Last week we had the discussion meeting of the Society of Rheology, Japan, in Niigata. There were many interesting talks but I saw some problems in the computational rheology session, which I organized. It seems that the session does not fit the situation. There exist some people doing computational researches, but they prefer submitting their papers to the sessions that discuss the target of the computation rather than the computational methods. The audience as well. I have to discuss this matter with the other members. Apart from the management of the session, I attended the board meeting and the editorial office meeting because I am in charge of the editor-in-chief of the journal of the society. The main issue this time is the installation of web-submitting system to our journal. Nowadays, most of the scientific journals collect the papers via web-system. Reviewing and editing of the papers are also managed via the system. But currently our journal does not have such a system so that the process is rather bothering, and indeed, not standard. Now I am investigating possible web-systems.
The society meeting was from Tuesday to Thursday, and the board meetings were Tuesday and Thursday. Very unfortunately, I had the meeting of the department heads in Nagoya on Wednesday. Thus, I got back and forth between Niigata and Nagoya on the day. I got in trains for 8 hours in total… But it was nice to finish up some papers and presentations in the Shinkansen.
During my train riding, I got this interesting article on the usage of plastics for luxurious watches. This article includes a nice introduction of the basics of polymeric materials, as well as the specific use of polymers in watches. In particular, I did not know about the wide use of Bakelite. The use of plastics for date disks by Seiko, and the use of PTFE by Rolex are also interesting. Carbon fibers and Carbon nano-tubes seem also in use, maybe for their impression as cutting-edge materials.