![[Download PQFP image from
http://www.nsc.com/pkg/gifs/pqfp.gif]](images/nscmirror/pqfp.gif)
National Semiconductor has some specs on the web. Their illustration is at right.
The detailed mechanical drawing below is of a 100-lead PFQP for a Fujitsu SCSI Controller (MB86601A.)
![[Mechanical drawing from
http://www.fujitsumicro.com/products/network/scsi_plug_html/MB86601A/graphics/MB86601A_nAt08.gif]](http://www.fujitsumicro.com/products/network/scsi_plug_html/MB86601A/graphics/MB86601A_nAt08.gif)
What, you wanted to know how the Prandtl number was defined? Oh. Actually, he was German. He was born in Freising (near Munich), 60 or 70 miles north of Austria. Fritz Pregl (Nobel prize in chemistry, 1923) was born in Austria.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
- Advertising for the company rather than the product.
- Unpaid advertising: publicity through news outlets.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Puerto Rican commonwealth government links.
Here, for example, is an indirect definition from chapter 1 of Practical Reasoning by D.P. Gauthier (Oxford U.P., 1963):
A practical problem is a problem about what to do. In saying this we are using the word `practical' more widely than in everyday discourse, to characterize all problems, individual and social, prudential and moral, whose final solution is found only in doing something, in acting. Practical problems may be contrasted with theoretical problems, whose solution is found in knowing something, in understanding.
I think that's at least two definitions, but for me they add up to a total of no problem.
``I saw what is not often seen ... the Master, the Boat-Swain, and others ... at their Prayers.''
In US spelling, both noun and verb are spelled ``practice.'' Another word pair distinguished by British but not by US spelling is dependent/dependant. A more complicated and perhaps typical situation is that of queen. The alternate spelling quean is used for a subset of the non-royal senses, but the subset is different on the two (or more) sides of the pond.
American English preserves the part participle form gotten where British English uses the same form as the simple past (got). (BTW, we have a substantial entry on the ``have got to'' construction.) I fear, however, that the gotten/got distinction might not be long for this world, or continent. I increasingly encounter putatively educated people, people who have studied (or perhaps merely ``studied'') another European language, who are unaware -- literally unaware! -- of the distinction between past participle and simple past. Strong verbs are weakening.
The book is pretty boring, so what you want are some sharp quotes, so you can pretend to have read it. In Part I (``Introductory,'' see excerpt here under I [a different I]), Richards wrote (metaphorically, I do believe):
We have to try to avoid judging pianists by their hair.
Well, I just thought that was a nicely turned phrase is all.
Discussing the reaction to Poem 3 (a sonnet by John Donne, with many obvious references to Christian eschatology, all of which went completely over many students' heads) Richards wrote the following:
Inability to construe may have countless causes. Distractions, preconceptions, inhibitions of all kinds have their part, and putting our finger on the obstructing item is always largely guesswork. The assumption, however, that stupidity is not a simple quality, such as weight or impenetrability were once thought to be, but an effect of complex inhibitions is a long stride in a hopeful direction. The most leaden-witted blockhead thereby becomes an object of interest.
What a fantastic spin doctor he would have made! Here for comparison is some other spin avant la lettre. In 1970, President Richard Nixon nominated George Harrold (``Harold'') Carswell to be a justice on the US Supreme Court. Senator Roman Lee Hruska of Nebraska offered the following in support of Carswell:
Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?
This is the best example I know for clarifying the sense of ``qualified support.'' Carswell, who had served a little under a year as a justice on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was rejected by the Senate on a 51-45 vote, and things went downhill from there. But this is an entry about Practical Criticism, remember?
According to Appendix B, the Donne piece got a 30%-favourable/42%-unfavourable rating. Longfellow's entry got 5%/92% (13th out of 13). The second-highest positive rating (but with high negatives: 53%/42%) went to an item by Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy (``Woodbine Willie'') that had been published in More Rough Rhymes of a Padre. Rev. Kennedy wrote Richards that he could ``use any of my poems for any purpose you like. The criticisms of them could not be more adverse and slaughterous than my own would be.'' The most favorably and also the least unfavorably regarded poem (54%/31%) was by J.D.C. Pellew, who in reply to IAR's request for permission to use the poem wrote: ``It is pleasant to know that I am serving the cause of science!''
