String theory explained

I'm vaguely aware of how string theory works (or rather, might work). It's an attempt at a theory of everything that tries to unite quantum mechanics. Basically it suggests that quarks and electrons within an atom are one dimensional strands (strings, one might say) and that by being so this makes everything work out. That's about all I know. Superstrings, string field theory, the holographic principle and heterotic strings are just a mystery to me though.

So I was enormously pleased when I was shown the following videos. In them, Professor Edward Witten of the Institute of Advanced Study (at Princeton) explains in fairly simple terms (fairly simple - you do still need to be smart) where string theory came from and how it works.

I love that the internet has this stuff. The cute cat pictures are nice and all, but I wouldn't have any difficulty in getting hold of them without the net, but access to the thoughts of the world's leading theoretical physicist? Kick ass.

Oh and the videos seem to have been taken from something Italian, which means you might have to skip a couple of sequences of graphics as the narrator speaks in that ridiculous jibber-jabber that Italians think is a language. But it sure beats listening to Hawking burbling on in his robot voice.

Oh and I realise that some of you might think that Steven Hawking is hot shit because he's always on The Simpsons and he's written a couple of books that people pretend to have read, but Witten is the real deal.

Jpop: Okay AKB48, you really are freaking me out now

AKB48 - an ephebophile's dream

I like J-pop. It's true. I genuinely enjoy Japanese pop music and have quite a large collection. I even present a radio show about it on some tiny god-awful community radio station (it's not a popular show and everyone at the station hates me). So yeah, I do like j-pop and I don't care who knows it. But AKB48 are just the most monstrously relentless j-pop machine and I think they're going to enslave the planet.

The English subtitles on this Morning Musume hit are rather fun

It all started with Morning Musume, a manufactured girl group who have quite a lot of members. In order to keep the interest of the fans, the members of Morning Musume "graduate" from the group when they hit a certain age and new members are brought in. The girls are encouraged to be effectively "blank canvases" upon which a personality and role in the group will be placed. There are several sister groups to which graduate members can move and from which new members can be drawn. It's a slick operation and the constant turnover of members ensures a level of freshness. The downside is that the management are very strict and controlling to the point where one girl was sacked for smoking in public as it was at odds with the image chosen for her.

Momusu (as us seasoned j-pop fans sometimes call them) might seem extraordinarily manufactured and somewhat sinister, but AKB48 have taken the same idea and just run with it. It seems that every teenage girl in Japan is a member of AKB48. The main group is comprised of four teams (A, K, B and 4) of sixteen members. The point of this is to allow them to perform live every day - the band has its own theatre in the Akihabara (hence AKB) area of Tokyo with the teams taking turns to perform.

Now you might think that it would be difficult to sell out a theatre three times a day, every single day but AKB48 are so popular that tickets are sold out years in advance and are allocated by a lottery. Girls audition to join the various sister groups (of which there are fourteen at my last count) and then elections are held to choose girls to promote to the main group. To give you some idea of the level of their popularity, at the last election, more than a million fans voted. Cleverly, the voting forms are distributed within certain singles, so you have to buy one in order to vote.

Picture by Puramyun31

It's not just theatres that are part of the AKB48 empire as there's a chain of shops too selling nothing but AKB48 stuff and there are now even cafes being opened all over their sales territories. The group controls every aspect of their business and makes sure that fans are always able to spend money on AKB48 music and merchandising at any time.

Since their debut in 2005, AKB48 has been through (by my count)... 147 members. The fourteen sister groups all have multiple teams of 16 members too making for a total approaching around 1,000 current and former members in just a few years. By the end of this article, that number will probably have doubled.

As a further example of the marketing genius behind the group, sister groups are based in other cities and even countries in order to expand the brand and make sure that fans are able to (pay to) see their local chapter any time they like. The sister groups include: NMB48 in Namba, Osaka; SKE48 in Sakae, Nagoya; JKT48 in Jakarta, Indonesia; TPE48 in Taipei, Taiwan; SNH48 in Shanghia, China, etc, etc.

Akimoto Yasushi - he looks more like an
accountant than an evil genius, doesn't he?

AKB48 have dominated the charts in Japan since 2005 and often have more than one single charting at the same time. Obviously the girls don't play any instruments or write any songs - that's down to the evil genius behind it all and a team of composers. The music varies but is usually bubblegum pop of some variety, but what's truly amazing is the way that Akimoto Yasushi is able to dream up bizarre marketing ploys that keep the band in the news as well as the charts.

You can even visit their website and create your own clone and do stuff like download wallpaper of it

For instance, last year he created a CGI member of the group. Yes, that's right - a thousand girls weren't enough so he had to digitise them and make a computer composite. She (it?) appeared in an advert for candy (Ice no Mi - which I've tried and is quite nice) and then a video was released explaining how it was done.




The current fuss is over another advert for confectionery which is a remarkably clever way of getting teenage lipstick lesbianism onto mainstream TV during peak hours. Various groups have appeared on the news to condemn them for promoting fake homosexuality to impressionable children, but one has to wonder if the management aren't actually paying these groups to pretend to be outraged.

