He complains about ASCII values assigned to characters are essentially arbitrary, but aren't the character shapes themselves essentially arbitrary as well?

By the same logic, one could use PWM encoded sound-bites of the spelled letters as values. It still would only get slightly closer to the actual "meaning" of the characters and require a lot more storage.

I think he's probably smart enough to have thought of this aspect...!

But you are of course absolutely right. And it's not a bad idea to add PWM sounds, and would be an absolutely interesting thing to see someone do for a project.

Point is it's more about a method or a way of thinking than a "practical" proposal. It's about learning how to think. If you don't like that line of thinking, you might also critique the Long Now Clock for its pointlessness. Maybe valid.

But I've used this even as a programming puzzle; to get people to write encoders and decoders for it. It's kind of more in that spirit than anything.

First time I see fresh rebol code. The embedded html subtype was interseting. JSX came to mind for a second :p

Thank you for saying that. If you haven't seen it, you might look at Red: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html

So it is essentially 5x7 bitmap font?

Well unlike many on this site, you demonstrate a slight bit of reading comprehension.

tragically named. given the reference to ascii, looks like u.s. cii.