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A symbol related to (g) is the upward-pointing arrow, which indicates that a gaseous reaction product is allowed to escape (typically from the solution in which other reactants are dissolved). Many elementary reactions are driven to completion by the escape of a gaseous product. Kinematically, one can regard this as a much-reduced rate for the reverse reaction: the product gas goes away and is no longer available to participate in a reverse reaction with the condensed products of the forward reaction. Thermodynamically, one can think of this as an entropy-driven reaction: the entropy of the gas, when ``confined'' in an infinite volume, is infinite. (In a finite volume, it grows logarithmically with the volume.)
Why use confusing single-letter amino-acid codes? Look, a typical protein is thousands of monomers long.
Once when I volunteered at Recording for the Blind, I was monitor for the recording of a biochemistry textbook. The terms of RFB's standard agreement with publishers require that all content be faithfully recorded and all the pictures described in detail. (I guess publishers will only allow a ``copy'' rather than an abridged ``derivative work.'') One page of the biochemistry book illustrated schematically a polypeptide chain (a short protein) that had been sequenced, each monomer represented by a little box with a three-letter code. For a few minutes, all the reader did was rattle off ``...glutamine, valine, glutamic acid, alanine, arginine, serine, alanine, ....''
I prefer ``Gravitation.''
Traditionally, one ``John'' was regarded as the author of GJohn and of [the Book of] Revelations, but serious scholarship now regards this as highly improbable, since the Greek of one of the texts (Revelations) contains many ``Palestinian'' errors and the other does not. ``GJohn'' is occasionally used to designate the John who was the (presumed single) author of the text GJohn.
The gram may have some other uses.
Extensions:
| <bg>, <BG> | Big Grin |
| <eg> | evil grin |
| <g,d&r> | grinning, ducking & running |
| <g,d&rvvf> | grinning, ducking & running very very fast... |
| <vbg> | very big grin |
In German, euro is spelled Euro; the pronounciation, written in English, would be something like ``OY-hroe.'' (As Twain remarked, foreigners spell better than they pronounce.) Also in German, one hundredth of a euro is a Cent. According to the usual German rules, this should be pronounced as ``tsent'' would be in English, unless it is regarded as a loan word from, say, American English, in which case it should be pronounced ``cent.'' In fact, German dictionaries generally favor the ts pronunciation, but the s pronunciation seems to prevail in practice.
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Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm as bad as most of the other beer receivers at the sports bar.
The entry looks a little thin.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
For some events (e.g. minor-league baseball, many rock concerts), all the seating is general admission. Rock concert promoters are reported to favor ``festival seating,'' as GA seating is also called, on the theory that the most enthusiastic fans get near the stage and generate excitement for the rest of the crowd; some performers and bands insist on a festival seating area near the stage. Many of the professional classical music concerts, most of the plays, and all of the operas I can recall had assigned seating, or at least assigned sections. Sporting events have typically been a mix, with some GA sections.
All the classes I have ever taught were GA, but none of them has had a mosh pit. I think I had better liven up the presentations. Can I do laser lightshows with PowerPoint?
I've heard the story that when Roosevelt and Stalin negotiated over the form of the UN, Stalin wanted every Soviet Republic of the USSR (all 15) to have a vote in the GA. Roosevelt counterproposed that then every one of the united states (all 48) should have a vote. In a compromise, Stalin got separate membership and GA votes for Ukraine and Belarus. If this seems like an unbalanced compromise, maybe not the best negotiating on FDR's part, well, you're catching on.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Georgia. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Georgia city and town links.
Not the same as the former soviet republic and current Russian vassal state of Georgia (.ge).
If you want to learn about gravure, you probably want to know about the GEF.
There's another link from the GAA homepage entitled ``What's Gravure?'' Do you feel entitled, punk? The explanation begins ``Gravure is an intaglio printing process. The image carrier has the image cut or etched below the surface of the non-image area.'' Thank you. I think maybe I'll just go to Kinko's.
Turns out the ``generally accepted'' doesn't stretch across national borders; US and Canadian GAAP are different, requiring separate tallies in the annual report of a company traded on US and Canadian boards.
Room temperature band gap is 1.43 eV. It's a direct-gap III-V semiconductor. There are satellite valleys at the L points, with minima 0.3 eV above the minimum of the gamma valley. The effective mass is 0.67 times the free-electron mass in the central valley (although I've seen 0.65 used) and 0.55 in the L valley (even less certain).
