Funny battle of the sexes in Japanese

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

When learning kanji tutors usually explain the real and assumed meaning of the series of strokes. In more sophisticated kanjis you’ll find a number of individual radicals combined. Each of them has a meaning of its own. This sometimes makes for funny twists. Here’s one such hilarious sample:

The kanji for cheap/convenient

安

consists of house and woman 女. Meaning: having a woman in the house is cheap and convenient.

Then the women, however, stroke back. The kanji for (ex)change

替

consists of twice the kanji for husband 夫 and one kanji for day/sun 日. Hence, changing the husband twice a day…

Why do Japanese live so long?

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

Up until now I was more or less convinced that electro magnetic fields/radiation (EMF/EMR) do no good to “living creatures” (humans, animals, plants). I couldn’t fully justify this believe with rational arguments only, though – bad for an engineer like myself. The internet is full of EMF/EMR articles for example at WHO, Wikipedia EMF, or Wikipedia EMR.

Living in Switzerland I’m not used to seeing a lot of electrical wiring hanging above people’s heads in cities. Most of it is nicely tucked away in underground channels and tubes. Whether they’re isolated is a different question of course. I want to believe so…

Should EMF/EMR indeed harm your body then why is life expectancy in Japan so high? Buildings in their cities span a tense net of wires that seem both chaotically arranged and unstable. Shouldn’t the Japanese all be fried alive with so much bad energy around them? Does the fact that they’re not suggest that EMF/EMR is harmless?

The following picture was taken from right outside my bedroom in Fukuoka, Japan …