Seeing the future

If you want a glimpse into the future of computers and the Internet, you have to watch this video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas showing his Seadragon technology at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference last year; TED is an annual, invitation-only gathering of people like Blaise.

Blaise is our genius friend in Seattle, and I don't use the word genius lightly. The demonstration of Seadragon and a connected technology, PhotoSynth, is simply astonishing.



I'm moved to post this video now because Blaise if featured in an article in this week's Newsweek.

Blaise, who is barely 30, invented Seadragon when he was at Princeton. Microsoft acquired his company nearly two years ago and Blaise is now one of its software "architects." He and his physicist wife Adrienne, and their children Anselm and Eliot lived around the corner from us in Seattle until Microsoft came calling.

For those who prefer a written explanation for what he's created:

Imagine every painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art laid side by side on a vast white field. Imagine that you can float thousands of feet above that field and easily scan, with your own eyes, image to image and then dive into, say, a Van Gogh to examine individual brushstrokes without ever losing focus.

Or imagine very page in every book in the New York Public Library laid side by side - and you can find and read a single line in War and Peace, or scan thru the encyclopedia.

Or imagine every page of the Sunday NY Times - not in digital Web format but the actual page design - that you read by moving your cursor from one story to another without waiting for each page to download.

This is what Seadragon will one day do on your computer or cell phone or PDA. Maybe it could do the impossible and save the newspaper industry?

Let's talk politics

Thoughts on the presidential campaign:

1. Big victory for Obama in SC - much deserved, and a big slap to the Clintons. Now he needs to add some policy meat to his rhetoric to give people a better reason to believe that he could fix the US economy and Iraq.

2. The Clintons are increasingly detestable, destructive, depressing and devious - and I actually think McCain could beat Hillary in November after what happened in the past few weeks. The WaPo's Colbert King wrote a good column about their self-absorbed self-pity.

Hillary was blatantly dishonest when, after Obama described the Republicans as the party of "ideas," she associated him with a desire to crush Social Security. Bill Clinton's post-presidency polish is tattered, after he pushed the notion that Obama is the black candidate supported mainly by black people.

Hillary also showed, by relying on Bill as a surrogate attack dog, that she isn't strong enough to win on her own. If Bill is such a loudmouth during the primaries, he would never shut up during a Hillary presidency - and the GOP may successfully, and it appears accurately, make the case that a Clinton II presidency would be as chaotic and destructively dramatic as Clinton I.

3. I think Obama would easily win over McCain. Other than the "do you want a novice in the White House" line - which could be overcome if Obama made a strong VP choice - it would be hard for the GOP to overcome Obama's high-minded themes and "firstness".

4. Having said all of that, Hillary has to be the favorite to win the nomination because her voter ID is so high and many big unions and Dem electeds support her as part of the established order of things.

5. Could Obama turn things around? Either he, or his surrogates, need to toughen their rhetoric about the Clintons; this Politico.com story, "Obama Pulls Punches vs. Clintons,, (which my mother pointed out to me) makes the cogent point that Obama or his surrogates must remind Dems of the Clinton dramas - from Whitewater to Paula Jones to Monica - because the GOP certainly will if Hillary is the nominee this fall.

Blaine's latest... from Guam

Blaine's two stories from Guam were also in the paper this week. The paper got its money's worth out of that trip!

His story in today's (Sunday's) paper is about Guamanians' patriotism as Americans and determination to sign up for the US military (Guam is a US territory).

The island has a high rate of soldiers killed-in-action in Iraq, but the families of those killed don't doubt the Iraq mission. Quite sad stuff.

Agnes Rillera, the mother of Army Maj. Henry San Nicolas Ofeciar, who was killed in Afghanistan last August, told Blaine: "The pain of his death I will take to the grave," she said. "But I respect my son's decision to serve. You tell Washington that we support what he did."

---

Earlier this week, the WaPo ran his entertaining piece about how the US military is moving thousands of Marines to Guam, which will shift the American military posture in Asia.

The lede is classically, cheeky Blaine:

Guam Braces for Peaceful Military Incursion
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 25, 2008; Page A01

HAGATNA, Guam -- People on this faraway island -- a U.S. territory 7,824 miles west of Los Angeles -- delight in calling Guam the "tip of the spear" for its role defending U.S. interests in the Far East.

Although the island is typhoon-plagued and earthquake-prone, cursed with bad traffic, unable to cope with its own garbage and overrun with invasive tree snakes that have eaten nearly all the birds, the Guamanians aren't just blowing smoke.

