Oh, wait, no -- it's not that at all! They explain:
The military organization, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, was created in 1947 to conduct nuclear weapon effects research and provide nuclear technical, logistical and training support for DoD. Renamed in 1959 as the Defense Atomic Support Agency and in 1971 as the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Agency became DSWA in 1996, as the result of a new charter and an expanded mission.
In Spanish, the acronym is ADN.
A little glossary of DNA terms as edited by Beverly Gaglione is available as one of the side-benefits of this decade's trial of the century. Patrick Carey has written a primer of some utility.
DNA has been proposed as a basis for computation.
If this seems wildly inappropriate to the context in which you heard it, then perhaps you heard the expression D'n'C (D and C).
During the campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, Howard Dean came out of nowhere to be the presumptive nominee in January, then place second in the Iowa caucuses, and crash and burn. At the end of 2004, after the man who beat him in Iowa lost in the general election, Dean campaigned to replace Terry McAuliffe, whose term was ending, as chairman of the DNC. He won the post. A lot of people think that having a parodically anti-defense figure as chair is an unwise move for the DNC, but that's not why I bring up the subject. I just wanted to record here for convenient reference the details of some of the most memorably preposterous comments made at the time, mostly instances of blindly wishful thinking.
(That's what I wanted to do. I haven't actually done it yet.)
Entering the third century of the life of the party, Democrats are generally ``pro-choice.'' Nevertheless, no actual abortions are performed at the convention, unless you count some of the non-prime-time speeches. If the confusion that brought you to this glossary entry remains, you might want to visit the D'n'C (D and C) entry.
Folks extremely unhappy with DNSO have a website at <http://www.dnso.com/>.
Hispaniola in this set-up looks a lot like the island of New Guinea, where a North-South line (the 141E meridian) divides the eastern half (the main territory of Papua New Guinea) from Irian Jaya, a province of Indonesia. The western half has a bay that makes it look like a jaw opening west. Irian, the Indonesian (and originally Malay) name for the entire island of New Guinea, means `Cloud-covered.' Or else it is derived from a Biak phrase meaning `shimmering land.' Resolving this question is next on my to-do list after solving the Palestinian problem. The Indonesian part of the island was originally called Irian Barat, meaning West Irian. When the Dutch granted Indonesia independence in 1949, they gave nominal sovereignty of Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia, but retained control. Under ``Guided Democracy'' (dictatorial) rule, self-appointed Indonesian Prime Minister Sukarno announced a military campaign to take control of Irian Barat (Dec. 19, 1961). Military infiltration began in early 1962. Under heavy US pressure, the Dutch gave it up to the UN on August 15, 1962, which after a decent interval (about a year) turned it over to Indonesia, with an unenforceable and unspecific requirement to obtain West Irian consent for integration within five years. That consent was manufactured in Summer, 1969. At that time, it was renamed Irian Jaya. Jaya means `victory' or `glory.' (Jaya is about 1000 miles east of Java.)
The country's (i.e., the Dominican Republic's) name in Spanish is República Dominicana, abbreviated R.D.
The DOA acronym (strictly: initialism; it's pronounced ``dee oh ey,'' not ``dough-uh'' or anything) has been adopted in the shipping business also. There the expansions are ``damaged on arrival'' (blame the carrier) and ``defective on arrival'' (blame the shipper) but I doubt the correspondence of acronyms is entirely accidental (oops, sorry about that!).
In India, hospitals are said to declare a person ``brought dead.''
Here's a comment on brain death by the tyrant Macbeth (Act III, Sc. 4 of Shakespeare's report):
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.
In Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Michael Corleone is asked to confirm a hit. He says ``I saw his brains.''
This entry is taking a turn in a nasty direction, isn't it.
Phrase used by people who have no business writing a book, will not write a book, and who are ``shopping'' the book they should not and will not write with publishers. Eventually, their celebrity will get them a contract, and a writer who shouldn't be wasting life with pap will ghost the book because he or she needs the money.
I hope you're not too troubled by the shift in grammatical number.
There is another, rarer usage in an honorable context. Here's an example from Scepticism, Man, & God: Selections from the Major Writings of Sextus Empiricus (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U.P., 1964). The preface begins
Years of frustration are the cause of this book. Writings of all sorts, including poems, plays, histories of philosophy, and even encyclopaedia articles on the Greek Sceptics have been so often wrong about and unreasonably antagonistic towards Classical Scepticism that I have finally felt compelled to do this book.The writer was Philip P. Hallie, who provided an introduction, notes and bibliography for the volume, and who selected the passages with the concurrence of Sanford G. Etheridge, who did the translation from the Greek.
Okay, now back to celebrity authorship. Michiko Kakutani writes engagingly for the New York Times. She writes book criticism, and even her individual book reviews rate a column (``Critic's Notebook'') in the broadsheet section, instead of the NYTBR. She often parodies the style she is critiquing. Her column for October 23, 2003, is entitled ``To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play.'' It tells the wonderful story of stars who write children's books.
Many [famous brand-name people] wrote books about children who sounded like themselves. Jerry, a comedian who made pots of gold with a television show and more pots of gold with commercials for a credit card, wrote a Halloween book about a greedy boy who wants to get his hands on lots and lots of brand-name candy. Madonna, a blond star, wrote about a pretty little blond girl who has no friends because everyone is jealous that she ``shines like a star.'' And Britney, a younger blond singer, wrote a book, with her mother, about a young blond girl who really, really wants to become a singer...
