After a mob burned his chapel and sacked his house in Birmingham, scattering his papers, his library, and his scientific instruments in the street, Joseph Priestley moved to London. His three sons encountered social difficulties in England, however, and emigrated to Pennsylvania, where they established themselves as farmers on the Susquehanna. He eventually followed them there, leaving behind a married daughter. For a while before he left, Southey and some even more eminent English poet (whose name I really shouldn't forget) played with the idea of going along with him.
Priestley settled in a village near Philadelphia that was originally envisioned as a haven for similar exiles. It was close to his sons' farms, and he helped them out in the fields a couple of hours a day, living in a village near Philadelphia. He continued his preaching, and formed a Unitarian congregation where Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were both occasional members, and he wrote his vast History of the Christian Church. He also continued his scientific research, and discovered carbon monoxide.
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Mark Twain's Tale of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, first published in 1889, tells the story of an accidental time traveler from New England in 1879 to the England of King Arthur (sixth century). There the Connecticut Yankee (Hank Morgan) becomes known as ``Sir Boss,'' and introduces various improvements (eventually suppressed by religious baddies). The following is from chapter 41, after he has married Sandy (whom we mention also at this V2 entry).
In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world. Many a time Sandy heard that imploring cry come from my lips in my sleep. With a grand magnanimity she saddled that cry of mine upon our child, conceiving it to be the name of some lost darling of mine. It touched me to tears, and it also nearly knocked me off my feet, too, when she smiled up in my face for an earned reward, and played her quaint and pretty surprise upon me:
``The name of one who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made holy, and the music of it will abide alway in our ears. Now thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child.''
But I didn't know it, all the same. I hadn't an idea in the world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her pretty game; so I never let on, but said:
``Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too! But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter it first--then its music will be perfect.''
Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:
``HELLO-CENTRAL!''
I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could hear my bones clack when I walked. She never found out her mistake. The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake. This was not true. But it answered.
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CO continues the earlier journal Latin Notes (LC no. PA 2063 .L34 ; before the days of ISSN's -- why don't they define these things retroactively for recordkeeping purposes?). [The supplement is LC no. PA 2063 .L348, as I'm sure you're relieved to learn.]
CO even continues the volume numbering of Latin Notes, picking up at vol. 14 in fall 1936. When the latter was discontinued, it published eight numbers a year. CO was originally a monthly, which also meant eight issues a year. In 1978, however, it became a quarterly and alternated with the new quarterly ACL newsletter (ISSN 0196-2086). [I may have the ISSN's switched.], which has since been a semiannual and a triannual. You can learn so much interesting stuff from on-line library card catalogs.
The article ``Latina Resurgens: Classical Language Enrollments in American Schools and Colleges,'' appears in CO vol. 74 #4 (Summer 1997), pp. 125-30.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Terrorist groups in Colombia kidnap fewer than 3000 people each year, using the ransom to finance their insurrection. Back in the 1970's, Argentine guerrillas used a similar strategy but concentrated on rich pay-offs for foreign businessmen. The resulting war, when joined by the military dictatorship that deposed Isabelita Perón, was called la guerra sucia. That's usually translated `the dirty war,' though perhaps `the filthy war' might better convey the moral tenor of sucia. One revenue stream available to various warring parties in Colombia today (see AUC) is cocaine -- growing, refining, and trafficking.
All wars must be financed. Wars against the Congolese government based in Kinshasa [the old Zaire, (.zr)] are funded by stealing from diamond prospectors. (Diamond is a common African mineral that is kept in short supply by the deBeers cartel to maintain a profitable world price. During a diamond market crash early in the twentieth century, deBeers managed to buy up most of the south African mines. Since then, discoveries in Russia, Australia, and elsewhere have been handled with a certain amount of judicious bribing or market-sharing arrangements. Lately, however, multiple wars in southern Africa have been making it increasingly difficult to stifle supply. In 1999, deBeers hit on a brilliant strategy to deal with this situation: they would become the supplier of ``clean diamonds'' -- diamonds not being used to fund some war.)
The IRA's activities are funded by charitable contributions. During the cold war, many armies were secretly and sometimes not so secretly funded by the major contending powers and their better-off clients. Usually this was in the form of government grants (not so called) of money, arms, training, etc., or loans (to be repaid in something other than money). Communist regimes liked to shake down their subjects for voluntary contributions to fraternal liberation movements. Subsequent developments demonstrate that there is no shortage of funding sources -- though of course, who pays the piper calls the tune. Regional interests (did you know that Syria can actually grow enough food to feed its surviving population?) and rich private investors have picked up the slack.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Colorado. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Colorado city and county links.
In some Spanish-speaking countries, such as Argentina, car is coche (masc.). In others, like Mexico (.mx), car is carro, although coche may be used as a `marked' synonym (like ``motor car'' in English). ``Carro'' sounds weird to Argentines, to whom carro only means `cart,' of the unpowered variety. It might be an Anglicism (Sp. carro < Eng. car), like the Chilean use of gallo (`rooster') to mean `guy' (pronunciation of the Spanish word would look like guy-oh in English eye dialect).
The vehicles making up a passenger train are variously called cars, coaches, or carriages, depending on what decade and region one has boarded. In strict Leftpondian usage a ``coach'' is the ordinary kind of passenger car, approximately equivalent to Rightpondian ``second-class carriage.'' Second class in Britain was formerly called third class and is now called standard class.
In earlier Leftpondian usage, trains were also called ``the cars.'' Although it was always common to say ``on the train,'' for many years the phrase ``on the cars'' was used as well. The most recent instance of this usage that I can find is in a poem Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) published in his Smoke and Steel (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1920). In other words, every occurrence I can find is out of copyright! I'm not going to go overboard on this and quote two entire books of Artemus Ward between here and the COAI entry, but maybe I will include Sandburg's poem:
Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
[SBF glossarist comments: not me!]
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.
[Gertrude Stein noticed that between WWI and WWII, American men learned to converse. See the have-got-to entry.]
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it--on the streets, in the postoffice,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for .. Blaa-blaa .. Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa .. and all points northwest .. all a-board."
[Cf. North by Northwest.]
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
See also balun.
