HP

Helicobacter Pylori. A bacterium discovered to be extremely common in human stomachs, which promotes gastric ulcers. Until the mid-90's, when this was discovered, it was thought that stress and diet were the principal etiologic factors in gastric ulcer. One clue otherwise was the observation that ulcer symptoms decreased in some patients taking heavy antibiotic doses. Surprisingly, in the initial stage of HP infection, there is a temporary hypoacidity.

HP

Hewlett-Packard. Named after founders William Hewlett and David Packard, cattle ranchers. Visit. You can get a quick guide to phone numbers and online stuff by fingering <@hp.com> (any username, or none, will do).

HP

High Performance.

HP

High Pressure.

HP

High Purity.

H&P

History & Policy. ``A national [UK] platform for scholars to offer informed, accessible and constructive insights from recent historical research to assist policy makers and advisers.''

Translation: Speakers' Corner isn't protected from the elements. People so eager to foist their prejudices on the ruling elite that they spend years in graduate school learning to stitch together specious arguments need a published outlet for their ``insights.''

HP

Home Plate. (Baseball designation.)

HP

Homosexual Panic. The secret fear that one may be homosexual. Also HD. Today's politically correct position is that any objection to homosexuality is irrational and yet also dishonest. The idea that those expressing such objection are reacting to the secret fear that they are homosexual was a rhetorically useful pose (and probably also sincere; many people easily believe sincerely in whatever they see it as in their interest, however slight, to believe). Hence, HP was a convenient label for anyone opposing homosexuality. This ``opposing'' phrase is vague only today. In the 1950's, and perhaps largely until Stonewall, the ``opposition'' was general -- homosexuality being widely deemed immoral, illegal, disgusting, and sick. The label ``HP'' was applied primarily to the more vociferously or actively intolerant.

With the liberalization of attitudes that began in the 1970's, it became possible to stigmatize increasingly mild or circumscribed opposition to homosexuality. In this context, a term like HP implies an implausibly exaggerated emotion. Perhaps that contributed to the displacement of HP and HD by the term homophobia, which has the undeniable added advantage of sounding a bit like a clinical diagnosis.

HP

HorsePower. One HP is approximately 745.7 watts, and exactly 33000 foot-pounds per minute or 550 foot-pounds per second. Also 9000 mile-pounds per day, or mile-stones per fortnight, in equally sensible units. Here you can see some of the genius and convenience of the English system of units: you can divide by 11 or 14 and still come out with a whole number of something. The horsepower unit was defined by James Watt (a bit on him at the W entry for watt).

A typical horse can do work at a rate (i.e., a power) greater than one horsepower for short periods of time, but not for long. Astro Boy has a strength of 100,000 horsepower!

hp

Hot Pudding. In England, pudding is served hot. Isn't that weird? Okay, I admit it; I made it up (the acronym being ``hp''). I should probably also mention that pudding originally referred to minced meat stuffed and cooked in an animal's stomach or entrails -- sausage, in other words. Hence the euphemism pud.

``If you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?''

Another food word whose meaning has drifted is sherbet. In the UK it still seems to be a fruit drink (now possibly from Kool-Aid-like powder) cooled with crushed ice (historically also with snow). In North America it refers to a frozen refreshment made from sweetened fruit juice, milk, and an agglutinant (egg white or gelatin). Like ice cream, it is churned while freezing, so the water crystals are small and the bulk opaque. In Australia, sherbet still refers to a beverage, but an alcoholic one -- mostly beer. There's a logic to this: like an iced drink, beer cools you off fast on a hot day.

H₃P

Phosphine. [Pron. /fasfi:n/.] (You really shouldn't be looking here. My collating sequence has numbers after alphabetic characters. However, I'm a nice guy so I'll let you off this time. Or again. Whatever. You should have looked here.)

HPA

(UK) Health Protection Agency.

HPA

High Power Amplifier. Typically, the amplifier that feeds a transmission Antenna.

HPAC

Head Peer Academic Coordinator.

H/PC

Hand-held Personal Computer. Not HPC.

HPC

Heterotrophic Plate Count. A count of heterotrophic bacteria growing in some medium, nowadays usually quotable in units of bacteria per milliliter.

Microorganisms are called heterotrophic if they rely on other organic material for energy. This includes not only blue-green algae (now called cyanobacteria) but a variety of prokaryotes that perform biochemical feats unknown to (cave) man.

HPC

High Performance Computing. (Meaning High-Performance Computing, not performance computing at height.) Tomorrow's low-performance computing today.

HPC

Hydrological Processes and Climate. An Interdisciplinary Science Team (IDS) project of the ``Earth Observing System'' (EOS).

HPCAF

Health Physics Calibration and Acceptance Facility.

HPCC

High Performance Computing and Communications.

HPCE

High Performance Capillary Electrophoresis.

HPCCIT

High Performance Computing, Communications, and Information Technology Subcommittee.

HPCI

High Performance Computing Initiative. US Government program to foster development of the ``Information Superhighway.''

HPCN

High-Performance Computing and Networking.

HPCS

High Performance Computing Systems. A component of HPCI.

hper, HPER

Health, Physical Education, and Recreation. The acronym is pronounced ``hyper.'' Mary has a degree in that from Indiana University. She says it's ``basically PE'' [pronounced ``pee ee'']. Courses on different kinds of play (cognitive, structural, fun-play [uninhibited freedom to choose]), on play theory, etc. In class she would think: ``I'm paying money for this?''

HPERD

Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance.

If you don't mind, I'll just sleep in today.

HPF

High-Pass Filter. A filter that transmits preferentially at high frequency. A lot of work at one time (1915-1955, say) went into designing electric-circuit filters with sharp transitions between frequencies allowed to pass and frequencies absorbed. In this context, one often aimed to approximate an ideal HPF, which would absorb perfectly all signals below a cut-off frequency and transmit without loss all signals above it. A low-pass filter (LPF) was analogously idealized.

HPF

High-Performance Fortran. An extension of Fortran 90.

HPH

Singapore-based Hutchison Port Holdings.

HPIB, HP-IB

Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus. Cf. GPIB.

HPIPE

Hyperbranched PolyIsoPhthalEster. A class of polymers; the plural HPIPES occurs.

HPL

High-Power Laser.

HPL

High-Pressure Laminate. Decorative laminated plastic sheets which consist of papers, fabrics or other core materials that have been laminated at pressures normally between 1,000 and 1,400 psi, using thermosetting condensation resins as binders. I'm just parroting this information from the LMA's downloadable glossary, so you might as well go and see yourself.

HPL

HydroPeroxide Lyase. One of three enzymes important in the formation of volatile compounds in ripening fruit (see the LOX entry).

HPLC

High Performance Liquid Chromatography (LC). Here's Perkin-Elmer's two cents. Here's some more from Virginia Tech.

H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). Author of gothic fantasies. He eked out a poor short life by publishing in trashy magazines, serving as a book doctor for inferior authors, and ghosting (how appropriate!). One of his ghost-writing gigs was for Harry Houdini.

Like Poe (and, less relevantly, Jim Croce), untimely dead and a posthumous hit. He has accumulated a cult, and spawned a USENET newsgroup (news:alt.horror.cthulhu). He liked to invent names with th in unlikely places -- e.g.: Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, shoggoth.

H.P.M.A.

High Plains Motocross Association, Inc. It was ``formed in January of 1993. During that year they held their first "Points" Series consisting of both Motocross and Supercross Races in a tri-state area including Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. [They're also in Montana now.] The goal of the H.P.M.A. is to promote the sport of motocross and bring quality motorcycle racing to the Midwestern States.'' So what are they doing out in the Central Plains and Mountain West?

HPMA

Houston Production Managers Association. Self-described ``vibrant group of advertising, marketing and printing professionals who plan, coordinate, produce and purchase commercial printing.''

HPMA

2-HydroxyPropyl MethAcrylate. It's a water-soluble histology resin used for cytochemical applications.

HP Magazine

Home Power Magazine. Home burning down? Don't waste a minute! Complete plans for turning your refrigerator into a power generating station in 20 minutes! (30 minutes if thawing is necessary.)

