put things in the context of the big ideas / advances of the time.
If it were the 1400′s, could you demonstrate that the earth was round? If it were the 1700′s or so, could you explain Maxwell’s equations? Late 1800′s – relativity? Quantum mechanics? Wave-particle duality?
This sometimes makes me wish I knew how to smelt.
On 09.25.07, In miscellany, By Dan
As I read today, Amazon is selling DRM-free music for 89 to 99 cents. As much as I love Apple and want it to bear my children, DRM irks me in so many ways; though they’ve begun selling DRM-free music for $1.29 (since May), whenever I find myself looking for music on iTunes, none of it is ever available for as such. And even then, I think I’d find it hard to man up the extra 30 cents per song.
I appreciate that it’s probably not Apple’s choice or “fault,” and it’s a product of some record companies wanting a little bit of an extra “guarantee” (though it’s hardly anything at all – try googling “break apple drm”). Still, it’s sad. I mean, you go and buy the physical CD, and you can do whatever you’d ever want to with it pretty easily.
In celebration of Amazon’s new feature, I decided to buy Feist’s “1234.” Ironically featured in the TV spot for the new (and impressive) iPod nano.
On 07.07.07, In miscellany, By Dan
I saw an interesting video blog on making carbonated fruit ( http://www.instructables.com/id/EZETHSWF1B3RB5H/ ), and decided to go scrounge around for some supplies to make some.
My went to the hardware store, and I bought a mason jar (in general, not a good idea to use glass for this project), because all the sturdy plastic containers were really expensive. In the demonstration I saw, they used a nalgene. I then went downtown with a friend, and on our way back, we stopped at Baskin Robbins and bought some ice cream and dry ice. Back home, threw some fruit in the jar with some dry ice, put it in a cloth bag (to hopefully reduce/elliminate any shrapnel, and stuck it in the fridge.
There was one… extra opportunity. You don’t need very much dry ice for the fruit, and so we had some left over. I may have called up some friends and may have asked them to collect their plastic bottles and meet me. We may have set off some dry ice bombs.
They’re relatively harmless, and in a country that doesn’t seem to regulate fireworks very strictly, it seemed like a pretty safe thing. With plastic bottles, you typically get only a couple pieces of shrapnel, but the bark is worse than the bite. A dry ice bomb is essentially putting dry ice into a plastic bottle (use gloves – dry ice can burn you) and add water to speed up the process (dry ice sublimes, giving off copious amounts of CO2; adding water makes it sublime faster by increasing the heat around the dry ice). Place cap on tight and throw. The ones we made took several minutes to explode, and some of them needed a little extra something. Some people enjoy shooting these with BBs for that little last activation energy, but lacking one, we decided to throw these against the concrete. We had a couple interesting moments when we didn’t throw them far enough away from the group, and it just flew straight up and straight back down. We had a couple explode in our hands, too (it wasn’t too bad; I wouldn’t recommend trying to make this happen, however).
With our last one, we apparently upset someone, and we heard someone yell very loudly at us in Japanese. We ran off, but one person in our group lost his kippah when jumping a fence, and so we needed to go back. I went down to get it, and the others kept a lookout from one of our apartments. I was about halfway there when they called me back, saying that the guy who yelled at us was walking around. We decided to ride our bikes past the scene, and as we did, there was a middle-aged man walking with the guy who yelled at us, holding a baseball bat. As we neared him, he held it up threateningly – and we were just passers-by!
About an hour later they stopped looking and we were able to get it back, but who the hell brings a baseball bat for hearing a boom? Granted, it could be a little freaky, but a baseball bat?
On 04.05.07, In miscellany, By Dan
After being in Japan for 6 months, I finally felt my first earthquake. This is by no means the first one I’ve been through, but I’ve been asleep the other times.
10 km +/- 11 km east of Sendai, we felt some wobble while watching a movie. At first I thought it might have been someone jumping around on the floor above me, but then it happened again. I gave my friend a high-five, as it was the first one he was awake for, too.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has a website on which you can see earthquake information within half an hour of one anywhere in the world. After the movie finished, we hopped onto the site, and looked ours up. (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007auay.php)
They even provide a service that e-mails you when earthquakes happen in regions you say you have an interest in. I might sign up for Japan’s, just so I can get emails equivalent to “Hello, you just had an earthquake.”
On 01.18.07, In miscellany, By Dan
It is apparently the tradition in many cities across Japan to have a little festival in mid January to burn to in luck for the new year.
We showed up at around 5 pm at Hachiman Shrine, which was packed with more Japanese people than I have seen anywhere. The road was roped off for several blocks leading up to the shrine (this is a 5-lane road, not a little street), and the hundred yard walk up the stairs from the entrance to the fire took the better part of a half an hour. When we finally got there, we got a look at this enormous bonfire going, no ropes holding people back, and people throwing stuff in.
In some of these pictures (see below) you’ll see these people in essentially a white headband and glorified shorts, and the many laboratories, classes, and companies do this. I’m told that this tradition started when during this celebration, sake brewers wanted to prove their strength and so go around like this in the freezing weather. And what’s more, it’s not a little jog down to the shrine warming up on the fire and then sprinting home. They really take their time, and they walk around a lot before they even come to the shrine. I imagine it gets chilly.
The things that people were throwing into the fire included New Year’s decorations, but also these items (many of which had dice on them) available for purchase nearby. A bystander who spoke English (he’s a professor at our University on another campus), was trying to tell us the significance, but it was too loud to hear, and most of it was lost on me.
Not far from the fire, there were hundreds of little food stands or game stands (very fair-like), and we had some food, and walked around the what was practically a little village around for while and found a temple where the scantily-clad folk were going and drinking a cup of sake, and then moving on. There was also a huge crowd in front of it all where people were waiting to throw money (in units of 5 yen) into these collection bins and ring a bell. Off to the side, you could buy a fortune for anywhere from 100 yen (~$1 US) to 30,000+ yen (~$300+ US).
Amazing festival, and I hope to see another again some day.
On 01.02.07, In miscellany, By Dan
Happy New Year everyone!
This holiday season was my first away from family, but it proved enjoyable. I was able to talk to almost all my family back home, and even got my stocking from home. I found a couple of good friends who were also staying in Sendai for the break, and that’s with whom I celebrated Christmas and New Years.
For Christmas, Collin (a friend from University of Wyoming) and I went downtown and saw all the lights and got dinner. We started off by going to one of at least a few of Sendai’s Irish pubs. Well, I suppose they’re only Irish in the sense that they’re run by Japanese. Japanese who have made it Ireland-themed. They even serve both kinds of beer – Guinness and stout. Then we found a nice little hole in the wall at which to try 牛たん (cow’s tongue), for which this region is apparently famous.
The time between Christmas and New Years has been spent trying to get back into a more normal sleeping arrangement. Instead of waking up at 5 PM, I tried to switch over to waking up around 7 AM, but to no avail. My chance actually came with New Years.
For New Years I bought a bottle of Champagne and Collin, Zhou Peng (from University of Beijing) and I cooked dinner and then waited for the new year on the roof listening to the Shinto shrines ringing their bells. (Every new year, all the Shinto shrines ring the bells 108 times. I’ve heard it’s to get rid of 108 bad spirits, but I have not verified this in any way.) Since Japan is all in the same time zone, all of the Shrines across Japan are relatively synchronized, and in a city like Sendai with so many shrines, it was really a wonderful sound.
Collin and I agreed to meet up again around 6:20 to see the sunrise at a nearby shrine that sits on top of a hill. We took a time lapse of the sunrise, which didn’t turn out super-great, but it’s still nice to have.