Update 2004: it's now ``MCoB'' or ``MCB.'' Here's a webpage all about vision and ``The Mendoza's Contribution.'' Don't think of all the mispunctuations as errors. Think of them as streamlined, impacting business communications. Leverage the synergy!
Because COBOL has been used for so long on IBM mainframes with a variety of data structure options, this code may not be very portable. The solution has generally been to run the legacy COBOL code on back-end mainframes, and have these accessed via web-based interfaces (running on whatever). Some people insist that this is an entirely flexible approach, and it might be if the original author of the COBOL programs was a visionary.
A Computerworld survey of 352 readers (self-selected respondents, I assume), published in 2006, included the following item: ``What programming languages do you use in your organization? Choose all that apply.'' Here are the listed results:
67% Visual Basic 62% Cobol 61% Java 55% JavaScript 47% VB.Net 47% C++ 30% Perl 26% C 23% C# 15% ColdFusion 13% PHP 7% Fortran 5% PL/1 5% Python 4% Pascal 2% AdaOf those respondents who said their organizations used COBOL, 55% said that at least half of their organizations' internally-developed business application software was written in COBOL, and 58% reported that it was still being used to develop new business applications.
These numbers suggest that COBOL is in good health and has a strong future, but most people agree that it is simply in a very slow decline. There are few programmers who can write new COBOL code. Many of those old guys probably died of heart attacks during the Y2K fix-it orgy. The old code is going away very slowly as conversion becomes necessary, and like the fixing of Y2K bugs, it is being hindered by the decreasing numbers of people left who still read the old code. Managers typically claim that it doesn't make economic sense to rewrite the code yet. At United Airlines, where my friend Rob used to work, this was called ``mining the gold'' or something. (I.e., amortizing the investment.)
Like FORTRAN's, COBOL's original language definition was written in a hurry. The first COBOL compiler was released in 1960.
Here's a perfectly characteristic fact about COBOL: it has a long list of reserved words. By my count of appendix A in Gary D. Brown's Advanced ANS COBOL with Structured Programming (Wiley, 1977), the number was 426, ``although'' as Brown warned (p. 35), ``individual compilers differ slightly from this list. New reserved words are constantly added as COBOL is expanded, and a program that compiles properly today may not compile properly tomorrow.'' He went on:
Only 85 reserved words contain the hyphen, and so it is common to use a hyphen in names to reduce the chance of inadvertently selecting a reserved word. However, more of the newer reserved words contain hyphens. No reserved word currently begins with a numeric character or the letter X [or Y, for that matter]. Hence 9TOTAL-AMOUNT, XTOTAL-AMOUNT, and TOTAL--AMOUNT would be relatively safe in never being reserved words, but this technique results in ugly names. Perhaps the best technique is to select meaningful names and then, if in doubt, check the name in Appendix A.
These wonderful variable names had to fit between columns 12 and 72 of the punch card, apparently, although statements could be continued naturally from card to card, if the card-break was part of the spacing. (A hyphen was used in column 7 (with a quote beyond column 11) to continue a string literal (``alphanumeric literal''). The minus sign was the same character as the hyphen; ambiguity was avoided by requiring spaces around the sign when it functioned as the binary operator. (Of course, better programming style employed the SUBTRACT reserve word.) Unary minus was unambiguous because variables could not begin with a hyphen (``procedure names'' and ``data names'' could consist entirely of decimal digits).
There's an FAQ for COBOL.
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages heroically includes one COBOL program. The obvious question that arises when anyone writes a COBOL program, even for mere ``demonstration'' purposes, is whether the act is morally excusable. The question is not addressed in any of the current cybermorality links at this page by the Michael Neumann who professes philosophy at Trent University.
Hard as it may be to believe, it is actually possible to calumniate COBOL: cf. SNOBOL.
The final agreements worked out in budget reconciliation are almost always late, and Congress is about to adjourn, and the final write-up, many inches thick, is distributed hot off the photocopier about an hour before the vote. This is where the pork goes in. Once, around 1990 I think it was, the Secretary of Defense (DoD) submitted a budget request that had continuations of old pork slashed. It was the only year in recent memory that Congressional appropriations exceeded the budget request. From the numbers involved, one may reasonably estimate that about 20-25% of the Defense budget is pork. All the pork reappeared in COBRA, and the executive branch hasn't tried that stunt again. Reagan came into (and even continued in!) office railing against ``waste, fraud and abuse'' and vowing to balance the budget by eliminating these. He ran massive budget deficits by raising defense spending without decreasing social spending. Towards the end of his term, it was becoming popular among commentators to argue that there really was very little honest-to-God WF+A -- most of the budget is transfer payments (not counting off-budget self-funded insurance systems like social security) salaries and ... procurement. Right.
You'll be formally notified after the termination date of your insurance under the terms of your prior employment. (The notification comes maybe a month, sometimes two months, after the formal termination date of the health insurance.) If you take advantage of the offer, you have to pay all the monthly premiums since the termination, and your insurance coverage holds without hiatus. It's a kind of grace period, but the initial coverage premium can be a kind of ``sticker shock.''
HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE: You might assume that, since your old employer has a group of regularly employed and therefore generally healthy people in its ``group,'' that it is able to get a good insurance rate. Yes but: You may not get the benefits of that rate, because you are not part of that group. The law requires you to be offered the same kind of insurance, but it does not require that your premium equal the old premium (paid by you and by your employer on your behalf). Call around. If you're a young non-smoker in good health you can get a better deal.
There's a lot I've left out, especially about disability issues and dependent coverage.
This part of COBRA 1985 became 29 U.S.C. §§ 1161-1168.
Reminds me of the British slang expression ``to cock up'' [approx. equiv. Amer. ``to screw up'']. I suppose it might be ``to caulk up'' -- the vowels in some common pronunciations of these two words tend to interchange between British and North American dialects. The standard illustration is caught and cot.
See also A. S. Bregman: Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, (Cambridge and London: MIT Pr., 1990).
- Cash On Delivery.
- Charge On Delivery. [Mail sent with more than just postage due.]
- Collect On Delivery. [Terms for freight.]
NIST makes available on line ``The 1986 CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants,'' an article by E. Richard Cohen and Barry N. Taylor in Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, vol. 92, pp. 85-95 (1987).
