Absolute temperature, measured in Fahrenheit degrees, is the Rankine scale. The globalizing bulldozer of standardization ruthlessly crushes the fragile flower of mensuration diversity. Visit our memorial entry for an extinguished victim of this remorseless social Darwinism: °R.
To determine the temperature Fahrenheit from cricket chirping, divide the number of chirps per minute by four and add forty. This is according to Polly's Ghost, a novel by Abby Frucht. Apparently crickets don't chirp at temperatures below 40°F. Or maybe they chirp in reverse. At 55°F they should be chirping at 1 Hz. If we were serious about precision, we'd measure temperature in chirps per minute instead of Fahrenheit degrees (never mind Celsius.)
I should probably mention that Fahrenheit didn't just fool with choosing among essentially equivalent schemes for designating temperatures. His major contribution to thermometry was overcoming technical obstacles to developing a good mercury (Hg) thermometer. His mercury thermometer was substantially more accurate than existing alcohol thermometers. He took into account the effects of glass expansion (and discovered that different kinds of glass had fractionally different expansion coefficients). He also discovered that the boiling point of water depends on pressure.
Nevertheless, the intriguing, almost enigmatic question about Fahrenheit is: how did he come up with numbers like 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling temperatures of water? For a long time, this question was essentially unanswerable, but with the publication of some old scientific correspondence the answer has become clear. Basically, the numbers arose almost accidentally. The main consideration seems always to have been to preserve comparability between earlier scales and new ones. The boiling point of water was never a calibration point for Fahrenheit, and the nonzero freezing point (I think it was 8 before he multiplied all temperatures by four) was inherited from an earlier scheme. That earlier scheme was used for recording atmospheric temperatures, and the freezing point was assigned a positive number so there would be no need to record negative temperature values. As you can see, I'm away from my references. I'll return and fix things up later.
When Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was elected a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, he contributed a paper on thermometers (written in Latin). The paper was a bit unclear on his points of calibration. He mentioned three points, the lowest one being defined in terms of a brine solution. It has been suggested that Fahrenheit was purposely unclear to protect the trade secrets of his instrument-making business, but this isn't really plausible as an explanation for calibration points. Instead, it seems that two of what have been regarded as his ``calibration points'' were simply given so his audience would have some idea of the range of his scale.
The meaning of Fahrenheit's name is given at the Fahrvergnügen entry. It's not especially deutlich.
This page cooly examines some of the evidence concerning the effectiveness of fluoride in preventing cavities.
Here is how General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) explained his actions to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) in Dr. Strangelove:
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.I'm not sure exactly what that was about, and Ripper is no longer around to tell us, but I figured this was a good place to mention it.
The problem here is that the foxtrot is dated. Try ``Fandango.''
Even on the best phones, ``eff'' sounds almost indistinguishable from ``ess.'' Most people just use ``Sam'' and ``Frank'' to distinguish these. You can try ``Foxtrot'' and ``Sierra,'' but people will just become confused, so if you're really not going to use the standard Sam and Frank, then you get more mileage from the SBF recommendations (Fandango and Succotash) than from the boring old FCC recommendations.
When I ordered my X-server from Xi Graphics, the guy who took my order actually asked me to spell my first name. I was so stunned that I just said ``Ay El Eff Arr Ee Dee.'' Sure enough, the package came addressed to Alsred. I mean, I know it's becoming an unusual name and all, but really! (When I was in graduate school and everyone was foreign, I once introduced myself to someone with ``I'm Al'' and he replied ``How do you spell that''? It's even an entry in this glossary.)
Update on Fandango and Foxtrot: maybe Foxtrot will come back. Alicia just wrote saying that she needed a new activity now that summer sailing is coming to an end, -- maybe she'll take up Swing Dancing. And the New York Times had an article on same.
Of course, Foxtrot is the name of a comic strip. I wonder if the late Charles Schulz got kickbacks from the peanut farmers for not changing his strip's name to Macadamia Nuts or something. It could have been quite a racket. Too bad he didn't get to name his own strip.
(In addition to the syndicate's address above, the peanuts site can be reached at <http://www.snoopy.com/>.)
These standard examples concern counts or events per unit of a continuous variable (typically time or distance) [and each describes an intrinsic rather than extrinsic quantity in the sense these words have in thermodynamics]. High values of these frequencies do manifest the conventional notion expressed by the term ``frequent'' in ordinary language, and carry the sense that distinguishes ``frequent'' from ``a lot'' (at one time or infrequently).
A further technical generalization is frequency as number of occurrences per sample. This preserves the conventional notion of frequency as count of events per unit of something else, but the something else is discrete, and these frequencies are given in essentially dimensionless units (like errors per bin). This usage is appropriate and more-or-less natural in some parts of biology and in most of the social sciences, and is the standard usage in statistics, but a physical scientist has to keep the difference in mind when reading statistical literature: statistical ``frequency'' can mean number (N).
In England, the FA is the senior administrative body of English soccer. There is also a Football League, which until the start of the 1992 season represented teams at all levels of professional play. I'm not sure exactly how responsibilities were, or were not, divided. The league was subordinate in principle, but represented a different set of interests. In the last years of this arrangement, there was an increasing feeling within the FA that the interests of the Football League were in conflict with those of the top teams and, therefore, those of the England team. (The FL, dominated by the larger number of lower-division teams, preferred more and weaker top teams, and more games between teams in the top and lower divisions.)
