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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

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Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#71

Post by Umofomia »

angus77 wrote: post #58
jrockway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. The first character in taifuu means "big", and the second means "wind". They came up with this on their own; and it's simply a coincidence that other languages have a word that sounds similar.

Actually, the first character in typhoon is 「台」, which means something like "stand" or "platform". It's also the first character in "Taiwan". I've read before that the word "typhoon" was of Arabic origin and came to Japan from Chinese, but the word spread to the West via Japan.

The original traditional Chinese character is 颱; the Japanese adopted the character 台 as a simplification of the original character (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai). Therefore, the "stand" or "platform" meanings of the 台 character are unrelated to that of 颱.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#72

Post by stoney »

brazzy wrote: post #29
mantas wrote: post #7

Agreed. After living in Japan for a while, european point of view on this earthquake makes me smile. Anyway, prayers and best wishes to Japan. On nuclear reactors: I bet Japan will restart them soon. Give them a month, max 3. For the fcks sake, they still hunt whales. IMHO Japan is one of those countries that still don't give a damn about loud-screamos. Although they'll upgrade their plants to prevent failure like th…

Re reactors: you're kidding yourself. The reacors that shut down regularly will be restarted, sure. But those where cooling failed will NOT run in a month or 3. Those where the core melted are gone beyond salvage. And patio11 is talking bullshit as well: the situation at Fukushiuma may not be a Apocalyptic Nightmare Scenarios yet , but the systems did not work "exactly as designed", the situation it's not under contr…

I don't know about these particular reactors, but I've worked at nuclear power plants in the past and the final cooling backup plan was generally a variation of "fill the building with sea water".

The reactors I knew (I assume it's similar in Japan) each had a LOT of options for cooling them. Some options would allow regular operation (which requires very fine control of cooling), some options would harmlessly shut a reactor down (where "harmlessly" means without causing any damage to the reactor). The filling-with-sea-water option was "standard operating procedure" in the sense that it was in the manual as a standard procedure, but it's the kind of thing you only get to do once because after you've done it your reactor is permanently broken and won't be restarted.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#73

Post by damncabbage »

pmjordan wrote: post #40
mattdeboard wrote: post #33

> "Japanese does not have a word for excessive preparation." Neither does English, as you've just demonstrated!

"over-preparation" I'll admit, it's hyphenated.

If we go that way, Japanese has something like 具え過ぎる (preparing-too-much).

(I'm going to stop nitpicking now. patio11's original phrase was humorous, which is all it probably needed to be. :D )

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#74

Post by Paulomus »

chc wrote: post #46
burke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to stop and think about that one for a while. Are there any cases that you know of where a Japanese word is anglicized before becoming an English word? It seems like english speakers have an easy enough time guessing at Japanese pronunciation that we normally keep the direct romanization. This is why "typhoon" seemed weird to me. It makes a lot more sense that both languages would have imported it from Greek.

Actually, there are several like that. The most salient one in this case would be "tycoon." A few more: - skosh - bokeh (a photography term referring to a certain kind of blur in English) - rickshaw

You can see the etymology of tycoon at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_magnate#Etymology

The borrowing pre-dates the Hepburn romanization system which wasn't developed until the 1880's.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#75

Post by Paulomus »

wazoox wrote: post #22
alexandros wrote: post #13

I hate to be -that- Greek, but the word typhoon in English is arguably either Greek or Arabic in origin. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=typhoon May the mocking commence.

Typhon is a Greek titan, master of the winds. By some coincidence, the english derivative "Typhoon" sounds very much like the Japanese word "taifu", but it's obviously unrelated. The English (an other European languages) word definitely comes from Greek. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon

I think it is more correct to say that all the typhoon words derive from Greek (or at least a common source). Europeans borrowed a cognate local word (tufan) to describe the cyclones of the Indian Ocean and 'correcred' the spelling to the Greek roots.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=typhoon&searc...

