![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
In many other countries, the area codes (or ``city codes'') are distinguished by the fact that they begin in zero (wait long enough after the zero without entering another digit and you get an operator). You omit the zero if you're dialing in from out-of-country.
TRU is one company mentioned here with the TGP area code.
This page has some pictures and speed records. The Washington University of Saint Louis electronic picture archive has a number of jpegs of French high speed trains:
- 580 × 397 jpeg, 99kbytes (tgva.jpg)
- 790 × 404 jpeg, 87k (tgvawr1.jpg)
- 572 × 387 jpeg, 91k (tgvawr2.jpg)
- 580 × 385 jpeg, 83k (tgvawr3.jpg)
- 768 × 358 jpeg, 141k (tgvawr4.jpg)
- 355 × 323 jpeg, 54k (tgvpse1.jpg)
- 569 × 394 jpeg, 95k (tgvpse2.jpg)
- 384 × 570 jpeg, 74k (tgvpse3.jpg)
- 567 × 387 jpeg, 74k (tgvpse4.jpg)
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Its area is 16,171 sq. km. The population in 1997 was about 2.5 million. The capital is Weimar. Thuringia is in the part of Germany that used to be East Germany, but it went out of existence as a separate state in 1934 and was only reconstituted following reunification in 1990.
At Eats 'n' Sweets, an ice-cream-and-pizza place on PA-611 in Scotrun, the garbage bins say
_________ ________
| TRASH || FEED |
| MONSTER || ME |
|_________||________|
THANK YOU
That's how it is: with the big chains you get consistency. With the independents you get personality.
I suppose that there's a lot more material, particularly moving-image material, available for WWII than for earlier historical events, but the prevalence of WWII programs must reflect some editorial decision-making as well. THC could probably put together a pretty substantial retrospective on how the war went in Vietnam -- wouldn't that be fun?
As you can tell from the wussy punches I'm landing, my heart isn't really in the task of lampoo--er, I mean writing a glossary entry for THC. The truth is that THC is my favorite TV channel, and in recent years I probably haven't gone more than a semester without watching at least a half hour of it. It's a shame I didn't watch any TV during the week that Nielsen had me fill out a diary; I'd've been happy to contribute to their statistics.
As long as I'm here and I'm not contributing anything useful, I might as well unload my burden of opinions about the popular presentation of nonfiction in general. I'm not going to discuss news, since I'm still getting over a cold and I don't think my stomach could handle that.
(This bit is under construction, see?)
Let's take a moment here to recall Lyndon Johnson's alleged comment about Gerald Ford -- that he was so stupid he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. This was widely reported when Gerald Ford was appointed US Veep, replacing ``disgraced former Vice President'' Spiro Agnew, and again when he assumed the presidency, replacing disgraced former president Richard Nixon (and again any time news cameras caught the athletic president stumbling). You could claim that Ford advanced because of his personal virtues, but that wouldn't be the complete story. Later it was revealed that the chew-gum version was a bowdlerization, and what LBJ had really said was that Ford couldn't fart at the same time. (Later yet it turned out that the retailer of the revised version was unable to provide a source for his claim. But what does evidence matter? Details at the Veep entry.) People seemed to think that the earthier version was more demeaning to one or both of the former presidents, but they're wrong. Was it walk-and-fart or chew-gum-and-fart? I forget. Either way, it may require careful sphincter control with simultaneous control of nearby (walking) or other GI-tract-related (gum) muscles. Now look, if you're not interested in the larger point I'm trying to make, you could read something else about reporter language competence or something else about the accidental president.
(To be continued.)
The sum of the square roots of the sides equals the square root of the hypotenuse, according to the scarecrow's acceptance address.
Square root of the ratio of power in all harmonics (or very commonly for audio, all harmonics up to 20 kHz) to power in signal.
More at the TDA entry.
Thirty centuries ago, as history emerged from the mists of ancient legend, an Athenian hero named Hekademos owned some land about a mile northwest of Athens. He donated the land to the city for a park, and over the years it was developed into a center for religion, sports, and education. In 388 or 387 BCE, a former playwright and politician named Aristocles established his own school in that park. Aristocles was better known by a nickname meaning `broad' or `wide,' which may have referred to his being broad-shouldered or to his having a wide forehead. The Greek root for `flat' and `broad' is related to the English word ``flat'': plat-. Aristocles was called Plato.
The park where Plato taught was named Hekademeia, and eventually Akademeia (these names seem more similar in Greek than English). Plato's school became so famous that eventually, Akademeia (our word Academy) came to refer to his school and his followers.
