Generally, the point of positing a Q document is to explain the correlation of GLuke and GMatthew. The simple view that the primary sources for both GMatt and GLuke were Q and GMark, and that GMatt and GLuke were written independently, is called the two-source hypothesis (2SH).
Because of the nature of the material common to GMatt and GLuke that is absent from GMark, Q is often conceived as essentially a list of sayings of Jesus. In German the document is also called Logienquelle, `sayings source.'
An alternative explanation of the similarities between the two longer synoptic gospels is simply to suppose that Luke cribbed from GMatt, or Matt from GLuke. The problem with this idea is that there exist various places where GLuke and GMatt disagree (compare the Sermons on the Mount or the birth and infancy stories, for example). Positing a Q gets around this problem. The idea seems to be that if Luke had cribbed from Matt, say, he wouldn't have written anything that was absolutely at odds with it. On the other hand, if both had access to a now-lost other source (Q), then they might have independently (and differently) filled in details not mentioned in Q.
For a critical view, see Mark Goodacre's The Case against Q. One alternative which does not posit a Q, but which is not very popular among US Biblical scholars, is the Farrer-Goulder hypothesis (FH). A theory that combines the disadvantages of Q and cribbing is the 3ST.
In every Scrabble set, exactly one of the 100 tiles is a Q. The other high-value letters (one tile each) are Z (also 10 pts.), and J and X (eight points each).
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
One of the most famous Quinti was Horace -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (b. 8 December 65, d. 27 November 8 BCE). That's right: he was born on a negative-count anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Japanese date). Amazingly prescient.
The manuscripts fell apart over the intervening two thousand or so years, and had to be reconstructed like jigsaw puzzles. One of the more interesting tools in this effort is DNA analysis: parchment is analyzed for the DNA of its, shall we say, donor animal, as a clue to which fragments belong together. We also find out what animals they had on hand. Seems they ate a lot of mutton.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written on parchment and papyrus in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek from 250 BCE to around 70 CE. (The older documents are supposed to have been written in Jerusalem and taken to Qumran later for safekeeping.) Among these manuscripts are parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible except the book of Esther (which is written in Aramaic anyway). There are also a variety of community documents, including mail.
In 1947, a 16-year-old Bedouin shepherd looking for his lost goat first discovered the scrolls in a cave near the Dead Sea. Eventually, 250 caves were explored, and eleven were found to contain scroll fragments. Between 1947 and 1967, twenty-eight nearly complete scrolls plus some 100,000 fragments. After the rapid publication of the nearly complete scrolls -- i.e., after the harvest of the low-hanging fruit -- there was a very long delay in publication of the remaining material. This gave rise to suspicions that discoveries embarrassing to one or another religion were being suppressed, or that the small community of scholars that controlled access was hogging it for its own scholarly advantage. Eventually the remaining fragments were published in dozens of volumes, reconstructed as 800 or 900 scroll parts. Reconstructed manuscript fragments are labeled 1Q, 2Q, ..., 11Q according to the cave in which they were found. Caves one and four have produced the greatest number of reconstructable texts.
None for J either, although that may be understandable (.bj).
The letter q, not followed by u, occurs in the transliteration to English of Arabic and some other Semitic languages. It is used as an alternative to k so that the common semitic distinction between hard and soft k sounds can be indicated.
In English, Qatar is pronounced in the same way as catarrh, although less often with a stuffed nose. You can also accent the first syllable as well as the second.
Way back when, you know, there was a time when the land areas of nations or realms were very fuzzy sets. (Egypt, for example, was the area around the Nile, and no one knew or cared exactly where in the desert the western border lay.) For Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the way-back-when period is the twenty-first century. The borders of Qatar and the Emirates with Saudi Arabia, and possibly with each other, have apparently never been precisely defined in any document that is publicly available.
As recently as June 2000, Qatar and Bahrain were disputing their (maritime) border at the ICJ. (The Emirates want Iran to meet them at the ICJ to discuss some islands in the gulf, but Iran is not interested.) If the Bahrain-Qatar dispute is any indication, the determination of borders in the Qatari-U.A.E.-S.A. area depends, in the absence of some secret treaty, upon maps made in Britain pursuant to treaties entered into as the Ottoman Empire was eroding away.
--- Three qarcs for Muster Muarc!
Sure he hasn't got much of a buarc
And sure any he has it's all beside the muarc.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
The quarterback rating is computed as the scaled sum of four normalized quantities. Each of the four quantities is a deviation of some average from some standard value.
- The first quantity is the excess of completion rate (number of completions divided by number of pass attempts) over 0.3, and it is scaled by a factor of 5. (Thus, a 25% completion percentage contributes -0.25.)
- The second quantity is the excess of average number of yards passing per pass attempt over three, and it is scaled by a factor 25.
- The third quantity is the TD pass rate (TD passes divided by total of all pass attempts) and it is scaled by a factor of 20.
- The fourth quantity is the excess of 9.5 over the percentage of pass attempts intercepted, and it is scaled by an overall factor of 25.
In the NFL, the quarterbacks, punters, and kickers have jersey numbers in the range 0-18. In 2009, Arkansas QB Alex Mortensen (yes, the son of (ESPN NFL analyst Chris Mortensen) wasn't selected in the draft, but he was signed as a free agent later by the Tennessee Titans. He played briefly in an exhibition game on August 10, throwing an interception and little else. He was released the next day. He's the only QB I'm aware of whose jersey number was 0. There is, however, a certain Keith NULL. Some random statistics (not ``random'' in a good way, I'm afraid) on P, K, and QB jersey numbers can be found at this P entry.
Over at <Rivas.com>, I noticed a list of college football recruits that divided quarterbacks into two categories: ``Pro-style'' and ``dual-threat.'' Don't bother to tell me that this is nothing new and in no way specific to <Rivals.com> I only follow football when the spirit moves me, and this spirit got kicked off the ghost squad for being underweight. Look, today (February 6, 2010), Kim Komando (``your digital goddess'' of the airwaves) warned her listeners against the Nigerian advance fee scam (she didn't seem to know any of the names for it), reading a con artist's letter on her program as if she had never seen such a letter before. So I get a bye.
- A periodicity in Chinese rainfall patterns found by Wang Shao-Wu and Zhao Zong-Ci, which they describe in ``Droughts and floods in China, 1470-1979,'' chap. 10 of Climate and History : Studies in past climates and their impact on Man, ed. T. M. L. Wigley, M. J. Ingram, and G. Farmer (CUP, 1981). They used extensive written data on floods and rainfall -- yearbooks, diariews, county annals, gazettes, Ming and Qing records, etc. -- to classify years on a five-point scale (very wet, wet, normal, dry, very dry). They were able ``to build up a series of drought and flood grades for 188 stations covering almost the whole east part of China from 1470 to 1977 with only a few gaps.'' Power spectra for 1471-1970 at 25 stations, and 1871-1970 at on hundred stations, found peaks for periods of 80-100 years (where meaningful), and at 36y, 22y, 11y, 5-6y and approximately 2y periods. Comparison with the most recent years, and geographic pattern, suggest that the QBO, with a period of 2-2.5 years, can be correlated with the EAI (power-spectrum peaks at 2 and 2.5 years), and the 36-year period with the SOI (strong peak at 36.7 years).
- The tendency for wind in the equatorial stratosphere to change direction from west to east every 27 months.
The formula currently (2015) used by the NFL was adopted in 1973. The same formula is used by the CFL. A different formula is used in the NCAA.
The NFL formula is based on two independent variables, attempts (ATT) and a messy numerator that doesn't seem to have any standard name (I'll use MNu). The passer rating is computed as
100 * MNu
QBR = --------- .
6 * ATT
Yes, I use MNu rather than MN so that the preformatted (<pre>-tagged) division line centers properly. In football arithmetic as in programming, good style is... valuable or something.
ATT is relatively unproblematical. I assume ``attempts'' is attempted passes as determined by the officiating crew, so grounding or throwing away the ball does not increase ATT.
MNu is a sum of five components:
MNu = 5 * COMP + 0.25 * YDS + 20 * TD - 25 * INT + 0.125 * ATT ,
where, within certain bounds explained below, COMP is completions, YDS is
``passing yards,'' TD is touchdown passes, and INT is interceptions. There is
plenty of injustice built into this stat, so the fact that a two-yard
completion followed by a 78-yard run is compiled as YDS += 80 is
only what you'd expect. The passer's effectiveness depends on receivers,
blockers, etc. Football is a team sport, so QBR is a team stat.
The QBR is normally defined (see the wikipedia description) in terms of four first-order algebraic quantities COMP/ATT, YDS/ATT, TD/ATT, and INT/ATT. These four quantities are ``capped'': when statistics are computed, any value exceeding 2.375 is recorded as 2.375, and any negative value is recorded as 0. Since COMP, TD, and INT are nonnegative, I prefer to express the bounds as (mostly one-sided) bounds on the underlying raw statistics
The constraint on completions means that completion rate is bracketed between 30% and 77.5%. For the 32 to 34 principal starting passers per year in the years 2005 to 2014, inclusive, the highest completion rate over the course of the regular season was 71.2% (Drew Brees in 2011). With three upper-40's exceptions in the ten-year period, the completion rates were all above 50%. So the constraints on COMP are pointless or irrelevant, depending on whether your cup is half empty or half full (unless it's the other way around). Of course, partial-year stats always cover a broader range [technically a non-narrower range], since the average is never smaller than the minimum or greater than the maximum. Likewise, career percentages fall in a narrower range. [``[P]rincipal starting passers'' above is my gloss for passers with ``at least 14 attempts per team's games played.'' Data provided by Elias Sports Bureau.]
The constraints on yardage mean that yards per passing attempt are bracketed between 3 and 12.5. While 12.5 is beyond stellar for any gunslinger who plays a complete game, the 3-yard minimum comes closer to relevance for teams down to their second back-up QB.
The constraints on passing touchdowns imply that you top out at TD above 0.11875 * ATT, though you get full discredit for any passing touchdowns you fail to make. Neither constraint seems to be worth keeping in mind for any serious but mortal pro quarterback.
I did the research for this entry so long ago that I don't remember what, if anything, I was planning to add. But the above seems like it might be useful to someone who cares, so I'll publish it as is for now.
qu does not represent a /kw/ sound but just /k/.)
The capital of Quebec is Quebec. The situation is not quite a parallel to ``New York, New York,'' because the capital of the New York State is Albany, and Quebec's largest city is Montreal.
Quebec is Canada's second-most populous province, with about 7.5 million inhabitants in October 2003, or 23.7 of the total for Canada. The most populous is Ontario (12.28 million), and the third and fourth (British Columbia and Alberta) have populations of 4.16 and 3.16 million. You know, this is suggestive of Zipf's Law. That law, as you recall, is a very general approximate pattern found in various statistics, that size varies inversely as the size rank. In other words, rank-order times whatever is the basis for the ranking is approximately constant. Let's test that on the estimated populations of Canadian provinces on October 1, 2003. (Precision in the products reflects less significant population digits not displayed.)
Pop. rank Est'd. pop. rank-pop. product Province
(million) (million) (or Territory)
1 12.28 12.28 ON
2 7.50 15.01 QC
3 4.16 12.48 BC
4 3.16 12.65 AB
5 1.16 5.82 MB
6 0.995 5.97 SK
7 0.937 6.56 NS
8 0.750 6.00 NB
9 0.520 4.68 NL
10 0.138 1.38 PE
11 .0420 0.46 NT
12 .0314 0.38 YT
13 .0294 0.38 NU
Normally, Zipf's law works poorly for first ranks, and better for most of the rest. This is an interesting inversion of the usual situation, and an interesting pair of step discontinuities. It's almost as if Canada had been stitched together over the past century from a highly disparate set of parts.
In one Australian's dot sig, I read the following definitions:
-- Q.C. (Queen's Counsellor): A | learned associate of a gay man. | Handbag: A male fashion __ | accessory of a gay woman. \/ |
I thought that should be a Queane's Counsellor, in commonwealth spelling.
Because the exams are taken at the end of the school year, college acceptances are given provisionally on the basis of expected A-level results. A-level grades were released in mid-August, and there were immediate indications of problems. The AQA board sent out only ``estimated grades'' to some 2000 students. By the end of August, widespread weird results had generated newspaper stories, but the next semester had already begun when grade-fixing was definitively revealed in mid-September.
One very convenient fact about quantum cellular automata, that simplifies their analysis, is that they manifest no essentially quantum mechanical behavior. It's basically all about capacitance and charge quantization. (Oh, okay, so technically charge quantization is a quantum phenomenon.)
- The photon has zero mass, so the
electromagnetic interactions have infinite range (another way to think of
this is that by Lorentz time dilation, a clock carried by a photon doesn't
tick -- the photon has no lifetime because it travels infinite distance
without detecting the passage of time). Speaking loosely here.
