Listen to the Waves

This was on the Yahoo news board, and the reason I find it fascinating is because I had a character in my novel Katsuren predict that this would someday be possible. And now it is:



Scientists have taken the seismic waves from last year's massive Japan earthquake and converted them into audio waves.

The new audio waves allow experts and general audiences to "hear" what the 9.0-magnitude earthquake sounded like as it moved through the earth and around the globe on March 11, 2011.

"We're able to bring earthquake data to life by combining seismic auditory and visual information," said Zhigang Peng of Georgia Tech. "People are able to hear pitch and amplitude changes while watching seismic frequency changes. Audiences can relate the earthquake signals to familiar sounds such as thunder, popcorn popping and fireworks."

True Fiction

This writer enjoys Okinawa. It's more than the weather, the scenery and the music. There's something about the atmosphere of connection--to people, of course, but also between past times and present times.

I used my background in an antiquities NPO and made up a story set in Okinawa. It's called Katsuren, and it will be published soon.

The story--and the characters--are all made up, but I think the Okinawa atmosphere will be true to life.

A Word from the Characters (1)

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Katsuren is a novel set in Okinawa, Japan. One of the characters is a man named Yu Ganaha. Here is one of his scenes, in which a young American woman asks him about his name.


"Which Yu are you?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon?" Yu said.

"I mean, how do you write your name in Japanese? Are you the Yu that means friendly, the one that means brave, or the Yu that stands for kind and gentle?"

"All of the above," he answered with a smug grin. "But if you really want to know which character I use to write my name, it's this one."

He took my hand and spelled out the strokes for warm, loving and tender with the tip of his finger. I blushed. And then I remembered. This was Okinawa. A man was expected to show his tender side. Yu wasn't setting me up; what he wrote in the palm of my hand was simply the truth.


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