By the middle of the closing ``Summary,'' (p. 315), Richards was deploying the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I defense:
The wild interpretations of others must not be regarded as the antics of incompetents, but as dangers that we ourselves only narrowly escape, if, indeed, we do. We must see in the misreadings of others the actualisation of possibilities threatened in the early stages of our own readings. The only proper attitude is to look upon a successful interpretation, a correct understanding, as a triumph against odds. We must cease to regard a misunderstanding as a mere unlucky accident. We must treat it as the normal and probable event.
I won't add that Latin ae often becomes e in English words (particularly in American spelling), and that the -tio inflection typically becomes -tion, so an alternative term is preterition.
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The old story used to go, a man walks up to a Moscow kiosk...
- Customer: ``Have you got Pravda?''
- Newspaperman: ``No.''
- Customer: ``What about Izvestia?''
- Newspaperman: ``Not that either.''
- Customer: ``Have you got anything?''
- Newspaperman: ``Oh, we have plenty of Trud.''
- Newspaperman: ``No.''
In 1987, a number of reform-minded members of the PRI, frustrated with their inability to effect reform by working within the then-dominant Mexican political party, left and joined forces with several small, mostly leftist parties. They formed the FDN (Frente Democrática Nacional, `National Democratic Front') to challenge the PRI in the 1988 elections. The FDN chose Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of a legendary father and one of the recent PRI refugees, as its presidential candidate. According to returns widely believed to have been miscounted, Cárdenas lost with 30% of the vote to 50.5% for Harvard economics graduate and PRI apparatchik Salinas. PRI did a poor job of hiding the rigging -- they were probably behind the assassination of FDN electoral coordinator Francisco Ovando Ruiz and an assistant four days before the election, there was a ``computer system crash'' in the middle of the vote counting, etc. Their feckless show of corruption was a sign of the beginning of the end. (Contrast that with Russia's Vladimir Putin, who laid careful plans for a believable 75-80% majority for his reelection, and who has weakened the Duma sufficiently that he can afford to allow some meaningless opposition there. And when he arrests the biggest capitalists, he can rule the smaller fry gracefully with fear. Now that's the way to establish a smooth-running benevolent dictatorship! Or even one that isn't benevolent. We'll have to wait and see.)
Aaaanyway, despite energetic political harassment (mysterious deaths, framing for drug trafficking crimes, etc.) of opposition candidates and their families, pollwatchers, and supporters, the PRI went into a steep decline in the 1990's. It turned out that in the attempt to create the appearance of political reform, the PRI was forced to actually create political reform. All those peso devaluations probably didn't help their popularity any too much either. (There's a tiny bit more about this at the PRI entry, surprisingly enough.)
Every now and then I just feel the need to perpetrate a truly vile pun.
With a little bit of historical research, we can discover the primitive beginnings of the pregnant-we construction. In chapter 16 of his memoir, Meant To Be, (2003), Walter Anderson writes:
... Incredibly, I thought, my mother could still recall conversations she'd had with [her adulterous lover] Al more than twenty years before, as if they'd spoken only yesterday. She began by describing a particularly troubling discussion.
``I've missed my period only twice before,'' she told Al, ``and that was for Billy and Carol. It's only a couple of weeks, but I'm like clockwork--never late unless I'm pregnant. So, yes, I'm sure I'm pregnant.''
The recalled conversation took place in late 1943 or early 1944 in New York. Al replied, ``I believe you and I'm going to help you [get an abortion -- which she ultimately decided not have].''
``Help us,'' she corrected.
``Of course,'' he agreed. ``Us.''
Going further back, there's the text of Isaiah 26:18 (KJV):
We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.
Well, it's the thought that counts (see also push present). Another of the somewhat exotic wes (we's? we're? ``we''s? we words!) is the medical we.
Their website is not exactly at <http://www.prestiegeproperties.org/>, as their billboard claims. I guess the error was just that of the sign maker. Still, the elementary spelling, punctuation, and graphics coding errors on the homepage don't promote confidence in their claimed ``highest quality.''
