Giving kids the "Where Do Emoji Come From?" talk

It was a thrill to give a presentation today at the Bay Area Science and Engineering Fair, on “Where Emoji Come From”, with great thanks to Apple for conveniently shipping the trombone emoji 🪊 in 26.4 beta 4 this week, which let me change the thrilling conclusion from Coming Soon, the Trombone Emoji to OMG It’s Finally Here, Are You As Excited As I Am?

At least two of the students in the crowd admitted to being trombone players, so I’m sure they’ll win the grand prize just for that.

Bay Area? What Bay Area?

Um, in this context “Bay Area” is referring to this Hamilton end of Lake Ontario and I know nobody else calls it that.

i have learned one thing in my career

One slight hitch. I built the presentation on my Mac Mini but grabbed my laptop on the way out the door and (whoops) it didn’t have macOS 26.4 beta 4 on it so some slides showed the Unicode “missing character” glyph instead. A little frantic last minute copy/paste from iPhone to the rescue.

“Steve, did you seriously consider doing a software update on your MacBook 10 minutes before your talk started, just so you could get the trombone emoji 🪊?”

look, I’m not saying I’ve learned many lessons in my career but I did resist THAT urge.

deleting slides

I always hit the point in a presentation where I’m finished Creating Slides and shift gears to Deleting Slides. The presentation immediately starts improving.

That was about 1 AM last night.

The students are surely happy that I deleted a lot of my Thrilling History of Text Encoding slides and that I did not spend much time on why there is a gap in EBCDIC between “R” and “S”, even though that’s really kind of fascinating. to some of us. ask your grandparents about EBCDIC.

(It’s because, on a punch card, which also ask your grandparents what THOSE were, if ‘S’ had been one more than ‘R’, it would have resulted in a punch card with too many adjacent holes and for a popular letter like S, it was thought that would weaken the card. So, the EBCDIC standard means that S is two more than R, not one more. Srsly look at the ‘S’ here - there should be three adjacent vertical punches if it was going to follow immediately after R, but it doesn’t.)

By Nikevich (talk) 18:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC) - The same image, with lesser contrast at the top, Public Domain, Link

morse code “today”, he says

I did use Rush’s opening strain of “YYZ” as an example of How Morse Code Is Still In Use Today even though that song is, uh, from 1981 and oh my god that was 45 years ago? what is happening to the concept of time?

Y’know, this. The rhythm is spelling out “YYZ” in Morse Code.
𝄆 •-•• •-•• ••– 𝄇.

Emoji and Inclusion

It’s great to show off that the Emoji standard includes both Gender and Fitzpatrick Skin Tone modifiers, and that most emoji that represent a person can be modified on the fly. Here are some variants of the Weightlifter emoji, for instance, with gender and skin tone modifiers applied.

Unicode and Emoji also support the idea of merging two emoji through a Zero-Width Joiner. Check this out. If you have the ADULT emoji followed immediately by a ZWJ and then the MICROSCOPE emoji …

… what you actually get is a SCIENTIST. (Also modifiable for gender and skin tone, if you like.)

Human emoji are rendered in an unrealistic yellow, on purpose, and you can customize them to your liking. (There are even Grouping modifiers to tailor a “Family” emoji, for instance, to different combinations of moms and dads and kids.

I applaud the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium for these serious efforts to make emoji inclusive for us all.

possible trendy emoji

I can also report that any mention of 6 and 7 still causes the usual reaction amongst the youth of today.

(that was my example of “don’t suggest a 6-7 emoji to the committee, they aren’t interested in fads.")

And I still very much enjoy this unofficial list of Rejected Emoji including my favourite -

#haymanSplaining