A character in the video game Street Fighter 2. Vega, who hails from Spain, was also known as the Spanish Ninja, because he blended the martial art of Ninjitsu with his acrobatic skills of a matador. The result was Vega's graceful yet deadly fighting style.

Vega is tall and thin with long blond hair, but also with brown hair at times, depending on which button you pressed when you selected him. He has a large tattoo of a dragon on his chest. Vega is an egotist, so he wears a mask to protect his face from getting scratched or bruised. He also has a set of metal claws on one arm that he uses to attack his enemy.

Vega, who does mainly assassin work, is a hired thug for M. Bison. Vega is also annoyed by the fact that the Thai kickboxer Sagat is M. Bison's right-hand man; Vega believes that Sagat is too ugly to be second in command.

In the Japanese version of Street Fighter 2, this character's name is actually Balrog. Vega was the name of the main villan, and M. Bison was the boxer who resembled Mike Tyson. When Street Fighter II was imported into the U.S., Capcom switched several of the characters names around, figuring that having a boxer named M. Bison who looked like the champ would cause legal trouble.

When Super Street Fighter 2 came out, Capcom made Vega's moves much better. I used to beat the piss out of all those people who thought they were badasses and played as Ryu or Ken,as they would predictably hurl fireball after fireball, then a dragon punch. Using those guys takes no strategy, just the ability to push buttons. Controlling Vega, who has no fireballs to hide behind, is an art form in itself.

The brightest star in the constellation Lyra. The name Vega is derived from an Arabic phrase meaning "swooping eagle" or "swooping vulture". It also forms part of the Summer Triangle with Altair and Deneb, and is one of three stars which divide the Northern Hemisphere into thirds, the other two being Capella and Arcturus. It is the fifth brightest star in the night sky.

At only twenty-five light years distance, Vega is one of the closest stars to our own solar system. Its diameter is roughly three times that of our sun, and it is 50 times more luminous. Its much greater mass means that it burns its nuclear fuel at a far higher rate than the sun, and will burn out a lot sooner, probably in less than 1 billion years time. Being a brilliant white main sequence star, it forms the basis for the scale against which the apparent magnitude of all stars in the Terran sky are compared.

14,000 years ago Vega was the Northern pole star, a position occupied today by Polaris, and, at some point in the future, it will become the pole star again. This is due to the precession of the equinoxes, a term given to describe a steady rotation in the alignment of the Earth's North-South axis due to the gravitational interplay of the sun and the moon. For this reason, and because of its brightness, it has occupied a significant place in many previous cultures. Babylonians called it 'Dilgan', which means Messenger of Light, and the Hindu Vedas refer to it as 'Abhtlit', or Victorious, because its influence helped the Devas (gods) to overthrow the Asuras (demons). The Arabic name refers to the eagle or vulture, sent by Jupiter, that swooped down to retrieve the lyre of Orpheus from the river it was cast into, after Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Maenads.

Vega is surrounded by a disk of planetary debris, in which there may reside several planets capable of bearing life, including at least one massive planet more than twice the size of Jupiter, orbiting at a distance greater than that of Pluto around our own sun. However, it is highly unlikely that any planets orbiting Vega could ever reach the point of supporting complex life, due to the star's short life cycle. It is very hot, bright and quickly-rotating, and is probably only 350 million years old. If the time scales related to the development of life on Earth are any indication, Vega will burn out long before anything more notable than algae can develop on its planets.


Vega: http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/vega.html
Vega: http://www.solstation.com/stars/vega.htm
Vega and Lyra: http://www.crystalinks.com/lyra.html
Pole Star: http://ms.essortment.com/northstarastro_rmdz.htm
Vega is not a greek letter. However the mathematicians Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, included it in their theory of option pricing that led to the emergence of the renowned Black-Scholes model and it has stuck ever since as an 'imaginary letter'. It is unclear why vega was chosen, as all the other parameters it is related to in Black-Scholes are denoted by standard greek letters. It is most likely that it 'sounded' right and its use has probably persisted due to the practice of options traders using it due to it starting with a 'v' just like the volatility which it helps to describe in the model.

To make matters worse depending on the various literature you read 'vega' is on occasion replaced with any of the following conventional greek letters; kappa, tau or lambda. (It appears that each new contributor to the theory of the option pricing had their own convention). In my notes taken from old university classes vega is written to resemble the small greek letter nu, ν, but with a further squiggle on the right-hand side of the letter, like you couldn't be bothered to lift your pen.

In Black-Scholes vega is used to measure the change in an option price in relation to a change in the perceived volatility of the market (i.e. risk). In broad terms a small value of vega implies that your model has a better estimate for the volatility of the market then for a large value of vega. This is because most models in the short term assume market volatility to be constant.

Asides from the origin in Babylonian astronomy as described by Dreamvirus above, Vega was also the name of a brand of Chevrolet car sold in the 70s, and is also used to describe a tobacco field in Cuba.

Ve"ga (vE"ga), n. (Astron.) [Ar. wAgi', properly, falling: cf. F. Wéga.]

A brilliant star of the first magnitude, the brightest of those constituting the constellation Lyra.

 

© Webster 1913


Ve"ga (?), n. [Sp.]

An open tract of ground; a plain, esp. one which is moist and fertile, as those used for tobacco fields. [Sp. Amer. & Phil. Islands]

 

© Webster 1913

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