____ NH
/ \ / 2
/ \____/
HN \
\ \
\ === O
=== NH /
/ /
/ HO
H N
2
Réaumur's scale is clearly superior to the others, for three reasons:
- It can describe the greatest range of temperatures with just two digits.
- It is conceptually less challenging.
- It has just the right amount of funkiness -- not too much (°F), not too little (°C).
The recommendation for J is ``Juliette.'' Perhaps you missed it when you were reading the jays.
The piece name Rook is derived from Persian. It's etymologically unrelated to the word rook meaning crow or someone who acts like a crow.
The whole game came to Europe from Persia. The name Chess itself comes from Shah (more evident in German, where chess is called Schach).
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
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Quintilian, trying to praise Seneca, but not too highly, remarks that
Seneca had many excellent qualities, a quick and fertile intelligence with great industry and wide knowledge, though as regards the last quality he was often led into error by those whom he had entrusted with the task of investigating certain subjects on his behalf.(Institutio Oratoria, book 10, ch. 1, sec. 130. Translation of H. E. Butler, part of the 1920-22 Loeb edition. See details and entire English at Bil Thayer's LacusCurtius.)
Traditionally, star catalogs are ordered by right ascension, whereas Sears catalogs are ordered by people distant from population centers. You could look them up as they rise. (I mean the stars. The sky ones.) Of course, if you're not using a tracking mechanism, the easiest way to locate most stars is relative to the constellations (q.v.) they are part of or near to.
The general information in the preceding paragraph came mostly from conversations with three other rabbit owners. Now I want to share a couple of things I learned during my own one-month stint as a rabbit owner:
- A rabbit that has been potty-trained may experience confusion in a new environment. In particular, it may seem to know that it should do its business in a rectangular tray, but may not realize that the presence of newspaper and straw are crucial identifying marks of the appropriate receptacle. It may therefore use any overturned boxtop it finds in a secluded location.
- The domestic rabbit has an innate habbit (that must be the spelling) of gnawing on electrical wiring. In my experience, if the wire is a plugged-in power cord, it gnaws through the insulation and stops after some of the wire is exposed. I haven't observed the process -- only its effects -- but from the condition of the wires it seems that a number of shocks are required before the rabbit gives up. I suppose high humidity would be helpful -- the rabbit would thus be well-grounded and well-shocked.
Hares are not rabbits. Hares were already in Europe during Roman times when rabbits from Spain invaded and colonized Europe. The origin of the name of Spain is uncertain, but one popular hypothesis traces it to the Punic (i.e. Carthaginian- and Phoenician-language) word for rabbit, tsepan or span in a couple of Latin-character renderings.
See also the Automobile Association (AA).
All French dictionaries I have checked give only an uncountable or collective racaille, and no countable individual use such as is now current in English. Intrigued by a November 2005 editorial in English that claimed en passant that racaille means `hoodlum,' I searched for uses of the lexeme in French news articles. It seems that the majority of uses are still uncountable (i.e., as described in dictionaries) or at least ambiguous (e.g., attributive uses of the singular form, which might be interpreted as countable or not.) However, a countable form applicable to individuals -- perhaps originally slang -- is becoming evident. In a July 2005 article in Le Télégram, a proud mother is quoted remarking that her daughter's success in school ``prouve que le cliché `gosses de HLM = racailles' n'est pas fondé.'' (Only the quotation marks have been changed to protect the innocent. This means ``proves that the stereotype `kids from the projects = hoodlums' is unfounded.'')
The earliest instance I can find is from 1994 (this mostly reflects the limitations of my database): ``Blues des racailles'' was the debut album of Tonton David, described as having ``origines banlieusardes.'' The last phrase can be translated literally as `suburban origins,' but if you're thinking whitebread and lawn-mowers, you need to have a look at the entry for jeunes des banlieues.
There were riots in the Lille area on Christmas Eve 1998, and among those charged in connection with it were three adults with prior criminal records. Their prosecutor told the court, ``Ce sont trois voyous, trois racailles.'' [`They are three thugs, three hoodlums.'] In a phrase that would resonate in 2005, Le Figaro described Roubaix as having ``un calme précaire,'' (`a fragile calm').
