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Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Roman god Mercury, typically depicted with winged feet (depictions do often include toes, though), was the god of thieves and translators, so hermeneutics was named after him (his Greek name is Hermes), as have a number of newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury.
Hatters once used mercuric nitrate to soften and shape felt, poisoning
themselves in the process. Hence the term ``mad as a hatter,'' immortalized by
Lewis Carroll:
Here's some other stuff that's related.
After a few years of publication under its original short title, the usual title bloat set in, and after 1897 it was known as Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte (QDhG).
Bandgap is 0.15 eV; lattice constant is 6.373 Å.
Hamburg, Germany's largest port, is fifty-plus kilometers up the Elbe River from the coast, and traditionally benefitted from traffic along the Elbe in parts of northern Germany. During the period of the two Germanies, Hamburg in West Germany lost trade from those regions, which lay mostly in East Germany (GDR), and compensated to some extent by cultivating business with Scandinavia.
Ran for president in 1968 and lost a close election to Richard Milhous Nixon (RMN).
Remembered for saying that he would eat the paper the bill was written on, if the voting rights act of 1964 led to what we now call reverse discrimination or quotas, which RMN imposed by executive order.
There's a Herbert Hoover Highway in Iowa, but I haven't seen it abbreviated HHH.
In deciding whether to challenge a horizontal business merger (under section 7 of the Clayton Act), the DOJ and FTC consider various factors, including ease of entry and concentration trends in the relevant market, financial condition of firms (an unmerged company that soon fails will not prevent market concentration), etc.
Nevertheless, the starting point for analysis is the HHI. Under DOJ-FTC guidelines, a market with pre-merger HHI below 1,000 is regarded as unconcentrated, and the merger is unchallenged. Note that HHI < 1000 means that there are at least ten companies, and that no single company can have a market share exceeding 31.62%; if the pre-merger market is dominated by two companies (with market shares near 23.6%), their merger can double the HHI to near 2000.
If pre-merger HHI is between 1000 and 1800, the industry is considered moderately concentrated and will usually be challenged only if it is expected to increase HHI by 100 points or more.
A market with HHI exceeding 1800 is considered highly concentrated; mergers that increase HHI by 50 to 100 then ``raise significant competitive concerns.''
In any case where a leading firm has market share exceeding 35%, merger with a firm having as little as 1% share may be challenged.
All that said, since the 1980's there's been substantial shift in legal thinking on what constitutes monopoly power, with a deemphasis of raw size concerns and a greater concern with how markets work, and in particular on whether customers are deprived in some way relative to the prices and choices that would be available in a less concentrated market. Still, all those what-ifs are harder to measure than market share.
The formulation of the HHI implies that square of market share is a proper measure of market power. According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network varies similarly.
For wood and natural gas, latent heat of vaporization is the most important component of the difference between energy released by a combustion and heating done by it. Of course, the thing most effectively heated by combustion is the exhaust gas, and the efficiency of a furnace is mainly a measure of how effectively the exhaust gas is cooled -- i.e., how much of the ``heating value'' is saved from direct loss to the environment in exhaust. (Some of the heating value is emitted as radiation during the reaction, and may never go into the reaction products.)
In the Hawaiian language, Hawaii is spelled Hawai`i. The opening single quote indicates the glottal stop consonant, the sound of ``tt'' in most Americans' pronunciation of ``cotton.''
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Hawaii. USACityLink.com has a page with a few links.
German Jewish refugees in Latin America pronounced it ``HEE-ahs'' (i.e., as it'd be pronounced in Spanish if written jías).
Rev. Jesse Jackson used to go around (still does, for all I know) getting schoolchildren to repeat ``I am somebody.''
The word hijo (`son') comes from the Latin filius with the same meaning (source of the English word filial). (Interesting, and not really surprising, that filius is one of those words with a distinctive vocative form differing from the nominative: fili. For more on that, see the entry for Brute.) In Latin, a filius terrae, literally `a son of the earth,' is an expression meaning `a nobody' or `an unknown person.' A similar Latin word, filum (`thread,' compare English filament) became hilo in Spanish. For more on the f --> h sound shift, see the Spanish entry.
Okay, let's do some more on the Spanish words. There's a tendency for bilis to be used as a technical or physiological term. Thus, a gall bladder is una vesícula de bilis. Conversely, hiel is used in nontechnical Spanish usage, where it can mean `bile' in the narrow sense, or something bitter. The latter sense is implied by the verb helear, which means `to make bitter,' normally in the fairly literal sense of `adding a bitter ingredient.' It's not a very useful word, except possibly for Spanish-speaking karela-eaters (living in Kerala, I imagine). The common verb amargar (related to amargo, `bitter-tasting') means `to make bitter, to embitter' and is frequently used in metaphorical senses. Hiel is also used simply in the sense of `bitterness.' This is particularly common in belles lettres (or is that lettres bilieuses?).
