Diacritiques

1. The awesomest eye-chart ever.

   Though I can’t exactly see myself rattling off “GEORGIAN CAPITAL LETTER LAS, LEFTWARDS DASHED ARROW, GURMUKHI LETTER AI, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI, TAMIL LETTER I, BOX DRAWINGS DOWN HEAVY AND UP HORIZONTAL LIGHT, ORIYA DIGIT SEVEN, VULGAR FRACTION ONE SIXTH, PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH FOUR” at the optometrist’s.#[a] Yet.

2. In other news, it has come to our attention that fungi (pl.: fungi) has joined the ranks of countable singular nouns. Congratulations.

   It sounds like something out of a comic book, although scientists already know that fungi will eat asbestos, jet fuel, and plastic. It has also been shown to decompose hot graphite in the ruins of the Chernobyl power plant, which melted down in 1986. The plant’s release of large amounts of radiation appears to have attracted black hordes of fungi. But how does it work?

   According to Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans and two other species use melanin, also a pigment found in human skin, to transform radiation into energy to use as food for growth.

   (Technology Review, via apostropher.)

3. The Guardian, or rather, Angelique Chrisafis on this Monday’s Guardian Newsdesk podcast, has some strange ideas about adjectives:

   (Note: neither tsunami nor tidal wave counts. The full mp3 can be downloaded here)

[a]: The line I just read looks like this: Ⴊ ⇠ ਐ ῼ இ ╁ ଠ ୭ ⅙ ㈣ — got all your Unicode fonts installed?

My friend and resident Unicode advisor Patrick Hall, when not busy getting the blogosphere on the road towards mutually translating itself, has branched out into the comic strip genre.

I fully admit that I lent a hand (or rather, a few brain cells) in the naming process, but the idea is all his: three-panel strips that feature glyphs from the vast set covered by Unicode and named the way Unicode characters usually are: “U+” plus the hexadecimal number of the character’s code point.#[1]

So check out Loonicode. And badger Pat not to stop at the third instalment!

(What does it say about my geekiness level that these comics give me uncontrollable fits of giggles?)

[The spell-checker didn’t know: geekiness.]

Note:

[1]: On my Gnu/Linux system with a Gnome desktop, the code point allows me to enter the character: I hold down SHIFT plus CTRL at the same time, type the hex code, and release the two keys. If I have an appropriate font installed, the character appears. Here’s U+1DC2 COMBINING SNAKE BELOW, enlarged a bit: ᷂. I sometimes use this feature for entering IPA. Our good friend LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA (ə), for example, is U+0259.

Seen in a few places on the web lately, this is what I want on a t-shirt:

I � Unicode

During yesterday’s Paris blogger meet-up Paris Carnet, Mouche noted that a sticker might be even better; and was worried about what it meant that she not only understood the joke but even found it funny.

The character is U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, by the way.

Via Bridget Samuels at ilani ilani: The IPA council has adopted the first new phonetic symbol in twelve years. SIL explains that the “right hook v” will symbolise a labiodental flap, and how to produce this sound. It is a phoneme in several African languages, among which Mono. The latest beta versions of the Doulos SIL […]