 OK, so you're all, well, hello. Bonjour. Connichiwa. Good evening. Buenos dias. Daniel, nice to meet you. Ni hao. I can't really speak American, but I didn't consider doing it. I'll talk in a really bad American accent, but it would be really painful for everyone involved. So I hope you all understand me here in Texas. So my talks, what's that supposed to mean? And most of what I'm going to tell you is true. I've taken a few liberties to kind of fit everything into 25 minutes. But my name is Paul Batme. And on the internet, I use the username 3daymunk in lots of places. And people often ask me, what does that mean? And that's a reasonable question. It's actually a Japanese yōji jukugo, which is a four-character expression, which is itself a four-character expression. It's kind of nice. It's four-character expressions all the way down. It's kind of embarrassing. But again, that expression, mi-ka-bo-zu in Japanese, literally means three-day muck. But figuratively, it refers to someone who starts things and doesn't finish them. So that's kind of an image of someone who joins a monastery, but after three days, they finally ascetic life is too much for them. And we're all a bit like that. And so I actually chose that username kind of to broaden my own conscience into finishing the things I started. But just how do you write three-day muck in kanji in Japanese? Well, three is really easy. One stroke is one. Two strokes is two. Three strokes is three. And day isn't so hard either. What is the day, but the passage of the sun across the sky? And that's what the internet character is. It's a stylized disc of the sun. That's an old version of it from Oracle Bones from 3,000 BC. Overtime, it's got a bit squared off. But it's still one of the simplest characters. So that's three-day. But what about the muck? You could try to draw a picture of someone in monastic attire. But it was going to get a bit fiddly. It's really hard to do. And as you can see, that isn't really what's happened. So there's a more general problem here, which is if our writing system is based on drawing pictures of stuff, how do we represent things that we can't draw pictures of? In other words, how do we represent abstract concepts? Well, one way is to use things that we can draw, which sounds the same. If you've ever seen those things for typical kids, called the rebus, then you might just understand how this could work. So for this sake of argument, I suppose I want to say, I hear you. Well, I can use a picture of an eye for eye. And I can use a female sheep for you, because that's the best that I could draw. And here, well, it's not exactly the same as here, but it's close enough. And in some dialects, it's probably the same. It's actually kind of tricky to draw an ear. And exactly what an ear looks like might depend on your culture. But I digress. So we can pull these together to get I hear you, and probably people will understand what we mean. But we might decide that I and you are a bit ambiguous. So we decide to draw a full kind of stick of person next to them to indicate that they represent people. And that is more or less what the ancient Chinese did. So for example, how do you write an image? If everything you draw is itself an image, how do you express the concept? Well, the word in Chinese is xiang, which is conveniently exactly the same as the word for elephant. Elephants are a pretty easy thing to draw. This is an old Oracle-Bone elephant, which I could be drawn in an inkscape. So it's not exactly the same, but close enough. And it's got legs, it's got a tail, it's got a trunk. It's got a tusk, so it's recognized as an elephant. And over time, again, it's become stylized and squared off. And, personally, it's become rotated through a quarter turn. But you can still, if you sort of sit on the side and squint a bit, you can still see an elephant. So you need to have a picture of an elephant to represent the concept of image. But sometimes you might want to make it clear that you're talking about a person, so how do you draw a person? Well, we drew some stick figures earlier on, but the Chinese reduced it down to something simpler. The defining characteristic of homo sapiens is obligated to bipedalism. In other words, generally speaking, we walk around on two legs. So you can draw something like that and it's recognizably a human, and that sort of looks like a human. Or possibly it came from two arms, it's not entirely clear, looking at little characters. Either way, it's something that's sort of recognizably human. So that's what the Chinese character, the person is, but if you put it together with elephant, you get a thing that is about people and it's pronounced like elephant. And 3,000 years ago in Chinese and conveniently still today means image or a statue or portrait. And this kind of combination, which is a character for the area of meaning that is on the left, in this case, an anti-characteristic pronunciation makes up by far the largest group of Chinese characters. And in fact, of these kind of component parts, there's only a few hundred of them, they're called radicals. And so the problem of learning to read Chinese isn't quite as hard as we might seem at first, although over millennia, certainly the pronunciations have changed quite a bit. So writing Chinese on the other hand is still relatively hard. Here's a shopping list for a jiaozi, which is dumplings and the author of this is a research from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with a PhD and he starts writing some of these characters, given up and written them phonetically. So even for educated speakers, it can be quite hard. But Japanese is a bit harder still, as we'll see. So back in the fourth century, the Japanese didn't have their own writing system. They borrowed Chinese. And there's no shame