Other solids that shrink on heating over some range of temperatures include various zeolites and zirconium tungstate (ZrW2O8). Liquid water is well-known to contract up to about 3.984°C), but the stable low-pressure allotrope of ice (ice Ih -- hexagonal phase I) has a positive thermal expansivity at high temperatures (i.e., temperatures not far below freezing). Ice Ih does have a negative thermal expansivity from 73K down to 10K or below. (The expansivity and its temperature derivative must vanish at 0K, so polynomial have the expansivity varying quadratically near zero. So far as it is possible to tell by extrapolation from data above 10K, the expansivity is negative between 0K and 10K.)
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Typically in P/U dialects, nouns like police and umbrella are pronounced with stress on the initial syllable. The term ``PU dialect'' is used in at least two slightly different ways. It may refer to dialects in which only some polysyllabic nouns that don't normally have initial stress receive initial stress, or it may refer to dialects in which initial stress for nouns is regularized, and nouns without initial stress are exceptional.
There's an informative polyurethane entry in the Macrogalleria.
The word is also applied to some sharp things that are not necessarily pin-shaped. For example, a guitar pick (or ``plectrum,'' if you want to be that way) is a púa. Regardless of shape, the barbs on barbed wire and the (normally metal) hooks or points of a carding brush (carda) are called púas.
A sewing or knitting needle is normally called an aguja in Spanish, as is the sharp end of a syringe.
For some reason (or perhaps for no reason), the word púa seems to have caught the fancy of bonaerenses: A phonograph needle is called a púa, although I may have the wrong tense on the copula, and there are colloquial expressions like ``darle la púa a algien'' (`to needle someone'; literally `to give someone the needle') and ``meter la púa'' (`stir up trouble, intrigue'; literally `stick in the needle').
Disclaimer: the assertions in this entry are not based on any particular research, just my impressions over the years.
I don't know why public becomes publicly. A much less common example is anticly, which appears to be about as common as antically. Cholericly seems to be six or seven times more common than its longer form. It may be significant that public, antic, and choleric all function as nouns as well as adjectives, and that the -ical adjectives of these words are rare. (``What corpus?'' What ``corpus''? All ratios have been determined by ``googling the web.'')
All other such exception forms that I can track down are less common than the corresponding regularly constructed -ically forms. Phlegmaticly seems to be about four times less common phegmatically. A few other terms have -icly frequencies on the order of one tenth those of their -ically forms. These tend to be technical terms like metalicly and cubicly. Other instances of -icly are typically 100 times less common than the corresponding -ically forms.
Faraday's maxim was ``Work. Finish. Publish.'' James Clerk Maxwell noted that
[Faraday] ... shews us his unsuccessful as well as his successful experiments, and his crude ideas as well as his developed ones.
Franklin had a maxim similar to Faraday's, but he was a printer by trade, after all. Franklin cautiously withheld publication of some experiments he had not at first properly interpreted. [But by sending them to his contact P. Collinson at the Royal Society, he assured himself priority in case they were correct. Franklin wasn't born yesterday, you know. He was born in 1706 (New Style; i.e. Gregorian calendar).]
The general idea is: you issue a ``public key'' and maintain a private key known only by yourself and by the untrustworthy ``friends'' you've been fool enough to trust, and all the people they told. Anyone who knows your public key can encrypt a message for you. However, only someone with your private key can decrypt a message thus encrypted. In principle, no public key system is safe against code-breaking. Someone with the public key can just encode a moderately long message and test enough candidate private keys until the right one is found -- the one that decrypts the known encrypted message correctly. By making the decryption depend on a sufficiently long private key, however, one can make this approach impractical. This is not the whole story, however. In any real private key system, a great deal is known about the encryption/decryption code, and so one can imagine that someone could find shortcuts to discover the private key. Crudely, one could imagine that only the first twenty bits of a long private key affected decryption of the first five characters, so one could quickly test the 2^20 or about one million possibilities on the first five characters, and with odds of 26^5 or about 12 million to one, chances are good that only the correct combination of the first 20 bits would be able to correctly recover the first five characters. No one would design an encryption system quite this stupid, but one might accidentally design a system in which a subset of the decryption task depended only on a subset of the private key in some way. This would enable someone to break the code by small steps.