At least it's easy to give them their full due. ``Prestiege'' is a spelling that makes sense (compare liege and siege). The writer only failed to take the next step, and ask how the spelling of an English word could make so much sense. The spelling is beyond merely heterological, yet it's logical as well.
- Chili Rubbed Chicken Breast with Pepperjack Cheese, Avocado Spread and Pico de Gallo. [Is rubbed a verb here?]
- Grilled Sirloin Burger with Carmelized Onion Jam and Horseradish Cheddar Cheese. [What a waste of hamburger!]
- Smoked Trout. Sorry, I mean Smoked Trout Cake. No wait -- it's Smoked Trout Cake Sandwich. With Vine Ripe Tomatoes, Lettuce & Cheese Remoulade.
- Turkey Pastrami with Baby Swiss [Cheese?!] & Cole Slaw & Orange Cumin Bread.
Here's a hint if you want to carry off the Europeanisticated thing: the plural of Gelato is Gelati.
Prezza dropped out of school at age 15 to work as a trainee chef. He spent 10 years as a steward in the merchant marine. He eventually returned to school, picking up a diploma in economics and politics in 1963. (The school was Ruskin College, Oxford, which specializes in programs for working union members.) If you do the math, you notice that he was either a very sharp drop-out, or that the diploma didn't represent many years of academic work. In any event, he is widely ridiculed for his uneasy relationship with the English language; see Wordsworth.
Calles was a boss, pulling strings, picking presidents, overseeing graft -- the usual boss things. Then he picked Lázaro Cárdenas to be PRI's presidential candidate. Cárdenas was duly elected (Mexico's 53rd president) in 1934, and that year forced Calles and many Callecistas into exile. (Calles means `streets.') Also in 1934, his son Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano was born. (He is discussed at the PRD entry).
In 1938, Cárdenas nationalized foreign (US and European) oil operations. Mexico became the target of a boycott, but that was set aside when Mexico's oil was needed in WWII. By expelling the companies that were sucking the country's rich blood, he made Mexico rich and prosperous. Oh wait, that last part didn't happen. Close though: he made subsequent PRI leaders and their cronies rich and prosperous.
Cárdenas himself, however, is generally acknowledged to have been honest. His first act as president was to cut his own salary in half. He lived modestly after his one presidential term, serving to 1945 as secretary of defense. His subsequent work was virtually a caricature of do-goodering: he supervised irrigation projects and promoted free medical clinics and education for the nation's poor. Ugh! Jimmy Carter without the dictator-worship. Cárdenas was Mexico's most, or perhaps only, popular president.
Also under the leadership of Cárdenas in 1938, his party changed its name (on March 30, 1938) to the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PMR). He was succeeded by Manuel Ávila Camacho. At the end of his six-year term of office, he changed the name again (January 18, 1946). He was succeeded by Miguel Alemán Valdés, who instituted the practice of not changing the party's name every six or seven years, and that reform has stuck.
According to Franz Kafka,
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
In the elections of Summer 1997, the PRI lost its majority in Congress. There was no majority party, and the four opposition parties were arrayed across the political spectrum (of course, everyone was in agreement that taxes had to be reduced... somehow).
It took a coalition of all four opposition parties to take control of the congressional committees. When they did so, they discovered that there were no committee staffs or histories: in the past, the PRI-controlled executive branch had sent over its legislative proposals complete with sham committee deliberations.
In national elections held on Sunday, July 2, 2000, the PAN candidate for president (Vicente Fox) won, marking the first time since its founding in 1929 that PRI's presidential candidate was defeated.
Priestley supported the French revolution, and for that support he was hounded from his home and lived his last ten years in the US. More detail at the CO entry. (Being a dissenting minister -- of the sort we now denominate Unitarian -- probably didn't help his popularity. Newton (vide s.v. TP) kept his own conversion secret.) Lavoisier built on Priestley's and Scheele's discovery (both contacted him in October 1774) and overthrew the phlogiston theory they both supported with his own precise measurements. He gave oxygen its name. He was executed as an officer of the Ferme Générale during the terror of the French Revolution (1794, he was 51). His rival and inferior, the physician and revolutionist Jean Paul Marat who agitated for his arrest, did not have the pleasure of seeing him guillotined, as he was assassinated in his bath by the Girondin Charlotte Corday. (It's not how you think. He was in his bath for therapeutic reasons. He had contracted something horrible while hiding from French authorities in the sewers of Paris.) We've gotten a bit off-topic here, haven't we?
