"Tau Zero" is my nom-de-infosphere on The Well from back when it was a dial-up BBS. When I teamed up with Brenda Laurel, it became our shared domain name. It is drawn from the title of the novel Tau Zero by Poul Anderson, who blessed the borrowing in person at a San Jose Worldcon in the 1980s; and from the original Norwegian spelling of my surname – Tau is a small village in the far north of Norway.

In relativity physics, the "tau factor" is the time-dilation inverse of the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction as an observer accelerates toward the speed of light; the tau factor starts at one at rest and approaches zero at light speed.

The logo I designed plays on this visually: the triangles are the physicist's symbol for change, here tilted on the side and foreshortened from left to right, following the direction shown by the arrow below, indicating acceleration. In special relativity, as you go faster and faster you shorten in the direction of travel as seen by an external observer; the colors, shifting from red toward blue, evoke the blueshift of the external universe as you accelerate. When light speed is reached, the deltas become infinitely thin, the blueshift carries past the visible through x-rays and gammas toward infinite energy, mass becomes infinite, and time freezes.