I met a guy called Nico who claims he's from northern Greece. ``Salonika?'' ``Further north than that.'' I forgot to ask if he wasn't really from Bulgaria.
Netwizards, based in Miami, Florida, spammed me with an email return address in the .bg TLD (ccTLD), but the remove link is to a mailbox in the .jp TLD. They've got me surrounded.
It's probably worth pointing out that in ancient times, books often did not have formal titles. (But they might; see sittybus, mentioned at the sillybus entry.) The books of the Old Testament instance some common ways in which books came to be named. The books of the pentateuch were called (and are called, in Hebrew) by the first word of their texts. Hence the first book is ``Bereshit'' (pronounced like English ``beret sheet''), Hebrew for `in the beginning,' which is the first word of the book. [A brief interlude:
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.``Begin at the beginning,'' the King said gravely, ``and go on till you come to the end: then stop.''
End of brief interlude.]
The Greek translators called it Genesis, `origin, creation,' which is a summary of the subject matter rather than the best translation of bereshit. (The first words of the Septuagint are En archê.) The title Genesis was preserved in Latin and most European languages. (It may be that the division into five books dates to no earlier than the Septuagint.)
Other O.T. books, particularly those of the prophets, were and are known by their authors' names. One book that is unusual in other ways was written by a self-identified Kohelet. This word's translation is uncertain, and it might be a name or a title. One oddity is that the word is morphologically female but construed male. From the root (i.e., from the three consonants) the word must have something to do with an assembly, though it's not directly clear whether it refers to someone who attends or leads the assembly, and it's not clear what kind of assembly it is. The Septuagint interprets the word as ekklêsiastês, a `member of an assembly' (although the author claims to have ruled in Jerusalem). The Greek word was Latinized straightforwardly to Ecclesiastes. Some modern translations, for example the NRSV, prefer to translate Kohelet as `Teacher.'
Ancient Latin books (i.e. scrolls) don't seem to have been any more likely to have names than do modern memoranda. Another famous Latin work with various forms of title is Satyricon or Satyrica (see the author's entry, Petronius, for more uncertainty).
When I feel up to it, I'll try to explain the status quaestionis of the Suda or Suida, a much later (Byzantine) Greek work whose title, or maybe that's the author's name, is uncertain.
The oldest surviving German book is a translation of a Latin collection of synonyms. (``German'' here means a continental West Germanic predecessor of modern German. This particular book is in something like Alemannic.) The work was probably written sometime between 765 and 775, probably in the monastery school at Fulda. The synonyms are ordered alphabetically, and the book is known as Der Abrogans, after the first word (`gentle, humble').
Let me take this opportunity to say that the banjo is DURN LOUD INSTR'MINT!
In 1990, they apparently decided that girls who roamed the streets should also have a positive alternative, and the more inclusive current name was adopted. Congress granted a new charter.
In 2001, Kelly Jones, Miss Alabama for that year, made B&GCA her platform. Good move -- Denby Dung, Miss Hawaii, was on the flimsy platform of ``The Music Effect.'' Everyone is agreed that music has effects, but ``the'' music effect that has been flogged for a few years is the Mozart Effect, at best a statistical fluke in a small experiment, completely discredited by further research, an urban legend with a known author. Too bad. Unlike most of the others, she was kinda cute. Oh, here's a ditzy doozy: Meranda Hafford, Miss Maine; platform: D.A.R.E. Miss New Mexico, from Roswell, was ``promoting US Citizenship.'' (Roswell is known for aliens.) I guess she was taking a cross-that-bridge-when-I-get-there approach to the Miss World competition. (Miss Washington was promoting aging in America. Ideological turf battle alert.) A couple of contestants were promoting good decision making. They needed to take their own advice. Did you know that there's a town in Ohio called Dublin? This stuff is as treacly as a presidential address. Remember President Ford's WIN? Miss Virginia's platform was B.A.S.E.
Miss Kentucky ran on the NYN platform, but America wasn't ready by 2001 for a Miss America named Monica. Emily Foster, Miss Georgia 2001, had a platform of Character Education. That only suggests character actors. I guess it passes muster, but not using a standard name like Emily -- that cost her.
Whenever I work on an entry like this, a little voice in my head screams ``INSIPID!! You have to point out that it's insipid!!!!!'' And I tell the little voice -- ``no, that's too obvious.''
This equation is much closer to the equation that semiconductor transport researchers usually call the ``Boltzmann equation.''
Ironically for an entity whose business is to standardize names, the BGN -- or its authority -- has had its name changed a number of times. It was originally founded with the name it has currently, but from 1906 to 1934 it was officially the US Geographic Board. In 1934 it was abolished and its functions were transferred to the Department of the Interior, which assigned those to a newly established Division of Geographic Names and an Advisory Committee on Geographic Names to perform those functions. (The board had accumulated technical responsibilities over time. I suspect that the move to the DoI in many cases meant hanging a new DoI shingle on the old offices rather than dispersing the talent and hiring newbies, although I've seen that approach too.) At the end of 1935 the DoI consolidated the Division and the Committee to form a new U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
All the preceding changes were made by executive order or DoI order. In 1947, the BGN was reorganized by an act of Congress. For more detail, see this page in the National Archives.
An example of the BGN's early arrogance can be found at the Pgh entry. Nowadays the BGN claims to cooperate with local authorities, and to some extent I'm sure it does.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
B-Greek was started by David Marotta at the Center for Christian Study, an independent Christian ministry at the University of Virginia. In 1998, David asked to step down as list owner. We are grateful to David for his vision of a forum where the Greek text and language of the Bible are discussed in detail by an eclectic group of beginning students and veteran teachers, laymen and clergy, conservatives and liberals, earnest inquirers and academic scholars -- all equally committed to probing the Biblical text in the original Koine, and jointly exploring the mysteries and probabilities of Biblical Greek morphology and syntax. If you are interested in what the New Testament or Septuagint says in the original Greek, and if you can appreciate and learn from people who aren't just like you, then B-Greek is the place to be!''
