Walking around the streets of Tokyo, I gradually became aware of a traffic sound—that was missing. Honking horns. You virtually never hear horns anywhere in Japan. It’s against the law, except when necessary to alert someone to danger. More simply, it’s against common sense, and unnecesary.

Contrast that to Los Angeles where the car ahead of you slowing down a bit, a car pulling into traffic 100 yards ahead of you, or someone changing lanes in front of you, someone trying to parallel park, or virtually any other perceived offense is considered valid grounds for a good lean on the horn. It’s not about alerting anyone—it’s about letting off steam, and auditorily punishing people.

Let’s outlaw honking horns. Of course, our democracy is too broken to actually do something this reasonable. I guarantee opponents of such a move would cite the First Amendment in their diatribes.

In Shizuoka, Sakiko and I saw an amazing natural phenomenon—the “mori-aogaeru”, or forest green treefrog.

These frogs climb up into the trees in late spring and have orgies involving one male and up to half-a-dozen females (look closely at the picture), the results of their labors taking the form of foam-like whitish-yellow egg sacks they leave attached to the tree. When the eggs hatch, the polliwogs fall into the pond below the tree where they commence their lives. Yes, that’s right—it’s very important for the parents to choose a tree not only that is above the water now, but one that will be above water in a month or so when the eggs hatch.

Apparently these frogs live only in Japan. Ko claims to have seen some around his nursery school near Hase Kannon. We asked about other locations near Shizuoka and were told that most were in private gardens. The ones we saw were at Seiganji, a temple near Shizuoka.

With no writing system, the Incas used “quipu” to record information—a system of knotted braids. Quipus were apparently a kind of accounting system, used, for instance, to keep inventories of the Emperor’s llama herds, and the population of the empire. Some people think that they were also used as a kind of mnemonic device to help people recall epic stories. The quipus were knotted and deciphered by a class of scribes called “quipu-camayo”.

Unfortunately, made of yarn, quipus have all decayed. And many were burnt by the Spaniards. There are only a handful remaining.

Now Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, has developed a new theory which is that quipus used a kind of 7-bit binary system. I can’t wait for his new book to come out!

The new LA Cathedral was designed by Rafael Moneo, the Spanish architect who also designed the Getty Center here in LA. Judge the design for yourself—to me it looks like he thought he was designing another museum instead of a church.

On April 30, 2003, Sakiko and I got the chance to attend one of the first concerts on the new organ at the new cathederal. This is a Dobson organ, with 4 manuals and 105 ranks. One unique thing about it is its height—85 feet, in order to fit into the dimensions of the cathedral.

At the console was Christoph Bull, a well-known local organist known for his great improvisations—one of which he graced us with at this concert as well. The program included Vierne, Alain, and Durufle—maybe Bull thinks this is a French romantic organ at heart? Bull is the organist who at a concert last year at First Congregational Church picked my suggestion for an improvisation theme—the Beatles’ “Michelle”.

More information about the LA Cathedral organ.

In his April 25th article in Science, titled Farmers and their Languages, Jared Diamond hypothesizes that “language follows agriculture”. As other scholars have already proposed, he muses that Japanese may have been derived from a language brought to Kyushu by Koreans (the “Yayoi” immigrants) who introduced their rice farming technology there, around 400 BC. Under this theory, Japanese was based on one particular Korean language known as Koguryo (whereas modern Korean is said to be based on the language of Shilla). Other researchers, though, view Japanese as more of a mixture, or even pidgin, of the language brought by the Yayoi invaders and the indigenous Jomon tribes.

The New York Times Obituaries column on May 15, 2001, ran the article “Joseph Greenberg, 85, Singular Linguist, Dies”.

I had never heard of Dr. Greenberg before. His books, such as “Indo-European and its Closest Relatives”, sound a bit intimidating to the casual reader such as myself.

Dr. Greenberg’s focus was apparently finding relationships between languages and placing them into groupings. He grouped most of the world’s languages into 12 superfamilies.

Most interesting: Dr. Greenberg postulated that the world’s original, ancestral language contained the word “tik”, Its reflection in the Indo-European language group includes the words “daktulus”, “digitus”, and “doigt”—Greek, Latin, and French for finger, as well as in the English word digital.

What other words from the human Ursprache did Dr. Greenberg deduce? Could “tik” have been the first word spoken by humans, and if so is it a coincidence that it in its “digital” form it defines a leitmotif of our culture 100,000 years later?