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Supposedly, heu is an equivalent interjection, but all the classicists I know seem to write only ``eheu.''
d² m -- r = - gradV(r) . dt²
If we can ignore spin, the corresponding quantum mechanical motion is described by Schrödinger's equation. For this quantum mechanical motion, a consequence that can be derived from the Schrödinger equation is Ehrenfest's theorem, which states that
d² m -- <r> = - < gradV > . dt²
This does not mean that the average position obeys Newton's law, despite the resemblance. The reason is contained in a definition:
A statistician is a person who, standing with his feet in ice water and her hair on fire [hey, (s)he's just an average person], will declare:
``On average, I feel fine.''
In order for the average position <r(t)> to obey Newton's law precisely, it would be necessary for the right-hand side (r.h.s.) of the last equation (i.e., in Ehrenfest's theorem) to read -gradV(<r>) . Note carefully the ordering of operations: in Ehrenfest's theorem, gradV is evaluated first, then an average is computed; in the alternative version, the average of r would be computed first, then the potential would be evaluated at that averaged position. The computation of an average implies, speaking, the repeated evaluation of the quantity to be averaged.
Temperature ----------- Feeling
^
|
hot Head not fine at all
|
v
-----------
^
|
|
|
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ok Body fine
|
|
|
|
v
-----------
^
|
cold Feet not fine at all
|
v
-----------
<Temperature> = ok <Feeling> = not fine
The reflection barriers, combined with the increased probability of adatom binding at the inside (lower) edge of a crystal step between edges, lead to a growth instability: low-temperature growth is unstable against the formation of mounds, and becomes amorphous for sufficiently thick growth layers. Similarly, sputter etching can be unstable against the formation of deep pits.
``The Society also acts as a pressure group working to influence government policy in the interests of history, alongside other societies, such as the Social History Society, the Agricultural History Society, the Urban History Group and the Association of Business Historians, and in concert with professional bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the History in Universities Defence Group and the Academy of Learned Societies in Social Science. In addition, the Society regularly liases with funding bodies such as HEFCE, SHEFCE, the AHRB and the ESRC.
The EHS was founded in 1926, a good time to study a bad spot of economic history as it was happening. It's based in the UK and holds its meetings there, but ``is very keen to attract new overseas members as well as those from Britain.'' A subscription to EHS is included in the price of membership (GBP 21, as of 2004).
Occasionally, as in CEG's homepage, the first word in the name is written ``Electronic.'' Perhaps this reflects the aversion of North American Anglophones for plural attributive nouns, and a misconstrual of ``Electronics'' as a plural. More likely, perhaps, is an unconsidered reflex that two plurals never follow each other. The problem is that ``Electronic Industries'' can include radio broadcasters and accounting firms, in which electronic equipment is a tool but not a product or the reason for creating the product. Any radio program is an electronic transmission. A radio program about VLSI is an electronics transmission. Everyone knows this, so why am I belaboring the obvious? If everyone knows it, then why doesn't everyone, to say nothing of the EIA/CEG, get it right?
EIDE hard disks have > 528MB.
(Einstein didn't say ... .)
Although Irish Gaelic is the first official language of the country, most people now speak English. Gaelic is spoken mostly in rural areas, mostly along the west coast.
Here's an official copy of the Irish constitution.
Cf. Eis.
More on the interstate system at I-.
The awkward comprehensiveness of the longer name reminds me of Gulliver's report from the Academy of Lagado's School of Languages.
The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.
Stop me if I've told you this one before...
In Tokyo once, I looked on at the chance sidewalk encounter of two acquaintances. The men both bowed, then one bowed a tick lower, then the other insisted, rapidly bowing another tick lower. But no... This onedownsmanship went through a few iterations before they finally bowed their good-byes and moved on. Walking away, each man rubbed the small of his back.
In 2003, total health spending in Japan was only 7.6% of GDP, as against an OECD average of 8.1%. Also, despite a steady decline (from 76% in 1975 to 54% in 2000), the rate of smoking among Japanese men remains very high (second in the OECD only to Korean men). Yet in 2003, Japan also had the highest life expectancy among OECD countries. I can explain this paradox: it's the exercise.
