And on the subject of subliminal advertising, Debra Ginsberg revealed these research findings in Waiting:
... I began experimenting with earrings early in my waitressing career. I found that if I wore fish earrings, I would invariably sell more fish, earrings in the shape of grapes or bottles equaled greater sales of wine, earrings in the shape of pasta--yes, I actually own a pair--were always noticed and invariably spurred orders for pasta.
Man, I'm mining that book deep. But what do grapes have to do with wine? What? You say wine is made from grapes? I didn't know! The things some people think ought to be common knowledge -- it's amazing. Once Dennis (Gary's brother) was skywatching with someone when they saw a shooting star. The other guy (let me be clear about that: not Dennis -- I wouldn't want to give him any anonymous notoriety) said, ``wouldn't it be cool if all the stars shot off at once?''
Yesterday I told my mom about how once in grad school I was telling a table-mate about a couple of identical twins. I had given their names, which were not common, and she had interrupted to ask ``are they the same sex?'' My mother insisted that it was not completely preposterous for someone to be ignorant enough to ask the question. Her idea of abject ignorance is not knowing why floats have greater buoyancy in the ocean than in fresh water. My friend Vladimir thought it, um, odd that I shouldn't know the standard number of teeth in an adult human mouth (32; see tooth numbering).
More pasta information is coming soon to an SBF entry near you -- probably the marzipan entry, when we have one. Be on the look-out.
El Estado reconoce y sostiene la religión Católica, pero garantiza el ejercicio público de todo otro culto (Art. 3ro. de la Constitución Política del Estado).
That is: According to the third article of their constitution, `the state recognizes and supports the [Roman] Catholic religion, but guarantees the public exercise of all others.'
BolNet claims to be the highest net in the world. Here's another Bolivian bookmark.
Mathematically, the way one uses this is to determine electronic wave functions that are solutions of the Schrödinger equation for a Hamiltonian in which the ion coordinates are treated as fixed and the ion kinetic energy is ignored. The resulting electronic states have, of course, energies that depend on the ion coordinates. These energies are, in turn, used as potentials for the purely ionic Schrödinger equation. [Physically, this corresponds to the idea that the time scales relevant to ion wavefunctions are so long compared to electronic time scales that the electrons evolve adiabatically, staying in the ``same'' (i.e., the continuously deformed) electronic states.]
On the other hand, bos is a genus that in principle, at least, is more precise in terms of species than cow, bull or cattle. Also, unlike cow, bull, or ox, it is not gender-specific. Therefore, I approve the fact that all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept bos (and bo), but not boes. I just don't agree with their reasons.
The quantity given in board feet is not the volume, exactly, because of conventions about how it is computed. The quantity of wood in board feet is computed from the nominal values of width and thickness (see lumber dimensions) and the actual length, except that for nominal thicknesses of less than one inch, the thickness is taken to be one inch. So if you were to use board feet to compute the quantity of sheet stock exclusively, you'd basically be computing something close to the area in square feet.
After 2006, all roads used as public paths (RUPP's) that had not been designated as BOAT's were designated ``restricted byways,'' and the old BOAT's became plain ``byways'' (unrestricted vehicularly or grammatically). The term BOAT is still used (to mean simply ``byway'' now).
If you don't know of a school that will take your boat anchor, try the Detwiler Foundation, which has detailed information (by state) on its Computers-For-Schools program. (But don't try too hard. The link was dead when I checked Oct. 14, 2003; I'm hoping that was temporary. Okay, as of 2010 it's back up, but not too useful unless you read Japanese.) Another group, PEP (``Resources for Parents, Educators & Publishers'') offered a PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs. It also listed non-US agencies. Now that's gone. Why are these sites going away? I think it's become common for local governments and other organizations to sponsor periodic electronic-equipment recycling collections, so it's no longer the problem it was.
This is probably the place to mention Motherboard Enterprises, Inc. When I browsed the site a few years ago, they explained their creative work thus:
Founded in 1991, Motherboard specializes in the manufacturing of high quality gift products utilizing reclaimed circuit boards and other fun and unique materials.These products capture the intrinsic beauty of technology while providing an environmentally friendly alternative to the circuit boards being disposed of in landfills. Each product may vary by color and pattern making every item unique - virtually one of a kind.
The circuit board may have been designed for use in a computer, an electronics component, a phone, or a television.
What an exciting crafts idea! Wasn't that inspiring? The domain name (motherboardinc.com) is available.
If your computer is a real antique, you might find a taker among the subscribers of ClassicCmp.
There was a NYTimes article, around summer 1998, on how folks won't discard their old computers, perhaps because they cost too much in the first place, and they're hanging around behind doors, on top of file cabinets, under desks, that sort of thing. It's true. It's worse at some public institutions, because they often have unrealistic accounting procedures. At UB, for example, equipment stays on the books at its original value instead of being depreciated, so the state hoards all its boat anchors like a crazy-jealous miserly aunt. These stupid accounting practices clutter the laboratories, so people leave worthless equipment out in the hall hoping it will be stolen. Vain hope (but see the Cu entry). This creates a fire hazard, so they have to make rules against leaving equipment in the halls.
As of 2010, I'm having second thoughts about that last paragraph. Computers prices have come down some, and people have gotten more used to tossing them. Some support for literally tossing them may have come from that cell-phone ad on television, where people stood around on rooftops waiting for a dump truck to pass by so they could toss their old brand-X cell phones into it.
On the private side, property taxes make people acutely aware of the cost of space, so stuff is likelier to get tossed. Also, someone is likelier to go to Washington D.C. and lobby for more liberal (i.e., faster) depreciation schedules for tax purposes.
There have been cute advertisements showing computers in reuse applications, such as monitor boxes converted to aquaria. Ironically, a good monitor is one of the easier components to integrate in an upgraded technology environment. Or was, until we all switched to plasma screens.
A synonym of boat anchor, with another interesting assortment of connotations, is legacy system.
