Gallery: The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols

If Susan Kare "poured" through an international symbol dictionary, she must have been a liquid. You mean "pored".

The Apple Command symbol can be drawn larger with a colored Magic Marker. When staring at this symbol for a few minutes, and then averting the eyes to the side, the outer loops fill in and the center spins. You see the complementary color of the Marker color. What is happening is that it activates the 3rd eye 6th chakra energy vortex which helps in remote viewing.

On the @ page, image 8 of 11, Anno Domini is said to count the years from the death of Jesus Christ when actually the count is from the year of His conception forward, as in AD 2010. The abbreviation BC (Before Christ) indicates the era before Christ and is not derived from Latin, while AD, though sometimes mistakenly believed to indicate "after death" is from the Latin noted above and on page 8, meaning, "In the year of our Lord.

Pax et bonum

So the Bluetooth symbol is "a combination of the two runes that represent Harald's initials", huh? Well, I imagine that would be "HB", or hagalaz and birkana (Harald Blåtand). I see the birkana (B), no problem. But no matter how I turn this thing, I can't find the hagalaz symbol - 2 parallel uprights with a slanting crossbar (like a cross between an H and an N).

The Bluetooth symbol looks more like a combination of birkana (B) and gebo (X) to me, folks. Nice try, though.

@shinyglassgirl:

If you look at the Danish runes on this page under "Danish runes from ca. 900 AD" you'll see that the H had changed to an X over a vertical bar:

www.arild-hauge.com/edruner.htm

If you then examine this image of the Jelling stone you will see that the first six letters (ltr) on the top line spell "HARALT", and the H, in that form, if superimposed on a B, would look like the Bluetooth symbol:

www.arild-hauge.com/arild-hauge/de-rune-jellinge-big.jpg

@brianjbyrne: Good catch on AD!

You're quite right about the rune for H being written at times rather like a cross between Latin H and N, but these symbols evolved and were written in different ways in different eras.

Ugh. The reply to brian was supposed to be at the END of my comment, not in the middle. Sorry.

@brianjbyrne
BC is not real any more. It is now BCE (Before Common Era). Religion is being phased out.

freebord.com/ride <-- Snowboard the Streets!

FYI, the spinning beach ball actually originated in the NextStep OS and was integrated into"MacOS X" with the early beta versions of yellow/blue box pre OSX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor

Cuddles - BC is still real. It did not fall out of reality. Yes BCE and CE are, in PC liberal universities, becoming the inforced standard - many respected historians still use BC and AD.

By the way, changing the name does not phase religion out - it merely reveals one's intentional bias to ignore it. Switching to a new calanader whose first year was based upon a consistant astronomical event or some secular event pertaining to all of humanity - that would be a phase out of religion.

Calling a foot an apple does not phase out the English system - useing meters does.

Well now Oakspar77777, please trust me when I say that not all of us who prefer to use the terms "CE" and "BCE" are either "PC" (I use a Mac, myself...) or "liberal." Some of us simply belong to non-Abrahamic religions. And we have no desire to "phase religion out", nor do we have any "bias to ignore [religion]", per se. We simply accept the Christian Calendar as the most commonly used one and prefer the terms "CE" and "BCE" because they are not "Christ-centric."

I myself am a good, Goddess-fearing Wiccan and consider myself slightly to the right of center on most issues. But I have a friend (former US Army SF and British SAS) who is a Mohawk Shaman and who considers ["pissed as a"] Newt Gingrich to be a liberal!