Cruisin' along I-5 once again with the tunes engaged. Little town of Weed, right in the volcanic flow path should Shasta decide to go nuts. Then comes one of those blue programmable text roadsigns. And I swear it's in some alien font. It would be easy to excuse this as a routine software glitch, but the pattern is too regular and cursive. My mind struggles to grasp what is happening to this unfortunate machine. The machine renders simple ASCII characters to a large area light bulb array. If this were a sane designer, the chcracter generator would be in ROM since the font is fixed by the limited pixel height. If it were in ROM however, I would not see this bizzare font unless a few hundred gamma particles went astray in this vicinity.

No, even though it's the sane thing to do, the character generator is not in ROM or PGAs. And none of these symbols are in any known wingding or unicode libraries. That means it's in RAM. Dumb. And the incredibly complex control software ( <= 1000 lines of code) is leaking buffer space into the character generator area. What's more, given once again that the patterns are regular and cursive, the actual font data is being stored as vectors instead of bitmaps. Amazing what you can figure out from a little software bug.

I'll try and ignore the other possibility - that indeed it was rendered for or by aliens.