Sorry folks, but I have been playing Japanese salaryman for the past few weeks and posting has slowed to this uphill trudge.

Photo thanks hiromy’s flickr.

Note that this photo was taken in one of the most expensive places in Yoyogi in expensive Tokyo, but the environment is a tangled Mass of overhead wires and cables celebrating Japanese-Pastafarian worship of clutter and concrete.

In several 3Yen reports of the past three years, poor Japan has been dropping in world supercomputer race–over the past several years the Earth Simulator supercomputer has gone from No. 1 to ninth place.
Never fear.
NEC’s new Earth Simulator system will help bring back the title to Japan for the world’s most fashionable, color coordinated supercomputer.

NEC Awarded Contract for New Earth Simulator System
hardwarezone.com : Fri 16 May 2008
… awarded the contract to build the “new Earth Simulator” ultra high-speed computing system for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).

The new Earth Simulator system will see an upgrade of the existing Earth Simulator, which has significantly contributed to the development of a simulation culture in the area of earth sciences and related technical fields….
…[it] is designed to deliver a system-wide peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second). Effective application performance is scheduled to increase two-fold on the existing Earth Simulator. The new system will be installed in the simulator building at JAMSTEC’s Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences and is expected to commence operation in March 2009. ...more...

As my drinking buddy Rob Pongi, the comedian has quipped before, “I think that you can get a clone model of one of these built for you down in Akihabara!”

This YouTube of a Japanese TV commercial is entitled, “How Japanese search engines work - goo.”

goo (properly spelled without capitalizing the first letter) is a top Japanese search engine and web portal that indexes primarily Japanese language websites. goo is operated by the Japanese telecomm giant NTT.

A solar-powered, booze-dispensing bra with text messages: What else would you possibly want except WiFi?

“Solar-powered bra displays text, holds drinks“
Pinktentacle.com (2008/05/14)….a waist-mounted solar panel that powers a small, chest-mounted electronic billboard or any other electronic device you choose to connect. A pair of reusable drink containers attach to the bra cups, allowing the wearer to reduce consumption of aluminum cans and plastic bottles while increasing bust size…more …

Ok, ok, the “increasing bust size” feature is not something I would want for increasing the size of my moobs, ha, ha.

Bejeweled Elephant Shaped Liqueur Tantalus Demands $612,000
EliteChoice.org 2008/May/13…this elephant shaped liqueur tantalus is a striking creation by French luxury crystal maker Baccarat. Exhibited at the Baccarat’s exhibition and Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi...more...

Q: What’s a “tantalus” you might ask?
A: It’s a liquor decanter with a post-graduate education.
(Tantalus– a type of drink decanter stand in which the bottle stoppers are firmly clamped down by a locked metal bar, as a means of preventing servants from stealing the master’s liquor. The decanters themselves, however, remain clearly visible.)

According to a rough machine translation of the Baccarat.co.jp website, this is a reproduction of a “liqueur set of the elephant” produced for Paris World Exposition of 1878. Baccarat is having an exhibition of this and many other pieces from May 13 to 18 at the headquarters of Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, under the theme of “Light and Sparkle of a Far-off Dream.”

Hey, I just report it—I can’t explain it.

This time of the year is the height of the training season for newly hired employees in Japan, so here’s Fujitsu’s new train simulator for some true TRAiNG®.*

Fujitsu train simulator gets real
Kyodo News via The Japan Times | Saturday, May 10, 2008
Fujitsu Ltd. said Thursday it has launched a train simulator that uses high-definition video to improve the driving skills of engineers. The new system, developed in collaboration with Japanese video game and simulator developer Ongakukan Co., provides unprecedented realism and accurate responses to trainee input…more...

According to Ongakukan, who developed the popular Train Simalor for the Playstation, this system uses videos of actual railways, and can play the footage back at 60 fps, regardless of the running speed of the simulated training, in full high-definition.

The training system responds accurately to operator’s reaction, including speed notches and braking operations using recorded train positioning and rail grade information. This recorded information helps model all the forces that affect a train’s operation, including grade, curves, mechanical resistance from the rails, and even aerodynamic resistance for Shinakansen bullet trains, resulting in a highly realistic training environment. The views from the simulator’s train cab shown on the right and below are far more realistic than existing simulators based only computer graphics.

*TRAiNG® (sic) is as an advertising campaign of JR, Japan Railways, as you can watch in this 30-second commercial.

Check out this moonwalking, mega-kool, “HPI G-Dog Robot” in the YouTube video below.

HPI Corporation’s regular product line is radio-controlled cars and planes–expensive ones for boys thinking about growing up. The G-Dog does has the right design philosophy—it is quick and nimble rather than sluggish like the late Sony Aibo robo-dog.
HPI Corp. was thinking of the look of a greyhound dog when they designed it, and it uses the “RS304MD” Time To Live command /PWM controls to make it fast. HPI is going to release four models of G-Dog robot in July.

Since the iPhone still isn’t available (and can’t function) in Japan, the newish Prada phone will have to slake the uber-trendy folks who want a mobile without a physical keypad.

NTT DoCoMo Develops New PRADA-Branded Handset
Tokyo, Japan, May 9, 2008 - (JCN Newswire) —NTT DoCoMo… will begin marketing “PRADA Phone by LG”, a full touch screen mobile phone for the Japanese market, from June. The handset, already available in Europe and other countries/regions, has been redeveloped specifically for DoCoMo…more...

For more info, read the full review if the European version at tweaktown.com.

Despite the unfortunate Japanese name, Nitendo’s wii game device has been a smash throughout the world. However, it was inevitable that that the product name would end up with description like this, “wii on your pole.”

Peekaboo pledges pole-dance kit for Wii
The Register / 09 May 2008 —The Wii’s all-white, but it’s hardly a raunchy unit. So, if you’ve been looking for ways to sex-up your console, then how about a private pole dance?…

Deeners’ flickr

Aliens with blue-eyes invade the streets of Tokyo!
With the extra-long Golden Week holiday, performance artists like the “Medaman-Medaman” eyeballs are cruising the pavement of the Ginza and Koen-dori districts.
Try finding the alien invasion on the live webcams of Koen-dori in trendy-to-tears Shibuya.