Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern,
Do you unwrap your Christmas gifts on the 24th or 25th? Either way I hope your festive season purchases arrived on time. Santa is currently experiencing delays due to global supply chain bottlenecks caused by the pandemic.
In the news: Exploding ATMs and Covid toll
- For the first time, the Federal Statistical Office has included Covid-19 as a cause of deathExternal link in its official tally of deaths in Switzerland. In March 2020 alone, Covid-19 was the main cause of death in 10% of men who died and in 6% of women. Not surprisingly 95% of people who died of Covid-19 were aged 65 or older.
- It is apparently illegal to deliberately try to infect yourself with Covid-19. Public broadcaster RTS reports that those who do so – ostensibly to procure a Covid certificate after recovery – risk up to five years in prisonExternal link.
- Did you know that 24 ATMs have been blown up by thieves this year to get their hands on the cash? It appears to be a growing trend and for the first time a culprit has been sentenced for the crime.
Culture corner: Tricky fonts and exasperated designers
Printing type design has allowed us to have a consistent style for characters in the alphabet. Designers of new fonts in the Latin script can get away with tweaking just 26 upper case letters.
Those working on other scripts are not so lucky. Take the Chinese characters (Hanzi), for example. There are 6,763 commonly used characters and tens of thousands for more elaborate sets. This means that designing a new font in Hanzi can take years. Until now.
Swiss researchers have developed a machine learning algorithmExternal link to generate Chinese Hanzi as images.
“The idea was, that to design new fonts, someone would only need to design a series of basic components and then they could be assembled automatically to form all of the character sets,” said scientist Mathieu Salzmann. “We then designed algorithms to do the second part – to generate different characters based on these components.”
The goal is to automatically generate Chinese typefaces based on less than 500 Hanzi inputs.
Christmas fun: Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it Santa?
Have you visited a Christmas market yet? They bring a festive atmosphere to the season even if you see the same stalls over and over again.
But innovation is not dead yet. The Christmas market in Montreux is making waves on social mediaExternal link thanks to an ingenious flying Santa’s sled whizzing over Lake Geneva.
Happy holidays everyone!
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