The essence of the problem of designing a safe public-key code, therefore, is to make sure that the decryption algorithm is a sufficiently complicated function of all of the private key. What RSA did was to find a class of algorithms which were in a sense as complicated as prime factorization. That is, they were able to show that the task of breaking the code was equivalent in difficulty to that of finding the prime factors of a large composite number. That is a quite difficult problem, even with all the short-cuts that have been developed in the more than two thousand years since Eratosthenes came up with a sieve algorithm for quickly determining if a particular number was the factor of another. It is by that thread -- the difficulty of factoring numbers -- that much of the privacy people believe they have hangs.
...
``PubPat works against wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy through several activities.''
Anyway, back on-topic: Joe's prize is given in fourteen different journalism categories:
- Public Service (collect gold medal)
- Spot News Reporting (collect $3000)
- Investigative Reporting (collect $3000)
- Explanatory Journalism (collect $3000)
- Beat Reporting (collect $3000) (This must've been easier in the '50's.)
- National Reporting (collect $3000)
- International Reporting (collect $3000)
- Feature Writing (collect $3000)
- Commentary (collect $3000)
- Criticism (collect $3000)
- Editorial Writing (collect $3000)
- Editorial Cartooning (collect $3000)
- Spot News Photography (collect $3000)
- Feature Photography (collect $3000)
- Fiction
- Drama
- History
- Biography
- Poetry
- General Non-fiction
Prestigious prizes like this are a lot like speeding tickets. The speeding ticket may be $100, but you'll pay many times that in increased insurance premiums.
Visit the homepage, apparently set up by CJR, for further information, including copies of the actual winning articles, photographs, etc. that won a Pulitzer in journalism.
If you want to puff up your erudition without conveying or even expressing any additional information, you can say that a pulse is the esculent seed of a leguminous plant. By extension (say ``metonymically''), the word pulse is also used to refer to the plant that yields the pulse (i.e., to the legume).
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
They're all more or less beautiful animals. They should all have the opportunity to become more beautiful through taxidermy.
The name puma is originally from the Quechua language of Peru, and entered English via Spanish. The word cougar is originally from Tupi (or at least from one of the Tupi languages of South America). The name was apparently first borrowed into Portuguese as çuçuarana, and went from there into the French of Buffon's zoological work, and thence eventually into English. The principal Tupi language today, and the best-documented, is Guaraní (one of the official languages of Paraguay). Guaraní is reported in some references as the specific source of the the word cougar, but at least one reference I have seen gives contradictory information.
I'd like to nail down some of the ulterior etymology, but it will have to wait. Frustratingly, one promising sources available to me for this language, a bidirectional Spanish-Guaraní dictionary, has a printing defect at a critical place (an incorrect fascicle is inserted, leaving out the fascicle where puma ought to be). (And the dictionary I reference in the next paragraph has a number of pages printed blank.) I think my library will repair the problems by ordering or scrounging replacement pages; I'm putting in the problem reports on September 1, 2008, and will get back to this entry later.
For now let me say that it seems that cougar (and possibly jaguar also) is a compound noun based on ara or (possibly just modern Guaraní) eira. The latter is ``lince o gato montés; animal carnivoro, feroz y sanguinario'' according to an abridged 2005 edition of a dictionary by Félix Giménez Gómez (``Félix de Guaranía''). [`Lynx or mountain cat; animal that is carnivorous, fierce, and sanguinary.'] Cougar in this book is eira guasu, where guasu probably means `large.'
Since C is free-format, you have the opportunity to develop your own distinctive style:
The comment
{
- the cliché
{- hope
springs eternal
springs eternal - hope
springs eternal;
I just received the following email message. (It's from someone known by no one reading this entry, so why should I name him and embarrass him in front of all his friends?)
> I understand completely. I've passed up many come-ons > from women due to poor punctuation. It's a real turnoff.
(After all -- isn't that the point, really?)
(Very sorry couldnt resist)
I don't know much about Northern Ireland -- I need this scorecard just to keep track of who some of the players are. Here's something possibly relevant from another former part of the British Empire that was partitioned.
One of my friends who was disappeared during the dirty war in Argentina lived. She was bribed out and fled to Israel the day she was released. (That evening, a different part of the state apparatus came by to try to take her.) She had been a typical nonviolent leftist in Argentina -- a socialist. She told me that after she arrived in Israel, she realized how completely irrelevant the usual left-right distinctions were there.
PUP is firmly unionist, but also declares itself dedicated to ``bettering the lot of the ordinary person.'' PUP won two seats in the first Northern Ireland Assembly elections.
