The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Missouri. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
The US WWII battleship Missouri was called ``Big Mo.'' At some point during a presidential campaign, George Bush exulted that he had the ``Big Mo,'' but he meant MOmentum.
Many of the illiterate early settlers of Missouri thought that the pronunciation /mizuri:/ was informal, like ``Caroliney'' for Carolina, and assumed that the proper pronunciation of the territory's name should end in shwa, like Carolina. That at least is the folk etymology of the standard Midwestern US pronunciation of the state's name.
However, an entry in a nineteenth-century encyclopedia, quoted in full at our American continent entry, apparently gives the name of the Missouri River as ``Misaures.'' This is presumably a French spelling (since French traders were the largest group of Europeans in the area, since France was the main colonial claimant of the territory until 1803, and since the word looks French, although in principle it could be, say, English or Spanish). If the appearance and presumption do not deceive, then the es at the end of the name is silent (as in Modern French) or shwa-like (as in older and dialectal pronunciations, I think). How does our hypothesis compare with hypotheses entertained in other reference works of comparable scholarliness? Well, the earliest instance of Missouri (dating to 1703, for the tribe) offered by the OED is in a translation from the French. The earliest names attested there for French are Ouemessourit (1673), Emissourita (1684), Emessourita (1702), and a plural Missouris (1687). I think they may have missed a parallel line of orthographic (and alternative pronunciation) development.
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Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Here's a list of links.
With a bit of parochialism and a judicious application of confirmation bias, the vast majority of people can think of themselves as squarely centrist. (Alas, as we moderate bien-pensants know too well, only crazy extremists get elected. They subvert democracy by deceiving the stupid majority that should be voting as we do. Democracy, you know, is an absolute good; it's just those damn voters that are the problem.)
In principle, as one drifts way out to the left or right (further if one lives in Berkeley or Idaho, resp.), it ought to become increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that one is comfortably in the middle of the political spectrum. (I wouldn't know, since I'm a moderate.)
This mathematical issue (approaching a limit from one side -- sup = limsup, as they say) reminds me of religious school. My earliest these-people-are-imbeciles epiphany (that I can recall) was in fourth or fifth grade, when the principal came in to teach us a special lesson:
No matter how poor you are, there's always someone poorer.
I suppose the point must have been that if you're starving to death, you can Thank God that you're not as hungry as someone else who's closer to meeting The Almighty. One of those there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I things. On its face, this seems a bit questionable to me. I haven't studied theodicy, but I think this line of reasoning should quickly lead George Soros to curse his luck/stars/deity that he doesn't have Bill Gates's kind of money.
But set that aside. The brilliance of the always-someone-poorer claim is that it seals up a leak in the argument over on the low end of the socio-economic status variable: it makes Schadenfreude, or relative-satisfaction, or whatever, available to every last wretched human. The only problem, obvious to a ten-year-old, is that it can't be true.
Postmodernism is the transfer of all that heavy modernism baggage into literary criticism.
In the US and England, the elites of status and class merged to a substantial degree through intermarriage and shifts of occupation, as high-status and upper-class groups each sought what the other had. In the US, this transition used the Episcopal church as a kind of vehicle or token. Late in the nineteenth century, Episcopal church membership in America grew by a factor of three and Episcopalians became for many decades the richest (per capita) denomination in the US. Henry VIII triumphed where George III was defeated. In England, of course, Anglicanism is the established church and church membership did not play the same role. In fact, today polls indicate that half of Britons regard themselves as Anglicans, but actual membership in the Anglican church is around three million (in a country of what, fifty million?). The US is a religious country to a degree that Europeans can hardly imagine. In a typical week, more than half the population of the US attends church.
Oh well, back to modernity. Most liberation and enfranchisement movements, and unionism, of course, are associated with modernity.
The industrial revolution began in England, and proceeded perhaps most smoothly there as a result. On the continent, industrialization began later, was more sudden, and was associated with various worker uprisings. Almost every European monarchy outside England was toppled by the end of WWI. (The Spanish and Greek monarchies were reëstablished by later conservative regimes.)
I haven't like, checked any references recently, so caveat lector.
Here are the lyrics to David Bowie's Modern Love, from a site in Australia. David Bowie is on the thin side.
Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times (1936) is the definitive statement on Modern Times. If you have not seen this hilarious yet touching movie, you are culturally destitute.
This figure of merit was created as a shorthand way of indicating the reliability of polling results to a statistically unsophisticated audience. It does have some basis in a more rigorous statistical analysis.
I will explain that later, but briefly for now: if the percentage you're trying to determine by poll is around 50%, then the margin of error is about equal to two standard deviations. Nineteen times out of twenty, the sample (actual polled) results will come within two standard deviations (the MOE, in this case) of the real (``universe,'' sample of the whole) percentage.
