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
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.
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 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.
In meteorology, we have symbols for denoting surface weather observations. ☇ means lightning and ☈ means thunderstorm. Maybe ⍼ was a corruption of one the thunderstorm one?
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.
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 🤯
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
This symbol is a cultural staple of LSD users, and especially in the LSD user/Chaos Magick practitioner overlap. To some, while under the influence, it's a perfect visual representation of time and space, and can appear 3D with the S wrapping around the L. Some Chaos Magicians also use it as a symbol for a "magickal current," which I don't know how to explain without a foundational lesson on the whole system. The LS current or Ellis current are search terms that could lead you to more. If you see graffiti of this symbol, there's a high chance it was put there by someone trying to utilize the LS current. This is a very popular system of magic for a wide variety of anti-establishment subcultures, and this current in particular is supposed to have to do with bringing down the status quo and/or channeling chaos. In that way, it sort of links into Discordianism, but with much less joviality and much less regard for anyone's safety, including the practitioners. Very many of the practitioners I have met work in the tech industry, some of which have been over the age of 60 and got into it by way of Thelema, or the works of Austin Osman Spare. Fun fact: Jack Parsons, a prolific chemist and rocket engineer, practiced Thelema and credits that for his breakthroughs on rocket engine technologies. Disclaimer: I *strongly* advise against anyone practicing chaos magick. I have only ever seen it lead to significant and worsening mental health issues, including severe, persistent delusions, scapegoating, and dangerous levels of escapism. "If it's not working, it's because you don't believe hard enough and you need to strengthen your delusion," is a literal foundation of this belief system. I'm interested in magic systems from an anthropological perspective, and can say with confidence that getting deeply involved with this one messes you up bad. Please don't.
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).
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
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.
My uncle was an electrical engineer. He knew the dollar was doomed and came up with that symbol to display it. He called it the Dwindle, because that's what the dollar was doing. He actually got a money order for $5, and sent it in, so it would be recognized in the future. He's been gone for 6 years now, but I know he would be happy to know his symbol will soon be recognized worldwide.
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.
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
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 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.
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!
"A snake slithering off a chair because you just asked it a really offensive question about snakes and ruined your whole dinner" Sounds like something that happened to me in 7th grade, lol.
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)%
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 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.
I bet it's an accident, like how "Dord" meaning Density was in the dictionary for 5 years, but turned out was just mean "D or d was an abbreviation for Density."
@@seanj3667 why? I'm just telling him his channel is gonna ạ̶̡̈̂s̶̨̐c̵̠̉e̵̟͔͂̽̚n̸̺̏̿d̸̠̅͒ ̵͍̉̚t̴̖̰͎͒ǒ̵̗̀̈́ ̸̖͆t̵̠͑͜h̶̢̜̦̊e̵̥̜̊̐̌ ̸͔̱̄̍͐š̷̫̺̔i̴̧̥͋̂̓x̶̳̼͉̔̐t̶͎̤͑h̶̩̓ ̵̘̳̈́͜l̷̙̳̽̃ô̷͉̾c̸͉̘͈̑̒ḁ̵̳̻͛t̷̠̲̿̃i̶̥̓͌̚ó̸̥͌̐n̶̹̥̎͘ ̶̡̼͔͂̀
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 UA-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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
I could see it as a way to represent a third axis (Z axis) since having a third line identical to X and Y would just look like a weird sideways y or something - in other words, it would be easily confused. And since trying to add extra detail like dashes or entire included symbols would make the symbol unnecessarily complex, having an arrow to signify “the third axis” was the most simplistic possible solution. Basically just Axis X and Y as the angle, arrow designating axis Z. Though I’ve got no clue what it is for sure so don’t quote me here.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
Is ChatGPT correct here? The symbol "⍼" is known as the "APL functional symbol circle jot". It is used in the programming language APL (A Programming Language), which is known for its use of unique symbols to represent operations and functions. APL is a language that has been historically significant in the fields of mathematics and computer science, particularly for applications involving array processing and manipulation. In APL, each symbol or combination of symbols represents a specific function or operation, often related to array or matrix manipulation. The "circle jot" symbol specifically is used to denote a particular function or operation within the language, though its exact use can depend on the context within which it appears. APL is known for its concise and expressive syntax, which allows complex operations to be represented in a very compact form. However, this also means that APL can be challenging to read and understand for those not familiar with its symbols and syntax.
