Currently, fuel cell technology is competitive only for certain niche applications such as space satellite power systems. The fuel-cell type used by NASA, and still the only one that is ``space qualified,'' uses potassium hydroxide electrolyte. More details about it and NASA's experiences with it are at the AFC entry. A number of new FC systems are being researched or developed. These are distinguished and designated primarily by their electrolyte material, and the main ones are Phosphoric Acid Fuel Cell (PAFC), Molten Carbonate FC (MCFC), Solid Oxide FC (SOFC) and Proton-Exchange Membrane FC (PEMFC). See also DMFC.
As of 1997, the basic problem was that costs were at US$3000/KW and up, whereas fossil fuel capital costs were about 800-1000 US$/KW. The gap is being closed from both ends.
The first fuel cell was demonstrated by William Grove in 1839, who used four large cells in series to generate the voltage to split water in a separate smaller cell.
A single hydrogen fuel cell has a voltage of about 0.7 V. That is, its open-circuit voltage is 0.7 V. As you draw current the voltage decreases. If it didn't you could just use a very small resistance to draw very high current and get arbitrarily high power. Let's start a research program to do just that! Maybe not. The first law of thermodynamics is such a party-pooper.
I had forgotten about the FCAT when I happened to see some thick workbooks for sale cheap. Their titles were Show What You Know® on the <n>th Grade FCAT. The ones I saw had <n> values of 4 and 5. It saddened me; Mr. Thomas Gradgrind would have been pleased. The workbooks came in two versions: ``Student Workbook'' (pink, with a place for the child to scrawl a name on the front) and ``Parent/Teacher Edition'' (blue).
I suppose the FCAT is a ``comprehensive assessment'' of how well the children have been prepped for the test, so it's about as uncomprehensive as ``comprehensive'' gets. Perhaps there is some inadvertent spillover of non-test-oriented learning that affects the FCAT grade. I can't remember the (clever punning) title right now, but I once read a book about a year in the life of an elementary school elsewhere (Maryland, if memory serves) that was under its own state's testing gun. It was in a poor neighborhood, and it regularly received extra state funding to improve its performance. Teachers and principal were hostages to the often chaotic home lives of their students, and lived in terror of poor test results.
½ 2which is the highest packing density possible for hard spheres in three dimensions. The problem of finding the densest possible sphere packing is easily visualized, and no denser packing than FCC or HCP was ever reported, yet it is immensely difficult to prove rigorously that there is no denser packing, as the following proverb expresses:/6 ,
Every physicist knows, and every mathematician believes, that Face-Centered Cubic has the highest possible packing density.The hypothesis that this widely-held belief is correct was called the Kepler conjecture. Kepler made this hypothesis in 1611. In 1831, Gauss demonstrated that FCC has the highest packing density of any periodic (i.e., lattice) packing, but for a long time there was no proof that a nonperiodic packing might not exist with higher density, so the Kepler problem was still open. The final proof was given by Hales in a series of papers ending in 1998.
In many higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces, it is unknown even whether the closest hypersphere packings have crystal (i.e. translation) symmetry.
The fact that FCC and HCP have identical, maximal packing densities has, as one of its most immediate reflections in crystallography, the fact that all noble gases (the group VIII-A elements) all have HCP or FCC structure. The reason is that with their closed atomic shells, noble gas atoms have weak interatomic forces and maintain their spherical symmetry more accurately in the presence of external perturbations. The interatomic forces among noble atoms therefore closely approximate the hard-sphere model. Helium (He) freezes in HCP (under pressure only; at atmospheric pressure, it is fluid -- superfluid, actually -- down to T = 0K). The other noble elements freeze in FCC. The number and distance of nearest neighbors is the same in FCC and HCP, so the difference in energy between the two structures, determining which is the equilibrium lattice, is dominated by van der Waals interaction between next-nearest neighbors.
FCC is a Bravais lattice, and its Wigner-Seitz cell is a rhombic dodecahedron. Its reciprocal lattice is Body-Centered Cubic (BCC).
It is convenient to regard the FCC lattice as a simple-cubic (SC) lattice with basis. For that picture, consider an SC lattice with points on hax + jay + kaz (a is the cubic lattice spacing; h, j, k are integers; x, y, and z are orthogonal unit vectors, so that ax, ay, and az are a set of primitive lattice vectors for the SC lattice). An FCC lattice can be generated using a basis of 0, (y + z)/2 , (x + z)/2 , and (x + y)/2 .
