DQ

Dairy Queen. A chain of ice cream restaurants.

dq, DQ

DisQualif{ ication | ied | y }.

DQDB

Distributed Queue Dual Bus. Defined by IEEE 802.6.

DQE

Differential Quantum Efficiency.

DQF-COSY

Double Quantum Filtered COrrelation SpectroscopY (COSY).

DQI

Dynamic Quality Improvement. As opposed to static quality improvement, I guess, as occurs with wine.

DQW

Double Quantum Well. See CQW.

DR

Democratic Republic (of).

DR

Diffuse Reflectance.

DR

Dining Room.

Dr.

DoctoR. Any kind of doctor.

Not ``Docter.'' According to a short piece in the Fall 1992 Radical History Review entitled "Spellcheck Saves Lives!" (pp. 205-6),

One of our faithful readers recently sent us a clipping . . . . 'TEACHER SHOOTS STUDENT TO DEATH--FOR MISSPELLING A WORD!' screams the headline. According to the story, 'nerdy college professor [tautology] Jon Frankel,' an English teacher in New Zealand, 'went crazy when freshman Bill Parnell spelled "doctor" with an "e" instead of an "o" and shot the boy to death.' The professor at Auckland Business College allegedly told police that he had no remorse over the shooting, 'because spelling errors are not only inexcusable, they're a crime against language.'

The RHR columnist then goes on to fantasize about a class visit by then-US Veep J. Danforth Quayle: ``Go ahead, Danny, make my day . . .''

More on spelling at the Liouville entry.

It is said that Rep. Carl Perkins, when he was chair of the House Education Subcommittee, instructed his staff to address every country school principle as "doctor" -- saying that you never got in trouble that way.

For more on that, visit the Ph.D. entry.

dr.

DooR. Cognate with German Tur. The pronunciation difference is mainly in the initial consonant, an example of a systematic shift from (initial, asirated) /d/ to /t/ took place in High-German languages. Other examples of cognates illustrating this shift include English deer and German Tier (meaning `animal'), Eng. dead and Ger. todt (same meaning), and do, tun.

dr.

DRam.

Dra.

Doctora. Spanish, `[female] doctor.' Used as a title, just like Dr. (Doctor, `[male] doctor').

DRA

(UK) Defence Research Agency.

Dra

Draco. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

dracaena, dracena

A plant that is found in tropical regions and in some parts of the Scrabble tablelands. (That is, TWL98 and SOWPODS accept only the dracaena spelling; OSPD4 accepts both.)

DRAE

Diccionario de la Real Academia española. `The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.'

DRAFT

Dynamic Reconfigurability Assisting Fault-Tolerance. An approach to flexible multiprocessing and fault-tolerant computing. An architecture that uses a high-speed controller that provides an interface for message-passing among a large number of computing subsystems. Has been implemented using FPGA's.

DRAGON

DiRect Access to Geophysics On the Net. From the Geological Survey of Norway.

dram

An old unit of weight and liquid measure in various ``conventional'' systems, including American and British. The dram is an eighth of the corresponding ounce in fluid measure and in troy and apothecary weights, and a sixteenth of an ounce in the avoirdupois weights. [Rel. to drachma of Greece.] In Britain, the variant drachm was used principally for apothecary and troy weights, and less for avoirdupois, back when these were all in use there.

Here is a fine smudge dealer who still understands drams.

DRAM

Dynamic RAM. [Pron. ``Dee-ram.''] DRAM tends to be somewhat slower but cheaper than SRAM. In DRAM, each bit of memory is represented by charge stored or not stored on a capacitor. ``Dynamic'' in that, over time, the charge dissipates, requiring periodic cycles of reading and rewriting. (A typical refresh time is a few ms.) Original design used three transistors per bit (``3T-cell'') with separate read and write leads. Density was improved with subsequent, and now probably universal, 1T cell.

Dram Shop Act

An act, typically enacted at the state level, setting standards for servers of alcoholic drinks (private homes and pubs). Such laws establish the legal liability of the servers in civil cases brought for damages caused by drunks. In the absence of such laws, liability is usually governed by (locally relevant) precedent. These acts often contain the only statutory bounds on awards.

Just a guess.

draper

Throughout history, drapers have played a prominent role in... aww, what transparent-- I'm not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes. Not if I make it out of whole cloth, not the whole nine yards. But this much is truth, and fiction too: one of Moll Flanders's husbands was a draper. More recently, in ``Under Milk Wood,'' a ``play for voices'' that Dylan Thomas completed the month before he died in 1953, a draper upholsters the dreams of a Miss Myfanwy Price (a dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper):

      I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crépon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

(Emphasis added.) The ``change hum[med] on wires'' only in the larger shops, which had systems of boxes on wires with spring-and-pulley mechanisms to move payment and change between shop attendants and cashier (different employees differently employed). Such systems were still in use a few years after WWII. They were supplanted by pneumatic systems, and eventually by different methods of doing business. I can't imagine why you'd want to know that Miss Price's given name is stressed on the second syllable, with the first y pronounced as a shwa and the second as a short English i or German ü, but now you know anyway. (The sound of y varies by region, and Dylan Thomas didn't speak Welsh anyway, just Welsh-accented English.) The f is voiced, as you recall from the Welsh bits in the recent collating sequence entry.

DRC

Data Recognition Corporation.

