Category Archives: Just a thought

Reproducibility is one of the principles of scientific method. Another scientific method is hypothesis.

Think of this scenario. One day, you saw your dog facing west and barking three times, and then it started raining. A few days later, you saw your dog facing west and barking three times again, and it started raining again. Then you concluded that your dog’s barking three times toward west causes rain. Now, saying “that’s ridiculous” is not scientific argument. Your dog might have sensed the gradual decrease in atmospheric pressure, noticed slight change of the western heavens, and reacted to it. You may need to consider what is the cause and what is the result, and review the reasoning and the logic behind it to relate or separate two sequential events before arguing unscientifically.

As I wrote in the previous post, I like visiting a museum and went to ROM lats weekend. Another weird habit that I do at a museum but did not mention in the previous post is to worship before a statue of Buddha. If you see some of my facebook photo albums like this one, this one, this one, or this one, you can tell how I like visiting Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Since there are few places like them in North America, I visit museums to meet Buddha. By the way, those statues of Buddha are usually called “Buddhism art”, but I do not call them “art” because it is more like religious practice, something people “needed for their daily life of the time”. Anyways, when I visited ROM last weekend, I worshiped before statues of Buddha and read a short Buddhism sutra carved on a temple bell twice.

As I often mention, I do freelance translation jobs now while looking for a full-time job, and as I wrote in another previous post, some clients disappear in the middle of negotiation and I often have to wait passively. In last couple of days after visiting ROM, I’ve got positive messages from some of my clients and got some freelance jobs.

Now you may be thinking “that’s ridiculous, it’s only coincidence”. But think one second. I have not concluded anything. I just wrote about two sequential events in last few days. For now I dare not to attempt any reasoning.

One of some topics I write in this blog is about technology and human development. As I wrote in an old post, I suppose that engineers and designers in the old days developed new technologies to improve the quality of life. But I often wonder if engineers and designers today still have the same goal; they often seem to develop a new gadget because they can do it whether it will make a better life or not. According to a Japanese internet article, a Japanese cellphone company has developed “translation glasses”. It looks like Google Glass, and according to the article, if the user looks at a text in a foreign language through the glasses, it shows translated text in the user’s first language. How helpful will it be?

First of all, I do not trust machine translation. For example, I used Google Translate to translate one paragraph from the article. It goes like this.

By slip a ring on the finger of a dedicated, another feature with this glasses, available to change the touch screen a variety of flat surface. Ring will convey the position information in the translation glasses, “touch” to make tags visible only to a person wearing glasses. Such as the search of the Internet will be possible with this.

I guess the translation glasses will work at an equivalent level. Does it make sense to you? Is this reliable? If I translate manually, it should be like below.

The glasses have another feature; the user can use various flat surfaces as touch screen by using a special ring on his/her finger. The ring conveys location information to the glasses, which enables the user to “touch” tags that only the user can see. The user can do an internet search and so on with this feature.

Well, this is still not very clear, but this is what the article actually says. In other words, I guess, the glasses project user interface on a flat surface which only the user can see, and the user can control it by touching the surface with a special ring on his/her finger. This feature raises another question. I wonder how the developers of this product thought of human behavior.

Since hands-free cellphones ware introduced, many people have experienced, in some degree, something like a funny beer TV commercial in which a guy assumes a beautiful girl is talking to him while she is actually talking on blue tooth device. If someone uses “invisible” user interface, doesn’t it look like victims of Just for Laughs Gags “blind test”?

OK, maybe I’m a little too skeptical now. But the point here is that designers should think of reliability and human behavior when developing new gadgets, or even whether the gadget will be needed or not in the first place. Am I too cynical?

As I wrote in a previous post, I often “practice” graphic design on a crowdsourcing web service. I have not learned graphic design. I just like it. As far as I remember, my earliest selected graphic design work was the cover of a “publication” of my fourth grade class. I think it was a collection of compositions. Everyone in the class submitted a “design”, and mine was voted as the best one. One of my nicknames during my elementary-school days was “図工の先生 (art-and-crafts teacher)”. By the way, in my earliest memory (probably it was before going to my kindergarten), I was drawing imaginary cats, like cats fishing on a boat. My parents proudly and generously posted those drawings on a wall of our living room, if I remember it correctly.

