We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future. This is hardly a recent phenomenon, and indeed practices meant to clarify the nature of events to come may be older than civilization itself.
Writing was invented three different times in world history—in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. But not all writing systems derive from those three original scripts. How can this be?
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.
The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a little slime will do a man no harm... whilst if you dance with dragons, you must expect to burn. - George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its downsides.
A mathematician has uncovered the stories behind the symbols used in math
In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the…
How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster.
For a younger generation, the once-powerful protest symbol packs about as much of a punch as a smiley face.
One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?
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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. But some concepts are hard to communicate…
For a couple of centuries, the British were in an unlikely frenzy for the exotic fruit.
Why China considers a covered eye to be dangerous. And why people still do it. From the winking owl to the Hong Kong protest eye patch.
How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.
An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar. An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial…
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:
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We’ll need both deep learning and symbol manipulation to build AI.
Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. Our stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures.
The removal of cultural emblems is not the erasure of history but part of it.
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.
Yard signs featuring this mysterious blue dot are quickly gaining popularity among Nebraska Democrats. Here's what it means.