B b
B was created in 1970 by Ken Thompson for the first Unix system on the PDP-7. A manual from 1972, for a PDP-11/Unix-11 implementation, is served by Dennis M. Ritchie online. From the abstract there: ``B is a computer language intended for recursive, primarily non-numeric applications typified by system programming. B has a small, unrestrictive syntax that is easy to compile. Because of the unusual freedom of expression and a rich set of operators, B programs are often quite compact.''
The ``rich set of operators'' included & and * for pointer manipulation (pointers were first introduced PL/I) and the shorthand assignment operators ===, =!=, =<, =<=, =>, =>=, =&, =|, =<<, =>>, =+, =-, =%, =*, and =/. [In B, the result of the binary relational and (in)equality operators was an integer 0 or 1.] Except for the first six, these were incorporated into C. (Of course, === is now used as a comparison operator in many object-oriented languages.)
The earliest versions of C maintained the same symbols that had been used in B for the shorthand assignment operators, in ``=<op>'' form. This led to problems with symbols that represent unary operations in addition to the binary operations understood in the shorthand assignments (viz., &, -, and *, as well as what one might call a unary identity operator: the optional + immediately preceding a numeric literal). For example,
x=-1may look like an ordinary assignment of -1 to x, but in B (and obsolete versions of C) it simply decrements x. Similar problems occur with expressions like x=--y. By the time K&R was published (1978), the =<op> symbols had been flipped to unambiguous <op>= form. In that book, the older form is described (Appendix A, sec. 17) following this sentence: ``Although most versions of the compiler support such anachronisms, ultimately they will disappear, leaving only a portability problem behind.''
If that manual is to be believed, identifiers (variable names and such) were slightly more general than those of C in the following surprising way. In both languages, identifiers must begin with an alpha character and continue with alphanumeric characters, where the alphanumeric set consists of alpha characters and digits. In C, alphas are the 52 alphabetic characters (26 upper- and lower-case ASCII letters) and underscore. In B, alphas included those characters and backspace?! This gives one the advantage of creating identifiers with overstruck characters, but on those displays where that would have worked, it could have been difficult to distinguish distinct variable names constructed with different sequences of the same characters. (E.g., an AB with an I overstruck on each letter could be any of A^HIB^HI, AB^H^HII, I^HAI^HB, or five similar sequences, not to mention identifiers with more than two ^H. Since spaces are not legal identifier characters, something like A ^H^HII^HB would be forbidden. Thus, identifiers with more than two ^H would either be shorter than they appear, like I^HAI^HB^H, or they would have extra extra double-struck characters as in AB^H^HII^H^HIB.)
Programming languages that manipulate strings are usually written using the same characters that constitute the strings. B was no exception. The manipulation requires one or more delimiters, and these delimiters cannot represent themselves. One approach to this problem uses, say, '' to represent an apostrophe within single-quoted strings. This is the approach in Pascal, and is apparently related to the absence of zero-length strings in that language. This PL/I (F) language reference volume gives the example of
'SHAKESPEARE''S ''''HAMLET'''''to represent SHAKESPEARE'S ''HAMLET'' ...
It is also inconvenient or impossible, depending on other syntax, to allow line breaks to represent themselves in strings. There is only one efficient general solution for representing delimiters, nonprinting characters, and any other characters that cannot appear within string literals: escapes. One character (which in turn also cannot represent itself and must be escaped) is chosen to introduce escape sequences that represent the parts of string literals that cannot represent themselves. In B (as in BCPL and presumably CPL) that escape character was the asterisk, and these escapes were defined:
*0 null
*e end-of-file
*( {
*) }
*t tab
** *
*' '
*" "
*n new line
The B language borrowed /* ... */ commenting from PL/I. This continued in C. The // style of comment was not originally part of standard C but of standard C++, though it was recognized by many C compilers. The // comment was eventually included in the C standard: ISO 9899:1999. C# has a further twist: the token /// introduces XML comments.
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In ancient times (like, increasingly from 6c. BCE to 7 c. CE, when Islam
made Arabic the common language), Aramaic was the lingua franca of the
Middle East, and quite influential (e.g., both of the early alphabetic
scripts of India have been hypothesized to have
originated from an Aramaic form of the Semitic alphabets).
(Aramaic survives as Syriac, and as a liturgical language in Judaism; some biblical texts, such as Esther, are written in the Aramaic language. A ketuba or contract [implicitly: of marriage] may be written in Hebrew or Aramaic. Hebrew today is written not using the original Hebrew alphabet but an Aramaic one that was adopted. Also Aramaic is explained here.)
The word barbarian entered most European languages from Greek, where it originally had the sense of `foreign' (adjective bárbàros, `foreign,' and various related words). Somewhat interestingly, there does not appear to be an Indo-European (IE) origin for the word. (On the other hand that is true of much of the Greek vocabulary.) Various etymologies have been proposed, but the gentle reader need not entertain them, as the Stammtisch has already decided that the origin is in the bar of eastern patronymics. (Note that longer ancestries can be indicated by multiple bars, in the style of ... son of ... son of ....)
Another etymology, no longer approved by the Stammtisch, supposed that barbarian is imitative of the language of foreigners, ``brrr-brrr' to the foreign ear. Once, Gary and I were prating about the sound of Chinese, and it occurred to Gary to ask Jun (from China) what English sounded like to him. Gary explained that to us, Chinese sounds like ``ching chang chung.'' Jun replied that to him, English sounded like ``sa se so'' [the vowels in both quotes are my best recollection after 20 years, but I'm sure of the consonants]. FWIW, as we say.
There have even been claims for an origin in the Latin for `bearded,' but the Greek term does not correspond. Okay, now you can read the Barbara entry.
B = N - Z = A - 2Z.
The Bishop initially nearer the Queen (Q) is indicated QB, for Queen's Bishop, the one on the other side KB, for King's Bishop.
These are not exactly equivalent. King's Bishop and Queen's Bishop designate files on a chessboard. (A file is a column of eight squares, ``vertical'' in the standard representation that shows the original positions of the white pieces along the bottom of the board -- viewed from high above the white side.) Bishop can designate either of those two files, as well as one of the four pieces called a Bishop. KB and QB are the files immediately adjacent to the King's and Queen's files. (To right and left, respectively, in the standard representation.)
As it happens, however, the KB and QB, if you wanted to use those designations for the pieces originally in those files, would be easy to determine: the B originally in KB always stands on a square of its own color (i.e., white KB stays on white squares, etc.). The other Bishop stays on the opposite color.
This property of a Bishop's movement serves as a model to illustrate a general physical phenomenon: Stated in physics language, that is: details of the law of motion gives rise a conservation law. In the case of the Bishop, whose law of motion constrains it to move only by integer steps along diagonals, the conserved quantity is the color of the square on which it stands. Each side begins the game with one Bishop that travels the white squares, and one that travels the black.
In particle mechanics, the most famous conservation laws are those of momentum (p) and energy, which arise from integrations over position and time, respectively.
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Lay sermons, addresses and reviews,
iii. ``A Liberal Education'' (1871)
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
I'm sorry, I guess I don't really have a lot to say about boron. You're becoming very sleepy...when I snap my... Actually, I'm becoming very sleepy. Yaaaa, aaaaw, wn. The French call boron bore. Even Tom Lehrer didn't mention it until the second line of the third verse of his famous song. Try the BN entry.
``Buffalo'' should work as well.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.
The Cranberries have a song called ``Bosnia'' on their third album (``To The Faithful Departed''). Their vocalist Dolores O'Riordan (somebody must like her voice, I guess) takes slight metrical advantage of the fact that one can pronounce the name of the capital, Sarajevo, in four syllables (spelling pronunciation) or three (Sarevo, usual pronunciation). I think she gets about a half a dozen syllables out of Bosnia.
According to the liner notes, Dolores believes it is a ``human impossibility to obtain complete peace of mind in this dimension. There's too much suffering and pain...'' She's right; I'll return the CD.
At the welcome page of BIHNET (the first Bosnian professional ISP), a graphic gives a glimpse of how QWERTY is modified there. The BIH links page looks like a decent starting point.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
I think it'd've been cool if they had named their organization the British Academy of Artistic And Aesthetic Dentistry. Then the members could be sayin' ``we baaaad, we so baaaad.'' I mean, it's not as if dentistry suffers from a surfeit of cool.
The English supergroup Bad Company was formed in 1973 and named after the 1972 movie of the same name, which was a favorite of lead singer Paul Rodgers. On the radio in 2009 I heard an interview with him or some other of the original members of the group, and that person claimed that there was a double entendre involved, with bad understood in the positive sense it had developed in slang. He claimed it was a bit of an inside joke, since that bit of American slang had not yet jumped the pond when the group was formed.
From one point of view, Babbitt is less an examination of life among the proles than a revelation of the author's fashionable and insensitive contempt for the modest but productive strivings of steady, ordinary people. In the US, that contempt was especially fashionable in the roaring twenties. I think the Great Depression reminded people of just how truly uncool it is to be poor, and perhaps made prosperity less intellectually suspect.
The 1950's saw some rising concern about bland conformity. A signal event was the publication in 1955 of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which shares some theme and plot elements with Babbitt. The novel was made into a movie (1956) starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. The late DeForest Kelley had a bit part as a medic. He went on to greatness as Star Trek's Dr. McCoy -- ``Bones.'' Peck's man in the gray flannel suit was wooden.
The 1960's eventually allayed concerns, rightly or wrongly I'm not sure, that the country was going to hell in the fatal-conformity handbasket. Zeitgeist fluctuations since then have included waves of concern about the nation's spiritual health and even about the effects of corporate culture, but Babbittry isn't really an issue with traction any more. A mild version, or perhaps a cowardly metonymic version, persisted as contempt for suburban sprawl, q.v.
Back when the famously mediocre J. Danforth Quayle was Vice-President, he had a large retinue of staff whose entire job was preventing him from looking quite so stupid, particularly as the national news media had him marked for reputation extinction. Quayle required his staff to read People magazine. I require you to visit the Bollywood entry.
Babbitt, or a Babbitt, is damnably without hard edges, bland.
To Babbitt, or Babbitt-line, was to line with Babbitt metal. Later in the twentieth century, there was a chemical-engineering explosion of new industrial materials, and the term seems to have fallen out of use.
BABT is a private, independent company and the leading telecommunications approval body in Europe. BABT operates internationally and in addition to its regulatory role offers a wide range of services and practical consultancy to a growing list of clients in the telecoms and other industries.Established in 1982 as a private company, BABT operates a commercially-oriented range of approvals services to help customers bring their terminal equipment to the market. BABT is the UK centre of technical expertise for regulatory and voluntary assessment of all types of terminal equipment. Formal appointments include the Approvals Authority for telecommunications terminal equipment in the UK, a Notified Body in Europe under the LVD, EMC and TTE Directives, and a Competent Body under the EMC Directive.
In 2002, Yamaha started selling a line of ``silent guitars.'' They're like air guitars, but with strings. More later.
I meant: more information later. It's later now. The guitars go for between $500 and $1000, which seems rather steep for a silent musical instrument. They do include hardware: each guitar comes with a standard sort of head, nut, neck, fretboard, saddle, and bridge -- so the strings aren't loose -- you can play it -- but it has no sound box or even a solid body like a typical electric, but just a narrow extension about as wide as the neck, corresponding to the portion of a normal guitar body (specifically its top plate, minus sound hole) underneath the strings. Turns out it can be heard through headphones. The idea is to use it for practicing where the sound would be unwelcome.
There are steel-string and nylon-string versions; both use piezoelectric pickups. The electronics, including signal shaping but (of course) not a power amplifier are built into the body. With a separate amp you can use it for performance. If you aren't Carlos Santana or Jimi or one of those, then you'll appreciate that without a body, the feedback effects are substantially reduced.
In addition to the parts described above, the instruments come with a couple of things that are not strictly necessary. One thing is a frame, in the form of the outline of a guitar body (cutaway style). This is partly decorative, but mostly it makes it possible to practice while holding the instrument as one normally holds a guitar.
The reason I mention the silent guitars at this entry is that the steel-string version includes a pickguard. The pickguard normally protects the top plate of the guitar. This guitar has a pickguard that protects the air where there would normally be a top plate.
Backronyms sometimes have rather recherché expansions shoe-horned into desired pre-existing words. (You know, in the version of the Cinderella story originally published by the appropriately surnamed Grimm brothers, Cinderella's step-sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to get them to fit into the golden slipper. If it had been a glass slipper, of course, the prince would have noticed immediately instead of at first riding off deceived with each of them in turn.) Once upon a time, at a doughnut shop called -- oh, never mind; a good example of shoe-horning is HABIT. A true story in which the step-sisters were really ugly, with a happy ending that -- just like the fairy tale -- does not involve a backronym, is told at KERMIT's entry.
Fiction is not always part of the backronym story. In fact, most backronyms involve no pretense beyond the implied sugestion that the acronym expansion really isn't so much of a stretch. They might be qualified as ``open-handed'' backronyms. Some backronyms are really ordinary words, possibly used in a new sense, to which acronymic expansions have been retroactively ascribed. See stealth backronym. For kicks, compare notarikon (in its precise sense). Hmmnym... maybe we should try this again.
Oh, alright. The discussion was about IC packaging strategies. Unless there's a good reason not to do so, which there oftentimes unfortunately is, you prefer to perform successive processing steps on a single side (the ``top'') of a wafer or a piece of it. (By ``wafer'' I mean a semiconductor wafer about a half a millimeter thick, with various much thinner layers of various materials variously patterned on top, like a burnt pizza, but rather thinner and with many more toppings, and able to perform logic operations.) One thing that is hardly possible to do from the top is to thin the wafer. To do that, you flip the chip and thin from the back. Backside grinding, of course, is mechanical thinning of the flipped chip. (You can also thin by etching, but a deep etch is uneven.)
Backward spellings seem to be especially common in electrical engineering, but we won't spell out any untoward conclusions from that (in any direction). (OTOH, if you're interested in electrical engineers' language obliviousness, there's a relevant entry just preceding this one. Following this entry there's a brief...
As Stanley Yelnats isn't discussed elsewhere in this glossary, I'll note that it's the name of the protagonist of Louis Sachar's Holes, which won the Newberry medal for distinguished contribution to literature for children. I'd like to point out that it was originally intended as adult literature, but won in the children's category anyway. That ought to give you an idea of how puerile backward spelling is. However, I don't know for a fact that Holes was originally written for adults. Contrariwise, I don't know that it wasn't. So maybe it was. That's logic.
Backward spelling is related to palindromy, of course. Palindromes are text strings whose letter sequences are unchanged when written backwards. If you have to coin a new word to create a palindrome, however, you're cheating. In order to develop your own ability to distinguish good palindromes from bad, study the examples at the Yreka entry.
I wish the government and law-abiding Colombians luck, but the reason I put this entry here has to do with the grammatical number and gender of bacrim. The word is construed as plural and also sometimes as singular. It's necessarily feminine, following the gramatical gender of bandas. It's a bit odd that it can be construed as singular, but since the acronym was formed as a plural not ending in s, and is not a proper noun, it's unclear how to back-construct a singular form. What's weird about the plural is that since the majority of plurals in Hebrew end in -im, it looks weirdly like a borrowed Hebrew plural. Of course, the -im applies to Hebrew masculine nouns, so an authentic borrowing would have looked more like * los bacarim than las bacrim.
The asterisk in the last sentence is a standard symbol in linguistics, widely used as a kind of subjunctive-mood marker. In discussions of grammar it typically precedes an example of incorrect usage (a sort of contrary-to-fact subjunctive). In historical linguistics it typically indicates a hypothetical reconstruction that it may with luck be possible to confirm (an unattested form in Old English, say, or 18th century slang), or not (a reconstructed form in PIE, say). The use in historical linguistics is for content of a type that appears in the apodosis of a conditional statement (implicit here), associated with the the marker ``would.'' [This is a common function of the subjunctive in various Indo-European languages that have a well-developed subjunctive. In English, the word ``subjunctive'' is avoided in discussions of both protasis and apodosis, and the discussion is framed in terms of the structure of conditional sentences.] As it happens, the linguistic asterisk in the preceding paragraph marks a contrary-to-fact conditional.
It is poor practice to put a space between an asterisk and the element following it in C code, but it's okay in linguistics (excluding /*, of course). Some grammarians even put it after the offending form (but on the same line).
The resistor color code goes
0 Black 1 Brown 2 Red 3 Orange 4 Yellow 5 Green 6 Blue 7 Violet 8 Gray 9 White
Another common version gets into specific allegations: ``Bad boys umm... our young girls but Violet gives willingly for gold and silver.'' This has the advantage that the mnemonics for violet, gold, and silver are Violet, gold, and silver, respectively. (An extra gold or silver band indicates 5% or 10% tolerance. No band indicates 20% tolerance. I mean that literally and also the way you understood it. My high school electronics teacher, Mr. Coulter, was in the Signal Corps over in 'Nam before he entered the teaching racket. One of his characteristic sayings was ``ten percent is good enough for government work.'')
Another color-code mnemonic that I suppose is from before my time goes ``Bad Beer Rots Our Young Guts But Vodka Goes Well.''
Here's a site dedicated to the resistor, lowliest of devices.
At the beginning of the 1978 spring break, I drove some of our neighbors from Apt. 235 down to the bus stop on the main campus. Looking forward to a week in Florida, one of them (let's call her ``Serena'') was remembering how, when she floated on her back in the water, her toes stuck above the surface. There are many possible interpretations for this buoyancy phenomenon, and the correct one is that she unconsciously bent her legs so that her toes would stick out instead of her belly. This has nothing to do with this entry, but as she inadvertently revealed her secret insecurities, it occurred to me that she might have forgotten to pack something. So I asked, ``did you bring your bathing suit?'' She replied ``What?'' So I again called back, loudly enough to be heard all the way back to the back seat of my sedan, ``Did you bring your bathing suit?!'' Came the reply: `What?'' We did another iteration, and finally I exploded, ``Hast du deinen Badeanzug gebracht?!'' (Don't worry -- Serena didn't take offense at my use of the familiar du, at least partly because she didn't know German.) The take-home here is that German is really a perfect language for when you're angry (verärgert). As the expression goes, one does not speak German -- one spits it.
In the movie, the two boys are grown up and have become a movie director and actor. Nobody thinks that this is just too pat? The actor has written a story about their childhood love; the director films it. It's not clear, evidently by design, what part is flashbacks in the frame narrative and what part movie-within-the-movie. A brilliant Spanish director who grew up in the Franco era can think of nothing better to do than make a movie about a Spanish director who grew up in the Franco era and makes a movie about it, and then everybody goes and complains about the unfairness of American movies (filmed in Canada, with Australian actors, by Japanese-owned companies) taking over the world. How rude! (¡Qué maleducado!)
- KAOS (first prize for progressive spelling and excellent survivor benefits; incorporated in Delaware)
- N.I.C.E. (first prize for irony)
- SMERSH (nonfictional but short-lived, which seems rather appropriate, in the abstract)
- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (anti-Bonding orbital)
- T.H.R.U.S.H. (no prize for irony; drop-dead serious, sort of)
In a dystopia like that described in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), it may be difficult to identify the bad guys' organization, but the four ministries of Oceania are Minipax, Miniplenty, Minitrue and MiniLuv (cf. Mindef).
Okay, back on topic. ``The name of the label originated from the 1987 movie Bad Taste directed and produced by Peter Jackson'' (a cult science-fiction comedy horror film, it seems fair to say). That's awfully modest of them, if that's their claim. If you're going to sell punk rock records, you could claim that it was the logical name that simply occurred to you.
There are also Bad Taste records from an Icelandic record label that is or was ``Bad Taste Ltd.'' More about them at their original name, Smekkleysa.
Blacks are the one large population group in the US in which self-described conservatives substantially outnumber self-described (or registered) Republicans. (We have a black Republicans entry under construction.)
Take it or leave it.
BAFTA is eager for your participation. Therefore, as a special service, they have a page entitled ``BAFTA: Incorrect browser'' that provides helpful information like
The browser you are using ([your browser here]) is incompatible with the BAFTA website.In order to bypass this, you'll have to disable JavaScript interpretation.
The French have a variety of motion picture awards. These include les César du Cinéma (Cesars in the more efficient English tongue) awarded by l'Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. (By the way, if you don't know how to speak French, then a good first approximation to French pronunciation is to pretend it's English, which it is, and pronounce it with a tres fake, over-the-top French accent.) These Cesars correspond most closely to the Oscars, although obviously they have no prestige since France hasn't made any decent movies in sixty or seventy years. (The top prize at Cannes is the Palme d'Or, presumably in memory of the assassinated Scandinavian prime minister). Note that unlike les anglophones, who only award prizes for movies that flatter our collective conceits, the French also give awards to movies that are simply pretentious bores.
That's what hospitality accountants do. Here's how the website explains it:
The British Association of Hospitality Accountants (BAHA) was formed in 1969 with the aim of bringing together those professionals who were involved in financial management and control within the hotel industry. Since inception the membership has expanded to include systems specialists, hospitality consultants and accountants, bankers, investment analysts, property professionals, academics and others who retain an interest in the hotel, catering and leisure sectors.
See? Just like I said.
Obviously, this has to be an overestimate before six months and an underestimate eventually (age 4+). In practice, it seems to be an underestimate in most of the relevant age range.
Oh sure, there are other definitions, but we prefer to be upbeat. It's like getting to savor the bitter aftertaste without having to take all the fattening calories in the initial draft.
The theory behind bailouts as enlightened self-interest is that everyone's ultimately in the same boat, so the bailers-out are really just bailing themselves out. The problem with this is that with a boat so big the buckets never reach the gunwales, and just end up get emptied elsewhere on board.
Much of the early post-colonial history of Argentina consisted of a power struggle between Buenos Aires, which sought a national government with strong central control (based in BAires, of course -- the capital), and the provinces, which sought a more federal system. I was born in BAires, so I am a porteño or bonaerense. Nowadays, of course, all that old history is forgotten, and when people from the provinces refer to the unusual accent, hustle, or alleged arrogance of bonaerenses it is of course only with affection, admiration, or facetiousness, respectively.
A British invasion of Argentina, early in its independence, was foiled by a British lack of river navigators familiar with the Rio de la Plata; the invading group ran aground. So I remember. There may not be a national multiplication table or geometry, but potomography is another story.
Both the river Plate and the Viceroyal colony of Argentina were named after the silver that the Spanish hoped to find there. If they had understood something of geology they would have realized immediately that the gold and silver would be found (as it was, mostly) along the Pacific coast. If you want to avoid making the same mistake in your next imperial adventure, see the pluton entry.
Spanish fly? Not vegetable. Corn? Cottonseed? Soy? Peanut? It's rapeseed! Isn't it?
Linseed? Castor oil?
The word comes from the French baies, the plural feminine form of the bai, `bay-colored,' from Latin badius. Bay, in case you forgot, or in case you couldn't forget, is a reddish or golden brown. Presumably that was the original color of this cloth, back in the sixteenth century, but apparently no one bothered to record this obvious fact. At least, it seems no one recorded otherwise. Nowadays the most common color of baize is green (many dictionaries describe it as ``bright green''; they may take a dim view of the usual green), but I've played on blue, champagne-colored, and beer-darkened-green pool tables. (Not all at the same time.)
Another thing about Turing. Among the public at large, he is probably best known today for proposing an ``imitation game'' now known as the Turing Test. The test is to see whether in a conversation -- conducted across a suitably anonymizing medium -- a computer program can fool a human into thinking it is another human.
I've only put this entry in so the glossary can begin to have a respectable representative sample of blends. No abbreviation reference work should be so abbreviated as to be without that. This case demonstrates that a single unstressed syllable makes a good emulsifier. The fact that Baker Street and Waterloo are both dactyls (see under meter) probably helps, as does the presence of a letter a in both first syllables, though they're pronounced differently. What probably helps the most is that ``Baker Street and Waterloo Railway'' is a mouthful.
I'm still puzzling it out, but in the meantime I discovered that back in 1999, the Chicago's Lyric Opera needed a supply of bald bodybuilders for ten performances of Wagner's (or maybe their) Tristan und Isolde. They were cast as the ``engine crew''; they rowed the ship in Act I, in time to the musik. They were lit in red. The compensation was $347.50 per week plus health and pension coverage. The world is full of amazing job opportunities.
Maybe the term is an allusion to Alec Baldwin, and to the fact that he is only the best known of four brothers in the movie business, so Baldwin begins to look like a common noun. In 2002, Alec Baldwin was separated from Kim Basinger and dating Kristin Davis, of the hit TV comedy ``Sex And The City.'' The four female leads on the show were all feuding. Also in 2002, Darren Star, the creator of ``Sex and the City,'' was planning a television show called Miss Match, to star Alicia Silverstone in the lead role. (The character's name was ``Kate Fox.'' For more pleasant associations, see this Fox.) The show's title was evidently a pun, and for 18 episodes Silverstone played yet another Emma. I heard the show was flailing in its first season (2003). It was cancelled before I had a chance to see it; I was still studying the owner's manual of my TV set, trying to figure out how to set the volume to a negative value.
Look, I don't endorse the term baldwin. I don't even recommend a capitalization convention for it. The term is here for informational purposes only, so you can understand when an inferior person uses it unironically. Cf. Betty.
Features of this book include thoughtful selection of notation, and a clear introduction of the basics, designed with the goal of presenting classical and quantum statistical mechanics in a unified formalism. Focus is on fluids.
(Jonathan Swift, M.D.: A Description of a City Shower.)``A coming shower your shooting corns presage.''
Jay Kardan uses the term ``helium implants'' in reference to what he deems the ``unnaturally levitating breasts'' of the ancient Greek sculpted female form. I am reminded of the famous clothed and naked Maya paintings by Goya. It's noticeable that the clothed Goya enjoys no support from her clothing. (And you know, I only just now noticed for the first time that the clothed Maya is wearing a shrug.)
My main source is The Incredible Ball Point Pen: A Comprehensive History and Price Guide, by Henry Gostony and Stuart Schneider (G&S). It's ``a Schiffer Book for Collectors,'' published in 1998. [Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., of Atglen, Pennsylvania, happens to have a colophon of a quill pen in an inkwell, and has published over 3100 titles.] As the title's missing hyphen suggests, and as scattered errors confirm, the editing standards are not high. On the other hand, the content of the book is probably fairly reliable. Gostony and Schneider both have long backgrounds in pen collecting.
The earliest known patent for a writing instrument with a ball point was issued to John J. Loud of Massachusetts on October 30, 1888. [Here's a putative link to page images of the relevant patent (#392046) at the USPTO. Maybe the site will work for you. The Wikipedia Ballpoint pen entry mentions a ``GB Patent No. 15630.'' Here's a link to the UK Patent office. Good luck.]
Gostony and Schneider quote Loud (evidently from the US patent): ``My invention consists of an improved reservoir or fountain pen, especially useful among other purposes, for marking on rough surfaces--such as wood, coarse wrapping-paper, and other articles--where an ordinary pen could not be used'' (p. 8). An error-riddled article at ideafinder.com claims that John Loud was a tanner, and that the pen was intended for marking leather, and I have no reason to suppose that the claim of his having been a tanner was invented from whole... cloth, let's say. G&S write that Loud made a few pens for himself and used them for marking boxes, but didn't exploit his patent commercially.
I'll be adding more stuff here as I nail down pesky details. For now let me just mention that Lázló Bíro, often and reasonably accurately described as a journalist, was already a successful inventor in Hungary before he patented a ball-point pen. Vacationing at Lake Balaton (in western Hungary; it's Eastern Europe's largest lake), he met fellow vacationer Augustin Justo. Justo was interested in Bíro's invention and suggested that he move to Argentina -- where Justo happened to be President -- and start a factory. The situation in Europe deteriorated, and Lázló Bíro immigrated to Argentina, arriving in 1940. He eventually seems to have gone by the name José Ladislao Biro, and shortly in this entry I will switch accent conventions too.
His older brother György Bíro immigrated to Argentina also and was his business partner in at least one of the ball-point-pen ventures. According to all sources, György, a chemist, participated in his brother's initial efforts to invent a new pen, and he is often described as a co-patentor with his brother. The only relevant information I have on the patent-holder question is that L.J. Biro was the only patentor on the US patent (number 2,390,636; filed June 17, 1943, granted Dec. 11, 1945). It is sometimes asserted that the Biros only obtained two patents on ball-point pens. This seems to be incorrect; an Argentine patent was applied for a week before the US patent.
Not much information seems to be available about the older Biro, but I'm not done looking. In the literature on ball-point pens, he is often called Georg Biro or George Biro. My suspicion is that he went by Jorge Biro after he immigrated.
For more on pens, see the penknife entry.
You know, when I first checked in May 1997, they didn't have a homepage yet. It wasn't surprising that the Aerobatic Association (BAeA) had gotten its web act together before BALPA, but at the time even the Beagle Pup Club had a homepage.
200 g Velvet Beer 100 g refined furniture polish 100 g methylated spirits
It has an aroma that is not really an aroma but a hymn to democratic youth. Hence, it fosters vulgarity and dark forces in the drinker. So it is recommended that one drink Spirit of Geneva instead (at the entry for which there will be some helpful clarification).
[We just happen to have some more detail conveniently supplied by our editorial and research office (see TK entry). Baltimore County borders the city of Baltimore for about 85% of its circumference, but Anne Arundel County reaches north between two pieces of Baltimore County and touches the south side of the city (and hence has two separate boundary sections with Baltimore County). The two points where the three jurisdictions meet are on the river, near I-895, and in the Bay near the middle of the Francis Scott Key bridge. (Sources: National Geographic Road Atlas, 1999, page 52, and Rand McNally Road Atlas, 1999, p. 46.) On the National Geographic map I-895 conceals one key part of the county line.)]
You know, a picture tells a thousand words, but takes longer to download. The boundary of Baltimore City is a polygon -- an irregular heptagon by my count -- and it pays slight heed to geography. The eastern triple point of the city of Baltimore with the Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties is in Patapisco, an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay. The ASCII art below represents the county lines schematically around that point:
|
|
|
|
|
|
City of Baltimore |
|
|
|
|
| *
|\ * Baltimore County
| \ *
| \
| * \
|* \ #
| \
*| \
* | \
* / \
* / \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ Anne Arundel \
County
KEY:
***** I-695, Francis Scott Key Bridge
----- County line
# Fort Carroll
Fort McHenry, at Baltimore, was the scene of a defense during the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write a poem called ``The Star-Spangled Banner.'' The poem came to be performed as a ballad and is now the US national anthem.
The idea behind the name is that a twisted pair is balanced in the sense that the impedance to ground is the same for the two terminals, whereas for the electrically asymmetric coax that is not true.
The two configurations -- coax and twisted pair -- represent the two main alternative approaches used to minimize radiative loss in the transmission of alternating current power, and to reduce interference between wireline AC signals.
Balkan Academic News is part of the Consortium of Minority Resources (COMIR) and affiliated with Southeast European Politics (SEEP). ''
The name of the fruit entered other European languages from Portuguese. Garcia de Orta, in his 1563 Simples e Drogues (`Simples and Drugs') 93b, gave ``banana'' as the fruit's native name in Guinea (Guiné in Portuguese).
In Spanish, la banana (`the banana') is the fruit of el banano (`the banana tree'). Similarly la manzana y la naranja (`the apple and the orange') are the fruits of el manzano y el naranjo (`the apple tree and the orange tree'). This works for a some other fruit-bearing trees, though certainly not all. This train of thought is extended at the entry on gender of fruit and trees. For a bit more on the initial n in naranja, see the adder entry.
Bananas are very compelling fruit. For example, they play a pivotal motivating role for Jordan in Sexing the Cherry.
- Reduce congestion (i.e.: reduce population density in crowded areas).
- Reduce sprawl (i.e.: reduce population density in uncrowded areas).
Kalashnikov designed his machine gun around the new bullet, so the clip holds the genesis of the gun.
There used to be a band named Boston, too. For a very long time, it was relatively easy to get a book banned in Boston, and publishers would often make sure to do just that, to attract salacious interest in a book. That's the legend, anyway. To a certain extent, something similar happens with movie ratings today: for a certain class of movie, a ``G'' or possibly even a ``PG'' rating is box-office death. (See MPAA entry for explanation of rating codes and more.)
For more on books of salacious interest, see the Housman and adult education entries.
The Flames of Time (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948) is a historical novel by Baynard Hardwick Kendrick (1894-1977). The dedication of the book reads thus:
The Bank of Romney (69-192)
Romney, West Virginia
without whose help this book
(and my others) would never
have been written.
That's the only time I can recall ever having seen a book dedicated to a bank. I appreciate the old-timey routing number.
Another noteworthy place with a similar name is a small town in the Sumy region of Ukraine. It is normally Romanized as Romny. In October of 1880, when the city was part of the Russian Empire, Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe was born there. He became one of the most prominent physicists in Russia, spending most of his career in St. Petersburg (officially Petrograd from 1914, then Leningrad from 1924 until 1991). Ioffe did good work, and he got his name on a little idea (``the Ioffe-Regel condition''), but his occasional epithet of ``father of Soviet science'' must reflect his achievements in bureaucratic physics, as founder of a number of laboratories that eventually became research institutes.
BAR offers a guide to current digs in Israel and Jordan that accept volunteers.
The English word awful has drifted in the opposite semantic direction from terrific and bárbaro; it originally meant something like ``awe-inspiring.''
In Italian, barbarossa is also a common noun. It is applied to various cherry-red ``uve da tavola'' (`table grapes,' which I take to mean grapes not used to make wine). The barba (`beard,' of course) refers to the form of the grape cluster. The name is also applied to the robin (the orange-breasted thrush).
Old Spanish (Old Castillian, or Aragonese) used a s/ss distinction similar to that described above, but Modern Spanish, with fewer sibilants, has no use for ss in its phonetic orthography, and the letter sequence occurs only in loans and unnaturalized proper nouns. The name with the same meaning as Barbarossa is written Barbarroja. The rr is required to preserve the sound of the initial r in roja (`red,' of course). This is evidently not directly a calque of the Italian, since roja was roxa (Old Spanish, remember?) when the last famous Mediterranean Barbarossas lived. Corominas y Pascual account for the esh sound represented by the x laconically, by deriving roxo from Latin russeus rather than russus. (I trust the switch to male gender didn't throw you.) The e following the ss presumably led to palatalization of the ess sound, and that pretty typically evolves into esh (compare the sounds of ss in express and expression). (The semantic difference between russus and russeus, when it was observed, was that the latter represented a less essential red: `dyed red,' `dressed in red,' or `a partisan of the red faction in the Circus.')
(The native French form of this name, Barbaroux, is a moderately common surname. The x in that form is just one of those final letters s that was converted to x by a stylistic scribal convention, and now it's generally silent anyway.)
In Spanish, Barbarroja is used to translate the Latin name Ahenobarbus. Literally, the latter name means `Brassbeard.' Brasses come in a range of colors (see yellow brass), so here etymology gives us more precise information than metallurgy. (Hey -- I didn't claim ``accurate.'') Ahenobarbus was a cognomen of the gens Domitia. The most famous bearer of this name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, born December 15, 37 A.D. His father Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus died in January 40, and he was adopted by his great-uncle the emperor Claudius, and is known to history as Nero. He became emperor following the death of Claudius. His name then was Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus, but it became Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus at some point. Nero doesn't mean `black.' It was a cognomen of the Claudian gens. (Nero was the fifth and last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.) The word nero is supposed to be derived from a Sabellic word which they say meant `strong, valiant, happy.' It sounds like they don't know what it meant. Don't ask me why the cognomen popped up in the place of a praenomen with this guy. Maybe it was just too crowded after the gens.
I'm not aware of any other languages that use Barbarroja or Barbarossa or suchlike to translate Ahenobarbus. However, there was another Roman Emperor who was known as Barbarossa. That was the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Born around 1123, he was the son of Frederick II, duke of Swabia, and in fact he succeeded upon his father's death in 1148, becoming Frederick III, duke of Swabia. He only became Frederick I when he was elected German king and Holy Roman Emperor in 1152 (succeeding his uncle Conrad III). With all those confusing numbers, it was good he eventually got the byname of Barbarossa. I haven't read specifically that he had a red beard, or who gave him the name, but he spent much of his reign fighting wars in Italy. In German he is known as Kaiser Friedrich I Barbarossa, and the translated form of the byname (Rotbart) occurs almost exclusively as a gloss. The name Friedrich means something like `peace ruler,' so there's some irony in that (see Friedrich). Barbarossa died on June 10, 1190, of drowning, in Salef, in the Kingdom of Armenia (modern Göksu nehri, in Asia Minor).
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the name Barbarossa was applied to a couple of brothers who united the Barbary Coast as a Turkish province. That's an interesting story too, but I'm all researched out, so all I'll write for now is that the Barbary Coast, and the Berbers, have the names in European languages that are derived from the Latin barbarus or something like that, meaning foreigner.
In August 1939, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia concluded a mutual-nonaggression treaty through their respective henchpeople (I just felt like neologizing), the German and Soviet foreign ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov, resp. (Conveniently, Stalin had earlier that year replaced his Jewish FM, Maxim Litvinov.) There was also a secret protocol that you could think of as a mutual aggression-against-Poland pact, with related ideas on other small central and northern European countries. The next week the Germans invaded Poland, and a couple of weeks later the Soviets did the same. The Soviets were unexpectedly inefficient in taking the parts of Finland that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact envision for their side, and after a few weeks Hitler ordered the first studies that ultimately led to Fall Barbarossa (`Operation Barbarossa') -- the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in June 1941. Considering the mix of treacherous intrigue and ruthless power politics that characterized the Barbarossa of the first Reich, the name was not inapt.
n.: An outdoor event where one eats food that smells of kerosene.
Okay, this entry is a joke, but it's not wrong. There just happen to be other meanings and more common spellings of barbeque (e.g., barbecue, q.v.).
Coincidentally, in the almost aboriginal Australian language family, which is characterised by an extensive system of highly specialised terms to indicate kinship relations, this term designates the wife of the man who cooks over a fire of black stones and starter fluid. (If you're actually interested in Australianese, you could hardly do worse than visit the Polish entry, but it's mentioned there.)
Jack Ryan, a designer who worked on the doll, also worked on a couple of missiles for the DoD and was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor for nine months. (That is too long to qualify as ``briefly.'') I don't know about you, but I see a recurring theme here. Ryan's famous for patiently and persistently sand-papering the areolae and nipples off the early models until the Japanese supplier finally got the idea and stopped painting them on.
Back on topic, the Iranian government was planning (1996) on entering the highly competitive field of children's dolls, with a much more modest, dark-haired Barbie doppel, decorously escorted by a male companion who is very decidedly her own brother and not possibly a romantic interest. As for coif, one is reminded of the (apocryphal) remark attributed to Henry Ford about the model T: ``You can have it in any color you like so long as it's black.'' I wonder how that turned out -- the doll, I mean.
As a matter of record, the model T was offered in other colors for a short while, but Ford eventually withdrew the option. It has to be remembered that the model T was not celebrated as a great car -- it was celebrated as a great car for the price. By a combination of simplified design, mass production techniques and standardization, and by raw economies of scale, Ford was able to offer a car so affordable that it changed the automobile from a rich man's toy to the workingman's horse.
Now where were we? Oh yeah, in some coed parks (!) in Tehran that past (1996) summer, women were prohibited from riding bicycles. Too sexually provocative.
Barbie was the first children's doll with significant breasts.
In Victorian England, a well-turned table leg was considered too sexually provocative, so table skirts were invented to hide them. More about this at the inanimate entry.
- (Obs.) A rod for manually propelling a barge. The end that pushed the bottom typically got mucky.
- A hackneyed literary rod for avoiding not even touching things.
Not a lot different than a ten-foot pole.
Here is another association of the barleycorn with three and with magnitudes greater than itself. Robert Burns's version of the ``John Barleycorn'' ballad begins thus:
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high;
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
(Yes, it's later. Burns's years were 1759-1796 and Edward I's 1239-1307; Burns's version of the ballad was published in 1782. However, there are earlier versions extant, including one in the Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568. It's been argued that the songs and personification date back to the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons and were adapted for their own purposes by Christian missionaries. Certainly the surviving versions have obvious Christian symbolic resonances. And that the number of men who attacked John Barleycorn was three is traditional. Of course, three is an iconic number.)
As a unit of length, the barleycorn is still in common use (by me). However, the barleycorn was once also a unit of weight. Indeed, it still is, but now it's called a grain (gr.). Here is a snippet of a, cough, seminal work that makes use of the unit. More precisely, it's a snippet of P. Fleury Mottelay's translation of the seminal work of William Gilbert: De Magnete [Book II (no title), Chapter II (entitled ``Of magnetic coition, and, first, of the attraction exerted by amber, or, more properly, the attachment of bodies to amber'')].
A loadstone attracts only magnetic bodies; electrics attract everything. A loadstone lifts great weights; a strong one weighing two ounces lifts half an ounce or one ounce. Electrics attract only light weights; e.g., a piece of amber three ounces in weight lifts only one-fourth of a barleycorn's weight.
Sure, ``one-fourth of a barleycorn'' is ``one poppyseed.'' But that's only a relationship of length units. An avoirdupois ounce is 437.5 barleycorns (that is, one sixteenth of a regulation 7000-barleycorn pound). Everyone else loves this stuff... What's your problem?
[A note on the language: William Gilberd (that's how he wrote his name) lived from 1544 to 1603, and his opus magn(etic)um was published in 1600 in Latin. Although in Elizabethan times all learned men studied Latin and most of them remembered some of it, there were at first many calls for an English translation to be made. This did not occur in a timely manner. Then, around the time of the three-hundredth anniversary of the first publication, two translations appeared almost simultaneously.
It's aptly named, for it does represent an enormous total cross section for any non-Coulombic nuclear scattering process. A Stammtisch member seems to recall, however, that Eugen Wigner disapproved of the term.
Operates weekdays, approximately 7am - 5pm.
Barytone means low tone, with the same Greek root bar-, bari- as occurs in barometer. While barytone, with wye (y) representing upsilon, names a tone stress, the word baritone, from Greek barutonos, means `deep-voiced.'
[One shouldn't worry too much about distinguishing adjectival constructions (deep-voiced) from nominal constructions (deep-voiced one). In Ancient Greek, adjectives and nouns constituted a single part of speech, somewhat as adjectives and adverbs constitute a single part of speech in German. Hence the enigmatic occurrence of such profound-seeming locutions as ``the hot,'' ``the dry,'' ``the cold,'' ``the wet'' in ancient Greek natural philosophy.]
From at least the fourth century to the second century, it was common to call a bad theater actor a `groaner' (barustonos), apparently a pun based on the idea that actors would like to be thought of as deep-voiced.
``Hello?''
``Yes?'' What are they selling this time?
``Hello? Is this Dorothy?''
Lady, I sing baritone when I can get up that high. Do
I sound to you like Judy Garland? ``There's no
Dorothy here.''
``Oh. I guess I have the wrong number, then.''
We're not in Kansas
anymore.
Every day, in every way, I am becoming better and better.
Wow, what an energy rush!
It takes time and drop-distance (and separation from jumping-off point) to deploy a parachute, and also some time for a parachute to slow one's descent, so lower jump-off points are more dangerous. Base jumps ought to be ranked on the basis of how much they increase surviving-population IQ. (Cf. Darwin Awards.)
For example, standard NTSC TV receivers use an intermediate frequency (IF) of 44 MHz. The audio and video are encoded as modulations of that signal. The extracted audio and video signals, which have a much lower frequency range, are called baseband signals.
I'm told that in Indiana, it's illegal to include the below-grade floor space in quoting the square-footage of a home (in the multiple listings, I guess), even if the basement is finished. If the house is not built on level ground, of course, things can get complicated.
When a house is extended sideways, it is typical not to enlarge the basement. It used to be common to create a crawl space under the extension -- a concrete-block wall around the perimeter of the extension supporting it above the ground, which might be excavated a little to leave about a meter of space between the extension floor and the soil. The ``crawl space'' (beneath the extension, enclosed by the blocks) would be accessible through an opening (typically a meter square) along the top of the basement wall. I don't know how typical all this is; most of the crawl spaces I've ever seen have been in Westfield, New Jersey. Nowadays, and probably since poured concrete became common in residential construction, extensions are typically built on slabs.
The Spanish word for basement is sótano (< Latin * subtulus < subtus `under'). Another word traced to subtus through an unattested derivation within Latin is sotana (< * subtana), for a floor-length garment, traditionally referring to a vestment worn by priests. It also referred to academic gowns, when academics wore them.
For a bit of the prehistory of BASIC, see the DART entry. See also Visual Basic.
A name like BASIC makes possible a book title like Elementary BASIC (1985), ``as chronicled by [Dr.] John H. Watson. Edited with commentaries'' by Henry Ledgard & Andrew Singer. The conceit of the book is that Holmes might use the Analytic Engine to solve mysteries, helpfully explaining his methods to Dr. Watson. Too much sugar coating and not enough bitter pill for my taste, but every intellectual palate must be served.
You know, you can't have enough organizations named BASIC. There's a student organization at Siena College that's called ``Brothers And SIsters for Christ.'' That looks like a theogenetic problem to me.
The ``installed base,'' so to speak, of English speakers, and the extreme lack of inflection in English (compared to other European languages) have motivated other attempts to create an international auxiliary language based in some way on English. The other successful effort (popular until Esperanto swept all before it) was Volapük. However, that language is unacceptable because in it my surname means `criminal.' The language E-prime is, like Basic, a subset of English (but devised on different principles). In the early 1960's, Basic (i.e., Basic English) influenced Alan Kay in his creation of the computer language Smalltalk.
If you're in a public computing lab with one of these loud verbal gorillas, wait it out. He'll quiet down as soon as his confident suggestion clearly fails to work.
Oops, louder again. ``Basically, Nr gets Bigger, you want to get it to come down.'' See, that number is bigger.
The corresponding marker in Spanish is Efectivamente....
The other thing you hear a lot in a computer lab is people repeating their previous statements with should inserted, or just saying ``well that should work... God how I hate hacking other people's code!'
Basic English is a careful and systematic selection of 850 English words which will cover those needs of everyday life for which a vocabulary of 20,000 words is frequently employed. Thse words are not the words most commonly used, as determined by word-counts; but all of them are common, and more than 600 of them are constantly used by an English or American child of six.
There are 200 names of picturable objects, and
400 other names of things; making
600 nouns in all.
There are 150 adjectives.
The remaining 100 words put these names and adjectives into operation, so that the whole system may work as normal English.
It might not be remiss to quote the answer to the second question, ``What is its purpose?''
Basic English has two chief purposes:
- To serve as an international auxiliary language; that is to say, a second language for use throughout the world in general communication, commerce, and science.
- To provide a rational introduction to normal English; both as a first step, complete in itself, for those whose natural language is not English, and as a grammatical introduction, encouraging clarity of thought and expression, for English-speaking peoples at any stage of proficiency.
Here is a paragraph from The Shape of Things to Come, a bit of speculative future history that H.G. Wells published in 1933. (Yes, I'm aware of the term ``science fiction.'')
Basic English was the invention of an ingenious scholar of Cambridge in England, C. K. Ogden (1889-1990), who devoted a long and industrious life to the simplification of expression and particularly to this particular simplification. It is interesting to note that he was a contemporary of James Joyce (1882-1955), who also devoted himself to the task of devising a new sort of English. But while Ogden sought scientific simplification, Joyce worked aesthetically for elaboration and rich suggestion, and vanished at last from the pursuit of his dwindling pack of readers in a tangled prose almost indistinguishable from the gibbering of a lunatic. Nevertheless he added about twenty-five words to the language which are still in use. Ogden, after long and industrious experimentation in the reverse direction, emerged with an English of 850 words and a few rules of construction which would enable any foreigner to express practically any ordinary idea simply and clearly. It became possible for an intelligent foreigner to talk or correspond in understandable English in a few weeks. On the whole it was more difficult to train English speakers to restrict themselves to the forms and words selected than to teach outsiders the whole of Basic. It was a teacher of languages, Rudolph Boyle (1910-1959), who contrived the method by which English speakers learnt to confine themselves, when necessary, to Basic limitations.
This convenience spread like wildfire after the First Conference of Basra. It was made the official medium of communication throughout the world by the Air and Sea Control, and by 2020 there was hardly anyone in the world who could not talk and understand it.
Working approximately backwards through this to elucidate some references -- The First Conference at Basra in 1965 was a ``conference of scientific and technical workers ... regarded by historians as a cardinal date in the emergence of the Modern State.'' The beginning of the world government that Wells (1866-1946) envisioned. Boyle is, of course, a fiction. The real James Joyce did not enjoy the long life Wells assigned him here, dying in 1941. Charles Kay Ogden actually died in 1957.
Some day I'll flesh out the actual history of Basic English. For now I should mention that I.A. Richards, who had collaborated with Ogden on The Meaning of Meaning (1923), also collaborated with him on the research that led to the creation of Basic English, though Richards credited the invention primarily to Ogden's resourceful ability to express the greatest variety of thoughts with the smallest vocabulary. (This was a compliment.) From my understanding, it is not entirely a travesty to use of the word ``scientific'' to describe the engineering feat that was the creation of Basic English. One of its striking features is that the basic vocabulary contains a negligible number (18, I think) of pure verbs (not counting their in-many-cases irregular conjugations).
Winston S. Churchill gave a boost to Basic English when he received an honorary degree at Harvard University on September 5, 1943. September is a strange time to receive a degree, but the exigencies of war bent all schedules. Churchill took the occasion of his acceptance speech to tout Basic, which fit well with his cherished vision of the unity of the English-speaking peoples. He described it as ``a very carefully wrought plan for an international language, capable of very wide transactions of practical business and of interchange of ideas ... a medium of intercourse and understanding to many races and an aid to the building of our new structure for preserving peace.'' It doesn't sound like his best stuff, but the speech was broadcast and heard by millions in the US, and the interest it stirred led to newspaper articles well into 1944 on the subject of Basic English.
Part of his argument was like a qualitative version of Metcalfe's Law: that the adoption of English as the universal language (to be accelerated through the use of Basic English) would increase the value of English to those already using it. His speech that day contained an obvious allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural address, also delivered in wartime. (``Let us go forward in malice to none and good will to all.'') This probably gets you to wondering about the famous and variously attributed ``[America and Britain] ... divided by a common language'' line. The status quaestionis of that quotation's origin is summarized here.
Subsequently, Churchill continued to press within the British government for possible application of Basic English, such as possible radio broadcasts by the BBC. When a grateful nation swept Churchill out of office (I mean every word of this) in elections shortly following the victorious conclusion of WWII in Europe, government bureaucrats were generally relieved to be relieved of the need to humor his minor obsession with Basic.
Texts originally written in Basic English can be quite graceful and fluent, but it is often hard to tell to what extent the author has allowed the vocabulary limitations to restrict what is written. Translations of ordinary English into Basic are often inaccurate, stilted, or absurd. Ridicule based on such stilted translations is the immediate reaction of many English-speakers introduced to Basic. Translations into Basic (``writing put into Basic,'' as one would say in Basic) grind down to flatness any fine gradations of meaning. Such gradations do not fail to exist just because they cannot be expressed, so one immediately suspects that texts originally written in Basic are in some sense also inaccurate despite the impression of fluency and naturalness. (No one denies that using Basic entails trade-offs; the argument is only over when and to what extent these trade-offs are worthwhile.)
A loss of nuance is also an important (but intentional) feature of Newspeak, the official language George Orwell outlined as the speech of the dystopia Oceania in his Nineteen Eighty-Four. The idea of Newspeak arose from his analysis of the relationship between speech and totalitarianism, as partly described in his famous essay, ``Politics and the English Language.'' There seems to be no direct evidence that Orwell intended Newspeak as a criticism of Basic English, though it must be noted that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published late in 1949 and he died early in 1950. I suspect that, in any case, the Basic English fad had already peaked by 1949. Nevertheless, the criticism inherent in the Newspeak travesty may have tainted Basic English to some degree.
It's just a matter of time, isn't it?
Last time I was in Toronto, there was a book store there that advertised itself as the largest in the world or something. Ignore it. It has the biggest ratio of aisle width to shelf height of any book store in the world. For a great bookstore with towering inaccessible bookshelves, try Powell's in Portland, Oregon.
Uh-oh. Looks like another emergency-candies situation. Turns out that World's Biggest Bookstore is just its name, not its claim. Grumble. Had a couple of us fooled there.
The following comments are more relevant than they seem yet: In English spelling, the letters b and p generally represent essentially the same consonant. B is a voiced bilabial stop, and p is a voiceless bilabial stop. All that means is that any vowel adjacent to b is pronounced 20 to 30 milliseconds closer to the consonant articulation than it would be adjacent to a p. In Arabic (at least as spoken in North Africa), and in Hebrew as spoken by North African immigrants to Israel, there is no phonemic b/p distinction. For an example of how this plays out, see the SG entry.
The reason I bring up the similarity of the consonants b and p is that in Spanish, pata means `paw, foot.'
The letter b in Spanish happens to represent a sound that is usually not a stop, but like the sound we represent by v. It is neither b nor v, however: it's produced bilabially like English b, whereas English v is produced labiodentally. In the IPA, that sound is represented by the Greek letter beta.
There's a similar, less discernible distinction with f. In Japanese, the sounds we distinguish as h and f are considered equivalent, with transliteration based mostly on the vowel sound following it (Japanese consists essentially of consonant-vowel syllables). Followed by u, it's interpreted as f (e.g., Fuji), followed by i, it's an h. Hence, coffee is kohi. These transliterations represent tendencies in the sound of the consonant. What is not so obvious is that the articulation is essentially that which English uses for h. With a front vowel like /i:/, the point of articulation moves forward to the lips. That yields a sound like our f, even though our f is articulated labiodentally. It's the sound of a blown kiss. (Not just any blown kiss; a blown kiss that's all blowing.) In the IPA, the bilabially articulated Japanese f-sound is written with a Greek letter phi. Japanese speakers who learn a European second language after infancy tend to use the bilabial f in the second language. That tends to be tiring for the speaker, because it requires greater aspiration to produce the same volume of sound. It's like loud whispering.
[An indication of the close relationship of eff and aitch sounds can be seen in a large class of English words that end in -gh. At one time, English had the aitch-like sound /x/ (represented by "ch" in German Bach and Irish loch) and the similar but more closed /ç/ (also represented by "ch" in German word Licht, cognate with English `light'). As these sounds disappeared from English, they were replaced (if at all) by the closest available sound: eff. Hence the modern pronunciations of cough, enough, rough, and tough.]
BTW, zapato means `shoe,' but un pato is a drake. A zapata is also one or another kind of shoe, but mostly it's a half-boot, what we used to call a chukka in the Boy Scouts. You're probably thinking that una pata should mean a duck, but no, it just means `paw' or `foot.' Remember that nouns for most wild animals have fixed grammatical gender in Spanish: females as well as males of the duck persuasion are patos, not patas (if you want to specify, a drake is a pato macho and a duck is a pato hembra). Incidentally, y'know there's no really convenient way of translating webbed feet into Spanish. I suppose you could call them patas de pato.
Emiliano Zapata led a popular rebellion in southern Mexico. It began in 1910 against long-time dictator Porfirio Díaz, and continued during a succession of elected and non-elected leaders. There's a bit more about this time period in the PRI entry. The BATA has neither los zapatos de Zapata nor las zapatas de Zapata. Not even las zapatillas de Zapata (his slippers). Their collection is not strong on Mexican military foot fashions, but they do have shoes of that general vintage. See? I'm not off-topic, I'm just a bit round-about. The BATA has 10,000 shoes in its collection. By my estimate, that comes to, in round numbers you understand, about 5000 pairs, more or less well-matched. Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos left behind 1500 pairs when her husband Ferdinand was deposed.
Come back in a few months, when we add exciting new material on Ernesto Zedillo and the cedilla.
You know, the lady from the teaching effectiveness program said you have to dramatize numbers, because numbers don't mean anything to people like her. Okay, so she didn't say that exactly, but that's what she meant even though she didn't know it. Lessee now, suppose Mrs. Marcos had left behind 1500 pears instead. In a walk-in refrigerator. You could have eaten four pears a day for a year and still had enough left over to plant an orchard even if you didn't save the seeds from the pears you ate.
Ed Sullivan always had a ``really, really big shoe for you tonight,'' but the time that Elvis Presley performed, the broadcast didn't show any part of him below the waist. It's not as if he left his fly open by accident or anything.
As you will recall from the beginning of the entry, the Bata shoe company was founded by one Tomas Bata in Zlin. One Tomas Straussler was born in Zlin on July 3, 1937, the younger son of Eugene Straussler, who was a physician for the Bata company. I don't understand why Bata had one or more company physicians, but for his own and his family's health and safety, Eugene was transferred to Singapore in 1939. This didn't work out so well for him personally, as he was killed there in 1942 when the Japanese invaded. His wife and two sons had been evacuated to India. There Martha Straussler eventually married Kenneth, an officer in the British army. The sons adopted their stepfather's surname, and Tomas Straussler became Tom Stoppard.
Early in 1938, my mother was also in Czechoslovakia. ``Stateless in Prague (1938)'' doesn't have the same melifluousness as ``Sleepless in Seattle (1993),'' but it does have its poignancy and cause for sleeplessness. My mother was on the last flight out before Germany occupied the Sudetenland. There's no little irony in the fact that this occupation, the result of Neville (``Peace for our time'') Chamberlain's infamous appeasement in Munich, was ostensibly needed to protect Germans in Czechoslovakia. When I mentioned Bata shoes to my mother, she looked puzzled for a moment and then corrected me. I meant ``Batya'' shoes. Turns out that in Czech, Bata is spelled Bat'a. Oh yes, they're world famous. She bought a pair in New York when she visited in 1954. I prefer Clarks (see this E entry to learn why).
Bata shoes is all about pronunciation. It might be the ideal shoe for when you need to put your foot in your mouth.
Other people who took the opportunity to leave central Europe around that time included the Biro brothers, mentioned at the ball-point pen entry. My friend Lisbeth Brodie did not have that opportunity. After surviving the Warsaw ghetto uprising, she ended up in the Czech town of Terezin, Theresienstadt in German, about forty miles from Prague. She always wore long-sleeve blouses. In her last years, at the invitation of the state of New Jersey, Lisbeth would go around to local schools and describe her experiences.
She told me that one question children would ask, that she knew she could not answer in a way to make them understand, was how she had felt. One felt nothing, one's feelings died. That is not exactly true, of course. In the rooms after morning roll call, she and her fellow prisoners would dance, to celebrate surviving another day alive. On May 8, 1945, she celebrated liberation by the Red Army. For this she had food, a rich feast: a bar of butter. An incomplete meal for an incomplete party; she was the only survivor of her family in Poland. She eventually got to the US, where she made a life as a nursery school teacher (including mine, when I first arrived in the US). As she lay dying on Tuesday, May 16, 2001, we and her closest family -- an English cousin -- quietly celebrated her life and her ninetieth birthday. She died the following Friday morning.
At the time that the BATF was formed, these three items (A, T, and F) were the most prominent federally-taxed items. Nor was the US the only country in which this was ever true. More recently, Gorbachev's early campaign against heavy drinking and alcoholism redounded in significantly reduced tax revenues for the USSR. A letter revealed in a recent new biography of Stalin shows that when he was contemplating ways to raise money for the coming war with Germany (known as the ``Great Patriotic War'' in the old USSR; WWII elsewhere), he considered promoting greater consumption of alcohol. In China, a corresponding rôle is played by cigarettes.
Technically, the correct acronym is NOT `BATF' but `ATF' (q.v.). Now you know.
The Romans generally believed that Batr. had been written by Homer. Considering that various elements of it parody the Iliad (as well as the Homeric cycle), this is as much as to say that Homer parodied his own great epic. It says something about the Romans that they thought this. Plutarch attributed the work to Pigres of Halicarnassus, brother or son of Artemisia, queen of Caria. I hope you find that illuminating. Halicarnassus was an Greek city on the coast of Caria (an ancient region of southwest Asia Minor), and this Pigres is also called Pigres of Caria. The Suda agrees on the authorial attribution, but given the derivative nature of the Suda and the prominence of Plutarch, that might not count as corroboration.
Interestingly, FROG and SPIDER are competing methods in the measurement of laser chirp.
Believe me, if I knew some way of working mice in there that wasn't WIMPy, I'd have done it.
Ángel María Ganivet García was a Spanish writer and a diplomat who represented his country in Antwerp, Helsinki, and Riga. He published a book called Ideárium Español, and Miguel de Unamuno replied to it in three letters which he also published in the periodical El Defensor. Ganivet responded to this with an extended essay addressed to Unamuno, entitled El Porvenir de España (`The Future of Spain'). By the way, my friend Vladimir's sister-in-law did her dissertation on Unamuno. One day we were driving in Washington, D.C., and I remarked about a statue that it reminded me of Unamuno, and she turned and asked me why. (I wasn't aware until later that she had a particular interest in Unamuno.) I explained that it was the grave, thoughtful attitude (I meant posture) that reminded me of a statue of Unamuno that I had seen in Spain. This personal bit of trivia involving a woman whose name I can't even remember is of no possible interest to you, but I don't have any other place to mention it. The take-home is that once, at least, I actually did have a life. No wait, let me try that again. The take-home is that Unamuno was a famous Spanish philosopher. Here's a quick passable translation [original follows] of the first paragraph of Ganivet's essay:
I have not forgotten, friend and companion Unamuno, those afternoons of which you remind me, nor those café chats, nor those strolls through La Castellana when, with the enthusiasm and earnestness of students just out of the classrooms, we reformed our country according to our whim. I still recall your projects of those days. Among them the one that most interested me was that of publishing the Batrachomyomachia of Homer (or whomever), with illustrations by yourself. To bring off this arduous enterprise with panache, you studied in depth the anatomy of mice and frogs. Whatever came of that interest? On the marble table of the café you painted a frog for me with such consummate skill that I have not been able to forget it: I still see it staring fixedly at me, as if it wanted to eat me with its bulging eyes.
[ No he olvidado, amigo y compañero Unamuno, aquellas tardes que usted me recuerda, ni aquellas charlas de café, ni aquellos paseos por la Castellana cuando, con el ardor y la buena fe de estudiantes recién salidos de las aulas, reformábamos nuestro país a nuestro antojo. Recuerdo aún sus proyectos de entonces, entre los cuales el que más me interesó era el de publicar la Batracomaquia, de Homero (o de quien sea), con ilustraciones de usted mismo, que, para salir con lucimiento de su ardua empresa, estudiaba a fondo la anatomía de los ratones y de las ranas. ¿Qué fué de aquella afición? Sobre la mesa de mármol del café me pintó usted una rana con tan consumada maestría, que no la he podido olvidar: aún la veo que me mira fijamente, como si quisiera comerme con los ojos saltones.]
I can save you the trouble: Ganivet doesn't mention the Batr. anywhere else in the essay.
History here (electrical batteries in the modern sense below):
In its original sense, battery was the name of the action of battering or beating, or of the apparatus for doing it. The word has been used figuratively, and the meaning has also been extended in many special applications where some kind of force is applied repeatedly. This kind of usage seems to have been especially popular in the nineteenth century, when battery was used in baseball for pitchers and later for pitcher-catcher pairs, in astronomy for series of lenses, and in mining for rock-pulverizing mills with multiple ``stamps'' (hammers). Perhaps the most widely used extended sense of the word bequeathed us by the twentieth century is represented in ``a battery of [typically psychological, intelligence, or clinical] tests.''The current principal sense of battery is that of a kind of self-contained electrochemical power source. This goes back to Benjamin Franklin. In 1748, or at least no later than that, he introduced the term into electricity in the sense of multiple capacitors connected in series. The idea was that if you charge a number of capacitors (often Leyden jars) separately or in parallel up to some voltage, then a multiple of them in series gives a multiple of the voltage.
When Franklin was doing his pioneering experiments with electricity, triboelectricity (q.v.; typically amber or glass rubbed with fur) was the main source of practical electric energy. (Lightning was not very practical except as an unusual way to kill yourself.) If you wanted higher voltage, a battery of capacitors was your option. Apart from that application, there's not much call for hooking a number of capacitors up in series: it yields a smaller capacitance, and an easier way to make a smaller capacitance (though with a lower voltage rating) is simply to make a smaller (less cross-sectional area) capacitor.
Electronics has progressed somewhat since the eighteenth century, and we no longer use the word battery for capacitors in series. I'm not going to get into a detailed analysis of just how capacitors are used today. There are some situations where it's appropriate to use capacitors in series, and capacitors (modern ultracapacitors) are again used as temporary power supplies in some applications. But now the word battery is used for electrochemical cells.
Today, if you have to work with a fixed-voltage source and you need a higher voltage, you just use a step-up transformer. (You can used it essentially directly for an AC source. If your source is DC, you use it to power an inverter, producing AC to feed the primary of the step-up transformer. If you need DC out, you can rectify on the secondary side of the transformer. See DC/DC converter.)
Modern electrical batteries (first the boring historical stuff):
Toward the end of the[under construction]
Modern electrical batteries (now the boring technical stuff):
The two idealized kinds of DC power supply are constant-current and constant-voltage sources. An ordinary chemical battery can be well represented by a constant-voltage source in series with an internal resistance or equivalently by a constant-current source with a parallel internal resistance. At the circuit-theoretic level, they are equivalent. Any such DC power supply will have a maximum voltage (at zero current: open circuit) and a maximum current (at zero voltage: shorted).(This interchangeability of current-source and voltage-source circuit models is quite general. In the small-signal analysis of a transistor circuit, one uses both voltage-controlled current-source models and current-controlled voltage-source models, choosing mainly for convenience of calculation. Of course, nowadays most people just use a simulator like SPICE.)
The voltage of a single chemical cell is determined by the
redox reaction it relies on. That voltage is less
than or equal (ideally) to the energy per electron transfer, so it is on the
order of one volt. The standard lead-acid reaction yields the standard cell
voltage of
By combining chemical cells in series one creates a ``battery.'' The term battery was borrowed from military usage by Benjamin Franklin, whose book on electricity was the vade mecum of ``electricians'' (researchers into electricity) through the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Like a military battery, a chemical battery combines the force of the individual cells to produce a greater force -- voltage, in this case. In a battery, the cells are connected in series. All commercial nine-volt batteries are made of six 1.5-volt cells in series. Car batteries are really batteries. Nowadays 12 volts has become the virtually universal standard, as far as I can tell, with the car chasis connected to the negative pole. However, there have been positive-ground cars, and I seem to recall my mother's 1964 Plymouth Valiant had a six-volt battery.
From the user's standpoint, there is little or no difference between a battery and a single voltaic cell, so it is natural (especially given the many other uses of the word cell) that the word battery should have come to be used for both. However, a number of cells in parallel is not what Franklin had in mind by ``battery.''
The main selling point to faculty is that it streamlines a number of on-line activities that one would normally accomplish using different programs, but BlackBoard itself is universally recognized to be clunky. There you have it: clunky streamlining.
B'nai Brith is a Jewish fraternal service organization. It was founded in Aaron Sinsheimer's café on New York's Lower East Side on October 13, 1843, by a group of twelve recent Jewish immigrants from Germany. The early meetings were held in German, but they eventually switched to English. Around then they also changed the name of the organization from the original Bundes Brüder (German for `brothers of the covenant'). I was going to praise their wisdom in preserving the initials, but the case is not so clear-cut. The English name they originally chose was ``Independent Order of B'nai B'rith.'' They didn't get around to shortening the name to plain B'nai B'rith (Hebrew for `sons of the covenant') until 1930.
At first it was really a fraternal organization like some Masonic ones -- a collection of lodges. Also, until 1988 it was all-male. (A women's auxiliary chapter was formed in 1897; see BBW.) The organization went international in 1875: A lodge in exotic Toronto! Or York or whatever it was at the time. Then Montréal! In 1882 it went intercontinental: a lodge in Berlin, where I imagine they spoke German. That is believed to have been the first instance of a Jewish organization founded in the New World being transplanted in the Old. Lodges were formed in Cairo (1887) and Jerusalem (1888).
Because the organization is international, you want to know how the name is pronounced in English. Roughly (very very roughly) speaking, that's what the rest of the entry is about.
Hebrew, like most Semitic languages, is written with a consonantal script. Vowels (and some other phonemic information) are indicated in schoolbooks and some other literature by a system of diacriticals called ``pointing'' (actually by Tiberian pointing, which is the one of various competing pointing systems that survived). The shwa can be indicated like any other vowel, but it can be very short, so in transliterated Hebrew it may or may not be indicated. Whether it is or not depends partly on what are regarded as acceptable consonant clusters in the target language. For example, an apostrophe indicates the shwa in the word b'rith as the BB writes it, but usually the vowel is not indicated at all, probably because br is a standard consonant cluster in English. The word is normally written brit: the final aitch in the BB spelling is an indication that the consonant was aspirated. (In practice, however, the BB word B'rith is pronounced as ``brith,'' to rhyme with ``with.'')
Do I really have to explain this aspiration thing again? No, but I'm gonna anyway. The final letter of the Hebrew alphabet is tav. A dot (called a dagesh) could be inserted in its glyph to indicate that it was not aspirated. The sound of the undotted (i.e., aspirated) tav evolved into an ess sound in Ashkenazi pronunciation (hence bris instead of brit). I think the Douai versions of the Bible (essentially the Catholic response to the KJV) use a lot of aitches to indicate aspirated consonants that evolved (bh for what became v, etc.). So for example, the apocryphal book Tobit in the KJV (the original Authorized Version did authorize the Apocrypha) is Tobith in the Douai. (Of course, the Hebrew version of the name Judith also ends in tav -- Yudit -- but the English version of that name was established. There's more about brit at the USA entry, about half a dozen paragraphs from the end.
Okay, now back to shwa. If the vowel occurs between consonants that don't occur as a recognizable consonant cluster in English, then some graphical indication of the vowel is more likely to be given. Before the en (Hebrew letter nun) for example, one typically sees an apostrophe transliterating shwa in b'nai (`sons, members of a group') and sometimes in p'nina (`pearl' -- the object, and also girl's given name). Notice that Ancient Greek had the consonant cluster pn, but in Greek-based words like pneumatic we don't pronounce it. Probably more often a vowel is used instead of an apostrophe, as in the more common transliteration penina. Incidentally, the final vowel cluster in bnai, typically pronounced like a long a in North America, actually transliterates a long i sound, just like ai in the Hepburn system for Japanese, but I've generally heard it pronounced ``buh-NAY.''
While we're on the subject, the strict Hepburn system also has an apostrophe associated with en. The two-letter sequences na, ni, etc. could either represent one kana (na, ni, nu, ne, or no) or two (syllabic en followed by one of na, ni, etc.). An apostrophe following letter en indicates that two kana are transcribed. (Yes, there is a difference in pronunciation.) Some Romanized-Japanese dictionaries use an apostrophe between doubled consonants to indicate that they should both be pronounced. This can be a bit of overkill, since there's no other reason to double a consonant in transliteration, but it's a useful reminder to people familiar with West European languages that, like French, English, and pre-spelling-reform Portuguese, maintain double consonants from Latin with no phonetic distinction from single consonants. However, in retranscribing nn or n'n back to Japanese kana, there is no ambiguity: it's a syllabic en followed by the kana for a syllable beginning in en.
As individually transcribed, all kana other than syllabic en end in a vowel, so you might wonder what other doubled consonants could occur. In a word (if you'll pardon the, uh, expression): plenty. For example, the kana for tsu, followed by the kana for ku, is sometimes used to write kku. (Most of the time, of course, you wouldn't see this because the word would be written in kanji.) This is not so strange as it might seem, for two reasons: First, because the vowels i and u are often elided. (Most people, for example, pronounce the final syllable su as an ess, or with a very soft vowel that sounds like a German ö.) Hence (and I'm not certain what ``hence'' means here), syllables with consonant sounds that cannot be represented by single kana are represented with kana pairs, the first kana ending in i. (E.g., kiya for kya, shisa for sha, etc.) A similar use of kana ending in u is less extensive; I'll have to look into this. The second reason that tsuku for kku is natural is that tsu is a sort of hyperaspirated tu (the related kana are ta, chi, tsu, te, to). So tsuku is like tuku is like t'ku.... Adjacent stops are often assimilated into one. For example, Latin -ct- becomes Italian -tt- (octo, otto). Let's not talk about duct tape. Some people pronounce ``dotcom'' as ``dah com'' -- you can't hear a tee. To take a more distant example (labial and dental stops, rather than palatal and dental), Western European languages generally simplified the pt and phth consonant clusters in Greek loans.
To round out the discussion, we should also cover doubled vowels in Japanese. Japanese vowels have length like Latin and German vowels: they vary in duration. In hiragana, lengthening is normally indicated by doubling the vowel (i.e., by adding a vowel kana for the doubled vowel). In katakana, the syllable is followed by a length mark. Prominent exceptions to ``normally'' in the preceding sentence occur with long-o in hiragana, which may be indicated using the a u kana or with the length mark normally used with katakana. The length mark, incidentally, is refreshingly intuitive: it's a long horizontal line. The strict Hepburn system tries to reproduce this, with some allowance for Western orthographic sensibilities. In particular, long e and long i are indicated by ei and ii if they would be written with hiragana (i.e., if they are native Japanese words or Chinese loans) and by a macron over the e or i if they are foreign loans (katakana). Vowels a, o, and u are consistently indicated by a macron. Of course, that's the Hepburn system. What people generally write is something else again. Most fonts still don't have macrons, so people either fail to indicate the lengthening or use a doubled vowel (or ei or ou). (You think this is confusing? Imagine ``or ou'' in French.) It seems to me that the usual practice is to omit any indication of long a or u, to often indicate long i, and sometimes to indicate long e and long o. Pronunciation varies, and the long e and o can be a little rounded (like English ey and ow, as you won't be surprised to learn given the transcriptions ei and ou). It occurs to me that I probably should move this explanation someplace else. What was this entry about in the first place anyway?
Watch out! Someone could get hurt with that thing!
-- Opening words of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions (I know what you're thinking, you filthy-minded person!) in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
Bogoliubov, in particular, worked in the Soviet Union. Although he published in major Soviet journals, there was always a delay before most Western scientists became aware of his work, since most of them did not read Russian, and cover-to-cover technical-journal translation was just starting up. Right through the 1960's, a lot of scientific work that was not secret and which had no evident military significance was done essentially in duplicate because of the poor communication between scientists on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, but that has nothing to do with what I wanted to write about. I only wanted to say that I would be surprised if this Bogoliubov didn't play chess, but that the one better known for playing chess was the Ukrainian master Efim Bogoljubov (1889-1952). (He lived in Germany after WWI, hence the transliteration using j.) Famous line: ``When I am White, I win because I am White; when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov.'' [It's the second definition of modesty in Eliot Hearst's Chess Glossary.] I suppose it would have crossed the line from modesty to self-abasement if he'd noted that when he was White, he lost because he was Bogoljubov.
Just go. You won't be missed.
Ugh! Anyway, it just goes to show that it's not only internal organs that can function just fine without any free advice from the upstairs. (Most business organizations are the same way, but those data are problematic as there may not be any brains upstairs either.) Limbs, the parts of the body one thinks of as being under ``voluntary'' (i.e. brain?) control can, uh, go through the motions without any input from the brain.
Your fall-back position is that that's just it: going through the motions is one thing, but fer larnin' yeh needs a brain. In fact, you say, it's also well known that some insects, such as cockroaches and locusts, are able to walk and to right themselves when turned over, even after they have been completely decapitated. You used to perform these experiments yourself. Heck, you'll even grant that chickens are very well known to sometimes run around after being decapitated, even though it's difficult to track down serious research on this. (In any case, that phenomenon is, pardon the expression, short-lived.)
But you're wrong about learning and the brain. In 1962, Nature (London) published a letter by G. A. Horridge in entitled ``Learning of Leg Position by Headless Insects'' (vol. 193, pp. 697-8). Horridge reasoned from the roach and locust facts you mentioned that ``[e]vidently there is a high degree of local control of the posture and responses of the legs by the corresponding segmental ganglia; therefore not all details of the proprioceptive control of leg position need ascend to the brain. In turn, long-term adaptive changes in leg posture might then necessarily be controlled by the segmental ganglia if the detailed information were available only at the segmental level.''
Sure enough, decapitation is only slightly more effective in changing the behavior of a roach leg than is amputating other legs. It reminds me of the line an alarmed Woody Allen utters in Sleeper, an encomium to his brain: ``It's my second-favorite organ!'' Horridge describes the basic experiment he performed with both cockroaches and locusts:
If a headless insect having only one remaining leg is placed in such a position that it receives an electrical stimulus at 1 per sec. to the tarsus during the time that the tarsus remains below a previously set level, it will repeatedly lower the leg to the point where a shock is received and then withdraw. However, after repeated shocks over a period of 15-20 min. the behaviour changes. The leg is progressively held up for relatively longer periods, fewer shocks are received .... Of 200 animals so tested in groups of 20, about 70 per cent behave in this way, 10-20 per cent hold up their leg for a period of up to 5 min. after receiving even one or two shocks, and 15-25 per cent behave unsatisfactorily and may never change their behaviour in such a way that fewer shocks are received.(Funny way the rounding works out. Even with three assistants, that's a lot of experimental animals. I guess lawyers were not so abundant in those days.)
In principle, of course, the behavior modification might be the result of shock-induced damage or some such effect other than adaptive learning. To rule out this possibility, Horridge performed an experiment using what are now called ``yoked controls.'' Forty decapitated one-legged cockroaches were wired up in pairs so that when one of the animals (the trainee) lowered its leg, both it and the yoked animal received a shock. After 30-45 minutes of training and 10 minutes of rest, the animals were separately tested to determine shock avoidance. The trainees dramatically outperformed the yoked controls.
Also very impressive: Horridge demonstrated a sort of cross-training effect. (He didn't use that term, but even as of 2003 the term hadn't appeared in an OED Supplement.) The cross-training used forty decapitated cockroaches with two legs each: one prothoracic leg and the metathoracic leg on the opposite side. Training shocks (or just shocks, for the yoked animals) were applied to the prothoracic leg, but post-training tests were performed on the metathoracic leg. The results were still significant by rank-order test, but only at the 5% level.
If you're interested in this stuff, you should probably have a look at the rattle entry, since some day I may put something useful there besides an explanation of terminology used in this entry. Eventually, I also plan to explain BBL. Right now, in fact.
It turns out that I could have forgone the foregoing. I only performed that long song-and-dance above to suggest the existence of some significant kind of learning that does not involve the brain, which would make ``brain-based learning'' (BBL, remember?) something other than the psychobabble pleonasm it appears to be. It turns out, however, that BBL implicitly ignores that possibility. ``Brain-based learning'' is merely a poorly conceived way of saying ``teaching based on brain research.'' The term implies a claim; it could give a new meaning to the term ``dream research.'' Teasing apart actual usage, the term names two things:
- An approach to teaching which is putatively derived from
- a theory of learning which is putatively derived from research on the brain.
Less often, it's called ``brain-compatible learning'' (BCL). By any name, it's still ed research. In principle, this may not be certain proof that it's pure horseshit. This article suggests how rudimentary and uncertain is our knowledge of the brain, and how unreliable that knowledge is as any kind of guide to teaching. That is rather beside the point, however, because BBL is not based on detailed scientific findings, but on fuzzy generalities. This particular brand of snake oil was first marketed by Leslie Hart, in Human Brain and Human Learning (1983). Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine franchised the idea with Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain (1991), Unleashing the Power of Perceptual Change: The Potential of Brain-Based Teaching (1997), Education on the Edge of Possibility (1997), and The Brain, Education, and the Competitive Edge (2001). Making Connections introduced ``Twelve Brain/Mind Learning Principles.'' (The use of solidus within ordinary English text is not a propitious sign.) As this sympathetic page declares, they ``are not based solely on the findings of neuroscience. Instead, these principles and the ideas generated from them come from a wide range of additional disciplines, including cognitive psychology, sociology, philosophy, education, technology, sports psychology, creativity research, and physics.'' Sure. Interesting mix there. Rather more goats than sheep.
A more recent classic of this depressingly tenacious genre is How the Brain Learns by David A. Sousa. Sousa is one of the bright lights of this dim field, thanked in the forewords of others' books. How was rated a cumulative 19 stars out of 20 by the four reviewers who had commented at Amazon when I visited. This gives you a pretty clear idea of the kind of person who would buy and read a book like this. (High school principals, gym teachers, and their ilk.) It's not actually a book. It looks more like a bunch of power-point slides with a relaxed attitude to grammar, semantics, usage, and logic. God help your children.
I just realized that I had already mentioned the praying mantis thing in the argonaut entry! Sorry.
It's made by reacting cycloocta-1,5-diene with borane or diborane (B2H6). The double bonds break to single bonds, and a BH group ends up bonded to carbon 1 or 2, and also to 5 or 6, of the cyclooctane structure. In other words, you get a bicyclic structure that is asymmetric (five- and seven-member rings) or symmetric (six-membered rings). Note, in other words, that ``bicyclononane'' is not a bi(cyclononane) -- it doesn't have two occurrences of nonane. Instead, it's a single nonane with a substituted boron (actually n-cyclooctane with a single-boron bridge somewhere across the middle) that can be thought of in the usual way as bicyclic. The two rings share a common -CH-BH-CH-.
With a bit of heat, the symmetric structure (the standard BBN) is thermodynamically favored and produced in high yield. See JACS, vol. B90, p. 5280 (1968) for details of the synthesis.
BBN is a popular hydroborating agent for organic synthesis. Unlike borane, BBN is stable in air. Also, whereas borane reacts with most double bonds, BBN's steric constraints make it highly selective, reacting preferentially with the most exposed and accessible double bonds (preferring, in particular cis- to trans-configured bonds).
As of 2005, the US consumes about 7 BBO annually. Of this, about 3 BBO is produced domestically, 0.9 comes from the Persian Gulf, 0.6 each from Canada and Mexico, and the remainder from Venezuela and a dozen smaller suppliers.
Oil represents 40% of US energy supplies, used primarily for transport -- cars, trucks, and aircraft. Since the oil crunch of 1979-1985, US utilities have shifted steadily away from petroleum, and in 2005 it supplies 3% of electric power.
That's okay, don't hurry. No need to put yourself out! Staaaay awaaay!
There might be a bit more to this move than initialism repulsion. BBW began as a women's auxiliary of the B'nai B'rith in 1897. The auxiliary chapters were largely shut out of participation in B'nai B'rith governance, so they developed their own, and ran the auxiliaries essentially independently and with their own budgets. In 1940 the auxiliaries created a national headquarters and Supreme Council. Hence, B'nai B'rith Women (technically, the name was only adopted in 1957, though it was the title of the inchoate organization's monthly magazine by WWII) became a parallel international organization affiliated with B'nai B'rith.
The precise terms of that affiliation were in some dispute by the late 1980's. In 1988, BBI overwhelmingly passed a resolution admitting women. At the same time, BBW passed a resolution to remain distinct. Finally in 1995 BBW declared its independence and changed its name to Jewish Women International.
This came up as a topic on the classics list, in the archives of which you can discover the answers, under the obvious rubrics.
You think I'm going to explain that? There are whole books to explain that.
Guicciardini's ricordo C138 reads, in Domandi's translation,
Neither fools nor wise men can ultimately resist what must be. Hence, I have never read anything that I thought better said than: Ducunt volentes fata, nolentes trahunt.
(The Latin may be rendered ``Fate leads the willing, drags the unwilling.')
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
No, that's not very amusing or precise. Please be patient. Humor is like constipation: it can cause painful delays, and straining hurts. ``Leave 'em laughing when you go,'' they say. Let's not think about that. At least we didn't perpetrate a pun on human ``chicks.''
``The Bird Conservation Alliance is a network of organizations whose focus is the conservation, study, and observation of birds. Through the Alliance, millions of birdwatchers and concerned citizens are united with conservation professionals, scientists, and educators for the conservation of wild birds.'' (I've noticed elsewhere that ``educator'' is a catch-all term now stretched to include people with no particularly relevant training or credential. I guess ``activist'' has worn out any connotational welcome it may once have had. A political organizer engages in education, you know. When you consider what goes on and doesn't go on in the schools, it's a sad comparison all around.)
I dunno, the humor crank seems balky this morning.
No wait -- don't tell me: ``people who stutter'' is respectful and recognizes the personhood of people who stutter, whereas ``stutterers'' is essentializing, derogatory, and offensive. (And somewhat onomatopoeic.) When all the professional offense-takers are done with the language, it'll be three times wordier and more opaque. It'll take longer to speak that speak than to stutter the language as it is now.
It's been almost seventy years, so I guess the story can be told. When my dad was a young man, the family was still in contact with relatives in Alsace-Lorraine. It was the run-up to WWII, and a lot of these relatives realized they were in a bad place and needed to get out. Of course, it was the middle of a world-wide depression and immigration visas were scarce. Many countries that were willing to take immigrants would only accept them to fill perceived labor or skill shortages. So a rich cousin of ours bought a farm and brought over a number of the mishpoche on the pretext that they were trained agronomists or something. My dad was fluent in French, so he was employed to teach the newcomers the local langauge (Spanish). He had variable success with this, and apparently the government was in a hurry for the newcomers to demonstrate that they were Spanish-speaking. So one other thing that my dad taught was how to stutter. You can learn to stutter faster than you can learn any language. When you stutter it's hard for others to tell that you can't speak the language because you don't know it well, rather than because you can't get it out. And people complete your sentences for you with the answers they want, as for example on naturalization papers.
More on stuttering and the New World emigration at the Abend entry.
Cc: not explicitly indicated on
the copied document (or the document copied).
The Bcc: field in email is an
optional header that functions like the Cc: field -- it instructs
the MTA to send a copy of the message to any
addresses listed after the field name. It differs from the Cc: header in that
the Bcc: line does not appear in the email received.
The similar-sounding initialism ``BCBDS'' seems to be widely used as an equivalent of BCDBS.
On January 4, 2004, I googled around trying to figure out what was going on. Here are the hit counts I got with various searches:
The words in the expansion: 3220
The expansion: 193
"BCBDS": 95
"BCDBS": 108
"BCBDS" and the expansion (as phrase): 56
"BCBDS" and the expansion words: 56
"BCBDS" and "Broadband" and "Service": 57
"BCDBS" and the expansion (as phrase): 51
"BCBDS" and the expansion words: 81
"BCDBS" and the expansion words: 83
"BCDBS" and "BCBDS" and the expansion: 39
"BCDBS" and "BCBDS" and "VERA" and the expansion: 36
("BCDBS" or "BCBDS") and "bearer of data": 0
As of March 2005, it has only five regional member states (miembros regionales) (Belize, the former British Honduras, and Panama are the nonmember C.A. countries). In addition it has five miembros extraregionales: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, the Republic of China, and Spain.
Wait a sec: Spain!? That's not just extraregional -- that's practically on the other side of the world!
No, that isn't it either. This is really beginning to bother me. Maybe they did away with it. In ANSI C, they dropped bcmp for memcmp().
Even more surprising, perhaps, is that you can download a machine-independent interpreted version of BCPL, implemented in C, made available by Richard Martin in 2000. He published an article in the December 2011 Computer Journal (``How BCPL Evolved from CPL''). The article abstract ends ``surprisingly, the language is still used commercially and by individuals all over the world.''
A copy of the BCPL manual from July 1967 (which also constituted the language definition) is available on-line (different typescript with almost identical content here). The abstract:
BCPL is a simple recursive programming language designed for compiler writing and system programming: it was derived from true CPL (Combined Programming Language) by removing those features of the full language which make compilation difficult namely, the type and mode matching rules and the variety of definition structures with their associated scope rules.
From Section 4.2, on string constants:
The string character alphabet contains all the
characters except * and ' are represented directly. These two
exceptions are represented by
** and *' respectively.
In addition
*n represents newline
*s " space
*b " backspace
*t " tab
It's interesting that nested blocks in BCPL (called sections), opened with multiple $( (called SECTBRA) tokens, could be closed by a single SECTKET $). This doesn't seem like a convenience to me. In later versions, the {,} tokens were adopted, and curly brackets have been the standard code-block tokens ever since. A little bit about the history of comment styles in BCPL and its successors B, C, C++, and C# can be found at the B entry.
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes a Hello World program in BCPL.
The Net Advance of Physics site has one (as of 95/08) paper directly on the theory.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
In 2005, for only the first time since 2003, Congress looked into the fairness of the BCS. Finally our legislators were getting off their duffs and getting to work on pressing issues! ``College football is not just an exhilarating sport, but a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore,'' said Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. Barton feared that the method for determining who's number 1 was flawed. Coincidentally, the Texas Longhorns were ranked #2 (behind USC) in most polls for virtually all of the 2005 season. (They were #1 in the BCS rankings for week 9, the second week that BCS rankings were available, due to higher computer ranking. In 2005, the score that determined BCS rankings was a simple average of the Harris Interactive poll, the USA Today Coaches poll, and a strange number called the Computer poll.) Barton represents Texas legislative district #6, which is nowhere near the Longhorns' Austin home, and he's an Aggie, so obviously the hearings represent his disinterested concern, and not demagogic pandering or Texas pique.
People complain about unfairness as if fairness were possible. The BCS is just a prominent example of the failure of the assumption.
George Harrison had a song called Bangladesh, and he made four syllables out of the name (BANG-uh-luh-DESH). What more do you need to know?
Cf. B.D.
Cf. BD
BDD's are one tool to analyze fault trees. See R. Sinnamon and J. Andreas: ``Fault Tree Analysis and Binary Decision Diagrams,'' Proceedings of the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, pp. 215-222 (January 1996).
The problem I have with the original definition is that those who are not ``otherwise normal'' get a free pass, but by now that definition has faded into obscurity. Many other ``derangement syndromes'' were suggested, but they have fallen out of fashion since the end of Bush administration. The initialism is also less common now, but for those who regard BDS as a real phenomenon, that has the virtue of tying together an affliction with an identically-labeled enthusiasm that is correlated with it (this other BDS, supra).
In the 1953 movie ``The Titfield Thunderbolt,'' there's a scene in a pub where Mrs. Valentine (so IMDb) asks her husband ``Do you know what time it is?'' He replies ``Yes, my love: summer double time.''
Another sweet thing that is bad for you is lead acetate, once also known as ``sugar of lead.'' (Just say ``no thanks, I'd rather have some cyclamate.'') The Romans used it as an artificial sweetener (and as a whitener in face creams, too!). It's hard to tell at this remove just how much lead poisoning it caused. Other associations of sweetness and bad health: schizophrenics and diabetics often smell sweet, though ironically, schizophrenics may have delusions that they are giving off noxious fumes. Okay, I agree: it might not be delusional.
Beryllium is the p-dopant of choice for GaAs semiconductor. Arsenic (As) ain't any too good for you either. Chemicals! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em! No wonder so many personals ads mention ``chemistry.''
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Be is the lightest alkaline earth element, if it's considered an alkaline earth element at all.
One of the weirder Latin words is zmaragdum
for `emerald.' It occurs in Petronius. Don't
believe me? Look here.
Belgium is also known for unusual vegetables (Belgian endive and Brussels sprouts).
If you have time to kill, you could visit the dialect entry now.
Also in 1996, the Belgian government pioneered a new public relations technique for getting scandals of government officials involved in corruption off the front pages: trump them with scandals of government officials involved in child sexual molestation and murder! A front page can only hold so much.
On February 17, 2010, Belgians celebrated their 249th day without a government, breaking a record set the previous November by Iraq. A caretaker government under PM Yves Leterme had been running Belgium since elections on June 13, 2010. However, there was some uncertainty or disagreement about the international no-government record. Therefore, to secure the record, the Belgians held off on a new government until December 2011.
You observe that ``Flanders'' is not exactly the same as the region traditionally identified as Vlaanderen. You want to nitpick, go argue with this map.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.
I should point out that that Welsh/Walloon joke is made possible by a common Germanic root *walh, meaning `foreign' (effectively `Celt-or-Roman'). The root occurs in the word walnut, probably of Low-German origin, which refers to the nut found in Gaul and Italy (as opposed to the hazelnut found in German areas). The root appears in the word Walloon, used by speakers of Old Low Franconian or Old Dutch (another Low-German language) in northeastern Gaul to describe their Celtic (Gaulish) neighbors. In Britain, the Low-German languages also preserved a reflex of *walh. (What we know best is West Saxon, which became normative in writing and is our idea of ``Old English.'' In this Old English, wealh meant `foreign.') Speakers of Celtic anywhere in Britain were called by the words that evolved into Welsh and Welshman. (This included, for example, an enclave in Strathclyde that persisted well into the Middle Ages.) Eventually, the term became specialized to Celtic speakers in the Western enclave that came to be called Wales.
This etymology has a certain bitter irony for the Welsh, as the Germans were -- from a territorial perspective -- the original foreigners who usurped their hosts. That's ``original'' only so far back as we can tell, of course, but at least it can be said that inhabitants of the area (the ``Britons'' in the original sense of that word) spoke Indo-European languages of the Celtic subfamily before local inhabitants spoke IE languages of the Germanic family.) The critical fact is that, as the Roman empire collapsed in the mid- to late fifth century, it became unable to protect its periphery. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (written some centuries afterwards) the Romanized Celts in present-day southern England hired Germanic what-you-might-call Gastarbeiter to protect them from their own marauding (Celtic) kin to the North; the Germanic mercenaries found easy pickin's and ended up taking over. The situation bears some similarities to the situation simultaneously playing out in southern Europe, where Roman emperors tried to enlist Germanic tribes en masse to protect the Empire. The names Cornwall, Walsh, and Wallace (and Wallis, I suppose) stem from the same root, adding further color to the story of Edward VIII, erstwhile Prince of Wales (who gave up his throne to marry Wallis Simpson). The dignity of ``Prince of Wales'' is a story in itself, but it is a relative recent invention (1348). The coat of arms of the Prince of Wales bears the motto Ich dien. `I serve' in Modern German is ich diene; dropping the final e is colloquial throughout Germany, and standard in some local varieties. One of the more amusing (and probably proportionately less plausible) stories about the origin has it that King Edward had promised the Welsh a prince who could speak not a word of English. When the prince was born, his father held him up and said, in Welsh: ``eich dyn'' (`your man').
There was an Old Norse reflex of the *walh: valir, meaning `Gauls, Frenchmen.' The Germanic word was adopted in Slavic languages and used to describe Latin- or Romance-speaking groups in south-eastern Europe, whose precise ethnicity continues to be in dispute (typical situation in the Balkans). It is well not to rely too much on etymology for information on a named group's origins. A famous cautionary example is Gypsy, a name applied on the misunderstanding that Gypsies were from Egypt.
Many years ago the TV show ``60 Minutes'' followed a group of tourists on a package tour of Europe. This led to a movie, a 1969 comedy about Americans on a bus tour of Europe, called If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. (It was rehashed as an inferior TV movie in 1987. The title If It's Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium gives you an idea of how much thought and originality went into that.)
In Fielding's Guide to Europe (Sloane, 1963), Henry Fielding wrote
As a member of an escorted tour, you don't even have to know the Matterhorn isn't a tuba.
(It's an Alp, if Alps has a singular, and it's not in Belgium.) Oh wait -- the Fielding's Guides were by Temple Fielding, not Henry. Too bad.
On Christmas Eve 2002, Scott Peterson of Modesto, California, reported the disappearance of his pregnant wife Laci Peterson. Over the next month, rumors began to circulate that he had been involved in an affair. On January 24, at a hastily arranged press conference, a woman named Amber Frey announced that she had met him the previous November 20, and that they began an affair after Scott Peterson, ahem, made a false statement about his marital status. (This was made explicit. I'm slightly surprised that it came up explicitly in the circumstances. I mean, if a woman thinks a man might be cheating on his wife, what does she suppose the conditional odds are, of his reporting his marital status accurately? Maybe she asked if he was separated.) Amber Frey had approached Modesto police shortly after the disappearance became news, and subsequent phone conversations she had with him were recorded. In April, Laci's body and that of her fetus were found in the East Bay, and Scott Peterson was charged with their murder. At his trial in 2004, the recorded conversations with Frey were played back.
In those conversations, Peterson claimed he was in Brussels, Belgium, on a business trip. A wholesale fertilizer salesman, Peterson really laid it on thick, inventing an assortment of entertaining details to support and fill out the basic lie. Among other things, he commented that Europeans work ten hours a day.
Incidentally, if you are planning to travel internationally, you need to be aware that Scott's phone would have been no good in Belgium. More to the point, US and Canadian cell phones don't work with the cell system in most of the rest of the world, including Europe. Short-term cell-phone rentals are now widely available on a variety of plans. Check before you go: you can probably get a better deal than at your destination airport. If you're coming to the US from Europe, you may find it more difficult. I used to rent a cell phone at the car rental agency when I visited Los Angeles, but some time between August 2002 and September 2003, the company that used to provide that service through the car rental agencies got out of the business. If this weren't the Belgium entry I'd probably try to track down more of the details.
This is probably a good place to mention the special status of San Francisco. Many counties in the state of California share a name with a city they contain. (San Diego and Los Angeles Counties, for example, contain the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles, respectively. It would be more interesting the other way around.) The city of San Francisco, by contrast, is a county. Berlin's status reminded me of that. See the entry HB (for Bremen) for a situation similar to, and in some respects even more extreme than, that of Berlin.
Berlin was split into four sectors of occupation at the end of WWII, a sort of microcosm of Germany as a whole. Violating a previous agreement with the other Allies, the Soviets formed a separate government for their sector, ``East Berlin,'' on Nov. 30, 1948. (There was also a blockade of West Berlin at that time.) As the Soviets turned their zone of occupation into East Germany (the so-called Democratic Republic, GDR), East Berlin became its capital in 1949. West Berlin, formally under continued Allied control until 1990, became a showcase for the West and a major escape route for East Germans. One of the periodic revolts against the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe was a 1953 strike in East Berlin that was put down by Soviet military force on June 17. Hmmm -- 1953. Wasn't that the year Stalin died? A growing hemorrhage of population to the West via Berlin was eventually stanched by the East Germans (under Ulbricht) under the Soviets (under Khrushchev) with the building of the infamous Berlin Wall, starting August 13, 1961 (the border was sealed off on that day; a more permanent structure was erected subsequently). Hmmm -- August 1961... the Kennedy administration was about half a year old then. The Wall was accompanied by a blockade of West Berlin, met by a Western airlift (some relevant information at Evita entry). The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the landmark event of the collapse of the Soviet empire. During the Cold War, West Germany's capital was Bonn; the Federal Republic moved its capital back to Berlin in 1999.
Berliners have a reputation within Germany for sophistication and rudeness, somewhat like the reputation of New Yorkers in the US and bonaerenses in Argentina. Back before Tokyo was capital of Japan, back when it was called Edo, the inhabitants of that city had a similar reputation among Japanese. The rudeness of Edo people, and their tricking of poor rubes from the sticks, are common themes in Kabuki characterization and plots. (For a related topic, see the Brooklyn Bridge entry.)
Berlin's total area now is 890.77 sq. km. The population of West Berlin in the 1987 national census was 2,013,000. The population of the united city on Dec. 31, 1997 was 3,425,759. This might be a good place to mention that demographers consider 1% accuracy excellent for large population surveys, and unattainable at the national level.
The ASCII map below was posted by Mark Brader in
1995 to the newsgroups rec.railroad (as it then was) and
<misc.transport.urban-transit>. It's a scale diagram showing how the
rapid transit system in Berlin was affected by the division of the city. The
commuter/suburban services called the S-Bahn, not
then numbered, fed onto three lines known as the Ringbahn, Stadtbahn (`city road'), and
Nord-Süd Bahn (North-South [rail]road), labelled RB, SB, and NSB on the
diagram. The Ringbahn, or as much of it as fits into an 80-column line, forms
the boundary of the diagrammed area. Subway (U-Bahn) lines were lettered A to
E. As the diagram shows, some routes were forked.
[D] #
_,--------*--------------*,
,-' ,o---' `o # | `--,_
RB _,--*_ | NSB \ ### o `o
__,--' C`o ##|# ##|#### / `-,_
_o--' ######\# |# ### o A | `,
### `o\### ## | | `o
# `*.### \ | `,
## \`-, o o `,
## | \NSB | / `,
# o | \ | RB `,
o-,_ C | o o o `o
/ ##`-, | / \ | `,
SB / ### `-, | / _,-o-, \ |[E] `-o
-o------' ## `---*'---' SB `-`-*--,_ |
## /| |\\ `o-,_ \
##,-o---' | | \\ --o |
#/ NSB o o \\ ---___ |
#| | ,o, A / o\_ SB o---__o_ E |
#| _,-o---*--' `--o___o' ,' `-_ ---o-___*
#*' | o --_ |
/#\#######|######### _- D `-o_ |
A / `, o #### / #### `-,_ |
B | o | C ##/## ###### ##### `--, [B] /
`*----o-, / / | o #### ##### ,*--___SB /
/ `-,_ `,_*,__x' | `-, ####/## `---*
A `o,__/ ,/ `--o----*,____ B `-, o--' ## /
,-'/ _/ `--o---------*-----o--------' # /
,o / * \ #### ,'
NSB ,' o' / \,_ C | ### /
/ ,' | `o-,___ o ### o
_,-' _/ NSB o `--o_ | ### RB /
-' / / `---,_ | ## /
__ / | `*_ ### /
\ / o | \ ### /
* RB | | `o ###/
_/ `---,__ / o \ _/###
/ `-----*,___ | o / ###
[C] `-, o | /
`, [D] | C /
`,_ RB | __/
`--------------o-----*----'
A * on the diagram indicates an interchange station; x shows that the lines cross without an interchange. Other stations are marked o, and letters in brackets (e.g., [C]) indicate line or branch termini of the corresponding lines.
The line of # signs snaking across the diagram is, of course, the the border between East and West Berlin -- formally, between the Soviet occupation zone and the jointly administered US-British-French zone. Note that it was crossed by 7 of the 8 railway lines just enumerated, in 11 places altogether: the Ringbahn, Nord-Süd-Bahn, and U-Bahn Lines C and D all crossed it twice, while the Stadtbahn and U-Bahn Lines A and B each crossed it once. Of course, the border actually formed a complete loop around West Berlin; this is just the city-center part of it.
When the border was closed and the Wall erected along it, only 4 of the 11 crossings were actually closed: those of Line A, Line B, and the Ringbahn. Line A and the Ringbahn were split into separate East and West Berlin routes, while the eastern end of Line B was simply closed, breaking the interchange with the Stadtbahn. The eastern end of the West Berlin part of Line A later closed due to lack of traffic in this form. Apparently, the West Berlin part of the Ringbahn also eventually closed. (This was presumably related to the fact that West Berliners were encouraged to boycott the S-Bahn, which was part of the East German railway system.)
On the other three lines crossing the border, almost all of the stations in East Berlin were closed. At these "ghost stations," the trains carrying West Berliners went through without stopping, like express trains.
At Friedrichstrasse station, however, a special arrangement was made. That station became a customs and immigration checkpoint. At an international airport today, you can often arrive from one foreign country, change planes, and depart for a third country without needing to clear customs. Similarly at Friedrichstrasse, people could arrive from West Berlin, change trains, and depart for West Berlin on another route (after patronizing the duty-free shops, if they wished). Apparently, passengers could change between not only Line C and the Nord-Süd-Bahn, but also the Stadtbahn through West Berlin; the latter line was split for S-Bahn purposes into East and West Berlin parts, not at the Wall, but at Friedrichstrasse. (Each of its branches reaching beyond West Berlin to the west was split again at the border.)
Apparently all of the U-Bahn routes through the city center are open again today. In this area, Lines A through E are now called Lines U2, U1, U6, U8, and U5, respectively; except that the eastern branch of Line C has been transferred to a separate line, U7.
We have another Berlin entry on this web page.
Bose-Einstein statistics were invented by Bose, who didn't understand ordinary classical statistics well enough to realize that he wasn't applying statistical principles in an orthodox way. (A full discussion of this point can probably be found in Bram Pais's Subtle Is the Lord : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. He described the events surrounding the introduction of Bose statistics at the Princeton Physics Dept. colloquium in 1979 or 1980.) Bose's paper was turned down by a British journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, I think, and he sent the paper to Einstein asking if he would translate it and submit it to a German journal. Einstein refused to translate the next paper Bose sent him.
Do not confuse this with CIROBE, or with open-air free-admission Chicago Book Fair on Printer's Row, held to coincide with the final two days of the BEA.
For more on pavement, see the like and, like, the John Loudon McAdam eponym entries.
Joan Rivers, for what it's worth (FWIW), thinks that cellar door is the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language, if it's pronounced as one word. Close, anyway. (This datum is tenderly preserved for posterity in Lewis Burke Frumkes: The Logophile's Orgy, (NY: Delacorte Pr., 1995). The claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in the English language has been variously attributed. It's been assigned to Edgar Allan Poe, with his reason being given as that it's a pun on c'est l'adore. It's also been attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien. The latter attribution has, in fact, a very solid claim, although the assertion recorded is a bit weaker than ``most beautiful.'' He mentioned it when he gave the inaugural Charles James O'Donnell lecture in October 1955. Some of those lectures, including Tolkien's, were published in Angles and Britons (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Pr., 1963). His transcript of his talk includes the following:
The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature. Though it may be allied to some of the elements in the appreciation of verse, it does not need any poets, other than the nameless artists who composed the language. It can be strongly felt in the simple contemplation of a vocabulary, or even in a string of names. [pp. 35-6]...
Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.
I understand there's something on the cellar-door controversy in Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien: A Biography (p. 56), but I haven't had a chance to check.
In 2004, an organization calling itself the British Council apparently decided that, instead of coming up with a usefully descriptive name for itself, it would get some free publicity by conducting and reporting a very stupid study. So, to celebrate their 70th anniversary (nothing like a round number to build excitement), they surveyed over 40,000 ``non-English speakers'' (this may have been a more accurate term than you'd think yet) in 102 countries, and compiled the 70 most beautiful words. At least 71 words, in fact, since ``hen night'' took 70th place. Oh, ``hen night,'' sure. But ``oi'' took 61st place, nosing out ``hiccup'' at 63rd. Right now I'm thinking that one of the most beautiful words for the survey team to learn would have been ``methodology.'' It has a nice rhythm and it's useful, too. Were survey participants asked to write their choices? Was it multiple-choice? Here are the top ten:
- mother
- passion
- smile
- love
- eternity
- fantastic
- destiny
- freedom
- liberty
- tranquillity
The mindless BBC puff piece on this ``news'' gave Michael Quinion a free plug for his ``recent book Port Out, Starboard Home'' about oddities of the English language. (Gee, a whole book of them!) Quinion commented, ``Oi is not a word that I would've thought turned up in English manuals all that often.'' Chris Wade, director of communications at The British Council (oh -- the British one; got it), remarked generally that the list had ``words denoting concepts that people aspire to, like freedom; words that sounded fun like peekaboo and others that aren't really words at all but they [sic] convey real meaning, like oi.''
FWIW, oi is in the SOWPODS dictionary of Scrabble words, widely used outside of North America, but not in the TWL98 (official dictionary for tournament play in North America). The word was not in the third edition of the Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary (standard in North American non-tournament play). The fourth edition incorporated a number of words that were in SOWPODS dictionary, and this appears to be one of them: oi is listed as an interjection equivalent to oy.
Clerk:Hello -- how may I help you?Customer:I'd like to buy eight units please.Clerk:Oh, but you're at least a three! You don't need any more than seven units.Customer:Is that how it works? In that case I'll just take five units. You're right -- I'm a 2.9 according to 700 hits on HotOrNot.com. I just want to go up to about eight. Any higher and I'd have to get a different spouse -- you know how much trouble that can be.Clerk:Of course.Customer:Now, I weighed myself this morning and---Clerk:--oh, that isn't necessary. You should go to Fitting to have your surface area measured. You know, beauty is only skin deep.
Just a word of advice: I am the person who wrote this entry, and when I came back and read it again years later, I found it utterly confusing on the first read. Try again.
Bose-Einstein condensation is an odd feature that Einstein realized occurs in certain boson gases. Essentially, it is that a finite fraction of the particles are in the single-particle ground state of the system.
Long version: A gas of bosons -- that is, a system of weakly-interacting (equiv.: ``quasi-free'') bosons -- has statistical properties determined jointly by the density of states (DOS), the chemical potential (μ) and the temperature. The density of states is an energy-dependent function that represents the single-particle quantum states available to be occupied by the bosons. Strictly speaking, for any macroscopic system the DOS is really a very jagged function: an infinite sequence of degeneracy-weighted delta functions. For any macroscopic system, however, the spacing between delta functions is microscopic, and in particular very small compared to the temperature. (You can understand this by measuring temperature in the natural energy units, or by reading ``Boltzmann constant times temperature'' wherever I write ``temperature.'')
Most of the interesting gas properties are expressible as few-particle expectation values. That is, as sums of all expressed as sums over states (and sums over pairs of states for two-particle functions, etc.) weighted by the associated B-E occupation numbers, and some other factors. This sum is equivalent to an integral over the DOS (a multiple integral for multi-particle expectation values). The thing that often makes the calculation tractable in this form is a kind of thermodynamic limit: the DOS is computed as a scaled version of its limit for infinite system size. This often yields a simple smooth function that is easy to to integrate over. Because the B-E distribution varies smoothly on a scale of temperature, the jagged structure of the true DOS washes out anyway, so the error from using the thermodynamic limit is negligible.
The bosons described by the B-E distribution may be conserved (like atoms) or not conserved (like photons or phonons). In either case, the chemical potential is determined self-consistently by the requirement to satisfy whatever are the constraints or boundary conditions determining the number of bosons. For example, in the case of photons, the temperature determines the energy density, and that determines the density of photons and the chemical potential (zero, for the usual situation). For composite bosons, there are usually a variety of conservation laws fixing the number of particles in a closed system. The number of particles is a single-particle expectation value of the sort described above. (In particular, it is a sum over all states of the probable occupancy of those states.)
Now we are ready to understand Bose-Einstein condensation. As the temperature decreases, the B-E distribution sharpens, falling more rapidly at energies above the chemical potential. For a fixed number of particles, this means that the chemical potential must increase to lie just below the minimum-energy state (i.e., just below the region of support of the DOS). With decreasing temperature, the distance to the minimum-energy state eventually becomes comparable to the interlevel spacing -- that is, comparable to the energy scale of the jaggedness of the real DOS. At that point, the smooth approximations associated with the thermodynamic-limit-smooth DOS fail. The fraction of particles in the ground state becomes a macroscopic fraction of the total.
Because Windows was not properly shut down,
one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it.
To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down
your computer by selecting Shut Down from the Start menu
Windows crashed again.
To avoid seeing this message again, use a different operating system.
They got a lot of media attention when George P. Shultz, who became Bechtel vice-chairman after a stint in the Nixon administration, replaced Al Haig as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State in June 1982. George has the kind of quiet confidence that is a real asset if screwing up is unavoidable anyway -- a kind of refined fatuity, worn lightly. He just published a book. He was trained as an economist.
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The BBC has taken advantage, I guess you might say, of its extra name, creating an internet shopping site at the domain <beeb.com>. This is the same government outfit that once upon a time forced the Kinks to sing ``taste is like Cherry Cola'' instead of ``taste is like Coca Cola,'' because of their fastidious distaste for commercialism. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.
The Benny Goodman Orchestra (how's that for a graceful transition, eh?) used the bandleader's initials as a logo on instruments, stands, etc. They weren't in a consistent style. (The B and G were generally in the same font style in any single logo, but different logos used various different font styles, the letters sometimes vertically offset and sometimes not.)
Lulu had a role in, and sang the theme song of, the 1967 movie ``To Sir, With Love.'' That movie was socially progressive: a black man (actor Sidney Poitier) was put in the role of a mature, highly educated authority figure, educating and reforming poorly socialized ignorant white youths. Benny Goodman was also progressive in relation to race relations. He was one of the first major bandleaders to have white and black players together in the same band.
- Don't know the language, never left the hotel.
- I feel your pain. Now go away so I don't feel it any more.
- I am a socially advanced life form. With my experience, nothing you have to tell me (especially the uninteresting contingent details of your drab existence) could be of interest.
Daisy -- Mrs. Tom Buchanan -- Nick's second cousin once removed, confides to him early in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
``You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,'' she went on in a convinced way. ``Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.'' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ``Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated.''The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. ... I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.''
I hear that they drink beer in Australia too.
Here's a comparison of beer and cucumbers archived from the rec.humor.funny newsgroup.
FWIW, Donald Glaser got the idea for bubble chambers (devices used for viewing the trajectories of subatomic particles) while staring at his beer one day in 1952. Eight years later, this invention won him a Nobel prize in physics. Cheers!
Now, I don't mean to disparage football players by this. Indeed, many football players exceed the maximum intelligence cut-off of the Sociology Department. They are admitted only on a provisional basis, and required to take extra practice without a helmet.
Here's a little something extra for those who think I'm coyly and very subtly insulting someone. It's from a work known as Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and similar titles, by Diogenes Laërtes. Book VI covers the Cynics (from the Greek word for dog -- cf. Latin canis), among them Diogenes. That's not Diogenes the author himself; plain ``Diogenes'' normally refers to the other famous Diogenes, a/k/a Diogenes of Sinope, Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes was the founder of the Philosophical School called the Cynics, and the name was earned by Diogenes practice of living like a dog. In particular, of having sex (alone or with someone else) as publicly as possible. At the market, say.
Chapter 49 of book VI (of Lives) reports that Diogenes was asked why athletes are stupid. He answered in Greek, but a translation is ``because they are built out of porkchops and beefsteaks.''
Frankly, it's a useful word, if only for constructing crossword puzzles. The OED, s.v. beef, n., seems to prefer it to refer primarily to oxen, but it allows that in the US it refers to [bovine] cattle. I'll take it! This is a word I've needed. (Further, the OED gives beeves as the standard plural; the only twentieth-century variant it recognizes is ``(in U.S.) beefs,'' although one cited quote with that plural form seems to issue from England.) Now all we need is to back-construct a new singular beeve, so beef can be just the uncountable meat again.
The two women met when O'Connor was finishing up a fellowship at Yaddo, the famous artists' community in New York. O'Connor needed a quiet place to stay as she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. Sally Fitzgerald and her husband, active in New York literary circles, rented her a room over their garage in rural Ridgefield, Conn. For a year and a half, O'Connor became a part of the Fitzgerald household and family; she was godmother to one of the Fitzgerald's six children. Afterwards O'Connor and Sally Fitzgerald continued their friendship by mail (some of the correspondence is in Habit of Being).
O'Connor left the Fitzgeralds' and returned home to Georgia in December 1950 when she became ill. She was hospitalized with lupus, nearly dying then (at age 25) and completely dying at age 39. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder -- the body attacks itself. The suicide disease of choice among writers is alcoholism, but O'Connor was an original.
Sally's husband, the poet and classical scholar Robert Fitzgerald, is well-known today for his translations of Homer. In 1969, they co-edited Flannery O'Connor: Mystery and Manners, a collection of O'Connor's essays and lectures.
Sally Fitzgerald received the offer from publisher Robert Giroux to compile O'Connor's letters at a time when her husband, by then a widely admired Harvard professor of classics, had left her for a younger woman. Before we leave O'Connor altogether, let me mention that she wrote a short story called ``Everything That Rises Must Converge.'' It's not about physics or math.
In Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves, the lothario of the first story seduces an unlikely young woman with his friend's copy of a book entitled, uh, The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire, maybe. Have to check.
Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about a man who is extremely popular with women. Of course, in principle it's probably about a lot of other deeper, eternal matters, with allegory and irony and veiled criticism of the regime and all that, but all he has to do is snap his fingers. Cf. adult education.
Richard Gwyn, a silly old journalist, wrote the book version of a speech he'd given in 1994 and entitled it Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). The entire title is filched, but at least he's up-front about it. Page 7: ``Inevitably, Canadians possess a far lighter sense of national identity than citizens of ethnic nations, Ireland, Poland, Thailand, whatever. At some point, the lightness of identity may become unbearable, as in the title of Milan Kundera's novel, and we'll let it slip away, scarcely noticing that it's gone.''
In Czech, the title of Milan Kudera's novel is Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. The verb nest means `bear, carry,' and the preformative ess yields snest, `bear with, endure.' The ne is a negating prefix. As an aside, I might point out that Ludwik Zamenhof, known to the world as Doktoro Esperanto, observed that negation in SAE languages is usually indicated by a prefix, and that suffixes are usually used to mark other distinctions. Not that he was the first to notice this, but he made these observations into rigid rules of Esperanto. Notice that English has a large number of such negating prefixes -- a-, an-, de-, dis-, dys-, il-, in- (im-), non-, un- are a few of them, though they shade off into related senses with anti-, contra-, mal-, etc. I can't think of any negating suffixes in English (discounting Pig Latin), except perhaps the weasel suffixes (-ish, -like).
Anyway, back to the main story, such as it is: nesnesitelná is reasonably translated as unbearable in English, and insoportable in Spanish. Milan Kundera, a dissident Czech writer, eventually became an exile, living in France starting in 1975. Since publication of his work was banned in his native country, the audience for his works in translation became his primary readership. He therefore undertook a campaign to correct the translations in the three or four languages that he could read. In the cover story of the March 6, 1988 NYTimes Book Review, he complains about the translations of The Joke, which appeared in all major European languages in 1968-9:
In France, the translator rewrote the novel by ornamenting my style. In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. Another country: I meet my translator, a man who knows not a word of Czech. ``Then how did you translate it?'' ``With my heart.'' And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I almost believed it was actually possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart. Of course, it turned out to be much simpler: he had worked from the French rewrite, as had the translator in Argentina.The article in the NYTBR was excerpted from ``Sixty-three Words,'' a chapter in Kundera's The Art of the Novel, translated from the French original by Linda Asher. It lists words that are somehow special, and usually cause trouble in translation. For example:
BEING. Many friends advised me against the title ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'' [So would many of his readers.] Couldn't I at least cut out the word ``being''? This word makes everyone uncomfortable. When they come across it, translators tend to substitute more modest expressions: ``existence,'' ``life,'' ``condition'' . . . There was a Czech translator who decided to update Shakespeare: ``To live or not to live. . . .'' But it's precisely in that famous soliloquy that the difference between living and being is made clear: if after death we go on dreaming, if after death there still is something, then death (nonlife) does not free us of the horror of being. Hamlet raises the question of being, not of life. The horror of being: ``Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being of the corpse'' (``The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'').
The complete title of the Spanish translation of Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí is La insoportable levedad del ser. My sense of definite article use in Spanish is irremediably corrupted by my naturalization to English, but I can't shake the feeling that ``del'' is wrong in the Spanish version of the title: ``del ser'' can mean both ``of the being'' and ``of being.'' The infinitive functioning as gerund generally takes an article, whereas the phrase ser + <predicate> need not. I feel that in this instance ser should be regarded as ser + <null predicate> (so ``...levedad de ser''), which is how I parse the standard translation of Hamlet (¡Ser o no ser...!), but apparently this was not considered acceptable. (Ser as a gerund occurs in the standard expression ser humano, `human being,' which typically needs an article.) Then again, AIUI Slavic languages generally lack articles (or equivalent affixes as in Romanian). Does ``del ser'' preserve an ambiguity that English ``of being'' removes? Not every equivocation that can be preserved under translation should be. (More precisely: it may be best not to preserve a necessary or natural ambiguity with a translated ambiguity that is unnecessary or unnatural.)
Of important words in Kundera's famous title, so far we've considered being and (but lightly) unbearable. Surely the notion that lightness should be hard to bear demands examination. (This entry is part of the glossary's funhouse. I dare you to follow the preceding link.)
WRONG: ``Dutch and Belgium'' (3.81) RIGHT: ``Dutch and Belgian'' (5.54) WRONG: ``Belgium waffles with strawberries'' (0.271) RIGHT: ``Belgian waffles with strawberries'' (0.672)
(You needn't worry about it, but the things at the end of each line are numbers. Just to get real technical, they are the numbers of millions of ghits, today [June 15, 2012], for each phrase. If you were to ``do the math,'' you would find [just trust me on this] that the numbers for the lines labeled RIGHT are vaaaaastly bigger than for the lines labelled WRONG, proving that the language hasn't gone quite entirely to hell yet.)
Bibliography:
- A. Gadgil, A. H. Rosenfeld, D. Arasteh and E. Ward: ``Advanced lighting and window technologies for reducing electricity consumption and peak demand: Overseas manufacturing and marketing opportunities'' in the proceedings of the IEA/ENEL Conference on Advanced Technologies for Electric Demand-Side Management (4-5 April 1991; Sorrento, Italy; hey, there's a Sorrento's Italian Restaurant on Central Avenue in Westfield, NJ -- I figured you'd wanna know).
- Amory B. Lovins and Ashok Gadgil have a related editorial on the web entitled ``The Negawatt Revolution: Electric Efficiency and Asian Development.''
- M. Anjali Sastry and A. Gadgil: ``Bombay Efficient Lighting Large-scale Experiment (BELLE): A blueprint for improving energy efficiency and reducing peak electric demand in a developing country,'' Urban Atmosphere/Atmospheric Environment 30(5), pp. 803-808 (1996).
- M. Anjali Sastry and A. Gadgil: ``Stalled on the road to the market: Lessons from a project promoting lighting efficiency in India,'' Energy Policy 22(2), pp. 151-162 (1994).
- Arthur H. Rosenfeld and Ellen Ward: ``Energy Use in Buildings,'' ch. 8 of The Energy-Environment Connection, ed. Jack M. Hollander (Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1992), pp. 223-257.
You'd figure this would be an important distinction (especially to the animal and his prospective mates), but castration is such a common farm procedure that the words that specifically refer to castrated males tend to slide into generic use. The other important example is ox. (Three reasons for this practice: castrated males are more tame and don't compete for mates; castrating most of the males makes it much simpler to breed eugenically; castrated animals generally grow larger and stronger.) Also see hog.
Metaphorically, a bellwether is any leader of shifting masses, like Paris or New York in fashion. (Something about this deep down in the AIU entry.) As I have seen ``bellwether'' used over the past decades, it usually describes a leading indicator of trends rather than a leader, as New Hampshire used to be an indicator of national presidential elections.
For the many years that New Hampshire was the bellwether state, the saying went ``As New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation.'' It wasn't that reliable -- they went for Dewey in '48 and Nixon in '60, but then those were close elections. Then in 1972, Democratic nominee George McGovern was defeated in a landslide. His second and final running mate was R. Sargent Shriver, Jr. (that's a given name, not a misspelled -- on my part, anyway -- rank). Sargent Shriver had Kennedy connections (married into the family; first head of the Peace Corps when it was organized in JFK's administration). George did not even carry his home state of South Dakota. The ticket carried Shriver's home state of Massachusetts, and adjacent New Hampshire. For a while people joked, ``As New Hampshire goes, so goes Massachusetts.''
In the 2000 elections, the country divided into large, electorally rather homogeneous regions. The Democratic ticket won most of the Pacific coast states, the Northeast and Midwest; the Republican ticket won the rest, including a solid South. One of the exceptional states, going for a different party than its region, was New Hampshire, which went, like the country, for the G.O.P. More on that election at the Electoral Vote (EV) entry.
For more on bellybuttons, try the navel exercises entry.
In French the corresponding expression is Les Pays Bas, and in German it's a problem: The country we call the Netherlands is called die Niederlande in German, and just like the English name, it already itself means ``the low countries.'' Like the English name, the German is somewhat archaic. But where nether is somewhat archaic in English, it is Lande that is archaic in German. As explained at the AbhKM entry, the modern plural of Land is Länder. If you wanted a modern compound noun meaning ``Low Countries'' in German, it would be Niederländer. The only problem is that this word already means `Dutchmen,' and in too many contexts would either be misunderstood that way, or just be confusing. German is not without a collective name for the Low Countries, however; they have die Beneluxländer.
Back to English now, I've seen the region described as ``the Benelux.'' As noted, the region is easily flooded, sometimes with troops from large neighboring countries. (The most recent such flood was WWII.) The OED2 lists no earlier instances of this term than 1947, when it was still being written in quotes.
In English, the Netherlands is also referred to as ``Holland.'' This is technically incorrect, since Holland is a just a part of the Netherlands. It's sort of like calling Iran Persia, though Persia refers to a southern province of modern Iran.
Japanese is written with many different character systems, in order to make it difficult (really, that's the theory). The principal sets are
- kanji -- Chinese characters used as logographs (i.e., as in Chinese), of which an educated person needs to know a few thousand.
- kana -- two parallel syllabaries of 46 characters each (48 counting the virtually obsolete characters for wi and we.) Katakana is used principally for foreign words, hiragana for the rest.
- Latin characters, more precisely the letters of the English alphabet, called romaji.
![[Greek letter alpha]](Gk/a.gif)
to mean plus bonus. In the good old days, before the
(speculative real estate) bubble burst and the economy ground to zero
growth, employees at the industrial giants could expect annual bonuses
that were a fair fraction of their annual pay. Okay, so bonuses aren't
bennies. Look, the information has to go somewhere.
The structure of benzene is typically drawn about as follows:
H H
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
H H
This represents a resonance between
H H
\ /
C-----C
// \\
// \\
H---C C---H
\ /
\ _____ /
C-----C
/ \
H H
and
H H
\ _____ /
C-----C
/ \
/ \
H---C C---H
\\ //
\\ //
C-----C
/ \
H H
H
\
H C===O
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
H H
H
/
O
\
H C===O
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
H H
\
H C===O
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
H H
The benzoyl group is an instance of an acyl group.
Long used to bleach flour, now an ingredient in topical acne medications. A white crystalline solid.
There's also a Berlin in Germany, described here at its postal abbreviation entry BE.
A Berlin (or berlin) is also a four-wheeled covered carriage, or was. It's not obsolete if you're travelling through the Scrabble forest.
If you're like me, you probably remember as if it were yesterday, how shocked you were to discover that there is such a thing as French opera -- so I don't have to explain. Naturally I was staggered by the concept, and though I never at any point lost consciousness, I did sway noticeably. Ruth put her hand gently on my forearm and said firmly ``stay.''
This action gives a fair indication of my status in that pack. They weren't just my humanist friends, they were my human friends, and I was their pup, a combination part-time mascot and taxi. I learned some tricks too: ``stay, sit, fetch, lampoon the music theorist.''
Since this is the Berlioz entry, we should have some information about him. He was born in 1803.
[See, for example, B. K. Liew, P. Fang, N. W. Cheung and C. Hu: ``Reliability simulator for interconnect and intermetallic contact electromigration,'' in Proceedings of the 28th Annual IEEE Reliability Physics Symposium, pp. 111-118 (1990).]
Here's one from Dallas Semiconductor.
That's Joseph Bertrand, not Bertrand Russell.
Berytus is the ancient name of the originally Phoenician city that is now called Beirut in English and Beyrouth in French, pronounced Bairut in Arabic.
http://emj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/collection/bets
The Greek alphabet (named for its first two letters alpha and beta) was derived from some northwestern Semitic alphabet. The second letter of all Semitic alphabets is a bilabial consonant. In Ancient Hebrew, that bilabial consonant was plosive -- a 'b' sound. Just as in English, the consonant (called ``bet'' or ``beyt'' -- like ``beta'' minus the final vowel) was sometimes aspirated (as in the English word ``but'') and sometimes unaspirated (as in the English word ``tub''). Whether the sound was aspirated or not was determined completely by the surrounding letters. That is, the two sounds were allophones. There do not exist two words in Ancient Hebrew that differ only in the pronunciation of the beyt. (That remains true of native words in Hebrew -- words derived from the Semitic root base. In foreign loans -- and both Medieval and Modern Hebrew have a lot of them -- such a distinction may occur.) In the IPA, the aspirated and unaspirated versions of the sound can be distinguished with a superscript aitch to indicate aspiration -- /b/ and /bh/, resp. In Hebrew, although it is not strictly necessary, one can indicate that the consonant is not aspirated by writing a dot in the middle of the character (this worked for other aspirated/unaspirated pairs as well). Over time, as pronunciation of the language evolved, the aspirated consonant evolved into a fricative, while the unaspirated one remained a plosive, so the consonants are now beyt and veyt. The mark on the beyt now indicates plosive rather than nonaspirated. It's useful now to be able to distinguish the two sounds, in order to transcribe foreign borrowings more accurately.
Type I diabetes (more information at DM entry) is an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system goes crazy and destroys the beta cells.
Beta is the Roman spelling (romaji) of a Japanese word meaning `quality,' so ``Betamax'' -- the formal name of the format -- could be interpreted as `highest quality.'
The other way to view the distinction is that the beta terms are used in certain nuclear or elementary-particle physics contexts. One doesn't call the conduction electrons in a semiconductor betas; one doesn't even call the electrons in an electron microscope or a linear accelerator betas. The term is reserved for electrons or positrons emitted in a nuclear decay, or generated in a particle collision. (Nuclear binding energies are on the MeV scale and in practice the energies of particle collisions studied in the laboratory are at least on this scale, so in practice the two loose definitions come out about the same.)
Just to tweak the second definition, however, I should note that there's an old nuclear-physics notation in which accelerated electrons (rather than electrons emitted in decay or from a collision) are represented by beta. That is in the shorthand A(b,c)D, representing a reaction in which an accelerated particle b strikes (``scatters off of'' or ``interacts with'' would be the usual terminology) a nucleus A that is stationary in the lab frame. After the reaction, a nucleus D is left behind and particles c fly off. In this notation, which is still used, if b is an electron it may be represented as β-. I haven't spoken with a nuclear physicist lately and it's been a long time since I worked in the field, but I suppose this indicates another context where an electron (or positron, as β+) might be called a beta.
The letter beta happens to be used for something else that comes up frequently in the same context: speed. More precisely, v/c, or velocity magnitude in units of the speed of light, is normally represented by beta. Of course, if you set the value of c to unity, you can just write it v, but sometimes it's useful to make a distinction. The next Greek letter is also used for both a particle and a quantity in relativistic dynamics. The photon is represented by a lower-case gamma (γ -- no superscript, as it's uncharged). The Lorentz factor is also represented by a lower-case gamma, and it's closely related to beta: γ = (1-β2)½. These multiple uses of beta and gamma don't cause any more confusion than any related pair of homonyms do in English. (Offhand, I can't think of a good pair of homonym pairs, but a single pair might be ``dying,'' the present participle of die and dye. Hence the term ``suicide blonde.'')
In 1897, J.J. Thomson demonstrated that cathode rays are charged particles. As late as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1906, he was still referring to these as ``corpuscles.'' The term beta particle came into use as it became clear that cathode rays consisted of the same particles that Rutherford called beta rays (entry follows below), discovered in radioactive decay. The name electron had been proposed by G. Johnstone Stoney in 1891 in the context of chemical bonding, and was eventually adopted as the general name for the particle.
Alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and neutrons, are the most common kinds of particle radiated by naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes (a/k/a radioisotopes). Those radioisotopes that have half-lives shorter than hundreds of millions of years (most of them, in other words) occur as part of the decay chains originating in very long-lived radioisotopes of heavy nuclei. Heavy nuclei generally have an excess of neutrons relative to lighter nuclei (see this B entry). Hence, alpha decay of heavy nuclei tends to yield neutron-rich lighter nuclei, and these tend to convert a neutron to a proton by beta decay, or just spit out a neutron. This simple picture of nuclear stability can be understood in terms of an essentially classical liquid-drop model.
Detail mostly irrelevant to this case: The simplest nonclassical (i.e., essentially quantum mechanical) correction is a pairing energy. The pairing energy is normally included in ``The Liquid-Drop Model.'' For large nuclei it is a fractionally small contribution to the total nuclear binding energy, but it alternates sign with the parity of the atomic mass number A. Hence, it can be a significant determinant of the relative stability of the isotopes of a given element. Since the parity of A is unchanged by alpha, beta, and gamma decays, however, it is a minor consideration here.
The binding energy of a nucleus is ultimately determined by the quantum mechanics of the interaction of its component nucleons. The simplest quantum-mechanical treatment of this problem (beyond pairing energy) is the shell model, in which the mutual interaction is dealt with in a mean-field kind of way: the nuclei are assumed to collectively define a potential well (typically approximated as a harmonic oscillator or a constant-depth spherical potential well, plus some spin-dependent corrections).
The shell model (or models, if you like) produces a fine structure in nuclear binding energy that is somewhat reminiscent of the structure of ionization energy as a function of atomic number. There are a set of ``magic numbers'' that are the nuclear analogues of filled shells in chemistry. When the number of neutrons or protons equals one of these magic numbers, the nucleus is unusually stable. (Doubly so for ``doubly magic'' nuclei, where both neutron number N and proton number [i.e. atomic number Z] are magic -- not necessarily, or even usually, the same magic number.) Thus, a decay that yields an unstable nucleus may yield one that has an excess of protons rather than neutrons. Nuclei with an excess of positive charge may decay by emitting a positron, but there are other mechanisms that are more common: emission of an alpha particle and electron capture (EC).
![[Manchester United Club Emblem]](images/Badge50.GIF)
The phrase has subsequently been used ironically to suggest extreme loyalty to soccer teams (``football clubs'') whose team color is red. One example is Portadown FC (``the Ports''), in the Irish Premier League of Northern Ireland. That team's best-known fanzine, a satirical item, is (or perhaps was) ``Better Red Than Dead.'' The first volume was issued during the 1992-93 season, but the (fanzine) website was abandoned when I checked in 2007.
For many years (and also as I write in 2007), the most prominent red team in English soccer was Manchester United, and it's in reference to that team that I have usually encountered the jocular allusion, but that might be a local fluctuation. In 2003, 59-year-old Paul Warburton, a lifelong Manchester City fan (team color blue) was suffering from chronic lymphatic leukemia. His younger brother Martin, a United fan, agreed to a stem-cell transplant that might save Paul's life after Paul agreed in writing to a number of conditions all related to his renunciation of the Blues to become a faithful United fan. No word on enforcement provisions. (See, moreover, Paul's handwritten codicil above his signature.) Here's the story as reported in the Telegraph, under the title ``Better Red Than Dead.'' The story was also reported (by various other news sources) under the titles ``Life-Saving Goal,'' ``Brother's Pact with Red Devil,'' and ``Blue Blood Accepts Red Cell-Out.''
Another tenuous Russell-Manchester connection: Wittgenstein was an engineering student (aeronautics) at Manchester before he went to Cambridge in 1911 to study mathematical logic under Russell. In 1964, Stanley Reynolds published Better Dead Than Red. It wasn't about soccer.
In craps, to bet on the come is to make a bet on the coming-out roll. (On a casino table for craps, such bets are placed on a portion of the felt that's called the come bar.)
In poker, to bet on the come is to play a bad hand in hopes that cards will come that make it a better hand. I suppose there is a metaphysical distinction between this and a half-hearted bluff. The sense of the expression has been extended metaphorically to taking a hopeful risk in general.
Her momma got mad,
But now her momma says it's aw-alright.
Quebec has the same problem. If they designate a special police unit for the problem, it probably won't be called BEU, because the whole point of using French is to be different from English, so the acronyms have be different even if it requires an unnatural renaming. Hmmm. It appears there's another reason. In Quebec French, beu is a rude word for a police officer, like `pig' in English.
US truckers use an unflattering species-shifted expression for state police (especially Ohio State Police, I suspect). A US trucker in Quebec (I think this is allowed under NAFTA) could modify this expression to a more effective pun: ``Smokey the Beu.''
The latter, whose name literally means `milk sweet' or `milk candy,' is popular in Latin America, especially Argentina (where I spent my formative dulce de leche-eating years) and neighboring countries. Dulce de leche has a consistency like cold molasses (or a warm caramel candy), but a matte appearance like light brown clay. It wasn't readily available when we moved to the US. We would make our own by pressure-cooking unopened cans of sweetened condensed milk, but we stopped that after the explosion.
As noted in the BeV entry, ``Bev'' is ambiguous on account of the two senses of billion. There was no ambiguity about the meaning in this instance. For one thing, it was an American machine, so American ``billion'' was understood. For another, the technology did not exist at the time to achieve energies of 1012 eV. The first machine to come close to that energy was the Tevatron at Fermilab, which first achieved 980 GeV (i.e., 0.98 TeV) proton energies in March 2001.
A 1946 novel by John P. Marquand was published under the title Polly Fulton in Britain and B.F.'s Daughter in the US. B.F., Burton Fulton, is a rich and important man, an industrialist, and his daughter Polly is like him in many ways. The story begins on the home front in the middle of WWII. Polly is Mrs. Tom Brett, and Tom is in Washington always doing war work, apparently.
Polly's mom seems to have an obsession with people not wearing enough underclothes. [Fast-forward to 2007: Attention all pop-tarts! Clothing, likewise unclothing, has consequences.] She recalls that when she and B.F. were first married, he ``would never wear any long underclothes either [like Polly], but only those things they used to call B.V.D.'s before everyone talked in initials....''
Great writers always return to important themes. Marquand to people attaching great significance to clothes (see attire, proper), I to initialisms.
And acronyms, of course. At Gray's Point, the ritzy New York suburb where the Fultons settled and Polly grew up, their neighbors include George Tasmin, a member of the NYSE. His son Bob, six years older than Polly, is clerking for a law firm in New York, and one day in chapter 15 they have a discussion at George's club. George wants to talk about the Bulwer Machine Company:
``Bulmaco they call it. It makes me tired -- that silly way of shuffling names together. They're having a directors' meeting Wednesday.''
``Bulmaco,'' Bob repeated. ``It didn't take much imagination to think that one up.''
The conversation was making him uneasy.
You're probably wondering why I'm dragging you through this book, eh? Maybe I'm trying to establish the fundamental connection between abbreviation and attire. Nah, too obvious.
At one point, someone comments about Polly: ``Look at her striped dress. She's an American girl.'' It reminds me of my mother's observation, that American women favor abstract patterns for the decoration of their clothes, while floral patterns are much less common here than elsewhere.
Well, there are some spoilers ahead, so I had better tie up the loose ends of the general BF content so you people eager to read this 1946 best-seller can bail out in time. Don't neglect to rent the 1948 movie of the same name, which almost unaccountably gives Marquand credit for writing his novel. The relevant point is that the boyfriend concept is not a human universal. Polly and Bob fall in love, spend a lot of time together for two years and finally become engaged for a couple of days until Polly happens to meet and fall in love with Tom. In all that time, the words boyfriend and girlfriend never occur, and this makes sense. These words refer to a more-or-less romantic relationship that is in some sense open-ended. Boyfriendship and girlfriendship, to coin a couple of truly horrid words, do exist, but in Bob and Polly's milieu, oh, you'll never understand.
To tell you the truth, I'm wondering why the author is dragging us through this book. Or rather, I'm getting an idea why. It seems to be a roman à clef. The idea was to create good characters and bad characters, and have the bad characters advance the ideas that the author dislikes. The go-to bad guy is Tom Brett, the husband that we realized by page two that Polly must unload (my money is on his forcing it by turning out to be having a tawdry affair). So Tom is a snooty critic of English literature and former Columbia University instructor, a second-rater, living off his father-in-law's money, who becomes a central-planner for the FDR administration. TLA's suffer from guilt-by-FDR-association in Marquand's book:
... ``I've got to hear this, because I'm handling him. He's one of those VIP's we sent out there.''
``Don't talk in initials,'' Polly said. ``What's a VIP?''
``Very Important Personage,'' Tom said. ``We sent a lot of VIP's out there to help in the news roundups. They didn't want Milton much. All those uniformed fascists tried to stop him, but we put it over.''
Well, Tom's affair is in place, and Polly has let go, but things are looking grim for Mrs. Tasmin. She's too good to wander, and she's going to be traveling. I foresee a terrible accident. Only a few pages left... No! What a wimp-out of an ending! Bob just gives Polly some insight (you know -- some of the less-important observations that readers figured out two hundred pages earler), and they part ways as friends. Who needs deep insight about people that don't even exist? This is too depressing; I'm going back to reading old reliable Harlequin Romances. If all I wanted were wishy-washy endings and pointless misery, I'd read nonfiction.
For other film awards, see the AMPAS entry.
Sample sentence:
Ever since Mischa Barton started dating Cisco Adler, who previously went out with Kimberly Stewart, Paris Hilton has been going around saying snarky things about Mischa; that's because Kim and Paris are BFFs -- best friends forever.(From the Chicago Sun-Times Fluff section, March 12, 2006.)
God's Gift to Gossip, Paris Hilton, and those others, are also mentioned at the NYU entry.
Usage note: the BFF term has also been applied to male friends, and there was a 1994 movie with the title ``Lassie: Best Friends Are Forever.''
Dahl wrote this in a more innocent time, when Big F... Giant did not yet suggest a common intensifier with the odd property of following the adjective it modifies.
All honor to me, forbearing from the odious pun!
In the newsletter of a union (UUP) I belonged to recently (20 years ago, actually), I read that BFI was based in Bellevue, Washington (just like SPIE), and was fighting organization by the Teamsters Union.
Ooooo EEEEE oooo! Chatachatachatachata.
I'm sure that Gloria Steinem had something clever to say about this, but it might be a shade too racy for us.
I met a guy called Nico who claims he's from northern Greece. ``Salonika?'' ``Further north than that.'' I forgot to ask if he wasn't really from Bulgaria.
Netwizards, based in Miami, Florida, spammed me with an email return address in the .bg TLD (ccTLD), but the remove link is to a mailbox in the .jp TLD. They've got me surrounded.
It's probably worth pointing out that in ancient times, books often did not have formal titles. (But they might; see sittybus, mentioned at the sillybus entry.) The books of the Old Testament instance some common ways in which books came to be named. The books of the pentateuch were called (and are called, in Hebrew) by the first word of their texts. Hence the first book is ``Bereshit'' (pronounced like English ``beret sheet''), Hebrew for `in the beginning,' which is the first word of the book. [A brief interlude:
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.``Begin at the beginning,'' the King said gravely, ``and go on till you come to the end: then stop.''
End of brief interlude.]
The Greek translators called it Genesis, `origin, creation,' which is a summary of the subject matter rather than the best translation of bereshit. (The first words of the Septuagint are En archê.) The title Genesis was preserved in Latin and most European languages. (It may be that the division into five books dates to no earlier than the Septuagint.)
Other O.T. books, particularly those of the prophets, were and are known by their authors' names. One book that is unusual in other ways was written by a self-identified Kohelet. This word's translation is uncertain, and it might be a name or a title. One oddity is that the word is morphologically female but construed male. From the root (i.e., from the three consonants) the word must have something to do with an assembly, though it's not directly clear whether it refers to someone who attends or leads the assembly, and it's not clear what kind of assembly it is. The Septuagint interprets the word as ekklêsiastês, a `member of an assembly' (although the author claims to have ruled in Jerusalem). The Greek word was Latinized straightforwardly to Ecclesiastes. Some modern translations, for example the NRSV, prefer to translate Kohelet as `Teacher.'
Ancient Latin books (i.e. scrolls) don't seem to have been any more likely to have names than do modern memoranda. Another famous Latin work with various forms of title is Satyricon or Satyrica (see the author's entry, Petronius, for more uncertainty).
When I feel up to it, I'll try to explain the status quaestionis of the Suda or Suida, a much later (Byzantine) Greek work whose title, or maybe that's the author's name, is uncertain.
The oldest surviving German book is a translation of a Latin collection of synonyms. (``German'' here means a continental West Germanic predecessor of modern German. This particular book is in something like Alemannic.) The work was probably written sometime between 765 and 775, probably in the monastery school at Fulda. The synonyms are ordered alphabetically, and the book is known as Der Abrogans, after the first word (`gentle, humble').
Let me take this opportunity to say that the banjo is DURN LOUD INSTR'MINT!
In 1990, they apparently decided that girls who roamed the streets should also have a positive alternative, and the more inclusive current name was adopted. Congress granted a new charter.
In 2001, Kelly Jones, Miss Alabama for that year, made B&GCA her platform. Good move -- Denby Dung, Miss Hawaii, was on the flimsy platform of ``The Music Effect.'' Everyone is agreed that music has effects, but ``the'' music effect that has been flogged for a few years is the Mozart Effect, at best a statistical fluke in a small experiment, completely discredited by further research, an urban legend with a known author. Too bad. Unlike most of the others, she was kinda cute. Oh, here's a ditzy doozy: Meranda Hafford, Miss Maine; platform: D.A.R.E. Miss New Mexico, from Roswell, was ``promoting US Citizenship.'' (Roswell is known for aliens.) I guess she was taking a cross-that-bridge-when-I-get-there approach to the Miss World competition. (Miss Washington was promoting aging in America. Ideological turf battle alert.) A couple of contestants were promoting good decision making. They needed to take their own advice. Did you know that there's a town in Ohio called Dublin? This stuff is as treacly as a presidential address. Remember President Ford's WIN? Miss Virginia's platform was B.A.S.E.
Miss Kentucky ran on the NYN platform, but America wasn't ready by 2001 for a Miss America named Monica. Emily Foster, Miss Georgia 2001, had a platform of Character Education. That only suggests character actors. I guess it passes muster, but not using a standard name like Emily -- that cost her.
Whenever I work on an entry like this, a little voice in my head screams ``INSIPID!! You have to point out that it's insipid!!!!!'' And I tell the little voice -- ``no, that's too obvious.''
This equation is much closer to the equation that semiconductor transport researchers usually call the ``Boltzmann equation.''
Ironically for an entity whose business is to standardize names, the BGN -- or its authority -- has had its name changed a number of times. It was originally founded with the name it has currently, but from 1906 to 1934 it was officially the US Geographic Board. In 1934 it was abolished and its functions were transferred to the Department of the Interior, which assigned those to a newly established Division of Geographic Names and an Advisory Committee on Geographic Names to perform those functions. (The board had accumulated technical responsibilities over time. I suspect that the move to the DoI in many cases meant hanging a new DoI shingle on the old offices rather than dispersing the talent and hiring newbies, although I've seen that approach too.) At the end of 1935 the DoI consolidated the Division and the Committee to form a new U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
All the preceding changes were made by executive order or DoI order. In 1947, the BGN was reorganized by an act of Congress. For more detail, see this page in the National Archives.
An example of the BGN's early arrogance can be found at the Pgh entry. Nowadays the BGN claims to cooperate with local authorities, and to some extent I'm sure it does.
B-Greek was started by David Marotta at the Center for Christian Study, an independent Christian ministry at the University of Virginia. In 1998, David asked to step down as list owner. We are grateful to David for his vision of a forum where the Greek text and language of the Bible are discussed in detail by an eclectic group of beginning students and veteran teachers, laymen and clergy, conservatives and liberals, earnest inquirers and academic scholars -- all equally committed to probing the Biblical text in the original Koine, and jointly exploring the mysteries and probabilities of Biblical Greek morphology and syntax. If you are interested in what the New Testament or Septuagint says in the original Greek, and if you can appreciate and learn from people who aren't just like you, then B-Greek is the place to be!''
BGU is the longest-running serial dedicated exclusively to papyrology. The first fascicle of its first volume appeared in 1892. Cf. MPER.
Furthermore, the very oldest CP members, the prunes who joined before 1905 or thereabouts, were sometimes known in the old Soviet Union as ``old horseradish.'' This was not necessarily affectionate. Time was, veterans who had fought in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) could cut ahead in the queue. That was no minor privilege, as the state distribution center would run out of anything good before the queue ran out.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
C(CH )
/ ³ ³
_____/
/ ___ \
H CO_____/ / \ \_____OH
³ \ \___/ /
\_____/
Many studies indicate that it's safe. I know of one study (a 1982 Japanese study of cancer in rats) that indicates otherwise; perhaps that's to be expected on statistical grounds. I say, if it doesn't taste good enough to glop onto junk food, it's probably safer than granola.
BHAch does not appear on an especially regular schedule. Volume I appeared during 1997. BHAch II, covering the period autumn 1997 to autumn 2000, appeared in Spring 2001. It's an analytic bibliography.
BHL is a stylish variant on the standard-issue public-intellectual idiot that France produces in abundance and American academics celebrate. His prose is pleasant, if you can stomach the stupidity.
Look, that's all you need to know now. I'll write up the reasons when I can find the time.
Actually, BHL is usually described as a philosopher, journalist, and foo, where foo varies but has included film-maker. If he were also a businessman, he'd be France's Hugh Hefner.
The Brinell hardness number summarizes the result of the Brinell hardness test, in which a hard ball is pressed into a flat surface of the material under test.
Informally, the unit horsepower is often called ``horses.'' For irrelevant thoughts on horses, see the hoofbeats entry.
C(CH )
/ ³ ³
_____/
/ ___ \
H C_____/ / \ \_____OH
³ \ \___/ /
\_____/
\
\
C(CH )
³ ³
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
In electronics, bias is almost synonymous with voltage or sign of voltage. Voltage, like any potential, is ``arbitrary up to a constant'': only differences in voltage are physically significant within the domain of electronics. In particular, this means that any ``positive voltage'' might be negative in a different, equally accurate description. Of course, in analyzing an electronic circuit or any electromagnetical system, one does select a convenient zero of voltage. (This is no different than selecting a convenient origin for a coordinate system, even though the ``origin'' is arbitrary.) The zero is usually the voltage of a node in the circuit, and that node is called ground (US) or earth (UK).Thus, in any particular context, ``positive voltage'' is meaningful; it means that the voltage is positive relative to whatever has been chosen as the zero of voltage. That is a statement about voltage differences. This is utterly obvious to anyone who knows anything about electronics, but the explanation would be helpful to a philosopher.
While positive and negative voltage have clear enough meaning for a circuit generally, there are many circumstances where one wants to distinguish positive and negative voltage differences between different terminals of a particular device within the circuit. In this context, one uses the word bias instead of voltage. In other words, voltage is implicitly the voltage relative to ground for the circuit or system; bias is the voltage of one terminal or node of a device relative to another. The term bias voltage is perhaps the more common term for bias when one is referring to the magnitude rather than the sign.
For two-terminal devices with symmetric CV or I-V characteristics, the bias is the voltage or the sign of the voltage between the two terminals, and which bias is positive must obviously be defined in terms of the circuit. Nonlinear two-terminal devices (usually with asymmetric IV characteristics) are called diodes. Most diodes are designed, or at least can function, as rectifiers; they have low impedance with one sign of bias and high impedance with not-too-large bias voltages of the opposite sign (Zener diode again have low impedance at larger negative voltage). For these (i.e., most) diodes, positive bias (more often ``forward bias'') is bias of the sign that turns the device on at low bias. For any diode that is essentially a pn junction, forward bias means p positive relative to n. This might be Vpn > 0 or VD > 0, if the diode is not so far beneath notice that it has its own voltage variable named. (But beware: VD is often the name of the ``turn-on'' voltage of a bipolar transistor.) For bipolar devices with three or more terminals, it is useful and common to speak of particular junctions being forward- or reverse-biased. For every bipolar device, any arrow in the schematic diagram represents the forward-biased current direction of the terminal or pn junction represented.
In many contexts, particularly when one is discussing the operation of an isolated device, there is no distinction in sense between bias and voltage, and the terms are used fairly interchangeably. Actually, in my limited experience, ``voltage'' is more used in school explanations (understandably, since one doesn't want to pile on new terminology all at once).
Israel has a parliamentary system of government with a unicameral legislature called the Knesset. The membership of the Knesset is fixed at 120 on a traditional basis (that was the size of the knesset gadol, `large' knesset, 2500 years ago; cf. 435). As in Italy and elsewhere that parliament has been split into uncooperative minorities, there was frustration with this system. The idea arose that a stronger executive was the solution, so in the mid-nineties a move was made a small part of the way towards an American-style separation of powers: the PM is now elected in a national poll, separately from the rest of the Knesset. (In the fact of separate election, this somewhat resembles the system of French Fifth Republic. In France, however, the separately elected president holds executive powers independently of parliament, and a prime minister is determined by coalition politics in the parliament. In Israel, the separately elected leader is the PM, and must form a government (a governing coalition in knesset) like any other prime minister. Israel also has a President who is head of state and has only a small, mostly ceremonial role in government.)
After just two elections under the new system (1996, 1999), many Israelis figured they had the worst of both systems (US and parliamentary): by casting a vote for one of the two major-party PM candidates, voters can determine the leader of the next government without voting to give that PM's party a single other seat in Knesset. As a result, there was a decline in the share of seats held by the two major parties (Labor and Likud, which are themselves more like close coalitions of smaller parties). Interestingly, this was thought to have a positive-feedback effect: smaller parties see their interest in the new system, and collectively the smaller parties are now more powerful, making it seem unlikely that the clock would be turned back.
On February 6, 2001, Sharon was elected PM by the largest majority ever. On the day he was sworn in, March 7, Knesset amended the Basic Law (the written constitution) back to something resembling the status quo ante (details in unofficial English translation here). The constitutional change took effect in 2003.
In 2001, Sharon formed a broad-based unity government. In the 2003 elections, Labor (Mapai) lost seats, and Shinui, a new moderate party, took a comparable though smaller number of Knesset seats. (One is reminded of a British SDP, created in early 1981, when the Tories were dominant and Labour was unreformed, though of course the British SDP was never quite as successful.) After the 2003 elections, Sharon put together a coalition of Likud and religious parties.
Sharon, it became increasingly clear, had concluded that negotiations with the Palestinians would continue to be a dead end at best, as they had been for decades. Israel's best option was thus to withdraw unilaterally from most of the territories occupied in 1967 and still under Israeli control, and to consolidate behind a security fence. Such a fence had long separated the Gaza strip from pre-1967 Israel, and most suicide attacks during the intifadahs had originated in the West Bank. Starting in 2003, Sharon aggressively advanced his disengagement plan of withdrawing settlements -- though only from the Gaza strip. In the meantime, the security fence in the West Bank continued to be built. Sharon never articulated his plan with complete candor, partly because to do so would repudiate the negotiated-withdrawal ``Roadmap'' of the ``Quartet'' group. An explicit explanation was also unnecessary because, apart from some West Bank settlers in denial, most people understood the plan. Everyone else understands that after the fence is complete, Jewish settlements outside the fence will be abandoned one way or another.
The majority of Sharon's own party (Likud) always opposed unilateral withdrawal, and most of Sharon's political moves from 2003 to 2005 were directed at pushing through the withdrawal over Likud objections. His in-party opponents demanded that the withdrawal be approved by a vote of party members. The vote was held and Sharon lost it, but he pursued his policy within the Knesset, reorganizing his governing coalition in 2004 into another unity government that included Labor. In the second half of 2005, he resigned from Likud and created a new centrist party called Kadima (`forward'). New Knesset elections were scheduled for March 28, 2006, and it looked like Kadima would be in a strong position to form the next government and probably complete Sharon's plan. Polls showed Kadima drawing its strength mostly at the expense of Likud, and becoming the new dominant party in Knesset, though with fewer seats (polling between 31 and 39) than Likud held in the existing Knesset (40).
In December 2005, Sharon suffered a minor stroke, and on January 4, 2006, he suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma. Under the nominally provisional leadership of Ehud Olmert, polls showed Kadima winning only slightly fewer seats.
Naturally, that's not what I want to write about. I want to write about the uncountable noun bibliography, which refers not -- or not mainly -- to the creation of bibliographies, but to a scholarly activity that is only marginally related to the creation of bibliographies. This other kind of bibliography is now more often called ``textual criticism.'' It is the activity of attempting to retrieve the most accurate possible text of a work, or (if the author or others modified it) to construct an accurate revision history of a work.
Whew! Well started is half done, they say, so I shouldn't have but a couple of paragraphs to go once I track down the various books I want to cite on this topic. Well, here's something to mention that's already on the web, on ``The Little Professor blog for December 17, 2007. (Alright, it was on the web. Apparently typepad only archives the last week or so of the month for this blog.) In a blog entry entitled ``Profession 2007: `Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion','' the blogger (a Victorianist in the English department at Syracuse or some other college in upstate New York) makes ``some scattered observations about'' the named report and the comments on it.
``Disciplinary Societies and Evaluating Scholarship: A View from History'': Stanley N. Katz rightly expresses bafflement that ``historical editing and bibliography'' (91) have been consistently devalued at RI campuses. The editors and bibliographers are frequently responsible for making our research possible in the first place! Moreover, even with the advent of new software and other technologies, editing and bibliography is time-consuming, exhausting labor (especially if the editor in question is working with manuscripts).
Lack of appreciation for their crucial hard work is a perennial complaint of bibliographers, one which I can easily document back to the late 1950's. Great! I'm finally making progress on this entry. Now I only have three or four more paragraphs to go.
This French Wikipédia page implies that Bich was shortened to BiC because the latter is easily identifiable and pronounceable in all languages. That's certainly somewhat plausible. The first foreign market entered was Italy (1954), where the two spellings would have to be regarded as equivalent, and closed syllables ending in /k/ are not part of the standard dialect, and are difficult for many Italians to pronounce. The second foreign market entered was Brazil (1956), where Bic and Bich are again both strange but pronounceable. Bich would likely have been pronounced as in French. In 1957 BiC expanded sales to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and in 1958 to the US and the Middle East. I have read in one of my books on the history of pens that Baron Bich decided to market as Bic upon being informed of how ``Bich'' would be pronounced and understood in English. Bic products are now marketed in more than 162 countries (according to the same wiki page).
Exponential Technology, a startup planning to roll out PowerPC compatible chips in early 1997, argues that bipolar is not a space hog, and that current conventional BiCMOS fabrication, with bipolar piggybacked on an essentially CMOS fab sequence, does not exploit the full potential of bipolar.
Often, this shows up on the label as ``take one tablet twice a day.'' This is easy the first time, but I recommend taking a different pill the second time than the first time. The pill you took once already is in no condition to be taken again.
A regular bid consists of a natural number from one to seven and ``a suit.'' A suit in this context is clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, or no-trump. Regular bids are ordered: a higher number always corresponds to a higher bid, and if the numbers are the same, then the bid with the higher-ranking suit is the higher bid (in the previous sentence, the suits are listed in order of increasing rank).
If all four players pass after the deal, there is a new deal. If there is a bid in the first go-round, then bidding continues until three successive players pass, which means that you can't raise your own bid.
A player may double if the last bid was a regular bid by an opposing player, and may redouble if the last bid was a double by an opposing player. (When 7 no-trump is redoubled, bidding ends immediately and everyone chants.)
This entry is actually something of a mock-up, inserted so that other entries with links to it have an it to link to. It's not finished, in other words.
For some reason, the bidet is used principally by women. I guess that's because it's about the right size to serve as a baby's bath. Yeah, that's it.
Recent archaeological research suggests that the baths at Bath were not Roman but Celtic. Quite surprising if true.
First the man takes a beer,
then the beer takes a beer,
then the bier takes the man.
For those of you studying the plain-text print-out version (or just carrying it around for the exercise), ``drunk entry'' above is the specific entry for the term drunk (high-lighted as a link in hypertext); more than one entry seems to have been written under the influence of liquid inspiration.
Looks like my memory was alcohol-impaired. Maybe my judgment was impaired too. I better see her again as soon as possible to learn some more travelling-with-children acronyms and to confirm the accuracy of my recollection that she's one hot babe.
(Yes, my selfless devotion to this glossary is the stuff of legend.)
The word bigamy itself entered English in the thirteenth century from Old French, in the form bigame (< medieval Latin bigamus), without too much legal baggage. Besides the conventional sense they have today, bigame and the modern form bigamy also had the meaning in Ecclesiastical Law of marrying a second time, possibly legally (typically after the death of one's first spouse, since the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce). That is not to say that whether a second marriage was contracted legally or not was insignificant. Until the reign of William III, bigamy in Christian England was punishable by death. Of course, as Anne Boleyn and many others discovered, having a spouse who can't get a divorce may not be less fatal.
Just to be slightly technical, bigamy is the name of the crime in which a person already legally married contracts a second marriage (in a jurisdiction where the first marriage is recognized). There is no need to define separate crimes for differing degrees of polygamy or oligogamy -- tri- or (preferably, I think) ter-gamy, quadrigamy, etc. -- since each subsequent marriage contracted during a valid first marriage is already a distinct individual crime of bigamy. For what to do when charged, see trigamy defense. For some egregious instances of modern bigamy, look under McBride.
If you want to make a distinction, the state of holy, or unholy, or any-remaining-optionsly matrimony between one man and two women is bigyny, and a similar arrangement between one woman and two men is biandry. Actually, these words (and the nonbarbaric di- versions) don't exist (polygamy, polygyny, and polyandry do), but I created them to make a point. There was a time when it was needless to specify that marriage involving one man and two women meant two marriages -- each involving the man and one of the women. When one recognizes, as some jurisdictions do, the possibility of two persons of the same sex being legally married, it becomes possible for any three individuals (above a certain age of consent, for now) to contract three distinct marriages. This gives rise to interesting possibilities. For example, if two women marry in a jurisdiction where that is legal, and one of them subsequently marries a man in another jurisdiction where same-sex marriages are not recognized, then the wife in the second marriage might be a bigamist in the first jurisdiction, even though the second marriage was legally entered into. How can the first jurisdiction pretend to accept the legality of marriages performed in the second if they are bigamous in its own? Of course, if the wording of the bigamy statutes carelessly assumed that only persons of different sexes marry, there might be no problem.
Andrew Koppelman's Same Sex, Different States (Yale U.P., 2006), has something to say about the important difficulties posed in the preceding paragraph. (I'll summarize to the glossary if I ever have the time to read and digest this. Pending that, you might as well know that there's a relevant book.)
- The moment when our universe came into being, roughly speaking. This occurred about fifteen billion years ago.
- The deregulation of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). This occurred on October 27, 1986. On that day fixed brokerage commissions ended and the metaphorical wall separating brokers from market makers in securities fell. A unique supervisory system made up principally of self-regulatory industry groups will got underway at the same time. (The corresponding event on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) took place on May 1, 1975, and was known as May Day. From all reports, the subsequent months felt like MAY-DAY.
In September 1996 a new company started flying under the same name and logos, and even some of the same management, using three A-330's.
- Accounting Firms in the US:
Arthur Andersen
Arthur Young
Coopers & Lybrand
Deloitte Haskins and Sells
Ernst & Whinney
Peat, Marwick, Mitchell
Price Waterhouse
Touche Ross - The title of a book by Mark Stevens (MacMillan, 1981), from which I cribbed the preceding list. There's been some conglomeration since 1981, as is clear from the Big Four list. Stevens didn't call these ``accounting firms in the US,'' as I do. He called them ``huge multinational business organizations, the largest professional firms in the world, and some of the most influential financial powers on earth'' (p. 2). This isn't really specific enough. GM fits the description just as well. He goes on (p. 3): ``The Big Eight are, among other things, auditors, accountants, executive headhunters, merger-makers, tax specialists, consultants, attorneys, lobbysts, expert witnesses, financial planners, actuaries, engineers.'' This puts me in the mind of those descriptions of housewives that make them sound like domestic multinationals. Point taken, but... a few counterpoints: (1) A tax specialist is someone or something that specializes in taxes. (2) GM is in the finance business, but ``motor vehicle manufacturer'' still describes it better than any laundry list of the activities it has its fingers in (or had, before it spun a lot of stuff off). (3) If you subcontract for art, that doesn't make you an artist. (And the subcontractor probably isn't one either.) (4) All of the Big Eight began as accounting firms. I'm willing to compromise: we can call them accounting and business consulting services firms.
- Accounting firms in the US and much of the world:
Deloitte & Touche, LLP
E&Y
KPMG
PwC
That's right: it's a quiz. You should know this. Yeah, yeah, KPMG is hard, but ask yourself: do I want to be intimately familiar with the tedious organizational history of the world's richest accounting firms, or do I want to be poor? - Britain's mainline railways in the Grouping era (1923-47). In
clockwise as well as alphabetical order:
GWR
LMS
LNER
SR - A single US railway named after four cities (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis).
Hmm... 50 daughters of Danaeus... maybe Mee's play gave Tom Hanks and the other producers their idea.
Notice how concentrated these names are in the middle of the alphabet. It's because the states are in the middle of the country. States that are at the extreme ends of the country, like Alaska and Washington, are on the ends of the alphabet. Sure.
In 1998-9, Notre Dame considered an invitation to join, but eventually decided to stay independent.
- Most prominent science-fiction authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.
- WWII allied leaders: Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. [Harry Truman is no more one of the Big Three than, say, Philip José Farmer is one of the Big Three. I have nothing against these two at all; I only mention PJF to name-drop, as I contributed some ideas to his most recent work, The City Beyond Play (September 2007).]
- Automakers: GM, Ford, and Chrysler. When Chrysler was a division of Daimler-Chrysler, it wasn't clear whether these were the big-three automakers of North America, the US, Detroit, or what, but ``big two automakers'' never caught on (see AAMA). Now that Chrysler is again American-owned, that problem is solved. The only problems left are for the companies not to go bankrupt, although that may be part of the solution.
- Others listed at Wikipedia. I think ``Big three Christian Beings: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit'' is a bit of a stretch, but it shows a good-faith (sorry) attempt at inclusiveness.
There are other duopolies!
Of course!
But I've actually seen that duopoly called ``Big Two.'' Another US duopoly that comes to mind is that of Kappa Publishing and Dell (the latter bought out Penny Press some years ago), which together dominate the market for cheap crossword-puzzle magazines. I remember reading an interview with a guy at one of those enterprises, in which the fellow says something like ``we always say that between the two of us we have 99% of the market, but really I don't know of anyone else who is even in the business.''
This should not be confused with the Logan airport at Boston: BOS.
- Laws governing, I don't know, bicycles, bisexuals, bigamists?
- A misspelling or perhaps a misconstrual of by-laws. For example, on May 6, 2005, the ABC TV affiliate WLOS (``Western North Carolina's New Leader'') reported a membership dispute at East Waynesville Baptist Church. Pastor Chan Chandler told nine members that if they didn't support George W. Bush, they should resign or repent. They were expelled, and forty others left in protest. Although he declined an interview with WLOS, the minister did explain that ``the actions were not politically motivated.'' According to the WLOS website, ``there are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed.''
- (With capitalization) rules governing the Bank of Indonesia.
If you think I put in this entry just to have a place to mention the news from East Waynesville, you're completely wrong. I put it here because I couldn't find the bye-laws entry.
- Having a knowledge of two tongues. That's ``tongues'' in the sense of languages. What you do in the privacy of each other's mouths, I'm not interested to know. See also bilingual education.
- In various contexts, two particular tongues are clearly implied, and the general term is understood in a restricted sense. For example, in Canadian bureaucratese, bilingual refers to those proficient in French. Hmm, let me check that. Oh, it means fluent in French and English. In much of the US, bilingual meants fluent, okay, maybe not exactly fluent, in Spanish and English.
- Decorated with both red-figure and black-figure art (see BF entry).
- Having two tongues. (Well, it could mean that, anyway.)
In Spanish, bilingual is bilingüe. In French, it's bilingue. Not what you expected, huh? German: zweisprachig. Every continent needs an outlier.
There is a more subtle flaw in the rationale for bilingual education, so-called, and that is the undervaluation of what educationists call ``language arts.'' Geography, history, science, and most subjects in elementary school are less important for their own sakes than as opportunities for mastering the language. A thorough competence in the language and mores of one's society is more important than the other specific knowledge that grade school is supposed to impart. For immigrant children, the need is even more urgent. That is, the metric of utility is more sensitive to language deficiencies at the elementary level than to language deficiencies at an advanced level or to deficiencies in any other grade-school subjects.
The tragedy is that children of elementary-school age are language sponges. Delaying their absorption of the country's main language is a disservice and an opportunity missed. In fact, it is absurd and cruel that children usually do not begin to study second languages until past age 12, when the task begins to be work.</rant>
``Dual-language'' elementary education, also called ``two-way immersion,'' is what you might have supposed bilingual education to be. In dual-language programs, students spend about half of their time in an English classroom environment and half in another language.
More generally, in the US scheme, a numerical prefix bi-, tri-, etc. before -illion counts the number of factors of a thousand multiplying the first thousand; in the other popular scheme the prefix refers to the number of factors of a million. Thus, trillion = 1012 (Amer.) and 1018 (traditional Br., current Fr. and Ger.), etc.
In Britain today, and in much of the British Commonwealth outside North America, the situation is perched uneasily between the two conventions. Generally speaking, the traditional British sense of billion coincides with the current French meaning (1012), but there have been a number of moves toward aligning usage with the US convention. There are some indications [Ftnt. 17] that the American usage, consonant with the factors-of-1000 SI prefix usage, is gaining greater acceptance in Britain, but it is still too ambiguous to use without qualification or fear of misunderstanding. The French meaning has also varied; the American meaning of billion corresponds to an earlier French definition.
In German and French ``milliard'' is 109; British English has that word (cf. Mrd), but the British have tended to use ``thousand million,'' as the Moody Blues did in a song called ``Question'').
See the entry "`billion': a U.K. view" in the alt.english.usage FAQ. There's also a history of the Sagan "billions and billions."
``A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon it adds up to real money.''
-- the wisdom of Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-1969).
``There are very few things we'll spend a billion dollars on just because they're cool.''
-- John Connolly, an engineer in NASA's Exploration Office, commenting on the possibility of another manned mission to the moon (Discover magazine, September 1998, p. 75).
When the liver is diseased, this pigment may fail to be excreted through the bile duct and instead accumulate in the body. This turns the whites of the eyes yellow and causes a yellowish discoloration of the skin, a condition called jaundice. Jaundice occurs in various kinds of chronic poisoning, including alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver, and by at least five viral diseases (see hepatitis).
The bima has a table on which a bible scroll is placed for reading (see megilla). The bima serves other obvious purposes, but practice varies. There is usually at least one lectern which is more convenient for reading less awkward books. (Haftorah readings are normally from a codex, and much of the service consists of the recitation of prayers rather than the reading of canonically holy books.)
Traditionally, the bima has been at the center of the room; the Talmud mentions (Suk. 51b) a wooden pulpit in the center of the synagogue of Alexandria. In Oriental and Sephardi synagogues there are usually no chairs between the bima and the front wall, where the torah scrolls are kept in an ark. This doesn't make very efficient use of space, according to some notions of ``efficient.'' Maimonides opined (you could look it up) that it's okay to have some chairs between the bima and the ark, and many Orthodox synagogues follow this.
I've been in at least a couple of Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues (one Hasidic, one not) where the bima was at the front. So it's clear that the bima location is not a big hang-up for everyone, but early in the twentieth century it was a bone of contention the size of a brontosaur femur. Brontosaur isn't kosher, in case you were wondering. At least, I'm sure it would be treyf (i.e., not kosher) today. This might not be an entirely academic or talmudical issue. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago cited a news item about prehistoric fish or salamander preserved in a frozen stream. It was reportedly so fresh that the people who found it devoured the meat before it could be studied. However, since we don't want to go off on a tangent, we'll relegate further discussion of that to a future GULAG entry.
You know, the kosherness of well-aged and too-well-aged meat is a lot more interesting than bima position, so let's talk about that. My friend Dan had an interesting thought on the subject. When Dan was 12 years old, he and a friend and Dan's kid brother Lou made a comic-book parody (or perhaps a travesty) called ``The Adventures of Stupidman.'' The hero was transported back in time to before the exodus from Egypt, and the first thing he did was go and have himself a meal of pork, since it wasn't treyf yet then. I guess this is one possible interpretation of whatchamightcall the question of when a particular one of God's laws is ``in vigor,'' based on the legal fiction of a covenant. They sold 160 copies; it must be collector's item.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION, okay? (That means it's not finished.)
At Princeton University, where I went to graduate school, the graduate students' ``residential college'' (local name for dorm complex, roughly) is called the Graduate College (GC). In the basement it has a bar (``The Debasement Bar''). One evening there I found B__ (a mechanical engineer pal) with a cute airhead townie that he'd met on a bus. In those days I was even ruder than I am today, and I happened to utter a sentence that contained the word bimbo. I don't remember what the sentence was, but I do remember that she heard the word. She seemed to be about equal parts
- insulted, and
- amazed that anyone could be so rude.
B__ assured me the next day that my unguarded comment hadn't been a problem. Ah -- business giveth, and business taketh away. Or maybe it's the other way around. I'm thinking of the anecdotes described in the long paragraph about (actually not much about) Joseph Black.
It occurs to me now that some readers may misdoubt my veracity. Those who've read the VTVM entry might suppose that this entry is, similarly, only loosely fact-based, with the COBOL thing as just a bit of amusing creativity. Well, it was a bit of amusing creativity, but we created it on the spot. B__ also achieved local fame for inventing a billiards variant.
I think they should do what the underarm deodorant and antiperspirant marketers did: come out with roll-on products. This sounds stupid now, but it's not any more stupid than those sheet-thin menthol chews that began to be marketed in 2003-2004. We introduced an entry here for the ``Suburban Conquistador'' before we learned that Cadillac and Lincoln were marketing their own SUV's.
It's a very reliable phenomenon. The next time I noticed a book with upside-down English spine text, it was Special Forces in the Invasion of France by Paul Gaujac, a translation of his French original (Les forces spéciales de la Libération), published by Histoire & Collections.
Okay, I finally came across a legitimate domestic instance: Public Policy and the Dead Hand, by Lewis M. Simes, part of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan. It was published by the University of Michigan Law School in 1955, which is not so long ago that printing downward along the spine was not standard. The book was manufactured by Twentieth Century Printing Co., Inc., of Baltimore, Maryland.
Okay, let's eye-dropper some information onto this entry. A magazine with a paperback-like binding -- a narrow side perpendicular to front and back covers -- is said to be ``perfect-bound.''
Bilingual books may pose a problem, but here's a practical solution that I haven't seen much of lately. The volume before me is two books. One book has the title of Proceedings of the Canadian Congress of Correction 1957: Montréal May 26-29, 1957, and was published by the Canadian Corrections Association of the Canadian Welfare Council. I imagine it has something to do with editorial work, given the thoughtful publication scheme. (There'd be a lot more editorial work to do, of course, if it were the American Corrections Association of the British Welfare Council, or vice versa.)
The other book has the title Le Rapport du Congrès canadien sur la Délinquance, 1957: Montréal du 26 au 29 mai 1957, and it's from La Société canadienne de Criminologie du Conseil canadien du Bien-être. I guess it was one of those joint-conference things, like APA/AIA meetings. Just so as not to show any bias, I suppose that presentations were in a neutral language -- probably Swahili. Anyway, to get back to the interesting issue: the volume is bound together like one of those flippable paired novels now regretably so rare. If you read to the end of one book and turn the page, the print on the next page appears upside-down. The volume is about 4 cm thick, so the binding is wide enough to allow the short titles to be printed across the top (i.e., the respective tops) of the binding. For a little more about how that worked, see W.F. CARABINE.
Transesterification generally is like a reaction between a relatively strong base and a salt. In the latter reaction, the strong base combines with the anion of the salt, and the cation of the base forms a (weaker) base. Transesterification works the same way, except that instead of salts one has esters, instead of cations one has oxyalkanes, and instead of acids in general one has organic acids. The organic acids of the original esters form new esters with the added alcohols, and release the original bonding partners as alcohols.
Transesterification was investigated during WWII as a source of glycerine needed for explosives. Probably the usual source of glycerine is the saponification process, so I guess that during WWII, people were not washing as much as usual. Either that, or they were using more nitroglycerine than usual. Transesterification of oils and fats is also similar to saponification, except that instead of glycerine and soap, one produces glycerine and fatty-acid esters. Thus, for example, RME is a mix of methyl esters of rapeseed fatty acids.
The great disadvantage of using straight vegetable oils (SVO's) as substitutes for diesel fuel is their much higher viscosity. The high viscosity can be understood crudely. (Like raw, undistilled petroleum or uncooked vegetable oil, get it? Oh, never mind.) To understand the general trends, one must recognize two qualitative sources of viscosity: deformation within the fatty acids of a triglyceride (fat or oil) molecule, and deformation of the molecule as a whole.
To take the second part first: fat and oil molecules are sort of dendritic. They consist of three long fatty acids that can rotate about a common axis of the three carbons of the glycerine, functioning as rather limber knuckles. Adjacent oil molecules become entangled, giving rise to viscosity. Transesterification separates the individual fatty acids, so that they don't entangle as three connected fingers but as individual fingers. (Don't imagine this too literally before lunch unless you're on a diet.) This substantially reduces the viscosity.
The principal difference between oils and fats is in the degree of saturation. Complete saturation means that carbon chains have as many hydrogen atoms as are possible for their chain topology. A monounsaturated chain has a single double bond, and each of the two carbons participating in the double bond has one less hydrogen than it would have if completely saturated. Polyunsaturated chains have more double bonds. Double bonds do not rotate freely, so less saturated chains are more rigid, and conversely.
Higher rigidity on a molecular scale in this case means lower rigidity on a macroscopic scale. Again intuitively: a disordered aggregation of rigid rods does not entangle and clump, but instead spreads out. Viewed on a large length scale at which individual rods cannot be distinguished, this is basically liquid behavior. Saturated fatty acids (i.e., those with no double bonds) correspond to floppy strings or chains rather than to rigid rods, and can form a pile or clump (this isn't the usual technical language, okay?). Hence, saturated fatty acids are more viscous or solid on a macroscopic scale.
Thus, it is fats (as opposed to oils) that are generally more highly saturated. They are more viscous than oils of comparable molecular mass at a given temperature. Equivalently, fats solidify at higher temperatures. That's why, to create a low-viscosity biofuel, one wants to transesterify oils rather than fats.
But first, let's have a lot of superfluous context. The quotation is from the introduction (starting at page ix) to James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow (pp. xiv + 686 -- do the math). At the age of xxviii, Atlas had published a biography of ``the poet Delmore Schwartz.'' (Oh, that Delmore Schwartz. Delmore is such a common name, you know. Is it really so snobbish to sneer at such thumbnail clarifications here? Can it really be thought uncondescending to readers of an adult-size biography of Saul Bellow, to suggest that they do not know who Delmore Schwartz was? For more of this snitty snoottiness, see the .se entry. Yeah, I'm shooting for some sibilant tongue twisters.) His biographies of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz are the two for which James Atlas is best known. James does not appear to be related to Charles Atlas, except probably through Charlemagne.
Anyway, Atlas (James Atlas, not the body-builder and fantastic, historic adman) had been pegged as a career biographer and was casting about for his next victim, err, subject. He had already signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to do the authorized biography of Edmund Wilson. (``America's gratest modern man of letters,'' okay? Yeah, ``greatest,'' ``gratingest,'' whatever.) But after five years Atlas ``hadn't written a word.'' [I've seen the term over-literal a lot. In fairness, under-literal is a more common fault.] Maybe he should've tried mapping him. Atlas writes that he loved Wilson's work -- he'd ``read every word he'd written'' (and published, I suppose). However...
I had a toxic response to his character. The bullying proclamations, the tedious self-revelations, the drinking and philandering--All that juicy material! On the one hand, we see that James Atlas has a gift for thumbnail characterizations. On the hand with the other thumbnail, we see that he failed to appreciate the value of a good salacious ogre of a subject.
--in the end, he just didn't appeal to me as a subject to whose life and work I was willing to apprentice myself for the better part of a decade, the time any conscientious biographer of a major personage can expect to allot.If he regards his own biography of Delmore Schwartz as conscientious, then I suppose he started it in college. Anyway, this was the point: you must devote the better part of a decade to do justice to a great literary life.
My experience of romance writing was similar to Atlas's experience of Wilson biographizing. I had planned a first book in the genre. (I had read an entire romance paperback. I also skimmed two more.) I hadn't signed a contract with Mr. Strauss yet, but my cousin Victoria and I had come up with a great nom de plume for me. Yet I had a toxic response--in the end, romance novelizing didn't appeal to me as anything that I could endure for the better part of ten minutes. I once belonged to a writers' group that was run by a couple who wrote romance novels. I was drummed out. I was drummed out of two writers' groups I attended. The third just stopped meeting, or so I was told.
BTW, this James Atlas is the same James Atlas who gets a brief mention at the periodization puns in book titles entry, for My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. The dust jacket of that book mentions that he ``is the founder of Atlas Books and the general editor of the Eminent Lives series.''
Biola is also a fair transliteration of the Japanese word for viola. There are now some katakana characters for syllables beginning with a vee sound, and the appropriate one is used in one Japanese spelling of viola, but in practice a bee sound is used.
This word had a high or rising pitch accent on the iota, so with accent, it was written bíos (combining form bío-). This was an instance where the accent was semantically useful (see next). The semantic field corresponding to the English words `life, living' was shared in ancient Greek primarily by bíos and zôê. (I can't easily add an acute accent to the eta; just pretend it's there.) The latter word, meaning essentially `animal life,' is etymon of English words like zoo, zoology, and zootrophy (not something you win at the zoo).
The earliest recorded bios pun, so far as I am aware, is due to that madcap philosopher Hê -- see the mad cap? -- rakleitos of Ephesos (more usually in English we use the Latinized form Heraclitus of Ephesus):
This has Diels-Kranz fragment number 22-48 (fifth and later
editions; 12-66 in earlier). The unaccented Greek reads
bios: tôi oun toxôi onoma bios, ergon de thanatos.
Heraclitus lived and probably tried out a bow around 500 B.C.; now he's
dead.
There doesn't seem to be any English word which this biós serves as a root of.
There's an awful lot of biomass in bacteria, and a lot in water, but here's something: bacteria (like actors) prefer to live in films. The surface of water with air or a solid has a high concentration of solutes that bacteria think of as nutrients, and protozoans that like to have bacteria for lunch encounter a little difficulty in penetrating surfaces. There are always a few free bacteria around, but even the flagellates go for the films. The thickness of the biosphere, or its depth, is apparently greater than anyone used to suppose. The presence of bacteria in subterranean sedimentary rock as early as the 1920's used to be dismissed as due to contamination after retrieval. Research since the mid-1980's has demonstrated that autochthonous thermophile bacteria and archaea live (low metabolic-rate lives) down to depths of at least a few kilometers, in sedimentary and even igneous rock.
The term biosphere was coined in the nineteenth century by the London-born Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. He slipped it in near the end of a monograph about the Alps. I guess when you've got a neologism you want to introduce, any text will do. [Suess was in many respects the scientific predecessor of Wegener, and he introduced many terms for phenomena that can only be adequately explained by the theory of plate tectonics; Gondwanaland and Tethys Sea were first conjectured and named in his Das Antlitz der Erde (`The Face of the Earth').]
Suess's word biosphere was popularized by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920's. Vernadsky was a pioneer in studying the effects of life on the atmosphere and the earth's crust, and is thus regarded as the founder of the theory of the biosphere. He also gave some currency to a related term, noosphere (q.v.). This latter term was apparently introduced by that infamous mystic P. Teilhard de Chardin in his L'Hominisation (1925). By this term (noosphère in French) he meant that part of the biosphere occupied by thinking humanity. This was supposed to include both red and blue states. Just as the noosphere is a subset (or subspace or subregion or sub-something) of the biosphere, so the blogosphere is a subset of the noosphere. We could take this further and define a newsosphere as a subset of the blogosphere, but we won't. We'll just suggest it and let someone else run with that sphere.
No, no: beer is cerveza in Spanish. (And cerveja in Portuguese, cervesa in Catalan.) It's birra in Italian. Spanish does have the word birria, however, that refers to anything horrible or ugly. In Mexico it has the more specific sense of something insipid to drink. I have to wonder if that doesn't reflect American influence and the English word beer.
Just give me muh-uh-uh-uh-ney! Muh-uh-ney -- that's what I need -- That's! What I need!
Jeanne M. Dallard has some links to BISDN documentation at NIST. Whatis?com offers a brief description.
BISG also puts out an annual report on the economic health of the book trade. In August 1999, they reported that after a general decline in the mid-nineties, there was an increase by over four percent in trade book sales (adult hard cover and trade paperbacks) from 1997 to 1998 (497 million volumes sold in 1998). 368 million children's books were sold, a six percent increase from a weak 1997, but still below 1996 sales. Unit sales of books about science and technology have been falling since 1995, and this is attributed to increased electronic publishing -- books on disk, CD-ROM, or on the internet.
Vide error latency and signature analysis.
BIT's have received considerably less press than PTA's. In a paper published online in January 2011, Jeffrey H. Bergstrand and Peter Egger suggest that BIT's are ``at least as significant'' as PTA's. (Bergstrand and various co-authors have been making that argument for a few years, but it's not the point of the cited paper. See references therein.) They note that in 2010, the U.S. had 40 BIT's in force and only 17 PTA's.
BITA is a member of BMHF.
Ingredients:
100 g Zhiguli Beer 70 g Dandruff Treatment 30 g ``Sadko'' Shampoo 30 g Athlete's Foot Remedy 20 g Small Bug Killer
Preparation:
Combine all ingredients and steep for a week in cigar tobacco. Serve.
See Spirit of Geneva for similar recipes and more on the book.
BITNET wasn't real-time -- it was occasional. Scheduled message-passing communications became increasingly frequent into the nineties. If you've got an old BITNET address of someone at a university, and you don't think they've moved, then there's a good chance that their old address username@SCHLNM.BITNET has become <username@schlnm.edu>.
Regarding the letter jay in the country code... for what it's worth, the I/J distinction is a relatively recent one. It can't even be indicated in German Fraktur (the original `Gothic script').
![[Image: npn BJT schematic]](images/tokuyasu-mirror/transistorcircuit.gif)
It's easy to fall into the pleonastic habit of saying, redundantly: ``BJT transistor.''
(Why does bju.com forward to FriendFinder? Gotta think about this. If you become a member you can search by religion and ethnicity, and these don't have to be the same as yours.)
``Yeah sorta. It's two burgers with cheese and a special sauce.''
``Well, I don't want the cheese. What's in the special sauce?''
``All I can tell you is, it's like a Big Mac.''
``Can I have it without the special sauce?''
I can't have it without the special sauce. ``Special orders don't upset'' them, but they may just not fill them.
The first Burger King opened in 1955 in Miami as ``Instaburger King.'' Skipping ahead a little bit, a merger of Grand Metropolitan and Guinness in 1997 created Diageo, which inherited BK (still based in Florida). In 2002, BK had 11,500 US stores, second only to McDonald's (over 13,000). London-based Diageo plc put it up for bid in 2002, originally seeking $2.5 billion, but soon had to lower its target to $2.3 billion.
(Turns out that it's rather a fixer-upper. As of 2002, average sales per store had been flat for years at about $1.1 million, while McDonald's was up to $1.6 million. The company went through nine chief executives in 13 years, and from 1996 to 2001, customer visits to BK stores in the US dropped 20%. McDonald's has been expanding internationally, with 50% of revenues coming from non-US sales; BK: 23%.)
On July 25, 2002, Texas Pacific Group (an LBO shop), in cooperation with Boston's Bain Capital Inc. and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, among others, reached agreement to buy BK from Diageo. The price was $2.26 billion, including $600 million cash. The deal left Burger King's management in place and was expected to lead to more capital for the Florida-based chain. In late July I mentioned this to the woman working the cash register at the BK in the Huddle. Actually, I mentioned it to Gary, but she kibitzed. She was happy to hear that the new owners were in an invest mood and that they didn't plan a lot of store closings. Isn't it great to have committed employees? It's not a business -- it's a community! In fact, it's not just a community -- it's a family! A big family, that needs to put food on the table.
Burger King is also mentioned at the KFC entry.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
sat in a corner,
eating his Christmas pie.
He stuck in his thumb,
and pulled out a plum,
and said ``What a good boy am I!''
Actually, it was almost certainly a blackberry, but that didn't happen to rhyme with thumb.
In the Dissecting Room feature of The Lancet, in vol. 357, iss. # 9249 (6 January 2001), Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe published a short essay entitled ``Jack Horner and biomedical literature.'' It was a parable of priority in research and publication, but it was by no means the first article in a scientific journal to mention Jack Horner.
Most instances seem to occur in the biological literature. The earliest one I can find was ``Lambda as Little Jack Horner,'' on p. 64 of the 22 March 1972 issue of Nature New Biology [a short-lived offshoot of Nature (London)]. The article byline is ``from our Molecular Genetics Correspondent.'' Citing four recent articles, it observed that phage λ could be made to integrate (or observed to integrate, in practical terms) in a much broader range of bacterial DNA sites than had been previously, by deleting the usual site of its integration. On the same page, there was a small box announcing ``First Korner Lecture.''
The example concerning a land war in Asia was borrowed from The Princess Bride, a movie released in 1987, but it is always timely. And undergarments were also not a central concern of Cleese's statement (about which, more below). However, Debra Ginsberg does have something relevant on page 219 of Waiting.
... Waiters and waitresses don't get much leeway [in ``style''] when they are required to wear a uniform, so some become quite creative in finding ways to make the most of their physical attributes. In this restaurant [to which she gives the fictitious name Baciare, `to kiss'], the uniforms were designed with old Italian waiters in mind and consisted of a jacket, pants, and tie [alas, they don't go shirtless, as we soon learn]. One waitress put darts in her work jackets so they tailored her torso. [Ouch! That must hurt!] Combined with her skintight black pants, this made her look like some sort of futuristic cyberbabe on assignment from the future [she mustn't have got first choice]. A less outrageous touch employed by various waitresses involved wearing a black bra under the white shirt so that the design of the undergarment was just visible enough for the imagination to run wild.
None of this works so well if you have a deep natural tan.
From the first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the first description of Julia:
One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
(The word you're thinking of is pneumatic. By the way, Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.)
While waiters and waitresses must usually conform to a uniform dress code, more often than not a host (hostess, seater, greeter, whatev-er) does not. For insight into that, see All dressed up and no place to go.
John Cleese's statement about mistakes is part of a speech entitled ``The Importance of Mistakes,'' which he delivered to a training and personnel conference in New York. The speech was excerpted in ``No more mistakes and you're through!'' an article by Dyan Machan in vol. 141, issue 11 of Forbes (May 16, 1988), pp. 126-7. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:
I want to suggest to you that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes--I might almost say a positive attitude toward them--we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically and unsuccessfully.
Of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No, Mac. There are mistakes and mistakes.'' There are true copper-bottomed mistakes like wearing a black bra under a white blouse, or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. I'm talking about mistakes that at the time they were committed did have a chance.
The entire speech was released as a training video shortly afterwards ($95).
Various versions of the quote are strewn across fortune files and the Internet. Here is a typical one of the longer versions:
I want to suggest to you today, that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes -- I might almost say ``a positive attitude toward them'' -- we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully. Now, of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird Limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No.'' There are mistakes -- and mistakes. There are true, copper-bottom mistakes like spelling the word ``rabbit'' with three M's; wearing a black bra under a white shirt; or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. These are the kind of mistakes described by Mr. David Letterman as Brushes With Stupidity, because they have no reasonable chance of success.
For all I know, Cleese may have delivered similar remarks in different speeches. If all the quoted versions originated in the same speech, I incline to the view that most of the variation among versions is due to silent elisions and mistranscriptions rather than to embellishment.
- From Andrew Young's memoir, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement
and the Transformation of America (1996), pp. 95-96:
Our voter registration drive [in Thomasville, Ga., for the 1956 elections] was not as successful as we had hoped--we were able to register only a handful of people. But our efforts helped Eisenhower carry Georgia by increasing the rolls even a little and encouraging those who were registered that it was an important election. Black voters in the South were still voting Republican, although most made an exception for Franklin Roosevelt. I voted for Eisenhower too. The Southern segregationists were all Democrats, and it was the black Republicans like John Wesley Dobbs, John Calhoun, and Q.V. Williamson who could effectively influence the appointment of federal judges in the South. The best civil rights judges in the South were the Eisenhower appointees: Frank Johnson in Alabama; Elbert Tuttle on the U.S. Court of Appeals; Brian Simpson, who would save my life in Florida; Minor Wisdom; and Skelly Wright on the D.C. Court of Appeals were all Republicans. These judges are among the many unsung heroes of the civil rights movement.
John Minor Wisdom was appointed a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the the Fifth Circuit in 1957. We have a short list of oddly-named judges. You're probably wondering how Brian Simpson saved Andrew Young's life. It's not so dramatic and hardly clear-cut; I'll fill in later.
In 1653, the native Iroquois sent word to the French in Quebec, requesting that a "Black Robe" -- as Jesuit missionaries were referred to at that time -- travel to their country. In July of the following year, Father Simon LeMoyne made the multiday journey to the land that would become Syracuse and Onondaga County.There, he lived among the native Onondaga -- a part of the Iroquois Confederacy -- for several months, and toured the entire region. It was Father LeMoyne who reached the salty shores of Onondaga Lake and realized its potential. At one time, Syracuse was known as the salt capital of the world.
A search on ``Simon Le Moyne'' at the Le Moyne College web site turns up nothing, but a google search does the trick. Father Le Moyne's work is commemorated in the seal of the college. The Le Moyne College yearbook is called ``The Black Robe.''
Clothing is frequently used in synechdoche. In Act II, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's ``The Tragedy of Macbeth,'' Macduff says to Ross,
Well, may you see things well done there: adieu!The old robes is the murdered King Duncan; the new robes is Macbeth, to be crowned at Scone (thither Ross).
Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!
Why is black wool cheaper? My guess: to reach to most hues and saturation levels by dying, it's harder -- if it's even possible -- if you start from black wool than if you start from white wool. But what if you like darker tones? This looks fashion-dependent. Cf. black monks and white monks.
Alternatively one may imagine a graph of use, and regard the ``leading edge'' as the initial rise from zero. In that case, the leading edge is not the technology adopted but the ``first-adopters'' or ``early adopters'' or avant garde. Depending on the technology, and the quality of its first implementations, this group might be called ``visionaries'' or ``foolhardy suckers.'' In either case, this group typically bears the brunt of early bugs and lack of support or implementation experience. Hence, this is the edge that bleeds. (Franklin had an apposite comment, taken somewhat out of context in the defensive driving entry.)
The bleeding edge is sometimes described as being just ahead of the cutting edge. I'm not going to be the first one to analyze that metaphor.
It is meant to maintain parity between the currencies of Belgium and Luxembourg, each currency being legal tender in the other country. The countries also hold their gold and exchange reserves in common.
Both countries are members of the EU and participate in the Emu, so some functions of BLEU are obviated, but BLEU is considered a success and will continue in existence.
Sacre bleu! Don't you feel stupid for asking, huh? You know that saying about there being no such thing as a stupid question? Of course you do! That's an example.
Blimp, like blizzard, is a recent word of unknown origin. bl, like gl, is one of those phonemic units that seems to function a bit like a morpheme, in the fashion that Roman Jakobson advanced as a common mechanism. (I revisit this at the ground entry.)
``Type B: limp'' is apparently just someone's guess, with no historical support.
For a bit more related to blimps, see this LZ entry.
- Henry Dandolo, doge of Venice: guiding spirit of the Fourth
Crusade. (Okay, a doge is a duke and not a cleric, but we have
to demonstrate that all religions are equal in all details that matter
to unbelievers, and it's hard to do that if we are fastidious about
facticity.)
- 'Abd al-Aziz ibn Abdallah ibn Baz: ``traditionalist'' (more
correctly Wahabi) head of Saudi Arabia's Council of Senior Islamic
Scholars, from the early 1960's on. Among his fatwas were prohibitions
on fortune tellers, women driving cars, and the importation of those
scandalously short veils that reveal part of a woman's face. In 1990,
he issued a fatwa approving a jihad against Iraq, allowing non-Muslim
troops on Saudi territory during the Persian Gulf War. He was grand
mufti from 1993 on, and I think it was also in 1993 that he declared
that the earth is flat.
- Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman: leader of Gama'a Islamiya (`Islamic
Group')
Rahman was acquitted of conspiracy charges in the assassination of
President Anwar Sadat, convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade Center and sentenced to life in prison, and suspected
of conspiracy in various other terrorist acts.
- Sheikh Ali al-Nakas: nothing. (On April 14, 1996, he was sentenced
to a year in jail by Bahrain's State Security Court, on charges of
incitement against the government. Fourteen other Shi'ite Moslems held
in connection with anti-government protests received longer sentences.
- Sheik Ahmed Yassin: leader of the Hamas terrorist organization until he was killed by an Israeli missile in March 2004. He was described as only half-blind.
BTW, I saw a headline behind the window of a newspaper box on December 10, 2005, claiming that blind dating is coming back -- as an alternative to online dating sites.
. * | * . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * . | . * | . *
braille: . . | . . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * * | * . | . *
* . | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | * .
German: äu au eu ei ch sch ü ö ä
French: â ê î ô û ü œ
(It's okay to push the rod thing up or down with the side of your cell phone, if the other hand is holding food and you're steering with your knee.)
The term was subsequently used in advertising to describe anything in any remote way resembling a great explosion or causing a great sensation. The war movie Pearl Harbor, released in Summer 2001, was often unironically called a blockbuster. Over 350 bombs were exploded in the filming of that movie. Cf. bikini.
Blogs are entry-wise inverse-chronological, which is as irritating as the beginning of this sentence. Catching up on previous entries (or, for that matter, reading a blog for the first time) is often confusing unless you scroll up to the top of each successive entry and then scroll down to read it. Obviously, they should be inverse-chronological by individual line. Wait here, I've got to get an aspirin.
In many respects, including the general politically rightward and libertarian tilts, it is a written form of talk radio. For important examples, see
- InstaPundit.Com
- BLOGGER (start your own at the related site blog*spot)
- AndrewSullivan.Com
There were half a million blogs in July 2002. To get a grip, try blogdex.
You could think of blogs as one-person chat rooms. Really quite crass, and I am glad that I can guarantee to you our faithful readers that we of the SBF would never do anything remotely similar. (There are also consortium blogs like Daily Kos.)
Regarding that scrolling business -- I'm told some people ``scroll down'' to the top of an entry, and then ``scroll up'' as they read down through it -- the idea being that the text is moved upwards as they read down through the lines in a fixed window. A similar confusion makes a tedious hassle out of defining the signs on angles of a general rotation. The solution is simple: pick one standard convention and stick to it. My standard is this: the intransitive verb scrolling is referred to the eyes: if you ``scroll downward,'' your eyes are looking for something further down on the page. Transitive scrolling is referred to the image motion: ``scrolling the text downward'' means scrolling upward so that the text moves downward through the window. Everyone should use my (SBF-standard) convention.
- In what seems to be the older sense in English, blood represents or emphasizes biological kinship: blood brothers are brothers by birth (as opposed, say, to the other kind of blood brothers). I'm not sure what distinction is normally meant here. It might be meant to distinguish full brothers from half-brothers (brothers with one parent in common), step-brothers (either half-brothers or sons of an adoptive parent married to one's natural parent), or brothers-in-law. But it might just be emphatic.
- In the other sense, brother is understood to represent the obligations, prerogatives, or other social implications of brother status, but the blood is real. In ceremonial practices known both in Africa and aboriginal America, a commingling of blood is used to consecrate a social tie between two men who usually are not brothers. I think the practice was unknown among the English until the age of exploration, whereas expressions such as ``brothers in the blood'' date back to at least as early as 1400.
The term seems to be meant mostly in the second sense nowadays and, along with the newish ``blood sister,'' is often used completely metaphorically -- that is, the relationship is like as to one consecrated in blood. That's good, because blood makes me queasy. For a different take on degrees of brotherhood, see the germanus entry.
When my father was in the hospital after his first heart attack, a nurse came in at one point and said that visitors (indicating Miguel) had to leave. My father protested that Miguel was his brother, and the nurse commented suspiciously that they didn't look like brothers. So my dad said that they had different fathers. He didn't mention that they also had different mothers. For a related kind of thinking, see the twins entry.
Glucose passes through the lining of the small intestines much more rapidly than other sugars. Other sugars, in addition to being absorbed much more slowly, are grabbed by the liver and converted to glucose. Since the conversion process takes a few minutes, while absorption through the small intestines takes hours, most of the single-ring (``simple'') sugars that started out as something other than glucose are present in the blood as glucose. Thus, although some other sugars are dissolved in the blood, for all practical purposes blood sugar is glucose. Cf. Chem 7.
- Bloomsbury is a neighborhood of London, England. In November 1919,
there was a running argument in the Times (London) letters section,
regarding the origin of the name. I'll type in the details as soon as
the librarians refresh the toner in the microfilm printer.
Bloomsbury is home to the ``British Museum,'' London University, and many antiquarian book shops, and may be regarded as the intellectual center of London by those who like to think in such terms.
- A political party that appeared in July 1765, led by the Duke of
Bedford. Also known as the ``Bedford party'' and ``Bloomsbury gang.''
- A set of creative types associated with Bloomsbury (defn. 1),
principally through their friendship or acquaintance with Virginia
Woolf, who lived there. Given the fuzzy definition, there is a core
of generally agreed members and a larger number of people on the edges
of the group whose membership is in dispute. The core included
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Leonard Woolf (VW's husband; 1880-1969)
Vita Sackville-West (VW's friend and lover)
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Roger (Roger Elliot) Fry (1866-1934)
Duncan A. (Duncan Andrew) Grant (1885-1978)
Vanessa Bell (VW's sister)
Clive Bell (1881-1964; VW's brother-in-law)
Adrian Stephen (VW's brother)
Saxon Sydney-Turner
Molly MacCarthy
Francis Birrell (1889-?)
Gerald Shove
H. T. J. Norton
VW was considered a brilliant writer for much of the twentieth century, and she certainly wasn't a slouch. Among literary types, she's still considered more famous than Maynard Keynes. On account of her fame and reputation, and because there's this name (Bloomsbury), there's an entire library of books on the Bloomsberries, Bloomsburyites, and everything else they were called. - Bloomsbury Publishing. At 38 Soho Square, in London. The publisher with the rights to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. [Scholastic contracted for the US rights. In addition to Americanizing the spellings and punctuation, they also changed the traditional ``philosopher's stone'' to the presumably more accessible ``sorcerer's stone,'' in the title and text of the first book. (Because of the title and relevant dialogue, the film was distributed in two English-language versions: US and ROW.) US and British publishers tend to compete for Canada, but in this case Bloomsbury negotiated the rights with Raincoast Books which, as you can guess, is based in Vancouver. Back in 1999 both versions of the first book (Philosopher's and Sorcerer's) could be found in Toronto. However, Raincoast Books has exclusive rights to sell and distribute the book in Canada, and the Scholastic edition should not be on store shelves (new) there.]
Political analysis in 2004: polling microscopy.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, and for those seeking terminal ennui, sale is explained at the yard sale entry.
``The purpose of this organization is to enhance the educational, social, recreational, cultural, and psychological environment of the Siena Community by promoting activities that are relevant to ethnic minorities in general and the Black and Latino in particular.'' (My emphasis.)
Wow, man, like -- far out! The word ``relevant'' just brings those old memories crashing back. It evokes tears of nostalgia, just like the scent of tear gas.
A common way of identifying blue dogs in the US House of Representatives is as those Democrats whose districts went substantially for the Republican standard-bearer in the previous presidential election.
Almost any weak optical scattering by particulates and inhomogeneities will be approximate Rayleigh scattering, and so strongest for short wavelengths. Hence, the sun looks yellow high in the sky and red near the horizon. Light from the moon is colored in the same way. However, since the moon's light is a dim reflection of the sun's, its color is paler (technically less deep, or less saturated). This results from the fact that the color-sensitive cones in the retina crap out at low intensity, so low-light vision is dominated by the color-neutral rods. One of the more subtle effects of color vision, one of those called the Perkinje effect, is that sensitivity to low-intensity red light is less efficient than sensitivity to blue and green. That is, the red-perceiving cones crap out earlier. This has a slight effect of making the moon bluer than it might normally seem, if atmospheric conditions dim it achromatically (i.e., if the view of the moon is obscured by opaque particulates that primarily absorb rather than scatter light). However, for the moon to appear perceptibly blue probably requires something more. Volcanic ash that has segregated by size in the atmosphere can occasionally do it. Spectacular weird sunsets widely reported after the eruption of Krakatoa were probably due to this effect.
In July 2000, Air University Press published Once in a Blue Moon: Airmen in Theater Command -- Lauris Norstad, Albrecht Kesselring, and Their Relevance to the Twenty-First Century Air Force, by Howard D. Belote, Lt. Col., USAF (CADRE Paper No. 7).
Also in 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published More Than Once in a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, by Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall (Research Division Report #40). I guess moonlighting made them blue.
Was the color blue chosen arbitrarily? We address that question elsewhere, but let me put forward a hypothesis here. Before the 2000 election, most major polling organizations predicted a slim popular-vote majority for Bush, the Republican candidate. Gallup predicted the smallest majority; Zogby was the only major pollster to predict a majority for Gore, and came closest to predicting Bush's ultimate winning margin of negative half a percent. But the important point here is that the media might have expected the majority of voters in the Democratic-leaning states to end up blue, hence the choice of color scheme. Now, I'm pretty sure this hypothesis is wrong, but I wanted an excuse to mention the polling situation before the election, so there you go. I state a hypothesis I consider less improbable at the red-state entry.
Incidentally, there was a lot of speculation before the election that, given the closeness of the vote, the electoral vote might go the opposite way from the popular vote. That happened, of course, but not as expected. After the 2000 election, and especially after the 2004 election, the blue states were evidently the states with the higher proportion of voters who were blue about the outome of the election.
We seem to be getting a bit off-topic here. At a separate entry we explain Bollywood to the uninitiated.
Nietzsche, always a sickly fellow, was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel when he was 24. There he met the historian Jakob Burckhardt, whom he came to admire greatly. (You wouldn't get the idea from his books that he could really admire anyone, would you?) The admiration wasn't mutual. Burckhardt is said to have remarked,
``That Nietzsche fellow? He couldn't even have a healthy bowel movement.''
Scattered other relevant stuff:
Mornings at his ashram, Mohandas Ghandi (or Ghandiji, or Mahatma Ghandi, as he
was later known) would typically ask his, uh, staff or whatever if they had had
good bowel movements. Barry Manilow's initials are BM. It reminds me of an
observation of W.C. Fields. He noted the identity of
the first two letters of the closely allied terms ``alimentary canal'' and
``alcohol.'' Could this be a mere coincidence? ``Hardly,'' he scoffed.
(Fields, incidentally, was born William Claude Dukenfield. He used various
pseudonyms as a scriptwriter, including Mahatma Kane Jeeves.) There's a bit
more specifically about BM at the CCU entry.
There's a bit more excrementitious or at least
GI-related stuff at the
Veep entry.
There is a series of student texts of Classical (Greek and Latin) works
called the Bryn Mawr Classical Texts. Here's a list.
There are two respected series of emailed reviews of scholarly literature called the Bryn Mawr Reviews (BMR), namely Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) and Medieval Review [used to be BMMR, now TMR (for The MR)].
On the subject of BM and beverages, I own a book by one B. M. Smirnov (Boris Mikhailovich), a member of the erstwhile Academy of the Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, who wrote Otristatel'nye Iony. I have Negative Ions (McGraw-Hill, 1982), a translation by S. Chomet.
BMD's aren't normally used for vote counting. The ballots marked by a BMD are transfered through a ``privacy sleeve'' (shades of cone of silence) to an optical scanner or ballot box.
If anybody wants to commit mass murder, they can buy a delivery vehicle from the North Koreans, say, a warhead from any of a number of states, and shoot. The most we could do is hit back at whatever innocent party is still in the vicinity of the launch site. It's still MAD.
- Association of Loading and Elevating Equipment (ALEM)
- Automated Material Handling Systems Association (AMHSA)
- British Industrial Truck Association (BITA)
- Federation of Manufacturers of Construction Equipment & Cranes (FMCEC)
- Industrial Cleaning Machine Manufacturers' Association (ICMMA)
- Lift and Escalator Industry Association (LEIA)
- Storage Equipment Manufacturers' Association (SEMA)
The BMI is invalid for anyone under 18 years old, serious athletes and body builders, pregnant women (duh), nursing women, and the frail or sedentary elderly. It's also invalid for everybody else. ``Invalid'' in the sense of ``poor prognosticator of future health'' and ``not a measure of lean/fat ratio.''
Incidentally, the otiose number that is 25 (threshold of overweight) was 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women. In 1998, when the NIH lowered the threshold, 35 million previously non-overweight Americans became overweight. Clearly, the NIH is one of the major causes of overweight in the US today.
The great utility of BMI is to remind people that obesity is not a weight condition -- it's a condition of weight relative to height. Therefore, if you're obese, you're not really overweight -- you're just undertall. It turns out to be just as easy to get taller (and stay taller) as it is to become lighter (and stay lighter). Food for thought. (I did not coin the word ``undertall.'' It occurred in a Garfield cartoon.)
``The main goal of BMP is to increase the quality, reliability, and maintainability of goods produced by American firms. The primary steps toward this goal are simple: identify best practices, document them, and then encourage industry, government, and academia to share information about them.''
The welcome text on their homepage (which can be hidden by Javascript-called images) is misaligned. Depending on the size of the window in which it is viewed, differing portions of the first paragraph are hard to read because they overlap images. Gotta give credit due, though, the text-browser version is well set-up.
One study has indicated that children's metabolic rates fall below the sleeping rate while they watch TV. TV: TM for children! [Other animals can do this.] Of course, ``sleep like a baby'' has always been an odd simile, as haggard new parents will testify.
Here's a BMR calculator that's very nice, but doesn't work. There're a couple of fatuously precise formulae here.
An increasingly popular measure for health discussion is the RMR (resting metabolic rate) which has the great advantage of being practically measurable.
There's an old Yiddish curse that goes [in translation] ``May you grow like an onion -- with your head in the ground.''
It's probably bad form to scratch your head while puzzling this one out.
Since the use of punctuation in initialisms has declined and can now seem old-fashioned, it is natural that the punctuated form (B.-M.T.) has come to be used exclusively for the original private company, in contradistinction to the BMT lines within the current subway system.
- You can take the driving exam on paper or by pushing buttons on a machine. The old paper exam is still based on the information in the driver's license brochure. The ``computer'' test? You're on your own.
- License branches are open late Thursday and closed Monday -- and most crowded on Tuesday.
- The light season is the last fifth of the year. If you can put off registering from the beginning of October to the end of October, it'll make an enormous difference. Even from the 18th to the 25th is a big difference.
(There is an exception to the closed-Monday rule: all full-service license branches are required by law to be open until 8pm the day before any election, and open early on election day, solely for the purpose of issuing driver's licenses and state identification cards.)
The BMW 507 is a legendary vehicle that you can find out about at many places on the web, such as BMW world. From the front it has a look that's a little bit like a Triumph. The picture below right is of a custom 1957 BMW 507, built by Pichon et Parat of Sens, France. [Click for a larger (360 KB) image.] I guess they couldn't have made it in Sedan, France. I should probably mention that the sedan chair and later the sedan (vehicle type) are not believed to have anything etymologically to do with the city of Sedan. Cf. coach.
![[sexy, sexy car]](images/cars/BMW507_q.jpg)
The car was for the personal use of Raymond Loewy, who designed the custom body. Loewy was a legendary (yes, more legends) industrial designer; if you can't see the bloodlines of the Avanti and even the Corvette in this picture, you're blind. Here's a rear view served by Loewy Design. (Their brief bio mentions some of his projects -- the Coca-Cola bottle, the original Air Force One for JFK, Lucky Strike, Greyhound Bus, the Pennsylvania S-1 Locomotive (see locomotives collection), the Exxon and Shell (not to mention BP) logos, NASA interiors for Skylab and the Space Shuttle, and of course the Avanti. But of course they can't cover the man's entire oevre briefly. The more extensive collection in the gallery doesn't even include the United Airlines plane paint scheme, introduced in the mid-fifties -- an important, as-usual fashion-setting commission.
In 1962 Loewy donated this car to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). It is now on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum (a part of the LACM founded in 1994).
(At the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, you can see a video about the designing of the Avanti. According to Loewy Design it's the only car ever to have been exhibited in the Louvre.)
Boron nitride has a high-pressure allotrope, CBN, that is harder than the hexagonal-plane low-pressure-stable isotope, just as graphite has a harder high-pressure allotrope in diamond. Unlike graphite, however, hexagonal BN is already pretty hard. In abrasives applications, the low-pressure allotrope is sold as ``Norbide.''
Also, back when Braniff (was still in business and) had given all of its planes garish solid-color VW-beetle-like paint jobs, Braniff flights were referred to in control-tower communications as ``jelly beans.''
The same act created the provinces of Ontario and Quebec (that's the province that eventually was renamed Québec) out of the former Province of Canada, restoring the division of former Québec into the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, respectively, that was implemented in 1791 and rescinded in 1841. I tell'ya.
People often speak redundantly and pleonastically of the ``BNC connector.'' We're gonna get the language police on your case.
A very common connector for 50-ohm coaxial microwave cable. Really the most common by far, but optimists deny it. Designed for operation to 11 GHz, not bad operation (VSWR less than 1.3) to 4 GHz. What do you expect from quick-disconnect system? You want performance, use a threaded connector like TNC, N-type, 7/16, triax...).
[The precise expansion of the BNC acronym is a much-disputed matter. Here is the unauthoritative straight poop, or scoop, or whatever: it does not stand for Berkeley Nucleonics Corp., not British Naval, not Banana Nutmeg Chocolate.]
Maybe: Bayonet Neill Concelman.
Barclay's Bank was giving American Express some competition in the traveler's check business. Whatever happened to them?
In Shakespeare's ``The Tempest,'' Miranda has a little speech in the first scene of Act V:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
(She has just met her future father-in-law.) A word is probably in order here about this play, since it was the obvious inspiration of such classics as Gilligan's Island and I Dream of Jeannie. Unfortunately, I'm too busy at this time to do justice to these classics. The only reason I'm putting this entry in at all is a novella by Aldous Huxley, who could trace his descent not just generally to the early hominids, but also specifically to Thomas H. Huxley (Canis darwiniensis, or ``Darwin's bulldog''). The book describes a dystopia of the twenty-sixth century -- a sex-obsessed, pill-popping, hedonistic society in which the process of human procreation has become highly technologized, and children don't know who their fathers are. Many children are born suffering to a greater or lesser degree from fetal alcohol syndrome, and this disability relegates them permanently to an underclass. Civilization, in other words, has finally been established on a rational basis. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds oddly familiar.
Anyway, as you may imagine, the BNW phrase enjoyed a vogue after Huxley's book was published in 1932. Archibald MacLeish published a sort of open letter to Thomas Jefferson, in the form of a poem entitled ``Brave New World.'' It basically took Americans to task for not struggling bravely to extend freedom. This was first published in the September 1946 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It's hard to be certain, from the vague contemporary references in the poem, what precise time frame is meant. It is just possible that it was written in the 1930's. From 1939 to 1944, MacLeish served as Librarian of Congress, and from 1944 to 1945 as Assistant Secretary of State; in that six-year period he claimed he wrote but one poem (this wasn't it), so this ``Brave New World'' might have been left over unpublished from before the war. But it doesn't seem to be.
The BNW phrase must have had a powerful resonance at war's end. A best-selling novel also published in 1946, B.F.'s Daughter, used the phrase also. (Page 154, line 9 of my copy; you should be able to find it.) See BF entry for more about this book.)
In some cases (like the two above) one cannot be certain whether the allusion is to Huxley or directly to the bard, or if the writer is pretending to just happen to be using brave in an archaic sense. In other cases, the Huxley connection seems obvious. In the negligible poem ``The Proposition,'' published in 1993, Sylvia Kantaris mentioned the BNW of condomless sex.
But I only wanted to point out that Huxley didn't single-handedly revive a phrase that had somehow sunk into complete obscurity: there were earlier examples. Not surprisingly, for example, the phrase occurs in the egregiously prolific Bulwer-Lytton's Orval (1869). (For a bit more about Bulwer-Lytton, see It was a dark and stormy night.) A most interesting use of the phrase is by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who published a poem entitled ``The Gods of the Copybook Headings'' in 1919. The named gods apparently represent ignored wisdom, as it is encapsulated in proverbs like ``stick to the devil you know.'' The poem ends thus:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man--[This poem was published a number of times and with slightly variant titles. It's possible that the original version had some final punctuation in the line that ends with begins, but there isn't in any of the versions I've seen, including that in Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (Doubleday, 1940).]
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:--
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
And on the subject of subliminal advertising, Debra Ginsberg revealed these research findings in Waiting:
... I began experimenting with earrings early in my waitressing career. I found that if I wore fish earrings, I would invariably sell more fish, earrings in the shape of grapes or bottles equaled greater sales of wine, earrings in the shape of pasta--yes, I actually own a pair--were always noticed and invariably spurred orders for pasta.
Man, I'm mining that book deep. But what do grapes have to do with wine? What? You say wine is made from grapes? I didn't know! The things some people think ought to be common knowledge -- it's amazing. Once Dennis (Gary's brother) was skywatching with someone when they saw a shooting star. The other guy (let me be clear about that: not Dennis -- I wouldn't want to give him any anonymous notoriety) said, ``wouldn't it be cool if all the stars shot off at once?''
Yesterday I told my mom about how once in grad school I was telling a table-mate about a couple of identical twins. I had given their names, which were not common, and she had interrupted to ask ``are they the same sex?'' My mother insisted that it was not completely preposterous for someone to be ignorant enough to ask the question. Her idea of abject ignorance is not knowing why floats have greater buoyancy in the ocean than in fresh water. My friend Vladimir thought it, um, odd that I shouldn't know the standard number of teeth in an adult human mouth (32; see tooth numbering).
More pasta information is coming soon to an SBF entry near you -- probably the marzipan entry, when we have one. Be on the look-out.
El Estado reconoce y sostiene la religión Católica, pero garantiza el ejercicio público de todo otro culto (Art. 3ro. de la Constitución Política del Estado).
That is: According to the third article of their constitution, `the state recognizes and supports the [Roman] Catholic religion, but guarantees the public exercise of all others.'
BolNet claims to be the highest net in the world. Here's another Bolivian bookmark.
Mathematically, the way one uses this is to determine electronic wave functions that are solutions of the Schrödinger equation for a Hamiltonian in which the ion coordinates are treated as fixed and the ion kinetic energy is ignored. The resulting electronic states have, of course, energies that depend on the ion coordinates. These energies are, in turn, used as potentials for the purely ionic Schrödinger equation. [Physically, this corresponds to the idea that the time scales relevant to ion wavefunctions are so long compared to electronic time scales that the electrons evolve adiabatically, staying in the ``same'' (i.e., the continuously deformed) electronic states.]
On the other hand, bos is a genus that in principle, at least, is more precise in terms of species than cow, bull or cattle. Also, unlike cow, bull, or ox, it is not gender-specific. Therefore, I approve the fact that all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept bos (and bo), but not boes. I just don't agree with their reasons.
The quantity given in board feet is not the volume, exactly, because of conventions about how it is computed. The quantity of wood in board feet is computed from the nominal values of width and thickness (see lumber dimensions) and the actual length, except that for nominal thicknesses of less than one inch, the thickness is taken to be one inch. So if you were to use board feet to compute the quantity of sheet stock exclusively, you'd basically be computing something close to the area in square feet.
After 2006, all roads used as public paths (RUPP's) that had not been designated as BOAT's were designated ``restricted byways,'' and the old BOAT's became plain ``byways'' (unrestricted vehicularly or grammatically). The term BOAT is still used (to mean simply ``byway'' now).
If you don't know of a school that will take your boat anchor, try the Detwiler Foundation, which has detailed information (by state) on its Computers-For-Schools program. (But don't try too hard. The link was dead when I checked Oct. 14, 2003; I'm hoping that was temporary. Okay, as of 2010 it's back up, but not too useful unless you read Japanese.) Another group, PEP (``Resources for Parents, Educators & Publishers'') offered a PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs. It also listed non-US agencies. Now that's gone. Why are these sites going away? I think it's become common for local governments and other organizations to sponsor periodic electronic-equipment recycling collections, so it's no longer the problem it was.
This is probably the place to mention Motherboard Enterprises, Inc. When I browsed the site a few years ago, they explained their creative work thus:
Founded in 1991, Motherboard specializes in the manufacturing of high quality gift products utilizing reclaimed circuit boards and other fun and unique materials.These products capture the intrinsic beauty of technology while providing an environmentally friendly alternative to the circuit boards being disposed of in landfills. Each product may vary by color and pattern making every item unique - virtually one of a kind.
The circuit board may have been designed for use in a computer, an electronics component, a phone, or a television.
What an exciting crafts idea! Wasn't that inspiring? The domain name (motherboardinc.com) is available.
If your computer is a real antique, you might find a taker among the subscribers of ClassicCmp.
There was a NYTimes article, around summer 1998, on how folks won't discard their old computers, perhaps because they cost too much in the first place, and they're hanging around behind doors, on top of file cabinets, under desks, that sort of thing. It's true. It's worse at some public institutions, because they often have unrealistic accounting procedures. At UB, for example, equipment stays on the books at its original value instead of being depreciated, so the state hoards all its boat anchors like a crazy-jealous miserly aunt. These stupid accounting practices clutter the laboratories, so people leave worthless equipment out in the hall hoping it will be stolen. Vain hope (but see the Cu entry). This creates a fire hazard, so they have to make rules against leaving equipment in the halls.
As of 2010, I'm having second thoughts about that last paragraph. Computers prices have come down some, and people have gotten more used to tossing them. Some support for literally tossing them may have come from that cell-phone ad on television, where people stood around on rooftops waiting for a dump truck to pass by so they could toss their old brand-X cell phones into it.
On the private side, property taxes make people acutely aware of the cost of space, so stuff is likelier to get tossed. Also, someone is likelier to go to Washington D.C. and lobby for more liberal (i.e., faster) depreciation schedules for tax purposes.
There have been cute advertisements showing computers in reuse applications, such as monitor boxes converted to aquaria. Ironically, a good monitor is one of the easier components to integrate in an upgraded technology environment. Or was, until we all switched to plasma screens.
A synonym of boat anchor, with another interesting assortment of connotations, is legacy system.
Not only computers can be boat anchors. The newsgroup for vacuum-tube-based amateur radios is called <rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors>. Here's a page with pictures of boat anchors of the radio kind.
When I worked at the Princeton University cyclotron, I was told that the big (meter-scale) blocks of cement that were used as bulk radiation shielding had been boat anchors. They had handles, but I don't know -- they didn't look like boat anchors.
- Oscillate vertically like an object floating in wavy water, or to move in a way that suggests this motion.
- Cut. Hence ``bobbed hair'' (short hair; one women's and girls' hair style popular in the 20's was called a ``bob'') and ``bobby socks'' (half-height socks, a teenage girls' fashion in the late 50's or so). Cf. a vindication of the nomen est omen proverb.
- An oscillation caused by bobbing (verb definition 1).
- A short hair style.
- Brit. slang for a shilling (a coin worth one twentieth of a pound sterling; five new pence or twelve old). Possibly this name for a shilling comes from the old low-denomination Scottish coin bawbee. This usage has nothing to do with the British expression ``And Bob's your uncle!'' The latter honors the memory of a famous incident of literal nepotism.
This book was discovered and promoted by Bob Schieffer, who apparently has nothing better to do for CBS News at his office in Washington, DC. This entire sordid inanity is what you could call extreme middle-brow.
``Bobos in Paradise'' sounds like ``Lawyers in Love,'' for more on which, see the PSU entry. Acronyms like bobo are wreaking havoc with the rule about forming plurals with -es from words ending in o.
It's disturbing that bobo is almost an anagram of boo, bob, oboe, and boo-boo. Anagrammatical reasoning often offers insights, but I can't think of any precise anagrams. Can you? More David Brooks content, alas, in the good humor entry.
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- A subvariety of the romance novel genre. The bodice is an outmoded
component of women's underwear (I think maybe that's supposed to be
``foundation garment'' or something else more decorous -- not VPL), so it's probably superfluous to explain that
bodice-rippers stress the excitement of seduction, and that they tend toward
historical settings peopled by men in exotic, violent lines of work like
pirate or highwayman.
In our modern era, of course, the only politically correct kind of sexual congress resembles political congress: it involves a lot of deferential expressions of respect and explicit, if possibly unromantic, reassurances that interaction is welcomed by the non-initiating party. Everything else is date rape. Pandas are like that, but they're not quite extinct yet. Europeans are going that way too.
This new regime seems to have drawbacks as a setting for sexy romances. Another advantage of historical settings is that obviously, the reader is not projecting himself or herself into the person of the heroine but merely indulging in an intellectual exercise that is not congruent with personal fantasies. Hence, no guilt!
- Romance novel.
His classmates gave him the name ``Bo Diddley'' around the time he got his first guitar, a cheap Harmony ``acoustic'' (as we call them now). It was a gift for Christmas 1940 from Lucille McDaniel, his adopted sister (a cousin or a half-sister, I can't make out which). He turned 12 the following December 30 (yes, Bo is one of those tragically undergifted late-December babies).
Because many of the entries in this glossary are permanently incomplete, it may be hard to tell that this entry is temporarily incomplete (for the foreseeable future). There's a lot of contradictory and even self-contradictory material on the web regarding the origin of the Bo Diddley name, and I plan to summarize and evaluate some of it. In the meantime, however, I'd like to launch into webspace something apparently not related on any other page mentioning Bo Diddley: Beau Diddely (note spelling of last name as well as first). That's a character in a Zora Neale Hurston story, ``Black Death,'' which might well have appeared around the time Ellas McDaniel got his nickname. (Hurston was one of the stars of the Harlem Renaissance; the story ought to have been widely read at the time it came out.)
Bo Diddley's first record was released by Checker Records in 1955. Checker Records was a subsidiary of Chess Records, which was owned by the brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. One of Diddley's songs on the record was originally called ``Uncle John.'' Changing its title name (and corresponding lyrics) to ``Bo Diddley'' was a move suggested by the Chess brothers. Didn't this damage the scansion some? Bo's discography, according to a page at <bo-diddley.com>, includes ``Bo Diddley'' (1955), ``Go Bo Diddley'' (1958), ``Hey Bo Diddley!'' (1962), ``Bo Diddley & Company'' (1962), ``Big Bad Bo'' (1974), ``Pay Bo Diddley'' (1989), and ``Bo Knows Bo'' (1995). They have the year wrong for the double A-side ``Bo Diddley''/``I'm A Man'', and they missed at least ``The Mighty Bo Diddley'' (1997), ``The Essential Bo Diddley'' (2000), and other works since 1995. In place of a biography, they have a message that begins...
Your Original Biography Of This Celebrity May Be Published HereThey obviously don't know Diddley.Biography must be an orginal [sic] composition beween 1200 and 1500 words containing a factual chronology of dates, events...
Bo Diddley's name occurs in many of his other titles and songs. It reminds me of a guest editorial that Al Franken did on the SNL news segment (in the mid-to-late 1980's, probably). Every time that he found an opportunity to refer to himself, he would give his name in an emphatic appositive phrase (i.e., not ``I'' but ``I, [pregnant pause], AL FRANKEN [name flashes on screen]''). There's a certain charm in unabashedly enthusiastic self-promotion; it is somehow the most honest possible ``act.''
Apropos of Checker Records, mentioned above, I must (absolutely must) note that in Spanish, the game of checkers is called damas (`ladies'). We have a dama entry which mentions another artist with self-titled albums. Also, to recall what you already know, the name ``Chubby Checker'' is a nom de microphone (of Ernest Evans). The name was suggested by Dick Clark's wife; Fats Domino was a popular singer at the time.
Other, equally useful information at the obesity entry. Utterly feckless ``information'' at BMI.
BOE is a highly specific etchant: it etches silicon dioxide and stops at silicon. It's used both for removing grown oxide (etch rate ~2 nm/s at room temperature) and initially to remove the native oxide from silicon wafer surfaces in preparation for further processing.
After a BOE wash, the silicon surface tends to stay hydrogenated for from tens of minutes to an hour. This fact has been used to do atomically precise lithography: after a BOE wash, the hydrogenated silicon wafer was placed in an STM (with an oxygen-containing atmosphere called air), where hydrogen atoms were driven off individually with the STM probe tip, oxidizing the silicon atoms at the slected sites.
Would you like to come up to my laboratory and see my etchings?
The campus shuttle at Berkeley is called the Gobart.
The US Post Office issued a Bogart stamp in June 1997.
Come think of it, bogo would be Spanish for `bogus,' and the singular male ablative form of bogus in Latin, if bogus, a, um were a Latin adjective, which it happens not to be.
More thoughts at 40. Gee, a big crowd of excited information shoppers has gathered around that entry. I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal: 66% more paragraphs of information right here, extra, at the same great low price!
In June 2004, I finished off a 22.5 fl. oz. bottle of Alberto VO5 shampoo that I had bought earlier in the year. No, I don't know what VO5 stands for, but I know that my elementary-school classmate Alberto was teased mercilessly until his family moved away. He had smooth and shiny dark brown hair. (For more on the Alberto name, see the Albion entry.) As it happens, the local Osco was having a sale on the same shampoo, in bottles that said
Dial offers its bar soaps in packages of 12 and in packages with fewer bars. For a while, the bars in the twelve-packs were slightly smaller than the bars in the packages with fewer bars. Doubtless marketing research had shown that people who bought packages with more soap bars didn't really want more soap: they wanted more convenience, so they preferred smaller soap bars. But now people feel differently, so the bars are all the same size.
During the 1992 US presidential campaign, Bill Clinton made ``Buy one, get one free'' a campaign slogan. His wife Hillary often rejoined with ``People call us two-for-one: the Blue Light Special.'' (Blue Light Specials were a promotional scheme used by the Kmart chain of discount stores. Special sales of brief duration were announced over the PA system in the store, and shoppers were directed to find the advertised product under a flashing or rotating blue light. At Kmart in those days, some products were on sale very frequently. At the Kmart near me, there was one kind of sneakers that was on sale for a week every other week.)
The Who sang
And like, one and one don't make two, One and one make one.
The song was called ``Bargain.''
In writing computer programs for atomic-scale calculations, it's usually convenient to use natural units like the bohr, so that floating-point arithmetic doesn't over- or underflow, or (worse) do nonfatal things like try to compute finite quantities by almost-infinite-looping near-zero increments. Also, if you state your results in natural units, any new measurement of the fundamental quantities that define a0 (the reduced Planck's constant ħ, the free electron mass m0, the speed of light c, and the fine-structure constant α) arguably improves the accuracy of your calculation. Oh, alright, you can use Ångström instead.
Bok choi and bok maal are not frequently confused.
Derek Bok was a president of Harvard University in the 1960's. They renamed a center in his honor. Bok also agreed to serve as interim university president starting July 1, 2006, after the departure of Lawrence Summers (see more under James D. Wolfensohn).
A lot of my Indian friends insist that they never saw those movies when they lived in India, that the entire industry was beneath their and their entire family's middle class notice. This ignores the first principle of cinema:
See also Mike's story at the NAFTA entry. For an opposing opinion, see the Charlie's Angels entry. Fans (of Bollywood) will want to know that there's a free email service called Bollywood Mail (BM, really), part of the Bollywood World Network.
Not that anybody seems to have noticed, but the official name of Bombay was changed to Mumbai in 1996 or 7. It's too bad, because Bombay was pronounced ``bomb by.'' ``Mollywood'' would be an interesting term, since mollies often are either made of or embedded in wood. But they haven't changed the name. They haven't changed the short name of ``The Stock Exchange, Mumbai'' either.
Because em is a nasal and bee is a plosive, people tend not to realize how similar they are both as sounds and as acts of vocal production. In English, they are the only two bilabial voiced consonants. In Modern Greek, the letter we call beta has become a fricative; the letter name is pronounced ``vita'' (still spelled beta-epsilon-tau-alpha, but iotization has closed the sound of the first vowel). In order to express in writing the sound that used to be written with a beta, you write mu-pi. The mu, as noted, has a similar articulation. Pi is essentially an unvoiced /b/.
Oh Gawwwwd: now Dolly Parton has a theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, called Dollywood. ``My one wish for you during your visit to Dollywood is that the wonder of the Great Smoky Mountains will touch your heart'' -- without causing fibrillations, she neglects to say. The park is more about wood than Dolly, heh-heh. The great new ride for 2004 was a wooden roller coaster. As the Dollywood Express, an authentic coal-fired steam train, takes you into the Smoky Mountains, you can see an abandoned sawmill. ``Let your imagination run wild as you explore America's largest interactive treehouse full of kid-powered games, gadgets, and gizmos for all ages.''
Your next stop on the SBF tour of the multilingual GI tract is the SABI entry.
There is a pork-and-beef sausage that originated in Bologna (Bulaggna in the local dialect), but of course that only bears a general resemblance to authentic American bologna. Once I ordered a sausage pizza in Florence (Firenze) and I got pizza with dinky little unappetizing slices of hot dog. No, it's hardly relevant, but where else am I going to mention it? Save yourself the trouble, and don't order pizza anywhere north of Naples.
On April 4, 2005, the US customs agency (CBP) made a major baloney bust. A 30-year-old Mexican, crossing into the US by bus at Las Cruces, New Mexico (las cruces is Spanish for `the crosses'), was bringing along (``carrying'' might be too strong a word) 845 pounds of pork bologna in his luggage. The bologna, packed in over 80 rolls, was not approved for import and was not refrigerated. The man said he planned to sell the rolls at a swap meat or fly market. Sorry, I mean swap meet or flea market. It would have been more interesting if he'd claimed he planned to eat them all himself on a reality show. The rolls cost $7 or $8 in Mexico, but can be sold for four times that price in the US, according to a CBP spokeswoman who seems surprisingly well-informed on these matters. The man was not charged, but the CBP claims that some of its ``agricultural specialists'' destroyed or got rid of the bologna somehow. The CBP cited health risks such as ``Classic Swine Fever.'' I'd like to hyphenate that, just for fun. It's reassuring to see that our borders are secure, but if customs agents had read our salamis entry, they would know just how narrowly we may have escaped disaster.
Let's face it: this has been a pretty ho-hum entry so far. Why not visit the exciting 007 entry for another Bond face discussion?
I suppose that if the sixties had been, like, you know, happening in the eighties, a bonding joint would have been marijuana cigarette used as part of a real warm-and-fuzzy social event, man.
I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.Sargent lost her bid. Pat Schroeder retired. A constituency goes unrepresented.
On February 2009, Dolly Parton visited Washington, D.C., to represent a different constituency. She was there in her capacity as an ``ambassador for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.'' It's a US national park, so I guess that's why it doesn't have an embassy and she had to make a special visit. Dolly Parton owns a ``family amusement park'' in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, though that's not what she's famous for. According to the website, her ``one wish for you during your visit to Dollywood is that the wonder of the Great Smoky Mountains will touch your heart'' if it can squeeze past the mastoidal appendages. Here are some remarks from the ambassador's speech at the National Press Club, on the tenth of that February:
Somebody said to me, ``Well, you know what -- you've got such a big mouth and you know how to talk to people, did you ever think about running for president?'' ... I said, ``I think we've had enough boobs in the White House, but hopefully Obama ain't gonna be one of them.''
I don't think she's famous for her big mouth either. She's famous for her, uh -- she's a singer! She's famous for her big lungs. Also, if she tries to touch her own heart and she's got a top on, she doesn't come close. Anyway, the point is that she sings professionally, and by commmon consent that makes her an artist. (You know what? She's a songwriter too! And she starred in a comedy about kidnapping and torture.) Did she come up with the boobs joke independently? I don't know.
It is said that Pablo Picasso said that ``good artists copy,'' while ``great artists steal.'' [It's less commonly ``quoted'' with the less clever ``bad artists copy.'' There doesn't seem to be a standard Spanish or French version.] If this is a bogus quote, then perhaps that confirms it -- if the theft can be done on the great artist's behalf: T.S. Eliot wrote, ``Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'' [Words given to the character of Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood (1920).] Proxy or surrogate quote theft is just the Matthew Principle in action, if the person robbed is considerably less well known than the thief or thief's beneficiary.
Before this entry gets away from me I'd like to point out that a few men get breast cancer too. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this is a bad joke.
In October 1962, San Francisco's legendary madam Sally Stanford was interviewed in advance of a trip to Europe. Asked if she had ever been abroad, she answered ``always!''
[BTW, after retiring from the House of Representatives, Pat Schroeder went on to become President and CEO of The Association of American Publishers (AAP). I wanted to mention this earlier, but it would have messed up the comic timing. Also, I wanted to point out that ``embassy'' used to be the word not just for an ambassador's mission but for an ambassador's visit or for an ambassadorial group. It is the original sense, just as office originally referred to the tasks an official or officer was tasked with.]
I'll probably end up citing it in two or three places, but for now the only cite is at the cybernetics entry.
If I had a nickel for every time I noticed some ghastly error on a book cover, I'd have, oh, probably a dollar or so. Here's a minor one: the second edition of History of German Literature, by Werner P. Friederich (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1948, 1961) had a paperback cover designed by Rod Lopez-Fabrego. I think it's great that they give credit or whatever where it's due. The back cover quotes a review from South Atlantic Bulletin thus:
``it should ... be in the hands of every student who is taking a college course in German, Australian, Swiss, Central European History, or who is pursuing the study of the German language beyond the first college year.''
I don't know, and don't plan to research, whether the error was present in the original review. The title given on the cover, perhaps in conformity with some Barnes and Noble standard for its College Outline Series (of which this was number 65) is An Outline-History of German Literature.
Book-cover misspellings (one I recall had martial for marital, or vice versa) are part of a broader phenomenon -- that artiste types are not expected to be attentive to such prosaic details as getting names right. A prominent and expensive example of this artistic (if that's what it is) deficiency made news in 2004. A new city library had been built in Livermore, California, and a new mural was unveiled for it. This creative achievement bore the names of 175 historically important people, and eleven of their names were written with what the artist later described as ``interpretive'' spellings. The eleven names included those of Albert Einstein (missing an n), Michelangelo (extra a), and Vincent Van Gogh (gratuitous u, when he could have used a bit of ear). Also counted in the eleven is William Shakespeare (spelled with one a fewer than usual). The city had originally paid the artist $40,000, and some California law limited its freedom to fix the mural on its own. On Monday, October 4, 2004, the city council voted to authorize $6000 plus expenses to have the artist come back and correct the misspellings. (I suspect that's not a record.) That's when the story finally went national, possibly thanks to an intrepid investigative report by USA Today. The country was scandalized, and the artist received many upsetting and even impolite messages. One person went so far as to send her an email with her name misspelled! It was so upsetting, in fact, that for a couple of weeks she threatened not to return for the wite-out® phase of the installation.
The artist's name is Maria Alquilar, or at least that's what she claims it is. Alquilar is a Spanish word meaning `to rent' (rent as in lease or hire, not rent as in tear). I haven't been able to come up with a pun on this name that is commensurate with its subject.
Alquilar has an installation at the San Jose International Airport, 17 feet long and 6 feet high. It is entitled ``Las Viajeros Vienen A San Jose'' according to Alquilar's website, which goes on to explain that ``[t]he people exiting the Freedom Train are examples of the cities [sic] ethnic diversity.'' (Not even a six-year-old Spanish-speaker could make the mistake of using the feminine article las with the male noun viajeros.)
Criticized for the Livermore library mural misspellings, Alquilar blamed everyone but herself. In an interview with the AP, she complained that ``[t]here were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters.'' On the other hand, ``[e]ven though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, [she] didn't see it.'' It seems that she overlooked the possibility that people around during the installation were also artistically gifted. As she explained, the ``people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words. In their mind the words register correctly.''
Misspellings are actually fairly common in monumental art, and have a history going back to the Roman empire. The Pyramid of Cestius in Rome has an enormous inset spelling correction, and after many years someone noticed an error in the Lincoln Memorial that had to be fixed.
That's it for the really interesting book dedications. The rest of this entry is a dreary catalog of any and all other entries I could find that mention a book dedication. Our anticline entry is fun and quotes a book dedication, but the dedication itself is fairly ordinary. The dedication of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven is discussed at our entry for that book, though I've forgotten now whether that really was a ``book dedication'' rather than just a short early book section entitled ``Dedication.''
That looks about long enough for a paragraph. Let's start another. Edward M. Petrie's Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants has a dedication that uses terms (bond, stress) that are central to the book's subject. (See Petrie entry.)
Okay, just for a change of pace, let's have an actual dedication instead of a pointer.
The slush pile entry refers in passing to the un- or badly edited dedication of an unfortunately published book.
Slightly to the Right seems to be dedicated to the author's editors.
The sed entry cites a comment on the Latin style used by Linnaeus in the Dedication of his famous work, but perhaps he used the same style elsewhere.
This entry is dedicated to the ``dear reader'' of legend.
- Familiar Objects and Their Shadows by Crawford L. Elder (Cambridge
U.P., 2011). Pp. xii+210, but no pictures of any kind, unless you count
word pictures or mental images. Part of the Cambridge Studies in
Philosophy series. Sample text (p. 16):
To gain a sense of the way simplicity constrains the indicative value of a pushmipullyu representation, consider another well-worn example from Millikan [Ruth, not the electric-charge guy Bob], namely the tail-slap of the beaver. When a beaver sees or hears a predator approaching, he will loudly slap his tail against the surface of the water. (A beaver will also sometimes do this when all that has happened is that a branch has fallen, or that human observers have spoken loudly to one another.) ... [T]he tail-slaps can be viewed as imperatives that say, so to speak, ``dive immediately, fellow lodge members!''
- Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, edited by Paul Martin Lester and Susan Dente Ross (Westport, CT: Praeger Publ., 2003). I picked it up for a few quick kiloword eyefuls, but apart from the front cover, it has no pictures. I suppose it might have been worse: although all the contributors are or were academics (one Ph.D. candidate and 27 professors), it was published in trade paperback format. If the first edition was a hardcover, it may well have lacked even cover illustrations. (And academic libraries tend not to preserve dust jackets.) Bonus: the book was dedicated to a contributor who died before the edition was completed, with the words ``friend and mentor who is surely [sic] missed,'' though I suppose that could be read as it was meant.
- As I point out at its entry, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven (also mentioned at book dedications) didn't suffer terribly from a lack of illustrations. I guess that counts in the could-have-benefitted category.
- I'll add others as I encounter or re-encounter them. In the meantime, you could read the unillustrated material at the sex sells entry, which is sort of a book-that-may-very-well-have-benefitted-from-illustrations entry.
Once ``Saturday Night Live'' had a skit that took off on an ad campaign for Smuckers preserves (jellies and jams). Various actors came on stage, each holding a jar of product in approved TV-display fashion, and said ``With a name like <foo>, it's got to be good!'' Each <foo> was worse than and upstaged the last. (A typical <foo> might have been ``boiled baby intestines.'') Finally, Jane Curtin (I guess that kinda dates me) came on and
SPOILER COMING SPOILER APPROACHING SPOILER IMMINENTrevealed the name of her product to each of her predecessors (they had all stayed on stage), and each in turn expressed disgust or distress. Finally she came forward to face the audience and made her pitch, which went something like this: ``With a name like that, it's got to be good! Ask for it by name.''
<Abebooks.com> isn't really designed for comparison shopping. It's more like a union catalog of small independent booksellers, remember them? With a focus on used, rare, hard-to-find, though if you want to buy an in-print mass-market paperback from them, they'll be happy to sell you that too. And it's searched by FetchBook and AddALL, and listed by <Amazon.com>. There's a certain amount of incest in the used-book search services. Back in 1998 or so it used to be possible to insert one or two middlemen into the supply chain, paying them a premium to turn around and find a book online that you could have looked up yourself, if you had visited this entry of the SBF glossary. I was about to write that a certain degree of transparency prevails today, but in fact it seems you pay about a 6% premium to buy an Abebooks-listed book via Amazon zShops. (You also get less information about the book condition and none about the ultimate source.)
You might have a particular book in mind, but not be able to find it because you don't remember enough index-type information -- forgettable stuff like title and author. In that case, you might want to visit BookSleuth, a sort of forum served by Abebooks. People go there to post descriptions of books they can't remember title or author of. Most of the sought books are children's books that the posters read when they were children. The flaw in this scheme, one might guess, is that not enough people go there to answer rather than ask questions, but they apparently do.
I have a bunch of other book links in scattered places around this site. This ancient (uh, four-year-old) page, for instance, was written primarily with the needs of classicists in mind.
Here are a few in no particular order:
- ``I Lived with Latin Americans'' by John L. Strohm (Danville, Illinois: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1943). The quotation marks are part of the title.
- Souls Without Longing by Allan Bloom. The original title of the manuscript that was published as The Closing of the American Mind. According to an afterword (by Andrew Ferguson) to the 25th anniversary edition, the original title ``was lovely, everyone agreed, but also uncommercial,'' Which is not to imply that the book was intended to be especially commercial. The first print run, in February 1987, numbered 10,000 copies. But the book rose to the top of the bestseller lists by summer and held that position for two and a half months, sold a million copies in the US and comparable numbers abroad, and made Bloom a rich man. ``The best minds in American publishing were boggled. Never in their experience had a book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger outsold memoirs by Patty Duke, Shirley MacLaine, and Sam Donaldson--combined.'' I figure the title did it.
- Me by Katharine Hepburn (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Subtitled ``Stories of My Life.''
- An Introduction to Science and Hygiene for Hairdressers by O.F.G.
Kilgour and Marguerite McGarry (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1964). You may
not find this title very interesting, but for me it brings back a poignant
memory. I valued the education I received as an undergraduate, and during my
exit chat with the chairman of the physics department (my major department), I
volunteered [Danger! Danger!] to help if there was anything for which the
department might need a recent graduate. Calm down; we're not at the poignant
bit yet. Actually it's poignant in an embarrassing way. Okay, it's just
massively embarrassing, but it was long ago, and I was tired.
So a couple of weeks later, I was the physics department's contribution to a college-wide effort that takes (took?) place every year, with newly admitted students coming in from all over the state to make their course selections for the following fall, under the guidance of recent graduates like me. I think I did alright by almost everyone, except for one girl. She was undecided whether to go for a career as a gynecologist or a beautician, I think it was. In one sense, that was a no brainer: since Rutgers wasn't a beauty college, she'd have to follow the pre-med curriculum. But I didn't think that. I only asked her how she did on her SAT's. The SAT score was good, so I advised her on how to sign up as a pre-med.
The advising marathon was nearly over, and a few minutes later I was walking to my car. That's when it hit me. She said she got 750 on her SAT's, and 750 on a scale of 200 to 800 was pretty good (especially in those days, before the scores were renormed toward meaninglessness). I assumed that she got 750 on each main part (math and verbal). I mean, that's what that phraseology meant when I was in high school. Anyway, she couldn't possibly mean that her verbal plus her math scores, added together, arithmetically, summed to 750. After all, Rutgers isn't a beauty college, so it's inconceivable that they could admit someone who scored a few lucky multiple-choice guesses above brain-dead. Not so. Rutgers admissions put a lot of weight on high-school class rank, so no part of the state, however poor academically, could feel that it was being stiffed in the allotment of openings at ``Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.'' - Suddenly by George F. Will (NYC: Free Press, 1990). Subtitled ``The American Idea Abroad and at Home.''
- The Plus and Minus of Fluids and Electrolytes (Reston, Va.: Reston Publ. Co., 1981) by Esther Norman Nicksic, who was an associate professor in the Division of Nursing at Indiana University Northwest at the time of publication. (The title page lists the affiliation as ``Indiana University Northeast,'' but my copy, signed and dedicated by the author to a personal friend, has been hand-corrected. And there doesn't seem to be or have been any Indiana University Northeast.)
A 1947 book with the title The Silent People Speak is described at the dalmation entry. Boiling Water: Tips from the Experts and Falling on the Floor: A Jump-Start Guide are book titles I have proposed, but neither title has been adopted complete with subtitle, afaik. Probably the most common book-title pun that I have encountered is some variant of (the nonexistent but plausible) ``Boyle on Steam.''
The first nine months of 1996 marked its worst performance in the then-current format (that used since January 1987), with a low around 0.8 in March-February. This principally reflected price collapse in DRAM's, but the widespread use of book-to-bill led stock market ``industry analysts'' to discount stocks throughout the industry. (It's particularly ironic that DRAM should have skewed the results, since the book-to-bill was during the eighties and early nineties taken as an indicator of the health of the US industry relative to Japan's. In 1996, DRAM and other commodity chips were dominated by Korea and Japan, so a drop in DRAM prices indicated greater relative health of the US industry.)
I was going to make a joke of this entry by pretending that I found the term confusing, but I didn't. Then I was going to explain why I didn't.
Leonardo da Vinci drew a flight scheme in which a flier essentially lifted himself up by his shoelaces. The idea has gotten a lot more mileage than the method.
Sure, I could look stuff up and have a more comprehensive entry with fewer irrelevancies, but I prefer to highlight my unique content.
A company called Borax will be happy to tell you all about borax.
Max Born's best-known contribution to the development of quantum mechanics is probably the idea that the (normalized) squared modulus of the Schrödinger wavefunction should be regarded as a probability density. On the other hand, the contribution which he is best remembered for having made is probably the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. It's worth a lot to get your name on something. I think Born's suggestion of the probability-density idea first appeared as a footnote in someone else's paper, though very soon (1926) he did publish it himself.
Born's most popular publication was Optik, later translated into English (Optics) and generally known as ``Born and Wolf'' after the co-authors of the English edition. (I haven't looked carefully, but I think the English is pretty much just a translation of the German.) Born was born Jewish, so after the Nazis came to power he lost his university position. He emigrated to England in 1933. [FWIW, his wife, née Hedwig Ehrenberg, was also at risk, as she was of Jewish descent on her father's side. She was a practicing Lutheran; in 1914, the year after they married, he converted to Lutheranism. Like his friend Albert Einstein, Max Born had well-known and vehement (not to say violently) pacifist opinions, though like Einstein he came around somewhat. Meanwhile in Britain his wife became a Quaker. Pacifism, fashionable among intellectuals between the world wars, is like disarmament -- a great idea when it is universal.]
Max Born was at the University of Edinburgh from 1936 to 1953. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Walther Bothe. That year also he and Hedwig retired to West Germany.
In the published Briefwechsel (correspondence, literally `letter exchange') of Born and Einstein one can find Einstein's earliest known formulation of his famous I-cannot-believe-that-God-plays-dice-with-the-Universe assertion. I probably ought to look all of this stuff up, but that would take too long. If you want to be sure, just poke around on the 'net.
The famous singer and actress Olivia Newton-John is the daughter of Irene Newton-John, who was born Irene Born (sorry, I needed to write that). Irene was Max's daughter, so Max Born is famously associated with the names (probably only the name, in the case of Newton) of two of the most celebrated physicists in history (not to mention Heisenberg and many other physicists he worked with).
The closest native Japanese word equivalent to boru is tama. Tama is used for rice balls and for the silver balls in pachinko (a kind of pinball machine), and can be used in reference to a baseball, but is inappropriate for a soccer ball. Tama is the common kun reading of a particular kanji. The kanji has one common on reading: kyuu. As is typically the case, the two readings have similar meanings but occur in different contexts, and the on reading tends to be used for compound nouns. Thus, baseball (i.e. the or a game of baseball) is yakyuu, but a baseball is yakyuu bouru or yakyuu tama -- a `baseball ball.'
Interestingly, there's another Logan International Airport serving a B-town in an M-state: cf. BIL.
Bosons obey Bose-Einstein (B-E) statistics: their total wavefunctions must be symmetric. When expressed in terms of single-particle quantum states, this implies that bosons do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and may multiply occupy identical single-particle states. The low-temperature extreme version of this is Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC).
``In 1920 Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Red Sox, who had won 5 of the first 15 World Series [so named], have yet to win another. The Yankees, who had never before won a championship, have since won 26. Some people call that The Curse of the Bambino.'' Bambinomusical.com ``call[s] it a musical.'' (They eventually ended their drought in 2004.) More of the grim details at this, um, fan site.
You might wonder what was in it for the Babe (formally George Herman Ruth). This was in the days before free agency. Contract negotiation was take-it-or-leave-it: take what the owner offers or leave professional baseball altogether. It was a form of monopsony so blatantly and obviously unfair that when the US Congress passed laws against collusion in restraint of trade, a special exemption had to be written in for the major-league baseball racket. (It's not every day I have occasion to write ``baseball racket.'' We also have an entry for cricket bats.)
In 2001 (the year, not the Space Odyssey), the MLB owners, pleading poverty, announced plans to terminate the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos franchises.
In 1919, a time when various other top players in the league (i.e., his closest inferiors) were making around $15,000, Babe Ruth was given a contract for $10,000. Other conspicuously underpaid players in the league (again, relative to comparable talents) were the Chicago White Sox. (You read about them in the WS entry, when you followed the link on the words so named earlier in this entry. By the way, here's some old programmer advice: only follow unvisited links, or you could end up in an infinite hyperlink loop.) In New York City, Babe Ruth was credited with single-handedly (mostly left-handedly) sparking a dramatic increase in attendance. Construction began on Yankee Stadium, known as ``the house that Ruth built.''
Uh... We're talkin' magnetic tape. Used in the 1960's and 70's to store data at densities like 700 and later 900 bits per inch (bpi). Also used, in conjunction with the entire back seat of my car, to transport experimental data across state lines.
I suppose that the reason this error is common is that in German, beide can also occur without an article, so the fact that English usage differs is not immediately apparent. The movie ``Me, Myself & Irene'' was distributed in Germany as ``Ich Beide & Sie.'' Here ich beide means `I two,' a construction parallel with wir beiden (`we two').
As long as we're on the subject, here are some movies with related titles:
- ``Ya Sama'' (1993), a Russian movie distributed in English-speaking countries as ``Me, Myself'' and ``Then Justice Will Be Mine.'' (I think the Russian title means `I myself.')
- ``La chance de ma vie'' (1999). The English title was ``me Myself i'' (capitalization according to the cover or poster art). It's a movie in which the main character gets to learn how her life might have turned out had she married her high school sweetheart (echoes of IAWL), so the ``i'' in the English title might be a Roman numeral.
A specialized drinking glass has the name ``tumbler,'' but its present form obscures the origin of its name. Tumblers originally tumbled if released: they had round bottoms to discourage holders from putting them down until they were empty. Glassware was one of the earliest manufactures (possibly the earliest) in British America. All good cutlery was imported for many years after independence. (Cheap but soft pewterware was manufactured locally.)
I should admit that books about antique and early American glassware that I've checked recently don't show any round-bottom tumblers from the mid-1800's. Could be the early stuff was so crude and is now so rare that it's all museum pieces rather than collectibles.
One of the old buildings facing Independence Mall in Philadelphia is called the Bourse -- the word is engraved above the entrance. This bourse was founded in 1904 or so, and served as a commodity market.
Our main entry for this stuff is dextrograde, because boustrophedon is a word I have often had difficulty recalling precisely.
On April 11, 2012, one of the contestants on the American Idol show wore $1600 ``asteroid spike-toe pumps'' designed by Christian Louboutin. She also sang.
I was talking with Mary today and she used that word again; Karen and I agreed that no one else uses that word, and Mary launched into a definition that included ``junior league women who never have to mow the lawn or feed the pets ... Cadillac SUV ... cry if they chip a nail ... never offer the gardener a drop of water ... complain if they have to go to St. Moritz for a ninth time'' among various other things rattled off. Karen and I didn't understand the ``junior league'' thing. I suppose it has some social similarity to, or impressionist association with, Jaycees or Young Future Free and Accepted Matrons of America. Mary declined to define junior league, which is probably just as well -- my short-term memory was maxed-out with one definition. Wondering how much I would retain by the time I could add it to the glossary, I commented that it was a rather long definition. Mary said that the condensed, Cliff-Noted version was rich bitch.
It resembles an egg bow in shape only.
It's normally the day after Christmas, but in Australia (I haven't checked elsewhere) it's the first weekday following the Christmas public holiday. Also in Australia, if Christmas falls on Saturday or Sunday, the Christmas public holiday is observed the following Monday.
The holiday has somewhat obscure origins in the UK, where gifts within family and among friends were given on or before Christmas, but on the next day cash or practical gifts were given to employees and the poor and so forth (I'm sure that so forth was a well-defined social class; everything was). Boxing Day is mainly the day that you return gifts you received to the stores where they were bought, because they're not what you wanted and they didn't fit. It also marks the start of after-Christmas sales days.
Take it from me: if you want to write something in a humor genre, do an acronym glossary. The jokes will just write themselves.
This tool will translate sequences into peptide chains.
The function itself can also push some local variables onto the stack. The range of the stack from return address to the end of the local variables constitutes the ``call frame.''
The BP register contains the address of the call frame itself. If you were writing an assembly-language function to be called by a C/C++ program, you might use an address location like bp+2 to refer to a function parameter. Of course, if you were writing an assembly-language subroutine for a C/C++ program, you would know this. (For the past twenty years, whenever I've heard about assembly language programming it has usually been in the context of accelerating programs written in higher-level languages by writing assembly-language subroutines for the most cycle-hungry tasks. Back in 1986 or so, a whole issue of Physics Today was devoted to songs of praise for the research you could with BASIC programming on a personal computer (provided you wrote those assembly-language subroutines).
In fact, however, the technical use of ``BP'' is not subject to even this in-principle problem, because for the sake of nominal precision, ``present'' is defined as January 1, 1950 (probably midnight at the beginning of the year).
London based BP is one of the world's largest petroleum and petrochemical companies and a leader in solar technology manufacturing. BP is the single, global brand formed by the combination of the former British Petroleum, Amoco, ARCO, and Burmah Castrol.
In a speech on the preceding April 23, Paula Banks (Vice President Global Social Investment, BP p.l.c) began with these words:
Now I'd like to turn to BP. You probably think you know the company. But I suspect you don't. Since the end of 1998 -- that's less than three-and-a-half years ago -- the company now known as BP has changed its name twice and more than tripled in size following seven large mergers or takeovers.
We were British Petroleum, then BP Amoco and now we're just BP. We're a new company - and truly a global company.
So ``BP'' is now a sealed acronym. That's as much as you need to know about the name. What more could you want to know? Oh, yeah: occasionally they expand BP as ``Beyond Petroleum.'' Gosh, those guys are so clever! No wonder they never have any accidents, and even if they should ever have an accident, they're ready with plans B, C, and D-.
``Pe - da - go - gy.'' That's a difficult word. Is this going to be on the teacher qualification exam?
What're you lookin' at!?
BPD is characterized by unstable and extreme moods, with unsurprising effects on interpersonal relationships and self-image. BPD sounds like an extreme version of being human. In fact, 2% of all adults suffer from BPD, as do 70% of bosses. Okay, I made the second statistic up. BPD is most common among young women, and accounts for about 20% of psychiatric hospitalizations. You remember Bad Company's top-40 hit ``Good Lovin' Gone Bad'' --
One day she'll love you.
The next day she'll leave you.
Why can't we have it--
Just the way it used to be?
Modern medicine provides an answer: because now she's suffering from BPD. Maybe you should consider DBT. Then again, maybe you should just wait a few hours, or a day at most. Upside or downside, depending on how you're standing: people with BPD often engage in impulsive behaviors such as risky sex. Beware, though: individuals with BPD are highly sensitive to rejection, reacting with anger and distress to the mild separations caused by vacations, business trips, or last-minute changes of plans. Right around now you're probably coming up with positive diagnoses for at least a couple of girls you dated in college.
The term ``borderline'' stems from an earlier idea, now largely discarded, that people with the disorder are on the borderline of psychosis. So people tend to refer to it by initialism rather than as ``borderline personality.'' It looks like a good initialism for bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depressive syndrome. Psychiatric nomenclature seems to suffer from its own instability syndrome. Fortunately, a precise definition of the target disorder to be treated is not needed, since the therapy is aimed like a shotgun at the symptoms. The main utility of a disorder name is in assisting the clinician in coming up with a diagnostic code to put on the insurance form.
Suppose you've got a hardass jerk supervisor. (Okay, I'm just leaving open the hypothetical possibility of an alternative. For argument's sake, let's say.) And suppose that every design or project plan you present, the supervisor has a personal need to find some error in, be it ever so nitpicky. Now you're going to present another project, and this one is perfect, your labor of love. For God's sake, put an obvious error in it, so the jerk finds that instead of detecting a nonexistent ``error'' in something that's right.
Today (2013.09.15) I noticed that the Mexican restaurant south of Myrrh's has ``NO NFL & BPL'' up on its outside specials sign. I do remember that their widescreen was off a few months back, but I'm not really sure whether this is a warning, an attraction, or a protest. Iff you need to know, I'll try to find out. (I won't.)
Blast is a disease of sheep, but if a herd of buffalo came down with it, that would make some kind of a symphony, or maybe asymphony. They could try harmonizing with the Elks.
The Jolly Corks was originally a group of actors whose drinking society enabled then to circumvent the New York blue law that closed bars on Sundays. Laws limiting the sale of alcohol are another great promoter of social organizations and of institutions not, in principle, primarily created to sell alcohol. Examples include the veterans' lodge in a dry Texas county my friend Victor used to work in, a variety of clubs in Salt Lake City, and the journalists' club in Damascus. Often the membership fee is nominal, and sometimes the mechanism for paying your bar tab is a little bit indirect. Once this sort of arrangement becomes established, it creates an economic incentive for those nominally private clubs, in favor of the preserving often unpopular prohibitions. Similar economic incentives exist for the suppliers of any illegal goods, of course.
The word badan means things like `group, council, organization':
badan legislatif ......... legislative body
badan pers ............... press agency
badan tenaga atom ........ atomic energy commission
See also BPK. A lot of these agencies are known by good, old-fashioned acronyms in the SeRoCo tradition, like Bakosurtanal, Bapedal, Bappenas, and Batan. As you can see, particularly with Batan (what? you didn't follow the links?), in the Indonesian language (bahasa Indonesia) adjectives follow the nouns they modify. This might make the apparent official English name of the BPS seem more natural: Statistik Indonesia. BTW, until about 1996, BPS used to be expanded Biro Pusat Statistik, corresponding to the other English language (bahasa Inggeris or bahasa Inggris) version `Central Bureau of Statistics.' Cf. CBS.
The included organizations apparently include the AACBP, ABA ABCBP, ABCT, BACB, and Division 25 of the APA.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The difference between 0.6 and 0.8 sounds small, but it actually means you get more than twice as many bounces (0.6 = 0.82.29).
* . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * | * * | * . | . * | . *
. . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * . | * * | * * | * . | * *
. . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . .
a b c d e f g h i j
* . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * | * * | * . | . * | . *
. . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * . | * * | * * | * . | * *
* . | * . | * . | * . | * . | * . | * . | * . | * . | * .
k l m n o p q r s t
* . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * | * * | * . | . * | . *
. . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * . | * * | * * | * . | * *
* * | * * | * * | * * | * * | * * | * * | * * | * * | * *
u v x y z ç é à è ù
and for of the with
* . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * | * * | * . | . * | . *
. . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * . | * * | * * | * . | * *
. * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . *
â ê î ô û ë ï ü œ w
ch gh sh th wh ed er ou ow
(The standard numbering for the dots in a single cell is
1 4 2 5 3 6but I won't use this very much below.)
As far as I can tell, in 2005 the same assignments are used throughout the English-speaking world that were standard in the UK by 1911. (This was not always so; vide braille variants.)
Besides the symbols listed, there are 23 other possible symbols, not counting the space (no raised dots). Part of the genius of Braille's assignments is in the symbols he did not use for letters. It seems to me that these virtues of braille have been too infrequently noted and praised. Now that Braille's system is universally accepted I suppose this is not a problem, but I still want to mention them to show off my cleverness in having noticed them, okay?
When a single letter or a few symbols are written in braille or a similar system, it is possible in principle that one might not be able to tell how they register. That is, a single dot might be in any of the six possible positions, two dots in a row might be at any of three heights, dots aligned vertically might be on the left or right, and dots that fit in two adjacent rows might be in the first and second or in the second and third rows. Braille's selection of assignments assures that for a sequence of alphabetic characters, however short, these ambiguities do not arise: there is only one alphabetic character (a) assigned a single dot, only one (c) is written as a row of two dots, etc. Furthermore, the sequence is reasonably systematic, with ten symbols in the upper two rows repeated systematically with the four different possible bottom rows.
Braille's symbol assignments mesh nicely with decimal numerals. The symbol
. * . * * *indicates that a sequence of letters a-i and j following it are to be interpreted as the Arabic numerals 1-9 and 0, respectively. (Certain punctuation symbols, but not a line break, are allowed to intervene without turning off the numeral interpretation.) These are the numerals you typically find in braille next to elevator floor buttons. Strictly speaking, I think these are the wrong numbers. According to Braille's scheme, the numbers represented by a-j are cardinal numbers. Ordinal numbers are represented by lowering those symbols by one row. For example,
* * * *
* *
* *
represents 16, and
*
* * * *
* * *
represents 16th. (This systematic distinction is made possible, of course, by
Braille's choice to leave the bottom row empty in the first ten letter
symbols.) It seems to me that students used to be drilled much more
intensively in the ordinal-cardinal distinction.
Other common elevator braille:
* * *
* * *
* * *
o p en
* * * * *
* * *
* * *
c l o s (close)
* * * *
* *
* * *
st o p
* * * * *
* *
* * *
a l ar m
* * *
*
* * *
u p
* * * * *
* * * *
* *
do w n
The letter d is used for both d and do. The reader is required to think.
But not too much. When the symbol occurs alone, it has to represent do. To
represent a single letter d, one must precede the symbol with a letter sign
(dots 5 and 6). Similarly, in
* *
* * *
*
letter g (g for ground floor)
sign
the letter g, appearing without the letter sign, would represent the word go.
Overloading of this sort can get more complicated: the letter pairs be and bb,
and the semicolon, are all represented by same single-cell symbol. However,
there are various restrictions on the use of the symbol. As bb, it can only
occur between other letters, etc. The number sign is also used to represent
-ble, and so forth.
When they are not preceded by a number sign, the letters a-j lowered by a row are punctuation signs:
. . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . * . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * | * * | * . | . * | . * . . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * . | * * | * * | * . | * * _,_ _;_ _:_ _._ _?_ _!_ paren _``_ _*_ _''_In the preceding line, I have used underlines to distinguish comma from apostrophe, etc., or else just to be moderately consistent. _``_ and _''_ correspond to different symbols in French than in English, but in either case they are open- and close-double-quote signs. (There is a separate symbol, neither comma nor period, to represent the decimal point; it is dots 4 and 6.) Paren represents both opening and closing parenthesis, so parentheses cannot be nested in ordinary text. (English braille usage does provide a paired set of nestable brackets. They're two-cell symbols constructed from the paren symbol with a raised dot 6 in the preceding cell for an opening bracket, or a raised dot 3 in the following cell to close. Separate symbols for opening and closing round and square brackets are part of the mathematical symbols of braille.) The only one of Braille's punctuation marks not used in English is the asterisk sign. In English, a single cell with dots 3 and 5 raised (Braille's asterisk mark) represents the letter pair in, and an asterisk is represented by two in cells. A large number of functional symbols and multi-cell punctuation marks have been devised. Frankly, braille looks, er, feels a lot handier than ASCII. (Braille's musical notation is also widely admired.)
Here are some comments from A Cyclopedia of Education, ed. Paul Monroe (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), from the waning years of that wild and wooly era when many different schemes competed. (The comments are excerpted from the article ``Education of the Blind,'' written by Helen Keller. If you attended a US school, you probably heard a lot of inspirational stuff about her life before she became a socialist.)
Curricula and Apparatus. -- The curricula of the ordinary institutions for the young blind are about the same as those of the common schools for the seeing, -- reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, etc. The chief difference in method lies in the apparatus, and is at once suggested by a study of the apparatus itself.
The first embossed book for the blind was printed at the Paris Institution in 1786. The early books were expensive, not easy to read, and were used primarily for exhibition purposes. The type was a form of Roman letter. Many persons experimented with variations of our common letters and arbitrary arrangements of lines and curves. [A number of such systems were used, but] except for the very useful Moon type for the elderly blind and those whose fingers are insensitive, all line alphabets have been abandoned (the Perkins Institution only recently discontinued the printing of Roman line) in favor of point systems, braille and two variants of it.
The base of braille is a cell of 6 points, thus [until I cook up a little image file, imagine two parallel columns of three equally-spaced dots]. The characters consist of various combinations of these 6 points. For instance, 3 points in a vertical line form the letter L. If the middle dot is struck out and placed at the right of the lower dot, the letter is U, and so on. There are 62 [sic] characters. Each represents a letter, a punctuation mark, or a contraction standing for several letters. This point system was made by Louis Braille in 1825, and bears his name. It is used all over the world. American braille embodies some changes, not in the form of the letters, but in the assignment of the letters to various combinations. The idea was that the letters which occur most frequently, such as E, O, R, S, T, should be made with the fewest dots. The changes do not alter the mechanical structure of the type any more than the mechanical structure of this ink type would be altered if it should be agreed to print s for e and e for s. New York point differs from braille in that the characters are not 3 points high and 2 wide, but 2 points high and 3 wide. It has no advantages, and some disadvantages as compared with braille. The variety of prints has caused some confusion and has resulted in reduplication of books. Some American institutions are provincial enough to cling to New York point when other American institutions and the whole of Europe use braille both for literature and for music. But any enterprising blind person who knows one print can easily learn another. The point systems can be written for notes, correspondence and manuscript books, on special writing machines and also by means of small hand frames and a stylus to indent the points. To write ink print the blind can use any typewriter, and typewriting is taught in the best schools. The blind also write pencil script, and there are several ingenious devices to guide the pencil.
Below are the letter symbols for braille and three other systems. (The cartouches are for the viewer's convenience only; no such boxes are normally embossed.) The ``English braille,'' coincides with Braille's braille in the letters shown. The American braille symbols differ as Keller explained. ``New York'' symbols are mostly identical with the ``Wait Anglo-American'' symbols for lower-case characters. [The symbols that differ are those for t, whose single dot the different systems have in different columns, and those for a, m, n, o, and s, which are only two columns wide in Wait l.c. symbols, but are three columns wide in New York (with a blank middle column). Not all the symbols that could have been stretched were, and it's hard to see a uniform principle according to which it was decided which letters would be wide.] There seems to have been some confusion of names. (And most tables of braille symbols that I have found in English-, Spanish-, and Italian-language encyclopedias contain some obviously erroneous symbol identification; none of the French encyclopedias I've checked gives a table.) There was a plate accompanying the cited article, source uncredited, that gave the Wait symbols but called them New York Lower Case and Capitals. (The braille system and most variants of it use a special character which indicates that a letter following it is capitalized.)
English American New Anglo-American (Wait)
braille braille York Lower
Case Capitals
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
| * * | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * * |
| * * | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
a | | | | | * * | | * * | | * * |
| | | | | | | | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
b | * | | * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
| | | * | | * | | * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
c | | | * * | | * * | | * * | | * * * |
| | | | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
d | * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * * * |
| | | | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
e | * | | * | | * | | * | | * |
| | | | | | | | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
f | * | | * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
| | | | | | | | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
g | * * | | * * | | * | | * | | * * |
| | | | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
h | * * | | * * | | * * | | * * | | * * * |
| | | | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
i | * | | * | | * | | * | | * * * * |
| | | | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
j | * * | | * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
| | | * * | | * | | * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
k | | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * * |
| * | | * | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
l | * | | * | | * | | * | | * * * |
| * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
m | | | | | * * | | * * | | * * |
| * | | * | | * | | * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
n | * | | | | | | | | * * |
| * | | * * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
o | * | | * | | * | | * | | * |
| * | | | | * | | * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
p | * | | | | * | | * | | * * |
| * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
q | * * | | * * | | * | | * | | * * |
| * | | * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
r | * * | | | | * | | * | | * * * |
| * | | | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
s | * | | | | * | | * | | * * * |
| * | | * | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
t | * * | | * | | | | | | * * * |
| * | | | | * | | * | | * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
u | | | | | | | | | * |
| * * | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
v | * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
| * * | | * * | | * | | * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
w | * * | | * * | | * | | * | | * |
| * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
x | | | * * | | * * | | * * | | * * * |
| * * | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * * | | * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
y | * | | * | | * | | * | | * * |
| * * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
+-----+ +-----+
| * | | * * | +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
z | * | | * * | | * * * | | * * * | | * * * * |
| * * | | * | | * * | | * * | | * * |
+-----+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +---------+
To be fair, the two-row symbols (i.e., those that are two points high) have one apparent advantage over three-row symbols like Braille's: they can be scaled about 50% in point spacing and still be read across without having to zig-zag one's finger. As the original problems with Barbier's system demonstrated, and Keller's comments on Moon type suggest, this is not an inconsiderable issue. A drawback with the two-row symbols, and one difficult to remedy, is that one must have a sense of isolated dots' positions. In the Wait and New York systems, for example, the e and t symbols are both represented by a single dot (in upper and lower row, resp.). A similar problem, probably worse, occurs with the ``American braille'' (second column of cartouches above). Braille avoided these ambiguities; his solution to the problem is clearer when his assignments are represented in a ten-column table as shown at the braille letters entry.
The major variants were all eventually abandoned. So far as I can tell, most languages which sighted people read in Roman characters are read in Braille's braille, or in minor variants of it that preserve the symbol assignments of the 26 letters of the English alphabet as well as the number symbol that reassigns letters a-i and j following it to the numbers 1-9 and 0. Different languages' versions of braille do differ in the assignments of symbols for letters with diacritical marks. For Braille's original symbol assignments and for some of the extensions and changes to this in the standard English variant, see the braille letters entry. Likewise for German, see Blindenschrift.
In 1661 Mexico, the Baron Vitelius of Astara is sentenced to be burned alive by the Holy Inquisition of Mexico for witchcraft, necromancy, and other crimes. As he dies, the Baron swears vengeance against the descendants of the Inquisitors. 300 years later, a comet that was passing overhead on the night of the Baron's execution returns to earth, bringing with it the Baron in the form of a horrible, brain-eating monster that terrorizes the Inquisitor[s'] descendants.
The movie was released as El Barón del Terror in 1962. You wonder if they didn't miss an editing deadline. As I understand it, a dubbed version was released in the US in 1963, with the title Baron of Terror (literal translation of the original title) and broadcast on TV in 1969 as The Brainiac.
Kiss the girls and make them cry. It starred Abel Salazar, Mexico's answer to Paul Newman or George C. Scott. If you want to see a horror movie but you don't want to be scared or even entertained, this is an excellent choice. A fast-forward classic. It is one of the 41 horrible movies excerpted in the Horrible Horror video (1986).
Shucks -- at the studio (Alameda Films) they give the entire plot, including all the spoilers:
México, 1661. El Barón Vitelius ríe mientras la Inquisición lo tortura por seductor y brujo. Un Testigo, el portugués Marcos, recibe 200 azotes por defender a Vitelius. Mientras Vitelius es quemado en la hoguera, para una cometa. Vitelius anuncia que volverá con el cometa al cabo de 300 años para vengarse en los descendientes de los inquisidores Pantoja, Meneses, Álvaro Contreras y Herlindo del Vivar., En 1961, Reynaldo, descendiente de Marcos, y su novia Victoria, descendiente de Contreras, ven el cometa por telescopio en el observatorio de su maestro el astrónomo Millán. Una roca desprendida del cometa cae y se convierte en un monstruo que mata a un hombre, le quita su ropa, cobra el aspecto de Vitelius y se hace amigo de Reynaldo y Victoria, llegados al lugar. En un bar, Vitelius recobra su aspecto monstruoso para matar a una mujer que lo besa. Vitelius ofrece una fiesta de lujo y se hace monstruo para matar en ella a Indalecio y a su hija María, historiadores descendientes de los Pantoja. Millán queda desesperado por la desaparición del cometa: es un cometa maldito. Vitelius mata al ingeniero metalúrgico Luis, descendiente de Meneses, a su esposa, a Ana Luisa, descendiente de Vivar, y a su marido el Licenciado Coria. Victoria y Reynaldo son Invitados a cenar por el barón, que cobra su aspecto de monstruo para liquidarlos, pero llega la policía y lo destruye con lanzallamas.
It occurs to me that the movie did have some novelties. It seemed that he didn't eat all his brains immediately, but saved some for later. At least at one point in the movie, he noshes on some left-over brains. He uses a narrow spoon with a long handle. I hadn't realized that iced tea was popular in Mexico.
Another horrible horror movie with the title Brainiac was released in 2004. The principal thing it has in common with the original movie is that it involves a monster that sucks people's brains out. It was a low-budget independent production, and perhaps the question in everyone's brain was, ``is it so bad that it's good?'' The consensus seems to be no.
Naturally, the term may be used ironically. For instance, in Los Angeles on August 6, 2007, Britney Spears crashed her black Mercedes into a parked station wagon, and then told the paparazzi, ``I'm a brainiac!'' (This is according to the NY Post, from its Page-SixSM gossip feature on August 8. I wasn't there myself, so I can't say for certain that this happened, but it sounds pretty plausible for someone ditzy and rich enough to drive disposable Mercedeses.)
It reminds me of one of the few really memorable quotes in Chamber of Secrets, the second book of the Harry Potter series. Arthur Weasley works at the Ministry of Magic, in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office. (At some point, though I think it is after this book, he is promoted to another office in the ministry.) Naturally, Arthur is intrigued by muggle artifacts, as well as enchanted (misused) ones, and his interest is a dangerous weakness. Anyway, in Chamber, the life of his daughter Ginny is endangered by an enchanted diary. At the end of the book... SPOILER AHEAD... her life is saved by Harry (big surprise there, I'm sure). After Mr. Weasley has heard the whole story, he admonishes his daughter for falling under the spell of the diary: ``What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brains.''
It's actually a multidimensional problem. First you measure torso circumference just below the breast. You add four or five inches to that to get a number that is called the ``bra back size.'' Actually, it might be five or six inches -- I've read conflicting accounts and I'm too timid to ask a professional in person. In this other scheme you apparently add five and round up an extra inch if necessary to get an even number. So if you measure a torso circumference of 29.6 inches, you compute a bra back size of 36. No wonder these things use elastic. After you've done all this, you forget about it, apparently. If I see a consensus developing on exactly how to compute bra dimensions, I'll come back to this entry.
After determining the bra back size, give or take a couple of inches, you measure the bust at its greatest circumference. The difference determines the ``cup size'' according to a rule that must have a tortured history indeed, and which is displayed below:
| ``bust size'' minus ``bra back size'' (inches) |
Cup size |
|---|---|
| 4 | AA |
| 5 | A |
| 6 | B |
| 7 | C |
| 8 | D |
| 9 | DD |
| 10 | E |
| 11 | F |
| 12 | FF |
| 13 | G |
| 14 | GG |
| 15 | H |
(For a plus size, see the TTBOMKAB entry.)
Interestingly, these measurements are supposed to be performed while the body being measured is wearing a bra. I can imagine that this could lead to chicken-and-egg problems, or at best a method of successive approximations. That also reminds me - this glossary does not have size information for athletic cups, but we do have a table of egg sizes.
Automated Securities Clearance Ltd. owned the brass.com domain, but doesn't seem ever to have gotten a web site up. Copper Development Association owned brass.org, and had registered www.brass.org, but didn't do anything with it. Now (January 1, 1999) both brass.org and brass.com domains are without DNS entries.
Whoops! As of December 2002 the brass.com domain is used by an e-commerce solutions company named BRASS in capitals, no expansion offered.
Brass.org has further information on useful copper alloys.
An unusual transitive use, equivalent to aufwenden müssen, is for time required to complete a task: ich habe eine Stunde gebraucht, `it took me an hour' or more literally `I needed an hour.' In another acceptation, brauchen is a synonym of gebrauchen or benutzen (`use'). Although this is less common without context help (ich könnte es brauchen, for example, is more likely to mean `I could use it'), derived words usually take a sense related to gebrauchen. Examples include Brauch (masc., plural Bräche), `custom,' and brauchbar (`usable, wearable, useful'); cf. gebraucht.
Goethe's Faust is a sort of story of Job, with Dr. Faust in the role of Job, although the methods of the Devil are much less unpleasant than in the Biblical story. The stage for Faust's attempted seduction is set during a discussion among God, the Devil, and some angels -- a prologue in heaven. There Mephistopheles (the Devil) comments on man:
Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein,
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.
[He calls it reason and uses it only
to be more beastly than any beast.]
(This is, of course, only a trend rather than a rigorous rule.)
The Portuguese referred to the area they colonized as ``terra do brasil'' (`land of brazil'). Shortened to Brasil, this eventually became the country name. Despite the development of artificial dyes, the existence of this tree is still useful because it grows in the Scrabble forest; all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept brasil and brazil, and their regularly-formed (-s) English plurals.
In electronic design, the verb to breadboard is commonly used as a synonym of to prototype (to make a prototype of, to test as a prototype).
Some websites:
- In German: a site primarily for people seeking their roots in Breslau from the time when it was German.
- Official pages of the Wroclaw Municipality with many resources in English.
My mother was born in Breslau, and that accounts for some of my interest in the place. She and I visited it in 2005.
The neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau on July 28, 1874. The German economist Karl Schiller was born there on April 24, 1911. Otto Stern, later famous for the Stern-Gerlach Experiment (1922), received his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Breslau in 1912. Fritz Stern, a historian of the various aspects and precursors of the Nazi era and now perhaps most famous for his book Einstein's German World, was also born there -- in 1926. I don't know if they're related.
You may have found yourself wondering: ``What's the weather like in Breslau in June?'' If so, you read my mind! Stop that! Overnight lows in the sixties Fahrenheit, highs around eighty.
Here's some interesting text I read in the Winamp3 License Agreement: ``Licensee may not ... (v) publish any results of benchmark tests run on the Product to a third party.'' One wonders how far this clause is valid under the first amendment. There are such things as nondisclosure agreements, but this is ridiculous. Freedom of speech includes the right to say the product (sorry -- the Product) sucks or rocks, but they think they can restrict the right to say by how much. Computer-mag reviews of this product could get interesting.
Gee, while we're reading along (everybody takes time out from the installation procedure to study these things carefully, of course) there's the following:
INDEMNIFICATION. Licensee agrees to indemnify, hold harmless, and at Nullsoft's request and
its
expense, to defend Nullsoft and its affiliates from any and all costs, damages and reasonable attorneys' fees resulting from any claim that Licensee's use of the Product has injured or otherwise violated any right of any third party or violates any law.
Whose ``its''?
- AAFP (mentions dental bridges)
- AAFP (road bridges)
- air bridge (microelectronics fabrication; we're not talking bridge circuits, such as those mentioned at the mho, rectenna, or TET entries)
- backboard (mentions a bridge on a guitar)
- BBN (bridge in a molecule)
- bridge to the future (hardly a metaphor)
- Bridgeville, California (what, I have to preview everything?)
- Brooklyn Bridge
- chitlins (suicide bridges)
- more honored in the breech (beautiful bridges)
- SBF (steel bridges)
- venter bridge
The card game bridge, related to whist, takes its name from a Russian word transliterated as biritch, vel sim. If you wanted to learn about this sort of bridge, the web site you're reading this from might not be the best place to do so. If you insist, however, you can visit the following entries:
- ABA
- ABA
- ACBL
- BFAAME
- BFAME
- BCRJ
- CAC
- CACBF
- CSB
- EBL
- FBB
- FCB
- FEDEBRIDGE
- FPB, FPBri, FPBridge
- F.V.B., FVB
- MAFIA... are you sure you want to visit this entry?
- NABC
- NBO
- PABF
- rubber bridge
- SPABF
- WBF
- TOX
- SBF
(These lists are under construction at this very hour!)
His metaphor was criticized as meaningless. This is pretty unfair, because if it's truly meaningless, then it's probably not a very big lie. You might say that building a bridge to the past -- connecting somehow with heritage -- is more meaningful than building a bridge to the future. I mean -- what happens if you don't? Will time come crashing to a halt in the space of a Planck time? When will we find out that it happened? Perhaps it already has!
But I'm not really concerned with that. Let's just say for argument's sake that there is a river in time and that we need to get to the other side without getting wet. I'm concerned about the practicalities. Do we have to build it as we go and carry it with us to the bank, or is there some way we can build it at the shore we haven't reached yet? What about the future? They're presumably already there, probably waiting for us to arrive. They could build it now. Why do we always have to foot the bill? We're being economically exploited! In the words of Marx, ``what has posterity ever done for me?''
But I'm not really concerned with that. I only put this entry in because I noticed an earlier use of the phrase ``bridge to the future,'' but now I can't find it. I will, though, in the future. Until then, there's ``a one-way ticket to midnight'' in a song explained at the triboelectricity entry.
The reserve price was $775,000, and bidding was frenzied , but when the original winner of the 2002 auction (with a bid of $1.78 million) backed out, it was purchased for $700,000 by Orange County banker Bruce Krall. That's a puzzling come-down. Krall relisted Bridgeville on eBay in 2006, saying he couldn't afford to continue making restorations. He finally flipped it for $1.25 million in August, to Daniel La Paille, a 25-year-old Los Angeles entertainment manager and college student. La Paille brought in work crews to repair many of the town's homes and began building a park. He wanted his whole family to move there, and in October his cousin Adam Wade went there to be the property manager and maintenance man. In November, however, La Paille committed suicide. (He shot himself in the chest and in Los Angeles.) Soon afterwards, town improvement efforts faltered. They need a new well, too, which will cost $50,000, and they don't even have the money for that. They are repainting the post office exterior in earth tones, however.
As of July 2007, it is described as having eight houses, a post office, and a café, and a population of ``about 30.'' They couldn't be more precise? According to Bruce McNaughton, the real estate agent handling the sale for the family, it's on the market for $1.3 million.
When the British Library was founded in 1973 (by an Act of the previous year), it absorbed the book and manuscript collections of the British Museum library and a number of less well-known British libraries. Details here. In 1997, the library was moved to vast new quarters at King's Cross. People who used it at the old location were generally pleased with the new digs.
Over the years of exploration and empire, the museum accumulated scattered artifacts like the Elgin Marbles (the Parthenon frieze, removed by Lord Elgin with the approval of local Turkish officials duly bribed; a continual thorn in the side of relations between Britain and fellow EU member Greece), the Rosetta Stone, royal Egyptian mummies, and one of the original holographs of the Magna Carta (I don't think there's any shadow on the title to this item).
Do not confuse the old company name British Rail with the marketing name Britrail.
She's also done a children's book.
These SAT-prep problems -- (1) (2) (3) -- embody, so to speak, the same idea. And adds a new item to the ``spherical cow'' toolbox of physics approximations. Sit down, Kanye. I'm reminded of a story Stanislaw Ulam told in his autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician.
I particularly remember one of the programmers who was really beautiful and well endowed. She would come into my office with the results of the daily computation. Large sheets of paper were filled with numbers. She would unfold them in front of her low-cut Spanish blouse and ask, ``How do they look?'' and I would exclaim, ``They look marvelous!'' to the entertainment of Fermi and others in the office at the time.
And here's one for the girls, or very young ladies or whomever. Follow these links soon; I don't know how long they live.
- One of the early Celt inhabitants of southern England.
- An inhabitant of England or Wales. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote (in an essay published in Angles and Britons; for details see the beauty entry) that this lamentable usage was introduced around the time that Scotland was united with England and Wales under a common king. (That was James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. Depending on your perspective, you might prefer ``reunited'' above. In any case, things didn't work out very well with the Stewarts.) Note that the famous triple-scepter symbolized not rule over England, Wales, and Scotland, but over England (and Wales), Scotland, and Ireland. My impression is that over time, this second sense has been superseded by a third:
- An inhabitant of Britain.
A British woman I know objected to my using Briton in the third sense. So I should've called her a Limey?
It's amazing that a language as rich in words as English never managed to get reliably unobjectionable gentilicial nouns for the two most populous countries in which it is the essentially universal language (UK and US). It's probably intentional.
``Reach the Wealthiest Demographics in Southern California.'' You can never be too rich or too thin, but chocolate cake is a different story.
While my mom was visiting me in Arizona some years ago, back in New Jersey my father decided to do some strenuous outdoor work. Not long after, his longtime friend Miguel happened to come over, and convinced him to go to the hospital (my dad didn't realize it, but he had had a heart attack). Miguel hung around until a nurse came in and said it was time for all nonfamily-members to leave, so my dad said that Miguel was his brother. The nurse astutely observed that they didn't look very much alike, and my father replied that they had different fathers. This was true, but they had different mothers also. My dad was using ``brother'' in a very loose sense (Miguel wasn't even a Mason, afaik), intending to be understood to be using it in only a slightly loose sense. My father didn't believe in lying when ordinary deception would suffice.
Cf. Bros.
There was this girl in high school I really liked and finally got the nerve to ask out. So we went to the movies, and then I took her home. I thought we'd had a really good time, but she jumped out of the car and ran into her house. I didn't understand it until I got home and looked in the mirror and realized I had gotten the broccoli from dinner stuck on my teeth. To this day I can't stand broccoli.
What George H.W. Bush said was this:
I do not like broccoli and I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.This launched an uproar.
On January 20, 1993, Bill Clinton became President of the United States. The following October, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton recorded a guest appearance on the children's show ``Sesame Street.'' She advised viewers to ``eat your broccoli, string beans, and apples.'' The original included a mention of peas, but she objected, saying ``Hardly anybody likes peas.'' Word got out. This launched another uproar (regarding which, see pea).
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Coco Fusco's collection of essays, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas received the 1995 Critics' Choice Award.
The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is about 2000 lb. of bronze. According to the National Park Service, it's about 70% Cu and 25% Sn, and the remainder is principally Pb, Zn, As, Au, and Ag.
In ``Mixed Media'' for the same day, a typical OJ interview (protestation-of-innocence) video buyer is caricatured as the sort of person who could be conned into ``buying'' the Brooklyn Bridge.
