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Create Your Family Tree with Geni
Another useful Web 2.0 application I am playing-with right-now is Geni. Their tagline: “Geni is the fast, free, fun way to create your family tree - and stay in touch”. Although fast may not apply to those unfortunate souls who does not have adequate internet pipe bandwidth (I’m exaggerating here 
), it is free and it is fun. Other than that, it can be used as a good exercise to remember your immediate (and even not so immediate) relatives.
On the first go, I was able to name (not their full name though, we used to know each other by our nick name only) over 50 of my closest relatives. Not a bad feat for someone who is terrible at remembering names like me 
. It grows to 106 by the time I wrote this. All uncles and aunts from my father’s side, and so their children (i.e. my cousins) are all covered, I think. Some with their husband/wife (I simply forgot the name of my in-laws, or even worse I don’t even know their name 
), even less are their children (e.g. the first-cousin-once-removed — I just found out that this term does exist ). Need a lot of help here ….
The bigger problem is on my mother’s side. My mother is the 11th child (of 13 siblings). I was able to name only 7 of them (miss the other 5) * shame on me 
*. I think this happened for at least two reasons:
- my mother is among the youngest, some of them are already passed-away even when I have not been born (still, this is not an excuse to not even knowing them).
- after the marriage, my mother lives quite far from her brothers and sisters, hindering intensive interactions with them (unlike the aunts and uncles from my father who were still living in Jogja until now).
Excuses excuses excuses . Yes, excuses, but I will ask my mom to be able to fill the blanks. On the good side, for the uncles closer to my mom (i.e. the age differences are not so great) I still very much remember them 
.
The other good (and important) thing is the family tree will surely help me completing the homework: knowing and remembering the relatives of my wife . Not an easy task… with 6 uncles/aunts from my father-in-law (got them all covered already I guess) and 16 (!) from my mother-in-law … (It’s not easy, isn’t it honey? 
)
May be you should build your family tree too, who knows that we share the same great great great great grand parent?
Processor vs Iron
The “power wall” problem is one of the main issues in research for next generation chip architecture. This problem is best described by the following figure.
Most (if not all) of the processors commonly used today are much hotter than the typical steam iron . In fact with the current growth, it is predicted that soon the power density will reach the level within the nuclear reactor 
. In the late 80’s, the shift to CMOS technologies (from bipolar) are the answer for this power density problem (notice the drop around 90’s in the figure above). For today’s problem, there have been no clear answer. The multicore/multiprocessor approach which offers more efficient performance/watt ratio is promoted to be one of the possible solutions.
The picture is taken from Lecture 2: Introduction to Cell Processor (Dr. Michael Perrone, IBM) page 8, part of the 6.189 Multicore Programming Primer course in MIT (the whole very excellent lecture materials are available online). Originally, I got the link to the course from the Multiprocessor Report blog.
Pollen Information
Spring should be the best season in Japan, with the exception of the rising number of pollen produced by mainly the cedar trees that causes hay fever (Japanese: 花粉症) for some people (including me, unfortunately ) .
That’s where the following website: http://kafun.taiki.go.jp/, that provides the information to the concentration of pollen around Japan, can be very useful. I will know when do I really have to put my mask on, and when it is wiser to just stay at home to minimize contact with the pollens .
Further information on hay-fever:
- Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever
- “Allergy Season Arrives“, webjapan.org, March 2000
- Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s page on pollen information.
- The library section of the web mentioned above.
Additional note: Even monkeys are also affected by this pollens [via JapanProbe]. Poor animals .