There's a common proverb no hay miel sin hiel, literally `there's no honey without bitterness.' This can be compared with the English proverb, ``too many cooks spoil the broth.'' Well, I said it could be compared -- I didn't say it was comparable. Another one is ``No bees, no honey; no work, no money.'' The one I learned was ``el que quiere celeste, que le cueste,'' literally `he who wants light blue [the sky], let it cost him [work].'
Miscellaneous paragraphs follow. Sometimes you want to mention something, but you don't want to interrupt the flow, you know? And then it's too late.
Spanish nouns derived from Latin neuters generally become masculine. (There is no neuter gender in Spanish. The Inquisition, you know. And Opus Dei.) Quite interestingly, although fel is neuter, the derived noun hiel is feminine. These things befall in the best of families, but more often in linguistics than zoology. Perhaps the gender change was due to the influence of female bilis, or maybe el hiel (`the gall') just sounded too sing-songy.
There's an idiom sin hiel. If the phrase makes no sense in context, you can understand it as `excellent.'
``Hi-Fi'' as an adjective for sound equipment is almost as superfluous as ``electronic'' to describe a computer. The term was used by our parents to describe their status-competition toys. In the 1970's when we started buying decent equipment of our own, we discarded (i.e., the marketing people decided that we would discard) the now old-fashioned term Hi-Fi. The radio lost its speaker and output stage (amplifier) and became a tuner. The record player lost its amplifier and speaker(s) and became a turntable. You combined one or more of these items with an amplifier and a couple of loudspeakers and you had a ``component system.'' The components had different brand names on them. They started to come from Japan; soon they all came from Japan. A turntable that came in a single box with an amplifier (what an innovative concept!) was a stereo. Often the stereo came bundled with a radio tuner. In the seventies you could get an old-style combination: a stereo with radio tuner, plus eight-track or cassette or (rarer) both, in a ``compact'' unit.
In the late 90's or so, the old-fashionedness of the term now bleached out by three decades' lying in the cold sun of the linguistic scrap heap, ``Hi-Fi'' has been dusted off and pasted onto some CD players.
Since the download of high-fidelity audio data requires high bandwidth or patience, webpages now often offer a Lo-Fi option.
Chaucer made use of the verb substantially, Shakespeare rarely. Twain embraced it in his Tale of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). [The action in that story is set mostly in the sixth century, but the language is Modern English colored with bits of Elizabethan (Early Modern English) archaisms.]
Over the centuries, there has been considerable confusion regarding the conjugation of this verb, with the vowel wobbling about and the parts of the verb interchanging. For this reason, it is clear that the verb should now be regularized: hight, highted, (have) highted, highting. See also contemn and clepe.
C.R. Haines uses hight in his translation, for the Loeb Classical Library, of the correspondence of Fronto. Specifically, in the third paragraph of the first letter -- a somewhat chastising letter from Fronto to his former student Marcus Aurelius, designated successor to Caesar Pius. (In this connection, it's amusing to read the so-called Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The first section is a list of acknowledgments, and around the middle of the list, Fronto has his paragraph and a carefully measured-out teaspoon of praise.) Haines uses the construction is hight [sic], so we may take the publication year of that volume (1919) as a convenient date marking the death of this verb, before its resurrection in this entry.
Very possibly, it is not accidental that the word occurs in this particular paragraph. The paragraph is about word choice -- beginning with Cicero's and going on to critique that of his correspondent Aurelius. According to Fronto (in Haines's English): ``Wherefore I commend you greatly for the care and diligence you shew [sic] in digging deep for your word and fitting it to your meaning. But, as I said at first, there lies a great danger in the enterprize [sic] lest the word be applied unsuitably [pause here and reflect] or with a want of clearness or a lack of refinement, as by a man of half-knowledge, for it is much better to use common and everyday words [volgaribus et usitatis] than unusual and far-fetched ones [remotis et requisitis], if there is little difference in real meaning.'' I am in perfect concord with this sentiment. The early Loebs are notorious for their archaic English. To judge by his 1889 work Christianity and Islam in Spain (756-1031), Haines was not normally quite so old-fashioned. (He did use shew and show verb forms in about equal numbers in the 1889 work, however, and by that time shew was distinctly a minority usage even among British writers. Then again, even in 2007 I know a Latin teacher in England who still writes shew.)
In the particular case of Fronto, however, the archaizing is probably appropriate, since he was deeply conservative regarding language and literature. Though born around 90 CE, he hated the modernism of people like Seneca, and only cared for the old republican writers. One even gets the impression that his praise of Cicero was grudging. Fronto's use of the variant volgaribus (see above) instead of the now-standard vulgaribus is probably an instance of his preference for old usages. (In the original manuscripts, of course, there was no graphical u/v distinction, so these words were written uolgaribus and uulgaribus.) At least, -uus nominatives could be and usually were written with -uos until the Golden Age (70 BCE-18 CE).
One thing obvious from Fronto's letters is that he liked to pile on the words, apparently to show off that he knew them. The reason that one obtains that impression is that, quite frankly, the supernumerary words often added little of significance and just reduced precision, accuracy, and overall correctness, so to speak.
An online introduction is available from Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston. The ORNL HTSC homepage (apparently this is technically the homepage for ``Superconductivity for Electric Power Systems'') is pedagogically useful as well.