HPMC

High-Pressure MiniColumn.

HPMC

HydroxyPropyl MethylCellulose. A group at U. Queensland uses this as a kind of gluten for their High-Temperature Superconductor (HTSC) spaghetti.

HPO

High-Performance Option.

HPOTP

High Pressure Oxidizer TurboPump. Part of the SSME.

HPP

Homogeneous Poisson Process.

HPR

High-Pressure Rinse.

HPS

Health Physics Society.

HPS

History and Philosophy of Science. An academic discipline. At its best, like others, an indiscipline.

HPSISN

Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation. That nation would be the US. Those schools would also be in the US, unlike health professions schools in Liberia, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries which typically export newly minted doctors to the US and any other country where one can get rich as a doctor. HPSISN is a program launched in 1995 by the Pew Health Professions Commission to demonstrate service-learning.

Service-learning [sic] is an innovative form of community-based education. The word innovative in this and many other contexts describes any old idea and means `promoted by earnest do-gooders constituted as a foundation.' These organizations have a superior understanding of the best ways to perform various activities that they are not directly engaged in, because they have control over the money of a philanthropist who is spinning in his grave. As the saying goes, ``everything is easier for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.'' It's quite amazing that professionals could continue for decades doing their work in the same old ineffective ways, when simple changes, relatively inexpensive once they are funded by the federal government, are so clearly superior. This should not be interpreted, however, as an indication of incompetence on the part of those professionals. Rather, it is only what one would expect from organizations that seemed to function for so long despite the absence of strategic guidance from suits.

Foundation-like thinking also occurs in the private sector, where it is known as the Harvard Business School Syndrome -- the idea that a firm understanding of general business principles is sufficient preparation to run any industry or commerce. Extensive, detailed knowledge of a particular business is recognized as not merely superfluous but detrimental, because it leads to small-picture thinking.

Innovation in both public and private sectors requires ``buy-in.'' That is, previously benighted professionals must be gently guided to enlightenment in a collegial manner, or be eliminated.

HPSS

High-Performance (data) Storage System.

HPSS

History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science.

HPT

Home Pregnancy Test. Works by measuring hCG.

HPT

HyPerTension.

HPT

HypoParaThyroidism.

HPT

Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Thyroid. Occasionally Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Testicular.

HPTLC

High Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography (TLC).

HPUX, HP-UX

Hewlett-Packard (HP) UniX. One of the Unix flavors that survived the late-nineties shake-out. Pronounced ``aitch-pucks.''

HPV

Human Papilloma Virus. Causes Cervical cancer -- about 15000 new cases and 5000 deaths each year.

HPV

Human-Powered Vehicle. Like a bicycle or the Gossamer Albatross. Vide IHPVA.

HQ

HeadQuarters.

You wouldn't want to be quartered in the head of a ship.

HQW

Helical Quantum Wire. A helical quantum wire has no superlattice bandgaps.

.hqx, .Hqx

Binhexed. File extension indicating that a (typically binary) file has been encoded (asciified) for transfer as a text file. (Macintosh standard.)

HR

Heart Rate.

HR

Hertzsprung-Russell? You probably want to see the entry for the H-R diagram.

But as long as you're here, why don't you have some tea and we can have a chat about the name Hertzsprung. The German word Herz (the t is just old-fashioned or variant spelling) means (and is cognate with the English word) `heart.' The meaning of sprung is a little less clear. It can mean leap, but it sometimes refers to a watch spring. The latter sense makes it fit right in with the preceding entry, but I think the proper interpretation is `sprung from the heart' or `leap of the heart.'

There are a lot of odder Herz- names that are common. Herzbach is `heart brook.' Herzberger or Herzberg is `someone from heart hill' or (what is implicitly the same) `heart hill.' Herzweig is written as a bit of a blend, constructed from Herz and Zweig. Hanks and Hodges offer `heart twig' as a translation, but I think this is slightly, unintentionally misleading. Zweig is indeed cognate with the English word twig, but German does not have a common term for anything larger, like the English word branch. Hence, Zweig covers the entire semantic and quantitative range from twig to branch. If anything, Reis and the diminutives Zweiglein and (rarer) Zweigchen edge in semantically from sprig towards twig (but don't hold me to that; translators must have license). So I would go with `heart branch.' Don't tell me this makes no sense; what is a Harzfeld? (I mean, what does `heart field' mean?) Oh yes, Herz can also mean strong or brave or hardy (from a cognate with the last) or deer (think hart), but these senses are not usually adduced to interpret compound names.

Here's an interesting biographical bit from Hanks and Hodges, s.v. Herz:

The Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen (1812-70) was given this surname because he was technically an illegitimate child, one born of the heart (vom Herzen). His father was Ivan Yakovlev, a Russian nobleman from a minor branch of the Romanovs, and he had married Alexander's mother only according to the Lutheran rite, which was not officially accepted.

Again we see how childhood trauma leads to adult pathologies like philosophy.

HR

High Reflectance. A typical laser is a kind of resonant cavity in which light is reflected back and forth between two end caps. One end cap is called the optical coupler--it's at the side from which the beam emerges. The other end is designated the HR mirror, which for practical purposes should have as H an R as possible.

HR

Hit Rate.

H.R.

First initials of H. R. ``Bob'' Haldeman. With John Ehrlichman, a long- time friend and admirer of RMN who was brought down in the Watergate scandal.

HR

HomeRoom. An American high school institution.

HR

House of Representatives. A bill proposed before the House is designated by HR followed by a number, as for example ``HR1043'' or ``HR 1043.''

.hr

Croatia (Hrvatska) domain name code. Go here for Croatian language stuff. International code for telephone calling 385. Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.

Here's the Croatian page of an X.500 directory.

HR

Human Resources. Sometimes Human Relations. Re-engineered name for Personnel Department.

Catbert is the evil HR director (redundant expression, I understand). Go in for your interview.

HRA

Human Reliability Analysis. A bad bet.

HRC

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Back when she was first lady, there used to be a site that featured her hair. Now she's junior senator from New York, and I notice that the URL belongs to a pornographic site. I imagine the new administration might have interestingly conflicted feelings about this.

HRC

Human Rights Campaign. The largest gay rights group in the US. Waved Matthew Shepard's bloody shirt for every buck it was worth, some years back.

HRC

Human Rights Commission. Saudi Arabia's governmental human rights organization. You can stop laughing now.

HRD

Hurricane Research Division. Part of the NOAA's AOML. The SBF has its own hurricane research division.

HRDC

Human Resources Development Canada. An internal audit of this ministry in January 2000 began a bribes-and-kickbacks scandal that was still leading to arrests in December 2006 (I write in February 2007). The initial report concerned about 460 employment-related grants awarded over the course of two years, and the main problem found was poor record-keeping. The value of the programs affected ran to about a billion dollars, but it was only a billion dollars Canadian, so there's no need to lose one's head over the matter. There's a bit more about this at the HRSDC entry and this SEDERI entry.

This HRDC entry is a Canadian-government-related stub. If you want to help improve this entry, you're out of luck, because this isn't Wikipedia. But I'll try to bring it up to snuff myself after I sort out the sloppy reportage.

H-R diagram, HR diagram

Hertzsprung-Russell DIAGRAM. A temperature-luminosity diagram. A scatter plot on a log-log scale of luminosity versus inverse surface temperature (of stars). That is, a plot of logarithm of luminosity (ordinate) against negative logarithm of temperature (abscissa, temperature increasing right-to-left). The principal feature is the ``main sequence'' of stars, a narrow band of the diagram along which most (80-90%) visible stars cluster.

Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell independently developed this kind of plot and discovered the main sequence early in the twentieth century.

HRSDC

Human Resources and {Skills|Social} Development Canada. The name, since about April 2004, of a ministry whose old name became tainted in a bribe-and-kickback scandal (see HRDC). It was somehow reorganized, then, and given the Skills name. In 2005, an umbrella organization was created, called Service Canada, to centralize various social services, and within Service Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada was combined with Social Development Canada into Human Resources and Social Development Canada.

HREELS

High Resolution Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy.