Other celebrity children's-book authors:
- Jimmy Buffet (of ``Margueritaville'' fame?),
- Bill Cosby,
- Sarah Ferguson (of the suckled toes?).
- Spike Lee,
- Keith Hernandez,
- Jesse Ventura,
- Maria Shriver,
- Katie Couric,
- Marlee Matlin,
- Bob Dylan,
- Bob Dylan??!!??
- Dr. Laura Schlessinger (I'd rather just go to my room without dinner),
- LeAnn Rimes,
- Jane Seymour,
- Harvey Fierstein,
- Della Reese,
- Michael Bolton,
- Cindy Crawford,
- Shaquille O'Neal,
- Debbie Allen, and
- Lynne Cheney.
Paris Hilton has done her first autobiography. It's titled Confessions of an Heiress and was written by Merle Ginsberg. It's selling well on the internet. It has lots and lots of pictures. (I'm sorry -- it's hard to shake off the effects of that children's-book section of the entry. But it really really has a lot of pictures! Ginsberg never had it so good.) Confessions is a natural companion volume to her porn video. I'm very excited about this book, and I plan to buy it as soon as it hits the dollar table. But I hope she invests in new boobs before the next autobiography.
Here's some further guidance on related wording -- specifically on the meaning of the preposition by in the context of such books. Marco Perella is an an actor too, and at the urging of his friend Molly Ivins, he wrote a book about his experiences. Her foreword to that book began thus:
Who wants to read another book by some rich, famous, successful actor? Especially when we can hear from Marco Perella instead. He's un-rich, unfamous and perfectly hilarious. Besides, he wrote this book himself.
More about the book, Adventures of a No Name Actor, can be found at our cybermuffin entry.
Bilitis was believed to be a poetess from the island Lesbos, one who was a contemporary and acquaintance of the famous Sappho. The cause of these beliefs is a hoax perpetrated by the French novelist Pierre Louÿs, who claimed he had discovered poems of this previously unknown person. In 1894, he published free-verse ``translations'' into French; a later edition included a bibliography of spurious related scholarship and related works on Bilitis. The poems provided relief to some for whom the surviving bits of Sappho are intolerably coy. Bilitis was well-known to be an invention long before 1951, but the poems continued to enjoy a certain censored vogue, and Bilitis also became a subject of paintings. (Bilitis in these came to be confused with Sappho, but given how little we know of the latter, and how entirely fanciful such paintings are, no harm done.) J.B. Hare speculates that DOB selected the name it did precisely because Bilitis was generally obscure. Louÿs shares writing credit for a 1977 French movie entitled Bilitis.
Dobro was a trade name, and it has not passed into the public domain. The trademark currently belongs to the Gibson Instrument Co., which is protecting it by insisting that only instruments manufactured under the Dobro trademark be called ``Dobros.'' Instead, people are supposed to use the generic term ``resophonic guitar.'' Gag.
As a way of needling the Gibson folks, a lot of people who own and play the instrument have taken a page from TAFKAP and taken to using the term TIFKAD -- ``The Instrument Formerly Known As Dobro.''
``And is that a real doctor or just a Ph.D.?''
It is possible to quantify the degree of ``reality'' of various ``Doctors'' along a straight line (specifically, the base of a triangle with apex at home plate): If the M.D. is in deep right field, then the Ph.D. is in shallow center, and the Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) is in the parking area. (Sometimes Doctors of Osteopathy can be seen wandering into left field.)
For those who nay be imterested, the N.D. landed foul, on the grass!
The wise kangaroos
Prefer yellow shoes.
The only wise kangaroo I know of, who probably wears athletic shoes, is a coauthor on the Stuperspace article cited at the Acknowledgments entry.
The mnemonic has been credited to Gilbert Murray, an Australian.
Okay, a kangaroo sits down at a bar and says, ``I'll have a Foster's, mate!'' The bartender charges him ten bucks for the brew and says, ``you know, uh, we don't see a lot of kangaroos in here.'' He replies, ``well at these prices, you're not likely to see many more!''
We also have kangaroo information at the KMP entry.
(Actually, that singer was Otis Redding, and he wasn't available to do a corrected version. He died in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin, three days after recording ``(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay.'')
In George Orwell's 1984, Oceania's DoD was called the Ministry of Love. In George Washington's first cabinet, it was called the Department of War. Here's how it evolved:
1789_ War (army and navy)
|
1798_ __|__
| |
Navy War (army)
| |
. .
. .
. .
| |
1947_ | |____
| | |
| | Air Force
| | |
1949_ |_____|____|
|
Defense
|
.
.
.
DoD is pronounced ``DEE-oh-DEE'' and never pronounced ``DEE-uh-DEE'' (like ``House o' Car Audio'').
As far as the US military itself is concerned, ``DoD'' is obsolete and has been replaced by ``DOD.'' I guess they just noticed that computer print-outs are in all-caps. Soon enough they'll notice that they aren't.
In 1798, the Department of War was split into Departments of War and the Navy. This use of war to refer only to military operations on land goes along with the traditional sense of military to refer only to the land component of what we think of as military. (For an example of this usage in British English, see the D. of I. (R) entry.) The word military comes from the Latin word milites meaning soldier. The division into separate Navy and War Departments continued until 1947, when the Air Force USAF was created as a separate department out of the earlier Army Air Corps (USAAC). The DOD was created by the National Security Act of 1949.
They were controlled by Italy for a while and transferred to Greece after WWII.
There have also been football teams called the Brooklyn Dodgers. For details, see the AAFC entry.