In 1958, the north and south divisions of English soccer's Third Division were joined and redivided to produce a system of four ranked divisions. In 1991, the FA decided to take the First Division out of the FL and create a special Premier League (eventually also called the Premiership) for those teams starting in the 1992-3 season. After serious contention, threats of legal action, and some compromises on detail, this plan took effect. By agreement, at the end of the 1994-5 season the Premier League was winnowed from its original 22 teams to 20 (by four relegations and two promotions). (Also starting in 1992, the earlier Second, Third, and Fourth Divisions of the FL became First, Second, and Third Divisions when the original First left to form its own league.)
In May 1996, the Nationwide Building Society replaced Endsleigh Insurance as the FL's sponsor, and the FL was frequently referred to as the Nationwide League (and less often as the Nationwide Football League). Over the Summer in 2004, to widespread cynicism (well, it's England, isn't it?), the old Divisions One, Two, and Three were renamed The Championship, League One, and League Two, respectively for the start of the '04-05 season. Coca-Cola took over sponsorship, but ``Coca-Cola League'' doesn't seem to be a very catching name.
One common way in which some thousands of the disappeared were disposed of was by dropping them (many alive, usually drugged; some with their bellies slit; a few previously dead) into the middle of the Atlantic. But the drops were apparently from naval aircraft.
As of 2001, there are almost forty 12-in. wafer fabs in the world, about two thirds of these in the Asia Pacific region -- predominantly Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
The band name The Beatles was chosen partly in allusion to The Crickets, the name of Buddy Holly's band, and partly in reference to beat -- whether musical or poetic (as in beatnik) or both I'm not sure. (More on this at the R.E.M. entry.)
Ringo Starr was originally named Richard Starkey. He married Barbara Bach, who was originally named Barbara Goldbach. I guess Starkey is his ``real name'' -- his kids (by first wife Maureen) use the last name Starkey.
Of course, it might not teach the truth. (Cf. experientia docet.) Also, for something interesting on the subsequent sense development of fabula, see the discussion of hablar in the Spanish entry.
Celebrating the great love of the French for American Art? Yes! And it was just a wild (I mean wild) guess! Anyway, it's the half of it.
From Paris Voice (``the magazine for English-speaking Parisians'') June 2001:
A new American institution devoted to cultural exchanges between the US and France opens its doors this month at the Espace Pierre Cardin on place de la concorde. With the death of the former American Center still on many Paris expats' minds, some people wonder if things will be different this time.''
Congress enacted the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to control the growth and operation of the "numerous committees, boards, commissions, councils, and similar groups which have been established to advise officers and agencies in the executive branch of the Federal Government" (5 U.S.C. App. 2 § 2(a)). An "advisory committee" is defined as "any committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group, or any subcommittee or other subgroup thereof" that is "established or utilized" by the President or an agency "in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government" (5 U.S.C. App. 2 § 3(2)).FACA places a number of procedural restrictions on bodies that constitute "advisory committees." Every advisory committee must file a charter (5 U.S.C. App. 2 §§ 9(c), 10(a)(2)); its meetings must be open to the public (id. § 10(a)(1)); it must keep "[d]etailed minutes" of its meetings (id. § 10(c)); and it must generally permit "[i]nterested persons . . . to attend, appear before, or file statements" with it (id. § 10(a)(3)), unless a decision is made to close the meeting (id. § 10(d)). In addition to governing how the group functions, FACA also requires an advisory committee to make publicly available "the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by [the] advisory committee" (id. § 10(b)). This obligation exists only "until the advisory committee ceases to exist" and is no longer subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
FACA also imposes a number of requirements on federal officials regarding creation and use of advisory committees. A committee must specifically be authorized (either by statute or by the President), or be determined by an agency head to be in the public interest (id. § 9(a)); it must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed" (id. § 5(b)(2)); and precautions must be taken to assure that an advisory committee is not "inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest" (id. § 5(b)(3)).
FACA is generally regarded as a hindrance to agencies' efforts to obtain information from the scientific community and stakeholders. Several survey participants argued that it should be amended to specifically exclude ad hoc agency efforts to obtain information from the public, state or local authorities, and scientists. They maintained that FACA should be limited to situations where an agency seeks the opinion of an advisory committee as an authoritative, expert source, consistent with the original intent of Congress.
Just the FACS, ma'am. We'll handle the power management.
The ``Free'' does make it sound commercial, doesn't it? Maybe if they charged a hundred dollars a pop, they could turn it into a lottery and one out of every thousand applicants would get a four-year free ride.
The association between paleness and ill-health of some sort has some generality. The word fahl is derived from an OHG word falo, and the cognate English word now spelled fallow originally also meant `pale,' but pale relative to red: pale brown or reddish yellow, like withered grass. If a field is not replanted after the fruit is harvested, then it may well appear fallow in this sense the following season, hence the modern sense of fallow or ``to lie fallow.'' In the case of vegetation, perhaps a certain element of ill-health or non-vibrancy was understood. The old sense, with no imputation of ill-health, survives in the common name fallow deer for a species of deer lighter-colored than the red deer. The words fahl and fallow are cognate with the Greek poliós (`gray'; cf. polio) and Lithuanian palvas (`pale yellow'). The Latin pallidus, `pale,' definitely implied that the paleness was due to sickness or emotional stress (in contexts where such implication made sense). The English word pale is derived from this Latin word via Norman French; the English word pallid was borrowed directly from Latin in the fifteenth century. The English word pallor also comes from Norman French, unchanged in spelling or meaning from the classical Latin pallor, a noun based on the verb pallere (the same verb that the adjective pallidus was based on). There are other connections with less-common words; one worth mentioning in this entry is fahl, used by geologists as a synonym for Fahlerz, q.v..
