About Me

My photo
Okaya, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

December 2015

Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

According to some news sources, the major subjects of the latest COP21 hopeful of progress are the agreements with the setting of an objective to reduce the carbon emissions not only from each developed nation but also from each developing country, and perhaps with the legal obligation to it. China, the US, and India are the largest, second-largest, and third-largest carbon-emitting countries nowadays. The proper control over the growth rates of the GDPs of both China and India, the populations of which add up to about 40 % of the world population, should be the most effective and realistic way during the period when the active promotion of the nuclear power generation is still premature in most developing countries. China's recent attempt to abstain from its unreasonably rapid growth on its own initiative is preferable. The rapid increase in India's GDP growth rate and carbon emissions following that in China is one of the deepening public anxieties. Taking various energy-saving measures by each individual and various low carbon-emission measures by the government and the power and the auto companies against the emerging climate changes is what the US should go further ahead with from now onward. In addition to the energy-saving measures by modernizing their domestic articles and automobiles, China, India, Brazil, and ASEAN need to place a special emphasis on the modernization of the manufacturing and power plants whenever possible. As ever, what the governments of all the countries should urge are the administrative guidance of their peoples and enterprises to the right courses and the international political cooperation with each other, and what the enterprises of good stand in the developed countries should pursue are the technical innovations in terms of the power efficiency and generation and the promotions of them.


Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

I purchased a laser pointer for my presentation about ten years ago. My laser pointer can emit only a faint red-laser beam. For most civil portable uses, this sort of low-energy laser device should be sufficient enough. Although it's weak, any irradiation of an eye with a laser beam must be avoided, except for some medical treatments by an oculist. The recently growing prevalence of the blue- or green-laser portable devices that are capable of carrying a higher energy over a longer distance and have been sometimes misused for some nasty pieces of harassment against a pilot on the cockpit seat of a plane and an athlete on the field of a stadium is really troublesome.
Of course, the treatments of and the trades in the laser cannons that some munitions companies have been developing should be very tightly regulated. Fortunately, these laser weapons, which are contrived to heat a pinpoint on a distant object up to a few thousand degrees C or above, can't come in portable size at the present time. Although the laser module itself may be rather easily downsized to some extent, neither the cooling system nor the power supply system can't do. These weapons must be very tightly restricted only to defensive military uses. In view of the times when there often appear the assault rifles, which are the typical military guns, on the TV and Internet news reports about the criminal scenes on the streets, the governments shouldn't be so optimistic about the possibility that these military laser weapons will fall into the hands of the criminal groups when these can be downsized significantly in the future. It's my belief that a portable laser gun isn't the future weapon that enables an officer to arrest the suspects or a civilian to defend his/her family against the offenders without risking anyone's life.


Thursday, December 3, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.

According to the Higgs mechanism, the existence of the scalar field prevailing among the entire universe appendixes a mass to most of the subatomic particles. The presence of a massive matter always accompanies the distortion of the space-time continuum around its center, which leads to the gravitations toward other massive matters according to the general theory of relativity, which was experimentally proven with the famous observations of the gravitational lens. In the framework of the quantum field theory, by the interaction with the Higgs boson, the mass is given to some subatomic particles, and by the interaction with the graviton a massive subatomic particle feels the gravity. As a derivation from his general theory of relativity and probably on the analogy of other physical phenomena, Prof. Albert Einstein presupposed that the distortion of space-time might propagate like the wave. This is so-called the gravitational wave. Because of some technical difficulties or others, however, none of the large-scale simple experimental apparatus has detected any clear indication of the gravitational wave so far.
It's my understanding that the absence of the gravitational wave from the universe isn't necessarily contradictory to what the theory of relativity describes at base. Someday, it will be confirmed whether or not the gravitational wave really exits. Subjectively speaking, it's delightful to consider that the space-time continuum may be rippled. According to Cosmology written by Prof. Steven Weinberg, the possible detection of the gravitational wave may allow the cosmologists to observe a remnant of the universe at a very early stage.


Friday, December 4, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's snowy to fair.

The advancement of the semiconductor technology node relying on the improving scalability of the FinFET structures utilizing the configuration of either the double-gate or the triple-gate may continue for a while. One of the technological breakthroughs after completing advancing the technology node following the ITRS roadmap may be the photonic integrated circuit, as written in my diary several times before. Once the practicability of the photonic integrated circuit SoC is proven and the mass production of it for PC and mobile applications is started, a new direction of the semiconductor chips will be clearly established. Because the use of the partially photonic integrated circuit is also advantageous for multi-core processing, it should soon be adopted to the multi-core SoCs and multi-core processors for higher-performance computing applications. Depending upon the ability to miniaturize the Si-based photonic devices and the optical cables integrated on a chip, the substitution of the optical fiber lines for the conventional metal lines might gradually step inside the cores and/or the memory banks on a chip in the future.
Although the mass data communication between the logic cores and the embedded memory banks through the optical fiber lines on a chip enables to improve the system speed significantly, the capacity of the memory banks on a chip shouldn't always be sufficient. Therefore, the success of the photonic integrated circuit SoC won't take away the necessity for the high capacities peripheral memory banks such as the solid state devices or other advanced ones for the high-performance computing applications of high-end PCs, servers, workstations, and supercomputers afterward. For the profitable mobile applications, however, the additional installation of any peripheral memory banks in the mobile devices with the future SoC may not be necessary.
Another technological leap may be the innovation of the compound semiconductor channel instead of the Si channel. By the use of compound semiconductors, the switching performance of the photonic devices integrated on a chip can also improve efficiently. The compound materials that aren't toxic may be smoothly introduced to future SoCs and processors.


Saturday, December 5, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, December 6, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.


Monday, December 7, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Due to the chilblain, the first, second, and third fingers of my right hand are rather swollen. My chilblained toes and heels are mildly itchy too. The cold weather in a highland of Japan during the wintertime has started bothering me. My ability to think has been congealing gradually and gradually.


Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Today, I noticed that the English name of the university at which I graduated in physics in my twenties was changed though the Japanese name of it was unchanged. It used to be called "the Science University of Tokyo" in English. For some reason or other, it was renamed "the Tokyo University of Science" previously. I also noticed that there's an abbreviation of "Tokyo Institute of Technology", which I proceeded to the master's degree in materials science after passing through the undergrad courses of the university above. "Tokyo Tech" is short for it. It seems to me that both were brought around the ways of naming the internationally prestigious universities and institutes, e.g. MIT and Caltech in order to be more successful in receiving worldwide recognition.
Some of the honor students and graduates from these Japanese universities and technology institutes may be comparable with those from MIT and Caltech if the cramming education system of Japan since early childhood hasn't made the abilities of their brains excessively oriented toward only memorization and the molds fettering their minds are sloughed off in their specialties properly at a proper stage.


Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.

The crude oil price that the winds of various world affairs and the decisions by the OPEC and other oil organizations have been influencing dropped down below $38 per barrel recently. The crude oil price is still one of the dominant influences on the world economy and will remain so for a while. The recent downward tendency of it has impacted positively on the economies of some countries and negatively on those of others. The influence of the trend on the living of my wife and me is very minor.


Thursday, December 10, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.

One of the questions in the questionnaires I recently filled out made me realize the change of the times again. Briefly speaking, the necessity for strict confidentiality of classified information has risen considerably because world affairs are getting worse and worse. Not to mention the business secrets of a company from others, classified information sensitive to the relationships between the nations has to be treated more deliberately than before.
Needless to say, I have never disclosed any business secrets. As far as I know, I have never touched upon the pieces of eyes only, sensitive, or secret classified information that I am bound by the rules to protect. Although a few of what I have diffidently written in my released publications, blog, and others may happen to accord with classified information of either a company or a government, these shouldn't correspond to any breach of confidence because I have never belonged to it. It's impossible for me to know what they have classified. Freedom of speech should be the essence of democracy, as long as no law is violated.


Friday, December 11, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a warmer rainy day.

North Korea claimed that it now possesses the hydrogen bomb. According to the news topics, most experts in analyzing North Korea's nuclear armament doubted its claim. In view of the location of North Korea and the recent criminal case at the Yasukuni shrine, anyway, the advancement of its nuclear armament should be a piece of unpleasant news for most of the Japanese people, as well as the American people.
About nine years have passed since North Korea first carried out its nuclear test in the middle 2000s. It took the US and Russia only a half-decade to succeed in testing the H-bombs after their first nuclear tests in the middle twentieth century. Because there are at least five thermonuclear powers in the world at the present time and these bombs are only old-fashioned weapons, it should be technically easier for the present Korean scientists and engineers to intensify their nuclear bombs by using the fusionable isotopes. This news topic tells that Korea may be more challenging to the existing thermonuclear and/or capitalistic powers than the Indian and Pakistani are.