Here is something from an introduction by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips to a volume of essays they co-edited:
The United States ought to be conducting large-scale experiments aimed at reducing uncertainty about the effects of schools' racial mix, class size, teacher selection systems, ability grouping, and many other policies. We do such experiments to determine the effects of different medical treatments, different job training programs, and many other social interventions. But the U.S. Department of Education, which should in principle be funding experiments from which every state and school district would benefit, has shown almost no interest in this approach to advancing knowledge about education. The most important piece of education research in the past generation, the Tennessee class-size experiment, was funded by the Tennessee legislature, not the U.S. Department of Education. Experimental assessments of other educational policies that have a major impact on school spending -- salary levels, teacher selection systems, education for the physically and mentally disabled, for example -- have been almost nonexistent.If we did more experiments, we might eventually develop better theories. At present, theorizing about the causes of the black-white gap is largely a waste of time, because there is no way to resolve theoretical disagreements without data that all sides accept as valid. Most theories about human behavior start out as hunches, anecdotes, or ideological predispositions. Such theories improve only when they have to confront evidence that the theorist cannot control. In education, that seldom hapens.
The Black-White Test Score Gap
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,
1998), p. 42.
I think the DoE was created (see HEW) early in the Carter Administration (say around 1978) and that abolishing it was a plank in Reagan's campaign platform (unfulfilled). The animus against the DoE was probably driven by the conviction that it was political payback to the (politically) liberal NEA for its support of Democrats, and by the expectation that the DoE would increase federal intervention in education, properly to be seen as a matter for states and localities. Then again, maybe not. You know, this stuff is history.
The word dog is an etymological mystery -- a foundling. Coming out of nowhere, it almost completely displaced the Germanic word hound (German cognate Hund). Sure, dog comes from Middle English dogge, and Old English docga, but before that, what?
For puns based on the dog-god metathesis, see the Dyslexic Theologian entry. There's also a lightly-forced double pun at JPO. There's no pun at woof that I can hear, but wolf may be pronounced with a ``dark ell.'' And the fire dog is not the Saint Bernard of hot California forests.
The organization was founded in 1857 by Albricht von Graefe. That's sort of doubly noble: in German surnames the word von, meaning `of,' betokens nobility, while Graefe means `earls.' His organization's acronym normally takes a definite article: die DOG, mit der DOG, etc. Die is the female article, so it's a bitch. See also SOE and AKC.
Doggers have traditionally been paid privately, on the basis of a per-dog bounty. There are still a few such doggers in Australia, but there are more attractive occupational opportunities, and the population of doggers is getting older. Although doggers will shoot dogs when the opportunity arises, most dogs are caught in traps. Nowadays, the traps' teeth typically have strychnine-soaked rags wired to them, and that poison is usually what kills them.
Another control measure used by state governments and federal agencies has been the air-dropping of poisoned bait, but there is concern that this bait will be taken by endangered species, so such programs are always themselves endangered. Besides doggers and poison, there is fencing. A 5,400-kilometer barrier cuts off the south-east corner of the continent from the interior. (For the sake of comparison, the Great Wall of China is 6,400 km long.) Erected in the 1880's, it's usually been described as successful in keeping dogs that roam the arid interior from crossing into sheep and cattle country. I don't know how they can be certain. There's a movie about some aboriginal children taken from their parents, who find their way home by following the fence, but I can't remember the title. There is currently (2006) a proposal under study to build a 1,100-km fence in the northwest corner of the state of Western Australia. It would stretch from Esperance in the south to Meekatharra in the north-east, separating the ``bleak'' interior from the pastoral properties closer to the Indian Ocean coast.
Australia has a variety of other feral populations besides dogs. These include horses, cattle, goats, hog, donkeys, camels (!), water buffalo, dogs, cats, rabbits, foxes, and mice. I suggest paving the interior. Using dogs to help hunt feral hogs (or ``feral pigs,'' as they are more often called) is called pig dogging (not dog pigging). The dogs used to find and attack wild boar and flush them out of the brush are usually pit bulls, which came to be called pigdogs by Australian hunters. The legality of pigdogging is under state jurisdiction (outside of the national parks), and varies across Australia. The legal situation is generally acknowledged to be confusing. Certain styles of surfing, in which the surfer's crouch is said to resemble a pigdog's posture as it hangs on a pig, are called pig dogging.
All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept dogger and its regular plural. Not that it matters, but OSPD and TWL, which offer definitions, list it as a fishing vessel.
One kind of dogger that sounds intermediate between these is a crane chaser. He also generally works outdoors. This kind of dogger attaches slings to cranes and directs the movement of loads handled by cranes, maybe does a little shoveling, and is occasionally crushed by accident. Oh-- that kind of crane! Anyway...
Dog food is also a stage in the Microsoft software development process, I was not surprised to learn. On the other hand, Intel's Moore speaks of how Intel must ``eat its own children.'' This must be the difference between software and hardware.
In common usage, the definite article is much more likely to be elided when DOI is attributive (e.g., ``Department of Interior administrative rulings'').
The presidential security escort, called the Secret Service, is part of the Treasury Department for historical reasons (like: that there didn't used to be a DOJ), or perhaps because the protection of the president is motivated more by a desire for a stable currency than by any consideration of justice. This might explain why secret service officers failed quietly to assassinate Quayl when Bush (president 41) was ill, and thereby risked the former's becoming president.
