Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
Second time's a charm!
http://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/orbview/misc/akatsuki_orbit_insertion.html
We'll know very soon whether it's in orbit. This one's a classic orbital insertion maneuver that either succeeds or fails, so no easing into orbit like Dawn has been able to do.
Looks like China is soon to begin construction of an undersea tunnel connecting the cities of Dalian and Yantai, close to each other as the crow flies but very far as any other animal walks, or drives. The route from one to the other looks kind of like this at present:
Größere Kartenansicht
For a total of some 1400 km or so, in spite of being right across the bay from each other. So the new route will naturally reduce ferry traffic and the money from that, but for all others involved it will be a good thing. Total distance is about 120 km.
A similar distance is the proposed Korea - Japan tunnel from Fukuoka to Busan (or thereabouts), which would of course use Tsushima on the way since there is no need to tunnel undersea when there is a good stretch of island to use on the way. This route has been proposed for as long as I remember, and I remember seeing posters promoting it around Kurume (close to Fukuoka) where I used to live in 2001. This tunnel never really gets the attention it deserves due to bilateral relations and the relatively small size of the cities and areas it would serve. If the two capitals were across the bay a tunnel like this probably would have already been built (maybe around the 2002 World Cup?).
Größere Kartenansicht
One other proposed tunnel is one from Korea to China, which is a good bit longer but still doable. The one to China would face all the necessary complications including relations with NK, which would view it as a threat. Korea is effectively an island right now, and a tunnel of this sort would join it to the continent. With a tunnel to Japan the explorable land by car or train would be around 4.8 times bigger (I'm not taking islands into consideration), but it would still effectively be cut off from the continent.
The Jeju-do one is hard to say, since all the traffic to and from there is by airplane and few would add 4 hours to the trip just to drive there. On the other hand, it only involves a single country which makes it easier, and being able to ship goods without a ship or plane is attractive.
So let's hope the Chinese tunnel gets the discussion started again, because it will be built first.
Another reason to feel good in Japan just a few days after Tokyo won the 2020 Olympics - Japan's Epsilon rocket has worked on the first try, successfully launching the SPRINT-A (soon thereafter renamed Hisaki) telescope. Japan has been notorious for being plagued with launch failures, and this new rocket is very interesting, using a good deal of artificial intelligence which allows the number of crew at mission control to be reduced from 150 to just eight.
So what does the telescope do? It has a diameter of just 20 cm, and observes the atmospheres of planets in the Solar System in the ultraviolet spectrum, observations that cannot be conducted from the ground. Checking the Japanese Wikipedia on this telescope we see the reason why:
すでにアメリカのハッブル宇宙望遠鏡など、より高性能な宇宙望遠鏡が運用されているが、これらはさまざまな天体の観測に用いられるため惑星観測に充てられる時間は限られてしまう。特定の惑星専用の探査機を飛ばせば非常に高精度なデータが得られるものの、高額の費用がかかり、目的の惑星以外の観測は困難である。用途を太陽系内の惑星観測に限定すれば、ハッブル宇宙望遠鏡のような高い性能は必要ではなく、小型の安価な宇宙望遠鏡で、複数の惑星を継続的に観測できるという利点がある。
Having Tokyo selected as the city to host the 2020 Olympics reminds me of 2002 in a way when Japan and Korea both hosted the World Cup together (I was living in a goshiwon and studying Korean in Seoul at the time). Though the timing and location is coincidental, having two Olympic games two years apart in two locations just 1000 km apart makes for an interesting dynamic. IOC officials in Korea before and during the 2018 Olympics for example could easily hop on a flight to Japan next door to keep an eye on construction and other preparations for the games just two years down the road. To show just how close these two are compared to the other upcoming locations, see this map.
From here in Spanish:
Japanese authorities will consider whether to include Spanish as an optative language in the national university entrance exam, after receiving a joint request from all the embassies of Latin America and Spain in Tokyo. The initiative, coordinated by the Instituto Cervantes in Tokyo, seeks to give an academic character to Spanish, which is currently offered in 240 Japanese universities. This number is still well below the 536 that offer French classes or the 525 that offer German.Read more...
The request was delivered to the Deputy Minister of Education Takashi Kii by a delegation compased of the director of the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo (Víctor Ugarte) and ambassadors and diplomats from 19 Spanish-speaking countries. The petition noted that Spanish, the official language in 21 countries and spoken by 500 million, "is the second language of international communication in the world after English and the second most spoken language as a mother tongue after Chinese."