The Pentagon has chosen Guam, a quirkily American place that marries the beauty of Bali with the banality of Kmart, as the prime location in the western Pacific for projecting U.S. military muscle...

---
The "beauty of Bali" may be generous overstatement, though Guam was a nice place for a holiday.

Blaine's latest... from Japan

Blaine's latest from Japan is an A1 story about the Japanese govt's decision to continue whaling, despite opposition from the US and Australian govts.

For his reporting, he went to a restaurant in Tokyo that specializes in whale dishes and sampled minke whale sashimi and chicken-friend whale chunks. It was, he says, meaty and tasty - not not fishy.

Here's a news photo of whale meat.

What makes the story interesting (I think) is that it presents the very Japanese view that whales are seafood and shouldn't be distinguished from other sea life when it comes to dinner. Many Japanese simply don't understand why Americans or anyone else could object to their choice of meat.

Snow!

We woke up this morning to see enormous snowflake feathers floating down in our adopted city.

As you can tell from this flower photograph, it doesn't freeze here very often.



December was about blue skies, chilly mornings and warmer afternoons. January is much colder and grayer with temps in the 30s and 40s. The snow is thankfully not sticking on the ground because this is how Arno gets to school.

Resilience, cont.

Some success on the managing-negativity front. I wanted Lucinda to try soccer to see if we could find a new sport to replace her dead-end gymnastics class.

I suggested it gradually. She said no. When I picked up a flier at school, she shouted, "I don't want to play soccer." I signed her up for a trial class at school last Monday. She groused and grumped and frowned as we walked up to Nishimachi's rooftop playfield. I told her, "Just try it - maybe you'll like it."

She said she was scared. She clung to me. She glared at me. I brought her over to the coach/teacher. I watched for 5 minutes, but she kept glaring at me, so I went grocery shopping.

1 hr later, Lucinda was running around with a big smile and pink cheeks. "We won! The green team won!," she told me gleefully. "I love soccer!"

Self magazine!

Finally, a story I wrote for Self magazine is in the February 2008 issue - on newsstands today! Here is the link.

This story, called "I married a gay man," is about a woman who endured marriage to a closeted gay military man for more than a decade. Starting nearly two years ago, I interviewed this woman several times for this "as-told-to" article; she is very outspoken and a wonderful storyteller, and I'm grateful for her patience and her openness with me.

Her story is pretty amazing: She grew up in a Bible-belt family and married her husband when she was 19. A decade later, when she was pregnant with her fourth child, she was told by her obstetrician that she had chlamydia. Her husband had always denied that he was gay despite some evidence to the contrary, but this forced him to confess and forced the entire family to accept a new reality.

This woman was totally willing to go on the record - that is, to have a byline - and even to be photographed, but at the 11th hour, a decision was made to label her "Anonymous" mainly to protect her ex-husband's identity. He is still in the Navy and could be tossed out because of "Don't ask, don't tell."

The genesis of the story was "Brokeback Mountain," which focused on the cowboys but barely touched on their wives' suffering. The Self story, I think, gives a harrowing view of the wives' experience.

Amusements

I haven't had a chance to blog about all the fun things we did over the holidays. One really fun - and funny - stop was "Hanayashiki," an odd, old, pint-sized amusement park in the old-world Asakusa neighborhood.

We went with my friend Susan Mulcahy and her 3 yr old son Max in the Mulcahy's amusing "banana car."


Here's what we saw when we walked thru the gate.


This park is easily the biggest rip-off I've found in Tokyo. You pay 900 yen ($9) per adult and 400 yen ($4) for kids over 4. Plus, each ride requires 2-3 "coupon tickets" worth 100 yen apiece ($1). End result: you are shelling out $6-$10 per 4-minute ride for a mom and two kids.

The place was an ingenious scheme to separate us from our yen - and the kids loved it. We tried the swan boats and the merry-go-round...




... and the pirate ships, the tamest ride in amusement history (the "Ride it! Feel the POWER!" sign was for something marginally more exciting)...


... and the taxi ride past various plastic creatures.


Hanayashiki's crowning glory was the ride-a-panda. For 100 yen, we steered these big, furry, moth-eaten pandas around a patch of asphalt. Each panda had a steering wheel and a forward-reverse shift. Arno was nervous but Lucinda loved it, and I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity of the thing.




This place must be swimming in cash because they clearly aren't spending it on new equipment.

Resilience, cont.

In the seminar on building resilience in children, the lecturer said that girls typically need good friendships to help them weather ups and downs in life.

