112: Life in Exclusion Zones & Every Single Character

Welcome and corrections

0:00All of us are wearing headphones. All of us are recording. As we always say, all that's left to do is play that theme song. Ella, one of these days, I'm just going to let that be the opening.

0:30Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn about anything and everything interesting. Today, we are going to be doing a science topic and a miscellaneous topic. I'm going to do neither because my name is Caroline and I'm the student this time round. Thank you for joining our class, Caroline. We appreciate it. This is a two-person, two-teacher sort of like... A two-to-one ratio, yeah. What kind of problematic child was I?

1:00We have a two-to-one student-faculty ratio here.

1:04My name is Ella, and I'll be doing today's science topic, which is exclusion zones. Oh, fuck yeah, baby. Hell yeah. Wait, no, I don't know what that is. I have no clue what that means. Oh, great. But that's why I said fuck yeah. First of all, it's a banger of a word. Oh, it rings a bell. You'll know. You'll know some of them when we talk about the definition stuff, but where we go with it is the fun part.

1:33My name's Tom, and today's miscellaneous topic is titled Every Single Character. What happens when you try to put every written character down into code with Unicode? And what can we learn from that endeavor? It's Unicode. Unicode. Okay, this is definitely on the tech side. It's tech and text, and it made my, it's the perfect intersection that made my nerd brain so fucking happy. There's some rabbit holes, so much I cut to make it a reasonable size.

2:04Yeah, amazing, amazing. Very quick corrections corner for my topic on horsepower, and thank you to BDSL for this correction. I said that the meter was redefined in 2019. It was actually redefined in 1983. But to my credit, 2019, they did redefine the kilogram. So I was only slightly wrong with my example that how recently we're still defining this stuff. That should now be corrected in the episode. I caught it pretty quick, actually. Nice. Update corner from me, because we missed the

2:35last episode due to my having a house fire, which is serious. We're laughing through the pain. Which is why we're laughing. Yeah, so house fire, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, everything's fine. We're all fine. The cats are fine, as Tom and Caroline told you two weeks ago. But I just wanted to say that we've literally just had to move really fast into a new place. And we've done that. But thank you so much for all of the well wishes on Discord and on Instagram. I really

3:06appreciated it. But everything is okay. And we're pulling our lives back together.

What are exclusion zones

3:11Aww. So, today's science topic is exclusion zones. Okay, do you guys know what an exclusion zone is? It sounds like you maybe don't. I am going to confidently say no. Ah. You will know when we say what one is. I think it'll become clear. But I'll ask anyway. Is it a space thing? Like outer space? That makes me want to say no, the way you phrased it. Is it an ocean thing? Yeah, I was going to say it's an ocean thing.

3:41I think you can get ocean exclusion zones normally from- What does that mean? What do you- what do you- what? Actually, can you not define it and then save it for the very end and just leave it like it's like a creepypasta? We do need to define it in order to talk about them, unfortunately. So, exclusion zones are geographical areas where certain things are prohibited. So, it might be like farming or residing there or just passing through. Can I be honest, Ella? Definition made it creepier. What do you mean? Things aren't

4:13supposed to be there. Yeah, you're not- things are prohibited there. And they fall under a handful of categories. Oh, can I- can I guess a one? I can imagine. Yeah, yeah. Why do you think an exclusion zone would exist? Maybe a Chernobyl happened. Oh, yeah. So, nuclear disaster exclusion zones exist. So, for example, in 2011, the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan lost power following a tsunami. And that meant the cooling systems failed and the reactors overheated. And that caused radioactive contaminants to be released

4:47into the surrounding area via air and water. So, and after the disaster, there was an initial 20-kilometer radius evacuation order of everyone around the plant. And this extended to 30 kilometers at some point, although I believe many people have returned to the kind of further out parts now. So, that's an exclusion zone. And they don't call it an exclusion zone, though. They separate into three different categories. Difficult to return area, areas preparing to have evacuation orders lifted, and habitation restriction area. I'm sure this sounds better in Japanese.

5:21Sure. But around 2.2% of Fukushima's prefecture is, for all intents and purposes, an exclusion zone. You cannot live there. You cannot farm there. You can pass through under kind of strict military presence. Yeah. Can you think of any other reasons why there would be an exclusion zone? If it's things that, like, my brain does go to, like, conservation and things like that, areas where you don't want to be doing drilling, farming. So, conservation areas don't tend to fall under exclusion zones. I thought they possibly wouldn't. Yeah.

5:52Yeah. So, exclusion zones are normally places that were once people lived there, but they had to be evacuated for some reason or other. I mean, so could that be in response to, like, places that have a high frequency of natural disasters? Like... Yep. Natural disaster exclusion zones exist. Yes. So, there's a place called Montserrat, which is a British overseas territory in the Caribbean, where a volcano erupted in 1995. And it continues to this day. Oh, my gosh. The volcano partially buried, the capital city of Plymouth, and a large chunk of the

6:26south part of the island is now an exclusion zone because of that. Any others? Any others? There are a few different types. The only other two types I have down here is a safety ordinance zone, which is kind of just like, it just means it's not safe there anymore. One of these is called Zone Rouge. Wow. It's just not safe. Yeah. This will become clearer. So, Zone Rouge is an area, it was initially 1,200 square kilometers of non-contiguous land in northern France, which was deemed to be physically too damaged by conflict in World War I for human habitation, basically.

7:02Holy shit. What? That's crazy. So, some of the soil is really heavily contaminated with, like, lead, mercury, chlorine, and arsenic from chemical warfare. Oh, my God. And there has been some cleanup and rehabitation, but much of it is still uninhabited to this day. Whoa. I can't help but think of this from every sci-fi writer furiously scribbling down notes being like, oh, we made up a space on our planet uninhabitable because of war. It's just, like, crazy. It's woof.

7:34Can I tell you my favorite part about this so far, Ella, is that so far, everything you've said is the, like, one-minute TikTok I watch that explains what exclusion zones are. And I go, oh, that's interesting. But we've only just started this topic. And so I'm very fascinated where this will go, especially the science of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also making me think of, Tom, you said sci-fi. And then my brain has gone to Annihilation, the book series, which is all based around exclusion zones. Great series. So I'll just say one more type of exclusion zone.

8:05The largest, probably the largest category is border zones. And so essentially buffers on either side of a border between two countries. You're talking about, like, the demarcation line between North Korea and South Korea? Yes, exactly that. The DMZ, yeah. They tend to be between countries that have had conflict because there's no reason to have that large of a buffer otherwise. So the Finnish-Russian border, for example, has an exclusion zone extending up to three kilometers on the Finnish side and 7.5 kilometers on the Russian side.

8:37God, fascinating. So no one lives in those areas. So the reason I'm telling you all of this is I want to explore what happens within exclusion zones after they are essentially given back to nature. I got up and did a little dance because I was not expecting that. Are you kidding me? That's fascinating. Yeah. What happens when we exclude ourselves from nature?

Chernobyl wildlife and evolution

9:02Oh. And we're going to start with one that I think a lot of listeners, and probably you guys too, will be familiar with. And that's Chernobyl. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

9:12We've talked about a few of these on the podcast before, haven't we? Briefly. Yeah, very briefly. Was it the fungi or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I've talked about the fungi, and the fungi will come into play a little bit here, but I'm talking mostly about animals, although I will talk a bit about other stuff. So I'm going to give a bit of background on Chernobyl for people who are not familiar with it. Oh, it's good to know. Yeah. On the 26th of April, 1984, the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine had a sudden power surge, which caused a massive steam explosion, and it ultimately destroyed

9:48the core and the reactor building around it, and it released, like, just huge amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. This included over 100 radioactive elements, but in particular, iodine, strontium, and cesium were the most dangerous. I did not know that, and that detail rattles me. Yeah. That's a fascinating detail that included over 100 radioactive elements. Yeah, and I learn a lot about this through watching the HBO series Chernobyl, and then

10:19actually researching it afterwards. I would highly recommend that series, because it's very interesting. But anyway, so almost immediately after the incident, the entire town of Pripyat, which was three kilometers away, was evacuated. And over the following months, around 200,000 to 300,000 people from around the plant were relocated, and this was a 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the plant that was put into place. It's 2,600 kilometers squared, which is about the size of Moscow or the greater Paris metropolitan

10:53area. It's also called the Zone of Alienation, which unfortunately makes it sound really cool. Yeah. I know. Yeah. You gotta name it something like the Zone of Doing Taxes so that people aren't interested. The Zone of Pee-Pee-Poo-Poo.

11:11No, unfortunately, some people. So between 1986 and 1989, hundreds of thousands of liquidators were brought in from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to help clean the area. So liquidators' duties were really varied, and a lot of the work was at the plant itself. But when it comes to the surrounding area, they did things like remove heavily contaminated topsoil from inhabited areas, and they buried it in shallow trenches. They also plowed soil in agricultural areas to bury the contaminated soil under a thin layer.

11:47It's the kind of work that just sounds so... Right? Because this is such a cataclysmic event that you just mostly think of the events, and it's so hard to imagine, the slow process of making it better. It's crazy. Well, actually, it was really quick. They did this over a couple of years. Okay. And it's because they had such huge manpower. It was part of the Soviet Union at the time, and so they could call on people a lot easier. Yeah, yeah. They also installed a pretty extensive underground system of hydraulic barriers and drainage wells,

12:17which is basically to stop radioactive isotopes in the groundwater from leeching out of the exclusion zone, which was really important. It was actually considered a pretty successful operation in preventing the spread of radioactive material. I feel like that never gets talked, or doesn't get talked about nearly as much. That's interesting, yeah. But it means that the area itself is still very radioactive, and the exclusion zone stands today, and it's considered very dangerous still. In particular, the isotope strontium-90, which is thought to cause leukaemia, and caesium-137,

12:54which can cause damage to the liver and spleen, are still quite high in the area. So no one is allowed to live there, but interestingly, there are around 100 to 200 people who have returned to illegally live in the exclusion zone. Oh, wow. They're mostly elderly people who live there prior to the accident. Children are absolutely not allowed to live there because of the risk of leukaemia. So if they find out that any children are living there, they take them out, but... They kill them? They kill them. That seems excessive.

13:25So then, what remains, or what has come back? Get the fuck out of town. So the United Nations Development Programme calls the Zone of Alienation the biggest rewilding experiment in Europe. Oh, that's another way to look at it, huh? I had seen a lot of social media and headlines about this before, about how animals had reclaimed

13:56this land. Many listeners may also be familiar with this idea. You get pretty big articles and headlines being like, wow, look how great it is that these animals have returned to the land. We should blow this up more often. And yes, it is absolutely true that mammals in particular, populations have increased in the exclusion zone. So deer, elk, roe, bison, beaver, otters, badgers, wild boars, all those populations have increased.

14:30The large, like bison surprises me because I feel like the larger you are, the more likely you are for this radioactive stuff to accrue in your body. Well, this is one of the interesting things that they seem to be, if not unaffected, their lifespans are not long enough potentially for radiation to be a problem or as much as a problem. Wolf populations are seven times higher than they were in the 1980s. And brown bears, which have not been in the area for a hundred years, have been spotted

15:01on trail cameras since 2014. Wow. And we all, we all listeners, I'm part of you. We all have to mentally turn off the like glowing green filter we've put on all these animals. They're just animals. Radio, radioactivity is unfortunately, and part of what makes it so scary is how invisible it is. And so it is, they are just there. I'll say the animals do seem to be doing fine. The, the large mammals don't seem to have any issues with having birth defects or long-term health issues.