HREM

High-Resolution Electron Microscopy. The HREM and Surface Structure Facility at Northwestern has a nice homepage.

The University of Michigan Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory has put a JEOL 4000EX HREM description online. So does the University of Melbourne Physics Dept.

HRG

Horizontal Ribbon Growth.

HRH

{His|Her} Royal Highness. As the case may be. In the UK. Never referred to as {His|Her} Royal Height. His Royal Arm (not Arms) Length (from nose to fingertip), on the other, uh, hand, once defined the yard. (``Once'' was, according to legend, in the reign of Henry I of England.)

HRIS

High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer.

HRL

Hughes Research Labs. Often appears in seminar announcements as HRL Labs.''

HRM

Holistic Resource Management. Pushing the cattle around more often so they don't overgraze any one spot. Labor-intensive.

HRMS

High-Resolution Microwave Survey. Of the sky. Part of SETI.

HRP

HorseRadish Peroxidase. I didn't make this up. See for yourself.

HR/PR

Human Resource/PayRoll. Used attributively, as in ``HR/PR database.''

HRSA

Health Resources and Services Administration. An agency of the Public Health Service (PHS) within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

HRSG

Heat Recovery Steam Generator.

HRT

Hormone Replacement Therapy. Most commonly: for menopausal and post-menopausal women.

HRTF

Head Relative Transfer Function. The ``head'' here is the one at the end of a neck. The name HRTF is given to algorithms that simulate 3D sound by taking account of how the brain integrates information from two ears to compute sound source location. Since heads and speaker pairs vary, and since the left (right) ear listens in on sounds meant for the right (left) [this is called crosstalk], there's room for improvement. The best 3D effect is obtained with headphones.

HRTOF

High-n Rydberg (atom) Time-Of-Flight (TOF) (spectroscopy).

HRV

Heart-Rate Variability.

HRW

Human Rights Watch.

HRXRD

High-Resolution X-Ray Diffraction (XRD).

HS

HandSet.

HS

Harmonized System. An international convention for classifying imports and exports so that data from different countries can be compared halfway meaningfully. Implemented by the US in 1989.

HS

Hartree-Slater. An version of Hartree-Fock-Slater approximation (HFS, q.v.). See Ingvar Lindgren and Arne Rosén,``Relativistic Self-Consistent-Field Calculations with Application to Atomic Hyperfine Interaction'' Case Studies in Atomic Physics.

Hs

Hassium. Atomic number 108.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

HS

Head Start. The HS program was created in 1965 under the Economic Opportunity Act. In other words, it's one of the original ``Great Society'' programs of the LBJ administration. (There's a bit more on the Great Society towards the end of the O entry.)

In FY 1998, over 822,000 children were enrolled in 48,000 Head Start classrooms. More information at the HSB entry.

HS

Hebrew Studies. A journal of language studies.

HS

High School. If obedience school teaches how to be obedient, then high school...?

High school is the last few years of secondary education. In most of the US, it is either the last four or the last three years. The latter is often called senior high school, to distinguish it from junior high school (JHS). Further discussion at the MS entry.

In Canada, all or many of the provinces used to offer secondary education through grade 13, and high school would typically be the last four or five years of secondary education -- grades 9-12 (culminating in what was called, in Ontario, SSGD), or 9-13 (SSHGD) for those continuing to university. (In at least one district, grades 7-8 were called ``senior public school.'')

Ontario, the last province to switch over to graduation at grade 12, did so at the end of the school year in Spring 2003. The students graduating from grades 12 and 13 in the high school class of 2003 were called the double cohort. Amazingly, based on original college entrance projections, this was not expected to be a logistical nightmare. Double the number of freshmen the first year? No problem! Twenty-five percent increase in enrollments and housing requirements one year, then a twenty percent decrease four years later? Sure!

HS

High Speed. A light on some old external modems.

H-S

High Speed. As in ``H-S Photography.''

HS

Holy Spirit.

Why does HS stand for Holy Spirit and not Holy Smoke or Holy Sepulcher? I don't know. No one knows. You can't understand it -- it's a deep mystery. You just have to believe.

Oh wait -- it can mean ``Holy Smoke''! It's a miracle!

HS

Hydrogen Sulfide, chemical formula H₂S. Smells awful; tarnishes silver.

HSA

Handicapped Scuba Association.

HSA

Hardware System Area. Central memory addresses accessible by the system software but not directly accessible by application processes.

HSA

Health Savings Account.

HSA

Hegel Society of America. ``[A] learned society, founded in 1968, whose goal is to promote the study of the philosophy of Hegel and Hegelianism, its place within the history of thought, and its relation to social, political, and cultural movements since his time.''

HSAA

Handbook of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics. The content is online as images, just inconvenient enough to make heavy users buy it.

HSAD

HydroxySteroid Alcohol Dehydrogenase.

HSAN

Hereditary Sensory & Autonomic Neuropathies.

HSAW

Humane Society And Welfare (web) Ring.

HSB

Head Start Bureau, within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), administers Head Start and Early Head Start programs.

Early Head Start was established by the Head Start Reauthorization Act (1994) to assist poor families with infants and toddlers, particularly including children with disabilities, and pregnant women. It is a relatively small program (six hundred projects in FY 1998, serving 35,000 children under the age of three). Small programs for small children -- I think we've got a slogan here.

HSB

High School and Beyond. A large database for US education research. Another is NELS.

HSB

Hue, Saturation, Brightness. One coordinatization of color space.

HSBC

Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. ``The world's local bank.'' In other words, they bought your local bank (e.g., HFC).

HS-C

Hampden-Sydney College. A selective four-year college for men, it was founded in 1775 (it's the tenth-oldest college in the United States). The big selling point is the absence of distractions. It has a zip code, but it seems to be located in the very middle of nowhere. ``Hampden-Sydney is six miles south of Farmville, Virginia, on U.S. 15. Turn west at State Route 133, bear right onto Route 692, and drive for one mile.'' Drive slowly and don't blink.

HSC

Heat Seal Connection/Cable. The cable is a flat polyester ribbon with metal traces on one side, which can be bonded to a number of substrate materials with the application of some combination of heat and pressure.

HSC

Health and Safety Commission. Its operational arm is the HSE (... Executive). The HSC/HSE in Britain is like OSHA in the US.

HSCC

High-level Serial Communication Controller.

HSCI

High-Speed (up to 52 Mbps) Communications Interface.

HSCP

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. As of May 1997, you can get the latest edition: vol. 96, for 1994. A lot of the Soviet journals poked along at this pace before they died around 1990.

Same as HSPh.

Oh look! It's Summer 1999 and there's already a BMCR review (it's 99.8.10) for volume 97 (1995).

HSCT

High-Speed Commercial Transport.

You know, when we colonize Mars, the HSCT is going to be rail and rockets at first. Aircraft won't work until it gets an atmosphere.

HSCSD

High Speed Circuit-Switched Data. ``High Speed'' in the wireless telecommunications context: up to 57.6kbit/s.

HSD

Honestly Significant Difference. The HSD is used in pairwise comparisons of statistical samples taken under conditions to be compared. The HSD value is a bound to be compared to the standardized range statistic. (The standardized range statistic is just the difference of two sample means divided by the best estimate of the sample standard deviation. Confusingly, writers sometimes also call this figure of merit the HSD, whether it is significant or not.)

This simple test of significance was first defined -- as a formal test -- only by Tukey, (of FFT fame) in the 1950's. When the HSD value is exceeded, then the assumption that two samples are drawn from a common distribution can be rejected (at a stated significance level). When careless writers HSD for both HSD and standardized range statistic (ideally to be labelled Z), you can sometimes tell the real HSD from the use of a subscript indicating the significance level (typically HSD_.05 or HSD_.01).

The HSD bound depends on the number of degrees of freedom, the number of levels of the independent variable (essentially the number of different samples available to be compared), and the significance level (alpha, the acceptable level of type-I errors).

HSD values are computed without making any assumption about the form of the underlying distributions. Thus, Tukey's HSD test is more general than the widely used F test, which assumes normal distributions.

HSDM

Homogeneous Surface-Diffusion Model.

