What is a Sign?
What is a Symbol?
What is a tag?
Check here to open a Pandora of signs
Yesterday my son Arnav asked me a question why do we have * in the phone? Which he followed up promptly with why do we have # in the phone?
Ever since growing up (I used to grow vertical and after horizontal but in all directions making me round before I started running.. ok that is a whole another post) # was first introduced as British (Long live the Queen!) , then as a mechanism in phone to shut the annoying mechanical lady voice..it was always better to press # rather than 2 for Spanish.
Now # has become a great deal. # tag here, facebook supports #,Twitter supports # tag.. the beauty of adding data to data = metadata is a very cool way . The ability for user to tag data with # tag provides a system of meta tag authoring without really using one.
It made me think - we understand arab numberals (1-9), Hindu symbol (0) and now on to these weirdos in phone and 2nd row in the QWERTY keyboard. By the way how long do i have to live with his QWERTY keyboards? Will it change before I turn 70 ( so my age is .. in another post you can find that)?
Will my child have to learn typing with this weird ABCD pattern by the way why we do we think ABCD is the correct order? Who decided that order and who decided 26 characters?
Now back to symbols.. the way I used to look at my phone keypad is 4x3 symmetry with my favorite 0 to talk to the operator after pressing all other keys .. these days it wont work till you have pressed or tried shouting yes/no before finally it will let you press that key.
What does * do in the phone? Before smart phones I don't know what it did. Now I press *2 for customer service *4 for minutes and data remaining . Why did they put * there?
So what is !? Why did it become exclamation?
What is @ ?
We will cover ~,`,%,^,&(,),;,;,',/,\| in other posts . In the meantime when you read another post or look at your phone or your car dashboard remember signs are everywhere
What is a Symbol?
What is a tag?
Check here to open a Pandora of signs
Yesterday my son Arnav asked me a question why do we have * in the phone? Which he followed up promptly with why do we have # in the phone?
Ever since growing up (I used to grow vertical and after horizontal but in all directions making me round before I started running.. ok that is a whole another post) # was first introduced as British (Long live the Queen!) , then as a mechanism in phone to shut the annoying mechanical lady voice..it was always better to press # rather than 2 for Spanish.
Now # has become a great deal. # tag here, facebook supports #,Twitter supports # tag.. the beauty of adding data to data = metadata is a very cool way . The ability for user to tag data with # tag provides a system of meta tag authoring without really using one.
It made me think - we understand arab numberals (1-9), Hindu symbol (0) and now on to these weirdos in phone and 2nd row in the QWERTY keyboard. By the way how long do i have to live with his QWERTY keyboards? Will it change before I turn 70 ( so my age is .. in another post you can find that)?
Will my child have to learn typing with this weird ABCD pattern by the way why we do we think ABCD is the correct order? Who decided that order and who decided 26 characters?
Now back to symbols.. the way I used to look at my phone keypad is 4x3 symmetry with my favorite 0 to talk to the operator after pressing all other keys .. these days it wont work till you have pressed or tried shouting yes/no before finally it will let you press that key.
What does * do in the phone? Before smart phones I don't know what it did. Now I press *2 for customer service *4 for minutes and data remaining . Why did they put * there?
So what is !? Why did it become exclamation?
What is @ ?
We will cover ~,`,%,^,&(,),;,;,',/,\| in other posts . In the meantime when you read another post or look at your phone or your car dashboard remember signs are everywhere
No comments:
Post a Comment