A Japanese physicist who I worked with as a post-doc spotted the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the wild, and picked up a copy. He sent along a scan of a couple of pages of the text, one of which I reproduce here:
I had totally forgotten that Japanese books are often printed with the text in vertical columns from right to left, which creates a slightly weird effect. What's even stranger, though, is the way the equations are done-- they're also rotated to be vertical, but the kanji characters are rotated as well. Not that the rotation changes the readability in any significant way, for me, but it's kind of weird.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
One of our poetry contest winners has been reading his proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and posted some comments. Actually, it was posted last week, but I was at Worldcon, and not dealing with much of anything else.
The comments are pretty positive, but he asks a couple of questions…
The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're…
Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in…
A bit more than a month ago, I got a Sony Reader as a birthday present, upgrading my electronic book-reading platform from an old Palm Pilot. this is, obviously, not as sexy as a Kindle or a Nook, but then again, it doesn't involve me paying fees to use wireless services and further stoke my…
I would say "it's all Greek to me", except that I would recognize the Greek letters....
Personally I think the buttcrack in the second paragraph is more odd.
Funny to see kana(?) in kets. I just threw my first Greek letter at the kids yesterday.
They are Kanji, not Kana.
| Left > and | Right > frequently appear on the page.
http://www.neverland.to/kanji/current/hidari.html
http://www.neverland.to/kanji/current/migi.html
I guess it's more practical to write out the equations vertically than have a mix of vertical text and horizontal equations. I don't think that they do write out their equations that way on a blackboard. At least I've never seen the nippon do that on conferences.