In a two-body problem, M = m1 + m2. In two-body problems involving only central forces, the center-of-mass and relative motions are independent. The equations of motion of the individual particles can be combined to yield a trivial equation of motion for the center of mass (zero acceleration) and an equation of motion that involves only the relative separation vector (and its second time derivative). By far the most common use of μ to indicate mass is in the two-body problem, to indicate the effective mass of the relative motion:
1 1 1 - = - + - µ m m 1 2
``Splat-cooled'' is a technical term. There's probably a pretentious and dignified term one uses in making presentations to the suited species.
Back in the summer after my freshman year, I worked in the induction furnace ``lab'' at what was then called Allied Chemical; I helped cook up alloy premixes that would later be remelted and splat-cooled. This wasn't a full-time job, and I was stupid, so I let people know that I was available to help out on other stuff when I wasn't trying to break molly with a rubber mallet or again attempting to electrocute myself. One morning a splat-cooling set-up down the hall exploded -- pieces of quartz crucible lay all over the floor, some insulating tiles and blocks were charred, etc. It was an emergency, and helping clean up was easily the most appreciated thing I did that summer. When the suits stopped by later that day on their long-planned tour, they never noticed anything amiss.
Ahem. Many of you have written concerning the generic chemical formula M0.8N0.2 written above. You point out that N is the symbol of a chemical element, and that might lead to confusion if it is used to stand for a generic nonmetal also. No problem! It turns out that N stands for nitrogen, which is itself a nonmetal. See?
Until we develop the postmodern chemistry entry, it may be encouraging to some of you to know that in the metglas context, the nonmetal was usually phosphorus (P), boron (B) or a mix of those, possibly including a little bit of silicon and maybe something more exotic. Never nitrogen.
While the M's I have seen in chemical formulae have generally represented metals, as described at the top of this entry, I have to admit that while cleaning out the garage, I came upon a paper of N. Washida, H. Akimoto, and M. Okuda, ``HNO Formed in the H + NO + M Reaction System,'' in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, vol. 82, no. 21 (October 19, 1978), pp. 2293-2299. There M can be any of He, Ne, Ar, Kr, H2, N2, CO2, N2O, H2O, and SF6, and that's not an exhaustive list. Here M is any room-temperature gas species that does not participate chemically in the reaction. So M here really refers to a mass. The role of the molecular species indicated by M is obvious: it makes the reaction mechanically possible: In the gas phase, the H +NO <--> HNO reaction is a two-body problem. Viewed in the center of mass, the separate species H and NO approach each other with equal and opposite momenta. Without some additional species, the momentum and energy constraints are rather tight.
Oh, Lord! At this rate I'm never going to get the car back in the garage.
Use Mojave.
I should mention Miss Match, a 2003 TV series starring Alicia Silverstone as a divorce lawyer who does matchmaking on the side, and of course she has her own personal romantic difficulties (anyone could write the project proposal for this). Okay, I mentioned it.
moles of solute ------------------ liters of solutionso the units are built into the definition, and the molarity is a dimensionless quantity. In fact, one can say ``the molarity is 0.001'' and be understood, but one is more likely to hear ``the concentration is 1 millimolar.'' In the second phrase, one doesn't really know what ``concentration'' means until one hears the unit. The concentration the speaker has in mind might be molality or normality, or any other of the 8 or so different concentration definitions in common use. These different measures give equivalent information, in the sense that any single given value of molarity corresponds to a single value of molality. (For dilute aqueous solutions, the molarity and molality are about equal.) On the other hand, in order to make the conversion between concentration measures one needs more or less detailed information about the solvent, the solute, and how they interact.
I should add immediately that the quoted phrases above were chosen to highlight a distinction. More commonly, one would say ``it's a 1 millimolar solution,'' so ``molar'' is used as an adjective. It's my impression that the natural language used by chemists tends to avoid situations that force the word molar to be a noun (don't think of teeth), but there is a real issue here. For purposes of comparison, consider length. You can say ``the length is 5 m,'' and clearly 5 m is the value of the length and not the kind of length being discussed, so 5 m is a noun. That 5 m can function as a noun is clear from its occurrence in a phrase like ``5 m of pipe.'' (Of course, one can also use 5 m as an adjective. One can even say ``a 5 kg length of pipe,'' though this ``length'' is not the abstract quantity that has a value, but a concrete thing with various properties. Thus, one can say of a particular 5 m length of pipe it has a 5 cm o.d., whereas giving the width of an abstract 5 m length is meaningless. Another indication comes from the fact that English does not inflect predicate adjectives for number, so the expression ``the length is five meters'' implies that meters in this context is a noun.)
A disused María may occur in two ways that I can think of. It may be one of multiple given names that a child is saddled with (like ``María Elena Isabela...'') or it may be part of a María epithet like María del Rosario. (See gender of Spanish women's names for other examples.)
Ordinary Markovian analysis assumes transition rates or probabilities independent of time. If these vary in time, it is still possible to write a formal solution using time-ordering operators of the sort developed for quantum field theory.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Massachusetts. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
In 1998, the total value of M&A in the EU was $600 billion; in 1999 it was $1200 billion. I have no idea how these numbers are handled when they involve parties outside the EU.
The word you often screw up the spelling of is medieval or mediaeval. Mnemonic: co[a]eval.
The Middle Ages is divided into two parts: the Early Middle Ages (that comes first) and the Late Middle Ages (that comes last). It's not divided into three parts because ``Middle Middle Ages'' would sound silly.
The active ingredient in Rolaids is a weak base with a long name, if not a strong one: aluminum sodium dihydroxy carbonate [AlNa(OH)2CO3].
The two ``-Seltzer'' products include bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate in the newfangled name; NaHCO3 in either case) and citric acid. Alka-Seltzer has aspirin as well. (Regarding the ``alka,'' see the entry for alkali. Bromo-Seltzer in its original formulation had a bromide. Today it contains the analgesic acetaminophen.
Awwww -- in August 2005, Apple came out with a mouse that has more than one button. Apparently, they're working hard to stay ahead of Windows and Unix which didn't have three buttons, or two buttons and a scroll wheel, until, uh, well, whenever.
(No, there isn't any clever joke you're missing in the previous paragraph. I just felt like rolling into the ditch of nonstandard English, and I did.)
Update 1998: Bob lost but he found a new career as a bail-bondsman for Newt Gingrich and a character actor in advertisements.
Update 2000: After her display of leadership in the Macarena crisis, Liddy Dole was considered a credible candidate for the 2000 Republican nomination. She ran a close second in many early (1999) polls, but eventually dropped out. Focus groups will prove that people were just afraid there'd be a new spate of Bob Dole erectile insufficiency advertisements if she became president. Look: Bill and Monica was enough. Change the subject. Let's have some good, clean, old-fashioned abuse-of-power and election-fraud scandals.
Update 2001: Done. Bush (``the inarticulate, junior'') became President and Colin (``Ay!! Macarena!!'') Powell became Secretary of State. God help us.
More on Macarena in the Richard Simmons entry.
(Seriously, it is widely adverted that in 1660, Isaack B. Fubine of Savoy, patented macaroni at The Hague. I don't know what that means, so I'm not going to worry about it.)
It turns out (don't tell the glossarist!) that Macca is a common nickname in the UK (or in England, at least) for anyone (not just Sir Pretty Face) whose surname begins with the Gaelic prefix Mac or Mc. I guess that in the early or middle twentieth century, ``Mack'' may have functioned that way in the US.
Machen is a German verb cognate with English make. The ulterior etymology of these words (beyond proto-Germanic) is uncertain.
The English noun might (the word that has a sense similar to strength) happens to coincide in sound and spelling with the modal might (subjunctive form of may), but the words don't seem to have any etymological relationship. German has a homonym pair: Macht is a noun also meaning `strength, force, or might' (as in Wehrmacht, `armed forces' or more literally `war force'). The word macht, on the other hand, is the 3d-pers. sing. pres. indic. of machen (usage example below). There doesn't seem to be a relationship between these words either, besides accidental coincidence.
German and English have another pair of cognates, tun and do, that like machen and make also have similar meanings. To native speakers of English, the assignment of meanings to machen and tun can seem a scrambled version of that of make and do. For example, ``er macht nichts'' means `he does nothing' rather than `he makes nothing.' Conversely, es tut mir Leid, literally `it does me sorrow,' means `I'm sorry' -- something like `it makes me sorry.' Probably the simplest thing one can say about the situation is that machen is a broader term than make in English, in part because there is less expectation that some thing (Ding) will be made. Crudely, one can say that machen is used more than tun, whereas make and do are comparably common. (It seems that Old English used the etymons of these words a bit more like German does now, the make etymon being much more common.)
Okay, I had some other ideas, about fashion effects in language and expressions like ``make trouble,'' ``make time,'' and ``do time,'' but the articulation is still embarrassingly vague. I've commented them away for the duration, so we can get the rest of these entries published.
Here's a peek behind the curtain. I found a clew to pull on: ``The Historical Development of the Causative Use of the Verb Make with an Infinitive,'' by Jun Terasawa, in Studia Neophilologica, 1985, vol. 57, #2, pp. 133-143. Abstract:
The development of the English causative construction with make + an infinitival complement is examined. Two types of causative V -- agentive causative & pure causative -- are distinguished, differing in both semantic & syntactic structure. Agentive causatives are seen to place stricter semantic restraints on causer, causee, & complement than do pure causatives. It is argued that the make construction began as a pure causative & later developed into an agentive causative. 5 Tables, 11 References.
This next one looked promising at first: ``Investigating Learner Vocabulary: A Possible Approach to Looking at EFL/ESL Learners' Qualitative Knowledge of the Word.'' [I've quoted the awful title accurately, but the paper itself is written in fluent English.] According to the abstract, the study involved ``a contrastive corpus analysis observing the uses of the high frequency verb make in learner & native writing...'' and it was published in a journal published in Germany [IRAL, vol. 39, #3, pp. 171-194 (2001)]. Unfortunately, the researchers (Erik T.K. Liu and Philip M. Shaw) studied only CSLE's.
Jackpot! ``The Grammatical and Lexical Patterning of make in Native and Non-Native Student Writing,'' by Bengt Altenberg and Sylviane Granger, in Applied Linguistics, vol. 22, #2, 173-194 (June 2001). From the abstract: ``The article focuses on what proves [sic] to be the two most distinctive uses of make: the delexical & causative uses. Results show that EFL learners, even at an advanced proficiency level, have great difficulty with a high frequency verb such as make. They also demonstrate that some of these problems are shared by the two groups of learners under consideration (Swedish- & French-speaking learners) while others seem to be L1-related.''
Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, quotes Ennius to the effect that ira initius insaniae -- `anger is the beginning of insanity.'
Actually, McNamara's name for the principle was just ``Assured Destruction.'' The longer name with the punny acronym was invented by opponents.
A program that is ``made possible by'' <name of public-spirited organization here> clearly would not have been possible without that organization. Evidently, we're talking metaphysical necessity here. No other organization could have done it. To you it looks like dollars, but really it is existential ambrosia. Without that particular organization, the very existence of the program would have been not endangered, not imperiled, but completely and utterly nullified and kaput. That's why they didn't say ``made possible by funding from'' <name of public-spirited organization here>.
You probably didn't realize these facts. You need philosophical training, pronto.
In 1979 Wieland moved to CERN, where he adapted the numerical method to other particle-beam problems. Over the next decade he continued to develop the program, which at some point was dubbed MAFIA. It's well-known code; anyway, it's not exactly my field, yet I've noticed it mentioned in a couple of places. Maybe if it had some other name I wouldn't have noticed. In any case, most of the information in this entry is cribbed from a 2009 <PhysicsWorld.com> article by Hamish Johnson.
See
Cf. journal and periódico. While you're there read on through the periodista entry.
According to Foxe's Acts and Monuments, William Tydale went up to Oxford in Easter term 1510 and was entered of Magdalene Hall, as they used to say.
This way to the next ALA round table.
Magic is also the team name of the Orlando, Florida NBA franchise. Orlando's long-time star, Shaquille O'Neal (more at the amphorae entry), was recruited to play for the LA Lakers; they got their magic back. For a while, anyway. In July 2004, Shaq went back (to Florida anyway, and the Miami Heat).
``Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.''
[In Profiles of the Future (1962).]
Of course, a little stagecraft may not be amiss (see VLIW).
In solids at sufficiently high temperatures, magnetic ions give rise to paramagnetism. The spins in a paramagnetic material align (i.e., tend to align, on average) with the applied magnetic field H, and give rise to a magnetization M that is parallel to and in the same direction as H. The total magnetic induction B is therefore larger than the applied field H. This behavior is essentially the sum of the behaviors of the individual atoms, acting more-or-less independently. In paramagnetism, M is proportional to the applied field, through a proportionality constant called the susceptibility <chi>: M = <chi>H.
At low temperatures, a qualitatively different magnetic behavior occurs, which involves a collective interaction of the atoms: the field of an atom's oriented neighbors is enough to keep it oriented as well. As a result, there is a spontaneous magnetization M, representing the self-consistent parallel orientation of atomic spins. This is the behavior of an individual ``domain,'' which might be 1000 Å for Fe. In large samples, the behavior is complicated by the interactions among different domains, and hysteresis (history or memory effects) occur.
There is a qualitative contrast between induced-field effects in magnetism and electricity: in magnetic materials, the predominant sign of the effect is paramagnetic -- M reinforces H, while in dielectric materials it is opposite -- P diminishes the effect of D. The fundamental reason for this is in the sign of the force between similar elements: in magnetism, the Biot-Savart or Amperé (inverse-square) force law between two equal (parallel) current elements is attractive, while Coulomb's (inverse-square) force law for two equal charges is repulsive.
Other kinds of behavior occur, although metals with high magnetic-ion concentrations eventually (at low enough temperature) exhibit ferromagnetism. The transition from paramagnetism occurs at the Curie-Weiss temperature TC (capital tee, sub-cee, if you're not Netscape-enhanced), and is signaled by a divergence of the susceptibility as <chi> ~ 1/(T - TC) in the paramagnetic regime.
A mailing list for a discussion group is a common address to which list subscribers send a single copy of their message, and from which they receive a copy of any mails. This kind of system is also called a mail reflector. Discussion groups can be moderated or not. After political arguments nearly destroyed ANCIEN-L in 1998, for example, it was reconstituted as a moderated group, with postings being vetted by one overworked list owner. The attendant delays destroy some of the immediacy that unmoderated lists have. An unmoderated list on a decent server can reflect messages around the world in a few minutes -- i.e., the delays are just the usual email latencies. A moderated list is occasionally also used to create a low-traffic announcements list by selection of relevant messages from a high-traffic list (e.g., classics-m).
This file from a humor archive accurately describes the natural life-cycles of mailing lists that ever get large.
A newsletter is essentially an application of a moderated mailing list for dissemination of an email newsletter. A lot of organizations use moderated lists to send out advertisements to potential customers, directives and news to employees, etc.
The traditional mailing-list software is run completely by email commands --
one subscribes, unsubscribes, changes options, accesses archives, etc.,
all by sending a batch job of command lines in an email to the mail server.
These commands are all supposed to be sent to a different address
than regular postings, but a lot of subscribers forget. Listproc, and probably
listserv as well, will bounce back mail that begins with what looks like
a command (the words unsubscribe
, set
, etc.)
The most common software packages for traditional mailing lists are LISTSERV, ListProc and MAJORDOMO, in about that order. Trailing behind are MAILBASE, popular in Britain, and the quite rare MAILSERV (I've only seen it on vaxen). Mailserv or MailServ is also the name of a web interface for MAJORDOMO. This useful page describes the (generally similar) commands for these five kinds of mailing lists. The software often recognizes synonyms for the most common commands, and accepts unambiguous abbreviations (i.e., it right-completes the command name).
There are now a number of web-based programs that allow mailing lists to be set up, managed, subscribed to, etc. all via http protocol. The email protocol is used only to send the mailing list messages. In effect, the parallel tasks have been transferred from the list processor address to an http server. A few of these are Cool List, Egroups, which absorbed OneList and which itself has been absorbed by Yahoo! Groups in early 2001, PostMaster General, Topica, The Vlists Network, Lyris.net and ListBot (associated with MSN). (And in case you're wondering, these aren't in any coherent order that I can remember or discern any more.)
Otfried Lieberknecht maintains a select list of literary and historical mailing lists.
David Meadows's extensive Atrium site includes a guide to Classics-related discussion groups, although he's almost as behind on updating links as we are.
An excellent moderately-inclusive directory of mailing lists is Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists (described at the PAML entry).
The largest general index of mailing lists (as well as newsgroups and chats) is probably Liszt, ``the'' mailing list directory. (Over 90,000 list listings as of March 2000, as well as 30,000 newsgroups and 25,000 IRC chats.) You know, I was just about to point out that apparently Liszt was written by Scott Southwick, and that he never gets any credit for it. Just to check, I followed the liszt link, and now (July 2001) I find that http://www.liszt.com autoforwards to <http://www.topica.com/>, Sic transit gloria mundi. Liszt was better, and it was sponsored by a disinterested party.
An extensive directory of publicly accessible mailing lists that use LISTSERV software is Catalist. There's also a directory of lists at Mailbase. Tile.net offers a search tool that searches a fairly extensive (and partly redundant) index, so far as I can tell on a cursory look.
The most appropriate place for list managers to discuss mailing lists is on the mailing list List-Managers, hosted by GCA.
<eList.com>, which sounds like it might be a mailing-list service, has changed its name to MessageBot!. It's a ``totally free service keeps track of the emails of people who wish to be notified of changes to your website.''
MessageBot! can be used to jury-rig a kind of mailing list also: If a site is set up to archive in web-accessible form the email sent to some address, then users who sign themselves up to be notified of changes at the site will effectively be notified in email of additional messages that have been posted to the site. They've actually automated a process similar to that: a web site where postings are entered via form (which they describe as ``the user enters their own email themselves'').
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you own a website, you can sign up for MessageBot, insert the free code at your website, and invite your visitors to leave their email address in the MessageBot window at your site.
I scraped this entry together around 1996. At the time, I thought those radio ads were a bit crass. Ah, lost innocence! Wasn't radio personality Steven King, er-- Alan King, er... Mr. King -- wasn't he hawking ``medicated coal bomb''? Or was it Saul Palmetto? Whatever. Larry has been married 53 times, each time to a younger female. (The day he marries an embryo, there will be a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion for same-sex couples.) I guess you might understand his obsession with these products. See ED, run.
Please Mister Postman, look and see / if there's a letter, a letter for me!
set
command, in MAJORDOMO you simply unsubscribe
and resubscribe to the parallel digest mailing list. On the other hand,
MAJORDOMO is free. Also, you can't set nomail
and remain
on the subscribers list while you're away -- instead you just unsubscribe.
On the other hand, MAJORDOMO is free. There isn't even any support for
archiving of posts. On the other hand, MAJORDOMO is free. (And you can
get the Perl source code and play with it.)
Great Circle Associates (GCA) is the Majordomo home; it distributes the software, hosts support and development mailing lists for it, and serves some documentation.
Mailing lists at the University of Alberta are handled with MAJORDOMO; see their mailing lists page for more documentation.
There is a simple web-based interface for MAJORDOMO called Mailserv or MailServ. Learn about that from U Alberta's page. MajorCool is another web interface to Majordomo, from Conveyance Digital.
One day, a memo appeared in all the graduate students' mailboxes. In it, Prof. Trieman declared, by the authority vested in him as Director of Graduate Studies, that Chinese was a ``major world language.'' No one challenged this arrogation.
O -- H / / O -- Cu / / O == C \ \ O -- Cu \ \ O -- Hor equivalently, since the bond angles and lengths are only drawn approximately and since structures rotate about single bonds,
H \ \ O / / Cu \ \ O / / O == C \ \ O / / Cu \ \ O / / H
Green, and very pretty when polished. In English the name dates back to Anglo-Norman, and stems from the Latin word molochitis. According to Pliny the Elder, the Latin name was derived from the Greek word for mallow, a purple-flowered plant. Not only is this color association puzzling, but it's not clear that Pliny had the same mineral in mind. Even if Pliny's claim was incorrect for the Latin word, it is correct (because self-fulfilling) for Modern English. The Anglo-Norman form was melochite (the changed first vowel reflects medieval Latin usage), but English (as well as French) has respelled it to conform with the Greek word for mallow (maláchê). For something about the occurrence of malachite, see the Fahlerz entry. Another hydroxy-carbonate copper mineral is azurite.
Malayalam diverged from Tamil in the sixth century or earlier, but over time absorbed a lot of Sanskrit. Supposedly in consequence of this, the Malayalam alphabet has the largest number of letters among the Indian languages and is reportedly capable of representing the sounds of all Dravidian languages as well as Sanskrit. This seems an exaggeration: the script has only 36 consonant letters, and symbols to represent only 16 or 17 vowels. I can believe that this is enough to represent any of those languages individually, but only if the individual characters are interpreted differently for different languages. (Consider just two similar languages like German and English: both have 12-14 distinct vowels in their standard dialects, but taking, say, standard German and one standard English pronunciation together, there are typically about 20 distinct vowels all told.)
Sadly, Malayalam isn't a palindrome in Malayalam script.
Not related to RMALC.
... he realized he hadn't even gotten fully undressed. As her feet hit the floor, the ruined nightgown dropped to her feet. She looked up at him.``I'm sorry. I was too rough. Did I hurt you?''
``No, I can honestly say that what you did to me didn't hurt at all.''
What a gift for graceful description and realistic dialogue! What subtle allusion! And no, ``his male masculinity'' isn't in that particular purple passage. But I remember. I remember Mary holding its pinkness (the book's cover) and reading and reading and how from between my teeth I let out a hoarse, longing moan (okay, it was actually more of a contemptuous laugh) and how I felt and--oh! I felt amused. But now I can't find the right sex scene (the bit above is at p. 201), and anyway the book is pretty homogeneous pulp, so I'm sure you can enjoy similar gems elsewhere as you stalk this one. (We're talking about The Bare Facts by Karen Anders, from the Harlequin B series, B putatively standing for Blaze. Price: $1 at the dollar table.)
int *x = (int*)malloc(20*sizeof(int)); ... free(x);becomes
int *x = new int[20]; ... delete x;
The common European word mama is now recognized world-wide, even where no European language is a common first language. For example, it occurs in kyoiku-mama.
Mama seems to naturalize well. A woman who spoke mainly Yoruba growing up in Nigeria wasn't sure if the word was Yoruba or not. (It isn't.) I was asking around because Roman Jakobson claimed something like that the word for mother in all languages contains a nasal consonant. This is a trickier claim than it at first seems, because many languages have multiple words for mother, but it's easy to find counter-examples. I think Georgian is one.
Most instances of the phrase ``dog bites man'' that occur in new reports are metaphorical. Nevertheless, the literal event does occur fairly regularly. One very common situation is that of criminal fugitives biting police dogs. The second-most common situation seems to be that of pet owners counter-attacking dogs that attack their own dogs -- dog's best friend 'n'all that. (For another sort of canine anthropomorphic dog fight, see the It was a dark and stormy night entry.) We'll be collecting examples of canine man-bites (whether they involve criminal fugitives or not) and listing them here:
Michael Vick was a talented quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons until just before the beginning of the 2007-08 season. Unbeknownst to him, treacherous family and friends had been running a dog-fighting operation on his property. As a non-participant, his pseudonym was Ron Mexico. A Finnish fan of US football, it appears, has ransacked the gazetteer to offer a web-based ``Ron Mexico name generator'' here. He must have the right algorithm: it satisfies the only known condition. Oh wait-- I'm sorry, that was his alias in the genital herpes thing a few years before. After the court papers were filed, there was a brief vogue in sports gear bearing the name. There was even a poor fellow in Brighton, Michigan, an auto-parts supplier, who comes by the name legitimately. He was ``getting a ton of calls.'' He wanted to know, ``How do you pull a name like that out of the air? Use Bob Smith or Jim Johnson; there's 50 million of them. Out of all the names in the whole world, I wanna know how he picked this name out.'' It reminds me of Tonya Harding's ex. This Ron Mexico knows two others -- relatives of his. You can see where this is going: ``To Tell The Truth,'' 2022. The rollicking panel of washed-up celebrities will consist of Sean Penn, Christina Aguilera, Ben Affleck, and Kitty Carlisle, somehow.
Anyway, Michael Vick is not alleged to have bitten any of the dogs or given them genital herpes, but he's supposed to have killed some of them in unnecessarily creative ways. (I didn't even know you could kill a dog by hanging. Not very quickly, anyway....) On August 27, Vick took a plea bargain and reported a Jesus sighting. (He claimed he found Jesus, but I'm not sure Jesus had been reported missing. I heard he was expected back.) The reason the story merits discussion in this entry, besides the general association with dogs, news, and violence, is the chew-toy angle. By the time of Vick's plea, there was a ``Vick's Dog Chew Toy'' available online for $10.99 plus $2 S&H, ``made of state of the art `dog' material'' whatever that is. Melamine-laced and lead-base-painted, I imagine. With so little time to set up the tooling, shipping wasn't scheduled to begin until September 7, 2007.
The situation of a man biting a dog is a paradigm of the unexpected, but it has not always been used to define news. Relevant evidence was posted on the Curculio blog, which had an anonymous ancient Greek couplet on April 20, 2006. (You remember, of course, that Cerberus is a three-headed dog.) In translation: ``Even as a corpse Timon is savage: Cerberus, door-keeper of Pluto, be afraid lest he bite you.''
Coming soon (okay: eventually) to a glossary entry near you: Irving Berlin had a song entitled ``Man Bites Dog'' in the 1933 topical revue ``As Thousands Cheer.''
Not just an acronym; this would make a pretty decent family name.
Similar Confusion philosophies are followed in the other seven states of the Southeastern Conference (Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina).
John Cole, head of the TFT, explains that in Texas, a school principal ``used to be anybody with a master's degree and two losing seasons.'' [Reported by Peter Schrag in ``Too Good to be True,'' an article on TAAS in The American Prospect vol. 11, #4 (Jan. 3, 2000).]
Spanish has the noun maniobra and verb maniobrar, with meanings similar to the English cognate. Cf. manejar.
Okay, okay: it does so happen that the English word man and the Spanish word mano (< Latin manus) are derived from the same Indoeuropean (IE) root *man- that has the meanings `person' and `hand.' One might regard this as an instance of synecdoche (hand representing man), but from the available linguistic evidence it is impossible to tell which, if either, meaning came first.
In fact, ``mano a mano'' can express, in a figurative way, a range of meanings like `on an equal footing,' some of which overlap the sense of `man-to-man.' There are lots of other such expressions. For example, mano en mano, literally `hand in hand,' means that or `pari passu'; de mano en mano means `from hand to hand' (literally `from hand into hand').
The Latin word manus is not, as one might suppose at first glance, a second-declension masculine noun. It's a fourth-declension feminine noun. Hence the Spanish word mano (like French main, etc.) is feminine.
El Diccionario del Español Actual (edd. Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés, Gabino Ramos), publ. 1999, is a good, representative Spanish dictionary. It has two volumes: A-F and G-Z. The two volumes are similar in size, and there isn't very much front matter. The disproportionate share of words starting with early letters of the alphabet is typical. (Not that it wouldn't be very suspicious if it weren't.) In contrast, the xx-volume OED2 has a volume xi that begins with the Scrabble-worthy word ow, whatever that means. For my own amusement (you should skip over this to the next entry), I'm going to list the number of pages dedicated to words starting in different letters of the alphabet in the Spanish dictionary mentioned above (this one alphabetizes ll between lk and lm, etc.):
A 559 B 201 C 632 D 299 E 409 F 174 G 146 H 120 I 174 J 41 K 8 L 131 M 295 N 63 Ñ 2 O 81 P 425 Q 23 R 212 S 232 T 217 U 24 V 107 W 3 X 2 Y 19 Z 21
What the Spanish language needs is an exchange program with Polish.
Yes, there are interesting questions here of what to do about conflicts of natural and grammatical gender, but this here is (a tangent to)n what I started writing about, where n is four or five, so that'll have to wait. I'd also like to mention manubrio, but I can't think what to say about it.
All these thoughts on hands in some genetic relationship to labor remind me ``of horny-handed sons of toil.'' No, the first of doesn't belong inside the quotation marks, but it makes a nice iambic tetrameter. The phrase sounds like something Carl Sandburg would have made up, but the idea that the working poor (anachronistic-term alert!) have calloused hands is certainly at least ancient and probably prehistoric. Here's an example from Trimalchio's first speech (ch. 39 of the Satyricon of Petronius). He prates that those born under the sign of Capricorn (capricornus means `goat horn') are ``wretches who grow hard facing their troubles'' (the Latin is ...in capricorno aerumnosi, quibus prae mala sua cornua nascuntur...). No, it's not a literal translation. There's too much going on to translate it all, and what goes on in English is different.
For one thing aeromnosus, which I translate as `wretch,' is derived from aerumna which is, loosely, a `burden' -- that is, a `task' or a `trouble.' Hence the connection with ``sons of toil.'' Also, prae basically means `before,' but is often understood to mean `in view of' or almost `as a result of.' I like to preserve the spatial idea of before-ness, which is why I use `facing,' which tucks a little bit of meaning into the translation that doesn't belong, in order to include something that does belong but that otherwise wouldn't be there. For a somewhat similar instance of the concrete notion of ``facing'' having different abstract, uh, facets, see the anti- entry.
Finally, you will observe that cornu means `horn' or `horny tissue.' (The coincidence of meanings makes me think of that roughly funnel-shaped neutronium thing in one of the ST:TOS episodes.) That Latin word is, in fact, the origin of the English word corn, but only in the sense of a local hardening, horniness, of the skin; other meanings represent other etymologies that happened to yield the same sound and spelling. Corn in the sense of grain is a cognate of Latin granus, with a common root in Indo-European (you know, it's the voicing/devoicing g/c thing). The word grain itself, of course, comes from Latin. English, as you will recall, is the vocable pack-rat of languages. Just as a common Indo-European root gave rise to both corn (via Germanic) and grain (via Latin), so a common IE root gave rise to horn (via Germanic) and corn (via Latin). [I'm making this a little more complicated than necessary in order to keep your interest up. Since you've staggered through my clotted prose so far, you can tell it's working.] All I need to do now is mention another pair of cognates, and I can pop a level of tangent discussion off the stack. The English verb harvest is cognate (again through a common IE root) with the Latin verb carpere (h/c again, like horn and corn, see?). Both contain the idea of `pluck, take for advantage.' (You know the verb carpere from the common expression ``Carpe diem,'' usually translated `seize the day.')
Trimalchio makes a pun on the word Carpe (in ch. 37), explaining that when he says Carpe, it is both vocative and imperative. (Carpus is the name of one of his servants.) Considering Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme, it seems that celebration of grammar, is a time-honored element in the stereotype of the low-born success.
I really don't know if there is any connection between Petronius and the HHSOT expression. Time to pop the stack again. ``Sons of toil'' (cf. hidalgo) occurs in English literature from the eighteenth century on, and seems to have had some kind of vogue among nineteenth-century poets. An interesting collocation occurs in Egbert Martin's ``Dawning,'' written in the 1870's or thereabouts. The second verse runs thus:
The horny sons of toil arise,
And labour's hammer rings
In honest music to the skies,
Like harps with iron strings.
While hoarse the shout of industry
Rolls like a billow from the sea.