- AOTBTY (All Of The Best To You)
- ATB (All The Best)
- ATG (Albert The Great -- no, not Einstein)
- ATG (Alexander The Great)
- ATM (At The Moment)
- ATWT (As The World Turns)
- BTW (By The Way)
- COTF (Classroom Of The Future)
- DSOTM (``Dark Side Of The Moon'')
- DtB (Down The Back)
- DtF (Down The Front)
- DWTC (Down With The Clown)
- FITL (Fiber In The Loop)
- FLOTUS (First Lady Of The United States)
- FOTA (Future Of The Alliance)
- FTAOD (For The Avoidance Of Doubt)
- FTHOI (For The Hell Of It)
- FTL (Fruit of The Loom)
- FTN (Face The Nation)
- GOTV (Get Out The Vote)
- GWTW (Gone With The Wind)
- HotS (Harvard Of The South)
- ITC (In The City -- the inclusion of this initialism probably proves that I have no shame)
- JTS (Jump The Shark)
- LotR (Lord Of The Rings)
- LOTS (Logistics Over The Shore)
- MOTAS (Member Of The Appropriate Sex)
- MOTOS (Member Of The Opposite Sex)
- MOTSS (Member Of The Same Sex)
- MTP (Meet The Press)
- nitle (Not In The Latest Explorator)
- OTH (Over The Horizon)
- OTOH (On The Other Hand)
- OTR (Over The Road)
- OTT (Over The Top)
- OTTOMH (Off The Top Of My Head)
- PLUTO (PipeLine[s] Under The Ocean)
- POTM (Phase Of The Moon)
- POTM (Programmer Of The Month)
- POTPOTUS (Part, nudge-nudge, Of The POTUS)
- POTUS (President Of The United States)
- PTL (Praise The Lord)
- RITL (Radio In The Loop)
- ROTFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing)
- ROTFLMAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off)
- ROTFLMFO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Face Off)
- ROTFLMGO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Guts Out)
- ROTFLMHO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Head Off)
- ROTFLYAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing Your Ass Off)
- ROTK (Return Of The King)
- ROTM (Run Of The Mill)
- ROTTI (Rights Of The Terminally Ill)
- RTFM (Read The Manual)
- SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States)
- SftP (Science For The People)
- SOTM (Satellite communications On-The-Move)
- SotRT (Society Of The Rusting TARDIS)
- SOTU (State Of The Union)
- STB (Shit The Bed)
- ST:TAS (Star Trek: The Animated Series)
- ST:TNG (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
- ST:TOS (Star Trek: The Original Series)
- STTSP (Save The Trafalgar Square Pigeons)
- TAE (American Enterprise)
- TAF (Africanist Foundation)
- TAFKAC (Archive Formerly Known As Cathouse)
- TAFKAP (Artist Formerly Known As Prince)
- TAIC (A______s In Charge)
- TAJ (Acts of Jesus)
- TAP (Airline of Portugal -- false etymology)
- TAP (American Prospect)
- TAP (American Psychoanalyst)
- TAS (American Spectator)
- TAS (Animated [Star Trek] Series)
- TBTB (Bastards That Be)
- TCF (Century Fund)
- TCIE (Center for Industrial Effectiveness)
- TDN (Detroit News)
- TDWI (Data Warehousing Institute)
- TELA (Electronically Linked Academy)
- TELOS (Electronic Library Of Science)
- TERI (Education Resources Institute)
- TFG (Five Gospels)
- TFWNSNBU (Film Whose Name Shall Not Be Uttered)
- THC (History Channel)
- THOG (House of God [title of a novel])
- THOMAS (House of Representatives Open Multimedia Access System)
- TIA (Internet Adaptor)
- TIAC (Internet Access Company)
- TIACA (International Air Cargo Association)
- TIFKAD (Instrument Formerly Known As Dobro)
- TIGHAR (International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery)
- TIGR (Institute for Genomic Research)
- TIIC (Idiots In Charge)
- TINCAN (Inland Northwest Community Access Network)
- TIP (Industrial Physicist [magazine])
- TIPTOP (Internet Pilot To Physics)
- TITWB (Trapped In The Wrong Body)
- TIWTGLGG (This Is Where The Goofy Little Grin Goes)
- TJB (Jerusalem Bible)
- TLC (Learning Channel)
- tLotF&tHotB (Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave)
- TLSC (Llama Steering Committee)
- TMC (Movie Channel)
- TMMW (Man-Made World)
- TMN (Movie Network)
- TMR (Medieval Review)
- TMS (Metallurgical Society)
- TMV (Mars Volta)
- TNC (Nature Conservancy)
- TNC (New Criterion)
- TNG (Next Generation)
- TNN (Nashville Network)
- TNO (Network Observer)
- TNR (New Republic)
- TOBY (Office Building of the Year)
- TOS (Operating System)
- TOS (Original [Star Trek] Series)
- TPI (PANSS Institute)
- TPM (Philosophy Magazine)
- TPTB (Powers That Be)
- TRIP (Road Information Program)
- TSCG (Surrealist Compliment Generator)
- TSL (Svedberg Laboratory)
- TSN (Sporting News)
- TSN (Sports Network)
- TSR (Software Resource)
- TSSAA [a missed opportunity]
- TST (Shakespeare Theatre)
- TTBOMKAB (To The Best Of My Knowledge And Belief)
- TTBOMKAU (To The Best Of My Knowledge And Understanding)
- TTBOMM (To The Best Of My Memory)
- TTG (Tarrance Group)
- TTP (TTP Project)
- TUC (Utility Connection)
- TUCOWS (Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software)
- TWC (Weather Channel)
- TWIAVBP (World Is A Very Big Place)
- TWUC (Writers' Union of Canada)
- TW3 (That Was The Week That Was)
- T.Y.W.L.S. (With Punctuation, Even)
- T5G (Five Gospels)
- WOTD (Word Of The Day)
- WTF (What?)
