The Villanova [University] Center for Information Law and Policy provides some links to state government web sites for Alaska. There's a page for Alaska from USACityLink.com, and here's a (self-described) Alaska Internet Travel Guide.
Here's a 405×480 map gif mirrored from <http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/a/alaska.gif>.
In Fairbanks, it doesn't get dark on the Fourth of July, so they don't bother with fireworks. They do set off fireworks for New Year's. (Yes, the latitude of Fairbanks is 64° 49', so it's a couple of degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Hence, around midnight the light levels resemble those a few minutes after sunset at the equator. For more of this, see the twilight entry. Barrow is at 71° 18'.) For other US coordinates, see this page.
Visit here for twenty-year-old apparitions, stigmata, crying-statue stuff.
Visit here for more on the dog breed.
There wasn't much on Akitas at Dmitri Gusev's O.J. Simpson Trial Center (OJ mentioned Nicole's dog in his statement to the LAPD) and just a decade later I notice that that site is down. Oh -- it was the trial of the twentieth century. For all you unrecovered OJ junkies, this metapage is probably as good a place to continue as any. Of its 17 OJ Trial links, one is still up and has relevant information. Then again, maybe it's time to move on to other injustices. See CJ.
AKP is a moderate Islamist party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It explicitly and firmly denies that it is Islamist, as it more-or-less must anyway since Turkish law that forbids the exploitation of religion for political ends. It describes itself as socially conservative. Be that as it may, some indeterminable part of its electoral strength is generally supposed to be due to the widespread belief that it is a moderate Islamist party.
There have been less moderate Islamist parties, and they have been popular, and they have been overthrown. The DP (Demokrat Parti) was the first not-so-secular party to contest a free election against the successors of Kemal Atatürk (see CHP). It won power in 1950 and lost it in a 1960 pro-CHP coup (which eventually saw the hanging of DP leader and PM Adnan Menderes and some of his ministers). The cycle was repeated a couple of times before the AKP was founded in 2001. The AKP won 44% of the vote in the 2002 elections, giving it an overwhelming majority in parliament.
The cover story of the June 2004 issue of T+D was about AL, with illustrations of a Superman character with ``AL'' in place of ``S.'' Since AL is my middle name (as in Alfred ``Al'' Cronym), naturally I was interested. Like any good business story, this article gets right to the point: it explains immediately why you the reader are interested in action learning, models exciting words about what it can do for your bottom line, produces anonymous testimonials of praise, and gives other essential information. Along about the third page, not really as an afterthought but more to dot all the tees and cross all the q's, there's a section entitled ``What is action learning?'' I quote the beginning:
Since Reg Revans first introduced action learning in the coal mines of Wales & England in the 1940s, there have been multiple variations of the concept, but all forms of action learning share the elements of real people resolving and taking real action on real problems in real time and learning while doing so.
Now let's get real here, people. Do we really need so many supporting columns? We could get a real high yield out of this seam if we knocked some of them down. Alright then, let's take some action! Right now, in real time! Good, I think we've really lear-- Oh-no-look-OUT! Gee, it's a real shame those were real miners.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
German, `Egypt and the Levant : Journal for the Archaeology of Egypt and Neighboring Regions.' Edited by the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Cairo Section, and by the Austrian Academy of Sciences; a publication of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.
Articles in German or English (roughly in equal numbers).
Rec.Travel offers some links. I offer the following advice: visit someplace else for now.
The Grateful Dead song ``Alabama Getaway'' begins
Thirty-two teeth in a jawbone; Alabama trying for none.
Before I have to hit him, I hope he's got the sense to run.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Alabama. USACityLink.com has a page for Alabama.
A Canadian carpetbagger named Neil Young dissed the state in his songs ``Southern Man'' and ``Alabama.'' Lynyrd Skynyrd gallantly rose to her defense in a palinode called ``Sweet Home Alabama'' (their first big hit). Alabama is not host to a Harvard of the South, but that entry is relevant nevertheless.
In the song titled ``Alabama,'' Young sang ``You've got the rest of the union -- to help you along!'' According to Robert Hunter and the late Jerry Garcia, ``Forty-nine sister states all had Alabama in their eyes.''
DB Alphonso Roundtree, receiver Alphonso Browning, and Alan Wetmore are all former-Al Als (and former Als Als). Any time after Wetmore receives the Gatorade treatment, journalists can deploy the ``former-Al Al Wetmore All Wet No More'' headline. Use two-inch type.
Aluminum is the only chemical whose symbol is also the correct spelling of a common English name. In fact, the only one whose symbol is the correct spelling of my name.
The Aluminum Association is online.
According to the IMDb bio of the late Tony Randall, the actor ``[s]tudied voice for 32 years but did not act on it, quipping `I have a nice healthy tone, but it's not terribly musical. If beautiful voices are golden, mine is aluminum.' ''
In 1991, Fleur Adcock published a volume with the title TIME-ZONES, subtitled Causes. It had a poem called ``Aluminum,'' and since it's only 24 lines long I can hardly excerpt a small, ``fair-use'' portion of it. Oh well, here goes: it ends ``warning you of dementia to come.'' It's about aluminum-containing water-sterilization tablets and the unenlightened Water Board and how aluminum is going to get you one way or another. Unlike some better poems, it doesn't contain a detailed quantitative analysis, though it is informed by real research. Research had suggested that aluminum was a or the main cause of Alzheimer's disease. The most readily understood reason is that both terms begin with the letter A followed by the letter L, though this angle was not pursued by medical researchers. The most direct evidence for a connection was the reported discovery of aluminosilicates in neuritic plaque cores. (Core-containing neuritic plaques are extracellular bits of crud found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The plaques range up to 200 microns in diameter and typically consist of an amyloid core, whatever that is, surrounded by abnormal neurites, whatever they are. So now you know.) Anyway, since at least 1976, various researchers had reported aluminum and silicon in the cores. But poetry is a fast-moving field, and you have to keep up with the literature. The original research was based on techniques that we wouldn't call very sensitive today -- able to detect aluminum at 100 to 1000 ppm. At least as early as 1986, however, much more sensitive techniques (1 ppm) failed to detect any aluminum.
It is not known why, in composing his poem, Adcock ignored the contrary findings that had already been published, particularly the laser microprobe mass analysis of A.J. Stern, D.P. Perl, D. Munoz-Garcia, P.F. Good, C. Abraham, and D.J. Selkoe, Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, vol. 45, #3, p. 361 (May 1986). If he could have had the luxury of doing so, I'm sure the poet would have waited for more definitive findings, but you know how it is in poetry: ``publish and perish.'' In fact, just one year after Fleur Adcock's poem was published, the problem was convincingly resolved by J.P. Landsberg, B. McDonald, and F. Watt, of Oxford University [``Absence of aluminum in neuritic plaque cores in Alzheimer's disease,'' in Nature vol. 360, #6399, pp. 65-68 (Nov. 5, 1992)]. Using multiple simultaneous nuclear-microscopic analytic probes (PIXE, RBS, and STIM), they studied stained and unstained samples (about 100 of each) of temporal-cortex and hippocampus tissue taken from seven AD cases and two controls.
The stained samples contained a little bit of aluminum (in 30% of all background scans, and in 8% of the plaque cores -- the latter in the AD samples only, of course). The unstained samples had no aluminum in any plaque cores. Hmmm. They studied the staining reagents, which are needed in the kinds of studies that had originally found aluminum in the plaque cores, and discovered that the reagents contained aluminum and silicon, apparently from airborne-dust contamination. (There was also some aluminum in the pioloform film supporting the tissue samples, and this apparently led to the detection of aluminum in 5-10% of the background scans.)
To be fair, the balance of research indicates that aluminum probably does play some role in AD, but so, to a similar extent, do iron, zinc, and copper. All create an oxidative environment and all are dysregulated or found in elevated quantities in some AD brain tissue. So don't bother to throw away your aluminum pots and pans, unless you're planning the same for the rest of your pots and pans. In conclusion, if this little object lesson convinces even one poet not to write an under-researched didactic poem, the entry will have been worthwhile. Of course, if you are not a poet, then the entry has been a complete waste of your time.
According to the Princeton Campus Plan distributed in January 2008, over the subsequent decade the Princeton University campus will come to be organized into ``neighborhoods.'' Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP and the university asministration have tried to make these neighborhoods somehow coherent or logical. Thus, there are a ``Core Campus,'' a ``Natural Sciences Neighborhood,'' an ``Ivy Lane and Western Way Neighborhood'' with various athletic fields, etc. (Looking over the map, I'm surprised to realize that along with the emotional scars and the bald pate, the place also left me with some fondish memories.)
There is also to be something called the ``Arts and Transit Neighborhood'' in the area currently dominated by McCarter Theatre and the NJ Transit Dinky terminus. (The Dinky is a small train that runs on a spur connecting the university with Princeton Junction -- on the line connecting New York and Trenton.) This paragraph is just a preview. I'll put in an entry for ``A & T'' as soon as I see that in use. Maybe sooner.
A saying among reference librarians is that ``patrons know what they want, but they don't know what they need.'' If adopted too rigidly, this could lead to interesting situations.
Met Jan. 9-15, 1998 in New Orleans, La., and June 25 - July 2 in Washington, DC.
The ALA publishes an ALA Bulletin and an ALA Washington News. Cf. CLA.
But you know, if you cock your head right, Alana looks like Latin (I mean very, very early Italian, not, like, South American). Then the genitive singular form would be Alanis. There's another well-known female Canadian rock singer with the initials A.M. and the first name Alanis: Alanis Morissette. When she was getting started, Morissette used the single name Alanis to avoid people confusing her with Myles. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Other female rocker singers with initials A.M. are listed at this site. Gee, I hope they keep this important information resource up-to-date and complete.
I wouldn't have bothered to spin out this tenuous connection except that The Brunching Shuttlecocks, a very valuable information resource, serves a Alanis Morissette morose lyric generator.
In 1988 and 1992 he suffered lopsided losses against popular Democrat incumbents in runs for US Senate (to represent Maryland). I'm not going to claim that Keyes is more in sync with Maryland's electorate than Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), but a certain senator can apparently lower the average IQ of any room she wanders into. One would think that the absence of any necessary correlation between intelligence and political success is obvious to all, but apparently it is not so obvious to the successful politicians. During his one term as president, George Bush was in the habit of asking rhetorically ``if you're so smart, how come I'm president?'' as if some contradiction were implicit.
In a February 2000 Nightline, Ted Koppel interviewed campaign directors of some retired politicians. They included Michael Deaver, who directed Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan was being dogged by the press for his claim that trees were a major source of air pollution, and his campaign was trying to get some other issue (any other issue) into public consciousness. They repeatedly coached and importuned their candidate to give his foreign policy speech and then walk past the rope line holding back the press without answering any questions. Sure enough, after the speech Reagan walked up to the press horde and answered the inevitable polluting-tree question, obliterating the TV-newsworthiness of his speech. Afterwards, Deaver was despondent and reminded Reagan of all they had gone over about avoiding the press trap, and Reagan asked ``if you're so smart, how come you're not running for president?'' Deaver found this disarming. (In his hagiography of Reagan, Deaver returns to the sulfur-dioxide-emitting-tree episode and tries to spin it as positively as he can, claiming Reagan always knew better but just got maneuvered into misstatement in a debate.)
