Coin, Coincidence, Connection, Computer Science

[André Schappo]

A few weeks ago I was on a bus going to Leicester. A couple of minutes into the journey, a guy (Brian, if I remember correctly) sat near me gave me a coin which he had found on the floor of the bus. He thought it was a Chinese coin.

I recognised it as a Japanese coin. The date on the coin was according to the Japanese Imperial calendar and not the common Gregorian calendar. I had previously encountered the Imperial calendar as I have written code to display a date in Japanese Imperial calendar format.

So, I got my mobile out, connected to the internet and looked up the details of Japanese era names and did some currency conversion.

I spent the rest of the bus journey explaining to Brian the meanings of the Japanese writing on the coin. Here is a summary of my impromptu lecture😀

五円 = 5 yen = approx 3.7 English pence

日本国 = Japan

昭和六十二年 = date according to the Japanese Imperial calendar. The date is the 62nd year (六十二年) of the Shōwa (昭和) Era. This is 1987 in the Gregorian (English) calendar. The current era name is Heisei 平成. A new Era name is required as the current emperor, Akihito, will abdicate on 30 April. A new era name has not yet been made public which will leave little time to inform computer systems of the new era name.

...end of story...

There are a number of relevant points I would like to make:

① If my specialism was not Computer Science Internationalisation then most probably I would have known nothing/little about the Japanese culture. If I had known nothing about the Japanese culture then the conversation would have been very short.

② The probability of Brian meeting anyone on the bus who could give him such an informed explanation would be very low.

③ I frequently tell my students such stories and I will be telling this one to a group of students tomorrow. I consider such stories enrich Computer Science. I have many such stories😀

④ I will also show and explain to the students my Japanese Imperial calendar display code which is online at  jsfiddle.net/coas/zvubxato The third date is displayed in Japanese Imperial calendar format.

André Schappo

[Valerie Clifford]

Great story André! My only claim to versatility is that I discovered all the different language keyboards on the computer and can now type my Spanish homework correctly!

Valerie

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Associate Professor Valerie Clifford

Affiliate Oxford Brookes University

Visiting Fellow, Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/cci/

[André Schappo]

On my Mac OSX computer I mostly use the "ABC - Extended" keyboard for typing Latin Script languages. The reason being that this keyboard supports typing of thousands of combinations of letter and diacritic(s).

Here is a very small sample of some of the combinations:

ẽỹũñ

ŵên̂m̂

ṙḟċṁ

üäḧẍ

ẘẙůo̊

ỷỏỉả

ȩşḩz̧

āáǎà (pinyin tones)

ȧ̦ä̧ą̊ã̦

André Schappo