Here I sit,You can figure it out. Hint: don't try to reconstruct this from scansion.
All broken-hearted
Paid a dime to ____
But only ______.
You wanted more graceful transitions in the previous paragraph? What do you think this is -- literature?
A-driver's-license-and-car is babe-bait in high school and in retirement communities. In the former, parents may impose a curfew; in the latter, the state division of motor vehicles may impose a no-driving-after-dark restriction.
I understand that after an initial IFFT, a ``cyclic prefix'' is slapped on the front, which is just a repeat of the end of the transformed signal, and that this makes decoding easy, and that another advantage of OFDM is that it's possible to design for ``bad spots'' in the frequency spectrum. The downside includes high peak-to-average power ratio, and the need for precise linearity in the amplifiers and very sharp frequency syncronization. Don't quote me on that, though -- the speaker intensity at the talk I attended on this stuff was fading into the air conditioner noise (white, Carrier), and the overheads were not easy to decode.
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[Vice President Dick Cheney's] office, oddly, or nervously, or defensively, refuses to supply a daily schedule of his recent activities, and, furthermore, makes this refusal off the record. (Truly--a spokesperson refused to provide information only under the condition that I agreed not to say she refused to provide information.)
I suppose she must have threatened to refuse to refuse to provide the information unless he agreed not to reveal her refusal. I think Wolff struck a bad bargain here, and it's not even clear that he honored the confidentiality agreement. It probably depends on the precise wording. What the nonspokesperson should have done was provide the lack of information on a recursive conditional basis. The reporter would have had to agree not to report any off-the-record information, with the stipulation that any information about off-the-record information (including but not limited to the conditions under which it might be reported) would be considered off-the-record information itself. One shudders to think what stick could correspond to such an indigestible carrot. One also wonders about the topology of such an uninformative information set. This set might have a hole in its interior: is it permissible not to report the daily schedule one hasn't been given, or is this tantamount to suggesting that one hasn't received the schedule?
Here's a less convoluted situation, but one with a little more emotional weight. It's from a Washington Post story of June 20, 2007, reporting the continuation of a ban on the use of BlackBerrys in French government ministries and the presidential palace. (After all, BlackBerry data are routed through servers in the UK and the US; the NSA may be listening.)
An Orange France spokesman said Wednesday that the company had no comment on the government's decision to banish the BlackBerry from the corridors and offices of government because of security concerns. The spokesman, however, pleaded not to be named declining to comment.
RIM, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, says messages sent via BlackBerrys are super-duper secure (not an exact quote). Of course, they have to say that. The question is, what are they not telling us, and what are they not telling us that they're not telling us? Check out the non-denial denial entry also, but don't tell 'em I sentcha.
- Province of Assumption B.V.M. (US Midwest)
- Bosnia
- Custody of the Holy Land
- Province of Holy Name (US Northeast)
- Province of Immaculate Conception (US Northeast)
- Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe (US Southwest) [This link is probably dead by now, since it was scheduled to move to Catholic University of America when I made this entry.]
- Province of Sacred Heart (US Midwest)
- Custody of St. Anthony of Padua (Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei)
- St. John the Baptist Province (Ohio, USA)
- Province of St. Paul the Apostle (Malta)
Niagara: Cumberland Falls (in Whitley County,
Kentucky)
Grand Canyon: Breaks Canyon
William Shakespeare: William Faulkner
See also our FSU entry. (F is for Florida, SU is for Soviet Union, and X is for the People's Republic of Berkeley.)
Cf. NGC.
The OGC sits at the top of a hill, on the far side of a golf course from the main undergraduate campus. On a misty morning, coming into Princeton on the train spur from Princeton Junction, the most prominent sight off to the west is the OGC's Cleveland Tower, rising like an upscale Brigadoon in central New Jersey. More than one person claims to have felt disoriented by the sight.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Ohio state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.
The song ``My City was Gone'' first appeared on the Pretenders' album Learning to Crawl. It was written by lead singer Chrissie Hynde, a native of Akron, Ohio, after she returned from a long stay in Britain. The song ends
Ay, oh, where did you go, Ohio?
The spectral classification sequence categorizes the light spectra of stars. The system was developed by E. C. Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919, a time when it was dark at night across most of the US and it wasn't ridiculous to operate a professional astronomical observatory in coastal Massachusetts. Back when there were competing spectral classifications (due to Secchi and Vogel), Pickering's system was known as the Harvard system or the Henry Draper system. Henry Draper was a benefactor of the observatory.