(You can't use BUY as an abbreviation for purchase, because buy is not an abbreviation. See?)
Another meaning of purchase is grip or hold. I suspect that is its original meaning. It's irresponsible of me to just mention it like that, but I'm tired and no one is paying me to look it up. In the 1980's, Russian language purists used to bemoan the fact that the Russian word for `get' was replacing that which originally meant `buy,' and there was speculation that the peculiarities of the centrally controlled economy (controlled prices and controlled supply, both low for consumer goods, and gee: shortages) were driving this semantic shift. The idea was that whether one bought was not the question; whether one found to buy was. Soviets never left home without a mesh bag, just in case they ran across anything to buy. Here's a joke from the good old Soviet days:
An inventor has just been awarded an Order of Lenin for designing a new small plane. Soon every Soviet citizen will have his own personal plane. He is being interviewed (I mean the inventor, not Lenin) on State TV, and the interviewer wants to know what practical good it does to have a personal plane. The inventor explains: ``Suppose you're in Moscow, and you hear that there's cheese in Minsk. You can fly to Minsk and get cheese!''
A similar class of surnames, which includes Perdue, is described at the Depardieu entry.
A breakdown product of purines is uric acid. Uric acid crystals cause the inflammation associated with the famous disease gout and certain kinds of kidney stones. The trademark Purina I presume is intended to suggest purity and is unrelated to purines. Like humans, however, Dalmatians and some other dog species form urinary stones -- ``urate'' or ``purine'' stones. Those animals should not consume too much organ meat (``beef by-products''). Other foods which are high in purines, and which you should therefore avoid feeding that ``stone-forming dog'' dog, include caviar, anchovies, clams, sardines and herring.
Now if they could come up with an acronym that suggested something that wouldn't be worth bending over to examine more closely...
Public Understanding of Science (not abbreviated PUS, that I have seen yet) is also the title of a quarterly journal (vol. 1 in January 1992) originally published by the IOP and now by Sage Publications.
Schoenstein (p. xvi): ``...America is now crawling with parents who are driving their darlings toward acceptances at both Harvard and the Menninger Clinic, parents who will sacrifice anything to make their children superior. They will even sacrifice the children.''
A Japanese term for female push parents is kyoiku-mama.
Pope John Paul II received his doctorate in Philosophy from PUST. (Thesis: ``The Problems of Faith in the Works of St. John of the Cross.'' Philosophy? Whatever.) He went back to Poland and got another degree there afterwards.
John Paul I got his doctorate from the Gregorian University in Rome, in Sacred Theology. (Thesis: ``The origin of the human soul according to Antonio Rosmini.'' Whatever.) The Greg is a Jesuit institution. John Paul I died only a month after being elected pope. I don't think it was after-effects of the white smoke. Draw your own conclusions.
The academic press of PUST, called Angelicum University Press instead of something stupid like PUSTSA (ess for stampa), publishes Angelicum, a quarterly journal of theology, philosophy, social science, and canon law. Articles are published in the principal European (scholarly) languages -- mainly Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish. Well, there seems to be some controversy about this. According to my local library catalog entry, they only publish articles in English, French, German, Italian or Latin. I promise to have look-see some day if I remember. I want to see if they publish in Polish.
It should be noted that historically, the better-known effect associated with selenium (Se) is photoconductivity: conductivity different (higher, in this case) under illumination than in the dark. Photoconductivity was discovered by Willoughby Smith in 1873, as he was investigating the tetchy behavior of a selenium resistor he had in a box....
Currently, the noun use of the term photovoltaic or PV designates photovoltaic devices used as power supplies, a/k/a ``solar cells.'' As a practical matter, these are mostly silicon-based.
It may be called ``acetate'' for short, and under that name San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information.
Vinyl acetate-alcohol copolymers are used in acrylic latex paints to hold hydrophobic acrylic monomer in suspension, as explained in the PVA entry of the Macrogalleria.
The Roberts & Etherington Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology for Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books is entirely too sanguine about this stuff in its entry.
Code 3 in PCS. May be indicated by `V' embossed on surface.
San Diego Plastics, Inc. serves a short page of application-oriented information on PVC. There's an informative PVC entry in the Macrogalleria. It's popular in applications that require a cheap flexible barrier between the wet and the the dry (garden hoses, raincoats, floortile). Related comments at PVA entry.
