One constant to rule them all
Yes
Tap for spoiler
Sí
Counterpoint:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein
Or maybe that’s also backing up the claim… All a matter of perspective lol
Or they can just be boring and do “Huh, we have an array of telescopes, it’s very large.” OK, what do we call the small one?
We’ve increase the frequency for radio, lets call it High Frequency. We’ve increased it further, what do we call it? Even further. Surely it can’t get faster than this. God dammit. Fuck it, just use numbers.
Well, sometimes it is an uppercase.
sometimes it can also be an uppercase squiggly letter: 𝒞
Or in blackboard bold Not sure if LaTeX works here but I’ll try $\mathbb{C}$
The preview does not give me hope.
There should be a Lemmy feature (perhaps just a client implementation detail?) for LaTeX conversion
huge fan of blackboard bold. i can already see the ℂ in my mind. i feel like its vastly underutilized in the literature given how insanely cool all the letters look. same thing with the \mathfrak letters. they’re wheeled out of storage whenever it’s time to talk about ideals and then discarded immediately afterwards. its a shame. they deserve better.
I’d much prefer those over cursive characters. I can tell those apart when written by hand.
I write sff for fun, and I hate running into neat science named something stupid.
You have to keep a balance between reality and the fantastic in scifi, and if I have to use a real but stupid name it doesn’t really give me truth points to spend, and it still uses up my “fantasy” budget even if it’s technically true , because I have to do extra work to make whatever I’m writing attractive to read and believable. Just because something is true doesn’t make it believable. And I’d rather use my fantastic budget on something actually fanciful, not fritter it away on true but poorly named things.
Basically, scientists lose out on a tiny bit of free marketing when they name their thing something stupid.
I wish astronomers in particular would name a star with earth like planets something neat. I would like to use Trappist as a setting…but that name. Bleh.
I am a sci fi reader but maybe my scientist side showing but I like the Trappist name. The fact that real scientific names are sometimes “stupid” or weird I think makes out easier.
I mean like Southern blots had a name behind them, Edward Southern. Northern and Western blots were just named as a sort of joke about it. Naming doesn’t have to be serious and rarely is by those within the community. So many congressional bills have long obtuse names because someone chose an word or phrase for it and then made the title acronyms spell it.
The favorite letter of pirates.
r is over here feeling betrayed
I thought one of those said “Columbus” and I briefly recited in my head, “In Spring of 1492, C sailed the ocean blue.”
Wait I thought it was “in 1776 C saild the river Styx”?
I saw a video once of a guy asking students at an Indian university what they studied and what k meant to them. I can’t find it now, but there were easily a dozen answers and then the joke answer at the end was “it means she’s mad at me”
Hey physicists generally use k for that integration constant. Or whatever unused letter they feel like.
K is also used for half of thermochem, too.
It’s also the abbreviation for the Kelvin temperature scale and the atomic symbol for potassium. I’m unaware of a K programming language.
Then you’re clearly not deep enough into the world of array programming languages. See, K is a programming language that takes many design cues from J, which is in turn based on APL. It’s known primarily for that and for KDB, the database engine written in it.
The brilliance of this is it could be real or bullshit and no one can tell.
I legit use a J interpreter instead of a calculator on my phone. I wrote fizzbuzz a few times - it was hard for me in J, but I’ve done it. K is real but I can’t even write fizzbuzz in it.
You know what they say, K for kthermokhem
I had a professor that heard us lament over all the values for k. The next quiz he made the entire back page all the different equations and constants for k and kappa. Legend.
Ayyy it’s the carameldanzen man
Definitely absurd. But if you were a sci fi author trying to make a consistent world building thing, it would actually be a useful video.
… I see you Neal Stephenson, hiding behind the couch.
Ah yes, Coulombs and capacitance, two things that are totally unique and unrelated entries in this list.
They are causing confusion in same context and i think that’s alsl the point
Nobody said they’re unrelated, first of all - in fact, that arguably makes it worse. Quickly looking it up, I believe capacitance is distinct from charge, which coulombs are a unit of.
But even if they weren’t, the point would be that they use the same character, possibly causing confusion so as to which is being referred to in equation or text when using the symbol.
Letter
Vitamin
At least a couple of these are uppercase and some are lowercase, but yeah.
It’s a bit like a fun game: Ask someone in the military to hand you an “M1” and see what they come up with.
Doesn’t even have to be the military
For M2, it could also be an M.2 - presumably an SSD, but depending on context could also be the slot itself!
Celsius is also basically always accompanied by a ° when abbreviated. So much so that “℃” is a single Unicode character.
Wat
I think that’s only used in Chinese and Japanese, so that °C occupies as much space as a Chinese/Japanese character.
One of my default phone keyboards had them. Either an old bersion of Gboard, or the Samsung keyboard.
I am flabbergasted.