Lattice constant of 5.653 Å is very close to that of the indirect-gap III-V AlAs, and the AlGaAs system has been the most productive for heterostructure research.
It's almost surprising, really. An acronym like GABOB ought to clue you that neuropharmacologists are more fun than a barrel of monkeys on psychotropic drugs. Here are some representative bits of humor:
For example, suppose one were interested in elucidating the presumed biochemical aberration in schizophrenia. What would one measure? ATP? Glucose? Ascorbic acid? [ROFL.] Unfortunately, this problem early on had been zealously investigated by people who measured everything they could think of, generally in the blood, in their search for differences between normal individuals and schizophrenics. As could be predicted, the problem was not solved. (It may be assumed, however, that these studies produced a large population of anemic schizophrenics with all this bloodletting.)
Deciding where to measure something in neuroscience is complicated by the heterogeneity of nervous tissue: In general, unless one has a particular axon to grind, it is preferable to use peripheral nerve rather than the CNS. Suburban neurochemists have an easier time than their CNS counterparts....
In the next-to-final step before selecting the color of the tablets, the ideal candidate will then be synthesized....
The excerpts are from pp. 6, 7, and 503 of Jack R. Cooper, Floyd E. Bloom, and Robert H. Roth: The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology (Oxford Un. Pr., 7/e 1996).
The name is Hebrew for `Freedom-Liberals Bloc' -- you can deduce the word-to-word correspondence yourself. It was an Israeli political coalition list created in 1965 from the combination of Liberal Party and Herut.
Only the non-Chinese loans -- that is, the third group of words -- count as gairaigo. The situation of Chinese loans in Japanese is similar to the situation of French and Latin words in English: so much of English vocabulary has been borrowed from French and Latin that the fact of a word coming from French is natural. The Japanese use gairaigo the way we would be using loanword if we decided that French and Latin words are not foreign enough to be regarded as loans.
The gai of gairaigo is the same as the gai of gaijin. The morpheme go in gairaigo means `language.' (The words eigo, keigo, supeingo, and tango mean `English language, honorific language, Spanish language,' and `word.' As I've heard it pronounced, the word supeingo sounds like ``Spain go''; the u in the first syllable is notional.)
A number of gairaigo are identified in entries of this glossary, and a list of them would serve as a good proxy test of how well you have studied this august resource. I suppose you could even use the list for fun, to see how well you can recognize them. I'll place a list here soon.
A Chinese (Han) character (called hanzi in Chinese and kanji in Japanese) is the most precise way to represent the word, and the existence of different kanji makes it possible to say certainly that two words that sound the same are in fact two different words rather than two different senses of a single word. In fact, there is another word with the same pronunciation. The other gakki means `musical instrument,' and is written with a pair of kanji.
Japanese has a native phonetic writing system called the kana. I describe this elsewhere in the glossary and I'm not going to repeat myself here. Since the kana is phonetic, two words that sound alike are represented identically. (I should say that there are some exceptions. In particular, the kana that once represented a sound we would write ``wo'' continues to be used in the standard spelling of various words, even though its sound is now generally indistinguishable from that of the kana for ``o.'')
As is typical, the homophone pair of gakki words with different kanji has identical spelling in kana. The spelling consists of two kana, for ga and ki. As it happens, there is a third word that has that spelling, with the romaji spelling gaki. This is a pejorative slang term for young person, something like `young punk.'
As you will have noticed, the kana sequence ga-ki has two different romaji representations. The reason is that there are phonemic aspects of Japanese that the kana cannot represent. The word spelled gaki is quicker, with accentual stress on the first syllable. The words spelled gakki are pronounced almost like two single-syllable words, with stress on both syllables.
(Japanese does not inflect for number, so each of these nouns is used indifferently for one or for more semesters, instruments, or punks.)
If your units aren't working out and it's not a mere factor-of-1.20095 error, maybe you're reading ``gal'' wrong...
- Instead of PROM-type burn-in, connections are written in EEPROM-type logic gates, so Gal's are reprogrammable (10,000 to 100,000 times).
- A ``macrocell'' controls the kind of outputs (direct, inverted, XOR, registered).
Term demonstrates what unrepentant sexists electrical engineers really are! It's just outrageous! Cf. PAL.
It's called a `way' because it looks like a whitened path running across the firmament. I'm not sure when it was finally realized that it's not just ``out there,'' but we're in it. In the 1980's when I would fly into LAX, I would usually notice a sort of yellowish line as we descended past the eastern mountain gaps defining an LA basin. (Something like the cloud on the New York side of the Verrazano bridge.)