In French it's the PACC (formerly the FPACC). Don't worry -- it's national but nongovernmental, so everything is in English.
In the name transition from FCS to FNS, there doesn't appear to have been a time when the official name could be abbreviated FCNS. However, either out of confusion or a desire to avoid confusion, FCNS has also been used.
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Look, if you mean freon, you can just say Freone. In any case, it's not the hydrogen that people worry about. It's not even the fluorine people are worried about, but mostly the chlorine -- on account of the ozone layer.
Information bits are stored on floppy disks, or diskettes, as orientation patterns of magnetic domains. X-rays are not particularly likely to flip these orientations. The concern about airport X-ray scanners has to do with the equipment used to generate the X-rays. This is high-power and therefore high-current, and high currents generate high magnetic fields, which certainly might wipe or corrupt diskettes. FWIW, I've put my portable, my quasiportable (Macintosh SE/30; hey -- it's got a handle on it!), and my diskettes through plenty of X-ray machines with no discernible problems. (Wow, historical entry.) Of course, YMMV.
The words state and district above translate the German Land and Bezirk. I guess if you read that last word in English it sounds like a common pronunciation of berserk, so right there I've filled my humor quota for the day. Correctly pronounced in German, it sounds something like ``beh TSEERK'' in English, which doesn't look a whole lot saner. Bezirke are like counties, so their capitals are like county seats. The proper term is Kreisstadt, and it doesn't gain much in translation.
The city and surrounding district take their name from die Fulda, a 218-km river, half of that navigable, whose waters join those of the Werra to form the Weser. The origin of the name Fulda is uncertain.
FDA-approved synthetic food colors have FD&C numbers.
The FSLIC was available to insure deposits at S&L's and savings banks from 1934 until 1989. As explained at the RTC entry, since 1989 the FDIC has also been the federal deposit-insurance corporation for these other banks.
For a long time the maximum amount insured per account per bank was $100,000. At the time of the market meltdown of September 2008, some kinds of accounts had their maximum insured amounts temporarily raised to $250,000, and that increase was eventually made permanent. The notion of ``per account'' is slightly tricky. For example, if a person has two essentially equivalent individual accounts at one bank, then as far as the FDIC is concerned that's one account. On the other hand, if the individual has one account that is P.O.D. to some particular person, and another that is not, then those may each be separately insured up to the maximum. But don't take my word! Ask your bank; everything depends on details of control of the assets.
The accounts referred to above are ordinary savings and checking accounts. Money-market accounts and certificates of deposit, at least, may be subject to different rules. Also, the requirement that accounts be federally insured, while now fairly uniform for ordinary accounts, may not extend to higher-yield accounts. At least in Indiana, I had money in a privately-insured money-market account as recently as 2008. This was through a credit union, which was essentially acting as an intermediary for a self-insured outside institution. I don't know if Indiana or some other state allows similar arrangements through other kinds of financial institutions, but I'm just saying: I don't know that they don't. Generally speaking, if you want to take a risk, there are plenty of ways to do it. And if you don't want to take any risk, then there may be no way to do that, unless you count burning your money and having nothing left to lose.
The German flag consists of three horizontal bands: black, red, and yellow (schwarz, rot, und gelb) from top to bottom. In the color shorthand for political parties, the Christian Democratic parties (CDU and CSU) are ``black,'' the socialist parties (primarily the SPD) are ``red,'' and the FDP is `yellow.' The yellows are a centrist party in the qualitative sense of being a moderate party that in some respects occupies the political middle ground between the reds and blacks. [I guess if you insist on seeing latent racial thinking everywhere, then you will also be pleased to recall that it was Kaiser Wilhelm II who coined the term ``yellow peril'' (gelbe Gefahr, discussed at the Morgenlande entry).]
An SPD-FDP coalition is known as a red-yellow coalition. A coalition of the (CDU/CSU) with the FDP is called a black-yellow coalition. In the elections of 2005 left parliamentary seats more broadly distributed than ever before, so no two-party coalition other than a grand coalition could make a majority. One of the possibilities considered was a black-yellow-green Jamaika-Koalition, named after the colors of the Jamaican flag.