More generally, if the fraction you're trying to measure is p, where p is not necessarily 0.5, then the margin of error is larger than two standard deviations, and overestimates the chances that the measured result will be wrong. Instead, two standard deviations are smaller than MOE by a factor of the square root of 4p(1-p). (Notice that for p=0.5, the correction factor is unity.) So if the number you're trying to measure is 0.01, and your poll samples 1000, then 2 S.D. equals about 0.0063. These numbers describe a rather skewed binomial distribution that is not too well approximated by a Gaussian. Roughly speaking, though: if, say, an unbiased poll finds that exactly 1% of respondents (ten of 1000) support a candidate, then the chances that the real support is 1.5% or higher are rather poor.
Two important issues I really ought to come back to: sources of bias and the fact that the S.D. estimate is really an estimate of an estimate.
Or maybe something to do with the Coulomb-Mohr Criterion (CMC)? Nah.
Bulk mechanical stress is described locally by a symmetric 3x3 tensor. (Pressure is the trace of this tensor, but you don't need to know that right now.) It is convenient to represent the six independent components of the stress tensor by a six-component vector. Stress is related, in the first place, to strain. (Remember: stress is a generalized force, strain is a generalized displacement.) For more on strain in the psychotherapeutic context, see the shoulds entry.
You know, one day I may get serious about this entry, but it will probably be too late for you.
To the extent that the above empirical rules hold, they imply the existence of a hierarchy or ordering of materials, from soft to hard. Friedrich Mohs invented a scale that numbers points along that ordering. Later the scale was ``extended.'' In the table below, we list some materials and their hardness numbers on the old and new scales.
|
Material |
Mohs Hardness |
Extended-scale Hardness |
| Liquid | 1 | |
| Talc | 1 | |
| Gypsum | 2 | 2 |
| typical fingernail | 2-3, nominally 2.5 | |
| Calcite | 3 | 3 |
| Fluorite | 4 | 4 |
| Apatite | 5 | 5 |
| typical stainless steel | 5-6 | |
| Orthoclase Feldspar | 6 | 6 |
| ordinary glass | ~<6.5 | |
| Ferric Oxide (``red rouge'') | 6.5 | |
| Vitreous Fused Silica (noncrystalline) | 7 | |
| Quartz (crystalline silica, SiO2) | 7 | 8 |
| Cerium Oxide | 8 | |
| Topaz | 8 | 9 |
| Chromium Oxide (``green rouge'') | 8.5 | |
| Garnet | 8-9 | 10 |
| Fused Zirconia | 11 | |
| Fused Alumina (Al2O3) | 12 | |
| Corundum (ruby, sapphire, Al2O3) | 9 | |
| Fused Silicon Carbide (SiC, carborundum) | 9.5 | |
| Silicon Carbide (SiC, carborundum) | 13 | |
| Fused Boron Nitride (BN) (hexagonal) | 9.7 | |
| Boron Nitride (BN) (hexagonal) | 14 | |
| Cubic Boron Nitride (CBN) | 9.9 | |
| Diamond | 10 | 15 |
Eric offers a mnemonic. Another is ``The Geologist Can Find An Ordinary Quartz -- Tourists Call Diamond.'' Yet another is ``Terrible Giants Can Find Alligators Or Quaint Tigers Conveniently Digestible.'' I suppose you could mix-and-match: mnemonic, whatever they call that game.
Visit a nice gemcutting site. Alternatively, you could take a walk and check out Kingzett, Charles Thomas: Kingzett's Chemical Encyclopedia: a Digest of Chemistry & its Industrial Applications, ed. D. H. Hey and others (London: Baillière, Tindell and Cassell, 9/e 1966).
The main computer cluster at FitzPatrick Hall has four rooms that were traditionally dedicated to Unix boxes. These were known as the philosophers', composers', artists', and writers' rooms, and the machines in the rooms have been named accordingly. Thus, starting from the northeast corner (in the philosophers' room -- the smallest) and going along the north wall, the first four machines were named aquinas, aristotle, augustine, and averroes. (Well, it's a Catholic school.) It was a sensible mnemonic scheme. The names weren't always written on the machines, but if you were on a nearby machine you could guess or remember its name from the hint of its relative location and from your own deeply integrated knowledge of the alphabet. This was convenient for networking and almost essential for reporting a sick machine.
One Summer some years ago, some officious geniuses came over from IT and replaced the old generation of workstations with a new one. They preserved all the old machine names in each room, but the exotic little subtlety of their being in alphabetical order was overlooked. After a few more years and another generation of machines, it occurred to someone to do something about the situation, or perhaps it just took that long to work its way through channels and so forth. I guess it would have been too much to hope that the names would be unscrambled. I suppose they reasoned that lugging and interchanging all those identical machines would be too difficult. (``Rename the machines,'' you say? I'm sure that requires a hardware upgrade.)
Instead, a work-study was detailed to go around and log in to each machine in turn and find out the machine name and to print out a label on a label printer, and apply said label to each machine in an appropriate way. This was a good and admirable thing, and could have been handy even in the good old days. A few days later he was detailed to do it again, but this time using labels that didn't peel off on their own. So for a while there, the improvements were coming fast on each others' heels.