DRC

Democratic Republic of the Congo. The former Belgian Congo, for many years Zaire (Zaïre in French; what is it in Flemish?), hence the country code ZR (.zr entry).

DRC

(NIDCR/CDC) Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Data Resource Center.

DRC

Design Rule Checker. Design rules are tolerances and minimum sizes for various dimensions of regions etched, implanted, diffused, oxidized, nitridized, deposited and otherwise mistreated on the semiconductor surface, as determined by mask dimensions.

DRDA

Distributed Relational Database Architecture.

DRD1, DRD2, ...

Dopamine Receptor D1, ....

DRE

Drug Recognition Expert. I take it that someone even more qualified in the field is called Dr. Dre. Once I mentioned to one of my colleagues that a stairwell in a nearby campus building smelled like hashish, and he asked me how I knew what hashish smelled like. Duh. (Actually, he was a Turkish colleague, and I answered ``I'm an American.'' The whole thing seems rather backwards now.) Well, some people never happen to gather the necessary experience. Many years ago (I wish I could find a record of it) there was a widely publicized drug bust in Georgia in which a man was arrested with a baggy containing a green herb that the arresting officer thought was marijuana. It was widely publicized because the arrested man said the herb was oregano, and even more so because the police lab confirmed that it was oregano. After the charges were dropped, the department said it would provide training so that officers would be better able to recognize marijuana. While they were at it, I hope they went out for some pizza and learned to recognize oregano.

DREAM

Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. The DREAM Act was a law proposed to regularize the status of children of undocumented immigrants in the US, resident in the US for more than five years but born elsewhere. Under terms of the bill, they would get legal status and become eligible for citizenship provided they graduate from high school, stay out of trouble with the law, and either attend college for two years or serve two years in the armed forces. The bill, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), had a bipartisan roster of 48 co-sponsors in the Senate in 2003, but stalled in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment. The bill will probably be reintroduced in 2005.

dreams

According to Delmore Schwartz, ``In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.'' Well okay, maybe so, but I'd rather not be reminded. I mean, when your dreams include sample screenshots, you're spending too much time in flatspace.

dreck

Something that's trash, but sold as something other than trash. I'm not sure if the word came from German (Dreck) or Yiddish (transliterated either drek or dreck) or both. The original Middle High German etymon of both was drec, which meant `excrement.' A common Old Germanic root yielded an Old English cognate threax, which already meant `trash' (the Modern English word it evolved into). So, as frequently happened, English expanded its word stock by adding the cognate (or cognates) of a word already present in the language. It's interesting that the semantic streams separated and then converged before the reabsorption occurred, but that's not unusual either.

I was motivated to add an entry for dreck by the heavy advertising for Oreck vacuum cleaners. They emphasize quality, and the logo has the brand name (the company owner's surname) written in block caps, making the initial letter hard to distinguish from a letter dee. I can't be the only one who thinks of these things.

DREN

Defense Research and Engineering Network.

dress

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, much-admired archbishop of Chicago, died on Nov. 14, aged 68, after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. The next week, he lay in state with his glasses on.

DRFM

Digital Radio Frequency (RF) Memory.

DRG

Diagnosis-Related Group.

Dr. Gunni

Gunnar Lárus Hjálmarsson.

DRIE

Deep Reactive Ion Etching.

drip, the

See the drip.

DRIVE

Dedicated Road Infrastructure for Vehicle safety in Europe. An EU program to alleviate road transportation problems by using information and telecommunications technology. One such is SOCRATES, another is PANDORA.

Driver

The number one wood (golf club). This term is not obsolete, like Brassie (2 wood), Spoon (3 wood), and Baffle (5 wood). The only reason I put this one in is to remind myself to say something about high-output-current buffers. Sure. There, I've done it.

driveway

Just what you were looking for: Driveways of the Rich and Famous (and in some cases Deceased). Many of the driveways are neither gated nor fenced.

Many years ago someone asked Israeli General Ariel Sharon why he didn't have a fence around his house for protection. He replied that his neighbors should be afraid of him, not the other way around.

DRL

Daytime Running Lights. Automobile lights that go on whenever the car is running. Required on new cars in Canada (since 1989) and Sweden. Allowed on cars in the US.

Dr. Laura

Doctor Laura Schlessinger. Likes to refer to herself as ``my kids' mom.'' This raises the question: who else's mom could she be? The answer is many unhappy children's, because Dr. Laura is an acid-tongued malpractitioner, a dispenser of common nonsense popular with those lucky enough not to need competent emotional counseling. She is even more popular with those who have a morbid need to be abused. Seeking an unsympathetic ear, they will keep her call-in lines busy for as long as it takes them to wise up and get real help.

She got her doctorate in physiology, although after that she got a certificate in marriage and family therapy.

She is a one-woman business, but like Ayn Rand, she has a besotted following (random example).

DRM

Development Rate Monitor. For time-critical reaction like photoresist development.

DRM

Digital (intellectual property) Rights Management.

DRM

DOD Reference Model.

DRN

De Rerum Natura. Latin, `On the Nature of Things,' a work by Lucretius.

DRO

Destructive Read-Out. A mode of old-style magnetic core memory read-out. NDRO is Nondestructive read-out. Playing a modern LP on a Victrola with one of those monster steel needles would probably also qualify as DRO.

