[HN Gopher] U+237C [?] Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
___________________________________________________________________
U+237C [?] Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
Author : cbzbc
Score : 592 points
Date : 2022-04-13 10:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ionathan.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (ionathan.ch)
| kromem wrote:
| It looks like someone asked for a glyph that would look like a
| chart with a downward trending zigzag, someone ended up getting
| the instructions and drew this thing, and the request proceeded
| bunched with other requests through the process with no one
| adequately challenging that the glyph really looks like what it's
| supposed to look like.
|
| And yeah, actually a downward zig zag on a x/y plot glyph would
| be useful to have.
|
| Like "chart with downwards trend" added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010,
| 25 years after "right angle with downward zig zag" was proposed
| and included.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2606/
|
| Now we have an XKCD for this.
| baruchel wrote:
| First thought was about Feynman diagrams :-(
| bamboozled wrote:
| These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an
| alien species or something.
|
| How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin?
|
| _I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a
| "descriptive name" when collating the symbols for the STIX
| project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the
| symbol in use.) [...] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed
| long before either AFII or the STIX project were formed. [...] I
| once asked Charles Goldfarb what the source of these entities
| was, but remember that he didn't have a definitive answer._
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I assumed W.A.S.T.E. were behind them.
|
| (Might need to add this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49)
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Notably, it appears that anyone could register a glyph with
| the AFII for a fee of 5$ to 50$ (about 8.60$ to 86$, accounting
| for inflation). Even if the International Glyph Register can be
| found, it likely merely contains another table with the glyph,
| the indentifier, and the short description. To know its origins
| would require the original registration request that added the
| character, but it's unlikely that such old documents from a
| now-defunct non-profit organization in the 90s would have been
| kept or digitized.
|
| Could be any random kid who found out about this and wanted the
| cool symbol they made up registered.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| In some sense, you can still do! The Ideographic Variation
| Database [1] essentially allows a definition of new CJK
| ideograph [sic] as a glyphic subset of existing characters,
| with a possible processing fee.
|
| [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from
| an alien species or something.
|
| I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing
| icon sets in play across different media.
|
| These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty
| intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing
| tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say
| the round headed person with their hand held up to say stop it
| was the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the
| heavens. Because of how the icons were used and not used these
| optimized errors were actually sitting around so long that
| nobody had examples of the original icons although one could
| guess because in some cases we had similar ones in other
| projects that had not been optimized.
|
| So maybe a similar thing would be the source of these weird
| alien entities.
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| buescher wrote:
| >star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens
|
| Could someone please feed that to DALL-E?
| kingcharles wrote:
| Every post and Tweet on the Net now includes this exact
| reply by someone.
|
| What monster hath we unleashed?
| [deleted]
| tclancy wrote:
| >the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the
| heavens
|
| That sounds like a useful reaction/ response these days.
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| imglorp wrote:
| Well, Klingon [edit, was proposed] for Unicode. Maybe someone
| imported some 70s scifi orthography, just because.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Klingon made it into Unicode.
|
| No it did not. Klingon was originally proposed in 1997 and
| rejected in 2001. A second proposal was made in 2016 with
| more optimistic noises. But AFAIK it has yet to be
| accepted.
|
| It is also, like Tengwar and Cirth (which AFAIK remain
| unincluded even though they are on the BMP roadmap), held
| back on IP grounds. To my knowledge, the IP issues remain
| fully unresolved.
|
| Klingon is included in the ConScript registry, but that is
| unrelated to unicode itself, it performs ad-hoc and non-
| standard allocations in private use areas.
| teddyh wrote:
| ConScript seems to have been semi-replaced by the Under-
| ConScript:
|
| https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Not yet. Even the 2021 request [1] to remove Klingon from
| the Not The Roadmap list [2] is in hiatus.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/
|
| [2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Did it? It was proposed a few times; did the last proposal
| actually land?
| bamboozled wrote:
| I would've thought they'd have a table of every icon and a
| description or something, maybe at the time it was never
| taken very seriously or likely to take off as it did, so
| people didn't bother. Like IPv4...
| dirtyid wrote:
| I remember convincing friend to build unicode pokedex extension
| that collected all the unicode symbol he was exposed to via
| cansual web browsing. Never followed up but I think it'd be
| neat, or something along the lines of rare unicode browser
| bingo.
| dicytea wrote:
| Something similar exists in JIS called You Ling Wen Zi (ghost
| characters), which refers to kanji of mysterious origin with no
| real-world usage that somehow made its way into the JIS
| character set. After some investigation, most of them turns out
| to be mistranscriptions of kanji from old historical materials.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_.
| ..
|
| _Due to this thorough investigation, the committee was able
| to pare down the number of kanji for which the source cannot
| be confidently explained to twelve, shown on the adjacent
| table. Of these, it is conjectured that several glyphs came
| about due to copying errors. In particular, Shi was probably
| created when printers tried to create by cutting and pasting
| Shan and Nu together. A shadow from that process was
| misinterpreted as a line, resulting in Shi (a picture of
| this can be found in the Joyo kanji jiten)._
| rcarmo wrote:
| I suspect there's an entire alien alphabet (like Marain, for
| instance) in there someplace. There was a proposal to stuff
| Klingon into the Private Use Area, at least...
| speed_spread wrote:
| If you're willing to use a discontinuous subset you could
| probably find close enough glyphs to make a full Marain.
| Ordering would be messed up and require a lookup table
| though.
| grandchild wrote:
| While I absolutely enjoyed the historical research on such a
| miniscule mystery, I also liked how it took me two clicks from
| the front page of HN into an occult eBook about "khaos magick".
|
| The things people write about...
| aharris6 wrote:
| According to today's xkcd, this symbol means "Larry Potter"
|
| https://xkcd.com/2606
| paledot wrote:
| Evidently Randall Munroe reads HN, to the surprise of no one.
| dskloet wrote:
| From the title I thought this was about some Uranium isotope.
| skykooler wrote:
| U-237 exists and has a half-life of about six days; I can't
| think of a valid modifier that would add that C on the end,
| though. (Unless you're talking about a very specific isotopic
| composition of uranium methanide, I guess.)
| [deleted]
| em-bee wrote:
| i guess randall got inspired by this discussion:
| https://xkcd.com/2606/
| cheschire wrote:
| The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward
| trend line on a graph.
|
| I'm guessing the person who implemented it got this exact
| requirement wording in the Unicode definition and nothing else,
| didn't make the logical connection, and just implemented it as
| close to literally as they could.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a
| downward trend line on a graph._
|
| Or a lightning bolt through a window (with only the bottom-left
| of the window frame being visible).
| Jarmsy wrote:
| There's already U+1F4C9 for that though.
| scbrg wrote:
| If by "already" you mean "eight years later" :)
|
| [?] (U+237C) is in Unicode 3.2 (from 2002), (U+1F4C9) is from
| Unicode 6.0 (from 2010).
|
| [edit]: HN ate my 1F4C9 glyph. Use your imagination :)
| mkl wrote:
| https://codepoints.net/U+1F4C9 CHART WITH DOWNWARDS TREND
| donkeyd wrote:
| The update under the article has an explanation of where the
| name probably came from:
|
| > I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it
| a "descriptive name" when collating the symbols for the STIX
| project.
|
| If I understand this correctly in the context, this person
| named the glyph based on what it looked like. So it wasn't the
| other way around.
| mkl wrote:
| It's possible both events happened. The downward trend line
| character certainly seems like something people might have
| wanted.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| But if I read the article correctly, this glyph comes from a
| set of math symbols. I don't think "stock goes down" was ever
| used in any mathematical script.
| yreg wrote:
| I generally (perhaps naively) think that going forward knowledge
| loss won't be much of an issue compared to our history.
|
| Surely the archeologists of the future won't have to wonder what
| some tool from our times was used for or what some symbol we
| currently use means... They will have Wikipedia and archive.org
| and whatnot!
|
| But that fantasy is not compatible with reality where we are
| already unable to find out what is the purpose of some characters
| in Unicode.
| chadlavi wrote:
| On the contrary: books might survive total societal collapse,
| but electronics don't.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Even digital storage is not permanent. Important things will be
| copied and preserved, but I imagine at some point so many of
| the relics of everyday life will be deleted or deteriorate at
| some point in the far future, such as this very comment
| tsol wrote:
| Electronics become unusuable quickly, though. We can find stone
| tablets and clay pottery, but 10k years from now will they be
| able to find hard drives and extract useful data? Seems like it
| can easily go in the opposite direction
| berkes wrote:
| That presumes humans can access our (electronic) media and
| understand it, in some 8.000 years or further.
|
| There's no saying that there'll be a society capable of reading
| bits and bytes by then. Not just collapsed society -they'll
| hardly be interested in reading a random discussion on an
| orange forum for a niche group that lived 8000 years ago- but
| maybe even societies that are vastly technical superior to our
| own but cannot fathom what things meant 8 millenia back. I mean
| we have texts from some 600 years ago, that we can read, but
| cannot understand (e.g. Rohonc Codex). Eventhough our
| technology and knowledge is far superior to when it was
| written.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It will probably be even worse in the future, given that
| internet subgroups form their own language dialects as a kind
| of shibboleth.
|
| "Why do people in this group of wall drivers show off their
| wedding bands?"