Mr. Cost, like RealClearPolitics generally (Cost blogs at RCP), is not as linguistically inept as in 2005, but this might still be a solecism. On the other hand, it is widely cited, so the usage, still clearly unusual for anyone but a political junkie, might catch on. (I'm not encouraging it.)
Chris Caldwell maintains an extensive prime numbers resource.
The asymptotic formula is an underestimate; the error is by a factor of 1.132 for x = 104 = 10000, and 1.0254 for x = 1018.
The theorem was proven in 1896, and I really ought to know whom by.
Pumphrey, the treasurer, drives the first name,
Roberts, the donor, is quick on his trail,
Inman dips slyly his first letter in,
McCormack adds M, which makes the full Prim.
Green, thinking of groceries, gives them the G,
Hayes drops them an H, without asking a fee,
Albright, the joker, with his jokes all at par,
Rerick brings up the rear and crowns al ``Primghar.''
It's got a ragged right edge, so it's poetry. It's probably not the only poetry that appears in Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada, ed. Kelsie B. Harder (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1976). Anyway, I see the money men come first, so now I suggest Prigharm.
``Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts. ... Here the people who compose what is called `society' enjoy even less freedom than their counterparts in Europe. Yet they seem unaware of this restriction, since their way of life tends to inhibit personality development from childhood.''-- Albert Einstein, in a letter to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium.
Anyway, the Architecture Research Institute, Inc. says that the information age is making buildings obsolete!
The noun principal is a person or agent; the noun principle is an
idea. There is an adjective in the form of a
participle -- ``principled'' -- but the word principle does not function
as an adjective, except as an attributive
noun. (The ``principle computer'' is a computer that calculates
fundamental maxims. The ``principal computer'' is the one it hurts most to
have crash. The first doesn't and the second does.) Other examples:
The school principal in the principal school of the district is a principal in the case against the town. The principal reason is that she was one of the principal beneficiaries of the previous regime's lack of principles.In an article in the June 17, 1996 TNR, Sara Mosle accuses Charles Sykes of wanting to
... supplant school principals with business principles.
In a July 25, 1996, NYTimes Op-Ed (p. A23), Maureen Dowd wrote that consultant Dick Morris (not yet disgraced at the time of writing; hence, not yet rehabilitated), by generating ``teensy-weensy'' pronouncements for President Clinton to make on school uniforms and such, gave him
... the aura of principal, if not principle.
In the German language, for example, the principal parts are usually taken as (1) the infinitive, (2) the first-person singular past indicative, (3) the past participle, and (4) the second- or third-person singular present indicative. Not all of these are always necessary.
_______
/-------\
/ \
/ \
\\ //
\\ //
\\_____//
| |
| |
N__________| |__________N
| \ / |
/\ | \ / | /\
/ \\ | \ / | // \
/ \\ | N | // \
/ \\_______| |_______// \
|| | \ / | ||
|| | \ / | ||
|| | \ / | ||
|| | N Cu N | ||
|| | / \ | ||
|| | / \ | ||
|| |_______ / \ _______| ||
\ // | | \\ /
\ // | N | \\ /
\ // | / \ | \\ /
\/ | / \ | \/
|__________ / \ __________|
N | | N
| |
|_______|
// \\
// \\
// \\
\ /
\ /
\_______/
-------
Well, the real molecule is planar also, so there's that. But the real molecule
has square symmetry, which is a bit hard to represent in ASCII.
As usual, unlabeled vertices represent carbon atoms. The copper atom at the center is coordination-bonded to the nitrogens (also called ``chelated''; the molecule is a ligand). Most of the lines represent single bonds, but the four outer hexagons are aryl groups, with three double bonds. Carbons with fewer than four bonds, and nitrogens with fewer than three, have hydrogens bonded to them to make up the shortfall. If any of this wasn't obvious, you should take an elementary chemistry course.