The Max-Planck IPP announced that its helical nuclear fusion reactor Wendelstein 7-X was able to sustain the He-plasma at the temperature of about one million K for about 0.1 seconds. The temperature at which the D-T fusion reaction may be ignited is 100 times higher than that temperature or above. They still have a long way to go.


Saturday, December 12, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The US major companies have traditionally embraced meritocracy, as well known. In some of these major companies, the performances of all the employees are placed on one of the orders from the top to the last after the periodical assessment of them. In such a society, companies attempt to hire people who are highly evaluated by other trustworthy companies, laboratories, and universities in order to be successful in hiring talents with a high probability.
Below is an example of what it may invite subsequently if a Japanese is highly assessed in a major company in the US. Other senior Japanese coworkers, which are usually the few, would try to bring the Japanese-style ways into the city in the US where they live, with the assistance of their American, European, and Asian friends who have regrettably placed the lower orders and see some advantages in introducing the Japanese ways such as the seniority system, surveillance system, gang stalking, handouts local administrative and so on. Behind the scenes, the accusations against him or her that are fabricated by the alleged victims may start circulating around in order to gather accomplices as many as possible. His or her situation becomes even worse than before when the sector of a major company that's located mostly in the city is spun off. Their American friends may additionally take the American-style measure of gang stalking or faked counterintelligence stalking while being oblivious to the good sense of a major company in order to let some of their friends confiscate their accomplishments from him/her. Moreover, their friends may continue to take the measure of stalking by cajoling some Japanese counterparts near them into helping them even when he or she moves to Japan.


Sunday, December 13, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a Japanese meal for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.


Monday, December 14, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.

Another object in making up a story that an alleged victim suffered for his or her careless behavior and other frame-ups is the justification for grabbing his or her rights and achievements while escaping his or her attention. If it's beneficial to a group as a whole to which they including an alleged victim belong, they may assert without shame or try to make believe that an alleged victim suddenly replaced him or her. That sounds supernatural. It seems to me that the conspiracy by an alleged victim is one of the usual measures of the Asians who learned from the Americans originally and modified it to fit their own tastes.
There is another way to aim at the same outcome. When he or she notices that some people often attempt to impose an opinion on him or her, and/or he or she often encounters a person who somewhat resembles him or her around, he or she has to be more careful than usual. That's a sign that a group is attempting to replace him or her for their benefit. According to a fable, the appearance of his or her doppelganger around may be an ill omen. It seems that the doppelganger isn't just a symptom of hallucination but a card of the favorite extortionate trick of the obsolete fellowships that are still hanging out the modern societies. It seems that the Japanese learned this sort of conspiracy by imitating the German or another European proficient in psychology.

The crude oil price dropped down below $36 per barrel recently.


Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's fair to rainy.

My personal opinion is that a married couple should have a family name. I don't support the legalization of separate family names for a married couple.
If some modifications to the system of surname of Japan have to be implemented for better, I propose an alternative plan that a newly married couple can decide their own family name when they marry. A couple may name a nuclear family that they have just created an independent family name. Of course, if they want, a couple may select the family name of either the husband's or wife's forefather. If they get divorced, unfortunately, each separated individual can select out of two choices, either his/her former surname or their family name. The individual of a separated couple who maintains parental authority after the divorce may keep his or her family name unchanged temporarily until their children reach a certain age. If his fiancé really wants it, a man who was born as a second son or a younger son of a family may accept more receptively an aforementioned choice of having either a newly named family name or a family name of her forefather, than the one who was born as a firstborn son may.
The implementation of this minor modification will help promote equal rights for men and women and the flexibility to the slowly diversifying society in Japan. It seems to me that this modification won't cause any unmanageable confusion at the present day when the social security number (my-number) system is just about to begin. However, the modification to the system of surname may bother some of the people who come from a good family if many new couples start naming their nuclear families after a good family.


Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to fair.

Recently, a Russian demonstration nuclear fission reactor BN800 started generating and transmitting electricity. According to the news report, it's a fast breeder reactor with a liquid-sodium coolant. This sort of reactor is advantageous to minimize the wasteful uses of the fissional and potentially fissional isotopes without causing rapid nuclear proliferation. In a simple phrase, it may allow, "Spend one bunch of fissionable fuel, and get one free". As well known, however, there are some difficulties in the treatment of the coolant of liquid-sodium that is very reactive to the element of oxygen, which exits abundantly in the air, water, and so on. Without resolving the safety problem, the time hasn't been ripe for mass production of the fast breeder reactor for its practical power generation use. Anyway, it's much more difficult to resolve all the deep problems of the fusion reactor than to resolve only the safety problem of the fast breeder fission reactor.


Thursday, December 17, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to snowy.

Now is still the time to rely chiefly upon the energy sources of oil and gas for power generation and automobiles while forwarding every project to economize energy use gradually and steadily. The cost reduction of the existing renewable sources of energy and the innovation of the new ones should continue to be desirable.

The US Federal Reserve Bank announced that it raised the interest rates from 0-0.25 % up to 0.25-0.5 %. The interest rates will be raised accordingly step-by-step next year. The schedule sounds reasonably prudent.


Friday, December 18, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The crude oil price hasn't touched the bottom yet. It dropped down below $35 per barrel recently.


Saturday, December 19, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, December 20, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast. Went out shopping this morning. Ate a Japanese meal for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, December 21, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.

By soaking my hands in hot water for a few minutes a few times per day, my chilblained hands have been curing gradually since last week. A grip of my right hand has almost been regained.


Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Just to make sure, I again wrote the sentence that my wife and I have never bought any lottery ticket since 2006. Only for half a year in 2006, I had occasionally bought some lottery tickets at the gas stations in the vicinity. Except for those purchases, I have never gambled on any others since 1995.


Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and pieces of pizza for dinner. It's cloudy to rainy.

To the best of my memory, the International Space Station is scheduled to drop from the present low orbit of the Earth after all the scheduled missions are complete in the course of time. It seems to me that some modules of the ISS may be reusable for NASA's new project to build a new space station orbiting around the Moon of the Earth when the parts of the modules whose service lives are going to end or whose functions have been out-of-date are replaced by the brand-new ones. In order to perform the transportation of these reusable modules from the present orbit up to the Moon's orbit, either a spacecraft like the retired space shuttle or a set of attachable rocket modules that is capable of either towing or thrusting these modules has to be developed. This reuse plan sounds narrow-minded but may help reduce the enormous cost to construct and launch the station around the Moon if many of the operating modules of the ISS are reusable.
After the transportations of some useful modules of the ISS from the present orbit around the Earth into an orbit around the Moon are completed successfully, the new modules that are designed for mining on the surface of the Moon and transit to another destination may be carried to there and docked with the other modules.


Thursday, December 24, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's fair to cloudy.

This sort of idea of being oriented toward cost reductions and energy savings in a space project will be somewhat inescapable in the era when people have to rely chiefly upon the finite fossil sources of energy while generalizing the existing renewable sources of energy and economizing the entire energy uses desirably in order to manage the emerging climate changes. A spacecraft that is refuelable in an orbit while going around the Earth may also be useful for the purposes of clearing up the increasing mess in the Earth's orbits.


Friday, December 25, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The introduction of the reduced consumption tax rate to some sorts of necessities would be beneficial when the base consumption tax rate is raised considerably. The planned introduction of it may signify that the base consumption tax rate of Japan will increase over and over. If the Japanese government is intentionally navigating the course of Japan pretty close to socialism, the introduction of it may be what they want to do. 
As the social system of a country leans toward socialism more, in general, its national wealth should decline increasingly and then its national power should also. In view of its modern history and the vigorous rise of its neighboring countries, Japan has to maintain its strength at least for the next half a century for the safety of its future generations. The other disadvantage of introducing the itemized reduced tax rate is obviously the complicatedness of everyday trades and the troublesomeness in preparing the tax return by the sellers. This is why I prefer one of the simplest ideas of tax-free only on uncooked rice if really necessary, as written previously. Both the delay of a retirement age and the enhancement of meritocracy seem to be inevitable.


Saturday, December 26, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, December 27, 2015
Got up at eight o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast. Went out shopping this morning. Ate a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, December 28, 2015
Today is our 14th wedding anniversary. Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast. Went out shopping this morning. Ate a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Thursday, December 31, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for dinner. It's a fine day. We have had a long-term warmer climate here. The world weather outlook for this winter is mild.