I don't think so.
Any individual unit of rack-mountable equipment is sold in a chassis with a firmly attached front panel, all designed to take up a whole number of U's of vertical space, and the entire width inside the rack. One mounts the equipment onto a rack by screwing the front panel to the front sides of two rails. (In the equipment I'm familiar with, the front panel is typically a steel sheet one sixteenth to one eighth of an inch thick.) Various elaborations of this system are used, particularly for heavy equipment, involving vertical rails at the back (see U entry). Regardless of these additional support mechanisms, the front panels have standard dimensions which allow them to be firmly mounted on the rails. At least twelve panel specifications are designated by letter names:
| Panel Size | Height in whole U's |
|---|---|
| A | 1 |
| B | 2 |
| C | 3 |
| D | 4 |
| E | 5 |
| F | 6 |
| G | 7 |
| H | 8 |
| J | 9 |
| K | 10 |
| L | 11 |
| M | 12 |
But Harry Morgan, who played the unit commander (Col. Sherman T. Potter) on M*A*S*H from 1975 to the end, really was the same actor who played Jack Webb's partner on the 1967-1970 Dragnet series. He also played a crazy general named Steele in a 1974 episode of M*A*S*H.
A palindrome, how 'bout that!
Invented in Britain in 1940 by Robert M. Page and others, and independently in Germany. The name was coined by S. M. Tucker.
During the war, Britain sent its developers to work in the US on rapid roll-out. Through the course of the war, there was time enough for a couple of generations of measures and countermeasures to be developed, what we now call ECM. In the course of research, it was unexpectedly discovered that microwaves didn't travel as far in humid weather -- a fact that led to development of the microwave oven. The research was conducted at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (``Rad Lab''), which was disbanded before the war ended. The lab name is often described as having been purposely chosen to be deceptive, but it's hardly inaccurate.
Text copied February 2005: ``The RADAR Network, sponsored by SAMHSA's NCADI, is the largest substance abuse prevention and treatment network of its kind. There are more than 700 active Centers worldwide with representation in every State and U.S. territory.
This unique network offers free membership and provides an organized way for States to connect with one another and with national agencies such as the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD), and the National Prevention Network (NPN).
In practice, almost any capacitor package that is not a box and has two leads not in an ``axial'' configuration is liable to be called ``radial.'' The usage even extends to those bright oblong capacitors whose correct technical designation I believe to be orange drop.
Here's a toy code to convert between different radices.
``Hexadecimal'' is one of those bastard ``New Latin'' or ``international scientific vocabulary'' words (ISV), half-Latin (-decimal) and half-Greek (hexa-) like automobile, television and electrocute.
See C. R. Cook and P. S. P. Wang, ``A Chomsky hierarchy of isotonic array grammars and languages,'' Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 8, pp. 144-152 (1978).
Nice Memorial Day weather. I pulled up to a light, banging time to the music against the outside of my car door. A bit ahead of me in the other lane, I noticed a guy in a ragtop; I couldn't hear his sound system. I wondered: what do people in convertibles do when some jerk like me comes up, and they can't block out the sound? There was some space ahead of him -- he could have pulled further away from me. I had Little Feat's ``Dixie Chicken'' on -- I turned up the volume. The guy in the ragtop turned and smiled, and gave me a solidarity sign.
Then one night in the lobby
Of the Commodore Hotel,
I chanced to meet a bartender
Who said he knew her well.And as he handed me a drink,
He began to hum a song,
And all the boys at the bar
Began to sing along...
The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland created in 1871 resulted from the remerger of the Anthropological Society with the Ethnological Society, from which the former had split off in 1863 as a result of ``racialist issues'' not further described at the society's short history page. The secession was led by James Hunt and Captain Richard Burton and was created ``ostensibly to provide an alternative to the Ethnological Society after the latter had allowed the admission of the `fair sex' to meetings'' according to an ``[e]xtract from W. Chapman's unpublished D.Phil thesis 1981, `Ethnology in the Museum'.'' (I'm not sure whose view is expressed in the quoted text.) Quoting from the same webpage: ``Following Hunt's death, the Anthropological Society itself, ... had generally lapsed into disarray.''
