Hardest Super Mario

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Large numbers and East Asian languages

A large number is usually written with commas separating every 3 digits (e.g. 123,456,789). The system is established this way only because many western languages have a decimal superbase of 1000. That is to say there are no new names for powers of 10 between one thousand (10³) and one million (10⁶). 10⁵ is constructed with 10²×10³. This is not the case for Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. These languages have a decimal superbase of 10000. So a large number like 123456789 should be written as 1,2345,6789. Different languages have different standards. The following table is a simplified illustration of the major standards in the world.

Country	Standard
France, much of Latin Europe	123 456 789,00
Germany, the Netherlands	123.456.789,00
the U.K., the U.S.	123,456,789.00
India	12,34,56,789

(more details at here)

In the past, financial and accounting industries in the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese speaking countries have employed the U.K./U.S. standard. It is understandable when computer systems had little resources for such customization. But now Windows and Mac OS have been completely translated. Windows even supports various decimal separating schemes described above, including the Indian numeral system (see screenshot). I have to wonder why isn't the East Asian scheme supported. I am disappointed in two groups of people because of this.

• Microsoft.
  They're supposed to be the leader of software localization. They have failed to do it.


• Speakers of these three East Asian languages.
  Just because some people who work in the financial industry or some of the bilingual people are accustomed to the U.K./U.S. format does not justify its usage in these three language. There is not enough root-grass demand for a change.

By the way, Vietnamese has a superbase of 1000.

See also 數字多位分節之我見.

This has been debated on the style guide discussion on the Chinese Wikipedia. I will counter some of the arguments against the "a-comma-per-4-digit" scheme.

Hindu-Arabic numeral isn't a Chinese thing to begin with

No, it is not. But it isn't a European thing in the beginning either. The Europeans adopted it and eventually the thousand separator evolved out of need and natural linguistic construction. And the Indians use a system different from the Europeans'? Why? Because it's how they say it!

A comma for every three digit is an established world standard

Wrong! As the table above shows, there are several standards.

Chinese pride has blinded your judgment

If there were any blind pride, I would argue not to use any Hindu-Arabic numeral at all in the first place.

Chinese speakers are accustomed to read and write the U.K/U.S. system

It is so only because there has not been any alternative. Trust me, if you're a native Chinese speaker and you start reading and writing like 1,2345,6789, you will get used to 4-digit-per-comma very soon. Imagine this:

Item	Numeral, U.K/U.S.	Numeral, Chinese	Chinese
Population of Taipei	260,0000	260,0000	260 萬
Population of Taiwan	23,000,000	2300,0000	2300 萬
Population of China	1,300,000,000	13,0000,0000	13 億

Now, which one is more natural?

Safari for Windows

Safari for Windows was released on 2007-06-11. It has some serious problem with internationalization. It doesn't display Indic scripts.

Safari

Firefox

In addition, when a page contains mixture of traditional and simplified Chinese characters, two different fonts are used. For the example on the right, the simplified characters 维 and 历 are rendered in Ming font, while the traditional characters (or characters common to both systems) are rendered in sans-serif. Apple can probably get away with internationalization because their website says so.

Usability issue: Hotkey Ctrl-+, Ctrl--, and Ctrl-0 for enlarging or shrinking font size don't work. Pressing enter after clicking on a radio button doesn't submit the form. It crashed within 5 minutes I started using, and continue to crash later.

Google Maps

Try searching for the driving direction from Boston to Paris on Google Maps.

Blue Screen of Death

Seoul Subway


New York Subway


Blue Screen of Death

Google Earth Taipei road map

Google Earth now has Taipei road map!! Including lanes (巷) and alleys (弄)!



So does Google Maps. It also has MRT routes.

Did you know?

White Chicks and Gang Signs

Don't do that please, I beg you. This applies to everyone, not just white chicks.

Gapminder

People usually want to live in the comfort of their own belief and stereotypes. And media, to attract more audience, would fall into the vicious cycle of presenting exaggerated stories, making stereotypes, and back and forth. In an age when the amount of information is increasing exponentially, we must not only read carefully edited news, but also the raw data. Some of the latter task can be aided by technologies now.

Hans Rosling's 21 min. talk at the 2006 TED Conference in Monterey, CA highlighting novel ways of presenting global statistics.

Search statistics through Google and watch it move with Gapminder. Google Subscribed Links makes it possible to search deep into Gapminder's moving graphs visualizing world development. Spring 2006.
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Go straight to the graph


A presentation for UNDP Human Development Report 2005 in English and some other languages. Human Development Trends was produced in 2005. Available in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish & Swedish.
Download


Related links

• Gapminder
  
• Hans Rosling's blog
  
• The same video presentation on TED's website
  

Wide screen

In recent years, there is an increasing trend to advertise "wide screen" on laptops. It seems that a wider screen shows more than a narrow screen. But it's all relative. One can say that a wide screen is a short screen, and a narrow screen is a tall screen. And I personally prefer tall screen over wide screen on a laptop. Why? The price of a LCD display is approximately proportional to its size and the number of pixel. For example, Dell 2007FP (20.1", 1600×1200 = 1.92 megapixels) is US$379 on PriceGrabber, and Dell 2007FWP (20.1", 1680×1050 = 1.764 megapixels) is US$369.95 on PriceGrabber. So if I'm paying roughly the same amount, I'd like to have as many pixels as possible. The number of pixels here is not really the simple product of the height and the width. It's how many are actually utilized. Most websites are built to be 800×600-friendly, and most sites have vertical scroll. If my screen width is larger than 800, then it is likely that I'm "wasting pixels" on the left and right, although enough websites are multi-resolution-friendly. Most blogs are fixed width. By the same token, many contemporary DVDs video have a aspect ratio of 1.85:1 or 2.35:1. On a screen that is 4:3 (or 1⅓:1), there would be black areas on the top and bottom. These are the two major cases where the pixels are wasted. And I have to ask myself, which one scenario is more common for myself? It's websites. When I'm reading a web page, what good is the extra 80 pixels on the horizontal axis, while I could have 150 extra pixels on the vertical axis, and possibly avoid some scrolling?

You may have a different use case. But you have to think about it for yourself. Marketing people do not have your best interest in mind.