Wednesday, February 1, 2012

20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 7 - Why the blog's name?


The seventh day of the 20 days of WoW blogging challenge wants to know, "How did your blog get it's name?" Well, a long time ago, Sarah wanted a pet name. After much thought, I gave her the name of my favorite number, φ. φ, pronounced 'phi', is also called the golden ratio, the ratio of width to length that allegedly produces the most appealing rectangle. It's a Greek letter that produces the 'f' sound. Mathematically,


Some of the unique properties of φ is that

and

φ is a lovely number that shows up in many places, such as pentagons and the Fibonacci sequence, and it frequently appears in the natural world, too. For these reasons and more φ is my favorite number, so I made it my pet name for her. 

Later, she wanted a pet name for me. She asked me if there were any other good Greek letters to use for my name. After some thought, I came up with τ, pronounced 'tau'. τ is another letter that is used for the golden ratio, although less frequently. 

The first characters we leveled together, the paladin and the shaman, were named 'Phi' and 'Tau', respectively. When we transferred servers, those names weren't available so we changed then, and 'Tau' became 'Tauf'. My guildies started to call me 'Taufmonster' and so the name became my twitter handle and, eventually, the first part of the name of this blog. 

The other part, 'log', came from "captain's log." I chose this because it identified the blog with myself, and I felt it scanned well. So that's how my blog got it's name. The subtitle, "More than you care to know.", comes from the obvious fact that I will often blog about stuff that seemingly nobody would ever possibly care about.

The images for this post were created by using the Online LaTeX Equation Editor, a fantastic tool for making images of equations.