You're in all Blogs Section

At the ear doctor

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

Last weekend I went to my doctor to have my ears cleaned. While I was sitting in the waiting room I was wondering about the way how patients are handled there. It’s an ear clinic which is usually very crowded, so patients have to pick a number in the morning before the hospital opens. Those poor guys who did not arrive early enough have to come during normal opening hours and are given numbers far beyond 30, i.e. there are at least 30 people who are treated before. I was there quite early when I went there last week and I got number 6 which in fact put me in row as 5th as the family in front of me had picked two cards. So until this point the system makes sense. However, once you are in the waiting room, number are called (!) instead of shown on a screen. Well, that might work out at any other hospital, but surely does not yield good results in an ear clinic . The funny thing is that the pharmacy which is just next to the ear clinic requires people to pick numbers from a machine as well, but shows the number who is next in line on a big screen.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Japanese

Patched aircraft

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

Many people believe that airplanes are always looking top-notch in order to give the passenger the feeling of safety. Well, planes are washed and polished regularly not only for this reason, but mainly to reduce the air drag and thus lower the fuel consumption. However, it can happen the planes need a temporary fixing to continue operation until their next scheduled maintenance. Given that the damage is not to severe, in a very few cases this means that the aircraft if “patched” byy mechanics patches, i.e. literally putting a tape (a so called speed-tape) on the wing or hull of the plane. Although this looks really scary for a passenger who is going to fly on that aircraft, it is a kind of industry standard procedure as explained by this article.

… legal application of some heavy duty aluminum bonding tape, called “speed tape” in the mechanic’s lexicon. Depending what a plane’s maintenance manual stipulates — the manual itself under aegis of the FAA — certain non-critical components can be temporarily patched with this material, embarrassing as it sometimes looks. It’s extremely strong, durable, and able to expand and contract through an extreme range of temperatures.

Well it might be legal, but I prefer to see a non-patched airplane when I look outside of my window and not examples like this or this one!

Popularity: 1%

Posted in travel

Hollerith constants

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

When reading and trying to understand some very old Fortran code I stumbled over an interesting solution to store character expressions in a time when PCs were only designed to deal with numeric types. If someone wanted to store the string MYSTRING in a variable V, it was necessary to declare

INTEGER V(2) DATA V/4HMYST,4HRING/

which is of course no problem for a computer to handle. These so-called Hollerith constants allowed programmers to store strings in integers and thus trick the compilers in the 70ies . However, reading code that was written under such circumstance is a pain nowadays. There exist simple scripts which convert Hollerith constants to better human-readable quoted strings, however the joy of going through several thousand lines of Fortran66 code does not improve much by solving this single issue

Popularity: 1%

Posted in computer, programming

Spicy recommendation XXIV

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

Although the weather forecast was not so promising I took a walk along a small river until I reached Higashi Yamatoshi station. As it was already half past one and I did not have lunch before I checked out the area in front of the station. There were only a few shops and restaurants, but on the right side of “Big Box” I found an Indian curry restaurant. The not so creative name of the place is “Delhi” but the restaurant looked friendly from outside and the number of guests at this time of day let me conclude that they serve quite popular food. The menu offers a selection of 8 curries which come each in a set with Naan or rice and salad. For an extra 100 Yen one can increase the size of the Naan/rice or modify the Naan, e.g. to a garlic Naan (as I did). They offer 5 spice levels, but one can talk to the staff and they make it more spicy (up to 25 times spice) as you wish. I went for a “10 times spice” chicken curry which turned out to be really nice. What really turned out to be best at that place is their Naan. I would say that my garlic Naan was close to perfect – outside crispy, inside soft. Moreover, the (Japanese) staff was friendly and fast. Thus, overall a really nice experience in a place where one would not expect to find a good curry restaurant. If by chance you are around Higashi-Yamato city I can recommend you to pay a visit to Delhi.
My rating:

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Food, Spicy recommendation

My new bicycle

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

I was thinking what I buy myself for my birthday this month. Long time I thought that a smartphone might be a good thing to purchase, but the increased monthly telephone bill did not really convince me to go and buy such a phone. After returning to Japan last week I noticed once again the high humidity (compared to Europe) and I started minding about my commuting time in summer when temperatures are far beyond the 30 degree Celsius and humidity is getting similar to those of a steam sauna. Since I don’t live so far away from my office I thought it might be possible to ride a bike to work in summer. As I put my old bicycle to the shredder before moving to my new apartment 6 months ago, I decided to look for a bicycle as my birthday present. Thus, today I went to a nearby “Cycle Shop Asahi” and looked around in their show-room. As I plan to commute by bike only if the weather is nice, I did not look for a bike with mudguards. Moreover, the bike should not be too heavy as I might carry it to the 3rd floor in case that the bicycle shelter is overcrowded when I return from the office. Thus, I decided to purchase a cross-bike and found the “Reunion Lilu“, which is a brand designed and produced by that cycle shop. Overall, it was not so expensive, is quite funny to ride (half road-race bike – half mountain bike) and I already carried it once to the third floor without much troubles.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Japanese, sports

