Weibel Lines

Nagasaki

On Tuesday I took an early morning train to Nagasaki from Fukuoka -- a two hour trip on the Komome Limited Express -- with only the vaguest plan, other than to explore the roots of western trade with Japan. The Portuguese got things rolling in the late 1500s but some 60 years later trade had become a  Dutch monopoly when the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country to foreigners, save for a tightly controlled portal on an artificial Island about 125 by 80 meters.  Between these dates it would appear the Jesuits insinuated themselves sufficiently well in Nagasaki to effect the conversion of a number of important Daimyos, and for a time, Nagasaki came under their (the Jesuit's) administration.  Apparently, they left with the Portuguese as the Japanese became ever more leery of foreign influence.  Christianity remains, however.  One of the churches in Nagasaki is a designated National Treasure, and another, once the largest in East Asia, was destroyed in the atomic blast of 1945.

The small crescent-shaped Island of Dejima (pronounced deh she muh, no accent) became a high-rent prison for the un-trusted but irresistible Dutch traders. The "sea gate" at one end had two portals -- one for imports, the other for exports, and the ever-guarded "land gate" at the center of the concave curve, restricted the ingress of Japanese and egress of the Dutch.  Talk about Island fever....

The Thousand Autumns of Jakob DeGroet is a recent and engaging historical fiction about life in Dejima, and provided the impetus for my visit.  I am confused by my memory of the details of the book, and their inconsistency with the history of the enclave as I now know it (a most superficial knowledge, to be sure).  In any case, it was a good enough read to motivate me to visit Nagasaki.

The tourist information desk at the train station provided an English language map, and happily the majority of the points of interest are strung along a trolley line that runs along the backbone of the city.  It wasn't Dejima that drew my first attentions when I arrived, though.  I found myself drawn to the Atom Bomb Museum, and of course, to stand at the point that some 26,000 days ago was the embodiment of hell on earth.

I am happy to leave to others the parsing of morality in the events that led to the bombing and the results.  The calculus of irony prevails.  Nagasaki was a secondary target, clouds and haze having obscured (and saved) Kokura, the first choice.  Kyoto was taken off the short list due to religious reasons (talk about irony!). Existing bomb shelters in Nagasaki would have averted many of the casualties, but people had become blase about air raids.  The blast destroyed the largest church in East Asia. Survivors were sometimes shunned and ridiculed by their own citizenry, and many took their own lives for it.  The entries go on and on and on, but the litany (for me) gives rise more to numbness than grief.  The exhibits don't... cannot... bring home the enormity of the event, nor does this ungraspable cataclysm give purchase to the larger context that spawned it.  For me, the crux of the experience was seeing the exuberance of school kids at the museum on a field trip.  When will we ever learn?  The answer is pretty evident, museums notwithstanding.

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A broken bell from the Urakami Cathedral, destroyed in the blast.

Ring them bells / for all of us who are left (Dylan)

Notes from Kyushu

Shigeo, Schubert Foo, and I came to the southern most of the main islands of Japan to visit the Kyushu University Library, talk to students and faculty, and confer, in particular, with Professor Emi Ishita about a new graduate program they are starting (in operation as of the first of this month... really new!).   We had very interesting discussions about the growing pains of new ventures of this sort (Schubert has experience in starting two such programs, and Shigeo is also an old hand at curriculum development and the administrative gymnastics that go with reorganizations).  I mostly was encouraging in a brash manner free of insight about either local or generic elements of such efforts. 

In the conduct of this mission, the four of us had occasion to share three meals - two dinners and a lunch.  Anyone who has eaten in Japan understands that the feast for the eyes is as important as that for the palate, and these meals were exemplary.  But goodness, the taste sensations were stunning.  Fukuoka, a prefectural capital and historically a major trading center (due in large part to its proximity to the mainland of Korea and China) has a cuisine to match the sophistication and hybrid vigor characteristic of cultural ecotones. 

My favorite was a dense wafer of compacted pork (including the skin) which was (I think) fried.  An explosion of concentrated essence of pork in a tiny, laminar format served on a bed of... well... something vegetative - Daikon radish, perhaps?  I can't recall, my culinary consciousness having been entirely suborned at this point.  An appetizer (for each meal, actually) of spicey roe was also new to me.  Salty, as one would expect, but also spicey hot, with a texture of molten velvet.  In one case, with a wrapping, and torched briefly, in the other, without having been flamed.  Amazing stuff. Exceptional representations from the world of sushi played supporting roles, and a central dish of nabe - a pot dish with a variety of constituents that, when done, offers its broth in final service to a concluding portion of rice or noodles.  We chose rice.

The second night we did a variation on this theme that included chicken sashimi.  Yes... and best you don't try this with your neighborhood supermarket chicken... even, I gather, if your neighborhood is in Fukuoka.  It takes a fresh chicken indeed to support this presentation, and the expertise to make sure it stays that way.  I imagined hearing clucking.  The nabe this night was also chicken-based, including meaty knuckles (for which I received finger-handling dispensation), and later, a diced paste of chicken formed into marble-sized balls tableside, slipped into the nabe, and extracted at the leisure of the celebrants.  Along with many other ingredients, of course -- fresh cabbage, mushrooms, those long translucent rice noodles, chopped green onions, all beautiful to look at wonderful to eat. A variety of  dipping sauces and spices accented the food.

My two subsequent days on the Island of Kyushu were less striking from a culinary point of view, but every bit as rich in other ways (post in progress).  I must say, I find it difficult to summon the courage to explore cuisine of this caliber without a guide, which is silly.  Many restaurants have English menus (though, am I wrong to be distrustful of such?).  I have a book on Japanese food, given to me by Ray Atarashi, which offers a helpful glossary, and a favorite phrase from the Lonely Planet guides, please feed me in Japanese. This may be the ticket. But eating even great food alone is far less joyful, and I am profoundly grateful to have had  great company for these sumptuous introductions to a region the locals insist is the birthplace of Japan. 

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 Temple carvings of this nature are commonplace here... work that any craftsman of wood would be proud to think of as masterwork.  This particular instance is from a shrine in the Tsukuba area.

 

 

 

Preparations

Preparations for a wedding. The season of sakura is an auspicious time to be married.

Jan Ask, Schubert Foo and his wife, and I were taken by Mitsuharu Nagemori to a lovely park full of Sakura at the point of poignant hubuki -- the 'snowstorm' of the loss of these lovely petals of cherry blossoms.  There we enjoyed a lunch prepared by Mitsuharu's wife and Schubert (who in addition to being a photographer and professor, is quite a cook). It was a beautiful, warm day that defines the notion of 'basking'.  On our way back to the University, we passed this scene, and Mitsuharu stopped and backed up, that we might... well... intrude with digital capture.  Uncertain as to whether such gawking might be rude, our moment of doubt was resolved on the face of the bride. Lord, I am not worthy.

Aftershocks, Conceptual Models, and the Future of Libraries

The bigger the quake, the more the aftershocks.  Supposedly, a magnitude 9 quake will spawn (roughly) an 8, ten 7s, one hundred 6s, and so forth. If you want to calibrate your seismic senses, you couldn’t do better than to be in central Japan at this moment in time.  I won a beer on a bet recently, about the intensity of one of the aftershocks, so I'm feeling a little smug.

In the process I’ve studied up on seismic rating systems (if you can call perusing Wikipedia ‘studying up’). Did you know the Richter scale is obsolete?  I didn't.  Its successor, the magnitude moment scale, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but is supposedly a better metric for overall magnitude.  Then there is the Japanese Meteorological Agency's seismic magnitude scale - shindo. 

Shindo is geographically contextual (the same quake feels different 10 miles and 100 miles from the epicenter), but more importantly, its written from a human perspective.  Check out the rating from the perspective of people for a 5(-): Most people try to escape from a danger. Some people find it difficult to move.  Having jumped out of my first floor window recently, this is a scale I can relate to.  Shindo descibes the characteristics of various levels of tremor on the observable surroundings of humans, rather than simply as a metric of energy released. A human understands being awakened by temblors and books flying off the shelf better than a logarithmic scale where an increase of 1 point means a factor of 30 more energy released, 2 points a factor of 1000.  So what does this have to do with conceptual models and bibliography, you ask?

I’ve recently (re-)read Allison Carlisle’s Understanding FRBR as a Conceptual Model.  It is quite a good introduction to every librarian’s favorite abstraction.   It affords a good context to understand the trajectory of cataloging over the past century, and talks about the virtues of models in general (and how to evaluate them).  The salient point (at least with respect to the shaky connection between seismology and bibliography) is that accuracy of the model is not necessarily the best predictor of usefulness.  An accurate model may be defeated by its complexity as compared to a less accurate, simpler approximation, that is more easily applied to achieve the task at hand. 

The FRBR model has probably had a greater impact on thinking about bibliography than any single abstraction... maybe ever.  Almost 20 years after deliberations began, it still organizes our discussions, and it's latest sphere of influence is the domain of linked data and bibliography.  The W3C Library Linked Data incubator group occasionally suffers mailstorms about small issues that have large implications for what bibliography looks like and how it will change as the web rewrites our perspectives.  FRBR is often part of these discussions.

The latest bit torrent is about name authority data, and how it should be represented in the irregular matrix of RDF, SKOS, and OWL, the enabling technologies for semantics on the web.  I won’t characterize the discussion (mostly because I can’t do it in a paragraph or two), but 42 messages, most substantive, in little more than a day, is a serious intellectual bun fight.  Always nibbling at the edges of such discussions is the perenial question of whether we are trying to model bibliography or reality (and where the line is). The former is arguably (if barely) tractable, the latter is the purview of a 7,000 year discourse in the realm of philosophy.