Not only computers can be boat anchors. The newsgroup for vacuum-tube-based amateur radios is called <rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors>. Here's a page with pictures of boat anchors of the radio kind.
When I worked at the Princeton University cyclotron, I was told that the big (meter-scale) blocks of cement that were used as bulk radiation shielding had been boat anchors. They had handles, but I don't know -- they didn't look like boat anchors.
- Oscillate vertically like an object floating in wavy water, or to move in a way that suggests this motion.
- Cut. Hence ``bobbed hair'' (short hair; one women's and girls' hair style popular in the 20's was called a ``bob'') and ``bobby socks'' (half-height socks, a teenage girls' fashion in the late 50's or so). Cf. a vindication of the nomen est omen proverb.
- An oscillation caused by bobbing (verb definition 1).
- A short hair style.
- Brit. slang for a shilling (a coin worth one twentieth of a pound sterling; five new pence or twelve old). Possibly this name for a shilling comes from the old low-denomination Scottish coin bawbee. This usage has nothing to do with the British expression ``And Bob's your uncle!'' The latter honors the memory of a famous incident of literal nepotism.
This book was discovered and promoted by Bob Schieffer, who apparently has nothing better to do for CBS News at his office in Washington, DC. This entire sordid inanity is what you could call extreme middle-brow.
``Bobos in Paradise'' sounds like ``Lawyers in Love,'' for more on which, see the PSU entry. Acronyms like bobo are wreaking havoc with the rule about forming plurals with -es from words ending in o.
It's disturbing that bobo is almost an anagram of boo, bob, oboe, and boo-boo. Anagrammatical reasoning often offers insights, but I can't think of any precise anagrams. Can you? More David Brooks content, alas, in the good humor entry.
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- A subvariety of the romance novel genre. The bodice is an outmoded
component of women's underwear (I think maybe that's supposed to be
``foundation garment'' or something else more decorous -- not VPL), so it's probably superfluous to explain that
bodice-rippers stress the excitement of seduction, and that they tend toward
historical settings peopled by men in exotic, violent lines of work like
pirate or highwayman.
In our modern era, of course, the only politically correct kind of sexual congress resembles political congress: it involves a lot of deferential expressions of respect and explicit, if possibly unromantic, reassurances that interaction is welcomed by the non-initiating party. Everything else is date rape. Pandas are like that, but they're not quite extinct yet. Europeans are going that way too.
This new regime seems to have drawbacks as a setting for sexy romances. Another advantage of historical settings is that obviously, the reader is not projecting himself or herself into the person of the heroine but merely indulging in an intellectual exercise that is not congruent with personal fantasies. Hence, no guilt!
- Romance novel.
His classmates gave him the name ``Bo Diddley'' around the time he got his first guitar, a cheap Harmony ``acoustic'' (as we call them now). It was a gift for Christmas 1940 from Lucille McDaniel, his adopted sister (a cousin or a half-sister, I can't make out which). He turned 12 the following December 30 (yes, Bo is one of those tragically undergifted late-December babies).
Because many of the entries in this glossary are permanently incomplete, it may be hard to tell that this entry is temporarily incomplete (for the foreseeable future). There's a lot of contradictory and even self-contradictory material on the web regarding the origin of the Bo Diddley name, and I plan to summarize and evaluate some of it. In the meantime, however, I'd like to launch into webspace something apparently not related on any other page mentioning Bo Diddley: Beau Diddely (note spelling of last name as well as first). That's a character in a Zora Neale Hurston story, ``Black Death,'' which might well have appeared around the time Ellas McDaniel got his nickname. (Hurston was one of the stars of the Harlem Renaissance; the story ought to have been widely read at the time it came out.)
Bo Diddley's first record was released by Checker Records in 1955. Checker Records was a subsidiary of Chess Records, which was owned by the brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. One of Diddley's songs on the record was originally called ``Uncle John.'' Changing its title name (and corresponding lyrics) to ``Bo Diddley'' was a move suggested by the Chess brothers. Didn't this damage the scansion some? Bo's discography, according to a page at <bo-diddley.com>, includes ``Bo Diddley'' (1955), ``Go Bo Diddley'' (1958), ``Hey Bo Diddley!'' (1962), ``Bo Diddley & Company'' (1962), ``Big Bad Bo'' (1974), ``Pay Bo Diddley'' (1989), and ``Bo Knows Bo'' (1995). They have the year wrong for the double A-side ``Bo Diddley''/``I'm A Man'', and they missed at least ``The Mighty Bo Diddley'' (1997), ``The Essential Bo Diddley'' (2000), and other works since 1995. In place of a biography, they have a message that begins...
Your Original Biography Of This Celebrity May Be Published HereThey obviously don't know Diddley.Biography must be an orginal [sic] composition beween 1200 and 1500 words containing a factual chronology of dates, events...
Bo Diddley's name occurs in many of his other titles and songs. It reminds me of a guest editorial that Al Franken did on the SNL news segment (in the mid-to-late 1980's, probably). Every time that he found an opportunity to refer to himself, he would give his name in an emphatic appositive phrase (i.e., not ``I'' but ``I, [pregnant pause], AL FRANKEN [name flashes on screen]''). There's a certain charm in unabashedly enthusiastic self-promotion; it is somehow the most honest possible ``act.''
Apropos of Checker Records, mentioned above, I must (absolutely must) note that in Spanish, the game of checkers is called damas (`ladies'). We have a dama entry which mentions another artist with self-titled albums. Also, to recall what you already know, the name ``Chubby Checker'' is a nom de microphone (of Ernest Evans). The name was suggested by Dick Clark's wife; Fats Domino was a popular singer at the time.
Other, equally useful information at the obesity entry. Utterly feckless ``information'' at BMI.
BOE is a highly specific etchant: it etches silicon dioxide and stops at silicon. It's used both for removing grown oxide (etch rate ~2 nm/s at room temperature) and initially to remove the native oxide from silicon wafer surfaces in preparation for further processing.