HSE

Health & Safety Executive. Operational arm of the HSC (above).

HSG

HysteroSalpinoGram. X-ray examination of uterus and fallopian tubes. Since soft tissue is not imaged, contrast is generated by a radio-opaque dye injected through the cervix. Barium or some other heavy metal, I suppose.

HSH

Hebrew Scriptures (Harkavy). The Hebrew Bible (``Old Testament'') in the standard Jewish ordering of the books, translated into English. This is a modernized (1951) rewording of the Leeser Version of 1814, which in turn was based on the KJV. There are also a few paraphrases, so that Alexander Harkavy wouldn't feel that his talents had been wasted.

HSI

Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Check with MOLIS (acronym MOLIS expanded here).

HSI

Human-Systems Interface.

HSINFET

Hybrid Schottky Injection Field-Effect Transistor (FET). See
J. K. O. Sin, C. A. T. Salama, and L. Z. Hou, ``Analysis and Characterization of the Hybrid Schottky Injection Field Effect Transistor,'' IEDM Technical Digest, 222-225 (1986).

HSIS

Hierarchical Sequential Interactive System. ``[A] prototype system for formal design verification'' according to the HSIS tutorial document. In fact, according to the HSIS Home Page, ``HSIS is not supported by the [UCB] CAD group any more. Instead, we distribute a new system VIS (Verification Interacting with Synthesis). Please check out the VIS homepage.''

HSL

The Health Sciences Library of the University at Buffalo. HSL is a Resource Library for the Middle Atlantic Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. HSL offers a variety of services through its Information Delivery Service (IDS) and through HUBNET.

HSLAN

High-Speed Local Area Network (LAN). ``High Speed'' is 100 Mbps, ca. 1997 (using FDDI or CDDI). ``Local'' seems to be only in the sense of General Relativity; common HSLAN's are metropolitan networks (MAN's).

HSLC

Health Sciences Libraries Consortium. A non-profit ``founded to promote information sharing among its members.'' Members in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York.

HSLC

Humane Society for Larimer County (Colorado). Founded in 1974.

HSLDA

Home School Legal Defense Association.

HSM

Hardware-Specific (software) Module.

HSMRS

Healthy School Meals Resource System (of the National Agricultural Library). Meals and agriculture, schools and library -- a perfect fit.

HSM

Hierarchical Storage Manage{ r | ment }. Or Data Facility Hierarchical Storage Manager. We all pity you poor souls who still have to deal with an IBM 3081. 'Nuff said.

HSN

Hereditary Sensory Neuropathy. The next HSN utilizes a pathology of the central nervous system, and stupidity is indeed partly heritable.

HSN

Home Shopping Network. The leading TV distributor of dreck, if you don't count dreck programming. I get this TV channel free and I don't even have cable. The word exclusive (q.v.) is used with some frequency by your hosts at HSN. Why don't they mention QVC? (And if you don't know what q.v. stands for, after you follow the QVC link you can just scroll up to find out. All the convenience of TV, and you can't beat the price.)

HSPh

Harvard Studies in (Classical) Philology. Same as HSCP, q.v.. Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

HSPVA

The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

HSQ

Hydrogen SilsesQuioxane. An inter-level dielectric (ILD) with a low dielectric constant k between 3 and 3.5.

HSQC

Heteronuclear Single Quantum Correlation. NMRtian. Cf. Multiple same (HMQC).

HSR

Hamilton Street Railway. (The City of Hamilton is near Toronto. In fact, it's between Toronto and Niagara Falls as the crow flies, if the crow prefers taking a dog-leg to flying over water.) HSR relies entirely on buses today, and hasn't run streetcars since 1951.

If you were so minded, you could regard the ``railway'' in the company name not as traditional but metaphorical, like the Underground Railroad which once passed through. Coincidentally, here's something from the letter mentioned at the streetcar entry: ``In spite of motorman's knee, as you may know, thirteen motormen escape every year from Rumania. Unfortunately they seek refuge in countries which have given up streetcars, so the problem is even greater than it was.''

HSR

Health Services Research. ``The journal is published bimonthly for the Hospital Research and Educational Trust by Health Administration Press in cooperation with the Association for Health Services Research.'' It's the official journal of that association.

HSS

History of Science Society.

HSSA

High School Sports America. It ``is dedicated to recognizing and rewarding select student-athletes throughout the U.S. with scholarships. Select students will be [when?] good athletes, students, and citizens who exemplify the true meaning of student-athlete.'' This isn't really fair, you know -- it discriminates against poor students, poor athletes, and poor citizens. There should be a program that seeks out and provides assistance to students who are athletically, scholastically, or (not xor) civically challenged. (There's an alternate URL.)

``HSSA is dedicated to assisting today's student-athletes throughout the U.S. with educational funding needed to become the leader's of our future.'' The leader's what? Smart bodyguards?

HSSFC

Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada. Same as la FCSHS.

HSSHP

High School Science Honors Program.

HSSI

High-Speed (up to 52 Mbps) Serial Interface.

HST

Harry S. Truman. Haberdasher and US President.

HST

Health and Safety Technician.

HST

High-Speed Train. Refers to a particular model of British train, the world's only diesel-powered train to operate at 125 mph. Known to the general public under the brand name Intercity 125.

HST

History of Science and Technology. Hmmm. Entry's kinda thin. Try HOS, HSS, SHOT, for a start.

HST

Hubble Space Telescope.

HSTEMM

History of Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, and Mathematics. It sounds like one of the Parkinson principles in action.

HSTM

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Here's the WWWVL site.

HSUS

The Humane Society of the United States.

HSV

Hue, Saturation and Value. One common coordinatization of color space.

HSV

Herpes Simplex Virus.

HSW

Heat-Sink Welding.

HSW

How Stuff Works.

h/t

Hat Tip [to].

.ht

Haiti domain name code.

ht.

HeighT.

HT

High Temperature. Productive prefix.

HT

High Tension (i.e., high voltage).

HT

Horizontal Tab (EBCDIC 5, ASCII 9: <ctrl>-I).

``Let's do the Time Warp Agaaain!''
(Madness takes its toll.)

HT

Hot Tip. Does not normally refer to a soldering iron.

HTB

Holy Trinity Brompton with St. Paul Onslow Square. No, I can't really parse that. It's ``a vibrant Anglican church in Knightsbridge, London.''

HTCVD

High-Temperature CVD.

HTD

Hot Tin Dip. In electronic interconnect fabrication, HTD refers to the final step in the process of tin-coating copper strips. The alternative is HALT (hot-air-leveled tin). HTD uses a mechanical wiper and HALT uses an air knife. The general process is described in more detail at this HALT entry.

HTF

Highway Trust Fund.

HTFA

High Temperature Forced Air.

HTGR

High-Temperature Gas-Cooled (nuclear) Reactor.

HTH

High-Test Hypochlorite. ``High-Test'' ... isn't that a gas?

In traditional terminology, moderately complex oxide anions had prefixes indicating the oxidation state of the base element. Hence, for example, the simple sulfur-based ions are

Name	Formula
sulfide	S-
sulfite	(SO3)=
sulfate	(SO4)=

In the case of a nonmetal like nitrogen or chlorine that has a number of stable oxidation states, prefixes hypo- and per- are selectively applied as well:

Name	Formula
chloride	Cl-
hypochlorite	(ClO)-
chlorite	(ClO2)-
chlorate	(ClO3)-
perchlorate	(ClO4)-

HTH

Hope { That | This } Help{ s | ed }. Often used as a sign-off before email signature.

HTI

Humanities Text Initiative.

HTK, H.T.K.

Head[line] To Kum. A specialized version of TK. (Also written out as ``Head to Come.''

The headlines of newspaper and magazine articles are normally not written by the original author of a piece but added by a copy editor or a headline writer. In the latter case HTK is a useful instruction from the copy editor to the compositor. Edited copy can be sent for composition even while the headline writer is still scanning the piece and thinking of a title. ``Composition'' used to be a time-consuming process involving highly-skilled Linotype operators who all lost their old jobs when new computerized equipment came in, but apparently HTK continued to have some utility. As recently as Sunday, March 8, 1998, the Chicago Sun-Times published a letters page where all the letters bore the title HTK (an oversight, of course).

