The Origins of the Octothorpe

10 June 2016 5 mins

The ideas for my writing come from the strangest of places. This one began when I was searching for the syntactically correct way to comment out a block of code in Python. I came across this Stack Overflow link, which mentioned everything I expected it would, until I came across the following witty discussion on the # symbol. 

Actually, that symbol is called an octothorp (referring to #). Please stop using local slang terms — few Americans call it a hash, and few non-Americans call it a pound, but nobody ever refers to anything else when they say octothorp. Except the person who chooses to defy this definitive answer by using it to mean something else. — @ArtOfWarfare

That escalated quickly. The debate had shifted from programming syntactic sugar to etymology. Stack Overflow can indeed be quite entertaining when you’ve been staring at code all day. What really got me interested in this topic, however, was this guy’s reply.

@ArtOfWarfare is correct, ‘#’ is an octothorpe. And ‘*’ is a hexathorpe, ‘+’ is a quadrathorpe, and ‘-’ is a duothorpe. Philosophical question: what is a thorpe? — @Pierre

Which led me to question, where does the symbol really come from? And what in the world is a thorpe?

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Hello World

9 June 2016 1 min

I’ve been meaning to get back into writing (I say that as if I used to write consistently, except I never did). So I guess it’s more accurate to say that I intend to get into the habit of writing. 

I’d like to think that I’m in the most exciting phase of my life thus far. Here are a few reasons why. 

  1. I am currently in the epicenter of innovation, living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. A place where you see advertisements for startups while walking along the street. A place where the person walking next to you could be the founder of the next Google or Facebook.

  2. I’m fortunate enough to be a Fellow with True Ventures as part of the True Entrepreneurship Corps fellowship. Every Thursday, we’re treated to talks by innovators at the forefront of the tech industry. 

  3. I’m interning as a data scientist at a cutting edge health startup where I get to work with real data and solve real problems. I’m learning so much everyday by interacting with entrepreneurs and gaining valuable insight into how a startup functions. 

Over the summer, I hope to write about all of these things, along with random musings about the things I see and read, or the places I visit. I also hope to work on a couple of data analytics projects, the progress of which I will be tracking in blog posts over the course of the summer.