I've used that symbol decades ago meaning that the vertical axis in a graph is NOT continuous nor proportional. Example: a graph of X:workers in a Y:monthly-salary. In this graph, there will be nothing between $0 and, let's say, $1,000, so instead of drawing a huge empty bottom, you hack the start to 1,000 instead of 0; plus you hack the Y-axis again between $5,000 and $20,000 because that's the top of the "normal workers" and the minimum of the "CEOs and friends", thus the Y-axis is NOT a complete-range nor continuous and the top range of paid people is distorted to look closer to the workers.
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.
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 UA-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.
@@googiegress7459 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 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.
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 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.
I don't know what's more depressing, the fact that a full-time narrator can't pronounce a two-syllable word like "sigil" correctly, or that the literal pronunciation key is on screen when he's mispronouncing it...
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.
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!
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
@@nokiasnakes 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
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.
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
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:
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.
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"?
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.
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 🤯
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...
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.
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
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'
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.
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
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.
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).
Half as Interesting single-handedly keeping the stock footage industry alive.
Together with Thoughty2
Also one youtuber called IGoByLotsOfNames
@@itsFnD an igblon viewer on a half as interesting video? weird coincidence
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.
The Angzar is truly one of the Unicode characters of all time!
This character “‽” is called Interrobang, the code (unicode) is U+203D and the html is ‽
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. :(
This symbol is a cultural staple of LSD users, and especially in the LSD user/Chaos Magick practitioner overlap. To some, while under the influence, it's a perfect visual representation of time and space, and can appear 3D with the S wrapping around the L. Some Chaos Magicians also use it as a symbol for a "magickal current," which I don't know how to explain without a foundational lesson on the whole system. The LS current or Ellis current are search terms that could lead you to more. If you see graffiti of this symbol, there's a high chance it was put there by someone trying to utilize the LS current.
This is a very popular system of magic for a wide variety of anti-establishment subcultures, and this current in particular is supposed to have to do with bringing down the status quo and/or channeling chaos. In that way, it sort of links into Discordianism, but with much less joviality and much less regard for anyone's safety, including the practitioners.
Very many of the practitioners I have met work in the tech industry, some of which have been over the age of 60 and got into it by way of Thelema, or the works of Austin Osman Spare.
Fun fact: Jack Parsons, a prolific chemist and rocket engineer, practiced Thelema and credits that for his breakthroughs on rocket engine technologies.
Disclaimer: I *strongly* advise against anyone practicing chaos magick. I have only ever seen it lead to significant and worsening mental health issues, including severe, persistent delusions, scapegoating, and dangerous levels of escapism. "If it's not working, it's because you don't believe hard enough and you need to strengthen your delusion," is a literal foundation of this belief system. I'm interested in magic systems from an anthropological perspective, and can say with confidence that getting deeply involved with this one messes you up bad. Please don't.
Thanks for your comment this was an interesting read
However he references this theory at 14:16 do you have a response for that?
I really ⍼ the video. Thanks!
4:29 In Russia we have a beautiful word to describe the same meaning: "Ж"
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 UA-cam filters some of it
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.
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.
I AM THE WITCH KING OF ANGZARR! *helmet crumples in on itself*
My uncle was an electrical engineer. He knew the dollar was doomed and came up with that symbol to display it. He called it the Dwindle, because that's what the dollar was doing. He actually got a money order for $5, and sent it in, so it would be recognized in the future. He's been gone for 6 years now, but I know he would be happy to know his symbol will soon be recognized worldwide.
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.
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.
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 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? 🥺
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?
"A snake slithering off a chair because you just asked it a really offensive question about snakes and ruined your whole dinner"
Sounds like something that happened to me in 7th grade, lol.
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
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
Dimensional shift left. (The spiral goes around the y axis, the arrow is the z axis facing the user)
Me: hey mom can we get ⍼
Mom: we have ⍼ at home
⍼ at home: ϟ∟
why would you want ⍼
Man, I only got⚡L
@@RubyPiec because ⍼ is the answer to everything, we just need to figure out what it specifically means
@@Name_Pendingg so its just a shortcut for '42'?
⍼ at MY home: ∟∟
Me: "fucking dollar store"
Thanks for making this good video, it was so ⍼!
4:29 In Russia we have a beautiful word to describe the same meaning: "Ж"
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
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.
