context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.

> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian

Ah, of course :)

I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.

I didn't know that this is a mystery?

A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.

This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.

I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.

This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.

Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?

[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon

I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.