15:32It's quite an interesting thing. My favorite though, of all the Chernobyl mammals was actually pointed out to us by a listener. Ooh. So. Yay. I love our listeners. Back in January, I was very sneaky. We got an email from a listener called Kennedy, which I saw. Don't tell me you fucking deleted it. I emailed it to myself and then deleted it from our inbox. Oh my God. Oh my God. Wow. Sorry, Elizabeth, this has never been. I have, I have never, I've never done it before and I've never done it since, but because

16:06I immediately was like, I love that and I want to talk about it. Wow. I made it from you guys. Fucking hilarious. That's so fucking funny. So Kennedy is a middle school teacher. Oh, amazing. One of her kids told her about the last truly wild horse, which Kennedy then told us about. Yeah. Yeah. I take it. Yeah. I'd be, if this happened while you motherfuckers were asleep, I was 4am in the UK. This is, it's called Schewalski's horse.

16:38Have you heard of this before? Oh God, sorry. The names just keep getting better. Fuck me. No, I haven't heard of this. It's spelled with a P-R-Z at the start. So sometimes, per Schewalski. For simplicity's sake, I'm just going to say Schewalski. And they're lovely. They look somewhere like between a domesticated horse and a donkey. They're quite like stocky. Can I Google it? Yeah, sure. They're quite stocky, stubby manes. They're a lovely tan color. That's a spot on description. I think they're very sweet. Yeah.

17:08They once lived very widely on the steppes of Asia and are called tacky or holy in Mongolia, but were quote unquote, formally described in 1881 by Russian Colonel Nikolai Schewalski. People knew about them before this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So today, there are free roaming horses all over the world, like the American Mustang and the Australian Brumby, but they are technically feral because they are descended from domesticated horses.

17:40Yeah. Okay. So I have heard this fact that technically there are no wild horses because they've all been domesticated. And the wild ones are feral as opposed to wild. Yeah, in the same way, pigeons are, you know, from domesticated pigeons. Although horses go back slightly further, but not that much further. Schewalski's horse is genetically distinct from feral horses. They have 33 chromosome pairs instead of 32, like horses do. So there's a very clear distinction there.

18:11There's other aspects as well. And there has been some debate if Schewalski's horse is actually a feral descendant from horses of the 5,000-year-old Bataille culture from Central Asia. But you guys probably don't care about this distinction as much, but I have to say it because someone will. Generally, I've seen two arguments against this. One is that the Bataille horses and Schewalski's horse may have descended from the same wild horse anyway. And two, even if the Schewalski's horse was briefly managed by humans,

18:41and it would have been quite a brief period, it has only done it briefly and then continued to undergo natural selection for millennia since then. So anyway, you have what people describe as the last truly wild horse. And it's at the very least the most wild horse, if not... Yeah, exactly. It's been existing in Central Asia and well-known in Mongolia for centuries. But in the late 19th century, it was already quite rare. Then Nikolai Schewalski brings it to the attention of the Western world,

19:13and everybody loves it. Oh, okay. Look, they say, and a wild horse, an actually wild horse. So there is this kind of aggressive rush by European elites to acquire them as living trophies, essentially. For goodness sake, why are we like this? I know. So expeditions are sent out to capture horses for private exotic animal collections. But the adults are too big and too fast to capture.

19:43I'm so glad. And too beautiful and too wonderful to be captured. So they are hunted and killed, and the foals are taken into captivity. Oh my God! So yeah, they take the babies instead. At the same time, where the horse is living, Russia and China are extending their borders into the Eurasian steppes, and they're bringing intensive agriculture with them and hunting, and they're forcing the horses out of the area, if not outright, just killing them. By 1969, Schiavalski's horse is extinct in the wild.

20:17Wow. Conservation efforts were able to increase their numbers in captivity, and some were reintroduced to Mongolia and Kazakhstan and China around the 1990s, so not that long ago. Yeah. One of the issues here, though, is that the existing horses today, all of them, descend from only 12 to 14 individuals. Oh, man. It creates this extreme genetic bottleneck, where you're getting lots of inbreeding and potentially dangerous mutations. So then a cloning program has been started in the United States of these horses, yeah.

20:53Sorry, I want you ever listeners to know the mic could pick up Caroline leaning forward in their chair.

21:00That was not fully afterwards. This is really recent. In 2023, two clones of a horse that was alive in the 1980s, but had not been part of the breeding programs, were born. So in 2023. And please tell me this isn't Colossus doing this. I was about to ask the exact same question. It's San Diego Zoo and a few other places. Okay. They're called Curt and Ollie. Nice. And they're very cute. Okay. They're being raised by a different type of horse. Fascinating. Brilliant.

21:31So yeah, the hope is that they'll bring more genetic diversity, because their genes are not part of that 12 to 14 original population. Right, yeah, okay. Ella, I just want to say what a great, well-written horse story you took us on. And I feel like my heart, man. I went from like, I don't know what that is, to being like, that they successfully cloned them and others too, and their name was Harley. In the span of a few minutes. It's too early to say if this is going to work. I don't believe they've been released to the wild yet. They will be eventually.

22:01But whatever the outcome, today there are only around 2,000 Schiavalski's horses in the wild. And the reason I'm telling you this story is that 10% of them live in the exclusion zone in Chernobyl. What the actual fuck? More Schiavalski's horses than old people that have moved back into the houses in the exclusion zone. I love that. Yeah, that's a real interesting population survey. Yeah. All it took for these horses to be safe from humans was a nuclear disaster.

22:31Yay! Yeah. Oh, yay. Okay. So interesting. Any researcher I've seen talk about the fact that mammal populations are increasing in this area has been pretty unambiguous as to why this has happened. The absence of human disturbance and the removal of the pressure of our towns and our roads and our farmland and our hunting has allowed these animals to flourish, and seemingly with very little change to them. Right. God, roads fuck up animals so much. It really, I always forget how much the infrastructure and stuff like that is also a thing.

23:05Yeah. And I've heard a lot about this even before I had researched this topic, and whenever I'd heard about the Chernobyl exclusion zone, this is what I'd gotten out of it, you know, humans' presence, bad. Yeah, humans' bad. In particular, how well mammals are doing. But there is more to this story than the charismatic megafauna. Ooh, love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I've reached the nuance center of my nuance pop.

23:34Like the frogs, for example, Caroline. Because the frogs are more likely to be more negatively impacted, aren't they, from all of the radiation. I think it's that they are just genetically predisposed to being more negatively impacted by stuff like radiation. Of course you know this. I might be pulling that out of my ass. You're not wrong that they are more likely to respond differently to radiation and faster. So there's this evolutionary biologist called Pablo Buraco, and him and his team have been visiting the exclusion area and the area around it and sampling tree frogs for decades.

24:14I want that to be my job. Oh. Now I have a picture to show you.

24:21I'll buy my own hazmat suit, please. Yeah, please, please, please, please. I have a picture to show you of some of the frogs they've sampled. They're going to be so fucked up. Oh, no. Oh, no. The picture I'm about to send is of two eastern San Antonio frogs. One is from the exclusion zone, and one is from outside of the exclusion zone, but still in Ukraine. And listeners, oh, my God.

24:49Listeners, I want to, because I have some images in my topic, I want to experiment with something. If you go to let'slearneverything.com slash 112, which is the episode number, you should be able to see these images ordered a little nicer. Because I know I had some comments that, like, the show notes don't always work for everyone. Right. And they should be within spoiler tags, so you can see just the ones that you've read. That's nice. That's great. Great idea, Tom. It should be able to be doing it. This is fascinating. Caroline, you want to give it a go? Two frogs side by side.

25:20And what I was expecting was to get, like, one frog covered in, like, tumours and growths and stuff like that. Three heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the difference is so simple. One of them is, like, a dark brown colour. Almost pitch black. Almost pitch black. One is bright green. One is the classic colour that you would expect from a tree frog there. Yes, you're right. The darker one is the one from inside the exclusion zone. It looks like you took the two same frogs and you just dropped one down, like, a chimney.

25:53Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Bureko found that frogs from the contaminated areas are around 40% darker, on average, than those outside. This is a much more extreme example. Yeah, okay, okay. But there's a gradient. And I have in my script, and I'll ask it and see if you remember. Can you guess why this is? It also applies to the fungus that is found in Reactor 4 of the plant itself that we talked about when I talked about extremophiles. The pigment? Is there a pigment? Mm-hmm. Oh. A melanin.

26:24It's melanin. Yeah. They just have very high levels of melanin in their body. Yeah. The classic bio thing to make things darker. The researchers hypothesize that the melanin is protecting them from radiation. Right. Because melanin can absorb and scatter high-energy particles and neutralize reactive oxygen species, which are the things that, like, damage DNA, that are generated by ionizing radiation in cells. So it really is a similar thing to the fungus. Yeah. With the fungus, the radiotrophic fungus, the hypothesis there is that they're using that to convert it into energy.

26:58Right, yeah. So the melanin is slightly different. This is, the hypothesis here is that it's protecting them from the radiation. In the same way, darker skin color is more protected from UV radiation in humans. So yeah, that's frogs. But another thing to highlight here is trees. During the very early days after the disaster, radiation killed most of the pine trees within a seven-kilometer radiation reactor because pine trees- Jesus fucking Christ. Sorry. They're really sensitive to ionizing radiation.

27:31Huh. But birch trees, which are much more hardy against radiation, have basically taken over this area. This is so, this is the kind of shit that's like you're playing, like, a video game and you're, like, the sim god and you just select all one type of tree and you just go, foof. Yeah. God, that's fascinating. Yeah, I bring these up because they are, I think, really interesting examples of the potential selective pressures of radiation. Yeah, yeah. Rather than it being, like, a simple repopulation after humans leave, you know?

28:05It's not just that the humans have gone. The selective pressures of radiation. Jesus Christ. Wow. This is just all such, this is all, these are all sci-fi one-liners that an author would kill to come up with. Yeah. Ugh. There is ongoing debate still whether or not there are evolutionary adaptations to cope with radiation emerging in life there, including in some of the mammals, but it's still not clear. Radiation, you know, it sticks around for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Evolutionary adaptations take a long time to emerge, so it's ongoing.

28:39And not all life in the exclusion zone has coped well or even bounced back after radiation either. Some bird species seem to have been hit particularly hard. For example, barn swallows have shown severe physical abnormalities and only around a 28% survival rate in the area. And interestingly, one study found that certain types of birds were hit harder than others. So this is really interesting. Most birds with vibrant plumage get their bright red, orange, and yellow colours from carotenoids.

29:13Carotenoids. Yeah, because Caroline has talked about these before. They're the pigment made by plants and algae and bacteria that give them their colour. Is it like because they're eating stuff from the polluted ground? Actually, so it's a bit different here. So basically birds eat like plants, fruit, or bugs that contain carotenoids and they get that colour. But carotenoids are also antioxidants like melanin. And they protect your cells against damage from radiation from reactive oxygen species.

29:46So I think I've mentioned this stuff before, but I'd like to explain it. Yes, please. It's great. So there are these unstable molecules called free radicals. And they steal electrons from other molecules in your cells and cause damage to DNA and the cell membrane. And whatever they can slurp electrons from, antioxidants neutralise free radicals by donating an electron. Radiation causes free radicals to appear. It's chemistry. It's cellular chemistry. There's loads of things that can cause free radicals.