in that. We use the Latin alphabet and the clues in the name. But Japanese and Chinese are completely unrelated languages and Chinese makes loads of assumptions which aren't even that good for Chinese always. But for Japanese, it's a very poor fit indeed. So the Japanese came up with a system called kanbun that involved firstly writing the sentence in Chinese, that's the left-hand column. Secondly, they annotated it with a set of transformations, kind of like a computer program that explains how you turn the Chinese sentence into a Japanese one. And that's the little annotations down the left-hand side of the left-hand column. Then they would execute this program and you can see the arrows. First of all, you move the third character down to the bottom. Then you swap the fifth and sixth characters. Then you move the third character down to the whatever it is. Sixth place, seventh place, sixth place, by now. And then you fill in all the blanks and you read the whole thing as in Japanese and all that's down the right-hand side. You have to go and make up on your own to work out how to pronounce it. So this was the way that the Chinese and the Japanese was written for a very long time. But luckily, some other people realized that you could just use the Chinese characters for their phonetic values and use just one character or a syllable. And this became maniogana. That, in turn, was simplified into hiragana by taking these complicated kanji and writing a cursive abbreviation of the strokes. Torontokatakana, which is the same kind of thing, another way of doing it, based on taking just a part of each sign. So there's only about 50 each of hiragana and katakana, which is kind of manageable. It's about the same order of magnitude as Latin or something, which has about 22 characters, but actually about 52, because we have lower-hand uppercase. And it's entirely possible to write Japanese just using those 50-person characters. And that's what children's books do, and it's still received as well. But in real life, it's a bit more complicated because firstly, there's a load of long words from Chinese, and those are all written in the original Chinese kanji with a bit of a kind of Japanese pronunciation. But to add on to that, Chinese words entered Japanese in about four different ways. So you've got the pronunciation from wo, or from utang, or sum, or main eras, and each of these characters can have several of these pronunciations. Then on top of that, Chinese characters are used to stand in for Japanese nouns and adjectives. Extraordinary characters are used to indicate things like the past tense or something. So that means that you end up with something like this, where red is Kazakana, black is Hiragana, blue is a Chinese loan word, and purple is a Japanese word that's written with a Chinese character. And it means that each character can have several possible pronunciations, which probably reaches its apotheosis in this character. You might recognize it from the Japanese beer label, but it's draft, it doesn't draft a bit. And in Chinese, it has one pronunciation. But in Japanese, it can be pronounced depending on context as shou, se, bi, o, u, o-o-o, o-ha, o-ki, o-nam, and so there's eight possible pronunciations for it. And none of these things. But Japanese, even despite all that, isn't that bad. There are more complicated writing systems or at least there were. So, slightly earlier than the Chinese, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia developed their own writing system, which is called cuneiform. And they started out with drawing pictures of things, which became more squared off over time. Quite anti-rosaic as well. The rotating character seems to be quite a common thing in history. Later, because it was easier to write on that angle. And then, because they were using read styles to press things into soft clay, they simplified everything to kind of pointy marks that you can easily make up with clay styles. So everything's sort of those forms of wedge shapes. And that's actually what cuneiform means, it means wedge writing. And the Sumerians sort of the problem of representing abstract concepts in the same way. Using readers, they'd use similarly pronounced characters to stand in for things that they couldn't draw. So, in the case of life, which is pronounced as teal, they would use the character for teal, which is an arrow, and that's, as in maybe we'll spell it in an arrow in a moment. It's obviously become quite simple for them by the time. And they also used something called the termers, which were signs to indicate what kind of thing they were talking about, a bird, or a name, or a tree, or something like that. And there was times someone like the Japanese, they reduced the number of symbols down and made much more use of the kind of syllabic pronunciations of signs. But this then starts to get rather confusing and ambiguous, so they took to kind of multiple redundancy approach, using low-grams and phonetic signs and deterrents all at the same time. So here is how you write raven in cuneiform. So the second character, Uga, is the word for raven. But it could also be pronounced as daga, which means soap or ash, which is a city, or Nisaba, who was the patron saint of that city. And so to make sure people knew which pronunciation was the one they wanted, they put an u at the start and a gu at the end, which, kind of to tell you, it's meant to be uga. And then, for good measure, they put this term into a bird at the end, so you make all those things together, and you know that you're writing raven. And the Sumerians were supplanted by the Akkadians, who spoke an unrelated language and adopted the Sumerian language system themselves. They regularised this bit into just five distinct strokes, and they used the Sumerian pronunciation before