Within the US, the most common code-sharing is asymmetric: a number of independent regional carriers will code-share with a better-known national carrier. The various regional carriers, typically flying twin-engine propeller planes like the Saab 340B (SF-340B) or commuter jets, will code-share with Foobar Airlines, tag their fleets and personnel as ``Foobar Express,'' and provide short-haul service between regional airports and national airline's hubs.
Internationally, and particularly between North America and Europe, code-sharing arrangements are common between American carriers and European ones.
At the beginning of 2005, a new magazine was launched with the title Co-Ed, self-evidently aimed at male college students. The February 2006 issue had advice on how to score during spring break. It included useful insights, such as the observation that one reason a woman may turn you down is that she can't sleep with everyone. Damn! Those girls must have been indoctrinated at the YWLS.
The coefficient of sliding friction is different for two surfaces moving or not moving relative to one another, and these are distinguished as dynamic and static coefficients of friction, respectively. The dynamic coefficient is smaller, so it takes a little more push to get things moving. The friction analyzed in rolling motion does not involve any sliding of surfaces past each other -- rolling friction refers to non-slipping motion of a wheel or roller. Standard formulas do not distinguish dynamic and static COF of rolling motion: they normally refer to dynamic friction and are equally accurate for static friction for small normal forces. When normal forces are large, deformation of surfaces is nonlinear and eventually inelastic, and friction is no longer described by a simple coefficient. (The possibly nonlinearly deformed surfaces referred to are the load-bearing surface and the roller or the sliding surface of the load.)
Drag in a fluid is also a form of friction. At low velocities, it varies quadratically with the velocity of motion through the fluid. I'll get a coefficient-of-drag entry in here eventually.
Come to think of it, back in the 1970's NOW distributed a pamphlet called ``Revolution: Tomorrow Is NOW.'' That pamphlet proposed (among many other things) a public veil-burning to ``protest the second class status of women in all churches.'' Well, there you go.
A neopagan religious group.
Cogeneration doesn't even have an entry in the online OED (as of 2005) and already it's gained a new acceptation. Dictionaries that do have an entry generally qualify the primary process as ``industrial,'' and traditionally it has been thought of as a stationary process. Since the mid-1990's, however, as fuel cells have been regarded as an increasingly credible power source for motor vehicles. Before we discuss that, however, let us take a long look back across the sweep of history, shall we? You wouldn't think I had other things to do, from the leisurely pace of this entry. Let's go back in time (entry to be continued).
Oh, alright: cogeneration in the fuel-cell context means use of waste heat from the fuel cells to chemically crack or otherwise preprocess the loaded fuel into a form usable by the fuel cell.
The whole naming thing is confusing, so let me try to reproduce in HTML what the titling looks like on the cover of volume 2:
Adhesives and Sealants
General Knowledge,
Application Techniques,
New Curing Techniques
Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants
Volume 2
Judging from the copyright notice at the beginning of each chapter, it appears that ``Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants'' is the official title of the series. I strongly recommend Petrie's Handbook. (For some thoughts on the differential analysis, see the bonding surface entry.)
What -- you want to know what it means, too? Haven't I done enough? Oh all right.
Carbon monoxide accounts for ``accounts for greater mortality and morbidity than all other poisonings combined.'' The half-life of COHb in the blood is 4-5 hours. The usual treatment includes use of a nonrebreather mask supplying 100% oxygen, which reduces the half-life to about an hour. Subsequent to this, depending on a number of factors, hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be used. This reduces the half-life of COHb to about a half hour, but that appears (a) usually not to be too important, since patients tend to present rather late, when COHb levels are in fact already low, and (b) the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen appear not to arise from reduction of COHb levels. This is not too surprising, because delayed and persistent symptoms are not well or completely explained by COHb.
Typical initial symptoms, acute in the medical sense, are headache, dizziness, and nausea. These effects appear to be explained by hypoxia due to CO binding to Hb. Recovery from the acute symptoms is usually rapid (if it occurs at all), on the scale of a day or two. (Currently, there are no methods for recovering from fatal CO poisoning.) In a large minority of cases, estimated at anywhere from 14% to 40%, there are longer-term neurologic symptoms such as memory and learning impairment and (less often) movement disorders. These may appear immediately, but typically follow an asymptomatic period of a day to as much as three weeks. The incidence and severity of effects (generically called ``delayed effects'' even if they are observed early) tracks loosely with duration of exposure and severity of the acute symptoms, whether the victim went into coma, etc. These symptoms are typically more persistent, lasting over a year in many cases. The mechanisms proposed to explain these neurological symptoms are more varied and more complex than straightforward hypoxia.
There's a museum, I think it is, and they sponsor scholarships for high-school seniors.
``COK'ed and loaded'' is not their motto, AFAIK.
Whatever he may have been called as a child, he was never known as Sam. His wife Sara (neé Fricker) called him Samuel, and he eventually got a legal separation from her. [Part of the strain on their marriage was that he'd fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, who afaik never called him Samuel.]
He seems rather to have liked his initials. He often signed his work ``S.T.C.'' or ``Estese.'' As a scholarship boy at Cambridge starting in 1791, he ran up debts to 150 pounds on wine, women, and opium. To escape his creditors he enlisted in the army in 1793 using the pseudonym ``Silas Tomkyn Comberbach.'' One imagines that during the Napoleonic wars, the standards for new recruits must have been allowed to slide a bit.
S.T.C. is remembered today (remember?) for his poetry. He spent a lot of time with Robert Southey, who even before he died was beginning to be remembered as a truly overrated poet. William Wordsworth and Col collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798), a work which kicked off the Romantic movement, unfortunately. In 1817, Col published Biographia Literaria, a book about everything. [I shouldn't neglect to mention that in Hebrew, kol means `all, every.']
It was republished by the Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, in 1975.
s (ASCII 59) precedes
t (ASCII 60) because 59 < 60. The committees that create
these character encodings are not intentionally cruel, so collating order
for simple alphabetic data that is all upper case or all lower case is
always the same as alphabetical order. (This excludes special characters
such as vowels with accents, which are generally shunted off to upper
reaches of the coding.)
