That night, winking stars decorated the peaceful sky curtain as usual. Our protagonist Audrey was on an ordinary business trip in Manila. She felt hungry all of a sudden, and walked in a nearby local restaurant. She browsed the menu, and found a familiar-looking fish name there, then confidently ordered the dish ‘steamed saba’. Not long, a plate full with steamed bananas was served to her table. She stared at the bananas with a face expecting some magic to happen. Maybe they’re all filled with fish meat, she thought. Seconds later, she realised this story was not a fairy tale or even in fantasy genre. Banana is just banana. Fish! She turned to the waiter with a strong urge to complain.

This isn’t a ghost or love story either, but an awkward moment with cultural misunderstanding. The spoiler? Blame the fish word that sounds similar in two languages, but differs significantly in meaning. Ironically, such a word is named ‘false friend’ in linguistics. Friend? Hmm… Have you heard about the cliche of a British bloke talking about ‘football’ to an American dude… Yeah, that’s the friend. Got it?

When Parker Pen entered Mexican market, it advertised that the pen ‘won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you’. The phrase was mistranslated as ‘no te embarazará chorreándose en tu bolsillo’, which means ‘won’t leak in your pocket and impregnate you’ in Spanish. Well, is impregnating someone so embarrassing? It’s wonder of life… I don’t believe it’s a true story. But the claimed translator should be embarrassed to mix up Spanish embarazada ([embaɾaˈθaða]), with its English friend embarrassed ([ɛmˈbarəst]).

False friends could be identical twins too. They just look exactly the same. In Japanese Kanji, 手紙 (tegami) means a letter, which is written by hands (手) on paper (紙). Its Chinese friend 手紙 (shou3 zhi3), unfortunately stands for toilet paper, which is paper (紙) used by hands (手) to clean… Shit, hope this won’t lead to another Sino-Japanese war.

Sometimes, the false friend drives you crazy in everyday life. If you’re buying chips in London, you get French fries, although you just want same potato crisps in New York… As George Bernard Shaw famously said, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”. Even the same language may have different meanings contextually. For Mandarin, if you ask for 土豆 (ㄊㄨˇ ㄉㄡˋ) in Taipei, peanuts will be given as they’re small beans (豆) grown in soil (土); 土豆 (tu3 dou4) in Shanghai? You should expect large beans (豆) grown in soil (土) — potatoes… Yay, potato is such a good friend no matter you’re Chinese, Briton or American.

Back to Manila, where saba in Tagalog language is actually a common cooking banana. Steamed banana is popular among Filipinos. Coincidentally, our poor protagonist only heard about 鯖の塩焼き (Saba Shioyaki or Grilled Mackerel), a seafood entrée in Japanese cuisine. So she couldn’t possibly understand how did her mackerel become banana in that strange starry night.

Fin (Hey I’m French, not a part of your fish…).

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Everyone has past and future. But not everything has a direction. Thus we can’t travel through time as we like. To refer to a point of time, we have to make use of spatial metaphor to reason it. We convince ourselves, time is on a line: up & down, left & right, front & back. And, here comes interesting cultural difference.

In English, we’re used to past on the left, future on the right. See how dates are arranged in our calendars. Because our words are written from left to right. But that’s not universal. You may heard that, Chinese language is traditionally written from top to bottom. That influenced the Chinese’s mindset of past is on top of now, and future’s lower. Sounds strange? In practical Chinese writing, previous month is referred as ‘the month above’ (上個月), and next month is ‘the month below’ (下個月). Likewise, Hebrew speakers treat time from right to left.

It’s all about how your brain builds the time-space model. There was a research by Stanford University asking people a seemingly simple question: ‘Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day will the meeting be on?‘ Monday? Friday? The sequence of dates in your mind already has the answer.

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Apparently you’re not an infant if you’re reading this. Then why should you be one? Though it sounds reasonable, learning a new language like an infant is actually not what you think.

Does an infant acquire a new language in order to pass an exam? Probably not. For them, it’s more about better communication to survive. Infants learn to speak from words they hear all around them. The statistical frequency of particular sounds affects the infant brain.