BGU is the longest-running serial dedicated exclusively to papyrology. The first fascicle of its first volume appeared in 1892. Cf. MPER.
Furthermore, the very oldest CP members, the prunes who joined before 1905 or thereabouts, were sometimes known in the old Soviet Union as ``old horseradish.'' This was not necessarily affectionate. Time was, veterans who had fought in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) could cut ahead in the queue. That was no minor privilege, as the state distribution center would run out of anything good before the queue ran out.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
C(CH )
/ ³ ³
_____/
/ ___ \
H CO_____/ / \ \_____OH
³ \ \___/ /
\_____/
Many studies indicate that it's safe. I know of one study (a 1982 Japanese study of cancer in rats) that indicates otherwise; perhaps that's to be expected on statistical grounds. I say, if it doesn't taste good enough to glop onto junk food, it's probably safer than granola.
BHAch does not appear on an especially regular schedule. Volume I appeared during 1997. BHAch II, covering the period autumn 1997 to autumn 2000, appeared in Spring 2001. It's an analytic bibliography.
BHL is a stylish variant on the standard-issue public-intellectual idiot that France produces in abundance and American academics celebrate. His prose is pleasant, if you can stomach the stupidity.
Look, that's all you need to know now. I'll write up the reasons when I can find the time.
Actually, BHL is usually described as a philosopher, journalist, and foo, where foo varies but has included film-maker. If he were also a businessman, he'd be France's Hugh Hefner.
The Brinell hardness number summarizes the result of the Brinell hardness test, in which a hard ball is pressed into a flat surface of the material under test.
Informally, the unit horsepower is often called ``horses.'' For irrelevant thoughts on horses, see the hoofbeats entry.
C(CH )
/ ³ ³
_____/
/ ___ \
H C_____/ / \ \_____OH
³ \ \___/ /
\_____/
\
\
C(CH )
³ ³
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
In electronics, bias is almost synonymous with voltage or sign of voltage. Voltage, like any potential, is ``arbitrary up to a constant'': only differences in voltage are physically significant within the domain of electronics. In particular, this means that any ``positive voltage'' might be negative in a different, equally accurate description. Of course, in analyzing an electronic circuit or any electromagnetical system, one does select a convenient zero of voltage. (This is no different than selecting a convenient origin for a coordinate system, even though the ``origin'' is arbitrary.) The zero is usually the voltage of a node in the circuit, and that node is called ground (US) or earth (UK).Thus, in any particular context, ``positive voltage'' is meaningful; it means that the voltage is positive relative to whatever has been chosen as the zero of voltage. That is a statement about voltage differences. This is utterly obvious to anyone who knows anything about electronics, but the explanation would be helpful to a philosopher.
While positive and negative voltage have clear enough meaning for a circuit generally, there are many circumstances where one wants to distinguish positive and negative voltage differences between different terminals of a particular device within the circuit. In this context, one uses the word bias instead of voltage. In other words, voltage is implicitly the voltage relative to ground for the circuit or system; bias is the voltage of one terminal or node of a device relative to another. The term bias voltage is perhaps the more common term for bias when one is referring to the magnitude rather than the sign.
For two-terminal devices with symmetric CV or I-V characteristics, the bias is the voltage or the sign of the voltage between the two terminals, and which bias is positive must obviously be defined in terms of the circuit. Nonlinear two-terminal devices (usually with asymmetric IV characteristics) are called diodes. Most diodes are designed, or at least can function, as rectifiers; they have low impedance with one sign of bias and high impedance with not-too-large bias voltages of the opposite sign (Zener diode again have low impedance at larger negative voltage). For these (i.e., most) diodes, positive bias (more often ``forward bias'') is bias of the sign that turns the device on at low bias. For any diode that is essentially a pn junction, forward bias means p positive relative to n. This might be Vpn > 0 or VD > 0, if the diode is not so far beneath notice that it has its own voltage variable named. (But beware: VD is often the name of the ``turn-on'' voltage of a bipolar transistor.) For bipolar devices with three or more terminals, it is useful and common to speak of particular junctions being forward- or reverse-biased. For every bipolar device, any arrow in the schematic diagram represents the forward-biased current direction of the terminal or pn junction represented.
In many contexts, particularly when one is discussing the operation of an isolated device, there is no distinction in sense between bias and voltage, and the terms are used fairly interchangeably. Actually, in my limited experience, ``voltage'' is more used in school explanations (understandably, since one doesn't want to pile on new terminology all at once).
Israel has a parliamentary system of government with a unicameral legislature called the Knesset. The membership of the Knesset is fixed at 120 on a traditional basis (that was the size of the knesset gadol, `large' knesset, 2500 years ago; cf. 435). As in Italy and elsewhere that parliament has been split into uncooperative minorities, there was frustration with this system. The idea arose that a stronger executive was the solution, so in the mid-nineties a move was made a small part of the way towards an American-style separation of powers: the PM is now elected in a national poll, separately from the rest of the Knesset. (In the fact of separate election, this somewhat resembles the system of French Fifth Republic. In France, however, the separately elected president holds executive powers independently of parliament, and a prime minister is determined by coalition politics in the parliament. In Israel, the separately elected leader is the PM, and must form a government (a governing coalition in knesset) like any other prime minister. Israel also has a President who is head of state and has only a small, mostly ceremonial role in government.)
After just two elections under the new system (1996, 1999), many Israelis figured they had the worst of both systems (US and parliamentary): by casting a vote for one of the two major-party PM candidates, voters can determine the leader of the next government without voting to give that PM's party a single other seat in Knesset. As a result, there was a decline in the share of seats held by the two major parties (Labor and Likud, which are themselves more like close coalitions of smaller parties). Interestingly, this was thought to have a positive-feedback effect: smaller parties see their interest in the new system, and collectively the smaller parties are now more powerful, making it seem unlikely that the clock would be turned back.