phonetic signs, and they used also the characters to represent Akkadian words. And sometimes the same sign could be either, so that's actually quite a part of Japanese. And it seems really unwieldy, I know, but cuneiforms stuck around for 32 centuries. You know, writing systems seem to, once they get traction to last for a really long time, no matter how bad they seem to fit. And then of course, there's the Egyptians. And that's kind of the same thing. They drew pictures of things they could and used them for a certain pronunciation of things they couldn't. So you know, there's a mouth, which is pronounced something like ru, and something like ra. No one really knows, because they never wrote about it. And the little line underneath is something they used to indicate that this was actually a mouth or actually a sun. The default was for it to just be a phonetic pronunciation. And so you end up with something like this, which is how you write the name of the god called Keppri. The scarab people is the pronunciation of most of it. Then they've added around the edge three other symbols with the same pronunciation, and then the e, and then god. And you could write, say, hieroglyphics in either direction. The way to tell this one is from left to right is that the people always face the start of the line. So I mean, they've got spacing left here. So we know that these are the end of the line. So that's Egyptian, but what's more interesting, I think, is where it went next into hierotic, into demotic. And these are kind of simplified scripts using a lot of phonetic, they were predominantly phonetic. But then it was the people who now lead them in Syria, who gave us all the evidence that we have today. They took a small number of Egyptian hieroglyphs and used them to stand for individual consonants. So that was the pretty sceniotic alphabetical that evolved into Phoenician, which gave us something more linear, more abstract, but became Greek and Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew. And in fact, a whole array of languages, including the modern things used today, is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Mongolian. And I have a few different Aramaic scripts that serve South Asia or the Ghez, the Ethiopia. And those are called apiguitas, they're a bit like Alphabets, except that each character has a kind of interval vowel that's actually to it. And then you can add a diachritic to change the vowel. So the default one is, this is Devanago, it's in Hindi, it's equal to ka, then you can change it to ki, or ku, or ka, or ka, or a whole load of other vowels by adding diachritics. And this is Ghez, it's in Ethiopian, where you're going to be ka, and then you can add it to ku, or ki, or ka, or ka, or a ka. But, that's those scripts, the Parami script, which no one really knows the origin, might have come from Aramaic, so it might even go all the way back to Egyptian. But we do know that it's given rise to a whole load of other scripts. Lots of ones who used to be in India, Thai, Lao, Khmer, used in Cambodia, possibly even Korean, might have developed from an Archaic script that was developed from Tibet, but no one's really sure about that. But, you know, all of that is kind of a long-winded way of trying to communicate a simple observation, really, which is, I think that human writing has been guided by two main limitations, firstly, you can't draw everything, and secondly, you can't remember everything, and there's a reason that most of the extant writing systems are fairly simple. The hand script, the one used in Chinese and Japanese, is kind of an ally, but even that isn't tremendously complex. You know, even eight pronunciations for one's energy aren't so bad, any more than OUGH is in English, or no vowels written down is in Arabic or Hebrew. But, enough about the past. Nowadays, we have microns, and we have custom microns, and we have emoji, which is a really interesting word in itself for reasons that I won't be able to answer right now, but I'll ask you later. And that's just online. Offline, all kinds of devices have symbols representing, you know, the functions, their statuses. Here in the US, it seems like most of the kitchen appliances are marked in English, and the same kind of things change apparently in the late 90s with no Japanese. But in Europe, electrical appliances are sold in dozens of countries, with each of them as one or more for its own languages. And there's much more of a tendency to try to avoid human language in favour of a pictorial language that just works anyway. And some of these symbols share a common vocabulary. So, you know what that is? The power of symbol, right? Obviously, I see 5,000 and I stand by symbol. You see it everywhere. Andy kind of knows it means. Some of them only make sense in context. So if you see that on a weather map, you know it means the sun. On my washing machine, it means dry. And then of course, there's things that don't really make any sense at all. Anyone can ask a guess what that means? I think it's rinse and drain on my washing machine. I say my washing machine, it's not mine, it's the one that came to my apartment, and I wouldn't actually buy anything that's that horrible to use. And the really complex thing in my own back washing machine is that there's actually plenty of space to write things in English. And other things are already written in English. And it seems like this is just a really poor aesthetic choice that someone made rather than any attempt at communication. But with that in mind, I'd like to take you on a tour of some icons that I've cited in the wild. So, shout out if you know what these mean. No, we don't. We don't. That's really interesting. So, that is select all on Android. And I don't know that because I hit it once by accident. And so, mighty Google. I