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| [?]
| slowmotiony wrote:
| I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed
| Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up
| unicode characters and upload pirated games and movies there to
| share with each other. The only way to open those directories was
| to specifically type the exact path in unicode, simply double
| clicking on the folder in filezilla or windows explorer resulted
| in a error. Sometimes the admins themselves couldn't delete them
| and just left them there. Good times.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all
| us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and
| thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the
| beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.
| bfuller wrote:
| i was 13 when my public upload folder started getting messed
| with, sad day
| vletal wrote:
| I do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make
| sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public
| unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set
| of credentials suffice?
| jorvi wrote:
| Sometimes people should be able to do nice things without
| it getting abused, no?
|
| In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have
| something called a 'buurtbieb' aka a 'neighborhood
| libraries', which is a weatherproof cabinet where people
| can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood
| can borrow.
|
| Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet
| to store candy, but why would you?
| jumpkick wrote:
| We have these throughout many neighborhoods in my city in
| central Florida, USA. We're a college town so I just
| assumed it was somehow connected to that. Neat that it's
| an international thing!
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Munich, Germany has them as well
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| In the UK these are commonly set up inside old unused
| telephone boxes - you can find them in many
| villages/towns, e.g.:
| https://nothingintherulebook.com/2018/11/03/british-
| phone-bo...
| neutronicus wrote:
| Here in Baltimore, MD, too, although the focus is mostly
| on kids books
| evandrofisico wrote:
| Here in Brazil we have those on bus stops.
| phyzome wrote:
| Usually called Little Free Libraries in the US.
|
| (The name is a _little_ weird, because regular libraries
| are also free...)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Yeah, but if you take a book from a LFL, you own it. With
| a public library, you merely borrowed it.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Obligatory "Free as in beer vs. free as in freedom"
| comment. I have pulled stuff out of small community
| bookshelves that would never have seen their chance in a
| "professional-run" public library, both bad and good.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I always took it to mean "no really this is free, take a
| book!"
| notreallyserio wrote:
| FWIW "Little Free Library" is a trademark and its owners
| have been aggressive in its defense. I don't know what
| folks should use as a generic name.
| Beldin wrote:
| Buurtbieb - in English, roughly pronounced as b-eew-rt-
| beep.
|
| It's a literal translation of "neighbourhood library", it
| alliterates, and it sounds cute. (Keep the "beep" part
| short for that).
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems bizarre to me that someone could trademark such
| a straightforwardly descriptive name.
| hedora wrote:
| Just keep using it as a generic name. They've already
| lost the generification war. Are they seriously going to
| track down and sue neighborhood libraries?
|
| Good luck getting a jury to enforce the trademark.
| samatman wrote:
| The word "public" in "public library" is load bearing,
| you can't replace it with "regular", hence your
| confusion.
|
| Private libraries (mine for example) are not free, as in
| beer or otherwise.
| elliekelly wrote:
| There are two libraries near me that aren't free - they
| charge an annual "membership" fee. One even operates more
| like an old blockbuster when it comes to newly released
| books. They charge a daily rental fee! It's 25C/ a day, I
| believe.
| db48x wrote:
| True, though to be fair most people never get to use
| private libraries. Or they used a library at their
| University that was technically private, but that gave
| access to the public as well. Public libraries are
| ubiquitous and very normal, while private libraries are
| the exception.
| samatman wrote:
| It's a normal elision, yes, we all picture a public
| library when we say "library". But "free library" isn't
| redundant or weird, because "public" is a modifier of
| library, not a trait.
|
| People tend to call their personal library a "book
| collection" or the like, but it's a library, in just the
| same way that a Little Free Library is.
|
| So most people who read have at least a small private
| library, whether they think of it in those terms or not.
| robonerd wrote:
| In America, public schools all have private libraries,
| reserved for attending students. (Maybe some operate as
| public libraries, but I've never seen nor heard of it.)
|
| Furthermore, public libraries are not necessarily free.
| In America they virtually are all; fees only for late
| returns. But this is not globally true; in some parts of
| the world, libraries open to the public charge a fee for
| checking out books, or even require a fee for entry.
| Arubis wrote:
| There's actually coordination around these things:
| https://littlefreelibrary.org/
| boredumb wrote:
| In Puerto Rico there are quite a few of these on the
| sidewalk and despite the rains they are generally always
| stocked with books. There are bars on everyone's windows
| and doors, but books piled up on the street.
| yawz wrote:
| Great to hear these little neighborhood libraries are
| international. We have them here where I live in
| Colorado, US.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Indeed. The zoning code for my town specifically calls
| them out (as allowed, with no permits necessary).
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Can confirm neighborhood libraries are a thing in
| Pittsburgh (USA).
| sodapopcan wrote:
| We have them in Toronto, ON. We call them LLLs or Little
| Lending Libraries. There are actually quite a lot of
| them.
| coldacid wrote:
| We have them out in the 905s too. I've seen quite a few
| of them here in Durham Region.
| chasd00 wrote:
| there's one down the street from me but instead of books
| it has canned food. It says "little free pantry" on it.
| It must have been around for a while because the
| neighborhood it's in has long sense been gentrified and
| is populated with very well-off residents vs the working
| poor that use to live there.
| username923409 wrote:
| I've also seen many of these at bus stations near
| Victoria, BC.
| mbeex wrote:
| I think, you don't get the full grasp of "early, friendly
| internet". Very few people do today. In my bubble -
| programming, for example, young people can't even imagine
| that there were times when you could focus on _things_
| instead of writing layers of security code around them.
| williamscales wrote:
| It's like how when I was a kid, nobody in our
| neighborhood locked their doors at night. There was no
| need. Until there was.
| hardware2win wrote:
| I think you make it sound as if that was good, but it was
| straight naive or irresponsible
| ysavir wrote:
| The GP is saying "I miss the days where I could easily
| exploit people" and the response was "I miss the days
| where we respected each other enough to not exploit each
| other". It wasn't naive or irresponsible, but reflective
| of a time with more trust, cooperation, and good
| intentions.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| mbeex wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| freedomben wrote:
| I think this takes the crown as the least-charitable
| interpretation of a comment that I've ever seen on HN.
| alex3305 wrote:
| Reminds me of a few years ago, when I accidentally
| exposed my Domoticz install to the internet without
| authentication. I've had missed something in my Nginx
| config with X-Forwarded-For headers. After about a week
| or something apparently a foreign visitor came by my
| install and decided to have some good fun. Turning my
| lights on/off at random times. It took me about 3 days to
| realize what have happened, but in the mean time he
| didn't just destroy my install and only mess with me.
| Which was really sweet, because nuking the system would
| be far easier than opening the webpage every night.
|
| That was a good and fun security lesson though and now I
| always check outside security with a mobile hotspot.
| FabHK wrote:
| "There are villages on the countryside that are safe and
| friendly, everyone knows each other, people don't even
| lock their door."
|
| - "Man, those idiots are naive and irresponsible."