I need a bobbing-toy entry.
Whether and how reliably that missing consonant might have been inserted is a somewhat ticklish question because it may already be in there. The dental alveolar plosives of Japanese are affricates to a greater or lesser degree when they precede i or u. Thus, the t series of sounds (in the ``fifty-sound table'' of Japanese) is {ta, chi, tsu, te, to}. The voiced version of this, the d series, is represented {da, ji, zu, de, do}. The zu syllable is really a voiced version of tsu, and really does sound like dzu... to a degree. I just spoke with a Japanese friend of mine, and to my ear she does clearly pronounce a dz cluster for this syllable, but the d is very slight. On the other hand, she grew up in Hiroshima, and I have read of the dz pronunciation of z as a specific feature of the Tôkyô dialect. (Granted that the dialect of Tôkyô has increasingly been the dominant or standard one since the advent of television, it has not extinguished the use of local vocabulary and pronunciation -- the pitch accent in particular has resisted standardization.) From what I can recollect of other Japanese I have known, I do think a stronger d sound in ``zu'' is probably more common in people from Tôkyô. Until I've asked some other Japanese friends, I'll stick with that.
It does happen that the s series of syllables, when voiced (i.e., when marked with the relevant diacritic), yields a z series {za, ji, zu, ze, zo} with a ji and zu graphically distinct from those in the d series. The ``zu'' in eizu is in fact written (in katakana) as a voiced su. That would appear to make much of the previous paragraph irrelevant, which is why I waited until this paragraph to mention it. But please read on.
As a practical matter, Japanese make no distinction in pronunciation between the zu sounds of voiced tsu and voiced su (as likewise between the ji sounds of voiced shi [of the s series] and voiced chi). That's why their Hepburn Romanizations are identical. Indeed, it's a source of inconsistent kana spellings. Anyway, I specifically asked to hear eizu pronounced. More theoretically, it appears that Ancient Japanese did not have a consonant s, but only ts. Hence, the Japanese zu sound ultimately developed as much from tsu as from su. (This absence of an independent /s/ in Japanese is somewhat paralleled by the absence of /z/ in Ancient Greek. The zeta representated an affricate /dz/ or /ds/. The letter z is pronounced /dz/ in Italian today, and in German, which has done a lot of devoicing over the centuries, z represents the affricate /ts/.)
Relevant, but too much of a burden for the previous paragraph: The voiced and unvoiced versions of Japanese consonants have historically been more like allophones than distinct phonemes. For example, a few centuries ago in Japanese, initial consonants tended to be devoiced, and the initial consonant of the second root in a compound tended to be voiced, etc. This accounts for many of the alternative pronunciations of individual kanji. English and German offer partial parallels or antiparallels. In modern German, for example, most final consonants are devoiced, and the initial s sound is always voiced (i.e., is pronounced /z/). Of course, local dialects offer exceptions and variants of these rules. In English the voiced/unvoiced pairs s/z and th/th (you can figure it out) were originally allophonic. While this is no longer generally the case, the -s inflections (as plural and possessive markers for nouns, and to indicate the third-person singular of nonmodal verbs in the present tense) are still voiced or devoiced according to the ending of the words they are attached to. (Generally, the voicing is assimilated: -s after a voiced consonant or vowel is pronounced /z/, even if the vowel is epenthetic, as in churches. Following unvoiced consonants, -s is pronounced /s/.) Aspiration of English stops is still completely allophonic, on the other hand, afaik.
Actually, I myself live in a toxic waste dump, but one of these years I plan to pass a vacuum cleaner over the accessible parts of the floor.
I'm waiting for Commodity Justice to become fashionable. It's just a crime that I can't have the same stuff rich people have. It's having a negative impact on my well-being, in particular my affective state. That in turn compromises my immune system, increasing my susceptibility to many fatal diseases. I need a federal luxury-supplementation program to save my life!
(And don't say you disagree. That's very stressful for me....)
Estimating (as well as defining membership in) the Jewish community is quite difficult, but 2 million is probably a fair estimate for all Europe. The largest Jewish community in Western Europe after WWII has been France, with 600,000 for decades. In apparent reaction to anti-Jewish violence that peaked in the Summer of 2001 but has continued, Jewish emigration to Israel (aliyah) rose to a level that has remained roughly constant (up to 2004, this writing) at about 2000 per year from France. This is most of the aliyah from western Europe as a whole.
The UK comes in second with roughly 300,000, and most other western and central European countries have much smaller Jewish populations: 40,000 Belgium, 30,000 Italy, and down. The Soviet Union was once estimated to have a couple of millions, mostly in the European part, but many of these emigrated to Israel when it finally became possible to do so without risking becoming stuck in the USSR as a refusenik. About 700,000 emigrated from the USSR and the countries that succeeded it between 1989 and 1995, and current estimates of the largest populations are 450,000 for Russia, 300,000 Ukraine, 50,000 Belarus. However, these numbers continue to shrink rapidly...
The exceptional case is Germany, where over half a million Jews lived before Hitler came to power, and where somehow there were 15,000 left by the end of WWII. By 1990, the Jewish population of reunited Germany had risen to 33,000. In a historic development, however, there has been a flood of Jewish emigration to Germany as part of a larger general emigration from the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Germany had the third-largest Jewish community in Europe, with an estimated 200,000. In 2002, 19,262 Jews from the FSU settled in Germany. (In the same year, fewer than 10,000 emigrated to the US. Israel for the first time had fewer Jewish immigrants from the FSU than Germany did -- 18,878. This was down from about 44,000 in 2001. The decline, attributed to the Intifada, has continued, with the number down to about 10,000 in 2004.)
European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe is published biannually in association with LBC-CJE and the Michael Goulston Educational Foundation.
There are, of course, other kinds of ray, translated by other Japanese terms. (For example, the fishy ray is an ei.) There are also other kanji with a reading sen. One sen is legal tender that you could toss on any Scrabble counter-top. It's worth its own entry.
Another Japanese word for X-ray is rentogen, after the discoverer. In German, X-rays are still called Röntgenstrahlen, but in Japanese almost as much as in English, the eponym has fallen out of use. Rentogen looks like an anagram of the alternate German name spelling Roentgen, but it's not so cute. ``Rentogen'' is the Romanization (according to the system of James Hepburn) of the Japanese spelling, which consists of five katakana characters.
Human infants can normally hear and distinguish far more sounds than adults can. As they learn language, they lose the ability to distinguish any two sounds, but they gain the ability to identify quickly what phoneme (i.e., which domain of sounds regarded as equivalent within the language) a sound corresponds to. In other words, they learn phonemics rather than phonetics. (More on that at emic.) A famous example is the r/l distinction: speakers of European languages typically distinguish at least one arr and at least one el sound. In contrast, Japanese and Chinese who do not, as children, learn a language that makes such a distinction tend to find it difficult to hear the difference.
For emphasis, let me restate this in contrast to a common misconception: It is well known that native speakers of Japanese and Chinese have difficulty learning to pronounce the r/l difference if they learn, say, English late (by late I mean no earlier than about 12 years of age). Many people think that this is fundamentally a difficulty in sound production, but that is not entirely the case: it is apparently at least partly a difference in brain wiring for language perception. Nerve connections in the infant that would have developed to process the difference have atrophied or not formed, and the brain capacity has been utilized differently. This happens to all speakers of all languages -- the only difference is that the particular set of abilities discarded and reinforced is different, according to the language[s] learned. For example, speakers of English have difficulty hearing the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds (b and bh, for example, in Hindi transliteration) or the difference between the sh sounds more carefully transliterated ``sh'' and ``shch'' from Russian. There are native speakers of German -- from some regions -- who don't distinguish between the ch of ich [/i:ç/ in the IPA] and the ch in German Bach [/bax/ in the IPA].
Some people learn to pronounce the r/l distinction reliably as adults, even without learning to hear the distinction reliably. This is the hard way, but sometimes it's the only way. (I know one such person well. From her speech I mightn't have realized that she can't hear the difference. When she hears a new word that contains an arr or el sound, however, she has to ask which sound it contains in order to know how to pronounce it.)