The gluon has mass, so the interaction is short ranged. The range of the interaction is essentially aitch-bar over em cee, and HTML will let me do only slightly better with considerably more work. By aitch-bar I mean Planck's constant divided by two pi, em is the mass of the interaction-mediating particle, and cee is the speed of light. Anyway, the interaction is on the scale of a fermi or femtometer or 10-15 m.
- The photon is uncharged, so the equations of QED are linear. The gluon
has color, so the equations of QCD are much messier. (Actually, the equations
are pretty simple, but the solutions...)
[QED, by contrast, exhibits ``asymptotic slavery.'' The effective interaction increases at short distances. An intuitive way to understand this is that with enough energy, one can create virtual electron-positron pairs in the vacuum, just as one can excite electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor. Thus, the electromagnetic interaction is screened even by the vacuum, and the `true' unit of electric charge is larger than the familiar 1.602 × 10-19 coulombs. As two particles get close, they are less-well-screened by the vacuum, which one may take account of by increasing the EM interaction strength. In fact, the true charge is infinite, if you consider only electromagnetic interactions, or even only electromagnetic and weak (nuclear beta-decay) interactions. This is an important fundamental reason why it is necessary to use perturbation series for QED that are asymptotic and divergent, but renormalized. By contrast, QCD screens at short distances, so that the interaction becomes very weak -- asymptotic freedom.]
This series continues the earlier Hansische Geschichtsquellen (HGQ), but with numbers restarted from one in a `New Series' (Neue Folge).
``QDR legislation was amended by the 2003 National Defense Authorization Act, which stipulated that the due date for the report is `in the year following the year in which the review is conducted, but not later than the date on which the President submits the budget for the next fiscal year to Congress...' ''
``Qualitative research is essential for interpreting statistical data and placing it in context; for providing insight into the problems and needs associated with a range of drug-using patterns...'' The initiative seems to have concerned qualitative research exclusively into drug abuse patterns and closely related stuff.
In Thomas Love Peacock's 1831 novel Crotchet Castle, most or all of the names represent some kind of play on words. Mac Quedy is a Scottish economist, and a pompous pedant, and as you have guessed from his presence in this glossary entry, his name is to be understood as something along the lines of `son of a demonstration.'
The original version of q.e.d. was the Greek phrase hoper edei deixai, which was sometimes abbreviated. That was o.e.d. -- omicron, epsilon, delta -- since the aitch just represents the Latin transliteration of a rough-breathing symbol (spiritus asper).
There are conflicting reports regarding what he said when he learned what happened to his ``armada invencible,'' though it seems agreed that he bore it with great equanimity. This webpage (I'm away from my books, okay?) says that he ``simply said `I sent my ships to fight against men and not against the winds and waves of God.' This other page cites Eugenio Sarrablo for the report that Philip II said ``Doy gracias a Dios por haberme dado medios para poder sufrir fácilmente una pérdida semejante y porque todavía estoy en situación de volver a construir otra flota tan grande. Una rama ha sido cortada, pero todavía está verde el tronco y puede producir otras nuevas.'' In English: `I give thanks to God for having given me the means to be able to bear such a loss easily [this could be taken in two ways in Spanish too] and because I am still in a position to build another, equally large fleet. One branch has been cut, but the trunk is still green and can produce new ones.' An earlier Spanish king, Alfonso X (Alfonso el Sabio, `Alphonso the Wise'), commissioned astronomical tables. These were calculated on the basis of Ptolemy's model of the solar system, and Alphonso is said to have commented: ``If the Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon creation, I would have suggested something simpler.'' Of course, Alphonso was an accomplished poet, and Philip was not. However, he had in his service one Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a veteran of many battles, including the glorious victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. As a royal agent in Seville from 1587, Cervantes participated in the provisioning of the armada. (Or perhaps the reprovisioning, since Sir Francis Drake's depredations of that year delayed the attack to 1588.) Apart from minor stylistic flaws, I believe Cervantes, with all his financial woes and his deep understanding of individual and collective insanity, might have been able to point out another flaw in Philip's little speech, and that was that the Spanish crown was in debt over its eyebrows, with ``the royal fifth'' mortgaged into the endless future. Philip II financed two more attempted invasions of England. The Hapsburg Empire (which included Spain, Portugal at that time, their overseas dominions, the rebellious Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and other bits of Europe) was the modern poster-child of imperial over-reach.
