#symbols — Public Fediverse posts

Candle and Shade

He laughs about the things
only he understands,
whether or not to heed
the hail and banshee winds.

He’s unhinged by gladness,
that’s why he’s so happy
dancing faster than light
heating the heart of night.

Terrified of loving
daylight more than the dark
blowing out the candle
before he counts the shades.

💁🏻‍♀️ ICYMI: 🌹🎨 An animated short from #MoMA's Once Upon an Artwork series, directed by Shadab Shayegan, explores a dream world inspired by Leonora Carrington's 1953 #painting And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur.

Through imaginative #play, the #film introduces young viewers to Carrington's surreal universe of mythical #creatures and magical transformations.

👉 Learn more: https://seethis.tv/post/the-dream-of-the-magical-rose-moma-once-upon-an-artwork

#activities #animals #animation #art #dogs #dreams #exploration #flowers #imagination #kids #magic #minotaur #museum #surrealism #symbols #mythology #education #tksst #video

Over the past few days a lot of people have shared this new open source symbol-based color identification system as design augmentation/accessibility toolkit for addressing color vision deficiencies:

https://colorsym.com/

ColorADD is another (older) system which relies on a very similar kind of symbolic algebra approach, but unlike the above it is proprietary/licensed:

https://www.coloradd.net/en/coloradd-code/

The same underlying additive symbolic system approach can also be used for a whole lot of other domains:

1. Identify/decompose into basic atomic concepts
2. Assign/design a matching set of modular symbols
3. Design/define a system of rules how base symbols can be combined

The key here is that symbols do not even need to be visual. Could also be audible etc.

Possible use cases: Character or biological feature traits, taste profiles/preferences, permission systems, material or product properties...

(More generally, this approach is also a key technique used in parametric [and by extension in procedural, algorithmic, generative] art/design fields...)

#SystemThinking #Color #ColorTheory #ColorBlindness #Accessibility #Symbols

How to Stop JSON stringify From Dropping Symbols

Symbols vanish in JSON output.

#javascript #symbols #json #bug #howto #serialization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvpsxKeYf4E

🧵 Tech-themed works, 22/x

Digital communication icon designs (2023)

#icon #icons #pictograms #pictogram #symbols #audio #video #computer #computers #modem #graphics #design #artwork #2D #vector #cartoon #illustration #illustrator #picture #DigitalArt #digital #experimental #style #art #artist #arts #arte #designer #GraphicDesign #minimalism #ArtLovers #FineArt #painting #drawing #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Russia occupied less than 1% of Ukraine’s territory since November 2022, monitoring group says — Russian media shows US armored vehicle with Russian, American flags storming Ukrainian positions — Russian gasoline prices hit record highs after drone strikes shut refineries — Muscle beaches, drag racing, and drones falling into the sea. Summer in Odesa hasn’t stopped — In Ukraine, democracy finds its fiercest defenders … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-19-2025/

😺🐻🐰 #satire #humor #parody #society #religiouscritique #rationalism #iconography #symbolism #symbols #cult #community #transparence #cat #cats #teddy #teddies #digitalart #generativeart #aicreation #aiart https://instagram.com/p/DK-KF2hTz8v/

The original, non-glitched version will be available this week as well if it's of interest 🤓. I'm also working on making my dataset available to the public (it's currently handwritten in my notebooks). #dataVisualization #archaeology #symbols #Pictish

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rrmt7f5eexmmrz2yoepqxrl3/post/3lh2qfyglfc2l

I will document everything when I have digested it and share it on the website dedicated to LoCos launched last month.
But first, I still have a lot to do on this website, as many things need to be polished in terms of content and functionalities...😅

I just wanted to share some bites with you here.

Oh, and I have many other things to share about my trip stay tuned
⸜(ꎣᵕ⦁)⸝

5/5

#symbols #pictogram #design #locos #yukioota #japan #loverscommunicationsystem

We have also talked about digitalization, as I understand now how he has constructed all LoCoS shapes and how I should improve mine. He still has a sharp mind and a good eye.
He grew up in a kimono shop owned by his family and was surrounded by Japanese family Crest design. He still owns catalogs, this one has a hundred years old I think.