There the situation has sat for a few years. Today I happened to walk into the composers' room and log in to a free machine. So here I am sitting between schubert and berlin (hey -- ``White Christmas''!) at a machine with the unfamiliar name of mohler. Pursuing my suspicion, I checked around and confirmed that in a room that has space to honor such relatively dim lights as Bernstein and Foster, there is no machine named in honor of Gustav Mahler. Now, I haven't been in here often enough to be sure, but it seems to me that there used to be a machine named mahler, and I think I know what happened to it.
So to summarize: first the machines had to receive labels because it was too hard to rename the machines, as if assigning aliases is something you only do once, like infant baptism. Then, when it was the turn of a new generation of machines to be baptized, the name of a famous composer was misread and became attached to one of the machines. Finally, when the last generation of machines was installed, the names on the printed labels took precedence over any electronic listing of machines. Progress marches on.
In French, the predicate of the copula is universally accepted to be in the oblique case. That is, expressions parallel to ``it is I'' are not over-correct, they're just wrong. Hence Louis XIV's famous ``L'état c'est moi.'' (`The state [France] is me.')
There was a case in Georgia (GA) a number of years ago where a state trooper mistook a bag of oregano for marijuana.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), the second juvenile movie in a series starring Mike Meyers, uses mojo to refer either to his libido or his attractiveness to women, or maybe that's the same thing, which Dr. Evil uses a time machine to go back to 1969 to steal from him, but which he somehow manages not to miss until recently.
A mojo is a charm worn on one's person (or, in mountain biking slang, affixed to one's bike).
In the Yardbirds song ``I Ain't Got You,'' a mojo and many other advantages are implicitly inefficacious in getting you.
(Me mojó means `[he, she, or it] got me wet.')
Of course, in all common dialects of Spanish, ``j'' has an aitch sound.
This surname is very different from the word mojón, which means `[bed] wetter.'
Speaking of names -- Paul Revere, of Paul Revere and the Raiders, got his name on his original birth certificate. Paul Revere and the Raiders did a cover of ``Louie, Louie'' in 1963, around the same time, and in the same studio, as the Kingsmen did their cover. It became a monster hit on a slow fuse for the Kingsmen. They didn't know the lyrics exactly, so they winged it; some people started to suspect that it was subversive. Eventually, the Kingsmen testified before a Congressional committee. You wonder if a band named after a Revolutionary War hero would have come under suspicion in similar circumstances. Maybe. The FBI concluded that the Kingsmen's recording, played forwards or backwards at any speed, was incomprehensible.
The song was originally written and recorded by Richard Berry in 1956, and it was a local (i.e., Seattle area) favorite for a while. (This was back in the days when there was such a thing as regional programming.) The song is the story of a lovesick sailor telling his bartender (Louie) how much he misses his girlfriend back home. Home is Jamaica, whose exotic accent presumably justifies any strange-sounding words or word-like sounds. For more Jamaica-related linguistic lapses, see the Van Morrison material discussed under this Cleveland BROWNS item.
With some dramatic license, the 1978 National Lampoon movie Animal House was based on the experiences of Chris Miller, Dartmouth '62, at the outlaw frat Alpha Delta. One of the liberties taken was using the Kingsmen's version of this song, which wasn't released until 1963.
In 1998, the (surviving) Kingsmen won a major suit for unpaid royalties on the song since 1968. Actually, it was really only a moral victory; if you check out the details, I think they still got shafted. The band is still in business (their domain name is <louielouie.org>), though over the decades since they were founded (in 1959), there's been a lot of turnover (listed here). As of early 2008, they still have one of the original members, and one from 1963.
Richard Berry's band was called Richard Berry and the Pharaohs. More famous was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which had a hit in 1965 with ``Wooly Bully.'' They performed in turbans and bedsheets.
The ending theme song for the TV sitcom WKRP also has incomprehensible lyrics, because it was originally recorded as a warm-up ``scratch tape,'' and the singers are just singing gibberish. (More at the unofficial WKRP site.)
The Rolling Stones also had a song about Louie, but it was a different Louie.
Happy Mole Day to you,
You live in a zoo.
Your mother's a rodent
Your father's one too.
At this site you can download a recording of the line ``Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry!'' and other memorable clips from Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Smelt is a fish, but not in the previous sentence.
Y'know, I still lose sleep every night wondering if guinea pigs are really rodents or not. I wish they would settle this pressing question.
For more information, see the Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, ed. Richard Dean Burns (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, etc., 1993). Volume II has an article by Webster A. Stone, ``The Hot Line: Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link, 1963 to the Present,'' pp. 847-853. The hot line agreements are excerpted in Vol. III.
Aw, momma, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again!
A thought just occurred to me that there is no conceivable appropriate place to insert. If this were the appropriate place, then I'd just go right ahead and comment that in a photograph showing him at a reception at the MOMA in November 2005, Prince Charles looked like Dagwood Bumstead.
