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Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol
- gerdesj 3y agoAt first it might look a bit pretentious: "Ok thickie, this will hurt your ordinary mind". However, on reflection, a warning that the writer has bothered to put their back into the job for a while is a great idea. When you see it, stop, put on the kettle, go out for a fag (cigarette) or whatever and then come back.
- JadeNB 3y agoAlthough Bourbaki was/were capable of being plenty pretentious, I think that it might seem less pretentious if read not as "from our lofty viewpoint, we can see that this is too tough for you," but rather as a very literal analogue of the road sign: "it's easy to get dangerous results if you traverse this territory without sufficient care."
- gerdesj 3y agoI was taking the piss 8) I will definitely be deploying this symbol in some of my documentation. Given I'm an IT bod: it will be the ones pertaining to name resolution and ... time.
- nomilk 3y ago> I will definitely be deploying this symbol in some of my documentation. +1. Also curious to see where it should be positioned on the page. The wiki page says it goes in the margin. I tried searching github for 'u2621' to find examples but couldn't spot any rendered examples yet (only code).
- belzsch 3y agoCheck out the TeXBook, eg. page 14.
- lloeki 3y agoYeah, other possible reads: - "brace yourself, here be dragons" - "til now it was a bit of a treadmill, but that's a part you probably don't want to fast read" - "on the surface this may look innocuous but there are tricky subtleties that you may not want to overlook"
- thewakalix 3y ago/* * You are not expected to understand this. */
- idontknowifican 3y agowhy the addition to clarify your use of fag?
- gerdesj 3y agoThe word fag has multiple meanings across the various en_* variants, including cigarette and (a) gay. Many readers hereabouts read English as a second language. It took me roughly two seconds to ensure that my meaning was spelled out. This response, rather longer 8)
- coolThingsFirst 3y ago[flagged]
- JadeNB 3y agoThe usual response from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I don't qualify as a good hacker, but I definitely find it interesting, and it could be that good hackers do, too.
- GuB-42 3y ago> I don't qualify as a good hacker yet Getting interested is how people become good hackers.
- coolThingsFirst 3y ago[flagged]
- JadeNB 3y ago> Is this symbol also fascinating to you ! How about this one . or this one ? Yes, they've got interesting histories, and, for example, Shady characters (https://wwnorton.com/books/shady-characters/ https://wwnorton.com/books/shady-characters/) has some fascinating things to say about them.
- coolThingsFirst 3y ago[flagged]
- JadeNB 3y ago> They don't, if we went ahead and were mesmerised by random symbols we couldn't get good at anything because becoming good means you have to filter out the BS from the signal. As I say, I'm not a good hacker, but I am a mathematician, and the skillsets are not disjoint. It seems to me not inconceivable that some good hackers become so precisely because of their ability to be mesmerised by things other people find boring or trivial, not in spite of it.
- layer8 3y agoFittingly, it’s right between U+2620 SKULL AND CROSSBONES and U+2622 RADIOACTIVE SIGN.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lifthrasiir 3y agoAnd amazingly it was a part of the original Unicode 1.0.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 3y agoIn both contexts, I read this as “fun ahead!”.
- andrybak 3y agoI put the symbol on my shell prompt line, when there's a readme file found in the current directory. Just a reminder, especially for directories, in which I'd put the readme file myself, but then forgot about it. https://github.com/rybak/scripts/blob/master/config/ps1_notifications.sh#L31 https://github.com/rybak/scripts/blob/master/config/ps1_noti... It works together with very dumb script in $PATH, which prints a readme file if one is found in the current directory. https://github.com/rybak/scripts/blob/master/commands/readme https://github.com/rybak/scripts/blob/master/commands/readme
- IgorPartola 3y agoThat is pretty brilliant. Nicely done.
- jen729w 3y agoMost notably, this Wikipedia page hasn’t been updated in over two years! It’s a fun little game I have with a circle of text friends. Almost everything you see there was updated last week. Sometimes you’ll find something that was updated a few months ago. Two years is epic.
- nomilk 3y agoI'm coming across this term for the first time and think it will be very useful. The most obvious thing missing from the wiki page is some visual examples of its usage. The wiki says it "appears in the margins of mathematics books" but would be great to see some examples.
- layer8 3y agoMathCast a few hops across is over four years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathCast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathCast
- Invictus0 3y agoThe sign seems confusing to me; just looks like a lopsided Z. I much prefer the American design: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/curvy-road-sign-mountain-rural-area-299150834 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/curvy-road-sign-mou...
- skykooler 3y agoNote that this was the French design before 1949. Current designs have arrows, like the American design: https://w7.pngwing.com/pngs/369/604/png-transparent-traffic-sign-warning-sign-danger-road-sign-in-france-panneau-a1c-d-annonce-de-succession-de-virages-en-france-province-no-3-of-nepal.png https://w7.pngwing.com/pngs/369/604/png-transparent-traffic-...
- lloeki 3y ago> current designs They don't ? (well, not a full arrowhead, but wedged head and tail) https://evs-profilepics.s3.amazonaws.com/production/cdr/images/attachments/000/005/264/original/0023cA.jpg?1543303200 https://evs-profilepics.s3.amazonaws.com/production/cdr/imag... (The important bit being that it indicates which direction is the first turn going to be)
- nomilk 3y agoHow mathematicians use it: > to mark passages tricky on a first reading or with an especially difficult argument. When I try this (on macOS) echo -e "\u26A0" it gives the 'triangle with an exclamation mark in it' icon (i.e. https://imgur.com/a/SJbl67s https://imgur.com/a/SJbl67s). I think there's no exact unicode equivalent of the dangerous bend symbol?