The Greek root gala occurs in the simple sugar galactose. ``Milk sugar'' is the double sugar lactose, composed of one galactose and one glucose.
The gamma is articulated in the back of the mouth in Modern Greek -- really in the throat, a bit like the Spanish gee (when voiced; see the AWWA entry). However, it is rhoticized -- it sounds a bit gargled (to a degree that varies among speakers), so the word gala today (it's still the word for milk) sounds like rala pronounced in Spanish.
Galaxy is also one of the names of TradeWave or EINet, ``[t]he professional's guide to a world of information.''
OH
/
_____/
/ ___ \
HOOC_____/ / \ \_____OH
\ \___/ /
\_____/
\
\
OH
A good strategy in any game of chance is to hope for more than one thing, to improve your chances of getting what you hope for. Ideally, you should hope to lose. Cf. lottery.
Also, keep your wishes up-to-date. Don't be caught wishing for something you no longer really want. A similar principle applies to your résumé.
Your hopes should not be modest: wish big. Since most wishes go unfulfilled, what you lose in pleasant surprise is more than compensated in pleasant dreams.
It's also prudent to have a fall-back wish. Don't wish for one thing to the exclusion of every other possibility. There is much greater variety in the improbable and impossible than there is in the probable and certain. Take advantage.
Focus. For example, say I need a black face card. Often what will happen is, I draw a two of clubs. This shows that the method is working, since I got a black card. Unfortunately, the notion of royalty has encountered some noise, converting ``royal'' to ``duke'' to ``deuce.'' People often claim they need silence to concentrate. They want to eliminate this kind of noise in the bettor-to-goddess channel.
Some people think it's illogical to hope for the impossible, but it's not. It's only illogical if you believe.
Did I mention that you shouldn't wish for just one thing? One way this can happen is, you wish for important things first, then get bogged down in details and wish for small potatoes. Don't forget the forest when you're looking at the tree! All this concentration is hard work. Indeed, it's not widely understood that because of this work, all games of chance are excellent aerobic exercise. Okay, so as a matter of pettifogging fact, it's not true, but people don't realize this untrue fact nevertheless. I mean, since when has the manifest falseness of a belief ever been a significant impediment to its being widely held? Obviously, there is a conspiracy of prejudice against games of chance. After all, how many games of pure chance do you know personally? Uh-huh. I thought so.
Do not dawdle. Hoping is subject to a window of opportunity. Hope while the outcome is still unknown, hope before it is too late, hope before all hope is lost. Hope while the hoping is good. Strike while the iron is at `cottons.'
And don't just wish for one thing.
Wish carefully. If you wish for the wrong thing and get it, not only do you have the wrong thing but you've also wasted one of the wishes that was going to be fulfilled.
Wish heartily. Don't wish half-heartedly -- don't leave any doubt as to what it is you want.
Subject your wishes to a ruthlessly rigorous examination. If you find that you've been wishing for a logical impossibility, consider quantum logic.
You know, it's important to recognize that what you want most may just not be in the cards for you. If you wish for just that thing, it's like the irresistible force running up against the immovable body ... you've just shot your wish! So for goodness sake and FCOL, wish for more than one thing!
One of the state lotteries, I forget which, has a slogan ``if you don't play, you can't win.'' (Maybe it's more than one of the lotteries, but I still forget which. And the converse of the slogan is true too.) This slogan is true for all games of chance, and in fact it demonstrates that hoping works. Look at it this way: if you don't have any wishes, then your wishes can't come true. Obviously, if you do have wishes, then sooner or later some of those wishes are bound to come true, it would be weird if they didn't. So basically, you're better off if you hope, because some of your hopes will come true. Skeptics will say this shows that hoping is not perfectly effective. Of course not! Nothing is perfect, not even the most fervent hoping. But hoping works a lot of the time -- even most of the time, if you play your cards right.
Some say, ``if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'' Obviously, wishes are not horses. That is a category error. Wishes are tactical desires.
