Possibly patterned on this is the, um, jocular usage ``desk jockey.'' As it happens, desk and disc are cognates, borrowed from Latin indirectly and then directly. For details see the fisk entry.
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When B.J. Friedman's first novel was published, he ``was invited to come say hello to the staff at Simon & Schuster'' (his publisher). After being greeted by an old and befuddled Mr. Simon, he was surrounded by a group of young editors who had nice things to say about his jacket.
``Thank you,'' [said Bruce Jay Friedman]. ``My mother bought it for me at Saks. She was heartbroken that I hadn't become a theatrical press agent. She'd been told that they all have big homes in Rockaway. But she wanted me to be properly dressed all the same.''
[The article from which this text is lifted, and a copy of the cover, can be found here.]
These events occurred in the early 1960's, when it was still common for adult men to have their clothes bought for them by women. I think that's much less common today. Today, on the other hand, authors (including adult male authors, okay?) don't normally design or even have much say in choosing their book jackets. Sometimes the cover will depict characters from the book, and the depictions will be impossibly different from the descriptions in the book. I've also seen ``marital arts'' used evidently unironically (i.e., as an error for ``martial arts''). The artsy types who do covers are often somewhat weak at spelling.
It's also become quite standard for book jackets and even the hard covers of books to bear the words ``a novel.'' This is especially helpful at library book sales, where book sorting can be rather haphazard. (Most of the larger library book sales I've been to have not been mostly library-book sales, but sales mostly of donated books.)
The fault (if multiple spellings are a fault) is not just in the imprecision of English spelling. It also happens that different Arabic dialects do different things with the initial consonant.
The AHD4 has this as its first definition for the word Winter: ``The usually coldest season of the year, occurring between autumn and spring, extending in the Northern Hemisphere from the winter solstice to the vernal equinox, and popularly considered to be constituted by December, January, and February.''
That definition manages to confuse three things: ``meteorological Winter'' (DJF), ``astronomical Winter'' (an underhanded retronym for the solstice-to-equinox period, used by the kind of people who would use the term ``meteorological Winter''), and the coldest period, or coldest three months, of the year. Some future iteration of this entry will sort all that out. For now I just want to publish the glossary page. Cf. MAM, JJA, SON.
It's even worse with words that contain the letter dee, which is pronounced by having your epiglottis do the unvoiced watusi.
The situation of Danish with respect to Norwegian and Swedish is similar to that of Portuguese with respect to Spanish (Castillian). Educated readers of any Iberian Romance language can understand most of a text in any other Iberian Romance language, just as the Scandinavian languages are mutually understandable in writing. Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish fairly easily, but their language has a rich phonology that subverts a Spanish speaker's efforts to recognize cognates. Danes similarly can understand Norwegians and Swedes, while the latter generally need a couple of months' study to understand Danish. (Overall, I should say that the Iberian Romance languages are not as similar to each other as the North Germanic languages of Scandinavia are to each other.)
Niels Bohr, a national scientific hero in Denmark, was known for delivering scientific addresses in his own approximation of the local language. It was said that he didn't speak any foreign languages, just different dialects of Bohrish. He and his son Aage wrote a major text on nuclear physics (in English). Now there is a third Bohr generation of physicist at work.
Some of the sayings famously attributed to Niels Henrik David Bohr (Nicholas Baker), he himself attributed to his own father. One of these was the maxim that there are two sorts of truths -- ordinary truths, whose opposites are false, and profound ones whose opposites may also be profound truths.
Note that the opposite of a profound truth is explicitly excluded from being an ordinary truth. Without this exclusion, some profound truths would also be ordinary falsehoods. If Aristotle had known about this, he probably would have called it the axiom of half of the excluded middle.
One of Niels Bohr's favorite sayings was ``Never express yourself more clearly than you can think.'' Most people would have difficulty manifesting that problem; Bohr specialized in implementing the solution. It's no wonder he was a hero in Denmark.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links for Denmark. The territory of Denmark is basically the Jutland peninsula, and -- oh yeah, Greenland.
Here's the Danish page of an X.500 directory.
The noun Danish refers to any sweet pastry, preferably with white icing and cinnamon, and two to go, thanks. Cf. Evita entry.
(BTW, you know that famous mermaid statue? I think a bunch of years ago she was temporarily decapitated by vandals.)
