This is a long post. The executive summary is:

The verb "to scale" in computer science refers to a solution's ability to handle dramatically increasing demands. Filtering spam by personally inspecting each message, for example, works fine if you get only a few each day, but reaches its limits when you get hundreds a day, and becomes totally unworkable if you got thousands. Personal inspection just doesn't scale to those kinds of numbers, which is why in real life we need a totally different approach, such as automatic filtering as a first line of defense.

When I first started writing [...]

After 15+ hours of flying, and 6+ hours of layovers, we're back in Kyoto after our annual summer visit to my folks. Cloud pictures make for easy posting fodder when I'm jetlagged, and though I didn't see another plane out the window, some big dynamic clouds made for some interest during a brief span a half an hour out of Tokyo. Previous years' "Back in Kyoto" posts (2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005) tended to also include an "Anthony sleeping on the plane" picture, but with not much room this time he slept with his head in [...]

I think I'm going to have to get into iPad app development... I just can't find the flashcard-type app I know should exist: to help Japanese kids study kanji ("Chinese characters").

There are about 2,000 kanji that an educated Japanese uses on a daily basis, and Japanese kids start learning in first grade. The Japanese Ministry of Education sets out exactly which characters are learned in each of the first six years of grade school (currently 80 characters in first grade, 160 in second grade, and so on).

By the time kids start learning kanji in the middle of first [...]
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Following on yesterday's Squirt Gun Water Fight, today Anthony and Josh had some water play on their own. They were out there for hours, but I stepped out just a bit to take pictures.

The picture above is from a game they played, where one sat in the car with his back to the faucet, and the other filled up and threw water at the first at unpredictable times. The one getting splashed would then yell "Hey, I felt something!". Repeat ad infinitum, switching places occasionally....

After "going vertical", Anthony tries to catch the water he just launched up. He [...]

In my most recent post about KidZania, Anthony had baked bread at a bakery. After that he did the radio show I posted about in May, just after our visit. Then it was time for a stint as a construction worker....

He'd done this before the first time we came; this was the only job he repeated.

It was getting late, but he was lucky to get one more experience in before KidZania closed for the evening: health-care aid.

And with that his second trip to KidZania was done.