At present the university entrance tests in Japan only offer the choice of English, French, German, Chinese and Korean as foreign languages. In secondary schools in Japan the presence of Spanish rose by 263% between 2003 and 2009, compared to 96% for German and 191% for French, but still far from Chinese and Korean (no numbers for these two given).
This week was full of articles to mention in a link roundup. Here they are:
--- Denmark aims to get 35% of its total energy from renewables by 2020 and 100% by 2050 - pretty self-explanatory.
--- Japan Airlines now has its first Boeing 787 Dreamliner, giving the world a total of seven of these airplanes so far.
--- Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com billionaire and the guy behind Blue Origin) has found the original Apollo 11 rocket engines and intends to raise them from the ocean floor. They should end up in a museum (they are still NASA property, even if Bezos recovers them), and hopefully their age and original appearance when first lifted up will remind the world of just how long ago Apollo 11 took place - in other words, we didn't go to the moon, a previous generation that has now mostly died away did. We have only been to Low Earth Orbit, no farther.
--- An article on why young Americans are less and less interested in buying cars, and even in getting driver's licenses.
--- An article on the checks and balances in the US system vs. the Canadian parliamentary approach. Americans by and large do not seem to be aware of how weak a president is compared to the Prime Ministers in other nations, and are frequently disappointed when the country has not changed 180 degrees in the two or four years after a presidential election. Remembering back to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the idea of a Prime Minister having to negotiate and negotiate again with his own party to pass a single bill is laughable.
--- From December - an interesting article on a French language program for Spanish speakers in Cal State.
--- The Office québécoise de la langue française, now with 246 staff, is adding another 69 (an increase of about 25%).
--- On Will Ferrell's Spanish immersion when filming Casa de mi padre and his language-learning ability. Will Ferrell is fluent in Swedish thanks to his wife, and so this is not the first time learning another language for him.
--- The PVV in the Netherlands on nomenclature in South Africa again.
--- An interesting brown dwarf has been discovered 29 light years away, trailing a star in the big dipper. I would prefer 1 light year away, but 29 is acceptable for now.
--- Votes and vowels: an interesting article on the pronunciation of certain vowels in parts of the US and how it affects the way a person comes across politically, plus a number of other things. I won't try to summarize it here, except to note that it's quite reminiscent of a Malcolm Gladwell book.
--- Finally, a small site with Italian etymology that I like. It seems to be just a number of images cobbled together from an old Italian dictionary, but being able to quickly search one word at a time is nice. The etymology for sbagliare (to be wrong) for example comes from Latin varius.
One interesting video and one article from Euronews to mention today:
After the earthquake in Japan, Korea's MBC reported on the fears of a reduction in Hanryu (Korean cultural wave, Korean mania, etc.) in Japan, bringing about a justified negative reaction from viewers who told MBC to start focusing on issues that actually matter in an earthquake. Here's a screen capture from that broadcast:
MBC's 특집 뉴스 데스크 (Special Report News Desk) is being criticized by viewers for its "Blow to Korean wave in Japan" on the day of the earthquake in Japan (11 March). The report said that "there are concerns that this large earthquake in Japan is going to result in a blow to Korean wave in Japan. Music concerts and TV appearances (by Korean stars) are going to have to be rearranged, resulting in a reduction of Korean wave."Read more...
Korean viewers who watched the report then went to MBC's bulletin board and criticized the report, saying that "the earthquake happened less than a day ago and you're worried about your bottom line?" and "you should have just reported on the safety of the Korean stars currently in Japan and left it at that."
Yesterday Japan successfully launched its second transfer vehicle, known as the Kounotori 2. Similar to the Automated Transfer Vehicle the ESA sends to the ISS from time to time, the role these vehicles play is quite simple: launch with a bunch of cargo, dock with the ISS, the astronauts on board then take the cargo in and eventually fill the now-empty vehicle up with waste, and a few months later they seal it off and deorbit it, and all the garbage burns up in the atmosphere and thus the mission ends.
Pretty boring, right? Not when JAXA is in charge. Take a look at their most recent video uploaded today promoting Kounotori 2, and prepare to get excited about a cargo in - garbage out unmanned mission. Select 720px to make it even better. I would have reuploaded the video with subtitles but I don't believe JAXA allows that so I've written the translation below.
0:02 - This...
0:05 - is the story of a spaceship...
0:10 - ...given the name The White Stork.
0:14 - KOUNOTORI (Japanese for stork) 2 H-II Transfer Vehicle MISSION
0:19 - (bottom corner) Space station supply vehicle Kounotori 2
0:23 - The mission it has been entrusted with: to deliver.
0:39 - Soar into infinite space, find your way to him (lit. to that person).
0:45 - Kounotori (HTV) control room
0:47 - International Space Station
This is par for the course for JAXA, and their YouTube account has a number of English videos as well for their more prominent missions.
So what does one of their videos look like for a mission that is exciting in and of itself? This video of the Earthrise video as taken by the Kaguya mission should answer that. Lyrics to the song are below. The song, Furusato (Home), is quite famous so no need to make a new English translation, though I have added transliteration to the right of the original lyrics. The song was originally written about one's home town, but when looking back on the Earth from lunar orbit one realizes that in fact the entire planet is our home (cue Carl Sagan quote).
うさぎ追いし かの山 Usagi oishi kano yama
小ぶなつりし かの川 Kobuna tsurishi kano kawa
夢はいまも めぐりて Yume wa ima mo megurite
忘れがたき ふるさと Wasuregataki furusato
I hunted rabbits on that mountain.
I fished for minnows in that stream.
I still dream about those days I spent when a child.
How I miss and long for my old country home.
いかにいます 父 母 Ikani imasu chichi haha
つつがなしや 友がき Tsutsuganashi ya tomogaki
雨に風に つけても Ame ni kaze ni tsuketemo
思いいずる ふるさと Omoiizuru furusato
Mother and father―are they doing well?
Is everything all right with my old friends?
Here's a piece of news in Japanese from today about a Portuguese-language news program that has begun in Japan. This is particularly interesting to me as this is the exact area where I first lived in Japan. The news program is for Brazilians living in Ogaki, which is just west of Ichinomiya where I lived, and the area in general is kind of a suburb of the much larger Nagoya, with the city of Gifu at about the same distance to the north if you feel like going to a bigger city on the weekend but are bored of always going to Nagoya. When I first lived there I was also struck by the large number of Brazilians, though at the time I was fully engaged in learning Japanese and Japanese only so I had no interest in Portuguese whatsoever then. Actually, the first non-Japanese person I ever spoke to in Japanese was a Mormon from Brazil.
View Larger Map
On the 14th of December (2010) Ogaki City's Ogaki Cable Television began broadcasting a local news program all in Portuguese for Brazilians living in the area. According to the prefecture Information Industry Division, "such a program entirely in Portuguese on cable television has never happened in Japan before".
The program is translated and created by a commission from the prefecture and is 30 minutes in length, broadcasting in Ogaki-shi, Kaizu-shi, Ikeda-shi, Kobe-cho, Tarui-cho, and Sekigahara-cho. Broadcasting time is Tuesday to Friday at 11 am, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30 pm and 11 pm.
The show can also be heard at any time online, and will also be shown in other places such as the TV monitor in the Brazilian-oriented school "HIRO Gakuen".
As of November there are 3142 Brazilians living in the city.
JAXA has once again done an excellent PR job in this video for its newest probe, Akatsuki:
The same video can be seen in Japanese as well, with the exact same length and makeup.
What I'm most looking forward to after Akatsuki's arrival will be determining just why superrotation occurs in the area some 50 km above the surface of the planet, since this is the most Earth-like area in the entire solar system; nowhere else can one find both temperature and atmospheric pressure similar to our own at sea level. This area is both one where humans could potentially live (in aerostats that float due to the air we breathe being less dense than the Venusian atmosphere), but also an area that could potentially harbor life as well.
One big big reason to love JAXA (Japan's space agency) is that they seem to really understand what people want to see from space exploration, and that's not only hard science but also a lot of eye candy. NASA's Lunar Prospector from 1998 was probably the best example of the opposite, a probe that carried out some good science on the Moon (and was the first probe to the Moon in decades) but didn't have a single camera. The result: people already interested in space monitored the probe's progress, others didn't. Without snazzy pictures a probe may as well not exist for most.
ESA is another good example of this with Venus Express, a probe with updates every ten months or so. As a big Venus fan I was quite disappointed with the lack of attention paid to keeping the public informed.
Dawn is a good example of what to do, with a chief engineer who makes otherwise boring updates extremely entertaining and informative. Here's the latest.
And back to JAXA: the most prominent example of JAXA understanding the public is probably all the HD images and movies sent back from Kaguya, the most entertaining images of the Moon since Apollo. This video alone has almost 300000 hits, which is 300000 more people thinking about the Moon than otherwise would have.
The most recent example of JAXA doing a good job here is in a video describing Hayabusa (the probe that just re-entered Earth two days ago). The video is here, but the most important part is at the end which looks like this:
Being able to visualize objects such as these is extremely important in keeping people interested in space. If the video had simply said "Itokawa is 540 metres in diameter" it would have meant nothing to most, but with the ISS next to it it's now easy to visualize. Many have seen pictures of the Space Shuttle docked there or videos from the inside, and by having it next to the asteroid you can now imagine what it would be like to stand on the surface, and "walk" around (since you can't really walk on such a tiny asteroid), Little Prince-style. Every news article and infographic on an asteroid or small planet should have such comparisons. If it's large then a country next to it with comparable surface area, and if smaller then a city or building or football field or something else. I wrote a post giving a few examples of this a year ago.
It will be interesting to see what happens with Akatsuki after it arrives at Venus in December, as then we'll be able to see the difference between ESA-style promotion and that done by JAXA. Mind you, I certainly appreciate the fact that the ESA has sent a mission to Venus and has a number of other interesting ones as well (Rosetta right now is a good example, and the Plato telescope is the one I'm most looking forward to) but a few of their teams are a little bit lax on the PR and that's a bit of a missed opportunity.
Check it out, Hayabusa's back:
A very impressive return for a spacecraft that almost never made it back and was plagued with a whole host of other problems. Though the sample gathering from the asteroid didn't function as planned if we luck out again there will be something in the sample container to analyze.
Some of the comments in Japanese below the video:
For some reason I'm crying, in spite of how short the video is. I think science and art are the most important fields for humans to be human.The re-entry has been watched very closely, as it's very valuable in understanding how asteroids interact with our atmosphere upon impact. Usually when an object enters the atmosphere we have only a vague notion of what it's made of, but with Hayabusa we know its exact composition, density, angle of impact, velocity etc., and thus this re-entry really is ideal for that.
Welcome back! You burned up, but that impressive work will live on in space development. Very good work, people from JAXA.
How beautiful. Banzai to Japanese scientists.
Today's news here in English and here in Japanese relates to what I've been saying about how the US should eventually have no choice but to begin concentrating on the Moon again (though the manned asteroid visit should be no problem), simply because the Moon is at just the right location whereby other nations (Japan, China, Russia, India) and private industry are able to explore it and I doubt that the US will be content to simply sit by and wait an extra 15 years for a single manned Mars flyby while the rest of the world is constructing and operating bases on the Moon. Wait for it...
As for the plan itself, it would involve sending robots to the south pole where solar energy is plentiful (24 days of light followed by 4 days of darkness) whereby they would then begin constructing a base. Recent experiences with the Mars rovers may lead one to believe that robots are incapable of doing work with any haste, but that is simply due to the large communication delay between here and Mars. On the Moon there is almost no delay at all (about 2.5 seconds there and back) so robots can easily be controlled from Earth, and in fact the Lunokhod rover drove a total of 37 km on the Moon back in 1973.
According to the proposal, the first robots would begin in 2015 by landing on the Moon, investigating and sending high-res images of the surface, as well as using seismometers to determine the interior composition of the Moon. After that in 2020 it would involve setting up a self-sufficient base through these robots which could move about in a 100 km radius, as well as sending back lunar rocks to Earth for analysis.
None of this is actually that difficult to accomplish, since the entire operation would be done robotically and these robots are extremely easy to control from Earth. Not only that, but setting up in the first place is not too difficult either. The rovers sent to Mars for example landed by using an interesting air bag system (inflate to encompass the rover, bounce bounce bounce bounce...then come to a stop, deflate and let the rover out) that would be impossible to use for humans due to the g-forces involved. Also note that since the Moon has (pretty much) no atmosphere any construction done on the Moon by these robots would be permanent. If part of setting up the base involved construction of a flat area for future landings, it would then remain as a permanent structure that anyone could use later on. Construct a habitation suitable for protecting humans from radiation and that would be there forever too.
Expected cost for the base: $2 billion, or less than one-eighth NASA's yearly budget. Or Canada's pitiful CSA budget (double it and I'll stop calling it pitiful) over 6 years.
Awesome, it looks like the launch (50 minutes ago as I write this) went off without a hitch and now it's time to get excited about the two probes launched this morning, Akatsuki (heading to Venus) and Icarus, a solar sail.