DRO

Dielectric Resonator Oscillator.

droit du seigneur

French, `right of the [feudal] lord' to sexual relations with a bride of a vassal on her first night of marriage. A myth whose history is traced by Alain Boureau in his The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage (Chicago and London: Un. Chicago Pr., 1998) pp. x, 300. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-226-06742-4; $19 (pb) ISBN 0-226-67432-4. (Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Original published as Le droit de cuissage: La fabrication d'un mythe (XIIIe-XXe siècle). Series: L'Evolution de l'humanité (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). ISBN 2-226-07634-4. It's reviewed by Adam Kosto of Columbia University in TMR 99.05.14.

drop kick

In a drop kick, a person releases a ball and brings his foot forward timed to kick it. You see a lot of drop kicks in Australian football, which has approximately continuous action resembling soccer, and anyone can score with a kick between uprights of the opposing side.

In North American football, traditionally (and technically still, I think) you can always make forward progress by kicking the ball, but the way the game has evolved, one doesn't see very much of that. Nonstandard stuff you do see includes forward passes by half-backs and (in high school, mostly) multiple short passes back to fellow team members running forward (flea-flicker play). On November 20, 1982, Cal beat Stanford on the final play of the game with a touch-down-scoring flea-flicker. If you weren't rooting for Stanford, it was a grand, giddy, hilarious bit of sand-lot. For a long time afterwards, it was known simply as ``the play.''

You probably came to this entry wondering where you could find the lyrics to the song ``Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.'' Here are a few places: (1) (2) (3)

I've got the will, Lord, if You got the toe.

Words and music by Paul Craft; was recorded by Bobby Bare. Cf. Motorist entry.

Dropsy

A Norwegian brand of fruit-flavored candy probably manufactured by Bergene. Name derived from Eng. drop. Cf. Mental.

The English word dropsy evolved from an earlier form hydropsy.

DRP

Distribution Requirements Planning.

DRPA

Delaware River Port Authority of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They're not concerned with all of the ports on the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They don't worry about the Delaware Water Gap or the bridges near Allentown and Easton. So why should I care about them? They've built four bridges since 1919, three of them into Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania side, and one crossing to Chester, PA. Through its ``subsidiary, the Port Authority Transit Corp., DRPA runs PATCO,'' q.v.

DRSCMOS

Dual-Rail Static CMOS. Visit a report comparing this with other gate-based design styles for CMOS WTGL. ``Rail'' here refers to a constant-voltage or to the array of conducting lines that supplies the voltage.

DRTV

Direct Response TeleVision. The triple plague: infomercials, television shopping and ``short-form direct response'' (this CD not available in stores). All represented, and even recognized with awards, by NIMA International. As if ordinary ads weren't bad enough. Hey? What am I complaining about? I wouldn't watch even if they removed the ads.

drug names

T.S. Eliot's famous ``The Naming of Cats'' begins

The naming of cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter
When I tell you a cat must have three different names.

All newly marketed pharmaceutical chemicals have at least three names: a brand name, a generic name, and a chemical name, and coming up with them is a difficult matter as well, though the difficulties are different in the three cases. Before getting into these (in reverse order), I should say something about stereoisometry. NOTE: this entry is still incomplete, but we have a bit of material on generic and chemical names.

Originally, pharmaceutical names tended not to distinguish between stereoisomers, and drug names usually distinguished only between different structures. In principle, this wasn't a big problem: drugs were manufactured, tested, and marketed in a single form -- either a racemic mix of enantiomers (synthesized starting from a racemic mix or optically inactive chemical) or else always the same optically active mix (synthesized or just separated from the same biological source). It was always the same mix or nonmix. It's been possible to measure the difference between isomers since the 19th century, but until recently it wasn't possible, or industrially feasible, or attractive, to synthesize a preferred nonracemic mix. So nowadays drug names are increasingly assigned to particular stereoisomers, and not just to the general structures.

Government agencies and the medical community pay little heed to ``the chemical name,'' except to denounce ``its'' use. What they mean by ``chemical name'' is what most chemists call a ``systematic name.'' Systematic names today are names constructed by following a set of rules defined by IUPAC. In principle, these rules lead from the known structure of a compound to a unique name. However, the rules are constantly changing in small ways. (There are good reasons for this, but also some bad consequences.) The sordid details will have to wait for the creation of a ``systematic''-chemical-nomenclature entry. The upshot is that each compound may have multiple systematic names and accumulate more over time. On the bright side, all or almost all systematic names refer unambiguously to individual compounds. (There may be some exceptions with modern systematic names that coincide with old names that are considered obsolete.) A working chemist who is serious about tracking down previous research on a chemical should determine the CAS registry number and perform literature searches using that.

Another kind of name used by chemists is a trivial name. Trivial names are arbitrary in principle, but are intended to be somehow useful (informative or convenient) in practice. There is no official agency that must approve trivial names, and researchers constantly invent trivial names for their own convenience. On the other hand, journal editors sometimes object to particular trivial names and refuse to publish them.

