Last week I read about a Japanese robot with a hell of a niche function: It makes lab rats depressed. By bullying them. Between the robot, my love/hate relationship with Japan, and the giant mirror held up to the face of society, this was too good to pass up. Though as I began researching for [...]
A discussion about creepy robots would not be complete without at least a passing mention of JAPAN. Were it not for its penchant for being really damn weird, I could say I was proud of my heritage. But alas, somebody over there has to go and invent some sort of drone-mounted, x-ray upskirt microscope, and [...]
Scale is an interesting thing, especially when related to human perception of scale. This happens a lot with numbers. For most people’s frame of mind, the difference between a million and a billion is negligible. They’re just “big numbers.” But the difference is incredible. To put it one way, a million seconds is almost 12 [...]
Stop. STOP. Before you go defending your hometown as having the “best pizza on the east coast” (Looking at you, Pepe’s. You couldn’t even bother to be open when I last visited. Dead to me.), know that all of your claims to the contrary—every last one of them—are hearsay, conjecture, and anecdotal at best. I’m [...]
I love rice. I also love robots. So now you can see why modern rice cookers excite me. At the end of my interview with Zojirushi Corp. marketing manager Marilyn Matsuba, I asked her, “How proud are you about the fact that your company has produced the closest thing to an all-in-one, automatic, food preparation [...]
Japan has a population problem. Though it isn’t what you think. For the reasons mentioned in the comic, Japan is becoming a nation of the elderly. Low birth rates and higher life expectancy has resulted in more elderly with less younger relatives to take care of them, but the impetus behind the Mimamori Hotline has [...]
Growing up in a small Italian-catholic area, I didn’t know any other Japanese people. Many of you who know me, and the rest that probably deduced why I have a funny name, know that I’m half Japanese. I hated my name because nobody could ever pronounce it right and the cleverest derogatory nickname bullies could come [...]