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kindkang2024 3 hours ago [-]
Great find — Satisfying to know ⍼'s origin story.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
The 64 coincidence between I Ching and DNA codons is always fascinating.
Probably coincidence, but it’s one of those patterns that makes you pause for a moment.
tantalor 8 hours ago [-]
I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
That's become of the most memorable threads on Hacker News to me. I definitely think about it at least once most weeks.
qingcharles 4 hours ago [-]
Closure finally!
aleyan 8 hours ago [-]
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
Elevation -- the angle above the horizon -- is usually what's paired with azimuth.
aleyan 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself.
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
Lasang 6 hours ago [-]
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
SlinkyOnStairs 5 hours ago [-]
> how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
adolph 6 hours ago [-]
Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian
Ah, of course :)
bombcar 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly the little example of how a sextant works was more interesting to me.
foxglacier 7 hours ago [-]
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
RobotToaster 7 hours ago [-]
Let's hope fonts will start correcting it to the original form
8 hours ago [-]
russellbeattie 5 hours ago [-]
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
dhosek 2 hours ago [-]
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
cookiengineer 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't know that this is a mystery?
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
SAI_Peregrinus 7 hours ago [-]
The typographic symbol was the element in question, not what "Azimuth" is.
2 hours ago [-]
Dawda 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
poizan42 5 hours ago [-]
Okay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?
cookiengineer 3 hours ago [-]
Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
[1] https://leibniz-bouvet.swarthmore.edu/letters/letter-j-18-ma... [2] https://leibniz-translations.com/binary [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78369.The_I_Ching_and_th...
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.7...
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
Ah, of course :)
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
Maybe read the article next time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...