There was from time to time a movement within his campaigns to ``let Reagan be Reagan.'' After Reagan looked frighteningly senile in his first debate with Mondale (campaign of 1984), Nancy became assertive in this insistence and was given enormous credit for turning the campaign around. (The key incident was showing the patience to allow Reagan to remember an old movie gag about youth and experience that he used in the second debate with Mondale.)
I still have stuff to say about the putative subject of this entry. After the 1992 loss to Mikulski, Keyes started up a conservative talk show, ``America's Wake-Up Call: The Alan Keyes Show,'' syndicated nationally. In news shorthand he is usually described as a former US ambassador, but that is incorrect. Ambassadorships are plums the president grants to campaign supporters. Keyes was in the civil service and held lower-visibility responsible positions -- consular official in Bombay (1979-1980), desk officer Zimbabwe (1980-1), US representative to the miserable UNESCO and various stateside positions.
Okay, technically, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) allows a director to use a pseudonym only if the producers made changes contrary to the director's artistic intent. In practice, though, this might not be that difficult to arrange. The real problem is that directing a movie is not exactly a reclusive activity, so the pseudonym offers little protection at best, and raises suspicion of motives at worst.
In 1997, a rather poor movie called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn took as premise that a director whose name is already Alan Smithee has no escape. Quite ironically, Arthur Hiller, who directed AASF:BHB, disagreed with writer/producer Joe Eszterhas and received DGA approval to remove his name from the credits, so in principle this was an Alan Smithee Film: "An Alan Smithee Film: `Burn Hollywood Burn'." (To get an idea of how this film was assembled, see how the soundtrack was put together.)
To summarize the situation:
The film-within-a-film was "Burn Hollywood Burn," directed by the
fictional character "Alan Smithee" (played by actor Eric Idle). The
film about the film-within-a-film was "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn
Hollywood Burn" and was in fact directed by Arthur Hiller, whose
producer-sabotaged work was allowed to be credited to "Alan Smithee," a
pseudonym.
Leonard Maltin rated this movie a BOMB. ``BOMB'' is not some cutesy acronym here. It's the word bomb, written in capital letters for emphasis. It's Maltin's lowest rating. His seven ratings range from four stars down to one-and-a-half stars, in steps of half a star, followed by BOMB.
For writers (movie writers, ça va sans dire) the rules work differently (see WGA).
Another sort of anonymity in movies occurs in a story I vaguely remember about the writer Graham Greene. Some actress friends apparently wangled him a bit part on a movie they were acting in, without revealing his true identity to the director, who they knew had never met Greene in person. From IMDb I guess this must be Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973), where he plays an English insurance broker. Greene's full name was Henry Graham Greene, and he is credited here as Henry Graham.
Nick Lowe mentioned on the Classics list a somewhat similar incident involving Richard Stanley, the writer and original director of the dismal John Frankenheimer remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau. After predictable tussles with star Val Kilmer [who has a track record of making enemies], Stanley was sacked on the third day of shooting, whereupon he promptly sneaked back on to the set in a spare ape-monster suit and remained there, with the full knowledge of many of the cast (but not Frankenheimer), for the rest of the shoot.
Also ALARP.
There are or were, broadly, two views of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers: one is that they were anti-fascist fighters for democracy, the other that they were supporters of the Communist side. During the Spanish Civil War they could be both, but after the Hitler-Stalin pact the veterans could be at most one. The American government's view was always that one couldn't be sure.
A physics professor I know at the University of Buffalo remembers once being surprised by a question about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on a security-clearance form -- in the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-member-of section. He hadn't known that the Lincoln Brigade was a Popular-Front-ish organization. The Encyclopedia USA entry explains: ``Although it was established and recruited by Communists, used for propaganda purposes, and largely supplied with Russian arms, by no means were all its members Communists.'' (It might have been more straightforward to note that in addition to committed Communists, the ALB attracted various other Republic supporters, including Wobblies, anarchists, and socialists. No doubt there were a few mere adventurers as well.)
The bit about ``Russian arms'' is unfair: because of official (Anglo-French, League of Nations) and unofficial (US) embargoes, the main source of arms available to the Republican side was Russia, and the arms were not donated. Germany and Italy contributed substantially, and substantially more than the Republicans were able to buy, to the Nationalist side. Italy and Russia, incidentally, adhered officially to the arms embargo.
I haven't seen much speculation regarding why the Abraham Lincoln Battalion
came to be better known as a ``brigade,'' so I'll hazard a guess. In
Spanish, most adjectives follow the nouns they
modify, as do names functioning attributively.
Hence, the wording on the battalion flag at right:
![[Image of flag: 3 lines of white text on a dark blue field.]](images/ALB.png)
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BRIGADA INTERNACIONAL
While the Americans who fought there doubtless understood the order of battle sufficiently, they were few and many of them died. (Ultimately, it is estimated that 2,800 Americans served in the International Brigades and 900 were killed.) Back home, many Americans' knowledge of the forces involved may have been informed by this flag and similar untranslated materials, and many must have inferred therefrom that ``Abraham Lincoln Brigada'' was the unit name. The capitalization also tends to guide the eye.
The term albedo is most often encountered in connection with celestial objects and artificial satellites. The terms absorptivity or reflectivity (same as albedo) are more often used to describe surfaces.
