Three Symbols

Trust an electronics expert!  

The first symbol is described here.

Was a math major in college, but with a physical science minor which helped me ID the first symbol.  Without divulging symbol #2, my years of coding Fortran and SimScript language for card punchers easily ID'ed the clue to #2.

Apr 18, 2021 21:11:17 GMT dagger66 said:

 my years of coding Fortran and SimScript language for card punchers easily ID'ed the clue to #2.

You are a museum piece, hope you have tattooed the bar code for inventory purposes

huh, much obvious than what i thought ...did not use the clues since i identified them from second #1

Finally.

My solution of the rebus was correct from the beginning.

I just didn't look further than the most obvious.

Apr 18, 2021 17:27:11 GMT frankmcvey (Angel) said:

The first symbol is described here.

I don't think the first symbol is the problem.

Even if you didn't know it, it can easily be found. And it isn't very helpful (an understatement). A perfect TIKT clue btw.

The second symbol, however, cannot be found anywhere. So you either know it and solve this, or don't, and don't.

I should've have known this was about war.

Maybe that's why the 2nd symbol is half destroyed.

Apr 20, 2021 8:32:30 GMT johnluke said:

Maybe that's why the 2nd symbol is half destroyed.

Is an official symbol (without the hint- content).

Maybe a little harder for Brits than for almost everyone else, since most other people would name the first symbol as "ground", where as most Brits refer to it as "earth".  The second symbol is just known as "slash zero", commonly used in scientific or engineering contexts, particularly when handwritten, to distinguish between the number 0 and the letter O.  Concatenate the symbols and you get "Ground Zero".  Ground Zero is that point on the Earth's surface closest to the centre of a a large explosion, usually used in a nuclear context.  There have been more than 2000 nuclear explosions, but most people would instantly think of the first two, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing us to the third symbol which is the Atomic Dome, part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

What probably led people astray was that the third symbol partially obscured the second.  Sneaky, yes; symbolic - nah, the rebus just looked good that way! 

I don't know about other languages than English and French, but in French, we use the word "terre", which is earth, although it can mean ground too, in various phrases. But of course I knew it could be either ground or earth.

The O with a line across can also mean other things than zero, like for example diameter, so I thought this could be about the earth diameter, maybe where it was first calculated. Then I thought, maybe there's no line inside the zero, after all it's not visible in the O, so I'm looking for a symbol with two bits of line outside. There's something that looks like that in electricity.

As I said, the third symbol half destroyed the second symbol. An act of war.

I was willing to bet it was the wheel covers from my neighbor's car.