In case this wasn't obvious: Caia (later spelled Gaia, as above) was a woman's name corresponding to Caius (just as Julia corresponded to Julius). This name had nothing to do with the Greek word Gaia.
Yes, ``G.'' was sometimes used, but less often.
Frederic D. Allen wrote an article entitled ``Gajus or Gaïus'' for volume 2 of HSCP (1891), pp. 71-87, in order to collect in one place the evidence for whether Gaius was pronounced disyllabically (with a consonantal i) or trisyllabically. He marshaled evidence from Latin, other local languages (Faliscan, Oscan, and Etruscan cognates are known) and from Greek. His concluding paragraph:
As results of the foregoing investigation, we may lay down: (1) that the name designated by the Romans by the letter C was originally Gauius; (2) that this form had passed into Gaius by 190 B.C., though it survived longer in some of the provinces of Italy; (3) that for some reason, not assignable at present, the customary pronunciation (of the educated classes at least) remained Gaïus (trisyllabic) at any rate until the end of the first century of our era, and probably still longer.
The puzzlement implied in the third point reflects the fact that while Gaius maintained its distract form, other -aiu- forms like Maius and Graius assume contract forms relatively early. Allen can think of no other explanation for the difference than the etymology (and the lingering usage) summarized in (1) and (2).
Learn useful stuff about carbon at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool. What's this? There are also lithium entries at WebElements and at Chemicool.
I really ought to have something to say about carbon, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the task. Have you ever heard of organic chemistry? Why don't you examine one of our diamond entries?
This is a sensible-enough proposition: compared with human scales of length and time, the precision with which time can be measured or defined is sharper than the corresponding length precision. Thus, defining a length unit in terms of a time unit allows one, in principle if not exactly in practice, to define a length unit more accurately than current length measurement allows. But however sensible this may be, and no matter for how long time measurement continues to be more precise than length measurement, the value of c will probably change at some point. The reason is that measurement is a simple but tedious subject which attracts minds that can master nothing more subtle. Self-important busybodies come to dominate the international weights-and-measures organizations during the long periods when well-enough ought to be left alone, and eventually they agree among themselves to make their dominance felt in some unnecessary decision or another.
Physicists often use a value of unity for the speed of light. That is, we assume that one second equals 299 million-odd meters. This is convenient and entirely legitimate, but at first (in a junior-level ``Modern Physics'' course, say) it can seem confusing. For one attempt to ease the discomfort, see the GeV entry.
In ``Genie In A Bottle,'' Christina Aguilera sings
Hormones racing at the speed of light But that don't mean it's gotta be tonight Baby baby baby (baby baby baby...)
Here's something less recent, from Flamm O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939):
Excellent, remarked Mr. Furriskey with that quiet smile which endeared him to everyone who happened to come his way, but do not overlook this, that the velocity of light in vacuo is 186,325 miles per second.
There are different stories about the origin of the Fahrenheit scale (°F). I like the one according to which it was defined in terms of a zero set by a particular brine fusion point and a high temperature of 100 equal to the human body temperature. That would make Fahrenheit and Celsius both centigrade scales. However, I'm informed that ``other versions have the defined points at 0° and 96°; 32° and 96°; or even 0°, 32°, and 96°.'' Fahrenheit was vague about this in his one published explanation of how the scale was defined and thermometers calibrated, but seemed to imply he used all three points. It's been suggested that he was trying to disinform his competitors.
So Celsius thought the temperature should decrease when things got hot, and Fahrenheit was okay with water freezing at 25 and body temperature about three times that, maybe. Didn't anybody have an intuitive system with sensible numbers? How about Réaumur?
Center is also a position in other sports, like...
Center is also a position in related sports like soccer and rugby, as well as many other team sports played on fields, courts, or rinks with two mirror symmetries (lacrosse, field and ice hockey, volleyball, basketball... the list goes on, but I don't). Center is usually a center forward (or center midfield) position, and the center or center-forward position is usually a scoring position. In football, the flashy players on offense and special teams are in the backfield. Football is like chess, with the forward positions uncelebrated, providing protection and making opportunities for the sprinters that start out behind. It's a game of strategy -- it's cerebral! That's why head protection is considered so important, see?
This is a good opportunity to mention that the chess game in the first Harry Potter book is a lot more convincing than quidditch in any of the rest that I've read. Quidditch is basically two games going on in parallel. One game has most of the players and more often than not is completely irrelevant. The other game is determined mostly by the ride, with glory going to the jockey. I tellya, it's pure make-believe.
At the time of the French revolution, an attempt was made to institute metric time, or at least more evenly-spaced, conventional time units. There were thus to be ten hours in a day and ten days in a week, exactly three weeks in every month, with five or six intercalary days at the end of every year. The idea never caught on, unless you count Mexico. In Mexico, you hear the expression ``ahorita nomás,'' but it sounds like ``horita nomás.'' That is: you are told ``in a small now'' and you think you hear ``in a little hour.''
There's a new effort to institute metric time. A proposal to standardize time references on the internet is based on thousandths of a day or 1.44 minutes (1:26.4), called pieces.
[An aitch elision that sounds similar is in name of a Classical Greek verb form known as aorist, which comes from a- and horizein. (It's not really an aitch, we write aitch to indicate rough breathing in Ancient Greek words.) Come to think of it, ahorita nomás is in fact a kind of aorist tense marker, indicating the action in a casual sort of way, without any real information about its completion. It could conceivably be useful in translating the Greek New Testament into Spanish. Okay, I'm joking. But in case you wanted to know, this flip bit of slang does not occur in any common Spanish translations of the Bible. Not even the dumbed-down (this is kind) Biblia en Lenguaje Sencillo.]
Thomas Jefferson, who was a big booster of decimal units (it is largely due to his influence that we had 100 cents per dollar while the British still had that colorful system of farthing, pence, and shilling), proposed a time standard that was based on a length unit (about a foot): the second was to be the small-oscillation period of a pendulum of standard length.
Note that the present system of numbering centuries was developed before the concept of zero had rediffused back into Europe. It's not clear what would have occurred in the alternative, but in the event, the first hundred years of the common era CE are known as the ``first'' century. This is preceded immediately by the ``first'' century BC or BCE. There is no zeroth century. Similarly, the first year of the first century CE (abbreviated a number of ways, including ``1 c. CE'') is the year one (abbreviated ``1 CE''). It is preceded immediately by the year 1 BCE, which is the last year of 1 c. BCE. In other words, there is no year zero either. Moreover, the first one hundred years, beginning from 1 CE, did not end in the year 99. Instead, they ended with the last day of the year 100. The new century thus began with the year 101. It is left as an exercise for the reader to show that 1901 was the first year of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first century will begin on New Year's Day in 2001. All of you people who celebrate at the end of 1999, it's like arriving an hour early for a party, only 8760 times worse.
To this, Wendy Warren answers ``The fun is when the calendar goes from one-nine-nine-nine to two-zero-zero-zero.'' According to a front-page article in the Monday, December 18, 1995 New York Times (which is often reliable) Warren and 900 of her closest friends have booked a hollow 600-foot obelisk in Seattle to celebrate the coming simultaneous triple-carry of the annual shift register.
TAFKAP had a hit record in the mid-eighties called ``(Tonight) We're Gonna Party Like It's Nineteen Ninety Nine.'' Already this year, the murder rate in Minneapolis is higher than in New York City. [National Lampoon's ``Deteriorata'' (a parody of Max Ehrman's ``Desiderata'') offers the following consolation: ``And reflect that whatever fortunes may be your lot, / It could only be worse in Milwaukee.'' Minneapolis is in Minnesota; Milwaukee is in Wisconsin. The consolation preceding the one just quoted is ``Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese.'' Wisconsin (WI) is known for cheese. What is the deeper meaning of this poem?]
The US Naval Observatory (USNO) is doing its best to proselytize for the true millennium.
Personally, I prefer ``Cucaracha!''
In many particular applications, trades, and industries, absent any qualification or special context, ``concentration'' is implicitly concentration of a particular standard substance that is understood. In the wastewater treatment industry, that's disinfectant.
There is a natural unit of charge, of course -- the magnitude of charge on the proton or electron, typically written e or q. This is 1.602 × 10-19 C.
1 1 1 1 - + - + - + ... + - - ln(N) - C 1 2 3 Nconverge to zero as N approaches zero.
The value of C is approximately 0.577215... It is sometimes convenient to define a quantity gamma = exp(C) = 1.781072...
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes four C programs, not all of them short.
There have been one or two non-MS compilers available since at least 2005, but outside of a machine running Windows, it's hard to see much reason to move from C++. Scratch that; Novell sponsors an open-source project called Mono that ``provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.'' Its programming languages include no platform-independent C++, but it does include a C# compiler. That has to beat learning Objective-C just to pull in an extra 10% market share. (Nothing against Objective-C, but it's very different from C++. Objective-C takes its object model and syntax from Smalltalk, while C++ uses Simula-type objects. Objective-C's message-passing way of dealing with objects might be a more natural fit for event-driven programs, and it's charming that Objective-C is a strict superset of C, but these things don't make recoding easy. Translating between C++ and Objective-C requires thinking across two different models.)
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes three C# programs.
``Double plus'' is a Newspeak adverb; that might be one of the better reasons to switch to C# (``cee sharp'').
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes over a dozen C++ programs.
Now you, dear reader, are obviously a very sensible person, as evidenced by the fact that you are looking things up here in a (very good, I may say) glossary, instead of risking a vocable miscue. Alas, not everyone is as intelligent or even as conscientious as you. Some people see the word circa enough times, and they think they know what it means when they don't. They lack imagination, which is a necessary component of learning -- if you can't imagine alternatives, then you risk supposing they don't exist, and thus failing to realize that you have guessed wrong. To cut to the chase, what I'm trying to say here is that some people wildly misunderstand the term circa. They seem to think it's a word that just goes in front of a number to indicate that the number is a year. I won't characterize these people further, but I will note that they apparently have a statistically enhanced probability of attending ed school.
For a variant of this, see the links from this page (``Gallery of Space Books'') that is part of The Space Educators' Handbook. Among the books linked from there one finds, for example ``TOM CORBETT : A TRIP TO THE MOON (circa 1953)'' above the image and ``Copyright, 1953, by Rockhill Radio Recording'' below. You get the idea.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for California. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of California city and county links.
California is a community property state, but it's not the only one. I think Arizona is another. If you have a prenuptual agreement, then the community property laws still have to kick in at the end of ten years. Tom Cruise filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman as their tenth anniversary was approaching. I guess he couldn't think of what to get her. Or could.
The California Historical Society is online.
In 2003, California found itself in a hole about $38 billion deep. Governor Gray Davis suggested balancing the budget by firing all the teachers and tripling the auto registration fee, but he was only able to fully implement the second part of this plan. Nominally, the budget was balanced by the usual accounting tricks, but there's something truly original on the way: California is going to balance its budget by a direct application of democratic principles. Specifically, they're holding a recall election to see if Davis can keep his job, and who gets to replace him -- and anyone can get on the ballot for $3500. Everyone's joining the party! If just one third of California's population buys a place on the ballot, the budget will swing into surplus. Unbelievable! As I write on August 6, they're well on their way to solvency. I think I've heard about four million gubernatorial hopefuls who already filed their papers. There are probably also some relative unknowns (that girl I mention in the rehab entry, for example) who've filed but haven't had their fifteen minutes of air, yet. (Thank the gods for all those satellite channels.) Of course, because being a candidate for high state office has become so commonplace, a lot of people forget whether they've already filed; these people are encouraged to file again -- twice, thrice, whatever they can afford out of the Social Security check. They're always assured that ``filing again can not reduce your chances of winning.'' This is great! Good news: I hear the filing deadline will be extended due to ``unforeseen delays'' -- the unusual number of candidates is causing some logistical difficulties in the paper-ballot districts -- this is a uncharted seas for the phone-book publishers.
``Canadian initiative, Canadian initiative, ...'' works better than ``one sheep, two sheep, ....''
In breakfast menus, ``Canadian'' is an adjective meaning `with bacon,' just as ``Virginia'' is a dinner-menu adjective meaning `glazed ham' and ``Hawaiian'' is just an elegant way of saying `with a pineapple annulus.' ``Wisconsin'' (WI) means `with yellow cheese.' `Nova Scotia' or just `Nova' (in a food context) means `lots of fresh,' but can only modify the word salmon. ``Louisiana'' means `cooked with hot spices, and imagine accordion music in the background.' ``New York'' is a restaurant term meaning expensive. ``New York-style cheesecake'' is mostly manufactured in Philadelphia. Here's what Alice May Brock says:
Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.
When this entry was first written, Canada had ten provinces and two territories. The territories were distinguished by the fact that their capital cities had concatenated compound common nouns as names. To wit:
The capital cities of the provinces all have three or four vowels, so long as you spell out St. John's.There's a search site called <canada.com>.
On April 1, 1999, the region previously called the Northwest Territories (prescient plural there) fissioned into two, with about the eastern half becoming the new Nunavut Territory; the capital is Iqaluit (formerly called Frobisher Bay). Alas, Iqaluit doesn't look like a concatenated compound common noun, but you never know. I don't at any rate. Agglutination is a common feature of North American autochthon languages, so there's hope. ``Frobisher Bay'' at least consisted of two nouns, though they weren't concatenated and one was proper.
Here's the Canadian page of an X.500 directory.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the ccTLD with the greatest number of hyphenated second-level domains is <.ca>, on account of all the bilingual acronym pairs. The CBC sponsors a Canadian-oriented search engine called MegaCrawler. Not a whisper of French -- I am amazed. (To follow their links, copy the URL and remove the duplicated part.) There's also a Friendly Canadian search site that appears to use babelfish machine translation. Even Yahoo! Canada does better than that!
Here's something I hadn't realized: Canada is a part of Europe! In this online TNR article, editor-in-chief Martin Peretz explains ``Europe (by which I mean Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, Australia, and a few others) holds the fate of Palestine in its hands.'' There you go. His magazine is owned by a Canadian company, so I figure he ought to know. Australia is part of Europe too.
Also from the news media: Canada is a part of the US. Or so it seemed for a while in January 2009. For the incontrovertible evidence, you could visit the Financial Times page of World New Headlines, as I did. In the left sidebar, under ``World,'' I clicked on ``US.'' There I found an alphabetized list of US categories:
So at least part of the US is part of Europe too. Possibly not Hawaii, though. This is really almost as stupid as the new ESPN homepage unveiled at the beginning of January. Checking the next month, I see that the US category has been renamed ``US & Canada,'' and Canada has been moved to the end of the list. What about Mexico? Isn't Mexico a part of the US? President Polk sure thought so. The ESPN page has been somewhat repaired as well.
The Reform Party of Canada was founded by Preston Manning in 1987. For a while in the late 1990's the party was trying to enlarge by merging with some smaller parties on the right, which after the humiliation of 1993 included the Tories (also called Conservatives, PC), but the Tories weren't interested. Manning made a renewed push in this direction in 1998, and in 1999 a few provincial Tories from Ontario and Alberta left the PC and created a forthrightly temporary party called the United Alternative for the express purpose of consummating some such merger. In 2000, Reform and United Alternative merged.
At one time it appeared that the new name would be Conservative-Reform
Alliance Party, which would have had a pronounceable acronym, but for unknown
reasons that name wasn't chosen. Instead they have become the Canadian Reform
Conservative (no hyphen!) Alliance, with an official short form of Canadian
Alliance and an official abbreviation of CA for that. (Note that
``Progressive Conservative,'' ``Reform Conservative'' ... diet sugar, compassionate conservative, sofa-bed, hurry up and wait. Something for everyone, a comedy tonight!
In the federal elections of 2000, the Canadian Alliance failed to make the ``breakthrough'' it had long hoped for in the east (i.e., in Ontario), while the Tories sank a little deeper. In 2003-4, Canadian Alliance and Tories merged, and Canadian Alliance ceased to be used as a party name. Stockwell Day, who is discussed at the Victoria Day entry, became shadow Foreign Minister and took the opportunity to visit lots of foreign countries.
U. Frisch, B. Hasslacher, and Y. Pomeau, Phys. Rev. Lett. 56, 1505 (1986), showed that a particular class of local, hexagonally coordinated two-dimensional lattice gases evolve according to conventional two-dimensional hydrodynamic equations.
Here are a few CA links. Cf. QCA.
``Central America'' has always been an essentially political designation, and changes in sovereignty have changed the extent of the region. Today, those who are paying attention recognize that it is the territory of the countries on the American mainland between Mexico and Colombia, including with their nearby island posessions. Other islands in the Caribbean (whatever their political status) are not generally called Central American. (The corresponding terms in other languages sometimes have different meanings.)
Central America is entirely within North America because Colombia defines the northwest limit of South America. This raises the question, how was ``Central America'' defined when Panama was still a part of Colombia. The answer is rather involved, and I'd like to publish a short form of this entry so another entry that links to it has something to link to. So to make a long story short, the term was a loose one. For example, a January 1812 letter to the editor of the Christian Observer mentioned ``...the boundless regions of central Africa; central America on both sides of the isthmus of Panama; and the whole of Australasia and Polynesia; all of which may be regarded as uninhabited [for the purposes of his argument reconciling Malthusian theory with Christianity].''
The region became independent of Spain in 1821 was initially a part of the Mexican empire. In July 1823 it seceded to form las Provincias Unidas del Centro de América (`the United Provinces of the Center of America'). ``It'' was the Spanish colonial administrative region that had been called la Capitanía General de Guatemala (`the Captaincy General of Guatemala') until 1821, and that consisted of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The borders of these states were approximately what they are today. The biggest differences were that Guatemala included Chiapas, and Britain controlled the Mosquito Coast, a strip about 40 miles deep along most of the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua and the 100 or so easternmost miles of the current Caribbean coast of Honduras. Costa Rica included a bit of modern-day Panama.
In 1824, the name was changed to la República Federal de Centroamérica (`Federal Republic of Central America'). This was the origin of `Central America' as a relatively precise political term.
In the 1830's a sixth state, Los Altos (loosely `the highlands'), was carved out of the western Guatemalan highlands, including Chiapas. The republic descended into civil war in the late 30's, and in 1840 it was dissolved. At that time, Chiapas chose to become part of Mexico, and the rump of Los Altos returned to Guatemala.
As you might expect from an essentially national organization that eschews any geographic or political cue in its name, this is one of those associations that sometimes styles itself ``The Association.''
The Classical Association publishes three journals, all of them important in the UK and other places where there are classical scholars who can read English: Classical Review, Classical Quarterly and Greece & Rome. (In 2005, with the sole purpose of mystifying everyone, CA switched publishers for these journals from Oxford to Cambridge U.P.)
In the interest of full disclosure, and so you can see what incorrect glossary entries look like (as we steadily work to extirpate them), here is what this entry used to read in its entirety:
PRC (Chinese) national airline. Supposed to be ``China Administration of Civil Aviation'' but the order is wrong, so it's probably French. The only English expansion seems to be `Chinese Airliners Always Crash.' Similar expansions at this site or this one. More explanation from Hong Kong. (Visit before July 1, 1997! Oops, too late. Don't visit now.) Note that if ``China Administration of Civil Aviation'' really were the expansion, its acronym would be a child's dirty word in many European languages. Here's the Air China site; I don't know of a specific CAAC site. (Use this alternate URL if you want to drag out the experience.)
On January 2, 1997 the Chinese government publicly congratulated itself for a record 29 accident-free months for the nation's airlines. (They waited until after the last plane had landed safely before the New Year.) The International Airline Passenger Association (IAPA) had cited China as one of the most dangerous countries in which to fly in 1994.
At education-world.com, there's a curriculum article'' explaining that ``HIV/AIDS Education Isn't Only for Health Class! (It's for English, Math, Science, Spanish.)'' The article continues...
HIV/AIDS curriculum is often relegated to Health class where instruction can be clinical and boring. But at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a special AIDS Awareness Week program involved teachers of all disciplines. AIDS education came to life in art class and English class, in math and in geography.
The ``Atlantic states'' are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The organization name is pronounced ``cass'' (to rhyme with pass) by its members; the 1999 fall meeting was in Easton, PA. The Spring 2000 meeting was in Princeton. After that, they let the website slide. Dang, and Janice tells me the fall 2000 one was the best in at least eleven years.
Well, the Spring 2001 meeting was in New Rochelle, New York at the end of April, and I finally went. Boy was I embarrassed! Everybody laughed at me, except a couple of people who thought I was joking and laughed with me (I could tell from their ear-lobe muscles). But I wasn't laughing very hard. I was humiliated. It turns out that the Latin C - A - A - S phrase in the seal doesn't translate ``Classical Association of the Atlantic States'' after all.
How was I to know? Causa looks a bit like Classical. I mean, the words have to be different in different languages, or they wouldn't be different languages, now would they? So there: Quod Erat Disputandum (Q.E.D.). After all, just look at the words: does causa or scientam remind you of any particular word in English? I thought not. I tell ya, it's not fair. It's not fair!
They say that Causa Artium Alit Scientiam means `the cause of the arts nourishes science.' This is a somewhat biased reading: scientia meant `knowledge.' The current meaning of its English cognate science represents an adaptation and restriction of the meaning of the French etymon. The Germans use Wissenschaft.
Okay, so some months after the Spring meeting, I got another copy of the program, along with a standard sheet entitled ``Professional Development Documentation.'' There CAAS is revealed to have provider/district registration number 1879, and the meeting turns out to be a professional development activity. I was there two days and I only accrued Professional Development in the actual amount of six hours? Add insult to injury.
I mentioned this to my cousin Victoria, who teaches bilingual kindergarten in California. She says she could use the hours. The states require public school teachers to do unbelievable amounts of often pointless busy-work, like accruing professional development hours or filling out forms detailing microscopically how each component of their lesson plans meets which of the state's myriad educational achievement goals. It's exactly like being punished by being made to stay after school.
In the US, private schools manage to escape a large part of this burden. An anonymous informant in the other .ca place reports on work conditions under the Catholic school board there:
A requirement of the permanent contract is passing a course in religious instruction. The course ran five months, once a week for three hours. This was the first year the course has been so onerous (I won't even get into the idiot assignments we had to do) and it was so onerous because the OCT won't recognize it as an official course if it doesn't have hours and work equivalent to a university-level course. Attendance was mandatory (you were allowed to miss at most two classes).
At professional meetings, it would be offensive to ``take attendance.'' One thing that surprised me about the CAAS meeting was the large number of participant packages (detailed program, meal tickets, pin-on ID) that were not picked up. A lot of people seem to have paid admission and not come for the show. I can't imagine what they got out of it.
You know, I was sure I had the URL for this around somewhere. Where did it go? It should be right -- Oh no! I've been hit by ...
The really scary thing about these guys is how fast and silently they work. Turn your head away from the computer, and it's gone (the bookmark, not the computer; this entry isn't about hardware theft). They're just like those softwear pirates. Look away from the tumbling and spinning clothing mass, and before you even know it, they've socked it to ya. Vicious peg-leg pirates who ``only take what we need,'' but you're left holding the bag -- of unmatched socks. Fgrep won't get you a.out of this one.
It should be obvious: just promote them to the next grade regardless whether they learned anything or not.
CAB holds its annual convention in October.
Alfred E. Kahn was the last head of the CAB, and he eagerly argued his job out of existence. He told an airline executive ``I really don't know one plane from another. To me they're just marginal costs with wings.'' After the CAB was disbanded, president Jimmy Carter made Kahn ``inflation czar.'' In a way, this was very appropriate for a man who in the long run lowered the real costs of air travel. However, Carter didn't give Kahn any power. Nobody on the fiscal side had any power over inflation in those years (see WIN), and in the Carter years inflation was compounded by economic stagnation (i.e., low or negative economic growth). The combination came to be called stagflation. The trouble with fiscal measures against stagflation was (and is) that increased government spending fuels recovery but worsens inflation (in theory). When Ronald Reagan ran against Carter in 1980, he made ``Are you better off now than you were four years ago?'' an effective campaign mantra. Fiscal measures not availing, and Reagan promising increased spending combined with tax cuts, Paul Volker applied the monetary brakes. Volker, appointed chairman of the Fed by Carter, raised interest rates (in the usual indirect ways, by raising the reserve rate and decreasing money supply) dramatically early in the Reagan administration, triggering the worst recession in US post-war history. That seems to have done the trick for twenty years. Amazing.
Another connection between cabbage and the human body, beside the latter eating the former and the former inflating the latter: cabbage is doctors' slang for a heart bypass, evidently derived from the common pronunciation of CABG. This usage has so far only come to the attention of SBF investigators in Canada, but the border is porous. (In fact, this porosity is a significant consideration when provincial governments negotiate compensation with physicians. It turns out that the physiology of Canadians and Americans is quite similar -- we have over 99% of our genes in common -- so Canadian physicians are able to find work in the US with very little retraining.)
I read once that ``my little cabbage'' (or however that's translated) is an affectionate lover's pet-epithet in France. Romaine?
In California, bilingual education basically means education in Spanish and English.
Massachusetts had something similar, and the famous Boston saying that ``the Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.'' As you can imagine, moving in such restricted social circles limited their marriage prospects, so the most famous Lodges and Cabots were Cabot Lodges. Then came the Kennedys -- new money (hold your nose).
Interestingly, Branch Cabell was born at 101 E. Franklin Street. What's that you say? You say that doesn't seem very interesting? Well just let me finish! That address is now the site of the Richmond Public Library. If they would just move to new digs, they could make that place the Branch Cabell Branch Library. As it is, there's a James Branch Cabell Library at VCU, but it seems to be the principal library on the main (Monroe Park) campus.
The awards were sponsored by the NCTA, which eventually created a ``National Academy of Cable Programming'' that oversaw and tried to lend a little lightweight gravitas to the awards from 1985 on. The original pretext for these NCTA-sponsored awards was the exclusion of cable TV programming from eligibility for the Emmy Awards. Cable shows became Emmy-eligible in 1988, but the disappearance of an organization's raison d'être is hardly enough, on its own, for the organization to fold. That the ACE thing coasted along for less than a decade after 1988 is thanks solely to its having a stupid name.
The awards were given annually from 1979 to 1997, but not in 1986 and twice in 1995, because they temporarily switched the event from December to January. (Cf. APA annual meetings.) The awards ceremonies took place in LA, often at the Wiltern Theatre. I never heard of it either. They were very memorable. Save a link to this page at IMDb, listing results of an ongoing investigation into who, if anyone, was honored by these awards.
In the US, the word was adopted in railroading to refer to a train car for the use of the train crew, usually the last car on a freight train. That car would have kitchen and sleeping facilities. Cabooses (I wish the plural were cabeese) are largely obsolete. Loosely, the word is used to mean the last car. This usage should be continued because it infuriates railroad buffs. In the UK, cabeese (what the heck), or at least the word caboose for such a car, never caught on. Presumably this is because it's a small country.
A caboose served other purposes besides quartering the crew. Crew on the caboose monitored the freight cars and cargo for problems like overheating axleboxes and load shifting. The last car is (was? was and now will be again?) sometimes a guard's van.
In Canada, the word caboose was also adopted for a mobile bunkhouse used by lumberjacks.
Cache is pronounced like ``cash.'' It frequently occurs as a misspelling of cachet (pronounced ``cash-AY''). For example, a Reuters wire report on August 30, 2005, included some comments of Brandimensions COO Bradley Silver interpreting poor box office results: ``He also said that the data indicates that even movie stars don't have the same cache as they once did.'' (Then again, maybe animatronics is more pervasive than I ever suspected.)
Pronounced khaki. Part of the religion of Demmingism.
Caca and similar-sounding words, from the Latin, mean `shit' in various European languages (particularly Romance languages; sometimes, given the form, a children's word). The tendency is for the word to have female gender, so the regularly constructed Italian plural would be cache (pronounced kah-keh, not like cache) rather than cachi (male plural, pronounced kah-kee). Actually, the count-noun version is probably pretty rare.
About 3 cm in diameter and 1 cm high, or thick.
``PROUDLY Made in U.S.A.''
Owned and Operated by Americans''
After all, what country is better known for delicious cookies? Don't answer that.
Important selling points:
Bud's Best Cookies, Inc., is located in Hoover, Alabama. That's outside of Birmingham. It started in 1992 with an initial investment of $12 million, and as of 1999 was making a million cookies a year. Of course, those are small cookies.
Cf. Kako.
A website for Houston, in TX [a state bordering on and once part of Mexico (.mx)], is eager to advance the international money-based amity that NAFTA was partly intended to foster. Their currency converter defaults to CAD/USD. On the upswing in 1999.
A popular CAD package is AutoCAD, for which there are usenet newsgroups comp.cad.autocad and alt.cad.autocad and some online faq's. The scripting language for AutoCAD is a version of LISP called AutoLISP. An extensive multipart FAQ for AutoLISP (including recent releases called Visual Lisp, Vital Lisp and ACOMP) appear in the AutoCAD newsgroups; a hypertext version is here.
Oh, here's something: in chapter two of her What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, Danielle Crittenden reports that ``that in [her mother-in-law's] college circles in the mid-1950s, a man who took a woman out for more than three dates without intending marriage was considered a cad.''
Wow. I'm always shocked when the ``joke'' entries are confirmed true. (This happens constantly.)
She continues ``Today, the man who considered marriage so rashly would be thought a fool. Likewise, a woman.'' Apparently, what her mother didn't tell her she found out from her mother-in-law. The world changes in unexpected ways. What your mother-in-law didn't tell you, you could look up on the internet, if only you knew where to look.
Cada is derived from the Late or Vulgar Latin word cata. This was used with much the same sense as cada, but in a construction that might have made gender agreement slightly tricky. Everyone seems to agree that Latin borrowed the word from the Greek preposition kata.
So I decided to add a new caddy entry to the glossary. But then I wondered whether this abbreviation for academic is in common use or was just a nonce term or a neologism of hers. So I decided to return to The Tradewinds and ask. All for you, dear reader. As you can see, maintaining this vast information resource can run into real money, or at least 90% of real money plus sales tax.
Jen explained that yes, she does like to create new words but no, she never said ``caddy discount.'' She said ``fatty discount.'' It wasn't a comment on the food groups I was eating, or to my BMI; it was an ironic reference to the fact that the discount was rather small (even though I had lemon meringue pie with that meal). That's what she claimed, anyway.
This entry isn't a total waste, you know. I can still take the opportunity to point out that ``caddy'' is a nickname for Cadillac.
Constellations are named after things they resemble, or evoke, or at least sort of seemed to suggest to whatever sleepyhead named them. (We'll pull in the cloud-interpretation scene from Hamlet later.) The official IAU constellation names are Latin. Caelum is a well-known Latin word meaning `sky.' That some stars may resemble or at least suggest the sky is very plausible -- you'll have no argument from me. So alpha Caeli could be interpreted, mischievously, as the `first [brightest star] of the sky,' but it's really the brightest in the constellation Caelum, which is a pretty drab bit of sky between Columba and Eridanus. The respect in which Caelum suggests the sky is that it's mostly black.
The most common alternative meanings of caelum are closely related to `sky' -- heaven, vault of heaven. Metonymic senses are common as well (air, atmosphere, temperature, climate, weather, horizon, height, vault, arch, covering). There's also a rather less common word caelum, which happens to have the same spelling, declension, and gender, and which essentially means `precision chisel' (L&S defines it as a ``chisel or burin of the sculptor or engraver, a graver'').
We have Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille to thank for this bad joke of a constellation name. The great achievement of de Lacaille (1713-1762) was to get in on the ground floor of the constellation-naming business by breaking open a whole new unclaimed territory (the southern hemisphere, basically). He spent the nights of 1750-1754 reportedly observing over 10,000 stars from the Cape of Good Hope with his 1/2-inch refractor. He ended up inventing fifteen new constellations and renaming an earlier one as Musca Australis (see the constellations entry). Fortunately, many of the other bad names he came up with were so cumbersome that it was considered permissible, despite his priority, to at least shorten them.
... The FDIC is concerned that readers of the Bank Rate Monitor's Internet site may mistakenly believe that the Bank Rate Monitor's CAEL system reflects actual FDIC CAEL ratings.
Bankers and other members of the public should be aware that depository institution ratings in the "Safe and Sound Bank and Thrift Rating System" on the Bank Rate Monitor's Internet site are not based on, and should not be confused with, the FDIC's CAEL system. The FDIC does not endorse the ratings of the Bank Rate Monitor, nor does the FDIC necessarily agree with the ratings assigned by the Bank Rate Monitor.
The CAEN Network's Companies is a micro-cluster of companies with excellence know how.
The network's companies works independently or handshaking with each other providing top class products in the following fields:
No comment.
In Latin, caedo means `I cut.' The stem changes to caes- in various related words. (This common stem change is evident in many sets of English words derived from Latin: video and vision, for example, and all Latin-derived verbs ending in -de that form nouns in -sion.)
At some point, a story got started that either Julius Caesar, or the first person with that gens (see tria nomina) was delivered surgically, and hence the name attached itself to the operation. Inasmuch as it would help explain the origin of the gens name, one would expect the story to concern an ancestor of Julius Caesar. Yet, many dictionaries, including the OED, repeat the legend that Julius himself was so born. Suetonius's mention of Aurelia (Div. Jul. 13, 74.2) also diminishes the plausibility of this legend.
It is a common pattern for ae
in Latin-derived words to become
e
in US spelling, so many US dictionaries give ``cesarean'' as
the standard spelling and ``caesarean'' as a variant. In fact, a quick web
search suggests that the -e- spelling is three times as common as the -ae-
spelling. However, the ae
-to-e
transformation
is not standard for Latin names (or for the Latin versions of
Greek names that we use, where alpha-iota or alpha
with iota subscript was systematically transliterated ae
, as in
Aeschylus). Given the etymology, therefore, I think caesarean should be
preferred.
I suppose Christensen chose <cafc.dk> because <cfc.dk>, was already taken. The latter forwards to the main website of Kopenhagen Fur. Why does a Danish company use a combination of German (Kopenhagen would be København in Danish) and English (fur is pels in Danish and Pelz in German)? Indeed, why was <cfc.dk> an appropriate domain name for Kopenhagen Fur? You better know the answer because it's going to be on the test. I hope someone gets it right because I'd like to know the answers.
Their motto is in English whether the language you select to read is English, Chinese, or Danish. (You need to know the reason for that too. It's because the Chinese start page text is in English. You should have realized long ago that the academic solution to a difficult problem is the answer to a simpler question.)
The motto itself is ``Simply the world's finest fur.'' Oh, simply that. The model has fine skin too. It reminds me of the expression ``neither hide nor hair.'' [Typical use: ``I've seen neither hide nor hair of him.'' Almost literally equivalent to ``I haven't seen any part of him.'' Essentially, it's just a colorful intensification, so the full sentence is equivalent to ``I haven't seen him at all.''] There's a German expression that's parallel, but the hide cognate still refers unironically to human skin (``Haut und Haar,'' meaning `skin and hair'). It seems to be widespread, at least in West Germanic. In Dutch it's ``huid en haar.'' English used to have the phrase ``[in] hide and hair'' meaning, like the previous two, `wholly, completely, like, totally, man!' but I've only encountered the English version in a dictionary. (I also owe the Dutch version to a dictionary, but since I rarely read or try to read Dutch, this isn't very significant.)
Kopenhagen Fur offers auction services (see the webpage) for fur ranchers. I once briefly (about 20 hours) dated a woman whose father had been a mink farmer. He fed them chicken, which he also raised. They're mean, nasty critters (the mink, especially the American species, but maybe the chicken too).
You know, in many countries you can't register a trademark unless you're actually going to use it (or a similar one that you're protecting) for something. Of course, the page includes the usual ``search tool'' returning paid links irrelevant to your search terms. And it deposits three cookies, so now you know something less appetizing than store brand.
What, back already? Well, I didn't claim they would confirm my antiperspirants claim. Clean Arms for Community seems to be a gang-tattoo removal program operating at a juvenile facility, the ``Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic.'' The word ``Southern'' here refers to southern California; the facility is in Norwalk. ``Correctional Reception Center and Clinic'' and ``facility'' are euphemisms for prison or perhaps part of a prison. Sure, ``Reception Center'' sounds welcoming, but why not ``Residential Lounge''? A ``gang tattoo'' seems to be any kind of tattoo on anyone who has ever been a gang member.
(The youngest son of a woman I know was recently kicked out of Catholic school and entered public middle school, where someone asked him if he was a Crip or a Blood. He explained or pointed out that he is white. His dad is actually Mexican. I also know Mexicans who would be regarded as pale in Spain and who consider themselves neither ``whites'' nor ``Westerners'' -- on account of their national origin. ``Race'' is no longer socially constructed; now it's a matter of personal choice, like hair color and gender.)
CAFC has a lot of video and stills, but they don't show any before-and-after comparisons. Absence of proof, they say, is not proof of absence. Here it is the absence of proof of absence that is not proof of absence of absence, but it does raise a doubt.
The use of circuit-riding appeals courts was begun under the reign of King Henry II and extended to North America in colonial times. Until 1891, even justices of the US Supreme Court had circuit-riding duties. (Carried out in summer, when the old dirt roads were more passable. This is supposedly the origin of the traditional long summer recess. They ended the tradition just as the bicycle craze led to a rapid increase in paved roads.) Below the level of the Supreme Court, there are still many itinerant judges.
The federal appeals court system below the Supreme Court comprises thirteen ``circuits.'' Individual cases are heard by tribunals. For some reason the much-preferred term is ``three-judge panels.'' Maybe the word ``tribunal'' is deemed threatening or forbidding. The judges for a case are selected at random from among the sitting judges. They're still called sitting judges even though the larger circuits use courthouses in far-flung districts, so they have to get up and travel to another city. The Ninth Circuit is by far the largest, with jurisdiction for the districts from Alaska to Arizona, and Montana to Hawaii (and Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands). Most cases are heard in Portland, San Francisco, or Pasadena, but panels occasionally sit in other venues.
Eleven of the thirteen US Courts of Appeals have multi-state jurisdictions. The DC Circuit has jurisdiction for Washington, D.C. (the federal government gives them a chunk of caseload). The CAFC (remember? that's what this entry is about) is the only one without a geographically defined bailiwick. It was created in 1981 (actually inaugurated in 1982) in a merger of the US Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) with the appellate division of the US Court of Claims, and its jurisdiction is nation-wide. It hears cases originating in various specialized lower courts, and also cases that originated in district courts but concern patents and scattered other legal matters specified by statute. (Because its jurisdiction is national, giving it the authority to rule on interpretation of a law prevents conflict-of-precedents problems in the administration of laws affecting activities that might span multiple circuits.)
They mostly sit in one of their DC courthouses, but once or twice a year they'll have a panel sit somewhere else. Frankly, the US Patent system today (2010) is broken, with clerk shortages, long delays, and poor quality of work. I don't know where that leaves the CAFC.
Most of these websites are written for people who already know a lot about the F.C. whose webpage they're visiting, and who just want to get caught up on the latest bluster and trivia. This is opportunity wasted. Webpages are like dictionary entries: most people visit them while looking for something else. If Crewe Alexandra F.C. had a link to follow that provided information such as, say, where their stadium is located... But no, if you want to know that sort of stuff, you go to the Wikipedia page. (Their stadium is ``at Gresty Road in Crewe, Cheshire and [they're] nicknamed The Railwaymen due to the town's historical links with the rail industry.'')
I'm going to have to go dig through the anthropology literature to see if anyone has solved the great mystery of why people attend sports events and care who wins. Don't tell me ``because it's fun.'' That's like ``explaining'' the existence of the world by saying that ``it was created by God'' (using materials he found on the back of the giant turtle, no doubt). No, sports fandom is a great mystery, and great mysteries should have deep answers. No explanation short of the cosmological is likely to be right.
``This new CAFE will measure `petroleum mileage' and give automakers incentives and credits for increasing ethanol consumption as a percentage of fuel use of their vehicles, not least by promoting flex-fuel vehicles, which can run on either gasoline or E85 fuel, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. This approach promises several significant benefits.'' Particularly to corn farmers.
Also, if you mix in some accordion music you don't need to film Paris on location.
According to marine biologist Tom Fenchel (see above) ``We found a new species of ciliate during a marine field course in Rønbjerg and named it Cafeteria roenbergensis because of its voracious and indiscriminate appetite after many dinner discussions in the local cafeteria.'' (C. roenbergensis mostly gorges on bacteria.) The quote is taken from the species entry at the Encyclopedia of Life, which has a lot of other interesting information, as well as a more sober comment on the name, of the sort that may be necessary to get a scientific joke accepted into the nomenclature: ``The name Cafeteria reflects the importance of this organism in marine microbial food webs.''
The family Cafeteriaceae now includes three other genera besides Cafeteria: Acronema, Discocelis, and Pseudobodo.
Anyway, a county gets a cut if you live in it or if you work in it, and those two cuts can be different. The county income tax calculation is part of the state income tax filing, and you add it all up and send it to the state. You also have to list which school district you live in. When a married couple that files jointly works in two or more different counties and lives together in a third, it gets so complicated that they usually get divorced to avoid the paperwork. Just kidding; they shoot themselves.
``The Committee on Ancient History desires to publish papers and short manuscripts that employ original research, critical review, and innovative methodology to promote the pedagogy of Ancient History. The Committee understands Ancient History generally to reflect all aspects of the development of societies in those areas about the Mediterranean basin and its peripheral regions before ca. AD 500. Submissions that make use of digital technology are encouraged, as are those using traditional print styles. All submissions accepted for inclusion in the Occasional Papers will be published electronically. Though English is preferred, the editors will consider submissions in any of the major instructional languages of North America.''
``Although known in Greece as the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens, the Institute is directly responsible to its mother company, the Canadian Academic Institute, which operates solely in Canada.'' So in CAIA expansions, ``in Athens'' means in Toronto, Canada, and ``at Athens'' means in Athens, Greece.
The French is no better: `L'Institut Canadien Académique à Athènes / L'Institut Canadien d'Archéologie à Athènes' (ICAA).
Also on the page quoted above, an explanation of why you might expect other such institutes at Athens (e.g.: ASCSA, BSA):
``Because the Greek government requires that archaeological work by foreigners ... be carried out under the auspices of their own national organizations with offices in Greece.''
The physical cause of the loss of [NASA space shuttle] Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminum structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and breakup of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.
The Cairo in Egypt is a few miles west of the site of an ancient city called Heliopolis by the Greeks. It is called On in the Bible, and the Egyptian name when it flourished was Anu.
Edmund Burke, a great favorite of quote books, wrote this eulogy in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,-glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart I must have, to comtemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Somehow the ideas of women and calculators seem to attract, sure. At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, most of the calculators (calculatrices?) were women. (I think Richard Feynman described in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman how at one point, his task was to organize the human card-sorting dance that got the calculations done.) Stanislaw Ulam told a story about one calculatrix in his autobiography (p. 218; title and the rest at the 86 entry), although by the time he wrote the book he was using the anachronistic term ``programmer.''
I particularly remember one of the programmers who was really beautiful and well endowed. She would come to 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.
There's a picture of an attractive young woman and an old mechanical calculator at the HW (for hardware) entry.
In August of 1914, Edward Grey, Viscount of Falloden, wrote an echo of Burke's words on Europe and the extinction of the light:
The lamps are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our lifetime.
He died in 1933. More on the end of the age of chivalry at the Taxasaurus entry.
Incidentally, you notice that Burke referred to the Queen of France as the Dauphiness? The King of France was called the Dauphin after the dolphins on his coat of arms.
The word calculus has continued to be used for various methods of calculation, as in ``differential calculus,'' or simply to emphasize the mathematical quality of a reasoning process, as in ``moral calculus.'' I really didn't want to write this much, but as long as I'm on this I'll mention that the words checkerboard and Exchequer are derived from the use of a table or sheet (a checker board) cross-ruled in squares to function as an abacus (for checking figures). We actually have more information on calculus at the abacus entry than at the calculus entry, and vice versa. If I'm not careful, this glossary could get to be quite odd.
``Software associated with papers published in the Transactions on Mathematical Software, as well as other ACM journals are incorporated in CALGO. This software is refereed for originality, accuracy, robustness, completeness, portability, and lasting value.''
The more recent algorithms can be downloaded from the ACM server, and used subject to the ACM Software Copyright and License Agreement.
The idea of calibration can be applied even when the measurement is qualitative rather than quantitative, and when the instrument is a person's judgment. For example, on November 21, 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Opinion page contained a column recounting an interview with Bhutan's first elected prime minister, Jigme Y. Thinley. The interviewer and author of the column gushed that Mr. Thinley ``studied in the U.S., and his English is so articulate that it borders on poetic.'' Setting aside the possible objection that poetry is not exactly the apotheosis of articulateness, one may still wonder about the accuracy of the general positive judgment of PM Thinley's English. Happily, the column contains specimens of it, so one may judge directly, and the column is written in English, so one may perform an independent calibration of the instrument herself.
Here is an example of the instrument's English: ``But the election, comprising of two parties with fairly similar agendas, was remarkably peaceful.'' The column ends by showcasing a sample of the PM's English: ``the individual himself and herself must pursue happiness.''
They can put a man on the moon, but they can't make a pill that you swallow and the next day you wake up speaking a strange language. (Not counting LSD.)
again, Because didn't he meet not obviously. or question. really talk That's the to want with you
If the claim at first appears to be demonstrated false, but then the research is shown to be so flawed as to make any conclusion impossible, then the research is said to seriously call into question the (obviously false) claim.
The calorie was originally defined as the quantity of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The precise pressure and temperature (interval) at which the defining measurement is supposed to be made have varied, and calorimetry itself is not such a hot (Ha-ha! Pun intended. Laugh, netsurfer, this was for you!) way to define an energy unit. Thus, over time there have been a number of different calorie definitions; it has been 4.185 ± 0.001 joule according to the most widely accepted definitions.
Okay, for you anals out there, the 4-degree calorie is 4.2045 joules, the 15-degree calorie is 4.1855 J, the mean 0-100 degree calorie is 4.1897 J. There's also the international steam calorie, 4.1868 J, and the ``thermochemical'' or ``defined'' calorie, which is simply an assigned value of 4.1840 J, the preferred value today.
[The value of a calorie, expressed in a unit such as joules or ergs is sometimes called the ``mechanical equivalent of heat,'' because it allows conversion between energy measured as heat flow to energy defined fundamentally in mechanical terms.]
ie
of
Kalorie is pronounced as the single vowel sound /i:/ (English ``long
e''), but in the plural Kalorie the ie
becomes a diphthong
/i:e/. This is typical of nouns ending in -ie, all of which, so far as I know,
are loans from French.)
Other languages, such as English, used to capitalize much more extensively than they do now. Capitalization of all nouns was a feature of Danish -- a language used in Denmark, Greenland (at least theoretically), and in the more urban areas of Norway when it was the subordinate partner in a Danish-Norwegian dual kingdom. Norway gained a kind of independence, and complete political independence from Denmark, by the Treaty of Kiel of January 14, 1814. Under its terms the dual monarchy was dissolved, and Norway was ceded by the King of Denmark to the King of Sweden. Norwegian national spirit expressed itself partly as language reform, a phenomenon which I'm amazed to discover I haven't discussed at any length elsewhere in this glossary, though at the bok entry I do mention Bokmål. The latter (`book language') is very similar to Danish (called Rijksmål, `language of the empire,' at the time of independence). FWIW, Danish pronunciation is so odd that the Norwegian and Danish versions sound rather more different than Norwegian and Swedish do.
The major language reform during the period of Swedish rule (to 1905) was the establishment of Nynorsk on an equal legal footing with Bokmål (this was initially more de jure than de facto, since officials tended to be educated in Bokmål or Swedish). Nynorsk (`New Norwegian') began as a synthesis of Norwegian dialects spoken in rural areas, created by the native philologist Ivar Andreas Aasen (1813-1896) and introduced by him as Landsmaal (`Country Language') in 1853. Aasen promoted his synthesis as the authentic Norwegian language, and advocated its use as a literary language. He even wrote some original poetry in Landsmaal (whether this actually advanced the cause, I'm not sure). Anyway, around 1880, and probably mixed in with this though I don't know the details, universal noun capitalization was abolished in Norway. Denmark itself abolished universal noun capitalization in 1948. In Denmark, this capped (Another pun, netsurfer! You're helplessly ROTFLYAO!) a period during which universal noun capitalization had become increasingly uncommon. (You know, Shakespeare's Hamlet is set in Denmark. You should read our more honored in the breach entry.) Nevertheless, I note that the reform came three years after the end of WWII and the German occupation of Denmark. So whatever other factors may have been involved, two countries that formally abolished universal noun capitalization did so following the end of involuntary foreign rule. (Per tells me that back home in Denmark, nutritional information is listed in the tiny calories. It must make the food seem richer.)
The attempt to distinguish different things by different capitalization of a single word has been tried in other situations, and it has a poor record of success; among the reasons must be counted the different capitalization conventions of different languages (see previous two paragraphs), the ignorance of copyeditors (see kT entry), and the general carelessness of writers (see this sentence). A recent example of the attempt, already failed, is in the distinction between the unitary Internet and various relatively disconnected or insulated internets. The hoped-for usage was still described in the 1992 edition of the O'Reilly book on DNS and BIND, still in print as of 1997. However, at least since 1995, the lower-case kind of internet has been approximately what is now called intranet. Another example of an attempt to make a case-based distinction in informatics is in the case of gigabytes and gigabits (GB and Gb, respectively). Case is also significant in the abbreviations of many numerical prefixes in the SI.
Ultimately, the only reliable way to be sure of which calorie is meant is to observe context and to use common sense: it's hard to make a 1000X error if one is familiar with chemical quantities. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) for an adult human is on the order of a couple of thousand kilocalories a day.
In Ronald DeLorenzo's Problem Solving in General Chemistry, which had a second edition in 1993, there is a calculation of the energy needed to melt one kilogram of ice at 0°C and warm it to body temperature. Our university libraries have not seen fit to acquire this pedagogical work, but I found it excerpted in my copy of Kask and Rawn's General Chemistry, p. 439 (also neglected by our libraries), as a 2/3-page box labeled ``Applications of Chemistry 11.1''). To summarize the box, it takes about 1.2 × 105 calories. Someone must have thought this was a big deal: the box is titled ``The Dangers of Eating Snow for Emergency Water.'' I thought it was going to be about pollutants or albino dogs or something. ``Fortunately, there are several simple ways to get your water from snow and conserve valuable calories so that you do not freeze to death. As part of their car winter emergency kit, some people carry a candle and a metal container such as an empty coffee can in which they can melt and warm the snow.'' Or you could try one of the techniques enumerated in one of the earlier paragraphs of our Veep entry.
Also, for those thinking of putting emergency candles in the car this Winter, where they will be forgotten and melt next Summer (and spoil the water purification tablets), I have an alternate suggestion: emergency candies. For example, one (1) Twix-brand chocolate-covered cookie bar, about the size and shape of a candle but without the wick, provides 1.4 × 105 calories, more than canceling out the calorie cost of a liter of water and providing needed proteins as well. Okay, Twix cookies also melt, assuming you really forget them. You could substitute M&M's or something, but you'll have to do that calculation yourself. I've already done so much research for this part of the entry that I'm about to burst a button somewhere.
Look, if you haven't got the joke yet, I have another suggestion. Turn DeLorenzo's warning around and you have DeLorenzo's golden diet recommendation. If you want to lose weight, don't just eat low-calorie foods, eat negative-calorie foods: ice cubes! Yes: one barely-frozen ice cube, with a volume of, say, 8 cc, costs over 900 calories to warm and bring to room temperature. Compare this to a typical diet of 2000 or 2500 Calories, and you can see how, with just a few cubes (about 2137 or 2671, to be otiosely precise), you can wipe out your calorie Consumption as well as your ability to taste food.
Herschel had been observing the Sun through various colored filters, and noticed that filters of different colors passed different amounts of heat, and this led him to do interesting experiments that he reported in 1800. Using a prism-and-thermometer set-up, he measured the heating caused by different spectral colors, and found greater heating with increasing wavelength (i.e., increasing from violet to red). He found that the greatest heating occurred in the region just beyond red. [This is an accident of the exprimental set-up, in which greater heating can be caused by greater absorption or by greater concentration of the light spectrum (if the index of refraction inside the prism varies more slowly with wavelength at longer wavelengths, or by simple geometric effects); for the solar spectrum, the energy per unit wavelength actually peaks around green.]
This was the first demonstration of light not visible to the eyes. Herschel went on to demonstrate that rays of this light could be reflected, refracted, absorbed, and transmitted as visible light could. (Of course, these facts were implicitly assumed in the original experimental operation.) Just the next year, 1801, Johann Wilhelm Ritter announced the discovery of invisible light on the other side of the visible light spectrum -- what we now call ultraviolet light. These didn't seem to have a direct heating effect, but he observed that they promote certain chemical reactions.
If anything about modern European languages can go without saying, it is that their vocabularies were all enormously influenced by Latin. In the areas that were dominated by Western Christianity, the influence was widespread not only among elites but directly at all levels of society, and there was correspondingly greater wholesale direct adoption of Latin words. The German language, or more precisely the various German languages, did follow this general pattern, and German today has a large number of naturalized Latin words, particularly in the language of the intellect and the traditional crafts, trades, and agriculture.
However, German is unusual: not only did it not absorb as much Latin as, say, Slavic languages that had a weaker direct exposure to the Roman Empire, German went further and replaced a number of Latin loans with calques. (The Académie Française -- the official arbiter of the French language -- would like to do that today with the language of the American empire.) The phenomenon was driven by a movement of mystics that arose in the fourteenth century, centered in the Rhineland; most prominent among these were Meister Eckhard (Johannes Eckhard, c. 1260-1327) and his pupils. These mystics preached and wrote in Latin and in a German filled with calques of Latin words. Their innovation was influential both directly and indirectly. The indirect influence consists mainly in the fact that Luther followed their lead, using their calques in his Bible translation. In those days German (like English, Spanish, and other languages spoken over broad areas) consisted of a very variable range of dialects. The choices made by Luther in his translation of the Bible established a de facto standard for German, and played a role in German similar to the works of Shakespeare in English. A good traditional source on the history of the German language is Adolf Bach: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache.
It should be recognized that the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) involved a number of related developments in language, government, and religion. The Roman Catholic Church had not authorized published translations of the Bible into various vernaculars, so the Reformation brought not only a reform of religion but also, with official translations of the Bible, changes in language status. The translations required increased attention to local language and began the establishment of national languages, usually based more or less closely on the prestige dialect spoken in the national capital.
