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Microbe Emoji

emojipedia.org

73 pointstosh51 comments

> Chess Pawn was approved as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993 under the name “Black Chess Pawn” and added to Emoji 11.0 in 2018.

Another existing normal character that got turned into an emoji and so will be rendered with funny colors rather than the original font color in firefox :(

Can't even use a simple left or right pointing triangle to indicate something anymore without it possibly getting funny colors in firefox :(

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Shouldn't it be possible to use fontconfig to force emojis to render under whatever font you want? At least on Linux I think this should be possible.

Unicode standard has a way of dealing with this: You can force non-emoji presentation by following your character with U+FE0E as detailed in this note:

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Presentation_Style

whether any particular browser or operating system actually implements this though is up to chance I suppose.

edit:

reading through the data files shows that chess pawn is intended to be shown with normal non emoji presentation by default, and only be shown with emoji presentation if followed by an emoji presentation character.

source: https://www.unicode.org/Public/emoji/11.0/emoji-data.txt

Surely it would have made more sense for the existing behaviour to be the default and have to request the new formatting, instead of potentially changing the presentation of existing documents?

Or just not bother with unification? Have "Pawn" and "Emoji Pawn" it's not like we're starving for space. This and things like CJK unifications make me feel like design happens on a level of naive convenience instead of giving a shit about what things mean or how they are used.

it turns out that, to many people's surprise, trying to create a computer encoding for every human written language is extremely political, and weird compromises have to be made. I think initially the CJK unification was because unicode thought they'd only ever need 16 bits, and that's pretty much the only way to fit all those characters in that space.

now it's up to 21 bits and I wonder if that will ultimately be enough.

But effectively the presentation system (in theory, stuff still needs to implement it) does make "pawn" and "emoji pawn", by having "emoji pawn" be [pawn character] [emoji presentation character]

Each character specifies whether it has emoji presentation and separately whether text presentation or emoji presentation ought to be default, in theory, with the pictograms that were initially text-presentation, and now have an emoji presentation, specified to be text-presentation by default.

Whether operating systems or browsers implement this is up to chance.

> Surely it would have made more sense for the existing behaviour to be the default

Since the pawn doesn't have the Emoji_Presentation property, that's basically what the standard says outside of contexts where emoji presentation is the default for anything that has the emoji property; the text presentation and emoji presentation modifiers are generically available to override the defaults.

I'm confused. What was the normal character that got turned into chess pawn? Or are you saying chess pawn was already a normal character and is now unnecessarily an emoji?

Yes, U+265F is currently a normal character.

http://graphemica.com/%E2%99%9F

That codepoint is slated to also have an emoji representation in Unicode 11. As far as I can tell, it will default to the normal character.

So the issue is that in Unicode 11 the black chess pawn will change appearance from a simple silhouette to a more detailed image that stands out from regular text?

I'm seeing black arrows in Firefox and Chrome.

Blue emoji arrows in Edge.

Hopefully this leads to the use of emojis in scholarly articles in the field of biology.

I've used them in a grant application.

Please elaborate.

Was working on a conceptual diagram for something, needed a small representation of a dog, ended up using the emoji.

Got funded, so it must have worked :)

They work great in slides and figures if you are studying taxa that are sufficiently covered by the emoji set.

Isn't it peculiar that we started out with pictograms, then migrated to alphabets, but now there is movement back towards pictograms?

Of course this is an over-simplified view of things, even for a language lay-person like myself.

Never mind that different OSs/fonts will represent the same thing in different ways.

That said, supposedly China could grow to the size it reached thanks to its writing system encoded meaning rather than sounds. Thus different communities with different languages could get one letter from the emperor and all understand it.

this wasn't always the case. The different communities used to have different characters as well as different words. there had to be unification. by military force.

Does anyone know what kind of microbe this is?

Sidenote: for a second I read "emoji" as plural, and envisioned a handful of different microbes (e-coli, amoeba, cyanobacteria, etc). I got excited that finally, 400 years after microbes were revealed to us, USB microscopes had so democratized the technology that the Unicode Consortium saw fit to familiarize us with our tiny fellow inhabitants of Earth, our distant cousins on the tree of life.

Hey, I can dream can't I? ;)

Maybe bacterial Fitzgerald next?

Fitzpatrick? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale)

It looks like a bacteria of some sort without a flaggelum, maybe gram positive.

If I had to bet, I'd bet on some kind of lactobacillus :)

Rod shaped bacterium are hardly ever Gram positive. Gram positive are defined by their thick layer of peptidoglycan. Because it is a thick, strong structure, it naturally sticks to round shapes.

Gram negatives also have a layer of peptidoglycan, but much thinner. Therefore they can form rods that have bends and straight sections as they are not constrained by their thick structure.

I see cilia and organelles, so this is a eukaryotic microbe, maybe Protozoa?

They should have standardized the microbial "features" instead, so we could build our own.

With unicode, you can use "combining characters" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character .

We would be able to do "bacteria + flagellum" or similar :)

you can still do this with opentype fonts and ligatures. you don't need to wait for unicode to standardise it.

Or "bacterium + flagellum + circumflex".

There are a bunch of other new ones as well, such as red haired man and pirate flag. Cool!

https://emojipedia.org/emoji-11.0/

Bug: https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes-and-th...

I only want to express myself with 3 hearts, not 4, but now I'm being forced to use 4. This does not align with how I'm feeling. How insensitive.

Ideally you would be able to use combining characters to join the intended number of hearts (or birds, flowers, poos, etc) to the intended facial expression.

Assemble the whole face from component parts while you're at it.

Finally, lacrosse is getting the recognition it deserves, from the unicode community:

https://emojipedia.org/lacrosse-stick-and-ball/

There's a petri dish too!! swoon I've been using the microscope to mean "science" all these years. Now I'll have some real options.

https://emojipedia.org/petri-dish/

We are witnessing the birth of a new ideogram language. Amazing!

Reminds me of these microbes stuffed animal. Someone also made an STD version.

http://amzn.to/2BhW7kp

Oh, they finally added a llama: https://emojipedia.org/llama/

I'm fine with the fact that there's a standard for pictographs. Just.. why does it have to be Unicode? Why can't it just be its own standard?

Because the unicode bureaucracy has to legitimize its own existence now that they have encoded the glyphs of every major writing system on the planet.

Because then we're back to square one: how do you store Unicode and Emojicode in the same text file? How do you know which bytes should be interpreted as Unicode and which as the other?

There are two control codes, SO (shift-out) and SI (shift-in) that can be used for this---SO to switch to another character set, and SI to switch back. So you SO to Emojicode, and SI back to Unicode.

Because of the “uni” in Unicode.

Because then it is ambigious to represent that standard for pictographs in different operating systems.

How many unicode emojis are we totaling currently?

looks like its in the FAQ, somewhat recentish https://emojipedia.org/faq/#how-many

In total there are 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard as of June 2017.

It looks good to use them.

Which emoji font do you recommend for pc? I am now just using Font Awesome to remove broken unicode on the web.

Esperanto flag is missing, not sure why it was not approved yet

It is very uncommon to have a flag associated with a language. In my 35 years of life, I have never encountered it. Only when I googeled esperanto I saw a green with white star flag.

How long until unicode becomes turing complete?

No sad poop emoji... How disappointing :(

Well, at least we have a toilet roll - https://emojipedia.org/roll-of-toilet-paper/

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