Category: Sciences
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Ancient Mediterranean alphabets
I have always been slightly fascinated by the way a language can move from oral tradition to a written system. Ancient civilizations developed some quite interesting alphabets (because we partially recognize or understand them). One of them appears to be well understood even today: The Greek alphabet evolved with technology around the Mediterranean sea. However,…
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Designing and comparing alphabets
Thanks to the very interesting (and very simple) website of Paul Hsieh GeekPress, I want to share two little gems about English scripture with you today. He found two ways to compare some alphabets. One is about grouping them (a bit like in a Venn diagram): The second is a more hierarchical walk between alphabets.…
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Alphabet evolution and hyphens
Thanks to very interesting (and very simple) web site of Paul Hsieh GeekPress, I want to share today with you two little gems about English scripture. You certainly knew that the alphabet we use (A to Z) has not always existed. You may have suspected that it was evoving in time from older scripts. Matt…
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Pi to one MILLION decimal places
One million useless figures The “most useless page” of this web site shows the first million decimal figures of PI (Do you remember your math? PI=3.14, more or less). All this is a kind of « virtual partnership » with French scientific magazine La Recherche whose December 2005 issue is titled : « Pi, le maître nombre » (Pi, the Master number). There,…
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This is beer day, here
So, I decided to share some information which would distract us all beer drinkers by concentrating more on the process of drinking and on drinking less (let’s be sure not to abuse any substance, even when it is pleasant/nice). A great/long paper about a well-documented book titled “A natural history of beer“, by George Scialabba.…
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Everest: Death from high-altitude hypoxia
These last days, there was a lot of talk about traffic ajms obsevred on the road to Mount Everest summit. They were the cause of several dramatic accidents in 2019, like in the previous years. Most people would not imagine how challenging survival is at high-altitude, without even counting on the huge physical exhaustion from…
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Ikea-style instructions for computer algorithms
Designed to help in a computer science and algorithms teaching course, these are great ideas of algorithm descriptions using only simplified drawings and no word (styled like Ikea assembly instructions). I love them. Idea-instructions.
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Zero digital noise photography
A few years ago I had written about Guillermo Luijk’s technique to remove completely noise from digital photos. We know that this is a difficult task, but his solution is relatively simple: Shot the scene in a correct exposure according to our usual workflow; Repeat the shot now reducing shutter speed by 4 f-stops that…