Nov 29 2021 - Alphabet Soup

 

Of course, alphabet has to be of greek origin -  alpha beta.  It is the first two letters of the alphabet.   "letters of a language arranged in customary order," 1570s, from Late Latin alphabetum (Tertullian), from Greek alphabetos, from alpha + beta. Attested from early 15c. in a sense "learning or lore acquired through reading." Words for it in Old English included stæfræw, literally "row of letters," stæfrof "array of letters."  This is a long evolution to get to an alphabet.  We think of the Egyptians and their hieroglyphics - there were around 800 characters growing to as many as 5,000 characters, and then simplifying things with the "publishing" of Hieroglyphic Bookhand.  It remains one of the most complicated "alphabets" in history.   Early vowelless alphabets are called abjads and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.  They are not considered proper alphabets.  Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages since it recorded words phonemically.   I am so impressed with scholars who were able to figure these out, and for archeologists who found that Egyptians wrote left to right and also in all directions.  The Phoenician alphabet spread to the Italian peninsula, and gave rise to a variety of alphabets  - of course one of these became the Latin alphabet. It was spread far and wide across the Roman Empire, explaining its enduring continuation, especially since it occurred in intellectual and religious works.  No one was giving these up. To get to the English alphabet takes a few giant steps - Old English, Middle English, and finally Modern English, starting in the mid 15th century.  The first English dictionary was titled Table Alphabeticall. Here's a humorous story:  It was a wise though a lazy cleric whom Luther mentions in his "Table Talk," — the monk who, instead of reciting his breviary, used to run over the alphabet and then say, "O my God, take this alphabet, and put it together how you will." [William S. Walsh, "Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities," 1892] Here's some advice: If "Plan A" didn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.   Here's the injection of mathematics into things: I was good at math until they mixed the alphabet into it. Today we have more pictures from the Fantasy of Trees display.

Nov 28 2021 - Getting to Know You

 

There were no classes in Greek when I went to school - not during school hours.  There was a boy in high school who took Greek after class - I don't recall what kind of offering this was.  He was a mot intellectual type and very pleased with such a distinctive undertaking.  That's why we all got a jolt of Greek letter education this week to find out the Omicron is a Greek letter. It follow Nu and Xi.  Xi is the first name of the Chinese president, so this would be weird - retrieving COVID and the Chinese President on a Google search.  And why not "nu"? - it is too easily confounded with "new".  Can you imagine the automatic spellcheck fixing that all the time?   But WHO says it is because the agency's best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding "causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups."   So I guess Delta airlines is not anything to worry about. We missed out on iota, as in not one iota - this expression comes from the Bible (Matthew 5:18): "For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished."   I see a this as a great Holiday gift and ornament on the tree this year - it could have circled variants "of concern".  It will be joined by the "Dog Pooping 2020" ornament made by a B.C. woman who can't keep up with demand.  I can't see putting that on the next tree anywhere near the cookies and cakes and donuts below.  This is one of the holiday trees in the Fantasy of Trees this year.

What is Alphabet?

Have you wondered about Google the company?  I use its search engine every day. So I went to the Alphabet site - it's the company that 'owns' Google.  Its domain name is www.abc.xyz. (They couldn't get the domain name of alphabet.com as it was taken by a BMW fleet management division). These founders are known to be creative and crazy.  Alphabet came about after Google, through a complicated restructure so that Google could be a subsidiary of Alphabet.  And Alphabet could get on with experimentation in all kinds of areas.  Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted Alphabet to be able to engage in a diverse range of activities.  Pictures of the pair show them as relaxed people with open smiles that have a little mischief showing, and often doing silly things for the photographer. We know about the Google car, so here are a few more: "What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related." Such an interesting pair to profile - CNET's article on them is HERE Do you know that both Page and Brin are "burners" - avid attendees of the "free-wheeling" art festival Burning Man?  I've covered this festival in the past. The theme for Burning Man 2018 is  "I, Robot".  Here is the introduction on the Burning Man website: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. — Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Along with developments in robots, there are a lot of events expected in 2018.  You can find theme HERE.  Many of these are outer-space related - for example the expectation of the first picture of a black hole and the launch of the transiting Exoplanet survey satellite. My pictures today apply the Flaming Pear India Ink filter first, and then Flexifly to get images that remind me of Escher's abstract drawings.