I like to imagine it was a scribble in a margin of some obscure math proof that people were too afraid to question and it just kept getting passed around
Its the symbol for electrical load on a circuit. I haven’t seen it in like 30 years, but there you go. I wasn’t aware it was a proprietary thing, but it may be a Swiss/German standard not used elsewhere.
Could you elaborate further? I could probably find a source if you know a certain field/situation where this was used... (am from Germany and have access to uni libraries)
@@Aligartornator13 If it's a symbol for electrical loads, then you may find something in old metro stations or distributions of the network with high voltage.
As "Manager of Text and Imaging Systems" at Amiga, I was amused to see something I did 40 years ago. I wondered if your example at 1:38 showed glyphs for the same hex character, but those shown for IBM/Mac/Amiga would have been encoded 9A/8B/E7. I offer: displaying E5 on all three would yield σ/Â/å. Unicode was a great but we weren't ready for all the places 16-bit characters broke things, especially as there was only 256 KB of RAM 🤯
In meteorology, we have symbols for denoting surface weather observations. ☇ means lightning and ☈ means thunderstorm. Maybe ⍼ was a corruption of one the thunderstorm one?
according to XKCD #2606, the character is a symbol for Larry Potter, so that's what i'm going with. the same comic also helpfully pointed out that ⩼ means "confused alligator", ⭈ means "snakes over there", and ⨓ means "integral that avoids a bee on the whiteboard"
This video needs an update. If it hasn't been posted yet (there are a crapton of comments and could only scan so much), the source of this character that apparently led to its incorporation into ISO/IEC TR 9573-13 is a 21 page insert appended to a typeface catalogue from Monotype Corp. Ltd., entitled "List of mathematical characters" (1972), where the symbol was designated with the matrix serial number S16139. The whole AFII thing was a red herring.
It is a little known electrical engineering schematic symbol. It simply means a ground to neutral leg junction of a 3 phase circuit. The point where they come together. Where you might find this symbol is just before an earth ground symbol. It is discontinued now for the most part, but was used to denote a way to help with the radio noise a 3-phase circuit makes so as to not allow bleed over to shortwave radio, cb radio, uhf tv, ect. Now the noise is generally cancelled out with ferrite beads, shielding, and filters.
@@stickyfox Older receivers have this marking on the backside of the units.(from the 1950 to 1960s if I recall correctly). I have had in the past an old transatlantic unit that had this marking. Thanks for the reply.
@@Blacksnowfanfics I think the one you are referring to is a bit different. The top of the one you refer to (if I am not mistaken and I could be) has a small triangle. It's close but not exactly the same. Check it please and if it is the same let us know and where it is located on the schematic. I am curious as this was and as far as I know still is used to show where a ferrite beaded cord or cable was called for. I would not think this would be hardwired into a motherboard but I guess if there is a lot of rf shielding needed maybe so. That is why I am curious as to where it is on the schematic.
Decent video, there's one thing about Unicode I think is important to understand to understand why this wasn't just allowed to happen, but *had* to happen. The goal of Unicode was to replace *every* previously existing character encoding standard. That means a core rule of Unicode is that it must support "round-trip conversion" with every older standard. You must be able to convert a document in a previous standard into unicode, and then back again to the previous standard, and the final document must be unchanged. So for example "one dot leader" (․) might be in practice exactly the same as a period (.), but Unicode has to give them separate characters, because in XCCS (the Xerox Character Code Standard from 1980) they were separate characters, so if Unicode collapsed them both into period then converting an XCCS document containing one dot leaders to unicode and back would result in the one dot leaders being changed to periods. And if there was a risk that converting an XCCS document to Unicode might damage (alter) the document, then that might give people an incentive to keep around documents in XCCS, thus defeating the goal of Unicode to be the one and only world standard. This roundtrip rule is why, if an ISO standard ever contained a character simply by accident (like ⍼), Unicode is *not allowed* to correct that accident. The roundtrip conversion requirement is also part of why Unicode contains about twenty different characters for a space (at least one of which is completely redundant with another space character) and, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, a prayer ("﷽" -- that is one character right there, codepoint 65021, it's called the Basmala and it's a blessing common in the Muslim world to open prayers or in some places legal documents).
@@bachaddict of course it'd contain a prayer that every Muslim is obligated to say everytime the prophet's name is mentiond. It's also why you have №: short for no. Which is short for "number" ±: short for + or - which is either short for "plus or minus" or short for "positive or negative" §: short for "section" You could type all of these out as statements but writers typically write them as if they're one character, and so do typist when they type them.
Thanks for explaining the "round trip rule". With Unicode having to adhere to that rule, it makes sense that the character may have been an error, and is now part of Unicode forever.
Similarly, there is "彁" This is a Japanese Kanji (Aka. Chinese character) but contains absolutly no meaning known. This is called "Yūrē Moji" or "Ghost Character" in Japan, which was quite more, but most of their origins were found eventually. In the end only this one letter "彁" left as mistery.
This is actually not the only character in Unicode with no known meaning. Because Unicode intends to have an encoding for any script ever used, it also includes stuff like the Linear A script used by the Minoans 1900 BC. Linear A has yet to be translated.
@@JOAOPENICHE Speaking of "nice". Since unicode includes Egyptian hieroglyphs, and some Egyptian hieroglyphs represent genitalia, it includes symbols for genitalia
2:36 My fave Unicode fact is that the Unicode Consortium is all those tech companies plus, randomly, Oman's Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs
A lot of Islamic phrases are repeated a lot and unicode makes life easier to write them quickly. I guess Oman was the first country to bring this up to the committee
I guess it makes sense to include some cultural organisations from different countries around the world (since all the tech corps are going to have a very American focus), but Oman specifically? And JUST Oman? That's weird!
@@Nalehw It's probably so uncontroversial that the other islamic countries are happy to let one country do the work (and foot the bill for committee meetings etc)
@@tanithrosenbaum it's also a relatively neutral Arab state with even a separate Islamic school than the Sunni and Shias, so i guess they are more than happy to let Oman officiate all the shortforms.
I would guess that ⍼ represents "exiting or breaking a known system" - something used to describe that an element cannot be used or transcends the understanding of a system that it's attempting to operate in. It could be in maths, physics, programming, philosophy, etc.
Back in the 80's SPSS used this symbol to mean "unplottable negative value", like, for a scatterplot to see the correlation between time to complete the survey and number of correct answers, it's okay if the scatterplot shows a negative *correlation* of data points from the upper left to the lower right inside the plot, but this data representation assumes 1) no one reversed time and completed their survey in -2 minutes, or 2) got 14 questions wrong on a 10-question form. So this was (and may still be) statistical shorthand for "data points appearing in supposedly impossible negative territory."
This one makes sense the most for me. Either that or is a "magic" symbol as another dude pointed out. Probably you answer is better, since it's based on real life
I am reminded of the stories about Van Halen's contract, which specifies no browm M&Ms. A quick look lets them determine if all fine print of the contract has been read. This could be a Unicode version of that check.
I've read it's because their shows involved pyrotechnics, performers being lifted with harnesses, and other potentially hazardous procedures. They wanted to know if the local crews actually read all the safety instructions.
Fun fact: this isn't even the only meaningless character in Unicode. Japanese has infamous "ghost characters" (幽霊文字 yuurei moji) that exist purely because Japan's standards bodies made a bunch of typos when standardizing Shift-JIS. That got wrapped up into Unicode because Unicode has a standing policy of accepting pretty much anything that existed in an already standardized character set (which is also part of the reason why we have emoji).
So, back in the day, we used to have terminals that printed characters out -- like a typewriter -- instead of a computer screen. -- You would connect to a mainframe, send it commands, and it would respond by printing characters out. A common trick, was to use backspace (which can't delete an already printed character), and just print a new letter over the top. So to underline something, you could print a "_" and a backspace, and then the letter "S", and that would give you an underlined S right there. This looks like two characters that may have been used in some ancient application, that they were probably porting to a modern system (that used screens instead of printers!) back in the mid 90s, and they wanted to make sure that future terminal applications would maintain compatibility with some crazy double printed character.
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx Yes, backspace allowed overstriking. A popular way to create "bold" text was to print something, then backspace over it and print the same thing again to make it darker.
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx No. Backspace deletes the character on screens. Old machines didn't have arrow keys. They didn't even have directories or graphical interfaces to navigate. There were running stuff similar to a command prompt/telnet/dos
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx Interesting unicode in your name ;) . For the original use of most ASCII characters, imagine that you were sending them to a printer, and you didn't send a new one until the previous one had been finished. Carriage return moved the print head (the "carriage") back to the starting point, but didn't move the paper. Line feed moved the paper, but not the carriage. Tab originally moved the carriage to a mechanical marker (the "tab"- this behavior was inherited from typewriters, where manually set tabs were used to make it easier to fill in forms with typewriters; this usage is why the tab key will sometimes move a cursor to the next GUI control), before being changed to fixed spacing. Other character encodings did similar things.
The symbol ⍼ is known as the "Z notation input delimiter." It's used in formal methods like the Z notation for specifying and designing computer systems to mark the beginning and end of input.
