Language
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Background: Columns of text in a book or newspaper are generally formatted in the fully justified style (Figure 1), where the text always lines up exactly on both the left and right edges. Fig. 1: The “justify text” button (circled in red) can be found in nearly every text editor. The issue: Justified text works…
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The issue: Many computers are unable to handle letters that don’t fall into the set of Latin characters used by English. Even though the Unicode standard has greatly improved multi-character-set accessibility, problems still arise: A character might not exist in a chosen font. For example, “Egyptian Hieroglyph of a bird catching a fish” is probably…
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The issue: English has a large number of words with multiple syllables. We could save so much time if all these words were replaced with unique single–syllable equivalents! Proposal: For example, in the section above, we would change the following words: English -> Eng number -> noim multiple -> mult syllable(s) –> syllb(s) replace(d) -> roup(ed) unique ->…
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Background: You’re probably familiar with web sites that have very particular password requirements: “Your password must contain a number, capital letter, and special character.” “Your password must contain the name of a Triple Crown-winning horse.” “Your password cannot contain your username.” The purpose of these requirements is usually to either: Require that the password not…
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Background: Misunderstandings of meaning are often encountered due to ambiguities in human language. This causes problems in several ways, particularly in: Translation between languages Interpretation of laws 1) In regards to translation: For any non-trivial translation between two languages, a human is still required in order to figure out the meaning of it and a…
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Background: Over time, old files tend accumulate on one’s computer. However, cleaning out a computer is an annoying and time-consuming task. In the past, storage increased at a rate such that old files could be safely ignored forever. But modern laptops may actually have less (although faster) storage than ones from five years ago.…
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Background: As time goes on, certain emoji will become obsolete. Some of them already have! Although this is not a huge problem right now, it may become one in the future: will anyone understand what the “pager” emoji means in 100 years? Fig 1: In a hundred years, this pager icon will will baffle and…
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Background: Our current alphabet is derived from an ancient system of representational icons. These icons were once pictures of actual objects, but have been simplified to an easier-to-write form over the millennia. For example, according to the inerrant source of knowledge known as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet): The letter “Q” used to be one of these: This…
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The horrifying issue: The “apostrophe + s” ending in English has multiple meanings. This can be confusing. Fig 1: Hypothesis: the apostrophe (as seen above) is a poor choice of symbol for indicating possession. Here are some examples of a few applications of ’s (or s’ ) : Singular possession (“The cat’s tail.”) Plural possession…
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