the qualia journal

I used to have the notion that natural language processing was lousy and unreliable by default. And it was not simply a Luddite sentiment. W...

I have made several visits to the tsunami devastated areas in Tohoku. The damages have been tremendous and heartbreaking. Now that the sorro...

I still cannot find a useful angle to come to terms with Facebook. I am not a heavy user. I should say I am perhaps not an active user at al...

On a day when a cold rain started to fall, I met with the famed writer Clive Williams Nicol. The severe weather was fitting, as Mr. Nicol is...

There is nothing more interesting than the enigma of time. The future becomes the present, and the present turns into the past. Once the tra...

This morning, I woke up to find a world without iPhone 5. The revision to iPhone 4S was a good and sensible one, although my enthusiasm at t...

It is difficult to characterize a particular era, especially when one is living in it. The last couple of decades have been marked by many u...

The novelist Yoshinori Shimizu once wrote a masterpiece titled "Don't talk about entropy on your date". This humorous short st...

The great Fireworks Festival of Nagaoka started, I learned on my last visit, after the city was burned to ashes during the Second World War....

I recently met a few pupils who had extraordinary characters. And they can't go to school. Chatting with them, looking at their faces, t...

As can be observed from my earlier blog entry ( Red bag was the object of desire ), I was fond of coffee flavor as a child. Coffee, however,...

Ever since my infancy, I knew one thing for sure. My father was not the type of person who would ride on a motorbike. He might drive a car (...

One of the things that really surprises and impresses me is the resilience of people who have been afflicted by the tsunami disaster. In par...

Youth is about wondering, not knowing why or how, and making many mistakes. As I look back, my college days were full of wonders and mistake...

Once I was in the restroom of a railway terminal. It was what some people would call "no.2". As I was sitting there, I noticed tha...

I stayed in England for two years, and have been returning to the country ever since. I found the English true to the reputation world wide....

Once in a lifetime you notice an entirely new universe, and see that stars are shining in a great constellation. In the naive belief that th...

When I was at kindergarten, there were two kinds of bags for milk money. Each morning we would bring 50 yen for the milk provided at lunch. ...

It is rainy season in Japan now, so that every day is almost certainly wet. I can't say I enjoy this time of the year so much. I am a wa...

Other people are mirrors. In them, you see the reflection of your own self. Sometimes the reflections are distorted, but they are still help...