Down the Wiki Hole

If I ever wonder why I don't get around to reading my books, it's because my nights go something like this:

"I should finish my tea and then read a book in my hammock."
"Huh, iTunes has the wrong art for Depeche Mode - 101."
"Wikipedia's article 101 is about the year, not a disambiguation."
"Wow, that's a lot of random facts about the number 101."
"What the hell is a strobogrammatic prime? Wow, who creates a word for a property of a number which depends on both base and script?"
"Ooh, what do Devanagari digits look like?"
"Huh. I guess I can't infer that the line at the top implies the language is Hindi. Distinguishing it from Nepali is like distinguishing English from Spanish."
"But I might be able to infer Gujarati by the lack of a line."
"There's a special writing system for indigenous Canadian languages? That's cool, the rotation of the consonant indicates the vowel."
"I didn't realize these weren't technically alphabets. All those crazy curly-cue languages are abugidas."
"... and Arabic, Hebrew, and other vowel-free writing systems are abjads (or perhaps "bjds" if you're using an abjad)."
"OMG. The list of writing systems has a map of scripts. Typogeography! Goetypography! I might cream my pants if I was wearing any."
"In the obscurity department, a script used only by women. With graphemes chosen so they'd work well in embroidery."
"Tengwar characters have phonetic features embedded, unlike most alphabets where there's no indication that 'f' and 'v' are pronounced similarly. It can therefore be used to write more than just imaginary languages. If you want a badge of obscurity and utter linguistic geekery, you can write Esperanto in Tengwar."
"kakos should make a shirt of Jabberwocky in Lojban."
"Let's not get into MovementWriting, but somehow I doubt DanceWriting can adequately transcribe the way I dance."
"Well, at least I have an adequate LJ icon to indicate how I spent my evening."

Men Pass Through The Gate

Two follow-up thoughts to my post about writing systems yesterday:

The obvious advantage of simplified Chinese characters over traditional characters is that they're easier to learn. The People's Educators have taught a couple hundred million people how to read and write a very complicated writing system, so using 门 instead of 門 as the foundation for a big pile of characters makes it a little easier. But there's a more subversive effect: It makes it harder for people to read old books. If the only books printed in simplified characters were approved by the Communist Party, young impressionable minds wouldn't be exposed to the books that slipped through the cracks of the cultural revolution.

In the way that some people form book clubs, I should join a Wikipedia club. Every week we pick a topic and share what we've learned about it from the Internet.


In other news, I seem to get stupid when I'm sick. I've been fighting a cold for four days and just now realized that I have Emergen-C at home, at work, and probably in my backpack somewhere.