Blessed by the Potato

I shocked the BEMs community at the conference this year when I grabbed the microphone after the student awards ceremony so that we could bestow a gift on Shin, who was so helpful in guiding us around, getting us together, and keeping us happy. They finally tracked me down, and asked for a “one paragraph” description of the student experience at BEMs this year, and what lead to that unexpected gift ceremony for the newsletter. Here’s what I sent them:

We had received a few emails from the organizers in advance of the conference that an attempt would be made this year to have some sort of student function during or before the conference. I know two requests came through and nobody from my lab volunteered. Luckily, Shin, Alice, and Marylene stepped up and organized the small, low-key student meet after the main opening wine and cheese.

Each student took a minute to introduce themselves to the group, and then we played a few hands of poker for poster pushpins as we got acquainted. All too soon, a few people had to leave, and we thought we had to leave the room we were in, so the rest of us headed off to find a pub. With the help of some locals, Shin found us the “Apres” bar, close to the Hotel Excel Tokyu.

After getting to know each other outside the bounds of the conference, the students made more of an effort to get together during the evenings and downtime that we had. We all went on a walking tour of Kanazawa, mostly lead by Shin (who could read the tourist placards, written in Japanese), and Julia (who had actually read her guide book on the city).

When the social event ended early and was found to be lacking in the dancefloor department, again the students (and the registration desk girls) headed off to the “Apres” to stretch the evening out.

Of course, _the_ thing to do while in Japan is karaoke. Shin went above and beyond and spent a good portion of his time (possibly over an hour, depending on who’s telling the story) calling a bunch of different karaoke places to find one that would be good for us (private booths, multilingual song selection, good price, and walking distance). At the end of the conference, to thank him for all his help in guiding us around the city (which, it should be noted, is not even his city: he’s from Kyoto), we each chipped in 100 Yen to buy him a shirt. While I jumped up to the mic after the student awards were presented to make Shin’s give “official”, it was Dave (and Alice) who thought of giving him a gift, organized the money collection, and went out to shop for it.

All in all, it was one of the more enjoyable conferences largely because of all the fun student interaction. Typically at these events people stick close to their research groups or countrymen. Of course, there is mingling and discussions take place with all kinds of people, but those invisible connections and groupings can always be seen, especially when it comes around to dinner time. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this kind of interaction with students from all over the world, regardless of research topic or supervisor.

“Sorry boss,” one might say “but we can have dinner together any time back home.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to include all the students in the largely unplanned events. But that leaves us with room to grow for San Diego!

[Note that it ended up being slightly longer than one paragraph]

It’s been a hectic time at work lately. We’re scheduling an upgrade to our MRI system sometime in the winter, and to get ready for that the hospital is going to cancel all research time to get caught up on the clinical backlog (since the upgrade is going to mean weeks to months of downtime). That, of course, is extremely painful to someone who needs research time on the magnet for their PhD. To add to the pain of it, we only found out about this plan two weeks ago, so we begged and pleaded to get at least some of the time we need to actually finish a study or two… and we did, sort of. A solid block of 31 consecutive hours on the long weekend. Whee! Sure, we could technically do about 25 subjects in that time, but realistically? Even if I did hypercaffeinate myself, it’s pretty difficult to convince someone to come in for a scan (a sober scan) in the middle of the night on the long weekend… I think we’ve got 4 or 5 people scheduled, and that was damned near miraculous (and involved a lot of begging, pleading, and favours called in). Heck, I can’t even convince my immediate family to come down (”well, maybe, if you really want to graduate this decade… and if the weather’s bad at the cottage.”).

By chance or design, Wayfare’s parents came to visit last weekend (when I had another, fairly inconvenient, smaller block of time on the scanner) and I scanned her dad. He was thrilled to get a CD with pictures of his brain on it to show the people at work, something he’ll treasure long after his hand has stopped aching. Of course, we tried to go out for lunch beforehand, but had a heck of a time with the logistics of that. Wayfare’s had her eye on the new french restaurant just a block from our place (”Red meat, red wine, etc.” is their motto). We went by at 3 pm, and they were closed until dinner time. Moving on down the street, we tried the Village Cafe, which was closed for a catering event. Some clowns walked by on the sidewalk, in full clown makeup. “It’s like we’ve passed through a vortex into a universe where restaurants are closed on saturdays and clowns walk the streets.” I suggested we try Bertoldi’s or Symposium next, but Wayfare hasn’t been impressed with Bertoldi’s the last few times we went, so we settled on TJ Baxter’s, which was close. They met us at the door and sat us down, but other than that they might as well have been closed too. The patio was mostly full, but we were the only ones sitting inside, so it wasn’t all that busy, yet we had to wait about a half hour for our food to arrive. “Perhaps we should run across the street for a quick lunch to hold us over until they get dinner ready here…”

