Some years ago, before the .com bubble, a Japanese company
put on the market a wrist computer called the Ruputer. What
with extremely-severe restrictions on display area, it made
considerable use of kanji to serve essentially as icons.
They took up very little space. (Anyone for "amount of
meaning per square millimeter"?)

Life-long, I have been casually and occasionally opening the
compartments between concepts in my mind, and this time, it
occurred to me that there is more in common with computer
icons and kanji (CJK, of course, really) than I had realized.

Icons seem to be culturally related to a considerable degree,
while CJK are more abstract. A good icon is self-explanatory
to most people. Sometimes, though, a badly-designed icon can
be almost as obscure as a CJK character to those who don't
know it.

--
Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
Opera browser fan/user
Millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch
one ship.
(Btw, what's a computer iconoclast?)