- WTH (What The Hell)
- wwftd (Worthless Word For The Day)
The phenomenon occurs in other languages, of course, but the only one that occurs to me is DKW, which received an alternate expansion of ``das kleine Wunder.'' One English acronym based on transliterated Arabic words is AQI, in which the A stands for al, the Arabic definite article. The same word is usually el when transliterated from the Egyptian variety of Arabic, and ul when transliterated from Punjabi, but mostly it has entered European languages as al or the syncopated form a-.
Spanish has a number of nouns borrowed from Arabic which still have the definite article al attached. For example, cotton is algodón. It's such a common phenomenon that it gives rise to overcorrection, as in almirante (`admiral'). [As explained at the VADM entry, the word was borrowed with an al on the end. The final l was lost, but the initial a was converted to an al.]
Sometimes, typically through French, this overcorrection enters English. For example, almond, immediately from French, is ultimately from the ancient Greek amygdálê (whence also amygdala, of course), by way of Spanish almendra. See also aceite.
Interestingly, where German has borrowed French words ending in -re, it has also inverted the final order. The German pronunciation of the final -er is similiar to the British, so the final consonant arr is present practically only in the imagination. The difference (from British) in German spelling reflects the fact that German is substantially phonetic. French borrowings in English normally preserve their original spelling, but that does not normally conflict with their pronunciation. Maintaining the final -re in Theatre would conflict with the German pronunciation, which uses the sound conventionally written -er (and pronounced virtually identically with -e) in native German words.
The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, uses the -er spelling in its name, of course (rather than centre). The KC is one of the few organizations involved in theatre in the US that persists in the theater spelling. They sponsor an ``American College Theater Festival'' that everyone else spells ``American College Theatre Festival.''
In our discussion of Fred Stone, there's a review from the first decade of the 20th century which uses the -re spelling. However, the origin of the quote is uncertain, and it's been through a couple of secondary sourcings (and possible spelling modifications).
One Thebes was an ancient Greek city, and now is ancient Greek ruin. It was one of the major settlements of Greece at least as far back as the early bronze age. One day back when I worked at ASU, I gave a ride home to a French colleague. As we were southbound on Rural Road, approaching her apartment, she asked me where I lived, and I said, ``two miles south'' or something close to that. She remarked that that was a very American way to answer. I suppose it's also very American to think that there wasn't any more sensible way to answer, and anyway the local landmarks were unknown to her. It's not like Tempe has named ``neighborhoods.'' (There are also studies that suggest that men find their way more by distances and directions, and women tend to go more by landmarks.) Anyway, it might explain my frustration with descriptions like ``on the south edge of the eastern plain of Boetia.'' Greek Thebes is about 50 km NNW of Athens.
Thebes is also the name of an ancient Egyptian city, about 200 km downriver from Swenet (modern Aswan), or 400 km north of the Sudan border. The ancient Egyptian name of the city was Waset.
Bergman received some of his early medical training at Oxford, but his internship was at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Beth Israel is a popular name for synagogues and for hospitals that were originally or are Jewish-affiliated. Beth is the common Hebrew word meaning `house.' The th in this word is generally pronounced like the th in Elizabeth (no, not a coincidence). The th transliterates a tav without a dot inside. Oh no! Not another phonology tangent! Let's just leave it as is.
- The Odyssey: An ancient Greek epic by Homer. Involves gods and bad things happening to good people. (Well, as good as they come, anyway.)
- theodicy: Why bad things happen to good people.
- the idiocy: Why bad things happen to stupid people and those who must depend on them. idiot is derived from the ancient Greek word for `layman.'
- But there's an ``m'' and an ``e.''
- And there's no ``we'' either.
- There's one in the IPA spelling: /ti:m/.
A note about the pronunciation: four syllables, mostly obvious. Despite the etymology, and despite models like anionic and cationic (which have the same accentual stress pattern), the first letter i is pronounced like a long e rather than a long i. When I write ``is pronounced'' I mean that since I first heard the term in school in the 1970's, in the half-a-dozen years I did research in hot-electron systems, and in all the other years that I have regularly heard the term from other physicists and electrical engineers across the US (and probably from time to time at international conferences elsewhere), I never heard it pronounced any other way until I clicked on the hear-it link at the Merriam-Webster entry for thermionic and heard some nasal North American voice model mispronounce it with the long i that M-W claims is in the pronunciation. The American Heritage Dictionary makes the same error. These dictionaries claim to give the American pronunciation. I suppose the long i might be in a British pronunciation, or not be phonemically distinguished from the vowel in an Australian pronunciation.
A similar bit of dictionary pronunciation nescience concerns the word gigawatt. In the movie Back to the Future, Doc pronounces this word with a soft initial gee. That pronunciation is sanctioned by the same two dictionaries cited above for botching the thermionic pronunciation. The ignorant use of dictionaries' fanciful pronunciations of technical vocabulary is a reliable indication that no technically competent person had any influence in the concoction of the story. I remember a bunch of years ago when a local news team visited the Engineering Research Center (ERC) at ASU to report on an expensive piece of prestigious equipment that I have sound reason to suspect they understood not at all. It was fun to watch the handsome newsface repeat ``mo-LE-cyoo-ler beam EP-i-TAX-ee,'' rolling the phrase around in his mouth so it would come out real smart-like. I'm glad he took the effort; he was doing his job conscientiously. (It reminds me of learning the German word ausgezeichnet in seventh grade, when that seemed like a long word to us.)