The aggregate results of such discussions will determine in part how librarianship survives on the web... whether librarians can bring data and structures into focus in ways that solve the information seeking problems of users on the web.  Success will depend in no small way on modeling information at the right level of abstraction.... matched to solving the problems, rather than modeling reality.  I don't know exactly what that level should be, but I do I think I feel a tremor in there somewhere.

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The cherry blossoms (sakura) were perfect on Wednesday, and the campus of the National Agriculture Research Center in Tsukuba is a wonderful place to be overwhelmed by clouds of these delicate pink blossoms.  Here, with a field of rapeseed in full blossom.  Many thanks to Shigeo and Mitsuharu who provided tours to their grateful visitors on this peak day for viewing.

Cheap Entertainment

I'm not watching much television in Japan.  Its that language thing.  I'm illiterate.  I know nothing.  Pictures, please.  Pointing. (Nihongo ga wakarimasen).

The link to the Unicode Movie came through my Twitter feed twice before I looked at it.  The keyword was 'hypnotic'.   Pretty much every glyph used in the digital universe passes before your eyes, one glyph per frame... 33,000 or so. 

So, some chocolate, cheap red wine, some Van Morrison and a dark room to enhance the contrast. For free you get a half hour or so of contemplative hypnosis.  Do this on a wireless connection so that every now and then the buffering occasions a still-screen with a single unicode glyph that persists for a few seconds, full of irony, or karma, or some other imagined semantic touchstone.  My favorite (so far) is 4 or 5 seconds of the Kanji character for 'strength'.   The art of techmnology.

Try it, you'll like it.

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Stone lanterns and the roof profile of the Tsukubasan Shrine.  From my bicycle trip to Tskuba san.  Ibaraki's version of Mr. Mountain.  Lord, I am not worthy.

 

 

Quake Map

Last evening's aftershock map.  Tsukuba is about 90 km SSW from the epicenter. Since that time (13 hours), there have been 47 aftershocks of magnitude 3 or greater.  Follow all the action at http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/quake_singendo_index.html

Words are inadequate to describe the ground shaking... not rumbling or vibrating, but shaking, trees swaying like a field of wheat.  And the buildings do not fall.  The electricity does not flicker.  The water pipes are not sundered.  Earth day, mirth day... Mother Nature is a tough gal.

Aftershock and Awe

Three hours ago a substantial 'aftershock' (magnitude 7.1) hit Fukushima prefecture, and continues to reverberate here in Ibaraki prefecture.  I have to admit, it was scary enough that I left the building.  Through my first floor window.  I feel sort of silly about it now, but standing outside, and feeling the ground shaking as it did, instills a reverence and awe.

It is still shaky, but at two full points below the big one, the energy released (if I understand the Wikipedia article on seismic measurement accurately), is about one one-thousandth as much.  I guess I can sleep with that.

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I biked to Mt Tsukuba yesterday.  The cablecar station (Miyawaki) is accessed through a really wonderful shrine.  Pictures on my Flickr site.

Happy Anniversary

I am informed by my friend Michael Braly in Seattle that today (yesterday) is the 40th anniversary of Starbucks.  I will honor this event with my homage to satisfying my urge for a morning cafe latte here in Japan.  My regular hangout between 7 and 8 in the morning is the busiest corner in Tsukuba, just up 64 steps from the underground Starbucks in Tsukuba Station.  As far as I have been able to determine, this is the only coffee shop open in Tsukuba before 8 AM.  Further, there is a wrought iron table and chairs on this corner, more suitable for a garden in Savannah, Georgia, than Tsukuba Science CIty.  I assert without fear of challenge that I am the only person actually to have used them.   Prove me wrong.

So, I sit here tapping away most mornings, connected to the world with the WiMax hotspot graciously provided by my hosts in Tsukuba, enjoying the sun and the only latte worth drinking at this place at this time. 

I have spent most mornings between 6 and 7 working on the goal of fixing my own in my room (without, of course, violating the prohibition on cooking appliances).  I'm on about my eighth iteration, and it is not bad.  Along the way, I've broken glass, burned my fingertips, sullied the hot pot with milky coffee, and produced drinks closer in taste to dishwater than coffee.