November 2015

Sunday, November 1, 2015
Got up at eight o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, November 2, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.

A telephone in a room of the house where I currently live rung followed by some long dial tones particular to connecting with a facsimile twice this afternoon. Probably, somebody dialed the wrong number when using his or her facsimile or computer. I have been frequently troubled with various types of prank calls since the early 2000s, but my telephone has seldom gotten that sort of typical facsimile dial tone.


Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

A resolution prepared by Japan for promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons, including a new proposal to draw on the political leaders and tourists to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was adopted by a majority vote at the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, but Russia and China opposed it as before, and Britain, France, and the US abstained from its voting.
Unless some proper reformations of the UN system are incarnated someday, like the proposal of mine that was explained in my diary about a month ago, things won't move forward at a desirable pace. The people who continue to enjoy the benefits of possessing nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear bombs don't easily give them up and therefore can't agree to any positive reformation of the UN system without difficulty. Some of them may justify themselves by claiming that deterrent power hanging in the world balance of nuclear power has been preventing the next Great War from occurring for the last decades, and only by means of these bombs, they may be capable of saving people on the earth from the future apocalyptic meteor strikes, despite knowing the fact that the possibility of a catastrophic terror should increase with swelling the number of nuclear club members. As the world matters with the worsening climate changes, the increasing number of nuclear club members, and the high frequency of terrorism go from bad to worse gradually and gradually, there should be a growing tendency to change the situation at the UN. However, there isn't so in actuality. The news that the US where these matters should be their own serious affairs abstained from voting on a resolution for promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons at this General Assembly is rather disappointing. Probably, they hesitated to agree to a new proposal that was found in Japan's resolution this time. Anyway, making every ceaseless effort to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons while also appealing to people to properly reform the UN system is the way. It's uncertain whether or not a change for the better can be anticipated soon.
 

Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

It seems to me that for the purpose of recovering people's spirits to abolish nuclear weapons the invitation of an international sports event, either the committee or association of which is headquartered in Switzerland and has no permanent membership with the veto power, to these atomic bombed cities is easier than the final agreement of a resolution including a new proposal at the UN, which is headquartered in the US where the Manhattan project was formed. There are a number of reasons why governments encourage their people to take part in and/or enjoy sports, e.g. education, health care, recreation, human-right and so on. It can't be denied that the educational purposes of promoting sports should still include a degree of soldiery. Apart from any complicated diplomacy, the invitation of an international sports event to these atomic-bombed cities may be a good opportunity for many patriotic people to revisit the difficult question of whether or not nuclear weapons should be maintained, after correctly and sufficiently understanding this destructiveness and hazardousness.


Thursday, November 5, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

For some reason or other, for the last few days, at least my computer was unable to access the website of the credit union in the US and I still maintain my account with only a small amount. It seems that this credit union should have been operating normally because they have continued to send me its bank statements on a monthly basis and has recently sent me the new credit cards. Nowadays it's hard to believe that the modern server system of a bank might have been down for a few days. There is a faint possibility that somebody may have been blocking my access to this website from Japan. Fortunately, it's recovered this afternoon.


Friday, November 6, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Since the beginning of this month, my computer access to several websites in the US has been obstructed in various ways. In one case, an account was removed, in another case a server was downed, and in another case a service was unavailable.


Saturday, November 7, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for dinner. It's fair to cloudy.


Sunday, November 8, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a rainy day.


Monday, November 9, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.

The occupation of advertising agencies and the talents for it have been highly thought of by the general public in Japan, like some advanced nations. That trend in Japan has recurred with extravagance since the 1980s. It seems that a noticeable influence of their fishy advertising skills can be found even in the news reports about various topics. It sounds as if an unscrupulous businessman shafts many readers and viewers through those news reports. Both the advertising agencies and the comedic performances should be valued more ordinarily in view of the current situation in Japan.


Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.

According to some news reports, Wendelstein 7-X, which is one of the advanced helical nuclear fusion reactors, was completed at the Max-Planck IPP in Greifswald, Germany last month. This largest stellarator 5.5 meters in radius is aimed at operating while confining the fusion plasmas in its core for 30 minutes, and as usual, the fuel for it is the pair of deuterium-tritium, which requires the lowest temperature to start the fusion reactions.
Even if the fusion reactions of Wendelstein 7-X may be ignited successfully and the confinement may be maintained for a target span according to the plan, it's still a long way off the fulfillment of a fusion reactor for the practical purpose of power generation. For this purpose, the plasma confinement has to be maintained as long as a reactor operates within its life span, i.e. some decades or longer, by means of an optimum design of coils and some new ideas, the service life of a reactor whose inner parts are unavoidably exposed to the very intense irradiation of fast neutrons and radiations has to be longer than the period when it takes the reactor's continuous operation to become profitable, and moreover the electric power into which the energy gained from the fusion plasmas is converted by using either a conventional turbine or another revolutionary generator must be greater than the electric power which is spent for causing and sustaining the fusion reactions. Therefore, at the present time, nobody knows whether or not its practical use will be fulfilled someday.
The above-mentioned news about a giant doughnut-shaped complex device seems to be reliable though it's difficult to know whether or not their experiments will be successful. The results of their experiments will be announced in the next few years or later.


Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

A smaller passenger jet MRJ (Mitsubishi Regional Jet) took off for its first public test flight this morning. In view of the current states of foreign and domestic affairs concerning the growing Middle East and Asian markets, the rising necessity for highly efficient passenger jets, the recent revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the increasing rise of China's armaments, the degree of the US's trust in Japan's confidentiality, and the level of Japan's technologies, a certain degree of Japan's independent development of aircraft should be politic. Of course, there is no Rising Sun painted on the wings of an MRJ.


Thursday, November 12, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Studies on the mobility enhancement of carriers by means of the presence of the stress or the strain in the compressive or tensile direction along the channel of the semiconductor devices have been made strenuously for the last few decades, and the silicon channel devices whose performances are significantly boosted by engineering the stress and/or the strain in the channel have been introduced into the high-performance, low-power, and other applications since the middle of the 2000s. On the assumption that the stress or the strain in the channel can be kept substantially constant for its service life, any problematic performance degradation or shift after operating for an acceptable span shouldn't be expected, as far as reliable materials such as the wafer, the gate dielectric, etc. are used and the transistors are properly designed and formed. This assumption should be reasonable in the case of evaluating the reliabilities of the stress/strain technology for most consumer and professional applications requiring normal operation at the surrounding temperature range of the RT to 85 degrees C, within my knowledge.


Friday, November 13, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

However, I don't know how stably the intentionally introduced stress can be retained under very harsh conditions. The exercise of vibrations or impacts on the VLSI composed of the aggressively strained/stressed devices might cause some reliability problems due to the undesirable relaxation of the stresses by the introduction of some crystal defects when it brings intense external mechanical stresses to it continuously. Such vibrations can be exercised on the VLSI when it's located near the engine of an automobile or an aircraft, and such impacts can be exercised on it when an automobile having it runs on a bumpy road or collides with something. Although the changes of its surrounding temperature within an assumable range in various environments of the Earth shouldn't cause any failures in general when the devices are properly designed with some margins, the frequent and rapid ups and downs of temperature for a long time might also cause because of the relaxation of the engineered stress/strain by the additional transient stresses due to the differences in the expansions rates between the constituent materials, especially at the boundaries near the channel on which the stress is designed to be concentrated and the self-heating has locally a great influence. Let's give a familiar example. As well-known, either by rapidly purring the boiling water into a thin glass that is initially cooled down to the freezing point or below, or by rapidly purring the very cold water into a thin glass that is initially heated up to a few hundred degrees C it may be broken suddenly. When a strong directional stress has been applied to a glass in advance, either way, it's broken by a stronger possibility. The operating VLSI on an automobile that runs in the tropical zone in high summer can be heated up to a few hundred degrees C, and the non-operating VLSI on an airplane that flies at a high altitude can be cooled down far below the freezing point.
Because any recent publications about the experiments on these extreme cases are unavailable to me, I am uncertain whether or not my speculation upon these issues above is probable. It's hoped that these issues are negligible so that the stress/strain technology can be applicable without any difficulty to both the automobile and the aircraft which are the applications that require the toughest reliability tests. Even if some sorts of stress/strain engineering weren't applicable to these heavy-duty applications, it shouldn't be a grave problem when it's foreseen, because the transistor designs can be rather easily modified not to have the intensified strain/stress if necessary.


Saturday, November 14, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a rainy day.


Sunday, November 15, 2015
Got up at five forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's rainy to fair.

