Peanut butter, for those unfamiliar with it, is a kind of spackle paste. It takes a bit longer to dry than the usual stuff, however.
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Atomic number 82. A dense metal and a heavy one. If you think that's redundant, then tell ZZ Top to stop singing ``a ton of lead'' as if that were any heavier than a ton of lumber. Lead is dense (11.34 g/cc). If you have a lot of it, it's heavy. Gold is denser (19.30 g/cc). If you have a lot of it, you're rich. Heavy is a matter of perspective and motivation. ``He ain't heavy, he's my brother'' and all that. From the perspective of nuclear or atomic beam physics, lead is heavier than gold (atomic number 79) because the most common isotopes have higher mass (atomic mass 207.2 vs. 196.97). Gold is denser because it has a smaller molar volume. Transition metals tend to have small molar volumes, and in consequence, the densest naturally occurring elements are osmium (Z=76, 22.61 g/cc) and iridium (Z=77, 22.65 g/cc).
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The electronic image archives at Washington University at St. Louis had a jpeg of an old postcard of Leadville, Colorado. Look around, it's probably out there somewhere on the web still.
Local 90 is the one in Westfield, New Jersey.
PBA spokesfolk are quick to assert that the PBA is not a union.
There: three one-sentence paragraphs in a row -- and you thought that was illegal!
Five.
I had a look at the 1944 and 1947 editions of The New Encyclopedia of Sports, by Frank G. Menke, to get some authoritative confirmation. Sure enow, it lists Bowling. It also lists birling, which is the sport form of the business of log rolling. A birling tournament is a roleo.
Similarly, a birding tournament is a rodeo. Well, okay, it isn't. But it should be. After all, the longest-running competitive birding tournament in the US is held in Texas.
Menke also lists corn husking. In the years 1924 to 1941, the three contests with the lowest winning net bushels husked (in eighty minutes) were the years with the most inclement race conditions (snow and ice in 1927! -- only 15.47 bu.). There were no contests in 1942-1946, but they were set to resume in 1947.
PBGC is meant to take over the operation of a corporate pension whenever the corporation fails. Corporations that run pensions are required by law to have pension funds that can't be looted by the company to make up business shortfalls. (It's not like the Social Security Administration, whose funds consist of the federal government's promise to pay back the money it took from FICA contributions.)
When the PBGC takes over a pension, it takes over the pension fund's assets but not, by law, its entire obligations. It's like federal deposit insurance, which protects deposits up to a certain amount, but determining the coverage is much more complicated. So the PBGC typically covers some of the shortfall from its own budget, but much of the shortfall is made up simply by reducing benefits.
Who gives up how much is a complicated calculation based on a variety of rules. The rules generally favor older workers. As of 2009, for example, the maximum benefit is $54,000 for a retiree aged 65 or over, $42,660 for a 62-year-old, and $24,300 for a 55-year-old. One doesn't automatically receive the maximum if one's defined benefit under the defunct pension exceeded it. The rules contain ``tripwires'' and cut-offs that can leave workers with similar work histories at the same company receiving very different benefits.
According to an article in the January 16, 2001, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PBS is trying to broaden its audience base. PBS president Pat Mitchell said the member stations were worried about the aging PBS audience. The average age of the PBS viewer was 56. I suspect that distribution is bimodal: a majority of the top ten children's programs are on PBS, and they start to lose those viewers around age six. When you subtract out the audience for Sesame Street and such, the average age was more like 65. Okay, more precision: according to Ron Santora, director of programming for Buffalo's Channel 17, the average age was 56.4 (quoted in the hometown paper that March).
Actually, PBS is used to this sort of audience. What worries them is that they used to pick up viewers as they aged, but they're not pulling in successive generations as they used to. Still, from the few publicly available figures, it looks like they made big progress in 2001. According to data gathered during the Nielsen sweeps in November 2001, the median age of PBS viewers was all the way down to 55. I'm not really sure how comparable this number is with the previous one, since it wasn't clear where the earlier one came from. It ought to be comparable with the other Nielsen numbers, however: 51 for CBS, 46 for NBC, 45 for ABC and 39 for Fox.
