N n

Back when most of my work was in nanoelectronics, I named one of my Sun workstations enano. It was a pun.

Usage note: units named after people are not capitalized, but their symbols are. Hence, N abbreviates a unit that is spelled out as ``newton.''

1 N = 1 kg m/s²

When people say ``as free as the air,'' they're talkin' nitrogen, 78%, and that can go for as little as pennies on the cubic foot.

Gallium Nitride (GaN) has been used to create blue lasers, so now [I think I entered this entry in 1995] full-color flat-panel displays and area illumination based on compound semiconductors are anticipated. When people talk about the danger of material shortages that might result, they're not talkin'bout nitrogen.

Although this is essentially a phenomenological correction, it does have some theoretical justification, in a slightly more complicated approximation than that which yields the standard Ebers-Moll equations. If transport across the depletion region is modeled as taking place in two stages, then n = 2 is obtained as a limiting case. Usually the two theoretical approximations serve as bounds on the empirical fit: the nonideality factor lies between 1 and 2. For good Si devices, n in the range of 1.1-1.3 provides a good fit for high voltages, and 1.6-1.8 fits well for low voltages. (The transition between these regions is moderately sharp -- taking place over less than half a volt around 0.65 V -- so there are regions where constant-n is a useful approximation.)

Schottky barrier diodes with low-to-moderate doping, dominated by majority-carrier conduction, are nearly ideal (1 < n < 1.03). Space-charge layer recombination (essentially the ``more complicated'' mechanism described above) and hole injection from the metal can both increase n. Interfacial effects and other cruddy parasitic stuff can also raise n.

The large-n limit is ohmic behavior. As the doping on the semiconductor side of a Schottky is increased and the space-charge layer correspondingly shortened, quantum tunneling comes into play and is said to raise n. This is not so mysterious: a highly-doped Schottky (i.e., a metal contact to highly-doped semiconductor) is simply (precious word, that) an ohmic contact.

See also A and A₀.

Until well into the twentieth century, calculations used Loschmidt's number instead, to get around the fact that the atomic hypothesis was not universally agreed to have been conclusively demonstrated.

You'd suppose the adjective form corresponding to Namibia would be Namibian. But FWIW, they have a bi-weekly (issues on Tuesdays and Fridays) Afrikaans-English newspaper, based in Walvis Bay, called the Namib Times. It was founded by Paul Vincent in 1958 as a bi-weekly trilingual newspaper. He sold it in 2002 when his health started failing. At the time of his death in 2004 it was the country's second-oldest newspaper.

In chapter 5 of William Cobbett (1925), G.K. Chesterton makes an observation about NA that it was very characteristic of him to make:

We should think it rather odd if a profiteer had a country house that was called The Cathedral. We might think it strange if a stockbroker had built a villa and habitually referred to it as a church. But we can hardly see the preposterous profanity by which one chance rich man after another has been able to commandeer or purchase a house which he still calls an Abbey. It is precisely as if he had gone to live in the parish church; had breakfasted on the altar, or cleaned his teeth in the font. That is the short and sharp summary of what has happened in English history; but few can get it thus foreshortened or in any such sharp outline. ... The romantic reactionary at the end of the eighteenth century might not often find the Bad Baronet in a castle, but might really find him in an abbey. The most attractive of all such reactionaries, Miss Catherine Morland, was not altogether disappointed in her search for the Mysteries of Udolpho. She knew at least that General Tilney lived in an abbey; though even she could hardly have mistaken General Tilney for an abbot. Nor was she wrong in supposing that a crime had been committed by that gentleman in Northanger Abbey. His crime was not being an abbot. But Jane Austen, who had so piercing a penetration of the shams of her own age, had had a little too much genteel education to penetrate the shams of history. Despite the perverse humour of her juvenile History of England, despite her spirited sympathy with Mary Stuart, she could not be expected to see the truth about the Tudor transition. In these matters she had begun with books, and could not be expected to read what is written in mere buildings and big monuments. She was educated, and had not the luck to be self-educated like Cobbett. The comparison is not so incongruous as it may seem. They were the four sharpest eyes that God had given to the England of that time; but two of them were turned inward into the home, and two were looking out of the window. I wish I could think that they ever met.

(To ``look badly'' is not a comment on visual acuity but an expression meaning to ``look bad.'' It seemed to be common back in the 1960's and 70's, mostly among the frail elderly. Presumably it was an overcorrection among those who'd been taught that verbs are modified by adverbs, without recognizing the accepted exception of copula and seem-type verbs. Other common expressions of this sort were ``look poorly'' and ``feel badly'' (i.e., feel sympathy or guilt). Of course, the -ly was added by these kindly elderly folk because they knew that the -ly changes adjectives into adverbs.)

a*pha*sia (uh-fay'-zhuh) n. An impairment of the ability to use or comprehend words, usually acquired as a result of a stroke or other brain injury.

See also Alicia Courville's Speech Disorders page.

Related useless entry: AA for Academy of Aphasia.

At its annual convention in 2007, the NAACP held a mock funeral to ``bury the N-word.'' The mock funeral was itself mocked as a sign of the NAACP's irrelevance and miredness in the past. That year also, the NAACP cut a third of its staff to close a $3 million budget deficit.

The usenet newsgroups soc.support.fat-acceptance and alt.support.big-folks have lots of FAQ material.

``NAASO, The Obesity Society is the leading scientific society dedicated to the study of obesity. Since 1982 NAASO has been committed to encouraging research on the causes and treatment of obesity, and to keeping the medical community and public informed of new advances.''

NABC's, still often informally called ``Nationals'' even by many Canadians, are held thrice annually. They're called the Spring, Summer, and Fall NABC's, and they open in March, late July, and late November -- at different cities in the US and Canada. The 2006 NABC's were successively in Dallas, Chicago, and Honolulu. This list illustrates two decided tendencies in the siting that are apparent from the venues for 1997 to 2012:

1. The ``Spring'' NABC (sometimes technically in late Winter) is generally in an inland city. (Vancouver, in 1999, was the only solid exception.)
2. Every year since 2006, and infrequently before then, the Fall championship has been scheduled for a major city that is (a) a seaport or (b) close to Disney World (which is on Seven Seas Lagoon).

The main sessions of play (afternoon and evening) usually run 10 days, from a Friday until the second following Sunday. In addition to the major championships that give the tournament its name, lesser games are offered that are suitable for all levels of player; there are morning and midnight games for those who want even more. Consequently, these are the largest bridge tournaments anywhere, except for those involving simultaneous play at many sites.

The twenty-first was held in Lowell, Massachusetts, July 6-8, 2001.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put into orbit the world's first artificial satellite. It was an 83.6-kg (186-lb.) metal sphere named Sputnik (Russian for `traveler'). Apart from going around the planet once every ninety-six minutes, it performed only two memorable actions: send out a lonely-toy beep, and send the West into a hysterical panic.

On October 1, 1958, NACA was succeeded by NASA.

It is probably fair to mention, in advance of further details, that the US space program suffered a number of embarrassing failures between those Octobers, but that they were the failures not of NACA but of the unprepared Navy program initially selected to carry out the effort.

The same word functions as a postposition meaning something like `according to [the object of the postposition].' See m.A.n. for an example.

Shows how much they know. Ask any advertising professional: image is everything.

That reminds me, in the Summer of 2005, the Royal Shakespeare Company is touring with Euripides' Hecuba. They're doing an English version by the poet Tony Harrison. Vanessa Redgrave stars. The last offering in a season of tragic plays, it should have been the climax. Reviews have been tepid. I'm not surprised. In this self-absorbed century, people -- even actors -- have a very selective ability to empathize.

NACUFS sponsors an annual ``National Culinary Challenge,'' and the winners receive American Culinary Federation medals. The six finalists are required to prepare four portions of an original hot entrée, with side dishes and sauces to balance the plate so that the center of mass is within one centimeter of the center. Okay, I added the words after ``plate.'' Contestants (``culinarians'') have seventy-five minutes to prepare the meal and present it to a panel of ACF judges. In the 2005 competition, it had to include lamb.

What, no ``other''? So narcotics are not dangerous drugs? That explains a lot.

In 2006, not even 80 months after the NCC co-membership decision, headlines read ``Rev. Ted Haggard leaves National Association of Evangelicals after male escort claims he paid him for sex for three years.'' Now, without reading the sordid article accompanying this headline, I can hazard a guess who was the ``he'' that paid, and who the ``him'' that got paid. (``Allegedly''! ``Allegedly''!) But it's not as clear as it would be if they were of different sexes. Things would be a lot clearer 99% of the time if we simply assigned everyone randomly at birth to one of 100 distinct grammatical genders, and referred to them by 100 corresponding distingishable third-person singular personal pronouns. Slime molds do something like that.

Sponsored jointly by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS).

``NAECON is the premier national forum for the exchange of specialized aerospace electronics and related information. It includes a strong technical program featuring high-quality papers and tutorials, extensive exhibits of the latest technology and applications, and discussions of the latest trends in the area. The theme of this year's conference is `Technology --A Bridge to the Future' [some people think that just because the president of the US uses a meaningless phrase, it's eloquent] and emphasis will be placed on technology development and application of new technologies. NAECON should be of interest to all military, commercial, and academic members of the aerospace and electronic community.''

There are, first of all, methodological questions. A school's participation in the NAEP is voluntary, and half the schools selected to participate choose not to. In other words, what we know about the participating schools is that they were in the half of schools, roughly, that chose to participate. After you've controlled for the controllable factors like SES (socio-economic status), race, etc., you still have a skewed sample. If you try to compare poor districts with rich, for example, on the ``low-SES'' side of the comparison you probably have a relatively small fraction of schools whose administrators for some reason feel confident or competent enough to allow participation. On the ``high-SES'' side, you probably have a more representative sampling of rich districts. Thus, you compare best-of-the-worst, putatively, with typical-of-the-best. In effect, you weaken the apparent or poorly ``measured'' effect of all factors that really are effective.

There are also political reasons to be wary of NAEP data. Here, for example, is a footnote (#73, p. 219) from a chapter in The Black-White Test Score Gap ed. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Pr., 1998). The chapter (6) is ``Why Did the Black-White Score Gap Narrow in the 1970's and 1980s?''

Dramatic changes starting in one particular year also raise the possibility that changes in sampling procedures or participation rates could be distorting results. One conceivable ``explanation'' of the trend data is that black adolescents' scores are overestimated in 1988 for some reason. When the 1986 NAEP results for reading looked inexplicably low, the Department of Education suppressed them, even though focused investigations never found methodological problems that might explain the decline. The 1988 scores for black 17-year-old students look abnormally high, and the black reading decline after 1988 would be negligible if this single data point were eliminated. However, this is not true for thirteen-year-olds, whose reading scores show a steady decline after 1988. Errors that affect only blacks and not whites in 1988, affect blacks of all ages in 1988, and affect black thirteen-year-olds after 1988 appear unlikely.

(My emphasis.)

Here are some excerpts from a Heritage Foundation Report entitled Critical Issues: A New Agenda for Education, ch 3 ``The Growth of the Federal Role in Education,'' by Eileen M. Gardner. The relevant text concerns programs under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Title I provides federal aid to counties for compensatory (remedial) education for educationally disadvantaged students from low-income families. Gardner writes:

Studies assessing the effectiveness of Title I consistently have shown that the goal of the program has never been achieved. Yet Congress steadfastly has resisted efforts to eliminate it. By 1969, however, clear signals were reaching Capitol Hill that Title I was failing to live up to its expectations. Results of congressionally mandated evaluations showed that federal budget officials did not view the program as cost effective; educators complained of red tape, excessive regulations, and unwieldy bureaucracy; and parents of eligible children complained they saw little change in the quality of their children's education. Most telling, perhaps, the achievement test scores of the children served were not significantly better than their non-Title I counterparts. The small improvements they did make proved temporary.

She cites some of the research supporting her claims, and continues (I don't know quote how archly or facetiously the word ``oddly'' is meant)

Oddly, these data had no noticeable effect on Congress's views of the program. High levels of funding continued. In fact, by the early 1980s, public policy was forcing researchers to distort data. A prime example is a 1982 report by the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)⁹ on the reading, science, and mathematics performance of American youth during the 1970s. No grade levels were given; no standardized tests were used. Performance on subjective ``exercises'' created by ``specialists'' determined ``achievement classes.'' ``Lowest'' and ``highest'' were insufficiently defined. No objective criteria for reclassification from one group to another were given. Vague data for Title I eligible schools were given, but Title I students were not identified.

[Ftnt. 9: ``Reading, Science and Mathematics Trends: A Closer Look,'' National Assessment of Education Progress, December 1982.]

Contradictions were unclarified. On the one hand, students within Title I eligible schools were reported to have increased their representation in mathematics and science in the highest achievement class at age nine and to have decreased their representation in the lowest achieving math class at age seventeen. However, a separate chart dividing groups into lowest and highest achievers showed that the lowest achievers at ages nine and thirteen significantly improved in reading but made no significant progress in math (nine and thirteen) and science (nine). At seventeen, the lowest achievers had declined in math, as well as reading, and had made no progress in science.

Uh-ohhh: It looks like I missed a period! What will I do!?!?

Among Union opponents: ``No American Factories Turning out Anything.'' (``American'' here used in the sense of US.) In Spanish, TLCAN.

A jealous protectionism of jobs unites all nations. Under (US) federal law, a work visa cannot be issued until it is certified, in this case by a state's Labor Department, that no American is willing to take the job. Thus, when a nightclub in Stuart, Florida wanted to hire a foreigner for an $11/hour job as an exotic dancer, it had to place an ad asking prospective US applicants to send a résumé to the Bureau of Workforce Program Support at the state's Department of Labor. (The ad appeared the week of April 11, 1999; it ran in the Palm Beach Post.)

Paid a wage up front to dance?

Is the state of Florida qualified to make this certification? My friend Mike, a solid-state physicist, had a job bartending nights at a club in Maryland. The proprietor explained to him how to decide whether a girl was a good dancer: If people bought beer, she was a good dancer. [Girl is a technical term here, okay? A term of art. I've been in a bar where the dancing girls happened to be male, although they didn't seem to be. You gotta be careful, you never know what you'll pick up.]

A concern for the AFL-CIO: there are more cheap-labor countries on the mainland of North America (N. Amer., q.v.). Good news for the AFL-CIO: NAFTA will not be expanded! Bad news: FTAA.

I guess they noticed that the letter sequence N - A - G has poor associations. Their logo just has ``GWS.''

1 Heath Square, Boltro Road, Haywards Heath, RH16 1BL. Cf. NUT.

To be head, or naht to be head -- that is the question.

British `head teacher' is American ``school principal.''

The District of Columbia and about three-quarters of the states have an affiliated organization. Some of the state organizations (Iowa, Louisiana, Washington, and Wisconsin) have names of the form <State Name> Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Unfortunately, there is only one NAICU member school in Hawaii (Chaminade).

The word national in the name is now used in the common sense of international. There are member companies in Australia, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Germany, Guam, Ireland, Singapore, the UK, and in the US, where the organization was founded.

I can't decide whether this entry should end on the line ``if you keep on doing that you're going to go blind!'' or some other.

``No.''

In digital communication, a NAK is a way to indicate that an expected data packet was not received within an expected time, or that it was found to be corrupt (typically because a checksum didn't check out). A NAK is effectively a retransmission request, like ``Wie bitte?'' NAK has been verbed; to NAK is to send a NAK. The use of NAK and ``negative acknowledge'' has led to the retronym ``positive acknowledge.''

Allied Van Lines does long-haul OTR moving, but that doesn't seem to have anything do to with NALLA. Oh, well. I was just trying to be helpful.

Oh, alright, technically, it was created to find a third way, not aligning with either of the two post-WWII power blocs (US and USSR). Sure. The locus classicus of the ``moral equivalence'' fallacy. [To be excruciatingly fair, Yugoslavia, China, and Albania did follow alternate paths toward the end of socialism, independent and opposed to the USSR.]

With the end of the Cold War and with emergence of some NAM members from poverty (typically through exploitation of their resources by the West), the pretense that this organization has unity or meaningful purpose is often threadbare, but it must continue to exist (this is a universal law of C. Northcote Parkinson). In service of its continued existence, it continues to achieve prodigies of hypocrisy. Perhaps that is its purpose.

You can read online an address by the Prime Minister of India at the XII NAM Summit at Durban on 3 September 1998. About half of the speech is devoted to the issue of rolling back nuclear proliferation. The position is very easy to understand if you simply understand that there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are all the countries that have nuclear weapons, and nothing that the bad guys do is ever even remotely progressive. The good guys are the countries that are working so hard to ban the bomb. Most of the good guys have no nukes, but some, like, uh, India, have tested peaceful nuclear devices. India is still with the good guys, though, because India's heart is in the right place. India was forced to develop its peaceful devices by military threats from unnamed neighbors. This is in contrast with the bad guys, who only developed nuclear weapons because they want to destroy the world and harm the environment. Ditto Pakistan. Others coming soon.

There doesn't seem to be an official NAM site. This one from the government of South Africa looks relatively official. Let's try this one for the XIII NAM Summit in early 2003.... Oops: ``[an error occurred while processing this directive].''

``Covering 49 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, NAMC's membership base includes general contractors, subcontractors, construction managers, manufacturers, suppliers, local minority contractor associations, state and local governmental organizations, attorneys, accountants, and other professionals.'' Organizational funding comes from membership dues, federal and state government grants, and private-sector grants and contributions.

I wonder if Vermont is the state where they have no members. In the last debate among Democratic Presidential aspirants before the Iowa Caucuses in 2004, Rev. Al Sharpton sharply criticized former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for not having any blacks in high positions in his administrations in Montpelier. (I forget the wording.) Former Senator Carol Moseley Brown, who was in the presidential race just to rehabilitate her reputation, defended Dean against Sharpton. In the aftermath of this debate, Sharpton's poll numbers plummeted from 1% to 0.1%. Moseley Brown dropped out of the race, mission accomplished, throwing her support to Dean. Dean's poll numbers slid, and he fell from front-runner to a disappointing third-place finish.