It's not as if hoping is some untried new idea. No, it's been studied scientifically, and people keep hoping. One interesting kind of study asks people to hope or pray on the outcome of some random event, and a computer keeps track of how well they do. In virtually every study, the same thing happens: the computer thinks that outcomes or winning percentages are consistent with chance unmodified by prayer, whereas the human participants recall afterwards that they did a lot better than one would expect by mere chance. The people who conduct these experiments claim this shows that people believe because their selective memory gives them a distorted idea of how effective wishing has been in the past. THiS KiND oF StUpIDITY is SO FRUSTRATING! All the studies really show is just that hoping doesn't work for computers, because computers lack the ability to hope. Social science is such a waste.
Some people say, ``wishing won't make it so.'' I think this clearly demonstrates that there are fools in the world.
Everyone plays at least one game of chance, because life is a gamble. Even looking up terms in this glossary is a bit of a gamble. Sometimes you get serious information, and sometimes you don't.
This isn't to say that Tyson would quit entirely when confronted with obstacles... but he often stopped putting in the exhausting work of continuing to attack: ``Did [Tyson] show heart when he took an ass-beating from Holyfield? Yes. He was a `game quitter.' A guy who doesn't give up, doesn't fall down, he's game with those punches. But he stops trying to win.''
(The quote is from Mike Tyson's Ex-Trainer: Heavyweight Is Not `Even Close' to One of All-Time Greats.'' Sean Cunningham interviewed Teddy Atlas, and the article was published on the twentieth anniversary of the infamous bout in which Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear.)
This is an interesting term because ``game'' could be misunderstood as an
attributive noun, giving the term a
meaning like ``quitter of games.'' In speech, the two phrases receive
different stress and timing, although the difference is not reliable and is
altered if the speaker wants to place special emphasis. In writing, all that
a reader of the term has to go by is context. In fact, it seems the most
common use of ``game quitter'' is in the context of video-game addiction, if
only because of the <Game Quitters>
website.
Robert Berger has a
tutorial
on the subject of Gamma. Charles Poynton has made available his own
articles
and ftp-able
FAQ's about something called ``colour.''
The three main types of radiation emitted in nuclear decay are alpha, beta, and
gamma rays. Each was eventually demonstrated to consist of particles, which
consequently were called alpha,
beta, and
gamma particles). The first two terms
(``alpha rays'' and ``beta rays'') were introduced by Ernest Rutherford in
1889, as described in the alpha rays entry.
This was during the period (see the
periodization entry if you have plenty of
time for following tangents) that is not widely known at all as ``the Montreal
Canuck exile'' or canard exile or something (see
alpha rays entry if you care to understand
that joke). Just to give you a small idea of the terrible hardships he
endured, here are some lines from an article he coauthored with Miss H.T. Brooks
[``Comparisons of the Radiations from Radioactive Substances,''
Phil. Mag. ser. 6, vol. 4, no. 19, pp. 1-24 (July 1902), on
p. 9]:
Rutherford's original distinction was based on the observation that some rays,
designated alpha rays, did not penetrate matter very deeply, while others,
beta rays, were much more highly penetrating. The beta rays were also known to
be deviable by a magnetic field [i.e., electrically charged].
P. Villard was apparently the first to distinguish gamma rays, although he
didn't introduce the name. Using a sample of
radium from the Curies, he found that when he
covered the source with enough thickness of lead to stop all the beta rays,
there was still some nondeviable radiation that could expose a photographic
plate. This finding was published as ``Sur le rayonnement du radium,'' in
Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des
sciences, vol. 130, pp. 1178-1179 (Jan-June 1900). Henri Becquerel later
confirmed this, though I haven't nailed down the precise publication. It seems
that Rutherford's first publication on the subject was an item (``Penetrating
Rays from Radio-active Substances'') sent to Nature on July 6, 1902, and
published as a letter to the editor there in the issue of July 31, 1902.
[Those were the days! These days, all the journals are bureaucratized and
ultracareful, and any important news circulates in electronic preprint for
months before it appears in any journal.]
Rutherford found that thorium, and to a lesser extent
uranium, also emitted the ``extraordinarily
penetrating'' rays that Villard had found with radium, but he maintained the
possibility that they were what we would call ultrarelativistic electrons --
electrons moving near the speed of light. This analysis was based partly on an
electromagnetic theory developed by J.J. Thomson and Heaviside, according to
which the apparent mass of the electron increases with speed, approaching
infinity as the speed approaches the speed of light. (This is strikingly
similar to some predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity, which was
published in 1905. I don't know much about the Thomson-Heaviside theory.)
