About RickBeckman.org

RickBeckman.org is the work of Rick Beck­man, for­mer Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist turned infidel.

[place­holder — a more infor­ma­tive “about” page will be forthcoming]

About Quo­ta­tions

In the course of my writ­ing, i may quote large por­tions of oth­ers’ mate­r­ial. I do this not only as an aid to my read­ers, but also to ensure that i am not mis­rep­re­sent­ing ref­er­enced mate­r­ial — the orig­i­nal quo­ta­tions are pro­vided so that the reader may judge. I believe that such usage falls within the realm of fair use, par­tic­u­larly its allowances for crit­i­cism, research, and commentary.

About the Low­er­case “i”

It may bother some of you that i write using the per­sonal pro­noun “i” in the low­er­case, rather than the “gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect” uppercase.

The rea­son i do so has to do with my own annoy­ance with the upper­case “I.” I could find no com­pelling rea­son to con­tinue ren­der­ing the pro­noun in the upper­case. It would seem that it was orig­i­nally ren­dered in such a way as to pre­vent con­fu­sion with other let­ters, i’m guess­ing the low­er­case “j.”

Today, though, there can be con­fu­sion between the upper­case “I,” the low­er­case “l,” the numeral “1,” and the sym­pol “|,” espe­cially in cer­tain fonts. This con­fu­sion was first made evi­dent to me in 2000, when i fre­quented the SEGA chat room #dreamcast2 via the Dreamcast’s chat client. There was no right-click func­tion­al­ity, and so refer­ring to other users required typ­ing their names; this included includ­ing their names in mod­er­a­tion com­mands, such as ban­ning. In an effort to sub­vert mod­er­a­tion, users resorted to what were known as “bar­code nick­names,” or names which were com­posed entirely of “I,” “l,” “1,” and “|” in ran­dom order & amounts.

So i have made the deci­sion to eschew “I” in favor of “i,” and i encour­age you to do the same.