You usually never hear any news here (in the US) about the Indian subcontinent unless it crosses a certain newsworthiness threshold. The threshold is normally exceeded only if at least a few thousand ordinary people die in a single incident. Fewer deaths are required if there is an element of novelty (one hundred dead from falling off the top of a train in a derailment, or from trying to vote in the ``wrong'' precinct, say) or of importance. It tends to give the impression that all accidents in India and thereabouts are weird or enormous catastrophes.
For that reason, you were grateful to read (at the IST entry) about a serious international incident between India and Nepal that turned out not only peaceful but funny. That way, you know something about Nepal besides the fact that on June 1, 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra murdered nine members of the royal family (including his father King Birendra) before fatally shooting himself. It seems he was upset because they didn't approve of his intended bride. You can imagine that ``Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' (1967) might have been a very different movie if it'd been set in Kathmandu.
Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal. The aitch in the name indicates aspiration. We're going to have to get an aspiration entry in this glossary. Speakers of English tend to pronounce it ``cat man do'' as Bob Seger did in his song ``Katmandu.''
Kappa Alpha Theta, or ``Theta'' for short (why not ``cat''?!), was founded at DePauw University (known then as Indiana Asbury University). It was the first ``women's fraternity'' at a US (or probably any) college. It was founded on January 27, 1870. Gamma Phi Beta was founded at Syracuse University in 1874, and Dr. Frank Smalley, a professor there, coined the word ``sorority'' for Gamma Phi Beta.
Because of a typo, that used to say ``National Pertroleum Council.'' I'm rather sorry I noticed and corrected the error.
I think most people, including most bodybuilders, find the concept, actual or implied, of a physique committee or of a national physique, to be at least faintly ridiculous. The two bodybuilders pictured on the NPC homepage are smiling. I remember when we were in college, Ken pointed out to me that in all the TV ads for unlikely bodybuilding equipment (twisterizers, Nordic Trac, tricepsomatics, kettlebells, Total Ab Work-Out-O-Rama and what-not), the swim-suited models demonstrating the equipment were always smiling and laughing. Ken conjectured that the models weren't doing this intentionally to demonstrate how effortless and fun the exercise was, but involuntarily because they couldn't keep from laughing at the silly useless equipment they were helping to foist on the witless.
I'd heard of continental philosophy, but this is new to me. Gee, that region seems to be a hotbed of philosophical, uh, activity, if that's what it is. Cf. INPC.
The German government has tried repeatedly to ban the party. This requires a trial before the Bundesverfassungsgericht (`Federal Constitutional Court'). The most recent effort was in 2003. Horst Mahler, a member of the NPD who years earlier had been a member of the far-left terrorist organisation Red Army Faction, defended the NPD before the court. The case was ultimately thrown out when it was determined that a large part the NPD party leadership was undercover agents of the German secret services. The court decided that it was impossible to know which moves by the party were based on genuine party decisions and which were provoked by the secret services in an attempt to instigate a ban.
At a party convention in Winnipeg, in late November 2001, centrist NDP leader Alexa McDonough held off the socialist hard-liners (i.e., the NPI) and retained her position with 80% of the delegate vote.
``Teddington'' -- sounds like they felt ``Eddington'' was too forbidding. Or maybe they found Sir Arthur's later quasimystical speculations a bit much. Yeah, that must be it.
Hmmm. Okay, I'm gonna cheat here and actually find out what this NPN is, to sort of supplement my speculations. NPN is an organization of State alcohol and other drug abuse prevention representatives, and a component of NASADAD, ``providing a national advocacy and communication system for prevention.''
A mnemonic for remembering the arrow direction on the circuit diagram is ``Not Pointing iN.'' The current arrow is on the leg of the bipolar schematic corresponding to the emitter, and points in the direction of current flow for a forward mode (forward active or saturated). That's current direction, not electron velocity direction.
