Aku Aku

Nihon Break Kogyo

JapanToday has an article about an unlikely hit pop song. The song is the official song for a demolition company, composed and performed by one of the workers.

Unlike the stiff, propagandalike nature of regular Japanese corporate anthems, the up-tempo rock tune, written and performed by a Nihon Break Kogyo demolition worker, sounds like the themes from old Japanese animated films featuring superheroes.

But the humorous lyrics reflect the pure corporate anthem spirit of promoting the company -- "We will destroy houses! We will destroy bridges! We will destroy buildings! To the east, to the west -- Run, Run, Nihon Break Kogyo!"

I guess in Japan it is common for corportaions to have their own theme song. After it was picked up and played on a TV show, the company began getting so many calls that they started to sell recordings of it.

I found the lyrics (english translation) here:

Break alright Break alright Now we're ready for your town
Dismantle away Dismantle away The just one rule we'll obey
Conclusion of the duration is comin'up, Concrete is losin' its unity
There are the delayers of buildin' our peaceful days Break'em out!
NIHON Break KOGYO Smashin' steel ball Da Da Da
NIHON Break KOGYO Chemical anchor bolt driven to beat&wave the hardest rock!!
Any houses! Any bridges! And any towers can't stop us in any way!
Going ahead! Going ahead! NIHON Break KOGYO

Break alright Break alright Terrible defective housings
Wooden frames, mortared walls and pencil-formed over tall buildings
Have you ever seen mighty skills to treat pile heads, rough clenched fists to support you
By the justice, like a hammer, Yumbo swung to raise!! Break'em out!
NIHON Break KOGYO Shinin' diamonded cutter Da Da Da
NIHON Break KOGYO Compressor roaring loud between the earth & the sky!!
Any houses! Any bridges! And any towers can't stop us in any way!
Going ahead! Going ahead! NIHON Break KOGYO

The japanese lyrics are here (I think, I can't read kanji).

Someone has created flash movie arrangments of the song in japanese and in english. You can listen/watch them here: [japanese|english]

I found the flash movies from a forum posting by someone named kawanago:

Well, I introduce a comedy song!
"Nihon Break Kogyo Shaka"(=The corporation song of Japan Break Industry) is the unique song. NBK-Shaka has designated the justice and courage of the employees who exhaust all power to dismantling the obsolete building as theme. The theme, justice and courage has been similar to the theme of many Japanese animation songs. The atmosphere of NBK-Shaka resembles the theme song of a passionate robot hiro animation.
Japanese edition parody (When it passes for a while, "break" is indicated. Please click that.)
English edition parody (When it passes for a while, "Start Da Da Da" is indicated. Please click that.)

I've been trying to find an mp3 sample on Kazaa, but no luck yet. Evil Timmy found a WMA file on the company site and converted to MP3.

You can buy the album from Amazon Japan.

Thanks Jesse!

sonic wire sculptor

Amit Pitaru of MIT has coded a beautiful java application called the Sonic Wire Sculptor. It allows you to make marks in a rotating canvas space and the positioning of the marks is translated into music. He provides a compendious quicktime movie explaining how the tool works and a simplified applet version which you can play with in your browser.

You'll need the Java Plugin installed on your browser, and will need to install a second java audio plugin which Amit links to. It's worth the time though, Sonic Wire Sculptor is much fun to play with!

feeling lucky?

A scientist did a study on the topic of luck, experimenting on people who claimed to be abnormally lucky or unlucky. He found some correlations to behavioural patterns which distilled down to this guide for getting lucky:

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:

* Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right

* Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine

* Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well

* Visualise yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy

I've got the first two down pat, I guess I should try the latter pair and then go buy a lottery ticket.

handwritten moblogging

I gave Mie a present today, The Nokia Digital Pen which is a bluetooth enabled pen that will allow her to handwrite her blog entries rather than typing them out on her phone's keypad (well as soon as I make the necessary changes to the blog posting code I have running for her website). Here's an example:

I don't know what that "dino" stuff is about, I guess she thinks I'm old. You can see Mie's blogpost which shows how she wrote out the message here.

There's some problems with this. It works great for people who go to Mie's blog and can see the images, but if you're subscribed to her XML feed then an image of handwritten text isn't going to do you a lot of good. And of course her prose won't be picked up by google. I've told her to just consider this a convenience to avoid typing the initial short messages on the phone keypad, and she should still plan on adding a lengthier commentary when she gets to a workstation with a keyboard.

I'm also going to look into handwriting recognition software that could maybe analyze the gifs generated by the pen and do at least a rough translation at posting time. I realize that an acceptable quality could be difficult to find though. But that's life at the cutting edge of moblogging, ha.

Maybe another alternative is to allow people to translate the text for her, as they do with the audio blogging at livejournal where other livejournalists can make a translation of a new phoned-in audio post. Tangentially, if you want to hear an interesting audio blog post, try this one where the blogger got mugged while making the posting, and the muggers took the cellphone and it continued recording...

