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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Imagine that you’re locked in a room. You don’t know any Chinese, but you have a huge instruction book written in English that tells you exactly how to respond to Chinese writing. Someone outside the room slides you a piece of paper with Chinese writing on it. You can’t understand it, but you can look up the characters in your book and follow the instructions to write a response.

    You slide your response back out to the person waiting outside. From their perspective, it seems like you understand Chinese because you’re providing accurate responses, but actually, you don’t understand a word. You’re just following instructions in the book.








  • The term ‘Handy’ for mobile phones started to become common around 1992. There are various different theories about the origin of the term but none of them has been conclusively proven.

    1. In WW2 Motorola produced a Handie-Talkie (SCR-536) that could actually be hold in your hand (the famous Walkie-Talkie was strapped to your back). There have been plenty of successors with the same name but researchers doubt that this was really that widely known at the beginning of the 90s. Yet, one of the first GSM phones by Loewe was subsequently named HandyTel 100.

    2. German-speaking CB radio circles used the term already before 1992 for hand-held transceivers. There are actually magazines and other things from as early as 1986 where the term is used.

    It must have spilled over from these circles to maybe a marketing department (Telekom claims it was theirs, without prove though) to public consciousness.