Archive for Symbols
In two of the Hugo Award-nominated works of fiction, equations appear in the text. In one of them, a power of a variable is represented with ^, a caret. In the other, multiplication is represented with *, an asterisk. Both of those notations are very common in plain-ASCII-text email. But it seems unlikely to me […]
I’ve been transcribing my grandmother’s diary from 1926, and found that there are a few lines written in shorthand, which she was studying at the time. I don’t read shorthand, and wasn’t sure what kind of shorthand it was. But many years after writing the diary, she provided a sort of Rosetta Stone in a […]
Interesting Wikipedia articles on astronomical symbols and astrological symbols. I’ve been seeing some of these symbols all my life, but had no idea what most of them derived from. For example, I didn’t know that the symbol for Mercury (☿) represents Mercury’s caduceus. I’m especially intrigued to learn that the symbol for Jupiter (♃) derives […]