Trivial names are not a recognized category of pharmaceutical name, but generic names are, and generic names are a subset of trivial names. Specifically, the generic name of a drug is a trivial name approved by a governmental or governmentally sanctioned entity. Since there are multiple such entities, there may be multiple generic names, such as the US Adopted Name (USAN), British Approved Name (BAN), (JAN), International Nonproprietary Name (iNN or INN), etc. The generic names approved by different authorities tend to be similar. For example, a anti-herpes virus drug marketed as Valtrex and Zelitrex (brand names) has the generic names Valaciclovir (Rec INN and BAN) and Valacyclovir (USAN). The drug marketed as Lasix has generic names frusemide (BAN) and furosemide (INN and USAN). Official national pharmacopaeia tend to be organized by generic name. In the US, USAN's are not allowed to be trademarked. I imagine there are similar arrangements elsewhere and possibly some international agreements. [But I suspect that trademark law is harder to coordinate between different countries than copyright or patent law. In Argentina, for example, trademarks are categorized by product type, and must be separately registered. I also wonder if, for example, a company may register a trademark with the US PTO a name that is the BAN of a drug if it is not also the INN or USAN.]

drum major

A male majorette, as the inflection indicates.

drum majorette

A girl or woman who leads, or at least marches before the first rank of, a marching band. She doesn't have a drum, but she does have a baton which could serve for a drumstick. The head term is more intuitive when the marching band is called a drum corps. For links to various baton-twirling organizations, see the majorette entry.

drunk

The drink and the drinker may both be drunk. Amazing!

Gee, it seems I wasn't the first fellow to think this up. In HHGTTG, there's an exchange that runs approximately

``It's unpleasantly like being drunk.'' ``What's so unpleasant about being drunk?'' ``You ask a glass of water.''

Here's a gnomic and symmetric old saw that's translated from a Japanese ballad:

First the man takes a drink,
then the drink takes a drink,
then the drink takes the man.

Under the looser definitions at least, this counts as chiastic.

drunk food

I asked the English-speaker at Boracho Burrito why it was that of all the fast-food places, the ones that stay open latest are the ones that sell Mexican food. He suggested that it's because Mexican food is considered good drunk food. He did concede that in Chicago, pancakes are considered the drunk food, but that with the exception of the McDonalds-owned chain, the Mexican places there stay open late too.

Burrito borracho means `drunk little mule' in Spanish, or `drunk burrito.' Given that the adjective is not only misplaced but misspelled, I always figured that the restaurant name Boracho Burrito represented gringo ignorance, but quizá something more subtle is going on.

dry closing

A real-estate closing at which the seller does not turn the keys over to the buyer, because the buyer hasn't produced the funds. A closing without closure, you might say. I don't know much about it, and I don't want to.

Incidentally, if you're like most people, this is approximately the umpteenth time you're reading this glossary (because it's addictive, because you thirst for knowledge but forget things, etc.). (Unless you only just learned of this famous resource.) And right about now you're probably thinking, ``I don't remember reading this entry before.'' [For a similar experience, try the Aden entry.] It's not your memory playing tricks; this really is a new entry. I had put off adding it because I'm superstitious. ``Superstitious'' means ``well-informed about luck and how to control it.'' I had to delay until after my own closing (which was satisfactorily moist, thank you) or -- as we luck experts realize -- bad things might have happened. (And they didn't. How much more corroboration do you need?) Of course, one mustn't gloat.

dry ice

Solid carbon dioxide (CO₂). It was first obtained by M. Thilorier in 1834 [Ann. Phys., 60, p. 432 (1835)].

dry water

A hydraulic theorist's construct: a perfectly nonviscous fluid. We also have other water entries.

DS

Dampfschiff. German, `steamship, steam boat.' It's not a cruising sweat farm, you understand. ``Steam'' refers to the power source (external combustion engine with steam working fluid).

Ds

Darmstadtium. Atomic number 110. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

DS

Dallas Semiconductor Corporation. Prefix on device names.

DS

Data Structure.

DS

Data System.

DS

Deep Structure. Now more popularly (or reconditely) D-structure. Think Chomsky, not Derrida.

DS

DHEAS.

DS-

Digital Signal. DS-0, DS-1, etc. are supposed to refer to the physical interface for transmission at particular rates, rather than to a particular protocol, or to the rate itself. Most users and network engineers are more interested in data rates and protocols than in the ``physical interface'' as such. Moreover, in many cases there is a dominant protocol, so referring to T-1 as DS-1 (in North America), say, is normally unambiguous. Conversely, stating the signal level is a fairly ambiguous way of specifying the physical medium. The misuse of ``DS-'' terminology is therefore not just not a problem, it is a positive instance of language usage adapting a poorly conceived term to a sensible and appropriate use. Metonymy works.

DS

Direct Sequence. As in DS/CDMA, spread-spectrum (SS) communication utilizing a quasirandom direct sequence (as opposed, say, to frequency hopping).

DS^-

(If deuterated bisulfide or thiohydroxyl does not seem a reasonable interpretation, it might be) Dodecyl Sulphate ion.

DS

Doppler Shift. Difference between frequency at its source and at a detector due to relative motion of source and detector.

DS

Down Syndrome. It used to be called Mongoloidism, mostly because non-Asian children with the syndrome had faces that looked vaguely Asian. And it used to be children only, because most with Down syndrome did not survive past their teen years. There's been a lot of progress over the past couple of decades, and both survival and coping ability have been improved.

The new name has nothing to do with fine, soft fluffy feathers. This fact was more obvious when it was called Down's Syndrome. It's named after a physician (John L. H. Down).

Another name for it is Trisomy 21, because we now understand that the syndrome arises when a fertilized egg accidentally contains an extra copy of chromosome 21. This is likelier to happen as the mother gets older. It also is somewhat likelier to happen with older fathers than with younger ones, independently of the mother's age.