Chicago usage is a bit different; see L.
In December 1931, New Masses published (pp. 16-7) Langston Hughes's ``Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.'' Hughes explained in In The Big Sea, (pp. 320-1) that the poem was ``modeled after an ad in Vanity Fair announcing the opening of New York's greatest hotel. (Where no Negroes worked and none were admitted as guests.)'' It's a bit of a downer, as poems go. Not upbeat at all. Here's an excerpt:
Don't you know they specialize in American cooking?
Ankle on down to 49th Street at Park Avenue. Get up
off that subway bench tonight with the evening POST
for cover! Come on out o' that flop-house! Stop shivering
your guts out all day on street corners under the El.
(I encountered an instance of the `L' spelling, also with a New York flop-house context, in a book from 1947. It's described at the L entry.)
Allen Ginsberg's ``Howl'' begins
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
...
(The meter has been described as Whitmanesque; according to Ginsberg, ``[i]deally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit.'') Well, the first part of the poem was typed out ``madly in one afternoon'' in 1955 in San Francisco, where Ginsberg had been living since the previous year. But I think elevated trains (not counting the later BART system) are the one of the few forms of mass transportation San Francisco lacks, and until 1953 Ginsberg had spent most of his life in Patterson, New Jersey, and in New York City. It's not entirely crazy to adduce Ginsberg's poetry cautiously as evidence of linguistic usage. A personal acquaintance who influenced Ginsberg (particularly between 1948 and 1953) was William Carlos Williams, who urged Ginsberg to write in a more colloquial American idiom. Williams wrote an introduction for the first edition of `Howl.'
Although ``Howl'' made a big splash and Ginsberg a lot of money, the poem ``Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)'' is considered the better of his two greatest works. Kaddish is the name of a kind of doxology, which is recited (mostly in Aramaic) in a few versions at various points during Jewish services. One version (most of the full text, minus a sentence or two) is the ``Mourners' Kaddish,'' the characteristic prayer recited by immediate family of the deceased. I worked with a guy (David) whose family knew Allen Ginsberg's family back in the 1950's. David's mother objected to ``Kaddish,'' saying it was all true, but one shouldn't write it. (Naomi Ginsberg, Allen's mother, died after a long emotional decline through mental illness.) Always the bridesmaid. I know by email and have met in person someone who was once called a Stalinist, in print, by Noam Chomsky. (The journal did not publish his reply, though perhaps Chomsky's politics can be regarded as generally self-refuting and rebuttal superfluous.) Alas, always at least a couple of degrees of separation. I have a couple of letters from Albert Einstein...written to my late great uncle Fritz (mentioned at the ZNR entry).
Lawrence Ferlinghetti knew Allen Ginsberg at first hand. In 1956, Ferlinghetti's recently founded City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems. United States Customs officers and the San Francisco police seized the edition and charged Ferlinghetti with publishing an obscene book. The court case, which ended in acquittal in 1957, established Ginsberg's national reputation. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti had already established his own reputation as someone who wrote poetry that mentioned the el. His 1955 work, ``20,'' began
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
But the poem of Ferlinghetti that is all about ``the El / careening thru its thirdstory world / with its thirdstory people'' is ``12.''
Living in the nearby suburbs in the 1960's and 70's, and listening to news radio regularly, I never heard of any `el.' 'El no!
Robert Kelly (b. 1935) mentioned ``the El'' in at least a couple of poems, including one from 1981, but he's so preposterously prolific that it can't be very significant. In ``Skies'' (copyright 1992, Black Sparrow Pr.), he uh, sang
...in 1946 when he walked, not cold but certainly tired, all the way home from Fulton Street, at first under the el and then the open spaces where Sunrise Highway starts, then the other, smaller, older el on Liberty Avenue, where these city streets, smirched with scabby snow, felt clean and wonderful and...
Ah, poetry!
You know, if you look up poetry on the basis of just about any nonaesthetic principle, you find a lot of really bad stuff. In 1974, I think, Daniel Hoffman (b. 1923) wrote ``Stop the Deathwish! Stop It! Stop!'' There he mourns the loss of once-useful knowledge:
is there many a man around who knows
by rote the dismantled stations of the El,
Later he observes that by then, ``about as few use rhyme as wigwag....''