You know, almost two million pigs lose their lives in America every week. It's slaughter! Carnage! PETA probably feels this way unironically.
The jocular and more-accurate expansion for NPR that I was familiar with was
``National Propaganda Radio,'' but here's the end of a paragraph from
David
Mamet's essay ``Why I Am No Longer a `Brain-Dead Liberal','' which appeared to
little immediate notice in the Village Voice of March 11, 2008.
(``She,'' infra, is his wife.)
India is not a signatory to the NPT, but has
substantial nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons. During the
administrations of George W. Bush, the US government courted the Indian
government on nuclear issues, trying simultaneously to strengthen political
ties and to bring India into some degree of compliance with nuclear
nonproliferation regimes. See NSG.
Sometimes, when it's high, even current inflation can only be estimated very
approximately. I think that currently (2013), the Argentine government has
made it illegal to publish inflation estimates that contradict those of the
government itself -- to prevent errors or embarrassment, no doubt. At least,
I think it's illegal, but nobody's talking. I'm glad that no situation
even remotely resembling this is occurring in the US.
During the high inflation of the 1970's and 1980's, construction took place
around the clock in Buenos Aires. It was cheaper
to pay high prices for building materials today and elevated wages tonight,
than to pay inflated prices and wages tomorrow.
An afterthought on the errors-or-embarrassment thing. Once, in the 1950's, my
father (a resident-alien Chilean) gave a public lecture (in Argentina) on
nuclear power, and the government contributed a man to the audience. He was
interested! He wanted to compare what he said with the public pronouncements
of another engineering expert -- el Presidente Juan Perón -- and make
sure that one didn't contradict the other. Perón had predicted that soon
Argentina would be selling electricity in bottles, but he was deposed (in 1955)
before that came to pass. The former dictator was welcomed back in 1973, but
he died in 1974, so he wasn't to blame for the high-to-hyper-inflation either.
(Oops, forgot I'd already mentioned this at the AATN
entry.)
A ``new roof'' isn't a feature of a new house. Rather, it's not-completely-new
feature of a house that is not completely new. Specifically, a roof is
normally ``new'' the way a retreaded tire is ``new'': it's re-covered. Real
estate listings sometimes have an expression like ``complete tear-off''
(sometimes with a date; often with no explicit mention of the roof). That
means all the old asphalt shingles were removed before new shingles were
applied.
In areas that get snow, if the roofline is too shallow you mustn't use
asphalt shingles. If you do, water will get under the (too slightly) lower
edges of the shingles and pry them up when it freezes overnight. Typical
alternatives are tar paper (often covered with small untarred stones for a
nicer appearance) or strips of painted rubber. There are other ways to cover a
roof, but that'll do for now.
That at least is the usual description, which implicitly ignores (and is
correct if one can ignore) gravitational effects. Crudely speaking,
gravitational effects can be treated within Newtonian mechanics if spacetime
curvature parameters are small compared to the other length and time scales.
Alternatively, one may say that spacetime radii of curvature should be large
compared to the relevant length and time scales.
Note that in this sort of discussion, lengths and times are interconverted
using c. Hence, 30 cm is about 1 ns (i.e., nanolightsecond).
You shouldn't be bothered by the measurement of time in length units, or
vice versa.
In a similar way, multiplying by appropriate powers of c, speeds can be
rendered as dimensionless quantities, and accelerations in units of inverse
length. A small acceleration of gravity corresponds to a large length scale --
essentially large radius of spacetime curvature. The acceleration of gravity
at the earth's surface (g), about 9.8 m/s2, equals an inverse
light year in pure length units.
If you arrived here following a link on this site, and had been expecting to be
transported to a different, more informative place, it probably means that the
more informative place isn't ready yet. Sorry. Look, if FOLDOC can do it (like this), so can I!
Moreover, there are important positive reasons for
taking this approach.
To know the current total number of links from anywhere in the glossary to this
entry, click here. (Don't worry -- this one doesn't
bite.)
