Keisuke Toyama Christmas Piano Concert

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I went to Sakai Civic Hall to listen to "Keisuke Toyama Christmas Piano Concert." Toyama was born in Sapporo in 1984 and got the first rank for the piano section of the 73rd Japan Music Competition in 2004. Thus, he is one of pianists whose activity in the future is much expected. The program included Beethoven's Piano Sonatas No. 8 "Pathétique" and No. 23 "Appassionata." An encore was Franz Liszt's "Dream of Love" No. 3.

One of the factors that make the joy of listening to music seems to be two kinds of repetition. One kind is the repetition of the listener's experience, i.e., repeated listening to the work we already know; and the other, the repetition in the structure of the work, i.e., repeated appearance of the melody that constitutes the theme of the single work. Did anyone already write a similar thing? If you knew that this was the case, you would just have enjoyed the repetition of reading the same thought.

Which Is the Real One?

The cover of the August 18 issue of Nature carried a fancy photo in order to symbolize one of the letter report [1] in the issue, together with the introductory words, "Coffee break: Cleaning up the 'coffee-ring' effect has practical applications in particle deposition." The mechanical pencil in the photo was of nearly the same size as a real one, so that I often reached my hand out to pick it up while the journal was on the desk. To commemorate my repeated mistake, I took a picture of the cover with a real pencil on it. Can you guess which is the real one?

1. P. J. Yunker, T. Still, M. A. Lohr and A. G. Yodh, Suppression of the coffee-ring effect by shpae-dependent capillary interactions, Nature vol. 476, p. 308 (2011).

My Face Flew with Discovery

I participated in "Face in Space" of NASA. It is the project to launch the images and (or) names of the participants into orbit to make them a part of history. My participation was for Shuttle Discovery's Mission STS-133. Its flight was delayed a few times from the originally planned return date of September 25, 2010, to March 7, 2011. Thus, I got my commemorative flight certificate signed by the Mission Commander (the above image) yesterday. The words on the certificate read as follows:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Face in Space

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Congratulations!
This certifies that the face of Tatsuo Tabata has flown in space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-133 from February - March 9, 2011. The face was flown on Discovery's mission to the International Space Station at an altitude of 220 miles above the Earth. It flew at a speed of more than 17,400 miles per hour as it orbited our planet. On behalf of my crew and all of NASA, we thank you for sharing the excitement of our mission and welcome your interest in space exploration. We were glad to have you aboard.

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STS-133 Commander Steven W. Lindsey

The next mission STS-134 is currently scheduled to launch April 19, 2011, and you can still take part in the project.

Note added later: The mission STS-133 was the last one the Discovery performed. Read the related stories "A Bittersweet Finale for the Discovery" in New York Times (March 9, 2011) and "Space shuttle Discovery lands in Florida, capping its 39th and final mission" in Scientific American (Mar 9, 2011).

Feynman and the Mirror Puzzle

On January 19, 2011, I found an online article about Feynman [1]. This article is a must read for Feynman fans, and I am sure that the person who is not yet a Feynman fan would also become a Feynman fan after reading it. I posted the following comment on it to express my little thought about Feynman.

It's regrettable that the publication of our paper that might supersede Feynman's explanation of the mirror puzzle was made after his passing. It would have been quite pleasant to talk with him about this puzzle.

The mirror puzzle is a fairly famous teaser expressed as: "Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not top and bottom?" Recently I just wrote the essence of our paper on Quora in reply to a question there [2].

1. "TED-X Caltec pays tribute to Feynman," Analysis by Jennifer Ouellette. "Caltech hosted its first ever TED-X conference last Friday, with talks by a diverse lineup of speakers all celebrating famed physicist Richard Feynman . . ." Discovery, News (January 18, 2011).
2. "The mirror puzzle: Reversal is attributed to the direction defined last." IDEA & ISAAC: Femto-Essays (January 14, 2011).

Dirac, Winnie-the-Pooh and Me

On page 261 of "The Strangest Man" [1], the much acclaimed biography of Paul Dirac written by Graham Farmelo, I found the following passage.

After dinner, he [Dirac] would read one of the books Manci had recommended to him (including Winnie the Pooh) [. . .]

Dirac was a British theoretical physicist and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." Manci was the sister of Eugene Wigner, who was a Hungarian-American physicist and also Nobel Laureate. Manci married Dirac in 1937. The anecdote expressed in the above quote was of two years before their marriage.

Stories in the book Winnie-the-Pooh [2] are about the adventures of a teddy bear [3]. Perhaps, most readers of this book are children, though it is also amusing to adults. Therefore, the fact that Dirac, then already a Nobel Laureate and more than thirty years old, read that book is smile provocative.

I especially like this anecdote for another reason. It is that I read Winnie-the-Pooh at an age similar to Dirac's when he read it. I read the Japanese edition of the book [4] to my first daughter Yuko (now forty-seven years old) when she was a small child. To my delight, she wrote in her blog a few years ago that she kept the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which I used to read to her, even then as one of her most valuable treasures.

While Yuko was still a little girl, I saw a father and his daughter at the bookshop of a department store in Osaka. They were looking for some English book. Soon the father found it. The daughter took a copy up from a small pile, opened it and read the first sentence of Chapter 1 aloud, "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, . . ." She then said, "This is it!" The father bought it for her. Perhaps, she had learned the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh in English at school and wanted to read the whole book. I then wished to do the same in a few years for Yuko as that father did for her daughter; but it did not happen.

Instead, I had a chance of taking Yuko to a short animation film "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" [5] released by The Walt Disney Company in 1966. (The second daughter Yasuko was yet too young to watch it; and stayed home with my wife.)

In 1991, Mainichi Shimbun Company held an exhibition of the original illustrations drawn by Ernest Shepard for the books Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and The Wind in the Willows at a department store in Osaka. I went to see it with my wife. On that occasion, I bought a booklet [6] of 48 pages. It includes lovely illustrations, in which Christopher Robin, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and other cute animals in Winnie-the-Pooh are seen. I still keep that booklet.

1. Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, quantum Genius (Faber and Faber, London, 2009).
2. A. A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard (illustr.) Winnie-the-Pooh (Dutton Juvenile, Boson, 1988; first published by Methuen, London, 1926).
3. "Winnie-the-Pooh (book)" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (6 March 2010 at 20:06).
4. A. A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard (illustr.), Momoko Ishi (transl.), クマのプーさん プー横丁にたった家 (Iwanami, 1962; first published 1940).
5. "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree", Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (31 May 2010 at 20:41).
6. The World of Winnie-the-Pooh & Ernest Shepard (Winnie-the-Pooh Festival Executive Committee, 1991).