Learning Mandarin? Don’t be intimidated by the huge number of odd-looking characters. You don’t really need to memorize all of them. Even memorizing couple of hundreds basic ones would be enough to have a basic conversation with Mandarin speaking people. Here’s the list of 135 character that make up around 50% of the words used in Mandarin daily conversation. Enough to understand simple conversation and hopefully help you survive socializing with Mandarin speaking people .

Warning: I use Google Translate, and haven’t done any proofreading, expect some mistakes

Continue reading →

Do you plan to learn a new language? Mandarin perhaps? Do you feel intimidated already by the huge number of vocab to memorize? I’ve seen lots cheap dictionaries claim that they contain millions or even billion[!] words, but lots of research suggest that languages like Mandarin or English doesn’t have that many words, neither any other languages, and even more importantly we don’t need to memorize that much to be fluently conversant in a language.

Continue reading →

“In lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time.”

Lots of interesting stuff could be built on this idea. Stay tune

“Blog is dead” echoes everywhere. And indeed it’s been a really long time since blogosphere got a big news. But the latest big news, came from none other than the bid daddy of blogging, sparks a new light. WordPress announced an ad platform exclusive for wordpress bloggers called WordAds.

From the release:

“We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.”

Well, yeah I hope it will be much better than AdSense or any other ad platforms. I’ve realized that in the past couple of years, ad platforms like that have change the online publishing landscape, for good or worst. Top Notch content creators get their incentive to create more and better contents. But the others are just incenticized to copy, scrap, spam, profit, profit, and profit.

It’s not clear yet how WordPress would make the platform different or (hopefully) better. But if you want to find out, you should meet their criteria (I hope it’s worth the hassle ).

I’m not a fanboy, but I have a couple of those shiny iStuff. I’m not a fan of Steve Jobs either, but I love to learn from everyone. And he’s nothing short of inspirational figure for most of us, despite anything you might hate of him. In 1995, during the making of “Triumph of the Nerds”, TV series about the birth of the PC, Bob Cringely did an interview with Steve Jobs. Continue reading →