Fact for the day: There is poo in unicode
Unicode is the way that computers represent characters in a way that means all human languages (and some alien ones like Klingon) can be represented on a computer. It is just a code mapping characters to numbers, and it replaced the earlier American ASCII code that only allowed for the latin alphabet as used in American english. It means that computers can display and letter or character from any language from Japanese to Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
So where does poo come in? Well, the Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it, so unicode has a number for it. There’s even more unicode poo in the emoji character set but the Egyptians got there 1000s of years earlier. Here is how the Ancient Egyptians wrote or carved poo:
𓄽
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs and search for excrement.
You can add any unicode character to a web page by including it in the html by putting &#x before the hexadecimal number corresponding to the unicode number of the character and following it by a semicolon so the Egyptian hieroglyph for excrement is written in html above as 𓄽
To write the heiroglyph for one of my favourites, an Egyptian Vulture, you use 𓄿 for example (it is also used to represent the letter aleph so a sound like our a when spelling out words).
𓄿
(If you don’t see the hieroglyphs it may just be that your browser can’t cope with unicode, try a different one!).
Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
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