On February 6, 2001, Sharon was elected PM by the largest majority ever. On the day he was sworn in, March 7, Knesset amended the Basic Law (the written constitution) back to something resembling the status quo ante (details in unofficial English translation here). The constitutional change took effect in 2003.
In 2001, Sharon formed a broad-based unity government. In the 2003 elections, Labor (Mapai) lost seats, and Shinui, a new moderate party, took a comparable though smaller number of Knesset seats. (One is reminded of a British SDP, created in early 1981, when the Tories were dominant and Labour was unreformed, though of course the British SDP was never quite as successful.) After the 2003 elections, Sharon put together a coalition of Likud and religious parties.
Sharon, it became increasingly clear, had concluded that negotiations with the Palestinians would continue to be a dead end at best, as they had been for decades. Israel's best option was thus to withdraw unilaterally from most of the territories occupied in 1967 and still under Israeli control, and to consolidate behind a security fence. Such a fence had long separated the Gaza strip from pre-1967 Israel, and most suicide attacks during the intifadahs had originated in the West Bank. Starting in 2003, Sharon aggressively advanced his disengagement plan of withdrawing settlements -- though only from the Gaza strip. In the meantime, the security fence in the West Bank continued to be built. Sharon never articulated his plan with complete candor, partly because to do so would repudiate the negotiated-withdrawal ``Roadmap'' of the ``Quartet'' group. An explicit explanation was also unnecessary because, apart from some West Bank settlers in denial, most people understood the plan. Everyone else understands that after the fence is complete, Jewish settlements outside the fence will be abandoned one way or another.
The majority of Sharon's own party (Likud) always opposed unilateral withdrawal, and most of Sharon's political moves from 2003 to 2005 were directed at pushing through the withdrawal over Likud objections. His in-party opponents demanded that the withdrawal be approved by a vote of party members. The vote was held and Sharon lost it, but he pursued his policy within the Knesset, reorganizing his governing coalition in 2004 into another unity government that included Labor. In the second half of 2005, he resigned from Likud and created a new centrist party called Kadima (`forward'). New Knesset elections were scheduled for March 28, 2006, and it looked like Kadima would be in a strong position to form the next government and probably complete Sharon's plan. Polls showed Kadima drawing its strength mostly at the expense of Likud, and becoming the new dominant party in Knesset, though with fewer seats (polling between 31 and 39) than Likud held in the existing Knesset (40).
In December 2005, Sharon suffered a minor stroke, and on January 4, 2006, he suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma. Under the nominally provisional leadership of Ehud Olmert, polls showed Kadima winning only slightly fewer seats.
Naturally, that's not what I want to write about. I want to write about the uncountable noun bibliography, which refers not -- or not mainly -- to the creation of bibliographies, but to a scholarly activity that is only marginally related to the creation of bibliographies. This other kind of bibliography is now more often called ``textual criticism.'' It is the activity of attempting to retrieve the most accurate possible text of a work, or (if the author or others modified it) to construct an accurate revision history of a work.
Whew! Well started is half done, they say, so I shouldn't have but a couple of paragraphs to go once I track down the various books I want to cite on this topic. Well, here's something to mention that's already on the web, on ``The Little Professor blog for December 17, 2007. (Alright, it was on the web. Apparently typepad only archives the last week or so of the month for this blog.) In a blog entry entitled ``Profession 2007: `Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion','' the blogger (a Victorianist in the English department at Syracuse or some other college in upstate New York) makes ``some scattered observations about'' the named report and the comments on it.
``Disciplinary Societies and Evaluating Scholarship: A View from History'': Stanley N. Katz rightly expresses bafflement that ``historical editing and bibliography'' (91) have been consistently devalued at RI campuses. The editors and bibliographers are frequently responsible for making our research possible in the first place! Moreover, even with the advent of new software and other technologies, editing and bibliography is time-consuming, exhausting labor (especially if the editor in question is working with manuscripts).
Lack of appreciation for their crucial hard work is a perennial complaint of bibliographers, one which I can easily document back to the late 1950's. Great! I'm finally making progress on this entry. Now I only have three or four more paragraphs to go.
This French Wikipédia page implies that Bich was shortened to BiC because the latter is easily identifiable and pronounceable in all languages. That's certainly somewhat plausible. The first foreign market entered was Italy (1954), where the two spellings would have to be regarded as equivalent, and closed syllables ending in /k/ are not part of the standard dialect, and are difficult for many Italians to pronounce. The second foreign market entered was Brazil (1956), where Bic and Bich are again both strange but pronounceable. Bich would likely have been pronounced as in French. In 1957 BiC expanded sales to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and in 1958 to the US and the Middle East. I have read in one of my books on the history of pens that Baron Bich decided to market as Bic upon being informed of how ``Bich'' would be pronounced and understood in English. Bic products are now marketed in more than 162 countries (according to the same wiki page).
Exponential Technology, a startup planning to roll out PowerPC compatible chips in early 1997, argues that bipolar is not a space hog, and that current conventional BiCMOS fabrication, with bipolar piggybacked on an essentially CMOS fab sequence, does not exploit the full potential of bipolar.
Often, this shows up on the label as ``take one tablet twice a day.'' This is easy the first time, but I recommend taking a different pill the second time than the first time. The pill you took once already is in no condition to be taken again.
A regular bid consists of a natural number from one to seven and ``a suit.'' A suit in this context is clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, or no-trump. Regular bids are ordered: a higher number always corresponds to a higher bid, and if the numbers are the same, then the bid with the higher-ranking suit is the higher bid (in the previous sentence, the suits are listed in order of increasing rank).
If all four players pass after the deal, there is a new deal. If there is a bid in the first go-round, then bidding continues until three successive players pass, which means that you can't raise your own bid.
A player may double if the last bid was a regular bid by an opposing player, and may redouble if the last bid was a double by an opposing player. (When 7 no-trump is redoubled, bidding ends immediately and everyone chants.)
This entry is actually something of a mock-up, inserted so that other entries with links to it have an it to link to. It's not finished, in other words.