The absence of the final e in Quayle's name is not a misspelling. It's a joke -- a reference to a famous misadventure he suffered when he returned to elementary school. Already in December 2003, as I was touching up the text, I restored the absent e. Fortunately, the editor caught the incorrectly correctly spelled name, and now the correct misspelling has been restored for your amusement. For help remembering the original incident and for some of its Nachleben, see the FF entry (french fried potatoes).
Frances Perkins was FDR's Secretary of Labor, and the first female member of a US Cabinet. They probably snuck that in under the radar, spelling her name Francis often enough to make people think Frances was the misspelling.
As of mid-2009 the only traditional dollar store I know of is Dollar Tree. A local Dollar Tree franchise (in Mishawaka, IN) fills a space of about 10,000 square feet, so it's not as if there aren't cheap items available to sell. Dollar Tree is a good place to go to buy AAA batteries in packages of fewer than 50, single items of silverware (two for a dollar), pickles that are not packed so tightly into their jars, and mystery brands. That local Dollar Tree is the only place I know where you can buy the Sunday edition of the South Bend Tribune for a discount (on the Sunday morning of issue, perhaps I should add).
Most dollar stores are franchises of major chains like Dollar Tree and Dollar General -- buying in bulk must be part of the business model -- but there are also variations on the idea, and probably some independents. I don't know if that includes the 99-cent store I remember in Garwood, New Jersey. Back around 2004-2005, they had a going-out-of-business sale that lasted about a year. They did in fact eventually close the store, but I wonder how much they restocked.
A June 24, 2009, story in the Wall Street Journal begins thus:
When Cyrus Hassankola moved to Dallas a couple of years ago, after successfully going out of business in several locales, he decided to settle down and go out of business permanently [selling oriental rugs]. ... Customers ... would sometimes say how sorry they were that he was going out of business. ``We're not,'' Mr. Hassankola told them. ``It's just the name of the store.''
The Texas AG's office objected to the name, so he changed it to ``Cyrus Rug Gallery'' and started to advertise a sell-out ahead of ``the impending demolition and redevelopment'' of the premises, apparently based on a rumor that has not yet been proven true... or false. He says he's looking for a new location.
Someone who has received two degrees from Notre Dame is called a ``double domer.'' The word ``domer'' is also used very loosely as an adjective meaning ``associated with Notre Dame.''
Nero took the opportunity of the fire to expropriate an area of over 200 acres in central Rome. There, between 65 and 68, he built a colossal palace (domus was a single-family dwelling of variable size). (When I say ``he built,'' I don't mean with his own hands. In 66 he went off to Greece for 15 months in search of religious enlightenment.) He laid out the area as a park with various porticoes, pavilions, baths, and fountains, with an artificial lake in the center. (The later emperor Vespasian had this drained to make a site for the Colosseum.) The domestic wing of the palace stood on the slopes of the Oppian Hill facing south across the lake. He didn't get to enjoy it for very long: in 68 he died, probably a suicide.
This is probably the ideal point to make the following point about NGO's: when you incorporate, you have to select a name that is unique, at least so far as the jurisdiction of incorporation is concerned. It's a lot like trademarking. An NPO could incorporate under the generic and not very helpful name DONGO, but then a group that wanted to develop a cross between donkeys and Australian dogs, or between dogs and bongos, could not be incorporated by the same jurisdiction under that name. So always have a plan B and maybe a plan C.
They didn't have much information on it, but they did tell me that a few years earlier somebody from Notre Dame had come and taped interviews with survivors and made some kind of movie out of it (which they apparently didn't think it odd not to have a copy of). Back at Notre Dame, I haven't been able to track that down easily, but I'll let you know if I do.
Perhaps an interest in Donora's tragedy is an occupational hazard of working at Notre Dame. Maybe it has to do with the bend in the river. Notre Dame is at South Bend, Indiana. (Actually north of the center of that city, but wholly outside the city limits.) South Bend is on the Saint Joseph River, which rises generally southeastward from Lake Michigan (at the city of Saint Joseph, Michigan), flows directly south from Niles, Michigan, and takes a sharp turn to the east here. If this were the eighteenth century, and you were canoeing south up the Saint Joseph, you might land in South Bend and portage west to reach one of the tributaries of the Mississippi. The Saint Joseph does not continue exactly eastward, and it turns out that the river's southernmost point is at the city of South Bend, whence the name.
Niles, Michigan, incidentally, is not named for the river in Africa. It's named for Hezekiah Niles, as explained at the Niles entry.
Donora name:
On June 1, 1902, under the headline ``How a Town's Name Was Made,'' the New York Times printed a column-inch of news from ``The Pittsburg (Penn.) Times.'' [Regarding the aitch missing from ``Pittsburg,'' see the Pittsburg entry.]Few persons know how the new town of Donora was given its name. It is simple enough. The first syllable is part of the name of W.H. Donner, President of the Union Steel Company, which started the town, and the last syllable is the first name of Mrs. A.W. Mellon, the wife of one of those heavily interested in the town and steel company.
Mr. Donner was in fact the industrialist whose enthusiasm drove the development of the area that was named Donora. There's an alternative story of the origin of the name Donora that is based on the idea that Mrs. Mellon's maiden name was Donner. That would have been a bit of a coincidence, unless Mr. Mellon had married a relative of his friend Donner. In any case, she was née McMullin. I didn't invent the ``Nora Donner Mellon'' story, but I helped propagate it. Sorry.
