CS

Caesarean Section. Vide C-section infra.

Ooh, I hope you didn't miss this talk by Katherine Duthie at CSWIP 2005: ``Agency and Elective Caesarean Sections: Using Feminist Critiques as a Jumping Off Point.''

CS

Carrier Selection.

CS

Cell Station.

CS

Centraal Station, Amsterdam.

Cs

Cesium. Atomic number 55. Yet another alkali metal. The heaviest with a stable isotope.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

CS

Chip Select. A chip or chip port enable voltage.

C.S.

Clive Staples. As in C.S. Lewis.

The Staples Center in Los Angeles, home of the Kings NHL team, Lakers NBA team, and other sports teams, is not named in tribute to C.S. Lewis.

CS

Code Segment.

CS

Commercial Standard.

Here's some old news that I'm permitted to quote because I credit it to Better Buyership, Use and Care, by Household Finance Corporation. (It's from p. 24 of the Fabrics booklet; look here for more about the Better Buyership Series.)

In the United States according to Federal Trade Commission Rulings regarding Shrinkage of Woven Cotton Merchandise [promulgated June 30, 1938], the words ``pre-shrunk,'' ``shrinkproof'' and the like when used must indicate that there is no remaining shrinkage left in the goods. If there is additional shrinkage left in the fabric the terms used should be qualified as: ``Pre-shrunk--will not shrink more than ------ per cent under commercial standard CS59-36.''

It's clear enough what they intended to mean, but some rewording would have improved the logic. The booklet was revised in January 1948. Possibly the rules have changed since then.

CS

Computer Science.

CS

Convergence Sublayer. An AAL comprises a CS and an SAR. A CS comprises comprises a common part (CPCS) and a service-specific part (SSCS).

CS

Cross Section. Scattering cross section is usually abbreviated by a lower-case sigma (). I don't remember from engineering drawings, but in square cut (SC) rubber belts for VCR's, ``CS'' is the thickness of the belt (inside-to-outside distance, not top-to-bottom), and that's all that really matters after all.

.cs

Czechoslovakia domain name code. This country is not currently in existence. Although Sorb, Bohemian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian and other peoples had existed in the central part of eastern Europe for many centuries, it was not always assumed that they should have their own ethnically homogeneous regions and governments. That opinion grew in number and strength of adherents, however, especially after the French Revolution, and eventually provided the immediate spark for a World War (now known as WWI). Among the casualties of that war were millions of people and a few monarchial empires (Prussian, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman). France and Britain split between themselves those former non-European possessions of the Ottoman Empire which they did not already control (wish I had a Sykes-Picot or Lawrence-of-Arabia entry). The Russian Empire (known as the prison-house of nations) continued to imprison various nations as the Soviet Union. The Kaiser abdicated, and after a revolution and counter-revolution, Germany became a fragile democracy (the Weimar Republic). Poland and the pieces of the old Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire became independent countries. (No -- the Sorbs didn't get their own country; Bohemia was the western Czech region.)

If I don't have stuff there now, eventually I will have stuff at the Czech Republic (.cz) and Slovakia (.sk) entries. On second thought, I'll probably hide the information in places you'd never think to look, like the Defenestration of Prague entry.

CSA

Canadian Standards Association.

CSA

Canadian Soccer Association. L'Association canadienne de soccer (L'ACS). I'm grateful they didn't call it a ``Federation'' -- too many accents. Also, ``soccer association'' can be expanded ``association-football association.'' A member of CONCACAF.

CSA

Canadian Space Agency.

CSA

Canned SubAssembly.

CSA

Carrier Service Area.

CSA

Center for the Study of Architecture.

CSA

Central Sleep Apnea. A nervous system disorder: diaphragm periodically fails to receive signal to contract. Breathing stops until oxygen distress wakens or partly wakes the sleeper. Cf. the more common Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA).

CSA

Chicago Software Association.

CSA

Chinese Student Association.

CSA

Community-Supported Agriculture. Buy local! In a typical CSA program, local customers buy a share of a farm's or a farm collective's produce. Sort of like share-cropping. Cutting out the middleman isn't efficient... it's just chic.

CSA

Confederate States of America (1861-1865). The Confederacy was founded on February 4, 1861 by the seven southern states that had seceded by that date:

1. South Carolina (December 20, 1860)
2. Mississippi (January 9, 1981)
3. Florida (January 10, 1861)
4. Alabama (January 11, 1861)
5. Georgia (January 19, 1861)
6. Louisiana (January 26, 1861)
7. Texas (February 1, 1861)

(Note that all this occurred before Lincoln took office. Until 1936, US presidential inaugurations took place on March 4.)

Jefferson Davis was selected president the next day (Feb. 5). The first official Confederate flag resembled the Union flag, except that it had only three bars (one white between two red) instead of thirteen stripes, and the canton had a circle of seven white stars (for the seven original seceding states) on a blue background. This was the ``Stars and Bars,'' and it was so similar to the Union flag that a very different battle flag was designed. This was the ``Southern Cross'' which most people today think of as ``the'' Confederate flag and which some people incorrectly call the ``Stars and Bars.'' Later in the war, the stars-and-bars was replaced as national flag by one that included the Southern Cross.

The cross bears thirteen stars, for the eleven states that seceded, plus two. The four additional seceding states were

8. Virginia (April 17, 1861)
9. Arkansas (May 6, 1861)
10. Tennessee (May 7, 1861)
11. North Carolina (May 21, 1861)

The two other states were the border states of Kentucky and Missouri. In each of these states there were efforts to secede that were thwarted by Union occupation. They had representatives in the Confederate as well as the Union legislature, but they were effectively neutralized by occupation.

CSA

Configuration Status Accounting.

CSA

Covariance Structure Analysis.

CSA

Cub Scouts of America. A sort of junior (grade-school) Boy Scouts (BSA). Cf. brownies.

CSAA

Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies. A constituent association of the EAAS.

CSAAR

Classical Society of the American Academy of Rome. Founded in 1937 to support the School of Classical Studies of the AAR.

CSAD

Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Had they asked me, I'd have counseled against the choice of such a lugubrious acronym. Alas, too late, too late.

CSAP

Core Service Access Point.

CSAP

Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. A SAMHSA center.

CSA/SCE

Canadian Society for Aesthetics / La Societé canadienne d'esthétique.

CSAT

Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Another SAMHSA center. For when CSAP has failed, I guess.

CSB

Confederación Sudamericana de Bridge. Currently (late 2006), this is the governing body for the World Bridge Federation's Zone 3, and its nine members are the NBO's of all South American countries except Venezuela, French Guyana, Guyana, and Surinam (those four belong to the CACBF).

When I first wrote this entry (offhand, I can only say that was between 1995 and 2003), the president of CSB, from Paraguay, in his own person constituted just less than 2% of the CSB membership in his country (54 members, not a multiple of four). Now the president is from Uruguay. How do they expect me to keep my entries up-to-date if they keep changing presidents?!?

