39 ms·
U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoSomeone show him U+29B0 REVERSED EMPTY SET.
- progbits 5y agoClearly useful for typesetting reflections of mathematical proofs. /s
- leipert 5y agoSeems 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 Ø (as when using the symbol in linguistics), the Unicode character U+29B0 REVERSED EMPTY SET ⦰ may be used instead
- yreg 5y agoNot 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoWouldn't "less than, equal to, or greater than" imply anything EXCEPT unordered?
- lifthrasiir 5y agoAh, correct. The slashed variant would mean unordered, while the original character means ordered.
- alickz 5y ago> ⋚ 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?
- a_shovel 5y agoPerhaps "has a comparison relation to"? So for any two numbers x and y, x ⋚ y is true, but "square ⋚ pentagon" is false.
- skykooler 5y agoMore concretely, it's true only for real numbers - so -4 ⋚ 7 is true, but 3+2i ⋚ 5 is false.
- vermarish 5y agoWhen 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.
- jason0597 5y agoI 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-unicode-superscripts-and-subscripts-block-not-contain-simple-sequen 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 5y agoI 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?)?
- cygx 5y agoShould 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 5y agoThey 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.
- bamboozled 5y agoThese 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.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>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.
- tclancy 5y ago>the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens That sounds like a useful reaction/ response these days.
- HNHatesUsers 5y ago
- imglorp 5y agoWell, Klingon [edit, was proposed] for Unicode. Maybe someone imported some 70s scifi orthography, just because.
- cheschire 5y agoThe 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.
- Jarmsy 5y agoThere's already U+1F4C9 for that though.
- donkeyd 5y agoThe 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 5y agoIt's possible both events happened. The downward trend line character certainly seems like something people might have wanted.
- throw0101a 5y ago> 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).
- quickthrower2 5y ago⍼
- slowmotiony 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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.
- vletal 5y agoI 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?
- p_l 5y agoSome 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.
- jorvi 5y agoSometimes 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?
- rich_sasha 5y agoMight 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...).
- lifthrasiir 5y agoThere 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/ http://ucsx.org/
- jancsika 5y agoOk 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 5y agoThe 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 Đ, Ethereum uses Ξ, Litecoin uses Ł, Namecoin uses ℕ, Peercoin uses Ᵽ and Primecoin uses Ψ. 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 https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf
- lizardactivist 5y agoThis 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".
- baruchel 5y agoFirst thought was about Feynman diagrams :-(
- saltmeister 5y ago
- primer42 5y agoSo 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-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of... Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_(Unicode_block), only 3 more Bengali characters have been added since 2015.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoThat 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.
- nograpes 5y agoI 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: আদিত্য. 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 ত্য. 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-phalā). I can understand why it would be confusing to see that the ya-phalā can't be typed as its own single character (" ্য"), 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 https://unicode.org/faq/bengali.html#6
- 5y ago
- tarsinge 5y agoAnd still no external link character, ridiculous.
- albrewer 5y agoHm, 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.
- grandchild 5y agoWhile 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...
- dskloet 5y agoFrom the title I thought this was about some Uranium isotope.
- skykooler 5y agoU-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.)
- yreg 5y agoI 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.
- berkes 5y agoThat 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 5y agoIt 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?"
- chadlavi 5y agoOn the contrary: books might survive total societal collapse, but electronics don't.
- yreg 5y agoSure, but my prediction is that the human civilization is likely to never have a total societal collapse.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
- Someone 5y agoI 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/ https://emojipedia.org/chart-decreasing/)
- jandrese 5y agoThe 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 5y agoThat 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.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt'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 http://i.imgur.com/ZjhHU87.jpg
- standeven 5y agoThis was my first thought as well. Either a misdrawn version of this, or a corrupt SVG, that somehow made it to production.
- sj4nz 5y agoI'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.
- ezoe 5y agoThere 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%AD%97 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5...
- kingcharles 5y agoI 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 5y agoFortunately 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 5y agoIt 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.
- firstcommentyo 5y agoDislosure: 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. ■
- kens 5y agoI'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 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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/ https://emojipedia.org/person-in-suit-levitating/ (Edit: Apparently HN automatically removes emoji.)
- logbiscuitswave 5y agoThe 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-business-suit-levitating-emoji-442192.html 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.
- abakker 5y agoTo 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 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.
- kortex 5y agoWake 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 5y agoContext: https://tme.miraheze.org/wiki/Ellis_(sigil) https://tme.miraheze.org/wiki/Ellis_(sigil)
- firstcommentyo 5y agoIm 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 5y agoHmm, 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 5y ago> 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?