Just for kicks, Akimoto arranged for several of the girls to be trained to play instruments well enough to be able to actually play one song live (although they still needed a few real musicians in there to carry them and they're not very good). The official AKB48 anime series is in production right now and will be released later this year.




The latest wheeze is that AKB48 have launched their own ISP. As well as (surprisingly good) broadband, they offer exclusive access to various offers as well as various online features not accessible from anywhere else. Just click on the video above and be freaked out by the baby predictor. Yup, you can upload a photograph of yourself and they'll calculate what your offspring would look like if you mated with a member of the group. Crikey.




I've just realised that I've got to the end of this article without actually showing you any of their music. Well, here's an astonishingly popular song about birthdays. Don't enjoy it too much though - the youngest one is eleven years old. Despite all the appalling j-pop rubbish that I like, I don't actually like AKB48. It's hard to avoid them though and I fully expect Akimoto Yasushi to take over Japan in a bloodless coup and reveal that they're actually all robots.

Japanese space toilets from the future

I stole this banner from the excellent Tofugu website rather than make my own

One of the things that freaks me out the most about Japan is their cleanliness. Oh sure, it's nice to be clean and it's not like I want to live in Africa. But there's an unsettling cleanliness in Japan that I find, uh... unsettling (note to self: buy thesaurus). The only other place that I've experienced this was during my first visit to Denmark. I'd been in Copenhagen for a couple of days before I realised that the uneasy feelings that I was uh... feeling (really got to get that thesaurus) were down to how clean everything was.

Look at that picture below. It's a Japanese alleyway. A tiny little hidden back alley. And it's clean. It's cleaner than my house. The Japanese hate dirt.

Japanese toilets are the front line in the battle against feculence (yes, I have just gone out and got a thesaurus). Despite their small size, Japanese houses usually have two separate rooms for toilet activities: bathrooms are for washing and ablutions whereas toilets are for defecation and micturition (hah! - that thesaurus is coming into its own). Heck, there are even special shoes to wear when you enter the toilet in a Japanese home.

Lavatory activity is still a surprisingly taboo topic in Western society. My doctor recently asked "how often do you open your bowels?" which rather took me aback. We simply don't have a word or phrase for describing the act of having a shit without resorting to excessively clinical descriptions or vulgarity. We have dozens of euphemisms for the porcelain throne, but no proper word - even "toilet" is a euphemism meaning "a cloth bag for clothes." But in Japan, toilets aren't just a hole for the deposit of bodily waste, but a voyage into a space-age future.





Just in case that incomprehensible penguin advert didn't quite explain how Toto Washlet toilets actually work, here's a video made by someone who owns one explaining the functions:




The seat raises itself when it detects you approaching and lowers when you've finished, thus robbing Japanese female stand-up comedians of half their act. The seat is heated, there's a deodorising function and there are a series of sprays and heaters for washing and drying your arse. All of this is controlled through a panel that will baffle a rocket scientist.

Believe it or not, there are more high-tech versions out there. Some toilets even perform stool-analysis and send the results, via an internet connection, to your doctor so you can be alerted to any potential health problems before symptoms become apparent.




And it's not just the toilet itself. There are a variety of equally confusing devices in Japanese lavatories. My favourite is the otohime (literally: sound princess). This is an electronic device mounted to the wall that produces sounds to cover up any 'toilet noises'. Most make water-related noises, but some play tunes and others have a variety of sounds to choose from. Skip to the 2 minute mark in the video above to hear one in action. God, I want one of these.




Our final video just confuses me further. The chap in the vid visits a disabled bathroom in a Japanese airport and encounters some devices that I've never seen before. I asked the wife (Taiwan is right next to Japan and shares a lot of technology and culture with them) and even she didn't know. The first thing he looks at does indeed resemble a sink, but the flushing thing has me confused as indeed does the lack on plug or drain. And the odd urinal-looking thing that the guy reckons is a stand up shitter just baffles me. Anyone got any clues?

So there we go: an introduction to the weird world of Japanese futuristic lavatories. 80% of Japanese households have got a space toilet. Talking of peculiarly unsettling nations, Toto's second-largest market for their robot toilets is Switzerland - why am I not surprised?

Miku Hatsune attempts murder. Puny human survives this time

At the Sapporo snow festival each year, teams compete to make the largest and most outlandish snow sculptures possible. This year, Crypton Future Media unveiled a 3 metre tall scuplture of everyone's favourite fictional singer, Miku Hatsune.

As some visitors to the show were passing by, Miku detached her head and flung it at the back of an elderly woman, hospitalising her. Authorities were quick to suggest that the sculpture's head was too heavy and had simply fallen off, striking the woman.This is obvious bullshit and shows the lengths to which the Japanese authorities are willing to go in order to collude with our new electronic overlords.




Crypton Future Media have announced they will be rebuilding the Miku Hatsune sculpture in the hopes that she'll get the kill next time, or something like that - I can't translate Japanese terribly well.