tokyo: October 2006

Laci!

Laci has left Tokyo 2 days ago :-(
We had a really good time! While he was here, the world chess championship was running. We were watching several games live on the internet. Fortunately, our idol (Vladimir Kramnik) won.

Some pictures!

Laci eating Sushi (with a fork ;-)

Laci with some Shibuya girls.

Funny: Laci was totally craving for red bull (which is not that easy to get in Japan). 1 hour later, we met some red bull advertising girls. They gave us free red bull + a nice chat. Life can be remarkably coincidential!

The first time since I am in Japan, I have spoken with Yakuzas. How this happened is a long story.... (stay tuned for my upcoming memoirs in bookform). It all started, because I have lost my way (as usual in Japan, haha)... At some point it was a little scary. But, finally it turned out nicely. We were led to some back-room of a Japanese bar. There, this picture was taken.

Little dude can dance

Can anyone translate this?

awesome movie

Cheers,
Chris

My child is born

Currently, my old friend Laszlo is visiting me. Like me, he is half Hungarian and half German. We had met playing chess. At some point we were training together very closely (I guess around the time when we both were among the strongest youth players in Germany). I would spend weeks in Berlin (his home-town), and he would spend weeks at Munich (my home-town). We looked at games from the 18th century :-) Also, he introduced me to live in a big city. Berlin is soooo much bigger than Munich! Now the roles are reversed: I live in one of the world's biggest cities, and he lives in a small village in England.
Life's strange :-) I am very glad to show him Tokyo. Now, he thinks about coming here to do an intership at C. :-)

Wow! Today, I have finished to write a research paper. The last 5 months, I have been working on it. I feel good now! I had worked so hard... But, after submitting my paper, I went out with Laci to the infamous Roppongi. Partying was insane! It is 8:00 in the morning, now!

Some thoughts about research papers:
Two years ago, an interesting theory about researchers and their papers was presented to me by research homie Alex (thanks Alex for enlighting me!!). Also, I had some discussion with my mother about this topic. She totally agrees on the point....

"Normal people" get married and have children, when they approach 30. This is totally understandable. They (typically) have a safe job and their life is not changing that much. One way to think about their urge to get children (I know this is an extreme opinion!!) is that they want some change in their lives. For many researchers life is very exciting, but very unsettled.

For example, 2 years ago, I had lived in New York. For one year now, I am living in Japan. Next year, I might live somewhere else (my current favourties: Shanghai, Brazil, or Hawaii). In any case, I cannot imagine to have children now.... My life is just too unsettled. Many reserachers have the same life. As Kant said: "The foremost goal of any reseracher must be to disemminate his knowledge on the world". Living according to this maxime requires sacrifices....

So what is the equivalent to children in a researcher's life? (now, I am getting to my point :-)

The answer is: research papers! Typically, you work 1/2 year like crazy (especially the last month) to complete a project.
Then, you summarize your results in a paper, and send it to some conference. If everything goes well, your paper is accepted and you can present it at the conference (which is a noble act towards mankind, according to Kant). So we can see one commonality to gettting children: you carry something inside you, and when it is ready, it gets born....

Another analogy is how exhausted you get. I will never bear a child. However, I imagine that how exhausted you get, is similar to completing a research paper. The last week, I was sleeping only around 4 hours per night. Today, I have been 24 hours awake. With all this effort, I managed to finish my paper 5 minutes before the deadline. You can imagine how stressful this is!

Now, I am totally exhausted. I feel, that I cannot think about anything serious for 1-2 weeks. The last thing I did before falling into a deep and dreamless sleep (I estimate 24 hours will be necessary): write this blog entry.