Fahl ore is sometimes defined simply as tetrahedrite. You may think this is of little help to you, but it's not of much help to me either. For unfortunately good reason, mineral terminology is sloppy in places. A single term will be used for a particular allomorph of a single well-defined compound, and it will also be used for what one finds in reality, which is typically an approximation. For example, tetrahedrite in the narrowest sense is a copper mineral with a pyrite structure and a composition Cu12Sb4S13. What one finds by digging, and what a name is needed for, is usually a mix. A fraction (up to one sixth) of the copper (Cu) sites in the crystal are occupied by iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), nickel (Ni), silver (Ag), and zinc (Zn) atoms. In addition, the antimony (Sb) may be replaced by arsenic (As). The pure mineral corresponding to tetrahedrite is tennantite: Cu12As4S13. The two are hard to tell apart by physical properties and appearance. In nature, deposits of tetrahedrite and tennantite are not homogeneous: different parts contain different concentrations of the various substituents, and vary in color.
In addition to the usual looseness of mineralogical terminology, the term fahl often has the burden of being used to indicate not so much a mineral but a geological situation. Specifically, fahl occurs where typically sulfidic copper minerals become exposed to the air and percolating water. They oxidize to form a mix of oxides, hydroxides, and hydroxy-carbonates (particularly azurite and malachite). The metals in these minerals are dissolved by ground water, trickle down, and recombine with sulfur to form a messy mix of minerals such as chalcolite (Cu2S) and tetrahedrite.
The mechanism of the previous paragraph describes only one of the ways that tetrahedrite can form, but it is a mechanism of great archaeological importance. The copper minerals on the surface can be reduced by aqueous surface solutions to produce native copper. It is reasonably speculated that the association of the native metal with this ore was a critical clue led to neolithic man to invent copper smelting. The tetrahedrite below accumulates in easy-to-mine clayey deposits. (After all, pickaxes were not initially available.) Archaeologists understand Fahlerz in the sense of this specific kind of clayey copper ore.
In German class in junior high school, we were taught to say ``Viel Vergnügen beim Tanz'' (loosely, `dancing with you was a pleasure') to our partners after a turn on the floor, but we weren't taught to dance, so the phrase would probably never have been true. The morpheme fahr in the headword is from the the verb fahren, `to drive.' ``Sie fahrt'' means `she drives' and sounds like a Bostonian saying ``zee fart,'' but after a while even seventh-graders tire of this joke.
German also has a verb reiten, `to ride.' The difference between driving and riding in English is not entirely clear-cut. To ride suggests something more passive to drive. To ride is to be conveyed, probably as a passenger. There are exceptions, however, and some are useful. In particular, a man driving a horse-drawn carriage and a man riding a horse are both driving a horse in some sense of that word, but consistently using the verb ride in the one of those two instances where it is applicable allows us to indicate that the carriage-rider is not riding the horse, even though the verb we use in the case (drive) is nonspecific. Similarly in German, to ride a horse is ``ein Pferd reiten,'' while to drive a horse is ``ein Pferd fahren.'' (Of course, when the horse has two riders, one might well be a nondriver. If you want to give that horse bamboo spine, I'm not going to abet you lexicographically.) In English, perhaps by analogy with horseback riding, we use the terms ``bike riding'' and ``motorcycle riding.'' The respective German terms use fahren: ``Fahrrad fahren'' and ``Motorrad fahren.''
A disk drive is ``ein Diskettenlaufwerk.'' The verb laufen means `to run.' (Die Platte is also used for `the disk,' as part of compounds like die Magnetplatte, but das Plattenlaufwerk is even rarer than das Disklaufwerk.)
Fahrenheit is a name that was given to people from Fahrenhaupt (in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). The place name Fahrenhaupt seems like it ought to mean `main drive.' The most famous Fahrenheit, of course, is Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. In the middle of the seventeenth century his family moved from Königsberg (then the capital of East Prussia, now Kaliningrad in Russia) to the Polish port of Gdansk (Gdańsk in Polish). There he was born in 1686. Since his family was German, and perhaps since Gdansk was from time to time under Teutonic Knight, Prussian, and German control, German references describe him as German. I don't know if the Poles claim him. His parents died suddenly in 1701, and his guardian sent him to apprentice in Amsterdam. He made his career in the Netherlands and died in The Hague in 1736, so the Dutch consider him Dutch. It reminds me of Einstein's repeated quip about what nationalities he would be assigned, depending on whether his theories proved true or false.
I'm also reminded of Handel. Georg Friederich Händel was born in Halle (in Saxony -- a German, um, Land), the son of a barber-surgeon (that was a common career combination, back then). In 1710 he was appointed Kapellmeister to George Louis, the elector of Hanover and the future King George I of England. That year Haendel (this spelling was used too) preceded his patron to England and found favor in Queen Anne's court. His warm reception in London made him reluctant to return to Hanover; Anne's death in 1714 and the crowning of George as King of England made the return unnecessary. From 1715 his name was George Frideric Handel, and in 1726 he became a British subject. In 1741 he wrote his Messiah, probably the most famous of all oratorios, whatever those are. He also wrote something called Music for the Royal Fireworks (1759). I've never heard it, but I bet it would make a great B side to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Handel died in 1759 in London. So the British have good cause to call him a ``German-born English composer.'' I believe the general unofficial view in Germany is that he was a German composer, but that England never produced any good composers of its own so they adopted him. Something similar, though to lesser degree, seems to have happened with Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). It's surprising I haven't mentioned somewhere how much Samuel (Erewhon) Butler despised Felix Mendelssohn's music. (He considered it repetitive.)