After a BOE wash, the silicon surface tends to stay hydrogenated for from tens of minutes to an hour. This fact has been used to do atomically precise lithography: after a BOE wash, the hydrogenated silicon wafer was placed in an STM (with an oxygen-containing atmosphere called air), where hydrogen atoms were driven off individually with the STM probe tip, oxidizing the silicon atoms at the slected sites.
Would you like to come up to my laboratory and see my etchings?
The campus shuttle at Berkeley is called the Gobart.
The US Post Office issued a Bogart stamp in June 1997.
Come think of it, bogo would be Spanish for `bogus,' and the singular male ablative form of bogus in Latin, if bogus, a, um were a Latin adjective, which it happens not to be.
More thoughts at 40. Gee, a big crowd of excited information shoppers has gathered around that entry. I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal: 66% more paragraphs of information right here, extra, at the same great low price!
In June 2004, I finished off a 22.5 fl. oz. bottle of Alberto VO5 shampoo that I had bought earlier in the year. No, I don't know what VO5 stands for, but I know that my elementary-school classmate Alberto was teased mercilessly until his family moved away. He had smooth and shiny dark brown hair. (For more on the Alberto name, see the Albion entry.) As it happens, the local Osco was having a sale on the same shampoo, in bottles that said
Dial offers its bar soaps in packages of 12 and in packages with fewer bars. For a while, the bars in the twelve-packs were slightly smaller than the bars in the packages with fewer bars. Doubtless marketing research had shown that people who bought packages with more soap bars didn't really want more soap: they wanted more convenience, so they preferred smaller soap bars. But now people feel differently, so the bars are all the same size.
During the 1992 US presidential campaign, Bill Clinton made ``Buy one, get one free'' a campaign slogan. His wife Hillary often rejoined with ``People call us two-for-one: the Blue Light Special.'' (Blue Light Specials were a promotional scheme used by the Kmart chain of discount stores. Special sales of brief duration were announced over the PA system in the store, and shoppers were directed to find the advertised product under a flashing or rotating blue light. At Kmart in those days, some products were on sale very frequently. At the Kmart near me, there was one kind of sneakers that was on sale for a week every other week.)
The Who sang
And like, one and one don't make two, One and one make one.
The song was called ``Bargain.''
In writing computer programs for atomic-scale calculations, it's usually convenient to use natural units like the bohr, so that floating-point arithmetic doesn't over- or underflow, or (worse) do nonfatal things like try to compute finite quantities by almost-infinite-looping near-zero increments. Also, if you state your results in natural units, any new measurement of the fundamental quantities that define a0 (the reduced Planck's constant ħ, the free electron mass m0, the speed of light c, and the fine-structure constant α) arguably improves the accuracy of your calculation. Oh, alright, you can use Ångström instead.
Bok choi and bok maal are not frequently confused.
Derek Bok was a president of Harvard University in the 1960's. They renamed a center in his honor. Bok also agreed to serve as interim university president starting July 1, 2006, after the departure of Lawrence Summers (see more under James D. Wolfensohn).
A lot of my Indian friends insist that they never saw those movies when they lived in India, that the entire industry was beneath their and their entire family's middle class notice. This ignores the first principle of cinema:
See also Mike's story at the NAFTA entry. For an opposing opinion, see the Charlie's Angels entry. Fans (of Bollywood) will want to know that there's a free email service called Bollywood Mail (BM, really), part of the Bollywood World Network.
Not that anybody seems to have noticed, but the official name of Bombay was changed to Mumbai in 1996 or 7. It's too bad, because Bombay was pronounced ``bomb by.'' ``Mollywood'' would be an interesting term, since mollies often are either made of or embedded in wood. But they haven't changed the name. They haven't changed the short name of ``The Stock Exchange, Mumbai'' either.
Because em is a nasal and bee is a plosive, people tend not to realize how similar they are both as sounds and as acts of vocal production. In English, they are the only two bilabial voiced consonants. In Modern Greek, the letter we call beta has become a fricative; the letter name is pronounced ``vita'' (still spelled beta-epsilon-tau-alpha, but iotization has closed the sound of the first vowel). In order to express in writing the sound that used to be written with a beta, you write mu-pi. The mu, as noted, has a similar articulation. Pi is essentially an unvoiced /b/.
Oh Gawwwwd: now Dolly Parton has a theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, called Dollywood. ``My one wish for you during your visit to Dollywood is that the wonder of the Great Smoky Mountains will touch your heart'' -- without causing fibrillations, she neglects to say. The park is more about wood than Dolly, heh-heh. The great new ride for 2004 was a wooden roller coaster. As the Dollywood Express, an authentic coal-fired steam train, takes you into the Smoky Mountains, you can see an abandoned sawmill. ``Let your imagination run wild as you explore America's largest interactive treehouse full of kid-powered games, gadgets, and gizmos for all ages.''
Your next stop on the SBF tour of the multilingual GI tract is the SABI entry.
There is a pork-and-beef sausage that originated in Bologna (Bulaggna in the local dialect), but of course that only bears a general resemblance to authentic American bologna. Once I ordered a sausage pizza in Florence (Firenze) and I got pizza with dinky little unappetizing slices of hot dog. No, it's hardly relevant, but where else am I going to mention it? Save yourself the trouble, and don't order pizza anywhere north of Naples.
On April 4, 2005, the US customs agency (CBP) made a major baloney bust. A 30-year-old Mexican, crossing into the US by bus at Las Cruces, New Mexico (las cruces is Spanish for `the crosses'), was bringing along (``carrying'' might be too strong a word) 845 pounds of pork bologna in his luggage. The bologna, packed in over 80 rolls, was not approved for import and was not refrigerated. The man said he planned to sell the rolls at a swap meat or fly market. Sorry, I mean swap meet or flea market. It would have been more interesting if he'd claimed he planned to eat them all himself on a reality show. The rolls cost $7 or $8 in Mexico, but can be sold for four times that price in the US, according to a CBP spokeswoman who seems surprisingly well-informed on these matters. The man was not charged, but the CBP claims that some of its ``agricultural specialists'' destroyed or got rid of the bologna somehow. The CBP cited health risks such as ``Classic Swine Fever.'' I'd like to hyphenate that, just for fun. It's reassuring to see that our borders are secure, but if customs agents had read our salamis entry, they would know just how narrowly we may have escaped disaster.