The anonymous content provider of bigwaste.com (gives the game away, huh?) writes:
In fact
, many individuals who have worked with computers and electronics
for the last several decades will confirm that they used to pronounce gigabyte
as "jigabyte."
Setting aside the question of how practical a unit the gigabyte was even as
recently as 1990, and refraining from claiming that these are probably the
same many individuals who thought that the vi editor
was called ``six,'' I note only that parallels, as in the case of anionic and
thermionic, do not rule usage.
If the metal is at a negative voltage relative to some nearby electrode (or more generally if there is an electric field in the direction of the metal), some of those electrons will fail to be reabsorbed, and will instead flow toward a more positive electrode, giving rise to a current. This current flow or discharge was the effect reported by Guthrie in 1873. Edison rediscovered the effect independently in 1880, and patented it, while perfecting incandescent light bulbs. This current effect, as opposed to the emission effect, also has fair claim to be called ``the Edison effect.''
Thermoosmosis is osmosis under conditions of a temperature differential. To review: osmosis is material transport across (i.e. through) a membrane in response to a concentration difference between the two sides. The situation as normally envisioned involves a solid, permeable membrane separating regions filled with fluid (gas or liquid). Osmosis is a general transport phenomenon, and as such may occur near to or far from equilibrium conditions. Umm, more words coming here. Basically, in thermoosmosis, the concentration difference is balanced not only by transport and osmotic pressure difference, but also by temperature difference across the membrane.
- H. J. M. Hanley and W. A. Steele, Trans. Faraday Soc., vol. 61, pp. 2661ff (1965).
- R. J. Bearman and M. Y. Bearman, J. Phys. Chem., vol. 70, pp. 3010ff (1966).
- R. Rastogi and K. Singh, Trans. Faraday Soc., vol. 62, pp. 1754ff (1966).
- R. Rastogi, K. Singh, and H. P. Singh, J. Phys. Chem., vol. 73, pp. 2798ff (1969).
Notice also the shift to a less personal voice. The conventional and preferred style of scientific and technical writing minimizes reference to the author and to personal agents. It is understood that the author or authors performed the necessary work, and that otherwise assistance will be explicitly acknowledged and credited. It is considered a bit unprofessional to draw attention to oneself, even though this may require extensive use of the passive voice and too much reliance on mushy abstract nouns instead of punchy verbs. With the exception of slumming, baby-talking introductory texts, the textbooks for college courses generally conform to this dry pattern. That may be contrasted with the better class of computer language books, which are bought voluntarily rather than for classes. The personal voice (and more extensive use of the second person) is more frequently found in textbooks for some of the social sciences.
The impersonality and affectlessness of scientific discourse is a pose, to some extent, but it is also an earnest of scientists' commitment to disinterestedness and thus to scrupulous honesty. To a great degree, science succeeds not just because it is intellectually serious -- as philosophy with its formal ``theses'' has been for 25 centuries -- but because it recognizes human limitations. The practice of testing, experiment, and confirmation of various sorts recognizes the limits of human reason in the face of natural variety: understanding is always approximate and imperfect, and logic applied to approximate concepts is not reliable. Similarly, scientific detachment is a recognition of the limits of human reason in the face of human emotion. When a researcher has a strong preference for a particular research conclusion, confirmation bias and simple obtuseness can overwhelm the researcher's sincere desire to be truthful and furnish the heart's desire, no matter the reality. As a defense against this weakness, one introduces a focus on process, on playing the game well rather than ``winning.''
In the nineteenth century, the success of science led people like Auguste Comte to consider how that success could be reproduced in other fields. There were some admirable efforts, like those of Émile Durkheim, to put the study of society on some kind of objective, quantitative, almost experimental basis, and thus arose the ``human sciences'' as distinguished from the older disciplines (the ``humanities,'' originally humaniora) examining the same general subject using a different scholarly approach. The work of early sociologists like Durkheim and Weber has been combed over, thoroughly criticized, and superseded. But a fair assessment must recognize, on the one hand, the muddled, detail- and exception-rich nature of human society. This continues to limit the generality and accuracy of ``facts'' and ``results'' in sociology to such an extent that I use scare quotes around the words. Notice the shift to an informal register? One little pronoun can do all that. Anyway, that recognition is necessary to compare early sociology fairly with its contemporary science. On the other hand, to compare that sociological research with recent work, it is worth remembering that statistical methods only began to be developed starting in the eighteenth century (to understand games of chance, and later to make best use of limited astronomical data). The most elementary statistical measures and tools now taken for granted in sociology are indeed mostly trivial in mathematical terms (though they don't seem that way to the sort of person who typically goes into sociology), but their development nevertheless represented a conceptual challenge.