Um, but back to Mie, who hopefully will never get mugged while scribbling a blog posting. Anyone know any good handwriting recognitcion software that will run automated on a linux server?

Update 21/Dec: I hacked up a system to allow people to transcribe her posts. Works like this: when the blogpost.pl script receives the email with the Jot*.gif note attachment, it inserts some special tags into the HTML and the text "No transcription yet, would you like to transcribe?" which links do a new cgi I wrote and stuck in the moveable type cgi directory. This cgi displays any handwritten note gifs in the entry and provides a form where anyone can enter a transcription and their name. When they submit their transcription it is inserted into the blog entry text. There is also place to type in an optional password on the form, if it is entered correctly then the transcription is locked (can't be updated anymore). Mie can give this password out to people she trusts. I strip all HTML out of the user-input fields just to guard against hi-jinx, and limit the size of the input to something reasonable. Seems like a decent system for now, but we'll see how it goes.

Ah yeah. Privately Funded SpaceShipOne

Ah yeah. Privately Funded SpaceShipOne Breaks Sound Barrier.

At motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph).

Binnie continued the maneuver to a vertical climb, achieving zero speed at an altitude of 68,000 feet. He then configured the ship in its high-drag "feathered" shape to simulate the condition it will experience when it enters the atmosphere after a sub-orbital space flight.

At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes.

The X-Prize has to be one of the most positive challenges in recent scientific history. At Burning Man this year, I saw White Knight flying over black rock city. It really got my geek heart thumnpin' (White Knight is the carrier plane that takes SpaceShipOne to altitude before the rocket ignites).

From Japan SAQ (or Seldom

From Japan SAQ (or Seldom Asked Questions):

Q. What does the name of the famous hamburger chain, 'MOS Burger' mean? A. The 'MOS' in 'MOS burger stands for "Mountain, Ocean, Sun'. According to the official MOS Burger web site, the mountain, ocean, and sun in the name symbolise the company's "infinite love" of both humankind and nature. MOS Burger's love of people and nature is "Grand and noble like a mountain", "Possessed of a spirit as deep and wide as the ocean", and filled with a "passion that, like the heat of the sun, never burns out."And you thought you were just getting a hamburger.

Found at CUP OF CHICA.

skeptic

There's a PBS show I like to Tivo called "Closer to Truth: Science, Meaning and The Future." The format is a hosted round table where the moderator gathers (often) diametrically opposed experts on a particular topic and records the ensuing conversation/argument. My favorite episode is one which poses the question "Can Religion Withstand Technology?" The guests were a christian expert on the sociology of religion, a muslim technologist and a skeptic named Michael Shermer. Being a skeptic myself, I thoroughly enjoyed Mr Shermer's rational arguments. It turns out that Shermer is not only a skeptic, he's sort of The Skeptic, being the leader of the Skeptics Society (motto: Devoted to the Promotion of Science & Critical Thinking and the Investigation of Extraordinary Claims and Revolutionary Ideas).

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Skeptic magazine (published by Shermer) at Cody's Books in Berkeley with great teasers on the cover such as "The Future of Intelligence: Are we geting smarter or dumber? Why smart people believe dumb things" and "Science v. The Media: Why can't we just be friends?"

Also inside I found a great essay in the reader's forum discussing the difficult journey most of us have to take in order to move from customary acceptance of whatever media and culture tells us to the critical thinking of the skeptic:

To expect a single conversation or event to cause this profound transformation is unrealistic. The impact it has on a person's life can be devastating, and may require a grieving period. It is much easier to stop at "denial", when that is an option. (I certainly would have liked to stop at "denial" when I heard that my mother had died in an accident.)

Voluntarily slogging through a reconstruction of one's psychological, and philosophical foundation, I think you will agree, lacks appeal to all but the most personally motivated.

People gravitate toward the "skeptical movement" when they are strong enough or open-minded enough to accept the responsibility, effort, and personal sacrifice (socially, and spiritually) that it requires.

You can read the whole thing here (it's the second section): E-Skeptic.

creative commons one year anniversary

Last night Mie and I went to the Creative Commons One Year Anniversary celebration down at 111 Minna. It was a well organized fete full of the passionate and intellectual "Cult of Lessig" types that one usually finds at CC parties (and the catering was top notch!). Unfortunately, we were both completely drained of mental and physical energy from Saturday night's bacchinalian Santarchy festivities, so we didn't stay for long as were were unable to hold up our end of an intelligent conversation. I think I'll quit drinking alcohol for awhile.

In a brief doomed attempt at one such conversation, Justin introduced us to his illustrated mobile poetry that he's been creating on his Treo 600. Which apparently he hasn't released under a CC license, hmm.

It was a good night for Creative Commons though; lots of positive things happening. You can get a good summary by watching the latest flash animation (warning: 7MB download).