DSA

Democratic Socialists of America. They have an amusing graphic that illustrates the feckless sectarianism of formal US socialism.

Hmm. Evidence at the YAF entry suggests a similar phenomenon on the right. I guess if you won't compromise your principles for a chance at power, splitting with a major political grouping is just the beginning of the story.

DSA

Diffusion Self-Aligned. Normally when you say ``self-aligned,'' people assume doping by implantation rather than diffusion. Diffusion is a fuzzy process, so with DSA gates you lose some of the advantage of self-alignment. Cf. SAG.

DSA

Directory System Agent. Software that accesses X.500 directory service.

DSA

Driving Standards Agency.

DSB

Danske StatsBaner. `Danish National Railways.'

DSB

Defense Science Board.

DSB

Deutscher Sportbund `German Sports Association.'

DSB-SC

Double Sideband Suppressed Carrier.

DSC

Differential Scanning Calorimetry.

DSC

Dynamic Stability Control. One synonym of electronic stability control. For other synonyms, see the ESC entry.

DSCC

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Cf. DCCC. The DSCC lines up against the NRSC. Who wins is hard to know in advance. Who loses? Well, they say in war, truth is the first casualty.

DS/CDMA, DS-CDMA

Direct Sequence - Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). ``Direct Sequence'' means that the code is embedded in the time domain, as opposed to FH/CDMA (q.v.; ``Frequency Hopping'') which uses a code embedded in the frequency domain. See also MC/CDMA.

DSSS is a synonym.

DSCOVR

Deep Space Climate ObserVatoRy. A NASA satellite to be placed at the L1 Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth along a line to the Sun, continually monitoring the sunlit hemisphere of the planet. The general idea was suggested by then-Vice President Albert Gore in 1998, and NASA took up the idea and designed a tool that would measure the light radiation emitted or reflected from the Earth. DSCOVR was originally scheduled to fly aboard the space shuttle Columbia (which disintegrated during re-entry on February 1, 2003, and was therefore no longer available to take DSCOVR up). The $100 million satellite was never launched. In January 2006, the project was quitely cancelled by NASA, which cited ``conflicting priorities.'' NASA has since refused separate offers from France and Ukraine to lift the satellite at no charge. So far as I know, NASA has not gone so far as to actually discard the observatory or sell it for scrap.

The mission was originally called Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout who first sighted the New World from Columbus's ship.

DSCS

Defense Satellite Communications System.

DSD

Direct Store Delivery. Relevant: DEX/UCS.

DSD

Driver's Safety Device. British rail term. A dead man's handle for the train driver. Cf. DVD.

DSD

A German waste disposal and recycling system operated by Duales System Deutschland, GmbH. `Dual System Germany.' Since 1991, recyclable packaging material is labelled with a green point (Grüner Punkt), a symbol licensed by DSD, GmbH. There is no charge to the end user for the collection of materials marked with a green point the unrecovered costs of the program are collected through the licensing fee.

Austria has a similar system run by ARA.

The material should be deposited in the gelbe Tonne oder gelber Sack -- `yellow trash can or yellow bag.' Such a colorful system; this I can understand.

And brown bin (braune Tonne) gets the nonrecyclable stuff.

Okay.

And the green bin gets the paper.

Uhh?

DSDD

Double-Sided Double Density. Designation for 5¼'' floppy diskettes. (All 3½'' diskettes are double-sided.)

dsDNA

Double-Stranded DNA. (All 3½'' diskettes are double-sided.)

DSDT

Differentiated System Description Table. An ACPI system description table.

DSE

Directionally Solidified Eutectic. How does one come to study these? That is, why not study noneutectic directionally solidified materials? Because the standard way to congeal materials rapidly is splat cooling, which only works if there is a single temperature at which the whole mix will melt, and so only works on a eutectic mix. Slower cooling typically takes so long that the directional nature of the cooling is not evident in the structure.

DSEA

Delaware State Education Association. One of the state affiliates of the NEA.

DSF

Delivery Sequence File.

DSG

Democratic Study Group. An informal group of US legislators created in 1961, working within the Democratic caucus to move the party to the left. It seems to have succeeded.

Regardless the precise degree of credit or blame that the DSG deserves for the political movement, it began with good timing. John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, and in his inaugural address he said: ``Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans....'' That was also the year that Rep. Sam Rayburn (D-Tx) died.

Rayburn had been the House Democratic leader from 1940 until his death. (Minority leader in the 80th and 83rd Congresses -- 1947-49 and 1953-55 -- and Speaker when Democrats controlled the House.) During that time he had marginalized the Democratic caucus as an institution, preferring to make deals behind the scenes. Rayburn's approach was motivated by the divergence within the party, between conservative southern Democrats and liberal-to-moderate Democrats from the rest of the country. Eventually, conservative white Democrats overcame their aversion to the GOP, just as thirty years earlier blacks had overcome their allegiance to the GOP. (Both of these alignments dated back to the Civil War, of course.) Everyone understood in the 1960's that it was the civil rights struggle that was turning the South Republican. But southern Democrats had been more conservative than the rest of the party across a broad range of issues. Thus, the departure of southern Democrats contributed to a rationalization of the major parties. With or without the DSG, the Democratic party was bound to move left simply by the shedding of more conservative members. Conversely, the Republican party became a less hospitable place for those who had constituted its left wing.

Cf. DSG on National Security.