Of course, you expect musical presidential chairs in South America, but there are other changes. Colombia (i.e., the Colombian NBO, FEDEBRIDGE) was a member of the CACBF when I first wrote this entry, and now is a member of CSB. In late 2006, the CSB site also lists Venezuela as a member, but no Venezuelan players are listed in competition results, and the Venezuelan NBO (the FVB) is quite clear that Venezuela is part of the CACBF. (The CSB site also has a map showing much of Central America and the Caribbean as CSB territory.)

The membership numbers seem to fluctuate a bit too. When I first wrote this entry (again, whenever that was), more than half of CSB members were in Brazil. As of the end of 2005, according to a WBF page, there are 3,700 players in CSB. The two largest NBO's are Chile's (FCB) with 1,471 members, and Brazil's (FBB) with 990. Paraguay is up to 75.

The name of the South American zonal federation is normally given in (and may officially be) Spanish, but the acronym CSB works in Portuguese as well, demonstrating that acronyms advance i18n and build a bridge of amity and understanding between nations. Sorry.

The CSB's Paraguayan president had an address on a street called Estados Unidos (that is, United States Street, see EEUU). Now the Uruguayan president's name is Santiago (capital of Chile). The CSB's delegate to the WBF is and was Brazilian. Have I bored you out of your mind yet?

I suppose one should let sleeping dogs lie, but a datum that really begs to be included in this entry is the fact that Paraguay fought the ``War of the Triple Alliance'' (1865-1870) against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. It looks like West was the dummy.

Paraguay lost a chunk of its territory then, and a large fraction of its male population. Nowadays people sometimes express skepticism that a war could have a massive effect on something like the sex ratio of the population, to the extent of modifying social behaviors (women accepting half a loaf, that sort of thing). Happy they, who can live in blithe ignorance of such bloodletting.

CSBM

Confidence- and Security-Building Measure. Portentious acronym, since BM occurs in a variety of other acronyms which concern confidence and security, such as ABM, ICBM, SLBM, ....

CSB/SJU

College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University. (That's not my OR operator; that pipe seems to be part of the official name.) ``The College of Saint Benedict for women and Saint John's University for men are partners in liberal arts education, providing students the opportunity to benefit from the distinctions of not one, but two [thanks for helping me out with the math] nationally recognized Catholic, undergraduate colleges. Together the colleges challenge students to live balanced lives of learning, work, leadership and service in a changing world.''

CSC

Center for Social Concerns. At ND; name presumably chosen in blithe disregard of the confusion that would occur with the other ND CSC.

CSC

Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. One of the five regional affiliates of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

CSC

Common Signaling Channel.

CSC

Complete State Coding.

CSC

Computer Sciences Corporation.

CSC

Congrégation de Sainte-Croix. (Named after Holy Cross, the LeMans suburb). Hence: `Congregation of Holy Cross'; not ``Congregation of the Holy Cross.'') The order that founded and leads the University of Notre Dame du Lac (ND).

CSCA

California Studies in Classical Antiquity. A journal now published as Classical Antiquity (CA).

CSCAP

Council on Security and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

CSCE

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Renamed OSCE (q.v.) in 1995.

CsCl

Cesium Chloride. Name often used to refer to the CsCl crystal structure, which is that of two interpenetrating simple cubic (SC) sublattices (one each for anions and cations), with the ions of each lattice occupying the body centers of the other. Decidedly less common structure for simple ionic salts than that of NaCl.

CSCP

Cambridge School Classics Project. This project produced the Cambridge Latin Course, which is widely used in the UK and somewhat less popular in North America. There seems to be a copyright issue that prevents some of the supporting materials from being distributed outside the EU.

CSCSR

Center for the Study of College Student Retention. ``Retention'' here refers to colleges retaining students, and not to college students retaining studies, or water, or anything else. CSCSR publishes a Retention Journal.

CSCW

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. (You may have to poke around; as of March 2003 the website's structure is a bit jumbled.)

CSD

Central (financial) Securities Depository. See ECSDA.

CSD

Children's Services Division. A defunct division (what would today be called an association) within the American Library Association (ALA).

CSD

(IUCN) Commission on Sustainable Development.

CSD

The Concise Scots Dictionary, ed. Mairi Robinson. The authoritative one-volume dictionary of the language, from medieval Scottish to modern. There is another, inferior dictionary with the same name. The one you want is produced and copyrighted by the Scottish National Dictionary Association (SNDA).

The CSD is widely available in US libraries. The ``Historians of Scotland'' edition of Androw Wynton's Orygynale Cronykil contains an extensive glossary of Scots, referenced to Wynton's text.

For something heftier, try DOST.

CSD

Crack Shearing Displacement.

CSD

Crystal Size Distribution.

CSDD

Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia.

CSDG

Critical Stress of Dislocation Generation.

CSDI

Chicago Southland Development, Inc. Trying to make the neighborhood of the University of Chicago too expensive for its graduate students.

CSDU

Core Service Data Unit.

CSE

Certificate of Secondary Education. Introduced in Britain in 1963.

CSE

Computer Science and Engineering. This may be interpreted as a parallel construction: ``Computer Science and Computer Engineering.'' An academic department or division designation.

CSE

Council of Science Editors. More at the CBE entry.

CSEA

Civil Service Employees Association. A union that represents some UB employees, and many other workers in New York State. It's local 1000 of AFSCME. (No, that doesn't strike me as a very local local. How does it strike you?)

C-section

Caesarean Section. In the US between 1970 and 1988, births by C-section rose from 5% to 25% of live births. Among the reasons cited: improved fetal monitoring during labor, which can indicate that a fetus is endangered by the rigors of continued labor, obstetricians' fear of malpractice suits in cases where vaginal birth is known to be (to some uncertain degree) risky (normally, vaginal birth is safer than C-section), and even the convenience of the mother or the doctor. In 1990, when the C-section rate was 23.5, the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) listed a 15% rate as a ``goal'' for the year 2000 (this was in its Healthy People 2000 report). In 1995-97, the rate seems to have leveled off at about 21%.

One alternative to C-section is the use of vacuum extraction to assist in difficult vaginal deliveries, but this leads to brain bleeding in 6% of cases. That was according to a NYTimes article on January 7, 1999. With a complication like that, you might imagine that by now the procedure has been abandoned. In fact, forceps, vacuum extraction, and C-section all have their risks. That's why they're not used if a normal vaginal delivery is expected or under way. As of 2008, the question of which method is preferable does not yet appear to have been definitively decided.

CSEE

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

CSEP

Center for the Study of Education Policy. (The homepage also, I think accidentally, calls it the ``Center for the Study of Educational Policy.'') ``Established in 1995, the Center for the Study of Education Policy provides research and expertise to policymakers and practitioners geared towards [blah, blah, and -- so to speak -- blah]. The Center is located in the College of Education at Illinois State University.''

CSEP

Center for the Study of Educational Policy. Been there, done that. Based in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education within the School of Education at Indiana University, it was publishing occasional papers in the mid-60's, when ISU's CSEP wasn't yet even a glimmer in the Illinois governor's eye.

When I write ``the mid-60's,'' I have in mind a particular paper from 1965 -- in hand, even: Occasional Paper No. 65-102, November 1965, by Richard Olmsted of Indiana University, entitled ``APPEALS To HISTORY IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-ADVOCACY: A Logical Inquiry.'' Olmsted begins by asking:

Is history a promiscuous woman who bestows her favor on every suitor? A brief review of the materials written on any major question of educational policy is enough to cast doubt on the morals of this venerable lady. Appeals to history in educational disputes are frequent, and often she seems to lend her charms in support of opposing points of view.

