From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Sat Sep 29 2007 - 00:00:17 CDT
Quoting Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>:
> On 9/28/2007 6:01 PM, William J Poser wrote:
>>> And I wonder why you would need to hide it. Because of some US =
>>> "churches" that spread antidarwinism, reject evolution (against
>>> all scientists) and even militate against teaching it in US schools?
>>> Do you fear antievolutionists in US so much that you'd need to
>>> use mystic symbols to defend science?
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure how "hiding" came up. The Darwin fish is used, primarily
>> on bumper stickers, by people of scientific orientation who are
>> opposed to Christian antievolutionism.
> Well, Bill, these are the mysterious ways of how Philippe thinks. I had
> mentioned that, if you wanted to propose the pro-evolution fish, you
> would have to figure out the unification of the various variants of
> that, for example, whether having just the feet, or the word Darwin
> inscribed make for different glyphs or different characters (James
> apparently is for a generic fish symbol that covers all, even
> conflicting, interpretations - that's the Grand-Unification theory of
> character coding ;-)
>
> BTW, I got that your initial reply was tongue-in-cheek, but I actually
> think it would not be wasted effort to have someone come up with a
> well-reasoned proposal.
>
> The conventional fish symbol might occur in the context of ancient
> writings - so it should be covered for that reason, but what about the
> modern variants. The one I like the best is the 'dead fish', where
> someone tried to improve the design by inscribing a cross with the
> short bar where the eyes of the fish would be, with the result that it
> looks like a comic book version of a dead fish. Do we excpect that
> Unicode unifies these or not?
>
The unificiation issues are complex, maybe the better question to ask
is which fish symbols have sufficient grounds to encode. The plain <><
is widely used both in terms of geography and time. Adding a cross for
the eye, 'dead fish' or writing ICHTHYS in some way inside, are
variants that I can think of no obvious reason to consider encoding
seperately.
The Darwin fish is a variant, though unifying it would be a like
strtange, however the questions regarding it are whether or not it is
widely enough used to encode. The fact that at present the word DARWIN
is usually included, argues against it being a well known symbol. It
is one of a number of 'modern' symbols/logos that the question is will
this still be used in the years to come.
Of course if these symbols start being used in some 'industrial
syandard', say symbols that can be selected on mobile phones and sent
to others, then the 'industtrial standard' tends to decide much of
both the encoding and unification issues.
Regards
John Knightley
> A./
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