Akatsuki costs $157 million (about a third or quarter what a similar probe from NASA would likely cost) and will be arriving at Venus December 7th this year, so a total of six months and two weeks from now. Venus has a probe orbiting it at the moment, the impressive but nearly completely silent to the media Venus Express from Europe, and having the two orbiting the planet will enable some pretty impressive observations that couldn't happen otherwise. Hopefully Akatsuki will be able to determine the origin of the superrotation in the high atmosphere of Venus, which is the part of the planet where humans could conceivably live (breathable air floats on Venus, and the temperature and atmospheric pressure there is similar to Earth at sea level).
More interesting in the short term will be Ikaros, as its mission is interesting from a technological standpoint due to being the first solar sail successfully launched, and after a few weeks will unfurl and begin showing results. It's similar to Deep Space 1 in being more interesting from a technological standpoint than any expected scientific return from its destination. It will be passing by Venus but its real goal is to just fly around and demonstrate how a solar sail works. For some reason solar sails up to now have been cursed with failure, from Cosmos 1 lost in 2005 to NanoSail-D lost in 2008 on a failed Falcon 1 flight, so Ikaros will be testing out a technology that we should have been able to test a number of times before now if it wasn't for such bad luck.
A few days ago this video was uploaded to YouTube. It's a two-month old kitten that has suddenly become the well-known eyebrow cat (眉毛猫 or mayugeneko). My translation of most the video is below.
Title: Cat with worried-looking eyebrows
So what could it be?
0:20 A cat with eyebrows. Yes, it looks like it's worried about something.
0:28 Try touching the cat and yes, they're definitely real.
0:35 Shizuoka prefecture's submission for Chinhyakukei (the name of the show): a cat with eyebrows that looks worried about something.
(Name: Maro-chan. Female, 2 months old.) This cat is Maro-chan, just two months old....doesn't seem to know how her eyebrows got to look this way...
1:00 Interview with dad: I was really opposed to getting the cat when we got it.
Q: Ah, you were opposed to it in the beginning?
A: Yeah, because I really hate cats.
Q: You hate...
A: Yeah, and when I saw this cat I just loved her. Right that moment my hate turned to love. It felt more like destiny than the first meeting with my mom.
Then a final comment saying the same thing, and then the people on the panel joke about how the cat always looks like she's running around saying she's sorry for everything, and how important these eyebrows are if they can change a person that hates cats into one that loves them.
And just in case you're at a workplace that doesn't allow YouTube on the job, here's a screenshot of Maro-chan.
Bad news from here in Japanese. The article says that the Japanese government has decided to recognize the re-election of Ahmadinejad and will be sending their ambassador in Iran, Akio Shirota (城田安紀夫), to the ceremony. This is him (image comes from here):
The reason given in the article is that Japan wishes to obtain a long-term source of oil and thus wants to place weight on good relations with the current government.
The article also says that he'll be appearing at Khamenei's official recognition of Ahmadinejad today (3 August).
Here's the contact address for the Embassy of Japan in Tehran.
(c) Embassy of Japan in Iran
Corner of the 5th St., Bucharest Ave., Tehran, Iran
Tel: (+98)-(021)-8871-7922
Fax: (+98)-(021)-8871-3515 mail:infoeoj@neda.net
Which is located here:
View Larger Map
From here in Japanese on July 24th, which is also the date that the taxi went into service for the first time. The place where it went into service is a city called Kashiwazaki in Niigata Prefecture, which is northwest of Tokyo. The car is a Mitsubishi i MiEV, costs 4.6 million yen ($48,500 USD) and cost starts at 660 yen ($7) for customers to ride it, same as other small taxis.
This article says that electric taxi service will start in Ehime Prefecture as well in August, which is located on the island of Shikoku. Prices are cheaper there, starting at 550 yen.
Well, this is pretty funny. Take a look at this picture:
That was broadcast today by Japan's Asahi TV as an exclusive photo they had obtained of Kim Jong-il's son and successor Kim Jong-un, because up to now the only photograph available has been one of him when he was eleven:
Naver then put the picture up on the site straight away.
(text says Picture of North Korea's successor, Kim Jong-un)
They look pretty similar, don't they? That's because it's a picture of a guy that runs an online cafe on Daum (kind of like a Google or Yahoo! Group), and when he put up this picture of himself in the country people wrote below that he looks just like Kim Jong-il. So the picture's just some dude that looks like Kim Jong-il hanging out, not his son.
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