Rhiannon had another doctor checkup this week. Beta is doing well at 132bpm, which is about all you can tell with the Doppler. I could go in to more detail about fundal height and blood pressure, but I don’t like to talk about things I don’t understand all that well. Suffice it to say that everything is progressing as well as can be expected as far as we know.
On to more important matters – yes, we are calling the baby Beta. And no, this is not going to be in the final name running, so don’t worry about trying to figure out if would be better for a boy or a girl. Many people have asked where Beta comes from, so I thought I would clear things up a little.
No, Beta does not refer to the hard to kill fish that live in college apartments, subsisting mainly on Cheerios and beer. (And that refers to the genus of the fish and is spelled Betta.)
No, Beta has no relation to Betamax, the failed tape format that eventually lost out to VHS. And yes, my parents did guess wrong on that one. This was one of the big reasons I had no desire to into the hi-def DVD format wars.
No, Beta does no reference a beta particle, which is a high-energy electron or positron. Nor does it have anything to do with the Beta-function in quantum field theory, the Beta velocity which references the speed of an object against the speed of light in special relativistic calculations, or the beta coefficient that sometimes represents the estimate of an analysis performed on variables that have been standardized to have a variance of one.
And yes, I do know what all of those mean and I used them at some point in my college career. No, I do not use them any more. Yes, I am a nerd. Thank you for asking.
Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet, but that really doesn’t have any bearing on my usage of it.
Beta also does not refer to “Beings of the Extra Terrestrial origin with is Adversary” (mean aliens) from the Japanese video game Muv-Luv, although I kind of wish it did. I bet I would get a lot better reaction with that explanation.
Beta does refer to the release life cycle of computer software.
Yeah, I little underwhelming, isn’t it? I told you before, I lean a little toward the nerdish side of the normalcy scale, and I like to live up to my reputation.
Software generally goes through beta testing where the bugs are worked out before having a final issue. Our final issue here will take us to Family version 3.0. Mom, Dad and baby = 3. Currently, we’re in version 2.1.20b. 2 for two of us at home, 1 to indicate the addition of some new features, and 20 to represent the week indicator of the pregnancy. b for Beta.
Now that I have lost roughly 97% percent of anyone who had any interest (Tyler and Brett, thanks for sticking around and actually knowing what I’m talking about), I won’t go into the debate over release candidate stages before the final gold edition.
We just hope that everything continues to go smoothly and progress according to schedule. And I’d also like to announce that Rhiannon’s new answer to the question of where Beta comes from is “You don’t want to know.”
And she’s very serious about that.
