I was never much of a fan of the puzzle games like Myst. The realistic looking world made me want to treat the game as if if were real, but the puzzles were
crazy, who would actually lock their doors, secure their valuables or operate their machinery in the fashion the puzzles implied? Nevertheless, the general
wonder what an alien technology might look like to our eyes has stuck with me. Similarly the contra-positive, what our technology might look like to alien
eyes, has also stuck with me.
By now all of us are probably familiar with the zero/one on/off symbol and we seamlessly consider zero to be off and one to be on. But when you look at the symbol from an "alien" point of view, this seems to be backwards. A circuit is on when it makes a complete loop. The universal symbol for a loop is an "O", and a simple symbol for something that is not a loop is a line segment or a "1". If I stumbled across this "puzzle" in a Myst-like game, I'd be crying foul every chance I got. And yet... here we are, hardly anyone on this planet thinks this is odd, and yet a case can be made that not only is this odd, it's completely backward.
By now all of us are probably familiar with the zero/one on/off symbol and we seamlessly consider zero to be off and one to be on. But when you look at the symbol from an "alien" point of view, this seems to be backwards. A circuit is on when it makes a complete loop. The universal symbol for a loop is an "O", and a simple symbol for something that is not a loop is a line segment or a "1". If I stumbled across this "puzzle" in a Myst-like game, I'd be crying foul every chance I got. And yet... here we are, hardly anyone on this planet thinks this is odd, and yet a case can be made that not only is this odd, it's completely backward.