Toilet games

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

Japan is famous for computer games and two of the three large video game console companies comes from here. Sega which had a console in the past is still active in developing video games. But beside video games, Japan is also famous for its advanced toilet systems. Just to mention the Washlet. So why not combine these two groundbreaking technologies and make one giant leap for mankind ? Well, it seems Sega had this idea a few years ago when they designed their トイレッツ (TOILETS). The idea is pretty simple. A sensor is put inside the urinal and the customer “controls” the character in a video game by doing what he is supposed to do on place like the toilet. Sounds weird? Well, I have seen small soccer goals on Europe’s toilets so this seems to be just a logical step ahead. Until now I have not heard about any location where such a device is really put up, but who know maybe its a trend in the future? And for those of you who have the chance to play a game: Don’t forget to wash your hands after setting up a new high score !

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Japanese, sports

Poor inflight service

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

I am not writing explicitly the name of the airline, but those who know me better or the country I come from can easily guess the company I am talking about. Last Saturday I returned from Europe and my flight in coach class was booked well with a seat occupancy of about 90%. After take-off and reaching the cruising altitude, we got our lunch served, followed by the usual tea/coffee service. However, for the next 8 hours the stewardesses were literally hiding in the galley behind closed curtains. Refreshments were not served before we had our breakfast one hour before landing. Those who wanted to have some water or other drinks had to walk to the galley, “disturb” the stewardesses (who were reading magazines) and ask (“beg”) for some liquid.
I am aware that the airline I am talking about is currently undergoing some financial troubles and that there is a severe conflict between the management and the crew. However, I am of the opinion that this should not affect the “motivation” of the crew! As a customer I expect that I get what I paid for. I know that this is not much in coach class, but serving refreshments during a 12h flight is surely something that must be included in the fare of a non low-cost airline. I experienced already a quite lazy crew on my flight to Europe the week before (with the same airline), but what I encountered last Sunday was not very professional. I have no idea why the airline is flying with more than 8 stewardesses when those who are assigned to the coach class are only sitting and reading magazines. I have never seen something like this with one of the Japanese airlines, which makes me think to book a non-direct flight next time when going to my home country …

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Drink, Food, travel

Tube travel

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

It seems someone had the same idea which I had in my childhood

Let’s hope that this project does not only include that nice video, but finds some investors who really spend some money on a feasibility study. I am doubting if any trans-ocean connection makes sense as tectonic plates are drifting w.r.t. each other, but why not make a continental link Asia-Europe similar to the Trans-Siberian Railway?

Popularity: 1%

Posted in travel

Central limit theorem

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — 2 Comments ↓

Today I had to recall some basic theorem which I learnt in one of the introduction courses on statistics at university – the “central limit theorem“. The central limit theorem states that, given certain conditions,

… the mean of a sufficiently large number of independent random variables, each with finite mean and variance, will be approximately normally distributed.

Since in many cases you don’t know the underlying statistics of your data, but as you deal with a derived quantity from different data-sets (which have their random variables identically distributed) one can assume a normal distribution for your (e.g. averaged) data. Here’s a quick example to demonstrate how it works. Assume you are rolling a large number of identical, unbiased dices (in the example below, roll 50,000). If you do this without averaging, you get an uniform distribution, i.e. all values between 1 and 6 are same likely. However, if you roll a dice 2,4, or 16 times and take the average (and do this 50,000 times) the distribution of the average will start to be approximated by a normal distribution. Well, here’s what I got. It nicely demonstrates that your peak value is moving closer to the expected average, i.e. 3.5, and that you distribution gets more and more close to the typical Gaussian shape.

Popularity: 2%

Posted in computer, math, programming

Diet water

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Thomas Hobiger — No Comments ↓

The marketing department of Sapporo Beverages has really some very creative guys. A few years they started to market bottled water as a diet drink. Yes, you read correctly – water for your diet. And their sales point? They say it supports your body when you drink it every day. Wow. Those marketing genius must have been into some totally different business before he joined the company. However, what looked like an April fool, was a product that has been sold for real several years ago as this press release proofs. However, I did not find any evidence that they are still running this product in their soft-drink line at the moment. Maybe the marketing guy was promoted to another position …

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Drink, Japanese