Rutherford's hypothesis that the new X-ray-like rays might simply be
higher-energy beta radiation probably accounts for his not naming them gamma
rays at the time. Otherwise it was a natural, since beta rays were originally
distinguished as the component of atomic radiation that was more highly
penetrating than alpha rays, and there turned out to be another kind of ray,
not originally detected, that penetrated even further. This was really just
dumb luck. You'd expect that if some kind of radiation occurred that had not
yet been detected, it would be because it was even less penetrating than those
already discovered. If Rutherford had been smart, he would originally have
labeled the most penetrating rays (the electrons) by alpha and the less
penetrating rays (the helium nuclei) by beta, and the whole trend would have
been screwed up when the gammas were found, but this didn't happen because
Rutherford wasn't as smart as I am. (The reason gamma rays weren't originally
detected is that in going from alpha to beta to gamma, one not only increases
penetration depth by roughly a factor of 100 at each step, one also decreases
the degree of ionization caused, also by a factor of roughly 100 at each step.
Despite being less ionizing, however, gamma radiation is regarded as the most
dangerous of the three kinds because it penetrates.)
The earliest article I can find that uses the term ``γ ray'' is one
published by Rutherford in the February 1903 Philosophical Magazine (see
alpha rays for the full journal title then
used), in an article entitled ``The Magnetic and Electric Deviation of the
easily absorbed Rays from Radium.'' An article of his in the previous month's
issue (``Excited Radioactivity and the Method of its Transmission,'' pp. 95-117)
still only mentioned alpha and beta rays. The February article starts off
describing alpha, beta, and gamma rays on the first page (p. 177) as if the
existence of all three had already been equally established, and as if the
terminology was already in place. He gives the respective thicknesses of
``aluminium,'' whatever that is, needed to reduce the intensities of these rays
by a factor of two, as approximately 5 microns, 500 microns, and 8 cm. Either
he introduced the gamma-ray term before then and didn't happen to think it was
relevant for his article published in January, or he simply decided that it was
time to introduce the new notation, and that it would be clear enough. It's
clear that I'll have to investigate further. It's even possible that I may
actually do so.
(As the title implies, the paper contains evidence demonstrating that alpha
rays are positively charged. Perhaps this conclusion, which Rutherford had
resisted, prompted him to accept that the γ rays were a distinct species.
If the February article
had the first instance of ``γ ray'' in print, then probably the
German term ``γ Strahlung'' was earlier into print. The February
Phil. Mag. paper was sent off by Rutherford from McGill on November 10,
1902, to both Phil. Mag. and Physikalische Zeitschrift. The
latter was on a weekly publishing schedule. The paper was received on Dec. 5,
translated by A. Gradenwitz (who apparently rendered McGill as ``Mc. Gill''),
and published in Phys. ZS. on January 15, 1903.
You need a break from all this serious science. Why don't you read
this ABC entry and enjoy the ``Alpher Bethe
Gamow'' story?
Don't worry if you didn't have the time to read Tom Wolfe. When he's gone,
his stock will plummet faster than Theodore Dreiser's.
I don't know when this (English gun) was borrowed, but words related to
war are often among the first to cross language barriers. That's my impression
from German, anyway. The German word Kampf meaning `battle, struggle,'
was an early borrowing of the Latin campus,
`field.' (Especially the Campus Martius at Rome, site of games and
military drills.) Of course, the same Latin word was taken over into English
as camp (originally in military senses) from the
French. The original Latin campus was
only borrowed much later. The earliest attestations are in the US, and the
first seems to be from 1774 at Princeton. That's Princeton University.
(Then the University of New Jersey.) Nowadays nearby ETS likes to call its
grounds a ``campus'' as well. ETS has a mailing address in Princeton, but it's
located in neither Princeton (borough or township).
BTW, Spanish ganso (`goose') is not a
direct restoration of the lost g in the Latin congener. Instead, it's just
derived from Gothic (so Corominas y
Pascual). The English gander presents some difficulties, and may
only coincidentally resemble gans. English goose is derived from
the common Germanic root (*gans-); loss of the n in English is pretty
typical. (Cf. tithe, originally a form of tenth, and
English-German pairs like other/ander, five/füf,
mouth/Mund. Yeah, yeah, only before certain consonants.)
Gas gangrene is infection of muscle tissue by clostridia bacteria (hence the
clinical disease name clostridial myonecrosis), usually Clostridium
perfringens. The common name of the disease comes from the fact that blisters
with gas bubbles form near the infected area. Yuck.