The ``soundtrack album'' for the movie ``The Graduate'' was definitely not made by the door slam method. The music was actually intelligently adapted to what was going on in the movie. Most of the songs sound at least a little bit different in the album, and a few are clearly different versions. (And the sound quality is better, not very surprisingly.) I would have investigated personally, but unfortunately that movie is not among the between 1¼ and 2¾ movies from the sixties that I am still able to stomach in their entirety, so I have had to rely on infallible sources like Robin. Robin claimed that ``Mrs. Robinson,'' though written for the movie, wasn't used in it. I passed that information along here (though of course I protected my sources). The claim was apparently made nowhere else among the many thousands of other web pages that mentioned this obscure song, so we had quite a scoop ... of something. According to an old FAQ page, the song is evidently used at least twice in the movie, though in at least one instance it is a whistled rather than sung version. If you come back to this entry later and it no longer mentions my good friend Robin, that'll be an indication that none of the versions used in the movie were sung.
The song was an enormous hit for Simon and Garfunkel, spending four weeks at number one in 1968. It contains a lyric
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Joltin' Joe wasn't sure how to understand the lyric, and said in an interview that he once took the opportunity to ask Rhymin' Simon about it. Joe didn't reveal what answer he got, but it was evidently complimentary.
More about Mrs. Robinson is hidden somewhere in the Buffalo Bills entry. Go figure.
You know, that entry is so bloated, I'm just going to continue the thought here. The thought concerns that movie (``The Graduate''). The graduate of the title, Benjamin Braddock, has an affair with a Mrs. Robinson, who is supposed to be old enough to be his mother. The characters are played by Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, 30 and 36 years old at the time, respectively. Even before it became illegal to make the contrary suggestion, it used to be said that women are more (emotionally) mature than men of the same age, but this doesn't really cut it. At least Bancroft was older, so I guess you could say casting got it qualitatively correct. Dustin Hoffman eventually went on to play an unemployed actor who poses as a woman to get acting work in ``Tootsie'' (more at the metastatic entry).
Now I think of it, one day I was in the car with [name actually omitted to protect my privacy, can you imagine?] and she asked me how old I was. In the years we'd been dating, it hadn't ever come up. It turned out then that I was twenty-five and she was thirty. She said ``why-you're-just a baaaaaaaaabyyyyyyyy!!!!'' I guess you could say she got that qualitatively correct, but I won't. She eventually married someone quantitatively (or chronologically, as they say) older.
In the movie ``Bridget Jones's Diary'' (2001), 32-year-old Renée Zellweger plays a 32-year old woman (the title character) desperate to hook up permanently. (Sort of like a mobile home, I guess.) The other two vertices (or is it sides?) of her love triangle are played by Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, who were born on September 9 and 10, respectively, 1960, or eight and a half years before Zellweger. Romantic comedy is an amazingly limiting and even ritualized genre, but because you're a sensitive person, you thrill to the subtle wrinkles in each new product. In this one, plucky-everygirl Bridget Jones overcomes-misunderstandings-and-a-rival-to-have-a-happy-ending-with-the-rich-and-talented Mark Darcy, the Colin Firth character. According to the script, she was four when he was eight. Bridget Jones says ``That's a pretty big age difference -- quite pervy really.'' (Full disclosure: this might be a tendentiously selected quotation.) (Further disclosure: the preceding full disclosure was not complete. I'm not saying it wasn't a full disclosure, just that it was not a complete one -- it was a partial full disclosure.)
A neurotransmitter amine. May be abbreviated DA.
Beautiful Leila once coaxed me into being a fourth for bridge -- her partner -- and tried to teach me the rules of the game as it went along (kind of like life). All I learned was the verb to finesse, but at that stage I could at most coarse. Bridge is all about social intercourse. I still regret every bid and every pass that I remember not making that night. I was very, very DOPey. Now Humiliation -- that's I game I know how to play.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is located in Dorado.
There are a number of US states with their own departments of state. I suppose it's cool to have a ``state department of state'' or a ``State department'' that is only a single one of the ``state departments,'' but after a couple of hundred years, I think the novelty starts to wear thin. The US Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 10, and elsewhere) limits the power of states to conduct individual foreign policy (although governors regularly head delegations seeking to expand foreign trade). State departments of state are generally not ministries of the exterior but of the interior.
For example, the ``State of New Jersey Department of State'' seems to be something of a catch-all, with responsibility for elections, volunteer programs, arts programs, tourism, American Indian affairs, and scattered other stuff. The ``Florida Department of State'' seems to be only slightly less scattered, with a stronger emphasis on elections. (And really, as the 2000 elections showed, that may already be more than they can handle.) The ``Pennsylvania Department of State'' has just ``five bureaus that work for the public.'' No mention of any bureaus that work against the public, so it sounds pretty focused. The links to the five are labeled ``Elections, Licensing, Corporations, Charities,'' and ``Athletics.'' Athletics? ``Each [bureau] is unique in function and all are vital to the strength of our Commonwealth.'' It's looking like Pennsylvania might be critical in the 2008 elections. Watch out.
In common parlance, refers to MS-DOS or PC-DOS, a CP/M-like set of commands (that is not technically an operating system) that IBM bought from Microsoft for the IBM-PC. (On those early IBM PC's, it used to reside on floppy disks.)
Be aware that paperback publications of DOST are actually sub-sections of the hardback volumes. In principle, one paperbound ``part'' or fascicle is supposed to be issued annually, and every four or five years the recent ones are bound into a hardback volume. Part XLIV, ``S(c)hake to S(c)hot,'' is dated 1996 (it came out in Dec. 1995), and our library doesn't seem to have received any subsequent parts.
For something you can hold completely in one hand, try the CSD.
