botany

Blue is the least abundant flower color. Because even I don't know the reason, you must not know it either. (Can anyone tell me why? I seriously want to know it. Please.)

Gentian is one of the few groups which feature true blue flowers. While not all gentians are blue (some are, for example, yellow), many people would associate the color with gentian. Besides the special color, for the Japanese, gentians remind us of a sense of autumn. Indeed, they are among the best-selling autumn flowers. You can find blue gentians at any flower shop around this time.

The gentian in the photo is Gentiana triflora var japonica. I'm growing the plant in my garden. As you can guess from japonica in its scientific name, the species is native to Japan. But not unique to Japan. They are also found in the surrounding Far-East region.

experiment (result)

The result is here. The ''s'' denotes ''seconds''. The first girl's record was 37s. This means that it took thirty seven seconds for her to become unable to move. Note that all participants were female. Only female mosquitoes which have copulated with some guys suck blood in order to lay eggs.

A thorough statistical anaysis revealed that the average time to perish was 33.7s and the standard deviation was 10.78. If the distribution of the perish time is normally distributed, to compute the confidence intervals is not too difficult. You can do it yourself. I'm less bored today.

I talked about this result to Benks Links, an insect analysist at a private consulting company in DC. His comment was:
''Impeccable..., highly convincing, totally unbeatable.''
─ Benks Links

CONCLUSION:

Mosquito coils work as insecticide. It can kill female, nonvirgin mosquitoes within, on average, 33.7 seconds.

experiment (methodology)

After discussing with world-leading scientists in the field of mosquito-coil study, I designed the experiment as follows.

STEP 1: Gathering Smoke.
A bottle of volume 200ml was used. I manually gathered smoke from the coil as you see in the photo. The bottle got fogged with the smoke, when an ample amount of smoke got in it.









STEP 2: Recruiting Volunteers.
Ten altruistic mosquitoes agreeded to voluntarily participate in the experiment.
Without calling for, they swarmed around me. I asked them to wait for their turns in the net.









STEP 3: Recording Results.
The moquitoes, one by one, were asked to enter the bottle filled with smoke. I recorded time for them to perish in the gas chamber. I refilled smoke for the each trial in order to keep the smoke condition uniform.



Next post will report the result and discuss it. See you tomorrow.

experiment (introduction)

An anonymous gave the following comment on the post entitled ''vortex'':

i thought that the coil was to make smoke that discourages mosquitoes from coming near, not actually kill them

I partly agree with the comment. But I still think that the coil is an insecticide rather than a repellent. My reasoning is found in the reply to the comment (see the backnumber). To my best knowledge, however, no guidebook studies whether or not it actually kills mosquitoes. To protect you against misuse of mosquito coils, I decided to experimentally demonstrate its killing power.

The apparatuses in the photo are used in the experiment. The next post will report the methodological details.

gloomy september

It has been cloudy or rainy for more than a week. I have not been able to photosynthesize. Due to the energy shortage, I couldn't update my blog till today.

Weather is one of the biggest problems for travelers. You may know that June in Japan is a rain season. However, so is September. September could be even worse because typhoons often hit Japan in this month, but seldom in June.

American counterpart for typhoon would be hurricane. I'm not sure about meteorological differences between them two. They might be the same phenomenon with different local names. While hurricanes are named with female names, typhoons are numbered. The number starts from one every year in the order of occurrence (not hit).As of today, the thirteenth typhoon is on the ocean east of the Philippines.

royal baby

He came out this morning at 8:27a.m. as their third child of Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko.The birthrate in this coutry is as low as 1.25 as of 2005. Given this low rate, the royal couple is pretty productive. Good job.

You know, this delivery is very special for the Japanese due to the succession problem. Under the current imperial rule, only boy can take the throne. The royal family, however, had not been blessed with male baby for forty years. You may speculate that Japanese people was surprised and pleased at the male birth. Yes, pleased but not necessarily surprised. While the gender of the baby, technically, had been strictly secret until the baby was born, there was an atmosphere on the street that everyone had assumed that the child would be a boy. Indeed, even before the actual birth, tabloids treated the baby issue as if they had known the sex. So I am guessing that many Japanese, including myself, thought ''As I expected'' when hearing about the gender this morning.

lawn

I found something bizarre at a station. A plate of lawn on the rail track. The green grass is growing on the plate on the track. Strangely, only a small part of the track is covered and the track on the other side is not covered.

I asked a station attendant about this weird green carpet. ''It has been there for some time now", he told me. But he did not know who installed it or for what. Actually, he was wondering too. Do you have any idea?

open pantry

To the question ''What would you like to import to your country from Japan?'', an American guy on TV, who are currently living in Japan, answered '' A convenience store'', while it is originally from his country. He said that Japanese convenience stores have much better food than American stores do and that the service is very good.

I found that convenience stores in American cities are rather sparse. However, in Japanese cities, there are too many stores. Especially around the centers of big cities, you can find them even in every block. This high density reflects how popular they are for the Japanese and induced intense competition to the convenience-store business. The goodness of Japanese convenience store, which the guy pointed out, would be an outcome of this keen competition.

We think convenience stores literally convenient. They are open 24-hour all the year over and have everything we need. We are so convenience-store dependant that we could not live without them (seriously). So we must allow them to proliferate, although we know they are extremely wasteful.