Afterwards, Dean gave a rousing, animated we-will-not-give-up speech to his supporters and campaign workers. The speech was televised, and apparently people over the age of about 25 thought it was a little too animated. He didn't look presidential enough. Throughout 2003, the man looked like he was ready to burst with anger at George W. Bush, and now they notice that he's emotional? What a bunch of uptight honkies. The next week, there was a debate ahead of the New Hampshire primary. Dean actually felt it necessary to spin his performance in that televised pep talk, implying none too subtly that he'd been condescending to his young supporters. Sharpton was consoling, pointing out that if he (Sharpton) had spent the money Dean had spent, and gotten 18% of the vote, he would still be in Iowa celebrating. Apparently some candidates are in the race only to place or show. After the debate, Dean's poll numbers began to rally from his post-Iowa low, but Sharpton's soared immediately, from the neighborhood of 0.1% to the threshold of those heady single-digit heights. With just another factor-of-ten bump, Sharpton could be a contender for third place. See the MOE entry for an explanation of why these numbers are meaningful.

Seriously, Dean needs to find out about fitted shirts. For any given sleeve or chest size, these are available in a number of different neck sizes. Here's a picture of an angry Howard Dean pointing his finger:

Wait a second. That's Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli PM and current (2004) finance minister, angrily pointing his finger. Here's a picture of Howard Dean angrily pointing his finger:

``All I want to know is, What's the name of the guy on second?''

``That's right!''

Are you nuts? Good, then visit our majorette entry.

The association was formed on the 6th of January 2002. This new association was born out of the desire for an association for majorettes that would give a broad range of events at regional competitions with qualified judges and also the opportunity of representing England at European and World Majorette Championships, and at the same time keeping their identity as majorettes. At the end of each competition year we hold our National Championships from which we select the England Team for that year.

Name [sic] is affiliated to the National Baton Twirling Association under whose umbrella we are able to take part in the European and World competitions.

NAME's webpages are on N.B.T.A. England's site, but they appear to be somewhat distinct organizations, just as baton twirling and, uh, majoretting appear to be somewhat distinct activities.

Biological twinning is something that normally has to be arranged before birth -- usually in the first couple of days after conception, in fact. Name twins can be made at any time, by marriage and other mechanisms. Jeff Gillooly, husband (1990-1993) and partner in crime of Tonya Harding, changed his name to Jeff Stone in 1995, over the in-court protests of many of the people whose name twin he became.

Usually, this kind of blend is made possible by the fact that past participles of -ar verbs like amar (`to love') take an -ado ending, while other (-er, -ir) verbs take an -ido ending. In this case, however, the situation is a little bit different. The noun marido comes from the Latin adjective maritus. (Yes, it's ``maritus, a, um.'' The neuter form maritum is necessary for the sense of `paired, closely joined.') Anyway, there was a Latin verb maritare which was derived from the adjective, rather than the other way around. Portuguese also has the derived verb maridar, though it is much less used than various synonyms like casar. (Regarding this interesting word, see this CASA entry.) Very rare is the verb's past participle (p.p.) maridado (Latin maritatus).

The verb morrer (`to die') has both a regular and an irregular p.p. form, roughly like English `die.' In a decent approximation, one may say that the regular and irregular forms correspond: regular morrido with `died,' and irregular morto with `dead.' Portuguese also has words na (a preposition contraction meaning `in the' and a personal pronoun), but it's syntactically difficult to arrange a na morrido collocation to pun on namorido. Namorido still sounds kinda pungent, but then, slang is supposed to. I propose namorto for whatever semantic opportunities may befall.

As I've been writing and researching this (sure, in that order), I've found the the comparison of Portuguese and Spanish enlightening, or somewhat instructive, or at least, well, never mind, it's going in.

The Spanish congener of Portuguese namorado is enamorado, but it is rather more marked and dramatic than `boyfriend.' It's more like `enamoured one' in English. Naturally, then, enamorido (analogue of Port. namorido) would not be a very compelling neologism. Just last January, Laura mentioned a term that now fills that semantic slot in Argentina, but I forgot it. Sorry. The word na is only an archaicism in Spanish, derived from the even more archaic enna for en la, corresponding to the modern Portuguese contraction na.

Except for those referring to words beginning in n, all of this entry's statements about Portuguese also apply to Spanish, with the following adjustments:

1. There are various slight pronunciation differences of the words spelled identically in the two languages. Most have to do with vowel qualities. The greatest difference is that the d in Portuguese sounds like an English d, whereas the Spanish d (in all contexts above) is pronounced like the voiced th in English them.
   
   
2. Maridado in Spanish is merely quite rare, rather than very rare. Sounds like meat, I know. The vocable tends to be used in food discussions, in the somewhat bian sense of `accompanied' (fancy fast food: ``fish accompanied by chips''). The gastronomical sense also occurs (but is very rare, of course) in Portuguese.
   
   
3. There are slight and increasing differences between the use of morrer in Portuguese and its congener morir in Spanish. The spelling difference represents a phonemic difference, and the r and rr of standard Portuguese correspond reasonably closely to the r and rr of Spanish. However, so far as I know, not being able to pronounce the rr properly (r is easy) is generally regarded as a speech defect throughout the Spanish-speaking world, whereas there are places in Brazil where the distinction is muted and in some contexts disappears.
   
   Like Portuguese, Spanish has two past participles for this verb. They are morido (for Port. morrido) and muerto (for morto). In Spanish, however, the use of morido has been steadily losing ground to muerto, so that now muerto is used in constructing all analytic conjugations. (This is especially so, that I know of, in Argentina.) A somewhat similar situation within English is that of some old adjectives like brazen, flaxen, leaden, leathern, and silvern. These special adjectives have largely given way to the attributive use of the corresponding nouns brass, flax, (do you even know what that is?) lead [the metallic kind], etc. (Of course, brazen survives in its transferred sense.) Other such adjectives -- golden and wooden spring to mind -- have fared better. So morido vs. morrido. So it goes. In functional terms, verbs make a closer analogy (lit/lighted). In some cases in English, strong forms are displacing the more modern weak forms. Don't tell me ``that makes sense.''
   
   

The irregularity of Port. morrer (and Span. morir) has a simple cause, somewhat similar to the cause of the oddity associated with maridar. In all these, an original Latin adjective was carried forward into Romance along with a verb from which it was not derived. At all stages of evolution, the verb also had a regularly derived p.p., which could be used as part of an analytic verb conjugation or as an adjective. (A little useful terminology: a verb form (normally a participle) used as an adjective is called a gerundive, just as a verb form (also normally a participle) used as a noun is called a gerund.)

In the etymology of marido and maridar, a Latin adjective maritus gave rise to a verb maritare. In the case of morto and muerto, the adjective and irregular p.p. is derived from the Latin adjective mortuus, which is in fact a regularly formed p.p. of the Latin verb morior. This is, however, a deponent verb. (Cue disquieting drumroll.) The verbs of modern Romance languages all use verbs that function more or less like active (i.e., nondeponent) verbs in Latin. (Cue disquieting sound effects.) Something had to happen, and something did, but different things in Portuguese and Spanish. The Spanish verb morir, like most cognate verbs in Romance languages, is derived from the Vulgar Latin active verb morire. (Cue monkeys.) A small number of Romance varieties constructed an active verb from moririor. The latter was an alternative form of the deponent, archaic but well-attested, that disappeared in the classical Latin of Rome; it evidently persisted in places. It is presumed that the rr in Portuguese morrer arose from collapse of the unstressed syllable -rir-.

This entry is what Wikipedia would call a stub, the sort of thing that painfully ambushes your toe. It's a twisted stub, and one day when I want to put off grading again I'll extricate the mori- material and create a new entry. Maybe by then I'll have some idea how moririor, a third-conjugation verb like morior (I think), gave rise to -er verbs in Portuguese and some obscure dialects.

I'll be sure to note that morto and muerto, in the respective languages, function as irregular p.pp. of matar -- yes, matar, `to kill,' as in matador. In Spanish, for example, instead of saying that a man was ``matado por la justicia,'' (`killed by [the legal instrumentalities of] justice') you say he was ``muerto por la justicia'' (`dead by justice' -- a marked construction, somewhat like our `put to death'). Imagine: we still don't have a defective-verbs entry!

Exactly how the semantic load is distributed between the regular and highly irregular participles of matar and cognates, however, varies a great deal. It is intriguing that Basque has a complete identity between matar and morir: its verb hil means both `to die' and `to kill.' ``Hil da'' means `he is dead,' while ``hil du'' means `he has killed.' Du and da mean `he has' and `he is,' resp. They are the respective forms of ukan and izan, as an atheist God is my witless, er, witness. These are the auxiliaries of all transitive and intransitive verbs, respectively, even if the transitive verb (like kill) doesn't happen to be taking an explicit target at the time. I'm dying; take me to the Camptown Races. (For enlightenment, see this DD entry.)

Incidentally, although it's not obvious from the orthography, the Portuguese verb morrer is a stem-changing verb like Spanish morir: the normally close o changes to an open o in the third person and the second-person singular of the present indicative. Something happens in the imperative too. The stem change is more extensive in the conjugation of Spanish morir, but apart from the stem change and the past participle, the verbs are basically regular. You wanted to know.

When all that's out, there'll be plenty of space to talk about Italian inamorata and the fact that wife in Portuguese and Spanish is not marida but esposa (that's right: `female spouse').

NANDA also designates a general-purpose taxonomy of nursing diagnostic terminology. There are a bunch of these ``standardized nursing languages.''

It's virtually impossible to pronounce NANP so it sounds different from NAMP. NANP is administered by ...

You also want to celebrate International Orthopaedic Nurses Day! Hey -- any excuse for a party. Just don't throw your back out.

• Chicago
• New York
• San Francisco
• DC (``MAE East'')

Keynote, which monitors ISP performance, finds that they are a major bottleneck.

Minor leagues were classified into A, B, C, and D levels from 1902 to 1911. A top level of Double-A (or AA) was added in 1912, and a level A1 was inserted between A and AA in 1936. In 1946, the top two levels were renamed: A1 became AA and AA became Triple-A (a/k/a AAA).

There was also one league that was Class E for one year: the Twin Ports League in 1943, discussed at the Class E baseball entry.

The lower classifications B, C, and D were eliminated after 1962. Since 1963, the lowest classification has been Rookie League. There are also Winter Leagues (a generic term for leagues that play in the off-season; their names usually include ``Winter League'' or ``Fall League'').

Remember: for hog accessories, NAPPA; for hogg accessories, NAPA.

Hmm. It seems to have been a consistent spelling error by their original homepage wizard. It's ``Patristics'' after all.

Oh yeah, ``The North American Patristics Society is an organization dedicated to the study of the history and theology of early Christianity.'' They publish The Journal of Early Christian Studies.

NAPS used to hold a members-only session at the annual APS, but in 1980 they went off on their own, and today (2004) they hold an annual meeting in Chicago in May.

That name turned out to be a foe paw, I think it's called. In particular, the word abortion doesn't have very positive associations, so those who favor it also favor a circumlocution when one is possible. ``Choice'' is the choice euphemism, and the right to abort is ``rights of pregnant women.'' Eventually (possibly as late as 2004 or 2005), they sealed the acronym and started going exclusively by ``NARAL - Pro-Choice America.'' This business works in both directions (the anti-abortion side favors ``pro-life,'' since everyone is pro-``pro'' and anti-``anti''), and maybe I'll have more to say about it after I cook up a shibboleth entry. Cf. NRLC.

The original expansion mentions abortion and ``reproductive rights''; I'm not sure what all the other rights are. NARAL has made it clear over the years, however, that it regards as a violation of those rights any law requiring a pregnant minor to have a parent or guardian's approval to have an abortion. NARAL's conception (ooh, sorry) of ``reproductive rights'' seems to include mostly non-reproductive rights.

Back in Argentina in the 1950's, my father worked in management for a conglomerate that had, among its businesses, a very large drug store. There was a strike by unionized employees, which put the pharmacists in a difficult spot. So the pharmacists came to work but stayed out of sight, and management personnel manned the counters. A fellow came in acting somewhat diffident, and didn't make it clear what he wanted. The pharmacist guessed and told my father to ask if the man wanted ``píldoras para bebé'' (`baby pills'). ``¡Para NO bebé!'' came the reply. So my father was instructed to dispense two large enteric-coated pills of ginger extract as an abortifacient.

``Today, regional organizations include not only regional councils of governments--or COGs--but also regional transit, sewer and other public authorities, regional chambers of commerce, regional studies institutes, regional civic organizations, regional faith-based groups and regional leadership forums.''

More at the 0-ary entry.

During the Democratic party's presidential nominating convention in 2000, nominee Albert Gore was suddenly overcome by sexual passion and completely spontaneously decided to give his wife Tipper a long wet movie kiss on prime time television, thus completely inadvertently proving that while his economic program was pure Clinton, he was obviously faithful to his wife (unlike some other people). Al must think that Tipper is quite a number. And Al invented computer functions. He probably also wrote that song about Tipperary. (Sorry. The song just kept going through my mind as I optimized the entry; I had to find some excuse to squeeze it in.)

The Greek root for the number one is hen-. Another song, written by Murray and Weston in 1911, was covered by Herman's Hermits for the US market in 1965. The words came out

I'm Hen-ary the eighth I am
Hen-ary the eighth I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
She's been married seven times before

The aitch is silent. The lead singer Peter Noone -- ``Herman'' -- is a Mancunian half-heartedly faking a Cockney accent. (Incidentally, his surname is pronounced ``noon'' -- a single syllable.)

In Greek (ancient and modern), the aitch sound is not indicated by a separate alphabetic character but by a breathing mark or spiritus placed over an initial vowel. Originally, there was only a rough-breathing mark; the absence of that mark indicated smooth breathing. Later a smooth-breathing mark (an inverted rough-breathing mark) was developed to indicate the same thing. This was not an improvement; the tops of the letters are cluttered enough with tiny illegible accents.

The rough breathing mark can also appear over the rho, where it roughly (sorry again) indicates aspiration. Aspiration on unvoiced plosives is indicated by a change of letter (kappa to chi, pi to phi, tau to theta). In Latin transliteration, all four aspirated consonants have the aspiration indicated by an aitch (rh, ch, ph, th), but initial rough breathing on a vowel is indicated by an initial aitch (as in hero, herpes, etc.). Farsi (the Persian language) also has that distinction in the arr sound, which is often indicated in English transliteration by r versus hr. (With a fricative, the aspiration is more or less simultaneous with other elements of articulation, so it's not surprising that when explicitly indicated, the feature has appeared both before and after the base letter.)

They've been proliferating, diluting their prestige among National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, and an Institute of Medicine. The thin end of the wedge was economists, then other social ``sciences.'' It was downhill from there. The same thing happened with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (IAS). When it was started by the Bambergers, partly as a haven for ``European scientists'' fleeing fascism, it was mostly physicists and mathematicians. Today it's mostly historians and social scientists.

American Studies was established at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) in 1947, the same year that Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave his famous speech (June 5, at Harvard) proposing elements of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan. NASA (the Dutch NASA) was founded in 1977, at a conference at the Agnietenkapel of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Here are some of their tips for not getting taken (from back in 1989, when fraud was not universal).

• The harder a telephone salesperson presses, the wiser it is to resist. If a caller turns abusive, hang up.
• Don't fall for any claims of spectacular rewards or promised ``guarantees'' until you can verify the legitimacy of the deal and have a clear picture of all the risks involved.
• If you can't understand an investment, don't buy it without the counsel of a trusted and knowledgable adviser. [Ah -- there's the rub! Finding an adviser you can trust.]
• Never give your credit-card number to a stranger on the phone. [Uh-oh...]
• Be especially suspicious of propositions involving delayed delivery of the investment in question.
• Likewise, look warily at any deal in which the seller proposes some unusual arrangement to collect your money, such as sending a messenger.

NASCA says it ``is an organisation devoted to areas of science that are otherwise poorly covered.'' It puts one in mind of things better covered, to say nothing of honored, in the breach.

I beg the reader's indulgence, but since I have a NASCAR entry and a Spam entry, I can't resist drawing a connection. In a townhall.com column September 10, 2004, Jonah Goldberg ridiculed US Democratic party presidential candidate John Kerry for slumming, in so many words, like a candidate campaigning for votes:

``Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?'' Kerry asked not too long ago, about as convincingly as a French chef lauding Spam.

The anticipated synergies did not materialize and the business model was abandoned. On January 24, 2002, NASD put the Amex up for sale. I still have to check on the current status of that.

Stocks listed on the NASDAQ are analyzed by the NSG (NASDAQ Stock Guide?) which is not affiliated with NASDAQ.

``Well-prepared, safe, wholesome'' ... this sounds like lunch. How about learned, demanding, effective?

Okaaaay! Well started is half done.

Nash was one of the companies that merged (as part of Nash-Kelvinator) into American Motors (q.v.) in 1954. The Rambler was Nash's most successful line at the time, and much of the early marketing effort of AMC was bent on leveraging the Rambler product and name. They rebadged Ramblers for sale by Hudson dealers in 1954; later the separate marques were dropped and all cars sold by AMC were called Ramblers. That happened in 1958. The same year there was a joke pop song in 1958 about a guy driving a Cadillac (in the 1950's this was a luxury car rather than your grandfather's pimpmobile) and a guy driving a ``little Nash Rambler.'' The story is told from the point of view of the guy in the Cadillac, who describes a race in which the Rambler driver is trying to show him up. The song was ``Beep Beep,'' by The Playmates, and it was on Doctor Demento from time to time. Choose a lyrics page for it from among these.

``America's only private, non-profit, non-partisan resource center made up of the nation's leading experts on social insurance. Both in the United States and abroad, social insurance encompasses broad-based public systems for insuring workers and their families against economic insecurity caused by loss of income from work and the cost of health care.

