Today's been one of those remarkably free/lazy day for me, waiting for a pending application of sorts that I need to confirm before my life can continue its ever ambitious spiral toward freedom. So I spent some time browsing through the aggregated content from my contacts in tumblr and thought I might as well share some interesting pictures I came across, no doubt influenced by the habit of my acquaintance (I suspect that he uses picture posting when there isn't much to write about).
Here's one I found first. As those of you who know me are already well aware of, I'm something of a gadget geek. I love things I can tinker with, whether they be molecular systems or robots, or even something entirely trivial like desktop computers. I also happen to like classical sculptures (though I guess you can't really call a Rodin classical sculpture), so the well known pose of the vehicle-robot was something that instantly caught my attention. For some reason I thought of German cars after I saw that robot, but then the logo is that of Honda, the eponymous Japanese car maker.
It's one of my secret lifelong ambition to be able to create a thinking system that is not based on human anatomy. I've been doing quite a bit of research on the subject (which is itself inspired by the dreams and methodology of Juergen Schmidhuber, the genius scientist in pursuit of an artificial scientist) and I'm beginning to suspect that there's something fishy about how every single thinking system in the observed universe are built on top of complex biological systems. Am I going to far in assuming that there might be a fundamental correlation between the two traits on a very physical basis?
Here's a beautiful picture of Tokyo skyline. Well, not really a skyline, more of a single building with interesting composition of colors. I used to travel to the Asian region almost every summer for the past ten years or so. I have relatives living all over the place so it became something of a fun thing to do when I couldn't think of anything more fun. Now that I look back on it I lived a pretty luxurious life. Not everyone travels across two continents and four countries almost every summer 'just for fun.' I've even been invited to Cannes and Florence (for those of you who don't know, France and Italy). If it's not luxurious on a student budget, I don't know what is.
Now that the summer's come again, I'm starting to get that yearning. Whenever I see pictures like this I get caught up in such nostalgia. When you travel like me, you begin to notice the differences of minutiae, like subtle change in smell of the air for example. I love Japanese air. Oh, and the colors. The colors forming the cities and towns, even natural flora and fauna are all different in each countries. It's like there's a different aesthetic theme that composes different societies across the world, with different emphasis on different colors.
Although I'd love to pack up and leave right now, I can't. At the rate my internship is going I'm under the impression that it would be much better for my future to stick around until the very end. Since I plan on making my living doing odd bits of research I can't afford to go off on a tangent at this point in life. Although, I am seriously looking into stopping by Seattle before the summer's over, with the pax happening there. I might even arrange to visit local chapter of diybio while I'm there. I also need to stop by Boston later, but that's all the way in October, so I'm not going to worry about it for now.
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