You know, I've really veered away here from what I wanted to say. All this in-fairness-to-Durkheim stuff was incidental to the observation that scientific method, as such, has tended to be misunderstood. As described by high-school teachers, it seems like a recipe or formula that magically turns out fact, and that is somehow disconnected from human nature. One can understand that the how-you-play-the-game party line of scientists might engender this subtly flawed view. Students should be made to understand that there is not a single scientific method, and that scientific method is not an arbitrarily constructed well into the aquifers of knowledge, but instead is intimately related to human reality. In every science, the general form of scientific method is adapted to the particularities of the subject matter. (Astronomy was a successful science when all that could be called ``experiments'' were alternative measurement methods. Behavioral science leans on ``control groups'' which hard sciences can safely eschew.) What is constant, or should be, is humility: the understanding that scientific method is the best we can do given the failure of unassisted reason. Science aggressively seeks to discover its own failures. Logically, excluding whatever we can demonstrate to be false does not guarantee that we will discover what is true. We only discover what is contingently not-known-to-be-false. Such are the limitations of inductive reasoning. Yet it works.
Hmm. We keep going off course. What I had intended to do, getting back to the initial tangent to the thesis definition, was not to define or describe scientific method, or to preface that by an apology for the limitations of science in sticky disciplines, but to observe something about language use and the personal voice. Just as schoolteachers give a rigid, somewhat unfaithful rendering of scientific method, it was probably inevitable that social scientists would fetishize, make a cargo cult of method. Today, much of social science research (particularly ed research and criminology) is garbage, and this cannot be taken out by improved scientific method. Rather, it requires a renewed commitment to the scientific attitude that is parallel to scientific method. Simply put, a researcher who cannot accept a possible research result is not qualified to perform the research. If you are confident that your cherished views won't be a problem because your views will be borne out by your research, you are probably right on the latter point; however, your research is not science but theology. And your language will betray you, if you cannot bear to allow undesired results their place in the gallery of the possible. So too, to that extent, your thesis presents not your results but your preconceptions: you. Suppressing the personal voice in scientific writing is not necessary or sufficient for scientific detachment. It is rather an expression of intent, a deference to hard fact, a reverence for the sacred that's-just-how-it-is. Amen.
(Of course, a skilled glossarist can use the personal voice. Don't try this at home.)
Thesis has nothing to do with tmesis, you can take my word. Honest, you don't have to check!
- ``Ummm...''
or - ``Well, ...''
The ``third way'' is usually intellectually incoherent, and that is its greatest virtue. Reality is messy, and a complaisant ideological attitude is usefully flexible. To see just how incoherent, see ``Writers Try To Describe the Radical Middle, a page served with a pretty straight face by Radical Middle Political Newsletter: Thoughtful Idealism, Informed Hope.
In the aftermath of John Kerry's defeat in the 2004 US presidential election, one of the groups trying to direct how the Democratic party regroups has called itself ``Third Way.''
The boy failing to call us up as I commanded, I was angry, and resolved to whip him for that and many other faults, to-day. Early with Sir W. Pen by coach to Whitehall, to the Duke of York's chamber, and staid a great while with the Duke. Home, and to be as good as my word, I bade Will get me a rod, and he and I called the boy up to one of the upper rooms of the Comptroller's house towards the garden, and there I reckoned all his faults, and whipped him soundly, but the rods were so small that I fear they did not much hurt to him, but only to my arm, which I am already, within a quarter of an hour, not able to stir almost. After supper to bed.
(Incidentally, the Duke of York was the future King James II, even more than his father Charles II a good friend to Pepys. Sir W. Pen, as Pepys mostly or always wrote the name, was the father of the Quaker William Penn, and it is in fact Sir William who is the eponym of Pennsylvania.)
``Optimization''? Are you kidding?
Thm.: His jokes are funny.
Pf.: He's your boyfriend.
This theorem can be understood in two very different ways, depending on whether his jokes really are funny or not.
It is very common for personals ads to claim that she's looking for someone with a sense of humor, someone who can make her laugh [she means this in a nice way], etc. Back in the 1990's, someone ran a reality check on this and found cognitive dissonance: when personals ads were divided into three categories -- straightforward, hard-to-get, and funny -- the funny ads were found to be the least effective at generating replies (even playing hard-to-get worked better).
Dang -- now I find out!
<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov"> <img src="http://thomas.loc.gov/images/link.gif" alt="[Link to THOMAS Home Page]"></a">to produce a flush-looking button like
![[Link to THOMAS Home Page]](http://thomas.loc.gov/images/link.gif)
The 1931 Thorndike count was based on a corpus of about 10 million words The other three studies each used a corpus of at least, but apparently not much more than, 4.5 million words. Frequencies, stated as number of occurrences per 4.5 million words, are given for each of the four base studies. (Frequencies are listed precisely only up to 1000 per 4.5 million.)
In order to come up with an overall estimate of frequency, the frequencies of the four studies are averaged. This is a bit tricky (``exercises of judgment have been necessary,'' p. v), because lemmatization and the treatment of contractions, abbreviations, proper nouns, and the most common words differed among the studies. Some of these average frequencies are marked by an asterisk (indicating an estimate) or a question mark (when frequency determination depends in large part on the extremely frequent use of a word in one of the counts). [Question marks in data from base studies indicate other problems.] The averaged frequencies are given in occurences per million up to 49, and then as either ``A'' (50-99 per million) or ``AA'' (100 or more per million). The Thorndike-Lorge data I mention in this glossary are the averaged frequencies.
Material towards a future co-author entry:
On the title page, ``By Edward L. Thorndike and Irving Lorge''
appears below the title, and the copyright is held by Teachers College.
The 1944 word book was apparently compiled by Thorndike.
The preface, however, was written by Thorndike in the first person singular.