Back to QE I: a more complimentary epithet for her, and one happily bestowed by a relieved and grateful nation (well, much of it), was ``Gloriana, the Faerie Queene.'' Hence the title and a character of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene. Spencer died in 1599, having completed only about half of this work. Elizabeth died in 1603, and Shakespeare and Cervantes died in 1616.
Pay attention to a particularly passionate passage of World Class Quality:
``The voice of the engineer'' must be replaced by the ``voice of the customer.'' The latter is then translated into meaningful product specifications through use [sic] of tools such as quality function deployment (QFD), which is the most well-known. But there are also simpler and less costly techniques that are almost as effective. These include value research, multi-attribute evaluations, and conjoint analysis. This author [Keki R. Bhote] is currently [not later than 1991] researching a process that embraces the best of these techniques at the least cost and lowest cycle time.
Any further questions, just ask pointy-hair.
You may have noticed that we don't have a lot of French acronyms in this here English-language glossary (apart from the Canadian doppelgängers), but Q.html is roomy.
I want answers!
The letter q is generally associated with ``security.'' Think queer quiet. Other examples: Q clearance (I could tell you what this means, but then I'd have to kill you), Q-ship.
On second thought, use q.4h. No point in compounding ambiguity (regarding which, follow the link).
One suspects that the station name WKRP, of the TV series ``WKRP in Cincinnati,'' is an allusion to QRP.
When my father was a kid in Chile, if fat supplies for making soap ran low his mother would send him to a corner store to buy quillaya bark. It was sold by the kilo, like produce. You'd let it soak in a bowl of water for 24 hours and then you could use it.
My mother knew it in Germany as Quillaya Rinde (Rinde is `bark' in this context). Another natural soap is ``almond powder.''
QS has been tested as an accelerant in the bioremediation of PCB-contaminated soils (see CBA entry).
If you don't know that the author of those two books is Amy Tan, then I suppose you may not have realized that the first explanation was a joke.
A qualified tuition program (also known as a 529 program) is a program set up to allow you to either prepay, or contribute to an account established for paying, a student's qualified higher education expenses at an eligible educational institution. A program can be established and maintained by a state, an agency or instrumentality of a state, or an eligible educational institution.
I suppose most people aren't bothered much by the chattiness of the second-person pronoun. There are other irritations.
In the description of integrated circuits (usually SSI), it means ``quadruple: there are four of the particular gate or circuit. For example, the TTL 7400 is a ``quad 2-input NAND,'' so it has four NAND gates.
It may be surprising to notice that the quality values fall outside the range of 0% to 100%, implying negative masses of liquid or gas. What's going on here is that ``quality'' is being used to represent the average intrinsic value of a first-order thermodynamic quantity. In the cases I've seen (and I'm no steam engineer) it seems to be enthalpy. That is, the quality is taken to represent the specific enthalpy: the enthalpy of the liquid-gas mix is simply the mass-weighted average of the specific enthalpies of the two components. If all other things are equal, then enthalpy varies linearly with quality, and one can compute the enthalpy corresponding to a physically impossible value of quality. Hence, a negative quality value really only stands for pure liquid water at a lower enthalpy than liquid water has when it's in thermodynamic equilibrium with its vapor. Similarly, quality values above 100% really stand for water vapor of higher enthalpy than water vapor that is in equilibrium with the liquid.
Because of the dark l, it sounds the same as ``quam.'' But you knew that.
Oh yeah, quandrification is a nonce word which I saw in fact, precisely once. It means the construing or making of quandaries where none really exist.
Unconscionably, there appears to be a movement afoot to replace this pronounceable and even cool-sounding acronym with the vanilla initialism NDPB (q.v.). The only defense one can make of this replacement, admittedly a feeble one, is that the weasel prefix quasi- sucks the protoplasm not just out of autonomous but also non-governmental.
The plural quangos is much more common than quangoes. There's really no excuse for this. Even with a loan like mango, the -es plural form is holding its own.
Qualitative analysis has always had certain tools besides reaction and separation -- i.e., beyond those of synthesis. Originally, these tools were things like taste, smell, hardness, and streak (the characteristics of a streak left by one mineral scratching another). Priestley distinguished gases in part on the basis of how long a small animal could survive breathing them.