Other useful information sites are SUPRAS and the Los Alamos server form for e-prints. There's also an electronic journal called High TC Update.
The English word fig and the Spanish word higo are both derived from Latin ficus, and both show the revoicing of the cee. (The letter c in Latin is essentially a gamma that lost its voicing. If you think I'm gonna explain that one again, you gotta'nother thing comin'.) The eff and aitch sounds are closely related. This can be seen in Japanese, where the syllables associated with ha are hi, fu, he, and ho. (Note, though, that the eff there is bilabial, represented in the IPA by the character phi.) The eff/aitch similarity can be seen in English, where the original aitch-like /x/ or /ç/ sound still found in Scottish loch evolved into eff (rough, tough) or disappeared (high, nigh). In Spanish, a number of Latin initial eff's became aitches, and aitch is now silent. Other examples: hacer, `make, do,' from Latin facere; herir, `injure,' from ferire; hierro, `iron,' from ferrum; hijo, `son,' (cf. hidalgo) from filum; horno, `oven,' from furnus; humo, `smoke,' from fumus.
The word higo is used figuratively in Spanish to suggest something small, somewhat as in the English expression ``I don't care a fig.'' However, in Spanish it is used more, uh, figuratively, if you catch my drift.
The lives of professional athletes are popular subjects of Hi-Lo. This strikes me as ironically appropriate, though there are, uh, many exceptions. Cf. El-Hi.
Babahindi is a `turkey cock,' and baba is one of the words meaning `father.' (Internationally, of course, ata is better known. Both words, along with cet [`grandfather'], have a scattering of generalized senses like `ancestor, forefather, elder.') There are many compounds beginning in baba, including babaanne (`paternal grandmother' -- so that's what the Beach Boys were singing about!), but a similar construction for any other bird does not seem to be common. For example, the peafowl is tavus, and the peacock and peahen are tavus kusu and disi tavus, respectively. (Please mark your screen with a cedilla under the s in kusu and in disi.) A drake is an erkek ördek (literally a `duck cock') and a gander is an erkek kaz.
A turkey buzzard (more commonly called ``turkey vulture'' outside the US) is a ``hindi akbabasι.'' I assume this is a loan translation rather than a coincidence; akbaba means `vulture.'
That's almost 100,000 times fainter than Sirius, the radio satellite, errr, satellite radio. Oh, wrong Sirius! Seriously, it's Sirius, the Dog Star, 26 times greater absolute magnitude than our sun and a mere stone's throw away (8.6 ly). It's the brightest star in the night sky.
- HIPPI-PH
- PHysical layer standard ANSI/X3.183-1991.
- HIPPI-FP
- Framing Protocol, ANSI/X3.210-1992.
- HIPPI-LE
- Link Encapsulation, ANSI/X3.218-1993.
- HIPPI-IPI-3
- Intelligent Peripheral Interface.
- HIPPI-SC
- Switch Control, ANSI/X3.222-1993.
- Disk Connections
- ANSI/ISO 9318-3.
- Tape Connections
- ANSI/ISO 9318-4.
It's commonly found in the urine of herbivores and, as you can probably guess, it was first identified in the urine of horses. It's formed in the kidneys by reaction of benzoic acid with the amino acid glycine, and it's a way that herbivores get rid of excess benzoic acid in some plants. Hippuric acid normally occurs only in trace amounts in humans and carnivores.
H H
\ /
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
/ \
H C===O
/
/
H---N H
\ /
\ /
C
/ \
/ \
H C===O
/
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O
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H
Here's something geographically numb-brained from the US Census Bureau:
In September 1968, Congress authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to proclaim National Hispanic Heritage Week. The observance was expanded in 1988 to a monthlong celebration (Sept. 15 -- Oct. 15). America celebrates the culture and traditions of U.S. residents who trace their roots to Spain, Mexico and the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point for the celebration because it is the anniversary of independence of five Latin American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on Sept. 16 and Sept. 18, respectively.
There used to be a Smithsonian Heritage Months page where, at least during Hispanic Heritage Month, you could find a link for ``evento calendarios,'' which was apparently intended to be Spanish. In Spanish, it means `calendars event' -- i.e., the event having to do with calendars. They've fixed that, but their bilingual stuff is still basically in English and translated English.
In passing, I should note that the homepage of ``Smithsonian Education'' is now set up with links based on who you are rather than on the information you want. The who-you-are approach works reasonably well for toilets, but the only thing it does well for information is insult. It's like the old ``Women's Section'' of the newspaper: tell us who you are, and we'll tell you what you want to know, dear. University homepages make the same offensive assumption. You want the Chemistry Department? Please tell us if you are staff, student, or money-ba-a-ah....err, heh-heh, alumnus/a/um.
