Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by Freak_NL on Thursday October 17, 2024 @01:34PM
(#41871749)
Elephants are fine animals, but the Unicode standard features a distinct and disturbing lack of guinea pigs — as well as capybaras — severely limiting the range of my digital expression.
capybara and guinea pig are both far less popular than taco or emoji
interestingly, the spike of taco in google trends seems like it might be correlated to it's addition to emoji - that spike would be about a year after iOS got the Taco emoji.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by rsynnott on Friday October 18, 2024 @07:35AM
(#41878406)
They're disadvantaged in the cute-animal stakes by their name, I think. The name implies something large, dangerous, and possibly mythical; it really doesn't fit with "round fuzzy thing somewhat smaller than a cat".
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by Freak_NL on Thursday October 17, 2024 @04:18PM
(#41873334)
Certainly. Capybaras are semi-aquatic mammals, and their head as a consequence is positioned significantly higher than their bodies, resulting in a general pose which can only be described as 'regally aloof'.
Cavies on the other hand look like adorable furry idiots with a much less angular — in fact, rotund — outline.
Aside from both being rodents and (apparently) delicious, these are quite different animals.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by IncreasePosts on Friday October 18, 2024 @01:23PM
(#41881535)
My implication was "at the resolution of an emoji" - you can clearly tell the difference in real life, but what about when you only have 18x18 pixels to work with?
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by Freak_NL on Friday October 18, 2024 @03:07PM
(#41882472)
If you can't tell the difference between a capybara and a guinea pig, you won't be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog either. The former pair differs more in terms of their silhouette than the latter. 18×18 probably means you won't be able to tell quite a lot of emoji apart, but don't blame these rodents for that.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by pxc on Saturday October 19, 2024 @09:16AM
(#41887589)
They also feel extremely different to the touch. Capybaras have really rough coats! They're not soft at all.
You could tell a guinea-pig-sized capybara apart from a guinea pig, or a capybara-sized guinea pig apart from a capybara, blindfolded. Probably anyone who expects guinea pigs to be soft but has never met a capybara would get it right on the first try.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by ygra on Friday October 18, 2024 @09:48AM
(#41879456)
Maybe after Han unification we also need a squirrel unification and leave this distinction to the font which is picked based on the region you're in ...
That being said, I already cannot parse many emoji and would love tooltips what they are supposed to represent in all places.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by dustyventure on Thursday October 17, 2024 @04:31PM
(#41873462)
If marketers found that any vote spontaneously creates the invested interest a democratic process needs then we all would have starved during the subsequent storm of pointless elections.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by spondylosaurus on Thursday October 17, 2024 @02:05PM
(#41872057)
These guidelines note that emoji proposals for "specific people, whether fictional, historic, living, or dead" will be rejected outright, but most versions of the rockstar emoji are an obvious Bowie homage!
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by jerf on Thursday October 17, 2024 @02:36PM
(#41872412)
While a perfectly reasonable request on its own terms, it also definitely reminds me of the brown M&M story, which if you are one of today's 10,000 [1], is https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ .
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by dmonitor on Thursday October 17, 2024 @04:18PM
(#41873330)
> There is already an emoji for frog, which can be used to represent all amphibians.
I'm not a big fan of this example. Does "lizard" represent all reptiles? "dog" all mammals? I suppose salamanders are taxonomically similar enough to lizards that specific amphibian emoji aren't necessary for them, but that's not the reason given.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by rsynnott on Friday October 18, 2024 @07:37AM
(#41878424)
Once they open the door to other amphibians, they will end up getting drawn into the whole "do toads exist" debate, and it frankly just isn't worth it.
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by lifthrasiir on Friday October 18, 2024 @01:37AM
(#41876620)
It is actually something more of reducing the number of faulty submissions, because the popularity alone doesn't get emoji registered. Everyone should look at the L2 register to see a (very tiny) portion of emoji proposals that clearly motivate this section and others. (Most proposals are directly sent to the Emoji subcommittee, so the L2 submission is relatively rare.)
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by xg15 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @03:21AM
(#41893581)
It's a clever idea to use another search term as the baseline as long as Google refuses to give any indicator of absolute search usage in the Trends graph.
...until the Great Elephant Incident of 2025 comes along and messes up the search trends...
Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural...
by yencabulator on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:11AM
(#41925843)
Unicode Consortium definitely jumped the :shark: with emojis.
It's such a bad system for actually doing beyond poor humor, yet they pretend it is doing useful things.
> Other examples of fixed complete sets are blood types {A B AB O},
Meanwhile, that's such a simplification that nobody actually uses just that information:
> As of 31 December 2023, a total of 45[2] human blood group systems are recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT).[3] The two most important blood group systems are ABO and Rh; they determine someone's blood type (A, B, AB, and O, with + or − denoting RhD status) for suitability in blood transfusion.
The commercial petitions for taco played no part in its selection; the taco was approved based on evidence in its proposal, not the petitions.
https://www.change.org/p/unicode-consortium-the-taco-emoji-n...
(I mean, if we can have 'taco'…)
capybara and guinea pig are both far less popular than taco or emoji
interestingly, the spike of taco in google trends seems like it might be correlated to it's addition to emoji - that spike would be about a year after iOS got the Taco emoji.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrax
I suppose you could start a popular open source project and name it the word you want to become an emoji.
Cavies on the other hand look like adorable furry idiots with a much less angular — in fact, rotund — outline.
Aside from both being rodents and (apparently) delicious, these are quite different animals.
You could tell a guinea-pig-sized capybara apart from a guinea pig, or a capybara-sized guinea pig apart from a capybara, blindfolded. Probably anyone who expects guinea pigs to be soft but has never met a capybara would get it right on the first try.
> Any of the rodents of the family Sciuridae distinguished by their large bushy tail.
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/squirrel)
That being said, I already cannot parse many emoji and would love tooltips what they are supposed to represent in all places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipmunk
(/s because from TFA "Petitions are not considered as evidence since they are too easily skewed")
Internet: "Boaty McBoatface."
Boat owner: "Democracy is a mistake."
TL; DR: washing-up-detergent maker Pril does online competition and promised to put the winning design on shelves, the design that got most votes: https://heideblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/screen-shot...
Somewhere online there's a pic of these things on the shelves/they did make them as collectibles.
Boaty McBoatface is the most famous boat behind the Titanic, so it definitely worked.
The inherent issue with these campaigns is the select for initial response not how long you’re going to like some design.
No elephant -> toss immediately. Save time.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I'm not a big fan of this example. Does "lizard" represent all reptiles? "dog" all mammals? I suppose salamanders are taxonomically similar enough to lizards that specific amphibian emoji aren't necessary for them, but that's not the reason given.
Let there be ten thousand cat breed emojis via combining characters!
(It would be much more fun if they'd just represented them as citrus hybrids with ZWJs.)
...until the Great Elephant Incident of 2025 comes along and messes up the search trends...
> Other examples of fixed complete sets are blood types {A B AB O},
Meanwhile, that's such a simplification that nobody actually uses just that information:
> As of 31 December 2023, a total of 45[2] human blood group systems are recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT).[3] The two most important blood group systems are ABO and Rh; they determine someone's blood type (A, B, AB, and O, with + or − denoting RhD status) for suitability in blood transfusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type