The Sea Shepherd Incident The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an international organization whose goal is stop whaling. They do this primarily by sinking whaling vessels. In January, their new “stealth” speed-boat, the Ady Gil, was split in two when they parked it in front of a moving whaling ship (the Japanese 第二昭南丸 Shonen Maru [...]

Vocaloid is a software voice synthesizer developed by Yamaha. Since the release of Vocaloid2 and the character vocal set (voice set) “Hatsune Miku” 【初音ミク】, Vocaloid has become immensely popular in Japan. From manga doujins to video games to plastic figurines, Miku and her friends have spread far and wide. As an audio engineer and human-computer-interaction [...]

Over the past two weeks, we’ve covered a lot of ground in Japanese Culture. We’ve explored, extensively, what culture is and isn’t, how culture is studied, and how all of this applies to Japan. We’ve seen pieces of the established culture of Japan – from modern martial arts to tea ceremonies and histories – and [...]

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) is an interesting book about how people think and see the world around them. The basic idea behind the excerpt we read is that people tend to come into new experiences with preconceptions that they can not shake. Our prompt was “does this relate to your experiences in [...]

Since I have Internet access on my own laptop, I can finally start upload pictures and narrate through my first few days here in Japan. We flew from Chicago to San Francisco, and then flew from SFO to Osaka. Flying over California. We had a short layover in SFO – we went to Burger King [...]

Today we finally got all of our personal computers on the wireless in the dorms, so I can start posting updates here. I found a nice little GTK app that lets me record video from my webcam at the full 720p resolution it advertises (and at a full 24fps), which is nice because Cheese always [...]