At the IC entry, you can read about the Illinois Central accident in 1900 that took the life of the man remembered as ``Casey'' Jones. At the KX entry you can read about a couple of accidents that took place at the King's Cross station north of London, in 1946 and 2002. The TOPS entry mentions the crash that took place at Southall (west London) in 1997. The next fatal accident on British railways took place two years later, October 5, 1999. That accident is described right here, at the entry you're reading.
Thirty-one people were killed at Ladbroke Grove, west London -- a Thames train went through a red signal (spadded) and collided head-on with a high-speed service traveling from Cheltenham to Paddington. These two accidents (Southall and Ladbroke Grove) occurred about 8 miles apart, on the same line, and in circumstances that at least superficially appear to bear a strong resemblance. Subsequent fatal accidents (October 17, 2000, four dead and 87 injured when the London-to-Leeds express derailed on a broken track near Hatfield station in Hertfordshire, and the 2002 accident described at the KX entry) seem to have been more track-related.
(There was also an accident at Selby on February 28, 2001, when a Land Rover veered off the M62 in North Yorkshire into the path of a GNER train coming from Newcastle. Driver Gary Hart, who had fallen asleep at the wheel, survived but was sentenced to five years in prison for causing death by dangerous driving.)
In Italian (and in Spanish, for that matter), lento is the adjective meaning `slow.' If your Italian comprehension is worse than your speech, Italians may answer you in a normal conversational speed. You need to say something like ``più lento, per piaciere!''
RALPH disbanded in 1987 when Gleason died. Its last convention was in August 1986 at the old Felt Forum in NYC (now called The Theatre at Madison Square Garden).
Most RAM is organized in rectangular arrays of word lines and bit lines. Any code in the process of execution, and as much as possible of the data which that code requires, are stored in RAM. (For a complication, see the OVL entry.)
Until the late 1960's, the RAM in most computers was in the form of arrays of small ferrite ``cores.'' (That's the origin of the term ``core dump.'') A bit was encoded by the direction of magnetization of a core. The first great success of MOS technology was the rapid take-over of the core memory market by SRAM. SRAM and especially DRAM are still the overwhelmingly dominant forms of central RAM.
Good resources are The RAM Guide and The Ultimate Memory Guide. Here's a nice general tutorial on computer systems that has substantial information on memory.
Some operating systems require a great deal of RAM.
He wrote,
Experience in working with sunlight indicated the techniques necessary for the observation of extremely weak phenomena, viz. the rigorous exclusion of stray light and the conditioning of the observer's vision by a prolonged stay in darkness.Those were the good ol' days.
The Cardona group is well known for it. They offer about a 500-word introduction.
Here's some more instructional material from Virginia Tech.
Hundreds of K of captioned gifs are available from the Wilson group at UCSD, at a science TV level of sophistication.
`Rambam' is too easy to confuse with Ramban (for R. ben Nachman, or Nachmanides).
Ramekins were traditionally made with the same material and finish as teacups and other flatware (i.e., either porcelain, or a substitute for porcelain such as hard low-friction plastic). Metal (stainless steel) is also common. If they were made of paper, they'd be cupcaKe cups.
Restaurants use ramekins to supply patrons with Individual servings of salad dressing ``on the side,'' dips, sauces, etc. Ramekin is easier to say than ``non-Newtonian-fluid container.''
Hmm. It turns out that ramekin is not an acronym. Not even an akrenim. I guess you can ignore the expansion capitalizations in the preceding paragraphs. If you did not ignore them before, you can go back and ignore them later. Anyway, the word ramekin, also spelled ramequin, is from the French ramequin, which was a food item. Exactly which food items were covered by the term is not entirely clear to me, but something like a miniature soufflé may have been one of them. In English, the name eventually became attached to the dish used to make the, uh, dish -- metonymy is a two-way street.
Some deathly-boring stories about ramekin-related conversations can be found at the restaurant jargon entry, so go there right away. (But don't forget to go back first and ignore that odd capitalization.)