``Exotic'' clothing is available from clothiers with no apparent awareness of the utility--nay, the necessity--of the apostrophe in forming the English genitive case, in Nylon and PVC as well as Leather and Rubber. The traditional considerations of comfort and warmth do not appear to have played an important rôle in the design of this bas couture. Link dead? There's always more.
There are other kinds of good, also possibly not clean, fun that you can have with PVC. Apparently polymer clay is PVC that one finishes polymerizing--crosslinking, I guess--in the oven.
See as well the acrylic acid entry.
Most epitaxial deposition methods fall into one of the two broad categories PVD and CVD. As explained in more detail at the CVD entry, PVD is the relatively low-pressure situation: the term is applied when molecules of the material to be deposited are unlikely to suffer a collision in going from source to deposition surface. (Hence the material moves in a straight line, hence ``beams.'')
Here's a tutorial introduction served by the Maui High Performance Computing Center. Here's one from Paul Marcelin at NERSC and LLNL. Here's some more.
Another such package is MPI (Message Passing Interface).
Grafted uneasily onto this schedule since 1994, there is a world conference (called ``World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion'' two out of the first three times) every four years or so.
- 1990 May 21-25 (Kissimmee, Florida)
- 1991 October 7-11 (Las Vegas, Nevada)
- 1993 May 10-14 (Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky)
- 1994 December 5-9 (Hilton Waikoloa Village Waikoloa, Hawaii)
(Billed as the ``First World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion'') - 1996 May 13-17 (Washington, D.C.)
- 1997 September 29 to October 3 (Anaheim Marriott Hotel, Anaheim, California)
- 1998 July 6-10 (Vienna, Austria)
``Second World Conference and Exhibition on Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion'' - 2000 September 15-22 (Anchorage Hilton Anchorage, Alaska)
- 2002 May 20-24 (Hyatt Regency New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana)
- 2003
May 11-15 (Osaka, Japan)
``Third World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion''
The fourteenth PVSC organizing committtee established an award to recognize persons who have made ``outstanding contributions to the advancement of photovoltaic science and technology,'' named in memory of one of the founders of the photovoltaic field, William R. Cherry. The award is given to one person (generally a different person) at each PVSC. You're probably wondering why I would bother to mention this. I mention this because Charles E. Backus was the recipient in May 1987, and I know Chuck, and I wanted to name-drop.
- 1990 November 26-30, Kyoto, Japan
- 1999 September 20-24, Sapporo City, Japan
- 2001 June 11-15, Cheju Island, Korea
- 2004 January 20-30, Bankok, Thailand
Anther weightlifting PWA is the Philippine.
FDR was elected US president in 1932 to end the Great Depression. (That's right, it was a time when everyone was bummed out. At least there were a lot of bums out. You know -- farmers, industrial workers, craftsmen, and other out-of-work riff-raff.) FDR's recovery plan, if trying anything that might work can be called a plan, was entitled the New Deal. One of the best-known New Deal programs was the PWA (Public Works Administration; officially the Federal Administration of Public Works), established by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Man did they spend money. Man did they build a lot of public works. They also loaned money to states and cities so they could spend a lot of money.
The PWA was headed by Harold L. Ickes from 1933 to 1939, when a reorganization made it a division of the Federal Works Agency. As war approached, industrial production became more important, and the PWA was abolished in June 1941.
Where treatment is available, PWA's are a large proportion of HIV positives. However, the vast majority of HIV+'s live in Africa, where treatment is available to very few. Without drugs, PWA's tend to survive only 18 to 24 months after the onset of full-blown AIDS.
The country with the largest number of HIV+'s is South Africa, which is also the richest country in Africa for now. As of Spring 2004, the South African government's effort against AIDS consisted almost entirely of encouraging condom use. (Condom use soared to the 5-10% level by 2002. Whoopee. Congratulations all around.) Another large portion of national AIDS-prevention expenditures appears to go to the production of overpriced plays about AIDS by Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki's wife. (Also, some provinces are distributing antiretroviral drugs.) Mr. Mbeki, an economist by training, made a name for himself (more precisely an eponym, as in ``some crazy mbeki'') by questioning whether AIDS was really just HIV infection. South Africa held its third post-Apartheid national elections in April 2004, and as expected the ANC won again handily, with over two-thirds of the vote. (It's a parliamentary system with at-large, list-only voting.) As Mbeki began his second term that month, 5.3 million of South Africa's population of 45 million were estimated to be infected with HIV.