Nu gecyðað we þæt on þam dæge beoð nigon hund and syxtig momenta. Momentum ys gewyss stow þære sunnan on heofenum; þonne he byð feowertig siðon gegaderod, þonne gefylleð he ane tid, and he ys gecweden for þæra tungla hwætnysse momentum (þæt ys styrung).
The word did not survive Old English in this form, at least in old England; it became moment in Middle English, and sometime early in the seventeenth century that form ceased to refer to a precise interval. Also in that century the word momentum was reborrowed from Latin and used primarily in technical senses related to mathematics and physics. You could say momentum regained momentum then, but I wouldn't perpetrate such a vile pun.
The momentum or moment was also defined in medieval times (had to say that) as one tenth of a point, and the point as a quarter of an hour... usually. Sometimes the point was a fifth of an hour. A fifth of an hour would have been two minutes. The whole melange, according to the most common definitions:
Notice that there were 360 degrees in a day. I hadn't realized that England got that hot.
Fetuses that develop from separately fertilized eggs always have separate chorions (are dichorionic, in the case of twins). So fraternal and half-identical twins are never monochorionic, let alone monoamniotic. The incidence of monochorionic or monoamniotic twins depends on when the original single zygote splits. Generally, earlier is better. In about a third of identical-twin pregnancies, splitting occurs within the first 3 days following fertilization; in these cases the twins are usually dichorionic. In the majority of cases, splitting occurs between 4 and 8 days; at this stage, splitting produces monochorionic twins that are nevertheless diamniotic. That is, each fetus has its own amnion (more commonly called amniotic sac). If splitting occurs more than 8 days after fertilization, the twins typically share a single amnion (why should I be common?), and this is a bad thing for them, or at least for one of them. If splitting occurs after 12 days, then there is a high risk of conjoined twins.
Monoamniotic twins occur in less than one percent of identical-twin pregnancies. As twin ``diagnosis'' occurs increasingly early, and as the membrane normally separating two fetuses is hard to image early, there is an increasing number of needlessly worried expectant parents. <Monoamniotic.org> is a support group for parents diagnosed with monoamniotic twins and for parents of monoamniotic twins. Their experience is that 40% of couples who find their group eventually (sometimes as late as the 24th week of pregnancy) learn that they were misdiagnosed.
The Monogahela is often described as flowing ``due north.'' This is sort of true if you smooth out meanders on a scale of ten miles. The small city of Donora occupies an oxbow of the Monongahela about 18 or 19 miles south of Pittsburgh. On Halloween 1948 (and on the preceding day, which happens to be widely known as mischief night), one of the worst disasters ever caused by industrial air pollution in the US took place in Donora.
In chapter CXXXV (``The Chase -- Third Day'') of Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance---as the whale sometimes will---and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.
From this sentence, or a bit of it, or from the Mount Monadnock link above, you might infer that Mount Monadnock does not rise very abruptly. This is in fact correct, so the mountain is popular for hiking rather than mountain-climbing. Among the hikers who have climbed it are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Rudyard Kipling. In 1845 Emerson wrote a very long rhyme about it entitled ``Monadnoc.'' Here's a typical example of that dross:
Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.
I wish I could add something here about Leibniz.
A synonym of monadnock is inselberg, which is a German compound meaning `island mountain.' In German the word is spelled with a capital I, not because it's a proper noun but because it's a noun.
Ye Highlands and Ye LowlandsThis was, as she learned years later, the Scottish ballad ``The Bonny Earl of Murray'' and the last line is supposed to go
Or, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Rock music has been a great boon for mondegreens, but religious and patriotic stuff taught to children is a great traditional source. In the 90's, the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll devoted a score of his Daily Datebook columns to mondegreens (first mondegreen column: April 23, 1990, p. F10).
We have some mondegreen examples at the beginnings of the enema entry (with a link to a misheard-lyrics archive for Van Halen songs) and the deconstruction entry. For more mondegreens, see ``The Ants Are My Friends,'' ``Mind the greens!'' and the misheard lyrics archives <kissthisguy.com>, and Am I Right.
A search on the web will turn up a couple of widely repeated improbabilities.
- Claim: Sylvia Wright published an article on mondegreens in the
Atlantic Monthly, in 1954 or
in the 1950's.
Test: I personally checked the author indices of all the bound volumes of Atlantic Monthly for the years 1941 to 1966. I found only one article under the name Sylvia Wright, entitled ``Chowder Is Out!'' It was published in the November 1957 Atlantic, pp. 255-256. It is an extended protest against The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. This seems to have been a life-long obsession of hers (vide infra).
The Atlantic and Harper's are similar magazines, easily confused. I imagine that someone remembered that Wright's article appeared in 1954 but misremembered the journal, and that this error was the origin of the claim. Afterwards, the error was propagated faithfully by the internet. Indeed, this very august glossary that you are reading was one of the mistaken propagaters of this claim until early June 2001.
- Claim: Sylvia Wright published two or more articles on mondegreens in
the 1950's.