The El is habit-forming. Of the poets and poetasts mentioned above, all with the possible exception of Ginsberg mentioned the el in at least two works, as have Angela Jackson, Jerome Rothenberg, and Constance Urdang.
In Spanish, un elevado is, in a traffic context, `an overpass.'
I haven't encountered or invented a good term for the phenomenon or for persons so elected, but I think of them as ``elected tyrants.'' Here I understand the word tyrant in the original sense of the word tyrannos. As explained at the linked entry, the word originally meant `usurper' -- someone who took power by irregular means (usually by force or menace). This did not necessarily imply that the ruler was widely unpopular or generally ignoble. Holinshed wrote of the historical Macbeth:
To be briefe, such were the woorthie dooings and princelie acts of this Mackbeth in the administration of the realme, that if he had atteined therevnto by rightfull means, and continued in vprightnesse of iustice as he began, till the end of his reigne, he might well haue béene numbred amongest the most noble princes that anie where had reigned.
The term ``elected tyrant'' is bound to be interpreted at first blush as equivalent to ``elected dictator'' -- someone elected to hold dictatorial powers. Too bad. ``Usurper'' sounds a bit too monarchial. The entry's gotta have a head term.
The question of legitimacy, and whether authority is duly constituted, is a very difficult one to address in the general case. Broadly, I agree with the careful wording of Jefferson, that governments derive ``their just powers from the consent of the governed.'' Consent expressed through free elections to offices defined by agreed law, however, confer a higher order of legitimacy than does the sullen or fearful resignation of those without hope of overthrowing hated rulers. For this entry I limit consideration to the modern era, so I needn't puzzle over the Roman Senate's endorsement of every Caesar proclaimed by the Praetorian Guard.
Jefferson's formulation implicitly contains a vague notion of majority or plurality, since universal consent rarely occurs (unless one lowers the bar of ``consent'' to ``absence of active resistance''). Modern constitutions vary in how they deal with the absence of majority agreement. It may be considered an unsolved problem. For my purposes, someone who comes to power by legitimate (or constitutional) means, either by direct election or by an indirect election that voters understood beforehand to have the effect of putting a winner in power, is ``elected.''
Within the modern era, I also ignore elections rigged by, say, systematic miscounting or exclusion of legitimate candidates. This can be a fuzzy line to draw, since not just an election but an entire electoral system is often rigged by limits on free speech and free assembly. My interest is in situations where the electorate had a real opportunity to reject or punish tyrants, and did not do so. Neither do I condemn such popular choices generally. The election of an executive is a blunt instrument for the expression of popular will, and voters compromise.
Tyrants (in the sense of this entry) often atempt to ``legitimate'' their rule ex post facto, by changing the constitution and whatnot. Like I care.
This entry will be visibly under construction. For any missing details, you know how to search.
- Argentina: Juan Domingo Perón. Col. Perón was part of a successful military coup in May 1943, and subsequently served in cabinet positions. Opponents within the military forced his resignation (he was by then Vice President and Secretary of War) on October 9, 1945; soon afterwards he was arrested. He was released on October 16, after mass demonstrations organized by the CGT (the main federation of unions). (On the 25th, he married Evita.) On February 24, 1946, he was elected president for the first time. After some changes in the constitution in 1949, he was reelected in 1951. A civil war in 1955 pushed him out of office. (Civilian supporters and opponents of Perón both had some of the military on their side. The tanks had different colors of paint splashed on them so the sides could tell each other apart. A few hundred noncombatants were killed and injured in this little war, including a filled school bus, if I remember correctly.) The effort to remove him started in June, and he left in September. Over the next 18 years there was a succession of military governments, interspersed with short-lived civilian ones. The last military takeover of the 1960's took place in 1966, and in a March 1971 palace coup within the military government, Gen. Alejandro Lanusse came to power. He decided to restore ``institutional democracy'' (democracia institucional, as they called it, as opposed to democratic government by milicos) in 1973. There were calls for Perón's return, but his participation was forbidden. Héctor José Cámpora ran with peronist support and was elected on March 11, 1973. He resigned from office on June 13, clearing the way for new elections in which Perón ran with his third wife (Isabelita) as running mate (in the English political sense). They won, he died on July 1, 1974, and she was ousted in a military coup on March 24, 1976.