In Spring 2002, the European Commission conducted the ``Eurobarometer 57'' survey, sampling at least 1,000 in each of its member countries (except in Luxembourg, where, probably to avoid sampling some people twice, only 600 people were surveyed). The main finding of Eurobaromometer 57 was that Europeans are a bunch of sourpusses. A key existential question was on ``overall life satisfaction'' (which I will abbreviate OLS here):
On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead? Would you say you are very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied?
The EU15 average percentage answering ``very satisfied'' was 21%. (Amazingly, it seems they actually went to the trouble of weighting it properly -- by population instead of raw sample.) Harris conducted a parallel US study, a telephone survey of 1010 adults, called between April 10 and April 15, 2003. The results were generally more positive on all questions, with 57% answering ``very satisfied'' to the OLS question. Of course, the European average hid a broad range of national variation. Exactly one of the EU15 countries scored higher than the US on OLS: Denmark, at 64%. (The next highest was Netherlands, 45%.)
Another Eurobarometer poll, conducted by phone between October 8 and 16, 2003, asked questions mostly regarding Iraq (500 sampled per country, results weighted by population). An EU15 average of 44% favored sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq. In Denmark the figure was 77%. (This probably exceeds the percentage of Americans who favored having US troops in Iraq by then.) A majority of Danes believed that the US-led invasion of Iraq was justified; in the other 14 members a majority believed it was unjustified (EU15 average 68%).
The practice of constructing given names from pairs of common nouns, or from a noun modified by an adjective, is apparent in Native American names, but seems to be a world-wide reflex. It was once the standard practice for constructing Indo-European names, but the words that formed the names evolved while the names tended to become fixed or to evolve independently, so people no longer recognize that Sigmund, say, means `defender of victory,' or Robert `bright fame.' As the examples suggest, however, the common names (at least those of whose etymologies I am aware) tend to be more positive. The Romans deviated from the usual practice of I-E peoples and even, in the cognomen innovation, from other Italic peoples. Their naming practices are discussed at the tria nomina entry.
I asked an Indian woman I know about this, and she mentioned someone she knows whose Indian name is ``Killing Water'' (this turns out to be a not-too-unusual name). I remarked that it is a somewhat ambiguous name, and she replied that he is a somewhat ambiguous person. So there you are.
I asked my mom, who fled Germany in 1938 (as a child, 71 years ago), if she recalled a motorcycle called das kleine Wunder. She didn't, but when I mentioned DKW -- ohh, that was a major company! Cars and mostly heavy vehicles like trucks. She thought it stood for ``deutsche Kraftwerk'' or perhaps just naturally assumed it. I'll try to investigate this further, if it doesn't require any work.
Here are my favorite top-tens from before 1996:
- ``Things Revealed in Newt Gingrich Exposé''
- ``Items on the Westinghouse "To Do" List''
- ``Signs of Sloppiness in the L.A.P.D. Crime Lab''
- ``Screw-ups in the O.J. Simpson Defense''
- ``Ways the World Would Be Different If it Were Covered With Water''
- ``Signs Judge Ito is Really, Really Mad''
- ``Ways to Beat the Heat''
- ``Dr. Kevorkian Tips for Summer'' Interestingly, #1 is about how -- I thought -- Bunsen (of burner fame) committed suicide. One morning he drank potassium cyanide and used a chaser of lemon juice to drive an acid-base reaction in his stomach. Or so I thought I read, long ago. I certainly didn't make it up, but now I can't find web corroboration and no longer have access to the book. Maybe I got Bunsen confused with his student and lab assistant Viktor Meyer, who in 1889 took over Bunsen's chair at the University of Heidelberg, and who committed suicide by taking cyanide in August 1897. Bunsen once almost died of arsenic poisoning, and a cacodyl explosion cost him the sight in one eye. (Cacodyl, which happens to be extremely toxic, also combusts spontaneously in dry air.) Bunsen died in 1899 at the age of 88.
- ``Signs You Have a Bad Airline Pilot''
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Processes occurring at a surface, and utilizing a reactant or adsorbate brought to the surface by a fluid (as in oxidation of a Si surface and in vapor- and liquid-deposition) tend to operate in one of two asymptotic regimes: diffusion-limited and reaction-limited. If the deposition process at the growth surface is rapid, then the fluid phase adjacent to the growing surface becomes depleted of (at least one) reactant, and the growth rate is controlled by the rate at which the reactant is replenished by diffusion to the surface. This is DL growth. If the fluid is well stirred or if the deposition stage is slow, then depletion of reactants from the fluid near the surface is not important, and growth is reaction-limited.