The FDP was for a period in a coalition government with the SDP, but after sixteen years as junior partner of the CDU/CSU, with the passing of the sixties generation of Nationalliberale, and with the rise of the Greens as a natural coalition partner of the socialists, it has clearly become a party of the right -- a ``liberal'' party in the current sense of that term in Europe, favoring economic liberalization and reduced government in general. It has adopted as mottoes ``So viel Staat wie nötig, so wenig Staat wie möglich'' (`as much state [government] as necessary; as little state as possible') and ``Schaffung und Wahrung der Freiheit des Einzelnen'' (`creation and preservation of the freedom of the individual').
With 8.8% of the vote in the 1998 general elections, they were allocated 44 seats (out of 669).
See also the entry on dog food.
In fact, when I made up a list, it quickly became unwieldy, so I've decided only to add items for which I have either written something useful or found a good link (mostly, as of 1997.12.21, from Eric's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography).
- Plato (especially the dialogue where Socrates maneuvers a slave boy to prove the Pythagorean theorem, the Timaeus and its influence on Kepler)
- Parmenides, mostly in connection with Zeno and Democritus. There's a local entry.
- Democritus, both on account of his atomic hypothesis and of Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on his philosophy.
- Zeno, and other ancient Greeks who had problems with time-evolution concepts.
- Aristotle, how his Poetics is really about drama, how his ``man is a political animal'' is a poor translation (``social animal'' is better), his tusk conjecture, his other biological work, especially the conclusion that eels come from horse hairs that fall into the water, the short-lived influence of his Lyceum on scientific approach to problems, Grosseteste and Francis Bacon and embezzlement and the Tower of London, his `apocryphal' works, the demonstration that the square root of two is irrational, the relationship of Plato and Aristotle to the bean eaters, the octave, Aristotle's theory of potential, relationship to Plato's forms, etc.
- Hippocrates, and how much of his work can really be attributed to him; what is the Hippocratic oath really, isn't it Maimonides's?
- Galen, his cure for gout (swallow gold), Paracelsus's ridicule of it, the likelihood that it was not entirely ineffective.
- Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493-1541) [Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim] and the etymology of gas, book-burning.
- Translation, multilingualism, polyglossia, logorrhea, thinking and dreaming verbally or not, PET brain scans, former Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and his ex-wife Margaret.
- llamas.
- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Joe LaGrange, Napoleon, Descartes.
- Decline and Fall of the University.
- The New York Times science reporting has a personality fetish.
The FE used to be called the Engineer-In-Training (EIT) exam. People who successfully pass the test may be called engineers-in-training or engineering interns, but use of their given names is probably preferable. For surveyors, the NCEES administers a different exam called the Fundamentals of Land Surveying (FLS) exam.
The FE and FLS exams are preliminary to the taking of the Professional Engineering (PE) and Professional Land Surveying (PLS) exams, respectively.
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A Mid-Iron is what a two iron (golf club) used to be called.
There's a TV commercial running these days (May 2006, mindestens) that plays off the stereotypes associated with fear of commitment. It's for Mitchum antiperspirant, which sells an urbanized Marlboro-man image for just the price of a stick. The commercial begins with a flattering portrait of you the customer, which includes this: ``Your only real fear is commitment.''
I saw an episode of a prime-time soap in 2003 or so -- I think it was Sex and the City. One of the regular-cast characters encounters an old high-school flame who looks a lot like David Duchovny (this isn't part of the story; it's part of the guest cast). They rekindle their relationship. He doesn't seem to have too great a fear of commitment. After sex and a few dates, he reveals to her that -- you know, I can just walk away from this entry whenever I want. I'd kick the f______ dust off my shoes and never look back. I mean, is it about me, or is it about you? Or is it really about ``fear of commitment,'' the head term?
Alright, let's try to patch this up. The Duchovny character turns out to be sort of part-time institutionalized. He usually spends his nights in bedlam. If you remember, that's not a kind of bed. By now one's probably not allowed to call it that or an insane asylum or even a mental-health facility. Let's call it a happiness center. All the same, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be committed there.
Really! I'm really, really sorry! It just sounded cool! I didn't know it would have offensive implications. Oh I'm really, really--wait a second. I'm not sorry. I've just developed a Social Theory of Masculinist Ethics, and according to that, it's alright. Everything is relative, you know, except Uncle Joe.
That's enough for today. Tomorrow: Monday.
``Note that presently campaigns for the Senate file their reports with the Secretary of the Senate -- not with the FEC -- so these reports are not available [there]. Reports of the National Party Senatorial Campaign Committees are, however, included in the system. (Microfilm copies of Senate reports are on file at the Commission offices in Washington, and candidates must also file copies with their state elections office.)''