In Spanish, the adjective and adverb is bastante, but the interjection is ¡basta! -- `it suffices!' -- from the verb bastar.
In Hindi, bas is the adjective, adverb, and interjection `enough,' and this is evidently related to Persian bas. I've heard a Sikh mother tell her son bascaro! (Punjabi `enough').
Not every Indo-European language has a bas cognate, obviously. English Enough is cognate with German genug.
That should do for now.
The Vowel States.
Alabama took ALDOT, which isn't exactly euphonious, but better than AKDOT. Alaskans must've thought the same; they have a DOT&PF (Department of Transportation and Public Facilities). Arizona uses ADOT. Arkansas is experimenting with Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD). This is one of the benefits of federalism: an innovative idea (a lunacy) can be tried out in just one state first, and if it fails there it can be tried out again nationally. This is why so many US presidents have been former governors.
IDOT (``Aye, Dot!') is used by Illinois, but written out it looks, uh, dumb. Neighboring I-states Indiana and Iowa use INDOT and Iowa DOT. When your state name is short enough to look like an acronym, you've got plenty of space left over on the truck door. Idaho went with ITD (Idaho Transportation Department). I'm not surprised, really. Idaho is ``way out there,'' and I don't just mean way out west. You know, ``... way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back -- that's like an earthquake.'' Oh, sorry, that's Willy Loman. Whatever. (Accurate and more complete excerpt at the dast entry.)
ODOT is used by Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon. Bosons, obviously.
Utah has UDOT all to itself.
There aren't any E states, so we have space for
The Semivowel States:
WashDOT is used somewhat, but Washington State's DOT is officially WSDOT, possibly because washdot sounds too much like what happens to roads in the wet western part of the state. Wisconsin uses DOT and also WisDOT to a certain extent, though not currently (2004) on the homepage. Perhaps this is deprecated, in the computer sense of being understood but superseded. That would be a good thing, because the voicing of the letter dee in WisDOT likely leads many to pronounce this ``Wiz dot.'' That doesn't mean anything, precisely, but what it means imprecisely isn't good. Wyoming uses WYDOT. Why not? West Virginia has a WVDOT. I never noticed before how much ``WV'' looks like ``VW.'' West Virginia sells ``Officially Licensed NASCAR® and NASCAR® Driver Plates'' on line. They call this ``Bridging the E-Commerce Gap.'' I call it playing to type. (``Collect the entire series of your favorite NASCAR® drivers!'' What, a different plate for every block-mounted car-cass in my yard?) West Virginia brings us back toThe States With Two-Word Names,
which in every case share a word with another state. What about the New states? NHDOT, NJDOT, NMDOT, ... boring, boring, and boring. Oh goodie, NYSDOT, for New York State. Someone got a gray-flannel suit with slightly larger belt-loops. Could that be pronounced ``nice dot''? I guess it could be.The remaining en's? Nevada takes no chances (the house never does): its chips go on NDOT. And Nebraska goes with ... NDOR! Yes! They probably figured Kansas made such good publicity with its Good Witch of the North, they should try a witch connection too. (I'm writing this stuff during ``Reading Days.'' There's nothing else to do. That's my excuse.) It stands for ``Department of Roads.'' More at the ENDOR entry eventually, perhaps, I suppose, in your dreams.
There are
Other States That Have To Share A First Initial
of course. Virginia took VDOT. Vermont has an Agency of Transportation. It would be sooo-ooo-ooo cool if they called it VAT, but they call it VTrans, which sounds like a bus service.Exams are coming up soon and we'll only have time for one more contested initial, so let's cut to the em's. As you know, the we're-not-a-boy-band! boy band of brothers Hanson had a big hit with MDOT. Who can forget those bittersweet lyrics --
In an mdot they're gone.
In an mdot they're gone. In an mdot they're not there
In an mdot they're gone. In an mdot they're not there
In an mdot they're gone. In an mdot they're not there
In an mdot they're gone. In an mdot they're not there
Until you lose your hair. But you don't care.
(repeat chorus if you can stand it)
Oh, I guess I forgot the lyrics. It's not mdot but mmmbop. Of course! That way the lyrics make much more sense. Let's compare what the various mmmstates do. Michigan: MDOT. Oops, that's all we have time for, sorry.
(My favorite StateDOT is DelDOT. It's the reason I wrote this entry at all.)
Name taken from the most popular TLD (particularly for retailers).
Here's something from a review of Ecco the Dolphin: DOTF that I found sadly amusing: ``...most of your first hour will be spent getting to grips with Ecco's simple, intuitive control system and marvelling at the beautiful graphics.'' (This is from page 317 of the same reference quoted at the virtual entry.)
On July 28, 2004, Beringer Vineyards unveiled a larger bottle at its winery in St. Helena, California. The four-and-a-half-foot bottle was filled with 2001 Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon (which suggests that they don't plan on letting it settle very long). It is claimed to be the world's largest bottle of wine, and officials of the Guinness Book of Records were on hand to certify the event.