In Spring 2002, Maryland Public Television had an unseemly public separation from 69-year-old Louis Rukeyser, the long-time host of its program Wall $treet Week (he quit and then was fired, if I understood correctly). During the dispute, MPT noted that the average age of the Fortune reader was 49, while most of the show's viewers were over 60.
It is a fine irony that PBS might be choosing the least opportune moment to condescend in age. Since PBS was created, it has seen its mission as providing ``diversity'' in programming. Yes, they were using that very word -- before it was fashionable, even before the Bakke decision. PBS tried to serve various small audiences, such as thinking people, that were ignored by the major networks. When cable came, it spawned a large number of new networks that targeted various niche markets that only PBS had served before. So PBS, like the commercial networks, lost market share to cable. But some of the networks that ate PBS's lunch (or dinner and prime-time, rather) found it less tasty than they expected. TNN, though it did not start as a cable network, was originally aimed at one of the larger niches underserved by ABC/CBS/NBC. With its devolution into Spike TV, ``the first network for men,'' any threat it may have represented to PBS market share has pretty much vanished into the ether. At the same time that PBS has been moving to attract younger audiences, A&E and the Discovery Channels have been doing the same thing. PBS might do well to let its competition go away instead of chasing it.
PBS receives public funding via CPB, q.v., but this covers a shrinking fraction of its expenditures. One of the distinctive features of public television in the US is the twice-or-more-yearly begathons. You know, I hate to interrupt the glossary, but all of you understand what a valuable service we provide, and you know this kind of quality doesn't come free. All of this information is supported by contributions from savvy internet surfers like you. Please call the number at the bottom of your screen now and make a pledge. We have celebrities standing by to receive your calls. Look, they're all celebrities. Beverly Sills and Josh Groban aren't able to take all of your calls, so if your call is answered by Ashley or Britney or Christina or Lindsay, please don't hang up and call again! If you call now, you will receive a tasteful and attractive WSBF extra-large diaper tote! Please call within the next 18 minutes, as we have a generous challenge grant: every dollar you pledge will be matched by an anonymous donor!
Another traditional source of PBS funding is corporate sponsorships. This started out as a fairly reserved PR thing, with Texaco or some other munificence covering an entire series of shows about some environment somewhere, subtly demonstrating Texaco's commitment to the existence of an environment. That well of money has been steadily drying up, and in the 1990's public television really started to explore the quid-pro-quo and bald-advertising reaches of ``sponsorship.'' You see a lot more Britcoms sponsored by local furniture stores these days.
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'') pc, or
1 pc = 206264.81 a.u. ~= 3.26 light year (ly). The
continued popularity of units like this demonstrates the hypocrisy of
some vocal scientists' insistence on metric conversion.
``For us, too, `PC' no longer stands just for Police Constable, postcard, Privy Counsellor or even personal computer, but also and above all for political correctness - a term which, whatever its polemical use and abuse, concerns a cluster of issues around codes of civility and censorship both verbal and behavioural.''
The preceding quote is dredged from page 19 of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics
of Classical Learning, a collection of essays including some gems of
aggressively bad writing. The particular essay quoted is Chapter 1:
``Classics: from discipline in crisis to (multi-)cultural capital.'' The
author, Paul Cartledge, thanks ``our extraordinarily conscientious and vigilant
editors.'' Those editors, Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, have allowed him
to clot his prose with conjunctions like ``despite - or because of? -'' and
parentheticals like ``(everything going wrong - or moment of decision).'' If
you have a term paper due tomorrow, borrow from this. No one will ever
guess that the callow, stilted prose you plagiarize would ever (1998) have
been published by Cambridge University Press. (Be careful, though: it's
not utterly dreadful.)
This isn't PC. If you wanted some thoughts on political correctness, you should have gone to the Retarded entry.
Polycarbonate may or may not be ``UV-stabilized.'' The unstable PC can be recognized because it fluoresces under UV light.
There's an informative PC entry in the Macrogalleria.
This isn't a new concept. One bourbon, one scotch, and one be-eer.
You're probably wondering, ``what is a `streetcar'? Is it the opposite of an off-the-road vehicle?'' For possible enlightenment, see the TTC entry.
