Expressions like ``the proof of the pudding is in the eating'' and ``the exception that proves the rule'' are widely misunderstood today, because the meaning of the word proof has drifted from its earlier sense of test. The exception that proves the rule used to refer to the difficult case that provided the hardest test of the validity of a rule, not -- as it seems to do today -- to the exceptional case that establishes where the limits of the rule's validity are to be found.
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``The PFIAB currently [text copied February 2005] has 16 members selected from among distinguished citizens outside the government who are qualified on the basis of achievement, experience, independence, and integrity.
``The Board was established in 1956 by President Eisenhower and was originally called the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. It gained its current name under President Kennedy and it has served all Presidents since that time except for President Carter.'' In some documents, the PFIAB is referred to without the A-word: ``President's Foreign Intelligence Board.''
Mary informs me that at a logging festival in Montana in the 1990's, she watched a pillow fight contest that was conducted on floating logs. The contestants were allowed to soak their pillows, but not to put foreign objects (stones, apples, pears, and soap were mentioned) into them. She says the women who participated (it was an all-distaff event) were big and strong.
In July 2006, Mary attended the Idaho Potato Mash-A-Thon. Among the events were mashed-potato sculpting, potato-eating contests, and mashed-potato wrestling.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
It's a movie rating of the MPAA (q.v.), originally called M (mature) and then GP (General audiences, Parental guidance suggested) later renamed GP and finally PG.
``Prince George's'' is a bit of a mouthful when you're busy announcing school snow closings and such, so the abbreviation, pronounced ``pee-gee,'' is common in speech.
Prince George of Denmark (1653-1708) was the consort of Anne (1665-1714), queen
of England and scattered other parts from 1702. Prince George's was
constructed from Calvert and Charles counties in 1695. The original name did
not contain an apostrophe, following seventeenth-century punctuation
conventions. This is reflected in the homepage and emblem of the Prince
Georges Radio Control Club (PGRC), founded in 1964.
A style manual for the
``Papers of George Washington Editorial
Project'' has in its list of
troublesome vocabulary a line
Prince Georges County, Md. (No apostrophe)
Not enough attention has been paid to this important issue. In 1971, the official seal of the state was altered by the addition of an apostrophe (and by the use of a modern u glyph in the word county instead of the old vee style), but confusion remains. In 2002, author guidelines from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) made the following claim:
... NIJ differs from GPO on using apostrophes in county names (e.g., Prince George's County).
Au contraire! The GPO's style manual for 2002 listed (in chapter 4 -- ``CAPITALIZATION EXAMPLES''; scroll down to page 43 or else do something creative with your search function)
County, Prince George's; county of Prince George's; County Kilkenny, etc.; Loudoun and Fauquier Counties; the county.
Who give's a rats ass about a prince of Denmark? I say, rename it P.G County and save all the punctuation hassles.
![[Download PGA image from http://www.nsc.com/pkg/gifs/ppga.gif]](images/nscmirror/ppga.gif)
National Semiconductor publishes specs on the web. A plastic PGA is illustrated (upside down) at right.
More interesting is the Bad Golfers Association (BGA).
Of course, if you yourself are in a Life+70 country, then you shouldn't do this, because you're cheating a poor book-publishing conglomerate. Don't tell me that the book has been out of print (OOP) for a century; that's irrelevant. You see, keeping works out of the greedy clutches of the public domain encourages potential readers to purchase new, often better books that are in print. The heirs of the original authors, recognizing this fact, gratefully reward publishers for their loyalty by refusing to allow books they own the rights of to enter the PD. Actually, they reward the conglomerates that swallowed up the companies that used to show some loyalty to the authors of the books that sold well, but basically it's the same warm, gooey feeling.
This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/e-book creation process.When a proofer elects to proofread a page of a particular book, the text and image file are displayed on a single web page. This allows the page text to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the page text. The edited text is then submitted back to the site via the same web page that it was edited on. A second proofreader is then presented with the work of the first proofreader and the page image. Once they have verified the work of the first proofreader and corrected any additional errors the page text is again submitted back to the site.
Once all pages for a particular book have been processed, a post-processor joins the pieces, properly formats them into a Project Gutenberg e-book and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.
