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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

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Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#81

Post by epochwolf »

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…

Worst possible case right now is a meltdown in the core (which is not explosive, just hot thermally and radioactively). A meltdown is not a problem because containment vessel is still intact and it's designed to handle a meltdown. It's just expensive and a bit dangerous to clean up radioactive sludge off the bottom of the containment vessel. (The building that blew off just protected the containment vessel from weather.) The article linked by anonymous246 explains in detail.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#82

Post by cubicle67 »

pokjhnboi wrote: post #56
Klonoar wrote: post #3

Thank. Fucking. God. I am getting increasingly tired of explaining these points to everyone who asks me (currently in Tokyo). A well worded piece that I can just link to, very nice to see at the moment.

No thank Fucking engineers. God did the deed - engineers countered it. Given the few 1000s casualties against a Mag8.9 earthquake I think God lost this one

I think the thanks was for Patrick's article

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#83

Post by hunterp »

Nukes are only "safe" when built to spec like the functioning,socialist government of Japan is capable of. And then very "intelligent" blog articles try to rationalize a cancer causing, radiation inducing thing. Nuke plants that are old, not kept up to date, etc are very very dangerous. As economies ebb and flow, the demand for energy always is present, but the resources to keep a plant up to spec are not. Sustainable resources like hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and tidal are far less worrysome, on a different level of dangerous, and do not require disaster contingency plans after contingency plans. Keep It Simple Stupid, nukes are not simple and they are not stupid, let us usher in an era of idiot proof nuke free earth that allows for energy independence from the empire of the nuclear grid. To the solarnet! To the hydronet! To the geonet! To the windnet! To the tidalnet!

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#84

Post by mistermann »

hunterp wrote: post #83

Nukes are only "safe" when built to spec like the functioning,socialist government of Japan is capable of. And then very "intelligent" blog articles try to rationalize a cancer causing, radiation inducing thing. Nuke plants that are old, not kept up to date, etc are very very dangerous. As economies ebb and flow, the demand for energy always is present, but the resources to keep a plant up to spec are not. Sustainabl…

I have to assume you are joking?

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#85

Post by Umofomia »

angus77 wrote: post #78
Umofomia wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

I only disputed that 颱 was related to the meanings of "stand" or "platform".

As for the meanings of "great" or "big", the OED and etymonline entries actually refer to a different character, 大, from the Cantonese pronunciation of 大風 (IPA: taːifʊŋ).

The Japanese and Chinese etymology of 颱風 is as convoluted as the English one that _delirium mentions above in a previous comment. It may have originated as a Western borrowing, be related to Taiwan as you have suggested, or be related to Cantonese 大風; it may have perhaps even been influenced by multiple sources.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#86

Post by kelnos »

jrockway wrote: post #41
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.

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.

Wrong character for the first. Going back to the Chinese (which is presumably where Japanese got it, given that it uses Chinese characters), the "tái" (颱 or 台, depending on whether you prefer traditional or simplified script) in "táifēng" is first-tone (ascending); the word that means "big" in Chinese is actually "dài" (大), fourth-tone (falling). Japanese also uses 大 for "big."

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#87

Post by Klonoar »

cubicle67 wrote: post #82
pokjhnboi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thank Fucking engineers. God did the deed - engineers countered it. Given the few 1000s casualties against a Mag8.9 earthquake I think God lost this one

I think the thanks was for Patrick's article

Thank. Fucking. God.

...that you pointed this out. Yes, yes it was.

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