I am studying Mandarin. This is an interesting language to learn because it has a long history which is all new to me. My native French and English languages I take for granted, but learning a completely foreign language, from a place like China, makes for a lot of new facts.
For example, I learned that Cantonese is older than Mandarin. This is shown by comparing classical Chinese literature to modern Cantonese and Mandarin. Poetry, for example, probably won't rhyme if read in the wrong dialect, and classical poetry usually sounds best in Cantonese because it rhymes and flows better.
What makes learning Chinese even trickier is that the written words are completely disconnected from the spoken words. In English, if you know how to pronounce "turn" and "key" you can probably figure out "turkey". In Chinese, however, the written words are just symbols, and knowing the shape of a symbol tells you little or nothing about the pronunciation.
There is one class of exceptions: Chinese characters made up of a meaning part and a sound part. A good example is the word for Mom1:
媽
The left half of that symbol is the radical for "Woman" while the right half is the radical for "Horse". The reason for the Horse is because both mom and horse are pronounced 'ma'2. Personally I find it funny that 'Horse' gets its own symbol but 'Mom' does not.
Next time: how using the wrong tone can lead to embarrassment.
Notes:
1. The word for "Mom" is actually 媽媽, as in 'mama'.
2. The words for horse and mother have different tones, which is how Chinese speakers distinguish them.
Signs you've been online too long
Some people don't know when to quit. As an avid computer user, I've had my share of long online games. A few times in university I recall playing online games until the sun came up. But this guy in China takes the cake. Apparently he played so long he died of exhaustion. I wasn't aware the problem was so serious, so I've put together a handy checklist which you can use to determine if you've been online too long:
- The Internet Cafe technician comes by to upgrade Windows on the computer you're using and you don't recognize the year in the version number
- You have to change your mailing address to the Internet Cafe's location so that you can continue to receive your credit-card statements
- You don't have time to shower but you've had to clean the mouse and keyboard several times since you started playing
- Your family stops visiting you or phoning you and only contacts you through MSN Messenger because that's the only way they can reach you
- You can't discuss geography or politics with anyone because all your knowledge is out of date due to continental drift.
Only a new C.N. Tower can save the Canadian Dollar
Today the Canadian Dollar reached parity with the US dollar. This is seen as a bad thing because it means Canadian labour is comparatively more expensive because Canada mainly exports to the U.S.. We need to prop up the U.S. dollar so that the Canadian economy isn't harmed. The last time the dollar was at par was in 1976, when the C.N. Tower was built. From that time the Canadian dollar dropped and dropped. What happened to change this situation? Clearly it's the construction of the Burj Dubai, which is now taller than the C.N. Tower. Obviously what we need to restore our dollar is a new, taller tower. I recommend one built of Lego.
Robert Jordan
Since I started writing this blog I've been meaning to post about the Wheel of Time. This is a fantasy series written by Robert Jordan, whose real name is James Oliver Rigney Jr. Since 1990 millions of readers have been taken into the world of Rand al'Thor, where only women perform magic because the male magic is tainted, and where young men and women must stand up and take up arms in the eternal struggle of good and evil. Over 11 volumes (plus one prequel novel) and 17 years Robert Jordan has told the tale. His loyal fans await the 12th and final book.
Alas, Robert Jordan has passed away. He struggled over the last few years with amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, a disease with a median life expectancy of approximately 4 years. Others will no doubt quote some passage from his books, but I will simply say thank you for the stories.
Alas, Robert Jordan has passed away. He struggled over the last few years with amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, a disease with a median life expectancy of approximately 4 years. Others will no doubt quote some passage from his books, but I will simply say thank you for the stories.
Times and Dates
Today a coworker and I grappled with a weighty issue: Time.
The thing is, time is one of the most complicated concepts humans have invented for themselves, but we've managed to hide the complexity behind artificial facades. For example, all business record the time and date when transactions occur. Businesses want to know how much money was made when, and this information is summarized on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis, but in the computer realm we deal with seconds or milliseconds.
How many milliseconds are there in a month?
It's a trick question, because the length of a month depends on which month it is, and whether this is a leap year or not. People expect to be able to calculate the time between two dates, and also to be able to determine what the date some number of seconds from now. Both of these tasks are extremely annoying because dates and times use convoluted units of measure.