The Academy's scope includes such social insurance systems as Social Security, Medicare, workers' compensation and unemployment insurance, and related social assistance and private employee benefits.''

It must be frustrating to be an expert in a field where everyone has a politically motivated opinion.

Too long to pronounce as an initialism, but how to pronounce ``LGC''? My best guess at the spoken form, until I am informed otherwise: ``Nasal Gee Cee.''

The article was subtitled ``Results, Implications, and Comparison to Psychologists.'' The first word there reminds me of a comment in an article by one R. Shankar, ``Statistical Mechanics of Random Systems--Exact Results'':

I will mainly be giving results and not many proofs. For those of you who are disappointed by this, I promise a later talk where I will give lots of proofs with no results.

[I have an incomplete citation source for this. I guess it was Ramamurti Shankar of the Yale Physics Dept., on or near page 446 of, I think, ``Disordered Systems'' (that's probably a section title if it's correct) in a 1989 book from IOP Publishing.]

The California Chapter doesn't use a distinctive initialism; they just refer to themselves as ``NASW-California Chater.'' If they used NASWC or something like that, they could have had their own entry in this glossary. See SW entry for related entries. I know two professional social workers. Judging from this experience, the range of intelligence of people in the field is vast.

As of 2004, NATAS is having a hard time figuring out how to make internal hyperlinks that work at the natas.tv site linked at the begining of this entry. They seem to have a number of independent, equally official sites. Try the slow-loading emmyonline.org or natasonline.com instead.

1. American -- as in `National Football League' (NFL).
2. Not American -- as in `National Football Conference' (NFC). Cf. AFC.
3. Canadian -- as in `National Hockey League' (NHL).
4. Of the US and Canada -- as in `National Junior Classical League' (JCL). You actually find some people who think that ``American'' can be used without qualification in Canada to mean ``North American'' or ``Canadian and/or of the US'' or some such. That might be logical, but it might also be inconvenient. Anyway, it doesn't work that way, other than in proper nouns for continental (or so) organizations.
5. Any-old-countrian -- as in the 100+ `National Contract Bridge Organizations' members of the WBF (details here), which is to say
6. International -- as in NAID or NWR.
7. Quondam country (adj.) -- as in TNN.
8. Of England and Wales (but not all of Great Britain, let alone the UK) -- as in NUT. London-born Kingsley Amis went to live in South Wales in 1948 (he got a teaching position at the University of Wales, Swansea), and he commented in his Memoirs that people there then made no distinction between England and Wales. They thought of themselves as living in England. (And presumably they used ``Englishman'' as a synonym of Briton, q.v.) These people spoke no or little Welsh, and many of them had short histories in the place. Amis noted that the culture was different further north and (of course) in rural areas, though I don't recall any comment specifically regarding the senses of ``England'' and ``English'' there.

A ``national of'' some country is a citizen of that country (not necessarily very carefully construed).

Ireland is predominantly Roman Catholic, and the UK (the union that unionists favor union with) is predominantly, or nominally, or by default or something, Protestant. (Too, the UK monarch has something to do with the state church, which is Protestant.) It happens that many of the Irish leaders in Ireland's struggle for independence from the UK were Protestant. Be that as it may, the partition of Ireland was approximately along religious lines. The parts of Northern Ireland where nationalist parties poll well are predominantly Catholic, and those where unionists poll well are not. In loose but accurate terms, the conflict in Northern Ireland is between religious communities. This is not to say that the conflict in Northern Ireland is about religion per se, any more than the 1960's civil rights struggle in the US was about skin pigmentation per se. Nevertheless, in both cases the grievances, perceptions, goals, etc., are strongly correlated with social identity, broadly defined. However, in the last few days I've added a couple of potentially inflammatory entries. (Ha! Try to find them!) Thus, like the news media, I will prefer to ignore the religious subtext and write as if the N.I. conflict were some sort of unmotivated abstract dispute about value-neutral national alliances.

Specifically, the plan called for the ``observance of Presidents' Day on the 3rd Monday in February, Memorial Day on the 4th Monday in May, Independence Day on the 1st Monday in July, and Thanksgiving Day on the 4th Monday in November.'' Bossemeyer claimed that ``[t]he plan has drawn enthusiastic support from the majority of individuals to whom it has been adequately explained.'' The individuals who did not support it were evidently deemed not to have suffered an adequate explanation (see educate people).

I just picked up a copy of NATO: A Bleak Picture (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), by S. Vladimirov and L. Teplov. (The translator is not named. I detect a pattern here; read about Trotsky's book.) Concluding the introduction, at p. 25 they explain:

  The aim of this book is to reveal the true nature of the North Atlantic bloc--from the time it was set up to the present day--to demonstrate both the futility and the dangerous nature of its activities. The book also outlines a broad programme of measures which are the only alternative to NATO policy.

I'm afraid the arguments are too subtle to summarize.

The earliest sense (judging from a quoted instance dating to 1581) given by the OED is that of ``[a]n expert in or student of natural science; a natural philosopher, a scientist,'' marked as obsolete. I first encountered this in the ``Historical Introduction'' at the beginning of A.E.H. Love's A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of Elasticity. On page 4 of the fourth edition (1934) there is this paragraph (of which only the part up to the word ``besides'' is relevant to this entry):

  Except Coulomb's, the most important work of the period for the general mathematical theory is the physical discussion of elasticity by Thomas Young. This naturalist (to adopt Lord Kelvin's name for students of natural science) besides defining his modulus of elasticity, was the first to consider shear as an elastic strain¹³. He called it ``detrusion,'' and noticed that the elastic resistance of a body to shear, and its resistance to extension or contraction, are in general different; but he did not introduce a distinct modulus of rigidity to express resistance to shear. He defined ``the modulus of elasticity of a substance¹⁴'' as ``a column of the same substance capable of producing a pressure on its base which is to the weight causing a certain degree of compression, as the length of the substance is to the diminution of its length.'' What we now call ``Young's modulus'' is the weight of this column per unit area of its base. This introduction of a definite physical concept, associated with the coefficient of elasticity which descends, as it were from a clear sky, on the reader of mathematical memoirs, marks an epoch in the history of science.

The OED quotes the second sentence above up to ``besides'' from the first edition (1892), in which Lord Kelvin was identified as Sir William Thomson. [Thomson was made Baron Kelvin, of Largs in the County of Ayr, only in the same year 1892.] The OED does not quote Thomson s.v. Its quotations for this sense of the word are from the years 1581, 1605, 1654, 1686, 1726, 1752 (publ. 1777), 1795, 1813 (publ. 1846), and 1892. It might be that in some conversation with Love, Thomson used the word naturalist in a way that had become rare, and that Love mistook his usage for a neologism. Some word was needed, but during the nineteenth century the word scientist was coined -- probably by Whewell by 1840, though possibly by someone else as early as 1834 -- and quickly became popular. William Whewell was a highly successful neologist.

1. contain soft meat emulsions during extrusion,
2. act as a barrier to oxidation, and
3. restrain fat leakage.

``A typical formulation for the emulsion [is] 120 lb. chuck tenders, 60 lb navels, 1.7 kg salt, 1 kg dextrose, 250 g black pepper, 100 g red pepper, 90 g mustard, 90 g coriander, 70 g nutmeg, 50 g garlic, 100 g curing mixture, and 100 g starter culture.'' Double-plus yummy. (But it needs way more spices.) ``The emulsion is placed on an edible collagen film about 1 mil thick, covered with another collagen film, and rolled [I think this means flattened with a roller] to a thickness of about 0.25 inch. The sheet is placed in a smokehouse or drier, and heated initially at a low temperature and high humidity to allow the starter organisms to function.'' What is their function, exactly? ``Eventually, a temperature of 150 °F is put in effect for 30 min. When the moisture content falls below 20%, the sheets are rolled and cut into the shape of candy bars and packed. A smoking step can be applied during drying. It is not clear whether the texture of the finished product is similar to that of a typical jerky.'' It isn't entirely clear why they need much of an ``upper'' layer.

The quotes above (including the metric-transition-era units, and the absence of the word ``cook'') are taken from the chapter 18, ``Meat-Based Snacks,'' of Snack Food Technology by Samuel A. Matz (p. 232; see the snack food entry for bibliographic details). It occurs to me that Metzger is German for `butcher,' and that Metzger and Matz bear as close a relationship to each other as navels and most people's unconsidered notions of meat or even of mats of meat emulsion. Yummy. Evidently, ``navel'' is a sort of meat-industry synecdoche for um, less commercial cuts of carcass.

Currently there's some more navel content in the entry that follows this one, and there likely always will be. There's also a bit at the orbit entry.

This entry is part of the Japanese belly information ring. Next stop: seppuku.

People often become vegetarians for moral reasons (cf. other NAVS). Perhaps you are attracted to moral persons. Alicia Silverstone is a North American and a vegetarian (or maybe a vegan; I'll have to remember to ask her next time I have a chance).

According to Desirable Men, Chapter 27 (``Dating the Second Time Around''), p. 195,

Two basic kinds of salads are available in almost every restaurant: Caesar salads and garden salads.

Further on: ``Hostesses of most restaurants are extremely helpful during off-peak hours. ... You may ask, `What is an easy food item to eat?' ... Be honest and let her know that you will be there on a date and don't want to make a fool out of yourself.'' (This is a juicy morsel of advice-book wisdom, inviting comment, but I'm not going to bite.)

Chapter 24 is ``Graceful Exit Lines.'' Here are a couple from p. 175:

• I'm celibate.
• I need to use the restroom.

(I know the second one worked for Michael Corleone.)

I happen to think that real grace is making ``Mr. Wrong'' think not meeting again was his idea. Here's a graceful exit-stimulation line for that purpose:

• It does no good to put Caesar dressing on the garden salad. Caesar salad dressing has finely divided anchovies.

If that doesn't work, just promise to call.

For more one what to eat and what not to eat on a date, see these entries:

1. Hold the onions.
2. LBI

It's becoming increasingly hard to believe, but the original impulse to create this glossary came from a desire for my microelectronics students to understand those elements of my lectures that might require a level of English fluency not commonly acquired by ESL engineering students. But it's all good: some fraction of engineering graduate students finish up their degrees and, perhaps after a stint as slaves on the fab line to convert their visa status, go on to open a restaurant with the word Tandoori in the name.

It was created by Donald P. Bellisario, creator of JAG, it fills JAG's old time slot, and its main characters were introduced in a special episode of JAG late in the previous season. For people who liked that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they will like. Some fastidious types assert that technically it is not a spin-off because none of the previous season's regular JAG cast got a regular part in Navy NCIS.

I don't know how Donald got the extra el in his name -- the Spanish name is Belisario. I see two possibilities. One is that the name is Italian. More likely, however, is that he was so happy with the first el, he figured he'd go with that and do the same thing again. Go with your strength. Do it again. Like JAG and NCIS, or Navy NCIS.

I think that Bellisario needs to be liberated from the endless cycle of violence investigation. That's my pretext, as they say, for mentioning Polisario, which is also known as the Western Sahara Liberation Front. They've been trying to break into prime-time news since 1975, with little success in the US.

The lead character of JAG is officer Harmon Rabb, former Navy fighter pilot. The lead role in Navy NCIS is a naval officer played by Mark Harmon. It's a good thing we're all so smart, or we'd have trouble keeping the different shows straight.

Where is Old Brunswick?

New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are known as the Maritime Provinces, or the Maritimes. At the time this nomenclature arose, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador could not be included among maritime provinces of Canada because it was not a province but a separate entity (as explained at the NF entry). If you wanted a definition that works today, you could say that the Maritimes are those provinces all of whose territory is within 300 km or 200 mi. of an ocean coast. The Atlantic Provinces (Maritimes plus NL) would have a corresponding definition with 300 mi.

The 6th Annual University of New Brunswick Ancient History Colloquium is scheduled to take place in Fredericton, NB, on 20 March 1999. The conference is entitled: GREEKS ON THE APPIAN WAY: PROGRESS, DECLINE OR STAGNATION. This link is to the first announcement. Further information will appear on the departmental homepage for Classics & Ancient History at UNB.

Other things probably will happen in NB in 1999, but we're pretty selective.

In September 2007, outgoing FAA administrator Marion C. Blakey spoke to a group of aviation executives at the Aero Club. He warned them that ``[a]irline schedules have got to stop being the fodder for late-night monologues. And if the airlines don't address this voluntarily, don't be surprised when the government steps in.'' According to an AP report, the US DoT estimated that only 70% of US flights had arrived on time the previous July. And my mom's flight from Vancouver was delayed by over two hours yesterday, so this is a serious problem that's hitting home! Blakey advocated pissy little steps like transitioning from 1960's-era radar-based air traffic control systems to satellite-based technology. However, this would cost the commercial airlines $15 billion in new equipment (instrumentation, not necessarily new planes) and would cost the FAA itself 15 to 22 billion dollars, and the result -- according to Blakey -- would only be to reduce delays by about 20%, and to reduce noise for 600,000 people. That's 600,000 people net, and there seems to be more resistance from those who would get more noise than push from people who would get less.

David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association (which represents US commercial airlines) had a number of comments in reponse. Among other things, he observed that in 1970, when Congress established the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, there were 2,500 commercial airplanes and 1,800 corporate jets in the US, and that at the end of 2006, 8,000 commercial airplanes and 18,000 corporate planes were operating 40,000 to 50,000 flights per day in US airspace. He also said that commercial jets made up 40% of air traffic in the congested Northeast. In her own remarks, Blakey had commented that corporate aviators should also be prepared to chip in. I'm going by a news report, so I don't know if ``chip in'' were her precise words. I imagine that the cheaepest way to chip in would be to increase spending on Washington lobbyists. What Blakey had in mind was that ``Flying to and from wherever you want whenever you want is not a free utility. You need to expect to pay for it.''

The fall 2003 season was not all that NBC hoped it would be, and less. According to NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker:

Some of our programs just sucked.

(It can't have been the fault of management.)

In 2007, NBC failed to fire William Arkin.

Cf. CBS.

An interesting omission is Belize, which is an independent country. (It is normally regarded as a Caribbean nation, like Trinidad and Tobago, and not as a Central American country. There's some history behind this.) Belize has plenty of bridge players and has had a few local clubs over the years; I suspect they mostly join the ACBL.

Since the 1980's, there have been continuing efforts to reform and improve the quality of teaching in the US. Some reforms are changes in teaching practice dictated by education bureaucrats, about which this glossary entry will be tactfully silent. Some reforms involve increasing remuneration for teachers; it takes special talent to make this idea fail, and -- all other things being equal -- good teaching follows good money.

A very common reform has been to tighten up teacher certification. In principle, this ought to work by providing excluding the least able entrants to the teaching profession or forcing them to improve. In practice, teaching reforms have coincided with a teacher shortage, so that whenever teacher cert has threatened to keep significant numbers of incompetent teachers out of classrooms, states have issued emergency credentials, circumventing the reform. One benefit of teacher testing has been to demonstrate, by the low standards that the tests impose, just how serious the problem is. For references, see

William A. Firestone, S. Rosenblum, B. D. Bader, and Diane Massell, ``Recent Trends in State Education Reform: Assessment and Prospects,'' Teachers College Record, vol. 94, #2 (Winter 1992), p. 254-77.

Diane Massell and Susan Fuhrman, Ten Years of Education Reform: 1983-1993 (New Brunswick, NJ: Consortium for Research in Education, 1994).

NBPTS certification is valid for ten years. Application for certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards requires a $2,000 fee, as of the 1999-2000 school year. That rises to $2,300 beginning in the 2000-2001 school year. Federal funds provide $1,000 toward the application fee for those teachers who complete the process, but not all do. The hoops one is to jump through require 200-400 hours of effort, by estimate of the NBPTS. Many states offer to defray the cost or guarantee wage increments to those successfully certified (NBCT's) and/or those who mentor applicants. The National Education Association (NEA) offers loans as a member benefit for those seeking national certification.

The National Baton Twirling Association is the biggest European Association for twirlers and majorettes. It is dedicated to promoting an interaction between twirling countries. The association aims to encourage active participation in twirling countries in Europe, to strengthen the movement internationally and to stimulate the stage of European and World events. Membership is open to all those countries who have an association and organise their own National Championships. Membership is also open for those countries who want to found an association for twirling and/or majorettes in their country and are looking at the possibility to become members of NBTA-Europe. They can ask NBTA-Europe for help to organise it. The member countries are interested in partaking in high calibre European and/or World Championships. When a country is accepted as a member of NBTA-Europe they are allowed to represent their country under the name of NBTA-(name of the country). NBTA-Europe is member of the Global Association for twirling and majorettes.

Yeah, that does seem to suggest that some people regard twirlers and majorettes as not quite equivalent sets. Let me know when you figure it out.

Various places are generally recognized as the standard-setters for various specialized productions -- particularly food. Virginia is the name to conjure with if you're conjuring glazed ham, Boston is the place for baked scrod, etc. (see the .ca entry for more examples). Boston is also known for well-educated taxi drivers, the same way Bhutan is known for piano players (see the ABPT entry). Haven't you heard this one already? Oh well, for archival purposes, then.

The cabbie picks up a fare at Logan International Airport, and as they're headed for the hotel the passenger asks ``do you know where I can get screwed around here?'' As the driver seems stunned, the passenger continues ``what's the matter, hasn't anybody asked you that before?'' The cabbie replies ``sure, but I never heard the regular form of the past participle before.''

I guess if you got here by following the link from the guitar entry, then the entry so far has been something of a disappointment. I should add something to make it worth your while. I'll point out that music for guitar is written on an ordinary (G-clef, treble-clef) staff, but the pitches represented by notes on the staff are shifted by an octave for convenience.

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

See also the Mo. entry for an interesting folk-etymological connection.

The term doesn't refer to the Jacquard loom, as you might suppose.

NC is understood to exclude computer numerical control (CNC). To the operator, NC and CNC machinery seem much the same: both read a stored program (originally on punched tape, subsequently on magnetic and optical storage media). In NC machinery, the instructions are read and performed directly. In CNC machinery, the program is input to a dedicated computer. CNC machinery may collect data and communicate with other machines and computers over a network.