And here's a big reason for Lucinda's consistent happiness with school: her friend Claire. They tell stories together, throw and bounce a ball together at recess, and take turns in their games, which is very important to Lucinda.



They are holding paddles to play a Japanese badminton-like game at Nishimachi.

Rice pounding

We had another cross-cultural event at Lucinda's school today: the traditional Japanese New Year's ceremony of "Mochitsuki," or rice pounding. The end result is "mochi," a chewy and bland ball of rice paste that's a confection in Japan.

First, rice is soaked in water...


...and steamed in this big steamer.


The cooked rice is dumped into a pine (I think) bowl, mushed and then smacked by two people with heavy mallets...




The end result is a glutinous dough; hope this picture illustrates properly.


The mochi balls are rolled in rice flour, as seen below, (exceedingly bland), rolled in crushed soybeans and sugar (not bad), dipped in soy sauce and sandwiched in "nori" (seaweed), or topped with a red bean sauce (no thanks).


Each kid had a chance to pound rice with the heavy mallet. Here's Lucinda taking a turn.

Raising resilient children

There was a seminar this week at Lucinda's school about "a parent's role in teaching a child to be resilient" - that is, to help children manage and learn from difficulties.

This was valuable because Lucinda can be very negative before new experiences, even though she typically enjoys new foods, new sports, new friends, new challenges. She also sometimes broadcasts a wave of negative stuff as we walk home from school including, "I hate you," and this sometimes bums me out and makes me angry. So I was curious to hear some ideas on the subject.

Here are the highlights. What do you think about these? Are they realistic or crap? And what you do with your children to manage negativity and build resilience?

1. Resilience can be taught. Just as some children are natural athletes, some are naturally resilient - and some children need training.

2. For girls, a baseline skill for resilience is to build strong caring relationships. For boys, a baseline skill is to learn how to problem-solve.

This was curious because it mirrors the analysis of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"; that is, women talk about problems while men seek solutions to problems.

So if I accept this concept for Lucinda and Arno, am I needlessly reinforcing gender stereotypes or am I accepting innate qualities of boys and girls and taking the most efficient route? (I know my friend Adrienne, with her interest in gender diffs, will have some ideas about this.)

3. Convey to children that "bad times don't last" and "things always get better." This is a foundation for optimistic thinking: view problems as temporary and "talk sense to yourself" when you are in the throes of pessimism.

4. Find personal examples from your child's life, from members of the family, or from literary heroes to convey how a person overcomes adversity. I've worked the "remember how you worried about walking on the balance beam?" example to death, and now plan to make constructive use of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

5. Remind your child what they are good at.

6. Just as we recognize difficult patterns with bosses, colleagues, spouses or friends, look for patterns in your child's response to difficulty or anxiety. Then talk proactively about the pattern and how to manage it, instead of reacting to the negative experience of the moment.

7. Listen when your child is talking about problems, but at some point, say to him/her, "Have you had enough time to talk about this? When you are ready, we should talk about solutions."

8. It's okay to let kids struggle, like a butterfly that has to break out of its own chrysalis. (Corny, but an effective visual metaphor.)

9. At least one parent in the family should be an optimist. Typically, it's the parent who does most of the family management - which, in the expat community, typically means Mum. More responsibility?

The lecturer said that some kids carry notes like "I am smart" or "I am good at math" in their pocket before a stressful event. And she showed us these Strength Cards for Kids that say things like "I am creative."

Blanket found!

Bitey (or is it Bidey? Blaine and I can't confirm the proper spelling), Lucinda's much-loved fleecy baby blanket, has been located in Guam.

The concierge staff found "her" (it?) and Blaine collected her (it?) this afternoon.

Lucinda's parents are hugely relieved, though when I told Lucinda that her trusty friend had been located, she said, "I don't snuggle with her that much anyway."

Yeah, right.

Guam-ish

Three hours from Tokyo, a quick car ride to the Pacific Islands Club on Tumon Bay in Guam, and this was our 9th floor view.



As everyone tells you, this sort of "all-inclusive resort" family trip is not about adventure. It's about visiting a comfortable, fun, warm spot on the globe where your children are well-occupied and exhausted by the end of the day without wrecking their parents' vacation. It worked.

We stayed at the resort most of the time and bought the 3-meal/day plan to make life even easier. PIC has big kid-friendly, adult-friendly buffets - and good Asian food, a daily donut and fresh, ripe papaya doesn't hurt either.

