Information visualization has been an everyday problem in geography for many years. If you have to depict several countries on a map and scale is a critical issue, long (place) names are killing you. Think of Germany, Poland, Albania, Austria and many more. All these names have to be depicted on the map and even at the right place. If this is a problem for you - lphbet is the answer! Maybe there is not enough space for Albania, but what about lbni?!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Geographers vote for lphbet!
Information visualization has been an everyday problem in geography for many years. If you have to depict several countries on a map and scale is a critical issue, long (place) names are killing you. Think of Germany, Poland, Albania, Austria and many more. All these names have to be depicted on the map and even at the right place. If this is a problem for you - lphbet is the answer! Maybe there is not enough space for Albania, but what about lbni?!
lphbet - a broken standard?
We are a bit surprised to see some people arguing against an approval of lphbet as ISO standard. These people claim that using lphbet makes it hard to differentiate between terms such as hat and hit. This is obviously nonsense! In terms of lphbet, hat can be reduced to ht, while the term hit is not changed. Hence, both terms can be easily differentiated.
In addition, some people argue that a particular lake called Aa-See in Muenster (Germany) will be spelled See using lphbet. See however is simply the German term for lake. Okay, this might turn out to be a problem for people from Muenster - but an international standard can not be directed towards satisfying some personal needs!
Think of Microsoft's new OpenXML format (also proposed for standardization by ISO). This document format is not able to handle dates before 1900. If you are trying to solve a task such as "How many days did the Spanish War last, which started on 2nd May 1808 and ended on the 30th of October 1813?" (read more...) using the new MS Excel, you will get no result. It turns out that this is neither a problem for the German DIN nor the Swedish SIS. So why should lphbet be affected by a small city and its even smaller lake?
In addition, some people argue that a particular lake called Aa-See in Muenster (Germany) will be spelled See using lphbet. See however is simply the German term for lake. Okay, this might turn out to be a problem for people from Muenster - but an international standard can not be directed towards satisfying some personal needs!
Think of Microsoft's new OpenXML format (also proposed for standardization by ISO). This document format is not able to handle dates before 1900. If you are trying to solve a task such as "How many days did the Spanish War last, which started on 2nd May 1808 and ended on the 30th of October 1813?" (read more...) using the new MS Excel, you will get no result. It turns out that this is neither a problem for the German DIN nor the Swedish SIS. So why should lphbet be affected by a small city and its even smaller lake?
Prominent brands to not rely on the letter A.
Proof it yourself, prominent brands do not rely on the letter A. Would you trust a company that makes use of a needless and ancient symbol? Such companies probably act in the same manner, they are slow and full of redundant structures.
Think of,
Think of,
- Microsoft
- Windows
- MS Excel, Word, Powerpoint
- Red Hat
- Mozilla Foundation
- International Business Machines (IBM)
Benefits
What are the benefits of our endeavour to abolish the A from the alphabet? In the following text we are going to summarize the advantages of our approach and will hopefully convince you to support our initiative with your vote. If you want to have more in depth information about each of the following points, we suggest to read the appropriate sections in our reference document. Our team of specialists succeed to compile more than 6000 pages of material for you to read, and I can promise you it's worth the effort.
Fact 1: The World Wide Web will be much faster.
As this text, most of the data available from websites consists of text. Your browser has to load all these letters from the web servers, causing much traffic which slows down the whole internet. More than 8% of all letters are an "A" (according to the well-known and trustworthy encyclopaedia Wikipedia) . Just imagine: if we are able to have no "A"s any more, we can speed up downloading by 8%. If it takes 10 seconds to load a website, it will now only take 9 seconds. If you read through 50 websites a day, you will be able to save nearly one full minute, which you can use to perform more important things and be more productive at the end.
Fact 2: Writing will be much more efficient
Writing texts can be a cumbersome task. We believe that having one letter less does help to simplify the creation of texts significantly. Thinking about 25 instead of 26 letters allows you to be more creative and, as result, create better texts. And of course, you save lots of time due to the fact that you can safe nearly 10% (see above) of the time spent for writing words.
