> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters).

Let's put aside the fact that this guy just equated "Chinese" with "Mandarin". This claim he's making suggests his entire measurement mechanism is broken.

Simplified Chinese is more "efficient" in terms of Traditional Chinese only in that it requires fewer strokes to draw each character. But the author spent quite some time harping on information. Given that Simplified and Traditional chinese have (for purposes of discussion here) identical characters, just represented differently, from an information standpoint they are exactly the same. Information means something, and it is not number of pixels.

I know this is outside the topic of the article, but it's worth mentioning that many Chinese scholars think Simplified Chinese has been a disaster. Traditional Chinese characters have strong visual relationships to one another depending on how they both sound, or whether they have similar meanings, or whether they were linguistically derived from the same historical source. This assists in memorizing them: a chinese person might come across some character she doesn't know but looks like a set of other characters, and can make a good guess as to what it actually is based on its relationship to them and its context in the sentence. The designers of Simplified Chinese broke a very large number of these rules: similarity didn't matter any more, just reduction in stroke count. As a result, Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn.