(no subject)

People talk about idle Wikipedia browsing as giving you knowledge that goes in through one eyeball and out the other; and maybe that's true in the longer run, but it's not true to say everything gets forgotten instantly: I was able to get the answer to two questions in today's Quote Unquote through information picked up off Wikipedia in the last month or two.

Speaking of Radio 4 quizzes, does anyone else think Paul Merton ought to be handicapped on Just A Minute, to stop him winning it all the time?

Meanwhile, on another front, fed up of being unable to enter Arabic, I adapted my Hebrew entry gizmo for use also entering Arabic. It's very impressive the way the system (for Firefox on either Windows or Linux values of "system") automatically handles the different forms of each letter (try typing "eee" or "ooo" to see what I mean); but it does make me wonder how anyone ever managed to implement Arabic language entry on computers back in the eighties, when machines weren't so powerful and did not have room for large character sets or CPU speed for having to stop and figure out what to do with every keystroke. Perhaps they simply didn't.