Section 52 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 July 13 Saturday.
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A quiet Sunday - nothing much to report except that the dead lizard outside the front door has started to decay past the stage of being ornamental. As it has tried up, its body has twisted, so it no longer looks as if it is alive. What is more, part of the skin has flaked away, revealing the inner bone structure.
The other news is that yesterday we had the first really bad smog of the summer. There was nothing on the news about it - the official world no longer issues smog alerts, as these have a tendency to upset the Japanese public - but the air was so hazy yesterday that buildings less than a hundred meters away were getting a bit fuzzy.
Oh, and one more piece of news - we of the six responsible houses have postponed the inauguration of our six-house garbage collection spot for one week.
As previously reported, because a vacant plot of land is now a construction site, many houses in the neighborhood have been told to cease the practice of piling up their garbage in front of that particular piece of land on rubbish collection days. The edict came down from on high that, instead, small groups of households must form their own rubbish collection points.
Up until today, it seemed that the people in the White Apartments, together with one of their neighbors. It is probably best to leave the "why" and the "wherefore" of this a little vague ... this is, after all, a highly sensitive diplomatic issue. Suffice it to say that today's happy news is that the problem of the left-out households has been resolved, and a new garbage collection site will be formed, and the appropriate authorities will, in the coming week, be duly advised of its existence.
The final result is that instead of one big, overflowing garbage collection point the neighborhood will now have four smaller, more manageable collection points.
This small exercise in civilization-building has reminded me of just how difficult it is to build a civilization. You can't do it just by being tough and by being ready to shoot people when the occasion arises. You need, to start with, some kind of plan - some kind of clear goal. And you can't build a civilization just by chanting the magic word "freedom."
Last week, I found that someone had put out a bag of garbage without bothering to tie a knot in the neck if the bag, with the result that some predator had strewn the garbage all across the road. This week, when I went to put out the garbage, I found something even worse. Some sociopath seemed to have exercised his freedom by jettisoning a bunch of trash over other people's piled up garbage bags. There was no empty trash bag in evidence - it really looked as if someone had just poured out a bunch of trash then walked off and left it.
(I say "he" because the trash included a page of pictures of a smiling woman very scantily clad, and the pictures didn't look as if they had come from a woman's magazine.)
Kanji combination of the day:-
keikaku - plan 
(printed version is to the left and handwritten version is to the right)
Question of the day:-
Keikaku wa nan desu ka?
What's the plan?
(The "ka" is a verbalized question mark which is why this Japanese sentence, although it is a question, does not have a question mark. In practice, question marks are sometimes used in modern Japanese - for example, in modern Japanese novels. However, technically, in the world of rules, the question mark does not form part of the written Japanese language.)
So, seriously, what is the plan? Right now, nobody knows. Right now we're in toughness mode. We don't have a plan, but we've watched plenty of cowboy movies, and we know how to shoot people. And that should be enough. Right?
Section 52 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 July 13 Sunday. Parasthesia - definition.
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Today's English language question: What is parasthesia? I usually teach business English here in Japan, but now I have one medical English class, which means that I'm having to do a certain amount of study myself before I go into the classroom to teach.
When it comes to medicine, I'm not a complete zero, as I've had a little paramedical experience - I know how to take a temperature, I've seen an autopsy, and so on and so forth. However, my background would best be described as "sketchy," and by now it's been something like fourteen years since I last saw the inside of either a hospital or an ambulance.
So I'm spending part of Sunday boning up ... "malaise" is easy and so, of course, is "incontinence." "Cervical" means "of the neck" (of various organs) but what is "spondylosis"? The Bantam Medical Dictionary explains it as "degeneration of the intervertebral disks in the cervical, thoracic, or lumbar regions of the backbone."
However, The Bantam Medical Dictionary (Third Revised Edition, April 2000) does not have an entry for "parasthesia," which is in the textbook I'm teaching from. It's an unavoidable fact that at my next medical English lesson we're going to hit this word full on. It's not in my big American English dictionary, either, nor is it in my big British English dictionary.