A series of terror attacks claimed more than 120 lives in Paris, and the accidental derailment of a bullet train TGV on trial claimed about 10 lives in eastern France in the last few days. It just happened that one of the scenes where the terrorist groups set off the suicide bombs was the stadium where a friendly match between French and German soccer teams took place at that time, and a bullet train was headed from France to Germany or the reverse. The terrorist groups are composed of French, Syrian, and possibly other nationals.


Monday, November 16, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The Japanese government announced that Japan's GDP growth rate during the last quarter (7 to 9) continued to be negative. That was –0.8%.

Samsung Electronics recently announced that it would start to mass-produce its 8-core processor Exynos 8 Octa 8890 utilizing the 14nm FinFET technology for the low-power mobile application at the end of this year. According to their briefing, Exynos 8 Octa 8890 has higher performance by more than 30% while achieving lower power dissipation by 10% than its predecessor.


Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.

The TOP500 project which semiannually evaluates the performances of the existing supercomputers announced the latest ranking of the 500 highest-performance supercomputers in the world at this period of time. The NUDT's Tianhe-2 supercomputer with the Intel Xeon E5-2692 (12 cores, 2.2GHz) and Xeon Phi-31S1P processors utilizing the 22nm Tri-Gate (Triple-Gate FinFET) technology is ranked first in the TOP500 four consecutive times. NUDT is the National University of Defense Technology in China, and Tianhe means Milky Way in Chinese. Although the Tianhe-2 is at the top, any Chinese semiconductor manufacturer doesn't have the ability to produce processors comparable to Intel's processors on its own currently. However, a South Korean electronics manufacturer and/or a Taiwanese semiconductor foundry may have the technology. If the US government asks Intel Corp. not to provide NUDT with their high-end Xeon processors, NUDT may enter into a contract with either a South Korean electronics manufacturer or a Taiwanese semiconductor foundry instead. The Chinese government should want to keep a good relationship with either or both of these neighboring countries.
Last six consecutive times, Cray's Titan supercomputer with AMD's Opteron 6274 (16 cores, 2.2GHz) processors utilizing the 32nm SOI technology and the Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, the IBM Blue Gene project's Sequoia supercomputer with the Power BQC (16 cores, 1.6GHz) processors utilizing the 45nm SOI technology, and the Riken's K supercomputer with the Fujitsu's SPARC64 VIIIfx (8 cores, 2.0GHz) processors utilizing the 45nm SOI technology are ranked second, third and fourth, respectively. The fact that the top three supercomputers have a set of more advanced device technology and circuit design of the processors manufactured by only the US chip makers, i.e. Intel, AMD, or IBM is a relief to the engineers who work for the Japanese ones. Simply because the Intel processor on the Tianhe-2 and the AMD processor on the Titan are more advanced in terms of both device technology and circuit design than the Fujitsu processor on the K by two and one technology generations respectively, the Tianhe-2 and Titan are much faster than the K. The IBM processor on the Sequoia is somewhat faster than the Fujitsu processor on the K though both use their individual 45nm SOI technologies and RISC architectures and the clock rate of one core of the IBM processor is lower than that of the Fujitsu one, probably because of the 2 X higher number of the cores and some advantages in the circuit design. A recent piece of news about Samsung's new processor (8 cores, more than 130% of the predecessor) utilizing the latest 14nm FinFET technology might upset them, though at present it's intended to be for mobile applications. Indeed, mobile applications are the most lucrative nowadays.
Probably, the government, the supercomputer, and the chip makers of the US want Japanese people either to purchase the supercomputers that Cray or IBM produces or to assemble the new supercomputer from the processors that one of the US chip makers manufactures. If allowed and afford to do so, many Japanese engineers in this field should prefer to pursue their independent development of the supercomputer and the processors for it, rather than follow reluctantly what the above-mentioned American people want.


Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.

Today I am writing my diary by using my old iBook G4 with the PowerPC G4 MPC7447A (1 core, 1.2GHz). The PowerPC G4 is the single- or multi-core processor of Motorola designed for Apple's computers that first used the AltiVec (Velocity Engine) SIMD instruction in the late 1990s, which is a class of parallel computing that has been used for supercomputers mostly. The IBM PowerPC G5 970FX (1 core, 1.8GHz) that my old iMac G5 has also used the Altivec.
According to some news reports, Intel Corp. announced that it would release the 72-core MIC Architecture product with the Xeon Phi utilizing its 14nm technology as either a CPU or a coprocessor, the codename of which is Knights Landing, for the limited server and workstation applications. The clock rate of one core of the multi-core processor is probably in the frequency range of 2.5 to 3.5GHz (3 to 4GHz with the Turbo). For the last decade, the number of cores in a processor for high-end computing applications has increased considerably in order to heighten the value of the new processors by fulfilling the expectations of their processing speed barely from generation to generation. The adoption of various stress/strain technologies may have improved the performance while enabling to delay the transistor scaling by one or two generations in the latter half of the 2000s. The delay in the transistor scaling by one or two generations was recovered to some extent by adopting some new materials for the dual metal gates and the high-k gate dielectric in the late 2000s. By the grace of adapting the new 3D device structure of the FinFET utilizing the Tri-Gate configuration and probably a low-k insulating dielectric material, a considerable improvement in the processing speed and power dissipation was achieved in the early 2010s. Since then further transistor scaling has become possible by reducing the thickness of the fins simultaneously. However, it can't be denied that, because of the fading gain in the NMOSFET performance only the scaling of the gate length, the pace to improve the clock rate of one core of it, which is still a meaningful indicator to evaluate the performances of the processors for the same architecture and a given number of the cores, has been somewhat slowed down comparing to that during the good old rushing period of time when the transistor scaling was easier and the performance gain with it was very promising. Nevertheless, the transistor scaling even beyond the 45/32nm technology node still improves the PMOSFET performance and the circuit speed and certainly reduces the gate capacitances and the power dissipation.
As the number of cores in it increases, the performance of a parallel computable processor should improve. Very roughly speaking, however, the cost to manufacture a processor is proportional to the size of it and accordingly the number of the cores in it. Therefore, the number of cores in a processor for inexpensive consumer PC and mobile applications can't be actively increased. The restraint on the size of a chip should be tight for mobile applications. Consequently, it's still in the range of 1 to 8. Nowadays, semiconductor manufacturers are making more efforts to reduce the power dissipation for these applications by enjoying the advantage gained from the reduction in not only the gate capacitances but also the operation voltage following the scaling rule, because it meets the needs of the time. It's rather surprising to know that the processing speed is still improving certainly while also scaling the operation voltage when advancing from the 32nm technology node to the 22nm technology node and then to the 14nm technology node, though the gain in the transistor performances by means of the traditional scaling method has been getting tougher and the reduction in the operation voltage should slow down the processing speed. It's certain that, when the operation voltage of the 14nm-node Xeon processors is increased up to that of the 32nm-node processors, the processing speeds and the clock rate of one core of the 14nm-node processors should be much better than those of the 32nm-node counterparts though the improvement in the power dissipations of these fades away to some extent. Without knowing the details of the device structure and circuit design of their 14nm-node processors, it's difficult for me to guess further.


Thursday, November 19, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

In the 1990s, it seems to me that although in terms of the semiconductor technologies IBM and Motorola, the Semiconductor Products Sector of which became Freescale Semiconductor, were comparable with Intel, in terms of the circuit design the Apple, IBM and Motorola alliance's PowerPC RISC architecture somewhat exceeded the Microsoft's Windows and Intel alliance's x86 CISC one. However, the marketing strategies including the aggressive advertisements of the Wintel overwhelmed the time-honored challenge of the AIM alliance those days.
Intel's processors have dominated the PC chip market for the last few decades as well known, and have also topped the supercomputer performance ranking for the last few years. Because Apple has energetically grown the mobile computing market worldwide and its revenue by popularizing smartphones and tablets for the last decade, the existing Wintel-dominated PC markets have been gradually shrinking from the prime. This trend has also started impacting Intel's ripened profits somewhat negatively. Intel is eagerly attempting to regain its bullish profits by expanding its share in the mobile chip market and others. TI, Samsung and the US fabless - Asian foundries are currently Intel's competitors in this profitable market. The ever-growing demand for mobile applications for lowering the power dissipation as low as possible has created a vantage ground for Intel's mobile processors that are successful in it. Samsung's new mobile processor should be one of the strongest opponents of Intel's. Actually, Intel has been the most profitable semiconductor company for the last twenty-three years, and Samsung is the second most profitable company for the last thirteen years. So, there have been enough accumulating funds for them to invest in some future breakthrough technologies in their depositories. Therefore, this tendency will continue for the time being unless a convulsion of nature or world affairs occurs. Toshiba may have possessed the ability to develop processors comparable to Intel's and Samsung's processors, but a series of recent negative news including a large-scale restructuring of its semiconductor sector overshadowed a possibility to be comparable.