Computers typically represent time in milliseconds since some arbitrary point. Linux, Unix and Java use Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC as the reference time. Thus the number 378113400000 represents Fri, 25 Dec 1981 07:30:00 GMT, while the number 378563400000 represents Wed, 30 Dec 1981 12:30:00 GMT. This is useful for determining how much time has passed from one instant to another but makes it difficult to determine what the date is at a particular instance. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the calendar isn't continuous: during the Gregorian switchover (when most Christian nations switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar) the date went from Thursday October 4, 1582 to Friday October 15, 1582. Except in countries that didn't switch calendars, including the United Kingdom, which rejected everything the Pope said, and thus they held on to the Julian Calendar until 1752, when Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752 (an 11 day jump, because in the intervening years the Julian Calendar had become further incorrect). It is difficult to accurately represent times in this era, mainly because not everyone agrees on what a specific time should be called.
Then there's time-zones: there's dozens of them and they cause havoc with time. In local terms some days are 25 hours long or 23 hours long when the time changes from or to Daylight Saving Time. Luckily most computer software uses UTC, which doesn't have time-zones. Internally computers represent time in UTC and only convert to local time for display purposes. But there are still issues, because the computer still needs to know the rules for how to convert to local time and sometimes the rules change, necessitating a software update. In some jurisdictions the rules for Daylight Saving Time change every year.
Which brings me to the problem we are facing at my office: for better or worse we have a system where dates and times are recorded in a non-UTC format, which is to say, in the local timezone. This arrangement makes it difficult to examine data and compare it to other systems because the other systems use UTC. Except for the ones that don't, because they use some other timezone. This makes it problematic to look at logs and discuss the order of events because the timestamps all mean different things. It's like England in the 18th century: When an Englishman spoke of the date September 1st 1752, any Frenchmen nearby would have to mentally translate to Sept 13th 1752. However fixing the clocks and time-zone settings on the various systems won't solve the problem of systems that don't speak UTC and can't be made to. For those there is nothing to be done. But as a lesson to future system designers: do everyone a favour and
The thing is, time is one of the most complicated concepts humans have invented for themselves, but we've managed to hide the complexity behind artificial facades. For example, all business record the time and date when transactions occur. Businesses want to know how much money was made when, and this information is summarized on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis, but in the computer realm we deal with seconds or milliseconds.
How many milliseconds are there in a month?
It's a trick question, because the length of a month depends on which month it is, and whether this is a leap year or not. People expect to be able to calculate the time between two dates, and also to be able to determine what the date some number of seconds from now. Both of these tasks are extremely annoying because dates and times use convoluted units of measure.
| 1000 milliseconds in a second | -> | 60 seconds in a minute | -> | 60 minutes in an hour | -> | 24 hours in a day | -> | 7 days in a week | -> | 28, 29, 30, 31 days in a month | -> | 12 months in a year | -> | 365 days in a year | -> | almost 52 weeks in a year | -> | almost 4 weeks in a month |
Computers typically represent time in milliseconds since some arbitrary point. Linux, Unix and Java use Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC as the reference time. Thus the number 378113400000 represents Fri, 25 Dec 1981 07:30:00 GMT, while the number 378563400000 represents Wed, 30 Dec 1981 12:30:00 GMT. This is useful for determining how much time has passed from one instant to another but makes it difficult to determine what the date is at a particular instance. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the calendar isn't continuous: during the Gregorian switchover (when most Christian nations switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar) the date went from Thursday October 4, 1582 to Friday October 15, 1582. Except in countries that didn't switch calendars, including the United Kingdom, which rejected everything the Pope said, and thus they held on to the Julian Calendar until 1752, when Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752 (an 11 day jump, because in the intervening years the Julian Calendar had become further incorrect). It is difficult to accurately represent times in this era, mainly because not everyone agrees on what a specific time should be called.
Then there's time-zones: there's dozens of them and they cause havoc with time. In local terms some days are 25 hours long or 23 hours long when the time changes from or to Daylight Saving Time. Luckily most computer software uses UTC, which doesn't have time-zones. Internally computers represent time in UTC and only convert to local time for display purposes. But there are still issues, because the computer still needs to know the rules for how to convert to local time and sometimes the rules change, necessitating a software update. In some jurisdictions the rules for Daylight Saving Time change every year.