Okay, that's correct, but there's a little history to it. Back in the sixties, economics modeling was grappling with the problem of what mathematical measure to use for risk. That is: how to quantify risk. Many of the proposed quantifiers were ``downside measures,'' which quantified the probability of, say, price decreases but not increases. One example of a downside measure of risk is the semivariance, which is essentially the price variance computed by considering only negative deviations from the mean (price). (Of course, it's a mathematical fact that this is exactly half of the ordinary variance.) In the end, perhaps primarily because of its formal convenience, familiarity and simple properties, standard deviation (the square root of variance) was widely adopted. It does have a couple of attractive properties from the practical economic point of view: it does more heavily weight large deviations (than does average deviation, say) and thus incorporates the notion of a ``comfort zone'' of unalarming small price fluctuations. Also, it is a linear measure, so it can be compared directly (i.e., dollars to dollars). [That's really also a disadvantage, because it gives people the mistaken notion that they understand it, since it is some number of dollars.] However, strictly speaking the standard deviation in price is a measure of price volatility. One may say that downside volatility is closer to a precise notion of risk, and because theoretical discussions now usually assume that ``risk'' is volatility, ``downside risk'' is not an utterly meaningless, stupid phrase. Just an ugly one.
The above is something of a guess.
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Myth of Daedalus. While there I had lunch in a student cafeteria, where
sixties rock was playing over the PA system.
Ninety-six Tears came on (you know -- by [question mark] and the Mysterians?),
and some kid on the north side of the room started grooving to it. He couldn't
have been much more than a spermatozoon when the sixties were a decade in the
can. I'm sure this is very meaningful and significant, but I'm just
doing data collection here. Insight will have to come later, when some
imaginative think-piece writer like Claude
Lévi-Strauss digests the data from all this precise ethnological
work. Still, I think it made me understand a little better how Schubert might
have felt forty years after he died, if he had lived that long. (A
priori, it's not unreasonable that Franz Schubert might have lived forty
years longer than he actually did. He died at the age of 31. Claude
Lévi-Strauss, by contrast, lived to be 100.)
The Holland visit was a side-trip on my way to a dinner date with Gail. Gail grew up in Detroit, and she explained that my Hope College observations did not mislead me: the western part of lower Michigan is strange. It's always good to get input from researchers on the ground.
This just in -- more anthropological data from Holland, Michigan. Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife Jamie into naming their son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. Version 2 was born January 27, 2004. Jamie Cusack said she figured that she got to pick out the theme of the baby's room and other things, so she ``decided to let Jon have this.'' (Welcome to Narcissism 102.) I imagine by now they're already expecting for next year -- 2.1.
The software-release analogy reminds me of 1984. In January of that year Apple launched its Macintosh line with a memorable advertisement that was based loosely on the ``Two-Minutes Hate'' (hate Emmanuel Goldstein) sessions of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Yes! A Goldstein variation.) At the Democratic Party convention in San Francisco that July, Jesse Jackson gave a most eloquent speech. (Everyone said he gave a very nice speech. That was the same convention where Mario Cuomo gave a mediocre speech that everyone praised as moving and eloquent. This proves that people generally have worse judgment than I do.) Here's one of the lines from Jesse's speech:
God is not finished with me yet.
Just like Microsoft.
Just to continue the remakes theme -- in 2007, a political attack ad against Hillary Clinton was put up on <YouTube.com> (it was made by someone who turned out to be associated with the Obama campaign). The ad was a remake of the 1984 Apple ad.
Study this entry well, and be prepared. Staircase wit is bitter in the throat.
The term arose in the US during Reconstruction, as ``bull dose,'' specifically a bull dose of punishment, usually flogging. To judge from contexts offered by the OED, these doses were generally originally delivered in a highly race-prejudiced manner, but later the courtesy was extended to all races. The verb meant to administer this flogging, or by extension to coerce by force. The word bull-doser applied to the sort of person who would, could, or looked like he might bull-dose. Somewhere along the way the ess must have gotten to be voiced, probably after or as the original motivation of the term was forgotten. Bulldozer, apparently never with an ess, was used by 1881 to mean a large pistol. Bulldozer, in the sense of a machine for flattening the inanimate opposition of earth, was in use by 1930.
Dislocated, Perhaps.
When I was in graduate school one October, a graduate student in the English department walked into the crowded TV room and, after vaguely discerning the focus of attention, asked aloud how many games there were in the World Series. The first answer she received was ``Are you an American?'' from a Tigers fan.
There ain't no DPAC Shakur.
An idea that helped make fax practical was the recognition that an efficient compression scheme is to encode only changes in density.
A DPDT switch would be appropriate for switching ordinary two-phase power between either of two alternative loads or for switching an appliance between either of two AC power supplies. (With three-phase power, the same applications would require triple-pole double-throw switches.) Another application of DPDT switches would be in selecting which of two alternative phones is connected to an ordinary (two active wires) phone line, or which of two phone lines is connected to a particular phone. If you were switching a single line among three phones, or a single phone among three lines, you would use a double-pole triple-throw switch.
Michael Hart (see PG entry) has authorized two or more PG groups in Europe. DP Europe is led by Zoran Stefanovic and will operate from Belgrade. (It's part of Ratsko. I don't know what Rastko is exactly, though it seems to comprise a collection of cultural preservation projects.) There is a separate PG-EU based in the Netherlands, which apparently will also do distributed proofing. As of this writing (Jan. 28; one day after official DP Europe announcement) the European operations are at various testing stages, so the situation is a bit fluid and the division of labor remains to be worked out.
Netherlands, like all of the EU, follows a Life+70 rule in copyright protection. The EU and the US (also +70) both are trying in their separate ways to extend the rule of that law. Serbia (like Canada and Australia) follows Life+50 as of 2004, so the siting may offer some flexibility. Although the jurisdictional issues are not clear, it seems to be agreed that some works are in the public domain in Serbia that are not so in the EU or US, and it will be possible to proof and serve them from a PG Europe there (once Serbian servers are used) though not at PG-INT or PG-EU. However, Serbia is expected to join the EU in 2008 or later, and is starting the ``harmonization'' process. Australia is in trade negotiations with the US, and Life+50 -->+70 is on the table. (There's a PG-AU, and as of this writing there are some very preliminary moves toward a PG-CA.)