- Players on the 15-day DL are taken off the active list but remain on the team roster (the 40-man roster).
- Players on the 60-day DL (a/k/a injured reserve) are not only deactivated but also taken off the 40-man roster, making room for a temporary replacement.
The Department of Classics at the University of Florida offers DL courses. One of their webpages explains (or doesn't explain) the following: ``The university requires proof of immunization of all students. Yes, even distance students. Don't ask why, just fill the form out asap or suffer grievously!''
Gephardt, the first leader of the DLC, joined in the middle of his own drift to the left. He had been pro-life as late as 1984, but by the time he began his first presidential campaign in 1987, he was pro-choice. Perhaps that is necessary for anyone who wants to win the Democratic primaries. But he ran on a protectionist platform in the 1988 primaries and stopped being identified with that ``new Democrat'' faction of the party. Four years later, however, the DLC had a candidate of superb political skills. With a little help from third-party odd-ball H. Ross Perot, Clinton won in 1992. Some missteps to the left were punished by a Republican takeover of the House in the midterm elections of 1994, and after that Clinton stayed ``new Democrat.'' During the second Clinton administration, I wrote the following completely ingenuous statement:
Of course, now every Democrat (incumbent), pretty much, is a ``new [i.e. centrist] Democrat.''Yeah, that ignored the Congressional Black Caucus and some Californians and such, but it wasn't far off the image.
In the 106th Congress (the one that began in 1999) Gephardt was the senior House Democrat. Approaching the Y2K elections, he was one of the two obvious and leading contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination (Vice President Al Gore, the eventual nominee, was the other). As the ranking House member of his party, he was the likely House Speaker if the Democrats took back the House in those elections. He apparently preferred those odds (a priori) and stayed out of the presidential race. At least he kept his job.
So Gore was the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2000 campaign. It's hard to criticize him as having been out of touch with the country's mood, given that he did in fact win a majority of the popular vote. But his campaign nevertheless represented something of a repudiation of what many had regarded as Clinton's policy legacy. Gore campaigned as a more leftist populist, moving the image of the Democratic party leftward.
To some extent, his campaign represented a reaction to problems imposed on him. During the primary season, Gore had faced opposition on his left from former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, and perhaps he moved left in reaction to that challenge. But no one is surprised, and few remember, if a candidate refashions his positions after the primaries to make them attractive to a broader range of voters. Still, a campaign needs a message (preferably one per news cycle).
Clinton had involved Gore in actual government more than most presidents have involved their VP's, and Gore might have run on Clinton's record, wringing prosperity for all its considerable political value. But Clinton inspired widespread loathing, in large measure due to the sordid affair of the sexual exploitation of White House intern Monica Lewinsky. So promising more of Clinton-Gore was a problematical campaign approach; Gore chose as his running mate Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman, whose most prominent qualification was his early and forceful denunciation of Clinton's affair. (That is, Lieberman had been the first prominent officeholder in Clinton's own party to rebuke Clinton for acting like JFK and LBJ, in the pants department, although he expressed this somewhat differently.) At the Democratic convention, Gore staged a spontaneous I-really-really-love-my-wife-unlike-some-people-we-know event.
In 2000, Gore chose Senator Lieberman as his running mate in significant part to distance himself from Clinton. Granted this distance was not along a policy axis, yet it is ironic that by the time of the next presidential campaign, Lieberman was really the most faithful remaining representative of the centrist legacy of Bill Clinton, such as it was. Lieberman remained centrist even as 9/11 and the Iraq invasion (strongly supported by the DLC) polarized the country. In fall 2003, he was the only Democrat in the race for the presidential nomination who was willing to defend the invasion of Iraq (with reservations, of course). Gore, in the meantime, confirmed his shift and ended up endorsing Dean just before Dean's campaign peaked and floundered. Lieberman pulled out of the Iowa caucuses and never really contended. (Iowa Democrats are somewhat more leftist than those in the next few states selecting convention delegates, and caucuses reflect the more activist segment of a party, which in both Democratic and Republican cases leans further from center than the bulk of the party.) Lieberman's campaign never got traction and he dropped out. For more and later on Lieberman, see
There's a precedent of sorts for the DLC in something that was called the Democratic Advisory Council. After Dwight D. Eisenhower twice defeated Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson (1952 and 1956), party chairman Paul M. Butler created the advisory council in defiance of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson (respectively Speaker of the House and Senate Majority leader in the Democrat-controlled Congress). The council was a group of ``wise men'' from the Roosevelt-Truman years, and some promising governors and junior legislators. They formulated the economic and social policies that became known as the New Frontier platform, which John F. Kennedy ran and won with in 1960.