The behavior of the dominant scheme ASCII differs significantly from that of one-time contender EBCDIC, however, when upper and lower case characters both occur, and when there are numbers and special characters (punctuation and other anger characters in cartoon comics balloons). (ASCII and EBCDIC also have somewhat different control character locations, though both place these in the low end of the encoding. However, there isn't much interest in alphabetizing or collating non-printing characters.) In ASCII, the collating scheme is (most) special characters, numbers 0-9 (Okay! Okay! They're ``Arabic numerals,'' O pedantic one), then upper-case characters A-Z, then lower-case characters a-z. In EBCDIC, it goes specials, lower case, then upper case, then numbers. Now you know why upper-case file names precede lower-case file names in Unix ls output.
There was once a character set that had upper and lower case interleaved, so the collating sequence was AaBbCc, etc. This is pretty weird, unless you happen to want a sort to order items alphabetically in the normal sense of the word.
An advantage of big-endian date formats like yy.mm.dd is that alphabetizing -- i.e., using ordinary collation order -- is equivalent to ordering chronologically. Of course, this is true for two-digit year representations ``yy'' only if the range of dates does not include the turn of a century. Hence the Y2K bug. Within a millennium, ``yyy'' would suffice, but computers weren't around in 1900, so the solution to the Y2K bug in many cases consisted largely of converting yy notation to yyyy notation. You're probably thinking that this is bleeding obvious, and I shouldn't waste your time. But let me tell you, I remember actual people -- not just corporate and small-time spammers and con artists -- who went around trying to sow profitable panic about this.
``JAGSort is a
web-based application that alphabetically sorts Ancient Greek words in their proper order. Text can
be entered in the BetaCode or GreekKeys
standard, and the output is provided in alphabetical order or in original order
assigned with an alphabetical ordinal. This application is suited for
sorting indices and providing databases comprising Greek text with an
alphabetical sort field.
(JAGSort is built upon the abstraction of ancient Greek built into the Java and Ancient Greek API package. As further translators are built for the JAG package, additional encoding schemes, in particular Unicode, will be supported. The underlying code is in Java, but for performance purposes, this resource uses the CGI method and therefore runs on the server through a shell script.)''
In Spanish, ch, ll, and rr were traditionally treated like individual letters of the alphabet immediately following c, l, and r, respectively. Thus, for example, calle was alphabetized after calzar. Acceding to pressure from ``Europe,'' the Academia de la Lengua changed the rule, so alphabetization is now by character rather than phoneme.
Gary alleged today that this glossary is like an enormous stream of consciousness. What poppycock! How could a stream of consciousness flow in alphabetical order? That would be a joke, like Stephen Wright's comment. (``I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.'') Oh yeah, you might want to take a quick look at the KWIC entry.
At Martin's (``count on us for service and savings'') the other day, I saw an aisle that had cereal, cookies, and crackers. What a concept -- alphabetical product shelving! Shoes near shinola! Peanuts near peas! This'll work, sure.
I'm sure I mention this elsewhere, but in Spanish
both ñ and the letter pairs ch, ll, and
rr are traditionally treated as the equivalent of ordinary single
letters, so the alphabet includes the sequence ``... k, l, ll, m, n, ñ,
o, p, ....'' At the urging of the EU, the Real Academia de la lengua
española has condoned the alternative of alphabetizing by single
letter (e.g., aro,
arroz, artista; instead of aro, artista, arroz).
This is the thanks Spain gets, after giving Europe and the world the gift of
the cedilla. It's just shameful.
The traditional Spanish collation scheme is also used in outline-type lists. There's an example in Mario Ferreccio Podestá's El Diccionario Academico de Americanismos. (It's not really a dictionary, only -- as the subtitle explains -- pautas para un examen integral del diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española.) The table of contents (indice) lists 8 modos formales de la imputación implicita. You don't really need to know what that means or what they are. I mention it because the modos are labeled thus:
a.
b.
c.
ch.
d.
e.
f.
g.
Another language with a number of two-letter symbols treated as single alphabetic entities is Welsh. Here's alphabetical order for that language:
You're probably wondering how the language can do without such essential letters as k, q, v, and z. Here's how: the words for kangaroo, kilogram, kilometer, quarrel, quarter, vinegar, and zoo are written cangarŵ, cilogram, cilomedr, cweryl, chwarter, finegr, and sŵ. (All of these nouns are masculine, except for sŵ, which may be masculine or feminine. If you were trying to guess the gender of a random Welsh noun, masculine wouldn't be a bad guess.)
From finegr and sŵ, and from the well-known fact that ll represents an unvoiced l, you've already realized that Welsh uses doubled consonants to represent unvoiced versions of the corresponding single consonants (except, of course, that dd is the voiced version of th, and though there's no ss, si represents the esh sound that arises from palatalizing an unvoiced s). See how fast you're catching on?
Specific senses of the word college usually mark a college as in some way inferior or subsidiary to a university. For example, an individual college that is not part of some larger university usually does not award graduate degrees, while any university usually has at least some masters programs. Many universities are organized into colleges (e.g., the College of Arts and Sciences of the University New Bigstate at Isolated Village, the Graduate College of CUNY, Rutgers College of Rutgers University). Some of the more pretentious universities (Princeton comes to mind) call their dormitories ``residential colleges.''
From the time that the first universities were established in the Middle Ages at Paris and Bologna, colleges were subdivisions of universities. That has been the case generally for degree-granting institutions of higher education in Europe. The one prominent exception I am aware of, of an Old World college that was never part of a university, is the renowned Gresham College whose success eventually led to the creation of the Royal Society of London. Gresham College, however, does not matriculate students or award degrees. Nevertheless, perhaps this was the example that led to the different use of the word college in the US. Either that, or an unwonted modesty.
We mention Red Brick universities at the pseudonym entry. Th Red Bricks come moderately close to being the English institutions equivalent to free-standing American colleges. There isn't much of a college/university distinction in Japan. For now such discussion as we have of that topic is at the rejârando-ka entry.
It may be that some vocational institutes call themselves colleges now, or that ``beauty colleges'' do not require a high school diploma for admission, so ``post-secondary'' may be a soft part of the definition of a college. College and university accreditation is not a function of government in the US, and the federal government is involved with post-secondary education in somewhat roundabout ways, so college and university do not suffer from much from official definitions, and are as loosely defined as any other ordinary nouns.