30:17It's like as simple as like your diet and like inflammation to more like extreme circumstances like radiation. Things like smoking can. And radiation like turns that up to... Yeah, you'll get more... Anyway, antioxidants neutralise free radicals by donating this electron. So they're no longer taking electrons out of your cells and damaging everything in your cells. Right, yeah. Carotenoids protect against free radicals because they're an antioxidant. Nice, yeah. So the more colourful birds seem to survive better?

30:48Yeah. No. This is the interesting part. They don't survive as well. So this study found that there were, quote, half as many brightly coloured orioles, black birds and blue tits, for example, than predicted from bird counts in places with little radiation. Yet birds with duller plumage, such as tree pipits, coal tits and chaffinches, had roughly the same size population throughout the area. Is it because the carotenoids, they're still... They both consume the same amount of the carotenoids, but the beautiful birds are wasting them on their plumage?

31:18The idea is that they are using carotenoids for other things. Yeah. So they're not available to protect them for their plumage. But also migration is a big thing. So migratory birds tend to use more carotenoids to sustain their metabolism while they're doing long distances. Because metabolising a lot, you know, exercising causes more free radicals. And so they use carotenoids to prevent damage from that. It just hit me, Caroline, that we are doing nuclear ecological biochemistry right now.

31:52Like, this is unreal, the level of science that has gone in here and the research that has been done. Oh my God. So yeah, so both bright and coloured birds and migratory birds that pass through this area, like rest of this area, tend to do worse than local birds that don't migrate and duller coloured birds. Wow. Which is funny because especially the birds that don't migrate out of this area, you'd assume, oh, they are exposed to more radiation. Yeah. It's not about, in this instance, how much radiation exposure they had,

32:23but if they have the proper defences against that. Right. Or they can... So complicated. Wow. None of these birds will have had automatically defence against radiation, but they have something available that can step into that place. Right, yeah. Fuck me. I should say this is all yet to be fully confirmed. This is actually reasonably new research, but I thought it was super interesting. Yeah, yeah. So those are our birds, things you can see. But you've also got the hidden things, right? The backbone of ecosystems, your fungi, your bacteria... Oh, that was an ugly laugh.

32:59So yeah, you've got these, the backbone of ecosystems, fungi, bacteria, and soil invertebrates. I feel like it's got to suck. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's counterintuitive. Oh no, this one sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So organisms that are decomposers, so they break down dead plants and animals, have been massively depleted around Chernobyl. And this makes sense because a lot of the radiation is in the soil. Right. Yeah. In some areas, it has been reported that dead leaves and plants are building up like

33:33big, thick layers. Wow. And just not. Oh. Yeah. The slow horror of a lack of decomposition. Oh yeah. Chills, man. Not even faking it, chills on my arm. It's also been reported that populations of bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and spiders have declined. Particularly the closer you get to the reactor, the less populated it becomes. And the authors of one study suggests it's because plants are changing their chemical

34:03defences in response to radiation, which is affecting insects. Right. Okay. That feed on those plants. Right. Ah. So, you know, bacteria and bugs are a lot less sexy than wolves and bears. A lot less charismatic. Yeah. Listen, if you're a leg guy, they got you covered. Yeah. But they're the backbone of ecosystems, right? Maybe they'll bounce back eventually, like it is already in some areas. Or maybe they will be replaced by more radioactive resistant species, like it is in some areas.

34:37Either way, this will likely have a knock-on effect for what life looks like in Chernobyl, around Chernobyl, decades from now. Yeah. Yeah. Radiobiologist Carmel Mothersill from McMaster University said in a BBC Future article that the Chernobyl area is, quote, teeming with trees and wildlife, but it's not the same as it was before the accident. So I think that the United Nations Development Programme calling this the biggest rewilding experiment in Europe is fun.

35:08Fascinating. But it's not entirely accurate because, yes, because rewilding is restoring and rebuilding native ecosystems. Yes. This ecosystem is something entirely new and we don't know how that's going to play out yet. When you, for me, it was when you described the trees as just like, oh, and all the, was it the pines? Yeah. And all the pines were gone. All the pines were gone. I was like, oh, so you literally, it's just like a Thanos snap. Yeah. It's just like, and now half of the tree's gone. It's like, what? It was really quick as well, though, how quickly those trees got wiped out.

35:40That's so interesting. I want to say, I don't think it's like a cut and dry, this is bad, this is not bad. It's a gray area. It's just so much more nuanced than the biggest rewilding experiment we've ever seen, you

The Korean demilitarized zone

35:53know?

The Korean demilitarized zone

35:54Yeah. So let's take a look now at another exclusion zone, which is a bit more cut and dry. And Tommy, you've already mentioned it. It's the Korean demilitarized zone. Right, because that's just no people. Yeah, there's no disaster that happened there. There's no radiation. This is a 250 kilometer long, approximately four kilometer wide area that splits the Korean peninsula roughly in half. The whole area is about double the land area of New York City. The demarcation line between North and South Korea is right in the middle of it.

36:25Although you can't officially cross it from one country to another. It's not like a, it's a border, but it's not a border. I'm having a thought, and it might not come up, but I'm thinking very small scale at the moment. When I used to work at a council in the South of the UK, we had a big thing about trying to make permeable boundaries between gardens so that wildlife could pass through everything. And I'm now thinking about like, if people can't get through it, can wildlife get through it? Oh, wildlife can. Wildlife can. There's a really specific reason for this.

36:56Okay. Okay. So it's like a semi-permeable membrane. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So actually, imagine a semi-permeable membrane where the holes are everything but human-sized, like human-shaped. So the membrane, humans can't pass through. So some parts of the DMZ have these like, enormous, like, almost like a Great Wall of China thing. But I think most of it, as I'm looking, is chain-link fence kind of a thing, less of a... Yeah, yeah. There's a different reason why animals can exist there and humans can't. Okay, listen, there are no troops in the DMZ, there are certainly no civilians, but

37:27there are an estimated 1 million to 2 million landmines.

37:35Yeah, that would do it. I don't know what to do with the feelings that I'm feeling right now. I know, we're doing a lot of macabre laughing, but it's just such a wild situation we live in. Yeah. Kim Seung-ho, who is the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, told The Guardian, Fascinating. I used to think I was the best environmentalist, but I realised the landmines are doing more for conservation than anyone. It's ironic, no? Weapons for killing people have become the greatest protectors of life. Wow. So the DMZ is absolutely flush with life.

38:08There are more than 6,000 species of animals there, including more than 100 endangered species, which is almost 40% of South Korea's endangered species. Holy moly. There's a huge range of habitats there. There's wetlands, there's mountains, there's forests, lakes, tidal marshes. Wow. It just means you get a huge diversity of life as well. Motion-triggered cameras in the DMZ have captured some really stunning images of animals like yellow-throated martins, Asiatic black bears, Siberian musk deer.

38:39God, I love trail cameras. Wild cats, like things that hadn't been seen in the air for a long time. And just in case you're wondering, because I was, anecdotal evidence suggests that larger animals like boar and deer have set off and been killed by smaller antipersonal landmines in the DMZ. But that happens rarely because many of the landmines there are anti-tank mines. So it takes 100, 300 kilograms to set them off. Now, the DMZ is also part of something called the East Asian Australasian Flyway.

39:13It's a bird migration superhighway between Siberia and New Zealand. So 34, lots of birds species migrate through this highway, but 34 internationally threatened migratory birds stop in the DMZ to rest and feed. That's incredible. Holy moly. Wow. Seven of the world's 15 crane species migrate through the DMZ. And it is the only place in the world where two endangered species of crane, they're called

39:44the red crowned crane and white naped crane, winter together in wetlands, specifically in the DMZ. Only place in the, wow. Most of these birds were lost before the Korean War due to urbanization and industrialization and the war itself. But they have bounced back from dozens in the 90s to thousands today. Also, just for listeners or for you guys, I suppose, if you'd like to do something helpful and interesting at the same time, you can check out- Plant a landmine.

40:15Plant a landmine in your local area. You could check out something called, it's a citizen science project called the DMZ Crane Watch. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, they, basically these researchers have set up trail cameras to capture images of cranes, but they need human volunteers to actually identify the species of the cranes in the images. So they have data on their populations and their different locations at different times of year. So they can just track how they're doing, basically. It's a neat project. Wow!

40:45This is a great website. Oh my gosh. It's just, it's just the depth of the interactions and things have, like, I went from like, oh, the DMZ to being like, and now we can track crane migration through specific, this is just like, my brain. They're hoping that this project can be used to convince policymakers to protect the crane's habitat. Ah, Ella, you scream. Why would their habitats need protecting?

41:16They're in the DMZ. There's already one to two million landmines there. What else could they possibly need? No man may pass through their area, right? Okay, well, sorry, listeners, we're maybe like half a second ahead of you because we can see Ella's expressions of contempt.

41:38So on the South Korean side of the DMZ, there is a buffer zone called the civilian control zone. About 20,000 people, mostly farmers, live and work in this area under, like, strict military watch. It's actually a larger land area than the DMZ itself. And most of what we know about wildlife in the DMZ is thanks to work in the civilian control zone, or CCZ. For two decades, the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, Kim Sung-ho, who I mentioned

42:13before, and his team, they've been making weekly trips into the CCZ. They survey the flora and fauna there. And what you find, basically, is while most of the wildlife in this area has thrived from the loss of human habitation, the cranes tell a different story.

42:34So, the cranes... Ow, I'm eating my delicious meal and I got a bone stuck in my mouth. Oh no, it's Nuance! God damn it! I was enjoying my delicious succulent meal! So, these two species that winter together in the wetlands, they actually get most of their food from agricultural rice fields. Hmm. Oh! They would struggle to survive winter in the Korean Peninsula without this food. Basically, the farmers that live there, they cultivate their rice using traditional methods

43:04that don't use large machinery. And that means there's leftover waste rice for the cranes to eat. Ah, wow! It's such an interesting story because it's not this typical humans leave and animals thrive, which is what it is for the rest of the DMZ in many ways. This is so interesting. This reminds me a lot of Natajac toads in the UK, where Natajac toads are endangered specifically in the UK and not necessarily in other parts of Europe. And it's because we used to do traditional grazing of heathland to manage heathland in

43:40the UK. Sounds exactly like this. Yeah! And then we took the cows off and the heathland started to grow and the Natajac toads started to struggle because the heathland wasn't being managed in the same way. Wow! Like, because of this agricultural stuff. And this is where you get, like, a lot of tactical heathland burning can be really helpful. But also, people bringing cows back onto fields and getting that human input back onto them is what helps Natajac toad populations in the UK. No, sorry, Caroline. I already heard burning fields and putting in landmines, and that's all I've taken away

44:11from this guy. Sorry.

44:13But anyway, it's like the Natajac toads, the cranes. It's a really interesting balance of human and nature. Yeah, yeah. And it may change very soon. So in June of this year, the South Korean Defense Ministry announced that they were going to move the civilian control line closer to the border, the demarcation line, which means there's less natural land, that means more people, more farming, and probably more farming with intensive agricultural practices rather than these traditional methods.

44:45It's not difficult to assume that this will be an issue for a lot of the animal life there. But given that the cranes are relying on human activity to thrive, it could be an opportunity, it could be bad. It's really hard to tell. It's nuanced, if you will. Yeah. Gosh, isn't it just... Also, really sorry for everyone... Please check up on all your friends who decided this episode to play the game of every time we say nuance, take a shot. Please check up on them. Nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance, nuance.