Today I revised some pages of my portfolio web site, and revisited some pages that I have not revised for a long time, including some early “design” works that I made before learning industrial design at the University of Calgary which is my first official design education. Those works include early “graphic design” works like this one, this one, or this one. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly), those early works look way nicer than the recent works that I submitted on the crowdsourcing service like those ones. Why? Probably because I forgot a beginner’s mind. Now I focus more on technique than design itself. But this expression is a little weird because I am still a beginner, or even “less than beginner” since I have not learned graphic design.

It sounds like now it’s time to go back to basics.

When I was learning English in Japan, an American teacher showed students an interesting Hollywood movie. It is a story about a creature visiting our planet earth from the outer space. It is widely known that the Voyager aircraft brings messages for extraterrestrials, and in the movie, the creature visits the earth because he (or she?) gets the message and it goes “come visit us”. The creature, which originally did not have a shape, gets a man’s body, and gradually learns one of the earth people’s languages, which is English.

But according to this article, it won’t happen in the near future: Voyager left solar system last year, new research shows. Voyager may or may not in solar system now, and it will take a long long time to have a chance to encounter an extraterrestrial.

A fascinating fact is that the aircraft was launched in 1977 and still sends signals from the “edge” of solar system to the earth daily. How many people own a vehicle that was made around 1977 and still works properly? Probably not many. Some people may own a car from that era because they have cultural values (may not be as valuable as those from the 30s, though), but I guess not many of them use it daily.

I often wonder which is better, making products that will last long, or making products that meet the needs of a particular time. There is no single answer. It depends. In terms of environmental impact, of course, it is generally better to make products that will last long. But technically, it generally costs more to make such products (I bet a Voyager aircraft is way more expensive than a typical vehicle!). More importantly, people generally like to have new things. Is this good or bad? If all the human beings give up to have new things, does it mean all creative people have to turn their interest toward something conservative?

I just looked around me and thought what is the oldest thing here. It’s a Japanese folding fan. I bought it in 1997, and that type of folding fan has been used in Japan for more than a millennium. Ideally, I want to design something like that.

One of the hottest news in last few days is a case that is considered to be a hate crime by many people; an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by a “Hispanic” neighbourhood watch leader, and he was found not guilty. According to an internet article, Obama: ‘Trayvon Martin could have been me’, U.S. President Barack Obama told something touching in his personal remarks. He also mentioned,

There are very few African-American men in this country who have not had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. That includes me.
There are probably very few African-American men who have not had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me – at least before I was a senator.

I have experienced something like this in three countries: Tonga, Spain, and Canada. In Tonga, I was harassed and abused daily in some ways. Literally, daily. Many of them threw stones at me. In Barcelona, Spain, if I went to a store, guards always stared at me while they even did not watch Spanish and Caucasian customers, and cashiers always used a fake bill detector to accept my 10-Euro bill while they did not use it to accept even 50-Euro bills from Spanish and Caucasians. If I went to a museum, a staff member always quietly followed me a few meters behind. In Hamilton, Canada, non-Asian cashiers in many stores, whether they are white or coloured, obviously changed their attitude toward me and toward Caucasians. If I said “how are you?”, most of them ignored. If I walked in town or sat down on a bench in a park, some people stared at me.

What is even worse than discrimination itself is that some people do not understand discrimination; they say those who are discriminated against are to be blamed because they did something bad. I know it because some people have blamed me for being discriminated against (and I hated them). Any discrimination is irrational, but they don’t know it.

What helps those who are discriminated against is to be understood by someone. When I was looking for a job after graduating from University of Calgary, some people suggested me looking for a job in Europe. I always said “I don’t like that option because Europeans are generally less generous to foreigners than Canadians are”. (It was after living in Barcelona and before living in Hamilton) All of my Caucasian classmates said, “come on, don’t worry about that”. Only an African student said “I know it. It’s a common problem between us.”

Probably President Obama knows this feeling. I admire him, and appreciate his remarks.