- aidenn0 3y agoSadly it's not named after the Nickieben Bourbaki who lives at 1 River Road in West Newbury, and spent a year working on a cattle ranch in Wyoming[1]. 1: https://dreamsongs.com/Nickieben.html https://dreamsongs.com/Nickieben.html
- bombcar 3y agoThis reminds me of how the "For Dummies" books would always have a few symbols to mark off certain sections of the book. Quite useful, actually.
- pimlottc 3y agoAnother article on a bit of mathematical typography linked from that page, which made me double-check that the fonts were working properly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone_(typography)
- Waterluvian 3y agoJust a buncha boxes. Where do those Mathies come up with such creativity? (disclaimer: am son of two Mathies who met in a combinatorics lecture)
- defrost 3y agoThe discrete product of a discreet permutation then?
- nerdponx 3y agoThe Wikipedia article says that it was meant to serve the same purpose as end boxes in magazines, and I think it is kind of creative to repurpose that same typographical element for math proofs.
- clauderoux 3y agoIn French, we use the expression: "Sortie de route" (going off the road) when someone says something awkward or terribly wrong. Basically, the real meaning of this expression is that you lost the control of your car and went off road. We also say "partir dans le décor" (to go into the scenery), which is used in the same context. And usually you loose control when you take a curve to fast. Hence this symbol.
- heavenlyblue 3y agoIn English you can go off the road in a metaphorical way too
- mathioso 3y ago
- macintux 3y agoRelated: Knuth’s collection of diamond road signs. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/diam.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/diam...
- ChoGGi 3y agoI'm a bit sad he doesn't have a snake crossing sign (lots of snakes breed in the coulees). https://maps.app.goo.gl/6ZXzKGNvQBw3mbmK6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/6ZXzKGNvQBw3mbmK6
- bjackman 3y agoHa, my equivalent before a galaxy-brained code comment is // Hold on to your butts...
- chrismorgan 3y agoSomewhat related: the “slippery when wet” road sign used in Australia and New Zealand <https://c.stocksy.com/a/jLM400/z9/1039227.jpg https://c.stocksy.com/a/jLM400/z9/1039227.jpg> doesn’t actually depict two tyre treads crossing over in a physically impossible way, but one tyre tread and the edge of the road. I finally realised this for no apparent reason at the age of 29 when cycling through New Zealand. None of my family had realised this, though we’d certainly talked about the signs before: we’d all just just written it off as a weird design.
- function_seven 3y agoI looked at the image before reading the rest of your comment. My first thought was that the tire tracks crossing each other was supposed to indicate a full rotation of the car. (It’s really slippery, you might spin out!) After reading your comment I still don’t think one of the lines is a road’s edge? Do you know if either interpretation is the official one? EDIT: Just took another look and I see it now. The line near the car’s left tire doesn’t actually align with that tire!
- lloeki 3y agoThe dramatically spinning car is how I read the sign, especially combined with what appears to be a straight road in the background (although we can't tell if there's a bend afterwards it looks like extremely straight) Easy to clear up (by Australian/NZ folks), do these show up on straightaways? Are they mirrored to indicate which direction the bend is going to be? > The line near the car’s left tire doesn’t actually align with that tire! could be: - pointing to and suggesting the other wheel on the right side, more like materialising an envelope of the skid marks instead of realistic skid marks themselves - stylisation of the overall 180 rotation, emphasising the overall spin out of control movement
- mkl 3y ago(NZ here) The signs don't get mirrored. They could show up on straight roads, but are much more common in places with corners. I've always interpreted it as a cartoony car version of what your legs do when slipping on ice - sliding out from under you in random directions.
- xg15 3y agoI'd put a "dangerous bend" symbol in front of the "dangerous bend" symbol itself - for authors: It's such an interesting and unusual tool that authors who have it in their arsenal will want to use it, even if just to show off some interesting bit of typography in their book and possibly interrupt the monotonicity of an otherwise very strict formal textbook. But this means that the symbol can excuse, or even incentivize writing exactly such "dangerous bend" passages instead of e.g. structuring the argument or the learning order differently, so the thinking trap doesn't occur in the first place. I think it' a very useful didactic technique to show common misconceptions of something, or popular simplistic but wrong interpretations of a concept. But then it's important to explain what exactly the misconception is and why it is wrong, and not just put a "beware, here be misconceptions" sign next to the introduction of the concept.
- junon 3y agoReally looks like the Russian Z. I thought that's why it was posted at first. Interesting nonetheless.
- Koshkin 3y agoTo be clear, Russian alphabet does not have a 'Z'. But I think I know what you mean.
- junon 3y agoI am referring to the Z that was alongside the V and O painted onto the tanks and other heavy military vehicles that invaded Ukraine, referring (presumably) to Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, as a means to gaslight the Ukrainian people whilst they were slaughtered. I'm fully aware Russia does not have a literal 'Z' glyph.
- layer8 3y agoNote that at least Samsung renders the Unicode character as a yellow warning triangle, because “caution sign” I guess: https://emojipedia.org/samsung/one-ui-6.0/caution-sign https://emojipedia.org/samsung/one-ui-6.0/caution-sign
- mdturnerphys 3y agoI gave a couple of physics talks where I used the "fasten seatbelt" sign on a series of slides introducing a controversial topic (weak value amplification). I told the audiences beforehand that they just needed to stay in their seats for these slides and we'd discuss once I'd laid everything out.