Another year has swiftly gone by and it is once again time to wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year. The time feels like picking up momentum as it passes. I wish to thank you all for your witty, serious, funny, heart-warmin…

When I first heard of the "black hole", I was very much worried about it. It was when I was 13. If it is so heavy that it absorbs everything, even light, right into its center, sooner or later it will gulp our planet. You know, it gains it…

There are some words in English that I somehow like; "Bleak", "sanguine", "oblivion", "upset", "crazy", "chronological", "serendipitous", "clink", "jingle", "catastrophe" "apocalyptic"... to name some. When I read a book and stumble upon o…

Quite a bit busy these days. I simply do not have time to write. I may not be able to update as often as before till the end of next January. But I'd appreciate it if you visit here once in a while to check out an update. It's raining. Loo…

He came to my desk and said. "Toshi-san, that is a copy of the contract document for your consultation to us next year." An envelope was on my desk. I opened it and found inside 5 pages of document. "The conditions are exactly the same as …

The other day I wrote about Japanese custom of washing hands on coming home which a British guy referred to as "hygiene maniac." There may be no point in trying to hide from your virus or bacteria, for they are on and around you, in number…

Ice-glazed trees are standing like white statues of the dead, sometimes blown in a blizzard, sometimes in a background of a perfect blue sky and a dazzling sun. Music by 石川泰 is instrumental, simply flowing as the camera pans through the…

Very cold this morning. But come to think about it, it is December now. We may have to say this winter has been weirdly warm. 6 degree Celsius this morning is not cold enough, still not my definition of winter. We are so much used to warm …

You wash your hands when you come back home. Some of you even gurgle. I asked a few foreigners, from time to time, if they wash their hands when coming back home. For most of them, the answer was "no". Then are they more susceptible to dis…

The US is struggling to make out a way to deal with the 3 major automakers. For them, to be or not to be, that is the question. 4 million people are directly or indirectly working for GM, Ford and Chrysler. Certainly many people will be th…

Before the end of the medical checkup I saw the doctor. First I got a flu shot. Then he looked through the X-ray picture of my chest, cardiograph chart and listened to my chest with a stethoscope. "No problem at all. Is there anything you …

Last week I went through an annual medical checkup. All the examined items resulted in "normal". Good news is that low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol came down to below a warning level. For almost ten years it had persistently kept …

Not having written here just for a few days what with my report and everything else, I find it already hard to get myself back to the habit of writing. But once I begin writing here, I wonder what it was all about. In my head, much knowled…

Seven out of ten. This was the number of people sitting in front of me in a train who were looking into a small screen of their cellphone. Three days ago, without having nothing to do in a train, I observed those people. A young business m…

Things fall, of course by the gravity. But have you ever seen the gravity? No, you haven't. All you can see is that things fall. So the gravity is just a concept you believe in. Why you believe in it? Because it seems to explain the behavi…

Night air was unexpectedly cold, It tightened up my skin immediately after I got out of the door. I ran down the slope in front of my house, running for a while to a hill and then ran up the hill at one stretch so that I could warm up my b…

This Sunday, as our belated wedding anniversary, my wife and I went, of all the romantic places to go, to Tokyo Dome to watch the final game of Asia Series baseball. The game was fought between Seibu Lions representing Japan and United Lio…

I suspect It would be very different if you learned English only from ears and not from reading. When I took a taxi in Denver, US, the driver was from Sudan, Africa. He said "Five マネット". "Sorry, five what?" I asked, thinking it was "mo…

Last Thursday, when I told an American guy in my client office my failure story about mistakenly hearing someone say "pawn shop" as "porn shop", he told me this. A: My wife finally is gone to live in a Caribbean island. B: Jamaica? A: No, …

With a bit more than 2 months to go before my research report is due, it is about time I had to get down to business... Ok, enough playing around. I have to read several literatures and conduct some computer simulation, interpret the resul…

It's getting colder and the days becoming shorter day by day. When I got up at 6:00, it was still dark. At 4:30 pm the sun was about to set. Last Monday, when I called the Zurich office at 5:00 pm, nobody answered the phone. I thought it s…

"Thank you for your application for the Tokyo City Marathon. We had applicants far more than our scheduled maximum entrants, thanks to you. As the result of a fair and strict lottery, we are sorry to inform you that we cannot meet your wis…

Global warming in recent years has felt like breaking news of big events such as deforestation, shrinking polar ice and endangered polar bears, sinking island of Tepuka(ツバル共和国) and so on. CO2 is considered as the culprit. So everyone…

Two weeks ago I went to the culture festival of Tokyo Institute of Technology(東京工業大学), my alma mater and now Eriko's college. I had to go because she was selling Tapioca milk tea at the festival and I felt obliged to buy some. I boug…

Recently I read "Miscellany in idleness (徒然草, I am not confident about this translation of the Japanese titile)" by Kenko Yoshida written almost 700 years ago. Here is the Chapter 211. "You should not depend on anything. Regret and grud…

Our intelligence is in a sense a substitute for DNA in terms of our collective evolution. Just as DNA gives us instructions to fit our environment, our intelligence works out a better way to get along with our social and natural environmen…

Strategy of a plankton to survive is to swim around randomly. If he feels comfortable where he is, he slows up his movement to stay there. If he feels not, he continues moving around until he by accident comes to a better place. He never t…

Iceland \890 => \310 Norway \805 => \480 England \469 => \300 USA \400 => \320 Australia \345 => \240 Japan \280 => \280 These are Big Mac Indexes after the subprime loan crash. I calculated them assuming the prices of BigMac remain the sa…

When I was 13, my family went to live for some time in Australia. My father was heading the branch office of a trading company in Sydney. My parents decided to leave me here in Japan to let me live with my grandparents since they were afra…

Fifty years or so ago, a college professor teaching English literature in Japan, went to US where he had a conversation with a young female student. "Mr. Tanaka, you talked about lace problems in America, but we have not lace problems here…