Hi, I'm the girl who painted that Linking Sigil shown at 4:20 (nice) in the video. Never thought it would get as much exposure as it did, but woah I am definitely impressed!
The beginnings of Unicode were apparently somewhat chaotic. The math symbols in particular contain a lot of ideas that some working group members had collected from unknown sources and just threw in. There was seemingly endless space so probably the thinking was "why not add anything that might be useful". This was, of course, foolish in hind sight.
I mean up until the 40s/50s every university/study group ect. had their own symbols and made them up along the way with their ideas (at least in maths, physics, etc.). Many of the original scripts of people like Pauli or Gödel are probably illegible in modern times. ⍼ is probably one of this old symbols.
I almost forgot about this symbol! I actually registered it for a few bucks way back then. The reason was that I wanted a half-satirical half-informative content creator on a then non-existent medium to wonder about its meaning in about five minutes.
But... but... but... I registered the code way back then. The reason was so someone could post in a non-existent future forum claiming the reason they created it was they wanted a half-satirical half-informative content creator on a then non-existent medium to wonder about its meaning in about five minutes. I was successful!!! Too bad I had to wait this long.
You joke, but I'd do something like that just for fun. I've already created a bunch of random crap I specifically created to confuse people many MANY years in the future long after I am dead. (although knowing me quantum computing will invalidate my efforts!)
I was scrolling through a list of Unicode characters and found the Hebrew alphabet and got all nostalgic because I learned it in preschool and then immediately forgot about it the second I got to kindergarten
@@seanj3667 why? I'm just telling him his channel is gonna ạ̶̡̈̂s̶̨̐c̵̠̉e̵̟͔͂̽̚n̸̺̏̿d̸̠̅͒ ̵͍̉̚t̴̖̰͎͒ǒ̵̗̀̈́ ̸̖͆t̵̠͑͜h̶̢̜̦̊e̵̥̜̊̐̌ ̸͔̱̄̍͐š̷̫̺̔i̴̧̥͋̂̓x̶̳̼͉̔̐t̶͎̤͑h̶̩̓ ̵̘̳̈́͜l̷̙̳̽̃ô̷͉̾c̸͉̘͈̑̒ḁ̵̳̻͛t̷̠̲̿̃i̶̥̓͌̚ó̸̥͌̐n̶̹̥̎͘ ̶̡̼͔͂̀
Search up the Poynting vector in electrical engineering and also apply that to a short circuit so it represents the short circuit towards the flow of electrons across a conductive material. IE: a electric welder follows that idea.
The price going back in time is interesting, but I thought it was the symbol for when the interest rate has an imaginary component, like when the interest on your loan is (2.53+14i)%
Probably my favorite Unicode Bloc is the Phaistos Disc characters; hieroglyphic-type characters from an undeciphered language that has only been found on one single ancient greek artifact: The Phaistos Disc. it contains such gems as BEEHIVE (𐇧), CHILD (𐇔), GRATER (𐇹), and WAVY BAND (𐇼). Unicode takes their "encode every character ever" mission very seriously.
"This weird little guy has been programming into nearly every single computer on Earth for decades, having been updated and carried over countless different times. But if no one seems to know what it means, then that raises a kind of strange question: Why is this symbol in your computer and who put it there?" I imagine there's quite a lot of code that's just sitting in most operating systems where the original purpose and author have been long forgotten, but no one removes it because they're afraid it'll break something. Backwards compatibility and all that...
@@LilacMonarch like that, except it isn't a coconut and it isn't actually a vital system... The 2fort cow, though... That's a keystone file if I've ever seen one.
The thing about The Unicode Consortium is that they do not care what do the symbols mean. That's why they name characters like Upper Right Block Diagonal Lower Middle To Lower Right and not simply Lower Left Part Of A Larger Shape. They describe the look of a character and not its use. And if symbol exists and someone had used it, they add it in.
That's not quite true. They just assign names and properties to character codes, but the actual appearance is left up to fonts. The code charts do include pictures, but they aren't definitive. Things like the box drawing characters and block elements have names like UPPER RIGHT BLOCK DIAGONAL LOWER MIDDLE TO LOWER RIGHT (Unicode names are officially in ALLCAPS for some reason) because their shape *is* their meaning. This actually causes some problems with emoji, which are generally chosen based on their graphical looks, but may look somewhat different to a recipient, leading to confusion. This is especially common with the facial expression emoticons: one example is the notorious Samsung Pervert Grimace.
There's a whole lot of "block" characters in Unicode, as well as in the proprietary character sets used by various vintage computers. On the old computers they came from, they were used to draw pictures in text mode. It was a way you could make primitive pictures on a computer that didn't have a graphics mode. Or maybe you didn't want to enter graphics mode because it was lower resolution than text mode and you just wanted to draw a distinctive frame around your text box and graphics mode would make any text you draw ugly and blocky. So, it isn't a specific part of a larger picture, it's a building block you can use many different ways. You might put a bunch of UPPER RIGHT BLOCK DIAGONAL LOWER MIDDLE TO LOWER RIGHT in a row to make a saw blade 🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓. Or you might use one of them to make a smooth transition from a bold horizontal line made up of UPPER HALF BLOCK, to an even thicker horizontal line made of FULL BLOCK ▀▀▀▀▀🭓█████. (No clue whether either of these will look nice, my Windows 10 doesn't have 🭓 in a font Chrome cares to use on TH-cam so I just get a rectangle with an X in it. Edit: Neither does my Android phone. I'm beginning to think this character isn't actually implemented on anything and is more of a placeholder to be used by a one-off font to be packed in with an emulator for whatever retro computer it was on.)
I'm such a Unicode nerd, I got super excited when you said "I need to explain how Unicode works in the first place," even though I already know damn well how it works. (And that message box at 1:55 brought back terrifying memories of '90s foreign websites in Netscape Navigator.) Still, I never heard the story of the angzarr before. Thanks for helping add another layer to my nerdiness!
I only learned about unicodes now, but i literally knew what unicodes were since i was 5 years old. And even then i didn't see them but i dreamed of unicode. Like a super long stream of unicode just flashed by and i woke up. It was bizzare and one of my earliest memories. And i have not had a computer till i was 12, but i always desired one my whole life strangely enough. I did recognize a few: U+2297,U+2242,U+23CA,U+25B1,U+2205,U+2252,U+22A8,U+22B5,U+22B7 and U+22C9. But there were many more, these are the only ones that i recognized from unicode list.
Actually this came up in a course when I was studying IT at uni and our lecturer mentioned that he had some old documentation that showed the character was used to represent
Barbara Beeton responded to this video herself: "The information in the video is inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the inclusion of the character in the STIX collection was based on its presence in a version of ISO 9573-13 earlier than the 1991 version cited, a version which existed long before AFII was formed."
I think this symbol should come to represent "Dord" which is the accidental word invented as a symbol for density that was added to the dictionary when someone mistook "D or d" for a word because because someone didn't leave enough space between the "or" and the lower and uppercase D's. Spaces are important. I once saw a hand written sign that was meant to say "Pen is broken" but because there was no space between "pen" and "is" It led me to ask the only male there how he had done it, and why he felt we all needed to know it was broken. He was very confused until I pointed out the sign to him.
Vertical line is Y axis. Horisontal line is X axis. Arrow actually starts from where horisontal and vertical lines meet, and it is the Z axis. The squigly line starts from where the three axis meet, and it goes 3 dimantionally up and right towards the viewer.
In the Japanese encoding system JIS X 0208, there are a few kanji encoded that are not found in any kanji dictionary. These are commonly known as “ghost characters” (yuurei moji 幽霊文字). The standard acknowledged the sources for these characters, but later people were unable to find these characters in the original sources. Later it was found that the encoded forms were wrong, and the forms that were supposed to be taken, were not encoded. Despite this, one character remains truly elusive, 55-27 彁 (U+5F41), its sources were not acknowledged and no results were found after extensive research. The character 彁 has since then become an internet phenomenon.
The wrong characters are still there, because once a character is encoded, you can’t remove it. The correct characters were added later to different JIS code pages. The most famous of such characters is 54-12 妛，which was a mistake for 𡚴。The source, when preparing the script for print, stuck two pieces of paper together for the 山 and 女 parts, but the gap in the paper created a mark in the print, and this was mistakenly spread as a vertical line in the middle. The right form 𡚴 was encoded in JIS X 0213. Likewise, 52-63 壥 is believed to be a mistake of 㕓, but the correct form is still not in JIS X 0213. For a more extreme case, 61-73 汢 was encoded for a place name, but the source character was wrong, and it should have had 冫instead of 氵。This character is still not even in Unicode. In 2002, the place that used this character officially changed their name to the form with 汢 for convenience.
@@RaymondHng An Asahi Shimbun commentator claimed that he found 彁 in a paper from 1923, in the term「埼玉自彁會」，but it was picked up wrongly by the digitization program, and was supposed to be 彊 (see 自彊術). Now for sorting and convenience, the character 彁 is arbitrarily assigned the reading “ka” (from 哥) or “sei”.
