Per the article, U+213a ('℺') is part of ISO 5426-2:
> ISO 5426-2 is a second part to ISO 5426, published in 1996.[4] It specifies a set of 70 characters, some of which do not exist in Unicode. Michael Everson proposed the missing characters in Unicode 3.0, but some were postponed for further study. Later, new evidence was found, and more was encoded. P with belt is probably an error for P with flourish.[5]
The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to "minor printing mark," the sort of role that would cause it to be rejected if someone proposed it as a Unicode character de novo.
> The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to "minor printing mark,"
Not really. The printing mark itself wasn’t a “character” in any character set until Unicode. It was probably a custom SVG-like shape that could be plopped into the margin of the document in desktop-publishing programs; sort of like drawing any other arbitrary vector shape (e.g. a 13-agon.) In specialized desktop-publishing programs (e.g. musical-score “engraving” programs), all sorts of these custom vector-shape symbols come with the system for placement onto the document; but—until very recently†—these weren’t “text” in any sense, just shapes.
What was a character in a character set (ISO 5426-2) was a sort of “reference to said printing mark” or “exemplar of said printing mark”, used once in a standards document to give examples of how printing marks are used. Note the difference: the printing mark itself is an arbitrarily-complex and varied shape that different desktop-publishing programs might render in all sorts of ways. The “reference to the printing mark” is one mark that appears in the standards document, one way. (Picture the difference between an actual calligraphic flourish separating passages of text, and a Unicode fleuron/heart-bullet. One is not the proper encoding of the other! The former is a shape, not a character per se. The latter is a character: it’s a standard shape-thing with a standard meaning, that communicates meaning, and is considered “part of” the text.)
Unicode’s mission statement is essentially to offer an encoding for the set of all characters needed to losslessly re-encode all document-corpuses (corpii?) of historical importance, such that those corpuses may be re-encoded into Unicode for archival purposes, with the Unicode standard then acting as the record-keeper of the semantic meaning of the characters used in those documents. Without this work, over time we’d lose the semantic meanings of those encoded characters, as the original living systems that represented the encoding began to rot/disappear. We’d just be left with opaque bytes in the middle of a document that we’d have to guess at the meaning at.
The printing mark, as used for its intended purpose, doesn’t meet Unicode’s mission statement, because nobody’s encoding it into a (preserved) document, only “drawing” it on page-edges before trimming them off. It’s not “text” per se. It doesn’t appear in any electronic stream-of-text in need of archival preservation. It exists only in the same way an image embedded in a Word document exists: as self-contained data interpretable by the document-publishing system, an “add-on” on top of the text, but without the meaning of the text depending on the image. The document-publishing system “brings together” a text source, and other data, to create a final “layout” that is more than just text per se. The text source, not the final layout, is what Unicode is concerned about.
But the “exemplar of the printing mark” ended up in a standard about document binding. And that glyph is “text”, in the same sense that an emoji is text — i.e. it’s part of the corpus that Unicode seeks to preserve, in order to preserve the meaning of the text surrounding it. So it must treat the mark there as a character.
(Yes, this means that if a text of historical importance has some odd squiggle in the middle of it — and it then talks about the squiggle — that squiggle will inevitably become part of Unicode. That doesn’t imply that a visual for the glyph will be drawn by every font artist, though! Just that Unicode will retain a codepoint defining it in the standard, to document the meaning of the glyph as it appears in that one archived document. It’ll likely appear as a replacement-box character, but people can go look up in the standard what that particular replacement-box character means, and that’s all a historian needs.)
You misunderstand. ISO 5426-2 is a standard specifying the encoding previously used for the text of the standard; it isn’t the encoding used by the desktop-publishing programs themselves that said standard refers to/affects. (After all, the standard is only tangentially “about” desktop-publishing.)
In the context of the standards document and its accompanying encoding, yes, sideways-Q — the exemplar of the mark — is already a defined character; and so Unicode could just adopt it directly from that source character-set.
But my point was twofold:
1. in the source desktop-publishing files that the standard documents, sideways-Q isn’t a character. It’s an embeddable shape. This shape is the ‘reality’ to which the character in the standard is a reference. Like the difference between a real floppy disk, and the floppy-disk emoji. Making it out to be one would be like encoding a game of hangman drawn on a page as a standard “hangman glyph.” Not the same! Loses meaning!
2. Even if the standards document didn’t have its own character set where sideways-Q was defined as a character, but instead just took a particular desktop-publishing program’s sideways-Q shape and plopped it inline into the text — the fact that the text refers to the mark, requiring you to be able to see the rendering of the glyph to know what it was talking about means that that “sideways-Q exemplar” would inevitably become a Unicode codepoint, in order to encode this document successfully. (In fact, if the standards document were entirely-analogue, e.g. typewritten; and the sideways-Q were drawn onto the page after the fact; then it’d still make it into Unicode in the process of digitizing the work.)
