百京円
This is the first post in a while that I'm writing in the little blogspot window thing instead of on Microsoft Word. I'm in Alisa's living room right now, staying here tonight instead of driving back to Kasumi and then back to Muraoka early in the morning for all my internet appointments. "But Alisa doesn't have internet yet, does she?" you might be asking yourselves. She doesn't. But we have made the discovery that somehow Jarryd's computer broadcasts some sort of wireless signal -- I don't entirely understand it, but that's okay! I'm willing to use internet I don't understand. And I am so much more comfortable hanging out here than in the empty apartment of a guy I've barely met. Heh. So tomorrow I should be able to use internet from here or Jarryd's place. よかった!
Firstly, I remembered what it was I'd also meant to say last time: namely, I had an insight into one little reason some of my interactions have been confusing. I should have thought of this before because it was something I already knew: in Japanese, the way you answer negative yes/no questions is different from English. In other words, if someone says, say, "Did you not eat lunch yet?" and you say "No," you've just negated their negative, so you're saying you did eat lunch. I've had a bunch of exchanges along the lines of,
日本人:これ、いらない? (Do you not need this?)
Me: ううん。(No.) *shakes head*
日本人:いる? (You do need it?)
Me: いいえ。(No.)
日本人: *confused*
And just yesterday it occurred to me that that's why they've been confused! I should have been answering "yes, I do not need it."
And now, I should be going to sleep, since it's 2:07am, but...I'd rather write about my day! Heh. So today I hung out for a while at the 公民館 (kouminkan -- remember those kanji 'cause from now on I won't transliterate), doing math, which was fun; and every little while one of the people would come over and look over my shoulder and say "へえっ、すごい難しい。" ("Heh, that's really hard!") There aren't any math people there so all of them are very impressed when they glance at whatever page I have open of the textbook. Unfortunately no one has asked me what sort of math it was, so I haven't gotten to use 楕円曲線 in conversation. I feel, though, like they wouldn't know that term...and if they knew what an ellipse is, which is likely, I'd probably have a hard time explaining that elliptic curves are not actually ellipses, but are just called elliptic curves for some rather involved reason...so perhaps it's just as well that no one's asked. ^_^
白井さん (Shirai-san) did ask me to say something that I thought was better about Americans than Japanese people. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just said it was a hard question and I'd keep thinking. (When I conveyed the question to Adam who was on gchat at the time, he suggested "they're modest." But I didn't know how to say that in Japanese...and we both agreed the irony would be lost on them anyway and they'd just be sort of confused. Heh. Ironically, the Japanese word for "modest" came up in conversation later; apparently it's 謙遜、けんそん. So now I know. Meanwhile it reminded me of the story my mom used to tell, where there's a Rabbi or something, some learned teacher-like person, and he's sitting with his eyes closed, and a few of his students come in, and think that he's asleep. So they start whispering to each other about how wonderful he is, how he's a wise and patient teacher and a kind person and his philosophical insights are so profound, and so on...and finally, the teacher, who is in fact awake, is getting a bit frustrated listening to them listing all his virtues, because he feels they're not including everything they ought to be; and finally he can't stand it anymore and he opens his eyes and looks at them, offended, and says "And of my modesty, you say nothing?")
Then I drove down to 村岡 (Muraoka -- learn the place name kanji 'cause it's more fun than writing them in romaji) and Jarryd and Alisa and I went to 豊岡 (Toyooka -- yup, same "oka") to a meeting with three Japanese women that Jarryd does volunteer stuff with. Right now they're working on a play, The Three Little Pigs, which is to be performed on October 11th for a bunch of kids. One of the women lives in 香住 (definitely learn that one -- it's Kasumi), and her son goes to 二中 (Nichu, the smaller school; that's the kanji for two, and middle, short for 第二中学校, number two middle school). She gave me her phone number and told me to call her if I ever need help with anything. We worked on reading over the script; the three women are going to be the pigs, Jarryd is the wolf, and apparently Alisa and I have volunteered to be mother pigs, with the job of sort of hyping up the audience in the beginning. (There was temporary worry about there being two mother pigs...but then Alisa pointed out that nowhere in our script was it written that the three pigs were siblings, so they could just be friends, with separate mothers. So that was okay then. A lesbian pig couple is apparently a little too much to ask the Japanese kids to accept...) We spent a lot of time repeating "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!" Which is quite hard to say if you don't really speak English. And hard to explain exactly what it means even if you do...And we also talked a bit about how to do the set, and apparently I am going to paint the basic background, just some simple mountains and a sky or something. Yay, painting. And it was just really fun and the people were lovely and it's nice to be getting involved in something. :-)
Afterward we had a bit of time to kill, so Jarryd and Alisa and I and the two younger women from the meeting (Ayumi and Tae, the two who don't live in 香住) went to an arcade/bowling place for like twenty minutes, and we did the little photo booth thing -- it's like one of those little photo booths that we have in the US, only it makes those look utterly pathetic. These ones are really fancy and have all sorts of backgrounds and special effects and you can draw and write stuff on the pictures. And the photos you get are stickers, I think. They came out really nice, actually.