So I fire up the Internet and enter "parasthesia" into Google and get "about 1,550" hits, plus the query "Did you mean paresthesia?" - which suggests that there are 1,550 medical writers out there who need either a new spellchecker or a remedial course in medical English.
This time The New Oxford English Dictionary knows the word - "paresthesia" is the American spelling of "paraesthesia."
The word "paresthesia" (glossed as "also paraesthesia") shows up in The American Heritage Dictionary explained as "A skin sensation, such as burning, prickling, itching, or tingling, with no apparent physical cause."
The New Oxford English Dictionary gives us this definition of "paraesthesia":-
an abnormal sensation, typically tingling or pricking ('pins and needles'), caused chiefly by pressure on or damage to peripheral nerves."
The Bantam Medical Dictionary explains "paresthesia" as "a spontaneously occurring abnormal tingling sensation, sometimes described as pins and needles." The entry goes on to explain a bit about possible causes and invites us to "Compare dysesthesia" - in dysesthesia, apparently, a patient with "partial damage to a peripheral nerve" feels uncomfortable when his or her skin is touched.
I'd prefer to have this spelt out a bit more in a "Medical English for Brain-Damaged Idiots" mode. However, my assumption is that the difference is that in "dysesthesia" there's an obvious cause for the unpleasant sensation (your doctor is prodding your skin with a bony finger, for example) whereas in "paresthesia" there is not an obvious cause (the pain is just happening).
(The Bantam Medical Dictionary says "when his skin is touched" - if you're in the medical field, does this excuse you from compliance with the doctrines of gender-neutral political correctness?)
I looked at a couple of pages on the Internet and am now ready to take a stab at:-
Definition parasthesia - correct spelling (US) "paresthesia" or (British) "paraesthesia" - definition paresthesia - definition paraesthesia:-
"Paresthesia" is what we feel when we have pins and needles. Why do we feel it? Because we've done some damage to our nerves. If you've been sleeping with your arm under your head then you may have a pins and needles sensation in your arm even though nothing is touching your arm. Paresthesia is this kind of unforced or "spontaneous" sensation. There is no obvious cause for this sensation: while you may have a pins and needles sensation, there are no pins in evidence, and no needles, either.
The term "paresthesia" does not only cover the "pins and needles" sensation. It covers a range of sensations, including tingling, burning, partial numbness and what one source (see the link below) describes as an "electrical-type buzzing."
Long-term paresthesia (chronic paresthesia) may be caused by a whole range of medical conditions, including (just to give a few) diabetes, alcoholism, heavy metal poisoning and multiple sclerosis.
One link for paresthesia is:-
The reference to "heavy metal poisoning" made me wonder what would happen if I punched "depleted uranium paresthesia," but at this stage my Internet connection seems to have fallen over ... a query to pursue another day, I think.
Section 52 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 July 17 Thursday.
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So what's the difference between a coronary thrombosis and a myocardial infarction? It turns out that a "thrombus" is a blood clot and so a "coronary thrombosis" is a blood clot in the heart. "Infarction" is tissue death and so a "myocardial infarction" is tissue death in the heart, the cause of which may (quite possibly) be a coronary thrombosis.
As I read it, then, the coronary thrombosis is the cause and the myocardial infarction is the effect, and both "coronary thrombosis" and "myocardial infarction" mean "heart attack."
Having learnt that "thrombus" means "blood clot" I thought to myself, "Well, there's a world I'll never need again," but to my surprise, having never met up with this word before, I immediately encountered it on the very next day, the very next day being today.
I was reading a serial killer thriller by Tess Gerritsen, a book called "The Surgeon," and here's "thrombus" in its plural form, "thrombi":-
And this extremely bloody scene isn't even part of one of the killings.If Catherine's diagnosis was correct, if the patient was suffering from DIC - disseminated intravascular coagulation - then throughout his bloodstream, massive numbers of thrombi were forming like a microscopic hailstorm, consuming all his precious coagulation factors and platelets.
People sometimes ask me what I'm reading, and I usually give the honest answer, which is "newspapers" - most days, I generally get through The International Herald Tribune on the train.
Apart from that I usually read novels about Americans killing other Americans, most recently The Surgeon and a book by James Patterson called Roses are Red.