- kortex 5y agoThere's a process for it. I'm not sure it costs anything but it's a bunch of paperwork. You have to justify what it's used for, why existing solutions don't work, etc. The working group is probably pretty reasonable, but I'm sure it's an involved process. If you do, can you please tack on symbols for following external links, space bar symbol, and all the other miscellaneous internet adjacent characters I always have to reach to Fontawesome for? http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html
- tlb 5y agoSince it looks like a caduceus on a graph, I propose it as a symbol for ethical statisticians.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AnthonBerg 5y agoThis symbol should be interpreted literally – it is of unknown meaning and origin. That’s what it means: “Of unknown meaning and origin”.
- herodotus 5y ago> And the inclusion of “AMS” in the names of the entity collections likewise remained mysterious. Could this be The American Mathematical Society?
- anentropic 5y agoSeems plausible, but from the linked stackexchange question: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/640588/what-is-%E2%8D%BC-used-for/ 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 5y agoThanks. I missed that.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoAMS = American Mathematical Society last i subscribed. How the heck would someone surveying mathematicians not have found that?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ectopod 5y agoIn 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%8D%BC-used-for/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/640588/what-is-%E2%8...
- jjtheblunt 5y agothat's even more wild! thank you for sharing / emphasizing that curious twist
- cold_fact 5y agoI work at AMS currently, this is so interesting!
- reaperducer 5y agono 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adamrezich 5y agoon the contrary, dude seems to have done pretty extensive research—did you read the article?
- cm2187 5y agoYou will soon need a billion usd budget to implement a new font
- jeffnappi 5y agoThe 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 https://www.ams.org/STIX/bnbranges.html [1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/640596 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/640596
- bell-cot 5y agoGuess: right-handedness (as in chirality, polarized light, spiral motion, etc.)
- tgorgolione 5y agoThis reminds me of the design used to denote a graph whose y axis does not start at 0: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/79272 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/79272
- russellbeattie 5y agoEventually 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 5y agoLooks like a break in a graph axis
- rackjack 5y agoThat rabbit hole of esotericism was pretty cool.
- ghostoftiber 5y ago(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 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_components/diode/step-recovery-diode-srd.php 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_printers 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 5y agoThat first link is a redirect spiral through multiple interstitial ads. Enjoyed the rest of the comment though!
- ghostoftiber 5y agoThanks for the heads up - I've edited the post to a copy of the image I uploaded to imgur.
- MzHN 5y agoIronically imgur is nowadays very, very user hostile. You can't view an image without JavaScript. Once you enable it you get "f*ck your privacy" popups, and ads if you don't have a blocker. On mobile I can no longer view anything on imgur at all, only the top bar renders for some reason. There seems to be no way around this. It was also recently, although after the downhill, bought by a company that specializes in buying dying social media platforms and milking them dry with questionable ethics. How questionable? Well, they got into a Darknet Diaries episode https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
- timonoko 5y agoIt 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 "YÖ-KLUBI" and "YÖK-LUBI" have different meanings. Source: I have seen Finnish proofreaders marks.
- bombcar 5y agoThis sounds plausible but I can't search Finnish enough to find examples.
- timonoko 5y agoYou can find German marks "Korrekturlesen Zeichen". The L-shape is described in DIN 16511, but cannot find the opposite.
- bombcar 5y agoHere's DIN 16511 https://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/sv/lehre/korrekturzeichen.pdf 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.
- 8ytecoder 5y agohttps://xkcd.com/2606/ https://xkcd.com/2606/ Now we have an XKCD for this.
- aharris6 5y agoAccording to today's xkcd, this symbol means "Larry Potter" https://xkcd.com/2606 https://xkcd.com/2606
- paledot 5y agoEvidently Randall Munroe reads HN, to the surprise of no one.
- em-bee 5y agoi guess randall got inspired by this discussion: https://xkcd.com/2606/ https://xkcd.com/2606/
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThat is a chaos magick linking sigil.
- kromem 5y agoIt 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.
- yablak 5y agoSomeone mentioned the lightning bolt means a contradiction so best guess is "use the left-hand rule"?
- teleforce 5y agoIt can be a symbol for polarization of electromagnetic (EM) waves, with Electrical and Magnetic fields moving orthogonal to each other [1]. Unlike other waves like sound waves, EM has polarization component. In wireless communication, for example, polarization can be used as another component for diversity to increase the performance of the communication channel. [1]https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/polarization https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/polarization
- aaron695 5y ago
- pfalke 5y agohttps://m.xkcd.com/2606/ https://m.xkcd.com/2606/ — mystery solved!