DSG

Deutscher Schlafwagen- und Speisewagen-Gesellschaft. `German Sleeping- and Dining-car Association.'

DSG on National Security

``The Democratic Study Group on National Security was created at the beginning of 107th Congress by Representatives Steve Israel (D-NY), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and David Scott (D-GA). Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger addressed the inaugural meeting of the DSG on National Security on May 22, 2003.'' (Berger did something else related to national security in 2003. On at least two occasions that he has publicly admitted to, he secretly removed documents from the National Archives, destroying some and keeping others, apparently to conceal lapses in his or the Clinton administration's counter-terrorism activity. The charges first came to light in July 2004. On April 1, 2005, as part of a plea bargain, Berger pled guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor charge related to the removal and destruction. I checked the DSG page that day, and Berger's name had not been removed from it.)

The stated purpose of the DSG is ``to explore new technologies and principles leading to a smarter national security capability against changing threats.'' Obviously, you couldn't hold congressional hearings on this kind of thing -- the Republicans would be opposed. The DSG ``holds regular meetings for the Democratic Caucus, bringing in speakers ...'' including former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Cf. DSG.

DSI

Defense Simulation Internet.

DSI

Digital Speech Interpolation.

DSID

Destination Signaling IDentifier.

DSK

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Really, it's the typing that's simplified, or made easier. The keyboard layout is different and more efficient, but it's not simpler than QWERTY, q.v. Vide etiam this page for some of the standard history.

August Dvorak, who conceived and developed this keyboard scheme, called it the American Simplified Keyboard. It's never been any more than a minority taste.

DSKY

DiSplay KeyBoard. Computer console on Apollo spacecraft.

DSL

Data SubLanguage.

DSL

Digital Subscriber Line. High bandwidth and always on like T1, installation and monthly costs more like ISDN. Too many ``standards.'' xDSL.com offers analysis.

DSLAM

Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer. It's not just a matter of having the line installed. you have to rent one of these puppies. See DSL.

DSM

Dedicated Server Module.

Sounds like a worker ant.

DSM

Deep SubMicron (design).

DSM

Demand-Side Management. In the utilities industry, DSM programs are attempts to reduce energy consumption by means of pricing structure and other incentives.

DSM

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (of Mental Disorders). Published by APPI. The editions of DSM, with years of appearance (-R for revised editions, -TR stands for ``text revision''):

DSM

1952 (lists 60 distinct psychiatric illnesses)

DSM-II

1968 (lists 145)

DSM-II-R

1974

DSM-III

1977

DSM-III-R

1987

DSM-IV

1994 (lists 410)

DSM-IV-TR

2000

Preserve your sanity. It might come in handy one day.

The DSM provides a coding scheme for disorders that has long been accepted in the US and which provides a precise-seeming basis for choice of therapy and billing. The ICD offered what I think was originally a distinct coding scheme. The ICD is a book about the same size as the DSM, but the ICD covers all areas of medicine and the DSM covers only mental health care. You're probably figuring that the DSM just slices and dices the categories into an astronomically large number of highly specific (as well as a generous number of explicitly and precisely general) disorders. That'd be my guess too, and there's a little of that, but that's not the main story. The DSM is rather discursive, with flowcharts and menus of criteria for particular diagnoses, thoughtful essays on various classes of disorder, keys to differential diagnoses, etc. The DSM has been using the ICD codes since at least 1987, and they're listed in an appendix. Disorders distinguished by the DSM and not by the ICD simply have the same code.

DSM

Digital Signal Microprocessor.

DSM

Digital Storage Medi{ um | a }.

DSM

Distinguished Service Medal.

DSM

Driver Standards Manager. British railroad term.

DSMC

Direct Simulation Monte Carlo. Method developed in the 1960's by Graham A. Bird, particularly for rarefied gas dynamics simulations (RGD).

DSM-CC

Digital Storage Media - Command and Control.

DSM-III

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 3rd edn. Published by the American Psychiatric Association. This is the one that became famous for finally removing homosexuality from among the disorders. The current edition, DSM-IV, came out in 1994.

DSNA

Dictionary Society of North America. ``[F]ormed in 1975 to bring together people interested in dictionary making, study, collection, and use. Our 500+ members who live in 42 countries around the world ....'' [Another meaning of ``North America''?] ``The only requirement for membership is an expression of interest in language, in words, dictionaries and lexicography, or any combination of these.''

Became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1994. ACLS has an overview.

DSO

Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

DSO

Digital Storage Oscilloscope.

DSO

Distinguished Service Order.

During WWI, the poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) served with distinction as a British officer, but when he became convinced of the futility of the war, he took a painful moral stand. He threw away his DSO medal and set out wilfully to defy the military authorities -- risking personal ruin at the least, and possible imprisonment and execution. He describes this in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Of course, it all turned out all right in the end, after all, didn't it?

Winston Churchill later said to Siegfried Sassoon

War is the normal occupation of man -- war, and gardening.

The poet Robert Graves appeared in Memoirs, thinly disguised as ``David Cromlech.'' In the trenches Cromlech was spouted new-age paganism avant la lettre, and Graves later published it in a pastiche of cribbed and invented myth (mythical myth, so to speak) called The Greek Myths (despised by scholars, needless to say, widely though not universally).