This four-fold symmetric chelate structure is quite versatile. It occurs in chlorophyll, hemoglobin, and myoglobin. The structure illustrated above has evidently also been adapted for fighter spacecraft in Star Wars.
The obvious question is: if prions have no DNA, how do they reproduce? This is only a funkier version of the earlier questions about viruses: How do they live without mitochondria, other essentials? Parasitically, by taking over host-cell apparatus. (Similarly, no-DNA viruses -- retroviruses -- keep their genetic instructions stored in RNA and use reverse transcriptase to take over replication apparatus at a more fundamental level. Over time, bits of viral DNA have been incorporated into the human genome, but these bits generally appear not to be expressed.)
For some guesses, evidence, and answers, try the Prion Diseases page.
PRISM was founded by Reuven Paz in 2002, ``in order to combine academic and field research of new developments of radical Islam and Islamist movements.'' In Portuguese and Spanish, by the way, paz means `peace' (< Latin pace). A Hebrew word meaning `pure gold' is also transliterated as paz in Latin characters. All three languages have yielded Paz as a surname (in the last case, often used in Israel as a new surnames for immigrants previously named Gold).
PRISM ``is part of the GLORIA Center in the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. The project is dealing with developments of radical Islamic and Islamist movements in the social, cultural, ideological, and political fields; Finance of radical Islamist groups; Sponsoring of Islamic states to Islamist radicalism and terrorism; Islamic communities in the West; The `Culture of Global Jihad' and its attitude toward the Western civilization, Israel, and the Jews; Islamist networks; and support for radical Islam through the virtual global Jihad in the Internet. The focus of its research is on primary sources in Arabic, and the project wishes to fill some vacuum in the use of Arabic sources for the Islamist phenomenon.''
When we first came to the US in 1963, we used Spanish as a private language. The effectiveness of this has decreased over the years. Many salesmen, especially, seem to have at least rudimentary Spanish. Now we use German.
A separate lineage of mammals seems to have evolved trunks in South America when that was a separate continent, but the animals became extinct in the prehistoric period. ``Seems'' because those trunks, like elephant trunks, are soft tissue that usually doesn't fossilize; trunks have been inferred from circumstantial evidence.
At the company where he was working, he was listening to some managers talking, and they were using the word productores (`producers') in a way that sounded odd to him. He protested that he and the other people working in the plant were the producers, because they produced the product (producían el producto). The managers explained that no, the salesmen were the producers, because they produced the sales (producían las ventas), and without sales there was no point in producing anything else. I imagine that arguments for the comparable necessity of something to sell would have fallen on deaf ears. See ears (when the entry is in).
Well, it might not be the most egregious instance, but I don't watch a lot of movies, so this will have to do.
The great thing about this practice is that the minority of viewers who loved last year's few hits will now have many undaring formulaic rip-offs to choose from, while the large majority will have nothing. Hey -- that doesn't sound like such a fantastic up-side. Oh, I'm sorry -- that's just an insignificant side effect. The real advantage is that since cast members of long-running good shows have higher salary expectations, the new clones can be produced more cheaply.
The six phases of a project:
- Enthusiasm.
- Disillusionment.
- Panic.
- Search for the guilty.
- Punishment of the innocent.
- Praise and honors for the non-participants.
I only wish this were a joke entry.
Okay, here's some funny stuff as compensation. As an example of the above, consider the Soviet downing of KAL007. Presumably the flight started out with some enthusiasm. We'll skip the intermediate steps, including the punishment of 269 innocents. Many years later, after the Soviet Union itself was downed, Colonel Osipovich (the SU-15 fighter pilot who shot it down) was quoted in the New York Times (1996.12.9, p. A6). He complained that his bonus for the kill was only 200 rubles, minus postage, whereas the ground-based radar officer who discovered the lost passenger jet received a 400-ruble bonus. As Osipovich noted, ``Those who did not take part in this operation received double their monthly pay'' for a bonus, while he received less than 87%. Talk about injustice!
In its current, also largely unknown usage, projicient is an adjective meaning ``concerned with an individual's perception of his surroundings.''