I should say something more about the limitations of federalism, beyond what you might gather from the entry on the principle of subsidiarity. I had a particular something more in mind when I started this entry but, distraught at Amanda's continuing difficulties with the legal system and her oily complexion, I was unable to finish and have now forgotten what I was going to add. You can help me out by completing this paragraph:
But really, federalism is all about limitations. Just this year, for example, ...
Hurry! Hurry to the website!
Among C. Northcote Parkinson's many great contributions to bureaucracy science were his preliminary investigations of the ``Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.'' [Quote is from Parkinson's Law (1957), available online from a Russian site, but perhaps only until the copyright holder finds out.] The standard example given of a low-cost/long-discussion item is coffee -- something everyone knows something they think worth prolonging a meeting to say. Here's something I circled on page D3 of the New York Times, SportsMonday, August 30, 1999. This continued the page D1 lead story about a secret agreement between the NFL and the NFL players' union under which a number of players who tested positive for illegal drugs went unpunished. (Unpunished by the league, of course. No one would think of applying the ordinary laws that put mere nonprofessional athletes in jail. It turns out that being a professional athlete does not constitute ``probable cause'' to test for drug use or search for evidence of possession, so an agreement on drug testing can be reached between league and union without any inconvenient involvement of the government, which anyway is too busy waging its war on drugs to get involved.)
Mark Collins, a former Giants cornerback, had been a player representative for 12 years and, though then recently retired as a player, remained a member of the union's executive committee. He had said in an earlier interview that there was usually a lot of bickering at meetings, and that players were known to argue about whether to use Federal Express or the United Parcel Service to mail documents. ``We get a lot done,'' he claimed, ``but things get pretty intense.''
An event this morning inspired me to haiku. I've entitled it ``New Computer.''
I hoped it was FedEx, but
it was the jay double-yoo.
If you read too many acronyms, soon you read too much into acronyms. Same problem with the next one (as opposed to HungryWorld).
If you would have me weep, begin the Strain, Then I shall feel your Sorrows, feel your Pain; But if your Heroes act not what they say, I sleep or laugh the lifeless Scene away.
The thought seems to have been in the air during that last decade of Jacobitism. In 1743 Henry Fielding published the following in a poem called ``Of Good-Nature'' in a three-volume set of Miscellanies. (The ``Name'' referred to is ``Good-nature.'')
What by this Name, then, shall be understood? What? but the glorious Lust of doing Good? The Heart that finds it Happiness to please, Can feel another's Pain, and taste his Ease. The Cheek that with another's Joy can glow, Turn pale, and sicken with another's Woe;
The earliest version or similar formulation that I can find, and probably the one that was most celebrated in its time, occurs in a much-reprinted minor poem of Alexander Pope entitled ``The Universal Prayer, Deo Opt. Max.'' The phrase of interest occurs in the tenth of thirteen stanzas:
Teach me to feel another's Woe; To hide the Fault I see; That Mercy I to others show, That Mercy show to me.
There are many similar expressions that are happily forgotten. Here are two such that were constructed with a third-person agent: (1) John Thelwall wrote ``Still prone to feel another's pain, / And to relieve inclin'd'' in a clever boring poem of 1787. (2) Jimmy Carter began an Address to the Nation with ``Good Evening. Exactly three years ago on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for the presidency of the United States. I promised you a president who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain and who shares your dreams, and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.'' (The pain people were feeling was an oil shortage created when Iran suspended oil exports following the overthrow of the Shah.)
Clinton introduced the phrase while responding to Act-Up member Bob Rafsky, who was heckling Clinton at a March 26, 1992, campaign stop at Laura Belle, a nightclub in Midtown Manhattan. Here's Clinton's key turn, as recorded by CNN and reported by the New York Times:
Let me tell you something. If I were dying of ambition, I wouldn't have stood up here and put up with all this crap I've put up with for the last six months. I'm fighting to change this country.And let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something else. You do not have the right to treat any human being, including me, with no respect because of what you're worried about. I did not cause it. I'm trying to do something about it. I have treated you and all the people who've interrupted my rally with a hell of a lot more respect than you've treated me, and it's time you started thinking about that.
I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you're no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don't agree with me, go support somebody else for President but quit talking to me like that. This is not a matter of personal attack; it's a matter of human wrong.
