2. Mathematics May Follow!

I have two opposing goals with this blog. 1) I want it to be accessible to the casual reader. 2) I intend for it to still be scientifically accurate, which means I must include the equations and numbers that make the science useful and clear.

Here, are some conventions I'll use to try to satisfy these inherently conflicting goals.

First, post numbers correspond to the order in which I publish related posts on the same topic. This is also the order they should be read if you’re interested in reading the whole blog. Or not, but you may find yourself looking back at links to previous posts as I use the results from them.

Capital Letters will be used to emphasize some of the main objects discussed in this blog, including Toast, Ledges, Tables, Floors, Butter, and, of course, the Buttered Side Down Condition. Think of these as proper nouns, the names of our friends in this journey, which are capitalized like any other proper noun, like Mrs. Bush, Scranton, PA, or Chuck Norris.

Allegedly, equations and math generally scare away readers who aren't used to dealing with them. To amend this, I intend to insert detailed discussion of the math and science points as necessary, as might be found in a popular book about physics where equations might be omitted entirely. However, I will include such discussion in parenthesis (and colored blue, like this) so this extra information can be skipped by anyone who already understands what's going on and doesn't want to deal with the extraneous recap of familiar science or math. I’ll use other colors as I see fit, such as red to draw attention to certain sections.

That said, I've also found that getting mathematical equations into Blogger isn't all that easy.

Luckily, I found 2below0's list of code for HTML4 Greek symbols, and a link to more general HTML4 character escape sequences. So I can finally express the irrational number 3.14159... (represented as π) as it's symbol, and I don't have to spell out "pi". Hopefully all my readers will have HTML4 compatible browsers or otherwise be able to interpret the escape sequences.

Despite offending many people's delicate sensibilities, I'm going to stick with whatever font this is by default, because it makes the letters I and l distinguishable (versus the subtle I and l in Arial, for instance).

For expressions involving complicated numerator and denominators, I'm going to leave everything in parenthesis and separate the two with a widely spaced "/" symbol, so x/y will become

(x) / (y)

and more complicated ratios will be understandable as well.

Similar parenthesis-based notation will be used with square roots, so hopefully it will be obvious that

√(x)

is the square root of x.

I'll probably append this post with more conventions as they are created.