For most of its length CA 1 is the highway closest to the coast. It's scenic in the undeveloped parts. (There are still some undeveloped parts as of this writing, April 8, 2002, 12:40 PDT.) Its southern terminus is just south of San Juan Capistrano (roughly halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles), where I-5 (which hugs the coast to the south) moves inland and CA 1 continues along the coast. Officially (according to Section 635 of the California Street and Highway Code), the PCH is the part of CA 1 from there to a northern terminus near Ventura, fifty miles up the coast past LA, where CA 1 ends at US 101.
In the most expansive popular usage, PCH is all of CA 1 plus US 101 in those parts of California, Oregon, and Washington where there is no California state route 1. One widespread usage defines the PCH as all of CA 1 (whose northern terminus is at Leggett, where it joins US 101) plus any pieces of US 101 needed to get between the southern and northern termini.
Honk if you passed P-Chem!
In my experience, PChem course is fairly unchallenging compared to any real course covering any single topic -- thermodynamics, kinetic theory, quantum mechanics -- included in a typical year of PChem. However, the material is wide-ranging, and it is qualitatively different from and much more mathematical than that in most other courses taken by chemistry and chemical engineering majors. If the material interests you, get the necessary math preparation and then take a specific course on the material -- it'll be more beautiful and satisfying, and make more sense.
See also EMag.
There's an old saying: ``A mickle, a pickle.'' Most people don't remember what a mickle is, or even a muckle. Me neither. Let me know after you look it up. Maybe check here.
PCL is the document description language developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) for its Laserjet series of laser printers. Compare PostScript.
Not the most important thing to say about PCM, but of concern to me right now, is that it's the most common storage method for wave files (*.WAV) on the Windows platform.
Here's a description from whatis.com.
- People Can't Master Computer Industry Acronyms.
- People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
PCP is probably the less accurate term, since nursing assistants are low-skilled workers. On the other hand, since the 1970's in the US, a few causes have led to shifts in health-care responsibilities: a shortage of doctors in general practice, a severe shortage of nurses, and demands for accountability arising from growth in the fraction of health care paid by some form of insurance. Some routine diagnostic and prescription tasks that once were the sole bailiwick of physicians are now often performed by registered nurses, and various routine nursing duties are performed largely by nursing assistants. (In the hazy, almost prehistoric, past, I seem to recall that they were called orderlies.) The market for medical care has many dimensions, and the profile of labor shortages should be noted: an aging population, smaller families, and a higher labor-force participation of the daughters who historically cared for parents have all led to a need for long-term maintenance care. In the US as in Europe, a large fraction of this care is provided by immigrants from LDE's.
The principal charm of the initialism PCP is that it is also used for the drug of abuse known as ``angel dust.'' This would be a good place to note something else connecting drug abuse and nursing, probably related to the fact that the latter offers opportunities, some dangerous to patients, for the former. In Indiana and probably every other place in the US, the state may refuse to allow someone convicted of a drug felony from taking the state boards -- i.e., prevent that person from becoming a registered nurse.
Here's what the government thinks. I have no idea what the second P stands for, but we have enough PC expansions, so I don't mind if they just threw it in for disambiguation.
But worse: compare PCP. I've seen many a bloody namespace collision in my time. In German it's called a Namenskonflikt (namespace is Namensraum). If German were a little more colorful here, we could call PCP a medizinische Namensmassenkarambolage.
According to a Classics-list posting by the generally reliable Laval Hunsucker, there was an article by Sydney Goldstein entitled Mathieu functions in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society. Hmmm. It turns out that the Cambridge Philological Society did once publish a Transactions, although the Goldstein article appeared in the Transactions of the Cambridge PhiloSOPHICAL Society.
Elections are one of the few hard tests of the accuracy of polling, because there are official results for comparison. The PCPO had such a test in 2006 and did quite poorly overall. A few things may be said in its defense, but they require context...
In order to provide that context, I'm writing an analysis of the 2006 PLC election, complete with irrelevant tangents. I haven't finished it, but it's holding up other material on this page, so I'm publishing it incomplete now and blaming the Israelis for any problems that may arise. By the time it's finished, I'll have settled on a single name to use to refer to district/first-past-the-post/winner-take-all/British-parliament-style voting.