Nevertheless, simulating such influential environment for adults isn’t easy at all. Listening to BBC for 24/7 won’t help you master RP like King George, but getting sick of British politics instead. Research shows, infants fail to learn a language naturally if they’re only exposed to that language by television or radio, other than live speakers. Human interaction with social context is contributing to the learning process significantly.

Don’t be naïve. We’re grown-ups. Travel to the origin land, live in a neighbourhood, eat local dishes, and date a native speaker. You’ll be definitely learning the language much better than any infant.

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Forget its Hollywoodised epic storytelling, or breathtaking visual effects on IMAX 70mm film, Interstellar represents the popular way to admire astrophysics with built-in hardcore space science. Sometimes we treat science as a myth, because it’s not easy to explain. Wormhole, black hole, relativity… Not everyone would be interested in scientific theories for long. Maybe we just need popular science to raise awareness. Technology doesn’t equal science. Skimming Wikipedia articles on your latest iPhone won’t make you closer to cracking quantum mechanics, although it helps more or less in understanding. Comic strips may work even better, so we got xkcd.

Recently I visited ArtScience Museum for Codex Atlanticus exhibition. Simply, it’s just Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which include his drawings and writings on subjects from mathematics, engineering, botany to musical instruments. Yes, he’s the same Da Vinci who painted Mona Lisa and The Last Supper hundreds years ago. I was heavily influenced by The Two Cultures coined by C. P. Snow, and thus in the past I didn’t believe there is a good way to harmonise sciences with humanities. Now with a close look at Da Vinci’s extraordinary ideas, I realised a genius polymath could draw out any incredible thoughts precisely. How valuable this is for one to articulate those abstract concepts in his mind! Then we really should promote science this way.

When we find science is more than a sci-fi blockbuster, it may seem less attractive without superheroes, aliens, or time travel in a faraway galaxy. Then think about those anti-ageing products we applied on our faces, no matter SK-II or Estée Lauder, all about using chemicals to fight time and gravity. That’s pretty interesting science in our universe, isn’t it?

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O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

— The Sick Rose by WILLIAM BLAKE

With title borrowed from William Blake’s well-known poem, the book The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration looks so interesting as a fantastic historic visual tour through the golden age of medical illustration.

Every page in the book is a remarkable piece of art, with beautiful drawing of patient’s symptoms, although some of them still make me sick. I couldn’t help flipping around. There are even some pictures from ancient China. It is really a fascinating book for any curious boy.

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I was totally overwhelmed by the order. The overweight Caucasian gentleman in front of me followed that obediently, so he had to hold his pants with hands. We all knew they had guns.

I was running out of time there. If failed, the next 24 hours would be extremely terrible. I meant, I might need to stay overnight in Bangkok’s international airport waiting for next available flight to Chengtu. My wristwatch from Singapore told me only 20 minutes left to the scheduled take-off. I worriedly rushed to the appointed departure gate, without tying up my shoelaces properly. It was closed.

There was a thought flashing through my mind: break in and catch up. In seconds I calmed down with cold sweat and felt breezes from the central air-conditioning. I stood still and looked up to the high ceiling, to sigh and accept my wrong decision on Bangkok stopover. At the very moment I saw a giant wall clock reading 8:55, while my watch was ticking 9:55.

In the world map from my memory, Singapore, Bangkok and Chengtu should be located within the same time zone UTC+07:00 geographically. I was right about the fact, but forgot that Singapore and Chengtu officially moved an hour forward years ago for historical standardisation reasons.

This unusual one hour difference for same longitudes made me feel stupid. Nevertheless, I was not late for my flight! So I bought a copy of latest Scientific American in airport bookshop, and sat down quietly waiting for the real take-off.

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The dream, which would not end for another a few hours – probably – began to be clear in my mind, so far as I can tell it’s a dream while I’m in the dream, with a happy friends gathering scene in a house.

Friends and I entered the house and waved to my maternal grandparents, who were watching some unknown television shows when we passed by the sofa in living room. They smiled and nodded.

