6 ms·

Every character has a story: U+213a (rotated Q) (2005)

• gus_massa 6y ago
  IIUC the original was moved (aka erased) in a big reorganization of the blogs of Microsoft. I think this is the new version hosted by the author http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/349769.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/34976...
  • bzb3 6y ago
    No, his blog was deleted when they fired him (I don't remember the details). Also, he's been dead for a few years now. Both things are a shame because I liked his blog a lot (along with Chen's)
    • austincheney 6y ago
      Not knowing any of this I looked it up. https://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/ https://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/ It seems, according to Michael Kaplan, that he was fired from Microsoft for taking a photo with a personal camera of a framed plaque of a patent certificate with his name on it where the patent number was too visible. That is some horrid garbage. Having gone through the corporate patent game myself it’s not something I would ever recommend.
      • adrianmsmith 6y ago
        I just googled and came up with the same result. Does anyone know why taking a photo of a patent (with the patent number visible) would be a fireable offence? I thought patents were public?
        • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
          I can think of a way. First to note you can easily find all patents with Microsoft as applicant and Michael Kaplan as inventor, eg via Espacenet. So, it's possible the "frame" is the issue. Suppose a patent was issued without Kaplan listed as inventor, or with others listed who did not have a role. Then a frame saying "thanks to $people for their [sole] effort on this project" could become part of a lawsuit (not necessarily in USA) for the right to be named as inventor; in UK for example a significant contribution can require that an employee is reasonably compensated. That can be worth $USD millions (eg recent case 'Shanks v Unilever and others'). Based on this even just the wall the frame is on saying "significant contributions" or something might make a court case work that otherwise wouldn't. I very much doubt that's the reason, but it gives me pause that a missing detail might explain the whole thing. Kaplan wouldn't even need to be aware of it. It could also be something as simple as the company wanting an excuse to fire him, and "photos of any materials associated with patents is a firable offence" being in his contract.
        • jcranmer 6y ago
          His blog post said "The second one was after I was granted a patent that I honestly believed never should have been issued." If he posted the photo of the patent in an article where he simultaneously made that remark, that combination would be extremely damning evidence in any patent trial and could lead to the invalidation of the patent. Although, on re-reading his statement, the firing wasn't the taking a picture of a patent, but including some ("infamous") art in another blog post.
          • jjjjoe 6y ago
            The "infamous art" was a red screen of death from a beta copy of Windows Longhorn. Apparently the blog post was in the middle of the negative news cycle about Longhorn and his posting the RSOD didn't help. That blog article is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20170623173912/http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/415335.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170623173912/http://archives.m... He blogged about it ten years later at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2015/09/04/8770668856267197190.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2015/09/04/87706...
      • runxel 6y ago
        Corporate America never ceases to amaze me (in bad ways, of course). Things like this always read like a "The Onion" headline. Anybody able to explain why this would be an offense? I mean, patent numbers are visible to everyone, since a patent has to be listed, no?
        • Zanni 6y ago
          My reading of it is that he got in trouble for blogging about a patent that, in his words, "never should have been issued," but in a general way that didn't name the patent. The picture he ran with the blog included the patent number, which someone else looked up, probably kicking up a stink, and his manager took that as a blog post critical of Microsoft. That's a lot of reading between the lines on my part, though, so who knows.
          • MauranKilom 6y ago
            Well it's not being critical of MS that is the problem, but admitting that the patent is worthless which can cause significant (unnecessary) damage/complications.
      • asveikau 6y ago
        He also had multiple sclerosis, so this is a heavy charge and I don't know anything, but I start to wonder if someone had some cruel ulterior motive related to that. (Insurance costs? Need to accommodate the illness?) I did not know him and he did not know me, but when I worked at Microsoft I would see him around campus. Small story, I remember one day in the building 10 cafeteria he asked me to hand him a bag of jalapeño potato chips he could not reach in his IBOT thing. Seemed like a nice guy. I later read in his final blog posts that he had a fairly eccentric personal life. I am late to say it, but RIP.
        • nl 6y ago
          Seems unlikely since he only joined if they would cover it. http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2010/03/21/9982732.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2010/03/21/99827...
          • asveikau 6y ago
            I don't remember the timing. MS did change their health plan around the time of this post. Maybe a little later. Also, people come and go in management and HR. Getting one kind of treatment at point A doesn't necessarily mean you get it at point B.
  • juped 6y ago
    That's an archive of the now-late Michael Kaplan's excellent blog by someone else.
• raldi 6y ago
  ℺
• throw0101a 6y ago
  Per the article, U+213a ('℺') is part of ISO 5426-2: > ISO 5426-2 is a second part to ISO 5426, published in 1996.[4] It specifies a set of 70 characters, some of which do not exist in Unicode. Michael Everson proposed the missing characters in Unicode 3.0, but some were postponed for further study. Later, new evidence was found, and more was encoded. P with belt is probably an error for P with flourish.[5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_5426 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_5426
• asveikau 6y ago
  I am not seeing in the article what the rotated Q is used for: what language(s), what phonetic value, etc. Found this: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%BA https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%BA > Used by publishers as a signature mark on the bindings of printed books I don't think I am familiar with this use.