I'll discuss such institutions as colleges of physicians only after I cover animal-group names (a shrewdness of apes, an exaltation of larks, a school of fish, etc.). I will point out, however, that schools of fish were originally called shoals of fish, and ``school'' was just an error for ``shoal'' that caught on.
Automobile collisions often occur when two egos attempt to exercise simultaneous sovereignty over the same time-dependent stretch of road. When the collision involves a large number of egos, Bunte Illustrierte many years ago used the wonderful term Massencarambolage. I hope that the etymology of this term has something to do with ¡Caramba!
In his very popular Worlds in Collision, the professional psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky advanced his theory that steady planetary orbits arose only in historical time, and that various mythological and biblical stories are descriptions of events involving planets which interacted electromagnetically. Despite the many glaring, um, difficulties with his theories, Velikovsky's books are still good for a laugh.
The largest and best known of these is the city of Colón, founded in Colombia in 1850. It is situated in what was known as the bahía de Limones (literally `Bay of Lemons'). It was built on the swampy low island of Manzanilla (`Chamomile'). It was an unhealthy place, but it has a deep, if unprotected, natural harbor. The port was connected to the mainland by an artificial isthmus created for the Panama Railroad to reach Panama City. (For the significance of this, see the golden spike entry.)
The settlement was originally called Aspinwall, after William H. Aspinwall (1807-1875), one of the railroad company's founders. The name was only changed to Colón at a later date, by a legislative enactment. The name had been suggested by Dr. Mariano Arosemena Quesada to honor the memory of the discoverer, who sailed into the bay in 1502 (on his fourth and final voyage of discovery). I tell ya, it used to be a lot easier to get your name in the encyclopedias. As the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada explains, the foreigners (``extranjeros'' not further specified) continued to use the name Aspinwall (the EUI neglects to explain that this was its original name, and that English was the common language of the city). In 1890 the government returned-to-sender all mail addressed to Aspinwall, and that was the end of that.
Also at some point, the name of the bay changed its grammatical number, becoming Bahía Limón (Limon Bay in English). The bay, protected by breakwaters, serves as a waiting area for ships about to enter the Panama Canal.
Colón has, of course, been a city in the Republic of Panama since that became independent of Colombia in 1885. It is the capital of the Atlantic-coast province surrounding it (also called Colón).
According to the EUI, the city plan of Colón is a modest imitation of that of Philadelphia (the one in Pennsylvania, I assume, and not, say, the one in Jordan). Also according to the EUI, the northern part of the city, with the railroad offices, was called Wáshington, and the southern part, built by the French canal people, was called Cristobál Colón. Yes, if true that is quite odd: a district with a name meaning `Christopher Columbus' in a city whose name means `Columbus,' in the country named after Columbus. The situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that Colón and Cristobal are twin cities, with Cristobal something of a suburb grown up around the portworks built by the US in the former Canal Zone. How all this aligns with the older areas, I'm not sure.
Over time, I think I'll collect a few items here that I want to mention in a future color entry. At least you'll have some hints if you want to do your own research. Color terms in Homer are particularly puzzling, and a perennial topic of discussion. On the classics list, back in the days before it could be embarrassing to participate, I once posted a summary of earlier discussion on that topic. (The links from that post are to a defunct archive. Sorry.) At the end of the nineteenth century, as experimental psychology and departments of psychology were first coming into being, the problems of color perception were an important initial area of study. Later, the sociologists and amateur linguists got into the act. One of the most respected and cited works along this line is Berlin and Kay's Basic Color Terms (1969). It is intellectually sloppy starting from page one, but the authors don't manage to disprove the claims they make. Their basic claim is that there is a universal sequence in which color terms are initially added to a language.
Corominas y Pascual indicates (or Corominas and Pascual indicate -- I can do it either way) that ... eh, why paraphrase when I can do as much harm by translating?
The gender vacillated until the classical era [sixteenth and early seventeenth century, say] (and still today in rural and poetic usage), the feminine attaching itself above all to the acception `facial coloration' (Quijote, II, ch. 10, etc.; general in the middle ages) but also, to a lesser extent, in the general acception (e.g., las colores de las flores [`the colors of the flowers'] Lope, Marqués de las Navas, v. 2134; common in the middle ages: Berceo, Loores, 85c; J. Manuel, Conde Luc., 30.1; but already masculine in J. Ruiz, 288b).
It seems also that certain idioms have standardized on female color. There's a colloquial expression ``comerle la color a algien,'' which literally translated means `eat the color of someone from him [or her].'' Some time ago I saw this described as a Venezuelan idiom meaning `to be unfaithful to, cheat on.' Looking around now (late March 2007, if it should matter), it becomes clear that the expression is most popular in Chile, and that it has a broader range of meanings. The various meanings taken together suggest that the action described drains the color from the face of the victim. Thus one meaning is to cuckold, but more generally it is to embarrass someone by taking something that belongs to him, figuratively to eat his lunch. (Or hers.) If you prefer literalness in translations, then the idiom involves a specific kind of causing someone else to lose face.
Oh yeah, the noun means `color,' essentially. For more on the meaning, see the coloreado entry.
Another example is political: leftist ``red,'' for example, is preserved in parties and persons called colorados, like the Uruguayan Partido Colorado, whose flag is a red field with a golden sun in the upper left. (A similar golden sun appears in a similar position in the national flag of Uruguay.) Of course, such names can become fossilized. The colorados today are social democrats, and in the 1999 presidential elections they were essentially the centrist party, between the blancos to the right and Frente Amplio coalition on the left. The blancos, `whites,' are the Partido Nacional or (original name) Partido Blanco. Since the nineteenth century, the colorados had been the dominant party in a two-party system, and the blancos the dominant conservative party, usually in opposition. Things have been changing rapidly, however. In the elections of 1999 the FA emerged as the largest party in the legislature (~40%) and forced a run-off in the presidential election. In the latter, the blancos supported the colorado candidate, who won. The two parties maintained a legislative alliance for a few years. Strategically, it was a bad time to be in power: a Brazilian currency devaluation, an Argentine economic collapse, and outbreaks of foot-and-mouth in the beef industry all contributed to major recession. In the 2004 elections, the colorados received about 10% of the vote (in legislative and presidential elections), and the FA won the presidency and absolute majorities in the legislature. I guess you didn't need to know all that, or that the left wing of the Partido Blanco, still and again the dominant conservative opposition, is now to the left of much of the Partido Colorado.