| hardware2win wrote:
| 1 I didnt call any1 "idiot"
|
| 2 it s not like other people cant go to those places,
| thus it is kinda irresponsible
| adrusi wrote:
| That's like saying it's naive and irresponsible to
| gooutside without locking your front door when you live
| in a tiny remote village with 40 other people you've
| known for your whole life.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Not really, in your example theres no way any1 appears
| and even if he does, then your friends protect ur stuff
|
| Meanwhile internet aint remote village
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Point is it used to be
| stirfish wrote:
| Do you know of any tiny remote internet villages left?
| There has to be a few
| fasquoika wrote:
| https://tildeverse.org/
| 0des wrote:
| It was a different time
| beowulfey wrote:
| Sure, in today's world.
|
| That's like saying it would be naive and irresponsible
| for me to go outside without a life preserver today
| despite an unforeseen catastrophic global flood drowning
| the lands 10 years from now. It was a different world,
| with different expectations and frameworks.
| angrygoat wrote:
| It makes me sad to think of all those simple little
| services we used to run on *NIX machines, like `finger`
| and `whois`. You'd never want to disclose that
| information now, but at the time it was quite nice to be
| able to see if a friend or colleague was around with a
| simple network query.
| joquarky wrote:
| I remember when I could connect to nearly any server on
| the internet on port 25 and manually type the commands to
| send an email.
|
| .
| siriussidus wrote:
| You can still submit mail to virtually any mail server
| using telnet. I just tried it on Gmail for curiosity, and
| it did work!
| brimble wrote:
| I dunno. Everyone fairly-publicly shares their entire
| friend network and what they had for lunch, now, usually
| under their real name.
| p_l wrote:
| Some were open for uploads by design, in spirit of sharing
| things - essentially use the free space left after maib
| purpose to provide friendly mirrors for things like new
| projects etc. I recall using Archie to find copies of open
| source software at the ending edge of that era.
|
| Some also were used as submissions for projects, long
| before sites like sourceforge started. Especially since
| plonking a bigger source dump on newsgroups wasn't exactly
| well received.
| wanderer_ wrote:
| You guys should read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. It's
| a classic.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| The fact you believed it would last is proof we still can
| have nice things. :)
| totetsu wrote:
| Wearz were very nice things.
| egfx wrote:
| It's Warez.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| "wah-rez"
| raydev wrote:
| This reminds me, my friend and I were the only people we
| knew who'd even used the internet in the late 90s so no
| one was around to correct us, and 3 of the apparently
| incorrect pronounciations we had agreed on were:
|
| - war-ehz
|
| - gee-aw-cit-eez
|
| - jif
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Wait what? It's pronounced like the city in Mexico?
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I've heard a lot of people pronounce it like that, but
| I'm pretty sure that's not correct. It's clearly the
| English word "wares"[1] with the S replaced with a Z,
| similar to "hackz" and "cheatz", which were also common
| in that era. I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came
| from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the
| original word behind it.
|
| [1] A synonym for "goods" or "products". See
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wares
| jholman wrote:
| It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of
| thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing
| up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez"
| (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on
| how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc.
|
| Anyway, by 1990, in the piracy circles I distantly
| associated with, it was quite common to pronounce it like
| "juarez". Sort of semi-ironically, like, it's obviously
| the wrong pronunciation, but nonetheless everyone uses
| that pronunciation on purpose. So, what could be more
| correct than "the thing everyone does"?
|
| Of course, pronunciation only happens in meatspace (or at
| least it did back before MP3s and before YouTube and so
| on), and of course I'm talking about clusters of
| teenagers separated by thousands of km. We had "meetupz"
| or "meetz" in my city, which is how I know how "everyone"
| pronounced it... but it's certainly possible that in most
| cities/whatever there was some other pronunciation rule.
| blowski wrote:
| > It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type
| of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for
| dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like
| "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of
| instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez",
| "warez", etc.
|
| Citation needed there.
|
| I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where
| people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes
| would be described as "selling their wares". Changing the
| s to a z was an obvious step in 90s internet culture.
| jholman wrote:
| Okay, so my citation is, I was there, I was a (fringe)
| participant in _pre-internet_ piracy culture, starting in
| 1990.
|
| Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you
| and GP mean) available for download, including images
| (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files,
| and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for
| various art media created by users, such as .mods or
| ASCII art or poetry or whatever. Those various "goods"
| would never be all slopped together, they'd be divided
| into categories. And the category called "warez" would
| never, ever, have anything in it other than pirated
| software.
|
| I agree that the s-to-z thing is just classic hacker/leet
| culture, though it's not internet culture, because it
| predates the people in question having internet access.
| I'm saying that the "wares" that becomes "warez" is not
| "wares-as-in-goods", it's "wares-as-in-softwares". It's
| pluralized even though "software" is a non-count noun,
| because then it fits with "files", "images", and so on.
| And yes, ultimately the "-ware" in "software" is from the
| sense that you and GP are talking about; I'm saying that
| the etymology is not directly from there, because
| otherwise all the other kinds of pirated stuff would also
| be "warez", and it never, ever, was.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I too never seen "warez" used to refer to anything other
| than pirated software. You make a good point about the
| derivation; it probably is directly from "software".
| Adding a superfluous Z to the end of a plural mass noun
| was also a characteristic of l33tspeak, as I recall.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people
| seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original
| word behind it.
|
| I think it was explicitly luls a lot of the time. I saw
| "warez" spelled as "juar3z", etc, a lot.
| Doubtme wrote:
| oh my god rapidshare was hot garbage
| sen wrote:
| We did the same thing using the character for a non-breaking
| space, I think it was ALT+0160. It would sort last in the list,
| and just be an effectively-invisible entry unless you were
| really paying attention. Combined with an exploit we had to
| change users on the FTP servers behind most dialup ISPs hosting
| (the free couple Mb hosting you'd get with your dialup account
| that very few people cared about or used), meant we had pretty
| much unlimited file hosting, filling random families web
| hosting with hidden folders full of mp3s and warez.
| moogly wrote:
| _vti_cnf
| kingcharles wrote:
| You too, huh? This was my first foray into the "dark" side of
| the Internet as a kid, pre-Web, hanging out with pirates on IRC
| and get "hired" to go around the early 'Net and fuck up
| people's upload folders by creating hidden directories we could
| load with our group's warez. ^H^H^H^H
| paskozdilar wrote:
| I remember making secret directories on my Windows desktop by
| using a transparent icon and ALT+255 as filename. Good times.
| ale42 wrote:
| I was doing the same on MS-DOS, keeping "secret" files on a
| floppy disk with a directory having a name ending with an
| invisible Alt+255... it was even impossible to look inside it
| with the Windows 3.1 file manager.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| That exact memory crossed my mind as soon as I saw that U +
| <number> in the title :-D. Fun times indeed!
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be
| running out of IPv4 addresses?
|
| As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen,
| with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin
| colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential
| growth once you consider family of snowmen (different
| number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races
| of "children" and so on...).
| masklinn wrote:
| > it adds up.
|
| It really, _really_ doesn 't.
|
| According to UTS #51, as of unicode 14 (and its ~140000
| allocated codepoints) there are under 3500 codepoints
| classified as emoji.
|
| And do keep in mind that #, or (r), are classified as emoji.
|
| And incidentally, U+2654 "white chess king" () was in unicode
| 1.0. The moral panic around emoji is really tiring, it's
| absolute, utter nonsense, every single time.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think the current approach is to just invent yet another
| "meta layer" of characters and declare that this particular
| sequence of bytes/codepoints/surrogate pairs/grapheme
| clusters/extended grapheme clusters/zwj sequences/whatever else
| you can think of has a special meaning and does not behave like
| you think it does. See also Henri Sivonen's essay on unicode
| string length [1]
|
| So in a way, Unicode is already long past the time where you
| invent NATs and other hacks to buy you time with the scarcity
| problem.
|
| [1] https://hsivonen.fi/string-length/
| masklinn wrote:
| > Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be
| running out of IPv4 addresses?