He thanked Dr. Irving Lorge for his work on their ``Lorge-Thorndike semantic
count and the Lorge magazine count, and for his generosity in permitting me to
use the results.'' Below the preface, an unsigned ``[w]e acknowledge'' help
from the Rockefeller Foundation and the W.P.A. for help on the same two word
counts. The date on that page is February 1943.
``Thorndike'' -- what a wonderful old-fashioned surname. Whatever happened to the Thorndikes? Did they stop having sons? (As it happens, R.L. Thorndike, Edward Lee's son, was the father's student and followed him into the field of educational psychology.)
I suppose this deserves credit for homonymy.
I remember when Cher's nose used to sing
Charleston was once the rage, uh huh...
History has turned the page! Uh-hu-uh.
Well the beat goes on.
Credit unions are distinguished from other thrifts in being ``cooperative organizations'' owned by their depositors, who are ``members.'' Typically, membership is restricted in some way -- to workers in a particular company or profession, say, or people living in a particular region. (I have the impression that the criteria have tended to become looser over time.) Once you're a member, however, you can stay a member even if you cease to satisfy the criteria for joining. When the term ``bank'' is used strictly, credit unions are the most likely of thrifts to be excluded.
The difference between a ``savings and loan'' and a ``savings bank'' is mostly historical. I've encountered two or three different kinds of explanations of the difference, and they're probably consistent. One is that they originally developed in different parts of the US, and another that they functioned somewhat differently, in one case focusing on home mortgages and in the other doing a fair amount of business in commercial real-estate mortgages, but without becoming commercial banks. When I get it sorted out I'll fix the entry.
The federal deposit-insurance organization for credit unions is NCUA. The corresponding entity for savings banks and S&L's was the FSLIC until 1989...
Until about the 1970's, thrifts could not have checking accounts (or ``share draft'' accounts, as the credit unions call them), and in return for this and for limiting their loan business (as described above), they were allowed to pay a slightly higher interest rate on deposits. These and various other fetters were removed for very good reasons, but a consequence was a meltdown of the thrifts in the 1980's.
In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) was passed into law. It dissolved the FSLIC, putting the accounts previously insured by the FSLIC under the FDIC, which had previously insured deposits only in commercial banks. FIRREA also created the Resolution Trust Corporation, a US-government-owned company set up to liquidate the assets, manage the bankruptcy, or steward the sale of the large number of insolvent thrifts. More about that at the RTC entry.
A TV show that was primarily a send-up of ``The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'' was Get Smart. Its bad guys' organization was KAOS.
HTH!
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The closest I've come to finding an etymology or meaning of the surname Thurber is in Reaney and Wilson, which lists Thurban, Thurbon, Thurburn, Thorborn, Thoubboron, Thoburn, Turbin, Tarbun, and various less common forms, though not Thurber.
Like most ``English'' names, it is of Norman origin. In particular, it stems from Old Danish and Old Swedish Thorbiorn, and similar Old Norse, meaning `Thor-bear.' That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and apparently it didn't make much more sense to the English, who Anglicized it to Þurbeorn, `Thor-warrior.' We'll call it an improvement.
Atomic number 22. In the first period of transition metals.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
A project for data-mining that combines government and commercial records of people in the US, proposed and beginning (2005) to be implemented as a component of the war on terror. It's not immediately clear whether this is constitutional or legal. Cf. TIPS.
Colorless. Pyrophoric, of course.
Note that in this abbreviation, the letter dee does not stand for dose, as in the next TID entry.
No. No punchline.
Walking through ASU campus one day, I saw a couple ambling along in faded jeans, tie-dyes, loose hair, little pink wire-frame glasses and love beads. It was early afternoon, 1989. I asked: ``What are you doing in this decade?'' I got an unloving stare for an answer. That, or they were still coming down from a bad high. Guys, if you're reading this now, I apologize.
An alternative expansion of SBF is Scenes From a life. The B is silent.
In detail, the city computes a base rate of tax revenues from the TIF district, essentially the pre-TIF rates plus expected changes without TIF investment. The various taxation districts are at least partly funded by property taxes. [Which ones and how much varies by state, but school districts, townships or boroughs (in the sense of parts of cities), cities and counties are typically included.] Under a TIF plan, those districts continue to receive their respective shares of the base revenue. Any increment above that is diverted to a special fund to pay for improvements. Typically, these repay development bonds, but some increment monies may be used for further pay-as-you-go improvements. (Obviously, if it is possible to fund pay-as-you-go improvements from the beginning of the program, before any improvements have been made to increase revenue, then either there's an error in the base-revenue calculation, or else there's something more complicated going on, like a major private-public partnership.)
TIF is typically used to fund clearing of abandoned and derelict properties, land acquisition and infrastructure development. The scheme seems to be very popular with Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley. As of mid-August 1999, there were 72 (up three from July 1), covering 13,000 acres and 8% of assessed real-estate valuation. (Update April 8, 2002: 117 in Chicago, out of 600 for Illinois as a whole.) More than half of the TIF districts are within the southlands. Chicago Southland Development, Inc. (CSDI) has a good page.
The prediction of revenues spanning a range of years is a tricky computation that can lead to creative disagreements about how and even whether the system is working. NCBG believes they're over-used and out of control.
