User Comments - Joachim

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Joachim

Posted on: Making Soup
January 23, 2013, 06:07 AM

This might seem a strange question as it involves milk and other foreign stuff, but: Would Chinese drink a cereal or it eat? 

Posted on: Receiving a Package for a Friend
October 22, 2012, 09:29 PM

Slightly sloppy translation: "... get the building [missing: management] to receive it for you..."

你们怎么了?

Posted on: Chinese Rock Music
July 02, 2012, 05:47 PM

This blog entry tries to interpret 中南海 in more detail:

http://crocksimplication.blogspot.de/2010/12/cui-jian-and-carsick-cars.html

Of course, as always with poetry or lyrics in this case, one can never be sure if that was the actual intention of the artist.

At least there's some translation of the lyrics.

Posted on: Chinese Rock Music
July 01, 2012, 01:46 PM

Nice show and interesting tastes!

Actually, there are not so many characters (汉字) in Jonathan Campbell's book Red Rock ;-) , but readers are introduced to a large number of 摇滚人 Chinese rockers.

Posted on: Product Localization
April 05, 2011, 09:22 PM

Is this just me or is the following sentence missing in the dialogue: 

中国以后这个产品是不是真的适合中国市场

Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
July 06, 2010, 09:55 PM

Sorry for my muddy comments. I had several things in mind:

- Successful engineering solutions are usually taken for granted quite quickly. E.g. not too many people wonder about how a conventional light bulb is made, the intricacies that had to be dealt with etc. It's there, it works, it's pretty cheap. Whereas a sonnet by Shakespeare is still interpreted these days.

- As people in the arts either take the value of their works for granted or explicitly abandon any justification of usefulness, engineering advances become obsolete by "technical progress". In art there are fads and fashions with the odd revival, re-interpretation etc. In engineering there is only nostalgia and investigation by historians. Nobody today would want to use a steam engine as built in the 1870s.

- Furthermore, it's a question of meaningfulness. Having finished a novel or having had ones CAD model approved and released for series production, those things do have quite a different ring to them. The former is for publication and to be (potentially) adored or criticized by the public or at least some readers. It's finished and inert in some respect. The latter will be revised and modified according to production needs and demands etc. Neither the drawings or data are valued or respected as documents, nor are the material products (if mass produced at least).

- Finally, original authorship is easily disputed with technical artifacts.

Oops, I am ranting. This is getting WAAAAYYY too long... Sorry!Gotta stop!

Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
July 06, 2010, 09:29 PM

From what I know, philosophy is a major subject in France (viz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_France).

Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
July 06, 2010, 10:35 AM

Engineering proves or DISPROVES its necessity everyday ;-)

Sometimes engineering failures do actually help to discover something new and important:

Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
July 05, 2010, 09:18 PM

As an engineer I am wondering how important usefulness is or how useful all that stuff really easy that's created by engineers and the like. Some poem or song or novel might still be appreciated in ages - but who has heard of so many (lay) people musing about a particularly innovative camshaft from 1988 or something?

At least philosophy has a circular argument to prove it's necessity. Asking if philosophy is needed means you're already doing philosophy :-)

Posted on: Outdoor Survivors (Part 1)
June 22, 2010, 03:39 PM

I guess that the measure words for crawly insects are pretty much the same, anyway.

It's strange that Chinesepod prefers those slightly scary scenarios instead of some nice family outing with a picknick, watching the kids play, having a re laxing chat on how to prepare a barbecue etc.

WIMP= Weakly Interacting Massive Particle = 大质量弱相互作用粒子

;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E5%A4%A7%E8%B4%A8%E9%87%8F%E5%BC%B1%E7%9B%B8%E4%BA%92%E4%BD%9C%E7%94%A8%E7%B2%92%E5%AD%90