People send me stuff. I get so many books and manuscripts to review that I could heat my home if I had a wood burning stove. While I was away, one arrived in the mail from Japan. Despite claims that Climategate is going away or was inconsequential, as evidenced below, it continues to gain interest worldwide.
Of course, I can’t read a thing in it.
The sender, Tadashi Watanabe wrote this curious note in the margin:
I’ve never thought of the Japanese language to be “freak”, just unreadable to me. (Note: in comments it has been pointed out that he may have written “fresh”, which makes more sense. I looked at it several times, but the last letters looked like a small a and small k. They still do. But let’s go with “fresh”.)
Fortunately the book has some familiar pictures, actually, a lot of them.
I feel honored that WUWT gets notice in Japan and I thank Mr. Tadashi Watanabe for the kindness of sending me this book. I also offer congratulations to Steve Mosher and Thomas Fuller for breaking the language barrier.
If you haven’t got your copy yet, click on the image on the right sidebar to order THE CRUTAPE LETTERS from Amazon.
Oh, and a note of acknowledgment to WUWT regular “bulldust” who coined the phrase “Climategate” right here on WUWT (Bulldust coined the phrase at 3:52PM PST Nov 19th) just hours after we broke the story. It was great to meet you in Perth.
JoNova’s ‘The Skeptics Handbook’ in Japanese is available here:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/translations/japanese/skeptics-handbook-japan-081909.pdf
that word looks like ‘great’ to me; enjoy a great language
Pascvaks says:
July 5, 2010 at 2:25 pm (Edit)
Doctor Tadashi Watanabe (if one and the same) is a very accomplished engineer.
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0611/0901.html
From the link:
“Furthermore, Dr. Watanabe played a central role in the successive development of the SX Series and “the Earth Simulator”. The Earth Simulator was certified as the world’s fastest supercomputer for three years running from 2002 to 2004. NEC’s SX Series and the Earth Simulator both employ the vector principle that was invented by Seymour Cray.”
Er, wow!
Dutch agency admits mistake in UN climate report
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100705/ap_on_bi_ge/climate
> The Earth Simulator was certified as the world’s fastest supercomputer for three years running from 2002 to 2004.
That was an astonishingly long run on the Top500 supercomputing list. The exponential growth in computer power on that list is utterly amazing. It wasn’t
long ago that a Teraflop was the holy grail. The Earth Simulator’s reign stands out in the middle traces at http://top500.org/lists/2010/06/performance_development
Way to go Tadashi Watanabe. Well done.
What a lot of ungracious carping! And, there is nothing wrong with “onerous” in this context. Also, because it is written in Japanese does not mean that Chinese or Koreans can understand it. Chinese people will be able to understand the title and a lot of the key words, as will older Koreans, and those Koreans who can read the Korean language it was written up to about 30 years ago. Anyway, stop your nasty comments.
Thanks for your comments folks.
I used “freak” as a (possible) synonym of bizarre, exotic or peculiar since my dictionary appeared to tell me so. Apology for any confusion.
Tha person Pascvaks has cited is another Tadashi Watanabe. As Watanabe is the fifth most frequent names in Japan (where the number of personal names well exceeds 100 thousand), there are naturally many Tadashi Watanabes here.
I’m a physical chemist working in the field of molecular mechanism of plant photosynthesis, which is closely related to CO2 problem and that was a key factor for me to get interested in the GW issue more than 10 years ago.
FYI one of my recent publications is: Spectroelectrochemical determination of the redox potential of pheophytin a, the primary electron acceptor in photosystem II. PNAS, 106, No.41, 17365-17370 (2009); this may be again bizarre for many of you.
Thanks again.
It’s freak. Two clues, the connecting of e to a or s is pretty standard, you connect em at top. However, of course people have different style, but would the style be so different so much so that the h is writ as a k? So, aha, freak.
Or one could just go with the fact that drawn japanese, not written roman letters, is freakish..ly different from spoken, not like mandarin which is just weird ’cause it’s like the original.
Why I like book with drawings: I read the book, now I just need someone to translate it. :p
It’s “fresh”
Keeps his fertile mind working.
One good thing about the wind change is that real, honest, searchers of truth will become the recognized leaders in an overhauled science of climatology and the climategate conspirators will be consigned to an ignominious footnote.
Sounds like one of those google translations, likely meant strange or odd but got freak or freakish……
We Japanese have no “L” sound in the language, so “R” is used instead.
Think Crime-at gate.
Thanks, Tokyoboy, you’ve made for an interesting discussion here.
I do not understand the language spoken here [ Japanese? Korean?], and I can’t read the subtitled characters. But I get the message loud & clear.☺
OT but I reckon NH ice is going to be a real surprise for some this minima
Smokey says: July 5, 2010 at 5:09 pm
I do not understand the language spoken here [Japanese? Korean?]…..
Neither. It’s Chinese.
I think he wrote “freak” … but the meaning is different from what you assume. I believe it is intended as something which might be considered “odd” or “strange” … from your perspective.
A wondrous note.
==========
I think, Anthony, that the word UNIQUE got lost in translation
tokyoboy says on July 5, 2010 at 5:18 pm
I concur!
Watanabe called Anthony’s work (not just his writing) onerous, long-standing, and enlightening. I suspect that Wanatabe meant that it must have been work onerous for Anthony to do. By “long-standing” I guess Wanatabe meant that the work has taken a long time (though maybe he meant that it will stand up to the test of time). So he seems to be saying that Anthony has worked long and hard and that the result has been enlightening.
Courtesy and gift-giving are very important in Japanese culture. I would take his comments in the very best possible light.
The Japanese language and culture has nuances that are almost impossible for a Westerner to grasp and communicate correctly without saying something that would be a terrible offense if a Japanese person said it. However, thank goodness the Japanese are very gracious and do not expect foreigners to master the subtleties of their language and culture.
pat says: July 5, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Unfortunately very few Japanese actually write English.
I must’ve been lucky then when I got talking to a couple of Japanese students in a bar in Fukuoka 5 years ago. When they couldn’t say what they meant, they pulled out pens, and wrote what they were trying to say in beautiful copperplate English. They could write it, but they couldn’t speak it. We conducted a lively ‘conversation’ in little exchanged notes, assisted with the odd word or two. And we gave ourselves a big round of applause whenever we’d succeeded in making ourselves understood.
idlex says:
July 5, 2010 at 7:05 pm
“They could write it, but they couldn’t speak it.”
I have it on excellent authority that all Japanese children study at least (6/8) years of English in school. Sorry, I don’t remember now whether it’s 6 or 8, I think it’s 8, but with either number, many students study English longer than that. However, many of their English teachers are Japanese who have no idea how anything is pronounced. So they often learn pronunciation that no native English speaker would recognize. Yet they can often do pretty well at reading and writing English.
Tokyoboy,
bizarre, exotic or peculiar?
Cheers.