By Christmas 1891 or so, the people of Pittsburgh were incensed. Somehow they managed to remain incensed for two decades, and on July 19, 1911, the United States Geographic Board (the renamed United States Board on Geographic Names) restored Pittsburgh's original name. (It seems the wound never completely healed; see the Pittsburg entry for a bit more.) The board's concession was half a loaf, at best. The proper resolution would have been a state-court finding that no federal agency had the authority to name any state-incorporated entity, followed by a federal court's refusal to hear an appeal.
It's instructive to consider this case in detail. The original ten-man Board on Geographic Names was established by an executive order of Pres. Benjamin Harrison in 1890. At the time, some states had as many as five different towns with the same name. Shortening all burghs to burgs was one of the first decisions taken by the board. Decisions of the board were accepted as binding by all departments and agencies of the federal government.
This is typical in many ways. There was a plausible case that a real problem existed, of course, though it was probably not as serious as it was made out to be. It was the responsibility of the states to solve it. The states could certainly solve it themselves, and were likely better-situated to solve it knowledgeably and with sensitivity to local concerns. A federal agency was created to solve it, even though neither the executive nor the federal government as a whole had any authority in the matter. (Oh sure, it was necessary to standardize the names for smooth federal government operation.) Among the first actions of the board was one which was largely irrelevant to its charge. Without legally imposing its (nonexistent) authority (i.e., without legally changing the names) but merely by acting as if it had, the federal government created a version of the problem the problem it had set out to solve: name confusion for one of the country's largest cities, created in the name of solving the problem that there were five places named Dry Gulch in New Mexico (or whatever).
(You know, the partial-concession method of securing authority was not invented by the USGB. Consider Marbury v. Madison.)
PGP is the creation of Phil Zimmerman.
![[pH scale illustrated]](images/ph_scale.jpg)
Acid taste is not a perfect measure of acidity, however: e.g., apples and grapefruit have comparable acidity (3 to 3.3). An important factor in determining sour taste is sugar: sweetness masks acidity.
The figure above the entry is from Water Watch.
The pH measure was introduced in 1909 by the biochemist S.P.L. Sørensen. At the time, he was working on controlling acidity during the brewing of beer. You should celebrate this fact soon by performing GI-tract experiments with Danish beer.
- n.
- Member of a 50's singing group. There's a bit of further information hidden toward the end of the Mojo Risin, Mr. entry.
-
Dead king of ancient Egypt.
-
Maybe you're thinking of farrow.
v.
- Definitely you're thinking of farrow.
Also, according to the progression B.S. (Bull Shit), M.S. (More Shit), Ph.D. is
expanded ``Piled higher & Deeper.''
[The animated gif to the left is not a server-push graphic. You can stop it by pressing the escape key or using the selection item under the rightmost (if not the only) button on your mouse.]
Someone has suggested the expansion Pretty Hard to Date. I dare say I have been.
Theodore Ziolkowski wrote a famous article entitled ``The Ph.D. Squid,'' for American Scholar vol. 59(2) pp. 177-195 (Spring 1990), concerned with how long it's been taking to get one. (See ABD.)
The medieval universities mostly had two degrees: bachelor of arts and master of arts. I suppose this pattern was set by the University of Paris. The MA was the ``teaching degree'' attained by someone who was competent to teach the subject matter. A friend of mine who got her BA at Cambridge (UK) and her Ph.D. at Princeton returned and joined the faculty at Cambridge. They gave her an honorary Cambridge MA so that she would be technically qualified to teach. The Oxbridge universities are deeply steeped in tradition. I stayed in a guest room at her college (with a view of the cemetery), and judging from the electrical fixtures (vintage nineteenth-century)...
The Ph.D. was invented in Germany and adopted in the US and elsewhere as a research degree, and over time it has come to be regarded as necessary for university-level teaching. (Adoption has been somewhat nonuniform, however. The first Ph.D.'s were not awarded in Italy until the 1980's.)
Probably most people find the ``philosophy'' part of the term ``doctor of philosophy'' puzzling. The origin is in the traditional division of universities, dating back to medieval times, into four faculties: theology, law, medicine, and philosophy. Philosophy was broadly construed as scholarship not targeted toward a specific professional end (churchman, lawyer, physician). The Enlightenment expansion of knowledge for the most part inflated the catch-all faculty of philosophy (elsewhere called ``arts'' or ``arts and sciences'').