Here's something interesting in 2005: Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is serving as a fellow at the DLC.
It's September 2007, and I'm just popping back in at this entry to record the DLC's slide. Harold Ford, Jr., was a blue dog Democrat in the House representing the Memphis area (9th congressional district of Tennessee) in 2006 when he ran for an open Senate seat (Republican Bill Frist, a physician who was then Senate majority leader, was retiring; he still thought he was going to run for President in 2008). He lost the election (48% to Republican Bob Corker's 51%). The following January 25, he was named chairman of the DLC. At the DLC's annual meeting in Nashville on July 30, 2006, he said ``Some people say we've lost our standing, but if there ever was a time when the country needed the DLC... it's now.'' He may be right, but the leading Democratic candidates all skipped the DLC event to attend the second annual Kos thing.
I'm not sure what the exact title of the DLE was supposed to be. It could use either latín (language name) or latino (adjective).
Our library has part 1 of a Diccionario latino-español that is already available (formal title Dictionarium latino-hispanicum) by Elio Antonio de Nebrija, based on preliminary studies by Germán Colón y Amadeu-J. Soberanas. It's not an original edition, however. It's a 1979 reprint of the edition that was published at Salamanca in 1492. Yes, Colón is the Spanish version of Columbus (which is really just the Latin translation of the real name. For a tiny bit of information about the name Germá (apparently a transliterated version of the name Herman), see the SN. Yes really the SN entry. Run along now.
Back already? Okay, now read about Salamanca (see under Cortes).
Also called NDLF.
The Isle of Dogs is smaller than the Isle of Man. Donne wrote that no man is an island, but the Isle of Dogs is a peninsula in an oxbow of the Thames. (Actually, such a peninsula itself may also be called an oxbow. As the name here indicates, it is also sometimes called an isle or island. The way rivers evolve, naturally or with human assistance, oxbows often become islands and vice versa.) Because of the hydraulics of meander, the deepest part of a river is close to the inside of the oxbow. Hence docks (and quays).
``Docks'' sounds an awful lot like ``dogs'' -- the difference being that the first uses an unvoiced consonant pair /ks/ and the second uses voiced consonants /gz/. Hmmm. Well, no. The Isle of Dogs takes its name from the fact that the king's hounds used to be kept there. It was a peninsula then too.
The name of the Canary Islands comes from the Romans' name for the largest island -- Canaria. According to Pliny, who probably just read it somewhere else, it was named after large feral dogs the Romans found there (from the Latin canis, `dog'). Eventually, the name was applied to the entire group. In the local language, Guanche, the islands were called Tamaran, translated or interpreted as `land of the strong.' You know, tamar- and canar- are very similar -- the tee and cee are differently-articulated but similar-sounding stop consonants, and em and en are similar nasals -- perhaps.... Aaah, after the docks/dogs thing came to grief, I better leave the speculation to professionals like Plinius.
The Canary name also came to be applied to a species of small yellow finches found on the islands.
Île aux Chats, in the province of Québec, is the name of a settlement and an island on the Rivière du Nord, a couple of kilometers north of Carillon, about 30 km west of Montréal. An island renowned for cats and birds -- now that would be something.
DLS's ``sister school,'' Carondelet High School, also in Concord, was also founded in 1965, ``by the Sisters [see?] of St. Joseph of Carondelet at the request of [the aptly named] Bishop Floyd Begin, first Bishop of Oakland [Oakland was his see, see?]. In the tradition of their congregation, the Sisters responded to the needs of the Church by establishing the only Catholic secondary school for the young women of Contra Costa County.''
As it happened, the European economy picked up and a lot of countries did switch starting in 1999 (q.v.).
All forms of the disease involve some problem with insulin, which enables blood sugar (glucose) to enter cells. There are two principal types:
- I -
- or Juvenile-onset, or insulin-dependent diabetes (IDDM).
