Everyday Scientist

which way, Dick?

PRL is trying to be all accepting-of-other-cultures. Pfsssh! If you can’t spell your name with normal letters, then you should change your name. If my name were a little drawing of a house or something, I would change it to Fred or George or William or Samuel (!) or Robert or something more … you know … waspy. I wonder how PRL would find another way to bend over if the artist formerly known as Prince decided to write a scientific article. I think PRL has already gone too far allowing accents in names: how am I supposed to remember which way the little hat blows on those crazy names?

In all seriousness, I think that this is a really good idea: inconsistent or degenerate English spellings cause quite a bit of confusion. And English hegemony can’t last forever, and there’s no reason to act like it will! But I wonder if scholarly search engines (ISI, SciFinder, Google Scholar, etc.) will begin to index by the true/original spelling. I know that SciFinder let’s you find alternative spellings of a last name, but what if I just want to search for 汉字 and only 汉字? I dunno, there’s probably a real solution out there somewhere (RFIDs, anyone?). Until then, I think PRL has a good idea.