IRC-Galleria

Just at this moment, my sister sends me a postcard from Oberlin, where she's going to college. It's written in pencil, with small symbols - it's in Chinese.

Joan is nine years younger than I am, and studied physics, too. having me as her older brother was tough on her. She was always looking for something I couldn't do, and was secretly taking Chinese.

Well, I didn't know any Chinese, but one thing I'm good at is spending an infinite amount of time solving a puzzle. The next weekend I took the card with me to Albuquerque. Arlene showed me how to look up the symbols. You have to start in the back of the dictionary with the right category and count the number of strokes. Then you go into the main part of the dictionary. It turns out each symbol has several possible meanings, and you have to put several symbols together before you can understand it.

With great patience I worked everything out. Joan was saying things like, "I had a good time today." There was only one sentence I couldn't figure out. It said, "Yesterday we celebrated mountain-forming day" - obviously an error. (It turned out they did have some crazy thing called "Mountain-forming Day" at Oberlin, and I had translated it right!)

So it was trivial things like you'd expect to have on a postcard, but I knew from the situation that Joan was trying to floor me by sending Chinese.

I looked back and forth through the art book and picked out four symbols which would go well together. Then I practiced each one, over and over. I had a big pad of paper, and I would make fifty of each one, until I got it just right.

When I had accidentally made one good example of each symbol, I saved them. Arlene approved, and we glued the four of them end to end, one on top of the other. Then we put a little piece of wood on each end, so you could hang it up on the wall. I took a picture of my masterpiece with Nick Metropolis's camera, rolled up the scroll, put it in a tube, and sent it to Joan.

So she gets it. She unrolls it, and she can't read it. It looks to her as if I simply made four characters, one right after the other, on the scroll. She takes it to her teacher.

The first thing he says is, "This is written rather well! Did you do this?"

"Uh, no. What does it say?"

"Elder brother also speaks."

I'm a real bastard - I would never let my little sister score one on me.

--
Richard P. Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?