Unicode even has some errors documented in technical note #27. They decided that stability was more important for the project goals than, say, correctly listing U+0238 as a ligature instead of a digraph.
@@ccreutzig There's also the character ㌬, while it was supposed to be spelled バーツ to represent the Baht, a typo resulted in the spelling パーツ. This caused it to become unused, and sometimes fonts that include the CJK Compatibility block don't include this specific character because of this.
The symbol ⍼ was actually first invented somewhere between 1973 and 1978 when it appeared in an architectural drawing. It was more than likely just a printing error. Then in the early 1980s, around 1983 it began to be used in certain business documents, generally for memos and some presentations.
Tired: Sneaking a chaos magick sigil into the Unicode database Fired: Using a Unicode character with a completely unkown purpose as a base for your chaos magick sigil
It can be a symbol for large models, like LLM. Large models come from large data sets that are then converted into much smaller files, but can then be used to generate content. The downward zigzag arrow symbolized this, because the data is being reduced in size, but is not being compressed like WinZip.
I always thought it referred to "loss" , be it of voltage or data in compression. Like it would in a schismogram or suchlike. But I'm just an old weirdo, so who can say?
Someone in another comment mentioned it being used back in the 80s in electrical schematics to indicate the maximum rated electrical load, in situations where thermal runaway could damage the electronics.
Imagine losing a channel just because youtube stops showing it to you randomly. Last year was quite a period of life, and there was a lot of mess. And amidst all that youtube just stopped recommending this and I didn't mind at first, then forgot. This is so funny. The kind of funny because of how ridiculous the situation is. Lol!
At 0:40 there's a version with a rounded "lightning bolt" that looks like a sine wave going up the y-axis. Taken that way, this symbol could represent a rotated "right hand rule" showing the moving charge (sine/triangle AC waveform on y-axis), the magnetic field line (straight x-axis), and the magnetic force (vector/arrow on z-axis).
It looks like it could be a misinterpreted א in a different font, a term used for ordinal infinities. It also looks like Ꝇ, a Old Icelandic letter. Other things it could be from are ≴, ≰, ⌙ and ↯, ι and ↯to form a function in APL. On the electronics side, it seems like it could be an obscure electrochemistry symbol due to that zig-zag arrow without the L shape can represent electrolysis. It is more likely that it may be a modification of the symbol for varistors, possible Magnetic Dependent Resistor in particular. I think that the varistor and MDR are the most likely sources for this symbol.
In the ISO/IEC TR 9573-13:1991 document it just stated "Entity Name: angzarr" and "Short description: angle with down zig-zag arrow ". It seems the symbol doesn't have any specific meaning by default.
Yep. The ISO/IEC TR 9573-13:1991 had already blindly included it, likely from some existing collection of symbols, without knowing what the original purpose was. For all we know, it was originally a printing error that somehow got added to a list of symbols because whoever was compiling the list didn't recognise it as an error.
The most amusing part of this to me is the people in the comments stating with 100% certainty what it means. They're absolutely sure that they know, despite the fact that several different meanings are being stated this way. You can't really provide any proof in a TH-cam comment, can you?
It's like a quotation mark, except it's quoting a random thought you had, which you are now certain of, for no reason whatever. It's the "random idea cake completely out of my butt therefore it must be true" symbol.
I interpret those comments to be a person's best guess, in absence of them literally typing out something like "this is absolutely the real answer". Life gets a lot easier when you don't assume to know with certainty what someone is thinking / feeling when they make a comment.
@@googiegress Well, that's true, the way to interpret any of these comments that makes the most sense collectively is as guesses and guesses only. But there are a few comments where the people specifically claim to have had experience with that symbol in some specific field, and it's multiple completely different fields. That's the kind of "I'm sure I'm right" I'm talking about, it's kind of hard to translate that to a "best guess" when it's a specific claim which can't be backed up.
it feels like a symbol to describe the grounding for lighting thingies on buildings, the long cable connected on the wall to the ground that prevents that you from getting fried when lighting hits your building. The ZigZag symbol is current flowing through the cable on the side, the L symbol is a wall and the floor.
If I were to hazard a guess before I watched the video, I would have guessed it was used in a UI of some kind, since it's a right angle and those were sometimes used to create boxes on screen in older computers, but hearing it was in a set of mathematical symbols rules that out.
0:40 Those computers are older than Unicode. Unicode is still somewhat newish. While it was first developed in the 90s, it did did not come into common use until after the turn of the millennia. So it has not been in every computer for "decades", yet. ANSI or even ASCII was the standard in use for those computers.
It's 2022. Living through the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s is decades. Even if it was created December 31st, 1999 it has still seen 2 decades. 2000s and 2010s
@@ww6372 AFTER "the turn of the millennia". It took a while for it to become ubiquitous. It's only 2022. At most it could only just be decades old. But it's not. It has been universal for over a decade, but not "decades", yet.
The idea behind Unicode was having a unified code system for every industry standard that encodes symbols - ASCII, EBCDIC, ISO, Windows codepages … and later on emoticons, modern and ancient writing systems were and still are being added. After a few issues at the start - Unicode 1.0 was based on two bytes, but filled up fast after Chinese Unihan and Korean Hangeul were included - they redesigned it with pages. Since Unicode 2.0 no codepoint that was added will ever be removed, to make it futureproof and usable for long-time-archives.
> and later on emoticons [...] were [...] added actually, the first emojis come with the first versions of Unicode, since some Japanese standards integrated some, and they couldn't just leave them out as it would become a non-all-inclusive standard like it tried to be. it's also why there's a lot of Japan-specific emojis, those were added in pre-Unicode times, mostly.
@@rubenverg Yes, I meant emoji. I remember reading the discussion that was about including them on the unicode mailing list. They wanted to wait for an industry standard to be passed before having to make their own thing. But now Unicode is the de-facto-standard for character encoding. Just remember, it does not define how characters look. Only what they mean and what place(s) on the list they occupy. Some characters even can be combinations of codepoints. And the codepoint list is actually pure plain ASCII, which is also a valid UTF-8 file.
I love Jonathan's final comment in his report "If she was unable to find a source while actively working with AFII and STIX back in the 90s, I doubt I would be able to uncover anything new now, three decades later. Here, then, I close the book on my investigation. The meaning of ⍼ will be whatever meaning is assigned by whoever uses it next… if anyone uses it at all."
Well... It's not like many of the Chinese characters in the Unicode definition actually carry some practical uses anyway. Chinese characters in Unicode don't even have any descryption available besides that they are all called "CJK character". Basically if the character was seen somewhere before some version of Unicode was developed it got added in without question. And the funny thing is, Unicode both got some of the CJK unification wrong (leading to loads of rendering errors), and from time to time you will still see some character being used in historical documents that aren't defined in Unicode, so you would have to either use the radical building system that I don't think any word processor supports, or just make up the character and assign a private use code point just to publish the book that make use of said character.
Looks like a schematic symbol for a lightning rod to me. Current traveling towards ground. I think that lends creedence to the other gentlemen's post saying that it is a symbol for electrical load on a circuit, of which a lighting rod is a specific case.
The Unicode spec even includes syllabic Korean characters made up of so many other characters that they are such illegal characters they have never once appeared in Korean writing, except in things written about these strange Unicode combos.
They are probably just included for compatibility reasons. Same for the separate character for "Ü". Technically you should write "Ü" as two characters, a normal "U" and a "combining trema above".
@@conepictures Ü is it's own character though, in German. Are you saying that ÅÄÖ also aren't their own characters, Æ shouldn't be a character then either, Ø shouldn't be one either as well as it's just an O with a / through it... Oh and all of the Kanji/Hanzi, should it be written as each radical instead of having their own symbols? should 炎 be written by combining 火 twice?
@@livedandletdie Thats really a matter of what you want to name a character. There just existing vowels with tremas. At least that's their unicode normalization. And "ß" could be considered a ligature, or has it become it's own since the long s has mostly vanished from German?
Just noticed that some modern routers use the downward arrow symbol for download speed indication. So maybe this symbol is supposed to be used to represent abnormal variation in download speeds
I thought for sure this was going to be a video about undeciphered languages (such as Linear A) and how ⍼ might be an unknown character we haven't figured out yet. And I was completely right! It's just a modern unknown character instead of an ancient one.
It doesn't look like any weld symbol I've ever seen, and I've seen symbols dating back to the 1940s at least. Weld symbols are usually descriptive of the shapes of the pieces of metal being joined.
My first thought, when I saw it, how do I get it on my mobile, but no. The second thought, on computer generated drawings, when what looks like a right angle isn't 90°, this character could highlight it.
I like to think it means something innocuous like “move tab stop to next line”. Word processors are pretty universal in using the right angle for tab stops.
Close. It's when you modify the scaling* of the y axis, or the scaling isn't uniform. Yeah, this video is a bit weird for me. It's obscure, but some people know what it means.
I think an axis break is when your axis, a straight line that may or may not have arrows at the ends, suddenly zigzags in the middle to indicate either a scaling change or an arbitrarily sized jump in values. It's not the same as having a zigzag (with an arrow on it) _over_ a straight axis and overlapping it. It could be used to represent that, but as stated, there's no proof that it is, or that there has ever been a symbol in math to represent that outside of the graph itself.