For some reason, the bidet is used principally by women. I guess that's because it's about the right size to serve as a baby's bath. Yeah, that's it.
Recent archaeological research suggests that the baths at Bath were not Roman but Celtic. Quite surprising if true.
First the man takes a beer,
then the beer takes a beer,
then the bier takes the man.
For those of you studying the plain-text print-out version (or just carrying it around for the exercise), ``drunk entry'' above is the specific entry for the term drunk (high-lighted as a link in hypertext); more than one entry seems to have been written under the influence of liquid inspiration.
Looks like my memory was alcohol-impaired. Maybe my judgment was impaired too. I better see her again as soon as possible to learn some more travelling-with-children acronyms and to confirm the accuracy of my recollection that she's one hot babe.
(Yes, my selfless devotion to this glossary is the stuff of legend.)
The word bigamy itself entered English in the thirteenth century from Old French, in the form bigame (< medieval Latin bigamus), without too much legal baggage. Besides the conventional sense they have today, bigame and the modern form bigamy also had the meaning in Ecclesiastical Law of marrying a second time, possibly legally (typically after the death of one's first spouse, since the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce). That is not to say that whether a second marriage was contracted legally or not was insignificant. Until the reign of William III, bigamy in Christian England was punishable by death. Of course, as Anne Boleyn and many others discovered, having a spouse who can't get a divorce may not be less fatal.
Just to be slightly technical, bigamy is the name of the crime in which a person already legally married contracts a second marriage (in a jurisdiction where the first marriage is recognized). There is no need to define separate crimes for differing degrees of polygamy or oligogamy -- tri- or (preferably, I think) ter-gamy, quadrigamy, etc. -- since each subsequent marriage contracted during a valid first marriage is already a distinct individual crime of bigamy. For what to do when charged, see trigamy defense. For some egregious instances of modern bigamy, look under McBride.
If you want to make a distinction, the state of holy, or unholy, or any-remaining-optionsly matrimony between one man and two women is bigyny, and a similar arrangement between one woman and two men is biandry. Actually, these words (and the nonbarbaric di- versions) don't exist (polygamy, polygyny, and polyandry do), but I created them to make a point. There was a time when it was needless to specify that marriage involving one man and two women meant two marriages -- each involving the man and one of the women. When one recognizes, as some jurisdictions do, the possibility of two persons of the same sex being legally married, it becomes possible for any three individuals (above a certain age of consent, for now) to contract three distinct marriages. This gives rise to interesting possibilities. For example, if two women marry in a jurisdiction where that is legal, and one of them subsequently marries a man in another jurisdiction where same-sex marriages are not recognized, then the wife in the second marriage might be a bigamist in the first jurisdiction, even though the second marriage was legally entered into. How can the first jurisdiction pretend to accept the legality of marriages performed in the second if they are bigamous in its own? Of course, if the wording of the bigamy statutes carelessly assumed that only persons of different sexes marry, there might be no problem.
Andrew Koppelman's Same Sex, Different States (Yale U.P., 2006), has something to say about the important difficulties posed in the preceding paragraph. (I'll summarize to the glossary if I ever have the time to read and digest this. Pending that, you might as well know that there's a relevant book.)
- The moment when our universe came into being, roughly speaking. This occurred about fifteen billion years ago.
- The deregulation of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). This occurred on October 27, 1986. On that day fixed brokerage commissions ended and the metaphorical wall separating brokers from market makers in securities fell. A unique supervisory system made up principally of self-regulatory industry groups will got underway at the same time. (The corresponding event on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) took place on May 1, 1975, and was known as May Day. From all reports, the subsequent months felt like MAY-DAY.
In September 1996 a new company started flying under the same name and logos, and even some of the same management, using three A-330's.
- Accounting Firms in the US:
Arthur Andersen
Arthur Young
Coopers & Lybrand
Deloitte Haskins and Sells
Ernst & Whinney
Peat, Marwick, Mitchell
Price Waterhouse
Touche Ross - The title of a book by Mark Stevens (MacMillan, 1981), from which I cribbed the preceding list. There's been some conglomeration since 1981, as is clear from the Big Four list. Stevens didn't call these ``accounting firms in the US,'' as I do. He called them ``huge multinational business organizations, the largest professional firms in the world, and some of the most influential financial powers on earth'' (p. 2). This isn't really specific enough. GM fits the description just as well. He goes on (p. 3): ``The Big Eight are, among other things, auditors, accountants, executive headhunters, merger-makers, tax specialists, consultants, attorneys, lobbysts, expert witnesses, financial planners, actuaries, engineers.'' This puts me in the mind of those descriptions of housewives that make them sound like domestic multinationals. Point taken, but... a few counterpoints: (1) A tax specialist is someone or something that specializes in taxes. (2) GM is in the finance business, but ``motor vehicle manufacturer'' still describes it better than any laundry list of the activities it has its fingers in (or had, before it spun a lot of stuff off). (3) If you subcontract for art, that doesn't make you an artist. (And the subcontractor probably isn't one either.) (4) All of the Big Eight began as accounting firms. I'm willing to compromise: we can call them accounting and business consulting services firms.
- Accounting firms in the US and much of the world:
Deloitte & Touche, LLP
E&Y
KPMG
PwC
That's right: it's a quiz. You should know this. Yeah, yeah, KPMG is hard, but ask yourself: do I want to be intimately familiar with the tedious organizational history of the world's richest accounting firms, or do I want to be poor? - Britain's mainline railways in the Grouping era (1923-47). In
clockwise as well as alphabetical order:
GWR
LMS
LNER
SR - A single US railway named after four cities (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis).
Hmm... 50 daughters of Danaeus... maybe Mee's play gave Tom Hanks and the other producers their idea.
Notice how concentrated these names are in the middle of the alphabet. It's because the states are in the middle of the country. States that are at the extreme ends of the country, like Alaska and Washington, are on the ends of the alphabet. Sure.
In 1998-9, Notre Dame considered an invitation to join, but eventually decided to stay independent.
