Matt Easton @matteaston - Tumblr Blog

New website

It’s time for another new website! I hope you like the new look.

The move was kind of forced on me, as Tumblr is no longer working in China, so my old website (which relied a lot on Tumblr’s servers) was looking rather sad. Starting my new job, I’ve been linking to my website from a number of professional sites, so I wanted it to work properly again.

I’ve moved from Tumblr to WordPress, and I’m…

View On WordPress

#blog #blogging #China #computers #design #internet #tech #web #websites

Safe stopping distance

When I was taught to drive in England, my teacher taught me how to drive safely by keeping space between the cars in front and behind. “If you're in traffic and the car behind is impatient and starts driving really close behind your car, you might be tempted to speed up to get further away from them,” he said. “In fact, that's the worst thing to do, because it brings you closer to the car in front, and if the car in front stops suddenly, you'll have to stop suddenly too, and then impatient car behind you will crash into the back of you. The most important thing is to have plenty of space in front of you, so if the car in front does something unexpected, you'll have plenty of time to react.”

The key word here is unexpected. In England, almost all drivers do what is expected of them. If there's a red light, they stop. If they're in a right-turn only lane, they turn right. If they're driving down a road at 30 mph with lots of cars around them, they'll keep going straight, slow down gradually, or indicate a change of direction. Of course, sometimes someone won't do these things, and that's the unexpected factor. But you have to have an expected way of behaving before you can have anything unexpected…

In China, you can't really define an expected behaviour for drivers. Red light? I guess most people will stop, but not if they're just going round a corner to the right, that doesn't count, right? And it's nearly green, so a few cars might start going a teeny bit early. And those cars were over the line when it went red, so they can keep going, when the twelve cars in front of them get out of the way, of course…

In this kind of environment, when there's no “expected” then there can't be any “unexpected” either. And that's how it works. All drivers know that other drivers are crazy. So everyone watches everyone else every second, and reacts to whatever's around them. And the crazy thing is, it pretty much works. It works because it removes people's assumptions—in the UK we might have accidents because, “I assumed it was safe to overtake because the other car was indicating left,” or some such excuse based on expected behaviour. Remove the expectations and assumptions and you remove the unexpected factor.

Sure, there are still accidents sometimes, but overall, I feel safer cycling in China than in London. I know that all the drivers around me are very aware of all the vehicles around them, and ready to react. I have to cycle differently, and I have to beware of my own expectations. But if there's one thing crossing cultures is good for, it's for smashing aside your assumptions.

#China #culture #driving #expectations #assumptions

Information density

I saw this sign in an office when waiting to hand in some paperwork. What really struck me was how much information you can squeeze into a small space using Chinese characters! Most everyday Chinese words are one or two characters, whereas most English words need four or five letters.

This sign is a great example. The English six-letter word, ‘closed’, while giving you the essential meaning, doesn’t match the information content of the Chinese. A literal translation of these six Chinese characters might be:

This counter is temporarily not accepting applications.

That’s a lot of meaning from six characters! Much more than from our six-letter word.

This is because Chinese characters are based on meaning rather than sound. They are ideographic, not phonetic.

English spelling is phonetic. The word “closed” is spelled C-L-O-S-E-D because that combination of letters explains how to make the sound of the word “closed”, and the sound gives the meaning that the counter is currently closed.

Chinese characters are ideographic, so each character brings meaning. In fact, before the standardisation efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, different dialects in China may have had wildly different pronunciations for each of these characters, to the extent that people from distant parts of China may not have been able to understand one another speaking this sentence aloud, but they would all write it down using the same six characters, because the characters define the meaning, not the sound.

此: this 台: counter 暂: temporary 不: not 受理: accepting

I love Chinese!

#Chinese #language #information

A library stores the books that store its soul.

Peking University library introduction

#library #books #knowledge #soul #spiritual #deep #quote