Louisville, KY 40202-1396.
No longer room 3041. I think they moved things around a bit.
Web site under redevelopment as of June 2001. There's an amusing sort of pot-calling-the-kettle-black aspect to this, I'll leave that as is and merely note that as of 2014, they have a separate domain distinct from that of the PC(USA) which they originally used.
300 Second St., Suite 201; Los Altos, CA 94022
The website was under construction as of late August 2003.
Tel: (415) 948-0150
Fax: (415) 948-5793
They sponsor some digs, but they are best known for producing a series of searchable CD-ROM for Classical Scholarship. CD-ROM 5.3 contains various Latin authors, and seven versions of the Bible. CD-ROM ``PHI 7'' contains collections of Greek papyri and inscriptions.
It is my irritated duty to point out that the translation `brotherly love' suggests a gender preference that is largely absent in the original Greek. Brother and sister in ancient Greek were adelphós and adelphê, respectively. (There's an acute accent on the final eta in the second word, but it's inconvenient to mark up.) Whichever of the two words you choose as basis, you get the same compound word with the -ia abstract ending. So philadelphía means both `brotherly love' and `sisterly love.'
At the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia was the second-most-populous city in the British Empire, after London. According the census of 1800, Philadelphia had 70,000 inhabitants. The other four US cities with populations over 10,000 were New York (60,000), Boston (25,000), Charleston (18,000), and Baltimore (13,000). The first census of London, taken in 1801, yielded a count of 959,300. (London was the largest city in Europe; Edo, now called Tokyo, was very likely the largest city in the world, with a population estimated to be over a million.)
The NASD negotiated to buy the PhilEx in 1998, with a plan that included moving its options business to New York. Given that options were the largest part of the PhilEx's business, it seems hardly surprising that NASD was never able to make an offer that was attractive to PhilEx members. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported by April 20 that year that the deal appeared dead.
The following August, the PhilEx, CBOE, and Amex got into what was described as an ``old-fashioned market brawl,'' trading options on a few of the stocks that had previously traded exclusively on one or another of the exchanges. The CBOE and Amex started the fight, listing options of the Dell Computer Corporation, which for years had been traded exclusively on PhilEx and which was almost a third of its business. Philex countered almost immediately by listing options in Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Apple Computer, which had traded primarily or exclusively on CBOE and Amex. By September of 1999, the CBOE had captured half of the Dell option business, and PhilEx, which kept only a third, was adding listings for GE, AT&T and Wal-Mart options. Remember AT&T? Things got even more exciting later when PhilEx began a price war, putting a ceiling on commissions for high-volume customers. Of course, that was all before ISE.
The term philology was originally a comprehensive term covering the study of all aspects of language. Indeed, early on the American Philological Association (APA, now mostly devoted to classical antiquity) had sections for Germanic philology, etc. Some time in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the word linguistics took over most of this meaning. Roman Jakobson (b. 1896, Moscow, d. 1982, Cambridge, MA) entered the historico-philological faculty [i.e., department] at the University of Moscow in 1914. In 1915, he and six other students there founded the Moskovij Lingvisticheskij Kruzok (`Moscow Linguistics Circle'), with the stated aim of studying `linguistics, poetics, metrics, and folklore' [translation from his Selected Writings II. Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971)]. He went on to make contributions in all those fields. In 1976, an interviewer referring to his broad scholarly activity and his multilinguistic competence, asked him ``Who are you?'' He answered, ``A Russian philologist. Period.'' On his gravestone are the words ``Roman Jakobson -- Russkij Filolog.''
But the word was not completely forget as late as fall 1949, when the novelist John O'Hara sent a letter to his friends Jim and Helen Thurber, preserved in Selected Letters of James Thurber.
Dear Thurbs: By the way, what does a thurber do? What is thurbing? ``I think I'll go out and thurb the nasturtiums.'' ``Shall we go thurbing this afternoon?'' ``That goddam thurbing son of a bitch Ross.'' ``Father, the greeve needs a new thurber.'' All these years, and I never had the philological curiousity to ask a simple question.
It's a shame if the reply was not saved, because it ought to have been pretty good. Better, at least, than what I came up with.
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils - no, nor the human race, as I believe - and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.
A famous remark of Frederick the Great:
``If I wanted to punish a province, I would give it to philosophers to govern.''
