HondSweetMission

November 2, 2005 6:01 PM

HondaSwetMission seems to be some sort of wild interface for a collection of Japanese audio blogs. Well. That's my guess.
posted by Pinwheel (26 comments total)

that is the weirdest thing. I tried to figure it out.. but got completely confused
posted by chohoh at 6:24 PM on November 2, 2005

I figured it out. Close the thing after it spends a minute loading the interface.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 6:30 PM on November 2, 2005

umm.. still dont get it
posted by chohoh at 6:33 PM on November 2, 2005

incrutable
posted by longsleeves at 6:42 PM on November 2, 2005

I don't think I'll be able to wait for the interface to load, but I am impressed by your ability to misspell HondaSweetMission in the both title and description! And not even the same way! +1 FP.
posted by team lowkey at 7:00 PM on November 2, 2005

The interface is really neat... but I have no idea what it is. What's really funny is you keep seeing people leaving comments that're having the same reaction.
posted by brundlefly at 7:04 PM on November 2, 2005

Okay, so I did actually wait for the interface to load, and it is pretty fascinating. +1 Section.
posted by team lowkey at 7:09 PM on November 2, 2005

That was awesome! Does anyone know who the music was by?
posted by oddman at 7:09 PM on November 2, 2005

tfm.co.jp is TokyoFM btw.

btw2, the Tokyo radio market is served by like 3 radio stations. The gaps on the radio dial are immense at any rate.

TV channels serving Tokyo, with the population of California?

1-3-4-6-8-10-12 (makes channel surfing a lot easier).

This trivia is ca. 2000, so things may have changed since then.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:19 PM on November 2, 2005

It's pretty cool, kinda cool way to use flash and maps.
posted by mathowie at 7:30 PM on November 2, 2005

OMFG. Clicking the reports is like a veritable Rosetta Stone for someone studying Japanese. Getting audio and a literal text translation in parallel is most awesome practice/drill/training. People pay good money for this shit.

flash kicks ass, huh? In my 2000年 interview at a certain computer manufacturer based in the S.V. I told the head of their graphics division that they should do a flash analogue since it was so much more powerful than freeze-dried API. Now Micorsoft is doing Sparkle, their flash-killer that will be shipping with Vista.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:31 PM on November 2, 2005

OMFG(2)! The audio notes in the right margin of the reports are the fucking future! The voices are damn good (Japanese is probably easier to do than English, but still).

My jaw is on the floor and my desk is covered in spooge right now. This is kinda like the visuals in Minority Report -- this is what the future's going to be, why we're going to need 10Ghz computers.

catchy bgm (background music) too.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:41 PM on November 2, 2005

and a literal text translation

sorry, transcription. Translation is still a bit in the future...
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:42 PM on November 2, 2005

Since some people liked my Japanese breakdown last week, here's another:

ブラジルの女性は、世界で一番美しいのはブラジル人だと思っているくらい、美に対する意識が非常に強くて、とにかく体をシェイプすることに気を使っています。
それで、ビーチに行っても泳ぐよりもスタスタと早足で歩いている姿をよく見かけます

(from one of the Brazil reports)

Pasting this into Jim Breen's pretty good dictionary gives you these lookups:

ブラジル (n) Brazil
女性 【じょせい】 (n) woman
世界 【せかい】 (n) the world; society; the universe
一番 【いちばん】 (n-adv) (1) best; first; number one;
美しい 【うつくしい】 (adj) beautiful; lovely
ブラジル人 【ぶらじるじん】 Brazilian (n)
思う 【おもう】 (v5u) to think; to feel
美 【び】 (n,n-suf) beauty
対する 【たいする】 (vs-s) to face; to confront; to oppose
意識 【いしき】 (n,vs) consciousness; senses
非常に 【ひじょうに】 (adv) very; extremely; exceedingly
強く 【つよく】 strongly (adv) (adv)
とにかく (adv) anyhow; at any rate; anyway; somehow or other; generally speaking; in any case
体 【からだ; たい; てい】 (からだ) (n) (1) body;
シェイプ shape
気を使う 【きをつかう】 (exp) to attend to; to fuss about; to take into consideration
ビーチ (n) beach
行う 【おこなう】 (v5u) to perform; to do; to conduct oneself; to carry out
泳ぐ 【およぐ】 (v5g) to swim
すたすた (adv) briskly
早足 【はやあし】 (n) quick pace
歩く 【あるく】 (v5k) to walk
姿 【すがた】 (n) figure; shape; appearance
見かけ 【みかけ】 (n) outward appearance


Just pasting the above lookups back back into the first text block yields this in-place translation:

Brazil のwomanは、the worldでbest beautifulのはBrazilianだとto thinkっているくらい、beautyにto face consciousnessがextremely stronglyくて、anyhow bodyをshapeすることにto attend toっています。
それで、beachに to performってもto swimよりもbrisklyとquick paceでto walkいているfigureをよくoutward appearanceかけます

Jesus, when I was going to school I had to look all this up in a paper dictionary, and it took hours.

