UPDATE: U+237C ⍼ ⍼

Part 1: U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW
This is part 2.
Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts
Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼
Many thanks to Barbara Beeton, James David Mason, Anders Berglund, David Bolton, Andy Whyte, Claire Welford-Elkin, and Bob Richardson.

Bopomofo is inconsistent sometimes

This was originally a two-part post on cohost.

One thing that bothers me about bopomofo is that words ending in ㄛ get an extra vowel ㄨ (essentially just /w/) in the middle sometimes when spoken but it’s never written down.

Little Shops in Philadelphia

I’ve previously posted about my favourite ice cream shops in Philadelphia, but there’s a ton of other great little shops to visit. Here’s a few that I’ve really liked, sorted into two categories: used bookstores and vintage/oddities. I’ve excluded all food places, including coffeeshops, roasteries, bakeries, dessert shops, grocers, markets, food trucks, and so on, because there are just too many of them.

Investigations into French Diacritics

This was originally two posts on cohost.

What's in a GIF?

This was originally a multi-part post on cohost.

I wanted to inspect the structure of an animated GIF, so I created a 1 px × 1 px monochrome animation that switches from white to black every 1024 milliseconds in GNU IMP, exported it as an animated GIF with disposal method “combine”, and hexdumped it. Here’s the GIF below, at the center of this 1rem box so you can see it.

Ice Cream Shops in Philadelphia

When I arrived in Philadelphia, I started a Tweet thread of ice cream shops that are or aren’t as good as Rain or Shine back in Vancouver, which was the ice cream place I frequented most often since they have a location on the UBC campus. (I don’t have a thread or a list for ice cream shops in Vancouver, but you really can’t go wrong with Rain or Shine or with Earnest.)

Here I collect a list of the shops that are as good as Rain or Shine, ordered from west to east. Prices are for the smallest (non-kid’s) scoop in a cup, including 8% tax, excluding tip.

Thulium is Four Years Old!

Thulium, my personal server, turned four this year! Its official birthday was a few months ago on 15 April. A few more things have changed since I last posted about it, so I thought I’d update with what’s new.

LaTeX for Jekyll from GitHub Pages to GitLab Pages

About a year ago I posted about using $\text{K}\text{A}\text{T}\text{E}\text{X}$ in a Jekyll site for GitHub Pages. This had been an unsatisfying solution to me, since GH Pages restricts Jekyll plugins to their allowlist, meaning that if I didn’t want to manually add precompiled HTML pages, LaTeX rendering would have to be done client-side using JavaScript. Furthermore, I found out that kramdown, the Markdown compiler that GH Pages uses, has built-in support for KaTeX without needing to explicitly include additional Liquid tags, but GH Pages, too, has overridden configurations needed to enable using KaTeX as well!

U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW

This is part 1.
Part 2: update: U+237C ⍼ angzarr;
Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts
Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼

Known as right angle with downwards zigzag arrow, angle with down zig-zag arrow, \rangledownzigzagarrow, and ⍼, no one knows what ⍼ is meant to represent or where it originated from. Section 22.7 Technical Symbols from the Unicode Standard on the Miscellaneous Technical block doesn’t say anything about it.

U+23BE..U+23CC DENTISTRY NOTATION SYMBOLS

The Unicode Standard has its fair share of mysterious and sometimes unexplained characters. The story of the Farsi symbol (U+262B ☫ farsi symbol) is one of the more well-known ones. Many blocks, especially the “miscellaneous” blocks, have smatterings of rather arbitrary character sets grouped together only by history. One such block is Miscellaneous Technical, which contains completely unrelated groups of characters, including keyboard symbols, APL symbols, electrotechnical symbols, UI symbols, drafting symbols, and of particular interest in this blog post, dentistry notation symbols. Here they are, all 15 of them:

⎾⎿⏀⏁⏂⏃⏄⏅⏆⏇⏈⏉⏊⏋⏌

The first two and last two are part of Palmer notation for denoting human teeth by their position. What are the rest for?