Today I Learned:
1) ...so I was thinking about unicode, and how big it is, and I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see just how big the standard really is. With some estimation, guesswork, and order-of-magnitude roundoffs, I determined that if every star in our galaxy was inhabited by a species with human-like intelligence, and every single one of those species used symbols with similar complexity and diversity to humans, then a 64-bit unicode standard would comfortably hold every single symbol in the galaxy.
...then I read up on Unicode, and discovered I was totally wrong. For one thing, there is no 64-bit Unicode -- UTF-32 is the biggest standard, and it's rarely used because it's bulky and inefficient compared to UTF-8 and UTF-16. Also, Unicode isn't a... simple mapping of binary to characters. The standard is organized into 17 planes (0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane, and 1-16 are the Supplemental Planes or "astral planes"), each of which defines 65,536 symbols. After subtracting out surrogates, non-characters, and code points reserved for private use, that leaves 974,530 possible points, of which about 10% are currently defined. That 10% very comfortably includes all modern languages, and some ancient heiroglyphics and cuniform languages as well. The majority of defined Unicode is taken up by Chinese (technically "CJK Unified Ideographs"), which actually surprised me -- I assumed there would be at least five or ten more languages of similar symbolic complexity. I was wrong.
(Another fun fact: Chinese has something over 50,000 characters, with about 20,000 in modern use. That's surprisingly close to my original back-of-the-envelope 70,000-character estimate (definitely more than 5,000 characters; definitely less than a million characters; roughly sqrt{5,000 * 1,000,000} ~ 70,000))
2) RNase also digesting DNA isn't just a story people tell on the internet. It happens. Confirmed with plasmid DNA with all the adequate controls.
3) ...about the story of Mac OS 9's Graphing Calculator program. You can read about it here: http://ift.tt/s4Nt2U. It's a great story, but I'm really unsure what I think about it. Or what I feel about it. How do *you* feel about it?
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