G g

A symbol related to (g) is the upward-pointing arrow, which indicates that a gaseous reaction product is allowed to escape (typically from the solution in which other reactants are dissolved). Many elementary reactions are driven to completion by the escape of a gaseous product. Kinematically, one can regard this as a much-reduced rate for the reverse reaction: the product gas goes away and is no longer available to participate in a reverse reaction with the condensed products of the forward reaction. Thermodynamically, one can think of this as an entropy-driven reaction: the entropy of the gas, when ``confined'' in an infinite volume, is infinite. (In a finite volume, it grows logarithmically with the volume.)

Why use confusing single-letter amino-acid codes? Look, a typical protein is thousands of monomers long.

Once when I volunteered at Recording for the Blind, I was monitor for the recording of a biochemistry textbook. The terms of RFB's standard agreement with publishers require that all content be faithfully recorded and all the pictures described in detail. (I guess publishers will only allow a ``copy'' rather than an abridged ``derivative work.'') One page of the biochemistry book illustrated schematically a polypeptide chain (a short protein) that had been sequenced, each monomer represented by a little box with a three-letter code. For a few minutes, all the reader did was rattle off ``...glutamine, valine, glutamic acid, alanine, arginine, serine, alanine, ....''

I prefer ``Gravitation.''

Traditionally, one ``John'' was regarded as the author of GJohn and of [the Book of] Revelations, but serious scholarship now regards this as highly improbable, since the Greek of one of the texts (Revelations) contains many ``Palestinian'' errors and the other does not. ``GJohn'' is occasionally used to designate the John who was the (presumed single) author of the text GJohn.

The gram may have some other uses.

Extensions:

<bg>, <BG>	Big Grin
<eg>	evil grin
<g,d&r>	grinning, ducking & running
<g,d&rvvf>	grinning, ducking & running very very fast...
<vbg>	very big grin

In German, euro is spelled Euro; the pronounciation, written in English, would be something like ``OY-hroe.'' (As Twain remarked, foreigners spell better than they pronounce.) Also in German, one hundredth of a euro is a Cent. According to the usual German rules, this should be pronounced as ``tsent'' would be in English, unless it is regarded as a loan word from, say, American English, in which case it should be pronounced ``cent.'' In fact, German dictionaries generally favor the ts pronunciation, but the s pronunciation seems to prevail in practice.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm as bad as most of the other beer receivers at the sports bar.

The entry looks a little thin.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

For some events (e.g. minor-league baseball, many rock concerts), all the seating is general admission. Rock concert promoters are reported to favor ``festival seating,'' as GA seating is also called, on the theory that the most enthusiastic fans get near the stage and generate excitement for the rest of the crowd; some performers and bands insist on a festival seating area near the stage. Many of the professional classical music concerts, most of the plays, and all of the operas I can recall had assigned seating, or at least assigned sections. Sporting events have typically been a mix, with some GA sections.

All the classes I have ever taught were GA, but none of them has had a mosh pit. I think I had better liven up the presentations. Can I do laser lightshows with PowerPoint?

I've heard the story that when Roosevelt and Stalin negotiated over the form of the UN, Stalin wanted every Soviet Republic of the USSR (all 15) to have a vote in the GA. Roosevelt counterproposed that then every one of the united states (all 48) should have a vote. In a compromise, Stalin got separate membership and GA votes for Ukraine and Belarus. If this seems like an unbalanced compromise, maybe not the best negotiating on FDR's part, well, you're catching on.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Georgia. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Georgia city and town links.

Not the same as the former soviet republic and current Russian vassal state of Georgia (.ge).

If you want to learn about gravure, you probably want to know about the GEF.

There's another link from the GAA homepage entitled ``What's Gravure?'' Do you feel entitled, punk? The explanation begins ``Gravure is an intaglio printing process. The image carrier has the image cut or etched below the surface of the non-image area.'' Thank you. I think maybe I'll just go to Kinko's.

Turns out the ``generally accepted'' doesn't stretch across national borders; US and Canadian GAAP are different, requiring separate tallies in the annual report of a company traded on US and Canadian boards.

Room temperature band gap is 1.43 eV. It's a direct-gap III-V semiconductor. There are satellite valleys at the L points, with minima 0.3 eV above the minimum of the gamma valley. The effective mass is 0.67 times the free-electron mass in the central valley (although I've seen 0.65 used) and 0.55 in the L valley (even less certain).

Lattice constant of 5.653 Å is very close to that of the indirect-gap III-V AlAs, and the AlGaAs system has been the most productive for heterostructure research.

It's almost surprising, really. An acronym like GABOB ought to clue you that neuropharmacologists are more fun than a barrel of monkeys on psychotropic drugs. Here are some representative bits of humor:

For example, suppose one were interested in elucidating the presumed biochemical aberration in schizophrenia. What would one measure? ATP? Glucose? Ascorbic acid? [ROFL.] Unfortunately, this problem early on had been zealously investigated by people who measured everything they could think of, generally in the blood, in their search for differences between normal individuals and schizophrenics. As could be predicted, the problem was not solved. (It may be assumed, however, that these studies produced a large population of anemic schizophrenics with all this bloodletting.)

Deciding where to measure something in neuroscience is complicated by the heterogeneity of nervous tissue: In general, unless one has a particular axon to grind, it is preferable to use peripheral nerve rather than the CNS. Suburban neurochemists have an easier time than their CNS counterparts....

In the next-to-final step before selecting the color of the tablets, the ideal candidate will then be synthesized....

The excerpts are from pp. 6, 7, and 503 of Jack R. Cooper, Floyd E. Bloom, and Robert H. Roth: The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology (Oxford Un. Pr., 7/e 1996).

The name is Hebrew for `Freedom-Liberals Bloc' -- you can deduce the word-to-word correspondence yourself. It was an Israeli political coalition list created in 1965 from the combination of Liberal Party and Herut.

Only the non-Chinese loans -- that is, the third group of words -- count as gairaigo. The situation of Chinese loans in Japanese is similar to the situation of French and Latin words in English: so much of English vocabulary has been borrowed from French and Latin that the fact of a word coming from French is natural. The Japanese use gairaigo the way we would be using loanword if we decided that French and Latin words are not foreign enough to be regarded as loans.

The gai of gairaigo is the same as the gai of gaijin. The morpheme go in gairaigo means `language.' (The words eigo, keigo, supeingo, and tango mean `English language, honorific language, Spanish language,' and `word.' As I've heard it pronounced, the word supeingo sounds like ``Spain go''; the u in the first syllable is notional.)

A number of gairaigo are identified in entries of this glossary, and a list of them would serve as a good proxy test of how well you have studied this august resource. I suppose you could even use the list for fun, to see how well you can recognize them. I'll place a list here soon.

A Chinese (Han) character (called hanzi in Chinese and kanji in Japanese) is the most precise way to represent the word, and the existence of different kanji makes it possible to say certainly that two words that sound the same are in fact two different words rather than two different senses of a single word. In fact, there is another word with the same pronunciation. The other gakki means `musical instrument,' and is written with a pair of kanji.

Japanese has a native phonetic writing system called the kana. I describe this elsewhere in the glossary and I'm not going to repeat myself here. Since the kana is phonetic, two words that sound alike are represented identically. (I should say that there are some exceptions. In particular, the kana that once represented a sound we would write ``wo'' continues to be used in the standard spelling of various words, even though its sound is now generally indistinguishable from that of the kana for ``o.'')

As is typical, the homophone pair of gakki words with different kanji has identical spelling in kana. The spelling consists of two kana, for ga and ki. As it happens, there is a third word that has that spelling, with the romaji spelling gaki. This is a pejorative slang term for young person, something like `young punk.'

As you will have noticed, the kana sequence ga-ki has two different romaji representations. The reason is that there are phonemic aspects of Japanese that the kana cannot represent. The word spelled gaki is quicker, with accentual stress on the first syllable. The words spelled gakki are pronounced almost like two single-syllable words, with stress on both syllables.

(Japanese does not inflect for number, so each of these nouns is used indifferently for one or for more semesters, instruments, or punks.)

If your units aren't working out and it's not a mere factor-of-1.20095 error, maybe you're reading ``gal'' wrong...

1. Instead of PROM-type burn-in, connections are written in EEPROM-type logic gates, so Gal's are reprogrammable (10,000 to 100,000 times).
2. A ``macrocell'' controls the kind of outputs (direct, inverted, XOR, registered).

Term demonstrates what unrepentant sexists electrical engineers really are! It's just outrageous! Cf. PAL.

It's called a `way' because it looks like a whitened path running across the firmament. I'm not sure when it was finally realized that it's not just ``out there,'' but we're in it. In the 1980's when I would fly into LAX, I would usually notice a sort of yellowish line as we descended past the eastern mountain gaps defining an LA basin. (Something like the cloud on the New York side of the Verrazano bridge.)

The Greek root gala occurs in the simple sugar galactose. ``Milk sugar'' is the double sugar lactose, composed of one galactose and one glucose.

The gamma is articulated in the back of the mouth in Modern Greek -- really in the throat, a bit like the Spanish gee (when voiced; see the AWWA entry). However, it is rhoticized -- it sounds a bit gargled (to a degree that varies among speakers), so the word gala today (it's still the word for milk) sounds like rala pronounced in Spanish.

Galaxy is also one of the names of TradeWave or EINet, ``[t]he professional's guide to a world of information.''

                  OH
                 /
           _____/
          / ___ \
HOOC_____/ /   \ \_____OH
         \ \___/ /
          \_____/
                \
                 \
                  OH

A good strategy in any game of chance is to hope for more than one thing, to improve your chances of getting what you hope for. Ideally, you should hope to lose. Cf. lottery.

Also, keep your wishes up-to-date. Don't be caught wishing for something you no longer really want. A similar principle applies to your résumé.

Your hopes should not be modest: wish big. Since most wishes go unfulfilled, what you lose in pleasant surprise is more than compensated in pleasant dreams.

It's also prudent to have a fall-back wish. Don't wish for one thing to the exclusion of every other possibility. There is much greater variety in the improbable and impossible than there is in the probable and certain. Take advantage.

