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There are lots of weirdnesses in Unicode that are consequences of enabling lossless round-trip translations to/from legacy encodings. Inconsistencies in how the various descendants of the Brahmic script are another such consequence.

Sorting rules can get really weird, and while some languages treat digraphs as separate letters for sorting, (e.g., Czech considers ch a separate letter coming after h), Polish does not.

There is speculation that the polytonic accents in Greek (which were a late addition to the alphabet, incidentally), originally were tone markers. ΄ represented a rising tone, ` a falling tone and ῀ a rising then falling tone.

This seems to be missing the iota subscript (aka ypogegrammeni) which is the source of the weirdness of what happens when casing, e.g., ῳ. (This is another diacritical that modern Greek has abandoned since its impact on pronunciation was already being lost in the classical era (when I took Attic Greek in college, pronunciation wasn’t a critical thing, but we treated all the accents as simply a stress accent, ignored iota subscript and pronounced the rough breathing as h.)

In upper case, ῳ can be written as ῼ, Ω with the subscript or ΩΙ with the distinction between the first two often made as a matter of font design (in fact the appearance of ῼ differs depending on whether it’s in the edit box or in text on this site.


One of the features of finl is the ability to have automatic substitutions of character inputs to, e.g., enable the TeX standard for inputing characters like “, ” and —

Playing with this, I was thinking that I could enable use of the Silvio Levy’s old 7-bit ascii input for Greek and realized that you would need different mappings of characters depending on where the character mapping happened relative to case folding. Text is messier than most peopler realize.


I read about an effort to do this in the 1950s (IIRC, it was in Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore, but I could be wrong about that) and as I remember it, most of the radiated seeds were either sterile or produced deformed offspring.


+ artificial selection by robots, could be a way to generate environment adapted organisms.

Did they expose the seeds or the plant that produced them?

iOS is surprisingly accessibly for the blind and visually impaired. Apple has shown that it can be done and between app review and accessibility support in the frameworks, despite the lack of buttons, the iPhone has long been the preferred phone for the visually impaired.

Never heard this about touchscreens not registering your touch when you get old. I guess my 83-year-old mother¹ and 92-year-old father aren’t old enough to experience this yet.

1. On the other hand, because her fingerprints have essentially vanished, my mother was never able to get touch ID to work.


iOS is accessible to blind people because of Voiceover, not because it has a touch screen. There really isn't a great alternative if you want access to all the mainstream apps. I used to have a Sony android phone with a tiny physical keyboard, and I still miss the keyboard even though Talkback on android in those days (Android 4) was unbelievably bad.

Before that, I could text quicker on a t9 keypad than I can with the qwerty keyboard on a touch screen.

The feedback from tactile keys also means you don't have to constantly listen exclusively to the phone while operating it. I find it impossible to use Voiceover in a noisy environment or when someone is talking to me.


That’s a big part of why I’ve never learned to solve a Rubik’s cube. I’d rather learn how to learn how to solve it than memorize an algorithm and I don’t really have the time/motivation/interest to learn how to learn how so I haven’t bothered.

My son, at age 9, loved learning these kinds of algorithms (he also learned how to solve square roots by hand from a YouTube video and would do random square root calculations to entertain himself, checking his answers against the calculator on my ex-wife’s kitchen Alexa).


The difference here is that “No” (actually “No!” in my text) is the entirety of Hamlet III.iii.87 without need to sample less than a line.

I believe that might be a difference in degree, not really in kind.

And selecting (and documenting) a single word extraction was part of the light hearted point. I was careful not to include a period inside the quote. :)


Another way to think about it is that for a given z, we can write it as (r, θ) where r is |z| and θ is the rotation of that norm in complex space. The complex conjugate is (r, −θ). A product of complex numbers zw is (r, θ)×(s, τ)=(rs, θ + τ) so zz̄ = (r², θθ) = r² = |z|².

Bill Watterson was absolutely brilliant at depicting the weird positions that cats will lie in.


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