Pickering's system is based not on the color of the star, but on the relative absorption of a sequence of pairs of absorption lines. Thus, as one moves along the main sequence from B to A (i.e.: B0, B1, B2, ... B9, A0) the relative absorption of helium lines decreases and the hydrogen absorption lines become more prominent.
A nice description is served on this page.
High German is a division of West Germanic. West Germanic is one of three main divisions of the Germanic language family, which in turn is one of a dozen or so major divisions of the Indo-European language family. The other two main Germanic branches are North Germanic, otherwise known as Scandinavian, and East Germanic. The East Germanic tribes migrated from the Baltic and settled around the Black Sea by the fourth century. Then came Attila. Someday if you're good I won't tell you the story. It's very exciting, and it doesn't have a very happy ending.
West Germanic includes Anglo-Saxon and its descendants (including English, a language you may be aware of), Frisian, Dutch, and related languages, and the two language groups Low and High German. Some time around 500 A.D., a sound shift occurred in OHG that still distinguishes Hochdeutsch (the more precise term for German from other West Germanic families.
The Low German branch of West Germanic has surviving members, such as Plattdeutsch, among the various local languages of modern Germany. But High German is the ancestor of standard German, and historically, most German literature has been written in OHG or one of its descendant languages. German literature is thus divided into three periods. Old High German (800 A.D. to 1050), Middle High German (1050-1500), and New High German (1500 to present)
Yes, yes, you're thinking of Violet, George and Mary Bailey's childhood friend in It's A Wonderful Life. She says, ``Oh, this ol' thing? I only wear this when I don't care how I look.'' The Violet character's best line, m.A.n., is uttered by the actress playing her as a child in an early scene. Coming into Mr. Gower's drugstore, she meets the little Mary Hatch,
Mary: I love [George].(From memory; first three lines approximate.)
Violet: Me too!
Mary: [But] you love all the boys!
Violet: What's wrong with that?
Look, what I'm trying to say here is, most people have an unconscious mind that would blow out their conscious mind in any fair test of intelligence, see? The conscious mind gets all the publicity only because it's out in front. Cool, no? Anyway, practice the head term until it rolls off your tongue like some bad meat you ate an hour ago, and you can sound spontaneous too.
The h in the German noun Ohm is silent -- it only serves to indicate that the o is long (in terms of vowel quantity). In Greek, the distinction is made by using different vowels omega and omicron, as the names imply.
Greek does not have a letter aitch. The capital eta looks like H, but it's just a vowel. When Greek is written in Roman characters, aitches are inserted to represent aspiration. Specifically, th, ph, and ch transliterate the Greek letters theta, phi, and chi, which in Greek represent the aspirated versions of the unvoiced stops tau, pi, and kappa, respectively. (We do the same thing with voiced stops in Hindi: bh, dh, gh.) Vowels and rho can also be aspirated, but there aren't separate letters for the aspirated versions. Instead, the characters for the unaspirated sounds are augmented by a breathing mark. (The breathing mark, also called spiritus asper in Latin, looks like a tiny left parenthesis mark above the letter.) Thus, the Greek words that we write hero and rhetor look like ero and retor with specks of ink or screen phosphor along the top. As you can see, the aitch indicating aspiration is usually written after the aspirated sound in Roman characters, but before the aspirated vowel. However, when a Greek word begins with an aspirated diphthong (as in haima, `blood'), the breathing mark is placed over the second vowel.
Well, I was trying to build to something. I was going to mention that vowels in Greek were only aspirated (or at least only got aspiration marks) at the beginning of a word. (This makes it a bit like English, which now has lost word-final aspiration -- it occurs only in foreign loans like Bach and loch -- and limited intervocalic aspiration.) Then I was going to bring in the microohm, and, like a soufflé, this Greek concoction would rise and yield mÔ! Or mo' or something. (I don't like soufflé.) But alas, as often happens, the ingredients didn't come together quite right and, deflatedly, I must simply ask you to proceed now to the mho entry.
At first blush, English appears unusual in having a compound to fill this semantic slot, but that is mainly appearances. Dutch has zonder. (And Dutch zonde is `sin,' so zonder zonde is `sinless.') This zonder is cognate with, and sounds a lot like, the German word sonder. The original senses of the word included `outside' (i.e., `without'), and considering that that is the sense of some Indic cognates (like reconstructed Old Indic sanu-tar), there seems to be some parallel reasoning going on here. Sonder (also sunder) accumulated some related meanings, such as `for each,' and now the main sense of the adjective (and adverb) is `separate(ly).' This all seems very reasonable if one meditates on the related senses of ``outside of'' and ``apart from'' in English. In fact, the outside notion just won't die. The Swedish adverb ut has about the same meaning as its English cognate `out,' utan expresses `without.' The Danish is uden. For Spanish and some other Romance, see sin.