Focus. For example, say I need a black face card. Often what will happen is, I draw a two of clubs. This shows that the method is working, since I got a black card. Unfortunately, the notion of royalty has encountered some noise, converting ``royal'' to ``duke'' to ``deuce.'' People often claim they need silence to concentrate. They want to eliminate this kind of noise in the bettor-to-goddess channel.

Some people think it's illogical to hope for the impossible, but it's not. It's only illogical if you believe.

Did I mention that you shouldn't wish for just one thing? One way this can happen is, you wish for important things first, then get bogged down in details and wish for small potatoes. Don't forget the forest when you're looking at the tree! All this concentration is hard work. Indeed, it's not widely understood that because of this work, all games of chance are excellent aerobic exercise. Okay, so as a matter of pettifogging fact, it's not true, but people don't realize this untrue fact nevertheless. I mean, since when has the manifest falseness of a belief ever been a significant impediment to its being widely held? Obviously, there is a conspiracy of prejudice against games of chance. After all, how many games of pure chance do you know personally? Uh-huh. I thought so.

Do not dawdle. Hoping is subject to a window of opportunity. Hope while the outcome is still unknown, hope before it is too late, hope before all hope is lost. Hope while the hoping is good. Strike while the iron is at `cottons.'

And don't just wish for one thing.

Wish carefully. If you wish for the wrong thing and get it, not only do you have the wrong thing but you've also wasted one of the wishes that was going to be fulfilled.

Wish heartily. Don't wish half-heartedly -- don't leave any doubt as to what it is you want.

Subject your wishes to a ruthlessly rigorous examination. If you find that you've been wishing for a logical impossibility, consider quantum logic.

You know, it's important to recognize that what you want most may just not be in the cards for you. If you wish for just that thing, it's like the irresistible force running up against the immovable body ... you've just shot your wish! So for goodness sake and FCOL, wish for more than one thing!

One of the state lotteries, I forget which, has a slogan ``if you don't play, you can't win.'' (Maybe it's more than one of the lotteries, but I still forget which. And the converse of the slogan is true too.) This slogan is true for all games of chance, and in fact it demonstrates that hoping works. Look at it this way: if you don't have any wishes, then your wishes can't come true. Obviously, if you do have wishes, then sooner or later some of those wishes are bound to come true, it would be weird if they didn't. So basically, you're better off if you hope, because some of your hopes will come true. Skeptics will say this shows that hoping is not perfectly effective. Of course not! Nothing is perfect, not even the most fervent hoping. But hoping works a lot of the time -- even most of the time, if you play your cards right.

Some say, ``if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'' Obviously, wishes are not horses. That is a category error. Wishes are tactical desires.

It's not as if hoping is some untried new idea. No, it's been studied scientifically, and people keep hoping. One interesting kind of study asks people to hope or pray on the outcome of some random event, and a computer keeps track of how well they do. In virtually every study, the same thing happens: the computer thinks that outcomes or winning percentages are consistent with chance unmodified by prayer, whereas the human participants recall afterwards that they did a lot better than one would expect by mere chance. The people who conduct these experiments claim this shows that people believe because their selective memory gives them a distorted idea of how effective wishing has been in the past. THiS KiND oF StUpIDITY is SO FRUSTRATING! All the studies really show is just that hoping doesn't work for computers, because computers lack the ability to hope. Social science is such a waste.

Some people say, ``wishing won't make it so.'' I think this clearly demonstrates that there are fools in the world.

Everyone plays at least one game of chance, because life is a gamble. Even looking up terms in this glossary is a bit of a gamble. Sometimes you get serious information, and sometimes you don't.

This isn't to say that Tyson would quit entirely when confronted with obstacles... but he often stopped putting in the exhausting work of continuing to attack: ``Did [Tyson] show heart when he took an ass-beating from Holyfield? Yes. He was a `game quitter.' A guy who doesn't give up, doesn't fall down, he's game with those punches. But he stops trying to win.''

(The quote is from Mike Tyson's Ex-Trainer: Heavyweight Is Not `Even Close' to One of All-Time Greats.'' Sean Cunningham interviewed Teddy Atlas, and the article was published on the twentieth anniversary of the infamous bout in which Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear.)

This is an interesting term because ``game'' could be misunderstood as an attributive noun, giving the term a meaning like ``quitter of games.'' In speech, the two phrases receive different stress and timing, although the difference is not reliable and is altered if the speaker wants to place special emphasis. In writing, all that a reader of the term has to go by is context. In fact, it seems the most common use of ``game quitter'' is in the context of video-game addiction, if only because of the <Game Quitters> website.

Robert Berger has a tutorial on the subject of Gamma. Charles Poynton has made available his own articles and ftp-able FAQ's about something called ``colour.''

The three main types of radiation emitted in nuclear decay are alpha, beta, and gamma rays. Each was eventually demonstrated to consist of particles, which consequently were called alpha, beta, and gamma particles). The first two terms (``alpha rays'' and ``beta rays'') were introduced by Ernest Rutherford in 1889, as described in the alpha rays entry. This was during the period (see the periodization entry if you have plenty of time for following tangents) that is not widely known at all as ``the Montreal Canuck exile'' or canard exile or something (see alpha rays entry if you care to understand that joke). Just to give you a small idea of the terrible hardships he endured, here are some lines from an article he coauthored with Miss H.T. Brooks [``Comparisons of the Radiations from Radioactive Substances,'' Phil. Mag. ser. 6, vol. 4, no. 19, pp. 1-24 (July 1902), on p. 9]:

As most of the experiments were carried out during the very dry Canadian winter, it was very essential [sic] to screen the electrometer and connexions with testing apparatus by wire gauze. Unless precautions of this kind were taken, every movement of the observer produced sufficient frictional electrification to disturb the electrometer. For the same reason and also for convenience the quadrants were separated by a cord connected to a suitable key and operated at a distance.

Rutherford's original distinction was based on the observation that some rays, designated alpha rays, did not penetrate matter very deeply, while others, beta rays, were much more highly penetrating. The beta rays were also known to be deviable by a magnetic field [i.e., electrically charged].

P. Villard was apparently the first to distinguish gamma rays, although he didn't introduce the name. Using a sample of radium from the Curies, he found that when he covered the source with enough thickness of lead to stop all the beta rays, there was still some nondeviable radiation that could expose a photographic plate. This finding was published as ``Sur le rayonnement du radium,'' in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, vol. 130, pp. 1178-1179 (Jan-June 1900). Henri Becquerel later confirmed this, though I haven't nailed down the precise publication. It seems that Rutherford's first publication on the subject was an item (``Penetrating Rays from Radio-active Substances'') sent to Nature on July 6, 1902, and published as a letter to the editor there in the issue of July 31, 1902. [Those were the days! These days, all the journals are bureaucratized and ultracareful, and any important news circulates in electronic preprint for months before it appears in any journal.]

Rutherford found that thorium, and to a lesser extent uranium, also emitted the ``extraordinarily penetrating'' rays that Villard had found with radium, but he maintained the possibility that they were what we would call ultrarelativistic electrons -- electrons moving near the speed of light. This analysis was based partly on an electromagnetic theory developed by J.J. Thomson and Heaviside, according to which the apparent mass of the electron increases with speed, approaching infinity as the speed approaches the speed of light. (This is strikingly similar to some predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity, which was published in 1905. I don't know much about the Thomson-Heaviside theory.)

Rutherford's hypothesis that the new X-ray-like rays might simply be higher-energy beta radiation probably accounts for his not naming them gamma rays at the time. Otherwise it was a natural, since beta rays were originally distinguished as the component of atomic radiation that was more highly penetrating than alpha rays, and there turned out to be another kind of ray, not originally detected, that penetrated even further. This was really just dumb luck. You'd expect that if some kind of radiation occurred that had not yet been detected, it would be because it was even less penetrating than those already discovered. If Rutherford had been smart, he would originally have labeled the most penetrating rays (the electrons) by alpha and the less penetrating rays (the helium nuclei) by beta, and the whole trend would have been screwed up when the gammas were found, but this didn't happen because Rutherford wasn't as smart as I am. (The reason gamma rays weren't originally detected is that in going from alpha to beta to gamma, one not only increases penetration depth by roughly a factor of 100 at each step, one also decreases the degree of ionization caused, also by a factor of roughly 100 at each step. Despite being less ionizing, however, gamma radiation is regarded as the most dangerous of the three kinds because it penetrates.)

The earliest article I can find that uses the term ``γ ray'' is one published by Rutherford in the February 1903 Philosophical Magazine (see alpha rays for the full journal title then used), in an article entitled ``The Magnetic and Electric Deviation of the easily absorbed Rays from Radium.'' An article of his in the previous month's issue (``Excited Radioactivity and the Method of its Transmission,'' pp. 95-117) still only mentioned alpha and beta rays. The February article starts off describing alpha, beta, and gamma rays on the first page (p. 177) as if the existence of all three had already been equally established, and as if the terminology was already in place. He gives the respective thicknesses of ``aluminium,'' whatever that is, needed to reduce the intensities of these rays by a factor of two, as approximately 5 microns, 500 microns, and 8 cm. Either he introduced the gamma-ray term before then and didn't happen to think it was relevant for his article published in January, or he simply decided that it was time to introduce the new notation, and that it would be clear enough. It's clear that I'll have to investigate further. It's even possible that I may actually do so.

(As the title implies, the paper contains evidence demonstrating that alpha rays are positively charged. Perhaps this conclusion, which Rutherford had resisted, prompted him to accept that the γ rays were a distinct species. If the February article had the first instance of ``γ ray'' in print, then probably the German term ``γ Strahlung'' was earlier into print. The February Phil. Mag. paper was sent off by Rutherford from McGill on November 10, 1902, to both Phil. Mag. and Physikalische Zeitschrift. The latter was on a weekly publishing schedule. The paper was received on Dec. 5, translated by A. Gradenwitz (who apparently rendered McGill as ``Mc. Gill''), and published in Phys. ZS. on January 15, 1903.

You need a break from all this serious science. Why don't you read this ABC entry and enjoy the ``Alpher Bethe Gamow'' story?

Don't worry if you didn't have the time to read Tom Wolfe. When he's gone, his stock will plummet faster than Theodore Dreiser's.

I don't know when this (English gun) was borrowed, but words related to war are often among the first to cross language barriers. That's my impression from German, anyway. The German word Kampf meaning `battle, struggle,' was an early borrowing of the Latin campus, `field.' (Especially the Campus Martius at Rome, site of games and military drills.) Of course, the same Latin word was taken over into English as camp (originally in military senses) from the French. The original Latin campus was only borrowed much later. The earliest attestations are in the US, and the first seems to be from 1774 at Princeton. That's Princeton University. (Then the University of New Jersey.) Nowadays nearby ETS likes to call its grounds a ``campus'' as well. ETS has a mailing address in Princeton, but it's located in neither Princeton (borough or township).

BTW, Spanish ganso (`goose') is not a direct restoration of the lost g in the Latin congener. Instead, it's just derived from Gothic (so Corominas y Pascual). The English gander presents some difficulties, and may only coincidentally resemble gans. English goose is derived from the common Germanic root (*gans-); loss of the n in English is pretty typical. (Cf. tithe, originally a form of tenth, and English-German pairs like other/ander, five/füf, mouth/Mund. Yeah, yeah, only before certain consonants.)

Gas gangrene is infection of muscle tissue by clostridia bacteria (hence the clinical disease name clostridial myonecrosis), usually Clostridium perfringens. The common name of the disease comes from the fact that blisters with gas bubbles form near the infected area. Yuck.

English frequently reborrows different cognates of the same word from different languages, but Middle English borrowing from French in some cases represented distinct borrowings from what were essentially different dialects. The pair warranty/guarantee is an instance of this in which both dialectal variants survived without diverging very much in sense, yet preserving different spellings and different pronunciations to go with them. The case of gaol and jail is similar: Northern or Norman French had a version of the word that was pronounced with a hard g, and spellings that eventually became standardized as gaol. Central or Parisian French (which is to say, really, only-slightly-less-northern French) had a soft-g version spelled with j, and whose spelling now standardized as jail.

The word jail, or at least its pronunciation, eventually became dominant -- probably sometime in the 16th to 18th centuries. British legal tradition preserved the gaol variant in spelling, but not in pronunciation.

Despite the name, the organization does not focus exclusively on government activity: ``The mission of the Government Accountability Project is to protect the public interest and promote government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering citizen activists. We also advise public agencies and legislative bodies about management policies and practices that help government deal more effectively with substantive information and concerns, while protecting the jobs and identities of those who provide this critical information.''

There's a page en<TITLE>d ``Government Acountability Project Project''</TITLE> and I thought ``Oh great! quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that,'' but it was just a typo. It seems to be a ``Government Accountability Project'' unrelated to the one in the previous two paragraphs. This one has the goal of helping ``improve government's funding and policy decisions by making transparent the public benefits produced with citizens' resources. Full transparency brings praise and criticism of results - and, eventually, change - based upon maximizing outcomes and minimizing expenditures.''

The focus is on screening of airport employees who have access to secure areas. This would include security screening of the sort that passengers and airplane crews already submit to, as well as more thorough employee background checks and a stop-gap of random physical screening until complete screening is implemented.

Elements of the bill have been introduced previously. In fact, the key provision is simply to amend a deadline in existing US Code from ``as soon as practicable after the date of enactment of this subsection'' to ``not later than 120 days after the date of enactment'' of GAPSS 2005. The text is in US Code Sec. 44903 (49 U.S.C. Chapt. 449). Apparently the TSA decided in 2002 that the earliest practicable implementation date was in the unforeseeable future. At the time GAPSS 2005 was introduced, an estimated one million airport workers could access secure airport areas without being physically screened. It is not hard to imagine objections on grounds of practicality to, say, screening of baggage handlers each time they cross the security perimeter. (One might then object on grounds of futility to screening workers once or twice per day, though random screening sounds good to me.)

Lowey introduced her bill (HR 2688) with six cosponsors, all Democrats, including ranking committee member Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS). Barring a legislative earthquake or an untimely news event, the bill will fail on a party-line vote. There is no Senate cosponsor and almost no media coverage.

The bill was introduced the same month that airport personnel screening was in the news in Australia, where a number of baggage handlers have been charged with drug smuggling. A practical suggestion made in reaction to that scandal and to other complaints about inappropriate baggage-handler ``interventions'' (theft and other mischief) has been to monitor baggage-handling areas with hidden or even with unhidden cameras.

I just wanted an entry in which to mention Precious Rubbish, with the subtitle, if that's what it is, As Raked Out of Current Criticism and Commented on by Theodore L. Shaw. I probably bought it at a garage sale; it probably cost me more than the 35-cent cover price, but nostalgia can be precious. The little paperback was published by the Stuart Art Gallery, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts, in a more innocent time (1956). I am reminded of Yossarian patching up Snowden's leg, with increasing confidence. This book corresponds to the moment before he notices that Snowden has taken major flak to the gut, and will die. In the 1960's, this book's target -- the pile of ``snobbery and humbug,'' the ``appalling barrage of ritzy twaddle'' and the ``pretention and priggery'' of ordinary working critics -- became a refuge from the tidal wave of academic litterature on literature.

Another useful thought is at the I.A. Richards entry.

Most garage sales fall fairly cleanly into one of two categories. In one kind, the object is to make money off the garbage, in the second kind the object is to get rid of the garbage. In the first kind, the garbage is overpriced. Since the attitude is the same for the whole lot, you can judge what kind of garage sale it is simply by asking the price of at most one item. If there's stuff on sale that no one could conceivably want, and it's not in a box labeled ``FREE,'' then you don't even have to ask.

Also diallyl sulfate, which gives garlic its strong odor. Onions have diethyl sulfate. The unsaturation that the allyls have is reportedly a bad thing. On the other hand, the odor of garlic can help repel vampires, as is well known, and also germ-spewing people (possibly selectively: see below).

Part of the reason that a person who eats garlic smells so strongly of it afterward is that the odoriferous compounds are excreted by the sweat glands.

Morley Safer has stated:

You can never have enough garlic. With enough garlic you can eat the New York Times.

In the summer of 1995, letters in response to a Consumer Reports article on garlic reported that rubbing stainless steel could get rid of the odor. Stammtisch speculation on possible mechanisms has been interesting and somewhat informed, but so far inconclusive.

A benign related syndrome, which might occasionally manifest as a garlic cryptophobia, is described at the entry for ``Hold the onions.''

Getting over a cold, I noticed that in three different foods, the garlic smelled unpleasantly strong. Two of these I eat often enough to know have consistent levels of garlic. If a lowered threshold for garlic distaste is a common effect of colds, then the health benefits of garlic may be enhanced by specificity of quarantine: garlic may repel sick people more effectively than healthier company.

It's the official gem of New York State.

Van Helmont's useful term came to be used first for vapors emitted in reactions and later for aeriform fluids, replacing the confusing or awkward term air. Gases in van Helmont's original sense were qualified as permanent, incondensible, or incoercible. (That's a serial a/k/a-type ``or.'') In fact, there are no truly permanent gases: at any fixed temperature, if you apply enough pressure you can condense any gas. (Above the critical temperature, there is no liquid/gas distinction, and you condense the fluid [call it gas or liquid] into a solid.)

It's worth noting that in the original Greek, chaos refers not to disorder but to `gap' or absence, and that too is altogether appropriate. In fact, while I've got your attention (Hello?) I'll mention the ``Kac problem,'' which might equally well be referred to as the ennui problem or the Maytag Monte Carlo repairman gas pains. It is simply this: when you simulate a gas (numerically), particularly one that is near ideality (low density), you spend most of your time simulating the simple motion of isolated, essentially non-interacting particles, and very little time simulating the interesting scattering or interaction events that determine the specifics of deviation from ideality. Incidentally, I believe that Kac is pronounced ``Katz.'' The ``c'' is supposed to have an acute accent on it, like the final cee on many South Slav names written in (augmented) Roman characters. Also, contrary to what one would suppose, the surname ``Katz'' does not really stand for the German word meaning cat.

1. MOS transistors (the most prominent microelectronic circuit element today), SCR's (a common bipolar discrete component) and some other devices have one terminal called a gate. (A few oddball devices have more than one gate. See, in particular, the floating gate entry.) Typically, the gate is the high-impedance terminal, or at least the one that in normal operation does not draw much current, but instead controls current flow through other terminals. Any modifier that indicates a material or device-operation context (metal gate or control gate) implies that this is the kind of gate meant. One can also avoid confusion with the other kind (below) by using a term like ``transistor gate'' or ``diode gate.''
2. A logic gate is an electronic circuit that performs a logic function (i.e. it has a recognizably distinct input stage and a much-lower-impedance output stage -- each output terminal that approaches one of at least two discrete logic levels).

There has been a sequence of Gaullist parties:

1. Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF). Founded by the general in 1947 on a platform opposing the new post-war French constitution (of the Fourth Republic). It split in two around 1952. But there was good bad news on the southern horizon...
2. In 1958, in the midst of a very bloody war in Algeria, France sought a savior in a military man, just as she had before (in 1940, as well as some previous occasions). De Gaulle agreed to serve as president on condition that a new constitution be adopted, with a much stronger presidency than in the Third and Fourth Republics. Wah-lah, as they say, it happened. De Gaulle ruled with the support of a Gaullist party (funny coincidence, eh?) that went by a variety of names (see UDR).
4. To be continued...

For more, see the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.

On the Johnny Mnemonic pinball machine, one GIGABYTE is worth only 100,000 points.

Here's the British page of an X.500 directory.

In (Modern) German, Great Britain is Großbritannien.

Poor English is apparently required, but not very poor English. (It's called ``Business English.'') It might be a difficult standard to maintain, but sloppy thinking helps. Here's some thinking from the 2006 registration form: ``Please Note: Registrations from Canada and outside the United States must be made in money order or cashiers check in $US drawn on an American bank.''

I don't entirely understand the inflections here. The term is medical Latin or neo-Latin. The Latin word forma is a straightforward first-declension female noun. There also exists an adjective formus of first-second declension. (That is, it takes the forms [sorry] formus, forma, and formum when modifying nominative nouns that are male, female, and neuter, resp.) However, this adjective means `warm' and is unrelated to the noun forma. I imagine that the term abbreviated by GBM was constructed using the genitive form formae, simplified to forme (as is common in English and very common in Romance languages such as Spanish). Thus multiforme is understood as `of multiple form.' I don't think this is an appropriate use of the genitive, and in any case I'd use formarum (`of multiple forms'), but that's the best explanation I can give for now.