Ballad meter. Anyway, ``horny sons of toil arise'' today suggests a rather different image than Martin probably had in mind. Then again, the OED has an instance of horny in the sense of concupiscent dating back as early as 1889, and this seems the sort of slang word that might be in circulation a long time before it happened into the literary record. One is reminded of the dialogue in Rock Hudson movies, when we see them again, now that we all know. Of course, some people never didn't get the jokes. Especially delicious is ``Pillow Talk'' (1959), in which the Rock Hudson character pretends to be gay in order to seduce the Doris Day character. At one point Tony Randall, playing the rival, gets to utter ``Need a light, cowboy?'' Mark Rappaport took an hour of these clips, spliced in unnecessary commentary mouthed by Rock look-alike Eric Farr, and released it in 1992 as ``Rock Hudson's Home Movies.''
Incidentally, earlier in that chapter of Satyricon, Trimalchio says ``May the bones of my patron [former master] rest well; he wanted me to be a man among men.'' (Patrono meo ossa bene quiescant, qui me hominem inter homines voluit esse.) Time to visit the mano a mano entry. (I mention this only for the benefit of those few who are not reading serially through all the entries.)
Oh man, look gambrel up at the AAT. Talk about making a federal case of it!
Here's a related proverb, recorded in Vermont Is Where You Find It: One of the best things about quiltin' is that it gives the womenfolks somthing to think about while they talk.
Uh-oh... the PC-police lookout gave the signal. Time for some quick gender-generic repair.
Also recorded in that old book is the following hypothetical exchange:
Pg. 88: What do you do up here in the winter when the road's blocked?
Pg. 90: We just set and think ... mostly set.
Page 89, like almost all the odd pages, is given over to a picture. I've quoted pretty much all the text on pp. 88 and 90. In 1941 it seems to have been easier to ``write'' a book. About the text the ``author'' wrote ``Most of these stories and sayings I heard in Vermont, but that's no sign I wouldn't have heard them anywhere else in America.'' Or, say, France. (Even Orsay, France!) See the I dunno entry for more yokel communication studies.
Oh, if you wanted to learn something about manual transmission, or ``standard transmission'' as it is still often called, with some justification, you should have gone to the stick-shift entry.
The two end carbons of each propane are aligned parallel to the axis, so that when the molecule is viewed end-on, the four bonds and three atoms of each propane chain appear as a bent leg viewed from the side -- the end carbons overlapping in one knee, with the middle carbon at the foot. Viewed in this way, the molecule as a whole has the form of a triskelion. The crest of the Isle of Man (traditional adjective form Manx, of course) is a triskelion. As far as I can tell, the trivial name manxane first appears in the chemical literature in a 1980 journal article by P. Murray-Rust, J. Murray-Rust, and C.I.F. Watt: ``The Crystal Structure of Bicyclo [3.3.3] undecane-1,5-diol and the Conformation of Bicyclo [3.3.3] undecane (Manxane).'' Their article concludes: ``We would like to dedicate this structure to the memory of the late Professor William Parker who first synthesised and named the manxane system.''
The 1980 article by the Murray-Rusts and C.I.F. Watt has an illustration of the Manx crest, though in the nonstandard orientation. All early representations of the three legs of Man shows them running (i.e., toes and knees pointing) clockwise, and this is how they still appear on the Manx flag and other official emblems. A distinctive feature of the Manx triskelion is that the legs are wearing armor -- at least the legs and feet are plated, and the heels have six-pointed spurs. (A triskelion of greater antiquity is that of Sicily. Its legs are naked and it has a Medusa's head at the center. See also AWB.) The Coat of Arms (technically Arms of HM in right of the Isle of Man) includes the three legs, which is an interesting thought. The Manx motto, associated with the island since about 1300, is ``Quocunque Jeceris Stabit,'' or `wherever you throw it, it will stand.' Like a three-legged stool, I suppose. It was reportedly in use before this date by the MacLeods of Lewis, ancient Lords of the Isles of Scotland. After 1266, these included the Isle of Man.
Karl Marx introduced the theory that there is a distinctive ... gee, it looks like I'm going to want an acronym in English. Let's use AMP, provisionally. During the 1850's, in a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune on British activity and politics in India, Marx introduced the theory of AMP. Okay, enough of that.
``The MAPLA caravan brings law school admissions representatives to midwestern colleges and universities each fall. For undergraduates unable to attend the Law School Forum in Chicago, this is, for most, the only opportunity for them to meet admissions reps face-to-face.''
There used to be a series of ads for a children's breakfast drink called Ovaltine, in which a child pleads ``more Ovaltine, Mom ... please.'' It does lack some of the poignancy of Dickens's gruel-starved young Oliver. (``Please, sir, I want some more.'') But still -- there's a mnemonic for ya.
I should probably explain why this is a mnemonic. This Ovaltine ad ran in the 1960's, and it seemed to me like a palinode for an earlier ad. In the earlier ad, naughty little Marky refuses to eat his breakfast cereal, so his dad starts to eat it with ostentatious delight, whereupon the child cries petulantly ``I want my Maypo!'' This Maypo ad debuted on television in September 1956. It has its own golden page at the online Breakfast Cereal Hall of Fame.
Of course, the Russian word transliterated mapo has a short a where Maypo has a long. But when we've got a great mnemonic like this, we dare not ask for more, now, do we?
The Bodleian Library at Oxford University has a map room.
Customize your own at Mapquest or Yahoo.
The Interactive UB Campus Map gives phone-book-quality maps for UB's two campuses. Detailed (room-level) campus maps for UB can be found at the Facilities Planning and Design site.
It's not clear that the term MAR meant anything but what was then designated a (middle-income) conservative. On page 21, the essence of the MAR ideology was epitomized by the statement ``[t]he rich give in to the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.'' Sometimes the MAR is described as a social conservative with liberal or even radical economic positions, but those positions (pro-Medicare, pro-Social-Security, etc.) were liberal in the 1940's. In the 1970's, US President Nixon was economically far to the left of anything we saw in the last fifth of the twentieth century.
To the extent that the so-called radical centrist attitude or resentment described above persisted through the economic expansion of 1983-1989, it seems to have been significantly reduced by welfare reform in the 1990's. Then again, maybe the economic expansion of the 1990's had something to do with it.
The term MAR never caught on, which is why you're reading about it here.
One exception was Samuel Francis, a columnist for the conservative magazine Chronicles, who used the term essentially for an America-Firster -- a social conservative like Patrick Buchanan, supporting isolationism, closure of immigration, autarky (if it can be implemented painlessly), and other actions intended to preserve a traditional cultural identity, etc. He published a collection of his columns as Revolution from the Middle. It appears to be the only or first publication of Middle American Press of Raleigh, NC.
You can find a favorable review of the Francis book here, courtesy of Ulster Nation, an organization advocating a ``third way for Ulster.'' This third way, as opposed to unification with the Republic of Ireland, or remaining a part of the United Kingdom, is independence. This political position, like every political third way, has at least the initially plausible appearance of not falling squarely within one of the two major pre-existing positions. However, as I need hardly remind you, ``Ulster'' and to a lesser degree ``Northern Ireland'' are shibboleths. The two positions that can command a committed following are the Republican (now usually called nationalist) and unionist positions. However, the desire of unionists is not the preservation of control by Crown appointees; it is home rule dominated by the Protestant majority and making less allowance for minority (i.e., Catholic) rights or preferences. (The precise sense of a word like ``less'' in the preceding sentence, and the question of how much falls in the two categories ``rights'' and ``preferences,'' are matters on which agreement does not appear likely during the lifetime of the author of this glossary.) The difference between the unionist position and the Ulster Nationalist position is really one of means rather than ends, or else a difference of degree of independence. These comments are off the top of my head and probably completely fatuous.
In ``The Radical Center or the Moderate Middle?,'' New York Times Magazine (December 3, 1995), Michael Lind even credited Donald Warren ('member DIW? source of the MAR term?) with coining the term ``radical center.'' (See excerpt here.) Michael Lind and his wife are famous for the landmark study Middletown, USA.
This word is derived from the Latin word mare, a neuter third-declension noun. In the transition to Romance, the gender system of Latin went from three to two genders and neuter nouns generally became male. That did not quite happen in this case. Unusually for a Spanish noun, this word can take both genders. Generally, mar is masculine to landlubbers and feminine entre marinos (`among mariners'). In addition, some figurative and sort-of technical expressions construe mar as female, presumably owing to their originating or being popular with seamen. For more on gender in Spanish nouns, see the D-ION-Z-A entry.
There's a bit more to say about mare, since it wasn't an entirely ordinary third-declension. It was an i-stem, meaning that the genitive plural ended in -ium rather than -um, that an ablative singular form mari could be used (alternative to the consonantal-stem-like mare), and that the accusative forms could be different as well. It seems to me that the unusual morphology might have contributed to confusion that allowed mariners to select a preferred gender on a more intuitionistic basis. FWIW, another neuter third declension i-stem is animal, which followed the general rule and became male in Spanish. The form of the noun that came to be used in Spanish, which does not inflect nouns according to case, most commonly resembles the Latin ablative (sing.) form. As animal and mulier (`woman,' Spanish mujer) illustrate, however, loss of a final unstressed vowel was not unusual.
One of the differences between English and Spanish is the relative abundance of different roots and substantially different words in English. Words related to mar illustrate this nicely:
Spanish English ======= ======= mar sea marea tide mareado sea-sick mareado dizzy marina marina marinero sailor marino seaman, mariner marino marine maritimo maritime
Nope. Forget it. It'll do you no good to look up the `shooting methods' entry because I don't explain that either. Bite the bullet and read a textbook.
An advantage of marks over pounds is that they can be halved an extra time: a pound is 16 times 1/3 (1s3d). A mark is 32 times 5 pence. You could divide up evenly 128 ways with farthings, but it begins to look like there are too many fingers in the pie.
Markovnikov is now the most common transliteration to English. Other variants include Markovnikoff, Markownikoff, Markownikov.
Cf. C.U.
There was an unusually favorable opposition of Mars in 1877. That year, a few days before the closest approach to Earth, Asaph Hall discovered the two moons of Mars, which he named Deimos and Phobos.
Also in 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed some lines on the surface of Mars that he described as canali. That word may be translated to English as `channels,' which may be natural, or `canals,' which normally are not. In English, his discovery was typically (one may regard it as a faux ami) translated as `canals.' (See also the open channel entry.)
BTW, Schiaparelli was born and died in same years as Samuel Clemens: 1835 and 1910. The latter wrote in his Autobiography,
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year [viz., 1910], and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ``Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.''
(For a similar idea, less intentionally amusing, see BRAINIAC.) William Sheehan's The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1996. The entire book is available to read free on-line.
The Fermis boarded the ``Franconia'' bound for their new home on December 24, 1938. Laura wrote about this in Atoms in the Family. Exploring the ship with their children Nella and Giulio, they ``... called an elevator. As its doors swung open, we were face to face with a short old man in a baggy red suit and furry white trimmings, with a long white beard and twinkling blue eyes. The three of us stood still, fascinated, open-mouthed. The queer old man motioned us inside the elevator and then, with a benevolent smile, said to us: `Don't you know me? I am Santa Claus.' ''
Later, when she explained about Santa Claus to her children (``He does not ride a broomstick but a sleigh ...'' etc.) they wanted to know
``Will the Epiphany come to us all the same? She knows we are Italian children. ...''
``No, she will not. She could not get a visa and must remain in Italy,'' I answered on the inspiration of the moment.
``Poor Epiphany,'' Nella said wistfully, ``I don't think she likes Mussolini too well.''
When their ship arrived in New York, Enrico ceremoniously declared the establishment of the ``American branch'' of the Fermi family.
In the year of 1942, announcing the success of Fermi's reactor (in guarded language over a telephone) Arthur Holly Compton told James Bryant Conant, ``Jim, you'll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world.''
Since AHC had previously indicated that completion of the pile was further away, he added, ``the earth was not as large as he had estimated, and he arrived at the new world sooner than he had expected.''
Columbus, on the other hand, underestimated the size of the earth, and it was partly for this reason that he supposed he could reach the Indies quickly by the Atlantic route. (He also figured he could take advantage of favorable winds off the West coast of Africa, but he couldn't admit this because an international convention between Portugal and Spain officially forbade him to sail that far South.) In 1492, Spain expelled all Jews living within its borders. (Actually, they also had the option of converting and coming under suspicion of judaizing and being tortured, confessed and executed by the Inquisition.) Columbus sailed from Spain on the last day for Jews to get out.
Columbus Day is celebrated (or observed, by those who object) on the second Monday in October. Traditionally, Columbus Day was celebrated on October 12, the day land was first sighted (the first recorded Columbus Day celebration in the US took place on the 300th anniversary of the day).
In 1954, the name of Armistice Day was changed to Veterans' Day.
Chico (1891-1961) (Leonard) Shtick was piano. Chico pronounced ``chick-oh,'' in reference to his hobby, or ``pursuit.'' Harpo (1893-1964) (Adolph) Mute. Most unbegrudged guest at the Algonquin Round Table. Some links: 1 2 3 Gummo (1894-1978) (Milton) Left the vaudeville act in 1915 because he stuttered (so why couldn't he have had the mute role?). Groucho (1895-1977) (Julius Henry) Mr. Nice Guy. Zeppo (1901) (Herbert) A juvenile delinquent. After the Four Marx Brothers act became the three, he eventually found more suitable work as an agent.
(One or more of the birth years listed above may be five years late.)
Visit the unofficial ``The Marx Brothers Page'' for more enlightenment.
For it is in its center of gravity that matter possesses its ideal individuality....So that if atoms are placed in the perceptible world they must have weight.
Marx died on March 14, 1883, the fourth birthday of Albert Einstein, who eventually had interesting things to say about matter, mass, and energy.
Without citing a source, this webpage claims that the asterisks were a publicity man's idea and were not in the original title. That seems likely, but it raises the question whether the asterisks were part of the initial promotion of the movie, or were adopted later. An original Polish movie poster describes the movie as a ``satyryczny obraz armii amerykanskiej w Korei'' (modulo some accents), and gives the title as M.A.S.H. Most other promotional posters for this movie that one can find on the web (here, for example) use asterisks. Probably most are unclearly or uncertainly dated, but all those that rely on stills or artwork from the studio (unlike the original cartoon in the Polish ad) seem to include asterisks. In some of the pictures that appear to be older, however, the asterisks are smaller than they usually are now, and are not centered vertically but appear lower. These could have been interpreted as slightly raised periods, though there were only three. Perhaps they were originally intended to emphasize (though one might have guessed it from the capitalization) that the title was not the nonacronymic word mash. It's worth noting that in Latin monumental inscriptions (of all periods, classical to modern), raised periods or dots have been used to separate letters of an abbreviation (so a four-letter abbreviation like SPQR would have only three marks in the locations where MASH has asterisks).
That's what I've found and thought of. Draw your own conclusions.
``Over my dead body!''
``That would be a mashie-niblick shot,'' said Sidney McMurdo.[P. G. Wodehouse: Nothing Serious, (1950).]
(Sounds vaguely obscene innat context, doan it?) BTW, it means `massive motor-vehicle pile-up.'
``But does not the lawyer sometimes arrive at correct conclusions? Undoubtedly he does sometimes, and, what may seem yet more astonishing, so does your historian and even your sociologist, and that without the help of accident. When this happens, however, when these students arrive, I do not say at truth, for that may be by lucky accident or happy chance or a kind of intuition, but when they arrive at conclusions that are correct, then that is because they have been for the moment in all literalness acting the part of mathematician. I do not say this for the aggrandizement of mathematics.''
For a contrasting opinion, consider Aaron V. Cicourel, Method and Measurement in Sociology, p. 7 (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964):
The research techniques and measurement scales of any science can be viewed as a problem in the sociology of knowledge.
I'm sure it's a delightful enough place, but I've never been. I only learned about it while browsing (this can be done by hand, my young friends) the June 2012 issue of Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics. The first article there was ``Sibship Size, Birth Order, and Children's Education in Developing Countries: Evidence from Bangladesh,'' by Cheolsung Park and Wankyo Chung. Here is the beginning of the abstract:
We examine whether the effect of sibship size on education differs by the individual's birth order in low-income countries, using details from Matlab, Bangladesh. Exploiting exposure to the randomized family planning program in Matlab for identification...
I have to say that I was momentarily disoriented. Because of MATLAB. Ironically, I was only browsing this journal as part of my randomized study of capitalization in journal titles on covers. Anyway, you might as well get something useful out of this entry, so here's the rest of the abstract:
...we find that sibship has negative effect on education [well, duh] and positive effect on labor force participation of the first and second-born children [duhble duh], but no significant effect on education or labor force participation of the later-born children [eh, makes sense, but it's beginning to be interesting, so I'll have to stop].
Groucho (I mean Groucho Marx, not any of the other famous people called Groucho) said:
Those are my principles! If you don't like them I have others.
Cf. the Farrer hypothesis (FH), 3ST, and 2SH.
The Matthew Principle is in itself an example of the Matthew principle: in its elaborated form, it was introduced by Robert Merton. Another example is the old saying about ``standing on the shoulders of giants.'' The phrase is normally quoted in the form used by Newton, but is far older. Merton himself examines this in an exhaustively discursive ``Shandean Postscript.''
Once while staying at Christ College, Oxford, I asked directions for ``Maudlin College,'' which was the only name by which I'd ever heard it called. When it was pointed out to me on the map, I couldn't see it. I said, ``there's just a Magdalene College there.'' It was very sweetly explained to me then that the pronunciation ``Maudlin'' for the college name is a popular affectation among the students. I am also informed that the ``Maudlin'' pronunciation is also used at Cambridge. There will always be at least a few who go by the spelling, so I am not surpised that many people outside the university (whichever university) think that the name is pronounced normally there (i.e., according to the normal pronunciation of ``Magdalene'').
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
(Mnemonic for capital: ``the Manatee is not a pinniped.'')
Near-equilibrium ensembles of particles with a current may be described by a ``drifted Maxwellian'' -- the usual MB Gaussian distribution translated to have a nonzero average momentum.
The electrons in a nondegenerate semiconductor band, although charged, can be approximated as noninteracting, and satisfy the MB distribution. One thus refers to a ``nondegenerate electron (or hole) gas'' or semiconductor plasma.
The ACBL publishes a Daily Bulletin during the Nationals. For Spring 2003, the Einstein's-birthday edition led with a story entitled ``Forget accounting: bridge is her passion.''
I suppose they should expand MBA as Mistresses in Business Administration when the holder is a woman.
There's more information about -- heck, there's information about -- the MBA at the GMAC entry.
The slight linguistic divergences between the US and the British commonwealth have the effect, in a surprisingly large number of instances, of allowing homonyms to be distinguished in one orthographic tradition and not the other. For example, US usage distinguishes carat and karat, and preservation of the old form gotten as past participle of get allows this to be distinguished from the modal got. On the other side of the ledger, British usage continues to distinguish queane and queen (perhaps a bit more useful distinction in a monarchy) and also distinguishes mold and mould.
When I asked after one in a coin store in Cambridge in 1993, I was told the going rate was fifty quid. The perfect gift for the molecular beam jockey who has everything (or at least no more unused chamber access points).
Queen Elizabeth II awarded the MBE to all four Beatles on June 12, 1965.
The Epi-Center MBE group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
The unofficial homepage from David Gotthold and the one from Alex Anselm, as well as the official homepage for Dr. Streetman's group's Varian at UT-Austin (visit their university homepage).
There's another Varian GEN II supervised by Prof. Ringel at the Optoelectronic and Microelectronic Materials Research Laboratories of the EE Dept. at the College of Engineering at Ohio State University (OSU).
When they finish constructing it, the homepage for the MBE group at the College of Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) will be at this address.
Editorial Bellisco publishes a Manual del Hormigón Armado (`Manual of Reinforced Concrete'; Manual de Hormigón Armado would be a reinforced concrete manual, and a good deal heavier). It was written by R. Ferreras, but for short, you could think of it as the Manual Bellisco de Hormigón (`Bellisco Manual of Concrete') and then you could recognize it from the MBH colophon. This is useful because the words along the binding are backwards... When an English-language book is lying closed on a horizontal surface, with the front cover on top, the lengthwise writing along the binding is right-side up. This is true in countries with right-hand-side driving and those with left-hand-side driving. (I would mention country where both left- and right-hand-side driving are common, but English is not an important language in West Texas.) A quick check proves that all books published in German, Spanish, Italian, and French follow the opposite convention. The great advantage of this is that if you have a multivolume work stacked on a table in order, with the first volume on top and all the front covers naturally facing down, then you can read the common title right-side-up (of course, the volume numbers are now facing sideways). An important exception to this rule is that books to teach English-speakers German, Spanish, etc., typically adopt the English orientation -- possibly because the books are manufactured by English-language publishers. If you've ever browsed a book-shelf that mixed the two orientations in comparable numbers, you'll probably agree that the greatest value of an orientation standard is not in its orientation but in the fact of its being a standard. Let me tell you, the EU was way ahead of you on this. In fact, they know exactly how much standardization is just right. In simple terms, it is this: globalization is bad; all Europe should be like France. First Brussels has to get the condom-dimension problem hammered down, so those things are not so monstrously large that they slip off Mr. Pencil, they will tackle book bindings. It's natural: they have to have you by the short hairs to get you to surrender sovereignty over your library.
But again to the manual/Manuel thing: Anglophones so frequently misspell the Spanish proper noun Manuel as Manual that at Amazon.com, some books are listed under both names: e.g., A Saint Is Born in Chima [or possibly in China], by the twins Manual Zapata Olivella and Manuel Zapata Olivella, tr. Thomas E. Kooreman; Self and Interpersonal Insight : How People Gain Understanding of Themselves and Others in Organizations, apparently by the father-and-son team of Manuel London and Manual London; Sounding Forth the Trumpet by Peter Marshall, David Manual [not credited on the cover], and David Manuel [no relation, I guess]. The anthology Menopause and the Heart includes Manual Neves-E-Castro among its editors, and has one Manuel Neves-e-Castro among its contributors.
This whole entry is going to be rewritten, but for now I'd just like to add that another way to describe how spine text on English-language books is normally printed is top-to-bottom. In Hebrew, writing is from right-to-left and as one reads, one turns pages on the left over to the right. (That is, books begin at what would be the back of an English book. This can cause confusion. Some years ago, I found a book of Talmud at the main library of UNM that had all the library markings upside down, so if you had no trouble reading Hebrew characters upside-down and from the bottom of the page up, you could open the book from the left and read it all left-to-right. Of course, a page of Talmud is segmented around a central text, so things are a little more complicated than that, but it was a nice thought.) Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that Hebrew books, at least the ones I've looked at, also have sideways text on the spine printed from top to bottom, which means that when you lay a Hebrew book down with the front cover up, you can easily read the spine text (unless you're more comfortable reading it upside down). The situation is more complicated with Japanese.
Here's one of many (approximately) equally otiose MBTI classifiers on the web. The one by David M. Keirsey seems to be quite popular.
An MC is sometimes an accomplished entertainer in his or her own right, and as such may have achieved mastery of some artistic skill. Unlike a Master of Arts, however, one may become an MC without first being a Bachelor of Ceremonies. I think.
For more thoughts on mens, see the ASICS entry.
``In 1950 Charles Stewart Mott gave $1 million to develop Flint Junior College into a four-year institution in collaboration with the University of Michigan...''
Today, MCC is still a two-year college, but for a bunch of years it provided facilities for the University of Michigan -- Flint.
Here's some text from Places, Towns and Townships (Lanham, Md.: Bernan, a division of The Kraus Organization Limited [I wonder if they use ``TKO''], 3/e, 2003), ed. Deirdre A. Gaquin and Katherine A. DeBrandt. Specifically, it's from the two-page Appendix A.
The primary political divisions of most states are termed counties. Minor civil divisions (MCDs) are the primary governmental or administrative divisions of a county in many states (parish in Louisiana). MCDs represent many different kinds of legal entities with a variety of governmental and/or administrative functions. MCDs are variously designated as American Indian reservations, assessment districts, boroughs, charter townships, election districts, election precincts, gores, grants, locations, magisterial districts, parish governing authority districts, plantations, precincts, purchases, road districts, supervisors' districts, towns, and townships. [Especially townships, in like 33 states.] In some states, all or some incorporated places are not located in any [state-defined] MCD (independent places) and thus serve as MCDs in their own right [for census purposes]. In other states, incorporated places are part of the MCDs in which they are located (dependent places), or the pattern is mixed--some incorporated places are independent of MCDs and others are included within one or more MCDs. In Maine and New York, there are American Indian reservations and off-reservation trust lands that serve as MCD equivalents; a separate MCD is created in each case where the American Indian area crosses a county boundary. [Exhale.]
If you want to see where the MCD's are on a map, you want to travel to the Lima entry for bibliographic details of Township Atlas of the United States.
For actual information, see the Title V Information System maintained by the NCEMCH.
``The faculty believes that each person is endowed with an intellect;'' -- whoa, stop the press! -- ``hence [logic in action!], the educational process of MCHS students is to develop that individual to the greatest possible degree in the mental, physical, ethical, and social aspects of his or her personality.''
Look, I realize that it's extremely unfair to take what's posted prominently on the MCHS web page and reproduce it here accurately for your amusement. So I want you to know that I'm not holding Kentucky up for special scorn. In the Boston area there's a school principal who has suspended a dozen of his teachers without pay because they've failed the state English competency tests, but he himself has failed them in a number of tries (as of early August 2003). He makes excuses and says it's ``frustrating,'' but I haven't seen the word ``embarrassing'' there yet.
``MCHS has as its philosophy the desire to meet adequately the needs of each individual student.''
The original name MCI reflects the history of the break-up of Ma Bell: when AT&T was a regulated monopoly, it charged businesses relatively high rates for long-distance service. Microwave links made this service cheap, and discounters competed for the business long-lines service. After years in anti-trust litigation, ATT agreed to be broken up (into seven original baby Bells that provided local service, ATT long lines, Bell Labs -- which last became Lucent -- and I forget what else; some other Bell Labs -- i.e., not in Murray Hill, NJ -- became corporate labs for Western Electric and whatnot). Part of the stated motive for agreeing to the break-up was the perception that increasing competition in long-distance services was draining the profit from ATT's most lucrative business while regulation as a monopoly prevented it from competing in emerging businesses.
Cf. KLM.
Maryland Electronic Capital is a good starting point for official information. The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Maryland. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
A clickable map of the state's counties is served by Historic Inns & Famous Homes of Maryland. Another one is served by Maryland Electronic Capital.
One way to categorize business environments is by considering whether their market and technological environments are stable or volatile. Not that these questions always have definite answers, but it might be a useful idealization for puposes of discussion or of writing a speciously convincing business plan.
If both market and technology are stable, then the environment is dull, and the organization that deals with it is ``hierarchical'' or ``bureacratic.'' That doesn't sound very good, but it's a flattering way to describe the challenges faced by the Dusty Ridge, Oklahoma news-stand.
If both market and technology are volatile, you can say the environment is dangerous, and the organization must be ``flexible'' or ``dynamic'' or at least have its résumé up to date.
If either the market or the technology environment is volatile, and the other is stable, then the organization that is supposed to best suited to deal with it is ``mixed.'' Whatever is volatile dominates changes and drives decision-making. Hence `MD mixed'' and ``TD mixed'' organizations.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
``MDA was created in 1950 by a group of adults with muscular dystrophy, parents of children with muscular dystrophy, and a physician-scientist studying the disorder. Since its earliest days it has been energized by its number-one volunteer and national chairman, entertainer Jerry Lewis.
The Association's programs are funded almost entirely by individual private contributors. MDA seeks no government grants, United Way funding or fees from those it serves.''
MDA is best known for its annual Labor Day telethon, still hosted in 2005 by Jerry Lewis, age 79. In the telethon context, children suffering from MD are ``Jerry's kids.''
``First broadcast over Labor Day weekend in 1966 by a lone TV station in New York City, the unique event starring popular comedian Jerry Lewis quickly caught the public's attention -- and raised more than $1 million in pledges.''
Go here if you want to find out how much that is in American money. (Short answer: a lot.)
MDJCL sponsors the Medusa Mythology examination.
The simple genetics of maternal-line heredity makes mDNA an attractive subject for archaeogenetic studies. Another attraction is that the typical human cell has about a thousand mitochondria, so there's more DNA material to work with.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Maine. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
In 1965 and 1966, in the second decade of the civil rights struggles, the NEA passed resolutions requiring that its member state associations remove discriminatory language from their constitutions and eliminate racial guidelines for membership, thereby forcing states with dual associations to move toward merger. At a meeting in Miami, Florida in 1966, the national organizations -- the NEA and the ATA -- merged. You can read a summary of the events at this page describing a critical document collection. Basically, the MEA and MTA leaderships met and managed (initially with some help from an NEA ``fact finder'') to hammer out merger agreements. However, while MTA members approved, MEA members repeatedly refused (through their delegate assemblies, apparently; I'm not clear on whether there was ever a vote by the full membership).
In 1969 the NEA suspended the MEA's affiliation, and in 1970 the NEA named the MTA as its sole affiliate organization. Contacts between the MEA and MTA continued, however, and a merger was approved by delegate assemblies in March 1975. The merged organization was called the Mississippi Association of Educators.
Offices in St. Joseph County (Indiana) and Marshall Co. (Michigan).
LookSmart has a short page of MechE info. Stanford serves the WWW Virtual Library for the discipline.
My source for the preceding information and opinion is William Lawren's The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1988).
``Manhattan Engineer District'' rings slightly odd -- one might have expected ``Engineering.'' It might be that military dialects have a greater preference for uninflected modifiers. Te only evidence I can adduce offhand is that a designation like ``X Corps,'' which a civilian like me would read ``tenth corps,'' is actually pronounced ``ten-corps.''
The original ``substitute materials'' name is reminiscent of the name the British had for their project -- ``Tube Alloys.'' That project, faster off the blocks than its American counterpart, was run by the MAUD committee. The MAUD name had its origin in a misunderstood personal name, in a telegram sent by Niels Bohr. (In 1940, after Germany occupied Denmark, he wired that he was still okay at his institute in Copenhagen. The message said to tell COCKROFT and MAUD RAY KENT. Cockroft was obviously Sir John Cockroft, the physicist, but no one knew any Maud Ray Kent. It turned out to be Maud Ray, of Kent, who had once been Bohr's children's English tutor.)
Dr. Lee T. Pearcy (at the Episcopal Academy, in Devon and Merion, PA) for many years maintained the Ancient Medicine / Medicina Antiqua (AM/MA) site and the MEDANT-L mailing list. In mid-April 2004, with slight name shortenings, the site (name now in Latin only) and list (minus hyphen-L, or should I say minus minus el?) moved. They are now hosted by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. If you want to continue potentially receiving postings, you have to resubscribe.
``Medicina Antiqua'' -- hmmm, that looks like Latin... I guess it's what they call ``Medical Latin.'' It seems to mean `old medicine.' Be sure to throw out your old medicines when they're past their expiration dates.
La Tribune reported April 16, 2003, that a ``recent'' survey indicated that 64% of Americans were less favorable to French businesses or products since the events in advance of the war in Iraq; 29% described themselves as inclined to boycott or avoid (``boycotter ou eviter,'' but I guess that wasn't the wording in the survey) French products.
At a regular news conference April 15, 2003, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, President of Medef, had some interesting instructions for Americans. I'm going to get the ipsissima verba, just wait. Well, it seems he had a lot to say. Here's an excerpt:
Il y a une incoherence à mêler les reproches à la diplomatie française et la distance vis-à-vis des produits et services français. On a donc envie de dire aux entreprises américaines: Ne vous attaquez pas à nos parfums, nos yaourts ou nos avions.