You can be for George Bush, you can be for somebody else, but do not stand up here at my rally, where other people paid to come, and insult me without -- listen, that's fine, I'll give you your money back if you want it, out of my own pocket.
I understand that you're hurting, but you won't stop hurting by trying to hurt other people. That's what I try to tell all you folks. You're not going to stop hurting by trying to hurt other people.
The reason I'm still in public life is because I've kept my commitments. That's why I'm still here. That's why I'm still standing here. And I'm sick and tired of all these people who don't know me, know nothing about my life, know nothing about the battles that I've fought, know nothing about the life I've lived, making snotty-nose remarks about how I haven't done anything in my life and it's all driven ambition. That's bull, and I'm tired of it.
And anybody -- there are other choices on the ballot. Go get 'em is my answer to you. If you want somebody that'll fight AIDS, vote for me, because when I come in to do something, I do it, and I fight for it.
The latest published work I've seen on this is an article entitled ``Harnessing High-Altitude Wind Power,'' in IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, vol. 22, no. 1 (March 2007), pp. 136-144. The authors are Bryan W. Roberts, Shepard, Ken Caldeira, M. Elizabeth Cannon, David G. Eccles, Albert J. Grenier, and Jonathan F. Freidin. They reported the design of a 240kW craft.
Frankfurter was born on November 15, 1882, and died on February 22, 1965; he is best remembered for his service as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from January 30, 1939, until August 28, 1962.
Phillips began his interviews with Frankfurter in 1953, as part of an ongoing oral history project at Columbia University, and the original idea was to produce archival material. According to Phillips's foreword (p. ix) ``During our sessions as we talked our way through his life to his appointment to the Court in 1939, no thought was given to the possibility of publication. ... It was only when the recordings were completed and ready to be filed away for future researchers that a re-reading made it clear that these recorded memories were [worth publishing]. Editing has been done in the interest of providing unity and flow to the work as a whole with relatively few retrospective changes in wording and phraseology.'' I will silently repair the punctuation in any of the quotes from this book that I use in this glossary.
The website <http://www.lafemis.fr/> evidently belongs to the same organization, but while it does mention the historical connection with l'IDHEC, it makes no mention of any INIS. It does mention that since 1998 it has enjoyed the support of the French ministry of culture. More interestingly, the organization is referred to as ``la fémis, école nationale supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son.'' In fact, one may find the acronym ENSMIS used in various places such as sound engineers' résumés, and even once or twice in lafemis.fr webpages.
My best guess is that one string that came with government support was that the school should be nominally national rather than European, but that people liked the old acronym and kept using it informally and unofficially. Moreover, an identically named INIS was already in existence in Quebec, with direct Canadian government support since at least 1990. In view of the namespace conflict, continued use of the already popular F-word must have seemed sensible. Proper obeisance was shown to the national government by the steadfast ignoring of the original expansion of the word and by tactics that obliterate the original sense. The ``tactics,'' as they must seem to any lexicographer, are the use of lower case and an acute accent on the e. The latter disguise is inspired: anyone guessing at an expansion is likely to suppose the e represents École rather than Européenne. Also, because accents have a habit of disappearing on capitalization, anyone aware of the old capitalized form could reasonably suppose that the accent had been there in reality all along. All in all, a well-camouflaged acronym subversion.
FEMMSS is going to be another club for the grievance-as-Weltanschauung crowd, which includes much of the humanities faculty at your better universities. There was an organizational meeting on March 2004 at the Penn State Conference on The Ethics and Epistemologies of Ignorance. For Kant's observation on ignorance experts, see the Idiot entry.
Fermions obey Fermi-Dirac statistics: their total wavefunctions must be antisymmetric. When expressed in terms of single-particle quantum states, this implies that fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle.
So in original. The period probably should be a semicolon.
On June 25, 2001, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Owasso Independent School District v. Falvo, 00-1073, that should be of interest to anyone who teaches or is otherwise humiliated in a classroom. The court will probably have to decide whether classmate grading of swapped papers violates FERPA.
The particular case in question was brought by Kristja J. Falvo in 1998, who sued the Owasso, Okla., school district (in suburban Tulsa). She contended that three of her children were embarrassed when classmates graded each other's work and called out grades to the teacher. A federal judge rejected her claim, but last year the 10th US Circuit Court ruled that FERPA was violated. The act prohibits the release of ``education records'' without parental consent, and the tenth circuit found that grades students record on homework or tests and then report to a teacher are ``education records.''
