information that breaks the confines of categories!
The Call for Submissions for the Unicode Technology Workshop 2026 is now open:
https://www.unicode.org/events/utw/2026/sessions
The deadline to submit is June 1, which is less than a month away. Please submit, and share this with other interested people!
Unicode’s 2025 edition of the Unicode Technology Workshop went well in November. Bigger, better, and we added tutorials to UTW for the first time (like we used to have with the Unicode Conference). Organizing was a smoother ride, although not without some hitches, most notable was Mark Davis having to miss out at the last minute. Everything was a team effort. Including the tutorial for ICU that I did, with Markus’ help, by picking up the virtual baton from Steven L and Craig and Shane:
I’m hoping to have time to make this even better for UTW 2026, and hey, that’ll be in Nancy, France this year. Hope to see you there!
Also a year ago, soon after my interview with Hilary, I joined Steven Loomis and Bridget Chase to talk with Eddie Arrieta, editor of the MultiLingual magazine, for an interview about Unicode, the volunteers behind the organization. Check it out!
Check out my interview with Hilary about the basics of Unicode, the Unicode Consortium, internationalization, and all the things that enable the things you use every day to be translated / localized and work seamlessly in multiple languages:
https://hilaryan.substack.com/p/drumroll-interview-with-elango-cheran
Here’s what she wrote in her post:
For the non-techies: “a rollback” or “rolling back” is undoing an addition to the codebase that you made. Engineers know how to easily do that because it requires engineering tooling that they use on a daily basis. Managers? That’s not in their skillset.
A year ago, I talked to the UMd students who are a part of the on-campus student-run startup incubator, Startup Shell. It was nice to be invited. I had to check with the organizers that what I had to say would be useful because, um… my solo startup wasn’t “lucratively successful”… okay, so no revenue at all. (The first feedback that I got from someone was really positive, but it was a month after I completely stopped…) The organizers said the topic was good, and the reception I got from the students was pretty positive.
I have been a believer in the magical properties of wool for more than a decade, after finally being observant enough to see what my friend had told me 3 years prior to that. But in the past year, I watched a bunch of Youtube videos about harvesting seaweed/algae to make biodegradable plastics. One video mentioned footwear, and based on what they showed, I went out and ordered my biodegradable shoes from what seems like the only truly biodegradable footwear company, Blueview. They came in about 3 weeks ago, and so far, so good! Here’s what makes me excited about the future, and why I’m happy to ditch wool shoes.
My teammate Craig got me to watch the interview with Lily Gladstone back in November, which was really interesting. I think she is Blackfoot, and you learn about the Blackfoot Nation in addition to hearing about her and her journey.
Even though she ended up not winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2024 that she was nominated for, the ideas that she brought up about Blackfoot society was interesting. A lot of people might hear about the Hierarchy of Needs, a framework by Abraham Maslow, an American, to describe the needs of an individual, from the most basic level of survival to the highest level of being a “self-actualized” person.
What I didn’t know was that Maslow got his ideas after spending time with Blackfoot members, observing their culture. And as the research paper that Lily Gladstone mentions, Blackfoot society is fascinating and quite different. Where Maslow’s hierarchy ends, Blackfoot society’s “hierarchy” begins. Kids in Blackfoot culture already start off “self-actualized”, with the level of autonomy and respect they are given. And instead of the individual, Blackfoot culture’s highest level of attainment is when it can ensure its own survival into the future.
See:
That article discusses interesting topics of self-actualization vs. community actualization, community perpetuity, and examining the construct of a hierarchy (or pyramid) vs. a circle of interconnectedness.
Shane and I were busy this past summer May – August co-hosting our interns Andrew and Pedro, who worked hard on implementing more calendar systems in ICU4X. In the icu::calendar crate, they added the modules chinese, dangi (Korean), hebrew, islamic (includes civil, observational, tabular, and Umm-al-Qura), persian, and roc (Taiwan). The summer required us all learning a lot about calendar systems, and how dates and times are just smaller units of the larger calendar systems. Humans created those calendar systems to precisely calculate the mathematically messy phenomena we use to orient our lives: the spin of the Earth, the orbit of the moon, and the orbit of Earth. It turns out there is one book that authoritatively catalogs all human calendar systems. The following are short videos giving an introduction to what makes calendars interesting, and a properly working version of the code for the Calendrical Calculations book.
The Face/Interface 2023 event was interesting. I wasn’t there for the first iteration in 2017, but I still felt entertained to spend this second iteration with internationalization people I know & got to meet. It felt like 90% of the event was about fonts and typography, and only the remaining 10% was for keyboards/input methods, but nonetheless, I got to learn quite a few things about the field. More importantly, it was a chance to meet people in a related discipline who also care about better supporting languages/scripts/people around the world who need it the most, even though it requires volunteer effort in their free time to achieve. Making connections with people was one of the best things I have taken away from the event, including people to collaborate with on interesting followup work that can help even more people.
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 