Whereas law, medicine, and other professions are largely self-regulated (in the US) by organizations of practitioners, the teaching profession (at elementary and secondary levels) is mostly externally regulated, by the states. In most states, licensing requirements for individual teachers are set by state education agencies and state boards of education. Similarly, most states have their own agencies to accredit teacher training institutions, rather than use NCATE.

Note that even when the letter of the law is the same in different states, court interpretation may differ, just as British common law is subject to differing interpretations in the jurisdictions where it holds. Indeed, the accumulated variety in the latter is the reason that the ALI (q.v.) publishes its Restatements.

NCC-1701 was (is, will be, whatever) the Starship Enterprise, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk. James is a gospel and Kirk means church. There's a Captain Kirke in Wilkie Collins's novel No Name. For a little more about Collins, read through the entire long Septimus entry. Hang in there! You're bound to find something.

I haven't sorted out yet whether NCE is a term for any new chemical for which an NCE submission is made to the FDA, or a classification for only those compounds which the FDA has approved for further research. Given the catch-22 logic of the process, it probably is required to mean both.

The exams themselves appear to be rather easy; few will quit working to study for them. In point of fact, passing the test demonstrates the ability to do something right, and secondarily to know which things one is likelier to be able to do right. (I.e., picking the right answer to a question like ``Do eight of the following twenty-four problems.'')

This board certification is of very variable utility. From the point of view of the individual professional, board certification is vital if one wants to put out a shingle and practice as an independent consultant. It is least important for the employee in a corporation, where, depending on the field of engineering concerned, state (or other jurisdiction) requirements can be satisfied by having one PE who can ``sign off'' on work done by a non-PE.

The exams are woefully behind the times, but board accreditation is not very coincidentally unimportant for fields of engineering which are progressing most quickly. A measure of the depth of the mud they stick in, perhaps, is the fact that many of the state boards lack email addresses.

A useful hint fer furriners: G is ``gee,'' J is ``jay.''

• SUNY Buffalo

``Ontology is a fast-growing branch of computer and information science concerned with the development of tools and theories designed to improve the integration and processing of data and information from heterogeneous sources. In response to the needs expressed by a variety of government and industrial bodies, the University at Buffalo and Stanford University have established the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), which is designed to serve as a vehicle to coordinate and enhance ontology research through the establishment and dissemination of best practices in ontology development and use.''

Feynman is sniggering in his grave. After all, it's not his tax money. You can't take it with you.

Sometimes expanded ``National Capitol Planning Commission.'' Its most prominent work has to do with the Capitol Mall in DC. (It seems that the Capitol Mall is officially the National Mall, so it is just the Capitol mall.)

The original cash register was invented by James J. Ritty in 1879. It was not a convenience, but a way to record transactions and foil larcenous bartenders in his Dayton, Ohio saloon. ``Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier'' became the basis of the National Cash Register Company.

George F. Will wrote about this in his 6 April 1989 column. The column is reprinted in Suddenly (Free Press, 1991), pp. 177-9.

There's a US patent #271,363 issued 1883.01.30 to J. Ritty and J. Birch, for a ``Cash Register and Indicator.''

NCR paper was invented at the company that became NCR Corporation. Microencapsulation was first devised in 1950 by Barry Green, a research scientist at the National Cash Register Company's labs in Dayton (see the NCR entry). On June 30, 1953, he and Lowell Schleicher, another NCR researcher, applied for a patent for the microencapsulation system that is used to produce today's carbonless paper.

NCR paper sheets have a standard sequence of colors:

1. white (top sheet)
2. canary
3. pink
4. gold

Here's an article on microencapsulation in general, from Technology Today, Summer 1995.

First funded by NSF in 1985. One of four NSF-funded Supercomputer centers, along with CTC, PSC, and SDSC). Participates with these in MetaCenter.

Generates freeware like NCSA Telnet and Mosaic (the creators of the latter took their degrees and went off to found Netscape). Conducts HPCC research locally. Grants supercomputer cycles to academic researchers.

In the late 80's, when I went to visit a relative living at a senior facility in Nottingham, the NCT driver got out and walked behind the back of the bus to point out exactly where it was. Well, it struck me as unusual.

The NCTE Annual Convention is in November -- every year.

Sponsors NCTE-talk, an electronic mailing list.

The NCTM was founded in 1920 to defend high school mathematics education from educational reformers. The organization's web site fudges this. Here is how their mealy-mouthed ``NCTM at a Glance'' begins:

• Founded in 1920, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is dedicated to improving mathematics teaching and learning from preschool through postsecondary school.

Here is how C. M. Austin, the organization's first president, explained the motivation in Mathematics Teacher, vol. 14 (Jan. 1921), p. 1:

During [the preceding decade] high school mathematics courses have been assailed on every hand. So-called educational reformers have tinkered with the courses, and they, not knowing the subject and its values, in many cases have thrown out mathematics altogether or made it entirely elective.

There's a simple reason why the NCTM fudges its history: the enemy captured the fort.

``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' (2006) is a movie about the movie ratings system overseen by the MPAA. It received a rating of NC-17 because it includes explicit footage from many films that received an NC-17 for sexual content.

Atomic number 60. A Lanthanide (rare earth: RE). There's some relevant historical information at the Di (didymium) entry. 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 North Dakota. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state. You're probably thinking: ``What `city'?''

• There's the relatively unimportant one for the academic institution.
• The ``Unofficial Home of Notre Dame'' is about football by default, but they also do hoops.
• Irish Legends is dedicated to the historical, aesthetic, statistical, and philosophical analysis of this central issue (ND football).
• Blue and Gold Illustrated is ``America's Foremost Authority on Fighting Irish Football.'' Why the geographic qualification?
• IrishLine hosts handicapping and columns.
• The Official Athletic Site of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish is now operated for the university by FANSonly - Your Ticket to College Sports.
• The officially licensed ND merchandise you need in order to breathe in the South Bend area can be found at N.D. Sports. However, the place I hear most frequently recommended for Notre Dame apparel is the Penney's store in the mall located between State Route 23 and Grape Road in Mishawaka (the mall is just south of Cleveland Road where it begins to coincide with SR 23 from the west, and is bounded on the south by the Indiana Toll Road -- I-80/90). On the other hand, if you need a gray tee-shirt that celebrates a particular sport (Notre Dame Baseball, Notre Dame Hockey, Notre Dame Midget Basketball, etc.), a better bet is Hammes, the Notre Dame Bookstore.
• Notre-Dame.com ``is a fans [sic] guide to buying and selling tickets to all Notre Dame Fighting Irish college football games, home and away.'' They seem to be a subsidiary of webtickets.com, a ``private ticket broker.'' I wonder what the technical difference is between a private ticket broker and a ``scalper.''
• The Golden Dome, ``your home for Notre Dame Football'' is apparently put together by Gulf Coast Recruiting Digest, which ``is committed to bringing you the most up-to-date information concerning high school football.''
• The Notre Dame Football site looks quiet, yet it's already August as I type this entry.
• Mike's Notre Dame and College Football page attempts to keep up with the more important ND links among the hundreds not listed here.

When Gilles, visiting the US from France, went to buy a ticket from Boston to South Bend, Indiana, the travel agent gave a knowing smile and said ``ah, football.'' Sure: physicists come from all over the soccer-playing world to South Bend, Indiana, so they can see the Irish play college football. And for kicks, they also take in a computational electronics workshop. I understand that there's a Notre Dame in France too, but that it's not a football powerhouse. (``Hunchback'' -- that must be French for `linebacker.' What does ESPN have to say about this? ``hunchback is not a valid Keyword.'' But ``Harry Potter'' is.)

The full formal name of the university is ``University of Notre Dame du Lac,'' or so I had thought. The university is aggressively beyond the city limits of nearby property-tax-hungry South Bend, and the post office serving the campus uses ``Notre Dame'' like a municipality name. But perhaps this is less of a fiction than I thought. According to the 1922 edition of The New International Encyclopædia (see the education subhead of the Indiana entry, volume 12, p. 94) there were three institutions of higher education under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church at the time: St. Mary's College and Academy for Women, University of Notre Dame at Notre Dame, and St. Meinrad College at St. Meinrad. It begins to look like Notre Dame might be a legitimate place name here. This is important, so I'll have to be sure to sort it out. In fact, it's very important, so I'll have to proceed very carefully and slowly, next year at the earliest (I need to calm down).

Interestingly, their abstract symbol is very similar to the international symbol for biohazard.

	dI
	-- .
	dV

Actually, you may have to do a bit of searching on the site now: ``This website contains the archive of the material of the New Democrat Network, a political action committee from 1996-2002 and a non-federal political committee from 2003-2006. It also contains information from NDN PAC, which was a federal political action committee from 2003-2006. You can visit the New Democrat Network's successor organization, NDN, at www.ndn.org, NDN's think tank for politics, New Politics Institute, at www.newpolitics.net and NDN's Blog at www.ndnblog.org.'' (The quotes are not strict; minor punctuation slips were repaired. Yes, I mention it because it's relevant; sloppy writing, like sloppy dressing, may indicate sloppiness in other things. Also, FWIW, the about page at the NDN site says that ``the New Democrat Network ... operated from 1996 through 2004.'')

In the 1980's, Knisely taught (``worked as a philosopher'') in a public-school program for gifted children in Richmond, Virginia. NDOPA began as a live call-in program on a public-access channel in Richmond. One of Knisely's students, Summer Schultz, originated the show's name. She liked to go barefoot in warm weather, and one day as she was about to enter a 7-11 to buy a Slurpee (a federally noncontrolled addictive substance that is a known risk factor for brainfreeze), she was stopped by a sign that said ``No Dogs or Bare Feet Allowed.'' Unfortunately, this made her think. She reflected on how the great thinkers throughout history had similarly been treated as pariahs. I guess she must have felt pretty strongly about going barefoot.

The NDP was created in a reorganization of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1961.

	dV
	-- .
	dI

Two kinds of NDR have standard names: N-type and S-type. These simply refer to current voltage characteristics (CVC for short) whose shapes resemble the capital block letters N and S, respectively. In N-type NDR, the current rises to a maximum, falls, and then rises again. The current is a function of the voltage, although there is a range of currents for which voltage is undetermined. In S-type NDR, the current is not a function of voltage, but the current is function of voltage. Thus, voltage initially increases with current, then falls, and rises again. Notice that in N-type NDR, the differential resistance stays finite, following a +,0,-,0,+, pattern, while the differential conductance diverges (following a pattern +, +inf., -inf., -, -inf., +inf., +). Notice also that, since CVC refers to the I-V plot, and NDR is a most appropriate measure for V-I plots, it might make more sense to speak of N- and S-type NDC. Setting aside the strictly semantic issue, however, the important consideration for convenience and comprehensibility is whether one can deal with a function or must deal with a mere relation (and with infinite derivatives). For this reason, devices like tunneling diodes, which exhibit N-type NDR, are described by I vs. V graphs, while plasma tubes, which exhibit S-type NDR, are represented with V vs. I plots.

Regions of NDR can be unstable; a device in circuit follows smoothly whatever segment of the CVC it is on, until that segment becomes tangent to the load line (this occurs only in a region of NDR), and then follows another segment of its CVC. (The CVC has an overall positive slope, while the load line has a negative slope. Thus, there is always at least one intersection point -- as is physically reasonable: a solution exists. Also, there will in general be an odd number of intersections, except when the load line is tangent to the CVC. At the point of tangency, a stable point and an unstable point are approaching and in effect annihilating; the number of intersection points is changing by two.)

In N-type NDR, hysteresis loops are followed clockwise; in S-type NDR, counter-clockwise.

High-power 532 nm cw is available commercially in packages where high-power AlGaAs (850 nm) pumps Nd:YAG, and its 1064 nm output is frequency-doubled in an nonlinear optic crystal. Doubled and tripled frequencies are typically used to pump dye lasers. Quadrupled-frequency is also available.

Oh how clever. Like qq in French.

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

That's noble, you letch, not nubile.

The term is used in the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) model for just about any component of a subject telecommunications network, including switching systems, circuits and terminals, other than the TMN itself. They're the things the TMN manages.

There's also a Plymouth that is, or has been, the capital of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, 350 mi. ESE of Puerto Rico. In 1995, the volcano that brought the island into existence came to life itself, and the capital and harbor has had to be abandoned, like more than half of the island.

Expert pet breeders value pure breeds best. But these often fail to thrive, whereas mixed breeds thrive and are popular. The same seems true of words. The fastidious lexicographer might disparage automobile, electrocution, sociology, and television as misbegotten Latin-Greek half-breeds, but it looks like these words will be with us for a while.

NEAR was the ``first low-cost Discovery mission.'' It used COTS components, less-than-optimal reliability, that sort of thing. The risk is that even when low-cost missions are cost-effective, spectacular failures like the Mars lander disappearance will erode public support.

The place that English-speakers are most likely to encounter the word neat in this acception is Shakespeare's ``Julius Caesar,'' in the neat first scene, spoken by one of the mechanical men:

I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork.

Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's matters, but with awl.

The recover wordplay might be difficult to recreate in another language -- German, say. However, the much of the wordplay here turns on the word awl, and the German word for that happens to be its cognate Ahle. German also has alle -- an adverb and indefinite pronoun with uses overlapping those of `every' and (the cognate, of course) `all' in English. So this is a very translatable bit of wordplay. I was curious how it worked out, so I checked all the Germaned Shakespeare I could find in the library. No luck. Here's what I did learn: the first translator of Shakespeare into German was August Wilhelm Schlegel. His translations made Shakespeare very popular in Germany. There have been many translations since then, but Schlegel's are so much the default that I have seen many editions of his translations, at most minimally reworked, that don't even bother to mention his name. It is reported, however, that the Schlegel versions now account for only a minority of German Shakespeare performances. (To be precise, one should note that the task of translating Shakespeare into German was eventually completed by Ludwig Tieck, Tieck's daughter Dorothea, and her husband Graf von Baudissin. But Schlegel did do the Julius Caesar.) I did find some incomplete Shakespeare translations by others, but no Julius Caesar.

I've read differing opinions on the matter, but at least according to some, Schlegel was most accepting of the bard's puns. Certainly in this same scene under discussion here, Schlegel was resourceful. For example, the wordplay between the precise and loose senses of cobbler is fairly reproduced by having the cobbler say that he does patchwork. (``Die Wahrheit zu gestehn, Herr, gegen einen feinen Arbeiter gehalten, mache ich nur, sozusagen, Flickwerk.'') Similarly, the first quoted item above becomes:

Im Ernst, Herr, ich bin ein Wundarzt für alte Schuhe: wenn's gefährlich mit ihnen steht, so mache ich sie wieder heil.

Here the pun on recover is translated with a pun one could imagine the bard himself using in its place: the cobbler makes old shoes whole again. (In German, heil is `unhurt,' cognate with English heal and hale. Also, heil is an old-fashioned way of saying `whole.' It's found in Bible translations, which dates it roughly to Shakespeare's time.) But the bit preceding this, with the awl pun, Schlegel simply skipped. It's just barely possible that Schlegel translated from a version that didn't include that line -- I'll have to look into this.

It turns out that this sense (pure, unadulterated fluid) dates back at least to the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century, according to the OED (June 2005 draft revision), it was extended to mortar -- neat mortar being made from cement and water only, and no sand. In fact, the adjective is widely used for fluids (particularly solvents and polymer resins) in chemistry and in chemical industries. It's a useful word because it doesn't mean quite the same thing as pure or unadulterated. These words are contrasted to impure -- they imply that the adulteration is dirty or generally undesirable. Also, ``impurities'' would generally be present in small quantities at most. Neat does not imply either of these things. It is used in situations where admixture may often be desirable, and in substantial amounts. (It is also used in situations where admixture generally does occur, and gives one a way of emphasizing that one is discussing properties of the pre- or un-mixed fluid.)

The adjectives neat and net are ultimately from the Latin nitidus. The root was widely borrowed from Romance into Germanic languages; in German, nett means `nice' and netto means `net' (the adjective, opposed to brutto, `gross').

The word, however spelled, is fundamentally an interjection, an expression of pity or resignation, as if to say ``oh well, what can you expect?'' It is also used as a dismissive noun, to describe a nullity of a person, someone who can't be expected to amount to anything, someone to be half pitied and half contemned, though there is no suggestion of malign intent.

The esh sound in the English word is an approximation to the ekh sound in the original word, but the esh sound is also common in Yiddish. The people I have known who were native speakers of Yiddish, or of German, Spanish, or any other language with an ekh sound, have tended not only to pronounce the word more correctly but also to use it primarily as an interjection. Those who use the esh pronunciation also use it only as a noun. This gave me the impression, at one point, that there were two words: the noun nebbish and the interjection nebbich. This is almost true, and if the latter pronunciation were able to survive, it might even become true.

Yeah, I'm kidding. But there's nothing really incorrect about the entry, apart from the conceit -- or the variant opinion -- that ``neckware'' is not simply a misspelling of ``neckwear.''

According to an email announcement from the executive director in February 2004, NECTFL is

... a 50-year-old association of language educators at all levels and in all instructional contexts. NECTFL publishes a bi-annual refereed journal and holds a conference every year in the spring. For the next five years, we will be in New York at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. ... About 2,500 people attend the conference, from 40 states and 15 countries around the globe. ...

I put the corrugated-cardboard `sun-shade' in backwards. I always do -- I'm an idiot.

Negative logic is very unusual these days. The choice is essentially arbitrary, but with switching logic rare, the confusion of ``1'' = 0 volts might be decisive. Note that what matters is the relative position of the voltages, not the absolute voltage. Thus, standard ECL, which for noise reasons does use ``1'' = V_CC = 0 volts = ground, is a positive logic because logic ``0'' is at a lower (a negative) voltage. Cf. positive logic.

1. an institute in New England with a very broad mission or
2. an institute dedicated to the study of New England or
3. an institute dedicated to the study of a new England.