Even in its more advanced systematic forms, qualitative analysis was a craft and a kind of game. Given certain broad constraints on what was present in an unknown, the qualitative analyst would apply a sequence of tricks, the next step at each point selected on the basis of what had been learned up to that point. Of course, a ``game'' need not be easy. When my mother was a chemistry student at UBA in the 1950's, the qualitative analysis course (inorganic, of course) was the weed-out course. That day is passed. As is often the case, progress has simplified a task and replaced a quaint craft with methods that simply require a technician to, in the usual metaphor, `turn the crank.'' This stuff has gotten so automatic that in 1989, I (a theoretical physicist!) was trained to use an FTIR, which cranks out organic analysis. As one indication of current conditions, I note the words ``qualitative analysis'' have not occurred in the title of any Chemistry Department course in at least five years at Notre Dame (I happened to check in 2007).
Although prisms and lenses were used to decompose white light long before Newton, and though the colors of flames in particular reactions had also been described early on, spectroscopic methods only began to be used in a quantitative way starting in the nineteenth century. Today a large part of qualitative analysis is done by spectroscopy -- NMR, FTIR, etc. Moreover, where separation methods traditionally were used to divide a mixed substance into two components, modern analytic separation methods -- chromatographies, electrophoresis, ion mass spectrometry -- yield a continuous spectrum of results in a single separation.
Note that although these are methods of qualitative analysis (again: determining the identity of components), they yield data that are quantitative. That is, the sign that a particular substance (or functional group, etc.) is present is a particular signal, quantiatively described, appearing as a component in a spectrum. The strength of that signal is a measure of the amount of the substance, and hence the line between qualitative and quantitative analysis has become blurred.
None of that is what I really created this entry to talk about, but it just seemed responsible to mention it. All I really wanted to talk about is the essentially qualitative use of quantities. This might seem to involve the blurring of a line between qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, but in reality there is rarely any quantitive analysis involved, just quantities.
The place where this qualitative use of quantities is most on display is in news reporting and in public policy discussions. A dead giveaway, in the case of reporting, is the use of marks like 000. As explained at the linked entry, these are used by the author of an article to stand in temporarily for some number not readily or not already available. What they demonstrate is that no analysis by the article author can depend on the precise value of the missing number.
The proper numbers are eventually inserted (or the text modified), and this may satisfy the curiosity of some readers. But the purpose of the numbers may be rhetorical or polemical rather than informative. It just happens that 38, seventeen thousand, or five billion sounds more dramatic and convincing than ``many,'' and that stronger effect is the motive for getting the numbers. I found what I think is an unusually frank admission of this in a 1978 essay by Wayne C. Booth entitled ``Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation.''
Explicit discussions of something called metaphor have multiplied astronomically in the past fifty years. This increase is not simply parallel to the vast general increase in scholarly and critical writing. Shakespeareans have multiplied too, as have scholars of Homer, of Dickens, and of Charles the Second. But students of metaphor have positively pullulated. The bibliographies show more titles for 1977, for example, than for--well, the truth is that I refuse to do the counting to make this point, but I'll wager a good deal [precise amount not stated] that the year 1977 produced more titles than the entire hisory of thought before 1940. We shall soon no doubt have more metaphoricians than metaphysicians--or should that be metamorticians, the embalmers of dead metaphor? I have in fact extrapolated with my pocket calculator to the year 2039; at that point there will be more students of metaphor than people.
That speaks for itself, pretty much. It might be worth observing that Booth manages to conflate at least three different claims in this fraction of a paragraph. The paragraph (and essay) begin with a claim about conferences or discussions (not carefully distinguished) on the subject of metaphor. In the third sentence of the quote the discussion shifts to numbers of scholars (professional students) and makes the claim that the numbers of metaphor scholars are increasing relative to the numbers of other humanities scholars. Finally, Booth proposes to demonstrate this by a quantitative measure that would show something else: that the numbers of metaphor scholars have increased in absolute terms.
Not entirely obvious from the material above is the apparent degree to which quantitative terms are used, perhaps metaphorically, in Booth's work. At least in etymological terms, the ``evaluation'' in his title is an instance.
- In gas chemistry and atomic physics:
- An approximation dating back to Fermi. To wit, that electrons in
very high-lying states of an atom interact with other ions and atoms
they encounter essentially as if they were free.
- In condensed-matter physics:
- Electrons in the bottom of a single parabolic conduction band minimum act essentially like free particles (with an effective mass defined by the band curvature).