The Palestinian Legislative Council is essentially the Palestinian Authority's parliament. The first PLC elections, in 1996, were conducted on a constituency basis (district voting, ``first past the post''). The 2006 elections were held under a new election law passed by the PLC on June 18, 2005. (Details for both systems here. Each used 16 districts. The first PLC had 88 seats. After proving his democratic bona fides with the 1996 election, chairman Arafat let the elections thing kinda slide.) The 2006 elections implemented a mixed system: some seats determined by district-voting for individuals, and some by voting for lists (i.e., proportional representation).
In the case of the 133-member PLC elected in 2006, 66 seats were filled on a constituency basis and 66 by proportional representation. (I think the remaining seat is that of the President.) Ahead of the elections, it was widely supposed that Fatah would retain the largest share of seats and that Hamas would place second. PCPO conducted a careful poll of 2389 Palestinian adults from January 18 to 21 to determine which lists they would support in the PR vote. Out of 11 lists, the following six had the largest support:
Fatah: 39.6% Hamas: 28.8% Independent Palestine: 7.7% Al Badeel: 7.2% PFLP: 4.9% Third Way: 4.7%The polling was arranged to make the secrecy of the poll apparent: voters in the survey marked a ballot and deposited it in a kind of vote box. Of the ballots deposited, 3.3% were unmarked. Some notes on the lists:
- The Hamas list was technically the ``List for Change and Reform.'' Technically, Hamas itself was not participating in the election. A distinction without much difference.
- The Independent Palestine list was headed by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti.
- Al Badeel or Al Badil, `The Alternative' list, was a coalition of DFLP, the People's Party, and ``FIDA.''
- The PFLP list was officially the ``List of Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa.''
- The ``List of the Third Way'' was headed by Salam Fayyad and Hanan Ashrawi.
The election took place on January 25, and it soon became clear that Hamas had won an overwhelming victory. This suggested that pre-election polling had been wildly wrong, but it exaggerates the error. Here are the final results:
seats seats by total
by PR district seats Grouping
29 45 74 Hamas
28 17 45 Fatah
3 0 3 PFLP
2 0 2 Third Way
2 0 2 Al Badeel
2 0 2 Independent Palestine
0 4 4 (independent candidates)
-------------------------
66 66 132 Total
Preliminary estimates of the election commission (CEC), based on 95% of the vote, originally gave Hamas 76 seats and Fatah 43. Final results reassigned one list seat, and one district seat in Khan Younis. Interestingly, 14 of those elected to the PLC were in jails of the IOF, including the top candidate of Fatah list -- Marwan al-Barghouthi, a West Bank Fatah leader serving five life sentences. Evidently, in Palestinian elections harrowing the flesh of Isaelis is a viable alternative to pressing the flesh of Palestinians. (Another was reportedly in a Palestinian jail guarded by US and UK personnel. Perhaps this report was garbled.)
It is apparent that Hamas did exceedingly well in district voting, while Fatah and Hamas did comparably in PR voting. PCPO concentrated on polling for the PR vote, and hence missed Hamas's greatest strength in the election. (I won't comment much on the smaller parties: the sample was clearly too small to measure their strengths accurately.)
An interesting question that I haven't seen adequately addressed is why Hamas did so much better in district voting than in the PR vote. A possible answer, or band of culprits, was shouted in street demonstrations after Fatah's defeat: Fatah party members who ran as independents in the district voting. Fatah's Revolutionary Council had adopted a resolution the previous November 7 that barred Fatah party members from running as independents in the district voting. Two days after the election, PNA president and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas expelled six party members for nominating themselves as independent candidates. I'm relying on English translations of Arabic press reports, and the inconsistent patterns of transliteration pose a problem in identifying candidates on the CEC lists. I only found three of the expelled members on the lists of final returns. Possibilities for the other three include having nominated themselves but failed to get on the ballot and having names that are highly fungible under transliteration. Here are the three I could track down, in decreasing order of significance (more like increasing order of insignificance):
- Ahmed al-Deek ran in district 7 (Salfit), where 11 candidates (one from each list) competed for one seat. Al-Deek ran third in a relatively tight race. The winner, for Hamas, had 6762 votes, and the Fatah candidate, in second place, had 5632. It is certainly plausible that al-Deek, with 4957 votes, prevented Fatah from winning that seat. List voting for the district was concentrated in the two top vote-getters: Hamas drew 35.41% and Fatah 34.35%, while no other list won more than 6.9%. The direct voting, by contrast, was concentrated among the top three candidates, who drew 32.10%, 26.74%, and 23.53%. The Hamas candidate underperformed relative to his list by a margin of 3.3%, but the Fatah candidate underperformed by 7.6%. (It should be noted, though, that Fatah district candidates as a whole underperformed relative to their list.)