Knights in Chess are actually moving in a straight line like every other piece. That line simply happens to be at an unusual angle halfway between a rook and a bishop.
My grandfather was actually the person. On his deathbed he told me quite a few of his secrets. It was shocking the things I never knew about him, but when he got to unicode he was telling me about what it was supposed to mean. "Now listen sweetie, I want you to be the only one who knows what that is actually about. When your grandmother and I were visiting..." and then he died.
ChatGPT says this: The "INSERTION SYMBOL" (⍼), represented by the Unicode codepoint U+237C, is primarily used in APL (A Programming Language) and related contexts. In APL, it typically denotes insertion or the placement of elements into an array or a data structure. It serves as a visual indicator in APL code to signify operations involving insertion.
1:30 How come the IBM and Apple systems get to have their identities shown, but the Amiga (A1000 with 1084 monitor) has all that removed? _HMM???_ Also, ASCII* (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was pretty well established back then and for the most part if you sent a message to at least another computer in the english speaking world it would be readable as long as it was not a character that did not exist in english. It's really only with the special characters that it became a problem, thus the necessity for unicode. * Computer makers had their own slightly different versions of this code. Commodore had PETSCII (the first Commodore was called the PET) and Atari had ATASCII for their 8 bit systems. I believe IBM and Apple used generic ASCII.
Its true purpose is that, when we finally meet alien life sometime in the exceedingly far future, the first aliens we come into contact with will see it as a union proposal, and they'll wish to join with us forevermore. We'll gain the best ally we'll have ever seen, one that will absolutely never betray us.
I was thinking something similar too. A formatting character for a graph, similar to how the skin tone emoji variants are the base with a color formatting
There is a theory that the arrow is actually supposed to be pointing to the right (think a 'stonks going down' graph) but a mistake was made along the way.
I like to imagine it was a scribble in a margin of some obscure math proof that people were too afraid to question and it just kept getting passed around
@@shouse_zip it’s a spam bot report it and move on
it does look like someone was about to write the qed squate but then realised it's a proof by contradition lol
No stonks? :(
@@Koisheep right? It def gives me QED vibes
@@Koisheep i hate when i squick my qed squates
Its the symbol for electrical load on a circuit. I haven’t seen it in like 30 years, but there you go. I wasn’t aware it was a proprietary thing, but it may be a Swiss/German standard not used elsewhere.
😲
Could you elaborate further? I could probably find a source if you know a certain field/situation where this was used... (am from Germany and have access to uni libraries)
@@Aligartornator13 If it's a symbol for electrical loads, then you may find something in old metro stations or distributions of the network with high voltage.
It usually means that the system is Grounded for High Voltage on that path, such as Lightning or other surges.
I actually believe this. I'm not sure why.
As "Manager of Text and Imaging Systems" at Amiga, I was amused to see something I did 40 years ago. I wondered if your example at 1:38 showed glyphs for the same hex character, but those shown for IBM/Mac/Amiga would have been encoded 9A/8B/E7. I offer: displaying E5 on all three would yield σ/Â/å. Unicode was a great but we weren't ready for all the places 16-bit characters broke things, especially as there was only 256 KB of RAM 🤯
wow this video was really ⍼ i especially liked the part where hai explains why ⍼ is still a unicode character ⍼ video ⍼ /10
whats the ascii code?
@@xNiDrOx It's not part of ASCII, its Unicode code point is U+237C
I'm totally ⍼ed
@@xNiDrOx 🤣 Good one!
yes it was very :angzarr:
In meteorology, we have symbols for denoting surface weather observations. ☇ means lightning and ☈ means thunderstorm. Maybe ⍼ was a corruption of one the thunderstorm one?
Really great idea!
Underwater thunderstorm! 😁
⍼ reminds me of lightning rod grounding scheme (could be any electrical grounding too)
@@harriehausenman8623 Understorm?
is there also a meteorological symbol for "very very frightening"?
according to XKCD #2606, the character is a symbol for Larry Potter, so that's what i'm going with. the same comic also helpfully pointed out that ⩼ means "confused alligator", ⭈ means "snakes over there", and ⨓ means "integral that avoids a bee on the whiteboard"
I am shocked it took me this much scrolling to find an XKCD reference.
@@MinnesotaExpat i'm even more shocked that the video doesn't have an XKCD reference, given the comic has been out for like a week or two now.
Wait, did u really mean Larry Potter? I never heard of that and reviews are terrible.... wait... is it a lightning over L??? WTF?????????????
@@anzahanifathallah because most people done give a care in the world about some bad comic book.
@@MoonCowGaming comic book lmao. You clearly don't know what xkcd is or how popular it is in scientific/engineering circles...
This video needs an update. If it hasn't been posted yet (there are a crapton of comments and could only scan so much), the source of this character that apparently led to its incorporation into ISO/IEC TR 9573-13 is a 21 page insert appended to a typeface catalogue from Monotype Corp. Ltd., entitled "List of mathematical characters" (1972), where the symbol was designated with the matrix serial number S16139. The whole AFII thing was a red herring.
But what does it mean?
@@Sonyim414 It's an electrical engineering Symbol, mostly used in germany.
☝️🤓
It is a little known electrical engineering schematic symbol. It simply means a ground to neutral leg junction of a 3 phase circuit. The point where they come together. Where you might find this symbol is just before an earth ground symbol. It is discontinued now for the most part, but was used to denote a way to help with the radio noise a 3-phase circuit makes so as to not allow bleed over to shortwave radio, cb radio, uhf tv, ect. Now the noise is generally cancelled out with ferrite beads, shielding, and filters.
In RF systems, particularly below 30 MHz, an actual earth ground is still the only way to do it.
@@stickyfox Older receivers have this marking on the backside of the units.(from the 1950 to 1960s if I recall correctly). I have had in the past an old transatlantic unit that had this marking. Thanks for the reply.
No it's not discontinued it's commonly used on schematics even my predators motherboard schematics uses it
@@Blacksnowfanfics I think the one you are referring to is a bit different. The top of the one you refer to (if I am not mistaken and I could be) has a small triangle. It's close but not exactly the same. Check it please and if it is the same let us know and where it is located on the schematic. I am curious as this was and as far as I know still is used to show where a ferrite beaded cord or cable was called for. I would not think this would be hardwired into a motherboard but I guess if there is a lot of rf shielding needed maybe so. That is why I am curious as to where it is on the schematic.
So it's likely an artifact from when early computer engineers had to know about electrical theory to build & modify their machines.
Decent video, there's one thing about Unicode I think is important to understand to understand why this wasn't just allowed to happen, but *had* to happen. The goal of Unicode was to replace *every* previously existing character encoding standard. That means a core rule of Unicode is that it must support "round-trip conversion" with every older standard. You must be able to convert a document in a previous standard into unicode, and then back again to the previous standard, and the final document must be unchanged. So for example "one dot leader" (․) might be in practice exactly the same as a period (.), but Unicode has to give them separate characters, because in XCCS (the Xerox Character Code Standard from 1980) they were separate characters, so if Unicode collapsed them both into period then converting an XCCS document containing one dot leaders to unicode and back would result in the one dot leaders being changed to periods. And if there was a risk that converting an XCCS document to Unicode might damage (alter) the document, then that might give people an incentive to keep around documents in XCCS, thus defeating the goal of Unicode to be the one and only world standard. This roundtrip rule is why, if an ISO standard ever contained a character simply by accident (like ⍼), Unicode is *not allowed* to correct that accident.
The roundtrip conversion requirement is also part of why Unicode contains about twenty different characters for a space (at least one of which is completely redundant with another space character) and, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, a prayer ("﷽" -- that is one character right there, codepoint 65021, it's called the Basmala and it's a blessing common in the Muslim world to open prayers or in some places legal documents).
thanks for the background info!
@@bachaddict of course it'd contain a prayer that every Muslim is obligated to say everytime the prophet's name is mentiond. It's also why you have
№: short for no. Which is short for "number"
±: short for + or - which is either short for "plus or minus" or short for "positive or negative"
§: short for "section"
You could type all of these out as statements but writers typically write them as if they're one character, and so do typist when they type them.
@@Stevie-J idc I liked the extra info and breakdown
Thanks for explaining the "round trip rule". With Unicode having to adhere to that rule, it makes sense that the character may have been an error, and is now part of Unicode forever.
i think you meant Bismillah. Also the character '﷽' is 'Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem'
Angzarr is now the name of my Big Bad Evil Guy in the DND campaign I'm running. And he comes with his own symbol too. Thanks Half As Interesting.
Similarly, there is "彁"
This is a Japanese Kanji (Aka. Chinese character) but contains absolutly no meaning known. This is called "Yūrē Moji" or "Ghost Character" in Japan, which was quite more, but most of their origins were found eventually. In the end only this one letter "彁" left as mistery.
its
@@NoName-zn1sb RIP, my man got executed mid sentence
Don’t comment because the Yūrē Moji kills you, I just read about it and now t
L
@@darkwing0o0rama haha guys this is such a funny joke, you guys ca
This is actually not the only character in Unicode with no known meaning. Because Unicode intends to have an encoding for any script ever used, it also includes stuff like the Linear A script used by the Minoans 1900 BC. Linear A has yet to be translated.