In fact, according to its homepage, ``[t]he New England Institute is an initiative ... [much verbiage excised] ... [for] cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.'' I learned about this institute in a conference announcement that began ``[t]he New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology (NEI) invites papers...'' Obviously, the original naming of this institute was highly incompetent.

• From Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady:

  Inwardly vexed, I told him, That he himself had proposed to leave me when I was in town: That I expected he would: And that, when I was known to be absolutely independent, I should consider what to write, and what to do: But that, while he was hanging about me, I neither would nor could.

  [Letter from Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe -- #43 in the first edition (1747-48), #41 in the third (1751). Clarissa is in the you'll-be-sorry-when-I'm-dead novel subgenre. It's another epistolary novel, like Richardson's morally despicable landmark Pamela.]
• From Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), from ch. 37, ``Chesney Wold'':

  And when I had turned, I was in such fear of the coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither would, nor could, do any such thing), that I ran the greater part of the way, to avoid being overtaken.

Here's an atypical one, with the word neither functioning as a pronoun, that might cause the non-native reader some difficulty. From Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), referring to himself and Alger Hiss together in the third person:

Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle.

Incidentally, Virginia Woolf's ``Mrs. Dalloway'' was a Clarissa also. According to the Census of 1990, Clarissa was the 744th most common name for females in the US.

Jules Verne gave the captain of the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (more at the chelys entry) the name Nemo. The motto or something of Scotland is Nemo me impune lacessit.

Has referred, in particular, to the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear blast. A few years and many events ago, in a climate of feeling called the ``Cold War,'' one of the panics of the West was fed by the thought that even a ``small'' nuclear attack might disable defense systems by EMP, and that solid state systems were more vulnerable to EMP than vacuum tube electronics. Fears increased when a North Korean fighter pilot defected to Japan with his plane, of the model called Foxbat in the West. It turned out to have some vacuum tube electronics on board.

Their Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations publishes a Journal of Ancient Civilizations.

My impression from this and one or two other cases is that much of the trade in scholarly journals about classical antiquity is conducted on a barter system -- the classics department or other entity to which the main editor belongs trades free subscriptions to its own journal for free subscriptions to those of other institutions.

I hope that NEPAD is pronounced ``knee pad,'' because it fosters thoughts of the situations, or postures, that require the use of a knee pad.

It was founded (around 1996) because for years, major science advisory organizations kept foreseeing a coming shortage of scientists, yet newly-minted science Ph.D.'s kept seeing a job shortage. I stopped by the website in 2005, and it looks like it's been moribund since 1999. My theory is that this occurred because science Ph.D.'s keep seeing a job shortage.

The word can also be written inscious.

The following is from the second act of Thorton Wilder's play ``The Skin of Our Teeth'' (1942). Antrobus is the inventor of the wheel (Act I), etc.

ANTROBUS: Oh, that's the storm signal. One of those black disks means bad weather; two means storm; three means hurricane; and four means the end of the world.

Later in Wilder's play, unnoticed by anyone but the audience (to the best of my recollection), the storm signal progresses to four discs.

The first time I went to England, I visited London, Cambridge, and Nottingham, in that order. Coming out of the train station at Nottingham, my immediate reaction was ``Oh wow! Life-size!'' (Well, the taxi area was cavernous, but I was not misled.)

Both sides use it to state and sometimes argue for their positions, but rebuttal and refutation seem to be more popular with the right, and meta-analysis more popular with the left. Politically selective match-making sites seem still to be a specialty of the right -- you might argue that it represents a demographic political grand strategy. Organizing and raising money for (immediate) off-net political activities seem to be a specialty of the left. So netroots in practice are usually netroots on the left. Marshall Wittmann, a conservative (Republican) activist in the 1990's and a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council as of 2006, seems to be the one who coined the description ``McGovernites with modems.'' See Kos.

Charlton Rose has made available a tutorial on Netscape Frames.

Progress marches on, but this entry will remain encased in amber.

Any journal which aspires to international standing is well advised to become accessible to a large audience. Even among linguists, the Finnish language is singularly inaccessible, and this journal is published by a Helsinki linguistics society. In consequence, the official title has never been in Finnish. On the other hand, when the journal was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, no one pretending to be a linguist could fail to know German; researchers working in German were probably the largest group of linguistics scholars. So it was very reasonable to name the journal in German. Also, Swedish was a very widely used language in Finland at the time, so Finnish linguists would have found it relatively easy to learn other Germanic languages. In fact, Swedish was at the time a very important language in Finland -- in many respects more important than Finnish. Let's talk about that.

During the height of Viking activity in the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Swedes settled along the southwestern coast of Finland. Starting in the twelfth century, Russia began to be an independent military power, and Finland became a battleground between Russian and Swedish empires. In a series of religious crusades and other wars, Finland came increasingly under Swedish control until, in 1323, the Treaty of Pähkinäsaari established a border between Russian and Swedish spheres of influence. (Separated by a fuzzy line running from the eastern part of the gulf of Finland, through the middle of Karelia and thence northwest to the Gulf of Bothnia -- there, does that help? Any line that manages to separate two spheres, whether of influence or anything else, is bound to fuzzy or otherwise differ in some way from a classical Euclidean line.) Anyway, the Finnish tribes were now all in Swedish territory, and the area that would become Finland was administered by Swedes under a few different kinds of Swedish governments (over time), enforcing Swedish laws. Finland was a rural appendage that Sweden controlled, something vaguely like Ireland to the British Empire. During the height of Swedish imperial power in the seventeenth century, the Finnish upper classes became increasingly integrated into the Swedish kingdom's clerical and governmental classes, and came increasingly to speak Swedish.

Sweden's imperial power declined sharply during Charles XII's reign, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finland became for Sweden a kind of buffer territory. Over the course of various Russian occupations and Swedish-Russian wars in that century, Finnish leaders (i.e., Swedish-speaking officials of the Swedish government, mostly of Finnish origin by the middle of the century) began to see greater benefits as a Russian than as a Swedish frontier province, and thought they might achieve greater local autonomy under Russian domination. (``Finlandization'' is older than you thought.) In 1809, the Finns negotiated a peace with Tsar Alexander I in which Finland became a grand duchy under his throne, with a Russian-chosen administration. Finland prospered and grew under this conservative administration. There's more to know about this, and you can know some of it by reading it elsewhere.

Since this is an entry about a linguistics journal, I'm going to twist this history back around to a discussion of language. The Tsar... Look, I happen to be in the middle of writing this entry. I'm just saving my work so I can go and take a leak. I'll be back before you know it, because I won't save my work again until after I've been back for a while. The main thing is, Swedish was the language of education and the educated classes when the journal was begun, so German and other Germanic languages were natural second languages for the founders of the journal. I think I said something like that before, in the early days of this entry.

So the journal was named in German, and the title was written in a slightly daring irregular font, described immediately below as herausgegeben vom Neuphilologischen Verein in Helsingfors. In subsequent forms, the title page has caused some confusion. (Starting with the 1938 edition, ``Helsingfors'' has been ``Helsinki.'')

The journal got off to a slightly bumpy start. Originally, it was intended to be published in eight issues per year. These were not numbered but dated, the fifteenth of a month. The first year (1899) the issues were dated 15/1 (11 printed pp.), 15/2, 15/3, 15/4, 15/9-15/10, 15/11-15/12. (Except for the first issue, each was 8pp. or, for the double issues, 16 pp.). The second year started with a double-size triple issue 15/1-15/3 (16pp.), then 15/5 (22 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (12 pp.), and 15/11-15/12 (18 pp.). So people got nine issues for their 4 FIM that year (in 68 pp.). This extravagance could not go on, and sure enough, the first issue of the third Jahrgang begins with a letter `To our readers' (An unsere Leser) describing the inauspicious financial circumstances under which the century was beginning; 15/1-15/3/1901 (32 pp.), 15/4-15/5 (36 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (25 pp.), 15/11-15/12 (26 pp.).

When the journal was founded, no educated European could fail to know French, and so the contributions were about equally split between French and German. The following observations about languages occurring in the early issues are based on a quick scan rather than a thorough study. It's not clear whether there was an official policy about languages or just some reasonable expectation. In any case, the first contribution in a third language was an English-language review (by a Swedish-surnamed Finn) of two German English books: Grammatik der englischen Sprache and Lehrbuch der englischen Sprache, pp. 21-22 of the 15/5 issue. Most reviews were in French or German regardless of the language in which the books themselves were written (e.g., Ny-islandsk lyrik, oversoettelser og studier af Olaf Hansen, published in Copenhagen, was reviewed in German), but some of the other English books reviewed got English-language reviews. The fourth language to be used was Danish, in two letters from Karl Verner, published in the 1903 issue of 15/9-15/100 (pp. 91-109 -- page numbering became consecutive through the year after 1902). The first letter is full of linear algebra and seems to have to do with physical rotations by multiples of 15 degrees, and the second is full of drawings of machinery. The issue has a fold-out chart of calculations. It's all about technology for studying phonetics, one century ago.

You get a spooky feeling looking through those early issues. There's a review of yet another new edition of Johann Peter Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, of works by Henry Sweet and Victor Hugo...

The first article other than a book review to appear in English was Anna Bohnhof's lead article in the 15/4-15/5/1903 issue: ``The Mystery of William Shakespeare'' (pp. 39ff). It begins

      In 1848 a certain Mr. J. C. Hart of America threw out some doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays in a book, called The Romance of Yachting, whether in joke or in earnest we do not know. This gave rise to the theory that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. A controversy began, which has lasted until the present day and will last while »good and sound knowledge will putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome and vermiculate questions, which have indeed a quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality», as Bacon says in his Analysis of the Abuses of Learning.

I have reproduced the quotation marks as they appear in this article and in all articles, regardless of language. It's a sickening precursor of the ugly C++ cin usage.

For 1904 they gave up the calendar-date scheme and started numbering the issues. I'm going to have to look more carefully to see if I can find any sign of the revolt in Finland that coincided with the 1905 Russian revolution.

The history of Finland in the twentieth century is reflected rather oddly in this journal. For example, the greatest Finnish upheavals associated with WWI and the Russian revolution were in 1917, yet in 1916 there was no volume, and volume 18 began in 1917 with the following notice (in number 1-4):

A nos lecteurs       Pendant toute l'année 1916, la publication de notre revue a été arbitrairement suspendue. Gràce au nouveau régime qui règne maintenant dans notre pays après le rétablissement de a constitution de la Finlande, nous sommes heureux de pouvoir continuer notre oeuvre modeste dans le domaine de la philologie moderne.
      Mai 1917.

La Rédaction.

I only put this entry in because it caught my eye. If you're not expecting it, even if you're reading about the popular writer Ludwig Fulda (whose only connection with nerve-neuro-anything was that he committed suicide in despair in 1939), you start reading neur... and you expect something like Neuritis or Neurom (`neuroma'). (FWIW, neu Rom is ungrammatical, but das neue Rom is `the new Rome,' an epithet currently applied mostly to the US. ``Das neue ROM'' is the ROM update. ``Der neue Roman'' is `the new novel,' which looks a bit redundant in English. Etymologically, of course, it's something like ``the new romance.'' ``Der neue Römer'' is `the new Roman.') The initial ambiguity of the word Neuromantik reminded me of unionized, though I can't find quite as perfect a homographic situation along those lines for neur-. Of course, if you stare at even an innocent word like ``neoromantic'' for too long, that starts to look weird too -- especially if your eyes start to go and you start seeing ``necromatic,'' which looks like the worst of necromancy, necrophilia, and movie Draculas combined.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil that ``he who fights with monsters might take care that in so doing he not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you, also.'' [If the tenses, verb aspects, and grammatical persons seem jumbled there, don't blame me. I'm just being faithful to the original: ``Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehen, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.'']

A favorite locution of Nixon (RMN), along with ``Remember:'' and various trite football analogies.

Another popular rhetorical tool along these lines is the more schoolteacherish ``when you consider that...''

Alright, let's get to work and take this entry to the next level. The head term was coined by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin around 1870. You know, this would be a good place to say something about Bakunin. Nowadays, I imagine that Bokonon is better known than Bakunin, because more high-school students are required to read Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 sci-fi novel Cat's Cradle than are required to know very much about Europe, such as the fact of its existence. Vonnegut's Bokonon invents a new religion to distract the people of the island of San Lorenzo from their miserable lives. ``What is sacred to Bokononists? Not God; just one thing: man.'' I imagine there are some analogies between Bokonon and Bakunin. Eh.

The novel is about the end of the wold. Oh no, the end of the world! It turns out (for the purposes of this fiction) that at room temperature, liquid water is thermodynamically unstable -- supercooled. (That is, even though it's cooled below the true ``freezing point,'' so that a solid phase is thermodynamically more stable than the liquid phase, it's still liquid because its molecules haven't happened to jump through the microscopic metaphorical hoops necessary to make the transition.) That (fictional) thermodynamically stable solid form of water at room temperature is an allotrope of ordinary ice called ice-9. The kinetic barrier to formation of a crystal of ice-9 is so high that it hasn't happened naturally on the earth's surface yet. A scientist has created it, however, and eventually it is accidentally released into the ocean and seeds the sudden crystallization of the oceans. This isn't really a spoiler because Vonnegut tells you right at the start of the novel that the world will end and pretty much how.

As a matter of fact, water does have a number of allotropes. The usual hexagonal form stable at moderately low temperatures and ordinary pressures is called I_h in a notation introduced by P.W. Bridgman. There's another low-pressure form that is cubic, designated I_c. This form is kinetically favored at very low temperature: under the appropriate conditions, it forms more readily than ice I_h. Nevertheless, it is probably not stable. It's hard to determine. Other forms are assigned higher Roman numerals -- II, III, .... The numbers assigned to stable phases go up to about XII or XIII, as best I can recall, but exclude IX. The reason is that there is a form that was originally numbered IX (a solid form that occurred below room temperature), but which was later discovered to be metastable, so it doesn't appear on a chart of stable allotropes. (None of these solid allotropes is stable at anything like room temperature and ordinary pressure. I seem to recall that ``ice 9'' was used in another scientific context besides a water-ice allotrope, but I can't recall where.)

So there is an ice IX, but, like many of the observed phases, it is metastable: thermodynamically disfavored. The apt (or at least scientifically ironic) choice of the number nine to designate the dangerous allotrope is unlikely to be coincidence. Kurt Vonnegut had an older brother who became a physicist. Cat's Cradle, like much of Kurt Vonnegut's work one way or another, is autobiographical; the narrator of the story has an older brother who's a scientist also.

[Kurt's older brother Bernard was a well-known meteorologist who discovered that silver-iodide smoke could seed rain. See his sole-authored paper, ``The Nucleation of Ice Formation by Silver Iodide,'' Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 18, pp. 593-595 (1947). The premise of Kurt's book is a ``phase-shifted'' version of this, if you will. I also recall a paper of Bernard Vonnegut concerning the wind speed required to pluck the feathers from chickens, but I haven't tracked it down yet. The closest I can come up with is D. Keller and B. Vonnegut: ``Wind Speeds Required to Drive Straws and Splinters Into Wood,'' Journal of Applied Meteorology, vol. 15, pp. 899-901 (1976).]

Let's talk about Bakunin. Okay, I'll talk about Bakunin, you listen. Back in 1843, Richard Wagner became Kapellmeister of the Royal Opera in Dresden (patience -- we'll get to Bakunin!). Come 1848, when revolutions roiled the European continent (but failed to jump the Channel -- another of those kinetic barriers, I suppose), Wagner publicly positioned himself on the left, and that year also he met Bakunin. For various reasons, among them that it was center of the publishing industry, Saxony had a somewhat anomalous political situation in the Germanies, so revolution (and its suppression) came late there.

Dresden is the capital of Saxony. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war there when the city was fire-bombed near the end of WWII, and he survived the firestorm in Schlachterhaus Fünf. He draws on those experiences in a book whose title is the translation of this designation: Slaughterhouse Five. See also L.T.I.

It's very hard to believe today, but Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was rarely performed in the years after his death in 1827. (All of Beethoven's late works were neglected, but the Ninth required a large number of instrumentalists and vocalists.) Wagner attended a poor performance of it in Dresden, and then in Paris in the Winter of 1839-40 he was inspired by a brilliant performance given by the Conservatoire orchestra. Partly by using cost-saving measures such as employing volunteer extras, Wagner overcame objections to the cost and staged a performance of the symphony in 1846.

In 1849, Wagner staged another performance of the Ninth Symphony. At the end of March that year, Bakunin was in the audience for the final rehearsal. (He was also at the time on the run from the police of many different countries, so attending a rehearsal rather than a public performance had advantages.) After the rehearsal, Bakunin approached Wagner and said that ``even if all music were lost in the approaching world fire, they should risk their lives for the survival of that symphony.'' (The quotation marks enclose my translation of ``...sie sollten, wenn beim nahen Weltenbrand auch alle Musik verlorenginge, für den Erhalt dieser Sinfonie ihr Leben wagen.'') As it happens, the Dresden Opera House, though not quite the whole world, burned down the following May 6.

Well, you know: Dresden, fire, and ice. It struck me as an interesting bunch of connections. Incidentally, the verb wagen, which I translated as `risk' above, is etymologically unrelated to the English word wager (from Anglo-French). Instead, that noun is related by a torturous route that I won't trace to the noun Wagen, which is cognate with the English wagon. (Cf. the VW entry and footnote 31.) The surname Wagner means carter or wagon-maker.

Wagner took part in the Dresden uprising in May, and when it was put down he narrowly escaped arrest with the help of Franz Liszt. He went into exile, spending a few years in Zurich, Switzerland. (He was amnestied in 1862.)

