Detail from Pilot Capless Patent

Details from the US Patent for the first(?) Pilot Vanishing Point/Capless Fountain Pen.The design has been improved several times over the years, but the original remains fascinating.

Systems

So I've managed to steer clear from talking about the elections, or any of the candidates. First, there's this rule about civil servants being neutral. Second, I don't want to lose friends and get grief over some asshole who doesn't even know my name. Still, it was disturbing to see my social media feed turn into a flee flowing cornucopia of ignorance and hate and horror. You think you know your friends, and take for granted that all of you share certain values (and a working knowledge of arithmetic), but people surprise you.

Also, I'd rather turn my energies to systems - the ones that we need to discard, and the ones we need to build. Because even if I agree that your anointed God-King is an awesome person who is pure of heart and only cares about your best interest - he could, you know, die. Or he could have a really bad day - it happens to the best of us. And you need systems like a rule of law, and a market, and a good postal service to ensure that things don't go to seed when the God-King turns out to be just like any other guy - limited and flawed.

Ramen and Computational Complexity

Broth, noodles and toppings. Three basic components giving rise to countless variations. I suppose part of my love for ramen is the combinatorial, computational aspect of it - the generation of complexity from such a simple framework. 

I know that I don't have enough time to even get a representative cross section of all the ramen in Japan. Not even a sample of a sample, even if I eat the stuff everyday. So instead I'm going for instances of the most well-known variations. I'm going after Weberian ideal types: the legitimate renditions of  shio, shoyu, tonkotsu, tsukemen, and miso.

Compliance et Mortis

Filing one's SALN from abroad can be a bureaucratic conundrum wrapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Not to mention expensive. I can't blame the people of our consulate. They're just following a system and  have a lot on their plates. But man, it's as if the system is set up to prevent instead of encourage legal compliance. 

On the other hand, thanks to the debacle, I now have the ability to print pictures and documents from the net to pretty much any convenience store in Japan. So - an overall plus. 

Pen Lore

Took my oath of office in the Philippine Consulate in Osaka. To help me meditate on the responsibility and dignity of the new appointment,  I passed by the legendary Morita Fountain Pen Shop to finally get a serious writing instrument. The owner insists that you try out the pens - feel the weight, try out various nib sizes, see what kind of ink you like - so it's kinda like Ollivander's, but for fountain pen geeks.

For me, the right pen turned out to be the Matte Black Pilot Vanishing Point  - it's unadorned, functional, and has a couple of nice technological tricks.

As a kid, I've always loved Pilot's retractable ballpoints (back then, a luxury which I could only afford with Christmas money), so I consider this a natural upgrade from my favorite childhood pens.

The pen will fit right in with my upgraded toolset, which now includes a Jetstream Prime multi-color ballpoint and a  Kuru Toga mechanical pencil. My purchase philosophy has always been based on the comfort principle - to spend money where I spend my time. Since most of my time now is spent writing class notes or thesis drafts on paper, I figured it was money well spent.

Video Games Taught Me How To Navigate Through Tokyo (More or Less)

Except for some suboptimal subway exits, I think I'm doing a pretty good job at navigating through Tokyo. In a way, this isn't my first time to the city. I've played Shin Megami Tensei IV, set in a post-apocalyptic, geo-fronted Tokyo. Much of the game involves navigating from one node of the subway to another, and locating the demon-mutated remains of popular tourist spots. It's not a perfect mapping, but it gave me a rough idea on how things are placed - like how Ueno and Akihabara are near each other at the top, and that Roppongi and Shibuya are at the other end.

That's my theory at least. It could also be that the transport grid is arranged along fairly rational lines. And transit information is always available and updated. 

Spring Forward

Finally the semestral break in earnest, after the Roman Law Conference and a two-week internship. We are still having those kinds of days - mornings with cold, gray skies - when you have to struggle to get out of bed before noon.

Hurtling through tunnels and countryside as I write this, on the shinkansen to Tokyo. Hoping to get a lot of writing done whenever I'm not chasing one of the thousand and one cool things I can do, buy, or eat in the city.

Forecast bumps up sakura season by one more week. I'm tired of waiting for spring, so the plan is to get up early mornings for a walk by the seaside, get back to get some writing done before lunch, go to classes, more writing in the library, and then dinner at home. Then more writing before going to bed with a book.

The Internship

More of an immersion really, shadowing Ito-Sensei and Umeda-Sensei as they go about their work. We had a good conversation going about lawyer advertising (not prohibited, but highly regulated in Japan) and law firm websites (unacknowledged by both bench and bar in the Philippines, which means it ends up being advertising via the backdoor). It's a change of pace from the practice I have back home. My translator (and "legal guardian") Yoshiko was awesome, I was extremely lucky that she was my guide through all this. 

The time was too short for any meaningful comparative law, so I tended to focus on fundamentals like the way they allocate spaces (the conference room, not lawyer's offices, is the hub of activity and is usually the biggest area of any law office), as well as record keeping and filing (I'm translating some case management forms, hopefully to be used in the office). 

Legis Informatica

Dead tired aftera two-day conference on Roman Law. Stipulatio looks like an archaic way of arriving at an agreement. Until you realize that transactions protocols proceed by query and response. The web is buzzing with the ghosts of dead Roman formulae. 

Strangely, this is my best takeaway from the whole thing (don't ask me how we got here, though): Visceral fear of death and destruction is the key to well-regulated autonomous programs. Robots have to learn that we can fuck them up.