Objects in a vacuum do not experience convective or conductive heating, more-or-less by definition, so their energy balance is determined completely by radiation and material transfer (ejection, vaporization, accretion, etc.). In the case of planets, material transfer is negligible, and we can determine the average surface temperature of a planet from radiation balances. By a simple thermodynamic argument, Kirchoff demonstrated that light reflectivity equals absorptivity. This seems to imply that a change in albedo, and hence the rate of light absorption, is accompanied by a proportionate change in thermal emission. As a result, albedo does not seem to affect the equilibrium temperature. However, it has to be understood that absorptivity/emissivity is a function of light frequency. The effective light absorptivity is an average of the frequency-dependent light absorptivity, weighted by the frequency distribution of the incident light. The effective emissivity is a different average of the same frequency-dependent absorptivity (the same as the frequency-dependent emissivity). The weighting that determines the effective emissivity is the black-body spectrum corresponding to the temperature of the emitting surface.
For any planet in our solar system, the dominant source of incident light is the sun, whose frequency spectrum is, to a good approximation, a black-body spectrum of temperature 5730 K. The sun heats the planets, so all planets are colder than 5730 K.
[You can accept that heat flow is from hot to cold, or you can prove it by combining the second law of thermodynamics with the definition of temperature -- 1/T is the partial derivative of entropy with respect to energy.]
[When I have some time, I'll explain the greenhouse effect here.]
Strictly speaking, the 5730 K bound mentioned earlier applies to a certain average of the surface temperature. Nothing prevents a planet from having hot spots that are hotter. Many chemical reactions can easily reach these temperatures --- it's a matter of properly confining the heat generated in an exothermic reaction. The larger hot spots that can be observed by interplanetary probes, on the other hand, are plasmas arising from atmospheric or planetary electrical and magnetic phenomena. A spectacular one was found by the Voyager missions in 1979: a sulfur-rich plasma near Jupiter's moon Io with a temperature around 100,000 K. It was not present when Pioneer 10 flew by in 1973. Smaller local plasmas associated with lightning can be even more impressively hot on shorter time and length scales. Data from the late Galileo satellite orbiting Jupiter, including images of eruption in progress, indicated that Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. (The surface layer (photosphere) of the sun is in more violent convulsions than the surface of any of its satellites. However, though the definitions of terms like volcanism and volcanic have been extended to cover the convulsive phenomena on Io, they are not widely used for solar activity.)
If they are small and isolated enough, hot spots don't have to be temporary either. The two most interesting planets in this respect are Earth and Jupiter. Jupiter, the largest gas giant, consists primarily of hydrogen and helium (in a ratio of about 8:1), with traces of other elements and deuterium. The pressure at its core is high enough to drive significant fusion; the core temperature is perhaps 30,000 K, and Jupiter emits about twice as much energy as it receives from the sun. Here's a good link for further information.
Earth was formed by the gravitational instability of cold dust and larger particles -- collisions tended to convert mutual gravitational energy into vibrational (i.e., thermal) energy, until one large warm condensed object resulted. Further heating was caused by compression (isentropic compression is not isothermal) and radioactive decay. In the hot molten object that resulted, the denser compounds and elements, including uranium, sank and concentrated toward the center. Even as the earth cooled by thermal radiation, the highly radioactive core has continued to generate heat, so the earth radiates slightly more heat than it absorbs from the sun and the average temperature increases with increasing depth. The temperature of the inner core is around 7000 K. This page has further interesting information. (Since Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, its age about equals one half-life of 238U.
The core heating of the earth gives rise to volcanism and plate tectonic activity. Venus, the planet most closely resembling Earth in mass (Venus's mass is 0.81 Earth's mass) and composition (surface rocks resemble basalt), also appears to have significant radioactive heat generation, as demonstrated by the presence of shield volcanoes. The relative absence of craters on their surfaces indicates that Venus is still geologically active, but there is no evidence of plate tectonic motion.
The other planets, which have no significant internal heat sources, have core temperatures about equal to their average surface temperatures. They'd be exactly equal, but the instantaneous average of the surface temperature varies over time, due to effects such as orbit eccentricity, solar variability, radiation from and eclipse by other objects, and rotation of the planet's nonuniform surface. The core temperature tracks the surface variation slowly, so at any given moment it is not precisely equal to the surface temperature. A long-term average of the temperatures of the planetary core and surface should be very close.
Heat can also be generated by friction dissipating tidal forces. This seems to be the case with Io, the moon closest to Jupiter. However, like Earth's moon, Jupiter's nearest moon Io is tidally locked: its rotation period equals its revolution period, so the same hemisphere faces its planet at all times. As a result, the direct tidal interaction with Jupiter no longer heats Io. However, other moons exert tidal forces as Io goes past them, and this is believed to be the source of heat that explains the spectacular volcanoes observed there recently.
There's an Albion College in Albion, Michigan. According to the President's message,
``Life is a series of connections. Most of them are random and disjointed. At Albion, the connections are intentional and coherent: for that is the essence of Albion College.
Wow. I think we'll aspire to that and achieve it in this glossary.
It must be said that historically (and maybe one of ALCS's pages says it), one of the principal difficulties that published authors have encountered in collecting royalties has been the traditionally obscure sales and royalties statement from the publisher. It's one of the reasons for having an agent (see AAA).
ALCS has a ``Where Are They Now?'' list of a few dozen unregistered authors for whom (or for whose estates) they are holding royalties that they can't deliver, either because they can't locate or haven't had a response from them.
H H
| \
R-C-H --> C=O + H
| / 2
O-H R
alcohol aldehyde molecular
hydrogen
When the group R is hydrogen (H), RCHO (i.e.
CH2O or HCHO) is formaldehyde (traditional name) or methanal.
For R a methyl group, RCHO (i.e. CH3CH2O) is
ethanal, etc.
If the dehydrogenation takes place on a secondary carbon, the product is called a ketone.
Also the name of a series of books on the history of chemistry, for some reason. And something else too.