In bedroom we talked loudly sometimes with the door open. I actually enjoyed the talk with old friends like what we really did when we were young, despite no words in conversation could be recalled by me. Why we still look so young at the moment? Who cares, it was my dream and I had a good time. Until, a friend Bill, or Jack, started to look at watch, and I realised we might need to leave for dinner or something.

It wasn’t that simple because I suddenly remembered that both of my maternal grandparents passed away years ago in real life. I couldn’t imagine how their faces would be if going out of bedroom and passing by the sofa again. I became a little nervous and had no idea whether I should tell my fellow friends.

A feeling of terror was growing. I thought I was going to lose my mind and start cruel killing of anyone, or myself – I could feel the tense so real although I was clear it was in dream. Then I calmed down for a second and did something different subsequently.

I turned all my friends into some tiny gemstones in my palm, then jumped out of the window of bedroom. Because in this way I didn’t have to pass by the sofa in living room and face my maternal grandparents. How high was outside the window? I didn’t care…

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To get out of debt, my father ever worked hard in a project of bus destination indicators. I was quite young back then, and was totally impressed by hundreds of rigid placards with different words, all in one standard face. A question was quickly raised in my mind: what is the similar look of all words there?

It was Ming typeface, the most widely used Chinese font family since woodblock printing invented in China hundreds of years ago. As we could easily guess, it’s associated with China’s Ming Dynasty, when the font originated. It has a very close variant, called Sung (Hanyu Pinyin: song4) typeface, not really originated in Sung Dynasty, but officially named by the Great K’ang-hsi Emperor 300 years ago, for political reasons.

In typography, Ming is the standard serif font in Chinese printing industry, equal to Times New Roman for English. In today’s computers, Windows OS comes with SimSun and NSimSun for Simplified Chinese, MingLiU and PMingLiU for Traditional Chinese; Mac OS has Li Song Pro and LiSungLight for all Chinese.

Inevitably, Japan’s relevant heritage is necessary to be introduced for most Chinese cultural topics. So there are Japanese variant of Ming, with sushi flavour probably. In computer, say MS Mincho and MS PMincho in Windows OS, HiroMinPro in Mac OS.

Subsequently, I have to get Internationalisation (i18n) involved, because we have CJK characters to take care of. CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, whose written language contains Chinese characters, that is, Han-tze (Hanyu Pinyin: han4zi4) in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean (sometimes Chữ Nôm in Vietnamese is included, so collectively CJKV). This traditional East-Asian writing system usually consists of more than 40,000 individual characters. Therefore typeface development with a reasonably complete coverage of CJK library would be much more complex than any other alphabet-based language’s. I really appreciate those hard-working Chinese typography engineers and artists making it happen, with beautiful fonts to read Chinese comfortably on both papers and screens.

Recently Google partnered with Adobe released an open-source pan-CJK typface, Source Han Sans, which is available now on popular Web font service Typekit. I’m glad to see such technological advancement, despite not a fan of most sans serif Chinese fonts, such as Microsoft YaHei. And for pretty Chinese Web fonts, I think justfont and decomoji have done a great job with better collections.

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My friend Aaron and James each have a million dollars today. Although yesterday, Aaron had 100 million and James had 100 thousand only. Well, for today, will they be equally happy with the fortune? Nope. Aaron probably will feel so sad as he lost 99% of his fortune in a day. Same fortune doesn’t equal same happiness.

James invested 100 thousand dollars in a steel company. Last year he considered to put all money in an IT company instead, but in the end he decided against it. Now he learns he would earn 50% more if he switched then.

Aaron owned 100 thousand dollars shares in an IT company. Last year he switched to investing in a steel company. Now he learns it would be 50% better off if he have kept then.

Who will regret more for their investment?

Apparently Aaron will. Because he made a move while James did nothing. People are more likely to regret something-done other than something-not-done.

But, as you know, Aaron had a fortune of 100 million dollars. This investment was just a scratch on his skin, which probably would make him find it interesting.

True story or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s the change that makes difference. No change, not a chance. Happiness has a cost.

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