|
| No. There are currently 144697 codepoints allocated, out of a
| possible 1.1 millions. And most updates allocate a few
| hundreds. The large allocations (in the thousands at a time)
| overwhelmingly concern large additions of CJK unified
| ideographs (see: 13.0 with 4969 out of 5930 new codepoints,
| 10.0 with 7494 / 8518, 8.0 with 5771/7716).
|
| There have been large additions of historical scripts (9.0
| added the entire Tangut script, 7.0 added 23 different scripts)
| but those occurrences have slowed down a lot.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| There is no reason to believe the current rate (about ~35,000
| over the period 2010--2020) to change rapidly, so we are
| probably safe for this century. You should be aware that emoji
| gender and skin color is encoded in character sequences and
| modifiers rather than atomic characters, exactly in order to
| avoid that exponential growth.
|
| And in the unlikely case that Unicode gets so many characters
| somehow, you can always extend it: http://ucsx.org/
| secret-noun wrote:
| > emoji gender and skin color is encoded in character
| sequences
|
| A good tool to see this broken down is https://unicode-x-
| ray.vercel.app/?t=%E2%9C%8C%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0... (edit: fixed
| url to use percent encoded emoji)
| jancsika wrote:
| Ok but what about all the cryptocurrency symbols? Those will
| probably accelerate the rate.
|
| Perhaps not by a significant or even measurable amount.
| Nonetheless, it's a great reason to start investigating a
| blockchain alternative to Unicode
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The successful bitcoin sign proposal [1] explicitly deals
| with such a criticism:
|
| > Will Unicode be flooded with symbols for many crypto-
| currencies?
|
| > Most other crypto-currencies have learned from the
| difficulty that a non-Unicode symbol causes for Bitcoin,
| and use a symbol already in Unicode. For instance, Dogecoin
| uses D, Ethereum uses Ks, Litecoin uses L, Namecoin uses N,
| Peercoin uses P and Primecoin uses Ps. Some, like Ripple,
| use Roman capital letters (XRP), mimicking ISO 4217
| currency codes.
|
| > While it is possible another crypto-currency will have a
| non-Unicode symbol that is extensively used in text, this
| is unlikely.
|
| I think this section was crucial for the eventual
| acceptance, because Unicode people do care (a lot) about
| long-term consequences of proposals.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf
| nybble41 wrote:
| It seem to me that this is something best handled with
| tag characters, like $?XBT + (U+E007F) = [?] (where the
| letters are from the tag block, U+E00xx). This mirrors
| one of the two systems for rendering national flags[0],
| just with a different starting codepoint, and can easily
| accommodate all the ISO 4217 currency codes and common
| unofficial extensions. If a system doesn't know how to
| render a particular glyph it can just fall back to
| showing the Roman capital letters.
|
| The downside of this approach is size: each tag codepoint
| (including the end marker) requires four bytes in UTF-8,
| plus two for $?, so the sequence above is 18 bytes long.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)#Cu
| rrent_u...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| That sounds interesting, but modern currency symbols are
| already fast-tracked anyway---they almost always get
| assigned in the next version of Unicode---and more than
| one currency symbols for given ISO 4217 code can exist so
| I don't think it would work.
| Jarmsie wrote:
| bayindirh wrote:
| Some of the glyphs you mention are combinatorial code points.
| i.e. they are multibyte characters combined to a single
| character. So you add a gender modifier and skin color modifier
| to change the appearance. You don't add multiple code points.
|
| It's your device rendering these 2-3 byte character sets as
| single icons/emojis.
| masklinn wrote:
| > So you add a gender modifier and skin color modifier to
| change the appearance. You don't add multiple code points.
|
| FWIW that's true for the skin colors (there are 5 fitzpatrick
| scale modifiers, U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF), but it's not true for
| the gender: the basic gendered characters (e.g. U+1F468
| "MAN", U+1F469 "WOMAN") were part of the original set
| "merged" from japanese emoji so the gender-neutral equivalent
| (e.g. U+1F9D1 "ADULT") was added as a separate codepoints.
| bayindirh wrote:
| According to this document [0], there are "Gender
| Alternates", which change the gender of an Emoji. Relevant
| part is starting near the end of Page 2.
|
| [0]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16181-gender-zwj-
| sequences....
| knome wrote:
| 1) there's only ~150k unicode values defined. If we assume a
| signed int for available space, we have 2,147,333,647 of
| 2,147,483,647 remaining. moreso if the int is unsigned. We're
| fine. 2) they use values that combine like ligatures to create
| the variants of values. there isn't a combinatorial explosion
| because color is a modifier value, and sex, and then the
| underlying symbol. It's not a unique symbol for each
| combination.
|
| IPv4 ran down because everything needs an IP to be on the net
| and there are more humans than available addresses, and more
| gear than humans.
|
| We don't need different characters per human, only to document
| existing languages and to account for the slow growth of modern
| hieroglyphs.
| masklinn wrote:
| > If we assume a signed int for available space
|
| While UTF8 was originally defined as able to encode 31 bits,
| because of the limitations of UTF-16 RFC 3629 explicitly
| restricted the unicode code-space to 21 bits (or about 1.1
| million codepoints).
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| > We don't need different characters per human
|
| Unicode NFTs here we come
| cygx wrote:
| _If we assume a signed int for available space_
|
| Note that as it is currently defined, the Unicode codespace
| ranges from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, with some reserved codepoints
| (eg to encode surrogate pairs), yielding a total number of
| 1,112,064 assignable code points.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 1,112,064 code points ought to be enough for anybody. --
| Bill Gates
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _as it is currently defined_
|
| I find it completely implausible that this will ever
| change: the current size is baked in too heavily.
|
| * The abomination UTF-16, which is distressingly popular,
| cannot possibly support it. Replacing UTF-16 would be a
| massive upheaval in many ecosystems (e.g. JavaScript, Qt,
| Windows), and there's no real prospect of most of those
| environments moving away from UTF-16, because it's a
| massive breaking change for them by now. Rather, if the
| code space were running out, they'd devise something along
| the lines of second-level surrogate pairs. (And then we'd
| curse UTF-16 even more, because it'd have ruined Unicode
| for everyone _again_.)
|
| * All code that performs Unicode validation (which isn't as
| much as it should be, but is still probably a majority)
| would need to be upgraded. Any systems not upgraded would
| either mangle or more commonly _fail_ on new characters.
|
| * UTF-8 software would also need to be adjusted, since it's
| artificially limited to the 21-bit space; and it wouldn't
| be just a matter of flipping a few switches here and there
| to remove that limit--there will be lots of small places
| that bake in the the assumption that representing a scalar
| value requires no more than four UTF-8 code units.
| nukemaster wrote:
| mkl wrote:
| We can't assume a signed int, as character encodings limit
| the number of codepoints: "Excluding surrogates and
| noncharacters leaves 1,111,998 code points available for
| use." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#:~:text=Exclud
| ing%20su...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Besides the difference between the abstract and unlimited
| Unicode and the encodings, our current "modern" encodings,
| UTF-8 and the new UTF-16 are artificially restricted and
| can be trivially expanded into a huge number of codepoints
| just by removing those restrictions.
| mkl wrote:
| New UTF-16? I'm only aware of the original 1996 one,
| which uses all of its 20 surrogate-pair bits for the
| codepoint (unlike UTF-8 which can use bits to extend to
| more bytes). In my understanding, "just" removing that
| restriction would mean completely replacing the encoding,
| like UCS-2 being replaced with UTF-16. The new one may
| have some overlap, but transitioning to it would still be
| a huge undertaking, and far from trivial (quite a few
| programs today still use UCS-2, quarter of a century
| after UTF-16 was introduced to replace it).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| But character encodings _don 't_ limit the number of
| codepoints. Unicode is just a big list of correspondences
| between an integer and a glyph. There's no limit to how
| many integers you can assign.
|
| Unicode _encodings_ are separate standards that give
| correspondences between Unicode code points (integers) and
| byte sequences. If Unicode changes in a way that
| invalidates an encoding, that just calls for a new
| encoding.