While color, has had a fluctuating gender and a roughly constant set of meanings, the related verb colorado has fluctuated in sense. (There could hardly be any argument tbout the gender; the female form is colorada, and the plurals are formed by adding ess.) The gender fluctuations (is that kinky ¿or what?) of color have a slight basis in Latin: the original word is of the third declension, so it gives no morphological clue to its gender. (To be fair on both sides, however, this is not a common source of confusion. Most male and female third-declension Latin nouns preserve their gender through the evolution into Spanish.)
The word colorado has a better alibi in Latin, but I jus realized that I can pretend that this entry is complete now, and come back and augment it later. You won't complain.
There is a similarly confusing red word in Russian. The standard word meaning red (krasn'ii) was once used in the transferred sense of beautiful, eloquent, fine, etc. These senses are preserved in various common compound terms and names, but otherwise it is now archaic to use in these senses. The plaza called Red Square was named in this way. Saint Basil's Cathedral was originally described as beautiful (krasnaya, in the appropriate inflection), and the adjective became attached to the square it was on.
John Edwards, who ran for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2004, born in Seneca, South Carolina, lived in a pink house as a newborn, but the family moved to a larger house across town during his first year. I'm not sure the house was pink when he lived there. You want to know more.
At the time of his death, ex-president Chester Alan Arthur's estate included something on New York City's Sixth Avenue, above Central Park, known as the Red House property. Slim pickin's, I know.
Here are links to various buildings and places named the equivalent of ``<Color> House'' in some language (possibly even English), where <Color> is, you guessed it, a color word:
- Casa Colorada
- Casa Roja
- Casa Rosada
- Charnel House (publisher)
- Casa Amarilla
- Casa Dorada
- Domus Aurea
- Casa Azul
- Schwarze Haus
- Casa Blanca
- Casablanca
- Casablanca (the movie)
- White House
- Casa Pintada
A good tantalum ore. The use of tantalum capacitors in cell phones is being blamed for driving an illegal, militia-financing coltan boom in DRC that is endangering gorillas and World Heritage sites.
-
Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, first published in 1936,
makes mention of the comb-over concept in chapter 3. Captain Arthur
Hastings, O.B.E., who is frequently Dr. Watson to Hercule Poirot's
Sherlock Holmes, describes a visit to Poirot by Chief Inspector Japp of
Scotland Yard:
``Well, I never,'' he exclaimed. ``If it isn't Captain Hastings back from the wilds of the what do you call it! Quite like old days seeing you here with Monsieur Poirot. You're looking well, too. Just a little bit thin on top, eh? Well, that's what we're all coming to. I'm the same.''
The second paragraph is pretty much in character for the captain, and touches on certain clichés of the comb-over phenomenon, particularly the sensitivity of the combers-over and their delusion that the strategem is not, so to speak, transparent. The only important aspect not very clearly referenced (perhaps because it follows or is obvious) is the fact that almost everyone who does not use one regards the comb-over as ridiculous and ugly.
I winced slightly. I was under the impression that owing to the careful way I brushed my hair across the top of my head the thinness referred to by Japp was quite unnoticeable. However, Japp had never been remarkable for tact where I was concerned, so I put a good face upon it and agreed that we were none of us getting any younger.
Inspector Japp's ``the what do you call it'' is ``the Argentine,'' as Argentina was known. (Ukraine was similarly once quite systematically referred to as ``the Ukraine.'') -
In May 1977, Frank J. and Donald J. Smith, of Orlando, Florida, were
granted US Patent No. 4,022,227: ``Method of Concealing Partial
Baldness.''
This
link is to the USPTO's own record. If
you want to see the associated images without using the USPTO's browser
plug-in, see it at
Google Patents.
It is unclear to me what part if any of this patent was not, ahem, covered under ``prior art.'' Comb-overs are most often done from one side only, so maybe that's it. The claims of a patent are generally separable, so it is safe to claim too much and let the chips fall where they may if an infringement case reaches court. It is my understanding, from an interview with the ``inventors'' that I once read, that at the time of the patent filing (1975) the Smiths (such an appropriately unoriginal surname!) had been planning to market some associated hardware, but later abandoned that project. This would presumably be the ``object'' mentioned in claim 3 (but evidently not 4):3. A method as in claim 2 wherein after the hair from the back of the head is folded over the bald area, an object is placed over the hair and hair from a first of the sides is brushed over the object, and after the hair from said first side is folded into place the object is placed over the hair and the hair from the second side is folded over the object.
4. A method as in claim 3, wherein said object is a person's hand the hair spray is applied after the hair from said first side is folded into place and again after said second side being folded into place. - After Japp has left, Poirot coughs and says ``You know, Hastings, there is a little device--my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity--one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one's own hair over it--it is not a wig, you comprehend--but--'' The captain is not intrigued by the possibility, to say the least.
Spanish English
La silla es confortable. The chair is comfortable.
La persona esta cómoda. The person is comfortable.
Here at home (i.e., in the SBF glossary) recent expansion has regrettably separated this (comic nose) entry from the common cold entry.
According to COMIR,
Over the last several years a number of organizations (NGOs, INGOs as well as IGOs) have been engaged in the development of online resources to facilitate the exchange of information, to support minority initiatives and to advocate minority rights in the region. These organizations have adopted various strategies to collect and disseminate information. These strategies often result in overlapping efforts and parallel projects. Thus is seen the necessity of cooperation and coordination between various organizations engaged in the development of online resources, networking and dissemination of information on the issues of minority rights, multicultural politics and ethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Commonwealth of Independent States.COMIR is an Internet-based cooperative project that aims at promoting the free flow of information and dialogue in the field of ethnic relations, multicultural politics and minority rights. COMIR aims to establish a clearinghouse of information and activities relevant to Europe (OSCE region) to support democratic governance of multiethnic and multinational societies. To this end, COMIR develops and promotes virtual libraries, mailing lists, a database of full text documents, training materials, etc. Major initiatives include a Virtual Library, coordinated mailing lists, a meta-search engine across founders' web sites, a Minority Rights Practitioners Resource Pack, a best practice database, curriculum development and advocacy training.