[A rather inexpert construal: `It makes no sense to mix the anger over differences with France and its diplomacy with French products and services. One wants to say to American businesses: do not attack our perfumes, our yogurts, or our planes.']
This reminds me of a conversation I had at the Student Union building (called La Fortune) with Gary in 2001 or 2002, discussing the pros and cons of bombing some country (a particular one, but I can't remember which). After he described one of the arguments, I commented that by a parallel reasoning, we should probably bomb France. He told me that I wasn't the first person to suggest that to him, so far that week.
We should not confuse the medical we with the obstetrical or pregnant we.
Some information on musical medleys, dubiously so called by me, is at the silent movie entry; some medleys dubiously so called by the music industry are discussed at the seamless entry. Some information on swimming medleys is at this IM entry. It may be inferred from the aberemurder entry that those do not exhaust the uses of the word.
MED-PED Coordinating Center
Program is run by Internal Medicine Prof. Roger R. Williams of Un. of Utah in Salt Lake City. (Same address as MED-PED.)
Meech Lake was the site of a meeting in late April and early May of 1987 that gave the place a few years of drab fame. At that meeting, the provincial premiers and various noisy interested parties reached final agreement on a set of constitutional reforms that were called the the Meech Lake Accord. The Accord was a real compromise: most parties agreed to it with reluctance.
Some were more reluctant than others. There was a deadline for approval of midnight at the end of June 23, 1990, and the Accord is usually said to have died on Friday, June 22, 1990, when Manitoba and Newfoundland ``failed to approve it.'' In Newfoundland the premier reneged on an earlier commitment and refused to allow the Accord to be put to a vote of the provincial parliament (``House of Assembly''). In Manitoba, an earlier parliamentary maneuver by native Indian legislator Elijah Harper also prevented passage before the deadline. (Under Canada's constitution, amendments require, in addition to approval by the federal parliament, either a bare majority or perfect agreement. That is, approval of seven provinces representing 50% of the population, or approval of all (ten, in 1990) provinces. The full Accord could only have been passed according to the stricter standard. It would have been possible in a revote to pass some parts with seven provinces. These parts could have included the clause recognising Quebec as a ``distinct society'' (largely symbolic when standing alone, I would think). In the event, there was no enthusiasm for that approach.
[There might be some interesting metalegal issues, since Quebec had rejected the constitution which specified how it and the other provinces might approve the constitutional amendments. But maybe the authority of the BNA Act takes care of that detail. Maybe they should have tried the American way. Under the Articles of Confederation, amendments to the Articles required approval by all the states. The Continental Congress (the national government under the Articles) called a convention to consider amendments, and that convention in the Summer of 1787 reported out an entirely new constitution. An interesting aspect of that document was that it defined the conditions under which it would come into force, and those conditions were weaker (approval of nine states only) than those defined by the pre-existing Articles. The fun part was in 1790, when the Senate of the new government (approved by 12 states) passed an embargo on Rhode Island to encourage it to reconsider its earlier rejection of the US Constitution. The threat of embargo worked so well that it wasn't necessary for the House to pass the legislation.]
The Accord was one of various efforts, this one by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (Progressive Conservative), to get Quebec to accept the Canada Act (a/k/a the Constitution Act of 1982). The failure of the Accord stoked Quebec separatist feeling; Lucien Bouchard, until then an ally of Mulroney, left the PC and formed the separatist Bloc Québécois.
Every synagogue has a cabinet at the center of the front wall. The cabinet holds Torah scrolls in an upright position, normally around chest height, and is called the aharon hakodesh in Hebrew or by the generic but now nicely archaic term ark in English. Each of the scrolls individually contains a complete copy of the pentateuch. The scrolls have to be very carefully hand-written on parchment, so they're kind of expensive, but they look pretty and make a great donation to the synagogue. Also, they eventually wear out and have to be buried, and after many centuries they make great archaeological discoveries.
Even though each scroll is complete, each synagogue needs two for a festival called Simchat Torah. (There's no English ch sound in Hebrew; the ch represents a hard aitch. The spelling Simhat Torah also occurs. Another traditional spelling is Simchas Torah. The final s represents the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew letter sav -- tav in Sephardi pronunciation.) The name Simchat Torah is typically translated `rejoicing in the Torah.' (Simha, `joy,' is also a common boy's given name.)
The practice of reading the Pentateuch completely over the course of each year became established in the Gaonic period, and the festival of Simchat Torah was created to celebrate completion of the reading on the 22nd or 23rd of the month of Tishri. At least as early as the tenth century C.E., it became common to start reading again on the same day ``to refute the devil.'' That is, to avoid negative inferences from the fact that one is celebrating the end and not the beginning of the reading. Hence, on this festival, the reading of the Pentateuch ends and begins again immediately. Having a scroll that is turned to the beginning saves having to spend time rolling back the scroll that has just been finished.
But I didn't write this entry to tell you any of that. It's just, you know, background. Like noise.
So anyway... back in the day, the separate books of the Bible were in multiple scrolls. However, there are other words one can use for Bible books, such as sefer (which means `book'). Nevertheless, five books of the Torah are referred to by the term megillah (`scroll,' remember?). These are the five shortest books of the Ketuvim: Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, collectively hamesh megillot (`five scrolls').
Of the five scrolls, only the book of Esther has megillah as a traditional part of its name: Megillat Ester. (The final t in the first word is a standard inflection in compounds. You saw the same thing above with simha and simhat. The th in the standard English spelling of Esther just reflects an attempt to indicate aspiration in the original Hebrew, but aspiration is no longer phonemic in Hebrew.) The Scroll of Esther is also distinguished from the other megillot in its prominent association with a holiday. (It is read during Purim, a late-Winter/early-Spring holiday. Less salient is the reading of the Song of Songs during Passover.)
For these reasons, the word megillah, used without qualification or prior specification, refers to the Scroll of Esther. It is not unusually long, but it is longer than a typical Torah reading in a traditional service (to say nothing of the one-third-length readings in a Reform service). This is the reason usually given for the fact that the word megillah in Yiddish, when used in a nonritual context, means `long story.' Now you see why it was appropriate for me to give you ``the whole megillah'' in this entry.
Let me just add that the Talmud records arguments regarding whether Esther should be a canonical book. There was substantial resistance to its inclusion in the canon, an important reason being the absence of any mention of God.
\ \==O / / \ \
I've read someone's recollection that the Canadian term courriel was already in widespread use in .fr (along with l'anglicisme email et le mot franglais émail) before mél was coined, and that this was created at France Telecom. Whatever its origin, the em-word was promoted by the French Academy, and in 1997 the French Ministère de la culture et de la communication accepted the Academy's recommendation. (A governmental ``Ministry of Culture'' -- what a concept!)
It didn't take. In 2003, the government issued new instructions in its Journal officiel, promoting the use of courriel and demoting mél to the very limited use described in the next entry.
The referenced article, dated October 31, begins ``Times are tough for Japanese women, according to Sunday Mainichi (11/13) [I guess they got a preview], which notes that a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to cope with all the different sorts of changes they're facing in their lives.'' The rest of the article is a glossary of terms, including a couple that I think could be generally useful or at least transferable to a different cultural context. They will be listed below after I add them.
What, you want more? Okay, the Userkare and gupta entries have some information (mostly about the Egyptian Memphis). Memphis is also mentioned at the MOMA entry.
Another technology? Sure! There's room for everyone: MOEMS. Now (2001) it has become necessary to coin the term NEMS.
Mendoza's telephone number is (574) 272-7510. I only put this entry in the glossary at all because I lose the phone book more easily than the laptop. It's making this one of the most frequently edited areas of the glossary.
They also sell harmonicas.
You know, when Mendoza did own the store, he sold photographic equipment. Mr. Wisner changed the merchandise and the product-word part of the store name when he took over.
Mentor was the older man Ulysses left to raise his son Telemachus when he went off to fight the Trojans. Used ``mentored'' or ``advisee'' or something.
Yes, it's weak, but not entirely without influence[,] as the hordes of Lobbyists that infest its corridors demonstrate.
What the pros say is ``10-3 equivalents.'' That's right: plural form. Okay, some say equivalent. You could analyze grammatical number thus: instead of the traditional singular/dual/plural and singular/plural distinctions that many languages have developed, what the modern world may need is a fractional/singular/plural analysis. The traditional fractional form of foobar is the periphrastic construction of a foobar. For some people, maybe the declined form is identical with the plural.
As the proprietary tyrannies of the Middle East rock our economic boat, it might be worth noting that seasickness is mal de mer.
The term mercaptan has also been used specifically for the ethyl mercaptan, or ethanethiol. This is identical with ethanol, except that the oxygen atom in ethanol (older name: ethyl alcohol) is replaced with a sulfur atom in ethanethiol:
H O--H \ / ethanol: H--C--C--H / \ H H H S--H \ / ethanethiol: H--C--C--H / \ H H
Looked at in terms of functional groups, ethanethiol is identical with ethanol except that the hydroxyl group (-OH) is replaced by a sulfhydryl group (-SH). In addition to the organic nomenclature, a few generations of which have been described to this point, there are distinct inorganic nomenclatures, according to which something bonded to SH is a hydrosulfide (or a foobar hydrogen sulfide).
The thiol group is more strongly acidic than a hydroxyl group, and thiols react not with other metals besides mercury to form salts. The mercury salts are highly insoluble.
Cysteine is the only thiol among the twenty standard amino acids. (Methionine is the only other one that contains sulfur. It's a thioether.)
Mercosur was originally a freeish trade zone in the southern cone, encompassing South America's two largest economies (Brazil and Argentina) as well as the interstitial countries Uruguay and Paraguay. Chile and Bolivia had become associate members by 2002, when Brazil was having some monetary problems and Argentina was in economic meltdown. Argentina all-but defaulted on its debts, and has been recovering under leftist president Kirshner. (In the wake of the worldwide financial meltdown -- shall we say anneal? -- of 2008, Argentina is recovering, perhaps, under Kirshner's successor and wife.)
When Mercosur met late in 2002, the agenda was mapping strategy for its eventual integration into FTAA. FTAA talks broke down. On July 4, 2006, agreements were signed in Caracas to make Venezuela (third-largest South American economy) a member of Mercosur. Its membership became official at ceremonies in Cordoba, Argentina, on July 22, with Fidel Castro, then totalitarian dictator of Cuba, as honored guest. Happily, the trip and festivities seem to have critically stressed the old man, who was hospitalized after he got home.
More important, though, is what you're missing out in the shared experience of the community. Standing in line at the supermarket checkout, everyone around you is talking about last night's HBO made-for-TV movie special. You stare at your footwear; you can't relate any more. You don't even recognize the faces on the covers of the tabloids. Without a cable to tie you to the community, you are unmoored, a rootless stranger.
People are beginning to use the word `rebel' when they talk about you, and they don't mean it in a nice way, like James Dean, or Robert E. Lee, or the Unabomber. People say ``It's a free country, but....''
Every day when the cable guy comes to check that you don't have an illegal hookup, he talks with the neighbor kids. Halloween is coming.
Remember what the song says:
Conform or be cast out!
One of these Sundays the preacher is going to deliver a coruscating sermon on the sin of pride, and he won't be looking at anyone but you. All around, your fellow parishoners will sidle uneasily away, and on the near end of the pew, an old woman will fall off and fracture her pelvis.
Then what will you do?
``The song'' mentioned in this entry is Rush's ``Subdivisions.''
More on fitting in at the Bellwether entry.
Maybe I should have mentioned Alice Cooper's ``No More Mr. Nice Guy.''
I blush to give its true meaning. If you're over age eighteen, you could look it up. If anyone peeks over your shoulder, pretend you're studying the merl entry. Make sure to actually read and remember that too, so your story checks out. As you leave the library, shout back at the circ desk, ``I always wondered what merl meant!''
More on Joe Bob Briggs at the fu entry.
It is extremely dangerous. To wit: according to the MERS page of the US CDC, ``[m]ost people who have been confirmed to have MERS-CoV infection developed severe acute respiratory illness. They had fever, cough, and shortness of breath. About half of these people died.'' (Emphasis added.) The text of that page, visited April 2014, had last been updated the previous February. Things have taken alarming turn. Cutting to the chase:
``It took more than two years to reach the first 100 cases of MERS,'' said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. ``Now, in just the past two weeks, we've had 100 cases. There's a major change occurring that cannot just be attributed to better case detection,'' he said. ``When humans readily transmit to humans, that's what will cause a worldwide outbreak. We are very concerned that ... with what we've seen over the past two weeks ... we may be at that point now.'' [Quoted in the Saudi Gazette, April 26.]
[Let's enjoy a little technical interlude on this. Suppose an is
the number of new cases found in the nth fortnight, where n is loosely defined
by a0 = 1. If an increases perfectly
geometrically (a/k/a exponentially) with n, by a factor r per fortnight, then
there will have been
SN := a0 ( rN - 1 ) / (r - 1)
total cases in N fortnights (i.e., in the 0 through N-1st intervals).
iOne hundred cases in the first two years implies that the expression above
equals 100 for N=52 (S52 = 100), for r value between 1.023 and 1.024, which is more than
precise enough for our purposes. (More precision is available on request. Use
PayPal!) The important take-away is that this is a slow rate of increase. The
real process is noisy (and the experimental data
are reported as integer values of an, which cannot exactly fit the
formula except for integral -- and very alarming -- values of r). However,
even if we take N as low 26, the increase per fortnight is still only 9%.
Under reasonable assumptions, then, by the time that there are 100 new cases in
a fortnight, there will have been more than about 90 the previous fortnight.
Under the precise assumption of (S52 = 100, etc.), the
first fortnightly interval with 100 new cases would have been after the 197th
fortnight and about 4200 previous cases.]
The Saudi Health Ministry announced on April 25, 2014, that the total number of cases reported (in the kingdom) since the first case in September 2012 was 313, with 92 deaths in that time. (That makes it seem as if the mortality rate was below 30%, but this ignores the fact that many (at least a third) of cases are recent. There had been a jump in the rate of new infections in the preceding weeks, with health care workers forming a large proportion of the people newly infected. I don't understand how that might have come about. It's hard to believe that health care workers throughout KSA simultaneously started getting careless; perhaps there's a new strain.
``Approximately 75 percent of the recently reported cases ... have acquired the infection from another case through human-to-human transmission,'' according to Ala Alwan, regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean of the World Health Organization. ``The majority of these secondary cases have been infected within the health care setting and are mainly health care workers, although several patients are also considered to have been infected with MERS-CoV while in hospital for other reasons.'' MERS is very dangerous, and news in April 2014 suggests it has suddenly become a much greater danger (see ``It took...'' below).
The Saudi Health Ministry announced on April 25, 2014, that the total number of cases reported since the September 2012 was 313, with 92 deaths in that time. So it would appear that the mortality is below 30%, except that many (at least a third) of cases are recent. There had been a jump in the rate of new infections in the preceding weeks, with health care workers forming a large proportion of the people newly infected. ``Approximately 75 percent of the recently reported cases ... have acquired the infection from another case through human-to-human transmission,'' according to Ala Alwan, regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean of the World Health Organization. ``The majority of these secondary cases have been infected within the health care setting and are mainly health care workers, although several patients are also considered to have been infected with MERS-CoV while in hospital for other reasons.'' (A recent study found that the virus has been ``extraordinarily common'' in camels for at least 20 years, and may have been passed directly from the animals to humans.)
According to an AFP reports on April 28, scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, identified natural human antibodies that act against MERS-CoV. In laboratory studies reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers found that these neutralizing antibodies prevented a key part of the virus from attaching to protein receptors that allow the virus to infect human cells. A neutralizing antibody is one that not only recognizes a specific virus but also prevents it from infecting host cells, so eventually the infection is "cleared" from the individual. Wayne Marasco, who led the research, added that an antibody-based treatment for MERS would be administered by injection and could provide protection for about three weeks.
MERS is considered a deadlier cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died. It has also been considered less transmissible than the SARS virus, but as of this writing (May 1, 2014), I think it remains to be seen whether that is still so.
Mn is called the nth Mersenne number. If n is composite (i.e., not prime), then Mn is also composite. This is obvious from the formula for the sum of a finite geometric series, which we can rearrange slightly as
k k-1 k-2 r - 1 = ( r - 1 ) × ( r + r + ... + r + 1 ) .Taking n =jk (by the assumption that n is composite) and r = 2j yields the result q.e.d. As it happens, the first few Mersenne numbers Mn for n prime are prime: n = 2, 3, 5, and 7 yield the Mersenne primes 3, 7, 31, and 127. However, the next Mersenne number, M11 = 2047 = ×89.
One might think to define numbers
In a letter to an aspiring young writer, Raymond Chandler once explained that authentic slang ages very quickly, and that one way he made his dialogue fresh and vibrant was by inventing his own slang [which would not age because it was not current and so not hackneyed]. I have not taken this advice here.
Instead, in selfless devotion to the information of those who have recurred to the wisdom of the Stammtisch, I have included this actual, and thus ephemeral, slang term, harvested from a New Republic article (issue of 3 June 1996), on MTV's meretricious get-out-the-youth-vote campaign, soon to rot in this very section of the em's. There's hope, however, because the author was decidedly and by his own admission unhip.
(Yes, I do know how to alphabetize. This is close enough.)
... requires ``two semesters'' of a European language?! That's not minor, that's bush. Can I satisfy the requirement with English or Algol?
I said mine!
The planet Mercury takes its name from, and is associated in mythology with, the Roman god Mercury (Mercurius in Latin, Hermes in Greek). Mercury was characteristically represented with what we call ``winged feet'' (feet with small wings above each heel) and credited with great speed (don't ask me ``compared to what?''). This led to the name's attachment to the only element that is liquid at room temperature (a/k/a quicksilver, Hg). [If gallium is liquid at your room's temperature, open a window.] The speed thing is associated with Mercury's traditional godly bailiwick, as god of thieves and messengers.
But even if Mercury hadn't been the god of messengers, NASA might still have created an acronym using ``geochemistry.'' There doesn't seem to be an alternative term that doesn't involve a ``geo-'' prefix.
For some reason, I didn't believe one should date students, though that certainly didn't impede many of my colleagues.[P. 53 of William O'Rourke's On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006). O'Rourke is a professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, a Catholic school that has strict rules about the subject of the quote. O'Rourke also writes fiction.]
``A coalescence of intellectual and physical resources unlimited by geographical constraint, a synthesis of individual centers that will create a new resource greater than the sum of its parts. ... The goals of the MetaCenter are to give scientists and engineers the ability to move their problems directly to appropriate computer architectures without regard for where the computers are located; to develop a national file system that gives researchers direct access to their files regardless of where they are located; and to design a common user interface that allows researchers to use the same commands on all systems at all centers.'' (This is an example, but not the worst, of proposalese.)
This reminded me of Walter ``Fritz'' Mondale's similar rhetorical dance in 1984. Mondale, who had been Vice President in the administration of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was leading in the race for the Democratic nomination; Gary Hart, a US Senator from Colorado, was in second place. Rev. Jesse Jackson was a distant but respectable third place in the delegate race, and the question had been raised whether Hart or Mondale would consider him as a running mate.
Here is a relevant excerpt from the Democratic Presidential debate on June 3 of that year, as quoted in the New York Times the next day. (The debate was held at the NBC studios in Burbank, California, and moderated by Tom Brokaw. All three candidates for the nomination were asked related questions, but only Mondale's answer is relevant to this entry.)
Mr. Brokaw: Mr. Mondale, would you pick Jesse Jackson as your running mate?
Mr. Mondale: I think that the important point here is to put in place a process. I'm not including, or excluding, anybody. I know something about the Vice Presidency; I think it's the most important decision that a candidate for President ever makes, because it's fateful in many, many respects. And I'm going to wait until the nominating process is over, and then I'm going to put in place a search. I promise to look for women candidates, I promise to look at minority candidates, I promise to look across the board and pick the best possible person I can find.
Mr. Brokaw: Why shouldn't the voters know now whom you are considering? After all, you tell us what you think about just about everything else in the world, and in the last 25 years we've had four Vice Presidents go on to become President, we've had one resign because of scandal, a choice in the Democratic Party could not get to the fall campaign because he'd not been checked out thoroughly enough. Don't the voters deserve to know who you have in mind?
Mr. Mondale: Yes, if I had someone in mind, but I do not now. In other words, I think that we've learned the hard way over the years that this choice has to be made with great care. We have to look into the backgrounds of each candidate, we have to look at compatibility with issues, we have to look at their ability to share part of the burden of a President both internationally and domestically. I've been Vice President, and I think one of the things that people credit President Carter with is, once he was the putative nominee, he looked all over the country, he checked all possibilities. In all humility, I thought he came up with a wonderful choice!
I can't decide whether to end this entry without mentioning a certain lyric from a Rush song written by Neal Peart. The song was first released on the Permanent Waves album (1980), and its title was ``Freewill.'' (If you will write it as two words, I think you are free to do so.)
When Miss Prism instructed Cecily Cardew to read her Political Economy, she instructed her charge to omit the chapter on the Fall of the Rupee.
It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.
I won't pretend to give a comprehensive analysis of the various types of metanalysis (that might be a meta-analysis of metanalysis). But we do have a number of examples in the glossary, and you should read all of those first before you return to Google and look for a resource that is more to-the-point.
One kind of metanalysis (which some linguists prefer not to class as such) is the discerning of a possible analysis where there isn't one. That is, detecting two morphemes within one. These can arise from inflectional analysis or folk etymology (history as ``his story,'' thence herstory). An older example of folk etymology is lone, which arose from the analysis of alone as a + lone. (It's really the compound all + one. Cf. German allein.)
Given the limited inflectional morphology of English in recent (i.e., the last thousand) years, many of the obvious examples of inflectional metanalysis are back-formations from plurals or apparent plurals. My favorite example of such a metanalysis is the derivation of pea from pease. The entry for pea describes this as well as clearer-cut instances of similar derivations of new singular terms from misconstrued plurals (e.g., base from bases). Another example is aphid (from the Latin aphides, plural of aphis). The same thing happened to Latin antipodes (whence English antipode), and antipodes wasn't even a plural. I couldn't neglect to mention kudos, and sure enough I mention it at the chaim.
In English, metanalysis of phrases often occurs where a word ends or begins in n. Examples include adder (``a nadder'' misunderstood as ``an adder''). Also described at that entry is the more complicated case of orange. Napron lost its initial n sometime around the fifteenth century. The word auger was still commonly nauger in the seventeenth century (the cognate word in Dutch also lost its initial n.)
Metanalysis in the opposite direction (adding n from the end of a preceding word) gave rise to nonce (see entry), but many such metanalyses of this sort failed to take, or at least were ultimately superseded by the original forms or their more direct descendants: nawl (flourishing in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries), nuncle (from old-style ``mine uncle'' misunderstood as ``my nuncle,'' and similar expressions) and naunt. The latter probably also count as baby-talk. In similar fashion, some French dialects have nante (ma nante metanalysis of mon ante). It is speculated that the modern French tante arose from Old French t'ante (`thine aunt').
Mondegreens are often wilder than mere metanalyses, but metanalysis is frequently a part of them. So have a look.
Coming attractions at this entry: assets, riding, cyber-, German -keit.
There's a moment of Laurel and Hardy I recall when Stan spells not as ``en oh ott.'' I seem to recall it more than once; I mention this again at this NO entry, but you can use the reminder.
The May 24, 2000, Critic's Notebook feature, by William Grimes, was entitled ``Fill It Up, and Check the Olive Oil.'' It's about all the new New York City restaurants having names that fit cars better than restaurants. He tested his theory in interviews with marketing people in the automobile industry. Beacon, ``the Midtown restaurant that specializes in wood-grilled dishes,'' would probably by ``a more economical car.'' Avra (Greek seafood) ``would probably be picked up by Hyundai or Daewoo.'' Lex 303 (new in the Murray Hill neighborhood) should be a high-performance European import, base price $38,995.
Okay, so we're drifting away from metaphor here. I'm just waiting to close the circle, that's all. Just be glad I didn't explain how Victor's Pizzeria (on Nassau Street in Princeton, NJ) got its name, the way I wasted your time at the Mendoza's Guitars entry earlier.
For the etymology of metaphor, see metaphery. I mean, carry on to the other entry.
Weicker so irked conservative columnist William F. Buckley that in his 1988 re-election bid, Buckley endorsed Democrat Joseph Lieberman and formed a committee to fight Weicker's re-election bid. Lieberman won and Weicker left the GOP, later running for and winning the office of Governor on an independent ticket. That is probably relevant context to the wing-feather wordplay, if Weicker really uttered it. There might be some more detail on this at the CT entry.
What went around in 1988 came around in 2006. Lieberman became too moderate -- particularly on the issue of the war in Iraq -- for a large and energized portion of the Democratic party. He faced a strong primary challenge from Ted Lamont, yet polls suggested that as an independent running in the general election, he would win handily. It was claimed that such an independent run would put at least some Democratic candidates in a politically uncomfortable position. Joe Courtney, the Democratic challenger for Connecticut's second US Congressional district, when asked in mid-June whom he would endorse if it came to that, expressed it thus: ``I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it.'' (Lieberman announced that he would pursue an independent candidacy if he lost the August primary, and Lamont -- in his maiden attempt at statewide office, beat Lieberman in the primary. In the event, Courtney and most other Democratic candidates and office-holders supported Lamont in the general.)
Oh, political discourse brings us yet another nice one, in an unsigned editorial from the DLC, back on March 3, 2004:
We suspect the more voters learn about John Kerry's actual views, the more they will be inclined to say: ``If this is a waffle, bring on the syrup.''
(Regarding these and other suspicions, one is reminded of Eisenhower's observation that most of the worst things in politics don't happen. Unfortunately, I can't seem to track this quote down.)
The term metaplasm came into Old English from post-classical Latin, as metaplasmus, from the Hellenistic Greek (no Hellenic attestation, apparently) noun metaplasmós, `reshaping.' A parallel but not very specific term from Latin is transformation, but transformatio does not seem to be (or have been) used systematically to describe a figure of speech. Given the vague etymological sense, it's not surprising that metaplasm has been used to mean transposition of words from their usual order. Since the word hyperbaton is already available to describe that figure, there is little excuse for even the limited continuing use of metaplasm in such a broad sense, and more than a hint of ignorance.
The term metaplasm has traditionally been used in learned discussions of the classical languages. (Possibly in unlearned ones too, I suppose. Hey Pete, when can you take my Chevy Lumina into the shop for a metaplasm? I want it pimped it out with a- and -um fenders.) In the classical context it often refers to changes associated with morphological features absent in Modern English. In a typical example, a second-declension noun can be made grammatically female with obvious changes in the endings (to turn it into a first-declension noun). Not counted as metaplasmic, in this or any other context, are the standard inflections of a word (plural, past tense, etc.), or word formation by standard affixes.
In English, metaplasms are usually figures of speech. (That is, English doesn't have any very regular morphological transformations, so the changes are made free-style for some rhetorical or literary effect.) Dog gone, for example, is a metaplasm of god damn. As a euphemism it is technically a figure of speech. You could claim that it is now so well established that many people use it without any consciousness of avoiding the harsher or more offensive term, and that hence it is not a euphemism and not a figure of speech. But I could then reply that fine -- then it's no longer an alternate spelling but an alternate word, and hence not a metaplasm either. I've got all the bases covered.
Gawd might be considered a euphemism in writing, but from my experience of the English language as she is spoken (and I happen to hear her every day), it is eye dialect.
In some cases -- particularly Middle English and Early Modern English, it can be difficult to decide whether a variant spelling is really a metaplasm. A relatively clear instance occurs (or possibly doesn't) in ``Two Noble Kinsmen,'' act 5, sc. 1, ll. 45-7:
... our intercession then
Must be to him that makes the Campe a Cestron
Brymd with the blood of men ...
(Bold emphasis added. ``Cestron'' here obviously means cistern. Shakespeare elsewhere used the spelling cestern (in ``Macbeth,'' ``Othello,'' ``Antony and Cleopatra,'' as well as cesterns in ``The Rape of Lucrece''). He never spelled it cistern or cistorn. It seems clear that cestron was not an ordinary spelling variant. In principle, it might just be a misspelling, but that would require postulating two discrete errors (ro for er) where a single one does not occur elsewhere. It seems probably intentional, although the effect achieved, beyond a kind of emphasis or vividness, is hard to describe. [I'm only basing myself on the Spevack concordance (details below). There's probably additional evidence to be gleaned from scholarly editions -- such as whether Folio and Quarto editions agree.]
For another, less convincing instance from Shakespeare, see the metathesis entry.
The Spevack concordance is six bound volumes of yellowing paper with the common title A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, edited or overseen or something by Marvin Spevack, output by an IBM 7094, and published by Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung in Hildesheim in 1969.
If I think of any metatheses that don't involve an arr sound, I'll be sure to add them. There's almug and algum, but leafing through the Scrabble dictionary, even if you've been challenged, looks a lot like cheating. Okay, then, there's the English surname Apps, which arose by metathesis from æspe, the original Old English word for aspen. Of course, I would have preferred a pair of modern words -- something not involving a surname -- and I know you would too, so I'll keep looking.
Oh yeah -- ask pronounced as ``ax'' and asterisk as ``Asterix.'' There seems to be a slightly broader pattern here: most English metatheses involve an ess or arr sound. There's probably a good reason for this, and the next time I see my spichiartist, I'll be sure to ask. For insensitive jokes about dyslexics, based on preposterous metatheses, start reading (or stop reading, if that's how you do it) at the Dyslexic Occultist entry. (Metatheses involving a sibilant like s and a velar or alveolar stop -- k and t, resp. -- are relatively common. Different ancient Greek dialects sometimes differed in the order of these sounds in various words.)
The rock musician Sly Stone (famous as leader of Sly and the Family Stone, which had a great run at the end of the 1960's) was born Sylvester Stewart in 1947. He got the Sly nickname in school. Reportedly, a fellow fifth-grade student made an error spelling it in a spelling bee (they asked for name spellings in a spelling bee?) and afterwards other students teased him with it. Frankly, it's not such an unusual nickname as to need a special derivation. [According to this page, ``[t]he `Family Stone' came from the fact that Sly, his sister Rosie and brother Freddie all adopted the stage name `Stone' when they formed their new band.'' It is probably also worth noting that stone is a general intensifier in Black English Vernaculars (not just ``stone cold'' but ``stone drunk,'' ``stone in love,'' etc.), so the choice was not arbitrary.]
Metathesis is sometimes intentional, as in the case of Sly Stone, perhaps. In other words, metathesis can be a figure of speech. (This metathesis is a special case of the more general deliberate misspelling figure: metaplasm, q.v.) It's a little tricky tracing this back in time in English, because English spelling has never been entirely regular.
One instance occasionally adduced as a metathesis is from ``The Merry Wives of Windsor,'' act 2, sc. 1. Pistol speaks these lines in a conversation with Ford, warning him not to be the cuckold (ll. 117-9 or 122-4):
With liver burning hot. Frevent, or go thou,
Like Sir Acteon he, with Ringwood at thy heels:
O, odious is the name!
Some people seem to regard frevent as a metathesis of fervent, perhaps related to the burning-hot liver. (That would make the location of the word an instance of hyperbaton, but that is so common in Shakespeare as hardly to merit mention.) It seems that most, however, take ``Frevent'' as a typesetting error for ``Prevent,'' and this happens to make sense.