My grandfather was a Siegfried also, but he officered on the other side and got an Iron Cross, first class. He also got an Iron Cross, second class. Then just before WWII, he got a big double cross. In Chaplin's 1940 sadly innocent satire The Great Dictator, Adolph Hitler is Adenoid Hynkel and the Nazi swastika is a double cross.

DSOTM

``Dark Side Of The Moon.'' A Pink Floyd album.

DSP

Delta Sigma Phi. First founded in New York. In early years it had difficulty recruiting members outside of NYC because it did not discriminate on the basis of religion.

DSP

Digital Signal Processing (or occasionally) Processor. (ADSP is Analog DSP; i.e. digital processing of analog signals, by means of A-to-D conversion.)

There is FAQ documentation associated with the usenet newsgroup <com.dsp>.

DSP

Divestiture Sequence Plan.

DSR

Data Service Request.

DSR

Data Set Ready.

DSR

Device Status Report.

DSR

Digital Standard Runoff.

DSR

Dynamic Service Register.

I'd be happy to tell you more, but the guy two workstations away from me is talking to himself with increasing conviction.

DSRI

Digital Standard Relational Interface.

DSRS

Data Signaling Rate Selector.

DSS

Dead Sea Scrolls. The ones found in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea, stored by a group we call the Essenes. For information and links to on-line resources on major DSS see Mahlon H. Smith's DSS page.

DSS

Decision Support System. (Generic term, as well as the name of an old Unidata RDBMS.)

DSS

(Australian government's) Department of Social Security.

DSS

Department of Social Services.

DSS

Digital Satellite System. Satellite TV receive station.

DSS

Dioctyl Sodium SulfoSuccinate. Used to fix fumaric acid in foods. Fumaric acid is a convenient, cheap `tartness agent' but dissolves in cold water without DSS.

DSS

Domain SAP Service.

DSSS, DS/SS

Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum (SS). Has the same meaning as DS/CDMA, although in principle the term might refer to SS applied to a single signal.

DST

Daylight Saving Time. So called because it saves some daylight from the early morning when you're presumably still in bed, and spends it in the evening when you presumably want it. Not ``Daylight Savings Time,'' as some people call it, which would presumably be the daylight portion of the bankers' hours.

Www.timeanddate.com serves a page announcing when the next gear-stripping change is scheduled to occur. An interesting book about DST is David Prerau's Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005).

The obvious utility of DST is that it accomplishes a coordinated shift of real business and school hours without requiring an explicit change in nominal hours of operation. The obvious problem with it is that some businesses and especially schools may not want to shift those hours.

When the US adopted a national DST law in the mid-sixties, states had the right to opt out. (From the mere text of the US Constitution, it's not clear that the federal government even had a right to legislate this. On the other hand, the Commerce Clause has been interpreted so elastically that on rare recent occasions when the US Supreme Court ruled that there was a power it did not give to the federal government, everyone was shocked.) Arizona keeps MST year-round, except for the big Navajo reservation (which spills over into New Mexico and Utah, just brushing Four Corners). [Here and here are two conflicting maps.]

Hawaii is the southernmost state, by a bit, meaning that the difference in day length between summer and winter is smallest. They keep standard time year-round.

Until 2006, there was one other state -- Indiana -- where standard time was kept year-round. (Most of the state's 87 counties kept EST. There were some counties that used DST with Central Time, consistently with nearby states -- some near Chicago in the northwest and some around Evansville, Indiana, near western Kentucky, five counties all told. Another five counties near Louisville, KY, and Cincinnati, OH, used DST with Eastern time.) Indiana's unusual situation probably arose because DST was an additional complication exacerbating an already confused one. When the original time zones were established in 1918, Indiana was mostly in the Central time zone. By April 1969, a sequence of shifts had gradually put most of Indiana in the Eastern zone.

On April 28, 2005, the Indiana legislature passed a measure that put all of Indiana on DST, and that petitioned the US Department of Transportation to hold hearings to consider possible changes in the location of the dividing line between the Eastern and Central time zones. Saint Joseph County, where I reside, was moved (back, after many decades) into the Central Time Zone by a USDoT ruling of October 25, 2005, and then forward again into the Eastern Time Zone by a ruling of January 18, 2006. At 2:00 am on the first Sunday of April 2006 (two hours after April Fool's Day officially ended), clocks across Indiana officially sprang forward. There's a detailed explanation here, last updated at least as recently as January 18, 2006.

Saskatchewan keeps time about as Indiana did: most of the province keeps CST year-round; some small bits along the Alberta border use MST and do switch to MDT.

The mnemonic to remember which part of the year uses Daylight Saving Time and which Standard Time is that you save when you have a surplus, so you use DST in the summer when you have daylight to spare. In many countries (e.g., Europe generally) there is no need for this mnemonic because DST is called Summer Time (or the translated equivalent) instead. In New Zealand they use ``DST''; in Australia both terms are known. In the US during WWII, DST was unofficially called ``War Time.'' In Quebec French, it's called ``heure avancée'' -- `Advanced Time.'

About half the people in the world don't need a mnemonic or a name (if they don't call long distance) because they keep standard time all year. Here's a world map showing which places keep DST and which don't. There are some southern states of Brazil that practically graze the equator but use DST. Like, what's the point? The variation in day length increases with latitude. In fact, Benjamin Franklin's earliest recorded speculations regarding the waste of early-morning sunlight date from his residence in London in 1757. He first published his idea for DST in 1784, when he was residing in Paris. What he proposed at the time was not a clock-time shift, but simply that people get up earlier in the morning. The essay in which he proposed this was light-hearted and not to be taken entirely seriously. (For example, he implied that readers would be skeptical of the claim that the sun shines as soon as it rises, and he exaggerated the savings of unneeded candles by assuming that people generally did not rise until after noon.) On the other hand, it seems reasonably clear that he was serious in advocating the general idea of making greater use of available daylight. In 1907, William Willett published a pamphlet, ``The Waste of Daylight.'' That was apparently the first proposal for DST.