The Patterson book surprised me because it contained a scene of necrophilia, and as far as I can remember this is the first actual necrophilia scene I've read.
(If you're interested, it's on 149 of the hardback edition published by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 0-316-69325-1. I won't quote it ... I don't want us to all get arrested.)
On a more virtuous level, I've recently bookmarked the Japanese version of Yahoo, which is:-
My aim is to read at least some Japanese every day in an effort to build up my reading skills, which, at this stage, are pathetically weak, considering how long I've spent in Japan.
On the Yahoo site right now there's a page which seems to be about ... suicide? The URL is:-
Speaking of suicide, a suicide was part of the news story I saw on Japanese TV this evening. I didn't follow most of it, but from what I understood (or misunderstood) I gather that some guy had four women locked up in an apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya area. One of the women (or girls, maybe) managed to escape (naked, if I understood correctly) and the guy who had done the locking up killed himself (but my Japanese was too weak to follow the chronology, and I'm not sure whether he killed himself before or after his prisoner escaped.)
Obviously, if I can improve my Japanese language skills, I will be much better placed to appreciate Japanese culture, perhaps (one day, who knows?) acquiring the ability to appreciate Japanese culture to the same extent that I appreciate American culture.
Section 52 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 July 17 Thursday.
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To improve my Japanese, I'd like to be able to keep notes on vocabulary items, and to give me an incentive to do this I'd like to maintain an online study journal. But to do this efficiently, I really have to crack one problem: the problem of how to represent a macron using HTML.
The Japanese language sometimes uses short vowels and sometimes uses long vowels, and the conventional way to do this is to put a macron (a short line) over a long vowel. However, I couldn't find any HTML code for this in any of my reference books, and so gave up.
Now Nicholas from New Zealand has sent me a recipe for manufacturing macrons:-
Sure enough, these codes make macrons, at least when using Mozilla running under Linux:-If you are able to find out the unicode value for a character, then you can represent it in HTML (and XML) as (ampersand hash xsemicolon - 쳌) or (ampersand hash semicolon - &#CCCC;)
A Ā
a ā
E Ē
e ē
I Ī
i ī
O Ō
o ō
U Ū
u ū
Ā makes Ā
ā makes ā
Ē makes Ē
ē makes ē
Ī makes Ī
ī makes ī
Ō makes Ō
ō makes ō
Ū makes Ū
ū makes ū
Section 52 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 July 18 Friday.
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True crime Japan: so what is the story with the females held in captivity?
Yesterday, on the Japanese TV news, I saw (and only partially understood) a new story about some females who had apparently been held in captivity in Tokyo's Shibuya area. One of them (if I understood correctly) escaped, and a 29-year-old man who was in the apartment where they were being imprisoned committed suicide (but I didn't follow whether the suicide was before or after the escape.)
One vocabulary item that confused me was "onna no ko" -
This literally means "female of child" (or, perhaps, "female who is child" or "female able to be described as child" - the "no" is generally translated as "of" but this Japanese "no" is a nimbler, more powerful word than its literal English equivalent).
Now, as a rule, this should mean "female child," but it is sometimes used in a politically incorrect fashion to mean "young woman" (just as English "girl" is used).
Having spent much of the day sitting on trains reading my way through Tess Gerritsen's American serial killer book, "The Surgeon," I was inclined to think that perhaps the prisoners (if I was hearing things correctly and if there really were prisoners involved) were mature females.
American crime - at least in the pages of fiction - tends to be directed at adults. And I think the real world statistics would probably support the fictional model. After all, when we read about some disgrunted American picking up a gun and going to the local donut shop to shoot a bunch of fellow citizens, the targets are usually adults rather than children.
However, when I watched the Japanese news again this morning, it became clear that the females involved were actually children.
The "females in Shibuya" story was the lead story on NHK news at 0700 and I caught the term "shō gakusei," which means "elementary school student." So (unless I am grossly mishearing) these were kids.
One key vocabulary item which I failed to understand was "kankin," so I hauled out the dictionary and looked it up:-
This "kankin" means "imprisonment."