Test: I personally checked the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for January 1929 to February 1981 (vols. 8-40). (I skipped the book review listings when they began to be a separate section; I ignored Sylvia Hart Wright, a writer on architectural and civil engineering matters.) The first publication listed under the name Sylvia Wright was a piece that appeared in Harper's Magazine in December 1952 (pp. 29-32), ``Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts.'' That piece was excerpted in Vogue (June 1956, pp. 84-5). The last item I found was in the March 1975 Harper's, a letter on pp. 6-7, in the ``Wraparound.'' In that letter she recalls that many years previous she had published in Harper's an article called ``How to Make Chicken Liver Pâté Once.'' She mentions Fannie Farmer's cookbook. A note after the letter says
Sylvia Wright is now at work on a book about the island of Chios.
It's possible she published on mondegreens in a magazine not indexed by the Reader's Guide, though I doubt it.
For more investigative etymological reporting, see the Pakistan entry.
The traditional meaning of monaural is ``one ear'' (as an attributive noun -- adjective -- only). The traditional meaning of monophonic is ``one melodic line'' (adj.).
Mono is caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) after an incubation period of 15-50 days. Most people have been infected by the time they're 40, but only a minority develop the disease. It's thought of as a disease of young adults because the symptoms in infants and children are milder. In any case the diagnosis is difficult, so mild cases can be mistaken for a common cold. If you're planning to get sick, don't just jump into any disease. You should at least consider coming down with an outer-ear infection.
Tuerto is the Spanish word with the meaning `able to see with one eye only.' That is, either blind in one eye or with one of two eyes put out. It's not exactly the same thing as one-eyed, since a Cyclops is one-eyed but not tuerto. Apart from the semantic misalignment however, another difference is that tuerto is an honest-to-God word and a perfectly common one, whereas one-eyed is a compound, forever consigned to the indignity of a hyphen by the silent e of one.
P.J. O'Rourke seems to agree with this view. In an article (``My E.U. Vacation: What I learned reading the European constitution on a French beach in the Caribbean'') that appeared in the Weekly Standard (June 3, 2005), he wrote
Actually, I claim that there's a tremendous journalistic advantage to covering politics when you can't speak the language. You aren't misled into reporting what people say; you're forced to report the inexorable truth of what people do.
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
Heterologicality is a linguistic phenomenon. Critical acclaim is a social phenomenon.
For an example, visit the VRoma MOO (you can log in immediately as a guest), part of the VRoma educational project, or MiamiMOO.
In 1822, he turned his writing skills to a short poem for the information of his children. In this work, entitled ``A Visit From Saint Nicholas,'' Moore established most of the few facts we know with any accuracy about this annual phenomenon. For example, he fixed the date of the visit as the eve of Christmas, rather than Dec. 5, the eve of Saint Nicholas's Day. His 28 rhyming couplets, the first beginning
'Twas the night before Christmas
It must have achieved a samizdat vogue; it was already considered a classic in 1860, when the report was reprinted in the journal Harper's Weekly, with new graphics by the journalist Thomas Nast. Thomas Nast is best known today for his zoological work, preparing illustrations of Equus asinus Democraticus and Elephas Republicanus (g.o.p.) beginning in 1874. It was Nast who established that Saint Nicholas was pathologically obese, but the chimney-passage question was not immediately reexamined. Nevertheless, it may be noted that only a few decades later, tunneling by bare and dressed particles became a widely accepted violation of classical physical law.
I haven't had a chance to update the entry (I don't have Santa's superluminal freight sled; I'm slow), but I figured I ought to at least mention this: In October 2000, Vassar English professor Don Foster brought forward substantial evidence that Moore was a plagiarist: that he fraudulently claimed authorship of this poem, and that it was probably the work of Henry Livingstone.
A number of similar exponential processes (such as size of largest known prime) may be regarded as consequences.
Any similar law of exponential improvement in semiconductor engineering is also often called a Moore's Law. (See, however, Grove's Law.) Recently, Moore pronounced a second law: that every generation of microprocessor requires a fab (fabrication facility) that costs twice as much as the previous. As of 1996, a new fab cost around a billion US$. Cf. Joy's Law and Rent's Rule.
Unanswerable questions still surface at parties.
``What kind of novels do you write?''
Legendary. Seminal. Filthy.
``Should I know your name?''
To which I usually reply, eyes modestly lowered, ``Not necessarily,'' but riding sufficient scotch, I become equally capable of a bellicose ``Yes, if you're literate,'' after which my wife usually points out it is time to go home.
I'm not sure what conclusion one is supposed to draw from this, the beginning of Broadsides (1990), but I figured I'd put the entry in just in case. (There might be an exemption if you happen not to be Canadian.)