45:17I think it is such a feeling of like, I have my pitchfork up on one side, and then I move to the other side, and I move back to the other side. I'm like, maybe I should just put it down for like a little bit and just listen a little bit. Yeah. And it is... I will say, above all, it's fascinating, more than anything. Like, the intricacies... Oh, thank God I found another... I found another scenario. Yeah, there you go. The intricacies there are really interesting, and I really hope that the goal is to take

45:51away what we can learn, as opposed to, again, being like, put landmines everywhere, or like, you know, we can extract the good lessons from the bad lessons and try to move forward with them and learn as much as we can from these, frankly, bad circumstances that we put ourselves in. These things all suck. Like, overarching energy, if this is bad, but yeah.

The United Nations buffer zone

46:16So, here we go. We have this kind of intersection of human and wildlife in this exclusion zone, and this is where I want to very briefly talk about one final exclusion zone, which is the United Nations Buffer Zone, or Green Line. I don't know this at all. It's a demilitarized zone, which splits the island of Cyprus into Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus in the south, and the Turkish Cypriot Republic of northern Cyprus in the north.

46:46It runs 180 kilometers across the whole island, and it's about 346 square kilometers in area. It's like a small city in area. And you now know the story, okay? Okay, people leave the area. In this case, they are forcibly displaced from the area, but I don't want to wade into the politics of Cyprus. Anyway, people leave in the 1970s, and decades later, surveys show that flora and fauna has thriven. Hooray! Thriven? I like Tom looking for a new word for nuance.

47:19While I was writing the script, I was like, God, I've said thrived and flourished so many times. Thrived and they did. And then the next sentence, many species of plants are flourishing, including 13 which are endemic to Cyprus and have really found a successful home here in the exclusion zone in the green line. Tulips, mandrakes, several species of orchids. Surveys have shown that there are booming populations of hares, birds, turtles. My favorite success story here is the Cypriot mouflon, which is a species of sheep.

47:51They're more like a goat, they've got lovely big horns, and they have overtaken an abandoned village in the buffer zone. And it's crazy, they've rediscovered capitalism, they fully have like a tiny... Actually, sorry, they're at barter economy right now still. A barter economy, if you would. Oh!

48:13Tom is doing a standing ovation. You're going to get one of those 10-minute can standing ovations, Caroline. But there are... Okay, so this is what's going on there, but there are two hitches in this lovely picture of nature restoring itself without man's presence, okay? Of course. One being that feral dogs appear to have become the first large predator in the area. There are also feral dogs in Chernobyl's exclusion zone. But back when the liquidators were cleaning the area, I'm sorry to say this, but they killed

48:46many, many of the dogs and family pets. Then that was to prevent dog populations going out of control, from leaving the area, from spreading radiation. And there are also other large predators around Chernobyl. So dogs being there doesn't throw off the food chain as much as it has the potential to in Cyprus. The dogs in Cyprus also increase the risk of spreading diseases, like Echinococcus, which is a parasitic disease caused by tapeworms. So just clearing the area of humans without prior planning to what might take over was not

49:19necessarily the best course of action here, because you didn't know what would happen in the immediate aftermath. Of course, when the buffer was set up, the ecology wasn't a concern. Yeah, yeah. Sure, there was other problems. It's just a lesson for these unexpected rewilding projects, or any rewilding project where you're removing humans. Yeah, yeah. And the other interesting thing is that this buffer zone is not entirely devoid of human life. About a decade after it was established, there was an agreement that designated plots of land

49:50would go to both Greek and Turkish Cypriot farmers. Right, okay. So they farm food like olive trees, they rear grazing animals, and they keep bees. But because the land wasn't subjected to pesticides or intensive fertilizers before the buffer zone was set up, this is how the farmers continue in this area. Fascinating. They have less intensive organic agricultural practices, and this is generally seen as quite a positive for the animals living alongside them. I never thought that United Nations buffer zone would have like an organic label on it.

50:25But now I'm like, I can so see some white chicken in the UK being like, oh my god, look. I got this from a conflict zone.

50:36It's like, yeah, conflict-free chicken, yeah. Conflict-full, actually. Conflict-full.

50:45An article I read about the buffer zone framed this as like a genuine, if imperfect case, of a socio-ecological landscape where restricted human presence combined with active co-management of the land can like support conservation. I feel like this is probably really obvious when you state it without all the preamble that nature and humans can coexist if human activity is done in a specific and sustainable way. That's awesome right there.

51:16Sure, I know, but it is sort of a marvel of an idea after so many examples of stuff. That's very funny. And maybe I could have said that somewhere else earlier, but obviously I wasn't going to do that because we're on that side every day. But also, I see so, for some reason, exclusions are quite a hot topic right now. I see so many videos and articles about how nature thrives when humans leave. I have to say, I'm guilty of it myself because I made a video about the DMZ for the BBC World

51:48Service just like this, and it sells the story, and I sell the story that we need to just clear out and let nature reclaim the land. But I was wrong. It's not that simple. A lot of this was really pushed during COVID as well, wasn't it? Oh, you're totally right, Caroline! The water is, and the dolphins have come through, and all of this stuff. And yeah, I feel like it's really been trendy since then. Those sorts of videos went so viral as well, didn't they? You know what it fucking is? Is as much as Abandon All Humans is a harsh concept, at the end of the day, it's a very

52:24simple concept. And that's why I think it's very... It's very attractive, isn't it? It's also not a bad thing to think either, that humans being somewhere is damaging to that area and restrictive to other life being there. But it's just not that simple. You know, Chernobyl isn't a return to like a lost, pristine past. It is a new ecosystem shaped by radiation and adaptation. In Korea, one of the largest success stories, the cranes, depend on the rice fields maintained

52:55by the farmers. In Cyprus, wildlife has bounced back, not in the total absence of people, but alongside it. And leaving suddenly also had its own issues. It's cynical, but easy to just imagine areas or a whole world without humans. But we are the most dominant form of life on Earth, in the sense that we have the most impact. And our grubby little fingerprints are already all over everything. So I don't think exclusion zones are interesting because they show us a world without people.

53:26There isn't such a thing, and there never will be again. I think they're interesting because they show us the different types of impacts we have. So at the end of this, for me, they suggest the goal isn't to detach humanity from nature or pretend we can rewind the planet to some pristine state that existed before us. The goal is to decide what kind of presence we want to be and can be. Holy shit. All right, you get some canned standing ovation also.

53:56That was like my best outro ever. It was really good. It was amazing. It was really good. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, dude. Also, shouts to all the, you know, when you said the DMZ ecology research sensor, I'm like, shouts to all these people doing some of the strangest on the ground science. It fucking rules.

54:18We are interrupting this for a Jumbotron. How exciting. What? I jokingly gasp, but I am always surprised and delighted whenever we get one. She's like, this is so lovely. So this message is for Summer, and this is from Michael. Hi, Summer. Do you want to hang out in the park tomorrow? If not, then maybe the day after? Thanks. Smiley face. That is such a good use for Jumbotron.

54:51It's a good use of Jumbotron. It got me. It did get me. Is that truly it? Is that truly it? That's all it says. Okay, fantastic.

55:00Fantastic. And Summer, we'll be waiting your Jumbotron response, I can only presume. Yes, of course, naturally. Oh, my God. Actually, what I want to hear from Summer is a little bit of a, like, overview of how the day went. Was it a picnic vibe? Did you, like, have to bring, like, a blanket? Did you manage to... Was it raining? Oh, I assumed Summer was going to respond and be like, sorry, just got that. 30th is a little busy. How is the, uh, how's next week? What's the calendar look like?

55:30Here's a GCal invite. GCal.com forward slash QR12235. Sorry, you were being genuine. Continue. Thank you so much, Michael, for sending in your Jumbotron. And I hope that Summer says yes, or at least proposes a good backup date. If you want to... If you want to send in your own Jumbotron, Tom, where can people send that to? Let'sleweneverything.com slash Jumbotron. I've got my coffee.

56:01I've got my book. Time for a quick break before my next meeting. And, oh, wait. Caroline and Tom are super active in the group chat. And, oh, I haven't got enough signal to load the messages. I wonder if, does this cafe have Wi-Fi? Frog's record coming to you on. The largest and strongest host has taken the bait. She's on public Wi-Fi. Nice work, Frog Rocks. Quick, put the data activity and fact-thieving device down and return to the safe house. Copy that, Cover D1. The daft device is in location. Returning to you now. Brilliant. This will finally be able to see Alice's search history.

56:32We can steal all her topics. And I'll be the best host of Let's Learn Everything! Really good evil laugh, Tom. That was great. All right, breaking into the mainframe, pulling down the firewall. A few more seconds, and... Oh, I should turn on my VPN. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, what are they doing? What are they doing? Oh, we should have thought of that. She's just turned on ProtonVPN. Proton what? You know I don't listen to the podcast.

57:03ProtonVPN is a secure VPN service designed for people who want to prioritise their digital privacy and security. It keeps what you do online, private, and lets you access the internet like it should work. Open, secure, and on your terms. Unlike most VPNs, Proton is backed by strong European privacy laws and years of expertise, creating a safer, faster, and more open internet for everyone. Wait, I'm hearing her. Is she continuing your conversation? Ella, what are you... Wait. You can use it for things like getting around blocks. Sites, and watching content from other countries.

57:35I've just changed jobs and have a much longer commute now, so I've been watching some shows on my phone, which has been really nice, but not everything I want to watch is available in the UK. All I have to do is open the ProtonVPN app and pick a different country where my show is available, and boom, I can watch The Aliens again whenever I want to. It's easy to get started. Right now, ProtonVPN is offering our listeners 70% off a two-year plan when you go to protonvpn.com slash learn. That's P-R-T-O-N-V-P-N dot com slash learn for 70% off your two-year plan.

58:09That's protonvpn.com slash learn. Caroline, I don't understand. I'm running diagnostics. How was she able to hack into our comms? How does she know what we're saying? Tom? Tom? You're... Yeah, hi. Yeah, you? You're literally right there behind a window. I can... I could hear your evil laugh from the cafe. Run, Comedy One! Run!

58:31Hey, guys. Um, it's just... Just Tom here. Um, just you and me. So, okay. Uh, oh, this is tough. I just wanted to be really brave and honest without Ella and Caroline here and, um, admit that I don't know what language it is that Caroline and Ella are speaking. Like, I know it's mostly English, but then occasionally they'll say something like Aluminium and, like, I can tell I think it's a Romance language, but the thing is, like, I've been practicing Spanish on Babbel and none of the weird words they say have come

59:05up yet. Like, I learned Spanish in high school and, frankly, I did not click with the curriculum we were using, but Babbel's got so many different ways to learn a language that fit into my schedule now that I don't have all the time I did as a student. And so I thought, surely I just missed these words in high school, but nope, doesn't seem to be Spanish. Um, I don't know. I might try jumping from intermediate Spanish to dipping my toes in another language like French, Indonesian, or Turkish. I mean, it's gotta be one of them, right? Like, they say pounds is money?

59:36What? Maybe the better plan is just to toss on a few of Babbel's podcasts and see if something sounds like them. And that's one of the great things about Babbel. You're not just reading text. You're actually hearing what these languages sound like in conversation, like what they might sound like if they were your podcast co-hosts for going on five years. And, well, okay, if you guys want to help me out or if you've got summer travel coming up, now is the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip or in helping me out. Right now, Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off.