In ancient myth, Acteon was out hunting with his hounds and accidentally encountered the goddess Diana while she was bathing naked. She turned him into a stag and he was eventually devoured by his own dogs. That would make Acteon the prototype of the voyeur punished. However, there was a legend that in some villages in Europe (just never this one, apparently), a man was collectively humiliated when his wife gave birth to a child recognizably not his own. This must have been quite a burden on couples who shared a lot of recessive genes. According to the tradition, there would be a parade in which the supposed cuckold would be forced to wear antlers. There doesn't seem to be any more evidence for this practice than for the Acteon-Diana story, but it did give rise to expressions like ``wearing the horns of a cuckold.'' Since Acteon wore antlers and suffered ignominiously, he came to be the representative cuckold.
The main source for the myth of Acteon and Diana is Ovid's Metamorphoses, book III. There the names of 31 hounds are given (there are others too numerous to name). No, I don't have this entry mixed up with the Baskin-Robbins entry. The last named hound is a shrill-voiced one named Hylactor. Golding's 1567 translation (the first) into English of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Golding translated Hylactor as `Ringwood.' (The name Hylactor is also used in the Fabellae of C. Julius Hyginus in his version of the Acteon story.)
Whether that's an approprate translation is an involved question. I haven't the time for a full investigation, but here are a few disconnected facts. The well-known Greek word hylê means `wood,' though it was used in extended senses, particularly for `matter' in general (see the HYLE entry). There is a dog named Hyleús in Xenophon's Cynegeticus 7.5. That name is traditionally translated as `Ringwood.' Well, that's the single translation offered by the LSJ. I'm not sure how far the translation is justified. The proper noun Ringwood in English is a place name that apparently originally meant `the woods of the Regni,' the last being an ancient tribe. There is no common noun ringwood (at least not one mentioned by the OED), but on the pattern of other words, like ring-tail, one would expect ringwood to be wood with rings. Hyleús doesn't really have enough morpheme in it after `wood,' so one could hardly squeeze out a `ring.' Maybe the translation is intended to suggest that the dog goes around the woods.
So much for the dog name Hyleús, and for one traditional ``Ringwood.'' The name Hylactor (so written in the Latin of Ovid and Hyginus) evidently recalls the Greek verb hylaktéô, `I howl' (or bay, bark, or growl, but it is applied only to dogs, or metaphorically to humans). Funny how Greek and English have words that seem to connect barking and trees. (The English word, of course, is bark, but perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree here.) I would have guessed that as a name, Hylactor would just mean `howler.' That would also jibe with the mention of his shrill voice. (Similar scattered comments for some other dogs indicate that the names tend to be appropriate.) But I'm no expert. Frank Justus Miller, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor in the University of Chicago, wrote (in a footnote) in his Loeb of the Metamorphoses (1916) that the English name of Hylactor is `Mountaineer.' My only insight into this is that mountaineers carry wooden staffs, and that maybe dogs howling are associated with mountains. Beats me. Ah -- I have a better insight: His footnote, which gives the ``English names of these hounds in their order,'' has the order actually scrambled. Another dog's name, also evidently mistranslated, is given as ``Barker.'' Sheesh!
A real-time entry -- can't beat it. (What, you think after doing all that research and typing up a bare summary, and finally realizing that it was all just an ordering confusion in a footnote, I should erase all that and only give the translation? Go to hell!) So the answer to the ``involved question'' posed above is finally ``no'': Golding's translation of Hylactor as `Ringwood' was a howler.
The value of a network can be measured by the square of the number of users.
Conclusion of an argument made by Bob Metcalfe, promoting computer networking standards in 1980. Name conferred by George Gilder in his book Telecosm.
Market power is also deemed to vary as the square (of market share); see HHI.
Letter | Keying Pattern | Metrical Foot Name | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
A | .- | iamb | Most common foot in English verse, and German and Russian verse as well. |
B | -... | paeon primus | Paeon with the long syllable in the first position. This and paeon quartus (V) are the two most common paeons in Greek meter. |
C | -.-. | ditrochee or dichoreus | A foot composed of two trochees (N). Not a common foot in any ancient meter, and it's also the accentual pattern of the word Macarena. |
D | -.. | dactyl | Common in English verse. D is for dactyl. |
E | . | (thesis) | Thesis is not the name of a foot as such, but just designates the unstressed or short-syllable part of a metrical foot. |
F | ..-. | paeon tertius | Paeon with the long syllable in the third position. |
G | --. | antibacchius | |
H | .... | proceleusmatic foot or tetrabrach | The less common name simply means `four short.' There's something very fourish about the eighth letter of the English alphabet. |
I | .. | pyrrhic foot or dibrach | Better than a Pyrrhic victory. |
J | .--- | first epitrite | Epitrite with the short syllable first. |
K | -.- | cretic foot or amphimacer | Complement of an amphibrach. |
L | .-.. | paeon secundus | Paeon with the long syllable in the second position. |
M | -- | spondee | Common in English verse. |
N | -. | trochee or choreus | Common in English verse. Very common in children's verse in English. |
O | --- | molossus | |
P | .--. | antispast | I guess it precedes the maisn curse. Complement of a choriamb (X). |
Q | --.- | third epitrite | Epitrite with the short syllable third. |
R | .-. | amphibrach | Amphibrach means `both [ends] short.' |
S | ... | tribrach | The name simply means `three short.' |
T | - | (arsis) | Well dah. It's not a usual foot, though you might regard it as a contracted dibrach (I). Arsis is not the name of a foot as such, but just designates the stressed or long-syllable part of a metrical foot. |
U | ..- | anapest | Common in English verse. |
V | ...- | paeon quartus | Paeon with the long syllable in the last position. This and paeon primus (B) are the two most common paeons in Greek meter. |
W | .-- | bacchius | Since it's named after the god of the fermented fruit of the vine, you might remember di-dah-dah as a grape hanging off a length of vine. |
X | -..- | choriamb | Composed of a choreus (N) followed by a iamb (A). Cf. antispast (P). |
Y | -.-- | second epitrite | Epitrite with the short syllable second. The Y is sort of a second way to represent consonantal J, and Morse code for J corresponds to a first epitrite foot. |
Z | --.. | greater Ionic | Cf. lesser Ionic (Ü). |
À, Å [non-English extension to Morse code] | .--.- | dochmius | One or more of the long syllables (especially the second syllable) may be resolved (i.e., replaced by two short syllables). Either or both of the short syllables may be replaced by a long syllable. |
Ä, Æ [non-English extension to Morse code] | .-.- | diiamb | Two iambs combined into one foot. |
ch [non-English extension to Morse code] | ---- | dispondee | Two spondees combined into one foot. |
Ö, Ø [non-English extension to Morse code]; ! in old North American landline telegraphy. |
---. | fourth epitrite | Epitrite with the short syllable last. |
Ü [non-English extension to Morse code] | ..-- | lesser Ionic | It's also called the smaller Ionic, but it's the same length as the greater Ionic (Z). The only difference is that the long syllables come first in the greater Ionic. It just goes to show that first impressions matter. |
Here, from pp. 13-14 of Halsey's book, are some estimates of how long the transition to metric units might take:
In lifestyle news [for January 2004], the hot trend is ``metrosexuals'' -- young males who are not gay but are seriously into grooming and dressing well. There are only eight documented cases of males like this, all living in two Manhattan blocks, but they are featured in an estimated 17,000 newspaper and magazine articles over the course of about a week, after which this trend, like a minor character vaporized by aliens in a ``Star Trek'' episode, disappears and is never heard from again.
Etymologically, metrosexual is akin to Oedipean (vide metropolis, infra). Incidentally, I heard of an English girl born in the 70's who was named ``Jocasta''! Her high school friends called her ``Joker.'' Ha-ha, I'm sure. And I used to wonder how parents could bring themselves to name their daughters ``Cassandra.'' (I think now that ``Cassy'' became popular, and that ignorant sorts in the nineteenth century started supposing it was short for Cassandra. One name it had been short for was Alexandra.)
The preceding information is of no use to you. My practical reason for including this entry is to alert you that the correct (well, etymologically Greek, anyway) plural form is metropoleis. It sounds a lot better than ``metropolises,'' too.
The mass of an electron is 0.511 MeV/c2. The next-lighter known particle is the muon, with a mass of about 107 MeV/c2. The electron and muon are leptons (q.v.), the name assigned to express the fact that they are in fact light. There are also massless particles -- the photon and the as-yet-unobserved graviton. Then there are the neutrinos, ghostly uncharged leptons, one per charged lepton. Neutrinos were originally supposed to be massless, but evidence piling up since the 1980's indicates that they have mass. That mass is difficult to measure, but is on the order of a few eV/c2.
If I were speaking instead of writing, I would just have said ``on the order of a few electron volts.'' Five syllables might mark some kind of transition point. While ``electron volt'' and ``ee vee'' are at least comparably common in speech, ``mega-electron volt'' or ``million electron volt'' is rare compared to ``em ee vee'' among physicists. (I've never heard ``mevv,'' but I suppose there must be some weirdo out there who says it. For more about this kind of usage, see the GeV entry.)
A common form of health insurance scam is a MEWA that operates as a Ponzi scheme. (See IRC entry for explanation and some history.) Since the pricing of insurance policies is a matter of uncertain calculation, it is difficult to prove criminal intent when these schemes fail. So long as the scam artist skims off the top in a formally legitimate manner (e.g., by taking a high salary), other criminal sanctions (such as those for embezzlement or fraudulent accounting) are inapplicable. Sometimes civil penalties (fines for restitution and possibly further damages) may be assessed under contract law.
FWIW, the family name of the company founder, Messerschmitt, means `knife smith' in German.
In the year MFA was founded and became affiliated with FIFA, 1996, Montserrat was the world's fastest-growing nation in proportional terms, and occasionally even in absolute terms -- 600,000 tons of ash, pumice, and rock on the night of September 17-18 alone.
On Friday after election day in 1992, president-elect Bill Clinton named Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., and Warren Christopher to head his transition team. Their main business was personnel. ``A diverse government'' was one stated goal of the process.
Appearing that Sunday November 8 on ABC's ''This week with David Brinkley,'' Jordan was asked whether the country was ready for its first black attorney general. Jordan, who is black (and a lawyer who was rumored to be in line for that post), replied levelly, ``I believe that America is ready for an able, competent attorney general regardless of race, sex, or previous condition of servitude.'' That was a joke, son. Jordan's anachronistic formula echoed the words of section 1 of the fifteenth amendment to the US Constitution:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
And that amendment was not ancient history to Jordan. Interviewed by Ebony magazine for the January issue, he recalled ``my friend, Primus King, an itinerant Black preacher, unlettered but learned, who brought with great courage, conviction, fortitude, and fearlessness the case, King v. Chapman, that gave Blacks in Georgia the right to vote in the Democratic primary. While this is an exalted position and a great honor, every day in this office I remind myself that I stand on Primus King's shoulders and so do President-elect Bill Clinton and Vice President-elect Al Gore.''
Psst! Listen, but keep this under your hat: a bill to change the name from `most favored nation' (a terminological oddity from the eighteenth century) to `normal trade relations' is making its way quietly through Congress. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent on Sept. 11, 1996. The House will be a bigger hurdle, but the odds for the bill look good nevertheless.
Can we say ``co - de - pen - dent''? Sssuuuuurrre we can!
At the board, on writing paper, or wherever one is not restricted by predetermined character sets, it is not uncommon to write MFT with a theta instead of a tee.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Matt Groening's ``single-theory-to-explain-everything maniac'' points out that
The nation that controls magnesium controls the Universe!
Magnesium burns hot and bright when ignited in an ordinary atmosphere. This added to the excitement of car races when magnesium wheels were first introduced for their light weight. This is one reason why alloy wheels were subsequently introduced.
Know what? As long as I'm here, why don't I talk about MG cars? Sure!
The place to begin is with Morris cars. William Morris, who operated a cycle shop in Oxford from the 1890's, briefly entered the motorcycle business, and then went into the car business in 1910. This web page claims that the Morris Oxford was introduced in 1913, and the Morris Cowley in 1915, and that ``[e]fficient production methods allowed large numbers of these cars to built before the Great War started.'' That must have been efficient indeed, since the Great War started in August 1914 (Britain was in it from the first month). Anyway, after the usual conversion to and from war production, Morris Motors Ltd. continued manufacturing improved versions of the Oxford and the Cowley. I'm not going to sort out the early history because Morris is not an acronym.
Now, TTBOMKAU, by 1922 Morris had moved his manufacturing activities (Morris Motors, Ltd.) to Cowley (the town, not the car). He continued to maintain a retail and service operation in Oxford (originally the Morris garage; ``Morris Garages'' after other Oxford properties had been acquired in 1913). In 1921, Cecil Kimber (1888-1945) became sales manager at Morris Garages, Ltd., and in 1922 succeeded to general manager. In 1923 he began selling a sporty modified version of the Morris Cowley ``Bullnose'' in 1923. This model, known as the Morris Garages Chummy, had an alternate body built onto an unmodified Cowley chassis. In the next few years, Morris Garages Specials were sold that departed increasingly from the Cowleys they were based on, with modified (lowered) chassis and outsourced bodies (originally from a shop called Carbodies) and engines. The first pure MG design came out in 1928. In 1929, the special-car business had outgrown the Morris Garages at Oxford and was moved to Abingdon, where Cecil Kimber founded the M.G. Car Company Ltd. The rest is history. So's the part that went before, but they say this anyway. You can read an overview history or a less picture-intensive but slightly saltier history, or you can go off and do your own web search -- I'm not stopping you. On page two of this newsletter, you can see that Cecil Kimber was insistent on the point made above, that ``M.G. does not stand for Morris Garages.'' He also looked askance at the writing of the company name using ``MG'' (i.e., without the dots). Hey! Old man! Did you notice that your famous octagonal logo, which made its first appearance in 1924, never had the dots? Gimme a break, really.
William Morris eventually got into the philanthropy business and was made Lord Nuffield. This William Morris is no relation to the New York vaudeville agent who in 1898 started the business that eventually (1918) was incorporated as the William Morris Agency. (Nor, either of these, to the William Morris (1834-1896) famous in Britain as the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement.)
While we're on name coincidences involving modeling agencies and automobile manufacturers, I must mention the Ford Modeling Agency, cofounded in 1946 by the famous Eileen Ford and her husband Jerry. These Fords are apparently no particular relation of the Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company. Comparisons are probably inevitable. Here are some from a New York Times article on the occasion of the modeling agency's twentieth anniversary,
[The Ford Model Agency] is to fashion and advertising what the other Ford organization is to the automtive industry -- one of the biggest and most successful. ... Among Stewart, Plaza Five, Gillis McGill and Ford -- the top four agencies in the country -- most fashion editors and advertising casting directors place Ford first.
Ask the Fords how they got there and they say that they, like the auto company's founder, had a better idea.
Jerry (for Gerod) Ford, president of the agency, which handles both male and female models, said: ``In the old days half the models did their own billing -- when they remembered their appointments and to ask to be paid. But even then they often didn't get their money, which meant the agency didn't get its fees.
``It was a way of doing business that was partly responsible for the demise of John Robert Powers, Bob Taft and Harry Conover, agencies that once led the field. Eileen modeled for Conover before we were married.'' To avoid confusion, Mr. Ford helped develop a system (since adopted by other agencies) for recording telephone orders and cancellations for models, a voucher system by which the agency pays the models in advance and then collects from the clients and a sophisticated cross index of their models with their available times so that this information can be supplied to clients in seconds.
They got 10% of each model's earnings, and collected an additional 10% from each client. At the time of the article (Dec. 21, 1966, p. 57; byline Bernadette Carey), the Ford Agency was just starting to move from index cards to a computer database.
Another Ford who is no particular relation of the famous Henry is former US president Gerald R. Ford, who represented a Michigan congressional district that was near Detroit, in some sense of the word near. Gerald Ford's wife Betty (maiden name Elizabeth Bloomer) had been a model in New York, but before the Ford Agency existed. (Gerald Ford, a football player at U of M and a football coach on the side when he attended Yale Law, also did some modeling work.)
If it had anything to do with Morris Garages, I'd be sure to mention that the model Christie Brinkley is not known to be related to the late TV news anchor Huntley Brinkley, er, I mean David Brinkley. Christie was a supermodel, one of the dozens of models who is incorrectly claimed to have been the first to be called a supermodel. In August 2000, she was a superdelegate from New York at the Democratic Party convention in LA. Super!
In typical configurations, the motor and generator of an MG set run synchronously and are directly coupled -- via belt, gears, or a common shaft. The exception I know of is the MG sets used for tokomaks. Tokomaks require a lot of power to build the magnetic confinement fields, but this power is needed only for periods of a few seconds. The power is provided by a bank of MG sets with flywheels. The motors rev up the flywheels over a period of minutes, and then the flywheels turn the generators, slowing down in a few seconds. I remember reading about a bus system in Scandinavia someplace years ago, that used flywheels to store power either from braking or from continuously running motors.
The MGB was one of those cars that inspired affectionate loyalty in its owners. One of the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve members (alpha chapter) had an MGA and has more interesting memories. I'll have to interview her for the glossary.
Gee, they're advertising. I should drink more.
Beer consumption in the US is roughly 25 gallons per annum per capita, so for some of the more popular brands, MGD is about the scale of consumption.
Frances Gumm was born in Grand Rapids, Minn., on June 10, 1922. (I don't know if people in Minnesota commonly abbreviate their Grand Rapids by GR, but we've got a GR entry waiting for them if they do.) Judy Garland stopped singing permanently in 1969. Before that, she said
I was born at the age of twelve on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.
Goldwyn Pictures was a partnership formed in 1916 by the two brothers-in-law Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn. Goldfish had been born Shmuel Gelbfisz in 1884, which is the Polish spelling of the Yiddish name translated to Samuel Goldfish when he came to America. In requesting a name change in 1918, he told the judge that everybody assumed his name was Goldwyn. In 1923 he began his own company, called Samuel Goldwyn Productions.
O. V. Michaelsen reports in Words At Play: Quips, Quirks & Oddities (1998) that Goldwyn never said ``Include me out.''
MGM now uses the slogan ``MGM Means Great Movies,'' which is almost a XARA.
In November 2006, it was inadvertently killed. According to an internal review board summary, on ``Nov. 2, after the spacecraft was ordered to perform a routine adjustment of its solar panels, the spacecraft reported a series of alarms, but indicated that it had stabilized. That was its final transmission. Subsequently, the spacecraft reoriented to an angle that exposed one of two batteries carried on the spacecraft to direct sunlight. This caused the battery to overheat and ultimately led to the depletion of both batteries. Incorrect antenna pointing prevented the orbiter from telling controllers its status, and its programmed safety response did not include making sure the spacecraft orientation was thermally safe.'' Apparently the incorrect antenna pointing was ultimately due to ``a computer error [sic] made five months before the likely battery failure.''
Mahatma Gandhi University was first established as Gandhiji University. ``Gandhiji'' is a polite or respectful inflection of the name ``Gandhi,'' whereas ``Mahatma'' means `great soul.' (This was used, by others, in place of his actual given name, which was Mohandas.) The majority view seems to be that ``Mahatma Gandhiji'' is slightly over the top. (Speakers of European languages ought to recognize the roots of ``Mahatma,'' which are cognate with the English words like major, mayor and atmosphere (or German atmen, to breathe.')
The university was officially established by Act 12 of 1985 of the Kerala State Legislature, and approved by the governor on April 17, 1985. However, that 1985 act includes (ch. I, sec. 1, subsection (2)) the statement that ``[the act] shall be deemed to have come into force on the 2nd day of October, 1983.'' I don't know when the university actually came into operation; many online resources state baldly that the university was ``established on 2 October 1983.''
The university name was changed by the legislature's Act II (it does not appear to be Act 11) of 1988, which had the so-called short title of ``The Gandhiji University (Amendment and Special Provisions) Act, 1988.'' That act doesn't say precisely that the University's name is changed. Rather, it makes a number of amendments to the 1985 act (the one that was deemed to have established a university in 1983). Most of these amendments consist of changing ``Gandhiji University'' to ``Mahatma Gandhi University'' separately in various sections and subsections of the original act. Most of the 1988 act ``shall be deemed to have come into force on the 28th of January, 1988.''
The structure of the 1988 act is puzzling without being confusing. Sections 3, 4, and 5 amend three specific parts of the 1985 act. The amendment in each case is the substitution of the words ``Mahatma Gandhi University'' for the original words ``Gandhiji University.'' Section 6 provides for the same substitution throughout the 1985 act, with the explicit exception of the three places where the substitution is made by the aforementioned sections 3, 4, and 5 of the 1988 act. The specific places mentioned are subsection (1) of section 1 of the 1985 act, clause (31) of section 2 of the 1985 act, and subsection (1) of section 3 of the 1985 act. These are amended in sections 3-5, respectively, of the 1988 act. (These subsections and clause are the only places where ``Gandhiji University'' occurred in the first three sections of the 1985 act, so the stipulation of subsection and clause numbers is nugatory.)
Sections 3-6 together seem to have the same effect that section 6 alone would have had if the explicit exceptions had been removed. I can think of three possible explanations for the separate treatments: (a) The version of the 1988 law that I am reading originally treated the three named sections of the 1985 act differently, but the 1988 act has itself been modified by some later act, making the original distinction invisible. (b) There is some magical distinction between making an ``amendment'' in which ``the expression'' (or ``the words'') <foo> is substituted for <bar>, on the one hand (secs. 3-5), and simply making a ``substitution'' of ``the expression'' <foo> for ``the expression'' <bar>, on the other hand (section 6). (c) Kerala legislators are paid by the word.
If computer programmers wrote this way, you'd see C code like
This is bloated. Better:
if ( (x == 3) || (x == 4) || (x == 5) )
{
x = 0;
}
else
{
x = 0;
}
if (x != 0)
{
x = 0;
}
/* And most compactly... */
x=x==0?x:0;
Incidentally, section 2 of the 1988 act amends the long title of the 1985 act. Go check out the pdf yourself. The 1988 act begins at page 75.
MHC's brief history summary includes this: ``Mount Holyoke's early history is one of struggle and triumph over tremendous odds. The country was in the grip of economic depression when Lyon set about gathering the means with which to establish her institution.'' This is mild understatement. The years-long depression that began with the [bank] Panic of 1837 was the worst economic contraction in US history, exceeding even the Great Depression in misery if not duration. It was the last period in US history when large numbers of city-dwellers died of starvation and exposure.
MHC is, or was when they were seven, one of the Seven Sisters.
Speaking of coils, it seems the electrical engineers are a very twisted bunch, at least linguistically speaking. (I like to say ``linguistically speaking'' and ``literally spelled'' and stuff like that.) They also came up with ``imref.''
MHV's have ``exposed'' center pins, so if you're going to be mucking around nearby, you might just prefer Safe High Voltage (SHV) coax connectors. Both MHV and SHV are intended to operate up to 50 MHz, but they have non-constant impedance structure.
The expansion of coax connectors' acronyms is notoriously uncertain. MHV is sometimes expanded ``Maximum'' or ``Modular'' High Voltage.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Michigan. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
The English foot is 30.48 cm long (see barleycorn), and an English mile has 5280 of them, making an 1 mile equal to 1.609344 km. It takes seven digits in kilometers to get the same accuracy that you get with just one digit in miles! It just proves yet again how inconvenient and unwieldy all those mutually incompatible metric systems are.
``Military intelligence--a contradiction in terms.''The phrase is commonly attributed to Groucho Marx.
According to the LatinCEO issue mentioned at the FTAA entry, 76% of (of the dollar value of) US airborne exports to Latin America and the Caribbean and 79% of US airborne imports therefrom, pass through MIA. The information source is MIA itself. Brazil has by far the largest share and MIA handles ``just under 60% of all [US] air cargo trade with Brazil and Argentina.'' Total trade (exports plus imports) with Brazil through MIA totaled $6 million in FY 2001. Colombia was second with $2 million. Gee, that's not a whole lot. Oh! They mean legal trade.
Joking aside, the dollar amounts appear to be off by a factor of a thousand.
\ / \/ /\ / \==O / /
The Bangles were originally (1980) a trio: sisters Vicky and Debby Peterson, and Suzanna Hoffs. Michael Steele joined them in 1982. They were the hottest all-girl group of the 1980's. They had some success in the music business too.
[The Runaways lasted less than five years and had more than five bass guitarists. Peggy Foster was bassist for a couple of weeks (according to this) or a month (per The Runaways Wikipedia page, browsed Nov. 2010) after Micki left. She was replaced by Jackie Fox (``this'' link of previous sentence is an interview with her, with details of her departure). Joan Jett filled in when Fox left the band in the lurch during a Japan tour (there was already a lead guitarist by that time -- Lita Ford). Victory Tischler-Blue (Vicki Blue) joined as bassist after the group returned from Japan; she got sick and left the group in 1978. Laurie McAllister replaced Vicki.]
There's another person, a Michael Stephen Steele, who was the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee (during the 2008-2010 election cycle).
A few outsiders use or impose the term expansively to mean Indiana and Michigan (or most of it). For example, the Michiana Region Volleyball Association is the RVA for all of Indiana and lower Michigan.
There's clearly some overlap between the first two definitions, which seem to be the two in most common use. On the other hand, I heard the last definition from a realtor. Most houses that are described as having a Michigan basement seem to have been built in the nineteenth century. (The late nineteenth century, but then fewer of the earlier houses still survive.) I guess that the notion of a Michigan basement as one that is inferior (in any but the most literal sense) has been extended recently to describe something else... which I haven't encountered yet.
The realtor who introduced me to this term works in South Bend, Indiana, which is only a few miles from the Michigan border. I thought the term might be invidious or at least colloquial, but it's not. And some people in Michigan wonder what such basements are called in other states. I haven't learned precisely how the name of Michigan got attached to something that was once rather common elsewhere. Use of the term is geographically widespread (in the US), but has become rare only because what it describes has become rare.
See CML.
Hence, when a microlensing event is observed, it is very useful to have data from many observatories, since one can't simply get more data by longer or later observation from a single observatory (even assuming the weather collaborates). MicroFUN, which is led by Andrew Gould, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, is a mechanism to activate the follow-up after a microlensing event is first detected, and to pool the resulting data. Other microlensing networks are MOA, PLANET and RoboNet, all of which have collaborated at some level. (At the very least, they exchange ideas on algorithms and strategies to find promising microlensing events. They also share news of such events, and pool data for analysis.)
As the PLANET acronym suggests, a major goal of microlensing observations is to discover planets. Planets orbiting the nearer star show up as interference in the bent light. As of February 2008, six planets had been discovered by this method (and announced). The latest two, announced on the 15th inst., were a pair of gas giants (like Saturn and Jupiter) orbiting a single star.
Martha: Oh, little boy, you got yourself hunched over that microphone of yours. ... Nick: Microscope. ... Martha: ... yes ... and you don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specks and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?[Ellipses in script. In the movie, Elizabeth Taylor plays the braying alcoholic (not a big creative stretch, eventually) Martha, and George Segal the callow biologist Nick. Martha's husband George was played by Liz Taylor's real-life husband at the time (as well as a second time, later) Richard Burton.]
In case you came to this entry just for information on microscopy per se, and assuming that you've read down to this point, one place you might visit is Microscopes and Microscopy. There's the main site `in Europe', or at least in nearby Britain. There's an American mirror hosted by U. of Oklahoma.
In Albee's play, Martha and George are a childless couple, and a fantasy child is part of their mind games. In reality, Virginia Woolf wanted children and her husband Leonard did not. They didn't have children. See the VW entry. Or don't.
MIDAC was a general-purpose computer completed in 1953. It had about 1000 tubes and 20,000 crystal rectifiers (i.e., semiconductor diodes) and 120 relays. Sounds like a vacuum-tube version of DTL.
Extensive technical details are served by the Computer History Museum at the MIDAC entry (original document page 111) in an etext of ``A Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems'' prepared by Martin H. Weik for the US Army in 1955; etext OCRed and marked up by Ed Thelen).
The Giant Computers file contains summary information from a Navy report of 1953, some of it possibly inconsistent with the Army report. In particular, the Army report says the machine used only 900 tubes of 10 different types. (Two types used in the central computer, others in the magnetic drum [data storage] system, tape units, and input-output stations.) The Navy report mentions 1100 tubes. Possibly there was some redesign. The Navy report gives a total footprint of 845 sq. ft. The Army report gives 65 sq. ft. for the computer and 12 sq. ft. for the air conditioning unit, but notes that there were 8 separate cabinets excluding the power and air conditioning units. They probably needed a lot of access space for the engineer and two technicians staffing the facility each eight-hour shift.
Recipe for success: First pick the name, then devise the acronym expansion.
On the other hand, in the last line of the G. Keillor parody of Oedipus, the chorus intones
``Everything Oedipus touches, Oedipus wrecks.''
I never claimed to be middle class in my intellect and in truth, I probably have the experience of all apostles, I am rejected by the class whose cause I preach but that has nothing to do with the case. I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
Wesleyan University is located in Middletown, Conn.
Cf. Plainville, USA.
Mid-majors don't get a lot of invitations to NCAA tournament. In 2006, it was a big deal when the Missouri Valley Conference got four bids and the Colonial Athletic Association got its first at-large bid in 20 years.
I'm struggling to find the relevance, but until then you might as well know that ort is English for `crumb,' while Ort (q.v.) is German for `place.' `Oort' is International for a quite far-away place. Platz is also German for `place,' but plotz is Yiddish for `explode' and some related things. Interestingly, in Spanish explotar is both `explode' and `exploit.' You can imagine the greater persuasiveness of union-organizing speeches. There's no connection, I suppose, but also in Spanish, bomba is both `bomb' and `pump.' I guess what I'm trying to say here is: if you're ever in an airport in Latin America, and you get into a heated discussion about unionizing fire companies, switch to English. The advice might be different in Brazil, however, as the Portuguese language has (too) many more sounds and allows more distinctions among words. As a matter of fact, during WWII, in a bar in Rio (or some other Brazilian city that's harder to spell), my father met someone who spoke English. So they used that language, and someone came up and asked what that language was they were speaking, and the other guy made a little joke. He said `German.' Ha-ha. Police. Arrest. The first thing to know about joke delivery is when not to. As they say, timing is everything. As a general rule, wartime is bad timing.
As it turned out (I asked my father) it was Rio, and the guy's name was Wilson. My father never saw this guy again, which seems to me just as well.
For more on pumps, visit Grundfos.
It's probably fair to point out that the semantic subrange of explotar corresponding to `exploit' is narrower than that of the English cognate. As compensation, I'll note that celoso translates both `zealous' and `jealous' (in English these words arrived from Latin zelosus via French at different times).
It is often the case that a single word in Spanish corresponds to two slightly differently spelled close cognates of the word in English, but the divergence does not always go in that direction. For example, the English word respect corresponds to Spanish respeto and respecto. Thus, for example, les tengo gran respeto means `I have great respect for them,' while the standard phrase con respecto a means `with respect to.'
You know, if tangential thoughts hadn't so rudely interrupted this entry, I could have been finished with it already. Now then, I need to add that the Spanish word miga comes from the Latin mica (female first-declension noun), meaning a particle or crumb or grain, especially of salt. You may be tempted to take one with the news of what words this is cognate with. It is not too surprising that it is cognate with Greek adjective for `small, little,' with various surviving forms. In Doric, Boeotian, and Ionic dialects, it occurred as mikkós (female nominative form mikká, BTW). The variant mikós was also widespread, found in materials from the 4 c. BCE to the 3 c. CE. By far the most common literary forms of the Greek word, however, were mikrós (hence the SI prefix) and smikrós. Through Proto-Indo-European, these are believed to be cognate with the English word small.