- Most prominent science-fiction authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.
- WWII allied leaders: Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. [Harry Truman is no more one of the Big Three than, say, Philip José Farmer is one of the Big Three. I have nothing against these two at all; I only mention PJF to name-drop, as I contributed some ideas to his most recent work, The City Beyond Play (September 2007).]
- Automakers: GM, Ford, and Chrysler. When Chrysler was a division of Daimler-Chrysler, it wasn't clear whether these were the big-three automakers of North America, the US, Detroit, or what, but ``big two automakers'' never caught on (see AAMA). Now that Chrysler is again American-owned, that problem is solved. The only problems left are for the companies not to go bankrupt, although that may be part of the solution.
- Others listed at Wikipedia. I think ``Big three Christian Beings: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit'' is a bit of a stretch, but it shows a good-faith (sorry) attempt at inclusiveness.
There are other duopolies!
Of course!
But I've actually seen that duopoly called ``Big Two.'' Another US duopoly that comes to mind is that of Kappa Publishing and Dell (the latter bought out Penny Press some years ago), which together dominate the market for cheap crossword-puzzle magazines. I remember reading an interview with a guy at one of those enterprises, in which the fellow says something like ``we always say that between the two of us we have 99% of the market, but really I don't know of anyone else who is even in the business.''
This should not be confused with the Logan airport at Boston: BOS.
- Laws governing, I don't know, bicycles, bisexuals, bigamists?
- A misspelling or perhaps a misconstrual of by-laws. For example, on May 6, 2005, the ABC TV affiliate WLOS (``Western North Carolina's New Leader'') reported a membership dispute at East Waynesville Baptist Church. Pastor Chan Chandler told nine members that if they didn't support George W. Bush, they should resign or repent. They were expelled, and forty others left in protest. Although he declined an interview with WLOS, the minister did explain that ``the actions were not politically motivated.'' According to the WLOS website, ``there are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed.''
- (With capitalization) rules governing the Bank of Indonesia.
If you think I put in this entry just to have a place to mention the news from East Waynesville, you're completely wrong. I put it here because I couldn't find the bye-laws entry.
- Having a knowledge of two tongues. That's ``tongues'' in the sense of languages. What you do in the privacy of each other's mouths, I'm not interested to know. See also bilingual education.
- In various contexts, two particular tongues are clearly implied, and the general term is understood in a restricted sense. For example, in Canadian bureaucratese, bilingual refers to those proficient in French. Hmm, let me check that. Oh, it means fluent in French and English. In much of the US, bilingual meants fluent, okay, maybe not exactly fluent, in Spanish and English.
- Decorated with both red-figure and black-figure art (see BF entry).
- Having two tongues. (Well, it could mean that, anyway.)
In Spanish, bilingual is bilingüe. In French, it's bilingue. Not what you expected, huh? German: zweisprachig. Every continent needs an outlier.
There is a more subtle flaw in the rationale for bilingual education, so-called, and that is the undervaluation of what educationists call ``language arts.'' Geography, history, science, and most subjects in elementary school are less important for their own sakes than as opportunities for mastering the language. A thorough competence in the language and mores of one's society is more important than the other specific knowledge that grade school is supposed to impart. For immigrant children, the need is even more urgent. That is, the metric of utility is more sensitive to language deficiencies at the elementary level than to language deficiencies at an advanced level or to deficiencies in any other grade-school subjects.
The tragedy is that children of elementary-school age are language sponges. Delaying their absorption of the country's main language is a disservice and an opportunity missed. In fact, it is absurd and cruel that children usually do not begin to study second languages until past age 12, when the task begins to be work.</rant>
``Dual-language'' elementary education, also called ``two-way immersion,'' is what you might have supposed bilingual education to be. In dual-language programs, students spend about half of their time in an English classroom environment and half in another language.
More generally, in the US scheme, a numerical prefix bi-, tri-, etc. before -illion counts the number of factors of a thousand multiplying the first thousand; in the other popular scheme the prefix refers to the number of factors of a million. Thus, trillion = 1012 (Amer.) and 1018 (traditional Br., current Fr. and Ger.), etc.
In Britain today, and in much of the British Commonwealth outside North America, the situation is perched uneasily between the two conventions. Generally speaking, the traditional British sense of billion coincides with the current French meaning (1012), but there have been a number of moves toward aligning usage with the US convention. There are some indications [Ftnt. 17] that the American usage, consonant with the factors-of-1000 SI prefix usage, is gaining greater acceptance in Britain, but it is still too ambiguous to use without qualification or fear of misunderstanding. The French meaning has also varied; the American meaning of billion corresponds to an earlier French definition.
In German and French ``milliard'' is 109; British English has that word (cf. Mrd), but the British have tended to use ``thousand million,'' as the Moody Blues did in a song called ``Question'').
See the entry "`billion': a U.K. view" in the alt.english.usage FAQ. There's also a history of the Sagan "billions and billions."
``A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon it adds up to real money.''
-- the wisdom of Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-1969).
``There are very few things we'll spend a billion dollars on just because they're cool.''
-- John Connolly, an engineer in NASA's Exploration Office, commenting on the possibility of another manned mission to the moon (Discover magazine, September 1998, p. 75).
When the liver is diseased, this pigment may fail to be excreted through the bile duct and instead accumulate in the body. This turns the whites of the eyes yellow and causes a yellowish discoloration of the skin, a condition called jaundice. Jaundice occurs in various kinds of chronic poisoning, including alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver, and by at least five viral diseases (see hepatitis).
The bima has a table on which a bible scroll is placed for reading (see megilla). The bima serves other obvious purposes, but practice varies. There is usually at least one lectern which is more convenient for reading less awkward books. (Haftorah readings are normally from a codex, and much of the service consists of the recitation of prayers rather than the reading of canonically holy books.)