So just before leaving for Japan, we noticed a vague burning plastic smell in the house when the A/C was on. Not finding any actual fire, we ignored it and got into the business of winning 3rd place poster. Upon returning, I noticed that the house smelled pretty foul, kind of like skunk. Of course, the skunks were working their way through the neighbourhood gardens, so I could really only hope that it would go away as the skunks moved on. Wayfare investigated a bit further, and found a dead skunk in the garden.

Eww.

Not a huge deal, I used to have to deal with that sort of thing for a living. We made plans to bag it and dispose of it in the morning (it being close to night when Wayfare found it), and thoroughly searched the internet for any sign of a city department that would handle it for us.

It being morning now, I went out to see the skunk with my own eyes, and well, eww. It looks like it’s been dead since before I left for Japan (which might just explain the earlier burning plastic smell), and I seriously fear for the structural integrity if I try to move it for disposal. So now we’re discussing our in situ containment options. I have considered a concrete sarcophagus, but wonder if that might draw too much attention to the situation. Since we don’t really want to disturb it to bury it deeper (if we thought we could move it without unleashing hell, we would go back to the garbage bag idea), that leaves us pretty much with the option of covering it with topsoil. The main complication here is that the damned thing decided to die right outside one of the air intakes for the basement — air that then goes into the A/C and thence into my personal space. So if we’re going to let it rot in peace, we’ve got to be damned sure that the smell stays down through these hot summer months. Currently, my plan is to cover it with drano, then bury it with a nice big bag of potting soil. Wayfare, however, thinks that plan is a little too crazy, partly because it would lead to a dead spot in the garden, and partly because I got the idea from reading about covering plague bodies with lye. I’m cool with a little herbicide, but I am concerned about the effectiveness of this plan. Particularly with regards to the ability of the sodium hydroxide to neutralize the specific skunk stink (it may work for other animals, but skunks have their own particular problems). Some hydrogen peroxide may be needed as well (as that forms the bathing solution to remove the smell from skin/fur).

Anyone with any knowledge or experience of this sort of thing care to chime in?

Also joining our garden woes is that whatever moved in under the front porch has been pooping right outside its entrance hole. I thought animals would be smarter than that… though perhaps its our dead skunk and we won’t have that issue anymore.

As was reported previously, my house has been a victim of creative contracting work in the past. I’m faced with that issue again today as I try to replace a halogen potlight in the kitchen. The bulb itself is pretty standard — the only type of halogen the grocery store carried. Changing it out and getting light was no problem. However, now I find that I’m stuck with the bulb hanging by the wires out of the fixture, completely unable to get the faceplate assembly back in the ceiling. The assembly looks like it should be supported by three hooks, arranged equilaterally around the circumference. The part of the fixture in the ceiling, on the other hand, has two slots in it. I tried just getting one hook in one slot, but not only does the light hang down that way, it hangs down crooked. So I honestly have no idea how this light was up there to begin with. I’m tempted to try to take out the matching light, to see how it’s held up, but I’m so dearly afraid that it will simply be held up by pixie dust and wishful thinking, and that it will never go back in again, and I’ll be stuck having to replace two potlights (or waiting months for my landlord to do it).

So the first thing I did when I got back was to get a pizza. I missed pizza so much over there… 10 days isn’t much to go without pizza, and I’ve done that many, many times in the past completely without noticing, but going without the possibility of pizza starts to erode the psyche. It makes their whole society seem like its a hollow sham, waiting to fly apart at the seams into unbridled anarchy. After all, where can a society expect its members to function normally when they must live each day without the security blanket that is knowing good pizza lies just a phone call away? Of course, they probably think the same thing about our society and the lack of good train/bus service.

They might be right.

The flight home was ok: completely packed this time, so we didn’t have the luxury of the empty seat. We were getting awfully sick of fish and rice, though. I mean, I don’t even eat the stuff yet I was sick of seeing and hearing about it. The dinner on the plane was fish and rice (we were aware of the fact that chicken and pasta was also an option, but it looks like everyone at the front of the plane opted for that so they were out by the time they got to us), and it reeked. Breakfast on the plane was… fish and rice (or a nasty-looking omlette and a sausage that even Dave wouldn’t eat). Our lunch/snack was an assortment of tiny sandwiches, and a giant seaweed-wrapped concoction of fish and rice.