Then 'twas time for dinner. For dinner we were joined by Tania, a math teacher from 香住高校 (high school) whose last name might or might not have been Ishigawa (let's assume it was for now), and an English teacher from 一中 (Icchu; can anyone guess what 一 means?) named Kuroda-san. So he's one of the teachers I'll be working with. But he's apparently only been teaching for three months. The conversation went back and forth between English and Japanese, which was nice because it was good practice but I was able to find a way to say pretty much anything I wanted to say. Oh, and we went to the restaurant the party last weekend was at, so I could eat Mexican food! うれしかったよ。 I had a share of some nachos, and a burrito. I learned that root beer is not common in either Japan or Australia; Alisa ordered root beer and everyone wanted to try some, and the Japanese people all said it tasted like medicine and they made very weird faces when they tried it. I got Dr. Pepper and that was also unfamiliar to them but they seemed to like it better. びっくりした; maybe it's just because I've been drinking root beer since I was little, but I'd have thought Dr. Pepper would be a harder taste to get used to. I tend to think of root beer as sort of neutral tasting. But I guess maybe it was the first soda I ever drank much of...
So I was chatting a bit with Ishigawa-san about his teaching, and he was saying (as I've heard several times about 香住高校) that there's a really wide range there, from students who are studying for the college entrance exams to students who don't care about school at all, and are doing the marine studies curriculum, i.e. fishing, which is not aimed at going to college. So he was giving me an example of the kind of problem he'd do with those students: Bill Gates, he said, has about 10,000,000,000,000 yen. Suppose that every single day, he spent 1,000,000 yen. Then how many years would it take him to run out of money? (I guess we're assuming he's not making any new money during this time...) And he told me to guess, without calculating. The woman sitting next to me (who was actually some random other woman who joined us later; another friend of Jarryd's, I guess, but I never quite caught who she was) guessed 50 years. Now, obviously, it's ten million days, and ten million divided by 365, even accounting for leap years, is not 50. But I know it's more fun when people make ridiculously low guesses like that...so I guessed 5000 years. He said it's about 27,000. Okay, I said, now suppose you have a chess board, and on the first square you put one grain of rice (I needed Jarryd's help to say "grain of rice" in Japanese...), and on the second you put two, and on the third you put four, and then eight, and so on for the whole board. How many grains do you need in total? And he kept wanting to calculate, but I told him to guess, because that's what he'd told me with his problem when I started counting up zeroes. So finally he guessed 100,000,000. Now, I did this problem in middle school -- and me being all anti-calculator, I had in fact written out all of the powers of two up to 2^64. But that was middle school. And I couldn't remember for sure exactly what the order of magnitude was, but I knew it started with Q. So I told him it was at least 1,000,000,000,000,000. Then, since he now had permission to calculate, he took the paper I was using and wrote down "log_10(2) = .301, 301x64 = 19200 + 64 = 19264", so apparently it should have been close to 10^19, so more like ten quintillion. I liked the fact that he knew log2 up to three decimal places off the top of his head. I told that to Alisa and Jarryd on the ride back and they said I am attracted to odd things...
(Being now at my computer, and having since middle school abandoned my principles, I can say that the correct answer is in fact 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice.)
I asked the same question to the two women from the meeting, except I changed it to be giving money each day for two months, one yen the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on, and asked how much money you'd have after two months. They were very reluctant to guess. Finally they guessed 3200 yen. They were very surprised when I wrote out one quintillion. They didn't even know the Japanese words for so many zeros. (One quintillion, apparently, is 百京、ひゃくけい, a hundred kei.) But, impressively, Ayumi noticed while she was working on the problem, starting to add up the first few days I guess, that when you added up everything up to a certain day, the total was one less than what you got the next day. A key observation.