Back in 2005, trying to impress Françesca (an impressive Londoner) with how Europeanistically au courant I was, I expressed sympathy with how disastrously the recent privatization (er... privatisation) of the railways had gone. She replied that yes, but they had been another kind of disaster before. Okay, she's not the kind of woman who has much to do with GB Railfreight, but where else will I unburden my heart and unload my troubles? And how more gracefully can I clarify that the eff in Railfreight is capitalized at the beginning of this entry only to indicate that it contributes to the acronym? Don't answer that.

An admirer of GBS may be called a Shavian. GBS coined the adjective Shavian, with the meaning ``pertaining to Shaw'' (or his works, wit, etc.), based on the Latinized form Shavius of his name. I don't know if this was influenced by his joining in the Fabian Society in 1884. The Fabian Society took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator. He earned the cognomen Cunctator himself as a nickname. It means `delayer,' and reflects his preference for attrition tactics against Hannibal Barca, rather than a direct confrontation. (The parallel is that the Fabian Society, like its offspring the Labour Party, favored gradual rather than revolutionary movement toward socialism. Lenin famously said of Shaw that he was ``a good man fallen among Fabians.'')

The gens Fabius is derived from the Latin for what we call `fava bean.' GBS eventually became a vegetarian, but that was just motivated by a hope of curing his migraines.

``A volunteer non-profit membership association ... formed in 1966 to apply computer technology to printing, publishing, and related industries. GCA developed and fosters the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), from which the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are derived.''

``GCA is a national affiliate and special industry group of Printing Industries of America.''

For other C compilers, see cc.

The question is really: what does it mean for many to be called and few to be chosen, within the client-server paradigm? This must be why push and ``channels'' technologies were so hot for a while.

Oh wait, they do have their own regional force, called Peninsula Shield. MENL reported June 10, 2002, however, that they are having trouble meeting a mid-2003 deadline to expand it from the previous strength of 6,000 soldiers up to 20,000. Not only is there a shortage of locally-trained soldiers, but most member states regard Saudi Arabia as a rival, and so are reluctant to send their soldiers to GCC headquarters there. Is this for real? Fears of the belligerent and bellicose Saudi Empire?

``GCC secretary-general Abdul Rahman Al Attiyya said Gulf Arab commanders [at a ninth meeting on the problem] discussed whether foreigners could be recruited into the regional force. Gulf Arab states have a significant number of expatriates in their militaries. These include soldiers from Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and mercenaries from Britain and the former Soviet Union.''

Hired help is the oil sheikdoms' answer to every problem.

In December 2013, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in Manama that the US will sell weapons to the GCC as a block. (Manama is the capital and largest city of Bahrain.) Following Hagel's announcement, the GCC announced the formation of a joint military command that could have as many as 100,000 soldiers. So soon? Promises, promises.

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar for the first time since the formation of the GCC, in reaction to what was described as Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the gulf state's involvement in regional conflicts. The three countries said in a joint communique that Qatar had failed to implement a GCC security agreement (adopted in Riyadh the previous November) to refrain from involvement in other nations' politics and supporting organizations that threaten the gulf's stability.

The next day, the Qatari Cabinet of Ministers announced it would not reciprocate the move by the three countries describing its ``regret and surprise'' at the recall of ambassadors and said it remains committed to the values of the GCC. The GCC has ``values''! Who knew?

Also expanded ``God's Chosen Operating System.'' He always seems to make choices He eventually seems to come to repent of.

Performance on the GCSE exams (highest grade A*, like A-plus). The next two years students take AS-levels and A-levels. The A levels are the college entrance exams.

For more, see the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Gadolinium tends to concentrate in tumors and so is used as a contrast material in MRI.

The Windows GDI is the part of MFC that provides all the services needed to produce images on the screen. This is another one of those strokes of genius that bends our knee when we face Redmond, Washington. [Cue the high-pitched humming.] I don't know what we did before, when we only had Macintoshes, TRS-80's, and HP's with slightly different instruction sets.

GD&T is what results when people with a bureaucratic rather than a mathematical turn of mind try to systematize the description of geometric information, but only if those results are redacted by editors with no grammatical or logical sense. For just a hint of the mayhem, see this FOS entry.

Ahhh, just think what might have been: GD&T could have been designed by mathematicians. It would have been based on only three undefined terms and yet have been completely general, logically well-defined, elegant, and utterly impractical.

You can download a Georgian font at the MultiMedia Center. The capital of the country is Tbilisi.

Uncle Joe was from Georgia. He was an Osete (as Mandelshtam pointed out in the untitled 1933 poem that led to his arrest), but the Georgians are proud of their local boy just the same.

Element was named after Germany (L. germania). Atomic number 32. A group-four semiconductor. First predicted as eka-silicon by Mendeleev on the basis of a gap in his periodic table.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Lattice constant 5.646 Å.

It's a byproduct of coal production, so there was plenty of it around in time for the beginning of the transistor age, even though until then it hadn't been good for very much in particular.

They have a homepage with an NII award-winning component on plastics.

Their Power Systems web pages contains a lot of history of turbines, but they gloss over all of the interesting history that would interest any normal person, like how Edison's gamble on DC power failed, and how he lost control of patent rights to his best inventions, and went broke and was supported in his later years by handouts from his former employee Henry Ford.

A belief in second chances is a part of the American credo. (That's right, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about there being ``no second acts in American lives.'') The GED is offered at over 3000 locations in the US and Canada, and can be taken on-line elsewhere.

One in every seven Americans with high school credentials received them via the GED, as well as one in 20 college students, but right now I can only think of two people who I know have taken the GED. One was thrown out of the house by his mother in the middle of his senior year, and the other started her senior year pregnant and had such severe morning sickness that she had to quit. (Most high schools in the US today try to help young mothers complete their education, but I think in this case she and her husband probably needed the money when she was able to go back to work.)

The tests are administered in cooperation with the local state or province, which awards a high-school equivalency diploma for successful completion. (Typically, the official name of this is something like ``Certificate of General Educational Development.'') All five component tests must be taken, and ACE sets a minimum standard for completion. (There's a minimum score for each test, and a slightly higher minimum for the average score on all five. This nicely mirrors the typical requirements for high school graduation.) The local jurisdictions may require a higher standard, but not a lower one. In practice this means that a GED certificate represents a higher standard than many high school diplomas.

For a fully detailed, in-depth investigation of the career advantages of a GED, see the K-8 entry. (You won't find much there, but if you're going for a fully detailed investigation, you should check out everything.)

On the other hand, according to this page, geeks were a major influence on the Life of Paul of Tarsus.

• Apple
  1 Infinite Loop
  Cupertino, CA 95014
  
• Apple
  1 Infinite Loop
  Cupertino, CA 95014
  It looks more like a zero to me. Help, I can't get off! Actually, it's a private crescent that looks like a U that opens to the south, where it joins the public street Mariani Avenue.
• Momentum Plaza
  The best-known one of these seems to be the Momentum Plaza in College Station, Texas. It's the name of a ten-story building on the east side of Highway 6 there (the road to Texas A&M), and it houses Adam's American Momentum Bank and Adam Corporation. ``Adam'' is businessman Don Adam. That's not quite ``Smart.'' The building was under construction for almost seven years, so it seems the momentum was due more to mass than velocity.
  
  Many years ago I used to mail my utility-bill payments to an address at a ``Momentum Plaza'' in Chicago. I became curious about this geekily named place, and eventually concluded that it doesn't exist. It was apparently just a fictitious address that the post office used for bill-payment mail to the utility company. Wouldn't ``Energy Plaza'' have been a bit more appropriate?
  
  I have also received an announcement that included the following:

  In Lieu of Flowers, memorial contributions may be sent to:
  
   
  
  The American Heart Association of Northern Indiana
  
              3816 Paysphere Circle
  
              Chicago, IL 60674
  

``Gravure is an advanced, high-tech printing process operating the fastest and widest printing presses in the world. It uses a unique image carrier, a gapless cylinder that can be imaged directly from the digital data. Gravure was the first printing process to employ a totally digital environment. The Gravure Association of America, Inc. promotes the use of the gravure printing process for publication printing, package printing and product (specialty) printing. The resources of the associations are dedicated to the collection and dissemination of state-of-the-art, as well as historic, information pertaining to gravure technology, marketing, environmental issues, government regulations, education, and training.''

They sell to the general public (although they won't write car insurance in New Jersey and one other state), but they did ask me if I'd ever been a government employee.

The German word Geisteswissenschaften is a calque coined in the nineteenth century by the translator of John Stuart Mill to render the English `moral sciences.' ``Moral'' in that instance had the older sense related to morale: conscious, mental. The word Geisteswissenschaften has now been borrowed back into English rhetorical ordnance in the War of the Words. The singular form (Geisteswissenschaft) is unusual, just as would be the singular of Humanities (in a related sense) in English. In fact, the semantic field of Geisteswissenschaften in German today shades strongly into what would be called the `Humanities' in English. This may be partly due to the fact that Wissenschaft in German has a meaning closer to the general sense of learning or knowledge expressed by the French word science than by its English cognate.

In the US today, sociology is the single most popular undergraduate major. In South Africa, the most popular field is Humanities, but there that term subsumes Sociology. Drawing disciplinary boundaries is a politically fraught and intellectually imprecise thing to do. In the US, one of the more common tricky decisions concerns whether History is to be included among the Social Sciences. (Please excuse the promiscuous capitalization -- we're talking Wissenschaft, after all.)

The word gender is cognate with genre and genus. (The Latin word genus is a third-declension noun, as one can tell from the genitive singular form generis. Most of the words derived from it are based on the root gener- and have nothing in principle necessarily to do with sex. It is nevertheless useful to note the sense in which, grammatically, gender ``is'' sex. In most Indo-European and Semitic languages, nouns have two or three genders, and the nouns for adult humans have ``natural gender.'' That is, one of the two or three genders includes all or most nouns for adult males, and another includes all or most adult females. It is the existence of this condition that makes gender ``sexual.'' (I've also seen ``natural gender'' called ``biological gender.'' Nouns with natural gender are sometimes called ``gender nouns.'')

Reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European itself identify an early stage in which there was no grammatical gender, followed by a first stage of gender development in which the fundamental distinction was between animate and inanimate objects. There are indications that what eventually became the feminine gender first arose to distinguish abstract nouns.

The distinction between animate and inanimate is a widespread basis for categorizing nouns. It is the only general distinction among nouns in Basque. In that language, exceptions demonstrate that this is a lexical rather than a strictly conceptual distinction; parts of the body, for example, are in the ``inanimate'' class, while tables are ``animate.''

The common pattern in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa is to have five or more genders (usually called noun classes in this case). Animate and inanimate objects tend to segregate into different classes (with, of course, some exceptions).

The reconstruction of PIE is based on comparisons of and inferences from daughter languages, so conversely one may describe various features of the daughter languages as being reflexes of the original. It is awkward, however, for a noun not to have a gender, since its gender is needed to determine the appropriate form of adjectives agreeing with it. What one does see, however, are coincidences of form in different gender. For example, in Latin (as in the other classical languages), nouns and adjectives fall into different well-defined groups called declensions, and the rules according to which they are inflected to indicate number and case depend on the declension. They may also depend on the gender. However, nouns of the third declension have identical inflections for male and female, and the fourth-declension inflections are independent of gender. The interpretation given to these facts is that gender in the latter case, and male-female distinction in the former, were not reflected in the morphology because they did not exist when at least some of the paradigmatic words in those inflections assumed their established forms.

The Indo-European language families with the largest numbers of speakers in Europe and the Americas are the Slavic, Italic, and Germanic. The Slavic languages generally retain three genders. Extant members of the Italic group are all descendants of Latin. Although Latin had three genders, its daughter languages have generally collapsed the system down to masculine and feminine, with the old neuter nouns coalescing into the masculine group. (The principal exception, not surprisingly, is Romanian, which still has three genders.)

Languages of the Germanic group have gone various ways, with German at one extreme preserving three IE genders, and English at the other discarding the concept entirely. [Discarding grammatical gender as such, that is. English preserves semantic gender, which is explicit primarily in third-person personal pronouns. (Hence the alternative name ``pronominal gender.'')] Standard Danish and Swedish have two-gender systems consisting of ``common gender'' (combining former masculine and feminine genders) and neuter. (The word neuter is a Latin adjective meaning `neither,' so the grammatical gender options are effectively either and neither.)

Nevertheless, a very common kind of grammatical gender is sex, and many people conflate the two. This conflation, which I am not alone in regarding as a misuse of ``gender,'' is made by people who ought to know better (and do). It seems like Victorian avoidance of the word sex, and to some extent it probably is, but there are tortured arguments for this use of the word, having to do with the claim that much of what we might call sexual difference is really socially constructed (just like the linguistic distinction among genders). My counterclaim is that the distinction -- between natural sexual differences on the one hand and culturally determined differences correlated with sex on the other -- can never be completely sharp, and are not competently distinguished in practice. Anyway, back to grammar.

When there is a third gender in addition to two sexual genders, the third is usually called neuter (via French, ultimately from Latin neuter, which meant `neither').

It is often the case that diminutives are classed as neuter, even when they have a natural gender. In German, for example, diminutives can be constructed by appending the suffix -chen or -lein or (in Southern dialects, including the Silesia of my mother's childhood) -el (-le in Swabian). All these diminutives are neuter. Hence Mädchen (`young girl') is neuter. Neuter diminutives are a widespread and ancient phenomenon. In Ancient Greek, to paidion meant `the little child' of either sex (to is the neuter form of the singular nominative definite article). Just as well. This must occasionally have helped avoided some embarrassment. The nondiminutive forms are ho pais (`the boy') and hê pais (`the girl'). (The final sigma here occurs only in the nom. sing. The noun root paid- is used to construct the other inflected forms -- plurals and the singulars of the other three cases, sc. accusative, genitive, and dative. Likewise compound and other forms, as seen in the case of paidion.) You also note that this is one of those situations in which natural gender is not reflected in the noun form. This coincidence might occasionally be used to cover ignorance, since articles are not as crucial in Ancient Greek as in English. (For example, at a climactic moment in the last book of Xenophon's Anabasis, the usual English translation has the soldiers shouting ``The sea! The sea!'' The Greek reads Thalassa! Thalassa! No article hê.)

With pais we see that the noun has gender (natural gender, in this case) which is reflected in the article (when present), as well as in (some) adjectives. The extent to which nouns' gender can be deduced from their morphology varies from language to language.

This entry will grow a bit more, but to anticipate let me mention that two and three genders are only typical of European languages, but many African languages use five and more genders, and these then tend to be called noun classes.

Here's an instance of gender-inclusive language that didn't fit in any acronym slot, finally forcing me to create this entry. It's from a progressive newspaper (an independent monthly distributed on the ND and SMC campuses), called and generally lacking Common Sense. The title and rustic font recall Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet of 1776. On December 23, 1776, Paine began publishing occasional essays under the common title of ``The American Crisis.'' The first number began with these words:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

(Capitalization and italics as in the original; no hyperlinks in the original.) The monthly mentioned above quotes these lines above its title, in what one might call abbreviated form:

These are the times that try men's souls. Women's too.

Okay, this wasn't inclusive enough. I noticed the March 2006 issue (vol. XX, #4); the font is no longer rustic, and the motto now reads thus:

These are the times that try women's souls, men's too.

I'm waiting for the times that try lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual souls. Since this is a Catholic school, there are probably people who fully expect those times. Hmm, April came and went with no issue. May brought #5/6, with the headline ``Worried About Vaginas.'' (It's got to be about the endless ``Vagina Monologues'' discussion.) This double issue isn't any larger than the usual, but it really is a double issue: first they filled the distribution boxes in time for graduation, then they refilled them for reunions. It's to épater le développement-comité, or something like that.

Oh, here's a good one. I'm not sure whether it's meant to be gender-inclusive or gender-specific or something else or nothing else, but here it is:

It was a speech defined by grace, feistiness, sly wit, generosity toward her former rival and by a powerful nod to the history her forewoman/bearers made --and which she carried forward with her unprecedented run for the presidency, winning more primaries and caucuses (23) than any woman in history.

It appeared in a blog posting by Katrina vanden Heuvel on the website of The Nation magazine. Obviously, it was about Hillary Clinton's speech to the Democratic Party convention on August 26, 2008.

I thought this might be an entry where I complained about all the ``/innen'' inclusiveness in my German-language email. It wasn't, but now it is. I get a lot of email addressed to Kollegen und Kolleginnen (academic `colleagues') that has a lot to say to and about ``Kollegen/innen.''

I wanted to add that I recently saw an article title uglified by gender-inclusiveness in a Spanish-language publication (Revista de Ciencias Sociales [Rcs]). From No. 6 (January 1999; but I only just saw it): ``Prácticas de aceptación y rechazo de estudiantes dominicanos(as) en una escuela elemental en Puerto Rico.'' [`Admissions Practices for Dominican [Republic] students at a Puerto Rican Elementary School.'] This is slightly interesting because the noun estudiantes is of common gender, so it can be modified by adjectives in masculine and feminine form. It raises an interesting question: when a noun has different forms for feminine and masculine gender, is it more or less likely that explicitly gendered modifiers will be used? This gets at the questions of whether gender-inclusivists care whether their locutions are awkward, and (if they do evince caring) whether they prefer awkwardness or grace. Probably no single answer applies generally, but it would be interesting to have some statistical data on trends. The contrast between common-gender nouns and explicit-gender nouns suggests a way to develop such statistics, but I haven't designed the appropriate study yet.

Greek:
• Fem. elaía means `olive tree';
  neut. élaion means `olive oil.'
• Fem. mêléa means `apple tree';
  neut. mêlon means `apple' or any `tree fruit.'
• Fem. oínê, ultimately based on an IE root meaning `twist,' originally meant `grapevine' (although metonymically, it eventually came to be used in the sense of `wine' also);
  masc. oînos means `wine.'
Latin:
• Fem. malus is any tree that bears a fruit called malum (the word was constructed from malum on the model of pirus, below);
  neut. malum originally referred to any fleshy- or soft-skinned tree fruit (so it originally covered apple, citron, quince, pomegranate, and peach) but eventually meant primarily apple).
• Fem. oliva means `olive tree' as well as `olive';
  neut. olivum means `olive oil.'
• Fem. olea means `olive tree' as well as `olive';
  neut. oleum means `olive oil.'
• Fem. pirus (also pyrus) means `pear tree' (no, not a fourth-declension noun: a rare second-declension female noun);
  neut. pirum (also pyrum means `pear.'
Spanish:
• Masc. banano means `banana tree';
  fem. banana means `banana.'
• Masc. cerezo means `cherry tree';
  fem. cereza means `cherry.'
• Masc. guindo means `cherry tree';
  fem. guinda means `cherry.' (It's a different kind of cherry -- morello cherry -- but both cereza and guinda are common words in Spanish, whereas few English-speakers distinguish morello cherries, afaik.)
• Masc. manzano means `apple tree';
  fem. manzana means `apple.'

It's surprising how many of these words have unrelated homonyms. The Greek mêlon could mean `goat, sheep' and oínê, written on a die, meant `ace' [from oînós -- note the accent -- meaning `one']. Malus is the male form of a general adjective for `bad' (`unpleasant, evil, etc.'), while malum, in addition to being the neuter form of the adjective, is the related noun (`evil, unpleasantness, etc.').

It's in line with modern practice, yet noteworthy, that the connection between wine and vine skips over unrelated ancient Greek and Latin words for grape (uva and rháx).

The trees and products listed above are not all independent, of course. Latin oliva was apparently adapted from the Greek elaía (the v reflects a digamma in the archaic form of the Greek word), and olea is either a native parallel form or an alternate Greek derivative. Similarly, malum was from the Greek mêlon (quite possibly in the Doric and Aeolic form mâlon).

