![]() Omega means “big O.” (Get it? O- mega?) Omicron means “little O.” O- micron. Although we are still near the middle of the alphabet, albeit on the downhill side, people are noticing that Greek has two “O”s. The Psi variant will sound like “sigh” psychiatrists may need to revise the DSM to reflect its symptoms.įinally, here comes omega (ω). It is, after all, the first letter in “Christ,” and zealots may interpret a Chi variant as the Second Coming. Upsilon is followed by three letters whose order nobody can keep straight: phi (φ), chi (χ), and psi (ψ)-or is it chi, psi, and phi? Fie on the Phi variant. Just as the English alphabet groups the three crazy letters-“X,” “Y,” and “Z”-at the end, Greek saves some very special characters for last. They also skipped the next letter, xi (ξ), not because it looks so exotic, sitting there between “N” and “O,” but because Xi is a Chinese surname and, one cannot help but notice, the surname of the guy who runs China. They got to mu (μ), which is right in the middle, and then left out nu (ν), because it sounds confusingly like “new” we can’t go around talking about a new Nu variant of interest. If this seems to be happening too fast, it’s partly because scientists have skipped some letters. Having reached omicron (ο), we are already more than halfway through the alphabet. Although it was unlikely that, even with global warming, a single hurricane season could yield enough storms to run through both alphabets, the pandemic threatens to deplete our store of Greek in no time. During the pandemic, scientists with the World Health Organization are relying on Greek to make the variants of the coronavirus easier to talk about and to avoid associations with the names of places where the variants were initially detected for instance, the strain with the designation B.1.617.2, which was first identified in India, is popularly known as the Delta variant. In recent years, we got as far as Hurricane Iota. What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters? During hurricane season, if meteorologists use up the approved letters of the English alphabet, they have traditionally turned to Greek for naming storms. The highly contagious Omicron variant has broken through in more ways than one: the Greek alphabet has made it into the Style section. For example to add a hat to i the command is print('i\u0302').īelow is a list of symbols and greek letters and the corresponding unicode escape to produce the character in python.An unusual side effect of the coronavirus is the regular appearance of the Greek alphabet in newspaper headlines. We can add a hat ^ (also called a circumflex) by putting the unicode escape after the letter you want to add a hat to. This is typically used to denote unit vectors. A useful one in engineering is the hat ^ symbol. There are a couple of special characters that will combine symbols. For instance, the code for β is 03B2, so to print β the command is print('\u03B2'). To print any character in the Python interpreter, use a \u to denote a unicode character and then follow with the character code. If you see utf-8, then your system supports unicode characters.
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