Note that most animals that reproduce sexually (and which therefore have natural gender) do not have both grammatical genders in Spanish. For example, frog and toad are la rana y el sapo. For more about that, see the sapo entry.
BTW, the Latin original of this word was ramus, a second-declension male noun, so one would expect only ramo in Spanish. On the other hand, gender wobbled a bit. One example I can think of is baculum, a Latin word meaning a staff of some sort. It was second-declension neuter, of course, but for some reason, I can't imagine why, it began to be declined male (as the word baculus) in late Roman times, until that became (I think) the word's predominant gender in Medieval Latin. In English now, a baculus (plural baculi) is a staff that serves as a symbol of authority. The restored classical form baculum is modern biological terminology for the penis-bone (found in many mammal species). The plural of baculum (in English -- as usual one uses only the nominative forms) is bacula. There is also a Latin noun whose singular nominative form is bacula; it means `small berry.'
Scott Bakula played Captain Jonathan Archer in Enterprise, a 2001 TV prequel of the original Star Trek series. The character played by Bakula was (i.e., will have been) James Tiberius Kirk's childhood hero. Always some Latin, or at least Romance, connection.
The West Greek alphabet, adopted by the Etruscans and inherited by the Romans, began with alpha, beta, gamma, just like the East Greek alphabet more familiar to us. (And about like all the Semitic alphabets -- aleph, bet, gimel in Hebrew, for example.) If you rotate a capital gamma counterclockwise by 45 degrees, it looks like an angular letter cee. (Back before printing, rotation was one of the most common deformations suffered by letter glyphs.) Over time, the sound of that third letter became devoiced in Latin, so instead of a hard gee sound as in the English word goat, it had a hard cee sound as in the English word coat. A way to represent the gee sound was still wanted, so a new letter based on cee was invented and inserted in the alphabet after the letter eff (which was the old Greek letter digamma). Notice the resemblance of the glyphs C and G? Most Latin words that contained the hard cee sound (i.e., the sound of kay or Greek kappa) were originally written K, but it eventually became common to write them with a C instead. With a few exceptions (like Kaeso), K came to be used in Latin primarily to transliterate the kappa in Greek loan words. I'm not sure if specific evidence exists that bacula was originally written bakula, but it is the natural presumption.
The indecision -- whether to use cee or kay to represent the hard-cee sound, recurred in other languages that adopted versions of the Latin alphabet. English and German, which replaced runes with Latin characters very roughly about the time they replaced indigenous paganism with Christianity, both went through an early period during which neither character was dominant. Eventually, cee became dominant in English (particularly in word-initial position and in consonant clusters, and wherever the consonant was not followed by e or i) , and kay became dominant in German. In both cases, the convergence on a preferred letter involved reform of some spellings that had become established. In English, for example, the adjective ending -ick was replaced by -ic, and etymologically unrelated final -ick was also often changed (when unstressed, I suppose). This might make a little clearer why we add a -k- in forming the past tense of -ic verbs (panic, panicked; picnic, picnicked, traffic, trafficked) instead of doubling the final consonant of the root in the usual way.
Incidentally, in Spanish one increasingly finds the word área used in the transferred sense of an abstract area of ideas or activities, just as in English. This is a recent development, an anglicismo. As recently as fifty years ago, área was rarely used except in reference to physical space.
If you look over the preceding entry as a whole, I think you will agree that most of the content was related to the headword. If you don't agree, too bad.
M-m-m-myyyy Ramona!
Oh wait, that was Sharona. A Ramones song? Never mind.
Anyway, a bass player and singer named Douglas Glenn Colvin learned something of this. (Precisely what Colvin had heard or knew is either already known or never will be, since he's dead.) With this as his inspiration, he adopted the stage name Dee Dee Ramone. Two guys he was starting up a band with in 1974 followed suit, and they named their group the Ramones. All subsequent band members, including Tom, who joined before their first public performance, adopted stage names with a Ramone surname. The first names and initials that were used with the surname were uniformly uninteresting and unoriginal. It's horrifying to think that the Spice Girls represented progress of any kind at all, but there you are.