The cover bears the title
You could be forgiven for assuming that it's a quarterly publication, but the
value of <Season> is always "Spring" -- it's an annual
publication.
The contents are, in order, Poetry, Fiction, Art, and Translations. The poetry
is sincere, and I'm sure its authors were moved by their inspirations.
In 2002, in another of a sequence of frequent changes, the A-levels were
computed for the first time using a combination of the AS-levels and a set of
exams called the A2's. Using the longer baseline ought to have made results
more predictable, but it apparently didn't. In an effort to maintain
year-on-year consistency in pass rates, the grading was apparently very
ham-handedly rigged. More on that at the QCA
entry.
As you can guess from the Latin species name, the alewife also resembles
herring. It's a
small silvery fish, and it used to be an ocean fish, but in 1873 it was
detected in the Great Lakes. It's adapted to fresh water, but it's not
completely adapted to warm temperatures. When it gets warm too fast in
Spring, the previous autumn's generation of alewives succumbs in large
numbers. Thus, in some years, around May, the shore will be covered with
a band of three- to five-inch fish from the die-off.
The definitive description of the language was published as ``Revised report on
the algorithmic language ALGOL 60,'' in Computer Journal, vol. 5,
pp. 349-367 (1963). The report was edited by Peter Naur, dedicated to the
memory of William Turanski, and written by thirteen coauthors. It's
available online.
Barron et al., in the article cited at the
CPL entry, wrote that ``[t]he publication of this
report [only months earlier] marked a turning point in the development
in programming languages, since it concentrated attention on, and to a large
extent solved, the problems of unambiguously defining a computational process
or algorithm.''
ALGOL itself never seems to have been very popular in the US, but descendants
of the language, particularly C and its object-oriented extensions, are
dominant today. Here, in brief, is the line of descent from ALGOL 60 to C:
ALGOL development did not cease with the creation of CPL, of course. ``ALGOL
66,'' said C.A.R. Hoare, ``was a great advance over its successors.'' (If you
can give me details on or a source for this quote, please
email me.)
ALGOL 68 was
considered disastrously complex, and it was the last major programming language
to bear the ALGOL name. In reaction or revulsion, Niklaus Wirth created
Pascal, which enjoyed a certain vogue but did not
leave any major direct descendant.
(Regarding the sought quote: no, it's not in Hoare's article ``An Axiomatic
Basis for Computer Programming'' that appeared in vol. 12, iss. 10 of
CACM (October 1969; pp. 576-580, 583), but thanks
for the thought. That paper is famous, though, and was republished in CACM's
25th anniversary edition (vol. 26, iss. 1; January 1983; pp. 53-6); in
it, Hoare introduced a famous notation:
Sure, and lose all the extra business from having obscure, perversely
formulated and generally incomprehensible laws.
Membership is attorneys, legal scholars, and judges.
The ALI shares copyright for the UCC with the NCC. The ALI publishes Restatements of the
Law, secondary legal sources that summarize common law as followed in
various states of the US.
There are even some chemists who use the word that loosely, but minimally
careful use usually applies the term only to inorganic bases. The strictest
usage, and not an uncommon one, applies the term only to the hydroxides of
alkali metals. Slightly looser usage
includes ammonia and hydroxides of alkaline earths.
The potassium entry (K) has some etymology of the term.
There is obviously much confusion on the distinction between base and alkali,
and I've even seen alkali defined as a base in aqueous solution.
The alkali metals are the metals whose hydroxides are the alkalis in the strictest sense of that term. Alkali metals are extremely electronegative, so their compounds are generally basic.
It seems no one ever expects alkali metals to have any interesting biological
activity. I can think of two instances:
Originally, the term alkaline earth applied not to metals but to their
oxides, and then only to the oxides of three metals -- calcium (Ca), strontium
(Sr), and barium (Ba). It referred to oxides whose properties were
intermediate between those of the alkalis and the ordinary ``earths.'' The
term was in use long before the periodic table and before the discovery of
radium (Ra), and so reflected a practical empirical orientation. Subsequently,
the term's usage expanded to include magnesium (Mg) and radium, and what the
heck, let's let beryllium (Be) into the club, too. This evolution did not
reflect a change in our understanding of the chemical properties of the group
members so much as an evolution towards a more theorrrrretical orrrrientation
based on the periodic table or the atomic structure.
The alkaline earth metals have the odd property of increasing solubility with
decreasing temperature. Normally, one only expects gases to have increased
solubility at low temperature.
For a modern example showing the similarity of the alkaline earths in the
earlier restrictive definition, see the CMR entry.
There is some disagreement regarding the origin of this usage of the phrase
``all day,'' but I don't think it's worth a lot of speculation. Restaurant
personnel are not known for their linguistic skills. Set aside the ``Belgium
waffles,'' ``with au jus,'' ``bake scrod,'' and other menu solecisms. Once I
mentioned to S. (a restaurant hostess I know) an observation I had made
regarding books. I had noticed that when I came into the restaurant with a
book to read, the probability that a waitress would mention it or ask me about
it was an increasing function of the book's size. S. suggested that this was
because -- not to put too fine a point on it -- waitresses are not the kind of
people who read big books. Okay, maybe this isn't such a stunning observation.
By way of compensation, S. herself is a pretty stunning observation. Maybe I
was hoping she'd say that women like men with a big one. (``Then I whip out my
big ten inch... record of the band that plays the blues.'') For a waitress who
wrote a book, see the Waiting entry.
