I don't remember very much of what happened before, but at one point I was
using a device with a monochrome yellow backlit screen.
It was a bit similar to a
PDA, except that the software that was
loaded, showed a
spreadsheet-like screen, with names of various
religions
in the leftmost column, and statements in some obscure programming
language in the other columns. The program, apparently, was designed to
analyze, using
formal logic, the relationships between religions, the sets
of
beliefs of which they consisted, and their
adherents.
In my attempt to make my own entry to try out the capabilities of the
program, I found that I was unable to figure out the programming language's
equivalent of the pseudo code
atheist = has_religion(nil). So, I decided to RTFM.
Before long, I found myself entangled in a TEX typesetting
manual. The passage I was reading, described in detail the appearance of
a mathematical symbol called a Kell triplet. Roughly speaking, it looked
like a right square bracket connected with a horizontal line to a circle,
which was connected with another horizontal line with a left square
bracket. The circle was supposed to enclose three variables, which
the symbol expressed some relationship between. The book read about as
follows:
Even with today's computing power, and the prevalence of the Amiga, rendering
the symbol as [slightly bold representation, with serifs] may
be very expensive1, and is not needed except in
printed publications (like this book).
If you intend to send [the printout] to the municipality, this
version should suffice: [very thin representation, with straighter lines,
and with small, open gaps between the five parts].
In joke collections2, [a symbol very similar to the one
before] may also be used.
The different representations of the symbol was inserted straight into the
text, but since they aren't included in
Unicode yet, I have described them
in square brackets in this
writeup.
And no, I never got back to my experiment with the pseudo-PDA.
1"
Expensive" as in "
computationally
expensive", was the intention.
2That would have to be mathematician jokes.