Friday, November 20, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.

What kinds of technologies should be introduced to the processors specialized in the auto application may be quite different from those in the supercomputer, consumer PC & gaming, or mobile application. Because of the increasing necessity to develop higher-performance processors that are capable of assisting a driver in the handling of a car in various aspects and situations, the attention of many people in the auto and semiconductor industries may have been strongly attracted to the development of these processors. The request for the development of AI to realize a fully autonomous car may also demand a significant improvement in the performance of the reliable future AI processors specialized in the auto application, which may be much different from the present conventional processors.
Let's use a process of elimination. The processors specialized in the application of supercomputers to which all the kinds of existing booster technologies should be introduced may be a good starting point. Let's find out what kinds of technologies have to be eliminated from it next. If necessary, the technologies that may cause reliability problems should be removed or replaced after the tough reliability tests appropriate for this purpose. In order to redesign the auto transistors to be more reliable, it may be necessary to replace some materials with other reliable ones and/or to eliminate the sources of some stresses/strains incorporated into the transistor structures. After determining what kinds of materials and levels of stress/strain should be maintained, an appropriate range of semiconductor technology nodes has to be chosen in view of the scalability of the transistors with these usable materials. Parallel computing should be indispensable for this higher-performance auto application. The optimum number of the cores of a processor should be identified, by taking into consideration the tradeoff relationship between the cost and the performance. It seems to me that the invention of the ideas that allow reducing the manufacturing costs of the multi-core processor not only relying upon the enlargement of the wafer size or the outsourcing of the manufacturing from the overseas foundries, which have been two of the traditional methods to reduce the cost per die, should be the key to succeed in the development of the smart auto chip. Needless to say, a slumping company can't choose the way to enlarge the wafer size, which has been periodically carried out when a major capital investment was injected into the construction of a new-generation semiconductor plant. Because these auto processors can be diverted smoothly to various applications of the munitions industry, the progress of the overseas foundry business in this area may need closer attention than before, in view of the current state of world affairs.
The lower the manufacturing cost of a multi-core processor can be, the greater number of the cores and the higher the speed it can possess for a given affordable manufacturing cost. Of course, the restraint on the size of a chip shouldn't be tight for the auto application. The necessity for the reduction of the power dissipation should depend upon the type of power system that a car has. For an electric car with a rechargeable battery, the power dissipation of the main auto processors is one of the important factors, but for a conventional gasoline engine car or an electric car with a fuel cell, it isn't so. Although the sensor that's embedded in the backend of a simple peripheral microcomputer may be applicable to some objectives, it isn't necessary for the sensor to be embedded in the higher-performance auto processors.


Saturday, November 21, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, November 22, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a cloudy day. A suggestive advertisement left in my voicemail the day before yesterday motivated me to rewrite the sentence that my wife and I have never bought any lottery ticket and have never gambled since 2006.


Monday, November 23, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's fair to cloudy.

A small time bomb exploded in a public convenience at the Yasukuni shrine this morning. Fortunately, that explosion didn't sustain any casualties.


Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.

In June 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced the vision for its future System on a Chip (SoC) utilizing the photonic device technology that's capable of performing the mass data transmission between the system core and the memory banks through the integrated optical fibers in order to significantly improve the processing speed of the system on the whole. By virtue of cutting down the undesirable self-heating and the parasitic capacitances of the wirings, the power dissipation of the system can also be significantly reduced. This sort of partially-photonic-integrated circuit is not only beneficial to the data transmission inside the SoC but also to that inside the multi-core processors. It is to be hoped that the practical uses of the partially-photonic-integrated circuit that is potentially very advantageous to high-end computing, consumer PC & gaming, and mobile applications will be realized in the course of time and that the fully-photonic-integrated circuit will be someday in the future. To my knowledge, the photonic-integrated circuit technology isn't so vulnerable under the conditions that the SoCs and the multi-core processors for the auto application encounter routinely. Indeed, by substituting the optical fiber wiring for the conventional metal wiring, the reliability problems related to the high self-heating and electric field in the wiring, which have become more serious with scaling down the backend minimum dimension when advancing the technology node, can be eliminated without relying on the reduction in the operating voltage. This shouldn't be an idea to help reduce the manufacturing cost of the multi-core processors. However, the potential performance improvement of the SoC and the multi-core processor by bringing it into play should also be very advantageous to the auto application as well as many other applications.

(Retouch on July 17, 2017: The conversion efficiencies of the photonic devices on the integrated circuit are insufficient, the energy losses from converting electricity into light and vice versa at a high frequency lead to a bottleneck in terms of its energy efficiency. To be honest, I don't know how Hewlett-Packard achieved very low-power communications of mass data inside its SoC prototype.)


Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to rainy.

A Turkish F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet shot down a Russian SU-24M Sukhoi bomber jet over Syria near the border of Turkey yesterday. A Russian CSAR helicopter that stayed on the ground near the skirmish scene for the purpose of a rescue mission was blown up by a Syrian rebel group. It seems that a portable missile that a rebel group used is more advanced than the Stinger. According to some news reports, what a rebel group used is the BGM-71 TOW anti-tank guided missile. By a curious coincidence, the American-made elderly weapons destroyed the Russian-made bomber and helicopter in the borderland of Syria a few days before Thanksgiving Day. It's unknown whether or not Turkey will be pardoned.


Thursday, November 26, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to fair.

Not only in the semiconductor and computer industries but also in the munitions industry, the US major companies have still coerced other countries under the pretense of rather weariness. Most possibly, the exhausted stance of the US government may change awhile after the presidential election next year. Although one of the Japanese-made supercomputers is in the top 5 of the supercomputer performance ranking, the present Japanese-made weapons are far from being comparable to the American-made weapons, without mentioning the basic technologies. Officially, Japan has never successfully developed any modern stealth jet comparable to the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lighting II, or any modern interceptors such as the satellite-/laser-guided missile, laser cannon, and rail gun. It's even uncertain whether or not the US government will permit its US munitions companies to sell these modern weapons to the Japanese government at no distant date. Currently, they want to sell mostly troop transport planes like the V-22 Osprey, which has the capability of the VTOL, to the Japanese government, instead of the latest multipurpose stealth plane the F-35 Lightning II.
The American-made weapons and the Russian-made counterparts have been rivals for the world market share in the munitions industries for the last several decades. The Chinese-made weapons have been vigorously expanding their share recently, leaving the German-made weapons behind.


Friday, November 27, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's fair with occasional snow.

With advancing the semiconductor technology beyond the 32nm node, the scaling down of the thickness of the gate dielectric has no longer been expected as it was, because of the limitation on reducing the effective gate dielectric thickness set by the indispensable interlayer whose physical thickness can't be reduced further. In order to go forward, the configuration of the double-gate, the triple-gate, or the gate-all-around has to be adopted. Instead of reducing the gate dielectric thickness, the thickness of the fin of the FinFET/TriGate has to be reduced when scaling beyond the 22nm node at which the FinFET/TriGate technology was first introduced. As the thickness of the fin is scaled down, the aspect ratio of the fin should naturally increase when the height of it is let be. In general, as the aspect ratio of the fin increases, it should be more difficult to shape the right-angled parallelepiped fin exactly using the photolithography and etching processes. When the semiconductor technology is scaled down to the 14nm node or beyond, the height of the fin may be somewhat reduced inevitably as well. Therefore, in order to maintain the effective width of the FinFET/TriGate as designed, it should be inevitable to increase the number of the fins a multiple-fins FinFET.


Saturday, November 28, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, November 29, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, November 30, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

At the present time, the world's largest GDP country is the US, and the second largest is China, according to some international organizations. The third, fourth, and fifth largest countries are Japan, Germany, and the UK, respectively. The US banks and the Chinese banks have been in the top stream. Of course, the trend in the economy of either world's economic superpower should immediately influence that of other countries, whether it's good or bad. The recent instability of China's stock markets has often made others uneasy.

October 2015

Thursday, October 1, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's fair to rainy.