At the University of Buffalo in 1994 or so, some students formed a group they called the Algonquin Round Table. My immediate reaction was that since they were unlikely to measure up to the original and famous group whose name they took, their choice of name was in the nature of lèse majesté. If Colvin et al. had called themselves ``The McCartneys,'' it would have been something like that. So I suppose they might be praised for their restraint, of all things.
Starting under USAAF funding, the Douglas Aircraft Company conducted a research program called Project RAND from 1945-8, a preliminary study of earth-orbiting satellites. In May 1948, RAND became an independent organization. It used to figure in loopy conspiracy theories. I order you not to believe them.
RAPID is a not-for-profit 501(c)(6) organization formed by over 70 leading agricultural companies to allow the agricultural community to take advantage of the new developments in electronic communications. This organization was formed by the American Crop Protection Association with the purpose of moving the agriculture industry manufacturers, distributors, resellers, growers and others to new levels of communications, electronic commerce and regulatory compliance and stewardship capabilities.In the early 1990's, several agricultural companies formed the Ag [sic] Alliance for Electronic Communication (AAEC). This group began the effort to develop necessary standards and guidelines to make electronic commerce work for the entire industry. In July 1995, that organization evolved into a separate legal entity called RAPID ..., an industry consortium dedicated to bringing Electronic Commerce solutions to all of agribusiness.
For more about rock material vide infra. For more on the Rock'n'Roll-chemistry nexus, see the geology and Li entries.
Back in the 1980's, a research group found surprisingly high rare earth concentrations in meteorites that fell to earth in Antarctica -- where the chance of environmental contamination is minimal. Specifically, they discovered perfect microscopic spheres very high in rare earth content on the surface of the meteorite. This was a very puzzling discovery. Eventually, they got another publication (in Scripta Physica) out of their research -- a retraction, in which they described very similar microspheres of essentially the same composition, generated by the flint from their cigarette lighters.
I'll put in the reference when I find my file of this sort of thing. I wanted to at least mention it now because it gives me an entry in which to add the following: In Houston, Texas, on the ides of March, 2001, an eighteen-wheeler overturned and spilled its 23-ton load of frozen chickens, closing part of I-10 for several hours. The driver had lost control of the rig when he dropped his cigarette and bent over to pick it up.
The rock group called ``Rare Earth'' was originally called ``The Sunliners.'' They had some limited success and released records with MGM, Hercules, Golden World, and Verve. They signed with Motown in 1969, and the name-change was inspired or imposed by Motown execs. More at RE, but not about the rock group.
![[cyrillic]](images/ikirust2.gif)
).
In principle, the inspector general of an agency is independent of the agency head, and there are rules meant to allow the inspector general to act without fear of interference by political appointees or the White House. It's a civil-servicey sort of idea. The RAT Board now will have the authority to ask ``that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting [sic] an audit or investigation.'' If the inspector general doesn't want to do so, then the IG must write a report explaining his decision to the board, to the agency head and to Congress. Fans of the institution of the inspector general, and of inspectors' general independence (I hope that's the pl. poss. form) fear that this oversight will have a chilling effect on IG's. I don't know who gets to sit on a RAT Board.
It's not known who put the RAT language in the bill, since the bill was ``crafted'' behind closed doors in a hurry. (It's doubtful that any single person -- legislator or staffer -- could have read all 1073 pages of the bill, let alone studied or largely understood it.) Byron York, chief political correspondent for the DC Examiner, reported that he was told by one Democratic senator that the RAT Board was ``something the Obama administration wanted included in this bill.'' (If true this would be one of the few indications that the Obama administration made an effort to influence the legislation.) When York asked the White House, staffers told him they'd ``look into it.'' He didn't hear back.
Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a longtime champion of inspectors general, only heard about the RAT Board from a concerned IG, a couple of days before the conference committee reported out a final bill. He was alarmed by the words ``conduct or refrain from conducting.'' On Friday, Feb. 13, as the bill was barreling toward narrow passage, Grassley wanted to voice his objections on the floor of the ``world's greatest deliberative body,'' as the US Senate is fatuously known. But there was no time in the rush to a vote, so Grassley's statement went unread. Part of his prepared statement: ``It's fitting that the acronym for this board is RAT, because that's what I smell here.''
