Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Origin of... Dollar Sign

When the U.S. government begin issuing its own money in 1794, it used the common world currency - the peso - also called the Spanish dollar.

The first American silver dollars were identical to Spanish pesos in weight and value, so they took the same written abbreviations: Ps.

That evolved into a P with an s written right on top of it, and when people began to omit the circular part of the p, the sign simply became an S with a vertical line through it.

The Origin of... Ampersand

This symbol is stylized et, Latin for "and".

Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later.

In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &.

But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with "and, per se, and" meaning "&, which means ‘and’".

This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.

The Origin of... Equal Sign

Invented by English mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: "I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gmowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus : , bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle."

His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

The Origin of... Exclamation Point

Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters.

The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning "exclamation of joy."

Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

The Origin of... Question Mark

When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio - meaning "question" - at the end of a sentence to indicate a query.

To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem - readers might mistake it for the ending of a word.

So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

十句话


第一句
如果我们之间
有1000步的距离
你只要跨出第1步
我就会朝你的方向
走其余的999步


第二句
通常愿意留下来跟你争吵的人
才是真正爱你的人


第三句
付出真心 
才会得到真心
却也可能伤得彻底
保持距离 
就能保护自己
却也注定永远寂寞


第四句
有时候 
不是对方不在乎你
而是你把对方看得太重


第五句
朋友
就是把你看透了 
还能喜欢你的人


第六句
就算是believe 
中间也藏了一个lie


第七句
真正的好朋友
并不是在一起
就有聊不完的话题
而是在一起 
就算不说话也不会感到尴尬


第八句
没有一百分的另一半
只有五十分的两个人


第九句
为你的难过而快乐的 
是敌人
为你的快乐而快乐的 
是朋友
为你的难过而难过的
就是那些 
该放进心里的人


第十句
冷漠 
有时候并不是无情
只是一种
避免被伤害的工具



这十句话很有深度,很有意思。认真去思考,你会得到意想不到的收获。