Completing the translation:

"It is often thought that Brazilian women are the most beautiful in the world; being conscious of beauty is very strong... at any rate people take a lot of care about staying in shape.
As to that, you can see a lot of people swimming and briskly walking at the beach."
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 8:14 PM on November 2, 2005

why are we going to need 10gHz computers?

so did my 800Mhz PBG4, but I was talking about the computer text to speech functionality. To go from toy to tool is going to take another order of magnitude of processing.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 8:16 PM on November 2, 2005

...once. Thin-clients are the future.

I tend to agree. Looks like architecture-wise we're on-track toward adding a Flex/Flash/JavaScript/Laszlo-esque platform-neutral middleware layer between the app and the OS. C/C++ is dead, hopefully. C#/Avalon is a defensive move against Google/Macromedia. Apple still has their thumb inserted apparently, Dashboard is a toe in the water I guess. Right now my 2.6Ghz P4 can handle any JavaScript I throw at it (my application development environment is WebKit on 10.3.x and FireFox 1.5 on x86 PCs), what I want to see is Flex/Flash (or more accurately a good standards analogue) replacing Win32 & PalmOS on the PDA/phone platform.

Palm has been busy imploding/inventing the past, unfortunately, leaving us with a PocketPC and Symbian future. Oh Apple! Where art thou PDA with a cool Flex-esque GUI toolbox?
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 8:48 PM on November 2, 2005

definately not comulent.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:12 PM on November 2, 2005

Jeesh this is like something designed by Keita Takahashi. Weird.
posted by bobo123 at 9:16 PM on November 2, 2005

That is cool. Though I don't understand it.
posted by wilful at 9:30 PM on November 2, 2005

yugop did that...he's always been pushing the boundaries with Flash.

what i'm curious about is how the reporters get their voicemail into the interface, and who transcribes it. you can record audio directly to your server using the Flash Comm Server, so maybe they are using that. or perhaps they can link to their voicemail system via the web... and enter the transcript themselves. or just record the mp3 locally and then upload. but how do they manage the cue points that synch the audio to the text animation? it all seems too dynamic to be done by hand... sorry, yammering.

the comments, that appear on the right, are just text being read by computer voices. still, it presents so well...
posted by cgs at 9:34 PM on November 2, 2005

what i'm curious about is how the reporters get their voicemail into the interface

long-distance POTS would work. This is a radio website after all, mebbe these are previous show segments posted to the web. Ah, checking the Tokyo-FM website I see it's a daily show and they post these reports up to the web daily.

and who transcribes it

webmonkeys?

it all seems too dynamic to be done by hand

there's not that many reports, and the sync is rough, not exact...

are just text being read by computer voices. still, it presents so well...

they're getting hit with the wikipedia GIGO effect pretty hard, alas.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 10:03 PM on November 2, 2005

Alright. There are clearly people here who understand this site more than I do. What is it? It's gorgeous and it's a technological feat, but what is it doing?
posted by brundlefly at 11:37 PM on November 2, 2005

brundlefly:

Tokyo FM (80.0Mhz if you have a very, very tall antenna) has a weekday morning segment that has monologues/reports from Japanese living overseas. This website collects their stories into this very sexed-up flash-y GUI website. As I listed above, the cool features for me were 1) the transcriptions that are synced to the original audio (IME this is the best way to get from low-intermediate to advanced in Japanese, since you can work from strengths in either reading or listening to cross-connect these separate language skills), and 2) a user-comment sidebar that reads user comments with a pretty damn good text -> Japanese voice software feature (but the comments themselves are uniformly crap, alas).
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:13 AM on November 3, 2005

oh yeah, the show is titled "Honda Sweet Mission Global Research Show". 'Honda' because the car company is sponsoring it. 'Sweet Mission' because, well, you probably already know about the Japanese love for Engrish.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:23 AM on November 3, 2005

odin -- sure, the implementations will still be C/C++.

But JavaScript to me is just Lisp dressed up in a C-like syntax and intimately tied into the DHTML DOM.

I'm 80% into writing a personal utility app in JavaScript+DHTML (includes spreadsheet, graph, and database functionality) and so far it's been a blast. I'm looking at C/C++ and thinking what do I need from it ... not much, anymore.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 5:46 PM on November 3, 2005

I want to build a Katamari and roll over those bloggers.
posted by ph00dz at 5:50 AM on November 4, 2005