Which brings me to the problem we are facing at my office: for better or worse we have a system where dates and times are recorded in a non-UTC format, which is to say, in the local timezone. This arrangement makes it difficult to examine data and compare it to other systems because the other systems use UTC. Except for the ones that don't, because they use some other timezone. This makes it problematic to look at logs and discuss the order of events because the timestamps all mean different things. It's like England in the 18th century: When an Englishman spoke of the date September 1st 1752, any Frenchmen nearby would have to mentally translate to Sept 13th 1752. However fixing the clocks and time-zone settings on the various systems won't solve the problem of systems that don't speak UTC and can't be made to. For those there is nothing to be done. But as a lesson to future system designers: do everyone a favour and
- Synchronize the clocks of your computer gear, and
- Always store dates/times in UTC
Vancouver Trip
I recently took a trip to Vancouver. The weather was much nicer than in Toronto, about 10 degrees cooler. This was our fourth time going to Vancouver, so we knew where to stay (Davie Street, not because it's the gay district but because it's close to English Bay) and we knew where not to go (Hastings and Main). We took an "airporter" bus but this turned out to be an expensive, less-than-convenient alternative to a taxi. The kicker is that we had to switch buses a few blocks from our hotel, but the bus we switched to drove all around the city in a big circle until finally dropping us off an hour later. It would have been faster for us to walk from the transfer point, dragging our luggage on its pitiful wheels. But after this dismal start the rest of the vacation went really well.
The first night there was the final night of the fireworks festival. We went to English Bay relatively early, around 7pm, when there were only about 200,000 people waiting for the show to start. I estimate that the crowd doubled in the three hours we waited, until there were so many people that we were standing on a bench because there wasn't room for us to sit (people crowded too close to the bench) and some people were actually climbing on the bench to try to get by. But the fireworks were good, and I wish I'd had a tripod there to photograph them.
After that we spent the rest of the time wandering around Vancouver and relaxing at English Bay. We also went on a walking tour of Gastown, where I learned that the fire department used to (in the old days) sell its horses to the police, milk-men, whoever, once the horses were too old to pull fire-wagons. But the horses had been so well-trained that whenever a fire alarm sounded, all the police and milk-men showed up at the fire along with the actual firemen.
Overall the trip was relaxing and fun. The only real excitement was when two F117A Stealth Fighters flew overhead. I'd never personally seen this plane flying and was so surprised to see two of them that I just gaped like a drooling nitwit until I realized that I was holding my camera. I tried to snap a picture but unless you know ahead of time that it's a picture of two aircraft you'd be forgiven for missing those two stealthy specs.
Our last night there was eventful as well due to a false fire-alarm which caused us to evacuate. Too bad the Vancouver FD doesn't use horses anymore.
The first night there was the final night of the fireworks festival. We went to English Bay relatively early, around 7pm, when there were only about 200,000 people waiting for the show to start. I estimate that the crowd doubled in the three hours we waited, until there were so many people that we were standing on a bench because there wasn't room for us to sit (people crowded too close to the bench) and some people were actually climbing on the bench to try to get by. But the fireworks were good, and I wish I'd had a tripod there to photograph them.
After that we spent the rest of the time wandering around Vancouver and relaxing at English Bay. We also went on a walking tour of Gastown, where I learned that the fire department used to (in the old days) sell its horses to the police, milk-men, whoever, once the horses were too old to pull fire-wagons. But the horses had been so well-trained that whenever a fire alarm sounded, all the police and milk-men showed up at the fire along with the actual firemen.
Overall the trip was relaxing and fun. The only real excitement was when two F117A Stealth Fighters flew overhead. I'd never personally seen this plane flying and was so surprised to see two of them that I just gaped like a drooling nitwit until I realized that I was holding my camera. I tried to snap a picture but unless you know ahead of time that it's a picture of two aircraft you'd be forgiven for missing those two stealthy specs.
Our last night there was eventful as well due to a false fire-alarm which caused us to evacuate. Too bad the Vancouver FD doesn't use horses anymore.
Cyberslacking
The Toronto Star has an article about cyberslacking. It basically says people spend all their time at work surfing the Internet instead of working. However it doesn't mention one of the worst offenders for cyberslacking: www.tetesaclaques.tv. This website, based in Montreal, is a collection of hilarious animated clips. The clips are in Quebecois French, which in this case is about as far from standard French as classic Newfoundland English is from the Queen's English. Speaking of English, half the words actually ARE English but some people do speak that way in Quebec. Anyway, it's great fun and if you can understand the dialogue you'll laugh your head off.
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