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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Something similar exists in JIS called 幽霊文字 (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.
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.
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...
(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").
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.
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/)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...).
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/
> 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.
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.
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 "YÖ-KLUBI" and "YÖK-LUBI" have different meanings. Source: I have seen Finnish proofreaders marks.
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.
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‽"
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".
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.
[+] [-] firstcommentyo|4 years ago|reply
(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|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] danparsonson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kens|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbauman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _haoa|4 years ago|reply
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."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] froh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeteo|4 years ago|reply
Any examples?
[+] [-] mizzao|4 years ago|reply
Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606
[+] [-] HNHatesUsers|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bamboozled|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] somedude895|4 years ago|reply
Could be any random kid who found out about this and wanted the cool symbol they made up registered.
[+] [-] dicytea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
(Might need to add this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49)
[+] [-] dirtyid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostoftiber|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Someone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowmotiony|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technothrasher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paskozdilar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vishnugupta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moogly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezoe|4 years ago|reply
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5...
[+] [-] jeffnappi|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] primer42|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cheschire|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] donkeyd|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] MauranKilom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jarmsy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
Or a lightning bolt through a window (with only the bottom-left of the window frame being visible).
[+] [-] yreg|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kortex|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firstcommentyo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rich_sasha|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
And in the unlikely case that Unicode gets so many characters somehow, you can always extend it: http://ucsx.org/
[+] [-] masklinn|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goto11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sj4nz|4 years ago|reply
> 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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abakker|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jason0597|4 years ago|reply
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‽"
[+] [-] grandchild|4 years ago|reply
The things people write about...
[+] [-] kromem|4 years ago|reply
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.