The current officially queer Spanish words are:
It's hard to say quid simply has identical singular and plural forms because there exists the expression ``quids in,'' meaning `in the money.'
Some lexicographers give a less strict definition, using the corners and center of a rectangle. Some offer adjectives (quincuncial, quincunxial) or adverb (quincuncially; what, no quincunxially?). Many offer less-fun botanical and astronomical senses, and etymologies are a nickel a dozen, but most only imply that the plural is regular. We tell you: quincunxes.
Wake up! It was also a loss because failure to achieve a quorum is sometimes intentional and interesting. This has mostly occurred at the state level in the US, probably because states are much smaller than the country, so larger quorums have been deemed feasible for state legislatures.
The earliest interesting instance I am aware of, without having studied this as a general phenomenon, occurred in Indiana during the Civil War. The governor was Oliver P. Morton, a stalwart Republican who was extremely active in the war effort, raising troops and supplies and canvassing the state in a campaign to support war morale on the home front. Perhaps those speeches were not as effective as they're made out to have been. In the wartime elections of 1862, Democrats took control of the legislature. The Democrats attempted to pass a military bill that would have severely limited the governor's authority and demanded the immediate retraction of the ``wicked, inhuman and unholy'' Emancipation Proclamation as a condition for continued Indiana support for the war. Morton convinced Republican legislators to leave the state, denying the Democrats a quorum. He ruled the state essentially as a dictator until the next elections, and in the absence of a budget the state was funded largely by personal loans to Morton from sympathetic bankers. For the elections of 1864, the soldiers were home and the legislature returned to Republican control. In violation of the state constitution, Morton was elected to another term, and he died solvent.
The famous legislative re-reapportionment in Texas was the motive of another quorum exodus, but I have to study that before I write more.
Three of the thirty chapters here are just substantial excerpts from Anderson's interviews with jazz musicians. I would have guessed that these were originally done for her radio show Sunday Morning Harmony, which airs on WBGO-FM 88.3 (a public radio station for jazz, with studios in Newark, NJ), but there's a small reason to think not. She is quoted by foreword author Randall Kenan as explaining that the show is limited ``to basically piano and guitar--or, as I say, `jazz without horns'.'' Chapter 11 is ``On Being Benny Golson.'' The artist profile on Benny Golson's website describes Himself thusly:
Multitalented and internationally famous jazz legend, - a composer, arranger, lyricist, producer - and tenor saxophonist of world note, Benny Golson was born in Philadelphia, PA on January 25, 1929.So I guess if they do something appropriately musical other than blow a horn, then she may still deign to interview them. The other interviews in the book are of Ron Carter and the son of Thelonious Sphere Monk. (That son, who goes by ``T.S. Monk,'' is a singer and drummer.)
Yeah, grammatical number is a chore. But languages that don't distinguish grammatical number often have even nastier features to compensate. The feature I have in mind is categorizers. That's the case with Guatemalteca (spoken by Mayan Indians) and Japanese (guess). In these languages, it's not necessary to distinguish plural from singular nouns. Kohi-o onegaishimasu indifferently means `I want a coffee, please' or `we want coffees, please.' (Not that Japanese makes a distinction between countable coffee and mass-noun coffee, but you get the idea.) However, if you do want to indicate a number, you can't just modify the noun with a quantifier; you have to give a categorizer along with the quantifier and (uninflected) noun.
The qwerty arrangement is traditional. Sholes, when he invented the typewriter, at first arranged the letters in alphabetic order. Unfortunately, people could type too quickly, and the type slugs, which had no return springs, would jam. (Even in the 1960's, typing on a Hermes or one of the inexpensive electric Smith-Coronas, I found that it was easy to type one character too soon after another and jam the machine.) In order to slow down the typist and keep the machine from being destroyed by frequent jams, Sholes moved the character assignments around so they would be inconvenient for most typists. One of the simpler inconveniences was placing the four most common letters (e, a, s, t) on the left. The first three of those are so far to the left they can only quickly be pressed with the weaker fingers of the left hand. (Note that in those days, left-handedness was suppressed, so even the approximately 10% of the population that would have been natural lefties were by training and practice not such strong lefties as righties were strong righties.) Some of the original alphabetic order is preserved in the dfghjkl/mn...z (think boustrophedon) order in the qwerty scheme. Cf. DSK.