Before you get too involved in studying the history of Protestant churches in Argentina, you should note some quantitative facts: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 92% of the population of Argentina is counted Roman Catholic, and 2% belongs to a Protestant denomination (including some, like the Baptist and Anglican, that don't belong to FAIE) . (Also about 0.7% Jewish, see DAIA.)
Fine. Now what I want to know is, why did this word just pop into my head? Isn't it too late to be going mad?
Pronounced like French faïence (even spelled that way if you like), it takes its name from the Italian town of Faenza.
SUBSCRIBE FAILURE Firstname M. I. Lastnameto <listproc@u.washington.edu>.
``FAIR is the national media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship. FAIR seeks to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press. FAIR scrutinizes media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.
Ultimately, FAIR believes that structural reform is needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong, non-profit, alternative sources of information.''
Established in 1978 as a ``national, membership-based, educational organization ... working to help the American public convince Congress that our nation's immigration laws must be reformed.''
Whether you agree or disagree, you have to admire that lovely sentiment --
An organization that sued to keep US military recruiters off US campuses, on the grounds that because of the don't-ask-don't-tell policy, granting access to military recruiters is tantamount to endorsing discrimination against homosexuals. [No law requires any institutions of higher education to grant such access, but the Solomon Amendment (not named after the third king of Judea and Israel) puts such institutions at risk of losing various sorts of government funds.]
So what we've done with the previous entry is, using special signal-processing software operating over spare Iridium satellite bandwidth, we detect the brainwaves of the closest millenarian, in order to fill in the entry and determine whether the rapture has occurred. Thus, when the definition component of the entry is -- OH MY GAWD! It's empty! This can mean only one thing! There are no millenarians with brain waves detectable on earth!
Check out the International Lyrics Server.
In 1962, Ford started selling Falcons assembled at one of its existing plants in Argentina. Starting in 1963, Falcons were manufactured in Argentina. The line was very popular there. Production peaked at 34 thousand in 1980; production finally ended in 1991. You want more details? See Todo Falcon -- Web Oficial del Ford Falcon en Argentina [`Everything Falcon']. The weird thing that strikes people about the car is that in Argentina the sheet metal was never modified very much after the mid 1960's. It's sort of like a Ford version of the Beetle or the Checker. They changed the lights, the grille, or the bumper every few years. This usually looked poorly integrated. ``Clumsily grafted'' seems to be a typical description. (The Falcon SL pictured here is a typically ghastly example.)
Something not mentioned at the official Everything-Falcon site has to do with the Argentine federal police: they must surely have been the biggest fleet purchaser of Falcons. The secret police were known for their unmarked Falcons. Here's one Australian tourist's story of his Falcon-related experiences down that line. When someone approached you from one of those unmarked Falcons, it was pretty scary, but this fellow got off with just an ID check. This reminds me of something that happened to my father when he visited Argentina in 1979. (Stop me if I've told this one before.) While there, he visited the publishing house that had continued to sell a translation dictionary of his from the late 1940's and early 1950's. I guess the Ford Falcon wasn't the only instance of Argentine business sticking with what worked. (It was an English-to-Spanish dictionary specifically targeted for technical translation, with sporadic words having large entries apparently at random wherever he felt like expanding on a topic. This seems to run in the family; it's practically spooky, but not as spooky as the rest of this story.) He was there making sure they stopped publishing his by-then already obsolete work. (Some years later, though, he did give me permission to put it up on the web if I made it extremely clear that some entries might be very much out-of-date.) He was at their storefront place on a side street, and as he talked with the owners there, traffic along the street seemed to peter out. It did peter out. Then some Falcons pulled up from both ends of the street and stopped, surrounding a doorway across the street. Soon there was a lot of noise -- of shouts, running, and guns firing. One man ran out the front door and had a chest-sized hole blown through his chest with what looked like a pistol-handled shotgun.
I remember once in the 1990's I attended an SPIE conference in Central Jersey (that's short for central New Jersey, okay?) and someone commented that he needed a US passport. I joked that I had one on me, and he commented that that was a very European habit (to carry a passport in my own country). Someone on the Classics list reported that during the 2004 elections, her precinct at first refused to accept her US passport as a valid ID. It makes sense to me: no American would ever use a passport as ID -- it's just for international travel. So when you're visiting Argentina, like my father, you should always carry your US passport.
So back to our story on a side street in Buenos Aires. After the firing was over, someone came into the shop and asked my father and the shop owners to show their ID's. One of the owners reached a little too quickly into his back pocket, and the government gentleman raised his gun. The editor fellow continued pulling out his wallet, but with a slower, if not exactly relaxed, motion (rate of speed, I think it's called). This glossary has another entry about presenting Argentine ID.
You probably think this is one of those joke entries, like the (somewhat lame, I admit) positive buoyancy entry, where I start out along the road of real events but then derail imaginatively. Nope. I didn't make anything up, though similar events were common enough that I could have.