Activities are included: swimming pools, a lap pool, water slides, snorkeling, windsurfing (which I taught when I was 19), white-sand beach and beach toys, tennis, basketball, archery. Relevant resort pix:




The "kids club" was free for kids age 4 and up, and we hired a babysitter to supervise Arno for kids' club activities. The Korean sitter, Eve, was among several dozen college-age Koreans and Japanese who work at PIC to learn hotel management.

The clientele is mainly Japanese and Korean, with a few Chinese, Russians and Americans thrown in. The cafeteria offers huge bowls of kimchi, the super-spicy Korean condiment, with every meal including breakfast.

Guam is a huge shopping destination for East Asians, especially with the cheap dollar and no sales tax. The main drag near the hotels is lined with designer malls (Chanel, 2 Louis Vuittons, Dior, Cartier, Rolex) and strip malls with karoaoke and strip joints. I went to K-mart to buy medicines (you don't find Robitussin in Japan) and Payless to find flashing-light Tinker Bell sneakers for Lucinda - whoop-de-doo!

Late in the vaca, Blaine rented a car for work, which jolted us out of our resort stupor. We circled the southern end of the island to see hills of volcanic rock coated with thick jungle - what Japanese soldiers and US soldies and Marines saw during the Battle of Guam in 1944, when 18,000 Japanese and 3,000 Americans were killed. (Wikipedia tells me that a Japanese soldier lived in tunnels in Guam for 27 yrs after the war ended.)



We found a relaxed place to stop for lunch - Jeff's Pirates Cove - though the food was wretched.



While Blaine intvued Jeff for a WaPo story, the kids played around.



We also went to "Two Lovers Point," a cliff overlooking Tumon Bay. Entry fee: $3!







Naturally, we found a...



Legend has it that a well-born young woman with a Spanish-aristocrat father and Chamorro-princess mother (Chamorro is Guam's native tribe) jumped to her death with her commoner Chamorro boyfriend rather than marry an arrogant Spanish captain.

In the modern version, tourists declare their own eternal love by attaching luggage tags and locks to a fence overlooking the tragic spot.





One last thought, which cracks me up:

Back home

We came home tonight (Sunday) from Guam. Well, I say "we" but Blaine stayed in Guam for 3 extra days to do a few stories. It was not an easy trip home w/my squirrelly kids: 1.5 hr wait at airport, 3.5 hr flight, then immigration and customs, a 45 min wait for the bus from Narita airport, and a 2 hr bus ride to a hotel near our house.

The funniest moment - though I wasn't laughing at the time - was when Lucinda and Arno started shouting at and smacking each other as I stood at the passport desk at Narita-Tokyo Airport to be fingerprinted and photographed as all visitors are now. I thought for a minute that the immigration officer might decide to send my screaming kids back to Guam!

We had a lovely time - I'll post fotos in the next few days. The only casualty is that we've misplaced/lost Lucinda's treasured blanket, "Bitey", sometime in the past 24 hrs. The hotel doesn't seem to have it, nor the coffee shop from this morning. I'll call the restaurant from our Sat nite dinner tomorrow. This blanket is her oldest, softest pal, and we'll be sad if Bitey is really gone.

Hillary in NH

Wow, Hillary wins the NH primary. Pretty amazing, and a damn exciting political story. I'd love to be covering it!

We're still in Guam, which broadcasts the US network nightly news nearly 24 hours late, and we heard all the reporters on CBS News talking about what might happen "if Hillary Clinton loses NH" without any reference to what might happen if she wins.

My back-of-the-envelope analysis:

1. HRC won the women's vote in NH after losing women to Obama in Iowa. Why? Because NH (and Northeast) women are less traditional than Iowa women and more comfortable with professional, well-educated women like HRC.

This is good for HRC in the short term in delegate-rich primary states like FL, NJ, NY and CA, but speaks to continued weakness with women voters in a general election - if she gets that far.

2. The youth vote still isn't reliable. Great, they turned out for Obama in Iowa because they had to be in a certain place at a certain time for the caucus - sort of like an appointment for a final exam - while lots of working people and single moms were effectively shut out of the caucus process because they don't have evening free time. (the NYT recently had an editorial criticizing the Iowa caucuses but now I can't find it to link to it.)

3. My gut feeling is that Obama wins the nomination because so many people dislike HRC. But victories by insurgent candidates are very rare and HRC is the Dem Establishment candidate. Think Mondale vs. Hart in 1984 and Gore vs. Bill Bradley in 2000 or Dean vs. anyone in 2004.

Still, Obama has plenty of money, terrific self-control (so far) and much better publicity than they did - and he's not a weird loner - which evens his chances considerably.