Let's face it: this has been a pretty ho-hum entry so far. Why not visit the exciting 007 entry for another Bond face discussion?
I suppose that if the sixties had been, like, you know, happening in the eighties, a bonding joint would have been marijuana cigarette used as part of a real warm-and-fuzzy social event, man.
I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.Sargent lost her bid. Pat Schroeder retired. A constituency goes unrepresented.
On February 2009, Dolly Parton visited Washington, D.C., to represent a different constituency. She was there in her capacity as an ``ambassador for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.'' It's a US national park, so I guess that's why it doesn't have an embassy and she had to make a special visit. Dolly Parton owns a ``family amusement park'' in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, though that's not what she's famous for. According to the website, her ``one wish for you during your visit to Dollywood is that the wonder of the Great Smoky Mountains will touch your heart'' if it can squeeze past the mastoidal appendages. Here are some remarks from the ambassador's speech at the National Press Club, on the tenth of that February:
Somebody said to me, ``Well, you know what -- you've got such a big mouth and you know how to talk to people, did you ever think about running for president?'' ... I said, ``I think we've had enough boobs in the White House, but hopefully Obama ain't gonna be one of them.''
I don't think she's famous for her big mouth either. She's famous for her, uh -- she's a singer! She's famous for her big lungs. Also, if she tries to touch her own heart and she's got a top on, she doesn't come close. Anyway, the point is that she sings professionally, and by commmon consent that makes her an artist. (You know what? She's a songwriter too! And she starred in a comedy about kidnapping and torture.) Did she come up with the boobs joke independently? I don't know.
It is said that Pablo Picasso said that ``good artists copy,'' while ``great artists steal.'' [It's less commonly ``quoted'' with the less clever ``bad artists copy.'' There doesn't seem to be a standard Spanish or French version.] If this is a bogus quote, then perhaps that confirms it -- if the theft can be done on the great artist's behalf: T.S. Eliot wrote, ``Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'' [Words given to the character of Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood (1920).] Proxy or surrogate quote theft is just the Matthew Principle in action, if the person robbed is considerably less well known than the thief or thief's beneficiary.
Before this entry gets away from me I'd like to point out that a few men get breast cancer too. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this is a bad joke.
In October 1962, San Francisco's legendary madam Sally Stanford was interviewed in advance of a trip to Europe. Asked if she had ever been abroad, she answered ``always!''
[BTW, after retiring from the House of Representatives, Pat Schroeder went on to become President and CEO of The Association of American Publishers (AAP). I wanted to mention this earlier, but it would have messed up the comic timing. Also, I wanted to point out that ``embassy'' used to be the word not just for an ambassador's mission but for an ambassador's visit or for an ambassadorial group. It is the original sense, just as office originally referred to the tasks an official or officer was tasked with.]
I'll probably end up citing it in two or three places, but for now the only cite is at the cybernetics entry.
If I had a nickel for every time I noticed some ghastly error on a book cover, I'd have, oh, probably a dollar or so. Here's a minor one: the second edition of History of German Literature, by Werner P. Friederich (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1948, 1961) had a paperback cover designed by Rod Lopez-Fabrego. I think it's great that they give credit or whatever where it's due. The back cover quotes a review from South Atlantic Bulletin thus:
``it should ... be in the hands of every student who is taking a college course in German, Australian, Swiss, Central European History, or who is pursuing the study of the German language beyond the first college year.''
I don't know, and don't plan to research, whether the error was present in the original review. The title given on the cover, perhaps in conformity with some Barnes and Noble standard for its College Outline Series (of which this was number 65) is An Outline-History of German Literature.
Book-cover misspellings (one I recall had martial for marital, or vice versa) are part of a broader phenomenon -- that artiste types are not expected to be attentive to such prosaic details as getting names right. A prominent and expensive example of this artistic (if that's what it is) deficiency made news in 2004. A new city library had been built in Livermore, California, and a new mural was unveiled for it. This creative achievement bore the names of 175 historically important people, and eleven of their names were written with what the artist later described as ``interpretive'' spellings. The eleven names included those of Albert Einstein (missing an n), Michelangelo (extra a), and Vincent Van Gogh (gratuitous u, when he could have used a bit of ear). Also counted in the eleven is William Shakespeare (spelled with one a fewer than usual). The city had originally paid the artist $40,000, and some California law limited its freedom to fix the mural on its own. On Monday, October 4, 2004, the city council voted to authorize $6000 plus expenses to have the artist come back and correct the misspellings. (I suspect that's not a record.) That's when the story finally went national, possibly thanks to an intrepid investigative report by USA Today. The country was scandalized, and the artist received many upsetting and even impolite messages. One person went so far as to send her an email with her name misspelled! It was so upsetting, in fact, that for a couple of weeks she threatened not to return for the wite-out® phase of the installation.
The artist's name is Maria Alquilar, or at least that's what she claims it is. Alquilar is a Spanish word meaning `to rent' (rent as in lease or hire, not rent as in tear). I haven't been able to come up with a pun on this name that is commensurate with its subject.
Alquilar has an installation at the San Jose International Airport, 17 feet long and 6 feet high. It is entitled ``Las Viajeros Vienen A San Jose'' according to Alquilar's website, which goes on to explain that ``[t]he people exiting the Freedom Train are examples of the cities [sic] ethnic diversity.'' (Not even a six-year-old Spanish-speaker could make the mistake of using the feminine article las with the male noun viajeros.)