According to the definition by the Japan Metrological Agency, the Typhoon is a "tropical" depression grown or existing "in the North Pacific", the maximum speed of the wind under the influence of which is faster than 17m/sec. Because of this definition, whether or not the depression that gains enough strength in the Japan Sea should be categorized as a typhoon is uncertain. As far as I know, the Japan Metrological Agency doesn't call such a strong enough depression grown in the Japan Sea Typhoon traditionally. It seems to me that categorizing it as a Typhoon is more relevant to the times when the climate has become severe and such strong depressions in the Japan Sea have affected the lives of Japanese people more frequently than before. It's no exaggeration to say that the hesitations in some proper changes of the laws and the customs result from the same constitution rooted in the mind of the Japanese, such as devotion to negative attitudes, flattery to the authorities, and so on. The troubles attendant upon amending the Constitution of Japan should be more awkward.

California Institute of Technology is ranked first in the THE world university ranking in 2015. The private universities of both the United States and the United Kingdom occupy the top ranks as usual. For some reason or other, most of the distinguished national universities in Japan that appear regularly in its top 200 slumped noticeably this year.
I don't exactly remember what he wrote in one of his essays, Prof. Richard P. Feynman who took up teaching at Caltech some decades ago encouraged the readers and his students to challenge the authorities including himself. Probably, this is one of what Japanese researchers have to soak up. Frontier spirit should always be recommended. In other words, sloughing off a negative attitude toward bureaucracy is necessary in the academic field. It may be said that the great achievements of the US private universities are the outcomes of the vitality and competitiveness of American capitalism. A more speculative emphasis on graduate school educations at private universities where the staff may ideally distance themselves from government officials should also be placed in Japan, if affordable. As I wrote recently, it should take a few of the Japanese prestige private universities some decades or a longer time to catch up with these top universities in the THE world university ranking. However, someone who's pessimistic and well-informed about this issue may mumble that it never comes true. Well, whether or not it would come true in the future depends upon the patient efforts mostly by the private enterprises and naturally by the educators in Japan. Probably, it's much more difficult for Japan to achieve this goal than to take the championship cup in the men's world cup soccer.


Friday, October 2, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. The rain was very heavy before dawn. It cleared up in the morning.

The advantages of the people who have grown up in the English-speaking countries are great, as many people in various fields on the international stages feel. This should explain partially the reasons why the universities in non-English-speaking countries have made little progress with the THE world university ranking so far, but doesn't explain why the ranks of the distinguished national universities in Japan declined this year. It isn't easy for me to know what's going on at the graduate school levels of these Japanese universities in recent years.
The successes in both standardization of the English language in the academic and business areas and the international organizations and popularization of English in the pop cultures have opened these doors to excellent staff and have attracted a lot of students, some of the superior out of which may become the staffs hereafter, from abroad to the universities and research institutes in English-speaking countries. This is one of the most decisive factors. It's advantageous that, because approximately all of the publications in which they put together their achievements are described in English, the visibility of these are somewhat ensured from being buried. The people who have grown up in English-speaking countries have an advantage in terms of aptitude over others, too. Native English speakers who intend to be scholars or scientists at the university, research workers at the institute, or businessmen or politicians on the international stages can choose to cease learning the 2nd, the 3rd, and/or other languages in earnest if they don't want to learn. It's really tough work for most people to master speaking a foreign language to a native speaker level and writing it to an executive level if they didn't start making a studious effort at learning it from early childhood. It amounts to this, that native English speakers can avoid making their brains oriented excessively toward the ability to remember from early childhood. So, the reserve force of their brains can be oriented toward the abilities of logicality, imagination, and originality. Actually, this is a big advantage.


Saturday, October 3, 2015
Got up at six-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine, clear day.

Differently from other areas, in no small part of the basic research of the advanced medical, regeneration medicine, and biochemical areas, Japan has recently been preceding the Western countries. This new tendency has built up because Westerners are much more thoughtful about the ethical issues attendant on these areas and the regulations necessary for these areas than the Japanese and other Asians are. This may have been a chance for the Japanese universities to remedy the situation. However, I personally feel these areas to be unpleasant though I understand that the results of these areas may be very beneficial for the human race. At least, people have to bless the lives of laboratory animals for their contributions to the human race.


Sunday, October 4, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast. Went out shopping this morning. Ate a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, October 5, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was reached broadly.

Some of the subjects that have often come up at the General Assembly of the United Nations in these latter days drew my attention. The talking points for and against the increase in the permanent members of the Security Council and the power of veto of these members are what interested me. The attempt to increase the permanent member of the Security Council or to invalidate the power of veto of these members separately won't bring up in the public benefits. A reformation of the system of the United Nations that includes these two changes, taking the similarity with an existing system of a nation, would be desirable.
The following is an example of possible reformations. Only one nation is elected from the candidate nations as a chief nation to which the privilege of veto may be granted and whose term should naturally be set. The secretary-general should be elected out of all the UN member countries as is. The number of permanent members of the Security Council should be increased while reflecting their military and economic powers and their past conduct and contributions but these members don't retain the power of veto, similar to the Upper House of the bicameral system. The reasonable number of permanent members in the circumstances nowadays may be ten to twenty. Only the permanent members have the right to stand for a chief nation, and all the UN member countries have the right to vote. On account to avoid causing any possible critical situation like the beginning of a major war structure, the formation of the parties of the nations grounded on the social system, religion, ethnicity, etc. should be refrained from, at least officially, for a while until this structure is stabilized. I think that my proposal above for the minor reformation of the UN system that's characterized by not electing a chief person, that is to say, a president, but electing a chief nation with a prefixed term of the United Nations may work well. This is because this reformation of the UN system doesn't require any major reformations of domestic administration from each member country, and granting only a chief nation the right to exercise the power of veto may help avoid evading a jeopardous majority decision without falling into insufficiency. The vote of no confidence may be held at law to ask whether or not it should dismissed promptly in the case that a chief nation is seriously suspected of exercising the power of veto self-centeredly or unreasonably during its term. If a chief nation abuses the power of veto frequently, it should sink into a delicate position when it aims for the next term after an interval in the future. Although my proposal for the minor reformation of the UN system seems to work well, it won't get easily moving because there are some well-known difficulties. One of the problems is that most or some of the present permanent members who insisted on having the right to veto when the UN was founded about 70 years ago won't easily agree to relinquish it though they can maintain a chance to be elected as a chief nation with the power of veto, and another is that there are no small number of the powers who don't want to see any change though this UN reformation doesn't require any major changes in the domestic administrations in which they are most interested. Making every respectable effort to gain a strong number of backers for this better system from the UN members in order to produce momentum is only the way to carry it forward.
As I wrote long before, the periodic change of the location of the UN headquarters should be quite reasonable for the purpose of advancing its neutralization. Someday, it may begin.


Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The river was extensively flooded by the heavy rains that the hurricane Joaquin brought to Colombia, SC in the US for the last few days. The photos showing a flooded area of Colombia reminded me of those showing last month's flooding in a city in Japan.

The most difficult point in the difficulties that remain to be resolved in order to realize the laser cannon that's disposed of in the orbits around the Earth is the establishment of the power system that ceaselessly provides plenty of energy for it. Probably, the solar power system that's directly connected to the laser cannon module isn't sufficient and reliable enough to supply electricity for the practical uses of these advanced interceptors. If the deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion reactor in a car-size that Lockheed Martin Corp. has been developing were to be realizable within the next ten years as they announced last year, it could resolve this problem. Because the tritium isn't so abundant on the Earth, the realization of it won't threaten the other sectors of the energy industry at this early stage. To be honest, I don't know whether or not that news about the compact D-T fusion reactor is credible. If it's really true, their coming achievement should be great. It goes without saying that any ill-uses of the laser cannon in the orbit and the fusion reactor on the ground have to be prevented in advance.


Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The other possible method to supply electricity for the laser cannon orbiting around the Earth is the use of wireless energy transfer technology. The electric power may be transmitted from a power plant that generates electricity on the surface of the Earth to an artificial satellite armed with some laser cannons that stay in a stationary orbit far above a power plant. The power may also be transmitted to a laser cannon satellite that's staying at any point in the stationary orbit via some relay satellites. When the wireless network of a lot of the satellites specialized in generating electricity ceaselessly and sufficiently using its large solar panels is established in the orbits in the future, the power may also be obtained from it in a similar way. However, it sounds very costly to construct the entire system made up of some laser cannon satellites, a lot of the power generation satellites, and relay satellites in the orbits around the Earth.
To my knowledge, wireless energy transfer technology has become prevailing, and the verification of its high-power and long-distance applications is currently in progress on the ground.


Thursday, October 8, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day. The season's 23rd typhoon went northward in the offing of the Northern part of Japan in the Pacific. This afternoon, it's still maintaining its strength and size in the Sea of Okhotsk, but the Japan Metrological Agency called it a temperate depression.