The regulations are imposed by the usual mechanism: federal monies not to be disbursed to institutions that violate them. This affects virtually all public schools, AFAIK, and apparently few if any private schools.
I've also seen the F of FERPA incorrectly expanded as ``Federal.''
Ottawa used to host a minor-league baseball team called the Lynx. Following the 2007 season, the team moved to Allentown, Pa., to become a Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies. Allentown is part of the rust belt: areas that used to have a thriving iron-and-steel industry and that now don't.
Well, that's not entirely accurate: a down-sized steel industry that employs fewer workers thrives in some places, but I'm not going to do heavy industrial research for an entry that's basically about a furry pig. Oh, all right, I suppose when the research falls in my lap I might as well type it in:
Through much of the 1970's and 80's, the United States, under intense competitive pressure from foreign countries, underwent an often agonizing economic restructuring. New and much more productive methods were adopted to produce goods that could compete with the flood of imports. Steel, which for a century had been the sine qua non of an industrialized economy, was a case in point. In 1974, 521,000 American steel workers were producing 99 million tons. In 2000, nearly exactly the same amount was being produced by only 151,000 workers.That's from a February 2008 Commentary article by John Steele Gordon. (Yes, the surname Steele is related to steel -- it was a name given to foundry workers in the Middle Ages. The word -- spelled style in Old English -- has been traced back to at least around 725, and the forms of its cognates in Northern and Western Germanic branches indicate that the vocable goes back to proto-Germanic. Cognates in non-Germanic languages, like Russian and Old Prussian, appear to be more recent loans from German or Scandinavian. This feels really weird; I thought I was into at least my third tangent, yet I'm writing content that's actually somewhat relevant to the head term.)
Steele and similar names (stele was the typical Middle English spelling) were also given to people who were just tough. A more recent example of the practice was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. He was born Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (that's a transliteration of the Russian form of his Georgian name). His assumed name Stalin means `made of steel.' It apparently had nothing directly to do with steles, funerary or otherwise. You could be forgiven for thinking so, but you probably wouldn't have survived saying so. The Arabic word for iron is hadid.
Anyway, fast forward back to the global market and so forth, and that article by John Steele Gordon, of all aptronymic authors. The article title was ``Look Who's Afraid of Free Trade.'' The ``who'' turned out to be the Democrats, and Gordon reminded the reader that Democrats have been the party of free trade since the time of Jackson. I'd have written that it had been the party of free trade. I think the surprise implied by the title would have been more appropriate a quarter of a century ago.
Billy Joel wrote a song called ``Allentown'' (1982) about economic hardship, and the mayor of Allentown tried to shake him down for a share of the profits. That's sharper evidence than industrial statistics. I've got family in Allentown, but nobody was ever in the steel industry. One time when I visited in the 1960's there was a 1"-diameter boule of silicon on the kitchen table, and in an odd way that's about as far as you can get from the steel industry and still have anything to do with manufacturing.
Where was I? So the new owners called the team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs and chose a large furry pig as mascot. (No, pigs are not notably furry, but this is a pig of the mascot species. And pig iron is kinda shaggy stuff anyway.) Having introduced or imposed the mascot, and perhaps belatedly thinking that they ought to have some prospective-fan input, they solicited suggestions for the mascot name. There were 7345 submissions, and the most popular name, with 235 submissions, was ``Ferrous.'' Another suggestion was Porkchop, which was the name the owners chose. As they quickly learned following the announcement of the name, porkchop is a derogatory term for a Puerto Rican.
If the team had still been in Canada, this error would have been punished by means of an efficient modern instrument known as a ``human rights tribunal.'' (It's ``efficient'' because part of the torture is the star chamber itself. No need to wait for the inevitable conviction.) Instead, following immediate protests that, absent a receptive government entity, had to go directly to the owners, the team switched to plan B the very next day (December 2, 2007): ``Ferrous.'' FeRROUS (this is the official capitalization as of 2013, since I-don't-know when) wears number 26, the atomic number of iron. (Ferrous is also the mascot of the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Single-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Given that this differently-named team is in a different league and plays games in a different region, the coincidence of mascot names was not expected to be a problem. FWIW, the last previous time that Allentown had had a major-league-affiliated baseball team was 1958-60; that team was called the Allentown Red Sox.)
