Roumazeilles.net

Category: Sciences

  • Alphabets and writing systems

    Alphabets and writing systems

    Who would not want to see all world’s writing systems organized in a structured way? This is what was done by WorldWritingSystems.org (referenced by Jason Kottke, including the partial list below). And, on a more humorous tone (from xkcd): But do not forget the history of… counting languages. It is not as simple as you…

  • Ancient Mediterranean alphabets

    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,…

  • Designing and comparing alphabets

    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.…

  • Alphabet evolution and hyphens

    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…

  • Pi to one MILLION decimal places

    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,…

  • Battle of the neighboroods

    Battle of the neighboroods

    This post is part of a small series of non-university studies (guest posts from enlightened amateurs) on Roumazeilles.net. So, we sometimes welcome a few authors whose works may be of a wider interest or simply original. The work below has been written by Marion Jonchères, in November 2020. Yves Roumazeilles 1. Introduction: Business understanding, target…

  • This is beer day, here

    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.…

  • Everest: Death from high-altitude hypoxia

    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…

  • Ikea-style instructions for computer algorithms

    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.