The directions:

Appliances and ingrediants:

• A standard hot water pot.  For those of you unfamiliar, this applicance is nearly as ubiquitous as vending machines, has a volume of a half gallon or so, and a top that opens, allowing unobstructed access to the lumen.  4 buttons - on/off, temperature, engage mechanism to dispense, and dispense.
• A six or eight ounce aluminum juice can with screw on cap (available pretty much within one hundred meters of any location in Japan (see #ubiquity-of-vending-machines).
• An AeroLatte (a tiny battery-powered whisk to froth the milk).
• Milk.
• A packet of Via, Starbucks' instant coffee (pricey at a buck a pop, but latte's are $4.75 and up, so...).  I know this is cheating, but all attempts to secure an electrically powered esperesso maker (under, oh, about a thousand dollars) have gone for nought.
• A packet of sugar if you're so inclined.  I am.

Methodology:

Put the milk in the aluminum can.  Assure there is not too much water in the hot pot, else it will float the can, dumping the milk into the water.

The water is just below boiling, so it takes about 2.5 minutes to heat the milk.  Set up the Via and sugar, and when the milk is about ready, flood with a small aliquot of water to form an espresso-like liquid.  Remove the can from the hot pot, gingerly with fingers, or more cautiously, by screwing on the still-cool-lid, and lifting out.  Froth the milk with the Aero-Latte.  Combine with the coffee.  Ersatz Latte!

For the record, in my limited experience here, the best latte I've had is from Tully's, a block away from Starbucks, but they are not open before 8 or on the weekend (#useless-virtue)

Happy anniversary, Starbucks!

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The Sakura have arrived.  Cherry Blossom season in Tsukuba started yesterday afernoon, and if the terrific winds now howling about the city subside, we have joined the heavens for a time.

A Modest Proposal

There is growing awareness of the need for management of namespaces for public vocabularies and for identification of authority data and other bibliographic entities.  For every FRBR entity, an identifier. There are three essential characteristics of such identifiers:

1. Global uniqueness: a natural benefit of the Internet as a global file system.
2. Persistence: a function of the commitment of the organizations.
3. Canonical character: assets that have a single preferred identifier will aggregate with greater visibility, strengthening citability and the benefits of social bibliography.

The first attribute comes for free with the use of Internet protocols.  The second has to do with the character of organizations, and no collection of organizations is more likely to succeed at this than the global library community (or has a stronger stake in that success).  The third characteristic is the missing piece.  Libraries have paid insufficient attention to identifier strategies, and the near-term business case for collective action is weak, even as the long-term imperative is strong.  Think of it as the tragedy of the dot commons.

National libraries lack a global mandate.  No software provider has sufficient reach. Open Library has the right philosophical orientation, but lacks standing and the promise of professionally-mediated persistence. Google can achieve the goal, but a shareholder business-model is a mismatch with the long-term social commitment required.  IFLA is a good forum for consensus, but lacks appropriate operational capacity.  OCLC has the critical seed data, but has insufficient business motivations to commit the resources, and is not considered entirely neutral by some stakeholders.

Many respected library technologists simply accept that Identifier Babel is a fact of a complicated environment, and the best that can be hoped for is identity mapping.  To accept this position is to accept a declining visibility on the Web (already low) for the intellectual assets managed by libraries, and over the long run, a commensurate decline in importance of libraries in a born-digital world.

ICANN is on the threshold of a new process for the approval of generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), open to applications from any established public or private organization. The application fee of $185,000 USD can be expected to reduce inclinations towards gTLD squatting, but still there will be a lot of interest in this new approach to Web identifiers. 

The international library community should take advantage of this opportunity to establish a business-neutral, canonical naming authority that will assure that digital library users of the future will benefit from the fixity of resources on a sound and persistent global scaffolding of knowledge.

This goal can best be met through an alliance of stakeholders who share identifier policies, infrastructure, and transparent governance, guided by a common responsibility to the needs of users, now and into the future.

Dot ID anyone? I’ll write the proposal... anyone care to stake the fee?
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Stone totems, the semantics of which are unknown to me. On the grounds of a temple in Kyoto (the Arashiyama ward).

Rocking to the gentle beat....

 

The Foreign Scholar's Residence at the University of Tsukuba is a building about the size of a modest motel in America... and way more solidly built.  There have been 5 aftershocks in Ibaraki prefecture today of magnitude 4.0 and above.  One of them was unlike the rolling temblors I have become accustomed to.  It began as a loud report sounding almost like a distant explosion, followed by a shuddering reminiscent of a helicopter flying near, and then quickly stopped.  Throughout a good part of the day, a more typical mild rocking and rolling is discernible from time to time, and the phantom aftershock syndrome I twittered yesterday occasionally raises the question... is that another one?

The amazing thing is all of this is taken in stride.  It isn't of the slightest concern to anyone I have talked to, beyond gentle queries as to whether a visitor might be nervous?  Not me.  Background radiation continues to drop, the weather is fine, the temperatures are warming, and the cherry blossoms are sneaking up on us.  Life is good.

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Juro, god of longevity

Nin'ami Dohachi

Edo Period, 19th Century

Tokyo National Museum