| mkl wrote:
| Yes, it could technically be extended, but the transition
| would be a massive undertaking, so in practice the
| encodings do limit the number of codepoints. UTF-16,
| which creates the limitation, is very widely used and
| required by major programming language standards like
| ECMAScript. A lot of software still can't cope with
| codepoints outside the BMP, and they were established
| with UTF-16 in _1996_.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Unicode has been limited to 21-bits for a while so that
| UTF8 is guaranteed to encode no more than four bytes per
| code point. It can support the full 32-bit code space but
| changing now will break a lot of validation code.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Things like skin tone variations are not defined as individual
| code points. They are sequences of code points that combine to
| make the full, customized glyph. So you have one code point for
| "medical", one for "professional", one for "female", one for
| "brown skin", one for "blond hair", and from that you get a
| more specific picture of a doctor..
| akvadrako wrote:
| We are nowhere close to running out of code points. Unicode as
| currently defined has 1.1 million, but even that could be
| increased if there was a need. There isn't, since only 114
| thousand are defined.
|
| There are not separate code points for all combinations of
| genders and skin colors; the characters are made as
| combinations.
| goto11 wrote:
| The snowmen are in Unicode because they existed in a character
| set before the Unicode standard was created. Unicode was
| deliberately created as a superset of all existing character
| sets at the time.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| (Edited to upload the image to imgur and avoid spammy
| advertisements).
|
| Here I'll date myself: I remember this as "diode with a gate".
| Back when we did circuit diagrams with stencils, you had the
| diode stencil which looks like a triangle with a line on top, and
| then with the electrical stencils you had "decorations".
|
| The intention was to put down the original symbol on the paper,
| move the decorations stencil over top of it and then add the
| required decorations. It's why diode symbols look like this:
| https://imgur.com/a/0tSLV7O (notice "step recovery diode").
|
| The "lightning bolt" isn't a lightning bolt, it's a hint that
| this diode is going to have a very sharp "snap off" in the
| waveform. See: https://www.electronics-
| notes.com/articles/electronic_compon...
|
| OK so why do we have a seperate decorator for a diode? Can't we
| just have a pocket full of stencils for diodes? Space was at a
| premium back then. It goes back to daisy wheels and typeballs:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_(computing)#Impact_pri...
| You would have one position for "diode" and one position for
| "decorator" and the printer would know when it got one ASCII char
| it would print the diode, then send whatever the thin space is to
| advance the print carriage a small step, then print the
| decorator.
|
| Someone should be able to find a daisy wheel or typeball
| dedicated to circuits and bear this out.
| esquivalience wrote:
| That first link is a redirect spiral through multiple
| interstitial ads. Enjoyed the rest of the comment though!
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > a redirect spiral through multiple interstitial ads
|
| For a second I was thinking you meant this as the correct
| definition of the symbol, and was very surprised :-)
| esquivalience wrote:
| That is horribly plausible!
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up - I've edited the post to a copy of
| the image I uploaded to imgur.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| This symbol should be interpreted literally - it is of unknown
| meaning and origin. That's what it means: "Of unknown meaning and
| origin".
| abakker wrote:
| To me, it looks like a symbol you would use to denote electricity
| present. I'd say it was meant to say that an electrical box or
| some other piece of infrastructure had electricity present. It
| could even be a non-standard symbol for a ground.
|
| edit: the right angle portion of it looks like the symbol for 3
| wire 2 phase electricity used here -
| https://www.conceptdraw.com/How-To-Guide/qualifying-symbols
| ..Yes, it is just a right angle. but I could see the electricity
| symbol being overlaid to indicate that it was an electrical
| symbol.
| jeffnappi wrote:
| The person who appears to have done the work of collecting this
| character (and others) for submission into the Unicode process
| back in 1997[0] (Barbara Beeton) has actually responded to the
| StackExchange question[1].
|
| Unfortunately even she is not aware of what the symbol is
| actually for.
|
| [0] https://www.ams.org/STIX/bnbranges.html [1]
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/640596
| Someone wrote:
| I would think something like this: |
| | \ | \ | \ /\ | \/ \
| | \ | _\/ |
| +------------------------------
|
| Could (more or less) fit that description and would make more
| sense as a symbol. Something like it even made it into Unicode
| (https://emojipedia.org/chart-decreasing/)
| standeven wrote:
| This was my first thought as well. Either a misdrawn version of
| this, or a corrupt SVG, that somehow made it to production.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's like the icon in question is a drunk / mirrored version of
| this one, from memory, drawn behind the back.
|
| It's like o7 vs 7o; if you know you know:
| http://i.imgur.com/ZjhHU87.jpg
| jandrese wrote:
| The article makes a decent case for the symbol to be a chart
| symbol that means "no right angle". The zig zag arrow
| apparently being a shorthand for "no" in that particular
| circle.
|
| It looks like a symbol that someone added for completeness but
| isn't particularly useful even in the field.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| That to me immediately communicates a decreasing chart. I would
| have no idea that the right-angle lines represent right angles
| generally and not chart axes.
| kortex wrote:
| Wake up, first thing that pops into my head, "I should check HN"
| (normally it's imgur, yeah bad habits).
|
| Number one post is the Linking Sigil. Neat.
|
| If you know, you know.
|
| As for how a chaos magick symbol concocted in the 21st century
| ended up in a 1994 font spec, clearly discordians used the power
| of fnord to retcon it.
| lgl wrote:
| Context: https://tme.miraheze.org/wiki/Ellis_(sigil)
| firstcommentyo wrote:
| Im sorry to be a party pooper but though Linking Sigil is also
| mentioned in the article but that's not what the article is
| refering/asking about.
| bckr wrote:
| Hmm, the article links to the Linking Sigil at the bottom, in
| the links section.
|
| But the rest of the article is concerned with how mysterious
| the symbol is, and how no one knows where it came from.
|
| A clue: anyone can register a symbol for a surprisingly small
| fee.
|
| A question: why would the sigil be mentioned in an addendum
| but not in the article proper?
|
| Anyway, it's pretty obvious that GP had a premonition this
| morning, with a pay off.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > A clue: anyone can register a symbol for a surprisingly
| small fee.
|
| A unicode symbol? I want a symbol! How much are we talking
| about?
| lizardactivist wrote:
| This is like the definition of legacy luggage. And somewhere
| there's probably someone who will argue that if the symbol is not
| present in a typeface, then said typeface is not "compliant".
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Eventually Unicode will think, "Hey, _maybe_ bold, italic and
| underline aren 't just decorative, but _required_ formatting
| which _conveys emphasis_ , and other information that needs to be
| contained within the text itself!"
|
| Or, maybe not and we'll continue to lose formatting every time we
| copy and paste and be forced to use _plain text_ for the rest of
| our lives. Also, we can color our emojis now, but that WARNING
| text can 't be in red. Because colors don't matter?
|
| Which ever person decided basic formatting shouldn't be in the
| spec was wrong and we lose important details every day because of
| it.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| Looks like a break in a graph axis
| reaperducer wrote:
| _no one knows what [?] is meant to represent_
|
| Translation: Nothing came up on a Google search, and going to the
| library and looking in a book is hard.
|
| I see this more and more often these days. Bloggers claiming that
| there is no known origin for something, or inventing their own
| histories based on nothing more than internet searches.
|
| The internet is vast, but 99.9% of the world's history and
| information is not online for free.
| adamrezich wrote:
| on the contrary, dude seems to have done pretty extensive
| research--did you read the article?
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Someone show him U+29B0 REVERSED EMPTY SET.
| yreg wrote:
| Not long ago I found these <= U+2264 LESS-
| THAN OR EQUAL TO [?] U+22DC EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN
| >= U+2265 GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO [?] U+22DD EQUAL TO
| OR GREATER-THAN
|
| or even [?] U+22DA LESS-THAN EQUAL TO OR
| GREATER-THAN [?] U+22DB GREATER-THAN EQUAL TO OR LESS-
| THAN
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The former is probably for the same reason that both plus-
| minus and minus-plus exist. The latter is commonly used for
| the "unordered" relation in partially ordered sets.
| account42 wrote:
| Wouldn't "less than, equal to, or greater than" imply
| anything EXCEPT unordered?