HTK

Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

HTK

Hit-To-Kill. A kind of interceptor missile.

HTLV

Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus.

HTM

High-Temperature Materials.

HTML

HyperText Mark-up Language. Sometimes said to be ``derived from SGML.'' Better said: falls within the constraints of SGML.

There are, as you've no doubt noticed, many tutorials. Perhaps you haven't seen this one on background, transparency and color from Mike Hutchinson.

This page is an artistic achievement in really bad HT mark-up; check it out!

There's actually something called the HTML Writers' Guild.

Back when I was a theoretical physicist, I tried to get a guild going. If I had succeeded, experimentalists would never be allowed to solve any problem more difficult than a three-by-three matrix inversion. I'm sure both experimentalists and theorists would have benefitted, but labor organization is hard in these times of down-sizing and reengineering.

HTMMC

High-Temperature Metal Matrix Composite (MMC). Like silicon carbide titanium and titanium aluminum titanate.

HTO, H_TO

According to this page on official the website of the City of Toronto, ``[t]he name H_TO represents the fundamental changes that will take place in the relationship between Toronto and its waterfront. H_TO was created by a design team led by Janet Rosenberg + Associates Landscape Architects (Toronto) and Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes Inc. (Montreal), in partnership with the City of Toronto's Parks, Forestry & Recreation Division. The design is based on six elements or layers: ground planes, water, islands, expressive horticulture [that's where your plants talk back to you, no doubt], lighting, and beach furniture.''

Here is a relevant excerpt from The Profit of Kehlog Albran (1933-1927):

    woman stepped forward and asked, What is the strangest day?     Tuesday, the Master explained.

Further down the aforementioned webpage, there is the following explanation of the symbol H_TO: ``The winning design team for Phase I consists of Janet Rosenberg & Associates Landscape Architects of Toronto and Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes Inc. of Montreal. Together they have created a design known as H_TO. The name represents the fundamental changes that will take place in the relationship between Toronto and the waterfront.''

There is a relevant quote from some fourth-century desert monks, but I don't have it handy right now. I think that H_TO might be expanded Harbourfront Toronto, Ontario, but that it normally isn't because mere words aren't pretentious enough.

TO is a widely used abbreviation for Toronto. Presumably the official form of the symbol is the one with the T subscripted rather than in a smaller font, and is intended to suggest water (H₂O). Subscripts and small-caps are usually at least a little bit inconvenient, and sometimes difficult or impossible, to insert in a printed document, and one sometimes sees the symbol written HtO.

HTOL

High-Temperature Operating Life (testing).

hTPO

Human Thyroid PerOxidase.

HTR

Harvard Theological Review.

HTRB

High Temperature Reverse Bias. Increased voltage magnitude, high temperature. A screening test for microelectronic circuits. Especially useful for MOS testing.

HTS

Hadamard-Transform Spectrometer.

HTS

High-Temperature Superconductors.

HTS

High-Throughput (medical, chemical, biological) Screening.

HTSC

High-Temperature Superconductors.

HTTL

High-speed Transistor-Transistor Logic.

http, HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol. See T. Berners-Lee, R. T. Fielding, and H. Frystyk Nielsen, `` Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.0.'' Work in Progress, MIT, UC Irvine (UCI), CERN, March 1995.

httpd

HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon. The HTTP server process.

HTTP response codes

Three-digit decimal codes returned by an httpd in response to an HTTP request. All clients are expected to understand the general classes of response, indicated by the first digit:

2xx

success

3xx

redirection

4xx

refusal of service

5xx

failure

In particular,

200

"OK" (requested document on the way)

301

"Moved Permanently" (redirect to another URL)

302

"Moved Temporarily" (redirect to another URL)

303

"See Other" (redirect to another URL)

304

"Not modified" (URL is not modified since last indexing)

401

"Authorization required" (login and password)

403

"Forbidden" (you have no access)

404

"Not found"

500

"Internal Server Error" (typically a bad CGI)

503

"Service Unavailable" (host is down or daemon isn't listening; connection timed out)

504

"Gateway Timeout" (stalled out)

HU

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Alternate URL at the grandfathered-in domain <hebrew.edu>.)

HU

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Also HUB.

.hu

(Domain name code for) Hungary. Here's an FAQ.

Here's the Hungarian page of an X.500 directory.

Enrico Fermi did an estimate of the density of planets with life and intelligent civilizations, and came up with a sufficiently high humber that afterwards he became known for the question, ``where are they? Where is the evidence of alien intelligence?'' [Paradigmatic form of the quote, so far as I can remember right now.] I suppose I should mention that at the SETI entry. Anyway, in the 1940's and 1950's when he was active in the US, there were also a lot of prominent emigre physicists -- refugees -- from Hungary. Very intelligent people like John von Neumann and Leo Szilard and Eugen Wigner. (For others, see Hungarians In America. There I learned that Joseph Pulitzer of Pulitzer Prize fame was born in Makó, Hungary, and that Béla Bartók died in New York City, September 26, 1945.) So somebody answered Fermi's SETI question: ``they are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.''

Actually, the somebody who gave this answer was Leo Szilard. See Is Anyone Out There?: the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, by Frank Drake and Dava Sobel (Delacorte Pr., 1992), p. 130. I should probably have mentioned this at the France entry. Skits involving the Coneheads were a popular feature during the early years of Saturday Night Live, back when SNL was funny. The Coneheads were a family of aliens trying to fit in as an ordinary family in suburban America. To explain away any oddities that might raise the suspicions of their neighbors (but not their two-foot-tall, minuteman-missile-shaped bald heads, which everyone accepted as unexceptional), they claimed that they were from France. (At the time, this was considered so improbable as to be funny.)

One of the Coneheads' oddities was their use of stilted, unnecessarily technical language, which sounded like a bad translation from Latin.

Consume mass quantities!

(For something similar, if imagination and memory both fail, check the ISO 9000 Certification entry.) Another example was ``fried chicken embryos'' for fried eggs. This term was technically inaccurate. Hens lay eggs, fertilized or not. The eggs you buy in the store are from hens not serviced by roosters. They can't develop into embryos, and it's pretty obvious that they haven't. We also have an eggs entry.

Microsoft used to promote something called Hungarian notation, which is just as relevant to this entry as anything in the preceding few paragraphs. All Microsoft API's, interfaces, technical articles and excuses used these conventions, which were developed by Charles Simonyi. Basically, it's a convention governing the initial parts of the names of variables, functions, types and constants, classes, objects, and parameters. Here is where I'm going to place a table of the basic prefixes, if I happen to get around to it:

...

HUAC

House Un-American Activities Committee.

I suppose they investigated people who didn't orient the pie slices to point at their stomachs before eating them. And people who play soccer.

HUAM

Harvard University Art Museums.

HUB

Historically Underutilized Business. Federalese for minority- and women-owned firms. Come think of it, most large corporations are controlled by minority shareholders, but not in that sense.

HUB

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Also HU.

Hubba-hubba!

Vavavoom!

How do they come up with this stuff?

HUBNET

Hospitals and University at Buffalo Library Resource NETwork.

HUC

Hebrew Union College. ``The Academic, Spiritual and Professional Development Center for Reform Judaism.'' Graduated its first class of Reform rabbis in 1883. They were fêted with an aggressively treif banquet (including clams, crab, shrimp, and frog legs). Most of the new rabbis succumbed to food poisoning. (Just kidding about the food poisoning. I mean, it coulda happened, but I don't know that it did.)

HUC-JIR

Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. Longer version of the name also abbreviated HUC. The appositive is useful clarification; without it, I'd probably have guessed it was a school of Jewish architecture. (They have a program in cantorial studies also.) There seems to have been a vogue in this sort of hyphenated name within the movement: cf. LBC-CJE.

HUD

Heads-Up Display. (As in displays for drivers of motor vehicles. That's `drivers' in the sense of human operators, not drivers in the sense of machines directly generating electronic signals to activate servos and such. Also, I mean `motor vehicles' in the sense of self-propelled conveyors of passenger(s), cargo, or both, and not animate carriers of a motor disease. And by `operators' I mean ....) The term is also used in computer games to indicate that status information (available ammunition, scores, etc.) is continuously visible on screen

HUD

(US Dept. of) Housing and Urban Development.