That conversation also reminded me that women seem to expect men to notice
their shoes. Sure, I noticed that she was taller that day and teetered into
me, but I didn't think of checking out the stilettos (which would be an
all-around funnier word as an -es plural). Honey, you need to discuss this
with a leg man. If my eyes are going to stop for refreshment, it's not going
to happen that far south. For more on restaurant-employee attire, and darts
rather than stilettoes, see the black bra
entry.
This entry took on added significance (for me, if not for you) six months
later. K. started working as a waitress at
Hooters. She told me the tips are better there. I asked if that was because
the food was a little more expensive or because they sold more alcohol. She
deadpanned that it was because of ``the uniform.''
Ironically, another recent snorkeling song (by Sara Bareilles; see the music for snorkeling entry) includes
the lyric ``I'm not going to write you a love song.''
What was it we were talking about?
(Excuse me if this is already obvious to you, but everybody has to find out
sometime, and for some, sometime is now: the word Halloween was originally a
slurred form of Hallow E'en, short for All Hallows Evening, or Eve. All
Hallows Day, as also All Souls Day, is an alternate name for All Saints
Day. Yeah, the apostrophe is optional on the English name. All the religions
that observe this holiday -- the major ones, anyway -- allow some poor spellers
into heaven. But mind that you capitalize Holy Names and His Pronouns. You've
been warned.)
Most customers dislike the really effective solution (shaving). I would
recommend Goop®, that white detergent spread you use to clean
roller-bearing packing grease off your hands after a brake job. An alternating
sequence of amyl acetate and any rubbing alcohol might help, but I wouldn't use
it on any hair that happened to be close to anyone's eyes.
The preceptor for my dorm in freshman year was Jay. When we asked Jay what his
major was, he said `preunemployment.' My room-mate freshman year was Dennis.
Dennis was a `premed.' Jay said Dennis looked like um, um, tip-of-my-tongue,
led the descamisados in Argentina, united Italy,
um, you know!, uh, I'll get back to this later.
Yeah,
Garibaldi! Except that Jay didn't have to struggle to recall. As you
probably surmised, Jay was technically a History major. Of course, Dennis was
`technically' a Biology major, because Rutgers didn't recognize `premed' as a
formal major. They didn't recognize `preunemployment' either. I think the
idea was not to stigmatize failure by making a formal admission that you were
trying to get into some professional school. Instead you were supposed to
pretend that you were in school because you had a sincere love of knowledge,
and weren't really making any particular plans for after graduation. Jay went
to law school, although only after falling in with the Moonies the summer after
his senior year, and being rescued by Art, who claimed to be `predent' but went
to med school instead. I don't know what story he gave the Moonie sentries.
For another alternative natural detergent, see this QS entry.
According to a potato chip I read recently (honest -- see the
bongo entry for details), almost is the
longest English word whose letters are in alphabetical order. In fact, that's
not even almost true.
A very practical and
useful ``Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia'' reports that ``AEGILOPS
(alternate spelling of egilops, an ulcer in a part of the eye) is apparently
the longest word'' in Webster's New International Dictionary, 2/e,
that consists of letters in alphabetical order. There you go.
The original alnico alloys -- Alnico I through Alnico V -- contained, as the
name implies, only Al, Ni, and Co in addition to Fe.
As we metallic types like to say, ``Bang yer head!''
In a variation called slotted Aloha, transmitters are synchronized to
begin transmitting at fixed times. This reduces collision rate by making
collisions doozies, and in complementary fashion transforming many would-be
fender-benders into near misses, i.e. safe noncollisions.
Cf. CSMA.
In late May 2002, the Les Belles Lettres (yes! an excuse for a double definite
article! oh, and a great tragedy) book warehouses burned down in Paris, and fires began in Colorado. Coincidence or
conspiracy? What did Nostradamus say about this? And NIFC?
The term alpha rays (written α rays) was introduced by Ernest Rutherford
in 1899 in the January issue of what was then called The London, Edinburgh,
and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, and which is
today called Philosophical Magazine. The article came at the beginning
of that period in Rutherford's career that is known as ``the Canadian exile.''
Okay, that's probably not a common term, since I just coined it, but you can
find some interesting pages if you google the phrase.
In any case, Rutherford was the Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill
starting in 1898. He took the job because it paid enough that he could afford
to marry his fiancée from back home in New Zealand. (Her name was Mary
Georgina Newton, interestingly enough; they were married in Christchurch in
1900.) He was so successful at McGill that in 1907 he was back in England as
head of his own laboratory at Manchester. This is always a problem for
lower-tier schools trying to move up: the very best young stars they manage to
attract may leave as soon as their reputations let them (while some bad bets
that the school has made accumulate as tenured deadwood). A few decades later,
another Ernest physicist and future Nobel prizewinner -- Ernest Orlando
Lawrence (1901-1958) -- took a similar risk. He felt unappreciated at Yale.
(For one or two things, the chairman was slow to promote him, and this made it
hard to recruit graduate students.) Like Rutherford, Lawrence in his late
twenties went west to start over at an unknown school:
University of California at Berkeley.
Anyway, this article by Rutherford is entitled ``Uranium Radiation and the
Electrical Conduction produced by it'' (pp. 109-143). (Ions produced by the
radiation -- what we often call ionizing radiation today -- produce an electric
current that makes it possible to study radiation quantitatively.) Previous
work by Röntgen and others had shown that X-rays (the rays Röntgen
had discovered) consisted of rays with different abilities to penetrate matter
(i.e., as we know now, they were emitted with different wavelengths).
Rutherford conducted a similar study of radiation from uranium and found two
components.
In detail, Rutherford found that the intensity of radiation that penetrated a
number of thin sheets of material (mostly metal foils, see
Dutch foil) did not fall off as a simple
exponential function of the thickness of material traversed. The results were
explainable in terms of two components.
