Holy Moly - lot`s of stuff

You can view the talk at blip.tv. You may need headphones during the post-talk discussion to hear the !me part of the conversation. Thanks a ton to Blaze Streaming Media for the stellar video work.

The @ sign through most of its history meant Each at. It was a commerce term. “Apples 10@.49″ It survived the typewriter cut by being placed as a shift above the 2, a position it still holds today. Then the Internet showed up. In 1971, when Ray Tomlinson was writing the first email system and needed an addressing system to send a message between two computers in the same room (but via Arpanet). He needed a separator between the name and the location. Oh, @ works perfectly. The @ symbol then adopted a new meaning: Location. Then Twitter showed up. Because Twitter is simply an unthreaded long list of messages where you can’t easily track a conversation, people early on adopted a convention used in discussion groups to target a reply to a specific person, as in “@billder That joke wasn’t so funny.” But then a subtle twist occurred. People began to use the @ convention to simply refer their username as their identity. “I really wish @billder would lay off of the snowman jokes.” In fact, the @ symbol is so strongly identified with Twitter identities that only saying “@billder” is enough of a way to contact somebody. The @ symbol then adopted its current meaning: Identity.

Pound sign, number sign, hash. The main two meanings of the # sign prior to the Internet were either number or pounds. Essentially, # meant Quantity. But again, Twitter provided a way for this symbol to evolve. Early on, people recognized that people talked in topics and desired a way to track certain topics. Chris Messina then proposed using the # symbol to mean “topic.” It worked. People used it, and software developers responded to this organic evolution of the # sign and built tracking functionality. Voila! # means Context.

The tilde (~) started it off. Normally it’s a diacritic above characters to indicate change in pronunciation, mostly commonly in Spanish and Portuguese. But it’s mathematical sense of approximation seemed to be the theme, i.e. ~50 means “about 50″. ~ To indicate dating. Bob~Mary means that Bob and Mary are sorta dating, just hanging out. Of course, Liv=Mel means they’re married. Was engaged ~~? ~ When writing a list of things to do, ~ indicates something started but not quite finished. ~clean office. ~write this blog post. It’s approximately done. ~ In Unix, it means home. My first webpage was www.nowdefunctdomain.com/~billder ~ means Approximate. I am ~French-Canadian. It is ~raining.

The exclamation point (!) or “bang” didn’t generate much interest. It’s already used to mean emphasis, dammit! It did used to mean “route” in early Unix UUCP days, used similarly to @ today. The typical wow! usage of the exclamation point is a bit opposite from its mathematical sense of “not” or “false”. It goes from extremely positive! to !negative. The Earth is !flat. George Bush is ~!President. ! means Opposite.

The caret (^) is another diacritical used in a lot of languages above vowels to indicate different pronunciation. Way too many examples to dig into. It also has the math meaning of power. 2 multiplied by itself 3 times is 8, 2^3=8. All math symbology is highly condensed shorthand to convey complex relationships. One person in the crowd uses ^ to conjoin disparate ideas to see what happens. Take any two words. Digital. Vegetables. Now conjoin them, digital^vegetables. It’s a way to invent ideas. In fact, it’s similar to a great sci-fi book called The Futurological Congress from Stanislaw Lem wherein futurologists combine words to discover new ideas to predict the future. The caret even looks like it’s joining^words. It’s two little arms connect each word and then points up to ask, this + that = what? ^ means Conjoin or Juxtapose. Belgian^piston. Wool^clock. Symphony^party. Touchscreen^cat.

In math, ⊄ means “not a subset of”, paired up with ⊂ “a subset of.” Pugs ⊂ dogs. Oranges ⊄ lizards. But others had some great ideas for ⊄ I cut my finger. “Oh frack, I ⊄!” Don’t go back there. “⊄ that dude. He’s no good for you.” Not magnetic. I love this one. “This orange is ⊄” But the best idea was to represent a wall plug. In airports, cafes, ⊄ indicates “electricity here.” ^ means Power Available.

Snowman with a Fez probably generated the most hilarity. And why not, it’s a snowman with a fez, or at least that’s what I saw. Somebody else saw Spicy Food for Gringos. In general, it’s a wtf? Ever seen a snowman in the desert? This this really isn’t possible. So, it’s an oxymoron, a non-sequitur, a wtf? “Dude, you’re being a snowman with a fez.” Can it be a symbol of sarcasm, maybe even replacing <sarcasm> HTML tags? Oxymoron.

The knight is a chess symbol, indicating, well, the knight. First idea, transportation. Sure, but a bit literal. “Condoms available here.” Wow. But then somebody threw out the gem. It’s a threat. A classic Mafia I’m going to leave a horse head in your bed threat. Perfect. So maybe being knighted isn’t such a good thing anymore? Threat.

The musical symbol was generally a happy symbol for most people. It’s music, song, singing. There were a few downer ideas. Painful like a tooth nerve? A redundant person, because they’re a one noter? But it’s a happy symbol. It’s sometimes used with statements to add a Wheeee! quality to it. Wheeee! The sun is shining! Happy.

Finally, a hand holding two fingers up. It’s simply the number two. Or most commonly, Peace. I’m not a crook. Breeding like a rabbit. But with two of them, used in pairs to surround a word or phrase, AIR QUOTES. Read more at www.pushclicktouch.com