Criticized for the Livermore library mural misspellings, Alquilar blamed everyone but herself. In an interview with the AP, she complained that ``[t]here were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters.'' On the other hand, ``[e]ven though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, [she] didn't see it.'' It seems that she overlooked the possibility that people around during the installation were also artistically gifted. As she explained, the ``people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words. In their mind the words register correctly.''
Misspellings are actually fairly common in monumental art, and have a history going back to the Roman empire. The Pyramid of Cestius in Rome has an enormous inset spelling correction, and after many years someone noticed an error in the Lincoln Memorial that had to be fixed.
That's it for the really interesting book dedications. The rest of this entry is a dreary catalog of any and all other entries I could find that mention a book dedication. Our anticline entry is fun and quotes a book dedication, but the dedication itself is fairly ordinary. The dedication of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven is discussed at our entry for that book, though I've forgotten now whether that really was a ``book dedication'' rather than just a short early book section entitled ``Dedication.''
That looks about long enough for a paragraph. Let's start another. Edward M. Petrie's Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants has a dedication that uses terms (bond, stress) that are central to the book's subject. (See Petrie entry.)
Okay, just for a change of pace, let's have an actual dedication instead of a pointer.
The slush pile entry refers in passing to the un- or badly edited dedication of an unfortunately published book.
Slightly to the Right seems to be dedicated to the author's editors.
The sed entry cites a comment on the Latin style used by Linnaeus in the Dedication of his famous work, but perhaps he used the same style elsewhere.
This entry is dedicated to the ``dear reader'' of legend.
- Familiar Objects and Their Shadows by Crawford L. Elder (Cambridge
U.P., 2011). Pp. xii+210, but no pictures of any kind, unless you count
word pictures or mental images. Part of the Cambridge Studies in
Philosophy series. Sample text (p. 16):
To gain a sense of the way simplicity constrains the indicative value of a pushmipullyu representation, consider another well-worn example from Millikan [Ruth, not the electric-charge guy Bob], namely the tail-slap of the beaver. When a beaver sees or hears a predator approaching, he will loudly slap his tail against the surface of the water. (A beaver will also sometimes do this when all that has happened is that a branch has fallen, or that human observers have spoken loudly to one another.) ... [T]he tail-slaps can be viewed as imperatives that say, so to speak, ``dive immediately, fellow lodge members!''
- Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, edited by Paul Martin Lester and Susan Dente Ross (Westport, CT: Praeger Publ., 2003). I picked it up for a few quick kiloword eyefuls, but apart from the front cover, it has no pictures. I suppose it might have been worse: although all the contributors are or were academics (one Ph.D. candidate and 27 professors), it was published in trade paperback format. If the first edition was a hardcover, it may well have lacked even cover illustrations. (And academic libraries tend not to preserve dust jackets.) Bonus: the book was dedicated to a contributor who died before the edition was completed, with the words ``friend and mentor who is surely [sic] missed,'' though I suppose that could be read as it was meant.
- As I point out at its entry, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven (also mentioned at book dedications) didn't suffer terribly from a lack of illustrations. I guess that counts in the could-have-benefitted category.
- I'll add others as I encounter or re-encounter them. In the meantime, you could read the unillustrated material at the sex sells entry, which is sort of a book-that-may-very-well-have-benefitted-from-illustrations entry.
Once ``Saturday Night Live'' had a skit that took off on an ad campaign for Smuckers preserves (jellies and jams). Various actors came on stage, each holding a jar of product in approved TV-display fashion, and said ``With a name like <foo>, it's got to be good!'' Each <foo> was worse than and upstaged the last. (A typical <foo> might have been ``boiled baby intestines.'') Finally, Jane Curtin (I guess that kinda dates me) came on and
SPOILER COMING SPOILER APPROACHING SPOILER IMMINENTrevealed the name of her product to each of her predecessors (they had all stayed on stage), and each in turn expressed disgust or distress. Finally she came forward to face the audience and made her pitch, which went something like this: ``With a name like that, it's got to be good! Ask for it by name.''
<Abebooks.com> isn't really designed for comparison shopping. It's more like a union catalog of small independent booksellers, remember them? With a focus on used, rare, hard-to-find, though if you want to buy an in-print mass-market paperback from them, they'll be happy to sell you that too. And it's searched by FetchBook and AddALL, and listed by <Amazon.com>. There's a certain amount of incest in the used-book search services. Back in 1998 or so it used to be possible to insert one or two middlemen into the supply chain, paying them a premium to turn around and find a book online that you could have looked up yourself, if you had visited this entry of the SBF glossary. I was about to write that a certain degree of transparency prevails today, but in fact it seems you pay about a 6% premium to buy an Abebooks-listed book via Amazon zShops. (You also get less information about the book condition and none about the ultimate source.)
You might have a particular book in mind, but not be able to find it because you don't remember enough index-type information -- forgettable stuff like title and author. In that case, you might want to visit BookSleuth, a sort of forum served by Abebooks. People go there to post descriptions of books they can't remember title or author of. Most of the sought books are children's books that the posters read when they were children. The flaw in this scheme, one might guess, is that not enough people go there to answer rather than ask questions, but they apparently do.
I have a bunch of other book links in scattered places around this site. This ancient (uh, four-year-old) page, for instance, was written primarily with the needs of classicists in mind.
Here are a few in no particular order:
- ``I Lived with Latin Americans'' by John L. Strohm (Danville, Illinois: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1943). The quotation marks are part of the title.
- Souls Without Longing by Allan Bloom. The original title of the manuscript that was published as The Closing of the American Mind. According to an afterword (by Andrew Ferguson) to the 25th anniversary edition, the original title ``was lovely, everyone agreed, but also uncommercial,'' Which is not to imply that the book was intended to be especially commercial. The first print run, in February 1987, numbered 10,000 copies. But the book rose to the top of the bestseller lists by summer and held that position for two and a half months, sold a million copies in the US and comparable numbers abroad, and made Bloom a rich man. ``The best minds in American publishing were boggled. Never in their experience had a book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger outsold memoirs by Patty Duke, Shirley MacLaine, and Sam Donaldson--combined.'' I figure the title did it.