Accurate statistics are hard to gather for most of Africa, and are quickly out of date. Indeed, HIV+'s are asymptomatic for as long as a decade after infection (and contagious for most of that time), so in the absence of systematic testing, most victims are unaware or uncertain of their own status. A major source of information is sampling of pregnant women. Their rates of infection, even when already at high (a few percent) levels, have exhibited alarming doubling times of as little as a year. Among the most horrifying statistics, it seems well agreed that in Botswana in 2003 over 35% of the population was HIV+. Almost all of these people will die young. Namibia may be worse, but data are virtually nonexistent. Across southern and western Africa, AIDS is a holocaust. In thirty to forty countries, with a total population of 800 million or so, it is or is becoming the leading cause of death. Life expectancy is declining rapidly; infant and adult mortality rates are rising. The population of South Africa at least has already begun to shrink. In some countries a quarter of all children are orphans, and significant numbers of these are homeless and alone. The most productive age segment of the population is dying off so rapidly that it is creating labor shortages. Resources are shifting toward care of the weak and sick, and away from food and education. Up next: India.
At the ends of the lines, holes may be drilled to allow the leads of surface components or sockets to be passed through. Discrete components like resistors and power transistors are inserted directly. Chips, and long ago transistors and even longer ago tubes, were not usually soldered on directly. Instead, sockets were soldered onto the board and these active components were inserted. This served two purposes: (1) Since hot solder and iron didn't touch the active components, there was no need for careful heat-sinking and shorting of sensitive leads when the board was assembled. (2) Tubes and transistors could be replaced easily.
Actually, tube circuits tended to have the sockets on a hard metal chassis, and then later some separate circuit boards that might be printed. I've decided to take a little trip down vacuum tube memory lane, so you may want to skip down.
Tubes especially had lifetimes much shorter than other components. When your old (black and white) TV started malfunctioning, you'd take off the back panel and, if there was nothing obviously toasted, you'd look at the circuit diagram pasted on the inside for clues. The tubes on the diagram, or the circuit blocks they were part of, had labels indicating their function. Thus, if your sound crapped out, you looked to see what tubes were part of the audio amp block. (I should say that some of this worked in reverse: if the blocks weren't labeled, you'd recognize them, or maybe identify them from familiar tubes with very standard functions. The more you looked, the more clues you'd find.) After doing all this intellectual heavy lifting, you'd rip out all the tubes and take them to Radio Shack or even a good drug store -- why risk wasting a trip? The old jalopy could break down any time.
Down at the store, there was a tube tester with a slanted top surface and a shallow lip at the edge. One of the tubes you placed there would roll off and could be replaced without further testing. The rest you would look up in alphabetical order in a binder attached to the tester. The binder would tell you what settings to use on the tester (these corresponded to pin pattern, plate and filament voltages with corresponding meter settings, etc.) and tell you what number to expect on the meter. (The meter face was on the top surface of the testing station. That's the reason the top surface had to be slanted, see?) Sometimes there'd be two sets of settings for two separate tests, but let's face it: it was a pretty crude test. Mostly you found out if the tube was working approximately right as a diode. However, when tubes go down the tubes, they tend to go big time, so crude tests are fine. When you found a bad tube, you said: ``Yup, it was obvious from the circuit diagram.'' If the TV didn't have a circuit diagram, you said ``Ahh, these 6AU8's, they don't make'em like they used to.''
If you were a professional, of course, you used professional methods. The
first method was checking that the tube filaments got hot. You could do this
a number of ways. One way was to
CONTINUE
That's not a method. There's no ``CONTINUE'' method in professional tube testing. ``CONTINUE'' is just a note the glossarist left to himself, that he should add stuff to this entry later.
The major event in Paraguayan history since independence was the war of 1864-1870, known as la Guerra de la Triple Alianza in Spanish and a Guerra da Tríplice Aliança in Portuguese, `the War of the Triple Alliance.' It was easily the bloodiest conflict in Latin-American history. Fighting began in December 1864, when Paraguay, with a population of half a million, invaded Brazil, which had a population of 11 million (all numbers approximate). In response, that triple alliance was formed between Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and declared war on Paraguay on May 1, 1865. At the end of the war, Paraguay's population was about 200,000 and mostly female.
