Scots denied Saltire emoji The Scottish former First Minister Alex Salmond has bemoaned the absence of a Saltire emoji from the forthcoming Unicode 9.0 release. Salmond told north of the border publication The Courier: "Last year, I wrote to both Apple and the Unicode Consortium, asking them to consider including the Saltire in their next update. …
Seems a bit of a daft comparison, since Martinique is an overseas territory of France, and it'd be more accurate to compare it to the Falklands than Scotland. If there had been a separate English one but not Welsh and/or Scots then fair enough, but if all parts of the UK have to use the Union Jack then that seems pretty reasonable, otherwise you end up with hundreds of separate flags having to be included.
Can't see if they're included, but Catalonia is probably a better comparison for Scotland in terms of including flags
Catalonia is probably a better comparison for Scotland
Debatable. UK is a union of unitary nations, of which Scotland is one. Catalonia is a technically "autonomous" region of a long-unified Spain. Both have significant independence movements, but politically and legally their situations differ enough that I don't think Catalonia is any better* an example than Martinique.
* Or worse, for that matter.
I suppose we learn something new everyday, as a Scotsman this is the first I have heard of us having a "unicorn" as our national beastie....
The Ramant Lion , OK
The Haggis : Why Not
A drunken Glaswegian: Definately a wild animal
But a Unicorn : I think that someone had a little but too much Buckie the day they chose the Unicorn..
The only reason I can imagine is that it shares one common element, a large appendice :-)
as a Scotsman this is the first I have heard of us having a "unicorn" as our national beastie
Look on your passport.
Technically it's Scotland's heraldic animal, not the "national" animal, but since we don't really have one of the latter (if you discount the odd wild haggis sighting in cartoons) I think folk have settled on the unicorn. I think it's a brilliant idea.
Also Blade Runner.
"Look on your passport."
Just did a quick Wikipedia, the Unicorn on the passport is actually part of the Royal Arms and therefore represents the Queen. Scotland is represented in the second quarter of the sheld, by a "Rampant Lion".
I did see that the Unicorn changes sides when using the Scottish variant, but again this is still part of the "Royal Arms"..
Very confusing to those of us who have not studied Heraldry...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn:
"The Lion and the Unicorn are symbols of the United Kingdom. They are, properly speaking, heraldic supporters appearing in the full Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The lion stands for England and the unicorn for Scotland."
Also worth noting that the unicorn is chained. I'm no student of heraldry, but I think the statement intended there is fairly clear!
Very confusing to those of us who have not studied Heraldry...
Well, it sure beats the one that goes "Gules, a fess or and three toads." Perhaps the College of Arms ought to request the various heraldic components be incorporated into Unicode and added as emojis. There are arguably plenty of worse things included already.
Haggis is pretty common around the world. Apparently, there is even something similar in (South) Korea. It are just poor people food that has been adopted as a national icon because it's very nice.
Like several items of Scottish culture, they can be traced to France rather than the southern half of this island.
The lion and the unicorn are heraldic symbols of the United Kingdom. The lion represents England and the unicorn represents Scotland. This has existed since the Union of the Crowns in 1603. The Scots and the English have been pals for a very long time and share so much history as a United Kingdom.
haggis lasagne, mmmm
Tried some in Newton Stewart a couple of years ago. Definitely a step too far as fusion cookery goes. Don't get me wrong, I love haggis, but in lasagne? No.
But what about the haggis quiche the St Andrews Students Union used to make many moons ago? Now that was yummy!
When I was a student at St Andrews the chippie on South Street used to do deep fried Cadbury's Creme Eggs as an "Easter Special"
No, I did not try one. Even thinking about it now gives me the dry boak.
One of my work colleagues also tells of a chippie in Stonehaven that sells deep fried Tunnocks Teacakes, which might be even worse.
Yeah, and who says we must stop at the national or sub-national level? There's plenty of polities who would be tickled to have their group's fetish, whatever it may be, included in the Book of Unicode. I know I would be.
And why stop even there? Isn't ICANN already flogging off top level domains? Seems to me there's an opportunity being missed here with Unicode.. ..you're way ahead of me. Sell those glyphs. I'll take eight! :-D
N. Ireland..Cornwall, Devon IoM wouldn't surprise me if the Isle of Wight has a flag too. Whered'ya stop.
For balance see article about the St Georges Tabard at sporting events.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/07/bbc_crusader_rumpus/
A rather different view of a UK nations flag. Odd isn't it? PP
Swings and roundabouts...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-30085309
The day after the referendum Alex Salmond said that the "No" voters were tricked. That's like calling them stupid. No Alec we were not tricked, after all those years in the planning you had no plan for the Scottish currency.
Next up Nicola Sturgeon says that she will keep working for an independent Scotland. What the fuck use are these "leaders" when they first insult and then ignore majority of the voters wishes!
Err, Sturgeon is the leader of the SNP; the SNP do occasionally mention their long-term aim of Scottish independence; the SNP is comfortably the most popular single political party in Scotland. So she might reasonably (which is not the same as accurately) conclude that the Scots do not want to shut the door on revisiting the independence issue some time in the next 5 to 10 years.
Which is not to say the SNP did not have a poorly thought out strategy before the referendum and haven't messed up since by concentrating on the trappings of politics rather than the people - by their very nature political parties cannot cope with non-party political activism.
Oh, and Salmond could have simply said that he thought the separate countries should have their flags emoji'd in addition to the union flag, e.g. for use when commenting on sport, but that might not have got the same media attention.
"The day after the referendum Alex Salmond said that the "No" voters were tricked. That's like calling them stupid."
A fair proportion might well be on the spectrum of gormless morons with an inexplicable hard-on for the British establishment - but no, what Salmond said is not like calling them stupid at all.
Another few years of being "governed" by these cunting inbreeds might yet determine the veracity of what he actually said, though.
Does Unicode have enough spaces?? UTF-32?? I hope not!
UTF-32 is one of the standard Unicode encodings, and has been for some time -- despite the fact that no current Unicode character uses more than 23 bits. (So, yeah, there are well over 4286578688 unused values.)
UTF-32 is very useful if you have to manipulate Unicode characters in memory because the fact that every single-glyph character (even the bonkers stupid ones like "ALIEN SMILING CAT WITH TOP HAT AND MONOCLE"*) can be expressed in a single 32-bit integer makes indexing and offset calculations very efficient. It's a fairly lousy storage format for most languages, though, because plain old ASCII characters use only a quarter of the bits available.
* I may have made that one up, but I'm sure many will now feel a need for it.
In the spirit of being properly representative of Scotland, if we have a flag emoji we should also have:-
A "See You Jimmy" hat emoji
A pizza emoji (battered)
A Duke of Wellington emoji (with a traffic cone on his head)
A square sausage emoji (Not square, but rectangular)
I'm not quite sure how to encapsulate the essence of our sporting heroes in emoji form. How do you have a single icon for the inherent ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
I don't think it was "his" referendum per se.
And according to the Fount of all Internet Knowledge (begins with a W), the turnout of 84.6% was the highest recorded for an election or referendum in the United Kingdom since the introduction of universal suffrage.
44.7% of those (1.6 million people) voted "Yes".
Just sayin'
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