WE DO OUR PART.
According to a column by George Will (Oct. 14, 2004), although there are only
four million dues-paying NRA members (that's $35 annually), polls show that
many people, primarily those belonging to a shooting or hunting club, are
confused as to their status: a total of 18 million think they are members.
(Another 28 million think they are in some way affiliated with the NRA through
their club. In one or another sense perhaps they are.)
On October 12, 2001, the NRC pulled down most of its website to review whether
information it was making public was too sensitive -- i.e., whether it
made nuclear facilities vulnerable to terrorist attack.
It doesn't take years of study to become a Microform Master, that's all I know.
Unless you're already very rich, you want to start out small. Try the
NRCC.
One change: material in 1 Samuel 11 that somehow got misplaced in the last
couple' thousand years. Frank Moore Cross hypothesized that something had gone
missing, partly on the textual evidence and partly by inference from Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus. The
material was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and is
restored in the NRSV. I'll buy a new edition when it includes the long-lost
recipe for tasty latkes.
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island
are known as the Maritime Provinces. This threadbare little concept is
analyzed right down to the subatomic level at the
NB entry.
Starting in 1605, the region was settled by the French, who adopted the Micmac
name, in some version, calling it Acadie or Acadia. This name was used
only for continental lands, and so excluded Île Royale (now called
Cape Breton Island), the easternmost part of the current province of Nova
Scotia. On the other side, Acadia included the northeast coast of the current
province of New Brunswick. The part of Acadia that was eventually included in
the modern NS is properly ``peninsular Acadia.''
The British started settlements in peninsular Acadia beginning in 1621, during
the reign of King James I of England. He had first assumed the dignity of the
purple as King James VI of Scotland and gave the colony a name which means `New
Scotland' in Latin (more about James at the KJV
entry). Control was contested periodically. The Treaty of Utrecht, 1713,
recognized British control of peninsular Nova Scotia; French settlers were left
undisturbed then by the British colonial authority. At the start of the French
and Indian War in 1755, however, local British officials doubted the Acadians'
professed neutrality and decided to deport them en masse, scattering
them mostly to other North American British colonies. As the war progressed,
Acadians beyond Nova Scotia were also deported. (The later refugees were
deported to Europe, as were some Acadians redeported from the British colonies
they were originally sent to.) Many of the Acadians who avoided deportation
fled to Quebec. Of the original 13,000 or so Acadians, only 1250 remained in
Nova Scotia by 1763. After various peregrinations, most of the people who
could be identified as Acadians ended up in the original lands that had been
French colonies (Quebec and the Maritimes). The largest group after this was a
group of four thousand or so (by 1800) who settled in the French colony of
Louisiana, where they came to be known as the Cajuns.
During the US Revolutionary War, many loyalists fled to Nova Scotia
(vide UEL). Later,
the US took over Louisiana. It all sounds like name confusion.
Earlier, when Spanish conquistadores had landed in
what would become Louisiana,
they greeted the natives and asked what their land was called. The natives
greeted the invaders with the local word for `Hello,' which was texas.
There's an old joke like this about immigrants on a ship to America, who don't
know any language in common but greet each other daily. The punch line is:
There's a town called Antigonish in Nova Scotia. Its name in the local (Native
American) language is supposed to have meant ``place where bears broke branches
off trees looking for berries.'' IMHO, this story
is the consequence of some misunderstanding (possibly intentional).
Replacing the French name Île Royale with Cape Breton,
incidentally, restored part of the appellation first given by Spanish fishermen
from Galicia (i.e., by Celts from Iberia rather than Celts from, say,
Hibernia). South of Ingonish (did I mention Ingonish? No I did not.) on Cape
Breton Island, there's a place called Chéticamp. There are
campgrounds there. It's no wonder they left the name in French instead of
translating it. The original can be translated `pitiful grounds' or `mean
field.' I left this for last so you have no excuse not to proceed to the MFT entry.