1:00:07Go to babbel.com slash learn everything, all one word. That's babbel, B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash learn everything for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right, I'll just keep searching. Just please don't tell Ellen, Caroline. I think I'm doing a pretty good job. I mostly just laugh whenever one of them laughs and I assume they're telling a joke.

1:00:28Well, gang, it's that time of year again. That's right. Labor Day is here, which means you can't wear white anymore. No. Oh, well, yes, but no, it's great British bake-off season. Oh, right. And that means it's time to draft your teams and play along. There's a new judge in town, but the game's the same. Draft your bakers, score points like it's fantasy football, and talk smacking in group chats. I wonder what Nigella Lawson would think about the Scripple Double. So, listen to TV Chef Fantasy League with me, Mike Caballon. Ify Wadiwe.

1:00:58And Sierra Cato. New episodes every week at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:01:06What's more action-packed than prestige television? With more continuity than comic books? And more reality than reality television?

1:01:18It's professional wrestling!

1:01:26And to better understand wrestling is the ultimate form of entertainment, you need the Tights and Fights podcast. This is the perfect wrestling show with a lot of love, a lack of toxic masculinity, and just the right amount of butts, cats, and spandex. Listen to Tights and Fights every Saturday on Maximum Fun. So, today's miscellaneous topic is every single character.

Introduction to Unicode

1:01:54What we learn in trying to do the impossible. It's a fancier way of saying we're talking about Unicode, baby, which on its own sounds much more boring, but when you think about what they're trying to do, it is really kind of fucked up, and we're going to talk about that. I am concerned that you're trying to, like, make it sound good in the title alone. Unicode Standard, page 14, chapter 3, specifies that a hyphen has to be a certain length in between. This is why I got two teachers, because I was going to get one super engaging one.

1:02:25Good teacher, bad teacher? I want to say, I don't know anything about Unicode, so you could have just called it Unicode, and that would have been interesting enough for me at the top. Well, there's going to be some computer aspects of it, but really what this is about is what happens when the very sticky human nature of language collides with the very hard metal of computers and, like, the mess that comes from trying to do those two. Right, yeah. So, we're going to be talking about Unicode. It's come up before, and we've talked about language before, and we've talked about emoji.

1:02:58Are you guys familiar, sort of, with what Unicode is? No. Everything!

1:03:05Everything? Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Let's try to get out of the topic. Caroline, any thoughts at all? I have nothing to add. You've heard the phrase? I've heard of Unicode, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you might have heard of the consortium behind it more than it. Yeah, I've heard of the Unicode consortium. And they're the ones that decide the emojis. Yes, yeah. Exactly. But emojis are a fraction of what they are actually trying to do. And so, we'll talk about that right now. Right, yeah. At its core, Unicode is the globally agreed-upon standard for representing text on computers.

1:03:38Okay. It is actually recognized by the ISO, which is the International Organization of Standards that coordinates things like the meter. Oh, fun! So, it's that official. And we've mentioned it before, talking about emojis, because if you'll remember, and this will be helpful for talking about the rest of Unicode, emojis aren't actually the image files, right? It's just a code in the backend and encoding. So, like, the smiley face emoji gets stored and sent between our devices as U plus 1F642. And then what different devices decide to depict that as is up to them.

1:04:11Right, yeah. Exactly. And that's why emojis can look different on Android devices than on Apple devices. More technically, your computer sends it as 111100000011. You get the point. No, no, no. Sorry, could you do the whole thing? So, be slower so I can take notes for the outro.

1:04:3111110000001111110011001100110010. Sorry, I didn't quite get it. I didn't get that. I'm sorry, because I only got 1111000, and then I stopped writing. So, again? So, yes, this is why emojis get rendered differently. But the truth of the matter is that this is the case for every single character on the web, not just emojis, right? Capital A, lowercase a, the dollar sign, the period, even the space all have a Unicode code

1:05:07behind them, which makes sense in some ways. But yeah, and fortunately, you know, 99% of the time, we don't have to think about this. We, as users of computers, don't have to worry about, like, how letters are being represented in the back end. As Scott McGinnis wrote for UC Berkeley, the ubiquity of character encodings and the enormity of the challenges involved in creating and standardizing them are happily obscured by the fact that when done well, they are not seen at all, right? Nice. We just, we just interact with language.

1:05:38The point is for it to just work. But of course, what are we three here to do, if not peek behind the curtain a little bit to look at how the sausage is made and to learn something from some of the oddities that crop up here? Can I just ask a question before you carry on? Because you've talked about how, like, emojis look different on different devices, and that's because that's how they choose to represent them. I assume fonts are done differently than for... Well, that's sort of like an example of why a font is like a front-end layer to the Unicode

1:06:11thing. So that's why it's, no matter the font, it gets stored as the same letter. It's always going to be the same code. It's just, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. The precursor to Unicode was a standard known as ASCII, which has sort of colloquially been redefined in internet speak. But in reality, ASCII was another standard of mapping characters to binary for computers, right? Characters to numbers. It was created in 1963. Wow. And because these were computers in 1963, each character was represented by only seven bits,

1:06:44so seven binary digits. So seven ones and or zeros. Yep. Right, okay. Which if you do two to the power of seven, that means you get 128 possible different characters. So there's only so many combinations. Okay, fine. There's a real limit on what you can do, basically. Well, why don't they just add a two then?

1:07:05Uh, the answer is that binary switches on the hardware level are the most basic component. Okay, that was a joke. I know it's on or off. Anyway. Uh, so this gives us 128. I'm in teacher mode right now. Any, no question is dumb. I love that. No, I love how serious he took that. I really appreciate it. I was like, that's actually a genuinely good question. We could talk about the English. I remember you teaching us about it, Tom. The first time. I know why it's one or zero.

1:07:35You could, this gives you a total of 128 different characters, which is, that's plenty, right? There's 26 letters of the alphabet. So we have plenty of, well, but also, sorry, uppercase letters and lowercase letters would be different. Punctuation as well. Oh, shit. Oh, God. Fuck. Punctuation. I'm just counting the number of keys on my keyboard. And then also, they obviously have things that they represent on the function key. Capital letter and lowercase are different because those are, those aren't just visual

1:08:06differences. They are, in fact, functionally different.

1:08:11The space and stuff like that. But there's plenty, there's room. We even, listen, we even have space to fit in these like invisible commands, like the escape key. So that's great. Yeah. It's great. We can do, we can, this is, this is so easy. This is fucking, this is a piece of cake. Oh, I'm getting, I'm getting a period accurate phone call. Give me one second. Hold on. Tom has a period accurate. Why do you have a wired phone, Tom? What the fuck? Where did you get that from? Because I'm dedicated to this podcast.

1:08:42Hold on. Yeah? No. Okay. I love that you did like full facial expressions with this as well, purely for our entertainment. For you guys? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I, I, I got some horrible news. Um, it turns out there are, and it hurts me to say this, other people besides Americans and they want to use computers too. All right. Why don't we just, if we, we add one more bit that doubles it, gives us 256 characters, that'll be plenty of, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Oh, the phone's still on.

1:09:13There are how many languages?

1:09:15Oh my God. And you've got to think about like umlauts and accents and all this stuff on top of Roman characters, but then obviously Cyrillic. You haven't even mentioned the biggest one. Oh. Also money symbols. Now I'm in my, I'm just in the zone of like, what other things can I list? You're doing the like, uh, modern major general. You're like, there's money symbols, numbers more, and the Cyrillic alphabet. Uh, so after years of duct taping and pushing the buck on the problem of other languages

1:09:48for years, in 1987, programmers Mark Davis, Joe Becker, and Lee Collins came together from various computer companies and began the Unicode project to think, hey, maybe this whole computer and internet thing will be important and require some more forethought. They try their best to block out their bits, to organize them, and also to future-proof them because they recognize like, this is going to be, we're going to keep working on this, right? We're not going to solve this all in one night. We should make it future-proof also.

1:10:19Uh, and in 1991, the Unicode consortium is officially established, and in 1993, it finally starts getting rolled out to computers. This isn't to say that like other languages didn't have computers. It's just that the standards were all different, and so that sucked. So, can you guess how many characters there might be? Uh... And give it a real like, back of the napkin language math here. Well, it's not just like, it's not like every single language needs to be represented in Unicode, because many of them share the same characters.

1:10:50Yes, it's the number of alphabets that are there. Yeah, so how many alphabets? So, okay, so we've got like the Arabic, we've got like Sanskrit. Carolyn, there's actually things beyond alphabets, uh, because not all languages technically use an alphabet, because an alphabet is phonetic. So let's call it like 10, 15 different alphabets, and then, let's say 30, 30 times 15, so at least 500 characters for, let's say, alphabet. And we've got to go numbers.

1:11:20And there's infinite of those. So 1 to 10, uh, 1 to 0, 0, 0 to 9.

1:11:30Great, good job. And then also mathematical notation might be important, I suppose. There's that in there, yeah. What's the big one we're missing, Tom, as you're saying? Um, give me, give me a rough number first, and then I'll, I'll talk about it, because it's in the script. I'm going to go with like 2, 3,000. I was thinking, in the thousands, I was going to go 5,000. So, Unicode version 1 launches with 7,163 characters. What? What do you mean Unicode version 1? And the most recent version, Unicode 17, which came out September 2025, has 159,801 characters,

1:12:09over 172 scripts. Look, I'm, I want to say I'm surprised, but I'm sure that as soon as you tell me what obvious thing I'm missing, it's going to not surprise me. So I'm holding on to my shock. Uh, kanji. There aren't that many. Oh, oh my god. I, oh no, no. I was thinking of, um, Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji, there are so many kanji. Yeah, dude. Yeah, crazy. I'm going to, I'm going to ask you about that in a second when we get to that. But yeah.

The scope of Unicode characters

1:12:37Um, uh, but also not, it's not just that it is the volume of languages that they have decided to encode. Right. Okay. Dude, when they talk about this shit, it is, it sounds like straight up Star Trek shit. It is some of the coolest that programming will ever sound. So for example, it's broken up into both blocks and planes. And so as the Unicode Consortium writes, the majority of common use characters fit in the first 64k code points, an area of the code space that is called the basic multilingual plane. Which sounds like something Spider-Man goes to in the newest, uh, in the newest Spider-Man

1:13:10movie. As McGinnis again writes for UC Berkeley, since Unicode's inception in 1987, the project has endeavored to create an encoding system capable of including all the world's written languages, past and present, in a single standardized format. Their mantra? A unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Which, you know, a totally impossible problem to solve, right? To do this. I don't know why you said that they couldn't do it all in one night.

1:13:42This sounds super straightforward. Oh my God. They've got like Nordic runes in Unicode, don't they? Yeah. And it does, it does of course have its, its limits. You know, Unicode doesn't have, uh, fuck it was a cuneiform. Uh, well, why not? Except, except it can and it does. Wow. Oh my God. Does it have hieroglyphics? I was just wondering that. It has, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics and things like, uh, OM, which is Celtic tree alphabets. Nice. What?

1:14:12That's really cool though. That's super cool. Truly, the Tower of Babel fell and the consortium was like, all right, bet. Yeah. Uh, I just want to do something Unicode, Eye of Horus. Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Look at this guys. But like, there is something beautiful about like, it going from ancient Egypt to now being represented in like the global printing press. Like it has a. That's some text. That is something. That's not a picture. And we can send that over discord.

