086 = Emoji Editions and Birthday Billions

A Problem Squared

🙏 Is this emoji praying hands or a high five?

🍚 What's the best present for celebrating a billion seconds?

💼 For the first time we have Any Other Business WITH SPECIAL GUESTS!

If you want a collectable (and mistake-ridden) copy of ‘Love Triangle’, with a special, limited edition book cover designed by print-artist Paul Catherall. You'll get one free while stocks last. Head over to MathsGear! https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/love-triangle-by-matt-parker-signed

Here’s some background on the ‘Folded Hands’ emoji mentioned in Bec’s problem: https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-folded-hands/

This is the pixelated 2001 Softbank version of the Folded Hands emoji: https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2001/folded-hands

Here’s the KDDI emoji from 2003, where someone is literally praying: https://emojipedia.org/au-kddi/type-d-1/folded-hands

You can find the ‘glowing’ folded hands emoji put out by Apple in 2008 here: https://emojipedia.org/apple/iphone-os-2.2/folded-hands

You can find some more variations of the folded hand emoji (including with faces) here: https://b1681952.smushcdn.com/1681952/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Early-Versions-Folded-Hands-Emojipedia-1.jpg?lossy=0&strip=1&webp=1

There were some fascinating early issues with Unicode (which made emojis universal), where ‘yellow hearts’ sent by iOS users would show up as ‘hairy hearts’ on Android phones. You can read about that here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140502051433/http://www.tuaw.com/2014/04/30/you-may-be-accidentally-sending-friends-a-hairy-heart-emoji/

You can find the Unicode emoji design guidelines here: https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Design_Guidelines

And if you want to find out whether you’ve already passed your 1 Billionth Second, you can do that here: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10%5E9+seconds+in+years+and+days

If you want to find out whether you’ve already passed your 1 Billionth Second, you can do that here: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10%5E9+seconds+in+years+and+days

As always, send your problems and solutions to our website: www.aproblemsquared.com. And, if you want more from A Problem Squared, you can also find us on Twitter, Instagram, Discord and on Patreon.