The Spanish word manzana (earlier mazana) is derived from the Latin Matiana mala (i.e., Matiana apple). At some point, it must have become more confusing to give the full name than just the adjective, for Matiana mala could have been interpreted as `bad apple.' The Spanish word melón (like the English melon and French mélon) ultimately comes from the same Greek word for fruit.

Spanish Cereza is ultimately from a Latin pair cerasus, cerasum -- female and neuter second-declension nouns grammatically parallel to pirus, pirum -- and these words were used for `cherry tree, cherry bark, and cherry,' but it's not clear that Latin maintained a semantic distinction between the female and neuter forms.

Some Spanish women's names are masculine common nouns. All of those I am aware of arise from the popularity of María as a girl's given name. Many girls are given names of the form María de <foo> (think of the names of some Catholic churches and schools, in the form ``Our Lady of <foo>'' or ``Notre Dame de <foo>''). These names are often shortened to <foo>, and sometimes such shortened forms have become formal given names themselves. Prominent examples include

1. María de los Ángeles (`Mary of the Angels')
2. María del Consuelo (`Mary the Consoler,' loosely)
3. María de los Dolores (`Mary of the Pains')
4. María del Pilar (`Mary of the Pillar')
5. María del Rosario (`Mary of the Rosary')

The other four names in the list above gave rise to the common girls' names Consuelo, Dolores, Pilar, and Rosario. In Spanish, as common nouns, all four are masculine. They don't just happen to be unobtrusively male, they are nouns whose morphology makes them hard to mistake for female. (Consuelo and rosario both end in o; pilar and the singular form dolor both end in r. When you get to the LONERS entry, you will see that this makes them, morphologically speaking, highly probably male nouns.) As proper nouns, these names are construed female: they agree with adjectives in female form, etc.

I'm not aware of any men's names that are female common nouns, but the popularity of the name María does bend gender a bit in the usual way. One has compound names with María as the second element. I believe that the most common is Juan-María (cf. the French Jean-Marie). However, I've also seen Jorge-María (corresponding to Georges-Marie, also comparatively rare).

Many schools call these ``distribution requirements,'' and inevitably people use the locution ``taking a distribution'' for taking a course in fulfillment of a distribution requirement. This is a Chinese-menu approach. Students must take, say, at least one course in each of four different domains of knowledge. Sometimes things will be qualitatively looser, with six areas defined, say, and students required to take a course in at least four or five. Sometimes there will be specific requirements, such as a foreign language.

Some schools have one or more ``depth'' requirements, in addition to the fundamental ``breadth'' requirement of courses distributed among knowledge domains. For example, students might be required to take at least one ``advanced'' (second-year or 200-level) course outside their field of concentration. Back in the 1960's, Yale had an infamous ``seventh distribution requirement'' that required every student to take either calculus or second-year Latin. If you felt you had to choose Latin then I guess that was a ``depth requirement.'' (Just between you and me: introductory calculus at the college level is a remedial course.)

The distribution areas are usually just collections of academic departments (or other units that offer courses), and sometimes any course will count towards fulfillment of gen-ed or distribution requirements. Of course, some departments may designate certain courses as ``majors only'' or impose other restrictions. The most common restriction relevant to gen-ed requirements is that only certain introductory courses may be allowed to count toward fulfillment of gen-ed requirements. Think of this as crowd control.

You're probably wondering how I could have written so much without more evidence of cynicism. I just want you to know that I'm not growing soft, just tired. An approach that is virtually opposite to gen-eds is Great Books. There are endless gradations and variations, but the following is certain: if you stop reading after you graduate, you are a peasant.

  After consulting several English-speaking chemists I have thought it best to use a literal translation of the Swedish title [General and Inorganic Chemistry] although the expression `general chemistry' may have a slightly misleading meaning, at least to an American reader. In Europe, this or equivalent expressions usually imply an introduction to the laws of chemistry without any specialized, descriptive material, while in America it seems to mean an elementary presentation of the entire science. An American reader may, therefore, miss a treatment of organic chemistry and biochemistry.

Frankly, I have no problem with this. I just want to know what ``and'' means.

Here's the front-cover blurb on the definitive edition:

The most explosive classic of our time, newly annotated by the author of Opus 21 [see 22], The Disappearance, The Innocent Ambassadors, brilliantly examines and exposes American morals, women, moms, schools, politicians, businessmen, doctors, religion, and a host of other explosive subjects from TV to sex mores. A powerful book that should be read by every thinking person!

Despite what you'd expect, it does have some virtues even a thinking person could appreciate. It is sometimes unexpectedly even-handed, in a plague-on-both-your-houses sort of way. Here, for example, is the beginning of a footnote from page 241:

  While the ``pink'' aspect of many professors was plainly to be noticed in 1941 (and not a Great New Finding of Congress made a decade later) it was seldom a true communism or even faith in Marxist theory; usually it was a vague trust in ``economics'' as the basis of human motivation, a belief also commonly held by capitalists.

It's a hat trick: he heaps scorn on businessmen (a little bit) as well as congressmen and professors (rather more in the following). One disadvantage, for anyone who cares what the author thinks, is that the complaints are often vague, or perhaps allude to events whose memory has become hazy in the mists of time. For example, page 38 has this:

  The people, beholding the real millennium of goods, rejoiced exceedingly (and smugly) upon being told that there was at hand a similar millennium of the soul. The cloacal welter of evidence to the contrary was shushed by a new set of fancy conventions variously called forbearance, tact, manners, purity, holiness, sanctity, tolerance, and so forth. Another batch of citizens walked out of the church when they were told they were whole. They knew it was a lie. Their archetypes made it plain that nobody could be whole save for a minute at a time. ...

I can believe that he had some more definite events and conditions in mind when he wrote this than I can conjure on reading. I also suspect that I might color the events differently, and in more different shades, if presented with the raw data rather than his pre-processed, post-consumer, uh,... -- cloacal, let's say -- conclusions.

It was a preposterously influential book. Some people like to read this stuff because they're the kind of people who enjoy hanging around the tavern when the town crank gets into a talking drunk. As you may have guessed, I value this book for its fresh language, occasional malapropisms, and neologisms. Some examples of the last: ``scumskulls,'' ``profundaments,'' ``prickamette,'' and most famously ``momism,'' for which see portiere. Also, I learned all I needed to know about baptism in utero (pp. 176-9).

``if the elections for Congress were being held today, which party's candidate would you vote for in your congressional district?''

Let not Geneva be forgotten or despised.

Adams continued

Religious liberty owes it much respect, Servetus notwithstanding.

From this city proceeded printed books and men distinguished for their wit and eloquence, who spreading themselves in the neighboring provinces, there sowed in secret seeds of their doctrine. Almost all the cities and provinces of France began to be enlightened by it. It began to introduce itself into the kingdom under Francis I, in opposition to all the vigorous resolutions which he took to suppress it. Henry II ordained, with inexorable severity, the punishment of death against all who should be convicted of Calvinism...

Calvinism as it actually evolved was hence considerably more tolerant than its creator, eventually. Calvinist religion was also, as many have observed, a good fit to capitalist economic philosophy. Actually, that observation is often made of Protestantism, but Calvinist ideas were widely influential, particularly though not exclusively among other Protestants. Adams wrote (in the paragraph preceding that quoted above) that Calvin's ``opinions were ... embraced with ardor, and maintained with obstinacy, by a great number of persons of all conditions.'' But not equally by persons of all different conditions. In France, Calvinism was more popular in the mercantile west. There as elsewhere it was especially well-received among shop-keepers, professionals, and others of the rising middle class (I swear I didn't crib this from a high school essay, but at least I inserted a sentence break before there). That's why persecution of the Huguenots (French Calvinists) was such an economic downer for the French kingdom.

Let me just mention here that Martin Luther was the son of a relatively prosperous peasant. John Calvin was the son of a relatively prosperous physician. If this were an encyclopedia entry, I would have integrated that information more gracefully into the capitalism/Calvinism/Protestantism discussion of the preceding paragraph.

Calvinism did not spread very effectively where capitalism did not, so it made negligible inroads in Russia. The only reason I wrote this and the previous two paragraphs was to build a digression that justified mentioning the entry for Spirit of Geneva, a Russian beverage.

At some point I should probably remind the reader that John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Done. Oh yeah -- and don't forget to visit the Reformed entry.

Also reportedly the pronunciation of Gen. Taylor Ave. in New Orleans. Let me just say ``palatalization.'' That way, when I have a palatalization entry, I'll remember to link to it from this entry.

One typically expects an adjective and its noun to have same ending in Latin. This is particularly the case with the nominative singular endings -us, -a, -um. These are the typical male, female, and neuter endings of first- and second-declension nouns and adjectives. And the adjective novum is indeed an adjective of the first and second declensions. (This is one of the two large classes of Latin adjectives; adjectives in this class take first-declension endings when agreeing with feminine nouns and second-declension endings when agreeing with masculine or neuter nouns.) As it happens, however, genus is not the masculine second-declension noun it appears to be. It's not even a fourth-declension noun. (Although there does happen to be a fourth-decl. neuter noun genu, reflected in the English word genuflect. The good old Germanic word knee in English is a cognate of genu going back to proto-Indo-European.)

Rather, the genus abbreviated in the head term is a third-declension neuter noun, indicated in dictionaries by giving the genitive singular form generis. Most derived forms within Latin, and most derived words in Romance, are based on the root gener-. Hence gender and genre.

FWIW, George Sand was the pseudonym of Aurore Dupin Dudevant, but she also signed her personal letters ``George Sand.'' Born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot signed her letters M.E. Lewes (although she was unable to become Mrs. George Henry Lewes legally on account of Mr. Lewes's first wife refusing to grant him a divorce). At the J. K. Rowling entry there's information which should make both their practices seem quite natural.

George-George couples are rare, or were. Evelyn-Evelyn couples have been less so.

A GEO is a geosynchronous circular orbit over the equator. In other words, it is an orbit (and the only kind of orbit) that places a satellite in a position that appears at a fixed point in the sky to observers on earth. Communication satellites in geostationary orbits can serve fixed antennas. In practice, the delivery vehicle does not originally place a satellite on a precisely geostationary orbit, and may not place it at its assigned longitude. The satellite's on-board rockets are used to nudge the satellite into its final orbit. However, GEO is itself an approximation: the Earth's deviation from a perfect sphere and tidal forces from Moon and Sun cause the satellite to drift, and the same on-board roackets used for initial positioning are afterwards used for station-keeping (correction for this drift). Rocket fuel left over from initial positioning typically suffices for 10-15 years of station-keeping, but a really good initial position can save enough to add 10 years to the life of a satellite.