(Concerning Bibles and language, it's worth noting that the King James version of the Bible was produced during the time that Shakespeare was active. This has led to speculation that he was a member of one of the mostly anonymous committees of translators, writers and editors who worked on it. There's also a place in the King James translation where some information about the bard can be ``decoded,'' but it's not statistically significant, from what I recall. Vide KJV.)
Another example of calque is the Hebrew shen-ha'ari, meaning `tooth of lion.' [The definite article ha in this position more-or-less puts the noun it determines in genitive case. A translation using an attributive noun -- `lion tooth' -- is also fair.] The Hebrew term is calqued from the French dent de lion. English, as usual, simply borrows the word with slight spelling and greater pronunciation changes, in this case to dandelion.
The Hebrew word ari in the previous paragraph should be recognizable: the Biblical name Ariel means `Lion of God.'
A more systematic and extensive, though trivial, instance of calque is the translation of organic chemistry and SI terminology.
ADsorption, not ABsorption.
The O'Reilly perl book is sometimes called ``the camel.''
The surname Oliphant might be supposed to stand for elephant, but in fact it may stand for camel. Many family names arose from locales, and some locales were most easily identified by the prominent sign of a pub. Pubs bore simple, easily identified illustrations (like ``Cock and Bull,'' at the most felicitously named public establishments) for the convenience of otherwise valued but illiterate, or possibly extremely inebriated, patrons. Some pubs were named after exotic animals like camels. However, if one accepts the premise that illiterate persons at the dawn of surnamehood might wish to patronize a pub, then the possibility must be entertained that persons with a limited education might misidentify the simple, easily identified et cetera. In this way, I've read, some persons living in the neighborhood of pubs identified by the sign of the camel came to be named Oliphant. After all, who would name a pub ``The Elephant''? (Don't answer that; it's a rhetorical question. Just shut up and lemme finish.) Anyway, se non e vero, e ben trovato.
Excavations of ancient animal bones at Tel Jemmeh [ftnt. 34] (once a crossroads near Gaza) indicate that camel caravans were not used in the area until around 600 BCE. On the evidence of Genesis 24 (describing a trip by Abraham's servant) and the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, it is clear that camels visiting Palestine until that time did not die locally, but waited until they had left.
Another book with a cheap binding is Wheelock's Latin. As with Wolfram's Mathematica book, a more expensive and durable hardcover is available.
They say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Blended departments like this are created by university administrators to, um, achieve greater interdisciplinarity and efficiency, and maybe find a way to reduce spending on and hiring for disciplines that are no longer valued, that's the word, quite as much as they once were. Anyway, the ANU used to have a Classics Department; now mail should be directed to the Classics Program, School of Language Studies.
[Normally we wouldn't put that last comment in parentheses, but we didn't want to make this entry confusing. You know -- mathphobia. Boo!]
You think it's bad to go bald? Just imagine if you had as many as five stumpy little lumps growing out of the top of your head.
Captious lexicographers insist that since the word was originally camélopard in French, the spelling ``cameleopard'' and the ``vulgar'' pronunciation ``camel-leopard'' are wrong. Not me. It isn't wrong, it's calque.
It's not clear what was in the original material, but over the course of centuries silk, Angora goat, wool, cotton, and linen have all been used in (or claimed to be in) the imported material or the domestic (European) imitation.
Presumably the Camelot of English folk history -- the Castle of King Arthur's Court, World Class Round Table Knights Centre -- is the same word, possibly through the association with luxury. In late nineteenth-century France, the Camelots du roi were what we might today call operations people (``bodyguards'' and spies) for La Ligue d'Action Française. Man, that looks like it would be pretty tough to translate into a known language. Whatever the name meant, the group itself was the most extremely monarchialist (Bourbon restorationist) group of significance. Hey, you know what? We've got some more bits of French history in this glossary. Look under Charles Bullion. Also, some Camelot characters star in the courtly love entry.
According to Kehlogg Albran,
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.This also works with camel-twirling on the head of a pin, though it's also likelier to fall off. The trick is to use a very big pin (something a rich man could easily afford). For more on lubrication (and pins), see this aside.
You're probably on pins and needles wondering who Kehlogg Albran is. You can learn more of his work at the fate entry, which features a picture of camels.
Cf. the Japanese word kami, discussed under the kamikaze entry.
Not ``straight-jacket,'' okay?
The Durham Centre for the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East draws its membership from the Departments of Classics and Ancient History (http://www.dur.ac.uk/classics/), Archaeology (http://www.dur.ac.uk/archaeology/), and Theology and Religion (http://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/). The Centre aims to promote the study of cultural encounters and exchanges in the ancient world, from India in the East to the Iberian Peninsula in the West; and to foster diverse approaches to, and perspectives on, this area. It particularly encourages projects that straddle disciplinary and/or cultural, temporal and geographical boundaries. Most of the Centre.s work focuses on the ancient world (ca. 3000BCE . 650CE), but all discussions have a strong theoretical underpinning and are based on a clear understanding of how the ancient world has been received and studied in the modern period. The Centre hosts major collaborative research projects but also maintains a broader programme of seminars, workshops and conferences. Members of the Centre are involved in teaching and research across a wide spectrum of relevant disciplines.
This just in: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played the greedy, pusillanimous, and otherwise no-good ``Dr. Zachary Smith'' on that TV series, dead at 87, Sunday, November 3, 2002. He died while receiving treatment for a chronic back problem. A death straight from central casting. The pain, the pain! Another character in that show was the robot (a Model B-9, q.v.). Harris would stay up late nights thinking up scornful, typically alliterative epithets for it. (``Bumbling bag of bolts,'' ``primitive pile of pistons,'' ``bubble-headed booby,'' etc. For a list of 378 or so of the ways he referred to or addressed the robot, see ``The `compleat' List.'') Maybe he was partly inspired by the fact that the robot didn't have a proper name. In after years, he said that he adopted his style of ``comedic villainy'' because he figured otherwise he'd be boring and soon out of a job. He stole the show.
To read about how I didn't visit Naples (or Campania) once, kindly take a trip to the ID entry.
We pass along here some news that as of 1997.7.14 had not made it into the web site, that I could see, though they were announced that day on the Classics list. Robert M. Wilhelm, Exec. Dir., announced
A special program designed especially for the blind and visually impaired which will include the followings sites:
For details and itinerary contact:
TOUCHABLE TREASURES IN NORTHERN ITALY:
(Milan, Lugano, San Bernadino, Verona and Florence)
April 26-May 8, 1998
This program has been designed especially of the Blind and
Visually-Impaired. Tactile experiences and hands-on opportunities
are a special feature of this unique program. Family members and
friends of the Blind are welcome of participate in this program.
This program will be limited to 16 participants.
For details and itinerary contact:
I guess this is a bit out of date, but maybe they'll do it again.
CAMWS publishes The Classical Journal (CJ). You wouldn't have imagined that was a unique journal title, but it apparently is in English.
``Middle West and South'' in the organization name is taken to extend (in the North) ``east as far as Ohio, South from Virginia, West to Utah and Arizona and North into the Canadian Provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan'' (and they mean it -- the 2001 annual meeting was April 19-21 in Provo, Utah). For other, even more expansive definitions of the midwest, see the entry for MWSCAS.
Tell me when I'm ``done'' so I can roll over.
"Taking Lives" has been shooting in Montreal while "Paycheck"'s schedule was in Vancouver. Although both cities are in Canada, this is the equivalent of filming in Los Angeles and New York at the same time.
Hey, we're not going to waste your time with unimportant information! See the .se entry (Sweden) for more don't-know-much-about-geography piffle.
See the BNA entry for an earlier usage of the word Canada.
At the Nazi death camps in WWII, shoes, clothing, and other personal belongings were confiscated from the prisoners who entered the camps, whether they were selected for immediate death or for death through work. The collection was stored on-site for shipping back to Germany for, uh, Aryan use. At Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the storage warehouses, located near two of the crematoria, ``were called `Canada,' because the Poles regarded that country as a place of great riches.'' (Quoting here a webpage from the Holocaust Encyclopedia served by the USHMM.)
Existing treatments are pretty crude. They consist primarily in destroying the cancerous tissue by irradiation or chemical poisoning (chemotherapy or ``chemo''), and surgery. Cancerous tissue is targeted on the basis of its greater metabolic and reproductive rate, and the substances it consumes disproportionately as a result.
Many years ago, when there were no treatments and little hope of recovery, the name of ``cancer'' was spoken only in whispers; it was never mentioned on the broadcast media.
Many of the colored cause ribbons that have become popular refer to cancer or
cancers. Here are some of the cancers with their assigned ribbon colors
(according to this color
code listing from 2004):
cancer | ribbon color | Comments |
---|---|---|
melanoma | black | Good choice. |
colorectal cancer | brown | Too graphically appropriate. |
multiple myeloma | burgundy | This is what happens when you delay. |
childhood cancer | gold | There probably isn't any good color here. |
brain cancer | gray | This is clever, but they should give it a slight pinkish or brownish hue. |
ovarian cancer | green | ? |
Hey waitasecond -- isn't that French for song? Oh well, close.
Perhaps this contrariness involving heat explains another tradition, encapsulated in an English proverb that dates from the late seventeenth century:
If Candlemas day be sunny and bright,
Winter will have another flight;
If Candlemas day be cloudy with rain,
Winter is gone and won't come again.
...that year. I.e., winter won't come again that year. A Scottish version is explicit on this point, and also avoids claiming that winter could end that early:
If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year.Candlemas day falls on February 2. (Yes -- every year. No correction for the precession of the equinoxes or leap years or nuthin'.) In the US and Canada, February 2 is known as Groundhog Day, and the associated legend is that if the groundhog comes out of its hibernation burrow and sees its own shadow (something requiring a day no more than partly cloudy), it knows that six weeks of winter remain. In principle that would be good news, since the spring equinox is still almost seven weeks away. Oh yeah -- another possible reason why February 2 might be associated with a ``second winter'' is that it falls close to the half-way point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
Candlemas day is also the date of the Purification of the Virgin Mary and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Let me say that that's wonderful, because it's a sin to have only one sentence in a paragraph.
It occurs to me that by February, traditionally, one would have been done making candles for awhile. If you're not going to keep an animal into the next year, you might as well have slaughtered it before then, since it wouldn't gain much weight during winter (possibly at the cost of grain) and it's cool enough for the meat to keep well by then. So you'd have had the tallow, and the long nights (and indoor work) around the winter solstice would have depleted your supply and motivated you to use the tallow for candles. (Soap? What's that?)
And don't tell me meat doesn't keep. In the US, livestock is `fattened' in significant part by hydrating the animals. Wet meat rots fast. In all other places where my family has lived, in Europe and Latin America, meat hung and bled on a meathook is quickly dry enough to need no further preserving. In Germany in the 1920's and 1930's, my family used their small icebox (cooled by ice delivered by an iceman) for milk. The meat (which there wasn't much of by the 1930's anyway) stayed in a cupboard that was built into an exterior wall with louvres to keep it well ventilated. When my grandfather and his future second wife came to the US, they learned to store meat (transported long distances by the miracle of refrigerated train cars!) in the refrigerator. When my great grandmother followed them to the US, she threw all the meat out of the refrigerator, because it smelled rotten.
John Aristotle Phillips visited India afterwards and inspected not only the plant but the contract under which the plant was built. That included special provisions intended to prevent use of the plant for nonpeaceful purposes [Canada is a signatory of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT).] Phillips learned, however, that India had exploited a loophole in the contract: India used the reactor to enrich its own thorium (Th) material.
[John A. Phillips is best known for submitting plans for an atomic bomb as his Junior Paper -- a standard requirement for physics undergraduates at Princeton (PU). He researched the project without any security clearance, but his paper was not returned because it ended up containing information that was considered classified. I've forgotten the precise details; he tells that story in Mushroom: the Story of the A-bomb Kid. The visit to India came later. It's not in the book; I heard about it from a friend of mine at the New Delhi Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses who met him there. Around 1980, Phillips co-founded a company called Aristotle Publishing, which provides campaign-management software to political candidates. That company has been renamed Aristotle and will focus on web-based fund-raising tools. Aristotle has venture capital from the market research firm Odyssey, but it's not all ancient Greek: the Nasdaq ticker symbol VOTE has been reserved in anticipation of a public offering. In 1998, $125,000 was raised online, about $70,000 of that by Jesse Ventura. On February 4, 2000, the day after John McCain won the New Hampshire primary by nineteen points over George W. Bush, his campaign raised between a half a million and a million dollars online. As of 2008, the typical numbers have gone up by a factor of ten.]
subscribe CANE-L
And because you asked: cani means `am' in Quechua. At least it does if you pronounce cani in Spanish. The preferred spelling is kani now, but since most Quechua-speakers are illiterate, that's somewhat academic.
Perhaps more relevantly, cani is the dative singular of `dog' in Latin. More straightforwardly, cani is Italian for `dogs' in any case. It's hard to know what those canny Northern Irish classicists had in mind. They could have used NICA, but see the next entry.
It is fortunate that he did something original that we can attach his name to. Specifically, he discovered that benzaldehyde reacted with potassium hydroxide in a reaction producing benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol. You can get the original article from the library -- just go to Ann. I mean, check with Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, vol. 88, pp. 129-30 (1853), and vol. 90, pp. 252-4 (1854). This reaction is a specific case of
_ _ 2RCHO + OH -----> RCOO + RCH OH 2with a phenyl group for R.
Okay, technically, the product does not include the acid RCOOH but its conjugate base. On a quick glance, this looks like an acid-base reaction (strong base to weak base: OH- to carboxylic anion); it is actually a redox reaction (specifically a disproportionation). The name ``Cannizzaro reaction'' is now applied generally to the reaction given above (where R has no alpha hydrogen).
Historically, ordinary rapeseed oil has for the most part not been for internal consumption. Originally used for lamps in Asia and Europe, rape has been grown in Europe since the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century it was used as a lubricant in steam engines. It was also used as a cooking oil, but it had a bitter taste. Reducing the acid and the glucosin (a toxin) have dramatically increased the economical value of rapeseed: canola is promoted as high in monounsaturated fatty acids, and the rapeseed meal is an economic livestock feed.
Check the canola entry in the alt.english.usage FAQ before you buy any of the competing dictionary etymologies for canola.
I know, I know: the capitalization raises the expectation that TEST is itself a backronym (backorpheme?) standing for as many as four or more words. This is a revelation to me. I mean, this is the first time I've ever found the ``as many as ... or more'' locution less than completely pointless. Anyway, no ulterior expansion seems to be given. There are contrary signs, moreover. A message above the quoted explanation informs the Francophone reader that ``(Les renseignements au sujet du CanTest [note dearth of caps] sont disponibles en anglais seulement).''
There is also a link to something called TESTCan that is offered by l'Institut des langues officielles et du bilinguisme (ILOB) at the (and let me say that I'm always relieved when I don't have to enter diacriticals) Université d'Ottawa. Le TESTCan est le ``Test de français ... pour les étudiant(e)s et les stagiaires au Canada administré par l'Université d'Ottawa [qui] a lieu trois fois par année.'' Never mind what this means; I doubt they managed, or even tried very hard, to make a French backronym of TEST. If I had achieved back-to-back English and French backronyms, they'd be in <font size="+10"> at the top of every webpage.
So to summarize our findings so far, CanTEST is an English-language test (remember this for later). Its name conforms to a small but representative subset of English-language naming conventions, such as that modifiers generally precede the noun they modify. TESTCan is a French-language test (remember this for later). Its name conforms to a small but representative subset of French-language naming conventions, such as that a modifier usually follows the noun it modifies. I don't doubt that this is intended to make the greatest number of people happy. It is very useful, even for a rabid Angloimperialist like me. I learned the new French word test (masc.). I think I'll remember it. This is even easier than learning Japanese garaigo. (The link isn't dead; it hasn't come to life yet. Gairaigo are words borrowed from languages like English. Especially English.)
All this symmetry is very wonderful, but confusion can result. Above the French-language description of the French-language test, there is a parenthetical phrase like the one discussed earlier. It reads ``(The information about the TestCan is available in English only).'' There are some problems with this translation. The first is that it is manifestly false, since le TestCan (or at least le TESTCan) is described in French immediately below the parenthetical. It seems that one of two bad things has happened.
None of this would have happened if the English and French departments had simply stayed out of each other's way. If you're still reading, go on to the RevCan entry.
In Spanish, a language not unknown in the Caribbean, canto means `I sing.' In many languages, canto means `canto.'
Many words and usages common in American Spanish seem to stem from the Canary Islands, which were an important staging area for ships sailing to colonial Spanish America. For example, the word concuñado, is shortened to concuño in the Canary Islands and America. The words mean `brother-in-law.' It would be out of place, I guess, for a Spanish dictionary (the preeminent Spanish dictionary, in this case) to just define concuñado as simply the Spanish for brother-in-law, so the DRAE goes through the circumlocution of defining it with the Spanish equivalent of `a sibling's spouse or a sister-in-law's husband.' That's how it is with those boring old monolingual dictionaries. We're not subject to that restriction here, which allows us to be much more concise (if we want to be). I suppose that gay marriage (already legal in Argentina, that I know of, and probably other Spanish-speaking countries), along with other progressive change, will eventually require rewording along the lines of `sibling-in-law's male-identifying spouse' for the latter possibility.
Another change has already taken place. I should have published this entry when I first noticed the concuño, ña entry of the 21st edition. Now the localization is narrower and longer: ``Can., Am. Cen., Bol., Cuba, Méx. y R. Dom.''
Quicklime is prepared by heating limestone. (Breaking it up a bit first helps speed the process.) Limestone is essentially microcrystalline calcium carbonate (CaCO3), from the point of view of a physicist or chemist, or a sedimentary form of calcite, from the point of view of a geologist or mineralogist. The reaction to quicklime goes thus:
CaCO3 (s) + heat --> CaO + CO2 (g)
Podesta stressed that the think tank was not an organ of the Democratic Party. Rather, he pledged that American Progress would offer its voice and ideas to any policy maker or party that would have them. It was obvious that he wanted the center to be seen as an insurgent force in politics, beholden to no one, although it was difficult to imagine who besides the Democrats would stand to benefit from a revitalized liberal agenda. (Presumably Podesta isn't raising $50 million in order to take over the Green Party.)
With all the foredoomed campaign finance reforms that swirl around, political parties, think tanks, PAC's and all the rest are like shells in a shell game. I think Dick whatsisname, the disgraced triangulation guy, explained that CAP is one of the institutions that the Clintonites are making so they have a power base when Howard Dean takes over the Democratic Party in 2004 and ousts them. According to Bai, Podesta is trying to steer clear of the left-vs.-center contention. A different battle is between those who think the Democratic Party's problem is putting its ideas across and those who think the party needs to come up with ideas to put across. Podesta is firmly in the second camp. (This entry was written as Howard Dean's star was rising in 2003, and Dick Morris's comment reflected the assumption that Dean would win the party's nomination. His campaign imploded in time for the Iowa caucuses, yet by the end of 2004 he had taken a clear lead in the race for DNC chair. This time his lead didn't evaporate in January.)
The site has rather asinine URL's.
``The Flying Nun,'' a popular TV series of the early '60's starring Sally Field, was based on The Fifteenth Pelican by Tere Rios. Rios, a Madison, Wisconsin housewife and novelist, was a former pilot in the Georgia Civil Air Patrol.
the Princeton marching band detached itself into lines to form letters and spell out certain words, while a scripted commentary was read over the loudspeakers. While playing ``Stars and Stripes Forever,'' the band formed the letters C-A-P, with one part of the band organized as a floating ``R.'' The commentator announced, ``The Princeton University Band takes a long `harding' look at concerned alumni.'' The trouble that CAP finds at Princeton, the commentator continued, really ``comes from the pen of T. Harding Jones, a self-appointed theologian, philosopher, campus politico, sociologist, lawyer, and Great Right Hope. The band now gives CAP a right-handed compliment.'' At this point the ``R,'' after trying to move between the ``A' and the ``P,'' finally settled in between the ``C'' and the ``A.'' The band next paid tribute to Shelby Cullom Davis, who, the commentator said, supports ``the students' favorite comic book, Prospect magazine.''
Starting in October 1972, the group published a magazine called The Prospect. Bradley was a member of the magazine's board and caused a stir when he resigned in protest following the first one or two issues.
Of little political significance, but I'm gonna tell you 'bout it anyway, is the resonance of the word Prospect. Prospect is a street running north from the Washington Road side of campus. The Woodrow Wilson School is at the NW corner of Washington and Prospect, and the Engineering buildings are hidden further away in the same quadrant. Prospect has many large old mansions that belong to ``eating clubs,'' essentially the Princeton version of fraternities. (Fraternities and secret societies were banned from campus in the middle of the nineteenth century. They were allowed back some time in the 1980's, and I remember that at least one fraternity started a chapter before 1984.) For many years there was a Prospect Club also. Eating clubs are considered one of the unique features of Princeton's undergraduate experience, though maybe they are a bug. In any case, most Princeton traditionalists cherish this as a part of what makes Princeton-as-it-used-to-be so wonderful.
CAP petered out of existence around 1986 or maybe 1987. It soared to prominence at the end of 2005 because Samuel Alito ('72) had listed his CAP membership in a 1985 application for a political appointment in the Reagan administration's Department of Justice. In 2005, Alito was undergoing the usual trial-by-ordeal required of all US Supreme Court Justice nominees, and stated (lookit me: I'm a journalist!) that he did not recall being a member until he was reminded (in 2005) by the disclosure of his 1985 application. He did remember that Princeton had expelled his ROTC from campus during his junior year and that he had to go to Trenton State College to finish his ROTC classes. He supposed in 2005 that his opinion of the ROTC expulsion might have been part of what led him to join CAP in 1972. No one ever turned up who could remember his having been a member. Records of the group give no indication that he played an active role in it. Back up: records of the group existed twenty years later!
Another early member was Bill Bradley ('65), a Princeton Tigers basketball star who had gone on to a professional basketball career with the New York Knicks, and who later served as a US Senator from New Jersey (1979 to 1996 legislative seasons). He quit CAP in 1973. In 1978 I attended a rock concert at Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) that was a campaign fund-raiser for Bill Bradley. The acts that I remember were the Blues Brothers and Patti Smith. It was an indoor event and the acoustics were terrible. (Either that, or Patti Smith couldn't sing.)
There is a great deal of disagreement on the precise explicit positions taken by CAP, if any. It is claimed that it was in some way or another opposed to coeducation (although the first women had already been admitted to the undergraduate college in 1969), or that it was opposed to race-based affirmative action in admissions, but that it favored traditional admissions and financial-aid favoritism for athletes and alumni children. Alito was confirmed; I can't be bothered to pursue this any more.
A long obituary of Ken Caminiti appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune (October 31, 2004; p. C-1) and mentioned a story his mother Yvonne used to tell ``of how Kenny, at age 2 1/2, decided he was Batman and tried to `fly' down the stairs.'' He took a lot of risks, and he usually survived.
This map will help you get to the building.
This is the place famous for its old mission and its annual miracle. The annual miracle is that every year swallows return to the ruined church there from their southern peregrination, precisely on St. Joseph's Day (March 19) -- even on leap years. Of course, although they return precisely on that day, they don't all return at once. It's just the precise day that they begin to return. Also, some special swallows also return a bit earlier -- these are the special ``scout swallows.''
The swallows come to this particular place because it was a Franciscan mission, and swallows were birds that St. Francis of Assisi loved. And St. Francis of Assisi is one of the parton saints of scouting, so that explains the early birds. Be prepared! Also each year, the swallows leave (or first begin to leave, not counting the scouts) on the Day of San Juan, October 23.
And look, I didn't say swallows were the birds he ``loved best.'' He was big on pheasant, he had a pet crow, pigeons attended his sermons, etc., etc. So let's not play favorites here. If it had been a Jesuit mission, each year Capo would see a plague of vultures, the favorite bird of St. Francis Xavier. Ha, ha, just kidding; everything else is entirely serious.
I have been asked: for advancement in what direction?
Forward, of course!
I'm surprised everyone doesn't support the progressive movement.
CAPS is located in the Arizona State University Research Park.''
This is a good links site from among the alternative medicine pages for Trigeminal Neuralgia. Here's an introduction to the unique chemistry of capsaicin, and some more detail. Here's a general description from the epicurious dictionary.
The CAPTCHA acronym incorporates the term ``Turing test'' in the loose sense of a test to distinguish humans from machines, and not in the strict sense of the relatively unstructured test originally proposed by Alan Turing. The usual problem with such Turing tests is not that computers can pass them, but that humans may not. There's actually an annual event where the Turing test in its original form is implemented. Communicating (in English) via keyboard in wide-ranging discussions lasting a few minutes, human judges try to distinguish the humans from the computers among their interlocutors. So far no program has convinced the judges that it is human, but some humans have been mistaken for computer programs.
In principle, a CAPTCHA need not be text-based. A CAPTCHA might generate other sorts of tests than distorted-text recognitions to distinguish humans from bots, but text-based tests are still the most common.
You gotta problem widdat? We ain't talkin' geology here.
Often paired with carping, but not in the sense of fishing for carp. Cf. Carp.
Back in the 1960's, I leafed through a silly paperback with fanciful cartoon pictures inspired by puns on the car syllable. A slow vehicle called Es-car-got, a scary one named Boris Car-loff, that sort of thing. I don't know -- the constellation name Carina puts me in mind of an ocarina or PCP.
I propose that the CAR find someone named Burator and make him president. I mean, what could possibly go wrong that hasn't already gone wrong?
They're also pretty good at detect-and-destroy against late-night quiet in residential areas.
When a burglar is trying to break into a car with a car alarm, people walk by and say things like ``poor sucker can't get his alarm turned off.'' Eventually someone calls the police, who help get the alarm turned off and say responsible law-enforcement-type things like ``take it to your dealer and have that thing adjusted.''
Actress Roz Kelly is best known for her role as Fonzie's aggressive biker girlfriend Pinky Tuscadero in the 1973-84 television series ``Happy Days.'' In 1998 she joined the ranks of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., spending time in jail for making a symbolic protest. In late November of that year, after being awakened repeatedly by a car alarm, she armed herself with a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun and fired into two cars and a neighbor's empty apartment. She was eventually sentenced to three years' probation.
Carat is also Commonwealth spelling for another unit of measure of precious value -- gold purity -- which in the US is written karat.
Diamond mass is sometimes measured in hundredths of a carat, called points.
The word carat comes from the Arabic word qirat for the seed of the coral tree. Another seed that became a unit of measure was the barleycorn (one third of an inch). However, the old folk songs about John Barleycorn refer to beer, which is traditionally brewed from fermented barley (though this is not necessary). The rock group Traffic recorded an arrangement of one of these songs, ``John Barleycorn Must Die,'' in the late sixties or early seventies.
Of course, the most common seed word to be an official unit of measure is the grain (gr.).
This hydrolysis reaction was discovered by Friedrich Wöhler in 1862. In 1888, an economically efficient way was found to manufacture calcium carbide (reaction of lime and coke in an electric arc furnace). Hydrolysis of calcium carbide quickly became the principal method of acetylene production, which it remained until it was replaced by petroleum fractionation in the 1950's.
Calcium carbide was also used directly in carbide lamps. In these lamps, water drips in a controlled way into a ``generator'' chamber containing the calcium carbide, and the acetylene is burned off.
The name ``hydrocarbons'' is often mistakenly used in place of carbohydrates. Hydrocarbons are all those compounds which contain only hydrogen and carbon, but carbohydrates contain oxygen as well. In semiconductors, the confusion is institutionalized as a conventional meaning (vide THC), just like the conventional meanings of ``cholesterol'' in medicine, ``rare earth'' (see RE entry specifically) in geology, and ``metal'' by astronomers.
That Immanuel Velikovsky confused carbohydrate and hydrocarbon was one of the more minor points lodged against the theories advanced in his best sellers Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. So if you hope to launch a daft new theory and cult, or even if you only want to nurse a persecution complex, be sure to get these two terms straight.
The three main bulk nutrients are protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Notice that carbohydrates are the only group not referred to by a singular-form mass noun.
The term carborundum was coined by the inventor Acheson. I don't know what he had in mind, but it seems very likely he wanted to evoke the term corundum (only inferior in hardness to diamond and carborundum itself, among industrial abrasives then available). The substitution of carbo- for co- would indicate the carbon component (it's made by burning sand and coke together; sounds like a great premise for a chimera movie genre -- beach blanket tales from the crypt).
Get oriented at the Mohs's Hardness Scale entry.
H--O \ \ C==O / /in structural formulas.
The hydrogen from this group typically has a high dissociation constant, so molecules containing the group are acids (called ``carboxylic acids'') by the Arrhenius definition (and hence by all accepted definitions). When people say ``organic acid,'' they usually mean carboxylic acid. This saves a syllable at a small cost in precision, since most organic acids of interest, and among these most of the strong ones, are carboxylic acids.
Carboxylic acids form salts in the usual way that acids do. In addition, carboxylic acids react with alcohols to form esters:
RCOOH + R'OH --> RCOOR' + H O 2 carboxylic acid alcohol ester waterThe reverse reaction is an example of hydrolysis. Usually when people say ``ester'' they mean an ester formed as above between an alcohol and a carboxylic acid, but alcohols can react in the same way with other acids (organic and not), and the term ester is applied to the resulting product.
In principle, a molecule with two carboxyl groups is a diprotic acid, but it's an interesting case. Normally in a polyprotic acid, each successive hydrogen ionization is harder. In other words, the dissociation constant for the first proton is higher than for the second, and so forth. For a large organic molecule with two well-separated carboxyl groups, however, the ionizations should be essentially independent.
Now just to set things up and give you the big picture orientation: Libraries used to contain books, because no one else would have them and it seemed a shame to discard them. (Okay, that's just a guess, but there's supporting evidence in the fact that as of 2006, libraries still contain books. Check 'em out!) These books are usually in codex form: printed on separate sheets of paper that are bound together along one edge.
[Usually codices but not always. Old Fine Hall at Princeton (a fine old hall where Einstein once had an office) houses the East Asian Studies department and its excellent collection of old Chinese books, mostly (okay, I only checked a couple of the book boxes, so I'm extrapolating) in the form of scrolls. One of my neighbors my first year in the NGC was a graduate student from Hong Kong who was studying Chinese literature. At some point, I remarked that I wouldn't have expected the US to be the place to go to study Chinese literature. He explained that the best collections of old Chinese literature were in Europe, because of all the stuff the Europeans took when they controlled China, and that the best place to study was the US, because the European collections were closed-stack, and American philanthropists had bought many European collections and donated them to American universities.
It's been over 25 years since he told me this, so things may have changed. He was also bitter about the script modification adopted in the PRC, which has been promoted as a way to simplify writing and help increase literacy. His beef was that it made young Chinese effectively illiterate: unable to read the old literature. Script reform as effective censorship of the past -- why didn't I think of that? From periodic complaints I hear, it seems that unhappiness with the script reform persists in Taiwan.]
The main or ultimate topic of this entry (the card catalog) is one we should wade carefully into; there may be hidden shallows in this deep topic, so an impatient dive could be disastrous. Let's start with a poem quoted before the preface of Soule's book:
BOOKS
These are the masters who instruct us
without rods and ferules,
without hard word and anger,
without clothes or money.
If you approach them they are not asleep;
if investigating you interrogate them
they conceal nothing;
if you mistake them, they never grumble;
if you are ignorant they cannot laugh at you.
The library of wisdom, therefore,
is more precious than all riches,
and nothing that can be wished for
is worthy to be compared with it.
Whosoever, therefore, acknowledges himself
to be a zealous follower
of truth, of happiness,
of wisdom, of science,
or even of faith,
must of necessity make himself
a lover of books.
-- Richard de Bury, ``Philobiblon.''
(Written in 1344, first published in 1474).
``The first great principle in learning to use a library is to acquire the knack of saving time.'' -- W.W. Bishop
``A month in the laboratory can often save thirty minutes in the library'' -- proverb.
In Las Vegas, in order to avoid having the cards become too friendly with the customers, the card decks are retired frequently. At the MGM Grand and probably many others, they'll give you used decks to take home as souvenirs. They're marked, so you don't try to sneak them into a game, but they're identically marked, so you can use them in your own game.
Presumably, the name of this relief organization has influenced the use of ``care package'' to refer to a mailed gift of necessities, like a package of food from parents to child away at school.
The name comes from the original location of its offices: the cross-roads at the center of Oxford.
There was a Carfax Gallery, founded in 1898, that exhibited such artists as William Rothenstein (a co-founder of the gallery), Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and Max Beerbohm. Robert Ross became involved with the gallery in 1901, and you can read about the Carfax Gallery in
(I understand that there's a small imitation someplace not far from Oxford, in addition to the Ontario carhenge made from crushed cars. Catherine Yronwode tries to keep track of some of the most important tribute (physical) sites.)
That show was open to pretty much all vehicles, even though it was sponsored by the Michiana Mopar Association. (As you know, of course, Mopar sells aftermarket parts for Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth vehicles. When Chrysler Corporation bought AMC (before eventually being bought in its turn by Mercedes), it kept the Jeep line in production and also retagged the Eagle line and continued selling those for a couple of years. It turns out that Mopar carries parts for AMC in general.
On a flight once, I was seated next to an employee of one of the major auto parts retailers, like Advance Auto Parts or something. He was reading some internal company literature, and while he was in the bathroom, I learned that their marketing research had discovered that putting stores close together has an anti-intuitive benefit. If the stores have overlapping sales regions -- i.e., if they're close enough that some customers who go to one store could as easily go to the second store when it opens -- you might expect the new store to take business from the old store. But in practice, same-store sales at the older store generally increase after a new store opens nearby (presumably more than they might otherwise be expected to increase, if the market is growing). It's believed that people are just generally more aware of the company -- of both stores -- when two stores are advertising than when one is. If I had read further, I might have learned how close is too close (I think they were considering stores about five miles apart), but the wait to use the bathrooms wasn't that long. (I really appreciate all this insider information, of course, but I'd be happier if they seated me next to a babe who works in swimwear next time. Even happier if she travels in swimwear. Driving has its advantages. Once when I was driving cross-country, I had to get my car repaired in Houston; another customer at the shop was an attractive saleswoman for Johnson beauty products. It's no wonder the airlines are all going bankrupt: they can't figure out how to satisfy their customers' most basic needs!)
Another marketing issue is who exactly the aftermarket retailers' competition is -- i.e., what their potential customers' alternatives are. Patronizing a different company's store? Putting up with a ratty car? Visiting junkyards? Scrapping the car and buying a new one? If other retailers are the main competition, then where they don't exist the market might be saturated with a single store. Don't laugh: Once I interviewed for a job in little Athens, Nowhere (or maybe Athens, Ohio; actually both), and happened to mention Meineke Muffler shops. They didn't have muffler shops in Athens; they had auto repair shops. Glad I didn't get the job.
I mentioned the nearby-stores thing to Gary -- Don't ask me ``Gary who?'' If you'd been reading the glossary diligently you'd know that I don't say, and you'd also know who he is. -- and Gary told me about his dad. For a while when Gary was a kid, his dad had a furniture store. When they found out that another furniture store was, pardon the expression, moving in nearby on the same street, Gary asked his dad if that wouldn't be bad for business. His dad said it would be good, because it would help make their area the place where people would think of going to buy furniture. Eventually a big fire on that street put them out of business, and Gary's dad bought a gas station. Or maybe that was before, but it's interesting how stories line up. I visited the car show (the one sponsored by Michiana Mopar) with Robert (the carchaeologist -- remember?). Robert's dad used to distribute marketing materials to Getty gas stations.
Oh, alright -- I guess that some of you may have valid excuses for not already knowing this, so I'll give you a hint. Saul Bellow wrote a novella with the title Seize the Day. That's a very old expression.
``Carpe Diem'' was a song on the first Fugs album. It was a boring number -- the longest track (over five minutes), and the fewest distinct (in the sense of nonidentical) words: ``Carpe diem / Death is a-comin' in. [Repeat.]''
In 1995, Metallica came out with a song called ``Carpe Diem Baby.'' The only other place in this glossary where we have Metallica information as of this writing is also Latin-related. See Agricola.
Another apparent classical allusion in rock music is the title track of a 1981 AC/DC album: ``For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).'' This is presumably intended to evoke the famous salute to Claudius: Morituri te salutant. This is typically mistranslated or faithfully misquoted in English as `we who are about to die salute you.' AC/DC also gave their 1977 album the title ``Let There Be Rock.''
In the late 1980's, the New Mexico State football team went from being just bad to scraping the profundities of the haplessness barrel. They made #9 on this list of all-time worst college football teams, where it is reported that a new assistant coach, watching his first practice said, ``Lord have mercy on our souls.'' The Aggies finally ended their 27-game losing skid in a blow-out upset of the 105th-ranked Titans of Cal State Fullerton.
See, for example,
M. D. Levenson, Physics Today, 30, #5, p. 44 (May 1977);
A. B. Harvey, J. R. McDonald, and W. M. Tolles, Progress in Analytical
Chemistry, p. 211 (New York: Plenum, 1977).
I've gotten used to the idea that social sciences are counted among the arts and sciences, but I never gave much thought to which. I realize now that I must unconsciously have classed them with the arts -- like metalworking and bricklaying. (As Sherlock Holmes pointed out -- when you've eliminated the impossible, then the truth must lie in whatever remains, no matter how improbable.) I noticed that Ball State (that's BS University now) has a College of Sciences and Humanities, and I thought: ``Cool -- they realized that these two belong together in a college separate from the social sciences!'' Eventually, I discovered that they had made the common error of regarding the social sciences as sciences. As if a fire dog were a breed of canine.
Okay, okay -- if you want to be fussy about it, `he [or she or it] hunts' is spelled caza. To 90% of Spanish-speakers, that's a homophone of (un homófono de) casa.
Oh, and, uh, it turns out that the two words that are not just homophones but homographs are related. The verb casar (`to marry') is derived from casa (`house'), in a development that might otherwise have yielded a verb meaning `to house.' Not to worry, though: casar also means `to nullify' and serves as a noun referring to the collection of houses constituting a village.
Casa Blanca and Casablanca are common place names in Spanish. The following list is just a sampling. It's taken largely from the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada and may be a little out of date, since the encyclopedia was published between about 1907 and 1930.
Municipio Provincia --------- --------- Arboleas Almería Denia Alicante Félix Canarias Letur Albacete Lietor Albacete Oñate Guipúzcoa Vicar AlmeríaSee also Casablanca.
There's a municipality of Casablanca in Columbia. According to the Diccionario Enciclopédico Planeta (1984): 274 km2 and 7339 inhabitants. Primary enterprises: sugar cane and corn farming, forestry, and gold mining.
There's a town of Casablanca in Chile. According to the Diccionario Enciclopédico Planeta (1984): 955 km2 and 12,314 inhabitants. A rich farming area in the fifth region of of Aconcagua.
There are neighborhoods (entidades de población) called Casablanca in many Spanish municipalities:
Municipio Provincia --------- --------- Abarán Murcia Cospeito Lugo Firgas Canarias Fuente Alamo Murcia Lorenzana Lugo San Carlos de la Rápita TarragonaSee also Casa Blanca.
I'm looking for other colored executive mansions, and I'm having a hard time finding them. I did, however, discover directions explaining that the ``Capt. [James & Emma Holt] White House will be the yellow house on your left.'' It's in Alamance County, N.C. How far is that from Orange County, N.C.?
While you're stroking your chin and disheveling your beard, visit the Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck items under the Nomenclature is Destiny entry.
``Citizens'' sounds so burgherisch, so sober and responsible. Just the sort of ideas you associate with Las Vegas.
In 1986, the last time the APS held a meeting in Las Vegas (and it was the last time; hotels were appalled by our sobriety and other unwelcome virtues), I visited family in LA, rented a car and drove in. Caught in traffic, I saw a taxi beside and slightly ahead of me, nosing toward my lane like he wanted go ahead of me... and then he did the most outrageous, stupid, unexpected thing one could have imagined: he gave me the right of way and waited for me to pass. Confusion! Anger! He could have caused an accident! They should confiscate his medallion!
Rule of the road #1: DO WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU.
If you don't someone will be surprised and an accident is very likely. If you're driving a taxi, you should cut people off and turn without signaling.
Sheesh. Fortunately I was able to handle the emergency, and no one was hurt.
The principal requirement in a word that is a synonym of catarrh is that it not have any nasal consonants, so you can pronounce it when you've got it. The best thing about the word catarrh is that you can hawk up phlegm just by prolonging the second syllable.
You know, the word calibre, referring to gun-muzzle size, is a corruption of the word caliper, which one used to measure it with.
Gloss for those who, uh, don't remember:
It is recorded that Cato the Elder used to end all his speeches in the Roman
Senate with that phrase, which meant `Carthage is [to be] destroyed.' Rome
did destroy Carthage in the third Punic war, although the business about sowing
the soil there with salt is now generally believed to be just a story invented
later.
Cato the Younger was a partisan of Pompey against Julius Caesar, and committed suicide after the defeat of Pompey. This Cato's daughter Portia was married to Brutus, who also eventually opposed Julius Caesar.
You know, it's pretty unusual for an organization to get a name that is a sentence rather than a noun phrase. Verbs power strong language; I guess they're trying to make a powerful statement about a computer (no article; is ``Computer'' its name? how quaint!) that assisted tools for study. I guess that's it. Either that, or the stonecutter lacked a stencil for the hyphen, and the name is just an ordinary noun phrase about Computer-Assisted Tools further specified by a prepositional phrase.
``Computer-Assisted,'' as I believe I point out elsewhere, is a rather widely used term. One problem with hackneyed phrases is that their use becomes a bit unthought. For example, what exactly is a computer-assisted tool? We can gain some insight by considering analogous expressions, such as power-assisted steering. This is steering that works without (engine) power, but that works better with a power assist. Obviously, then, any computer-assisted tool exists independently of any computer, and can be used without a computer, but works better with a computer. That's why it's not called a computer-based tool, or software study tool. I'm going to think up some examples of computer-assisted tools real soon, in the interests of scholarship.
``[A] member-owned information organization serving producers in all segments of the cattle business. Cattle-Fax is a member-directed corporation, governed by a board of directors, elected from the membership. The staff of Cattle-Fax is comprised of [sic; they mean comprises] market analysts, research analysts, data collectors, an information services department and service personnel.''
That and more here. Really, there is no more accurate and complete compilation of the facts of cattle than the cattle themselves. Eventually, then, as they improve their operation, when you ask for detailed information about one of their beeves, they'll just send its genome description and some historical data to your phone, and a device on your end will clone a facsimile for your inspection.
You should be careful pronouncing Catullus, that it doesn't sound like Catallus, the Roman army general. The error is unbelievably frequent. In fact, until Mark B. pointed it out, I had even spelled Catullus as Catallus above, making an oddly meaningless sentence.
Final cause is purpose. Efficient cause is what we call cause in the sense of cause-and-effect; efficient cause is what we moderns think of as the determinant cause. Material cause is what a thing is made of. On 96.10.25 the Stammtisch considered the possibility that analytical chemists have Aristotle all wrong, but we went off on a tangent about saponification process [200] and Maimonides [613] before we could reach a firm conclusion.
Everyone mistakenly thinks of formal cause as ``name.'' Well, alright, not everyone, but I misunderstood for twenty-one years and nobody corrected me. The formal cause is really the identity of a thing in a fundamental sense -- related to Plato's ideal forms but inhering in the thing perceived, rather than in some thing outside the cave that is not directly perceived. For Ari, the formal cause is determining.
Okay now, some email input from an appropriate Stammtisch member allows me to raise the quality of discussion a notch: there are relationships among the causes...
In Metaphysics 1050a8, Aristotle wrote ``The initiating principle [arche] is that for the sake of which a process of becoming takes place, and this is always the end or goal [telos].'' Nearby he also writes ``Matter [hyle] exists in a potential state, just because it may attain to its form [eidos]; and when it exists actually, then it is in its form.''
As it happens, I can understand the meaning of these passages. The meaning of these passages is that it may require some study to understand Aristotle's philosophy.
If you have a library handy, you could see C. Cruz-Neira, D. J. Sandin, and T. A. DeFanti, ``Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE,'' Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH '93 Computer Graphics Conference (ACM SIGGRAPH, August 1993), pp. 135-142.
On the other hand, if you have access to the internet, you can follow this link to Fakespace Systems Inc, which also markets RAVE.
CAVE requires viewers to wear special goggles; the illusion of depth is created by displaying distinct left- and right-eye images projected in linearly polarized light. (This causes a confusing double image if a viewer tilts his head.) Similar systems include NAVE and BNAVE.
Softwarehouse -- now there's a word.
A number of years ago, George Constantou was its head. His niece was property manager where I rented an apartment.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
Channel | Frequency (in MHz) |
---|---|
1 | 26.965 |
2 | 26.975 |
3 | 26.985 |
4 | 27.005 |
5 | 27.015 |
6 | 27.025 |
7 | 27.035 |
8 | 27.055 |
9 | 27.065 |
10 | 27.075 |
11 | 27.085 |
12 | 27.105 |
13 | 27.115 |
14 | 27.125 |
15 | 27.135 |
16 | 27.155 |
17 | 27.165 |
18 | 27.175 |
19 | 27.185 |
20 | 27.205 |
21 | 27.215 |
22 | 27.225 |
23 | 27.235 |
French Kings Louis XIII and XIV used to, uh, maybe this isn't appropriate for a family glossary.
According to ongoing research conducted by someone who once sat next to me on an AA flight (OKC to O'Hare), most people can't name twenty active football players. My suspicion is that most of the twenty active football players they can't name are linemen.
One barrier to the practical utilization of this biodegradation process is the fact that PCB's are hydrophobic (i.e., nonpolar, not water-soluble), whereas the bacteria live in moist sections of the soil. In order to accelerate the process, surfactants such as QS have been considered (see F. Fava, D. Di Gioia: ``Effects of Triton X-100 and Quillaya Saponin on the ex situ bioremediation of a chronically polychlorobiphenyl-contaminated soil,'' Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, vol. 50, #5, pp 623-630 (1998)).
``[O]versees the collection of $1.00 per head on all cattle sold in the U.S. and $1.00 equivalent on imported cattle, beef and beef products and is responsible for approving the annual budget for its national checkoff-funded programs.''
(To talk back to As It Happens, email <aih@toronto.cbc.ca>).
I have seen the CBC described as the party organ of the Liberal Party. To the extent that parallels can be drawn, the Liberal Party of Canada corresponds to the Democratic Party of the US.
On January 22, 2008, the CBC sponsored a debate among candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, ahead of South Carolina's Democratic primary on January 26. Neil Young and the NHL, Mark Steyn and now this! We're being recolonized! Sound the alarm, it's... Oh, it's the Congressional Black Caucus, sponsoring a debate on MLK Day.
For our serious, solid-information-seeking glossary readers (at least the ones we haven't driven off): any actually useful link or content has been segregated in this CBCF entry.
This entry used to claim the CBE was the ``energy surface of the conduction band as a function of momentum coördinate.'' WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! Viewed in momentum space, the conduction band is all surface: at any point in momentum space (more precisely in the space of crystal momentum or quasimomentum), there is a discrete set of energies that an electron may have.
The CBE was founded in 1957, as the Conference of Biological Editors, by a joint action of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the US government's National Science Foundation (NSF). The Conference was changed to Council some time between 1964 and 1972.
A major activity of the organization is the production of a style manual. Interestingly, or perhaps not so interestingly, while the issuing entity had Biology in its name, the manual's original title was Style Manual for Biological Journals. A case can be made for that, I suppose.
The sixth edition, published in 1994, broadened the scope of its style recommendations beyond biological disciplines (``microbial, plant, zoological, and medical sciences'' -- why not botanical and animal? why exclude clinical medical research?) to science generally. The cynical view (mine) is that this was a territorial encroachment, a power play, a bid to stick their noses in other people's business. An alternative and fashionable view is that science is rapidly becoming highly interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity is an occasionally useful idea because it gives people with money and a negligible knowledge of science the illusion of understanding. In fact, as any fool can see, specialization continues to increase. Interdisciplinarity takes the form of cooperation between specialists who understand each others' work only at a what-can-you-do-for-me level.
Whatever its virtues, the manual seems to be consulted primarily as an arbiter of the somewhat arbitrary conventions of citation. We're talking about scholarly or at least putatively scholarly research here. The most widely used citation style standards seem to be those of the MLA and the APA style manuals, with those of the CBE and University of Chicago style manuals in distant third and fourth places. On the other hand, the most widely used style manuals (as such) are probably the MLA, APA, and U. of Chicago, and fourth place would probably go to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. That's my impression, anyway. Outside of academia, I imagine that the most popular style manuals would be those of the University of Chicago, the AP, and the New York Times, in that order.
In 2000, six years after making its move with the style manual, CBE changed its name to the Council of Science Editors (CSE). As of 2007, there has not been another edition of the style manual, and its citation standards are still widely referred to as the CBE conventions/standards/whathaveyou. I suppose this will change when the CSE issues a new style manual.
Kristal soon discovered that there wasn't much of a market for more C, BG, or B in the city. The bar was in the Bowery, appropriately enough for what eventually became a trendy venue for the 1970's punk rock movement. (For most of the twentieth century, the Bowery was a blighted area. Jim Croce's ``You Don't Mess Around With Jim'' begins ``Uptown got its hustlers / Bowery got its bums.'')
CBGB's was still there as of August 2005, having dodged the landlord's attempt to evict it. However, the landlord, not exactly surprisingly, refused to renew the lease, and that expired in September 2005. Lawyers for Kristal managed to forestall the closing for a year, which shows how much you can do when you haven't a legal leg to stand on and everyone knows it. The club will closed Sunday, October 15, 2006. Hilly Kristal, still the owner after all those years, was 74 years old and battling lung cancer, but said he planned to reopen in Las Vegas.
See Sean Landis's pages.
See Sean Landis's pages.
China's Cultural Revolution was begun by Chairman Mao in 1966. In intention, it was something like one of the Great Awakenings that the US has experienced since the colonial era: it was meant to bolster religious belief. In China, the religion was an economic messianism called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Unlike the Great Awakenings, participation in the Cultural Revolution was not optional. There were some other differences, such as the mortality rates, but I want to focus on an aspect relevant to this entry. That was this little thing we call the ``Down to the Countryside Movement,'' begun by Mao in December 1968, which continued for a decade. It wasn't a walk in the park. It was an involuntary ``movement,'' in this case of ``young intellectuals'' into the countryside, where they were educated by the peasants. The education consisted of learning what farm servitude was like, first hand. Most of the ``young intellectuals'' were recent college graduates, but some were not. A friend of mine told me some of his experience of this internal exile, begun before he finished high school. After some time, he got word from his mother of rumors that the Movement would soon be ended; she urged him to try to prepare for the college qualification exams. There were no useful textbooks available, but he and a couple of friends found an educated fellow who taught them whatever he could, which included mathematics to the calculus level. (When you spend a couple of decades exiling intellectuals to the sticks, you're bound to end up with some sharp sticks.) My friend did well enough on his exams to continue on to college.
This is very different from CBL, of course. But every experience can be a learning experience, so the fact normally goes without saying. When it doesn't go without saying -- whenever an intrinsically noneducational activity is explicitly labeled as learning or education -- it strongly suggests some dishonesty afoot. Okay, here's a CBL definition from a useful email: ``courses, often called service-learning, typically offer students opportunities to provide some meaningful service over an extended period of time that meets a need or goal that is defined by a community group or agency.''
Cf. CBR, EL. Uh-oh... namespace collision straight ahead!
This term dates from before widespread web use. It meant something like learning based on an educational computer program distributed on floppy disks. Nowadays it might mean googling for answers. I can't assign take-home exams any more, because any problem sufficiently simple to assign for an exam is liable to have an answer available somewhere on the web.
Did you say ``honor code''? Look, that might have been effective when cheating normally required the cooperation of a second person, typically drawn from a small pool of fellow students who had also pledged to follow the honor code. With the Internet, it effectively takes only one to tango, and the dance floor fills up fast.
More on promotional activities: After co-starring as Major Anya Amasova in ``The Spy Who Loved Me'' (1977), Barbara Bach kvetched about having had to kiss icky Roger Moore, who was old enough to be her father. (Not her exact words; I'm going from memory here, okay?) Moore, whose first movie role was as a soldier in a 1945 movie, was 50 at the time and is three years older than Sean Connery. In a 1996 interview, Moore said, ``I have a couple of projects that are simmering. One is a remake of a French film which is almost ready. All we need is to find a leading lady old enough to look as if she would be interested in being kissed by me.''
Barbara Goldbach was born August 27, 1947. (Not sure when the name changed -- maybe when she started modeling for the Ford Agency at age 16.) When she was 18 she married 29-year-old Augusto Gregorini. BB co-starred with Ringo Starr in a stupid movie called ``Caveman'' (1891; sorry, make that 1981 -- there weren't any pterodactyls in 1891). Starr (Richard Starkey) and she married on her thirty-fourth birthday (he was 40).
It was founded in 1996. The Stammtisch Beau Fleuve is a more venerable organization.
Since the CBO is ultimately controlled by the majority party in Congress, one might expect it to reflect a partisan bias in predicting future US economic performance (such predictions are needed for estimating tax revenues and public assistance expenses, for example). Nevertheless, over the years the accuracy of its predictions has compared favorably with that of nonpolitical agencies. Tentatively, I think this could conceivably perhaps possibly be taken, arguably at least, as demonstrating personal integrity.
The CBOE and the Amex compete with each other on most of the contracts they list. Exceptions include options on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and some other benchmarks for which the CBOE has an exclusive license. On the other hand, the Amex offers S&P 500 depositary receipts, called ``Spiders,'' and other ``exchange-traded funds'' that track benchmarks. The Amex and other exchanges offer options on many ETF's, but no options market offers contracts on the Spiders.
I just looked around, and found another CBRC -- possibly the same one at a new URL. The site seems extremely bare, but I guess that's how we like it.
The CBS style is also used by a couple of former Dutch colonies. Indonesia, most of the former Dutch East Indies (including Dutch New Guinea, discussed at .do), had a Biro Pusat Statistik that goes by BPS (q.v.). This translates `Central Bureau of Statistics,' one of the names given on its English pages, though the official English name seems to be Statistics Indonesia, which leads to ``Statistics Indonesia of The Republic of Indonesia'' (for Biro Pusat Statistik Republik Indonesia). The loan word Biro in the official name has now been replaced by the native Badan.
Suriname, a Dutch colony that in 1975 achieved full legal independence (that doesn't mean it's independent of financial aid from the Netherlands), has an Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek (`General Bureau for Statistics').
The Netherlands Antilles, formerly known as the Dutch West Indies, has been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1954 (like Suriname from 1954 to 1975). This status seems to be more like that of Puerto Rico's as a commonwealth territory of the US, rather than like that of independent countries of the British Commonwealth. Aruba was originally part of the Netherlands Antilles, but was granted separate independent status, still within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in 1986. Aruba has a Central Bureau of Statistics. (Stay tuned: it seems the Netherlands Antilles may be dissolved, with Curaçao and Bonaire becoming independent countries and the smaller islands becoming a province of the Netherlands, or something of that sort.)
In order to finish writing up all my physics labs at the end of my first semester in college, I pulled a double all-nighter (i.e., I stayed up over fifty straight hours; I'm not that young any more). During my last hour or two of consciousness, I hallucinated, or maybe just dreamt on my feet, and this was unaccompanied by cognitive aspects of psychosis, aside from worrying about grades. Does that count? So I'm not crazy? Does this mean I have to serve the prison sentence?
Bonnet first described the syndrome in 1760. (I mean the CBS -- not exactly what I experienced.) This was before the days when patient confidentiality came to be such an important part of medical ethics, and anyhow Bonnet gets a professional `bye' on account of not really being a physician, exactly, so we know the identity of the patient: it was Charles's grandfather.
Charles Bonnet was also the name of Audrey Hepburn's character's father, played by Hugh Griffith, in the delightful 1966 instructional film ``How to Steal a Million.'' (If they made a prequel today, it would be an infomercial.)
CBS is not a lot like the dream-like hallucinations that often accompany sleep deprivation, except that both tend to be ``pleasant'' or ``comforting.'' CBS occurs in the elderly and typically accompanies ocular pathology such as macular degeneration. In other words, it results from attempts of the brain to make sense of defective visual information. As I noted above, the coincidence with the broadcast media corporation is too rich. In CBS, people usually imagine they see things that are smaller than normal (little people, for example). Sort of like on TV.
CBS was founded in 1928, when William S. Paley bought United Independent Broadcasters, Inc. and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. Early days, they would say ``this is the CBS'' as we still say the FBI. In 1974 the acronym was sealed and the company became CBS, Inc. This was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corp. in 1995, and Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation in 1997. Bits and pieces of this were sold off in subsequent years, and what remained was purchased by Viacom in 1999 or 2000. Eventually, Viacom was split into Viacom and CBS Corporation, with the latter having the broadcast network as its core business.
CBS has the epithet of ``the Tiffany Network,'' reputed to be an allusion to the quality of its programming in the Paley era, or less plausibly because some of CBS's first demonstrations of color TV, in 1950, were in the former Tiffany & Co. building in NYC. Nowadays the epithet is typically used in lamentations of the declining quality and prestige of CBS News. The prestige was real, cemented by the legendary Edward R. Murrow with his dramatic reporting from England during the Blitz. It's been downhill since, and fairly precipitously in the 21st century. Regarding CBS programming generally, ``we look forward to'' an upcoming ``reality show'' called ``Kid Nation.''
The team nickname is ``Customs'' (also Douane -- see ASFC). It's not whether you win or lose -- it's how you play the game.
A careful examination of the map shows that Canada has land borders with the US and, uh, the US. This is not such a common situation. We set aside island nations (like Ireland, the UK, Brunei, East Timor, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Papua New Guinea), of course. A few countries are entirely surrounded by (and have a land border with) a single other country: Lesotho, the Vatican, and San Marino (Lesotho is enclosed by South Africa; we'll let you guess which two are in Italy). The countries which definitely have a land border with only one other country without being surrounded all have sea coasts (no such countries are squashed up against just a river or lake): Denmark, Monaco, Portugal, the Gambia, and South Korea. (Bangladesh touches Burma, and Swaziland has a Mozambican border.) Qatar occupies a peninsula that borders Saudi Arabia on the south. The western end of the UAE comes close and may or may not border Qatar. All I want to know is: how do they assign the ``mineral rights''?
Well, it seems that the CBSA isn't concerned only with land borders. Still, they should have called it the ``US Border Services Agency'' -- that would have caused amusing confusion and possibly even eliminated some errorist threats.
Interesting factoids about the evolving CBSA will be available from the website of the Canadian Prime Minister's office.
It can't be government censorship if it's not governmental! (But the CRTC maintains that ``[i]ncreased reliance on self-regulation, however, does not imply that the Commission [the CRTC] is relinquishing its responsibilities. Any interested party may, at any time, choose to approach the Commission directly.'')
Famous quote:
In Canada we respect freedom of speech but we do not worship it.(From May 10, 2000, statement censuring radio nag Laura Schlessinger.)
bcc Borland C btc Borland Turbo C gcc GNU C cc Unix C (traditionally bundled with the Unix operating system) cl Microsoft C ztc Zortec C
Copies now are more often created by photocopying, by ink-impregnated paper, or
by digital reproduction of an electronic original. Cc:
labels a
mail header field listing one or more addresses that an email should be sent to
in addition to any addresses indicated in the To: field. Cf. Bcc.
The first house pet clone was a gray tabby cat named CC. This achievement was perpetrated at Texas A&M in February 2002, with help from the biotech firm Genetics Savings & Clone. That company plans to offer pet owners the chance, by 2003, to replace old pets with genetically almost identical copies.
The clones are not completely identical genetically, since they are made by transferring the donor chromosomes into a cell from which DNA has been removed. The DNA from mitochondria and other organelles in the original egg remain, and differ to some degree from that of corresponding organelles in the donor.
Moreover, identical genotype does not guarantee identical phenotype. For example, although donor (Fluffy, in this case) and clone (CC) have identical sets of the gene pairs that control fur color, the expression of these genes does not follow a simple dominant-recessive pattern. Fluffy has a calico coat; CC is, as noted, gray.
I'm not going to repeat here the Goethe quote I recently mentioned at the BSET entry.
More recently, a physicist I know, who went to a small Baptist school on a football scholarship, needed a job and went to a local preach' to declare: ``I wanna preach the BaAAAAAahble!'' -- got a job on the spot. He eventually tired of that, or maybe got too many ministers' daughters in trouble; I met him making equipment for HEP.
Another guy I know was getting a Ph.D. in Rocket Science at a Big-Time Ivy League school. He visited his fiancée's old neighborhood during a traditional old-country block party, and his future brothers-in-law took him aside for the traditional old-country serious talk about honorable intentions and ...
``... and whaddaya gonna do when you get outa school?''Persuaded by the cogency of his new family's adumbrations, this friend was saved and went on to wealth and fame and wealth in the software racket. He can eat juicy steak and buy a fancy new car whenever he wants.
``I plan to become a Professor of Rocket Science at [Prestigious East-Coast University].''
``What, you wanna be a teacher? Ain'tcha got no ambishun?''
[Names and details have been changed to improve the story.]
Could there be a pattern here?
(Although the choice of terminology is completely inexplicable by us, there is no mystery about the coincidence of English and French abbreviations. In both languages, these are C.C., O.C., and C.M. This occurred completely by accident.)
``The Order of Canada was established in 1967 [wasn't that an anniversary or somethin'?] to recognize outstanding achievement and service in various fields of human endeavour. Appointments are made on the recommendation of an Advisory Council, chaired by the Chief Justice of Canada. The motto of the Order is `Desiderantes meliorem patriam - They desire a better country'.''
I see a couple of problems with the Latin motto's
translation. First is that desiderantes means, in this context, `they
who desire.' This is mistranslated so uniformly that I'm having trouble
trusting my eyes. So it's more of a description than a statement. Second, as
translated it can be interpreted as meaning that members of the order wish that
the US were a better neighbor. When patriam is translated a little more
accurately, as `homeland' or `fatherland,' the meaning becomes easy for us
Americans to understand: `they who wish they lived in the US' or `they who wish
they'd been born in the US.' Bill
Casselman sort of agrees with me. He argues slightly inconsistently that
to the sensitive Latinist, the motto means that order members long to be dead
again. I suggest that we just regard this as a two-part motto, with the Latin
and vernacular parts expressing sentiments that reinforce each other. Something
similar is done with
the French part of the Latin-and-French motto: it's also formulated as a
statement rather than as a noun phrase. (More philological analysis is
described at the related OC entry. I hope to have
some slightly funnier material at the CM entry.)
Happily, the US got its Latin mottoing out of the way when educated people
still had the elements of Latin. As this bit from
Macauley's
History of England indicates (search on mottoes
), among
English-speakers the devising of Latin mottoes has long been regarded as a
specialized task best left to experts.
Casselman also hates the medal design and serves a good jpeg of it. I like the jaunty way the crown is cocked.
The Order of Canada is Canada's highest (or three highest) civilian honor(s). A ribbon bearing the words desiderantes meliorem patriam was also added to the Canadian coat of arms in 1967.
Two random variables are correlated if they are not independent. The independence of two random variables x, y can be expressed as the factorizability of their joint probability distribution function P(x, y) -- if the variables are independent, then there exist distributions (normalized, positive, measurable in the Lebesgue sense) P1(x) and P2(y) such that
I'm mobile!
Classicists can no longer huddle in the rear in the surf as waves of their greenhorn Greek and Latin 1 A-ers are machine-gunned in the sand. If we are going to lose Greek, let us do so with burly, cigar-chomping professors, red-eyed from overload classes, wounds oozing from bureaucratic combat, chests bristling with local teaching medals and complimentary Rotary pens from free lecturing, barking orders and dragging dozens of dead bodies forward as they brave administrative gunfire, oblivious to the incoming rounds from ethnic studies and contemporary cinema.
It is rosy-fingered dawn on the day of the epic battle. ``Here, son: have some spiritus asper. You'll need it before this day is done.'' Later...
Construe! Construe!
Hold the dochmiac line!
Damn the torpedoes and conjugate to the max! In the name of Zeus-- batten the scansions! ... They're recensing! They're recensing!! Hit 'em in the gutturals! Reeeeeloooaaad vowel quantities! Go gettus, go getta-- Go-ooo gettum!!!!
Oh, uh... waitasec. Ummm, tiny little corrigendiculum: Spanish clasista isn't `classicist.' It's like English classist: a different word (if it's a word) related to clase, `class.' So CCC is just an Argentine organization whose name means something vaguely like `combative classist current.' (Actually, it means that rather precisely, but it's vague in both languages. That translation, though, is overliteral; in figurative use corriente corresponds more closely to `stream.') Someone trying to make sense of it may come up with `class-struggler movement.'
Nevermind...
``The Certified Coin Exchange - CCE is an electronic exchange for US certified rare coin dealers. Founded in 1990, the CCE is open for trading among its 130+ member firms every business day. CCE provides dealers and collectors a ready market and pricing data as well as a way to execute rare coin transactions. CCE member firms have agreed to rules which govern delivery of coins and payment, as well as dispute resolution procedures. There are currently in excess of 37,000 bids for US certified rare coins posted on CCE and about 4,000 asks.''
Successor of ANE.
Hey Pops -- you want fries with that?
This entry is a good illustration of the great utility and convenience of having names in two languages. Without the French, you might make the mistake of supposing that this was a Canadian foundation about communications. With the French, you realize that it's a foundation about Canadian communications. The English is useful too, because if you don't know French, you probably think this is a Canadian journal for foundry studies. (You probably realized all this before, but I have to mention it because most other readers are not as sharp as you are. Please send money now so we can continue our valuable outreach efforts to enlighten the benighted.)
``The CCHREI's goal is to ensure the right match between the skills and knowledge of Canadians with environmental employment, and the needs of the environment sectors. This match will enable Canadian industry to maintain a world class environmental workforce. The CCHREI is working toward its goal by: developing national occupational standards, certifying individuals with environmental employment and accrediting environmental courses and programs, helping young Canadians enter the environmental labour market, promoting cooperation between industry, government, and the academic community, and, conducting research on the environmental labour market.''
[Labour is a special Canadianese word meaning `labor.']
La Version français: Conseil canadien des ressources humaines de l'industrie de l'environnement (CCRHIE).
This is not illustrated at right.
Originally a standards body of IEEE; has been succeeded by the ITU-TSS or ITU-T.
``[R]esponsible for one of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research support organisations, the [not at all] Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC).''
A member of the recently inaugurated SBF Hall of Acronym Fame (SHAB).
That's 256, for those of you keeping score at home. According to their low-visuals website, CCLVI has four local affiliates:
The three-story downtown building, at Second Street NW between D and E Streets, is now a 1400-bed shelter (1250 men, 150 women), still run by the CCNV. The shelter itself is also frequently referred to as the CCNV, though it's a bit more accurate to call it the CCNV shelter.
Despondent over his failed relationship with fellow homeless activist Carol Fennelly, Mitch Snyder committed suicide in July 1990. Fennelly led CCNV until January 1994, when she was ousted by the CCNV board. Gregory Keith Mitchell, a former computer programmer and drug dealer who was rescued by the shelter and made good, was voted the new director (technically: ``Vice-President''). His wife was named Secretary-Treasurer. In 1996 he was ousted (that seems to be the only way to leave alive) amid various charges of misuse of funds; in 1998 he pled guilty to stealing $65,000 out of HUD grants.
In case it hadn't occurred to you already, you should check the pea entry for more about homelessness.
In testy testimony before Congress in 1980, Mitch Snyder claimed that there were 2.2 million homeless in the US. Later he claimed that the number was three million, and numbers in the low millions have been popular scare stats among homeless activists ever since. The calculation that this number was based on was apparently political, and Snyder was adept at that kind of mathematics. The number has also been justified on the basis of telephone surveys to bien pensant fellow shelter operators, but maybe that's the same thing. Grindingly sound surveys and censuses, which arrive at boring, mere statistical accuracy, find numbers clustering around 300,000, and with very high likelihood within the range 200,000 to 600,000. (Peter Rossi of the University of Massachusetts estimated 330,000; the US census came up with 230,000 for a typical single day in 1990. Given the unavoidable uncertainties in counting, it would be hard to plot a reliable trend since the late 1980's, which were the glory days for this kind of study.) A third of a million homeless is a tragedy, but it is a different tragedy than two million homeless, particularly when it means that most of the homeless are deinstitutionalized mentally ill.
I have to track down Mitch Snyder's ipsissima verba. I recall they included a statement of his indomitable credo of defiance against the evil concept of accurate counting.
See, for example, Allan Rosman and Michael Nofal: ``Computer controlled pump unit cuts power, increases output,'' World Oil, vol. 217, pp. 53ff (November 1996).
which some may regard as significant.
CHRCL at least has a website.
How long will it be before the members of CCR find themselves rocking the chairs in a CCRC?
The CCR's are a contract agreed by every purchaser of property that is part of a planned community. If a planned community and a community association are the privately realized analogues of a municipality and its government, then the CCR's are analogous to municipal laws (but they tend to be difficult to amend). For more, see this introduction to community associations from the perspective of a student of parliamentary process.
``Unit'' seems to be one of those name units that later begins to seem like not such a good idea after all. Another example is Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of Frank Zappa. Discussing the death-ray-on-the-moon project in ``Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'' (1999), Dr. Evil says
The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.Moon Unit Zappa's real-life husband, Matchbox Twenty drummer Paul Doucette, says they got a chuckle out of that, and that while she is used to all the old jokes about her name, everyone they know just calls her ``Moon.''
Moon was born on September 28, 1967. So was Mira Sorvino. (Coincidentally, this entry was first put in the glossary on September 28, 2003.) The first soft (i.e. survivable) landings on the moon of vehicles from earth took place in 1966 -- the Soviet Luna 9 on February 3, the US Surveyor 1 on June 2, and Luna 13, which was launched on December 21 and landed on the 24th. (I'm not sure to what points on earth these dates are referenced.)
Incidentally, the Alpha-Zappa thing reminds me of something that happened to a journal called The Historian. This is published for Phi Alpha Theta, a history honor society with chapters at over 700 (mostly US) universities. Following the usual practice of Greek-letter societies, each chapter is designated by one, two, or three Greek letters (the first 24 chapters founded had one-letter names, the next 576 chapters had two-letter names, and the most recent chapters have three-letter names). Each issue of The Historian lists the newest initiates into the society by chapter. Originally, the chapters were arranged according to the order of letters in the Greek alphabet. (You probably remember ``I am the alpha and the omega.'' Omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet.) Beginning with the fall 1997 issue, the chapters have been alphabetized according to the English spellings of the Greek letters' names (... tau, theta, upsilon, ...). I am tempted to write that this is stupid, but a more precise characterization would be ``capitulation to ignorance.''
If you're still reading, then the logical order for reading entries would have you going on to the collating sequence entry. If you're not still reading, then you can ignore this.
On October 16, 2008, at Ravenna Bowl in the town of Ravenna in western Michigan, Don Doane bowled his first perfect game. He was 62, and he had been bowling with the same five-man team for 45 years (Nutt Farms, one of the 16 teams that compete in the Commercial League there). Normally this sort of thing doesn't make news, but as he was hugging and high-fiving his teammates, Doane collapsed of a heart attack. EMT's were unable to revive him; he was taken to a hospital but died. So it made Sports Illustrated and newspapers in Thailand and Australia, and you probably heard and read about it.
This story confirms what we all know: too much excitement can kill you. My advice is to tone it down, and if things are getting too exciting, take a break. By all means have fun, but not too much fun. Are you happy now? Maybe that's not a good thing. Your heart isn't racing, is it? Oh no! Here quick, think about these horrible lyrics:
Hey girls, gather round
Listen to what I'm putting down.
How do you feel now, worse? Good! Remember that it's important to calibrate this thing. You want to dose yourself carefully. So if you're feeling bad enough, stop now. Otherwise, read on:
Here is the main thing that I want to say
I'm busy twenty-four hours a day
I fix broken hearts, I know that I truly can.
If you need a refill, just do a search on the song title "Handy Man" and the singer "James Taylor." It's the Barry Manilowest thing he ever did. Cf. the latter's ``I Write the Songs'' (``...of love and spe-ecial thi-ings'').
I want to warn you that at this point, we're going to deviate from the heretofore narrow focus of this entry on cardiac care and consider shopping district management and demographics. Be it noted, however, that many shopping malls now have AED's.
Christchurch, the second-largest city in New Zealand, has a central shopping district with over 400 businesses. According to Paul Lonsdale, the manager of the Central City Business Association there, they have a problem with several dozen young people who regularly spread rubbish, spray graffiti, get drunk, use drugs, swear, and intimidate patrons. The obvious solution would be to require them to purchase the rubbish they spread (and the spray paint and intimidation supplies, etc.) only from local merchants. But the business association, with the approval of the city council and the police, has thought of something more subtle.
They plan to pipe music into the mall area. ``Nice, easy listening'' music like Manilow's ``Can't Smile Without You,'' ``Mandy,'' and other pop hits. ``The intention is to change the environment in a positive way ... so nobody feels threatened or intimidated'' according to Lonsdale. They hope that BM's ``smooth and gentle tones'' either pacify the unruly teens or else drive them away. The Press newspaper interviewed one 16-year-old who promised defiance if the threatened measure is implemented. ``We would just bring a stereo and play it louder,'' said Emma Belcher, who I am grateful chose not to remain anonymous. According to the AP story on March 3, 2009, that is my main source for these paragraphs, Lonsdale retorted that the city would then hit them with anti-noise laws. If noise is unwelcome sound, then she might bring countercharges. Perhaps Lonsdale was laying the groundwork for a defense when he insisted that ``I did not say Barry Manilow is a weapon of mass destruction.'' It's obviously more selective than that.
You know, it is my ambition that one day all the entries in this glossary will form a single hyperlinked ``cluster,'' in the percolation-model or graph-theoretic or seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sense. Entries like this are important in achieving this ambition, because it is necessary to establish and demonstrate the firm connection between WMD-related content and pop-music-related content, not to mention the medical aspects. You may want to have a look at our spiffy new torture music entry, although it still needs stuff about the US siege of the Papal Nuncio's compound in Panama when Noriega took asylum there. Now all I need is another Latin link.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
There are a variety of formats defined for various kinds of data and application. The standard music CD uses the Redbook audio format (so called because the spec was distributed in a red book). This has a bit depth of 16 and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.
Maine has an interesting way of allocating its votes in the Electoral College. The popular majority statewide is used to select two electors, and popular majority in each CD determines ``its'' EC elector. The way things looked for a long time, it seemed this might matter in 2004. Nebraska uses the same system, but all districts were expected to go to a single ticket (Republican). In fact, through 2004 neither state has split its electoral vote since they changed their allocation laws (1969 in Maine and 1991 in Nebraska).
In the 2004 general election, there was a ballot issue in Colorado to amend the state constitution. The proposed amendment 36 would have apportioned electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote (without respect to CD's, but this seemed a good place to mention it anyway). If passed, it was supposed to take effect immediately, determining EV apportionment for the 2004 presidential election. Most polls favored the Republican ticket to win a narrow victory in the state in 2004, so Democrats stood to benefit from a switch of as many as four of the state's nine EV's in that cycle. (In the very close election that was anticipated, that might have been decisive.) The effective-immediately provision, however, was challenged in court in mid-October, and fear of adding to election confusion and uncertainty worked against approval of the amendment. Both major parties opposed the amendment, with one of the main stated objections being that it would make Colorado a guaranteed fly-over in future presidential campaigns. The ballot proposition had some popular traction, but was eventually solidly defeated.
The US House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature, and many democracies have bicameral legislatures with identifiable upper and lower houses. In parliamentary democracies without a separately elected executive, however, the different role of parties, the typically attenuated role of the upper house, and the different dynamics of power make the correspondence with the US system a bit shaky. With that proviso, at least at the formal level one may say that in Canada, what correspond to US CD's are the voting districts for the House of Commons. These are informally known as ``ridings.'' It puts me in the mind of Dudley Do-right, the only cartoon character I can think of with a hyphenated name.
CDAI = 2F + 5F + 7F + 20F + 30F + 10F + 6F + F , 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8where the Fi are ``weight factors'' that you can read about on this page, which has a CDAI calculator. The first three authors of that 1976 paper later published ``Rederived Values of the 8 Coefficients of the Crohn Disease Activity Index (CDAI)'' in vol. 77 of the same journal, pp. 843-846 (1979). The next article (pp. 847-869), by R.W. Summer, et al., describes the National Cooperative Crohn Disease Study. I have neither online access to the journal nor sufficent interest in the subject to walk over to the medical school. The titles, including the disease name, are quoted as I have them. There are other, less popular indices of Crohn's-Disease activity.
The real Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth-century writer. In one of his stories, he proposed seven ways to reach the Moon from Earth, including rockets. The other six ways wouldn't have worked. In True History, written in around 150 C.E., Lucian of Samosata explains how a Greek ship could reach the Moon by winds and water-spouts. When you consider that a water-spout is a jet and that the propellant in modern rockets is electrolyzed water (i.e., combusted hydrogen and oxygen), this is amazingly prescient. In the movie Roxanne, the title character (Roxanne Kowalski, played by Daryl Hannah) is an astronomer. More on Roxanne and other Steve Martin movies at the Hfuhruhurr entry.
It provides speeds up to 100 Mbps, for distances up to approximately 200 km, but only 125 mi., yet again demonstrating the inferiority of the metric system.
The copper cables are shielded twisted pairs, thus the alternative name SDDI.
Well, they had to give up physical torture and immolation in the eighteenth century. But they still get to work in secret, ignore their own rules, conduct kangaroo proceedings, lie, punish their enemies, excommunicate, etc. So it's fun work if you can get it. I hear the church is short of normal heterosexual men who would like to take vows of celibacy and obedience, but I haven't yet seen help-wanted ads for CDF in particular. Until then you might get some pointers from The Modern Inquisition : Seven prominent Catholics and their struggles with the Vatican, by Paul Collins (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Pr., 2002).
G. Vignale and Mark Rasolt, Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2360 (1987). and Phys. Rev. B 37, 10685 (1988).
The method is obsolete a few times over.
Different entries for a given head text, usually corresponding to different expansions of a shared initialism, are normally ordered in this glossary by alphabetizing on the definition text. I figured this is a good place to point that out, since this entry is almost problematical. Alphabetization here is based on the immediate appearance of text rather than on its expansion. (The reasoning is that if you knew all that, you wouldn't be looking it up. The flaw in the reasoning is that since you don't know all that, the ordering isn't especially helpful.)
Here's some standard Census Bureau boilerplate, taken from the same appendix as the MCD boilerplate; I've only added a hyphen and an otiose parenthetical aside:
Census-designated places (CDPs) are delineated for each decennial census as the statistical counterparts of incorporated places. CDPs are delineated to provide census data for concentrations of population, housing, and commercial structures that are identifiable by name but are not within an incorporated place. CDP boundaries usually are defined in cooperation with state, local, and tribal officials. [What -- no community activists??? Stonewalling!] These boundaries, which usually coincide with visible features or the boundary of an adjacent incorporated place or other legal entity boundary, have no legal status, nor do these places have officials elected to serve traditional municipal functions. CDP boundaries may change from one decennial census to the next with changes in settlement pattern; a CDP with the same name as in an earlier census does not necessarily have the same boundary.
Here's a colorful picture from the Smithsonian's Information Age photo exhibit.
A local-focus posting on the Classics list points to a few other postings on CD-ROM readers.
A CD-ROM holds up to 680 Megabytes of data, about the same as 300,000 pages of text.
Places to look for particular CD-ROM's:
Lattice constant of 4.136 Å is by far the smallest among common compound semiconductors, so it doesn't lattice match or even make a tolerable pseudomorphic heterointerface with anything, so it isn't used to make any heterostructures. Room-temperature direct bandgap of 2.42 eV isn't very exciting either.
Lattice constant of 6.050 Å is in a populous neighborhood.
Bandgap of CdTe is 1.58 eV; lattice constant is 6.482 Å.
According to a 1996.11.20 posting by Fei Long in the semiconductors-2-6 newsgroup, he (at the University of Hull) and Paul Harrison (at the University of Leeds) had recently published work on the CdTe band structure. Here's the meat of the posting.
This is probably a good place to mention the problem of Man's alienation from God, and how it's much worse than not being able to attend classes located conveniently near your home. And how the rapture will take place at warp speed. (But maybe I have the wrong religion. Do they teach Kierkegaard?) However, I don't know enough about all that and the information doesn't seem to be within reaching distance, so I'll just quote CDU's homepage, which says it was ``established in 1983 to respond to the need for life long spiritual formation and a deeper knowledge of Church Teaching. CDU's mission calls for transmitting faithfully and systematically the teachings of Sacred Scripture, the living Tradition of the Church and the authentic Magisterium, as well as the spiritual heritage of the Fathers, Doctors and Saints.''
The Courses-and-Programs page has a cool picture of the old pope hunched over a laptop. (I mean ``old pope'' here not as opposed to ``new pope'' but as opposed to ``younger pope.'' In other words, the same old pope when he was new.) This picture reminds me of those tired old gag pictures of people holding up monuments. You know: someone stands in the foreground with arms raised and palms flattened under an imaginary weight, and in the background a mass of concrete or whatever, lined up by the photographer's angle to appear to be pressing down on those thumbs. I mean, the pope is always hunched over squinting at the floor a few feet away. Put an open laptop before him and it's a wrap! (The laptop is black. Unless you're going as a Cardinal or as one of those fruit-colored Swiss guards, black is the only fashionable color for Vatican City.)
Another thing that picture reminds me of is an early Saturday Night Live sketch in which President Ronald Reagan does a rap video. Whenever the old man has to move, a couple of Secret Service men pick him up by the shoulders like a talking prop. It had a catchy tune, too.
The ``Ronald Reagan'' in the preceding paragraph, by the way, was not the actual president. Ralph Nader and Al Gore have appeared on the program, and probably some others who were presidential candidates, but the closest they got to having Ronald Reagan on the show was when they got his son Michael Reagan on. Michael (a dancer at the time) did a skit in which he jumped around in his skivvies, and it was reported that his parents wondered why. (It was a parody of a scene in a popular movie of the time -- Tom Cruise in ``Risky Business''? I can't find it on the web, so I guess this didn't happen either.)
Along about this point, when I first wrote this entry, I thought it would be apposite to put in a link to wherever it was in the glossary that I told a related story about Benoit Mandelbrot, but I couldn't find it. Coming back now, I see that the story is in the glossary, so I can provide a link to it.
Benoit Mandelbrot was the fellow who gave the name fractal to geometric objects of noninteger dimension, and he promoted fractals so effectively that scientists actually recognized their value and fractals achieved a pop-culture vogue. Mandelbrot was a sort of scholar-in-residence at IBM's main research labs (I guess that would be in White Plains, NY), at least in the late seventies and eighties, and he was naturally part of a video that IBM made then to spread the gospel of fractal beauty. In the video, Mandelbrot does a little introduction, then turns to a desktop computer and watches as a fractal begins to fill the screen. The audience may be forgiven for assuming that Mandelbrot has pressed a key to launch the application. However, the story goes that Mandelbrot, who worked at IBM as a mathematician (other people did his programming), was so computer-phobic or -averse that he refused to so much as lower a finger onto the keyboard. The way the problem was eventually handled was that somebody crouched behind the chair while Mandelbrot talked, then with one finger on the keyboard launched the necessary application, all below the camera's view. I heard this at a seminar at Princeton Plasma Labs at Forrestal in about 1983, but I can't find this story on the web either.
Under the leadership of CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Germany was reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1998, after 16 years of rule, with continuing high unemployment and relatively slow economic growth, and in a continuing secret-campaign-funding scandal involving Mr. Kohl, the CDU suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1949. In the September 27 general elections, CDU/CSU won 35.2% of the vote, down from 41.4% in the 1994 elections, and ended up with 245 out of 669 Bundestag seats.
A red-green coalition (socialists and environmentalists) came to power, and Gerhard Schroeder, the new prime minister, promised to fix the economy. In a Nixon-goes-to-China sort of way (that is, with his solid leftist credentials to protect him), it was expected that he would be able to negotiate with the trade unions to reduce the job and unemployment benefits that make German labor expensive and German manufacture less competitive than it is regarded as needing to be. (Interestingly, however, one thing that Germany did not have as late as 2005 was a national minimum wage. One might reason that this is in the interests of the powerful industrial unions, which negotiate industry-wide minimum hourly wage agreements. Apart from this, however, the Sozialhilfe, which is more extensive than the social welfare available in the US, supplements the income of low-wage earners. Other EU nations without a statutory minimum-wage law are Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Cyprus.)
Schroeder had no significant success solving Germany's economic problems, and by the Summer of 2002 he and his party were behind in the polls. By making opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq the main issue in the campaign, he was able to distract attention from the slow-growth economy and win.
In 2005, he again tried making an issue of US foreign policy, by insisting that Germany would not send troops to Iraq. It worked almost to the point of victory. He made up a substantial deficit in the polls, and the SPD forced the CDU into a tightly negotiated and greatly hamstrung red-black coalition.
Proof here that people smart enough to describe condensed matter physics research are not too smart to write ``CDW wave'' (an acronym AAP). Cf. next entry.
Click here to see some instances of the ever-popular ``CDW waiver,'' an AAP pleonasm. (Of course, this may only apply to the principle driver. Click here for that. The two usages seem to occur with comparable frequency, although the second is occasionally correct.) Cf. preceding entry.
For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
(In Spanish, the use of the singular ``la mujer'' to stand for women in general is a standard usage.) There's also a Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Comité para la Eliminación de la Discriminación contra la Mujer; Comité pour l'élimination de la discrimination à l'égard des femmes). It is not abbreviated, as CEDAW or anything else, so far as I'm aware. This committee is ``a body [uh-huh] of 23 [what is this -- Sufi mysticism?] independent experts'' (oh sure) that ``receive[s] and consider[s] communications (petitions) from, or on behalf of, individuals or a group of individuals who claim to be victims of violations of the rights protected by the Convention.'' Rent by the hour; special rates for holidays and weekends.
The year 1899 was an interesting year in American college admissions. In June, Helen Keller passed the entrance examination of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. An ``Answers to Correspondents'' column in the August 19 New York Times reported that
Helen Keller, sometimes spelled Kellar, was born in Tuscambia, Ala., July 27, 1880. Her father was Arthur H. Keller, a Confederate officer, an editor, and at one time United States Marshal of Alabama. At the age of eighteen months, Helen, a bright and active child, was overcome by a disease which deprived her of sight, hearing, and the use of the organs of speech. At the age of seven years her parents began to educate her. In 1887 she was taken to Boston, where she became the pupil of Miss Sullivan, who remains with her to-day. Miss Sullivan was three years teaching the child lip reading. She will enter Radcliffe College, Harvard's Annex, in September. The girl is a relative of Robert E. Lee, and a great-great-granddaughter of Alexander Spottswood, the first Colonial Governor of Virginia. She is remarkably pretty, and has a lovable, poetic nature.
But the year's truly consequential event in college entrance exam history took place on December 1 in Trenton, New Jersey, at the 13th annual convention of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland. There before over 500 delegates, Prof. Nicholas Murray Butler (Dean of the School of Philosophy at Columbia University) read a paper urging the creation of a unified system for testing candidates for college admission. In a discussion following the paper, President Eliot of Harvard and President Low of Columbia pronounced themselves enthusiastically in favor of the proposal. President Patton of Princeton expressed reservations.
At the time, each college had its own set of requirements, with examinations in different sets of subjects, and different topics in the subjects they had in common. Each college offered examinations in various cities in areas of the country from which it expected to accept students. The chief selling point of Butler's proposal, however, was not the relief it would give the colleges from the burden of designing and administering all those exams. Rather, the advantage stressed was that standardization of entrance requirements would make it possible for secondary schools to know what to teach their students. (The discussion implicitly assumed that in the past, students had studied for only one exam.)
Under Butler's proposal, it was contemplated that tests would be created for each subject then currently part of the entrance examinations of two or more colleges, and that colleges could base their admissions on the students' performance on the subjects they chose to use as their basis for admission. (This information would be provided in certificates to be issued by the board administering the tests.)
The delegates at the Trenton meeting endorsed the plan. The proposed board was duly founded in 1900 as the College Entrance Examination Board of the Middle States and Maryland. Here is the list of chief examiners of the first Board of Examiners (along with the institutions where they were professors), announced on December 15, 1900, after their election by the College Board:
The following January 22, Prof. Butler of Columbia, in his capacity as Secretary of the College Board, released a list that included associate examiners. Each group of examiners consisted of one chief and two associate examiners. In each case, one associate was from a different college than the chief examiner, and the other associate was a secondary school teacher. (For Latin and mathematics groups they were high school principals.)
All of the schools represented on the Board of Examiners were in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, or (in the sole case of JHU) Maryland. I assume therefore that ``Middle States'' stood for the three northern Mid-Atlantic states.
In the January 22 announcement, Butler claimed that all colleges in the middle states and Maryland, as well as most colleges in the nation, would accept the College Board's certificates in lieu of their own exams.
Moving on up the alphabet, we notice that the Dutch sat out that war. It is commonly suggested that the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII, which was mild compared to that of countries to the east, was resented more keenly by the Dutch because they hadn't suffered occupation in the previous war. Perhaps. As the war was ending and the Germans withdrew, there was famine in the cities; many people went into the countryside and dug up flower bulbs for food.
Not technically a part of the Canadian Forces were those of Newfoundland, mentioned at the Memorial entry.
Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe and author of The Big Sleep and other works, was born in the US on July 23, 1888. After his parents' divorce, he moved to London with his mother in 1895 and was educated in England. He returned to the US in 1912, and in 1914 enlisted in the Canadian Army. (He joined the Canadian Army because they paid a dependent's allowance that he could send to his mother.) He served in the First Division of the CEF in France and became a platoon commander. In 1918 he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps (later the R.A.F.), but had not completed flight training when the Armistice came. He was demobilized in England; his mother returned with him to California.
The Spanish cognate of ceinture is cintura. It means `waist' and the word's augmentative form cinturón means `belt' (the main sense of the French word). (Also, cinta is any ribbon. Estar en cinta, literally `to be on the ribbon,' is an old but still-used euphemism meaning `to be pregnant.' There's an American company called Cintas that sells and rents uniforms for all kinds of businesses.)
These words are derived from the nexus of Latin words connected with cingere, loosely `to encircle, gird.' The disused English word cingle comes via Old French (before they started writing it with an s) from the Latin diminutive form cingulum meaning `girdle.' The more general term cingula gave rise to Spanish cincha, referring among other things to barrel hoops and the girths of harnesses and saddles. In the last sense it was borrowed from Mexican Spanish into the American and general English cinch.
The legendary cartoonist Chuck Jones (b. Sept. 21, 1912; d. Feb. 22, 2002) got his first regular job in 1932, washing cels. According to his grandson Craig Kausen, ``he thought he was going to be cleaning in a prison.''
If he had had a fast (superluminal) internet connection, he could have avoided confusion, unless it came from the Acme technology company.
Chuck Jones directed the first Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon (``Fast and Furry-ous,'' 1949) and had a hand in creating Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
If you didn't reach this entry by accident (it could happen), then you might be interested in this newsletter editors' resource guide.
The cell header holds addressee and flow-control information, in the form of values for six fields:
Have you heard about this philosophy conference in Budapest, April 28-30, 2005? ``Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age.'' Contributions ``invited from philosophers, psychologists, education theorists, and other interested scholars [could this include electrical engineers? nah!] on the following and related topics:
You learn something new every day. I didn't realize that anyone considered ``education theorists'' to be scholars, interested or otherwise.
Okay, enough about that poor, long-suffering supermodel. Here's a strange incident took place just before midnight, on April 23, 2005, along the possibly quite aptly named Savage-Guilford Road in Howard County, Md. Occupants of a vehicle shouted to a male pedestrian, who at first thought they were acquaintances. He approached the vehicle, and a male passenger appeared to point a weapon at him. Another passenger got out and ordered the pedestrian to empty his pockets. The other two occupants of the vehicle then got out. One grabbed the pedestrian around the throat, and the assailants rifled the pedestrian's pockets and took a cell phone. The assailants then drove away with the cell phone, made a U-turn and drove back. One of them threw the cell phone at the pedestrian and the robbers fled.
December 15, 2005, Council Bluffs, Iowa. A 48-year-old man rammed his pickup into the wooden deck in front of Chit Chat Wireless store at 2034 W. Broadway. The man, a Chit Chat subscriber who was clearly not well-gruntled by his cell-phone service, then got out of the truck and approached the front door of Chit Chat Wireless, evidently to have a chit chat. An employee inside the store judged that the man was ``up to no good,'' as he later told police, so he locked the door. The tough customer told the employee to open the door, but the employee accountably refused. (Well, unaccountably is a word....) The man then became upset (that's how the police report put it) and began punching and kicking at the glass door. He succeeded in shattering the glass, but didn't get in. (This would be the right time to cue the ``I hear you knockin' / But you can't come in'' ringtone.) He then threw his cell phone at the door and drove off. The customer was later arrested at a hospital where he sought treatment for the hand he hurt breaking the door.
To be frank, they should have saved this acronym for teachers of Gaelic. (The Franks were speakers of a West Germanic language in the area of present-day northern France. Their language was influential in the development of the French language, and the name France is derived from the tribe's name.)
Got it! It's:
To be frank, I think ``Communist Economic Mummble and Ahhh'' is more informmative.
The title of that Steven King novel and Mary Lambert-directed horror movie is ``Pet Sematary.'' That's overkill.
I suppose the reason for my error is that in my native Spanish, the word is cementerio. After I became aware of the difference, I noticed that my mom makes the same error in English. But the error may not be so rare -- I heard it in a radio ad in 2005. Another word whose spelling in Spanish can easily mislead one in English is substraer (`to subtract'). That is, I used to, uh, em, never mind.
The Spanish cognate is cementerio. Yes, that's with an en. Perhaps the en got in there via an assumed connection with entierro (`burial') and enterrar (`to inter'). I feel compelled to mention that the Spanish words for exhume, exhumation are constructed as something like ``unbury, unburial'' (desenterrar, desentierro).
Useful list of terms that sound utterly different in Spanish:
entrar -- to enter
enterrar -- to inter
enterar -- to let know
[enterarse -- to find out]
Also note:
entero -- entire, whole
A few miles east of Point Concepcion (probably Punto Concepción at some point in its history -- particularly the point of its first conception), there's a ``Canada Cementeria'' according to the map. That is, a Cañada Cementería. This is either the cement-mixing ravine or the burial gully. If it were in New Jersey instead of California, that wouldn't be ambiguous. (If you find the last comment confusing, see the teamster entry. If you haven't had enough of obfuscated interlingual puns, visit the faux ami entry. For another example of an unexpected en, see the gringo entry.) For an instance involving a similar pair of sounds in a pair of words having similar meanings, see the mujerengo and mujeriego entries.
What, still here? Don't you follow links? Try this one, for an epitaph.
Centaurus is the Latin name for what we call a `centaur'!
CEN's mission is to promote voluntary technical harmonization in Europe in conjunction with worldwide bodies and its partners in Europe.Harmonization diminishes trade barriers, promotes safety, allows interoperability of products, systems and services, and promotes common technical understanding.
In Europe, CEN works in partnership with CENELEC -- the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (www.cenelec.be) and ETSI -- the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (www.etsi.fr).
Vide etiam SBA and NASE and AHBA.
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch. 26.
In music, a cent is one one-hundredth of a half tone. Since music intervals are not absolute frequency differences but frequency ratios, this means more precisely that two notes differing by one cent have pitches (frequencies) in the ratio of 21/1200 (yes, the 1200th root of two). For example, in the usual tuning, the fifth string of a six-string guitar is an A with a frequency of 110 Hz. If you're sitting in my bedroom with the air conditioning roaring and you're tryin' to tune that string with one o'them newfangled eelectronic tuners, the 120 Hz component of the A/C vibration is going to spoof the tuner, to the tune of one or two half-steps (or half-tones -- we can do it both ways). Now you want to know,
1200 log2(120/110) = 150.6 or so. (That is, about a quarter tone above A#.) Cf. decibels.
Noisy fluorescent lights hum at 120 Hz also, but with a tinnier timbre.
This situation may be contrasted with that of the corresponding legislative authority of the federal government of the US: According to Art. I, Sec. 6 of the US constitution,
No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.
Similarly, Art. II, Sec. 1 forbids members of the Electoral College to hold other federal office:
... no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.[The Electoral College was originally intended to select the President, but the twelfth amendment, court decisions and practical developments have turned it into a rubber stamp, conveying the decisions of the majorities of voters in the several states. There are persistent movements to abolish the Electoral College because of its nominal status, because of the possibility of mischief (electors' violation of their pledges to a candidate -- i.e. insubordination to the public will), and because of perceived problems with the coarse-graining procedure (winner-takes-whole-state) associated with the College.]
On the executive side, the restriction on multiple offices takes a weaker form:
The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.
European corporations are generally less likely to have the same person serve as CEO and Chairman. Also, many publicly held corporations in Europe -- particularly in Germany (.de) it seems -- have worker (viz. union) representation on the board.
The Chairman of the Board is not very often abbreviated as COB.
The late Frank Sinatra was also referred to as ``Ol' Blue Eyes'' and ``the Chairman of the Board.'' Another New Jersey (NJ) music icon, Bruce Springsteen, is known as ``the Boss.'' In 1984, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had a hit with an album (and its title track) ``Born in the U.S.A.''
Yet another pop music icon with a rank appellation was Nat ``King'' Cole. He was born in the USA, but not in New Jersey. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1917.
During the Cold War, the USSR usually (from the late sixties or so) held an advantage in strategic missile throw weight. (The US usually led in SLBM's and bombers.) An important part of the argument in parity computations was the fact that more accurate missiles can kill a target using less megatonnage.
The library has been trying to unload some back issues of Revista de la CEPAL on its dollar table, and I'm going to give them some free advertising. The journal seems to be a thrice-yearly (April, August, December) publication of the United Nations, ISSN 0251-0257, edited and printed in Santiago, Chile. For a dollar, that should be enough.
CEPTES has a regularly scheduled volleyball game with CAPTES (Center Against Philosophy of Technology or Engineering Science) on the fourth Thursday after the second Monday of each month.
Why don't these ``think-tanks'' save us all some time by stating up front what their animating prejudices are? ``Centre'' hardly ever describes their political location. Well, I don't know when I harvested the self-description quoted above, but I checked back in March 2016 (the Brexit referendum is this coming June) and they're clear enough (that they're mainstream): ``The Centre for European Reform is an independent think-tank devoted to making the EU work better, and strengthening its role in the world. We are pro-European but not uncritical.'' I guess ``centre'' means ``in'' rather than `out'' -- that makes geometric sense to me.
... Now the copula `is' which Radcliffe-Brown himself uses here--`he is a biological organism': `he is a citizen of England'--is highly significant. He does not say: a man has a body or he plays a role. This form of words is avoided because it implies a third element, namely the true self, which neither is a body but has a body, nor is a role-complex but plays roles. Am I really no more than body on the one hand, actor on the social stage on the other? Am I not a substantive ego in the Cartesian sense....
Religion: a smile on a dog.
Yeah, yeah, I gotta add some stuff on President William Jefferson (``Bill'') Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, who expounded on the copulative verb to a grand jury:
It depends upon what the meaning of the word ``is'' is.(The wording of Clinton's testimony has been variously reported, by people who in many cases are only indifferently interested in accuracy. A more accuracy-oriented discussion of the quote occurred on the <alt.fan.cecil-adams> newsgroup, first threading at the end of December 2000. The version quoted above was transcribed by a newsgroup contributor from a video of the jury testimony.
In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. For the time being, at least, it's clearly not a plutoid, because plutoids are trans-Neptunian by (current) definition, or at least sometimes trans-Neptunian. I've also read equivocal claims about whether Ceres ceased or did not cease to be an asteroid. I hereby issue a Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Directive recognizing Ceres as an asteroid. I can't be bothered to sort out the other stuff, because the boy who cried ``dwarf planet!'' (that's the IAU, for short) will scramble its definitions soon again anyway.
Okay! Alright already! In response to countless requests (that's right, I haven't counted them, or it, or whatever the pronoun[s] for nonpositive numbers is or are or whatever) to lift the confusion created by the IAU, I am issuing a new SBF Directive on dwarf planets. A dwarf planet is a planet whose humanoid inhabitants are mostly dwarves or seem to walk awkwardly but aren't obese. If the planet has no humanoids, it may qualify on the basis of bonsai trees.
You know, that long parenthetical in the last paragraph reminds me of the great French grammarian Dominique Bouhours, S.J.; when he died in 1702, his last words are reputed to have been:
Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent.Loosely, this is `I am going to or I is going to die; either is said or are said.' The first clause of the original sounds at least as atrocious in Modern French as that of the translation does in English. (And for about the same reason: use of non-first-person verb with first-person subject. It's the second-person familiar form in French, but I used the third person in English since that's a recognizable nonstandard usage.) During Bouhours's lifetime, however, ``je vas'' was accepted usage.
7 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW.
Well, relax; CEST is gone now. They did their deeds into the early 1990's, apparently, but by 2008 their homepage was a domainer's generic search form with no sign of a successor organization. All that's left is some technical reports and glossary entries.
It was based in London, so it was probably a ``Centre'' rather than a ``Center,'' but the text at vestigial dead links are equivocal on the question. For your convenience, however, and also to keep the next two entries together (entries with a common head term are ordered by alphabetizing by entry content), I won't update that.
There's an old children's song with the lines
No more pencils, no more bo-oks,Alice Cooper quotes those lines in ``School's Out.''
No more teachers' dirty lo-oks.
School is never out forever, never out completely. ``The learning society,'' ugh.
Cf. CPD.
CF is based on the ``like likes like'' idea. (That's not a direct quote; I just happened to like the symmetry of the expression.) Users are prompted to indicate their preferences for various documents or sites or what have you, and these preferences are recorded as a collection. Each new user belongs to a neighborhood (in the topological sense) determined by the degree of agreement of his preferences with other users. The system makes recommendations based on the idea that if you like the things I liked among those we've both viewed, then you will also like the things I liked among those you haven't viewed.
It had something over 30,000 vehicles in its fleet, and had 20,000 employees, 14,500 of them Teamsters.
In some cases, mere submission of an abstract guarantees an opportunity to present. It used to be that any APS member submitting one or more abstracts to a national conference of the APS was guaranteed the chance to present at least one poster. (That may still be the rule, but I'm not sure. It was a problem because the APS abstracts volume, distributed to APS members and anyone else attending an APS meeting, became the principal ``publication'' of crackpots who couldn't get their lunacy published elsewhere.)
Often, referees are under the impression that the papers of invited talks are guaranteed publication. I have never seen this stipulated explicitly by any proceedings editor, but it is an informal expectation and some allowances may be made.
The respectable assumption is that a submitted abstract describes the results of research that is completed or nearly completed, even though a paper describing the research has not yet been prepared. The reality is that abstracts are often submitted describing research not yet begun.
See C. R. Cook and P. S. P. Wang, ``A Chomsky hierarchy of isotonic array grammars and languages,'' Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 8, pp. 144-152 (1978).
Don't they know the story of the boy who cried wolf?
This is a good place to discuss some of the less important differences between conferences in the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and engineering and sciences on the other. For brevity, we'll say humanities vs. sciences, but so far as I know the following applies about equally to social sciences and engineering, respectively. (My experience of attending talks in science and engineering is broad; my experience of social science and humanities talks is mainly restricted to the fields of human communications, politics, HPS, psychology, medieval studies, and classics.)
One difference is that humanities talks are really spoken papers. ``Speakers'' prepare papers and read them. In science, talks are talks. In practice, this difference is quite consequential, making and marking a difference in approach much greater than it might in principle imply. However, here we're talking about some ``less important differences,'' so we can't discuss that issue any further.
In all scholarly and would-be scholarly disciplines, talks are followed (and in various situations also interrupted) by questions or comments from the audience. In departmental talks (a single speaker for 50 minutes, say, and 10 min. discussion), discussion is usually handled informally. In a single-room conference, a session chairman or moderator may intervene more or less obtrusively, primarily to introduce speakers, make late announcements, keep things on schedule, etc. In a large conference with parallel sessions, keeping things on schedule becomes more important. (Keeping to schedule is quite a topic in itself, and I don't want to get into it here. Until I write an appropriate entry, however, let me mention here that in the March 2004 CJR there's an article by a presidential jokewriter that mentions getting Bill Clinton to use an egg timer. Vide etiam c.t., s.t.)
I once chaired a session that included a graduate student who gave a core dump of a talk. Most of her overheads consisted of unlabeled octal data. I don't know what the talk was about, but though it was in 1987, I can honestly say that I have not forgotten anything important. When her talk fell off the edge of the data and terminated, I called for questions. Unsurprisingly, none of the two-hundred-plus victims who were surviving there waiting for a later talk had any question to ask. Therefore I asked a question that I had conscientiously contrived in anticipation. That too is part of the chair's responsibility -- to get past any awkward potential silence. I watched decorously and paid no attention as she answered, mission accomplished.
A session chairman who traffic-manages questions from the audience or who ``gets things started'' represents about the greatest degree of intervention one is likely to encounter in the discussion following a scientific presentation.
In the humanities, things are different. Organizers of conferences, and of sessions within conferences, receive a great deal more praise for their activity, and their role is more prominent. To a scientist, it sometimes looks quite ostentatious and silly. In the discussion following a presentation, the mix of questions and comments is much more heavily skewed toward comments. If you've ever attended a university-sponsored movie (or worse -- gallery opening or play -- get me outta here!), you probably know what I mean. You remember in the discussion afterward (and possibly also before), supercilious jerks in tweed jackets asking ``questions'' to demonstrate their irrelevant knowledge, twisting their necks in William-F.-Buckleyesque fits of pretentious contemplation, and generally taking too long to utter what amount to no more than excuses for the speaker to puff on. I'm not going to tell you what I think of that.
Now where was I? Oh yes: conference sessions. (Often called ``panels'' in the humanities.) Not only is the role of organizer exalted, but even the task of appreciating the speakers' talks is exalted. Hence, there is sometimes a designated respondent or commenter for each paper; more often there is a single commenter for an entire panel. In the latter case, decorum dictates that all papers be acknowledged. The respondent has received advance copies of the talks (spoken papers, remember) and prepared five or ten minutes of commentary placing the papers in the context of recent scholarship and raising ostentatiously thoughtful questions for further discussion in the ``question-and-answer'' period. It's good form to find a common thread, preferably recondite, joining the papers so one can talk about how the talks ``illuminate different aspects'' of some issue or other. This isn't exactly a sinecure, but it is a bit of plum job, since it takes up as much real estate on an academic résumé as a real paper, but takes much less effort. So respondents are people favored by the conference or panel organizer, and there isn't really much call for a public call for commenters, but if there is I can assure you that at least once it has been abbreviated CFC. Usually it's a call for respondents.
Example of usage:
Terms & Conditions:
If your reservation is not canceled at least one day prior to pickup, you may be subject to a one-day rental charge. Tax and Surcharge rates are subject to change without notice. [SBF: !] Concession fees may be charged (where applicable) at airport locations. At many airport locations a consolidated facility charge (CFC) may also apply ($10/contract in California). A $5.00 per day U.S. Government imposed Administrative Rate Supplement (GARS/GA) will be added to all U.S. Government rentals.
For other film awards, see the AMPAS entry.
This study examined the incidence of neckwear tightness among a group of 94 white-collar working men and the effect of a tight business-shirt collar and tie on the visual performance of 22 male subjects. Of the white-collar men measured, 67% were found to be wearing neckwear that was tighter than their neck circumference. The visual discrimination of the 22 subjects was evaluated using a critical flicker frequency (CFF) test. Results of the CFF test indicated that tight neckwear significantly decreased the visual performance of the subjects and that visual performance did not improve immediately when tight neckwear was removed.
-- Langan, L.M. and Watkins, S.M.
``Pressure of Menswear on the Neck
in Relation to Visual Performance.''
Human Factors vol. 29, #1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 67-71.
The CFIUS was at the center of a political firestorm in early 2006 after it approved the sale of operation contracts for six major US ports to Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the government of that Arab gulf state. The firm eventually withdrew.
In February 2006, the Jerusalem Post reported that Dubai Ports World actively enforced the Arab trade embargo against Israel. The Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007, signed into law in late July, included language requiring the Secretaries of State, Commerce, and Treasury to report to Congress on investments in the US by ``foreign governments, entities controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government, or persons of foreign countries which comply with any boycott of Israel.''
CFJ is not racist. Their homepage excitedly announces that ``communities of color, and young and poor people of all colors -- represent a new emerging majority in California.''
They seem to be heartened by the increasing number of poor in California. With the price of real estate in Silicon Valley, even the pretty well off are poor. CFJ should be thrilled.
The CFL holds its annual draft on the same weekend that the NFL does. In other respects -- punts, pro-championship game, snow -- the northern game is earlier. How they managed to get T-day to happen earlier, beats me.
Until the 1970's, fluorescent lamps used inefficient core-coil ballast that made lamps shorter than 2 feet (~60 cm) impractical. The advent of high-frequency ballasts in the late 70's made CFL's possible.
CFL's have been touted as a way to save both money and energy, but the calculations on which this rosy claim is based make two false assumptions: (1) that CFL's are used to replace an equal number of lumens of incandescent lighting, and (2) that CFL's last twelve times as long as incandescents. Assumption (1) is false because CFL's tend to replace lights that are dimmer. Assumption (2) is hype. It probably is true in the laboratory, where hot incandescent filaments wear out by sublimation. Installed, however, my experience and that of people I know is that they frequently fail far short of their advertised average life. In principle, this doesn't refute the claim of long average life (the long-lived ones might be very long-lived), but it appears that problem is jarring and vibration.
The claims are being put to a large-scale test in the BELLE project.
With more realistic assumptions, the trade-off is iffy. The calculation is also affected by heating issues: all the power used by an incandescent lamp, whether it is transformed into light power or not, goes into local heating. This entails an extra cooling expense or heating bonus, depending on immediate conditions.
This conference democracy thing (to coin a phrase), where the groups of listeners and speakers are the same, is not universal. It's not like entertainment; I've never seen a ``Call for Movie Scripts'' or ``Call for Fiction Book Proposals.'' They've got enough coming in over the transom to keep all their assistant editors busy full time rejecting first chapters, even though the first paragraph is usually enough to assure a rejection.
Appel de textes and appel de communications seem to be the most common French equivalents to ``call for papers,'' but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding abbreviation of any sort. Appel à communications and appel à textes are also used. I haven't read enough to be very sure, but it seems to me that the French terms are used less narrowly. I've seen appel à textes used in a call for [very-far-off-off-Broadway theatre] scripts, for example, and in a call for research proposals.
Any ``invited'' speakers at a conference, almost by definition, are selected on the basis of reputation or of known, typically recent work. In any case, they are not the intended audience for a CFP. Nevertheless, some conferences do occasionally promote to invited status some papers sent in response to a CFP.
CFR's, as measured by Inversenet, tend to go up during the Winter Holiday season, a result which they explain in terms of increased numbers of people staying home in the cold, and internet shopping. On the other hand, Keynote finds that performance, as measured in delays for pages to be retrieved across the web, improves during the same period, as they write: ``the Internet is "at rest" over the holidays.'' I can only reconcile these observations by guessing that when people browse at work, they put a heavier load on the internet's main arteries than when they have to wait at home.
There's also an organization that was founded in 1922 (the year after CFR) and which took as its name The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Its goals are similar to those of its New York rival, but it never gained the same level of public visibility. Finally on September 1, 2006, it changed its name to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The President's message explaining the shift never mentions the 84 years of namespace friction. This organization insists on eschewing an initialism and referring to itself for short as ``The Council'' or ``The Chicago Council.'' Why don't they go for ``Chicago City Council''? That has a familiar sound. And though I know nothing about the quality of this organization's work, it is with an exceptionally clear conscience that I don't give it an entry of its own in this glossary.
This FAQ, by Robert Burns, has some unclear connection with alternatives.com, which offers this menu of text documents.
There ought to be a Cheney Clinic that specializes in keeping vice-president and executive-branch designated adult Dick Cheney operative and unfatigued.
By a similar sort of shorthand, in Europe the political meaning of ``Christian'' has been anti-Socialist, anti-Marxist, anti-Communist, rightist. This has been so especially since 1917. Interesting, then, that the CFTC should have been founded in 1919. See also CFTD.
First, the historical passion, composed of minimal knowledge, was known only in general terms recorded by, say, Josephus or Tacitus. Next, the prophetic passion, composed of multiple and discrete biblical allusions and seen most clearly in a work like the Epistle of Barnabas, developed biblical applications over, under, around, and through that open framework. Finally, those multiple and discrete exercises were combined into the narrative passion as a single sequential story...The narrative passion is but a single stream of tradition flowing from the Cross Gospel, now embedded within the Gospel of Peter, into Mark, thence together into Matthew and Luke, and thence, all together, into John.You'd figure if they were all reading from the same page, they might have gotten the details to agree.
There's a good explanatory `` Instantaneous Introduction to CGI Scripts and HTML Forms.
LPAGE Internet services in Sacramento, CA would like to teach you how it's done, for $100 in Sacramento. They have a couple of on-line tutorials, but it's all rather PC-oriented. (From the ``but,'' you may guess correctly that I'm a MacBigot.)
Web Communications, a W3 presence provider, has a W3 Fill-out Forms Tutorial, though this has a somewhat local focus.
CyServices offers links to CGI resources for three levels of wizardship.
There's a site for those with a focus on language learning applications.
Yahoo has, of course, a generous list of links.
Un-CGI offers to take care of most of the details for you.
The CGI Information Resource Center is a handy list of links.
CGI appears to be the least international of the three.
It's ``a strategic alliance of countries, international and regional organizations, and private foundations supporting 15 international agricultural Centers, that work with national agricultural research systems and civil society organizations including the private sector. The alliance mobilizes agricultural science to reduce poverty, foster human well being, promote agricultural growth and protect the environment. The CGIAR generates global public goods that are available to all.''
The name is often incompetently translated from the French as `General Conference of Weights and Measures.' That's where a bunch of weights and measures get together and talk. The heavy weights do most of the talking. Walk softly and carry a big stick.
Switzerland was belittled for its cuckoo clocks in the movie ``The Third Man.'' One of the things that my mother brought with her as a refugee to Bolivia in 1938 was her cuckoo clock. Her family set up a tailor shop in La Paz, and many of the customers would bring their children along so they could watch the cuckoo clock tweet the hour or half hour.
There's a cleverly named sear.ch engine.
Here's the Swiss page of an X.500 directory.
Here's something: since 1945, Swiss mothers have been required to take eight weeks off work after childbirth, but in 1999 a measure to require and fund maternity leave again failed to pass.
The terms chalcogen and chalcogenide are used for three nested sets of elements. Here they are described in order of decreasing set size:
The important exception to the cha pronunciation is Fujian Province (Fuchien and similar in earlier transliterations), across the Taiwan Strait (Formosa Straits) from Taiwan. There the name is pronounced te. Because this was the most important source of tea for Europe, early on, variants of te were adopted in most Western European languages. (Portuguese is an exception, using both te and chá.)
The cee-aitch in the standard transliteration reflects German orthography, it represents the /x/ sound in German Bach and ach, Scottish loch, and Spanish ajo. (But not the /ç/ sound of German ich.) If you're not particular about your aitches, then chai sounds like the English interjection ``hi'' (but without the palatal glide at the end) or the Japanese word hai.
The English spelling used here (chaim) is traditional, and is explained at the chai entry. When Modern Hebrew is transliterated into English, the most common scheme tends to hew more closely to letter-by-letter correspondence. For instance, an Israeli moshav named in honor of Chaim Weizman has a name meaning `Chaim Garden,' which is transliterated Gan Hayyim.
The transcription hayyim corresponds to the Hebrew het-(patah)-yod-(hiriq)-yod-mem. The vowels, in parenthesis, are (mostly, as in this case) written beneath the consonants, and (almost always, as here) pronounced after the consonants below which they're written. So you're wondering why the transcription isn't ``hayiym.'' One reason is that consonantal wye followed by em is hard to pronounce. That's related to the real reason, which is that the yod following the hiriq is obviously mater lectionis; it's used to indicate that the hiriq vowel preceding it is long. The double wye in the transliteration corresponds to the fact that the first yod has a dagesh. The dagesh indicates consonant ``hardening,'' which can mean many things (usually indicated by replacement of one transcription consonant by another), or consonant doubling. Consonant doubling doesn't mean anything in Modern Hebrew (it doesn't affect the pronunciation), but there you are.
Incidentally, in the transliterations above, there's a little dot under the aitches in hayyim, het, patah, and hiriq. (You can't see them because I didn't insert them.) This indicates that the h represents a letter het rather than a letter heh.
The -im ending of chaim indicates that the word is a masculine plural. It is easy enough to reconstruct a singular form by removing the -im suffix, but that putative singular form is not used. Instead, the same form is used for singular and plural. (That's life.) Only the context may indicate the number. Another word without a singular is panim (`face'). Syntactically, these words are construed singular. Close English parallels of this grammatical situation are possible in principle, but precise ones are hard to find.
Examples that come immediately to mind are natural duals like trousers, pants, (swimming) trunks, tweezers, pliers, and scissors. These nouns have more or less common singular forms that are used attributively (i.e., adjectivally, as in ``trouser leg'' or ``scissor kick''), so it is fair to regard their final esses as plural inflection. Moreover, the limited number agreement that occurs in English indicates that they are countable nouns construed plural (``these scissors have'' equivalent to ``this pair of scissors''). These exceptional words fit a bit awkwardly into the language, evidently causing some juxtapositions to be avoided. Thus, the answer to the question ``do you have tweezers?'' is affirmative with even one, but that is more likely to be described as ``one pair of tweezers'' than as ``one tweezers.'' In contrast with the Hebrew comparands, then, these words could almost be regarded defective nouns, missing their singular forms (for which a circumlocution with ``pair of'' is substituted). In the case of some of the words, the formal singular is used or is coming to be used as an equivalent, thus regularizing the usage: the singular pant, originally meaning what the current pantleg or trouser leg does now, went out of use in this sense and has reappeared as an equivalent of pants. The word tweezer (with regularly formed plural tweezers) exists alongside the word tweezers that has limited application as a singular.
Etymological accident provides a closer fit to the situation of chaim. The words species (definitely see sp. entry), series, and congeries each have identical plural and singular forms in English, essentially because their spellings are unchanged from the nominative forms of the original Latin nouns (which also had identical singular and plural forms).
Words that look like plurals, and whose use is typically ambiguous as to number, can lead to confusion and anomalous usage. (Did I just write ``ambiguous as to number''? Is my CSP simply draining through my ventricles onto the floor?) Kudos is an example that comes to mind. The anomaly, however, occurs primarily between different users. Those like you, my dear ``intelligent general reader,'' realize that this is just a singular Greek noun, and don't bother to use a plural form because kudos (like nous) is uncountable. Other people try to construct a singular kudo. (Smile superciliously. Or just sneer, if you prefer.) Either way, however, original-flavor or regularized, any individual's usage is likely to be consistent with itself. The word agenda, a plural in Latin, is now an ordinary singular in English, with regularly formed plural agendas. (The Latin agendum gave rise to an English singular agend, now obsolete.) Let's leave discussion of data for some other entry or entries. A relevant contrasting example is provided by the Middle English word peases; that's discussed at the pea entry.
For other grammatical-number weirdness in Hebrew, see the agricola entry. In the indefinite future, when I return to lengthen this entry, I will survey words like depths, sports and funds, and a few related words like monies, in legalese, and means.
Jensen had noted that the word chalcogen has become common but that ``the origins of the term remain obscure.'' He examined a number of introductory chemistry textbooks (most in English, apparently) and found that most glossed the term as `chalk former,' though other etymologies were offered. He rejected `chalk former' and concurred with Gunnar Hägg's suggestion of `ore maker.' Hägg suggested (p. 93 of General and Inorganic Chemistry) that the word chalkós meant ``copper and later also generally metal and ore''). That this was the intended derivation was eventually confirmed by Fischer: `` `chalcogens' (`ore formers' from chalcos old Greek for `ore').'' The only problem with this etymology is that chalkos did not in fact mean `ore.' To be a little less categorical: the LSJ Greek-English Lexicon has a bit over two pages of definitions for words beginning chalk-, and it is clear that in all compounds, this lexeme has meanings closely related to copper and to its colored alloys brass and bronze. Examples include
The word chalkos alone usually meant bronze in Homer, and might mean anything made of metal in poetry, but even poetic licenciates did not stretch the meaning to ore. The closest one comes to ore is with líthos chalkîtis, almost literally `copper-containing stone.' This can certainly be translated `copper ore,' but the notion of ore is essentially in the word líthos. This term, and perhaps the adjective alone, was also applied to rock alum. Alum was not in fact an ore. If it had been, aluminum might have been discovered a few thousand years before it actually was. The fact that chalkîtis might refer to one ore and one dye mordant does not justify using chalko- as a root for `ore,' any more than the fact that chalkidîtis meant `penny prostitute' justifies using the same root as equivalent to porn-.
For kicks, I have also checked ten other Greek dictionaries, some of them dismayingly ``exhaustive,'' covering Archaic, Classical, Septuagint, Patristic, Byzantine, and Modern Greek. No dice, no `ore.' So it seems there are two possibilities: one is that Fischer was aware of a sense development of this lexeme that has escaped the notice of the most respected lexicographers, and the other is that he was wrong. My guess is that he assumed, perhaps unconsciously, that the Greek word chalkos has the same semantic range as the German word Erz. The latter word, possibly related to the Sumerian (!) urud, originally meant `copper,' but at one time had its meaning stretched metonymically to cover weapons and other objects made of (any) metal. (The same things happened in Greek, though to a lesser extent.) However, since the eighteenth century, Erz has also meant `ore,' and that sense is now predominant. Where it does not mean `ore,' it now usually means `bronze,' though the more common German word for that is Bronze.
Jensen, attempting to support Hägg's suggestion and evidently lacking the luxury of a Greek reference that would back him up, adduced the facts that German inorganic texts translate chalcogen as Erzbilder, and that the geochemical term chalcophile, with the sense of `ore-loving,' was coined by Victor Goldschmidt (who was born in Zurich in 1888). I think these examples do not corroborate the etymology so much as demonstrate that Fischer's was a common error. Chalcogen was part of Goldschmidt's classification of the elements, introduced by him in 1922 and still part of any elementary geochemistry course. It may be that Fischer's misunderstanding was derived from Goldschmidt's.
The word chalcogen was coined by Werner Fischer. In an article claiming credit or blame for the neologism, he wrote that the terms chalcogen for the elements and chalcogenides for their compounds ``quickly became popular in the work group of Hannover because they were analogous to the well-known terms `halogens' (`salt formers') and `halogenides' for the neighboring elements in the periodic table, the majority of halogenides being salts and chalcogenides being ores.'' Fischer's word halogenide is practically an adaptation of the German word Halogenid (plural form Halogenide). In English, the overwhelmingly standard form of the adjective is halide. This is consistent with the pattern of hydride, nitride, oxide, and cyanide, corresponding to hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and cyanogen. German has related adjectives hydrid, nitrid, oxid, and cyanid, but as the corresponding nouns are Wasserstoff, Stickstoff, Sauerstoff, and Cyan, there is no established pattern of removing the -gen before adding the -id[e]. Hence there is no inconsistency in using words like halogenid and chalcogenid.
(To give a devilish morphology its due, there is a logical argument for keeping the -gen-: if a halogen is a `salt maker,' as its etymology implies, then by the same token perhaps a halide ought to mean `salted,' while halogenide might mean `combined with halogen.' But this is no way to reason in chemical nomenclature. The morphology of chemical terms already has enough to do to describe the morphology of chemical compounds.)
The word chalcogen and its congeners became official with the Report of the Committee of the International Union of Chemistry for the Reform of Inorganic Chemical Nomenclature, 1940. (The International Union of Chemistry was the predecessor of IUPAC.) Section B of that report deals with the nomenclature of binary compounds, and subsection V is on group names. In the American version (Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 63, pp. 889-897), this subsection begins with the following paragraph:
Compounds of the halogens are to be called halogenides (not haloids nor halides), while the elements oxygen, sulfur, selenium and tellurium may be called chalcogens and their compounds chalcogenides.
The etymologically creditable but otherwise inane recommendation to call halides ``halogenides'' was understandably ignored by English-speaking chemists. The term chalcogenide caught on. Presumably the absence of an established form chalcide was part of the reason why this -genide recommendation ``took.'' Another reason may be that the second letter c in chacide becomes soft (that means it's pronounced like an s, you dunderhead) before an i, making its association with chalcogen less clear. (I should probably mention, along about here, that some people actually pronounce the initial ch like an ordinary chastity-chalk-chapstick-champion-cha-cha-cha cee-aitch. Don't.) A third reason may be that, for good reasons adumbrated in the chalcogen entry, people were confused about how chalc- should be understood. (The article by Jensen mentioned in that previous entry attests the erroneous ch pronunciation.) Whatever the reasons, the word chalcogenide has often seemed inappropriate or flawed to linguistically alert chemists. Jensen, in the abstract of the article referred to, wrote thus: ``It is further suggested that the term chalcogenide should be replaced with the term chalcide in order to maintain a parallelism with the terms halogen and halide.''
So much for how the recommendation was received. The question occurs, why was the recommendation of ``chalcogenide'' made in the first place? The obvious guess is a disproportionate German influence on the committee. That committee (``for the Reform of Inorganic Nomenclature'') met in Berlin in January 1938, and in Rome the following May. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and WWII began. This doubtless complicated any subsequent interactions of the committee. In 1940, the German version of the report was published in Chemische Berichte (vol. 73A, pp. 56ff., estimated) and the British version was published in Journal of the Chemical Society (pp. 1404ff, estimated). It is true that the committee chair was Prof. W.P. Jorissen of Leyden (that's in Massachusetts -- man, don't you know anything?!), and various countries were represented [the four other members were from Reading (England, not West Virginia), Paris (no, not Texas), Basel, and Hamburg (south of Buffalo)]. By the way, Leyden is in the Netherlands. But German chemistry was better-represented than that suggests. First, because the prestige and dominance of German chemical research and industry meant that opinions representing German chemistry carried greater weight. Second, the editor of the Gmelin, a German chemical publication, attended the Berlin meetings in an advisory capacity by invitation of the committee. Finally, the final report was drawn up by Prof. H. Rémy (Hamburg) on behalf of the German Chemical Society and in collaboration with some of its members. I figure that Prof. H. Bassett (of Reading), who did the English translation, happened not to consider the chalcogenide name question adequately.
The Life at Chaminade page demonstrates that the school has some or a very cute, tanned student body. Did I mention that the school is located in Honolulu? ``Relevant Links'' include ``Student Affairs,'' but it's not interactive enough. The important stuff about Chaminade is at our Tempe entry. Nowadays the Chaminade Swordsmen, or ``Swords,'' are an NCAA Division II team.
Taylor Wineries is no longer in business.
All the more common words for hog have derived terms. In Latin America, for example, chanchero (or chanchera) is someone working in the pork business (anything from `hog farmer' to `pork butcher'), and chanchería is a `shop that sells pork or sausage.' Chancho and chancha are used figuratively in the sense of `filthy person.' Also, a chancho in chess (ajedrez) is a `blocked pawn.' I don't know why; possibly this has to do with the use of chancho in the specialized sense of a hog fattened and destined for slaughter. At least cochino is used this way. Cochino is also used for various contemptible or pitiable types -- the miserly, crass, slovenly, fat, filthy, or poor.
From these extensions of meaning one would not be too surprised to find chancha also meaning a `lie' or `cheating trick.' It once had these meanings as well, but the etymology is elsewhere completely. The word was a seventeenth century or earlier borrowing of the Italian ciancie, and the ci's were properly transliterated as ch in Spanish. The Italian word could also be used with the more innocent connotation of `joke, jest.' This sense is either preserved or re-evolved in the word txantxa of western Basque dialects. (See also the chiste entry.) Within Spanish, the emphasis of the word quickly shifted to subtility and graciousness. The pronunciation (now chanza) has also shifted over the years. The Italian word is not supposed to have anything do with the French word chance. It has intriguing similarities to German words like zenzeln (`caress, fondle') and Modern Greek tzátzala (`gossip').
Somehow, no matter where they come from, words associated with irregularity of some sort seem to congregate in the cham/chan section of the Spanish dictionary. There's chancar (considered of American Indian origin) meaning `beat, `break,' or `grind,' changar (considered onomatopoeic, God help me) meaning `destroy,' and chantaje (from French chantage), meaning `blackmail.' Various words for old-fashioned or ill-fitting things begin in cham. Even an exception to this pattern, the Indian-origin word chancaca, meaning a dough prepared with sugar or honey, includes the unfortunately suggestive ``caca.''
The article cited above is ``Diffusion and channeling of low-energy ions: The mechanism of ion damage,'' by Ching-Hui Chen, Debora L. Green, and Evelyn L. Hu in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology, B: Microelectronics and Nanometer Structures, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 2355-59 (1995). Here's the abstract:
A simple model, including both channeling and diffusion effects, was developed for the understanding of the mechanism of low-energy ion-induced damage. This model provided much better agreement with the authors' exptl. data, and yields a value for the effective diffusivity of defects during ion bombardment as ~3 × 10-15 cm2/s. The numerical results support the authors' exptl. data that diffusion of defects, even at room temperature, plays an important role in determining the profile of ion-induced damage and suggests that some enhancement of defect diffusion occurs during ion bombardment. Since the majority of defects are located in the near-surface region (within ~50 Å of the surface), even modest etch removal of the surface can dramatically alter the damage profile. Therefore, surface removal also was considered in the authors' model to find the influence of etch rate on the ion damage profile.
The law named after Charles (but first discovered by Dalton): that the volume of a (rarefied, or ideal) gas under constant pressure is proportional to temperature.
Choice quotes:
I'd like to point out that chapter 17 [``Augustus Gloop Goes Up the Pipe''] is improbable on physical grounds. In the room where chocolate is mixed by waterfall, the downstream product is suctioned off in big pipes. Since the room contains trees, it appears that the pipes must raise the liquid a distance a great deal higher than 34 feet, which is about the limit that can be achieved for water at sea level (under a cold front).
[Reminder: much as ``nature abhors a vacuum,'' it is the pressure outside that raises a fluid to fill a vacuum above it, so a fluid can be raised no higher ``by'' a vacuum than atmospheric pressure divided by the fluid mass density, divided by the acceleration of gravity. A pressure of 76 cm of mercury (760 torr) is equivalent to 10.3m of water, or 33'9''.]
In the present case, the factory is deep underground, so atmospheric pressure may be higher by a bit. Not much, though, because Charlie, Grandpa Joe and Mr. Wonka don't suffer the bends when they exit through the roof. In any case, the greater density of the chocolate more than compensates. The effect of changes in gravitational acceleration should also be small: the acceleration of gravity inside a sphere of uniform density decreases linearly with radius, so a significant change in gravitational acceleration would require significant penetration of the earth, and the crust itself is everywhere less than one percent of the earth's radius thick. Not to mention that in fact, the earth's density increases with depth, diminishing the magnitude of the decrease in gravitational acceleration.
(Seven centuries ago, the question whether the force of gravity increased or decreased as one approached the center of the earth was a debated topic. Dante took the view that it increased, which is why Virgil had such a hard time turning to face upward again upon crossing the center of the earth. More about this at the BUR entry.)
Oh, now I get it! The waterfall makes the chocolate frothy! That's how it's made light enough to go up the pipe!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of a small number of oeuvres that constitute the food science fiction genre. As in general science fiction, science has been catching up, and Nestlé now markets WONKA Chewy CENTERED GOBSTOPPER -- ``jawbreakers that change colors and flavors with a Chewy Center,'' 50 grams in a regular package. Here's a hint for Grandpa Joe: this will break your dentures, dad gum it!
Another title that mentions chocolate is discussed at this P entry, but it's in the foodie subgenre of Magical Realism.
The Stammtisch banjo authority claims that the preceding statement somehow dates me. I should probably point out that, except for this sentence, this entire glossary entry was written before the revival (remortal?) of Charlie's Angels as one -- no two -- stupid movies.
The late Doris Duke owned a complete set of tapes of the series, but when you're a billionaire you can afford to make risky investments. She also helped out Imelda Marcos when the latter was just about literally down at the heels.
Kate Jackson, when she was on ``The Rookies,'' was apparently promised the star slot on a future show, and this would account for her outranking the other angels. Either that, or they figured that she had to be the one with personality. When I was in college, we studied this program with the sound off. Hypothesis: the show was a parody of its future imitators. Conclusion: Preemptive parody successful. No imitators. Just sequels.
I noticed that UB's chapter of Delta Xi Omega printed its rush calendar on stock with the well-known three-angels-attacking silhouette from that show. Tomorrow Wednesday there's 70's Training at 8 pm. These kids today don't know how hard it was, back when we had to endure the seventies for the first time, with no one around who had any more relevant experience than 1949. Now they get a free ride from the Student Union. Bids go out a week from tomorrow! ``Good luck!''
Marx wrote somewhere that `Hegel wrote somewhere' that historical events occur twice. Marx remarked that Hegel had neglected to note that the first time was tragedy, the second time farce. Perhaps in the current circumstance the order has been reversed.
[Later] I saw a Charlie's Angels Sticker on a superannuated Buick Skylark. The other bumpersticker said ``Mean People Suck.'' The driver was smoking, I don't know what.
We have another entry on angels.
Because this glossary has been under construction for years, the thought may have occurred to you, dear reader, that the ``tomorrow Wednesday'' mentioned above is now past. The odds may seem strong for that conclusion, even if today is Tuesday. If so, dear reader, you are mistaken. There is a place in the heart where it is always Tuesday, that Tuesday. Delta Xi Omega held Charlie's-Angels-themed rushes in the mid-nineties, and had a revival in 1999. How about a Brigadoon-themed rush!?!?
Hmm. Mock sentiment doesn't always go over well in serious information resources like this experimental theater of the acronym, but you can't be sure if you don't try. That's why it's necessary for you to read this trash.
After wearing my fingers to the bone, writing and rewriting this entry for your maximum enjoyment, I heard that there is in fact a Charlie's Angels parody, called VIP, on the WB channel. It apparently stars Pamela Anderson in the Kate Jackson role. Well, I'm sorry, but after all that work I'm not going to change the entry for the sake of mere accuracy. You'll just have to go without learning this more recent information. Someone else who hasn't seen it wonders whether it's really a parody. Maybe it's an homage.
Oh, while flipping channels one day the program befell me. Turns out I was right in the first place. Look, Charlie's Angels was a show about three private investigators who just happened to be model-beautiful. VIP is about a Baywatch babe who just happens to be a private investigator. This is totally different. VIP is a parody, really of the entire private investigator TV series genre, but it is not specifically modeled on Charlie's Angels.
You have to trust that if you relax and let him explore your body like unchartered territory, you'll have fun and be satisfied.
Another book in this genre is Desirable Men.
One of my college roommates used Chas. as an abbreviation of his name. He decided to become a Chemical Engineer (ChemE) after seeing ``The Great Escape'' with Steve McQueen. (He didn't actually go with McQueen to see it; McQueen had a rôle in the movie.) I call him Chuck.
Che Guevara studied medicine for a few years, completing his coursework (in 1953) but not his clinical training. He first signed on with Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement as a medic. He also killed a lot of people; you could say he was always involved in health issues.
The events covered in the original book took place mostly in 1920's. In those days the a family with twelve children was unusual, but not nearly as rare as today. In that decade automobile ownership took off, and some manufacturers began to introduce annual model changes. While the number of children was still increasing, Frank, Sr., used to refer jokingly to the current youngest child as ``this year's model.'' That's what I remember, anyway; I'm not going to go check. (Cf. Jon 2.0, at the downtown Holland entry.)
The interlock poses a slight problem for the repairman or repairperson, since it's at best inconvenient to diagnose equipment with either the power off or the case closed. It even poses a slight impediment to that most ingenious of characters, the enterprising idiot. The solution is a separate cable that's called a ``cheater cord,'' because it bypasses the safety interlock. This has an ordinary male plug for the wall socket, and a female end to attach to the exposed equipment (male). I'm workin' up a sweat just writin' about it.
Televisions pose a special danger because the CRT has a DC voltage between anode and cathode of at least 10 kilovolts. Nowadays, of course, TV's are in the disposable category of electronic equipment. You save the power cable, write ``WORKS. NEEDS CORD'' on a post-it note, and sell it at the flea market to someone who will throw it away after giving you ten dollars. In the olden times, however, we'd actually ``fix'' it, which meant replacing the burnt-out parts -- a 12AU6 audio amplifier tube or something of that sort. In the stories I heard, people who accidentally brushed the aquadag usually survived. However, they were usually thrown across the room, had a little burn, and felt sore. It wasn't the sort of ride you'd stay on for another round.
The preceding paragraph was written in 2003 or earlier. It's now 2006, and more and more students are heard to complain that not getting caught cheating is almost as hard as honest work. And the fear of getting caught is almost as stressful as studying. If these injustices concern you, perhaps you should consider Mount Saint Vincent University, in the provincial capital of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In March 2006, the university's board of governors banned the use of turnitin.com ``and any other plagiarism detection software that requires that students' work become part of an external database where other parties might have access to it.'' The decision takes effect in May (final exams for the Winter term end on April 21, surprisingly). Read more about it in the Chronicle Herald.
It's based on wave-function collapse. Before you go outside, the keys are in an ``indoors'' sector of Hilbert space. When you check for them, you project the density operator into the pocket sector. If you don't, the probability that the keys will still be with you outside is less than 10-100.
So basically, this key thing is a macroscopic quantum effect. Other macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics are superconductors (e.g., Toscanini) and clothes-dryer sock annihilation.
Professors, I'm registered for your class, [course name] next semester. I'm trying to finalize my plans for spring break, so I'd like to know if you intend to have a midterm exam on the friday beforehand (March 5). Thanks, -[student name]
The Latin word for cheek is buca. This is the etymon of the Spanish word boca, meaning `mouth.'
Current research indicates that the bacteria that age cheeses and give them their distinctive odors are related to the bacteria that give feet and some other moist portions of the human epithelium their odors. Although the carbon-dioxide-rich plume rising from stationary animals is one of the main beacons used by mosquitos to locate blood donors, particular odors have been demonstrated to have significant effects as well. This was reported in the August 1997 issue of Discover magazine.
Clifton Fadiman wrote [in Any Number Can Play (World, 1957)]
Cheese -- milk's leap toward immortality.
Oops -- missed.
``It's-a religion of-a peess,'' I've heard them say. (At least it's not a religion of peas. See what future Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to say about that at the pea entry.) On the other hand, I've also heard them say ``Cheese it -- the cops!'' Well, I suppose every religion has its fundies, its extremist fanatics, its people with big headgear issues. So heed this simple poem:
Stay away
From Green Bay.
(Incidentally, on the subject of packers or packing, and of staying away, see the new material at the skosh entry.)
Of course, religion is intimately connected with football (when they aren't the same thing). The pro football franchise in New Orleans is called ``The Saints.'' One of the most popular hymns (more generally -- i.e., among, say, small-ess-saints fans) is Paul Kraft's ``Dropkick Me Cheeses (Through the Goalposts of Life).'' Here's a 1976 recording of it by Bobby Bare. Also, many religious icons are represented in classic football poses. See, for example, the entry on Touchdown Cheeses.
A good layman's introduction to cheesology (the theology of cheesolatry) is Who Moved My Cheese? (Available in a new Chineese translation.) You'll want to study this before you make your first pilgrimage to France (the Holy Land) or Wisconsin or even Switzerland (the Holey Land).
I called the gym to see if I left my glasses lying on one of the machines.
Well, what color is the frame?It's got a wire frame, but the ear things are like mixed browns.
[A minute later...] They're here.
When I came to pick them up, she pointedly told me: it's called tortoise-shell.
Studies have shown that women tend to use more specific words than men do. If you show a man a picture of a pair of jeans and ask, ``what's this a picture of?'' he'll answer ``pants,'' whereas a woman would identify the style and maybe the brand. Similarly, a picture of an ordinary flower will elicit answers like ``flower'' from him and ``daisy'' from her.
These are just general patterns, okay? If you deviate from them in any way you can consider yourself superior. I explained to the proprietor at Mendoza's Guitars that I wanted a Fender pick, medium thickness, normal size, dark colored; he'd only had other thicknesses and sizes when I looked before. Sure enough, when I pointed to what I wanted (but thinner), he said ``Oh, you want tortoise-shell.'' Was I out sick the day they covered this stuff in school?
I'd also like to know what the ear thingies are called.
One of the most famous professors the University of Notre Dame ever had taught chemistry: Knute Rockne. He also coached -- varsity football, I think it was. Before he began his coaching career, Vince Lombardi taught Latin and chemistry at a New Jersey high school. Classicists like to brag that studying Latin ups your SAT score (and, sotte voce, your general intelligence), but I believe it was the intensive familiarity with chemistry that made Lombardi such a memorable quotesmith.
Many of the leaders of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960's were chemists. Well, okay, one that I know of. Hosea Williams had been a chemist with the US Department of Agriculture when he quit to join the SCLC staff as a voter-registration organizer and coordinator. Andrew Young explains in An Easy Burden, p. 281, that therefore he ``was used to making a very good salary, more than any of us, so I had persuaded Gayraud Wilmore of the Presbyterian Church national staff to pay Hosea, as the UCC had done with me. The Presbyterians paid Hosea twelve thousand dollars a year, which made him the highest-paid person at SCLC.'' George Washington Carver was born into slavery in 1864 and grew up to become an agricultural chemist, yet he worked for peanuts. (Also in 1864, physostigmine was first isolated from the calabar bean. At this point I should probably say something about Percy L. Julian, but I'd only be cribbing from websites you can visit directly.)
Andrew Young got his BA at Howard majoring in biology, but decided to enter the ministry. Back in the 90's (the 1790's), young Jöns Berzelius planned to become a clergyman. To escape family quarrels, however, he took a job tutoring on a nearby farm. There he became very interested in collecting and classifying flowers and insects. (It must be a Swedish thing. Normal people in such situations become very interested in farmers' sons or daughters.) Berzelius decided to develop his interest in natural science and pursued a medical education. By the 1820's, he had become the preeminent authority (in Europe, and thus in the world) on chemical questions. (As soon as I find a movement leader who majored in chemistry before deciding to enter the ministry, Young is out.)
An excellent quick resource for chemical information is <ChemFinder.Com>.
Personals ads often mention chemistry as an important determinant of whether a relationship will succeed. What about biology?
Another site of interest to ChemE's, less amusing than this but possibly of some other use, is Chemical Online.
The system of symbols we use today to represent elements and compounds is based on, and still looks a lot like, the system developed by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and first published in a French brochure in 1811.
The feature of Berzelius' system that is most recognizable today was his use of one- and two-letter element symbols, first letter capitalized. The idea of using letters to represent chemical elements and compounds was not entirely original. But the system of Berzelius was the first such suggestion to be successful -- overwhelmingly successful, in fact. The summary below is based on a multi-part paper he published during 1813 and 1814 in Annals of Philosophy, which described his system in the course of reporting other research. There is an online excerpt of relevant portions of the article. (The funny spelling of radical used below is taken from there.)
Chemistry by that time had advanced to the point that every substance that
chemists thought (or at least that Berzelius thought) was as an element is
still regarded as an element today. Most of the 47 substance symbols Berzelius
used in this paper (three were for elements he did not yet concede were
elements) are still identified by symbols that he gave them. These include the
following 38:
H,
B, C,
N, O,
F,
Al, Si,
P, S,
Ca, Ti,
(Mn), Fe,
Co, Ni,
Cu, Zn,
As,
Sr, Y,
Zr, Mo,
(Rh), Ag,
(Sn), (Sb),
Te,
Ba, Ce,
(W), Os,
Pt, Au,
(Hg), (Pb),
Bi,
U.
The preceding list is in order of increasing atomic number (which was unknown at the time). This makes it easy to recognize by inspection which elements are missing. (If not, learn the mnemonic that begins Hard Hearted Little Beggar Boys....) Successive lines above correspond to successive periods of the modern periodic table; the first version of a periodic table was not created until 1860.
The symbols in parentheses were used by Berzelius, but not consistently or exclusively. For manganese (Mn) he also used Ma, for rhodium (Rh) also R, for both tin (Sn) and antimony (Sb) he also used St, for tungsten (W) also Tn, for mercury (Hg) also Hy, and for lead (Pb) also P (which he also used as the unique symbol for phosphorous, as indicated above). In addition, for columbium he used both Cl and Cb. The latter symbol was accepted, but eventually the element name was changed to niobium and the symbol changed to Nb.
Element symbols that Berzelius introduced but that have not survived: For beryllium he used Gl, representing ``glucinum.'' (The name is discussed at the entry for its current symbol: Be.) For sodium (now Na): So. For magnesium (now Mg): Ms. For potassium (now K): Po. For chromium (now Cr): Ch. For palladium (now Pd): Pa. For iridium (now Ir): I.
The article used one other element symbol not listed above: for chlorine (our Cl), Berzelius wrote M (``muriatic radicle''), so that hydrochloric acid would be HM (originally written ``H + M,'' see below). For Berzelius, however, M was not the symbol for an element. Following Lavoisier, he believed that the muriatic radical was the oxide of another element not yet isolated. (For the back-story, see the remarks on oxygen in the technical misnomenclature entry.) Sir Humphrey Davy, whom Berzelius admired, isolated, named, and claimed element status for chlorine in 1810, but Berzelius only conceded that chlorine was an element in 1818.
There were two other symbols listed above that Berzelius regarded as representing the oxide of some undiscovered element: his N stood for ``nitric radicle'' and F for ``fluoric radicle.'' (He finally agreed that nitrogen was an element in 1824; I don't know about fluorine.)
I have read that the notational system of Berzelius was not the first to use alphabetic symbols. Certainly Dalton's rather graphical representation used alphabetic symbols, almost haphazardly: an atom of hydrogen was represented by a circle with a centered dot, carbon by filled circle, copper and lead by circles with the letters C and L inside. If there was a compact and consistent alphanumeric system before that of Berzelius, I'm not aware of it.
In any case, the scheme of Berzelius was the first to catch on in a big way. It may be that the moment for such a system had arrived or it may be that Berzelius's prestige and extensive publication popularized it, or maybe it was as it still seems: a major improvement on previous notations. One thing that certainly promoted its adoption was that Berzelius based a system of compound symbols on it. This system incorporated the assumptions of his own ``dualistic'' theory of bonding -- essentially a theory of ionic and polar bonds.
The system posited that atoms had a net charge and formed a succession of combinations to neutralize successively finer charge imbalances. The bonding of ``first-order compounds'' was represented by a plus sign between positive and negative ions (calcium oxide was ``Ca + O'') and relative proportions were indicated by prefixed numbers (sulfur trioxide was ``S + 3O'').
``Second-order compounds'' were represented in a similar way, as binomials of first-order compounds. In the representation of second-order compounds, if the hierarchy of compoundings had any meaning, one had to distinguish the numerical factors from first- and second-order combinations. This could be done with parentheses (and nested parentheses for higher-order compounds), but instead Berzelius used a superscript notation. Thus, for example, sulfur trioxide, when participating in a second-order compound, was written as SO3. This is almost the modern notation, but for two things. (1) We use subscripts instead of superscripts. In fact, the superscript style was popular for many years in France, before they conformed to majority usage. (2) Although most references show the numerical superscripts as I have, above and to the right of the element symbol, it seems Berzelius (at least in 1813) wrote the numbers centered above the element symbols. I have yet to check this with a facsimile of an original. Berzelius identified compounds up to fourth-order. The fourth-order compounds were constructed of third-order compounds with water -- essentially hydrations. Something of that notation seems to survive today in the notation for hydrated ionic and polar compounds, which uses a centered dot (instead of a plus sign) followed by the water-molecule symbol (with a prefixed number as necessary).
Textbook authorship was a frequent source of inspiration to nineteenth-century chemists. When I get around to filling in the details, chemists I mention will include Prout, Berzelius, Cannizzaro, and Mendeleev.
Cf. LDR.
The Spanish translation of chemo is quimio (short for quimio-terapia). It's natural to guess that chemo might be translated quimo. That faux ami (which corresponds to the English chyme) is discussed at the SABI entry.
However, after Neil Armstrong's dramatic moon landing on July 20, 1969, a sense of ``mission accomplished'' infused the country; and the nation began to turn its attention to other issues: the Vietnam War, the domestic social unrest and student protests, Watergate, and the oil crisis and economic downturn of the 1970s. Public education was pushed off center stage of the national agenda. The years of neglect exacted a heavy toll.
This is quoted (I don't entirely agree with the way the chronological development is worded) from Seaborg's A Chemist in the White House: From the Manhattan Project to the End of the Cold War (American Chemical Society, 1998), p. 272. The book describes his personal interactions with the US presidents (all of them) from FDR to Bill Clinton. (That's while they were in office; he also knew Hoover after he retired.) According to the book, ``[a]t present, 24 audiovisual productions in the CHEM Study series are available as films and as VHS and PAL videos. These were last revised in 1989. Millions of copies of the textbook and lab manual have been sold around the world. The books have been translated into 17 languages and the films into 8 languages.
When I was a senior in high school, I was one of three students who happened to be enrolled in both Chemistry II (an AP course, in fact though not in name until some years later) and an English course called Modern Satire. The three of us (Mark Tomalonis, Claude von Roesgen, and I) created a COME'n'Study film about deterium, a substance that prevents things from happening. Tom Sullebarger and Laurel Bloecher also contributed. I have thought that it's amusing how movie folks obsess over film credits (see, for example, the Alan Smithee and second second entries). But now with the shoe on the other foot, I wish we had written out formal credits to save me the worry of unfairly slighting someone's contribution.
``Rocks are a major source of deterium.'' In a white lab coat, I dipped a chunk of granite in a beaker of water to see if it would dissolve, and I tried to coax an irregular rock to roll across a lab bench. Afterwards, the camera panned left, where Claude and (if Mark's memory serves) Laurel held up Olympic-style judges'-scores signs.
It's not surprising to remember one's own bit best. The theory that this is a general phenomenon has been used to try to deduce facts about William Shakespeare. The approach assumes that words or phrases spoken by a character the bard acted in one play would sort of ring in his head and appear with higher-than-average frequency in his next play. This has been used in arguments over the order in which the plays were written. Don't laugh -- Shakespeare makes critics think even crazier things, such as that he didn't exist.
Anyway, our sound track was on a cassette, but synchronization wasn't too much of a problem because the sound was mostly voice-over narration. I heard they showed the film at our school for a few years after we left. We used Mark's camera equipment, but Claude is the one who eventually went into the film business in any way. I also acted in (and co-produced, etc.) a video for my Current American Problems course that year, and filmed excerpts from Airport (Sophomore English group book report), so I guess I must have gotten that out of my system, but sometimes I wonder if it hasn't all gone downhill since high school. I also wondered what ever happened to our film. Then in April 2009 Mark found this entry and contacted me. It turns out that the 16mm video component has survived. Maybe we'll do something with it.
'
= c/n, where n is the
index of refraction. In the light equivalent of a sonic boom, the radiation
forms a cone with opening angle
away from the backward-pointing vector,
given by
sin(/2) = c'
/v,
where v is the particle speed.
(The opening angle of a cone is the maximum angle made at its vertex between two segments along the side. That is, it is twice the angle between the cone axis and its side. By ``cone'' I mean what is technically a ``right cone.'')
Cherenkov counters are devices which detect the presence of very rapid particles by measuring the Cherenkov radiation. Most ordinary solids and liquids have dielectric constants n not very close to unity, and most gases have dielectric constants between 1 and 1.001. The need to detect particles moving within a few per cent of the speed of light led to the development of aerosil.
Cherenkov's name should really be written Cerenkov, with a hachek on the cee, but that's hard to do with only ISO Latin-1.
Many proverbs are in chiastic form. For example: ``you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy.''
Extra credit for apposite name:
We didn't land on Plymouth Rock;
Plymouth Rock landed on us.
Malcolm X
(Born Malcolm Little. Eventually changed his name to Malcolm El Shabazz or something like that. He also was the first major figure to advocate replacing ``negro'' with ``black.'' Seems to have had a thing about names.)
Malcolm X had some ideas about religion. I think I'll just leave it at that for now.
Chiasmus is very popular in early Christian work. In Matthew 10:39, for example:
He who FINDS his life will LOSE itThree centuries later, one finds chiasmus and chiastic structures very common in Augustine's sermons.
and he who LOSES his life [for my sake] will FIND it.
The meaning of the term chiasmus is frequently stretched to cover a number of other rhetorical figures and literary structures that have any sort of ``geometric structure.'' (Such is the terminology for rhetorical structure best described in geometric terms.) This is the case, for example, in the discussion notes for Catallus in the A.P. edition published by Bolchazy-Carducci Press.
(I probably shouldn't neglect to mention the five-member soft-rock group that called itself The Fifth Dimension. Despite the name, neither their music nor lyrics had any unusual geometry that I ever noticed, but they did have a hit with the song ``Love's Lines, Angles & Rhymes,'' title track of an LP they released in 1971. The song was also released as a single that year, b/w ``The Singer.'')
The looser category of ``chiasmus'' typically involves symmetric organization around a central event or episode, and has been called Ringstruktur by German philologists and later pedimental structure by John Linton Myres, in his Herodotus, Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953).
Calvert Watkins, in his How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), assembles extensive evidence of ring composition in a variety of Indo-European poetic traditions.
For an elaborate structural analysis of the Iliad, see Cedric Hubbell Whitman: Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), including chapters entitled ``Homer and Geometric Art,'' and ``The Geometric Structure of the Iliad.'' See also André Weil's contribution ``Sur quelques symétries dans l'Iliade,'' pp. 305-309 of Miscellanea Mathematica, ed. Peter Hilton, Friedrich Hirzebruch, and Reinhold Remmert (Springer-Verlag, 1991).
Elaborate geometric structure can also be found in, for example, Plato's dialogues and Aeschylus's plays. It continues in the Hellenistic period, at least in Jewish writing (in Koine).
One finds ring structure very frequently in Vedic poetry, though generally it is compressed within individual stanzas. On a larger and more intricate scale, one finds it in Avestan and in the Gathas of Zarathustra.
Saussure noticed the phenomenon nearly a hundred years ago. Roman Jakobson explored it as well, both in Slavic and on an abstract theoretical plane, in his discussions of the poetic function. David Weir is apparently another language professor who got the chiasmus bug (see decadence).
Much of the preceding stuff was patched together from material posted by Owen Cramer, Jim Helm, Steve Mason, and George Thompson during a thread on the classics list in April 1999.
John F. Kennedy used chiasmus in his inaugural address: ``...ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.''
This echoed a famous speech Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., made on Memorial Day 1884:
For, stripped of the temporary associations which gave rise to it, it [the Fourth of July] is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
At the time, Holmes was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He went on to become a justice of the US Supreme Court. Theodore Roosevelt, who appointed him to the position, came to regret it. His original choice had been William Howard Taft, but Taft turned the position down to continue governing the Philippines. (The story seems to be that Taft's ambitious wife wanted him to wait and be president instead.) As it turned out, Teddy Roosevelt also hand-picked his own successor as president: in 1908 he pushed through the nomination of his Secretary of War, who was none other than Taft, now home from the Philippines. By 1912, Roosevelt again decided that he had made a mistake, and when the Republican Party nominated Taft for candidacy to a second term, TR formed a third party called the National Progressive Party (the ``Bull Moose'' party). I seem to have gotten off on a tangent, and the TR situations are really parallel rather than chiastic or in some complementary relation. All this geometry! Look, here's what we'll do: from here on this entry is retasked to the Holmes quote, and we'll start another entry that you can go to immediately if you're still interested in chiasmus, okay? (I'll finish this entry later, and mention Harding.)
(Isn't hypertext great? It allows so much greater flexibility in organizing reference information!)
A reference dedicated to chaismus is Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You: Chiasmus and a World of Quotations That Say What They Mean and Mean What They Say, by Dr. Mardy Grothe. It's recommended by X. J. Kennedy, which ought to count for something. I suppose X stands for Xavier, but I don't know.
As the earlier examples suggest, the typical chiasmus involves interchange of words or phrases. Interchanging parts of words makes possible a class of puns that has been called phonetic chiasmus (I think ``phonemic chiasmus'' would have been a better term):
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
The second pun occurs in Randy Hanzlick's song ``I'd Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me,'' which explores the relative merits of these alternative ways to ``kill the pain.'' Hanzlick, an Atlanta physician, got the idea from a graffito scrawled on a bathroom wall in a VA hospital in the early 1970's. That said ``I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.'' This story is reported on the phonetic chiasmus page at chiasmus.com. (Another doctor -- Demento -- has played that song on his program.) I'd always heard the pun credited to Groucho Marx, but then it probably would be even if he didn't come up with it originally or even say it. Pending more substantive information, I would note that the popularity of frontal lobotomy as a procedure peaked in the 1950's, when Groucho hosted ``You Bet Your Life,'' and was largely the stuff of folklore and sad survivors by the 1970's.
During the Prohibition Era (roughly the 1920's in the US and Finland), one element in the war on alcohol was (in the US) a sort of Lysistrata approach. It was encapsulated in the following:
It's got a beat! Four-three time. Carrie Nation could march to it. (Eight six if she'd had soul.) And its structure is distantly reminiscent of this old saw:
There must be a name for this figure, but I don't know it. And no, it's not very chiastic, but I had to put it in somewhere. I think I first read the lips and liquor ditty in Cheaper by the Dozen.
Here's a good phrase that I found in an article on the unsolved 1919 disappearance of the despised millionaire Ambrose Small. It's not chiastic, but I couldn't think where else to put it. Let's just pretend that it's a useful exercise for distinguishing chiasmus from other figures, okay?
Just one thing seems certain. For decades, Ambrose Small got away with murder. In 1919, someone else did.(Penned, for all I know completely originally, by Garnet Fraser, writing in the Nov. 30, 2003, Toronto Star.)
Oh, alright, let's do have some real chiastic stuff. (Hint: more chiasmus at that link.)
If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.
Bacon, Advancement of Learning, bk. I, v., 8.
``The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.''
``You can't turn back the clock,'' expostulate those who mistake weariness for wisdom. Yet these believers in history, foreordained, never seem to consider the possibility that their watches show the wrong time.
This book examines--sympathetically--the people, movements, and arguments of six hopelessly (or so it might seem) ``lost causes'': opposition to school consolidation, the Interstate Highway System, woman suffrage, and the maintenance of a large standing army; and the defense of child labor and the back-to-the-land movement of the Great Depression.
I remember reading that New Zealand's experience with kiwi fruit turned out to be a cautionary tale of agricultural development. Once New Zealand exporters had done all the spadework, opening up the market against resistance to the fuzzy brown fruit that tastes a lot like a tart strawberry, other lower-cost or closer (which can be the same thing) competitors dove in and ate their dessert, so to speak.
Anyway, that's what I read a bunch of years ago in an article about economic development planning for the Isle of Jersey, but things can't be entirely bad. I was shopping at Meijer's a couple of days ago and all three varieties of kiwi were ``Product of New Zealand.'' Kiwi trees are thirsty. For California growers, that meant daily irrigation. In the early eighties, kiwi were fetching a dollar a pound for the growers. When that came down to pennies a pound, most California producers got out of the business. According to an IHT article of September 22, 2008, Italy had become the world's leading producer.
A wearing and accouterment A01 man garment A02 lady garment A03 children garment A04 silk dress A05 leather/fur dress A06 knitting dress A07 full dress ...
Anyway, CHIP is one of those federal-state partnerships that are so popular in the US. Like Medicaid, it's ``administered by the states under broad federal guidelines.'' CHIP is meant to provide health care coverage for poor children who don't qualify for Medicaid. I suppose that in practice, ``low-income'' may be more accurate than ``poor,'' but gratuitous accuracy is not a reflex I associate with bureaucracies, and I suspect it's not the reason that the word poor doesn't appear in the literature.
One thing about federal-state partnerships is that it takes two to tango. If a state doesn't implement the kind of program the feds want, the feds can refuse to fund the state's program, but they can't force the state directly to change the program or even to implement one. And they don't offer to pay all the expenses, either (see FMAP).
Some NGO's, at least, prefer to refer to CHIP as SCHIP (oh yeah, there's a ``State'' there), but that looks like it ought to be pronounced ``skip'' in English. The federal organizations that administer the programs (I'm sorry, that set the rules by which the states administer them) use ``CHIP.''
Ala ALL Kids Az KidsCare Ark ARKinds First Ca Healthy Families Co Family Health Line Co. CHP+ Conn HUSKY Plan DC DC Healthy Families Fla Florida Kid Care Ga GA Peach Care for Kids Ill KidCare Ind Hoosier Healthwise Iowa Hawk I Ks Health Wave La LA CHIP Me not available Md Maryland's Children's Health Program Mass MassHealth Mich MIChild Minn Minnesota Care Miss MS's Children's Health Insurance Program Mo MC+ Mont. MT Kids Ne. Kids Connection Nev. Nevada Check Up NH Healthy Kids - Gold NJ New Jersey KidCare NY Child Health Plus NCar NC Health Choice Oh Healthy Start OK Sooner Care OR Oregon Health Plan Pa PA Children's Health Insurance RI RiteCare SCar Partners for Healthy Children Tenn TennCare Tx Texas CHIP Utah CHIP, Utah's Children's Health Insurance Program Va VA Children's Medical Security Plan WVa CHIP
The Spanish chiste was adopted with the same meaning and pronunciation into some western Basque dialects (those of Biscay and Guipuzcoa), with the transliterated spelling txiste. A synonym in the same dialectal regions is txantxa, from Spanish chancha, q.v.
The word is ultimately from the Latin, cistella (`small basket'), through cistere, the form of the word in the French dialect of Gascony. This is probably a good place to point out that Gascon is derived from the Latin Vascones, Latin word for `Basques.' The region got the name when the Basques invaded in the sixth century. The shift from the Latin -ll- to Gascon -r- is regular, as is the shift from ci- to chi- in Basque.
To be honest, there seem to be a number of slight variations, particularly on the initial consonant or consonant cluster. In Spanish the more common word for the same equipment is cesta, and versions of this word also occur in Basque (xisto in, uh, Baja Navarra, for example). The Spanish word cesta is derived from the Latin cista, and thus cognate with English chest. Corominas y Pascual (1984) criticize the Real Academia for supposing that cesta in the particular acception used in jai alai has some different etymology, and to jusdge from the 21st edition (1992) of its dictionary, the Academy has come around.
You know, certain kinds of grasshopper or locust are technically kosher. However, the specification of which are kosher and which treif is considered too vague to allow of certainty, so to be on the safe side all are proscribed (does this predicate dangle?). I have never found this proscription to be a significant burden. For more treif food, see the next entry.
According to Cicero, Cato was well-known to have wondered
`...how two entrail-readers [prophesiers] could keep from laughing when they saw each other.'... quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem cum vidisset.
Cicero is a town in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New York, Washington and Wisconsin. For more about entrail-reading, see the insurance agents entry. The word haruspex is originally Etruscan (Etr.).
It is reliably reported [New York Times, p. 10, 1996.11.10] that you can get chitlins at any of eight outlets around Atlanta owned by Shelley Anthony, who is 44 and hasn't had even one heart attack yet. He's got a drive-through-only outlet on Ponce de Leon. My grandmother used to live on Ponce de Leon; there's a science sort-of-museum to the North before you reach Decatur.
I've noticed that increasingly, late at night when only the drive-through is open, people are walking through the drive-through service at Burger King restaurants. It's one of the few places where pedestrians and vehicles obey identical rules. Try to imagine the Staten Island ferry on a similar regime. I read once that half the people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge have crossed another bridge that day to get there. Sure, but the Golden Gate has a pedestrian walkway. You don't want to get run over on your way to commit suicide -- you could get killed!
Once, driving through Pecos, Texas, I stopped at an authentic Mexican restaurant, the kind where no se habla inglés. I saw something on the menu that I didn't recognize -- menudos. It was explained to me that this was carne, `meat,' so I tried the sopa de menudos, which turned out to be soup with boiled-tripe flotsam. As neither Cicero nor Cato was first to have said,
or, `there's no arguing taste.'De gustibus non est disputandum,
Cicero means `small pea.'
On March 12, 2004, Tonya Harding made an appearance at an Ice home game against the Colorado Eagles (who won 2-1 in an overtime shoot-out). She didn't skate either! She did a little exhibition boxing between periods, sparring with her trainer. To keep up with Tonya's periodically newsworthy (or at least News-Of-The-Worldly) career, save a link to the degradation entry.
Oh wait -- I forgot! Fighting is a part of hockey! How could I forget? As Ice General Manager Larry Linde explained in a press release, ``[s]ome people have questioned our toughness this season and I intend to put an end to that this Friday [March 12].'' Of course, this makes perfect sense. ``She certainly gives new meaning to the [team's slogan] `Are You Tough Enough?' '' Hmmm. ``Harding.'' Almost worth a nomen est omen entry.
Not precisely to the point, but relevant, are some numbers published in Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2000 (US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001). Table 2.77 lists the results of a survey question asked of Americans by the Gallup Organization in surveys since 1959: ``Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?'' In 1959, 60% responded that there should, 36% that there should not (4% no opinion). The number favoring such a law declined, steadily, so far as two intervening surveys suggest, until in January 1980 31% favored such a law and 65% were opposed. That was the low point in measured popularity for handgun prohibition. In eleven polls between December 1980 and 2000, the percentage favoring has fluctuated between 34 and 43. In 2000, 36% favored and 62% opposed handgun prohibition. (Although survey sample sizes have varied, the 2000 sample numbered 1012.)
``Credit hire/credit repair became a significant customer service in the late 1980's. Back in the 1980's or earlier, if you wanted to hire a car and recover the cost from a negligent driver's insurer you had to pay for it up front, obtain a receipt and then spend weeks, if not months waiting to get your money back. That led to credit hire firms being established enabling innocent motorists involved in an accident to obtain a car on credit.''
I only put this entry in because it occurred to me that choque and coche form a cute Spoonerized pair. They have the same stress and vowel patterns, with only the consonants switched. Choque, related to chocar, is the countable noun for `crash, collision.' Coche is `car.' [The latter is cognate with English coach, as discussed at the coach entry.]
OH / ____/ / \ ____/ \ /¯¯¯¯\ / / \____/ \ /\ \____/ \ / \ ___/ \ / \ / / \____/ \ /\ \ / \ \ / \ | \____ | / \ / \ / \____/ \Cholesterol was first extracted from bile, and the name is constructed using the Greek word (khole) for bile.
There is a set of blood solutes called lipoproteins associated with the alcohol cholesterol (they can transport it), which are collectively called ``cholesterol'' in the medical field. The only thing certain about ``cholesterol'' numbers is that the units on the numbers that come back from the laboratory, results from your blood tests, are milligrams per deciliter. And that's not an international standard. (At least in Canada since metrification and also in Denmark, I've heard of some other unit.) Vide liter.
Syrupy. Famous stuff because acetyl choline [esterize the alcohol group with acetic acid] turns out to be essential for communication between nerves.
There seems to be a lot of variation in what goes in besides fried noodles and some common Western vegetables. Helpfully, chow mein dishes usually include the main non-veggie ingredient in the name (``chicken chow mein,'' ``pork chow mein,'' etc.).
Scientific or technical news articles appearing in its pages are required to contain at least one major foolish blunder. Opinion pieces don't need logic howlers if they are otherwise without intellectual merit.
Abbreviated CHE.
Send for a catalogue to:
Chthonios Books
The same principle is even more important in the American civil religion, where each person is an authority unto him- or herself.
ch
is pronounced as in French
and why the same sound at the end is spelled in English.
The word has an etymology that you could look up on the internet. UCSB has a Chumash Room or Chumash Auditorium or something in the student center (UCen).
ch
is
pronounced as in German because when transliteration of Hebrew into Roman
characters became common in the nineteenth century, it was principally done
into German.
The word chumash is based on the Hebrew word hameish, `five.'
C.I. Lewis (born April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Mass.; died February 3, 1964, in Cambridge, Mass.). A Harvard philosopher.
The CIA are very good at what they do, whatever it is. We know because they tell us so.
They say that doctors bury their mistakes.
Aerostat, for a body having neutral bouyancy in air, and aerostation, are obsolete words in English, so we have gone back to an 1813 encyclopedia to work up entries for these terms. (Follow the links!) In French, of course, no word is ever officially obsolete that might conceivably displace a borrowed English term.
The CIA are very good at what they do, whatever it is. We know because the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
E. Metzger, of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, maintains as complete as possible a page of Roman legal texts, including CIC, on the web at <http://www.iuscivile.com/materials/sources.shtml> (part of Roman Law Reseources.
The canonical codification was done under the Eastern Emperor Justinian, so see it as the Codex at Imperatoris Ivstiniani Opera (`the works of Emperor Justinian').
Cicero was regarded as the greatest of the Roman orators. If you want some idea of what this could mean, just square Tony Blair and divide by George W. Bush. (Vide etiam Wordsworth.) But enough about Cicero. We only add entries now so we can go off on irrelevant tangents, and to give you the information you neeeeeed and couldn't find in the other hits your search engine dredged up. For this entry, that special information has to do with my home town, Westfield, New Jersey. (Well, I should probably mention that there's a Tully County or something in upstate New York. Some other time, I guess. No need to mention the well-known town of Cicero, Illinois.) Westfield was for many years a powerhouse in New Jersey high school football, and the legendary Gary Kehler, coach from 1961 to 1982, was probably the principal reason.
To take a ferinstance, his 1977 team was rated by the Newark Star-Ledger as the second-best New Jersey high-school team of the century (apparently the century from about 1910 to 2003 or so), and the best among public schools. And they did it all without steroids. (At least, they were generally small teams, by today's standards. Draw your own conclusions.) Westfield played its home games at Memorial Stadium, built by the WPA on Rahway Avenue, and at some point the name was changed to Gary Kehler Stadium. On April 20, 2006, with due ceremony and the honoree in attendance, the town put up a sign there describing Gary Kehler's coaching achievements at Westfield High. The sign, which was placed on the press box at the stadium, lists Kehler's 171-26-7 record and his eight football teams that won the state championship. (Boy, I really need a transition play here.) There's an inscribed bust of Cicero in the Wellington Museum, at Apsley House in London. [There's a picture of the bust in F.R. Cowell's Cicero and the Roman Republic (Penguin/Pelican, 1948, 5/e 1973), facing p. 174.] It's a pretty good likeness of Gary Kehler around 1973.
Did I ever mention Garibaldi? Yes, I did! And you already forgot. It's at this ALM entry. I should probably add that Dennis played football on the Westfield school teams.
I should probably also add that the cognomen Cicero is a third-declension noun, with genitive singular Ciceronis. So most of the forms are constructed with an n. That's why the adjective form (in English) is Ciceronian. A similar-sounding word in Latin is cicer, `chickpea.'
When you think about it, that's what always happens in diffusion.
Product endorsement: ``You could do worse.''
I have tried at various times in my life to grasp the rudiments of such inventions as the telephone, the camera, wireless telegraphy and even the ordinary motorcar, but without success. Television, of course, and radar and atomic energy are so far beyond my comprehension that my brain shudders at the thought of them and scurries for cover like a primitive tribesman confronted for the first time with a Dunhill cigarette lighter.--- Noël Coward
CIH Registration Office P.O. Box 764 Tucker, Georgia 30085-0764 Phone: (770) 938-4291
I used to have the expansion with Interational -- interesting thought.
The project stems from a campaign promise President Jacques Chirac made during his successful 2002 campaign to remain in office (and thereby avoid prosecution on corruption charges stemming from his years as Paris mayor, though he had other motives for seeking reelection). He promised a ``CNN à la française.'' In other words he meant to create something like CNN, but government-run and government-subsidized. Its annual budget is initially about $87 million, operated as a 50-50 joint venture between TF1 and France Télévisions. CII plans (as of March 2006) call for broadcasts to begin at the end of 2006, initially to Africa and Asia.
Notice that although Chirac said it would be the ``voix de la France dans le monde,'' he did not promise that this voice would speak French -- he didn't call it a ``CNN en française'' or a ``CNN francophone.'' In fact, it came out around mid-March 2006 that most of the programming would be in English. A week or two later, Chirac was attending an EU meeting where a French businessman announced that he would make his presentation in English, since that is the international language of business; Chirac and the rest of the French delegation at the meeting walked out in protest.
``MISSION: Connect all meeting professionals to the internet and build a global community of tech-savvy buyers and sellers of meeting products/services.''
CIMPA traditionally holds a breakfast for members and guests who are attending the US Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC.
Alternate URL: <http://www.MEETINGPROFESSIONALS.ORG/>.
The usage dies hard, however. A memorandum of September 15, 2003, includes the following:
Let's make sure that no service, CINC, or others make announcements on troop rotations, stop loss or mobilizations, without the proposal having been worked through the Joint Staff, David Chu [undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness] and me personally.The memo was written by Donald Rumsfeld.
The name cinchona is based on definitely bad information about possibly bad information: in 1742 Linnaeus named the genus in honor of the Countess of Chinchón. That's a small town about 45 km from Madrid, along the way to Toledo, and if Linnaeus could have googled this he wouldn't have misspelled it. It's too late now, because the one-aitch spelling has been widely incorporated in botanical and chemical nomenclature. I wish that IUPAC would adopt a sensible, similarly conservative attitude to terminology. Leave well enough alone! Look: I'm willing to compromise in the interest of letting sleeping dogs lie. You never heard me complain that the word, misspelled as it is, is mispronounced in some sort of church-Latin way (``sink-oh-na,'' or some such).
There's a new hotel in that town, named Hotel Condesa de Chinchón, only twenty minutes from the Warner Brothers Theme Park (Parque Temático de la Warner Bros.; ``Warner Bros.'' gets a female definite article because it is implicitly la empreza or la compañía Warner Bros., now where was I?). Oh yeah, the hotel is on Calle de los Huertos (previously called Avenida del Generalísimo). Calle de los huertos means `street of the orchards,' so it's rather appropriate and you're glad I mentioned it. According to legend, La condesa de Chinchón was cured of malaria by the use of Peruvian bark in 1638 while she was serving as vice-queen (no, no! -- ``vice'' as in ``deputy'') of Peru, and she brought some of the bark back to Spain in 1640. Well, it's not certain that she didn't.
Other names for the bark are Jesuits' bark (based on a separate legend) and quinquina, from the local (Chechua) word kina, meaning `bark.' (The reduplication is original in Chechua; the letter q is just the preference of Spanish orthography.)
In 1935, the CIO was formed behind the leadership of UMW head John L. Lewis, who stormed out of the AFL after beating up Carpenters-Union president William L. Hutcheson on the floor of the AFL convention floor.
The UMW was the only large industrial union in an AFL dominated by craft unions, and Lewis wanted the conservative AFL to engage in more aggressive organizing based on industrial unions. He put this idea into practice with the CIO, which created automobile and steel industrial unions and grew rapidly.
Semantically, Lewis's work was characterized by late nomenclature revision. For example, CIO originally stood for Committee of Industrial Organizations, and the United Steelworkers of America originally did business as the CIO's ``Steelworkers' Organizing Committee.'' Other important things can be and have been said about his leadership, but let this be here recorded: he showed that the American labor movement knew how to deploy apostrophe marks as well as sit-down strikes.
In 1940, Lewis returned from CIO leadership to UMW leadership, and after WWII the AFL experienced faster growth than the CIO. The AFL and CIO were merged as the AFL-CIO in December 1955.
Cf. DGB.
They apparently stopped keeping up a website, but they're reported still to exist, meeting in donated space. According to this webpage, they ``meet the third Sunday of each month from 2-5:30pm in the lower banquet room of the Pizza Hut on Hwy. 31 North in Kokomo, IN.'' Makes you want to join just to learn what the ``lower banquet room'' of a Pizza Hut might entail.
Cf. BEA.
Look, I'm just a down-to-earth guy. Explain it to me in layman's terms. Make it relevant. Is it pronounced like ``Sears''?
Cf. WGD.
In the detailed city-by-city (``agency'') tables, you can see that if one year there were no murders and the next year there was one, it was counted as a 100% increase in the murder rate. You can't blame them for using a nonzero baseline, I guess.
Georgia Tech hosts the WWW Virtual Library section. LookSmart has a small page of CivE links that does not include the SBF glossary. We're not offended, heck no!
There's a Jakob-Creutzfeldt virus (JC, q.v.), but it does not cause CJD.
Chilean saltpeter is sodium nitrate (NaNO3); ordinary saltpeter is potassium nitrate (KNO3). Ordinary saltpeter has a diuretic effect and at least a reputation for reducing libido in male humans. Before you go off thinking up lascivious etymologies, recognize that peter comes from the root for `stone.' [More on ordinary saltpeter at the P (phosphorus) entry.]
In March 2003, an editor for the New York Times op-ed page, Mr. Tobin, invited Boris Johnson, a Tory backbencher in the UK House of Commons, to write about the Iraq war. Johnson wrote the op-ed for the New York Times, and then he wrote an editorial about writing the op-ed for the New York Times for The Spectator. (Johnson is editor of that magazine.)
Tobin was very enthusiastic about the piece, but a few changes were necessary. ``Labour'' became the ``Labor party,'' and ``Rummie'' for Rumsfeld was considered a bit too undignified for New York Times readers. Oh, and a few other things. Johnson had written about US lobbying efforts for UN resolutions, including something to the effect that one doesn't make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. (You don't?) This was changed to ``the President of Chile.'' Explanation: ``Uh, Booris,'' said Tobin, ``it's just easier in principle if we don't say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn't affect your point, we would like to say Chile.'' (To be perfectly fair, the President of Guinea was dying of kidney disease -- for all I know he may be dead by now -- and from credible reports was being very statesmanlike. OTOH, Guinea held the rotating leadership of the Security Council at that time, for whatever little that's worth, and Chile was merely a member. In fact, Chile's opposition was firm, and for this Chile was widely expected to pay a price in future American disfavor -- to get the stick rather than the carrot, or squash racket.)
Johnson's op-ed mentioned Tony Blair. Jayson Blair (also having something to do with accuracy in the NYT) is mentioned at our CSPI entry.
For something on Chile's politics, start at the Concertación entry.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
A chlorine.net site is under construction, but I don't know what/who it'll be about.
It is reputed to measure critical thinking and analytical reasoning, which presumably demonstrates that ``critical thinking'' is not a fraud. The instrument is administered -- it's like a therapy, see? -- to freshmen and seniors, and colleges can take credit for the measured improvement. About 120 schools use it, but for some reason nearly all of them keep the results a secret.
As of January 2003, Cleveland State seems to be the only university that has adopted this tasty nomenclature. However:
``CLASP is a [knowledge-based] organisation committed to improving the efficiency of the whole building process for the benefit of owners and users.'' They are ``Britain's number one public sector designer of permanent building systems and refurbishment solutions.''
A building system is what idiots like you and I tend to think of as one or more buildings. (Idiots like I would never have thought of writing ``like I,'' but ``you and me'' always invites reflection.)
The Duluth Dukes were the one team that had existed before 1943. They played their first games in 1934, and except for 1943, they were part of a Northern League that was founded in 1932 and foundered in 1971. There is and there had been other minor leagues with the same name. Until 1962, when the classification scheme was changed, each Northern League has been a Class D league. That was the lowest classification used by the minor league association (the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues -- NAPBL), with the single exception of the Twin Ports League of 1943, which was designated Class E.
In 1946, the Northern League resumed operations after its wartime hiatus of 1943-1945, and the Duluth Dukes came back, playing their home games at Wade Municipal Stadium (``the Wade''). The Dukes had a 45-80 season in 1955 and disbanded. (The 50's killed a lot of minor league teams; the third Northern League was unusual both in being founded during the Depression and in surviving the 50's only to go down in 1971.)
Wade stadium has had better longevity than the teams that played in it. For the next year (1956) the Northern League created another team to play there. It was called the Duluth-Superior White Sox and was affiliated with the Chicago White Sox major-league team. This was replaced in 1960 by the Duluth-Superior Dukes, which was affiliated exclusively with the Detroit Tigers from 1960 to 1964, in a co-op arrangement with the Chicago Cubs in 1965, and then exclusively with the Cubs from 1966 to 1970, their last year.
A visit to Wade Stadium is reported to have been one of the things that convinced Miles Wolff to create the modern Northern League, an independent minor league. The Duluth-Superior Dukes were resurrected in 1993 as a founding member of that league, and played in the Wade until their final season in 2002.
``I love classic Mickey, but he needs to evolve to be relevant to new generations of kids,'' Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, said in an interview.
Beau David Case, a professor at Ohio State (OSU), used to keep a list of classicists with homepages, back when that was a manageable task.
You don't have to subscribe to the Classics mailing list in order to enjoy or otherwise experience the contributions of its members, you can visit its recent (since July 1998) hypertext archives. Frequent posters are often referred to by their initials, but those abbreviations aren't listed in this glossary.
One person I know, who got the usual ineffective English-language instruction as a student in Japan, watched children's television when he first came to the US as a way to improve his English. You could visit a page listing Greek and Roman Classics for Children.
Edmund Wilson was widely regarded as the greatest literary critic of his day. Yeah, whatever.
Teachers tend to feel that the order of presentation of grammatical topics in CLC is mixed up. The vocabulary introduced in CLC is far larger than is required for the GCSE's that UK students take at age 16. Some teachers consider this a problem.
The use of CLC in North America is supported by the NAACP. Surprising, isn't it? Oh no wait -- I think that should be the NACCP.
CLC and the Ecce Romani program are similar in approach and level of difficulty, and seem to be the two most popular Latin text sets in the US. Distinguishing features: the stories in Ecce are more domestic, whereas CLC focuses on political, military, and religious or cultic topics.
For the basic blue-state/red-meat distinction among Latin texts, see the OLC entry. Many texts besides CLC, Ecce, and OLC are in wide use. A more comprehensive list of texts can be found at the Latin school texts entry. (Go ahead: see if you can find it! Hint: click on the link.)
With half the academic year behind them, members of the Campus Life Council (CLC) examined the purpose and scope of their existence at Monday's meeting -- the first since Christmas break.
The accompanying photograph shows a couple of participants in the meeting looking a little bit down, but certainly not as downcast as this suggests.
If you want to see the awkward consequences of explicitly gendered language, compare the English and French on their bilingual start page. In most European languages with sexual gender, the male form has traditionally been ``unmarked'' and the plural male form has implicitly been inclusive. Thus, for example, Spanish amigos usually means `friends' and not `male friends.' Amigas is used for `friends' only when all of them are female. Similarly the first-person plural pronoun (English we, us) is nosotras when we are all female, nosotros otherwise.
The politically correct view is that this gender asymmetry is unfair, and explicit gender balance is necessary. Hence, on the CTC-CLC page we see first travailleuses et travailleurs (`female workers and [male] workers') and then travailleurs et travailleuses. Oh so delicately balanced and ... ladies first. What?! What did I say?
The rot spreads. Here's an example from German. The principal German-language electronic forum for history of science is the DGGMNT-sponsored Oldenburg Mailingliste. The mailinglist homepage explains that it is for ``der Kommunikation zwischen Wissenschaftler/-innen'' (`communication among scholar/-ettes,' if scholarette rather than scholar were the feminine form of scholar). For worse, see VIAL.
By the way, the corresponding, higher-traffic English-language HOS mailing list is MERSENNE. As of 2004, these are both basically just announcement lists, primarily for conferences and jobs.
The local baby Bell does not have a monopoly on local service, but they'll have little incentive to stop acting like a monopoly if you continue to act as if they do and are. Visit the relevant Business.com pages to see how many options you have.
In the US, real competition among local service providers began after passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (enacted and signed February that year). That act was intended to increase competition in both local and long-distance phone service, by specifying how CLEC's could function and how ILEC's could also compete in long-distance service. The act also deregulated cable TV rates and included among its provisions the widely detested CDA, q.v.
CLEO is sometimes written Cleo, and occasionally participates in the AAP pleonasm ``CLEO conference,'' but most people I know who go to CLEO know better. CLEO used to be called CLEOS -- Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optical Systems.
As of 2001, there were 34 separate CLEP examinations.
A really useful word, and one which should be reintroduced into common use, is hight.
It's a two-seater, but to reduce the front-end surface area (to about one square meter) the passenger sits behind rather than beside the driver. Also, in order to reduce the length and weight of the vehicle, the legs of the rear-seat passenger have been removed. The designers are hopeful that ``with the backing of a major manufacturer, it could be on sale within five years for around'' GBP 5000 (USD 9000), to people who lack the coordination to ride a bike. BMW, which provided some backing for the project, is thinking of manufacturing it if, as expected, the EU imposes CAFE-like standards.
Most people, when they learn the name of this car, think it's a reference to (or a dig or whatever at) the Smart (not I, because I'd never heard of the Smart). The Smart vehicles have all been four-wheelers and have demonstrated their continuing viability by failing in the marketplace ever since 1994. Recently, however, demand at six-month-waiting-list levels has been achieved by reducing production. The Smart was originally intended to be high-tech, innovative, you-know-that-routine-too. It never quite worked out that way. Clever was in fact designed to reduce emissions mostly by brute force: punier vehicle, ergo punier emissions. The target was to design a vehicle with half the weight, power, front-end surface area, and emissions of ``the smallest and most economical mass-produced vehicles (for example [the] Smart Diesel).'' (Those are given as 800 kg, 30 kW [40 HP], 2.2 m2, and 100 g of CO2 per km. The Clever is supposed to weigh about 400 kg empty, develop 15 kW, and emit 60 g/km. It's just too bad they didn't cut the number of wheels in half, too.)
The most touted and probably the most galling feature of the Clever design is an electronically computed tilt mechanism that leans the vehicle into turns. The idea is that because its profile resembles a motorcycle's, it's top-heavy and prone to tip over, but because it's a tricycle in an egg, it can't be intelligently maneuvered like a motorcycle. The designers call the computed-tilt feature ``fun.'' It's not fun. Fun can be a characteristic of things that you do. The things that are done to you are fun only for the engineer and the mad scientist.
Just look around you, people! What do you see? That's right, tons -- literal megagram units -- of CLHS entries. So what are you going to do from now on? Louder -- I can't hear you! That's right, you're going to use CLBHS.
As a veteran of visits to high school web sites, I have one piece of advice: have something to do while you're waiting for the page to load. Knitting a decorative headscarf for your garage would be a good project.
As I was clicking around trying to figure that stuff out, I was thinking that I was really wasting my time big time. But I actually learned something moderately important. The middle grades program has a wonderful facility of which everyone can be justly proud, with so many computer labs you trip through them on your way between classes. On the other hand, it is stated as a matter of pride that ``students learn Spanish or French,'' as if that were not a meager selection.
If there's only one company lawyer, then I suppose either she or one of his bosses is it. (Sorry, my Chief Language Officer has not authorized me to use the singular ``their.'') We have a short list of CXO's that nevertheless probably manages to include some CXO's that you don't need to be aware of, so visit!
For Spanish, there is really no one-word translation; if you want a precise translation, it might be ``según las manecillas del reloj.'' In most contexts, ``hacia la derecha'' (to the right) will do. Many years ago in Argentina (back when this was still an industrially advanced country), my father bought a product with instructions that had been translated rather literally into Spanish from English (or possibly from Japanese by someone rather more familiar with English than Spanish). The instructions featured the phrase ``reloj sabio'' fecklessly attempting to modify a verb. That phrase (as well, for that matter, as the formally poetic ``sabio reloj'') means `wise clock.' Cf. pole.
Roman aqueducts used open channels except in inverted siphons; urban distribution was in narrow pipes usually operated as closed channels.
You might suppose the distinction is minor, but it's not. Closed-shop labor contracts give unions the right to control who may join them, and thus who may work. Union-shop contracts require the union to admit all hires. The union may, however, expel a member for cause. In that case, however, so long as the member continues to pay union dues, or service fees (see agency shop), the union is forbidden to make any effort to affect the employee's job status. (Discussions of race discrimination in employment tend to focus on employer racism, but unions were also an interested party. The Taft-Hartley act limited their power to act on their interest.)
The Taft-Hartley Act also forbade secondary boycotts, strikes in jurisdiction (representational) disputes, certain kinds of featherbedding, and union contribution to political campaigns. It gave the president the right, for strikes in key industries (transportation, energy) to impose a ``cooling-off'' period requiring strikers to return to work for sixty days, and required union officials to take an anti-Communist oath.
In the years following the passage of this act, many states passed ``right to work'' laws banning union shops as well. There are 21 such states as of 1997.
The Taft-Hartley law also banned the direct employer deduction of union dues from pay, but that is now a negotiable matter, and common.
Here's something, uh, closely related: The Mexican presidential election of 2006 ended up as a close race between the PAN and PRD candidates.
During the election-night coverage, reporters often used the expression ``elección cerrada,'' which literally means `closed election.' This usage, while not exactly un anglicismo, doesn't make a lot of sense except as an English-influenced expression. At least one reporter I heard used the expression ``elección acercada,'' which means something like `approached election' [an election brought closer together]. It's difficult to make a loan translation of the English term ``close election'' because close has a particular set of acceptions that do not coincide in a single word in Spanish. The closest approximation (you will pardon the expression) of the adjective close in English is the word cercana in Spanish, but ``elección cercana,'' means `nearby election.'
There are, of course, various ordinary Spanish expressions for a close race or election. The head of IFE called the election ``estrecha'' (`narrow'). Rough equivalents are apretada (`pressed') and reñida (`[closely] fought').
When you try to visit the CLRC page, you reach what looks like the CCLRC page instead.
By the end of 2003 CLS had been adopted by all the world's biggest banks, and was settling more than half of the dollar-value of daily foreign-exchange transactions.
The 70 or so banks and other financial institutions that support CLS account for a substantial majority of cross-currency transactions, but as of the end of 2003, only 11 currencies were eligible for CLS settlemen: Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Danish krone, euro, Japanese yen, Norwegian krone, pound sterling, Singapore dollar, Swedish krona, Swiss franc and US dollar. Additional currencies are to be added. The Hong Kong dollar, New Zealand dollar, and the Korean won are due to become CLS Bank ``eligible currencies'' in 2004, once the full CLS Bank and regulatory approval processes have been satisfied and the technical implementation completed.
Cf. RTGS.
In the 80's, Club Med had the reputation of a modern Bacchanal. Today it is best known as a useful basis for plays on words that rhyme with bed.
Some further information can be found at the G.O. entry.
I regularly meet people who are surprised to learn that Hard Rock Cafés are a real chain of, well, night clubs, let's say (though I've eaten breakfast at one) and not just a figment of an overactive tee-shirt maker's imagination. So that probably makes two things you learned today. I don't run with a very fast crowd, I guess.
More details are collected at the CC entry, not because that's the highest level, though it is, but because it's the funniest. But having ``Member'' be one of three ``different levels of membership'' is kind of amusing too, so we'll have to think of something to say here as well, eh?
Also called center of gravity (c.g.), since a uniform gravitational field applies torque on the system as if the total force were being applied at the center of mass.
Relativistically, momentum is not mass times velocity. It is a fundamental quantity, like position, and the easiest way to define it classically is to say that it is the quantity that satisfies
dE v = -- , dpwhere E, v, and p are energy, velocity, and momentum. You want a formula? Okay, with c as the speed of light,
mv p = ----------------------- , ____________________ / 2 / 1 - (v/c) V
but when you work with relativistic particles, you stop thinking in terms of velocity, since the speed is always pretty close to c.
100 --- in. 254This is exact, whereas the original and less practical definition of the centimeter was one billionth (10-9) of the length of the quadrant of longitude between the equator and the North Pole that passes through Paris. Whenever the Seine flooded, everyone had to recalibrate; it was just a nightmare.
To be fair here, it's worth noting that a lot of effort had already been put into mapping the Paris meridian in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, in order to test Descartes's hypothesis that the earth is elongated. (It's not, of course; centripetal acceleration flattens it, as Newton predicted.)
For photons in the vacuum, there is a simple proportionality between wavenumber (i.e. wavevector magnitude) and energy. Thus, inverse centimeters, a wavenumber unit, is also used as an energy unit. I mention it here, since the unit is sometimes sloppily called ``centimeters'' for short. Physicists also often use the term ``finite'' to mean nonzero (as in ``finite-temperature Green's function''). A quantity and its inverse are usually interchangeable measures of the same thing, and anyway you can usually tell which quantity is meant by the units (oops!).
The element has atomic number 96, it's an actinide. They couldn't abbreviate it Cu because that was already taken for copper.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Although the element itself is your typical silvery metallic, most of its (trivalent) compounds are yellowish. In the sixties, there was something called ``I Am Curious Yellow.'' This makes sense, because the two most common valences are three and four. If the tetravalent compounds were yellowish, then it would have been ``Curic Yellow.''
In 1950, about a million tons of salt (NaCl) were used for deicing US roads. By 1970, the figure was close to 10 million; with weather-related fluctuations, the figure has stayed there since then. [Or at least until 1988; my information comes from Highway Deicing: Comparing Salt and Calcium Magnesium Acetate (1991). It was Special Report 235 of the Transportation Research Board of the US National Research Council.] In 1980, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the US identified CMA as a possible replacement for salt. Salt is cheap and CMA is less so; the motivation for using CMA is the hard-to-quantify environmental cost of salt use. The FHWA had considered a variety of other chemicals and rejected them due to high cost, low availability, properties making them unsuitable for application (they were gaseous or not water-soluble) or other undesirable properties (they were corrosive, flammable, or toxic). The only two items not ruled out were CMA and methanol (not flammable enough for ya'?). Methanol is particularly effective at low temperatures, but CMA was chosen for continued development ``because of its greater environmental acceptability,'' and handling and spreading characteristics similar to salt.
The bottom line on CMA is that it still costs about $2000 a ton, versus $30 a ton for NaCl, and is needed in equal or slightly larger quantities. Calcium Chloride costs about $300 per ton. The FHWA has also been pushing CMAK.
Realtor.com offers a quick-and-dirty computerized version of a CMA that it calls a ``Community Market Analysis.''
``Cover[ ed | ing ] My Arse'' in Commonwealth usage.
In 1998, I saw a lead headline so inane that it convinced me to buy the local rag (The South Bend Tribune). It was a report that the King of Thailand had collected another utterly meaningless and unmerited honorary degree, and with this had pulled ahead of the hometown favorite (retired long-time University of Notre Dame president Father Hesburgh -- more at this PLS entry) in the unofficial competition to see who could collect the most such honors before dying.
Further down the front page was less important news. It seems that a physician was lost overboard on one of those ``in-service cruises'' -- sugar-coated CME. Contributing to his fall may have been disorientation from pain medication for a fall he had suffered earlier during the cruise. And -- the name was familiar. Where had I seen that name before? Egad, that was my physician!
I have found that weird news comes in clusters. Another memorable cluster was in August 1979. That was the time of the dirt-granola incident. Up near the tree line, we entertained ourselves reciting translations of Jabberwocky into neo-Spanish and similar languages. But it wasn't the camping trip that was weird, and it wasn't my visits to the Moonies and the Scientologists before and after the trip. It wasn't the Fresno Gestalt. It was coming back to civilization and encountering news. There was an Aeroflot jet at JFK that waited three days for permission to take off. Bolshoi dancer Alexander Godunov had defected, and Soviet minders had escorted his wife (ballerina Ludmilla Vlasova) onto the plane. The US government refused to allow the plane to leave until they could be sure that she was on board of her own free will. (Things didn't work out so well professionally for Godunov, who had been a star in the Bolshoi. He died in 1995, age 45, of unspecified ``natural causes.'' There were continuing rumors of Vlasova's ambivalence about the separation, but after the fall of the Soviet Union they did not reunite. BTW, for details of my Scientology expedition, see the Cosmo entry.)
There was more.
Good ol' Enver Hoxha pulled brave little Albania out of the sphere of Soviet influence and out of CMEA at the end of 1961, but it continued to be a member, nominally. Yugoslavia, which also pulled out of the Warsaw Pact, was an associate member of CMEA starting in 1964.
Mongolia was added to CMEA in June 1962, Cuba only in 1972, and Vietnam in 1978. The organization was formally dissolved at a meeting in Budapest on June 28, 1991.
Ain't that grand?
(No.)
CMOS is a kind of semiconductor logic using gates with complementary PMOS and NMOS parts, designed so that power dissipation is near zero when the gate is not switching.
A CMOS inverter (mislabeled ``transistor'') is illustrated at right. On the right side within the diagram is a p-well, in which an NMOS transistor has been fabricated. On the right side is a PMOS transistor, fabricated directly in epi material that is n-doped. Not shown are connections between different electrodes or terminals that are made with metal deposited over the silicon. In particular, the drains are joined and their value is the inverter output, while the sources of NMOS and PMOS are connected to the lower and upper voltage rails in the circuit, respectively. In the case shown, the input voltage is low, so the NMOS (on the right) is off. A low voltage applied to the PMOS gate turns it on, although current flows in the channel only to the extent that the gate attached to the output of the inverter has low input impedance.
Illustrated at left is a more realistic version of the same gate. The especially thick regions of oxide are ``thickox'' typically grown by oxidation with steam. It is intended to be thick to assure that metal interconnects on the oxide do not ``turn on'' as transistors any regions in the silicon. The transistor gate (metal deposited by PVD or polysilicon typically deposited from silane by CVD) is usually grown over a thin oxide layer (``thinox'').
The transistor gates in this instance are made of polysilicon (silicon deposited by CVD; because it is deposited over a disordered surface -- the oxide is amorphous -- it too is disordered). The polysilicon is heavily doped to place the effective location of the charge electrostatic plate that is the gate as close as possible to the silicon wafer. From the substantial overlap of transistor gates with the source and drain regions, it appears that a self-aligned process was not used.
The above diagrams are side views. Below is a SEM image of a small segment of a (metal-gate) CMOS gate array (details at source, from Notre Dame Microelectronics Lab). (See gate entry for two meanings of ``gate.'')
I still don't know what the sealed acronym CMP stood for. Perhaps some personal initials. Maybe I'll look into this in 2012, when they celebrate their first anniversary.
Don't blame me; I don't make these terms up, I just record'em. Mostly.
A number of mechanisms besides CMS can contribute to current drag, such as the van der Waals interaction, according to theoretical work by A. G. Rojo and G. D. Mahan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 2074 (1992).
Philip W. Anderson, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University (and my Ph.D. advisor) writes the following on a research-interests page at the department:
I am a condensed matter theorist, a field in which I played the role of a major agenda-setter for 40 or so years (in fact I believe a colleague and I named the field in 1967 when we named our group in Cambridge--before that it was `solid state theory').
He also comments that he invented the ``Higgs'' boson in 1962 and named the ``spin-glass'' phenomenon in 1970. It's interesting that he mentions only in passing (among ``earlier interests'') the fields he left his own name in (with ``Anderson model, Anderson localization'') and the work for which he shared the Nobel prize in 1977.
Founded by the steal magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. (Oh, was that supposed to be spelled ``steel''? Sorry.)
In the sixties, another industrial baron -- Andrew Mellon -- was a great friend of the president of the University of Pittsburgh. Apparently that president spent big time (stadium construction, that sort of thing) in anticipation of a big donation from his friend. Then it seems they had a falling out of some sort. Andrew Mellon took his munificence across town to the old Carnegie Institute, now CMU. The U of Pitt, in debt up to its academic eyeballs, ended up becoming a public university.
I heard this story from a guy who was post-docking at U Pitt in those days; for a while until the state bail-out, he had trouble cashing his paychecks.
A young woman I know worked as a CNA in nursing homes or extended-care facilities for a number of years. I once asked her if she ever worked in an Alzheimer's ward. She said she did -- once. The patients were too vicious for her. And this is from a woman whom I once saw calm a raging sea of women desparate to use the one women's room during a Saturday-night bar rush at Myrrh's. Wow.
A couple of years ago she completed an accelerated course (15 mos., I think it took) to become an LPN, at the same time that she was working as a CNA and also waitressing a couple of shifts a week at Myrrh's (down from a regular schedule, before she returned to school). Ahh, to be young again and not need sleep.
She came back to work at Myrrh's recently, to catch up on old times and to help pay her mortgage. But basically the latter. I asked her how her work had changed since she became an LPN. She explained that when she was a CNA, she basically fed the patients and took them to the bathroom, but that now as an LPN, she basically supervises the CNA's to see that they feed the patients and take them to the bathroom. So basically, I said, she used to be an orderly but now she supervises orderlies. She basically agreed. If I interview her again and get a better handle on all this, I may spare you some basicallies.
If you aspire to greater LAN's, you can become an MCNE.
Okay, a little more seriously... CNG has been proposed as clean-burning alternative automobile fuel. As of 1996, there were a couple of thousand fleet vehicles running on CNG in the New York City area, and under a hundred thousand CNG vehicles nationwide.
Ordinary gasoline engines can be modified to run on CNG, but it costs $5K to convert a gasoline car to CNG, or $3K to build it with CNG capability, because of the pressurized tank and fuel lines. Ford was the first major US motor-vehicle manufacturer to offer ``factory CNG'' (i.e., factory-installed CNG-capable engine).
This word has an intriguing Scrabble status: cnida (with its plural cnidae) is accepted by the OSPD4 and SOWPODS, but not TWL98. I haven't checked OSPD3; if it's not there (i.e., if it's new in OSPD4) then it may be in the second edition of TWL. Somebody ought to look into that in 2006.
The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.
On a June 2007 browse, I learned that ``CNU is starting to form chapters.'' Maybe they could put together a whole book. They have ``a number of local groups working toward chapter status.'' The interest group for Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia uses the attractive name of Cascadia. Well begun is half done.
An alternative viewer for some of the same data (all of the same structures) is the 3DB Browser made available by Brookhaven for its Protein DataBase (PDB, q.v.).
After a mob burned his chapel and sacked his house in Birmingham, scattering his papers, his library, and his scientific instruments in the street, Joseph Priestley moved to London. His three sons encountered social difficulties in England, however, and emigrated to Pennsylvania, where they established themselves as farmers on the Susquehanna. He eventually followed them there, leaving behind a married daughter. For a while before he left, Southey and some even more eminent English poet (whose name I really shouldn't forget) played with the idea of going along with him.
Priestley settled in a village near Philadelphia that was originally envisioned as a haven for similar exiles. It was close to his sons' farms, and he helped them out in the fields a couple of hours a day, living in a village near Philadelphia. He continued his preaching, and formed a Unitarian congregation where Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were both occasional members, and he wrote his vast History of the Christian Church. He also continued his scientific research, and discovered carbon monoxide.
Mark Twain's Tale of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, first published in 1889, tells the story of an accidental time traveler from New England in 1879 to the England of King Arthur (sixth century). There the Connecticut Yankee (Hank Morgan) becomes known as ``Sir Boss,'' and introduces various improvements (eventually suppressed by religious baddies). The following is from chapter 41, after he has married Sandy (whom we mention also at this V2 entry).
In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world. Many a time Sandy heard that imploring cry come from my lips in my sleep. With a grand magnanimity she saddled that cry of mine upon our child, conceiving it to be the name of some lost darling of mine. It touched me to tears, and it also nearly knocked me off my feet, too, when she smiled up in my face for an earned reward, and played her quaint and pretty surprise upon me:
``The name of one who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made holy, and the music of it will abide alway in our ears. Now thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child.''
But I didn't know it, all the same. I hadn't an idea in the world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her pretty game; so I never let on, but said:
``Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too! But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter it first--then its music will be perfect.''
Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:
``HELLO-CENTRAL!''
I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could hear my bones clack when I walked. She never found out her mistake. The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake. This was not true. But it answered.
CO continues the earlier journal Latin Notes (LC no. PA 2063 .L34 ; before the days of ISSN's -- why don't they define these things retroactively for recordkeeping purposes?). [The supplement is LC no. PA 2063 .L348, as I'm sure you're relieved to learn.]
CO even continues the volume numbering of Latin Notes, picking up at vol. 14 in fall 1936. When the latter was discontinued, it published eight numbers a year. CO was originally a monthly, which also meant eight issues a year. In 1978, however, it became a quarterly and alternated with the new quarterly ACL newsletter (ISSN 0196-2086). [I may have the ISSN's switched.], which has since been a semiannual and a triannual. You can learn so much interesting stuff from on-line library card catalogs.
The article ``Latina Resurgens: Classical Language Enrollments in American Schools and Colleges,'' appears in CO vol. 74 #4 (Summer 1997), pp. 125-30.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Terrorist groups in Colombia kidnap fewer than 3000 people each year, using the ransom to finance their insurrection. Back in the 1970's, Argentine guerrillas used a similar strategy but concentrated on rich pay-offs for foreign businessmen. The resulting war, when joined by the military dictatorship that deposed Isabelita Perón, was called la guerra sucia. That's usually translated `the dirty war,' though perhaps `the filthy war' might better convey the moral tenor of sucia. One revenue stream available to various warring parties in Colombia today (see AUC) is cocaine -- growing, refining, and trafficking.
All wars must be financed. Wars against the Congolese government based in Kinshasa [the old Zaire, (.zr)] are funded by stealing from diamond prospectors. (Diamond is a common African mineral that is kept in short supply by the deBeers cartel to maintain a profitable world price. During a diamond market crash early in the twentieth century, deBeers managed to buy up most of the south African mines. Since then, discoveries in Russia, Australia, and elsewhere have been handled with a certain amount of judicious bribing or market-sharing arrangements. Lately, however, multiple wars in southern Africa have been making it increasingly difficult to stifle supply. In 1999, deBeers hit on a brilliant strategy to deal with this situation: they would become the supplier of ``clean diamonds'' -- diamonds not being used to fund some war.)
The IRA's activities are funded by charitable contributions. During the cold war, many armies were secretly and sometimes not so secretly funded by the major contending powers and their better-off clients. Usually this was in the form of government grants (not so called) of money, arms, training, etc., or loans (to be repaid in something other than money). Communist regimes liked to shake down their subjects for voluntary contributions to fraternal liberation movements. Subsequent developments demonstrate that there is no shortage of funding sources -- though of course, who pays the piper calls the tune. Regional interests (did you know that Syria can actually grow enough food to feed its surviving population?) and rich private investors have picked up the slack.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Colorado. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Colorado city and county links.
In some Spanish-speaking countries, such as Argentina, car is coche (masc.). In others, like Mexico (.mx), car is carro, although coche may be used as a `marked' synonym (like ``motor car'' in English). ``Carro'' sounds weird to Argentines, to whom carro only means `cart,' of the unpowered variety. It might be an Anglicism (Sp. carro < Eng. car), like the Chilean use of gallo (`rooster') to mean `guy' (pronunciation of the Spanish word would look like guy-oh in English eye dialect).
The vehicles making up a passenger train are variously called cars, coaches, or carriages, depending on what decade and region one has boarded. In strict Leftpondian usage a ``coach'' is the ordinary kind of passenger car, approximately equivalent to Rightpondian ``second-class carriage.'' Second class in Britain was formerly called third class and is now called standard class.
In earlier Leftpondian usage, trains were also called ``the cars.'' Although it was always common to say ``on the train,'' for many years the phrase ``on the cars'' was used as well. The most recent instance of this usage that I can find is in a poem Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) published in his Smoke and Steel (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1920). In other words, every occurrence I can find is out of copyright! I'm not going to go overboard on this and quote two entire books of Artemus Ward between here and the COAI entry, but maybe I will include Sandburg's poem:
Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
[SBF glossarist comments: not me!]
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.
[Gertrude Stein noticed that between WWI and WWII, American men learned to converse. See the have-got-to entry.]
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it--on the streets, in the postoffice,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for .. Blaa-blaa .. Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa .. and all points northwest .. all a-board."
[Cf. North by Northwest.]
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
See also balun.
Update 2004: it's now ``MCoB'' or ``MCB.'' Here's a webpage all about vision and ``The Mendoza's Contribution.'' Don't think of all the mispunctuations as errors. Think of them as streamlined, impacting business communications. Leverage the synergy!
Because COBOL has been used for so long on IBM mainframes with a variety of data structure options, this code may not be very portable. The solution has generally been to run the legacy COBOL code on back-end mainframes, and have these accessed via web-based interfaces (running on whatever). Some people insist that this is an entirely flexible approach, and it might be if the original author of the COBOL programs was a visionary.
A Computerworld survey of 352 readers (self-selected respondents, I assume), published in 2006, included the following item: ``What programming languages do you use in your organization? Choose all that apply.'' Here are the listed results:
67% Visual Basic 62% Cobol 61% Java 55% JavaScript 47% VB.Net 47% C++ 30% Perl 26% C 23% C# 15% ColdFusion 13% PHP 7% Fortran 5% PL/1 5% Python 4% Pascal 2% AdaOf those respondents who said their organizations used COBOL, 55% said that at least half of their organizations' internally-developed business application software was written in COBOL, and 58% reported that it was still being used to develop new business applications.
These numbers suggest that COBOL is in good health and has a strong future, but most people agree that it is simply in a very slow decline. There are few programmers who can write new COBOL code. Many of those old guys probably died of heart attacks during the Y2K fix-it orgy. The old code is going away very slowly as conversion becomes necessary, and like the fixing of Y2K bugs, it is being hindered by the decreasing numbers of people left who still read the old code. Managers typically claim that it doesn't make economic sense to rewrite the code yet. At United Airlines, where my friend Rob used to work, this was called ``mining the gold'' or something. (I.e., amortizing the investment.)
Like FORTRAN's, COBOL's original language definition was written in a hurry. The first COBOL compiler was released in 1960.
Here's a perfectly characteristic fact about COBOL: it has a long list of reserved words. By my count of appendix A in Gary D. Brown's Advanced ANS COBOL with Structured Programming (Wiley, 1977), the number was 426, ``although'' as Brown warned (p. 35), ``individual compilers differ slightly from this list. New reserved words are constantly added as COBOL is expanded, and a program that compiles properly today may not compile properly tomorrow.'' He went on:
Only 85 reserved words contain the hyphen, and so it is common to use a hyphen in names to reduce the chance of inadvertently selecting a reserved word. However, more of the newer reserved words contain hyphens. No reserved word currently begins with a numeric character or the letter X [or Y, for that matter]. Hence 9TOTAL-AMOUNT, XTOTAL-AMOUNT, and TOTAL--AMOUNT would be relatively safe in never being reserved words, but this technique results in ugly names. Perhaps the best technique is to select meaningful names and then, if in doubt, check the name in Appendix A.
These wonderful variable names had to fit between columns 12 and 72 of the punch card, apparently, although statements could be continued naturally from card to card, if the card-break was part of the spacing. (A hyphen was used in column 7 (with a quote beyond column 11) to continue a string literal (``alphanumeric literal''). The minus sign was the same character as the hyphen; ambiguity was avoided by requiring spaces around the sign when it functioned as the binary operator. (Of course, better programming style employed the SUBTRACT reserve word.) Unary minus was unambiguous because variables could not begin with a hyphen (``procedure names'' and ``data names'' could consist entirely of decimal digits).
There's an FAQ for COBOL.
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages heroically includes one COBOL program. The obvious question that arises when anyone writes a COBOL program, even for mere ``demonstration'' purposes, is whether the act is morally excusable. The question is not addressed in any of the current cybermorality links at this page by the Michael Neumann who professes philosophy at Trent University.
Hard as it may be to believe, it is actually possible to calumniate COBOL: cf. SNOBOL.
The final agreements worked out in budget reconciliation are almost always late, and Congress is about to adjourn, and the final write-up, many inches thick, is distributed hot off the photocopier about an hour before the vote. This is where the pork goes in. Once, around 1990 I think it was, the Secretary of Defense (DoD) submitted a budget request that had continuations of old pork slashed. It was the only year in recent memory that Congressional appropriations exceeded the budget request. From the numbers involved, one may reasonably estimate that about 20-25% of the Defense budget is pork. All the pork reappeared in COBRA, and the executive branch hasn't tried that stunt again. Reagan came into (and even continued in!) office railing against ``waste, fraud and abuse'' and vowing to balance the budget by eliminating these. He ran massive budget deficits by raising defense spending without decreasing social spending. Towards the end of his term, it was becoming popular among commentators to argue that there really was very little honest-to-God WF+A -- most of the budget is transfer payments (not counting off-budget self-funded insurance systems like social security) salaries and ... procurement. Right.
You'll be formally notified after the termination date of your insurance under the terms of your prior employment. (The notification comes maybe a month, sometimes two months, after the formal termination date of the health insurance.) If you take advantage of the offer, you have to pay all the monthly premiums since the termination, and your insurance coverage holds without hiatus. It's a kind of grace period, but the initial coverage premium can be a kind of ``sticker shock.''
HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE: You might assume that, since your old employer has a group of regularly employed and therefore generally healthy people in its ``group,'' that it is able to get a good insurance rate. Yes but: You may not get the benefits of that rate, because you are not part of that group. The law requires you to be offered the same kind of insurance, but it does not require that your premium equal the old premium (paid by you and by your employer on your behalf). Call around. If you're a young non-smoker in good health you can get a better deal.
There's a lot I've left out, especially about disability issues and dependent coverage.
This part of COBRA 1985 became 29 U.S.C. §§ 1161-1168.
Reminds me of the British slang expression ``to cock up'' [approx. equiv. Amer. ``to screw up'']. I suppose it might be ``to caulk up'' -- the vowels in some common pronunciations of these two words tend to interchange between British and North American dialects. The standard illustration is caught and cot.
See also A. S. Bregman: Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, (Cambridge and London: MIT Pr., 1990).
NIST makes available on line ``The 1986 CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants,'' an article by E. Richard Cohen and Barry N. Taylor in Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, vol. 92, pp. 85-95 (1987).
Within the US, the most common code-sharing is asymmetric: a number of independent regional carriers will code-share with a better-known national carrier. The various regional carriers, typically flying twin-engine propeller planes like the Saab 340B (SF-340B) or commuter jets, will code-share with Foobar Airlines, tag their fleets and personnel as ``Foobar Express,'' and provide short-haul service between regional airports and national airline's hubs.
Internationally, and particularly between North America and Europe, code-sharing arrangements are common between American carriers and European ones.
At the beginning of 2005, a new magazine was launched with the title Co-Ed, self-evidently aimed at male college students. The February 2006 issue had advice on how to score during spring break. It included useful insights, such as the observation that one reason a woman may turn you down is that she can't sleep with everyone. Damn! Those girls must have been indoctrinated at the YWLS.
The coefficient of sliding friction is different for two surfaces moving or not moving relative to one another, and these are distinguished as dynamic and static coefficients of friction, respectively. The dynamic coefficient is smaller, so it takes a little more push to get things moving. The friction analyzed in rolling motion does not involve any sliding of surfaces past each other -- rolling friction refers to non-slipping motion of a wheel or roller. Standard formulas do not distinguish dynamic and static COF of rolling motion: they normally refer to dynamic friction and are equally accurate for static friction for small normal forces. When normal forces are large, deformation of surfaces is nonlinear and eventually inelastic, and friction is no longer described by a simple coefficient. (The possibly nonlinearly deformed surfaces referred to are the load-bearing surface and the roller or the sliding surface of the load.)
Drag in a fluid is also a form of friction. At low velocities, it varies quadratically with the velocity of motion through the fluid. I'll get a coefficient-of-drag entry in here eventually.
Come to think of it, back in the 1970's NOW distributed a pamphlet called ``Revolution: Tomorrow Is NOW.'' That pamphlet proposed (among many other things) a public veil-burning to ``protest the second class status of women in all churches.'' Well, there you go.
A neopagan religious group.
Cogeneration doesn't even have an entry in the online OED (as of 2005) and already it's gained a new acceptation. Dictionaries that do have an entry generally qualify the primary process as ``industrial,'' and traditionally it has been thought of as a stationary process. Since the mid-1990's, however, as fuel cells have been regarded as an increasingly credible power source for motor vehicles. Before we discuss that, however, let us take a long look back across the sweep of history, shall we? You wouldn't think I had other things to do, from the leisurely pace of this entry. Let's go back in time (entry to be continued).
Oh, alright: cogeneration in the fuel-cell context means use of waste heat from the fuel cells to chemically crack or otherwise preprocess the loaded fuel into a form usable by the fuel cell.
The whole naming thing is confusing, so let me try to reproduce in HTML what the titling looks like on the cover of volume 2:
Judging from the copyright notice at the beginning of each chapter, it appears that ``Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants'' is the official title of the series. I strongly recommend Petrie's Handbook. (For some thoughts on the differential analysis, see the bonding surface entry.)
What -- you want to know what it means, too? Haven't I done enough? Oh all right.
Carbon monoxide accounts for ``accounts for greater mortality and morbidity than all other poisonings combined.'' The half-life of COHb in the blood is 4-5 hours. The usual treatment includes use of a nonrebreather mask supplying 100% oxygen, which reduces the half-life to about an hour. Subsequent to this, depending on a number of factors, hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be used. This reduces the half-life of COHb to about a half hour, but that appears (a) usually not to be too important, since patients tend to present rather late, when COHb levels are in fact already low, and (b) the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen appear not to arise from reduction of COHb levels. This is not too surprising, because delayed and persistent symptoms are not well or completely explained by COHb.
Typical initial symptoms, acute in the medical sense, are headache, dizziness, and nausea. These effects appear to be explained by hypoxia due to CO binding to Hb. Recovery from the acute symptoms is usually rapid (if it occurs at all), on the scale of a day or two. (Currently, there are no methods for recovering from fatal CO poisoning.) In a large minority of cases, estimated at anywhere from 14% to 40%, there are longer-term neurologic symptoms such as memory and learning impairment and (less often) movement disorders. These may appear immediately, but typically follow an asymptomatic period of a day to as much as three weeks. The incidence and severity of effects (generically called ``delayed effects'' even if they are observed early) tracks loosely with duration of exposure and severity of the acute symptoms, whether the victim went into coma, etc. These symptoms are typically more persistent, lasting over a year in many cases. The mechanisms proposed to explain these neurological symptoms are more varied and more complex than straightforward hypoxia.
There's a museum, I think it is, and they sponsor scholarships for high-school seniors.
``COK'ed and loaded'' is not their motto, AFAIK.
Whatever he may have been called as a child, he was never known as Sam. His wife Sara (neé Fricker) called him Samuel, and he eventually got a legal separation from her. [Part of the strain on their marriage was that he'd fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, who afaik never called him Samuel.]
He seems rather to have liked his initials. He often signed his work ``S.T.C.'' or ``Estese.'' As a scholarship boy at Cambridge starting in 1791, he ran up debts to 150 pounds on wine, women, and opium. To escape his creditors he enlisted in the army in 1793 using the pseudonym ``Silas Tomkyn Comberbach.'' One imagines that during the Napoleonic wars, the standards for new recruits must have been allowed to slide a bit.
S.T.C. is remembered today (remember?) for his poetry. He spent a lot of time with Robert Southey, who even before he died was beginning to be remembered as a truly overrated poet. William Wordsworth and Col collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798), a work which kicked off the Romantic movement, unfortunately. In 1817, Col published Biographia Literaria, a book about everything. [I shouldn't neglect to mention that in Hebrew, kol means `all, every.']
It was republished by the Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, in 1975.
s
(ASCII 59) precedes
t
(ASCII 60) because 59 < 60. The committees that create
these character encodings are not intentionally cruel, so collating order
for simple alphabetic data that is all upper case or all lower case is
always the same as alphabetical order. (This excludes special characters
such as vowels with accents, which are generally shunted off to upper
reaches of the coding.)
The behavior of the dominant scheme ASCII differs significantly from that of one-time contender EBCDIC, however, when upper and lower case characters both occur, and when there are numbers and special characters (punctuation and other anger characters in cartoon comics balloons). (ASCII and EBCDIC also have somewhat different control character locations, though both place these in the low end of the encoding. However, there isn't much interest in alphabetizing or collating non-printing characters.) In ASCII, the collating scheme is (most) special characters, numbers 0-9 (Okay! Okay! They're ``Arabic numerals,'' O pedantic one), then upper-case characters A-Z, then lower-case characters a-z. In EBCDIC, it goes specials, lower case, then upper case, then numbers. Now you know why upper-case file names precede lower-case file names in Unix ls output.
There was once a character set that had upper and lower case interleaved, so the collating sequence was AaBbCc, etc. This is pretty weird, unless you happen to want a sort to order items alphabetically in the normal sense of the word.
An advantage of big-endian date formats like yy.mm.dd is that alphabetizing -- i.e., using ordinary collation order -- is equivalent to ordering chronologically. Of course, this is true for two-digit year representations ``yy'' only if the range of dates does not include the turn of a century. Hence the Y2K bug. Within a millennium, ``yyy'' would suffice, but computers weren't around in 1900, so the solution to the Y2K bug in many cases consisted largely of converting yy notation to yyyy notation. You're probably thinking that this is bleeding obvious, and I shouldn't waste your time. But let me tell you, I remember actual people -- not just corporate and small-time spammers and con artists -- who went around trying to sow profitable panic about this.
``JAGSort is a web-based application that alphabetically sorts Ancient Greek words in their proper order. Text can be entered in the BetaCode or GreekKeys standard, and the output is provided in alphabetical order or in original order assigned with an alphabetical ordinal. This application is suited for sorting indices and providing databases comprising Greek text with an alphabetical sort field.
(JAGSort is built upon the abstraction of ancient Greek built into the Java and Ancient Greek API package. As further translators are built for the JAG package, additional encoding schemes, in particular Unicode, will be supported. The underlying code is in Java, but for performance purposes, this resource uses the CGI method and therefore runs on the server through a shell script.)''
In Spanish, ch, ll, and rr were traditionally treated like individual letters of the alphabet immediately following c, l, and r, respectively. Thus, for example, calle was alphabetized after calzar. Acceding to pressure from ``Europe,'' the Academia de la Lengua changed the rule, so alphabetization is now by character rather than phoneme.
Gary alleged today that this glossary is like an enormous stream of consciousness. What poppycock! How could a stream of consciousness flow in alphabetical order? That would be a joke, like Stephen Wright's comment. (``I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.'') Oh yeah, you might want to take a quick look at the KWIC entry.
At Martin's (``count on us for service and savings'') the other day, I saw an aisle that had cereal, cookies, and crackers. What a concept -- alphabetical product shelving! Shoes near shinola! Peanuts near peas! This'll work, sure.
I'm sure I mention this elsewhere, but in Spanish
both ñ and the letter pairs ch
, ll
, and
rr
are traditionally treated as the equivalent of ordinary single
letters, so the alphabet includes the sequence ``... k, l, ll, m, n, ñ,
o, p, ....'' At the urging of the EU, the Real Academia de la lengua
española has condoned the alternative of alphabetizing by single
letter (e.g., aro,
arroz, artista; instead of aro, artista, arroz).
This is the thanks Spain gets, after giving Europe and the world the gift of
the cedilla. It's just shameful.
The traditional Spanish collation scheme is also used in outline-type lists. There's an example in Mario Ferreccio Podestá's El Diccionario Academico de Americanismos. (It's not really a dictionary, only -- as the subtitle explains -- pautas para un examen integral del diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española.) The table of contents (indice) lists 8 modos formales de la imputación implicita. You don't really need to know what that means or what they are. I mention it because the modos are labeled thus:
a. b. c. ch. d. e. f. g.
Another language with a number of two-letter symbols treated as single alphabetic entities is Welsh. Here's alphabetical order for that language:
You're probably wondering how the language can do without such essential letters as k, q, v, and z. Here's how: the words for kangaroo, kilogram, kilometer, quarrel, quarter, vinegar, and zoo are written cangarŵ, cilogram, cilomedr, cweryl, chwarter, finegr, and sŵ. (All of these nouns are masculine, except for sŵ, which may be masculine or feminine. If you were trying to guess the gender of a random Welsh noun, masculine wouldn't be a bad guess.)
From finegr and sŵ, and from the well-known fact that ll represents an unvoiced l, you've already realized that Welsh uses doubled consonants to represent unvoiced versions of the corresponding single consonants (except, of course, that dd is the voiced version of th, and though there's no ss, si represents the esh sound that arises from palatalizing an unvoiced s). See how fast you're catching on?
Specific senses of the word college usually mark a college as in some way inferior or subsidiary to a university. For example, an individual college that is not part of some larger university usually does not award graduate degrees, while any university usually has at least some masters programs. Many universities are organized into colleges (e.g., the College of Arts and Sciences of the University New Bigstate at Isolated Village, the Graduate College of CUNY, Rutgers College of Rutgers University). Some of the more pretentious universities (Princeton comes to mind) call their dormitories ``residential colleges.''
From the time that the first universities were established in the Middle Ages at Paris and Bologna, colleges were subdivisions of universities. That has been the case generally for degree-granting institutions of higher education in Europe. The one prominent exception I am aware of, of an Old World college that was never part of a university, is the renowned Gresham College whose success eventually led to the creation of the Royal Society of London. Gresham College, however, does not matriculate students or award degrees. Nevertheless, perhaps this was the example that led to the different use of the word college in the US. Either that, or an unwonted modesty.
We mention Red Brick universities at the pseudonym entry. Th Red Bricks come moderately close to being the English institutions equivalent to free-standing American colleges. There isn't much of a college/university distinction in Japan. For now such discussion as we have of that topic is at the rejârando-ka entry.
It may be that some vocational institutes call themselves colleges now, or that ``beauty colleges'' do not require a high school diploma for admission, so ``post-secondary'' may be a soft part of the definition of a college. College and university accreditation is not a function of government in the US, and the federal government is involved with post-secondary education in somewhat roundabout ways, so college and university do not suffer from much from official definitions, and are as loosely defined as any other ordinary nouns.
I'll discuss such institutions as colleges of physicians only after I cover animal-group names (a shrewdness of apes, an exaltation of larks, a school of fish, etc.). I will point out, however, that schools of fish were originally called shoals of fish, and ``school'' was just an error for ``shoal'' that caught on.
Automobile collisions often occur when two egos attempt to exercise simultaneous sovereignty over the same time-dependent stretch of road. When the collision involves a large number of egos, Bunte Illustrierte many years ago used the wonderful term Massencarambolage. I hope that the etymology of this term has something to do with ¡Caramba!
In his very popular Worlds in Collision, the professional psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky advanced his theory that steady planetary orbits arose only in historical time, and that various mythological and biblical stories are descriptions of events involving planets which interacted electromagnetically. Despite the many glaring, um, difficulties with his theories, Velikovsky's books are still good for a laugh.
The largest and best known of these is the city of Colón, founded in Colombia in 1850. It is situated in what was known as the bahía de Limones (literally `Bay of Lemons'). It was built on the swampy low island of Manzanilla (`Chamomile'). It was an unhealthy place, but it has a deep, if unprotected, natural harbor. The port was connected to the mainland by an artificial isthmus created for the Panama Railroad to reach Panama City. (For the significance of this, see the golden spike entry.)
The settlement was originally called Aspinwall, after William H. Aspinwall (1807-1875), one of the railroad company's founders. The name was only changed to Colón at a later date, by a legislative enactment. The name had been suggested by Dr. Mariano Arosemena Quesada to honor the memory of the discoverer, who sailed into the bay in 1502 (on his fourth and final voyage of discovery). I tell ya, it used to be a lot easier to get your name in the encyclopedias. As the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada explains, the foreigners (``extranjeros'' not further specified) continued to use the name Aspinwall (the EUI neglects to explain that this was its original name, and that English was the common language of the city). In 1890 the government returned-to-sender all mail addressed to Aspinwall, and that was the end of that.
Also at some point, the name of the bay changed its grammatical number, becoming Bahía Limón (Limon Bay in English). The bay, protected by breakwaters, serves as a waiting area for ships about to enter the Panama Canal.
Colón has, of course, been a city in the Republic of Panama since that became independent of Colombia in 1885. It is the capital of the Atlantic-coast province surrounding it (also called Colón).
According to the EUI, the city plan of Colón is a modest imitation of that of Philadelphia (the one in Pennsylvania, I assume, and not, say, the one in Jordan). Also according to the EUI, the northern part of the city, with the railroad offices, was called Wáshington, and the southern part, built by the French canal people, was called Cristobál Colón. Yes, if true that is quite odd: a district with a name meaning `Christopher Columbus' in a city whose name means `Columbus,' in the country named after Columbus. The situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that Colón and Cristobal are twin cities, with Cristobal something of a suburb grown up around the portworks built by the US in the former Canal Zone. How all this aligns with the older areas, I'm not sure.
Over time, I think I'll collect a few items here that I want to mention in a future color entry. At least you'll have some hints if you want to do your own research. Color terms in Homer are particularly puzzling, and a perennial topic of discussion. On the classics list, back in the days before it could be embarrassing to participate, I once posted a summary of earlier discussion on that topic. (The links from that post are to a defunct archive. Sorry.) At the end of the nineteenth century, as experimental psychology and departments of psychology were first coming into being, the problems of color perception were an important initial area of study. Later, the sociologists and amateur linguists got into the act. One of the most respected and cited works along this line is Berlin and Kay's Basic Color Terms (1969). It is intellectually sloppy starting from page one, but the authors don't manage to disprove the claims they make. Their basic claim is that there is a universal sequence in which color terms are initially added to a language.
Corominas y Pascual indicates (or Corominas and Pascual indicate -- I can do it either way) that ... eh, why paraphrase when I can do as much harm by translating?
The gender vacillated until the classical era [sixteenth and early seventeenth century, say] (and still today in rural and poetic usage), the feminine attaching itself above all to the acception `facial coloration' (Quijote, II, ch. 10, etc.; general in the middle ages) but also, to a lesser extent, in the general acception (e.g., las colores de las flores [`the colors of the flowers'] Lope, Marqués de las Navas, v. 2134; common in the middle ages: Berceo, Loores, 85c; J. Manuel, Conde Luc., 30.1; but already masculine in J. Ruiz, 288b).
It seems also that certain idioms have standardized on female color. There's a colloquial expression ``comerle la color a algien,'' which literally translated means `eat the color of someone from him [or her].'' Some time ago I saw this described as a Venezuelan idiom meaning `to be unfaithful to, cheat on.' Looking around now (late March 2007, if it should matter), it becomes clear that the expression is most popular in Chile, and that it has a broader range of meanings. The various meanings taken together suggest that the action described drains the color from the face of the victim. Thus one meaning is to cuckold, but more generally it is to embarrass someone by taking something that belongs to him, figuratively to eat his lunch. (Or hers.) If you prefer literalness in translations, then the idiom involves a specific kind of causing someone else to lose face.
Oh yeah, the noun means `color,' essentially. For more on the meaning, see the coloreado entry.
Another example is political: leftist ``red,'' for example, is preserved in parties and persons called colorados, like the Uruguayan Partido Colorado, whose flag is a red field with a golden sun in the upper left. (A similar golden sun appears in a similar position in the national flag of Uruguay.) Of course, such names can become fossilized. The colorados today are social democrats, and in the 1999 presidential elections they were essentially the centrist party, between the blancos to the right and Frente Amplio coalition on the left. The blancos, `whites,' are the Partido Nacional or (original name) Partido Blanco. Since the nineteenth century, the colorados had been the dominant party in a two-party system, and the blancos the dominant conservative party, usually in opposition. Things have been changing rapidly, however. In the elections of 1999 the FA emerged as the largest party in the legislature (~40%) and forced a run-off in the presidential election. In the latter, the blancos supported the colorado candidate, who won. The two parties maintained a legislative alliance for a few years. Strategically, it was a bad time to be in power: a Brazilian currency devaluation, an Argentine economic collapse, and outbreaks of foot-and-mouth in the beef industry all contributed to major recession. In the 2004 elections, the colorados received about 10% of the vote (in legislative and presidential elections), and the FA won the presidency and absolute majorities in the legislature. I guess you didn't need to know all that, or that the left wing of the Partido Blanco, still and again the dominant conservative opposition, is now to the left of much of the Partido Colorado.
While color, has had a fluctuating gender and a roughly constant set of meanings, the related verb colorado has fluctuated in sense. (There could hardly be any argument tbout the gender; the female form is colorada, and the plurals are formed by adding ess.) The gender fluctuations (is that kinky ¿or what?) of color have a slight basis in Latin: the original word is of the third declension, so it gives no morphological clue to its gender. (To be fair on both sides, however, this is not a common source of confusion. Most male and female third-declension Latin nouns preserve their gender through the evolution into Spanish.)
The word colorado has a better alibi in Latin, but I jus realized that I can pretend that this entry is complete now, and come back and augment it later. You won't complain.
There is a similarly confusing red word in Russian. The standard word meaning red (krasn'ii) was once used in the transferred sense of beautiful, eloquent, fine, etc. These senses are preserved in various common compound terms and names, but otherwise it is now archaic to use in these senses. The plaza called Red Square was named in this way. Saint Basil's Cathedral was originally described as beautiful (krasnaya, in the appropriate inflection), and the adjective became attached to the square it was on.
John Edwards, who ran for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2004, born in Seneca, South Carolina, lived in a pink house as a newborn, but the family moved to a larger house across town during his first year. I'm not sure the house was pink when he lived there. You want to know more.
At the time of his death, ex-president Chester Alan Arthur's estate included something on New York City's Sixth Avenue, above Central Park, known as the Red House property. Slim pickin's, I know.
Here are links to various buildings and places named the equivalent of ``<Color> House'' in some language (possibly even English), where <Color> is, you guessed it, a color word:
A good tantalum ore. The use of tantalum capacitors in cell phones is being blamed for driving an illegal, militia-financing coltan boom in DRC that is endangering gorillas and World Heritage sites.
``Well, I never,'' he exclaimed. ``If it isn't Captain Hastings back from the wilds of the what do you call it! Quite like old days seeing you here with Monsieur Poirot. You're looking well, too. Just a little bit thin on top, eh? Well, that's what we're all coming to. I'm the same.''The second paragraph is pretty much in character for the captain, and touches on certain clichés of the comb-over phenomenon, particularly the sensitivity of the combers-over and their delusion that the strategem is not, so to speak, transparent. The only important aspect not very clearly referenced (perhaps because it follows or is obvious) is the fact that almost everyone who does not use one regards the comb-over as ridiculous and ugly.
I winced slightly. I was under the impression that owing to the careful way I brushed my hair across the top of my head the thinness referred to by Japp was quite unnoticeable. However, Japp had never been remarkable for tact where I was concerned, so I put a good face upon it and agreed that we were none of us getting any younger.
3. A method as in claim 2 wherein after the hair from the back of the head is folded over the bald area, an object is placed over the hair and hair from a first of the sides is brushed over the object, and after the hair from said first side is folded into place the object is placed over the hair and the hair from the second side is folded over the object.
4. A method as in claim 3, wherein said object is a person's hand the hair spray is applied after the hair from said first side is folded into place and again after said second side being folded into place.
Spanish English La silla es confortable. The chair is comfortable. La persona esta cómoda. The person is comfortable.
Here at home (i.e., in the SBF glossary) recent expansion has regrettably separated this (comic nose) entry from the common cold entry.
According to COMIR,
Over the last several years a number of organizations (NGOs, INGOs as well as IGOs) have been engaged in the development of online resources to facilitate the exchange of information, to support minority initiatives and to advocate minority rights in the region. These organizations have adopted various strategies to collect and disseminate information. These strategies often result in overlapping efforts and parallel projects. Thus is seen the necessity of cooperation and coordination between various organizations engaged in the development of online resources, networking and dissemination of information on the issues of minority rights, multicultural politics and ethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Commonwealth of Independent States.COMIR is an Internet-based cooperative project that aims at promoting the free flow of information and dialogue in the field of ethnic relations, multicultural politics and minority rights. COMIR aims to establish a clearinghouse of information and activities relevant to Europe (OSCE region) to support democratic governance of multiethnic and multinational societies. To this end, COMIR develops and promotes virtual libraries, mailing lists, a database of full text documents, training materials, etc. Major initiatives include a Virtual Library, coordinated mailing lists, a meta-search engine across founders' web sites, a Minority Rights Practitioners Resource Pack, a best practice database, curriculum development and advocacy training.
See also BAN.
Omitting a comma can also cause a subordinate clause that modifies an entire main clause to modify a single word instead. Consider, for example, this sentence from our But seriously folks... entry:
I didn't write back asking for proof, which demonstrates that I am a clueless moron.
Sentences whose meanings are reversed by omission or addition of commas are rarer, but they're not too hard to construct.
The words request and instruction are also used, particularly in computing, since computers don't yet have what we think of as volitional preferences (but then there's HAL). For more thoughts along these lines, I firmly encourage you to see the kill -9 entry.
In Ack-Ack, ``Tim'' Pile remembers his early years in the Army...
I did not remain long at Topsham Barracks. In the following January, while on Christmas leave, I received a telegram: ``Would it be convenient to you to embark for South Africa 30th January.'' This was my first experience of official letters; later on I began to understand their underlying significance. I even understood that the displeasure of the Army Council--which I received at a much later stage in my career--was not nearly such a fearsome thing, anyway, after one had survived the first shock. On this particular occasion I took the telegram at its face value and wired back, ``Would much prefer to embark after the hunting season is over.'' This caused a terrible sensation, and I got wires to return at once to Topsham Barracks, where my major spoke to me at some length on the duties of a soldier. I tried to explain that I thought they were giving me the option as to what I should like to do, and he replied, ``Young man, a request from the War Office is a command.''I embarked on the troopship Dunera for Cape Town on January 30, 1905. ...
If Tim Pile had not had such an irregular, indulgent, and deficient grade-school education (as he describes in the book), he would not have entered his military training at the bottom of his class. He would also already have learned from the example of his fourth-grade teacher that figures of authority may express commands as if they were suggestions or options. Sometimes this is a form of humor. It's a funny sort of humor: funny only to the commander, and only funny if the person commanded does not find it funny but ``gets it.''
Oh, here's something I read in an email from the unnamed chairman of an unnamed department at an unnamed university today:
I hope you will all encourage (i.e., require) your undergrad researchers to participate in this event.
What makes this particularly interesting is that it contains nested, errr, expressions of preference.
Oh, it has other meanings! I guess the sartorial sense is derived from the earlier use of commando to designate a small body of picked men (or a member of that unit) sent on a difficult, possibly unconventional mission -- what we now call special forces (or, sometimes imprecisely, spetsnaz, for local color).
(They say that truth is the first casualty of war. And if you go commando, you do without war briefs. Makes perfect sense.)
But where did it all begin? Here's the entry from EB11, vol. VI, pg. 765:
COMMANDO, a Portuguese word meaning ``command,'' adopted by the Boers in South Africa through whom it has come into English use, for military and semi-military expeditions against the natives. More particularly a ``commando'' was the administrative and tactical unit of the forces of the former Boer republics, ``commandeered'' under the law of the constitutions which made military service obligatory on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Each ``commando'' was formed from the burghers of military age of an electoral district.
The Portuguese, you will remember, colonized regions to the northwest and northeast of South Africa -- present-day Angola and Mozambique, resp. It must be noted that Portugal is a small country even by European standards, and most of its colonization was in the form of coastal enclaves ranging in size from Goa to undermanned fortresses on coastal islands. That's why it was natural for King Leopold II of little Belgium, getting a late start on the African colonization bonanza, to squeeze the Portuguese out of the Congo, where they had only a trading-relations toe-hold.
The Portuguese language before the twentieth century had a pseudo-etymological orthography like English and French, preserving many historical features that encoded no systematic phonemic information. One such feature was the double em in words like commando. Much of this was swept away after reforms were adopted in the Portuguese-speaking countries in 1911-1915. These generally popular reforms left Portuguese with a leaner phonetic spelling like those of Spain and Italy. Differences in pronunciation between Brazil and the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world (primarily Portugal) have made further standardization problematic. Anyway, commando, as the word was spelled during the Boer War, has been spelled comando in the original language since just after the above-quoted EB entry was published.
The Portuguese noun comando has about the same range of meanings as the English noun `command,' including that of `military order' (regarding which, vide supra). (The form comando of the verb comandar means `I command.') At least as early as 1791, the word was in use in the restricted sense of an official order permitting an action against natives such as described in EB11. Historical examples in the OED2 suggest that the word became attached successively to the action itself and then to the organized group that did or might undertake the action. In the UK in 1940 the word was retasked, referring to men selected for special training as shock troops to repel the expected German invasion of England. The modern sense (I mean before the underwear sense; the sense of special forces for raids -- actions behind enemy lines) came into use later in the war.
Louisiana is not technically a community property state, but it is similar. On most legal matters, Louisiana is an exception because of its Spanish/French legacy (i.e., tradition of Roman/Napoleonic code, instead of Common law).
One of the underappreciated benefits of religious pluralism is the load-leveling: different denominations worshipping on different days makes it possible for everyone to have a good time or fulfill their religious obligations or whatever on their own special day, while there is always someone on-duty at the help desk.
The official Monday Night Football URL is at the MNF entry.
Como. -- `I eat.'
¿Como como? -- `How do I eat?'
¡Como como! -- `How I eat!'
Como como como. -- `I eat as [i.e. in the manner that] I eat.'
...
Moco, from Latin mucus, means what you'd expect. Mocoso means `runny-nosed' and (not in the literal sense) `runny-nosed kid.'
In grammatical terms, comparative refers either to the nonabsolute forms of modifiers (e.g., hazier and haziest, as opposed to hazy), or specifically to the forms (like hazier and more hazy) that are neither absolute nor superlative (haziest or most hazy). (In languages without a superlative form, that's not a very important synactic distinction.) In the following, we use the narrower sense.
The comparative of adjectives in English can always be formed periphrastically (as more heated and more loud from the absolute forms heated and loud) and often by inflection, using the suffix -er: (e.g., louder). The -er inflection tends to be less acceptable on word already inflected. Hence, the (past and present) participles heated and writhing, formed from verbs by addition of -ed and -ing, do not take -er. Similarly, adverbs formed from adjectives by the addition of -ly rarely occur in a comparative form in -lier. The apparent exceptions all seem to be adjectives in -ly (shapelier, kindlier, livelier). Adjectives formed by the suffix -y from nouns take the -er (and -est) inflection readily (e.g., windier).
Where an inflected comparative form is available, the periphrastic form avoided.
A small number of older comparative and superlative forms are not straightforwardly constructed by addition of the -er or -est suffixes: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; etc. The word more itself is the common comparative form of the adjectives many (for countable nouns) and much (for uncountable). The word most is similarly the common superlative form. The expressions many more and much more are instances of the absolute forms many and much functioning as adverbs to modify their own comparative forms (to wit, the word more functioning as adverb or adjective).
Corresponding to the general quantifiers many and much for countable and uncountable nouns, respectively, there are adjectives few and little. These do have distinct comparative and superlative forms: fewer and fewest, and less and least. The widespread supermarket-checkout use of ``less than 12 items'' is offensive because it is such a trivial and pointless error. Complain to the manager.
The reason so many words begin with these four letters -- C-O-M-P -- is that con- is common prefix in Latin and lots of useful Latin root words begin in the letter "p," The bilabial nasal consonant em is easier to articulate before another bilabial consonant like "b" or "p" than the open consonant en, so in Latin as in many languages, there is a systematic substitution of -mp- for -np-.
In 2001, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina began a push for HP to purchase Compaq. The purchase was opposed by director Walter Hewlett, son of company co-founder William Hewlett. The Hewlett and Packard families, which together owned 18% of the company, voted against the merger, but HP shareholders approved it over their opposition on March 19, 2002; Compaq shareholders accepted the deal the next day.
At the first step, there are the well-known N, E, W, S. (There is a folk etymology that the word news is derived from this sequence of letters, representing the idea that news comes from all directions. This is a very lame theory.)
To establish a mathematical convention for the rest of this very important glossary entry, we note that taking E as the orientation of origin, and taking positive angles in the conventional sense, E, N, W, and S represent angles of 0, /2 (90°), , and 3/2, respectively.
A second set of directions is named by combining terms for adjacent directions in the first set: NE (northeast), NW (northwest), SW (southwest) and SE (southeast), at /4 (45°), 3/4, 5/4, 7/4. Note that in this binomial set, N or S always precedes E or W.
The third set of direction names is constructed in the form ABC, where A is in the first set {E, N, W, S} and BC is one of the two directions in the second set {NE, NW, SW, SE} which is closest to the given A. The direction represented by ABC is half-way between the directions represented by A and by BC. Thus we have the eight directions ENE, NNE, NNW, WNW, WSW, SSW, SSE, ESE, at odd multiples of /8 (22.5°): /8, 3/8, ... , 15/8. The names of these directions are simply the names of the direction components used to construct them: ENE is ``east northeast,'' SSW is ``south southwest.'' All one is doing is reciting or writing the three elementary direction names, with a pause or space between the first two. By the nature of the construction, two of the three elementary directions in the name are identical.
The fourth set of directions is constructed by ``tweaking`` (not official terminology) directions from the first and second set (but not from the third set) by /16 (11.25°). The names of these compass directions reflect this origin. They are of the form AbC and ABbC, where A and AB are directions in the first and second sets, respectively, and C is always one of the four principal directions (the first set). Thus, directions in the form AbC have both A and C a principal direction: AbC is A tweaked a little bit in the direction of C. For example, EbN (east by north) is almost east; it is the direction /16 instead of exactly 0. [Intermission: in the summer of 1979, I would take 3 AM walks through deepest suburbia. It occurred to me that I could strip naked and walk down the middle of the street unobserved, because everyone was asleep. I sort of have that feeling now, writing this section. Sometimes I feel that way when I'm teaching class. End of intermission.] NbE (north by east) is almost north, but tweaked a bit to the east, so it is 7/16 instead of exactly /2. Directions ABbC follow the same idea, but the directions one is tweaking away from are from the second set. Thus, SWbW (southwest by west) is a shade west of southwest: (5/4 - /16 = 19/16) and SWbS (southwest by south) is a shade south of SW (5/4 + /16 = 21/16). The sixteen independent directions in this fourth set are odd multiples of /16.
I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, as long has he has income and she is pattable.
-- Ogden Nash
Here is another example, from a published article on scavenging and aerosol reactions in cumulus clouds:
*
``Aircraft measurements were
complimented by a ground sampling station ....''
As you now surely realize, the authors meant that the ground station
``complemented'' the aircraft monitoring. As written,
the passage suggests that someone on the ground was radioing encouragement
to the pilot.
Warren McCulloch was the first to extend the familiar usage of the word ``computation'' beyond the description of mere numerical manipulations to the general class of operations that reduce information. By this he restored its classical meaning, used by Juvenal when he wrote computat say ``Your face shows your age.'' Doubtless, the showing is an information reduction, for while ten billion faces can be distinguished (about 33 bits), a man's years are--at most--associated with only 7.
I'm not sure I'd entirely agree. Determining x+1 does not reduce x in any common sense, but I think it counts as a computation. I'm also concerned that with the growing population of the world, it's increasing likely that someone out there is indistinguishable from me, or at least from one of the ages of me. Poor fellow.
The Latin phrase referred to, incidentally, is facies tua computat annos.
The question of reduction is not a minor one. One of the attractions of quantum computation is that (if some of its advocates are correct) quantum computations can be performed dissipationlessly -- i.e., at zero cost in energy. I suspect that can only be done if you have infinite time to wait for the results, but never mind. An obvious objection to this claim is that if a calculation involves a reduction in information, then entropy increases, and entropy increase implies heat generation and dissipation. The answer to this objection was (back when I read about this) that computation can be made reversible, so that at any stage the stored data are sufficient to recover the initial inputs. This logical reversibility is at least a necessary condition for thermodynamic reversibility.
``Never try to explain computers to a layman. It's easier to explain sex to a virgin.''-- Robert Heinlein. (Don't try to explain lap-tops to Heinlein. He's dead.)
The name is slightly redundant, since Central America is a part of North America. Also, the Caribbean islands (we're not talking water polo on the ocean, after all), while not a part of the North American mainland, are considered a part of the Americas. (I suppose at least Trinidad and Tobago would have to count as part of South America, though.) So an equally accurate and more mellifluous name would be CONACAF (you figure out the shorter expansion). Probably the main difficulty with this is that Latin Americans tend to use the term norteamericano as a synonym of estadounidense and yanqui; i.e., pertaining to the USA. North Americans (at least Anglophone North Americans) tend to use American in the same sense.
I suppose this would be as good a place as any to point out that repeating a word like American or even and can have useful effects like making a list correct. In this case, setting aside what it is named, and accepting the technical redundancy just discussed, CONCACAF is a confederation of North American, Central American, and Caribbean Football Associations. If you think three syllables is too great a sacrifice for accuracy, try ``North and Central American and Caribbean Football.'' You could roll it around on a plate-full of commas, too.
And it's SOCCER, dammit!
Historically, Chile has had a fragmented political spectrum. This led to disaster in 1970, when Salvador Allende was chosen president by the lower house of Congress, after an election in which none of three candidates came close to winning an outright majority. The first coup in Chilean history took place in 1973, and the country returned to democracy, with some initial constraints, in 1989. Since that time many political parties have appeared or reappeared. It is plainly obvious to all parties that they have little prospect of governing alone: political allegiances have been rather stable. It follows logically, though logic in many other places and times has not been a significant political consideration, that a party that wants to play a part in government must form alliances. Many alliances have formed and mostly dissolved since 1989. By 1997, however, two major coalitions had formed which have been dominant to the time of this writing (2004).
Concertación is a center-left coalition that has controlled the presidency and the legislature since it emerged. It comprises a number of parties; I think the only parties it doesn't include are a few small parties on the left (the largest being the Partido Humanista and Partido Communista de Chile, which together win 5-10% of the vote nationally) and the two parties on the right that constitute the Unión por Chile (for more on that coalition and on the word por, see the UDI entry). The dominant parties of the Concertación are the centrist Christian Democrats (PDC), 24 seats in the 2001 Congressional (Chamber of Deputies) elections, and two leftist parties (PPC and los socialistas, a combined 32 seats in the same elections). Other members of the coalition won another 6 seats all told.
It is important to understand that concrete is not cement. Concrete is chunks of hard material embedded in a matrix of sticky material called cement. The same principle is used in constructing Spam.
Condom is on the Baïse River. The word baise (no dieresis) is French slang for `sexual intercourse.' For related information, see the ``I dunno'' and Tampon entries.
The participial ``coned off'' seems to be even more common; when I first saw it I thought for a moment it was an egregious misspelling of ``cordoned off.'' Now it only reminds me of the conehead sex. In one skit that aired on SNL, Beldar and Prymatt Conehead (Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin) take some time out for a quickie. They stand facing each other, each holding a stack of hoops, and engage in a horseshoes-like game. Each alternately tries to toss a hoop onto the other's cone. Beldar succeeds, but Prymatt just runs out of hoops and is visibly disappointed and frustrated. I guess that time she was the one who was ``coned off.''
The Get Smart cone of silence didn't look very much like a cone. It looked like a couple of plexiglas bubbles mounted on a screen-door-size horizontal frame, with various contraption components attached to make it look technological. The umbrella of silence looked more like a cone. Over the years, we've come to realize that Get Smart was a more true-to-life portrayal of intelligence agencies east and west than any Bond film ever was. Consider also the ``privacy sleeve'' mentioned at this BMD entry.
Pablo Neruda's memoirs are entitled Confieso que he vivido (`I confess that I have lived'). He died in 1973. A note on the copyright page reads, in translation, ``the editing of these memoirs of Pablo Neruda was left interrupted by his death.''
The elementary explanation of present perfect, the tense of he vivido (`I have lived'), is that it describes action completed in the past. In practice, aspect and tense are more subtle, but Neruda's death assured that in both reasonable and unreasonable senses of the words, his title was literally correct. Neruda was a Chilean poet.
In 1956, E.M. Cioran published La Tentacion d'Exister. Alright, really Librairie Gallimard published it; E.M. Cioran only authored it. It was just a manner of speaking. The book was translated from the French by Richard Howard and published in English as The Temptation to Exist in 1968, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. I just figured that a temptation to exist might help explain why having lived would be something to confess.
Complete (and utterly superfluous) disclosure:
This entry is here because I noticed an announcement of the
program
for the Third Postgraduate Conference in Conflict Archaeology, to be held at
the University of Birmingham (England), 5-7th November 2014. When I first saw
the term, I thought it referred to archaeology conducted in a conflict area.
Since one is only illuminating a small region of the object, one expects to produce only a small portion of the image, so scanning is necessary. By appropriately collimating the returning light, one can reduce unwanted reflection from parts of the illumination light away from the focus. [Essentially, one places a diaphragm in the image plane with an aperture only at the image of the illuminated focus. Light coming from any part of the object away from this focus is in a different plane, and consequently its image is focused in a plane in front of or behind the diaphragm, and only a small portion of its light goes through the image aperture.
All this gets you an extra factor of two in resolution.
In linguistics, congeners are cognates.
In chemistry:
Modern English, which uses an extensive and quite regular modal structure (in addition to adverbials of time, and instead of inflections) to indicate precise time, tense and mood information, has a conjugation based on four principal verb forms: the infinitive or present-tense form, the past, the past participle, and the present participle (typically given in that order). Respecting the way of making the four principal forms, three classes of verbs can be distinguished: regular, irregular, and strong. Most verbs, and especially most verbs not derived from Old English (i.e., Latin, French, and other borrowings, and native neologisms). For example, the verbs PO, interleave out-gas, flame and dephlogisticate are conjugated:
interleave, interleaved, interleaved, interleaving;
unglue, unglued, unglued, ungluing;
tip-toe, tip-toed, tip-toed, tip-toeing or tip-toing;
PO, PO'ed, PO'ed, PO'ing
tow, towed, towed, towing;
fly out, flied out, flied out, flying out (baseball usage);
fly, flew, flown, flying;
out-gas, out-gassed, out-gassed, out-gassing;
flame, flamed, flamed, flaming;
dephlogisticate, dephlogisticated, dephlogisticated, dephlogisticating.
Some particularly nasty, exceptional examples have been chosen in order to
make certain points. Note first, however, that the general pattern is to
add -ed for the past and past participle, and -ing for the present participle.
As interleaved correctly suggests, there is a rule that verbs ending
in e do not have the vowel doubled in the past and past part., and drop
the e when adding -ing. More precisely, this rule applies to the
silent e; thus: flambé,
flambéed, flambéed, flambéing
. These cases are
somewhat rare. A large fraction of the words with voiced final e are
French borrowings.
As we can see, the past and past-participle forms are identical for regular
verbs. (The apostrophe occurs only in some acronyms.)
Note also that
two verbs may have one or some forms, but not all, in common -- obviously
this can only happen if at least one of the two verbs is not regular.
An example of the situation occurs with the verb to leave on which
interleave may be regarded as being patterned. This verb is related
to the noun leaf. Another verb to
leave is an antonym of arrive. This is an example of an irregular
verb: leave, left, left, leaving
.
The ARTFL project offers a verb conjugator for the French language.
Among other revelations: the trilateral commission is a Stammtisch front. Heeding Caesar's observation that ``Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,'' we have fashioned an equally portentious (spelling? maybe that should be pretentious. must check.) organizing vision based on a crucial organometallic source for compound semiconductor growth and fabrication of devices: ``Gallium est omne partitum inter ethyles tres'' (TEG). The mysterious origin of the name, ``trilateral commission,'' now stands revealed as a simultaneous allusion to the three tentacles of the Stammtisch (FAL, FNSM, SEAS), and to its three tripartite tools -- gall, solid gallium sources, and the trilateral commission itself.
Oh, wait! Maybe it's the Council on Foreign Relations, with the same acronym as the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). I'm no longer sure. Columnist (fifth?) Tony Snow appeared on the Rush Limbaugh radio show and claimed that ``[i]n most meetings, the key challenge is for members to stay awake.'' I must have missed that. Obviously a ruse, or he hasn't been ``made'' yet. [Newsweek, p. 23, April 1, 1996.]
Fascinating! This is the stupidest entry I have yet visited upon this glossary. What dastardly definitions am I planning even now? I shudder to think.
The IAU no longer refers to the 88 as ``principal constellations,'' but simply as ``[the] constellations.'' I haven't investigated exactly how quickly the qualifier disappeared. To understand what they might have had in mind, consider this from a couple of decades earlier: R. H. Allen, in Star-Names and their Meanings (1899):
The Kids are the stars Zeta and Eta Aurigae. Zeta, [magnitude] 4, orange, is the western one of the Érifoi, or Kids, of Hipparchos and Ptolemy, the Haedi of the Latins. Pliny made of them a separate constellation.
(Note that Allen's interpretation of classical texts is known to be unreliable. As James L. P. Butrica noted on the classics list, for example, it was Allen's misunderstanding of some references to individual kids of the four-legged terrestrial variety that allowed him to write about the Kids, ``Propertius wrote of them, in the singular, as Haedus....'')
This page maintained by Chris Dolan, and this one from the Peoria Astronomical Society (PAS), each list the 88 constellations with links to associated information. Here at SBF, we have mostly bare entries for the 88 and then some, which we'll be decorating as the occasion arises.
contagion n. a process whereby operations on objects of differing types (e.g., arithmetic on mixed types of numbers) produce a result whose type is controlled by the dominance of one argument's type over the types of the other arguments. ee Section 12.1.1.2 (Contagion in Numeric Operations).
You know, a lot of people who take good eyesight for granted, because they've always had it, may start to suffer headaches and watery eyes as adults, and have difficulty keeping their eyes focused toward the end of the day...
Figure it out! You finally need glasses.
'Took me two years to figure it out. The (non-drowsiness-inducing) antihistamine I got seemed to help the watery-eyes problem, too. I was about 1.5 diopters hyperopic.
The two most common non-drowsiness-inducing antihistamines at the time were Seldane and Claritin. (Seldane-D is Seldane with a Decongestant.) In the US, these were both prescription drugs at the time. (Claritin went OTC at the end of 2002, I think it was.) In Canada, they were available without a prescription at pharmacies (or at least Seldane was), because Canadians are much more responsible and informed. (Also, there seems to be some difference in access to health care; no very big difference, I'm sure -- under a typical provincial health plan in Canada, anyone who needs an urgent operation pays for it out of pocket in Florida, just like many uninsured Americans. So I've heard.)
If you live in Buffalo or Niagara Falls or Detroit, smuggling is quicker, cheaper, and more convenient than visiting the doctor for a prescription. The price of the drug is about the same (after exchange; not in nominal dollars). Back in 1997, that was about 1 USD per twelve-hour pill (or dose or ``hit,'' as we drug smugglers called it).
Also, it is more concise than circumlocutions like ``view with contempt,'' and in particular does not have the ambiguity of ``hold in contempt,'' which might allude to its special technical sense at law. Moreover, its semantic field is more sharply defined than scorn, spite, despise and disdain in various ways:
To scorn is not only to hold in low regard, but also to express that opinion, if only by avoidance or at least aversion. It has a transferred meaning in which the avoidance is central and the contempt is secondary. In this way one can scorn an inanimate object, and the contempt is not for the object as such, but for its use or users. For example, in billiards I scorn the granny stick. Scorn is also more of an immediate reaction than a considered judgment.
To spite is principally to express contempt. It resembles to contemn more closely than scorn only in that the action (the expression) is directed at the object of contempt, whereas one may scorn (avoid, disdain to use) an object that is associated with, and not precisely the object of, contempt. Spite also differs from scorn and contemn in that an expression constitutes spite only if it is consequential for the target. If spite results from a prior act of the party spited, then it can be called revenge. Spite is usually also unpleasant, or has an edge. Hence, a spiteful person is generally regarded as unpleasant by anyone who does not share the person's bitter enmities. One can be cheerfully spiteful, but it is a vengeful cheer, participatory Schadenfreude. One can be anonymously spiteful, but hypocritical spite is a convoluted sentiment, not yielding full measure even of the slight satisfactions spite is due.
To despise is to contemn angrily or with hatred.
One uses the word disdain in preference to scorn or contemn in order to draw attention to the usually implicit elevated status of the disdainer. Today a concern for any social position other than slumming celebrity is in low repute, and Prince William of England like his late mother Diana, princess of Wales (née Lady Diana Spencer) scorns use of HRH. In this atmosphere a sense of propriety is generally contemned, and disdain carries the connotation that the disdainer is haughty, supercilious, or arrogant. In other words, disdain is used to express one's contempt for the contemner. (In a similar way, condescend now retains only a pejorative sense.)
In conclusion, contemn is a needed word. Languages develop vocabulary as animals develop muscles -- need and use lead to growth. Your first responsibility is to know it, to have passive knowledge of it. It would be admirable if you use it from time to time. See also hight.
It's not necessary to actually carry out the rotation. This is one of the better features of the game, allowing it to be played on moving vehicles. Naturally, when bridge is played at the North or South Pole, or elsewhere along the earth's rotation axis (the coordinate singularity of its spherical-coordinate description), there may be some problems. For example, players may freeze to death. (See also the comments on making water at the Veep entry.)
Now that we've got all that technical stuff out of the way, you can relax and enjoy the game. If you want to understand what's going on, however, you might want to visit the entry about bidding in bridge.
The same sort of thing happens in your kitchen: when you uncover the stew pot, the water-saturated air in the pot rises into the cooler air of the kitchen and condenses into tiny droplets. Rayleigh scattering by the droplets makes the condensed steam appear white.
The water vapor in a con trail is a product of combustion: the fuel is mostly hydrocarbon, and energy is released its oxidation, which produces carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O).
The advance announcement of the tornado-warning tests did not give the exact time of the testing, so as ``to add some reality to the tests.'' The announcement also gave a sort of rain date: ``Should actual severe weather be a threat on March 17, the testing will be held on March 18.''
Don't visit Amanda Haverstick's Get Smart pages without a volume control.
The bad guys' organization is KAOS.
CONTROL corresponds to U.N.C.L.E. on ``The Man From U.N.C.L.E.''
A common faux ami for Spanish is convent in its religious application. In English, a convent is now implicitly a nunnery, and a convent for brethren of a religious order is called a monastery. In Spanish, a convento retains the older sense -- it does for both monastery and nunnery. If you're still awake, you can go read about double monasteries under Audrey (an eponym). If you're not, you can't.
Donald Margulies's play ``Collected Stories,'' tells a story of a young writer, Lisa, and her mentor Ruth. In a Nov. 2002 review of a new production of the play, Alvin Klein wrote
As everybody knows, nobody is safe in the company of a writer, and Ruth has fallen victim to her own advice.``You taught me to be ruthless,'' Lisa retorts when Ruth accuses her of revising and cheapening her life. Then Ruth caps her confessional with intimate details that give the lie to the book's steamy scenes.
Here's some more general advice about conversations: in or out of the company of writers: If your pleasant outdoor conversation should happen to be interrupted by a loud noise, turn your head ninety degrees to face forward, stop talking to the passenger, and DRIVE, already!
One dinner at Procter Hall, I saw a friend walk in with her tray and I shouted over to her ``Isobel, you are Ruthless!'' She was pleased by the remark; she came and sat with me. I often saw Ruth and Isobel together at dinner. It's not especially relevant to you, but it's sad to me and hard to forget, that Isobel died young.
One time, I don't know how, Isobel and I got into a discussion of the difficulties of finding a man. It hadn't really occurred to me that she should have any such difficulty. Her comment was, ``it's hard to find a man to come up to scratch.'' ``Like a dog?'' was my immediate puzzled thought. She meant that it was hard to find one who came up to her standards. Oh look, here comes a related entry...
Just like JONES and SIGECAPS, this is a healing doctor's mnemonic. In particular, it is a mnemonic contrived by Dr. Romance, author of Desirable Men (p. 117).
We have invented the motor car--and Caliban has climbed into it and Europe flares red in the wake of Panzer armies. We have invented the aeroplane--and Caliban soars in it, dropping on our clever heads the two-ton bombs we have likewise contrived for his amusement. We have invented the wireless and from it Propagandaministerium comes--the voice of Caliban. For his are the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.''
-- F. L. Lucas, Critical Thoughts in Critical Days (1942).
Here's a little vignette about ``Barbara'' from Your Erroneous Zones (see F.O.O.L.):
...She could and would manipulate her own mind. Next time she felt hungry she resolved to reward herself with thoughts of her own internal strength rather than a cookie. ...How does that taste? Anyway, it's true that if you eat a lot of cookies, you're going to blow up.
Yes, that pun bombed.
Actually, in the early morning, and in somewhat unusual conditions, it's warmer by the lake. It's a heat capacity/conductivity thing: Heat conductivity of earth is low, so the thermal mass to be heated is a thin layer at the surface, and it heats (and cools) quickly. By comparison, water is heated (a) radiatively (light penetrating surface, and also thermal IR light emission and reabsorption and (b) by ordinary thermal conduction. Thus, even though the specific heat capacity (i.e., per unit volume) of the water is lower, it is heated to a greater depth, and its heat capacity per unit area is higher than that of the land. Upshot: land heats faster.
A similar effect at the coast gives rise to the sea breeze: rapid heating of the land means the air pressure over the sea is higher, causing a breeze to blow in from the sea. (Above 500m, a return anti-sea breeze blows back.)
You wouldn't expect a convection effect when you're heating water from above, but there is one: warmer water has a higher salt solubility, and as you warm the surface salt diffuses upward. Saltier water is denser and sinks, enhancing heat transfer. I'm not sure how still the water has to be for this effect to be a significant correction to the heat transfer caused by ordinary wave motion. Obviously this isn't significant on a sweet-water lake.
[Strictly speaking, of course, solubility is not the parameter that causes salt diffusion across a temperature gradient. Raising the temperature lowers the chemical potential for the solute species, and the salt diffuses to approach diffusive equilibrium.]
A weaker effect than sea breeze is valley breeze, which blows upward into the mountains or hills that have heated up more than the valley they shade.
In the winter, of course, it's typically warmer by the lake. The weather reports only include an -er-by-the-lake comment if it is systematically true for much of the day, and that condition only clearly holds in summer and winter.
In Toronto, the comment is more often in the form ``cooler in the suburbs'' than `warmer by the lake'' (conveniently ignoring the suburbs along the lake). Presumably, the reason for the difference in usage has something to do with the airport location. Toronto's airport is only a dozen kilometers from Lake Ontario, so the reference point for Toronto weather is essentially lakeside. In Chicago, by contrast, the larger airport, O'Hare, is far inland -- a whopping, uh, 18 kilometers or so from the lake.
Nyah-nyah, nya-nyah-nyah!
We-won't-tell, we-won't-tell!
Nyah-nyah, nya-nyah-nyah!
Bite-your-lip-and-go-to-'ell!
(That's not exactly verbatim, but it's more precisely informative on this topic than the entire website.) They continue
If you wish to refer to Copac, on a web site or in a publication, we prefer you to just use Copac rather trying [sic, and appropriate] to deconstruct [sic] the acronym. It may be helpful to add an explanatory sentence along the lines of: "Copac provides ... to the ... of major ... and ... plus ...."
(You can look up the details. Of course I want to be ``helpful,'' but I don't want to burden you here with information that you might want.)
COPAC started out as ``CURL OPAC,'' where OPAC stood for On-line Public Access Catalogue and CURL is also in the glossary. It's a union catalog for UK and Irish libraries -- mostly large research-university libraries, plus the British Library and the National Library of Scotland. On April 30, 1996, CURL OPAC was officially relaunched as COPAC. At the time, it covered the university library catalogs of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, and Oxford. By 1997 sometime, coverage included ten libraries in England and Scotland, plus Trinity College Library in Dublin. Some time in 2003 or early 2004, all of the two dozen CURL members' catalogs had been integrated into the system.
The term ``co-payment'' is not necessarily equivalent to ``deductible.'' In some insurance arrangements, ``deductible'' refers to an amount of expenses to be borne by the covered party before insurance starts picking up some or all of the tab. Medical insurance schemes generally have at least one of the following three features: co-pays, deductibles, government subsidies.
(1) To promote nationally the values of superior ... setting in order to enhance understanding among the general public of the value of moderately sized [etc.].
(2) To communicate ... policy makers ... vital importance and benefits of providing ... comprehensive ... in the [etc.].
(3) To work actively ... institutions ... improve ... quality ... achieve the goals ... organization.
(4) To support the efforts of the other institutions to achieve [yawn].''
It's a good thing I copied that stuff into here. By 2005, they had a completely new list of four goals to accomplish.
No one knows for sure, but one quantitatively plausible explanation of decreased crime rates is that the increasing legalization and availability of abortion in the 1970's made it possible for pregnant women to nip crime at the source. This explanation is not popular with groups that are philosophically opposed to abortion.
(AAMOF, you don't copyright the name of a work, you trademark it. But what do I do if I'm just ``some piece of work''?)
Back in 1952, the avant-garde American composer John Cage released a piece entitled 4'33". Next time I'm in that part of the attic, I'll have to see if any of those old discs (``records'') used the angular minutes/seconds notation for the time units. The title is often given, incorrectly, in a glossed form like 4'33" of Silence, but it is actually 4:33 of no sound added to that of the environment in which it is performed. I suppose we've all heard it. Cage died in 1992. For the time being, I will express the most interesting paragraphs of this entry tacitly. Sorry; good things take time.
Composers must respect the instrumental limitations to which the performance of their works will be subject, and even in his Zen period Cage apparently did not feel at liberty to ignore them. The longest track one could record on one side of a 78-rpm record was about 4.5 minutes. [The first of the longer-playing formats (see the LP entry), at 33 rpm, was already available starting in 1948, but the sound quality, or the quality of the silence, was initially probably not so good, since this was technologically edgy at the time. That was probably a crucial issue, since this is obviously the sort of work you'd want to play at maximum volume.]
It seems to me that when you copyright silence, or claim to, and then claim infringement by a work with a silence that probably sounds different in detail, you're not really copyrighting silence. What you're really doing, apart from being a mischievous pimple on the ass of justice, is copyrighting a concept, or trying to. It is well established that concepts can not be copyrighted (they can be trademarked in some cases, but that requires an application to an appropriate national authority, as copyright in the US no longer does). Another thing that cannot be copyrighted, besides my name and Cage's concept, is the plot of a story. (And if it could, the copyright would probably have lapsed by now.) For more on the law and reuse of plots, see the C.S.I. entry. I really ought to put a link here to the TNN entry also. Okay, I relent.
You say pimples can't be ``mischievous''? Alright, then: ``suppurating.''
Sigmund Freud's landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams [Die Traumdeutung in the original German], was first printed and bound in 1899. I remember reading somewhere (probably some Freud biography) that Freud already had a copy in hand late that year. I have also read that it used to be common for books published towards the end of a year to have a forward-dated copyright. This effectively extended the copyright protection by an extra year -- a profitable démarche back in a time when copyright protection did not last so long as today, and when the backlist of a good publishing house was typically (certainly in the US until the 1960's) its main source of income.
Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders was first published on January 6, 1936, by the Collins Crime Club. The copyright information that I have seen in a reprint is ``Copyright 1935, 1936 by Agatha Christie Mallowan. Copyright renewed 1963...'' One's first thought is that the original target date for publication was late in 1935, and that the book was somehow recopyrighted when that was delayed into the new year. It's probably relevant that the Collins Crime Club (an imprint of William Collins & Co., Ltd. begun in 1930) marketed its titles via a loose subscription plan (subscribers received a newsletter but made no advance commitment to buy) and had a schedule of publishing three new books on the first Monday of each month (which did fall on the sixth in January of 1936). The number of books published exceeded plans, with a modestly overachieving pre-WWII peak of 42 in 1938. It seems like an operation that might have been seriously discombobulated had a book not been published on time, or when offered in the newsletter. But there you are.
[The following tedious parenthesis contains a bit of gory but lazy detail on the question of whether Freud's book was published (i.e., made available to the public) or merely manufactured in 1899. At least it's a start to resolving the question. (Why don't you dive into the stacks and write to me with a nice potted explanation?) A few Wikipedia pages for the book claim, perhaps sloppily, that it was published in 1899 and post-dated. These include the pages in Frenc h (which uses the word ``publié''), Galician (``publicada''), Italian (``pubblicato''), and Portuguese (``publicado''). This is hardly corroborative, since anyone writing in any of those languages could easily crib from any of the others. The Spanish Wikipedia page for the book goes a bit further and claims that it was first published (``publicada inicialmente'') in November 1899 and simply forward-dated. None of these Romance sources gives a source specifically for the fact of interest. There's no specific German Wikipedia page for the book, but the page for Traumdeutung describes the book as inauguriert 1899, verlegt 1900. The first participle is a bit vague in this context, and the second could mean `printed' elsewhere but must mean `published' here. It seems to me that the usual and more precise word would be veröffentlicht. It could all be hedging. I see that the brief Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia page echoes the Spanish one. To my horror, it begins to seem as if there is some information that cannot be found in Wikipedia.]
Corbino, a Sicilian, was a senator as well as the head of the physics department at the university at Rome. His greatest contribution to physics was to apply his political acumen and pull the strings so that Enrico Fermi would have a job.
The question arises whether a similar test exists for masculine sex appeal. Sure. A man who looks good in really expensive clothes is sexy, if he can afford the clothes.
The biggest pictures on the homepage (browsed Dec. 19, 2008) are of two young children, and the widest words are passion and integrity. It seems designed to evoke ``The Second Coming'' of Yeats, written in 1919. The first of its two verses runs thus:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ah, what the heck. The second verse is this:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Although the traditional core memory is technically a kind of RAM, the term
RAM was introduced along with the semiconductor memories. On the other hand,
the term ``core'' has continued in use: the main memory in a CPU is still
sometimes called core memory, and a program crash
generates a record of core memory called a core dump, often in a file whose
filename is or includes the word core
. (Virtually no one seems to
read core dumps. Let me suggest that you try reading it. Some of it is
humanly readable, or at least composed of printable characters, and it can be
more informative than ``segmentation fault.'' It's easier to at least try that
than it is to learn how to use the debugger.)
The typical old core memory consisted of tiny ferromagnetic doughnuts (okay, ``tori') called cores, strung at the intersections of a square lattice of insulated wires. (The wires were woven through the doughnuts, or cores, so they were suspended at an angle at each of the lattice intersections.) Each core would store one bit of information, encoded as direction of magnetization. A major criterion in choosing the material was that the hysteresis curve (of M vs. H) be sharp. Ferrite material fit the bill, and all core memories -- back in the day -- used ferrite cores.
Possibly the only vegetable quantified like one body appendage (cf. cabbage) and sharing a name with a different body appendage. The government of British Columbia answers your questions here.
Visit Corn Palace, South Dakota's answer to Carhenge.
The early history of this, like many sports, is shrouded in the mists of time. Actually, it looks more like dust. Anyway, county and regional husking bees had been going on for a long time in the corn belt, but in 1924 the sport went national. Henry Wallace, editor of the Iowa periodical Wallace's Farmer, had the idea of holding a national championship and organized one that very year. (I doubt that this was the same Henry Wallace who was FDR's vice-president before Truman. Wait -- it was!) It seems they never had a, um, winnowing process, let alone seedings for brackets. It was open to all farmworkers in the corn-growing districts of the US, according to The New Encyclopedia of Sports, ed. Frank G. Menke (NYC: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1944, 1947). (This Barnes & Co. was a different publisher than Barnes and Noble. A.S. Barnes seems to have struggled on to about 1969, ending its days in South Brunswick.)
As explained in the encyclopedia, the husker
uses an arrangement strapped to the right hand. This consists of a palm-shaped plate, on which a hook is attached. The hook is about one-half inch long, and its sharp protruding length enables the husker to tear off husks from the ear. In husking, he grasps the ear in his left hand, swings it up and, with one motion, if the right hand, opens the husks, grabs the ear in the right hand, continuing to hold the shank of the ear in the left hand as he snaps it off and tosses it to the wagon with the right hand.
When I first visited Cambridge University, a friend of mine made arrangements for me to stay in a guest room at the college where she is a reader, or whatever they call a professor. I never paid careful-enough attention to the name of the college, and when I got into a cab at the train station, I simply asked for ``Christ College.'' The driver patiently explained to me that Cambridge has a ``Christ's College'' and a ``Corpus Christi College'' (he didn't mention Jesus College). (They also have both a Trinity College and a Trinity Hall -- Good Lord!) I guessed that I wanted Corpus Christi, because that was more ironic.
I guessed right. Always go with the principle of maximum irony. It's the minus-second principle of theodynamics.
Similar business organizations are AG (Germany), plc (Britain), S.p.A. (Italy).
Here is an example of the misuse of corpse where corps is meant:
Give kudos to the much maligned corpse of wide receivers for Kordell's elevated completion percentage.
This is from the Christmas Eve 2001 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Kordell is the Steelers' QB Kordell Stewart.
It's hard to believe today, when conservation of energy is derived as a consequence of Newton's laws in elementary mechanics courses, but even though Newton's Principia was published and famous in the late seventeenth century, conservation of energy was not discovered until the nineteenth. Analysis of energy in mechanical systems involves forces and displacements: a force F acting through a displacement r performs a quantity of work F⋅r. It took a long time, however, before systematic vector notation was widely used. Absent that, some compact alternative was needed. The notion of ``correponding displacement'' fills that bill. The corresponding displacement δ is simply the signed quantity F⋅r/F (F = |F|). Thus the needed energy quantity (work) is equal to δF.
This notion is introduced in a textbook that was published in 1936 by Oxford University Press: Richard V. Southwell's An Introduction to the Theory of Elasticity for Engineers and Physicists. It comes in section 7, which bears the title `` `Corresponding' Forces and Displacements.'' (When using the word in this sense, he always places ``corresponding'' in quotes, evidently to indicate no looser or broader sense of the term is meant.)
Southwell emphasizes the fact that the corresponding displacement is computed as a projection of the ordinary displacement along the direction of the force, but another aspect of the definition, which I have left largely implicit above, is that in a system of forces applied at multiple points, and with multiple displacements corresponding to those multiple points, the ``corresponding displacement'' is defined in terms of the displacement at the point where the particular force is applied. In the few other (generally old) contexts where I have seen the term ``corresponding displacement'' used, the sense seems to be that given by Southwell.
Southwell footnotes his introduction of the concept of corresponding displacement thus:
Cf. Rayleigh, Theory of Sound, 1, § 74.
Note that he doesn't claim that Lord Rayleigh's Theory of Sound actually defines ``corresponding displacement'' at section 74 of volume 1. He merely suggests that you take some time out of your busy day to pull this classic book from your shelf and check it out. When you do, you'll find that Lord Rayleigh (a) uses vector notation, and (b) introduces the notion of ``corresponding force'' (not displacement), but only (c) to distinguish points of application. He introduces the concept with the longer term ``force of corresponding type,'' and explains by an example that for a given displacement, the ``corresponding force'' (apparently an equivalent term) is just the force applied at the same point. That the force is in the same direction (or in the opposite direction and with negative sign) is implicit.
The phrase ``corresponding forces and displacements'' occurs in Southwell's index, but apparently it is always the displacement that is made to correspond to (i.e. be projected onto the direction of) the force, and not vice versa.
Neither Rayleigh nor Southwell spends much time explicitly examining the notion of a point, but of course there is a complication. If there is a displacement of a point, then the point is displaced, and the precise point at which the force is applied is unclear. The resolution of this ambiguity is usually implicit, and depends on the problem. In problems with macroscopic forces applied at isolated points, the ``point'' that occurs in the analysis is the point of application of the force, and there is no real problem. Such isolated-point analysis is a large component of older books on elastic solids (like Rayleigh's and Southwell's), and of books on ``structures'' for civil engineers (and to a lesser extent mechanical engineers). This kind of analysis is convenient for deriving some general theorems, and it is also appropriate for many kinds of problems (cf. -- as Southwell writes -- lumped parameters.)
Problems, for the careful person, occur in the general analysis of elastic continua, which takes account of the microscopic structure of forces and displacements. In this analysis, the forces acting on points are formally zero. Nonzero forces arise from the integration of fields representing forces per unit area (stresses) or per unit volume (body forces). In the first analysis, the fields are taken as functions of the undisplaced (a/k/a undeformed, undistorted) coordinates. This is analytically convenient, but it means that in principle, the forces are evaluated at the ``wrong'' places (the force does not ``correspond,'' in Rayleigh's sense): When the solid is deformed, the force field at a point is associated with the displacement at a point away from which it has been displaced. This is not a problem because the displacements are small and the force fields slowly-varying. More precisely, the displacements are much smaller than the characteristic length scales of the variation of the force fields, so the errors involved are fractionally small.
The idea involved here is a near cousin of a common elementary calculus idea: When one defines a derivative as the limit of a difference quotient, one has some ``infinitesimal'' play in where the difference quotient is evaluated. For example,
f(x+Δx) - f(x) -------------- Δxand
f(x) - f(x-Δx) -------------- Δxboth approach df(x)/dx in the limit as Δx approaches zero. This requires the function f to satisfy some smoothness condition, and this parallels the ``slowly-varying'' condition on force fields described above.
There is a crucial difference between these conceptual cousins, however: Derivatives really are limits of finite differences taken to zero, but the theory of elastic continua is used to describe displacements that are nonzero (``finite,'' as physicists say to mean noninfinitesimal). As a practical matter, there are many applications in which the error introduced by the small-deformation approximation is negligibly small. This is the sense in which it is ``not a problem,'' above, in the ``first analysis'' of elastic continua. There are also plenty of practical situations in which the deformations are not so small. This requires a further ``finite deformation'' analysis that is mathematically rather uglier. When deformations are not small, it is also the case that the Hookean approximation fails. That is, the force is no longer linear in the deformation, and accuracy demands a nonlinear analysis. Usually, for not-much-greater deformations, the material ceases to be elastic: it flows, and one is out of the realm of elasticity and into viscoelasticity. In summary, when trouble comes, it doesn't come alone.
I'd like to go back now and tie up a loose end in the safe realm of linear, nonfinite elastic continuum theory. I mentioned point forces (formally zero in the continuum theory) and forces derived from fields distributed in three and two dimensions (body forces and stresses). That leaves one-dimensional fields, for forces acting on edges or other lines. Such forces are common in the analysis of liquids in contact with gases, with solids, and with other liquids. There they are called surface tensions, and they represent the area-dependence of the interfacial interaction energies of different bulk phases. In the study of elastic continua, such forces are rarely important. I think that back around 1990, Mario Ancona of NRL did some work on this kind of force, and that was only in an application of continuum mechanics as a semi-empirical ``jellium'' approximation to quantum mechanics. He sent me a preprint to look over, and I wrote back praising his use of the plural ``jellia.'' But maybe the extra force involved torsion rather than edges. Hey, I only said ``I'd like to go back'' and tie up the loose end.
The term corundum only sounds like Latin. The mineral is found in Sri Lanka [new improved postcolonial name for Ceylon] and parts of India, and its name in English comes from the Tamil (i.e.: not IE) word _kuruntam_. Ruby is red gem-quality corundum. Sapphires are gem-quality corundum in any other color.
It does seem rather scientific, but it's not indexed by the ISI Web of Science (not even in its Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Citation indices). The journal doesn't have a source code either. Ditto for Biological Abstracts and MedLine. But it hasn't been entirely shunned. The following quote is taken from an article in Sexual Behaviour in Canada: Patterns and Problems, ed. Benjamin Schlesinger (University of Toronto Press, 1977):
Writing for Cosmopolitan Magazine, Dr. David Reuben deals with the myth of sexless old age and sets out his three criteria for active, enjoyable sex in the later years.
Reuben's article is ``13 Sex Myths Laid to Rest'' (is that the same as putting them to bed?); it's in the April 1971 issue. Masters and Johnson (the Masters and Johnson: William H. and Virginia E.) are quoted from a December 1970 Playboy interview. Cosmo used to be regarded as a sort of women's Playboy, before that market niche got cluttered with things like Playgirl, and before Playboy got major competition. The title of the Masters and Johnson interview was ``Ten Sex Myths Exploded.''
Interestingly allusive word, exploded. It reminds me of the time I visited the Scientology storefront on Hollywood Boulevard for a free psychological screening that would discover (correctly) that I was an emotional mess and recommend that I join their group to get my head straight. You know, like Tom Cruise. Anyway, they had a good-cop/bad-cop routine, as it's called in another context, with the bad cop first (standard MO). The bad cop met you in a private booth and explained the sorry results of your psychological test (one of those fill-in-the-ovals machine-graded things). I wasn't impressed with his analysis, and the meeting turned into a dialogue. In the course of it, I pointed out that his cigarette could be regarded as a phallic symbol. (Yes, in those days you were allowed to smoke a cigarette in California.) The emotional health professional countered that no, he thought of it as symbolic of a volcano. I might have said ``oh, that's different!'' but some moments are too precious, and I'm glad I had the presence of mind not to gild that lily. Alas, he must have written me off; I didn't win a trip to a good-cop booth, though I did get to breathe again.
Perhaps I should clarify that this Dr. Reuben has nothing to do with healthful corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches. Rather, he's the fellow who published a famous very-long-titled book about sex in 1969 (details and full title at the TTBOMKAB entry), also cited in that article in the scholarly Canadian sex tome. The article was ``Sexuality and the aged: taboos and misconceptions must give way to reality.'' (``Misconceptions''! Good one! ``Myths'' was becoming hackneyed.) It was by Schlesinger and Richard Albert Mullen, reprinted from Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, vol. 3, #11 (November 1973), pp. 44-53.
Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.
I've noticed versions of this line elsewhere (with others than cosmologists). I guess it's an international proverb template.
``[A]n advocacy organization supported by more than 100 professional associations, scientific societies, universities and research institutions. COSSA stands alone in representing the full range of social scientists.''
I knew the social ``sciences'' were in trouble.
Cf. National Humanities Alliance (NHA), corresponding advocacy organization for humanities.
They have an office on K street (in Washington, DC). Their original homepage was at an AOL location that we will leave tactfully undisclosed. One day in his campaign for president, Adlai Stevenson crossed his legs on a podium and revealed (stop that! I know what you were thinking!) a hole worn through the sole of his shoe. Eisenhower won handily, and for a long time a shoe with a hole worn in the sole (you'll have to figure out the sense of worn here) was called a ``Stevenson shoe.''
This organization was obviously at the end of the line when they were giving out acronyms. Say what you will, but any American legislators stupid enough to suggest such an honest name for any proposal would be punished so severely that you could never again see them on C-SPAN any time before 3:30 AM. Cf. COBRA.
He put together his first album, ``My Aim Is True'' by taking sick days away from his computer programming job. That classic album, as well as the next two (``This Year's Model,'' and ``Armed Forces'') are being rereleased by Rhino Records, a division of Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner, which used to be Time Warner) to coincide with the release of Costello's 2002 album, ``When I Was Cruel.'' I learned about it in an interview published at CNN.com, a division of Time Warner. The interview concludes
... He expects little from commercial radio.``[Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business,'' Costello says. ``So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.''
Under Queen Elizabeth (the first, or now the First), Parliament passed a famous act limiting the building of houses without at least four acres of land. The law's title was ``An Act against the erecting and maintaining of cottages.'' From that time until around the middle of the eighteenth century, a cottage was a house or hovel with less than four acres of land (whether that land was enclosed or allocated as strips in the common fields). There were exceptions for the dwellings of gamekeepers and seafaring people, but most cottagers were ``housed beggars'' (in the words of Francis Bacon). The law was finally repealed in 1775.
[The original act was passed in 1589 (the 31st year of Elizabeth's reign) and modified near the end of her reign by the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor. I haven't read the original law, but I assume the land restrictions did not apply to domiciles within any ``City, Town or Place Corporate'' in the language of the 1601 act. There were also similarly-intended measures for limiting construction in London, described by M.D. George in London Life, pp. 66-72.]
I'm reminded of the observation Plainville, USA, that people (in that early twentieth-century rural Midwestern town) clung to the land: even people who lived in town and had substantial income from a nonfarm profession (like teachers, and the doctor) tried to keep a plot of land going on the side.
In August 2003, Johannas Pope died at the age of 61. She had told her live-in caregiver ``Don't show my body when I'm dead. Don't bury me. I'm coming back.'' So (I think that's the proper connective), after she died, her caregiver left her sitting in a chair in front of the TV set, like an updated Momma Bates, in an upstairs room of her home in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. She was dressed in white, which is possibly one of the few appropriate aspects of the story. The caregiver came in regularly and did, apparently, whatever she thought was necessary, which included turning on the TV occasionally and swatting away flies. The caregiver, a woman in her forties, was encouraged by the apparent regeneration of her nose and an ear. When the case eventually came to light, the coroner speculated that the ``regeneration'' was an illusion created by the appearance of the face when it was covered with maggots. You know, this is just a little bit too intense. Why don't you amuse yourself reading the next paragraph, while I run off for an urgent visit to the nearest bucket, okay?
There's a magazine called Veggie Life ``with more than 100 full-color pages of tips, techniques, and delicious recipes,'' but we don't have an entry for it. Try the NAVS entry instead.
Ahhh. Okay, I'm back. Initial reports were somewhat unclear about how regularly the house was inhabited by the living, but it seems that Pope's daughter and three-year-old granddaughter, and the caretaker, all lived on the first floor. Pope's upstairs room had a window-mounted air conditioner, and this was left on. You have to wonder about their electric bills. Finally in December 2005, the air conditioner succeeded its owner in death, and according to Hamilton County Coroner Dr. O'Dell Owens, ``standing outside, one could smell death.'' (Dr. Owens is the source for this entry of all quotes and medical speculations regarding the case.)
At least four other relatives apparently knew about Ms. Pope's non-departure departure, but not all. Police had been asking after Pope's whereabouts around the neighborhood in fall 2005, and you have to wonder why they didn't focus on her house. In any case, a relative who hadn't seen Pope in years called police in January 2006, and this apparently prompted a visit to the house on January 4, and the discovery of her body, or what was left of it. The coroner believed that the air conditioner had allowed the body to mummify. I don't know if ``mummify'' is really the right word for the process, but the word does conjure associations with vaguely similar ancient Egyptian attitudes to death. The coroner's office was attempting to determine the cause of death, but as of the January 9 press conference, it looked like it was going to be difficult because very little organ tissue was left.
Look, I don't really care about those cats. The previous paragraph was just due diligence. The point of this entry is that ``older'' women who seek romantic relationships (or romance-optional sexual relationships) with men significantly younger than themselves are described by the names of cats. The most general term is apparently cougar. More specific terms are jaguars (women over 50), cougars (restricted in its narrower sense to women between 40 and 50), and pumas (women under 40). (Among felids, pumas are cougars, so there's one difference between women and cats.) Those seem to be the most common age ranges; the next-most common definitions differ in lowering the age dividing pumas from cougars to 35 or so.
The general term for the partners of cougars (in the general sense) is ``boy toys.'' However, when I was 25, the woman I was dating and I happened to get into a discussion of ages, and learned each other's ages. It turned out that-- oh, I just realized I told this story elsewhere in the glossary. Never mind. Actually, not just that story but other stuff relevant to ``cougars'' can be found under Door Slam Method, Car.
The newsgroup rec.food.chocolate has an faq. Go on, you can't resist. Just read a little bit. Also visit TOP 20 Reasons Chocolate Is Better Than Sex.
Sex and death -- this is beginning to resemble a Woody Allen film.
There is no recorded instance that the compiler of this glossary is aware of, in which ``courtly love'' has been confused with Courtney Love, despite the obvious similarities, if any.
The term (l'amour courtois) was introduced by Gaston Paris in ``Études sur les romans de la table ronde,'' Romania, 10, pp. 465-96 (1881), specifically on p. 478; although he intimated its meaning in that article, he gave a full definition in the context of the love of Guenevere and Lancelot, in ``Études sur les romans de la table ronde: Lancelot du Lac,'' Romania, 12, pp. 459-534 (1881). Soon a major industry sprang up to study this idea to death, and eventually the term entered mass consciousness. One authoritative treatment is Clive Staples Lewis: The Allegory of Love; A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1936). (Yes, that C. S. Lewis.) (Yes really, that's a semicolon in the title. What did you expect?)
I imagine that you've probably read down this far through dry citations in some foreign language, all in the hope of encountering one of my brilliant humorous mots, which would make it all worthwhile somehow. Well, here's the punch line: the joke's on you! There is no joke, sucker.
The director of ``US vs. Larry Flynt'' or whatever it was called, sought a newcomer, a fresh new face, not a professional actress, for the rôle of Flynt's wife. He sought advice from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, who recommended Courtney Love and was promptly hospitalized.
Man Under is a variant of Cover 2 that looks similar before the snap, but the five underneath defenders play man-to-man on the five eligible receivers. One advantage of Man Under is that it can be used as a change-up, if the offense has been led to expect Cover-2 and has made offensive adjustments for zone coverage.
It happens that over the years of domestic breeding, cattle have had most of the intelligence bred out of them. This may be convenient for some purposes, but it has reached the point where it has made their grazing habits pretty indiscriminate, and they scarf up scraps of metal along with the more nutritious browse. (N.B., we're not talking about BSE-afflicted cows here, just your ordinary ruminant of average-for-a-cow but still stupefiedly low intelligence.) Too much of this, and cows can develop ``hardware disease.''
Treatment is to feed the afflicted cow or bull a strong little bar magnet -- a couple of inches long, no sharp edges -- which clumps together all the metal (nails, bits of barbed wire) in the leathery first stomach (rumen), so it doesn't get to the downstream, more easily perforated parts of the GI tract. You launch the magnet into the animal's mouth with the same device normally used for pills. The person who told me about this is probably grateful that I have left his name (i.e., Craig's name) out of the entry.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has been running a California condor recovery program since 1975. A landmark achievement of this effort occurred in Spring 2002 when, for the first time in eighteen years, California condor chicks hatched in the wild. The three chicks (from five eggs laid in the wild by five breeding pairs of rereleased condors) survived the Summer. They were at the point of fledging the following autumn when they all mysteriously died. A necropsy of one found that its digestive tract was crammed with glass chunks and various metal objects -- electrical connectors, washers, half a dozen bottle caps. Condor program coordinator Bruce Palmer explained that ``Condors are very curious. They eat bone chips and gravel or anything that looks different.'' You know, it's not as if the birds nested on garbage dumpsters. The pairs nested in caves in remote mountain wilderness areas around the Los Padres (apt name there) National Forest in southern California. The litter is apparently quite old junk, and officials think it was already in the nest areas when the chicks were hatched. They might have been collected by previous generations of condors (who didn't eat it?) or by ravens. They're thinking of sweeping out the nesting areas.
[Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet, with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal.There is also a folk-etymological note that ``[s]ome people believe this was coined by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.''
Scott Adams, in Dilbert Newsletter 17, relates the tale of a cow orker who was offended by messages she was being sent marked FYI:
I KNOW what the 'FY' stands for. What does the 'I' stand for? ENORMOUSLY?
The Dilbert Newsletter is the official publication of the DNRC.
Thanks to a Canadian informant, we are able to give you all the juicy details: Traditionally the abbreviation was CPR. In the 1960's they decided to emphasize their nature as a multi-modal transportation company and adopted ``CP'' for the whole and ``CP Rail,'', ``CP Air,'' ``CP Ships,'' etc. for the parts. This had the further advantage that ``CP Rail'' works in French, as Rail is the same and CP can be Canadien Pacifique. Today CP Air is gone, and the railway and company may have different names, but CP is what you see in big letters on the side of the cars.
No! No! That's so passée. So yesterday. Now the hot spot is hp.
I see definite comic possibilities here.
You know, I've been trying to figure out where to put some information that I might want later, that I probably wouldn't find under its own name (because I couldn't remember it). I give up. I'm gonna drop it here.
Librería Paidós is an Argentine bookstore dedicated to ``la psicología y el psicoanálisis.'' I'll come back and fix this just as soon as I can get that translated. If I remember where I put the entry. 18000 books -- that's crazy! (043120 books -- that's octal.)
Yaaaawn. I don't have anything to add here. Why don't you visit the AICPA entry?
In principle, the (macroscopic) properties of an alloy or other microscopically disordered system are best found by computing the properties of a randomly chosen system which is microscopically disordered. If the system is ``self-averaging,'' then the macroscopic properties of all large enough systems are indistinguishable, and any randomly chosen system will do for calculational purposes. (If the system is not self-averaging -- i.e. if the measured properties of the system vary from sample to identically prepared sample -- then one needs more information about the microscopic configuration than that it is randomly selected: the selection matters.)
It is difficult in formal work to specify a single random system, and a single random system that is large, however chosen, has little symmetry and is therefore hard to compute the properties of. To overcome these two difficulties, it is usually much more convenient to compute the average properties of the whole ensemble (all possible microscopically random configurations, appropriately weighted). For a self-averaging system, by definition, this averaging process yields the same macroscopic predictions as would be found in the limit of a very large single sample (typical single element of the ensemble).
Although it would seem that averaging over an infinite or large ensemble is more work than computing the properties of a single configuration, in practice it usually is not. The reason is that symmetry, particularly translation symmetry, is an almost indispensable crutch of theory. One may think of the process of computing macroscopic properties as being a kind of multiple integration (or summation). In principle as the problem is set up, there is an integration which corresponds to computing a macroscopic property from microscopic configuration (concretely, this may be thought of as integrating a differential equation like the Schrödinger equation, although the situation is usually rather more involved). A further integration is introduced by the ensemble average. The initial integration is difficult to do immediately, because the integrand is essentially random. The great advantage of ensemble averaging is that it's sometimes possible to perform a kind of interchange of order of integration: one may be able to average over the distribution first, and then perform the ``integration'' that yields macroscopic properties. In this order-of-integration-switched approach, the integrand for the properties evaluation now may have enough symmetry to make the problem computationally tractable.
[I haven't described CPA yet; more later.]
In 2004, about a seventh of its revenues came from the US government. If I understand correctly (and budgets are not models of clarity) the Bush administration request for FY2004 proposed to slash CPB funding to $80 million from its $365 million appropriation for FY2003. Never mind the merits of this proposal; the interesting thing is, this helps put the budget request closer to balance by $285 million. That's in principle. In reality, there was a negligible chance that the budget would be thus slashed (the eventual budget appropriated about $380 million).
The CPC has over eight million distinctive orange pallets in circulation as of 2002. ``The Canadian Pallet Council is a non-profit organization which sponsors the CPC pallet. The CPC system was established in 1977. It is now recognised throughout the world for providing a low cost industry wide pallet interchange system for its members. Although based in Canada, the CPC has members in Canada, the U.S.A. and Europe. Members include: suppliers and manufacturers; distributors and wholesalers; public warehouses; transport carriers; and pallet manufacture, repair, rental and retrieval companies. More and more pallet users are taking advantage of our cost effective system based on the ownership and rental of pallets.''
``The Communist Party of Canada is the Marxist-Leninist party of the working class dedicated to the cause of socialism.''
Not to be confused with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) [abbreviated CPC(M-L)].
The CPC(M-L) is widely supposed to have started as a splinter group out of the CPC. I've been informed that it was begun independently. I just had a very liberating thought: I don't care.
Also expanded Continuous Professional Development by people who haven't considered that some time might be set aside for other things.
George Bernard Shaw's ``Man and Superman'' has an appendix of ``Maxims for Revolutionists'' that includes
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
(The usual expression now is ``those who can't do, teach.'') Although I am a teacher myself, I can set aside my personal feelings and inform you quite authoritatively that this is grossly unfair and untrue! However, out of some dangerous compulsion to pass along inaccurate information, I must also say (or write, or impress upon the keyboard) that there are extended versions of this, such as (probably Woody Allen's)
Those who can't do, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach gym.
This is funny (particularly when you consider Woody Allen's physique) but it misses or corrupts the point of the original: if you can't do, then you probably don't know, and hence probably can't teach. (Unless it's something whose doing is not a matter of knowing, in which case, if you can't do, then you can't demonstrate, and hence still can't teach.)
Today I received some spam for a CPD management product. The final lap of the first sentence reads
``necessary for the execution of professional and associated technical duties throughout ones [sic] working life.''
Sentence two holds out the hope of an
``opportunity for personal progression.''
This probably means that you get to take a walk. Exercise! Just like gym.
The CPI is widely believed to overstate, and even contribute to, inflation, because the index ignores the most fundamental market realities:
That's how the price of goods is established for the purposes of CPI computation. They are not ``quality-adjusted.'' In 1984 or '85 I bought my first computer; an ATT 6300 (8086 processor, two 5.25 in. floppies, 640k RAM) for $2K. If I buy another computer for $2K in 2004, a laptop with a pentium running a clock rate at what used to be called microwave frequencies, and all the standard bells and whistles, the CPI figures that there has been zero net inflation, whereas in reality there has been more like 99% deflation. Examples can be multiplied.
And it's the same basket all the time. Fruit out of season, buy yellow corn in February. Washington's birthday white sales coming up? Never mind, I need new sheets today. In principle, the buying on-sale ought to average out and only lower the price index but not affect the rate of inflation computed. Still, this is usually listed as a reason that the CPI overestimates inflation, and here I have too.
The overestimate resulting (at least from the lack of ``quality adjustment'') is variously estimated to be a percentage point, or maybe a third of the stated inflation rate (or half, as of 1999-2000). Because many transfer payments are indexed to the CPI, the over-estimate in the CPI increases transfer payments disproportionately, to say nothing of spooking the Fed, whose chairman claims to know better. Of course, since the CPI is used to correct all dollar figures for inflation, an error in this figure creates errors in all others.
Vide COLA.
The core CPI is the CPI computed on everything except the ``volatile'' food and fuel components. What counts as a quality improvement in food? As far as economists can quantify, a quality improvement is something you'd be willing to pay more for, or take more of at the same price. So New! Sour-sweets! are a quality improvement over plain old Sour-sweets!, if the advertising works.
Computed annually for many countries by Transparency International (TI).
... CPL is the name of a rather large (for its time) and elegant programming language developed jointly by the universities of Cambridge and London. Before the London people joined the project "C" stood for Cambridge. Later, "C" officially stood for Combined. Unofficially, "C" stood for Christopher because Christopher Strachey was the main power behind CPL.
The first published description of the language, afaik, was this article: ``The main features of CPL,'' by D.W. Barron, J.N. Buxton, D.F. Hartley, E. Nixon, and C. Strachey, in The Computer Journal, vol. 6, #2, pp. 134-143 (1963). CPL was at that time ``being implemented for the Titan at Cambridge and the Atlas at London University,'' and this was an informal account of the new language. [Mythologically, of course, Atlas was one of the Titans. All I know about these computers is what is written in the article, which includes this: ``In those features which affect the language (e.g. word length and arithmetic facilities) these two machines are identical....'']
According to the article, CPL was developed ``to produce a language which could be used for all types of problem, numerical and non-numerical, and [which] would allow programmers to exploit all the facilities of a large and powerful computer without having to `escape' into machine code.'' In my limited experience, the stated aims of those who create a new programming language are not well correlated with the ultimate role they serve. Ultimately, the importance of CPL was as an ancestor of C. For a short summary of the genealogy, see our ALGOL entry.
Here is what the article abstract says about the relationship between CPL and ALGOL:
CPL is based on, and contains the concepts of, ALGOL 60. In addition there are extended data descriptions, command and expression structures, provision for manipulating non-numerical objects, and comprehensive input-output facilities. However, CPL is not just another proposal for the extension of ALGOL 60, but has been designed from first principles and has a logically coherent structure.
One insufficiently anticipated problem for CPL was the uneasy coexistence of recursive procedure declarations with side effects. There was apparently some difficulty assuring that the side effect occurred only once, rather than each time the procedure recursed. Maybe that should be ``accursed.''
See the comp.os.cpm newsgroup, where an faq appears regularly, as well as the FILES listing from TCJ.
For a top-of-page banner, 400x40 to 468x60 pixels (file-size up to about 15K), rates range from half to five cents a hit -- i.e., $1 CPM to $50 CPM, depending on the demographic that the content-provider pulls in. Smaller ads are cheaper (duh). Run-of-site banners also get lower rates, since the same ad seen a second time by the same set of eyeballs presumably makes a less profitable impression.
This kind of advertising is where the money comes from for click-to-donate sites like the Hunger Site (the original, from June 1999) and <4GoodnessSake.org> (Goodness! It's 2008 and the hunger site hasn't yet starved to death from lack of attention. But it's way slow.)
See also CTR.
CPR came out with a double CD (Live at the Wiltern) in September 1999 (it included some of the debut album material, plus covers of ``Eight Miles High,'' ``Almost Cut My Hair,'' ``(Four Dead In) Ohio,'' etc.) I've seen the reasonable suggestion that CPR is a pun referring to therapy for the heart, but I haven't seen it officially and I don't care to check. I just had a big meal and I feel sluggish. This entry is only here at all because the group's third release, another studio album that came out in June 2001, was entitled Just Like Gravity (the same as the twelfth and final track). The thing that is locally just like gravity is acceleration. A full stomach is more like an increase in the gravitational constant. The thing that is just like gravity in the song is the lyrics. Heavy, man. Oh yeah, and sexual attraction at a distance. Fat hippies don't age very gracefully, and disconnected lyrics that sounded deep and allusive in 1969 just sound disconnected in 2006. You wonder if these people ever read any decent poetry in their whole lives, just to have an idea of what lyrics could be.
This official profile concludes, ``CPR creates echoes with every listening, because the heart has a memory of its own.'' Awwwww. If (whichever) memory serves, Crosby is currently out of jail.
The five universities are (with CPRE links) University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Pennsylvania, and (general links) Stanford University, University of Michigan, Harvard University.
The CPSC is headed by a three-member commission headed by a chairman. In July 2006, chairman Hal Stratton left the commission and Nancy A. Nord, the vice chairman, became acting chairman. The CPSC is allowed to function with just two commissioners for only six months, so as of January 2007 the ``temporary quorum'' expired and the commission was no longer able to vote on new federal rules or civil penalties.
At the beginning of March 2007, President George W. Bush nominated Michael E. Baroody to head the CPSC. Baroody had served as assistant secretary of policy in the Labor Department during the Reagan administration. More immediately interesting was the fact that because at the time of his nomination, he was executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). As of June 2007, he still was. In the face of strong Democratic opposition, Baroody withdrew the day before his scheduled May 24 appearance before a Senate confirmation panel. Senators had planned to ask him, among other things, about how he might handle possible conflicts of interest in dealing with the NAM. It may be that in legal terms, Baroody would have had no conflict of interest had he become CPSC chairman. Still, did the Bush administration really expect this to fly? It's possible to interpret this nomination as a roundabout way of extending the CPSC's commissions no-quorum period.
In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona ran for President of the US on the Republican ticket and a conservative platform, and lost in a landslide. In 1996, he noted that ``we're now the liberal wing of the Republican Party, can you imagine that!'' [This is pretty close; I'm working from memory here.] The CP-USA platform, to judge from what they say online, is now where the center of the Democratic party used to be. Of course, the left of the Democratic party may have drifted off in a different direction.
Relevance is hard to dissimulate.
Pre-vocational education must be British for vocational education (Amer.), as postgraduate education is British for graduate education.
In Summer 1941, research into the design of a nuclear reactor was begun at Columbia University, by a group led by Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn. In December of that year (pause and think: what happened in early December 1941?) the uranium project was reorganized under the OSRD, and the decision made to concentrate research at a ``Metallurgical Laboratory'' to be headed by Arthur H. Compton at the University of Chicago. Columbia and Princeton University groups were transferred there early in 1942.
Prior to the construction of CP-1, some 30 subcritical experimental piles were made to measure parasitic absorption rates and other parameters. The modules to be used in CP-1 were long blocks of graphite, each holding two cylinders (approximately fist-size ``pellets'') of uranium oxide. As designed, they could be arrayed in a dense configuration that located the pellets in a cubic lattice (Fermi and Leo Szilard's proposal), the overall shape of the pile being approximately spherical to minimize surface leakage. By July the necessary measurements had been performed with accuracy sufficient to determine the dimensions of CP-1, and the dimensions die was cast, so to speak, when dies for pressing uranium oxide pellets were ordered to be made from Zinn's design at that time.
Under the direction of Fermi, construction of CP-1 began on November 15. Two ``construction'' crews, one each under Zinn and Herbert L. Anderson, worked nearly round-the-clock to machine graphite blocks and press pellets. Instrument work was led by Valney C. Wilson (``Bill Wilson''). [When the reactor was being designed, uranium metal of adequate purity was not available. Usable amounts had begun to arrive in early November and in the tons by mid-November. It was placed at the center of the pile.]
Measurements were taken as the pile grew, and Fermi fine-tuned his estimates of when criticality would be achieved. The pile was completed at 4:00 pm on December 1, and as Fermi had predicted, activity rates with the control rods in indicated that the reaction would be self-sustaining with the rods withdrawn. The next day, with some theatricality appropriate to the momentous nature of the occasion, Fermi methodically demonstrated the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Our Martinmas entry mentions one way that the news was transmitted. The SCRAM entry mentions an enduring detail of the CP-1 construction.
CQD is -.-. --.- -..
There's no period at the end of the previous line. Those are two dits.
National Semiconductor publishes some description and specs on the web. Their illustration is at right.
National Semiconductor publishes some description and specs on the web. Their illustration is at right.
B. Deveaud, A. Chomette, A. Regreny, J.-L. Oudar, D. Hulin and
A. Antonetti, pp. 101ff, in
High Speed Electronics, edited by B. Källbäck and H. Beneking
(Springer Verlag, 1986).
Y. J. Chen, E. S. Koteles, B. S. Elman and C. A. Armiento,
PRB 36, 4562 (1987).
R. Sauer, K. Thonke, and W. T. Tsang,
PRL 61, 609 (1988).
When ASCII was created, the separate actions of carriage return and line feed were given separate codes, but their historic and natural connection led to conflicting conventions. Unix text files indicate the end of a line by a single <LF> (ASCII 10 or CTRL-J; indicated by the escape \n in many programming languages). MS-DOS and Windows indicate the end of a line by <CR><LF>. AIUI, these are the only two options approved by industry standards bodies. Apple text files indicate the end of a line with a single <CR> (ASCII 13 or CTRL-M; indicated by the escape \r in many programming languages).
Even before electronic keyboards, there were key-punch machines. These would perforate standardized data cards, using one column of hole positions per character. At the end of a line, or whenever one was done with data entry on a card, one did not ``return'' to the beginning -- at least not of the same card. The key that released the current card and loaded the next card for data entry was labeled by the word ``enter.'' In that position on the keyboard, it survived as the variously labeled ``return'' or ``enter'' key on electronic keyboards.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
``Founded in 1886, The Classical Review publishes reviews of new work with the literatures and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Over three hundred books are reviewed each year, the full-length reviews being followed by shorter notices of less important works. It can be regarded as a companion to The Classical Quarterly [CQ].'' The CA also publishes a journal abbreviated G&R that even peons such as yourself may aspire to comprehend.
According to a 17 April 2002 article by Norman Lebrecht for This is London (possibly still available online), conductors of classical music have the most fulfilling sex lives.
I thought that maybe C/R referred to an electric power conductor, like a live rail or something. In any profession, people develop their own terminology. We try to bring it all together in one place to confuse you.
One of the courses I took in high school was auto shop. At the beginning of class for a while, the teacher would go around the room (didn't I tell you this story already?) and ask us to call out the next step in doing tune-up work on the distributor. Since we sat in assigned seats and since he always called us in the same order, each one of us always got called for the same step. It wasn't a very effective teaching method, I think. Teaching auto shop was the career fast track at our high school; the next promotion was to assistant principal for discipline. We had a couple of Ph.D. chemists who after many years retired in the position of chemistry teachers. Dr. Hoffman's chemistry classroom and laboratory was above the auto shop. In Dr. Hoffman's Chem II class, I learned, or tried to learn, the rudiments of thermodynamics, and inorganic and organic reactions. Downstairs in Mr. I-forget-his-name's class, I learned, or tried to learn, that the next step was removing the condenser.
I had great difficulty with this. Mr. future-assistant-principal-in-charge-of-discipline would race around the class and get to the guy (me) who was supposed to say ``condenser'' and who would say ``cap,'' and he would say ``CONDENSER!'' It was a regular routine, like an ``I Love Lucy'' rerun. After two years of electronics shop, I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of calling a capacitor a ``condenser'' (a word that stopped being used in electric technology, by English speakers, not long after the invention of the gasoline-engine distributor). I guess the auto-shop teacher figured that I was just stupid enough to think that the third step after removing the distributor cap was to remove the distributor cap again. All my friends in Calculus class wondered why I didn't get into the National Honor Society (NHS).
A kid I know went to the same school a couple of years after I left; he told me that it had become dangerous to use the bathrooms (except perhaps for dealing drugs). I guess the auto shop teacher got promoted.
I seem to get into a lot of trouble trying to make fine distinctions or give precise definitions of cooked fatty products. For example, as I now explain at the Schmaltz entry, I originally defined that term too narrowly. Similarly, though I had been led to understand that there was some subtle distinction between the mass noun crackling and the plural-form mass noun cracklings, it seems I may have been misinformed. Anyway, read the cracklings entry.
Here's what Snack Food Technology has to say (p. 223; bibl. details at snack food entry) first about POPPED PORK RINDS.
Popped pork rinds, sometimes called bacon skins or ``skeens,'' have been popular as a between-meal snack in the [American] South for many years. They appear to have originated as an improvement on cracklings, or the crisp and somewhat expanded meaty tissue that is found in the kettle after lard has been rendered from pork fat. ``Cracklins'' have been used as a snack by farm people for hundreds of years, and also are used as adjuncts to give variety to corn bread and some other foods.Popped pork rinds represent a considerable technological advance over the very non-uniform, hard, and often distasteful predecessor snack. [I never imagined that I would live to see the day when the words predecessor and snack would appear together like that outside of a Dadaist restraurant review.] Distribution has spread to other parts of the country and the product can be found in most areas at the present time. In simplest terms, these products are pieces of pork skins that have been [coooooooked] so that they puff to many times their original volume lose most of their moisture. Their flavor is fairly bland and reflects the character of the fat in which they were cooked.
The AFL was originally primarily a craft union organization, while the CIO was the quintessential (and eponymous) national organization for industrial unions.
In Spanish, a necktie is a corbata. That word and cravat come from the French cravate, from Crabate, Cravate, meaning `Croatian.'
Since the launch of the Great Society programs by President Johnson and Congress in the 1960s, many thousands of nonprofit advocacy groups have emerged, often promoting more government welfare programs in areas once considered the domain of families, charities, neighborhood associations, and other voluntary organizations. The growth of government has increasingly supplanted the voluntary action and community-based problem solving that the great observer of early American society, Alexis de Toqueville, recognized as a defining feature of our country.
Capital Research Center is analyzing organizations that promote the growth of the welfare state - now almost universally recognized as a failure - and in identifying viable private alternatives to government welfare programs. Our research forms the basis for a variety of publications.''
It's an antifoundation!
``The Cooperative Research Centres, generally known as CRCs, bring together researchers from universities, CSIRO and other government laboratories, and private industry or public sector agencies, in long-term collaborative arrangements which support research and development and education activities that achieve real outcomes of national economic and social significance.''
(As opposed to imaginary outcomes or real outcomes that have no economic or social significance. I'm glad they made that clear. There's more to say, or unsay, but bureaucratese is easy kills for a thinking reader.)
If they want to do something truly significant they should take the lead of the Carlsberg Research Center.
Back in 1985 or so, when I was working at NRL, I would remind people of our weekly beer meeting by posting a clipping from the Weekly World News, a periodical that I could still afford in those days. Often the clipping would suggest a topic of conversation, such as what we should do about the Martian invasion. One time I posted an item about golfer Greg Norman (at the top of the golf world in those days), who was diagnosed with an allergy to grass, of all things. As he told reporters, however, ``it could be worse -- I might be allergic to beer.''
I've been able to confirm this story on the internet, but I have no evidence that it is true. Here's something, though: on June 15, 1986, when the final round of the US Open began, Greg Norman was in the lead and Raymond Floyd was three strokes back, in a five-way tie for fifth place. At the end of the day (Father's Day, appropriately enough), Floyd had become the oldest player, at 43, ever to win the US Open. (Earlier that year, Jack Nicklaus won the Masters at 46, and Bill Shoemaker rode the Kentucky Derby winner at age 54. I became a ``senior research analyst.'') Here's part of the Thomas Boswell's report in the Washington Post the next day:
Almost nobody gets the sort of Open chance that Norman squandered. At the turn Friday, he led by five shots. Saturday at the turn, he had four in hand. Both times, he'd reached 3 under par. He ended the tournament tied for 12th (behind Nicklaus, whose 68 copped a share of eighth place) as he played the last 27 holes 8 over par."I couldn't get the flame going today," Norman said. "I did everything I could possibly do to fire myself up, but I couldn't light the wick . . . This has happened to me a few times, but never when I was in contention . . . all of a sudden, the party was over . . . I had a good margin both days and didn't really capitalize on it . . . There were no hecklers today. I might have done better if there had been . . . I don't know how much more determined I can get . . .
"I lost it and he won it."
Rumors of death threats against both Norman and Trevino buzzed around the course but were not confirmed. Norman heard them and asked Trevino about it, but finally assumed that the day's double security was standard Sunday practice at the Open. "No excuses," said Norman. "Gotta go get a beer."
On June 1, 1984, Boswell described Norman (the ``Great White Shark of Golf'') as ``an Australian who used to take rifle and beer to sea to hunt sharks as a lark...'' Everyone should have a Boswell.
It's not an NGO; it's a government agency.
TNR published an article by Bruce Bliven for June 27, 1927, entitled ``In Dedham Jail: A Visit to Sacco and Vanzetti,'' based on an interview conducted four weeks before the men were to be executed. (Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were eventually executed on August 23, two days after Supreme Court Justice Brandeis refused to hear a request for a stay of execution, exhausting their appeals.) It's a rather atmospheric article, reflective almost to avoid sounding lugubrious. Bliven's description of the prisoners at Dedham includes the following: ``These men wear trousers of gray stuff, uncouthly cylindrical--since they never have been pressed and never will be--and gray-and-white-striped shirts, cheap and coarse.''
Evolution is not a species'
adjustment to a new environment but one's memories'
triumph over reality...
I wish this entry were more preposterous.
Rosario here is the name of an Argentine city. Generally, rosario means `rosary' and Rosario is a woman's name.
High stress and high-stress cycling are said to cause creep behavior even in high-temperature materials (HTM's). I can sympathize, but I don't think this justifies changing physical laws.
CREN supports ListProc, a mailing list program (and certifies that ListProc versions 7.2 and above are Y2K compliant).
FWIW, the King made a movie called King Creole in 1958. If you stare a while at the silhouette background of the poster at the right (i.e., at the r.h.s. of this browser window) you realize that it represents a close-up of crawdaddy.
By extension, crescendo is used to describe a process in which growth is perceived. Again please observe: a crescendo leads to a climax, a climax is the culmination of a crescendo. A crescendo and a climax are different things, and even you are capable of perceiving the distinction.
Thank you.
Cricket is best described as organised loafing.
How better to loaf than browsing the internet? Cricket is played on and around a pitch. Or maybe just on and over the pitch. I really don't have the time to find out.
A cricket bat doesn't makes as good of a shovel as an oar does, but why waste a good oar? (Then again, there are the events of 1919.)
For an interesting discussion on cricket, search on the word in this corner of the archives of the classics list, naturally.
Rosario here is the name of an Argentine city. Generally, rosario means `rosary' and Rosario is a woman's name. Oh wait, I didn't have to mention that -- you already learned it when you read the CREATS entry. Sorry, please unread it. Also, see the LONERS entry to understand why this is a slightly counterintuitive woman's name.
Oh wait, I've got it: it's ostentatious chin-scratching.
too many creatures
both insects and humans
estimate their own value
by the amount of minor irritation
thay are able to cause
to greater personalities than themselves
Center for Research Libraries. [Remember: to quit (Q) you have to return to the new search screen.] Based in Chicago.
``Reproductive rights'' are the rights to prevent oneself from reproducing, and ``reproduction rights'' are the rights to prevent others from reproducing. There ought to be a Center for Abortion and Copyright Law (CACL).
At the ragtop entry, I describe an incident that took place on the westbound side of the intersection of Douglas Road and Route 23, back in 1999, I think. That's not a good place to cross anything. Anyway, just a few hundred feet southwest (along 23) there's a goose crossing. It's sort of disused (by geese). It's at the same latitude as the goose crossing on Main Street in Mishawaka, just a couple of miles east. (More to the point, these crossings are near Juday Creek, a tributary to the St. Joseph River.)
You'd think it wouldn't be so much trouble, they could fly, but I've had to stop for geese a few times there. They looked Canadian; maybe it's a diplomatic immunity thing. (See also the weather entry.) You'd figure that would be an unusual collocation -- ``they-looked-Canadian'' -- and I'd guess you'd be right. As recently as May 2007, we owned the first ghit for the phrase. Weirdly enough, the phrase seems to be catching on. August 2009 we're down to third, and there are 465 ghits, including a 2002 book.
We also have a zebra stripes entry, but the zebra entry is more interesting. The crossing information at Berlin's entry (BE) is perhaps nicht so vernützlich as it once was.
What is really clever, however, is the exploitation of multiple connections to a single region of a device in the silicon. This can increase propagation delays, and take up some extra real estate, but if handled properly it can make tremendous short-cuts. An example of this would occur if contact needed to be made to the base of a BJT transistor and to a terminal beyond it. One way to complete these connects would be to put a trace to the base contact, and make a cross over to get past the transistor. A better way is often to make two base contacts, one on the near and one on the far side of the transistor. The trace extends as before to the base on the near side, but instead of a cross over to get around the transistor, the base material itself, within the transistor, makes a contact to the other side of the BJT, and a trace is continued to the further terminal.
Data cables carry data along multiple channels. For long-distance communication, it is most efficient to encode these channels as multiplexed signals on single physical media. For connecting to in-office peripheral devices, and over longer but still-short distances (as in LAN's) the mux/demux overhead is not worth the cost compared to using multiwire cables with parallel connectors. These cables are available with a range of (male) connectors, identical on each end.
Depending on the way the connectors are wired, the cables are designated ``crossover'' cables or ``straight-through'' cables. In a straight-through cable, the connectors are wired so that lead #1 on one end is connected through the cable to lead #1 on the other end. Lead #2 goes to lead #2, and, well, you probably get the idea. In a crossover cable, the connections cross over: the first lead on one connector is wired to the last lead on the connector at the other end, the second lead is wired to the last but one, etc.
Which kind of connector is used depends on the kind of devices being connected. These also fall into two categories:
Crossover connectors are used to connect ``like to like'' -- that is, one DTE to another DTE, or one DCE to another DCE. Straight-through cables connect unlike -- DTE and DCE on opposite ends. The only exception to this rule is that straight-through cables when connecting like devices through an uplink port.
Strictly speaking, and even in ordinary speech among engineers, the word noise above is incorrect; it is interference. See the noise entry.
Because of the cross-training effect (in humans), it is believed to be possible to accelerate healing of a sports injury -- without straining the injured limb -- by exercising healthy limbs.
Moreover, exercises that strengthen muscles not used in a sport have a spill-over effect on muscles that are used in the sport. Too-frequent exercise is known to be counterproductive in strength training, and this effect is seen as a way to circumvent the problem. Because of this application, the term cross training has increasingly come to refer simply to working out with exercises that work muscles not used in one's primary sport. By a false etymology, ``cross'' is understood to refer to different sports rather than different sides of the body, and cross training is understood as training for one sport by practicing another. Even more loosely, the term is used in business for the practice of training employees for more than one job.
The second annual conference was held on September 23-24, 2005, at Cal State Northridge. ``The purpose of the roundtable is to bring together philosophers of race [Thales: ``the principle of all race is water''], and those working in related fields, in California, and throughout the nation, in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline.''
Totally unrelated to the psychosocial comment: ``critical, resolved: sheer stress.''
Ensuring that Canadians get enough of Canada even when Céline Dion is away singing the US national anthem.
Certification Renewal Units are credits which may be applied toward license renewal only after earning a Master's degree, or after completion of thirty-six semester hours beyond the Bachelor's Degree of approved academic credit. Fifteen CRU's are considered equivalent to one semester hour, and any combination totalling six semester hours (90 CRU's) satisfies the requirement for renewal. A standard license for teaching, school administration, or school services (I don't know what sort of services) must be renewed every five years. A professional license is initially valid for ten years, but afterwards must be renewed every five years (90 CRU's a pop).
There's an exception to this: you can obtain a professional license valid for life (your life). To do this you must complete the requirements to obtain a professional license before September 1, 1990. I guess it's too late.
I'm not going to look up the details for California, but my cousin Vicky, who teaches in the public schools there, tells a similar story: get yourself grandfathered in, or you'll be on a Sisyphean treadmill for life. All so you can accept low wages to teach the stupid children of irresponsible, ungrateful parents. (Not her precise words.)
Oh yeah, back in Indiana -- CRU-land -- if you want the credits to be valid the program had better be pre-approved by the Division of Induction and Continuing Education. ``Induction''?
The Southern Cross is probably the best-known constellation of the far south. Later in the entry, there's more about the constellation proper, but first I want to record some substellar facts. Some signal facts, in fact. More or less stylized versions of the Southern Cross appear on the national flags of Western Samoa, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Australia. Likewise the flags of the Australian state of Victoria and of some of the Australian territories that have their own flag.