It quickly became clear that the beta rays were deflected by a magnetic field,
and they were eventually identified with the electrons that J.J. Thomson had
identified with cathode rays in 1897. It was also early suggested (by Strutt,
in Phil Trans. Roy. Soc. 1900) that alpha particles might be positively
charged, and the suggestion was advanced again by Sir William Crookes
(Procs. Roy. Soc. 1902). However, it was unclear for a couple of years
whether alpha rays were charged at all (equivalently, deviable by a magnetic
field). In a paper dispatched on May 7, 1902, Rutherford (with Mr. A.G. Grier)
was still writing
The problem was simply one of measurement sensitivity. Beta particles have a
charge-to-mass ratio 1836 times that of the proton, whereas alpha particles
have a charge-to-mass ratio only about half that of the proton. Rutherford
managed to get access to a sufficiently strong magnetic field later in 1902,
resulting in ``The Magnetic and Electric Deviation of the easily absorbed Rays
from Radium,'' which described ``some experiments which show that the α
rays are deviable by a strong magnetic and electric field'' and of opposite
sign to beta rays. The paper also, perhaps not coincidentally, introduced the
term gamma rays. (This is discussed at the
gamma rays entry, duh.)
ALPSP ran a survey of
contributors to scholarly journals. Questionnaires were sent to about
10,500 contributors to a range of journals published in ``the UK, the USA and elsewhere'';
response was 30%. They found that we're not doing it for the money. Duh.
Somewhat more interesting: ``Offprints continue to be the main way in
which authors disseminate their findings after publication, though 84%
also claim to announce their results at conferences pre-publication.''
``...two-thirds of authors agree that the purpose of scholarly publishing does
seem to be changing. It is seen as moving away from knowledge dissemination
to building of an author's CV/resumé
or reputation.''
The OECD is
proud to be a member. What else is there left to aspire to?
It's bigger, but I'd rather pass a milestone than a kidney stone.
The term was originally created by the Japanese Ministry of Education at the
time of the creation of the JET Program, as the standard translation of a term
in which ``language'' translates gaikokugo, which is literally `foreign
language.' There are, in fact, some ALT's who provide assistance in foreign
languages other than English. The JET Program is the ``Japan Exchange and
Teaching Program,'' which exists mostly to bring ALT's to Japan and distribute
them to participating school systems. The program also brings some CIR's
(coordinators for international relations, with various duties) and SEA's
(sports education advisors).
At any given time, the JET program has upwards of 4000 foreign participants,
more than half from the US. It's the largest exchange teaching program in the
world. Independently of this program, ALT's are also hired in smaller numbers
by private schools in Japan, and by schools in prefectures that have opted out
of the JET program.
One woman I know followed her Japanese boyfriend back to Japan from the US and
taught as an ALT for a year or two. You have to have a bachelor's degree to
participate in the program, but it doesn't matter what it's in. Hers was in
Spanish, for example. In the time she was
there, she never learned much Japanese. One thing she remembers well is that
the ministry or the local board of ed or whatever occasionally tried to enrich
the cultural experience of her and her fellow ALT's by subjecting them to icky
raw meat.
ALT's have one-year contracts that can be renewed up to four times, though
later renewals are harder. She broke up with her boyfriend, though, so it was
never an issue. (And this is good because she's cute, so it's nice to have her
back here.) But now she's getting a master's in English to become certified to
teach ESL in the US. Don't tell me you're not
interested in these details.
Their twentieth annual conference was held at University
of Texas at Dallas, October 30th - November 2nd, 1997.
The keynote speakers were Robert Fagles, talking about his translations of
Homer, and Margaret Sayers Peden, translator of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
Be it noted that Robert Fagles evokes very mixed feelings among classicists.
His translations are more popular with students than with scholars.
This
ALTA ``brochure is for the literary translator who is translating into
English for the American audience and who has published very little or not at
all. Drawing on the experience of some of America's most distinguished
translators, it discusses the special obstacles faced by the literary
translator, offers suggestions for preparing a translation for submission, and
provides advice and resources that will help you become a better-informed and
more successful literary translator.''
Cf. the not-necessarily-literary translation group ATA.
Used to be one of the most complete (with Hotbot and Infoseek) and among the fastest, but
it's become flakey since Digital was bought by Compaq.
Anyway, the standard form needs a clear button:
Daddy (Aaron Spelling) was a producer of very successful television garbage.
He executive-produced a drama called Charmed, about three sisters who talk
about sexual situations and cast spells. In the opening credits,
instead of appearing on screen complete, the names of the stars are spelled
out by little boxes that roll across the screen. The little boxes also
have little letters inside that spell out Charmed. More about this rot
at this TNT entry.
Tori Spelling was named Victoria Davey Spelling at birth. In 2006 she starred
in a comedy TV series that lasted 10 episodes. Loni Anderson played ``Kiki
Spelling'' and Ariel Winter played ``Little Tori.'' I hope that wasn't another
take-off on ``Mini-Me.''
The comedy was called ``So noTORIous.'' Tori Spelling seems to be involved in
a lot of wordplay recently. In 2007, she and her husband Dean McDermott filmed
a reality show for Oxygen called ``Tori & Dean: Inn Love.'' The ``Inn'' is
a Bed and Breakfast that the couple own and
operate in California. According to the
Reality
television entry at Wikipedia, when I visited on Einstein's birthday 2008,
had this short definition: ``Reality television is a genre of television
programming which presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous
situations, documents actual events, and features ordinary people instead of
professional actors.'' Okay, so Tori and her actor husband Dean are batting
.333 -- that's not so bad. More Tori te
salutamus. Look, sometimes wordplay requires
Miss Spelling.
