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Tomorrow at Five on 12 News: How to raise a child, and not a BRAT.

I hope this means they're going to run an infomercial.

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This article on history of character codes describes the system invented by Baudot to replace Morse code. His system was a manually-entered five-bit encoding system; operators would sit at a five-key keyboard and type in chords to send letters. Since five bits gives room for 32 symbols, and that's not enough for both letters and numbers, there was a "figures" and "letters" key which allowed one to shift between two sets of codes. Sounds confusing? The article explains:

It's not much worse than having to remember to press the SHIFT key on your computer keyboard to get the % character above the 5 key. The alternative was using a sixth finger, which was probably deemed to be even more cumbersome.

Of course, it's not so hard to learn to type in Braille, which uses six "bits" which are typed in chords. But, I suppose Braille might have only been recently invented in Baudot's time.

Inspired Googlewhack.

On Usenet, I mentioned what a surprise it would be if Esperantists turned out to be total assholes, since they're absolutely the most civil people you've ever met in a chat room. This inspired a Googlewhack attempt by my friend Zixia. "Esperanto assholes" came up blank, but "esperantist arseholes" led to an article about insults in Lojban.

The article sprinkled heavily with references to malglico, a perjorative translated most often as "damned English" or "fucking English", and the word I see as primary evidence of rampant assholedom in Lojbanistan, both in its preferred translation, as well as its popularity within the Lojban community.

See my earlier comparison of Lojban vs Esperanto culture.