The announced emphasis of Operation FALCON was on ``gang related crimes, homicides, crimes involving use of a weapon, crimes against children and the elderly, crimes involving sexual assaults, organized crime and drug related fugitives, and other crimes of violence.'' The arrested included 4,291 ``major narcotics violation suspects,'' but there were only 210 drug seizures during the operation. The latter included 30 kg cocaine, 190 g heroin, 204 kg marijuana, and 39 kg ``other drugs'' (i.e., at most 330 g per seizure); 243 weapons were also seized. Arrested were 1818 burglary and 1727 assault suspects, and 638 armed robbery, 553 sexual assault, 483 weapons violation, 203 stolen vehicle, and 162 murder suspects. They included 154 ``documented gang members.'' Cash in the amount of $373,000 was seized -- $36 and change per arrestee. It's not clear to me under what authority this cash was seized.
The number of outstanding warrants may seem surprising. If so, consider three facts: First, as is well-known, state and local law-enforcement agencies make a certain calculation in deciding how strenuously to pursue fugitives -- resources are always limited. Second, in the case of fugitives wanted on bench warrants (i.e., bail jumpers and other no-shows), police may delay pursuit in the not-entirely-unreasonable expectation that the fugitive will turn up. Finally, cases grow cold, other cases come up, and in the meantime fugitives return to associations and places they knew would be investigated in any initial search. A systematic review of cold cases can net a share of those, and many individual cases reported for this operation seemed to fall into that category.
Historically, it is also the case that coordination among different agencies has sometimes been poor, occasionally obstructed by professional rivalries. Also, cases tend to go cold when the suspect appears to have left a local jurisdiction. It seems the USMS usually does a bit more than half of its work apprehending federal fugitives. During FY 2004, at least, it cleared 39,000 federal felony warrants, while ``U.S. Marshals-led fugitive task forces ... clear[ed] 37,900 state and local felony warrants.'' By contrast, in Operation FALCON, eight of nine arrests were on state or local warrants.
On the matter of jurisdictional conflicts and poor coordination, I remember reading in 1980 or so about the relevant case of a serial murderer back in the 70's who turned out to have worked for a police force and who had thus been familiar with this problem. He deliberately left remains and other clues in multiple jurisdictions in an effort (which must be judged a partial success) to thwart investigations. I can't track this down, so I'm probably misremembering some details. A recent case in which apprehension of the killer is claimed to have been delayed by interagency rivalries (RCMP vs. local cops, in this case) is that of a Vancouver serial killer, allegedly Robert Pickton, a pig farmer arrested in 2002. On the other hand, the disappearances began in 1983, and the RCMP was apparently not involved until 2001.
In the first example, the second A of NASA is expanded administration, but the SBF does not regard this as a pleonasm. The reason is that there are two different entities legitimately called ``administrations.'' NASA as a whole is an agency but it is named synecdochically after its management, as an ``administration.'' That part of NASA is the NASA administration (distinct from higher levels within the executive branch of government, which might engage in administration of NASA's administration, or just plain administration administration). If someone were to refer to NASA redundantly as the NASA agency or (more equivocally) as the NASA administration, then the latter term would be an AAP pleonasm, and both would be perverse.
Another false pleonasm is ``a US state.'' Whaddaya expect me to say, ``a United state''?
Explicit examples of false pleonasm are rare because they are mostly regarded as poor style, because they are easily avoided, and because they are obvious. Thus, the given example (history history) can be converted into a more complex noun phrase in which a preposition establishes a distinction between the instances of the repeated word (history of history) or can be replaced by another, possibly not-quite-synonymous term (historiography). The language provides other alternatives that do not rely on a previous coinage, like metahistory or higher-level administration.
Creative false pleonasm, in which a single word appears thrice or more, or which is otherwise novel or amusing, is generally regarded as good style wherever other forms of punning are (vide postmodern English). Sealed acronyms can be problematic, particularly if there is uncertainty regarding the status (as sealed or not) of the acronym. Recursive acronyms, or XARA's, necessarily have a pleonastic form. I don't know if that makes them false pleonasms, but I do know this: I'd rather have pleonasm than a neoplasm.
Another related common term in Spanish is falso cognado. The Spanish Wikipedia page for falso amigo warns against confusing falsos amigos with falsos cognados. I can't but agree: a ``false cognate'' or falso cognado ought to be a word that appears to be a cognate but isn't -- regardless of its meaning (which determines whether or not it is a false friend). It is true that false friends are most often cognates, especially among European languages. Such cognates generally mislead not by appearing to be cognates when they are not, but by suggesting an incorrect meaning. In any case, usage may have demolished the distinction. The reference shelf of relevant books that is nearest to hand right now contains three dictionaries of Spanish-English false friends, and two of them bear athetizable titles:
- Marcial Prado: NTC's Dictionary of Spanish False Cognates (Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1993).
- Bernard H. Hamel: Comprehensive Bilingual Dictionary of Spanish False Cognates / Gran Diccionario de Términos Equívocos del Inglés (Los Angeles: Bilingual Book Press, 1/e 1998).
- Marcial Prado: Diccionario de Falsos Amigos Inglés-Español (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 2001).
Of course, if you want cheaper, there's Wikipedia. It is interesting that the corresponding Galician (northwest Iberian) Wikipedia page indicates in passing that falso cognado is the same thing as a falso amigo. If both Spanish and Galician pages are to be believed, then falso cognado in Spanish is a falso cognado in Galician of falso cognado in Galician.