The development of human abilities should be practiced by taking into consideration the well-balanced orientation of abilities that satisfy the necessities of the times, conform to the existing and soon-coming living conditions, and best fit the individual aptitudes. The ability to remember is always important, but the importance of indiscriminate memorizing has been increasingly declining because a variety of tools that assist people in accessing necessary information are now available everywhere. Keeping people's bodies in tone is always desirable, but the importance of strengthening excessively their physical performances isn't high. The abilities that are necessary to develop the new tools better than the old ones and to make the most of these tools in order to accomplish the matters, whether trivial or important, are distinctive of the human being.


Friday, October 9, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day

DNA manipulation before birth is a medical and bio-chemical treatment that's potentially fraught with serious risk, as well known. Probably, it could be one of the most potentially dangerous technologies that human beings have ever developed. Unlike nuclear technologies, it's rather difficult to assume what sorts of critical situations the inattentive uses of DNA manipulation will lead our world to. Although the achievements in various applications of DNA manipulation have proved to be very beneficial to us, both the orientation and the scope of its research have to be kept under strict watch. On the basis of the successful cases for other species, it's quite reasonable to make an inference that the treatment of DNA manipulation before birth for a person can also improve his or her abilities. However, the dangers attendant on it aren't easily assumable. This is one of the deeds that some ethical and religious groups condemn as evil.
There are a number of medicaments that can boost physical performance and those that can temporarily alter the mental states of living things. In the sporting world, athletes are banned from using performance-enhancement drugs under the rules set by the sports associations on account of the ideas of education and fairness. Although any law may not forbid people outside the sporting world to use some sort of performance-enhancement drugs, strengthening their physical performances excessively by using these drugs isn't necessary. This may be merely a matter of liking. On the other hand, in most countries, the laws strictly forbid people to use some sorts of drugs that affect the activities of their central nervous system because of the strong addictions and side effects that these drugs bring. Of course, some of these drugs may have some effects to stimulate people's mood for a while but have no effect to make people smarter. The proper place where the people whose physical performances are intensively enhanced and whose mental states get uncontrollably excited using these drugs may live without causing any flutter is the inside of the cage.
A well-balanced education, training, and nutrition are what people need. It's highly recommended that people should reinforce their abilities by making the most of the tools appropriate for their purposes. In general, some sorts of breeding activities are all in the day's work more or less, and may not be criticized for unless these activities go too far.


Saturday, October 10, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a cloudy day.


Sunday, October 11, 2015
Got up at eight-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.


Monday, October 12, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

If a nation succeeds in realizing the practical use of the artificial satellite armed with laser cannons that are designed to shoot ICBMs carrying nuclear warheads, etc. down for defensive purposes in the future, some of the world should feel strong anxiety about the possible ill uses of the laser cannons orbiting around the Earth by its military authorities. The law of nations that obliges the UN members to enable some third parties to monitor both the locations and the states of the laser interceptor satellites in orbit, especially in a peace footing, after their ratification will be necessary. One of the auditors that are eligible and competent for inspecting the uses of these satellites may be a UN organization, and another may be an NGO close to journalism. The awkward problem of this issue is that there will be no safeguard if a nation is forwarding this plan by itself in secrecy.


Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.

A chemical plant where a large amount of alcohol was employed for some manufacturing purposes exploded a few times in Tianjin, China last night. Explosion accidents have quite frequently happened in China in these latter days.

Various kinds of frauds taking advantage of the people's ignorance of the my-number and the consumption tax refund have already made news before starting the delivery of the notification to each door. Today, the Japanese government announced that the my-number of each individual has to be treated in confidence, and both the notification and the my-number card on which it's printed have to be kept in a safe place. Probably, the disreputable plan for the consumption tax refund utilizing the my-number card will fall by the wayside.


Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Seven Eleven is one of the major gas suppliers that don't only retail fuel oils for automobiles primarily but also a variety of convenience goods in most cities of the US, and is headquartered in Dallas, TX. Seven Eleven Japan is famous as the major chain retailer that doesn't retail any gasoline within my knowledge but a larger variety of convenience goods including some luncheons at a small room of their so-called convenience store located nearly everywhere in Japan. The widespread of convenience stores throughout Japan that may be considered to be a success beyond their expectations when they embarked on the retail business in Japan can be ascribed to their business style characterized by running a growing number of around-the-clock neighborhood stores, attracting customers with their favorable original goods, and improving both the quality and the quantity of the services available without cease, which have met the necessities of Japanese mostly in the metropolitan areas since the post-high-growth period and moreover in all the areas with deepening the aging society.
According to the TV news programs, Seven Eleven started opening some Japanese-style convenience stores in the UAE recently. It isn't reported whether or not they retail any gasoline at their stores there. In the first place, the ingredients and the tastes of the luncheons that are prepared and sold there are arranged in the way the Arabs like. How Seven Eleven will adapt its business style by degrees in order to satisfy the necessities of the Arabian people is rather interesting.


Thursday, October 15, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

The reactor # 2 of the Sendai nuclear power plants in Kagoshima prefecture restarted operating this morning.

Today, I would like to venture to make an unimportant proposal. Due to the exceeding centralization to the metropolitan area and the soaring price of land in Tokyo, there has been no better alternative choice but to locate a considerable number of public and private organizations, e.g. the airport, amusement parks, hotels, universities, metropolitan facilities whose names include the word of Tokyo in the prefectures adjacent to Tokyo for decades. The unimportant proposal today is that the name of "the Kantô region" where Tokyo is included may be changed into "the Tokyo region" for the sake of convenience, while the Metropolis of Tokyo (Tokyo-to) and its adjacent prefectures are called as these are. The advantage of this negligible proposal is that it requires only the minimum burdens while removing the incoherencies nicely, which tend to go unchecked perfunctorily in most Asian countries. It's much simpler and easier to change the name of the region than either to change the names of the adjacent prefectures into something like ** Tokyo or to merge either some small parts or the whole of some adjacent prefectures with Tokyo. However, someone who dotes on the name of Kantô will feel unpleasant if it disappears from the map. Anyway, this alternation means little to most of the Japanese who live outside the region and even those who live inside.


Friday, October 16, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

As quoted occasionally, the winners wrote the history books. A metaphorical line found in the US TV SF drama called A Wise Saying Above to mind last night. This tendency should have been true since the period when human beings started to record the races for power. The historic records in which the winners wrote with bias should have become official in a territory for a while during their rules, so that the records may have taken root there since then. The world history books were compiled a number of these historic records into together with the piles of these biases. The tendency should become more dominant with tracing history back to the past. Likewise, even in the modern age and these latter days, the more backward in both idealism and journalism the nations are, the more dominant this tendency should become. For instance, the modern history of Japan tells that the intervention of the US government triggered the last of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but it seems that the involvements of the Westerners during the Meiji Restoration weren't adequately documented by the winners of the civil war. Since the dawn of modern times, by the grace of both the efforts of idealistic historians and the rise of journalism, confidence in modern history has been improving significantly. However, it still has been far from being perfectly reliable. Indeed, even now, the news reports that the journalists and politicians inform people usually include some permissible or impermissible extent of the favors and disfavors that various powers push to incorporate. Therefore, in actuality, it's quite wholesome for a nation or a world to maintain the mass media groups of various orientations available for the people who somewhat understand their distinctions. Needless to say, it's unforgivable that the major mass media group in which people may be able to confide spreads a piece of overly haphazard news around on purpose.


Saturday, October 17, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.


Sunday, October 18, 2015
Got up at six-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, October 19, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

China's GDP growth rate during the period from April through June of this year was 7.0% and that during the period from July through September was 6.9%. It looks reasonably stable. In view of the countermeasures on the move against its environmental pollutions including carbon emissions and public nuisances, the potential scales of its growing productions and markets, and the hesitation in forwarding democratization, liberalization, and capitalization, its growth rate in the range of 5 to 10% seems to be proper. The foundation of the world structures may be wobbling when China's economy expands at a two-digit growth rate for a long period of time. Indeed, it's still fresh in our memory that China's rapid growth in addition to South Korea's shook the world following the slump of the US economy on account of the overflows of capital into these Asian countries about seven years ago.


Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day. Some reason or other motivated me again to write the sentence that my wife and I have never bought any lottery ticket and have never gambled since 2006.

