Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
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 disaster -- this is just my wee little contribution from a place well removed from most of the worst scenes.
I live in Tokyo. On Sunday, I was looking at the buildings on the way to the train station. There were no visible cracks, except on a few old buildings which might as well have had the cracks before. Almost all businesses were open, etc.
Edit: as Patrick says, civil order continued. However, there were huge traffic jams and I witnessed a traffic argument turning violent. This is really rare in Japan.
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 think the news should steer back to the middle east and libya in particular right now; thats where things hang in the balance and can impact billions of lives.
If this is a matter of life-or-death importance to you, find my contact info and I will find someone for you to speak to about it. If not, wait a few weeks and the prefectural tourism board will be able to help you out.
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 fluff (e.g. "things on fire"), spammed by marketers, or deliberately hijacked by paid sockpuppets, fanatical propagandists, and well-funded PR campaigns? We go on and on about this stuff, routinely.
But on the other hand, we worry about these things because they are important, and because we still haven't done enough. Especially in the USA, our failed media infrastructure is a very big problem. It creates an environment where everyone is either perpetually ignorant or perpetually afraid, or both, and it fuels random acts of sabotage and irrationality, and it serves as a constant drag on our civilization's energy. So when, as an engineer, I think about ways to advance my favorite design and engineering projects - smart civic design, renewable energy, robotic exploration of space, cheap and widespread applied genetics, popular appreciation of science, promotion of the creative arts - it always seems to come down to education and information. Here we have an example: Why, in a world where we can build a global information system like this one, must patio11, with obvious reluctance, spend so much time restating the obvious? (And, indeed, he must spend this time, because the alternative is that many of our friends, and relatives, and especially our parents run around like Chicken Little.)
I am genuinely jealous, after reading this post. In that I would love for _my_ country to have its shit together to this degree. That, also, goes without saying.
I like how you put that. It describes my experience with Switzerland as well. I remember the pros and cons of being an American ex-pat there -- it could be quite rigid at times. As I get older, however, my frustration with this dichotomy appears to be growing. Individual expression can get off my lawn.
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.
If you want to fix the news, start there.
This is fantastic and worth repeating. Thank you.
May the mocking commence.
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).
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.
Further, you asserted that 「台」 was adopted into Japanese as a simplification of 「颱」, which I've shown to be false (it was adopted into Japanese as-is and wasn't simplified until 1956, and was also simplified in the same way in Chinese), yet people continue to upvote your incorrect assertion and downvote mine. Not that I hold that against you; you seem reasonable enough. But it does make me wonder what people's motivations would be.
- skosh
- bokeh (a photography term referring to a certain kind of blur in English)
- rickshaw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_magnate#Etymology
The borrowing pre-dates the Hepburn romanization system which wasn't developed until the 1880's.
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.
Given the few 1000s casualties against a Mag8.9 earthquake I think God lost this one
...that you pointed this out. Yes, yes it was.
"thousands of people were killed - but one person survived, therefore a miracle, therefore praise god"
Neither does English, as you've just demonstrated!
Just because someone doesn't have a word for something doesn't mean they have a concept for it; they might express it in two words instead of one. Also, most of the time you hear the claim that a language doesn't have a word for something, the claim is wrong, and the language actually does have such a word, while the person in question is ignorant of the language they are talking about (I presume that patio11 is not ignorant of Japanese, but may just be making a sloppy generalization).
It's used as a way of demonstrating that some entire culture thinks or acts in some particular way, which is usually a poor approximation of reality. While there are distinct cultures that have distinct practices, cultures are generally not so homogenous as to not even have a way to express a particular concept that goes against cultural norms.
I ask, because Christensen claims that Japan success a few decades ago was because all their successful firms (Toyota, Sony, etc etc) began with disruptive innovations, that needed to be improved, with sustaining innovations. Aiming at quality works really well for this.
He then says their recent hard times are because those disruptive innovations have now become good enough - but the Japanese firms are still improving on quality. He contrasts this with the US, where new disruptive firms are being created all the time (aided by employee mobility, VC/angel/YC non-debt funding, open markets, start-up infrastructure, largely unregulated competition, and strong IP for R&D).
US was first with mass-produced cars (Ford); Japan with games (Nintendo). Both these past innovations were disruptive.
Today, the US is pioneering consumer DNA testing (eg. 23andme), portable computers (iPhone/iPad - industrial uses are appearing, it's not just games);
The suggested case is that Japan doesn't seem to be innovating disruptively (although Nintendo has been working great at some disruptive stuff: wii and a 3D handheld). Disruptive innovation is possible in cars etc, such as the smartcar, and hybrids. Note that the all-electric car, Tesla, is from the US - and it's not clear that it will succeed. That's a big part of the disruptive game.
If anything, I'm pro-Japan, but mostly I'm a fan of disruptive innovations, and I sincerely hope that Japan will find a way to become disruptive again. Maybe it's harder because they have an aging population now... yet this could be a plus, because they could lead the world in innovations to cope with that, that the rest of the world will adopt when they catch up.
Can you give examples of Japanese disruptive innovation in planes, ships, cars? (I see your account is 14 hours old, and your comment history is a mix of intelligent discussion and reddit-style quips - I urge you to favour the former on HN).
EDIT if you are interested in constructive argument here, I'll offer some of Christensen's thoughts on disruption: it is lower-cost and/or targets non-consumers of an established product (e.g. as wii expanded the userbase of "game-players"), but it's not good enough for high-end consumers (e.g. hard-core gamers); over time it improves and replaces the established product when it does become good enough (unless the innovation is "co-opted", as Kinect is trying to do with wii).