Geostationary satellites orbit at an altitude (a height above sea level) of about 35,786 km. For comparison, you realize that the earth's circumference is about 40,000 km, since the meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant arc passing through Paris. What this means, among other things, is that a GEO is kind of close. The average equatorial radius of the earth, r_E, is 6378 km, and the center-to-center distance R between Earth and GEO satellite is 42164 km. The Earth therefore has an angular diameter 2θ, where sinθ = r_E/R (θ ≅ 8.7°). Each satellite is visible in a spherical circular region representing a fraction [1-sinθ]/2 ≅ 42.4% of the earth's surface. In particular, geostationary satellites are below the horizon for all points on earth above a lattitude of 81.3°.

For something about powering GEO's, see the solar cell entry. More at the DBS entry.

Once when we were living in Illinois, my pal Ken said ``I want to start a rock club!'' I said ``I have a geode!'' Ken had a guitar.

Vide Rare Earth.

The LTTC GEPT is divided into five levels with content appropriate to each level, and each level incorporates listening, reading, writing and speaking components. The Elementary, Intermediate, and High-intermediate Levels are administered twice a year, the Advanced Level once a year, and the Superior Level upon request.

The LTTC GEPT is used by various government institutions as well as private enterprises. The test is also used by hundreds of public and private schools as an admissions, placement, or graduation criterion. About 2.20 million people have taken the test since its inception in the year 2000. [This appears on a webpage with copyright 2002. Wow! Oh wait: ``Revised: 2006-11-27.'']

Well, here's something interesting about sports. Ford was the star center for his high school (``South High'' -- imaginative name) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As a senior in 1931 he won a football scholarship to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he played center on the undefeated national championship teams of 1932 and 1933. He graduated on time (1935) and had offers to play professional football with both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, but he passed that up to attend law school at Yale. He paid his way through Yale Law by working locally as an assistant football coach and as a freshman boxing coach.

Now, I knew that the whole scholar-athlete thing had changed a little bit over the years, but who today could ever imagine a football center as a ``star''? It's too strange.

(The second sentence in the preceding paragraph was put in because in school I learned that you can't have a one-sentence paragraph -- or is that ``halve''?)

According to True Confessions, a collection of unprovenanced quotes compiled and edited by Jon Winocur (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1992), Gerald Ford said ``I've had a lifelong ambition to be a professional baseball player, but nobody would sign me.''

Gerald Ford's finest achievement was to become the first US president to be overshadowed by his wife in his retirement. Entries that are about other people or things, but which happen also to mention something about Gerald R. Ford, include those for 11Q5 (mentions the museum), MG autos (mentions his wife), the WWII channel (he served with distinction), and WIN (not a winner for him).

FWIW, Gerald Ford was born on Bastille Day, 1913. His name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. His mother left his dad two weeks later -- and who could blame her? They lived in Omaha, Nebraska! She returned to live with her parents in GR, and literally before he knew it, Leslie Lynch King, Jr. was known as Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. Interestingly, Gerald Jr.'s mother's maiden name was Dorothy Gardner. In the Wizard of Oz, the role of Dorothy was played by Judy Garland, who had been born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Okay maybe not so interesting. Mnemonic, a little bit. I usually mention the American proclivity to name change in connection with Werner Erhardt, creator of est, but you can find another example at the MGM entry.

A substantial online translation dictionary (German-English two-way) is offered by LEO (translations are also accessible directly via google.de). As of 2005, a parallel German-French resource is under development. A comparable German-English resource, <dict.cc>, has been constructed by user contributions, somewhat like Wikipedia. Another online two-way dictionary is ODGE. I haven't used any of these much, so I'm not making any recommendation.

I just (May 2007) had a surprise. On a German-language mailing list I subscribe to, there was an announcement for a junior research position (30-month contract) in economics, and the funding was from a grant whose title was in English (``Emergence and Evolution blah, blah, lasers, blah,'' approximately). The weird thing is, the title was accompanied by a translation into German. The implication seemed to be that there might be post-doctoral researchers working in Germany whose reading ability in English is less than excellent, and that one would consider hiring them.

In Classical Latin, the adjective became an abbreviation for the noun phrase, in about the same way that automatic stands for ``automatic transmission'' in English. So germanus came to mean `brother' and (to a lesser extent) germana `sister.'

The same word capitalized (Germanus) means `German.' In this sense, the earliest known use occurs in the second book of Caesar's Gallic War (written sometime between 52 and 50 BCE).

Quintilian (viii.3.29) quotes the second epigram in Virgil's Catalepton (`Trifles'; a collection of 14 now often obscure epigrams) and explains that it refers to T. Annius Cimber, who [was accused of having] killed his brother. In this connection he cites Cicero's ``Germanum Cimber occidit'' (Cimber killed [his] brother'). Germanum here is the accusative of germanus, so the brother is killed rather than killer (except that, oh never mind). Cicero's pun is a little better than that: ``nisi forte jure germanum Cimber occidit.'' Cimber was the name of a Germanic tribe, so the phrase can be interpreted to mean `unless perchance by law, a Cimber may kill his countryman.' [This might be a good place to mention again that the German nation has a remarkably large number of names in different languages. Part of the reason is that as different neighboring nations encountered them, they often knew Germans by the name of the local tribe and tended to apply the name in an unconscious antonomasia. Something like considering Cimbri as equivalent to Germani.]

There's a wonderful family named Stein,
There's Ep, there's Gert, and there's Ein.
    Ep's statues are junk,
    Gert's poems are bunk,
And nobody understands Ein.

Gertrude Stein is cited usually quoted at various entries in the glossary such as CSICOP and GRE but those are not really relevant and I shouldnt have mentioned them see? Not like 5-2 defense sure and ans. why not? Popular music too The Archies As Time Goes By thats not one song!

Okay, that's enough of that. Other entries with significant Gertrude Stein content:

• have got to
• middle class
• S.O.S.
• stick shift
• Va., VA
• VOA
• V2

Actually, the phrase was uttered by William Shatner (who played ``Captain James T. Kirk'' in TOS). In an SNL skit set at a Star Trek convention, he speaks it to some trekkies.

Because E = mc², energy units can be used to state a mass (and vice versa, of course, though this is less common). For example, the proton and the neutron have masses equal to about one GeV/c² (see amu). It is very common for physicists to elide the ``cee squared'' in informal conversation. There are three ways of looking at this. (1) Linguistically, one may regard GeV as an abbreviation for GeV/c<sup>2</sup> where no confusion is possible. (2) Lexicographically, one may regard ``mass'' as having among its acceptions ``energy equivalent of the mass,'' so that ``the mass is 1 GeV'' is to be understood as ``the energy equivalent of the mass is 1 GeV.'' (3) Logically, one may observe that there is no way to measure time in length units, or length in time units, or perform any other experiment or theoretical calculation that establishes an equivalence between, say, microseconds and kilometers, or nanoseconds and feet. Looked at another way, this means that if one were to posit that, say, one nanosecond equals one foot, it could not contradict any bit of science otherwise known. Also (this is a bit harder to see), making such an assumption does not prevent one from performing any calculation one might otherwise perform. Hence, and because it is convenient, physicists often assume that c has precisely the value one. (Hence the constant can be replaced by the number in calculations, which means that as a factor it disappears entirely.) This is a very common move for elementary particle physicists, and common also for some electromagnetic calculations. Similarly, other universal constants such as the gravitational constant G have their values set to one for calculations. At the end of a calculation, if necessary, explicit constants are reinserted for the evaluation of quantities in ``practical'' units.

GeV is usually pronounced ``gee ee vee'' in my experience, but I have heard ``jevv,'' and for all I know usage has shifted in the twenty-five years since I was last regularly involved. Cf. MeV.

It is troubling to read, in the documentation of their National Panel, ``Information on many of these sites helped brief the Greater Expectations National Panel during its deliberations.''

The 1984 movie Top Secret is an action comedy thriller, a parody of WWII spy movies from the 1950's and Elvis vehicles from the 1960's. Val Kilmer stars as Nick Rivers, the role I'd like to call the Elvis impersonation. While performing in East Germany (just so), he falls in love with a beautiful heroine and becomes involved with the French Resistance (if this makes sense, you're in trouble). The German dialogue in the original (English) release of this movie is generally inappropriate. Sometimes it's nonsense syllables, sometimes it's ordinary German but out of place (`I love you, honey' in reply to an officer's command), and sometimes it's Yiddish. At one point, a waiter seems to ask Nick if he's ready to order, but he actually says ``Gey kak'n af'n yam?''

In the Ring Lardner short story ``Zone of Quiet,'' a stupid chattering nurse goes on for a few minutes about a couple of her G.F.'s, and about the B.F. of one of her G.F.'s, and finally the patient says

``Maybe I'm a D.F. not to know, but would you tell me what a B.F. and G.F. are?''

She apparently understands what a D.F. is:

``Well, you are dumb, aren't you!'' said Miss Lyons. ``A G. F., that's a girl friend, and a B. F. is a boy friend. I thought everybody knew that.''

Ring Lardner grew up in Niles, Michigan, where there is now a Ring Lardner Junior High School, and since July 2007 the Niles District Library has sponsored the Lardner Writers Ring. Niles is just north of the state line from South Bend, Indiana. Lardner got his start as a sports writer with the South Bend Times in 1905. Them wuz the days. Today the only surviving local paper is the South Bend Tribune. (I mean, not counting the Irish Sports Report.)

``Zone of Quiet'' is the third story in The Love Nest and Other Stories (1926). Ring W. Lardner was one of the writers whose editor was the famous Maxwell Perkins.