HUDG

History in Universities Defence Group. A UK group. I believe the group conceives itself to be defending history against the shade of Margaret Thatcher. This is appropriate, since she is a historical figure, even a historic one.

HUF

Highway Users Federation. A dependency support group?

huge chocoholic

Okay, maybe not the best choice of words.

Huge, Victor

A writer best known for The Halfback of Notre Dame. Something like that, anyway.

Above the main doorway exiting the computer cluster in Notre Dame's main library, a sign says ``LOG OFF LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY.'' You're supposed to get that joke too. What are you, stupid or sumpin'?

hugging

Vide promiscuous hugging.

Hum.

HUMidity. It's not the heat.

I've asked around, and in Japanese there doesn't seem to be a common phrase that would translate ``It's not the heat, it's the humidity.'' That's a defect, because the (English) phrase is very appropriate to Japan.

human scale

The emblem of the 2004 Olympics in Athens was an olive wreath, called kotinos in Greek. This was the prize in those earlier olympics. (There were no second prizes, only winners and losers.) Officially, the wreath represented the four values of the 2004 Games: heritage, participation, celebration, and human scale. If those were answers on a multiple-choice test, the question would be: ``Which of the following does not belong?''

There is much confusion about the meaning of the term human scale. It is widely used to mean the dimension or length of a hand or a few feet. This is incorrect. Those are the scales of monkeys and horses. The human scale is interstellar; we just haven't arrived yet.

humane vents

Huh? Oh! Human Events -- the journal. ``Leading the Conservative Movement * Since 1944.'' So what is the late WFB's National Review, chopped liver?

humble physicist, I'm just a

Now there's a phrase you don't hear much.

Laura Fermi recalled that the physicist Leo Szilard said to Dr. Luria of the University of Indiana, who didn't know at what level to pitch an explanation of his work,

You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.

Laura once asked her husband Enrico (see FGR, fermi entries) why physicists were so arrogant, but I forget his answer. It's somewhere in her biography of him, Atoms in the Family.

Humboldt-Stiftung

Swedish site. Main site in Germany.

Hume

David Hume was a ``British Imperialist'' who died in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence. Something like that, anyway. In his portrait you can see he's wearing a rug more fake than a duck decoy in mating season. Naturally, he made contributions to the philosophy of science (no, not in specie but in kind).

Hume-Rothery

William Hume-Rothery (1899-1968) was a ``British Metallurgist,'' who did science, instead of just talking about it. The eponymous Hume-Rothery rules are an empirical guide to when two metals are sufficiently similar to be completely miscible (form a single phase at all relative concentrations). The rules are:

1. Atomic radii no more than about 15% different.
2. Pure metals have the same crystal structure.
3. Atoms have similar electronegativities.
4. Atoms have the same valence.

HUMEVAC

HUManitarian Emergency eVACuation.

HUMINT

HUMan-sourced INTelligence. ``Intelligence'' here is meant in the espionage sense; HUMINT is knowledge of an enemy (or opponent, or potential enemy, for that matter an ally that is not perfectly transparent) that is obtained by interviewing someone who knows. Cf. HI.

Hummer

Originally one nickname for a military vehicle officially designated HMMWV. Eventually, Hummer became the official name of the civilian versions of that vehicle. In 2000, after GM bought the right to use the name, Hummer became the marque name, and the earlier class of civilian Hummers became the H1 model. In 2002, the H2 model went on sale, rather more affordable and nearly as rugged as the H1.

The other common nickname, now used exclusively for the military vehicle (HMMWV), is Humvee. Interestingly, a military version of the H2 is being considered by the US Army. The Humvee was originally intended as a combat vehicle, but has been used for noncombat missions.

humor, humour

One way to classify humor is into the categories of unintentional humor (e.g., amusing errors) and intentional humor (jokes). Behind the scenes here at The Glossary, we are working constantly to increase the intentional:unintentional humor quotient. Also, we're looking out for errors. Of course, since it's surprising and amusing that we would make any errors at all, these are instances of category I humor. We constantly check and double-check for any mistakes. We don't want any unintentional humor to go to waste, so what we do when we find mistakes is carefully mark them with a mental checkmark, so they become jokes. We've been doign [sic: intentional, ha-ha!] very well, take my word for it.

For slightly substantive thoughts on humor, see the kill the frog entry.

HUMRRO

HUMan Resources Research Organization.

Humvee

Onomatopoeia of what happens when someone tries to pronounce HMMWV, the US military's original official abbreviation of the vehicle which succeeded the Jeep (another modified initials sequence). Also informally called Hummer, but that name was later made the official name of the civilian versions. Built by AM General of South Bend, Indiana. (Plants in Mishawaka -- one town east.)

Hunter College

Well, really this is about Rose Hamburger, but there is as much on Hunter College as there is on any other topic other than Rose Hamburger. The daughter of a department store executive, Rose was born in Manhattan on December 29, 1890. Her maiden name was Rosenbaum, so I suspected that Rose was not her original given name, but a leaf a couple of branches further out along the family tree informs that it was.

Normal College had been established in 1869 as the Female Normal and High School, and held its first classes on Valentine's Day in 1870, regarded as the official founding date of the institution and its successors. Its name was changed to Normal College of the City of New York later that same year, but it was still a girls' school. (A normal school, incidentally, is a school that prepares students to become teachers. As secondary education became common, normal schools evolved into normal colleges, and in the middle of the twentieth century the term ``normal college'' was abandoned in favor of ``teachers' college.'')

In 1879, the length of the program of studies was expanded from three years to four. In 1888, the minimum age for admission, which had been raised to 14 in 1872, was raised again to 15, and Normal College was authorized to grant baccalaureate degrees. [The first B.A. was granted only in 1892. Possibly this is because students in the ``normal'' program were still earning teaching certificates. The ``classical'' (i.e., nonteaching) program of studies was only created in 1888.] Only later did the Normal College receive Regents accreditation and state recognition of its degrees (provisional in 1902, full recognition in 1908). Miss Rosenbaum graduated from Normal College in 1910 at the age of 19, with degrees in mathematics and music. (This implies that she finished in less than four years or was admitted before reaching age 15, or simply that graduation took place earlier in the year than admission. According to an article based on a 1995 interview, she enrolled in 1907. Then again, she explained that she never fulfilled her dream of becoming a concert pianist because her memorization skills weren't too good. (You're probably wondering why I'm providing this information. It's not for you. It's because someone else out there wants to know. Everyone has to wait his turn.) The first president of Normal College, Thomas Hunter, finally retired in September 1906. In the same interview she remembered his words from a speech he gave to an assembly there. That's another reason I distrust the 1907 enrollment date. In April 1914, the NY State legislature authorized changing the name of Normal College to Hunter College of The City of New York.

According to her obituary in the New York Times, Mrs. Hamburger was at that time the youngest graduate in the college's history. She was too young to obtain a teacher's license, so she accompanied her father and uncle to Germany. There she went to her first horse race (according to one news article, and contrary to another) and became hooked on playing the horses. Back in the US, she attended every Preakness Stakes from 1915 to 1988, or only 73 between 1915 and 1992, depending on which news report you want to believe. (Well, okay, the facts don't really depend on your beliefs. You can believe one story or the other, if you trust one of the reports. An obviously error-riddled transcript of a brief Bloomberg broadcast claims she attended every Preakness from 1918-1988, which could of course be true.)

Even after she became the first woman licensed in Baltimore to sell real estate (at age 47, in 1938), she still managed her schedule so she could make it to the track (Pimlico) almost every day. In 1975 she moved to New York to be near her adult children, and gave up selling real estate to become a rental agent for a Manhattan building, but eventually returned to selling real estate. She became a regular at Aqueduct (she also went to Belmont). She liked her work apparently only a bit less than her hobby; she finally retired in 1990. ``The market had been absurdly bad,'' was her comment on real estate, reported from her 100th birthday celebration at the end of that year, ``I miss it -- life is without a challenge.'' She focused on the track.