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Ah, correct. The slashed variant would mean unordered,
| while the original character means ordered.
| alickz wrote:
| > [?] U+22DA LESS-THAN EQUAL TO OR GREATER-THAN
|
| > [?] U+22DB GREATER-THAN EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN
|
| These are very interesting. What would be the use case for
| these?
| vermarish wrote:
| When I was learning statistical hypothesis testing, I once
| wrote notes that looked like "H_0: mu [?] a <--> p-value:
| P(T(X) [?] T(a))", although I didn't include the equal-to
| bar.
| mkl wrote:
| That sounds like a different symbol: [?] U+2276
|
| There are lots of similar symbols: [?][?][?][?][?][?]
| Nadya wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%8B%9A
|
| > If the function f is differentiable and concave, then
| f'(x1)[?]f'(x2) as x1[?]x2. That is f'(x1) and f'(x2) have
| the opposite relation as x1 and x2.
| bialpio wrote:
| This blew my mind:
|
| "Related terms [?] (synonymous when
| used on its own, but antonymous when used jointly)"
| a_shovel wrote:
| Perhaps "has a comparison relation to"? So for any two
| numbers x and y, x [?] y is true, but "square [?] pentagon"
| is false.
| skykooler wrote:
| More concretely, it's true only for real numbers - so -4
| [?] 7 is true, but 3+2i [?] 5 is false.
| progbits wrote:
| Clearly useful for typesetting reflections of mathematical
| proofs. /s
| willis936 wrote:
| It's how Leonardo Da Vinci would type up proofs.
| mkl wrote:
| I think he would have typed things left to right. He only
| wrote in mirror because it was more ergonomic for him, but
| there's no such issue with a keyboard.
| leipert wrote:
| Seems like Wikipedia has the answer:
|
| > When writing in languages such as Danish and Norwegian, where
| the empty set character may be confused with the alphabetic
| letter O (as when using the symbol in linguistics), the Unicode
| character U+29B0 REVERSED EMPTY SET may be used instead
| bell-cot wrote:
| Guess: right-handedness (as in chirality, polarized light, spiral
| motion, etc.)
| herodotus wrote:
| > And the inclusion of "AMS" in the names of the entity
| collections likewise remained mysterious.
|
| Could this be The American Mathematical Society?
| anentropic wrote:
| Seems plausible, but from the linked stackexchange question:
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/640588/what-is-%E2%8...
|
| > It appeared in the entity set ISOAMSA, which, regardless of
| the name, had no connection with the American Mathematical
| Society.
| herodotus wrote:
| Thanks. I missed that.
| tlb wrote:
| Since it looks like a caduceus on a graph, I propose it as a
| symbol for ethical statisticians.
| saltmeister wrote:
| sj4nz wrote:
| I'll propose that it could be the glyph to represent "cutting
| corners":
|
| > To skip certain steps in order to do something as easily or
| cheaply as possible, usually to the detriment of the finished
| product or end result.
| timonoko wrote:
| It is a proofreaders mark with languages with long words. The
| L-shape is "Split the word here" and same with arrow-squiggle on
| top is "Do it at the next syllable or not at all". For example
| words "YO-KLUBI" and "YOK-LUBI" have different meanings. Source:
| I have seen Finnish proofreaders marks.
| bombcar wrote:
| This sounds plausible but I can't search Finnish enough to find
| examples.
| timonoko wrote:
| You can find German marks "Korrekturlesen Zeichen". The
| L-shape is described in DIN 16511, but cannot find the
| opposite.
| bombcar wrote:
| Here's DIN 16511 https://www2.informatik.hu-
| berlin.de/sv/lehre/korrekturzeich... for anyone interested.
| Perhaps someone in Finland could dig further? It might be a
| bit strange to have proofreader marks for proofreading
| marks, but maybe something slipped in.
|
| "oikolukumerkit" found an image with more than just the DIN
| referenced marks, but not much more.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| That is a chaos magick linking sigil.
| rackjack wrote:
| That rabbit hole of esotericism was pretty cool.
| primer42 wrote:
| So Unicode has all these mysterious characters... but I would bet
| that it's still true that many people on the planet speaking
| common languages can't even type their name...
|
| This post is from 2015, and I'd love to know if unicode has added
| better support for non-English languages since then.
|
| https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
|
| Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_(Unicode_block),
| only 3 more Bengali characters have been added since 2015.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That publication was so good, I was really bummed when they
| shut down. Looks like they came back for a minute in 2020? I
| had no idea but I know what I'm doing tonight.
| goto11 wrote:
| The article present it like it purely due to western-centrism
| these characters does not have distinct code points in Unicode.
| In reality the issue is much more subtle - a discussion whether
| a certain glyph is a ligature of two characters or its own
| distinct character.
| nograpes wrote:
| I was very surprised by your comment and by the article you
| linked that the name Aditya cannot be represented in Unicode. I
| think it can be represented: aadity.
|
| I am not a Bengali-speaker, but I am familiar with the class of
| scripts to which the Bengali script belongs, abugidas. These
| scripts assume a vowel following every consonant. When two
| consonants occur one after the other in a word (a consonant
| cluster), this must be represented specially, because if you
| just wrote (consonant, consonant) it would be pronounced
| (consonant, inherent vowel, consonant).
|
| The "ty" in Aditya is one such consonant cluster. The way this
| cluster is written is ty. This is represented as three code
| points (I think I am messing up the proper terms), one for the
| "t", one to "join", and one for "y".
|
| Some people think of the special shape that the final "y" as a
| separate character on its own. In fact, it has it's own name
| (ya-phala). I can understand why it would be confusing to see
| that the ya-phala can't be typed as its own single character ("
| y"), but it really has to do with a difference in how the input
| is is implemented and how the person thinks about their own
| language.
|
| In fact, on the unicode.org site, typing this very character is
| part of the FAQ for Bengali:
| https://unicode.org/faq/bengali.html#6
| andlarry wrote:
| There was a lot of discussion [0] of that point when the
| Model View Culture article was originally posted 7 years ago.
|
| It's complicated, but the author of the piece seems to take
| issue with how the character set was designed by the language
| authorities the UTC delegated to.
|
| The whole comment thread is an interesting read.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220147
| kens wrote:
| I read that "I Can't Write My Name" article when it came out
| and it's remarkably misguided. First, there are solid
| linguistic reasons why Unicode handles that character the way
| it does. Second, the article completely misunderstands how the
| Unicode Consortium works. Finally, the Unicode Consortium is
| remarkably open to character proposals from random people. The
| author could have written a proposal and fixed the problem in
| half the time it took to write the article. Source: I am a
| random person who got multiple characters added to Unicode.
| cm2187 wrote:
| You will soon need a billion usd budget to implement a new font
| tgorgolione wrote:
| This reminds me of the design used to denote a graph whose y axis
| does not start at 0:
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/79272
| ezoe wrote:
| There are some kanji scripts that has no record of existing usage
| in the JIS character encoding which was also incorporated to the
| Unicode. It's called "ghost character" in Japanese.
|
| https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5...
| kingcharles wrote:
| I feel bad for the font designers who have to put all these
| inane characters in, have to draw them and hint them, and they
| have no purpose except they have to be there or someone will
| complain.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Fortunately there are only a handful of such cases. But
| unfortunately there are tons of commonly used CJKV
| ideographs; typical Chinese or Japanese fonts are of course
| not expected to have all Chinese characters (there are almost
| 100,000 of them while OpenType fonts can only have 65K
| glyphs), but they _are_ expected to have thousands of
| commonly used characters.
| ezoe wrote:
| It must be really nice that even an amateur font designer
| can single-handedly create a quality font for English usage
| in his spare time.
|
| For Japanese, it requires a minimal of few thousands of
| characters and symbols and it still doesn't cover all the
| commonly used characters today.
| tarsinge wrote:
| And still no external link character, ridiculous.
| albrewer wrote:
| Hm, now that you mention it, I always thought of the external
| link symbol as being a box with an arrow coming from inside it
| and protruding out of the upper right hand corner, but I don't
| see that symbol anywhere in Unicode, and I'm not sure why I
| have that association.
|
| There is the U+1F517 link symbol but I'm not sure that's
| communicating the same thing.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I'm not sure why I have that association.