Traditionally, the bima has been at the center of the room; the Talmud mentions (Suk. 51b) a wooden pulpit in the center of the synagogue of Alexandria. In Oriental and Sephardi synagogues there are usually no chairs between the bima and the front wall, where the torah scrolls are kept in an ark. This doesn't make very efficient use of space, according to some notions of ``efficient.'' Maimonides opined (you could look it up) that it's okay to have some chairs between the bima and the ark, and many Orthodox synagogues follow this.
I've been in at least a couple of Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues (one Hasidic, one not) where the bima was at the front. So it's clear that the bima location is not a big hang-up for everyone, but early in the twentieth century it was a bone of contention the size of a brontosaur femur. Brontosaur isn't kosher, in case you were wondering. At least, I'm sure it would be treyf (i.e., not kosher) today. This might not be an entirely academic or talmudical issue. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago cited a news item about prehistoric fish or salamander preserved in a frozen stream. It was reportedly so fresh that the people who found it devoured the meat before it could be studied. However, since we don't want to go off on a tangent, we'll relegate further discussion of that to a future GULAG entry.
You know, the kosherness of well-aged and too-well-aged meat is a lot more interesting than bima position, so let's talk about that. My friend Dan had an interesting thought on the subject. When Dan was 12 years old, he and a friend and Dan's kid brother Lou made a comic-book parody (or perhaps a travesty) called ``The Adventures of Stupidman.'' The hero was transported back in time to before the exodus from Egypt, and the first thing he did was go and have himself a meal of pork, since it wasn't treyf yet then. I guess this is one possible interpretation of whatchamightcall the question of when a particular one of God's laws is ``in vigor,'' based on the legal fiction of a covenant. They sold 160 copies; it must be collector's item.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION, okay? (That means it's not finished.)
At Princeton University, where I went to graduate school, the graduate students' ``residential college'' (local name for dorm complex, roughly) is called the Graduate College (GC). In the basement it has a bar (``The Debasement Bar''). One evening there I found B__ (a mechanical engineer pal) with a cute airhead townie that he'd met on a bus. In those days I was even ruder than I am today, and I happened to utter a sentence that contained the word bimbo. I don't remember what the sentence was, but I do remember that she heard the word. She seemed to be about equal parts
- insulted, and
- amazed that anyone could be so rude.
B__ assured me the next day that my unguarded comment hadn't been a problem. Ah -- business giveth, and business taketh away. Or maybe it's the other way around. I'm thinking of the anecdotes described in the long paragraph about (actually not much about) Joseph Black.
It occurs to me now that some readers may misdoubt my veracity. Those who've read the VTVM entry might suppose that this entry is, similarly, only loosely fact-based, with the COBOL thing as just a bit of amusing creativity. Well, it was a bit of amusing creativity, but we created it on the spot. B__ also achieved local fame for inventing a billiards variant.
I think they should do what the underarm deodorant and antiperspirant marketers did: come out with roll-on products. This sounds stupid now, but it's not any more stupid than those sheet-thin menthol chews that began to be marketed in 2003-2004. We introduced an entry here for the ``Suburban Conquistador'' before we learned that Cadillac and Lincoln were marketing their own SUV's.
It's a very reliable phenomenon. The next time I noticed a book with upside-down English spine text, it was Special Forces in the Invasion of France by Paul Gaujac, a translation of his French original (Les forces spéciales de la Libération), published by Histoire & Collections.
Okay, I finally came across a legitimate domestic instance: Public Policy and the Dead Hand, by Lewis M. Simes, part of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan. It was published by the University of Michigan Law School in 1955, which is not so long ago that printing downward along the spine was not standard. The book was manufactured by Twentieth Century Printing Co., Inc., of Baltimore, Maryland.
Okay, let's eye-dropper some information onto this entry. A magazine with a paperback-like binding -- a narrow side perpendicular to front and back covers -- is said to be ``perfect-bound.''
Bilingual books may pose a problem, but here's a practical solution that I haven't seen much of lately. The volume before me is two books. One book has the title of Proceedings of the Canadian Congress of Correction 1957: Montréal May 26-29, 1957, and was published by the Canadian Corrections Association of the Canadian Welfare Council. I imagine it has something to do with editorial work, given the thoughtful publication scheme. (There'd be a lot more editorial work to do, of course, if it were the American Corrections Association of the British Welfare Council, or vice versa.)
The other book has the title Le Rapport du Congrès canadien sur la Délinquance, 1957: Montréal du 26 au 29 mai 1957, and it's from La Société canadienne de Criminologie du Conseil canadien du Bien-être. I guess it was one of those joint-conference things, like APA/AIA meetings. Just so as not to show any bias, I suppose that presentations were in a neutral language -- probably Swahili. Anyway, to get back to the interesting issue: the volume is bound together like one of those flippable paired novels now regretably so rare. If you read to the end of one book and turn the page, the print on the next page appears upside-down. The volume is about 4 cm thick, so the binding is wide enough to allow the short titles to be printed across the top (i.e., the respective tops) of the binding. For a little more about how that worked, see W.F. CARABINE.
Transesterification generally is like a reaction between a relatively strong base and a salt. In the latter reaction, the strong base combines with the anion of the salt, and the cation of the base forms a (weaker) base. Transesterification works the same way, except that instead of salts one has esters, instead of cations one has oxyalkanes, and instead of acids in general one has organic acids. The organic acids of the original esters form new esters with the added alcohols, and release the original bonding partners as alcohols.
Transesterification was investigated during WWII as a source of glycerine needed for explosives. Probably the usual source of glycerine is the saponification process, so I guess that during WWII, people were not washing as much as usual. Either that, or they were using more nitroglycerine than usual. Transesterification of oils and fats is also similar to saponification, except that instead of glycerine and soap, one produces glycerine and fatty-acid esters. Thus, for example, RME is a mix of methyl esters of rapeseed fatty acids.
The great disadvantage of using straight vegetable oils (SVO's) as substitutes for diesel fuel is their much higher viscosity. The high viscosity can be understood crudely. (Like raw, undistilled petroleum or uncooked vegetable oil, get it? Oh, never mind.) To understand the general trends, one must recognize two qualitative sources of viscosity: deformation within the fatty acids of a triglyceride (fat or oil) molecule, and deformation of the molecule as a whole.
