Do it right, with real numbers

Trays of metal letterpress type seen from above, individual raised letter blocks sorted into red compartments, the nearest ones in sharp focus.

Chinese Culture 6 min

The letter Chinese passports will not print

Hanyu Pinyin has a letter no Chinese travel document will print: ü. The rule that replaces it is two rules, not one — 吕...

A wall-mounted year planner photographed in shallow focus, columns of printed date numbers running down the sheet with several rows blocked out in yellow highlighter.

AI & ML 9 min

One cloud answers with a different model instead of failing

Every hosted model has a date after which it stops answering. Almost everywhere that is an error you can see in your log...

Kenji Tanaka

A Chinese calligraphy practice book lying open on a pale desk, its ruled grid squares each holding one traditional character in regular script, with a hand at the right holding a brush pen above the page.

Chinese Culture 10 min

花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten

Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says ten — a num...

The wave-patterned Portuguese paving of Senado Square in Macau, with the white Leal Senado building on the left and a pink colonial-era building on the right under an overcast sky.

Chinese Culture 7 min

The 226-page book that decides how Macau spells your name

Macau has a statutory table for romanising Cantonese names, running 226 pages of the 1985 gazette. Hong Kong has no rule...

Close-up of the round metal keys of an antique typewriter in black and white, showing the letters A, S, D, Z and X beside a shift-lock key labelled in Spanish.

Cybersecurity 7 min

The lookalike domain that is blocked on .com and shown on .ru

The famous all-Cyrillic apple.com impersonation was patched in 2017 and the matter filed as closed. Both major browsers...

Kenji Tanaka

A vertical pink neon sign spelling three Chinese characters, glowing against a dark city street at night with blurred lights behind it.

Chinese Culture 6 min

Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file

Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard. It is on...

A Chinese calligraphy practice sheet printed with traditional characters in a grid, with a black ink stone, a brush and two small jade water droppers resting on top of it.

Chinese Culture 6 min

Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity

干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obscenity in T...

A tray of movable metal printing type, the letters in sharp focus in the foreground.

Chinese Culture 9 min

Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011

The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the st...

A weathered stone sundial, its gnomon casting a shadow across the engraved dial face.

Chinese Culture 8 min

The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon

Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixe...

A Chinese calligraphy brush resting across a shallow dish of black ink.

Chinese Culture 8 min

The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei

兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a s...

A DNA double helix rendered in glowing gold against a black background.

Science 6 min

Mitochondrial DNA does not use the genetic code you were taught

Four codons differ between the standard genetic code and the one your mitochondria use, and two of them are stop signals...

Nadia Rahim