Aquatic Inference Engine

Your kanji lesson for the day.

This is “tensai”, it means genius. It’s a compound of two kanji. A kanji picture-book I saw this afternoon translated the two roots as “devil talent”†. But this evening I looked it up in my kanji dictionary, published by one of the most respected japanese language houses in the world Kodansha (who, incidentally, publish all sorts of expensive but gorgeously designed, laid-out and assembled books on the asian milieu), and discovered that it actually means “heavenly talent”† or “angel talent”†. I thought the first one was amusing but cynical, so learning the actual meaning was kind of nice.

† - word order mirrors the left-right order of the kanji above