Welcome! This blog discusses something about science, climate change, languages, PhD, graduate school, USA, Canada, UK, Belgium, EU, Japan and etc: this is just a collection of daily snap shots of my thoughts or interests.
I am a scientist specialized in computational analysis. Trained as a non-traditional physicist up to my PhD, I am currently in bioinformatics. I lived in many places and have been living in Cambridge, UK and Antwerp, Belgium these days after hopping around Ontario and New Brunswick, Canada and Boston and California, USA. I was born and lived in Japan to a normal Japanese household and moved a lot within the main island and eventually settled down in the city, just next to the lake of almost 4 million years old. Since my college I have been living abroad and doing science.
Living on this ever evolving tiny planet with ever increasing temperature and sea level, I am looking for common, universally true principles in biology, physics, society or culture.
Antwerp is well known for Japanese for an odd reason. A Dog of Flanders. But this is not popular in Flanders at all. That is really a letdown for Japanese who may have grown up watching TV shows. The reason Belgians do not like the story is that it depicts the depressing time when poverty prevailed the region due to unfair governance of dominant French bourgeoisie at that time. That past is still affecting the current messy politics in Belgium. It has been a mess and it seems it will be a mess. Flemish people particularly in Antwerp are eager to regain its lost prosperity of the past.
If you are seriously considering come to USA, Canada, UK or some EU countries for university or research, I may be able to give some help, thought I already discussed it in my blogs. Do you need some help in English? Me too. Learning a language takes much longer than you may think and do not expect any magic tricks. All people who claim otherwise are rubbish or just doing for business.
Please drop me lines. I will read any language which Google translate supports.
Dank u, Merci and Thank you:)
PS:
About climate related issues, I am not interested in how much some people do not know about science, and I will not waste my space to show their retarded ideas about climate change. Climate change deniers are looking for a few doctors who say they are doing fine when they are diagnosed to have cancer by over 100 doctors. They will trust a few and do nothing when their cancer can be treated. Also most of the climate change deniers are older generations who may not suffer the consequence of their catastrophic irresponsible behaviors: their kids will. Aside from climate change issues, energy based on fossil fuel is limited. So it is time to adapt new way of thinking which eventually bring better life for many people.
Also, people come all the way here to express their displeasure about my comments made elsewhere might be wasting their time since their opinions will not likely show up and will be likely deleted immediately. Of course, I welcome opinions and comments which do not contradict basic science nor logic.
A Pillow Diary of an Expatriate Scientist 
TOEFL: Don’t remember. I took only semi-official TOEFL exams.
TOEIC: What?
No one has ever asked me about these English scores during my interviews. They are useful up to a certain point to know and demonstrate your English proficiency. Good luck on these. If they ever do, I will ask them to judge my proficiency during the interview. Seriously, people should get over these exams as soon as possible.