An excellent source for information on German surnames is Familiennamen: Herkunft und Bedeutung von 20 000 Nachnamen [`Surnames: Origin and Meaning of 20,000 Last Names'], Rosa Kohlheim and Volker Kohlheim (Duden, 2000). A cool thing about this book is that it lists ``bekannte Namensträger'' (`famous bearers of the name') and is illustrated with pictures of some. It also has charts and maps of the German Sprachraum, where one can see correlations of the relative prevalences of different names with dialect boundaries. For given names there's the five-volume Historisches Deutsches Vornamenbuch, Wilfried Seibicke (de Gruyter, 1996). Hanks and Hodges do the same for names encountered in the English-speaking world (including names from throughout Europe and the world, with varying degrees of coverage as you might expect). See also Reaney and Wilson.
Hanks and Hodges had a special consultant for Jewish names, and the Kohlheims' book has good coverage of Ashkenazi Jewish names, but there's a very complete work that is more comprehensive even for Jewish names of German or Yiddish origin: Etymologisches Lexikon der jüdischen Familiennamen, Eva H. Guggenheimer and Heinrich W. Guggenheimer (K. G. Saur, 1996). This is written in German with a Roman font, as you'd expect, but it also provides the spellings of principal forms, as appropriate, of the names in Amharic, Arabic (and Farsi), Cyrillic, Georgian, and Hebrew alphabets (used for Yiddish), and with special characters in the Roman alphabets for Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish. A much less complete collection forms the second half of A Dictionary of Jewish Names and their History, Benzion C. Kaganoff (Schocken Books, 1977). The first half is an interesting history.
The singular form is used in the sense of `catch, haul, take.' For example, ``die Fischer brachten ihren Fang ein'' can be rendered as `the fishermen brought in their haul.' It's also used like `the hunt' in English: ``auf Fang ausgehen'' is `to go hunting' or more literally `to go out on the hunt.' Similarly, ``zum Fang auslaufen,'' ``zum Fang ausfahren,'' and ``aus Fang fahren'' mean `to go fishing.' It may help to understand that ausgehen just means `to go out,' while auslaufen means `to go out on a watercraft' (less awkwardly: `to put out to sea' vel sim.). The verb ausfahren is a bit more general, meaning `to set out riding or driving' in a precise translation. Since going out to capture or kill land animals can be done on foot (I mean, let's be sporting about this), ausfahren tends to imply fishing. If you want to be explicit, you could just use ``zum Fischfang ausfahren.'' Of course, the laconic expression is ``fischen gehen'' (`to go fishing').
For the anatomical parts so called, the plural (Fänge) is more common. The claws (usually Klauen) of a bird (Vogel) such as a hawk (Habicht) can be called Fänge, and more figuratively, ``in seinen Fängen halten'' means `hold in one's clutches.' Fang is also used for sharp, predatory dentition, though tusks -- particularly those of a boar (Eber) -- also count as Fänge. You can remove ambiguity with die Fangzähne (`the fang-teeth').
Tush is a domesticated pronunciation of the Yiddish slang tuchis. (The ``ch'' is like that in Bach, although it might be more palatalized. When I used to hear this word I wasn't paying attention to the difference between /x/ and /ç/.) A word less widely adopted in English is the rhyming huchis, one of the words for `head.' The rhyme would often occur in discussion of the two ways of thinking (i.e., with huchis or with tuchis).
Fanny (now more often spelled Fannie, I think -- perhaps to make a distinction) was originally, and still is, a nickname for Frances. It seems like a pretty radical abbreviation, losing three consonants from sundry parts of the original, but it doesn't beat Peg for Margaret. In France it has been a nickname for Françoise, I think. My entire basis for this belief is the established fact that Fanny is a nickname for Frances in English, and the information that Claude Bernard, the French physiologist, married one ``Françoise Marie (Fanny) Martin'' in 1845.
The earliest famous Fanny that I can think of was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the author of Evelina (1778) and other novels.
A well-known fictional Fanny is Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), who has the same names as her mother. Their legal name is Frances Price. Almost, so it might seem, to compensate, they have a sister and aunt who is never given a first name. She is first described as ``Miss Ward'' (the elder Frances Price was neé Ward), and after her marriage as Mrs. Norris. Mrs. Norris is not a sympathetic character. I think that in all of Jane Austen's work, there is only one use of ``who'' where only ``whom'' would have been acceptable, and it is put in the mouth of Mrs. Norris. (Mrs. Norris is also the name of a cat in the Harry Potter series.) It is reasonably conjectured [for example, by Maggie Lane, in her Jane Austen and Names (Blaise Books, 2002)] that the original Mrs. Norris was an Elizabeth, since her goddaughter is called Betsey.
This godchild business highlights the fact that at the time, nicknames were not so readily recorded as given names. So long as Fanny or Betsey was recognized as a diminutive form of Frances or Elizabeth, one could be reasonably confident that someone called by the former had been assigned the corresponding latter at birth. That standard has slipped.
An early apparent instance of this slippage seems to be the case of the actress Fanny Ardant, who was given the name ``Fanny Marguerite Judith Ardant'' at birth (according to IMDb). She was born to French parents in France in 1949. I suppose the naming was inspired by a very popular French movie trilogy of the 1930's, sometimes known as the Fanny series. The three movies were Marius (released in France in 1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936), named after three main characters (a young man, his lover -- who discovers she is pregnant shortly after he begins a five-year maritime stint -- and his father). You mightn't think that would make Fanny a very attractive name, but apparently Fanny was a very sympathetic character. There were a number of stage and film remakes. (Another name whose popularity is surprising is Cassandra.)
This sort of stuff tends to be forgotten. My mother was given the middle name Beatrice at birth, and it wasn't until I was in my forties that I happened to learn that her father had been a great admirer of Dante.