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"
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 wonder if it is meant to represent a lightning rod? Considering, that there is a symbol indicating a short to ground
This was also my thoughts...
that’s actually not a bad idea
@@linkly9272
half a good idea
I like it. My first thought was it was some kind of ground.
Hmm - maybe a degaussing symbol, then.
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.
nothing could ruin this video - it makes ancient, maggot-ridden feces look good
Trying to read that character on my Smartwatch was a struggle lol
Why would you watch UA-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 found this video going down the rabbit hole of why incandescence was federally banned from being manufactured in the US
I bet it's an accident, like how "Dord" meaning Density was in the dictionary for 5 years, but turned out was just mean "D or d was an abbreviation for Density."
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 ̶̡̼͔͂̀
⍼.
Im gonna go with the moment when you accidentally hit your elbow and it zippity zap you through multidimensional existence of ourselves
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.
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 UA-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?
"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
Never seen it, and I've gone over unicode tables to find a character multiple times per year for decades
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.
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.
"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'm gonna add this character fir shits and giggles"
Then this person forgot about it week later
it's clearly a "lemon power" symbol. one of the most important symbols in all history of writing.
this character clearly means
"L+get shocked"
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 UA-cam comment is too small to contain.
P. de Fermat
@@jonathanrichards593 take my upvote bloody mate
It was me I payed the $5. 🤔
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?
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!!!
I feel sad for this Unicode character "⍼". This one must be remember.
I could see it as a way to represent a third axis (Z axis) since having a third line identical to X and Y would just look like a weird sideways y or something - in other words, it would be easily confused.
And since trying to add extra detail like dashes or entire included symbols would make the symbol unnecessarily complex, having an arrow to signify “the third axis” was the most simplistic possible solution.
Basically just Axis X and Y as the angle, arrow designating axis Z.
Though I’ve got no clue what it is for sure so don’t quote me here.
Pass the banana down already, whats the wait, the instructions were clear!
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
To me, this has got "leave that slot open, we'll put something there later" written all over it.
"Ancient" and "Chaos Magick" just don't belong in the same sentence.
Agent Mulder: I would tell everyone what that symbol means, but we would have to kill them afterwards.
Scully: Yeah. Right. Whatever.
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.
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.
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
That awkward moment when I realize that I see this character for the 1st time in my life while being user/programmer since 1995...
That ended up being much more interesting than i thought it would be. That was like 7/9 as interesting.
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.
This is giving me angzarriety.
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.
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.
Is ChatGPT correct here?
The symbol "⍼" is known as the "APL functional symbol circle jot". It is used in the programming language APL (A Programming Language), which is known for its use of unique symbols to represent operations and functions. APL is a language that has been historically significant in the fields of mathematics and computer science, particularly for applications involving array processing and manipulation.
In APL, each symbol or combination of symbols represents a specific function or operation, often related to array or matrix manipulation. The "circle jot" symbol specifically is used to denote a particular function or operation within the language, though its exact use can depend on the context within which it appears.
APL is known for its concise and expressive syntax, which allows complex operations to be represented in a very compact form. However, this also means that APL can be challenging to read and understand for those not familiar with its symbols and syntax.
I've used that symbol decades ago meaning that the vertical axis in a graph is NOT continuous nor proportional. Example: a graph of X:workers in a Y:monthly-salary. In this graph, there will be nothing between $0 and, let's say, $1,000, so instead of drawing a huge empty bottom, you hack the start to 1,000 instead of 0; plus you hack the Y-axis again between $5,000 and $20,000 because that's the top of the "normal workers" and the minimum of the "CEOs and friends", thus the Y-axis is NOT a complete-range nor continuous and the top range of paid people is distorted to look closer to the workers.
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.
I remember have seen that simbol in an old computer for the power button.
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 UA-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.
@@googiegress7459 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.
This video kind of explains why moving a text file from a PC to a Mac in the very early 90's often resulted in gibberish.
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.
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.
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.
Some bored kid in the 90s paid $5 to register it for no reason at all not realizing it would exist in Unicode in the 21st century.
After seeing this I used the character as a GroupMe topic name and it broke the ability to change topics for almost a full year
I don't know what's more depressing, the fact that a full-time narrator can't pronounce a two-syllable word like "sigil" correctly, or that the literal pronunciation key is on screen when he's mispronouncing it...
In electrical engineering it looks like a symbol for a potentiometer.
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?
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!
⍼ = 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