Richler (1931-2001) was at first probably best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which is basically Portnoy's Complaint without the masturbation. (And with no mother instead of a domineering one. Well, maybe it's not a very accurate description, but it sounds cool to say.) Eventually Richler became more of a celebrity writer, known for nothing in particular except being a moderately well-known author. He wrote some other novels, but really, who's got the time? He wrote amusing essays and magazine pieces, and these were repackaged as tomes from time to time. You know how Gary worries that anything he says in my hearing may be used against him in the glossary? (Sure you do -- I mentioned it back at the conversation entry. BTW, Gary is an actual real person, but there's no point in worrying -- I can invent.) Well, Richler was that kind of writer to be wary of.
It comes from the Ancient Greek word kallipugos having the
same meaning -- pugê meant buttocks, and kalli- was a
productive root meaning beautiful. A very productive root. Among attested
uses were words for having or being beautiful(ly)- eyelids -- kalliblepharos
- sounding -- kalliboas
- clustering -- kallibotruas
- [fine, rich] soil -- kallibôlos
- bridge (not the dental sort) -- kalligephuros
- women -- kalligunaix
- chariot -- kallidiphros
- reeds (yeah, sounds kinky to me too) -- kallidonax
- yoked -- kallizugês
Watch this space! More to come, someday.
So clearly, ``Acme grows more grass than'' (vel sim.) is not the intended meaning, and is probably false. In fact, Acme is probably the worst. (If it weren't, they'd compare it to the worst product and say ``comparison studies with a popular alternative [spotted hyena chips] show Acme grows grass faster than the competition.'') When one considers, however, that comparison cannot take place without observation, the meaning becomes clear to anyone familiar with quantum physics or child psychology: the ``more'' outcome depends not only on the conditions of observation, but on the very fact of observation. It's a Copenhagen construction. If Acme fertilizer is placed in competition with an alternative manure, the grass will grow -- or at least a measurement of its height will appear to show that it grows -- faster. Not faster than the competition, just faster than it would without competition -- if it weren't being observed. You could deny that, but you could never prove you were right. If you want to maximize the effect, you should intensify the competition -- add motivation, so to speak -- by using the competing product directly in the soil where you are testing Acme. Boy, will you be impressed!
Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany (abdicated 1918), held a high opinion of his own opinion, and liked to give avuncular advice to his cousin Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia (executed in secrecy 1918). In 1895, astonished by the Japanese victory over China, Kaiser Willi began to warn his cousin and Europe of the rising power of the Rising Sun. He coined the term Gelbe Gefahr, `Yellow Peril,' to describe the threat (he had a cartoon executed to illustrate his brainstorm).
Japan's victory was over another Asian country -- far larger, of course, but known from recent European and American experience to be militarily backward. With the prevalent racist and cultural prejudices of the West, the Sino-Japanese events were ignored, and the Orient continued to be thought of as backward and as no military match for any Western power. Few realized the extent of Japan's rapid industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. The Japanese victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) thus came as a shock to Europe.
Not currently discussed anywhere else in this glossary: Abendland, which means ... oh wait -- I figured out where it's discussed!
Here's a pitifully brief bibliography.
Look, what I'm trying to say here is that MORI was a poorly researched choice of name, evidently selected when the company already regarded itself as international. Making an AAP out of it does not help.
``These days,'' when I first wrote the entry, were just after the turn of the century. This glossary has some substantive information on mortgages at other entries. Serious glossary entries for serious times. You can tour these entries starting at the ARM entry.
A MOS transistor (MOST) is a kind of IGFET. Both IGFET and MOST are relatively rare terms, and one hears ``an MOS'' used for an MOST. This is equivocal in principle, because there are also MOS capacitors. If this bothers you, use MOSFET.
German-speakers with poor English typically, or at least stereotypically, pronounce the English w semivowel as a German w consonant (i.e., like English v) and are understood. In the case of various cognates (world/Welt, west/West, wish/Wünsch, word/Wort, war/Wehr, was/war, water/wasser, etc.) this has the pleasant feature of familiarity for the German-speaker, although in many cases semantic evolution has yielded faux amis (e.g., ``I will'' is cognate with ich will, but the latter still has a meaning close to `I intend to').
English is unusual among Western European languages. I can stop right there and it's a true enough sentence, but what I intended to say was that it's unusual in respect of having words for with and without that are closely related. Compare Germanic languages like German (mit/ohne) and Swedish (med/utan) or Romance languages: com/sem, con/sin, avec/sans, and con/senza, for examples, in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, resp. With the Romance examples, you get the impression that maybe there was some earlier language that these languages have as a common source of their similar words.
![[Image: MOS-C schematic]](images/tokuyasu-mirror/capacitordev.gif)
MOS capacitors have asymmetric Q-V characteristics -- i.e., they have bias-dependent capacitance. In fact, for one sign of applied voltage they have voltage-dependent capacitance. The asymmetry does not arise simply because the two ``capacitor plates'' are of different material. A mica capacitor with different-size plates made of different metals has a Q-V characteristic that is symmetric (and substantially linear, so the capacitance C is a constant). The problem is that doped semiconductor is in some respects not a very good metal.