  In addition, because of reasons similar to China's case, the framework of the world may lean remarkably when India's GDP growth rate also soars above 10% and continues to be so for a while. As we have seen, the economies of both nations have been developing at a fast pace for the last one to two decades. Actually, the growth rate in the range of 5 to 10% is fast enough for China and India, the populations of which add up to about 40 % of the world population. In terms of carbon emissions, China has already left the US behind, and India is coming up with it gradually. Somebody who is fastidious about climate change may mutter that it's still too fast. Although the intensive advancements in relying upon nuclear power generation and electrification in these two nations should avail to relieve the worsening frequencies of natural disasters worldwide due to climate changes effectively, it doesn't anticipate other economic problems like the case of the late 2000s when the economies of both nations continue to expand beyond a certain level and may lead us to too fast shift in the basic energy uses of the world, which some of the world powers don't let go by for various reasons. Both their growths in economy and their reliance on the nuclear power generation have to be carried out at certain adequate paces.


Wednesday, October 21, 2015
  Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.

If its foundation isn't solidly laid and its balance isn't well, a high rise that towers into the open sky may lean little by little, like Campanile di Pisa. A large building on an insecure foundation may also sink noticeably someday. When an earthquake occurs, the shakings may hasten its leaning and may inflict a number of mechanical defects on its structure, so that its property value may be lowered and its lifetime may be shortened.
The FinFETs that are correctly formed on the substrate according to its device design don't lean after the completion of the front-end processes because the interlayer spaces between the fins on the substrate were filled with a low-k insulating dielectric material or another. Once the gaps are bridged, there is no way that the fins may slant away. Vibrations within a practically possible range of strength from the outside don't cause any reliability problems resulting from its 3D device structure.


Thursday, October 22, 2015
  Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
 
On the other hand, the use of a high-k gate dielectric causes the degradation in the reliability and carrier mobility of the semiconductor devices on a chip, compared to that of the silicon dioxide gate dielectric, which has made a large contribution toward the semiconductor industry since its incunabula. Because of the possibility the VLSI that's composed of the transistors with a high-k gate dielectric fails due to their undesirable performance shifts after use for a certain period of time and the performance degradation may be kept below an acceptable level by inserting a reliable silicon dioxide layer or silicon oxynitride layer only a few ML thick between the unreliable high-k gate dielectric and the channel, this gate dielectric technology together with the dual metal gates processing has been widely introduced into many Si-device applications since the late 2000s. Of course, although the indispensable interlayer is extremely thin, vibrations within an assumable range of strength from the outside don't cause any reliability problems. The injections of the carriers from the channel into the high-k gate dielectric and the interfaces adjacent to it for a long period of operation may cause some failures. Indeed, for compound semiconductor devices, a high-k gate dielectric should quite naturally be used without a hitch.


Friday, October 23, 2015
  Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

About five months ago, an amount of contact spray was sprayed over the keyboard module of my electronic dictionary in order to restore its original state. As a result, however, the replacement of the keyboard module became necessary because its rubber-made part was seriously damaged. The damaged keyboard module hasn't been replaced by the new one yet.
Today, despite the risk, a small amount of the contact spray was applied to the clicking switch and some other parts inside the computer mouse that had been prone to malfunctioning since the freezing season of this year, through a tiny gap without disassembling it. It wasn't disassembled because some parts were firmly glued on its body to begin with. Fortunately, my computer mouse was mended with the contact spray this time. This proved that some electrodes inside it had become rusty during the recent freezing winters, and their rusty contact surfaces may be activated through the application of the contact spray today. It seems that a hand-held device that's equipped with the minimum number of mechanicals, e.g. the keypad, power switch, clicking switch, etc. can be nearly free from this sort of trouble native to the very cold latitudes.


Saturday, October 24, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Sunday, October 25, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.


Monday, October 26, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Recently NASA reported that the possibility that a significant earthquake will hit Los Angeles by 2018, which is one of the candidate sites for the 2024 Olympics, is about 99.9%. Because LA lies to one of the representative seismic zones on the Earth, the possibility that some noticeable earthquakes will hit there should be quite high. However, it isn't reported how significantly strong the upcoming earthquake that NASA talks about will be. It seems to me that the possibility that 99.9% of a significant earthquake will hit a major city within the next few years is surprisingly high, in any case.
Today, an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 hit the northeast of Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. That magnitude should be considered to be significant.


Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese noodles for dinner. It's a fine day.

The future worldviews that Hollywood movies describe and image tend to be very progressive. This is because Hollywood people engage in business in the world of entertainment. The box office results of the SF movies about the human's interplanetary travel to the surface of Mars in our solar system and the interstellar travel to that of a planet in another solar system were in top shape in these latter days.
A new project by NASA to build a new space station orbiting around the Moon of the Earth was recently announced. Differently from Russia's project, which is probably oriented toward the exploitation of the land and resources developments around a particular region and the attempt at approaching ideal self-sufficiency on the Moon by constructing a station on or slightly below its surface, the US's project is more oriented toward the establishment of a transfer station for the interplanetary travel e.g. the travels to the Mars, the asteroids and so on. Obviously, these projects should have both merits and demerits. It seems that from a shorter-term perspective, the US's project is more conservative than Russia's project, unlike some recent Hollywood movies. The US government has asked the ISS member countries and others to participate in this new project if they see it to be beneficial.


Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Indeed, some major industries and politicians of the West Coast states including California have been playing an important part in expanding the productions and markets in China for the last decades and partially enabling the Chinese to work on their rather aggressive projects of now and future including its own space station project and Moon exploitation project alone or with some technical supports by the Europeans. Taking into consideration the dispute with the Chinese government over China's unsinkable carriers under construction at a rapid pace in the Spratly Islands which is an important marine zone for their national defense and under which there is an abundance of natural resources such as oil and natural gas is recently getting more serious than ever, there may be no small number of the agents of the US military and NASA who want to warn the California pioneers fascinated by the growing vastness of the Asian markets with threatening words.


Thursday, October 29, 2015
Got up at five forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Neutrinos had been considered to be exactly massless or nearly massless. Because neutrino mass had never been measurable, the standard model which was established in the late 1970s describes neutrinos as massless. The physicists who played some leading roles in developing the framework of the standard model estimated that neutrino masses may be in the range of 1E-4 to 1E-1 eV or less (i.e. 1E-10 to 1E-7 times the electron mass or smaller) if neutrinos aren't exactly massless. Even now, neutrino masses aren't directly measurable because of their smallness and neutrality. However, some research groups have ever confirmed the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations that indirectly suggest that three types of neutrinos have slightly different masses. The oscillations of a neutrino type into another have been identified from various neutrino sources such as cosmic rays, colliders, and nuclear reactors.
The book entitled "The Quantum Theory of Fields" by Prof. Steven Weinberg briefly explains one of the possible ways to extend the existing standard model so that neutrino masses can be set in it, which requires the idea of Majorana neutrinos meaning that neutrinos and their antiparticles are identical, the see-saw mechanism, and the introductions of the Higgs doublets, left-handed lepton doublets, and right-handed charged lepton singlets with the mass M comparable to the Grand Unified Theory mass scale in order to make the theory renormalizable. Some publications explain another way through the idea of Majorana neutrinos and the introduction of the Higgs triplets, and another way through the idea of Dirac neutrinos meaning that not only left-handed neutrinos but also right-handed ones are taken into account, and the idea of extra dimensions, for the purpose of making the standard model compatible with small neutrino masses. To be honest, because I haven't yet read any full-textbook about supersymmetry or the superstring theory, I understand the way requiring the Higgs triplets or extra dimensions only roughly. Anyway, because of the difficulty in measuring the very small masses of neutrino directly, it should still be difficult to know which version of the extended standard models best describes the universe.
According to the theory of relativity which is one of the fundamental principles of the standard model, the achievable maximum speed of a massive particle must be asymptotically close to and never be above the speed of light when it's accelerated from a slower speed. So, if neutrinos aren't massless, the speed of neutrinos with a very small mass and a high kinetic energy should be found somewhat below the light speed. This is contradictory to a mysterious discovery that the neutrinos from the supernova 1987A might have reached the Earth earlier than the light from it did by several hours. This is why I still haven't been fully convinced that neutrinos have mass. Some future reproducible experiments will make this experimental or theoretical contradiction clearer.


Friday, October 30, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.

Yesterday, the Chinese government announced the rejection of its one-child policy, which has been enforced since the late 1970s. A Chinese married couple may be allowed to have two children when they want. Adopting a policy of two children for a pair should be reasonable and less troublemaking. Under this policy, the population of China will continue to decrease at a healthier pace. The policy of three children for a pair may also work well nowadays.
There has never been any birth control policy in Japan, to my knowledge. Honestly speaking, I want to have my own two or three children.


Saturday, October 31, 2015
Got up at eight o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's a fine day.