Weather: sunny, fairly strong sunshine · Sleep quality: wait for the punchline · Meals: teriyaki-egg sandwich (yum) · Music: Mike Oldfield, Neuroticfish, mind.in.a.box
So, yesterday I finally managed to go to bed at midnight, and I slept like a log — not even a cannon could have woken me. I went in to work at 9:30 and I’ve been doing science ever since.
Haha, no. I quickly threw together a paper for a special issue, and since the usual UR5 robot sim-versus-reality business (the controller settings) screwed me over yet again, I sat over the topic until about 4 a.m. before it all came together. Lucky that, with AI’s help, all this is relatively easy to log, and now I’ve definitely saved this thing. Damn it that I always run into this when I install the system fresh. You’d think they’d fix it one day, but the whole thing is such a hassle: in reality they use a scaled controller, while in simulation a plain joint controller.
A good thing, then, that I’m working precisely on making the ROS world a bit simpler via hypergraphs.
Work
I start straight with work — what else. Before I leave the dorm, I crush my PET bottles (there’s no deposit return here; you have to flatten and toss them) and throw them out. It’s a little sad to see that other foreigners — even though the request was made to kindly remove the caps from the PET bottles — simply put the bottles in as they were.
I bought my sandwich at the shop the usual way. Although most cashiers are visibly kind — beyond the typical politeness — there’s a shorter, brown-haired older lady who clearly keeps only to basic courtesy. I don’t read much into it; anyone who’s actually lived, and not under a rock, knows that in Hungary too it varies how much someone takes a liking to you — especially at the till.
This time, though, I bought an iced coffee at the shop, not from the machine. Among the photos you’ll see one of my favourite coffee brands here. I have to say, it slaps. But just look at the logo too: CRAFT BOSS. Doesn’t that instantly put you in a kingly mood? (For once I’m not being ironic — it really does feel good.)
But back to work. Yesterday I promised the demo and the T-SMC paper — at least one of them. Let’s get to it.
Work and science
Fun fact: I’ll admit I’d put on a little weight back home in Hungary. Now, a few days into the Japanese diet, I can already sit cross-legged on my chair in the lab. When I realised this, I felt great!
So, I got things going. I’m building a web editor for HyMeKo (nothing fancy, just a WASM-based editor). On the science-policy front, the following happened:
- acceptance of a review for an MDPI paper;
- writing a review for an IEEE conference, quickly.
After that I returned to my own papers. There’s still a SISY paper to go and a T-SMC, blast it all! And one of my students wants to submit a really good paper too, so I started submitting that as well.
Japan and homegrown science
As I sat in the lab, I suddenly noticed NHK’s (Japanese public media) R&D magazine. I figured this too was probably just a heap of dumbed-down popular-science articles, the kind you see back home.
I was wrong. This magazine is literally of a calibre that would comfortably fit a Q3 or Q2 journal back home. And this too shows what I think Hungary should change so that our country — which has enormous intellectual reserves anyway — can aim higher.
You can see that in Japan there really is a process for everything. And the universities and public media take this technical character seriously. They promote it fairly strongly and try to give an account of every new development. But, in order to please the “average consumer” — whatever that means — they don’t strip everything down, only where there’s a proper place and time for it. And rightly so: why should a university researcher spend their time making everything fully comprehensible at kindergarten level? Sadly, back home I often feel that this is the expectation.
It would probably take me a long time to unpick what the cause of this might be — starting from the dismal state of public education, all the way to what Hungary’s focus was for so long in the SME and large-corporate sphere. What also keeps surprising me is that big companies here regularly publish science and development reviews. Back home, as I recall, the last one to do that was MATÁV — which has, of course, long been Deutsche Telekom’s property and has rather shifted to promotion. Though there were a couple of scandals just these days about what Hungarian big companies actually focus on; development, training, and science — as I currently see it — are not among them.
Today’s scientific result
I spun up a new thing a bit further, which could enable communication between LLMs in a fairly simple language. I’ll tell you more about this another time.
But today I managed to put together a nice little WASM-based editor for HyMeKo! Both a web editor and a viewer! I love it. And it has a 3D view too, which helps with visualisation and getting an overview. You can also export to your favourite format. I showed it to Sakuma as well — he liked the thing. He left earlier today, though, so I’m off too.
Evening
I finished a bit earlier in the evening, so I had time to eat properly! So I went back to Wakashachiya again. The fast-talking, black-haired girl with glasses greeted me again. She spoke fast again, but I think I’m starting to understand what she says — at least more and more. In any case I learned the concept of kamibukuro (paper bag) forever — handy for udon and saucy bites. There was another waiter beside her who helped, of course. Mainly when I asked whether there was a free seat: of course there is — and I simply sat down in the queue when I should have gone to the tables. An honest mistake, alright.
The meal was curry udon with shrimp, and for a starter I got a shrimp onigiri. It was decidedly delicious! I think I’ve found my regular spot here in Nagoya. True, it was hot as anything, but that should be the least of one’s worries after a long week and day. Either way I ate it with relish, paid, and moved on to the supermarket. Gochisōsama deshita.
I went into the supermarket thinking, right, now I’ll buy bin bags. I know my magic routine well: buy yellow bags for plastic, and another kind for the rest. Well, of course it’s not that simple. There I realise the yellow one is 70 litres — oops, that’s for companies and institutions. Plastic gets a green bag, burnable waste a red one. And here a bit of Hungarian bravado kicked in on my part: even though there was a briefing on waste management at eight today, I figured, “what do I need that for, I can read the instructions, I can go to the supermarket to buy bags, there you go.” Of course there’s truth in it too that for many people even this really is hard to grasp — but the fact is one fumbles a little at first. Then it’s perfectly logical, especially if the Hungarian plains raised you for survival anyway.
After that I thought I’d try a gelato. Honestly: when I queued and looked at the range of flavours, my mouth watered. It was full of flavours that are my world! Mandarin, orange, kiwi, matcha. I love it! And although the portion is a bit smaller than at home — and, I should add, no more expensive at all — I ate it in the end and headed home to the dorm around 21:00.
At home
On the way home, something struck me. I suddenly felt I’d been away for a long time. As if I’d been here for ages, as if I knew this place. Then it hit me that I’ve only been here five days. I can’t understand what causes this, but it was a very strange and, honestly, unsettling feeling. I really worked well today, and all week. Interestingly, I even got a lot done on my own things back home (research, primarily). The language isn’t terribly hard; I know I still have to study. But the whole thing isn’t foreign at all, isn’t strange.
Either way, I’ll go back once more, take out the rubbish, and try to finish the papers I’d planned for today. And of course sort the rubbish.
Photos