1:14:42We can, because of Unicode, we can do that across continents. I'm like, why am I so amazed by this? It's, it's, it's, it rules, man. It's just like, yeah, there's a lot of feelings going on. It's like, we, we decided it was worth putting in there. And of course, I mean, like, this is great for researchers, researchers talking about this because they can now communicate this, this back and forth, record it into documents, have searchable PDFs, you know, like, like there's so much to this that is, um, that this, this, this gives us besides just being like, oh, ha ha ha.

1:15:14We have, you have cuneiform in, in, in, in our code. Uh, now, of course, is this a perfect system? No. And I think they're the first to admit that as the consortium is still currently active, they haven't gone like job well done. But I think in trying to solve this impossible task, not only have they done a pretty cool job, but you learn a lot of interesting things about language in our attempt to smush them

Braille in Unicode

1:15:38into computers. For example, one of the things that most people raise an eyebrow at when it comes to Unicode is when they learned that there was a block dedicated to Braille. Uh, yes. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to have your second thought. I'm going to have my second thought, which is potentially it could be used to get Braille on a special printer or can it be directly translated from Braille into like something audio? I don't know. Um, another obvious thought I literally just had is, um, teaching Braille to, for example,

1:16:11like the sighted parent of a child who has, uh, sometimes visually learning Braille is actually a thing you need to do if you want to be a teacher, right? For, for, uh, people with visual impairments, but there are even deeper reasons than just this, uh, that I got to learn about because I went, huh? Uh, cause again, most people's first reaction is computer interaction is so visual. Why do you need Braille in Unicode? Firstly, all these examples you've mentioned wanting to print it in books or blah, blah, blah. Secondly, there are Braille computer interfaces.

1:16:42Um, I actually went to college with someone who used one easily one of the best programmers in the class swept us all under the rug. Uh, but there is a third, much bigger and much more interesting reason why Braille is necessary in Unicode that we haven't talked about. Because if you're a programmer, you might be thinking like, does it need to exist in the, in, in the backend? Like, can't we just translate the letters to Braille on the front end? Kind of like you were saying, Caroline, why not just use like a Braille font? Right. Like, why does it need to be represented as Braille? Well, that's because Braille does not map one-to-one with letters.

1:17:15Right. Yeah. I did not know that. I mean, it, it does, but it also does more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. As Unicode writes themselves, there is no fixed correspondence between a dot pattern and a character or symbol of any given script. Dot pattern assignments are dependent on context and user community. A single pattern can represent an abbreviation or a frequently occurring short word. Also, I suppose because you'll use the same pattern of dots between different languages that have different alphabets. That's also a good point.

1:17:46Exactly. That's my other, the other point. Yeah. A could always, you know, be A in English, but that, that same pattern of dots could be a completely different character in C. Yeah. Exactly. And also, it was mentioned these abbreviations and contractions. So, in English, there's something known as contracted Braille. You basically, you start off with the one-to-one letter conversion in Braille, and then you have contracted Braille. It's what's known as a stenography, meaning a shorthand writing. You might be familiar with that word with stenographer.

1:18:16Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people in courtrooms who use specialized keyboards to similarly, like, contract words into shorthand to type quickly. So, an example of this is contracted Braille includes a single symbol that is and, the word and. Like an ampersand? No, Ella, because you can then combine the letter B with the symbol and and spell band. Oh, cool. So, it literally means and. A-N-D. Yes. And I'm sure, I'm sure it can also be used in other, again, in the context can maybe

1:18:48be, function more like an ampersand to your point, Ella, but like. It's kind of like. It's both. Yeah. I mean, it's more formal and official than like, but, but for example, in text speak, the L, the number eight. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it, it's like, duh. Like, of course. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's like Braille, technically it's not a language. It is a system of writing. Yeah. Because it maps onto a language. But like, of course, it makes perfect sense that like Braille is representing a language. So it will, of course, develop these linguistic nuances and depths that our human brains crave.

1:19:21Right. And, and that is why there is Braille in Unicode. That's so great. Yeah. I love that. And now I'm really interested in a Braille keyboard. I'd love to try a Braille keyboard and see what that was like. It's just so, it's just so, it's just, uh, I love humans. Uh, another famous quirk of Unicode that you might know is that in Japan you can write longer tweets. Oh. Did you know about this? I didn't know officially, but I have seen how long Japanese tweets are. It's not longer in Japanese characters, but when you translate into English, it does become,

1:19:55that's what I mean. I've seen how long the translated English. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So before Twitter was a Nazi hellscape, it used to be a respected microblogging platform. And you originally only had 140 characters to write your hot takes, but these weren't English characters. These were Unicode characters in the background. And that can be anything, an emoji, a letter, or kanji. And this is where we're going to bring this up. So, written Japanese, and correct me if I'm wrong, Ella, if you happen to know, written Japanese uses two different systems.

1:20:26Kana uses phonemes, so they're symbols that make sounds. And then kanji uses graphemes, which are symbols that mean words or concepts. Technically three different parts of that. The katakana, hiragana, and the kanji. So, but then the katakana and hiragana are phonemes. They're both groups of kana, I guess. And so it's weird that there's two of them all. So you're right, there's another complication in here. It is three systems, you're right, actually. But you have two phonemic systems, and then you have one grapheme system.

1:20:57Can you explain this all again to me? Two of them are like, kind of like letters in English, but they are more, they're phonemes, so they're normally a sound, which is like... You break them up, so it's like, O-mayo wa shinderu. Right, okay. But then you have the kanji, which is also used in Chinese. And that's a, like a little... It's a little more dense of a symbol. Right, okay, yeah. And that means a whole word, or even sometimes, it can mean more than just a word. Wow. Mother, tree. Right. And it's really hard to learn.

1:21:28It sounds like hell. I can read katakana and hiragana pretty easily. Like, I still have no... Even though I haven't been doing Japanese for a while, can still read them. I basically got nowhere with kanji. It's crazy how big it is. It is fascinating. And also, the same slightly different, like, the meanings you can have by combining different things as well. Oh, okay. It's so expansive. It's so expansive. It's just such a different kind of language that is fascinating. And so, yeah.

1:22:00Fortunately, like you said, Ella, a lot of these languages share some of these symbols. So, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, the nuances of, like, when you would use one or the other is sort of, like, especially, you know, like, with ceremonial things, I think, and, like, just, like, certain patterns. And, um, but in as much as they share symbols, Unicode does still have its largest block containing the, they call them the CJK block. That includes 101,996 different characters.

1:22:32What? Say that number again. Now, you don't, 101,996 different characters. Now, again, some of these are slight variations, right? Like, maybe, like... Japanese and China upgrades their kanji a lot. And I don't believe Japan does it as much. Oh, okay. Interesting. And also, it is a fact that, like, to have, like, a speaking proficiency, you have to know, like, a certain percentage of them, roughly. And then, like, there are just others that you're just, like, you can encounter and just be, like, I've literally never seen this symbol. You know, like, like, different levels of fluency of these that you...

1:23:05It's not like you have to memorize every single one, right? It's like... But yes. Had a little existential crisis about this. Languages are wild. We can't dive into the history of all Asian language in this topic halfway through. But the point is, as a result, since a single Unicode character can be a concept like dog, a Japanese tweet can contain more information than an English one. BuzzFeed wrote an article about this in 2017 when Twitter was expanding their character count. And they picked an example tweet from a BuzzFeed Japan lifestyle writer. I picked this one specifically because it's one of the most, like, Twitter-ass tweets I've

1:23:37ever seen. It's so funny. But it's 140 characters in Japanese, but the English translation is over twice as long with 307 characters. Wow. Okay, cool.

1:23:49I don't want to go on a trip abroad. Don't want a cute pet. Don't want an expensive car. Don't want fashionable clothes. Not at all. All I want is just to live in a comfortable home, cook by myself, and eat what I want to eat. That's all. But it is not easy to make these tiny dreams come true. My life sucks. Great. Wow. That is such a treat. Oh, I love it. It's so fucking good.

The longest Unicode character

1:24:11Back in the good old days, huh? But it is this exploration into the density of characters that led me to one of the most infamous Unicode characters of the entire set. Ooh. So, obviously, in trying to encode every single character, there are going to be some that break the mold, stretch the definition. And as a former front-end developer, you have to make sure these edge cases don't break your design. And so, in 2015, Max Wolfe published The Big List of Knotty Strings. It is a set of especially persnickety strings of characters that can break your system if

1:24:43you're not careful and you make assumptions about what a character can look like. So, these include obvious things like undefined, you know, dividing by zero. Uh-huh. But among these is Unicode character U plus FDFD. Don't look it up because I want to send you... I want to make sure the one that I send you is the one that's rendered correctly. And that character looks like this. And this is the longest Unicode character. Single character. Oh, wow. It looks like Arabic.

1:25:14Yeah. It is. Spot on. I want to be clear. In Arial font, this single character is the same length as the word cacophonous. Wow. It's a beautiful character. I can't imagine this being used regularly in Arabic writing, though. It's technically a single character in Unicode, but it seems to clearly include several different characters kind of all together. There's also a lot of diacritics, these, like, accent march below and above. There's a ton of them. Yeah. Again, if you want to see this image, you can go to let'slearneverything.com slash 112

1:25:46or check out the show notes. But yeah, it looks like a sentence in Arabic, but it also includes this really long swoop that takes up almost half of the entire character. To demystify this immediately, I will say that if it does look like this is just several words in one single character, you are correct, because it is several words. You can, in fact, just alternately write this out as 19 characters in Arabic, because it's not a word or a name, but it's an entire phrase known as the bismillah, which goes bismillah

1:26:22ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. After Mamdani was elected in New York, it was mandatory to learn how to pronounce this. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say, your pronunciation sounded quite good. So anyone who speaks Arabic, let us know. Yeah. I have a friend who helped me practice. Nice. Okay. There's so many voice memos between us. It was very, very cute. So this phrase means, in the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. In the Quran, it starts every chapter except the ninth. And in the modern day, depending on how secular you are as a practicing Muslim, it is said before

1:26:56daily rituals like a meal, right? So when I said, I can't imagine this being used in everyday Arabic, I was completely wrong. Completely wrong. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you see things like this in all kinds of cultures and religions across the world, right? Like these phrases to God that are said just sort of almost routinely, especially in the more secular days, right? And so we have an answer to our question, right? Like it's, this is the most common answer you'll find. It's like, oh, this is a single symbol to represent this common phrase.

1:27:27But I still wasn't satisfied. Like, like, why, why is it one long character? Why is there this really long swoosh? No one, no one's explaining what that is. That why is there this stylistic swoosh there? This cursive bridge connecting the letters. It's known as a ligature. And because, you know, we have nothing like this in English. And I just wanted to know more. And so many of my searches really just kind of brushed it off as just like weird. I know this is a bad example, but there's an urban dictionary definition of the character,

1:27:58which reads, the longest Unicode character. I don't know what else to say about it. I set my Discord username to 32 times bismillah. And now when I say a message, others have to scroll to the bottom of the chat just to see my message. Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's so good. But of course, this just made me want to understand it more. And after so much digging, I finally found, oh, that good shit. It took a lot of digging, but I found it. And it turns out there is a lot to say about it, actually. Okay, I just want to say before you get, this is like, bismillah is like the Shavalski's

1:28:32horse of this topic.

1:28:36You're not wrong. I fucking, I, I, what a sentence. Oh, I love this podcast. Brand new sentence. Yeah, yeah. Can be honest, we say that a lot. I think that is fully true.