Fact 3: We will have much better and smaller notebooks
The main problem why we have so big laptops today is the problem of placing so many letters on the keyboard. We believe that reducing the alphabet helps to make keyboard layouting more efficient. It allows for much smaller keyboards, and therefore at the end also smaller laptops with better displays and less power consumption.
Fact 4: 25 letters are more useful than 26
Using 26 letters is antiquated and does not fit to the modern information age. 25 letters are much more convenient: 25 letter can be divided into 5 equal classes, making it much easier to divide. 5 times 5 (or 5 to the power of 2) is again 25. We are currently investigating the reduction of the alphabet to 16 letters, which makes it even more useful for the use in computers.
Criticism
We do, of course, listen to counter-arguments and discuss them in detail in our reference material. For example, one argument was that the A is actually needed for reading and understanding texts. We investigated this issues and found indeed some few words where the lack of the letter A leads to some confusion. We are currently investigating the introduction of a new letter (sorry, we can't tell you how it will be called, it's not yet patented) to avoid such ambiguities.
Fact 1: The World Wide Web will be much faster.
As this text, most of the data available from websites consists of text. Your browser has to load all these letters from the web servers, causing much traffic which slows down the whole internet. More than 8% of all letters are an "A" (according to the well-known and trustworthy encyclopaedia Wikipedia) . Just imagine: if we are able to have no "A"s any more, we can speed up downloading by 8%. If it takes 10 seconds to load a website, it will now only take 9 seconds. If you read through 50 websites a day, you will be able to save nearly one full minute, which you can use to perform more important things and be more productive at the end.
Fact 2: Writing will be much more efficient
Writing texts can be a cumbersome task. We believe that having one letter less does help to simplify the creation of texts significantly. Thinking about 25 instead of 26 letters allows you to be more creative and, as result, create better texts. And of course, you save lots of time due to the fact that you can safe nearly 10% (see above) of the time spent for writing words.
Fact 3: We will have much better and smaller notebooks
The main problem why we have so big laptops today is the problem of placing so many letters on the keyboard. We believe that reducing the alphabet helps to make keyboard layouting more efficient. It allows for much smaller keyboards, and therefore at the end also smaller laptops with better displays and less power consumption.
Fact 4: 25 letters are more useful than 26
Using 26 letters is antiquated and does not fit to the modern information age. 25 letters are much more convenient: 25 letter can be divided into 5 equal classes, making it much easier to divide. 5 times 5 (or 5 to the power of 2) is again 25. We are currently investigating the reduction of the alphabet to 16 letters, which makes it even more useful for the use in computers.
Criticism
We do, of course, listen to counter-arguments and discuss them in detail in our reference material. For example, one argument was that the A is actually needed for reading and understanding texts. We investigated this issues and found indeed some few words where the lack of the letter A leads to some confusion. We are currently investigating the introduction of a new letter (sorry, we can't tell you how it will be called, it's not yet patented) to avoid such ambiguities.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
What is lphbet 2.0?
We propose to abolish the letter A in the latin alphabet. We suggest to rename the alphabet to lphbet (spoken: elphebet) to reflect this change. Our team of established and well-known specialists has performed in-depth research and came to the conclusion that the letter A is in fact not needed for communication. The results of the research, a more detailed explanation of the changes, and the expected benefits are compiled in the reference document. We managed to write more than 6000 pages of detailed, well-written and sound information about our proposal. A few of the benefits are also posted here.
We propose to accept the new lphbet as new ISO standard. We sincerely believe in the ISO standardisation process and standards in general, and hope that we, with the help of the local standardisation gremiums, can push forward our proposal in a fair and decent process.
[to be extended]
We propose to accept the new lphbet as new ISO standard. We sincerely believe in the ISO standardisation process and standards in general, and hope that we, with the help of the local standardisation gremiums, can push forward our proposal in a fair and decent process.
[to be extended]
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