The mnemonic for adjusting your clock is ``Spring forward, fall back.'' Since the seasons are shifted by half a year between northern and southern hemispheres, the time zone difference can vary by as much as two hours between two countries in opposite hemispheres that both use DST.

In fact, although DST normally advances clocks by one hour, other shift amounts have been tried. During 1927, only standard time was legal in Connecticut, but many town-dwellers illicitly used ordinary DST (you wonder they didn't simply change their hours of operation). The mills in Connecticut's aptly-named town of Hazardville used what was called half-time (clocks advanced by a half hour during the DST effective period), a compromise motivated by the need to deal with both farmers (on standard time) and town customers (on DST). DST clock advances as short as 20 and 15 minutes have been used. Rarely.

Double daylight saving time was used in the UK during WWII: a further one-hour advance over the wartime DST used for the rest of the year. More about this and other two-hour shifts at the DDST entry.

In October 1998, Dave Barry published a column of twenty-five lessons he had learned in his fifty years. Number two was

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.

When a westbound train has stops near each other on opposite sides of a time-zone boundary, the train schedule can show a local arrival time that precedes the earlier departure time. Niles, in southwestern Michigan, used to have an unusual share of such local-time anomalies. Michigan keeps Eastern time, and eastbound trains arrive from Chicago and Gary, which keep Central time. Moreover, westbound trains come in from nearby South Bend, Indiana, which keeps Eastern time but didn't use DST until 2006.

DST

Dexamethasone Suppression Test.

DST

Dynamic (Fuel Emissions) Status Test.

DSTC

Dynamic Stability and Traction Control. One synonym of electronic stability control. For other synonyms, see the ESC entry.

DSTO

Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

D-structure

Deep structure. Conjectured innate metagrammar. Hip name adopted when so many people had heard about ``deep structure'' that it just wasn't clubby any more. Apparent similarity of its pronunciation to that of destruction is not merely a happy coincidence; it is an indication of an underlying structure in the language. Hmmm.

DSTU

Draft Standards for Trial Use.

DSU

Dakota State University. In Madison, South Dakota. There's a long-term smouldering sort of movement in North Dakota to change the state's name. It's a bit bewildering to people from out of state, but a lot of North Dakotans feel that sharing a name with their southern neighbor, they've gotten the short end of the stick or whatever. One of the complaints that I never understood was that when people hear ``Dakota'' they think of South Dakota. (Speaking only for myself, I think, ``wait, aren't supposed to say `Lakota' now?'') Anyway, I guess DSU must be the sort of thing they have in mind.

DSU

Data Service Unit. A kind of DCE. In particular, one that interfaces between low-rate services (56 kbps) and higher-rate circuits.

DSU

Delaware State University. In Dover.

DSU

Digital Service Unit. A kind of DCE. Probably just a less-standard expansion of DSU (Data Service Unit).

DSU/CSU

Data Service Unit/Channel Service Unit. One unit combining DSU and CSU functions.

DSV

Diving Support Vessel[s].

DSW

Direct Step-on-Wafer. Step-and-repeat photo-exposure of a wafer, to define a repeated pattern in photolithography.

DSWA

Defense Special Weapons Agency. Shiny new name for the old Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA). You have to admit, the old name didn't make a lot of sense: a ``nuclear agency''? Of the defense type? I mean: a noun functioning as an adjective (attributive noun) followed by an adjective indicating an elided noun (nuclear weapon) functioning as an adjective anyway but for the noun agency? Gimme a break. They used the opportunity of a prized acronym make-over wisely: a ``weapons agency'' makes sense, doesn't torture syntax and it's an honest step away from bureaucratic euphemism.

Oh, yeah, they have a homepage, which prominently warns that your visit is being monitored, but they don't even display a counter.

DSX

Digital Signal Cross-connect (system). Also DCC, DCS, and DXC, where it's explained.

DS-0, DS0

Digital Signal, Level 0. A transmission rate of 64 kbps. Strictly speaking, DS-0 is supposed to refer to the physical interface, rather than the transmission rate or a particular protocol.

DS-1, DS1

Digital Signal, Level 1. A physical interface (um, that'd be connection, to you and me) capable of carrying 1.544 Mbps digital transmission. Also called T-1 standard, because DS-1 can carry a twenty-four-fold (24X) multiplex of DS-0 (24 × 64 kbps = 1536 kbps = 1.5 Mbps).

DS-2, DS2

Digital Signal, Level 2. Physical interface for digital transmission rate of 6.312 Mbps. Supports a four-fold (4X) multiplex of DS-1 (i.e., 96 × DS-0).

DS-3, DS3

Digital Signal, Level 3. Physical interface for digital transmission rate of 44.736 Mbps. Supports a seven-fold (7X) multiplex of DS-2 (i.e., 672 × DS-0).

DS9

Deep Space Nine. Third Star Trek television series. More at the alternate abbreviation ST:DS9.

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