The Latin word mica entered English directly as a mineralogical term, for a small particle of talc, selenite, or other crystalline inclusion when it is one of a large number in a matrix of some other rock. The word was also used for rocks containing micae (also micas). [There was, perhaps understandably, some confusion, about both etymology and sense, with the Latin micare (`to glitter, shine').] This meaning was abandoned as the term came to be used systematically for one particular class of minerals that had been common mica materials, namely (what we still now call) mica.
The word miga in Spanish developed another meaning, but to avoid clutter in this glossary we try to discuss only one meaning per entry, so you'll have to wait. Stop tapping your feet-- it's rude. It is better to scroll down than to curse the browser.
The Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada offers translations of miga in this second sense and of migaja (synonym of miga and crumb in the usual sense). Here they are in that encyclopedia's standard order (which isn't alphabetical by language in Spanish either):
Language | miga (bread interior) |
migaja (crumb) |
---|---|---|
French | mie | miette |
Italian | mollica | briciola, rimasuglio |
English | crum | crumb |
German | Krume | Krümchen |
Portuguese | miolo | migalha |
Catalan | molla | engruna |
Esperanto | panmolajo, molajo | peceto, panpeceto |
In French, mie has the same common senses as Spanish miga, while the diminutive miette not surprisingly only means `crumb.' The Italian mollica seems primarily to have the sense of loaf interior, though the plural molliche means `crumbs.' Briciola means `crumb,' but rimasuglio primarily means `[food] remnant, left-overs.' The putative semantic distinction between the English words crum and crumb exists only in a diachronic analysis: the spelling variant with the b seems to have arisen only around 1800, under the influence of the earlier crumble and dumb (how abt). Since the soft-interior sense of crumb seems to have petered out in the 1800's, one may say loosely that over time, crum had both senses and crumb had only one. I plan to check the other translations someday.
A gry is a tenth of a line, and a line is a twelfth of an inch, so a gry is 1/120 inch or about 211.6666667 µm, proving once again how ugly metric units are.
Mils, or ``angular mils,'' are generally almost exactly equal to a milliradian. Mils are typically defined as fractions of 360 degrees, and can be thought of as equivalent to approximations of π. The largest mil so defined is equivalent to a milliradian in the π=3 approximation: 1 mil = 2000π mrad / 6000. This was used in the former Soviet Union and Finland; Finland is switching over to the NATO mil. Other implicit values of π that have been common are 3.1415 (perhaps), 3.15 (formerly used by Sweden, which has moved to the NATO standard), and 3.2 (NATO standard). I write ``perhaps'' for 3.1415, which corresponds to the mil said to be used by many manufacturers of telescopic sights for civilian use, because it's not clear that saying a mil is defined as 1/6283 of a circle isn't simply an awkward way of saying it's defined to approximate a milliradian as closely as possible.
Mils are often described, if not defined, as the angle subtended by one foo at a distance of one thousand foos, where foo is typically ``yard'' or ``meter.'' This is equivalent to defining the mil as 2×Arcsin(1/2000) or about (1 + 4.1666671×10-8) mrad. Of course, the thing that makes mils convenient is the same thing that makes this description accurate: the fact that in the small-angle limit, the sine of an angle approaches the angle (in the natural units, radians).
Before the military forces of the world discovered the small-angle approximation, another unit was popular: the decigrad (the grad being defined as 1/100 of a right angle, or 0.9 degrees).
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard P. Feynman described some of his WWII work on mechanical analog computers for, iirc, bomb sights.
The minors serve as the ``farm system'' that grows players for ``the show,'' a/k/a ``the majors,'' ``big league,'' or MLB. Each team in the minors, with the exception of the Winter League teams, is part of the farm system of some team in the majors. Players are transferred back and forth up and down the Minor League levels, usually within the farm system of a Major League team. There are also a number of independent baseball leagues; they are not affiliated with any MLB team and are not part of the MiLB system.
Minor League Baseball was officially known as the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL) until 1999. NAPBL was founded in 1901. Major League Baseball and NAPBL reached a wide-ranging cooperative agreement in 1902, but the practice of having minor-league teams owned by particular major-league teams came much later.
The first season of NAPBL was 1902, with 14 leagues and 96 teams. As of 2008, there were 188 teams.
And fwiw, this afternoon, April 29, 2006, this glossary begins its fourth myriad of entries.
I know what you're thinking. You figure that the Greek word moron, meaning `dull,' has dropped the final en, the same way Platôn dropped the final en to become Plato. However, that doesn't always happen even in English. (E.g., the last king of Syracuse before the Romans conquered it, the king for whom Archimedes designed novel weaponry, is called Gellon in English.) It happens less often in Spanish. Good guess, though! Moro is the Spanish word for a Moor, related to the name of the country Morocco. The word has been used with varying degrees of precision for people like Moors. (Think of Othello.) The words moreno/morena (more common in Spain) and morocho/morocha (chiefly Latin American) mean dark-skinned (adjective and, technically, pronoun).
The Moors were, of course, mostly Muslim. In the Philippines, moro refers to a Filipino Muslim. Islam was introduced to the Philippines from Borneo and Malaya in the 14th century, and currently about 5 per cent of the Filipino population, mostly in the South, is Muslim.
I am most intrigued by the ``military obligations'' exemption for 6-to-16-year-olds. When my great grandmother became a naturalized citizen of the US, she was asked if she would serve in the armed forces if called to. We won't say exactly what her age was. Let's just say that the question was preposterous. She replied, ``Me? An old woman? I'll cook for the troops!'' This was apparently recorded as ``I do.''
My great grandmother was known as ``Grandma Moses.'' This was not because of her spunk or her artistic ability, but because of her surname.
Wait, you wanted to know about milk snakes? That's okay: we have a little something about them too; see under Regina CREAMER.
Galaxy is also one of the names of TradeWave or EINet, ``[t]he professional's guide to a world of information.''
In the linear regime, the output contains a dependent current or voltage source linear in the voltage across an input impedance between + and - of the input. The small-signal equivalent circuit generally has an (ideally low-conductance) element connecting input and output + terminals [y++ = yBC or yDG]. This leads to an input current proportional to the difference in input and output. The Miller effect is that, because the output voltage is amplified (by a gain factor A), the input conductance is increased by an amount y++ (1-A) instead of just y++. [For the devices mentioned, A < 0; for a good voltage amplifier, |A| » 1.]
The Miller effect is put to good use in Op Amps: by using Miller effect to increase parasitic capacitance associated with one part of the amplifier relative to the capacitance of another, poles are kept apart to maintain stability. (Two nearby poles can cause a 180 degree phase shift and associated feedback problems.)
Here's an overview, etext copy of a paper presented by Borenstein. Ghastly formatting (1000-character lines); d/l and read in an editor.
Alternate expansion: Massively Incompatible Mail Experiment.
The RFC822 mail header passes the MIME type in a
format that begins:
Content-Type: mime-type/subtype
Here's an entire page of them.
From AOL version 6.0 on, it is impossible to send text/plain content. It is of course possible for an AOL subscriber to, say, connect to the internet via AOL, and then use non-AOL software such as a browser or telnet client over that connection. However, the same is not true for email: AOL's proprietary internal mail protocol prevents AOL users from using an alternative MUA for email sent to or from an aol.com address. You can contact the online help chat, and once you get the friendly serviceperson to wrap its head around the idea that you do not want ``plain text'' encoded as MIME-type text/html, but instead want plain text encoded as text/plain, just as God intended, that polite person may recommend that you install version 5 if you want that to happen. One reason you are unlikely to want to do that is the temporary inconvenience of installing the older AOL version. Another reason not to do it is the temporary inconvenience of reinstalling the newer version, after you discover that AOL servers are not backward-compatible with older versions of AOL software. The upshot is that you can't send Content-Type: text/plain from an AOL address. In many civilized venues, this means that it is impossible for an AOLuser to participate as an adult.
In Unix, a typical mail or news application uses metamail to interpret any MIME types it doesn't know how to handle. Metamail in turn mostly just looks in a mailcaps file (default search path $HOME/.mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap may be overridden by the environmental variable MAILCAPS) and passes the item to the application designated as capable of handling the relevant type/subtype.
Oops, missed it. Now I'll never know.
``What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.''Someone must have remarked that such a statement could be construed as self-referential. Cf. deconstruction.
The useful sense for which the word has no adequate synonym, however, has to do with the Gothic letters of late Medieval manuscript, used throughout Europe but most directly influencing the German typescript called Fraktur. Anyway, if you look at any of those Gothic texts, you'll notice that much of the lower-case text looks like a half-height fence -- a long low sequence of fat vertical strokes that could be mmmm or nnnn or unnu or whatever. Each vertical stroke of one of these letters was a minim -- three in an em, two in an en or `u.' With a little beveling at the top or bottom of a minim, you could make some other letters, though you couldn't really read them. It was almost as bad as Oriya. (A single minim represented an i; the practice began of putting accents on the letters i so they could be distinguished, and these evolved into the current dots.)
Note carefully that ``lead (II, IV) oxide'' is lead sesquioxide. CAS registry number 1314-27-8. (Mnemonic: 13 14 - 13+14 -ate.)
As you may guess from the names, I have read some contradictory information about red lead. It does have at least one allomorph, but it seems that the red tetragonal phase is the stable one at standard temperature and pressure. There is another lead oxide that is sometimes associated with red lead in some way, and that other phase, or one of the other phases, may be black. But that black phase may be a red herring (sorry), because the sesquioxide is normally black (and monoclinic). I'm on the case! This is an interim report.
Two red minerals were well known to the ancient world: one was red lead, the subject of this entry, and the other was mercuric sulfide, or cinnabar. A Roman craftsman would have had no difficulty distingishing between pure samples of the two. Most immediately, they could be distinguished because cinnabar has a more brilliant red color. Book XXXIII, sec. 119 of Pliny's Natural History indicates that they were also able to (as we would say) reduce cinnabar under heat to produce liquid mercury, so they had a chemical assay.
The word minium entered Middle English from Latin, but the word apparently does not go back to proto-Indo-European and its ultimate etymology is unclear. It is believed to be related to the Basque word armineá, which means `cinnabar.' It is hard to know precisely what was meant by the word minium in Latin, since writers sometimes either were unaware of or confused about the difference between the minerals. (Pliny, confused as he himself was, mentions various instances of confusion.) In addition, even when writers knew what they meant, what they wrote does not give us enough clues for us to know. Nevertheless, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that minium has switched from describing the brighter (cinnabar) to the duller (red lead) mineral. It's not hard to see how this might have occurred. Pliny reports that cinnabar was adulterated in many ways. [Since the price was fixed by law (70 sesterces per pound), it was impossible to reward honesty with a higher price, so this is hardly surprising. See also next paragraph.] The first adulterant he mentions is red lead (either native or prepared by heating cerusite -- lead carbonate). He describes it as secundarium minium, where context implies that by secundarium he means `second-rate.' At any rate, minium secundarium was the standard way of referring to what we now call minium. Pliny gives some evidence of confusion at various places where he mentions either of the two minerals. He also notes that use of a Greek-origin word (our cinnabar) was causing [further] confusion.
If the word for the mercury compound (viz. minium in its original sense) should have a Basque etymon it would not be surprising: Spain is still today the world's leading source of cinnabar. However, for the Carthaginians, and for the Romans after they took it over from them, Iberia was a source of mineral riches primarily in the form of silver. [Yes, the Athenian silver mines of Laurion had also been an important lead resource, but by late Republican Roman times they were mostly exhausted, and the Spanish mines were by far the most important.] Silver mines are lead mines, for reasons explained at the pluton entry. The silver is extracted from galena (lead ore) by a process called cupellation, and lead is a byproduct. Galena is lead sulfide (PbS), so perhaps it is not too surprising that the lead compound minium and the sulfide cinnabar both are often found in the vicinity. According to Pliny the most famous Spanish cinnabar mine, and the most important one in terms of revenues for the Roman state, was the one in Almaden (where silver was not found). Raw cinnabar ore from Almaden (as much as a ton per annum) was required to be shipped to Rome, where one company was granted a monopoly for its production.
Snazzy names with minerals seem to be a status thing, like fine clothes with people. Cinnabar gets a choice of exotic names and casts off a perfectly serviceable but unwanted excess name like minium. Cinnabar even has a distinct name, vermilion, for its color. The mineral minium, on the other hand, in addition to having to make do with a hand-me-down name, has to share that name with its color, which is either called minium or minium red. To make matters even more humiliating, the drab name red lead (or is that read led? homonyms are so confusing!) has apparently led to some confusion, and minium is sometimes called red minium, as if there were any other kind.
Minium is also used as name for the bright red color of this oxide.
I once dated a woman whose father had owned a mink ranch. Perhaps that dates me. You know, minks are carnivores. If you think about it, you realize that raising carnivores is a lot more expensive than raising herbivores. They also tend to be a bit less social, you know? And a bit wilier and more on the look-out for a way to escape. What with all the meat-handling he did, he eventually started a meat-canning business as a sideline.
You know, German aircraft supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan are not allowed to fly at night in areas where there might be trouble. God forbid, someone might get hurt! MINUSTAH also operates under European-style rules of ``engagement.'' The mission has 8800 soldiers and police, which is woefully inadequate and also larger than Haiti's official police force (only about half of whom actually show up to work). Some Haitians use the alternate name TOURISTAH, because they're only found in the safe places where they're not needed. Again we see the Francophone propensity to use apparent acronyms without proper expansions. It's scandalous! (It would also have been helpful if the original acronym had picked up the E in en, since the proper spelling of the tee word is touriste.)
I hasten to assure those suffering shell-shock from the revelations about pumps and exploitation (miga entry above) that mío is only a posessive pronoun, and not an explosive or exploitable thing below.
The explanation I had here before was at best confusing and at worst wrong. Okay, okay, I've scolded myself long enough!
If you feel dizzy, stop reading now.
In contrast, germanium (Ge), which is much easier to grow in single-crystal form and was therefore the basis of all the early progress in semiconductor (transistor) electronics, has an oxide that dissolves in water (and desorbs at 450 °C).
There are other opinions, of course. According to Thomas Carlyle, ``Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.'' Of course, Tom never had the opportunity to experience television, laser light shows, or nitro-burning funny cars!
This entry was provoked by Bob Patrick, who started an old-fashioned blog called ``Latin Proverb of the Day.'' His proverb for 17.08.05 is Forma viros neglecta decet, which he translates `Neglected concern for appearance is befitting men.' (I'm not sure it's a proverb, but it is Latin. It's from Ovid's scandalous Ars Amatoria, 1.509.) I don't think Bob Patrick gets it, but the meaning is obvious and I'm happy for his blog, so I won't get into that. I want to write about mirrors. (Considering that this is the mirrors entry, I figured I should warn you.) Bob Patrick, contemplating Ovid's thought, observes that weight rooms are full of mirrors, and supposes that they're there so people can check each other out. No, no, noooOOOOOOoooo!
Mirrors in a weight room serve many important purposes:
Aside on resistance machines: many of them are loaded with stacks of oblong metal plates. These are shaped like broad, short (about an inch high) bricks. Their upper and lower surfaces are approximately flat and smooth, so the force is spread out when they stack (or bang together). They have holes (usually two) bored vertically through the short dimension of the plate, located symmetrically away from the center (along the longer center-line). A vertical guide rod goes through each stack of these holes in the plate stack, keeping the plates aligned. Those rods are lubricated, and some of the lubricant (a light oil; see CAMELSPIN) spreads along the horizontal faces of the plates.
You probably don't need to read this paragraph. To adjust the resistance, you push a pin into one of the plates (there's a horizontal hole or slot for this in each plate). The pin catches on a vertical tongue (this passes through a third vertical bore, this one centered), so that you lift the selected plate along with all the ones stacked above it.
When your movement in the machine lifts a subset of the plate stack, one or two of the plates below the selected stack may come along as well. They seem stuck to the plates above, but it's not quite ordinary adhesion. The force provided by surface tension in the spread-out oil is enough to pull along a plate or two (i.e., as much as 40 lb.). In principle, the pressure of the air around the circumference of the oil slick should shrink it to the point where it can't hold the plate. This will eventually happen if your set lasts long enough. The problem seems to be particularly severe on the old Polaris-brand machines, which sometimes have the plate stack behind the user. You do three or four reps, thinking you feel a bit weak, and you hear a clang as one plate crashes and lightens your load, then you go on another couple and another plate crashes. It's one way to push the envelope.
Oily plates are rarely a problem on Universal machines, evidently because the plates, with upper edges rounded and bottom surfaces slotted, don't spoon snugly. Cybex plates are also only roughly flat -- they have some texture on a millimeter scale, so they don't suffer oily-plate sticking either.
Some Cybex machines do have another sticking problem, however. The guide rods run through the plate stack down to the machine frame, and usually there is something elastic around the bottom of the guide rods, so the bottom plate doesn't rest directly on the machine frame. Some machines have metal springs very similar to those that close the valves on a gasoline engine. These are okay. Other Cybex machines use a hard rubber annulus around the bottom of each rod. Since the rubber is under almost constant compression and since it is, well, a little bit rubbery, it sticks to the bottom plate and the frame. Hence, when you max out the stack, you have to unstick each rubber annulus from either the bottom plate or the frame. It feels like maybe ten extra pounds to unstick it the first time. (It's a different kind of experience from oily sticking, however, since you can't lift the stack until you've pulled the bottom plate free.) Anyway, just mention it to Ryan or whoever and he'll spray some WD-40 on the rubber and the underside of the bottom plate while you hold up the stack. Don't forget to mention later that the fix lasted less than a day.
It's also disturbing, although you know it doesn't matter, when you see one annulus rise, stuck to the bottom plate, while the other annulus stays stuck to the frame. Some Polaris machines have the bottom plate rest directly on the frame; this looks bad when exposed (abraded paint) but is less subject to any kind of sticking. Universal machines often use rubber annuli (broader than, but otherwise similar to, those of Cybex machines). What I haven't seen is any machine that uses a washer between the plate and rubber.
A lot of machines are loaded like dumbbells -- you hand-load free circular plates to set the resistance. These machines typically also have rubber pads to limit motion, but since such machines spend most of the time unloaded, the rubber doesn't stick noticeably.
I suppose another use of mirrors in training would be to pretend you're lifting a great weight along a wall when you're really only pushing it along the floor. I'm just full of practical suggestions.
Okay, here's something to do with mirrors in weight rooms, and it might cast some light on the question of what they're there for. It's from an article in Men's Fitness, issue on the racks in January 2006. (This is the issue that features UFC ring-card girl Rachelle Leah on the cover. A woman whose name is constructed from the names of Jacob's two wives, hmmm. This is the famous issue that ranked Baltimore as America's ``fittest city,'' so you may want to take the information in it with a grain of salt.)
On page 98 there were some budget tips for designing a home gym: ``#3 Install lighting that flatters your physique. Quality lighting is worth the expense. Looking good in the mirror during a workout makes you feel good and will keep you motivated. A single lightbulb with a string attached? It may be cheaper, but it will leave you feeling flabby and pathetic.'' I didn't notice any specific positive recommendations on lighting, but the meat section at the supermarket uses pink fluorescents to make the meat look good, so try that. Here's an idea: in ``A Streetcar Named Desire,'' Blanche DuBois says, ``I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.'' She bought this adorable little colored paper lantern at a Chinese shop on Bourbon, which she gives to ``Mitch'' to install. That can't be too expensive, and Stanley Kowalski's (Marlon Brando's) physique looked good in that. Of course, that was before he began to commit slow suicide by bursting belly. For expensive lighting, see the EU entry.
There's a popular German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, whose title means `the mirror.' The German word was borrowed a very long time ago from the Latin speculum. (Interesting that the grammatical gender switched from neuter to male.)
Plutarch's life of Demosthenes records an early instance of the use of mirrors in physical training. Here's the relevant bit from John Dryden's translation:
Demetrius, the Phalerian, tells us that he was informed by Demosthenes himself, now grown old, that the ways he made use of to remedy his natural bodily infirmities and defects were such as these; ... in his house he had a large looking-glass, before which he would stand and go through his exercises.
Later, ``stimulated emission'' was used to describe the slightly more human practice of induced (rather than forced) resignation.
In literal translation, mise en scène is `staging.' No one knows what it means, so you can use the phrase wherever you feel you can intimidate your audience into not challenging your use of it.
Viejo means `old,' so the name seems intended to suggest (with transparent deceit) that the town has been there since the local language was Spanish. This ``old'' city was actually designed and founded in 1966 by the Mission Viejo Company, which continues to design and found small towns in the US (mostly California and Colorado, I think). Mission Viejo Corporation was bought in the early 1970's by the Philip Morris Cos., Inc., which sold it to Shea Homes in 1997.
You might think it strange for a corporation to be designing, founding, and owning an entire town. Eventually, a large-enough town would have its own courts and police force (small towns rely on their counties'), making it seem as if a part of the state government were owned by a private corporation. Then again, maybe that isn't so unusual, official niceties aside. We don't have a Levittowns entry yet. If you're looking for further amusement in this vein, consider the town of Bridgeville, California.
Mission Viejo is on I-5 a few miles north and inland from San Juan Capistrano, near the southern endpoint of the PCH.
The fifteen cities are distributed among ten states. Five states have two cities in the list, and in two of those states -- Arizona and Pennsylvania -- the cities that made the list are the two largest cities of the state. Only one state could have the most misspelled city name, and it is just that Pennsylvania was that state. Pennsylvania toponyms are a rich subject.
I'm not aware of any similar list for other countries, but for Canada I nominate Ottawa. For Latin America, or at least for Mexico, I nominate México, D.F. Hmm...capitals both.
[``ePodunk was launched in 1999 in Ithaca, NY, just east of the real Podunk, a community so small it doesn't appear on the U.S. Census Bureau's list of places. ePodunk was founded by journalists with years of experience in newspapers, online publishing and demographics.'' They ``believe in the power of place,'' and they have a lot products related to real estate.]
There. I just wanted to clear up your stupid confusion. For another mistake dichotomy, see the black bra entry.
You can get a degree in this, but many businesses need much less. At least one national restaurant chain I'm aware of promotes shift managers to MIT's via a ten-week training course.
Oooh! Oooh! I've got a good one... intradisciplinary!
... That a metaphor is mixed is nothing against it; the mind is ambidextrous enough to handle the most extraordinary combinations if the inducement is sufficient.
(He continues: ``But the mixture must not be of the fire and water type--which unfortunately is exactly what we have here.'')
The term ``mixed vegetables'' does not normally refer to vegetables of a single type that have been mixed. That is, if you have a bowl of Italian-cut string beans and you take a spoon and stir them around, that's not ``mixed vegetables'' despite the fact that the individual beans are not identical among themselves, as electrons are (so there's no ``bean exchange interaction,'' even in string theory). I think that a mix of French-cut and Italian-cut and pureed-from-too-much-mixing string beans is not mixed vegetables either. It hardly seems fair. Xenophobia. I need to bone up on the entropy-of-mixing aspects of this. Calico bean salad is not normally called ``mixed vegetables'' either. I think what we have here is a term that only looks like an ordinary compound, but which is really a slightly specialized term with a meaning not completely inferrable from analysis.
Peter Meyer has a clear exposition of the various Julian Day numbers.
There's some information at the Open Society Institute (OSI) - Macedonia.
Two million people live on about 10,000 sq. mi. of territory. If they stood in pairs on a square grid, spaced a tenth of a mile apart in N-S and E-W directions, well, that would be something, wouldn't it?
The capital is Skopje.
The common noun and verb mark is one of those basic words like get that gets crazy-long dictionary entries. Because a mark is often made to measure height or progress, by metonymy the word mark is used to mean a level of development, and level designations like ``Mark I,'' ``Mark II,'' etc. come to be used as proper names. Examples include the Lincoln Continental Marks Series, various Mark 1 and Mark I computers, and the quality influence bureau for this glossary (it's an informal operation; we don't have a quality control bureau). Mk. sometimes abbreviates such nominal uses of Mark.
The number 120 is traditional from, I think post-exilic (post-Babylonian exile) times, when 120 was the membership of a knesset gadol (gadol means large). The number was ten (a good round number) times twelve (the original number of tribes, and also a good number).
The children of Salvation Army volunteers are both MK's and Army brats.
You could probably save yourself a lot of argument by calling it a cc. Then again maybe not.
Louis Kampf explained this in 1967 (bibliographic source details at the Brooks and Warren entry):
The MLA's power lies in its strong stomach, in its capacity to digest almost everything, thus giving it institutional sanction. It can do so because the professional standards it allegedly maintains do not exist: there is no basis on which to exclude anything. Clearly the MLA, rather than being a professional organization, is a trade association: its natural drift is toward the councils of the Chamber of Commerce, where it will best serve the social and economic aspirations of its own membership.
One year when the MLA's annual meeting was held in San Francisco, a Bronx native spotted Joe DiMaggio in the lobby of the conference hotel and introduced himself. The great man was gracious as always, but he wanted to know what MLA stood for. When told, he replied ``Modern languages? What the hell's wrong with the old languages?'' Cf. RMMLA.
A lot of people unfamiliar with the game of baseball think it's a slow-moving, boring game where people mostly wait, alternately in a sitting or slouching position. (People familiar with baseball think that of cricket.) However, this impression misses the real action, which is in the strategy and tactics. The pitcher and the batter try to fake each other out, as the fielders try to anticipate where the ball will go. Baserunners coordinate their movements in part by anticipating each others' actions rather than watching for them. Yes, baseball is a game of expectorations. Major League Baseball is, anyway. Minor League Baseball is a game of expectations, or at least hopes.
``Real life speed eating contests approved by Major League Eating and the International Federation of Competitive Eating are held only in a controlled environment with appropriate rules and with an emergency medical technician present.''
Takeru ``The Tsunami'' Kobayashi, six-time winner of the annual Independence-Day Hot Dog-Eating Contest at Coney Island, ``did not eat this year'' (2010, that is) because he refused to sign a contract with Major League Eating. He explained on his Japanese-language blog that he wanted to be free to compete in contests sanctioned by other groups. A few days before the 2010 event, however, he did tell Japan's Kyodo News that he really wanted to compete in the Coney Island event. After the 2010 competition ended (in a fourth consecutive win for Joey Chestnut), Kobayashi came on stage. He was welcomed by host George Shea, but then security officers appeared and tried to usher him off the stage. He was under arrest that night on charges of resisting arrest, trespass, and obstructing governmental administration. (It wasn't clear from news reports exactly which or how many of the security personnel were police.)
One person at U VA (which no longer has an MLS program) writes
``MLS programs also have a tendency to come to an abrupt halt, or to change their name to `Information Science' or some such.''
MM is a continuation of the ``Vietnam Mail Call'' program established in 1965.
For $25, MM makes available something they call a ``Behavioral Self-Control Program for Windows'' (BSCPWIN). They ought to look into bundling that with Norton Utilities.
Electric phonograph players use electric motors to turn the disc and (since the mid-1920's) electrical amplification of the stylus movement. This requires something to convert the mechanical signal to an electrical one: a transducer or pick-up. Originally, the transducer was a piezo-electric crystal. (Stylus material has varied with cost considerations and the technical requirements of increasingly narrow grooves, but sapphire and diamond generally superseded steel, and since the 1960's diamond has been standard.)
I guess you didn't really need to know much of that. Eventually, magnetic transducers were introduced. These give higher-fidelity playback. If you're listening to vinyl in the twenty-first century, it's out of nostalgia or for high fidelity, so in the latter case you're using a magnetic cartridge (the cartridge is the housing that holds the stylus and transducer at the end of the tonearm). All magnetic cartridges use a magnet and a pick-up coil (or a pair of coils, for stereo), and work on the basis of Faraday's law of induction: movement of the magnet changes the magnetic flux through the coil, and changes in the magnetic flux through the coil induce an electromotive force (EMF). EMF is a traditional term; in plain terms, the EMF is the voltage between the ends of the coil wire. In principle, the magnet could be electromagnetic, but in practice I think it's always a permanent magnet or an induced magnet (a paramagnetic material with a magnetization induced by a nearby permanent magnet).
An EMF is generated by relative motion of the magnet and coil. This is kind of a big deal: Faraday's law was eventually incorporated in Maxwell's equations, and the notion of ``relative motion'' implicit in Maxwell's equations led to the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations. As properly understood by Einstein, they lead to the special (i.e., gravity-free) theory of relativity.
But if you're just interested in pick-up cartridges, the implications are more circumscribed. Since transduction depends on relative motion, you can either let the stylus move the coil while the magnet is ``fixed'' (i.e., is attached to the much more massive and approximately stationary tonearm), or you can let the stylus move the magnet while the coil is fixed. The former of these is called the moving-coil (MC) configuration, and the latter may be called a moving-magnet configuration (MM, remember?). If the magnet is simply a permanent magnet, it's MM. However, cartridges in which the stylus moves an induced magnet (typically soft iron) have ``moving iron'' designs. They are not usually described as moving-magnet cartridges (perhaps because the permanent magnet is normally fixed), but by some other more specific term.
The stylus may be a user-replaceable part of the cartridge. User-replaceable styli are more common with MM cartridges than MC cartridges.
The last elected civilian prime minister of Burma was U Nu. U Thant was a parliament secretary in the Ministry of Information in U Nu's government. In 1952 U Thant became a Burmese delegate to the U.N. and five years later became the country's permanent representative. He served as Secretary General from 1961 to 1971. Since you want to know more, you should go to this page.
``So what'' you ask? So what? These are not only important diplomats who achieved countless important diplomatic achievements -- they also had some of the shortest names in the world!
Not that it's anything unusual, but it's probably worth mentioning at least once: when the acronym is used in a sentence, it functions as a noun and takes the male article el, as would museo, the gender-determining noun of the noun phrase.
Alternatively, you can view search the data with the 3DB viewer from PDB.
MMPI was one of the earliest personality inventories to use ``empirical keying.'' Previously, personality inventories had used a ``logical keying'' approach. Logical keying created targeted questions intended to detect various personality characteristics, and personality scales were defined on the basis of expected answers to those questions.
In empirical keying, scales are defined by correlating responses on the inventory with other data (clinical data, professionals' evaluations, etc.; eventually one scale, a measure of masculinity-femininity, was simply correlated with sex).
[For example, in a simple linear approach, one could assign to each tested person (labeled i) a value yi by some external criterion (clinical evaluation if y represents psychosis, say) and tally the answers xij given by person i on inventory question j. A scale would be defined by assigning nonzero weights wj to an appropriate subset of inventory items, and the y-scale value of a particular person would be determined by taking the weighted sum over all items (i.e., by summing xijwj over j). The y-scale value is regarded as a prediction of externally assigned yi. The work of defining the scale, which is to say of assigning values to the weights wj, is typically done by a least-squares technique, treating the weights as variables and adjusting them so as to minimize the variance between externally assigned yi values and the y-scale values determined by the linear (or some more complicated) formula. There are various slightly different least squares techniques, and there are a number of detailed issues to be worried about, such as the validity and reliability of evaluators' assessments, the discreteness (as opposed to continuity) of the yi values, etc.]
Psychologists give many reasons why empirical keying is better than logical keying, but the fundamental reason is formal: the measure of an inventory's validity is the smallness of the residuals between inventory predictions and independent measures. Empirical keying simply minimizes the residual by explicit calculation rather than by intuition or estimation. Most claimed disadvantages (the empirically determined lower validity) of the logical approach are directly implied by this general fact. Deficiencies in question design are largely unavoidable; the MMPI was created by collecting about 1000 statements (which examinees are to agree or disagree with) from published sources, and selecting 504 that seemed ``independent.''
In burst mode, power requirements were estimated to be in the range of tens to hundreds of megawatts. It was expected, however, that this would be required only for periods of minutes or an hour. This stretched technology far past anything then available. Approaches to the problem of providing such large bursts of energy included SMES and open-system chemical and nuclear power sources.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Minnesota. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
(Historically, I suppose that Eskimos, Aleuts, and others occupying the iced-seafood ecological niche were probably even stricter carnivores.)
Ah, dem Minisotens -- dey all-vays gots to do tings difrrent. (As witness DFL.) The local affiliate of the NEA and AFT is Education Minnesota.
Here is a spelling mnemonic for mnemonics:
Mnemonics Neatly Eliminate Man's Only Nemesis -- Insufficient Cerebral
Storage.
There's also a relevant movie, but I can't seem to remember the name.
Cf. C.O.M.N.F.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Missouri. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
The US WWII battleship Missouri was called ``Big Mo.'' At some point during a presidential campaign, George Bush exulted that he had the ``Big Mo,'' but he meant MOmentum.
Many of the illiterate early settlers of Missouri thought that the pronunciation /mizuri:/ was informal, like ``Caroliney'' for Carolina, and assumed that the proper pronunciation of the territory's name should end in shwa, like Carolina. That at least is the folk etymology of the standard Midwestern US pronunciation of the state's name.
However, an entry in a nineteenth-century encyclopedia, quoted in full at our American continent entry, apparently gives the name of the Missouri River as ``Misaures.'' This is presumably a French spelling (since French traders were the largest group of Europeans in the area, since France was the main colonial claimant of the territory until 1803, and since the word looks French, although in principle it could be, say, English or Spanish). If the appearance and presumption do not deceive, then the es at the end of the name is silent (as in Modern French) or shwa-like (as in older and dialectal pronunciations, I think). How does our hypothesis compare with hypotheses entertained in other reference works of comparable scholarliness? Well, the earliest instance of Missouri (dating to 1703, for the tribe) offered by the OED is in a translation from the French. The earliest names attested there for French are Ouemessourit (1673), Emissourita (1684), Emessourita (1702), and a plural Missouris (1687). I think they may have missed a parallel line of orthographic (and alternative pronunciation) development.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Here's a list of links.
With a bit of parochialism and a judicious application of confirmation bias, the vast majority of people can think of themselves as squarely centrist. (Alas, as we moderate bien-pensants know too well, only crazy extremists get elected. They subvert democracy by deceiving the stupid majority that should be voting as we do. Democracy, you know, is an absolute good; it's just those damn voters that are the problem.)
In principle, as one drifts way out to the left or right (further if one lives in Berkeley or Idaho, resp.), it ought to become increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that one is comfortably in the middle of the political spectrum. (I wouldn't know, since I'm a moderate.)
This mathematical issue (approaching a limit from one side -- sup = limsup, as they say) reminds me of religious school. My earliest these-people-are-imbeciles epiphany (that I can recall) was in fourth or fifth grade, when the principal came in to teach us a special lesson:
No matter how poor you are, there's always someone poorer.
I suppose the point must have been that if you're starving to death, you can Thank God that you're not as hungry as someone else who's closer to meeting The Almighty. One of those there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I things. On its face, this seems a bit questionable to me. I haven't studied theodicy, but I think this line of reasoning should quickly lead George Soros to curse his luck/stars/deity that he doesn't have Bill Gates's kind of money.
But set that aside. The brilliance of the always-someone-poorer claim is that it seals up a leak in the argument over on the low end of the socio-economic status variable: it makes Schadenfreude, or relative-satisfaction, or whatever, available to every last wretched human. The only problem, obvious to a ten-year-old, is that it can't be true.
Postmodernism is the transfer of all that heavy modernism baggage into literary criticism.
In the US and England, the elites of status and class merged to a substantial degree through intermarriage and shifts of occupation, as high-status and upper-class groups each sought what the other had. In the US, this transition used the Episcopal church as a kind of vehicle or token. Late in the nineteenth century, Episcopal church membership in America grew by a factor of three and Episcopalians became for many decades the richest (per capita) denomination in the US. Henry VIII triumphed where George III was defeated. In England, of course, Anglicanism is the established church and church membership did not play the same role. In fact, today polls indicate that half of Britons regard themselves as Anglicans, but actual membership in the Anglican church is around three million (in a country of what, fifty million?). The US is a religious country to a degree that Europeans can hardly imagine. In a typical week, more than half the population of the US attends church.
Oh well, back to modernity. Most liberation and enfranchisement movements, and unionism, of course, are associated with modernity.
The industrial revolution began in England, and proceeded perhaps most smoothly there as a result. On the continent, industrialization began later, was more sudden, and was associated with various worker uprisings. Almost every European monarchy outside England was toppled by the end of WWI. (The Spanish and Greek monarchies were reëstablished by later conservative regimes.)
I haven't like, checked any references recently, so caveat lector.
Here are the lyrics to David Bowie's Modern Love, from a site in Australia. David Bowie is on the thin side.
Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times (1936) is the definitive statement on Modern Times. If you have not seen this hilarious yet touching movie, you are culturally destitute.
This figure of merit was created as a shorthand way of indicating the reliability of polling results to a statistically unsophisticated audience. It does have some basis in a more rigorous statistical analysis.
I will explain that later, but briefly for now: if the percentage you're trying to determine by poll is around 50%, then the margin of error is about equal to two standard deviations. Nineteen times out of twenty, the sample (actual polled) results will come within two standard deviations (the MOE, in this case) of the real (``universe,'' sample of the whole) percentage.
More generally, if the fraction you're trying to measure is p, where p is not necessarily 0.5, then the margin of error is larger than two standard deviations, and overestimates the chances that the measured result will be wrong. Instead, two standard deviations are smaller than MOE by a factor of the square root of 4p(1-p). (Notice that for p=0.5, the correction factor is unity.) So if the number you're trying to measure is 0.01, and your poll samples 1000, then 2 S.D. equals about 0.0063. These numbers describe a rather skewed binomial distribution that is not too well approximated by a Gaussian. Roughly speaking, though: if, say, an unbiased poll finds that exactly 1% of respondents (ten of 1000) support a candidate, then the chances that the real support is 1.5% or higher are rather poor.
Two important issues I really ought to come back to: sources of bias and the fact that the S.D. estimate is really an estimate of an estimate.
Or maybe something to do with the Coulomb-Mohr Criterion (CMC)? Nah.
Bulk mechanical stress is described locally by a symmetric 3x3 tensor. (Pressure is the trace of this tensor, but you don't need to know that right now.) It is convenient to represent the six independent components of the stress tensor by a six-component vector. Stress is related, in the first place, to strain. (Remember: stress is a generalized force, strain is a generalized displacement.) For more on strain in the psychotherapeutic context, see the shoulds entry.
You know, one day I may get serious about this entry, but it will probably be too late for you.
To the extent that the above empirical rules hold, they imply the existence of a hierarchy or ordering of materials, from soft to hard. Friedrich Mohs invented a scale that numbers points along that ordering. Later the scale was ``extended.'' In the table below, we list some materials and their hardness numbers on the old and new scales.
Material |
Mohs Hardness |
Extended-scale Hardness |
Liquid | 1 | |
Talc | 1 | |
Gypsum | 2 | 2 |
typical fingernail | 2-3, nominally 2.5 | |
Calcite | 3 | 3 |
Fluorite | 4 | 4 |
Apatite | 5 | 5 |
typical stainless steel | 5-6 | |
Orthoclase Feldspar | 6 | 6 |
ordinary glass | ~<6.5 | |
Ferric Oxide (``red rouge'') | 6.5 | |
Vitreous Fused Silica (noncrystalline) | 7 | |
Quartz (crystalline silica, SiO2) | 7 | 8 |
Cerium Oxide | 8 | |
Topaz | 8 | 9 |
Chromium Oxide (``green rouge'') | 8.5 | |
Garnet | 8-9 | 10 |
Fused Zirconia | 11 | |
Fused Alumina (Al2O3) | 12 | |
Corundum (ruby, sapphire, Al2O3) | 9 | |
Fused Silicon Carbide (SiC, carborundum) | 9.5 | |
Silicon Carbide (SiC, carborundum) | 13 | |
Fused Boron Nitride (BN) (hexagonal) | 9.7 | |
Boron Nitride (BN) (hexagonal) | 14 | |
Cubic Boron Nitride (CBN) | 9.9 | |
Diamond | 10 | 15 |
Eric offers a mnemonic. Another is ``The Geologist Can Find An Ordinary Quartz -- Tourists Call Diamond.'' Yet another is ``Terrible Giants Can Find Alligators Or Quaint Tigers Conveniently Digestible.'' I suppose you could mix-and-match: mnemonic, whatever they call that game.
Visit a nice gemcutting site. Alternatively, you could take a walk and check out Kingzett, Charles Thomas: Kingzett's Chemical Encyclopedia: a Digest of Chemistry & its Industrial Applications, ed. D. H. Hey and others (London: Baillière, Tindell and Cassell, 9/e 1966).
The main computer cluster at FitzPatrick Hall has four rooms that were traditionally dedicated to Unix boxes. These were known as the philosophers', composers', artists', and writers' rooms, and the machines in the rooms have been named accordingly. Thus, starting from the northeast corner (in the philosophers' room -- the smallest) and going along the north wall, the first four machines were named aquinas, aristotle, augustine, and averroes. (Well, it's a Catholic school.) It was a sensible mnemonic scheme. The names weren't always written on the machines, but if you were on a nearby machine you could guess or remember its name from the hint of its relative location and from your own deeply integrated knowledge of the alphabet. This was convenient for networking and almost essential for reporting a sick machine.
One Summer some years ago, some officious geniuses came over from IT and replaced the old generation of workstations with a new one. They preserved all the old machine names in each room, but the exotic little subtlety of their being in alphabetical order was overlooked. After a few more years and another generation of machines, it occurred to someone to do something about the situation, or perhaps it just took that long to work its way through channels and so forth. I guess it would have been too much to hope that the names would be unscrambled. I suppose they reasoned that lugging and interchanging all those identical machines would be too difficult. (``Rename the machines,'' you say? I'm sure that requires a hardware upgrade.)
Instead, a work-study was detailed to go around and log in to each machine in turn and find out the machine name and to print out a label on a label printer, and apply said label to each machine in an appropriate way. This was a good and admirable thing, and could have been handy even in the good old days. A few days later he was detailed to do it again, but this time using labels that didn't peel off on their own. So for a while there, the improvements were coming fast on each others' heels.
There the situation has sat for a few years. Today I happened to walk into the composers' room and log in to a free machine. So here I am sitting between schubert and berlin (hey -- ``White Christmas''!) at a machine with the unfamiliar name of mohler. Pursuing my suspicion, I checked around and confirmed that in a room that has space to honor such relatively dim lights as Bernstein and Foster, there is no machine named in honor of Gustav Mahler. Now, I haven't been in here often enough to be sure, but it seems to me that there used to be a machine named mahler, and I think I know what happened to it.
So to summarize: first the machines had to receive labels because it was too hard to rename the machines, as if assigning aliases is something you only do once, like infant baptism. Then, when it was the turn of a new generation of machines to be baptized, the name of a famous composer was misread and became attached to one of the machines. Finally, when the last generation of machines was installed, the names on the printed labels took precedence over any electronic listing of machines. Progress marches on.
In French, the predicate of the copula is universally accepted to be in the oblique case. That is, expressions parallel to ``it is I'' are not over-correct, they're just wrong. Hence Louis XIV's famous ``L'état c'est moi.'' (`The state [France] is me.')
There was a case in Georgia (GA) a number of years ago where a state trooper mistook a bag of oregano for marijuana.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), the second juvenile movie in a series starring Mike Meyers, uses mojo to refer either to his libido or his attractiveness to women, or maybe that's the same thing, which Dr. Evil uses a time machine to go back to 1969 to steal from him, but which he somehow manages not to miss until recently.
A mojo is a charm worn on one's person (or, in mountain biking slang, affixed to one's bike).
In the Yardbirds song ``I Ain't Got You,'' a mojo and many other advantages are implicitly inefficacious in getting you.
(Me mojó means `[he, she, or it] got me wet.')
Of course, in all common dialects of Spanish, ``j'' has an aitch sound.
This surname is very different from the word mojón, which means `[bed] wetter.'
Speaking of names -- Paul Revere, of Paul Revere and the Raiders, got his name on his original birth certificate. Paul Revere and the Raiders did a cover of ``Louie, Louie'' in 1963, around the same time, and in the same studio, as the Kingsmen did their cover. It became a monster hit on a slow fuse for the Kingsmen. They didn't know the lyrics exactly, so they winged it; some people started to suspect that it was subversive. Eventually, the Kingsmen testified before a Congressional committee. You wonder if a band named after a Revolutionary War hero would have come under suspicion in similar circumstances. Maybe. The FBI concluded that the Kingsmen's recording, played forwards or backwards at any speed, was incomprehensible.
The song was originally written and recorded by Richard Berry in 1956, and it was a local (i.e., Seattle area) favorite for a while. (This was back in the days when there was such a thing as regional programming.) The song is the story of a lovesick sailor telling his bartender (Louie) how much he misses his girlfriend back home. Home is Jamaica, whose exotic accent presumably justifies any strange-sounding words or word-like sounds. For more Jamaica-related linguistic lapses, see the Van Morrison material discussed under this Cleveland BROWNS item.
With some dramatic license, the 1978 National Lampoon movie Animal House was based on the experiences of Chris Miller, Dartmouth '62, at the outlaw frat Alpha Delta. One of the liberties taken was using the Kingsmen's version of this song, which wasn't released until 1963.
In 1998, the (surviving) Kingsmen won a major suit for unpaid royalties on the song since 1968. Actually, it was really only a moral victory; if you check out the details, I think they still got shafted. The band is still in business (their domain name is <louielouie.org>), though over the decades since they were founded (in 1959), there's been a lot of turnover (listed here). As of early 2008, they still have one of the original members, and one from 1963.
Richard Berry's band was called Richard Berry and the Pharaohs. More famous was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which had a hit in 1965 with ``Wooly Bully.'' They performed in turbans and bedsheets.
The ending theme song for the TV sitcom WKRP also has incomprehensible lyrics, because it was originally recorded as a warm-up ``scratch tape,'' and the singers are just singing gibberish. (More at the unofficial WKRP site.)
The Rolling Stones also had a song about Louie, but it was a different Louie.
Happy Mole Day to you,
You live in a zoo.
Your mother's a rodent
Your father's one too.
At this site you can download a recording of the line ``Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry!'' and other memorable clips from Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Smelt is a fish, but not in the previous sentence.
Y'know, I still lose sleep every night wondering if guinea pigs are really rodents or not. I wish they would settle this pressing question.
For more information, see the Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, ed. Richard Dean Burns (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, etc., 1993). Volume II has an article by Webster A. Stone, ``The Hot Line: Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link, 1963 to the Present,'' pp. 847-853. The hot line agreements are excerpted in Vol. III.
Aw, momma, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again!
A thought just occurred to me that there is no conceivable appropriate place to insert. If this were the appropriate place, then I'd just go right ahead and comment that in a photograph showing him at a reception at the MOMA in November 2005, Prince Charles looked like Dagwood Bumstead.
Nu gecyðað we þæt on þam dæge beoð nigon hund and syxtig momenta. Momentum ys gewyss stow þære sunnan on heofenum; þonne he byð feowertig siðon gegaderod, þonne gefylleð he ane tid, and he ys gecweden for þæra tungla hwætnysse momentum (þæt ys styrung).
The word did not survive Old English in this form, at least in old England; it became moment in Middle English, and sometime early in the seventeenth century that form ceased to refer to a precise interval. Also in that century the word momentum was reborrowed from Latin and used primarily in technical senses related to mathematics and physics. You could say momentum regained momentum then, but I wouldn't perpetrate such a vile pun.
The momentum or moment was also defined in medieval times (had to say that) as one tenth of a point, and the point as a quarter of an hour... usually. Sometimes the point was a fifth of an hour. A fifth of an hour would have been two minutes. The whole melange, according to the most common definitions:
Notice that there were 360 degrees in a day. I hadn't realized that England got that hot.
Fetuses that develop from separately fertilized eggs always have separate chorions (are dichorionic, in the case of twins). So fraternal and half-identical twins are never monochorionic, let alone monoamniotic. The incidence of monochorionic or monoamniotic twins depends on when the original single zygote splits. Generally, earlier is better. In about a third of identical-twin pregnancies, splitting occurs within the first 3 days following fertilization; in these cases the twins are usually dichorionic. In the majority of cases, splitting occurs between 4 and 8 days; at this stage, splitting produces monochorionic twins that are nevertheless diamniotic. That is, each fetus has its own amnion (more commonly called amniotic sac). If splitting occurs more than 8 days after fertilization, the twins typically share a single amnion (why should I be common?), and this is a bad thing for them, or at least for one of them. If splitting occurs after 12 days, then there is a high risk of conjoined twins.
Monoamniotic twins occur in less than one percent of identical-twin pregnancies. As twin ``diagnosis'' occurs increasingly early, and as the membrane normally separating two fetuses is hard to image early, there is an increasing number of needlessly worried expectant parents. <Monoamniotic.org> is a support group for parents diagnosed with monoamniotic twins and for parents of monoamniotic twins. Their experience is that 40% of couples who find their group eventually (sometimes as late as the 24th week of pregnancy) learn that they were misdiagnosed.
The Monogahela is often described as flowing ``due north.'' This is sort of true if you smooth out meanders on a scale of ten miles. The small city of Donora occupies an oxbow of the Monongahela about 18 or 19 miles south of Pittsburgh. On Halloween 1948 (and on the preceding day, which happens to be widely known as mischief night), one of the worst disasters ever caused by industrial air pollution in the US took place in Donora.
In chapter CXXXV (``The Chase -- Third Day'') of Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance---as the whale sometimes will---and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.
From this sentence, or a bit of it, or from the Mount Monadnock link above, you might infer that Mount Monadnock does not rise very abruptly. This is in fact correct, so the mountain is popular for hiking rather than mountain-climbing. Among the hikers who have climbed it are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Rudyard Kipling. In 1845 Emerson wrote a very long rhyme about it entitled ``Monadnoc.'' Here's a typical example of that dross:
Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.
I wish I could add something here about Leibniz.
A synonym of monadnock is inselberg, which is a German compound meaning `island mountain.' In German the word is spelled with a capital I, not because it's a proper noun but because it's a noun.
Ye Highlands and Ye LowlandsThis was, as she learned years later, the Scottish ballad ``The Bonny Earl of Murray'' and the last line is supposed to go
Or, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Rock music has been a great boon for mondegreens, but religious and patriotic stuff taught to children is a great traditional source. In the 90's, the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll devoted a score of his Daily Datebook columns to mondegreens (first mondegreen column: April 23, 1990, p. F10).
We have some mondegreen examples at the beginnings of the enema entry (with a link to a misheard-lyrics archive for Van Halen songs) and the deconstruction entry. For more mondegreens, see ``The Ants Are My Friends,'' ``Mind the greens!'' and the misheard lyrics archives <kissthisguy.com>, and Am I Right.
A search on the web will turn up a couple of widely repeated improbabilities.
Test: I personally checked the author indices of all the bound volumes of Atlantic Monthly for the years 1941 to 1966. I found only one article under the name Sylvia Wright, entitled ``Chowder Is Out!'' It was published in the November 1957 Atlantic, pp. 255-256. It is an extended protest against The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. This seems to have been a life-long obsession of hers (vide infra).
The Atlantic and Harper's are similar magazines, easily confused. I imagine that someone remembered that Wright's article appeared in 1954 but misremembered the journal, and that this error was the origin of the claim. Afterwards, the error was propagated faithfully by the internet. Indeed, this very august glossary that you are reading was one of the mistaken propagaters of this claim until early June 2001.
Test: I personally checked the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for January 1929 to February 1981 (vols. 8-40). (I skipped the book review listings when they began to be a separate section; I ignored Sylvia Hart Wright, a writer on architectural and civil engineering matters.) The first publication listed under the name Sylvia Wright was a piece that appeared in Harper's Magazine in December 1952 (pp. 29-32), ``Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts.'' That piece was excerpted in Vogue (June 1956, pp. 84-5). The last item I found was in the March 1975 Harper's, a letter on pp. 6-7, in the ``Wraparound.'' In that letter she recalls that many years previous she had published in Harper's an article called ``How to Make Chicken Liver Pâté Once.'' She mentions Fannie Farmer's cookbook. A note after the letter says
Sylvia Wright is now at work on a book about the island of Chios.
It's possible she published on mondegreens in a magazine not indexed by the Reader's Guide, though I doubt it.
For more investigative etymological reporting, see the Pakistan entry.
The traditional meaning of monaural is ``one ear'' (as an attributive noun -- adjective -- only). The traditional meaning of monophonic is ``one melodic line'' (adj.).
Mono is caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) after an incubation period of 15-50 days. Most people have been infected by the time they're 40, but only a minority develop the disease. It's thought of as a disease of young adults because the symptoms in infants and children are milder. In any case the diagnosis is difficult, so mild cases can be mistaken for a common cold. If you're planning to get sick, don't just jump into any disease. You should at least consider coming down with an outer-ear infection.
Tuerto is the Spanish word with the meaning `able to see with one eye only.' That is, either blind in one eye or with one of two eyes put out. It's not exactly the same thing as one-eyed, since a Cyclops is one-eyed but not tuerto. Apart from the semantic misalignment however, another difference is that tuerto is an honest-to-God word and a perfectly common one, whereas one-eyed is a compound, forever consigned to the indignity of a hyphen by the silent e of one.
P.J. O'Rourke seems to agree with this view. In an article (``My E.U. Vacation: What I learned reading the European constitution on a French beach in the Caribbean'') that appeared in the Weekly Standard (June 3, 2005), he wrote
Actually, I claim that there's a tremendous journalistic advantage to covering politics when you can't speak the language. You aren't misled into reporting what people say; you're forced to report the inexorable truth of what people do.
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
Heterologicality is a linguistic phenomenon. Critical acclaim is a social phenomenon.
For an example, visit the VRoma MOO (you can log in immediately as a guest), part of the VRoma educational project, or MiamiMOO.
In 1822, he turned his writing skills to a short poem for the information of his children. In this work, entitled ``A Visit From Saint Nicholas,'' Moore established most of the few facts we know with any accuracy about this annual phenomenon. For example, he fixed the date of the visit as the eve of Christmas, rather than Dec. 5, the eve of Saint Nicholas's Day. His 28 rhyming couplets, the first beginning
'Twas the night before Christmas
It must have achieved a samizdat vogue; it was already considered a classic in 1860, when the report was reprinted in the journal Harper's Weekly, with new graphics by the journalist Thomas Nast. Thomas Nast is best known today for his zoological work, preparing illustrations of Equus asinus Democraticus and Elephas Republicanus (g.o.p.) beginning in 1874. It was Nast who established that Saint Nicholas was pathologically obese, but the chimney-passage question was not immediately reexamined. Nevertheless, it may be noted that only a few decades later, tunneling by bare and dressed particles became a widely accepted violation of classical physical law.
I haven't had a chance to update the entry (I don't have Santa's superluminal freight sled; I'm slow), but I figured I ought to at least mention this: In October 2000, Vassar English professor Don Foster brought forward substantial evidence that Moore was a plagiarist: that he fraudulently claimed authorship of this poem, and that it was probably the work of Henry Livingstone.
A number of similar exponential processes (such as size of largest known prime) may be regarded as consequences.
Any similar law of exponential improvement in semiconductor engineering is also often called a Moore's Law. (See, however, Grove's Law.) Recently, Moore pronounced a second law: that every generation of microprocessor requires a fab (fabrication facility) that costs twice as much as the previous. As of 1996, a new fab cost around a billion US$. Cf. Joy's Law and Rent's Rule.
Unanswerable questions still surface at parties.
``What kind of novels do you write?''
Legendary. Seminal. Filthy.
``Should I know your name?''
To which I usually reply, eyes modestly lowered, ``Not necessarily,'' but riding sufficient scotch, I become equally capable of a bellicose ``Yes, if you're literate,'' after which my wife usually points out it is time to go home.
I'm not sure what conclusion one is supposed to draw from this, the beginning of Broadsides (1990), but I figured I'd put the entry in just in case. (There might be an exemption if you happen not to be Canadian.)
Richler (1931-2001) was at first probably best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which is basically Portnoy's Complaint without the masturbation. (And with no mother instead of a domineering one. Well, maybe it's not a very accurate description, but it sounds cool to say.) Eventually Richler became more of a celebrity writer, known for nothing in particular except being a moderately well-known author. He wrote some other novels, but really, who's got the time? He wrote amusing essays and magazine pieces, and these were repackaged as tomes from time to time. You know how Gary worries that anything he says in my hearing may be used against him in the glossary? (Sure you do -- I mentioned it back at the conversation entry. BTW, Gary is an actual real person, but there's no point in worrying -- I can invent.) Well, Richler was that kind of writer to be wary of.
Watch this space! More to come, someday.
So clearly, ``Acme grows more grass than'' (vel sim.) is not the intended meaning, and is probably false. In fact, Acme is probably the worst. (If it weren't, they'd compare it to the worst product and say ``comparison studies with a popular alternative [spotted hyena chips] show Acme grows grass faster than the competition.'') When one considers, however, that comparison cannot take place without observation, the meaning becomes clear to anyone familiar with quantum physics or child psychology: the ``more'' outcome depends not only on the conditions of observation, but on the very fact of observation. It's a Copenhagen construction. If Acme fertilizer is placed in competition with an alternative manure, the grass will grow -- or at least a measurement of its height will appear to show that it grows -- faster. Not faster than the competition, just faster than it would without competition -- if it weren't being observed. You could deny that, but you could never prove you were right. If you want to maximize the effect, you should intensify the competition -- add motivation, so to speak -- by using the competing product directly in the soil where you are testing Acme. Boy, will you be impressed!
Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany (abdicated 1918), held a high opinion of his own opinion, and liked to give avuncular advice to his cousin Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia (executed in secrecy 1918). In 1895, astonished by the Japanese victory over China, Kaiser Willi began to warn his cousin and Europe of the rising power of the Rising Sun. He coined the term Gelbe Gefahr, `Yellow Peril,' to describe the threat (he had a cartoon executed to illustrate his brainstorm).
Japan's victory was over another Asian country -- far larger, of course, but known from recent European and American experience to be militarily backward. With the prevalent racist and cultural prejudices of the West, the Sino-Japanese events were ignored, and the Orient continued to be thought of as backward and as no military match for any Western power. Few realized the extent of Japan's rapid industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. The Japanese victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) thus came as a shock to Europe.
Not currently discussed anywhere else in this glossary: Abendland, which means ... oh wait -- I figured out where it's discussed!
Here's a pitifully brief bibliography.
Look, what I'm trying to say here is that MORI was a poorly researched choice of name, evidently selected when the company already regarded itself as international. Making an AAP out of it does not help.
``These days,'' when I first wrote the entry, were just after the turn of the century. This glossary has some substantive information on mortgages at other entries. Serious glossary entries for serious times. You can tour these entries starting at the ARM entry.
A MOS transistor (MOST) is a kind of IGFET. Both IGFET and MOST are relatively rare terms, and one hears ``an MOS'' used for an MOST. This is equivocal in principle, because there are also MOS capacitors. If this bothers you, use MOSFET.
German-speakers with poor English typically, or at least stereotypically, pronounce the English w semivowel as a German w consonant (i.e., like English v) and are understood. In the case of various cognates (world/Welt, west/West, wish/Wünsch, word/Wort, war/Wehr, was/war, water/wasser, etc.) this has the pleasant feature of familiarity for the German-speaker, although in many cases semantic evolution has yielded faux amis (e.g., ``I will'' is cognate with ich will, but the latter still has a meaning close to `I intend to').
English is unusual among Western European languages. I can stop right there and it's a true enough sentence, but what I intended to say was that it's unusual in respect of having words for with and without that are closely related. Compare Germanic languages like German (mit/ohne) and Swedish (med/utan) or Romance languages: com/sem, con/sin, avec/sans, and con/senza, for examples, in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, resp. With the Romance examples, you get the impression that maybe there was some earlier language that these languages have as a common source of their similar words.
MOS capacitors have asymmetric Q-V characteristics -- i.e., they have bias-dependent capacitance. In fact, for one sign of applied voltage they have voltage-dependent capacitance. The asymmetry does not arise simply because the two ``capacitor plates'' are of different material. A mica capacitor with different-size plates made of different metals has a Q-V characteristic that is symmetric (and substantially linear, so the capacitance C is a constant). The problem is that doped semiconductor is in some respects not a very good metal.
In order to have a small inter-plate spacing (and hence a decently high capacitance) the silicon must be doped. For purposes of illustration, let's say it's doped N: a high density of electron donor impurities like arsenic (As) or phosphorus (with the unfortunately confusing atomic symbol P). At absolute zero temperature, these donors create un-ionized (i.e. filled) ``donor levels'' at energies just below the conduction band (CB). This means that charge neutrality puts the Fermi energy (the electrochemical potential) close to the CB. At room temperature, most of the donors are ionized and charge neutrality is maintained by electrons that can be thought of as promoted from the donors to the CB. (It's an entropy effect: even though the donors have slightly lower energy, there are many more states in the conduction band. The characteristic energy scale over which this effect can manifest is kBT, 0.026 eV at room temperature.)
Anyway, getting back to the MOS-C... For simplicity we'll let the ``metal'' in the gate be a (theoretically unproblematic) elemental metal. If a positive voltage is applied to the silicon side of the capacitor, that side of the capacitor charges up with electrons. These electrons pile up against the insulating oxide that separates the capacitor plates. (Yeah, yeah, there are some quantum effects; the electrons don't pile on like geometric points on a geometrically thin oxide plane.) This polarity gives the highest possible capacitance for the given capacitor geometry. If the polarity is reversed -- negative voltage on the silicon side -- then the silicon takes a positive charge. This positive charge is initially produced by depletion of electrons. That is, the electrons in the conduction band move away from the oxide, and the remaining positively-ionized donors yield a net positive charge at the plate. However, the donor ions are not mobile. In order for the positive charge to increase, the silicon must be depleted further into the bulk away from the oxide. Thus, as the voltage increases, the effective plate spacing increases, and the capacitance decreases.
In the past 100 years, the effective sea level has risen 23 cm. Currently, despite the end of pumping, it is estimated to be rising at 0.5 mm per year. The future magnitude of the problem is subject to many uncertainties, among them the magnitude of sea-level rise expected to be caused by global warming. Estimates are typically in the range of 20-100 cm by 2050.
The MOSE plan is to install 79 gates (I've also read 78), distributed at the three inlets to the lagoon that Venice lies in. The hollow gates will ``normally'' be filled with water, and hinged on the seabed, they will lie flat along the bottom. When floods threaten, air is to be pumped in, so the gates lighten and float into vertical position, protecting the city. The project will be expensive, but fortunately Italy is situated on Euroland, so it will only cost an estimated 3.5 billion euros (mere American billions). Just a few years ago, it would have cost trillions of lire. Construction began in May 2003; completion is scheduled for 2011.