Nice
@@JOAOPENICHE Speaking of "nice". Since unicode includes Egyptian hieroglyphs, and some Egyptian hieroglyphs represent genitalia, it includes symbols for genitalia
@@sundhaug92 Nice 𓂺
@@sundhaug92 Well it's good to know that the ancient Minoans and ancient Egyptians will be able to send emails to each other.
As well as the Voynich manuscript
Half as Interesting single-handedly keeping the stock footage industry alive.
Together with Thoughty2
Also one youtuber called IGoByLotsOfNames
@@fanndx an igblon viewer on a half as interesting video? weird coincidence
Unicode Character “⍼” (U+237C)
Name: Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
Unicode Version: 3.2 (March 2002)
Block: Miscellaneous Technical, U+2300 - U+23FF
Plane: Basic Multilingual Plane, U+0000 - U+FFFF
Script: Code for undetermined script (Zyyy)
Category: Math Symbol (Sm)
Bidirectional Class: Other Neutral (ON)
Combining Class: Not Reordered (0)
Character is Mirrored: No
HTML Entity: ⍼ ⍼ ⍼
UTF-8 Encoding: 0xE2 0x8D 0xBC
UTF-16 Encoding: 0x237C
UTF-32 Encoding: 0x0000237C
2:36 My fave Unicode fact is that the Unicode Consortium is all those tech companies plus, randomly, Oman's Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs
A lot of Islamic phrases are repeated a lot and unicode makes life easier to write them quickly. I guess Oman was the first country to bring this up to the committee
I guess it makes sense to include some cultural organisations from different countries around the world (since all the tech corps are going to have a very American focus), but Oman specifically? And JUST Oman? That's weird!
@@Nalehw It's probably so uncontroversial that the other islamic countries are happy to let one country do the work (and foot the bill for committee meetings etc)
@@iwatchwithnoads7480 okay, but what about the endowments?
@@tanithrosenbaum it's also a relatively neutral Arab state with even a separate Islamic school than the Sunni and Shias, so i guess they are more than happy to let Oman officiate all the shortforms.
2:46 It's actually added for Teletext compatibility, not Apple II compatibility.
Teletext was a way for analog broadcasters to broadcast text.
I like that you explain what teletext was because young people don't know anymore while my mom still uses it to this day
teletext still exists
@@Minecraftzocker135 what does she use it for?
@@99temporal mostly time I think. She uses analoge clocks and they tend to run dry at some point
I guess teletext is still the best way to look up a weather forecast if you somehow can't go online at home, maybe?
I would guess that ⍼ represents "exiting or breaking a known system" - something used to describe that an element cannot be used or transcends the understanding of a system that it's attempting to operate in. It could be in maths, physics, programming, philosophy, etc.
That would be a "boundary break" …?
that was my interpretation of it as well.
⍩
I love that meaning, this is now what I'll say to anyone that asks what it means when it's a tattoo on my leg :D
I do not know of any mathematics or physics that does that, though. :(
Back in the 80's SPSS used this symbol to mean "unplottable negative value", like, for a scatterplot to see the correlation between time to complete the survey and number of correct answers, it's okay if the scatterplot shows a negative *correlation* of data points from the upper left to the lower right inside the plot, but this data representation assumes 1) no one reversed time and completed their survey in -2 minutes, or 2) got 14 questions wrong on a 10-question form. So this was (and may still be) statistical shorthand for "data points appearing in supposedly impossible negative territory."
There we have the answer!
This one makes sense the most for me.
Either that or is a "magic" symbol as another dude pointed out. Probably you answer is better, since it's based on real life
What did they change the symbol to?
Do you have evidence, like an example of it being used?
Is there a link to a manual like a pdf with the symbol shown and a date? It would be nice to share it with everyone.
I am reminded of the stories about Van Halen's contract, which specifies no browm M&Ms. A quick look lets them determine if all fine print of the contract has been read.
This could be a Unicode version of that check.
I've read it's because their shows involved pyrotechnics, performers being lifted with harnesses, and other potentially hazardous procedures. They wanted to know if the local crews actually read all the safety instructions.
Fun fact: this isn't even the only meaningless character in Unicode. Japanese has infamous "ghost characters" (幽霊文字 yuurei moji) that exist purely because Japan's standards bodies made a bunch of typos when standardizing Shift-JIS. That got wrapped up into Unicode because Unicode has a standing policy of accepting pretty much anything that existed in an already standardized character set (which is also part of the reason why we have emoji).
but we know these yuurei wenzi origin, that it was an error
@@micahmeneyerji I can't tell the difference between the last two. Is it less than 0.5dp or something?
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx some of them are just literally the same
Maybe it's presence and absence of a zero width space?
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx TH-cam filters some of it
So, back in the day, we used to have terminals that printed characters out -- like a typewriter -- instead of a computer screen. -- You would connect to a mainframe, send it commands, and it would respond by printing characters out.
A common trick, was to use backspace (which can't delete an already printed character), and just print a new letter over the top.
So to underline something, you could print a "_" and a backspace, and then the letter "S", and that would give you an underlined S right there.
This looks like two characters that may have been used in some ancient application, that they were probably porting to a modern system (that used screens instead of printers!) back in the mid 90s, and they wanted to make sure that future terminal applications would maintain compatibility with some crazy double printed character.
So "backspace" didn't delete the character it just moved the pointer left? So it was almost like the "←" button?
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx unless you had one of the fancy ones that had built-in whiteout
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx Yes, backspace allowed overstriking. A popular way to create "bold" text was to print something, then backspace over it and print the same thing again to make it darker.
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx No. Backspace deletes the character on screens. Old machines didn't have arrow keys. They didn't even have directories or graphical interfaces to navigate. There were running stuff similar to a command prompt/telnet/dos
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx
Interesting unicode in your name ;) . For the original use of most ASCII characters, imagine that you were sending them to a printer, and you didn't send a new one until the previous one had been finished. Carriage return moved the print head (the "carriage") back to the starting point, but didn't move the paper. Line feed moved the paper, but not the carriage. Tab originally moved the carriage to a mechanical marker (the "tab"- this behavior was inherited from typewriters, where manually set tabs were used to make it easier to fill in forms with typewriters; this usage is why the tab key will sometimes move a cursor to the next GUI control), before being changed to fixed spacing. Other character encodings did similar things.
The symbol ⍼ is known as the "Z notation input delimiter." It's used in formal methods like the Z notation for specifying and designing computer systems to mark the beginning and end of input.
If that were true, why isn't it in the 1992 second edition of the Z Manual? Not sure why this has 30+ upvotes.
Wikipedia says Z notation goes back to 1974, but this symbol was found in a Monotype catalog in 1963: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angzarr
Hi, I'm the girl who painted that Linking Sigil shown at 4:20 (nice) in the video. Never thought it would get as much exposure as it did, but woah I am definitely impressed!
That's awesome, that's my favorite drawing of Ellis. Also, not every day I encounter anyone else who's even heard of DKMU.
Yep, I've been in it for 12 years now. Come say hi, we're not hard to find!
HI OMNI I SEE U THERE :3
@@ErikratKhandnalie drink yer grape juice youngin
Did you invent it, or merely paint that (awesome) version of it? If the former, was it inspired by the unicode glyph at all?
The beginnings of Unicode were apparently somewhat chaotic. The math symbols in particular contain a lot of ideas that some working group members had collected from unknown sources and just threw in. There was seemingly endless space so probably the thinking was "why not add anything that might be useful". This was, of course, foolish in hind sight.
People making Unicode: "there's basically endless space!"
Emoji, waiting to be invented: "heh heh heh, that's what you think"
I mean up until the 40s/50s every university/study group ect. had their own symbols and made them up along the way with their ideas (at least in maths, physics, etc.). Many of the original scripts of people like Pauli or Gödel are probably illegible in modern times. ⍼ is probably one of this old symbols.
Emoji was already invented, just not added to the Unicode standard.
Why is it foolish in hindsight?
Can I have a source for this claim please? 🥺
I almost forgot about this symbol! I actually registered it for a few bucks way back then. The reason was that I wanted a half-satirical half-informative content creator on a then non-existent medium to wonder about its meaning in about five minutes.
proof
visionary
But... but... but... I registered the code way back then. The reason was so someone could post in a non-existent future forum claiming the reason they created it was they wanted a half-satirical half-informative content creator on a then non-existent medium to wonder about its meaning in about five minutes.
I was successful!!! Too bad I had to wait this long.
You joke, but I'd do something like that just for fun.
I've already created a bunch of random crap I specifically created to confuse people many MANY years in the future long after I am dead. (although knowing me quantum computing will invalidate my efforts!)