J.P. Meier in his A Marginal Jew, writes (vol. 2, pg. 178):
I must admit, though, that the affirmation of Q's existence comes close to exhausting my ability to believe in hypothetical entities. I find myself increasingly skeptical as more refined and detailed theories about Q's extent, wording, community, geographical setting, stages of tradition and redaction, and coherent theology are proposed. I cannot help thinking that biblical scholarship would be greatly advanced if every morning all exegetes would repeat as a mantra: ``Q is a hypothetical document whose exact extension, wording, originating community, strata, and stages of redaction cannot be known.'' This daily devotion might save us flights of fancy that are destined, in my view, to end in skepticism.
When Julius Caesar instituted his major calendar reform, he relied on the advice of the astronomer Sosigenes. Sosigenes worked in Alexandria, Egypt. This was part of the Hellenistic world, only recently conquered by the Romans. It was ruled by Macedonians (who liked to think of themselves as northern Greeks, and who was to argue), though this was about to change. (Remember Cleopatra? Cleopatra VII? Let's forget about Cleopatra 2525.) There Greek was the lingua franca, the language of science and trade, sort of like English in Chicago. Greek uses noninclusive counting, like English. So when Sosigenes prescribed a leap year every fourth year, he meant that four years should pass between leap days. Julius Caesar, just like a Roman would, misunderstood, and instituted leap days that were three years apart.
In the first few decades of the Julian calendar, the intercalation continued to occur after the bissextile day, as it had in the Roman Republican calendar (see Q5 entry for the gory details). In our language, there were two February 24ths in a leap year. With the success of the new calendar, Julius Caesar decided to introduce one other little reform: he renamed one of the months after himself (the month we call ``July''). However, he never got to enjoy it. The March whose ides he was assassinated on occurred in the same year.
Starting in about 8 BCE (I have to check this), his nephew Octavius began to repair the problem with the too-frequent leap years: until 8 CE there were none -- that corrected the offset problem -- and afterwards they were resumed on the schedule that remained in place until at least 1582. Octavius, or Augustus Caesar, introduced another ``reform'' in 8 BCE. Like Julius, he renamed a month to honor himself (our ``August''). Since that month originally had only 30 days, and he wouldn't accept anything less than uncle Julius, he added one and ``balanced'' things out by changing the rest of the year. That is, the following month, September, went from 31 to 30, as did November; October and December were lengthened from 30 to 31. These changes, however, obviously didn't change the fact that the months after July now had one extra day. To keep the (non-leap) year at 365 days, Augustus shortened February to 28 days. Leap years continued to be called bissextile. I'll have to check when the leap day was inserted.
One year long enough to accommodate almost five ordinary quarter years was 708 AUC, which we know as 46 BC. Julius Caesar, finally in sole dictatorial control of the Roman Empire after defeating Pompey, instituted a substantial reform and rationalization of the calendar. The main previous system had required substantial intercalation, determined by a committee that deliberated secretly... The calendar had slipped backward relative to the seasons. In order to get the year back into sync with the seasons and celestial phenomena (i.e., Winter solstice in late December, etc.), 708 AUC was extended to at least 440 days, probably 445 (sources differ). Counting months instead of days, 46 BCE easily had five quarters, since it very likely had fifteen or sixteen months. Specifically, it had an ordinary 23-day intercalary month at the end of February, and 67 intercalated days between November and December. According to the Julius life in Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars and according to Censorinus 20.8, the 67 days were inserted as two months. Since 67 = 22 + 23 + 22, it has also been suggested that the 67 days were inserted as three intercalary months of the length that had been typical previously. They could thus even, though there is no evidence for the distribution, have been inserted in the traditional pattern of alternating lengths (23, 22, 23, 22).
Strictly speaking, 22 or 23 is not the length of the intercalated month, but the net number of days by which the leap year was longer than an ordinary year. The intercalated month, Mercedonius, had 28 or 29 days, but it was inserted in the Roman Republican calendar after the sixth day preceding the Kalends of March (Martius) -- hence the term ``bissextile'' describing it, and the loss of six days. That ``sixth day'' was determined by inclusive counting, of course. It was February 24 because February had 29 days in an ordinary year.
Anyway, following that five-quarter year Julius Caesar instituted a new calendar discussed at q.4h.. Heck, that's the previous entry!
Coming soon: information on finance and the Fifth Third.