Gee, I almost forgot about the New Class. Bakunin coined the term and used it with something close enough to its current meaning. This is moderately impressive, considering that no Marxist revolution had ever yet taken place to provide empirical evidence. (Though frankly, 1789, 1830, and 1848 provided some good clues to 1917.) (I ain't talkin' Sudoku here, BTW.) Look, I don't really know anything about this. Let me quote some experts, such as Lawrence Peter King and Iván Szelényi, authors of The New Class: Intellectuals and Power (U. Minn. Pr., 2004). At some places, this book looks like a bad translation from the German, so it must be really well-researched. King and Szelényi write on page vii (you didn't expect me to delve deep into the actual text, did you?):

Bakunin accused Marx of advancing a theory that was actually a project by the intelligentsia to exploit the working-class movement. By pretending to represent working-class interests, intellectuals sought to establish themselves as a new dominant class after the fall of capitalism and the propertied bourgeoisie. History did not follow Bakunin's forecast: while intellectuals in the first Marxist-inspired revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, did play a formidable role, soon after their victory not only were they squeezed out of power positions by the Stalinist bureaucracies, but many of them perished in the Gulag.

But though he foresaw to some degree that socialism on Marxist principles would be dictatorship by a new elite, Bakunin was not the person directly responsible for the vogue this term eventually had in the 1950's and 60's. That vogue stemmed from a book entitled The New Class by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas.

In his memoir Life in Dark Ages, Ernst Pawel mourned ``the loss of an entire generation of potential [Yugoslavian] leaders'' during WWII. Writing around 1993, as Yugoslavia was breaking up and Bosnians were being used for target practice, he speculated that this loss ``contributed much more decisively to the current crisis than those hoary `primitive tribal hatreds' reflexively invoked by pompous pundits simulating omniscience.'' (Despite this mocking stance, Pawel makes clear throughout the book that primitive tribal hatreds were very real and could readily become violent.) He continues:

   Perhaps the most representative figure of this truly lost generation is Milovan Djilas, now at eighty-two an unhappy and powerless but still keen observer of the political scene. Born in Montenegro--his ``land without Justice''--in 1911 and already a dedicated Communist in high school, he came to Belgrade in 1929, enrolled in the liberal arts faculty of the university and soon gained the reputation of a charismatic firebrand. In 1933 he was arrested, brutally tortured and sentenced to three years in the Sremska Mitrovitsa penitentiary, which at the time already hosted the elite of the Communist party. On his release he was elected to the party's clandestine Central Committee and became its most notoriously doctrinaire member, the Saint-Just of the proletarian revolution. During the years of Partisan warfare he was Tito's chief lieutenant; after the victory he became Tito's vice president and most likely successor, indisputably the second most powerful man in postwar Yugoslavia.

(Some paragraphs following this seem to be poorly researched or at best interpretively phrased, so I'll free-hand from here.) In the early 1950's, after the break between Tito and Stalin, Djilas started publishing articles demanding reform of the party and the government. This was especially easy for him to do because propaganda was part of his portfolio. Generally speaking, this is called ``giving a man enough rope to hang himself.'' He created a journal called Nova Misao (`New Thought'), in which his own articles were increasingly unorthodox. His criticisms, particularly in a series of articles for the journal Borba from October 1953 to January 1954, led that January to his expulsion from the government and removal from all party positions. He later resigned from the party, though he always continued to regard himself as a communist. He also got a chance to experience how Sremska Mitrovitsa was operated under the new regime.

I should probably say a bit more here about the ideas of Djilas on The New Class, but given the odds against your having read down to this point, I'll just stop abruptly.

Narrowly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in American literary criticism, dominant in the 1930's and 40's. The core group of New Critics labored in the American hinterlands, influenced by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson and others on the East Coast and in England. (Don't ask ``what others?'' -- I'm typing just as fast as I'm finding out.) Broadly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in Anglophone literary criticism that included many of the ``influences'' on the narrow group, and was dominant from the 1930's to the 1960's. I'm focusing first on the narrowly defined group because that's how I happened to start out.

The movement got its name from the title (The New Criticism) that John Crowe Ransom used for a major essay on poetry, published in the journal New Directions in 1941. It seems everything was New.

Ransom's title reveals a reliable feature of New Critics: they focused their studies narrowly on poetry. It could be hard to tell whether they viewed poetry simply as paradigmatic, or simply forgot other forms of art literature altogether. This prejudice was not unique to the New Critics, but common to many of the critical approaches to literature that arose around that time in Anglophone academe. Richards's Practical Criticism is a parallel example: only a few sentences into the preface does IAR indicate, in passing, that the literature whose criticism is discussed in the book is all poetry. (By the 1960's, the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme. As the celebrated charlatan Jacques Derrida would write in De la grammatologie in 1967, ``Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.'' This is typically translated `There is nothing outside the text. N'ya-n'ya.' By implication, everything is a text, and equally worthy of being misunderstood by academic critics. On the other side, we should note that Derrida's rhetorical stance amounted to the claim that there was nothing inside the text either, since it could be twisted to mean anything and hence nothing. Incidentally, ``de la grammatologie,'' can be translated `all about grandmother.' Also, when I say that Jacques wrote this in ``De la grammatologie,'' I don't mean as a marginal comment or graffito or anything: I mean it was part of the text -- it had to be, after all. Page 227, to be precise.)

Some of the most important New Critics were

• Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), mentioned at Brooks and Warren and Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness, The.
• John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), mentioned above.
• Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), mentioned at the Brooks and Warren entry.
• Allen Tate (1899-1979), mentioned in this entry.
• Kenneth Burke (1897-1973).
• William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907-1975).

In case you were wondering, they're listed in diminishing order of how long they lived. Looks like lit professor ain't a bad gig.

(Working, working. Don't complain that the content is incomplete. The content is always incomplete. Rejoice -- yes, I think rejoice is the opposite of intransitive complain -- that I'm rushing out all this content before it's all polished and shit, and at the risk of great personal embarrassment, just so you can have another source to plagiarize your term paper from.)

• Canada: NDP members.
• US: A group of moderate Democrats formed in 1996. Less conservative than the blue dogs. As of May 2005, the New Democrat Coalition in the US House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. Ellen Tauscher (Calif.), had 42 members.

Pronounced by some with two syllables (e.g., neewis) to distinguish it from Usenet news[groups].

At the time that the word news arose in English, most people were illiterate and acronyms were rare. The story about the word news being an acronym of ``North East West South'' is untenable, a coincidence that works only in English, and in fact silly.

Here is a short, somewhat idiosyncratic list of online news organizations or sources:

• AGI Agenzia Italia (AGI)
• American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• Cable News Network (CNN)
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
• Canadian Television (CTV)
• Christian Broadcast Network News (CBN)
• Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)
• Courier News (Plainfield and central NJ)
• Deutsche Welle
• Drudge Report
• ESPN (Look, if you're a real sports fan, you don't really care what ESPN stands for.)
• Fox News Channel
• Guardian Unlimited
• Google News (news aggregator and search engine)
• History News Network (amateurish)
• La Stampa
• London Times
• MSNBC
• News Index (news search engine)
• Newsweek (MSNBC)
• New York Observer
• New York Sun
• New York Times (NYT)
• PhysOrg.com (science and technology news)
• Saudi Arab News
• Science Daily
• Sky News
• Slashdot
• USA Today
• Virtual Library for International News Sources
• Washington Post (WP)
• The Westfield Leader and Scotch Plains-Fanwood Times (Union County, NJ)

On January 7, Michael Kinsley had a light-heartedly pessimistic ``Op-Ed'' column on the same topic in the Washington Post. (Op-Ed in scare quotes because I don't consider a column an Op-Ed if it's by someone on the editorial staff of the newspaper whose ``Op-Ed'' page it appears on.)

Here's an example of probably nonlinear extrapolation from that article:

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

The previous group of economists who believed that the business cycle could be tamed (but believed this for the wrong reasons, as we now all realize) were the Keynesians (the followers of John Maynard Keynes). Keynesians believed that the economy could be fine-tuned by fiscal policy -- deficit-based government spending to increase in bad times and decrease in good times. Okay, in very good times. In very, very good times. Eventually, anyway. When Nixon announced that he was a Keynesian, you had to know the jig was up. Today we believe in monetary policy.

In Euroland, they believe in everything -- fiscal policy, monetary policy, and fairies. When the French and German economies stall, the French and German governments rack up big deficits (fiscal policy). They don't play games with the currency, because that's controlled by the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to assure stable growth (monetary policy). Before they could join the the euro, countries had to demonstrate the fiscal discipline that would allow a common currency to work, by meeting certain ``convergence criteria.'' In order to make sure that countries continued to exercise fiscal discipline after they joined, penalties are imposed on a country that fails to keep its budget deficit in check (fairies).

Okay, now: let's build on these successes with a more challenging resolution. When I'm striding at a healthy but unhurried pace toward a door ten yards away, and some jerk decides to hold it open for me, I will not rush appreciatively to minimize the time he or she stands there holding it. Instead, I will immediately slow down and grab my hip, and start limping in obvious pain. They want to do a good turn, let 'em put in the hard time. Give 'em value-for-money: do the whole steppinfetchit routine. (And if they grab my elbow to help me along, I'll whack'em with my pocketbook. Must remember to pre-deploy brick.)

Stepin Fetchit used to say about his stage act (not his demeaning turns in the movies) that just getting to center stage was half the act.

Also, if you do decide to resolve to lose weight in the new year, resolve big. Failing to lose five pounds is embarrassing. For the same amount of effort, you can fail to lose fifty pounds, which is heroic.

Somewhere in the glossary I have a list of good ideas. When I find it, I'll place a link to it from here. Until I do, I'll mention here that it's a bad idea to go shopping in a supermarket (Meijers) or hardware store (Menards) wearing a red polo shirt, unless you want to have lots of short conversations with strangers.

In early 2006, there seems to be a greater number than usual of stories in the media about people crowding the gyms on account of their resolutions to get in shape. Some of it is seasonal: Men's Fitness magazine has a smattering of articles on things like adjusting your routine to deal with January crowding, and on designing a home gym, since this is the month you're likeliest to decide to do it. Both stories are in the February 2006 issue (``display until January 31'') also eventually mentioned at the mirrors entry.

The Observer, student newspaper for Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, had a front-page article on January 19 entitled ``Campus gyms see new year influx,'' with slugline ``Motivated exercisers flock to the Rock, Rolfs at spring semester's outset.'' The Rock (nickname for the Rockne Memorial Building, named for legendary chemistry professor Knute Rockne) and Rolfs Sports Recreation Center (named after a donor, I think) are said to be experiencing a flood of ``resolution-makers and fitness faithful.'' (It's a Catholic school, but the Church gave evolutionary theory a general nihil obstat in the 1950's or 60's). The director of RecSports reports that the first 6 to 8 weeks of the Spring semester are the busiest time of the year.

NexGen was supposed to continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary, but I don't know what kind of distinct existence it maintained. What would have been their Nx686 was marketed as the AMD-K6, next generation in AMD's Superscalar uP series. As it happens, at midyear 1997, AMD reported that it would not be able to meet K6 production targets, not long after engineers had told stock analysts that ``yields had been all that they had hoped for'' (as reported in the 8 Sept. 1997 issue of Semiconductor Business News). Studying the Delphic oracles would have taught the ``analysts'' how to interpret such an ambiguous report.

I'm not sure if it's the same company, but a NexGen with the same URL is now (2004) in the consumer electronics retail business and also offers related services.

This interesting page from the US National Weather Service gives a contemptibly foolish explanation of Doppler radar, if you realize that the word ``phase'' is not a synonym of ``frequency.'' (I.e., if you remember high-school physics.) [It is possible to measure the phase shift of a scattering wave, if there is no frequency shift. That is essentially what a hologram does.]

I have more to say, but it's also obvious.

Cf. qq1.

Newfoundland and Labrador is not (and was not) one of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' Not even two of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' You have three guesses left. (Warning! Spoiler information at the entries for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.)

The provincial capital is St. John's. Let's petitition some government to make St. John's's the official possessive form of St. John's. I have no position on whether St. John's should be alphabetized among the SA's or the ST's. On May 29, 2002, the Board of Regents of Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John's, recommended to the provincial government that the name of the university be shortened to Memorial University, but as of 2004 I haven't noticed any change in usage. Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec are Canada's two easternmost provinces. Don't people think these things through in advance?

There isn't enough humor in this glossary, so I'll repeat here something that made me laugh at an (I hope) not-entirely-serious page.

A determined contingent of Newfies, thickly muscled from pushing houses down dirt roads to kickstart their furnaces, heavily fueled their boats and quietly embarked upon a vacation.

(Yeah, there was more, but that was the funniest part.)

If I had to guess, I'd say that 38% of book sales by volume are nonfiction.

Barnes and Noble, which used to discount books on the New York Times best-seller lists, now makes up its own best-seller lists as well, and also mixes fiction and nonfiction. Does this trend away from a fiction-nonfiction distinction signal the approaching collapse of the commitment to truth and civilization, or does it herald the dawn of a more nuanced and mature understanding of the radical ambiguity of language?

You know, abstracting can be done well or badly. Chemical Abstracts is done much better than Physics Abstracts, and they are correspondingly much more heavily used (and more expensive). This isn't just my opinion, you know, this is my professional second opinion. Of course, the situations are not simply comparable. It is rather harder to organize physics abstracts than chemistry abstracts, because chemistry papers can always ultimately be categorized by the substances they study, and there is no comparable principle for physics papers. Also, there are many more chemists and chemical engineers than there are physicists.

The College Football Hall of Famewill be moved from South Bend to a site across from Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, on a piece of land to be donated by the Cathy family, founders of Atlanta-based Chic-fil-A.

Jersey number ranges in the NFL:

1-19:

Quarterbacks, kickers, and punters.

20-49:

Running backs and defensive backs.

50-59:

Linebackers.

60-79:

Linemen.

80-89:

Receivers and tight ends.

90-99:

Linebackers and defensive linemen.

In 1991, Cecil Adams answered a question regarding evolution in man. Here is some of the answer (the full answer is at The Straight Dope):

As for whether our genes are accurately reproduced, you silly goose, the genes always accurately reproduce. Except sometimes. On the latter occasions one of several things results: one, monsters-- that is, grossly malformed babies resulting from a genetic mistake. Years ago most monsters died, but now many can be saved. This has made possible the National Football League. ...

Teller, of the famous Penn and Teller comedic magic act, was born Raymond Joseph Teller (on St. Valentine's Day 1948). He legally changed his name to Teller. On his driver's licence, NFN appears in the space for his first name.

% frm -s new

That is, returns data only for email messages with status ``new.''

Let's try that again, shall we?

It is composed of 35 specialty nursing organizations.

Therefore, it comprises 35 specialty nursing organizations.

There, now: that wasn't so bad, now was it? Gooood.

Based in Pitman, New Jersey.

In the IPA the ng sound is represented by a non-ASCII symbol that looks like a lower-case n, but with the second stroke extended below the line like the descender of a letter j. On the other hand, most languages that have the sound and which use an alphabet script avoid using a separate symbol for it. The earliest instance of this situation is probably Greek. In Greek, two successive gammas (not a digamma!) represent the ng sound. Thus for example, our word angel comes from the Greek word spelled ággelos (`messenger'). The Greeks further recognized that the nasal consonant preceding kappa (unvoiced version of gamma) and chi (aspirated version of kappa) was also sometimes an ng, and represented these by an extention of the double-gamma representation: gamma-kappa represented the consonant pair that occurs in most native English-speakers pronunciation of think, and gamma-chi the nasal sound in a typical reporter's pronunciation of ``Nkomo,'' perhaps. A more native example of the gamma-chi sound which works for some Anglophones is income, since most speakers aspirate the c, but for some the n is just /n/. (And in case you're wondering, Greek didn't have an aspirated gamma sound. I should also note that the chi pronunciation I refer to is the Classical Greek. On the Italian peninsula, the chi was eventually pronounced /ks/, and became our letter ex.)

[Note that throughout this entry, by ``g sound'' I mean what is usually called a ``hard gee'' (not a ``soft'' or ``sweet gee''); in other words, the consonant in the word go.] An ng sound arises naturally from a kind of slurring-together of n with g or k: Since g and k stop consonants are articulated at the back of the mouth, it is less effort to pronounce an ng than an n before the stop. The income example above is an example of this, though English spelling doesn't show it. That is, in + come --> income represents an instance of n + k --> (ng)k. Greek spelling makes this change more visible. For example, the name pancreas was constructed from Greek pan + kréas, `all flesh.' The many compounds that include a pan prefix usually use a Greek letter nu, but pancreas is written págkreas.

The Greek practice of writing gamma-kappa for what we represent by ``nk'' works so long as there are no words that actually have a g-k consonant cluster (like rug-cutter). If there were such words, they were probably rare.

It goes without saying that English spelling does not have a general rule for indicating the n/ng distinction. As usual some general patterns hold imperfectly. In particular, a final nk or ng is fairly certain to imply the presence of an ng. Also, when the letter en precedes a k or g sound (uncle, anger, ankle, banquet, anxious, etc.), it usually indicates an ng, although dialects differ, and not entirely systematically. It is important to observe, however, that ``ng'' may or may not indicate the presence of the stop consonant. For example, ringer and ringlet have no g sound, but Ringo, ingot, and English do. (The difference is noticeable in the German word English, which has no g sound.)

(As a sidelight on the Greek double-gamma practice: in the Korean Hangul script, two g's together represent a harder gee sound, something conceived as lying between /g/ and /k/, even though that is really a voicing difference.)

Nigeria.com says it's ``the premier Nigerian website on the Internet.''

In Beast of Burden (off the 1978 Some Girls album; lyrics written with Keith Richards), Mick Jagger sang

There's one thing, baby, I don't understand:
You keep on telling me I ain't your kind of man --
Ain't I rough enough?
Ain't I tough enough?
Ain't I rich enough?

(It's so nice Mick didn't lose touch with his ordinary-guy roots.)

Cf. OGC.