- Me by Katharine Hepburn (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Subtitled ``Stories of My Life.''
- An Introduction to Science and Hygiene for Hairdressers by O.F.G.
Kilgour and Marguerite McGarry (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1964). You may
not find this title very interesting, but for me it brings back a poignant
memory. I valued the education I received as an undergraduate, and during my
exit chat with the chairman of the physics department (my major department), I
volunteered [Danger! Danger!] to help if there was anything for which the
department might need a recent graduate. Calm down; we're not at the poignant
bit yet. Actually it's poignant in an embarrassing way. Okay, it's just
massively embarrassing, but it was long ago, and I was tired.
So a couple of weeks later, I was the physics department's contribution to a college-wide effort that takes (took?) place every year, with newly admitted students coming in from all over the state to make their course selections for the following fall, under the guidance of recent graduates like me. I think I did alright by almost everyone, except for one girl. She was undecided whether to go for a career as a gynecologist or a beautician, I think it was. In one sense, that was a no brainer: since Rutgers wasn't a beauty college, she'd have to follow the pre-med curriculum. But I didn't think that. I only asked her how she did on her SAT's. The SAT score was good, so I advised her on how to sign up as a pre-med.
The advising marathon was nearly over, and a few minutes later I was walking to my car. That's when it hit me. She said she got 750 on her SAT's, and 750 on a scale of 200 to 800 was pretty good (especially in those days, before the scores were renormed toward meaninglessness). I assumed that she got 750 on each main part (math and verbal). I mean, that's what that phraseology meant when I was in high school. Anyway, she couldn't possibly mean that her verbal plus her math scores, added together, arithmetically, summed to 750. After all, Rutgers isn't a beauty college, so it's inconceivable that they could admit someone who scored a few lucky multiple-choice guesses above brain-dead. Not so. Rutgers admissions put a lot of weight on high-school class rank, so no part of the state, however poor academically, could feel that it was being stiffed in the allotment of openings at ``Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.'' - Suddenly by George F. Will (NYC: Free Press, 1990). Subtitled ``The American Idea Abroad and at Home.''
- The Plus and Minus of Fluids and Electrolytes (Reston, Va.: Reston Publ. Co., 1981) by Esther Norman Nicksic, who was an associate professor in the Division of Nursing at Indiana University Northwest at the time of publication. (The title page lists the affiliation as ``Indiana University Northeast,'' but my copy, signed and dedicated by the author to a personal friend, has been hand-corrected. And there doesn't seem to be or have been any Indiana University Northeast.)
A 1947 book with the title The Silent People Speak is described at the dalmation entry. Boiling Water: Tips from the Experts and Falling on the Floor: A Jump-Start Guide are book titles I have proposed, but neither title has been adopted complete with subtitle, afaik. Probably the most common book-title pun that I have encountered is some variant of (the nonexistent but plausible) ``Boyle on Steam.''
The first nine months of 1996 marked its worst performance in the then-current format (that used since January 1987), with a low around 0.8 in March-February. This principally reflected price collapse in DRAM's, but the widespread use of book-to-bill led stock market ``industry analysts'' to discount stocks throughout the industry. (It's particularly ironic that DRAM should have skewed the results, since the book-to-bill was during the eighties and early nineties taken as an indicator of the health of the US industry relative to Japan's. In 1996, DRAM and other commodity chips were dominated by Korea and Japan, so a drop in DRAM prices indicated greater relative health of the US industry.)
I was going to make a joke of this entry by pretending that I found the term confusing, but I didn't. Then I was going to explain why I didn't.
Leonardo da Vinci drew a flight scheme in which a flier essentially lifted himself up by his shoelaces. The idea has gotten a lot more mileage than the method.
Sure, I could look stuff up and have a more comprehensive entry with fewer irrelevancies, but I prefer to highlight my unique content.
A company called Borax will be happy to tell you all about borax.
Max Born's best-known contribution to the development of quantum mechanics is probably the idea that the (normalized) squared modulus of the Schrödinger wavefunction should be regarded as a probability density. On the other hand, the contribution which he is best remembered for having made is probably the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. It's worth a lot to get your name on something. I think Born's suggestion of the probability-density idea first appeared as a footnote in someone else's paper, though very soon (1926) he did publish it himself.
Born's most popular publication was Optik, later translated into English (Optics) and generally known as ``Born and Wolf'' after the co-authors of the English edition. (I haven't looked carefully, but I think the English is pretty much just a translation of the German.) Born was born Jewish, so after the Nazis came to power he lost his university position. He emigrated to England in 1933. [FWIW, his wife, née Hedwig Ehrenberg, was also at risk, as she was of Jewish descent on her father's side. She was a practicing Lutheran; in 1914, the year after they married, he converted to Lutheranism. Like his friend Albert Einstein, Max Born had well-known and vehement (not to say violently) pacifist opinions, though like Einstein he came around somewhat. Meanwhile in Britain his wife became a Quaker. Pacifism, fashionable among intellectuals between the world wars, is like disarmament -- a great idea when it is universal.]
Max Born was at the University of Edinburgh from 1936 to 1953. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Walther Bothe. That year also he and Hedwig retired to West Germany.
In the published Briefwechsel (correspondence, literally `letter exchange') of Born and Einstein one can find Einstein's earliest known formulation of his famous I-cannot-believe-that-God-plays-dice-with-the-Universe assertion. I probably ought to look all of this stuff up, but that would take too long. If you want to be sure, just poke around on the 'net.
The famous singer and actress Olivia Newton-John is the daughter of Irene Newton-John, who was born Irene Born (sorry, I needed to write that). Irene was Max's daughter, so Max Born is famously associated with the names (probably only the name, in the case of Newton) of two of the most celebrated physicists in history (not to mention Heisenberg and many other physicists he worked with).