Today’s featured Facebook gift is a paper crane. LOL, I can’t escape!

I slept 14 hours last night. It was pretty good — it would have been better if the fan at my parents house didn’t have an auto temperature detector/shutoff that made it cycle on and off all night. Stupid electronics trying to be smarter than me…

At least three times now I’ve meant to go out for ice cream (once leading an expedition for it), and three times we’ve found all the places we could find closed up. Today I finally went to the place that had the fancy crepes and ice cream, and got myself a tiny bowl. It was much more expensive than I thought: 300 Yen (~$3) for a tiny, tiny little scoop. It was really good orange ice cream though (not quite sure if it was sherbert, gelato, or something else… I think its closest to a traditional sherbert), so I think I might go back this afternoon before they close on me again, or maybe tomorrow morning, and spring for the 1100 Yen crepe + 2 scoops + toppings. Plus I probably should try the green tea flavour (thankfully this particular store doesn’t trade in whale flavour).

Yesterday, Dave completely lost his mind. Too many nights in a row drinking and not sleeping, and all of a sudden he was giggling like a madman at anything. As he was trying out the TMS stimulator, he was giggling uncontrollably. At dinner, he nearly lost it laughing over the picture of the sausage in the menu. This, I assure you, was not a normal giggling fit, but clearly one that bordered on madness. Actually, it lay on the madness side of the border, so I should say it bordered on sanity. Despite desperately needing to sleep, when he got back to the hotel he stayed up until dawn (which, to be fair, is at 4 am here — I don’t think they’re in the right timezone for their longitude) uploading photos to facebook.

Facebook, meanwhile, has started to scare me. They have all these stories, pictures, information on links and relationships between people, and chintzy gifts. The only purpose I can see for all this is that they aim to slowly replace us with robots, or perhaps pod-grown versions of ourselves, and this information is necessary for the first wave to fit in without drawing undue alarm.

For dinner tonight we found an out-of-the way Italian restaurant that was fantastic. It only had two tables and seating at the bar for about 6, but the food was really quite good, even by Canadian standards of Italian food. I had a plain penne with arrabiata, and Gen had linguini with salmon and I think a pesto sauce. The proprieter was a very friendly old woman who spoke 4 languages (including passable English). Like many places, we had a bit of trouble walking out with a receipt: it seems to be a pretty foreign concept here, at least for food.

For all those who doubted its existence, behold: bacon bread!

Well, the conference has ended, I’ve taken a nap, won 3rd place in the poster competition, and now I have to figure out what to do with myself for two days. About half our group is heading to Kyoto, perhaps to climb mount Fuji, and the other half is already in Tokyo. Presently, I’m leaning towards going to Tokyo, if only to make my trip home an 18-hour one instead of a 24-hour one.

Tonight, we went looking for dinner down one of the many long, winding alleyways. We found yet another, smaller, dodgier alleyway off of that one, which was barely wide enough for 3 people to stand abreast, and where the roofs were below Dave’s head. So far we’ve done okay ordering off menus with pictures, even where English was completely lacking. At the end of that alley though, we weren’t feeling quite as adventurous, so we went to another place on the main street that was kind of interesting. Before going in we thought it would be sushi and the like, but instead they had a variety of other things. I ended up getting fries with a strange spice/flavouring on them, while my travelling companions Dave and Carlos got large shrimp, chicken, seaweed (plus lettuce and some other stuff) salads.

The last day of the conference was quite interesting. I got to participate in a live demonstration of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and watched as my motor cortex was involuntarily stimulated and my hands jerked. It was especially interesting because I had read somewhere that the scalp nerves were painfully stimulated at the same time. I mean, it just makes sense that that would be the case, since the induced fields that are activating the brain are even stronger in the scalp… but surprisingly, it didn’t hurt at all. When my arms were being stimulated, it felt like being electrocuted (I’ve never been seriously electrocuted, but we did have a short in the lab that sent a bit of a tingle up my arm, and I have touched the electric cow fences in PEI).

I had some time today to run out and do a bit of shopping in Japan, and also see the famous Kanazawa Geisha district.

I tell you, there aren’t a lot of typical tourist trap stores here. There are plenty to cater to tourists, but they’re filled with expensive gold-plated, or intricate and delicate things that don’t make very good cheap gifts to bring back. I couldn’t even find a simple post-card with a picture of the city, all I saw were Japanese LOLcats.