Refers to any of the charitable and not-so-charitable organizations which volunteer their real or imagined expertise to the public and the public's governments. It also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid. E.g.: Greenpeace, The Tobacco Council, NOW, ... NGO's are a twentieth-century realization of the Platonic ideal of government proposed in his Republic. Their variety and disagreements raise an issue not much considered by Plato: in the day of the philosopher-kings, which shall be the king's philosophy? The scientific take on this question -- the way science keeps itself honest and on-track -- is: ``how will you measure it''? The sociological terminology is: ``how do you operationalize it''? The political form is: ``who counts the votes''? Luis Alvarez once said:

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to an opinion as Fermi.

The term NGO also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid, such as MSF and ICRC.

Spanish for NGO is ONG.

Generally speaking, NGO's are organized as nonprofit corporations, so they are also NPO's. The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at CWRU offers Master of Nonprofit Organizations (the ``MNO'' -- sounds a bit too alphabetic) and Executive Director of Management degrees, and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management (this really doesn't sound so good). If they're so good at this nonprofit management stuff, why do they have to charge tuition?

Related acronyms (mostly for subcategories of the generic NGO):

• CBO: Community-Based Organization.
• DONGO: Donor-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.
• GONGO: Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.
• NGDO: Non-Governmental Development Organization.
• PDO: Private Development Organization.
• PSO: Public Service Organization.
• PVO: Private Voluntary Organization.
• quango: QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization.
• VO: Voluntary Organization.

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

The NHA homepage was first webpage that I noticed had an extra   at the end of each sentence to assure proper spacing!

Cf. Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), corresponding advocacy organization for social whutzits.

``National History Day is not just one day, but a yearlong education program that makes history come alive through educator professional development and active student learning.'' NHD is an educrat's idea of a useful site. Its main feature is that you get to see a lot of webpages that are refreshingly free of unfamiliar information before you have to face any page containing historical stuff. Its principal sponsor is The WWII Channel.

National here means, or certainly at least originally meant, Canadian. In fact, although a majority of the teams play in the US, a majority of the players are still Canadian, despite the influx of Russians.

One little-appreciated unfortunate consequence of hockey is Tim Hortons coffee. There's no justice: a lockout by the owners cancelled the entire 2004-5 season, but Tim Hortons coffee poured on. (Tim Horton was a hockey player. There was only one of him and his last name was spelled without an ess.)

Amazingly, the most successful hockey players move efficiently and spend much of their time not attacking other players. Fortunately, these facts have not been widely noted. Hockey is regularly touted as a down-to-earth sport played by regular blue-collar sorts of guys. (Senator John Kerry did inestimable damage -- I can't estimate it, can you? -- to the sport's reputation during the 2004 presidential primary campaign in New Hampshire, when he put on skates and a Bruins jersey and played a scratch game with some firemen.) I think that ``regular guys'' are people who go to the race track in hopes of seeing a gruesome accident. On the other hand, my friend Paul ate with the Canucks one day because they were staying at the same Toronto hotel as he was. But that was back when the average NHL player earned under a million dollars. (In 2003, the average NHL player earned 1.79 million USD.)

A good rule of thumb, if you're trying to guess the modern pronunciation of an ancient Greek word, is to change all the vowels to a long ee (/i:/ in IPA). This is called ioticism.

Nickel has an interesting rôle in the formation of contacts to GaAs. A eutectic alloy of gold and germanium (at a surprisingly low 12% Ge) can make a good contact at a point, but it tends to bead on the GaAs surface. In practice, one makes a Gold-Germanium-Nickel contact: starting from the semiconductor surface, one deposits a layer of germanium (say a micron), a layer of gold of about equal thickness, and a layer of Nickel. When the temperature is raised above the melting point of the AuGe eutectic, gold and germanium mix, by forming a melt beginning at their common interface. The liquid AuGe mix, however, does not bead, presumably because it wets the Ni surface. The small concentration of nickel dissolved into the gold-germnanium melt apparently also improves the ohmic contact.

The oldest ancient iron artifacts found in Egypt have high nickel content, apparently because they were made from meteorites found on the ground, rather than from mined iron ore.

Lower Saxony is the second-largest state, with an area of 47,611 sq. km. Its population was 7,162,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 7,845,398 for Dec. 31, 1997. Okay, what time on Dec. 31? You know, a couple of hundred people are born and die in that state every day. The very best census data are considered to be accurate at no better than the 1% level. Seven pretended digits of accuracy are purely otiose.

The West German state of Lower Saxony was stitched together in 1946 from a bunch of older states. The capital is Hanover, which is spelled Hannover in German.

The European colonial powers granted or conceded independence to their African colonies starting in the 1950's and accelerating in the 1960's. The process was largely complete when Portugal granted independence to Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and 1976. South Africa was somewhat exceptional. Initially settled by the Dutch, it finally came completely under British control in 1910. Very quickly, and in significant measure due to the efforts of Jan Christiaan Smuts, a Liberal government in Britain soon granted a high degree of local self-government to South Africa in 1910. At the time, it was mostly taken for granted by whites -- i.e., by the British and by white settlers -- that South Africa would be governed by whites. South Africa would consist of a black African colony (or colonies) within the territory of an independent European-style nation. Not everyone agreed; the African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912.

Despite majority opposition, the minority-rule arrangement must have looked like it had long-term stability. Majority rule did not come to South Africa until the 1990's. Many whites in neighboring Southern Rhodesia (the country now known as Zimbabwe) wanted a similar deal. It wasn't unreasonable for them to suppose they could tough it out indefinitely. They probably saw the US and Canada as proofs of principle that a European presence and eventually -- with the help of immigration -- a European majority could be established over a large territory originally controlled by a non-European majority. (In Latin America to this day, European elites govern some countries with autochthon majorities.) One could also imagine a smooth transition to majority rule in the distant future. The white minority in Southern Rhodesia had a virtual monopoly on modern weaponry, and a history of putting down insurgencies since the 1890's.

Southern Rhodesia had been taken over by stages into the British Empire, starting with agreements that Cecil Rhodes made with local chiefs in the late 1880's to allow mining. In 1953, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia were combined with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in a Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Under pressure for majority rule in Northern Rhodesia, the federation was dissolved at the end of 1963, and Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia on October 24, 1964. (After that time, Southern Rhodesia was simply called Rhodesia.) Following the dissolution of the federation, and as the UK moved to grant independence to Northern Rhodesia, the white minority administration in Southern Rhodesia also sought independence under its existing arrangements. This was opposed by the British government, which was formally committed to a policy of NIBMAR.

NIBMAR had been promoted by African, Asian, and Caribbean members of the British Commonwealth for years before the Rhodesias split up. British PM Harold Wilson resisted. Eventually, at the July 21, 1961, Commonwealth conference in London, he accepted a draft resolution formulated by Canadian PM Lester Pearson. Nevertheless, he continued to offer Ian Smith, leader of Southern Rhodesia, deals that fell far short of NIBMAR. They were not enough for Smith, at least in the 1960's, and on November 11, 1965, his administration unilaterally declared independence (see UDI).

Even taking a 9-iron with the same loft angle as a basis of comparison, the clubs differ in other ways: they have different blade shape and face curvature, and the lie angle of the niblick is smaller because it was intended to be hit with a squat, side-winding swing rather than a modern upright swing. See our ye olde golfe clubbies entry for little more.

A night-cap? Don't mind if I do. Aaeeeeiiii!!!

There doesn't seem to be an official overall title of the series or trilogy or whatever. Unofficially, both ``Cosmic Trilogy'' and ``Space Trilogy'' have been used. The first and second books take place mostly on fictional stand-ins for Mars (``Malacandra'') and Venus (``Perelandra''), respectively. The third takes up as much shelf space as the first two combined and takes place mostly on the Earth (``Thulcundra,'' the ``Silent Planet'').

The first two novels [entitled Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943)], have as their principal bad guy a Dr. Weston. He's a renowned physicist. Ransom kills Weston in Perelandra. (Alright: technically he kills Weston's body, which Weston's moral weakness has allowed to be taken over by the Un-Man. So the killing would be okay even if it weren't already okay because Ransom kills in self-defense.) Dr. Elwin Ransom is the hero of all three novels and a professor of philology. In the third book he is called Fisher King.

You know, C.S. Lewis novels come out pretty badly in a comparison with the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo. At least the Catholic Church made a distinction between what it thought were Galileo's motivations and the effects of his ``errors.'' Lewis makes his star scientist a kidnapper and murderer to begin with, and he goes morally downhill from there.

As celebrities, by definition they're mostly famous for being famous, but they had to become famous (i.e., boot-strap the process) by doing something else first. Jessica's something else was being a ``singer,'' which nowadays means something like ``cute dancing lip-syncher.'' Nick is also a ``singer,'' but I think he became a celebrity through his connection with Jessica. CD's are issued with their names, and possibly they even perform. Somebody seems to buy the CD's, though I'm not sure if this is listening music. It might be more like those recognition gifts that you get when you contribute to public radio: an emblem of your contribution, but not necessarily a thing of any practical value.

Nickel coins in other denominations, such as three and ten cents, have also been issued by the US.

The soups:
• Sunday: a pretty quiet night. Chicken soup and French Onion. Never, to my knowledge, called Freedom Onions.
• Monday: the slowest night. Creamy chicken and rice soup, and navy bean soup.
• Tuesday: pea soup (it's ham negative, but there's no credible way of expressing this fact in English) and some kind of chicken soup. It's like a 24-7 pharmacy.
• Wednesday: chicken bow-ties and vegetable beef.
• Thursday: cream of potato and chicken noodle.
• Friday: a pretty busy night. Chicken soup and clam chowder. Have to have a seafood option, of course.
• Saturday: cream of broccoli and chicken with rice.

Croutons (crunchy brown right square prisms of deep-fried bread, very popular) are available on Tuesday and Sundays. Research for this entry is ongoing, and in fall 2004 they shuffled the options a little bit, but I wanted to share our findings in real time.

I wasn't sure, so one time I asked Mario (the third-shift cashier-and-seater for most nights) whether he pronounced his name ``Mario or Mario?'' He answered no, he pronounced it ``Mario.'' It's a good thing we didn't conduct that conversation in ASCII.

Oh wait -- it's a technical term. It's used by the US CIA (the CIA based in DC, not the one in NY), intended to mean ``Estimation by National Intelligence Service'' (capitalization for impact and prestige only) and actually meaning ``opinion of a single memo-writer, based on analysis that consists of ignoring data that contradicts opinion.''

The Green Scissors lobby (``Cutting Wasteful and Environmentally Harmful Spending'') has a scientifically ignorant protest against it on line.

A trivial logical corollary of the proposition that what was NIH is no good is the proposition that if it is any good, then it was invented here. This is the fundamental intellectual reflex of the Microsoft Corporation.

I have before me a physical copy of a research report entitled ``The Sexual Victimization of College Women.'' Naturally, I was greatly disappointed that it lacked any racy anecdotal data or illustrations, but it seems to be a fair-minded study by disinterested researchers. (Yaaawn.) See here, the first paragraph of the Conclusions bends over backwards to be balanced. It begins

The sexual victimization of college students has emerged as a controversial issue, pitting feminist scholars who claim that the sexual victimization of women is a serious problem against conservative commentators who claim that such victimization is rare and mostly a fictitious creation of ideologically tainted research. ...

It's too bad the scholars don't have any feminist commentators to lend them any moral support. It sure must be lonely on that half of the political spectrum. Further, when you consider that there are apparently no scholars on the conservative side of the argument, it's surprising that government-funded researchers bravely pretend that they can continue to regard the contending sides in the debate as intellectually or even morally equal. Of course, this was a scientific study, so any bias on the part of the researchers would be irrelevant because it could not possibly affect the study at any stage. I mean, contrariwise, if it could affect the study, then it wouldn't be very scientific, so it didn't. That's logic.

You can download your own PDF version or ASCII text file from a listings page at the NCJRS.

The Niles in Michigan is close to where I live, so it's mentioned at various entries in this glossary. Ring Lardner, a nationally famous writer, was a native of Niles. A scrap of his writing, and indications of how he is commemorated, can be found at this GF entry. Niles is part of the loosely defined region known as Michiana, but that entry doesn't say much about Niles itself. Until Indiana adopted DST, Michiana was split through the middle by a kind of time zone boundary, and that's how Niles gets a mention at that entry. Pokagon was a nineteenth-century Indian chief in the area. There's some local color from the Depression era at the entry for ``Shave and a haircut, two bits.'' Southwestern Michigan College has a campus in Niles, and that's what this SMC entry is about.

Niles is also the name of a township in Cook County, Illinois, comprising northwest suburbs of Chicago. It's not known definitely how it got its name, but it was established in 1850, the year after the Niles Register finally ceased publication. The Village of Niles gets its name from the township; it's scrunched into the southwest corner of the township. (``Village'' was descriptive when Niles was incorporated in 1899 and it had a population of 500. The population was estimated at almost 29,000 in 2007. The village of Skokie (population 63,348 in the 2000 census) was incorporated as Niles Centre in 1888. The center of the township does in fact lie within it. The spelling was changed to Niles Center around 1910, and in 1940, to avoid confusion with the Village of Niles, it was renamed the Village of Skokie.

There is a Town of Niles in Cayuga County, New York (pop. 1,208 in the 2000 census). It was carved out of the Town of Sempronius (founded 1799).

There's a Niles Canyon in the San Francisco Bay area of California. There was a town of Niles in that canyon. I suppose the name dates from around the time of the gold rush of 1849, or not long after, so it was probably named after Hezekiah Niles or his Weekly or both as well. Another possibility is that it was named after one of the eastern Nileses by someone who came from there. The town of Niles eventually joined the towns of Centerville, Irvington, Mission San Jose, and Warm Springs to form the city of Fremont, and each of these is still an identifiable district of Fremont. Here's a link to the Niles district of Fremont, California.

``[O]fficially changed its name in May 1994 to NIMA International.'' Also now represents television shopping companies and short-form direct response marketers. Oh joy.

``To eliminate confusion, NIMA International would prefer to be referred to as, `the association that represents the worldwide electronic retailing industry.' Please do not refer to NIMA as the National Infomercial Marketing Association.'' You could call them vermin, if only that weren't unfairly insulting to rats.

Noam Chomsky's nonpolitical thoughts are less controversial. Widely though not universally accepted is his position that the ability to use language is uniquely human, with the proviso that true language has an indefinitely productive grammar: a user can apply linguistic rules to express new thoughts with old words. (New to him, her, or it, at least.) Chomsky is a philosopher, so he shuns experiment and reasons from what he supposes he might find if, God or Whatever forbid, he ever tried an experiment. Others are not so constrained.

The first modern tests to determine whether a non-human animal could learn to produce a human language were conducted with chimps and spoken languages. (Produce, that is, as a communication of the ideas the language is intended to communicate, and not as parroted speech.) In the 1930's, W.N. and L.A. Kellogg raised a baby chimpanzee named Gua together with their own infant son Donald. The project began when Gua was 7 or 8 months old and lasted 9 months; Gua never learned to speak because they tried to teach her English instead of Purtuguese. Okay, joke, but still she never learned to speak. In the 1950s, Keith and Cathy Hayes adopted a female chimp, Viki, and tried to teach her to speak. After three years, she was able to speak three words: mama, papa, and cup. She never learned to say her own name, but that was probably because of the irregular spelling. She also had a heavy whispery accent. Planet of the Apes, this wasn't.

These experiments were not considered successes. Since primate vocal apparatus is substantially less versatile than human, however, it was plausible that the failure of those experiments did not reflect any cognitive deficiency in primates, but just physical impediment. In 1966, R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice Gardner at University of Nevada, Reno, began the first experiment to teach a primate a non-vocal human language. Their Washoe project (named after Washoe County, Nev.), was intended to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee they named Washoe. Washoe learned over a hundred signs, used them individually in semantically appropriate ways, and apparently even taught a number of them to an infant she adopted. She has been less reliably credited with more sophisticated achievements, but the question remained whether she ever grasped any elements of grammar. She used words together that might be interpreted as compounds (water and bird for swan; I don't know that the bird wasn't near water) and collocations that might be regarded as sentences except that there was apparently no consistent syntactic pattern to the collocations. A subsequent project of Francine Patterson, begun in 1972, taught a female gorilla named Koko to sign hundreds of ASL signs and to understand words of spoken English. She apparently notices rhyme in English and has constructed a number of what seem to be compound nouns.

In order to address more sharply the grammatical question raised by the earlier primate-ASL studies, Herbert S. Terrace began the Nim project. The subject of the study, Nim Chimpsky, was born in 1973 and raised and socialized like a human infant. Nim appeared to learn American Sign Language, and by age four had mastered a 125-sign vocabulary. In the end, however, Terrace was not convinced that Nim had really mastered language. After analyzing more than 20,000 different combinations of signs produced by Nim (this study was far more intensively videotaped than the earlier ones), he concluded that Nim signed mainly to obtain particular rewards and that most of his signed combinations were unoriginal imitations of those uttered by his human teachers, rather than original sentences demonstrating a constructive understanding of ASL's grammar. Terrace wrote an article on the experiment for Psychology Today in 1979: ``How Nim Chimpsky Changed My Mind.''

In the appositely named movie Bananas, Woody Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a nebbish upon whom ill-conceived consumer products are tested. His parents wanted him to become a surgeon like his dad. In one scene, he visits his parents in the operating theater (mom is an OR nurse), and they try on the spot to involve him in the family business. Parents, natural and adoptive, often see their children with eyes blinded by love and hope. Read this ``chat'' with Koko and see what you think.

There's a Gopher directory as well as a homepage.

The group name is normally abbreviated with the second en inverted, so the initialism is not just a palindrome but reflection-symmetric. If they didn't mess with the second en, it would be rotation-symmetric (C₂ symmetry) instead. There's only an unofficial site yet, but you could try one of the newsgroups: (alt.music.nin) (alt.music.nin.creative) (alt.music.nin.d) (rec.music.industrial).

By the time you read this, their official site may finally be up. Or maybe it's come down already and I missed it.

A backward capital en looks like the Cyrillic letter normally transliterated I. Korn, a metallic punk band out of Southern California, also writes its name KORN with a backwards ar. I have just one link to say about this: ABBA.

