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Comment by squiggleblaz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the circle represents a zero - but it isn't a zeno, and the line represents a one - but it isn't a one. They're graphics that seem removed from the meanings they represent. Semantically they're removed too, since turning a device on seems to have complex, multi-byte significance.

And as graphics, the zero seems to represent "circuit connected" and the one seems to represent "circuit disconnected". Yet they have the exact opposite meanings!

They're meant for public consumption after all.

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I did an image search on a few search engines to make sure "on off switch" still returned the same ⏽/⭘ switches I've seen forever. Pretty sure the back of your printer probably has one.

Where are these switches uncommon? Where are they flipped to the opposite meaning as you described? Where has the circle ever represented a connected circuit? Most circuit diagrams are squared off, so which one was circular? I'm so confused.

It's clearly supposed to be a metaphor for genitalia - with the line suggesting 'presence', and the circle suggesting absence. (Note the latin 'vagina', literally means sheath). It works better in the case of the numeral 1, which even has a glans.

Whoever downvoted this was apparently offended by the association. However, there is insight in the point you raised, and you stated it intellectually - not in a juvenile sense, which was in the eye of the beholder.

In anthropology and psychology, primitive symbols like a vertical line or a circle are often found to represent the male and female dichotomy. In fact, it's quite prevalent cross-culturally as basics of a visual language. [citation needed]

Insight? It's false. The symbol for zero originated as a dot, indicating an unfilled place in the place value system, and evolved from there. [0]

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2147450-history-of-zero...

Obviously, your source doesn't support your argument. Just because something once had one shape doesn't mean a new shape can't have new connotations. You're jumping from 'the zero was not always a hole', to 'the zero can never symbolize a hole'. Which is pretty strange.

This 1/0 man/woman white/black kind of binary is so ubiquitous in our culture it's kind of redundant to go and find examples - but it is in itself interesting that when you mention stuff like this, some people will always find a way to claim it is nonsense.

I think it's a desire for security amongst political turbulence - you say, this stuff is abstract and clean and without cultural baggage, so I can hide in it from the world, which is ugly and ambiguous and provokes uncomfortable reactions.

It's a kind of desire that's really common around engineering, mathsy people - I mean, part of the attraction of these subjects is you don't have to navigate anything sticky. So that's why it usually provokes a pretty extreme reaction if you profane the temple by bringing cultural stuff in.

A word or symbol does not represent every single thing that can be free-associated with it. If you want to show that "1" represents the Washington Monument, it is not sufficient (or even necessary) to point out that they're the same shape, you have to show some evidence that there once was a culture that used the symbol "1" whenever they wanted to say "2 15th St NW, Washington, DC."

Using '1' to symbolise the washington monument would be reasonable, if the washington monument was something people very commonly referred to. It would also be reasonable to describe that as phallic. It wouldn't be reasonable to use 1 to refer to an address in DC, because you're jumping from three obviously formally similar things, to the street address of one of those things.

It's a pretty good example of what people mean by free association - and why what I'm(1) doing isn't.

1- I mean, obviously I'm about the millionth person to make this particular observation.

You got a point there (pun intended :) about the symbol for zero.

I guess I was being generous with interpreting the parent comment, by mentioning the (possibly common and cross-cultural) visual association of a circle with womanhood, a straight vertical line with manhood.

I didn't mean to imply that the symbols for zero and one have direct historical origins in those ideas - like the parent comment might have suggested - but I do think there is a philosophical or artistic merit in drawing the analogy.

I never heard of this. Have you ever heard of the symbols also used for Mars and Venus indicating male and female?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol

According to that page, in some contexts, a circle means female and a square means male, but I've never heard of that before either.

Interesting, I've seen the symbols for Mars and Venus being used to represent genders, but not a square or triangle for male.

As for zero/circle/woman and one/vertical line/man.. I guess in my mind, they couldn't be more obvious, universal and simple - to put it crudely: the hole and the stick.

But also: off and on, dark and light, absence and presence.

(So far, I have found no historical evidence that supports the above theory, no basis in logic or fact. I'll leave it as idle speculation on a possible primordial/mythological way of thinking in pictures, with perhaps two of the most primitive symbols.)

I have always seen it this way too: a broken or completed circuit. But I've accepted that my initial understanding of the visual metaphor doesn't match its intent. I think misunderstandings like these result when we abandon written language to point and grunt at tiny pictures.

I've always looked at the line as a connection and the open circle as no connection. It's just what I came up with when I was young as a way to make sense of the markings.

Interesting. I always took ⭘ to be an open circuit and ⏽ to be a closed circuit, using the symbol for a switch as the rough guide. Perhaps they're poor symbols if people can look at them and come up with rational reasons for each interpretation to be correct.

To be extremely pedantic, I think they’re correct at an implementation level: for most chips, as long as they’re receiving power at all from a power supply, they’ll run, unless a reset line is being held high. In most consumer electronics, that reset line is held high by default (by power coming off the wall or from the battery), unless power is supplied to a NAND gate coming from (a flip-flop in front of) the power switch on the front of the computer.

To “turn on” a computer (using the push-button at the front, rather than by flipping a power-supply toggle-switch) is, then, actually to SET that flip-flop, feeding a high input to the NAND gate, which in turn will turn off the reset line to the CPU.

(And, vice-versa, if your computer has a “reset button” on the front like some old computers do, that one throws the flip-flop back to its RESET state, which puts the NAND gate back low, which brings the reset line to the CPU back high. Wiring for push-button toggles is weird!)

Hmm, in most embedded processors I know (e.g., the ESP8266/32 [0], RPi's BMC2835 [1], or Ti's MSP430 [2]), you send the line down for reset but hold it high for running (either by internal pull-up or by actually holding the line).

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[0] https://tttapa.github.io/ESP8266/Chap06%20-%20Uploading.html

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2012/04/Raspberry-Pi... In particular, see first page, D15

[2] https://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp430/f/166/t/3...

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