The University of Minnesota Design Institute has designed a dynamically generated font which varies depending on the weather outside—cute and curly for warm, angular and stark for cold, that sort of thing. You can see an example here. The New York Times reported on this as well, although this is just a link to their brain-dead pay-per-article page. It was also discussed in the Typographica Blog, with lots of comments.

It seems, though, that these fonts are not really dynamically generated—instead, there are discrete glyphs pre-designed for each cell of a 2- or 3-dimensional matrix.

This reminds me of my original doctoral thesis project at Tokyo University, the one Sakamura didn’t like. We were going to develop a mathematical representation of kanji, and based on that generate characters in real time, completely parameterizable. This is a much harder problem than it looks, and surprisingly little progress has been made on it. The only result of my research was an overview of all the work in related areas done over the previous decade or so. I’m going to put that up on-line sometime real soon now.

A class/instance or part/whole relationship, normally used in semantics and linguistics. In a meronymic analogy, a part is used to stand in for the whole: “He’s got a nice set of wheels”.

I like Sakiko’s idea of a special annual bad movie prize. It’s really a reverse prize—the “winner” has to pay. The money could go either to help develop a new, better generation of directors and writers; or, it could simply be given back to the unfortunate slobs who wasted their money going to see the movie. We really want to punish the people who made the big stupid movies that made a lot of money, so the amount of money they’d have to give back would be proportional to the film’s box office take—maybe 20%. That should get their attention.

Especially for bombs like “Matrix—Reloaded”. Its box so far is three hundred million or so so 20% would be like sixty million. Here’s a movie without a plot, without a script, without characters, without anyone who can act, and barely anyone who can put together an action sequence. For that, I can go see Hong Kong kung fu flicks anyway. The only possible reason in life for this film, as far as I can see, is to set the groundwork for the third movie later this year, sure to be equally inane.

Fortunately, the American movie-going public is not really as stupid as the producers of this travesty appear to think. Box-office receipts fell off much faster than is normal for a movie like this after word got out about what a dog it was.

Another good candidate for the 2003 prize would be Legally Blonde 2. I can only imagine the discussions that went on in producers’ offices leading up to the creation of this bomb, as they snickered over how much moolah they could extract from clueless moviegoers for any old movie with the Legally Blonde name and Reese Witherspoon in it—who, by the way, is getting much less perky and cute as time goes on. Beyond her, again, there’s no story (OK, there is one, it’s just very stupid) and no acting. Of course, with box office receipts at only $80 million, at 20% the fine would be a mere 16 million dollars.

Sakiko took me to the world’s best kushi-age restaurant in Shinjuku—Kobushi, where she ate a decade or two ago. Don’t get confused. This is not kushi-yaki, which is a variety of yaki-tori. The “age” of “kushi-age” means deep-fried, a basically Kansai (western Japan) dish (where it’s called, confusingly, “kushi-katsu”); Kato-san told us there are only a dozen kushi-age places in all of Tokyo. His is certainly one of the best.

Address is Shinjuku-ku Shinjuku 3-21-3, Katou Bldg. 2F, 03-3354-7605. Access from Shinjuku higashi-guchi (east exit), B-12 (Mitsui-Sumitomo) stairway.

We made some notes about what we ate. We started off with the basic course of ten items. The pork was tender and succulent. Shiitake mushrooms were fried up perfectly. Chicken and celery were an ingenious combination. Ebi (shrimp) were wrapped in shiso, the incomparably aromatic Japanese leaf. Kuruma-ebi are the huge, juicy Japanese shrimps. Hotate-gai are scallops. Renkon—the crunchy lotus root. Kisu, a tender white fish. Asparagus works perfectly when deep-fried. Uzura are the quail eggs, the perfect candidate for kushi-age. Finally, another piece of fish—isagi, a tender white fish.

Mr. Kato has been running his store for 25 years. Initially thought he would do tempura, since that was what his family did, but then decided he would try something else. As Shinjuku changed under and around him, he has just continued doing kushi-age for nearly three decades. Judging from the name of the building, he made at least one smart real-estate decision, which probably made him more money than any number of years of frying sticks would.

Each stick is deep-fried individually and lovingly. The oil is part of the trick; the composition is changed seasonally, to give a lighter taste during summer, for instance.