A backward-facing ar looks like the Cyrillic letter normally transliterated ia or ya. Toys'R'Us does the same thing as KORN with its ar. Maybe you want to go to SeaRs. (Sounds like ``See youse'' if you've got the accent.)

``Established in February 1998, the NIPC's mission is to serve as the U.S. government's focal point for threat assessment, warning, investigation, and response for threats or attacks against our critical infrastructures. These infrastructures, which include telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water systems, government operations, and emergency services, are the foundation upon which our industrialized society is based.''

``Northern Ireland Railways was founded in 1968 to operate the railway services of the former Ulster Transport Authority, which in turn had taken over the three private railways (Great Northern Railway, Northern Counties Railway and Co. Down Railway) in Northern Ireland between 1948 and 1957.''

The old shekel suffered through a hyperinflation that reduced its value against the US dollar by a factor of 250 over the six years it was in circulation. One NIS was an exchange for 1000 old shekels.

After all, Aristotle said only that Man is a political animal. (What a beast! Emphasis added; italics, and English for that matter, were more than a millennium away.) Or did he? This is a common translation, but it is clear in context that he meant that man is a social animal. Same problem with his `Poetics.'

Probably the thing that first-time visitors to New Jersey find most surprising is that it is uninhabitable. This is especially surprising when you consider that it's the most densely populated state of the US, but in fact, that's one of the reasons. New Jersey is actually populated by human guinea pigs who are exposed to every available chemical pollutant. It's not a coincidence that two of New Jersey's biggest industries are chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Another reason that New Jersey is uninhabitable is the road system. It's illegal for roads anywhere in the state to be straight for a distance exceeding half a mile. And although the state has an approximately convex shape, the shortest distance between two points in it is usually by a path out to New York or Pennsylvania, around, and back in again.

New Jersey is not a community property state, but for real estate property it sort of works like one.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New Jersey. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state, including -- ohmigod! -- my home town has a home page. And another! And yet another. This is spooky (and not just because Charles Addams was born and raised in Westfield). When you leave your hometown you want it to remain constant, preserving old folkways -- churning butter by hand, hand-cranking the car, dial phones, rubbing sticks together to start the fire for dinner, that sort of thing.

(There's now an ``official homepage.'') Even my old Boy Scout Troop has a web presence! What is the world coming to?

A much more comprehensive list of towns, libraries and counties is served by New Jersey Communities OnLine.

The latest color scheme for automobile licence plates in New Jersey has a background that starts out white at the bottom and shades smoothly to yellow at the top. This represents smog. (Ohio has white plates shading to reddish browns at the bottom. This represents rust or rich earth and, on recent nonfarm vehicles, makes it easier to distinguish them from Ontario plates for people who can't remember which name is longer.)

In Spanish, New Jersey is normally called Nueva Jersey, where the first word (meaning `new') has its usual Spanish pronunciation. The second word is pronounced neither in English nor according to Spanish rules applied to the English spelling. Instead, it is pronounced in a Spanish approximation of the English. In my dialect of Spanish, for example, which has a zh sound (for ll and most y), ``Jersey'' is pronounced as if it were spelled ``Llersi.'' In other words, not a single consonant or vowel is the same. (The first vowel in Spanish is more open than in the American pronunciation and also has no r coloring. It sounds even further from the British vowel. The r is articulated differently, the s is unvoiced, and the i is more clipped.)

This naturalized pronunciation is used even by Spanish-speakers who are perfectly fluent in English. And that is very natural, but possibly not as some may imagine. An English-speaker who gratuitously pronounces naturalized French words or place names in French sends a signal (possibly not the one intended). Pronouncing France as ``Frrrawnce'' may send the signal that one knows French, and may be received as a signal that one is a pretentious twit. Pronouncing Paris as ``Paree'' is (or was, a mere 80 years ago) an affectionate affectation, a suggestion of fond memories. I don't think that the Spanish pronunciation of Jersey as described in the previous paragraph has much to do with these social phenomena, because for Spanish-speakers, English and the English-speaking lands have never had the kind of intellectual cachet or romantic associations that French and France, respectively, have had for English-speakers. (Granted, the US today has prestige in certain things, but it's not the kind of prestige that rubs off on anyone who happens to speak English.) The reason one uses a Spanish pronunciation of Jersey is either (a) one can't produce an English pronunciation or, (b) more interestingly, it is more comfortable not to switch phonemic systems.

The letter j in Spanish is pronounced like the English h, so one might expect a naturalized spelling to develop. One has: Nueva Yersey. (This spelling implies a final diphthong. For comparison, a common and fairly faithful naturalized Spanish spelling of English okay is okey.) But Yersey seems (from ghits) to be about a hundred times less common than Jersey, and I haven't seen it in major references. Even the English Channel island Jersey and the clothing material jersey have their English spelling in Spanish. In Portuguese, New Jersey is ``Nova Jersey.''

I can see a couple of reasons why Jersey was assigned a feminine gender in both Portuguese and Spanish. Morphology does not offer a firm guide, but I suppose that a final /i/ sound in a toponym suggests the standard feminine -ia ending. (For comparison, Italy is Italia in Spanish, and Turkey is Turquía.) Moreover, the Latin name of the largest English Channel island is Caesarea, which is feminine. (Jersey is widely supposed to be a corruption of this, but there is an alternative etymology I can't find right now, which has the advantage of explaining the -sey in Jersey and Guernsey as a common Germanic or Celtic morpheme. The Latin name of Guernsey is Samia.) For a more problematic case, see NY.

On its website, NJC has a practice of indicating in bylines the time that a reporter participated in NJC's internship program (I think that's it), the way colleges tag graduates in their alumni newsletters (e.g., ``Greg Myre (NJC spring '83)''). In an archive of articles with no other date information, this can be disorienting.

The NJCA sponsors an e-mail list ``to offer New Jersey classics teachers a forum to discuss and share news about classics, school programs, questions and ideas.'' Subscribe by sending a blank email to <NJCA-subscribe@topica.com>.

The NJCA fall meeting in 1997 was on November 8, at the Newark Museum. John Bodel of Rutgers gave the keynote address, ``Putting Roman Artisans in Perspective,'' and Susan Auth, Curator of the Classical Collection, gave an introduction to the collection. I suppose. That was the agenda anyway.

The fall meeting in 1999 was Saturday, October 30. It was held at the High Technology High School in Lincroft -- appropriately enough, since its focus was on the use of computers and the internet.

Research demonstrates that girls named ``Virginia'' are at increased risk of becoming high-school Latin teachers active in their state classical associations. There is no need to panic -- most girls with this name grow up to lead normal, fulfilling lives. Watch out for early warning signs, however, such as going by the nickname ``Ginny.''

There's really no place you can insert the word junior in National Honor Society and have it mean what it's supposed to mean and nothing else.

Continental Airlines Arena used to be called Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands, after Governor Brendan Byrne, who aggressively promoted New Jersey tourism and pushed the construction of the Meadowlands complex. The arena was financed by bond issues. The budgetary achievement for which Brendan Byrne was better known was getting New Jersey an income tax. I remember a lot of grumbling when Meadowlands Arena, already completed, was renamed for Byrne. When Continental paid to put its own name on it, it was a largely unresented bit of sports meretriciousness.

Some readers will be surprised that New Jersey managed without an income tax until the early 1970's. Most states did without an income tax until the nineteen-sixties. One of the big federal-government ideas of the 1960's was Revenue Sharing. The idea was that state revenues, based principally on sales taxes, were regressive or at least not progressive. Also, due to the regressive base and other causes, state revenue dipped more sharply in a recession, while state expenditures, more heavily weighted to social services and transfers, increased more at the same time. Finally, since states must balance their budgets (on paper, anyway), they have a harder time than the federal government to square the decreased revenue and increased expenditure. Revenue Sharing was direct federal funding of state expenditures, intended to address all these problems.

New Jersey Transit is an operator of commuter trains mostly connecting the New Jersey suburbs and New York City. (A lot of the lines stop in Hoboken; from there you take a PATH train or ferry into the city.) They also have a line connecting Philadelphia with Atlantic City. I'll play it safe and not characterize further -- here's a route map as of May 6, 2002. You can get between Philadelphia and New York by transferring between SEPTA and NJT in Trenton. (I doubt you'd be wanting to stay in Trenton. If you want to stretch your legs, get off at Princeton Junction and take the spur to beautiful Princeton. That spur figures briefly in the Rebecca Goldsmith book mentioned at the trivial entry.)

The NJTP logo consists of lettering and a polygonal frame in white against a green background. Large letters T and P appear in the middle, offset but overlapping, with smaller letters N and J positioned as bookends, and TURNPIKE in tiny caps running between the N and J, across the middle of the TP. Something like this, though the large TP is thicker:

                              PPPPPPPP
                        TTTTTTPTT     P
                            T P       P
                            T PPPPPPPP
                            T P              J
               N    N  T U R N P I K E       J
               NN   N       T P              J
               N N  N       T P         J    J
               N  N N       T            JJJJ
               N   NN                    

P. Simon and A. Garfunkel have described research (counting the cars on the NJTP), and reported a surprising finding: ``They've all come to look for America.'' Maps are available at rest areas (called service areas), which are named after famous unknowns.

(That used to say ``...after obscure luminaries.'' It was a better oxymoron if one attended the original literal senses of the words, but morons like you, dear reader, just didn't ``get it.'' We had no choice but to abase the vocabularary. After all, we wouldn't want to do anything to make anyone feel inadequate.)

Country code 31 for direct-dial phone calls.

In 1839, Thomas Hood wrote that ``Holland...lies so low they're only saved by being dammed.'' I also quote the incorrigible punster at a Boyle.

``Welcome to my National Laborratorrry,'' says Uncle Frankensam. ``I have crreated a beautiful monsterr!''

The capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is St. John's; it's the only provincial or state capital in all of the Americas with an apostrophe in its name. (FWIW, the province of New Brunswick has a Saint John County which consists essentially of the port city Saint John and a few miles of coast on either side.)

This is probably the ideal entry at which to point out that the UK spelling of artifacts is artefacts.

Many study guides and cram courses are available for the well-known admissions tests and professional licensing exams, but NLC seems to be the organization that helps one prepare for civil service exams. For example, I have before me C-1727 of its Career Examination Series (CES): Assistant Supervisor (Elevators and Escalators) Passbook. (Plastic bound -- lies flat for study ease!)

They also have supervisor and foreman volumes for elevators and escalators. It's no wonder they claim their passbooks (R) are ``Preferred By More Test Takers.''

I got my copy of Assistant Supervisor (Elevators and Escalators) Passbook (copyright 1991) off the discount table at Borders. It had been reduced from $29.95 to $15.00 to $1. This time they skipped the 75%-off stage. I also picked up a bunch of decade-old conference proceedings from Springer-Verlag for a buck apiece. I couldn't resist, Springers are usually very dear. Soon you'll be reading entries like BIER, which I found on page 566 of Computer Aided Systems Theory -- EUROCAST '91 : A Selection of Papers from the Second International Workshop on Computer Aided Systems Theory, Krems, Austria, April 1991 Proceedings, F. Pichler and R. Moreno Díaz (Eds.), published as volume 585 of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series (originally $111.95, now priced to move at $1). I'm not putting this down -- half the publications in my CV are older than this.

One thing the Springers and the NLC's have in common is that they didn't require a lot of effort on the part of the publishing house. The NLC thing looks like fuzzy photocopies of typed pages, with bold sans-serif headings applied separately (the tape backing shows through). The Springer volumes were prepared by the contributors, each set of notes in its own font. Springer has some really excellent professional books in mathematics and physics, but their business in conference proceedings is pure slumming.

I also picked up How To Run For Public Office And Win : A Step By Step Guide. It started out at a price intermediate between the NLC and the big Springer volumes -- $54.95 -- but at a buck it was clearly the worst deal. It's the thinnest of the three (ca. 85 pp., about a third the page count of the Elevators volume and a tenth that of the EUROCAST '91 volume). It has the best font, and pictures, but the grammar is not all there. It's not as technically sophisticated as the book for Assistant supervisors (Elevators and Escalators) either. On page 79, the candidate learns that being drunk at a public gathering with reporters is definitely a bad idea. Still, perhaps the authors know their readership.

You'd figure that there ought to be a ``Running for Public Office for Dummies'' book, but a search at Amazon.com yields only

Books Search Results: we were unable to find exact matches for your search for "Dummies public office".

• Microsoft Office XP Inside Out by Michael Halvorson, Michael J. Young (Paperback )
  Our Price: $31.49 / Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars
• Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2000 (Special Edition Using) by Ed Bott, Woody Leonhard (Editor) (Paperback - May 1999)
  Our Price: $27.99 / Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars
• Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP by Ed Bott, Woody Leonhard (Paperback )
  Our Price: $27.99 / Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars

I notice that NLC's database search brings up links to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, but not to Borders.

It may be that for partial matches, Barnes and Noble has a better algorithm than Amazon.com (or worse, depending on what you seek). A search on ``Dummies Public Office'' there turned up books on Public Relations, Public Speaking, and Successful Presentations in the for-Dummies series, and a similar search yielded a nice assortment from the Complete Idiot's Guide and Pocket Idiot's Guide series.

JACKPOT! Additional out-of-print titles yields biographies of FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

Borders was mentioned in an article I read in CHE recently (July 20, 2001 issue). It turns out that 2000-2001 was a cruddy year for university presses. The fiscal year ended in June, and hard numbers are either unavailable or embarrassed secrets, but nobody met sales targets and most presses lost money. In recent years Borders had boosted UP distribution by carrying a lot of their titles, but no more. I'll be keeping an eye on those bargain tables.

After an expansion and a reorganization in 1995, there are three divisions, and the NL champion is determined in an NL playoff series that consists of two rounds: the NL Division Series (NLDS), best-of-five, followed by the NLCS, best-of-seven.

The American League champion is chosen the same way (ALDS, ALCS).

If you need a review, all of the preceding information is repeated with slightly different wording at the LCS entry.

The teams that meet in the NLDS are the winners of the three divisions (East, Central, West) and one wildcard team. The division champion is the team with the best W-L record in its division. (The division championship is called the penant, and competition for this, heating up toward the end of the regular season, is called the penant race.) All regular-season games count equally in determining the division champion, whether the games are against an intra-division rival, a team outside the division but in the same league, or in another division. (For a long time before the reorganization into 3+3 divisions, there were no interleague games during the regular season apart from the All-Star game.) The wildcard is the team with the best record among the remaining teams -- i.e., the second-place team with the best record.

If, at the end of the regular season, two teams are tied for first place in a division or two second-place teams (possibly in the same division) have identical records, then a single play-off game to determine the division champion or league wildcard. I don't know what happens when three or more teams are tied this way. We've come pretty close to having three or more potential wildcards since the 1995 reorganization.

[In (American) football, there are fewer games and schedules are much more rigid, so ties are broken by formulas, in which games count differently depending on whether they were played against opponents in or out of the division, etc.]

Home field advantage in the division series and the championship series are both determined by the same rules:

1. The wildcard team never has home-field advantage.
2. Priority among division champions is determined on the basis of regular-season won-lost record.

(The URL has varied a bit; make sure you're using the correct one. It moved to <http://nle.aclclassics.org> on April 22, 2002.)

Their indoctrination scheme involves cutting people off from their friends and family and

I know I'd crack. They also collect illegal firearms.

Source: NYTimes p. A1, 1996.11.13 Here's an article from a few days later. Part of an unsympathetic trove.

An Annotated list of resources on statistical natural language processing and corpus-based computational linguistics is served by Christopher Manning.

Originally, in keeping with the intentions of the Democratic Congress and President (FDR) that brought it into being, the NLRA did not allow public-sector unions to bargain collectively for their employees. In 1962, President Kennedy's (JFK's) executive order 10988 extended this privilege to postal workers and some smaller categories of federal employees.

``Throughout North America there is a serious need for Latin Teachers. Each year, for lack of teachers, existing programs are cancelled, thriving programs are told they cannot expand, and schools that want to add Latin are unable to do so.''

Ten angstroms.

If Neiman were pronunced according to English spelling, uh, rules, the first syllable would be pronounced like the English words nay and neigh instead of like knee. (In German it's like English nigh.)

A search on the words pronunciation and pronounced at the n-m website only produced the information that Nambé, which ``creates simple, elegant designs in metal, porcelain, and crystal'' that are not inexpensive, was ``[c]hristened for a tiny New Mexican [next entry] village near Sante Fe, where the company was founded in 1951, is ``pronounced nom-BAY.''

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

New Mexico is a community property state.

The westernmost ``New'' state.

The most convenient universal property of ``1.852'' that I can think of is that 8, 5, and 2 are lined up on decimal keypads. Hmmm. Maybe there's more. The meter was originally defined to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian through Paris. In other words, the length of the quadrant through Paris. (Some people thought it would make sense to measure longitude away from this meridian; I can't imagine what they might have had against a zero meridian through London.) There was a big scientific project to determine this distance, although they didn't actually go to the North Pole or the equator. If no one had measured the exact distance to the pole, I guess we'd never have learned the speed of light, so this must have been an important project. Let's suppose that the measurement was accurate, and that the earth is spherical to a good approximation. In that case, the 10,000 km is the distance corresponding to 90 angular degrees of lattitude, 90° of longitude measured at the equator, or 90° measured along any great circle on Earth's surface. That would mean that 59.9952 nmi would correspond to one degree, or about one nautical mile to one minute of angle. Come think of it, one nautical mile per minute of angle was the original definition.

Since one inch is defined (now) to be 2.54 cm, an ordinary (i.e., a universal American) mile is 1.609344 km, so 1 nmi = 1.1507794 mi., approximately.

If you came to this entry as part of the ``Meter Definition History Tour Package,'' I'm afraid I have some bad news. Combs with suspiciously sharp teeth were found in the carry-on baggage of tourists at the next few entries, so as a precaution the tour will proceed directly to the current definition, described at the entry for c, the speed of light.