Fridaygram: Unicode, ancient lake, very ancient sound
By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog EditorUnicode was created with the
ambitious goal of representing every human language, with room left over for a whole bunch of
symbols, too. More than 20
years after Unicode was started,
over
60% of the pages on the web are now encoded in Unicode. That’s pretty good growth
when you consider that Unicode’s coverage was less than 5% of the web in 2005. Having a
standard like Unicode is important because, as
Mark
Davis writes, "The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see
mangled characters (what Japanese call
mojibake) when you're
surfing the web."
In news of older stuff, a Russian
expedition that has been working for 10 years has finally drilled through Antarctic ice and
reached
Lake
Vostok, a huge freshwater lake more than 12,000 feet below the surface. The ice has
covered this lake for at least 15 million years, which is well before the work on Unicode
began. Eventually
the team
will take samples of the lake water, looking for signs of life and other ancient
treasures.
Finally, you can go back even further in time and
listen to the
song of a cricket that was around during the Jurassic period, 165 million years ago.
That cricket really sounds great for its age.
On
Fridays we take a break and do a Fridaygram post just for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass
only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.
