I'm italian, so some of the things made sense from the start (Panoramix, Asterix and many of the one-off characters which I can't recall) but some have always been obscure :)
Coming from Russian books I was extremely confused by the varied asterisks used for footnotes in English/American literature. Why would you go to all the trouble with 15 different types of asterisks when you can just use numbers?
Number and symbols serve a slightly different use. The general rule in English is that footnotes (ie they reference something at the foot of the same page) use symbols and that you only have to use different symbols for different footnotes if you have multiple footnotes on the same page. Numbers are used for references found at the end of the book/chapter/article and have to be unique for the whole book/chapter/articel.
Realistically I've never seen most of those symbols in any book I've ever read. If you're regularly using more than 2 footnotes a page, you're probably better of numbering them and moving the references to the end of the chapter or book.
In German academic texts, numbered footnotes are very common. I think it's similar in other continental European traditions. In English texts, I've usually seen more chapter end notes than footnotes.
Also, some citation styles make heavy use of footnotes.
The three things I thought worth noting from this:
(1) The paragraph marker ¶ is called a pilcrow or alinea.
(2) The names sin and cos were invented by William Oughtred, whose 1631 book Clavis Mathematicae, The Key to Mathematics was the first use in print of the saltire (, a rotated +) for multiplication.
(3) Traditionally serif faces included a six-pointed asterisk, while sans serif asterisks had five, but in practice this is no longer an observed convention.
I know that * is the wildcard in many expressions, such as some query languages and (as you say) file name globs. However, I don't actually think a wildcard glob is a regular expression. Wikipedia, always a risky source :-), makes that point, with a reference to further reading.
The article is about the asterisk character, and the connection to the wild-card seems legit. But the sentence "I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally" (which I agree fully with!) hints towards the idea that the * is used as a wildcard in regular expressions, which I think isn't quite true.
A glob isn't a regular expression, and indeed one of the reasons it isn't is that it lacks the Kleene star - which is the thing an asterisk does in the typical regular expression syntax.