[SeanLuke]

I'm sorry, but information means something, and it does not equate to number of strokes. A character can have millions of strokes and still convey the same information as a character with a single stroke.

There are other measures of "efficiency" of course. If the author wanted to argue for how long it took to write a sentence, then sure, Simplified is definitely more "efficient" than Traditional in this context. On the other hand, it's pretty odd to be defining languages in terms of written form rather than their spoken form. (And I'm not sure why Cantonese would be more efficient than Simplified Mandarin as Cantonese is normally written using traditional glyphs.)

Anyway, the author inserted information into this discussion. And if efficiency is in terms of information, then this pixel argument doesn't hold water.

As to the difficulty of simplified chinese: this is a well studied topic with a lot of scholarly analysis. I am pretty sure the literature as a whole strongly disagrees with your claim.

[bllguo]

uh, what? once we're talking about simplified vs. traditional it should already be clear that the discussion is about the languages in terms of written form? in fact the entire article makes clear that it is about written language.

Not using "information" in a scientifically proper way is a fine criticism, I just don't understand why you seem to think the author did not define "efficiency" when it is one of the first points made..

re: simplified chinese, i guess im bad at searching? care to provide a review paper?