This is a video from swaying buildings in Shinjuku. Thank god the buildings are designed to sway, so they will not crumble.

I think Dan Ariely is one of my favorite lectures at the TED conferences. He is a behavioral economist, but his research is not dry stuff at all. In this talk Ariely uses classic visual illusions and his own counter-intuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

(Image credit)

(Image credit)

(Image credit)

(Image credit)

Oh god, this is the most amazing thing I have seen in a little while. These larvae uses things around them to build their cocoons, and Hubert Duprat gave them gold and pearls and other gorgeous materials, and the larvae spun their cocoons using the material he gave them. Isn’t that amazing. You can read more about it here.

“Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.”

“At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and “taking statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.”

I am not sure if I am completely in agreement with this talk – especially the point about how adults can not learn new languages fluently – basically this video builds up under the view that it is impossible to learn new languages as an adult. However, I have met several people who have become incredibly good at new languages they started to learn as adults. Especially people who learn English – they become immersed in English, probably because English influence is all around them, and they end up sounding next to native (at least to my ears).

At the same time I am thinking about the Norwegian language, I have not yet met a single person who came to Norway when they were older than maybe 12 – 14 years old who sound completely Norwegian. Their grammar and vocabulary might be fabulous and flawless, but you can still hear that there is this slight something (accent? naturalness?) which gives them away. Somebody prove me wrong here, please. I would really love to be wrong about this.

I am assuming that Paticia Kuhl is talking about true multilingualism in her talk above, and not the ability to make yourself understood in another language (using great grammar and vocabulary). She is saying that it is only infants up to age 10 months who can truly learn to distinguish different sounds from different languages. At the same time, after just spending a year in Japan – my Japanese is far from good, it is not even decent – but I can hear a much clearer difference between different Japanese sounds than what I did when I first moved to Japan. On that note, I know quite a few Japanese people that have made a huge improvement and can actually distinguish between English r and l, even if they did not learn this as an infant.

All in all, I thought this talk had some interesting points, but I get a bit sad thinking that I am basically in the middle of mission impossible here, trying to learn Japanese. That being said, my goal is not multilingualism, my goal is to have a decent conversation in Japanese and be able to express my option without having to directly translate every word in my head. And I think this is possible for most adults, and maybe we have to leave the perfect sounds up to the infants who can not utter a single word yet.

This is really inventive use of Norwegian language. It is probably of no interest at all to you if you do not know Norwegian, but wow, I was pretty impressed with how all of this added up and made sense in the end.

(These were made as a wall sticker set a couple of years ago, I thought they would look nice in a big white room with minimal furniture.)

1. Wikipedia’s article about sushi. This is a really nice article about sushi and sashimi. A lot of people think that sushi is the same as raw fish, but in fact sushi is the rice, and not the fish. This article about sushi is good reading if you want to know more about different kinds of sushi.
2. The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World. This is a Smashing Magazine article about different exotic writing systems, mainly focusing on Eastern Asian Languages and Arabic writing systems. I learned a lot about how Arabic is written from this article, and the illustrations are beautiful. It almost made me want to learn Arabic, just to draw those beautiful letters.
3. Kari Bremnes lyrics. Kari Bremnes is my all time favorite artist. A lot of people just quote “Åpen Post” (Norwegian TV show that made a joke about her name) or mistake her for other people (why do people think she is Lynni Treekrem, there is nothing similar about them apart from having a northern dialect). If you have actually listened to any of her songs, you will find a beautiful melancholic and poetic voice. She is absolutely wonderful, and I found out that there is a part of her web page which has lyrics for most of her albums, and it made me so happy. I have been humming to myself all day, even if I can not sing, because her words are so beautiful.
4. Sinhala script. God, it looks beautiful. I first saw it in a bible in a hotel room in Yokohama last summer, and I wanted to find out more about it, so I found some beautiful examples doing a google image search.
5. Lang-8.com. Regarding language studies, lang-8 is absolutely awesome. You write a diary entry in whatever language you are studying, mark what language it is (by choosing from a drop down list), and then native people will correct your diary entry for you. In return, you can correct journal entries written in your naive language. I have found a lot of cool people learning Norwegian and English, and there have been so many kind people correcting my Japanese on this site. No matter what language you are studying, this web page is a great resource.

Yes, I have an exciting life today. I just spent the last half hour looking at Mola Molas on youtube. My favorite fish of all time is the Ocean Sunfish, also called Mola Mola. It looks out of this world, both because of the size, and because they look sort of like they have been cut of half way through their bodies. I think this video was filmed in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Which means I visited this very sunfish. He was super-big in real life, and it is such a humbling experience to experience something so beautiful and strange. I was locked to the glass for a good half hour while the people I was with wanted to move on. I can not recall if I have any pictures of him (the light was really low), but I am sure I have a couple of other pictures from the same aquarium which I am sure I will get around to posting some time.

(Picture courtesy of hubblesite.org)

I don’t believe in astrology per se, however, I think it is a fun to read the personality traits of the different star signs. I do think that these descriptions are so general that you can label any person any star sign, but that is a whole other discussion. No matter if you believe in astrology or not, I think that people associate themselves with what star sign they belong to, no matter if they believe in astrology or not. I have not yet found a single person in the western world that did not know their star sign, so even if people do not believe in astrology, they still care enough to at least know what star sign they belong to.

Apperantly a new star-sign has been found, the Ophiuchus. It is affecting those born between November 29 and December 17.

“In January 2011, Robert Roy Britt wrote in a post on Live Science, “Over the past 2,500 years or so since the zodiac was established, your sign has moved about a month relative to the sun and stars” and indicated that many people may not actually be the sign they think they are.”

“The constellation Ophiuchus represents a man wrestling a serpent, dividing the snake’s body in two parts.  It is the only sign of the zodiac linked to real men, sharing traits with Imhotep, a 27th century BCE Egyptian doctor, and biblical Joseph. Like Joseph, he is an interpreter of dreams and vivid premonitions. He is envied by his peers and favored by his father and authority figures.”

So, now I am a slight identity crisis here. All of a sudden I belong to a different star sign than what I thought I did? Oh my.

This video has been floating around the internet for the past little while, and it is basically a long commercial or a short film about the fashion-blogger The Sartorialist. I have this love-hate relationship with fashion-bloggers and their blogs, I love some of them, but I think there are too many of them and I can not keep up, so I avoid them for the longest I can so I don’t have to realize how far away and out I am from the magical world of fashion.

I have been thinking about going around Tokyo and take pictures of the amazing people, watching the video above inspired me even more, but I am a bit shy when it comes to going up to strangers and asking them in Japanese if it is ok for me to take their picture and post them on the internet just because they look so amazing. Maybe I will dare to do it one of these days soon.