Ten years or so ago Kato-san renovated the inside of the store. But business is still not that good. Problem is that he is a little bit expensive (2,500 yen for his basic meal) for people looking for a quick bite, but he’s not hip enough to attract the cool crowd (and probably doesn’t want to anyway). Since the building he built around his store is probably worth two million dollars I suppose he doesn’t care that much though.

The science or study of the origins and forms of words especially as used in a specialized field; or, the science or study of the origin and forms of proper names of persons or places.

Also, the system underlying the formation and use of words especially for proper names or of words used in a specialized field

Ken Sakamura is the legendary founder of Japan’s claim to operating system fame: TRON. A quick Google reveals a robust web presence for Sakamura and TRON. Sakamura is also, of course, Bob’s professor from his ill-fated two-year sojourn in a doctoral program at Tokyo University.

Joi Ito recently posted a brief note about his dinner with Sakamura on his ubiquitous blog. It seems like Sakamura still has his endearing fixation on all kinds of cute little devices.

CNN reported on Sakamura and his TRON project. This was also picked up at Slashdot. Their bottom line: TRON is wildly successful, running on hundreds of millions of devices, and Sakamura is an unassuming genius who left billions of dollars on the table in the interest of seeing his technology benefit the world’s masses.

Well, sort of. What’s happened now is that the part of TRON they used to call ITRON, the real-time OS, has indeed become the OS of choice for lots of embedded devices, particularly phones. That’s because it’s small and fast and robust. But actually Sakamura didn’t invent ITRON —it came from another group at Tokyo University. As with all the parts of TRON, Sakamura was mainly responsible for finding the technology and sprinkling it with the TRON holy water—a laudable contribution not to be sneezed at. The notion, though, that Sakamura would have been a billionaire had he charged one cent per device is a bit illusory. First, clients used the product exactly because it was free. Second, Tokyo University professors at the time weren’t allowed to have side jobs. Third, I don’t knew who does the math at CNN, but to reach Bill Gates’ level of wealth at one cent per unit there would have to be 4.3 trillion TRON devices, something that even the visionary Sakamura, who has long dreamed of massively ubiquitous computing, could not imagine.

The other pieces of TRON did not fare nearly as well. The TRONCHIP was one of the most CISC-y chips ever designed, with the further bad fortune to come out right as the RISC winds were blowing strongly in the late ‘80s. CTRON was an NTT-sponsored OS for telephone switches that saw only sporadic use. BTRON was the poster boy of the TRON movement—a cool desktop OS clearly inspired by the Macintosh, and with some truly useful features like a network-shaped file model. Its technical merits aside, BTRON lost in the same way that DesqView lost the desktop wars. It simply could not make it past the barrier posed by the massive installed base, hardball marketing, herd mentality, and critical mass of Windows.

We all love Ken Sakamura. We love his TRON house. We love his TRON toilet (I still remember narrating a video about TRON where I had to explain the toilet in English). We love his cool toys, his unbridled imagination, his almost child-like amazement at neat technogadgets. He is certainly in line for a spiffy award from the Japanese Emperor once he gets a few more gray hairs. He unquestionably is the single best symbol of Japanese computing over the last couple of decades and the next couple of ones. It’s just too bad that neither Japanese computing nor Sakamura could accomplish much more during this period, all the ITRON phones out there notwithstanding.

characterized by chance or indeterminate elements; “aleatoric music”

JavaScript Object Notation is a very simple idea—a standard way to represent XML documents as a JavaScript object. This could be useful when you’re trying to do client-side processing of complex XML-like datasets and want to avoid dependencies on a particular browser’s XML functionality. In a way, the JavaScript containing information about a game tree that’s downloaded to your browser from gobase.org is the same idea, albeit specialized for SGF.

Next step: JSXSL to apply XSL transforms to these objects?

Kobayashi Chizu 5-dan had one of the most insightful reactions to Igowalker™ that I’ve heard so far. She said that this medium would require go authors to write much differently than in the past. In particular, they would have, and should take advantage of, the opportunity to include many more variations in their commentaries.

Touchgraph has super-cool ways of visually navigating relationships found in Google or Amazon searches.