Month: September 2021

271’2021 (2021-09-28) – Tuesday

Posted on by What did you learn in School today ?

Today, I learned about:

In my earlier post of 212’2021 (2021-07-31), I talked about how fantastic it was to enjoy the Olympic Summer Games from Tokyo, but also showed an example of an anachronic feature, the use of security pins to secure the number tags of the participants, something that really should be improved in Paris in 2024.

Another thing that really needs to be improved is how the organisers treat the names of the participants. It seems that we are still in the stone ages of information technology, when all texts had to adhere to the 128-character ASCII set, with no non-US characters allowed. Fortunately, that has been improved through the UTF-8 and UTF-16 character sets, so why should IOC still behave as it was the 1970’s? Can we hope that the four athletes below, and their colleagues, may have their names written in the correct way in 2024?

Four prominent athletes who participated in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and had their names spelled in the conservative IOC fashion. In the upper row, from left to right, are Sarah Sjöström, Sweden, the queen of world swimming, but due to an elbow injury earlier this year only managed to squeeze one silver medal in these games; Novak Đoković, Serbia, currently outstanding in world tennis, but who had to settle without any medal this time. In the lower row, from left to right, are Batuhan Çiftçi, Turkey, a boxer that did not do very well this time; Gabriela Braga Guimarães, Brazil, member of the Brazilian female volleyball team which took the silver medal in Tokyo.

More about current text coding can be found in reference # 1 below.

That’s what I learned in school today!

Ref.:

1: UTF-8

*: What did you learn in school today ?