I was scrolling through a list of Unicode characters and found the Hebrew alphabet and got all nostalgic because I learned it in preschool and then immediately forgot about it the second I got to kindergarten
I've found a few references to Dutch economics textbooks using it to denote the Y-axis continuing below the X-axis.
My man!
I think that’s the answer then
Are you sure they are old enough to count?
The market for Dutch economics textbooks becomes suprisingly active as 2 million HAI subscribers look for evidence.
Ìf you don't mind taking it a few minutes it'd be great if you could upload an image on an imagehosting site and share the link here (:
Thank you
You should do a video on how printers still use the ⎊ as the stop button, when that symbol has largely been phased out from older European stop signs.
WAIT, THAT COMES FROM STOP SIGNS?!
That is Yield sign.
It is stop, but not dead stop.
wow i didn't know that's what the button symbol was from
Didn't know that either, yield signs here are just upside down triangles, no circle around them
@@jackgerberuae No it's not, it's an older alternative used in Britan until the mid 70's
If you keep the good work, I think your channel is gonna ⍼!
NOOOOOOOOOOOO
@@potato1907 ?
NAH
its gonna ⍨!
That's pretty rude.
@@seanj3667 why? I'm just telling him his channel is gonna ạ̶̡̈̂s̶̨̐c̵̠̉e̵̟͔͂̽̚n̸̺̏̿d̸̠̅͒ ̵͍̉̚t̴̖̰͎͒ǒ̵̗̀̈́ ̸̖͆t̵̠͑͜h̶̢̜̦̊e̵̥̜̊̐̌ ̸͔̱̄̍͐š̷̫̺̔i̴̧̥͋̂̓x̶̳̼͉̔̐t̶͎̤͑h̶̩̓ ̵̘̳̈́͜l̷̙̳̽̃ô̷͉̾c̸͉̘͈̑̒ḁ̵̳̻͛t̷̠̲̿̃i̶̥̓͌̚ó̸̥͌̐n̶̹̥̎͘ ̶̡̼͔͂̀
I want to troll Unicode by somehow getting a Trollface as a symbol.
Search up the Poynting vector in electrical engineering and also apply that to a short circuit so it represents the short circuit towards the flow of electrons across a conductive material. IE: a electric welder follows that idea.
It's for when the market gone mad and the price goes back in time
lmao
The price going back in time is interesting, but I thought it was the symbol for when the interest rate has an imaginary component, like when the interest on your loan is (2.53+14i)%
@@blumoogle2901 how the fuck do you interpret that? And how do you pay 2.83i dollars of interest to the bank?
Temporal inflation
Thanks for making this good video, it was so ⍼!
4:29 In Russia we have a beautiful word to describe the same meaning: "Ж"
Probably my favorite Unicode Bloc is the Phaistos Disc characters; hieroglyphic-type characters from an undeciphered language that has only been found on one single ancient greek artifact: The Phaistos Disc. it contains such gems as BEEHIVE (𐇧),
CHILD (𐇔), GRATER (𐇹), and WAVY BAND (𐇼).
Unicode takes their "encode every character ever" mission very seriously.
"This weird little guy has been programming into nearly every single computer on Earth for decades, having been updated and carried over countless different times. But if no one seems to know what it means, then that raises a kind of strange question: Why is this symbol in your computer and who put it there?"
I imagine there's quite a lot of code that's just sitting in most operating systems where the original purpose and author have been long forgotten, but no one removes it because they're afraid it'll break something. Backwards compatibility and all that...
Old, out of use engineering shorthand. Unicode does not remove symbols. There is the entirety of dead languages preserved in Unicode.
like the tf2 coconut jpg
@@LilacMonarch like that, except it isn't a coconut and it isn't actually a vital system...
The 2fort cow, though... That's a keystone file if I've ever seen one.
@@energy538 Apparently the coconut jpg makes the game break when deleted
He actually put the phonetic guide for Sigil on the screen and still mispronounced it 😂
Phonetic guides? What strange magic!
he just reads a script, then the editors put the images. so it makes sense
Hey now, it wouldn't be a HAI video without a mispronounciation or two!
How do you pronounce it? Sigil or sigil?
@@ctbrokaw The G is pronounced opposite to the G in GIF.
The Angzar is truly one of the Unicode characters of all time!
The thing about The Unicode Consortium is that they do not care what do the symbols mean. That's why they name characters like Upper Right Block Diagonal Lower Middle To Lower Right and not simply Lower Left Part Of A Larger Shape. They describe the look of a character and not its use. And if symbol exists and someone had used it, they add it in.
That's not quite true. They just assign names and properties to character codes, but the actual appearance is left up to fonts. The code charts do include pictures, but they aren't definitive. Things like the box drawing characters and block elements have names like UPPER RIGHT BLOCK DIAGONAL LOWER MIDDLE TO LOWER RIGHT (Unicode names are officially in ALLCAPS for some reason) because their shape *is* their meaning.
This actually causes some problems with emoji, which are generally chosen based on their graphical looks, but may look somewhat different to a recipient, leading to confusion. This is especially common with the facial expression emoticons: one example is the notorious Samsung Pervert Grimace.
There's a whole lot of "block" characters in Unicode, as well as in the proprietary character sets used by various vintage computers. On the old computers they came from, they were used to draw pictures in text mode. It was a way you could make primitive pictures on a computer that didn't have a graphics mode. Or maybe you didn't want to enter graphics mode because it was lower resolution than text mode and you just wanted to draw a distinctive frame around your text box and graphics mode would make any text you draw ugly and blocky.
So, it isn't a specific part of a larger picture, it's a building block you can use many different ways. You might put a bunch of UPPER RIGHT BLOCK DIAGONAL LOWER MIDDLE TO LOWER RIGHT in a row to make a saw blade 🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓🭓. Or you might use one of them to make a smooth transition from a bold horizontal line made up of UPPER HALF BLOCK, to an even thicker horizontal line made of FULL BLOCK ▀▀▀▀▀🭓█████. (No clue whether either of these will look nice, my Windows 10 doesn't have 🭓 in a font Chrome cares to use on TH-cam so I just get a rectangle with an X in it. Edit: Neither does my Android phone. I'm beginning to think this character isn't actually implemented on anything and is more of a placeholder to be used by a one-off font to be packed in with an emulator for whatever retro computer it was on.)
@@gwalla ...the what?
Trying to read that character on my Smartwatch was a struggle lol
Why would you watch TH-cam on a smartwatch
@@Nate5 ikr
weird of you to say that
@@Nate5 I just got the notification for it
@@Nate5 Because they can.
I'm such a Unicode nerd, I got super excited when you said "I need to explain how Unicode works in the first place," even though I already know damn well how it works. (And that message box at 1:55 brought back terrifying memories of '90s foreign websites in Netscape Navigator.) Still, I never heard the story of the angzarr before. Thanks for helping add another layer to my nerdiness!
I only learned about unicodes now, but i literally knew what unicodes were since i was 5 years old.
And even then i didn't see them but i dreamed of unicode.
Like a super long stream of unicode just flashed by and i woke up. It was bizzare and one of my earliest memories.
And i have not had a computer till i was 12, but i always desired one my whole life strangely enough.
I did recognize a few: U+2297,U+2242,U+23CA,U+25B1,U+2205,U+2252,U+22A8,U+22B5,U+22B7 and U+22C9.
But there were many more, these are the only ones that i recognized from unicode list.
As ci was first
You mean ASCII? Because plenty of character encoding schemes existed prior to Unicode, ASCII is just one of them.
this character clearly means
"L+get shocked"
To me, this has got "leave that slot open, we'll put something there later" written all over it.
It looks like the Y-Axis is being reduced, i.e. “reduction” or “reduce”. Or even indicate the y-axis is showing a negative value.
So it exists ... to show there's no Y
Actually this came up in a course when I was studying IT at uni and our lecturer mentioned that he had some old documentation that showed the character was used to represent
represent what?
@@zanayeng3983 That's the joke! 😄
I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for this symbol that this TH-cam comment is too small to contain.
P. de Fermat
@@jonathanrichards593 take my upvote bloody mate
Barbara Beeton responded to this video herself: "The information in the video is inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the inclusion of the character in the STIX collection was based on its presence in a version of ISO 9573-13 earlier than the 1991 version cited, a version which existed long before AFII was formed."
Where did she says that?
He mentions that he didn't want to pay 198 euros for the pdf of ISO 9573-13.
I think this symbol should come to represent "Dord" which is the accidental word invented as a symbol for density that was added to the dictionary when someone mistook "D or d" for a word because because someone didn't leave enough space between the "or" and the lower and uppercase D's.
Spaces are important. I once saw a hand written sign that was meant to say "Pen is broken" but because there was no space between "pen" and "is" It led me to ask the only male there how he had done it, and why he felt we all needed to know it was broken.
He was very confused until I pointed out the sign to him.
Comment of the day award!!!
Vertical line is Y axis. Horisontal line is X axis. Arrow actually starts from where horisontal and vertical lines meet, and it is the Z axis. The squigly line starts from where the three axis meet, and it goes 3 dimantionally up and right towards the viewer.