English frequently reborrows different cognates of the same word from different
languages, but Middle English borrowing from French in some cases represented
distinct borrowings from what were essentially different dialects.
The pair warranty/guarantee is an instance of this in which both
dialectal variants survived without diverging very much in sense, yet
preserving different spellings and different pronunciations to go with them.
The case of gaol and jail is similar: Northern or Norman French
had a version of the word that was pronounced with a hard g, and spellings that
eventually became standardized as gaol. Central or Parisian French
(which is to say, really, only-slightly-less-northern French) had a soft-g
version spelled with j, and whose spelling now standardized as jail.
The word jail, or at least its pronunciation, eventually became dominant
-- probably sometime in the 16th to 18th centuries. British legal tradition
preserved the gaol variant in spelling, but not in pronunciation.
Despite the name, the organization does not focus exclusively on government
activity: ``The mission of the Government Accountability Project is to protect
the public interest and promote government and corporate accountability by
advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering
citizen activists. We also advise public agencies and legislative bodies about
management policies and practices that help government deal more effectively
with substantive information and concerns, while protecting the jobs and
identities of those who provide this critical information.''
There's a page
en<TITLE>d ``Government Acountability Project Project''</TITLE> and
I thought ``Oh great! quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that,'' but
it was just a typo. It seems to be a ``Government Accountability Project''
unrelated to the one in the previous two paragraphs. This one has the
goal of helping ``improve government's funding and policy decisions by making
transparent the public benefits produced with citizens' resources. Full
transparency brings praise and criticism of results - and, eventually, change
- based upon maximizing outcomes and minimizing expenditures.''
The focus is on screening of airport employees who have access to secure areas.
This would include security screening of the sort that passengers and airplane
crews already submit to, as well as more thorough employee background checks
and a stop-gap of random physical screening until complete screening is
implemented.
Elements of the bill have been introduced previously. In fact, the key
provision is simply to amend a deadline in existing US Code from ``as soon as
practicable after the date of enactment of this subsection'' to ``not later
than 120 days after the date of enactment'' of GAPSS 2005. The text is in
US Code Sec. 44903 (49 U.S.C. Chapt. 449).
Apparently the TSA decided in 2002 that the
earliest practicable implementation date was in the unforeseeable future. At
the time GAPSS 2005 was introduced, an estimated one million airport workers
could access secure airport areas without being physically screened. It is not
hard to imagine objections on grounds of practicality to, say, screening of
baggage handlers each time they cross the security perimeter. (One might then
object on grounds of futility to screening workers once or twice per day,
though random screening sounds good to me.)
Lowey introduced her bill (HR 2688) with six
cosponsors, all Democrats, including ranking committee member Bennie G.
Thompson (D-MS). Barring a legislative earthquake or an untimely news event,
the bill will fail on a party-line vote. There is no Senate cosponsor and
almost no media coverage.
The bill was introduced the same month that airport personnel screening was in
the news in Australia, where a number of baggage handlers have been charged
with drug smuggling. A practical suggestion made in reaction to that scandal
and to other complaints about inappropriate baggage-handler ``interventions''
(theft and other mischief) has been to monitor baggage-handling areas with
hidden or even with unhidden cameras.
I just wanted an entry in which to mention Precious Rubbish, with the
subtitle, if that's what it is, As Raked Out of Current Criticism and
Commented on by Theodore L. Shaw. I probably bought it at a garage sale;
it probably cost me more than the 35-cent cover price, but nostalgia can be
precious. The little paperback was published by the Stuart Art Gallery, Inc.,
of Boston, Massachusetts, in a more innocent time (1956). I am reminded of
Yossarian patching up Snowden's leg, with increasing confidence. This book
corresponds to the moment before he notices that Snowden has taken major flak
to the gut, and will die. In the 1960's, this book's target -- the pile of
``snobbery and humbug,'' the ``appalling barrage of ritzy twaddle'' and the
``pretention and priggery'' of ordinary working critics -- became a refuge from
the tidal wave of academic litterature on literature.
Another useful thought is at the I.A.
Richards entry.
Most garage sales fall fairly cleanly into one of two categories. In one kind,
the object is to make money off the garbage, in the second kind the object is
to get rid of the garbage. In the first kind, the garbage is overpriced.
Since the attitude is the same for the whole lot, you can judge what kind of
garage sale it is simply by asking the price of at most one item. If there's
stuff on sale that no one could conceivably want, and it's not in a box labeled
``FREE,'' then you don't even have to ask.