Despite the reduced price, the project is controversial. It is feared that frequent closings will disturb the ecosystem in various ways. Also, it seems that a lot of the ecosystem must consist of bacteria and the less fastidious sort of fish, processing Venice's sewage, much of which is still untreated. (The large fraction of Italian sewage that is not treated, and the resulting ecological problems for the Mediterranean, have been a continuing bone of contention between Italy and the rest of the EU, except for countries like Greece that want to keep their head down because they figure they're next.) Nobody seems concerned that flooding of a subsided Venice might disturb the ecosystem.
Ecosystem in ``balance.'' Please do not disturb. Don't touch anything.
Estimates of how long MOSE will be effective vary. Supporters offer estimates of 100 years, opponents say no more than 50. I haven't seen any discussion of future retrofit ideas. The one alternative seems to be locally raising the land level underneath existing structures, starting with the lowest-lying, most immediately threatened areas. This is already being done, apparently by private owners.
One solution that is not piecemeal is to pump seawater into a broad 600-to-800-meter deep aquifer underlying the area. (A deeper aquifer is preferred in part because it should lead to a more even rise at the surface. The layer considered also has convenient clay layers. I am not completely certain why refilling the aquifers previously pumped for fresh water is not considered a good option; it seems that uncertainty about uneven uplift is the main concern.) The aquifer idea is being studied and promoted (yes, the usual engineering conflict of interest) by a group at the University of Padua as a supplement, not an alternative, to the MOSE project. Numerical modeling by Giuseppe Gambolati of U. Padua predicts a 30-cm rise produced within a circle 5 km in radius around Venice, produced by injection of 18 million cubic meters of water through a ring of twelve vertical wells along the circumference. For further information on the various projects and proposals, see the pages of CORILA.
The Republic of Venice was once a great empire, contending with the Ottoman empire for control of the Aegean, and medieval Venice had a population of a quarter million. They invented the practice of keeping regular ambassadors in foreign countries -- sort of the diplomatic equivalent of a standing army. (Venice was probably also the first place to enforce segregation of Jews in a ghetto. Oh well-- win some, lose some.) The inconvenience of frequent inundation has been cited as a cause of population decline in recent decades (though it's claimed tourism has not declined). The resident population has subsided to 60,000.
Venezuela was named after Venice (the former word is a diminutive form of the latter). Alonso de Ojeda gave the area this name after coming upon native American stilted houses built over Lake Maracaibo. (It is a lake, so sea-level rise is not a direct concern.)
Subsidence under ancient buildings seems to be a characteristic Italian problem, but we don't have a entry for the leaning tower of Pisa yet.
Your practical take-away from this entry is this: don't visit Venice in the off season. St. Mark's Square, one of the city's lowest points, used to flood about ten times a year back around 1900; now it's flooding about 60 times each Winter. I guess low tide makes it possible to number the floods. Here's good news: if it gets much worse, St. Marks will be flooded only one time all Winter.
Zager and Evans had a number-one hit in 1970 with ``In The Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus).'' They consider ``...the year 2525 / If man is still alive / If woman can survive / They may find....'' They speculate that ``in the year 6565 / Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife / You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too / From the bottom of a long glass tube, wo-oo-wo.''
Under the Ottoman Empire, Mesopotamia (al-Iraq in Arabic) was governed as a federation of three provinces centered on their main cities. The province of Mosul in the north was mostly Kurdish. The other two cities were Baghdad (Arab Sunni, rather than Kurdish Sunni) and Basra (Arab Shi'ite). After WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British imposed a highly centralized government, a constitutional monarchy modeled on their own.
According to the song, motor-sickle and motor-sigh are acceptable also.
I don't care if it rains or freezes --
'long as I got my plastic Jesus
sittin' on the dashboard of my car.
I can do a hundred miles an hour!
Long as I got the almighty power,
Way up there with my pair of fuzzy dice.
Accept no substitutes. Mojo Nixon and others have promulgated heretical versions, to say nothing of exegeses. Don Imus apparently used to sign on with riding instead of sittin'; that might be a translation problem. For other liturgy, visit the drop kick entry.
George Westinghouse made his first fortune from the design of air brakes for trains. He used that fortune to commercialize an AC power system ultimately based on Tesla's designs. A financial panic ruined him in 1907.
In a television ad that ran, oh, I don't know, probably in the eighties, selling photographic film or something, an excruciatingly cute little girl asks her older brother, ``Am I the opposite sex, or are you''?
It would be in poor taste if I were to comment ``out of the mouths of babes.''
Ted Turner was an undergraduate at Brown University. (That's the ``Harvard of Rhode Island,'' although nobody calls it that. If this comment sounds stupid, you should read the the Harvard-of-the-South entry. Then the comment will still sound stupid, but you'll be better informed. A lot of his business ventures were based in Atlanta. Atlanta has more Harvards of the South than any other city anywhere.) Ted Turner was expelled from Brown in 1960 for violating some rule. It had something to do with having a female friend in his dorm room. In 1990, Brown awarded him an undergraduate degree after all.
The greatest movies of the color era are roloc. No, not really, but I wanted to keep the palindrome going. Actually, the greatest movies of the color era are the following:
I'm sure you'll want to read our insight into other movies.
If you're wondering about a movie we haven't reviewed yet, go to Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) for on-line information (about movies).
Inflected forms: APMOVPE and LP-MOVPE (atmospheric-pressure and low-pressure).
A lot of developers were irritated that when Microsoft came out with its browser, that browser self-identified as ``Mozilla'' in requests, even though it follows slightly different conventions (``MSIE'' is given as part of the version information). Presumably this was done so the browser would have the greatest chance of being identified by the server as a graphical browser. Of course, it had the side effect that developers unwilling to work too hard would end up selecting a single set of browser-dependent extensions for all graphical browsers. Some feel this is naughty.
The Northern Marianas used to be (1947-1978) a trust territory (assigned to US trusteeship by the UN), but since then it's been a US commonwealth (the CNMI, ``a self-governing commonwealth in political union with the United States''), and the trusteeship was formally dissolved in 1990. Since 1986 (on the eve of Guy Fawkes Day, FWIW in a largely Roman Catholic island), the residents have been US citizens.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to territorial government web sites for the Mariana Islands.
Cf. the distributors' organization IPDA and the sister organization ASME for editors.
``[T]en publishing companies with more than 200 titles.''
Oh.
Cf. the distributors' organization IPDA and the sister organization ASME for editors.
It's a proposed amendment to the US constitution, nominally intended to outlaw any kind of marriage other than the main sort traditional in the West, between one man and one woman at a time.
Since the late 1960's, they have issued the ``voluntary'' classifications that have generally replaced actual censorship of movies in the US.
The original scheme was G, M, R, X - the first three letters stood for General, Mature, and Restricted. M was found to be confusing and was quickly renamed to GP (General audiences, Parental guidance suggested) and then to PG (Parental Guidance). PG-13 was added in the 1980's. The current system is described here.
Note that viewing occurs in real time, so decompression must be done on the fly. This means that, whereas the ultimate resolution of images extracted from JPEG's is limited only by file size, the resolution of MPEG video is also constrained by bit rates.
Notice the archaic spelling Mittheilung for Mitteilung. Der Erzherzog, translated archduke in this context, was the title of the Austrian crown prince. Theil was the earlier spelling of the root word Teil, back when aspirated and unaspirated initial tees were phonemically distinguished. I think it was a proclamation of the Kaiser that, taking cognizance of the general disappearance of the distinction, standardized the spelling by removing the aitch (with a few exceptions for foreign words like Theater).
MPER is the longest-running serial dedicated to papyrology. Cf. BGU.
One of my college roommates had gotten into a bad accident in high school and couldn't afford the car insurance rates it caused. So he got a motorcycle. Insurance companies promote safety, but premiums probably aren't the mechanism.
The government serves a directory of MPO's that was current in October (October 1994). AMPO might have more up-to-date information.
PFC Gomer Pyle CMR 345, Box 12334 APO AE 09250
Here APO is the ``city'' and AE is the ``state'' code. APO (Army Post Office) and FPO (Fleet Post Office) are the only two ``cities'' that should occur. For the obvious historical reasons (see USAAF), APO serves for army and air force installations. The only ``states'' are ``AA,'' ``AE,'' and ``AP.''
An ideal voltage source drives as much current as its load wants to draw. This implies that it provides as much power (voltage × current) as desired. In your dreams. Real power supplies can only supply finite power, so they deviate from ideal voltage sources. The voltage at zero current is called the open-circuit voltage VOC (since zero current flows when the circuit is open). Need I add that since no power is supplied when no current is drawn, the maximum power from a real power supply is achieved at nonzero voltage? No, of course I needn't add that. I'm just bulking up the entry. I'm paid by the word, you know. The rate is pretty low -- zero, to be precise -- but I'm hoping that with enough words it'll add up to something.
Equivalently, one can view a power supply as a current source. The current supplied when the power-supply voltage is zero is called the short-circuit current ISC. Short-circuiting a power supply is usually unhealthy for something and possibly someone.
The current I supplied by a real power source is a smooth function I(V) of the voltage V. (It's a funny thing: smoothness assumptions are not approximations. Instead, nondifferentiable functions in science and engineering are approximations of more accurate functions that really are smooth. Even the best examples of nondifferentiable functions, the singularities and discontinuties called phase transitions in thermodyamics, are really the result of taking the limit of infinitely large thermodynamic systems. Large-but-finite systems are characterized by very rapidly varying thermodynamic functions that are experimentally indistinguishable from singular functions, as numbers like 10-24, in whatever macroscopic units, are indistinguishable from 0.)
Anyway, by assumption the power P = V × I(V) is a smooth function, and we maximize it by finding a point where the derivative w.r.t. V is zero. Applying the product rule for derivatives... (Just to interrupt here. For almost all readers, this discussion is either blindingly obvious and staggeringly slow, or mysterious and waaaaaaaay too fast. Sorry.) ... and doing a little rearranging, we find a condition
I dI - = - -- V dV
satisfied at the MPP. If the load is just a dumb resistance R, then according to Ohm's Law the left-hand side above is just R. The right-hand side is just the internal resistance r of the power supply at the MPP. (A very similar calculation leads to the famous rule that power to a loudspeaker is maximized when the output impedance of the final amplifier stage equals the impedance of the speaker.)
A standard figure-of-merit for power supplies is the fill factor F. This is simply the maximum power Pmax divided by the maximum conceivable power VOCISC. Equivalently:
P V I max MP MP FF = ------ = --- × --- , V I V I OC SC OC SC
where VMP and IMP are the voltage and current at the MPP.
An optimistic view of fiscal stimulus holds that, because of knock-on effects, putting an amount x in consumers' pockets generates a larger-than-x increase in overall spending. Explicitly, the initial spending x goes into the pockets of someone else, who spends a fraction MPC (marginal propensity to consume) of it, generating a further contribution xMPC to total consumption. That in its turn generates a further contribution x(MPC)2 in the next round, and so forth. It's obviously a geometric series, and an infinite one to some approximation, so the total increase in consumption is really
x( 1 + MPC + MPC2 + ...) = x/(1-MPC).
This enhancement is called the multiplier effect, and the factor 1/(1-MPC) is called the GDP multiplier. (See the relevant bit connected with Joseph Black for another economic factor.) On the reasoning that money not spent is saved, MPC+MPS=1, and the multiplier factor is 1/MPS.
There is a lot wrong with this analysis, of course. Just off the top of my head, here are a couple -- my downpayment on a complete entry:
Hey Mark -- there's nothing in the early 2004 ToC's about BR.
(You can ignore that. It was just a note to the editor. It turned out to be the wrong MR anyway. It was Modern Railways. You have no idea of the magnitude of selfless research effort that goes into writing this apparently careless reference work!)
Noninvasive, but getting inside the magnet makes many people claustrophobic.
In the 7 March 1994 New Yorker, Alfred Kazin wrote
My cancer is so real to a lot of people that they feel free to probe me front and behind, stick me, prick me, haul me up and down, insert my claustrophobic head in the drum of one scan after another, in a process splendidly named Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
It has the largest telescopic camera ever sent to another planet, and plans are for it to orbit Mars for at least four years. Data from MRO will help in planning where to land two robotic subsequent explorers: the Phoenix Mars Scout, to be launched in 2007, which will search for organic chemicals, and the Mars Science Laboratory to be launched 2009.
Originally an abbreviation of mistress, but now the latter word has some offensive denotations, so a slurred version (missis, missus) of the original word is used. Nevertheless, the word missus continues to be regarded by many as slang, and while other courtesy titles (Mister, Miss, Reverend) are occasionally written out, Mrs. is much less frequently written out, and rarely as Missus. A lot of people wonder what the arr (r) in Mrs. stands for.
The word madam has suffered similar depredations. However, the abbreviation Mmes. of its plural is used in lieu of an accepted plural for Mrs.
Even though Drs. is the plural of Dr., Mrs. is not the plural of Mr.
An introduction is served by Virginia Tech.
Here's what you need to understand.
During the 1990's, one of the more widespread education fads was the idea that children of middle school age have special in-between needs that are not well served by either elementary school or high school. It gives you some idea of how dim the education poobahs are, that this crude and essentially empty thought was seen as a cogent reason for converting junior high-senior high school systems into middle school-high school systems.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Mississippi. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
Maintaining an artificially low exchange rate against major foreign currencies is a common strategy of export-led economies. However, maintaining a weak currency feeds domestic inflation by raising the prices of imported goods as well as the local-currency value of export earnings. (``Raising'' them relative to what they would be absent aggressive quasi-mercantilist government interventions.) The monetary approach to this problem is to soak up the excess liquidity with MSB's. (Another strategy is to keep a well-employed population from spending its earnings is to promote domestic investment in government savings bonds, as the US did to control inflation during WWII.)
Some other countries in the region with growth strategies similar to Korea's are currently (2005) using similar instruments: in Malaysia the BNM issues Bank Negara bills, and Bank Indonesia offers Sertifikat Bank Indonesia. From time to time, other countries have issued such bonds, but South Korea is apparently the only country that currently calls them by the generic name of MSB's. (No, I don't know the Korean for that.) Since we're talking won and inflation, you want to make sure you're familiar with the material at the WIN entry.
Very well, then, but don't say you weren't warned.
Usually, ``doctorate'' implies some sort of Ph.D.. That's not its sense in M.S.D. At PIMS, which administers the M.S.D., a Ph.D. is just a prerequisite for candidacy to a different degree, the LMS. In contrast, the MSD isn't something you apply or ask for. Instead, according to this detailed confession, a ``Licentiate candidate who has shown unusual promise as a research scholar may be invited to enter the MSD programme, which consists of at least two full years of study and research beyond the Licence.'' [Emphasis added.]
As Bud Abbott would have put it, ``a p-p-, a p-p- -- a post-post-doctoral doctorate!'' When they get the news, the disbelieving ``invitees'' fall to their knees and scream ``NOOOOoooo!!!'' as tears of maniacal joy stream down their contorted faces and they are dragged away.
Incidentally, rumors that the letters ess and em in MSD stand for sadism and masochism are obviously untrue. Given the order in which they appear, they would have to stand for masochism first, and then sadism.
NOAA serves a list of links to publicly accessible MSDS information, including the above (whose URL's, if they change, will more likely be up-to-date at NOAA than here). The whole thing is mirrored in Japan. A short link list is at Michigan State U.
``Wine Stewards Without Borders'' is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon (p. 75, issue of Feb. 18 & 25, 2002; cartoonist so famous his signature need not be legible). Attired for an upscale fine dining experience, the WSWB pours a drink for the reclining wino on a streetcorner.
This entry used to be a lot more fun back in the old days. MSF didn't have its own web site, so I just went weaving back and forth on the web -- surfing without a helmet. Unofficial, unauthorized information providers were the wind in my bandana, most of them long since highsided into the /dev/null, alas. Here are a few sedate, speed-limit-obeying survivors: Minnesota's Motorcycle Safety Center (MSC), Oregon's Motorcycle Safety Program, and a page of links from what used to be a Motorcycle Rider Education Program.
MSG was first isolated by Japanese scientists, and Japan today has the world's highest per capita consumption of MSG. MSG was introduced to China around the beginning of the twentieth century, and China is today the world's largest producer and consumer of MSG, producing 650,000 tons a year (as of 1999). Most of that goes to domestic human consumption, an estimated 1.3 lb. per capita per annum. It's also used in medicines and in a salty hard candy that is a popular export to West Africa. There are also proposals to put it in livestock feed to fatten animals more quickly. The Chinese name for MSG is wei jing, `flavor essence,' essentially equivalent to the Japanese name umami.
MSG first became widely known in the US through its use in Chinese restaurants. Chinese restaurant syndrome is the reaction of sensitive people to high doses of MSG. A wide variety of side effects have been reported from MSG, including fainting and headaches. (Hair loss is one feared in China.) Animal and human studies suggest that sensitivity to or inadequate metabolization of MSG results from vitamin B6 deficiency and can be reversed with B6 supplementation.
MSG is well known to be a major ingredient of flavor enhancers like Accent®. However, it is often also present in hydrolyzed vegetable protein, textured vegetable protein, gelatin, yeast extracts, calcium and sodium caseinate, vegetable broth, whey, smoke flavoring, malt extracts, and several other food components. When MSG is only introduced indirectly as a component of such ingredients, the ingredients list of a food will not list MSG.
In 1987 the WHO placed MSG on its list of safest ingredients, with items like salt and vinegar. In 1995 an FDA report concluded that ``MSG and related substances are safe food ingredients for most people when eaten at the customary level.'' It also concluded, however, that large quantities can produce transient symptoms, particularly in asthmatics.
In addition to its main flavor effect, MSG also tastes salty, since salt taste is caused by sodium ions. However, MSG does not have a high degree of ionization in water (or saliva), so the degree of saltiness per sodium ion is low. This has led to problems with cooks who season with MSG by saltiness. That is, using MSG as weak salt, they end up using too much MSG as MSG.
(A ``licence'' is an even more general term than ``baccalaureate,'' and the latter has been used to refer to a range of academic levels of accomplishment (sometimes in the same school at the same time). In Latin America and Iberia, the licenciatura is now some kind of undergraduate degree, although the term has also been used for an honors secondary degree that was regarded as a first undergraduate degree. At PIMS it's a post-doctoral program. Go figure.)
Tory MSP Jamie McGrigor, twice-married and a father of five, was at a parliamentary dinner in Edinburgh with some Pfizer executives when discussion turned to the needs of isolated sheep farmers. One problem they face, according to the Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail, is ``find[ing] themselves snowed-in for weeks at a time in deepest winter.'' This apparently suggested an opportunity to address another problem: the declining number of Highlands shepherds. (According to the trashy but aptly named tabloid The People, ``the population of the Highlands is set to fall below 200,000 by 2017.'') Pfizer manufactures Viagra, and McGrigor suggested that the company might distribute it free to shepherds, to help raise the sagging population. (That's how he should have phrased it, but his exact words were not reliably reported.) McGrigor, 54, is a stockbroker as well as a ``hill [i.e. sheep] farmer.'' He said later that ``[i]t was a bit of a joke but it is not a bad idea. I am still waiting to hear from Pfizer.'' Pfizer already distributes freebies like jackets to promote its animal husbandry products, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, such as sheep dip. (Mmmm-mmm! Goes great with blue pills!) A spokesman for Pfizer said later that they were ``actively considering Jamie's proposition. Anything we can do to help valued customers such as Scotland's sheep farmers is worth considering.''
This news was reported on June 27, 2004. The very next day, there was a load of stories, including this one in The Scotsman, about khat. Khat is an African plant which is chewed for its hallucinogenic and stimulant effects. At the time, khat was illegal in the US and Canada, and in most of the EU but not the UK, where it is popular in the Somali community.
The active ingredient in khat is cathinone, which is broken down into various phenylpropanolamines (PPA's). PPA's are a common class of stimulants, sold OTC and by prescription in various diet and asthma medications. As you can imagine, that's not why I mention them here in the entry for Scottish Parliament members. The news reported on June 28, 2004, was on findings reported that day in Berlin, at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. It turns out that certain PPA's from cathinone help sperm cells through the final stage of maturation, when they develop the ability to fertilize.
Indepthopaedia:
The research was reported by Professor Lynn Fraser (who gave the talk) and
Dr. Susan Adeoya-Osiguwa, of King's College London. Uh, yeah, there's more,
but I'm too squeamish to include it.
That's right -- apparently concentric centers.
On Tuesday, at a McDonald's on I-80 in Pennsylvania, I listened attentively as the girl behind the counter mixed up orders and chatted with her coworkers. I made a big problem for her: my order cost $4.47, I gave her a ten and, as she efficiently keyed in $10 on the cash register, I gave her seven cents. Now she was in a bind since, to perform the modified change calculation, she might have to do something complicated like cancel the order. Thrown back on her own resources, she DID THE MATH IN HER HEAD! This involved a carry operation, I believe. Then she asked her scurrying coworkers at large if $5.60 was correct, explaining as she did the charge and the cash tendered. I'm afraid that rather dulled the shine on her immediately previous achievement. Later, as my food item was being assembled, she chatted on about how she was going to take Geometry again, because she enjoyed it so much the first time. I was relatively quiet.
Some or all of the dollar amounts are meaningless in principle, particularly since certain combinations of options are rare or nonexistent. In practice, it may be conceded that the sticker does provide some useful information to the prospective buyer, including what options are included, and now the EPA mileage estimates (YMMV). The total sticker price provides a point of reference. In particular, no one pays the full sticker price except on high-demand/short-supply vehicles.
Once it became legally required, the MSRP was added to the palette of artists (car salesmen and car salespersons) who create attractive images for car-buyers. To inflate the price, they can add ``preparation charges,'' ``advertising charges'' (I kid you not), extra transportation charges. Once upon a time, dealers were often in the business of installing post-manufacture options, and charges for these things could be inflated. The price inflation serves two main purposes. One is for the dealer to quote you a low-ball price exclusive of the extras, and then add them to bring the price up after getting past ``yes.'' The other is to appear to offer a better deal by offering to discount the inflated price or offering better financing or a bigger trade-in allowance.
Car dealers have long had the reputation of being the sleaziest of all retailers, and I don't know anyone who thinks that reputation is undeserved. Maybe I'll ask around. Anyway, many people I know have delayed or avoided buying a new car (or buying a used car from a lot rather than from an owner) simply because dealing with dealers is a degrading and stressful experience. In theory, this might create a niche for honest dealers, and perhaps they exist, but the main market manifestations of the disgust have been work-arounds: information services of various sorts and buying or bidding services. If one knows more or less precisely what kind of car one wants, the latter services make it possible to reach a final purchase price without having to interact directly with a dealer.
Car information services take many forms. For particular used cars, there's CARFAX Vehicle History Reports. In general, Edmunds.com and Kelley Blue Book are good places to start for both used and new cars. There are many others, all doing something like what the AIDA was originally intended to do. You know how to google, don't you?
For new cars, the main piece of information that has changed the dynamics of car-buying is the dealer invoice price. Back around 1990, when this information began to be widely available, new-car dealers protested the unfairness of having their costs revealed, when other retailers (the kind that aren't nearly so sleazy) can mark up with impunity. After all, they have fixed costs! Eventually they adjusted. I don't know to what extent it was part of the adjustment, and to what extent it was a pre-existing arrangement, but one thing that makes the invoice price less informative than it seems is the ``holdback.'' Typically on cars sold in the US there is a 3% holdback that the manufacturer pays the dealer once the vehicle is sold. (About 3% of the MSRP, or a slightly larger percentage of dealer invoice.) This is why it is easy for dealers to advertise ``BELOW INVOICE! BELOW DEALER INVOICE!!'' (That's before various other charges, of course, to say nothing of government-imposed costs -- DMV registration, sales tax, and especially whatever.)
In addition to the holdback, from time to time manufacturers may offer ``dealer incentives'' of, say, a few hundred dollars per vehicle. Sometimes manufacturers offer incentives directly to purchasers.
Maltese is spoken on Malta, Gozo, and Comino. It can be honestly said that every person living on the two other islands of the Maltese Archipelago, Cominotto and Filfla, is fluent in at least four languages besides Maltese. This is tremendously useful in principle, but it's only true because there are no persons living on these islands. Okay, bad joke. When I think of a better I'll replace it. Start boning up on your Dashiell Hammett.
The Maltese language is very interesting -- a Semitic language, it began as the Arabic brought by Moslem conquerors in 870. Maltese has had an increasing Romance component since the Christian reconquest by Normans from Sicily in 1091. The Normans sure were active in those years. From 1530 to 1798, Malta was the stronghold of the former crusading order, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John (who used Italian and Latin). The French took it over in 1798 as a sideshow on the way to Egypt. (Napoleon asked for safe harbor, then turned his guns on the port.) The French were not popular; they provoked the island's first known popular uprising, which the English assisted. The French hung on long enough to say hello and goodbye, or more precisely bongu and bonswa, with meaning and sound of bonjour and bonsoir. English rule started in 1800.
Many web pages claim that the Semitic component in Maltese dates back to the Phoenicians. This is plausible, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of it and I haven't seen a published scholarly source that deigns to so much as mention the possibility. Certainly Malta was settled prehistorically, and was for many centuries controlled by the Phoenicians and later the Carthaginians. However, to cite a parallel situation, the survivals of Carthaginian in Spain are negligible, apart from a few place names like Barcelona, Cartagena, and España. My guess is that a direct connection of the Maltese language with the Phoenicians is fanciful, and motivated by the greater prestige of a more ancient provenance.
In the broad circumstances of its history, Maltese is similar to English. Here is how Joseph Aquilina expressed it in the preface of his The Structure of Maltese: A Study in Mixed Grammar and Vocabulary (1959):
Maltese is a separate language resulting from the interaction and fusion of North African Arabic, but with its own dialect features outside the North African group, and Siculo-Italian, covering two different cultural strata. The Arabic element in Maltese historically very often corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon in English, while the Romance loans correspond to the Norman-French element. As in English, the primitive linguistic stratum is confined mainly to the description of the obvious facts of nature and man's reactions to them while the abstract and progressive vocabulary of the intelligentsia belongs to later times.
Another similarity is that the underlying grammar is that of the ``primitive stratum'' -- Semitic, in this case; Romance words have been assimilated into the Semitic morphology. A further and most melancholy similarity is that the mixed vocabulary has made the spelling a disaster area, reflecting etymology about as much as pronunciation. (Even Yiddish, composed mostly of Middle High German with only about 10% admixture of Hebrew vocabulary and even less Slavic, uses the Hebrew character set in two very different ways for words with different etymologies. Medieval Hebrew and Arabic were both more successful in absorbing large amounts of Greek.) One familiar bit of etymological spelling is the aitch, which is silent as in Italian -- with one significant exception.
Like Serbian, Maltese is written with a character set that contains an aitch-bar (an aitch with a bar through the middle of the riser). (Note that Serbian is written with a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet, though the aitch-bar and J characters appear to be borrowed from the Roman; Maltese is written with a variant of the Roman character set.) The aitch-bar represents an unvoiced pharyngeal fricative. That's like the unvoiced velar fricative /x/ (the sound of ch in Scottish loch and German Bach), but further back in the throat, if you can imagine. In fact, traces of the velar sound still survived in the dialect of the island of Gozo as recently as the 1950's, but there was apparently no phonemic distinction. Both the velar and pharyngeal aitches occur in Arabic, but in Maltese cognates, both sounds are represented by the aitch-bar. At the end of a word, an ordinary h is pronounced like an aitch-bar.
As in Chinese Romanization and as in various Iberian languages (more or less systematically), the x is usually pronounced ``sh.'' [It is sometimes pronounced as ``zh,'' the voiced sibilant in the English word measure. Voicing in Maltese assimilates regressively: if an x is followed by a voiced consonant, it becomes voiced also.] Different quantities (long and short duration) of the general sound represented by x are distinguished phonemically. The difference is comparable to the allophonic difference in German between final sch (long, as in Arsch, Stammtisch, etc.) and initial sch (short, as in schleichen, Schwarze Haus). In Maltese, the longer sound is indicated by a double x.
That Maltese has double-exes might be the best-known fact about the language, on account of the events of 1972. In that year, Standard Oil of New Jersey introduced a new trade name for its products. It had been selling its gasoline under at least three different trade names: Esso, Enco, and (only in Ohio) Humble. It would have liked to have used Esso everywhere, but ever since the original Standard Oil had been broken up in probably the landmark trust-busting action of the US government, there were a number of competing Standard Oil companies that could prevent it from adopting that name. A secretive and expensive computer-assisted search for a new name that could be used everywhere and which meant nothing anywhere eventually yielded ``Exxon.'' [Pronounceability may not have been a major consideration. The word Exxon is unpronounceable in the many languages (including all the Polynesian languages, I believe) that only allow open syllables. The best one can say for this glaring nonuniversality is that among the languages that are almost entirely constructed of open syllables, syllabic n and syllables closed by n are among the more common exceptions to the open-syllable rule. E.g., Italian (esp. the Venice dialect) and Japanese. And that's to say nothing of X itself.]
One thing simplifying the allegedly strenuous search was the claimed fact that Maltese was the only language with a double x. Given that only a few hundred languages are represented by Roman alphabets, it is at least conceivable that the claim is true. On the other hand, confirming that hypothesis would probably have cost Standard Oil of New Jersey more than the few millions it devoted to the name search. Let's agree that double-exes are very probably quite unusual, though it shouldn't be hard to construct a silly compound noun with xx in German. If the term ``box xylophone'' is ever borrowed into German from English, it ought to become ``Boxxylophon,'' although current orthography rules allow a hyphen.
On May 1, 2004, the EU's membership officially increased from 15 to 25, and the number of its official languages increased from 11 to 20. All official documents are supposed to be made available in all the official languages. The costs of translation were estimated to be about 800 million euros before the 2004 expansion. Each new language was expected to require hiring 60 new translators (I think that figure is for Brussels alone). Not every regional and minority language gets to be an official language of the EU, but Maltese got the nod. At the time of accession, no EU translators happened to know Maltese.
Malta had never had a school for translators. It wasn't necessary: Malta's other official language is English, which is as widely spoken as the local one. According to Jan Andersen, the chief translator in Brussels, in 2003 there was a test for translators from Malta. Out of 16 candidates, four made it to the final round, but all failed. I wonder who wrote the exam. Malta is racing to catch up, but Malta isn't the only country with these problems, and as of 2006 most EU documents were only available in a limited number of languages (fewer than 20).
You know, it stands to reason: if your native language is something common like English or French, or a similar language like Dutch or Romansch that makes it easy to learn one of the common languages as a second language, then you're more likely to study something unusual as a second or third language. (Or at least, less likely to find practicality a persuasive reason to study something more common.) The weirder your first language, the more attraction there will be in learning something widely-spoken as a second language. Still, it's surprising they didn't get a Maltese-English interpreter in the first batch. I'd put it up to a tiny country having a tiny applicant pool.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Montana. USACityLink.com has a page with a couple of city and county links for the state.
sendmail
and qmail
.
sendmail actually made the cover of the New York Times (1998.03.17, give
or take a day) when a new version came out with greatly enhanced anti-Spam
features.
The same name was formerly used in Boston (see MBTA) and in Melbourne, Australia (come back and see Met later, after we install an entry). In Los Angeles it could also be used for LACMTA.