The closest native Japanese word equivalent to boru is tama. Tama is used for rice balls and for the silver balls in pachinko (a kind of pinball machine), and can be used in reference to a baseball, but is inappropriate for a soccer ball. Tama is the common kun reading of a particular kanji. The kanji has one common on reading: kyuu. As is typically the case, the two readings have similar meanings but occur in different contexts, and the on reading tends to be used for compound nouns. Thus, baseball (i.e. the or a game of baseball) is yakyuu, but a baseball is yakyuu bouru or yakyuu tama -- a `baseball ball.'
Interestingly, there's another Logan International Airport serving a B-town in an M-state: cf. BIL.
Bosons obey Bose-Einstein (B-E) statistics: their total wavefunctions must be symmetric. When expressed in terms of single-particle quantum states, this implies that bosons do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and may multiply occupy identical single-particle states. The low-temperature extreme version of this is Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC).
``In 1920 Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Red Sox, who had won 5 of the first 15 World Series [so named], have yet to win another. The Yankees, who had never before won a championship, have since won 26. Some people call that The Curse of the Bambino.'' Bambinomusical.com ``call[s] it a musical.'' (They eventually ended their drought in 2004.) More of the grim details at this, um, fan site.
You might wonder what was in it for the Babe (formally George Herman Ruth). This was in the days before free agency. Contract negotiation was take-it-or-leave-it: take what the owner offers or leave professional baseball altogether. It was a form of monopsony so blatantly and obviously unfair that when the US Congress passed laws against collusion in restraint of trade, a special exemption had to be written in for the major-league baseball racket. (It's not every day I have occasion to write ``baseball racket.'' We also have an entry for cricket bats.)
In 2001 (the year, not the Space Odyssey), the MLB owners, pleading poverty, announced plans to terminate the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos franchises.
In 1919, a time when various other top players in the league (i.e., his closest inferiors) were making around $15,000, Babe Ruth was given a contract for $10,000. Other conspicuously underpaid players in the league (again, relative to comparable talents) were the Chicago White Sox. (You read about them in the WS entry, when you followed the link on the words so named earlier in this entry. By the way, here's some old programmer advice: only follow unvisited links, or you could end up in an infinite hyperlink loop.) In New York City, Babe Ruth was credited with single-handedly (mostly left-handedly) sparking a dramatic increase in attendance. Construction began on Yankee Stadium, known as ``the house that Ruth built.''
Uh... We're talkin' magnetic tape. Used in the 1960's and 70's to store data at densities like 700 and later 900 bits per inch (bpi). Also used, in conjunction with the entire back seat of my car, to transport experimental data across state lines.
I suppose that the reason this error is common is that in German, beide can also occur without an article, so the fact that English usage differs is not immediately apparent. The movie ``Me, Myself & Irene'' was distributed in Germany as ``Ich Beide & Sie.'' Here ich beide means `I two,' a construction parallel with wir beiden (`we two').
As long as we're on the subject, here are some movies with related titles:
- ``Ya Sama'' (1993), a Russian movie distributed in English-speaking countries as ``Me, Myself'' and ``Then Justice Will Be Mine.'' (I think the Russian title means `I myself.')
- ``La chance de ma vie'' (1999). The English title was ``me Myself i'' (capitalization according to the cover or poster art). It's a movie in which the main character gets to learn how her life might have turned out had she married her high school sweetheart (echoes of IAWL), so the ``i'' in the English title might be a Roman numeral.
A specialized drinking glass has the name ``tumbler,'' but its present form obscures the origin of its name. Tumblers originally tumbled if released: they had round bottoms to discourage holders from putting them down until they were empty. Glassware was one of the earliest manufactures (possibly the earliest) in British America. All good cutlery was imported for many years after independence. (Cheap but soft pewterware was manufactured locally.)
I should admit that books about antique and early American glassware that I've checked recently don't show any round-bottom tumblers from the mid-1800's. Could be the early stuff was so crude and is now so rare that it's all museum pieces rather than collectibles.
One of the old buildings facing Independence Mall in Philadelphia is called the Bourse -- the word is engraved above the entrance. This bourse was founded in 1904 or so, and served as a commodity market.
Our main entry for this stuff is dextrograde, because boustrophedon is a word I have often had difficulty recalling precisely.
On April 11, 2012, one of the contestants on the American Idol show wore $1600 ``asteroid spike-toe pumps'' designed by Christian Louboutin. She also sang.
I was talking with Mary today and she used that word again; Karen and I agreed that no one else uses that word, and Mary launched into a definition that included ``junior league women who never have to mow the lawn or feed the pets ... Cadillac SUV ... cry if they chip a nail ... never offer the gardener a drop of water ... complain if they have to go to St. Moritz for a ninth time'' among various other things rattled off. Karen and I didn't understand the ``junior league'' thing. I suppose it has some social similarity to, or impressionist association with, Jaycees or Young Future Free and Accepted Matrons of America. Mary declined to define junior league, which is probably just as well -- my short-term memory was maxed-out with one definition. Wondering how much I would retain by the time I could add it to the glossary, I commented that it was a rather long definition. Mary said that the condensed, Cliff-Noted version was rich bitch.
It resembles an egg bow in shape only.
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It's normally the day after Christmas, but in Australia (I haven't checked elsewhere) it's the first weekday following the Christmas public holiday. Also in Australia, if Christmas falls on Saturday or Sunday, the Christmas public holiday is observed the following Monday.
The holiday has somewhat obscure origins in the UK, where gifts within family and among friends were given on or before Christmas, but on the next day cash or practical gifts were given to employees and the poor and so forth (I'm sure that so forth was a well-defined social class; everything was). Boxing Day is mainly the day that you return gifts you received to the stores where they were bought, because they're not what you wanted and they didn't fit. It also marks the start of after-Christmas sales days.
Take it from me: if you want to write something in a humor genre, do an acronym glossary. The jokes will just write themselves.
This tool will translate sequences into peptide chains.