The term natural history ought to give you a hint of that. It comes from the Latin historia naturalis. That was the title of a sort of compendium of universal knowledge compiled by Pliny the Elder, and for him natura was a little more inclusive than our nature, which deserves its own entry, eventually. For now I'll just mention that like Linneaus in the eighteenth century, Pliny dealt not just with the animal and vegetable but also the mineral kingdom, both wild (as found `in nature') and domesticated (dyes and other technology), and also the weather, and other stuff. He really wanted to cram all knowledge into his encyclopedia, and at 37 books it is believed to be nearly complete, but curiosity killed that cat. He died in A.D. 79 when he went to investigate the volcanism of Mount Vesuvius, which erupted and covered Pompeii and Herculaneum. (He succumbed to toxic gases on the shore of the Bay of Naples.)
Histôria was a term borrowed from Greek, meaning `investigation,' so natural history is the investigation of nature. It was only gradually that the sense of the word historia (apart from special contexts like historia naturalis) became specialized to the investigation only of past human events.
The Greek histôria was based on the verb histôrein, `to inquire,' related to the noun histôr, `learned man.' No, no, his doesn't mean `man' here. (If anything, *-tor does; it's an element in archaic Greek men's names, such as Nestor, Hector, and Mentor in Homer, and in no women's names that I can think of. That would make story, derived from history, the more purely gendered term. Make of this what you will, but leave me out of it.)
Histôr is generally agreed to be a suffixed form *wid-tor of the common Indo-European root *weid-, meaning `to see.' The same root also led to the Greek words eidos (`form') and idea (`form,' `appearance,' and `idea'). (Hence Plato's ``idealism'' was his ``theory of the forms.'')
The University of Kansas serves a number of history resources such as the Virtual Library page for History and a linked Index of Resources for Historians. (That means that if you're not a licensed historian, you're not allowed to use them. Stay AWAY!)
At least two sets of strains are distinguished -- HIV1 and HIV2. HIV probably evolved from SIV, which induces symptoms more like HIV2. Cf. FIV.
HIV-tainted needles in gas-pump handles? A hoary urban legend; check out the UL entry.
One frequently encounters the usage ``HIV virus'' (an acronym-assisted AAP pleonasm). For clarity or emphasis, or for some unknown reason, ``HI virus'' is sometimes used. The spelling looks somewhat insensitively upbeat. On the other hand, it goes with the thoughtfully constructed adjective ``HI-viral.''
Any chance this guy is a distant relative of Max Headroom?
A lot of us nonbelievers are secretly hoping that he comes back anyway, just to hear him say ``No, no! That's not what I meant at all!''
Here's the Hong Kong page of an X.500 directory.
The SAR entry has even less information about Hong Kong.
When I was there in August 1990, ground crew were eating lunch on the tarmac, in the shade of 747 wings.
Here's a list of computing languages with online resources.
Large blocks of rental units always seem to develop negative social connotations, and words associated with them become pejorative in various ways. Those ways vary among different languages and we'll visit that topic here eventually (for Spanish, English, and German).
Properly, that should be written ``Hln, formerly known as headLine News.'' It's a wasted opportunity, of course. They should have called it TCNNFKAHLN (The Cable News Network Formerly Known As HeadLine News). And maybe they will. It seems to get some kind of rebranding every few years. It was launched as CNN2 in 1982, was Headline News 1983-1989, HN 1989-1992, Headline News again 1992-1997, CNN Headline News 1997-2007, and HLN since then. During the HN era and the first year or so of the HLN era, ``Headline News'' was regularly used appositively. Therefore, while it is fair to identify it as ``HLN, formerly known as Headline News,'' it is preferable, because ridiculous and accurate, to write ``HLN, formerly known as HLN, Headline News.''
For most of its existence, it has provided what ``headline'' implies: a condensed version of the news, repeated on a 30-minute loop. It was like the old WINS 1010 AM radio station in New York, which used to repeat, frequently: ``you give us twenty-two minutes, we give you the news.'' (Well it sounded like a comma splice.) The loop actually repeated exactly three times per hour, but they wanted you to show up early and hear the final two minutes of ads from the previous cycle. I would foil them by rehearing the weather report instead.
Since 2005, the once and future Headline News has shifted toward another kind of content strongly associated with headlines: tabloid programming. I believe they're now featuring two hours of Nancy Grace (``television's only justice themed/interview/debate show for those interested in the breaking news of the day'') twelve times daily. Notice that they say ``for those interested in the breaking news.'' Even they aren't claiming that it's always breaking.
Horace Mann, as you probably realize, is also the name of a person. Horace Mann (1796-1859) was an early advocate of free universal public education. He was known as the ``father of the American public school,'' but that's a lot of syllables; his friends probably called him ``Horace.'' (Even though ``Horace'' is disyllabic, it's practically as atomic as ``Paul.'') He was elected the first secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts when that was founded in 1837. The Horace Mann School traces its history back to the Horace Mann Lincoln School, founded in 1887 and described today at our HML entry.
See also the Hardwood Agents and Brokers Association (HABA).
HML was a progressive school, and after John Dewey joined the TC faculty in 1904, it only got more progressive. The school was also politically ``progressive.'' It may have had a limousine-liberal period, but eventually the student body came to be mostly red-diaper babies. The philosopher John Searle, who attended HML in the 40's, recalled in this 1999 interview that, as a mere socialist, he ``was sort of the class right-winger of the ninth grade.''