(Incidentally, Rose Hamburger's 100th birthday celebration was organized by her daughter Nancy Sureck. Mrs. Sureck is the founder of Centennial Celebrations, and has organized them for such institutions as the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall.)

She began to get a lot of attention after she turned 100. As part of the centennial celebration, Nancy arranged for a congratulatory letter from the Hunter College president. After that, she was the guest of honor at several college functions. A letter she wrote to the Daily Racing Form led to a wave of publicity when she was 100. Aqueduct held a race in her honor on December 28, 1992 -- the ``Happy 102d Rose'' purse, which she went to the winner's circle to present.

She came out of retirement to be a racing handicapper (``Gambling Rose'') for the New York Post, beginning work on her 105th birthday, and she later appeared on ``Late Night With David Letterman'' and other television programs. She died the following August. (In those days, the New York Post was also looking pretty terminal.)

hup

A built-in csh command. Not unrelated to...

HUP

Hang UP. A Unix signal. Typically, you can send it to a process with kill -1 (that's a one).

HUP

Harvard University Press.

HUP

Hydrogen Uranyl Phosphate. Uranophosphoric acid.

hurling

I just read that hurling is a traditional sport in Ireland. How gross can you get!?

hurricane

A extreme low-pressure (i.e., ``warm'') air mass whose structure is a single convection cell with a calm central ``eye.'' The ones that approach the east coast of North America form as tropical depressions in the mid-Atlantic, typically drifting first west across the Atlantic and then northward. (``Depression'' refers to the pressure.) They are typically categorized on a five-point Saffir-Simpson scale. In contrast to tornadoes, which last minutes and wreak destruction along a narrow path (funnel diameter at the ground on a scale as small as a hundred feet), hurricanes cause damage over a swath tens of miles (~ tens of kilometers) wide, and create heavy showers across a couple of thousand miles of seacoast. You can figure out a bit more about how hurricanes work by reading the entry on Buys Ballot's Law.

For a long time, hurricanes were given women's names (on the basis of a scrap of Shakespeare that I forget), but in the seventies it was discovered that this was sexist, and since then men's and women's names have alternated. Each successive tropical depression gets a name beginning with the next letter of the alphabet, and a typical hurricane season has half a dozen hurricanes. More on hurricane naming at the WMO entry.

husfriend

A semantic and orthographic blend of husband and boyfriend. I guess boyband might've been less clear. It's not a very common word. Just now I had ``about 17,000'' ghits for hemidemisemiquaver and only ``about 494'' ghits for husfriend. Who knows? Maybe I'm misspelling it.

When I showed Mary the glossary entry for namorido (an equivalent but much more common Portuguese term), the best English translation she could come up with was ``rentee.'' The word she had in mind, of course, was Leo. Her nonce word for tenant points up an interesting problem with the word renter, which is that it refers both to the person who rents, and to the person who rents: lessor and lessee.

Famous husfriends include Kurt Russell (husfriend of Goldie Hawn), Steadman Graham (Oprah Winfrey) and Tim Robbins (Susan Sarandon). I've seen the complementary term gwife (for Goldie, Oprah, etc.). The word, or at least the five-letter string, appears to be common. However, it seems to be some kind of Welsh variable name (also gWife), and anyway someday it will be short for Google Wife.

HUT

Helsinki University of Technology. Called Teknillinen Korkeakoulu (TKK) in Finnish. See EDUFI for an overview of the educational system of Finland.

HUVEC

Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cell[s].

HV

Heating and Ventilation.

HV

High Vacuum. Low pressure.

HV

High Voltage.

HVAC

Heating, Ventilati{on|ng}, and Air Conditioning. `Heating Vents, Air Conditioning' has also been reported.

HVAC

High VACuum.

HVAC

High Voltage, AC.

If you're not sure which of these HVAC's you've got -- you don't want to go there.

HVEE

Home Video Entertainment Events.

HVFA

High-Volume Fly Ash (concrete). Concrete in which 55-60% of the portland cement is replaced by low-calcium fly ash, a by-product of thermal power plants. Developed by CANMET in the 1980's.

HVHB

Hudson Valley Home Brewers.

HVMA

Hawaii Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

HVT

High-Value Target. For whom, I suppose you might ask.

HW

HardWare. In the classic definition of Jeff Pesis:
``The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.''

At left, a portable calculator (this was hardware) is shown.

For information about ``hardware disease,'' see the cow magnet entry.

HW

HardWired.

HW

Hazardous Waste.

H-W

Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

HW

HighWay.

HW

HomeWork.

HW

Hot Water.

HW

HotWire. The term refers to a deposition method: source material is cracked near the deposition surface by nearby hot wire. Bypassing the ignition circuitry and starting the car motor by shorting power to the starter motor is also called hotwiring, but I've never seen ``HW'' used in that context.

HWA

Horrible Writers Association. Dedicated to finding something more productive to do with its members' lack of talent. Uh-oooh... Moaaannn. Bad guess. Turns out it's the Horror Writers Association. ``A worldwide organization of writers and publishing professionals dedicated to promoting dark literature and the interests of those who write it. HWA was formed in the late 1980s with the help of many of the field's greats, including Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, and Joe Lansdale.''

I'm speechless! I don't know what to say! Okay, I should probably at least mention Charnel House Publishing, though. I'll add more if I ever make it back here.

HWC

Hackensack Water Company. (In Northern New Jersey.)

HWG

Hot-Water natural Gas heating. See the HWO entry for nonusage information.

HWG

HTML Writers' Guild. Their website claims they're ``the first international organization of World Wide Web page authors and Internet Publishing professionals.'' They claimed over 50,000 members as of 1997.04.04, and over 150,000 as of 2003.12.07.

HWHM

Half Width at Half Maximum. Half of FWHM.

HWO

Hot-Water Oil heating. That is, home heating by radiators, which in turn are heated by hot water, which in turn is heated by oil. Part of an abbreviation system that was in use in the Toronto area in the early 1980's. I have no idea how widely this system was used, but with the exception of two abbreviations (FAE and FAG, attested mostly in Ontario) it seems to be quite obsolete today. So what better reason do we need to explain the system here?

The abbreviations were three letters long. The first two letters were FA, GA, and HW, for forced air, gravity air, and hot water, respectively. ``Gravity air heating'' is convective heating. The third letter was G, E, or O, for natural gas, electric, or oil, respectively. HWO, HWG, FAO, FAG, GAG, and FAE, are attested (and the preceding list is ordered roughly from most to least common in the early 1980's).

HWP

HardWired Processor.

HWP

Height and Weight Proportionate. Personals ad abbreviation.

HWR

HandWriting Recognition (software).

HWTPF

Hazardous Waste (HW) Treatment and Processing Facility.

HWVD

Hot-Wall Vapor Deposition.

HX

Heat eXchanger.

Hx

[Patient] History. Medical abbreviation. Other common abbreviations of the same form: DX (diagnosis), Fx (fracture), Rx (prescription), SX (symptoms), TX (treatment).

Explanation of abbreviation at Rx.

Hya

Hydra. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

hybrid

A circuit that converts between two-wire and four-wire telephone transmission.

hybrid

Mixed SMT/PTH technology. Reasons for using hybrid technology include (1) using both surfaces of a PCB allows denser mounting of integrated SMT devices and solves cross-over problems, so much of the fabrication tooling for PTH is in place; (2) many power-application devices are available only in PTH packaging.

hydrodynamics

In The African Queen, Bogie explained:

``In order to steer the boat, you must be going faster than the river.''

In Casablanca, Claude Rains (as Captain Louis Renault) asks Bogie (playing Rick Blaine) why he came to Casablanca.

Blaine: ``My health ... I came to Casablanca for the waters.''
Renault: ``Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.''
Blaine: ``I was misinformed.''

Find equally useful intertextuality at the positive buoyancy entry. Actually, Casablanca is on the Atlantic coast. Also, the statement about relative velocities is poorly phrased. It is just that if your speed relative to the current is less than the speed of the current, then there are directions you can't go.

hydroelectric

The Talking Heads song ``Once In A Lifetime'' includes the following lyrics which I haven't sorted out yet.