TIGER files are available for every county in the United States and for the millions of census blocks in urban areas. (In Louisiana, counties are called parishes.)
This is a good place to mention that the Spanish g and b sounds are similar. The b is a soft bilabial represented by a beta in the IPA, and the g is a soft glottal represented by a gamma in the IPA. A similar pair of sounds were represented by w and g in northern Europe a millenium ago, and gave rise to pairs of words entering English separately from Norman and non-Norman French (guarantee and warranty, guard and ward, etc.). Typically, these words had Germanic roots, part of the Frankish heritage of Vulgar Latin and its descendants. For example, the words war and guerrilla, with etymons that entered English via Norman French and from Spanish, are ultimately related to the same Germanic root that gives us the word worse -- part of the English language in some form since Old English was spoken.
[As you realize, the w never caught on in Romance orthography, and g ruled. Hence the Germanic name William is rendered Guillermo in Spanish, Guillem in Catalan, Guilherme in Portuguese, and Guillaume in French. All have something of the palatalization of the lli in English William.]
The g was presumably used in the Spanish cognates because most of the Germanic words entered via French. I'm not sure if Spanish b had its current soft sound in those days (I know there's scholarly work on the question; I just haven't checked it yet). In any case, some words evolved in a direction that indicate a softening of b. In particular, if you read Cervantes in the original spelling you'll notice that grandmother is aguela -- now it's abuela. The reason I'm boring you silly with all this amateur linguist stuff is that as I was growing up, hearing and speaking Spanish but not reading it much, I thought that the word for shark was tigurón, a sort of augmentative form of tigre (`tiger'). But it turns out that the word is tiburón, with no known relation to tigers.
There were sharks in the waters off Spain long before the tiburón entered the language. In fact, in one of the earliest attestations, Fz. de Oviedo in 1535 commented that they were more common in the Caribbean than around Spain. Since the word appeared in Spanish only shortly after the discovery of America, and the cognates in Portuguese (tubarão) and Catalan (tauró) are not clearly much earlier, an American origin seems likely. One hypothesis is that it comes via Portuguese from the Tupí word uperú (or iperú), with a t- that functions as an article in the Tupí language. (At the time of the Portuguese took possession of Brazil, Tupí tribes occupied most of the coastal territory from the Rio de la Plata to Amazon. The two main tribes were the Tupí properly speaking, who lived at the mouth of the Amazon, and the Guaraní, who lived in the eastern part of present-day Paraguay, between the Paraguay and Paraná rivers. The Guaraní language has something of a semi-official status in Paraguay. Although most of my South American family lives in Chile, everyone who lives for very long in Paraguay learns Guaraní.) Well, okay, enough about tigon and all.
The IRS did not always require a TIN for dependents (mostly children). The requirement was instituted in 1987 (for tax-return filings on FY 1986 income). Tax forms that year showed seven million fewer dependents than the previous year.
TiN is an excellent barrier to diffusion, widely used in microelectronic device fabrication. Sputter-deposited material has very variable properties; resistivities in the range 20 to 2000 microohm cm, densities 3.2 to 5.0 g/cc. For more, see references cited in Ki-Chul Park and Ki-Bum Kim: ``The effect of density and microstructure on the performance of TiN barrier films in Cu metallization,'' Journal of Applied Physics, vol 80, #10, pp. 5674-5681 (15 Nov. 1996).
More and less dense TiN has different appearance: gold (G-TiN) and brown (B-TiN).
I should stress that the negative associations are conventional connotation, not my own prejudice.
Tin is not very shiny. The Modern English word tinsel < Middle English tineseile < Old French estincelle, `spangle, spark.' It's cognate with the word stencil.
Clive James has written (in one of the essays in As of This Writing)
Flaubert liked tinsel better than silver because tinsel possessed all silver's attributes plus one in addition -- pathos. For whatever reason, [Raymond] Chandler was fascinated by the cheapness of L.A. When he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it. When he said that he could leave it without a pang, he was saying why he felt at home there.
Anyway, Tiny Tim used other stage names (among them Larry Love and Darry Dover) and gave variable answers for his year of birth (usually between 1922 and 1933). At least his first and last names are reasonably certain. At some point he gave himself the middle name Buckingham for the royal associations. His Lebanese father was named Butros Khaury. The son's full name is given on a number of webpages as Herbert Butros Khaury, and for all I know that might be accurate.
On a scale of one to ten, with one being not at all and ten being completely, how confused were you by the use of the archaic form ``enow'' of enough?
Really?
One the same scale, how confused were you by the phrase ``one to ten,'' which might have been 9:59? How about the sparse punctuation, was that a problem? We really want to know, but we can't be bothered to write the cgi polling interface. You know, TechnoMetrica -- or TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, Inc., as it is also known -- has an internet polling arm called Netpollster. But HotOrNot gathers more important information.
Recent studies (``recent'' in March 2002) indicate that TIPP is teaming with IBD.
Humping.
Sex.
The nasty.
French postcards.
Knowing in the Biblical sense.
Please excuse the outburst. This was purely for the benefit of the Yahoo and Lycos search engines. I just felt like making this my most-visited file next month. [It didn't work. Others had similar ideas.]