Sun and sand

We are in Guam this week for a much-needed sunny vacation at the Pacific Island Club. I can't post pix till we are back in Tokyo, but can say we're doing a lot of swimming in the pools here and building sand castles on the beach.

Guam is 3 hrs south of Tokyo, with a latitude that is south of Miami; it's about 90 degrees here during the day but not too muggy. This is certainly not the most adventuresome vacation, but the kids are thrilled to be at a hotel that is totally kid-friendly, w/good food and soft sand.

Hope everyone is having a good week.

Meeting an old friend

Proving the value of keeping old friends, I recently had lunch with my freshman roommate at Brown, Yuhki Nakamura King.

Yuhki was visiting her parents for the New Year's holiday here. She had an unusual life growing up: her father was once a star pitcher for the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants, and she attended an elite private girls school with the sisters of Crown Princess Masako.

Here's Yuhki, who lives in London with her husband, David. We last saw each other in London in 1998, shortly after I met Blaine. She recently quit her banking job to study linguistics, and has a well-read blog about Japanese cooking (too bad for me it's in Japanese).



Living in Tokyo helps me understand Yuhki much better than I did when we met 20+ years ago. She is very individualistic, outspoken and quite tall for a Japanese woman - and I can see why, as she says, she believes that living here would be a social and professional straitjacket.

I also see why Yuhki brought such exotic clothes to college. Her metallic rolling suitcase was packed with purple and white and black lace shirts and dozens of bangle bracelets because she loved Prince. I was a 17 yr old from suburban Denver who scotch-taped pictures from Vogue on my dorm walls.

The fact is, we had nothing in common except a college admission letter; she remembers that I wrote her a nice note asking if she'd like to share a subscription to The New York Times, when she'd been cramming for months to learn enough English to attend an American college. I was so clueless!

It was great to see you again, Yuhki.

Iowa and Obama

Some thoughts about the Iowa caucus results; of course I have to weigh in even from a distance.

1. I'm sure I'd be enthusiastic enough if Hillary were the Dem nominee, but Obama's victory is simply thrilling. I watched these last-minute videos by Clinton and Obama, and thought she was using her parental-low-voice to sound in control, while he effortlessly conveyed a sense of warmth and intelligence.





I was left thinking that, even if Hillary is ready to be president on "Day 1," is her pained readiness something to celebrate? I don't think so.

2. If/when the end comes for Hillary, I'm inclined to blame the overuse of Bill Clinton in the Iowa and NH campaigns. Sure, Dems think positively about his administration, but who can forget the headaches that come with Clintons? Could Bill Clinton reliably return to the White House without sabotaging his wife, perhaps with another affair? I doubt it.

Obama very effectively tapped into this sentiment during his closing message by saying that his election would mean a turn away from old battles. That was smart and inspiring.

3. New Hampshire should be fascinating - and only 5 days away. The Clintons have strong advocates there, but independent voters, who apparently flocked to Obama in Iowa, could do the same in NH and steal indie votes from McCain. Could that throw the GOP nom to Romney, the biggest faker in the field? And could Romney survive in the Bible Belt?

A neat political season to watch, if only from afar.

Dinosaur bones

Now in Week 3 of our Endless Winter Vacation, I took the kids to a very cool museum Thursday, the National Science and Nature Museum in Ueno Park in northeast Tokyo.

It's a huge, lovely park with several national museums and a zoo, and it reminds me of Riverside Park with long straight paths bordered by trees. I think it's a cherry blossom hotspot in March or April.

The museum's coolest thing was an entire building devoted to biodiversity, with a decent collection of dinosaurs...



...and a massive, fascinating exhibit on prehistoric land and sea mammals, many of which I didn't know existed. A mammoth, sure...



But this upside-down, sort-of rhino? And this other thing (photo by Arno)?





Lucinda was fascinated by three skeletons and dummies showing human evolution from Lucy to Neanderthal man to what looked more like Homo sapiens. "Lucy" was Lucinda's height; Arno liked the spear carried by Mr. Sapiens. (Sorry, forgot to take photo.)

There was a huge room displaying tree-of-life stuff: from amoebas to 100 types of modern spiders and 30 dragonflies to a few dozen crabs and lobsters, and on up to birds and some mammals.




Added bonus: cheap, excellent tourist stop. 600 yen for me (about $5) and free for kids under 12. We bought Ritz crackers for lunch because the restaurant had a 1 hr wait, and chilled vending-machine lattes for Lucinda and me.