Perfectly Awesome

The confounding consistency of color categories. When Paul Kay, then an anthropology graduate student at Harvard University, arrived in Tahiti in 1959 to study island life, he expected to have a hard time learning the local words for colors.

The removal of cultural emblems is not the erasure of history but part of it. In November 2016, a swastika was painted on an elementary school in my Denver, Colorado, neighborhood of Stapleton.

Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more.

The world is full of icons that warn us to be afraid — to stay away from this or not do that. And many of these are easy to understand because they represent something recognizable, like a fire, or a person slipping on a wet floor.

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar.

We’ll need both deep learning and symbol manipulation to build AI.

Let’s come back, more directly, to a theme in my writing — what happens when something small becomes a tipping point for change. When the seemingly innocuous becomes unpredictable.

Symbols have always been used to signal one's status. Military insignia, family signet rings and heirloom watches; impressive properties filled with original art, expensive cars and designer handbags ensure a luxury lifestyle is obvious to all.

The use of a “Help Mark” symbol by people with hidden disabilities or illnesses who need assistance is spreading across Japan, after it was created by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government 10 years ago.

How, exactly, does one go about making a global dictionary of symbols? It is a Herculean task, one few scholars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philological approach that gathers and compares artifacts from every culture underwent a correction: No one person can ha