Comments on: My ideal wallpaper

My ideal wallpaper

wanderingmind — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:03:20 -0800

What does all of Unicode look like? At once, as a poster? Ian Albert decided to find out... No full image of the whole thing, sadly (but understandably, given its 22,017x42,807 resolution).

By: bigtimes

bigtimes — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:18:58 -0800

Wow.

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:26:06 -0800

What's your favourite character? I like 0F12.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:36:36 -0800

That rules. Allthough the cool way to do it would have been to generate them based on a unicode font....

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:37:36 -0800

And how come there's a Hammer and Sickle but no Nazi swastika? That's prejudice.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:44:32 -0800

Pretty_Generic : " And how come there's a Hammer and Sickle but no Nazi swastika? That's prejudice." It's either U+534D or U+5350 (can never remember which direction is good and which is evil). Chinese character, so therefore probably not technically a Nazi swastika, but from a functionalist standpoint, I believe they're the same.

By: hypnorich

hypnorich — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:47:52 -0800

Now someone just needs to etch it into stone, burry it somewhere deep inside the earth for a few thousand years...

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:48:46 -0800

Hooray! (clockwise is bad.)

By: nmiell

nmiell — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:51:53 -0800

? ?^???? ? ?^!? ? ^??^? fin

By: nmiell

nmiell — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:54:09 -0800

Bloody hell, my three act play in which snowman encounters difficulties and ultimately prevails against adversity is ruined. It worked in the preview.

By: Simon!

Simon! — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:04:51 -0800

I want this poster. I don't care if it's bigger than my apartment.

By: bingo

bingo — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:12:36 -0800

Chinese character, so therefore probably not technically a Nazi swastika, but from a functionalist standpoint, I believe they're the same. If it's the Chinese (Mandarin?) character I'm thinking of, the cross is actually 'twisted' in the opposite direction of a swastika.

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:19:55 -0800

It worked in the preview. Yeah it's a common metafilter bug, discussed here, you can get around it by inputting the characters as hexadecimal character entities (本 for 本) and you should copy your text before you hit preview because previewing takes out all the formatting.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:23:18 -0800

bingo : " If it's the Chinese (Mandarin?) character I'm thinking of, the cross is actually 'twisted' in the opposite direction of a swastika." There's both characters (left twist and right twist) in the Chinese character set, hence the two Unicode codes. Japanese only has the non-swastika one.

By: Josh Zhixel

Josh Zhixel — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:03:10 -0800

Ian Albert, what an unfortunate name.

By: sudasana

sudasana — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:32:54 -0800

(Getting way off topic) Every Chinese dictionary I have only lists the 'clockwise' one, not the Nazi one. I can testify that it has a totally different impact in China. Most people associate it with Buddhism first, rather than WWII Germany. I once saw a guy get a huge swastika (the clockwise one) tattoo on his chest. I just hope he never goes shirtless in a bar in the West.

By: daninnj

daninnj — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:44:07 -0800

The Bookshelf Symbol 7 font had a swastika (not the reversed one) in it before it was removed with a Critical Update.

By: tiamat

tiamat — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:59:38 -0800

This is very cool, we should fire this poster into space!

By: undecided

undecided — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:46:58 -0800

Gorgeous! But somebody needs to learn how to use mpage.

By: undecided

undecided — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:55:40 -0800

...recursively.

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 20:00:58 -0800

It worked in the preview. Solution: 1. Click preview before typing 2. Type your message 3. Preview it 4. Press the back button 5. Click Post

By: JHarris

JHarris — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:49:51 -0800

I'd like to reiterate bigtime's comment (i.e. "Wow"), and also ask if anyone knows what funky language, or character set, or whatever it is, contains the characters from the "sample row" image on the site. It looks like some mixture of electrical symbols, set theory operators and road sign mating calls. Now that's a language I wouldn't mind learning....

By: wanderingmind

wanderingmind — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:14:13 -0800

That's the Yi syllabary, JHarris - the Yi are a minority group in southwestern China (extending into Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, according to the notes in my copy of the Unicode Standard). And I agree, it's got to be one of the coolest-looking writing systems ever. It was, according to the book, introduced in the 1970s, which accounts for its modern look.

By: wanderingmind

wanderingmind — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:17:40 -0800

...Double-checking that, I need to correct myself. It was standardized in the 70s, but examples of it have been around since the 17th century or so, so nobody really knows where it came from. Here's the Omniglot page on it. The t, p, and x on the end of some of the syllables aren't pronounced; they're tone markers (t=high tone, p=low tone, x=middle-high tone, unmarked=middle-low tone).

By: joe lisboa

joe lisboa — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:53:15 -0800

Thanks for the Omniglot link, wanderingmind. That's a neat site!

By: DrJohnEvans

DrJohnEvans — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:09:08 -0800

The Poster of Babel.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 00:35:38 -0800

Thanks for the info wanderingmind, now all I need to do is get to work on a zany web meme utilizing these symbols! DrJohnEvans: Nice reference, though the Library of Babel makes my brain hurt enough as it is with "only" every possible permutation of 25 characters. The Unicode version would probably undergo gravitational collapse.