The function itself can also push some local variables onto the stack. The range of the stack from return address to the end of the local variables constitutes the ``call frame.''
The BP register contains the address of the call frame itself. If you were writing an assembly-language function to be called by a C/C++ program, you might use an address location like bp+2 to refer to a function parameter. Of course, if you were writing an assembly-language subroutine for a C/C++ program, you would know this. (For the past twenty years, whenever I've heard about assembly language programming it has usually been in the context of accelerating programs written in higher-level languages by writing assembly-language subroutines for the most cycle-hungry tasks. Back in 1986 or so, a whole issue of Physics Today was devoted to songs of praise for the research you could with BASIC programming on a personal computer (provided you wrote those assembly-language subroutines).
In fact, however, the technical use of ``BP'' is not subject to even this in-principle problem, because for the sake of nominal precision, ``present'' is defined as January 1, 1950 (probably midnight at the beginning of the year).
London based BP is one of the world's largest petroleum and petrochemical companies and a leader in solar technology manufacturing. BP is the single, global brand formed by the combination of the former British Petroleum, Amoco, ARCO, and Burmah Castrol.
In a speech on the preceding April 23, Paula Banks (Vice President Global Social Investment, BP p.l.c) began with these words:
Now I'd like to turn to BP. You probably think you know the company. But I suspect you don't. Since the end of 1998 -- that's less than three-and-a-half years ago -- the company now known as BP has changed its name twice and more than tripled in size following seven large mergers or takeovers.
We were British Petroleum, then BP Amoco and now we're just BP. We're a new company - and truly a global company.
So ``BP'' is now a sealed acronym. That's as much as you need to know about the name. What more could you want to know? Oh, yeah: occasionally they expand BP as ``Beyond Petroleum.'' Gosh, those guys are so clever! No wonder they never have any accidents, and even if they should ever have an accident, they're ready with plans B, C, and D-.
``Pe - da - go - gy.'' That's a difficult word. Is this going to be on the teacher qualification exam?
What're you lookin' at!?
BPD is characterized by unstable and extreme moods, with unsurprising effects on interpersonal relationships and self-image. BPD sounds like an extreme version of being human. In fact, 2% of all adults suffer from BPD, as do 70% of bosses. Okay, I made the second statistic up. BPD is most common among young women, and accounts for about 20% of psychiatric hospitalizations. You remember Bad Company's top-40 hit ``Good Lovin' Gone Bad'' --
One day she'll love you.
The next day she'll leave you.
Why can't we have it--
Just the way it used to be?
Modern medicine provides an answer: because now she's suffering from BPD. Maybe you should consider DBT. Then again, maybe you should just wait a few hours, or a day at most. Upside or downside, depending on how you're standing: people with BPD often engage in impulsive behaviors such as risky sex. Beware, though: individuals with BPD are highly sensitive to rejection, reacting with anger and distress to the mild separations caused by vacations, business trips, or last-minute changes of plans. Right around now you're probably coming up with positive diagnoses for at least a couple of girls you dated in college.
The term ``borderline'' stems from an earlier idea, now largely discarded, that people with the disorder are on the borderline of psychosis. So people tend to refer to it by initialism rather than as ``borderline personality.'' It looks like a good initialism for bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depressive syndrome. Psychiatric nomenclature seems to suffer from its own instability syndrome. Fortunately, a precise definition of the target disorder to be treated is not needed, since the therapy is aimed like a shotgun at the symptoms. The main utility of a disorder name is in assisting the clinician in coming up with a diagnostic code to put on the insurance form.
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Suppose you've got a hardass jerk supervisor. (Okay, I'm just leaving open the hypothetical possibility of an alternative. For argument's sake, let's say.) And suppose that every design or project plan you present, the supervisor has a personal need to find some error in, be it ever so nitpicky. Now you're going to present another project, and this one is perfect, your labor of love. For God's sake, put an obvious error in it, so the jerk finds that instead of detecting a nonexistent ``error'' in something that's right.
Today (2013.09.15) I noticed that the Mexican restaurant south of Myrrh's has ``NO NFL & BPL'' up on its outside specials sign. I do remember that their widescreen was off a few months back, but I'm not really sure whether this is a warning, an attraction, or a protest. Iff you need to know, I'll try to find out. (I won't.)
Blast is a disease of sheep, but if a herd of buffalo came down with it, that would make some kind of a symphony, or maybe asymphony. They could try harmonizing with the Elks.
The Jolly Corks was originally a group of actors whose drinking society enabled then to circumvent the New York blue law that closed bars on Sundays. Laws limiting the sale of alcohol are another great promoter of social organizations and of institutions not, in principle, primarily created to sell alcohol. Examples include the veterans' lodge in a dry Texas county my friend Victor used to work in, a variety of clubs in Salt Lake City, and the journalists' club in Damascus. Often the membership fee is nominal, and sometimes the mechanism for paying your bar tab is a little bit indirect. Once this sort of arrangement becomes established, it creates an economic incentive for those nominally private clubs, in favor of the preserving often unpopular prohibitions. Similar economic incentives exist for the suppliers of any illegal goods, of course.
The word badan means things like `group, council, organization':
badan legislatif ......... legislative body
badan pers ............... press agency
badan tenaga atom ........ atomic energy commission
See also BPK. A lot of these agencies are known by good, old-fashioned acronyms in the SeRoCo tradition, like Bakosurtanal, Bapedal, Bappenas, and Batan. As you can see, particularly with Batan (what? you didn't follow the links?), in the Indonesian language (bahasa Indonesia) adjectives follow the nouns they modify. This might make the apparent official English name of the BPS seem more natural: Statistik Indonesia. BTW, until about 1996, BPS used to be expanded Biro Pusat Statistik, corresponding to the other English language (bahasa Inggeris or bahasa Inggris) version `Central Bureau of Statistics.' Cf. CBS.
The included organizations apparently include the AACBP, ABA ABCBP, ABCT, BACB, and Division 25 of the APA.