was talking to one of my colleagues about this talk a few weeks back. And I was telling him about some of the icons I was going to talk about. I showed him this one and he said, oh, is that what that does? And he's on Android phone, so probably no one knows. How about this one? How long is code? It was ViewSource at one time, but I think we're all sourced from it. They've changed that. I do, I'm mocking it a bit. I do understand well the motivation for this kind of thing. One time I worked on a website that was in four different languages. It was in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English. And it has Japanese designs. And they would give us all these layouts that expect every word in the navigation that's on to be two characters long. And that didn't work for English at all. We wouldn't work in German, even less, in fact. So how about this one? Hot water. I see. Hot water. So when I was a kid, I used to wonder why there was a picture. I thought it was just a sailing boat on the dashboard of my parents' car. And it's temperature-gated. It's, yeah, I don't remember what. How about this one? That's loud noise. That's really tiresome. Oh, it's like, teams you. So this is, I'm actually fitting a lot of parts into what no one knows what this is, because when I learned to drive, the first time I went out on a long journey, just after getting to my driving lessons, I was puzzled by this. I'd been driving for a while, like a few hours. And then I was puzzled by this warning light on the dashboard. And I knew something was wrong, because it was red, and it had an exclamation mark. And it was quite difficult to drive. But I thought, it's because something's wrong, right? It turns out that I had the handbrake for the fucking break days, but I did eventually realize what was wrong. But not before I kind of destroyed the brakes, had to get in a place to create expense. My parents were absolutely delighted by that. But I think it's actually meant to look like a pair of brake shoes around the edge of a brake drum or something, but it doesn't really work. How about this one? You know what this is? So you get it. It's from something from the previous era called the floppy desk. And I'm kind of interested about this one, because it's a different word for saying. And yet, you know, no one has a floppy desk anymore. There are young designers who are going to move into the workplace in a few years who have probably never even seen a floppy desk. And you know, what do they need to do with this icon? Are they going to turn this into something more abstract? Maybe we'll just give it a say altogether, because it's probably a bad idea. I don't know. Now, the world of Java applications is particularly rich in icon art. Here's the clips. Now, I've never been in a Java program. So I can't even guess what are for these icons, me. I guess that the picture of a kind of like a scarab beetle or something is a bug or debugging. I guess the green circle in the triangle then is probably a run. I don't know what the kind of red briefcase is. I don't know what those things with the pluses are. I don't know why there's balloons coming out or something like that. I like to pen there's a plethora of arrows. It seems to me that this stuff is just there because I don't want to drop pictures. So how about this one? You might have thought so. So I think copy of this story is likely to be important on a pivotal track. I did consider putting a whole load of things from a pivotal tracker up, but because I'm obliged to use it and it has so many better icons than I thought it would be. And so I guess the final one is this, the hamburgers. I mean, this doesn't really look like a hamburger to me. It was like that black one that's ironed out in Japan. Not any hamburger I've cared to, but it's kind of rectilinear too. And it's kind of nowhere in the last few years, I think. But on the other hand, well, it doesn't really mean anything. It's so widespread, but it seems to be quite understood. I think the meaning is if you click this or press this, something will happen. It's just that we give up, kind of like. I was using something on my phone last night, and it's got a two icons like this. It's got a little bit of an Instagram. I had the white hamburger menu, which is actually a menu, and it's kind of really narrowed the hamburger menu, which is another kind of menu, and it didn't really, yeah, no obvious difference. But it wasn't my point with all this. I'm not actually sure there is a single point to a job, but one of the things that I want to observe is the recent language has evolved over thousands of years into an early and abstracted way of representing complex ideas. So we have alphabets like Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, or Korean-Hungle, and jazz like Arabic and Hebrew. Ad-hubidus, like David Adler in New York, Thai, or Slavery, like Japanese, Hylianna, or Cherokee. And the most complicated, excellent browsing system is probably Chinese, but even that's made up of a smaller set of common elements. On the other hand, though, we're currently in a situation in which every website, every app, every electrical device, every vehicle has its own visual vocabulary. And asking people to learn and remember and be able to use all of this is quite a big demand. I expect that it will follow some, oh, sorry. It's back. Yeah, I expect it will follow some of the same evolutionary paths as writing has done. But whether that means simplification and kind of reduction and getting things down to shared elements, or whether it results in the kind of explosion of difference in mutually-incorporated violence that remains to be seen. Thank you. That's me. There's some credits there, which I guess you're not gonna be able to read now. But yeah, you're not going to be L.A.M. No. Okay.