The traditional GFCI for single-phase power supply is based on a current transformer (CT) -- a toroidal core surrounding the live and neutral wires. (That is, the wire pair passes through the hole in the doughnut.) A ground fault occurs if some of the current in the live wire doesn't return in the neutral (i.e., if a circuit closes through ground; a ground loop). Normally, without a ground fault, the net current in the wire pair through the hole in the CT is zero. When a ground fault occurs, a net current flows, generating an azimuthal magnetic field around the wires. This magnetic field is concentrated in the toroidal core of the CT because the core is made of high-permeability material (supermalloy or something similar; relative permeability typically 40,000 at a density of 4 mT). The current flowing in the wires is AC, so it induces an AC magnetic field.

If you consider a small sector of the magnetic core, something like a slice out of a Bundt cake, you realize that an alternating magnetic field through the slice yields an alternating electric field around the slice. The way this is detected is by wrapping a secondary wire poloidally around the torus. Poloidally means going around the ``small'' radius of the torus, as if you were wrapping ribbon around a hula hoop gift without covering the center. (The toroidal direction is the way the little noise-making marbles go inside the tube of the hula hoop. This is parallel to the azimuthal direction for a wire passing through the center of the hoop, perpendicular to the plane of the hoop.) The poloidal electric field integrates to a significant voltage across the ends of the sensing loop, and this voltage is amplified and drives the circuit that throws the circuit breaker.

There have been few accurate studies of the lethality current threshold for humans. (Red tape problems, you know. Legal technicalities.) Nevertheless, statistical fits of available data suggest that when a current I passes through the body, persisting for a time t, may be fatal if

[Number from C.F. Daziel: ``Reevaluation of Lethal Electric Currents,'' IEEE Transactions on Industry and General Application, vol. IGA-4, #5, pp. 467-75 (1968).]

The resistance from one hand to the other, when the hands are clammy, can be as low as 500 ohms (this is very clammy; take a towel). With a line voltage of 120 V, the current through this resistance may approach 240 mA (if other resistances in circuit are small), so if the GFCI takes the full 25 ms to trip, it would only give a completely unacceptable safety factor (for death, never mind injury or pain) of about 3. In fact, the standards bodies specify (UL 943, CSA 22.2 No. 144, etc.) permissible trip time as a (decreasing) function of current (up to a maximum current rating). As a practical matter, the trip time is almost an el-shaped function of the current: the circuitry takes much less than 25 ms to break the circuit, and except for low currents close to threshold, the circuit breaks at its maximum rated speed.

Cf. GFEC. See GFCB for operation.

``... I don't need -- a big fine car.''

The band had a hit with ``We're an American Band,'' mentioned at the Sweet Connie entry.

GFR may have been an American band, but their group name was an allusion to a Canadian railroad, the Grand Trunk Railway.

H. L. Ong, J. Appl. Phys. 64, 614 (1988).

There's no nonsmoking section. Then again, if you go there to eat, you're probably not overly concerned about living healthy. Shirley herself is deceased.

The tired old joke is that the waitress or whatever is supposed to ask: ``You want some heave to go with that gag?'' Basically, though, it's a hamburger-and-fries joint. Some other meats are also grilled.

In July 2009, I was shocked to discover that ``Giordano Bruno'' is not universally known, is not a standard cultural reference point like Seinfeld. In order to get an idea of his relative celebrity, I did phrase searches on various names (i.e., I searched on the names as quoted strings). Here are some names and their ghits between around 10:30 and 11:45pm EDT, July 13, 2009:

Name:		   ghits:
God		 483,000,000
Obama		 224,000,000
Michael Jackson	 200,000,000
Jesus		 199,000,000
Paris Hilton	  65,500,000
Buddha		  28,500,000
Lindsay Lohan	  27,000,000
Sarah Palin	  24,700,000
Tom Cruise	  24,600,000
John McCain	  23,400,000
Oprah		  22,000,000
Jennifer Hudson	  18,000,000
Elvis Presley	  17,700,000
George Washington 15,900,000
Paul McCartney	  14,400,000
Albert Einstein	  13,900,000
John Lennon	  13,000,000
Santa Claus	  12,800,000
Sarah Jessica Parker 12,000,000
Abraham Lincoln	  11,600,000
Susan Boyle	  11,200,000
Descartes	  11,100,000
Mel Gibson	  10,600,000
Nicole Kidman	   9,940,000
Thomas Jefferson   9,750,000
Nicole Richie	   7,950,000
Joe Biden	   7,860,000
Fidel Castro	   7,630,000
Winston Churchill  6,850,000
Max Planck	   6,720,000
Jennifer Love Hewitt 6,000,000
Elizabeth Taylor   5,540,000
Dolly Parton	   5,020,000
Elvis Costello	   4,820,000
Lionel Richie	   4,590,000
Immanuel Kant	   4,570,000
Yoko Ono	   3,870,000
Isaac Newton	   3,250,000
Christopher Columbus 3,040,000
Ashley Olsen	   2,550,000
Groucho		   2,460,000
William Shatner	   2,180,000
Cookie Monster	   1,860,000	(tied with next)
Mary-Kate Olsen	   1,860,000	(tied with previous)
Mark Sanford	   1,650,000
Philip Glass	   1,580,000
Jackson Pollock	   1,360,000
Ronald McDonald	   1,570,000
Axl Rose	   1,440,000
Harpo		   1,420,000
Richard Burton	   1,370,000
Giordano Bruno	   1,350,000
Zeppo		   1,280,000
John Quincy Adams  1,250,000
Francis Drake	   1,230,000
Leonard Nimoy	   1,220,000
Mary-Kate and Ashley 1,100,000
Werner Heisenberg  1,090,000
Carrie Fisher	     997,000
George Thorogood     996,000
Henry Hudson	     941,000
Enrico Fermi	     850,000
Alfred Nobel	     753,000
Richard Feynman	     729,000
Debbie Reynolds	     704,000
Jan Hus		     661,000
Maura Tierney	     624,000
José Canseco	     601,000
Leon Panetta	     599,000
Robert Boyle	     467,000
Gummo		     370,000
James Polk	     286,000
Eddie Fisher	     231,000
Stedman Graham	     199,000
Steven Hawking	      92,600
Ashley and Mary-Kate  63,700

There are some other things that might distort the numbers. One is that Google at first returns only an estimate of the number of documents that satisfy the search criteria, and these estimates are sometimes off. For example, when I first drafted this part of the entry (Feb. 11, 2011), I did a search on "exciton polariton scattering" (sic: the search string was in quotes in the text box; I didn't want just any old page that happened to mention excitons, polaritons, and scattering). The results page came back with ``About 17,500 results (0.13 seconds)'' but there were only four more (ten-result) pages linked at the bottom of the first page. Clicking on the last link (page 5) brought up ``Page 4 of about 33 results (0.13 seconds),'' from which we can see that the 0.13 seconds is pretty consistent. I took up the offer at the bottom of that page. (``If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.'') In response, I got ``About 7,870 results (0.38 seconds).'' Clicking on the last linked page at the bottom (page 6), I reached ``Page 6 of 52 results (0.26 seconds).'' Notice the absence of the word ``about.'' When there are more than about 1000 hits, using Google's regular search will not get you to the point of no-``about.'' Maybe there's a way around that; I'll have to find my copy of Google Hacks and see.

Another search that (as of this writing) yields interesting rapidly diminishing ghits is "transmitted light lamp housing". Back in February, it first yielded ``About 2,530'' ghits, then 19, and finally, at the end of the second pass with ``omitted results included,'' 26. I guess that when the individual words in a search string are common, an estimate of total hits is computed based on their individual probabilities and some low-level correlations. However it is computed, it seems the estimate can be far off. [When I repeated the procedure on June 26, the numbers were 3200, 19, and 23. If correlations are used as suggested above, then the increase in the initial estimate is most simply explained by correlations that stayed about constant as the overall size of the database (i.e., higher page counts for the individual words).]

Estimation oddities do not require multi-word quoted strings, however. For example, back in February a simple search on the single word lateration yielded an initial estimate of ``About 7,780 results.'' Google often returns results that are close to, but not exactly what one searched for. One used to be able to get around this by prefixing a plus sign to strictly require a word or quoted string; normally and logically, this would yield a smaller number of ghits. The search on +lateration, however, yielded 10,400 results. When I ran the searches some time later, however, the results were more logical. However, the ghits were also much greater -- about 26,800. This is about the number of ghits I got back in February for the plural (no plus). But now there are fewer ghits for the plural than the singular form. I don't think that anything had happened to turn the world of webpages that mention lateration upside down. In fact, I don't hope to make any sense of this.

[Some time in 2011, the plus-sign syntax (to require a word to be contained in the hits) was changed without warning or noticeable notice. Now, so far as I know, single words or phrases in quotes are strictly required. Generally speaking, Google's attitude is that Google is bigger and smarter than you, so it will give you the results that you really want, rather than what you asked for. Hence, there's no point in maintaining consistent behavior while tweaking and optimizing the software.}

Given the variability described above, some other apparent illogicalities are less surprising or less puzzling. It is frequently the case, for example, that narrowing a search seems to increase the number of ghits. For example, nonspecularly yields 5460 ghits, and nonspecularly reflected yields 10,200 ghits. Using plus signs (later: quotation marks) to force a strict search yields logical results in this case, but not in all. For example, today a strict search on +"heavy Majorana" yields 23,100 ghits, while a manifestly narrower strict search on +"heavy Majorana neutrinos" yields 51,000 ghits. I suppose this is an artifact of correlation-based estimates: +"Majorana neutrinos" yields 58,800 ghits, and it might be that this number, along with the ghits for heavy, and with some further two-word correlation, yields the initial estimate for the full phrase. Whatever the explanation, it is certain that at least one of the numbers is off by at least 33%.

1. By accident (74%)
2. Grudgingly (22%)

1. Greek and Roman; Greece and Rome.
2. Greece and Rome, a classical journal published by the august (British) Classical Association but targeted at you blokes. Published for the CA until 2005 by Oxford U.P., by Cambridge University Press after.
       All the Greek and Latin stuff is translated into English so you can understand it, but they show you the original words so you can feel like they respect your ability to read it and merely provide the translation as a convenience. The joke's on you: knowing that you'll skip over it even if you could pick out a word or two, they substitute dirty jokes for the real Greek and Latin. This saves on copyright permissions too. Cf. Polish. G&R is catalogued by TOCS-IN.

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