``The Horace Mann School for Boys moved to Riverdale in 1912, and during the 1940's, severed formal ties with Teachers College and became Horace Mann School. The HM School for Girls remained at Teachers College through the 1940's.'' I read somewhere that that closed in 1948, and that its old building is now New York's P.S. 125.
Can't take a hint, can you?
A brief explanation of the origin of the HMO can be found on the web.
If you can't enter the umlauted character in the text, write ``Hueckel'' for Hückel.
``H-Net is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The computing heart of H-Net resides at Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe.''
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they do a lot of fine stuff, but primarily they're known for setting up mailing lists for some of the more electronically halt and lame among humanistic and social scientific learned societies.
in erbia earth by Per Theodor Cleve, who named it after the Latin name of his
native city, Stockholm. Perhaps the reason for the resemblance between that
city's Latin name and
Swedish name is the fact that the city was founded
in the thirteenth century. On the other hand, for a long time the place was
Christiana. Oh wait -- that's Oslo. Never mind.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Henry Mitchell MacCracken, a chancellor of New York University, conceived the idea of a pantheon of great Americans, and coined the name ``Hall of Fame'' for it. It was founded in 1900 and built on what was then the uptown campus of NYU. It opened in 1901 with 29 inductees.
A surprisingly uninquisitive Dave Blevins did not even address the question of priority in his nevertheless interesting book Halls of Fame (2004). It's subtitled An International Directory, and in addition to a few he found in the US, he gamely listed HoF's in Canada and 17 other countries. (He counted ``more than fifteen countries.'' Maybe he was running out of toes, or maybe he just had a nagging suspicion that possibly the Irish Music Hall of Fame in Dublin, Ireland, is not in the UK.)
According to the back cover, more than 450 HoF's are listed. I'm not going to check, but here are some numbers I can compute easily:
- US: 229
- Canada: 45 (!)
- RoW: 17
Blevin is also the author of UFO Directory International: 1000+ Organizations and Publications in 40+ Countries (2003).
In July 1995, a stray Vietnamese potbellied pig named Chi-Chi discovered a shiny black hog belonging to Walter Wyatt, in the yard of Wyatt's home in Key West, Florida. Excited, Chi-Chi mounted the brand-new hog's front tire and tried to mate with it. Okay, perhaps it succeeded in mating with it. Who's to say? Walter's wife Patricia witnessed the whole thing from her kitchen and called police. The 50-pound animal did at least $100 of damage to the object of his affections, scratching the paint and tearing the bike's fabric cover. It must've been hot.
According to animal control officers, state law requires all unclaimed strays to be neutered, and the owner, not identified in news reports, declined to claim him. Many locals, including the assault victim's owner, felt that the punishment was too harsh. I say the punishment fit the crime better than the victim did, but Walter Wyatt said, ``His crime is an alleged sex act against a Harley. We don't even know if that's a felony!'' A ``Spring Chi-Chi'' defense fund raised $300, and Wayne Smith, president of the Monroe County Bar Association, handled the case on a pro bono basis. ``The punishment could be death or what some males may consider a fate worse than death,'' said Smith.
What were the alternatives? A local motorcycle dealer said he might let Chi-Chi go hog-wild in his showroom, just to get it out of his system. ``Just a night's stay.'' One man offering to adopt Chi-Chi sent a letter to the Chamber of Commerce. It ended ``P.S. I have a broken scooter. It's his.'' Chi-Chi was fixed and retired to a local petting zoo.
Florida seems to produce a disproportionate share of animal-related weird news. For another example, read about the trouser snake at CREAMER. For more about potbellied pigs see NAPPA. Many NAPA distributors also carry motorcycle parts.
I'd like to mention that Key Lime pie was invented in Key West, but I can't think of a good excuse to do so. One of the factors in the creation of that confection was the widespread use of canned condensed milk there, at a time when it was less common elsewhere in the country. This must have been due to Key West's isolation. Isolation was probably a factor in the siting of the Agriculture Department's Animal Import Center at nearby Fleming Key. On July 26, 1989, six years to the day before Chi-Chi's case was heard in Key West, the Ag department officially admitted a herd of Chinese hogs after four months of tests at the center. The herd of 140 animals included three breeds: Meishan, Ming and Feng-Jing. They had been purchased by the University of Illinois and Iowa State University for breeding experiments. The breeds were described as ``unusually prolific''; their twice-yearly litters average 16 to 20 newborn, with a record of 33. They must suckle in shifts. Most U.S. breeds have litters of 10 to 12. (I couldn't bring myself to write ``only 10 to 12.'') I should probably also mention the nearby Bay of Pigs. Done.
Also -- you know those double burgers with the pre-positioned cheese slice between the patties? Take it out or start over.
Also, when I say ``Taco Salad, hold the lettuce,'' yes, that means I want no cheese with it. Obviously, I meant ``hold the cheese'' and misspoke. ``It comes with cheese'' is not an acceptable response.