Ah, a breath of dusty antique air -- like opening an old box in the attic. Well, it's downhill from there. The paper is just a preliminary exploratory thing.

CSEQ

College Student Experience Questionnaire. It's not just a generic term. There's a standard survey instrument by this name.

CSERP

ChemoSensory Event-Related Potential.

CSF

CerebroSpinal Fluid. More at the GROSSKOPF subentry.

CSF

Critical Success Factor.

CSG

The Council of State Governments.

CS gas

A widely used kind of tear gas. Not actually a gas but an aerosol of CS, which gets its name from the first initials of its co-discoverers' last names, Ben Carson and Roger Staughton.

CSGR

Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation. At the University of Warwick.

CSH

Combat Support Hospital.

CSHPM, CSHPM - SCHPM

Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics. (Société canadienne d'histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques.) Founded in 1974, it ``promotes research and teaching in the history and philosophy of mathematics.''

CSHPS, CSHPS/SCHPS

Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. (Société canadienne d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences.) Their logo has a nice way of compressing together the initialisms.

CSHSG

Colorado Springs Homeschool Support Group.

CSI

CANE Summer Institute. An annual program of the Classical Association of New England since 1983. The week-long institute (six days in 2005) includes a program of lectures (nine in 2005) open to the public, a dozen or so courses (registration required), reading groups, and various events.

CSI

Channel State Information.

CSI

Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The group that used to be CSICOP.

Their literature once explained that their Committee is a serious and fair-minded research institution that ``[d]oes not reject claims on a priori grounds, antecedent to inquiry, but [rather] examines them objectively and carefully'' and then proves them WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Yeah, that's it! Embarrass them rascally, irrational, demagogic quacks and snake-oil salesmen and unscientific no-goods! Down with prejudiced, emotional credulity! Yippee!!! Ahem -- and disseminates the findings in a serious, fair-minded journal that it publishes itself. I notice that Dr. Brian Josephson is not on their distinguished list of fellows. (Of course, they probably can't include every Nobel laureate who studies paranormal phenomena.) CSI is based in ``fast-growing'' Amherst, NY, across the street (Sweet Home Road, to be specific) from the north campus of UB.

The official journal is The Skeptical Inquirer, not affiliated in any way, shape or form at all with the National Enquirer no no no no thats based in Lantana Florida not even the Philadelphia Inquirer a far better paper read by far fewer people I gotta get outta this breathless Gertrude Stein mode there must be an editor key here somewhere that restores punctuation ah, that's it! Oh, and did I mention that CSICOP is based right here in thoughtful Amherst, New York, at the Center for Inquiry, ``a hub of rationality and critical thought worldwide--and a resource for the local and academic communities''?

They did manage to attract Steven Jay Gould, who made a wonderful career of interesting hypotheses that turned out to be wrong. He also wrote many very popular books and articles, only some of which were politically correct nonsense. He was a very good writer, although his last big fat white book, written as he was dying of cancer, needed a lot of editing that Harvard's Belknap Press never gave it.

Carl Sagan was in there, too. Another politically correct popularizer. Early in his career, Sagan made himself the point man in the generally successful effort to discredit Immanuel Velikovsky, author of addled nonsensical theories. I don't doubt that Velikovsky's theories were wrong, and that those of his ``predictions'' that turned out to be correct were correct as the result of chance. But Sagan's debunking was intellectually very weak. Sagan's skills were in propaganda, not research.

CSI

Common Sense Initiative. An EPA attempt to have cost-effective environmental protection by making intelligent trade-offs and market- or technology-savvy deals with industry.

CSI

Construction Specifications Institute.

CSI

Convergence Sublayer Indication.

CSI, C.S.I.

Crime Scene Investigation. The activity or the CBS series. Note that the plural of series is series. As of this writing (start of the fall 2003 season) there are only the following two CSI shows on CBS:

1. C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation (since 2000).
2. C.S.I.: Miami (since 2002).
3. Navy NCIS (since 2003).

CSIC

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. The Spanish National Research Council.

CSIC

Customer-Specific IC. Cf. ASIC, the oldest term, and USIC. Is CSIC pronounced ``sea sick,'' as ASIC is pronounced ``AY sick''?

CSICOP

Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal. Pronounced ``SIGH cop.'' Actually, the acronym CSICOP happens to represent the old name for this organization. On September 23, 2006, the executive committee decided to change the name to the initialism CSI. (``See ess I.'' Reverse gringonese for `Yes it is me.') The change primarily reflects a shift in emphasis: although debunking claims of the paranormal was never their only focus, it is no longer as central as it was. To be blunt, they've gone political. It's a plague. I'm told that the alpha chapter of Stammtisch Beau Fleuve has gone political, too. It's not just an Amherst thing, either. Even the once-funny Joe Bob Briggs has succumbed. (Likewise, Frank Rich -- undistinguished chief theater critic for the New York Times from 1980 to 1993 -- went on to apply his limited talents to political analysis.)

Hence the amputation of the three-letter coda. The rump letters are now to stand for the ``Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.'' ``Committee for Scientific Investigation'' struck them as too broad and possibly presumptious, or presumptious-seeming. That seems to imply that they think scientific investigation is broader than skeptical inquiry, as if one could be scientific without keeping one's bullshit detector on. (No, they don't claim to think that. They assert the opposite. It's only their muddled implication. The name doesn't matter very much, but I do think it's more accurate: they are more skeptical than scientific.

I miss the days when the Committee was just running the fool's-errand steeplechase on just a parapsychology circuit. For old times' sake, follow a link for ASP.

``CSICOP-type skeptic'' is a term that has been used on television. A news note from the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) once had a heads-up for a NOVA special on UFO's, and described an in-studio discussion panel for that program as including ``...a Washington area abductee, and a CSICOP-type skeptic.'' So for a while, CSICOP was a recognizable type. Was it wise to give up the brand?

CSiGe

Less common expression for SiGeC. No, it's not an alloy composed mostly of carbon instead of mostly silicon. It's the usual stuff.

CSIOCP

Committee for the Scientific Investigation Of Claims for the Paranormal. I've seen this used as an alternative to CSICOP, supra. I guess that one advantage of shortening the name (see CSI, further supra) is that people are less likely to scramble the initials.

CSIR

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. A popular name:

CSIR India

``[E]stablished in 1942 ... India's largest research and development organisation. It has 40 laboratories spread over the length and breadth of the country. More than 22,000 persons work in various laboratories and institutions of CSIR, with an annual turnover in excess of Rs. 400 crores.''

CSIR (South Africa)

``[T]he premier industrial research organisation in Africa committed to innovation, supporting sustainable development and economic growth and creating value for clients, partners and stakeholders.'' It's probably still true if the ``committed...'' were not a restrictive clause (i.e., if there were a comma after Africa, so the comma introduced an appositive phrase). I suppose the imitation of commercial English (i.e. incompetent English) is part of the effort to make a government-controlled organization as business-friendly as possible.

CSIR

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. A popular name:

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of Ghana.

The old URL (http://www.csir.org.gh/) is currently off the DNS lists.

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of South Africa.

CSIRO

(British) Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The CSIRO Australia site doesn't seem to have any link to a CSIRO in any other Commonwealth country. See NML.

CSIS

Center for Strategic & International Studies.

CSIS

Canadian Security Intelligence Service. French Service canadien du renseignement de sécurité (SCRS). Something like the US FBI.

CSJ

Columbia School of Journalism.

CSL

Clay Sanskrit Library. Begins to do for Sanskrit classics what the Loeb Classical Library does for Greek and Latin classics. Facing-page translations with limited apparatus.

CSLA

California School Leadership Academy. Funded by the state government.

I am opposed to leadership because it demands followership.

CSLA

California State Lifeguard Association.

CSLA

Canadian School Library Association. A division of the CLA.

CSLA

Canadian Society of Landscape Architects.

CSLA

Church and Synagogue Library Association.

CSLD

Center for Language and Speech Disorders. A Chicago-area nonprofit. ``Our mission is to help children with communication disorders reach their full potential through family centered services.''

CSLE

Chinese-Speaking Learners of English.

C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis. You really have to wonder about the sanity of a reference work that includes a C.S. Lewis entry (let alone two of them) primarily because his given names are not usually spelled out. Then again, maybe you needn't wonder.

Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast. He died on November 22, 1963, at Oxford. The C.S. Lewis item was not the biggest obituary news for that date.

Lewis served with the Somerset Light Infantry in WWI and was wounded in 1917. From 1918 he was at University College, Oxford, achieving distinction as a classical scholar. From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Those are the dry details which he is not known for. (Some of this unknown work is remembered -- or is it? -- at the courtly love entry.)

He is known for his books. He wrote a lot of them -- about 40. It's slightly less impressive than that, because most of it was Christian apologetic literature, so he was making a lot of the same points repeatedly.

He wrote a lot of Christian apologetic literature, so he could probably just grab text from an earlier book and put it into a later one.

It's a good thing he didn't have access to a word processor.

His best-known work of apologetic literature was The Screwtape Letters (1942). This comprised 31 letters from an elderly, world-wise devil named Screwtape, written for the instruction of a junior devil named Wormwood. It's all about how to seduce a young convert to Christianity away from it. It's a work of fiction -- possibly a real set of such letters is not available. Possibly the reason that an authentic set of such letters has not become available is not just effective security among devils, but the nonexistence of devils. If devils do not exist, then possibly the doubts that believers feel are the result not of nefarious intervention but of rational doubt. But this is impossible, because rational judgment poses no barrier to belief or disbelief. Therefore devils exist, possibly.

Lewis also wrote a celebrated science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945). It was highly celebrated by people who don't necessarily actually like science fiction, which probably ought to put you on notice. The stories center on Ransom, a linguist who visits Venus and Mars and becomes involved in the battle of good and evil (and N.I.C.E., q.v.). Lewis was a member of a group of writers that called itself the Inklings. Another member of the Inklings was J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Lewis, JRRT was a philologist who is best known by his initials and wrote a trilogy (LOTR) about a world-wide battle of good and evil. It must've been the times.

LOTR was in the ``fantasy'' genre. Lewis dabbled in that too: The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's books. (Books for seven children, yeah.) At the end of the 1980's, the BBC made uninspired TV out of some of the chronicles: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe (bk. 1) (1988); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (bk. 3) (1989); The Silver Chair (bk. 4) (1990). Around 2001 there was also some effort to ride the Harry Potter coattails, and worries that efforts to repopularize the series would squelch their spiritual, almost crypto-Christian content. At first it seemed they didn't move quickly enough to capitalize. In the meantime (2001-2003), LOTR came out as three movies. Another Lion-Witch-Wardrobe retread finally came out in 2005, along with an entourage or retinue or whatever they call these things of five shorts with titles like ``Behind the Magic of Narnia: The Grips and the Roadies.''

If this wasn't enough unreliable information for you, try visiting the alt.books.cs-lewis newsgroup.

CSLIP

Compressed SLIP.

CSLM

Confocal Scanning Laser Microscopy. Same as Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy (LSCM, q.v.).

CSLP

Canada Student Loans Program.

CSLR

Center for the Study of Latino Religion. It ``was founded in 2002 within the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Its mission is to serve as a national center and clearinghouse for ecumenically focused social-scientific study of the US Latino church, its leadership, and the interaction between religion and community.''

I don't know if suggesting improvements is part of their charge, but I have one. Change the name of ``el Señor'' to something distinctive. As Richard Pryor and others have pointed out, Jesús is an extremely common name in the Latino community. Confusion is likely to result. Also, he needs more names. Everyone in the Latino community uses three names nowadays (a Christian name and one surname from each parent, adoptive or otherwise). I propose calling Him Ralph Josephson Christiansen Hanna instead. (Sure it sounds strange. All good ideas take some getting used to.)

CSLR

City & South London Railway. This was the first deep-level electric railway in the world, and also in London. The name was on the common pattern of <terminus> and <other terminus> Railway. When it opened in 1890, it ran 1890 between Stockwell, in South London, and King William Street in the City of London. It was the genesis of the ``London Underground,'' and as such, a major bit of history, so I'm not going to bother writing it up. You can read about it in recollections of one relatively recent independent explorer or at this permanent virtual exhibit of the London Transport Museum.

CSM

Center for Systems Management.

CSM

Center for Student Missions.

We would go out on short missions when I was in college, usually for more beer. The Summer before I entered college, I took a trip to California. I walked into a bar and ordered a beer, and I was shocked to discover you had to be 21 there to buy one. What a crazy state! The only trouble is, their worst ideas catch on. I was actually 21 when I first discovered that there's enough alcohol in beer that if you drink enough of it, it'll eventually make you drunk. It happens so slowly that you can actually observe incremental losses of motor control. And since you probably have to go to the bathroom a few times too, you get to see the practical consequences. Liquor is quicker. Beer is just outdoor air-conditioning. Coolant with a pinch of vasodilation (and diuresis).

CSM

Charles Stewart Mott. An abbreviation not used by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

CSM

Christian Science Monitor. A heart monitor for patients in a Christian Scientific hospital. If anything bad happens, the monitor alerts the nurses to pray with deliberate urgency. Of course this is absurd: taking a pulse or performing any other meaningful diagnostic test is forbidden, so monitoring is impossible.

CSM

College of San Mateo. In California. It's a public community college in San Mateo County that used to be called San Mateo Junior College. They have, or have had, a lot of web domains:

• <collegeofsanmateo.edu>
• <gocsm.net>
• <smccd.net> Okay, really this is for the San Mateo County Community College District, which also includes Cañada College and Skyline College (``Achieve'').
• <smccd.edu> (defunct)

San Mateo is Spanish for `Saint Matthew.' If it were called ``College of Saint Matthew,'' you'd probably be correct to guess that it wasn't a public college.

CSM

Colorado School of Mines. In Golden. Contrary to near-universal supposition, you don't have to major in geology if you go there.

CSM

Creation Science Movement. ``Science'' is such a pretty word.

CSMA

Carrier Sense Multiple Access. A network protocol for the media access sublayer of the data link layer. Basically, a transmitter senses whether a channel is in use before attempting to transmit.

This scheme is evidently less daft than Aloha, but there's a way to dumb it down part-way: in nonpersistent CSMA, if the carrier is detected to be busy, then the transmitter waits a random amount of time and then transmits without rechecking to see if the line is busy.

CSMACD, CSMA/CD

Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) with Collision Detection (CD). You wouldn't think it was necessary, but it certainly is necessary in nonpersistent CSMA, and even in persistent CSMA collisions occur because of transmission delays (not just delays in transmission between nodes, but also delay between channel detection and beginning of transmission).

CSMHA

Center for School Mental Health Assistance.

CSN

Crosby, Stills and Nash.

CSNET, CSNet

Computer Science Network. Supported by CREN.

CSNY

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Buy their recording-studio work. I have a tape recorded live, in-concert, and the instrument work is okay but their voices are awful.

CSO

Central Statistics Office Ireland.

CSO

Chained Sequential Operation.

CSO

Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. Charlotte is in North Carolina. (Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte -- let me hear the band play.)

CSO

Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

CSO

Chief {Science|Security|Strategy} Officer. Uneasy lies the head that wears a triumvirate's crown, I suppose. Chief security and information-security officers must defend their authority from inroads by CRO's.

CSO

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. There's also a Cleveland Orchestra. Skip down a few entries to continue symphony orchestras in Ohio.

CSO

Civil Society Organization. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, as ``western-style'' democracy was on a roll around the world, many of the policy-making mediocrities who pass for independent deep thinkers swarmed around the idea of ``civil society.'' That is the idea that, as de Tocqueville found in America, healthy functioning democracies have many nongovernmental organizations (NGO's) that serve a number of important roles -- they provide some public services; they dilute and resist the power of central government, both in action and in the world of ideas; they serve as nurseries for leadership and new ideas. This and more is certainly true, to varying degrees. An understanding of this might be found reflected in the free-association clause of the US constitution's first amendment.

Of course, the existence of these CSO's is clearly not a sufficient condition for democracy to flourish. Also apparently required are the attitudes that go along with the social structure. There are essentially two extremes in the way of viewing this. On one extreme is the idea that CSO's and the associated socialization are a chicken-and-egg problem. That view suggests that if one establishes the CSO, the attitude will follow -- given the chickens, or the eggs, then eggs and chickens will follow. At the opposite extreme is the view that CSO's are the externalities of a worldview: that democratic peoples act in ways that produce not only democratic government but also CSO's. This suggests that it is futile to put CSO's (or free elections) in place where people weren't already creating them.

CSO

Color Separation Overlay.

CSO

Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

CSO

Columbus Symphony Orchestra.

CSO

Combined Sewer Overflow. See (CSS).

CSOS

Court Services and Offender Services. It's fun to imagine what this broadly named independent agency of the US government might do.

CSP

Car Signal Processor. Used in Electronic Fuel Injection, among other things.

CSP

Chip-Scale Package[s].

CSP

Chiral Solid Phase.

CSP

Comité de salut public. This glossary doesn't have the most complete description of the CSP, but we do have some idiosyncratic musings part way through an SSP entry.

CSP

Community-Supported Publishing. A publishing model based on Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). In a typical CSP program, readers (or at least book purchasers) subscribe annually to receive a pig-in-a-poke book each month. A lot of small houses don't publish as many a dozen books a year, but that's no problem: if there isn't a new book, there may be something in the backlist.

CSP

Comité de salut public. This glossary doesn't have the most complete description of the CSP, but we do have some idiosyncratic musings part way through an SSP entry.

CSP

Magazine for the Convenience Store and retail Petroleum industry.

C-SPAN

Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.

CSPC

Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Sounds like they sit around and watch television all day, periodically going to the drive-thru for some eats. But let's open up the discussion to alternative opinions from across the political spectrum! The organization's own self-description (and after all, who is better qualified or even at all qualified to give its self-description?) begins ``now in its second decade of activity, is dedicated to defending the cultural foundations of a free society, a task made even more pressing by the attack on America of September 11^th, the Iraq conflict and the internal opponents of freedom this attack has revealed. The Center is led by its President, David Horowitz a man who has been called `the left's most brilliant and articulate nemesis,' [actually, I think the left's precise words sound less flattering than that] who is suited both by experience and dedication to the task at hand.''

CSPDN

Circuit-Switched Public Data Network.

CS-PDU

(ATM) Convergence Sublayer PDU.

CSPI

Center for Science in the Public Interest. An NGO. The public controversy over olestra has been driven in large part by CSPI. In this connection, you can visit this letter.

There was a New Republic magazine article by Stephen Glass (no longer available in the archives of selections from the issue of 30 December 1996), about CSPI and its head tree-hugger, Michael Jacobson, which reported that CSPI is now more of a center for pseudoscience in the interest of publicity. HOWEVER, in Spring of 1998, Stephen Glass was revealed to have faked quotes and other data for many of his articles. It was the second such recent embarrassment for TNR, and they investigated all his stories, retracting some. According to a report from the editors in the 29 June 1998 issue, the CSPI article is one of those compromised by fabricated material.

Hmmm. It gets worse. Buzz Bissinger has an article on Stephen Glass in the September 1998 Vanity Fair. According to this, the chair of the CSPI board sent ``a detailed response, challenging virtually every aspect of Glass's story.'' In a letter to TNR editor Michael Kelly, who was staunchly defending SG, Jim Naureckas wrote that the ``whole article is so dishonest in approach that one can't help but suspect that Glass knew he was fudging.'' On the other hand, Naureckas edits Extra!, a publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which isn't qualified to polish TNR's shoes.

For all I know it may be true that, as reported when Michael Kelly was killed in the Iraq war of 2003, Kelly was forced out at TNR because he was too hard on President Clinton.

Ultimately, TNR's internal investigation, under Kelly's successor Charles Lane, concluded that SG's first unequivocal use of fabrications had been in the CSPI piece. The piece had been fundamentally a smear of Michael Jacobson, who understandably feels that the damage cannot be undone.

Stephen Glass was in the news again in April 2003, explaining that he committed all those frauds for self-esteem. Whether this is just another lie or stupid, I honestly don't know, but it is self-evident that he did it for other people's esteem. If he esteemed himself the more for it, it would have been secret pride in putting one (or a hundred) over on his audience. More likely, he is simply milking the term ``self-esteem'' for unthinking sympathy. If he did it for self-esteem, then he must have had ``low self-esteem,'' and still in some circles those with LSE are deemed innocent victims.

I thought it was interesting that the story of Jayson Blair's frauds at the NYT broke shortly after the Stephen Glass story was rehashed.

Not enough psychobabble? Okay, Newsweek has reported that Blair had sought treatment for substance abuse. Blair granted an exclusive interview to the New York Observer, for publication May 21, 2003. In it he says that his deceptions stemmed from personal problems:

``I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona,'' he said. ``So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.''

How neat.

CSPP

California School of Professional Psychology.

I suppose it must be possible.

CSR

Indiana University Center for Survey Research.

CSR

Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response. Part of the WHO.

CSR

Controlled Substances Registration[s].

CSR

Corporate Social Responsibility. ``Hard-headed businessmen'' can mean thick-skulled, but sometimes it just makes sense from a PR POV. Leverage the greenery, y'know?

CSR

Customer-Service Representative.

CSRA

Child Support Recovery Act of 1992. Intended to compel deadbeat dads to pay up.

CSRL

The Center for Study [sic] of Responsive Law. Nah, it's not about lynching.

CSRS

Coherent Stokes Raman Scattering. Vide CARS.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets. Part of HTML 4 -- an attempt to reduce direct tagging for presentation information in HTML and to replace it with a set of instructions for how to act on lexicographic/functional tagging of the text. This comes closer to the original conception of SGML.

W3.org offers a CSS validation service.

CSS

Channel State Sequence.

CSS

Channel SubSystem. A collection of subchannels that directs the flow of information between I/O devices and main storage, relieves the processor of communication tasks, and performs path management functions. Gee, could I have one of those?

CSS

Coastal Systems Station.

CSS

College Student Survey. A survey of graduating college seniors, administered by cooperative post-secondary institutions across the US for the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI, q.v.). HERI has a corresponding survey for incoming college freshmen (vide CIRP).

CSS

Combat Service Support. [Battle Lab (BL).]

CSS

Combined Sewer System. A sewer system in which some channels carry both sewage (from homes and businesses) and runoff (of rainwater and melted ice and snow, collected from streets and also, in cities, directly from roof drainage). As of 2005, there were about 700 US cities with this kind of system. It used to be a popular system to build because in the short run, it was cheaper than a separated system. The increased cost of treating a higher volume of runoff-diluted sewage was more than offset by the savings in building fewer separated channels.

In the long run, however, there have been increased costs of complying with environmental regulations that became more stringent. The reason is that occasional large storms may exceed the peak capacity of the waste treatment facility or the sewage network. For those occasions, to prevent sewage backup, the overflow of the combined system has to be shunted through relief structures into some external watercourse. That untreated overflow ends up in some body of water in a place sometimes known as ``the environment.'' (Don't tell me that's not a body of water. It is after the storm.)

The overflow exits the regular network at a combined sewer overflow (CSO), a term which is used to refer to both the overflow and the apparatus that handles it. CSO's often incorporate some primitive screen in lieu of treatment.

The northern Indiana cities of South Bend, Mishawaka, and Elkhart all have CSS's, and have been under pressure from IDEM and the EPA to reduce the overflows. The overflow from these cities goes into the St. Joseph River, which empties into Lake Michigan. The three cities' CSO's are the main source of E. coli contamination of the river, and thought to be a major source of that contamination of the lake.

The cost of reconstructing the sewer network of a city is high (for Mishawaka, a city of about 50,000, the estimate was about $100 million for a complete reconstruction), and the solutions planned by all three cities have been for improvements to increase the peak capacity of the treatment plant. Mishawaka has 19 CSO's. I wonder if some partial reconstruction wouldn't work. It would be cheaper to build separate runoff drainage channels in less-developed outlying areas, and if these could be shunted out (unmixed with sewage) at the nearest CSO points, it would reduce the peak load on the rest of the system.

CSS

Content Scramble Systems. Encryption system used for DVD's.

CSSA

Computer Something Something Association. An IT industry association in England. I'll learn `something' when their server is up. Oh! It's up now! Computer Services and Software Association.

CSSER

Center for Solid State Electronics Research at ASU.

CSSF

Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier Luxembourg.

CSS/II

Computer System Simulator II. For the IBM 360.

CSSR

CzechoSlovak Socialist Republic. (No, not Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic.) See the Chechoslovak (cs) entry.

CST

Central Standard Time. GMT - 6 hrs.

CSTA

Computer-Supported {Telephony|Telecommunications} Application.

CSTO

Collective Security Treaty Organization. A successor, if it can be called that, to the Warsaw Pact: an organization for military cooperation centered on the Russian Federation, and involving some other former Soviet republics.

CSTR

{ Continuously | Completely } Stirred-Tank Reactor. A wastewater treatment term. The stuff stirred includes sludge, for want of a better word.

CSU

California State University. ``The Cal State system.''

CSU

Chicago State University.

CSU

Christlich-Soziale Union. Main conservative party in the German state of Bavaria (BY); `Christian Social Union.' A political party organizationally independent of the CDU, which occupies a similar part of the German political spectrum. The CDU and CSU have a sort of mutual nonagression agreement: the CDU never runs candidates in Bavaria, and the CSU never runs candidates outside Bavaria. In the federal parliament (Bundestag), the two parties are always in coalition or both in opposition.

CSU

Cleveland State University.

CSU

Colorado State University. In Fort Collins, CO.

CSU

(Communication-) Channel Service Unit. User-end equipment that interfaces user and communications network. May be combined in a single unit with DSU.

CSU

Connecticut State University. It's not the name of any single university. The CSU system has four main campuses (or campi, if you're feeling pedantic):

• Central CSU (CCSU).
• Eastern CSU (ECSU).
• Southern CSU (SCSU).
• Western CSU (WCSU).

CSULB

California State University, Long Beach. Part of the Cal State system.

CSUS

California State University Sacramento. ``Cal State Sacramento.'' Part of the CSU.

CSV

Comma-Separated Variable[s].

CSW

Commercial Sex Worker. A prostitute, whore, harlot. Someone paid for ``sex.'' Sex is such a tricky word. I think it means ``sexual act'' here, in particular one that involves physical contact. The nonacronymic terms for prostitution are widely used in transferred senses. We really ought to have an entry for meretricious (and a happy new year).

The word pornography is derived from porne (ancient Greek word for CSW) and graphia. The cool thing about this is that at first blush, it seems to be a term no longer used in its original sense. After all, pornography isn't pictures of prostitutes -- it's sexy pictures! But then, the distinction begins to look a bit dodgy. Consider at least ``hard-core pornography,'' which is generally agreed to involve the performance of a sex act...

If someone hired a CSW for a third person, or hired two CSW's to uh, interact sexually, and then filmed the ``work'' with full knowledge of the participants, did prostitution occur? Does it matter if both (or all) participants are paid? Equally? If one of the actors contributes his work for free and subsidizes another? If a cameraman pays the actors, and recoups his costs by selling the film to one of the actors, is that actor a john, a ``producer/director/actor'' like Woody Allen, a blackmail victim, or just underpaid?

Nah, it ain't sex. It's experimental casuistics.

CSW

(Communication link) Channel Status Word.

CSW

{ Clinical | Certified } Social Worker[s], or Clinical Social Work. See SW entry for related entries.

CSWIP, C-SWIP

Canadian Society for Women In Philosophy. Founded in 1976. Also, see SWIP.

This is a most unfelicitous acronym, for anyone who remembers Nietzsche. In the first book of Thus Spake Zarathustra (why is the proper noun in that title so rarely translated `Zoroaster'?), he has an old woman with a bundle advising ``You go to women? Do not forget the whip.'' (Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!)

What does this have to do with philosophy? One of his works Nietzsche entitled Twilight of the Idols, or How to Do Philosophy with a Hammer, so we can see that he was a practical philosopher. That's not an oxymoron: he went insane. Living in Turin, he hugged a horse and collapsed. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton wrote that ``Italy is a paradise for horses, and a hell for women.'' Mrs. Patrick Campbell (famous actress of the stage and a great friend of GBS, if he had one) is supposed to have commented once ``I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.''

Regarding idols and hammers, incidentally, I should probably cite the midrash of Abram destroying most of the stock in his father Terah's idol shop. But you could look it up.

CSWMG

Committee on the Status of Women & Minority Groups. Presumably this name and acronym have been thought up independently by other groups, but at least the American Philological Association (APA) uses it.

CSX

Channel Subsystem (CSS) eXerciser.

Not available by 800 number. Not advertised in hour-long infomercials between prime time and the farm report.

CS1

Capability Set One.

CS2

Capability Set Two.

CT

Center Tap. On the secondary of a transformer. Spinal taps are also taken at the center, but they're worlds more unpleasant.

CT

Central Tablelands. A region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia (.au).

There're also NT and ST.

CT

Channel Termination.

CT

Charge Transfer.

CT

(Computing-) Cluster Technician.

CT

Computer Telephony.

CT

Concentration (multiplied by) Time. Not normally referred to by its expansion but as ``value time.'' A wastewater treatment term: concentration is the concentration of disinfectant, and time is the amount of time the disinfectant is active -- the ``contact time'' (not abbreviated CT, AFAIK).

CT

Connecticut. USPS abbreviation. Well, which is it -- connect or cut? Fish or cut bait!

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Connecticut. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Connecticut city and town links.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, the two major political parties in the US became increasingly polarized ideologically, the Republicans becoming the rightist party and the Democrats the leftist. A large part of this was due to the collapse of Southern allegiances dating back to the Civil War. Most Southern blacks (when not prevented from voting) had voted Republican, and most Southern whites had voted Democratic. At the national level, however, particularly in the 1960's, the Democratic party generally came to support the Civil Rights movement, and the Republican party was characteristically conservative: opposing reform at first, then generally accepting it but opposing further reform. I really ought to discuss that at its own entry. I just wanted to mention that and set it aside to focus on a second, slightly less obvious feature: the disappearance of centrists.

Right on into the 1980's there were Democrats on the right wing of their party, and Republicans on the left wing of theirs, who would probably have been about as comfortable, or about as uncomfortable, switching parties and becoming centrists on the opposite wing of the opposite side of the aisle. On the GOP side, Taft Republicans in the 1950's and Rockefeller Republicans in the 1960's still represented a substantial share of their party. Certainly President Nixon, and probably Ford as well, would be positioned as extreme liberals on their (Republican) party's current (post-Reagan) ideological spectrum. Republican liberals were liberals on domestic policy.

On the Democratic side, as noted, the majority of Southern officeholders in Washington, D.C., were conservative, and most of them remained members of the Democratic party until they retired and were mostly replaced by Republicans. Apart from that group, however, there were Democrats who were with their party only on domestic policy. Under LBJ and under Nixon, the Vietnam War hardened the antianticommunism and antimilitarism of many Democrats. Thus, the centrist or conservative Democrats were the pro-defense Democrats like Senator Henry M. (``Scoop'') Jackson of Washington State (who died in 1983). Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia might have been counted among the hawks, but the end of the Cold War changed the calculus. Nunn opposed the liberation of Kuwait by force in 1991, and after that war was deemed a success, his earlier opposition dimmed his presidential hopes. He retired from the Senate in 1996. Nunn and other moderate Democrats had created the DLC to move their party toward the center, and as a platform for... You know, this isn't what I wanted to write about either.

Suffice it to say that there were still some conservative or moderate Democrats in national politics at the end of the 1980's. There were even a few moderate (liberal?) Republicans at the national level then. One of them, or perhaps all of them, was Lowell Weicker, Jr., a US Senator from Connecticut. He has been reported to have described his isolation with a clever mot that you will have to go to the reincarnated-metaphor entry to read.

William F. Buckley, the famous conservative columnist, became so disgusted with Weicker that in the 1988 elections he endorsed Democrat Joseph Lieberman and formed a committee to fight Weicker's re-election bid. The committee issued bumper stickers asking, ``Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?'' Lieberman won and Weicker eventually quit the GOP. In 1990, he ran for Connecticut governor as an independent and won.

What makes this story interesting (to me -- who cares what you think?) is that just as Senator Weicker was too liberal for his (Republican) party, Lieberman has turned out to be too conservative for his (Democratic) party. In 2004 and 2005, Lieberman has emerged as a latter-day Scoop Jackson, and in the process so enraged much of his party that many Democrats were supporting a challenge -- any challenge -- to his nomination in 2006. In an interesting turnabout, Weicker announced at the end of 2005 that if necessary, he would mount an independent challenge to Lieberman for the Senate in 2006. As it turned out at the state Democratic convention, Lieberman won the party's endorsement but Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont won more than 15% support, the threshold for a primary challenge. Lamont won the Democratic primary on the following August 8, but that was his high-water mark. Lieberman ran as an independent in the general election and won with substantial Republican support.

(Oh yes, there was already a Republican candidate in the race. He wasn't given a chance, in both senses of given. He was considered a weak candidate. How weak? Republican Senate nominee Schlesinger had a campaign song in which his name was set to the music of the Mickey Mouse Show greeting song.)

CT

Cordless Telephone.

Ct.

CourT.

CT

Covert Toxocariasis.

c.t., C.T.

Cum tempore, added after a scheduled time to indicate that the event will really only get under way fifteen minutes after the nominal starting time. Slightly obsolete usage found primarily among German-speaking academics. Cf. s.t.

CT

Current Transformer. For one example, see the GFCB entry.

CTA

California Teachers Association. One of the state affiliates of the NEA.

CTA

Cellulose TriAcetate (polymer).

CTA

Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos. `Central [organization] of Argentine Workers.' Typically, like MTA, described as a ``dissident trade union confederation.'' This refers to the fact that the Argentine trade union movement is dominated by the Peronists: see CGT. A break-away from the CGT, the CTA was founded as the Congreso de los Trabajadores Argentinos in 1992 and changed the cee-word in its name to Central in 1996. It conceives itself as more of a social movement. Individuals both employed and unemployed (incl. retirees) are members, and non-union organizations such as neighborhood improvement organizations can belong.

CTA

Chicago Transit Authority. City buses, subways, and L trains.

CTA

Computerized Tomographic Angiography.

CTA

International Center for Technology Assessment.

CTAM

Cable Television Administration & Marketing Society, Inc. The annual ``CTAM Marketing Summit'' is in July.

CTAN

Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.

Ct.App.

CourT of APPeals.

CTB

Calibration Test Box.

CTB

Communications ToolBox.

CTB

Comprehensive (nuclear-bomb) Test Ban treaty. (See the table of contents first.) More at entry for IMS (International [compliance-] Monitoring System).

CTB

Comprehensive Text Ban treaty. If only. This little-known concession in the war of the words is attested only in the <title> blocks of certain documents. (Also here.)

CTB

Control TestBed.

CTBT

Comprehensive (nuclear-bomb) Test Ban Treaty. (See the table of contents first.) More at entry for IMS (International [compliance-] Monitoring System).

Looks familiar, for some reason.

CTC

Channel-To-Channel

CTC

Combat Training Center.

CTC

Cornell Theory Center. Located on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Participant in the National MetaCenter for Computational Science and Engineering (q.v.), along with the other three NSF supercomputing centers NCSA, PSC, and SDSC.

CTC

Congrès du travail du Canada. L'acronyme bilingue est CLC-CTC.

CTC

Counter Timer Circuit.

CTCP

Client-To-Client-Protocol used for IRC.

CTD

Cell Transfer Delay.

CTD

Chronic Tic Disorder. Chronic motor tics or Tourette's Syndrome (TS).

CTDB

Current Topics in Developmental Biology. Published by Elsevier, so you may need to develop your wallet first. ISSN: 0070-2153.

CTE

Center for Transportation and the Environment.

CTE

Charge Transfer Efficiency. Term used in CCD's: the fraction of stored charge lost in each packet-switching operation.

CTE

Coefficient of Thermal Expansion.

C'tee

Com[m]it[t]ee. Especially useful if you can't r'ber how to spell committee.

CTF

Canadian Teachers' Federation.

CTFE

Center for Thermal/Fluids Engineering at UB.

CTFE

ChloroTriFluoroEthylene (plastic).

CTEM

Conventional Transmission Electron Microscopy.

ctenoid

Comblike.

CTH

The Classical Theatre of Harlem. Some of the plays performed are modern versions of plays from classical antiquity.

CTHRA

Cable and Telecommunications Human Resources Association. Any plans for a Mothra meets CTHRA sequel?

CTI

(UK) Computers in Teaching Initiative.

CTI

CCD Transit Instrument.

CTI

Charge Transfer Inefficiency.

CTI

Computational Testbed for Industry.

CTI

Computer-Telephone Integration. [Sometimes `...Telephony...']

CTIA

Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. Now the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.'' They want you to visit WOW-COM (``World of Wireless Communications'').

CTIO

Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. (It's for observing the sky, not inter-America or Cerro Tololo.)

It's located in Chile, like many astronomical observatories (e.g., ESO). The principal reason for putting them in Chile is that Chile occupies the western slopes of the Andes over the latitudes where the Andes generally reach the highest altitudes. Moreover, northern Chile is a desert area, so cloud cover is minimal. The legal and political climate is probably more congenial to (safer for) foreign researchers as well. That, and transportation issues, probably explain why the most important international observatories are there and not on the western side in Argentina (which has the highest Andes peak, by a couple of hundred feet) or Bolivia. Going further north to Peru would increase the area of sky observed (by pushing the northern horizon closer to the north polar direction), but humidity and lawlessness become issues.

CTL

Capacitive Threshold Logic. An implementation of threshold logic with large-fan-in, multiple outputs. Operation based on the gating of MOSFETs by the voltage developed in discretely charged capacitors. This is a pretty recent invention and use for this letter sequence. Chances are, if you're trying to expand a logic-design acronym, it's one of the following CTL entries (Computation Tree Logic).

CTL

Checkout Test Language. There's a FOLDOC entry.

CTL

Compilation of Typed Logics. A German research project, succeeded by a program called Deduktion that includes most German research groups studying automated reasoning.

CTL

Compiler Target Language. There's a FOLDOC entry.

CTL

Computation-Tree Logic. Probably the most popular temporal logic. A propositional branching-time temporal logic popular for finite-state system model checkers. An extension of Boolean logic which distinguishes four temporal categories of formula: atomic formulae, propositional logic, next-state logic, and until logic. Here's a description of CTL syntax for VIS.

CTL, Ctl.

ConTroL.

CTL

Current Trends in Linguistics. In 14 volumes, The Hague: Mouton, 1963-76. General editor T. A. Seboek.

CTL

Cytotoxic T-Lymphocyte. Usually called T killer-cell.

CTN

CarToN. In English, this refers to a box made of cardboard of some sort. The word originated in Italian, cartone, meaning `cardboard.' The English spelling reflects the fact that it was borrowed via French (early in the nineteenth century). Italian cartone, French carton and Spanish cartón (with male gender in all these Romance languages) all still mean `cardboard.' In Spanish, a carton is una caja de cartón (`a cardboard box'), although one begins to hear and read cartón in the English sense, at least in Latin America.

CTN

Clinical Trials Network. Clinical trials of drug addiction treatment. Network instituted and principally funded by NIDA.

CTNR

ConTaiNeR. Why not ``CNTR''? Well, I suppose one reason is, if you write CTN and then aren't sure, you can add an arr to hedge your bets.

CTO

Caribbean Tourism Organization. See also Tourism entry.

CTO

Chief Technology Officer.

CTO

Compensatory Time Off. ``Comp time.''

CTOL

Conventional Take-Off and Landing. A retronym to designate planes that are not VTOL or the like.

CTR

Click-Through Rate. Typical CTR's on web ads (``tiles'') are 0.5% -- one click-through every two hundred impressions.

CTRL, Ctrl

Control. A keyboard shift key for entering (typically) ``low-ASCII'' ``control'' (nonprinting, information-to-computer) characters.

CTRL-G

Control-G. ASCII-7. \cG The bell.

CTRW

Continuous-Time Random Walk.

CTS

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

CTS

Central Technical Services at UB.

CTS

Chemical and Transport Systems. Division of the NSF's Engineering Directorate.

CTS

Clear To Send.

CTS

College Theology Society. Main entry for this organization is at SCCTSD.

CTS

Common Type System. A set of rules regarding the data types accepted within the Microsoft .NET framework.

CTSC

(Canadian) Cable Television Standards Council. French CNTC.

CTSCM

Continuously Twisted, Structurally Chiral Medium.

CTSF

(Canadian) Cable Television Standards Foundation. Distinct from CTSC, but I don't know in what way.

CTTN

Cable Trunk Ticket Number.

CTTS

Compatible Time Sharing System. An operating system of the 1960's that was eventually developed into Multics.

CTTT

Consortium for Training Translation Teachers. ``[F]ounded in 2000 in order to respond to the needs of teachers, practitioners, researchers, administrators and others actively involved in designing and implementing curricula, syllabi or courses in translation.'' CFFT in French.

CTU

Chicago Teachers Union. An AFT-affiliated union for teachers in the third-largest school district in the US. (New York and Los Angeles are larger.)

CTV

Canadian TeleVision network. The largest privately owned network in Canada.

CTV

Cell Tolerance Variation.

CTV

Centre Telemàtic Valencià. It seems the name is in Catalan but the pages are in Spanish.

CTVC

Closed-loop TeleVision Camera

CTY

(Johns Hopkins University) Center for Talented Youth. Also referred to as JHU-CTY. Not referred to as the ``Center for Really Aptitudinously Smart Students'' (CRASS) -- so far as I am aware. I mean, I suppose it's a useful program, but have they no shame? Even the Mensa people didn't call their organization Nous.

Their summer program ``is an intensive 3-week residential academic program where students [aged 8 to 16] can study advanced topics at a pace and depth that match their abilities'' instead of at the boring, laggard pace of good schools.

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