See also BAN.
Omitting a comma can also cause a subordinate clause that modifies an entire main clause to modify a single word instead. Consider, for example, this sentence from our But seriously folks... entry:
I didn't write back asking for proof, which demonstrates that I am a clueless moron.
Sentences whose meanings are reversed by omission or addition of commas are rarer, but they're not too hard to construct.
The words request and instruction are also used, particularly in computing, since computers don't yet have what we think of as volitional preferences (but then there's HAL). For more thoughts along these lines, I firmly encourage you to see the kill -9 entry.
In Ack-Ack, ``Tim'' Pile remembers his early years in the Army...
I did not remain long at Topsham Barracks. In the following January, while on Christmas leave, I received a telegram: ``Would it be convenient to you to embark for South Africa 30th January.'' This was my first experience of official letters; later on I began to understand their underlying significance. I even understood that the displeasure of the Army Council--which I received at a much later stage in my career--was not nearly such a fearsome thing, anyway, after one had survived the first shock. On this particular occasion I took the telegram at its face value and wired back, ``Would much prefer to embark after the hunting season is over.'' This caused a terrible sensation, and I got wires to return at once to Topsham Barracks, where my major spoke to me at some length on the duties of a soldier. I tried to explain that I thought they were giving me the option as to what I should like to do, and he replied, ``Young man, a request from the War Office is a command.''I embarked on the troopship Dunera for Cape Town on January 30, 1905. ...
If Tim Pile had not had such an irregular, indulgent, and deficient grade-school education (as he describes in the book), he would not have entered his military training at the bottom of his class. He would also already have learned from the example of his fourth-grade teacher that figures of authority may express commands as if they were suggestions or options. Sometimes this is a form of humor. It's a funny sort of humor: funny only to the commander, and only funny if the person commanded does not find it funny but ``gets it.''
Oh, here's something I read in an email from the unnamed chairman of an unnamed department at an unnamed university today:
I hope you will all encourage (i.e., require) your undergrad researchers to participate in this event.
What makes this particularly interesting is that it contains nested, errr, expressions of preference.
Oh, it has other meanings! I guess the sartorial sense is derived from the earlier use of commando to designate a small body of picked men (or a member of that unit) sent on a difficult, possibly unconventional mission -- what we now call special forces (or, sometimes imprecisely, spetsnaz, for local color).
(They say that truth is the first casualty of war. And if you go commando, you do without war briefs. Makes perfect sense.)
But where did it all begin? Here's the entry from EB11, vol. VI, pg. 765:
COMMANDO, a Portuguese word meaning ``command,'' adopted by the Boers in South Africa through whom it has come into English use, for military and semi-military expeditions against the natives. More particularly a ``commando'' was the administrative and tactical unit of the forces of the former Boer republics, ``commandeered'' under the law of the constitutions which made military service obligatory on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Each ``commando'' was formed from the burghers of military age of an electoral district.
The Portuguese, you will remember, colonized regions to the northwest and northeast of South Africa -- present-day Angola and Mozambique, resp. It must be noted that Portugal is a small country even by European standards, and most of its colonization was in the form of coastal enclaves ranging in size from Goa to undermanned fortresses on coastal islands. That's why it was natural for King Leopold II of little Belgium, getting a late start on the African colonization bonanza, to squeeze the Portuguese out of the Congo, where they had only a trading-relations toe-hold.
The Portuguese language before the twentieth century had a pseudo-etymological orthography like English and French, preserving many historical features that encoded no systematic phonemic information. One such feature was the double em in words like commando. Much of this was swept away after reforms were adopted in the Portuguese-speaking countries in 1911-1915. These generally popular reforms left Portuguese with a leaner phonetic spelling like those of Spain and Italy. Differences in pronunciation between Brazil and the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world (primarily Portugal) have made further standardization problematic. Anyway, commando, as the word was spelled during the Boer War, has been spelled comando in the original language since just after the above-quoted EB entry was published.
The Portuguese noun comando has about the same range of meanings as the English noun `command,' including that of `military order' (regarding which, vide supra). (The form comando of the verb comandar means `I command.') At least as early as 1791, the word was in use in the restricted sense of an official order permitting an action against natives such as described in EB11. Historical examples in the OED2 suggest that the word became attached successively to the action itself and then to the organized group that did or might undertake the action. In the UK in 1940 the word was retasked, referring to men selected for special training as shock troops to repel the expected German invasion of England. The modern sense (I mean before the underwear sense; the sense of special forces for raids -- actions behind enemy lines) came into use later in the war.
Louisiana is not technically a community property state, but it is similar. On most legal matters, Louisiana is an exception because of its Spanish/French legacy (i.e., tradition of Roman/Napoleonic code, instead of Common law).
One of the underappreciated benefits of religious pluralism is the load-leveling: different denominations worshipping on different days makes it possible for everyone to have a good time or fulfill their religious obligations or whatever on their own special day, while there is always someone on-duty at the help desk.
The official Monday Night Football URL is at the MNF entry.
Como. -- `I eat.'
¿Como como? -- `How do I eat?'
¡Como como! -- `How I eat!'
Como como como. -- `I eat as [i.e. in the manner that] I eat.'
...
Moco, from Latin mucus, means what you'd expect. Mocoso means `runny-nosed' and (not in the literal sense) `runny-nosed kid.'
In grammatical terms, comparative refers either to the nonabsolute forms of modifiers (e.g., hazier and haziest, as opposed to hazy), or specifically to the forms (like hazier and more hazy) that are neither absolute nor superlative (haziest or most hazy). (In languages without a superlative form, that's not a very important synactic distinction.) In the following, we use the narrower sense.
The comparative of adjectives in English can always be formed periphrastically (as more heated and more loud from the absolute forms heated and loud) and often by inflection, using the suffix -er: (e.g., louder). The -er inflection tends to be less acceptable on word already inflected. Hence, the (past and present) participles heated and writhing, formed from verbs by addition of -ed and -ing, do not take -er. Similarly, adverbs formed from adjectives by the addition of -ly rarely occur in a comparative form in -lier. The apparent exceptions all seem to be adjectives in -ly (shapelier, kindlier, livelier). Adjectives formed by the suffix -y from nouns take the -er (and -est) inflection readily (e.g., windier).
