
Every Unicode character shown once per frame as a 33-minute movie - DanielKehoe
http://netpoetic.com/2011/04/unicode/
======
coderdude
I'm surprised that I was able to perceive individual characters. At the
beginning when the movie is displaying the alphabet it seems like I can see
each letter. Is this really one character per frame (assuming playback at 24
frames per second)?

 _Edit:_

49,571 (characters) divided by 25 (frames per second) comes out to 1,982.84.
1,982.84 seconds is 33.03 minutes. Taking into account the padding at the
beginning and end of the video reveals that the video displays 1 character per
frame at 25 frames per second.

~~~
jerf
Some people adapt this into a system they claim helps speed read [1], and
while I don't particularly believe the speed reading claims it is true that
you can actually read quite quickly with words flashing at fairly high rates.

There are various sites online that can help you play with this, but I can't
get any of them to work on the machine I'm posting this on (no Java,
zapreader.com doesn't work for unknown reasons).

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation)

~~~
sliverstorm
I could buy the speed reading claims, perhaps at _slightly_ slower rates. One
of the cool things about language and our brains is you can miss letters and
get order mixed up, and instantly guess what was meant with a very high rate
of success.

Emxalpe: I persmue you sitll udnr snatd tis?

~~~
Rondrak
sliverstorm, I don't want to take this too far off topic, but what are the
rates you're hearing of that you have trouble believing? I read at a little
over 1,300 words per minute (and I keep getting faster). As to comprehension,
without taking a test it's hard to say, but by reading a section of material
for a few minutes, writing down everything I can remember without looking at
the book, then re-reading to see what I've missed, I seem to get roughly 80%
comprehension, which I find acceptable for most things (and it keeps getting
better through practice).

Disclaimer: That's depending on the material, I read at about half that rate
(around 600 wpm) if it's extremely technical or dense, or a good deal faster
in anything at or below a high school reading level.

~~~
sliverstorm
What I have trouble believing is that anyone could, using Rapid Serial Visual
Presentation (which was the subject of the comment I replied to) process
characters (or words) that flash on the screen as fast as (or faster than)
25fps.

Problem with serial presentation is of course, you cannot skip words or
process words in parallel. I suspect when you attain 1,300wpm, you are
focusing your eyes on half a page or perhaps the entire page, and only
skimming sentences and absorbing key words and ideas, rather than processing
each word one at a time.

~~~
Rondrak
Ah, my apologies for misunderstanding your comment. That's what I get for
attempting rational thought at one in the morning.

Before I learned to speed read the way I currently do, I tried learning using
RSVP. In my personal experience I didn't find it very helpful, and my
comprehension rates (when using RSVP) plummeted. I'm in complete agreement
there.

As to my 1,300wpm, you're partially correct. 1,200wpm is just about the limit
at which I can read word by word, line by line in a book, using my hand as a
pacer. After 1,200, I stop dropping conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions,
and anything that can be inferred through context or isn't necessary to the
meaning of the sentence (e.g. - absorbing key words and ideas, but still more
precise than 1/2 a page at a time).

Here's the book I learned from so you can judge the merits based upon
something better than my attempted explanation:
[http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Rapid-Reading-Peter-
Kump/...](http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Rapid-Reading-Peter-
Kump/dp/073520019X?tag=duckduckgo-d-20)

------
pavel_lishin
"Oh, neat, I found where the Asian characters begin!"

And then they never ended.

~~~
fedd
i personally think it's not very correct to call hieroglyphs characters and
assign each of them a code.

i may be wrong but i think that there is an growing number of hieroglyphs as
there is an infinite (growing) number of words; and every h. consists of more
primitive parts - i think they should be coded so that the sequence of
primitives would form a hieroglyph like in european languages letters form
words

~~~
qq66
That's an interesting idea, but there seems like there would be a tremendous
amount of complexity in encoding how the various strokes or components fit
together. In English, there are twenty-six letters that fit together in one
linear order, delimited by spaces and a few punctuation marks. How would you
write that "down-and-to-the-left diagonal stroke meets unfilled square
somewhat above the midpoint of that square's right-hand side?"

~~~
Umofomia
The granularity doesn't necessarily need to get down to the stroke level. In
fact, if you start playing the video at around the 6 minute mark, you'll see
that many of the characters are composed of the same elements, known as
radicals (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)> ).

Unicode does have the concept of "combining characters" in which a string of
characters is used to compose one glyph (see:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character> ), but currently they
generally are only used for adding diacritics. All Chinese characters in the
current Unicode standard are precomposed, but it's potentially not out of the
question to encode them as a composite of two or more sub-characters. The
downside to this is that each character would end up taking several more bytes
to encode, but one advantage is that novel characters could be created by
combining two or more existing characters, which currently cannot be done
without explicitly adding the novel character to the Unicode standard (see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precomposed_character#Chinese_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precomposed_character#Chinese_characters)
).

The input methods that fedd mentions are just input methods, which translate
what the user inputs into encodings of precomposed characters. This is
different than having the encoding themselves represent the composition of the
characters.

~~~
calloc
This here explains why this has not been done:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2435708>

------
Vivtek
Fantastic!

What is the sound and how was it generated? It sounds like it might be narrow
samples of some voice.

~~~
kilovoltaire
It gets higher and higher pitched as the video goes on, so may have to do with
the unicode values. But too jumpy to just be that.

~~~
andos
You're probably right. Not all values have been assigned a glyph yet.

------
sp332
It's not _every_ Unicode character, just the ones in Helvetica.

------
fishtoaster
I'm curious how the audio was generated. It seems to be somewhat dependent on
the character being displayed, as evidenced by jumping between different types
of characters (basic letters vs japanese characters)

------
BasDirks
See also: <http://www.youtube.com/user/ffoitl#p/a/u/1/gGiENL4XrjE>

------
syncsynchalt
Only shows the Basic Multilingual Plane, when does the first sequel come out?

------
biot
I was really hoping to see things ordered by closeness of one character's
shape to another so that as it plays it looks like something organic growing
and moving around. I'll buy a beer for the person who creates that video.

------
stretchwithme
They say characters are the most important element of a story.

~~~
chrischen
They're the most important element to a movie, especially this one.

------
BasDirks
Strangely beautiful.

~~~
Rondrak
It is, isn't it? I found myself thinking, "I'll just watch for a minute to see
what this is", then getting lulled in until a distraction broke my reverie.

------
artfail
Where were you guys in 2009?

<http://vimeo.com/7489601>

------
charlesju
This video would be a lot cooler with some good background music.

------
fedd
u vee double u ex wye zed now we know the alphabet

