August 21 2019, 00:54

Interesting news. If you haven’t been tracking, the Israeli “Beresheet” landed on the Moon rather abruptly in April. Well, or in other words, crashed. So, aboard it were tardigrades encapsulated in artificial amber – spineless creatures considered nearly indestructible. They withstand freezing to absolute zero, strong radiation, and heating up to 150Β°C. They have already ventured into open space – and survived. In the absence of water, they literally dry out and enter a state of apparent death, but it’s reversible as soon as water reenters their system. Due to no water in their cells, they aren’t ruptured by deep freezing or boiling. The spacecraft crashed, but these little friends are scattered somewhere. Theoretically, they could be revived in the future, and in the artificial amber at those temperatures, they might well wait an eternity.

Also, I recently read an interesting fact that life on Earth is impossible to annihilate. First, these tardigrades from the previous paragraph. More specifically, in the last ones. Firstly – the bacteria in the depths of the earth. It turns out that their total weight amounts to “…17-25 billion tons, which is 300-400 times more than the mass of all the people on Earth”. Thus, these little friends are impervious to destruction. Unless, of course, an asteroid hits the Earth and shatters it into small pieces. Even then, life would still remain, albeit in a somewhat conserved form.

August 19 2019, 00:27

I have published a large (45 pages) research paper on “Searching in Chinese and Japanese”, welcome. The co-author for the Japanese language part was @[100001772111225:2048:Timofey Klyubin], huge thanks to him. This paper compiles everything regarding the peculiarities of searching in Japanese and Chinese, including user interface features and reviews of existing solutions.

I am starting a project tomorrow where a large part will focus on Chinese search, so this whole endeavor was not in vain.

I deliberately did not touch on Korean, traditionally coupled with Japanese and Chinese (CJK) in the context of information retrieval. Including Korean would have added another 10 pages and ultimately confused the reader. Maybe someday I will return to it in a second part. I have dealt with Korean before.

https://hybrismart.com/2019/08/18/the-challenges-of-chinese-and-japanese-searching/

August 15 2019, 12:25

On Monday, an article about support for Japanese and Chinese languages will be released. Still figuring things out – I’m blown away by the Japanese.


preview

How does Japanese write large and small numbers?
https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/large-numbers.html

Since the 17th century, the character ζ₯΅ in Japanese has meant 10^48 (1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000). And there are individual characters for all smaller numbers in increments of 10,000 (because for all the numbers in between, a different notation can be used, within the scale of 10,000).

One of the meanings of this character is “very ordinary” πŸ™‚