In order to have a small inter-plate spacing (and hence a decently high capacitance) the silicon must be doped. For purposes of illustration, let's say it's doped N: a high density of electron donor impurities like arsenic (As) or phosphorus (with the unfortunately confusing atomic symbol P). At absolute zero temperature, these donors create un-ionized (i.e. filled) ``donor levels'' at energies just below the conduction band (CB). This means that charge neutrality puts the Fermi energy (the electrochemical potential) close to the CB. At room temperature, most of the donors are ionized and charge neutrality is maintained by electrons that can be thought of as promoted from the donors to the CB. (It's an entropy effect: even though the donors have slightly lower energy, there are many more states in the conduction band. The characteristic energy scale over which this effect can manifest is kBT, 0.026 eV at room temperature.)
Anyway, getting back to the MOS-C... For simplicity we'll let the ``metal'' in the gate be a (theoretically unproblematic) elemental metal. If a positive voltage is applied to the silicon side of the capacitor, that side of the capacitor charges up with electrons. These electrons pile up against the insulating oxide that separates the capacitor plates. (Yeah, yeah, there are some quantum effects; the electrons don't pile on like geometric points on a geometrically thin oxide plane.) This polarity gives the highest possible capacitance for the given capacitor geometry. If the polarity is reversed -- negative voltage on the silicon side -- then the silicon takes a positive charge. This positive charge is initially produced by depletion of electrons. That is, the electrons in the conduction band move away from the oxide, and the remaining positively-ionized donors yield a net positive charge at the plate. However, the donor ions are not mobile. In order for the positive charge to increase, the silicon must be depleted further into the bulk away from the oxide. Thus, as the voltage increases, the effective plate spacing increases, and the capacitance decreases.
In the past 100 years, the effective sea level has risen 23 cm. Currently, despite the end of pumping, it is estimated to be rising at 0.5 mm per year. The future magnitude of the problem is subject to many uncertainties, among them the magnitude of sea-level rise expected to be caused by global warming. Estimates are typically in the range of 20-100 cm by 2050.
The MOSE plan is to install 79 gates (I've also read 78), distributed at the three inlets to the lagoon that Venice lies in. The hollow gates will ``normally'' be filled with water, and hinged on the seabed, they will lie flat along the bottom. When floods threaten, air is to be pumped in, so the gates lighten and float into vertical position, protecting the city. The project will be expensive, but fortunately Italy is situated on Euroland, so it will only cost an estimated 3.5 billion euros (mere American billions). Just a few years ago, it would have cost trillions of lire. Construction began in May 2003; completion is scheduled for 2011.
Despite the reduced price, the project is controversial. It is feared that frequent closings will disturb the ecosystem in various ways. Also, it seems that a lot of the ecosystem must consist of bacteria and the less fastidious sort of fish, processing Venice's sewage, much of which is still untreated. (The large fraction of Italian sewage that is not treated, and the resulting ecological problems for the Mediterranean, have been a continuing bone of contention between Italy and the rest of the EU, except for countries like Greece that want to keep their head down because they figure they're next.) Nobody seems concerned that flooding of a subsided Venice might disturb the ecosystem.
Ecosystem in ``balance.'' Please do not disturb. Don't touch anything.
Estimates of how long MOSE will be effective vary. Supporters offer estimates of 100 years, opponents say no more than 50. I haven't seen any discussion of future retrofit ideas. The one alternative seems to be locally raising the land level underneath existing structures, starting with the lowest-lying, most immediately threatened areas. This is already being done, apparently by private owners.
One solution that is not piecemeal is to pump seawater into a broad 600-to-800-meter deep aquifer underlying the area. (A deeper aquifer is preferred in part because it should lead to a more even rise at the surface. The layer considered also has convenient clay layers. I am not completely certain why refilling the aquifers previously pumped for fresh water is not considered a good option; it seems that uncertainty about uneven uplift is the main concern.) The aquifer idea is being studied and promoted (yes, the usual engineering conflict of interest) by a group at the University of Padua as a supplement, not an alternative, to the MOSE project. Numerical modeling by Giuseppe Gambolati of U. Padua predicts a 30-cm rise produced within a circle 5 km in radius around Venice, produced by injection of 18 million cubic meters of water through a ring of twelve vertical wells along the circumference. For further information on the various projects and proposals, see the pages of CORILA.
The Republic of Venice was once a great empire, contending with the Ottoman empire for control of the Aegean, and medieval Venice had a population of a quarter million. They invented the practice of keeping regular ambassadors in foreign countries -- sort of the diplomatic equivalent of a standing army. (Venice was probably also the first place to enforce segregation of Jews in a ghetto. Oh well-- win some, lose some.) The inconvenience of frequent inundation has been cited as a cause of population decline in recent decades (though it's claimed tourism has not declined). The resident population has subsided to 60,000.
Venezuela was named after Venice (the former word is a diminutive form of the latter). Alonso de Ojeda gave the area this name after coming upon native American stilted houses built over Lake Maracaibo. (It is a lake, so sea-level rise is not a direct concern.)