Tournament Scrabble is played with a chess clock. Each player has 25 minutes
to play free, and has ten points deducted for every minute beyond that.
Players' rankings are adjusted following each tournament they participate in.
Here's a free biosecurity advisory: keep it in your pants.
Oh, FCOL! How can I make up stuff that's
over-the-top funny if the real world keeps raising the bar? I can't compete!
As of this writing there seems to be an F-18 on
offer to the first ``qualified'' buyer.)
On the other hand, last Sunday, as Gary and I spent a pleasant dozen hours or
so filling out NSF forms, we remembered a rumor. I write `we' advisedly,
because neither he nor I can recall having heard the rumor before. However,
we're now pretty convinced it's true. The NSF, as you know, has a couple of
major problems: (1) a shortage of money and (2)
a surplus of proposals. Until
recently, the solution has been to review the proposals, classify each one as
either ``Excellent'' or ``Yawn,'' and fund only the excellent. However, with
funding levels continuing to decline in real terms, and desperate mendicant
professors flooding NSF with ever more proposals as they are turned down with
increasing frequency, NSF finds it necessary to introduce a new policy.
Henceforth, proposals will be reviewed and rated ``excellent,'' ``eh,'' or
``bad.'' If your proposal is judged ``bad,'' you will be assessed a charge
equal to the amount of the NSF's money that you would have wasted had your
proposal been funded. Normally, you will have three years in which to pay, and
a final report will be due then listing all retractions and published errata.
However, if you are unable to complete payment in this time, you can request a
no-cost extension, so long as the university is willing to certify that your
research continues to be bad. If your no-cost extension is denied, you will be
summarily shot. After a mandatory three-day mourning period (MP3D), your
university can appeal the decision.
This policy has already been tested on a limited basis in Alabama, Alaska
and Arizona. (The faculty of one small college was decimated when an
extension was denied on a major block grant.) During this shake-out period,
efficiency experts from the office of the vice president discovered that
response time could be improved dramatically, and nervous faculty often
relieved of their concerns more quickly, if proposals were arbitrarily assigned
an evaluation immediately upon receipt, rather than being put through the
endless and universally irritating ``review process.'' Reviewer comments were
generated by randomly recycling ``good ones'' from previous years. The changes
have drawn favorable comment from proposers, both for the faster turn-around
time and for the increased relevance of the reviewers' remarks.
The new program does not just promise to decrease the burden that NSF imposes
on the government. Eventually, grant proposals will be accepted only from
schools with strong football traditions or other collateral, and the NSF will
become a revenue resource for our government in these fiscally strapped-tight
times.
Gee, the NSF must be pretty important: they rate an entry under
the LC number Q127.U6 in the CyberStacks.
It seems that JSPS is the Japanese NSF.
The NSF is allocated about 5% of US government's funds for research, but for
areas of fundamental science that do not attract so much immediate-application
funding (I mean physics and mathematics, and the pie-in-the-sky parts of other
fields), the NSF is the major source of funding for university researchers. In
many areas of engineering that attract either OXR or
commercial funding for research, NSF funding is attractive (despite relatively
small dollar amounts) because of its greater prestige.
In his The Voice of the Dolphins, and other stories (Simon and Shuster,
NYC, 1961), the physicist Leo Szilard had a story
called ``The Mark Gable Foundation.'' The premise was that in a future society
suffering from excessively rapid scientific progress, a way to retard that
progress and so protect the society would be to create a large endowment...
The sad-sack dollar has been pretty unpopular, but the state-theme quarters
have been in demand. The government went on advertising them even as
production fell behind demand, and bank tellers got the grief.
India is still not a signatory as of 2008. However, a US-promoted deal would
allow the sale of civilian nuclear technology to India. The
International Atomic Energy Agency, whose
effectiveness in preventing nuclear proliferation elsewhere has been literally
unbelievable, in August 2008 approved an inspections agreement with India.