This apparent coincidence proves conclusively that cartoonists are in telepathic communication. And if you believe that ...
I don't understand why FedEx bothers to keep its offices open for more than couple of hours a day. I'm never there until the last minute, and when I haven't been there, I've never seen anybody else there early either. Anyway, the other day I was there at the usual time, and some guy was chatting up an attractive clerk, when she could have been processing my very important package instead. Apparently to prove a point, he asked the assembled multitude ``who said `I shall return'?'' Only one person volunteered the answer. This proves conclusively that important parts of our cultural heritage are in danger of being forgotten. [Just in case a proof was somehow lacking. This is not the situation in England, where important parts of their cultural heritage are in danger of being forgot.]
Therefore, as a public service, I will retell the Brooklyn Bridge story in this very place. But not at this very time.
Okay, now: a yokel comes to the big city from the sticks. He's sitting on a bench near the Brooklyn Bridge, eyes wide, straw almost fallen out of his gaping mouth. A friendly stranger walks up... ``How do you like my bridge?'' ``Yes, yes, my bridge, see: I just collected the tolls from the booths. It's a shame though, I can't wait for it to all roll in; I need a chunk of money right tonight, or it's worth nothing me. . . . Say, uh ... you wouldn't happen to, I mean, could you -- aw nah, I shouldn't ask...''
Completion of story, seasoning and regional accents to taste; an exercise for the student.
In Argentina, the traditional scam had the con man strike up a friendly conversation with a greenhorn provincial in a bar. A confederate appears in the character of a bus driver and delivers what are represented as receipts from a bus belonging to the con man, who ceremoniously takes a small fraction of the income and returns it to the ``driver'' as wages. The object is to sell a city bus to the mark.
This glossary discusses pyramid schemes at the IRC entry. A rock harmony group called Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge has been performing since the 1960's.
The administrators don't seem know much about branding, but their IT people had the good sense to take <poly.edu> as a domain name. And the name beat goes on. According to email forwarded me in January 2013,
> NYU-Poly, formerly known as Brooklyn Poly and Polytechnic University, > is merging with New York University, and is undergoing rapid growth in > the heart of one of the world's most vibrant cities. NYU-Poly offers > its faculty unprecedented opportunities for personal and professional > growth with the guiding principles of invention, innovation and > entrepreneurship.
(The NYU-Poly name was adopted when Poly affiliated with NYU back in 2008. So far the merger hasn't given rise to an new name, afaik.) This ``invention, innovation and entrepreneurship'' boilerplate is a slogan of Poly's administrative class. It is sometimes written with, and sometimes without, the serial comma. E.g.: ``NYU-Poly is well on its way to fulfilling its remarkable potential. Its drive to push the boundaries of what it means to be a 21st century research institution, one founded on the principle of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship (i2e), led to numerous educational and research strides.'' Sure, it's probably very common for someone at a departmental faculty meeting to say something like ``I've been thinking about the principle of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and it gave me an idea...'' while other people nod thoughtfully to disguise the fact that they're not paying any attention, and the one person who was listening bursts a bronchiole from trying not to laugh. The symbol 12e, incidentally, is sometimes written with, and sometimes without, superscripting of the 2. I haven't seen it as 2ie or in upper case, and you won't see it with its own entry in this glossary.
I'm not cynical, you know -- just reasonable. Two or three physicists I have known were undergraduates at Brooklyn Poly. Many kids go through a period, typically in their teens, when they're constantly embarrassed by their parents. Who knew that alma mater could do it to them later?
I see from our library catalog and some other sources that Understanding Poetry: an Anthology for College Students by Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) and Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), was first published in 1938 by H. Holt and Company. English and American poetry, 20 cm, xxiv+680 pp. -- does anyone really need that much poetry? Couldn't they have published a more selective anthology in a dainty 10-cm booklet with generous margins? Ugh -- I see that by 1950, a completely revised edition had grown to 22 cm, and had lvi+727 pp. Maybe later I'll try to run down something meaningful about this. (Yeah, sure. When I get around to it.) It seems that the book and its editor/authors (both of them ``New Critics'') were very influential.
The quote at the beginning of this entry is from ``The Scandal of Literary Scholarship,'' by Louis Kampf, a contribution to The Dissenting Academy (Random House, 1967). The book is a whine or a roar (depending on your POV) against complacency and careerism among academics in the humanities, doing something else when they should be protesting the Vietnam War.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Promulgated by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. in his The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975; rev. edn. 1995). Brooks headed OS development for the IBM 360. As of 1996, he was a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina.
Obviously this is an old and well-known law that precedes Mr. Brooks's elegant statement of it. In one famous example, Andrew Carnegie demonstrated that four men could lift an iron beam that eight men could not lift.
An interesting variation was used by a couple of venerable publishing houses: ``G.P. Putnam's Sons'' and ``Charles Scribner's Sons.''
In 1905, Einstein explained Brownian motion definitively, in the process deriving an estimate of Avogadro's number NA. [This came at a time when the atomic hypothesis was not completely accepted, although there were other estimates.] Einstein made an arithmetic error in the paper, which was pointed out a few years later. With the error corrected, one gets a pretty decent estimate. Conversely, knowing Avogadro's number, one can use the observed motion to estimate the mass of the randomly kicked particle. The method is commonly used in the milk industry to determine fat globule mass. At one point (and possibly still), milk-industry publications made the Brownian motion paper Einstein's most-cited work.
- A sort of junior (grade-school) Girl Scouts (GSA). So called after the color of their uniforms. Cf. Cub Scouts (CSA).
- Pieces of a dense, chewy chocolate cake. So called after the color.
The term seems to exist in a no-man's land between mass or uncountable nouns and count nouns. Any piece of brownie cake is a
brownie, so you can cut a brownie in two and have two brownies, with no very
sophisticated tools.
This is not how Democritus came up with the concept of atoms.
You know, there are certain kinds of flatworms that regenerate into two complete animals when cut in half. When my mother was a little girl growing up in Germany, pasta was not so common there. She remembers the first time she was introduced to it. She asked her father if they were worms. She wasn't assured by the negative answer (and after all, her father was a lawyer), so she then asked whether, when they were alive, they had been worms.
My mother did not belong to the Nazi brownies (the JM) because she is Jewish.
Very thin spaghetti is called vermicelli, which is Italian for `small worms.'
Our Diet of Worms entry isn't very informative.There's a TV news report that first aired in the sixties, I think, on the annual ``Spaghetti Harvest Festival'' in Italy. The festival took place on April 1.
Later, when I was a little boy growing up in the US, my elementary school asked her to contribute a baked good to sell for some worthy fund-raising. My mother is a good cook, but she decided to try something new to her (when in Rome, etc.), so she made brownies. They were probably chewy at first, the way all cement is chewy before it sets. (I've never eaten cement; I'm extrapolating from the properties of the brownies.) She was never again asked to bake anything for a school bake sale, which is just as well. Back in those days, working mothers were kind of unusual, so there wasn't much understanding of how difficult it is to balance work and bake sales. I actually like brownies that are tooth-challenging.
I attended Columbus Elementary School. The school system in my town was integrated by closing the school and dispersing the students to other schools. Eventually they tore the school down and put up a bunch of duplexes.
``Goodbye, Columbus'' was a Broadway hit when I was in fifth grade.
There's a famous story about an exchange between the Earl of Sandwich and John Wilkes (the story is often told with the parts improbably played by William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli). In a typical version, Wilkes or Gladstone exclaims:
Egad sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox.Sandwich or Disraeli replies smoothly:
That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
Disraeli despised Gladstone, and he as much as wished him dead in his famous definition of tragedy. Gladstone almost certainly had no mistress in the modern sense of that word, although he did pick up prostitutes (talked at 'em, tried to save their mortal souls). But Disraeli would not have made such an extreme comment. Disraeli probably despised Gladstone not for having bad principles as such, but for too many and impractical ones. He probably said as much somewhere. Disraeli reserved his most unfair criticisms for his novels, romans à clef.
You may be wondering if there is some reason why I have put here in a Russell-related entry all this stuff about an alleged conversation that probably didn't even take place between Wilkes and Sandwich. There is indeed.
The examples of ``[s]econd-declension nouns ending in -us,'' given above are both male. This isn't accidental; almost all second-declension nouns ending in -us are male. There are, as there will be, a few exceptions. One exception is domus (`house, home'), which is a fourth-declension female noun that sometimes takes second-declension endings. The only other native exceptions (as opposed to Greek loans) seem to be trees: fragus, fraxinus, pinus (`beech, ash, pine').
Brute is an evocative vocative, on account of Julius Caesar's alleged words as he was murdered. Among the conspirators was ``gentle Brutus'' (in the oxymoronic epithet of the bard), whom Caesar, who had no recognized son of his own, had regarded as a son. [In fact, there were rumors that Brutus was really Caesar's illegitimate son. Brutus was remembered in Julius Caesar's will, and Marc Antony (I mean Marcus Antonius, not the singer) scored tellingly against Brutus by revealing this in his funeral oration for Caesar. It has also been speculated that a shift in Caesar's sentiments, away from Brutus in favor of his nephew Octavius, helped sway Brutus to join the conspirators.]
The short version of the last-words story goes that as Julius Caesar fell, he said, ``Even you, Brutus!'' But of course he didn't say anything in English. In fact, in the history of Cassius Dio he says nothing at all, just grunts. For someone with 23 stab wounds, this is pretty plausible. (Even if only one, according to examining physician Antistius -- hi, Antisti! -- was fatal.) In Act III, Sc. i of the play ``Julius Caesar,'' Shakespeare has Caesar say, ``Et tu, Brute.'' This means the same thing in Latin as the English quote above, allowing for the fact that et, usually a conjunction meaning `and,' clearly expresses the idea of `even' here. But Caesar didn't speak this Latin either.
According to Suetonius (Divus Iulius 82.3), he spoke in Greek -- ``Kai su, teknon.'' Now, on its face, this should be translated as something like `And you, boy.' The use of Greek and the age-inappropriate teknon have been a puzzle for much of the last two millennia, but not enough of a puzzle to prevent people from generally assuming that it meant what Shakespeare rendered in his Latin.
That interpretation has changed due to an enormously influential paper by James Russell entitled ``Julius Caesar's last words; a reinterpretation.'' [This was published in Vindex humanitatis: Essays in honour of John Huntly Bishop, ed. B. Marshall, (Armidale, N.S.W., Australia: Univ. of New England, 1980), pp. 123-128.] Russell's main point was that ``kai su'' was a standard (Greek) apotropaic formula that would have been well known to educated Romans like Caesar and Brutus. In other words, Caesar was not expressing surprised dismay, but rather cursing Brutus and also insulting him by calling him ``boy'' (and possibly also lending sly support to that rumor that Brutus was Caesar's own son). Quite a performance for three last words.
Just as a sidenote here, I'd like to explain something about the careful scientific process by which we decide what information to place in this glossary. This entry, for Brute, is fairly typical. It was only created to keep the preceding entry company. (That one, for BRUTE, is here because BRUTE is an acronym.) The brutes would have looked a bit thin and lonely otherwise. The next question, given that there must be a Brute entry, is what to put in. Only the most important information, of course, but where to stop? The answer is, where we get stuck. We usually get stuck when we reach the point of having difficulty finding compact wording to explain one or more further topics. (In the case of this entry, the topics are the story of the legendary ancestor of Brutus who earned his line the cognomen Brutus and who defeated Tarquin; Shakespeare's poem ``The Rape of Lucretia'' about the signal event in that legend; the Kenny Rogers ballad ``Coward of the County'' in which Becky has the role of Lucretia and Tommy that of Brutus; the fact that the modern English word brute has a connotation of violence, associated with the word brutal, that was originally absent in the Latin word brutus; the survival of the original sense in the mathematical term ``brute force''; the fact that the earlier meaning has something to do with the Greek word baris; and the fact that I haven't had a chance to actually read J. Russell's paper, but I guess he got his ideas in part from what he learned over his many years' excavations at Anemurium in Isauria.) When we get stuck in this way, of course, we set the new entry aside ``to think about it'' for a couple of months or a couple of years. When we finally get back to it later, we can't remember what it was we were going to add to finish the entry, so the entry is effectively complete and we publish it.
^H is ASCII 8,
^I (HT) is ASCII 9,
^J (LF) is ASCII 10, ... hmmm.
Cf. DEL.
They excerpt an explanation of just what Bibliography is.
Sounds like a 3AM TV movie.
A group of fish is a school. A group of bees is a swarm.
HTH.
Cattle affected by BSE first appear alert but agitated, anxious and apprehensive. Later: abnormal posture, spastic and frenzied movements, clumsy gait, skin wounds caused by falls, wasting syndrome accompanied by normal appetite. Another cause of wasting syndrome in cows is hardware disease (more at cow magnet entry).
For more on mad cows, have a gander at ``The Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page'' or this long list of links or this other site.
The first major BSE event was the one that began in Spring 1996 involving British cattle. The UK government confirmed that a number of people who had consumed BSE-tainted beef later developed a variant form of CJD. The EU then imposed an embargo on the export of British beef, beef products, etc., that was not lifted until August 1999.
BSE detectors are typically solid-state scintillation counters, since the high-energy electrons can generate photons efficiently. BSE detects are sometimes segmented for a coarse-grain energy resolution that yields more compositional resolution.
Goethe had Mephistopheles say
Grau, teuer Freund, ist alle Theorie[All theory is gray, dear friend; / The golden tree of life is green.]
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
``We are called a British Society, not for chauvinist reasons, but simply because we want cheap and accessible conferences. We welcome foreign participation and membership.'' I never realized how simple it was! Henceforth, I will be called a ``British webmaster.''
The Bodleian Library is the famous old library at Oxford. To get in if you're not affiliated with the university, you have to apply at a local office full of supplicants. Oxford must do this to keep the tourists at bay, but they're very understanding and helpful if you seem to be a serious researcher. I am reminded that they make you promise aloud that you won't damage or steal the books. I forgot. Uh-oh.
``Welcome to the web-pages of The British Society for Phenomenology. The BSP is an international independent academic society which seeks via its conferences and workshops to promote awareness of, study of and research into the European Phenomenological Tradition and its cognate arms of philosophy. Through its journal - the Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology - the Society champions publications and book reviews in the field of phenomenology, contemporary European Philosophy, social philosophy, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and other associated branches of philosophical research.''
``The BSP seeks to provide a friendly and supportive forum for inter-disciplinary discussion amongst those with broad philosophical interests.'' STOP RIGHT THERE!
``Supportive'' could be one of the filthiest words in scholarship. Scholars should attack each others' work in a friendly way. That people who can think tolerate the airy effusions that others call philosophy is one of the main reasons why that ``discipline'' does neither attain consciousness nor yet die.
On page 163 of his autobiographical or fictional I Lost My English Accent (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939), C.V.R. Thompson wrote:
I'm surprised that this seems not to be hackneyed.
I got sunburned in London in July 1990.
Ball State is in Muncie, Indiana. When the Lynds published their landmark sociological study of a typical small midwestern city, they called it ``Middletown.''
A young woman I know is moving to Atlanta this winter to pursue a BSW at Georgia State. I asked her how she chose social work as a career, and she explained that her high school (South Bend's Washington High School) has an extensive pre-nursing program (``not just candy-striping''), and that while she was in that she realized that she couldn't bear the stench.
I never asked her why she left the army. For information of equally general applicability, but concerning the engineering professions, see the Chas. entry.
More about Bhutan, or not, at ABPT entry.
But seriously folks, the New York Times reported that the King, who is a great fan of soccer, gave up playing goalie when he realized that none of his subjects would dare try to put a goal past him. He loves soccer so much that he allowed TV into the country for the world cup.
See also The Theatre of Small Convenience.
The first famous Boltzmann Equation was written, oddly enough, by Ludwig Boltzmann himself. It took explicit account of particle-particle scattering, and with it Boltzmann proved his famous H-theorem, that there was a quantity whose time evolution was monotonic (on average). This was quite important at the time because it convinced many skeptics of the second law of thermodynamics.
See TiN entry.
Ulrich Schmitzer's review of BTL2 for Gymnasium (in German) is available on line.
In accordance with Education Code section 44259(c), induction programs may be offered by school districts, county offices of education, and/or institutions of higher education. Section 44279.2(c)of the Education Code allows local education agencies to apply for and receive state funding to support induction programs through the Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment System, a program that is administered jointly by the California Department of Education (CDE) and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC).''
The BTU was originally defined as the energy needed to raise the temperature of a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit (from 58.5°F to 59.5°F, at a pressure of one atmosphere). One watt is 3.413 BTU/hr.
What did people do with themselves? It's impossible to imagine.
BTW, that's the motto of this glossary.
Let a1, a2, ... an, be n independent quantities measurable in terms of m independent dimensions or units. The theorem states that if f(a1, a2, ... an) = 0 has a solution (i.e., if f has a root), then that solution is of the form F(b1, b2, ... bn-m) = 0, where the {b} are independent, dimensionless products of the {a}. It's the fundamental theorem justifying dimensional analysis, but most people just use dimensional analysis when, by hook or crook, n = m.
(The name, 
[Pi] Theorem, apparently comes from
the fact that the {b} were written with that character to indicate
that they represented products.)
Hey, wasn't Buckingham the guy who came up with the theme for Friends? Oops, my bad: the Friends theme song, ``I'll Be There For You,'' was performed by the Rembrandts. I was thinking of the Buckinghams, who had five Top-40 hits in 1967. ``Kind Of A Drag'' was probably their greatest hit, and hit #1 that year. It wouldn't be a bad title for a text book of aerodynamics. Aerodynamics makes extensive use of dimensional analysis.
Illustration below is mirrored from http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/b/bball.gif.
close
closer
too close.
When two buffalo fight, it is the grass that gets hurt.
Occasionally a team name is constructed from a definitized singular, as in ``the Stanford [Univ.] Cardinal,'' although this singularity is often forgotten. This works better with uncountable nouns, as in `the Nashville Sound'' or ``the Utah Jazz.'' And in case you're wondering: yes, the Jazz was originally a New Orleans team. In the early days of the National League, Buffalo had a team; Buffalo once had a basketball team as well. Alas, the vicissitudes of time.
Editorial Health Advisory: this entry contains pointlessly odd formatting.
Anyway, the Buffalo Bills are the only team in American pro football (NFL) with a name that is constructed from another proper noun. ``Buffalo Bill'' was the nickname of William Frederick Cody. He was not from Buffalo, but he killed some as a frontier scout, and in 1883 he started a ``Wild West Show'' that toured the US and Europe. This was a popular show, with spin-offs and tie-ins, and even though Buffalo Bill himself died in 1917, you could still join a young boys' adventurers' club and get a Cody decoder ring if you order now as recently as the 1960's. I think so, anyway. You get old your memory starts to fail and you start going off on random tangents. In It's a Wonderful Life a young George Bailey tells a young Mary Hatch about being an explorer and reading National Geographic. No ring, but then George was always the literary type. Some years later, George Bailey's father tells him that he was ``born older'' than his brother. If I was born older that would go a long way to explaining my literary style [called ``Krimanian Discursive Geometry'' by Steve Bishop, who did photospectroscopy before he got into the research lab director racket]. Eventually, George tells his dad that he loves him, or that he's a swell guy or something, which is probably about as close as you could get to saying something like that in a movie in the days of the Hayes office anyway. (The possible team name ``the Hayes Office Days'' is not taken yet.) Amazing but true, there were things that Frank Capra left out of the movie to
keep it from being too corny,
like having George get down on his knees and recite the Lord's prayer at the end of the movie.(That was in the script at one point.) From her listening post behind the door, the maid declares that it was about time that one of the two lunk-heads expressed affection (I paraphrase). That night, George goes to his brother's high school senior prom, where he dances with Buckwheat's date, Donna Reed, who is playing the older Mary Hatch, who at that point of the movie is younger than actress Donna Reed. This is a bit unusual. Usually, actresses are cast older than their actual age, like Phylicia Rashad as Mrs. Huxtable, or Mrs. Robinson, the `older woman lover' of Benjamin Braddock (played by Anne Bancroft, and Dustin Hoffman, 36 and 30 years old at the time, respectively, but she got some make-up aging) in ``The Graduate'' (1967). Barry Williams, the actor who played Greg Brady on the original Brady Bunch series, briefly dated Florence Henderson, who played his mom on the show. More about Mrs. Robinson and these issues at the entry for the Car Door Slam Method.
But the main thing about age is that you get old your memory starts to fail and you start going off on random tangents. I think I mention that elsewhere in this reference work. It's good to have a reference work where I can discard used thoughts, since I don't know if I'll ever remember where I put them, because when you get old your memory starts to go. George Bailey's father has a fatal heart attack that night, and four years later, as he is about to leave town and do some exploring, George finally gets a ring, but he gives it to Mary Hatch and they get married. Rap! ... Rap-Rap! Uh-oh, e. e. cummings is paging me from the other side.
Back before I was a kid, mothers would get their sons National Geographic so they wouldn't steal their dads' Playboy magazines. A sort of homeopathic browsing prescription. (Update here.) George Bailey probably would have read the accompanying text as well, but in any case, the movie is set (and was made) in a time before Playboy. Sex itself was only invented in 1953, and at first it was available only by prescription. (Phillip Larkin had an alternate opinion.)
You know, if you came here for information about Wild Bill Hikock, you're probably wondering why so few pages turned up on your internet search, forcing you to visit us as a last resort. The reason is that his last name is spelled Hickok. But Wild Bill Hickok was somebody other than Buffalo Bill. He wasn't even a William.
Of course, you probably didn't come here to learn all of that. You wanted to find out about the Bills per
se, rather than about the linguistic and historical significance of their name,
let alone the other stuff. You should have visited
There's something called the Universal Cheerleaders Association, but they're not a union. They are ``the largest organizer and producer of cheerleading camps, regional and national competitions, and summer conferences in the United States.''
Some surfers who browse here are not interested in NFL cheerleader labor relations, despite the interesting questions raised about trade versus industrial unionizing and how that would affect struck games. Instead, a small number of our visitors are interested in alright! alright already! pictures of cheerleaders. Here's a site that has what you came here for. That site does not have Buffalo Jills pictures at this writing, so you might try some individual admirers' sites like Paul Kiister's. and the Unofficial Buffalo Bills Home Page.
There is a Buffalo Official Online Guide.
There's also a page constructed with the desultory assistance of usacitylink, which demonstrates the awesome power and utility of the internet by giving you the current time and date in Buffalo.
The hottest and best wings near UB are found at Duff's, on the SE corner of S...I-can't-believe-I-forgot-the-name and Millersport, about a mile south of the hotel cluster near the North campus. Sheridan and Millersport. Open for lunch. Like good Texas chili, the strongest stuff makes your forehead sweat and your ears tingle. Across Millersport from Tandoori Kitchen, where the chicken vindaloo is not as hot.
The other local food is beef on weck. That's roast beef on a Kaiser roll. ``Weck'' is short for Kümelweck, a German variety of cumin that is used to flavor the rolls. Good with mustard, spiral fries garnished with vinegar, and beer. Especially beer.
Among the ``southtowns'' (towns south of Buffalo or south of the main East-West rail lines) is a town named Hamburg since 1812. Hamburg is one of the places that claims to be the home of the American Hamburger (sold during a world fair ca. 1903). They have a water tower with a tank that from time to time has been painted to look very convincingly like a juicy hamburger on a bun. On April 21, 2003, PETA sent a fax to the town offering to supply $15,000 worth of mutilated plant matter to feed the cattle in area schools (not PETA's wording) if only the town would change its name to Veggieburg. PETA spokesman Joe Haptas claimed that the publicity ploy was ``serious as a heart attack.'' I don't much doubt it. I do doubt that $15,000 would even cover the costs of changing the signage and stationery, or the revenue that would probably be lost from the town's annual Burgerfest. Hamburg town supervisor Patrick Hoak's (nudge) response: ``We're proud of our name and proud of our heritage.''
What I want is for neighboring towns to change their names, to ``Mayo,'' etc. There's also a Hamburg in Germany (see HH).
The couple said that they were under the ``impression [that] Chuck-A-Rama was an all-you-can-eat establishment'' and demanded a refund. The manager refused and called the police when they refused to leave. Jack Johanson, the chain's district manager, explained that buffet is not a synonym of all-you-can-eat: ``We've never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment, our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating.''
There you have it: if you're on an all-you-can-eat type of diet, then a buffet restaurant may not cut it.
Incidentally, not long after this incident, I ate at an Iron Skillet somewhere along the Ohio Turnpike. They had an ``All-You-Can-Eat Buffet.'' I was careful to observe that the menu did not use quotation marks around any part of the overweight compound noun I quoted in the preceding sentence. The qualifier that Iron Skillet uses suggests that the unqualified term ``buffet'' does indeed just describe a ``style of eating.'' (More eating than style, though.) The Iron Skillet restaurants I've seen cater to truckers, and many are open 24/7. All-You-Can-Eat and 24/7 sounds like a recipe for occasional disaster to me.
Singular bugloss and plural buglosses grow in the Scrabble tablelands. That's where I found it.
In a little book of quotations of Charles Barkley, compiled from press clippings and published when he was still playing for the Phoenix Suns, he recalls a conversation with his family. They criticize him for voting Republican -- the party of millionaires, but he protests that ``I am a millionaire.'' Money talks.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1964, he observed that he had signed away the Democratic party's strength in the South for the rest of his life. If the civil rights movement had been even more effective he might have lost the Democratic party's strength in the Black community. Abraham Lincoln and the radical Republicans (how oddly that phrase rings today!) won the Black vote for many decades after the Civil War; the broad loyalty of African Americans to the Democratic party dates from the administrations of FDR. Jack Kemp, former quarterback (QB) for the Buffalo Bills, appeared for a while to be the only prominent member of the Republican party seriously interested in bringing blacks back into the party.
History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
Some people I've told about this have expressed skepticism. They say it couldn't have happened. Look: before you jump to conclusions, let me point out that it was a pretty humid day, like maybe 2000%. The air was way heavy. It was just one of those days when relatively light wooden objects might weigh less than the air they displace. It's the reason trees have roots. Light things rise from the depths, if they're really light; Alicia Silverstone has explained this rather succinctly in an oceanographic context. Still don't believe me? Some people are pretty stubborn. You know, there's probably a physical law that says if you saw it happen with your own eyes, then it happened. Now do you believe me? Sheesh. Wait a sec, I'll put Gary on the keyboard:
Yeah, like Al said. Good thing the skylight was insured. But, did I ever tell you how I got that piece? No? It's a pretty interesting story, I -- Uh Gary, Gary? -- same piece at Menards, but $40 more, so -- Gary, I don't think they care how -- make a deal, but I said ``Look -- Gary, gimme the keyboard! -- Al, they probably want to know where they could get a good deal on a TV table, don't-- legGO! It's MY computer! --MY modem. Now where was but I'm the glossary guy! What, this is the glossary? I thought it was live.
Well, you heard it folks, broke through the skylight, just like I said.
This is probably as good a place as any to mention George Carlin's explanation of Frisbeetarianism -- ``the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.''
Don't laugh -- it's a religion: you're supposed to respect!
And so everyone present begged the architect to tell them how the weight of the wood could be scientifically and reliably measured against that of water; and he explained the matter succinctly and clearly, in such a way that it was understood by all except the philosophers. He was in fact constrained to repeat the explanation a second and a third time; and finally, with great difficulty, they managed to understand it.``It is quite true,'' said the architect, ``what most people say of them--that they possess nothing but the false conceit of knowledge. For it has been proved that in areas where knowledge is difficult they understand nothing; in areas where it is easy, they merely pretend to know.''
The Affections and Errors of the Soul
Galen
tr. P. N. Singer
Coming back to this entry years later, I don't know if that was a spelling error or a joke. Certainly bottom-up review is the sort of term that could be entertainingly misunderstood, but not so much this way. Joseph Bottum is the Books and Arts editor for The Weekly Standard and does other reviewish things like hosting ``Book Talk,'' a syndicated radio show.
I'm reminded of Dante's journey in the Divine Comedy, as Virgil carries him on his back out of the Inferno. At the center of the earth, with great effort, Virgil turns around to be upright again on the other side (they're ``headed'' for the antipode along the most direct route). When Dante looks down again he sees the feet of the devil sticking ``up.''
[In Dante's time there was still a great uninformed debate going on about whether gravity increased or diminished as one approached the center of the Earth (and the universe as then understood, of course). ``Dante's time'' was 1265-1321. Even back at the beginning of the Christian era, there had been few among the educated who thought that the Earth was flat; by the time Columbus proposed to sail west to reach the Indies, no one seriously suggested that he would fall off an edge of the Earth. It was correctly thought that westward was far the longer way around.]
The following is widely attributed, on the internet, to Mary McCarthy:
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
The line first appeared in The New Yorker, on page 186 of the issue of October 18, 1958. (You might want to note that information in detail; the magazine is available in many on-line databases, but none of them go back much before the 1990's. The printed magazine has no table of contents, and the article authors are listed at the ends of the articles. And if your library is my library, then this issue is in a volume that didn't make it into the electronic catalog.)
The quote is from McCarthy's rave review (pp. 182-189) of a book with the not especially imaginative title of The Human Condition (Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1958). The book is by Hannah Arendt, whom McCarthy does not happen to identify there as a good friend of hers. This is one of those teachy reviews in which it's not always clear what part is about the book and what part is about the reviewer's reaction to the book. In the pages preceding the quote, McCarthy went on about the difference between work and labor (craftsmanship and drudgery, essentially). These are important terms, along with ``action,'' that are discussed in Arendt's book. The relevant paragraph, however, concerns an ancient-modern comparison which ``is not in fact made in her book'' and which frankly doesn't seem to have a great deal to do with it either. Here's immediate context for the quote:
Progress has effected not a steady march but a bewildering transformation. The supplanting of tools by machinery has reached its logical conclusion in automation; the discoveries of physics and chemistry have interfered with the life process (artificial insemination) and with inanimate nature, while the vast growth of the social [sic], steadily encroaching on both private and public life, has produced the eerie phenomenon of mass society, which rules everybody anonymously, just as bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Oh man, if I keep looking up etymologies I'm never going to memorize the OSPD4. How will I ever win games against Gary again when he practices against a computer and is faculty advisor to the Scrabble Club?! (Needless to say, burl, burls, burled, and burling are in SOWPODS and TWL2006 as well.)
The first thing to know about Burmese people names is that Burmese people don't use family names. Okay, I guess this often applies to Burmese cats as well. Children simply receive given names at birth, and these names carry no geneological information other than that they are likely the children of Burmese parents. Then again, the child may be named after the parent. For example, well-known Aung San Suu Kyi was named after her father, the independence hero Aung San.
Traditionally, astrologers are consulted to help choose a success-oriented name. A general with the inauspicious-sounding name of Ne Win became head of the military junta that installed itself in 1962, and then president under a new constitution promulgated in 1974, so his parents' astrologer must really have known his stuff. Then again, Ne Win is not an unusual name.
Given names were commonly just a single syllable long as late the beginning of the twentieth century, but they've been lengthening more or less systematically, and nowadays newborns typically get names that are three to five syllables long.
Back in 1999, in a classics-list discussion of Circassian women (of legendary beauty), I recalled reading of one such in the second book of Candide. I recalled incorrectly: a favorite odalisque of Candide there was Zirza, not (necessarily) Circassian. (In my defense, c for z is an easy switch in some languages, and may have been made in the translation I read.) Some years later, I received an email from a woman who had read my posting in the classics-list archives; she informed me that (a) she was Circassian, and (b) it's true about Circassian women. I didn't write back asking for proof, which demonstrates that I am a clueless moron.
Anyway, the second book, like the first, is framed as a translation (to the French) from the original German of one ``M. le Docteur Ralph.'' This sequel is not well known. Trying to learn more back in 1999, I spoke with a local professor of French who taught Candide regularly in her classes; she was unaware of the sequel. I now understand that the sequel is considered spurious, and that its true author is apparently unknown. I did learn something from the French professor, however. She shocked me with the information that her students don't realize that Candide is funny.
For an example closer to homepage, you can visit our ENT entry. When I first wrote it, I assumed people would ``get it.'' (I think it was only one paragraph long, then.) Eventually, I received a polite email explaining that otorhinolaryngology was Latin (!) for the ENT thing. I surrender.
I imagine many people today might not recognize an allusion to Dale Carnegie's self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People. First published in 1936 and based on a 14-week course he had been teaching, it has sold 15 million copies world-wide, and remains in print in a revised edition (1981). In 2010 or so, a display case that my local Barnes and Noble has at the front of the store to draw the attention of incoming customers featured two books: this one and one from the 1950's (one of Vance Packard's books, I think it was); they were being plugged as ``New Books.'' So much for the lemma; on to the trivial theorem.
Toby Young (born 1963) had many publishing failures until he wrote a memoir about them, entitled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2001). Now the corollary.
The Young ``How To'' book also achieved world-wide success. It became a best-seller and was translated into a dozen languages, anyway, and it was made into a movie (2008) starring Megan Fox, Kirsten Dunst, and a couple of guys. The screenplay for that movie was done by Peter Straughan, but the book's success had garnered Young an invitation to try his luck as a Hollywood writer. He failed there too, and wrote a memoir of his new failures entitled The Sound of No Hands Clapping (2006). Is Tom Young the George Plimpton of our time?
Remark: I suppose Young's earlier title may also have been meant as an allusion to Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. That was an autobiography that Bruce had the foresight to publish in 1965, the year before he died of a drug overdose, aged 40. Lenny Bruce was a comedian, and one whom we (or at least English professors) would now describe as ``transgressive.'' His audiences might gasp rather than clap with two hands... or laugh. Riverrun.
Four frustrating hours in a chat room with forty indistinguishable nonpunctuating flirts frothing about phone sex, and then finally someone says something to make it all worthwhile.
/2 (90°) to the right of the velocity
direction;
in the southern hemisphere, to the left. This simple rule is the consequence
of the dominance of Coriolis [fictitious] force over ordinary centrifugal
[fictitious] force. The former is ``omega cross vee'' while the latter is
``omega cross (omega cross arr).'' [Here omega is the Earth's orbital angular
momentum vector, vee is the local wind velocity, arr is the position vector
(most conveniently defined with an origin at the earth's center), and woe is me
that the standard ISO character set has
virtually no Greek.] Clearly, however, the
centrifugal force is larger, since (omega cross arr) is the surface speed of
the earth itself -- much larger than puny
vee (order of 20-30 mph in a typical cold front, up to 200 mph in the terror
hurricanes that come once per century or so).
The point, however, is that when the wind is still and there is no pressure
gradient, the centrifugal force is already acting, but the BB law is concerned
with the additional effect of relative velocities to induce pressure
gradients: When the air ``starts moving'' (relative to the local piece of
earth), the centrifugal force is unchanged but the Coriolis force changes.
Interestingly, the law named after Christoph Hendrik Diederik Buys Ballot had previously been discovered both by James Henry Coffin and by William Ferrel, and Ferrel had actually explained it (correctly) in terms of Coriolis force, while Buys Ballot merely reported it as a statistical regularity. This injustice is typical. Buys Ballot was a science bureaucrat -- he chaired a bunch of committees and tried to steer the research efforts of his intellectual superiors. He had entered the field of meteorology when he failed at chemistry. He claimed Sine hypothesi scientia nulla, but most of his research consisted in dull accountancy: looking for regular patterns in the vast meteorological data that technology (the telegraph) was then making available. In his creative application of busy, mind-numbing mediocrity, he was truly a man ahead of his time.
In England, ``blessed'' was once used to allude to BVM, and in that sense was regarded as sacrilegious. ``Bloody'' eventually came to be a standard euphemism for ``blessed,'' and it is by that route that ``bloody'' came to be regarded (perhaps no longer in our decadent time) as profane.
That's one story, anyway. I've heard that it was debunked, but I haven't the bloody time to look into it.
Typical analog telephone bandwidth is somewhat under 3 kHz. Digital
cellular phones can sound cruddy because they use only 1 kHz (and
compression; a very unsolved problem over lossy channels).
The selection of books at the website is curious, possibly because the website lists only those books they couldn't unload in bulk. Unexpectedly for a charity that gets its books in end-of-year donations from college students, textbooks, especially recent textbooks, are poorly represented. I just took a peek at the books accumulated at the donation box on campus, and what I saw were recently-published textbooks. Also, the price distribution is bimodal. Do a title-word search on chemistry and you'll find a bunch of old texts for two to ten bucks, a number of monographs for $250+, and little in between. Anyway, not a bad place to look for used textbooks, if you know what to get.
Three-Card Monte bunko artists on the streets of New York City often use a shill of a different race than the dealer, to dispell the (correct) suspicion that that lucky man in the crowd is a confederate of the dealer. (The game is completely rigged; the job of the shill is to be allowed to win, thus encouraging others to risk and lose their money.) This different-race decoy practice is not called ``B&W'' but salt'n'peppa.
Isn't it wonderful how the workplace is tearing down traditional barriers between the races?
In various cities and various times, black-and-white has been the color scheme of one or another fleet of vehicles (police, typically, back as recently as the 1960's, and sometimes taxis). There and then, ``a black-and-white'' has meant one of those vehicles.
You wanted to know about Botswana? Its CIA World Factbook page is here.
... The job of admissions officers is to recruit, to boost application numbers. The more applications, the lower the admit rate, the higher the institutional ranking. Increasing application numbers is usually the No. 1 mandate of the recruiting season. Partly, that means trying to get the very best students to apply. But it also means trying to persuade those regular, old Bright Well-Rounded Kids (B.W.R.K.'s, in admissionese) to apply -- so that the college can reject them and bolster its selectivity rating. Reject them because there are so many of them, and because they're actually not as interesting as the "well-lopsided" kids -- those who have shown real prowess and potential in a more focused manner.
We'll be replicating traditional pharmacological studies. Repeatability is a hallmark, or a benchmark, or a trademark, or a foomark of Science. Repetition is a sign of addiction.
In fact, why don't you just stay home?
Generally, language communicates information. When language appears not to be performing the communicative function, it is really just performing it in a more subtle way. When something obvious is stated, the fact being communicated is not the obvious stated fact -- which was already known to the reader or hearer. Instead, what is communicated is an acknowledgment by the speaker that the obviously true fact is also important enough to bear in mind. To be a little more precise, this is the meaning intended to be conveyed. The significance, and the meaning understood, may be simply the author's continued fear of those who would insist on continued emphasis on the disclaimer.
This is rather too abstract, isn't it? It would be considered so, by some.
There's a suggestion there that byte was an acronym, but lots of people suppose it's intended to suggest bite and allude to bit. Cf. nybble.
If there's a possibility of confusion with bytes of length different than eight bits, you can use the term octet.
Oh well, B0 is just one more doomed effort to crack the world dominance of paper sizes that are measured out in inches. A0, A1, etc., are defined so that the area is rational, but the length and width are irrational -- they are rational numbers times (alternately) 2¼ and 2¾. B0, and B1 and the rest, manage to get one side rational, but the other side smaller or larger by a factor of the square root of two. It doesn't work! If you want paper with both width and length that are rational (i.e., that makes sense) in inches or even in centimeters, you gotta go with the real thing: eight-and-a-half-by-eleven! Yeah!
B0 paper has a width of one meter and a length of the square root of 2 (2½). Successive sizes (B1, B2, ...) have their linear dimensions shrunk by successive factors of 2½.
| Name | Area (sq cm) | Width (cm) | Length (cm) | Length (in) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| B0 | ||||
| B1 | ||||
| B2 | ||||
| B3 | ||||
| B4 | ||||
| B5 | ||||
| B6 |
Following are the conditions for reimbursement of visitors to an academic institution, under the liberalized rules that came into effect in January 2001.
| Travel status | Honorarium | Compensation for incidental expenses |
|---|---|---|
| B-1 visa or WB | Maybe | Permitted |
| B-2 visa or WT | Maybe | Maybe |
Incidental expenses are costs of travel, meals, and lodging. ``Maybe'' in the table above means permitted if and only if the visitor stays at the institution nine or fewer days, and has not accepted payments from more than five US entities in the preceding six months.
Another way to look at it is that tourists are like business travelers in that, to some extent, they may receive financial compensation. The rules are explained at the B-1 entry. This can be a problem, because in many academic disciplines, in many countries, an honorarium for the speaker is common courtesy. It might be embarrassing or rude not to return the favor. I've noticed that the honorarium is typically delivered in crisp Mark or yen notes, with a minimum of paperwork (it comes in a paper envelope).
Perhaps a word is in order here about rules. According to the bean counters at a certain large state university system, if I take a visitor out for dinner, we can go to an expensive French restaurant or to McDonalds or Hooters, it doesn't matter -- it's food and the expense is covered. But if we order a beer at Hooters, or if we are so gauche as to have wine with our French food, that's entertainment or something, and not a legitimate business expense. It is for wisdom like this that we have accountants. I certainly couldn't have figured this out myself. I probably still can't. So by all means go to Le Crazy Horse or a French restaurant, but for goodness sake don't be entertained, and don't itemize, or petty cash will have to take a hit. 'Nuff said.
(It could be worse: you could work for the US government.)
In the GNU release of grep, the options -A #1 and -B #2 cause #1 lines after and #2 lines before a matching line to be displayed.
WARNING! WARNING! Aliens Approaching!!(Flail arm-things.)
The most complete technical details are available here. Less-technical details at our camp entry.
B-9 was modeled on ``Robby the Robot'' from the classic Forbidden Planet. Robby was cool; a couple of space cadets, or troops or whatever, give him some whisky to analyze. Can he synthesize some more?
Robby: Would 60 gallons be sufficient?
