I'm experiencing one of those little clusters of noticing. Your attention snags on one thing, then lots of similar things seem to crop up all at once.
I realised that, all my life, I'd been wondering about those hand signals people use in action movies. Holding up their fist to say Stop etc. And I finally wondered about it while in front of a computer and ready to do a little googling.
Here, for instance, is a guide from the First City Rifles, a military explorer programme for 14-18 year olds.
I can imagine this being useful on a conference call:
This, hopefully, would crop up less often:
And, then I saw this piece in the NY Times which illustrates the signs the staff at a New York restaurant use to talk to each other and references the same practise at the 'legendary Stork Club'. Photos of which you can see here. Guess what this means:
It just occured to me that these are all North American examples. I wonder why that is, the influence of baseball maybe? Did military signals preceed sporting ones?
Ah - I've just thought of a non-US version - cricket umpires. And, of course, Give Us A Clue.
There's no particular point to this except to wonder whether these vocabularies will be mined by the gesture scientists. I can imagine furiously signalling I DO NOT UNDERSTAND at a computer vision device somewhere - trying to do the signal equivalent of shouting or enunciating more clearly.
(I always wanted to make a Kinect Hack which would read Give Us A Clue signals, connect to the IMDB database and guess the movie. That'd be a proper demo of machine learning.)
Anyway.