In the Japanese encoding system JIS X 0208, there are a few kanji encoded that are not found in any kanji dictionary. These are commonly known as “ghost characters” (yuurei moji 幽霊文字).
The standard acknowledged the sources for these characters, but later people were unable to find these characters in the original sources. Later it was found that the encoded forms were wrong, and the forms that were supposed to be taken, were not encoded. Despite this, one character remains truly elusive, 55-27 彁 (U+5F41), its sources were not acknowledged and no results were found after extensive research. The character 彁 has since then become an internet phenomenon.
So what happened with the characters that were wrongly encoded? And what happened to the charcters that were not encoded?
The wrong characters are still there, because once a character is encoded, you can’t remove it. The correct characters were added later to different JIS code pages.
The most famous of such characters is 54-12 妛，which was a mistake for 𡚴。The source, when preparing the script for print, stuck two pieces of paper together for the 山 and 女 parts, but the gap in the paper created a mark in the print, and this was mistakenly spread as a vertical line in the middle. The right form 𡚴 was encoded in JIS X 0213.
Likewise, 52-63 壥 is believed to be a mistake of 㕓, but the correct form is still not in JIS X 0213.
For a more extreme case, 61-73 汢 was encoded for a place name, but the source character was wrong, and it should have had 冫instead of 氵。This character is still not even in Unicode. In 2002, the place that used this character officially changed their name to the form with 汢 for convenience.
@@hanzimaster 彁 is composed of the 弓 radical for bow (weapon) and 哥 for older brother.
@@RaymondHng An Asahi Shimbun commentator claimed that he found 彁 in a paper from 1923, in the term「埼玉自彁會」，but it was picked up wrongly by the digitization program, and was supposed to be 彊 (see 自彊術). Now for sorting and convenience, the character 彁 is arbitrarily assigned the reading “ka” (from 哥) or “sei”.
@@RaymondHng and mountain and girl make that above kanji but which is the radical?
Given the sheer number and variety of characters represented in Unicode, it would be extraordinary if there weren’t any errors.
Unicode even has some errors documented in technical note #27. They decided that stability was more important for the project goals than, say, correctly listing U+0238 as a ligature instead of a digraph.
@@ccreutzig There's also the character ㌬, while it was supposed to be spelled バーツ to represent the Baht, a typo resulted in the spelling パーツ. This caused it to become unused, and sometimes fonts that include the CJK Compatibility block don't include this specific character because of this.
The symbol ⍼ was actually first invented somewhere between 1973 and 1978 when it appeared in an architectural drawing. It was more than likely just a printing error. Then in the early 1980s, around 1983 it began to be used in certain business documents, generally for memos and some presentations.
Proof? E.g. scans of the drawing or business documents or textbooks
yeah pics or it didn't happen
What Architectural drawing? I have never seen this, and I am in this business 🧐
Link the Dutch textbooks
@@jackgerberuae that's because the full symbol as you and I see it wasn't what was used.
This character “‽” is called Interrobang, the code (unicode) is U+203D and the html is ‽
and it basically means "!?"
@@santinosalamanca4378 Yeah
Tired: Sneaking a chaos magick sigil into the Unicode database
Fired: Using a Unicode character with a completely unkown purpose as a base for your chaos magick sigil
Yea clearly looks like one
It can be a symbol for large models, like LLM. Large models come from large data sets that are then converted into much smaller files, but can then be used to generate content. The downward zigzag arrow symbolized this, because the data is being reduced in size, but is not being compressed like WinZip.
Angzar looks almost like something you'd see in a schematic.
Except not.
I always thought it referred to "loss" , be it of voltage or data in compression. Like it would in a schismogram or suchlike.
But I'm just an old weirdo, so who can say?
@@dsnodgrass4843 nah, this refers to "loss" though
i ii ii i _
Someone in another comment mentioned it being used back in the 80s in electrical schematics to indicate the maximum rated electrical load, in situations where thermal runaway could damage the electronics.
Imagine losing a channel just because youtube stops showing it to you randomly. Last year was quite a period of life, and there was a lot of mess. And amidst all that youtube just stopped recommending this and I didn't mind at first, then forgot. This is so funny. The kind of funny because of how ridiculous the situation is. Lol!
Still more understandable than enchanting table
hi chess commenter guy, i forgot about you for a year lol
as someone who can (roughly) read the enchantment table, it's a lot of nonsense that doesn't help with anything or mean anything
It's the Intergalactic Alphabet from Commander Keen...
⍼: The Artist Formerly Known As HAI
"listen kid, I don't have much time, the secret for immortality is ⍼"
*melts*
Well it obviously didn't help with the whole immortality thing if they ended up melting, now did it?
The secret of immortality is ꑭ
The secret of immortality is
∞
The secret of immortality is ☥
The secret of immortality is: don't die
I see an explanation of Unicode, I press like. Those guys deserve more recognition.
At 0:40 there's a version with a rounded "lightning bolt" that looks like a sine wave going up the y-axis. Taken that way, this symbol could represent a rotated "right hand rule" showing the moving charge (sine/triangle AC waveform on y-axis), the magnetic field line (straight x-axis), and the magnetic force (vector/arrow on z-axis).
It looks like it could be a misinterpreted א in a different font, a term used for ordinal infinities. It also looks like Ꝇ, a Old Icelandic letter. Other things it could be from are ≴, ≰, ⌙ and ↯, ι and ↯to form a function in APL.
On the electronics side, it seems like it could be an obscure electrochemistry symbol due to that zig-zag arrow without the L shape can represent electrolysis. It is more likely that it may be a modification of the symbol for varistors, possible Magnetic Dependent Resistor in particular.
I think that the varistor and MDR are the most likely sources for this symbol.
In the ISO/IEC TR 9573-13:1991 document it just stated "Entity Name: angzarr" and "Short description: angle with down zig-zag arrow
". It seems the symbol doesn't have any specific meaning by default.
😳
Thanks for actually checking.
Yep. The ISO/IEC TR 9573-13:1991 had already blindly included it, likely from some existing collection of symbols, without knowing what the original purpose was. For all we know, it was originally a printing error that somehow got added to a list of symbols because whoever was compiling the list didn't recognise it as an error.
From another poster it sounds like it is a symbol for the electrical load on a circuit. Maybe mostly used by Germans/Swiss.
Well, I used the symbol in a research essay at school to mark connections to different chapters, so I guess it has a meaning for me now.
Literally read an article on this 5 minutes ago, now it's in my recommended, God bless.
Edit: It was the same article too!
Wikipedia page for _Ellis (sigil):_ [clarifies that “sigil” is pronounced /ˈsɪdʒəl/]
Sam: [confidently mispronounces it as /ˈsɪɡəl/ multiple times]
How do they manage to make and edit a whole video and not realise ?
🤓
Could be too much Planescape.
ok but are you guys sure that it is wikipedia considering it only says "the multilingual encyclopedia"
"Doing hard things is hard, excpet when it isn't"
-Sam 2022
*H • A • R • D*
⍼
☈ = right-hand rule. ⍼ = left-hand rule.
For indicating the direction of electric coiling or threading on screws/bolts.
1:50 good timing with the stock clip, that final reaction look from her is perfect
The most amusing part of this to me is the people in the comments stating with 100% certainty what it means. They're absolutely sure that they know, despite the fact that several different meanings are being stated this way. You can't really provide any proof in a TH-cam comment, can you?
Yeah, there is a lot of "I know for sure what it means (even though I have never seen it before I watched this video)"
@@LaurenzEdelman I can say with 100% certainty that is exactly the meaning of ⍼
It's like a quotation mark, except it's quoting a random thought you had, which you are now certain of, for no reason whatever. It's the "random idea cake completely out of my butt therefore it must be true" symbol.
I interpret those comments to be a person's best guess, in absence of them literally typing out something like "this is absolutely the real answer". Life gets a lot easier when you don't assume to know with certainty what someone is thinking / feeling when they make a comment.
@@googiegress Well, that's true, the way to interpret any of these comments that makes the most sense collectively is as guesses and guesses only. But there are a few comments where the people specifically claim to have had experience with that symbol in some specific field, and it's multiple completely different fields. That's the kind of "I'm sure I'm right" I'm talking about, it's kind of hard to translate that to a "best guess" when it's a specific claim which can't be backed up.
it feels like a symbol to describe the grounding for lighting thingies on buildings, the long cable connected on the wall to the ground that prevents that you from getting fried when lighting hits your building. The ZigZag symbol is current flowing through the cable on the side, the L symbol is a wall and the floor.
lightning rods, you mean?
If I were to hazard a guess before I watched the video, I would have guessed it was used in a UI of some kind, since it's a right angle and those were sometimes used to create boxes on screen in older computers, but hearing it was in a set of mathematical symbols rules that out.
at face value i feel like it's telling me everything i did was wrong and I should feel bad.
4:29 In Russia we have a beautiful word to describe the same meaning: "Ж"
⍼ = Housing not grounded. Was used in the 80's in some electrician magazines in some European countries but never actually caught on.
Do you have any evidence for this?