  • JoelMcCracken 6y ago
    The post says exactly this.
    • asveikau 6y ago
      Ok, I missed this part from the article: > according to the Unicode annotation, it is "a binding signature mark." I still did not parse what that meant. It is a tad succinct, in that dry way you might expect from a description of Unicode codepoints. Edit: then it says: > Binding signature marks are marks placed by publishers on the edges of signatures (aka "gatherings" -- printed and folded sheets in units of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 pages) for book binding
      • JoelMcCracken 6y ago
        It goes on to explain what that means, and also which signature marks are represented in Unicode
  • jcranmer 6y ago
    It's not a phonetic letter; it's a symbol. The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to "minor printing mark," the sort of role that would cause it to be rejected if someone proposed it as a Unicode character de novo.
    • derefr 6y ago
      > The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to "minor printing mark," Not really. The printing mark itself wasn’t a “character” in any character set until Unicode. It was probably a custom SVG-like shape that could be plopped into the margin of the document in desktop-publishing programs; sort of like drawing any other arbitrary vector shape (e.g. a 13-agon.) In specialized desktop-publishing programs (e.g. musical-score “engraving” programs), all sorts of these custom vector-shape symbols come with the system for placement onto the document; but—until very recently†—these weren’t “text” in any sense, just shapes. † https://blog.dorico.com/2013/05/introducing-bravura-music-font/ https://blog.dorico.com/2013/05/introducing-bravura-music-fo... What was a character in a character set (ISO 5426-2) was a sort of “reference to said printing mark” or “exemplar of said printing mark”, used once in a standards document to give examples of how printing marks are used. Note the difference: the printing mark itself is an arbitrarily-complex and varied shape that different desktop-publishing programs might render in all sorts of ways. The “reference to the printing mark” is one mark that appears in the standards document, one way. (Picture the difference between an actual calligraphic flourish separating passages of text, and a Unicode fleuron/heart-bullet. One is not the proper encoding of the other! The former is a shape, not a character per se. The latter is a character: it’s a standard shape-thing with a standard meaning, that communicates meaning, and is considered “part of” the text.) Unicode’s mission statement is essentially to offer an encoding for the set of all characters needed to losslessly re-encode all document-corpuses (corpii?) of historical importance, such that those corpuses may be re-encoded into Unicode for archival purposes, with the Unicode standard then acting as the record-keeper of the semantic meaning of the characters used in those documents. Without this work, over time we’d lose the semantic meanings of those encoded characters, as the original living systems that represented the encoding began to rot/disappear. We’d just be left with opaque bytes in the middle of a document that we’d have to guess at the meaning at. The printing mark, as used for its intended purpose, doesn’t meet Unicode’s mission statement, because nobody’s encoding it into a (preserved) document, only “drawing” it on page-edges before trimming them off. It’s not “text” per se. It doesn’t appear in any electronic stream-of-text in need of archival preservation. It exists only in the same way an image embedded in a Word document exists: as self-contained data interpretable by the document-publishing system, an “add-on” on top of the text, but without the meaning of the text depending on the image. The document-publishing system “brings together” a text source, and other data, to create a final “layout” that is more than just text per se. The text source, not the final layout, is what Unicode is concerned about. But the “exemplar of the printing mark” ended up in a standard about document binding. And that glyph is “text”, in the same sense that an emoji is text — i.e. it’s part of the corpus that Unicode seeks to preserve, in order to preserve the meaning of the text surrounding it. So it must treat the mark there as a character. (Yes, this means that if a text of historical importance has some odd squiggle in the middle of it — and it then talks about the squiggle — that squiggle will inevitably become part of Unicode. That doesn’t imply that a visual for the glyph will be drawn by every font artist, though! Just that Unicode will retain a codepoint defining it in the standard, to document the meaning of the glyph as it appears in that one archived document. It’ll likely appear as a replacement-box character, but people can go look up in the standard what that particular replacement-box character means, and that’s all a historian needs.)
• ncmncm 6y ago
  Guessing that printers originally picked the Q because (in some face) the plug was square, so fit in a frame sideways.
  • Taniwha 6y ago
    My guess too, also because Q doesn't get used much so there's probably one spare in the box
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  Is there also a Unicode encoding for the invisible interjection "fnord"? I tried looking it up in the Unicode dictionary but could not find it, but maybe I'm just not seeing it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord >In the novel trilogy (and the plays), the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of unease and confusion, preventing rational consideration of the text it appears in. The uneasiness and confusion create a perpetual low-level state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power. >In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords—occurrences of the word "fnord"—are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. The exclusion of the text from rational consciousness also enables the Illuminati to publish messages to each other in newspapers, etc., without fear that other people will be aware of them. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see the actual word. [...] >Paulo Goode, a typeface designer from West Cork, Ireland, created a humanist serif font named Fnord in 2016 which contains 23 fonts in five weights. The geometry of the upper case ‘O’ is drawn on an axis of 23 degrees while the lower case ‘o’ falls on a 17-degree axis. The 23 / 17 numerology is reflective of similar numerical themes from The Illuminatus! Trilogy.