The Federated States of Micronesia has a flag comprising four five-pointed stars on a light blue background. The four stars are located on the corners of a diamond (an imaginary diamond -- the flag is just white stars and the background), and that diamond, taller than it is wide, looks like it represents the Southern Cross. (The FSM is at a latitude of about 5 degrees north, and the Southern Cross is at a declination of about minus 60 degrees, and so is about 25 degrees above the horizon at its zenith.) Officially, in any case, the four stars of the flag represent only the four states of the federation, and when the FSM had six states its flag bore six stars arranged on the corners of a hexagon.
[The precise interpretation of the stars has varied. The current Micronesia is a rump of the earlier (UN) Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (administered by the US), which also included the Northern Marianas, Palau, and the Marshall Islands in addition to the territory of the current federated states. If you do the math, as they say, it doesn't add up, as they say. What happened was that after the Northern Marianas seceded from the federation, a new state was carved out of one of the remaining states, restoring the number to six. Specifically, the Northern Marianas achieved commonwealth status outside the federation on April 1, 1976, leaving five states. In January 1977, the new state of Kosrae was formed from the eastern islands of Ponape. Maybe they decided that creating a new state was cheaper than printing new official stationery and replacing the flags. Palau and the Marshall Islands became independent of the FSM in 1978, and the four-star flag was adopted by 1980.]
The four brightest stars of Crux occur at the four points of the cross in clockwise order, starting from the southern point. The brightest is officially Alpha Crucis, of course, and also is known as Acrux for short. The name Gacrux is also sometimes used for Gamma Crucis (at the top of the cross). A ray from Gacrux through Acrux points approximately to the South Celestial Pole.
Epsilon Crucis is southwest from the center of the cross (i.e., in the lower right to an observer who is not too far south and is not bending over backwards to see it). It's within the diamond defined by the four brighter stars, and makes sort of an attractive dimple on the face of the constellation. Flag representations of the Southern Cross typically show five stars, although a few other stars of the constellation have apparent magnitudes not much less than Epsilon Crucis. The large sixth star of the Australian national flag, centered below the quarter-size Union Jack, is called the Federation Star and is meant to represent the federation of the colonies of Australia on January 1, 1901.
COMMENT: The FAQ reads like an ISO-9000 application that still needs work. ``2. A much-debated source of psychic information - defined as various things. ... Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) is a very highly controlled set of physical/mental protocols which allow a person to bring something which lies hidden within the subconscious mind to the surface, and objectify it.'' This could give psychoanalysis a bad name.
COMMENT: I agree that ``[t]his is far from being as easy as it sounds.''
The early forms had three strings. Interestingly, it evolved into a six-string version in which four strings were bowed and two were plucked.
There's a newsgroup.
Ooh, I hope you didn't miss this talk by Katherine Duthie at CSWIP 2005: ``Agency and Elective Caesarean Sections: Using Feminist Critiques as a Jumping Off Point.''
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Staples Center in Los Angeles, home of the Kings NHL team, Lakers NBA team, and other sports teams, is not named in tribute to C.S. Lewis.
Here's some old news that I'm permitted to quote because I credit it to Better Buyership, Use and Care, by Household Finance Corporation. (It's from p. 24 of the Fabrics booklet; look here for more about the Better Buyership Series.)
In the United States according to Federal Trade Commission Rulings regarding Shrinkage of Woven Cotton Merchandise [promulgated June 30, 1938], the words ``pre-shrunk,'' ``shrinkproof'' and the like when used must indicate that there is no remaining shrinkage left in the goods. If there is additional shrinkage left in the fabric the terms used should be qualified as: ``Pre-shrunk--will not shrink more than ------ per cent under commercial standard CS59-36.''
It's clear enough what they intended to mean, but some rewording would have improved the logic. The booklet was revised in January 1948. Possibly the rules have changed since then.
If I don't have stuff there now, eventually I will have stuff at the Czech Republic (.cz) and Slovakia (.sk) entries. On second thought, I'll probably hide the information in places you'd never think to look, like the Defenestration of Prague entry.
(Note that all this occurred before Lincoln took office. Until 1936, US presidential inaugurations took place on March 4.)
Jefferson Davis was selected president the next day (Feb. 5). The first official Confederate flag resembled the Union flag, except that it had only three bars (one white between two red) instead of thirteen stripes, and the canton had a circle of seven white stars (for the seven original seceding states) on a blue background. This was the ``Stars and Bars,'' and it was so similar to the Union flag that a very different battle flag was designed. This was the ``Southern Cross'' which most people today think of as ``the'' Confederate flag and which some people incorrectly call the ``Stars and Bars.'' Later in the war, the stars-and-bars was replaced as national flag by one that included the Southern Cross.
The cross bears thirteen stars, for the eleven states that seceded, plus two. The four additional seceding states were
The two other states were the border states of Kentucky and Missouri. In each of these states there were efforts to secede that were thwarted by Union occupation. They had representatives in the Confederate as well as the Union legislature, but they were effectively neutralized by occupation.
When I first wrote this entry (offhand, I can only say that was between 1995 and 2003), the president of CSB, from Paraguay, in his own person constituted just less than 2% of the CSB membership in his country (54 members, not a multiple of four). Now the president is from Uruguay. How do they expect me to keep my entries up-to-date if they keep changing presidents?!?
Of course, you expect musical presidential chairs in South America, but there are other changes. Colombia (i.e., the Colombian NBO, FEDEBRIDGE) was a member of the CACBF when I first wrote this entry, and now is a member of CSB. In late 2006, the CSB site also lists Venezuela as a member, but no Venezuelan players are listed in competition results, and the Venezuelan NBO (the FVB) is quite clear that Venezuela is part of the CACBF. (The CSB site also has a map showing much of Central America and the Caribbean as CSB territory.)
The membership numbers seem to fluctuate a bit too. When I first wrote this entry (again, whenever that was), more than half of CSB members were in Brazil. As of the end of 2005, according to a WBF page, there are 3,700 players in CSB. The two largest NBO's are Chile's (FCB) with 1,471 members, and Brazil's (FBB) with 990. Paraguay is up to 75.
The name of the South American zonal federation is normally given in (and may officially be) Spanish, but the acronym CSB works in Portuguese as well, demonstrating that acronyms advance i18n and build a bridge of amity and understanding between nations. Sorry.
The CSB's Paraguayan president had an address on a street called Estados Unidos (that is, United States Street, see EEUU). Now the Uruguayan president's name is Santiago (capital of Chile). The CSB's delegate to the WBF is and was Brazilian. Have I bored you out of your mind yet?
I suppose one should let sleeping dogs lie, but a datum that really begs to be included in this entry is the fact that Paraguay fought the ``War of the Triple Alliance'' (1865-1870) against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. It looks like West was the dummy.
Paraguay lost a chunk of its territory then, and a large fraction of its male population. Nowadays people sometimes express skepticism that a war could have a massive effect on something like the sex ratio of the population, to the extent of modifying social behaviors (women accepting half a loaf, that sort of thing). Happy they, who can live in blithe ignorance of such bloodletting.
The CSD is widely available in US libraries. The ``Historians of Scotland'' edition of Androw Wynton's Orygynale Cronykil contains an extensive glossary of Scots, referenced to Wynton's text.
For something heftier, try DOST.
One alternative to C-section is the use of vacuum extraction to assist in difficult vaginal deliveries, but this leads to brain bleeding in 6% of cases. That was according to a NYTimes article on January 7, 1999. With a complication like that, you might imagine that by now the procedure has been abandoned. In fact, forceps, vacuum extraction, and C-section all have their risks. That's why they're not used if a normal vaginal delivery is expected or under way. As of 2008, the question of which method is preferable does not yet appear to have been definitively decided.
When I write ``the mid-60's,'' I have in mind a particular paper from 1965 -- in hand, even: Occasional Paper No. 65-102, November 1965, by Richard Olmsted of Indiana University, entitled ``APPEALS To HISTORY IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-ADVOCACY: A Logical Inquiry.'' Olmsted begins by asking:
Is history a promiscuous woman who bestows her favor on every suitor? A brief review of the materials written on any major question of educational policy is enough to cast doubt on the morals of this venerable lady. Appeals to history in educational disputes are frequent, and often she seems to lend her charms in support of opposing points of view.
Ah, a breath of dusty antique air -- like opening an old box in the attic. Well, it's downhill from there. The paper is just a preliminary exploratory thing.
Their literature once explained that their Committee is a serious and fair-minded research institution that ``[d]oes not reject claims on a priori grounds, antecedent to inquiry, but [rather] examines them objectively and carefully'' and then proves them WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Yeah, that's it! Embarrass them rascally, irrational, demagogic quacks and snake-oil salesmen and unscientific no-goods! Down with prejudiced, emotional credulity! Yippee!!! Ahem -- and disseminates the findings in a serious, fair-minded journal that it publishes itself. I notice that Dr. Brian Josephson is not on their distinguished list of fellows. (Of course, they probably can't include every Nobel laureate who studies paranormal phenomena.) CSI is based in ``fast-growing'' Amherst, NY, across the street (Sweet Home Road, to be specific) from the north campus of UB.
The official journal is The Skeptical Inquirer, not affiliated in any way, shape or form at all with the National Enquirer no no no no thats based in Lantana Florida not even the Philadelphia Inquirer a far better paper read by far fewer people I gotta get outta this breathless Gertrude Stein mode there must be an editor key here somewhere that restores punctuation ah, that's it! Oh, and did I mention that CSICOP is based right here in thoughtful Amherst, New York, at the Center for Inquiry, ``a hub of rationality and critical thought worldwide--and a resource for the local and academic communities''?
They did manage to attract Steven Jay Gould, who made a wonderful career of interesting hypotheses that turned out to be wrong. He also wrote many very popular books and articles, only some of which were politically correct nonsense. He was a very good writer, although his last big fat white book, written as he was dying of cancer, needed a lot of editing that Harvard's Belknap Press never gave it.
Carl Sagan was in there, too. Another politically correct popularizer. Early in his career, Sagan made himself the point man in the generally successful effort to discredit Immanuel Velikovsky, author of addled nonsensical theories. I don't doubt that Velikovsky's theories were wrong, and that those of his ``predictions'' that turned out to be correct were correct as the result of chance. But Sagan's debunking was intellectually very weak. Sagan's skills were in propaganda, not research.
Hence the amputation of the three-letter coda. The rump letters are now to stand for the ``Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.'' ``Committee for Scientific Investigation'' struck them as too broad and possibly presumptious, or presumptious-seeming. That seems to imply that they think scientific investigation is broader than skeptical inquiry, as if one could be scientific without keeping one's bullshit detector on. (No, they don't claim to think that. They assert the opposite. It's only their muddled implication. The name doesn't matter very much, but I do think it's more accurate: they are more skeptical than scientific.
I miss the days when the Committee was just running the fool's-errand steeplechase on just a parapsychology circuit. For old times' sake, follow a link for ASP.
``CSICOP-type skeptic'' is a term that has been used on television. A news note from the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) once had a heads-up for a NOVA special on UFO's, and described an in-studio discussion panel for that program as including ``...a Washington area abductee, and a CSICOP-type skeptic.'' So for a while, CSICOP was a recognizable type. Was it wise to give up the brand?
I am opposed to leadership because it demands followership.
Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast. He died on November 22, 1963, at Oxford. The C.S. Lewis item was not the biggest obituary news for that date.
Lewis served with the Somerset Light Infantry in WWI and was wounded in 1917. From 1918 he was at University College, Oxford, achieving distinction as a classical scholar. From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Those are the dry details which he is not known for. (Some of this unknown work is remembered -- or is it? -- at the courtly love entry.)
He is known for his books. He wrote a lot of them -- about 40. It's slightly less impressive than that, because most of it was Christian apologetic literature, so he was making a lot of the same points repeatedly.
He wrote a lot of Christian apologetic literature, so he could probably just grab text from an earlier book and put it into a later one.
It's a good thing he didn't have access to a word processor.
His best-known work of apologetic literature was The Screwtape Letters (1942). This comprised 31 letters from an elderly, world-wise devil named Screwtape, written for the instruction of a junior devil named Wormwood. It's all about how to seduce a young convert to Christianity away from it. It's a work of fiction -- possibly a real set of such letters is not available. Possibly the reason that an authentic set of such letters has not become available is not just effective security among devils, but the nonexistence of devils. If devils do not exist, then possibly the doubts that believers feel are the result not of nefarious intervention but of rational doubt. But this is impossible, because rational judgment poses no barrier to belief or disbelief. Therefore devils exist, possibly.
Lewis also wrote a celebrated science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945). It was highly celebrated by people who don't necessarily actually like science fiction, which probably ought to put you on notice. The stories center on Ransom, a linguist who visits Venus and Mars and becomes involved in the battle of good and evil (and N.I.C.E., q.v.). Lewis was a member of a group of writers that called itself the Inklings. Another member of the Inklings was J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Lewis, JRRT was a philologist who is best known by his initials and wrote a trilogy (LOTR) about a world-wide battle of good and evil. It must've been the times.
LOTR was in the ``fantasy'' genre. Lewis dabbled in that too: The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's books. (Books for seven children, yeah.) At the end of the 1980's, the BBC made uninspired TV out of some of the chronicles: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe (bk. 1) (1988); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (bk. 3) (1989); The Silver Chair (bk. 4) (1990). Around 2001 there was also some effort to ride the Harry Potter coattails, and worries that efforts to repopularize the series would squelch their spiritual, almost crypto-Christian content. At first it seemed they didn't move quickly enough to capitalize. In the meantime (2001-2003), LOTR came out as three movies. Another Lion-Witch-Wardrobe retread finally came out in 2005, along with an entourage or retinue or whatever they call these things of five shorts with titles like ``Behind the Magic of Narnia: The Grips and the Roadies.''
If this wasn't enough unreliable information for you, try visiting the alt.books.cs-lewis newsgroup.
I don't know if suggesting improvements is part of their charge, but I have one. Change the name of ``el Señor'' to something distinctive. As Richard Pryor and others have pointed out, Jesús is an extremely common name in the Latino community. Confusion is likely to result. Also, he needs more names. Everyone in the Latino community uses three names nowadays (a Christian name and one surname from each parent, adoptive or otherwise). I propose calling Him Ralph Josephson Christiansen Hanna instead. (Sure it sounds strange. All good ideas take some getting used to.)
We would go out on short missions when I was in college, usually for more beer. The Summer before I entered college, I took a trip to California. I walked into a bar and ordered a beer, and I was shocked to discover you had to be 21 there to buy one. What a crazy state! The only trouble is, their worst ideas catch on. I was actually 21 when I first discovered that there's enough alcohol in beer that if you drink enough of it, it'll eventually make you drunk. It happens so slowly that you can actually observe incremental losses of motor control. And since you probably have to go to the bathroom a few times too, you get to see the practical consequences. Liquor is quicker. Beer is just outdoor air-conditioning. Coolant with a pinch of vasodilation (and diuresis).
San Mateo is Spanish for `Saint Matthew.' If it were called ``College of Saint Matthew,'' you'd probably be correct to guess that it wasn't a public college.
This scheme is evidently less daft than Aloha, but there's a way to dumb it down part-way: in nonpersistent CSMA, if the carrier is detected to be busy, then the transmitter waits a random amount of time and then transmits without rechecking to see if the line is busy.
Of course, the existence of these CSO's is clearly not a sufficient condition for democracy to flourish. Also apparently required are the attitudes that go along with the social structure. There are essentially two extremes in the way of viewing this. On one extreme is the idea that CSO's and the associated socialization are a chicken-and-egg problem. That view suggests that if one establishes the CSO, the attitude will follow -- given the chickens, or the eggs, then eggs and chickens will follow. At the opposite extreme is the view that CSO's are the externalities of a worldview: that democratic peoples act in ways that produce not only democratic government but also CSO's. This suggests that it is futile to put CSO's (or free elections) in place where people weren't already creating them.
There was a New Republic magazine article by Stephen Glass (no longer available in the archives of selections from the issue of 30 December 1996), about CSPI and its head tree-hugger, Michael Jacobson, which reported that CSPI is now more of a center for pseudoscience in the interest of publicity. HOWEVER, in Spring of 1998, Stephen Glass was revealed to have faked quotes and other data for many of his articles. It was the second such recent embarrassment for TNR, and they investigated all his stories, retracting some. According to a report from the editors in the 29 June 1998 issue, the CSPI article is one of those compromised by fabricated material.
Hmmm. It gets worse. Buzz Bissinger has an article on Stephen Glass in the September 1998 Vanity Fair. According to this, the chair of the CSPI board sent ``a detailed response, challenging virtually every aspect of Glass's story.'' In a letter to TNR editor Michael Kelly, who was staunchly defending SG, Jim Naureckas wrote that the ``whole article is so dishonest in approach that one can't help but suspect that Glass knew he was fudging.'' On the other hand, Naureckas edits Extra!, a publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which isn't qualified to polish TNR's shoes.
For all I know it may be true that, as reported when Michael Kelly was killed in the Iraq war of 2003, Kelly was forced out at TNR because he was too hard on President Clinton.
Ultimately, TNR's internal investigation, under Kelly's successor Charles Lane, concluded that SG's first unequivocal use of fabrications had been in the CSPI piece. The piece had been fundamentally a smear of Michael Jacobson, who understandably feels that the damage cannot be undone.
Stephen Glass was in the news again in April 2003, explaining that he committed all those frauds for self-esteem. Whether this is just another lie or stupid, I honestly don't know, but it is self-evident that he did it for other people's esteem. If he esteemed himself the more for it, it would have been secret pride in putting one (or a hundred) over on his audience. More likely, he is simply milking the term ``self-esteem'' for unthinking sympathy. If he did it for self-esteem, then he must have had ``low self-esteem,'' and still in some circles those with LSE are deemed innocent victims.
I thought it was interesting that the story of Jayson Blair's frauds at the NYT broke shortly after the Stephen Glass story was rehashed.
Not enough psychobabble? Okay, Newsweek has reported that Blair had sought treatment for substance abuse. Blair granted an exclusive interview to the New York Observer, for publication May 21, 2003. In it he says that his deceptions stemmed from personal problems:
``I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona,'' he said. ``So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.''
How neat.
I suppose it must be possible.
W3.org offers a CSS validation service.
In the long run, however, there have been increased costs of complying with environmental regulations that became more stringent. The reason is that occasional large storms may exceed the peak capacity of the waste treatment facility or the sewage network. For those occasions, to prevent sewage backup, the overflow of the combined system has to be shunted through relief structures into some external watercourse. That untreated overflow ends up in some body of water in a place sometimes known as ``the environment.'' (Don't tell me that's not a body of water. It is after the storm.)
The overflow exits the regular network at a combined sewer overflow (CSO), a term which is used to refer to both the overflow and the apparatus that handles it. CSO's often incorporate some primitive screen in lieu of treatment.
The northern Indiana cities of South Bend, Mishawaka, and Elkhart all have CSS's, and have been under pressure from IDEM and the EPA to reduce the overflows. The overflow from these cities goes into the St. Joseph River, which empties into Lake Michigan. The three cities' CSO's are the main source of E. coli contamination of the river, and thought to be a major source of that contamination of the lake.
The cost of reconstructing the sewer network of a city is high (for Mishawaka, a city of about 50,000, the estimate was about $100 million for a complete reconstruction), and the solutions planned by all three cities have been for improvements to increase the peak capacity of the treatment plant. Mishawaka has 19 CSO's. I wonder if some partial reconstruction wouldn't work. It would be cheaper to build separate runoff drainage channels in less-developed outlying areas, and if these could be shunted out (unmixed with sewage) at the nearest CSO points, it would reduce the peak load on the rest of the system.
The word pornography is derived from porne (ancient Greek word for CSW) and graphia. The cool thing about this is that at first blush, it seems to be a term no longer used in its original sense. After all, pornography isn't pictures of prostitutes -- it's sexy pictures! But then, the distinction begins to look a bit dodgy. Consider at least ``hard-core pornography,'' which is generally agreed to involve the performance of a sex act...
If someone hired a CSW for a third person, or hired two CSW's to uh, interact sexually, and then filmed the ``work'' with full knowledge of the participants, did prostitution occur? Does it matter if both (or all) participants are paid? Equally? If one of the actors contributes his work for free and subsidizes another? If a cameraman pays the actors, and recoups his costs by selling the film to one of the actors, is that actor a john, a ``producer/director/actor'' like Woody Allen, a blackmail victim, or just underpaid?
Nah, it ain't sex. It's experimental casuistics.
This is a most unfelicitous acronym, for anyone who remembers Nietzsche. In the first book of Thus Spake Zarathustra (why is the proper noun in that title so rarely translated `Zoroaster'?), he has an old woman with a bundle advising ``You go to women? Do not forget the whip.'' (Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!)
What does this have to do with philosophy? One of his works Nietzsche entitled Twilight of the Idols, or How to Do Philosophy with a Hammer, so we can see that he was a practical philosopher. That's not an oxymoron: he went insane. Living in Turin, he hugged a horse and collapsed. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton wrote that ``Italy is a paradise for horses, and a hell for women.'' Mrs. Patrick Campbell (famous actress of the stage and a great friend of GBS, if he had one) is supposed to have commented once ``I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.''
Regarding idols and hammers, incidentally, I should probably cite the midrash of Abram destroying most of the stock in his father Terah's idol shop. But you could look it up.
Not available by 800 number. Not advertised in hour-long infomercials between prime time and the farm report.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Connecticut. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Connecticut city and town links.
Over the second half of the twentieth century, the two major political parties in the US became increasingly polarized ideologically, the Republicans becoming the rightist party and the Democrats the leftist. A large part of this was due to the collapse of Southern allegiances dating back to the Civil War. Most Southern blacks (when not prevented from voting) had voted Republican, and most Southern whites had voted Democratic. At the national level, however, particularly in the 1960's, the Democratic party generally came to support the Civil Rights movement, and the Republican party was characteristically conservative: opposing reform at first, then generally accepting it but opposing further reform. I really ought to discuss that at its own entry. I just wanted to mention that and set it aside to focus on a second, slightly less obvious feature: the disappearance of centrists.
Right on into the 1980's there were Democrats on the right wing of their party, and Republicans on the left wing of theirs, who would probably have been about as comfortable, or about as uncomfortable, switching parties and becoming centrists on the opposite wing of the opposite side of the aisle. On the GOP side, Taft Republicans in the 1950's and Rockefeller Republicans in the 1960's still represented a substantial share of their party. Certainly President Nixon, and probably Ford as well, would be positioned as extreme liberals on their (Republican) party's current (post-Reagan) ideological spectrum. Republican liberals were liberals on domestic policy.
On the Democratic side, as noted, the majority of Southern officeholders in Washington, D.C., were conservative, and most of them remained members of the Democratic party until they retired and were mostly replaced by Republicans. Apart from that group, however, there were Democrats who were with their party only on domestic policy. Under LBJ and under Nixon, the Vietnam War hardened the antianticommunism and antimilitarism of many Democrats. Thus, the centrist or conservative Democrats were the pro-defense Democrats like Senator Henry M. (``Scoop'') Jackson of Washington State (who died in 1983). Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia might have been counted among the hawks, but the end of the Cold War changed the calculus. Nunn opposed the liberation of Kuwait by force in 1991, and after that war was deemed a success, his earlier opposition dimmed his presidential hopes. He retired from the Senate in 1996. Nunn and other moderate Democrats had created the DLC to move their party toward the center, and as a platform for... You know, this isn't what I wanted to write about either.
Suffice it to say that there were still some conservative or moderate Democrats in national politics at the end of the 1980's. There were even a few moderate (liberal?) Republicans at the national level then. One of them, or perhaps all of them, was Lowell Weicker, Jr., a US Senator from Connecticut. He has been reported to have described his isolation with a clever mot that you will have to go to the reincarnated-metaphor entry to read.
William F. Buckley, the famous conservative columnist, became so disgusted with Weicker that in the 1988 elections he endorsed Democrat Joseph Lieberman and formed a committee to fight Weicker's re-election bid. The committee issued bumper stickers asking, ``Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?'' Lieberman won and Weicker eventually quit the GOP. In 1990, he ran for Connecticut governor as an independent and won.
What makes this story interesting (to me -- who cares what you think?) is that just as Senator Weicker was too liberal for his (Republican) party, Lieberman has turned out to be too conservative for his (Democratic) party. In 2004 and 2005, Lieberman has emerged as a latter-day Scoop Jackson, and in the process so enraged much of his party that many Democrats were supporting a challenge -- any challenge -- to his nomination in 2006. In an interesting turnabout, Weicker announced at the end of 2005 that if necessary, he would mount an independent challenge to Lieberman for the Senate in 2006. As it turned out at the state Democratic convention, Lieberman won the party's endorsement but Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont won more than 15% support, the threshold for a primary challenge. Lamont won the Democratic primary on the following August 8, but that was his high-water mark. Lieberman ran as an independent in the general election and won with substantial Republican support.
(Oh yes, there was already a Republican candidate in the race. He wasn't given a chance, in both senses of given. He was considered a weak candidate. How weak? Republican Senate nominee Schlesinger had a campaign song in which his name was set to the music of the Mickey Mouse Show greeting song.)
Looks familiar, for some reason.
It's located in Chile, like many astronomical observatories (e.g., ESO). The principal reason for putting them in Chile is that Chile occupies the western slopes of the Andes over the latitudes where the Andes generally reach the highest altitudes. Moreover, northern Chile is a desert area, so cloud cover is minimal. The legal and political climate is probably more congenial to (safer for) foreign researchers as well. That, and transportation issues, probably explain why the most important international observatories are there and not on the western side in Argentina (which has the highest Andes peak, by a couple of hundred feet) or Bolivia. Going further north to Peru would increase the area of sky observed (by pushing the northern horizon closer to the north polar direction), but humidity and lawlessness become issues.
Their summer program ``is an intensive 3-week residential academic program where students [aged 8 to 16] can study advanced topics at a pace and depth that match their abilities'' instead of at the boring, laggard pace of good schools.
The politician Benjamin Disraeli said
I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.
Lois Farnham and Holly Putterbaugh have been together since the early 1970's. In 1997, they and two other couples were plaintiffs in a suit against the state of Vermont that led to the first C.U. law. In December 1999, Vermont's State Supreme Court ruled that denying gay couples the benefits of marriage (they counted 300, wow!) amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. In April 2000, after months of bitter debate, the legislature passed and the governor signed a civil unions bill. When it went into effect July 1, 2000, Lois and Holly got married.
That's fine for them. However, at churches around the state, other brides were not having such a good time of it. Their ``special day'' became a day of special tragedy, as grooms in large numbers decided that C.U. had abased the value of marriage. Some simply were no-shows, some went through most of the ceremony and then refused to say ``I do.'' Of the few grooms who were prevailed upon to fulfill their engagements, most insisted on having a second, traditional ceremony in Reno, Nevada, and refused to consummate their marriages until then.
Outside the churches, the situation was only worse. Convoys of marriage-minded gay couples have been sighted streaming north from Gotham. Already, starting in the seedier districts of Vermont's larger villages, bigamists are protesting violently for their rights. In many towns, the dollar that is passed around each winter to facilitate economic activity has been looted. As perverts fan out into the forests, deer are rioting and chipmunks stampeding. Governor Dean refuses to call out the National Guard, even as the green mountains turn red, millions reported dead! Save us! Save us!
Things work the other way too: sometimes people expect color and won't accept a product that lacks it. A prime example might be soft drinks, which get caramel and other food colorings that have no effect on the flavor. Back in the 1950's, a chemical plant my father managed produced large amounts of chlorine as an unused byproduct, so he burned it with hydrogen, bubbled it through water, and sold it [hydrochloric acid, known industrially as muriatic acid (see HCl(aq))]. The customers were unhappy with this extremely pure product because they expected their muriatic acid to look like the low-purity product they were used to, which was urine-yellow, more or less. To make the customers happy, an iron nail was dropped into each transport tank, which dissolved in the acid and provided the necessary color.
For years I never wondered that Consumers was written without an apostrophe.
Matter of fact, some people with base tastes or motives can't tell red-brown copper from yellow gold. I've worked where bulk copper had to be locked away from metallurgically unsophisticated thieves. Perhaps gold can be protected by labeling it ``yellow copper'' or ``soft brass.''
The opening lyrics of ``Brilliant Mistake'':
He thought he was the King of America.
Well, they bought Coca-Cola just like vintage wine.
(Elvis Costello and the Attractions)
Once when I was hanging out at Ventura and Van Nuys, a kid on a bicycle came up and offered me a deal: If I would go in to the jeweler's and sell this gold necklace (putatively his), I could keep half the price.
In Germany (.de), jewelry stores have big signs that read ``Schmuck.''
When a man walks up to you on an Atlanta backstreet and asks if you'd like to buy a gun, the correct answer is ``I don't need one'' with a hand in your pocket. I have road-tested this advice.
Copper is a soft metal, inappropriate for gun barrels, though it's not as soft as gold. If you machine it as fast as you would, say, aluminum, it comes off unevenly and cruds up the tool like peanut butter. For related advice, see the PCB entry. For practical purposes, copper is alloyed to form brass or bronze, and has been since about the Bronze Age.
Learn more at the Cu entry in WebElements and the copper entry at Chemicool.
More on ``Brilliant Mistake'' lyrics at the ABC entry, of course. Complete lyrics of the song here.
``Dr. Copper'' is a term used among financial analysts for the price of copper when regarded as a leading indicator for equity prices. Generally speaking, Dr. Copper is a good prognosticator of economic trends and markets, sometimes. Sometimes it's not. I have a copper coin in my pocket that's about as accurate when I flip it for advice. It's a quarter (91.67 wt.% Cu). The only US coin minted today that isn't mostly copper is the penny, which is all zinc except for an outer plating.
This brings us to another point, which is that while cover alone can function as an English noun, cubre alone is not a noun. It is the form meaning `it [or he or she] covers' of the verb cubrir (`to cover'). The usual noun is the female past participle cubierta. (The male plural past part., cubiertos, means `silverware.') Make of this what you will, but don't ask me why cubre- compound nouns above are masculine when the only true nouns that occur in them (cama, cadena) are female. (Cubre is the form for other conjugations. In particular cubre la cama can be the command `cover the bed' as well as the observation `it covers the bed,' but in no case does it have a gender.)
In Spanish, the plural pops up occasionally where non-native speakers wouldn't expect it. Probably the best-known examples of unexpected plurals are the common salutations buenos días and buenas noches, meaning `good day' and `good night' (spoken to many persons or one). You won't be too surprised, then, to learn that formally plural words are more common (e.g., cubrecadenas) or about as common (cubrecamas) as the formally singular words. (They're still singular male terms, by the way.) Somehow, this just feels right, the same way plural attributive nouns feel right to Brits.
I see that un cubreruedas is moderately common for `a wheelcover,' but I suspect that it's a recent loan-translation from English. Notice that the compound is masculine and singular, even though the ruedas is feminine and plural.
This-all ain't so interesting, and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open too, but the reason I mention it is that I'm trying to resolve some questions regarding the English word curfew. Thinkin' out loud, see? That word curfew is a corruption of an Old French compound that French now spells couvre-feu. Italian has a similar construction, coprifuòco. These constructions correspond to English fire-cover (which means something else altogether, if it means one thing) and cubrefuego[s] in Spanish, which is a very much rarer expression for curfew than queda (or toque de queda).
The Spanish word cuerpo, like the English word body, has a range of somewhat figurative meanings, but the range is broader in Spanish. For example, some expressions using corps or corpus in English use cuerpo in Spanish. In chemistry, where compound has been nominalized in English, cuerpo compuesto may still be used in Spanish (though compuesto is normal among chemists and other scientists discussing chemistry).
Nevertheless, in ordinary speech cuerpo still typically means a human body, alive or dead. Whether the body is dead or alive is usually allowed to go unspecified. If you mention a body (un cuerpo) lying on the ground or on arranged on an easy chair, it will be assumed -- absent contrary evidence or context -- to be more or less dead. The usage is generally similar to that of English, and when the deadness of the body is explicitly noted in Spanish, it suggests -- to a landlubber, at least -- about what ``dead body'' does to in English. I'm not sure what most Spanish-speakers would make of a cuerpo tibio (`warm body').
/ ____ \ | \ | | \ 1 / n\ | / \ exp | > - \S / | = \ exp(S) / , | / n! c | | /___ | \ n=1 / / n\ where \S / is the nth cumulant of S; cangle brackets without a subscript denote an ordinary average.
Equating order by order in the expansions of the two sides, one finds successive expressions for the cumulants in terms of the ordinary average values of powers of the variate S:
/ \ / \ \S/ = \S/ c / 2\ / 2\ / \2 \S / = \S / - \S/ c / 3\ / 3\ / 2\ / \ / \3 \S / = \S / - 6 \S / \S/ + 5 \S/ c / 4\ / 4\ / 3\ / \ / 2\2 \S / = \S / - 24 \S / \S/ + 12 \S / c / 2\ / \2 / \4 + 156 \S / \S/ - 121 \S/The third and fourth cumulants are measures of skewness and kurtosis, respectively. For Gaussian distributions, only the first and second cumulants are nonzero. Cumulant expansions are often useful because distributions may be nearly Gaussian and have cumulant expansions that fall off rapidly with increasing order. It is possible to create distributions which have only finite subsets of cumulants nonzero, whereas ordinary moments of a distribution are all nonzero for any but the most trivial distributions.
Cumulant expansions occur in quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics because these involve exponentials of the Hamiltonian. [The Hamiltonian, if you don't know and haven't the time to find out what it is, is normally the energy expressed in terms of (possibly generalized) momentum and coordinate variables.] For oscillatory systems near equilibrium, the Hamiltonian is a quadratic in the momenta and coordinates, so the ``averages'' to be evaluated are essentially Gaussians.
Many more are listed at the Wikipedia Bible errata entry. I'm taking my examples from A. Edward Newton's The Greatest Book in the World and Other Papers (1925) and from Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice: Definitive Edition (2000). There are some minor inconsistencies, which I'll try to sort out later, between these sources and the Wikipedia entry. Bibles with errors that turn intended proscriptions into prescriptions, like the third example above, or which make similarly infamous errors, are also called Wicked Bibles.
Here's Universal Currency Converter, a term Xenon Laboratories claims as its trademark. Try to register it.
A program called Exchange (people are getting really wild and creative with trademarks) runs on your PC (or would, if you don't have a PC). There's Hmmm. dead link. Must have failed to make a name for itself.
Currencies are listed by ordinary-language names (``American Dollars,'' etc.) on the Inatos Currency Converter. The list is short, but it represents something close to an actual offer (from Currencies Direct).
There's another from TravelFinder.com, which would be happy to offer you other travel-related services. They feature an extra-long (fifteen digits) text-input field, for those who like to dream and those who must deal with hyperinflation.
-- Par Leijonhufvud (and probably others)
The Marteau Currency Converter provides conversion among European currencies of the early eighteenth century, using exchange rates of 1709.
The EC (then the EU) not (yet, in both senses) being a country, it has no country code. Country codes starting with X are not allowed, so a code beginning in X is a no-country code -- just what was required. XEU was the currency symbol adopted for the ecu (with U for Unit, apparently). An initial X followed by a chemical symbol (fully capitalized) is used to represent each precious metal: XAU, XAG, XPT for gold, silver, platinum, etc.
When the ECU was replaced by the euro, the new currency got the symbol EUR, which obeys the rule that hecha la ley, hecha la trampa. (Loosely translated, that means that all laws come with loop-holes pre-installed.) EU is now on a reserved list of ISO-4217 prefixes.
There is also a euro sign, which looks like the variant "e" usually used for an ``is an element of'' sign, but with the horizontal stroke doubled; or if you prefer, like C and = overstruck.
The name euro is supposed to be the same in all languages, but 1/100 euro is translated (cent, centime, lepton etc.).
The Center is a member of UAA. CURL is too.
One common way to get more cuts quickly for competition is to tighten up using diuretics. It's reminiscent of how fighters used to compete below their natural weight class, by sweating off the pounds ahead of the weigh-in (which took place a day or two before the bout). Immediately after making the (weight) cut, fighters would start dosing themselves with dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) in order to be recovered for the bout. This and other abuses of DHMO are listed on this page from the DMRD.
You probably guessed that cutter number, and thus cutter, is a noun. I haven't seen cutter used as a verb, but the gerund cuttering occurs in the term ``double-cuttering'' (the use of two cutters; this will eventually to be more fully explained at the cutter number entry).
Cutter numbers are used primarily to encode the names of authors and titles, and are used following a subject classification code like the LC number. Together, the subject classification and one or two cutters are usually enough to construct a unique shelving number for a given work, but don't distinguish different editions of the same work. It has thus become common to add the year of publication as the final element in the shelving number. Similarly, separately-catalogued serials receive a volume or year number.
An important goal of cataloguing is to assign shelving numbers that keep similar and related works close to each other. Sometimes this results in the continued use of no-longer-appropriate cutters. For example, here at Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame, the reference section has an item entitled Cassell's French Dictionary, with a label on the spine that reads ``Ref. PC 2640 .L837n 1978.'' The reason is that the original 1881 edition, according to the title page of a crumbling boxed copy, was ``A French and English Dictionary compiled from the best authorities of both languages by Professors De Lolme and Wallace, and Henry Bridgeman, revised, corrected, and considerably enlarged by Professor E. Roubaud, B.A. (Paris).'' The cutter was assigned on the basis of the name of De Lolme. Interestingly, the 1881 edition has a shelving number PC 2640 .L75 1881. The cutter is slightly different (L75 instead of L837n), probably because from time to time, libraries change Cutter tables. (More about that in the cutter-number evolution entry.) As it happens, De Lolme is not mentioned in any of the later editions that the library currently owns, making it hard to see how L837n was chosen to provide any continuity. I am told that De Lolme was mentioned in the 1930 edition (which we no longer possess).
The De Lolme of that early Cassell dictionary is widely identified with J.L. de Lolme (J.L. stands for Jean-Louis and John Louis), who died in 1806. (See, for example, this entry in WorldCat.) The identification has some plausibility, since de Lolme was a French-English bilingual (born in Geneva 1840 or 1841, went to England at 26), and appears to be the only prominent person of that name. [He's the only de Lolme or Delolme, vel sim., listed in the most comprehensive references, including the 46-volume Nouvelle Biographie Générale of 1860, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (index entry here), and the sacred eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (but not the current pretender). La Grande Encyclopédie has an entry for Lolme (Jean-Louis de) as well as a shorter entry for Delolme (Jean-Louis), neither cross-referenced to the other. At least they don't contradict each other much (he died July 10 (typo) or 16).]
De Lolme is rarely mentioned in smaller encyclopedias (or anywhere else, for that matter), but in his time he was an important translator of French and English ideas to the English and French respectively, and he influenced some of the drafters of the US Constitution. As a writer of pamphlets and books in England, he was a popularizer of Montesquieu's ideas in English; his most successful work, a study of the English constitution, was with Hume's History of England the main source for the philosophes' ideas of the English constitution.
On the other hand, I can find no record of his ever having compiled any dictionary, and he was never a professor anywhere. If this was a courtesy title, it was an extravagant one; on the evidence of his La constitution de l'Angleterre, he was not fastidious about accuracy. Still, he might just have done a sloppy first job of a French dictionary. At various times, he could certainly have used the money.
Cutter tables in cataloguing are a lot like hash functions in database design. A hash function is a lossy compression of somewhat general string inputs into constant- or bounded-length outputs. An important goal in defining a hash function is minimizing collisions. That is, one wants a hash function that is practically injective (i.e., one-to-one), or perhaps strictly injective for a given domain of arguments. The practical way to achieve this is first to make the function surjective (onto); waste not, want not. Beyond that elementary step, the strategy is to level the load: have all hash values mapped to with equal probability. Without any very precise model of the probability distribution of arguments of the hash function, the way to level the load is to make the map chaotic. That is, to make the hash value an exquisitely sensitive function of the argument, so that any clustering or concentration of argument values is mapped into a broad spray of hash values. Hence the name hash.
The design criteria for Cutter tables are similar to those for hash functions, because the goal is to construct compact but distinct shelving numbers. A crucial difference is that chaotic shelving numbers are considered undesirable. (One wonders if Borges had anything to say about this.) Hence, Cutter tables map the first few letters of a string monotonically into the space of codes, with more codes assigned to more-common initial strings. Often, particularly in cataloguing fiction, one distinguishes the works of an author by adding initial letters from the title after the cutter number for the author.
Just one tip (in the caption to Fig. 300) from chapter 7, ``Chisels and Chipping,'' in Shop Theory, Revised Edition, prepared by The Shop Theory Department, Henry Ford Trade School, Dearborn, Michigan (London and New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934, 1941, 1942), p. 45.
Chapter 15 of this page-turner is titled, with majestic understatement, ``Gearing.'' You think I'm kidding, but the mathematics of gear design, and things like involute curves, once stayed the thoughts of great minds.
It looks like the Ohio pronunciation of ``Cuyahoga'' should be definitive or authoritative or something. The vowels and stress pattern of the word coincide with ``[give that] guy a toga.''
Just the other day, I stopped to help a couple of women pushing their car off the road. ``What's the problem?''
``Oh, I think a CV joint broke.''
``Oh, I understand, I have a Honda too.''
In his diary for January 16, 1922, Franz Kafka meditated upon ``something very like a breakdown,'' in which it was ``impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life.''
Here is a nonstandard etymology of CV.
The term CVD pointedly excludes film growth in which some component of the grown film is a reactant from the growth substrate. Thus, growth of oxide and nitride layers on silicon have the specific names of oxidation and nitridization, and both in fact are pyrolysis (the reactions burn--oxidize in the chemical sense of changing the oxidation level--the substrate silicon). In CVD oxidation and nitridization, on the other hand, additional silicon is supplied in the gas phase, typically in silane or dichlorosilane); vide SIPOS and silicon nitride.
Applied Materials sells CVD systems for industrial application. Visit their CVD product page (link here is to their lower-graphics page; they seem to have a slow or busy server).
CVD is used extensively to grow epitaxial layers of compound semiconductors. In this application it is called MOCVD or (more descriptively) MOVPE.
In Britain and Anglophiliated places, however, CVD is ``Chemical Vapour Deposition'', probably something completely different.
We got trouble! Right here in River City!
Judging from my extremely limited experience in northern Indiana and northern New Jersey, CVS has more of its stores open all night. I never studied the thing in detail, but I have the impression that OTC pharmaceuticals and other health-related goods tend to be a bit cheaper at CVS, while other prices are a little lower at Walgreens. OSCO/Jewel used to have the best prices in my area, but they pulled out of the region and sold stores off to CVS. I can't imagine that their price point had anything to do with their decision to pull out. There are no Rite Aids convenient to me.
There are still a few stores without customer loyalty systems (you know -- discount cards that allow a store to monitor your purchases and feed you coupons only for things you don't normally buy, that sort of thing), so nowadays I avoid CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and other stores that do have them.
``Czech Technical University has the Most Popular College Web Site in the Czech Republic.''
It was called Classical Weekly until 1957, but the U.S. Post Office insisted on a name change, claiming that ``weekly'' was deceptive because it wasn't published when school was not in session (viz., Summer and other holidays). But there's less; see below. CAAS chose ``World'' in part to keep the same initials.
Hey, Mr. Postmaster General, psst! Have you ever heard of a man named Ed McMahon? YOU ARE ALREADY A WINNER!!!
Hmmm. My comments above regarding the USPS were based on mailing-list posting from someone who's been involved with CW. She's usually accurate, but the name change must have been a bit before her time, and perhaps it was fair to demand it.
The journal was published under the title of Classical Weekly from Oct. 5, 1907 to May 20, 1957. Those fifty volumes comprised numbers 1 through 1227. That amounted to 24.54 issues per year, or almost one issue per fortnight, averaged over the calendar year. Since the primary and secondary school years in US public schools conventionally have 180 class days, there are a bit over 36 weeks per school year, so the Weekly averaged 0.68 issues per school week. That's not too terrible, especially allowing for a publication schedule that only began in October (i.e., about a month into the school year).
In fact, those coarse-average numbers hide a reality of slow decline in publication frequency that seems -- prima facie, I should say -- to reflect the declining popularity of Latin study in the schools. Before getting into the history of the latter decline, however, I should note that the actual amount of published text per year in CW has remained about constant or increased; it's simply been published in bigger chunks. Volume 93 (first issue September/October 1999) was the last to be bimonthly. It's been quarterly since then.
It's only fair to warn you that the rest of this entry is tedious, even by the standards of this glossary, or of the first part of this entry. I gathered a lot of data and it turned out to be of no interest whatsoever, but I would feel bad if I didn't use some of it for something. That's one of the reasons for this glossary: to have something to do with that kind of information, so I don't feel so bad about having collected it in the first place.
Through the end of volume XX (which had 27 issues), there were 557 total issues, or about 27.85 per year. From issue XXI to XXXIII (the latter had xxvi issues; yes, I must use Roman numerals, don't you see?), there were 434 issues, for an average of about 26.38. Volume 34 also had 26 issues, and right through the war years (vols. 35 to 38, 1941-1945) there were 25 issues per school year. Oddly, it was only in the April 29, 1946, issue that the publishers made this announcement:
Because of the difficulties under which printers are laboring these days by reason of shortage of skilled help and materials, a few issues of the current Volume of The Classical Weekly will be omitted. Hence this will be the last regular Number, with the exception of the Index Number (22), which is expected to appear in the fall.(Capitalization and boldface sic. I've spared you the small-caps.)
Volume 40 also had 22 issues, and for the final ten Weekly years, there were 16 issues per year. This was typically described by a formula such as ``published weekly from mid-November for sixteen issues, except for any weeks in which there is an academic vacation.'' (The formula often changed slightly from one year to the next.) They found rather a lot of academic vacations.
Elvis Costello's 2002 album is ``When I Was Cruel.''
Not widely available for people.
They used to have a functioning acronym search tool.
The link is to an entry that is initially about the use of X to represent the word ``cross.'' It has some interesting stuff about Charing Cross from a ``book'' of Samuel Butler (the much ``younger'' one). Those aren't all scare quotes, you know. Please remain calm. Please remain calm!
Anyway, on account of all the Charing Cross content that doesn't really belong there, that X entry is a bit crowded, so I'm going to put some other thoughts I had here. Samuel Butler's work Erewhon is divided into ``books.'' This usage is a carry-over from the time when works (like the Bible) were divided into separate codex volumes or scrolls (or not). Describing the largest subdivisions of your work as ``books'' instead of ``parts,'' even though two or more such books are intended to be bound in a volume, is old-fashioned -- a kind of affectation. It's still done, but it is what linguists call a ``marked'' (i.e., meaningfully nonstandard) usage, like scattering Elizabethan words in one's otherwise, methinks, modern English (a speaker using such a mode of speech is said to be using a different ``linguistic register''). JRRT divided his purposely (but slightly) archaized LOTR into six dreary books. (And the six books constituted three volumes: The Hobbit; The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, and the Return of the King, and Silmarillion; and Bored of the Rings. Nobody enjoyed any of those books, but they were so enormously popular that peer pressure forced everyone to read them. And now they've been turned into enormously popular movies. Will this torture never cease!?) Now where was I? Oh yes --
The ``book'' mentioned at that X entry is ``The Book of Machines.'' It has a nice sort of technologically ecclesiastical sound. It reminds me of something I can't remember the name of right now, but I promise to look it up when I get home. (I'll -- I'll make a note of it. Somehow.) It also reminds me of ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1975), where a ``Book of Armaments'' is described.
(I didn't rip off Yogi Berra. My enormously popular comments above paid ``tribute'' to his observation of the place so crowded that no one went there any more. That quote is so widely used that I can't google an authoritative version.)
Hey, let's all go examine the Caribbean!
Okay, seriously? CXC sets school-leaving exams for high schools in the Caribbean.
Nowadays, in most places, that means January 1 to December 31 of the Gregorian calendar, but it hasn't always been thus.
The Gregorian calendar was first promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1582, and was immediately adopted in Catholic countries. Protestant countries (or duchies, principalities and tiny little specks of territory, in the case of Germany and some other areas of Europe) adopted the new calendar gradually over the coming centuries, and Orthodox countries did not adopt it for secular use until late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. (The Russian revolution rather accelerated the process.)
The Orthodox liturgical calendar continues to be based on Julian reckoning, and eastern churches celebrate holidays about two weeks later than western ones. The Department of Internet Ministries of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America offers a service called Iconograms, which enables you to ``[s]end a message to a loved one or friend in celebration [according to the Orthodox calendar] of a name day, feast day, or sacrament.''
England switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1740's or so. Under the Julian calendar, the new year began on March 25 or thereabouts (you expect me to look this stuff up?), so March 20, 1730 fell one week before March 27, 1731. The new year was moved up to January 1 at the same time that the date was shifted to Gregorian. Thus, for example, George Washington, who was born on February 11, 1731, Old Style, had a birthdate of February 22, 1732 after the switch. In fact, he always celebrated February 11 as his real birthday, one day before Lincoln's birthday. Nowadays, we celebrate both days on a Monday -- ``Presidents Day.'' I dont no if that gets an apostrophe.
Because of the phase shift in year, dates in the first quarter of the year (New Style) could be ambiguous. To avoid confusion, people would write ``January 15, 1751/1752,'' meaning the date that was January 15, 1752 New Style, or January 4, 1751 Old Style. By the 1760's I think everyone was reading from the same New Style page and the double-year notation was abandoned. Old and New Style were usually abbreviated (O.S., N.S.).
Perella was hired to staff an IBM booth at SIGGRAPH 2000, and his definition of cybermuffin occurs as an aside in the story of his misadventures there. Here's the definition (from p. 177), spiffed up a bit to meet our high lexicographic stadnards:
Cybermuffin /sigh bur MUFF in/ n. A curvaceous young woman in a short skirt, hired by a software company to sit on a stool in front of its booth and pass out literature to hordes of panting geeks [ < cyber + muffin].
Despite the impeccable provenance, I was skeptical. I'd have thought that definition would go with cybertart. The word cybermuffin suggests ``stud-muffin.'' Do these people really understand their breakfast cybercarbs? Yet I ventured out on the web, and was surprised to discover only two pictures of cybermuffins, both female, although one was from ConventioCon II (an MST3K convention) and the other was a rabbit or similar animal. (I did get a lot of hits for Cybertart, an Australian outfit that sells shlocky clothing accessories.)
Investigating further, I found an old David Barry column entitled ``You Have to be a Real Stud Hombre Cybermuffin to Handle Windows.'' This involves at least two-plus-epsilon reentrant levels of irony, but I think Dave nailed the meaning of cybermuffin precisely.
Weiner coined the title of his best-seller [viz., Cybernetics, (1948)] whose first two syllables have since become ubiquitous and lost their meaning, from the Greek word for steersman. His idea was that self-regulating feedback mechanisms in search of equilibrium are analogous to the steersman adjusting his tiller in response to the flow of air and water, the weight and balance of the boat, and other unpredictable variables. ...Epstein goes on to draw ``implicit moral lessons.'' The later editions (1961, 1965) of Weiner's surprising best-seller had a longer title: Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. His other successful popular book was The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950).
Weiner certainly believed that he was coining a new word, but -- doesn't anybody ever look in a dictionary? The word already existed in Ancient Greek (kybernêtikê, `art of steering'), and had been used in various ways in the modern era, so Weiner's may be regarded as a re- or re-re-coining of the word.
Along with the multiple recoinings, there have been a number of differing definitions. The meanings tend to cluster or overlap, but there is a surprising outlier, explained at the cybernetic warfare entry.
The word cynicism has a negative connotation in English, and probably in most languages with a cognate of the word. That is not surprising, in view of its etymology (for which, see the entry for Diogenes of Sinope). A cynic is regarded as not just jaundiced and suspicious of others' motives, but (perhaps in consequence) manipulative, scheming, dishonest.
Argentina, however, is different. My Argentine friend Laura, visiting the US, met my clear-sighted pessimist friend Robert, an American. Later she told me she thought he was very cynical. I passed along the compliment to Robert, and then I was forced to explain to him that from an Argentine, cínico is a compliment. Avivado is another word whose different use in Argentine Spanish is indicative of a different mindset, but it doesn't have an SBF entry yet. (Look it up in a dictionary of argentinismos.)
Perhaps Argentines are not entirely unique. Here is some equivocal usage from Simon Jenkins, in a July 21, 2011, option piece in the Guardian, wrote this:
The chancellor, George Osborne, showed impressive cynicism in abandoning his opposition to a "two-speed" Europe and demanding that the eurozone move swiftly to fiscal union -- with Britain firmly outside. Only such a union, he said, would discipline the debtor nations and thus avoid bank anarchy that would spill over into the British economy. Britain would have no part in any rescue, but it relied on the eurozone to continue on its path to ever closer union.
Cynical Osborne may be, but he is right in his historical analysis. ...
The single currency bound the politics of Europe with hoops of steel. Osborne wants those hoops to tighten further, to trap the 17 eurozone countries in a realm of unaccountable federalism, a fiscal rigidity that he must know will eventually snap.
... The attempt to impose fiscal union on all Europe will bring its demise. But where Osborne and his brand of scepticism are wrong is in so obviously willing this demise. When monetary union reaches breaking point and unravels in an orgy of xenophobia, Britain will not be immune from the chaos.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.
Here's the Czech page of an X.500 directory.
Czochralski first developed the method to pull metal crystals.
The main purpose of Zionist organizations is to encourage Jewish emigration (aliyah) to Israel. Thus, one of the unusual difficulties faced by Zionist organizations is that they lose their most active members... who do aliyah. (At least nihilists understand that they have to stick around for the good of the unconverted. See also the related Roe Effect.) So after a while, the ones left are those who, yeah, uh, next year in Jerusalem, uh, but not right now. (Kind of reminds me of Augustine's youthful prayer: ``Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.'')
Look it's not just nutty theories. It's unproven nutty theories, so you should suspend judgment.
Cf. B2B.
General Curtis LeMay, once head of SAC, used to say
``Without communications, the only thing I command is my desk.''
C³ has been superseded by various C3-something's and C4something's. Just as a reference point, I saw C3 in the Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1977, submitted to Congress by outgoing US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on January 27, 1976. (Why does that name ring a bell?)
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Oops! Overshot the pointers.