- Fayez Zaidan ran in district 5 (Nablus), where 30 candidates competed for 6 seats. Zaidan ran 23rd and won 2290 votes. The margin of votes separating the sixth-place candidate (for Hamas) and the seventh-place candidate (Fatah) was 1480, so it's conceivable that, had he not run, Fatah might have won another seat. To argue that, however, we must imagine that some voters disposed to vote for Fatah voted for Zaidan rather than a non-independent Fatah candidate. It seems likely, however, that his popularity with such voters would have drawn strength from the four weaker Fatah candidates (ranging down to twelfth place) rather than from the best-performing loser. (In each district, each voter could cast at most one vote per candidate for up to n candidates, where n was the number of district-selected seats alloted to the district.) With so many candidates and such a muddy distribution of votes, the best guess is that Zaidan had no effect on the final result.
- Burhan Jarrar ran in district 2 (Jenin), where 32 candidates competed for 4 seats. Jarrar also ran 23rd, and he won 2040 votes. If those votes are added to the votes of the other Fatah candidates, then the most that changes, depending on how the votes are distributed, is which two of the four Fatah candidates win seats.
District voting, at least for districts selecting a single candidate, is also called ``winner take all'' voting. This points to one obvious explanation for Fatah's relative weakness in the district voting: a slight Hamas advantage, distributed evenly over various districts, was amplified by the nonlinear winner-take-all function (a very real function of too many variables). There are reasons why some nuts advocate proportional representation. But first, let's analyze one of the extreme districts.
In district 13 (Gaza [city area]), 49 candidates ran for 8 seats. This was the district in which Hamas had its best list showing -- 56.72%. It only ran five non-list candidates, and these won the top five slots. There are small technical difficulties in assessing the performance of candidates relative to their lists, as the following numbers may indicate. Out of 174,379 registered voters, 136,551 (78.31%) showed up and voted. Each received two ballots: one to cast for one of the 11 lists, and one on which to select up to eight individual candidates. A tiny percentage (0.53%, 719 total)) of the individual-candidate ballots were blank, and 3.00% (4097 ballots) were invalid.
The remaining 131,735 ballots (at 96.47% the highest percentage of valid nonblank ballots among the districts) contained a total of 977,959 votes for individual candidates, for an average of 7.42 votes per ballot. Right away, you realize there wasn't a lot of ``bullet voting.'' (I ought to make a joke here. Ha-ha.) I've decided to regard 131,735 as the highest number of votes that a candidate could win. Note, however, that 131,894 votes were cast for lists. For Gaza, this is a 0.1% difference, but for other districts it is typically 1-2%, and as much as 2.5% for district 1 (Jerusalem). In most districts, not every list fielded individual candidates, so one could argue that using a number like 131,735 (valid nonblank constituency ballots) inflates candidates' percentages by discounting the abstentions of voters who didn't have a candidate of their list to vote for, but this doesn't account for all of the blank votes. (For Salfit, discussed above, I used the total number of votes published for all candidates -- 21,066 -- yet the total number of nonblank valid ballots for candidates was reported as 21,310 by the CEC, and it's not apparent how to reconcile the discrepancy. Maybe it was write-ins.)