Doctors of Philosophy, maybe? The Best and the Brightest! And do not forget that great philologist and foiled lexicographic reformer, Claudius.
William F. Buckley has famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 1000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Of course, WFB is a Yalie.
Sloppy from the start, though, as I said: The first extended prose in my copy is the ``Note to the Second Edition,'' on p. vii. (None of the roman-numeral pages displays a page number; I got the page number from the ToC. Useful, eh?) It begins thus: ``Writing to a friend, Voltaire apologized for the length of his letter: `If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.' '' The author (Martinich) means this quote to say something about his own writing and it does: it says that he couldn't be troubled to check any handy reference to find out that the author was Blaise Pascal.
It goes on like this, but I'm not going to work any harder writing a review than the author did writing the book in the first place. The book is a great deaccession candidate for any library that has it.
That succinct definition is just the second fruits of my research. I'll be adding more later, after I think even more deeply about it.
A chart of APA Philosophy Referee Hand Signals was created by Landon W. Schurtz (a Ph.D. candidate at U. Okla.) in 2009, but seems to be available only on other peoples' blogs, like this one or this other one. The signals are similar to those of (North American) football, though the meanings differ slightly. Here is a comparison:
Football meaning(s) of signal Philosophy signal meaning
============================= =========================
Clipping Straw man
Delay of game Can you state that claim
more concisely?
False start Please let me finish
before you object
First down Premise accepted
Holding Irrelevant
Illegal cut I'd like to make a
friendly amendment
Illegal motion Non sequitur
Illegal use of hands Unilluminating appeal to intuitions
No play, penalty declined I'll spot you that claim for now
Ineligible receiver downfield That thinker does not
argue what you think
Intentional grounding Naturalistic fallacy
Loss of down I'll have to consider that
Offside I don't actually believe this,
but for the sake of argument...
Pass interference Unilluminating appeal to skepticism
Personal foul Personal foul
Safety I believe that claim actually
supports my objection
Start clock (time in) Your argument is circular
TD, successful PAT or FG Q.E.D.
Time out Your claims are inconsistent
Touchback Those claims yield an unexpected
conclusion
Unsportsmanlike conduct Was that article from
a refereed journal?
After the game, we can all get together and sing The Philosophers' Drinking Song.
SUBSCRIBE phnurses Firstname M. I. Lastnameto <listproc@u.washington.edu>.
- Flirting with an unseen prostitute, usually. (I almost wrote ``normally.'' Out of sight...) And paying for the privilege. (Out of mind.)
- Ooooh, getaload o'that sleek Trimline. Hubba-hubba!
- The best thing about phone sex is that you don't have to sex them to make sure they're properly paired. They'll ring and swing anyway. Have a conference-call orgy!
See also sexting.
``The Living Encyclopedia of Physics'' has an entry
I will try to finish this.
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes a couple of bits of PHP script for insertion in a PHP document.
I learned of it during the celebrated 1997 divorce trial of Gary and Lorna Jorgenson Wendt. Gary Wendt, CEO of General Electric (GE) Capital Corp., and Lorna separated in 1995. He offered her $11 million, she sought half of an estate she claimed was worth $100 million as her due for being a ``career corporate wife.'' She introduced the Ph.T. in evidence (inter alia, of course). She was awarded over $17M plus over $0.252M alimony.
This entry is on the level.
Here's my contribution to physical demography. On February 2, 2008, on his regularly syndicated weekly (Saturdays) radio program (``America's Car Show''), Tom Torbjornsen gave his evaluation of the Kia Spectra5 Wagon, I think it was. He said he had one basic problem with it: it was inappropriate for a person of his ``stature.'' He didn't mean his eminence as an automobile talking head. He also didn't mean his height. He drove it 200 miles and was very uncomfortable. The seats were narrow -- adequate for a 120-lb. woman or a 150-lb. man, but not for anyone bigger. He commented that this made the vehicle inappropriate for ``a large part of the population.'' From his intonation it was clear that he did not intend or recognize the pun. That's why it was cool.
According to a Stammtisch informant in a good position to know, the following event occurred in the old days. Someone called the department's director of undergraduate studies (the informant, as a matter of fact) to ask what courses the department offered in astrology. The caller probably was not satisfied with the answer.