Back on-topic. Here is a typical exchange with the TIPS ``Ask the Sexpert'' (by T. E. Whalen, Ph.D., ©1994, Gov't of Canada), which won the 1994 Loebner Prize for ``the most human-like natural language program.'' [In the following, prompts and output printed by the program are in italics; typical human reponses and commentary are not italicized, or at least within square brackets.]
- You say: What is my name?
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Good. What does `TIPS' stand for?
- I can not answer that.
- You say: What is sex?
- "Sex" is a noun, adjective, and verb. Generally it refers to the
differences between male and female and the activities arising from those
differences. Thus we can talk about having sex, sex acts, and even sexing
chicks.
- You say: This is not exactly what I wanted to know.
- The single most common complaint that sex therapists treat is a claim that
one or both partners are uninterested in sex. Low sexual desire may vary from
a simple discrepancy
[... blah, blah, blah ...]
negotiations do not look like demands for sex, that you
[... blah, blah, blah ...]
needs and feelings are given equal consideration with your own,
even if they are very different than yours.
- You say: We're not getting anywhere here, are we?
- I can not answer that.
- You say: What's your sign?
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Are you a virgin?
- How do I appear to you?
- You say: I'm asking the questions.
- As Popeye says, "I yam what I yam."
- You say: Aren't you programmed with Asimov's three laws of robotics?
- Surely you don't find that as interesting as human sexuality. What would
you like to know about sex?
- You say: Are yoou a virgin?
- You should have sex when you are ready. You should have sex when
you have found a suitable partner and when you both feel comfortable being
intimate with each other. [Tell me about logorrhea, really.]
You should not have sex with someone if you [... mercy excision ...]
have any doubts about the sincerity of their consent. [ ! ] ...
It is normal to be nervous the first time you have sex because ...
- You say: What would you know from normal?
- I think sex is one of the most interesting things people do. What would
you like to know about sex? How to do it? What can go wrong? Who is doing
what? How much they do?
- You say: Length
- Penises of all sizes and shapes are equally able to satisfy
most women and to impregnate them. It is true that some women like men
with large penises, but it is equally true that some do not. A woman's
%cat political.correctness >/dev/null - You say: Width
- I can not answer that.
(I am doing the best I can with your keywords, but I can often give you
better information if you ask a question that is a complete sentence.)
- You say: How wide?
- If you have never tried sexual intercourse before, but only know
about it from books and movies, it can sound rather intimidating. Fiction
pretends that ...
[Man this sure ain't Playboy.] - You say: Are you a Virginian?
- How do I appear to you?
- You say: Virginia is for lovers.
- There are few intellectual persuits [sic] as
unrewarding as trying to
determine the maximum sexual experience that a person can have and still
claim to be a virgin. The true issue is ...
[Scholasticist evasion >/dev/null.] - You say: What about this Whalen guy?
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Pretty tight-lipped, huh.
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Use your imagination.
- People think about sex a lot. Especially, they think about sex during
sexual activity, though more than two out of three people may not be thinking
about [... telnet yourself for
the scintillating lowdown ...]
For example, many women fantasize about being
raped, but no woman actually wants to be raped.
- You say: My name is Attila the Hun.
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Pretty intimidating, I know. Okay, now I am Casanova.
- I can not answer that.
- You say: You know: Casanova -- the famous librarian.
- I can not answer that.
- You say: I like you.
- I can not answer that.
- You say: Your place or mine?
- A bedroom is undoubtedly the most comfortable place to ...
- You say: Exit
- Goodbye.
- End of Conversation
In fact, you can violate Snell's Law, and transmit under conditions that nominally correspond to total internal reflection, by having the light transmitted into the low-refractive-index medium immediately (a few wavelengths distant at most) reenter a higher-index medium. This is the classical analogue of quantum tunneling, and can be easily understood: whereas in ray optics, the reflected beam does not penetrate the low-index medium, in a wave theory one finds a spatially evanescent wave (a wave with imaginary wave vector in the direction normal to the interface), magnitude decreasing exponentially into the `forbidden' medium. Placing a high-index material nearby changes the electromagnetic wave problem in a way similar to that of transforming a semi-infinite quantum barrier into a finite one.
- Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
(Yeah, it's a play, but the script has been published as a book. See the 40 entry.) - Catch-22
(See the 22 and TV entries, as well as the book Now all we need is a Title.) - Everything You Always Wanted to Know... titles
(See the TTBOMKAB entry.) - Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein
(See the 100 entry.) - Nineteen Eighty-four
(See 1984 and entries linked there.) - Now all we need is a Title: Famous Book Titles and How They Got
That Way
[It's by André Bernard (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994).] On the title page (bearing the entire title) and on the cover, the only words of the short title (the part before the colon) that are capitalized are now and title. Normally I wouldn't mention it, but in this entry (titles of books) I figured you'd want to know.]
The spelling has evidently been influenced by mouse, and the plural in Modern English is titmice. Time to renew efforts to make mongeese the official plural of mongoose. After that, meese as plural of moose will be as easy as tipping a cow.
Just for the record, titmice (love to write that) are passerine birds of the family Paridae, especially species of the genus Parus, such as the chickadee. Titmice (yeah!) are found in woodland areas around the world.
Okay, okay -- it's possible the first syllable meant `small.' That would imply that titmouse means small titmouse. ``Small'' compared to what -- a titmouse? If we apply this recursively, pretty soon the insects are going to be eating the titmice.