BTW, it's not necessary literally to hold the cheese, just don't put it on the food item.
Time passed, and people forgot. In Waiting (chapter 9 -- see LBI entry), social scientist Debra Ginsberg actually went to the trouble of explaining, as if to a child, that ``a couple on a date early in their relationship will either both have garlic in their meals or request that it be entirely removed from their dishes.'' At least she realized that it could go without saying, that the latter group experiences less satisfaction.
Wood seems somehow to be prototypical stuff. When you try to conjure up an image of nonspecific stuff, likely as not the image you conjure will be of wood or clay. That's my theory, anyway. I mean, if someone says ``a fish'' out of the blue, the mental image evoked is not likely to be of a barracuda or a zebra fish or even a mature flounder. You're more likely to imagine something that looks roughly like a cod. It's like that. For supporting evidence, see the HYLE entry. Another bit of evidence is in the fact that the German word Klotz, meaning `block,' is understood to mean a block of wood if the material is not otherwise specified. More about that word is now at the klutz entry.
Lakes Erie and Ontario have areas 25,719 sq. km (9,930 sq. mi.) and 19,477 sq. km (7,520 sq. mi.), resp.
- Cloth woven by hand.
- You're looking for stuff about Norman Rockwell. Try the NYC entry.
Cf. (the less common) HODO.
Ears, snouts and innards,
A homogeneous mass.
Pass another slice.
See also the navel entry.
- affect
- agape (adjective meaning ``wide open'' or the Greek word for a kind of `love,' adopted in certain specialized senses in Christianity)
- aged
- are (metric area unit or second-person form of the verb to be)
- axes (plural of axe or of axis)
- bases (plural of base or of bases)
- bass (low pitch, or fish)
- bow (part of a crossbow or part of a ship)
- buffet (verb or noun)
- chile
- cleanly (adjective [short vowel] or adverb [long vowel])
- close (verb or adverb)
- coax (two syllables as short form of co-axial connector; one syllable as verb meaning persuade)
- commune (noun or verb)
- content (noun or adjective)
- converse (noun related to conversion or verb related to conversation)
- convert (noun or verb)
- conjugate (verb or adjective)
- defect (initial syllable stressed in noun; second stressed in verb)
- defense (stress usually on second syllable of noun, except in sports; in team sports, stress is initial in both noun and verbed noun)
- delegate (verb or noun)
- deserts
- does (third-person singular of do, or plural of doe)
- dove (the bird, or the preterite of dive)
- dying (present participle of die or dye)
- effect (verb has long initial e in some pronunciations)
- entrance (verb and noun)
- Espy (the surname, pronounced ``ESS-pea'' or the verb, pronounced ``ess-PIE,'' appearing capitalized at the beginning of an imperative sentence)
- Evelyn (two syllables as a male name, three syllables as female; also, although the distinction is not reliable in British English, the first e is long for a male name, short for female)
- house
- import
- lead (metal whose name rhymes with led, or verb with the past tense led)
- live
- lives
- minute (noun and adjective)
- mobile (noun and adjective)
- multiply (verb and adverb)
- periodic (short e and long i in the chemical name)
- precipitate (verb or adjective)
- predicate (verb or noun)
- primer
- putter
- putting
- read (past tense or present tense form of read; rhymes with lead)
- recall (initial syllable stressed in either sense of noun; second stressed in either sense of verb)
- refuse (the noun, with short e and accent on first syllable, and final sibilant voice, and the verb, with none of these)
- reject (initial syllable stressed in noun; second stressed in verb)
- resent (sent again, or be resentful)
- resort (voiced or unvoiced s)
- row
- secreted (past of secrete and of secret, a transitive verb meaning hide)
- sewer (sewage conduit or seamster)
- severer (comparative of severe and agentive noun of sever)
- singer (one who sings or singes)
- sliver (short i in most senses, long i in textile sense)
- supposed (verb or adj.)
- tarry (delay or tarred)
- taxes (plural of tax or of taxis)
- taxis (plural of taxi, or the medical manipulation of a body part back into normal position after an injury)
- tear
- unionized (organized into a union, or not ionized)
- tower
- use (and abuse, reuse, ...; verb or noun)
- wicked
- wind
- winged
- wound
Margaret Carlson describes this as a joke ``[a]mong consultants'' in her March 27, 2008, ``Commentary'' at <Bloomberg.com>, entitled ``Hillary's Just Making It Up As She Goes Along.''
In the movie Duck Soup, which begins with a shot of ducks swimming in a bowl (IIRC), Groucho says
Gentlemen, Chicolini may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
HOPOS also referred to ``[t]he History of Philosophy of Science Working Group ... an international society of scholars who share an interest in promoting research on the history of the philosophy of science and related topics in the history of the natural and social sciences, logic, philosophy, and mathematics. We interpret this statement of shared interest broadly, meaning to include all historical periods and diverse methodologies. We aim to promote historical work in a variety of ways, including the sponsorship of meetings and conference sessions, the publication of books and special issues of journals, maintaining an email discussion group, and the dissemination of information about libraries, archives and collections, and bibliographic information.''