Rockets, jet engines, and squid all use a backward-directed jet of fluid to generate thrust. Squid suck in the fluid (dirty water, yuck) from sides and front and squirt it out the back. Jet engines suck air in the front and mix it with fuel in a turbine. The fuel-air mix burns, and the expansion (of the air and combustion gases, mostly H2O and CO2) turns the turbine. The turning of the turbine pulls in more air and propels a jet of exhaust backward. Part of the jet force comes from the fact that the exhaust gases are under higher pressure than the intake air. It would be simpler if you just burned the fuel and used its expansion directly, but then how would you get the expansion to produce a backward-directed jet without a forward-directed jet?
Rockets are simpler in that respect. Instead of sucking in air to oxidize the fuel, they use oxidant that is carried with the vehicle, condensed in tanks, the same way fuel is carried. From a practical perspective, oxidant and fuel (reducer) are similar: volatile, dangerously combustible condensed materials in tanks. Hence, the propellants are sometimes both loosely called ``fuel.''
Similarly, jet and rocket engines both propel by burning fuel to produce a backward-directed jet, and so are somewhat similar in practical terms. Hence also, the term JATO is often used where RATO confused. Here (see pg. 2) is a clear instance of ``RATO/JATO'' being used where only RATO is meant. If you want to be charitable, you can say that RATO is jet-assisted, just not jet engine-assisted.
The scientific method is like that.
A biologist conducted a series of experiments on a grasshopper. When he shouted ``jump'' or clapped, he could make it jump (``induce saltatory behavior,'' as he wrote in journals). So he removed its front (prothoracic) legs and yelled, and the grasshopper still jumped. He removed the middle two legs (mesothoracic), and the grasshopper still jumped. Finally, he removed the rear legs (metathoracic), and the grasshopper did not jump. He concluded that a grasshopper hears with its hind legs. Fascinating similar research is described at a BBL entry.
When my old boss at Naval Research Labs (NRL) told this story over beers at the end of my first week at work, I pointed out that many insects do hear with their legs. [I think it's called keeping an ear to the ground, but I didn't say so.] Years later, he told me that this had been the first sign to him that I might be alright after all.
I say that the blueness we see in the atmosphere is not intrinsic color, but is caused by warm vapor evaporated in minute and insensible atoms on which the solar rays fall, rendering them luminous against the infinite darkness of the fiery sphere which lies beyond and includes it.... If you produce a small quantity of smoke and if you place [behind it] a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not fall, you will see that the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue color.... Water violently ejected in a fine spray and in a dark chamber where the sunbeams are admitted produces then blue rays.... Hence it follows, as I say, that the atmosphere assumes this azure hue by reason of the particles of moisture which catch the rays of the sun.
According to one book:
It is impossible to translate the Russian word razvedka precisely into any foreign language. It is usually rendered as `reconnaissance' or `spying' or `intelligence gathering'. A fuller explanation of the word is that it describes any means and any actions aimed at obtaining information about an enemy, analysing it and understanding it properly, like cleaning your eyeglasses.
(Emphasis added. Actually, the whole emphasized phrase was added.) Perhaps the claim about ``any'' foreign language is overstrong. I don't imagine the author checked more than a few hundred languages before giving up, do you? Anyway, assuming that the standard for precise translation is not set so high that most words are untranslatable, I think `intelligence operations' or `secret-agent stuff' may do. This quote opens the second chapter, ``Spetsnaz and the GRU,'' of a book by ``Viktor Suvorov'' (actually Vladimir Rezun; see spetsnaz entry for details).
Spetsnaz, not to put another fine point on it, is `special ops.' Rezun goes on to say: ``Spetsnaz is one of the forms of Soviet military razvedka which occupies a place somewhere between reconnaissance and intelligence.'' It doesn't look that way to me... ``Spetsnaz differs from other forms of razvedka in that it not only seeks and finds important enemy targets, but in the majority of cases attacks and destroys them.'' I guess you could think of this as a form of constructive proof in intelligence analysis: if you destroy an enemy asset, say, then you have given a proof that it no longer exists. Okay, then: a ``destructive non-existence proof,'' if you insist. But it's really just a kind of muscular logic.
