My grandfather is an artist and likes to contrast old fashioned symbols with modern ones.

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image showing My grandfather is an artist and likes to contrast old fashioned symbols with modern ones.

onyx86 on July 3rd, 2021 at 03:19 UTC »

Not OP

I'm a designer and have always been fascinated by symbols and visual communication. I recently saw an interesting tidbit in a Jim Alkhalili documentary on the history of information and symbols:

Originally, symbols were drawn to represent ideas like "trade" or "danger", etc. Eventually it occurred to someone that you could use symbols to represent a sound instead. So a picture of an eye and a deer no longer had to mean just an eye and a deer. It could represent a spoken word, in this case "idea".

This led to what many historians refer to as the great leap for mankind. Anything that could be spoken could now be written for future people to see, capturing ideas and storing them for future generations.

One reason earlier attempts to decipher Egyptian heiroglyphs failed was people were too focused on their pictographic nature. People assumed they represented ideas. After the Rosetta Stone was found, they were able to confirm that the heiroglyphs instead represented phonemes or sounds.

The documentary: Order And Disorder - Episode 2 - Information (goes to relevant timestamp which I'm paraphrasing from)

(EDIT:) The other part: Order And Disorder - Episode 1 - Energy

chloe_cabbage on July 3rd, 2021 at 03:23 UTC »

what’s the qr code for tho?

letswatchtv on July 3rd, 2021 at 03:46 UTC »

can he move so i can try to scan it?