|
| Wikipedia uses it.
| teddyh wrote:
| I often see a globe symbol used to indicate external links;
| i.e. U+1F310, U+1F30D, U+1F30E, or U+1F30F.
| jason0597 wrote:
| I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure
| symbols but they _still_ haven 't added all superscript/subscript
| numbers and letters
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni...
|
| To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they
| added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that
| the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake
| , but we will never get our missing superscript q!?"
| blacklion wrote:
| I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain
| superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of
| Unicode is to have encoding of all characters used by all
| languages, past and modern. Subscript and superscript are not
| used by any language as separate characters, it is typesetting
| property. It should be solved by other means, not by
| character/glyph encoding. Should Unicode include ALL characters
| strike-out? Underlined? Double-underlined? Small-caps variant
| for all letters for languages where small-caps are used in
| typography tradition?
|
| And, BTW, what do you mean by "all letters"? Should Unicode
| contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or
| letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages? So,
| Unicode must be approximately tripled, bar hieroglyphic part
| (and why hieroglyphics should not be sub/superscripted?)?
| BaRRaKID wrote:
| This is probably an edge case, but I work in lab software
| that uses chemical symbols and having sub and super
| characters saves lots of headaches. I can just store "CO2" in
| a database, query it, and display it back as a simple string,
| or display values in scientific notation like 1,3x103,
| without having to use any formatting.
|
| But to be honest I'm not sure what the parent comment wants
| to see added because at the moment having all the letters
| from A-Z, numbers from 0-9, and plus minus and equals signs
| as both subscript and superscript seems to be enough.
| cygx wrote:
| Upper-case subscripts are missing, for one: I'm not allowed
| to talk about the normal force F_N in plain text email.
| Superscript and subscript Greek letters would also be nice
| to have, eg in context of relativity.
| blacklion wrote:
| Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of
| view bother me.
|
| Also, I've seen a lot of different symbols as subscripts
| in mathematical and physical articles, like squares,
| triangles, arrows, etc.
| cygx wrote:
| _Why not Devanagari then? This Europe-centric point of
| view bother me._
|
| Sure: As I mentioned in another comment, I'd add markers
| to enable arbitrary super and subscripting.
|
| However, the question I responded to was asking what
| specifically people were missing in practice, and the
| examples I gave are things I personally would have used
| if they had been available.
| cygx wrote:
| _Should Unicode contain sub /superscript variants of Hangul
| or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-
| alphabae languages?_
|
| Nope, you'd use markers similar to U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT
| MARK) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) that already exist to
| indicate text direction (which is also a typesetting
| property).
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| They are relevant because Unicode _had_ to define the
| bidirectional rendering and not every rendering can be
| automatically inferred from logical (abstract) characters.
| Unicode has no reason to define the general text rendering
| including subscripts and superscripts, so there is no
| reason for Unicode to define control characters for them.
| cygx wrote:
| _Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering_
|
| Why? They could have left this for a higher layer to
| handle.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Unicode defines characters, their semantics and (very
| flexible) guidelines for rendering them. Unlike, say,
| bold, italic or super/subscripts, bidirectionality is an
| intrinsic property of those characters and can't be
| easily refactored.
| cygx wrote:
| Should a _universal_ text encoding provide a way to
| encode the names of mathematical and physical quantities?
|
| In my opinion, yes. If it can't, it's not fit for
| purpose, no matter what is or is not an intrinsic
| property of some characters...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Unicode defines characters, their semantics
|
| Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the
| semantics of characters. That would seriously interfere
| with its purpose of defining characters.
|
| There are some notable exceptions, and they are
| acknowledged to be mistakes.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > Unicode specifically states that it doesn't define the
| semantics of characters.
|
| The Unicode Standard explicitly says otherwise:
|
| > Characters have well-defined semantics. These semantics
| are defined by explicitly assigned character properties,
| rather than implied through the character name or the
| position of a character in the code tables (see _Section
| 3.5, Properties_ ). [1]
|
| > The Unicode Standard associates a rich set of semantics
| with characters and, in some instances, with code points.
| The support of character semantics is required for
| conformance; see _Section 3.2, Conformance Requirements_.
| [2]
|
| To be fair, it refers to "character" semantics which is
| more or less abstracted by character properties. It is
| not like that, for example, ^ U+25B2 WHITE UP-POINTING
| TRIANGLE UNICODE CHARACTER can only ever be used for
| denoting triangles. But it has defined semantics in the
| way that the character has properties expected for such
| symbols.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch02.p
| df#page...
|
| [2] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.p
| df#page...
| mbauman wrote:
| Sign onto the proposal: https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-
| proposal
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Unicode superscript and subscript is not intended for
| mathematical usages [1].
|
| [1] https://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#Pf8
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's a cop out. You could equally say that new emojis
| shouldn't be added because you should use inline images for
| those. Or RTL markers shouldn't be added because you should
| use dedicated text styling for that.
|
| There are a ton of places that don't support superscript
| markup.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| > You could equally say that new emojis shouldn't be added
| because you should use inline images for those.
|
| Well, that's really a better solution. Or a unicode
| character that allows you to set a pixel on a 256x256 grid
| and one to compose them. Strike that. Better not give
| anyone bad ideas.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Almost sounds like you reinvented DEC Sixel.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > You could equally say that new emojis shouldn't be added
| because you should use inline images for those.
|
| If emojis weren't allocated out of compatibility concern,
| this would be exactly my opinion from the day 1. To be
| honest I'm not still happy with the current emoji
| assignments and semantics. Not even Unicode people are
| satisfied either, there are numerous proposals for
| replacing emoji with something else (example keyword: QID
| emoji).
|
| > RTL markers shouldn't be added because you should use
| dedicated text styling for that.
|
| > There are a ton of places that don't support superscript
| markup.
|
| Unlike most text attributes, bidirectionality is an
| intrinsic property of abstract characters and thus
| absolutely within the Unicode's scope. Ideally you can't
| and shouldn't make some LTR character to behave like RTL
| characters or vice versa. Bidi control characters only
| exist to correct automatic rendering, and can be presented
| out of band (the Bidi specification is explicitly designed
| for this use case in mind [1]).
|
| [1]
| https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#Markup_And_Formatting
| goto11 wrote:
| > but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript
| numbers and letters
|
| That would triple the size of Unicode.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| They would just need to add one Unicode modifier for
| superscript and one for subscript like there is for gender
| and skin color.
| goto11 wrote:
| Fair enough, but general formatting codes would overlap
| with what is already supported in rich-text formats like
| HTML or LaTeX. Unicode is a standard for encoding
| _characters_ , it is not supposed to be a rich-text
| document format itself.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I mean they could at least add q.
| c22 wrote:
| I've been told we'll never run out of space in Unicode.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Should we also have slanted, bold, semi-bold, light and
| underlined versions of every code point? Versions with/without
| serifs? For monospaced text? Those are all presentational
| matters. That we have super/subscripts in Unicode in the first
| place seems to have been just a hack to help terminal emulator
| software deal with obsolete encodings like ISO-8859-1:
| https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00159-ucsterminal.txt
| account42 wrote:
| Should we have bold and/or slanted characters in Unicode? It
| seems someone thought so!
| mkl wrote:
| Those are intended for maths, not for formatted text.
| Variables in mathematics are usually a single character, so
| there is a great variety of ways to format the characters
| to create different symbols. Diacritical marks, underlines,
| etc. are also used for this.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| AMS = American Mathematical Society last i subscribed. How the
| heck would someone surveying mathematicians not have found that?
| ectopod wrote:
| In a linked post Barbara Beeton says not. She collated these
| characters while working for the AMS so she should know.