Evidently, the design of this language was based on the idea that logic is an important element in decision making and other fallacies. One of the greatest language creators, in an essay on decision-making called ``The Tempest,'' remarked on the by-then already grim prospects for this language:
What's past is PROLOG.
Example of usage: ``Nuclear holocaust?! Oh, no! -- now prom will be cancelled!''
Also a titan who taught men secrets of the gods (fire and other preindustrial technological wonders). For this he was punished by Zeus (as described in the docudrama ``Prometheus Bound'') by being chained to a rock and having birds peck at his liver. Since he was a god, however, (of the titan generation) this didn't kill him, although it is generally agreed to have been unpleasant. The story goes that he eventually got off the rock by ratting on his fellow titans, who were planning to revolt and recover control of the world from the Olympian gods.
English personal pronouns decline into three cases: nominative, oblique, and possessive. (Oblique covers all forms appearing in predicates, other than nominative and possessive; possessive is also called the genitive case.)
| Grammatical Number |
Grammatical Person |
Nominative form(s) |
Oblique form(s) |
Possessive form(s) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| modifier | substantive | ||||
| Singular | First | I | me | my | mine |
| Second | you | you | your | yours | |
| Third | he | him | his | his | |
| she | her | her | hers | ||
| it | it | its | its | ||
| Plural | First | we | us | our | ours |
| Second | you y'all |
you y'all |
your | yours | |
| Third | they | them | their | theirs | |
The forms indicated above are mostly ``standard.'' I have also given the Southern dialectal y'all. Traditionally, this was strictly for the second-person plural (like Latin vos, Spanish vosotros, German ihr, etc.). Ignorant people who use y'all as a conscious affectation often think it's synonymous with you (i.e., that it does not distinguish singular and plural grammatical numbers). There is some disagreement about the correct possessive forms of y'all. Y'all's might be acceptable for both, or y'all might could use a periphrastic construction.
Many languages mark degrees of formality or ``politeness.'' That is, they have different words or expressions that have essentially the same meaning, but which express in a recognized conventional way differences in some aspect of the relationship between the speaker and the person spoken to or of. (For Japanese, see keigo.) This is a common feature of European languages, showing up most often in ``polite'' and ``familiar'' forms of the second-person pronouns. English does not now have such marked forms, although you can achieve a similar effect in the vocative case (familiar ``hey you!'' vs. polite ``uh, sir?). What is the vocative case? You just saw it. (O gentle reader: if it's any help, the vocative case is mentioned at this O entry.) The now unmarked pronoun you was originally a polite form in English (like usted in Spanish, vous in French, Sie in German, etc.), and that it gradually displaced the original familiar forms (English thou).
When I get around to putting less obvious information in this entry, I will mention that the Pennsylvania Amish came to use thou and thee in an unusual way. I'll also discuss the capitalization conventions in German and English pronouns, the reflexive (oblique) forms, and those poor Siberian high school graduates.
But I'm not going to do that now. When I do get around to it, though, I'll also mention that the word it is also a relatively recent innovation, before which inanimate objects were referred to by she or he. I will also, alas, record the gradual displacement these days of the generic (i.e., the non-gender-specific) he, him, his by they, them, and their.
CMU serves a pronouncing dictionary that you can download.
Power is the product of torque and angular velocity (2π × circular velocity). When power is stated in units of HP, it's called the horsepower. ``Brake horsepower'' (B.H.P.) was once a more common term for this quantity (I read it in UK car books in the early 1970's). The name reflects the fact that the measurement is done against a brake. The engine really shouldn't care whether the drive shaft is causing the car to accelerate or just the tires' rubber to burn -- the torque at the crankshaft should be the same function of engine speed in either case, so ``brake'' is basically just a nod to de Prony. (Which is fine.)
- Theater: PROPerty. Not the origin of ``to prop (up).''
- Aviation: PROPeller.
Cf. also oxytone and paroxytone.
Cf. proparoxytone and perispomenon.
Robert Ulery, posting off the top of his head, answered thusly the call on CLASSICS-L (vide Classics entry) for a mnemonic by which to remember the -cy and -sy distinction:
I think that I should never see
The verbal form spelled prophecy,
Nor will I ever cease to sigh
At noun forms misspelled prophesy.