At some point, a furry sow named FeFe was added to the mascot lineup. She sports pigtails and doesn't seem to have a number, because she wears team gear but not a uniform. Don't feel bad if you didn't groan immediately at the ``pigtails'' pun. It was years before I noticed that FeRROUS is a pun on feroz, the Puerto Rican word that means `ferocious.' The second syllable is in all-caps because the Spanish word is stressed on the ult.
In demographics and social sciences today, the term fertility is used consistently to mean what might be called ``manifested fertility'' or perhaps ``fecundity.'' A couple of our entries that mention fertility in this (demographers') sense are kyoiku-mama and WEU. (For the ordinary sense of the word fertility, demographers use ``biological fertility.'')
Fertility is computed by demographers as the number of children born per woman. This expression is a kind of shorthand for the actual mathematical definition. Obviously there are difficulties if one tries to take it as a strict definition. One difficulty is that one does not know how many children a woman will have until she is past her reproductive period (nowadays that is usually until menopause; at various times and places it has often been until death). Hence, for a large fraction of women and girls alive at any given time, one does not know the value of the individual vital statistic. A second problem with understanding the loose definition rigidly arises because fertility varies over time. Even when computing fertilities in the distant-enough past, with all necessary data putatively available, it is unclear how to assign the time in a meaningful way. For example, in one strict interpretation, the fertility rises immediately when a cohort of girls is born who will have a high birth rate years later.
These problems are analogous to the problems of defining life expectancy, and the solution is similar. In any given year, one can know (for the previous year, which is ``current'' in published statistics) how many children are born to women of each age. To compute fertility, one uses that current rate to estimate how many children women currently in each age group will ever have. Thus, the total number of offspring that women who are currently 25 will ever have is estimated by assuming that at age 26 (i.e., the next year) they will have offspring at the same rate as current 26-year-olds, at 27 (two years out) at the same rate as the current age-27 cohort, etc. This makes it possible to fold the current demographic profile (more-or-less known) into an estimate of future birth rate (the current birth rate). There are elementary corrections to this that are based on mortality rates (next year there won't be quite so many 26-year-olds as there are 25-year-olds today, because some will die -- tragically young). When birth rates are changing, one can attempt to extrapolate future birth rates in order to get a better estimate of fertility. There is no real agreement on how to do this, since many of the factors affecting whether women have children are not known, often by the women themselves.
(That's right, it's nothing but a convolution integral.)
Here's a description from Charles Evans & Associates.
Pronounced both eff-ee-tee and as word rhyming with set.
1 wapentakes = hundred (Danish term) (Odd, though, because Danish doesn't use w much.) 1 hundred = 100 hides (in principle), a subdivision of a shire. 1 knight's fee = 12 hides 1 sulong = 2 hides (Kentish unit) 1 hide = 120 acres for tax-assessment purposes (actual area varies) 1 hide = 4 virgates 1 hide = the land that can be cultivated by an eight-ox plow in one year 1 carucate = 1 hide (in the Danelaw) 1 yoke = 2 virgates (Kentish unit) 1 arpen = 1 acre
(The term ``fill factor'' evidently refers to the fact that power is represented by a rectangle on the I-V characteristic. The simpleminded maximum is the area of a rectangle of height ISC and width VOC. The real maximum power is the area of the largest rectangle that can be inscribed from the current and voltage axes to a point on the solar cell's I-V characteristic. The fill factor is the fraction of the former rectangle filled by the latter.)
An alternative discussion of this stuff is at the MPP (Maximum Power Point) entry.
``French fries'' (or just ``fries'') is American for potatoes cut into long pieces and fried. Potatoes fried in other shapes are called by various names -- curly fries, country fries, home [style] fries, hash browns, potato cubes, 'tater bits, Cajun fries, etc.
Originally, ``French fries'' was a more specific term implying that the lengths of potato had been deep fried. That's the impression I have from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (11th edn., 1965), which defines French frying as a general procedure that we would now call deep frying. (Frying by immersion in hot shortening -- ``fat,'' in the book's definition. Fast-food restaurants nowadays use vegetable oil.) The book offers recipes for both French fries and German fries. The German fries were similar, but the fat was not as hot; they took 15 minutes to fry instead of 5 for the FF. The next time I get limp, soggy fries, I'll complain that if I'd wanted German fries, I'd have asked for them. Realistically, though, nowadays there's no reliable terminological distinction between potatoes deep fried (placed in a basket and immersed in shortening), potatoes grilled on a metal surface, and potatoes shallow fried (my neologism for fried by immersion in tepid oil, since no one would understand ``German fried''). Potatoes are not the ideal vegetable to stir fry.
