Thursday 8 November 2007

Pictograms > Kanji.

Pictograms are good fun.
This is a river:

This is water
(if you squeeze a river (the three lines) you get water):

I stopped smiling when I discovered there are 3000 of them and each has 2 names, one when alone, the other when in a compound.Some pictograms have 22 names and 34.6 meanings. How much fun...

Three and counting.

I learned the numbers from one to ten. But I can't use them: if I want to tell I want three fishes at the marked, I cannot say I want 3 fishes. I must use a counter. Either one for cylindrical objects or one for animals (wonder whether there is a special one if they smell).
And there are other counters for flat objects: sheets, stamps, T-shirts, if neatly folded and not smelly. For mines I'll need the mackerel counter.

Tuesday 30 October 2007

Negative results

From: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-10/st_essay

Since 2002, the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine has offered a peer-reviewed home to results that go negative or against the grain. Earlier this year, the journal Nature started Nature Precedings, a Web-based forum for prepublication research and unpublished manuscripts in biomedicine, chemistry, and the earth sciences. At Drexel University, chemist Jean-Claude Bradley practices "open notebook" science — chronicling his lab's work and sharing data via blog and wiki. And PLoS is planning an open repository for research and data that is other wise abandoned.

Thursday 18 October 2007