So that was fun. ^_^
We were at the restaurant until about 12:30, and then came back here, and now it's -- eep! -- 3:21, and I've got a Skype date with my parents in five and a half hours...so I guess I should get some sleep.
Powers of two make me think of this song:
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds;
You and your arithmetic,
You'll probably go far.
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds;
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are...
Firstly, I remembered what it was I'd also meant to say last time: namely, I had an insight into one little reason some of my interactions have been confusing. I should have thought of this before because it was something I already knew: in Japanese, the way you answer negative yes/no questions is different from English. In other words, if someone says, say, "Did you not eat lunch yet?" and you say "No," you've just negated their negative, so you're saying you did eat lunch. I've had a bunch of exchanges along the lines of,
日本人:これ、いらない? (Do you not need this?)
Me: ううん。(No.) *shakes head*
日本人:いる? (You do need it?)
Me: いいえ。(No.)
日本人: *confused*
And just yesterday it occurred to me that that's why they've been confused! I should have been answering "yes, I do not need it."
And now, I should be going to sleep, since it's 2:07am, but...I'd rather write about my day! Heh. So today I hung out for a while at the 公民館 (kouminkan -- remember those kanji 'cause from now on I won't transliterate), doing math, which was fun; and every little while one of the people would come over and look over my shoulder and say "へえっ、すごい難しい。" ("Heh, that's really hard!") There aren't any math people there so all of them are very impressed when they glance at whatever page I have open of the textbook. Unfortunately no one has asked me what sort of math it was, so I haven't gotten to use 楕円曲線 in conversation. I feel, though, like they wouldn't know that term...and if they knew what an ellipse is, which is likely, I'd probably have a hard time explaining that elliptic curves are not actually ellipses, but are just called elliptic curves for some rather involved reason...so perhaps it's just as well that no one's asked. ^_^
白井さん (Shirai-san) did ask me to say something that I thought was better about Americans than Japanese people. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just said it was a hard question and I'd keep thinking. (When I conveyed the question to Adam who was on gchat at the time, he suggested "they're modest." But I didn't know how to say that in Japanese...and we both agreed the irony would be lost on them anyway and they'd just be sort of confused. Heh. Ironically, the Japanese word for "modest" came up in conversation later; apparently it's 謙遜、けんそん. So now I know. Meanwhile it reminded me of the story my mom used to tell, where there's a Rabbi or something, some learned teacher-like person, and he's sitting with his eyes closed, and a few of his students come in, and think that he's asleep. So they start whispering to each other about how wonderful he is, how he's a wise and patient teacher and a kind person and his philosophical insights are so profound, and so on...and finally, the teacher, who is in fact awake, is getting a bit frustrated listening to them listing all his virtues, because he feels they're not including everything they ought to be; and finally he can't stand it anymore and he opens his eyes and looks at them, offended, and says "And of my modesty, you say nothing?")
Then I drove down to 村岡 (Muraoka -- learn the place name kanji 'cause it's more fun than writing them in romaji) and Jarryd and Alisa and I went to 豊岡 (Toyooka -- yup, same "oka") to a meeting with three Japanese women that Jarryd does volunteer stuff with. Right now they're working on a play, The Three Little Pigs, which is to be performed on October 11th for a bunch of kids. One of the women lives in 香住 (definitely learn that one -- it's Kasumi), and her son goes to 二中 (Nichu, the smaller school; that's the kanji for two, and middle, short for 第二中学校, number two middle school). She gave me her phone number and told me to call her if I ever need help with anything. We worked on reading over the script; the three women are going to be the pigs, Jarryd is the wolf, and apparently Alisa and I have volunteered to be mother pigs, with the job of sort of hyping up the audience in the beginning. (There was temporary worry about there being two mother pigs...but then Alisa pointed out that nowhere in our script was it written that the three pigs were siblings, so they could just be friends, with separate mothers. So that was okay then. A lesbian pig couple is apparently a little too much to ask the Japanese kids to accept...) We spent a lot of time repeating "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!" Which is quite hard to say if you don't really speak English. And hard to explain exactly what it means even if you do...And we also talked a bit about how to do the set, and apparently I am going to paint the basic background, just some simple mountains and a sky or something. Yay, painting. And it was just really fun and the people were lovely and it's nice to be getting involved in something. :-)
Afterward we had a bit of time to kill, so Jarryd and Alisa and I and the two younger women from the meeting (Ayumi and Tae, the two who don't live in 香住) went to an arcade/bowling place for like twenty minutes, and we did the little photo booth thing -- it's like one of those little photo booths that we have in the US, only it makes those look utterly pathetic. These ones are really fancy and have all sorts of backgrounds and special effects and you can draw and write stuff on the pictures. And the photos you get are stickers, I think. They came out really nice, actually.