To take the second part first: fat and oil molecules are sort of dendritic. They consist of three long fatty acids that can rotate about a common axis of the three carbons of the glycerine, functioning as rather limber knuckles. Adjacent oil molecules become entangled, giving rise to viscosity. Transesterification separates the individual fatty acids, so that they don't entangle as three connected fingers but as individual fingers. (Don't imagine this too literally before lunch unless you're on a diet.) This substantially reduces the viscosity.
The principal difference between oils and fats is in the degree of saturation. Complete saturation means that carbon chains have as many hydrogen atoms as are possible for their chain topology. A monounsaturated chain has a single double bond, and each of the two carbons participating in the double bond has one less hydrogen than it would have if completely saturated. Polyunsaturated chains have more double bonds. Double bonds do not rotate freely, so less saturated chains are more rigid, and conversely.
Higher rigidity on a molecular scale in this case means lower rigidity on a macroscopic scale. Again intuitively: a disordered aggregation of rigid rods does not entangle and clump, but instead spreads out. Viewed on a large length scale at which individual rods cannot be distinguished, this is basically liquid behavior. Saturated fatty acids (i.e., those with no double bonds) correspond to floppy strings or chains rather than to rigid rods, and can form a pile or clump (this isn't the usual technical language, okay?). Hence, saturated fatty acids are more viscous or solid on a macroscopic scale.
Thus, it is fats (as opposed to oils) that are generally more highly saturated. They are more viscous than oils of comparable molecular mass at a given temperature. Equivalently, fats solidify at higher temperatures. That's why, to create a low-viscosity biofuel, one wants to transesterify oils rather than fats.
But first, let's have a lot of superfluous context. The quotation is from the introduction (starting at page ix) to James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow (pp. xiv + 686 -- do the math). At the age of xxviii, Atlas had published a biography of ``the poet Delmore Schwartz.'' (Oh, that Delmore Schwartz. Delmore is such a common name, you know. Is it really so snobbish to sneer at such thumbnail clarifications here? Can it really be thought uncondescending to readers of an adult-size biography of Saul Bellow, to suggest that they do not know who Delmore Schwartz was? For more of this snitty snoottiness, see the .se entry. Yeah, I'm shooting for some sibilant tongue twisters.) His biographies of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz are the two for which James Atlas is best known. James does not appear to be related to Charles Atlas, except probably through Charlemagne.
Anyway, Atlas (James Atlas, not the body-builder and fantastic, historic adman) had been pegged as a career biographer and was casting about for his next victim, err, subject. He had already signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to do the authorized biography of Edmund Wilson. (``America's gratest modern man of letters,'' okay? Yeah, ``greatest,'' ``gratingest,'' whatever.) But after five years Atlas ``hadn't written a word.'' [I've seen the term over-literal a lot. In fairness, under-literal is a more common fault.] Maybe he should've tried mapping him. Atlas writes that he loved Wilson's work -- he'd ``read every word he'd written'' (and published, I suppose). However...
I had a toxic response to his character. The bullying proclamations, the tedious self-revelations, the drinking and philandering--All that juicy material! On the one hand, we see that James Atlas has a gift for thumbnail characterizations. On the hand with the other thumbnail, we see that he failed to appreciate the value of a good salacious ogre of a subject.
--in the end, he just didn't appeal to me as a subject to whose life and work I was willing to apprentice myself for the better part of a decade, the time any conscientious biographer of a major personage can expect to allot.If he regards his own biography of Delmore Schwartz as conscientious, then I suppose he started it in college. Anyway, this was the point: you must devote the better part of a decade to do justice to a great literary life.
My experience of romance writing was similar to Atlas's experience of Wilson biographizing. I had planned a first book in the genre. (I had read an entire romance paperback. I also skimmed two more.) I hadn't signed a contract with Mr. Strauss yet, but my cousin Victoria and I had come up with a great nom de plume for me. Yet I had a toxic response--in the end, romance novelizing didn't appeal to me as anything that I could endure for the better part of ten minutes. I once belonged to a writers' group that was run by a couple who wrote romance novels. I was drummed out. I was drummed out of two writers' groups I attended. The third just stopped meeting, or so I was told.
BTW, this James Atlas is the same James Atlas who gets a brief mention at the periodization puns in book titles entry, for My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. The dust jacket of that book mentions that he ``is the founder of Atlas Books and the general editor of the Eminent Lives series.''
Biola is also a fair transliteration of the Japanese word for viola. There are now some katakana characters for syllables beginning with a vee sound, and the appropriate one is used in one Japanese spelling of viola, but in practice a bee sound is used.
This word had a high or rising pitch accent on the iota, so with accent, it was written bíos (combining form bío-). This was an instance where the accent was semantically useful (see next). The semantic field corresponding to the English words `life, living' was shared in ancient Greek primarily by bíos and zôê. (I can't easily add an acute accent to the eta; just pretend it's there.) The latter word, meaning essentially `animal life,' is etymon of English words like zoo, zoology, and zootrophy (not something you win at the zoo).
The earliest recorded bios pun, so far as I am aware, is due to that madcap philosopher Hê -- see the mad cap? -- rakleitos of Ephesos (more usually in English we use the Latinized form Heraclitus of Ephesus):
This has Diels-Kranz fragment number 22-48 (fifth and later
editions; 12-66 in earlier). The unaccented Greek reads
bios: tôi oun toxôi onoma bios, ergon de thanatos.
Heraclitus lived and probably tried out a bow around 500 B.C.; now he's
dead.
There doesn't seem to be any English word which this biós serves as a root of.