Also diallyl sulfate, which gives garlic its strong odor. Onions have
diethyl sulfate. The unsaturation that the allyls have is reportedly
a bad thing. On the other hand, the odor of garlic can help repel
vampires, as is well known, and also germ-spewing people
(possibly selectively: see below).
Part of the reason that a person who eats garlic smells so strongly of it
afterward is that the odoriferous compounds are excreted by the sweat glands.
Morley Safer has stated:
In the summer of 1995, letters in response to a Consumer Reports article
on garlic reported that rubbing stainless steel could get rid of the odor.
Stammtisch speculation on possible mechanisms has been interesting and somewhat
informed, but so far inconclusive.
A benign related syndrome, which might occasionally manifest as a garlic cryptophobia, is described at the entry for
``Hold the onions.''
Getting over a cold, I noticed that in three different foods, the garlic
smelled unpleasantly strong. Two of these I eat often enough to know have
consistent levels of garlic. If a lowered threshold for garlic distaste is a
common effect of colds, then the health benefits of garlic may be enhanced by
specificity of quarantine: garlic may repel sick people more effectively than
healthier company.
It's the official gem of
New York State.
Van Helmont's useful term came to be used first for vapors emitted in reactions
and later for aeriform fluids, replacing the confusing or awkward term
air. Gases in van Helmont's original sense were qualified as permanent,
incondensible, or incoercible. (That's a serial
a/k/a-type ``or.'') In fact, there are no truly
permanent gases: at any fixed temperature, if you apply enough pressure you can
condense any gas. (Above the critical temperature, there is no liquid/gas
distinction, and you condense the fluid [call it gas or liquid] into a
solid.)
It's worth noting that in the original
Greek, chaos refers not to disorder but to
`gap' or absence, and that too is altogether appropriate. In fact, while I've
got your attention (Hello?) I'll mention the ``Kac problem,'' which might
equally well be referred to as the ennui problem or the Maytag Monte Carlo
repairman gas pains. It is simply this: when you simulate a gas (numerically),
particularly one that is near ideality (low density), you spend most of your
time simulating the simple motion of isolated, essentially non-interacting
particles, and very little time simulating the interesting scattering or
interaction events that determine the specifics of deviation from ideality.
Incidentally, I believe that Kac is pronounced ``Katz.'' The ``c'' is
supposed to have an acute accent on it, like the final cee on many South Slav
names written in (augmented) Roman characters. Also, contrary to what one
would suppose, the surname ``Katz'' does not
really stand for the German word meaning cat.
There has been a sequence of Gaullist parties:
For more, see the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
On the Johnny Mnemonic pinball machine, one
GIGABYTE is worth only 100,000 points.
Here's the British
page of an X.500 directory.
In (Modern) German, Great Britain is Großbritannien.
Poor English is apparently required, but not very poor English. (It's called
``Business English.'') It might be a difficult standard to maintain, but
sloppy thinking helps. Here's some thinking from the 2006 registration form:
``Please Note: Registrations from Canada and outside the United States must be
made in money order or cashiers check in $US drawn on an American bank.''
Back in 2005, trying to impress Françesca (an impressive Londoner) with
how Europeanistically au courant I
was, I expressed sympathy with how disastrously the recent privatization (er...
privatisation) of the railways had gone. She replied that yes, but they
had been another kind of disaster before. Okay, she's not the kind of woman
who has much to do with GB Railfreight, but where else will I unburden my heart
and unload my troubles? And how more gracefully can I clarify that the eff in
Railfreight is capitalized at the beginning of this entry only to indicate that
it contributes to the acronym? Don't answer that.
An admirer of GBS may be called a Shavian. GBS coined the adjective Shavian, with the meaning ``pertaining
to Shaw'' (or his works, wit, etc.), based on the Latinized form Shavius
of his name. I don't know if this was influenced by his joining in the Fabian
Society in 1884. The Fabian Society took its name from the Roman general
Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator. He earned the cognomen Cunctator
himself as a nickname. It means `delayer,' and reflects his preference for
attrition tactics against Hannibal Barca, rather than a direct confrontation.
(The parallel is that the Fabian Society, like its offspring the Labour Party,
favored gradual rather than revolutionary movement toward socialism. Lenin
famously said of Shaw that he was ``a good man fallen among Fabians.'')
The gens Fabius is derived from the Latin
for what we call `fava bean.' GBS eventually became a vegetarian, but that was
just motivated by a hope of curing his migraines.