This was a precondition for the deal, and the NSG, after receiving some
pleasant-sounding verbal assurances from India about its intentions, approved
its part of the deal. (To see how India has adhered to the letter of a
previous written nuclear agreement, see the CANDU
entry.)
Opposition parties in the Indian parliament have been resisting approval of the
deal for years. The US Congress, with both chambers controlled by the
Democratic party, has not evinced any great enthusiasm for the Republican
administration's initiatives and will begin an election recess in late
September. Realistically, this agreement has a chance, but not a very good
one. It takes a special kind of stomach to be a diplomat, working for years to
find appropriately evasive language that all sides can ultimately agree to
disapprove.
...
Our members become future leaders in the fields of media and communications.''
More at the ACP entry.
Listening to a radio production of Antigone on the BBC World Service one groggy Saturday morning, I was
shaken awake when Creon threatened a guard: ``I'll have you shot!''
Interesting translation.
Tell the teacher we're serfin', serfin' USA!
Oh wait, it turns out some of the preceding is wrong. ``Student engagement''
apparently refers to how engaged students are in learning activities.
The complete sets of questions in various versions of the survey can be viewed
at the website. Some of the questions are not otiose. Hundreds of North
American colleges and universities use Nessie.
See also the closely related DEEP and
BEAMS.
The NSTA, working in conspiracy with the Amgen Foundation, has created
something it calls NSTA New Science
Teacher Academy. Such naming is so obviously a prospective source of
confusion that it was either intentionally provocative or magnificently
insensitive, though probably not both. One is not surprised to learn that it
``was established to help promote quality science teaching, enhance teacher
confidence and classroom excellence, and improve teacher content knowledge by
providing professional development and mentoring support to early-career
science teachers.''
The single quotes within the preceding quote are just SBF editorial comment.
Ignoring Dewey, or else going only by reputation, it's fair to say that the New
School has sunk low. In 2004 it has virtually no regular faculty. Adjuncts do
more than 90% of the teaching, one course per semester. (Of course, many of
these will be teaching simultaneously for one or more other schools, cobbling
together a living from higher-educational piecework. The going rates are about
$65 to $95 per contact hour, so you can earn roughly $2000 per course per
semester. It'd be pretty good pay if you didn't have to prepare lectures and
grade and correct the homeworks, essays, and exams of 30 or 40 students, and be
available for student conferences. No medical benefits, of course, but on the
bright side -- who'd want to go on living this life? It's the sort of thing
that might have interested Beard or Veblen. Adjuncts are the migrant laborers
in the groves of Academe. Someone should write a book about it. It could be
called The Sour Grapes of Wrath.) (Here's a blog on the subject. It's
an exhausted and defunct blog, unsurprisingly, but you can still cry over the
archives.)
NSU has close to 900 adjuncts
available to teach at any given time. Those on the full-time payroll who
happen to teach are also administrators.
``School'' is right. It sounds like a travesty of a university. According to
the AAUP, however (see
page on ``Contingent Faculty Appointments''), ``44.5 percent of all faculty
are part-time, and non-tenure-track positions of all types account for more
than 60 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education.'' So
you might argue that NSU is only about twice as bad as average. Coming soon
to a ``campus'' near you: an entry for Phoenix University.
"?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always,
awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various
organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of
place. Further: I found I had been--rather charmingly, I thought--referring to
myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as
"National Palestinian Radio."
Well, I learned how to say `hello': it's Goldberg!
... the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy
on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific
workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered
promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few
years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after
the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something
like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not.
There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants.
Those who wouldn't would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the
fashion, too.
``In 1921, NSPA began helping students and teachers improve their publications.
oday that goal remains #1.
provide top quality, structured events and encourage the merits of academic
achievement for the benefit of it's members.
Sic. Ya gotta love it.
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