In BJT logics, the constraint is typically that the current drive on the output stage can become insufficient for the input current draw. I.e., the output voltage shifts. Roughly speaking:
fan-in × input current × output impedance = noise margin.
An exception is I²L, in which it is useful to define current noise margins and related current quantities analogous to the usual (voltage) noise margins and related voltages.
In MOSFET logics, inputs are very-high-impedance gates, and DC fan-out is practically unlimited. However, parasitic capacitances of gates increase RC delays, so maximum fan-out is determined by maximum allowed fall and rise times.
Fil has collected a bunch of Electronics-related FAQ's in one spot, in HTML format.
There's actually an FAQ about FAQ.
The question of how to translate FAQ (in the collection sense) into French is a subtle one. One general approach is to translate the underlying expansion; this yields something like questions fréquemment posées, which is obviously unacceptable because it is too similar to the English. The solution has been to supply the English acronym with the French expansion foire aux questions. Normally, of course, a completely different and unrecognizable acronym would be required, but an identical acronym is acceptable in this case because the French expansion, meaning something like `question fair,' would be incomprehensible without it.
- n.
-
A litter of pigs (not pig litter, unless that's how you feel about
it, alright already let me finish the glossary entry!).
v.
- To give birth to a pig litter. (Similarly, to litter means to give birth to a litter, not necessarily of cats. Some places it does, anyway.)
The lyrics of Prumpufólkið were written by the comedian Jón Gnarr, who also performed the dozen or so sound effects on that song and wrote the lyrics to ``Óli HundaÓli,'' the fifth of thirteen songs on the album. In 2010 he was elected mayor of Reykjavík. This reminds me of a friend of mine who is also of Scandinavian descent: Moe (that's his actual nickname). Moe attended a high school in South Dakota that was so tiny that everyone had to fill multiple roles. Moe, for example, was both a nerd (computer programming) and a jock (basketball), and probably a bunch of things I never heard about. But Gnarr's is a different case, because his campaign for mayor was an extension of his comedian shtick, and was taken seriously by no one except, apparently, a plurality of Reykjavík voters.
Fanciful etymology: Boston Tea Party.
A friend of mine did a study of interpretation work at a Tokyo hospital. Some local nonprofits train volunteers for this (teaching them some Japanese medical vocabulary, at least) and supply the hospital with mostly native speakers of some of the more necessary languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Tagalog. One thing she didn't mention in the papers she wrote on the subject is the following: she sat in on some of the separate classes for groups training in various languages, and the Filipinos were clearly the ones who were having the most fun.
There's a FASO (webpage here) at the University of Notre Dame. Their major annual event is Fiestang Filipino. Fiestang I was held on April 29, 1995, and Fiestang II was December 2 the same calendar year, but since then it's been mostly the last week of February. In 2008 (Fiestang XIV, on February 23), it won the university's MSPS Culture Show of the Year award.
She said, ``fasta, fasta, the lights are turnin' red.'' -- Life in the fast lane -- sure to make you lose your mine.
Heretical precepts:
- The entire road is a parking lot.
- The rearview mirror is for (a) backing out of parking spaces, (b) hanging fuzzy dice and pine scent fresheners, (c) personal grooming.
- Blinkers should be used because the law requires it. They must be turned on at some point before the end of a turn.
- Most of driving is pressing on the accelerator when the lane ahead is empty, and on the brake otherwise. (When in doubt, depress both.)
- The driver with blinders has the right of way.
It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.
It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.
[According to The Profit (1973), by Kehlog Albran (1933-1927).]
Oh, I'm sorry, that's freight... but it's okay, you needed to know
that too.
![[Image of camel caravan]](images/www.halcyon.com-mongolia-camels.JPEG)
In book 17 of the Odyssey, as Odysseus finally arrives at his home disguised as a beggar, he explains to Eumaeus the swineherd (translation of A.T. Murray):
``... a ravening belly may no man hide, an accursed plague that brings many evils upon men. Because of it are the benched ships also made ready, that bear evil to foemen over the unresting sea.''
Shortly afterwards, Odysseus's dog dies. As Murray puts it --
``the fate of black death seized him straightway.''
The term oil is rather ambiguous, as it may refer to mineral oil or to petroleum. Fat is a more precise term that doesn't usually exclude triglyceride oils.
Need to cut down on your fat consumption? Here's a true fact and a health tip: Sugars are carbohydrates, not fats. For more worthless dieting tips, see calorie and lose weight entries.
Faux amis are like approximate homonyms. As in the case of English-language homonyms, there are two large subclasses of homonyms: homographs, which are written similarly, and homophones, which sound similar. These two subclasses overlap, and in languages with a one-to-one correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, the two coincide perfectly. (I am aware of no European language with such a perfect correspondence.) Different languages, of course, have different sound-value correspondences, so visual and aural classes of faux ami overlap imperfectly. An example of a visual (homograph) faux ami is once, meaning `eleven' in Spanish. In the episode of ER that aired October 25, 2001, a Spanish-speaking patient dies because her prescription drug bottle was labeled in English, ``once'' a day. She wouldn't have made this mistake if it had been labeled in the original Latin -- q.d. (For more on once in Spanish, see the entries for las once and las onces.)