0: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/sympathy-for-jap...
1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/%E6%88%91%E6...
I'll admit, it's hyphenated.
(I'm going to stop nitpicking now. patio11's original phrase was humorous, which is all it probably needed to be. :D )
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 of their expert guests
I've said this before, though: Japan is a big country and it's diversity is often underappreciated. There is largely not a monolithic Japanese viewpoint on this. The same goes for just about everything. (See also: the United States.)
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 pressure in a chamber they have no view or control over doesn't sound that much better either. Nor does the evacuation of 140,000 people "from the area around Fukushima".
All in all, based on the quotes of Japanese authorities that sip into the Reuters' feed - they did not have a situation under full control at several points. They handled it as professional as it's possible, no doubts about it, but it could've unfolded differently.
That'll probably go up with Fukushima out of commission.
I can't help but think what a disaster of this scale would look like in almost any other country but Japan. Checklists at almost every level of response is unimaginable in most countries I know (though maybe Singapore ...). If this were a 3rd world nation things would have been very, very different.
Probably might look like the 2010 Haitian earthquake or the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake/tsunami
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_ocean_earthquake
Most people would never think a relatively obscure software blog would be a source of some of the most reliable information about an event that the entire world is watching. Because we read HN (probably more often than we should), we are more informed than a sizable portion of news consumers.
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 this one. Kudos to them.
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 control, and may still turn into a ANS if containment fails and the wind turns towards Tokyo (which is forecast to happen around Tuesday). Flooding the building with sea water is a desparate measure, not SOP.
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.
I like a lot the comparison of nuclear energy with airplane safety: when you look at the statistics, it's a lot safer. But when it fails, it makes the headlines.
I'd be very interested to learn what those specs actually said. If it really was a Richter scale value, it would logically have to be at point blank, which this quake wasn't. If so, the energy that hit the reactors may well have been considerably less than what they were designed for,
Flooding the building with sea water is not something they came up with on the spur of the moment during this crisis. All of their options are well planned.
More info: https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...
Nuclear engineering is imagining the worst case, every reload, and coming up with a plan for what to do to contain radioactive material if it happens.
patio basically says everything is under control, nothing to worry about, no harmful radiation levels - not more than eating a banana or taking a long distance flight.
The media is talking about meltdown, nuclear catastrophe and there have been at least two explosions by now. US forces moved away from the shores due to radiation, Russia is worried about the wind carrying radioactive caesium and iod all the way over to them. As far as I can tell from news coverage, radiation levels did exceed 500 mikro-sievert, at times were as high as 1500.
It is just hard to understand what all this really means in terms of risk and how bad the situation really is. Meltdown and explosions at a nuclear plant just generally does not sound very safe and "standard procedure" to me.
Anyone can shed some light on what is going on there, from a technical and engineering and maybe even physicist point of view?
Still, several thousand people died in the third biggest economic power in the world, that’s obviously going to get a lot of coverage and moms are going to call because that’s how moms are.
[0] Approximate quote from one report I saw: “There’s no student who doesn’t get to take a ride on the earthquake simulator, no kindergartner who doesn’t learn how high tsunami waves can become.”
I haven't seen single article in local media saying how well Japanese survived the earthquake/tsunami. It's more about how shitty situation (usually with ever-rising dead/missing headcount) is and rat-race to find worse pictures of post-apocalyptic Japan.
The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. Even if devastation in the worst-hit areas is complete, a lot of people probably escaped because of the infrastructure and drills.
Between 100,000 and 300,000 people (the numbers are still very much unclear) were killed during the or in the aftermath of the much weaker earthquake in Haiti and if you look at other earthquakes you see similarly high death tolls – that tells me very clearly that Japan was extremely well prepared and I never for one second doubted that.
Guess the glass can be half-empty or half-full. FWIW, I'm also sitting in Germany and I'm mighty impressed by the Japanese response. It's bad but it could have been much worse.
Saying that the situation in the affected areas in Japan (which, even relative to Japan’s size, is quite a large area) is most certainly bad is in itself not at all a criticism of the Japanese response and I’m a bit baffled at how you could get that impression. There are certain things no diligent and excellent preparation can currently prevent (as evidenced by the horrible death toll).
The checklists are absolutely fantastic. I've been a part of writing various different disaster manuals that were to be used in the event of X and none of them had checklists, I am going to have to add that in.
Also: Would be better to say Great Britain and Honshu are about the same size instead that Honshu is larger (Britain is slightly larger). Leiman Shock: slight spelling error in Lehman Brothers?
If you can't slip smoothly from being sad about the death and destruction to analyzing the disaster response dispassionately, that's your problem.
Additionally, your language indicates you're still not grasping the problem we are examining. There is no "premise that everything went as planned." That is absolutely not his point at all. His point is that there is a hugely complex system that performed admirably, that emergency relief systems are a war against the unexpected.
I think it's pretty self-righteous to prioritize the decision-making that the Japanese will take care of on their over examining and controlling our own reactions, reactions based on a poor understanding of the emergency response and hysterical reporting.
Deleted comment
Yes. I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but once again, your terminology indicates you're not grasping the problem. There is no perfect system, there will always be flaws.
In what sense is the system worthy of no admiration? Because that is what you are asking for: you're saying that a viewpoint that regards the loss of tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands as praiseworthy as somehow "apathetic" when really it's just realistic: things could have been much worse.
The larger bug is, of course, using Apache when if this had been on Nginx I would be snug in my bed right now instead of getting paged. shakes fist
http://www.kalzumeus.com.nyud.net/2011/03/13/some-perspectiv...