Friday, July 18, 2025
I'm officially on vacation today so no preamble.
Item 1: a link
The Computer History Museum blog had a post, pegged to last year's release of The Chinese Computer: a Global History of the Information Age, by Thomas Mullaney, professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, about the difficulties of adapting devices built for western languages to languages with very different structure:
The Chinese language became “a problem,” Mullaney said, only when new technologies like the telegraph and typewriter were invented in the early 19th century. They were built with the English language in mind and could be made to function well enough for languages like French and Italian. But other languages—like Chinese—were blamed for their incompatibility with the machines. Some reformers even suggested that to keep pace with the industrial age, the Chinese language had to go.
Others, however, tried to imagine a world in which heritage could come forward into the modern world. It involved an entirely different way of thinking about inputting to a keyboard.
Their blog post is peppered with YouTube clips from Mullaney's talk, along with summaries of some of the points made in his book (and they put the whole talk on YouTube), but if you'd like to learn more about this topic, I recommend this piece from the MIT Technology Review, about the many different ways people have approached the problem of inputting Chinese characters.
Item 2: a list
Some Manhattan Bridges, Ranked:
- Brooklyn Bridge
- Williamsburg Bridge
- High Bridge
- Queensboro Bridge
- Robert F. Kennedy (née Triborough Bridge)
- Hell Gate Bridge
- Manhattan Bridge
- George Washington Bridge
- Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
Item 3: a media recommendation
The Police - Message in a Bottle (Today's World Disco, Hong Kong, 1980)
Item 4: word of the week
Marmoreal
I'm glad you found a facial moisturizer with a scent you like, but I don't think your skin is supposed to look so marmoreal.
Item 5: a photograph

See ya!
Again, vacation. Thanks for reading.
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