(My made-in-Japan Japanese-English dictionary also gives an alternative definition, "durance vile," which is technically English, but not really the English of this century. "Four kids were being held in durance vile by a vile scumbag who later topped himself" - that's technically sayable but stylistically disastrous. As an English teacher, I've gradually come to look upon the average dictionary as a boobytrap just waiting to explode in the face of the zealous student.)
Anyway, I plan to follow this story in the news for a few days and see how much more of it I can understand, in Japanese.
Following news stories is a good language-study technique because (a) the vocabulary tends to repeat itself, (b) there tends to be a logical development of the story, which helps the mind hold it together (plot is a mnemonic device) and (c) if you learn Japanese from TV then you're probably going to be learning the Japanese of this century (unless you start watching samurai dramas, in which case we're talking about an entirely different ball of wax.)
Speaking of news stories, one disturbing feature of life in Japan is that there is what seems to be, on the face of it, a disturbingly large number of crimes against children. These include crimes of random violence - someone just picking on randomly chosen elementary school kids, for example, and slashing the kids as they walk to school.
Here in Japan, there have also been a couple of incidents involving someone throwing some kind of inflammable liquid on a kid then setting the liquid on fire - again, these have been street crimes involving randomly chosen victims who were unknown to the perpetrators of the crimes in question.
Section 52 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 July 18 Friday.
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Definition: mneumonic.
Definition: mnemonic.
What does "mneumonic" mean?
"Mneumonic," as I discovered today when I checked with the dictionary, is a misspelling of "mnemonic," which The New Oxford Dictionary of English tells us is "via medieval Latin from Greek mnēmonikos, from mnēmōn 'mindful'."
A mnemonic is a device to aid memory, for example "Be a fine girl, kiss me" (a politically incorrect way to remember the sequence BAFGKM) or "My very earnest mother jumps straight upon new plates" (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.)
I just entered "mneumonic" into Google and got about 2,590 results together with the question "Did you mean mnemonic?" With 379,000 results, "mnemonic" seems to be the way to go.
.... and I just checked with my big American dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and this, too, supports the "mnemonic" spelling.
Up until this very day, I've gone through my entire life thinking that the pronunciation of "mnemonic" was something like "new monik," with the stress on the "NEW." However, both my British dictionary and my American dictionary agree that the vowel in "mne" is the same as the vowel in "sit" or "pit."
In other words, the "mne" should sound like the "ni" of "nipple" or "nitwit" or "nilchispalchasphalistic."
However, I think a lot of people must be running around the planet lawlessly mispronouncing this word as "NEW Monic." After all, if there weren't all these pronunciation criminals in action, why would we get about 2,590 Google results for "mneumonic"?
(The mnemonic for remembering this errant "NEW monic" pronunciation is "New Monica Lewinsky," a possible new name for Baghdad once Iraq becomes a permanent part of the United States).
If you punch "BAFGKM" into Google then you get "about 76" results, and one which is relevant is for the April 2003 magazine from the Newbury Amateur Astronomical Society which Google summarizes as "The recognised order in surface temperature is now (WO)BAFGKM(NS), those in brackets are special stars. GREEN / WHITE Type W & O 36000+ o C." The magazine says, in part:-
Because this is difficult to remember, back in the age of political incorrectness some astronomer (doubtlessly male) cooked up the mnemonic "Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me." A new mnemonic is undoubtedly needed for the modern age, but my own interest in astronomy did not outlast high school, so I am not going to be the one to come up with it.Stars are categorised by their colour and given a letter dependant on that colour. Unfortunately the category letter is not in alphabetical order or any other order for that matter. At one time, many years ago the types of star were placed in alphabetical order but as astronomers knowledge of the nature of stars advanced the categories were shuffled around but the letters attached to the type remained. The recognised order in surface temperature is now (WO)BAFGKM(NS), those in brackets are special stars.
2003 July 21 Monday: Dave from New Zealand sends a corrected version of the mnemonic:-
"Oh be a fine girl kiss me!"
(Can't run the universe without those O-type stars!) Dave also sends this extended version to include "the carbon stars R, N and S":-
"Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me Right Now Smack!"