Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1926: Read the manuscript
“When you are busy, you can read books piecemeal. When the time comes, flowers will bloom in full bloom.” Zhou Zhi has discovered that Mai Xiaomiao’s knowledge of Chinese characters is not systematic and she does not recognize some rare characters, so he teaches her to recognize characters first.

"Shu, Hua, Jin, I always confuse these three words." Mai Xiaomiao stuck out his tongue and said honestly: "I don't recognize Hua and Qi even when they are written like this."

"Well, Chinese calligraphy has existed for thousands of years. From the perspective of calligraphy theory, the writing styles that appeared in later generations can use the structure of previous writing styles. This led to the writing method of regular script being inherited from bronze inscriptions, seal scripts, and official scripts, so there are often more than ten ways to write a character."

“So many?” Mai Xiaomiao was shocked.

"That's not a lot." Zhou Zhi's interest in popular science came back: "The Palace Museum has an important collection called the Kangxi Longevity Character Zun. It was made by Jingde for Emperor Kangxi's 60th birthday in the 52nd year of Kangxi's reign. There are two circles on the lips, with 77 characters per circle, one circle on the sides, with 48 characters, seventy-three circles on the abdomen, with 130 characters per circle, and one circle on the sides of the feet, with 48 characters. The total is..."

"Exactly ten thousand words!" Mai Xiaomiao has a strong mental arithmetic ability and he recited them all at once.

"Well, these ten thousand characters are all longevity characters. After our software recognized them, we found that these ten thousand longevity characters actually contain a thousand combinations of glyphs, and each glyph was written ten times."

"How is that possible? Even a thousand is terrifying!" Mai Xiaomiao was speechless. "Theoretically, it's impossible to create so many glyphs for one word! Isn't this too much invalid redundancy?!"

"Your idea is to consider the value of words from the perspective of information carriers." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "But Chinese characters are different. In addition to their value as information carriers, they also have unique aesthetic value."

Zhou Zhi pulled out a thick album from the wall and turned to a page: "Here, this is the great master."

"Of course, as you said, there can't be so many characters for longevity in Chinese characters, but this doesn't bother the craftsmen." Zhou Zhi said, "Some of these characters were actually created by the craftsmen themselves. In addition to using various variations of the seal script for longevity, they also used bird and insect seal script, tadpole script, stone drum script, bronze script, and even mountains, rivers, clouds, wind, rain, thunder and lightning, and the stars and the eight trigrams to turn them into longevity characters."

"In addition, there is another part that uses auspicious patterns and even uses a combination of characters such as 'wan' and 'qianqiu' to form the image of the character 'shou'."

"Ancient Chinese characters originally had pictographic and ideographic characters. This combination did not violate the rules of word formation. Eventually, the ancients racked their brains to construct these 1,000 kinds of longevity characters."

"Of course, this is just a special case. Chinese calligraphy is like literature. 'Literature is like looking at a mountain and does not like flatness.' It focuses on changes and hates repetition. Therefore, this practice of 'one word with multiple forms' is actually to avoid repetition in calligraphy creation."

"For example, if there are several flower characters in a calligraphy work, they can be written in different structures to avoid monotonous repetition and make the work richer as a whole."

"This 'backup' approach is also used in literary genres. Generally, for a level tone word, you can always find a rising tone word to express the same meaning, such as run and run, swim and swim, high and up, wide and wide, etc. This ability is often needed in poetry and parallel prose, in order to take care of the beauty of rhyme."

“It’s so complicated.” Mai Xiaomiao shook his head.

"It's not that complicated, is it? This is a unique advantage of our Chinese language, and it's also a luxury unique to our Chinese nation." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "Previous scholars believed that this was an ancient primitiveness, but after my research, I found that it was an advanced nature. In terms of unit information density, Chinese characters are undoubtedly the largest, and the greater the density, the less information length we can use to carry more information content. This is very obvious in the information age, and we can save more space and transmission time."

"It's just that it takes a lot of time to master such a text with high information density. So when we talk about which nation values ​​knowledge the most, we can't just look at how many college students there are. We should look at the proportion of the country's financial investment in education and the proportion of each family's expenditure on education. In addition, the type of written language used seems to be a proof. Our nation started a little late, but if this trend continues, in another 20 years, we will have almost 100 college students per capita." Mai Xiaomiao was a little confused by what Zhou Zhi said: "Although I think you are a little biased, I can't argue with you, so I'll just assume you are right."

Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "Let's talk about this on the wall. This is a literary form called couplets. The two sentences mean that when you have a lot of things to do, don't forget to read and study. Even if you use your spare time to learn a little bit in an unsystematic way, it will still be beneficial."

"As long as the accumulation is in place, it can bloom into beautiful flowers just like flowers in season."

"Is that so... Is this how you learned all this messy knowledge?" Mai Xiaomiao tilted her head and looked at Zhou Zhi, as if there was an object worthy of serious scientific research in front of her.

"It's mainly because my interests are too diverse. I'm not as focused as you are on one thing." Zhou Zhi shook his head with a wry smile, took out a small stick from a paper box on the small stool under the couplet, lit it, and inserted it into the Yaobian green glaze string pattern earthenware bowl.

The room was suddenly filled with a faint fragrance.

"Your working environment is simply enjoyable." Mai Xiaomiao sighed, "It's just that the preparations beforehand are a bit of a waste of time."

Zhou Zhi added water to the ceramic plate on the table, added charcoal to the stove, poured a bottle of Zhuo Shi Yi wine he had brought upstairs into the copper stove to heat it up, and took out some melon seeds and peanuts from the ceramic jar on the bookshelf and placed them on the stove, preparing to start making tea around the stove.

"The night is long, so I can work and have fun at the same time." Zhou Zhi shook out some things from several paper jars on the wall: "This is rose, this is longan pulp, this is mulberry, this is raisin..."

He threw the ingredients into the rice wine in the copper pot, and then added a piece of yellow rock sugar: "Okay, let's get down to work! If you're hungry or tired, come over and take a rest!"

Mai Xiaomiao could already smell the floral and fruity aroma wafting from the copper kettle, blending with the aroma of the incense sticks. She couldn't help but feel a sweet feeling in her heart: "I'm afraid that if I work like this, I won't even notice how tired I am!"

6◇9◇Book◇Bar

Tonight's work is actually quite simple. It is to create a new work group in the office system and at the same time to inspect and approve the resources that have been allocated to the laboratory.

“You don’t need to build this manually.” Mai Xiaomiao looked over and saw Zhou Zhi typing on the keyboard. He pushed Zhou Zhi away with his chair and said, “There is code for building a workgroup in the open source area. Just copy it and use it…”

Damn, how do you, a new employee, know all this? Zhou Zhi secretly complained to himself. Although this hacker did not cause any damage to the group, it seemed that he knew a lot of things.

Sure enough, after the code was moved over, the work group was automatically set up. The next step was to make fine adjustments according to the work structure and then fill it with people based on the personnel list. It was easy and enjoyable.

As a result, what Zhou Zhi expected to be a whole night's work was completed in just over half an hour thanks to Mai Xiaomiao's help. Zhou Zhi looked at Mai Xiaomiao and asked, "What's next?"

“Next…” Mai Xiaomiao tapped his chin: “Aren’t you writing a book? As for me… can you show me the manuscript of your novel? I’m anxiously waiting for it to be serialized!”