@@GreaterJan THE SOURCE IS I MADE IT THE FUCK UP
@@GreaterJan It came to me in a dream
@@GreaterJan my cousin's wife's best friend told my parrot who then repeated it to me
This was once revealed to me in a dream
0:40
Those computers are older than Unicode. Unicode is still somewhat newish. While it was first developed in the 90s, it did did not come into common use until after the turn of the millennia. So it has not been in every computer for "decades", yet.
ANSI or even ASCII was the standard in use for those computers.
It's 2022.
Living through the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s is decades.
Even if it was created December 31st, 1999 it has still seen 2 decades. 2000s and 2010s
@@ww6372 AFTER "the turn of the millennia". It took a while for it to become ubiquitous.
It's only 2022. At most it could only just be decades old. But it's not. It has been universal for over a decade, but not "decades", yet.
@@pkz420 I think he's using imperial decades, not metric decades. The difference is ⍼.
Standard? IBM would like to talk to you about EBCDIC.
Windows NT used Unicode back in 1993.
We love that unicode content
The idea behind Unicode was having a unified code system for every industry standard that encodes symbols - ASCII, EBCDIC, ISO, Windows codepages … and later on emoticons, modern and ancient writing systems were and still are being added.
After a few issues at the start - Unicode 1.0 was based on two bytes, but filled up fast after Chinese Unihan and Korean Hangeul were included - they redesigned it with pages.
Since Unicode 2.0 no codepoint that was added will ever be removed, to make it futureproof and usable for long-time-archives.
> and later on emoticons [...] were [...] added
actually, the first emojis come with the first versions of Unicode, since some Japanese standards integrated some, and they couldn't just leave them out as it would become a non-all-inclusive standard like it tried to be. it's also why there's a lot of Japan-specific emojis, those were added in pre-Unicode times, mostly.
@@rubenverg Yes, I meant emoji. I remember reading the discussion that was about including them on the unicode mailing list. They wanted to wait for an industry standard to be passed before having to make their own thing.
But now Unicode is the de-facto-standard for character encoding. Just remember, it does not define how characters look. Only what they mean and what place(s) on the list they occupy. Some characters even can be combinations of codepoints.
And the codepoint list is actually pure plain ASCII, which is also a valid UTF-8 file.
That ended up being much more interesting than i thought it would be. That was like 7/9 as interesting.
I love Jonathan's final comment in his report "If she was unable to find a source while actively working with AFII and STIX back in the 90s, I doubt I would be able to uncover anything new now, three decades later. Here, then, I close the book on my investigation. The meaning of ⍼ will be whatever meaning is assigned by whoever uses it next… if anyone uses it at all."
Got to apreciet his final words there too "Half as Interesting did a video on this post (don’t bother, it’s less than half as interesting)"
How the hell do you get that symbol?
“Right angle with downward facing arrow”
AFI and Styx are good bands
I feel like you commented this just to put the symbol in your comment
Well... It's not like many of the Chinese characters in the Unicode definition actually carry some practical uses anyway. Chinese characters in Unicode don't even have any descryption available besides that they are all called "CJK character". Basically if the character was seen somewhere before some version of Unicode was developed it got added in without question. And the funny thing is, Unicode both got some of the CJK unification wrong (leading to loads of rendering errors), and from time to time you will still see some character being used in historical documents that aren't defined in Unicode, so you would have to either use the radical building system that I don't think any word processor supports, or just make up the character and assign a private use code point just to publish the book that make use of said character.
Looks like a schematic symbol for a lightning rod to me. Current traveling towards ground. I think that lends creedence to the other gentlemen's post saying that it is a symbol for electrical load on a circuit, of which a lighting rod is a specific case.
The Unicode spec even includes syllabic Korean characters made up of so many other characters that they are such illegal characters they have never once appeared in Korean writing, except in things written about these strange Unicode combos.
They are probably just included for compatibility reasons. Same for the separate character for "Ü". Technically you should write "Ü" as two characters, a normal "U" and a "combining trema above".
@@conepictures Ü is it's own character though, in German. Are you saying that ÅÄÖ also aren't their own characters, Æ shouldn't be a character then either, Ø shouldn't be one either as well as it's just an O with a / through it...
Oh and all of the Kanji/Hanzi, should it be written as each radical instead of having their own symbols? should 炎 be written by combining 火 twice?
@@livedandletdie Thats really a matter of what you want to name a character. There just existing vowels with tremas. At least that's their unicode normalization. And "ß" could be considered a ligature, or has it become it's own since the long s has mostly vanished from German?
⍼.
Just noticed that some modern routers use the downward arrow symbol for download speed indication. So maybe this symbol is supposed to be used to represent abnormal variation in download speeds
That's much newer than when the symbol was introduced though.
I thought for sure this was going to be a video about undeciphered languages (such as Linear A) and how ⍼ might be an unknown character we haven't figured out yet.
And I was completely right! It's just a modern unknown character instead of an ancient one.
Ever seen the symbols used specifying welds on blue-prints?
My guess is this is/was a common symbol for "arc welding"
It doesn't look like any weld symbol I've ever seen, and I've seen symbols dating back to the 1940s at least. Weld symbols are usually descriptive of the shapes of the pieces of metal being joined.
If it has anything to do with welding it would be on the circuitry side of things. As confusing as weld symbols can be, this is not one of them.
Love these nerdy videos, you earn this ⍼
How did you that‽
@@Bayoll it's easy, watch: ⍼
Well said. ⍼.
My first thought, when I saw it, how do I get it on my mobile, but no. The second thought, on computer generated drawings, when what looks like a right angle isn't 90°, this character could highlight it.
I like to think it means something innocuous like “move tab stop to next line”. Word processors are pretty universal in using the right angle for tab stops.
Isn't it the symbol for when you change the Y axis on a graph?
Close. It's when you modify the scaling* of the y axis, or the scaling isn't uniform. Yeah, this video is a bit weird for me. It's obscure, but some people know what it means.
@@smokeybobca are we talking about a kink?
PS- I thought for about 3 minutes if this reply could be misinterpreted before posting it
@@smokeybobca I can't find any source about that anywhere
@@smokeybobca The proper name for what you’re talking about is an axis break. There is literally no proof that that is what an angzar is for.
I think an axis break is when your axis, a straight line that may or may not have arrows at the ends, suddenly zigzags in the middle to indicate either a scaling change or an arbitrarily sized jump in values. It's not the same as having a zigzag (with an arrow on it) _over_ a straight axis and overlapping it. It could be used to represent that, but as stated, there's no proof that it is, or that there has ever been a symbol in math to represent that outside of the graph itself.
Haven't watched the video yet but this character can only represent one thing: The Knight's Move!
r/anarchychess user there
Knights in Chess are actually moving in a straight line like every other piece. That line simply happens to be at an unusual angle halfway between a rook and a bishop.
My grandfather was actually the person. On his deathbed he told me quite a few of his secrets. It was shocking the things I never knew about him, but when he got to unicode he was telling me about what it was supposed to mean. "Now listen sweetie, I want you to be the only one who knows what that is actually about. When your grandmother and I were visiting..." and then he died.
ChatGPT says this: The "INSERTION SYMBOL" (⍼), represented by the Unicode codepoint U+237C, is primarily used in APL (A Programming Language) and related contexts. In APL, it typically denotes insertion or the placement of elements into an array or a data structure. It serves as a visual indicator in APL code to signify operations involving insertion.
Because there’s a very important design principle: “you CANT destroy something until you can explain its purpose”
Maintaining a low bar for destroying dat poosi, baby
Dimensional shift left. (The spiral goes around the y axis, the arrow is the z axis facing the user)
1:30 How come the IBM and Apple systems get to have their identities shown, but the Amiga (A1000 with 1084 monitor) has all that removed? _HMM???_ Also, ASCII* (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was pretty well established back then and for the most part if you sent a message to at least another computer in the english speaking world it would be readable as long as it was not a character that did not exist in english. It's really only with the special characters that it became a problem, thus the necessity for unicode.
* Computer makers had their own slightly different versions of this code. Commodore had PETSCII (the first Commodore was called the PET) and Atari had ATASCII for their 8 bit systems. I believe IBM and Apple used generic ASCII.
Though IBM used EBDIC for a time as well, and caused all sorts of compatibility issues.
This video deserves ₷100
⍼ looks like Lightning rod, could make sense since in old days physic and math had a lot of "locally used" symbols.
How did u get that symbol?
@@gstotty Likely copy-pasted it from the video title, or from the other 1,500+ comments that have used it.
Its true purpose is that, when we finally meet alien life sometime in the exceedingly far future, the first aliens we come into contact with will see it as a union proposal, and they'll wish to join with us forevermore. We'll gain the best ally we'll have ever seen, one that will absolutely never betray us.
Oh good, that's what I was hoping for
I feel like ⍼ would be the symbol of swapping the x and y axis on a graph
I was thinking something similar too. A formatting character for a graph, similar to how the skin tone emoji variants are the base with a color formatting
1:55 I get those running old games from other countries. Now I know a reason that might be happening thanks
There is a theory that the arrow is actually supposed to be pointing to the right (think a 'stonks going down' graph) but a mistake was made along the way.