The biennial meetings of HOPOS are also called HOPOS, or more specifically HOPOS '98, HOPOS 2000, HOPOS 2002, HOPOS 2004 (San Francisco), etc.
Between the time when I first put this entry in (around 2002) and today (2004), the ``working group'' has renamed itself ``The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science,'' and slightly reworked its self-description with more formal and less personal wording. HOPOTH abideth within the membership of la FISP.
(And FISP is a member of CIPSH. It's like Russian dolls.)
horology.com offers a comprehensive index of internet resources. There's also an Antiquarian Horological Society (AHS). Washington University hosts a museum wall of old clocks and a nice sundial.
If you ask scholars of eighteenth-century English literature (dieciochistas) what the greatest work of their period is, a large fraction will answer that it was Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne's strange (``experimental''!) novel published in 1760. It has an extremely discursive style, even for its era. The book begins at the very beginning, with Tristram's conception, and a clock plays a pivotal role in that beginning.
Tristram's father made a very regular habit, the first Sunday night of each month, of personally winding a large house-clock that stood at the head of the back stairs. The book is written as a first person narrative, and it includes this delicately phrased report:
...it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, -- but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp'd into her head, -- & vice versâ : -- which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.
Shandy was conceived ``betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen....'' By the workings of his mother's vice versa clause above, as they were doing the deed, she quoth, ``Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?'' This untimely question disturbed his father, and in so doing it ``scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception'' thus damaging him for life.
In mid-June 2004, Blind River, Ontario, a town of 4,000 on the northern shore of Lake Huron, had a related experience: all the electric clocks gained about ten minutes per day against the eastern time kept in surrounding areas and by computers and VCR's in the same town. It eventually turned out that, in order to do some maintenance work, engineers of Hydro One (the power utility) had taken Blind River off the Ontario power grid and supplied the town from a local generator. That generator's frequency was slightly higher than the usual 60 Hz.
What, you were expecting some connection with Tristram Shandy? No. This story is only connected -- and that most tenuously -- with the dueling time zones entry.
Okay, a thumbnail description: history of science is historical inquiry (now ``interrogation,'' in the pomo term) designed to demonstrate that scientists are fundamentally self-deluded and irrational. Because the majority of in-fashion historians of science like science as much as they like scientists, HOS is increasingly externalist.
One of the interesting emerging research problems in this careful field of scholarship is ``the Science Wars.'' The circumstances of the Science Wars are the following: Working scientists (natural scientists, I mean) mostly ignore philosophy of science because it is of no use, and ignore history of science, as written by historians rather than scientists, because it is no good.
Time-out for an opposing opinion: Scientists dislike philosophy of science because it exposes their unthinking prejudices, and ignore history of science, as written by historians rather than scientists, because it is not Whiggish and so does not flatter scientists' triumphalist fantasy. We now return you to the regularly-scheduled rant.
People in HPS have difficulty understanding scientists' POV, because they think that what they're doing is useful (philosophers) or competent (historians). Occasionally, a scientist will notice the spew from HOS, point out that it's garbage, and possibly even trouble to explain why, even though the fact is essentially self-evident. The HOSers will respond by psychoanalyzing the offending scientist. Occasionally the story makes it into the newspapers. This is the Science Wars.
Okay, time for another fit of conscience. Philosophy is useful, though not usually in a practical way, because it attempts to answer the most fundamental questions thinking people have tried to make sense of. Unfortunately, science deals only in approximations. Often excellent approximations, but still not certain enough to hang a heavy philosophical argument on. For example, Newtonian mechanics is an excellent approximation for the reality the eighteenth century could understand, but the qualitative aspects of that theory bore only a partial formal resemblance to the quantum mechanics that replaced it in the twentieth century. So while Newtonian mechanics might be highly accurate in physical terms, in metaphysical terms it wasn't in the same universe, never mind close. Today's physical theories are much more accurate than Newton's and explain a much broader range of phenomena, but there is no reason to suppose that these accurate theories are anything but sand foundations for a metaphysical edifice.
As to HOS, well, a lot of it is garbage, and a lot of it is excellent. Because HOS is not itself a science -- that is, because it does not as a discipline integrate regular tests of theory against experiment, there is no very good way to cast off the ballast, and various ships in the HOS fleet are sinking under the weight of too much pomo freight.
Taking cognizance of the preceding information, you may or not be interested in the discipline's professional society HSS and the fact that the largest, oldest, and probably the best respected (within-field) HOS department in the US is the one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), q.v.
The name ``Hoss'' suggested build or strength. Dan Blocker died of a pulmonary embolism following surgery at age 43 (1928.12.10-1972.5.13).
Incidentally, if you're ever in the land of Heinrich Schliemann or anywhere else that German is spoken, you should be careful to distinguish phrases about the weather or environment, such as ``es ist heiß'' (`it is hot') or ``mir ist heiß'' (`it seems hot to me'), from statements about internal conditions like ``ich bin heiß'' (`I am sexually excited, I am in rut'). You wouldn't want your partner to get up and turn on the air conditioner -- it might get very cold in the room (das Zimmer), very fast.