Almost nobody takes Visa here, and the one place we did find that took it obviously didn’t use it much, because it took two staff members a long time to figure it out.

Prices here are all tax-included as far as I can tell, which helps a fair bit. I took a look at the mini bar price list just to see what it costs, and like all hotels most of the stuff in there is ridiculously priced (300 Yen for a tiny narrow can of Coke that’s maybe 200 mL). Surprisingly, the bottled water was fairly reasonable at 200 Yen (well, reasonable as far as buying bottled water in Canada in a single bottle is; it’s still a really over-priced commodity). So far things do look to be expensive, but less so than they were in Dublin. However, as I think I mentioned earlier, nearly everything is cash-only. We took a small walking tour of the city (we only covered about 1 km x 1 km, which isn’t much) and didn’t see a single bank machine that would take visa, mastercard, interac, plus, or cirrus. We didn’t see any restaurants with credit card logos in the window, either. I think the next step is going to be finding a post office, which I’m told may give cash advances on Visa.

It’s amazing how different the simple things can be between countries, especially on different continents. The trees here are all a bit different, but what really got me is that there’s hardly any grass, mostly just moss grows in open spaces between trees. The space utilization is also intense: the view out the plane and the train showed that no space was wasted. There were hardly any yards around houses, and the very few that did exist were small. Farms and gardens come right up to a house, and rice patties are squeezed into any spare bit of land, even right up next to the rail tracks.

The cars on the road are all almost all a bit different than what we’re used to seeing. I only saw 2 SUVs all day, though there were a number of vans and vehicles that could pass for lowered SUVs — nobody seems to have been fooled into “needing” that much ground clearance. The cars seem to fall into two different categories: really aerodynamic models (lots of Prius, and other cars like that so it doesn’t look so out of place) and really exceptionally boxy ones (likely to maximize interior space).

The washrooms are strange, as hardly any so far have had paper towel or handdryers. I was told a while ago that the custom here is to carry small packets of paper towels/tissues around and to use those to dry your hands — at the conference hall, someone had put out a packet of paper towels for us, as well as a bar of soap: there were no permanent fixtures for either. So perhaps carrying your own soap around is the custom as well?

Anyway, I’m sure at least one of you is itching for photos, so here we go:

We visited a shrine and a famous, very old garden (and a large hilly one at that), and of course had to hit a sushi place and a bar at some point. To get to most of the restaurants we had to wander down these really small, narry, dodgey-looking alleys. We spent a lot of time getting lost in narrow back alleys :) Here’s the entrance to one we went down to get to the bar; trust me, it looks creepier at night:

This is an impressive looking stone support/drainage system for the hill a castle is built on (I first thought it was the castle, since the grove of trees at the top didn’t look large enough to hide one from the road… but it’s really actually a huge hill).

When touring the gardens, we stopped by the pond to get our picture taken. A tour group came up, and had to wait for us while the person we asked to get the shot cycled through about 6 cameras to make sure everyone got a copy. I shot the people waiting instead (yeah, I take weird pictures sometimes):

Then we toured a museum of some sort (I think it was local art and culture from ~1600 to present). I was impressed by the high-tech humidity control devices:

Look! Duck!

So, almost exactly 24 hours after I left my parents house (and about 25 hours since waking up), we finally got to the hotel.

The flight was actually not too bad (bearing in mind that it was a 12-hour flight). We were lucky and didn’t have anyone sitting in the 3rd seat beside us (the plane is laid out in 3 rows of 3), which gave us a lot of room to spread out and get WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos going. The plane, a brand-new Boeing 777, had a bunch of neat amenities to make the flight go a bit better. There was a selection of on-demand movies on the screens in the seat backs in front of us, as well as power outlets for our laptops (2 outlets per 3 seats). Unfortunately, the outlets seemed to have extremely low-amperage breakers, because the power would keep shutting off (there’s a small green light to indicate when the outlet is energized) with my laptop on. I could charge it when it was off though, and Dave had no problem running his non-beastly laptop. With a 12-hour flight even being able to use the laptop for an hour every 3 is a decent compromise (and if I had taken Wayfare up on her offer to take her laptop, I might have done even better). While I’m on the subject of laptops, I should also note that we got the internet in the room working so I can blog and check my email — my STMP server isn’t letting me send any (not a big surprise there), but there’s still webmail for sending. Dave’s using my computer at the moment as well, partly because we only have one ethernet port, and partly because his laptop has a 3-prong grounded plug, whereas all the outlets here are 2-prong ones. It is convenient for the most part, since it’s the same 2 prongs (at the same voltage and roughly the same frequency) that we have in North America, but is unfortunate when you get a 3-prong outlet like that :(