Okay, so I think we agree that ISO 5426-2 is a character set... are you saying that it's a character set invented solely to encode its own standard document, or some predecessor standard? Or you're possibly saying that it was only included in Unicode to facilitate representing the ISO 5426-2 standard document as Unicode?
Do you have some particular knowledge/reason for saying so? Other than your comments I can't find any evidence to this effect... maybe I'm simply misunderstanding you. I don't see anything that leads me to believe this was the rationale behind either the creation of the original standard or its inclusion in Unicode.
The sideways Q specifically, like most of this particular set, seems to originate from a British Library internal character set, was included in the earlier 5426-2 set, and from there into Unicode, with the primary interest throughout focusing on bibliographic records, i.e., MARC.
The bit about the difference between the character and the shape/glyph is fine as far as it goes (and does matter here as these older standards didn't really follow that separation) but is similarly true for all of Unicode.
> according to the Unicode annotation, it is "a binding signature mark."
I still did not parse what that meant. It is a tad succinct, in that dry way you might expect from a description of Unicode codepoints.
Edit: then it says:
> Binding signature marks are marks placed by publishers on the edges of signatures (aka "gatherings" -- printed and folded sheets in units of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 pages) for book binding
It seems, according to Michael Kaplan, that he was fired from Microsoft for taking a photo with a personal camera of a framed plaque of a patent certificate with his name on it where the patent number was too visible. That is some horrid garbage.
Having gone through the corporate patent game myself it’s not something I would ever recommend.
His blog post said "The second one was after I was granted a patent that I honestly believed never should have been issued." If he posted the photo of the patent in an article where he simultaneously made that remark, that combination would be extremely damning evidence in any patent trial and could lead to the invalidation of the patent.
Although, on re-reading his statement, the firing wasn't the taking a picture of a patent, but including some ("infamous") art in another blog post.
The "infamous art" was a red screen of death from a beta copy of Windows Longhorn. Apparently the blog post was in the middle of the negative news cycle about Longhorn and his posting the RSOD didn't help.
First to note you can easily find all patents with Microsoft as applicant and Michael Kaplan as inventor, eg via Espacenet.
So, it's possible the "frame" is the issue.
Suppose a patent was issued without Kaplan listed as inventor, or with others listed who did not have a role. Then a frame saying "thanks to $people for their [sole] effort on this project" could become part of a lawsuit (not necessarily in USA) for the right to be named as inventor; in UK for example a significant contribution can require that an employee is reasonably compensated. That can be worth $USD millions (eg recent case 'Shanks v Unilever and others'). Based on this even just the wall the frame is on saying "significant contributions" or something might make a court case work that otherwise wouldn't.
I very much doubt that's the reason, but it gives me pause that a missing detail might explain the whole thing. Kaplan wouldn't even need to be aware of it.
It could also be something as simple as the company wanting an excuse to fire him, and "photos of any materials associated with patents is a firable offence" being in his contract.
My reading of it is that he got in trouble for blogging about a patent that, in his words, "never should have been issued," but in a general way that didn't name the patent. The picture he ran with the blog included the patent number, which someone else looked up, probably kicking up a stink, and his manager took that as a blog post critical of Microsoft. That's a lot of reading between the lines on my part, though, so who knows.
Well it's not being critical of MS that is the problem, but admitting that the patent is worthless which can cause significant (unnecessary) damage/complications.
He also had multiple sclerosis, so this is a heavy charge and I don't know anything, but I start to wonder if someone had some cruel ulterior motive related to that. (Insurance costs? Need to accommodate the illness?)
I did not know him and he did not know me, but when I worked at Microsoft I would see him around campus. Small story, I remember one day in the building 10 cafeteria he asked me to hand him a bag of jalapeño potato chips he could not reach in his IBOT thing. Seemed like a nice guy. I later read in his final blog posts that he had a fairly eccentric personal life.
Is there also a Unicode encoding for the invisible interjection "fnord"? I tried looking it up in the Unicode dictionary but could not find it, but maybe I'm just not seeing it...
>In the novel trilogy (and the plays), the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of unease and confusion, preventing rational consideration of the text it appears in. The uneasiness and confusion create a perpetual low-level state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power.
>In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords—occurrences of the word "fnord"—are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. The exclusion of the text from rational consciousness also enables the Illuminati to publish messages to each other in newspapers, etc., without fear that other people will be aware of them. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see the actual word.
[...]
>Paulo Goode, a typeface designer from West Cork, Ireland, created a humanist serif font named Fnord in 2016 which contains 23 fonts in five weights. The geometry of the upper case ‘O’ is drawn on an axis of 23 degrees while the lower case ‘o’ falls on a 17-degree axis. The 23 / 17 numerology is reflective of similar numerical themes from The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
> ISO 5426-2 is a second part to ISO 5426, published in 1996.[4] It specifies a set of 70 characters, some of which do not exist in Unicode. Michael Everson proposed the missing characters in Unicode 3.0, but some were postponed for further study. Later, new evidence was found, and more was encoded. P with belt is probably an error for P with flourish.[5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_5426