Automobile engines are almost all four-stroke engines. Hand-held chainsaws, lawn mowers, boats with outboard engines, motorcycles, and snowmobiles all traditionally used two-stroke engines. The principal advantage of a two-stroke engine is that you get one power stroke per cylinder per revolution of the crankshaft, rather than one every two revolutions. This means that roughly, you only need half as many cylinders and you have a lighter engine. Two-strokes are also lighter because they're simpler. The earliest designs had no valves, just inlet and outlet openings on the side of the cylinder, closed by the side of the piston. Later designs improved operation slightly with reed valves -- one-way valves that do not require actuation (so no cams, etc.). Some two-strokes do have valves at the top of the cylinder, but I don't know anything about their actuation.
The philosophical disadvantage of two-strokes is that they're sloppy: they squeeze the four operations of compression, power, exhaust, and intake into just two strokes (one complete turn of the crankshaft). This means that you're adding fuel-air mix as you're removing combusted fuel from the same cylinder, so some fuel is wasted: being exhausted immediately as it is let in. Fuel injection gets around this, since fuel can be injected just before spark, and that approach has also been tried. In any case, there are many kinds of inefficiency, and carrying a heavier, harder-to-repair engine may not be worth slightly greater fuel efficiency.
In practice, many other factors influence fuel efficiency, and fuel pass-through is not even the most important cause of hydrocarbon (unburnt fuel) emissions now. Nevertheless, with the exception of hand-held chainsaws, the two-stroke applications listed earlier are moving toward four-stroke. The main practical advantage is vastly reduced noise.
The first part of the term is derived from the Greek oîkos, `house, dwelling.' Other English terms with the same root tend to be based on the Latinized root form oeco-, and the initial oe has generally eroded to e (as in foetus > fetus). In fact, the only common words I can think of that have the root are economy and ecology, and derivationally related words. (According to the OED, oecology was modeled on oeconomy.) The Greek original of that word, oikonomia, essentially had to do with household management. [For a really thorough discussion of the semantic evolution of the word economy in English, see the beginning of Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (Un. of Calif. Pr., 1973).] In German, economy is Ökonomie. (The umlauted character represents oe.) The word Ökonomie shares the semantic field of economy with the more common Wirtschaft. (The distinction doesn't line up with that of economy and finance. Look, this is the oicotype entry. Wait until we have a dedicated Ökonomie entry, or look in a German dictionary.)
By now you're eager to know how oicotype happens to be spelled the way it is. The reason is probably that the word was introduced by a Swede, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. See Selected Papers on Folklore, ed. Laurits Bødker (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948).
Roseanne (the show) ran from 1988 to 1997. Its outlook would appear to have had little in common with that of ``The Cosby Show,'' which ran from 1984 to 1992. The Cosby Show was a sort of black ``Father Knows Best'' (1954-1963). Bill Cosby said he created it partly because he was tired of sit-coms in which ``the children were brighter than the parents.''
It is clear from the IIC's report that the OIOS generated many reports accurately detailing major problems and making sensible recommendations. It is also clear that, with minor exceptions, the content of these reports was ignored. Apparently the OIOS has no enforcement power and no mechanism to instigate enforcement. This is deeply characteristic of the UN, which is ultimately sustained by a faith that words magically lead to deeds, without credibly threatened penalties or force.
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The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Oklahoma state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.
If the carbon is part of a benzene ring, then the compound is called a phenol or (with multiple hydroxyl groups) polyphenol. Otherwise -- with hydroxyl group (or groups all) bonded to nonaromatic carbon(s), it is an alcohol.
There are a number of older chemical terms that end in -ol and do not describe alcohols or phenols. Typically these are terms widely used among all chemists in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and which have lingered in use among nonchemists and industrial chemists after the IUPAC rationalization of chemical nomenclature. Prominent among these no-longer-appropriate uses of -ol are the aromatic (but nonphenolic) chemical names ``benzol, toluol, and xylol,'' now replaced by benzene, toluene, and xylene.
In the previous paragraph, the sentence containing the word meager is declarative, not interrogative. That's why I didn't use a question mark. Some people disapprove. We need to have an international conference on this question. The question question, I mean. You understand?
Outside linebackers used to be called defensive ends, but that sounded slow, so they came up with a different name. More seriously, the linebacker position was invented by legendary University of Michigan coach Fielding Yost. The number of men on the field (11 per team) hadn't changed, so I guess the original OLB's were DE's who were playing slightly off the line.