In Spanish, the English term mountain bike has been borrowed as two words. In German, the term has been borrowed and naturalized by removal of the space (and by capitalization, of course): Mountainbike. I shouldn't be, but I'm amused by the regular construct Mountainbikefest.
Many people complain that they get lower gas mileage with oxygenated fuel. I have no idea of the magnitude or sign of the effect. Well, I do have a clue. A few Iowa State Fairs ago, I drove from Indiana to Colorado and back. In some of the states I drove through, you actually had the option of buying gasoline with or without extra oxygenation. In most places, ordinary fuel was priced higher, though in the Denver area the MTBE'ed fuel was more expensive. Both of these trends seem consistent with MTBE lowering gas mileage.
MTBE has also been used as an octane enhancer, but that effect is factored into the octane rating at the pump, so it's not as if you get a higher effective octane rating with oxygenated fuel of the same stated octane level.
Two-stroke engines exhaust a large fraction of their fuel unburned (as much as a quarter in the cheapest and oldest models), and are the common power plant for jet skis and outboard motors. Research shows that this increases the MTBE levels in recreation lakes at the time of major holidays and for a few days after. Jet-ski-industry-funded ``research'' disagrees.
The problem is not restricted to recreation lakes. A small ether like MTBE is polar and dissolves in water, unlike gasoline and most of the other things in gasoline. (The solubility is part of the reason that MTBE levels in lakes fall.) Also unlike a lot of other stuff in gasoline, MTBE is not broken down by bacteria. As a result, when gasoline is spilled, MTBE is the one item that efficiently diffuses into the ground water.
MTBE gives water a turpentine taste. That's a known effect. MTBE might be a carcinogen. That's a guess -- I'm not sure that there is any evidence for this. It's clearly not an especially good thing to drink, although whether the quantities getting into the water supply are having significant health effects is not known. In the summer of 1999, after weighing the known benefits of decreased air pollution against the unknown dangers of water contamination, the EPA reversed its earlier position and now wants MTBE banned in gasoline.
It is a statistical curiosity that for a Bernoulli or Poisson process, these two times are the same. To be precise, consider a sequence of times . . . t-2, t-1, t0, t1, t2, . . . . We suppose that these times were determined by a Bernoulli process. Briefly, we assume that for any tiny time interval dt, the probability that a failure occurs during the interval is r × dt.
Thus, if we start a timer from any given moment (whether or not a failure has just occurred and been repaired or not is immaterial: the Bernoulli process has no memory), then the probability that the timer can run for a finite time interval t with no failure occurring is exp(-rt), giving a mean time before failure of 1/r. The counter-intuitive nature of the Bernoulli process lies in the constancy of this number: If, at time zero, the mean time before failure is 1/r, and we happen to experience a time interval T during which no failure occurs, then we intuitively expect the mean time to the next failure to decrease, perhaps to 1/r - T. The fact that the process is probabilistic implies that T will sometimes exceed 1/r, so that hypothetical formula, which would predict a negative expectation of a positive quantity, is clearly wrong. The source of the problem lies in our quotidian experience of probability. If the failure is one of human health, then we might take the ``mean time to failure'' as the life expectancy. If the life expectancy at 30 is 45, then we surely do not expect that the life expectancy at 75 still to be 45. We expect more like zero, which is closer to the truth. In general, though, life expectancy decreases less rapidly than one year per year. In some age ranges it can stay nearly constant or actually increase, as a cohort passes through a dangerous period (first year of birth) or through a filter interval that takes the unhealthy (the seventies is such a period) in an inhomogeneous population. Gamblers reckon with intuition that they may be ``overdue'' for luck to go their way.
Returning to the general problem formulated in a sequence of times, it is clear that if we number the sequence of failures so that t0 is the last failure before the time zero, and t1 is the first failure after the time zero, then the mean time before failure from time zero is <t1> = 1/r, and similarly the mean time elapsed since the last failure before time zero is -<t0> = 1/r. The mean time between failures #0 and #1 is < t1 - t0 >. Why can't we just say that < t1 - t0 > = < t1 > - < t0 > = 1/r - (-1/r) = 2/r ? It seems that the mean time between failures is really 2/r, twice the mean time to failure (measured from any arbitrarily determined moment).
The problem is that the numbering of the failure-time sequence introduces a correlation between different times; we enter the domain of order statistics. To see the problem, we first ignore the condition established to assign numbers to the failures. There is a probability distribution function for t1 - t0 : We write the probability that t1 - t0 falls in the interval t < t1 - t0 < t + dt as P10(t) dt. Well bully for you, you caught me with my pants down. I haven't finished writing the entry yet. Gimme a break.
Apparently Nemesis prefers Off-Broadway companies to stay off Broadway. The very first production at the Biltmore, Richard Greenberg's new play ``The Violet Hour,'' suffered two actress defections, one rather late. Laura Benanti left during September rehearsals because of ``artistic differences,'' according to MTC. (Benanti was replaced by Dagmara Dominczyk.) Jasmine Guy quit during an intermission of a preview performance, less than two weeks before the November 6 opening (her understudy, Robin Miles, took over the role).
On December 3, 2003, during rehearsals for Neil Simon's ``Rose's Dilemma,'' Mary Tyler Moore (``Rose'') was seen storming out the backstage door minutes before the 2 p.m. curtain. This was apparently her reaction to a letter from Neil Simon demanding that she learn her lines. Everyone involved made a public expression of deep and undying love and admiration for everyone else involved, or at least refrained from getting personally nasty. Patricia Hodges, Moore's understudy, was named the new lead. The play previewed for theater critics as scheduled on December 12, ahead of the official opening on December 18.
There were conflicting reports regarding the precise circumstances of MTM's departure. One uncredited report published by the Press Association (and slightly garbled by the Sunday Telegraph) claimed that Simon's letter, hand-delivered by his wife, actress Elaine Joyce, was an ultimatum ``apparently demanding that she learn her lines `or get out of my play'.'' [Emphasis added by me. I mean, you don't expect italics in wire stories, do you?] Her publicist Mara Buxbaum said in a statement that her feelings were badly hurt and that ``Mary has been working tirelessly for months but feels pushed out of this production.'' [My italics again.] Simon made no public comment until the 12th, when he implied that his letter had been sent the day before MTM stormed out, and claimed that he had threatened that he would leave the play if she didn't learn her lines. Simon's description of the letter's contents seems to better explain Buxbaum's ``feels pushed out'' wording than does the original apparently inferential report of the letter's contents.
Although MTM's best-known work has been on television, which has a smaller burden of memorization, she has done ``legit'' theater. Her most recent stage performance in New York City was in the 1988 Broadway production of A.R. Gurney's ``Sweet Sue.'' She also acted in a 1966 musical version of ``Breakfast at Tiffany's,'' (1966), which closed in previews, and in ``Whose Life Is It, Anyway?'' (1980), which ran for 96 performances. Her appearance in ``Rose's Dilemma,'' Neil Simon's 33rd play, would have marked her Off-Broadway debut.
Neil Simon, like many other playwrights, is known to make extensive changes in plays that he feels are not working. Anonymous informants all seem to agree that the play wasn't getting the laughs he was aiming for, and that he had been making substantial revisions. You know, Simon isn't director for the play. If he hadn't been making substantial revisions, his threat to leave would have been rather empty. Before MTM left, the premiere had been pushed back from an originally scheduled date of December 9.
``Rose's Dilemma'' was first staged in February 2003 at the Geffen Playhouse in LA. Its title there was ``Rose and Walsh,'' starring Jane Alexander and Len Cariou in the title roles. In a Variety review, Phil Gallo wrote that it ``could well see extended runs anywhere it's staged --- even Broadway.'' (In the move to New York, almost everyone was replaced. David Esbjornson, the play's director at the Geffen, was replaced by Lynne Meadow, artistic director at MTC. One of the four actors stayed with the production -- David Aaron Baker, in the role of Clancy, a young writer.)
``Rose'' is a play à clef based on the relationship of Dashiell Hammett (Walsh) and Lillian Hellman (Rose). Walsh, dead five years but visible to Rose and the audience, wants to give up the ghost -- leave his old haunts -- in two weeks. He reveals to Rose the location of his unfinished manuscript (``Mexican Standoff'') that needs a final chapter of 40 pages, and which will assure her financial security. If you know the styles of Hammett and Hellman, you realize that Rose can as easily finish this work as Mother Goose can finish the report of a chemical analysis. The ghost of Walsh recommends that that last chapter be ghosted by Clancy, author of a book Walsh found in his robe pocket. The basic problem with the original play, and probably the problem in New York, was getting the premise established. The initial going was slow.
There are elements in this play of Neil Simon's ``Jake's Women.'' Jake is a writer who has imaginary conversations with seven women in his life -- just a little bit like the Eagles' Glenn Frey singing ``Take It Easy.'' (One of Jake's imaginary interlocutors is his first wife -- who died young, like Simon's.)
Just for laughs, let's refocus on the head term. It contains the word Manhattan. One of the main reasons that people have been saying that theatre is dying in New York is that it costs a fortune to put on a show. That's probably a major reason why it really is dying. Hence, the only shows that get a chance on Broadway are perceived sure things. If costs could be reduced, more people might attend (the market for entertainment can't be too weird) and there would be more variety in plays, appealing to a broader potential audience. Why not New Jersey? Hey -- the Meadowlands sports complex worked out. (See NJSEA.)
Many people working in the field are very fussy about distinguishing between HIV infection and AIDS, at least in public. People who are HIV-positive but asymptomatic are PLHIV, in a currently favored acronym. But in practice, when speaking of transmission, I notice people tend not to speak of ``passing the measles virus.''
Not only is this intellectual terrain mined with shibboleths, but the term MTCP itself seems squeamishly to avoid naming what it is one wants to prevent. [At three removes! One wants to prevent transmission (1) of an agent (2) that causes a disease (3).] It suggests that ``mother-to-child'' itself might be a thing one wants to prevent. There's good news on this: an alternative term, the acronym PMTCT (Prevention of MTCT (below), is gaining in popularity.
In the field of device testing for electromigration failure, the acronym also refers to a specific technique described by F. M. d'Heurle and P. S. Ho: ``Electromigration in thin films,'' in Thin Films -- Interdiffusion and Reactions (eds. J. M. Poate, K. N. Tu and J. W. Mayer) p. 250 (New York: Wiley, 1978).
Definitely see the MTTF entry.
Status as of October 2004: there have been a few demonstration successes against mortars and rockets. The most recent tests were against ``mortar rounds and mortar rounds fired in a salvo'' on August 24. Test conditions have never been very stringent and there are many doubts about the system's effectiveness in a real-world ``test.'' The system is considered bulky and not really very ``M.'' Needless to say, it's very expensive. Deployment is not expected before 2009.
Oh, all right. THEL stands for Tactical High-Energy Laser. In the context of missile systems, tactical is almost a synonym of mobile, and THEL seems to be used interchangeably with MTHEL and M-THEL.
H. H. Berger and S. K. Wiedmann: ``Merged-Transistor Logic (MTL) -- A Low-Cost Bipolar Logic Concept,'' IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-7, pp. 340-346 (October 1972).
K. Hart and A. Slob: ``Integrated Injection Logic: A New Approach to LSI,'' IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-7, pp. 346-346 (October 1972).
Cf. ETO, PTO. At least WWII didn't have any serious casualties in the STOW.
The Science and Engineering of Nuclear Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1947), edited by Clark Goodman, was written with the purpose of ``present[ing] the fundamentals of chain-reacting systems in terms that are understandable to the non-specialist, particularly to engineers interested in the industrial applications of nuclear energy. Progress in this field requires the coordinated effort of many branches of science and engineering, particularly during the next several years. Gradually, the responsibility will devolve to a new breed of specialists, already dubbed nuclear engineers.'' (Quoted text from Clark's preface.) Chapter 10, ``Heat Transfer,'' is by E.R. Gilliland, a rare engineer among scientists. He even provides a short table of conversions between engineering units (you know: good ol' Btu, feet, °F) and, uh, other units. He comments drily (p. 323):
In removing heat from a reactor, there are a number of considerations, but to an engineer, the chief one appears to be that the physicist prefers that he keep his equipment out of the reactor. Apparently, nearly any material used in the reactor is objectionable. If a gas like helium is used, while not objectionable from its nuclear properties, it is not a good moderator and hence increases the size of the reactor. Many of the liquids require structural materials for the passages through which they flow that are objectionable in thermal reactors.
The usual formula for computing how long a task will take is to start with the amount of time it should take, multiply by two, and switch to the next, larger unit of time measure. (Forget fortnights. If it should take a week it'll take two months. Relax, it was ever thus.)
Not that anyone is taking this concept very seriously, but median time would be a lot more meaningful than mean time. After all, we know there are repairs which will never occur (this is too often intentional), for which a time is problematical to define at best, and infinite at worst. Thus, the Mean TTR is correspondingly problematical or infinite, while the median is unaffected by odd stuff at the edges of the probability distribution. Now you understand why the simple arithmetical average is called ``mean.'' [Actually, the real etymology is interesting too: mean, like French moyen meant `common, middle' and followed the downward path of the word vulgar in common usage. See villein entry for similar story.]
See related comments at MTF.
/usr/ucb/mail
), the X-windows application
xmail
, mh
, xmh
, and flora like
Pine
or
ELM
.
You can also use the MUA built into Netscape. Beware, however: if you're using Unix, you're quite possibly allowing many of your emails to accumulate in the system mail spooler, rather than saving them onto your own disk space (in mailx, you do this by PREserving the file rather than explicitly saving it into a mail folder or allowing it to be saved into a default mailbox like ~/mbox). Netscape, oriented as it is to a personal computer community that retrieves mail before it can read it (typically using POP) will download your possibly bloated mailbox on the system mail spool (i.e., the mailserver's disk space, /var/spool/ say) before you know what hit you. I wouldn't want to be around to see what happens if you go over quota or exceed disk space as Netscape tries to download. On the bright side, Netscape doesn't use some dog-Am proprietary format to store mails in mailboxes, so after you run this experiment, assuming you have the disk space to survive it, you can go back to using an honest-to-God Unix application to read your mail, including the stuff hidden in .netscape/ . Just a word to the wise.
Housman's ``Fragment'' parodies English translations of Ancient Greek that are awkward and worse, and also parodies a Greek predilection for metaphor. Housman's phrase was suggested by some words in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (at 494f; speech that different editors have assigned to either Clytemnestra or the chorus): kasis / pêlou xunouros dipsia konis (`the dust, dry sister of the mire,' in Lattimore's translation). In Housman's parody, mud's sister is clearly also dried mud:
Chorus: Beneath a shiny, or a rainy Zeus?
Alcmaeon: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
Of course, out of context it obviously makes a wonderful dysphemism-as-over-the-top-euphemism for merde.
There are many online copies of Housman's parody, though they probably represent very few original transcriptions of the published work. (Besides the copy linked above, here are three URL's that have stood the test of time: 1, 2, and 3.) The online versions I've seen all give it the title ``Fragment of a Greek Tragedy,'' but the Encyclopedia Britannica is careful (or careless -- I'm not sure which, yet) to give the title with an initial article ``A.'' That is the usual style for new fragments as published in philology journals, and would be appropriate for a parody. The version (from Trinity Magazine, see below) published in Housman's Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Penguin, 1988) uses the shorter title, but that does not entirely settle the question. Please don your dustmask now.
Housman (1859-1936) wrote ``Fragment'' in 1883, and it appeared June 8 of that year in the Bromsgrovian, a publication of King Edward the Sixth Grammar School, Bromsgrove. [That was where he got his secondary education. He also retreated to Bromsgrove in 1882 after an initially promising undergraduate career at St. John's College (Oxford) ended disappointingly. By December 1882 he was working at the Patent Office in London.] Housman reentered academia as a professor of Latin at University College, London, in 1892; the circumstances have been widely retailed. ``Fragment'' was republished by the University College Gazette in 1897, the year after Housman published A Shropshire Lad at his own expense. (Sales of the latter were initially slow, but they picked up by the time of the Boer War, and during WWI it became enormously popular). Cornhill Magazine republished ``Fragment'' in April 1901. Housman moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1911, and Trinity Magazine republished ``Fragment'' in February 1921. Housman remained at Trinity until his death in 1936, but for some reason Yale Review republished the parody in 1928. It went on being republished.
Housman made a considerable revisions for the second (Cornhill) and third (Trinity) publications. In 1927, when Wilbur Cross asked permission for the Yale Review to republish ``Fragment,'' Housman (referring to it by the no-``A'' version of the title) turned down the offer of an honorarium but asked to have a chance to correct the proofs. He also mentioned that he didn't have a copy, but suggested that Cross could find it in Cornhill. When YR did publish it, ``recent changes'' by the author were vaguely mentioned. Interestingly, or perhaps not, apart from a couple of misprints the YR version coincided with the third (Trinity) version, but with the punctuation of the second (Cornhill). (This is by report. If and when I have a look at the Cornhill and, conceivably, the Bromsgrovian, I'll be able to pronounce on the title.)
FYI, the word vitamin is pronounced with a short i in England.
In case you had a deprived childhood: after Noah opened the ark (or was it the arc?) he told the animals to go forth and multiply. One pair of snakes protested, ``We're adders -- we can't multiply!'' Nevertheless, some time later they came back with a bunch of little snakelets or adderlets or 7483's or whatever they're called, and Noah asked how they did it. ``We used logs.''
Oh! I just knew I'd told that one before. See the etymologically interesting adder entry.
Someone else who really couldn't multiply was Samuel Pepys. He and his dear young wife never had children. The very first entry of his diary mentions that his wife had given him ``hopes of her being with child,'' hopes disappointed the previous day. Hmm. Okay, that was pretty limp. Coming after the snake pun, it was the pits. I can do better than that if I try.
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
(Quoted in Mysli o nauke by V. P. Ponomarev (Kishinev, 1973), p. 121.)
Why is it appropriate, you ask? Because they restrict students' political speech in ways that are not merely immoral but absurdly so. Read about it in this George F. Will column of October 25, 2007. It's about a student who was removed from his unexalted position as a student senator in the ASUM because he spent a penny per voter more than was allowed during the campaign. (If the link dies, let me know and I'll summarize more here.)
The initialism common on the university's own pages is the inferior and ambiguous UM. Maybe we could compromise on the filled pause, UMM?
The etymology of mung is uncertain. The cluster of meanings represented by French manger, Italian mangiare, English munch and mange represents one obvious possibility, but would imply a ``soft gee'' and a spelling like munge. An alternative that gives the right consonant is derivation from a past-tense form of the verb ming (now mingle).
By 1960 at MIT, the word had become a backronym, with imputed expansion Mash Until No Good. Later, the XARA MUNG Until No Good became popular.
The information that is both in the mung entry of the Jargon File (version 4.4.7) and in this entry is from the former. The OED2 does not give any hackish senses, but its examples suggest that the old word mung, in senses related to mingle, had not been an entirely obscure word in the US as the computer era began.
Multidisciplinary is very fashionable in government research funding these days, and they're getting increasingly serious about it: they don't want a bunch of Lone Rangers who only meet at funding reviews.
The diminutive Latin form musculus is also the basis of words for muscle, mussel, shoulder, and thigh in various Romance and Germanic languages. Some Romance languages also preserve the root for an animal name (French mouche) and some don't. Spanish uses the word ratón. This is puzzling because it looks like an augmentative form of rata, `rat.' I would presume that the -on in ratón is related to the identical French and Occitan diminutive ending (cf. aileron and lumignon), but Corominas y Pascual prefer more complicated explanations.
The name (Museo del Objeto del Objeto) is somewhat clever, but it'd've been cleverer had it been accurate. One motivation for choosing the name is that it makes an apparent backronym -- MODO. I haven't written that entry yet.
Other mushroom entries: BMS, CANDU, kombucha.
Okay, here's another musical reference, of a sort similar to those described in the Day Tripper entry: at the end of the Traffic's ``Dear Mr. Fantasy'' (at the end of a standard studio version that appears in some album) the guitars start doing some power-chord riffs from the Moody Blues song ``Ride My See-Saw.''
Doubtless there are whole albumsful of snorkeling songs. The above are just the ones that have come to mind in the last few years.
If you plan to listen to any of these using electronic sound reproduction equipment, wait until you're back on dry land. Water conducts (come back some day and read the future torpedo entry), and it's hard to hum along in noseplugs and mouthpiece, to say nothing of a shroud.
The relevance of water saltiness, although Sheik does not sing the details, is that dissolved salt makes water denser, and thus makes a swimmer more buoyant. Counterweights are thus necessary for snorkeling in it, and the song is appropriately downbeat. (Salt water is also a better conductor of electricity.) I remember that my tenth-grade English teacher (the second one, after my dad had me removed from Honors English), Mr. O_________, criticized me for using an extended simile involving water waves, crushing youthful literary aspirations I didn't even have, but it didn't involve punning, and anyway he (Mr. O) also insisted that it was Aristotle and not Democritus or anyone else who came up with the idea of atoms, which shows how much he knew, but I don't recall his ever criticizing my extended run-on sentences, but then again maybe that stands to reason. Whatever. Getting back to the subject: when I finish the item on burping the alphabet, I'll link to it from here.
Celebration of tornadoes is a perennial theme in popular music. Lionel Richie's 1986 hit, ``Dancing On The Ceiling,'' also asks listeners to clap their hands. What goes around comes around, pretty fast. But the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis hit, ``Can't Hold Us'' -- the one which features Ray Dalton singing ``So we put our hands up like the ceiling can't hold us'' -- celebrates earthquakes and not tornadoes. That's obviously the reason why the official video has a seaplane and a camel. (A plane is a safe place to be during an earthquake, but landing strips may be damaged. And being trapped in the rubble of a collapsed tent is fairly survivable.)
A ``neat little word'' coined by Albert Ellis, according to Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. (See F.O.O.L.) Apparently Ellis and Dyer agree that musterbation is a bad thing. That's strange -- I thought it was supposed to be natural and ... oh sorry, that was the other word.
Okay, more precisely, so far as I can determine from Dyer's book (at pp. 148-9), musterbation is the inappropriate acceptance of obligations that others somehow impose. This is not Dyer's wording, because his book would have made a short pamphlet if he had preferred clear sentences to unclear paragraphs. It also makes explicit, in the word inappropriate, the presence of at least one unexamined notion. Acceptance of societal norms is not always inappropriate or self-abnegating. And musterbation isn't a ``little'' word, either.
Some other German words ending in -ut that have a close cognate in English are Blut, Flut, gut, and Hut. The cognates are blood, flood, good, and hood, although in the last case a better translation is usually `hat.'
German Mut is cognate with English mood. The semantic relationship is clearer if you consider that mood has meanings similar to spirit, and that you may en-courage someone by saying ``have some spirit!'' Or, failing that, ``have some spirits!'' Which reminds me, you need to reread this CCC entry.
Getting back to the hood/Hut thing. Let me briefly clarify that -hood in English words like brotherhood and neighborhood is unrelated; it's cognate with the German noun-forming suffix -heit (and later also -keit). The hat Hut is more interesting. With a change to feminine gender it becomes an elevated term with meanings related to `protection.' But back to the concrete Hut, indicated by the masculine gender: I won't tell you what a Panamahut is, but Strohhut and Zylinderhut are `straw hat' and `top hat.' A Fingerhut is a...
(Giving you some space to guess here.) (Come on, play along!) (Time!)`thimble.' And of course, Handschuh is `glove.' It's not just clothing; the Germans seem to have a certain attitude about bodily extremities. The word Bein means `leg.' It's cognate with the English word bone. (Actually, this isn't very innovative. There's evidence that the word always had a narrower sense of `shank,' which was lost in English.)
I should probably say a little about what multiplexing is. The action involves multiple distinct signals that must be bandwidth-limited. For example, because the human ear is insensitive to continuous signals at pitches above 20 kHz, it is possible to apply a low-pass filter (filter out all frequencies above fLP) to any sound and produce a signal that is not audibly distinguishable from the original (to some degree, any recording or transducing device will filter anyway). If this signal is modulated by a constant frequency fM, then the resulting signal occupies the frequency range (fM-fLP,fM+fLP). Multiple signals can be modulated by different modulating frequencies (typically integer multiples of some fM). So long as each of the modulating frequencies differs by more than 2fLP, the modulated signals occupy non-overlapping frequency regions. These signals can be added together and transmitted together on a channel with a broader bandwidth, and the original signals reconstructed by demodulating the component signals.
Eventually, I'll probably add some words to make clear what I mean by ``modulate,'' but for now I want to mention that in practice, telephones economize bandwidth by using a tight low-pass filter -- chopping frequencies higher than 3000 or 5000 Hz, say. This allows the company to multiplex more signals into one channel, but it also means that the sounds ess and eff are virtually indistinguishable over the phone. (It's actually a band-pass filter: very low frequencies are also filtered out. For obvious reasons they also filter out any signal at the frequency of ordinary power supply -- 50 or 60 Hz, in most places -- even more strongly than they would be filtered out just from being on the fall-off of the band-pass.)
Cf. MUSAC.
There's an old Russian saying that what is healthy to a Russian is deadly to a German. The form with the nationalities switched is also common, but less so.
Maldives is the smallest member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The UNDP has a human development index used to rank countries on the basis of things like life expectancy, education, and income. In 1996, Maldives's six partners in SAARC were ranked from 89 (Sri Lanka) up (or maybe down: Pakistan: 134, India: 135 -- was this close match cooked?, Bangladesh: 143, Nepal: 151, and Bhutan, 158). Wasn't Maldives even ranked? No matter. In Havana on September 6, 1979, Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom addressed the sixth conference of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) in these words:
Ours is a small country in relation to the majority of the countries that are represented here. We may lack numbers; we may lack in material wealth; we may lack in technological advancement; in fact, we may lack in many of the material criteria by which progress is measured in the present-day world.
He also said other stuff. Speaking as he did is called ``setting yourself up'' or ``asking for it.''
The name Mecklenburg basically means `great fortress.' Burg means `fortress,' though it seems to get conflated with berg (`mountain'). The adjective part of the name comes from the Old High German root michil, `big,' as in the old English expression ``mickle and pickle'' (big and small). Hence also the extant expression, ``Many a pickle makes a mickle.'' There seem to have been cognates of mickle in most of the Germanic languages, and English is, typically, unusual in having lost the original form. Maybe it lost twice. The High German form, borrowed northward, seems to come from an ancient borrowing through Gothic of the Greek megalo-, lengthened stem form of mégas. The root is widely represented in Indo-European languages, including that outlier Hittite. The Latin reflex is magnus. So what English lost once or twice it gained back at least a couple of times more.
The site is intended, among other things, to foster a kind of virtual community by providing free web space for those volunteering to build a relevant group of pages.
You know, there are certain questions people planning to marry don't often ask themselves, like:
Charpak spent his career at the École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie and at CERN. When I was running the data analysis programs (punch cards on CDC 6400/6600's, sonny boy, with 36-bit words just to be slightly exotic) at Fermilab, I noticed that they were written in Fortran with comments in French. I don't think I ever gave much thought to why, though practically everyone in our group was American (the one exception I can recall was British).
These research groups are very long-lived, so the program might have been coded locally by a Francophone who had moved on before I arrived, but it would have been more efficient just to cadge someone else's code. At Fermilab I also met members of a group from UC Santa Something that decided to save a few bucks on computers by buying Data General machines (Novas?) instead of the PDP-11's that were almost universal at Fermilab experimental sites. The result was that they lost more in extra coding to adapt the widely shared local software than they gained in hardware cost savings.
Before the general interest magazine Midwest was launched, the publishers did some market research, asking among other things which states people in their target region considered to be a part of the midwest. It was reported that Iowa (IA) was the only state that appeared on everyone's list. I think this may have had something to do with the surveying technique. [In 1996, the Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems was held at Iowa State.] Be all that as it may, I don't believe that even that idiot survey found very many who regarded California as part of the Midwest. The 1997 MWSCAS was in California. Then again, the 1995 symposium was held in southeastern Brazil.
Oh wait, here's something: The Eleventh Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar was held by the Department of Classics, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, 18-22 June 1997. And they went back to South Africa in 2003! (University of Stellenbosch, in Stellenbosch, South Africa, Wednesday June 25 to Saturday June 28.) I guess they wanted a point that was roughly equidistant from all of the Pacific rim, but not in the Pacific.
Here's the very sparse Malaysian page of an X.500 directory, maybe it'll fill up later.
The way to remember that MY stands for Malaysia and not for its neighbor Myanmar is to think of .my and remember that internet access is illegal in Myanmar. (Pretty much, anyway. Maybe they've had a little political thaw and allowed people to take occasional deep breaths also. If it weren't for countries like Myanmar, countries like Malaysia would look like dictatorships. Hmmm.)
Googling for engine stuff in 2004, I discovered that Myanmar has an industry! It's called PANSAR, which sounds like a Spanish verb that would mean doing something with your belly. (La panza is Spanish for `the belly.' The name of Don Quixote's Sancho Panza was originally spelled Sancho Pança. The second name was pronounced then, and is still pronounced in most of the non-Iberian Spanish-speaking world, like Pansa.) Pansar would probably be a word for doing something quite specific with a belly, but since the verb does not exist, it is equally likely to be anything, such as pounding something with a belly or vice versa, sort of like sumo wrestling. For other Japanese belly information, see the navel exercises entry.
On second thought, there's a Spanish verb pensar, `to think.' When you're seriously hungry, your belly does a lot of your thinking. My mother is slowly writing her memoirs now. They involve a period when she was a refugee, but start when she was a little Jewish girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Concluding one early anecdote, she writes ``so you see, I was interested in food even before it became scarce.''
The myotto of PANSAR is ``everyday in so many ways we are part of you.'' (Rather weak Coué imitation.) I think that one you they refer to is Yanmar Co., Ltd., a Japanese firm. They missed a real opportunity here; they could have called it Anmar, and then your account at the web site (please allow cookies) would be MyAnmar! For more humorous Japanese -- oh wait, we did that already.
Some of that material is finding its way into this glossary and lodging in entries such as these:
MyRRh's is preferable to ``my regular restaurant'' not only because it's brief and because it needlessly inconveniences or confuses glossary readers, but also because it need not be accurate. I mean, if I were to write ``my regular restaurant,'' I'd have to consider whether the phrase is true each time. But MyRRh's merely stands for ``my regular restaurant.'' In the interests of brevity, I can leave out details that might yield MyRRhULY's (``until last year'') or MyRRhiahaU's (``in an [h] alternate universe''). But it happens to be accurate as I write this.
Mission Statement (from this superannuated page):
To collect, preserve, and exhibit the World's most comprehensive collection of North American Television Receivers, from the formative, first fifty year period between the 1920s & 1970s. To contribute to the understanding of the impact of television. To help tell the story of television.
Related Goals:
To accumulate relevant books, magazines, videos, discs, photographs, personal papers and ephemera. To provide a learning resource.
Ah, yes -- where would we be without ``learning''? The new improved web site integrates Macintoxic features (too-responsive graphics, nonstandard codepoints for standard characters, etc.) to cleverly reproduce one of the most characteristic features of TV: annoyance. The medium is the message, and the message is annoying. If you want content, like information about museum hours, follow the link for the low-bandwidth/dialup-user site.
Full disclosure: In 1976 I went to a Halloween party dressed as a television (a Zenith ``portable''). It was hard to dance. The next year I obtained superior results by dressing as a pop-up toaster and using the two-quart glass unit from a blender as my beer stein.
Read more here and here.
``Messier'' is not the comparative of ``Messy.'' It's a French name pronounced Messy-ay in English.
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Oops! Overshot the pointers.