- Chile: Augusto Pinochet.
- Germany: Adolf Hitler.
- Ghana: Jerry Rawlings. One ``minor mutiny'' against the military government in 1979; released from prison and made leader of a coup two weeks later (June 4); relinquished power to elected civilian government in September 1979; overthrew that same government Dec. 31, 1981; headed military governments of Ghana continuously until 1992, when he allowed elections. In the November 4 elections, he was elected president with 59% of the vote. He became the president of Ghana the following January 7, and went on to become the first president to serve out the entire term for which he had been elected. He was reelected in December 1996 with 57% of the vote, against 40% for John Kufuor. Kufuor was elected president in December 2000, and reelected in 2004. (An interesting feature of his career is that the coup that put him in power took place two weeks before elections, scheduled a year before, that were planned to return the country to civilian rule. He allowed the elections but announced that civilian rule would be delayed while he cleaned house.
- Nicaragua: Daniel Ortega Saavedra.
- Paraguay: vague recollection, have to check.
- Venezuela: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. Hugo Chávez led a failed military coup in February 1992. He was imprisoned, then pardoned and released in 1994. In 1998 he was elected president for the first time.
None of this explains why it wasn't the second Wednesday in November, but there you go -- it has to occur on some date.
Of course, Behaviourism ``works''. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
Another point of comparison between the two movies is that the Woody character in Sleeper was named Miles Monroe. That doesn't sound like a comparison, does it. Just wait, I wasn't finished. The name Monroe recalls James Monroe, fifth president of the US. Whether one is thinking of American history or not, the first person with the given name Miles that one is likely to think of is Miles Standish, a ship captain best remembered for not getting the girl. In Bananas, the Allen character is Fielding Mellish. Mellish suggests nebbish, a Yiddish word for an earnest, ineffectual loser. As you know, the -ish ending in English, like -like, contains the idea of approximation. It may thus imply imperfection, or failure to achieve.
``Miles Davis''? He's history.
Certain unusual first names convey a certain sense of aspiration. This is manifestly clear in the case of names commemorating a famous person (e.g., George Washington, John Wesley, Martin Luther, Henry Fielding). Foreign names, and names more commonly occurring as surnames, also have this effect. Depending on how things play out, such a name may have an inspiring or even a demoralizing effect on the bearer, and may convey prestige, pretentiousness, or some other impression. A given name Fielding, followed by Mellish, will suggest to some a pretentious hope unfulfilled. In the movie, Fielding's parents still hope that he'll become a surgeon like his father, even though it is clear to others, such as a patient, that his ideal career path may lie in other directions.
The Woody Allen character doesn't measure up to his name, just as the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin failed to measure up to his ill-fitting clothes. A name is an identity: what you are called is in some measure who you are. Whether the power of names was deemed mystical or psychological (I'm lapsing into freshman-essayese here, aren't I) names have long been manipulated as tools of personal growth (forgive me, you know I didn't invent that phrase). Often the name change is minor. For example, a nickname may be substituted for the formal version of a name. James Earl Carter, Jr. used ``Jimmy'' from the beginning of his political life. He apparently never had his name legally changed to Jimmy, so in 1976 he was obliged to go to court to assure that his name appeared as Jimmy Carter on the national presidential ballots. The original name was particularly infelicitous after 1968, as the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. was James Earl Ray. (Some questionable history anent political nicknames and their advantages here.) Other ways to make a minor change include having a new name that is an extension or apparent modified version of the original (e.g., Abram to Abraham) or a change of emphasis (Thomas Woodrow Wilson to Woodrow Wilson).
Major name changes are also associated with major turns in a person's life. John Rosenberg abandoned his wife and kids and changed his name to Werner Erhard. I suppose this may have been convenient. He invented the name Werner Erhard after reading an article on West Germany in Esquire magazine which mentioned Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard (then the FRG economics minister). He later went on to found est.
