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.   

The Aspirational Homescreen

This is from a question from Note to Self, which asked its listeners to describe their relationships with their phones. 

My phone (or at least its homescreen) is an aspirational anchor. It belongs to this parallel-universe version of myself, someone who does not compulsively check Facebook or Twitter, who blogs regularly (about interesting stuff from curated sources), and who has a lot of interesting thoughts that need to be noted down right away (in Evernote). 

In reality, it's a struggle uninstalling Facebook, then installing it again. But I want to keep trying.

Five Point Update - February 7, 2016

1. Track in heavy rotation - Run into the Sun by Joachim Svare, Julia Michaels. I am trying to invoke some sympathetic magic for some earnest spring weather. 

2. What I'm watching - Foundations of Modern Social Theory with Iván Szelényi, a series of Yale lectures made available on YouTube:

The subject can be dry at times (especially when he starts covering Weber), but the guy's enthusiasm for ideas is infectious. Plus: lots of juicy gossip on the personal lives of philosophers.

3.  Purchase I'm excited about -  The uni-ball KuruToga mechanical pencil. It's got a sophisticated internal mechanism to prevent breakage and ensure the point stays sharp. Plus, diamond-infused lead - which gives you an idea how worthless crystallized carbon really is. 

4. Article I'm reading -  You're Wrong About Voicemail  by Leslie Horn. The Philippines was overtaken by text and email before it had a chance to develop communications practices around voicemail. Which is a shame.

5. Podcast I'm listening to - Note to Self, which explores all the good and maddening ways we relate to our phones and our tech. 

Susan Kare (Layers 2015)

From Wired:

Here, Kare, icon of icons, talks about the creative decisions behind some of the best-loved symbols of the past four decades.

Susan discusses her history with Apple and icon design, and sits down with John Gruber to talk design.

Jankufūdo

Getting nutritious, wholesome food isn't a problem here in Japan. Good vegetables and meat (forget Kobe beef - the professors swear by Nagasaki and Sasebo - and I'm inclined to agree). And the seafood! I'd like to imagine that there is a ministry bureaucrat out there who cares deeply, maniacally about the catch, and would weep and be anguished by shame if the freshness in the shelves go below a very fine threshold.

What I haven't had luck with is finding good junk food. And by that I mean bad junk food. Because hey, what good is existence without some little self-destructive tendencies? I buy a bag of local potato chips, and they have low sodium, and the spuds are from some organic farm in Hokkaido. It says right there in the package - and there are pictures of the honest, noble farmers that grew them. I go for the rice crackers, and they have no MSG and they have all sorts of nuts and vegetables baked in. 

So imagine my happiness when I got a "care package" full of my favorite junk food from the Philippines (Thanks, Remir and Farrah!). Salty, oily, high-carbohydrate snacks made in a factory. For now, things are as they should be. 

Kara

Not enough to tide me over until the next movie comes out. But I will take what I can.