Then 'twas time for dinner. For dinner we were joined by Tania, a math teacher from 香住高校 (high school) whose last name might or might not have been Ishigawa (let's assume it was for now), and an English teacher from 一中 (Icchu; can anyone guess what 一 means?) named Kuroda-san. So he's one of the teachers I'll be working with. But he's apparently only been teaching for three months. The conversation went back and forth between English and Japanese, which was nice because it was good practice but I was able to find a way to say pretty much anything I wanted to say. Oh, and we went to the restaurant the party last weekend was at, so I could eat Mexican food! うれしかったよ。 I had a share of some nachos, and a burrito. I learned that root beer is not common in either Japan or Australia; Alisa ordered root beer and everyone wanted to try some, and the Japanese people all said it tasted like medicine and they made very weird faces when they tried it. I got Dr. Pepper and that was also unfamiliar to them but they seemed to like it better. びっくりした; maybe it's just because I've been drinking root beer since I was little, but I'd have thought Dr. Pepper would be a harder taste to get used to. I tend to think of root beer as sort of neutral tasting. But I guess maybe it was the first soda I ever drank much of...
So I was chatting a bit with Ishigawa-san about his teaching, and he was saying (as I've heard several times about 香住高校) that there's a really wide range there, from students who are studying for the college entrance exams to students who don't care about school at all, and are doing the marine studies curriculum, i.e. fishing, which is not aimed at going to college. So he was giving me an example of the kind of problem he'd do with those students: Bill Gates, he said, has about 10,000,000,000,000 yen. Suppose that every single day, he spent 1,000,000 yen. Then how many years would it take him to run out of money? (I guess we're assuming he's not making any new money during this time...) And he told me to guess, without calculating. The woman sitting next to me (who was actually some random other woman who joined us later; another friend of Jarryd's, I guess, but I never quite caught who she was) guessed 50 years. Now, obviously, it's ten million days, and ten million divided by 365, even accounting for leap years, is not 50. But I know it's more fun when people make ridiculously low guesses like that...so I guessed 5000 years. He said it's about 27,000. Okay, I said, now suppose you have a chess board, and on the first square you put one grain of rice (I needed Jarryd's help to say "grain of rice" in Japanese...), and on the second you put two, and on the third you put four, and then eight, and so on for the whole board. How many grains do you need in total? And he kept wanting to calculate, but I told him to guess, because that's what he'd told me with his problem when I started counting up zeroes. So finally he guessed 100,000,000. Now, I did this problem in middle school -- and me being all anti-calculator, I had in fact written out all of the powers of two up to 2^64. But that was middle school. And I couldn't remember for sure exactly what the order of magnitude was, but I knew it started with Q. So I told him it was at least 1,000,000,000,000,000. Then, since he now had permission to calculate, he took the paper I was using and wrote down "log_10(2) = .301, 301x64 = 19200 + 64 = 19264", so apparently it should have been close to 10^19, so more like ten quintillion. I liked the fact that he knew log2 up to three decimal places off the top of his head. I told that to Alisa and Jarryd on the ride back and they said I am attracted to odd things...
(Being now at my computer, and having since middle school abandoned my principles, I can say that the correct answer is in fact 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice.)
I asked the same question to the two women from the meeting, except I changed it to be giving money each day for two months, one yen the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on, and asked how much money you'd have after two months. They were very reluctant to guess. Finally they guessed 3200 yen. They were very surprised when I wrote out one quintillion. They didn't even know the Japanese words for so many zeros. (One quintillion, apparently, is 百京、ひゃくけい, a hundred kei.) But, impressively, Ayumi noticed while she was working on the problem, starting to add up the first few days I guess, that when you added up everything up to a certain day, the total was one less than what you got the next day. A key observation.
So that was fun. ^_^
We were at the restaurant until about 12:30, and then came back here, and now it's -- eep! -- 3:21, and I've got a Skype date with my parents in five and a half hours...so I guess I should get some sleep.
Powers of two make me think of this song:
Measuring the marigolds;
You and your arithmetic,
You'll probably go far.
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds;
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are...
posted by Ashila at 12:56 PM
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