There's an awful lot of biomass in bacteria, and a lot in water, but here's something: bacteria (like actors) prefer to live in films. The surface of water with air or a solid has a high concentration of solutes that bacteria think of as nutrients, and protozoans that like to have bacteria for lunch encounter a little difficulty in penetrating surfaces. There are always a few free bacteria around, but even the flagellates go for the films. The thickness of the biosphere, or its depth, is apparently greater than anyone used to suppose. The presence of bacteria in subterranean sedimentary rock as early as the 1920's used to be dismissed as due to contamination after retrieval. Research since the mid-1980's has demonstrated that autochthonous thermophile bacteria and archaea live (low metabolic-rate lives) down to depths of at least a few kilometers, in sedimentary and even igneous rock.
The term biosphere was coined in the nineteenth century by the London-born Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. He slipped it in near the end of a monograph about the Alps. I guess when you've got a neologism you want to introduce, any text will do. [Suess was in many respects the scientific predecessor of Wegener, and he introduced many terms for phenomena that can only be adequately explained by the theory of plate tectonics; Gondwanaland and Tethys Sea were first conjectured and named in his Das Antlitz der Erde (`The Face of the Earth').]
Suess's word biosphere was popularized by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920's. Vernadsky was a pioneer in studying the effects of life on the atmosphere and the earth's crust, and is thus regarded as the founder of the theory of the biosphere. He also gave some currency to a related term, noosphere (q.v.). This latter term was apparently introduced by that infamous mystic P. Teilhard de Chardin in his L'Hominisation (1925). By this term (noosphère in French) he meant that part of the biosphere occupied by thinking humanity. This was supposed to include both red and blue states. Just as the noosphere is a subset (or subspace or subregion or sub-something) of the biosphere, so the blogosphere is a subset of the noosphere. We could take this further and define a newsosphere as a subset of the blogosphere, but we won't. We'll just suggest it and let someone else run with that sphere.
No, no: beer is cerveza in Spanish. (And cerveja in Portuguese, cervesa in Catalan.) It's birra in Italian. Spanish does have the word birria, however, that refers to anything horrible or ugly. In Mexico it has the more specific sense of something insipid to drink. I have to wonder if that doesn't reflect American influence and the English word beer.
Just give me muh-uh-uh-uh-ney! Muh-uh-ney -- that's what I need -- That's! What I need!
Jeanne M. Dallard has some links to BISDN documentation at NIST. Whatis?com offers a brief description.
BISG also puts out an annual report on the economic health of the book trade. In August 1999, they reported that after a general decline in the mid-nineties, there was an increase by over four percent in trade book sales (adult hard cover and trade paperbacks) from 1997 to 1998 (497 million volumes sold in 1998). 368 million children's books were sold, a six percent increase from a weak 1997, but still below 1996 sales. Unit sales of books about science and technology have been falling since 1995, and this is attributed to increased electronic publishing -- books on disk, CD-ROM, or on the internet.
Vide error latency and signature analysis.
BIT's have received considerably less press than PTA's. In a paper published online in January 2011, Jeffrey H. Bergstrand and Peter Egger suggest that BIT's are ``at least as significant'' as PTA's. (Bergstrand and various co-authors have been making that argument for a few years, but it's not the point of the cited paper. See references therein.) They note that in 2010, the U.S. had 40 BIT's in force and only 17 PTA's.
BITA is a member of BMHF.
Ingredients:
100 g Zhiguli Beer 70 g Dandruff Treatment 30 g ``Sadko'' Shampoo 30 g Athlete's Foot Remedy 20 g Small Bug Killer
Preparation:
Combine all ingredients and steep for a week in cigar tobacco. Serve.
See Spirit of Geneva for similar recipes and more on the book.
BITNET wasn't real-time -- it was occasional. Scheduled message-passing communications became increasingly frequent into the nineties. If you've got an old BITNET address of someone at a university, and you don't think they've moved, then there's a good chance that their old address username@SCHLNM.BITNET has become <username@schlnm.edu>.
Regarding the letter jay in the country code... for what it's worth, the I/J distinction is a relatively recent one. It can't even be indicated in German Fraktur (the original `Gothic script').
![[Image: npn BJT schematic]](images/tokuyasu-mirror/transistorcircuit.gif)
It's easy to fall into the pleonastic habit of saying, redundantly: ``BJT transistor.''
(Why does bju.com forward to FriendFinder? Gotta think about this. If you become a member you can search by religion and ethnicity, and these don't have to be the same as yours.)
``Yeah sorta. It's two burgers with cheese and a special sauce.''
``Well, I don't want the cheese. What's in the special sauce?''
``All I can tell you is, it's like a Big Mac.''
``Can I have it without the special sauce?''
I can't have it without the special sauce. ``Special orders don't upset'' them, but they may just not fill them.
The first Burger King opened in 1955 in Miami as ``Instaburger King.'' Skipping ahead a little bit, a merger of Grand Metropolitan and Guinness in 1997 created Diageo, which inherited BK (still based in Florida). In 2002, BK had 11,500 US stores, second only to McDonald's (over 13,000). London-based Diageo plc put it up for bid in 2002, originally seeking $2.5 billion, but soon had to lower its target to $2.3 billion.
(Turns out that it's rather a fixer-upper. As of 2002, average sales per store had been flat for years at about $1.1 million, while McDonald's was up to $1.6 million. The company went through nine chief executives in 13 years, and from 1996 to 2001, customer visits to BK stores in the US dropped 20%. McDonald's has been expanding internationally, with 50% of revenues coming from non-US sales; BK: 23%.)
On July 25, 2002, Texas Pacific Group (an LBO shop), in cooperation with Boston's Bain Capital Inc. and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, among others, reached agreement to buy BK from Diageo. The price was $2.26 billion, including $600 million cash. The deal left Burger King's management in place and was expected to lead to more capital for the Florida-based chain. In late July I mentioned this to the woman working the cash register at the BK in the Huddle. Actually, I mentioned it to Gary, but she kibitzed. She was happy to hear that the new owners were in an invest mood and that they didn't plan a lot of store closings. Isn't it great to have committed employees? It's not a business -- it's a community! In fact, it's not just a community -- it's a family! A big family, that needs to put food on the table.
Burger King is also mentioned at the KFC entry.