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/640588/what-is-%E2%8...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that's even more wild! thank you for sharing / emphasizing
| that curious twist
| cold_fact wrote:
| I work at AMS currently, this is so interesting!
| [deleted]
| firstcommentyo wrote:
| Dislosure: I'm not directly from the fields of the Sciences Of
| Angles And Ambiguously Crossing Lines nor I've every seen or used
| this symbol before. However to me it's, pretty evidently,
| supposed to be a "no right angle" symbol.
|
| (A) It's in the math section, (B) it's with angles, (C) the
| thunderbolt | is commonly used for "not" or more specifically for
| dis-proof in this area and
|
| (D) at least by my 30 s internet search on a mobile phone I
| couldn't find any other "no-angle" or "no-right-angle" symbol.
|
| Someone could argue that usually you use a simple strike through
| as like as in [?] (unequal), [?] (not-element-of) or [?] (empty
| set) but I would say it was chosen to avoid confusion in this
| case. The angle itself (without the "no/not") consists of only to
| orthogonal lines so it would be kinda complicated to "strike it
| though" in any direction without ambiguity that would resemble a
| triangle, a fork or whatnot.
|
| #
| esperent wrote:
| > the thunderbolt | is commonly used for "not" or more
| specifically for dis-proof in this area and
|
| I don't think it's that common. At least, I don't recall seeing
| it ever. Maybe it's used in non-English mathematics?
|
| Wikipedia mentions it's also used in electrolysis so maybe this
| new one is related to that somehow?
| qiskit wrote:
| Same. Never seen that symbol in my life. I've seen !, ~, !,
| etc used for not/negation in computer science, math, logic,
| etc.
|
| And some commenters said they used it to mark proof by
| contradiction, but why is there a need to mark it when you
| are showing it via proof? A canonical example of proof by
| contradiction is proving sqrt(2) is not rational. Never have
| I seen it marked with that symbol. Where would you even mark
| it? At the beginning with the assumption? Or at the end like
| QED?
| valtism wrote:
| I was taught it in extracurricular mathematics in
| Australia. We were taught that it goes at the end of a
| contradiction proof once the contradiction has been found.
| We used to write it extra large, like lightning strike. I
| think of it like a proof mic-drop.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| Math degree holder from Iowa, yeah, I've seen and used it
| many times. The symbol is used when you reach the
| contradictory statement. Like "1 = 2".
|
| "By way of contradiction suppose P, then ..., thus ~P |.
| Therefore ..."
| ratmice wrote:
| I believe I have seen it used as a symbol which indicates the
| discharge of an assumption, but never for "not".
| maze-le wrote:
| It's used in german mathematics education (secondary level),
| either to mark a contradiction in a proof or more generally
| to mark an erroneous statement.
| ruuda wrote:
| Also in Dutch universities to mark a contradiction,
| especially in a proof by contradiction.
| ceh123 wrote:
| It's the first symbol referenced for symbols used in proof by
| contradiction to show contradiction [0]. I know that's not
| exactly "not" or "disproof" but I think that might be what
| the poster was getting at.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction#Symbolic_repr
| ese...
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| kens wrote:
| I've thought that it would be cool to have a Wiki with an entry
| for each character, describing what it is, and its history.
| Although that wouldn't help for mystery characters like this
| one, there are a lot of characters with stories behind them.
| sprayk wrote:
| I like this idea. It would serve as a place to put a well-
| sourced answer to the question about this character, and the
| talk section could be used to discuss further investigation
| into the topic, or when new uses inevitably arise.
| paledot wrote:
| I was just discussing :man-in-business-suit-levitating: with
| some friends earlier today. Also an interestingly cryptic
| background, albeit not an unsolved one.
|
| https://emojipedia.org/person-in-suit-levitating/
|
| (Edit: Apparently HN automatically removes emoji.)
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| The story behind MIBSL is definitely fascinating and some
| great trivia there. There's a longer article about it here:
| https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/06/secret-ska-history-
| man-b... that covers not just the inspiration for the emoji
| itself, but a brief history behind the inspiration behind
| the inspiration. Lots of levels of metaness to unpack.
| alx__ wrote:
| I love this! I've always assumed it was a rude boy emoji.
| Was briefly in a high school ska band :D
| subroutine wrote:
| Wikipedia already does this for many symbols. See for
| example...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical
|
| Aside from the table describing each symbol, if you scroll to
| the bottom of the page, it links out to full articles related
| to each. For a full list see...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters
| zeteo wrote:
| > (C) the thunderbolt | is commonly used for "not" or more
| specifically for dis-proof in this area
|
| Any examples?
| contravariant wrote:
| I've seen it used for contradiction. Though that's not the
| same thing as 'not' and I can't think of why you'd combine
| this with orthogonality.
| hedora wrote:
| If the thunderbolt means not, and the right angle is
| displaying the x and y axis, then this symbol could be a pun
| for "not a function".
| firstcommentyo wrote:
| High school physics and math as a major. I could scan you my
| scripts and papers if you're interested.....no won't. ;-D
|
| But maybe "commonly used" was maybe the wrong term. More
| appropriately: "sometimes" or "by some".
| renewiltord wrote:
| Where in the world? I've never used it despite similar
| background. Perhaps regional?
| IshKebab wrote:
| I have never seen it used as not once in maths or physics.
| "extremely rarely" perhaps.
| mywittyname wrote:
| To be fair, there are _lot_ of math symbols out there.
|
| http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ctan/info/symbols/comprehensive
| /sy...
|
| There are lots of examples of the lightning bolt in
| there. In fact, under ulsy Contradiction symbols, there
| are four variants.
|
| I also noticed the exact symbol being discussed is listed
| under "Angles".
| HuangYuSan wrote:
| I believe in German (possibly also other languages) the
| thunderbolt | is commonly used to mean "this is a
| contradiction" in a mathematical proof, equivalently to in
| English a kind of [?] rotated by 45deg or the symbol *. The
| symbol [?] on the other hand means "false" and is used in
| particular in formal logic.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Right angles have a small box near the vertex which denotes it
| is a right angle [0].
|
| This symbol doesn't have that box, so I don't think it's a
| right angle.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_angle#/media/File:Right_...
|
| Edit: This merely adds to the confusion, since the name of the
| glyph contains the words "right angle."
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| mikeryan wrote:
| _This merely adds to the confusion, since the name of the
| glyph contains the words "right angle."_
|
| The article notes that sans a given meaning the glyph was
| given a "descriptive name".
|
| So you're not wrong? :-P
| cgriswald wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_angle
|
| > In Unicode, the symbol for a right angle is U+221F [?]
| RIGHT ANGLE (HTML ∟ * ∟). It should not be
| confused with the similarly shaped symbol U+231E [?] BOTTOM
| LEFT CORNER (HTML ⌞ * ⌞, ⌞). Related
| symbols are U+22BE [?] RIGHT ANGLE WITH ARC (HTML ⊾ *
| ⊾), U+299C RIGHT ANGLE VARIANT WITH SQUARE (HTML
| ⦜ * ⦜), and U+299D MEASURED RIGHT ANGLE WITH
| DOT (HTML ⦝ * ⦝).[5]
|
| > In diagrams, the fact that an angle is a right angle is
| usually expressed by adding a small right angle that forms a
| square with the angle in the diagram, as seen in the diagram
| of a right triangle (in British English, a right-angled
| triangle) to the right. The symbol for a measured angle, an
| arc, with a dot, is used in some European countries,
| including German-speaking countries and Poland, as an
| alternative symbol for a right angle.[6]
| aaron695 wrote:
| danparsonson wrote:
| I submit to you that it's clearly not a thunderbolt but an
| arrow indicating changing directions; that being overlaid on
| top of a pair of axes is obviously useful in the study of non-
| Euclidean geometry to indicate the use of wibbly-wobbly
| dimensions.
| etothepii wrote:
| Particularly useful for timey-whimey relativistic analyses.
| froh wrote:
| Perpendicular + Unicode combining solidus = [?] + / = [?]
| mbauman wrote:
| That doesn't jive with the history in TFA -- the Unicode name
| and location was _inferred_ from the symbol itself without
| knowledge of its meaning.
| dundarious wrote:
| I don't see the contradiction. The only thing they used from
| the name is the "right angle" aspect. Given their argument is
| this is a composition of thunderbolt + X, for some X (and
| derived from their prior knowledge of thunderbolt's
| compositional meaning), deciphering the image as "thunderbolt
| + right angle" is trivial and consistent with the naming
| origin in TFA.
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