I was using the facilities earlier today and scratched into the paint on one of the walls of my stall was an odd symbol that I’ve never seen before. I’m wondering if there’s any significane to it. It was a 4, but with an additional veritcal line extending from the sharp angle on the left side up to the top of the number, running parallel to the vertical section of a normal 4. In case my description thoroughly confused you, here’s a quick representation of it that I made in paint and uploaded: http://www.imgmag.net/images/newton/symbol.gif
It could be that this symbol is meaningless, but I figured if it means something, one of you guys might know or be able to find out.
L4? It’s a gang symbol you think? Any cites of it looking like the symbol I posted? By ‘“L” & 4th sts’, you mean '“L” & 4th streets? There is the corner of Liberty and 4th street, which actually is only a few blocks from here… The gang operates only a few blocks from me?
No, no cites. Some gangs do use their location to represent their gang.
You could make a sign with that symbol, and the caption “WTF is this shit?” and wait for a response.
You know, of course, that I’m kidding. Don’t do that.
Johnny LA: When you write a four, how do you do it? Do you make the smaller bar that intersects (not tees) with the horizontal bar slanted so it touches the top of the longer vertical bar? (This is the typewritten four.)
Or do you make both bars (long and short vertical) parallel, such that it looks like an H without the vertical segment in the lower-left-hand quadrant? (And possibly with a small horizontal bar extending past where the horizontal bar tees with the long vertical bar?) (This is the digital clock (LCD) four.)
Maybe it’s the L4 Society, seeking to place a manned habitat in orbit around the Earth at lunar distance, but 60 degrees ahead of the Moon. (That’s the L4 point; there is an L5 Society that wants to do that at the L5 point 60 degrees behind.)
The “two ways” are the open form with no diagonal line (commonly seen on LED/LCD displays) and the closed form, where the leftmost upright stroke is slanted to connect the other two strokes (commonly seen in printed material). Both forms are used in handwriting and various typefaces. It’s one of the many details that bedevilled early Optical Character recognition efforts: many letters have alternate forms (e.g. the ‘simple’ lower case a, which is a loop with a tail, and the ‘classic’ form which extends the upper end of the stroke that forms the tail, to curve into a ‘roof’ over the loop’)
Humans familiar with a language see such alternate forms as transparently interchangeable, while humans who are not familiar with the language are often stymied by them (try transliterating a casual/public Hebrew or Hindi sign or poster into Romanized form for translation, and you’ll see the problem), so it’s clearly a matter of experience, not neurology, but the equivalences do relate in some ways to either learned or innate human perceptual patterns, so computers do have a slightly tougher row to hoe. The German ess-tsett [ß - a symbol which resembles a Greek lowercase beta and represents a double ‘s’) and the large form of the eighteenth century English ‘s’ (which, to modern eyes, resembles a long ‘f’ with a descender) are two other forms that you might have learned to readily learned to convert ‘manually’ in your head, but may not be ‘transparent’ (and hence invisible) to your eyes.
Alright, I think we’ve all sufficiently answered Johnny L.A.'s question regarding the two ways to write the number “4,” but what about the symbol? It’s probably something so obscure that we could never hope to figure out its meaning, or else something madeup with no meaningful significance outside of whatever the person who wrote it was thinking at the time. I liked your sign suggestion, btw mangeorge.
Can’t say as I recognise it (and I’m a bit of a symbol buff). I looked it up on http://www.symbols.com and came up with this page which has one (top of third column) which is kind of close.
They say that one is called the Cross of Invocation and “was used in early pharmacology on recipes for medications to mean may it be useful or take with God’s blessing.”
Not quite yours, however.
I’ve got a few books at home I can dig through if you can wait until later today, but I don’t recognise it right off.