Using the denominator not justified in the preceding paragraph (131,735), we find that the top five candidates (all Hamas) won from 57.6% to 53.0% of the maximum of votes they could have won, comparable to their list's performance. The next three candidates (all independents) had from 47.9% to 41.7%. The eight Fatah candidates placed 9 to 16, ranking as well as they could without winning any seats. (Actually ranking almost as well as they could without winning seats. One seat was reserved for a Christian, and if the top Christian candidate had not placed in the top eight, Fatah could have had a candidate place eighth and still not win a seat.) The Fatah candidates won from 33.8% to 25.6% of maximum, whereas the Fatah list won 36.64% of list votes in the district. So in Gaza, individual Fatah candidates were 3 to 11 points less popular than their list, while Hamas candidates were no more than 4% less popular. (One might guess that partisans of other parties preferentially settled for Hamas candidates, or that fans of independent candidates preferentially chose Fatah in list voting. It would be hard to tell from these data alone.)
PCS-1900, as it's also called (from the band) is GSM-compliant. It is one of two systems (the other is D-AMPS) in widespread US use.
If this doesn't some familiar, visit the plastics section of Recycler's World.
Learn more without as much pain as pulling teeth at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Palladium is one of the platinum group metals. Palladium was discovered about the time the asteroid Pallas was discovered. Whoop-de-do!
At Teachers College (TC), the PD represents something between a Masters (M.Ed.) and a doctorate (see Ed.D.). As such, I suppose you could think of it as an official ABD. I'm sure it stands for different levels of accomplishment (even of ostensible accomplishment) at different institutions.
When prescriptions give two PD numbers, they may be the distances between the bridge of the nose and the right and left eyes (in that order), so 32/30.5 implies that the PD in the usual sense is 62.5 mm. You know, the fish called flounder start out life fairly symmetric and upright. As the fish matures and lists to one side, the eye on the lower side shifts forward.
When two PD numbers are given and they are each around 60 mm, it probably means that you have a swelled head. Oh wait, there's another possibility: it could be the the distance PD and the reading PD. As you focus on things that are closer up, your eyes cross and the PD decreases. A typical reading distance is 33 cm, so if your distance PD is 60 mm, each of your eyes turns inward by about 5 degrees when reading. If the distance from the center of your eye to the center of its pupil is, say, 1.5 cm, then reading PD is 2 or 3 mm less than distance PD.
Does she qualify as ``family friendly''? Shannen Doherty was the fourth ever Republican Babe of the Week. This achievement, or whatever, is recognized by the <JerseyGOP.com> website. The weekly feature is not precisely dated, but I estimate that she won the honor at the beginning of 2003, so I guess her public standing, if not her career, has been rehabilitated. There doesn't seem to be a corresponding Democratic site, but I believe there may be one or two nonpartisan weekly babe sites on the web. It is hard to sort through all the hits if you search too broadly on "babe" and "party".
A search for physics babes turned up a lot of hits for the Department of Theoretical Physics, Babe¸s-Bolyai.
My adaptation of PDCA is PDCA: ``plan, do, check, act.'' Hey, lookit me -- I'm doin' kaizen!
A number of analogous effects in differrent systems are called light-induced drift (LID).
In 1989, the US took military action to topple Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega. On Christmas Eve, he took refuge at the Papal Nunciature in Panama City (i.e., in the Vatican's embassy, which also serves as the residence of the papal nuncio). There was some irony in this, as the nuncio had been a vocal critic of Noriega, and the nunciature had provided sanctuary for many persecuted by Noriega's régime. During the invasion, US troops discovered a house that Noriega had used for witchcraft. According to a Christmas pageant of sorts presented by U.S. Army specialists, a Brazilian witch and a variety of elaborate rituals were used to cast magic spells on numerous political enemies, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and the entire U.S. Congress, Guillermo Endara (the man who had been elected Panamian president earlier in 1989, but prevented from taking office), and the papal nuncio, Monsignor Juan Sebastian Laboa. (This is a very incomplete inventory.) According to Italian news reports, 32 Noriega supporters also took refuge with the nuncio.
Beginning on December 27, members of a psychological warfare team from the 82nd Airborne Division played loud rock music over (initially two) powerful loudspeaker units positioned across the street from the nunciature. The music could be heard blocks away. One of the songs played was Judas Priest's ``You're Going to Burn in Hell.'' The first day's program lasted five hours and also included selections from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie (``Modern Love''), the Who (``We're Not Gonna Take It''), and the Grateful Dead, followed (according to one report) by rap music.