Anyhow, the service on the plane was pretty good. The seats had enough leg room that I wasn’t too cramped (though I would be a bit if I had my bag under the seat in front of me instead on the empty seat beside me — I might have to use the overhead bins for the way back). The flight attendants were all pretty good, and were especially free with the drinks and snacks this time (none of this tiny glass of Coke — they gave me the whole can :) In fact, I find it weird how good Air Canada is once you get in the air, and how actively hostile to their customers they are at the ticketing phase. For instance, their tickets are generally non-refundable, unchangeable (but, for a fee, you can opt to change them, for a second fee, later on… such BS). They didn’t end up getting my request for a veggie meal (the travel agent didn’t seem to put it through right, and I forgot to call AC directly), but when I asked one of the flight attendants for more of the corn chip things, he gave me two big handfuls of them :)

I lost my watch on the plane, it was really strange how it disappeared. I was trying to put it in my pocket, and dropped it down beside the seat near the window. When I had a chance, I got down on the floor and looked around for it (something else that would have been difficult with a 3rd, strange, person in that seat), but couldn’t find it. I figured it went behind me to the next seat back, but when the people back there got off the plane and I went to look, there was no sign of it. Some flight attendants helped look when the plane was empty, and we did everthing including tearing off the velcroed-on seat covers and cushions, with no sign of it. It simply vanished!

After that, we breezed through customs. The lineup wasn’t too bad, and they had absolutely no questions for us other than “anything to declare?” Waiting around on the plane meant we didn’t have to wait for our bags, and went on to the train. That, however, was a bit of a problem. We each had about 20,000 Yen (roughly $200) in cash, which should be plenty for lunches, trinkets, cabs, and the like, and we planned to put everything else (like train tickets) on VISA. Unfortunately, the train only took cash, despite having fancy machine-readable tickets. So, we parted with nearly all our cash, and headed out on what the conference organizers hailed as a 4.5 hour train ride. It came out closer to 6 hours, and would have been over 7 if our plane wasn’t early. Part of the problem is that the BEMs officials, aside from taking glee in torturing their scientists with obscure travel destinations and terrible planning, thought that Nartia airport was actually in Tokyo (from their description, attached directly to the Tokyo train station), rather than having its own train station over an hour away.

The Japanese trains are quite efficient, timely (every station has at least one white-gloved official with a stopwatch), and clean. I found the whole automatic ticket process really confusing though: we got 4 tickets to get from the airport to Kanazawa, an overall fare ticket, as well as a ticket for each train along the way. Different gates wanted different tickets, and combinations of different tickets, and we always got it wrong and have the gate beep and close on us. Then the officials would help us, and take our tickets, and we had to try to ask for them back (to get reimbursed by work). The Shinkansen (bullet train) wasn’t as impressive as I was expecting, at least at first. There weren’t any reading lights or individual air vents, and it didn’t really get up to speed until after we got out of the city (over an hour before we got over 200 km/h by my extremely rough eyeball estimate). The last train in our link, which took over 3 hours, was pretty painful. It was really hot and stuffy, and despite getting a seat in a non-smoking car, someone in there was smoking. It was also pretty noisy and rough — it rocked and jerked up and braked a lot, with a lot of squealing wheels.

Finally, after 24 hours of travelling, we got to our hotel. Checking in was pretty rough — I know my Japanese is worse than their English, but it didn’t make the process any smoother. The hotel has a 1 room, 1 key policy, which is pretty rough with 2 people in a room who are probably going to be attending different talks at different times… a policy that’s made more painful by the fact that everything in the room turns off if the keyplate isn’t left in the slot by the door (so while we’re out, the room gets hot and sticky, and if someone wants to walk off for a bit at night, the other one has to be ready to let him in — if they fall asleep, the one out for a walk might be SOL, but if the one walking takes the key, the one staying won’t have any lights). Dave suggested that we leave the key at the front desk when we go out, and then whoever gets back first could pick it up without worrying… but that seemed like a painful idea to begin with, then we got a call this morning asking for “Mr. Gen” — turns out Gen’s registered to our room, and they have no idea who we are. I don’t think I’ll be handing the key over just yet.

The phone says they charge for local calls, but I wanted to know if that applied to toll-free calls as well (for my calling cards); the front desk had no idea what I was talking about, which is just as well: the phone connection in the room is terrible, so I was better off using the pay phone anyway (I can call out for free from there — at almost $1/min on my phone card).