I notice that the web page of this article is beautifully justified to two sides instead of left alignment, and there is hyphen in breaking lines. Does anyone know how to achieve this in web page? text-align: justify seems to produce inferior results than this page, e.g. rivers in text.
Yes, it's a pain to write math related manuscripts.
Normal texts are a simple character list, so they are easy to input. Math equations are much more complex, with more symbols, 2D placement. So we need to 'mark up' the normal texts to provide enough information for a proper math equation.
Current machine learning can help translate hand-written equations into the one computer can understand, I think this can help a lot. However, if we want to use keyboard only, it still seems very hard to design a system that can input math as smooth as texts without 'mark up' or GUI.
there are 90 million party members among 1.4 billion people. I don't know how to count indirect party members. But I don't think that is near 1/4, that's too exagerating
1.4 may not be accurate, but nearly every child is educated. 9-year compulsory education is the lowest standard across the country. The number fighting for survival is very small compared to the whole population (the recent number is 20 million). Now the government's poverty line is <400$ annual income, and the gov has the goal to eliminate this absolute poverty in 2020.
The current path is different from the last 30 years, but Deng's reform has never changed.
In some area, censorship is more strict (this has to do with complicated political reasons), but in more areas such as science, technology, trade, and finance, China is becoming more and more open to the world.
Things may seem that Chinese are alienating themselves, but that is not true. More and more people go abroad every year. And although there is the wall, actually people know what happens outside China.
Your question is insightful.
I think a major reason that China once fell so low is the Qing dynasty secluded itself from the outside world, and didn't catch up with the industrial revolution.
So in 18xx-19xx, China was still an agricultural civilization and western countries have stepped into modern industrial form. And we know as to production efficiency, (non-modern) agriculture vs industry is like fist vs bombs.
Besides, before 1911, China was still imperial, most people were not liberated and educated, so they can not effectively participate in industrial production (In some sense, being uneducated, they were not useful people).
Now with 1.4 billion educated people, it's no wonder China is coming back to its normal place. And I believe today is not the end of China's rise, the Chinese people can do better as long as they continue working hard, especially on science and technology.
It seems that book authors make almost no money across the world in this era (especially they put a lot of efforts into writing a book), I feel pathetic
When I read "You could say that PHP is a programmer-producing language, whereas most other languages are programmer-consuming." I laughed out, it's interesting.