Gaijin in Tokyo

One year ago I did it. I passed my oral defense and the committee signed my dissertation.

At the start of the semester I had a tremendous bout of writers block, but somehow I had managed to pull through and finish my dissertation in time. I largely credit the late hours of JP’s Java, the new coffee house across from the Posse, a block from RLM and not so far from where I was living. Though during the day I often toiled away in the recesses of the various libraries, I needed someplace to work in the evenings; I wasn’t very productive at home. Fortunately, I found myself able to think more clearly and write more freely at the coffee house than most other places. I spent many evenings there, working through revisions and corrections.

In the end, it’s not the doctorate title itself that has much value. It’s the process which got me there that has meaning. On the scientific front alone I had spent the previous five years working on my experiment, helping my advisor write grant proposals, giving many seminars including presentations at scientific meetings, writing a paper accepted for publication, taking courses, teaching undergraduate courses, attending countless seminars, interacting with fellow students and visitors from all over the world…. not to mention having written my dissertation.

The doctorate itself is just a piece of paper. The literal blood, sweat, and tears that I shed over my experiment are what it represents. The experiences of those six years of my life are invaluable.

日本語に通訳しようと思っている。

下手だ。 もうぼろぼろになってしまった。最近日本語で書いていないし。妻と日本語で話さない訳じゃないけどね。少々日本語を使っているが簡単な日常会話しか使っていない。さすがに日本語の能力が減ってくる。さらに日本語の知識の減少に相当するフランス語の知識の増えることがない。いやな感じだ。前は（パリで）日本語能力試験を受けるつもりがあったけど本当に落ちる心配がある。ま、レベルによってね。一級除く。ま、落ちるという訳じゃないけど、成績が悪くて自分に失望する。フランス語を習いながら、日本語の能力をキープするためにどうすればいいのかな。英語をやめようか。

We arrived safely back in France. No strikes hampered our return home from  the airport (Chirac had finally decided to yield by scraping the CPE for now). After my brief brush with the Austrian subset of German, returning to French-speaking is actually a bit of a relief. …Though I was really getting used to the German tendency to use giganticultralongsupercompoundwords.

The workshop is on Turbulence and Navier-Stokes: Theory and numerical simulations for Navier Stokes equations. I hadn’t actually attended a workshop before, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. The style of this workshop ended up being somewhat informal with all the participants giving talks on their research with discussion.

The first day featured many "spirited" exchanges. Occasionally the talks would degenerate into a cacophony of voices as the more vocal of the participants all tried to demonstrate their knowledge at the same time. At one point someone remarked, "… this is becoming like the Russian style: everyone is talking except for the speaker!". However, after the first day it cooled down a bit as it was becoming clear that the talks were dragging on forever due to the numerous interruptions for argument.

Most everyone was trying to prove the regularity of Navier-Stokes solutions (some people preferred the L6-norm, while others the L4-norm), whether or not the NS equations developed a singularity in finite time at the limit of infinite Reynolds number, or whether or not the NS equations converged to the Euler equations at the limit of infinte Reynolds number. In short, everyone was after answers to the million dollar prize to prove the existence of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations.

The focus of the workshop on theory made me a bit intimidated to speak to the group. The majority of everyone were mathematicians, with only a few people from simulation. In fact, I was the only experimentalist in attendance. However, my talk went fine (without any arguments breaking out). I guess that it was a bit of a breather to have an experimental talk after all the other notation-heavy mathematical talks.

…I found on the website that I’m actually listed under talks and I’m also listed as under the 2006 Wavelets and Turbulence program.

One of the nice things about living in Europe is that there are a lot of neighboring, or nearby, countries to any one country. A short flight that may only take you to the next state in the U.S. will take you to the next country in Europe. Doing science means meeting with other scientists, attending conferences and workshops. In Europe those conferences held in different countries are actually all quite close to one another. From Paris it was only a short hour and a half flight over to Vienna, where I am now attending my first European workshop on Turbulence and Navier-Stokes at the Wolfgang Pauli Institute.

Well, windows are nice, but Windows sucks.

…Of course, just before I have to leave for a week in Vienna the computer that I am doing data processing on crashes. And of course it is a computer that a student needs to use during the next week, while I am away.

 
The machines in the laboratory are (almost) all running Windows 2000 because the software used for processing and most of the software used to interface with hardware is proprietary.

I had been transferring a lot of files
over the network to the computer that crashed. The same exact thing actually happened before. It doesn’t
seem to be able to handle a lot of sustained network traffic, especially
if something interrupts the transfer. When something goes wrong, it seems to screw up the master file table and after that windows refuses to boot up. Before when this happened, the drive was completely unreadable, until running chkdsk. However, this time the drive was still readable.

The computer that I was transferring files from also had a problem. It reboot itself
automatically and would not startup again, giving a message: "NTLDR
manque". The C-drive and a new 500 Gb hard disk were not even being
recognized by the BIOS! I eventually figured out that the IDE cable
connecting the drives to the motherboard was not working. By swapping
cables, I could see all the drives and confirm that my data was still on
the computer (whew!). Could it have been possible that this cable suddenly went bad and caused all the troubles??

However, since it was already late at night after everyone went home, I didn’t have access to many software tools. 
I had no choice but to leave the problem, hoping that the computer guy would be able to quickly fix the problem in my absence.

Windows sucks.

I had just moved into a new office with one wall almost entirely taken up by windows. I should mention that in Paris, the old buildings have quite high ceilings, maybe 4-5 meters high. That means a lot of windows and a lot of light coming into the office. Though my office in Tokyo had a window, the sunlight was mostly blocked by trees and the lighting was dominated by overhead flourescent lights. Now having so much light during the day is really great, especially after living in the laboratory for the past six years without a window!