David Wigtil suggests
- prophecy with a "c" that precedes "n" (for noun); prophesy with an "s" that precedes "v" (for verb).
- prophecy rhymes with "cee" (the name of the letter); prophesy is what's left over from this rule.
There is yet more at the chitlins entry.
Many years ago, research demonstrated that irritating commercials are remembered best. This does not strike me as being one of the more attractive self-correcting mechanisms of the ``free'' market.
The most famous prosign is SOS, which also has an entry in the alt.usage.english FAQ.
Perhaps you're interested in a list of Q-signs served here.
...was fifty-four, and during his years of living alone he had fallen into the habit of talking to himself. He reckoned this among his old bachelor's foibles, along with losing the lid of the jam, trimming the hair in one of his nostrils and forgetting... or flushing in the middle in the hope that the sound of rushing water would help him overcome his stuttering bladder. He would try to finish while the water was still running; so there was always a race between his own water and that from the tank. It was a race he always lost, and he would be faced with the infuriating alternative of standing there, tool in hand, until the tank refilled and he could have another go, or admitting defeat and leaving his urine in the bowl till next time. He did not like to admit defeat or waste his time waiting, so impatiently he would pull the handle before the tank was full again. This would provoke a premature eruption which was insufficient to flush, and again he had the abhorrent choice between waiting longer or giving up and going away.
He should have asked his doctor about drugs that can palliate the side-effects that many men experience as they age and the prostate gland becomes enlarged.
``Infuriating''! ``Abhorrent''! Translation by Nicholas de Lange.
When a man has married a wife, he finds out whether
Her knees and elbows are only glued together.
There's a page on the history of prosthetics, less loosely construed than by me above.
It has to be said that Blake's wife was one of the all-time martyrs of women's fidelity to their husbands' muses. Charles Goodyear was another hard case (six of his twelve children died in infancy, the family was often starving; he was usually in debt, died $200,000 in the hole). And Karl Marx's wife did not have material distributed unto-her-according-to-her-needs either. [Karl Marx was a London-based itinerant reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Regarding his politics, he insisted ``I am not a Marxist.'' He's been dead for a while now.]
One provision makes sex between a minor and an older American abroad illegal if the minor is younger than sixteen. There is no direct mention of marriage in the text of the law. Canada, Mexico, and many other countries in this hemisphere (as well as at least half a dozen US states) make legal provision explicitly allowing minors or females under 16 to marry (usually only with parental or court approval).
Okay, a little precision: 18 USC 2243 defines sexual abuse of a minor as knowingly engaging in a sexual act with a person over 12 but under 16 years of age, if said abuser is more than four years older. Not incorporated into the definition, but allowed as a defense, is the possibility that the persons participating in the sexual act are married to each other at the time. (Sex acts are defined in section 2246 and they're about what you'd suppose. In fact, you can see why Pres. Bill Clinton ended up defending his grand-jury perjury by arguing the meaning of ``is.'')
Anyway, the sections mentioned in the last paragraph are part of 18 USC Chapt. 109A, which defined violations only in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US (``in the US,'' hereinafter). The PROTECT Act includes provisions modifying Chapter 105 at 18 USC 2423 (penalties against sex tourism). Included are new penalties (up to 30 years' imprisonment) for US citizens and PR's engaging in ``illicit sexual conduct'' in foreign places. Here ``illicit sexual conduct'' is defined as either (1) a sexual act (per sec. 2243) that would be a violation of chapter 109A if it occurred in the US, or (2) a commercial sex act defined elsewhere in the code (sec. 1581). The PROTECT Act specifies a defense of ignorance for (2), but nothing for (1). A reasonable person would suppose that for the purposes of the new law in sec. 105, the marriage defense in ch. 109A would be allowed, and sex between married persons would not be a violation. A zealous prosecutor, on the other hand, might argue that the affirmative defenses allowed in ch. 109A are not part of the definition of the violation, or they would have been included in the definition. After all, ennumerated defense definitions specify the standard of evidence (preponderance of evidence, say), which clearly has nothing to do with whether a violation has occurred, but only with whether a possible violator can be found guilty of the offense.