If you only have space in your library for one so-bad-it's-good book, please consider A Short History of Technology, copyright 1954 (details at self-published). It's not by professional historians of technology either; it's by Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen and Charles F. Kettering. I have two bits of advice about reading it:
- Don't drink and read.
- Vacuum the carpet first. (You'll thank me when you're ROTFL.)
For a sample, read the first two paragraphs of Kettering's foreword:
This booklet is a short history of discovery and invention. It also is an explanation of how our country became the leading industrial nation of the world with the highest standard of living ever attained.It tells how the nameless people of Western Europe by their own inventions, plus those acquired from the Arabs, improved the existing practical arts. The improvement continued until suddenly the mind of man became emancipated from most of the century-old ideas which had been holding him back and he became creative.
Also, they apparently didn't use tents historically, but more permanent structures, despite practicing transhumance (moving their herds between winter and summer pastures). A west African friend told me (in 1982 or so) that people would ask him things like ``do Africans still live in trees?'' But he was still kind of hung up on the colonialism/neocolonialism thing, and it wasn't unknown for him to exaggerate. Also, he claimed that they don't live in trees. I could be more precise with the details, but I'd rather point out that he is now his country's UN ambassador [temporary ``permanent representative to the UN''] and leave his and his country's identities vague.
Once upon a time, there was an African King who kept several thrones hanging around in his grass hut palace. Then one day they all came crashing down. The moral: ``People who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.'' [This was once a widely told pun.]
It is dangerous to try to draw conclusions in English based on spelling alone. The sound-spelling correspondences, er, correlations, depend very much on the origin. The etymologies of -ouse words, as it happens, are a bit varied and occasionally unknown. However, I think it is useful to consider all -ouse words as a group, because they tend to look Germanic and be interpreted as such. (Just as deacon, from Greek via Church Latin, is pronounced like Germanic beacon.) Anyway, I think that the pattern of voicing may have to do with assimilation of voicing in the final consonant of the verb inflected forms. That is, rouse, say, even if it have started with an unvoiced ess, could have gotten a voiced ess first in the frequent form roused. Later, the voicing would have jumped the vowel in rouses and also appeared in rouse, in an instance of psycholinguistic reasoning (in Sapir's sense). Nouns, and words that may be verbs but usually are nouns, would not have been affected. House is then exceptional in a consistent way: unlike most -ouse nouns, its plural has voicing in the root. That is, the first ess in the plural noun houses has a zee sound, just like the second and final ess. So it all pretty much hangs together, if one can explain why the first ess in houses is voiced, even though it's not voiced in similar collocations elsewhere. Probably has something to do with archaic plurals. Uh, yes, um... we'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.
Comments above about current pronunciations tend to reflect my own (typical mid-Atlantic) dialect. Pronunciations vary. AHD4 claims that blouse is somewhere pronounced with a voiced final ess. A regional variation related to house is in the name(s) Houston, q.v.
The first volume of the edition of Manilius now completed was published in 1903, the second in 1912, the third in 1916, and the fourth in 1920. All were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor. Of each volume there were printed 400 copies: only the first is yet sold out, and that took 23 years; and the reason why it took no longer is that it found purchasers among the unlearned, who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface and hoped to extract from it a low enjoyment.
More at the A. E. entry.
There are proposals floating around to allow LEV's in HOV lanes.
Also the title of a (probably justifiably) unknown monologue (by Don Nigro, 1966) in which a woman describes how her ambition to play the role of Lady Macbeth has led to some funny and some sad consequences.
- Sit to one side (i.e. next to the middle) of an old sofa. Ideally, the sofa should be dusty or have loose dry dirt on top, or have threadbare cushions filled with hardened, disintegrating old urea foam.
- Slap the middle of the sofa repeatedly.
- Without moving your legs/lap, twist your upper body sideways to lean down to face the center of the sofa.
- Sneeze involuntarily, surprising yourself.
This method may not be very repeatable, but you won't mind.
- Physical damage coverage. This pays repair/replacement costs for house, unattached buildings on the property, and personal property, and incidental expenses for temporary alternate housing.
- Liability coverage. Pays for liability you or your household or pet(s) may incur for someone else's bodily injury or property damage, or to defend in court against a claim of such liability, or both.
- Medical coverage. Covers the same group as liability, but pays medical expenses. The idea behind this is, say some knucklehead visits and walks into your door. The medical coverage part of your homeowners insurance is a kind of no-fault coverage that pays for an MRI scan to see if his brain cell was damaged. It's hoped that this will take care of sincere nuisances, up to a kilobuck or so. If that won't do, and knucklehead wants you to pay for an intelligence transplant or for mental anguish (oh! the embarrassment!), then he's going to have to sue or settle, and that's where liability coverage for bodily injury kicks in. He'll need to convince a court that it was negligent on your part to have a door, or demonstrate that he was not already stupid before the brain trauma suffered on your property. (And no, it's not hard to find donors for an intelligence transplant. Plenty of people have it and never use it.)