Subsidence under ancient buildings seems to be a characteristic Italian problem, but we don't have a entry for the leaning tower of Pisa yet.
Your practical take-away from this entry is this: don't visit Venice in the off season. St. Mark's Square, one of the city's lowest points, used to flood about ten times a year back around 1900; now it's flooding about 60 times each Winter. I guess low tide makes it possible to number the floods. Here's good news: if it gets much worse, St. Marks will be flooded only one time all Winter.
Zager and Evans had a number-one hit in 1970 with ``In The Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus).'' They consider ``...the year 2525 / If man is still alive / If woman can survive / They may find....'' They speculate that ``in the year 6565 / Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife / You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too / From the bottom of a long glass tube, wo-oo-wo.''
- The same dozen keywords every time!
- Having a good sense of humor, but not, you know, ``funny'' in that other sense.
- The traits I think will attract the kind of person I'm looking for are. Personalsese.
Under the Ottoman Empire, Mesopotamia (al-Iraq in Arabic) was governed as a federation of three provinces centered on their main cities. The province of Mosul in the north was mostly Kurdish. The other two cities were Baghdad (Arab Sunni, rather than Kurdish Sunni) and Basra (Arab Shi'ite). After WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British imposed a highly centralized government, a constitutional monarchy modeled on their own.
According to the song, motor-sickle and motor-sigh are acceptable also.
The Motorist's Psalm
I don't care if it rains or freezes --
'long as I got my plastic Jesus
sittin' on the dashboard of my car.
I can do a hundred miles an hour!
Long as I got the almighty power,
Way up there with my pair of fuzzy dice.
Accept no substitutes. Mojo Nixon and others have promulgated heretical versions, to say nothing of exegeses. Don Imus apparently used to sign on with riding instead of sittin'; that might be a translation problem. For other liturgy, visit the drop kick entry.
George Westinghouse made his first fortune from the design of air brakes for trains. He used that fortune to commercialize an AC power system ultimately based on Tesla's designs. A financial panic ruined him in 1907.
In a television ad that ran, oh, I don't know, probably in the eighties, selling photographic film or something, an excruciatingly cute little girl asks her older brother, ``Am I the opposite sex, or are you''?
It would be in poor taste if I were to comment ``out of the mouths of babes.''
Ted Turner was an undergraduate at Brown University. (That's the ``Harvard of Rhode Island,'' although nobody calls it that. If this comment sounds stupid, you should read the the Harvard-of-the-South entry. Then the comment will still sound stupid, but you'll be better informed. A lot of his business ventures were based in Atlanta. Atlanta has more Harvards of the South than any other city anywhere.) Ted Turner was expelled from Brown in 1960 for violating some rule. It had something to do with having a female friend in his dorm room. In 1990, Brown awarded him an undergraduate degree after all.
The greatest movies of the color era are roloc. No, not really, but I wanted to keep the palindrome going. Actually, the greatest movies of the color era are the following:
- Animal House. It's a love story. Over the course of the movie, as various subsidiary love stories evolve, John Blutarsky (John Belushi's first romantic lead) shows repeatedly that he is devoted to Mandy Pepperidge (played by Mary Louise Weller) and only to her. Mandy is model-beautiful (this is literally true of the actress), and is in an unsatisfying relationship. She is oblivious to ``Bluto,'' even when he is very close in front of her (and also usually, and symbolically, below her); he belongs to a group of social outcasts. Although Bluto has leadership skills that will eventually propel him to the Senate and (according to the Double Secret Probation release of 2003) the US Presidency, he is reduced to puerile stunts in her presence. Events conspire, however... Ironically, Mandy's best friend's selfish betrayal helps Mandy toward her destiny. I don't want to give too much away, but the two lovers are happily united in the end. Because the love story has a happy ending (in contrast with ``The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,'' say, which also has some funny bits) it is classed as a ``comedy.'' It's also an homage to courtly love.
- The Ballad of Narayama. It's a comedy about euthanasia, and it's about youth in Asia! But most of the gags are not puns, which wouldn't translate very well between Japanese and other languages. (See, though, mama-haha.) Instead, they have to do with things we can all relate to like sex, very bad body odor, tooth decay, and burying alive a family that hunger has reduced to potato-robbing.
I'm sure you'll want to read our insight into other movies.
If you're wondering about a movie we haven't reviewed yet, go to Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) for on-line information (about movies).
Inflected forms: APMOVPE and LP-MOVPE (atmospheric-pressure and low-pressure).
A lot of developers were irritated that when Microsoft came out with its browser, that browser self-identified as ``Mozilla'' in requests, even though it follows slightly different conventions (``MSIE'' is given as part of the version information). Presumably this was done so the browser would have the greatest chance of being identified by the server as a graphical browser. Of course, it had the side effect that developers unwilling to work too hard would end up selecting a single set of browser-dependent extensions for all graphical browsers. Some feel this is naughty.