“Today a character costume can be seen in many places, such as amusement facilities, sport stadium and so on. They perform comical and funny body action for us. In general, the performers can’t control their costume’s facial expression. We developed ‘mimicat’ that can synchronizing performer’s facial action and costume’s one. A character costume performer can […]
Tag: Japan
Ig Nobel winners on display in Hakodate July 1
Two of the most eloquent Ig Nobel Prize winners will give free public talks at Future University Hakodate, Japan, on July 1, starting at 6:30 pm: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, winner of two Ig Nobel Prizes for his (and his colleagues’) various experiments with slime mold Koji Tsukada, co-inventor of the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s […]
Spoon bending – two angles
There are many and varied ways of looking at the practice of ‘SpoonBending’. Here, Hugh Laurie (a.k.a. Dr. House / Bertie Wooster / &etc) and Stephen Fry (a.k.a. Oscar Wilde / Jeeves / &etc) adopt a comedic viewpoint : Whilst Professor Yoshio Machi (a.k.a. 町 好雄) of the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tokyo Denki University, […]
Excelling at use of a mental abacus, and words, too
“In this clip the two girls are adding up 30 digits in 20 seconds while simultaneously playing ‘shiritori‘, a Japanese game in which you must say a word beginning with the last syllable of the previous word,” says the report by Alex Bellos, in The Guardian. The subhead on the article explains: “Flash Anzan, in […]
Earthquake-activated house-levitating pneumatic system
The Air Danshin Systems company of Japan says it offers pneumatic technology to protect buildings in the event of an earthquake. The shaking triggers a stream of air that levitates the house. The diagram below, from the company, shows to some extent how the system works, with blue representing the stream of air. (The Spoon & Tamago blog […]
The Ig Nobel Prizes (NHK’s fab documentary)
In 2002, NHK, Japan’s public TV network, made this documentary about the Ig Nobel Prizes. They broadcast it in Japan on Christmas eve, a time when much of the nation stays home, imbibes delicious substances, and watches television. We were told that the broadcast received the largest audience of anything broadcast on NHK during that […]
Ritual: Carp’s sake-drinking
One of our readers, a scientist who spent the first half of his life in Japan, tells of a ritual that seems to be not terribly well known or studied. He writes: This is a strange tradition in some part of Japan which I was not aware of until today, when I saw a report in Yomiuri […]
A look at the Wasabi fire alarm (Chemistry Prize)
Here’s a BBC News report about the wasabi fire alarm, whose inventors received the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry. The photo below (by Alexey Eliseev / Improbable Research) shows Makoto Imai (center) and one of his co-inventors (several others also attended the ceremony) at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, receiving their Ig Nobel Prize from Nobel laureate Roy […]
Go-go biking across Japan: Toilet power
“‘Poop As You Go’ Biogas Bike To Go On 600 Mile Tour Of Japan” reads the headline on Treehugger’s report about exactly that. Treehugger gives details: Japan’s biggest toilet maker, TOTO, takes the toilet on the road with its launch of the Toilet Bike Neo, a bike that’s powered entirely by human waste. The bike runs […]
Meat, following vanilla, from dung
Hearing about unexpected things, people used to say, “How do they think up these things? There must be something in the water….” The Digital Trends web site, among others (see video, below), reports that a scientist has devised a way to make meat, of a sort, from feces: Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama […]