The politician Benjamin Disraeli said
I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.
Lois Farnham and Holly Putterbaugh have been together since the early 1970's. In 1997, they and two other couples were plaintiffs in a suit against the state of Vermont that led to the first C.U. law. In December 1999, Vermont's State Supreme Court ruled that denying gay couples the benefits of marriage (they counted 300, wow!) amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. In April 2000, after months of bitter debate, the legislature passed and the governor signed a civil unions bill. When it went into effect July 1, 2000, Lois and Holly got married.
That's fine for them. However, at churches around the state, other brides were not having such a good time of it. Their ``special day'' became a day of special tragedy, as grooms in large numbers decided that C.U. had abased the value of marriage. Some simply were no-shows, some went through most of the ceremony and then refused to say ``I do.'' Of the few grooms who were prevailed upon to fulfill their engagements, most insisted on having a second, traditional ceremony in Reno, Nevada, and refused to consummate their marriages until then.
Outside the churches, the situation was only worse. Convoys of marriage-minded gay couples have been sighted streaming north from Gotham. Already, starting in the seedier districts of Vermont's larger villages, bigamists are protesting violently for their rights. In many towns, the dollar that is passed around each winter to facilitate economic activity has been looted. As perverts fan out into the forests, deer are rioting and chipmunks stampeding. Governor Dean refuses to call out the National Guard, even as the green mountains turn red, millions reported dead! Save us! Save us!
Things work the other way too: sometimes people expect color and won't accept a product that lacks it. A prime example might be soft drinks, which get caramel and other food colorings that have no effect on the flavor. Back in the 1950's, a chemical plant my father managed produced large amounts of chlorine as an unused byproduct, so he burned it with hydrogen, bubbled it through water, and sold it [hydrochloric acid, known industrially as muriatic acid (see HCl(aq))]. The customers were unhappy with this extremely pure product because they expected their muriatic acid to look like the low-purity product they were used to, which was urine-yellow, more or less. To make the customers happy, an iron nail was dropped into each transport tank, which dissolved in the acid and provided the necessary color.
For years I never wondered that Consumers was written without an apostrophe.
Matter of fact, some people with base tastes or motives can't tell red-brown copper from yellow gold. I've worked where bulk copper had to be locked away from metallurgically unsophisticated thieves. Perhaps gold can be protected by labeling it ``yellow copper'' or ``soft brass.''
The opening lyrics of ``Brilliant Mistake'':
He thought he was the King of America.
Well, they bought Coca-Cola just like vintage wine.
(Elvis Costello and the Attractions)
Once when I was hanging out at Ventura and Van Nuys, a kid on a bicycle came up and offered me a deal: If I would go in to the jeweler's and sell this gold necklace (putatively his), I could keep half the price.
In Germany (.de), jewelry stores have big signs that read ``Schmuck.''
When a man walks up to you on an Atlanta backstreet and asks if you'd like to buy a gun, the correct answer is ``I don't need one'' with a hand in your pocket. I have road-tested this advice.
Copper is a soft metal, inappropriate for gun barrels, though it's not as soft as gold. If you machine it as fast as you would, say, aluminum, it comes off unevenly and cruds up the tool like peanut butter. For related advice, see the PCB entry. For practical purposes, copper is alloyed to form brass or bronze, and has been since about the Bronze Age.
Learn more at the Cu entry in WebElements and the copper entry at Chemicool.
More on ``Brilliant Mistake'' lyrics at the ABC entry, of course. Complete lyrics of the song here.
``Dr. Copper'' is a term used among financial analysts for the price of copper when regarded as a leading indicator for equity prices. Generally speaking, Dr. Copper is a good prognosticator of economic trends and markets, sometimes. Sometimes it's not. I have a copper coin in my pocket that's about as accurate when I flip it for advice. It's a quarter (91.67 wt.% Cu). The only US coin minted today that isn't mostly copper is the penny, which is all zinc except for an outer plating.
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
Thus, for example, a high-pressure diving tank (say 3500 PSI) described
as ``100 cubic feet'' has an internal volume of100 cu. ft. × (14.7/3500) = 0.42 cubic feet
This brings us to another point, which is that while cover alone can function as an English noun, cubre alone is not a noun. It is the form meaning `it [or he or she] covers' of the verb cubrir (`to cover'). The usual noun is the female past participle cubierta. (The male plural past part., cubiertos, means `silverware.') Make of this what you will, but don't ask me why cubre- compound nouns above are masculine when the only true nouns that occur in them (cama, cadena) are female. (Cubre is the form for other conjugations. In particular cubre la cama can be the command `cover the bed' as well as the observation `it covers the bed,' but in no case does it have a gender.)
In Spanish, the plural pops up occasionally where non-native speakers wouldn't expect it. Probably the best-known examples of unexpected plurals are the common salutations buenos días and buenas noches, meaning `good day' and `good night' (spoken to many persons or one). You won't be too surprised, then, to learn that formally plural words are more common (e.g., cubrecadenas) or about as common (cubrecamas) as the formally singular words. (They're still singular male terms, by the way.) Somehow, this just feels right, the same way plural attributive nouns feel right to Brits.
I see that un cubreruedas is moderately common for `a wheelcover,' but I suspect that it's a recent loan-translation from English. Notice that the compound is masculine and singular, even though the ruedas is feminine and plural.
This-all ain't so interesting, and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open too, but the reason I mention it is that I'm trying to resolve some questions regarding the English word curfew. Thinkin' out loud, see? That word curfew is a corruption of an Old French compound that French now spells couvre-feu. Italian has a similar construction, coprifuòco. These constructions correspond to English fire-cover (which means something else altogether, if it means one thing) and cubrefuego[s] in Spanish, which is a very much rarer expression for curfew than queda (or toque de queda).
The Spanish word cuerpo, like the English word body, has a range of somewhat figurative meanings, but the range is broader in Spanish. For example, some expressions using corps or corpus in English use cuerpo in Spanish. In chemistry, where compound has been nominalized in English, cuerpo compuesto may still be used in Spanish (though compuesto is normal among chemists and other scientists discussing chemistry).
Nevertheless, in ordinary speech cuerpo still typically means a human body, alive or dead. Whether the body is dead or alive is usually allowed to go unspecified. If you mention a body (un cuerpo) lying on the ground or on arranged on an easy chair, it will be assumed -- absent contrary evidence or context -- to be more or less dead. The usage is generally similar to that of English, and when the deadness of the body is explicitly noted in Spanish, it suggests -- to a landlubber, at least -- about what ``dead body'' does to in English. I'm not sure what most Spanish-speakers would make of a cuerpo tibio (`warm body').
/ ____ \
| \ |
| \ 1 / n\ | / \
exp | > - \S / | = \ exp(S) / ,
| / n! c |
| /___ |
\ n=1 /
/ n\
where \S / is the nth cumulant of S;
c
angle brackets without a subscript denote an ordinary average.
Equating order by order in the expansions of the two sides, one finds successive expressions for the cumulants in terms of the ordinary average values of powers of the variate S:
/ \ / \ \S/ = \S/ c / 2\ / 2\ / \2 \S / = \S / - \S/ c / 3\ / 3\ / 2\ / \ / \3 \S / = \S / - 6 \S / \S/ + 5 \S/ c / 4\ / 4\ / 3\ / \ / 2\2 \S / = \S / - 24 \S / \S/ + 12 \S / c / 2\ / \2 / \4 + 156 \S / \S/ - 121 \S/The third and fourth cumulants are measures of skewness and kurtosis, respectively. For Gaussian distributions, only the first and second cumulants are nonzero. Cumulant expansions are often useful because distributions may be nearly Gaussian and have cumulant expansions that fall off rapidly with increasing order. It is possible to create distributions which have only finite subsets of cumulants nonzero, whereas ordinary moments of a distribution are all nonzero for any but the most trivial distributions.
Cumulant expansions occur in quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics because these involve exponentials of the Hamiltonian. [The Hamiltonian, if you don't know and haven't the time to find out what it is, is normally the energy expressed in terms of (possibly generalized) momentum and coordinate variables.] For oscillatory systems near equilibrium, the Hamiltonian is a quadratic in the momenta and coordinates, so the ``averages'' to be evaluated are essentially Gaussians.
- The Breeches Bible (the first edition, at least, of
the Geneva Bible):
Genesis 3:7:
KJV: ``And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.''
oddity: ``... made themselves breeches.'' - The Treacle Bible (an issue of the Great Bible,
first published in 1539):
Jeremiah 8:22:
KJV: ``Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?''
oddity: ``Is there not treacle in Gilead...''
(Treacle is molasses.) - The Adulterous Bible (an issue of the KJV):
Exodus 20:14:
KJV: ``Thou shalt not commit adultery.''
oddity: ``Thou shalt commit adultery.''
- The Basketfull of Errors, a/k/a The Vinegar Bible
(a printing of the KJV; the publisher was John Baskett)
Bible):
Printed marginal note at Luke 20:
KJV: ``Parable of the Vineyard''
oddity: ``Parable of the Vinegar''
Many more are listed at the Wikipedia Bible errata entry. I'm taking my examples from A. Edward Newton's The Greatest Book in the World and Other Papers (1925) and from Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice: Definitive Edition (2000). There are some minor inconsistencies, which I'll try to sort out later, between these sources and the Wikipedia entry. Bibles with errors that turn intended proscriptions into prescriptions, like the third example above, or which make similarly infamous errors, are also called Wicked Bibles.
Here's Universal Currency Converter, a term Xenon Laboratories claims as its trademark. Try to register it.
A program called Exchange (people are getting really wild and creative with trademarks) runs on your PC (or would, if you don't have a PC). There's Hmmm. dead link. Must have failed to make a name for itself.
Currencies are listed by ordinary-language names (``American Dollars,'' etc.) on the Inatos Currency Converter. The list is short, but it represents something close to an actual offer (from Currencies Direct).
There's another from TravelFinder.com, which would be happy to offer you other travel-related services. They feature an extra-long (fifteen digits) text-input field, for those who like to dream and those who must deal with hyperinflation.
-- Par Leijonhufvud (and probably others)
The Marteau Currency Converter provides conversion among European currencies of the early eighteenth century, using exchange rates of 1709.
The EC (then the EU) not (yet, in both senses) being a country, it has no country code. Country codes starting with X are not allowed, so a code beginning in X is a no-country code -- just what was required. XEU was the currency symbol adopted for the ecu (with U for Unit, apparently). An initial X followed by a chemical symbol (fully capitalized) is used to represent each precious metal: XAU, XAG, XPT for gold, silver, platinum, etc.
When the ECU was replaced by the euro, the new currency got the symbol EUR, which obeys the rule that hecha la ley, hecha la trampa. (Loosely translated, that means that all laws come with loop-holes pre-installed.) EU is now on a reserved list of ISO-4217 prefixes.
There is also a euro sign, which looks like the variant "e" usually used for an ``is an element of'' sign, but with the horizontal stroke doubled; or if you prefer, like C and = overstruck.
The name euro is supposed to be the same in all languages, but 1/100 euro is translated (cent, centime, lepton etc.).
The Center is a member of UAA. CURL is too.
One common way to get more cuts quickly for competition is to tighten up using diuretics. It's reminiscent of how fighters used to compete below their natural weight class, by sweating off the pounds ahead of the weigh-in (which took place a day or two before the bout). Immediately after making the (weight) cut, fighters would start dosing themselves with dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) in order to be recovered for the bout. This and other abuses of DHMO are listed on this page from the DMRD.
You probably guessed that cutter number, and thus cutter, is a noun. I haven't seen cutter used as a verb, but the gerund cuttering occurs in the term ``double-cuttering'' (the use of two cutters; this will eventually to be more fully explained at the cutter number entry).
Cutter numbers are used primarily to encode the names of authors and titles, and are used following a subject classification code like the LC number. Together, the subject classification and one or two cutters are usually enough to construct a unique shelving number for a given work, but don't distinguish different editions of the same work. It has thus become common to add the year of publication as the final element in the shelving number. Similarly, separately-catalogued serials receive a volume or year number.
An important goal of cataloguing is to assign shelving numbers that keep similar and related works close to each other. Sometimes this results in the continued use of no-longer-appropriate cutters. For example, here at Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame, the reference section has an item entitled Cassell's French Dictionary, with a label on the spine that reads ``Ref. PC 2640 .L837n 1978.'' The reason is that the original 1881 edition, according to the title page of a crumbling boxed copy, was ``A French and English Dictionary compiled from the best authorities of both languages by Professors De Lolme and Wallace, and Henry Bridgeman, revised, corrected, and considerably enlarged by Professor E. Roubaud, B.A. (Paris).'' The cutter was assigned on the basis of the name of De Lolme. Interestingly, the 1881 edition has a shelving number PC 2640 .L75 1881. The cutter is slightly different (L75 instead of L837n), probably because from time to time, libraries change Cutter tables. (More about that in the cutter-number evolution entry.) As it happens, De Lolme is not mentioned in any of the later editions that the library currently owns, making it hard to see how L837n was chosen to provide any continuity. I am told that De Lolme was mentioned in the 1930 edition (which we no longer possess).
The De Lolme of that early Cassell dictionary is widely identified with J.L. de Lolme (J.L. stands for Jean-Louis and John Louis), who died in 1806. (See, for example, this entry in WorldCat.) The identification has some plausibility, since de Lolme was a French-English bilingual (born in Geneva 1840 or 1841, went to England at 26), and appears to be the only prominent person of that name. [He's the only de Lolme or Delolme, vel sim., listed in the most comprehensive references, including the 46-volume Nouvelle Biographie Générale of 1860, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (index entry here), and the sacred eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (but not the current pretender). La Grande Encyclopédie has an entry for Lolme (Jean-Louis de) as well as a shorter entry for Delolme (Jean-Louis), neither cross-referenced to the other. At least they don't contradict each other much (he died July 10 (typo) or 16).]
De Lolme is rarely mentioned in smaller encyclopedias (or anywhere else, for that matter), but in his time he was an important translator of French and English ideas to the English and French respectively, and he influenced some of the drafters of the US Constitution. As a writer of pamphlets and books in England, he was a popularizer of Montesquieu's ideas in English; his most successful work, a study of the English constitution, was with Hume's History of England the main source for the philosophes' ideas of the English constitution.
On the other hand, I can find no record of his ever having compiled any dictionary, and he was never a professor anywhere. If this was a courtesy title, it was an extravagant one; on the evidence of his La constitution de l'Angleterre, he was not fastidious about accuracy. Still, he might just have done a sloppy first job of a French dictionary. At various times, he could certainly have used the money.
Cutter tables in cataloguing are a lot like hash functions in database design. A hash function is a lossy compression of somewhat general string inputs into constant- or bounded-length outputs. An important goal in defining a hash function is minimizing collisions. That is, one wants a hash function that is practically injective (i.e., one-to-one), or perhaps strictly injective for a given domain of arguments. The practical way to achieve this is first to make the function surjective (onto); waste not, want not. Beyond that elementary step, the strategy is to level the load: have all hash values mapped to with equal probability. Without any very precise model of the probability distribution of arguments of the hash function, the way to level the load is to make the map chaotic. That is, to make the hash value an exquisitely sensitive function of the argument, so that any clustering or concentration of argument values is mapped into a broad spray of hash values. Hence the name hash.
The design criteria for Cutter tables are similar to those for hash functions, because the goal is to construct compact but distinct shelving numbers. A crucial difference is that chaotic shelving numbers are considered undesirable. (One wonders if Borges had anything to say about this.) Hence, Cutter tables map the first few letters of a string monotonically into the space of codes, with more codes assigned to more-common initial strings. Often, particularly in cataloguing fiction, one distinguishes the works of an author by adding initial letters from the title after the cutter number for the author.
Just one tip (in the caption to Fig. 300) from chapter 7, ``Chisels and Chipping,'' in Shop Theory, Revised Edition, prepared by The Shop Theory Department, Henry Ford Trade School, Dearborn, Michigan (London and New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934, 1941, 1942), p. 45.
Chapter 15 of this page-turner is titled, with majestic understatement, ``Gearing.'' You think I'm kidding, but the mathematics of gear design, and things like involute curves, once stayed the thoughts of great minds.
It looks like the Ohio pronunciation of ``Cuyahoga'' should be definitive or authoritative or something. The vowels and stress pattern of the word coincide with ``[give that] guy a toga.''
Just the other day, I stopped to help a couple of women pushing their car off the road. ``What's the problem?''
``Oh, I think a CV joint broke.''
``Oh, I understand, I have a Honda too.''
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
In his diary for January 16, 1922, Franz Kafka meditated upon ``something very like a breakdown,'' in which it was ``impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life.''
Here is a nonstandard etymology of CV.
The term CVD pointedly excludes film growth in which some component of the grown film is a reactant from the growth substrate. Thus, growth of oxide and nitride layers on silicon have the specific names of oxidation and nitridization, and both in fact are pyrolysis (the reactions burn--oxidize in the chemical sense of changing the oxidation level--the substrate silicon). In CVD oxidation and nitridization, on the other hand, additional silicon is supplied in the gas phase, typically in silane or dichlorosilane); vide SIPOS and silicon nitride.
Applied Materials sells CVD systems for industrial application. Visit their CVD product page (link here is to their lower-graphics page; they seem to have a slow or busy server).
CVD is used extensively to grow epitaxial layers of compound semiconductors. In this application it is called MOCVD or (more descriptively) MOVPE.
In Britain and Anglophiliated places, however, CVD is ``Chemical Vapour Deposition'', probably something completely different.
We got trouble! Right here in River City!
Judging from my extremely limited experience in northern Indiana and northern New Jersey, CVS has more of its stores open all night. I never studied the thing in detail, but I have the impression that OTC pharmaceuticals and other health-related goods tend to be a bit cheaper at CVS, while other prices are a little lower at Walgreens. OSCO/Jewel used to have the best prices in my area, but they pulled out of the region and sold stores off to CVS. I can't imagine that their price point had anything to do with their decision to pull out. There are no Rite Aids convenient to me.
There are still a few stores without customer loyalty systems (you know -- discount cards that allow a store to monitor your purchases and feed you coupons only for things you don't normally buy, that sort of thing), so nowadays I avoid CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and other stores that do have them.
``Czech Technical University has the Most Popular College Web Site in the Czech Republic.''
It was called Classical Weekly until 1957, but the U.S. Post Office insisted on a name change, claiming that ``weekly'' was deceptive because it wasn't published when school was not in session (viz., Summer and other holidays). But there's less; see below. CAAS chose ``World'' in part to keep the same initials.
Hey, Mr. Postmaster General, psst! Have you ever heard of a man named Ed McMahon? YOU ARE ALREADY A WINNER!!!
Hmmm. My comments above regarding the USPS were based on mailing-list posting from someone who's been involved with CW. She's usually accurate, but the name change must have been a bit before her time, and perhaps it was fair to demand it.
The journal was published under the title of Classical Weekly from Oct. 5, 1907 to May 20, 1957. Those fifty volumes comprised numbers 1 through 1227. That amounted to 24.54 issues per year, or almost one issue per fortnight, averaged over the calendar year. Since the primary and secondary school years in US public schools conventionally have 180 class days, there are a bit over 36 weeks per school year, so the Weekly averaged 0.68 issues per school week. That's not too terrible, especially allowing for a publication schedule that only began in October (i.e., about a month into the school year).
In fact, those coarse-average numbers hide a reality of slow decline in publication frequency that seems -- prima facie, I should say -- to reflect the declining popularity of Latin study in the schools. Before getting into the history of the latter decline, however, I should note that the actual amount of published text per year in CW has remained about constant or increased; it's simply been published in bigger chunks. Volume 93 (first issue September/October 1999) was the last to be bimonthly. It's been quarterly since then.
It's only fair to warn you that the rest of this entry is tedious, even by the standards of this glossary, or of the first part of this entry. I gathered a lot of data and it turned out to be of no interest whatsoever, but I would feel bad if I didn't use some of it for something. That's one of the reasons for this glossary: to have something to do with that kind of information, so I don't feel so bad about having collected it in the first place.
Through the end of volume XX (which had 27 issues), there were 557 total issues, or about 27.85 per year. From issue XXI to XXXIII (the latter had xxvi issues; yes, I must use Roman numerals, don't you see?), there were 434 issues, for an average of about 26.38. Volume 34 also had 26 issues, and right through the war years (vols. 35 to 38, 1941-1945) there were 25 issues per school year. Oddly, it was only in the April 29, 1946, issue that the publishers made this announcement:
Because of the difficulties under which printers are laboring these days by reason of shortage of skilled help and materials, a few issues of the current Volume of The Classical Weekly will be omitted. Hence this will be the last regular Number, with the exception of the Index Number (22), which is expected to appear in the fall.(Capitalization and boldface sic. I've spared you the small-caps.)
Volume 40 also had 22 issues, and for the final ten Weekly years, there were 16 issues per year. This was typically described by a formula such as ``published weekly from mid-November for sixteen issues, except for any weeks in which there is an academic vacation.'' (The formula often changed slightly from one year to the next.) They found rather a lot of academic vacations.
Elvis Costello's 2002 album is ``When I Was Cruel.''
Not widely available for people.
They used to have a functioning acronym search tool.
The link is to an entry that is initially about the use of X to represent the word ``cross.'' It has some interesting stuff about Charing Cross from a ``book'' of Samuel Butler (the much ``younger'' one). Those aren't all scare quotes, you know. Please remain calm. Please remain calm!
Anyway, on account of all the Charing Cross content that doesn't really belong there, that X entry is a bit crowded, so I'm going to put some other thoughts I had here. Samuel Butler's work Erewhon is divided into ``books.'' This usage is a carry-over from the time when works (like the Bible) were divided into separate codex volumes or scrolls (or not). Describing the largest subdivisions of your work as ``books'' instead of ``parts,'' even though two or more such books are intended to be bound in a volume, is old-fashioned -- a kind of affectation. It's still done, but it is what linguists call a ``marked'' (i.e., meaningfully nonstandard) usage, like scattering Elizabethan words in one's otherwise, methinks, modern English (a speaker using such a mode of speech is said to be using a different ``linguistic register''). JRRT divided his purposely (but slightly) archaized LOTR into six dreary books. (And the six books constituted three volumes: The Hobbit; The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, and the Return of the King, and Silmarillion; and Bored of the Rings. Nobody enjoyed any of those books, but they were so enormously popular that peer pressure forced everyone to read them. And now they've been turned into enormously popular movies. Will this torture never cease!?) Now where was I? Oh yes --
The ``book'' mentioned at that X entry is ``The Book of Machines.'' It has a nice sort of technologically ecclesiastical sound. It reminds me of something I can't remember the name of right now, but I promise to look it up when I get home. (I'll -- I'll make a note of it. Somehow.) It also reminds me of ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1975), where a ``Book of Armaments'' is described.
(I didn't rip off Yogi Berra. My enormously popular comments above paid ``tribute'' to his observation of the place so crowded that no one went there any more. That quote is so widely used that I can't google an authoritative version.)
Hey, let's all go examine the Caribbean!
Okay, seriously? CXC sets school-leaving exams for high schools in the Caribbean.
Nowadays, in most places, that means January 1 to December 31 of the Gregorian calendar, but it hasn't always been thus.
The Gregorian calendar was first promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1582, and was immediately adopted in Catholic countries. Protestant countries (or duchies, principalities and tiny little specks of territory, in the case of Germany and some other areas of Europe) adopted the new calendar gradually over the coming centuries, and Orthodox countries did not adopt it for secular use until late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. (The Russian revolution rather accelerated the process.)
The Orthodox liturgical calendar continues to be based on Julian reckoning, and eastern churches celebrate holidays about two weeks later than western ones. The Department of Internet Ministries of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America offers a service called Iconograms, which enables you to ``[s]end a message to a loved one or friend in celebration [according to the Orthodox calendar] of a name day, feast day, or sacrament.''
England switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1740's or so. Under the Julian calendar, the new year began on March 25 or thereabouts (you expect me to look this stuff up?), so March 20, 1730 fell one week before March 27, 1731. The new year was moved up to January 1 at the same time that the date was shifted to Gregorian. Thus, for example, George Washington, who was born on February 11, 1731, Old Style, had a birthdate of February 22, 1732 after the switch. In fact, he always celebrated February 11 as his real birthday, one day before Lincoln's birthday. Nowadays, we celebrate both days on a Monday -- ``Presidents Day.'' I dont no if that gets an apostrophe.
Because of the phase shift in year, dates in the first quarter of the year (New Style) could be ambiguous. To avoid confusion, people would write ``January 15, 1751/1752,'' meaning the date that was January 15, 1752 New Style, or January 4, 1751 Old Style. By the 1760's I think everyone was reading from the same New Style page and the double-year notation was abandoned. Old and New Style were usually abbreviated (O.S., N.S.).
Perella was hired to staff an IBM booth at SIGGRAPH 2000, and his definition of cybermuffin occurs as an aside in the story of his misadventures there. Here's the definition (from p. 177), spiffed up a bit to meet our high lexicographic stadnards:
Cybermuffin /sigh bur MUFF in/ n. A curvaceous young woman in a short skirt, hired by a software company to sit on a stool in front of its booth and pass out literature to hordes of panting geeks [ < cyber + muffin].
Despite the impeccable provenance, I was skeptical. I'd have thought that definition would go with cybertart. The word cybermuffin suggests ``stud-muffin.'' Do these people really understand their breakfast cybercarbs? Yet I ventured out on the web, and was surprised to discover only two pictures of cybermuffins, both female, although one was from ConventioCon II (an MST3K convention) and the other was a rabbit or similar animal. (I did get a lot of hits for Cybertart, an Australian outfit that sells shlocky clothing accessories.)
Investigating further, I found an old David Barry column entitled ``You Have to be a Real Stud Hombre Cybermuffin to Handle Windows.'' This involves at least two-plus-epsilon reentrant levels of irony, but I think Dave nailed the meaning of cybermuffin precisely.
Weiner coined the title of his best-seller [viz., Cybernetics, (1948)] whose first two syllables have since become ubiquitous and lost their meaning, from the Greek word for steersman. His idea was that self-regulating feedback mechanisms in search of equilibrium are analogous to the steersman adjusting his tiller in response to the flow of air and water, the weight and balance of the boat, and other unpredictable variables. ...Epstein goes on to draw ``implicit moral lessons.'' The later editions (1961, 1965) of Weiner's surprising best-seller had a longer title: Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. His other successful popular book was The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950).
Weiner certainly believed that he was coining a new word, but -- doesn't anybody ever look in a dictionary? The word already existed in Ancient Greek (kybernêtikê, `art of steering'), and had been used in various ways in the modern era, so Weiner's may be regarded as a re- or re-re-coining of the word.
Along with the multiple recoinings, there have been a number of differing definitions. The meanings tend to cluster or overlap, but there is a surprising outlier, explained at the cybernetic warfare entry.
The word cynicism has a negative connotation in English, and probably in most languages with a cognate of the word. That is not surprising, in view of its etymology (for which, see the entry for Diogenes of Sinope). A cynic is regarded as not just jaundiced and suspicious of others' motives, but (perhaps in consequence) manipulative, scheming, dishonest.
Argentina, however, is different. My Argentine friend Laura, visiting the US, met my clear-sighted pessimist friend Robert, an American. Later she told me she thought he was very cynical. I passed along the compliment to Robert, and then I was forced to explain to him that from an Argentine, cínico is a compliment. Avivado is another word whose different use in Argentine Spanish is indicative of a different mindset, but it doesn't have an SBF entry yet. (Look it up in a dictionary of argentinismos.)
Perhaps Argentines are not entirely unique. Here is some equivocal usage from Simon Jenkins, in a July 21, 2011, option piece in the Guardian, wrote this:
The chancellor, George Osborne, showed impressive cynicism in abandoning his opposition to a "two-speed" Europe and demanding that the eurozone move swiftly to fiscal union -- with Britain firmly outside. Only such a union, he said, would discipline the debtor nations and thus avoid bank anarchy that would spill over into the British economy. Britain would have no part in any rescue, but it relied on the eurozone to continue on its path to ever closer union.
Cynical Osborne may be, but he is right in his historical analysis. ...
The single currency bound the politics of Europe with hoops of steel. Osborne wants those hoops to tighten further, to trap the 17 eurozone countries in a realm of unaccountable federalism, a fiscal rigidity that he must know will eventually snap.
... The attempt to impose fiscal union on all Europe will bring its demise. But where Osborne and his brand of scepticism are wrong is in so obviously willing this demise. When monetary union reaches breaking point and unravels in an orgy of xenophobia, Britain will not be immune from the chaos.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.
Here's the Czech page of an X.500 directory.
Czochralski first developed the method to pull metal crystals.
The main purpose of Zionist organizations is to encourage Jewish emigration (aliyah) to Israel. Thus, one of the unusual difficulties faced by Zionist organizations is that they lose their most active members... who do aliyah. (At least nihilists understand that they have to stick around for the good of the unconverted. See also the related Roe Effect.) So after a while, the ones left are those who, yeah, uh, next year in Jerusalem, uh, but not right now. (Kind of reminds me of Augustine's youthful prayer: ``Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.'')
Look it's not just nutty theories. It's unproven nutty theories, so you should suspend judgment.
Cf. B2B.
General Curtis LeMay, once head of SAC, used to say
``Without communications, the only thing I command is my desk.''
C³ has been superseded by various C3-something's and C4something's. Just as a reference point, I saw C3 in the Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1977, submitted to Congress by outgoing US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on January 27, 1976. (Why does that name ring a bell?)