Where an inflected comparative form is available, the periphrastic form avoided.
A small number of older comparative and superlative forms are not straightforwardly constructed by addition of the -er or -est suffixes: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; etc. The word more itself is the common comparative form of the adjectives many (for countable nouns) and much (for uncountable). The word most is similarly the common superlative form. The expressions many more and much more are instances of the absolute forms many and much functioning as adverbs to modify their own comparative forms (to wit, the word more functioning as adverb or adjective).
Corresponding to the general quantifiers many and much for countable and uncountable nouns, respectively, there are adjectives few and little. These do have distinct comparative and superlative forms: fewer and fewest, and less and least. The widespread supermarket-checkout use of ``less than 12 items'' is offensive because it is such a trivial and pointless error. Complain to the manager.
The reason so many words begin with these four letters -- C-O-M-P -- is that con- is common prefix in Latin and lots of useful Latin root words begin in the letter "p," The bilabial nasal consonant em is easier to articulate before another bilabial consonant like "b" or "p" than the open consonant en, so in Latin as in many languages, there is a systematic substitution of -mp- for -np-.
In 2001, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina began a push for HP to purchase Compaq. The purchase was opposed by director Walter Hewlett, son of company co-founder William Hewlett. The Hewlett and Packard families, which together owned 18% of the company, voted against the merger, but HP shareholders approved it over their opposition on March 19, 2002; Compaq shareholders accepted the deal the next day.
At the first step, there are the well-known N, E, W, S. (There is a folk etymology that the word news is derived from this sequence of letters, representing the idea that news comes from all directions. This is a very lame theory.)
To establish a mathematical convention for the rest of this very important
glossary entry, we note that taking E as the orientation of origin, and
taking positive angles in the conventional sense, E, N, W, and S represent
angles of 0, 
/2 (90°),
, and
3/2, respectively.
A second set of directions is named by combining terms for adjacent
directions in the first set: NE (northeast), NW (northwest), SW (southwest)
and SE (southeast), at /4 (45°),
3/4, 5/4, 7/4.
Note that in this binomial set, N or S always precedes E or W.
The third set of direction names is constructed in the form ABC,
where A is in the first set {E, N, W, S} and BC is one of
the two directions in the second set {NE, NW, SW, SE} which is closest to
the given A. The direction represented by ABC is half-way between the
directions represented by A and by BC. Thus we have the eight directions ENE,
NNE, NNW, WNW, WSW, SSW, SSE, ESE, at odd multiples of /8 (22.5°):
/8, 3/8, ... ,
15/8. The names of these
directions are simply the names of the direction components used to
construct them: ENE is ``east northeast,'' SSW is ``south southwest.'' All
one is doing is reciting or writing the three elementary direction names,
with a pause or space between the first two. By the nature of the
construction, two of the three elementary directions in the name are
identical.
The fourth set of directions is constructed by ``tweaking`` (not official
terminology) directions from the first and second set (but not from the
third set) by /16 (11.25°). The names of these
compass directions reflect this origin. They are of the form AbC and
ABbC, where A and AB are directions in the first and
second sets, respectively, and C is always one of the four principal
directions (the first set). Thus, directions in the form AbC have
both A and C a principal direction: AbC is A
tweaked a little bit in the direction of C. For example, EbN (east
by north) is almost east; it is the direction
/16 instead of exactly 0.
[Intermission: in the summer of 1979, I would take 3 AM walks
through deepest suburbia. It occurred to me that I could strip naked and
walk down the middle of the street unobserved, because everyone was asleep.
I sort of have that feeling now, writing this section. Sometimes I feel
that way when I'm teaching class. End of intermission.]
NbE (north by east) is almost north, but tweaked a bit to the
east, so it is 7/16 instead of exactly
/2. Directions ABbC follow the same
idea, but the directions one is tweaking away from are from the second
set. Thus, SWbW (southwest by west) is a shade west of southwest:
(5/4 - /16 =
19/16) and SWbS (southwest
by south) is a shade south of SW (5/4 +
/16 = 21/16).
The sixteen independent directions in this fourth set are odd multiples
of /16.
I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, as long has he has income and she is pattable.
-- Ogden Nash
Here is another example, from a published article on scavenging and aerosol reactions in cumulus clouds:
* ``Aircraft measurements were
complimented by a ground sampling station ....''
As you now surely realize, the authors meant that the ground station
``complemented'' the aircraft monitoring. As written,
the passage suggests that someone on the ground was radioing encouragement
to the pilot.
Warren McCulloch was the first to extend the familiar usage of the word ``computation'' beyond the description of mere numerical manipulations to the general class of operations that reduce information. By this he restored its classical meaning, used by Juvenal when he wrote computat say ``Your face shows your age.'' Doubtless, the showing is an information reduction, for while ten billion faces can be distinguished (about 33 bits), a man's years are--at most--associated with only 7.
I'm not sure I'd entirely agree. Determining x+1 does not reduce x in any common sense, but I think it counts as a computation. I'm also concerned that with the growing population of the world, it's increasing likely that someone out there is indistinguishable from me, or at least from one of the ages of me. Poor fellow.
The Latin phrase referred to, incidentally, is facies tua computat annos.
The question of reduction is not a minor one. One of the attractions of quantum computation is that (if some of its advocates are correct) quantum computations can be performed dissipationlessly -- i.e., at zero cost in energy. I suspect that can only be done if you have infinite time to wait for the results, but never mind. An obvious objection to this claim is that if a calculation involves a reduction in information, then entropy increases, and entropy increase implies heat generation and dissipation. The answer to this objection was (back when I read about this) that computation can be made reversible, so that at any stage the stored data are sufficient to recover the initial inputs. This logical reversibility is at least a necessary condition for thermodynamic reversibility.
``Never try to explain computers to a layman. It's easier to explain sex to a virgin.''-- Robert Heinlein. (Don't try to explain lap-tops to Heinlein. He's dead.)