H H
\ /
C-----C
// \\
// \\
N C---H pyrimidine
\ /
\ _____ /
C-----N
/
H
... and also of derivatives obtained by substitution of one or more
hydrogens. In nucleic acids, by far the most common
pyrimidines are cytosine (C), thymine (T), and uracil (U).
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
There is another connection between quartz and pyrite, apart from the
association with gold: the name pyrite is evolved from the Latin word for flint [ultimately from Greek for fire (pyr-) stone], and flint
itself is made of finely divided quartz. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.
See the explanation of how quartz, pyrites, and gold all happen to be found
together under the pluton entry.
The word pyrite is also used in indefinite singular and plural forms (i.e., ``a pyrite,'' ``pyrites'') to refer to metal sulfides in general. This is most often for metal-sulfide compounds that include iron stoichiometrically, like chalcopyrite, CuFeS2. Another well-known sulfide is galena (lead sulfide: PbS).
Flipping channels the other day, I found an elegant lady (so far as I could tell) explaining to a select audience of QVC insiders like me about the precious but affordable jewelry made with ``iron pyrite.'' It turns out that this is found underground in Southern France and Switzerland (she didn't mention other sources, such as New Jersey), so it's a mineral. The pyrite is surrounded by ``silver,'' so it's precious. Oh, brother. All that glitters ain't copper either (see Cu for related story).
pyrophoric substance + air (at STP) = Kaboom.Sometimes a nasty look is required to initiate the reaction of marginally pyrophoric substances. A very useful concept to be aware of: silane is pyrophoric.
a² + b² = c².
It is clear that the 3,4,5 triple was used to generate right angles in the Middle East in times when it is not clear that the Pythagorean theorem was known. Leonardo Pisano (Fibonacci) devoted seven of the twenty-four propositions in his Liber quadratorum (`Book of Squares') to finding different kinds of Pythagorean triples.
There are a few equivalent construction methods for Pythagorean triples. Here's one that essentially defines one Pythagorean triple for every fraction u/v: if u and v are integers, then a = u² + 2uv, b = 2v² + 2uv, and c = u² + 2uv + 2v² are a Pythagorean triple.
The usual approach takes q = v and p = u + v, so a = p² - q², b = 2pq, and c = p² + q² are a Pythagorean triple. It's worth noting that in looking for inequivalent triples, only p and q of opposite parity need be considered: if p and q are both odd or both even, then a, b and c will all be even and the triple will simply be a multiple of a smaller one.
The inbounds region of a US football field is a rectangular region 300 feet long and 160 feet wide. These dimensions are the legs of a Pythagorean triple (proportional to an 8, 15, 17 triangle), so the diagonal of the rectangle is 340 feet long. I suppose this could be useful if your mensuration technology is four zebras and ten yards of chain. Note that all boundary markers (pylons and lines) are outside the playing field; measurements are taken to the inside of the boundary markers. Hence, a player who steps on the sideline is out of bounds.
The inbounds region of a Canadian football field is 110 yards long by 65 yards wide (330 by 195 feet). This does not yield a Pythagorean triple, so the diagonal is irrational. (But it's only an algebraic irrational -- it's not transcendental. There's no crying in baseball, and there's no transcendence in football.) Since practical conversion factors are normally defined to be rational, the diagonal is also irrational in unreasonable international units that will remain unnamed. Frankly, there's no particular rational reason for sending the ball precisely along the diagonal, either. On the other hand, at 127.8 yards, it would be a mighty, impressive pass (read the comma at your discretion).
The playing-field aspect ratios above are 1.875 and 1.692 (US and Canada, resp.), or 2.25 and 2.308, resp., when you add in the end zones (ten and twenty yards deep, resp.). As long as we're on the subject of rectangles with aspect ratios that vary by nationality, let's consider paper. In the US, by far the most common size of paper sold in sheets is 8.5 by 11 inches, with an aspect ratio of 1.294. Less common, but also a standard, is ``legal paper,'' 8.5 by 14 (ratio 1.647). Nearest half-centimeter approximations to these standard sizes are used in any country that uses the metric system but which has an economy closely integrated with that of any large country that does not, much. Otherwise, they use a boring system of paper sizes which have aspect ratio equal to the square root of two (i.e., about 1.4142), because it's such a clever-seeming idea. Here's a thoroughly informative (though typically biased) page on irrational ISO paper sizes. Here's a proposal to convert Canadian football to metric dimensions.