↓ 4/5

#symbols #pictogram #design #locos #yukioota #japan #loverscommunicationsystem

He invited me to his apartment full of documentation about language systems, pictogram design, and his research on LoCoS when he was working on one of the first courses in the world on pictogram design at Zokei University around 1966. I had to buy a portable scanner to scan his postcard sized archives full of drawings for my own research and only had the time to scan a drop in the ocean.

↓ 3/5

#symbols #pictogram #design #locos #yukioota #japan #loverscommunicationsystem

In #bioinformatics, and #scientific #computing generally, raw #data is never ever in a usable form.

This is one of the many things #Hollywood persistently gets wrong: the #scientist / #hacker / omni-computer-geek opens up the file, stares at a bunch of #numbers or #symbols, and says, “Ah hah! If I #compile the #HTML to reverse the #polarity on the #IP #gateway, I can #deconvolve the #DNA sequence to #backpropagate the #cellular #metabolism of the #alien #plague! Oh, and make #dinosaurs if you want, but that’s extra.”

Bonus points if the screen projects on said scientist’s face and reflects from the inevitable chunky-framed glasses. Scribbling equations backward on a transparent whiteboard may also be involved.

#Scientists, as I have said many times before and no doubt will need to say many times again, are people. We’re pretty good with numbers, yes, as a rule. But what we’re good at doing with those numbers is not reading and understanding them. It’s using them as the raw materials for product which makes sense to the human brain. Words, pictures, and a MUCH SMALLER number of numbers is our goal. Also continued #funding, which is about the kind of numbers everyone understands.

Before we process the numbers, we need to “#preprocess” them. There are several intermediate steps between the really raw data and the cover story for next week’s issue of Nature. Preprocessing is where we turn the glowing symbols projected onto our faces into something that kinda-sorta makes sense. It’s still not really readable, but people looking at it, who know what they’re looking at, can tell what it represents.

Usually this is in the form of one or more #tables: for a familiar example, think of an #Excel workbook with several large #spreadsheets. (In reality, storing data in Excel is a terrible idea, but I’ll stick with that metaphor.) Nobody’s going to read and digest everything in the workbook. You can look at the headers and a few of the values and at least have an idea where to start. Preprocessing gets you to that point.

For most types of data, preprocessing is fairly standardized. You don’t have to write your own code: someone else has already done that work for you. Just pick a #software #package, run the raw data through it, glance at the output to make sure nothing went horribly wrong. Now you’re ready to write the code only you can write, to discover the Secrets of Life Itself. Now is the time for SCIENCE.

Or Nature. Or The Journal Of Obscure Subfield Ten People In The World Know Exists. Or a tech report. You know, whatever.

Careful readers will have noticed the word “fairly” above. In fact there are multiple #algorithms to choose from, and multiple packages implementing those algorithms, and #documentation written at 3:00 AM by an exhausted #postdoc who really just wanted to check the #cell cultures one last time and grab the remaining half a chicken salad sandwich from the break room fridge and go home and crawl into bed for a few hours’ sleep before dragging ass back in tomorrow. Shower optional.

Other exhausted postdocs and their harassed #principal #investigators, who get somewhat more sleep and a somewhat finer grade of chicken salad but are much more worried about upcoming funding application deadlines, may or may not bother to write down which package they use to preprocess their data. Or what specific parameters they tuned. Or if they even know how they’re supposed to use the damned thing: there’s a really good chance they just ran the data through on the default settings, got something that looked reasonable, and called it a day.

Amazingly, most of the time this doesn’t really matter. Data has a life of its own. The bigger the data set gets, and these days nearly all data are “big data,” the more likely it is that any reasonable method will produce similar results. Good thing too, otherwise science (and Science) would grind to a screeching, shuddering, smoking halt.

Sometimes it matters a lot. Careful scientists check, just in case. I try to be one of those, and when I’m not, my coworkers pick up the slack. Luckily for me, for most of my career I’ve found myself in the company of those who live up to that standard, and I can mostly convince myself I do the same. Another item on Hollywood’s long list of sins: science is not a solo enterprise. In fact it’s deeply social, which is one of several reason why the stereotype of scientists as loners is a load of crap. But I digress.

In case you’re wondering if this has a point, yes it does, and here it is: all the above is why my boss recently sent me a message saying, “Woah yeah ok so maybe you do need to process from raw after all. B/c idk wtf that is.”

Without any irony at all: I love my job.