I guess ``card catalog'' (like ``carriage return'') has lost some semantic traction, so OPAC will become increasingly common.
As we stroll briskly down electronic memory lane, let's pause a moment and record a melancholy milestone, a John Henry moment. After Notre Dame's libraries switched to an OLCC system in the 1980's, and then to another in the 1990's, the old card catalog at Hesburgh Library had some inertia. It ceased to be updated, but it remained available, and I even used it a couple of times in the late 1990's when the electronic catalog was off line. In particular, during and just before final exams, Hesburgh stays open around the clock, which is cool, but the old electronic catalog went off-line after about 3 AM, which was not cool. That was when I used the cards. I'm sorry I didn't record the dates of these significant events. It was probably before 2000 that the card catalog cabinets were moved out of the first floor.
Once all volumes were on electronic record, the cards started to be recycled for scratch paper. You would look up a book on the OLCC, grab an old card from a convenient stack near the PC, and write the call number on the back of the old card. It was faster than printing out. There is a certain poignant nobility in this final humble service of each card, making its lonely departure among bad photocopies and forbidden candy wrappers, too soon, forever, out of the only library it had ever called home.
One evening last week, during the traditional end-of-semester scavenger hunts, a callow youth approached me and asked where the card catalog was. He wasn't sure what he needed, but apparently he needed a catalog card. When I reached over to get him one, I realized that the scrap-paper stack had only the recycled bad-photocopy slips. I did find a couple of old cards nearby, but today (December 11, 2005) I learned that we have indeed come to the end of an era: the capacious cabinets were finally emptied a couple of months ago, and since then there are no more cards to refill the scrap-paper stacks. Sic transit.
Eda Kriseová is a Czech novelist, was a dissident under Communist rule. Thanks in part to international pressure, she received an exit visa from Czechoslovakia in 1988.
She visited Harvard, where she was to give a reading. Sitting down at a computer terminal in Widener Library, she typed in the words ``Czech underground literature.'' To her surprise, the computer responded. She then typed in her own name. The computer answered that it had carbon copies of some of her own samizdat manuscripts. ``I burst into tears,'' she said. ``I felt like a victorious Robinson Crusoe, whose message in the bottle had washed up on shore.''
She went home. Fast forward to -- no wait! Better go to slow-mo; everything happened suddenly. On January 16, 1989, Kriseová's friend Vaclav Havel and seven other civil rights campaigners were arrested for hooliganism. They were trying to place flowers at the statue of St. Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square. (Wenceslas is the English form of the Czech name Vaclav.)
On May 17, 1989, Vaclav Havel was released after serving only four months of his nine-month term for this crime. Ms. Eva Kvetenska, the judge who ordered his release, read a report from the prison authorities that Havel, a playwright, had shown ``disciplined conduct.'' She ordered him placed on two years' probation, pronouncing that this would be long enough to guarantee his ``re-education.'' In 1968, Havel had gone on the air with the short-lived Free Czech Radio, during the Soviet-led invasion by fraternal socialist armed forces that crushed a liberalization known as the Prague Spring. From that time, he was permanently banned from publication and performance. (The next year, a student named Jan Palach immolated himself at St. Wenceslas Square in protest. The hooliganism of January 16, 1989, was to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his suicide.) As a coauthor of Charter 77, Havel was arrested within 24 hours of that declaration's announcement; charges related to Charter 77 work won him a four-year prison term in 1979.
Havel became president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989. Well, other things happened too, so I'm just concentrating on the stuff that seems relevant to this entry. Kriseová became a member of Havel's advisory board. In 1992, she attended a conference organized by Partisan Review, on ``Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern Europe'' (held at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ). Her talk, on the last day of the conference, was entitled ``Where I Hid My Manuscript.'' [The block of quoted text above is from Jacob Weisberg's report on the conference in the back-page ``Diarist'' feature of the New Republic: ``Newark Diarist'' for May 4, 1992, p. 41 (vol. 206, #18).] Kriseová wrote Havel's official biography, which received mixed reviews.
L&S has older scholarship, of course; in particular, our understanding of Indo-European is supposed to be improved. I've also read the claim that L&S is notorious for the inaccuracy of its indications of vowel length. I guess notoriety is a matter of degree.
On behalf of the L&S it may be said that it has more usage information, details on semantic shifts, etc. Also, the OLD -- unlike L&S -- is more sharply focused on classical texts for cites and sources, and excludes Christian and other late antique evidence. Some see this as reflecting the values of ``old-style Christian-hating classicists.'' Fight! Fight!