I suppose Rezun might have had a point in insisting. Among the best-known KGB spetsnaz operations was the coup against Afghan president Hafizullah Amin, two days after Christmas in 1979. This doesn't really fit entirely under the category of intelligence gathering. Then again, in 1954 a coup was orchestrated in Guatemala by the US CIA, so a somewhat similar operation (in general outcome if not in method) was conducted by an ``intelligence'' organization. But by this reasoning, the secret service protection of the US President is a treasury operation. Well, maybe it is. Still, we wouldn't say training, aiding, and advising a Guatemalan rebel army is an ``intelligence operation,'' but rather a ``covert operation.'' Eh.
Incidentally, I earlier referred the date of the Afghan coup to a US, yes US, holiday. I did this specifically because there is a natural and general pattern of taking action when one's enemies are at a lower level of readiness due to their holidays, and in this case the relevant strong enemy was the US. (If it had been Canada, I'd have written ``hours after Boxing Day,'' which sounds more aggressive.) Other examples: The 1973 Arab war against Israel, launched on Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday, and George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware to attack Hessian troops on Christmas night in 1776. In the latter case, there is a legend that aftereffects of drunken Christmas revelry in the Hessian camp contributed to the American victory, but apparently the main advantage in the attack timing was simply that of surprise, and weather that on balance worked to American advantage.
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Look at it this way: FM broadcast-band frequencies are located 200 kHz apart. There's no point broadcasting sound with pitches much above 20 kHz, unless you're broadcasting for dogs, so even with stereo broadcasts they're not using 160kHz of the bandwidth allocated. There's plenty of unused bandwidth for a little bit of digital data. (No, the pun was unintentional, completely unavoidable; I do not apologize.) In fact, systems have been in place for years which piggy-back signals for private subscribers multiplexed over the public signal. Sometimes, this is where Muzak comes from -- i.e., the way franchises get their music ``piped in'' without extra wiring. (Actually, the available bandwidth is greater in principle and narrower by law: two radio stations in close geographic proximity are not allocated adjacent frequencies, but in any case the FCC limits the transmission bandwidth.)
Incidentally, while we're on the subject of kudzu (Radix puerariae). A chemical called daidzin can be extracted from it that reduces the preference of hamsters to drink alcohol rather than water, but these results (like earlier similar results with Prozac) are suspect because hamsters metabolize alcohol too quickly to achieve intoxication -- they apparently drink for the calories, and will give up alcohol for chocolate drink with similar calorie content (first preference) or tomato juice with similar content (second choice). The research was reported in 1995.
They only play cricket there, so it's not a problem.
It occurs to me that window blinds, which used to be called Venetian blinds in the English, are called persianas in Spanish. Hmm. I may not have been the only one dissatisfied with the old name. ``Royal Blind Society has merged and is part of RBS.RVIB.VAF Ltd incorporating the former businesses of Royal Blind Society of NSW (RBS), Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (RVIB) and the Vision Australia Foundation (VAF).'' A company called ``Brand by Voice'' was hired ``to position and brand the newly combined agency. Brand by Voice has extensive experience in brand development and strategy for major organizations in both the public and private sectors. ... They have worked for Qantas, Vodafone, AMP, NAB, St George, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Australian Government.'' I imagine that they also invented those funny words (wallaby, etc.) and the practice of making ay and aye sound alike. (Marketing issues are discussed at the Polish entry.)
``Brand by Voice is currently [2004] in its discovery phase consulting with key stakeholders, gaining insights into specific audiences, competitors and potential challenges.'' Yeah, well, don't make it sound like an interior decorator group, or an exhibitor's booth at a duck-hunters' convention. Isn't this a charity? What are ``competitors''?
See ``A New Mechanism for Degradation of Al-Si-Cu/TiN/Ti Contacted p-n Junction,'' by Takehito Yoshida, Hiroyuki Kawahara and Shin-ichi Ogawa in Procs. of the 1992 IRPS, pp. 344-348.