In the US, the centimeter has been defined as exactly 50/127 inch, sort-of. DPI is also the initialism of the slightly Orwellian-sounding UN Department of Public Information.
The emergence of the DPJ represents a qualitative change in Japanese politics -- the possibility of something like a two-party system. DPJ is now (ahead of the snap general election called for September 2005) large enough to credibly challenge the LDP for the status of largest party, a status it has held firmly since 1958. The closest previous parallel is the SDP when it was led by Takako Doi. The SDP briefly achieved parity with the LDP in the upper house of the Diet in the early 1990's, and was the largest party in the coalition that kept the LDP out of government for a few months in 1993-4.
In the Summer of 2005, 60 years after the end of WWII, Germany and Japan find themselves in similar circumstances. Both countries experienced spectacular sustained growth for decades after the war, and both economic engines stalled after 1990. Both countries have been making painful economic reforms, the leaders moving slowly against resistance within their own constituencies. Following votes that went against them, both countries' leaders (in a move unpopular with their fellow party-members) dissolved their governments and called early elections for September 2005. In both elections, the principal question is the pace and direction of economic reform, and in both countries a new party is changing the electoral dynamic. (In Germany the new party is die Linkspartei, `the Left Party.')
I am reminded of some famous lines I misunderstood for years, from RWE's ``Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing'':
Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.
In the Japanese elections on September 11, PM Koizumi's gamble paid off. The LDP increased its share of seats in the 480-member lower house of the Diet to 296, up from 249 before the election, reversing a decade-long slow decline. The most seats the LDP ever held was 300 in 1986, when the lower house had a total of 512 seats. The LDP and its coalition partner, the Buddhist-supported New Komeito Party, together now hold 327 lower-house seats, exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to override any veto by the upper house. I think most people realize now that 63-year-old Koizumi is a rock star. (The following Summer, on a state visit to the US, the rock star visited Graceland, where he did one of his Elvis impressions. Memphis, in Tennessee as in Egypt, is an ancient shrine. But visiting this one doesn't get the PM in much trouble with Japan's neighbors.)
The day after the 2005 elections, DPJ president Katsuya Okada conceded defeat and announced his resignation. During the campaign, he had already said he would resign in the event of a defeat, and the defeat was severe: the DPJ crashed from 175 seats to 113, holding onto only one seat in Tokyo, a former stronghold. Seiji Maehara became DPJ president on September 17. There had been speculation that DPJ would break up as a result of the electoral defeat, but they're still in existence as of June 2006, the current update of this entry. This month also, a hefty tax increase kicked in (something like an increase in the withholding percentage for social security), while social-security benefits are being reduced. That ought to give them a fillip. (There is a downside to high life-expectancy, as SciFi writers in large numbers were pointing out in the 1950's. It isn't helped any by a birth dearth -- something not so widely foreseen then.)
This obscure corner of the glossary is just the sort of place I would choose to mention the fact that what used to be called ``the Diet'' is nowadays called ``Japan's Parliament'' in English-language news stories. I'll have to look into why and when this change happened, but I imagine that the underlying cause is a discomfort people feel with this acception of the word diet. The precise etymology of this word is unclear, but it's certainly related to the German word Tag (as in Bundestag, the lower and more powerful house of the current German parliament, and Reichstag, the corresponding assembly of the Weimar republic). In Spanish, the German lower house is called dieta.
The week after the decisive result in the Japanese elections, Germany had a very inconclusive election that was expected to lead to a coalition government -- probably a grand coalition -- and gridlock on many major issues.
In 2009, eighteen large US cities participated in the the federally-sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress. The math results came out around December 10, 2009, and they showed Detroit firmly in last place, with 69% of fourth-graders and 77% of eighth-graders scoring below the basic level, the lowest levels in the 40-year history of the test. (Reading scores would be released in 2010.) Speaking on Saturday, December 12, DPN executive director Sharlonda Buckman reacted to the news:
Somebody needs to go to jail. Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, And it shouldn't be the kids.(I didn't hear her say it, but it was obviously sung.)
After the song, she asked for go-to-jail volunteers from the audience of 500 parents. That's amazing! Gosh, let me check that. No! She said that teachers should go to jail. That's a great idea: there they can finally meet many of the parents who never show up for parent-teacher conferences. It might give a kind of fillip to teacher recruiting, too.
Tonya Allen, a founding member of DPN, said ``They could have took this test in French and done just as bad.'' Gosh, there just full of great ideas.
It's probably 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (below). As a stable radical, this presumably has a wonderfully strong EPR signal, but don't take my word for it--I'm a spectral innocent.
_____
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
\ \___/ / O N
\_____/ ² \
\ \_____
\ / ___ \
N---N___/ / \ \___NO
/ \ \___/ / ²
_____/ \_____/
/ ___ \ /
/ / \ \ /
\ \___/ / O N
\_____/ ²
From what I recall, the FAA considers a flight to have departed on time if it pulls away from the gate no more than fifteen minutes after the stated departure time. If it spends the next few hours on the tarmac awaiting clearance for take-off, that's not a late departure, just your bad luck (though it might lead to a delayed arrival). The reason you have to wait is that the FAA imposes a minimum separation between flights, which in turn puts an upper bound on the rate at which flights can take off. Airlines ignore this and schedule large numbers of flights to depart at virtually the same time.