Water dissolving...and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
UNDER the water
Carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean

This might have something to do with a power generation project.

MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Hyi

Hydri. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation Hydrus.

HYLE

International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry. ISSN 1433-5158.

The ancient Greek word hylê originally meant `woodland' and `[cut down] wood.' Even Homer used it in an extended sense to refer to the material or stuff out of which an object was made. Aristotle was apparently the first philosopher to recruit the word to mean `matter' in a more general sense.

It may be that at some point, the journal name HYLE was a backronym -- that is, they may have cooked up an expansion to coincide with the word. That's the only excuse I can think of for the fact that they always write the title in all-caps, but I haven't encountered any such expansion.

You can read the journal online for free, or you can pay money and receive a paper copy. According to their statistics, since 1999 their website has had about 1000 visits a month. Since 1999, the website you're visiting now has looked just as unsexy as it does now and has had about 500 visits a day. They should consider adding some llama humor. And canned beans.

(Time flies when you're having fun. During 2005, the HYLE website had between 10,000 and 20,000 visitors per month. I haven't been preserving a systematic record of SBF traffic, but 3000 daily visits was typical for 2006, so they're clearly gaining on us.)

hypermail

A tool for managing mailing list archives. Full information at <hypermail.org>.

hypernucleus

A nucleus containing at least one hyperon in addition to an ordinary nucleon. No hypernucleus is known to be or expected to be stable.

hyperon

Any baryon that is not a nucleon. The only nucleons are the proton and the neutron, and all other baryons are more massive (yeah, we say ``heavier'') and unstable. (The free neutron is also unstable, but it's stable in stable nuclei.) So hyperons are all baryons heavier than the neutron, and all hyperons are unstable.

To review: fundamental particles that contain quarks are hadrons, and hadrons are of two types: mesons, which consist of quark-antiquark pairs, and baryons, which consist of three quarks. (Particles consisting of three antiquarks may be called antibaryons, since they're the antiparticles of baryons, or they may be called baryons, because one doesn't want to complicate the discussion of baryons with the sometimes extraneous distinction between particles and antiparticles.) Anyway, the only baryons one can make with only up and down quarks are the nucleons, so the hyperons are baryons with at least one quark other than these. Hence, one speaks of strange hyperons, which include a strange quark.

hypocrisy

An underrated social lubricant.

hypocracy

Government by the low, to judge from the Greek roots. Perhaps you were thinking of hypocrisy.

hyponym

In taxonomy, a name invalidated by inadequate description. In linguistics, a word whose meaning implies another inequivalent term, as scarlet implies red (but red does not imply scarlet, so the terms are not equivalent). Hyponymy is a kind of containment or partial ordering relation in semantics.

HYP

Harvard, Yale, Princeton.

hyphen

The remarkable text in the block quote below is taken from the third edition of Watts' Dictionary of Chemistry (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893). Henry Watts, B.A., F.R.S., died in the saddle, 63 pages into a work of about 3000, and the third edition was completed by M. M. Pattison Muir and H. Forester Morley (with help from an army of contributors). The two editors dealt with the inorganic and organic chemistry portions of the work, respectively. In his introduction, Morley necessarily dwelt on nomenclature issues. One paragraph reads thus:

Hyphens   Hyphens are placed between each significant part of a name; absence of the hyphen usually indicates close connection between two groups of atoms: e.g., phenylethyl-urea is C₆H₅.C₂H₄.NH.CO.NH₂ while phenyl-ethyl-urea is C₆H₅NH.CO.NHC₂H₅.

In the current IUPAC nomenclature, these are N-(2-phenylethyl)-urea and N-(2-ethylphenyl)-urea. Some things do improve. Morley's next paragraph is about ``Ambiguous Names.''

HYPS

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford. Not a consortium, but a term used by high-school guidance counselors.

hysteron proteron

A figure of speech, or perhaps better said a class of figures of speech: any expression involving reversal of expected order. (The head term is Ancient Greek for `later earlier.' That is, the cart before the horse.) Spoonerisms and some syntax errors used to be considered part of this class of figures, but as well many grammatical and even logical expressions. Now hysteron proteron refers primarily to the interchange of two words in a sentence or two phrases in a construction.

The classical example of hysteron proteron is Virgil's moriamur et in media arma ruamus, `let us die and charge into the thick of the fight' (Aeneid bk. ii., l. 358). The unnatural order is here supposed to lend emphasis, but maybe it just helps the line scan. The English expressions ``head over heels'' (meaning ``heels over head'') and ``have your cake and eat it too'' (meaning ``eat your cake and still have it'') are examples frozen by convention. In French and Spanish one has main d'œuvre [main d'oeuvre if the special character doesn't appear in your browser window] and mano de obra, respectively. These literally mean something like `hand of work' and really mean something like `manpower,' in other words `work of hands.'

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, ``All his successors (gone before him) hath done't: and all his ancestors (that come after him) may.''

I.A. Richards (q.v.) was a hysteron proteron repeat offender; he made a habit of presenting various claims about subjects before stating what the subjects were. Languages like Japanese and Classical Latin, in which the verb in a simple sentence normally follows not only the subject but the object and most other sentence elements, can seem like prodigies of hysteron proteron to an English-speaker. I keep repeating the phrase hysteron proteron instead of using, say, a demonstrative pronoun for the term hysteron proteron, in an effort to assure that if you do remember the term hysteron proteron, you won't misremember the second word as the name of a common subatomic particle.

hysteron proteron

A logical fallacy: assuming as true, and using as a premise in argument, a proposition yet to be proved. This fallacy is obviously closely related to petitio principii, the original sense of `begging the question.'

HYTELNET

HYpertext browser for TELNET-accessible sites. Also available in Spanish.

Hyvää syntymäpäivää

Finnish: `happy birthday!' English: `I can't stop gnawing my tongue!'

Vowel harmony only gets you so much.

Hz

HertZ. One inverse second. The SI unit of frequency. Usually implies circular frequency rather than angular frequency. When I was a kid people resented the intrusion of this new name for what everyone had always called cycles per second (cps), but it caught on. According to current SI rules, when the unit is spelled out rather than abbreviated the name is in lower case: hertz.

Herz is the modern German word meaning `heart.' Hertz is an older spelling of the same word, still common as a surname and a rental car company. The person honored by the SI unit is Heinrich Rudolph Hertz. He was the first person to succeed in generating and detecting the electromagnetic waves predicted by the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. In the process of doing this work, he observed that his detector was more sensitive to electromagnetic waves if it was exposed to UV light. This was the first observation of what is now called the photoelectric effect.

HZ

Historische Zeitschrift. A German journal that might have been named `Historical Journal' in English. See Stuart Jenks's page of Tables of Contents of Historical Journals and Monographic Series in German for a complete table of contents (deutsche Seite: Zeitschriftenfreihandmagazin Inhaltsverzeichnisse geschichtswissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache).

HZ

Short for HanZi. A 7-bit data format for arbitrarily mixed ASCII and Chinese characters encoded in GuoBiao. The point of using seven bits instead of the standard eight is that this encodes within the printable-character part of ASCII codes, making email transmission possible. This is the same thing that's achieved by BinHex on Macintosh and Uuencode on Unix. See RFC 1843 of 9/95.

H1

The civilian version of the Humvee. The vehicle that first bore Hummer as its official name. As of Summer 2002, it went for about $112,000.

H1

First Half.

H2

Second Half.

H2

A version of the Chevy Suburban (1/2-ton and 3/4-ton trucks) with a body resembling the H1, manufactured by AM General and marketed as another Hummer model. As of roll-out in July 2002, it cost a mere $48,800 stripped, $55,000 loaded.

H₂SO₄

Hydrogen sulphate, ``vitriol.'' Dissolved in water, it dissociates and forms sulfuric acid. Also an oxidant.

H₃P

Phosphine. [Pron. /fasfi:n/.]

H8

A common abbreviation of Shakespeare's play The Life of Henry the Eighth.

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