Boston - hotels

The notorious (?) American quality can be seen in even at luxury hotels like Sheraton.  One of the conference attendees that I made good friends with said she does not have hot water for shower in her room. She reported the problem to the reception the previous evening and was told that it had been fixed; however, she still did not have warm water in her shower.  Poor lady.  I thought Sheraton was a prestigious hotel brand that never has this kind of problems.  I guess not.  I’m so glad that I had warm water in my room in a different hotel, but the water pressure is low.  Very weak shower took me a lot more time to shower.  Why is not the water pressure in the American scale? 

My room did have hot water, but I had my own problem of noisy neighbors and no stirrer sticks.  I wanted some stirrer sticks with which you stir your coffee with, because I was using them as chopsticks to eat deli foods. However, one day the housekeepers did not leave new ones, so I called the reception desk and asked for some.  They said they’d run out of them!  I couldn’t believe my ears.  A hotel as luxurious as Marriott has run out of stirrer sticks??  They could kept a ton of them cos they are small and non perishable!  I thought it wasn’t true because it was 6 am that I called them and thought they are just too sleepy to deal with a trivial request as stirrer sticks (that is, of course, not professional at all!). But no sticks were left on the following day after housekeeping also.  It made me now believe that they run out of them. Really?  Have they heard about doing an inventory check and ordering in advance before they run out of items?  Anyway…

Another thing is that the air conditioning is so loud in older buildings. The fan is so loud that I cannot sleep with AC on. Thankfully it was not hot enough to have to keep the AC on during the night, but it was quite noticable noise. I wonder how people deal with it, but I guess you get used to it to some extent, as everything's bigger and louder in the US. 

My impression of Boston is just such a busy and hectic city to be in.  I shut in my room, ate some deli or takeout food, while sunbathing at the window, with the temperature set at 75F.  It was so cold in the conference room, whereas it was so hot and humid outside that I was having a heat shock, which is not good for the body at all. I constantly felt that my lymph grand was swollen. It must’ve been working hard to fight with various germs that I got throughout the days mingling with people.  Very thankful for that.

View from my first hotel on the 13th floor.  There was no room No. 1313. Interesting! 

My second hotel room.

View from the 15th floor of my hotel near the harbor.

There's a ferry port. 

This hotel was nice, with marine-themed paintings and lots of mirrors both in the rooms and the common area. 

View of airport runway. 

Cargo center..

I need to remember that I should have all my bank notes in $1 so that I can tip porters and drivers.. It's easy to forget!  Tipping is the only occasion where you cannot use your credit card. 

Boston - Trains

The subway was convenient to get around in Boston for an affordable fare, but inside it was filled with gas emitted from the trains (diesel?), and the air quality was poor.  I’m now amazed how breathable Kyoto’s subway is. As is often the case in the US, there are…. extremely diverse people. Those who look like homeless, or someone who screams something with a loud voice, someone with her entire hair covered (powdered) with dandruff, someone who starts dancing to the music their phone is playing with a loud volume. It was quite a… chaos, in many ways.  Though most passengers looked fine, I never want to commute on these trains in Boston.  

And of course, some ticket machines are broken. One read my credit card and made a transaction, but never spitted out my ticket.  It is expected, something that I perhaps was able to shrug my shoulders at and say “this is the American way..” when I was living in MI, but now I have low patience towards this kind of thing after living in Japan for quite some time now.  First of all, machines should be more reliable, and broken ones should be labeled as “out of order”.  But I know even if I talked to one of the station staff members, they won’t do anything because it’s not their job.  Indifference and low motivation are another thing that I noticed here.  Workers generally take their time and are not interested in customer satisfaction whatsoever, unless they rely on tip.  In Japan, workers are expected to meet very high standards and it is sometimes too much, so we should take the middle ground.

Boston! American Society of Nutrition conference

The nutrition conference was good and informative.  It had 3000 attendees, and multiple concurrent sessions going on. It was a busy one, and it was hard to look for a person that I have met once.  All in all, it was interesting to see so many presentations. There were about ~1500 poster presentations and countless oral presentations. 

I was presently surprised that there are many female researchers. About 70% of the attendees were women. They dress well! They must be more aware of their appearance because they often interact with clients and patients. It was an interesting contrast with plant breeders, who care more about how their plants look than how they themselves look.

The conference venue was at Sheraton in the heart of downtown Boston.  It was astonishing that prices are SO high for everything.  Even canned soups are $3-4. I cannot say canned stuff are affordable anymore.  Drunken noodles with chicken (the cheapest option) at a Thai restaurant was still $13, which converts to almost 2000 yen with weak yen against USD.  How can I survive with having 2000 yen meals for lunch and more for dinner every day??  I was forced to be a vegetarian because the only thing that were reasonably priced was products containing cheeses and eggs.  It is crazy expensive to dine out, so I went to the supermarket nearby frequently.  Though things were still expensive at a supermarket even, it was economical to have deli takeout. How come it is a city with so many universities and prices and rent are this high, 20-30k per month.  I cannot believe how students make a living here.

Just out side of Prudential Center, a shopping mall and a convention center combined. 

Trinity Church

Old South Park Church in Boston.  It's huge!  Their website had LGBTQ inclusion!