In general, redundancy is calculated as a ``left-to-right'' procedure; that is to say, the predictability of a following term is calculated upon the extent to which preceding forms determine its probability of occurrence.[In Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964).] When people who can think but not calculate try to put their ideas into mathematical terms, the results can be amusing.
...
In actual speech, however, as well as in the understanding of written materials, persons do not decode merely from left to right. Rather, they take in what might be called ``meaningful mouthfuls'' and actually determine the meaning by two-directional decoding, so that redundancy must be calculated both lineally and structurally.
On the uk.railway newsgroup, monitored by our research department, the despised Connex has been compared favorably to Outlook Express. However, on that newsgroup OLE has another expansion:
It's often called a polyester, but it's not a polymer. It's a sucrose (double sugar) esterized with five to eight fatty acids.
As of this writing (March 1997), olestra is found only in, and in all, fat-free potato chips.
It has been impossible to test toxicity using the usual animal-model protocols. That is, normally one gives factor-of-a-hundred (proportional-by-body-mass) overdoses to test animals to detect any deleterious effect. This has been criticized on the basis of the idea that too much of anything is bad, but it does improve the odds of detecting problems that might otherwise take years to develop, or to which the test animal happens to be less susceptible. In any case, since fat substitutes are not trace-level additives but a major fraction of the food they're used in, factor-of-a-hundred increased ``doses'' would simply burst the test animals. A part of the argument for acceptance has simply been that olestra isn't absorbed, so it would take some pretty nifty magic for it have a toxic effect.
There are, in fact, a number of health problems possibly associated with olestra, among the least of them the fact that olestra tends to leak out through the other end of your GI tract, even though you thought you were toilet trained. On the other hand, there are a number of health problems associated with the consumption of ordinary fat.... Studies suggest that GI problems (cramps, ``fecal urgency'' and soft stools, mostly) happen to a few percent of people who eat the equivalent of half a tube of fat-free Pringles, but the data are still, pardon the expression, spotty. The GI effects are reported to be comparable in magnitude or severity to those produced by baked beans, dietary fiber, and prunes.
The main specific concern is that olestra is a solvent for fat-soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, E and K. This affects the ability of the intestines to absorb them, but then so does whether you cook them or not, and whether you eat fiber with them, etc. Federal regulation requires fortification with vitamins A, D, E and K, but that's not so simple. Vitamin A is not one substance but a large class including some of the carotenoids. The possible consequences of depleted carotenoid uptake are unknown, so try to eat a cooked carrot unaccompanied by fat-free potato chips or oat bran, every once in a while.
It's marketed by P&G. They spent 25 years and $200 million dollars on research and health studies. What a bargain. Accidentally created in 1968; first petition filed for its approval as a cholesterol-reducing drug in 1975 and withdrawn in the face of research showing that it wasn't very effective; P&G petitioned for food-additive approval in 1987.
Here're some other sites:
- The FDA's ``backgrounder'' from around the time that a majority of its olestra advisory committee recommended for approval.
- A lot of hysterical adverse publicity from CSPI, a tree-hugging organization.
- A humorous take on the leaky anus problem
- Procter & Gamble's promotion pages. (They call it olean.)
- A fence-balancing act from the American Heart Association. They basically say: go ahead but ... take in small quantities only ... careful monitoring ... more research.
- A typical, mostly low-brow Letterman Top-Ten.
- An FAQ from Ohio State.
In Japanese, this syllable is rendered in such a way that the romaji transliteration becomes `aum.' Hence the name of the infamous Aum Shinrikyo cult (discussed elsewhere in the glossary: LPF).
Oh, all right:
- rumen
- reticulem
- omasum
- abomasum
For more, see the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
Until 2002, news reports in major papers expanded O.M.F.U.G. (with whatever punctuation or capitalization) with Gourmandizers (observe the u), although innovative, daring, progressive, and illiterate USA Today used Gormandizers in 1993. From 2003 on, most news reports used Gormandizers.
FWIW, in English the obsolete verb gourmand had the distasteful connotation of sloppiness that the noun gourmand still has, while the obsolete or rare verb gourmandize (used by W.M. Thackeray in his 1841 essay ``Memorials of Gourmandising'') had or has the genteel connotation of the noun gourmet. Personally, I prefer the 1820 suggestion made by A.D. Macquin in a footnote to Tabella Cibaria: ``The gormand unites theory with practice, and may be denominated Gastronomer. The gourmet is merely theoretical, cares little about practising, and deserves the higher appellation of Gastrologer.''