The next day's set featured repeated playing of ``Nowhere to Run,'' a hit for Motown's Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1965. The music programs grew longer. Conflicting, or at least multiple, explanations were given of what purpose the performance served. Noriega was reputed to favor opera. The legality of the music offensive, like that of many aspects of Noriega's stay, was not clear. By the 29th, those who thought it was legal nevertheless generally agreed that the joke wasn't funny anymore, and the psyop was terminated. Noriega surrendered to US forces the following January 3. (After conviction on drug charges in Florida, he was sentenced to forty years in federal prison. This was later reduced to thirty, and he is first eligible for parole in 2006.)
In 1994, a constitutional amendment (title xii, article 305) was passed that abolished the standing army (another Central American country, Costa Rica, had many years previously abolished its standing army in the aftermath of a civil war). Panama retains ``security forces'' (PPF).
When Barbara Streisand married James Brolin at her Malibu estate in 1998, she didn't want paparazzi to so much as hear the wedding, never mind see. For four hours she blasted the press with continuous playing of ``Thunder Kiss '65,'' a heavy metal song (?) recorded by Rob Zombie in 1992 with his band White Zombie. Zombie took no offense. He said ``[h]opefully, the Funny Lady will use a track off my new album, Hellbilly Deluxe, to ward off meddling paparazzi at her divorce hearing.'' ``At least it isn't Streisand music,'' commented a reporter on the scene.
At that time, Rob Zombie claimed that some of his music was blasted at Noriega and the nuncio in 1989. So far as I have been able to determine, that was the first time that anyone publicly claimed that recognition for Zombie. I have searched LexisNexis (including entertainment news), and the artists and titles listed earlier are all I was able to reconstruct of the playlists from newspaper and wire reports. Perhaps it's a military secret. In Time (for Jan. 8, 1990: Vol. 135, Issue 2) the cover story ``No Place to Run'' (G.J. Church, R. Chavira, pp. 38ff) added the information that ``Voodoo Chile'' [Jimi Hendrix] and ``You're No Good'' [Van Halen] were played. Did Rob Zombie really rank in this company?
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Here's a page with their New Year's resolutions, stacked up a couple of years in advance. As of January 2004, the first thing reported in their mission statement (in an appositive phrase; it's a fact rather than a mission component) is that PDK is now ``the leading advocate for public education.'' Further down the page, the first of the strategic goals listed is that ``[b]y 2006, PDK will be recognized as the leader in advocacy for public schools and the education profession. Well then, I guess it's just a question of getting the word out. Also, one of the first bullets under strategies reads: ``Advocacy. We will develop and implement plans to advocate for public education and the education profession. NOTE: To be recognized as the leading advocate, PDK will consider collaboration with other professional groups.
Dinosaur
Operating System.
Not this purple dragon. Here are some satirical sound files.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) wrote (in Über die Psychologie des Unbewussten [`On the Psychology of the Unconscious'] 1917):
Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen Machtwillen, und wo die Macht den Vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.[`Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is missing. The one is the shadow of the other.']
It's the same in electronics: many of the simple things you can do to decrease power consumption also increase delay times, and vice versa. (To take a trivial example, increasing a load resistance in a simple BJT inverter decreases power dissipation in the output-low state, and increases RC time delay by the same factor: power goes as V²/R, delay as RC.) Thus, while power and delays are easily adjusted individually (or inadvertently affected by fabrication variances), the product of power dissipation and a representative delay like the average propagation delay does not budge so easily, and constitutes a good figure of merit.
In the foregoing analogy, Love is Delay.
In most former Comecon countries of Central Europe, communist parties have survived and sometimes held power by taking a, well, less communist economic position, adopting mixed-economy or even somewhat neoliberal views. The situation of reunited Germany, and of the PDS, is exceptional. The strength of the PDS continued to be in the Länder (`states') of the former GDR; even after 2002, the PDS retained representation in eastern Landtage (`state parliaments').
At one point it was thought that the PDS and the Greens might merge to form a more viable party. The motivation on both sides presumably was the declining individual electoral strength of each. The Greens were drifting a little bit rightward economically, however, and that merger did not occur. Instead, in 2005, the PDS merged with dissenting former socialists to form the Linkspartei.