I didn't know it's Japanese style.  I thought this style is common worldwide.  This cafe had Japanese snacks like Macademia nuts/chocolate and rice crackers, too. Of course they didn't have a price tag. Be prepared to be surprised at the casher!

Papa Jon's cafe/restaurant

It looks like a chain with multiple locations, but I like the relaxing interior and atmosphere.  I had a banana smoothie, which was fresh and delicious.  Was able to write a bit and took a break from outside summer heat.  A nice cafe to drop by.

Papa Jon's Rokkaku St.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/2Pp72tNEqmjkuwN58

There were a man and a woman talking, in English, with very loud voice, and I was able to hear everything they were saying.  They do not seem like a couple... but how they interacted with each other made them look quite intimate.  Maybe they are just about to start dating?  The man looked much older than the woman, but I don't know. It's really hard to guess people's age by their appearance.  Anyhow, I learned a new word in their conversation: vernacular, meaning a language or dialect.  The context was about religion, and she said she does not subscribe to those vernaculars, which is a qutie interesting and perhaps sophisticated way of saying that she's not religious.  Hm.  It's nice to learn new words in a real-life setting; it's much easier to remember new words as it's tied to my own experience.

学会準備。

なんとか論文完成に漕ぎ着けて、プレプリントサーバーに出すことができた！ そのプレプリントサーバに出すのはいいが、そこから受理されて公開されるまでに数日かかる。ポスター印刷…そろそろ注文しないとやばいんですが…となっていた。。めっちゃ余裕をもって論文書いてるのに、結局共同著者の人達が見てくれないのでそこで止まってしまう…そして結局学会ギリギリになる。いつものパターン。教授たちって…一日100通もメールが届くとか聞くし、多忙に多忙を極めるという話は重々承知だが…。しかしよかった間に合って… 大阪に印刷所がある会社を選んでよかった。注文して翌日には届いた。ふう。布ポスター折り畳めて便利。

二年くらいゆるーく活動に参加していたAgBioDataの活動も、論文が書けて、なんとか一区切りついたようだ。朝5時のミーティング、大変だったなーー笑

ここに来て論文がけっこう何報も出てきているので、ここ2年の収穫期といったところか。

7月過ぎるの速すぎ！！ 11月も学会あるのに、すぐやん。11月は口頭発表せないかん気がするんだよな〜〜〜 うぐぐ。 しかしこの間、哲学研究者と話していたら、「他の研究者の、私の研究に対する見解がほしいから、発表する」と言っていて、そうですよね、その通りです… と頭を垂れる思いだった。あー発表憂鬱、となるのではなくて、他の研究者に自分の進捗を共有して、助言をもらったり、新たな共同研究を模索したり、そういう目的がある。より大きな目的としては、その研究を通じて、社会に貢献する。だから発表する。発表のための発表ではないんだよな、ということを思い出したのでよかった。

今日は宵々々山だった！ すっかり忘れてた…去年よりも人多いんだろうな〜 去年満喫しておいてよかった。この時期に授与される、京都人が家の玄関に飾るお守り、粽（ちまき）をぜひ入手したいのだが… 暑い中の人混みをできるだけ避けるべく、平日にいこう！

浴衣を洋服に仕立て直したいなとか思っている…

ていうか共同研究者さんへのお土産に何か持っていこう！ 備忘！ 日本のペンとか文房具とか質が高いのでいい気がする…。

Nutrition project finished, half-time break, and AI...

"Done is better than perfect" is the "mot juste"... 

The goal is to get your project done, not to work on it for a certain number of hours just for the sake of it.  I need to remind that to myself once in a while..

It seems like I'm going to SC in autumn for a conference!  Another trip to the US.  But this one is OK, it takes every other year, so I should take this opportunity to present my work, get feedback, and discuss with people what I can do/help next.

The other project, the nutrition one, has finished.... I supposedly have half time off this month!  There are some things I still need to work on, editing my tutorial/script/website, poster, and preprint/publication, but that is something that's extra I can do in my free time.  During my half-time break, I think I will:

1. Take epidemiology course, then
2. Write a proposal to do an NHANES analysis with better methods next time
3. Apply for Food and Health Scholarship to take that course for free...
4. Start a blog about mental well-being...?  But I feel like I already have too many blogs, lol.

The discussion of AI potentially taking our jobs away is widespread now.  Well, taking our jobs is okay if it frees up more of our time, but AI dominating the world's systems, like finance, trade, logistics, communication.. that's kind of a scary part.  Will AI have their own desire to concur the world and enslave humans...? That's the most important question I want to know..  

How did people in the past do when their jobs got obsolete, like typists or telephone operators?  They went for different jobs, that's the only thing they could have done.  Survival of the fittest.  There should be some new jobs because of technological advancement and stuff.. so, it is just that people (labor) are re-alocated to where labor is needed, I guess. 

AI can be of great use if we use it wisely.  It's so fast in generating text and summarizing volumn of information.  I don't know what I'm thinking here, but it's nice that at least I don't have to translate languages from scratch.  Just throw it to DeepL or some sort, and just edit here and there. If productivity increases like that, it must be a good thing...?