The PROTECT Act also prohibits child pornography, including even depictions (computer-generated, say) that are not reproductions from life. (We will call the latter fictitious child pornography.) Similar provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 were previously ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The reason for prohibiting apparent child pornography that was made without abusing a child is explicitly stated in the act, in what amounts to a plea to the courts to allow the relevant prohibitions of the law. The basic argument against fictitious depictions of child sex is this: Since it is virtually impossible to prove that depictions were not computer-generated, the contention that they were has become an effective defense against child-pornography charges. [It is further claimed that child pornography is only a by-product of child sexual abuse, so that computer-generated child pornography, if or when it should be possible, does not reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse.] The new law mentions the 1973 case that resulted in the Miller Test (based on ``community standards'' -- an absurd, confused, and irrelevant concept -- and some other irrelevancies). Apparently by inference only, it seems that something like the Miller test is supposed to be applied in cases brought under the new prohibitions.
Proteins are long polypeptide chains. Polypeptide chains are daisy-chained amino acids, the amino (-NH2) group bonding to the acid group (-COOH) of an adjacent amino acid, with the release of a water.
Proteins arrange themselves in commensurate helices called alpha helices (3.8 amino acids per turn). Here's a nice tutorial on the geometry. It's part of a course in the Principles of Protein Structure.
The alpha helix structure of protein was deduced by Linus Pauling and Robert Corey. Pauling always cited this success as something that only chemists, with their structural insight, would deduce, while physicists remained stumped. He was just whistling Dixie.
The term protein was first suggested by Berzelius, who proposed it in a letter to Gerardus Mulder (who was investigating them at the time). Berzelius derived it from the Greek proteios, `primitive,' meaning to imply ``fundamental[ly important].''
There are only two results of the present R & D competition which we can expect definitely. (1) The so-called ``rich'' countries will get richer and the ``poor'' ones will get poorer; not necessarily in absolute terms but in relative ones.
I think he should have put quotes around ``richer'' and ``poorer'' too, for consistency. Incidentally, (2) is that the precise rank order of richest ``will change considerably.'' Ditto the poorest.
No, you didn't really need to know this.
- piastra (Italian name for Spanish peso coins; short for ``piastra d'argento,'' `plate of silver')
- piastre (French; borrowed from Italian)
- ``piece of eight'' (from the fact that some coins were scored for breaking into eight reales or denominated as 8 reales, or both; see 2 bits entry)
- dolar and various related names (ummm, have you visited the 2-bits entry yet?)
Hey, the English have a word for watt -- why shouldn't the Germans come up with a word for horsepower?
Used in styrofoam (Dow TM) cups. Recycling code 6 of PCS. May be indicated by ``PS'' embossed beneath symbol.
Here in tiff format is an SEM micrograph of the interior of a polystyrene packing peanut, courtesy of ESEM.
There are also some who are not so enamored of this magic substance.
Polystyrene was first developed by I. G. Farben in 1930.
(If the preceding entry sounded familiar, it's because it's a rerun.)
It gets worse: P.P.S.
One of the hit songs from the musical Grease was ``You're The One That I Want.'' It begins thus:
I got chills, they're multiplyin'
And I'm lo--sin' contro-ol
Cause the power, you're supplyin'
It's electrifyin'!
Literature, of course, can be found in sources other than books. Poetry, drama, and fiction can be read in magazines and literary journals, even on subway and bus placards.
The NEA is apparently not concerned that commuters are not getting enough poetry in their placards, because the PSA ``provides poetry to transit authorities throughout the country, including Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Dallas.''
Cf. USFSA.
I have a link for a PSA Research Center, but there isn't a lot of money to publicize it. So what I do is, every night at 3:01 AM, if no paying customer has bought the time slot, I stick it in during the station break after the first minute of the hourly news snippet. That way, you don't get accustomed to long intervals without advertising. Also, as the spot says, ``this message was brought to you by this station and'' whoever. So I get credit for public-spiritedness, too.
I was at a party a few weeks ago where a detailed discussion took place of changing fashions in ear piercing. Apparently it was once standard to have little girls' ears pierced and now it isn't, or it wasn't and now it is. Something along those lines, and more, but once I knew what the subject was I sort of turned my ears off.