May first appear as early as the first month of infancy, and typically appears before or during adolescence. The current preferred name is IDDM, however, because onset may be delayed into the thirties, forties and beyond (albeit with decreasing likelihood).
In IDDM, the pancreas fails to produce insulin, or enough insulin. The disease is currently believed to be an autoimmune disorder: the body fails to recognize certain cell surface proteins in the pancreas as ``self,'' and destroys the insulin-producing cells (``beta cells'') found in regions of the pancreas called ``islets of Langerhans.''
[Alpha cells make and release glucagon; delta cells make the hormone somatostatin, believed to regulate the alpha and beta cells. The gamma cells just sit around and look busy, I guess.] Insulin-dependent diabetics require daily insulin injections to survive. Not just hyperglycemia but hypoglycemia becomes a problem (there's a fine region between too little and too much insulin). Moreover, after a few years there may be the additional difficulty that the overt initial reactions to low blood sugar become muted.
- II -
- or Adult-onset, or non-insulin-dependent diabetes (NIDDM).
This is by far the more common form of diabetes (95% of US cases -- 13 to 14 million). Usually appears after age forty. Onset is slow and often goes unnoticed for a long time. There is a significant heritability of this disease, or for the predisposition to the disease, but a number of other factors play a rôle.
Type-II diabetes does not result from destruction of beta cells or from underproduction of insulin. Instead it has to do with ``insulin resistance'' -- a problem with insulin consumers rather than producers. At the cellular level, for incompletely understood reasons, glucose transport becomes less efficient. Insulin levels are typically elevated, and appropriate treatment does not (initially) include insulin injections. However, after years of type-II diabetes, the ability of the pancreas to produce insulin can diminish and lead to type-I (insulin-dependent) diabetes.
- GDM
- - for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
Elevated blood sugar in pregnant women, may occur during the second half of the pregnancy. Glucose levels return to normal post partum in 95% of cases, but GDM is an indication for type II.
The CDC has a ``Diabetes Public Health Resource.'' Diabetes.com would seem like another reasonable place to learn more. See also the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International (JDF), ... Gee, this must be a pretty important disease.
The name diabetes mellitus comes via Latin from Greek: diabetes (`passing through') + mellitus (`honey'). Hippocrates stressed the careful noting of all symptoms that the technology of his time could detect; diabetics' urine tasted sweet. As we now understand, the sweetness comes from the high blood sugar (glucose), some of which is excreted instead of being properly metabolized in cells. A possible indicator of diabetes is excessive thirst (which I suppose arises from the extra workload on the kidneys, but I don't know). More along these lines can be found at the Be entry.
You know -- spawn of the devil, ruthless sociopaths.
In recent years, when you're home during the day, you seem to get a lot more calls where there's no one on the other end. The explanation is straightforward. In a little warren or a Texas jail, a bank of slaves, felons, or other menial employees call potential marks (sorry -- speak with prospective customers). Phone numbers are dialed for them automatically, many calls at a time. The reason many numbers are dialed at once is this: if each number dialed is allowed to ring five times before being hung up, then every not-at-home wastes half a minute of the slave wages. Simultaneously dialing many numbers saves pennies. It happens constantly that two or more calls will be picked up when there is only one slave available to make a pitch. In that case, one or more of the completed calls will be dropped. That is the source of your mysterious phantom calls. There are also wrong-number calls where the calling party realizes the error before speaking, and is too rude to apologize.
I guess this is occupational rehab. When they get out of jail, the ex-cons are ready to make an honest living.
Medicare imposes pricing and contract constraints on DME providers, such as requiring (on hospital-type beds) a rent-to-buy option with repair contract.
DMIS 3.0 was accepted by ANSI as ANSI/CAM-I 101-1995. Current work is focused on implementing an object technology, DOT.
A region of the semiconductor under the gate has not been doped. This drift region always works out to be lightly n-doped.
If this isn't enough, you could look up
H. J. Sigg, G. D. Vendelin, T. P. Cauge and J. Kocsis: ``D-MOS Transistor for
Microwave Applications,'' IEEE Transactions on
Electron Devices, vol. ED-19, pp. 45-53 (January 1972).
Y. Tarui, et al.: ``Diffusion Self-Aligned
MOST -- A New Approach for High Speed Devices,'' in
Proceedings of the First Conf. Solid-State Devices, appearing as a
Supplement to the Japanese Journal of [the Society of] Applied Physics,
vol. 39, pp. 105-110 (1970).