the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3577

Perhaps, but it has to be learned as if it were a separate language (which it actually is). The misconception I keep seeing is that people believe that all these little diagrams are good because they have some sort of intrinsic meaning and can therefore be understood by anyone with no instruction.

Exactly. That's why one of my favourite examples is the lawn mower whose throttle is marked with a tortoise at the slow end and a hare at the fast end. To someone from a culture that doesn't have the fable of the tortoise and the hare, those markings are meaningless. And even for people who know the story, I could probably confuse them thoroughly by pointing out that in the end the tortoise finished first.

Again, it's a cherished misconception that messages of arbitrary complexity can be conveyed if you just find the proper set of symbols.

Exactly. It's all just an arbitrary set of actions that has to be learned. And even with textual commands, wasn't there some study where it was shown that it didn't matter whether the command was "intuitive" or not? Either way, the right string of characters had to be learned.

People's fondest wishes notwithstanding, hieroglyphs are no subsbreastute for learning.

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