Before this scam was concocted, electric power was distributed by single
DC lines (the ground was
ground, and it carried the return current). The primary application was
arc lighting, which took up to 240 VDC. Since there
was no practical and economical way to convert voltages, power delivery lines
had to carry larger currents. Viewing the power-supply cable and the load as
parts of a voltage divider, one sees that as load power consumption increases
(more lights in parallel), the power cables must either bulk up or dissipate a
progressively larger fraction of generated power. The initial solution was to
build more and more closely spaced dynamos.
The ultimate solution was to supply high-voltage AC power and transform it down
in voltage at substations. (Yeah, okay, so it wasn't entirely a scam.) There
was initial resistance (ooh, sorry about that) to this idea from Edison and his
backers, who had major capital and prestige invested in DC. (Therein lies the
story of a fierce contest, which I hope to write up into an electric-chair
entry.) A more practical problem was the absence of efficient AC motors.
Nicola Tesla invented the first asynchronous AC motor and polyphase power
delivery system, which solved most of the existing problems. The practicality
of AC power systems was first demonstrated to the public at the 1893 World's
Fair in Chicago. A more spectacular demonstration was made later at Niagara
Falls. I don't remember what was more spectacular about it, but there was
obviously plenty of hydroelectric power available there. The availability of
cheap electric power promoted industrial development in the area. The
production of shredded wheat is one application I can recall. A couple of
others are mentioned at the ALCOA entry.
It is conventional to use this term, or more usually AC, even when negligible current is flowing. (Someone
really wondered.) In principle, some small curent is always flowing anyway,
even if it seems that all you have is alternating voltage, since the reactance
of the line cannot be made infinite. That's if you want a reason, but most
people would simply regard the no-current objection as a captious technicality.
This discussion continues at the VAC entry.
Also in principle, alternating current might refer to any current or signal
whose sign or direction varied in time. In practice, AC tends to refer to
power supply (including what in Britain is called mains voltage) rather than to
general electrical or communication signals, and these applications virtually
always use a sinusoidally (time-)varying voltage of a single frequency. So
AC generally implies sinusoidally varying.
Any reasonable continuous time-varying signal can be Fourier-analyzed into
sinusoidal components. This is a very powerful technique, so the analysis of
analog circuits is generally done in terms of frequency-dependent response to
sinusoidal inputs. (Linear circuit response is completely specified by
frequency-dependent response. Nonlinear circuit analysis uses the response to
small, linear-regime signal deviations from one or more set points.)
The issue of aluminum vs. aluminium even gets an entry in the aue FAQ, but
no real answer. My guess is that as long as aluminum was difficult to reduce
(i.e., before the Hall process), it was a chemists' curiosity, and long
years of chemical practice (using -ium) were probably of no significance
compared to isolated highly public news involving aluminum. I have in mind the
completion of the Washington Monument, which was capped in 1884 with a pyramid
of cast ``aluminum.'' The -num word was standard usage among miners and
in other practical trades, just as the old name ``columbium'' is preferred by
metallurgists to the chemists' ``niobium'' (vide Cb). See also the World Wide Words
Aluminium versus Aluminum article.
Another UB alumnus, but not an EE, is Wolf Blitzer,
who looked dashing in CNN's reportage of a Persian
Gulf War (`Operation Desert Somethingorother') in 1991. He was temporarily
immortalized by Gary Trudeau, who based a Doonesbury character on him. Later,
he did a stint as a White House
correspondent for CNN. The White House beat is a sinecure: you twiddle your
thumbs until the press secretary is ready to spin the news, and then join
everyone else in asking a different version of the question he doesn't want to
answer.
I'm sorry, that should be ``four-year liberal arts college for women.''
You probably thought it was a four-year engineering college for women.
To state the required connection between a precondition (P), a program (Q)
and a description of the result of its execution (R), we introduce a new
notation:
The earliest quotation that the
OED2 gives for allophone is of Whorf,
dating from 1938. They quote from Language, Thought, and Reality:
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J.B. Carroll. Carroll
commented that ``Whorf ... was apparently the first to propose the term
`allophone,' now in common use among linguistic [`]scientists['].''
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Charles
Baskerville dies and his baronetcy is inherited by his nephew Henry,
who has been farming in Canada. The first time Sir Henry takes his
leave of Sherlock Holmes, he says ``Au revoir and good morning.''
(Here at the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Research Centro, we strive to
provide you with the most timely, relevant, and obscure information,
but we don't strive very hard.)
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
These experiments show that the uranium radiation is complex, and that there
are present at least two distinct types of radiation--one that is very readily
absorbed, which will be termed for convenience the α radiation, and the
other of a more penetrative character, which will be termed the β
radiation.
For brevity and convenience we will call the non-deviable rays of all
radioactive substances α rays and the deviable rays β rays.
[See ``Deviable Rays of Radioactive Substances,'' Phil.
Mag. ser. 6, vol. 4, #21, pp. 315-330 (Sept. 1902), p. 325.]
[If this seems inconsistent, buy the report. Almost certainly, the 84%
fraction consists mostly of journal contributors who only present some of
their work before publication. Moreover, conference audiences range in
size. Though it is hard to generalize
across the disciplines, I'd guess from conferences I've attended -- in
fields ranging from semiconductor physics to mass communication -- that
poster sessions and small (say 20-30 in attendance) sessions represent
the majority of papers. (Small sessions would include most workshops,
departmental seminars, and parallel sessions of larger conferences.)
A typical presentation, to any size of audience, includes mostly people
who are only peripherally involved in one's field of research. Offprints
are better targeted.]
There were also bilingual readings (always a high point!), panels, and
workshops. There may have been a workshop devoted to translating Greek and Latin, too.