The term ``French fry'' is surprising to the French; the idea of serving potatoes cut and fried was a Belgian innovation a couple of centuries ago. For all I know, the idea of slicing them twice, so they'd be long instead of flat, was an American innovation. (In Japanese, the names of numbers change depending on the general kind of thing that is being counted. Flat things and long things, for example, get different kinds of numbers.) In French, `fried potatoes' are normally called frites -- more or less literally `fries.' If you wanted to get a bit more specific, it wouldn't be as helpful as you'd suppose. The standard long term is pommes frites, which can be literally translated `fried apples' -- pomme is `apple'; pomme de terre (`earth apple') is `potato.' In the US, road apple is what a horse's behind leaves behind. The French are also innocent in the invention of what is called ``French [salad] dressing'' in the US -- a goop of equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup. ``French toast'' is just the new name that was given to ``German toast'' when Germany became the main enemy and France an ally in WWI. Belgium was overrun by German forces in that war and the next.
Actually, Belgian fries are fried twice, first at high temperature and then at a lower temperature. It seems like a compromise between French Fries and German fries. What the world needs is a truly scholarly cookbook. Fries in the US are cooked in the French way: a single stage.
The true origin of the potato chip is controversial. My own experiments indicate that it's not too easy to make, either.
British `chips' are fried potatoes, but not what most US restaurants would advertise as ``French fries.'' For many years in London, there were merchants who sold freshly fried fish, and merchants who sold freshly fried potatoes, but none who offered both. Selling fish and chips together was a twentieth-century innovation.
The Guinness Book of World Records reports that someone survived more than a year on just potatoes and water. It doesn't say what prompted him to live again.
The elementary school pupil who spelled potato correctly, but was persuaded by veep Quayle to add a final `e,' had his moment of fame afterward; I saw him on the David Letterman show, he seemed like a bright kid. Today, August 8, 1997, the news media reports tracking him down. He dropped out of high school and works for a Pontiac dealer in Trenton. He's still in the vanguard of linguistic innovation, though: he was described as an `unwed father.'
Living in Indiana (IN), the home state of J. Danforth Quayle, I passed by an Arby's recently that advertised ``Potatoe'' something or others. James C. Quayle, Dan's father, died in July 2000.
Somewhere else in this glossary I explain that politicians like classroom audiences because they tend to ask questions keyed to the intellectual level of political rhetoric, rather than to the level of ordinary intelligent conversation. Anyway, something like that. You knew that, of course -- it's obvious. But you don't realize how long it's been going on. I have here before me a dusty old copy of the New York Times ``Week in Review'' section. The lead story: ``Greasy Kid Stuff: Washington Kidnaps Dick and Jane.'' The featured pull-out quote: ``Children are cute, and useful to politicians, in ways that adults aren't.'' It was news that week, so that must be when this political trick was first tried. Sunday, June 15, 1997. There you go.
J. McSavage and S. Trevisan published a study entitled ``The use and abuse of frying oil'' in Food Service Technology [vol. 1, #2, pp. 85-92 (2001)]. They assessed the quality of frying oil discarded by a sample of catering establishments, using a rapid test method to measure the FFA concentration. ``Results show that none of the establishments used an objective assessment method; a lack of consistency between establishments, and many discarding oil where the FFA levels were above the recommended safe level.''
FFC makes Church Pew Cushions! Of course! Why didn't I think of it?
I was sort of a greeter at Gary's wedding (yeah, and taxi driver too), and when Wally and his wife came in, he explained that he considered that attending this wedding would satisfy his personal church attendance obligations for the week. Most weeks, Wally is a Roman Catholic. This week, I told him to put on a yamulka. He told me later that when he went to sit down in the pews, and seeing no knee-rests, it struck him that Jews must be serious masochists about worship. He might be right, but there's no full genuflection in Jewish worship.
Nobody understood the structure of the beast, and its various limbs hardly knew what else they were attached to, so in July 1983, with great fanfare (i.e. with twenty-page glossy inserts in The Economist), FFI introduced a unifying corporate identity, ``Investors in Industry,'' and a 3i logo painted in wavy-edged watercolors, with the dot over the "i" replaced with a drawing of an eye. Except for ICFC, the 3i symbol began to be used as a prefix to the names of the various entities (``3i FFS'' and so forth).
For later developments, see the 3i entry.