Examples between English and German include knave/Knabe. This is a typical instance in which a word's negative connotation has become the essence of its denotation. The German modal verb wollen, with will as first- and third-person singular conjugations in the present, has the meaning English will had not too long ago: `want to.' (The modal for constructing future tense is werden.) Another example, for those who recognize it, is starve/sterben (as explained at the linked entry). If one is alive to the sound shifts that have affected English and German since their source languages diverged from a common Germanic root, one notices many more examples. E.g., German Tier, meaning `animal,' is the cognate of English deer; German dick (like Dutch dik) is an adjective meaning obese (i.e., thick); dieb and tief (both pronounced with long-ee vowel sound) mean `thief' and `deep,' in that order.
Some examples between English and Spanish:
- assist/asistir (the Spanish word means `attend,' mostly in the sense of being present -- i.e., attending a meeting, not a surgical ward; to assist or help is ayudar)
- carton/cartón (cartón is normally the material a carton is made of; discussion at the CTN entry)
- competence/competencia (`competition'; there are many synonyms for competence in Spanish, as in English, but competencia is not one of them)
- embarrassed/embarazada (`pregnant,' as discussed toward the end of the TP; shame, taken from the Latin root, is vergüenza, and embarrassed or ashamed is avergonzad{o|a})
- man/mano (`hand,' see discussion at mano a mano)
For an example involving a number of languages, see the libraries entry. Here are some other scattered examples involving at least two languages other than English:
| Language | word | English meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Swedish | tryck | push (as a door) |
| Norwegian (Bok Maal) | trekk | pull (as a door) |
| Language | word | English meaning | true friend |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Öl | oil | olya in Swedish (vide infra) |
| Swedish | öl | beer | Bier in German |
For a more thorough discussion of the above, see the this oe entry.
| Language | word | English meaning |
|---|---|---|
| German | Gift | poison |
| Swedish | gift | bride |
| English | gift | something given (see gift entry) |
| Language | word | English meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish | olla | pot |
| Swedish | olya | oil |
| Language | word | approximate English meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish | algún | some |
| cualquier | any | |
| French | aucun | none* |
| quelques | some, any |
* There are a few difficulties in translating these words into English. The first is that negation is coordinated or additive in French and Spanish, somewhat as in slang English. Thus, Standard English I have no problem is normally translated No tengo ningún problema in Spanish, corresponding to [I] don't have no problem. Typical parallel expressions in French use aucun in place of ningún. This corresponds to an older usage in Spanish, now markedly formal, that uses the adjective alguno in place of ninguno.
[Note: algún is the prepositive version of the adjective alguno. In Spanish as in French, adjectives other than quantifiers usually follow the substantives they modify -- placement before the substantive often marks poetic diction just as placement after the substantive marks poetic diction in English. Some adjectives appear commonly both before and after the substantive, and a few of these have different postpositive and prepositive forms. For example, the (etymologically related) adjectives that have masculine forms uno (`one'), alguno, and ninguno following a substantive have the forms un, algún, and algún before it (the feminine forms are unchanged). The adjective grande (postpositive form, both genders) becomes gran before a substantive.]
For glossary visitors not fluent in English, I will point out something well known (usually unreflectively) by native speakers. English takes advantage of the absence of coordination: negation in Standard English is somewhat multiplicative. For example, ``I don't want no feedback.'' For the purposes of elementary education, this is called a ``double negative'' and marked incorrect. Between even moderately sophisticated speakers, this is simply a kind of litotes: speaker is saying, generally, that he wants some feedback. If the stress is placed as indicated above, on the word no, then typically it might mean ``I do want less feedback, but not none at all.'' (If this ``not none'' bothers you, think ``not zero.'') Some emphatic intonation is usually applied to the sentence in order to make clear that the double negative is not a careless ungrammatical slip.
Generally speaking, English syntax uses the position of negation to make distinctions that other languages may make in different ways. In particular, negation of a modal verb in a periphrastic tense is not generally the same as negation of the verb. An example follows.
Did I ever tell you about the time I managed to not quite electrocute myself? (I was not suicidal. It would be wrong to say that ``I did not quite manage to electrocute myself.'') I may have mentioned it somewhere else around here -- there's a hint of it at the M (for Metal) entry. What happened was, I was operating an induction furnace, which melts ferromagnetic metal by surrounding a crucible with an electromagnetic coil and having the metal to be melted function as the core of a heavy-duty electromagnet. (The area enclosed by the hysteresis loop on the M-H diagram is the energy absorbed per cycle, up to a constant factor.) I doubt that the Filipino lab technician explained any of this to me.
To avoid oxidation, the crucible and the mold which received the molten metal from the crucible were enclosed in a vacuum chamber (which was evacuated cold and refilled with nitrogen before heating). The crucible was mounted on a horizontal axle, and this axle extended out of the chamber through a gasketed bearing, to a handle that allowed the operator (yours truly) to pivot the crucible for various purposes. On the handle there were a couple of thick bolts that hold the handle in place against the axle. Believing myself to be savvy and generally in-the-know about bolt-based mechanical systems, I never paid much attention to these exposed bolts on the handle, and I never touched them. Then one day my hand happened to brush one of them.
As I was getting up off the floor, at my new location a few feet away from the furnace, the lab tech ran up and admonished me in an alarmed voice --
A second difficulty in translating, say, French quelques into English has to do with the any/some distinction. The distinction between the English words any and some corresponds reasonably closely to that between Spanish algún and cualquier. German and French, although they have apparent cognates, do not make the distinction.
That annoying shriek that announces a fax - the fax calling tone defined by CCITT T.30, is only 1100 Hz.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
There are a variety of different kinds of Monte Carlo simulation, but they all have in common the approach of following the behavior of only the most interesting electrons