1:28:49Although, I don't know, maybe there's, there's, maybe those two cultures intersect somewhere in the, in the, you know, Arab Asian region. But they wouldn't call them, they wouldn't call them Shavalski's horse, so. That's true. You know what? You're right. Okay. Um, so what I found, I found some very fun facts because it turns out Arabic has not just been trouble for computers. It has broken the printing press. And the combination of two is responsible for a cursed book that historians thought was lost to time, described as a bibliographic enigma. Oh, come on.

1:29:19You know what? I said we don't have time to dive into the history of a language halfway through a topic, but fuck it. Let's dive into the history of Arabic halfway through this topic. I love, because you, before you went into this topic, you said that you had to cut out so much stuff to cut this down. And I love that this has made it through the cracks. That makes me really, genuinely, really happy. Yeah. One, you'll see why, because it's so great. So I just want to do first shout outs to my old friend, Sufjan, as well as my new linguistics

1:29:49friend introduced to me by Gretchen, Manish Gorgakar, who, who both of them fielded a lot of my basic, very basic and very silly questions. Panicked email Gretchen. I was like, do you know anyone who could help me with this? And she was like, let me, hey, of course I have. Of course I know a guy.

Arabic typography and the printing press

1:30:07So Arabic is a phonetic language. So unlike kanji, it is 28 characters in an alphabet that each represents a sound, much like English. I'm really surprised to hear that because, I mean, it's a beautiful script, but it looks so much more complicated to me, to my eye. Oh, and we'll get into why that is the case in just a second. But yeah, you're right. It does look so visually distinct. So it's nice to cover the basics. It is, however, written right to left, much like other languages from that region, like

1:30:37Hebrew. And it has, of course, many variations. But modern standard Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world after English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish. But unlike those languages, it also has a beautiful written quirk that you have sensed there, Ella. And so I simply have to shout out one of the best essays I've read in a while that I stumbled upon. It is fucking poetic. It cites its sources. And it just so happened to come out three months ago, like just in time to perfectly answer my

1:31:11specific question. I could not believe it. This is from a person who simply goes by the pseudonym LR0. I'll call them LR. In their essay, an interactive introduction to this terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. Nice. As they write, to understand why every machine since Gutenberg has wrestled this script and mostly lost, you need one structural fact. Arabic is cursive always. There is no print versus handwriting distinction, no block letters.

1:31:44The letters connect in stone inscriptions, in manuscripts, in metal, on screens. Each letter, therefore, changes shape depending on its neighbors. Again, poetry, right? Like, damn. So, the letters in one Arabic word are all joined together. They're spaced between words, but in a word they're joined together. So, that means that each letter has a form if it's standing alone, if it starts a word, if it's in the middle of a word, and if it's at the end of the word, right? Because it will have different connections, ligatures.

1:32:15Right, right, right, right. But it's important to note as they go on, the shapes are not costumes over some underlying real letter. The positional variation is the letter. So, this obviously makes it hard for a computer to represent because there's so much more going on. But again, when you're writing this, it's just intuitive, right? And it, again, results in such a beautiful script that, again, to your eyes seems so different. And of course, coming to this from a simpler alphabet like English might seem, this might seem

1:32:47gratuitous, but by having your script be like this, joined and cursive always, it doesn't just look nice, it actually affords you some functionality that is so fucking cool, at least for nerds like us. I'm going to show you guys this block of written Arabic from, I think, the 1400s, and I want you to spot what's unique about it. It is sort of like a minor beauty that a nerd would appreciate. I mean, it always fills the width of the area it's in.

1:33:23Exactly right, Ella. Do you know what that's called in typeset? No. It's called justification. Oh. It is perfectly justified. Oh, that sounds lovely. Oh, yeah, baby. And, again, once you see it, you see it. And, again, in comparison, the ancient Greek text, the lines end when they end. And also, we have a bad habit of, like, putting in, like, the hyphens to cut off words if we need to justify them. Yeah, I hate that. Yeah. Yeah. Arabic script simply extends the ligatures, the curves between the letters, to fill the

1:33:56space.

1:33:58Doesn't that fucking rule? I see. So, there's, like, on the kind of, like, fifth or sixth row of the imagery centers, there's one particularly long tail ligature reaching out to the end. And some are so well hidden that it just beautifully met. You know, so, obviously, in English, the way we do this is by spacing the letters. And, like, you can have either a well-trained I person do it. Or on computers, you do it automatically. Just fill the space. Well, I was going to say, one of the things I do in pretty much all text documents I have

1:34:29is use the option where you can extend where it goes from end to end. It's called, yeah, justifying it. Yeah. Is that? I didn't realize that what it was called. I didn't know that. It had a name. Huh. Left align, center align, right align, justify. Yeah. Huh. Oh, wow. So, Arabic was ahead of the game, computer-wise, in that way. Yeah, in many ways. That must be a fucking nightmare to try and do that on a computer. Good instinct, Caroline. We'll get to that in a second. Oh, well. Oh. Well, let's enjoy our time here for now and we'll get into some problems there.

1:35:01But, of course, LR would be the one to put it the most poetically. As they write, run your eye down the left edge. Every line lands flush and not one word space was stretched to get it there. The justification lives inside the words. Oh, I like that. Sometimes when you have to force the justification, you'll have these huge spaces between the lines. These huge gaps and I hate it. Yeah, I hate it. Yeah, yeah. But you get even fucking more than that. More than just functionality, you get some real beauty.

1:35:31So, there is specifically one kind of ligature. That long swoop that we've been seeing is called the kushida. It is a specific kind of ligature that is used often because it's just a beautiful long line. And my favorite example of this, the moment that it clicked in my brain and I went, oh, this is beautiful, is, of course, one of the nerdiest ways it could. It is this image that I came across in my research. If you can describe what you're seeing.

1:35:57It is a map of... Of some sea in the region, I believe. With the place names labeled. And I assume that the name of the ocean here is what we're seeing in the water. And it's been extended as very, very long of the kushida to fill the space of that ocean. And same with the land as well. Some of them have particularly long kushida right at the end. Yeah, these tails. This clicked in, it's just like, it makes the map beautiful and intuitive.

1:36:30It lets you stretch a word to fill a space in the most appealing way, right? In a way that we can't. Yeah, yeah. In English, you would, I mean, you would, you would just make the font bigger, right? Or you would space out and be like P-A-C-I-F-I-C ocean, right? Yeah, yeah. But then you end up taking more space like by a height if you're making the letters bigger. Random floating letters way away from each other. It's kind of like I'm doing the measurement almost within the word itself, which is quite nice.

1:37:01This covers this area here, yeah. Exactly. It's just, and when I saw it on the map, I was like, the intuitiveness of just like moving your pen across the map like that to stretch across a thing. I was just like, fuck me. This comes from a fantastic paper. It'll be in the show notes called Design Principles of Kushida Justification, A Unique Technique in Arabic and Persian Mapping. One example they include has two Kushidas intersect to form an X. Oh, that's so fun. Like an X marks the spot.

1:37:31Are you fucking kidding me? That's gorgeous. This picture you sent us, there's an island on the top of the image and the name of the island is beneath it, I believe. And it's perfectly the width of the island. It's very satisfying. It like cradles the island. Yeah. And the shape, yeah, it's lovely. And it's just like, that's not a thing we can do. Yeah. It reminds me, Ellie, you might be familiar of when they use, because there's so much more symbols for sound effects in Japanese manga.

1:38:02Like, they'll just choose like a huge symbol to be like, bam, right? And like, the English translation always reads like a fucking comic book. It's like, pow. And it's like, there's something, the visual that the language affords you that is specific to the language that is just so fucking like, I don't know. It's just so cool. It's just so fucking cool. And as you might expect, there is an excess of artistry around a phrase as important as the bismillah.

1:38:32William Graham's Encyclopedia of the Quran online includes some really creative versions of this phrase, including these. Oh my gosh, is that a freaking turkey? No, it's a stork. It's a stork from Turkey, Caroline. That's great. So this is the bismillah. These are all the same phrase just written in. That's beautiful. I wonder how legible it is to an extent. Yeah. It's kind of like colline. Yeah, we have here five variations of the bismillah. One is like a circular emblem.

1:39:04One is this square weave. One is shaped like a stork. Very literally so. And of course, at the bottom, we have our form, the longest Unicode character. Now, an interesting quick wrinkle in the story is that the version of the bismillah that was proposed to Unicode looked actually more like one of the oval versions here. And I think that might be what your versions of the computer are rendering. And that's because there was a specific version that was used specifically in Pakistan for official documents, you know, once again, to be able to repeat this phrase very quickly.

1:39:42But most browsers, or at least my browsers, have settled on representing it like the original image I showed you, the long kashida tail on the bismillah. And if you look at written Korans, you might remember how I said it's the first line of every chapter. And so you often see it take this long tail form to fill out the first line. The full first line. Right. Okay. And I don't think this is the sole reason. I think, you know, obviously, over time, form and function and culture sort of blend this all together.

1:40:15I proposed to my new linguist friend. I was like, is that the reason why? Because it's the first line of the Koran? And that justifies it? It's an important phrase. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So you, yeah, you want it. What does it mean? In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. You want it to be impactful and big. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so I was like, what's the reason? What's the reason? And then, of course, he was, he's responded, quote, I don't know. My guess would just be that it's an important phrase starting in the document. So making it fancy is nice.

1:40:45And it says kind of like drop caps, which is when in like old illuminated manuscripts, you have the like big fancy letter in English. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. No, it's so different on my phone. Oh, are you seeing how the Bismillah Unicode character, how it looks on your phone? Yeah, because it's a, because it's Unicode, like an emoji, it can look different. It doesn't even extend outwards. Oh, interesting. It's a completely different shape. And doesn't that show that there are different cultures of ways of representing this phrase,

1:41:16right? Like, sorry. No, it's so interesting. Right? That's so cool. Listen, if I had known you guys would have been Googling this on your phone frantically, I would have slept easy last night. It's so great. It fucking rules, dude. And yeah, and I love, I love that Minish compared it to the like fancy first letter of a, of a English teacher. Because I guess it's just universal across cultures wanting to make texts look cool, you know? Yeah. And Ella, you said like, does this make it not legible anymore?

1:41:47But I guess the context of where it is means that like, oh, of course, you know exactly what this means. I don't, yeah. People aren't like drawing this crane version in the middle. Like on their worksheets, you know? Yeah, yeah. And similarly, it's like the, the fucked up Disney D. I can barely parse that, but I know from context, it's a D. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. The Disney. So we now know why there exists this stylized version of the Bismillah with the long swoosh, the long kashita. Hooray! Woo!

1:42:17But you raised the question, Caroline. Why does it exist as a single character in Unicode? There is some precedent, maybe, I think, you know, as it being like a recurring phrase you would want to use often, but that's not the best excuse. And it was put in early on, so it might have been kind of a little bit of a mistake. But to answer that has to do with not just the limitations of Unicode, but the limitations of set type as a whole. So when describing the rules of joining the letters, LR said this, he dropped these bars.

1:42:48He said, A Latin font that ships 26 lowercase shapes needs no opinion about any of this. An Arabic font is wrong unless it has opinions about all of it. And this is, this is not just true for Unicode. It was true for the printing press. As they write, The first book printed in movable Arabic type was a book of ours produced in 1514 in Fano, the Popal States, by the Venetian printer Gregorio de Grigori. It was set by craftsmen who could not read a word of what they were setting, and you can

1:43:22tell. Two decades later, the Paganini Press in Venice printed the first Quran in movable type, a commercial venture aimed at the Ottoman market. And it failed so completely that every copy vanished, and scholars spent four centuries politely doubting the edition had ever existed. Wow. That is until in 1987 when a single copy surfaced in the library of a Venetian friary, which it had been sitting in the whole time.