``A volunteer non-profit membership association ... formed in 1966 to apply
computer technology to printing, publishing, and related industries. GCA
developed and fosters the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), from which the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are derived.''
``GCA is a national affiliate and special industry group of Printing Industries of America.''
For other C compilers, see cc.
The question is really: what does it mean for many to be called and few to be
chosen, within the client-server paradigm? This must be why push and
``channels'' technologies were so hot for a while.
Oh wait, they do have their own regional force, called Peninsula Shield.
MENL reported June 10, 2002, however, that they are
having trouble meeting a mid-2003 deadline to expand it from the previous
strength of 6,000 soldiers up to 20,000. Not only is there a shortage of
locally-trained soldiers, but most member states regard Saudi Arabia as a
rival, and so are reluctant to send their soldiers to GCC headquarters there.
Is this for real? Fears of the belligerent and bellicose Saudi Empire?
``GCC secretary-general Abdul Rahman Al Attiyya said Gulf Arab commanders [at a
ninth meeting on the problem] discussed whether foreigners could be recruited
into the regional force. Gulf Arab states have a significant number of
expatriates in their militaries. These include soldiers from
Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and mercenaries from Britain
and the former Soviet Union.''
Hired help is the oil sheikdoms' answer to every problem.
In December 2013, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in Manama that the
US will sell weapons to the GCC as a block. (Manama is the capital and largest
city of Bahrain.) Following Hagel's announcement, the GCC announced the
formation of a joint military command that could have as many as 100,000
soldiers. So soon? Promises, promises.
On Wednesday, March 5, 2014, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain recalled
their ambassadors from Qatar for the first time since the formation of the GCC,
in reaction to what was described as Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood
and the gulf state's involvement in regional conflicts. The three countries
said in a joint communique that Qatar had failed to implement a GCC security
agreement (adopted in Riyadh the previous November) to refrain from involvement
in other nations' politics and supporting organizations that threaten the
gulf's stability.
The next day, the Qatari Cabinet of Ministers announced it would not
reciprocate the move by the three countries describing its ``regret and
surprise'' at the recall of ambassadors and said it remains committed to the
values of the GCC. The GCC has ``values''! Who knew?
Also expanded ``God's Chosen Operating System.'' He always
seems to make choices He eventually seems to come to repent of.
Performance on the GCSE exams (highest grade A*, like A-plus). The next two
years students take AS-levels and A-levels. The A
levels are the college entrance exams.
For more, see the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
As most of the experiments were carried out during the very dry Canadian
winter, it was very essential [sic] to screen the electrometer and
connexions with testing apparatus by wire gauze. Unless precautions of this
kind were taken, every movement of the observer produced sufficient frictional
electrification to disturb the electrometer. For the same reason and also for
convenience the quadrants were separated by a cord connected to a suitable key
and operated at a distance.
[Ernest Rutherford, spiritual daddy of the TV remote! Of course,
he was wrong to call the electrification
``frictional.'' Let me take a moment to mention that in modern cleanrooms,
it is usually necessary to dehumidify the air. However, at
Arizona State University, near Phoenix, for part of
the year the humidity of the ambient air is so low that it's necessary to
humidify the cleanroom.]
You can never have enough garlic.
With enough garlic you can eat the New York Times.
I guess technically one has to conclude that the question whether one can eat
the New York Times remains open, though the
strong implication (it suggests a syllogism) is that one cannot. It's a
question of what you're willing to swallow. I suggest a Saturday edition in
August. Safer's comment appeared in the food section of the New York Times on
October 5, 1994.
I don't entirely understand the inflections here. The term is medical
Latin or neo-Latin. The Latin word forma is
a straightforward first-declension female noun. There also exists an adjective
formus of first-second declension. (That is, it takes the forms [sorry]
formus, forma, and formum when modifying nominative nouns that
are male, female, and neuter, resp.) However, this adjective means `warm' and
is unrelated to the noun forma. I imagine that the term abbreviated by
GBM was constructed using the genitive form formae, simplified to
forme (as is common in English and very common in Romance languages such
as Spanish). Thus multiforme is understood as `of multiple form.' I
don't think this is an appropriate use of the genitive, and in any case I'd use
formarum (`of multiple forms'), but that's the best explanation I can
give for now.
GBWD is differential GBW in an op amp;
GBWCM is common-mode GBW in an op amp.