I'm going to type Werner Erhardt here for people like me who can't remember the exact spelling, so they'll get a prophylactic hit on the search engine. And Jack Rosenberg for good measure.
In MST3K, there was a character named Dr. Lawrence Erhardt (yeah, with a final tee). An FAQ explains that Josh Weinstein came up with the name on the basis of Werner Erhard, with Lawrence chosen for its pretentiousness. JW thought it had an evil ring. What, he was thinking maybe of Lawrence Welk? (And-a one and-a two, Ig-or!) Josh Weinstein was one of the original creators of the show, writing and doing the voice of Dr. Larry Erhardt and some other characters in the first two seasons. Larry Erhardt disappeared abruptly when JW left, and was eaten by a giant spider in a later episode.
He was credited as J. Elvis Weinstein. If your name is Joshua and you think that's too pretentious, you can use Josh, a homonym of a word meaning kid, joke.
Josh Phillip Weinstein played a hippie in Mars Attacks! (1996). This is also a science fiction piece, a spoof of 1950's alien-invasion movies. What is it about that name?
I am not going to spell out why I am reminded of John Aristotle Phillips, but he's mentioned in the CANDU entry.
More on names at the Nomenclature is destiny entry. More on bananas at the potassium (K) entry. More on Woody Allen's Sleeper at the health entry.
(Charlie Chaplin's screen pants were too large, but his jacket was too tight. Look for my Ph.D. dissertation on the deeper significances of this.)
Once on MST3K, the robot companion Tom Servo remarked ``Emby Mellay? That's not a name, it's a bad Scrabble hand!'' What is that, a reverse rebus? Eye dialect hits the big time!
This made me laugh out loud. Another thing you can't have in a democratic society, or any other one, is an ``elite'' that constitutes a quarter of the adult population.
Voltage (E) in an inductor (L) is ahead of current (i) [by 90° of phase].
Current (i) in a capacitor (C) precedes voltage (e) [by 90° of phase].
The Cardona group has a 500-word introduction.
Pine.
This faq is associated with the comp.mail.elm newsgroup.
Élodie is also a common-enough woman's name in French. From its Visigothic roots, it can be interpreted to mean `foreign riches.' My understanding is that the correct spelling uses initial É and not E, but the instances I can find instantly, of the personal name, all use plain E.
I find this apparent coyness about acronym expansions irritating. It occurs with acronyms in all languages I've had any substantial experience of, but Francophones seem to take greater liberties in divorcing acronyms from their expansions. See, for another example, fémis.
The newsiest application of ELODIE has been in the successful search for exoplanet. In 2006, it is being succeeded in this role by SOPHIE. Sophie is also a woman's name, but this SOPHIE has an unobscure expansion.
``The National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program was established in 1990 as an integral part of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to foster basic and applied research and support outreach. The ELSI program funds and manages studies related to the ethical, legal and social implications of genetic and genomic research, and supports workshops, research consortia and policy conferences related to these topics. The ELSI program at NHGRI is the largest supporter nationwide of ELSI research.''
This reminds me of the line attributed to LBJ (regarding FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover), that it was ``probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.'' (This appeared in the NYTimes on October 31, 1971; I have no idea whether it's accurate.) For more LBJ mots, apocryphal and canonical, see the Veep entry.
The first systems, mandated by many countries in the 1970's, transmitted analog signals at 121.5 MHz.
New digital systems under development will transmit digital bursts of information at 406 MHz.
Sometimes the term is used rather loosely. For example, the University of Manchester offers an M.Ed. in ELT. My personal experience is that when I took a cab from the Manchester airport, the driver understood me but I did not understand him. I had more success in the shops in town, and a friend of mine is a Mancunian/English bilingual, with a smattering of ancestral Ukrainian. Well, in case you had any doubt, this information is useless.
Go to their site and hear the music for ``Your Teddy Bear'' sounding like it's being played by an Oktoberfest accordion.
Pressure studies by George Samara demonstrated that EL2 is an antisite defect.