I've been taking part in a neuroscience research study about how the brain develops and changes over the course of adult life. As part of this I spent an hour in an MRI scanner listening to beeps and watching Alfred Hitchcock. At the end they gave me a souvenir photo, conclusively proving that I do in fact have a brain:
Kind of odd to think that all those folded up bits of grey stuff somehow make me me...
I passed a milestone last week: I've now been studying Japanese for ten years! (My first notebook from my first lesson says it was on 27th February 2002.) So that's three years of evening classes, nine months full time study in Japan, over six years of independent study, and fifty-six books... Also, I've finally got round to booking a holiday in Japan this year (itinerary not yet decided but probably mostly Kyoto area).
I should mention that I now have a blog for work-related technical stuff: translatedcode on wordpress. For LJ readers, fanf kindly set up a syndicated account you can add to your friends list if you prefer.
Well, I cast my vote for the new chancellor of the University of Cambridge this afternoon. The queue was quite long (about 45 minutes from start to finished-voting), but I'd brought a book, and it was all very well organised (including a setup where they handed you a gown on your way into the building and collected it at the exit to be run back around for the next person), so it didn't feel like an overly long wait. The university had laid on complimentary tea and cakes afterwards (on the basis that since elections are only once every fifty years or so it could afford the expense, I assume) and I had a pleasant chat with a random economist who'd come up from London for the vote.
It was a curious experience to vote for something where I genuinely had no idea what the outcome would be -- I'm used to elections being sufficiently well polled in advance that you go into the voting booth already knowing what most other people think about the question. In this case the electorate is rather large (150,000 graduates) but obviously most won't bother to come down to Cambridge for the vote, so the turnout is rather unpredictable. My guess is that most academics and staff will vote for Sainsbury, a lot of alumni will vote for Blessed, and that it will come down to how many of the latter turned up.
(FWIW, I voted Sainsbury, Blessed, Arain, Mansfield.)
This morning's keynote presentation (800K PDF) at the KVM Forum was a collection of statistics about QEMU development over the last year. Slide 6 lists the top ten contributors this year by number of patches submitted:
Author | Commits | Percent --------------------------+---------+--------- peter.maydell@linaro.org | 217 | 7% blauwirbel@gmail.com | 174 | 6% kraxel@redhat.com | 169 | 5% weil@mail.berlios.de | 162 | 5% jan.kiszka@siemens.com | 158 | 5% aurelien@aurel32.net | 156 | 5% aliguori@us.ibm.com | 121 | 4% yamahata@valinux.co.jp | 109 | 3% agraf@suse.de | 105 | 3% pbonzini@redhat.com | 97 | 3%
Somebody's started making vaguely drop-shaped handlebars with 22.2mm grip diameter. Shame nowhere in the UK seems to be stocking them yet.
[22.2mm is "mountain bike" standard, as opposed to 23.8mm for "road bike"; my bike's gear shift lever is 22.2mm but drop bars are pretty much exclusively 23.8mm. Aren't standards wonderful?]
Oh, and anime-watching people who aren't watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica definitely ought to be.
My place in Cambridge (unlike Reading) has a garden. I take a rather laissez-faire approach to gardening (read: I mow the lawn and prune away obviously dead things but not much else). One of the effects is that there are rather a lot of this flower, which seems to thrive under these conditions; can anybody identify it? ( click for a photo... )
From the Independent on Sunday:
"We anticipate that this year bike theft may be on the up as high fuel prices mean people look for ways to economise [...]" said Martyn Foulds from Halifax Home Insurance.
Bandai are bringing out a set of toys which transform between animals and kanji. I totally want a set. They're only 105 yen each, but I bet the shipping would be painful :-(
Neojaponisme has a roundup of the last decade of Japanese music with handy links to youtube. Shugo Tokumaru turns out to be quite good, although I wouldn't go so far as to call him the Messiah the way the article writer does :-)
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