1:43:52I double checked this. It's 100% true. Wow. There was this cursed, bastardized Quran that everyone went, what the fuck? Like, universally, it was so embarrassing that people didn't think it existed. That's great. There's a paper on its discovery from 1990 in the show notes. It describes it as, yeah, a bibliographic enigma. If you want to dig more into that, you can. Fascinating. But I was then introduced into another deeper enigma.

1:44:25There's a myth that I did not know about that is related to all of this. So there is still a pretty prevailing myth that during this time when the printing press was on its rise, that it was taking off in Europe, but that the Islamic Ottoman Empire outlawed it. People say it was a decree of the sultans punishable by death. Some say it was just the sensibilities of the culture. Some say it was an aversion to a technology coming from the West. But, of course, as historian Catherine A. Schwartz put it,

1:44:55these allusions to the Ottoman printing press present a cohesive portrayal of it in tone. Despite this coherent tenor, however, the nine examples that I have provided offer nine different explanations for why the Ottomans did not print. Basically, like, you guys keep coming up with different examples, but they're all different. So what's the truth? Which one did it? It's so easy to be like, oh, surely the reason why they didn't is because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever flavor of racism that day.

1:45:26And the quote I read comes from Catherine Schwartz's fantastic 2017 paper. It's simply titled, Did Ottoman Sultan's Ban Print? We love it. We love it debunking paper that you can hear the snark in the title. Did Ottoman Sultan's Ban Print? Did it really? Fucking rules. God, I love papers. As she writes, I argue that the sources available to scholars today do not support the notion that the sultans banned printing. Rather, they demonstrate that this claim arose from early modern European scholars in their

1:46:01search to articulate their sense of Ottoman inadequacy through explanations for why Ottomans did not print. Oh, for goodness sake. Caroline's face. Caroline rolled their eyes halfway through that sentence. The mic might have picked it up.

1:46:15So there were instead myriad reasons why the printing press might have not, including, as LR put it, an empire employing tens of thousands of calligraphers in a refined thousand year old craft looked at the phaeno quality output and saw quite reasonably a downgrade. Yeah, I was just about to say, we've literally just spent all this time talking about the complexity of the written Arabic language and how that probably isn't going to translate that well into the printing press on a mass scale.

1:46:45Exactly. It's some of the, again, there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is just purely technical. Yeah. Right? That's so interesting. Now, and I do want to be clear, like, I'm not, this isn't me, like, I'm actually, the printing press isn't that important. Instead, I think what's beautiful about this is it asks us to give a depth to it and reframe it not as the classic story of, like, this perfect Eurocentric enlightenment genius innovation. Anyone who disagrees with it is a backward country, right? It's instead asks us to remember, like, it is a technology, right?

1:47:19Yeah. And once again, like computers, has to grapple with this impossible task of codifying language. Yeah, it's like Unicode having 120 originally not being useful for Arabic or Cyrillic or, you know, Japanese, whatever. You can't just, it's a technology. It can't just be transplanted immediately from one culture to another. It has to have use in that culture and under those circumstances. Can you imagine being like, oh, these people are backwards because they don't use computers.

1:47:50And it's like, motherfucker, everything's left to right. Why is everything backwards? Yeah. Actually, you don't have the letter A in my language on your computer. So what am I supposed to do? Oh my God, have I, is this your, this is your thing? The Arabic printing press to the Unicode and languages. This is the thing. This is the. This is the thing. This is the unifying. Yeah, so Arabic would eventually find its way to fit in the printing press through various forms of simplification and technological innovation.

1:48:22And of course, they find their way to computers. But still, even in 2026, we are able to print Arabic pretty well on computers. But we still don't have a cohesive standard to replicate that beautiful Kushida justification that has existed for thousands of years. Understandably, it's stylistic, but we have English justification. And this is in part because this actually isn't technically a problem that Unicode can solve. Because the Kushida isn't a character.

1:48:53It is a ligature that needs to be stretched based on the front end. How long is left on the page? And that could be anywhere. Exactly. And more importantly, like there were some workarounds where it's like, oh, why don't you just include a Kushida as a character, like a space, right? A special character. Except that completely fucks up search. Because now. Oh. Right. Yeah. So the long bismillah we've been seeing is a sort of unique case where it's like, let's just store basically like the PNG of that image ostensibly.

1:49:25But in a perfect world, a system should be able to do that with regular text. We should be able to, in the year 2026, stylize text better than, you think as advanced as computers are, you know, we don't have a solution to this. And that's in part because, you know, when you leave this problem up to everyone, because Unicode can't be the ones to solve it, it kind of falls by the wayside. One of my favorite weird fun facts. In the year 2000, there was one browser who did implement it, actually. Ah. And it was Internet Explorer.

1:49:56What? As LR writes, for one brief weird browser quarter, Microsoft is the only software vendor on Earth that can justify Arabic correctly on a screen. What? You know what? I had no idea you knew Ball like that, Internet Explorer. Inshallah, you find on the Internet what you're exploring for. But of course, this was abandoned because, quote, the value was quietly dropped from the specification on the reasonable and perfectly circular grounds that only one browser had ever implemented it.

1:50:29So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the work of Unicode to render every single character has not fully undone the Tower of Babel. Aside from many problems within its scope, there are, it turns out, problems outside the domain, like the Kushida. But of course, the Internet is still young, and while the attempt to codify the world may feel like, at times, trying to organize every grain of sand on a beach, you know, while the problem may seem endlessly complex, does that not also make it endlessly interesting, right?

1:51:02And in spite of the differences between the languages, I do find the commonalities really beautiful, right? The devil is in the details, but so is the complex beauty. And one of my favorite things from all of this is just that as different as these languages are, as much as the world wants our cultures to feel diametrically opposed, at the end of the day, we all just want to make text look pretty. You know, we want the words on our screen to feel like how they feel in our heart,

1:51:33and I think that rules, and we should do our best to make that possible.

1:51:38Unicode. I loved it. I love that whole topic. Not a standing ovation, though. Just a seated one. That's fine. That's fine. Wasn't hoping for a standing ovation. I can't. My back hurts. I can't stand up. And Caroline. My back hurts, and I can't stand up. Cool, cool. Yeah.

1:51:55That was so great. That was amazing. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I had such a blast. Like, every little new bit was just another lovely interlude.

1:52:08Oh, this exclusion zone has been uninhabited by humans for so long. It's full of reviews. But you know what thrives here?

1:52:17The reviews have taken over. Oh, my God. The review life is flourishing here. This review. Ah, fuck. I stepped on the landmine. God damn it. I'll go see the next one.

1:52:30This review comes from Dizzy Lizzy Lilibet, who says, 10 out of 10 recommend. Let's learn everything has everything. You get infectious enthusiasm, genuine care for putting out a quality podcast, and a crew you can't help but adore. Tom, Caroline, and Dr. Ella are about to give you so many interesting topics to talk about with your friends, neighbors, strangers on the street. This is about to be your new favorite podcast. Together, we are all well on our way to learning everything. Nice. LLE crew, you are all genuinely so lovely and wonderful. I hope you know how adored, respected, and valued you are, parentheses, and not just by

1:53:04Tom's dad. Oh, I love to be adored. Thank you. Thank you, Lizzy. That was a joke. And I believed it at the same time. Anyway, are there any plugs and shoutouts? Oh, thank you, everyone, for coming to the shows that I've been screaming about for forever. I really appreciate it. I will shut up, but I appreciate it, and it was good. But there's still some shows you could... Actually, no, they're close to sold out. Are they both sold out? I don't know yet. Let's check. We've got to check the second one.

1:53:35I want to shout out UK listeners. I know you've been struggling for merch stuff, and Maximum Fun has been fighting for so long, but I believe you can now get merch in the UK, finally. So shouts out to the Maximum Fun folks for dealing with all of that. My favorite of our merch is the bee dad hat with the lovely little... The green with the lovely little yellow bee on. There's three tickets left. Wow, three tickets. God. Should I shout out to us? You can find out all of the details about this show, including the Discord server link over at letsleneverything.com, where I would like to know your favorite exclusion zone.

1:54:12Oh, yeah. I want to find some cool ones. That seems like a bad idea. There's got to be... I'd love to know your favorite disaster that has happened that means humans can't live there anymore. That's what it sounds like. I'm sure there are some interesting ones I've missed, so I would like to hear. I have clearly skipped so much of Unicode. Please let me know the Unicode oddities, what languages you're amazed are there. Write us a nice message in Cuneiform. Why not? And send it over Discord, because you can. Let's see if we can figure it out.

Episode summary and wrap up

1:54:43This episode, we have learnt about exclusion zones, the geographical areas where certain things are prohibited. We talked about Chernobyl, some of the animals that are still in that exclusion zone, including Schowalski's horse. Spelt with a P and an R. Yeah. Just so you know, if anyone's trying to Google it, nothing like how it sounds. Nothing like it. 10% of the population that exists in the wild are in the exclusion zone, which is super cool. We talked about tree frogs, we talked about trees, we talked about swallows, we talked

1:55:14about fungi, we talked about all sorts of good stuff in Chernobyl. Yay! We talked about the Korean Demilitarized Zone and the 6,000 species that live there, including several types of cool crane. And we talked about the United Nations Buffer Zone. I truly don't envy you summarizing this, Caroline, because I feel like this was so... The summary was nuanced. Yeah!

1:55:42We have also tried to talk about every character in Unicode, or given it a good crack at least. We talked about the precursor, which was ASCII. We talked about how it's not a perfect system, and some of the quirks that come with Unicode as well, including an infamous character, the Bismillah, or U plus FDFD. We talked about how Arabic as a language has some really beautiful quirks, including the Kashida, and how that presents some limitations not only to Unicode, but also to the printing

1:56:14press, and all of the problems that are both within and outside of the scope of Unicode that really we should be able to sort out in the year of our Lord, 2026. And you can join us next time, where we will learn about everything!

1:56:35Let's Learn Everything is a Maximum Fun podcast, hosted and produced by Ella Hubber, Tom Lump, and Caroline Roper, with editing and music by the wonderful and talented Tom Lump. We have a Jumbotron!

1:56:54Why did I sound so sad about that? No! It's exciting!

1:56:59I know, listen, Ella, I know you were hoping for a switch too, but a Jumbotron's pretty good, you gotta admit. A Jumbotron's nice! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is specifically from Wall. Is this the wall from Discord, and that shows up on our livestream? This is our wall! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's funny. That's so sweet! This is especially to Ella Louise O.V. Hubber, PhD. Wow, they got all my names! Yeah, I didn't know it! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to thank all three of you for your work. You have brought so much happiness and knowledge to our lives.

1:57:31I hope this small contribution helps Ella at least a little bit to rebuild her home. And if Ella says something about not wanting help with what happened, tell her to shut up. I wanted to increase my support anyway, Wall. Oh no, now I'm crying.

1:57:47Oh! Oh dear. That's very sweet. Thank you so much, Wall, for such a kind message. Oh no, I'm very emotional at the moment, guys. Yeah, yeah.

1:57:59Oh, thank you, Wall. Thanks, y'all. These are really happy tears. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're very appreciative. Everyone's just been so good. And that's actually making me more emotional than the bad stuff that's happened. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Wall. If you want to do a jumbo truck... I don't know!

1:58:20That's no fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.