Easter, Relatively Speaking

Arrgh! A wasted day!

First, I slept late and therefore got a late start to my day. Then, because today is Easter Sunday, I decided I would write about Easter. You probably know that Christians didn’t invent Easter. The holiday was invented by Anglo-Saxons long before Christianity was a thing. They had a spring celebration most likely named after their goddess Ēostre, goddess of fertility. The festivity celebrated the rebirth of life with the coming of spring. Rabbits and eggs were symbols of fertility. The date of Easter is still calculated based on the position of the Moon. Then early Christians came along and said, “Here’s a nice holiday, let’s make it ours.” And so they did.

But I’m wandering. I decided a proper article about Easter would be too long for a blog post. So I thought, “What else can I write about?” It happened that I also watched an interesting video on YouTube called “Why E=mc² Is Wrong.” It was created by someone at Fermilab.

As long as I’m this far off topic, I might as well go a little further. (Mental note: If farther means more far, why doesn’t further mean more fur?)

So E=mc² got me thinking about Relativity and how I could make some non-technical observations about it, but then I got bogged down in a search for an Alt Code for a particular letter. I needed to type the symbol for the Lorentz transformation, but now that I think about it, I probably would have lost some readers at that point. But anyway, I thought I needed an Alt Code for the Greek letter gamma ( Γ ), but after much wasted time I realized I needed the Alt Code for a Latin gamma, preferably upper case ( Ɣ ). I won’t say how much time I wasted trying to find the Alt Code I needed, but I can be stubborn that way. I even found an error on an Alt Code website and sent an email alerting them to it. I now know way more about alphabets than I knew this morning—or ever wanted to know. I never found the Alt Code I needed. So how did I type this Latin gamma Ɣ without an Alt Code? I didn’t. And yet I have used it twice in this blog post, because while I can be stubborn, I can also be clever. I mean, I have my moments. Unfortunately, my moments don’t make any money for me, they’re just stupid moments like how to type a Latin gamma.

If you have ever studied written Spanish, you know a sentence that asks a question not only ends with a question mark, it begins with an inverted question mark. The same rule applies to an exclamation mark. Furthermore, you can type those symbols because they have Alt Codes.

Are you a student?
¿Eres un estudiante?

I am a student!
¡Soy un estudiante!

In a table of Alt Codes, you can find every stupid symbol you can think of: smiley faces, negative smiley faces, diamonds-hearts-spades-clubs, and so on, but not the Latin gamma. I guess I won’t be able to write a blog post about Relativity. And if you can’t type a Latin gamma, then what good are computers anyway? I mean, except for watching porn. There’s always that. They probably watch it even at Fermilab—when no one is looking. “Man, look at those electrons and positrons gettin’ it on! You dirty little particle!”

Wow, this blog post has gone all to hell.