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#76

Post by anonymous246 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #66
patio11 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interest in the nuclear question is running very high. Japan historically has a complicated relationship with nuclear power, for all the obvious reasons. (Heck, I got freaked out when I saw the word "hibakusha" used in print today in a context not related to WWII.) I would characterize the tenor of reports I saw on NHK earlier as "visible concern" on the part of the anchor and "restrained professionalism" on the part…

I read what you wrote in the linked post, and your view of the situation appears to be... erm... too bright if you will. Were there not repeated cooling system failure resulting cooling pumps running on batteries (that needed to be swapped every few hours)? This sounds to me less like "something working as designed" and more like scraping last fallback options. Releasing (lightly radioactive) steam to ease the pressu…

https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#77

Post by pokjhnboi »

elptacek wrote: post #57
mechanical_fish wrote: post #11

English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety. I can believe it. So, on the one hand, it often seems like HN spends way too much time absorbed with inside-baseball conversations on the design of social news. How do we keep social-media communities intelligent and informative? How do we prevent them from being constantly trolled, dominated by sugar-coated memetic fluf…

I guess it goes without saying that this very thoughtfully composed post also implies is that it's not only the media infrastructure that is failed. But the answer is written into the post as well: be involved. Apparently everyone in Japan has a duty in times of crisis, and it's not something opted into. I am genuinely jealous, after reading this post. In that I would love for _my_ country to have its shit together t…

I live in a city of 2M people directly opposite the pacific from this. Our 50 person earthquake response team was disbanded last year after an investigation into police funding.

Of course since we are mostly on reclaimed land which will liquefy, all our drinking and firefighting water comes into the city across 2 ancient bridges and very few of the buildings have been earthquake retrofitted we aren't worried about the loss of 50 search and rescue people.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#78

Post by angus77 »

Umofomia wrote: post #71
angus77 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the first character in typhoon is 「台」, which means something like "stand" or "platform". It's also the first character in "Taiwan". I've read before that the word "typhoon" was of Arabic origin and came to Japan from Chinese, but the word spread to the West via Japan.

The original traditional Chinese character is 颱; the Japanese adopted the character 台 as a simplification of the original character (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai ). Therefore, the "stand" or "platform" meanings of the 台 character are unrelated to that of 颱.

If you follow the link to 颱 from the wikipedia page to the wiktionary entry, you'll find that:

a) 台 is the simplified version of 颱 in modern Chinese

b) there is nothing in the entry that suggests it means "great" or "big", and that, in fact, the one character translates as "typhoon"

Also, if you check out the Japanese wikipedia page for 台風, you'll find that the Japanese spelled it 颱風 up until 1956. There's also a rational for the 台風 spelling suggesting that it may have meant that typhoons were great winds that came from the direction of Taiwan, which is why the 台　character was used (although none of the suggested etymologies are yet proven).

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#79

Post by po »

cperciva wrote: post #23
patio11 wrote: post #2

There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public. At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disa…

I am not "HN's Japan Guy." Perhaps not, but I'd say that you're probably the best writer out of HN's Japanese Guys. (No offense intended to other HNers from Japan -- I'd say that you're one of the best writers on HN from any location.)

I'll give him highest ranked writer. He is a very clear writer but no need to make it a pissing match. Our friends at other startups here pen some nice articles as well for example. Besides, he's fully absorbed one Japanese quality: he probably wont accept your praise without deferring it. :-)

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#80

Post by robryan »

rwmj wrote: post #25
pieter wrote: post #4

Perhaps someone can tell about about the perception of nuclear reactors in Japan after the earthquake. Is there any knee-jerk reaction calling for the demolition of all existing reactors and stopping of all plans, or do most people have the same reaction Patrick has, seeing this as somewhat of a success? Is there any hysteria about the current problems with some of the reactors?

I guess the Japanese don't generate 30% of their electricity from nuclear power for fun or because it's a popular choice. It's by necessity -- Japan imports 99% of its oil and has only tiny coal reserves.

Wondering roughly what kind of cents per kilowatt hour they pay for electricity over there, I know nuclear is a lot more efficient energy generation but have no idea how this translates for the end consumer.
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